Dynamic Stall

Ah, the sweet relief!

I finally got my recommendation letter requests to FedEx today! Yay! So this time tomorrow, my wonderful writers will go ‘Wow! Barbara is great! I’m gonna write the best letter ever for her and she will get into UCLA!’

It’s true, gentle reader. Now that the packages are away, I am suddenly bone freaking tired and spent. It’s the most mentally fatiguing ordeal I’ve ever gone through. The ‘package’ has everything a letter writer needs to write a strong recommendation - it’s basically like explaining yourself through paper - everything they need to know to sell you to the admissions committee.

But, with amazing amounts of help from Cary and great suggestions from Sandra, I survived and finished! Yay! Thanks you two! I owe you a ton. If I win the lottery, I promise to give you, like $5 or something!

Now I am going to have some yummy homemade tacos - the real kind, not the nasty El Paso crap - fresh, soft corn tortillas, fresh vegs and cilantro with homemade everything else! Delish! Then I most likely will pass out on the couch watching Home Movies or in bed with The Alienist (my second reading!).

Oh, just so everyone knows I applied to 3 programs because Cheryl made me have a ‘plan b’ and ‘plan c’ - so I may be going to Chapel Hill or Georgetown if UCLA gives me the hand.

AND if by some bizarre alignment of the planets I am rejected by them all - well, like I said before, I will drink heavily for about a week, cry and go get a freaking job in tech. Oh and I will move somewhere but I don’t know where. This is officially known as ‘plan 9 from outer space.’ Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone!

Till next time, gentle reader!

I heard this story on NPR and found the blurb plus a bitchin’ cool pic to go along with it (thanks medGadget!).

Basically, the boys over at Caltech have figured an easy and quick way to ‘fold’ DNA into any shape they want. This is useful not only for the cool pictures they can make, but also for building nanotech devices for medicine and, hopefully, other fields.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

Oh, gentle reader. What a tangled web I weave! I don’t really know how that phrase fits with this post but it’s staying in. I gave up hard drinking a long time ago yet seemed to have forgotten that fact this past Friday nite.

Ick.

Remind me next time some soggy excuse for bar hopping comes along, that I don’t have the drinking legs of my youth and that I’m now a mature, sipper of fine spirits. Not a rowdy youth bent on consuming as much alcohol as the ATM card will allow.

Aging, in this one case, has many advantages. In becoming a sipper I will save a ton of money, not consume empty calories, forestall liver damage, lower the risk of possible legal fees and will be in better command of my faculties so I can openly mock rowdy youths incapable of resisiting the $2.00 draft night at Beuford’s Bar and Bar-B-Que Shack.

Also, I will not ‘lose’ days in recovering from said debauchery. No wonder I was so unproductive in my youth. I obviously spent most of my time either sleeping off hangovers, working on the ‘easy landings’ or laying around feeling rather green about the gills agonzing about how long hangovers take to go away. What a bloody waste of time!

No more liver-killing activities for me. I will gladly participate in the moderate glass of red wine a day as the doctor ordered.

Yep. I’m cured.

So I have been dragging ass on getting my personal statement together for grad school. It’s killing me to write a one page synopsis of why I think I should be accepted.

Why I should be accepted? That’s a freaking joke. Anyone who wants to teach should not only be accepted but they should be paid to do it - and a lot! And shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops to do it. Dang!

So, instead of focusing on what I can bring to the field, how’s about we focus on what sacrifices I will make in order to jump through those academic hoops.

Reasons I should be accepted:

1) Because I’m the freaking shiznite and might actually teach tweens something interesting and useful
2) I quit a well-paying job and will be poor a long time
3) Because I will go into debt to get a PhD… a lot of debt… like house-sized debt
4) Because I will have to put up with making little to no money teaching uninterested tweens until I can get tenure, if they even have it by the time I’m a PhD
5) So I can have summers off to go to dusty, hot and third world-like foreign countries and dig in the dirt with people who generally think women are scum
6) So I can spend time doing research… alone… a lot
7) So I can be the oldest associate professor in the history of archaeology

And knowing that this is my future, I still want to teach! I know I’m fucking nuts. I should just go and get a nice normal tech job again and make decent money.

But I’m not. Unless I don’t get into any program then I will cry, get drunk and then go find a nice, normal tech job.

At this point I’m so tempted to write in, like, 22 font

ACCEPT ME YOU ASSHOLES!

But somehow I think that may give them a poor impression of my kind nature and intellectual promise. I don’t know.

What do you think, gentle reader?

On this very interesting show

I would hope that I could choose the cooking style.

That would be my only condition. Otherwise…sign me up!