Are you on the Bus?

I am fortunate enough to enjoy a completely free transit system in my town. There is no parking on campus so we all save hundreds of dollars a year being able to ride the bus to and fro. I am absolutely not complaining about the gratuitous transportation provided by the good people of Chapel Hill today. Absolutely not. Indeed, today I'm complaining about the good people of Chapel Hill.

As someone who took buses around Chicago for four years, I am freaked out when I ride the buses here. In Chicago, if I saw the same man every day on the way to and back from work, I would probably consider him to be stalking me. But my little bus route has few enough riders that I actually notice when new people are on the bus. Not only that, but I can remember things about the people I see every day.

There's the girl with the bag I really like. Sometimes I hate my bag so much that I want to ask her to trade with me. There's the guy that dresses well and smells awful. There are the girls with perfectly straight, blond hair-- I have no idea how anyone keeps their hair so smooth in this humidity. There's the girl who is always sucking face with some guy and looking at me as if I should be jealous. I'm not jealous, lady... no disgusting tongue maneuver you perform can make me wish I were you. I can out-maneuver you any day of the week, honey.

Then there is this guy on the bus that I tried to ask out last year. He had long black hair, piercings, fingerless leather gloves, and always wore classic rock t-shirts. One day he and I both wore a Beatles shirt, so I got on and sat next to him, then tried to talk about how funny it was that we were both wearing a Beatles shirt. It got awkward real quick (as you may have suspected). Later in the year, he cut his hair and looked respectable and I lost all interest (as you may have suspected).

I have not yet lost interest in cornering strange men on the bus and attempting to make them love me. It's a fun game. Today I happened to be sitting next to a marginally attractive man and quickly noticed an unpleasant odor emanating from an unidentifiable direction. It definitely wasn't Attractive Man. I became increasingly paranoid that he might think I smelled like baby poop-- I wanted to turn to him and say, "Sir, you should know that I just stepped out of the shower 20 minutes ago and thus have not had the opportunity to generate the nostril profanity we now experience." But that would have been even more awkward than the sometimes-goth boy incident.

Suddenly I located the origin of the scent: BAD SMELLING GUY was sitting right in front of us. He became impossible to ignore. Why was BSG on the bus at this unusual time? What have I done to evoke this inopportune fortune? Well, I've done a lot of bad things in my life, so I can't really claim I don't deserve to sit next to an odoriferous person or two... but I digress. The smell continued until BSG got off the bus at the stop before mine.

People, I beg you. Please don't go on the bus if you haven't showered in weeks. Just walk home from work-- it's not like a little sweat will make you stink worse than you already do. It makes it really hard for me to terrorize good-looking men with my flirtations when an ambiguous odor shakes my deluded self-confidence.

Can vodka cure headaches?

When I was a senior in high school, my gigantic wisdom teeth pressed on a nerve in my jaw and gave me a headache for almost the entire year, nonstop. Or maybe the kids I went to school with were just so annoying, blonde, and orange that I was in psychic pain all the time... I don't know. If you went to my high school you'd understand that both options are equally likely. I had my wisdom teeth removed and graduated high school in the same week, and the headaches went away. Hooray!

But I get headaches now that are almost as bad as that one. Let me tell you this week's tale of woe: On Tuesday before I went to a concert, I started getting a headache. I kept it at bay by taking 3 Advil with a Guinness. That is probably not so great for my liver, but what's done is done. The next day it was back! So I left work early and took a nap. Then it was back again! And I haven't been able to shake it since.

Here is something you shouldn't do when you have a headache: Go on internet medical advice websites. All I can think about now is how I may have a subarachnoid bleed. Every ten minutes I'm running to the mirror to see if there's blood leaking from my ear. But if my meninges were hemmoraging for 5 days, wouldn't I be craving meat? Probably, since I'm already (according to the blood drives that reject me) "dangerously anemic." It's okay: If I sit really still and try not to breathe much and don't think about anything or open my eyes, I barely feel any pain. It's like being dead.

Random aside: I was at the gym this morning laughing to myself about a cat food commercial. I think it's weird that they advertise salmon, lobster, and sea bass as a "natural" diet for cats. When was the last time you saw a cat deep-sea fishing or cracking open a lobster tail? Hell, cats don't even have the opposable digits to properly handle a seafood fork. You might as well give them pureed polar bear liver, because they're just as likely to eat that in the wild.

I have never been so happy to have a photographic memory than I was this morning when I had a dream about my wallet without my debit card in it and got up to see it was true. I was able to visualize where I had left it and that is today's reason I didn't jump off a bridge.

I'd be pretty disabled without my photographic memory. How does everyone else do it? Please explain "paying attention" to me.

I have a dream...

What if all the Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvds in the United States were connected to form a single coherent boulevard? Then we could take a luxuriously slow road trip around the United States, passing from city to city in a nonsensical labyrinthine path. This would benefit people who sometimes wake up in strange cities and find themselves confused by their orientation to home relative to the identically-titled but fundamentally unequal MLKJBs. I'm just sayin'-- it would save some people a lot of time that would otherwise be spent meandering around, burning fossil fuels, and trying not to cry in front of the gas station attendant.

Some people would also really benefit from intuitively renaming all roads according to her place of residence: "Direction of Ice Cream Store Street." "Intersects with Gym Road." "Pathway between Work and Home Skyway." "Full of Speed Traps Go Slowly Way."

Also, what if we outlawed parallel parking? I think it's discriminatory to people who never took the driving exam because they passed driver's ed with an extremely high grade. Some people can't help it if they are too smart for the system.

A roundabout excuse for not posting more often.

I love multidisciplinary studies. Specialization limits the accessibility of whatever topic you study-- sure, you might be an expert in the environmental theory of praying mantis egg-hatching dynamics, but if you can't communicate what you know to someone who studies the neurobiochemical interactions of crawfish mating rituals, what good does it do? We do need experts, though... it's just that, we need a few experts, and we need them to mentor people in a broader context than their own expertise. Multiple mentors-- that's the idea behind a thesis committee, I think.

I am writing about this today, not to change the face of science (I'll save that for another day, a greater blog), but to express my frustration with grad school lately. I work in a fantastic interdisciplinary lab that combines chemistry and neurobiology, and yet I find myself constantly tripping on the crack between the two. Imagine you have a study where you use a chemical technique to study a neurobiological phenomenon. Now you have a problem: write for a chemistry journal, and the chemists think you're doing chemistry wrong. Write for a biology journal, and the neurobiologists think you're doing neurobiology wrong. You're wrong from every angle, even if you're right. (My lab is really well established, luckily for us, but the problem still arises, especially when you're trying to do something new. Cough, cough.)

Now back to that age-old (beginning of this blog-old) notion that as a woman, I feel that I experience extra frustration. Most of the men I know are happy to step back and say "Yes, I'm a chemist-- who cares about the neurobiology?" or "The neurobiology is solid, so I am going to let it speak for itself." I feel this is easier for someone with a Y chromosome because society expects them to be great at one thing-- and everything else be damned. Women are supposed to be multi-talented: can you cook? do you keep a clean house? does your hair have bounce and shine? can you wiggle your hips attractively when Lady Gaga comes on at a club? please theorize about the themes in the Bronte sisters' literature as compared to Jane Austen's. how does NMDA antagonism in the hippocampus impact task-acquisition in various behavioral paradigms? etc. Maybe that's not true-- maybe that's just some neurotic pressure I feel because I can barely cook, clean, control my hair, and wiggle seductively, and I haven't read early 19th century women's lit since high school.

But my obvious neuroticism aside... my point is, taking a multidisciplinary approach to science is, in my opinion, the best approach-- and the most open for criticism. And unlike a lot of people, I don't let criticism roll off my back. I take it as a challenge to get better. Guess what? Being a first year grad student presents a lot of challenges (mostly because I don't know anything), and I'm EXHAUSTED. And that, my dear reader(s?), is why my posting has been lackluster lately. I'm just too tired to store up my vitriol. It leaks out of me all day like a car with a bad transmission. And your diaphragm (again, not the contraceptive) is the one that suffers. I apologize to diaphragms everywhere.

Queueing up

In an effort to not spend my money, I'm kicking television. Cable costs an extra $40-something a month and I would like to have that money in my bank account. Or to spend on concert tickets. The best part about not having television is that I won't have to see a single Grey's Anatomy commercial and wonder how Americans became so tasteless that they made it one of the highest rated programs on TV.

The cynic in me is crying out for some depressing and inherently-biased indie documentaries. Any recommendations? I'm partial to movies about America's obesity problem, but I also like macabre political agendas, doom-and-gloom nature prophecies, and anything with bizarre wooden puppets acting out modern day biographies in the style of Greek theatre. (Protagonist!)

UNCLE

North Carolina, I give up. Enough with the insects, okay? I give up. I concede that nature hates me.

I have good reason to think that my car has a nest of bees inside. Does that sort of thing happen to normal people? What would someone do if their car was full of bees? Will I at least get some delicious honeycomb out of the whole ordeal?

I still love Obama

I don't know a lot about politics, but I do know a lot about bitching. It seems that lately, a big mouth is all you need to put your two cents into debates about the economy and healthcare. People I went to high school with are posting daily rants on Facebook about how Obama's a communist-- the last time I saw these guys participate in anything was gym class, and I think that was only to prove who was the superior douchebag. Seems like the same thing now. My friends (who definitely know more about these subjects than I do) want to debate politics with me just to prove me wrong, as if making their point clear to me is useful. I guess political stress makes people a little bit aggressive. But hey, what's the point?

So I don't know a lot about politics, but I'm pretty sure that the government isn't taking tips from Facebook and Google Chat transcripts. I know that back before we had these online social outlets, people actually got off their fat asses and organized protests. Regardless of the effect, at least they sent a message of discontent to someone other than irritated social networkers (well, me). Some people that were frustrated with the system actually wrote great music instead of contributing to their gigantic beer guts all day. Our generation is fucked and that's not Obama's fault. We are lazy and fat (well, not me) and whiny. We aren't apathetic enough to quit complaining, but we're content pass the hard work on to that nebulous "someone else." I think we deserve whatever shitty future America that evolves for not taking action about whatever we believe in now.

It took me a lot of angsting teen years to unearth this nugget of zen, but I'll share it with you for free: If I can't control it, I'm not going to stress about it. I'm a biologist and I've got no business telling Obama what to do, unless he decides that all research should be creationism-based. I pay my taxes, obey traffic laws, spend too much on clothes, and think that the government's doing its job if a tribe of neighboring Neanderthals don't pull me out of my bed at night to rape and pillage me. Here's what I worry about:

• Poorly conducted fMRI studies influencing our view of neural processing.
• Lack of respect for women in science.
• Ignorant medical professionals-- every time I go to the doctor, I end up diagnosing myself and giving suggestions for my own treatment. Why don't we teach our doctors to THINK? About something other than money, I mean.
  
• Politicians who don't know anything about research and take pride in their blazing ignorance (I'm looking at you, Sarah Palin).
• People without a sense of humor and their sad, sad, sad, sad lives.
• The fact that I'm writing this blog on a Sunday morning when I should be cleaning my apartment.