No good, very bad day

Ever have one of those days? Rhetorical, I know, but those days just suck. I’m five minutes from the end of one of the worst days in recent memory. God damn wallet was stolen last night on the train. I thought I just misplaced it when I got home and decided to go to sleep and find it in the morning. Instead, I got a call from an anti-fraud agency who informed me someone was using my credit card to buy shit. So, after hours of trying to clear everything up (which I think I did correctly…) I’m still unsure of how to proceed. Could have been worse though, they only spent a few hundred before the cards were canceled. I’m not really worried about my credit or anything, it’s mostly just the hassle of getting new IDs and junk. I keep telling myself that things could be worse, I could be on fire.

Doesn’t change the fact that I hate people though.

This is gonna make SfN fun…

Getting back into the fold

Well, I’m finally kind of back to normal. The craziness of school has died down a little but is still somewhat difficult. Honestly, the most difficult part of school is actually my lab rotations since they take up so much time.

Speaking of lab rotations, mine appears to be going relatively well all things considered. I was paired up with a new post-doc who isn’t very organized, complains a lot, and just isn’t my ideal type of person to be paired with. Fortunately, the lab is full of great people who help me out whenever I need it and are actually quite fun, so this lab is certainly in the running for my thesis work (having tons of money and equipment doesn’t hurt either).

Short post because I have to catch the bus to class.

Older and smarterer?

It has only been two weeks since school officially began and I’m already overwhelmed. Not that this is coming as a surprise to me considering this is grad school, but it sucks nonetheless. I’m only taking a single fundamentals course and doing a lab rotation (though I do spend at least 30h/wk in there) and yet I’m still overwhelmed. Guess that the way it’s supposed to go though, at least from what I hear from the older classes.

Honestly, as hard as it has been I’m having a great time learning massive amounts of new information and techniques. Oh, I’ll still complain, but don’t listen to it because I’m having a great time.

What I’m not enjoying so much is turning 26 this weekend. Each year passes more quickly than the last and it terrifies me to think that I’m going to wake up one day as a 30 year-old grad student who still has a fucked up relationship with his “wife” and won’t have anything resembling a decent job in his future. Part of what upsets me is knowing I am older than most of the people in my class, and the ones who are my age already have M.S. degrees. Could be worse though, I could be on fire. Guess I’ll just have to go to a dive bar with my friends tomorrow night and celebrate the inevitable; I’m getting older and there ain’t shit I can do about it. Awesome.

A few randoms

First, grad school does not appear to be easy.  Should have paid more attention in my undergrad physics course when we were learning about circuits.  Kinda kicking myself for that one.

Second, if you don’t know how to use the self check-out line in the supermarket then DON’T FUCKING USE IT!  I swear to god most people get up to those things are become bumbling retards.

Finally, I need to stop going out thinking I’m just going to drink “a few” beers and should just embrace the fact that chances are good I’m going to go out and get pretty messed up.  Happened both Friday and Saturday.  Not good.

Not dead, I swear

Seriously, I’m not dead and will begin posting again.  Just got internet in my place (couldn’t avoid it) and grad school/lab has been taking up most of my time lately, but I will make time to post again soon.  Promise.

Happy with my decision

Of all the good that has been done to my life by the exclusion of cable TV in its entirety and limited access to the internet the best thing to come from it is my increased faith in humanity.  However, this is not a good thing.  You see, I’m simply fooling myself that Americans, and humans in general, are more intelligent than they truly are because I’m not exposed to their incessant stupidity on FOX News and similar programs.  They’re just as stupid as they ever were and arguably getting worse by the day.

This latest freak-out over Obama addressing the nation’s students made me want to scream.  It also made me happy that I don’t own a TV.  Ignorance is bliss.

Recent happenings

I honestly don’t really know what to write about.  So much has happened/been happening that it’s hard to figure out even where to begin.  I guess since it’s freshest in my mind I’ll write a little bit about grad school first.  For the past few months I have been working in a lab as a temp because my grad student status doesn’t officially begin until September 1^st.  Unfortunately, that means I have to stop working in said lab at the end of August.  Even worse, it means that I have to get my ass in gear and write up a lab report summarizing my research so that this will count as one of my mandatory three lab rotations (though I’m going to do four).  This is a problem because in addition to all the work involved in “my” project my boss has made me take over parts of three other projects that no one wants to do (I’m decent at a particularly finicky and tedious technique that involves a lot of front end work that no one else wanted to do).

Because of this situation I have a very odd problem.  I’ve been generating data like it’s my job (literally and figuratively… wait, nope, just literally) but I haven’t learned anything new.  I’ve missed the big picture.  I feel like a lab tech again.   Such feelings are not good when one is in grad school.  So for the past week I’ve been trying to play catch-up and figure out what my results have added to this particular field and while I’ve been having success in doing so there’s just so much more I need to learn before I feel comfortable with it.  Maybe it’s a lost cause and no one really expects me to know all that I expect myself to know, but since those people aren’t telling me otherwise I am just going to assume I do.  Well, grad school is off to a fantastic start!  Can’t wait for more of this!

Sarcasm aside I actually can’t wait for the school year to begin.  I haven’t been intellectually stimulated in years and very much look forward to the challenges that await me in classes that range from how to build a patch-clamp rig so we can study individual ion channels on the surface of an axon to how large-scale neural circuits underlie complex behaviors.  It’s gonna be awesome and I am truly excited for the long term, but now is all I know and now sucks.  Oh well, it will get better soon.  It always does.  In the meantime I’ll just listen to a little M83, Drive-by Truckers, Broken Social Scene, and MGMT to get me out of this funk.

No time for a title

Hot damn I have been neglecting this blog. That’s what happens when you don’t have internet access at your house. Don’t worry though, I’ll write up something good these next two days and post it while at work.

On moving

I nearly forgot what it was like to move out of an old and disliked, yet comfortable, place into completely different one.  It throws your whole life off, as I have been for the past week.  In a sense I have felt a bit manic depressive due to the elation I have felt unpacking all of the stuff I have accumulated over the past few years into my new apartment while feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness.  It’s weird, I haven’t lived with Emily for six months now, but for some reason living in a place where we had once lived together had fooled me into believing that I wasn’t alone.  My new place doesn’t have that history and now, finally, I feel alone.

Being alone sucks.

Thankfully, I still see Emily fairly frequently which has helped immensely, but coming home to an apartment still full of semi-empty boxes just doesn’t feel right.

On the grad school front I’m nearing the end of my first rotation and attempting to set up my next three for the upcoming year.  So far I’m zero for three of my top picks (one “no” and two haven’t replied yet) which is beginning to worry me a bit and now I have to spend a lot of time making a back-up list of profs I would possibly want to spend the next six years with.  Fun stuff.

Also, one of the forgotten joys of moving involves eating a lot of crap because your kitchen isn’t completely unpacked and situated the way you like it.  Throw in the recent Chicago heat wave and I’m left to eating prepared foods from the supermarket or anything cold I can get my hands on.  I feel like crap eating that stuff but I’m so hot that I don’t want to cook anything.  Talk about a rock and a hard place.

I’m going to do what I can to get most of the rest of my junk unpacked tonight just so I can begin to get my life in order.

Now the hard part begins

Well, 14 hours and many hundreds of steps later I am finally moved into my new apartment.  Now comes the tedious part of making sure everything in my apartment works (it mostly does) and putting all my shit away.  I have a lot of stuff.

So far it’s been fine not having cable and internet.  I get a lot of reading in between unpacking and it’s forcing me to come into work on Sunday to get a little access and tie up some loose ends from the end of the work week, so all-in-all it’s not going badly.  We’ll see how I feel about it in a week or so.