*Drinking at a proper Irish pub with grad students after the exam this past tuesday. Low-key and disappointing enough so as to warrant no comment save one: Becky thinks I'm hilarious and she was a great deal of fun to talk to; the sane and pretty ones are all taken.

*Wrote the first drafts of my four NSF essays, with the shortest one taking the longest. Honestly, do I remember why I wanted to pursue science as a career? No. One's calling in life is like cancer: it just slowly builds until it's damned obvious.

*Started on my stats project by creating fake data (which we're allowed to do), doing an initial data analysis, and making pretty Excel charts and graphs of anything significant. I did all of this on saturday between 7 and 9:00pm at the psych building.

Yeah, I didn't know what to do about my personal essays that badly. It was calming, proving once again that I am and always will be a geek.

The project is due on Dec. 8th (I think) and we technically haven't covered part of what we need to do the project in lecture. Go me and asking the TA how to do Mixed ANOVA designs ahead of time.

*Found and bought my membership into a Society that focusses on getting minorities into science careers. I can now e-mail grad students and let out the call to prayer/diversity: "Hey, you know all those grant applications that want you to talk about diversity? And what you're gonna do about it? And how that part of your application makes you cringe? Well come on, let's found a student chapter on campus so you can look like you're doing some impressive shit." I know how my kind think. If I did pull off a student chapter, I'd be the founder and president. I'd genuinely like to do it, too.

*Got half-way done with the research procedure/protocol to do my first year project. From what I can tell from the successful applications I've used as templates, this university's animal board requires a hell of alot less justification. That's certainly a comfort considering that some Mt. St. University procedure applications I wrote ended up being 30 pages.

Seriously, the fucking kitchen sink and the plumbing too.

*Looked into applying to other fellowship programs. Damn but organizations love to use the words "excellence" and "outstanding" alot. I found one I might apply to, focusing on scientists who want to study ethnic minorities and mental health issues. I talked about that alot as one of my future goals in my Ford essays. I could probably cut and paste this application together.

Of course, that'd require getting my 4 recommenders to write yet another set of letters for it.

Still, 3 years of government money is 3 years of government money.

*I survived Thanksgiving and only got moderately depressed during it. Christmas will kick much more ass with Dork and J. That's Caribbean J, not Ohio J, although it'd kick ass to see Ohio J again and the crazy shit she and her friends get in to.

I lead a tame life, but I did enough off-the-wall bizarre shit earlier in life to warrant a little peace.

Well, peace is relative if you consider the bullet list above.

Right, happy coma time. Good luck with Monday. I get up at 8:30 to do blood draws on monkeys. Man's gotta get on-the-job-training.

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