This, is grad school

I had a dream last night where I'd forgotten the time for my candidacy exam until five minutes before and then had to run off to find the projector, which didn't work right. Then I realized there was a bit of extra material that I should have had, but someone didn't put it back where it was supposed to be and so I ended up spending way more time than I should tracking it down. At that point I was ten to fifteen minutes late, however, none of my committee members showed up and I realized that I had forgotten to send them a reminder email the day before (nevermind you sent an email the week before, in grad school you quickly learn to send a reminder the day before). At that point the gnawing anxiety cum nausea quickly became overwhelming and I realized, to my horror, that what I had thought was anxiety was in fact an acute bout of stomach flu and had to go home. The next day I was sitting around and contemplating what I should tell my committee, since I obviously need to tell them something. I was considering whether rescheduling was possible and recalled that I do have a deadline for this sort of thing that I need to finish everything by, and that yesterday was the only day in the next two months when everyone on the committee had time (also, true to experience). Somewhere around there the nausea swelled again and I woke up panicking, with a greater appreciation of the phrase "stomach in knots" than I had ever cared to learn, and it took me far too long to realize that the candidacy exam was four months ago.

It was a very, very realistic dream.
(I am out of practice for dream retention, but I can still pick up around 15%, out of residual training.)
(My God the things I picked up, back when summers meant time off.)

This was how my subconscious is coping with the four presentations that are still left: badly. But at least it's coping. It's deeply reassuring to know, upon waking, that there's no way this scenario can happen exactly as is in real life because I trust my ability to remember (or at least scribble things down in multiple places in brightly colored ink), and it will hold. The closest approximation in real life would be a case where there is a sudden health issue severe enough that I would need to reschedule, but in that case I'm more likely to react with resignation (c'est la vie) than panic.

And now for something completely different.

Okay, I lied, it sort of ties back. Well.

According to blogger I first started making attempts at dating back in June of last year (whoa I lasted six months?), by the way of online dating. After some trial-and-errors, I ended up sticking with OkCupid. I am ending this particular experiment, and on Valentine's Day seemed apropos. (Well, I'd do it tomorrow except I have a list of experiments and I'm pretty sure all I'll want to do at the end of tomorrow is sleep, I'll have a bit more time than just sleeping but certainly not enough time to write. Writing takes me a long time. Some day I'll figure out a way to diagram my thought processes and just post that instead.)
(Account has been deleted.)

This is what the stats looks like from my experience:

N=15

avg age = 26, with stdev of 5 years

education level = most common: college

occupation = most common: computer

avg messages exchanged per person = 3, with stdev of 4

I also kept track of a bunch of other stuff, but even the data I presented may not be conclusive, given the sampling bias -- the type of people who visit OkCupid is possibly a less skewed representation of the singles population than, say, Geek 2 Geek, but the fact remains that the internet is more popular among the younger generations and dating sites are...well, you can draw more conclusions from that than what I have shown, because there's no one to compare my data against and you shouldn't trust an experiment, with N=1, that has no control. (Har.)

Other miscellaneous info: I have been on a "date" with three different people, though I'm not sure how much you'd count the meet-up from this sort of thing as a date. It seemed all very none standard but then, to be fair, two of the three people I met up with were very none standard as well. I am friends with three of the people still, though one of them is not the same person that I met up with. There is only one person that I went out with more than once but I called that off in the beginning of this month.

My conclusions from this is that I like going out, when I have the time to. Going out with people who are nice and who like me and whom I like is fun. I really don't give a flying fig about the actual relationship part, and the the guilt from that particular realization, in combination with the insanity that is this month were the main reasons why I called the last one off. The sad truth is that the desire for something is more beautiful than the real thing, and as much as I like the idea of romance the truth is that I can't really be bothered to deal with it myself (someone around, all the time, seems a bit co-dependent and invasive) (-- a matter of personal preference, I have nothing but respect for people who are capable of deriving some kind of soulful satisfaction from being around their special person) (and yes, I know it's voluntary but you still have to make time for that other person -- given how important person is supposed to be, you should always find time -- and the effort in juggling four different collaborator is complicated enough without the need to try to find free time during the week days to do whatever it is that couples do) (what do normal couples do? All the people I've talked to have one or both sides of the equation in grad school, so it seems to involve a lot of staggering around in exhaustion singularly or together). Here's something else I learned from SHERLOCK: the phrase "married to your work". It is very applicable in my case. I think I'll stick with that.

I also have to go to lab now. There needs to be more tea.