How much Buffy is too much Buffy?

My friends Jeff and Carrie got me hooked on watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I kid you not. In the matter of about a month I have raced through nearly the entire first two seasons. This weekend alone I watched 7 episodes. In one sitting. This seems unhealthy. (As does my unreasonable crush on David Boreanaz, but that's another story entirely. Am I too old for a crush on a TV star? Does he still count as a star? Whatever. He's hot.)

I'm not going to pretend this is a great piece of small screen cinema. It's not. But it is entertaining. And I enjoy mocking people's hair from the late 90's. That's nothing but good quality fun. Plus it's not deep at all so I can watch it without thinking. Maybe that's not a perk for everyone, but it is for me.

In other news, today my advisor asked me the question I have been simultaneously dreading yet hoping to hear for well over a year now. "When do you plan to graduate?" I'm officially on board for May 2006. Thank heavens. Strangely, he and I have never really discussed my thesis. Apparently, he thinks it's pretty much up to me to outline what I think belongs in it and, you know, to write it. I had been thinking that he and I would go over my plan together and make sure I wasn't doing something stupid or missing something huge. Other advisors have told students what each chapter in their thesis will be for heavens sake! They hand their students a thesis on a silver platter; all the student has to do is actually do it. But whatever. Apparently it's all good and he trusts me. Scary thought.

Oh, and another friend of mine that's graduating this year got a rockin' cool post-doc. He's headed to Cal Tech. And since I assume no one outside of astronomy knows what Cal Tech means within astronomy, let's just say that you can pretty much write your ticket to a faculty job nearly anywhere if you have Cal Tech on your CV. (Grad school at Cal Tech is better, but a post doc will certainly suffice). So way to go Greg, this is what I say. :)

Noise

I wish I could somehow record the extremely loud party going on in the apartment right below mine right now. The drunk screeching, the pounding bassline of whatever crap music they are playing, the screaming across the building at someone walking down the street.... If only I could capture these moments so that I could post them and all could then feel the rage I do right now toward my neighbors.

You had better believe my butt will be at my apartment's management office in the morning. This is not the first time (or 10th, for that matter) that this has happened. I pay way too much to live here to have to put up with this kind of crap from the freaking undergrad punks that have moved in below me. I may not be able to do anything about being shat on at work, but I sure as hell will not put up with this.

And I had such high hopes for getting a decent night's sleep tonight.

Unfair

So, I'm observing again. Why is it that I only seem to post anything anymore when I am observing? Anyway, I'm off at midnight tonight. Yay! But that's not what this is about.

I was supposed to teach a class this summer. It was my first opportunity to have a class of my own and the first time I would really be teaching astronomy. (Labs don't count, in my opinion). Up until now, I have only taught physics or chemistry. I'm really trying to figure out right now what career path I want to take--do I want to just do research, or do I want a tenure-track faculty position where I would teach and do research? I thought that this class would give me a huge opportunity to really see what teaching is like in a university class. I was looking forward to it. (And being as obsessive compulsive as I am, I was already starting to do a little prep work).

I should also say that this has been set up for several months now. The department asked for graduate student volunteers to teach summer classes; I volunteered and was assigned to teach one that starts in July. Today my advisor told me that he has decided to give my teaching position to someone else. So I am pretty damn disappointed.

Rationally, I can sort of understand his reasoning. The person he has decided to give this job to has no funding for the summer. I won a NASA fellowship a few years ago, so I pay myself (well, I pay about 75% of my own salary and a former advisor pays the rest). Technically, I don't need the money. (Though, I wasn't going to get paid any extra for teaching; it's just that this other advisor wasn't going to have to pick up the extra part of my stipend for a month). So, by giving this teaching position to unnamed-student, my advisor has found him about 50% of his pay for 4 weeks out of the summer. My advisor also said he wants to free up my time this summer to focus on my thesis.

Irrationally, the argument in my head sounds like this. Why do I get punished by not being allowed to have this opportunity because I happened to have won my own funding? Why did my advisor decide to take my position to give to this other student, and not the positions of one of the other teachers this summer? There are three grad students teaching; am I the one who got shafted simply because the student taking my place is another student of my advisor's? And what was my response supposed to be when my advisor says "I hope you can understand this." Was I supposed to forbid him from giving this position to someone else?

(My response was a calm, yet clearly cold "Well, this decision isn't really up to me is it." )

And those extra 4 weeks I now have to focus on my thesis, some 10 months before I defend? Wow. What a difference that will make. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm pretty ticked. And pretty hurt. And pretty well done with my department. I'm ready to graduate and get the hell out of here. They can all bite me.

I also know that I am full of over-the-top melodrama right now, so I'm sorry about subjecting you to that.

What does this mean?

I had a dream a few nights ago. I dreamt that my mother arranged a marriage for me. Apparently, the "me" in the dream was planning to change my mind and back out of the wedding at the last minute, but everyone around me convinced me that I had to do it, since I had a dress and all. (Clearly the me in my dream was a total pushover, because what kind of argument is that??) And may I say, while we're on the topic, the dress was awful. It was covered in strands of tiny beads and had some kind of shoulder ornamentation involving butterflies. We're talking really horrifyingly bad. But I digress.

So, I'm getting married. And another woman in my department here at school was evidently getting married at the same time so we decided to have a joint wedding. I don't remember much about her dress, probably because I was overwhelmed by her hair. She in real life has dark brown curly hair, roughly mid-back length. In the dream she covered her own hair with a red wig, sadly without bothering to tuck her own hair up into it. She just laid the red wig on top of her own hair. And that's how she walked down the aisle.

So I'm in the freakishly bad dress, waiting in the back of the church when my father comes up to me to walk me down the aisle. Mind you, I'm still having reservations about this whole arranged marriage thing. My father and I get halfway down the aisle when he sees someone he knows and starts talking to them. After a brief converstaion he turns back to me, saying that I can go the rest of the way on my own and sits down in the pew next to this person to chat. I walk the rest of the way to the alter only to find that my groom has decided not to show. I got stood up at my arranged marriage in my freaking dream!! To top it all off, the guy I was supposed to marry was Jess from The Gilmore Girls. Not the actor that plays him, but actual the character himself. I couldn't possibly tell you where that idea came from.

In the end, it's hard to say which part of this whole dream was the most appalling. The stand up? My father? The joint wedding? The whole arranged marriage itself? The god-awful dress? Regardless of what wins that competition (and frankly, it's kind of a toss-up), I have to wonder what in the world was going on in my subconscious. How did I ever come up with all that mess in my head?



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Aside, completely unrelated: How can I go to Target to buy shower soap, and leave $75 later with teeth whitening strips, eye cream, tomato sauce, and egg whites, among other things? What is it about Target?