Things I Have Learned

I like to learn things. Since Sunday, I have been amassing a list of the new(-ish) knowledge I have gained. It's terribly exciting.

(2) When making a huge batch soup with pasta, do not put ALL of the pasta in on the first cooking. It will simply suck up all of the soup broth in the refrigerator overnight. The broth is the essence of what makes soup soup, so without the broth you really just have pasta-y stew. (I have actually learned this about a dozen separate times. I just keep forgetting).

(3) Desperate Housewives is on at 8, not 7. So don't sit down with a bowl of lukewarm noodle-ful soup-stew at 7:15 hoping to catch the remaining 45 minutes of DH. You'll find Ty Pennington instead and only be disappointed.

(4) Everything involving thesis writing takes about 10 times longer than you think it will. Just go ahead and plan for that.

(5) My microwave has roughly the power output of a Glade^® candle.

(6) I need background noise when I'm working. Having listened to every CD I own in the last week at least twice, I'm moved on to leaving the TV on. Cable networks play CSI and all its variants a lot.

(7) Also related to #6, some network (maybe one of the Turners?) plays about 3 episodes of X-Files in a row in the middle of the night. The first few seasons of that were really quite good. But it's a scary show to watch in the middle of the night.

(8) I heart Pandora. You should heart Pandora, too.

(9) Four alarm clocks does not an on-time wake up make.

Counting Down

I've set a date for my thesis defense. It's very exciting. In a terrifying, please-don't-let-me-fail kind of way. I take some comfort in the fact that in only a few weeks my thesis will be turned in and 14 short days after that I'll be done. I expect the manic mood swings characteristic of my last few months to be wrapping up then as well.

I wonder if anyone has ever earned a PhD in clinical psychology (or something related) by studying the mental well-being of other PhD candidates. I think it could be an interesting study.

Sam

I remember a brief scene from The West Wing when Sam Seaborn was having some difficulty writing a speech. He's writing on a pad of yellow legal paper on the desk in front of him. In one smooth motion he stops writing, rips off the top sheet, crumples it up in his fist, bangs his fist on the table three times, throws the crumpled up ball of paper into the corner, and picks up the pen to start writing again.

I feel Sam's pain.

Not coincidentally, my computer is also named Sam. Yet ComputerSam does not crumple in a very satisfying way like a piece of paper does. ComputerSam does not crumple at all, in fact. And slinging him willy nilly into the corner is probably a bad idea at this juncture. But I feel Sam's pain.



Gosh I'm wordy when I've run out of relevant work-related words.

Procrastination

Pigs pointed out the irony that I wrote a post about my inability to write my thesis. That irony is not lost on me. I'm now dogsitting this weekend at a friend's house and am looking so eagerly at a copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell that I'm about to rip it off the shelf to read it. I haven't wanted to know anything real about biology since I took 9th grade biology in the early 90's. That's how badly I am in procrastination mode right now.

Luckily this whole graduate school thing/debacle will be over one way or another in a matter of weeks.