The Mono

Why in God's name did anyone think that I would like graduate school better than undergrad work?

To Those Who Think, When Invited to a Pizzeria With a Group, I Should Just Go and "Get a Salad":

Fuck you.

Did that today, at a Greek place with no other options. Bought the salad with the most protein in it, chatted, still felt like my body was wondering when the meal would arrive. Low protein level made me tired and emotionally unstable for the next four hours while I raced to meet a deadline, unable to get supplemental food. Still feel rotten after having a snack during my drive home. Very tired now. Please shut the hell up about "just getting a salad".

Love,
A

( Let me tell you about my week. )

I looked up Valium (benzodiazepam) to see what its mode of action is. I've been a wreck over the whole dentistry thing, and being able to take a sedative to manage the anxiety would be a good thing, no?

About halfway down the Wikipedia page I see the magic words:

central nervous system depressant

Brilliant. Grouped in with ethers and ingested ethyl alcohol, both of which f*ck me over. Guess that's out of the question. I'll stick with deep breathing and being overcontrolling about the procedures.

Why yes, having a damaged central nervous system is fun, why do you ask?

Next time the fries look like they've been coated with something, and the waitress cheerily assures me that no, they're just potatoes without anything else, I will send her into the back (no matter HOW certain she sounds) to fetch the ingredient list anyway. Stupid bint cost me a good night's sleep.

Edit: Now apparently I'm reacting to phantom wheat. I called up Chez Pierre and asked the waitress to check the ingredients list; she asked the cook and told me, "oil and salt." She confirmed that it was potatoes in, fries out. Yet my pulse spiked to about 110 25 minutes after eating them, I had a very restless night last night, and I'm still not hungry -- classic signs of my wheat sensitivity.

I think I'll still stay away from fries that have flaky outsides.

The Wasilla police chief is against new legislation that protects rape victims against being billed for their rape evidence kits.

( Cut for those who are allergic to politics )

I am so angry, I'm literally shaking.

One last final, right? Time to hand in the last lab report, take the test, and be done. I've already been accepted to grad school, so (as long as I pass) my eventual grade is a formality. I can do that.

I had thought the study guide for weed biology was rather sketchy, but the midterm was pretty easy, as such things go. A few little twists, but okay. I had a pretty good grasp of most things.

Then I go in there and 1) several of the questions were just like the study ones, except reversed -- i.e. they looked exactly the same if you didn't happen to catch that it said "weed" instead of "crop", or "declining" instead of "growing"... 2) I was supposed to be able to construct a population trend, without actual numbers, on a double log scale (constant vs. log is something I'm only just getting the hang of mentally translating into), and 3) he told us to create a plausible linear-algebra transition matrix (3x3), for a "declining" weed population no less, out of thin air and brain cells.

I understood all the terms involved. I understood the relevant concepts (I thought), like what all of the numbers in the matrix meant, how to apply it, and so on... I could answer questions (even vague ones) like "What makes a weed more invasive in a disturbed area?" Sure, I'll take a stab at that one. But this... this...

I wrote a couple of scathing comments about the particularly bad questions, threw a few numbers into the 3x3 matrix that didn't look too weird, made a nasty remark on the last page about the fact that the expectations we were studying under didn't cover this sort of thing, and told the TA it was a damn good thing I don't care about my class grade when I tossed my paper on his desk. I suppose I should be grateful that Marcel himself was nowhere to be found, because I would have been very, very tempted to drag him into the hall and make a few choice remarks that might have further damaged my grade.

I should be happy it's over. I'm just mad.

I walked into the SciLab computer lab this morning, smelled something, and paused to check. Yup, I could feel brain cells quickly going offline... walked back out. Came back after a few deep breaths to ask the desk guy what I was smelling. After a moment of confusion, he said, "Oh, yeah, I used 409 on the" and stopped when I swore. I called over my shoulder (I was already walking out) that I'm sensitive to it.

I took some C to mitigate the effects, and I should probably take some charcoal in an hour or so to catch the metabolites. It wasn't fresh, but it was recent enough; I'm missing about half my peripheral vision, I'm a bit foggy, and I can feel a few waves of reaction. Lovely.

They've changed the fragrance -- I can smell it now, when it used to be odorless to me. That's a good thing.

Maybe I should stick to Hutchison... there are no whiteboards in here other than the ones in the attached classrooms and the teeny ones that announce the class schedules. I've been lucky on this campus -- this is the second exposure in a year and a half of going to god knows how many rooms. Luck only goes so far, though.

I hope I'm not too toxed out to garden this weekend. The weather's supposed to be great. As it is, I'm glad this didn't happen yesterday before my history midterm...

Edit: Sonofabitch. I go in to MU Station to ask the CRC there about who I should contact about general computer lab policy... and after she hands me a card I realize she's wiping down the counter with 409 right in front of me. DAMMIT.

I wasn't sure whether I should contact IT before, but if they just handed out shiny-new bottles of 409 for all the labs to use, they're damn well hearing from me now. Just as soon as my brain starts functioning again.

( Things I really should learn to ignore: )

I guess I'm just thin-skinned today.

I hate days like this. I feel like I don't have a legitimate complaint, as I actually have managed to do everything I need to so far... it's just been so much more stressful than it really needs to be.

( the litany )

It's going to be a long day.

It's the 21st century. You know what I expected science to have given us by now?

1) A telephone that doesn't make me feel like I'm on one end of a pair of tin cans connected by string. We have amazing digital audio equipment and pretty darn good data compression, driven by tiny yet high-powered processor chips. If I can get high-quality streaming radio over my 802.11 wifi connection, why the hell can't I get a phone (and corresponding network) that actually sounds like a human voice rather than Charlie Brown's schoolteacher?

(Don't tell me it's the limitations of the existing network -- even full quality cell-to-cell calls would be a tremendous selling point, and wouldn't touch the old copper wires or switchboards. Have any of the phone cariers even muttered about it? No.) (Also: Skype is computer-based, and therefore counts more like a radio station for the sake of this argument. I want to be able to use a phone, not a full computer with headset and net connection.)

2) A bathroom fan that's quieter than the engine of an F-16 for less than 3 grand. (Let's not get me started on vacuum cleaners.)

3) A comfortable, reliable toilet. No, really. When you think about it, we're really only a step or so up from the hole cut into the seat of the ol' shack out back (or a hole in the ground, for those in Asia). We've made the hole prettier, and cleaner, but the average toilet is still a) cold on winter nights, b) not even close to ergonomic (how often do you get numb feet after a few minutes?), and c) touch and go when it comes to heavy work. You can buy warmed seats (for more money). You can buy high-pressure toilets (for a lot more money). I've heard that you can even buy an ergonomic toilet from Japan (for a *ahem* crapload of money), or one of the "ergonomic" seats which really are just trying to put lipstick on the pig. None of this helps you when you need to pee at the train station, and there it is: the icy-cold, hard, uncomfortable standard. Which is probably clogged anyway.

Spider Robinson touched on the last point (in "Callahan's Secret"), but it's one I had already been thinking about for a while. It's something everyone uses, every day. Modern engineering is amazing stuff. When are we going to get over our Victorian prudishness and actually design a good one?

The "never-ending windy drizzle with temps under 40 degrees" thing can stop any time. It's getting old by the third day...

It's a beautiful day outside... and I'm spending the entire day doing homework.

Again.



One of these days I'm going to snap, rip my notes to pieces, scream obscenities at my teachers, and ride off into the sunset. I'll live in a remote rural area, eat almost exclusively food I plant myself, and reread the same fifteen sf/fantasy books over and over. And that will be that.

This is what I get for falling out of the habits of 1) carrying an alcohol wipe with me and 2) washing my hands religiously after using the lab keyboards.

Bad timing, in that I have a take-home final I need to concentrate on this weekend. I'll still go to the party this evening, as I've had no indication in the past that I'm openly contagious at this stage, but I'll take precautions all the same. Hopefully I can whup this before it becomes more than an annoyance... Yin Chiao and lots of vitamin C seemed to do the trick last time.

S. pyogenes, how I hate thee.

Over the past week, I've been working to cut refined sugar out of my diet. I realized that my thinking was muddy, my energy was low, and I generally felt like crap... and I was aware of the fact that I really wasn't eating well. Lots of sugar, lots of HFCS, lots of refined carbs. Generally, if I go back to a meat-and-veggies existence, I think more clearly and I have more energy.

I haven't been completely successful yet -- the cravings have been hideous this time around (it baffles me that people don't believe me when I say I get withdrawal symptoms from sugar). I've been eating huge amounts of vegetables and other okay things, just eating almost all the time, because the cravings are so fierce and I'm not giving in to them. I'm still trying to kill the urge to go out and buy a tin of cake frosting and eat it straight.

The cravings usually go away within about ten days. In the meantime, I've been feeling much better, like I can actually think and get stuff done rather than lie around the house. This is good.

At least, until this morning, when I realized that my eyes were stinging because caustic skin oil from my face had made its way into them -- I'm in the middle of a detox cycle. I'm listless and fatigued, and too paranoid to leave the house. This is bad.

Summary: cutting sugar out of my diet has shifted my metabolism back to the point that I no longer feel like crap, but it's also shifted my metabolism enough that I've started to lose weight again, and the toxins stored in the fat are making me feel like crap. My usual way of slowing down weight loss is... to eat more HFCS.

Great. Now what?

It's a good thing that I found a program that will let me burn CDs in Ubuntu... and that it's not related to cdrecord.

cdrecord won't work with Debian-based distros these days, you see. There's a Debian fork of it called cdrkit, with a component called "wodim"... I did finally find a package for that. It conflicts with the package for cdrecord. That was actually kind of expected; all I needed to do was uninstall cdrecord first. But I didn't. Why?

Because apt-get, when asked to uninstall cdrecord, wants to uninstall three other packages that are "no longer needed". The list: cdrecord, k3b, nautilus-cd-burner, ubuntu-desktop.

ubuntu-desktop? Christ. I don't know how essential it actually is, but it seems pretty damned important to me, and I'm not going to remove any package that firmly suggests you not uninstall it if you want your system to continue to function. Not to mention the fact that it can get along just fine without cdrecord. (As can the other two, given a replacement burning program.)

Both Synaptic and apt-get insist on bundling these four together, with no obvious means of separating them. Sigh.

On the plus side, Gnomebaker created a perfectly sound mp3 CD with very little hassle. I can finally burn CDs again!

My credit union ran me through setting up a captcha image and security questions yesterday.

Unlike some people I've heard from, I don't consider that to be a huge hassle, given that more security is good and it took me only about five minutes. I'm a very visual person, so the image thing works for me. I'll probably remember that picture when I'm sixty and the current credit union website has long ago crumbled to its component electrons.

What bugs me, as it does with all sorts of places that use this now, is the "challenge questions". Are these always written by idiots?

( more ranting )

I was on my way to discussion section when I ran into Angela, who cheerfully said, "Hey, you weren't at discussion section today."

Buh? It was.... 3:50. For some reason I had thought the section was at 4:10, not 3:10 like it's been all quarter. Either that or I had misread my watch. As a result, I went out and tried the falafel at a mediterranean restaurant I'd never been to instead; the "snack" cost me $11, more than lunch generally does, and I'm beginning to seriously doubt the assertion of the (somewhat surly) counter clerk who assured me the falafel had no bulgur wheat in it. My system is telling me otherwise.

I have to wait almost an hour for the next train now, too.

Whatever is causing this streak of misfortune and stupidity can stop. right. now. In the meantime, I'm going to go home and hide under the covers. Wake me when it's over.

I wonder whether there's a "law" that resembles the following:

No matter how bad a situation is, it can (and likely will) get worse. (Also known as the "F*** me harder" rule.)




I hope the rest of the year isn't like this week.

Okay... when I got a "Notice of Abandonment" (it reads like a notice of imminent impounding) on my bike the Monday after Thanksgiving, I was peeved. Sure, it was hitched to the fence at the station, but it's not like there's enough racks for bikes around there.

( Now I'm ready to ride the two miles to the police station and raise hell in person. )