Very Quick Deep Thoughts

Why oh WHY would a man wear faded, acid-washed, denim capris? It's an abomination to the senses. And seeing it is kind of like watching a train wreck: you can't not look at it.

What exactly does Pringles put on their chips--oops, I mean "potato crisps"-- to make them so addictive so quickly? I mean, who actually eats 10 potato crisps and then seals up the can saying, "I've had my single serving of Pringles; I'm done now." Why don't they just go ahead and call a third (or half) of a can a serving and be done with it? Oh, and acknowledge that they are drugging all of us to make us eat more. That said, I did notice that my can of Pringles has 0 g of trans fat. That makes them "healthy" apparently. (What crap.)

I've been tagged by Pigs for a meme. What is a meme? Regardless, I'll work on it and post it asap. Meanwhile, if you've not read Pigs's blog you should. She's funny and a great writer. That's my public service announcement for the day. :)

In case you were wondering

The opposite of "soundproof" is apparently "dorm room walls."

Seriously, what do they build these things out of? Paper mache?

Here we go a-conferencing

Ah summer. The season of warm weather, sunshine, beaches, late sunsets. It's also the season when the undergrads leave campus and one can walk around without bumping into people and find decent parking. But that's a thought for another day.

Summer is the season of conferences. Conference = a "business trip" we science types take to an exotic locale to speak and think deeply about the groundbreaking & trendsetting new discoveries of the last year or so. We kiss up to the bigwigs in the field and give presentations on our own little bits of research, hoping for someone to stand up and say "Look--she's a genius! The next Einstein!" (Wait, maybe that's just me.) But really, we also revel in the chance to go somewhere cool.

It stands to reason that a lot of conferencing takes place in the summer. This is when most faculty are not teaching and can actually take the time to go to Kuala Lumpur or the Canary Islands or Sydney for "work". And if you have to be in Lisbon for a week for work anyway, well you may as well stay another week or two and bring the family over for a little vacation while you're there. :)

Summer, however, is perhaps not the best time to schedule a week-long meeting in Columbus, Ohio. No offense to Ohio as I am sure it is a lovely place, but I can think of about 1000 other places I'd rather be right now than a freakishly cold dorm room in Ohio (complete with permenantly dirty bathroom and microfridge!). I don't really know why the conference housing is university dorms, but it is. I had a complete undergrad flashback when I checked in this afternoon. I don't miss dorm living at all.

I'm giving my very first talk this week. Thursday afternoon to be exact, if you'd like to think good thoughts for me. :) I've given plenty of presentations and seminars and the like at school; public speaking doesn't really bother me. The science of what I'm presenting does bother me a little. I feel like I know just enough to pick out the weak spots in my arguments; I just don't know that I have my feet under me enough on this project to stand up to the audience when they call me on it and convince them that I am right. It's a little nerve-wracking, too, doing this on the eve of my last year of grad school. I'm getting ready to start applying for postdocs and I cannot afford to make an ass of myself and then ask for a job.

Anyway, prepping for this conference has given me migraines for weeks and cost me countless hours of sleep. So I am glad it's finally here. Wish me luck; maybe I'll post again after the conference picnic tomorrow. There's supposed to be some kind of Beer Bash.....who doesn't love several hundred drunk scientists? :)

Morning Woes

No two clocks in my house are set on the same time; they range from 2 minutes fast to 13 minutes fast. I do this partly because I hate to be late, but mostly because I am not a morning person. I am a master at convincing myself that I don't really have to get up in the morning. I come up with all kinds of wacky reasons why I should not get up yet. My favorite was when I decided I couldn't get up until the number on the clock was divisible by 7. I have no idea where I came up with that. I am an uber-geek even in my sleep!

So my conscious self has finally had to resort to some CIA-worthy covert ops to get my body up in the morning. I have two alarm clocks now; one in my room, and a really loud one hidden in the den. I periodically move it around in the den to force myself to actively seek out the beeping when it goes off. Neither clock is set on the right time (or even the same time), but they are carefully aligned so that the alarms go off exactly halfway through each other's snooze cycles. There is beeping about every 4 minutes in the morning in my house. It also turns out that my sleeping self often doesn't register that the clocks are fast until I am mostly awake. So the ambiguity of time in my apartment in the daytime is worth it to me if it will confuse me enough in the morning to actually wake up.

This morning turned out to be particularly challenging. I had been working quite late last night and only intended to sleep for a few hours before getting back up again. The alarms began around 4:30 this morning. I alternately smacked around for the snooze button on my nightstand and sleepwalked to the den looking for the hidden clock in an effort to lay down in silence for just a few more minutes. At some point I decided (while getting back into bed to snooze another 4 minutes) that I should put my glasses on; that way, I could see the clock next to my bed and know that I am oversleeping. Seemed like very logical reasoning at the time. So I got back into bed and slept very carefully with my glasses on. A few snoozes later, I decided I should get in the shower to wake up. I got as far as getting my towel before deciding to get back into the bed. And that's how I woke up an hour later in the bed, wearing my glasses and clutching my towel.

Bizarre.

Migraine City

There are days when I wish my head would just go ahead and explode. It sure feels as though it is on the brink. My migraines are (as best I can tell) brought on by either (a) stress or (b) certain lighting situations. Sometimes both! The recent batch of the last week have been predominantly of the stress variety.

I know the headache will be bad when I can pinpoint the exact location of origin. The "pointy headache" is a personal favorite of this variety. It feels not unlike an icepick pointing radially outward from my head, usually behind one of my eyeballs. (The accompanying eye twitch is always a nice added bonus). Variations on the pointy headache include the "my eye is too big for its holder" (often with the pointy headache somewhere in my forehead above the eye) and the inward pointing icepick. Strangely enough, I feel as though the inward directed pointy and outward directed pointy are separate headache entities.

The pointy headache is different entirely from the "my head is in a vice" experience. The vice headache feels exactly as it sounds; a clamp has been affixed around my head and tightened so as to squeeze the two sides together. In a bizarre twist of nature, sometimes adding pressure to the areas of pain actually relieves it a little! (I have done vast experimentation on homeopathic headache relief while waiting for the pain killers to do their little dance of let's-make-her-wait-it-out-before-we-work).

And we just won't talk about what bright lights (or any lights at all for that matter) do to my head during a migraine. Computer screens, I have recently determined, are equally as enjoyable what with the added fun of high frequency flickering.

Anyway, it's been stressy around here for the last week or two. I can't wait for my upcoming conference to be over so I can have my head back from the evil demons that appear to have taken it over.

Beach Time

I went on vacation last week. Woohoo! An entire week at the beach. It may seem like a decent enough time for vacation, but it never ends up being enough. We're thinking 2-3 weeks next time. :) I vacation with some of my closest friends whom I met while in grad school, round 1. (I've been to grad school twice in succession, but that's an entirely separate story). You know that saying about how you don't get to choose your family, but you do get to choose your friends? And they become your chosen family? Or something like that? Well anyway, that's what these friends are to me. They're like my family.

We've been summer-vacationing together for about 6 years. Twice we went to the North Carolina Outer Banks, once we went to San Francisco, and now for the third year running we've gone to Emerald Isle, NC. I absolutely love Emerald Isle, it's one of my favorite places. I hope that we always are able to get together each year and do this. I have this vision of all of us, 10 years from now with our significant others, our kids, and our own personal beach house. It's a lovely vision.

At any rate, I'm terribly depressed now to be home. It seems to be a recurring theme among my beach buddies right now; everyone wishes they were still sitting on the sand, fruity drink or scotch in hand, listening to the waves. Can't wait for next year!