Pretty in Pink
All I have to say is that it's super difficult to try and do simple formatting-related things like changing around the alignment of the text or altering the pre-existing margins or changing the dimensions of the side-bar of a blogger template when all you know is like 5 html tags and have absolutely no knowledge of Java, or Perl, or PHP, or whatever else is out there. I might tinker with this a little more later, but probably not, because my new-fangled blog template is satisfactory. I'm not sure if I like it more that my previous one. No matter. I copied all of the code down so that it can be easily replaced.
NOTE: I just checked my blog on my work Mac, and the formatting is all funny. The text should all be left-justified. Please let me know if it looks centered or anything else on your computer and I will try to fix it. Thanks!
Get Into My Belly!
This next post will cover an embarrassing weekend moment, which I don't know for sure if I want to commit it to writing. But for the sake of entertaining you, I will continue.
As I'm sure that most of you are aware, I was trained since a very young age to finish everything on my plate when given food during a meal. This has, over the years, developed into my ability to eat a fairly large amount of food in one sitting or to continue eating even when I'm full. And of course, there's always room for dessert. On a number of occasions, I have eaten to the point where I was really really full and wanted to immediately fall asleep or sit on a comfy seat or lie down, and I'd swear each of those times that I'd learn to use some self-restraint and not eat so darn much next time. However, despite occasionally eating too much, I have never binged to the point of feeling more than just a little bit uncomfortable while harboring the newly acquired food baby in my stomach.
That is, until last Sunday.
I went to a dinner party at a friends house and the combined culinary efforts of three different people resulted in a fabulous meal of roast chicken and stuffing, two kinds of potatoes, loads of veggies... I can't begin to do this meal justice. Anyway, we all dug in and after the first round of food, there were still TONS of leftovers so I went for seconds. This in and of itself wasn't so bad. By the time I finished my second helping, I was at the point where I was full, but not any more so than any other time I'd eaten a little bit too much (was I uncomfortably full at this point? I couldn't really say, since I ate WAY to quickly and I'm assuming my stomach hadn't had enough time to tell my brain that there were no vacancies). It was the dessert that ultimately brought about my downfall. Apple and rhubarb crumble with ice cream. Bad idea. My stomach said no, my brain said YES YES YES! And as it almost always is with dessert, my stomach lost the battle and I gave into the greedy gluttonous voice in my head.
What happended afterward, I can try to blame it on the fact that maybe I had something weird for dinner the night before, or maybe it was the milk I drank earlier that day that was a day past its expiration date but still passed the smell/taste test, or that maybe I was having sympathy pains for Eva who had just had a bout with stomach flu. But what probably happened was that I ate too much. Shame on me.
It all happend quickly. I suddenly got a splitting headache and broke out in a cold sweat. I felt nauseated and my stomach hurt. I had to excuse myself from the dinner party and managed to stumble home (it only takes about 5 minutes to walk from my friend's back to my place, but it felt like 10 miles), climb up the three flights of stairs to my flat, and managed to spend the next hour or so having a date with el baño. Not my best moment. My stomach still felt a little funny when I woke up Monday morning. Thank God it was a holiday.
So what did I learn from being bulimic for an evening? Eat less, eat slowly, and listen to your stomach because your brain had no capacity for self-control. Got it.
P.S. I finally figured out how to put titles on each blog entry through my blogger template. Hooray!
Around the World in 240 Days
Last July, when I began packing my stuff in preparation to leave Japan, I found that I had way more stuff than would fit in my allotted two suitcases. I packed two cardboard boxes of extra stuff. Box #1 was desstined for home, but I also had the clever idea of not taking my winter clothes home but instead, packing them in box #2 to be shipped to the UK directly. After all, I wouldn't be needing a thick wool coat or my fluffy turtleneck sweaters in SoCal in August. What a great idea. Or so I thought.
Box #1 arrived in California only a month behind me, way ahead of schedule. The box was a bit smooshed, but the contents were intact and the whole experience was relatively painless. I then asked my friend Satomi to send box #2 over to my UK address in mid-September, anticipating an equally smooth sailing transaction. No such luck.
I waited and waited and waited. Summer turned to fall and I wasn't too worried yet. I'd heard that British customs is strict and they feel the need to violate every large semi-unidentifiable box that arrives in its ports with x-rays and strip searches. Besides, a bunch of other Americans that I spoke with said that their packages were taking forever as well. Nothing out of the ordinary. Fall turned to winter and I started to get a little nervous. Not to mention kind of annoyed. It was COLD and I wanted my sweaters and fleeces! I tried looking online for what port it might have come to or if the post office was the one that would deliver it or what, but I couldn't really find anything. I had to give in and finally buy a cheap ass coat just to get me through the next couple of weeks until my box finally arrived (this is the coat that later got lost in a coatcheck at a club, but that's a different story). Winter turned to spring. I still had not given up hope. If the British shipping/postal beauracracy was anything like that of the U.S., I guessed that my box was just sitting in some warehouse somewhere. My only fear now is that I wouldn't recieve my box before I left. I was hoping that it would at least arrive before my parents did so that they could take my now unnecessary winter garb home with them at the end of their visit to the UK. Again, no such luck. Spring turned into "summer" and I'd pretty much given up hope. I was gonna make a last ditch effort to recover my wayward box and make some angry angry phone calls, but then today, I got this email from Satomi:
I got your box back today. It says that it was sent back from UK.
Son of a bitch... Well, at least I know where my box is now.
Super Vixen
Someone told me recently that I've become a crappy storyteller as of late and I guess I can't really disagree with that statement. I haven't been good about updating my blog regularly and I keep using the whole "nothing exciting happens in my life anymore" thing as an excuse for why I don't have anything fun to write about. But I guess that's the thing. Not many people every really have mega-cool news to report, it's just a matter of me giving you the right kind of details that you might find funny/interesting in the context of my life.
This same person asked me what I did last Saturday night, to which I replied, "Oh, nothing much. Just went out for a couple of drinks with JP." With much prying, poking, provoking, and prodding, I managed to come up with a bit more story-meat and managed to flesh out the details:
Last Saturday, JP and I went out for a couple of drinks and instead of going into town, we decided on going into the student-y part of Manchester for cheap drinks and a change of scenery.
The first place we went was a typical joint populated by the 18- and 19-year old undergrads who should have been studying for their final exams, but hey, this is Britain so let's drink instead. For the first time in my social life, I felt OLD. Everyone around me was engaged in the whole "chug! chug! chug!" mentality that is so characteristic of teenage boys as well as the "if I dress in something reeeeeeally skanky, maybe no one will notice that I look like I still belong in high school?" mindset of the age-matched females. Hooray for bad judgment!
We soon left hormone-palooza and opted for a more upscale (ie expensive, therefore no undergrads) cocktail bar which was a lot more enjoyable and I got to have yummy drinks as opposed to the cheap vodka and fountain coke combo that was pretty much my only choice at the previous student dive (I'm being mean, it wasn't a dive; it was actually pretty clean and nice for a student-oriented drinking establishment, but I digress). The bartenders there were very good at doing simple things like opening bottles of imported beer with a swift samurai-chop-like maneuver and mixing drinks with a pretentious nonchalance suiting such a swanky place. The cocktails of course had fun names and I decided on one called Super Vixen (I chose this one over Silicon Queen, a citrusy cocktail), which had various strawberry-flavored stuff in it and even incorporated a little chocolate strawberry cheesecake hagen daas ice cream. Mmmmmmm. Tastiest cocktail ever.
To end the evening, I decided that it was time I take part in a drunken British past-time which I had until now, carefully avoided. I don't know what exactly prompted it. Maybe it was because I was surrounded by student budget-friendly food places which were open until the wee hours of the morning? Or maybe because I was really hungry for some reason? Or maybe because I love fast food and I've been secretly craving one the whole time I've been here, but would never admit to it? Who knows. But in any case, I ordered myself a greasy kebab wrapped in fluffy naan bread and I dug in. Verdict: Exacatly as I expected it to be. Something that no tee-total sober person could enjoy, but in a state of tipsiness at 1 in the morning, it hit the spot. Just like Denny's or Jack in the Box might.
And that is what I did last Saturday night.
Sorry for the lack of posts as of late. I really don't have anything cool/important/exciting to report. I have started my third and final rotation in which I will be characterizing a novel human protein which may bind/interact with Golgi membrane proteins. Should be a cool project because they found it during the whole sequencing-the-human-genome thing and it is a completely new protein, the actual existence of which has yet to be confirmed and whose function is currently unknown. Right now, though, it's hard to get too excited about it, since I'm stuck in the cloning steps and I'm just trying to get the gene into its appropriate vector and I'm having mixed success rates. Booooo, sometimes biology is frustrating and slow.
But on a good note, the weather has finally turned permanently warm. Nearly 70 degrees on a regular basis! I could get used to this...
Oh, and I came across this during some down-time at work. You can now buy Silly Putty
by the pound or choose from
5 pound lumps in different colors, just in case you wanted to copy the entire funny pages section in your local newspaper instead of just settling for one comic strip. For some people, the little blobs that come out of their classic egg containers is not enough.
Also, I came across
this while surfing the web this afternoon. They've been wanting to make Ender's Game into a movie for years now, but never got the ball rolling, thank God. Now, apparently, there's a script AND a potential director. This doesn't look too good... But, on the bright side, at least Jake Lloyd (who was being considered to play Ender a while back) is too old to play the part now.
Started my third and final lab rotation today. So far, everyone I've met seems really nice and very helpful. I think my new supervisor seems like the kind of person who will provide me with the bare minimum of help which is good for the whole "becoming a better, more independent scientist" thing, but bad for that "I am a lazy lazy bum" tendency that I have. Oh well, in the long run, this'll be better for me, yadda yadda yadda. As another (dis)advantage, I am now working on the 4th floor of the Smith Building, which means every time I want to get to my lab from the 1st floor, I have to climb up 78 stairs. Wheeeee, buns of STEEEEEEEEL! Or, I might just start taking the elevator within the next two days.
