Passion

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.

I first came to Yale (and the east coast) a year ago today.

It feels like an eternity ago. Temporally, spacially, mentally, I'm so removed from that weekend. It seems like much more than a year must have fallen into the space between that memory and now. As has been the case every time I've looked back a full year, I've found that I'm a completely different person. This is actually a matter of a small amount of distress this time, because I liked who I was last spring, and I'm not that person anymore. Also, while things weren't perfect a year ago, I was in a good place, and it's slightly sad that that entire world construction eventually dissolved.

On the other hand, I'm at Yale and I love graduate school. I guess that's really all I have to say, but at least it's the important aspect.

Let me preface this by saying that I am drunk, and therefore anything I update about cannot be held against me.

In the last couple of days, a lot has happened. I walked several miles Thursday night, alone, in the cold, and saw the luminaria on the Green and sat in front of a church and thought about my life and where it's going and whether or not I'm happy here. And I'm not. And maybe I'm just not used to New England, and maybe I left the real me behind in Santa Cruz, tipsy on a beach on a May afternoon after a day of climbing and a bit of drinking at the Seabright Brewery. But even so, maybe this just isn't the right place for me. I'm not fitting in here, I don't feel at home here. Would I feel more at home at UCSF? Did I make the wrong decision?

It snowed yesterday. And it was windy and the powder blew straight into my face and stung my cheeks. Maybe I was wrong to be excited for winter?

I also learned how to knit yesterday, and am now on my way to making a scarf. I feel very... domestic.

Anyway. There's an 8-10 page paper for 603 I haven't chosen a topic for yet, and Monday we're getting take-home exams for 602, and 625 has a shit-ton of stuff coming up, so I'm going to go get some sleep and try to think of sunny things. I hadn't realized I liked the sun so much, but damn I miss the temperate nature of California. Right, anyway, I was saying--I'm going to bed.

Today was pretty good. I got up and lazed about a bit, then went to Circuit City when it opened at 10 so I could buy the sixth season of Gilmore Girls, which came out on DVD today. I don't know why, but for some reason it was on sale, so I didn't even have to pay the exorbitant amount of money they charge normally! Thrilling! Like Christmas!

I got to lab at about 11. I started my first rotation yesterday. I'm working in the Baserga lab, doing yeast two-hybrid screens to try to determine which part of Utp21 interacts with the cl-TPR of Utp6. The two proteins are part of the processome that assembles the small subunit of ribosomes in the nucleolus. It's pretty exciting, actually. There's some RNA work in the lab, and I'm learning how to do two-hybrid screens, and learning to work with yeast, and everyone in the lab is super nice. So today I did a transformation and plated some yeast. Yesterday I ordered primers, and hopefully tomorrow I can use them to do PCR to create truncated copies of Utp21 to transfect into my colonies....

Anyway.

I also got a new issue of Real Simple today. So it was really a Christmas-y sort of day. Honestly, it will take me two weeks to read the whole thing. It's monthly, dependable reading material!

Nothing else new to report... I'm loving Yale, and I'm currently pretty damn happy. I miss Santa Cruz and my friends on the left coast like you wouldn't BELIEVE, but grad school really isn't all that bad.

So that's good.

Okay, I lied. I am too lazy to post pictures, but I'm also bored, and in this case bored wins out. To the pictures!

( My new home )
So there you have it! Welcome to Kara's Life In New Haven, Part One: Geographic Orientation. Stay tuned for such things as Kara Gets Internet and Cable Working, Kara Finds the Best Grocery Store, and Kara Grumbles About The Laundromat Down the Street, all to come within the next two months!

I dreamt again last night. Three nights in a row now I've had interesting nightmares.

I had just gotten to the East Coast, and was visiting New York for the first time. I've always wanted to go to New York City; it's always seemed like a fascinating place. I was wandering around with a man, a woman, and their small daughter. The city looked astonishingly like San Francisco, except a lot bigger. And by bigger, I mean, everything was physically larger. The roads were wider, the doors were taller, the buildings were ginormous. We wandered through the parts of the city that had trees planted along the sides, and things were going okay. For some reason, the woman and I had to go run and get something else, and as we ran down the street, the trees disappeared, and when they did, rain came down like a wave, and within seconds we were soaked. We rushed back to where the man and the child were, sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant, with drinks ordered for us. I picked up my glass of water to take a drink and found a fly in it. I set the drink down so I could fish out the bug, and as I did so the man got very angry with me, and told me that if I stopped to fish out every bug that landed in my drink, I would never drink at all. And indeed, suddenly there were other flies in the water glass, and as soon as I scooped one out, another would appear. The man held me and forced me to drink from the glass while bugs were still landing in it.

Some time later, the four of us wandered down the street, in the opposite direction that we had run and gotten drenched in, and found ourselves approaching the sea. I thought to myself as we rounded a corner and started walking up another street, "The water looks so much the same as it does on the west coast!" As soon as I finished the thought, the water began to flow away from the shore instead of towards it, since water on the west coast breaks towards the east; apparently my mind was trying to make this water break towards the east too. The physics of the whole thing somehow backfired, though, because after the water rushed away, it came back, and though we were walking along a safe city street, the tidal wave that dropped down behind us managed to not be on the beach and somehow flood the street, and suddenly we were running away from torrential amounts of water, hiding behind stone columns on the left (and here is the strange part, because as far as illustrating goes, we were on the left, but in my dream we were screaming to move to the right, and the left was the right, so apparently even in my dreams I still have problems telling them apart) side of the street, screaming. We finally reached the end of the street and the water ran out of power. A stone wall appeared in front of us, covered in ivy, with a stone archway we couldn't see through. The little girl stepped through the archway and sunshine broke through where she had pushed the ivy aside. It was that kind of golden, dreamy, ethereal light, and then she started laughing in that sort of ethereal, dreamy, golden child kind of way. The man and woman and I looked at each other and smiled and then stepped through after the girl. And everything was wonderful.

I do not understand my subconscious.

I dreamt about Yale last night. Well, it was really more of a nightmare.

( *shudder* )