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Yeah that's more like it

2010-05-05 - 10:36 p.m.

I am minus bizarre sore throat (mostly) and sick malaise feeling. Nearly go through getting to resubmission of the vascular health and brain atrophy paper for monkeys.

I am feeling sassy, slightly drunk, and generally well with the world. I went to El Pastor today and marveled at all the high school and college students there. It took me 35 minutes to get food. Y'know what day it is? Cinco del Mayo. Y'know how aware I was of that before 10 minutes ago? Nada. I ordered chicken tacos. Anything but chorizo is just awful. Yet somehow their 3 dollar lime margaritas on Wednesdays tempt me back, like a hobo to Wild Irish Rose.

Tomorrow I will sit with my fellow peeps talking with the sub-director of the monkey project about how to finally exhaust the baseline data. She is a bitch. I would prefer using the vociferous 4 letter word. You know the one. I reserve that word ONLY for women that cannot be, in any other adequate or possibly sufficient way, described. Where the sheer negative umbrage of the personality is so saturated, overwrought, and utterly unnecessary that they are no longer a person, but a cliche reserved for movies and bad 20th century writers of Oxygen-related drivel. It is a special word for very special people. She does not qualify. She almost qualifies.

What she can do, hopefully, is not be unnecessarily defensive about swapping data. I've given her all my physiology stuff. I just want an insulin sensitive index, the glucose tolerance test data, glycosylated and glycated hemoglobin levels, lean muscle mass as indexed by DEXA, and while we're at it that cognitive data that's allegedly in no good shape but had over 100 grand thrown at it so we may as well salvage the fucker as best we can.

I asked her once for some cortisol data.

"We don't want a grad student to take all our data [nasty giggle]."

Fuck you.

In a time long ago, in a galaxy right here, I was your only hope for making your brain imaging project anything but a goddamned fiasco. And funny enough, the grant renewal for that specific arm of the greater project contained. How much of stuff I initiated? 65%. How much I additionally contributed to in an additive manner to said percentage? Roughly 75%.

So hopefully she'll listen to reason. I'm in a position to get nasty if I need to be. Collaboration should not emphasize the 'labor' part that constitutes the word.

That was rambling and mildly hateful. The woman inspires strong emotions.

I am genuinely feeling well.

I received word back from Penn about the additional training grant slot that I'd applied for. As a recap: I'd apply for a position at U Penn in a mega lab, got a job offer, had effusive praise all throughout the process while I was in here in Madison and out there while I was interviewing, accepted the offer after a lot of soul searching, and then suddenly received word that more qualified candidates had been found.

Y'know I could've accepted that there are more suitable people. I've never done work in the clinical disorder I would've been working on. I'm a reasonable guy. But when you offer a job to someone and make pretenses throughout the interview process that it is YOU who are in a position to accept or reject them, you are not expecting a sudden 180 reversal.

So I applied with their help to the NIMH to get an additional training grant slot, on account of I am 1/4 indian on both sides. The letter indicated that while nothing was in writing (ha ha), it sounded like they were willing to plop on the training grant slot. So I could still go to Penn if I wanted to. And the question was did I want to?

I replied and BCCed my new boss. I replied with politik and said no. No I was not interested anymore.

So I can at least say for the rest of my life that I turned down an Ivy League school. They fucked me. They betrayed my trust. I said fuck you right back.

I'm not sure what to do with the rest of the evening. I've made it a habit to deskull at least one monkey brain every evening. This one is looking good. So I can either do the additional adventures in the expanded Witcher pack, try Syberia, or get back to working on the game project. I have had next to no interest in the latter for several months. I don't deal well with micromanaging. I no longer have the pretense of trying to hurriedly get through a Ph.D. process. So I guess I I'll need to dedicate some time to it. But despite putting in the better part of a decade on it, it's just gotten boring.

We'll see. I'm mostly looking forward to this Saturday. Assemblage 23 is playing the Inferno. One of my favorite Goth industrial bands. I don't know who else is playing. Inevitably it'll be one of those standing around and getting engaged affairs, but I'm guessing many more people than usual for a band night will come out. It's Assemblage 23. This is roughly like the Seether or Lil' Wayne of the Goth world.

Oh how the sub-culture has become a mockery of its past glory. But what the fuck. I'm still going.

In other news I am revising my dissertation. I am taking a minimum effort approach. As far as I'm concerned, let my publication record be my basis for whether I should or shouldn't officially get a Ph.D., not if I can revise a 244 page document to include what basically amounts to window dressing.

Anyway. Recap: dealing with bitch tomorrow. Not worrying about shit today. Waiting for Saturday to come.

EDIT: I am speaking with a very old friend. He is going into arithmetic about dating and having children with women our age. This is the most depressing conversation I have had all week. This sort of heaviness would quash the most rampant libido out there. I mean I love the person. But damn. I cannot get that way, or else hope is just snuffed like a motherfucker.

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