Like any good fragrance I snort this bastard. I enjoy it. There's a steady energy, urban decolletage, drifting along fog-accented fluroescents. You can hear 'Hail to the Thief', its title track. "Just cuz you feel it, doesn't mean it's there..." A state of thought-ful thought-less. Maybe thought-halfway.

These smiling hordes of Mongols are unknown to me. They come from foreign lands at the great 21st century bazaar. Tea, coffee, italian soda, condensed chocolate sipping thingies, all our common language. Yet how selective do we speak it. I'm a mute as usual, doing the dedicated student thing. A few others are fiddling that rosary: the blonde woman reading literature several tables up, the slightly nerdy gentleman, hand perched on forehead, vertical stripes up his chest. As usual I'm in black, more for the fact I haven't done laundry than any inner goth trying to tap dance. I am not that 6 inch platform boot motherfucker.

We now join in on our philosophical conversation stage right (audience left), where the great berg of Insanity is dissected. There's a curious embracing distance about my city. It's like those chicks who do that tapping hug thing, hips and legs a half foot from you. Callisthetic fuckery.

And for some bizarre reason, I've been smoking euphoria for the last hour. Slight food deprivation. Random chemical change. Something. I like it. I don't question it. Much. Usually.

So where were we in this quarter century gang-bang of existence?

Hot, got it.

So last friday was the beginning of my hunt for two undergrad assistants. The trade-offs seemed obvious. On one hand, I'd need to spend time training these folks. On the other, they could help make doing blood draws on monkey legs much easier, and code my behavioral data, and do other random assistant stuff.

The word went out far and wide from the fingertips of Dr. C. He sent out the message that I needed help to the entire Primate Behavior class. All 350 of them. He expected a flood. I expected a flood. I got a small hurricane, with 1/10 of the class taking a sudden interest in my sordid existence.

How to pear down the tide? How to make interviewing people something less like Kafka and more like Capra? Simple, you:

1) Explain your research. We get high off of possibilities, but the exit ramp doesn't look half as sexy.

2) Introduce criteria. These were fairly mild criteria. I expected ~3.4 GPA's or so, people available Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, other niggling niblets not worth mentioning.

And then they came--again and again and again.

I'd boiled down the fat to 6 hardy prospects, lean to the bone with interest and sparkling eyes. This shit would rock.

I'll summarize the interviews from friday (last week), and monday and wednesday (this week):

#1 - Ameliya. A sophomore packing potential, having thug love for that madd chronic psychology. She impressed me, asked many good questions, and our personalities worked together. I was pretty sure she'd be one of the picks. She was quite well dressed, with a blouse that was curiously a few buttons unbuttoned. I paid no mind to that minefield. I wanted competence, not eye-candy. But I won't complain if both come in the same package.

#2 - Kate. As reserved as Ames was speak-easy. We were on time, she asked a few questions, I rambled a bit more than she wanted. Her GPA and schedule nixed things. She dressed professionally, however, which I was impressed by.

#3 - Bran. I couldn't believe I was probably 5 years older than him. So young and, fuck, young. I liked his attitude. He asked some questions about research, but his schedule didn't work with when we'd be doing research.

#4 - Ally. Maybe it was my memory, but she looked an awful like like Ames. Had the same general demeanor and casual eagerness to impress thing going on. Her eyeliner was expertly applied, a brightly subtle blue with some other light make-up. I'd noticed by now that the more endowed recruits had worn clothing to let this be known. Not to accentuate, not to cover up, but like time leaving boulders (mountains?) to ponder the ages. I was a good scientist and went out of my way to not look. I was dressed like a professional, and I'd damn well act like one. No eyeball indulgence. Even if it was kinda sorta maybe vaguely slightly tempted. Kinda.

Scientists have dicks too, watcha want from me?

#5 - Maria. Wow was that unpleasant. She seemed nice enough at the outset, but I got this weird quiet aggressive sorta thing. Just like a hunter in the jungle, waiting to ambush a cheesesteak sandwich or an antelope. It was that kinda quiet. She was significantly older, a sophomore. Too standoffish and quiet for me.

#6 - Nicole. My printer and her resume (sent 15 minutes prior) played tag for awhile before I finally gave up printing it. She was apologetic, I was amused. Her resume was absolutely striking. I'd mostly gotten psychology students, but here was a junior biology major with a solid bio background. The stuff I do is more molecular and biomedical based, so I thought this was damned serendipitous. As we talked and the tens of minutes passed I became more and more impressed. She was fascinated by the study, by the psych aspect, the bio aspect--and it seemed like she was genuinely enthusiastic. Intellectually speaking she was perfect for the position and I accepted her on the spot. Hell, we talked for at least 45 minutes and she had the right answer for everything. She also had an open, out-going nature that would make working with her easy.

I also appreciated the fact that she wore something more conservative than alot of the other female applicants, even though she could have flaunted what she had. I respected that.

And so, in the end, I picked Ameliya and Nicole. I gave Niks a tour of the monkey floors today to gauge her reaction. She just thought the whole thing was really cool. I apparently have chosen wisely..so far as it seems right now. We'll see how Ameliya deals with her first time around not exactly pleasant monkeys. I have the feeling she'll be just as cool-headed.

So I have hand-picked assistants, one psych and one bio student. A perfect balance for the nature of the study, I think.

Classes were classes this week. We have a stats midterm next week on thursday. It's "conceptual". For right now I'm pretty comfortable with almost all of the material. I know most of the equations already...and hell: we're going to be given ALL of the equations for the exam. Still, if you know the equations, you save that much more time for thinking.

Most people are scared about it. I organized a study group this past wednesday to get the ball rolling. We ended up comparing answers for the homework due that thursday. Still, from those 5 I sensed fear. We had no previous exams to reference, no real idea just what the test would be like.

"Conceptual", with some other guidelines. The midterm is apparently just supposed to motivate us to study the material more in-depth and get a good practicing knowledge of it.

Where some people bring a beretta, however, I will recruit a few armored panzer divisions. Blow that fucker into atom dust. If you're gonna go for gold, overkill the bastard with extreme prejudice.

Right now I'm digesting my beef and lamb plate from the mediterranean restaurant, writing this, and then moving to finish the 3rd of 4 Brain Damage articles. This week is light in that regard. It's all on glutamate. Think of glutamate as the medium-grade octane of the brain. When you get brain damage, glutamate is the fuel for the fire--at least in part.

Speaking of science stuff (and I promise this is the last section), I had lunch with David H. today. He's a cognitive person with a big philosophical and developmental bent to his work. I'd met him way back during that introductory grad dinner. We talked about his work and struck something of a mutual "wow, you're pretty cool" understanding. And so about half a year later, we decide to have lunch out to catch up.

Catching up for scientists who don't know each other well consists of talking about your work. This is not a bad thing. After all, psych. is our field, it's what we sleep and breath and occasionally bleed. We sat down at an italian place I'd been wanting to try for awhile. We talked shop over italian sausage and spinach fetuccini, first about my stuff, then some of his. We also yakked about how psychologists in general are having more trouble getting funding. In this age, people want to see some biology in your findings, want to see some 'objective' measures of what you're studying besides self-reports and questionnaires. I'm all for looking at biological variables--hell I am a biology-based psychology person. But as David and I agreed, some fields just don't have that kind of background..and some fields of psych find it very hard to include such indicators.

He also mentioned genetic therapy and how a bunch of top people from the field were meeting in Europe. Apparently they want to discuss what went wrong with the whole thing, if they should go forward despite some patient deaths. I mentioned that the cloned stem cells used in gene therapy were almost all contaminated. See, in order to clone stem cells, you need mouse cells. It's complicated. You just need mouse cells to properly make stem cells in a dish. Because you're fucking with human DNA and adding new genetic material laced with mouse genetic material, you naturally will get some bad results.

And death is sorta kinda bad. Improvements have been made, though, and apparently you don't need mouse cells any more with new methods. I think the whole thing should go ahead.

After paying the check, walking to the psych building and yakking about grants along the way, we shook hands and said we should do that again some time. On one level I did enjoy it. On another level it felt odd to have a collegial lunch. I like David, I like his work, but we aren't friends--yet we're having lunch. Maybe I've taken this hermit thing way too far.

Be that as it may, I'm glad he and I could talk about the state of the field of psych. and other stuff.

EDIT: I lied. This is the last section. A week or so back I got a note from an old friend. I hadn't talked to her in a year or two. Hadn't expected to, either. That would kinda make sense if you nearly ended someone's engagement (which I won't get into; you all know my policy). So naturally I was surprised and, oddly, relieved to hear from her. I'd liked our friendship. We talked for awhile over the phone some time ago, about this and that. It was good to reconnect. Toward the end we were getting really tired. She'd suggested we should talk again soon, and she teased me (I think) when I just said something like "sure". I'm pretty sure it was teasing, at any rate. I think I waxed pathetic a little too much on a few topics, but what can you do.

Enough of that silly shit outta me. It was cool and I liked talking to her again.

Woot.

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