Found cricket in bathroom. No idea where it came from or how it got there. Ended up stepping on it because it was jumping all over the place. Wish I hadn't put on my glasses because the hi-res view of the thing is actually incredibly creepy.

Well that was different

This morning on my way to the bus stop I was waylaid by an unknown young man who tried to offer me a ride in his truck to the beach.

1) It sounds like the start of a joke. It FELT like the start of a joke -- especially since I initially thought he was asking for directions.

2) This wouldn't have been too shocking, I suppose, if it was in the evening, but this happened around 7:30am. Mornings are quiet time. It (the context) was confusing.

3) It vaguely made me think of that scene from Disney's Aladdin. Except instead of Aladdin and a flying carpet I got a boy in tank top and a white pickup truck on a thankfully public street. (Oh geez a pickkup truck why.) (Huh, given the thing with strange man showing up on her bedroom balcony unannounced, at night, I suddenly understand why she keeps a tiger as a pet.) (Though for the parents out there: despite of what Disney says, tigers do not make appropriate pets for your daughters so, for the safety of you and yours, just get her a dog. Mutts tends to be less neurotic and hardier than purebreds.) I think there's some kind of connotation about guys offering girls rides. I'm still working on figuring out when people are talking with metaphors and when they're talking about this sort of things literally.

4) What is he even trying to accomplish??? As I've mentioned, it was around 7:30am in the morning. The only people I see around that time are shift-workers, students, and occasional senior citizens. Maybe he's well meaning and genuinely in the habit of offering random rides to strangers (that early in the morning?), but can you imaging him dropping off random shift-workers, students, and seniors at the beach? What. 

Conclusion: it was strange and people are weird. 

Manuscript writing, 8 hours in

I just compared Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) to tumbleweeds to my PI (it made sense in my head at the time). Also: I need more tea.

...

Went in for a talk with one of my committee members about a part of my project as well as future career plans. During the talk she made a comment about how my logic is "different". It's not an insult or a compliment -- just a matter-of-fact observation. Yet, somehow, it made me feel inexplicably lonely -- more so than anything else anyone's said to me within the past year.

Professorial duties and tests of limit

Quote from friend on why she's not planning to become a professor: "I don't want to my goal in life to be making other people feel stupid."

(...well, considering the job of a professor in training scientists is, in theory, to find where our limits are and to push us past them....) (In our program it seems to be, by consensus, a yearly pushing until we fall flat on our face and then wait, and then setting the point where we fail to get back up as the new limit.) (Have I mentioned that it's almost time for my yearly committee meeting? I'm told that I'm being pushed harder because I can "take it", which has yet ceased to be equally flattering and terrifying.)

It's a perfectly valid goal.

"You're beeping," says she

Dear all,

I was comparing Wordpress with Blogger this week and have, in conclusion, decided that though I like the fact that Wordpress is under the GPL and I am all for open-sourced things, the really cool things that caught my eye about Wordpress only applies to Wordpress.org and not Wordpress.com (for some reason I keep typing "Worldpress", which makes me think of some kind of newspaper), or in other words, only if you host your own blog. For the regular stuff the differences isn't that great, and frankly I've been with blogger for too many years (since what? 2003? Definitely by 2004 and christ that's a long time ago) to bother changing for the minutiae. (Though blogger? Being able to password protect an entry so only certain people can see it would be very very nice. Hint hint.) On the plus side, I did find out more stuff about blogger that I could do, that I didn't previously known I could. Like this

Probation!?

I'm on probation. Sort of. All my committee members have signed the form except I'm not allowed to turn it in until I've revised my slides and sent everyone a copy of the revised version. (I'm not considered a candidate until the form's turned in and processed.) Because they didn't like the format of my presentation (i.e. it's still too much at the level of a beginning graduate student and not enough at the level of a scientist). On the plus side? They like my experiments and my data. Given that those two things are what we are generally supposed to be marked down on, I conclude I pretty much suck at presenting stuff. (Which my PI sort of agreed and suggested that I volunteer myself for the seminars and lunch-talks.)

In case anyone is wondering: yes the questioning was gruesome and yes we did use up all 90 minutes.

I was given a deadline of exactly one week for revision. At least one of the committee members has promised (read: warned me about) more comments following.

So now I'm eating ramen, because somehow over the years Oodles of Noodles with veggies has turned into my comfort food of choice. (Oh my god, stupidest way to delay ever. I'm surprised that I haven't started crying yet.) I mean I sort of passed, the people congratulated me and everything...but I really hate the "probation" label (which granted is a term I assigned to myself, but it's technically true).