Book It!

most relevant bumper sticker ever.

this week i went to a show. a rather good show featuring nightbeats and the black lips. i brought my book along as i knew that the time between bands would be rather uneventful. so, as the nightbeats wrap up and i'm nose-deep in the text, i notice a younger-ish gentleman to my left looking at me, then looking at me again, then again. i keep reading, and then he shouts "HARD TO READ IN HERE, RIGHT??" i respond "yes, yes it is" and keep reading. he then asks "ARE YOU DOING HOMEWORK?"

speechless. i am speechless.

i look up from my book, struggle with what to say for about five seconds, then turn to look at him and assure him that no, no it is not homework. he reassures me that it's totally cool if i was doing homework, and i counter by giggling rather hard and telling him i'm thirty-three and far too old for homework. he looks sort of confused, then starts in on a spittle-filled tirade on how good the show is going to be and have i seen the bands before and man.. the show is going to be so fucking good. awesome. now let me get back to my homework cus this book report's going to kick my ass and Book It! doesn't let just anyone get their personal pan pizza without appropriate documentation.

and the show was great. Nightbeats concluded with the bassist falling off a speaker and onto his back, and Black Lips wrapped up with one of the guitarists vomiting on himself. success.

dead rat not ok

this morning i woke up and walked into my back garden to water my plants. it's lovely.... as i'm preparing to descend the steps towards my basement door to turn on the hose i spot it. "it" being a dead, decaying, fat, smelly, fly-coated dead rat. and if you don't know what a baltimore rat is like, it's not like your standard everyday "just scoop it up cus it's dead anyway" type of rat. these rats are rats of nihm-type rats. rats with neighborhood organizations and food co-ops and car pools. rats that weigh as much as your standard cats. rats that i have seen CHASING cats down the street. rats that are afraid of nothing... that saunter down the streets in broad daylight and heave their pulsating bellies onto the porches of unsuspecting home owners to get to the delicious bird food because SHIIIIIIIEEET, who is going to stop them? if i remember right, my response to seeing this rotting carcass/destroyer of my daisy-laden garden of delights was "ARE YOU SERIOUS?!" i think i yelled that for a couple of reasons: 1- i've got a dead fucking rat all up in my face. 2- i awoke last evening and had one of those oh-so-fun nighttime panic attacks. a panic attack that resulted in me hunched on all fours, watching some youvideo of a tibetan monk talking about how meditation helped him through panic attacks, then forcing proton to lay next to me so i could count his little heartbeats to try to calm down. it was a doozy.... and it's gotten to the point that i can feel them coming on... all day something was off... almost like all the frustration/emotional reeling/overwhelmingness of it all accumulates until BOOM. i wake up at 1:30 a.m. and feel like running across the street to wake up my neighbor friends to ask them if i can sleep at the foot of their bed because i'm just having a hard time. but as the monk said, learning how to make friends with these things, and not making them an enemy or something to be afraid of, is the best way to try to deal with them. i wish it was that easy to convince myself that these lovely adrenaline tsunamis are not the end of it all when i'm freaking out in my bed, trying to not think about my heart exploding or my lungs deciding to collapse.

and then there were my students today. i took them to the hopkins medical campus to see all the super fancy stuff.... peabody, the old hospital, the big jesus statue, STEM CELLS. yep. in an super surprise (for me, too) a researcher showed them pluripotent human stem cells derived from fibroblasts. AWESOME. and then on the way back to the hopkins shuttle, one of my quietest students is reading some bmore graffiti out loud. i hear him say "sucking di----wah?" then his face got red and i giggled very very hard with him and some other students. they also REALLY solidified their nerd status when many of them exclaimed "it smells like old books!" as they walked into the peabody library. they were so excited AND so upset that they couldn't get to most of the texts. same kid who saw the "sucking di--" explained how all he wanted to do was find an old copy of Dracula on one of the inaccessible upper levels and sit by a fire.

LOVE.

additions

1: today when i asked how the dance last week went, the response from one of my students was "great. we raised the floor. THE ROOF. THE ROOF. we raised the roof." such. nerds.

2: i just took proton for a walk. a very sweaty runner trotted past us and screamed "YOUR SLEEVE IS DOPE" at me. he screamed this because he was wearing headphones. and he really liked my sleeve.

legalize torso teepees

at left is a picture of people having fun at a water ballet murder mystery. they are eating snoballs (sans marshmallow) and having a really good time.next to them is a picture of ladies doing the water ballet murder mystery. they are also having a really good time. i have already signed up to do it next year.

it has been very hot here. VERY HOT. like the 9th circle of hell hot, assuming the 9th circle of hell also has people walking around shirtless with the piece of cloth that should be covering their ill-shapen nipples precariously balanced on their equally misshapen head. I don't care how hot it is: men should legally be obligated to keep their shirts on at all times. Unless they are swimming or just about to make out with you. That's it. None of this walking around hampden, showing off your distended bellies to the kids... or biking down st. paul with your man boobs being jostled by the slight but persistent breeze generated by you finally going downhill. and i don't care if you have a great body. shirts should be on. like the nice guy at the dog park.... guess what? you're nice and fairly attractive, but i saw you walking home with your pooch SANS torso teepee. so you suck.

that being said, i have a super hot, sexy, muy caliente heat rash. i'm pretty excited about it. it looks incredibly nasty, itches and hurts a lot (and both at the same time), and i'm not going to go to the doctor about it because i'm 99% sure they will just look it up on webmd and then prescribe me some antibiotics and/or hydrocortisone. i can look that up myself, and have, and people with heat rashes are gross.

so today in class we discussed X inactivation and dosage compensation. i put a picture up of a calico kitten and described it as an evil, evil calico kitten. my students asked me why i don't like cats, as i had mentioned my dislike of felines in previous lectures. i asked if they really wanted to know, and they all shouted "YES" as they all put their pencils down to take in what they knew what going to be an outrageous story.

Reasons i don't like cats:
1. kittens are like velcro. they stick to everything. they climb up your pants or bare legs and when you try to take them off they stick their little kitten claws into your denim and/or skin. they are impossible to remove.
2. i grew up with lots of feral cats. more feral cats than i can count are buried in shoe boxes on the ol' family homestead. these cats were hit by cars, tractors, one was run over by my dad in a lawnmower-related accident. gross.
3. princess the cat would leave headless birds on the stoop for us as morning "presents." my brothers and sisters and i would gear up for school, head out into garage to pile into the station wagon and BOOM. there it was. every morning. the dead headless bird present. first person out the door always ran the highest chance of stepping straight in it. in a dead bird with no head.
4. princess became pregnant. princess gave birth to those kittens and was kept in the garage because it was winter. she was in the garage with her daughter and son kitties and that's it. so a few months later when princess was pregnant again, i wondered "hmm... that's weird. how could princess get pregnant if the only other cats in the garage were... oh god. the only other cats were... her sons?! her sons and princess? princess and her sons?!" i was 10. it was a dark day.
5. it's a fact that cats are icky. a scientific fact.

rabbit of caerbannog

today was one of those days that makes me so happy i am a teacher. so happy that i get to experience the amazingly insightful and kind and profound and beautiful thoughts and ideas of developing minds. our discussion today was on genetic technology and ethics and the dangers of genetic testing and why maybe having access to that kind of information isn't as great as you might think. so once we wrap up the discussion on considering how much you want to know about your own DNA, i ask who you might not want to have access to that information. the kids sort of look at me and then after a few moments two boys in the back yell out "THE GOVERNMENT!". hells. yes my little science nerdball anarchists.

the conversation eventually moved to Hopkins and Baltimore city and the using of Baltimore city residents as a research population and the state of the school system and literacy rates and the role race and poverty play in the whole thing. one of my darling students (who is indian) raises her hand and tells us the story of taking her six-year-old sister shopping for a barbie doll and how, when she asked her sister which barbie she wanted, the six-year-old picked the white barbie. and as she's telling the story she's getting teary-eyed and i'm getting teary-eyed and the longer she keeps looking at me with her doe eyes the closer i'm getting to crying and *sigh*. so we talked about the story and how whiteness is portrayed as the "best" and "most attractive" in the US the whole walk to lunch. amazing girl.

THEN we take them to the nearby art museum as a super-secret surprise after lunch. then our conversation on genetics moves on transgenic organisms. we discuss a mouse model that was developed to study the role memory has in the development of fear, and i discuss one reason we are afraid of things is because of what has happened to us in the past. quiet kid in the back (who knows everything about achondroplasia) raises his hand and asks the following question: "so if you have a run-in with an animal with big teeth... like maybe a big dog with big teeth.... big pointy teeth... and you are scared of it. so if you have meet an animal later in your life, and let's say it's a cat but it has big teeth... big pointy teeth like the dog you saw before... would you be afraid of it? or would you be afraid of the teeth?"

AMAZING.

i told him you could test that by making a model of huge teeth and see if the teeth scared people. i so hope he tries that at the dance tonight.

eau de adorable

tonight a couple of my male students came to study hall wearing cologne. a lot of it. then they came up to ask me questions about epistasis and polygenic traits and brought their spindly little fragranced limbs a bit too close to me. but considering they weight 80 pounds soaking wet and challenge each other with unsolvable math equations, i'm not exactly feeling threatened. but if they start looking eagerly at me when i drink my coffee i'll know they've roofied me. and i'm not convinced some of these kids couldn't cook up a quick quaalude during their activity time.

other fun events of the day:
todd wore seersucker pants and tucked his napkin into his dress shirt and tie during lunch.
nugs continues to wear sunglasses inside. i love it.
potter still looks like he's 10 hours behind on sleep in the daytime. but interestingly that phenotype disappears when the sun goes down.
hicks and his logic still make no [sense].
nips's nips are nipping.
jack talked to my TA and i for a good 10 minutes about physics and did modern dance stretches the entire time.
mr. perfect piles 10-12 slices of cheese and 5-8 slices of tomato on top of whatever he is eating.
the kids watched "time bandits" during movie time today. "TIME BANDITS." amazing.
i convinced a kid that eddie munster (the character) was what the actor who played eddie munster looked like in real life. this is the kid that highlights every part of the textbook page that DOESN'T have writing in it. the margins, the drawings, everything. it's terrible.

what i don't need: an open letter to my future life partner

there are many many things i do not need. but before we go into those, i'd like to mention one thing i do need: i do need children to walk in front of me and utter things like "but i have no IDEA what it's like to be a mushroom!" and then have his friend say "just try... just try to think like a mushroom."

but in the list of things i do not need: lots of furniture, lots of clothes, an ipod, a recipe for split-pea soup because it's disgusting, and, of course, i do not need an ex-boyfriend who broke my heart a year and 1/2 ago emailing me to let me know that i (and the professor) are beneficiaries on his life insurance policy. i just don't need it. i don't need the feeling of getting punched in the gut it brings, i don't need the reminder of how much i compromised myself for one person, and i don't need the wondering what the hell the whole thing even means. i'm lost enough in the whole human dating/mating ritual thing as it is; unless a guy tells me "you're hot. i like you. i think we should go out." i have no idea what's going on. so this? THIS? i don't want it. i don't need it. i'm not interested in going down that road again and i sure as hell do not need the journey back.

so back to the things i do need: Lactaid when i want to eat delicious ice cream, books about serial killers and goofy science, and apparently more bath towels, as i dried myself off with a hand towel after yoga tonight. i also need my future amazing life partner to realize that the time of hiding himself is done. that he needs to both himself and i a favor and get serious with this whole thing. i would like to have said man threaten to beat someone up when they hurt my feelings, then have us both start laughing after he says it because we're pacifists.... and have him read books in bed before we go to sleep and/or make-out....and honestly, have us do all the boring stuff that people in relationships hate but i miss. and we can go on road trips and be best friends forever.

worthy addition

notable quote of the evening delivered from wei-te, a.k.a. mark, in regards to faraz's attempt to have him solve his uno card-shuffling debacle using an equation: "you're trying to have me solve a four-dimensional equation without any constants." he was incensed. faraz told him to use 3. it didn't go well.

hermaphrodites is a good way to start

at left is a a picture of kids fighting. it's cute and kind of hilarious. it is nothing like how i fight.

and it's sad... really sad because so many people are SO AWESOME. seriously. so many folks i know are amazingly empathetic and honest and supportive and intelligent and witty and delightful and compassionate and *sigh.* and then there is this whole other group of people: people who remind me of how much i like my friends and how fantastic folks can be and why now, more than ever, darwin and his selective power needs to squeeze the shit out of some people's faces.

i have met the notorious "big red." it happened at lunch today.. and may i just say that i was lucky enough to have her sit down as my lunch partners and i were in mid-conversation on the sweeping hermaphrodite epidemic that my regular-year students think is sweeping the nation.
she proceeds to squeal out in the most nasally, freckley voice "um... in my multicultural studies class we learned that they don't like being called hermaphrodites." really? that's fascinating you're in a multicultural studies class because i'm offended by the fact that the word "multicultural" just came out of your mouth. i suspect your idea of multiculturalism is watching The Sopranos and going to Fogo de Chao.

THEN the amazing older gentleman M.D. neuroscience teacher says "i don't think they like hermaphrodites. i think they like being called its." oh jim... you are a delight. we all start laughing super hard and red rocket mutters "well that's just as offensive as what she said."

yep. it's on. you're an idiot.

and the amazing comments keep coming... she asks where i teach, i tell her the city, she tells me she teaches in the county (no shit you do) then asks what school i teach at, i tell her, and then she goes on to tell me how much she hates my school because they do so well at the Maryland science fair. then she says "so are you a part of the science fair?" me: "no." red rocket then snidely chips in: "oh... i would figure you being a DOCTOR and all you would be all into that."

official. enemies.

my retort was that i think the science at science fairs is really sad because the projects totally lack imagination and i feel bad for the kids. and then when neuroscience man leaves and i comment on how nice he is, she makes sure to let me know that she's known him for four years. and has been coming to nerdball camp for that long. that's great. really really great. because i'm pretty sure the ten minutes i have spent with you have stunted my intellectual and emotional growth by just about that much.....

and it's just day 2.

fiona and mr. perfect

these are my new earrings. i love them.

today was the first day of the second session of the third best nerdball camp. kidding. it's the number one nerdball camp. the last three weeks of my life were spent lecturing total dweebs on the minutiae of genetics, giving students nicknames like "wolfman," being amazed by the ability of one of my students to make origami men playing guitars and men playing violins and double helices and coffins with corpses that pop out of them, and watching presentations on Drosophila where my kids identified that the difference between male and female Drosophila is that the males have black butts. And then wondering why I was giggling so hard in the back. i also met some of the most wonderful adult folks i have met in a very long time.... so nice they let my non-imbibing self play beer pong and corn hole and go to dance parties and let me get crazy with crafts for them. and then two of the bestest left. and what has their absence been replaced with? oh... i shall tell you...

some of the new instructors....
1. mr. perfect. his name is mr. perfect and he is a chemistry instructor and he is british and i'm 99% sure he's a spy sent on a secret mission to infiltrate terribly administrated and overly passive-aggressive summer camps. i want to be his best friend/excuse for a torrid tea affair.
2. ms. no-bra from the east. she's the new biology TA. she is chinese and apparently likes the phrase "goddamn it" and doesn't wear bras. with boxy ill-fitting polo shirts. she's going to be so awesome in air conditioning.
3. ms. fiona the censor a.k.a. red rocket. i have heard much about this woman (also nicknamed "big red") and how our meeting may cause the earth to split open and some sort of cosmic battle ensue. she covers pictures of the reproductive system in textbooks with post-it notes. my goal is to say "vagina" as much as possible in our first meeting. she looks like fiona. from shrek. with lots of freckles. and she likes to stare at me during instructional meetings. probably already has planned a way to put a post-it on my vagina.

and some of our returning favorites...
1. todd, a.k.a. panther. that's the new nickname i've given him because he's from illinois and has the BEST midwest accent ever and when i suggested that everyone grow a mustache for second session, he said he couldn't and that it was something he really hated about himself. i then followed him around all night waiting for him to say funny stuff.
2. ngs. ngs and potter (soon to be introduced) got into a backbending contest at the last dance party. it did not go well. ngs teaches astrophysics and i'm pretty sure that most of the glittery shiny stuff she wears is made directly from stardust. she is awesome.
3. potter. potter drunk is like a six-year-old drunk. not that i've seen a six-year-old drunk, but potter is the most happiest drunk i have ever seen. lots of giggling and squealing and high fives.

those are the good things..... the administration of the place is an entire story in itself..... but we shall wait until further madness ensues to lay that all out.... til then, i've got a vagina to cover.

well hello again....

and i'm back. again. after a long hiatus... with proton.

and the reasons for my rising like an inked phoenix from a mountain of cookie crumbs?? several. 1: how else would my friends keep up with my fleeing the advances of balding married men i work with? or newly separated men who live around the corner from me? or dates with men who look like mr. burns? 2: blogging about the dailies of life is such a nice way of reminding yourself that each day is chock-full of absolutely wondrous insanity and humor. 3: i really really really like making my friends laugh. a lot. both liking and making.

so yes... the dating hijinks that pepper my existence are back. and in some way, knowing that they are entertaining other folks makes them a little bit better to deal with. it's like i'm going on all these terrible dates and engaging in incredibly awkward conversations for you. FOR YOU. like a recent one with a guy i work with. ran into him at a bar... and mind you, i have really never ever had a conversation longer than three words with this man. so he sees me and squeals like we're long-lost separated bestest of friends... the conversation progresses (after he learns my name) and before i know it, i'm aware of how much pot he smokes, that he smoked it before coming to the bar, and that i am apparently quite awesome. conversation went like this:

he: "so you're married."
me: "no... no. i'm single."
he: "wah? why are you single?"
me: **trying not to scream THAT IS THE FUCKING DUMBEST QUESTION I HAVE EVER BEEN ASKED** "i don't know."
he: "are you lesbian?"
me: **trying not to scream THAT IS THE FUCKING SECOND DUMBEST QUESTION I HAVE EVER BEEN ASKED** "no. i am not a lesbian."
he: "i think you're a blast."
me: "great."

then it really got fun when he found out i don't drink. he suggested we share a beer at some point, and i said he could have a beer and i would have a root beer. he then let me know that it's totally cool i'm an alcoholic. *sigh* lesbian. alcoholic. perfect.

then yesterday a married friend from the dog park let me know that he and his wife separated so we should hang out some time. all i remember after that is my skin getting hot and me saying "oh... that's too bad" over and over again.

my new fancy plan is to have these sorts of things happen with guys i am actually attracted to. that would really revolutionize my weekends and maybe even week nights. in a really carnal way. i just gots to figure out how exactly that whole thing works. reeling in the hot, smart ones who like eating delicious things and reading books, that is. and making out.

and then there's my new summer job full of delightful new friends who i heart very much and equally outrageous people who deserve fat punches in the throat that stun them long enough for me to punch them in the cooter. but those stories, my dears, shall have to wait....

i'm back....

soon. very very soon. like later tonight. MONTHS of build-up.