I also talked with Jen for awhile before I decided to sleep in early (i.e. 2:30am). We had a great time talking as usual. She showed me pictures of her ears and hands displaying fine jewelry. It was cool. I now have a folder on my harddrive called "bits o' Jen." You can have as much macabre or kinky out-of-context fun with that as you want.

((((fanfare)))) Yes, the post-college saga continues...

After thinking it over, UC Davis wouldn't be a good fit for me. Maybe it's sour grapes, but a VA hospital reminds me of a morgue too much and the guy...well he's probing, intelligent, but way too academically pretensious. I'm straight out of college, how should I know who first discovered the visual "what" pathway?

So now it's decision time again. Two labs. In one, same as last time, I'm guaranteed the position. I woke up at 8:30am just to speak with the Gelperin guy over at Monell in Pennsylvania. Doing smell memory on brain damaged and mutant mice and molluscs, maybe programming smell algorithms for electronic sensors, sounds kinda cool...but two YEARS? I could swing half of one, but TWO? I like learning and memory, have most of my training in it, but honestly...two years on mice? For a psychologist? I'm still thinking about it, but I'm leaning toward staying in the wasteland of job hunting.

The other lab...is a long shot. I got an email from a Dr. Dulcimer who also works for Monet Corp. She does work on human smell and taste preference and how that's influenced by prior exposure to certain tastes and odors. Learning and memory stuff with a twist, basically. She works in humans and uses a combination of physiological measures (mucous build-up, nasal skin irritation, etc.) and responses from the person. Seems more in line with my interests.

What those interests are...well...I like studying physiology and seeing how a person's perception of something influences it. I like the sub-discipline of comparing brains from people with abnormal conditions versus 'normal' people. Looking the subjective by some objective means to study health...that's about it.

Wait. No. My secret interest is to actually study Chi. Yeah, Chi. Plenty of Chinese scientists have documented evidence relating to it. There are masters out there who can bend a metal sword...with their stomach. I want to study bizarre physiological phenomena that are mostly tapped or accessed by conscious awareness. Heh, you try telling that to most scientists. Hell if it had more of scientific basis behind it and some proof, I'd be a parapsychologist in a snap. You know, people who study ghosts, group influence on a person in occultish situations like seances and group prayer, psychic phenomena...interesting, pipe-dream with no chance in hell of being funded stuff that ends up on TV specials. I'm too far fetched and philosophical to be a run of the mill scientist.

Am I out of my mind for wanting to study these things? Probably. Realistic? No. Practical? No. But damnit...it's what I want to do. There's gotta be some legitimate researcher out there who isn't a New Age freak that thinks about these things when the power goes out. Damned if I know where. Maybe I should try anyway. Hell I'm already desperate, why not directly pursue what I want?

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