The Annotated Life

There are a few weeks out of every year in which you are glad that a mess of blackberry bushes has declared a soveriegn state in the field behind your house; this is one of them. Blackberry cobbler, my friends, is a wonderful thing, particularly when you've struck upon exactly the correct amount of blueberries to add, which add flavor and pectin, helping to firm up what can sometimes be an unhappily gooey affair. I shall truly miss the unruly flora 'round these parts, although I hear the produce in CA is choice.

I'm probably chancing death at the hands of our Facebook Overlords for contradicting my profile, but the truth which must be told is that I did not in fact end up going on tour with the band for spring break (Minor complications such as temporarily non-functional limbs tend to get in the way of such things as weeks spent living out of a mini-van and playing music, although I really expected to have gained another lease on left-handedness by now), instead heading to Portland for Family Time. Mostly though, I've been reading and eating asparagus and other green things. As a side note, my parents categorically refuse to try Odwalla Superfood, made from:

Which turns out to look more like:

none-the-less, putting your lips to a glass of this stuff is the culinary equivalent of being a princess full of toad-lust: turns out this liquid of questionable appearance is fucking delicious.

Found a superastic book in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by the very talented and slightly megalomaniacal Dave Eggers. The title may come off as pretentious but is meant in a self-deprecating way; Eggers relates in memoir form the death of his parents and subsequent sociology experiment that is the upbringing given by the then 21 year old author to his 8 year old brother in San Francisco. Some of it is weird, some of it is depressing, a lot of it is funny, but it's all great writing.

To wit:

Addressing Toph's presents is up to me, and the night before, I do everything I can to spruce up the task, to forge new ground. Some I address to ficticious recipients, or to other kids in the neighborhood. Many of Toph's presents I address to myself. Those that actually bear his name are misspelled. Or else I do what I do when filling out school forms: I get his name wrong, writing "Terry" or "Penelope," then cross it out and write his real name, smallish, below. I sign a few from "Us," a few from "Santa," but prefer this:
FROM: God.
He doesn't know what to think. He does not want to seem overly cavalier when reaping the booty, and we exploit his eagerness to please. A package of colored clay is opened.
"Thank you," he says.
"Thank who?"
"I don't know. You?"
"No, not me. Jesus."
"Thank you, Jesus?"
"Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun."
"He did?"
I turn to Bill. Bill is staying out of it.
"He did," I say. "Beth, did he not?"
"Indeed he did. Indeed he did."

Also: ordered a MacBook Pro. I'd been looking for a laptop that would be able to take the place of the tower, which size and noise-wise almost counts as a roommate, and after a few months settled on this. Never thought I'd ever find myself getting a Mac, always had a beef with Apple's ethic of controlling the hardware/software tether, but they've come along way in the last few years, to the point where the hardware (x86 switch is new and a boon, but the design always was) and OS are just better than anything else available. What washed away my remaining doubts over using a Mac was the recent (and successful) efforts to get Windows running on an x86 Mac; at some point there will be a Win-native app that I need to run, but if I can dual boot OS X and XP, I can have the best of both worlds. Alright, so now I've confirmed your suspicions (an improbably spelled word) that I'm a geek. And I READ /., TOO! Not only a geek, but a Nigerian Spam-Mailer:

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

Welcome to finals week. Welcome to the library. Welcome to the machine. Study. Study. Study.

Brief factual update:
Going to be living in San Francisco next year. Mailed the acceptance form to UCSF on Monday; would rather not wait until September. Confounded by process of locating housing in downtown SF. The city is made up of several 'neighborhoods' each with its own flavor, such as the Mission, which has great weather and a lot of taquerias, or the infamous Castro, which is the self-proclaimed gayest place on earth, to the Deco Ghetto, which is a bit run down but does indeed have several art deco shops. Possible places to live: the Inner Sunset (more suburbish, lots of grad students), Potrero Hill, (weather, close to school) but the gut feeling is to steer clear of the Tenderloin. Oh, and Potrero Hill is OJ Simpson's old 'hood. I'd better check on their murder-per-capita rate...

The hill is also where O.J. Simpson grew up, and, as a result, even though Simpson never visited the area much after becoming famous, the hill has the nation's densest remaining concentration of O.J. Simpson murals. One, on Connecticut at 17th Street, shows the former football great in his uniform, with later spray-painted details like blue devil horns.

Wearing a cast on the left arm following surgery on wrist, but please, no pity. If I wanted it, I'd bludgeon it out of you with my new, but thankfully temporay, club-like appendage. Empathic abilities toward the disabled are increased. Spending The Break on the road with The Band, a solid week of great shows/bands, minus the beach day. Gotta have the beach day.

There's trouble in the world today. And yesterday, too, and also the day before that, I suspect. But today, it seems worse than ever. What we have cooking today, in the big cauldron of international politics, has a distinctly foul stench about it. The intensity of the tension in our world was highlighted in the last few days by the speed and depth of the Muslim reaction to the 'Mohammed' cartoons. I don't think that a similar article in the Danish press would have set off such a serious reaction as the burning of Danish embassies in multiple Islamic countries if it had been printed five years ago; people are becoming increasingly trigger-happy with their hate. Is this a sign of the times? Our zeitgheist even? If instead of reality it were a drink, it might go something like equal parts hate, greed, ignorance, and pride, with religion to taste. And this would be a drink that is impossible to abstain from unless not one person wishes to drink of it, and rather than get you drunk, it kills you. Bottoms up, kiddos.

Your daily anti-propaganda / voice of reason, comrades; South Park vs. Scientology (avi; right click to save)

I'll be visiting UCSF in the coming weekend, and it couldn't come at a better time than at the end of week 5, midpoint of winter term. My chances of picking up some UV while enroute above the cloud layer are pretty good. I may have to dust off my digital camera for this one, and if everything goes according to plan I'll be back with photographic proof of the rodeo in Oakland, and plans for years 23 and beyond. The bay is not quite Bulgaria or Ecuador, but I still might get plowed or hear that Tom Cruise is gay.

This post is really only for non-Corvallians. Locals already know this recipe by heart.

The Corvallis

• 8, 16, 32, 64...n oz H2O... "the bigger, the better" holds true here.
• 1 oz patchouli oil
• Best served in an inverted glass over the head, enroute to campus.
  
• Can be used as a chaser for a Linus Pauling
  

Simple, yet spirit crushing.

I really hope someone gets that, because that's how this thing is going to usher in the new year; with style, belabored equanimity, and a touch of the bizarre. And if we're lucky on a cosmic scale, multiple posts...only time and the groundhog's shadow will tell.

"Fill me in on the last 3 months, go!"
My reply: Well, it all relates to the fact that I'm finally over my post-partum depression in relation to college, and I haven't even graduated yet. This often happens when you find out that you've got another on the way; I'm headed to grad school to study x-ray crystallography and biophysics. I spent the last term getting scammed by ETS (ie taking the GREs), researching potential schools and programs, and finally applying to them. Overall, a very stressful process, but it's starting to pay off; I'm headed to San Francisco and Fort Collins in February for interviews at UCSF and CSU. I really do think this is a good decision for me, it will take me out of the state and put me in an entirely new situation, not to mention the opportunity to devote myself to working on something novel and ideally, important. If I end up working with any of the faculty that I'm interested in, it will be. These are some top-notch people. Karolin Luger at Colorado State determined the x-ray structure of an entire nucleosome-DNA complex and was recently chosen as an HHMI Investigator, and literally everyone at UC San Francisco is just insanely brilliant.

So maybe I was a bit single-minded last term, but if the last week or so is any indication, the next few months may bring flavors of experience that I haven't had time for in a while, like getting in a bit of PT over at dixon, drunkenly micturating behind La Conga/Rigoberto's, and enjoying a large container of good ole' Carlo (grapejuice for grownups) with friends. Here's to some more of all of the above.

That's all for now, comrades.

P.S. Anyone up/down for some racquetball?

Sitting at my desk here in Stamm Palace (the only one with a view, mind you), thinking about how tonight is a fairly momentous night what with my last and most-lacking-in-nap-time year of college laid before me, got me thinking that no nights are really more momentous than any other night, because last night I was also sitting at my viewtiful desk here in the Palace. But, I digress from my point, which is that at 1 pm tomorrow I'll be furrowing my brow in an attempt to learn biophysics from Shing Ho in a poorly lit auditorium. I say it now and I'll say it again when you have to wake me up: 1 pm is a fine time to nap.

I hope they all think I'm cool.