So I saw The Time Traveler's Wife tonight with my mom.  I thought, Henry DeTamble is a literary crush, Eric Bana is a movie crush, what could be better?  I thoroughly enjoy that book when I'm in the mood for something ridiculous and romantic.

And as I watched the movie, it suffered from the same problem has Harry Potter and 90% of film adaptations ( Read more... )

How come yesterday, when I was in the mood to curl up in the office and read papers, I had an obscene amount of labwork to do, and today, when I'm more in the mood to do labwork than to read papers, I need to wait for people before I can set stuff up (like my sephedex column) and I just need to wait in general for my LC-MS samples to be done and my ( Read more... )

When people try to teach you common German phrases, there are several that no thinks to teach you but are used constantly.  The two examples I can think of that are most prevalent are "ach so" which means something like "oh I see" and "genau" which means "exactly", but is used as an agreement.  "auf Widersehen" was always taught to me as "good-bye ( Read more... )

I have trouble talking about what I'm doing here in Germany, even to friends of mine that study biology, chemistry, or biochemistry.  I'm always afraid that I'm boring them because I need to explain a lot before I can begin to explain exactly what it is that I'm doing.  Forget friends that aren't involved in science or my parents.  It's just very ( Read more... )

The thing about being somewhere between an undergrad that is on the way to becoming something between chemist, a biochemist, and a molecular biologist, is that no one knows exactly where to place me.  People either expect me to know more or less than I do about just about anything.

DUDE!  On Tuesday I'm going to do an organic workup (ethyl acetate, sep funnel work, sodium sulfate drying agent, rotovapping) on some stuff that I made IN A BUG.  I'm going to throw some ethyl acetate into a bacterial culture I made to see if it made the natural product analog I wanted it to make.  Using the same lab techniques that I use in ( Read more... )

I am sitting in my room, my shit is half packed, maybe a little more.  Tomorrow I'm going to be bopping on a plane to Germany, and arriving Friday morning (their time) to catch a train.  Then some PhD students from the lab are going to pick me up and I'm going to go to my apartment.  I also speak no German whatsoever.  I mean, I have a German- ( Read more... )

I think I am developing an unhealthy relationship with lastfm.  I keep looking at my charts obsessively.

So.  Things remain pretty dull.  I'm drinking bordering lukewarm coffee and sitting in the kitchen.  My mom has started harassing me about doing my laundry.  Then she started doing it for me.  Then she got mad at me for making her do it, even thought I did not ask at all.  My mother is crazy.

I've been flipping through GRE prep books lately, sort of ( Read more... )

So I started noodling around on my little brother's guitar tonight.  I wonder why I never do this at Reed; well, I guess there are a lot of things I never do at Reed mainly due to a lack of time/other ways that I want to direct my concentration ( Read more... )