Am feeling a bit upset. Ladies and gentlemen, how many people,  in your esteemed opinion,  must I have sex with before I can make a believable claim to be an asexual? Because apparently I should not claim that label if I have never has sex, because how else will I find out if I like it or not? (Nevermind that I have never met anyone I liked enough to want to have sex with,because I simply have not met THE ONE- the fact that I have had multiple crushes and experienced zero physical attraction is iirrelevant. ) I also can't claim the label if I had sex with only one or two people because it could be those people are just bad at sex! Don't underestimate technique and experience! (I kid you not someone said this to me. Also if I met THE ONE it will be different! And so I should not be so *hasty* in labeling myself as an ace!

So how many then? How many people? Or perhaps how many years must I live without experiencing their definition of sexual attraction to qualify?

Forgive me my facetiousness but really, how many?  I am curious.

Have I mentioned that French macaroons are weird? They're like a weird hybrid between candy and cookie. Also have been introduced and taken moral offense to the term "fugly" and a weekly farmer's market apparently opened in the high school parking lot three blocks over.

I have a hypothesis that the balcony in front of my door is where all the stray bees in these couple of blocks come to die.

The combination of residual adrenaline and watching ELEMENTARY apparently meant that I get to dream about nearly being shot by Sherlock Holmes, which jolted me awake enough that I spent an indeterminable time awake, in the dark, plotting my experiments for the next two weeks until my brain gave up and I went back to sleep and dreamed about being shuffled off to retake SAT II and how the math portion is now a subject test of STATISTICS which, even dreaming, I knew made no sense and was trying to reason with my own dream logic.

You know what I've never dreamed about? Ducks. Why can't I dream about ducks? I'm going to make a token effort from here on out to insert ducks into my dreams and will post when that is successful.

Also for the people who, in the past few months, have received random blank txts from me the current working hypothesis is that it's a result of a key lock (current phone not a flip phone / does not have retractable keyboard /does not have touch screen) only engaging when I go back to desktop and after certain number of seconds (so if I stick it in my bag before the keylock comes on...you get the idea) and I have been unable to find a way to change this setting so far. It is a work in progress. Like my life.

I've improved over the years but 150 people is still a LOT OF PEOPLE and now the symposium is over and I'm in front of my computer and I can't focus because of adrenaline, it is making me slightly deranged HELP.

I live in the relatively quiet sector of my neighborhood but occasionally there these sudden events that happen that floods the place of people and (with the exception of 4th of July and Labor Day, whose firework fans I am now well prepared for) it always catches me by surprise. Like that time when I stepped out on what's usually supposed to be a quiet Sunday morning and the street I was on was swarmed by a stampede of people in colored jerseys, because it was mapped as part of the route for a half marathon / marathon that ends at the bay 20mins over. I'm not sure what's happening today, but I gathered there's some new thing going on for St. Patrick's this year, and the street two blocks over is filled with cars and haphazard driving and there is suddenly no parking.

Ugh just finished my taxes. Hope I didn't screw anything up. Filing these things as a grad student never gets any better, but at least most things are online these days so I basically end up with one browser window with a lot of times so I can squint at the numbers and figure out the difference between fee remissions and scholarships.

Things We Established Today:

1) I have very "round" hair
2) birds have lymphoid tissues and bone marrow
3) people develop allergies to urushiol, which is present in both mango and poison oak (how did I miss that family connection I have no idea), and is enriched in the skin and the area near the pith near the mangoes and so people who want to avoid becoming allergic to mangoes should avoid the slice-and-eat method and peel the entire thing ...and possibly handle it with gloves while peeling. (But then not everyone reacts to allergens the same way and I think Linda'd be fine...?)
4) mathematicians are aliens
5) the undergrads apparently thing I'm qualified to give advice on public speaking. This is in fact the weirdest thing to me, in this entire list.

Baffled by undergrads.

In which we verify that yes, she is still very much Weird

Went to Ashley's baby shower, which I liked much more than I expected, considering that the only person I went in knowing was ...Ashley. People were astounded when they found out how long we've been friends and actually said things to me along the lines of "I could never keep a friend that long", which I thought was sad. Upon reflection, it could be that everyone has different definitions of friends. Certainly I've in instances when I heard someone refer to me as their friend to their other friends when I consider us to be more like friendly acquaintances, and I know some people like to have large numbers of friends so that they have this...cloud of people they know, wherever they go, and certainly that's fine too! It's just that for me, partially because I'm an introvert, I'm more comfortable with a small group of friends and I suspect that my definition of friend is more like "close friend". Or at least I measure whether or not someone is my friend by how far I'm willing to go for someone, to trust someone, allowing them the liberties I would never consider for others? For me, at least "friend" is a label that has a LOT of emotional investment! I try to be polite and friendly to all and make the effort of being acquaintances with more people than I'm strictly comfortable with, but I don't actually make the commitment to making a friend unless I start to think that's someone I want around for the rest of my life in some way. Even if I don't always succeed. Even if we only get the chance to talk once a year or something I go in wanting to keep the person for as long as I can and from that perspective, the number of people my age who are ...agog at friendships that can last for longer than five years makes me sad. Yes it's fine to have a group of ..."casual friends" -- I guess that's what you'd call them? I don't even know -- but I keep thinking, during each iteration of "yes we really have know each other for that long", that's there's this really, really wonderful thing that they're missing out.

Sadly this isn't like...some new type of tea I can just get them to try. And of course for the ones who are just making the remark for the sake of something to say, I don't care as much, but for those who said it quietly, enviously, it's a little heartbreaking. Because it's possible. It's possible to have people in your lives, unrelated to you, that you can rely on. And certainly they sound like this is something that they wanted and of course I don't know any of them or their stories so it's all just...there's this fine tinge of melancholy in the laughter bubbling through the afternoon.

It's one thing about me that I can understand people being envious about, because I have been on the other end as well. Though being the subject of envy has always been equal parts flattering and unnerving.

Also unnerving are people who only knew you for three hours and expect you to hug them when leaving. I am not comfortable with casual physical affection at all by which I mean being hugged by people whose name that I don't even know makes me want to crawl out of my skin. (Also one of the lady was wearing really strong perfume so now my coat smells like it and I kind of feel like I need to get it dry cleaned but then I feel like it's insulting to the unknown lady who I will probably never see again -- yes I am aware of how much logic there ISN'T -- that I'm acting like I find her so repellent that I need to remove all traces of physical contact with her but it's really making me uncomfortable and weirdly jittery but it's not worse than jittery so I don't know. I haven't decided. Maybe if I just hung my coat out in the sun all day tomorrow that'd do the trick?)

Mother just sent me a bunch of photos to prove that there are plants that she hasn't killed yet.

Last night I had a dream where I met a girl that I've never seen before, developed a crush, asked her out, and was irrevocably rejected. In case anyone's wondering: I find being rejected in a dream to be actually more depressing than being rejected in real life. Also I crashed my tablet while editing the script for CODA. The tablet recovered fine but I lost a bit of my latest edits. All of the script and notes were on Evernote, which got HACKED this weekend and so ALL the users got a password reset, which I didn't find out about until I checked my email much later -- I just kept getting notices telling me that the notes failed to sync and that my password couldn't be authenticated. All of THIS, of course, was the perfect wrap up for a rather FAIL-filled end of my week, during which I failed to replicate the really cool result I got two weeks ago, failed another separate experiment, and then had to drive to campus at nearly 11pm because that's when I remembered that I forgot to turn off one of the power supplies and I didn't want to risk a blown fuse when the buffer inevitably ran out.

I can't think of a more eloquent way to express my current state of being other than "ugh". I've had three cups of tea and did a bit of house cleaning and I'm going to go and draw a ton now, and I WILL PREVAIL because tomorrow is a new day and all that and I'm too stubborn to give up.