Passion

It's been a very relaxing weekend. I bought the sequels to the book I finished yesterday--the series is called The Novels of Tiger and Del, and was written waaay back in 83, but it's pretty good. It's awfully simplistic, which makes it easy to remember what's going on when my brain is totally somewhere else. And there are six books, so they'll keep me entertained at least until quals start.

Emily and I went to the beach yesterday, too, which was awesome. We got there a couple hours before sunset. I enjoyed a nice long swim, semi-pretending that I was back in California, and then we climbed some rocks and took some pictures. It was a nice afternoon. We followed it up drinking port back at her house with her new roommates.
I would post pictures of the beach, but I appear to no longer have my photo editing software. Alas.

Anyway, somehow I managed to burn my pinky on the oven while making dinner, so I'm gonna go do something that doesn't involve typing. Like watching a few episodes of Gilmores and drinking more port...

I hate it when I feel like I desperately need to write, but I don't know what to write about.

I sort of picked my qualifying committee today. If the scheduling works out among all three faculty members (and all three say yes to my request that they be on my committee...), I'll start qualifying the second week of September. I'll then read for six weeks instead of five (to accommodate one professor's travel plans), write for 1.5 to two weeks, and then take the qualifying exam the first/secondish week of November.
I'm no longer freaked out about the process. I'm more sort of...tired. Thinking about it just makes me tired. Part of me is really excited, but it's a really tiny, really far away part. Hopefully, as the beginning of the exam draws nearer, my enthusiasm will increase. After all, I'm in graduate school, and in this lab, because I love science, right? Because I love ribosomes? Even though that makes me super weird?

Does anyone have any good book recommendations? I'm looking for something in science or in current events. Definitely not fiction. I'm feeling particularly uninformed lately, and I'd like to read a book on something other than genetics. So anything mathy, physicsy, or current eventsy should do it. Anyone? Anyone?

I've been thinking a lot lately. This is probably a bad thing, and is likely a product of me not being in lab and class all day long. Luckily my normal hectic life resumes tomorrow, and I become a prisoner of science once again....

Before I get into all the thinkingness, I just wanted to mention that I had a really good spring break, despite being bitterly lonely for most of it. I don't know when I became a social creature; the transformation seems to have snuck up on me. I used to be so antisocial and so afraid of other people. It seems weird that these days I'm so dependent on the company of others. But I did have a good break, and the solitude allowed me to some things I hadn't been able to do in all the hubbub of grad school academic and social life. I watched The Chronicles of Narnia, which made me cry. Such a good movie.... I finished knitting the Cascade 220 bag I've been working on forever, and have learned 1) that it really does matter how long the cable is on circular needles and 2) you really can't felt something in the bathroom sink unless you're a lot more patient than I am. I shall have to bribe a friend with a washing machine. I've also read about half of the second book of the Bridei Chronicles, which I bought about a week ago. I love Juliet Marillier. Her books are amazing. They seem to take hold somewhere inside my heart and then proceed to pull out all of my most secret inner longings about love and life and honor and strength. Her stories speak to me in a strange way that most other stories don't. Then again, I cry at commercials, so maybe I'm giving her too much credit. But this book is amazing, and it makes me wish I had the first one here in Connecticut so I could read it again, since I don't remember most of the minor characters, and Ms. Marillier has a nasty way of making her sequels about minor characters instead of about major ones.
Also, I saw 300 on IMAX the other day, and it had a weird way of actually making me feel violent. Actually violent. I got into the bloodthirstiness of the Spartan killing tactic, and I WANTED the Persians to die. And when the Queen (all right, I won't say anything for those of you who haven't seen it; I don't want to spoil it) does that awesome thing she does, I relished the violence of the moment. It felt good. This led me to realize that I am, in fact, withholding a great deal of anger. This, again, is probably a bad thing. I think I need an outlet for all of this anger, or something really bad is gonna happen.

Anyway.

I've been thinking a lot about my life and what I want out of it. What I want to do with it, who I want to become, where I want to live, how I want to make my living. I listened to last week's This American Life last night, and they sang "California," and for some reason the song hit home in such a strong way that I actually stopped knitting so I could stare out my teeny tiny cell window. I felt like ice. I felt like I had this huge, momentous decision before me, and I knew the way I was supposed to choose, and I knew the way I would choose, and they were different. I'm supposed to go home to California and be something else, do something else, follow some other life path. But it's easier to take no action, to continue following a course already set out, and that's what I've chosen to do. Besides, what kind of other life would I lead? There seem to be so many options, and all of them are terrible, or at least depressingly difficult.

1) Stay here, follow current path, do postdoc in California, etc. Be geneticist.
2) Re-apply to grad schools this coming fall, transfer to UCSF, Berkeley, or Stanford. Be scientist.
3) Move to California (or, more realistically, Reno) and buy a flower shop. In Reno, I bet you anything I could talk my mom into helping me do this, because she tried to about three years ago, and would have succeeded if someone hadn't outbid her on the shop she was trying to buy.
4) Throw a ton of money at a really nice camera, and somehow fight my way into the realm of respectable photography. I could then either be a travel photographer (and writer, there's no way I could travel and not write), or photograph weird inner-city wildlife like deformed pigeons and tame rats. I have no idea where this idea came from, but my dark and twisty brain really likes it. Photography would be so much fun.
5) Re-apply to grad schools, except this time for marine biology. Like Woods Hole and Scripps. Be scientist. Study whales, like I planned in the second grade.
6) Stay here and work on PhD and write a novel. Publish novel, become horribly rich, drop out. Become writer.

Most of these options seem to be horribly flawed in at least one way. Several of them, I know, are completely inviolate (that's a word, right? too lazy to look it up).

In the end, I don't even know why I bother updating about this sort of thing. I know in my heart that, even if being here is utterly wrong for me, I'm too weak to take any action on that decision. I've made my choice in coming here, and am too terrified of being left alone and starving in the cold to leave my current career path. I have no money and so much debt as it is; how could I possibly end the only income I've ever had to throw myself at a dream that may turn out to fail horribly? Or that I may turn out to be bored with? Perhaps I underestimate myself, and I'd be bored to tears as a florist or photographer. I know that spring break is boring me to tears....

I can't help but wonder if all of this insanity and upheaval over HIM is because I'm really all insane and upheaved about ME. I think I'm projecting. I think my own life is a crazy mixed-up confusing mess right now, and I'm living something I'm not sure I believe in (haven't I always yelled at people who don't follow their dreams?), and I'm transferring all of that upsetness over to him so that I'll have something concrete to be frustrated at.

I'm angry. I want to throw things. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure I'm mad at myself. I shouldn't have made the decision to come here, and once I did I should have given myself over to it completely. And since I haven't, I should make up my damn mind about what I want to do, and then I should have the balls to follow through with it and DO something about my misery. I'm so mad at my own unwillingness to help myself. That's a quality I despise in other people, and it makes me livid to see it in myself. AAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH.

First off, I LOVE the new lj layout. Okay, moving on.

Tuesday I took off and left lab as soon as I could. It was cool to learn HPLC and sort of purify proteins Tuesday morning, but I was totally ready to end that rotation. I think I just really, REALLY need spring break. And suddenly I have a week and a half at my complete and utter disposal! Anyway. I took off Tuesday afternoon and drove to Falmouth, Massachusetts (near Woods Hole) to visit Ann, who was interviewing with the MIT/Woods Hole joint marine biology program. I met up with her at a pub in Falmouth and we drank beer on MIT's tab and talked and caught up. She loved the slug I knit for her (pictures are coming!) and I swear, every single person in the bar came over to ask us, "What IS that??!!" And each time we had to explain that it was a banana slug, followed by WHY it was a banana slug.

Yesterday morning we got up super early and drove into Woods Hole to buy breakfast and coffee, and to find a suitable place for Ann to touch the Atlantic. It was a gorgeous morning in Cape Cod. I think it was showing off for her. It was warm (okay, we were shivering) and sunny and the ocean was just the right shade of Cape Cod blue (not Santa Cruz blue, mind you, but still very pretty). We drove around the town a little bit before heading north toward Boston. My Google directions failed to tell us that our highway changed names, so we freaked out and stopped to buy maps, and then realized we were going the right way, but the purchases turned out to be justified, because the Google directions REALLY failed us once to GOT to Boston, whereupon we became immediately and nearly irrevocably lost. I think we saw half of Boston, driving around on one-way streets, before we managed to find our way to Newbury Street, which the internet said was the best place in Boston to shop. We finally found a (super expensive!) parking lot, left the car, and walked along the street window shopping. It was warm enough for just light jackets, and the wind was gently blowing, and life just felt... good. It was a nice day. We got pizza and hung out in a giant Barnes and Noble. I got to fondle the leather in the Levenger store. And we chatted and got caught up and just generally had a good morning. I took her to the airport (with a minimal amount of getting lost), and then realized I'd never bothered to Google the directions to get home from Boston. So I meandered my way toward I-95, which I knew was SOMEwhere south of the airport, and eventually made it back that way. I got home at 4:15, just 23.5 hours after leaving Tuesday afternoon. It was a super fast trip and definitely not enough time with Ann, but it was a really good day.

I took a two-hour nap (~450 miles in 23.5 hours, on very little sleep, ouch), then went to a dinner party at Emily's. Her roommate got a creme brulee kit, so we drank wine and flamed our own creme and it was awesome. I came home tired and happy, sweet tooth definitely satisfied.

This morning I got up super early again to drive Andrew to the airport. The weather was definitely not as friendly today. It rained. But it was a nice, warm, gentle rain, the kind that means spring is on its way and the worst of the winter is over. It was a hopeful rain (which was good, because on the drive back from Boston yesterday, the weather was gorgeous but I was definitely not in a hopeful mood. I listened to some of the first music I ever bought, in the eighth grade, and cried because the stupid sappy emotionalness of it seems to fit my exact romantic situation right now, way more than it ever did when I was 13 and thought it was so poignant). I stopped at two yarn shops on the way back (Google redeemed itself) and ended up buying some Noro Kureyon. Oh my god. I love the colorway. It's greens and browns and just a touch of blue--it's all earthy and dark and I dunno, if it had a name I would name it Redwood Forest Mulch.
See it here... and here. (All colorways here.)
It's not terribly soft; I'm going to make a bag out of it and felt it. This is, I admit, a bit absurd, because I'm making a bag out of Cascade 220 that I'm going to felt, and then I'll have two extraordinarily similarly constructed bags, but they'll be wildly different in color and texture, and slightly different in size. And I just couldn't resist the Noro. Maybe it's its reputation, but honestly I think it's the colorway that I love. I found a cheaper knockoff, but the colors sucked, so I went with the real deal.
Anyway, enough about yarn.

Shannon and I went to a used bookstore today. She bought me coffee and we sat between the shelves and held books and talked. It was good. It felt so... life (I know that's not an adjective; be quiet). Maybe "real" is the word I want. I felt like I existed. I guess lately I've just felt like things have been happening to me, but the last few days have felt more like real life. I feel like I'm living again. It felt so good to drink coffee and sit near books with a friend; it felt like something I would do. You know, me. Whoever that is... wherever she went...
I guess maybe I'm just finally catching up with myself; my body got here in July and now my soul and heart are catching up.

Speaking of my heart.... This is a reminder to myself of the advice my mother gave me in June of 2004: "Just. Stop. Thinking. About him." It seemed so obvious, and yet I never seem to remember that it's an option. So this is a reminder. EVEN if I believe I made a mistake, I can't do anything about it now. Life is just too short to sit around and cry about mistakes you've made; you have to truck on forwards and hope that you can make up for it when a better time comes around. I KNOW a better time will come around; I feel that in my soul, in every fiber. So I just need to enjoy life and make myself a better person and be READY when that time comes.