Couple of things

These things relate to each other only in the sense that they relate to me. Though there's a sort-of book review at the bottom.

Lab stuff first:

One of my friends (2 years my senior) defended her thesis on Wednesday! There was a lot of vicarious excitement on my part (and a bit of sadness because graduate / professional school really does forge a kind of bond not unlike those between comrades) so...another person leaving this summer in addition to Wendy.

Mostly I want to blog about this because she's the last grad student in her lab (which will now be solely comprised of techs and post-docs -- but then the professor is the chair of the department so I suppose he's well-established enough to be able to pay all of their wages) and so, when the rest of her lab came to her public defense, they all wore this t-shirt which featured the cover image from The Last Samurai except with her face photoshop'ed on, and the caption reads, in all bold, The Last Graduate Student. 

Even the professor (yes the chair of the department) wore it. Under his blazer. And her lab is much bigger than mine so it looked like either a club or a cult following of some sort as they swarmed into the room. Either way it was pretty entertaining and did a lot, I think, to relieve her tension.

Unrelated is the fact that my professor uses the "bloody" a lot for someone who's not British, to the degree that it has somehow entered my brain via osmosis, resulting in an instance where I caught myself muttering "oh bloody hell" instead of just "oh hell" like I usually do, when one of my longer experiments failed spectacularly. It's one of those awkward moments, a bit like when you realize you sound just like your dad, and made me vaguely want to smack myself in the face (which I of course couldn't at the time because I had gloves on). It's kind of fascinating how in a small lab everyone's mannerisms end up bleeding into each other a little. Though the chocolate thing was probably arrived at individually.

Unrelated to that is the piece Neil Gaiman reblogged the other day, by Maria Dahvana Headley. After a few moment of furtive giggling (I was in lab, and there are just somethings I'd rather not have to explain), I recalled that Sabbatai Zevi supposedly married the Torah, at which point the furtive degenerated to mildly hysterical because apparently people can get married to books (and doesn't a sharp dust-jacket and capitalized eyes just sound delightful?). It might even be allowed in North Carolina, because I think the Bible is feminine in the romance languages (or at least it's La Biblica or something in Spanish) (though I suppose the female enthusiasts can refer to it as El Libro?) (yeah it gets confusing because it's la gente and las personnas but el humano and el pueblo, or this could just mean equal opportunity for both genders...?) (This is of course operating off of the assumption that all romance languages share gender, which may or may not be true.)

Right and I also finished The Divine Comedy, which I wrote a review on in Good Reads. My more informal impression is that...largely it just made me uncomfortable because yeah it's a...certainly impressive piece of work but the content bothers me because in addition to the rather graphic violence of what happens to the sinners there's the very period-appropriate idea of what constitutes sinning which, surprise, includes sodomy and, did you know, that if a woman is raped she will not be able to access the higher spheres of heaven? There's a message like that, if not in those exact words because, according to Dante, being raped means that you didn't resist hard enough and if you lost your faith in God after being raped that's some kind of sin. So yeah, yes it's 1300s but-- not re-reading that again, even with all the fascinating mythology references. Also the thing is really verbose and archaic and heaven is really boring. In hell and purgatory they were actually moving up and down (and complaining about how much walking there was, which I found hilarious) and encountering new weird-looking people / souls and scenes and creatures, whereas in heaven he magically drifts up (no actual climbing) and everything is made of light and grace and sparkles. At some point there are like, balls of light (i.e. souls) running around him and spelling out words in Latin (and for a crazed moment I imagined they'd spell out "YMCA" or something but that's what my humor resorted to for the last teeth-gritting bit of the book) and people do nothing but sing and watch glowing balls float around and admire the beauty of the eyes (it keep reminding me of the "fine eyes" comments from Pride and Prejudice) of Dante's lady-love-or-something, Beatrice, whom he addresses with the term of endearment as "my beloved tree". (I mean, what?) (So I can only conclude that my life here on earth, according to Dante's visions, is the closest thing I can have to what I consider to be heaven, since Dante's hell involves me being fried, drowned, burned, gnawed on, diseased, and frozen, which doesn't sound fun, and Dante's heaven bores me to tears -- literally -- I yawned so much there were actual tears.) Also there're these pseudo-science type explanations for why souls look like they're being tortured/ diseased / starved when they're souls and have no real "substance" and how the spheres of heaven and hell adhere to the natural spheres of...uh, earth and her orbits. (Apparently the parameters for the rotations are grace and virtue, which I...I don't even know. It's in 1300s so I guess?) I mostly stuck to the end because the narrator went down to hell and then up to purgatory and then flew...somewhere to heaven and I wanted to know how he went back down to earth, but I was disappointed because basically he saw a holy -- well, holier -- light at the end and that's it. Nada. End of book.

Can you tell I'm really frustrated with this book?

Yeah I know it's The Divine Comedy but I've never claimed to have refined taste or anything. As far as breath of reading material goes, at least, it's a definite eye-opener.