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Entering the groove; random Madison factoids; {UPDATED} Stuff related to T and important diatribe

2004-09-25 - 4:49 p.m.

I have now entered the groove.

Once I had been bogged down and overwhelmed by the first (real) week of classes and homework, but now I have the pacing down and it's not bad at all. I'm still busy most days, since I'm also doing research on creating a first year experiment/project, but I'm getting roughly 8 hours of sleep a night and I eat regularly.

I'm thinking my usual stress level is low to low-moderate nowadays, ever since I took care of those silly re-occuring problems that drive you fucking nuts.

My favorite (I guess you can call it that) was my apartment's DSL not working. It'd run just fine the first few days I moved in, but then suddenly it stopped working. And it wouldn't work. At all. It was only slightly comforting that people in both buildings had this problem. So as the landlord consulted network guru after network guru, I subsisted off the rats and vermin of the earth, taking my essence from them until I regained some semblance of what had been a real internet connection. Yes, I used constantly shifting wireless networks via my laptop. It was a loathsome and detestable process: finding a network that works, staying connected for 1-15 minutes, then getting booted--and repeating the process, again and again. Yet these networks didn't always work that way, no; sometimes they didn't work at all.

I'm happy to say, then, that the DSL is now up and running again and my constant stream of MP3's and video files flows from Kazaa like the Nile.

I could've sacrificed a goat and gotten slightly quicker results, but what can you do.

Some other annoying issues included getting a TB test to start working with the monkeys in the lab, finding a place that does transmission work, and hooking up/reorganizing all my office crap. I could have gone three for three, but apparently there are 4 people in the United States that do transmission work, two of which are retired. I think you need to be a Japanese 32nd degree Mason mechanic voodoo priest to receive proper training for transmissions. The car seems to behave when I take it out anyway, so maybe it's a moot point.

* * *

Mad Town Highlights

So here's some random facts or events that might be amusing:

*When they say Mad Town is a party school, they don't fucking kid around. I was at a college where 1/3rd of my fellow undergrads were in greek societies, and those fuckers would be put to shame by the shit done along Greek Row. My cul-de-sac apartment happens to be right next to Greek Row, so I get daily and nightly visuals of thousands of young people doing silly shit. On friday and saturday nights, for example, you get your usual teeming hordes of small groups drunkedly strutting from one party to the next like beer vultures. Then on saturday mornings, whenever there's a football game, the sidewalks are lined like mob hit scenes, with nearly every motherfucker sporting the red school color and bellowing some bizarre chant-house shit. Not just greekies either, but a good swathe of the whole city goes all Midwestern Sports Pride when there's a football game, like today.

*I have rediscovered the wonders of the red bratwurst. Mom said I used to love them when I was a kid, but apparently now you can usually only get them in german delis. Not so in Wisconsin. They have every bratwurst here known to God and human alike. This one place in particular, which I'll call the Brat Barn, has every weird Wisconsin food item you can think of, including my adored little red brats. It's one of those beer-drinking asshole sorts of middle-aged jackoff sports bars, but I don't care: I order, eat, turn up the perpetually 0 volume news channel, then leave.

*Wisconsin accents make me smile. They just do. It's like listening to drunk Canadian pirates.

*Over near the union terrace, which is right next to the tiny lake harbor, is a rotunda with a stage. The university apparently likes having bands perform on it, usually in the late afternoon of the weekends. And inevitably, be it from the 3rd floor of the library (i.e. The Tomb), or walking past it at night to commune with the lake on a distant pier, I've come to one conclusion: there are alot of fucking terrible musicians getting paid every day. One group of wankers in particular, 'The Gomers', were playing just last night when I'd gotten brain-fried on studying and headed out to the pier. This was like some Special Olympics performance by some middle-aged guys (and a hippie bassist) that thought they were the Rolling Stones. And the lead singer was fuck all get-out awful, combining the best elements of pubertal voice-cracking with a lack of talent only born by severe alcoholism during pregnancy.

*You have to get to everywhere by walking or by bus. Finding parking in downtown Mad Town is next to impossible. That's why my landlord can get away with charging me 110 dollars a month (!): every street here is a '2 hours only' street, which makes me wonder how they're constantly full of cars.

*The bus system makes very little sense and the drivers got their training by studying Clint Eastwood. You'd think, first of all, that there'd be a downtown only bus. You know, something that circles and goes through the heart of the place--so that students and regular folk can quickly get to this or that place 5 blocks off.

Fuck no.

You have to wait 30 minutes for every line. No exceptions. It takes the same amount of time waiting for a bus that goes to the bum-fuck outskirts. I mean wouldn't it make sense to have buses going around/to downtown a little more often?

I can't fathom how people who actually pay for that shit stay calm about it.

* * *

In terms of good news, I talked at length with my advisor a few days back. He was eager to see what I thought about the chronic pain article he'd given me. I told him it wasn't my cup of tea--but I had figured out a cool project from it.

It's like this: You know what Special K is? It's called Ketamine, and it fucks you the fuck up for at least 3 days. But in animals it's used as an anaesthesia. All the time. Now, the way I figure it, if a monkey gets knocked out with Special K on a regular basis for several years, that monkey bastard's brain chemistry is gonna shift--and not for the better. After all, chronic Special K users get persisting cognitive problems, so why not semi-chronic monkey users?

Dr. C thoughtfully considered all this and said it was a good project, but kept bringing up concerns in such a way that told me he was tentative about it. For example, I'd have to train monkeys at a cognitive task, and that'd easily take two months. He had a good point there. Doing learning and cognition stuff with monkeys would take alot of time.

Still, he was saying if I wanted to do that, that'd be fine. I then confessed that I'd come up with that idea because he'd ask me to research chronic pain and Ketamine and all...but that I had another project in mind, one that I'd come up with a few weeks ago. We'd spent an hour talking by now, but he was fine with hearing me out.

So I described my other project, which is a little too complicated to go into detail about right now. Let's say it involves the immune chemicals that make you sick, how those chemicals seem to be involved in developing depression-like symptoms, and whether some genetic predisposition for having high amounts of this immune chemical might lead some monkeys to be more easily 'depressed' when dealing with a new environment, stress, etc.

He thought this was also a good project, but again mentioned some things I'd have to worry about. For instance, while we've mapped the entire Human genome, we haven't quite done that for monkeys. So it might be that the gene I'm looking for hasn't been found yet. I need to do a search of the current research in the field to see. Then there's finding a geneticist who knows what they're doing and can help us, but Dr. C knows some people. Worse comes to worse I can ask Dr. Zivago if he knows any geneticists. Cold day in Hell kindof 'worse comes to worse', but you never know.

All that put more simply: I'm excited he likes my project! This is the sort of wacky complicated stuff I've been wanting to do for awhile: psychological immunology mixed with behavioral genetics mixed with hormones mixed with animal behavior. And I'll do it, too. I've studied all these areas to varying extents. Just takes alot of ingenuity and creativity to combine them.

* * *

I'm also kindof worried about my friend Nicholas, who seems to be doing not so good. He called me while I was watching "Hero" last week. I've tried calling him back since, but no word yet.

Hopefully I'll hear from T sometime soon, too. It's pleasant but equally frightening to be emotionally involved with someone again. I wax and wane in how paranoid I am at getting hurt. After all, my past experiences in 'dating' have almost unanimously sucked {although since I wrote that entry, the flirting and kinda-almost-sorta friends-with-benefits/dating situations over these last few years have been generally good). So yeah, I'd worried it was a trick of some kind. Now, though, I think it's something that can happen. It feels right.

It'd be fun, I think; the life-affirming sort.

I should have mentioned this next part earlier, talked about it earlier, done something about it earlier, but you could say I'm a well-meaning coward. I'll explain.

While seeing eye to eye is the only way to truly know if something is there, T's message has stayed consistent, despite the ludicrous circumstances that pop up like speed-bumps.

So where is commitment? When does a relation to another person become more important to stop pursuing that same relation with others? On one hand, I could argue that I've gotten to know and get closer to T at the same time as when I've been flirting with others. One doesn't commit to something until they say they do, after all. This is especially so when you let people know that you and they aren't exclusive in flirting, and you and they accept that.

On the other hand, where's the line when you decide it's inappropriate to heavily flirt with others? It's a much more thin red line than it seems.

This dichotomy has gnawed at me for a long time now. Partly I didn't want to talk about it or write about it because it'd inevitably cause some hurt to those I know--and I wanted to somehow avoid that. I accept that'll happen, though, and so I must talk about this with a few of you. I suppose this realization is something I just came to recently; I suppose it was when I decided I could believe T and that it wasn't the usual horseshit mind games of years past.

This lack of saying anything has bothered me alot. Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe my thinking is too old-fashioned; I tend to be that way about a few things. Regardless, whether it's another train-wreck or something unbelievably beautiful, I think it's time to focus on T and only T. This seems like the right thing to do.

I say all that because while I might sometimes try to obscure things for my advantage, I tell the truth when asked or when it needs to be said. And hiding what's going on with T doesn't feel right anymore.

So, this is how I feel. I can't apologize for it. It just happened and it seems like I should go with it. So I will--to wherever that might be.

* * *

I still need to get dinner and see if 'Ghost in the Shell 2' is playing at a good time. I should go grocery shopping, but Mom and I had a phone talk recently and she understood my eating out because I'm busy and all. Oh, and she got a new kitten that's lovely!

Yes, bouncy news.

I admit, though: I generally am happy with my lot in life. The older I get, the more I enjoy just studying for hours at a time and playing with ideas--that and Mad Town isn't half-bad when you get to know it well.

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