I'm homesick for my home away from home

Carrboro, I love you, but you bore the hell out of me. I can only appreciate beauty for so long before I need to bask in the gritty 24-hour gleam of the city. I'm counting down the hours until I can count down the days until I'm back in Chicago. All my memories seem more intimate when I experience them as just another anonymous, coffee-swilling speedwalker, gripping my cell phone and handing out fruit to homeless women (I like to hand out oranges... they need the vitamin C). Right now, I really miss the Lake, which looks like a sleek science fiction ocean in the middle of the jagged urban badlands. My boyfriend kissed me for the first time while we were watching the sailboats come in one night, and people walking by stopped and watched because we were so fricken adorable. True story, it was cute squared.

Tell me your favorite tourist spot in Chicago, and I'll ruin it for you by telling you that I made out there. Navy Pier? CHECK. Millennium Park? CHECK. The Point? CHECK (aaaaand regret). Revolving doors anywhere in the city? CHECK. Jaywalking across Michigan Avenue and almost getting hit by a bus? CHECK.

I am stupid

So far this week, I...

1. picked UCLA to beat Duke,
2. claimed that I wanted to be "the Amelia Earhart of neurobiology,"
3. exploded small tubes of glass all over a table and wiped them up with my bare hands,
4. cried over a boy (Although estrogen can probably take the fall for this craptasm),
   
5. LOL'ed a Friends episode,
6. watched a For The Love Of Ray J marathon,
7. managed to ruin hummus,
8. and forgot my umbrella after obsessing over the hour-by-hour forecast for ten minutes one morning.

The list goes on, but it's just depressing to think of how incompetent I am at living my own life.

I don't think #2 is that bad... imagine if one day you simply vanished into a hippocampal wonderland of place cells, AMPA receptor trafficking, and neurotransmitter playgrounds. That's where good neurobiologists go when they die. (Bad neuroscientists have to hang out with Carl Jung.)

Things I would miss if I lived in the 1940s

• My iPod
• the Beatles
• ethnic food, especially middle eastern and thai
• Johnny Depp movies, and vibrators
  
• wimmen's lib
  
• the end of the Cold War
• microwaves
  
• Google, and vibrators
• polymerase chain reaction
• not being called a spinster
  
• PubMed and Web of Science
• laparoscopic surgery
• the HPV vaccine (I got dose #2 yesterday. I'm so responsible.)
• Long lasting batteries, and vibrators
  
• cell phones and digital cameras
• word processing
  
• President Barack Obama (and vibrators)
  

Giggle-O-The-Day

I have been watching this video over and over all evening and it hasn't gotten less funny:

Unseen footage of the Australian lyrebird

If this doesn't make you laugh, you must have a diaphragm* of STONE!

*the organ that enables laughter, not the convenient contraceptive device. Don't put rocks in your pants, gals.

Albums good enough to pay for

Last night I watched an hour of VH1's weekly top video countdown and remembered why I gave up on pop music in 7th grade. By the way, as you may have predicted, the new single by the Fray sounds exactly like the previous singles by the Fray. Thus, I would like to provide you with a list of albums worth buying.

• TV on the Radio, Dear Science
• The Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed
• Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
• Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
• David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust
• Fastball, Keep Your Wig On (and I'm looking forward to Little White Lies in April; go pre-order it)
• Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
• The Beatles, Revolver (and Abbey Road, White Album, Sgt. Pepper, Let It Be... Naked)
• Uncle Tupelo, Anodyne (or at least all the Tweedy tracks)
• Voxtrot, Mothers Daughters Sister and Wives
• John Lennon, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
• Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (I know I put Wilco on here twice, but I don't know how people can exist without both albums)
  

Animal Fact Time

I mentioned in the previous post that I watched a documentary on Africanized bees last week. I learned a lot of things about bees in spite of the overarching humanist framework that clouded the perspective of the entire documentary-- "We have to learn to live in haaaaaaaaaaaaaarmony with the apian world!" Yuck, isn't it enough that I make weak attempts to live in harmony with the human world? I also could have done without the dramatic bass-thumping, five-minute death scene in which a nest of Africanized bees attack a man in his yard... especially the part where he's writhing around on the ground with insects blanketing his body. Not very educational.

Okay, Animal Planet documentaries have their faults. Let's just say I learned one really cool fact about bees and that made it worth while.

In AFRICA, where Africanized bees obviously originate, beekeepers have tried to relocate their colonies to South Africa-- however, another species of bee (the Cape bee) already lives there. The Cape bee has an adaptation to the high winds in this area-- their queens are often blown away from the nest, so the workers have the ability to lose the reproductive suppression that the queen imparts. Basically, the workers can become queens. These Cape bees are sometimes able to infiltrate the African bee hives, where they begin to lay unfertilized eggs that are basically just clones of themselves. The African bees care for the Cape bee larvae and original imposter queen as if she were part of their hive... and kill their own queen. Meanwhile, the Cape bees do not forage for food and simply live as freeloaders until the nest is run into the ground.

Those Cape bees are mooching superheroes-- a role model for all those moochers I knew in college.

I don't believe anything I hear on TV: Sources
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16622343.600-cape-invaders.html
http://www.beekeeping.org/articles/us/battle_of_the_bees.htm
http://westmtnapiary.com/africanized_bees.html

Did you miss me?

I missed you, blog readers. All four of you.

When my computer crashed, it gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate my life. Last Monday, my laptop rested in the corner, a wisp of smoke trailing from its lower lip-- a sexy throwback to the good old days of Marlboro advertising. It was a cool cowboy and I was a scared heifer. I realized then, that I had come to rely on my computer not only for random Google searches and self-obsessed Facebooking, but as a scheduled distraction from everything else in my life.

So I cleaned my apartment. Then I made a mess and cleaned it again. I watched a really cool program about Africanized bees on Animal Planet. I fell asleep at 10 every night because there was nothing better to do.

The really sad part about not having my computer was that, every so often, I would think "Well, since I can't do any work right now, I'm going to shop online!" and I'd be very excited for a few minutes before remembering that online shopping also requires a computer. I am a pathetic, pathetic girl.

Anyway, I have a working computer now. All the rage I felt about terrible customer service and unreliable products has dissipated into a methadone-like*, soothing calm. I spent four hours last night shopping for clothes online and not buying anything. Oh, it feels good to give into addictions.

*I've never taken methadone, but I've listened to a lot of music that references it, which obviously makes me qualified to talk about it as if I have first hand experience. Obviously.

SAD NEWS

My hard drive is fried like okra. It's pretty hard for me to blog from work because I like to blog in my pajamas while I eat brownies -- and my lab lacks both key components. My new hard drive will be here Monday! You can read the archives if you miss me.

I have a lot to say about the quality of Hewlett Packard computers, but this is a family blog* so I will keep my negative, expletive-laced opinions to myself for now**.

*No, it's not.

**Until the next post.