Another Chance to Get It Right

Nostalgia Mixed with Pursuit of the Infinite

2012-01-07T22:06:00.003-05:00

There's that thing they say, about being late and never doing something at all. It's already seven days into 2012, and I haven't said anything about 2011. Which I guess isn't too surprising, since I don't say too many things around here any more. There's the 9th anniversary post I should have done in October, the Now-I'm-No-Longer-A-Bright-Young-Thing post I should have done in May. When I get caught up in the supposed-toos, I end up in the nevers.

Sometimes a year ties itself up neatly in a bow. Sometimes, something begins in January. Last January, out of nowhere, my PhD project started working. This made my life alternately beautiful, frustrating, complicated and tear-inducing. I didn't sleep that much in January. Or October. And I still made it through. Maybe that was this year's lesson: you will probably survive whatever you are doing now. So, keep doing it. Even when it sucks and when it's hard. And even when it's absurdly easy, and you think you can do it with your eyes closed.

This was a fun year, most of it, but I think most of my years are. I like to orient myself around people who laugh often and loudly, and my days are certainly better because of it. I worked hard, but I had so much fun too.

So, what did I do in 2011?

I was completely unable to take myself seriously almost 100% of the time.

I got love notes in the lab.

I worked hard.

No, seriously, hard.

Really, really hard.

Prepared for a hurricane that never came.

Made some terrible terrible decisions.

Organized a completely successful Lab Olympics.

Celebrated the Royal Wedding.

Held back proud tears as I watched my friends take the Hippocratic Oath.

Continued my girl crush on my brother's girlfriend.

Bruised my ribs cutting off my alarm on Cinco de Mayo.

Got all dressed up for Halloween...

as my boss...

much to the delight of my boss.

Had fun with my family.

Became the shortest of my siblings, right before my sister became a teenager.

Made midnight cake with a wonderful old friend, talked shit while we did it.

Woke up early in the morning for my health.

Ran a 5K in a cape in a month that wasn't October. Also, made my own bad-ass Robin costume.

Trained for and ran a half-marathon.

Found out that I totally do not look cute when I run.

We moved to a house, adopted a dog and rapidly fell in love with her.

And took the whole thing in stride, holding hands and laughing all the way.

***
I've given up on New Year's Resolutions, not because I don't believe in having direction but because I rarely feel very resolved. Defining them as resolutions gives you too much time to fail; you pile all of the pressure on the first part of the year. Doing that primes yourself for failure; the first few times you find yourself not acting how you have "resolved" to, you give up. So, instead, I have goals. Goals that I have a whole year to accomplish.

The sports store where I buy my running shoes have a good guideline for goals; their mnemonic is SMART and stands for specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and timed. For a few months, I've been thinking about these guidelines and what I want to accomplish this year, so I have decided on 12 specific goals for 2012.

Creative:

1) Take a basic sewing machine class

2) Take a letterpress class.

3) Write stories for each round of NPR's Three-Minute Fiction

Health:
4) Lose final 60 pounds. This is important, because I will hopefully going back on the wards next year, and I want to give myself the health advantage, because I know it can be difficult to keep up with once you are in the clinics.

5) Exercise at least 4 times a week.

6) Run at least one half-marathon.

7) Run a full marathon.

8) Eat at home at least five nights of the week.

Random:
9) Read one new book per month.

10) Listen to one new album per month.

11) Complete the 2000 piece puzzle I got for Christmas.

12) Publish a first-author science journal paper.

***

2012 got off to a crappy start; I got sick on January 2nd, and I've been tired since before Christmas, and it's a long time until Memorial Day, the first day of the year my lab counts as a holiday. Some people would give up then and there, take it as a sign that it's going to be a bad year. But I don't think it will be. I'm pretty sure.

These Streets Will Make You Feel Brand New

2011-11-16T22:05:00.002-05:00

There's something about being on streets you don't know in a place where people couldn't possibly need anything for you to keep moving. A place where almost no one knows your name, where you can wander for hours or days without a familiar place. There's something about that.

The past month, maybe six weeks, maybe longer, has been crazy. I was getting ready to go to my first national conference, and there were so many things to do. Western blots that took forever to work (so long that my boss half-canceled my vacation, our 9-year-anniversary vacation). Countless PCRs, things that weren't where they were supposed to be. Work that I thought would be done in a certain amount of time, when it really turned into that-certain-amount-plus-two-weeks. It was so fucking frustrating.

And then the conference came. And then the conference went. And then I left the city where the conference was, hopped on a train for one hour, and got picked up by one of the best friends I have in one of the best cities in the world.

***

Things are best when there aren't any expectations, no plans. When people asked what I would be doing there, I just said that I would be seeing friends. That was it: me, some friends, beer or good food. Those were all the plans I had.

When I got in town, I was so keyed up. I'd had a loud verbal altercation on the conference shuttle bus that morning, an altercation with a douchebag that had plenty of "FUCKING"s and a few "GODDAMN"s, and I was in a fighting mood. For a month, six weeks, I'd been in a fighting mood: irritable, grumpy. Sleepless, over-caffeinated, tired of a whole gamut of bullshit.

Then a subway ride to Washington Heights in a warm coat and a hat; a walk up to the roof; the sparks of a dying lighter in a corner made of bricks to shield the flame from the wind; then the simultaneous rush of THC to the brain, the rush of the wind across the roof, and the boy's hand over my shoulder pointing out the Empire State Building. That moment when everything that has made you worry just falls away. I breathed in the cold air. Breathed out all the air I'd been holding in for six long weeks.

***

The last time I'd been there, I was with my mother. I was 12. We went to Broadway shows, museums, to see the Rockettes. That was all the memory, all of the pretense. That was the only thing I had.

Roberto had to work for 8 hours on Saturday, so I hopped on the subway by myself, took it to Columbus Circle and hopped back off. Hopped all day, 8 hours, down city streets. I punched my 1-Stupid-Tourist-Thing card with a reuben at Carnegie deli; the other people at the table looked sad for me, that I was alone, but I wasn't sad at all. I didn't have to say anything to anyone. Just, "No, this is the only thing I want." "Ticket for one adult." "A mocha, please." And that was it.

I went to MOMA and saw everything, wandering quietly through the galleries for two hours at my own pace. I played a game with myself, guessing the artists from as far away as possible. I nailed a Francis Bacon triptych from a good distance, a Klimt from far away. On my way back to the Klimt, I realized that I had almost missed Les Demoiselles D'Avignon and The Starry Night. I saw a Magritte, several by Man Ray and Du Champ. Everything I wanted to see was there, and more. It was so amazing, so perfect.

I went back to Roberto's, feet sore from walking more than 40 blocks for a fantastic cup of coffee, burning time. I watched trashy tv with his roommates, and then stood up.

"Oh, do you have somewhere else to go?" one asked, then immediately apologized, "Oh, I'm so sorry, that's none of my business!" I smiled at the politeness. No one I know is ever that polite. It was so sweet, so refreshing. I laughed and put on my coat, walked out the door in the dark and back to the subway.

***

"I conquered the subway," I announce. "I took the C train to the 1, and it brought me right here."

"Oh, so you rode the 1 all the way here?" asked a new friend, a friend-of-a-friend who'd been laughing with me all night.

"Mmhmm," I say, proud, "Yep, all by myself. Figured it out."

Roberto leans in close to my ear, "He's making fun of you for not taking the express train." I wrinkle my nose and look back at this new boy. He cracks a smile. I laugh. We all laugh, two pints down and not at all done for the night. A table of champions, me and three gay boys. One from high school, one from college, one new. We don't stop laughing.

I get terribly tipsy, find my hands in someone else's warm hands, brushing someone's arm. There is the immediate comfort of being physically close to someone who would never want to fuck you. You sink in, knock back more drinks, keep getting warmer.

"Why don't you move here?" they whine, the sangria pleading through them. "I wish you lived here. Please don't leave!" I teach them about blow job eyes, we top off each other's glasses. We argue over who pays for what, step out of the restaurant. Leave with kisses on the cheek. Get back on the subway, fold my legs up under me and turn toward Roberto. Hold onto his arm as we go back home.

***

We stayed up late, blazing off of the vaporizer with his polite roommate, a pot philosopher. I sat back while the room spun around me and watched Roberto make faces. We were talking about college, about all kinds of things. Until I excused myself to the bathroom, laid down on the floor. I went back to the living room. "Here, let me tuck you in," said Roberto. Covers went over me, tucked under my feet, kiss on the forehead. "Goodnight," he whispered, and went to bed. After he was gone, I got back up, ran to the bathroom and puked my guts out.

Worth it. Worth every single second, every stupid choice, every ounce of alcohol and wisp of smoke.

***

On Sunday morning, I got coffee with one of my best friends from high school. We shared an omelet, good conversation. She walked me to the next friend, hailed a cab with an ease that made me feel a flash of jealousy. "This is her life," I thought, suddenly amazed.

My friend from medical school and I took a cab to the meatpacking district to eat brunch. They wouldn't serve us mimosas until noon, so we just ate instead, snagging bites of each other's meals, sharing. We shared stories and gossip, wished out loud that our least favorite person from medical school would keep a residency blog for us to make fun of. He told me to come back for New York Restaurant Week, that I always have a place to stay with him. That was what they all said, "Come back. You have a place to stay with me."

They all meant it.

***

When you're not there, you forget what the draw is. You tell yourself that it's not that special, just a collection of big buildings, a high density of people. You forget that it's built on the dreams of millions of people, and that those dreams are what makes the city so bold and beautiful. The dreams of my friends there are so bright, weaving in and out of rooftop weed smoke and drunken nights. That there's something so vibrant about the place that somehow infuses you while you are there too. That it's a special city because you can blend in with everybody else and still feel like you're important. That in a city filled with beautiful things, you start to feel a little bit beautiful too.

***

But in the end, I walked away. Roberto putting my bag in the cab, my lips on the sharp edge of his jaw, an "I love you" text exchanged as I was driven away. Then I boarded the plane and flew back to this much smaller city, where a long-suffering and amazing boy picked me up from the airport, drove me home and cuddled me to sleep.

I don't know if I could live there, but I don't know -- not anymore, not really -- that I couldn't live there. I saw the kids being raised to navigate the subways, to know which one is the express and how to get on it. Couples walking hand-in-hand into stores that don't exist within 500 miles of my city. And I could see me there, me and Joey, in an apartment somewhere deep in the city.

Either way, it was amazing. Perfect. Everything I needed and have been needing for so long now. A chance to disappear. A chance to not have to worry -- at least not for a few days -- about even trying to get it right.

I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You

2011-04-21T19:57:00.002-04:00

Alternate title: "Another Irritating Spring Post" -- feel free to ignore should you be in the midst of snowdrifts or should you simply hate the hopeless optimism of a girl in the spring.

It's always this time of year that I start to fall in love with my city. Two weeks now, two weeks in October -- this city owns all of my heart. Even just now, listening to a back episode of This American Life, where Ira was talking about the Mediocrity Principle, the idea that no particular place is more special than any other. The idea that each city, each planet, each universe is equivalent -- I shook my head. This city, small and frustrating as it may be, has a piece of me tied up in its giant humid pocket. There's no time when it's more apparent than now, on the cusp of tourist season, right before it gets hot and busy. It's already so busy that we didn't want to wait for the unexpected line at our favorite dessert place, but not so busy that we couldn't cross the street to the ice cream shop, get blueberry cream pie milkshakes and walk the mile back to Rob's. There is a tenuous balance here that won't be around for much longer. We're about to hit the tipping point, and I'll start to fall back out of love...but until then, I'll sit smitten, smirking, ready to walk away at a moment's notice.

***

A list of things that I've professed my love for in recent days: the weather, french fries cooked in duck fat, attending step aerobics class with my favorite ladies for the first time in two months and nailing the combos, the weather, the incredible headbands that Anna made me several months ago, the Kindle the Fire In Your Chest mixtape, mixtapes in general and my brother's amazing girlfriend for sending them to me, Starbucks Cocoa Cappucino, Easter hymns, Eppendorf 10 uL pipets, the new Comedy Central show Workaholics, the pen I nicked from a colleague who got it at a conference, and the science of uncertainty.

***

Work has been hard, lately, in a really weird way. I'm getting to a point in my project where I'm really excited about the future, but I'm at a point where I get frustrated with the tedium of things, all the waiting that has to happen. And it's so gorgeous outside, and I'm trapped in a room with poor climate control, and I am distracted, limbs flailing and eyes darting around my computer screen. I have to slow myself down, breathe.

A few weeks ago, both of my bosses were out of the lab for the day, so the boys and I left the lab to get calzones and ended up drinking 10 pitchers of beer, leaving all of the things in the lab behind. At the end, I stood up from the table, toppled immediately backwards and hit my head on a chair. The next day, I had a bruise at the base of my skull and a vague memory of laughing on the floor of the pizza place. All day, I pieced together evidence of my drunkenness, text and Facebook messages I'd sent, pictures I'd taken. It was irresponsible. I'm not particularly proud of it. But I think it happened for a reason, this indescribable feeling we all had about that day, about this work.

I think it's all a symptom of this time of year, the perpetually-tripping-over-myself I described not that long ago. But I'm looking forward to the summer, to having long stretches of the day to do work without distractions when everything else -- classes, journal club, seminar -- in the department slows down, when it's too hot outside to want to be there anyway. I'm looking forward to that schedule, to buckling down on a marathon training schedule, to moving to a new place. Until then, limbs flailing, brain racing, I'll make do. Watch my bosses when they talk about science, with a true smile on their face that comes from making a discovery or going to a talk that they didn't think would be as good as it ended up being. Keep working until it works out. Open the door and run out into the gorgeous weather until I sweat bullets and can't think about anything. That's what I'll do. Just that.

***

Life gets weird, sometimes, like two weekends ago when I saw a friend I hadn't seen forever, on purpose. I felt like I was standing in a weird spot, like that place in a domed room where you can hear the whispers of someone across the way. I couldn't look her in the eye for the first fifteen minutes; there was a chasm between us, and that chasm was filled with the idea that she doesn't know any of the people I know now, that she doesn't know what I do on a day-to-day basis, that she doesn't know anything about the lab or my psychiatrist or step aerobics. I had a lot of feelings about that position -- some of them sad, and some of them mean, and some of them ok. And then at the end, some of them happy. I was glad I got to see her. It felt good in a way I almost hadn't expected.

And then I walked away, back into my life, leaving the tiniest crack in the door behind me.

***

I have 1 month and 6 days left of 25. I keep falling head over heels for the boy who makes me laugh. We are about to get our first set of produce from our CSA, and the farmer's market is back in full swing. Recently, the whole lab went to support our coworker who is in a fantasy rock band that dresses like wizards. Against all odds, our IMAX downtown didn't close. I still get to work out with my team from the fitness program, and we keep running up stairs and doing laps like it's our job. I get to see all of my siblings this weekend. The boy and I are working our way through The Wire while eating ice cream. My life is never dull, always kicks me right in the shins, begging me to chase after it. So I do.

The weather is gorgeous, and I'm in love.

The Sugary Smell of Springtime

2011-03-17T00:22:00.004-04:00

We almost had winter this year.

It gets cold here, in the supposed-to-be winter. And we complain, pretend that our 30 degrees are so terrible we just can't stand it. "I didn't move here to be this cold," we say. You can barely see your breath. "It's cold as balls out there."

It usually starts in early January, winds through February, maybe into early March. Then, briefly, spring. Then six months of summer.

But this year was different. This year, there was even snow. Upstate, snow that kept kids out of school for weeks out of time. Here, a memorable vicious ice -- an ice that kept my boss out of work, but certainly didn't keep the rest of us from being there, worried he would show up to an empty lab. People here don't know how to handle snow, handle ice. We don't do cold.

***

Our spring preceded Groundhog Day, as luck would have it, a shiny reward for December cold. Spring used to be my favorite, before I moved here and realized how long I'd been undervaluing autumn. Here, it's a slippery slope from cool to warm to hot to HOT.

But this year, I think we'll actually have 100 days of Spring, which started in February and never quite let up. I've been wearing t-shirts for weeks now, some days with a cardigan that gets shed before I even get to the lab. We've been walking around in flip-flops, down streets in the evening. This weather is ambling weather. It makes it feel like everything is ok, like I can do anything.

***

Spring is such a mish-mash of feelings. Did I mention that on this day, the 16th, four years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I didn't really think about it until just now. I always thought it would stick out like a razor lodged in flesh, would always be oozing and bleeding. Again, I've underestimated the human capacity for forgetting. Once upon a time, I drove around in a parking lot, blind with tears and deaf with the word "BIPOLAR" echoing deep in my ear. But now that pain is much more dull. Bipolar disorder rolls out of my mouth -- an explanation, an assertion, never an apology.

Next week, it will be four years from the first time I ever took the pills. And then there is stillness. March 22nd is the end of a story. Seeking -- and receiving -- treatment was the end to a year of sad confusing stories. From the first time I ever fucked someone else to the day that I first put that 25 mg pill on top of my tongue -- one continuous narrative. There's not much time in the year that's empty, where I can't say: "2006 -- May. I was smoking up on the swing by the softball field and getting felt up, implored to go home with someone. 2006 -- August. I was getting engaged and trying to figure my life out, thinking I could just make myself be ok. 2006 -- November. Remember how it all fell apart?"

March 22nd - April 1st. Ten days of reprieve each year. Then, on April 2nd, it all starts again -- this year will be my 5th round through the Jenny B Magical Mental Illness Tour.

From Baby, a book that makes me think about this too: "Life is made up of circles."

***

"if you want freedom

dont mistake circles

for revolutions"

(da levy, from Tombstone As A Lonely Charm)

Every year, in spring, there's a distinct feeling of longing. My neurons ache to go off their rails. They sputter out their neurotransmitters in an impotent attempt to make me feel something like that again. They are hissing pitiful assholes, "But don't you remember how good you felt? Remember when you felt smart and brilliant, like you could do anything, be anyone? You remember, don't you?"

I pretend that I don't remember, but I do. I remember how it felt, what it looked like. I trace my fingers over words I wrote at those times, my handwriting all swinging and scrawling, nothing like the tight letters I write when I'm sane. My brain, wanting to run, was perpetually tripping over my fingers. I was my own limiting reagent. Then, that seemed terrible. Now, I know it was the only thing that let me hold anything together. We like to think that we have insight, that we are the glue. But really, at my most undone times, the only things keeping me in real life were gravity, the time-space continuum and connective tissue. If it weren't for those anchors...oh man, the things I could have done.

My mind gets caught in ruts, gets strung up in the circles. The circles are what generate the longing, the real physical ache in my limbs and stomach. I am standing still at a crosswalk, and suddenly I hear "Crash" by the Dave Matthews Band, and I am stunned for a few seconds. I lose feeling in my shoulders and jaw -- my arms and my lungs are just hanging in the air. The longing makes it hard to breathe.

The truth is -- I will never forget. This is the longing. These are the circles.

Then, I remember this life. This life is held together by so much more than physics and physiology. I sneak in at night after he's already asleep and I'm putting things down on the bed stand, I wake him accidentally and he wraps his warm arms around my legs. My life is held together by hard work, by brunch negotiations and Netflix Instant Play of Parks and Recreations, by inside jokes and apologies. My life now is held together by the give and take of a beautiful relationship, by many good hearty solid friendships, by the fact that i'm trying hard to get somewhere and appreciating the struggle. There's not much time, these days, for longing. This is a revolution.

***

My team is made up of people who are older than me, much older -- 50s, 60s even. I love spending time with them because I realized that I don't have that in my life -- older people who aren't in charge of me. Older people who can be friends. Older people who just let their hands float away after a fist bump, telling me that their fist bumps don't blow up, they amble.

Today, the two older males on the team were telling jokes before group workout.

"So, there's a first grade teacher," starts Bob, our constant joker, a man with arthritis in his hips who pushes himself to run around the track and go 6 times up and down the stairs.

"This first grade teacher is reading the story of the Three Little Pigs. And she says to the kids, 'The first pig went to the farmer and asked for some straw. And what did the farmer say back to the pig?'" There's a gleam in his eye now, it's coming....

"And a kid in the back of the room yelled out, 'SONOFABITCH, It's a talking pig!'"

We are all doubled over laughing, warming up for an hour of hard work. It was one of those things I didn't realize I was missing -- people to connect with in this way. It was missing, and now it's here. It's spring time, and there is laughter in my life, and there isn't much room for longing anymore.

SONOFABITCH, not much room at all.

Me, Elsewhere

2011-02-01T22:59:00.002-05:00

Hey, remember that time I said I'd like to write here once a week! Surprise, I'm failing at that -- as well as many of my other resolutions.

But--

I did remember that I never linked my second ( and third) Tumblr here, and it's probably a good time to remind this space about my first.

1) Another Chance To Get It Right

This is where I post videos and interesting links and pictures and songs. I find that I mostly talk about Ben Gibbard and Maurice Sendak. I also sometimes post gratuitous pictures of what I wear to the lab on the weekend.

I like to think it's interesting, but maybe it's not. Either way, it's there.

2) How About Today?

These are really just mini-blogs where I write blurbs about what happens in my day. They tend to be short -- anywhere from a sentence or two to a few paragraphs. They often involve shit talking about my boss. The ones recently have been about exercising, because that's what I've been doing.

3) dear ____, i found this for you. love ____.

Once upon a time, my brother fell in love with a girl. Soon after, I fell in love with her too (albeit in a very different way than my brother did). We have many shared interests, so we found ourselves spamming our own (and each others) Tumblrs and Facebook wall with links we thought the other would enjoy. Finally, we just sucked it up and got a shared Tumblr. Which is really fun and (allegedly, according to my boyfriend) really dorky.

A Movie Script Middle

2011-01-02T00:06:00.003-05:00

The other night, we went to dinner with two other couples, friends of mine from medical school. We sat tucked in the back of a brick-oven pizza restaurant, ordering almost everything from the menu and pushing things back and forth over the table. "Here," you'd shout, "dip this in that!" Someone else, in reply, "Who's still hungry? What else should we order?" And another, "This round's on me!"

We were cute, good-looking in chunky sweaters, button up shirts, scarves. We laughed, loud, for hours. There was almost always someone else's hand in front of you -- handing you something, taking something away. The waiter always had a perfect response: "What's speck?" "What was the name of Dan Ackroyd's character in The Ghostbusters?" "Show us your best gang sign!"

At the end of the night, we leaned into each other and hugged, even the newest of friends. And then, echoes of laughter and extended invitations trailing behind us, we turned and walked out into the night, emboldened by the connection. The day felt magical.

***

Even at my most bitter (and I promise, it gets bitter up in here), I can't help but love life. I can't help but love my life. It suckerpunches me all the time, right in the gut. I wake up, and I look around -- this is mine. A messy house, a something else boyfriend with stylishly messy facial hair who always smells good, a messy desk, a messy life. It's so messy -- full of late nights in the lab, too few showers, a lot of good runs and some not-so-good runs. It's messy with morning sex and Sunday brunches and clothes that are tattering at the sames, cluttered with brilliant friendships and hope. It's absolutely cluttered with hope.

I don't know if there's ever been a year so littered with possibilities. I say that, and it feels strange. "What possibilities, douchebag?" my cynical self says. "You're locked in, here -- MD/PhD almost-half-through, the same boyfriend since 2002, the same pills since '07. Nothing is new here, not really."

Which is true.

I've shrugged more this year, said more maybes. "Maybe 2 and a half, if I'm lucky," I said. "2015, I hope." "April 30th, I'm thinking." I've stopped being sure of anything.

This year, I looked around and started to feel like I was growing up. A consensus happened, it seemed, between those of us who turned 25. Instead of a quarter-life crisis, it was like we just stood up and took stock. "So this is what it feels like," we said to each other. "The end of a beginning."

Was I the only one who thought that being young was original to me? Sat around and thought, "I am young. This is what I am. This is who I am. You? Surely you were never young. It was only me. I invented it." Sitting around this year, I had the first intimations of what it must actually feel like to get older. Not to simply age, but to have your whole identity shift. "Once I was young, but now I am not-so-much. Here are the traits that I still have -- here are the things that are me."

I think there are the possibilities. The idea that someday I will be not-this. I don't know what parts of me will survive into the not-this-ness, but I am curious to find out.

***

Of course, we're not completely through growing up in these parts, only just started. This year, I wondered (with all of the natural curiosity of a scientist) if I would have grown up enough to not vomit on New Year's Eve. Seriously, it was a mystery to me. Up until the very moment that I jumped out of bed, ran to the guest bathroom, bent over and blllarrrragghghghggghhh, I had no idea.

The first surprise of 2011: Not that grown-up yet, asshole! Better luck next year!

***

So, 2011 started like 2010 (this year's poison: six glasses of beer, one of champagne): new year, empty stomach. Not to go all thinspirational on you (duh...), but there's something kind of pure in my head about starting the year with a clean gastronomical slate. I slept like death through the morning, then filled the void with Indian buffet. It was deeply satisfying. I had no regrets. About that.

I echo myself from one year ago, in that I still think most of your adult years are average on the good/bad scale. This year had a lion's share of frustration, guilt, even the occasional regret. I hate that I sometimes had to miss things for the lab -- this is probably the first year ever that I had a good glimpse at the future challenges I will have with striking work/home balance. This is the first year I ever seriously missed sleep for reasons related to work (and not just because I was dicking around during the regular hours of the day when I was supposed to be working). For Pete's sake, I'm writing this entry from the goddamn lab!

But this is also a year that I saw clearly that I am not struggling in futility. I stand around the lab and I think about all of the things that I have accomplished here. I think about the people who need me here -- I've never felt that about a work environment. It feels good. And, a blessedly unexpected side effect of this place -- I have grown a tougher skin, which I didn't think was possible. I've cried a lot less about work this year. I've learned how to roll with failure, how to look someone in the face and tell them I've fucked something up. This is one of the best things that came out of 2010.

This year was all about laughter -- gut-busting, accidentally-peeing-a-little-in-your-pants-inducing. Laughter at home, at work. Laughter everywhere.

This year was all about love -- about getting to know people and loving them. Inspiring them to send pointless text messages. Getting them to do stupid stuff with me. Eating, drinking, singing, dancing. Living together. That was what this year was about too. If my goal last year was to live fiercely and laugh fiercely, then strike a big red mark through it. Accomplished.

***

This year, there are more specific goals. Since last year's health goals went well, I've added to them this year:

(+) Run my first half-marathon

(+) Run my first marathon

(+) Fit into a pair of cargo pants and a formal dress I haven't fit into since I was a freshman

Since some of last year's work related goals didn't go at all, I'll repeat them this year:

(+) Get to work earlier

(+) Read more scientific literature.

And some others:

(+) Keep up the good fight -- this year, the mental health has slipped once or twice. My meds have been upped, but it's always the right time to remember to hold on, because I have so many things to hold on to.

(+) Cook at home more. God, my wallet and my marathon running depend on it.

(+) To find Joey's memory card that has all of his pictures from Europe on it. Fast.

(+) To write more. Writing is something I love to do, and it fell by the wayside this year in the face of an extremely increased workload and my newfound love for physically punishing myself in the gym or on running trails. Still, I'd love to continue to write more fiction (a few months ago, I got myself a few FieldNotes, and this had been helpful), and I'd like to write here at least once a week. Here's hoping.

(+) Read the ten books I got for Christmas (and hopefully more!) before reaching next Christmas.

(+) To make more days magical. Even if it's just holding-hands-for-two-minutes-before-we-sleep magical. Especially if it's just holding-hands-for-two-minutes-before-we-sleep magical.

Zeitgeist

2010-11-30T23:21:00.002-05:00

Well. We made it through NaBloPoMo. Me as a writer, and you as a poor reader, someone who had to slog through gimme posts and barely coherent scribble, with a worthwhile thing or two in between.

I got the email about the end of NaBloPoMo today, and it had the topic for December (some people try to write every day of the year, with themed months -- I am not once of those people). And the topic is "zeitgeist," the challenge: " You have 31 days to try to capture the mood of your culture and your life as they exist right now. Use every tool in your blog box: words, photos, music...?"

Which sounds like an awesome challenge. So, although I won't be writing every day in December, I do hope to crank out a good 10 or 12 (hopefully worthwhile) posts on the topic. And, for ease, I'll tag them all zeitgeist. That being said -- so long, November!

Peace in Paperback

2010-11-29T22:24:00.002-05:00

If you catch me and I don't escape you...

I would probably read a lot more books if I didn't love to re-read books. When I try to decide what to read next, I stand in front of my bookcase, head tilted. My hands float involuntarily up to the spines on the shelf. This one worn, this one ruffled at the bottom from being dipped too many times in the bathwater. My fingers run along the top edges, getting caught up in the bookmarks of half-finished reads. Maybe I'll return to this one or that one. Maybe I'll start something new -- one I got for my birthday this year or last year, something I picked up from the used book store on vacation.

I contemplate. But more times than not, my hand grabs something I've read before. My mind refused to take on the impossible unknown in the stead of the magnificent known. These words will be more than enough. I know they will.

***

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you

I've been re-reading Middle Age: A Romance by the ever incredible, ever amazing, ever human (and superbly so) Joyce Carol Oates.

The amazing thing about books is that they never change; but reading them multiple times over the years, you always see something different. Books hold up a mirror to your own changes. There are two books for which this is especially true for me -- Middle Age: A Romance and A Girl Could Stand Up. Both are books about unique friendships between a boy and a girl. Before I made the friendship that would change how I looked at every friendship, both those before and after. Between the first time I read them and now, reading one again, having read the other again, I see how important these books are.

"Marina understood that Adam had many friends, and he was a man who enjoyed plying them with sudden sharp questions. It was known that Adam's interests were impassioned but curiously impersonal You would never get to know the man intimately. But you might get to know yourself."

Have you ever read a sentence in a book so familiar, you think it's been written about yourself? Get the feeling that somewhere out there, you're just a character in someone else's novel. This whole beautiful wild infuriating world, built and created just for you?

Books can be spooky like that. Can catch your breath up in the back of your throat. Are you breathing? Do you want to be? It's like a conversation with someone who understands you more than you thought possible. Like reading your own thoughts written down in a diary and sent back in time, de-identified or classified for your protection.

***

If you catch me and if I don't escape you...

Without even trying, I found the Adam Behrendt to my Marina Troy, the Raoul Person to my Elray Mayhew. The things I first found beautiful, infurating about those relationships, I find here. I read the lines and I am reading about myself.

There is peace in paperback, in reading lines to a story that is about you. One you didn't have to bother to write, because it's right there. Waiting to be discovered. Or re-discovered, as the case may be.

Spoiled and Melting

2010-11-28T22:05:00.002-05:00

"Then looking upwards

I strain my eyes and try

To tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites

From the passenger seat as you are driving me home."

I got in the habit, years ago, of riding in the passenger seat. Two years of being here, alone, without Joey. In the habit of riding in cars with other people, people who love to drive. I got spoiled, never having to drive, always being in the passenger seat.

I like to relinquish control. In this way, and in other ways too -- forever, I've assumed (I've written about this before, I'm sure) that it's a reflex, a "fuck you" to the control I have in my professional life. I can't tell my boss to fuck off when he tells me I need to do some work that will, surprise surprise, take up much more of my holiday than I want. I have to be there late. I do things that require a lot of self-disclipline. There.

But here, I don't want to take control. Don't want to be in the driver's seat. Literally.

But Joey also doesn't like to drive, and he usually sleeps in the car, so I end up at the wheel, listening to Death Cab or TV on the Radio, my hand on his leg as he drifts off.

But sometimes, I'm lucky. He's awake, takes the keys in his hands. I sit in the passenger seat and relax. Spoiled. Melting. I'm not too hard to please, really. Sometimes, I just want to be a passenger. This, and nothing more.

"With my feet on the dash

The world doesn't matter.

When you feel embarrassed then i'll be your pride

When you need directions then i'll be the guide

For all time."

ZZZzzzz

2010-11-27T21:13:00.001-05:00

Today is the only true day of vacation I have -- read: the only day of vacation when I don't have to go to the lab and feed cells. I've celebrated by sleeping, sleeping, and sleeping. I woke up at 11:30 AM, took my first nap at 1:30 PM and my second nap at 5 PM. Now it's 9:15ish, and I'll be asleep before too long, I'm pretty sure.

This day, by the way, has been really telling. I apparently live life on the fringe of exhaustion. I think I already knew that, but days like this remind me of how close I am to the edge. And really, I don't mind that much. It's just weird to have a day like this and realize -- Man, my life is insane.

Oh well. Carry on. C'est la vie.

Smokey, this isn't 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

2010-11-26T13:17:00.003-05:00

My life is run by a series of very serious rules. If by serious, I mean arbitrary and nonsensical rules that don't dictate anything of significance in life. And they mostly have to do with food.

Rules of Starbucks drinks: I cannot drink Pumpkin Spice Lattes until the first day of fall. I cannot drink Peppermint Mochas until after Thanksgiving, and I cannot drink them after New Years Day (this being a rule that is mostly in place to save my poor waistline).

Rules of holiday plates: Nothing should be touching anything else. This is an impossible rule for follow, but I strive for it every year. This especially goes for cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes. I failed on both fronts last night.

Rules of Reese's Holiday Shapes: The higher the peanut butter: chocolate ratio, the better. Eggs are the ultimate in Reese's holiday shapes. The big eggs, not those mini-shit one they started rolling out in later years. Also, the more traditional ones trump the newer versions. Christmas trees are classic, so they also place high. Eggs > Christmas Trees > Pumpkins > Hearts.

Rules of flavored candy: The acceptable method for eating flavored candy is least favorite --> favorite.

Sweetarts: Yellow, orange, blue, green, pink, purple. (Purple recently and unexpectedly overthrew pink for first place. I'm not sure how that happened.

Starburst: Lemon, Orange, Cherry, Strawberry

Skittles: Lemon, orange and lime eaten three at a time (one of each flavor) until all are gone. Then purple (grape, I guess?). Then red.

Tootsie Roll Pops: Grape, Orange, Cherry, Raspberry, Chocolate. Once, in high school, I went through a big Tootsie Roll Pop phase. My mom kept buying bags of them for me, and I kept eating my least favorite first. However, just as soon as I finished my two least favorites, she would bring a new bag and I would have to eat all of the least favorites from that bag before I could eat the good ones from the other bags. Eventually, I had to get her to stop buying them, because I was only ever eating the terrible ones, leaving quite an untouched stash of my favorites.

Basically, what I think I'm trying to say: It is exhausting being me.

Live From The Lab, It's Thanksgiving Night

2010-11-25T23:45:00.002-05:00

So, what does the girl who just dismantled the cell shaker with a hex key at 11 PM on Thanksgiving have to be thankful for?

A cell shaker to dismantle. Cells that go on that shaker -- an 120 mg yield of cells, more than I've had in a long time. Thankful for a lab to go to -- a lab that pays me to go to school. I'm thankful to escape from higher learning with very little debt. I'm thankful that I live in a country where I, as a woman, can be freely educated. Can be free, period. I'm thankful for all of the women scientists who've gone before me. All of the women who've gone before me.

I have a full stomach, and I'm thankful for that. Thankful for a local family full of friends who invite us for Thanksgiving when we have no other place to go. Thankful for all of the people here who love me with a crazy powerful love. Thankful for getting hugs from their mothers when we leave. Thankful for hugs from mothers.

I'm thankful for my lab mates, for all of the people who know me. Really know me. Thankful for text messages and Facebook messages. Thankful for phone calls and emails. Thankful for laughter and sorrow, and for those who share equal parts in those emotions. Thankful for unending patience. And more patience. And more.

I'm thankful that we'll be able to go home tomorrow to see parents, siblings, cousins, old friends. Thankful for having those people. Thankful for close family. Thankful that I am old enough to know that not all families are close and, then, thankful for knowing I ought to be thankful. Thankful for a boy to warm my feet in bed. Thankful that he's still here after Thanksgiving 2006.

Thankful that I made it out of sickness and into (relative) health. Thankful for a strong mind, for strong quads and strong lungs, a heart that pumps strong despite the murmur found in March. Thankful that I could have, so many times, fallen out or down and didn't. Thankful for titanium rods and mood stabilizers. Thankful for living in a time when my hardest medical problems don't have to kill me.

Thankful for all of the beautiful things in life -- for health and balance, for love and its derangements. Thankful, always, for friends. For family. For good coworkers and people who care.

Despite the fact that I am at work on Thanksgiving night, I don't really mind that much. I have so many things to be thankful for. Who am I to complain?

(Today, at least. Tomorrow, complaining is certainly back on the table. I'm not a saint, after all).

One of My Favorite Things

2010-11-24T23:31:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, I stumbled onto this gem of an essay by Kevin Keck. Entiteld "Lost In Translation," it is one of the best essays I've ever read about the connections (and misunderstandings) of a family.

Each year I spend away from the home where I grew up, I get a greater understanding of what this essay is really about. Right now, much of my life is un-translatable to my parents. We first reached this point when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was in a situation -- a bunch of situations, and they were all shitty -- where my parents could offer no guidance. I was suddenly out of the realm of their experiences. We were lost together. And though we both ended up finding our ways to deal with those new things, we still can't effectively find a way of translating that to each other. It was scary to be a daughter with fucked up feelings, who'd almost trashed the best things she'd had in life for those feelings. It was scary to have a daughter who'd always seemed to capable and high achieving, with a solid life and a sweet fiance, turn into a tornado of emotional destruction. We were both scared, but unable to translate that fear into comfort with each other. Even now, as I can intellectually describe what that time must have been like for them (terrifying, disorienting, helpless), I will not be understand what it likes to fear for my child until I have a child. Keck's assertion that we will never quite speak the same language is such a spot-on observation. And a hard thing to admit. There will always be things between us that we don't understand.

My favorite part, the point that brings it home:

Thinking of all this, I am filled with remorse — a beautiful word that comes from old French which literally means to be bitten again. And I am bitten continually. When I see my parents with my children, I feel trapped as a thought between two languages, with no adequate word in either tongue to express what I am feeling.

The idea of being bitten continually -- by heart-wrenching love, guilt, fear -- is such an apt one. And the exposition of the word "remorse" as being bitten again -- by these things, and others -- is one that follows me often. This phrase is forever in my head. Because the emotion I most often feel with respect to that time in my life (which was, coincidentally, smack-dab in Thanksgiving 2006, easily the craziest I've ever been) is remorse. I am sad that I waited too long to get help. I am bitten by love for my family and friends who supported me. I am bitten by guilt that they had to do it, for me, in the first place. I am bitten by fear that they will someday have to do it again. I am bitten by hope -- blind beautiful hope -- that I don't have to worry about that fear. I am bitten by so many things. And, I think, partially due to this essay, I am able to recognize how often I am bitten, and how lucky I am. How lucky we are, as family, to have each other. And how family -- beyond blood -- is about trying our best to translate. Even if we fail miserably. And we do. We often do. But we keep trying.

(Note on the author -- Last year after I posted this here, Kevin Keck sent me the nicest email saying he had read what I had written about the essay. I love it when an author reaches out to his or her readers to make a connection. He seems like a truly stand-up guy. Also, everything I've ever read by him has been equal parts hilarious, thoughtful, and touching. This, I've discovered, takes much skill. Take some time and check him out.)

From The Vault: The Hues and Overtones of Manic Depression

2010-11-23T18:04:00.002-05:00

[Note -- This is from this current blog and it was cross-posted to Real Mental. However, I wanted to re-post it because I think it is my favorite thing I've ever written. I have to admit that I am not always as clear-headed as I am in this post, which was written at the end of a time when I had been less effectively medicated. It's about my decision to stay medicated, and I like to go back and read it when I'm struggling. The urge to feel super-human still comes, sometimes. I'm glad I wrote this post when I did, as both a note of understanding to my past and a note of hope to my future.]

Being an Art Star is about struggling to remember.
[Rev Jen]

So, the experiment is over. But I still haven't finishing processing the experience. I've been mulling over it in my head for a few days, now, turning it over and over. Last night, as I drove home, I had a series of small revelations.

Bipolar disorder gives me colors, hues that "normal" people can't understand. My mania is the color behind your eyelids when you look at the sun with your eyes closed. It burns brightly and strongly, and it is hard [so hard] to turn away. You can't move--it's just there.

My depression is the black-blue in the center of bruises, the color that sits dully, the one that makes you cringe when you press it. It reminds you of pain. It is tender to the slightest touch.

I told Joe that I wanted to stop feeling the feelings the other day, and most of that is true. But a small part of me, the smallest part per billionth aches for the feelings. It's the part that relished their return, the part that wanted to get out of bed and drive around the city, the part that wanted to drape itself down a staircase and cry. It's the part that feels most alive when it feels sick, the part that wants to smile at the cars that drive by. The part that wants to break itself into pieces, the part that wants to fuck and fight and talk shit and sleep and cut. It is self-destructive and can be [was once] all-consuming.

So we talk about why I want to take more medicine. Yesterday, I had some depressed moments. I thought of driving to the lab, stealing one of the razor blades. The fantasies expanded, more than they ever have [I've never cut]. I thought of which one I would chose, the one least likely to have chemicals on it. I would boil a pot of water and drop the razor in. I would wait, slowly, patiently. When it was done, I would lift it up. When it cooled down, enough to use but still warm with the memory of water, I would press it in. Where? Somewhere less noticeable. Not the flashy, needy, begging wrists, no matter how much that vein shines and pulsates out. No. The ankle, perhaps. The upper shoulder.

The upper shoulder--when I first started treatment, I would write on my left shoulder in brown thin line Sharpie. I would remind myself that there were four things that were important, that I wanted, that I needed: prayer, honesty, fidelity, love. The things you turn to when razors cut across your mind, the things you turn to when you are stuck.

So I remember that the only thing that can fight a broken mind is that same mind, wanting to be fixed. That same mind, that same ache for things to be ok. It's the aching yearning mind that reaches out for help. That mind compels you to talk when you don't want to. That mind helps you remember that the palette you have in your mind is beautiful but poisonous. Bright things usually are.

So, with one part relishing the darkness, wanting desperately to succumb to the heaviness of depressed eyelids, the other parts push back, open the mouth, and say--to whoever is listening, but mostly to that one rogue part--"I want to stop feeling that being human is an irrevocable injustice."

This is why you keep living. This is why you keep shaking the pills into your hand. This is why you torture yourself with therapy, why you eventually give up all of the bad thoughts you've been hoarding. For true happiness and true sadness, for human emotion that your human peers can relate to and comfort. For this, you give up being a superhuman. For this, you finally become what you're meant to be. Yourself.

The Important Things

2010-11-22T22:39:00.000-05:00

My brother is visiting. Unexpectedly, kind of. I told him he should just ride back with me on Saturday. He did. Today, he drove me to work.

After work, we all went to our favorite tacqueria, because it's cheap fish taco night. Then, we came home, threw hot chocolate ice cream in the blender with milk, graham crackers, marshmallows, Hershey bars. Drank s'more-flavored milkshakes out of blue plastic cups with straws.

Then, we watched 4 episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

I could probably think of a better way to spend an evening if I tried. But I'm not trying

Zen and the Art of Emotional Maintenance

2010-11-21T23:42:00.002-05:00

The leaves are finally changing colors and beginning to fall off the trees. I've been waiting for this, the explosion of reds, oranges and yellows (my favorites, easily). The colors are consolation for the impending cold. "Yes, you'll be freezing your asses off soon -- but look! Red!" And like a sucker, I take it. Even stevens. My heavy coat, your insistence that my entire world be orange.

And the weather, hot damn! This afternoon, I drove through town with the windows down, AC on. This evening, windows down, heat on. The hot humid breezes of the summer have given way to real breezes, to something cool that snakes across my skin. The air smells smoky, delicious, full-bodied, more substantial. Promising.

***

I spent last fall unhappy at work. "The Autumn of My Discontent," I may have said once or twice, or twenty times. I wasn't at all happy with the second lab I'd been saddled with; as it became more apparently how much I was a member of that lab, I became even grumpier. I spend months being nothing but grumpy at work.

I spent my time outside of work getting suh-massshed. Every weekend, stumbling in and out of bars, taking drags on clove cigarettes as we weaved our ways home, stopping to take pictures. My initials carved into tables in bars. Hopping back and forth, and then back again to the first bar, hours later. Guinness. Shock Top. Yuengling. Soco and Diet Coke. My consoling solutions to my discontent.

I don't regret those evenings spent drinking, not at all. From what I remember, they were all a blast (until I inevitably puked). I don't pretend that my life now is even more reasonable (believe me, it's not). I'll still get trashed at holiday parties. I will most likely puke on New Year's. But the in-betweens are still much calmer. I crave cloves, but don't acquiesce because I know I'll regret it later when I run -- I've traded one dopamine high for another. The same with the booze -- it doesn't make sense when I have to run the next day. I've done it once or twice. And felt so dumb later. I'm not the best at learning my lesson, but I'm trying. I've tried.

***

Self-medicating. We all do it, right? With food, with booze or pot. With sex or sleep or exercise. There's always a tipping scale, a balance that is most difficult to hold. All of these things, in balance, are fine, good, beautiful. A good dark beer, a good crisp crust on a creme brulee. An afternoon nap, a good long run.

But in excess, they leave you heavy or nauseous. I'm not saying I can always tell the difference. I've spent my time vomiting off porches or unbuttoning my jeans, icing knees that could have taken another day of rest, sitting sluggish for an evening because I've slept too damn long. Dopamine can be a cruel mistress. Ask your average crackhead; they'll tell you.

Small doses, my dear, my self. Baby sips. Function over form. Quality over quantity. If no other rule, then this.

***

There is zen here. Underneath electric blankets, riding the about-to-be-cut tags of new clothing. In cardigans and boots, in the coffee I've been drinking way too much of. Each white tablet, double what I was taking last year at this time -- zen. The beat of my feet against the sidewalk, a music player full of songs that make me want to move. A life that makes me want to move.

For now, a balance. For now.

Nostalgia

2010-11-20T18:30:00.003-05:00

I went to the mountains last night with some of the members of my family, spent the evening playing Trivial Pursuit with my brother, his awesome girlfriend and one of my best friends from college. Woke up and ate Golden Grahams, a cereal that I haven't had in years (it was delicious), and watched Toy Story 3 with my dad while sitting underneath my new heated blanket. The air was cool, but not too cold, and when I was moving between the house and my car to load more suitcases, I ran down the stairs to the house -- one foot on each long step, running until I reached a complete stop and almost fell over at the bottom -- like I've done one hundred (or more) times in my life.

The house changes, mutates each time I go, each time I sleep on a different couch or bed. I've never noticed, until now -- when I have my own home, when I would love to buy a home -- how charming the house is, how lovely it would be for entertaining guests. And how well laughter carries out of it, across walls and down the pipes into the downstairs bedrooms.

Few houses come into your life and stay there, holding tiny pieces of your memory and personality. Stepping into them is like falling through time, settling in and smiling. Hitting a "reset" button. Sometimes, life just needs a "reset" button.

Shit My Coworkers Say

2010-11-19T19:06:00.002-05:00

"Good morning, Baby Jesus!"

***

"Hey, uh, it looks like you have some more bottles to wash."
"Why don't you go fuck yourself!"

***

"You know, we're supposed to feed the cells every day."
'Yesn"
"You know what the problem is with your cells?"
"No."
"You need to feed them every day."

***

"Get off my nuts!"

Eff PETA, Support Animal Research

2010-11-18T19:36:00.003-05:00

Rebekah over at Dusting Myself Off (otherwise known as My Oldest Friend In The World, Because She Was Born Twelve Days Before Me and Our Parents Were Friends) wrote a post yesterday about PETA's ad that plays off of the new TSA scanners. While I have many many bones to pick with this particular ad (and other PETA ads that body snark about how vegetarians are thin and more fit than omnivores), I was reminded that I've been meaning to write a post here about a topic close to my line of work: PETA and animal research.

I'll start, first, by telling you how much I love animals. All of my life, I have had animals. We had our dog Arthur since before I could remember. After he died, it was a string of other dogs (Hershey, Ezra, Joy and Jill, Oliver, Heidi, Dr. Octopus, now Annabelle and Al Godfrey). Many of these were strays who wandered into our yard, some of them old and decrepit. Dr. Octopus, my favorite, was obviously abandoned by someone. He was ancient, with a gray muzzle, missing teeth and a bum back leg. We didn't think he'd live very long, but we loved him into another three years. He was smart, obviously trained -- he came to us knowing how to catch things we threw, how to shake hands. I loved him so much and was so sad when he died; he was so old, but so full of life that I'd somehow become convinced he would live forever.

It's not just dogs, though. My mother is an elementary school teacher, and we've gone through quite a few small mammals and reptiles -- turtles and lizards, a snake, countless guinea pigs, hamsters and gerbils. My favorite of these was Junie B, a rat she had acquired from who-knows-where. She was one of the best natured animals I'd ever met (though, actually, all of the rats I've worked with have been mild) -- she even won over my not-usually-taken-with-animals father, who fed her cereal and Cheetos when my mom wasn't watching.

Me & Junie B, circa 2006. I am wearing clothes, I promise -- it was an unfortunate decision to take this picture in a tube top, I'm aware.

And there were the rabbits. From the age of eight or so, through about 12, I raised a series of rabbits. The first one we bought as part of Mission India, a mission my church participated in; the idea was to make a fifteen dollar investment, and then to grow this investment and donate the money to the mission. My parents decided that my investment would be a pregnant rabbit; I would then raise the babies and we would sell them. This plan was working swimmingly until my parents let it slip that my buyers might want to eat the rabbits! I threw a fit, and my family ended up giving them to a man who raised rabbits in his barn. Although, recently, thinking about making this blog post, I thought to myself: "My mom said he was a man who owned a lot of bunnies, and they just ran around free in his bar--fuck, those rabbits totally got eaten."

Another time, I adopted a bunny that had been won at a carnival and were unwanted by the child who won them. I remember at that point that we weren't prepared to take her on, and she had to stay outside her first night, and she were already sick. And the next morning, before anyone was awake, I slipped outside to check on her, and she was cold. I had already named her Sarah Louise, and I was devastated that she was dead. I cried at school all day long; this memory is still as vivid to me as if I'd lived it yesterday.

I love animals. I even love rodents, rats, rabbits. And now, I do animal research. I do it unabashedly, unashamed. And I do it for one reason -- as much as I love animals, I love humanity even more. I want to be helpful to society. I hate that I have to kill animals; but more than that, I hate the people have to suffer for years and die because their kidneys fail and never recovery. Anything I can do to alleviate that suffering, I will do.

I have never witnessed anything unethical in all of my time working with animals. There are strict rules that MUST be followed, and anyone who does not follow these rules can get banned from doing animal research. There are rules about euthanasia (for example, carbon dioxide euthanasia can only be used in rodents, and it is mandatory to do either cervical dislocation or thoracotomy after they stop breathing to make sure that they do not wake up during organ harvesting. I do all three: carbon dioxide, cervical dislocation, then thoracotomy). There are rules about pain management -- every time I do a survival surgery on a mouse, I give it Buprenex, an opioid pain reliever. I have been taught the signs of distress in animals, and I've been taught how to manage that distress. I separate mice who fight (and it's always mice; lab mice have aggression bred into them accidentally, unfortunately). I have had, all told, probably 24 hours of animal care instruction. Imagine that -- an entire day, sitting in front of a monitor, learning how to properly care for these animals that I use.

Even rabbits. Yes, the same animals that I kept as pets when I was a child -- at least once a week, I walk to the animal facility. I use a badge to enter the room where the rabbits are kept. I choose the calmest one, walk over to it, pet it on the head and then grab it to move it to the cage. It's not always pleasant. Sometimes they are scared, no matter how soothingly you talk to them. Sometimes, they are so distressed, they scream (yes, rabbits scream, though very rarely; yes, it's unnerving; yes, I choose another rabbit because I don't want to exacerbate a screaming rabbit's distress). I put them in a small cage, cover their eyes, walk out of the room with their heads tucked beneath my arm, because it comforts them. Once in the surgery suite, I pet their heads and call them "baby." I lie to them and tell them everything will be ok. Then, I inject a needle into their ear and wait as my partner slowly pushes a barbiturate into the vein. I wait for them to heave a big sigh, then slowly stop breathing.

Then I take their kidneys back to my lab, and I spend hours getting them into a cell dish. And then, I do experiments that I hope will one day lead to better treatment for human disease. The primary cells are preferable because they act most like human cells, physiologically. We take great care to make sure they respire correctly. The thing we want to avoid is injury to humans. This thing is the one thing that informs all of our animal research.

PETA paints us as killing machines, monsters who refuse to use other methods. They suggest we use cell lines -- transformed cells that often do not behave like the human cells in a human body. They suggest that we do epidemiological studies (some do, but that doesn't get us closer to new drugs); they suggest that we do clinical studies. We all HOPE to do clinical studies some day, but there is such a high burden on us, the evil scientists, to make sure that our drugs are as SAFE AS POSSIBLE before they ever pass into a human body. And even that system is not perfect -- not a day goes by that I don't see some advertisement: "Do you have heart failure/vomiting/intractable depression/a child with a birth defect? That might be due to a medicine you took! Hop on the bandwagon and get your money!" More than half of all drugs designed and tested in animals fail in humans; can you imagine what would happen if we didn't do animal testing? Thousands and thousands of drugs that were aborted before they got to humans would not have failed; more humans dead, injured, as a result of negligence. That's what it boils down to.

It takes approximately 17 years and 2 billion dollars to get a drug from its first stages of development to the market. Animal research is an integral part of that process -- it provides a necessary bridge between cells and humans. A bridge, I promise you, that every human wants to be in place. Our animals do not die in vain -- they save human lives. Either by leading us to a new drug, or leading us away from an ineffective or, worse, harmful drug. They save lives.

Animals have been responsible for some of the most life-changing advances in medicine. They brought around insulin (which saved the lives of how many diabetic children?) and heart transplants. They help us understand complicated neural processes, like what goes on when a child is abandoned. Animal research has not always been ethical, but so many steps have been taken to make sure that these animals are well cared for. And care, we do.

For example, PF (our lab tech) accidentally killed a mouse in an anesthesia induction chamber while he was teaching me a common surgery we use. He pulled it out of the chamber and begged it to start breathing, using one finger to do chest compressions on its tiny heart. And our post-doc once spend 5 minutes trying to get a mother rat to recognize some abandoned babies. "I need to tell someone," she said frantically, "or they'll die from neglect." She later laughed at the irony, that she was so worried about them when they would eventually die. But it's not surprising, really. We aren't heartless cruel people. We all wish that it wasn't necessary. But we know that it is. We have intellectually separated ourselves from the process. We acknowledge the sacrifice that these animals give, and we respect them for that sacrifice.

PETA would have you believe that we are all terrible robots who don't give a shit about animals. They somehow try to hammer in this point by using oversexualized ads that don't even begin to touch the surface of the issues. They invade labs and release animals that have been institutionalized, not realizing the cost of that action. They protest with visceral images of animals that have been stripped of all of their context. They are sensationalists. They don't ask for dialogue. They have never learned how to pick their battles, how to separate animal research for cosmetics (which I'm not particularly in support of) from animal research for medicine (totally necessary). They get it all wrong. They don't even try to get it right.

And still, I have a job to do. And that job is to help people. To save lives. To alleviate suffering.

So, once a week, I go to the rabbit room, and I choose one from the wall of cages. I pet its head as I put it down. It should break my heart. But by virtue of emotional distancing and knowledge of a bigger purpose, it doesn't.

How Joey Feels About Blogging

2010-11-17T22:18:00.002-05:00

"I'm going to bed."

"Ok, I'll be there soon, I need to write a blog."

"No, you don't."

"Yes, I do, you know I have to write each day in November."

"....BLOGS ARE FOR WUSSES."

Odds & Ends

2010-11-16T21:06:00.005-05:00

1) There Is No Me Without You

I was lying down in bed with Joey, just now -- I'd been gathering laundry to throw in the washer, and he'd been going to bed, and he pushed me over onto the bed (laughing) and threw his arm over me. "You're in bed, now," he said, "now you have to go to sleep with me!"

So, I threw my legs over his for a few minutes and we talked. I'd rather not mention how we got to this lame topic of conversation, but we were talking about Pokemon and how he and my brother used to collect the cards. "Jim called me one day," he said smiling, "to try to sell me a card, because your mother was doing a Pokemon card purge."

I remember that time in my life. He remembers it too, from the other side.

It's funny to me that he knew my brother long before he knew me, that they were friends before I knew he existed, before he knew I existed. I look back over the long long trail that took us from that point, not knowing each other in our teens, to meeting each other in high school, going to college together, moving in together. It's hard to imagine him, a boy, sitting talking on the phone to my brother. It's hard to remember that there was a point where he didn't exist for me, where I didn't exist for him. That we were so close to each other -- and yet, it seems, so far. That I would one day be sleeping in the same bed as that boy my brother was talking to on the phone -- in the scheme of everything, it would have seemed at that point an impossibility. Time has a way of shaking things out.

Sometimes the things that we thought were impossible were just waiting in the wings, sitting patiently around the corning waiting for us to come along.

2) Sisyphus, revisited

By the time I had read yesterday's Sweet Juniper post (today, at around 6), a picture had already been taken of the horrible state of affairs of my desk. Two weeks ago, on a day when I was home sick from work, Janet took the opportunity to clean my desk:

She did a great job, as you can see. Unfortunately for both of us, it didn't take me very long to restore it to its previous condition:

My desk stays like this for a reason...it's because I can find everything more easily this way. I never pretended that my life is anything other than barely controlled chaos. Still, the pictures tickled me, incontrovertible proof that I am (as two people who barely know me have recently commented) a mess, most definitely a mess.

Also, check out that sweet computer monitor! I take very intricate pictures of cells, and you can't imagine how awesome it is to see a giant image like this one:

Rabbit kidney cells I imaged on a confocal microscope -- the red structures are filamentous mitochondria. Aren't they beautiful!

3) Baby, I Got A Plan, Run Away Fast As You Can

One of the feelings I used to get with the mania was a restlessness, an itching in my nerves that made my feet twitch and my fingernails press into my palms. At night, I would lie in bed and imagine myself just taking off, running as fast as I could through the streets. I thought that this idea was just a fantasy, that I would never be able to just take off like that and run for hours. I would want it so bad.

Now, I'm not manic, but I can run for hours. I lace up my running shoes, step out into the darkness of the evening, and just take off. I run down near the river, where the moon reflects out and water sometimes splashes up the sidewalk. I run through tourists, college students. I run, and I keep doing it until I'm done. Until I stop, exhausted, after 3 miles, or 5, or 8.

Tonight, I couldn't go running because it was about to rain, so I walked to my car. The air was so comfortable, warm with a breeze that made me wrap my cardigan a little more tightly around me. Almost reflexively, I thought, "I want to go running in this. This would be so perfect."

And the knowledge that I can -- if I so choose -- take off into the night and run for hours, that feeling was so different, so much more pleasant that anything I ever would have imagined.

My Celebrity Fantasy

2010-11-15T22:43:00.004-05:00

So, last January (as I've previously mentioned), I participated in a 10 week weight loss/fitness program at my gym. In this program, groups of participants (10-ish) are paired with trainers and mentors who've been through the program before. These teams do several weekly workouts together, and during the program, I was working out every day, sometimes multiple times a day. (I was a beast).

After the program ended, I kept my gym habits pretty high -- step, spin or pilates at least 3-4 times a week, often more. However, in August, I moved out of the gym and out to the street/greenway. When I started training for the run I'm doing in January (originally a marathon, although the goal has been amended to half-marathon), I stopped going to the gym, instead running 4-5 times a week. I've been to a few step classes here and there, because I miss my ladies, but other than that, I've mostly been absent from the gym.

However, in the last month or so, I've been hearing news about the gym. And that news is that a celebrity is using our gym now.

(image source)
Hint: it's one of these guys.

So this celebrity, we'll call him Phil Blurry, has been hitting up the morning classes for the past month. Spin classes! My spin classes! And Zumba classes! My Zumba classes! My trainer even had to frantically take Ghostbusters off her spin playlist the week before Halloween because Phil Blurry unexpectedly showed up. Phil Blurry! Up in my hizouse! Although I'm never there anymore to see him! Fate, you are such a cruel cruel mistress!

Lately, I have to admit, I've had a pretty vivid and constant celebrity fantasy going on in my head --

Next January, Phil Blurry decides to do the same fitness program I did. He happens to be put on my trainer's team, for which I will be mentoring. And we BECOME BEST FRIENDS. We go to spin classes and for runs with the rest of my team. When he is frustrated and exhausted, I encourage him to keep going. He spots me when I do bench presses. When I toss out the phrase "workout partner," casually, everyone knows I mean Phil Motherfucking Blurry!

Honestly, the fantasy keeps getting more vibrant and vibrant in my head, like it's actualy going to happen. I should probably start seeking professional help soon, right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I'm also considering the possibility that my gym is paying Phil Blurry to work out there because they want more people to be physically fit. I mean, if you thought you might get to run into Phil Blurry, you might make a bigger effort to make it to the gym too. I know I am.

A Series of Absolutely Unrelated Open Letters To Things That Frustrate And/Or Enamor Me

2010-11-14T13:28:00.003-05:00

Dear Moped Man,

Dude. You have a moped. I have a car. We are in a strip mall parking lot. There is bidirectional traffic on the road that runs through the mall. That road has a speed limit, presumably a low one, presumably because people need to be able to back out of the parking spaces without being jammed in the ass. I don't know who you think you are, but swerving around cars is a bad idea. One (me) presumes that you are on a moped because you have lost your driver's license; in my experience, that is how these things work. And I'd believe it, based on the way that you stupidly passed me going 25 miles an hour because you're impatient. For future reference: my vehicle, 2000 lbs; your vehicle, 200 lbs.

Love,

Dear Bra That I Accidentally Bought From Target,

I was looking for a different bra last week at Target, when I saw you. I've been buying the same bra from there for years, now, and I even cheated on my I-Should-Be-Boycotting-Target-Because-They-Support-Anti-Gay-Candidates Boycott because I desperately needed a new one of you. Well, not you, exactly.

Here's the problem. I buy demi-plunge bras for a reason. 1) The cup doesn't show over tank-tops. 2) The plunge allows for a lower cut of tops, like in certain dresses. I'm young, I'm kind of cute. So, you know, those things work for me. I like my straps to fit under tank tops. I don't wear them often, but I like to be prepared.

While frantically looking for this style of bra, I found you. I picked you up as a "Just-In-Case," as in, "This-Would-Do-In-A-Pinch-If-I-Can't-Find-That-One" option. But then I found that one. In the right size and everything. So, satisfied, I put down the bra I would no longer be needing as a back up. Or, so I thought.

When I got home with you, I realized I had made a grave mistake. But I wore you anyway. You have super thick straps. And you are way too high up on my boob. And this is not working out.

I'm really sorry to break this to you, but you are an old lady bra. And you won't stop staying under my tank top today, so you are making me look like a trashy old lady. And it's really not working out for me. So I'm afraid we may need to break up. It's not you, it's me.

Well, it may be a little you too.

Sorry!

Dear Target,

Alienating the gays was probably one of the dumbest things you could have ever done. I love your designer lines dearly -- how many of those were designed by awesome gay dudes? I bet a lot! Figure it out, and stop being a homophobe. Quick. I need a new bra.

Seriously,

Dear Fellow Wal-Mart Customer,

I have no idea where you would possibly go to purchase a (non-hooded) sweatshirt that reads "University of OZ" with a picture of Toto on it. No, seriously. Where could you have possibly purchased that? And for what reason? I saw you 24 hours ago, and I can't stop thinking about you. My mind is completely blown.

Infatuatedly yours,

Dear Marijuana,

If you were legal, I would probably smoke you more than the occasional hit once a year. In the mean time, thanks for helping me have these conversations with my stoner friends.

R (stoned): How strong are pheromones?

Me (not stoned): Uh, I don't know?

R (still stoned): Pheromones are very strong.

(30 minutes later)

R (pretty stoned): We might not have enough paper.

Me (still awfully sober): We have plenty of paper.

R (sooo stoned): We might have too much paper.

Keep cool (and I know you will),

Giving Thanks For...

2010-11-13T21:17:00.002-05:00

We had the first of three Thanksgivings this year -- a friend from the lab's parents are in town to do "their" Thanksgiving, so he and his wife (also in my lab) decided to invite over a lot of friends from the labs to do a proper Thanksgiving dinner.

There are few things as joyous as a big table of people eating delicious food that they've all shared a hand in preparing. Compliments are thrown out between bites and sips of wine. We burn off all the calories with laughter. During the more than four hours we were there, places at the table were continually swapped, and three or four conversations were going on at once. At one point, the father who was visiting asked us to introduce ourselves and explain how we know each other. This was one of the most fun exercises I've ever had to do, actually -- tracking how everyone got to this point, where we all know and are comfortable with each other, was surprising.

My favorite part, though, was all the absurdity. The only fight of the night was not over politics, but over which Star Wars movie is the best. We told long drawn out stories that ended up in hysterics. And one of our friends said, in utter seriousness, "Well...I think if Anne Hathaway and I ever met, she'd be really into me."

The Memory Keeper

2010-11-12T23:15:00.003-05:00

A conversation between my brothers on Facebook sparked a memory --

When my youngest brother was small, maybe 4 or 5, he went through a movie obsession where he watched Home Alone multiple times a day for weeks. At that time, we had some VHS of Home Alone that had been taped off of the television, and the same cassette also had Kindergarten Cop, and the label on the tape had "Home Alone Kindergarten Cop" written on it.

And even though he only watched Home Alone, Jacob always called it "Home Alone Kindergarten Cop" like it was one movie. And it was charming and adorable, and he was charming and adorable, and he still is.

***

It's funny to be the oldest, isn't it, the keeper of memories. I'm the one who remembers when the others (with the exception of Jim) were born, where I was -- eating a Happy Meal in the hospital room, or waiting at Grandmama and Granddaddy's. I remember the quirks, the misspoken names of things -- the "sadpoles" in the baby pool, the "ambliances" that would hurry past, sirens wailing, followed by police who would put the bad men in "hand coffees."

I taught my siblings how to pump their legs on the swings, how to ride bikes. I would ride in the car with Jacob when he had his learner's permit. Almost everything important in life, I either learned with or taught to them. I changed diapers, especially with Jessie. I gave baths. Since their beginnings, I've been there. Their beginnings were my beginnings.

***

The last phrase there is one I've linked, to the essay where I first got it. I think that essay is the reason I've been reminiscing about siblings this week. Because it's true. Their lives have given shape and structure, purpose to my life. The years between us continue to flatten out, and the age differences feel less real. Siblings are the ones who are there to stick life out with you -- even after your parents are gone, your siblings keep you tethered in a way I imagine even your spouses and children can't. Our shared memories bind us in like strands of silk in a mysterious web.

***

My entire life, my mother and her sisters have called each other "Sis." Casual, tossed out like nothing -- "Here you go, Sis," "What do you need, Sis?" and so on.

Lately, my brothers have picked it up too.

"Here you go, Sis."

"What do you need, Sis?"

You, my darling boys, my one darling girl. I have always, and sometimes only, needed you.

Five Things To Read

2010-11-11T23:04:00.003-05:00

I'm constantly making lists in my head -- favorites, least favorites. Things to do, places to go. Movies, episodes of television, books.

Not long ago, I made a definitely list of my five favorite short stories, in no particular order:

1) "Rape Fantasies" by Margaret Atwood

Although it sounds like you know what this story is like, I promise that you don't. It's a story about a woman who is told by the other women at work that all women have rape fantasies, and then she elaborates on how hers are different from those of everyone else. The would-be rapist who has a cold is my favorite.

2) "Lust" by Susan Minot

(full text can be found here, although I do find the interspliced pictures a bit distracting...)

We waded into the sea, the waves round and plowing in, buffalo-headed, slapping our thighs. I put my arms around his freckled shoulders and he held me up, buoyed by the water, and rocked me like a sea shell.

Of all of the books and movies out there about growing up and discovering one's sexuality as there are, none (in my opinion) are as simple and poignant as Minot's.

Even now, I've forgotten how real it feels, reading it:

They look at you seriously, their eyes at a low bum and their hands no matter what starting off shy and with such a gentle touch that the only thing you can do is take that tenderness and let yourself be swept away. When, with one attentive finger they tuck the hair behind your ear, you— You do everything they want.

3) "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

(full text here)

I don't think it's possible to read this and not think that Hemingway was a genius with words. It's all set up as a conversation between two lovers; the writing is subtle and beautiful. You can almost see them sitting a table beside you; you can almost see their faces.

‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said we could have everything.’
‘We can have everything.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘We can have the whole world.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘We can go everywhere.’
‘No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.’
‘It’s ours.’
‘No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.’

4) "The First Seven Years" by Bernard Malamud

One of my favorite stories about love and sacrifice, about our parents and how they want the best person to fall in love with us, ignoring the perfect person who is there already.

5) "The School" by Donald Barthelme

(full text here)

Simultaneously one of the funniest and -- later -- existentially sweet stories I've ever read, this one starts with a classroom of kindergarten students whose classroom pets keep dying and ends with their demand for an explanation about death, and about the meaning of life. It's absurd, yes, but absurdly beautiful too.

The Names of Things

2010-11-10T23:20:00.003-05:00

I was talking, the other day, about the gross anatomy lab. It's come up in my mind several times in the past few days. It's a weird time in a girl's life, the semester she spends pent up with cadavers on weekends and late at night, holding organs in her hand, trying to figure out how everything goes together.

I'm forgetting the things that I learned back then, taking apart Edna and putting her together. I am forgetting the names of things. There are so many of them, inside us -- so many things, named long ago by the men who first took us apart.

The ones I remember best are the ones named after objects. Pes anserinus, the goose's foot where three tendons come together. The sella turcica, the Turk's saddle that holds the key to the door we unlock between childhood and adulthood. The falciform ligament, sickle-shaped and slicing across the liver. Pterion, the weak wing of our skull, the place where we are the most vulnerable. Two muscles twisted together like twins.

And then the brain, the organ that most fascinates me because it is the key to everything. In my head, I wander around my brain and wonder where things sometimes go wrong, spark out. Does my mental illness lie in the star-shaped cells that dot the sky of my consciousness? What goes wrong with the bitter almond of my emotion?

And what about my memories, wild and sweet, when they are swept out to sea?

From the Vault: "Repair Guide for a 1998 Chevrolet Lumina"

2010-11-09T22:21:00.005-05:00

[This was posted as a guest post in July 2008 on another blog. It was a follow-up to my previous Repair Guide for a 1991 Buick LeSabre. Unfortunately, I think a lot of misguided people have ended up here actually looking for advice on car repair. And to those people, I whole-heartedly apologize!]

Problem: Knock off driver’s side mirror while maneuvering backwards through gates surrounding the driveway and talking on the phone.

Solution: Well, that was a shitty mirror anyway.

Problem: Turning right occasionally causes CD to spin in the CD player.

Solution: Get really good at anticipating the effect on the CD; continue singing, including the skips.

Problem: Cupholder console is not strongly attached to the floor separator it sits on. In fact, it doesn’t appear to be attached at all; instead, it is simply sitting on the separator, held in place by magic and sunshine.

Solution: Try to duct tape the console down and realize that duct tape, which is supposed to stick to everything, does not stick to carpet. Leave the console to magic and sunshine, watching helplessly as it throws Route 44 drinks across the carpet in heavy traffic.

Problem: Console throws Route 44 drink across the carpet in heavy traffic.

Solution: Start swearing to your friends that you keep your car so dirty to absorb the imminent spills.

Problem: Man rear ends you in another city.

Solution: The problem is not so bad, because the man was in a high-sitting truck. There is almost no damage done to the bumper, and his insurance promises to fix it.

Problem: The repair company accidentally gets a new trunk with a spoiler on it.

Solution: You are offered the choice of leaving the spoiler on or having it taken off. You opt for the later, because—really?—you don’t know what spoilers do. And you probably don’t need one for your daily excursions to work, Target, and the cupcake place.

Problem: While sitting at a red light, there is a knock at your window. It is the man from the car behind you, who informs you that your brake lights—yes, all of them—are out.

Solution: Ignore until you have money to fix.

Problem: Before the next paycheck arrives, your friend sends you a text message as you drive to school, asking if you have your brake lights fixed yet. When you reply “no,” he asks you if the money saved is worth crashing your car.

Solution: After briefly considering answering “yes,” you consult both the friend and your father, who posit that the problem is not the lights, but the fuse. You drive to the local Auto-Zone, where a nice man who likes your Green Lantern shirt helps you check all the fuses and change the one that’s burnt out. But you totally could have done it by yourself.

Problem: While your boyfriend is visiting, his car decides that it doesn’t want to go above forty.

Solution: Seriously? You’ve got to be shitting me, right?

Problem: Still in the time before the next paycheck, your car starts to shake and grind. But not in a good sexy way.

Solution: You turn around and call Daddy’s Long-Distance Car Repair Consulting Company. After five minutes of imitating the problem and making “Reerrr Rerrrerrerrerrr” sounds into the phone, you are relieved when he decides that the problem might be transmission fluid. Tapping into your craftier side, you make a funnel out of purple cardstock and staples, then pooouuuur the transmission fluid in, making sure to get it all over everything.

Problem: Has that paycheck arrived yet? No? Good, just in time for your rearview mirror to fall off of its exalted place on the windshield.

Solution: Start to feel like a contestant on Every Day You Don’t Get Paid, Something Fucks Up On Your Car. Arrive home to find a rebate check from Verizon in the mailbox.

Problem: You don’t have a local or national bank account, so you can’t cash your check, not even at Wal-Mart.

Solution: Surprise, new checking account! And this one almost has as little money as your other checking account!

Problem: Epoxy you bought with money from new checking account does not work. Mirror continues to fall off, threatening to hit you in the face every time you try to see if it may be sticking.

Solution: Return to Wal-Mart; buy new epoxy with a side of Triscuits and hummus. Sit in the car at home, listening to Frou Frou and folded up into a position that makes it comfortable to hold the mirror into place. Listen to Track 6 repeatedly and ignore the stares of people who look at you through the glass, eager to behold the Amazing Frustrated Pretzel Woman who Smells Like Cheap Glue and Desperation.

Problem: Your friend says you can’t drive.

Solution: Try to prove him wrong by driving a mutual friend around town. Hint that this guy may want to tell your friend that you CAN drive. Punctuate this hint by running up onto the curb. Give up. Give up. Give up.

[Ed. to add -- that rerr rerrrrr rerrrr sound was actually my transmission slowly dying. Two months after this blog was posted, the transmission crapped out completely, and was repaired. Only to have something else go wrong with it later...]

Things That Grind My Gears

2010-11-08T21:02:00.003-05:00

Isn't hate one of the most delicious emotions? Seriously. I know, I know, I know that I'm not supposed to hate people or things. But it's such a self-indulgent emotion. I would be lying if I said I don't relish it sometimes.

I have a long list, believe me, of things that I hate. But these three are at the top of my list, things that I hate and am -- even worse -- constantly exposed to.

1) People who wear exercise clothing in public when they have no plans on exercising

I work in a lab. Which is by no means a professional environment. I am always in jeans, often in a t-shirt. Sometimes what I am wearing is holey; sometimes a perfectly fine item comes in and leaves holey. But I am a grown up. I always manage to make it to work in something other than glorified pajamas.

In all honestly, I'm not a big fan of anyone wearing workout clothes anywhere that's not the gym. I admit that I am sometimes responsible for wearing gym clothes to the store after a workout, but it's not my preference and I usually have on some sort of large shirt or jacket to cover my ass. (Because, fact: I don't have gym pants; my ass has gym pants, and I don't need everyone to see my business. It's different when I am at the gym -- everyone can see everyone's business, and so it's ok.)

Because I work out pretty often, and often for decently long periods of time, I can sometimes spend 3 or 4 hours of time in my gym clothes. But those hours are NEVER the same hours that I'm in my lab with my co-workers. And certainly never just hours when I was just too lazy to wear clothes that have buttons on them. If you want to wear exercise clothes for a living, then be a personal trainer or a junky housewife.

(in interest of full disclosure, I often give my best friend a pass on this rule. however, in her favor, it's usually because she has to go to a doctor's appointment or to get an MRI and she doesn't want to have any metal on her)

2) People who ask me when I'm getting engaged or -- worse -- when I'm going to have children

First, I'll cover the baby-having portion of this. Number one -- Have you seen my house? I'll give you a few clues. Weeks after Halloween, it still looks like the Hobby Lobby took a giant shit in my living room. I've been eating with plasticware for the past few weeks because we have no clean silverware. We are still sleeping on our mattress and boxspring on the floor, because we never assembled our bed after we moved. We are in no way prepared for the responsibility of a little person. Number two -- Have you seen how much money we make? I'll give you a hint: one of us is a professional student on a (low, living wage) stipend. The other one of us is a department manager at Wal-Mart (with a college degree that would have gotten him a job, fast, any year of graduation before 2009). Although we live relatively comfortably -- can pay bills, are able to go out to eat at relatively nice places and buy most things (within reason) that we want -- bringing a child into this world would be complicated. Number three -- bipolar disorder. I am on a medication that is not approved for use during pregnancy and has shown some teratogenicity. Although I'm not jazzed about going off of it ever, I will one day when I chose to have little people. But it will take extensive planning, and extensive coordination of resources. I'm not ready to do that, yet. I don't think either of us is.

Number four -- we're not married. I would like to be married before I have kids and/or buy a house. All other things are negotiable.

So, all of you who ask me when I'm getting married (including those of you who want me to get married solely so you'll be able to wedge yourself into my wedding planning; actually especially those of you who want me to get married solely so you'll be able to wedge yourself into my wedding planning), the answer is Whenever Joey and I Damn Well Please. Everyone acts like it's so easy to get married. But it isn't. There are a lot of things to consider.

Like. 1) What type of ceremony to have? I am at least moderately religious; one of Joey's favorite things to say is "That's a trick question, there is no God." 2) Where to have it? We are from the same town, but most of our friends live somewhere else. Since our general idea of a wedding is "Bigass Party Where We Give Friends Lots Of Booze (and declare undying love for each other)," we'd like to have it here. But here is very expensive and is a popular spot for destination weddings. Which brings us to 3) See above where I mentioned our salaries. My parents have five kids, and they are still in the process of putting some of them through college. There isn't an ample amount of money, and we kind of want to wait until we are in a financial situation to have the wedding of our dreams (and that includes an open bar with good alcohol).

But the biggest thing is this: we were engaged before and it ended kind of poorly. Yes, it ended poorly because I had a mental illness. Yes, it has been a very long time since that awful awful time in our lives (as much time now since we broke the engagement as the time before we got engaged). But the wounds that were there were so deep. We are doing so well, having so much fun together -- and we have been for a while now. And it is disrespectful to his patience, to all of the work I've done in therapy and with psychiatrists, disrespectful to the busted road of love that we traveled until we reached something better, to imply that it's really not that important until we're engaged or married. Yes, the ring is beautiful; I've worn it before and I hope one day to be lucky enough to wear it again. But it's nothing in comparison to his comfortable and broken-in love, which I wear every day.

So, yeah, sometimes I really want to silence those who keep asking with, "Well, we were engaged before and I was crazy and fucked around on him with several different people in a short amount of time, so I kind of understand his reluctance to put a ring on it, if you know what I mean." Seriously, people who have no idea what they are talking about are cordially invited to get the fuck out of my face.

3) Traffic

Number 3 is such a constant source of my displeasure that my friend Joe used to call me the "Jenny B---- Traffic Report" when I would start a sentence with, "Do you KNOW what happened TODAY?" When I go flipping through notebooks -- both old and current -- there are crude drawing of traffic situations I have witnessed. I am serious about traffic.

I am part-time driver and part-time pedestrian. So I am sympathetic to both sides. And over the past 3 years (the number of years when I've been equal parts drive and pedestrian), I have developed two rules for etiquette. Rule one: Pay attention. Rule two: Don't be an asshole.

Honestly, people break rule one much more often than two. Most of us aren't assholes, most of the time. We are nice people, who will let someone over or cross the street. The real problem is that, a lot of the time, we aren't aware that those people have those needs because we aren't paying attention. For example, I used to have to merge left very quickly to get to my parking lot -- the left turn lane arose out of a lane that joined mine only 100s of feet before the turn. I cannot tell you how many times I needed to get over to the left and sat there with my blinker on, waiting for the person behind me and to my left to look up from their phone and let me in.

Although people often do appalling things in their cars to other people in cars, these are no comparison to some things I've seen while being a pedestrian.

Being a pedestrian is scary. I have a pretty fervent respect for the rules of pedestrianism -- not because I'm scared of being hit, but because I'm all the time in my car waiting for some errant pedestrian who is not following the rules and it irks me. Everyone is big on "Pedestrians have the right of way!" and we do. We totally do. However, that means "When pedestrians are in the crosswalk and have the 'WALK' light, please don't hit them in the ass with your bumper." That does not mean, "Pedestrians can cross in heavy traffic wherever they damn well please, and scream 'WE HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY!' as drivers hope that theirs brakes are tuned enough to not make them vulture feed." So, pedestrians, follow the rules.

However, drivers, you have to follow the rules too! I am totally over drivers who ignore the pedestrian walk sign. I am also over drivers who get pissed and gesture at me to hurry up when I slow down in the crosswalk -- pro-tip, I slowed down in the crosswalk because your bumper is in it and I thought I was going to get hit. When I step four feet into the crosswalk and you gun your engine, what am I supposed to do? Slowing down is a pretty reasonable response. If you pull into the crosswalk and I slow down, you are not allowed to yell out of the car, "COULD YOU GO A LITTLE FASTER?" Reap and you will sow, bitches.

Also, if you are following a car into a crosswalk and you can't see over that car, then you might want to go ahead and assume that there might be a pedestrian there. There is all the time some tiny ass car that almost hits me because their driver goes blazing into the crosswalk while following some SUV into it.

So, please be respectful, and please don't kill me or any of my fellow pedestrians.

And one last thing. When I'm crossing a highway with four lanes that all go the same direction, as I do (legally, in a crosswalk with signs) several times a day, then I have no problems with you pulling into the first two lanes while I'm walking across the last two, or vice versa. However, if you choose to not do this and wait until I've completely crossed to start turning, I will love you forever. And I will smile and wave to you, and mouth "Thank you!" to you. I promise your actions will not be unnoticed.

And if you are a PA student who is in the same parking lot as I am, and the school oversells your parking lot, and you are left as baffled as I am when you pull into a full lot 3 minutes after I do, and a spot opens up and you are in a position to snatch it, but you let me have it anyway because I was "here first?"

Then I will tell people about you all day, and no one will believe you are real. But thanks for the spot anyway, traffic fairy.

'Tis The Season

2010-11-07T22:06:00.003-05:00

So, it suddenly got cold here. By suddenly, I mean super-suddenly. The week before Halloween was hot, averages in the 80s. I ran a 6 miler one night that week, and by the time I had finished two miles of it, I was dripping sweat off the ends of my elbows. Then, last week, I had to run my long run in a long waffle knit tee, which I rolled up after 2 or 3 miles. The change was so quick, I can barely believe it. We don't really have much Autumn here -- one minute it's 80, and the next you can see your breath.

I have the coldest extremities of anyone I know, and I spend much of winter with freezing fingers and toes. I hate sleeping with socks on, so I prefer to warm my feet at night by pressing them up against the much warmer calves of my boyfriend. I love this. Him, not so much.

Last night was the first time since last spring that I needed to put my feet on him. He fought it for a few minutes, pressing the soles of his feet up to mine so I couldn't reach his calves which I struggled against them. But he finally acquiesced, and my feet were warm.

He looked over at me and said, "You know what? You're like one of those parasitic fish. You know what?? I'M THE SEA ANEMONE and YOU'RE THE CLOWNFISH!"

And I said, "Cutest clownfish ever," and fell asleep with warm feet.

My Favorite Ritual

2010-11-06T22:06:00.003-04:00

As a couple, honestly, neither Joey nor I is too clingy. Although we have a lot of mutual friends that we spend time with together, we also often spend time alone with friends. Since I've lived here longer than Joey has, I see "other" friends pretty often. And I spend a lot of nights in the lab or (lately) running. It's not rare for Joey to be home and in bed before I get there -- in fact, it probably happens two or three times a week.

Our weekends are sometimes so full -- the afternoons and nights are dedicated to (again) running and lab, or to hanging out with groups of friends. In fact, if we are going out at night or on a weekend, there's a good 80% chance that at least one of our friends (usually Rob) is with us. This is not a complaint; I'm glad we have so many friends to fill our lives and our time. We are very lucky to have people other than each other to connect with; they give us time and space to explore other relationships and to talk about other interests. And having Rob with us most of the time provides endless (literally endless, as he never stops talking) hours of entertainment.

And we do get to have the occasional date night, like last night (when we went to a concert) or last Sunday (when we went out for our anniversary dinner), and those are great.

But my favorite thing is our weekend morning kind-of-ritual. It happens at least one morning of the weekend; we wake up slowly, around the same time. If one of us wakes up first, then the other will usually just watch tv. But then we are both awake. We talk and laugh for hours -- literally hours! There are tickle fights and cuddles. And then one of us will do something that we know will irritate the other (there is a big list for both of us), and then some sort of wrestling will ensue. This time gives us the chance to do all of the things we don't have time to do during the week (like, ahem, each other...). And it's swiftly becoming my favorite one or two hours of the week.

Telephones and Old Typewriters

2010-11-05T18:43:00.002-04:00

It's late at night, and I'm sitting on the counter in the lab, in front of the iBlot, watching him pipet. I swallow and start singing, "I heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord, but you don't really care for music do you?"

He smiles, protests, "I do like music..."

"...it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift..."

I don't sing for people, unaccompanied, bare voice rising up and out of me with nothing else to mask it. Contrary of what it seems, I keep these parts of myself guarded. I don't sing, not without music, not like this. I don't sing or wear tanktops. I don't not do it for myself -- I do it for everyone else. I figure they don't want to hear me sing. I figure they don't want to see my upper arms (easily my least favorite part of my body). I don't like imposing, feeling so naked like that. Like this.

***

We were talking about our plans for Thanksgiving, and I was talking about my grandmother's bonfire, the one she has every year. The Friday after Thanksgiving, we put on our coats and sit in the field below my house. We bring guitars and our voices, my cousin sometimes dragging his djembe to join us. We sing all kinds of things -- old bluegrass songs, new indie music, folk music. My dad (age 47) and my cousin Phoebe (age 10) sing M.T.A., a song written when my grandparents were young.

"So your father sings?"

"And my brothers, all of my brothers sing. They sing well."

Of course, I sing too. I don't mention it, but I sing. In the car, in the shower. To myself in the cell culture hood, when everyone has left for the night and I am all alone. But I don't sing as well as my family, not quite. They have strong voices, beautiful voices. Except for a narrow range in my narrow register, my voice is thin, unsupported by a weak diaphragm that can't push out like I want it to push out. I sing, sure. But not like them.

***

We're messing around with mice, Wednesday afternoon, which I hadn't expected. I'd come to school in a button-down shirt over a tank top, which I wouldn't have done if I'd known. The gowns we wear to the animal colonies are yellow, gauzy, hot. I never wear long sleeves under them, because it's too uncomfortable.

I think about it for a moment before I unbutton the shirt, with a fuck it attitude, wearing nothing but the tank top (which has a hole in the front) and my newest bra, an accidental buy with thick straps that makes it look like an old lady bra. This is an unattractive combination. I do it anyway, because I'll die if I don't. And it feels fine, anyway.

Since I was younger, in high school, time has worked against me. Not in the getting-older-and-hating-it way, but in that it takes people away. To death, rarely, but to other places. One day, someone is in your life -- real, tangible -- and then the next, they are somewhere else. All of the people around me are trying to get out of here. Like car parts on an assembly line, we ride to the end and then drop off. Into something else.

Time is cruel in that the amount of time it takes me to get comfortable like this is too often the same amount of time it takes someone to leave. One minute, it's night time and I'm in a tank top, and singing on a counter, with a Sam Adams in my hand, my stomach and riding to my brain, flushing my cheeks along the way. Then the next, he's gone somewhere else. We don't do this anymore. There's a last time, here. There's a last time, always.

But maybe, just maybe, I only allow myself to be comfortable when I know they will be gone soon. Maybe I only want to be comfortable, naked, open when I only know I won't have to do it for too long. Maybe I crave the discomfort. Maybe I want to keep on button-down shirts, cardigans, jackets. Keep my mouth clenched shut. Maybe it's easier that way.

On who?

On me.

***

Late at night, almost 4 AM, I'm standing by the doorway, watching him pipet. It's November. The weather is changing. I know what I want to say. I know what I want to sing.

I swallow, hard.

"Cold skin and bones at this latitude, we ain't paying 'til the heat comes through..."

He turns. Smiles.

"So you take after your father, huh?"

Comfortable. That's what I am. For now.

For now.

From the Vault: "Lucky: An Evolutionary Essay in Eleven Parts"

2010-11-04T16:29:00.003-04:00

[ "From the Vault" means that this post was previously "published" on another blog, a blog belonging to my friend, which she has since taken down. It was written in 2008 as a guest post there, during the year when I was on my break from this blog. Although some things are different now from then (for example, Joey now lives with me, but then he was living 3.5 hours away at college), most of what I've written here still stands. I have a few other "lost" posts from that time that I will probably post here, probably as "gimme" posts on days that I want to continue fulfulling by NaBloPoMo requirements, but can't write something new on that particular day.

Ed. to add -- I was re-reading this, and I remembered the conversation about Bizarro us (section VII). The lucky one we decided was Bizarro Me is now in my lab, a friend. Life is funny sometimes. In that way, I happen to be lucky, too.]

Lucky: An Evolutionary Essay in Eleven Parts

I. On a drizzly March day, the computer spat out a piece of paper, and the spike that correlated with symptoms of Bipolar Disorder was huge. The scientist in me said, “Bingo. The data can’t be any clearer than that.”

Later, in the car, the logical part of me faded out, and I sobbed into the phone about how we couldn’t adopt children from China. Earlier this week, as I recounted this story to a friend, he told me that he found it bizarre. “Why was that your first thought?” he wanted to know.

“Already,” I told him, “I was seeing that I could never have the future I really wanted.”

II. May, the day before I left college for good. A friend, once so close that we referred to ourselves as “The Chosen One,” slammed his car door in my face. The last thing he ever said to me was “Thanks for trying, Jenny.”

I could have said the same to him, but instead I closed my car door and cried. The friend driving the car cried with me, cried for me.

III. Two months later, my once-best friend—girlfriend of the guy who slammed the car door in my face—told me I had a choice. I could forgive him [though he’d never apologized]. Or I could lose her too. I chose the latter. Having burned my bridges, I had swiftly lost most of the friends I’d had in college. The ones that stuck around were saints, believe me. You have to believe me.

IV. It’s August, and it’s hot in my bed, but it doesn’t matter. Under the covers, there is the boy I’ve loved since 2001. Since this one day when we both ended up at a breakfast for high school students with A averages and realized we kind of liked each other.

Since he walked me to French and walked away with my heart.

V. Sometimes, when you’re crazy, you feel like you are unlovable. Even afterwards, even with the meds, you still can’t shake the feeling sometimes.

Then someone who’s too young to have had to put up with all this shit touches your face, and you fall in love with him for the one billionth time.

Then you have a game night at your house, and your new friends eat all your spinach-artichoke dip and get tipsy off your beer, and you all laugh for six hours straight while eating Chex Mix and drinking Wild Turkey with Diet Coke.

Then you reach under your chair at the request of your closest friend in medical school, and your hands close around a fetus-shaped cookie cutter. When you tell your mom about it, she shakes her head and says, “I don’t understand your relationship with Joe.”

“I know,” you reply with a half-cocked smile you’ve developed over the past year. “I know.”

VI. Joe: “Where do you want to go for lunch?”

Me: “Rio.”

Joe: “How about a Coin Flip of Destiny?”

Me: “Ok. But I always lose Coin Flips of Destiny.”

Joe: “Call it.”

Me: “Tails, like always.”

The coin lands on heads, like it always does.

Joe: “How do you do it, Jenny? How do you change the laws of probability? How are you that unlucky?”

VII. When a new class of students comes in, we notice that—to a man—their gender distribution is the opposite of ours. Whereas my class is not-always-fondly referred to as the “Boy’s Club,” they are mostly girls.

“Maybe each of them is a Bizarro One of Us,” Thomas postulates.

“Which one do you think is me?” I ask.

“Well…” he draws out, “there is that one who escaped the Midwest right before that terrible flood. Which makes him lucky. Which makes him the exact opposite of you.”

VIII. In the past year, I’ve fallen off a curb eating string cheese. I’ve had a car splash rain water halfway up my torso. I’ve tripped by catching my big toe in my pajama pants more times than I can count. I’ve had more than twenty bruises and driven three different cars, never crashing but enduring your typical run-of-the-mill old car problems. I’ve replaced fuses and car batteries, re-glued my mirror to the windshield, and been rear-ended while parked quietly at a red light. I gave my retinal cells a bacterial infection three times and had to administer antibiotics.

I helped build a ball pit in a friend’s house. I’ve eaten so many lunches at our local Chinese restaurant that they have my order [Chicken Moo Goo without carrots or snow peas, fried rice and hot-chili oil on the side, please] memorized. I’ve received plenty of bizarre presents: Hello Kitty earmuffs, a transected fetus woven blanket, a monacle that is prescription for my right eye. I’ve improved my sparring skills out of necessity, and the phrase, “Dammit, Jenny!” always makes me smile.

On the first test of this semester, I was one of two people who put the same unique number as my ID.

After the second test of this semester, I was one of the three people the computer decided to ignore when it posted our revised grade.

I was the only person who accidentally copied our entire class in the email to tell our professor’s secretary that my grade wasn’t posted. The stress of realizing what I had done, coupled with not knowing my revised grade, was too much. On the phone with Joe, I cried.

IX. Which isn’t unusual. Four days earlier, we sat in the auditorium, receiving our grades for pathology. It’s hard to get an undesirable grade and keep a straight face, it turns out.

“Look at this morose motherfucker,” I think to myself. The entire test review, I fight to hold it together.

During a break in the review, Joe looks over at me. He holds one hand out, and simply says, “Squeeze my hand if it hurts.”

My knuckles turn white. “It does,” I whisper softly. “It does.”

X. Thanksgiving break turns out to be brighter than I could have ever imagined. It is amazing how well I sleep when I’m next to the boy, how lovely those moments with him can be. How slowly I breathe, how often I choke out belly laughs from a permanently smiling face.

For alone time, we drive forty-five minutes to his apartment, singing with songs on the radio and holding hands the whole way.

Afterwards, I’m standing in front of the heating vent in my underwear and a pair of high heels, bright red lipstick smudged across my face. I could easily stay there forever.

He comes over and kisses me. “I love you,” I think. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The countdown is a T minus six months until he lives with me. I don’t at all regret wishing the time away.

XI. I’m in the bathtub, thinking about writing this essay and reading A Girl Could Stand Up, the book I always turn to when I’m bored, when I need something to make me smile, when I need to be reminded that a girl could, indeed, stand up.

The sentence at the end of my chapter reads, “I really was a lucky luckless girl.”

To bedlam and back, losing friends and finding exponentially better ones, being loved by the one who stuck through it all--I really am a lucky luckless girl.

My Newest Musical Obsession

2010-11-03T23:41:00.003-04:00

A huge amount of my time now is spent listening to music -- my life at work should be an advertisement for the Zune (an under-rated music player, for sure, although one of my coworkers did look at it, smirk, and say incredulously, "Is that...a Zune?"). A couple of weeks ago, my brother's girlfriend Laura sent me to this website of music casts, since she and I like the same music and I have a minor obsession with mixtapes. I got really hooked on the 37th mix, which led me to a new band.

Technically, I had heard of Stars before. I remember that there was a Stars cd in the box of stuff I used in my research in 2005, obviously left there by some prior student. I remember thinking, "Is that a band?" and never looking into it. Which is definitely too bad.

The song "On Peak Hill" is on the mix, and it was immediately a stand-out song for me. A "What is this song, who sings it and ohmygod I'm in love with it" song. Hopefully, you know the sort.

So, after listening to that song obsessively for the last 2 or 3 weeks, I finally acquired a lot of the Stars discography, and I've been listening to Nightsongs for the past few days. Love it. Love it. Love it. The music is really mellow, but the lyrics are all so solid. The writing is REALLY good, in a way you rarely see in songs (Death Cab is another stand-out on this front, which may be why I like Stars so much).

Some runaway favorites from my first few listens:

The Very Thing:

("And even though I tried I couldn't make her see

I wasn't quite the man she thought I'd be

And even though I cried I couldn't make her be

the very thing I needed")

Tonight:

(I know this is a live version, and kind of hard to hear, but I definitely love the way he grasps the microphone and looks like he really means what he's singing...here is a fan video where you can hear the album version. Also, anyone who can get me piano tabs to this song will win something awesome. Like, my undying love and affection.)

On Peak Hill (my still-favorite):

("You're gonna make me wish for a time right before I was born,

when every living breath was another new dawn,

like the time I was five on the top of Peak Hill

and the wind almost took me away...")

Three Firsts

2010-11-02T23:40:00.002-04:00

1) 10.75 miles run tonight -- this is the longest I've run by several miles. (The next one down is 8 miles. I also now hold the household record, as the longest Joey has ever done is 8).

2) The first time I've ever vomited as a result of running (or any sort of exercising). I've come close several times -- I mean, running to the bathroom urgently close. One of my trainers loves making her trainees barf -- it's a sign, for her, that they are working super-hard. I have a regimen I go through to prevent it -- Gatorade, some sort of fruit immediately after finishing. In the past, this has been sufficient. But not tonight.

3) The first time I've ever vomited in a Harris Teeter. Honestly, that statement could remain on it's own -- I puked as I was walking (running) out of Harris Teeter. I puked blue Gatorade and banana chunks right as a nice older man walked by (He thought, based on the blue puke, that I was vomiting mixed drinks. So, I guess I could have been trashier...). Thankfully, I have excellent vomiting skills. No lie, I've actually been complimented on my vomiting before. I'm very non-dramatic about it, and I almost always vomit in an appropriate place. My dad always had to clean up vomit when we were kids, so he taught us how to read, understand and respond to the various body cues about vomiting. In this case, I knew I would probably vomit before I walked out the door, so I grabbed an extra grocery bag at the checkout. This is where I vomited.

So, could have been worse. Still pretty mortifying, though...

(Somewhat Necessary, but Mostly Space-Wasting Because I'm Totally Not Prepared) NaBloPoMo Intro

2010-11-01T23:06:00.004-04:00

Seriously, though, how did it get to be November? Every time I say this about (insert month here), I feel ancient. Like Aunt-Iris-Forgot-To-Take-Her-Aricept ancient.

I should probably say, up front, that I need NaBloPoMo like I need a literal hole in my head. If I were to say to Janet (my official Sleep Nazi), "What do I need more, something extra that will take 30-45 minutes of my day or a hole in the zipcode of, say, around mid-forehead?" she would probably reply, "I hear that holes in the head go super-well with this year's forecasted pattern-mixing trend."

I no longer ascribe to the "Sleep Is For The Weak" or the "I Can Sleep When I Die" camps of thought. Now I'm in the somewhat more mature "I Need Sleep Or Else I'm Certifiably Insane" or the more primal "I Need Sleep Or I'm Going To Cut Someone While Projectile Crying" camps.

Also, it should be mentioned, I am currently training for a marathon to be run in January. I love marathon training. I love how it feels to do 6 miles on a Wednesday night, jogging (I really don't travel fast enough to count as a "run" most of the time) past other runners in the dark (while taking all necessary safety precautions, dontworry) or running along the river under a starry sky, feeling sweat drip off my elbows after 2 miles and knowing I will be so completely soaked with sweat when I'm done. I also hate marathon training, because who --seriously, who? -- wants to use up semi-precious 2 hours to punish one's self after eleven hours of work? Who wants to not drink alcohol and eat well on Friday nights so that one can wake up early on Saturday morning and run 10 miles?

(Me. Because I have a weird boner about ridiculous goals. I'm kind of an extremist. I've kind of always been one. Most years, it seems, if I'm not doing something time consuming and goal driven, then I'm not living. Goals -- they put the breath in my lungs.)

There is a reason that I have been an inconsistent poster for the year I've been back here after the year I took off. Many reasons. A short list:

1) Grad student in scientific field of study. Unlike many other graduate programs, we actually get paid to go to school. My tuition is paid. I made $23,000 a year in the form of a living-wage stipend. In return, I am expected to work 50+ hours a week. I am expected to work nights, to work weekends. This process is exhausting, but natural -- many days I expect to be there only 8 hours, and end up spending an extra 2 or 3, getting stuff done. Joey has learned to tack on an extra 1-2 hours on any of my getting-home projections. If I say it'll take 3 hours, it will take 5. If I say 5, make it 7. It's so weird, to work through the week and "celebrate" about it being Friday, knowing you'll be in on Saturday and/or Sunday to do more work. This is not unique to my lab, to my school. It's status quo for science graduate work. 10 hour days aren't unusual. 8 hours on a Saturday really isn't either. Sometimes, it's exciting "I really want to see these results!" work. Sometimes, it's not. Either way, it's science.

2) Joey came to live with me. Adding a physical living person to the work-life balance equation is difficult. When he lived somewhere else, I could do pretty much whatever I needed to do during the week. When he would visit, it was all about him. It was easy to compartmentalize then. Obviously, the rewards of him living here wayyyy outpace the effort it takes to get home, make dinner, etc. And he is very forgiving about my extreme lack of ability in the home-making department. And very very forgiving about the time I need to spend in the lab. But having him be that forgiving makes it even more critical for me to put in the effort to spend good quality time with him. And most nights, warm-up-my-feet cuddles or watching Party Down and eating sorbet on our nest win out over writing.

3) Exercise. This may not seem like it should be a big deal, but it really is. When I'm working out 4-5 days out of the week, it really is a big time commitment. Especially the aforementioned marathon training, which can add 2-3 hours of time to each day and generally leaves me feeling pretty done for the day. Once you add in time to get ready, time to sit and refuel, time to shower, etc -- it's a lot of time. But it's certainly time I don't regret -- I marvel at how much better my brain feels with regular exercise. Exercise is the most socially acceptable form of selfishness -- I love dedicating that time to thinking, to being myself, to working out my problems. Having that time makes everything feel much smoother.

Written out like that, it makes it look like there could be no reason for me to do NaBloPoMo. But there is. One huge reason.

I love to write. I fell in love with writing in high school. Writing helped me through college. It helped me deal with an unfair situation in which I lost a job due to someone else's lies. It helped me through the worst times in my life, through crushing depression and my eventual diagnosis with bipolar disorder. It helped me through my first year of medical school, when I was still newly diagnosed and very bad at handling my new school work.

Once upon a time, I told myself that I had no time to exercise. Then, through a program in which I had to exercise (and was given tools and encouragement to do so), I found that I could make time. Now, I tell myself I have no time to write, no things to write about. So, here -- once more -- I'm going to try for NaBloPoMo.

And, I have to remind myself, I have another reason. I am good at writing. When I felt hopeless and useless in medical school, like a constant failure, the connections I made with people through my writing on this site showed me that I was good at connecting with people, and that my words here could help them. It gave me purpose, and I appreciate that too.

So, here we go. I'll see you, hopefully unscathed, in the other side.

***

Some housekeeping:

I'm doing this with two very good friends.

First: Allison at Tales from West Virginia -- my college roommate and one of my very very best friends. She is a librarian, lover of cats and generally hilarious person. Check her out!

Second: Rebekah at Dusting Myself Off -- my very oldest friend. We were born 12 days apart in the same tiny community, where her father was the pastor of my parents' church. She started her blog after she lost her job at a newspaper (she's been rehired!) and it is alternately hilarious, sweet and thought-provoking. And always incredibly well-written. She has gotten quite the nice following, I should add -- it definitely puts my blogging heydays to shame!

And, if you're new to this blog, here are a few good posts to introduce you to my writing and to me, in general:

Meditation Five: Light will Guide You Home and Ignite Your Bones

In which I dream about my medical school cadaver

On Deciding To Disclose

In which I disclose my diagnosis with bipolar disorder to my program director

The Hues and Overtones of Manic Depression

In which I talk about why I sought treatment and remain treated

I Kiss The Ring You Gave Me and I Swing With All My Might

In which I look back at the one year post-diagnosis

The Apologetic Touch

One of my few posts where I even approach explaining my best friend from medical school

Bright Young Things

The night that inspired this post is one of my best nights in all memory, which makes me feel -- probably falsely -- that this is one of my best posts ever.

The Occasionally Unbearable Heaviness Of Being

This one is about fantasizing about self-harm and suicide. Heavy, in general, but I'm guessing familiar to those who've experienced major depression.

Same In Blues

In which I discuss the phenomenon of 'instant nostalgia' and my tandem worry that I will be forgotten.

The First Seven Years

2010-08-28T00:07:00.002-04:00

When you would dress for school in the morning, you would iron your work clothes on the end of the bed, pushing my short feet aside to make space. Half-asleep, somewhat improbably, with the bedroom light on, I would half-worry that you would burn me. If I happened to be awake, you would steam the iron at me, smiling. "That's the sound a Shark makes" you would say. I would always laugh. Laugh for real, not to placate you. It was always funny.

When you would leave, there was a warm spot in the bed. I'd put my feet directly over it, and drift back off for a few minutes or more.

This is us.

***

In those days, you were working two jobs. Teaching during the day, Wal-Mart at night. You were always tired, and apologetically so. I would go to the lab, go to the gym, come home and shower. Make dinner. We would eat at 10 or 11 and fall asleep. For months, we were too tired to have sex. Between us, we worked more than 100 hours a week. We were almost always gone from more more than 12 hours in the day.

If you were home earlier, you would fall asleep before dinner. Once, you fell asleep while I was making sweet potatoes, and when I brought yours to the bed, you simply mumbled sleep potatoes and dropped back into the abyss that is your sleep. Sweet potatoes have been sleep potatoes since. This is our language, peppered with secret words and phrases.

Kisses have been "kithes" since 2003. Nothing calms me like, "I love you, ok." And I will always love you mostest plus 11.

Some days, I am exhausted with the weight of our history. The weight of all the things said and done between us -- good, bad, neutral. We recently went to the birthday party of woman who has been married to her husband for 72 years. I could spend 72 years with you.

It wouldn't be enough.

We have history, like my parents have history, like your parents have history. When my parents talk about living in Indiana, the one year my dad was in grad school, when my parents were 23 and I was a newborn -- we have that kind of history. First apartment where we couldn't do laundry after 10 PM history. Remember when you bought our first toaster history. Nights of drinking or fucking or laughing or crying or cuddling or sleeping on someone else's couch kind of history. Hell or high water history. Me and you history.

***

Three weeks ago, I started crying and I didn't stop. For the first time since 2007. It was scary. It scared the hell out of me, but not half as much as it scared the hell out of you. I don't know how to let you in through the cracks in my brain. I don't know how to explain to you that it will be ok, that I will crawl into bed sad and lurch out days later, eyes blurry at the sudden brightness of a world filled with light. I can only give you my promise that I will tell the right people, that I will continue to sit in offices with no windows and shitty lamps and scratchy off-brand tissues. My first therapist told me that I would do this for myself, but I was as honest then as I am now -- this is for you. These new bigger verging-on-horsepills medicines, these hours spent talking to a stranger about my mood -- this was always only for you.

I want there to always be an even trade-off, though I'm not sure it always is. For your incredible strength in the face of all the heart-breaking pain my mental illness inflicted on us, I want to give you love and joy, ease from hurt and unending laughter. I am a terrible housekeeper, an uncommitted chef, a forced workaholic who goes to listen to Radiohead and sit in front of a microscope at 2 AM on a Wednesday.

But I will always drive the car while you sleep for hours in the passenger seat. And I will make you butternut soup in August, even though that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard (but admittedly delicious and healthy, blah blah blah). And I will roll over into your side of the bed the minute you get up -- and when you just go to the bathroom or just stand up to cut off the alarm --just to soak up your warm smell before I have to wake up. And I will get a thousand sunburns as I change your car battery and let you have the umbrella and take you to brunch and ride with your Jimi-Hendrix-costumed drunk ass home early from parties and not hold it against you too much when you barf on my feet.

I can only promise you that the first seven years will be justified by the second seven years, and every seven after that. Until seven times ten. Past seven times ten. To 72, at least.

Things I Wrote, Once Upon a Time

2010-08-11T00:30:00.000-04:00

You'd be my invisible man
and I'd hate the way you talk.
We could live inside the subway
in a house we'd drawn in chalk.

We could have sex in the sewers
and sleep in broken cars
(hell--if it weren't for pollution
we could probably see the stars).

And you'd stand in the shadows while
I yearned for Robert Frost--
like Simon, we'd use bookmarks
without knowing what was lost.

With one foot in the wasteland
you could watch me slowly walk
back into the subway
to the house we'd drawn in chalk.

And early in the morning
when we were falling out of bars
we'd curse the damned pollution
(for denying us the stars).

99 Problems (or Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky)

2010-07-18T22:09:00.003-04:00

[[Saturday]]

It started with an invitation to a party. A murder mystery party, a dinner party for a friend's birthday. We replied to the invitation -- if hesitantly -- with a "yes." Joey, who chooses to assuage his social anxiety with copious amounts of booze, agreed only in the event that he could be somewhere near wasted. Our host agreed and held up to her end of the bargain by assigning us the parts of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

We left yesterday afternoon to get costumes -- a 60s mini-dress, disheveled wig and big glasses for me. Purple striped pants, an afro and a headband for Joey. We went to the Goodwill to get him an ostentatious shirt, and stumbled into a sheer women's size 1X button down shirt, the perfect icing on the Hendrix cake and -- at $3.99 -- the cheapest hysterical laughter I've had in ages. We went home and got dressed, watching videos of Janis and Jimi, picked up phrases to pepper our clues. My car was so close to empty that the fuel light was on, and we were running late (of course), so we decided to take Joey's car. True to his word, Mr. Hendrix had put on a serious pre-game of rum and coke, so I drove. And drove until suddenly the car stopped accelerating and I had to pull into an empty doctor's parking lot and the car battery was completely dead. Joey tried to jump it with his portable car-battery-jumping-device, but it was a no go. The battery was kaput.

So I called our hosts and said that the battery was dead and we probably wouldn't be making it, which would be for the best at this point, because Joey's buzz was seriously harsed, and he was mad at his car for being a piece of shit, and I was mad at him for being mad at something so unchangeable. But our hosts begged, "Please come, you have parts to read and clues to give, and we need you to be here. We can get you here, and we can get you home." At this point, Adam was already on the way to get us, so we told them he would drop us off at the party if they could get us home. And they agreed, and Adam showed up--an unmistakable smile curling up at the sight of pissed-off-Jimi-Hendrix and pissed-off-Janis-Joplin standing beside their broken-down car in the mid-July-deep-South-fucking-humid-heat. Seeing him made me realize just how funny it was. I started laughing again.

On the way there, Hendrix complained about the aforementioned buzz harshening, and we finally made it (Adam dropping us off with "I'm glad this happened to you guys, so that I could see you like this."). We walked inside, and sat down, and food was placed in front of us, and wine was poured. And, in the case of Mr. Hendrix, poured and poured. And beer brought. And more wine.

We reached the main course, and enthusiastically tucked into our food. Cheap polyester costumes had left us hot and sweaty. Mr. Hendrix put his head in his hands, and I requested water for him. Just as I was finishing my chicken, he stood up. "We have to go," he said, as we rushed out the door.

In case you haven't been following along: 1) Mr. Hendrix was very drunk. 2) We desperately had to leave. 3) We didn't have a car. 4) We needed the host of the party to take us home. 5) There was still at least one more act of the mystery that needed to be explicated. 6) Oh shit.

By this point, Joey was lying in our hosts' driveway, on his side, Afro slightly askew. After waiting for a few minutes to see if he would perhaps pull out of it, I walked back inside. "I think Mr. Hendrix needs to go home," I said. I felt awful, but he needed to not be there anymore. It was decided that our host's husband (Elvis) would change and drive us back. While Mr. Hendrix puked on the driveway outside, we took a group picture. The Host Formerly Known as Elvis (also known as Rich) spread a blanket over the backseat of the car, and we put Joey/Mr. Hendrix in the car and drove home, sharing Great Tales of Times We Blacked Out and/or Puked, as the occasion demanded.

Once home, we stood Mr. Hendrix up outside the car, and he proceeded to barf. This is the time to mention, once more, that it is mid-July in the Deep South. Everyone was wearing sandals. Everyone's shoes -- and thereby everyone's feet -- got puked on. It was one of those things where you know just how terrible something is going to be, and you have to just stand there and take it. As Rich went back to the car to get our stuff, I leaned Joey against the wall to open the door. As he stood there with his head against his arm, he mumbled, "This is all your fault. It's your fault for making me do this."

At this point, I had two distinct thoughts: 1) He is going to feel like a real ass when I tell him this in the morning. At that point, he will apologize. 2) I am soooo getting free brunch tomorrow.

So I settled him in the bathroom, and Rich and I washed off our feet. "Well, you have to admit, Joey's the only one who never broke character," I quipped, and Rich laughed and left us to our own devices. I put Joey to bed, and took a bath while reading a book and eating cookie dough. After getting out of the bath, I went to check one more time on the boy. Or, should I call him, Mr. Hendrix. Because, of course, he was flat on his fucking back.

The next day, it was revealed to us that Mr. Hendrix was the killer. Unfortunately for the fictitious murder mystery police, he had fled the scene long before that revelation occurred.

[[Sunday]]

So, we woke up this morning when Joey's alarm from Friday went off at 5:30 AM. "What happened last night?" Joey asked, and I started laughing.

For the next 15 minutes, I regaled him, and he was appropriately mortified, especially about his comment that it was my fault that he was that drunk. (I was totally getting free brunch). We went back to sleep and woke up to meet Rob for brunch. Joey discovered the puke in his sandals ("Oh God, there's puke on my sandals." "Surprise, you puked on your sandals, my sandals and Rich's sandals. Oh, and all of our feet. "Ohhh Godddd.")

The plan was for us to take my car into town. After brunch, we would go take out the old battery, buy a new one, and put it back into the car. Joey would go home, and I would go to the lab to prep for a tutoring session I was doing at 4. We were dressed and ready to leave. I could not find my keys. "When was the last time you had them?" he asked.

"Um...last night, before we got in your car......Oh God, they're still in your car."

In case you haven't been following along: 1) Joey's car is dead and parked 5 miles away from our apartment. 2) We are fucked.

So we called Rob and told him that he would have to pick us up. So he drove 20 minutes in the opposite direction of the restaurant, picked us up and drove us there in time to make our reservations. Brunch was lovely. (And so totally free, if you were me.) We drove back to our apartment, stopping to get my keys (which were totally in Joey's car) on the way.

Once home, we got in my car, thankfully made it to the nearest gas station, and filled up. We drove back to Joey's car, noticing--this is important later--that we were across the street from an auto parts store. We took my socket wrench set (purchased by me two years ago, when I also had to change my battery) with us.

So I set about changing the battery. If you were wondering why it was my job, there are two reasons: 1) I have had a string of shit-box cars in my lifetime and have acquired both the tools and the repair experience to fix most common problems. Including changing batteries. 2) I have a LOT more patience than the boy.

Rather quickly, though, we ran into problems. The hole in the socket that we needed wouldn't accommodate the bolt that the nut was attached too. If I were more artistic and if it wasn't 11 PM, I would maybe draw a picture to illustrate the problem. But instead, I'll just tell you that we needed either an adjustable wrench or a new socket. So, Joey ran across the street and got an adjustable wrench. It worked to undo one of the nuts, but the other was stuck too hard. So we both drove across the street in my car to inspect the sockets. We realized that we were probably using a slightly wrong size, because the size we were using was so uncommon, the store didn't carry it. We also realized that the nuts were probably metric, because Joey's car is a Hyundai. So, I ran back across the street to see if a metric size fit. Oh, and then back across the street, because we'd taken the socket wrench set to the store and I'd left it there. (While calling the people I was tutoring for and informing them that I would not be making it). And then back across the street to try the sockets for real this time.

So, I realized that the 10 mm socket fit, and I was super-excited, because there was an extra-long 10 mm socket and we purchased it, and the battery was changed in 5 minutes. And I may or may not have yelled "SUCK IT, HYUNDAI!" while pointed to my sweaty crotch. (In case you haven't been following along, it was 3:30 PM in mid-July in the Deep South. I was wearing shorts and a tank top. This is important later.)

I got in my car and drove to work, stopping along the way for a celebratory coffee. While feeding my cells, I realized that the amount of time I'd put into battery changing had yielded a pretty impressive tank-top-outlined sunburn.

And when I got into my car to go to dinner, it was completely dead. And when Rob came to jump it, it wouldn't charge. So, my car needs a new battery. And is parked in a parking lot it's not supposed to be in come 8 AM tomorrow. And all the car-battery-selling stores are closed.

And that was our weekend.

[[except]]

As Joey drove me home, after I'd arranged transportation for the morning, we stopped by the grocery store to get some things we'd need tomorrow. And as I stood picking out berries and Joey looked for suitable bananas, "Sweet Caroline" came on. After we sang the "Bah bah bahhhh" part of the chorus, while pointing and looking at each other over produce dividers, we sang, "Good times never seemed so good..."

And I yelled the "So good! So good! So good!" part. And it was.

The Moon In June -- It Is So Bright

2010-06-30T05:18:00.002-04:00

I've been coming to the lab god-awful late (or, god-awful early, I suppose, depending on how you look at it...) lately. Partially because I currently mostly use shared instruments, and people use them all through the day, and sometimes the only block of time I can get to run four plates is at four AM.

Partially because I've gotten used to the schedule, pushed into it slowly by my friend (and lab-mate) Andre, who keeps this schedule permanently. Because sometimes you have to come in at 2 AM to learn how to use the (very expensive) confocal microscope while drinking (fairly cheap beer) out of the free cups you steal from the cafeteria.

Partially because I keep going to my newest friend's apartment during lab breaks to talk and drink coffee, and those talks keep winding into the night, much later than I'd planning. (but I'm not complaining)

Partially because it's comfortable this way, quiet with no one else around. We all have a shared office space, and this is wonderful (for dicking around, for having random cluster conversations, for eavesdropping, for knowing where everyone is when you need someone to show you how to do a Western blot) and terrible (for doing uninterrupted work, for sometimes doing work at all). At this time of night/day, no one is here. The workspace is cleared out. I can push things off the center of my desk and do quiet calculations, the only sound coming from the clicking of my circa-2001 TI-89 plus graphing calculator.

Partially because I can do whatever I want while I wait -- plan experiments, blog, dick around on Facebook, sing in the cell culture hood. Wear whatever I want. Be whoever I want to be, away from the incessant micromanaging eyes of my incessant micromanaging boss.

Headband courtesy of Etsy -- I own 4 of these and wear one almost every day. Flyaway curls courtesy of the ridiculous heat and humidity we've got going on here right now. Shirt, an old favorite, champion of gay clubs and the summer of 2008, now relegated to working out and late-night lab runs. The perfect shirt, actually -- the sleeves are amazing, and I wish Old Navy would roll out this style again. I would buy one in each color, plus two black and two gray. Barely-visible collar bones courtesy of my two trainers, my workout partner, and 5000 hours logged in spin class. Jeans, the smallest I own, courtesy of some number of years ago and the triumph of fitting in them now. And shoes, totally OSHA unapproved, open-toed and glorious, my newest component of my summer uniform.

A Series of Letters to Myself

2010-06-08T23:47:00.004-04:00

I just turned 25. There are some pretty sweet things that I think are going to come out of that, and I'm working on starting a dedicated project for my 25th year. (Shut up, Allison, I know I don't do any work on my current blog projects as it. You are cordially invited to shampoo my crotch.). In the meantime, I'm been thinking about the things I would say to myself at each age. I'll probably expand the one to my 20-year-old self and send it here (and would encourage you to do the same). In the meantime, here's this:

A Letter To My Five-Year Old Self:

Dear very-small Jenny --

One day, your psychiatrist will ask you how long you've been a perfectionist. Right now, luckily, you know nothing about psychiatrists. And you don't realize you're a perfectionist. Don't cry when you don't get it 100%. You're fantastic anyway.

Find something active that you love to do, and keep doing it. One day, you will regret that you didn't. I know that Mama and Daddy don't have enough money for dance lessons, but they'll let you take them when you're 17 (and guess what! you'll be taking them with your sister! you're going to have one of those too! and she'll be everything you ever wanted in a sister, I promise).

When you're older, your favorite memories of the trailer will take place outside, in the yard. I know that it sucks that you never win Grasshopper Contests because you're too scared to pick up the biggest ones. And the junebugs that you captured and tried to feed blackberries always escaped and felt like failures. But the fact that you did these things at all will wind happiness into your heart forever.

Smile hard now, kiddo. It gets much harder later.

A Letter To My Ten-Year Old Self:

Dear lost Fifth-Grade Jenny:

Your life totally sucks right now. I wish it weren't the case, but it's true. This will be one of the worst years ever -- but you'll get through it. I promise.

Right now, you're figuring out that the world isn't the bright sunshine-y place you always thought it was. The world is scary, I know. People kill other people. Someday you will die. All of this concerns you deeply. What you don't know is that adults think about these things too--it's all part of growing up. Yes, some people kill people. But many more people give up all they have to help people. And someday, you will die. But before that, you will live. That is the important part.

Also, right now is the first time that people have ever been mean to you because you are intelligent. People are intimidated by intelligence, and some people will translate that intimidation into unjust meanness. There is only one way to combat people who think you think you are better than them: know that you are not better than them. Intelligence is not a free pass to insult people who are less conventionally smart. You can learn something from everyone. Intelligence in a vacuum is useless--but intelligence coupled with niceness is rare and beautiful. Strive, always, for the latter.

And it's ok that some of your best friends are characters in books. Books will always help you make sense of things, even when your own life seems so senseless. And don't worry that everyone has read A Wrinkle In Time and you haven't. You'll read it when you're 14, and it will be the perfect time.

A Letter To My Fifteen-Year Old Self:

Hey you --

Weird and magical changes are happening. That sounds corny, like the beginning of some 1950s menstruation video. But, by this point, you're sarcastic enough to pick up on that. You're really starting to come into your sense of humor. One day, your laughter and presence will fill a room when you really want it to. There is a certain undelicate power in humor, and you are learning how to wield. Someday, people will say that you act much more like a boy than a girl, and they mean that you joke and laugh like a boy. There is something beautiful there. Your humor will carry you through everything. Let it keep blossoming, and don't listen to the angry women who frown at your belly laughs in restaurants.

This is the first point in your life where your friends will start to be more important to you than your family. The first point where your friends will start to act like family. This is a turning point. Family has always been just one thing to you, and now it will splinter into a thousand pieces. And all of those pieces will grow up out of the ground. There are so many people who will make you feel like you belong. Feel grateful. Not everyone has this.

Anyway, shit's about to get crazy. You're about to make friends with some unconventionally loving people. They'll drive you around in cars at night, too fast on a night that's too cold, and they'll wrap you up in blankets as they hit mailboxes with baseball bats. This is not a proud moment in your life. I want to tell you to not get in the car. But, here's the thing: without that moment, there would be a piece in my heart missing. It's the memory of being loved and taken care of in that weird wild way. And I'm not sure I'm willing to give that up. Not yet. Ask me again when I'm 45 or 50. I may have changed my mind by then.

You're so worried, right now. You're worried that no one will ever kiss you or hold your hand. You are worried that no one will ever want to have sex with you. You are assured of your own unattractiveness. I need you to know that the sexiest thing a woman ever has is confidence. You'll get some along the way. You're about to get a boyfriend, and he'll be so sweet and loving. You won't kiss until long after you've stopped dating. But it's ok. You're taking your own path to your acceptance of your body. And when you land, you'll have a better self-esteem than most. I don't know what combination of good fortune will take you there. But you'll get there.

And next year, you're going to meet the most wonderful and sweet boy. Please try hard not to break his heart. You love him, you asshole. Don't spend so much time fighting it. Let him in, let him hold your heart in his hands. He'll be exceptionally good at it. Love him back with the same force that he's loving you. Don't question it. He's the boy for you.

PS: In the meantime, you kiss lots of boys. Eventually, you have lots of sex. Even if I can manage to subvert the tragedy of your early twenties, you'll still have lots of sex. Good sex, too (most of it. Not all. You're not superwoman, after all). Be excited!

A Letter To My Twenty-Year Old Self:

My dearest hopelessly lost self--

There's a hole in your heart. You can feel its gravity, but you haven't yet deciphered it. You're dancing around the edge. You are about to fall in.

There's something worse than depression, although the depression is bad. And I know you're trying to get help. No one is trying that hard to help you now. They think you're overreacting. They don't know what you know.

Listen to me. Don't listen to anyone else. For the first time in your life, your parents don't know what's best for you. Everyone reaches this point, the place where their experiences go out of the range of those of their parents. It's part of growing up. Listen to me. I'm the one who knows.

Take the goddamned test. I know that you don't feel sad anymore. And I know that people tell you that mental illness means you can't have children, and that scares you. But take the test.

Because you know what? Not taking the test doesn't mean that you don't have a mental illness. It means that you do have one, and you don't know about it. You are undiagnosed and dangling precipitously on the edge of danger. Go to the testing psychiatrist. You'll meet him later anyway, so you might as well go on now. He will charm you, with his description of vegetable soup as "invigorating" and the way he gains your trust by complimenting your handwriting. And he will tell you how to get help. You don't have to fuck up as bad as I did. I highly do not recommend it.

In the horizon, your life is still stressful--this will not end--but you will learn how to find it beautiful too. The meds won't ruin your perception of life, art, literature or beauty. And you are about to meet some people who understand you like you didn't think was possible.

So, enjoy the time that Joey spends playing video games. Don't get mad about such a stupid thing as that. Read books while he does it. Or take some naps. Don't get all bent out of shape over such dumb things.

And when you go to medical school (spoiler alert: you achieve your dreams of entering an MD/PhD program! go you!), introduce yourself to that tall boy in your program at orientation.

And when you go to grad school, don't be so judgmental. You can never guess who your best friend is going to be. But then again, I guess that's true for all of life.

Love, your twenty-five year old me.

Me, Elsewhere

2010-05-02T23:38:00.003-04:00

Because I'm always lagging, I neglected to link this post from Real Mental:

Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea

I was pretty proud about this one--it's about my first experience in exposing Janet to the crazy. And about how she responded. Spoiler alert: she was amazing.

Same In Blues

2010-04-20T00:46:00.002-04:00

There's a new application [app, if you will--but I won't] for the iPhone. I do not own an iPhone, and I only know about this application from various other bloggers--it's called Hipstamatic, and the premise is that it gives your photos the patina from various old camera types, Polaroids and the like. You know, the supersaturated or too-bright faded or scratchy-looking photos of your youth. Or, in my case, my parents' youth. I think it's funny, that we take cameras that can take perfectly clear dime-a-dozen photos and make them look less clear, more fuzzy.

I'm not making fun of Hipstamatic, not by any stretch of the imagination. The phone I'm temporarily using runs the Android OS, which as a similar application--Vignette. Which I love, by the way.

But I do think it's funny, our attempts to inject nostalgia into our very real and present lives. The pictures I take in Vignette look like the pictures my parents took when my dad was in grad school, or when they were dating in high school. I'm so familiar with these pictures, part of the mythology of my parents. Sitting on the back of a car, age 15. My father, at his desk in the apartment in Indiana, our old green and blue paisley couch in the corner and a stack of books that rivals the one on my desk now. My parents, 22 or 23--younger than I am now--with a very tiny me. Faded out. Less clear. Fuzzy, by now.

Our pictures are like our memories. Only these, we start out fuzzy. Like we're only giving them half a chance.

***

There are defining moments of each stage in your life--you just don't know it when you're experiencing them. They sneak up on you, steal a piece of your soul and slink away.

There's a rainy day in high school and a gray sweater.

A story about someone's mother and a speed bump. A failed camping trip and a waterfall swelling with flood waters. A foggy night and a soup bowl full of tears. One hundred clandestine drawings passed forward and backward through Organic Chemistry.

Two simultaneously opening elevators, a prescription monocle and a two-hit hypothesis.

I wonder about the defining events of now, of my life with Joey. We're about to move into a new place, out of our first apartment. We're molting out of the shell we've made together. I think about the things we'll carry--the kitchen floor he's picked knives off of (telling me he was reconsidering having children with someone who drops knives on the floor and doesn't pick them up), the couch where we sink into each other to watch TV. The bed, where he reads me Scott Pilgrim out loud, where I fell asleep today cuddled up to him in a way I rarely do. Our life together--my car, where as he held my hand while I drove across the bridge last week, he turned and said, "I love living here with you." Our favorite restaurant, where we sit outside with friends on a Saturday evening and laugh into the fading light of an almost-summer dusk.

These events, standing out like telephone poles--our memories in-between traversing the gaps, carrying whispered words via electricity over time and space.

***

Charlie has a bad habit of forgetting things once he's drunk. I didn't know this at first, but eventually I noticed that I had to explain things over and over again. Night after night spent together, the same surprise over the thumb stuck defiantly in my mouth. Or days after, when I reference something we talked about or did--not remembering. I make fun of him. But at the same time--

I worry that I will be forgotten. That someday, there will be no more flickers of the lighter, no more mixed drinks. No arms winding drunkenly around each others' backs or in the crooks of each others' elbows. That one day, I'll wake up on a couch that isn't mine and just walk away. Into another life.

I know that everything I do on earth, I will do for a last time. The last time I ever feed cells. The last time I sit and talk to a patient as a student doctor. The last time I give birth. The last time I have sex or kiss someone on the lips.

The idea that everything will be done for the last time doesn't intrinsically bother me. What really gets to me is the idea that I won't see it coming. That the last time will slip away with the ease of our ocean breezes, the ones that kick up tiny pieces of sand that graze your skin as they slide on by.

So I hold my hands out in the wind, grasping at ghosts and the fading pieces of my own synapses. No matter what, I beg them in their sleep. Just promise to remember this.

The Center, Somewhat Inexplicably, Managing To Hold

2010-03-27T12:28:00.002-04:00

It's almost April, apparently. I wouldn't believe it, really, except that it's there--the calendars on my computer and phone insist that it's true. When I think back, I guess I know where the first part of the year has gone. It was tangled up in calorie and fiber counts, in the phenotypes of manganese superoxide dismutase knockout mice and more listenings of "I've Gotta Feeling" in spin classes than I'd ever in my life admit.

But still--almost three months. 90ish days--floating up and away into the breezes of the past. One extended blink--and it's seventy degrees outside, bright. Perfect weather for riding with the car windows down, for skipping Friday afternoon classes and driving to Costco to buy handles of Firefly instead.

***

So, what has happened since I was here last?

I suppose the most important is that I dropped around 25 pounds with my program. This is, of course, a huge deal for me, and I am not even pretending like I'm not proud as hell of myself. Also, in this time, I've picked up a bit of running--I've done two 5Ks. The first, 45 minutes. The second, 37. Waiting for the third (April 10). Can't wait, even.

In 90 days, I've become some version of a runner. A shitty one, albeit. But there's just something about it--about getting halfway there, and then to the end. About putting on music--or none--and just letting your mind slip into it. About going until you want to stop, and not stopping. Hoping you never stop.

***

My research problem changed. First, we thought we were going to do something new, something that hadn't at all been done. And I researched, read papers ad nauseum for a whole week--sitting at my desk, head in one hand, Hi-Liter in the other. And then busted out a presentation, started writing on the board. And we realized--them first, me soon after--that it wasn't going to work. This, my friends, is what we call "science."

Then, we decided something else. Continuation of the work that has already been going on in the lab, but a new direction. The boys in the boy's club telling me that it would be frustrating (but when isn't it?). Then laughing, stopping by the hood, to ask me--"How long have you been doing this prep? Aren't you done yet?" Smiling as I flip them off with my mint-colored medium-sized nitrile-gloved hand.

And I yell back, "Don't you ever do any work around here?" And then we're a family--brothers, like my own brothers. The sisters I never would have imagined. And on days when it's so frustrating, I pout and get angry or let tears come to the edge of my lids--they help. And it's ok.

***

And then, Dr. Faster [this is what I've decided I'll call my jerk-boss, here] comes up to me on a Wednesday. "You're writing a grant." he says, "Due in two weeks."

An NIH grant, a fellowship that would support me for 3 years. Aka, A Lot Of Fucking Money. Aka, My Friends Who Are Writing This Same Grant Started In January. Aka, Due To The NIH In Two Weeks, Not Just To Dr. Faster by Then. Aka, Welcome To The Stress Party, Here's Your Dumb Hat.

***

Just prior to telling me that I have an Indiana-shaped mole on my bajingo, the general practitioner at Student Health asked me if anyone had ever told me I have a heart murmur. Popped his stethoscope on my ears and held it to my sternal border, left side. And there it was.

And my fingertips are all peeling away.

And my body is falling apart. Except for all the running and spinning and weight-lifting and jumping. Except for the parts where it's not actually falling apart at all.

***

"An off-month," we've been calling it. March, with it's confusing weather. It started out so cold we didn't want to leave the house to go to work. And now it's so warm, we don't want to go inside to go to work. And Charlie was gone, doing an away rotation. And I was working on my last few weeks of crazy exercising. And Dr. Faster was away for a week, and half the lab wasn't there. And so, things have been off.

But then, yesterday. Everyone finished their rotations. Charlie came home. We had friends over to the house, cleaned the kitchen and made Irish Car Bomb cupcakes. Poured Firefly and lemonade and drank it with straws. M&Ms and Law and Order for breakfast. And suddenly, brilliantly--everything was ok. I was home. I am home.

Me, Elsewhere

2010-01-28T10:02:00.004-05:00

Dudes, I promise that I am trying to work my way to posting here, but I might be remiss for the next seven weeks. I'm doing a fitness challenge here in my hometown and it is commanding a LOT of my time. The time commitment is the only downside, though, because it's working, bitches. And I couldn't be happier.

In the meantime, I didn't want to overwhelm this space here with fitness, food and weight loss entries, so I started a separate blog section to write those posts. It isn't linked back to this (my "main" site) because it's being read by my teammates and other people who live in my city, but I will link its URL here in case anyone is interested:

Another Chance To Lose It All

Also, today I have a new post up at Real Mental--and it is about a subject that is VERY important to me:

The Ones We Leave Behind

Kept Clean And They Will Let You Breathe

2010-01-21T22:53:00.001-05:00

Today was hard. That is almost all I can say about it. Hard in that way that made me realize, later, that I was gritting my teeth. And rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth on the bed. Hard.

Me, Elsewhere--several times over

2010-01-09T10:57:00.003-05:00

Things are absolutely insane over this way--this week was already busy, and then I started a new program [which I promise I'll talk about later], but I am still in the process of getting myself organized. Seriously organized.

In the meantime, I've been totally remiss in linking my last few posts from Real Mental--so here they are:

Grace Under The Weather

Civil Wars to Cease

The Fight in the Kid

New Year's Revolution

Something Slow Has Sparked Up In Me

2010-01-02T01:08:00.003-05:00

I woke up this morning with dried blood on my toe. Middle one, left foot. Further examination of my skin, later today, yielded two pretty serious bruises. One on my right shin [from what?] and one on the back of my left thigh [attempt #1 to climb onto Rob's porch railing, which resulted in a swift tumble into the bikes tied there].

Throwing up on New Year's Eve is a tradition, now, four years running since the transition from 2006 to 2007. The transition from the worst year of my life [objectively, no contest, no other contenders] to one of the best. The best. In 2006, it was a combination of Gin Bucket and Bullshit Pyramid. 2007, I can't honestly say--Circle of Death, probably, and vodka. 2008, gin again and a midnight-countdown phone call that left me screaming gleefully into the receiver until Joey stopped me with a rather pointed, "Kiss me!"

And 2009, a mix of Svedka and Raspberry Sparkletini and a four-way-split spliff, consumed after my duties as a designated driver were finished. Then, a climb up the porch railing [attempt #2, a sign of my unwavering obstinance, was successful] and a few minutes of feeling infinite. These are the things I remember. These things, then waking up cold and shivering.

I've accepted, I think, that most years in your adult life will be classified as neither good nor bad. With a few glaring exceptions [marriages, births, promotions, graduations, divorces, layoffs], I presume that the years slip by--a healthy mixture of good and bad. The bitter and the sweet.

Still. 2009 had its share of trials: the 6-week-board-studying-insanity tour, a bad grade or two that left me crying and frustrated on the living room floor, a serious adjustment to a new lab mentor.

But it has more than its share of beautiful hazy nights: a wine tasting that ended in a constant supply of offered elbows, a birthday celebration in a now-defunct restaurant and the drive home with the wind in my hair. Nights of sipping out of other people's drinks and the leaning in of our bodies, the alcohol functioning as magnets that draw us in to each other. Six months of non-stop laughter, of having my elbows eaten and my feet tickled until I can't breathe. Thousands of text messages and an endless number of pictures taken surreptitiously. I found them the next day--

[still life with the gay boy who would later have his face buried in my breasts]

And that was it. A whole year of staggering beauty, warm nights and cold drinks, and offered elbows on uneven streets.

And at the end of the year, several presents marked To or From Jenny and Joey. Christmas wishes from friends I didn't know January 1 of 2009. A baby in my arms with a thumb in his mouth and a powdering of snow. A deep satisfying breath in and out.

***

"You're pretty," she says, more-than-half lit. I don't know if this makes her more honest or less. Maybe I don't care. I don't often feel pretty in public--but sometimes (straightened hair, favorite high heels) I can maybe see it.

At the end of the year, I sometimes feel pretty. And sometimes hurt or overwhelmed. Sometimes filled with soul-shattering longing. Sometimes blessed and fulfilled. Sometimes invincible.

Always loved.

***

2010 has started. A new decade we all cried, after the countdown and one quite special midnight kiss. Today it rained and I ate soup, curled under blankets and read, lit a candle and drove to the movies choking on my own laughter.

I don't really have resolutions, just things I'd like to do. Go in early to the lab 2 or 3 days a week to stay on top of the immense body of scientific literature. Write letters--by hand, in pen on typing paper--to Roberto. Write, period--write more, write with intensity and purpose. Stay on top of things here. Listen to more new music. Drink more hot tea and less cafe mochas.

Touch people and be touched. Laugh fiercely. Love fiercely. Fall into nights the way I have this year.

In fact, if this next year is anywhere near this past, then it will be a perfect success. So let's crank it up and do steamrollers. Where shall we begin?

Four Things To Read

2009-12-21T23:09:00.003-05:00

[Lest this become a blog sub-entitled "I Went To Graduate School, and All I Got Was Smashed," I decided to show you these four things. Two are fiction, two are non-fiction--and I can't stop reading any of them. Serious, I've read all of these countless times, over and over again. And sometimes I stop and think about them, and then I have to run to the internet to read them again. They all, in their own unique ways, have some modicum of perfection to them. They have all grabbed me, tightly, in their words. The way that only the best writing can.]

Fiction

1. Mix Tape for a Dead Girl by Joshua Allen

I think part of my obsession with this is that the death of my close friend Ryan was still raw when I first read this, linked from A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny. It reminded me of the things we do for the dead, the memories we hoard for them. There are still days when I want to write him an email or a text message, days when I want to send a quote to him or tell him about my data.

There's also a quiet brilliance to this, a point where he goes back to a previous point and the story starts to develop. I only wish I could be so subtle a writer.

2. Anniversary by Abigail Schilling

I first connected with this piece because it quotes one of my favorite songs, but fell in love with it because it made so much sense in the context of my relationship with Joey.

"I loved you that way. You were only a twinkling."

Non-Fiction

1. Lost in Translation by Kevin Keck

This is a fucking brilliant essay about the love in a family. It touches on the Communication Gap between generations and what it means to care for a deteriorating family member. I posted it earlier this year in my Tumblog, but it deserves a second mention here:

"Thinking of all this, I am filled with remorse — a beautiful word that comes from old French which literally means to be bitten again. And I am bitten continually. When I see my parents with my children, I feel trapped as a thought between two languages, with no adequate word in either tongue to express what I am feeling. So many things about my father that I found confusing while growing up have finally been deciphered with the Rosetta Stones that are my children."

I love that phrasing, that idea--"I am bitten continually." Because I am. I think we all are.

2. [untitled] by Eden Marriot Kennedy at Fussy

An essay about the death of a friend and the things we keep behind. Hers were a pair of shoes, mine are a set of pipets.

If We Can Get Around It

2009-12-10T23:22:00.003-05:00

You don't often get to hear the songs that people have set as your ringtone.

It's not for you to hear, really. It's a private thing they've decided on. It's supposed to only play when you're not around.

You're not supposed to hear it.

***

We didn't have a lot of money these last few weeks. It had leaked out, from bills and traveling. Car payments and speeding tickets. Life.

We'd talked about the things we wanted and needed, the few things that came up from time to time, as things do.

In a wave of nostalgia, we wished we could find our copy of Guitar Hero 2, the game we'd played ad nauseum that spring when we decided to give it another try. We'd played it, even, earlier on the day he asked me to date him again. We played it until the songs wove their ways into our muscle memory, programmed in our brains in a way that can make you really respect the human body.

On Tuesday, I showed him how my every day shoes were falling apart. Purchased for 19.99 the day before Easter and worn almost every weekday since, I knew they couldn't be long for this world. And a closer examination revealed that the soles are peeling from the uppers, the inside of the sole worn unevenly. "I need new shoes," I said. He inquired size, and I told him, "Six." He was being not-so-sneaky, and today as I left the lab, I told Janet, "I'm pretty sure I'm getting new shoes for Christmas."

***

Comcast somehow didn't take money out of our account for automatic payments, and this pay period has too many weekends. And I had already borrowed money from him, and there wasn't that much money left this week for groceries. And we were out of the Diet Coke that we drink in 24-pack boxes, one of the many many vices we have and pay for.

And the kitchen is crack-house dirty from too much cooking, and the sink was full of dishes, and I asked him before I left home to please please please unload the dishwasher so I could load it again while I made dinner. And suddenly, we're everyman, full of money worries that could be alleviated by going out less and stuck in conversations about household chores and how we'll be cooking fish for dinner.

***

After a long but satisfying day, with two happy bosses--for the first time ever?--I dragged my cold self home, listening to a CD I had burned as a sophomore in college. The best songs by some of the lamest artists, including Nine Days, who sang these lyrics in a song that now skips every time I play it:

The answers we find,

Are never what we had in mind.

So we make it up as we go along...

We make it up as we go along, I thought. Yes, we do.

***
So, I get inside, and Joey is standing in the bedroom in his boxers, working his way through the songs on Guitar Hero 2.

And I take off my pants to put on pajamas, and he tells me not to take off my socks. But I think he's dicking around, and I take them off because that is easily in the top five most satisfying moments of every day.

But then, he comes over to give me a kiss and says, "I have a present for you."

And goddammit, if it isn't a new pair of every day shoes.

***

"Thank you!" I say. "I love them." [i do] "Are they my Christmas present?"

"No," he says. "You needed new shoes. I got you some."

***

And of course, the dishes have been put up, and he put the ones from the sink into the dishwasher. And when we sit down to watch TV-on-the-internet and eat M&Ms, he asks if I want a Diet Coke. And if it weren't so stupid to be so sentimental about Guitar Hero and shoes, about dishes and Diet Cokes, then I would have cried.

Or is it stupid to be happy that someone pays attention and then spends their two-weeks paycheck on the things you need? Is it really so stupid to want to cry when someone loves you that much?

Because that's what it is. On the surface, it's a lot of things that don't seem to matter that much. But somewhere else, there's that girl who will never forgive herself for hurting him. I never expected him to give me anything. Much less everything. The least of these things being Diet Coke and shoes. The most being unrelenting love and a fresh start at being ok.

***

So, after TV night, I get up to do work.

[I do this a lot lately, work in the later hours after he has gone to sleep. I lie in bed with him for an hour or two, watch TV while he drifts off, and then slip out to the den. It's a weird pattern, one that I've seen many scientists fall into. We spend as much time as we can with our families. Then, while they're asleep, slip back to science. God, it's weird.]

He is on the verge of nodding off, but he wants to find his phone. So I call him in the living room, and stand still to locate where the sound is coming from.

And in the bedroom, the ringtone I didn't know was set for me.

"Well, it's you...I fell into."

Oh, but boy--you don't know the half of it.

Lord, If You've Got Lungs--C'mon and Shout Me Out!

2009-12-08T03:36:00.003-05:00

A couple of months ago, my oldest friend mused in her blog about what she called the "The in-between blues." It was an excellent post, and I think it highlights a lot about the confusion of the mid-20s. No matter who you are, what your job is. No matter what your relationship status--married, dating, single. It's a weird age.

My favorite movie of all time is Garden State--and I think it describes the uncertainty of this time with an enlightening clarity:

"You'll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place."

But with my most sincere apologies to the delightful Mrs. H, I do believe I have to describe myself as being firmly ensconced in the "In-between Yellows."

I don't mean to be infuriating or overly sunny, I promise. Life here is not easy. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But surely you are tired of me complaining about chronic exhaustion and a grumpy boss [who, by the way, happens to hate Christmas because people stop working as hard...seriously]. So--my yellows.

My grandmother refuses to stop asking me when I am getting married, and I am tempted to tell her "never." Although I do want--and occasionally long--to be married, I am increasingly satisfied with this stage of in-between. It's like all of the fun of being married--cheaper finances, living in the same place, getting to go out on dinner dates and to get coffee at the bookstore--without some of the more serious stresses. I don't know what it is--if not being constrained by the legality and formality of it makes it seem easier to love harder and more freely. Or if it's just the lingering "honeymoon" phase of seeing each other every day, as opposed to once every two weeks. Or if it's just that we finally feel pretty sure that we can, actually, do this. But, whatever it is, this in-between is somethings else. Something my grandmother doesn't understand, but something--simultaneously--that I'm not eager to let her take from us.

The in-between, mixed with the absolute good fortune of living in a city with college friends and working in a field that constantly exposes me to people of my general age, has also yielded a collection of friendships that is deeply satisfying. For the first time, Joey and I have real couple friends. Like, "Hey, we'll be inviting you to dinner when we move into the new house," couple friends who are actually married. Somehow, the in-between lets us bridge this gap, the one between married friends and single friends. We have things in common with both. In the same week, we could ostensibly go to dinner with a married couple one night, and then spend the next out in bars with our less-attached friends.

But I continue to be amazed with the amount of intimacy we can manufacture with this latter group--I am, as always, intrigued by what I have come to call the "post-crazy intimacy" of these friendships. I am enamored with the arm thrown casually above my head on the couch, when we're tipsy off liquor, debating the finer points of Lady Gaga and leaning into each other. I am taken with the the image of my clove cigarette in Charlie's mouth as he lights it for me, after I've failed miserably in the dual forces of the December wind and my own inexperience. There's the delight of knowing that someone knows how I pronounce the word "couch," of knowing how someone else pronounces the word "breakfast." Making Janet laugh until her face turns red and she cries. Getting drunk and hiding Rob's kitchen appliances--finding some way, any way, to relieve the disarming stress of a crazy week.

It's the hangups, the sudden pleasure of a slip of emotion you weren't expecting. The sudden frustration that you can only feel with the best of your friends, followed in a flash by something redeeming they do. Something that makes you smile and forget why you were grumpy in the first place.

Because Joey lives here, I am now closer to the people I intentionally guarded myself from. I am safer, less worried about what someone will think. If a boy falls asleep on my couch on a Saturday night, it doesn't matter. Let the neighbors be confused about two boys slipping out of my house, one at 4:45 AM and another at 5. I couldn't care less.

I'll just be asleep in my bed, hoping to avoid a hangover and not minding if I don't. Stuck--somewhat improbably--in the in-between yellows.

I Wanna Know--Have You Ever Seen The Rain

2009-12-02T23:28:00.003-05:00

Everyone got to work late today--came trickling in at 10 or after. It took me an hour and ten minutes to get in, 3.5 times my usual twenty minutes.

Downtown had flooded, due to extreme raining. This happens maybe once a year--everything floods out, and noone can get anywhere. And people get trapped in or out of downtown. It was such a fucking mess.

This is the view from Rob's house, which is downtown and one block away from my building.

In anticipation of more rain, the Graduate School officially closed at 3 PM, and we all headed home. I remember the days when 4 PM was a late day home for me, but it felt decadently early today.

It felt like a vacation, light-hearted like a Friday night. Joey was off work today, so he was home when I got home.

We watched several episodes of Law and Order in bed, eating pretzel crisps and snuggled in.

I made leftover turkey taco soup and sweet potato biscuits while Joey napped, and talked on the phone to several friends in the meantime.

We watched Glee while Joey ate dinner and talked shit about the song "Smile."

Sang the second verse and chorus of "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies, which we plan on singing next Tuesday night during karaoke at our favorite dive bar.

And played Soul Caliber IV on the XBOX while lying in our underwear, then laughed hysterically for several minutes while sprawled out on our shared bed. Sometimes at night, when someone's elbow is in my face, the space seems so small. But then--this afternoon and evening--it was just the right size.

Number 30

2009-11-30T22:24:00.000-05:00

Well--I made it. 30 posts. And some of them were damn good, if I do say so. And, naturally, some of them were phone-ins.

But, I think this has accomplished what I had hoped it would--I remembered that I do have many things to say. Sometimes, they may be planned, and sometimes they won't be. There is value to both.

However, I am currently springing a migraine, and given the embarrassing number of times I have vomited thus far in November [for various reasons, and I consider >1 to be an embarrassing number...], I am going to take my ass to bed.

A Rest

2009-11-29T20:54:00.002-05:00

"A change is better than a rest."

I read this some time ago, on another blog--and for a long time, it was my mantra. I waited--not so patiently--for a change. Any sort of change. Different classes, different apartment. Different type of degree. Anything that was a new pace or a new focus. Anything.

But now, I am thinking that there is no rest like...well, rest. I don't know how we do it--all, or any of us. How do we keep going, stay motivated? How do you prevent exhaustion or burnout? How do you stay engaged or involved? How do you continue to grow and not get static? Or how do you push forward, when you are bored or frustrated?

And what do you do when you are tired? Tired with no promise of rest? What do you do, when you've been going for years and years--it seems--without stopping? How do you get out of a cycle of exhaustion?

A rest, my friends. All I want is a fucking rest.

Currently Obsessed With...

2009-11-28T20:23:00.002-05:00

Lima bean salad.

If my mom were to read that, I think she'd do a double-take. I love almost all vegetables, but I have led a lifelong crusade against lima beans and their dopplegangers, butter beans. I had seriously never met a lima bean I could tolerate.

Which is unfortunate, generally, because lima beans are one of the few vegetables Joey has always loved.

So, a few weeks ago, we were trying a pizza place downtown that I had read about. It's a nice little place, which focuses on small-plate appetizers and brick oven pizza. They also fulfilled another of our dining requirements, which was to find a place in town that serves a killer tiramisu.

One of the appetizers mentioned by name in the review I had read was a lima bean salad, so Joey wanted to get that. And it came in a bowl, cold and marinated in vinegar and lemon juice, mixed with the occasional small piece of celery.

And goddamn, if it wasn't three kinds of amazing. The kind of amazing where you think about it a few days later, and suddenly you are craving something that cravings aren't usually made of [since my cravings are usually composed of chocolate, pizza, and chocolate...].

So, we went again tonight, and it's just as amazing as I remembered. If not, honestly, more. Again, I can't stop thinking it--and I am vowing to recreate it in my kitchen.

I'll keep you updated, internets.

En Fuego

2009-11-27T20:28:00.001-05:00

My favorite family Thanksgiving tradition is, without a doubt, our Friday bonfire. And it was so delightful, it almost completely wiped the memory of the $82 speeding ticket I got en route.

The First Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T23:03:00.005-05:00

If you looked at the components from a distance, it wouldn't look like the best of days.

1. Today, the 26th, started early--1 AM, when I woke up and puked for the next two hours. In between runs to the bathroom, I laid at the foot of the bed, in the fetal position and tried to figure out what was wrong. I ruled out the two glasses of wine. I ruled out overeating [because, well, I hadn't--and because that is usually alleviated by one round of yakking]. I ruled out everything eaten after 3 PM, because Joey had eating the same. And settled on the Thai lunch I had eaten almost exactly 12 hours earlier.

Joey would wake up every half hour or so and reach over and rub my back. I watched countless episodes of the CBS Early Morning Show and finally went back to sleep.

2. My day was--to my distaste--overscheduled. This happens when you're in a serious relationship. Everyone wants you to eat with them, and you are just supposed to keep eating and eating. Lunch was scheduled, an hour away, at 12:30. Dinner scheduled in our hometown at 5. So, I went and ate a leisurely lunch, and found myself with dessert at 2:45. And knew I would pay for it later.

3. We didn't leave until around 3:30--good time to make it home. But we were riding in Jim's car, which has a radiator leak [apparently]. My dad had topped off the water at home and sent us with two jugs of water. And on the way home, the car started smelling hot and we realized my mom had been watching the oil gauge instead of the temperature gauge.

Seriously? We asked ourselves.

How is it that we know how to service our own cars and Mama doesn't?

4. By the time we'd gotten all the water in, it was established that I would be late to eat dinner at Joey's. So I sent them a text saying to go ahead and eat. And when I finally got there, I ate too. I was so. goddamn. full. Joey's mom looked up at me and said, "You look miserable." And I kind of felt miserable. I certainly hate this culture of "You have to eat everything you possibly can on one day to make everyone feel ok." I didn't even eat dessert--that is how miserably full I was.

But after dinner, Joey and I lounged back in recliners for about an hour, because we didn't want to spend the entire ride home full and sick-feeling.

He was originally supposed to drive home, but he felt full and sleepy, and he has to work tomorrow at 5 AM--so I took the wheel. And thankfully, he didn't fall asleep until about 80 miles from home, so I had plenty of time to be entertained.

I've been reminded this Thanksgiving that living together is learning how to compromise. It's learning how to suspend what you really want [to NOT have to drive home] for what someone else needs [to be in the passenger seat]. Or going to two different Thanksgiving lunches when you'd rather be together.

I used to be really selfish about these types of things. I'd pout or whine or complain when I didn't get my way, would say to myself "This means he doesn't respect me." But over the past three years, I've gotten much better. I am constantly reminded that love must be a two-way street. That sometimes, respect looks much more like helping each other out. Much less like getting my way.

So this is our First Thanksgiving together, the first year that we had to work around work schedules and lab schedules. The first year when Thanksgiving wasn't just five free days to lounge around and do nothing. The first Thanksgiving that we had to work together to make things happen, and were rewarded by a long and winding car trip home, where we held hands and sang Crocodile Rock.

The first Thanksgiving where we are completely us.

I Cannot Break Bread With You

2009-11-25T12:17:00.003-05:00

Without a doubt, this is my favorite Thanksgiving video.

An Open Letter To Boys Who Are Friends With Girls

2009-11-24T22:05:00.002-05:00

Dear boys--

You know I love you. Yes, all of you. I love you because you are crude and crass, because you love dick jokes and drinking beer [all of the things that I love]. I love you because you let me be "one of the guys" and because you let me shoot straight.

But there is something you need to know.

Each and every time you criticize a woman's body, you criticize my body. Let's face it, I'm not Victoria's Secret model. I have genuine curves. No matter what you call it--I am thick, voluptuous, plump, zaftig, fat. I am also smart and funny, vivacious and interesting.

But when you criticize a woman's body, you relegate me to that first list. When you call a woman who is smaller than me "fat," then you are calling me--to my face, no less--fat as well.

Seriously, can you not see me here? It's been so hard for me to maintain anything above a shitty self-esteem. But I've done it, because I know that I have those second list qualities. Because there is at least one boy who find me sexy--who loves my ass and my tits, everything between and above.

But when you say that you don't care how a woman acts or how smart she is, when you say you only care how "hot" it is, then you are working hard to damage me. You are telling me that it doesn't matter how hard I've worked to achieve my goals. That it will never matter how funny I am, or that I can wipe your ass with Guitar Hero. That as long as I have a pants size in the double digits, I don't count for anything.

And goddamn it, when you climb all over yourself to invite someone "hot" that I have openly expressed distaste for to our weekly evening events--then it means that you don't care about my opinions. So, also--thanks for that.

So, dearest boys--I love you. But think about the girls sitting to your left or right when you say these things. Seriously, I promise--we're listening. And your words are stabbing wounds into us, no matter how much you want to think they're not.

Home for the Holidaze

2009-11-23T21:31:00.004-05:00

I hate to admit it, but I'm feeling underwhelmed about Thanksgiving. I'm not completely sure why--I think it's a bunch of smaller reasons cobbled into one big reason.

Like that I feel chronically exhausted, and I am worried that Thanksgiving Break will not be very break-ish. [which is at least partially my fault and I should really learn my lesson, don't you think?] I want to see my family [both sides] and I want to spend some time with Joey's family, and I want to do the things we did in Thanksgivings past.

But I think the problem is that this isn't like Thanksgivings past. It's the first year that Joey and I don't have classes and an "official" Thanksgiving break. Our break is simply whatever both of us can manage to take off. And that adds to the stress of it, the fact that it's not much of a break for him.

There is also always the looming heaviness of certain Thanksgivings in the past. This time of year carries the silent threat of mania and crazy--I don't know why, if it's just all the holiday mess matched with the inconsistent weather, if it's the general stress of this time of the school year. There's the pain, the sudden specific memories of moments that arise for the first time in months. Things that you haven't thought of in so long. And then suddenly, your muscles remember that you once took off a ring [that you'd kill to wear again] and placed it between you like a threat.

Or your text message goes off, and your breath shoots up inside you, your lungs remembering the panic of your beating heart, remembering how your brain shot off fireworks to trigger your manic smile.

And although you've vowed to never again wield a ring and the promise of love as a weapon, although it's now and not then and things are different and better and beautiful--you worry.

I worry that the holidays will never be perfect and bright ever again. That even the movement of our hands to grasp each other will not be able to 100% overcome the shadow. That I'll never sit down for Thanksgiving lunch, not ever again, without thinking--if only for 1 second--about the way things were.

That, I think, is it.

***

Which reminds me:

The problem of the accumulating detritus of quotidian memories had not yet begun to distress him, although it was tiresome to remember every day of one's life, every conversation, every bad dream, every cigarette. There were times when he hoped for forgetfulness as a condemned man hopes for mercy.
-Salman Rushdie, from Shalimar the Clown

There's a Tattoo of Your Name Across My Soul

2009-11-22T19:11:00.002-05:00

[remember that one time I said 'no more weekend warrior-ing'? i lied. am attempting to decide if i at all am considering growing up. survey says no?

these are the nights you fight to remember, the ones that are all hazy memories between the booze and the windy night air. you pick through the images in your head and on your phone, like a detective you reconstruct your happiness and the tilt of your crooked smile.

you watch as your friend and your boyfriend, tongues set in determination between their teeth, carve out the hieroglyphics of your initials on the bar table with their keys.

in the end, you'll ask yourself if the fogginess of the memories makes these nights more or less real. and are there a finite number of these nights, counting down ominously in the shadows of your impending adulthood?

or do you care?

in any case, it's a shame that Rob didn't get in on any of those pictures...but don't worry. he's there, just behind the camera]

Craving

2009-11-21T10:42:00.002-05:00

This is weird, but for the past few days, I've really wanted a cigarette. Not just any cigarette. A clove cigarette. In fact, I want to go downtown and sit on Rob's porch, and smoke a clove cigarette.

I don't know what it is, the stress or just something else. It's not any sort of typical "cigarette" craving, the kind we see on commercials or in movies. I don't smoke, really, very often. Almost never. In my life, I've smoked cigarettes maybe [maybe] three times.

But there's something about it that I can't figure out--I've been craving the stillness of it, the fact that for a few minutes everything stops. And the sweet taste at the end of the filter, the leftover Christmas taste that cloves leave in your mouth.

In any case, it doesn't matter. Because cloves are now banned in the US, and they are no longer sold in stores. I could buy them online, but they sell them in cartons. Which would last me until the end of time, at my rate.

But it's weird--I want one. I can't stop thinking about it. But unlike my other cravings, this one can't be satisfied by the taste. And it's frustrating.

When Trying To Be Helpful Goes Wrong

2009-11-20T21:30:00.002-05:00

"I saw a snake the other day. It was a small snake, at the back of the complex. On a gray box near some bushes. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it wasn't close to me. But it looked like it might be a coral snake."

"You know how to tell the difference, right?"

"What?"

"Between a king snake and a coral snake?"

"No. I'm going to treat every snake like a coral snake, so it doesn't matter."

"No, you need to know. There's a mnemonic. You need to know it just in case."

"I don't need to know...I am just going to treat..."

"Red on black, friend of Jack......ermm....black on yellow, poisonous fellow. Wait, no. Red on black friend of Jack. Red on yellow, poisonous fellow. Yeah. That's it. I think...yeah, that's it."

"I'm just going to treat every snake like a coral snake."

But We Can't Talk About It Now

2009-11-19T19:43:00.004-05:00

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I have seasonal tastes in music. The music I listen to in the spring [Funeral by The Arcade Fire] isn't the same as the summer [Red of Tooth and Nail by Murder by Death] or the winter [April by Vast, DECEMBERUNDERGROUND by AFI]. It's not that I don't listen to those albums other times in the year [I do], but they stick out more at those times of year. I'm much more likely to grasp for them, to play them over and over in loops.

I can't really say what it is about them that makes them seasonal--it has a lot to do with the general gestalt of the sound, the instruments and the beat, the lyrics. But also, I think, I associate each album with the season in which they first came to me, the season that wound around me as I fell, deeply, in love with each individual song.

It's November, of course, but our weather here has been described as "schizophrenic." Alternately rainy and balmy with bright and cool. Mild. Probably best described as mild.

The last few days have been positively brilliant for rolling down the windows of my car and listening to my autumn music. Here, this season, there are three albums:

1. Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes

I "discovered" Fleet Foxes last autumn, at the beginning of the school year. It became the easy backdrop for the last few months of 2008--winding around me in the car or as I made dinner. The sound was immediately drawing, a mix of the indie sound I love and the CSNY sound of the music my parents raised me on. I'm just waiting for the day I can go see these guys live.

My favorite songs on the album are, well, all of them. But I particularly like:

White Winter Hymnal

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song [as covered here by "First Aid Kit"]

He Doesn't Know Why

2. Kid A by Radiohead

Yes, I know, everyone and his mother started listening to Radiohead years ago. But last autumn, they fell into my hands for the first time.

Idioteque

3. Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie

Not the first songs I'd ever heard by Death Cab, but definitely my favorite. Autumn 2005 for 10/11 of the songs. A beautiful album, and almost perfect.

Lightness

Tiny Vessels

Then, in 2006--late in the year, when I was spinning and off. I discovered that one of the dangers of chronically pirating music is sometimes losing pieces of albums, that one single song that could bring everything home.

We Looked Like Giants

***

I think, honestly, that my autumn music is the most beautiful music in my cd case. It represents a depth and reflects the stark change that autumn can be. Music so deep and beautiful it hurts sometimes.

I know that the videos are jumbled--a mix of true videos, live performances and fan mixes. But I chose them for specific reasons--because they show the range of experiences these songs can reflect. And show a little bit of what they can mean to each person--even the people who wrote them.

Sometimes, in someone redoubling a song you've heard one hundred times, you find something new in it. And that can be just as enlightening as the first time you sat--in the car or in the dark--smiling or sobbing because of the way the song made you feel.

The Occasionally Unbearable Heaviness of Being

2009-11-18T22:24:00.010-05:00

Three years ago, I wrote:

"There were razor blades stuck in between the shelves above her desk, and her blue veins had never shown so brightly against the white of her wrist."

Because there were razor blades in the shelves above my desk. Because there are razor blades in the shelves above my desk. They're all over the lab--stuck into crevices and sitting on ledges. A whole box of them in a drawer--individually wrapped in paper, shiny and sharp.

I use them, almost every day. I use them to cut packaging, to open up my sterilized filter pipette tips, to trim off clean lines of cortex from the kidneys of rats. Every day, I make a choice to pull one off the shelf, to use it, to put it back or throw it away into a sharps container. Every day, I have choice.

***

Every time I go to see him, the Android asks me if I have suicidal thoughts.

You'd think I would get used to it, people asking me if I want to kill myself. It's par for the course when you're in treatment for a mood disorder.

If asked if I ever thought about killing myself, I have to answer yes. But yes gets no relief--you have to elaborate. My first two years of medical treatment have taught me what they're looking for.

Plan. "What ways would you kill yourself?" Hanging, I might reply. Bridge jumping. Cutting.

Means. "Could you get the things that would allow you to kill yourself?" Ropes aren't that hard to find. I say. You can buy them anyway--the hardware store, Wal-Mart. Fuck, I could probably find one somewhere. And there are endless numbers of bridges here. And razors. There are razors stuck in the shelves of our lab.

***

I'm missing the third part. I'm missing the intent, the real desire.

But I haven't been to the Android lately. And when I do, I wonder what I'll say when he asks.

I wonder, every day--will I mention that one moment, when I was crossing the street on that bad bad week. I wonder if I'll tell him that a car almost came into the crosswalk, and for two seconds, I couldn't stop.

That instead of the normal "You better cut it out, asshole," that flashes in my head when someone goes too fast, I thought, please hit me.

I don't wish for death. I don't now, and I never really have. But I have wished for physical pain, for physical harm--I don't know why. I don't know if I expect it to give an outlet for the mental pain I sometimes have. Or if I expect it to make me slow down. Or if I expect it would be easier for people to relate, because people understand physical pain.

Or if it's just the memory of what a relief it can be, when you hurt inside and you accidentally slip a knife, and you are bleeding and sobbing, choking--but then, eventually it's over and you feel so much better.

***

I've never been a cutter. I've never physically harmed myself. But the idea is seductive, sometimes. You get the feeling, sometimes, that it's not as far from you as you think it is. That all it would take is a bad day, a bad week. Someone saying the wrong thing. And it's scary, because it would be so goddamned easy, to be inconsolable and to take the plunge, to sink that shiny blade into my upper arm or thigh, the fleshy skin of my hip.

***

I don't tell people these things. I don't talk about it. I don't want for people to think I'm some fleshy bag of emotions, liable to crack at the slightest affront. Even the people who are there to help, even the Android or the people who care for and love me. Even those who would want to be there, who would want to help.

So I delve into books, savor and search them. I pull out fragments of them, embed the words into my head. To pull out when I need them.

Some days, Donald Barthelme whispers in my ear:

"And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life?
And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life."

And yes, yes--I know. The Android is my psychiatrist, not Donald Barthelme. And maybe one shouldn't always take existential advice on the meaning of things from writers.

But if it makes me stop in my tracks for three minutes. If it pushes me past razor blades, safely through a crosswalk and into the evening, then it can't be that bad.

And writers and literature may always be my solace. But it's something. Even on the worst days, it's something.

Mid-NaBloPoMo Writer's Block and Exhaustion

2009-11-17T21:29:00.002-05:00

My last few days as a "mitochondriac" have made me seriously exhausted. I am not at all cut out for these long days and evenings.

It's been truly fantastic--I've gotten the opportunity to meet such fantastic scientists and I've been so impressed. Some of the speakers are people who I've cited in different papers. It's so weird, like meeting a favorite author or a politician.

Perhaps even more than that, though, I've enjoyed spending more time interacting and getting to know the other people in the department. Much more than ever before, I really feel like I'm a part of something, like I fit in.

So, yes--exhausted. But strangely fulfilled too.

Meet Me At The Bar

2009-11-16T23:11:00.002-05:00

I am fully exhausted from a 14 hour day at a conference being hosted by my department. The meeting site is a forty-five minute drive from my house and--although, I am thankfully carpooling with our post-doc--it's a long drive. To be there at 7:30 AM, we had to leave at 6:45; we left at 9:10, getting me home at 10-ish. So, I'm tired.

But, here are ten of my favorite things about scientific conferences:

10. The unmitigated dorkiness that goes on. Today, I met someone else who loves the Nobel prizes as much as me--it was so exciting!

9. The chance to meet and speak with the "rock stars" of your field.

8. When someone who is presenting simply answers a question with, "Oh yes--we answered that question in 1977. You should read our papers!"

7. When two people have discovered the same things twice in the past two years. And as one walks back to his seat, the other simply yells: "We should speak more often!"

6. How much more palatable data--good, bad or otherwise--becomes when you have a beer in your hand.

5. The sudden insights you have into your own work, when you start writing ideas frantically in your notebook.

4. The pained look on a moderator's face when the presenter is 10 minutes over and people are squirming in their chairs with impatience.

3. Watching a seasoned presenter give a talk and answer questions--seriously, it's so goddamned beautiful.

2. When arguments break out in the questions portion of the last presentation of the night, when it's 10:00 PM and 97% of the people in the room just want to go home...

1. And when those arguments are resolved by the presenter's flourished wave of the hand as he yells, "Just meet me at the bar!"

Linguistics Minutes

2009-11-15T23:10:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite quotes:

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointments of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with the "hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."
[Jeffrey Eugenides, from Middlesex ]

I think about this quote often, actually--when I feel any of the emotions Eugenides describes, yes, but also when I experience others that I think belong on the list.

Like, the amusement inherent in the arguments of two scientists at the same conference.

The clean smile you give to someone who truly understands you.

The exhaustion that comes from pretending you are something you are not.

The mortification that proceeds the realization you've been talking from your ass.

The frustration that arises when someone continues to ruin your speculative conversations with a smart phone and a data plan.

That feeling when you turn over in the night and someone places his hand on your side.

The first breath after 5 PM on a Friday.

The sudden sad knowledge that nothing will ever be this way again, that knowledge that comes at the end of things.

Because It's Only Fair...

2009-11-14T18:20:00.004-05:00

Usually, when I'm done with the bucket of liquid nitrogen I use to snap freeze my tissue sections, I pour the excess into our cell culture freezer. It's a decent way to reduce waste and costs, because--

1) the excess I need to submerge the sections is used &

2) they don't have to pull more to put in cell culture

See, people! Green science.

However, when I come in on a Saturday--all bets are off. If I'm here on my weekend, then I sure as shit get to play like I want to. And since I have a partner in crime...

The Assault on Memory

2009-11-13T21:15:00.002-05:00

My head is like Communist Russia--the words and pictures all shifting to fit my liking.

Sometimes, to stop the hurt, I pretend that we never happened. That we never clicked into place. I tell myself that I always knew that it was temporary. I tell myself that I was always pretending--that I knew they wouldn't be there for my wedding, to meet my new friends here, to hold my children.

I rearrange my memories--I take out all the smiles and the laughter. But I do a bad job--those memories that I try to trade out for others, they hold cached pieces of themselves.

By the time it ended, I had to concede that college was not the best four years of my life. Not even close. But it is seductive to pretend that there was nothing there. Seductive, but untrue.

I pretend that we didn't touch, that we weren't close. I pretend that we didn't know each other's ins and outs, that we didn't know how to frustrate each other or how to console each other.

The memories are dark...

and fuzzy...

and so fucking painful. If you pretend they aren't there, sometimes they're not as painful. Sometimes.

I think, though, that the scariest thing these memories bring is the fact that it could happen again. I do everything I can to ensure that it doesn't. And my friends (both new and old-ish)--we're on a slope, picking up speed. Every day, there's something new that falls into place. Whether it's a blog entry that provides a new insight, a spill of laughter that brings tears. Even if it's just me talking, him nodding until I discover something about myself in the mirror of his face. Or a note left on my computer when I've left the lab.

The scariest thing about the turnover of memories is worrying that I'll have to do it again, someday.

But I don't want to. I don't want to edit, or re-haul. I don't want to make things up. Most of all, I don't want to pretend that these moments don't happen.

They do:

They do:

Me, Elsewhere

2009-11-11T13:27:00.003-05:00

[But not where you'd expect...]

Almost exactly a year ago [seriously--11/14 of last year], I was contacted by a woman who was working with the authors of a book about blogs. She told me that they wanted to use a picture of mine in the book--and I was excited. But I didn't tell anyone, mostly because I was afraid it would fall through and nothing would come out of it.

But I gave permission, talked to the woman. I mentioned that the picture in question was very special to me, because it was the only picture of Joey and me taken in the in-between, the two and a half months between the night he broke our engagement and the day I hit my head on his bunk bed and he changed his facebook status to "In a Relationship."

She liked the picture, liked the story. A few months later, she told me that the authors had decided to add a blurb about some of the pictures. She asked if I would write one.

So I did.

And the book was made, my picture went into it, and the blurb was placed to accompany it.

And now, it's real. And is coming out soon. And I'm excited, proud to be part of something this beautiful.

And knowing that this phrase may show up in their data mining, I suppose I can say: it's true. I do, in fact, feel fine.

Edit:

If you're interested, here are some pages from the book:

I Long To Touch Your Genius Hands

2009-11-10T17:15:00.002-05:00

In the kitchen, my hands become my mother's.

It sounds unusual, I know--but somewhere in there, they transform. I pull off the ring [my mother's mother's] on my right hand and reach, over the sink, to put it on the ledge. And there--if you squint--are my mother's rings too, on the ledge of the window in the kitchen of my childhood home.

They are most hers when I am preparing pans for baking--I remember the first time they transformed. I read the recipe, it told me to grease the pans for baking, to flour them. So, instinctively--without pausing--I pulled off one square of paper towel, swiped it into a stick of shortening and wound it around the edges of the metal pan. Then sprinkled in a palm full of flour and upended the pan, shaking and turning until everything was coated. Just like that--my hands, my mother's.

But when I'm sifting flour--something my mother never does--my hands are my grandmother's. My sifter isn't nearly as old as hers; it still have that new appliance sheen and I am young yet. But I tap the sides to break up the last clumps. My grandmother's hand, mine.

Pouring liquid from bottle to bottle, shaking it back and forth to dissolve chemicals--writing structures and equations, my hands are my father's. Not quite yet as bitten up by acids and bases [maybe I'm more careful, maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm just young], but his.

And curled around pipettes, holding them still and being proud. Proud that I'm not shaking, that I never shake when I hold them. These are Ryan's hands--passed down when he took out his marker and wrote my name on pieces of lab tape, when he wrapped them around the plastic and handed them to me. The pieces of tape that outlasted him, the weirdest sweetest last will and testament. His hands, my hands, our pipettes.

Yes, most of the time, they are mine--writing, typing, driving. Drawing them up to the edge of Joey's face or clenching them into a fist and sending them into the ribs or sternum of whichever boy is vexing me. All night, in the morning--they are mine. But sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes, something else.

A floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again

2009-11-09T13:19:00.002-05:00

I saw this on a friend's blog, and I immediately had to do it--

The trick is this: I will tell you my favorite poem [which is, in fact, a lie--I will tell you my favorite six poems]. If so inspired, you may add your favorite poems in the comments, and I'll add them here.

Mine:

For John, Who Begs Me To Not Enquire Further by Anne Sexton

it may not always be so by e.e. cummings

Homage to My Hips by Lucille Clifton

It Was Raining in Deflt by Peter Gizzi

Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds

Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay

On My Brief Stint as a Weekend Warrior

2009-11-08T22:28:00.002-05:00

Bleary-eyed, this morning at lunch with Joe, I looked up and said, "I really don't think I can do this weekend warrior shit anymore."

Seriously, here's to you, frat boys and binge-drinking college students. God bless you, but it's a hard damn life. Unbelievably fun, it turns out, but liable to wear you the fuck out.

Maybe I'm just getting old, I think to myself, at the ripe old age of 24, as I finally extricate myself from my "sleeping" place on the couch and retreat to the kitchen table to write my grocery list. I can't sleep well on the couch because, well, a million reasons. Like: the metal in my back makes it uncomfortable, or because I've never been too good sleeping sitting up. Or because I can't stop thinking about aquaporins and research. Because I can never stop thinking about research.

Joe points out that I can't be a real weekend warrior, because weekend warrior's don't have weekend responsibilities. They don't have to go to the lab to make buffers or run PCR or do extractions--that is, they don't have to be functional on the weekend. I, on the other hand, do have weekend responsibilities: lab stuff, sure, but also cooking and cleaning, running errands. My apartment does not, as it turns out, organize itself. And if I don't get groceries, then two people don't eat. And so on.

I don't really have that much of a desire to be a weekend warrior, anyway--it just turns out that I have a lot of friends here now, in a lot of different circumstances. And for a lot of us, it just makes sense to do things on the weekend. But doing one thing often spins out of control, until I have planned myself to the hilt. Enter hung-over mexican food lunch at 11 AM. Enter Rocky Horror Picture show at midnight. Enter going and going and going until I collapse, exhausted, at the end of the day.

It makes for some incredibly fun weekends, filled out with tequila and laughter and sitting with my back up against the arm of the couch, turned sideways with my feet tucked in under me, bent forward and talking about something--politics, history, medicine--as the long hours wind by.

But next weekend, I think I'm just going to stay home. I may be boring, but at least I'll be rested.

They Push and Shove and Won't Bend To Your Will

2009-11-06T19:12:00.002-05:00

So, this week in lab--not the best. The semi-boss had his bitchpants back on today and that was, well, something. I didn't cry--not even close--but it was still frustrating. He frustrates me. Frustrates me.

But then, this afternoon, I got to see a Nobel laureate speak. He was so entirely down to earth and said so many truly beautiful things.

Like how science brings together people of all nationalities, politics and belief systems.

How important it is, in science, to be lucky. We don't all get to be lucky all the time, of course. But we do almost all get to be lucky some time.

And that we should celebrate the victories in science, because they don't come that often. Because we struggle against hardships and strain so much for what sometimes seems so little. But the small victories--they count. And they should make us happy. And proud.

His was the type of talk that can fall across the "hokey" line so quickly in the hands of the wrong person. But watching him speak, I knew that what he was saying wasn't hokey, if only for one reason--that he believed every word of it.

At the end, he put up the Mandarin characters that mean "crisis." Two characters. One means "a time of disaster." Every day, he said, is a day of crisis in our careers. A day of disaster, a day to struggle. The other character, "a time of opportunity." There's a lot of that too, I know.

But goddamn, sometimes it's nice to be reminded.

But Then Again...

2009-11-05T21:44:00.002-05:00

One of the best things about grad school is that it keeps me in close contact with people my age--and pits us against an antagonist. The result? Friends!

I was worried, honestly, about returning to the lab. Since I started there so long ago, all of my friends from the lab had graduated and gone on to other jobs. I knew almost noone there--and I was worried that I wouldn't make any friends. That my job would be miserable without people to laugh and talk smack with me.

I shouldn't have worried--quickly, I made new friends. Fast friends. Awesome friends. And it didn't stop with my lab--I made new friends in classes, and our Tuesday Night Trivia Team just keeps getting bigger.

Today, I was talking to Peter, who is the new tech in one of the labs that shares our work space. He was around a few summers ago, so I was familiar with him. He formally introduced himself soon after getting here, and we've talked for at least a few minutes each day. He had apparently heard some of us discussing our weekend plans, because he slipped in, "You know, I've never seen Rocky Horror Picture Show."

"Oh, neither have I!" I exclaimed. "We're going this weekend--you and your wife should totally come!"

He laughed and said he would have, but he's having family in town. I told him that it's a monthly event, and that we'll surely be going next month. And I think we'll be inviting him in the future to come to trivia.

I know it's scary to move to a new place, and it's scary to leave a situation with such good friends and to enter into a new one. But, the lab makes it so much easier--the close contact will either break you [which it has, with relations with some people] or draw you in.

Usually, thankfully, more of the latter.

Another Chance to Get It Right

Nostalgia Mixed with Pursuit of the Infinite

These Streets Will Make You Feel Brand New

I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You

The Sugary Smell of Springtime

Me, Elsewhere

A Movie Script Middle

Zeitgeist

Peace in Paperback

Spoiled and Melting

ZZZzzzz

Smokey, this isn't 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

Live From The Lab, It's Thanksgiving Night

One of My Favorite Things

From The Vault: The Hues and Overtones of Manic Depression

The Important Things

Zen and the Art of Emotional Maintenance

Nostalgia

Shit My Coworkers Say

Eff PETA, Support Animal Research

How Joey Feels About Blogging

Odds & Ends

My Celebrity Fantasy

A Series of Absolutely Unrelated Open Letters To Things That Frustrate And/Or Enamor Me

Giving Thanks For...

The Memory Keeper

Five Things To Read

The Names of Things

From the Vault: "Repair Guide for a 1998 Chevrolet Lumina"

Things That Grind My Gears

'Tis The Season

My Favorite Ritual

Telephones and Old Typewriters

From the Vault: "Lucky: An Evolutionary Essay in Eleven Parts"

My Newest Musical Obsession

Three Firsts

(Somewhat Necessary, but Mostly Space-Wasting Because I'm Totally Not Prepared) NaBloPoMo Intro

The First Seven Years

Things I Wrote, Once Upon a Time

99 Problems (or Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky)

The Moon In June -- It Is So Bright

A Series of Letters to Myself

Me, Elsewhere

Same In Blues

The Center, Somewhat Inexplicably, Managing To Hold

Me, Elsewhere

Kept Clean And They Will Let You Breathe

Me, Elsewhere--several times over

Something Slow Has Sparked Up In Me

Four Things To Read

If We Can Get Around It

Lord, If You've Got Lungs--C'mon and Shout Me Out!

I Wanna Know--Have You Ever Seen The Rain

Number 30

A Rest

Currently Obsessed With...

En Fuego

The First Thanksgiving

I Cannot Break Bread With You

An Open Letter To Boys Who Are Friends With Girls

Home for the Holidaze

There's a Tattoo of Your Name Across My Soul

Craving

When Trying To Be Helpful Goes Wrong

But We Can't Talk About It Now

The Occasionally Unbearable Heaviness of Being

Mid-NaBloPoMo Writer's Block and Exhaustion

Meet Me At The Bar

Linguistics Minutes

Because It's Only Fair...

The Assault on Memory

Meta

Me, Elsewhere

I Long To Touch Your Genius Hands

A floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again

On My Brief Stint as a Weekend Warrior

They Push and Shove and Won't Bend To Your Will

But Then Again...