Good Day

Today I had a pretty good day. First, I won the battle of wills with my bangs and beat them into submission with a hairdryer. (They look better than that sounded). I finally worked up the courage to talk to my advisor about teaching this fall. The gist: he doesn't really want me to do it (he's worried it will keep me from graduating on time), but he won't stand in my way. So that looks like it will pan out. And, to top it off, I taught my second to last MCAT class of the semester! I'm looking forward to having my weekday evenings back (or some of them at least) when I finish that up next week.

So all in all, not a horrible day. :)

363 and Counting

To graduate in May 2006, I have to have my thesis submitted by a year from this past Friday. So I have 363 days to finish my research, apply for jobs, and write a thesis.

No worries.

Understanding the Bang

I got my hair cut yesterday. My hair is now pretty short, for me at least. I have pretty much always had long hair. The shortest it ever was was when I did the Jennifer Aniston 'do, around 1995. The "Friends" bob, if you will. Even then it was down to my shoulders. Anyway, I had 5 inches cut off last night, so now it falls about down to my shoulder blades. It feels incredibly light, which I love!

What I'm not so sure I love is the bangs. I had long-ish bangs cut as well. I haven't had bangs since the era of the infamous "mall bangs", approximately 1988. These are obviously very different; there's not nearly as much product involved for one! But I'm not quite sure what to do with these yet. There is hair in my face! The other bizarre thing is that my hair is naturally pretty wavy/curly. I learned this afternoon that very short hair around my face has a tendency to curl up like a bad perm when not properly handled. I didn't anticipate that. So no airdrying the hair for me, that is lesson 1! Lesson 2 is: do not use a straightening iron. Like I told my friend Jackie this afternoon, that caused me to end up looking like Lucy Camden, circa 1996. Not at all what I was going for.

Suffice it to say that it took me a solid hour this afternoon to get my new bangs in a place where I would actually leave the house with them. It's going to be a learning experience I guess.

Addendum

Ok, so I forgot one major geek example from my life. Too many people know about it to ignore it. I was a band geek. I wasn't just in the band, I really liked the band. I had fun. I took it rather seriously as a youth.

Total geekness.

In a strange twist of grammar (or something), I just spellchecked my post. It suggested replacing "geekness" with "sexiness". I'm laughing too hard right now to have any real comment on that.

And Now I will Copy Too

Since Ginny copied Stephanie's geek list, I will now copy both of them. :) It really is quite therapeutic! This post's secondary title could be something to the effect of "Confessions of a Childhood-through-Early-Adulthood Geek." We can assume that I am no longer too geeky...though I am in astrophysics, so maybe that's a bad assumption.

1) I didn't take naps as a child and would pitch fits during nap time in pre-school. I wanted to read books and they wouldn't let me.

2) I got glasses in fifth grade. They were large with purple rims. I wore them attached to a rainbow colored string around my neck so that when I would take them off, they could lie at the ready across my chest for the next impaired-vision emergency.

3) I skipped the 4th grade in a small private school. There is no faster way to be hated by your peers. Unless you were fat and non-athletic, which I was too.

4) I actually started a Babysitter's Club with some other girls in my neighborhood. We did all the same things at our meetings that the girls did in the books. We didn't do much babysitting, though.

5) In middle school/early high school I loved loved loved New Kids on the Block. I even had a NKoTB t-shirt that I wore while at Space Camp. (No further comment needed there.)

6) I wore braces from 7th grade through 11th. To add insult to injury, I had to have 7 teeth removed prior to putting on the braces. So I looked a lot like a rabbit with braces since I had no bicuspids and only 1 cuspid and my shiny new braces.

7) I was jealous that my sister got a retainer. I wanted one too.

8) I built model rockets through middle school and high school. I thought that made me cool. I don't know which of those two sentences made me more of a geek.

I'm sure there's much more, but I've got to keep some secrets to myself. :)

Getting What You Ask For

Sometimes the worst thing in the world is when someone actually listens to you and gives you the one thing for which you have asked. Take me, for example. I get tired of people hovering over me, be it literally (ie--my mother calling to ask if I need money) or figuratively (as in at work, when my advisor keeps the advising strings tied a little too tightly). What I really would like is to be able to make my own decisions, be they good or bad. I don't want other people having conversations for me and deciding my fate. I'm 28 for goodness sake, I am a grownup. Please treat me like one.

You might remember several weeks back when a teaching opportunity was rudely ripped away from me. (Clearly I'm still not completely over that. Maybe I used the term grownup a little prematurely back then). Well, I talked to the powers that be (the department chair, let's call him DC) about the whole deal. DC and I (thank the heavens) have a great working relationship. He actually sought me out when he heard that I had "been informed" of the teaching change and wanted to check to see if I was really ok. I told him exactly what I thought about the situation and he told me exactly how everything went down, including the parts my advisor failed to mention to me. Long story short, DC wants to give me a chance to teach a class in the fall since I cannot do the one in the summer. So in theory, all is well and I am getting what I want.

Here's the catch. Of course there is a catch.

My advisor does not want me to do it. Apparently, the faculty member in charge of scheduling went to my advisor to talk to him about the opportunity and my advisor (let's call him Pain in My Ass for the moment) has decreed that he would prefer I did not teach this fall. Mind you, PiMA has not mentioned a thing to me about the chance; the word went from PiMA to faculty member in charge of scheduling to DC and finally back to me. I had lunch with DC yesterday at which point this whole conversation is relayed back to me. DC tells me that it's up to me to make a decision on whether or not to teach the class; the class is mine for the taking. He's leaving the ball completely in my court. He, unlike everyone else, does not want to tell me what to do. Of all the times to listen to me and not actually offer his opinion, this is the one he chooses.

So now, I have two weeks to decide whether (a) to teach this class and piss off my advisor the semester before I need him to sign my thesis or (b) to turn down a golden opportunity that has been created for me by DC and dropped into my lap, thus ensuring that DC will be unlikely to go out of his way for me again the semester before I need his help finding a job.

See how getting what you ask for can come back to bite you in the bum?

Whoa

I love E! as much as the next guy. Maybe more. (Actually, considering the people I'm surrounded by on a daily basis, probably a lot more.) I love some celebrity gossip and spoilers for my favorite TV shows and snarky comments about rich people's fashion sense or lack thereof (see Paris Hilton and/or Jennifer Lopez). I'm a total sucker for it all. But I cannot get behind the headline that greeted me on E! this evening:

"Witness: Michael Licked my Brother"

Ew. Ick. Just no. I have kept myself Michael Jackson-free for as long as possible. I don't want to know anything about the case. Especially not about who licked whom. Why is this stuff news? Why is the trial even open to the press and public? Why did it have to interrupt my gossip reading?

Woe to me.

Grad School Rush

Coming up soon is the time of year when a whole gaggle of college seniors start going around to various graduate programs to decide where they will attend graduate school. At least in astronomy (I can't really speak to other academic fields), many schools really wine and dine the students, trying to entice these 22-year olds to grace the department with their scholarly presence for the next 4-6 years. It can be a very bizarre thing, this whole courting of students thing. It's all very "sorority rush" to me. (And yes, gasp, I did the sorority in thing in college. It's apparently atypical for an astronomer, hence the blank stares of confusion directed at me when I used to mention to colleagues my days in a college sorority.)

It really is like an academic rush. Because the students are often admitted to the school before being invited to visit, the whole point of the visit becomes the department trying to impress the student. There's a whole dog and pony show that the department puts on, showing off their dazzling research opportunities and the fantastic locale where you are now lucky enough to get to live should you choose to attend Astronomy U. There are presentations detailing the glories of the department, there are tours of the facilities, and there are parties designed to facilitate after hours interaction between students and faculty. The whole thing is often topped off with a weekend-long demo of the frighteningly stunted social skills of an entire department of astronomers. All this to convince students that this department is the one to join instead of all of the others to which they were also accepted.

When I take a step back to look at it, it's all just a very strange event. One I am sad to say that I am not looking forward to this year. I'm just to old to smile and put on a good show any more.