semen/ seminal/ hardly sensical
I am so good at certain aspects of being a student that sometimes I wish I could be a student for-ever. A new faculty member (behavioral neuroscience and endocrinology area) came in to speak for my psych organization today. He was a member of the research team that discovered the role of the neurotransmitter nitrous oxide in promoting vasodilation in the smooth muscles of the penile area, thereby mediating erectile function (que pasa Viagra?)- work he accomplished as an UNDERGRADUATE. (I remember thinking this was so cool that I texted my ex-something about it several months ago when I read about it for the first time in my psychopharmacology textbook). By the time he was a few years older than me, he'd already served on the editorial boards of three major APA peer-reviewed journals (Behavioral Neuroscience, Learning and Behavior, and I forget the third) and collaborated several times with Eric Kandel (Nobel Laureate who discovered long-term potentiation in the amygdala and limbic areas). He gave a fascinating lecture on the neurochemical and neuroanatomical bases for sex behaviors in male rats & male humans. Afterward, I asked him the following question- "Given that so much of the work on the neuroanatomical bases of sex behavior has been conducted using non-human subjects, how has it been established that visuotactile sensory gating in the amygdala is the mechanism by which arousal states are reached in humans, rather than olfactory sensory gating, as in rats?" to which Dr. Dominguez responded that results from fMRI studies conducted in Holland wherein men were given hand jobs by their wives in the lab show high levels of correlation to the rat studies in terms of which brain areas are implicated in arousal (hand job studies wouldn't past IRB muster here). Also, he made a seminal/semen joke about his research on the medial pre-optic area and sexual functioning in male rats, forever ingratiating himself to me in my heart.
Many or most of my professors have commented on my ability to ask compelling questions or make excellent comments throughout the course of my undergraduate psych career. I have also received profuse accolades for my ability to write good papers and literature reviews. I'm fairly good at test-taking and note-writing. It's really too bad that I can't master the basic (and necessary) tasks of coming to class on time or doing my work on time or making all A's. My GPA will forever fall one point short of qualifying me to be able to conduct my own undergraduate research and write an undergrad thesis, meaning that I will never get into a competitive psychology graduate program in the US. Which is fine; the thought of conducting research for the next few years wears me out. Anyway, I think I would rather know things than discover them. Maybe once I know enough things, I'll want to discover some things of my own- I'd rather have discovery come about organically, rather than being forced into discovery, as is present in the unfailingly ubiquitous "publish or parish" paradigm that drives academia today. I'll get into some sort of program (even if it's a trillion-dollar-a-minute PsyD program) and I'll learn lots of things and become a clinician or a counselor (I'm really interested in developing biopsychosocial/ facilitative teaching and awareness-oriented approaches to counseling and helping the client to become an active intellectual participant in rooting out the etiology or course of his or her own disorder, dysfunction, or history from an omni-integrative perspective: basically, I believe that I'd want to counsel from a perspective that was informed by every discipline in psychology and other social and biological sciences, and I'd want to be able to disseminate teachings from these areas to the client in order to formulate a holistic, informed idea of "the problem at hand", after which the client would be better able to take an active hand in creating a course of individualized treatment that would best fit his or her personal history, philosophy, genetic and medical history, world view, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc). This approach would involved knowing lots of things, which is good because I love knowing things. I wish I knew more things.
Besides an ongoing love affair with chronic tardiness, I'm pretty sure I don't know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, or solve basic algebraic or geometric equations anymore. The other day at a coffee place, it took me embarrassingly long to figure out how much change I needed to add to round out my bill to $3 (how long does it take you to figure out 3.oo-2.81= ?) I need to take super-remedial maths. I don't know how I pulled off a middling B in stats two years ago, truly I don't. A-ny-ways. Sorry for all of the rambling and incoherency and horrid seven-line sentences, I need to get out of this lab!