The Mono

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. )

I've been fighting with my wireless drivers.

It feels like I'm always fighting with my ( wireless drivers. )

Every three days.

Every three fucking days we end up chasing a rat around the house. Then we lose it again.

It's been at least three roof rats, as we've ushered two of them out the door... but a few days later, there's another rat.

I think the latest one is in the living room with us. The screen is closed to keep the cats out. My rage is sufficient that I may postpone cleaning off the dining room table and baking, so that I can instead turn the whole place completely upside down. All books off the lower bookshelves, anything with hiding space under it blocked off or lifted off the floor, etc. etc.

I'm tempted to leave it all that way, too, if we're going to have a rat in here every three fucking days.

So sick of it.

Edit: We got the latest one out. After working my way all around the circumference of the living room, systematically eliminating hiding places, she teleported past me into the kitchen and got driven out the back door.

I'm ready to crash... but at least they can't hide behind the bookcases anymore. I nudged the wire going to the old stereo and got a flash of fire -- turns out it was chewed down so much it shorted across a piece of lint. That's been unplugged now.

I cannot adequately express my hatred of this class.

We have to draw double-reciprocal (that's 1/x vs. 1/y) plots of the given data, figure out the apparent slope and y-intercept, then plug them into one of five different equations that all look the same. Which we have to have memorized. That's ignoring all of the equations for the constants involved, which we also have to memorize.

We have to look at the resulting plot and decide whether it's an example of competitive, non-competitive, mixed non-competitive, or uncompetitive activity -- the only differences are the slope of the lines and where they intersect (at the x-axis, at the y-axis, in between, never). If all those terms sound very similar, it's because they're really fucking stupid descriptors for what's happening.

I can't use my calculator to make a coherent graph based on points, only based on functions. If she doesn't provide us with graph paper I will bite somebody.

Oh, and she still wants the exam to be done in pen.

Edit: There is a review question telling us how many amino acids are in a certain protein, and asking us to calculate the length in Angstroms of the resulting coil. This would require memorizing 1) how many amino acids to a turn in a coil, 2) how many Angstroms to a turn, 3) the fact that this protein is different, and 4) the number of Angstroms to a turn in this protein. I don't give a tinker's damn that a turn of this particular keratin is 5.1 Angstroms in length rather than the usual 5.4 Angstroms -- I have enough actually relevant things to worry about.

If she puts something like that on the exam, I will have to choose between kneecapping her, or just giving her Hemingway on why memorizing shit like this actually hurts learning. I'm thinking about three pages worth of handwritten essay. In pen.




I've lost the battle to not stress over this exam.

apparently all I needed to do was to say I was having a nice, pleasant, easy day.

The Windex used to clean the microscopes has short-chain ethers in it. Despite being the blue flavor, which is normally safe.

Brilliant.

My teacher understands, and let me take off early; I've taken enough vitamin C to fend off all but mild tremors. I'll stay for biochem unless I start having serious issues -- since this isn't ethylene glycol butyl ether (it's probably one of the longer-chain relatives) the reaction should be more mild. EGBE would have sent me flying out the door at the first whiff.

I hope I'm not flat for the weekend. I hope I can manage to make it to lab tomorrow. I hope I can stay at the co-op for dinner tonight.

Just beautiful.

Update (6pm): I'm not feeling half-bad, actually. My verbal and writing coordination are kind of iffy -- I seem to have picked up a little dyslexia, and word choices are difficult -- but the panic is gone, and so are all but the tiniest of tremors. I'm not too much more tired than usual, either, which surprises me. I'll take it easy with the bike, but I think I'll go to dinner and see what happens. I'll leave a little earlier so that I'm not racing the train. Oh, and I'll take a little more C.

Maybe speed-bump rather than disaster. At least Professor Leary was more coherent than usual in biochem.

The fact that an article suggesting that the Democrats might have an edge in the elections, simply because they have prettier candidates, made it onto the front page of the Washington Post is bad enough. But reading the article made it worse.

... [R]esearch has shown that voters who are easily swayed by social trends tend to favor more attractive candidates. Conversely, people who resist social trends prefer unattractive candidates.

Aaaugh.

Could someone with a more formal knowledge of logic please put a name to the fallacy in the second sentence? The sheer idiocy is making my eyes bleed.

The rest of the article is horrifically shallow. Read it at your own risk.

My biochem teacher really should not teach when she has a temperature of 102.

( a little rant )

I was really, really not well when I got out of PlAnat lab -- cold, very tired, and depressed. Cold I could do something about; there's a little espresso bar on the ground floor of the Lab Sci building. Coffee plus chocolate plus heat restores my temperature, add in a little sugar and some milk for energy... sure.

The guy at the machine made me the best damn decaf mocha I've had in ten years. I haven't had a non-bitter mocha of perfect temperature (and decaf has a tendency to bitterness, too!) since I left the Seattle area. Nobody in Contra Costa county knows how to make one properly. I suspect I'll be frequenting that little coffee bar pretty regularly this quarter...

So that made me feel better. Biochem let out early, so I'm futzing around before I go to the co-op for dinner. Gotta go bond with potential new housemates and all that.

It's been a week. I need to come up tomorrow morning, early, to deal with all the bureaucracy, then I'll fix my bike and garden at the co-op. Downtime? Oh, right, that's these ten minutes right now...

or is that kneecap?

I am currently at home, tending to my wounds. It certainly was an eventful day; ( I hope some of those events are not repeated. )

Other than being bruised and tired, I'm in pretty good shape. The quarter doesn't look too scary -- a bit of a challenge, perhaps, but it should be. Not overwhelming. And I hope it gets less tiring. School does tend to agree with me; I eat small amounts more often, and exercise far more, so I get a bit leaner and my stamina goes up. I wouldn't complain if it happens again this year.