tarigwaemir

Lowell House on the Feast of Ste. Scholastica

Whew! Feeling deliciously tired. I really ought to attempt to get some work done this afternoon before schwimmerin and I go off to get wined and dined by the MIT biology department, but I'm in the mood to curl up in bed with a good book instead.

( Post-practice thoughts )

( The problems of being an introvert )

Yours &c.

Post-script: On a completely different note, the new "gifts" feature on Facebook? How much do you want to bet that they copied that from LiveJournal? ^_^ (Even the price is about the same!) Oddly enough, it seems to be fairly popular judging by how many items on my news feed are about people receiving gifts. I wonder, is the uselessness of a feature inversely proportional to its trendiness?

Lowell House, on the Feast of St. Paulinus

Dear self, please procrastinating and actually resume studying. Obviously, it was a bad idea for me to connect my laptop to the Ethernet jack in my room. -_-

Reading period: an undifferentiated blur of time spent alternately in self-castigation and in panic, interrupted only by irregular periods of sleep and meals accompanied by morbid conversation.

Anyway, because gloating to everyone I know in real life clearly isn't enough for my ego: I received one acceptance letter yesterday and two interview offers today! ^_^ (Unfortunately, this translates to major lack of motivation for getting any work done.)

Okay, back to biology.

Yours &c.

Lowell House, on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo

Argh, my iPod just ran out of batteries. Current state of mind: hyped up on coffee and going gradually insane. The overwhelming desire to beat my head against the desk has largely subsided now, thanks to finally finding a topic where I can actually propose experimental approaches (as opposed to the many other topics previously considered and even partially written up, until now). But alas, there are "many miles to go before I sleep" for I have resolved not to go to bed until I'm finished with this application...even if it means not sleeping at all! ::dramatic flourish::

I'm currently doing the section reading for Developmental Biology to restore my nerves. Who knew that dorsal-ventral axial patterning in frogs could be calming? But it is. (Well, more calming than the bajillion papers I just skimmed on robustness anyway.)

( Weekend summary )

Next up on schedule is the Leverett 80s dance next Saturday night and the Harvard Ballet Company the following Sunday afternoon. By the way, for the musically literate, what exactly counts as 80s music? Queen? ABBA?

Yours &c.

Lowell House on the Feast of St. John of Capristano

One. More. Paragraph. Why, oh why, is it so difficult to write a statement of purpose? If it were not for my research mentor, who put her foot down and set a deadline for me to finish a first draft, I would probably still be at two paragraphs. -_- I'm pretty certain that this statement sounds bland and awful. I'm also pretty certain that it'll end up being too short, which is ridiculous.

If you look at the timeline I made for myself a few weeks ago, I was supposed to be finished with the statement of purpose and already working on my plan of research. Alas, the plan of research is still nonexistent. I also really need to figure out what to do about a third letter of recommendation, preferably before the end of this week. (I have three possibilities for that third letter, and none of them are ideal. I thought I'd procrastinate until my statement of purpose was finished before I went about figuring out which possibility to choose.)

This grad school application ordeal has been brought to you by Google. No, seriously. The spreadsheet containing all my information on graduate schools is on Google Docs. So is my personal statement. I'm using a Gmail account to handle all the online application accounts, and Google Calendar keeps track of all my deadlines. Also, my newest method of online procrastination is to read the ScienceBlogs biology RSS feed via Google Reader, which serendipitously has become a good way of finding interesting labs at the institutions I'm applying to. If Google were to spontaneously combust tomorrow, this whole application process would go down the drain.

In other news, ladydaera came last Wednesday and has been here all weekend. She's leaving tomorrow. As a result, I've actually had a semblance of a social life this weekend. Friday evening, we had dinner with Kofi, Chit and Mariana, wherein Daera pulled this awesome stunt where she seized the bill by snatching it out of the checkbook. It was quite dramatic, and let me assure you, I've seen quite a few spectacular fights over the bill before. She hid the bill with her credit card until the waitress came back for it. Kofi protested a lot and attempted to give his card to the waitress but met with no success. I guess it was a shock to our dear "father" that one of his daughters was grown up enough to pay for his meal. ^_^

Saturday night, schwimmerin, Nan and I went to see The Prestige at Boston Common. Originally, we were supposed to go with ladydaera too, but she was held up by her conference. I shan't spoil the movie, but let me just say that we left the theatre with identical looks of awe on our faces. I mean, you would think a story about Victorian stage magicians in London would be enough brilliance in and of itself, but the movie actually surpassed my already sky-high expectations and then some. I was completely blown away by the plot twists. The last time I had a comparable reaction to the sheer coolness of the narrative was Lucky Number Slevin. As schwimmerin put it, "That, my friends, is what we call a mindfuck."

Sunday brought another kendo dinner, this time with the sophs and juniors, with the expected amusing conversation. Honestly, one of these days, I need to buy a recorder and tape all these conversations because it's impossible to reproduce them in text. Actually make that a camcorder.

Alas, I still need to write this concluding paragraph. -_- And read more Western Marxism. (By the way, is it just the translation or does Lukacs really write that badly? I want to give him a chance, but it's hard when Bernstein's prose is lucid and reasonable, while Lukacs keeps writing vaguely of historical dialectic and methodology over and over and over again without really saying anything. I'm so tempted to skip him and his meandering.)

Yours &c.