tarigwaemir

Stanley Hall on the Feast of St. Sidonius

Good news! Ran into the professor that I mentioned in the last entry (with regard to my recommendation letter woes) in my advisor's office today and extracted verbal confirmation that he will indeed write the recommendation letter for me on time. I'm going to bombard him with reminders though, just to be safe.

More good news! After getting very little labwork done in the past few weeks, I've actually managed to be quite industrious this week. Have some promising data although I will need to follow up before I can say anything for sure. Mood is cautiously optimistic though. My advisor is, uh, not-so-cautiously and enthusiastically optimistic. (I'm setting myself up for disappointment here, aren't I?)

Somewhat good news. Many of my students who were doing poorly before did really well on the second midterm (which had a lower average, making their improvement all the more impressive). Some did worse though, and one of my sections still has an average that's lower than the class as a whole. (The other section's average is ten points better than the class mean though!)

Not so good news. Steve will be gone at a conference for nearly a week. ;_; By the time he gets back, I'll be away at the computational biology group retreat. -_-

Bad news. Apartment is a mess, and I've had a severe stomachache for most of the day. Going to take some Pepto Bismol and hope it goes away.

Yours &c.

Stanley Hall on the Feast of Ste. Teresa of Avila

Exams were handed back today. Quite possibly as unpleasant for me as it was for the students: one of my sections did very poorly compared to the class average. Although everyone has reassured me that I haven't done anything wrong, looking at the list of students who are in the D/F range and realizing that this particular section has more individuals in that range than any other section was rather demoralizing. I've been comforting myself with the thought that my other section, which gets more or less the same material, had a mean comparable to the overall class.

Anyway, I contacted the students who are doing poorly, and some of them have asked to meet with me to discuss how they're doing in the class. Thank goodness Berkeley undergrads aren't shy about talking to their TAs!

Progress in research has slowed, in part due to the teaching workload and in part due to my own fatigue/lack of motivation. Had talk with P.I. about my project and what I should focus on to be ready for quals. She kept telling me that I needn't feel pressured to take the project in a direction that I didn't find interesting, which made me think that I must be looking remarkably unenthusiastic. Admittedly, experiments haven't been going well, but when do they ever go well?

To comfort myself, a list of pleasant and cheerful things, in reverse chronological order:

1. The lab is going bhangra dancing on Saturday night. Plus, will be meeting up with jaebi_lit to hang out.

2. Made some progress on fellowship applications today.

2. Steve stayed over the last two nights and cooked me a cabbage-and-chickpea stew plus kugel. Yum. Also a relief since I've run out of fresh produce in the fridge.

3. Went to karaoke last Thursday with Steve and his friends. Realized that being a karaoke addict has enabled me to sing backup for the major Britney Spears hits. Sigh. Didn't try any new songs, although admittedly I haven't been following K-pop lately so I wouldn't have had many new songs to try. It was a good group of people for karaoke: people were enthusiastic and uninhibited. ^_^

4. Prior to that, I got to eat okonomiyaki for the first time! It was delicious.

5. Had lunch with tokyofish last Thursday where we ended up talking for nearly three hours. Cathartic ranting plus commiseration plus sheer fangirling = very relaxing.

6. Read a lot of Georgette Heyer ebooks. So far, not a single male protagonist other than Freddy from Cotillion has met my approval. They are either arrogant, condescending rakes--Alverstoke from Frederica--or violent, amoral rakes--Avon and Vidal from These Old Shades and The Devil's Cub--or rude, tactless rakes--Carleton from Lady of Quality. I think the most appealing male romantic lead so far has been Charles Rivenhall from The Grand Sophy, who is rude, arrogant and prone to belittling women but is puritanical rather than rakish. (Carleton is pretty much the same as Rivenhall except with a reputation for womanizing.) Would approve of the Earl of Rule in The Convenient Marriage for his laidback nature but alas, he too has a reputation for rakishness.

I understand that the whole appeal of the rake is that he reforms himself for the heroine; she is the exception that causes him to change. But the fact that the rake often becomes possessive and jealous isn't flattering; it's a double standard. Also, the excuse that the rake will never ruin a lady of Quality is also offensive. Anyway, courteous and slightly dumb Freddy is much more likely to win my heart than any romantic hero who seems "mysterious" and "dangerous" from the hint of scandal attached to his name. ::rolls eyes:: I wish there was a romance novel convention featuring Preternaturally Intelligent heroes, à la your favorite genius strategist/go player/absent-minded professor, but I suppose they won't pop up in Regency romances in any case. (Is there such a convention? Maybe I should be reading Heyer's mysteries instead.)

On the other hand, I was very fond of the practical, no-nonsense Frederica who is so very good of taking care of her younger siblings (plus, Felix and Jessamy stole the story in that novel), and Sophy, in her breezy disregard for English conventions, was also refreshing (especially when she trod down Cousin Charles' attempts to belittle her).

7. Picked up CDs from a pile of random free albums left out on the street next to Amoeba. Mostly unknown indie bands distributing free samples or demos to the record store. Rule of thumb: when rifling through CDs whose artists you don't recognize, look for interesting cover art. Apparently similar visual aesthetic = similar musical aesthetic.

8. Saw The Dark Knight (finally) with Steve two weeks ago. Went in with overblown expectations for Heath Ledger's acting; was a little surprised to realize that the Joker was actually a fairly standard sociopath. Also disliked the unambiguous moralizing of the ending. But the movie was still great, and I ate a Cinnapretzel and a whole box of Sour Patch candy (while stealing sips from Steve's giant Icee). How's that for artificial sugar intake?

Yours &c.

Durant Avenue, on the Feast of St. Pacific of San Severino

Causes of stress and anxiety:

1. I have no ride to the departmental retreat this weekend. I need to leave late in the afternoon because I teach Friday section, and unfortunately, no one is leaving after 2 PM. Everyone has told me that I needn't worry since surely someone will be planning on arriving late. Actually, I don't even particularly want to go to the retreat; the only appeal is the prospect of having an entire weekend to myself. But it will be a waste of my P.I.'s money if I don't go.

2. Also, I'm supposed to prepare a poster for the retreat. I thought I could get away with not making one, but my P.I. strongly suggested that I do so about a week ago, so here I am, being a good grad student and pulling an all-nighter to finish this poster in order to get it printed in time. Of course, I could be sensible and just pin up some graphs instead of designing a nice-looking poster using a vector graphics editor. Then again, I don't really have enough data to present, so I'm kind of forced to make pretty diagrams to cover up my lack of results. -_-

It's 4:30 AM and the poster is only 2/3 complete. What data I do have, I haven't finished analyzing yet--hence the missing 1/3--so I'm not even sure how to present it. Am burned out and would very much like to skip tomorrow's lecture but I skipped Monday's as well...

3. I signed up to present papers for my seminar this week. I'm excited about the papers but haven't had a chance to review them yet. Maybe I should take a break to do that since I feel so unmotivated about the poster right now. I suspect though that my brain is too fried to do any deep reading.

4. My students requested extra practice problems with solutions, so at some point before I leave for the retreat on Friday, I need to supply them with said problems and then solve them myself since I don't actually have any solutions manuals with me. Plus, I'll have to triple-check my answers to make sure I don't make any mistakes when I provide them with the answer key.

5. I also have to grade 60+ quizzes this weekend.

6. I've gotten next to no experimental work done (other than a RNA isolation) and suspect that I won't be able to fit in the qPCR runs and cloning that I planned to finish by Friday.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday! Steve came over the night before, and we made red bean buns. He also brought sea squirt, which I'd never eaten before, and I made myself seaweed soup, which is traditional Korean birthday food. My parents sent me a birthday card and three textbooks (which I requested). Also, schwimmerin sent me a cute card. ^_^ Steve gave me a set of Nabokov: an annotated version of Lolita, the famous Lectures on Literature, and Strong Opinions. I finished The Defense a while ago (my first Nabokov novel) and thought it was rather brilliant, so I'm finally giving in and reading Lolita after all. Probably will attempt to finish it during the retreat (if I can get there).

I spent my actual birthday napping and doing laundry. On Monday, the lab threw a little birthday celebration for me. We had ice cream, Choco-Pie (thanks to the new post-doc who is Korean), scones from the Cheese Board, and a cantaloupe. All in all, a very good birthday.

I also met up with two high school classmates in Chinatown on Monday night. I hadn't seen either of them in a while, so it was good to catch up again.

Okay, back to work. I've consumed enough caffeine that I don't feel tempted to go to sleep but my head is very groggy. I ought to have gotten more of this poster done over the weekend. -_-

Yours &c.

Stanley Hall on the Feast of Ste. Monica

First day of classes today. This semester I'm a GSI (graduate student instructor), so I need to attend 9 AM lectures. >_> Fellow GSIs have decided to meet a half-hour before the next lecture to discuss section logistics, which means making it to the building by 8:30 AM. I suspect I'll need to whip my sleep cycle into shape for this course. Oddly, I didn't have trouble staying awake during lecture, probably because I was busy taking scrupulous notes. All on material that I learned in, well, middle school, but I refuse to be caught off-guard by questions. ^_^

I also enrolled in a graduate seminar on systems biology. Fellow labmate is also taking the course, as well as kaydeefalls' ex. Ahaha. I wasn't exactly surprised, but it was a little bizarre nonetheless. I'm fairly excited about the course; it'll be covering network properties and graph theory, which means I don't need to take a math class on the subject.

Currently still in lab doing RNA isolation. I'm feeling pessimistic about my samples, since I didn't anticipate that much variation in growth rate. Oh well. I had a streak of good luck last week--perhaps the minor demi-deity of academia heard my entreaty and offer of sacrifice--but I feel like I'm already back in the failure slump. Blah. If my latest transformation attempt was successful, perhaps I'll have some glimmer of hope.

Wow, my journal entries have gotten to be so boring. I've been meaning to write up posts about my previous weekends but I really can't seem to find the time to sit and write. Maybe I'll put in a short day on Monday and take the opportunity to catch up.

Yours &c.

Stanley Hall, on the Feast of Ste. Madeline Sophie Barat

( Late night in lab )

Yours &c.

Post-script: So stuck in my own real-life happenings that I forgot to mention that I posted the reveal for blind_go. Didn't try guessing this time around because to be honest, I only read the fics for the theme challenge plus a few extra that caught my eye during posting. (I did recognize harumi's on sight because she was the top choice for attempting a Mononoke crossover and pulling it off so well. I suspect I would have identified arboretum by her paragraph breaks, but I had prior knowledge of her fic to begin with.)

Stanley Hall, on the Feast of St. John of Beverley

I think I've made every mistake I could possibly make today: mislabel tubes, contaminate one of my samples, load the wrong sample, run a gel in the wrong direction (...am rerunning it now in correct direction, on the off-chance that the bands can be saved). Oh, and after making a trip to West Berkeley to run an assay on an expensive and supposedly better fluorescence plate reader, I found that not only did my cells not respond--have no idea why, argh--but the plate reader may not be a good option after all. >_> What is it with me today? Most likely causes: lack of sleep and stress.

Best course of action: go home and get some rest. (Unless my gel turns out to be salvageable. ::hopes against hope::)

Yours &c.

Haste Street on the Feast of St. Cyril of Jerusalem

The theme of this weekend: being ridiculously happy and procrastinating on my presentation. ^_^ Actually, I did try to go into lab on Sunday to finish taking images, but I got kicked out because the floors were being waxed. Fantastic timing on my part as usual. I spent most of today finishing up the Powerpoint, rehearsed it quickly once with the grad student supervising me, and gave a much better presentation than my last one, which I had not only finished ahead of time but rehearsed several times with my first rotation advisor. I think the key difference was that this time, I didn't feel stressed out at all.

blind_go round five: sign up for the panic here.

Links of interest:

1. Via Reading Copy, Man Travels Country to Fixe Typo's on NPR, and the associated blog, Typo Hunt Across America. Excessively neurotic? Perhaps, but I find it just a little satisfying as well. ^_^

2. Hilarious op-ed in the New York Times, satirizing the latest fake-memoir scandal: A Bug's Life. Really.

3. Via Paper Cuts, The Charms of Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books, which the writer concludes by proposing a "Deletopedia" for all the rejected edits on Wikipedia articles.

4. Via Seven Stones, Craig Venter and NSABB on Synthetic Biology. You have to hand it to him: Venter may be egotistical and tactless, but he does have neat ideas. He came to speak at Berkeley a few weeks ago, and we couldn't even get into the room.

5. Courtesy of Steve, an article in the New York Times that will surely disappoint a significant fraction of my classmates: For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test. Apparently the correlation is quite linear. (Ironically, I can't think of a single successful researcher whom I haven't seen drinking beer.)

Yours &c.

Haste Street, on the Feast of Ste. Colette

Oh no, another introspective post.

( A long day )

aiwritingfic had a long navel-gazing post about writing, so I thought I'd do some navel-gazing of my own.

( On writing )

Yours &c.

Post-script: I said I wouldn't bother doing one of these memes again, but oh well, jumping on bandwagon: brutal honesty meme.

Haste Street on the Feast of St. Leander

Hurrah, my genetics problem set/take-home exam is done! I handed it in at noon today. On the syllabus, it's called a problem set, but everyone has been referring to it as an exam, including the professor. I refuse to think of it as an exam though because it makes me feel less anxious about my answers. I didn't write very thorough descriptions of experimental design because I procrastinated (as usual) until the last minute and ended up figuring out the answer to the last question about two hours before I finished writing. My motivation for classwork is at an all-time low, possibly because I have none to spare after labwork.

Our class has been holding study sessions almost every other day for the past week in order to work on this problem set. I stopped going after a while because I was busy in lab and hadn't really made much progress thinking about the questions. However, once I started writing up my answers, I realized that all of us could have saved a lot of trouble if we looked at WormBook and our lecture notes. I received two late-night emails about the properties of certain mutant strains that added further complications to the screen that the class collectively agreed upon, and I realized that both those points were written out explicitly and underlined in my notes.

Anyway, we are now beginning the unit on Drosophila genetics, taught by Prof. Cline. His first lecture yesterday could basically be described as a love song to the fruit fly. Iris believes that no one becomes faculty without losing one's sanity; I have now realized that Prof. Cline's particular brand of madness is his passion for his model organism. Not even Prof. Levine talks so lovingly about Drosophila. Prof. Cline spoke about how the fly was commensal and its migration patterns followed that of humans all the way from Africa, how rare it was to have an insect be both attractive and yet easy to kill, and how appealing were the dark-red eyes of Drosophila melanogaster when most other flies had merely ordinary brown eyes. You know, I shouldn't talk since I've written an ode to the fruit fly as a kind of pastiche, but I think Prof. Cline was being perfectly serious.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post; I was surprised and touched to get so much sympathy from all of you. Also, the suggestions were really useful, and I finally got my mother to come up with a compromise where I text home instead. Well, actually, my mother came up with a new objection to text-messaging yesterday, but we've decided to switch to email, which works well for me because I like communicating by email more than phone anyway. Also, this way, I can actually talk about the parts of my day that I do want to share with my mother before she interrupts me with her usual interrogation.

I just saw this Youtube video of melting Cadbury rabbits via Aurgasm and found it tragic and horrifying. I'm not sure why--they're just chocolate rabbits after all--but the slow deformation seems like something close to torture. -_- Maybe it's the music.

Discussion period going strong at bibliophages for your dose of school stories (jaebi_lit's review of The Year of the Griffin isn't linked yet). I reviewed Maurice, The Invention of Love and Gaudy Night, all of which are set (or partially set) in British universities.

I assigned tryogeru the same recommendation list because I knew she would like it; of course I know tryogeru's reading preferences like the back of my hand. It's easy to decide on good matches for people on my friends list because I have a fairly good sense for their taste in books, but it's a little harder for people I'm less familiar with. I wish I had a more systematic way of assigning recommendation lists, but it's hard to translate the reading profiles into a set of clear parameters. -_-

sub_divided, the next theme is going to be "religion", right? (I think I could come up with three separate lists for this theme, but the question is, who will want to read any of them?)

That reminds me, I need to update my reading blog. Current backlog equals eighteen books. Need to post before the number increases to nineteen.

Yours &c.

Haste Street, on the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

New lab! My third and last rotation, before I must decide on a thesis lab. I sorted out heterozygotes today by looking for flies with curly wings. After reading so many papers on fly genetics and development, it's kind of neat to be looking at real flies. My last rotation was also in a fly lab, but I only worked with sequence data, not actual organisms. Say what you will about the power of computational biology, but there's nothing quite like real bench work.

I keep having the urge to write up a long self-reflective post, by which I mean, the sort of vaguely neurotic navel-gazing of which Thomas Merton wrote:

The soul that picks and pries at itself in the isolation of its own dull self-analysis arrives at a self-consciousness that is a torment and a disfigurement of our whole personality.

How true. In any case, I'm endeavoring to achieve a healthier state of mind by posting instead about K-dramas. ^_^

Specifically, Sharp Blade Hong Gildong! ( And why you should watch it )

In other news, the reading list for "School Stories" is up at bibliophages. (I didn't realize how long the list was! Next time, I promise to use a LJ-CUT.) I was surprised and delighted to see that Delia Marshall Turner, the author of one of the recommended books, commented on the list and friended the community! (How did she find us?) I haven't read any of her books, although sub_divided's blurb for Nameless Magery makes me want to read it.

Yours &c.

Post-script: Note to self, please remember email hostee for recruitment weekend! (Not to mention conducting four interviews on top of that! By the way, anyone have suggestions for good questions to ask? I've never been an interviewer before.)

Post-post-script: I forgot to add that ramble_corner has a post with photos on Klang Valley bookstores at bookwormhabitat.