Quixotic Chemistry

Worst RPG Ever

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:44:00 -0400

“You’re a graduate student in Someplace University. You’re starting a new project to cure cancer with catalytic red light solar harvesting magnetic monopole polymer nanoraptors. Your starting materials are limited. You have 200 milligrams.”

“I combine all of my starting materials in an oven dried flask and used standard air-free techniques. I freeze-pump-thaw my solvent and dissolve my starting materials.”

“It’s lunch time, do you let the reaction run or do you skip lunch?”

“I go to lunch.”

“You return from lunch. The reaction mixture needs to be worked up.”

“I strip my solvent off by rotovap.”

“You succeed in your bulk solvent removal, but a small fraction of it remains. A gooey residue results. You notice that what was a relatively colorless material has darkened to a slight degree.”

“Shit. Okay. I attempt to triturate it with pentane to force off the other solvent and force it into a free flowing powder.”

“You attempt to triturate it. Please roll for initiative.”

“It’s a 5.”

“What year are you?”

“Third.”

“Before you can even triturate your residue, it turns purple. Your material has decomposed. Your boss looks at you with disdain.”

—-

“You have managed to scrape together enough interesting data to convince your boss to publish your work. He wants you to attempt to submit it to Nature. After a month of work, you finally finish the manuscript. Roll your luck.”

“I got a 19!”

“Sorry. Your manuscript was not accepted. Your work wasn’t viewed as something with broad appeal. Your boss looks at you with disdain and asks that you submit it to Angewandte Chemie. Roll for initiative.”

“I rolled a two. I’m in my fifth year.”

“A flurry of papers show up in Angewandte that are on your topic. One practically scoops you. Your boss looks at you with disdain and decides to not even pursue publishing in that journal because the topic is old news now. He suggests one of the more specific ACS journals. Now you have to reformat everything. Do you use Word or LaTeX?”

“Word.”

“Roll your fight.”

“A 16? Okay, you wrestle with Word, attempting to get all of the graphics in the places you want without the text wrapping oddly although you have an issue with the pictures jumping to the end of the document over the week that you work on the manuscript. You submit the paper to the journal. The paper is accepted for review, and in two weeks, you receive a response. Roll for luck.”

“A one…”

“While the review process is supposed to be anonymous, your boss can tell from the phrasing that your paper was sent to your lab’s three major competitors. They recommended that it should never see the light of day in any ACS publication. Your boss looks at you with disdain. He says, ‘Submit it to Tetrahedron Letters.’ Roll for luck.”

“Another damned one.”

“Attempt a saving roll.”

“These dice hate me. Would you believe it is another damn one?”

“You get thoroughly and completely scooped. It’s like this other group was looking over your shoulder and made every single compound that you prepared. Dr. Someotherguy’s lab writes an eloquent paper that is published in Angewandte, complete with crystallography, DFT calculations, cleaner NMR spectra than you have ever seen, spot on combustion analysis, an analysis of the photophysics in film and solution as well as solid state, and a series of other analytic techniques that you haven’t even heard of. Not even Tet Let accepts your manuscript for review. Your boss looks at you with disdain and tells you, ‘Well, at least you can put it in your thesis.”

Failure Is Always an Option

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:30:00 -0500

I am imagining a game that rethemes Arkham Horror as grad school. Just give me a chance here.

Combine the idea of a board with locations, bosses with different win conditions, wandering monsters, shops for items, changing mythos, and characters with their own abilities and you could probably describe any part of life. I choose to use if for graduate school.

Characters (the PhD candidates) are a part of a lab run by the PI (final boss). They wander around the map (the university’s labs and instruments) collecting clue tokens in order to gain enough knowledge and experience to run experiments competently. This gives them a good standing with their boss while their boss’ timer plods on towards the defense of the students. The better their standing at the end of their fifth year, the more easily the defense will go. The students must balance their own mental health by finding modes of entertainment and ways to relax, which are probably found through a shop (the internet), and also stay on their boss’ good side to ensure their graduation. Using something like the internet, which could be a tool for research but also a method of entertainment, would require the students to pass an evade check to stay on their boss’ good side. The internet allows for interesting objects to be discovered, like radio podcasts to allow students to research and entertain themselves at the same time or fellowships that give them extra cash to buy entertainment. While wandering the halls to characterize their compounds, verify their results, or accomplish other grad student type tasks (lunch), there is the possibility of running into major personal barriers (monsters). Laziness, self doubt, loneliness, the nesting instinct, depression, weight gain, money problems, all of these things could jump out at any moment. The characters’ abilities could cover anything from being super dedicated to cleverness to sneakiness to confidence.

Mythos cards would constantly change the environment. An undergrad appears and now you have less movement points while trying to teach them the ropes. Your boss is writing a grant so you can slack more easily because the boss’ attention is diverted. A paper writing frenzy occurs, and the boss’ respect is lost more easily. The post doc causes a swarm of self doubt monsters to appear. A rumor goes around that the department will cut off funding past your fifth year. The department retreat is coming up and your entire lab is thrown into the other world to try to survive encounters that are much more arduous but can result in bigger rewards.

Other world encounters could be used as a method of getting past major hurdles: qualifiers, presentations, a defense which leads into the final conflict…

Students must build themselves up so, when their boss finally decides to get rid of… I mean, graduate them, the students can leave with the PI’s blessing and a piece of paper.

Yeah, Arkham Horror could totally be rethemed as grad school. I’m still trying to figure out if it should be cooperative or competitive with forced cooperation. An entire lab would affect the PI’s mood, but you want to graduate first, so I suppose it’s forced cooperation, like the boss’ mood will drop if the lab isn’t doing well making it more likely that the boss will boot members out of the lab if they have wandered onto their boss’ bad side.

The rules would probably be a mess, but yeah, grad school in the context of Arkham Horror. I will not look at these next 1.5 years the same way. Dice rolls represent the uncertainty of life. Life is but a game. Yadda yadda yadda. I wonder, is my boss more of a Nyarlathotep, Hastur, or Azathoth? Hm.

As a scientist, I realize that efficiency is a part of all processes. If you put some work into some...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:14:56 -0400

As a scientist, I realize that efficiency is a part of all processes. If you put some work into some portion of a system, you’ll only get back some of that work in a usable form. The rest is lost to heat, vibrations, or other nonsense (a very technical term). Try to light a light bulb and only a small portion of that energy you’ve put in comes out as light. Cooling a room is the most efficient where the temperature of the cooled room is very close to the temperature of the outside of the room.

Friendships follow the same rules regarding efficiency. While the nature of a friendship should be not expect reciprocity, a return of work should occur. If I put in 100 units of friendship or care or work, perhaps a return of 80 units would be nice. That’s generally not how these friendship systems work though. I’ve invested enormous amounts of time and emotions into a few of these friends and most seem to give a 20% yield. I’ve learned an important lesson: most friendships have low efficiencies. When I’ve taken care of someone on the verge of falling into a deep dark pit and that person won’t even acknowledge me one day, especially when I am very obviously need someone to talk to, there’s an issue with a return in care, especially if I put my neck on the line for this person. If that person won’t let me mention something that bothers me because negative feelings make them feel worse after they’ve dragged me down emotionally and belittled me, something is wrong with the system. This is just one example of the messed up relationships that I have in my life. I can tolerate a certain level of selfishness, I can understand diminished returns and don’t expect to get everything back that I put in to a relationship, but I can’t help but notice a pattern where I put much more of myself in than someone returns.

I’m tired of it.

I am feeling particularly thin-skinned. I’ve had a bad weekend. I actually know that most of my relationships aren’t super inefficient friendships. It happens enough that I want to complain. Yes, I will feel bad about writing this post later, but right now, all I want to scream, “FRIENDSHIPS ARE INEFFICIENT.”

Okay. I feel better. I guess I won’t invest time in becoming a misanthrope now.

I hate my subconcious

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 07:15:19 -0400

I just woke up from a dream that filled me with sadness and shame, and there’s no one to talk to right now.

I dreamt that the father of my last guy of the romantic sort called to say that this guy had lost his voice. Well, I didn’t get the phone call. The first failed romantic venture received the call and relayed the message to me. The doctors tried to help the latest failure, but they couldn’t save his ability to speak. I felt awful and so sorry for him, so I sent him a message.

Next thing I know, it’s the day before Christmas. We see each other, and he hugs me, tells me how good it is to see me, that he missed me. I tell him that he hurt me, and he said that he knew and looked like he felt awful about it. I asked him why he hadn’t come to visit me before and he said something to the extent of, “I’m here now.” Apparently he got his voice back.

The dream got a little hazy at this point, but I remember that we were in my grandmother’s bedroom but in a different bed that my grandmother’s. Initially my first ex was there with us, talking, until he decides to get up and leave us alone. We were then engaging in some rather serious kissing, but I noticed that my grandfather was across the room, and I could see that his eyes were open. The guy and I spoke for a little while waiting for my grandfather to go to sleep. He tells me that he’s dating a girl named Rose, and I ask him when they started dating. I wanted to know if it was while we were together, and I have this vague recollection of them talking in Gchat. He says he can’t remember, and I push it to the point where he says the beginning of the year, revealing that I was the other girl possibly. I asked him if he was in an open relationship, and he told me, “Of sorts, but if Rose’s mother finds out, my future with her is done.” At this point, I apparently fall asleep because I wake up to find him gone.

I feel this urgent need to find him, so I hop out of bed. On my way down the stairwell (all of this taking place in my grandmother’s house), I run into my mother who asks me if I had seen that boy. I said I had. She told me, “You know better than that Am.” I felt this moment of shame and then run out the door, out of a house in Pennsylvania into NYC.

I run all over the city to find him, and can’t. It’s Christmas day but a Sunday, which meant that I needed to be back in the lab the next day. I had to find him, needed to finish my business with him. However, I can’t find him and nature calls, so I duck into a restaurant and run into Rose. I just know it’s her; dreams are fun like that. I panic and squeeze in between tables in what seems like a very tight restaurant to get to the bathroom.

Suddenly, I’m in a basement type area that’s still supposed to be accessible to the public for strolling. I see him and her together, and I run off to another area. I’ve lost my purpose for my search, so I try to find my way out. I still am drawn to him, still want to talk before I have to fly out of the area. As I turn a corner, I see them sitting together near a computer terminal. He notices me but acts like he doesn’t. I turn around and run until I can find the elevator. My lungs are burning, and I’m trying to keep myself from crying, so I don’t draw him attention or make him feel bad.

At this point, I wake up, stumble out of bed about to cry while I feed the cats. That dream hit on so many weird little fears, discomforts, and themes in my life that it just hit me hard. My words are not conveying the right level of discomfort and sadness that this dream caused.

Ugh. Way to make a girl feel broken, brain. Why do you have to be such a jerk sometimes while I sleep?

Irk-kissed Post

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:37:47 -0400

Someone’s writing has irked me.

I don’t claim any excellence in writing. I won second place in a writing competition once only because two people qualified for my age group (although, honestly, I may have taken first if I had selected a person born in America for my personal American hero). On the other hand, I do write and read a lot, so I kind of have some pet peeves when it comes to the written word.

So, let’s get back to the writing that has irked me. I’ve followed one food blogger for the last five years because I love her recipes, even if they’ve teetered a little on the far too simplistic or repetitive side as of late. Now, I have the strange habit of reading cookbooks; I like the stories behind the food like how a certain recipe reminds one woman of her grandmother or the path to designing the dish one rain cloaked night when the fridge bore no fruit. The food blogger writes a post alongside the recipe, and I always read it. Today, I snapped. After reading that this specific recipe is an ingredient-kissed edible (a description that has been used by this writer in what feels like 100 recipes), I just have to complain.

In food writing, please don’t reuse a specific description so often that it feels like it has been used in every recipe. Don’t get me wrong, writing that something is salt-kissed is amazingly evocative. It reminds me of the term sun-kissed; I can feel the warmth of summer in addition to the taste in a dish that is citrus-, salt-, sugar-, vanilla-, or whatever-kissed. I just think that with the entirety of English at one’s disposal, a writer should throw different descriptors into the mix to describe a dish.

rosalarian: rosalarian: What if you found the girl of your...

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:46:52 -0400

rosalarian:

rosalarian:

What if you found the girl of your dreams? What if, just as it seemed you were going to live happily ever after, you found out she was literally the girl “of your dreams”? What if you woke up? Would you do like Fiona, and go back into the Dream World, navigating through a surreal land of monsters and tyrants? What if “It was all just a dream” wasn’t the twist ending, but just the beginning?

Such is the premise of “YU+ME: dream”, a webcomic I created 10 years ago, started drawing 8 years ago, and finished 2 years ago, with a total of 847 pages. It uses a multitude of art styles and mediums, including watercolors, vector, and even clay puppets. Sometimes it’s silly, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s romantic, sometimes it’s an adventure. It can be read online at http://yume-comic.com.

June 18th is “YU+ME Day”, the day I both started and ended the comic, six years apart. In commemoration, I am doing a giveaway!

The Prize: A set of the comics, in paperback form, 6 volumes. Volumes 1-3 are in black and white, volumes 4-6 are in color. All volumes include bonus comics not found online. All of them signed.

To Win: Reblog this post. A winner will be chosen by a random number generator. Your ask box must be open so I can contact you and obtain your address. You must live in a country where it is legal to receive the books. Due to the LGBT content and (very brief, non graphic) nudity, many countries won’t let them through customs, so check with yours, first.

Winner will be chosen on June 18th at 11:59pm.

Tonight at midnight I’m picking a winner. If you haven’t entered the contest, today’s your last chance!

I rarely see the idealism of shared information that betters the world in science. Call me jaded,...

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:53:06 -0400

I rarely see the idealism of shared information that betters the world in science. Call me jaded, but it seems like scientists hoard information to gain recognition. Publishing papers isn’t about solving energy, resource, medical, or other crises; it’s about establishing a name for yourself and prepping your students so they can go onto bigger and better things to spread your legacy. Funding, rather than need or curiosity, motivates research projects. I’ve read journal articles where the procedures are missing important sections to allow the reproduction of a synthesis. You can’t write about things that don’t work because someone else may figure out a way to make it work, and you’ll end up with egg on your face. People troll the literature to point out flaws. Papers may be withheld by the primary investigator to prevent others from using the methods developed in their lab. Hell, I’ve heard someone say, “We have an MS technique that we’ll be publishing soon,” and wouldn’t tell his collaborator about it. Progress is inhibited by this constant need to protect or elevate reputations in addition to policies motivated by emotional rather than scientific discourse. It makes me sick.

So, when I read this article about The Molecular Frontiers Foundation, I found myself reading about a group that is attempting to spread scientific interests amongst young people, but that jaded individual just had that quick and bitter thought, “Great, add more to the glut of PhD chemists” and “That joy of science will be ruined once those kids get into college or grad school” rather than “Nifty.” What has happened to me? How can someone who’s ideal job is to be the next Carl Sagan feel that way? Has the academic machine beaten me into thinking that I will never make a difference? No, I have hope, and I still love science. I just can’t let that jaded person rule my thinking. Science will save the world.

A Chemist's Prayer

Fri, 04 May 2012 18:11:02 -0400

I beseech you, oh dark lords of Chemistry. I call upon you: Frankland, Lavoisier, Pauling, Cotton, Lewis, Arrhenius, Avogadro, Kekule, Boyle, Dalton, Faraday, Pauling, Gibbs, Thenard, Pople, and van der Waals. As your willing servant, I have sacrificed my twenties, friends, and love in pursuit of the augmentation of your insidious craft. Now, I beg that you watch over my samples as they begin their journey towards validation and smile upon them as they are analyzed for their elemental composition. I, your humble and undeserving servant, gratefully accept any fortune that you deign to direct my way. Igne natura renovatur integra; ignis aurum probat.

Shit, the uncited gods of Chemistry are probably going to strike me dead for not including them in my summons.

In Case...

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:37:04 -0400

No, I am not contemplating purposefully shuffling off of this mortal coil. I’ve ventured into the realm of deep thought this week, and on the ride home, due to my elevated seat in the bus, I noticed a DB in the back of an ambulance. That got me thinking…

I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had particularly strong notions of immortality; elementary school baby Amberle frequently suffered from regular bouts of existential crises, fighting with thoughts of the sun blowing up, death, religion, and the like. Since the tumor, I’ve accepted that my body may do things that I have no control over. Good health is so frail. Not even taking physical ailments into account, I realize that I work with dangerous, sharp, explosive, poisonous, and flammable things. A tiny event could lead to a disaster that will leave my corpse in the back of an ambulance, just a story for the EMT on duty. I’m not writing this to be morbid; I just have a small wish that I would like to have known.

In the event of my death, please don’t send flowers. If you feel like spending money, please donate it to Radiolab or This American Life. I thoroughly believe in making science accessible and sharing the human experience to promote understanding between people. These two radio shows have given me a lot of joy, and I would love it if others would support them in my memory. Hell, if you feel like giving me a present or card for some holiday or birthday, you can totally do that while I’m alive.

Chemicals with the Feels

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:13:10 -0400

After a quick trip to the NMR room, my spectra confirmed the suspicion that three reactions failed. Considering that they were brand spanking new, it was no surprise although I cannot say that it didn’t break my heart just a little. I formed a new plan of attack and shared the spectra with my labmate Ayan. He suggested the same battle plans with a slight modification: turn up the heat. I, of course, forgot that my boss sits a whole 3 yards from our shared cubicle, so he popped up because he heard me say, “I’m so upset.” I explained how I planned to resolve the issue and giggled as he walked away. “I’m such a drama queen,” I said to Ayan. He told me no, I’m very enthusiastic, and I must love chemistry.

He’s right. Despite the hell that is grad school (from romantic to physical to academic problems), I still love chemistry. I haven’t quit. It’s taken 2 years for me to remember why I even majored in let alone pursued it. I wouldn’t say that I’ve fallen head over heels again, but perhaps I’m seeing this all more positively.

I just punched myself in the uterus with a 4L bottle of hexanes. At least it wasn’t a bottle...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:01:47 -0400

I just punched myself in the uterus with a 4L bottle of hexanes. At least it wasn’t a bottle of methylene chloride.

Today, I really understand why people (my sister, mom, friends, boss…) keep telling me to chill the fuck out. Someone told me last week that I need to practice giving myself permission to relax. I came back to the lab last week because I thought that I could handle working again (read: bored as hell and felt guilty about not doing work). Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were 10 hour days. I went home sore and exhausted. On top of that, I started bleeding again. Friday was an 8 hour day because I came in late and went to happy hour with the purpose of not overworking myself; I was still tired. I can’t not work.

I came in an hour late today because I had an entire weekend to recover. Despite trying to be aware of how much I need to relax, I realized at 5:30 that I had been standing on my feet prepping and working up reactions for the last 5 hours. I only became aware of the time because I felt a pang when I was standing at the solvent purification system. Then, of course, I pushed myself to finish preparing the three reactions that I had almost finished and then cleaned up. With shaking hands, I grabbed the hexanes to wash some of my materials and BAM, it swung on its handle off of the shelf into my lower abdomen.

It’s a little late, but I made myself come out to the office (after cleaning up) and type so that I could kill the last 20 minutes before my bus comes instead of cleaning my glassware. Maybe my hands will stop shuddering soon…

What’s wrong with me? Does it really take an attack from the chemicals to get me to stop?

Post Operation Table

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:02:32 -0400

Funny how many things you can learn about yourself by way of a surgery…

Seriously, I don’t give a damn about needles.

Removal of a 700 gram tumor via a laparopscopic myomectomy takes 2 hours. That thing was huge. The shape of my belly has changed.

If I’m ever pregnant, I will need a C-section. It was expected, but at least I didn’t end up getting a hysterectomy. I still don’t know how I feel about having children, but it’s good to have the option.

Redheads apparently respond to anesthesia a bit differently than most other people. My friend, Rash, already knew that, but didn’t want to tell me because she worried that it would freak me out. If I recall properly, the nurse who attended me in the recovery room said that it takes more to put a redhead under and it takes longer for that redhead to come out of it.

The abdominal muscles are used for everything. Even though it has been 9 days since the surgery, when I’m standing up for long periods of time, my hands begin to shake from the effort of being upright.

I understand addiction to painkillers a little more. When I stopped taking the percoset and found myself staring at the dark ceiling, I thought, “Man, it is so much easier to get to sleep when I was taking those pills.” I’m happy to be off the things; they dulled everything.

I go nuts without work or constant stimulation. I’ve felt more lonely than I have in a while, the kind of soul crushing loneliness that I felt as a teenager when I needed music just so I could fall asleep without having an existential crisis. There’s nothing to keep my mind occupied right now. I hate my phone because it just reminds me of the shallowness of most of my relationships. I’m sure that a lot of this loneliness is my fault because I grew increasingly withdrawn about a month before my surgery, but there’s an underlying issue of me being unable to form close relationships or making decisions that ruin the ones I do form. At least, this is the kind of stuff I think when I go more than 2 days without doing something.

Then there are the other things I’ve thought about. Strip away friends and work, all that’s left is entertainment. I’m not helping anyone, despite my intentions; why didn’t I go for med school? I so badly want someone to hold me, to prove that I’m not some ugly distortion of a woman; logically I know that, but it’s harder to prove emotionally. All these things make me feel empty and meaningless.

I’ve been picking away at this post for the last couple of days. I started last Friday, and it’s been hanging here on my screen. Looking over the last two paragraphs, I’m really seeing how problematic boredom is and how much I ignore my problems until I have no distractions. I went back to school yesterday, and it felt so right to put on my lab coat. Talking to my friends, labmates, and boss, the eleven days of loneliness, emptiness, and pain were forgotten. While I am a shy person, I am a more social person than I ever suspected.

Thankfully, I’m back to normal with a flatter belly. Okay, I have to wait 4 more weeks before I can head back to the gym, so it’s not quite normal yet, but it’s close enough. As an added bonus, this week the student invited speaker is coming, and I’ll be able to attend the lecture and go to dinner with him. It’s not every day that you get to dine with a Nobel Laureate. Life goes on, and I am thankful that I had a fantastic doctor who helped me and removed the tumor.

AM1 - An acronym influenced by a highway, a rifle, and a sauce

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:18:20 -0400

AM1: A semiempirical method published in 1985, which was an improvement over MNDO (at the very least in terms of hydrogen bonding) due to alterations in the core repulsion function that modified the van der Waals attraction between atoms

Yeah. Computational chemistry causes eyelids to droop, minds to wander down unexplored life choices, and pencils to record the chicken scratch on the board without a thought. Well, actually, I enjoy computational chemistry, but I also get a kick out of quantum chem. Paying attention has benefits in the class that I’m auditing. The professor (my boss) interjects stories about the politics and history of the seemingly dry-as-kindling field.

Today, he told the class about the difficulties of naming AM1. It stands for ‘Austin Model 1.’ Okay, not a thrilling name with not particularly thrilling origins since Michael Dewar had a faculty position at The University of Texas, Austin. I suppose the fun part is why the other names (Model 1 and Austin 1) were rejected:

M1 - British highway between London and Leeds

Kind of a well known army issued rifle

A1 - Steak sauce

Chemists, they’re always worrying about silly things.

jessfink: Depression comics! Aaaah.Bigger version...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 07:11:43 -0400

jessfink:

Depression comics! Aaaah.
Bigger version here:
http://jessfink.com/kwe/

I keep believing this will happen someday but it never does. I am 30 years old and I still get waylaid by anxiety and depression.

What has happened instead is I’ve gotten better at dealing with it. Instead of curling up in a ball and crying in bed all day I cry for maybe and hour and then I try to do SOMETHING even if it’s just the dishes. I have to accept the fact that I’m never going to not be afraid of everything, I am just going to get better at managing my fear and maybe that is what being an adult is.

The trouble with dry ice…

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:30:47 -0400

The trouble with dry ice…

For My Own Sake, I Wish...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:24:55 -0400

…that I had better self esteem.

…that I could be less of a people pleaser.

…that I didn’t make things so complicated.

…that I didn’t feel like I have to fix everything.

…that I could be happy for more than a month at a time.

I am working on 1, 2, and 4. 3 and 5 are difficult.

Why?

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:52:49 -0400

Take a sniper who passes psychological evaluations, and you have an effective member in a military force. Now take that sniper after he receives trauma to the head. He passes evaluations again, and then goes off to kill boys. What has gone wrong?

Someone said to me that he was a warm body. I’d like to think that the US military functions better than that. In a tense situation like Afghanistan, it’s logical to be overcautious, right? I’d think that they wouldn’t have sent him back out if there were any signs of instability. Is there something wrong with the test? Did someone just make a really bad decision? Should a soldier be put back in the line of duty if there is an injury that affects the brain?

It’s just hard to understand why these incidents happen. I would expect much more cautious behavior in precarious political, social, military, etc… situations. There’s no finger pointing here; I’m just confused. Perhaps I’ll just chalk it up to the fact that we can’t prevent everything because human nature doesn’t allow for accurate predictions. The Radiolab short ‘Killer Empathy’ and episode ‘The Bad Show’ may offer the appropriate way to think: what happened is difficult to understand, and there may never be a satisfying answer as to why.

So Long, Farewell...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:04:58 -0500

We both knew this was coming. With any luck, tonight I will leave you. You’re an awful phone. You drop messages and calls, don’t update, freeze at the most inopportune times… Look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make this about blaming you. I tried to make it work. I let go of a lot of opportunities for you, overlooked many interesting apps knowing that it would be too taxing for you. It has gotten to the point where I can’t even use my calculator or text without some freak out. You don’t fulfill my needs, and it would be healthier to just move on.

I will let go of my fantasies about destroying you. I will not dissolve you in aqua regia, shoot you, light you on fire with thermite or a t-butyllithium “torch,” send you into space, bread and bake you, or smash you with a bat because we had some good times together. Perhaps I will find someone for you.

…

Let’s just face it, you’re going to become my in-lab calculator. Hope that works for you.

Smooches!

http://bemusedlybespectacled.tumblr.com/post/18824927050/birth-control-101-for-idiots

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:45:34 -0500

http://bemusedlybespectacled.tumblr.com/post/18824927050/birth-control-101-for-idiots:

bemusedlybespectacled:

This is hormonal birth control.

As you can see on the box, you take exactly one pill per day. To make sure it works, you need to take one pill every day at the same time, or it stops working. You take only one pill, and you keep taking them regardless of what you are doing that day.

Hormonal…

Body Image Dipole

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 09:47:38 -0500

The body positive movement could strongly impact on women. We are skinny and chubby and tall and short; our breasts are all sorts of sizes; and we have freckles and moles. Women come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. We don’t have to base our happiness upon how close our shapes are to the ideal woman, and we don’t have to put others down (you know what I mean, something like big girls are superior to twigs because twigs have no curves or some other nonsense). Megan Rose Gedris has done some great work about body positivity that I particularly like and maybe you should check it out.

Despite my support of the movement, I can’t seem to apply it to myself. At the beginning of last year, after I had begun exercising, I weighed 300 pounds, and yes, I lost weight before I had actually found that out. Man, I feel embarrassed even admitting it. I fell into a rather dark place for a year, and I was down right lethargic and eating in a destructive way. Then I got my shit together. I’ve lost more than 70 lbs since that first weigh in and gained a lot of muscle mass. My weight is the lower than it was in high school. I feel healthier, and I can run a 7 minute mile (my low in high school was 10 minutes). Sounds like stuff to be proud of, right? Why yes, it does sound that way.

I had a particularly bad two weeks in terms of going to the gym. The week before, I had only gone for 3 hours compared to my normal 5, but I ate well. However, I gained 4 pounds that week. Buhwha? Probably water weight. Last week, I went for 2 hours because I was feeling pretty unwell and had a lot of crap to do in the lab. When I weighed myself this morning, those 4 pounds were gone, and I had lost an additional pound. Right, okay, I should be feeling pretty positive about how things turned out.

My brain won’t let me think that way. When I get out of the shower, I look straight into a mirror, so I don’t have any illusions about what I look like. This morning, when I opened the curtain, all I could see was how big my love handles were. Then I stared long and hard at my belly, which would be flatter without the tumor I will admit. Then I was thinking about how saggy my breasts are and that my thighs rub together. Never mind that I have a pretty face or my fantastic butt and calves, all I could focus on was how terrible these parts of my body made me feel. I found myself thinking, “No one will ever want me.”

You know what, that disgusts me. I started losing weight for my health. I was doing it for me. I wanted to be able to take the stairs without breathing hard. I wanted to get into shape so I could start playing IM sports. Hell, I wanted to be able to wear cute skirts, sundresses, and skinnier jeans. Also, I didn’t want to die young from a heart attack or get diabetes. Somewhere along the way, it became about being attractive, being skinny enough for others to like me. I’m happy with the way I look, why should I give a damn about being attractive? Why would I want to be with someone who only showed interest in me for my body? Where do these thoughts come from?

It’s just so counterproductive. I just hope that I can get over it one of these days and stop beating myself up because it makes me feel like I’m not getting anywhere. I want to be as positive about my own body as I want others to feel. There’s something wrong with me saying, “I’m positive that you should be positive about your body but I remain negative about mine.”