Life in Photos!
So here's sorta what I've been up to for the past week! The first few photos were not taken by me. They're of our long training night, 8pm-11pm, during which we were trained how to do our duty rounds, complete with backpack and walkie talkies. DUDE I LOVE USING THE WALKIE TALKIES. It's unnatural.
from L-R: co-worker HAs (House Advisors) Alex, Lindsay (she's on my duty team), Justin (my HA last year before I took off for Singapore), Katie (exceptionally cool), and Rose (who is also in the CHP, so it's bizarre and unfortunate that I've never met her before because she also rocks)! The duty team consists of three people who run into different houses, check for propped doors, policy violations, passed out / bleeding people, all that good stuff. It's fun! My duty team is me, Lindsay, Justin, and Matt (photo after next).
TEAM PALM TREES! Go team. From L-R: Josh (very into Japanese culture), me (looking decidedly odd with the inverted light source), Fidela (the lead HA, also very cool), and Alex once again, who was really on our team but decided to be a blood traitor and appear in all the teams' photos. ;)
Vivi (hiiilarious and hyper, would be super fun to party with), Hsin-Ya (so cute!), Alex in the back, David (yes that david - small world), Megan (apparently her residents started having roommate issues like on the first day), and Matt (he has decided to take on rapper names during our duty shifts, so for the first shift I would hear "Tupac entering 1080" over the walkie talkies. Awesome.)
Dylan, Brandy(she and I are actually both in the same house right now, but she gets her own house in 5 weeks), Ben (knows how to get stuff done), Lila (I think she was an HA before too), Rikin (very, very cool guy - he was the photo editor for the campus newspaper so I sorta knew him for the 2 weeks I was with the paper, he's a trained EMT, and he kindly traded First Aid bags with me because I liked his red zipper one), and, once again, Alex!
These are most of the people I work with. I don't have photos of my three supervisors, Marco, April, and Eric, but they are also very cool! Marco is my main supervisor - I have a weekly one-on-one meeting with him. He got his BS from UCI a few years ago in Psych and Social Behavior. His favorite movie is Mean Girls. Heh. April I don't know too well, but she also went to UCI as an undergrad, and is actually a trained psychiatric counselor. Eric is da man. He's just overall chill and cool, and he once moved this 3-foot snake found in the housing area, and he's going on Semester At Sea in a few months!
On to where I live! My house is sadly lacking, despite hours of poster-making efforts. Ah well. Maybe I'll put up photos of the posters I made, like the huge palm tree, but... they suck anyway. Heh. So here's my room!
Step into my room! Sorry, didn't mean to make it small. You can kinda see my guitar. Um, the bright rainbow things are poi, balls on the end of string that you swing around. Lauren got them for me! They are polynesian/hawaiian/maori.
One corner of the room! My extra bed (it now has bedsheets and a new pillow - sleepover!!), posters that haven't been put up yet, yay. The big silver thing is, yes, a plastic hubcap that my brother nabbed off the road. So ghetto, and so awesomely displayed in my room. The hanging thingy is a calendar I bought in Bali, next to some small souveniers from Cambodia, and the most adorable photo ever of Tanya, me, and Tiki. Oh, this is my fun desk. it has fun things. And a pineapple.
My work desk! Hopefully soon it will have a big monitor and a new laptop on it. :D To the left is one of two wardrobes. Oh, and the giant brain. Haha. So I'd been in the poster room for a few hours and I think the paint fumes were having an effect, because I decided to draw a multi-colored brain that is worthy of a photo on its own!
BRAAAAIN! Heh, it actually sucks - the eye is too small, the forebrain is shaped funny, yadda, yadda. But I had it as my Facebook profile photo for about two days, and during those two days E (thesis advisor) and J (grad student) were on Fbook searching for me (long story) and E joked about wanting to adopt it as the new lab logo. Hah. Awesome. If you look closely you can see a heart and a peace sign. Those with imagination may also see a check mark and a capital Sigma.
On to the real brains!
Here's mine! I popped into the lab today and ran a quick multi-study statistical test on my brain. GLM stands for General Linear Model. The graph to the right shows the timecourse of when the 3 conditions were presented (green, blue, red bars) and the brain response (white line) for a specific brain region of interest (area MT in the right hemisphere, what the crosshairs are pointing to). The lit-up areas represent the activity that occurred when I was looking at various animations of people doing actions like throwing a frisbee, jumping, etc. Orange means that the activity when I saw the actions was higher than my resting baseline activity; blue means that activity was for some reason reduced (possible Nobel for the neuroscientist who explains that one).
Uh, at least that's what I think I'm doing. :P
There should be another really neat graph up there but I clicked something so it's not. But yeah. BRAINVOYAGER IS COOL.
So... that's it! Life is good. I saw Blades of Glory last night with Fidela and David, and it was surprisingly funny! Highly recommended for those of us who can hit up the $1 theater. :D
Speaking of photos, Carolyn and Greg, sorry I haven't gotten those to you yet - I was putting some finishing touches on in photoshop and my computer spazzed and corrupted the files. Do you just want the huge uncorrected ones fresh off the dSLR?
Yuuuuuup. Life!