It was obsessive-compulsive at it's best. Dozing around my desktop were several bastard children editions of the essays. I'd named most of them "newest PS" or something similar. I'd spend an hour on one document just to realize that it wasn't the heir apparent essay, just one of those descendants you sweep under the rug or send to France or something.

The Stanford essay more or less wrote itself from nitro bursts of inspiration, on the fumes of fading consciousness and stress. That is, I was getting tired at 7:30, so I drove myself mad for a little while for the long haul.

A little while turned into 4:00am. I must have read those two essays close to a dozen times each before finally uploading them to my online applications. Funny thing is, I didn't spell check the U Penn one. It just never occured to me. When that fact itself flashed me, though, I checked the Stanford app right quick. I'd spelt 'pharmalogical' instead of 'pharmacological'. Would anyone notice? Would someone three paragraphs into my essay, quite possibly 5 hours into doing shit like this, actually stop and suddenly wonder why I'd spelt it incorrectly? My reason said pretty damn likely no. By 4:00am, though, I was a mess.

As for printing up all the stuff I was sending in the mail, I kept getting copies back with these odd little black dots in really obvious places. Perfectly fine for anything other than an application, but everything has to be blemish-free. At first the paper in the printer was too dingy, then the dots showed up, then went away. The fleas of misfortune seemed to have slipped into the printer. It didn't help that I automatically stapled all the pages together, but hey--it got done eventually.

It all got done eventually. And I slept the odd sleep of 4 hours: that extended nap where you wake up, feel rested and not at all groggy.

I'd woken up an hour before my alarm and decided it was some sort of psychic fire alarm to get food. I ate, re-re-re-re-checked that I had all the stuff I needed to send out, then headed over to the post office--detouring myself around and back home when I suddenly couldn't stand the thought of my U Penn essay have pharmacology misspelled. I read it over, revised it, then suddenly realized that I needed the whole supplemental form that came with it. I wasn't about to print out that whole thing. Hell, I could just send another copy to the office and tell them to 'update my file'.

I'd burned about 35 minutes, but it was only 9:55 when I started deciphering what Express Mail was. The directions were simple enough, I knew this, but I wanted to make absolutely certain the application things got and stayed in the right envelopes--and that the mailing labels didn't suddenly switch on me. I only checked those about four times each over the course of 45 minutes. I think I vaguely disturbed the upper-crust white folk about me. Trenchcoats are out of style right now, I guess.

----

Finally, though, I dropped the things through the slot, got in the car and headed to the lab for the end of that ill-conceived, entirely inconvenient Electro-Convulsive Therapy experiment. By some grace of luck Hideyoshi was around wed-fri, as well as Shannah--a cute young blonde undergrad of the alternative variety.

It all culminated in this: live decapitation to get the brain. Fucking hell: I never signed up to do shit like this. I didn't see why we couldn't just put them down, pump them full of formaldehyde and THEN get the brain. Dr. Ziv did the first two, while what seemed like Hara-Kiri's superior spliced up the brain sections we needed. Hideyoshi sacrificed the third one--which I probably should have done, but he beat me to the punch by about a second. I just wasn't all that keen on cutting a live rat's head off today.

Mind you, we have no authorization to do any of this shit. That's part of the reason why I really don't want to take part in any of it--even if it would end up being on Dr. Ziv's head.

----

So I've got my two applications in, whipped my professors back at Obie town to get my recommendations in and generally wrapped everything up. I decided to treat myself. I got sauced, really sauced, so sauced that I suddenly felt like lying down at around 7pm. I woke up about 30 minutes ago. I feel utterly disoriented and not too creative at the moment. Me thinks I'll eat some biscotti, make some tea and then play some Morrowind: Bloodmoon.

----

In terms of the weekend, I have to attend a lab party tomorrow at Dr. Ziv's place. Being the senior person in the lab, I have to go--that and I made an excuse the last time they threw a party.

Now, I firmly believe that business is business and it should stay that way--with your work and with the people you do it with. I don't want to socialize with Dr. Ziv or his family. I'd frankly rather perform a live decapitation; that would be less complicated and uncomfortable. The consolation in this might be that Attila is showing up, and he and I have formed a weird friendship that mostly stems from not being comfortable with some of the stuff Dr. Ziv does.

Originally I'd only planned on staying for a few hours, but since I have my applications out of the way, I figure I'll try to stay around and seem like I'm having a good time. Getting sauced might help, but then I might let something slip or get too personal.

After all, I pride myself on always sticking to business where Dr. Ziv is concerned. I feel like I steer him back to what he should be doing. Mind you, that might be the reason why he's so gruff with me, but hey--that's my style at work. I like to keep everything in my life completely segmented: these activities and topics with these friends, this attitude and demeanor with these colleagues, this mindset at the lab, this mindset at home. In other words, mixing personal and business fundamentally clashes with how I divvy my world up.

But for now I've done everything and feel reasonably accomplished. Maybe I'll do photography or the Rocky Horror Picture Show tomorrow to wash my mouth of the whole party thing.

And hey, it's winter break now. Selene will be coming from Phillie to spend the holidays around here, meaning that I and The Captain will have yet more fun in nostalgic frolicking.

Even better, things at the lab will slow to a crawl. Yeah, I'm still going into the lab, since I'm saving my vacation time for a huge stint in mid-february and early march. I figure I'll be helping Dr. Ziv write his grant, get official approval for the shit we've been doing and run some of my experiments, not the ones he arbitrarily decided to assign me. You can just feel the hostility, eh? Well random shit that I hadn't planned on pisses me off, and the whole ECT experiment was the pinnacle of that kind of thing.

----

Again, though, it's all thankfully done with.

Incidentally, alot of you have left wonderfully encouraging notes. I've dearly appreciate them all and the tiny smiles they've given me when my day otherwise sucked. I'll reply to them soon. For now I'm just tired and want to relax.

previous - next