Daily Silver: A recap of stuff I haven't told you yet. And "the weather isn't evil, it just wants a hug."

Can I write Friday's Daily Silver even though it's technically Saturday?  Of course I can!  I'm running the show. (bwahahahahahahahaha!!!)

What can I tell you about Friday.  Other than "TGIF" or rather, TGIWF (Thank Gods It Was Friday).  Oh, well it snowed a bit up here in the wild wild North (better known as Western NY).  Lessee... oh, we have an accumulation of about 8 or 9 inches, and it was all melted two days ago.  So not overnight, but pretty good.  Actually, snow on the ground is okay.  It's when it's blowing in your face that's not so cool.  Hot.  Whatever.  Today I got up and (mistake #1) did not look out the window.  I had no idea what it was like outside, but I assumed that it would be much like yesterday: sunny and clear with snow on the ground but none in the sky.  As I was preparing to leave for class, still not looking out the window, I (almost mistake #2) debated putting on my winter hat or my baseball cap.  I luckily chose the winter hat and opened the door (surprise!).  The snow was coming down at about a 45deg slant, and they were fat, slushy flakes, the kind that can sting in a sudden [sadistic] gust of wind but then will accumulate on your hat and coat and any exposed skin and make you shed water when you walk inside like molting snakeskin.  Except cold and wet.

Now make it 50-80degF colder and dump some ice water on him.

In other news, I'm taking a practice GRE tomorrow.  I'm excited about the future (Ooooh, the future...) but I'm not excited about getting up on a Saturday.  Ah, the sleep I sacrifice...

Speaking of sleep: I think I'll pretend to go to sleep now.  I say pretend because I'll end up laying in bed staring at the ceiling.  Or the wall.  I've become sort of attached to staring at the wall lately.  Buonanotte!

I have to say I'm kind of sad that I won't see 2100...

Ever since I was little, I've thought about mortality.  Yes, in a morbid-fearful-squeamish sense, but also in a more... limiting sense.  Well, I don't know if "limiting" is the word I'm looking for; I'm trying to describe the sadness--disappointment, really--in the knowledge that I will not live to see the future.  I'm not talking flying cars and androids and living on other planets necessarily (although probably within our grasp now or in the near future) but more about the progression of life and the world and all that.

When I was little I did think more along those lines; I envisioned a future that I now recognize as some variation on steampunk, full of Wells-ian time machines

and Fifth Element-esque cities and cars.

Oooh, flying cars!

Now, I'd like to imagine I'm more realistic, and my conjured images include cures for African sleeping sickness (alternatively, effective treatments [read section "treatment"] that aren't as deadly as the disease) and music players that read your mind and time machines.

gotta love time machines

All these fantasies and imaginings and ideas are a source of woe for me.  Because I probably won't live to see them.

Granted, the things I just described that I dream of now (in my 20s) may be close enough that they'll happen in the next decade or so, but of course I've no way of knowing.  No one knows.  It just makes me sad that I won't be around for new things.  I'm not planning on checking out anytime soon (at least for the next 80 or so years), but even if I make it to 100 I won't see the year 2100.

I think all this stuff about chronological milestones (the decade, the century, the millenium) hits people alive now with more oomph.  We all lived through the turn of the millenium (unless you're under 10, then you're SOL).  That's friggin' huge.  That's only happened 3 times in recorded history (I start counting with the Romans, maybe the Greeks and Egyptians so 4).  It makes me feel like I have a place in history sort of.  'Course everything's history when you get right down to it, but we as humans feel the need to ascribe particular significance to certain events, and the turn of the millenium was one of them.

The prospect of a human living to see 2 century-changes is fairly slim, and that occurs to me more clearly than I suppose it would to someone born in 1918 who lived to 77.  We're so damn close to surviving two century-turns!  Ah, pointless frustration!  Perhaps at some point humans will be able to live that long; I seriously doubt it, as aging seems to be in the framework of our cells and scientists are having little success with "anti-aging" treatments.

I seriously doubt that I will see another millenium.  Though you never know...

Daily Silver: Oh darn, zombies ate my roommates.

No, not really (well maybe in the few hours I've been working alone in my room...) but I went out to dinner tonight and when I came back no one was in the living room, but I saw their shoes and coats.  Logical conclusion: zombies ate my roommates.

You can imagine how relieved I was when I crept downstairs (ready to kick some zombie butt if it came to that) and found them quietly studying in their rooms.  No, I was not relieved that they were quietly studying in their rooms; in fact that was somewhat distressing in itself.  Ours is a house of proud procrastination! (*dons viking helmet and shakes hammer at sky*)

Yeah, kinda like that.  And yes, my hammer glows, too.  Duh.

So today's Silver is just more a trick to get me to write, and in the true spirit of writing, I am... going to bed.

Wait, that didn't make sense.

Well, if I'm to the point of not making sense anymore it really is time for me to go to bed.

And in the spirit of perpetual curiosity (meo--) I will share with you a new blog I've discovered and a good article.  It's interesting; it's a science blog, but the issue discussed here is sort of philosophical.  I like it!

Daily Silver: The future looms, but I think I'm seeing tropical medicine through the fog.

Today's thoughts are on graduate school.  I know that I want to get my master's degree, and I'm thinking public health.  I have to do a little looking around...  Then I want to get my Ph.D.  But that's farther in the future than I'm willing to consider at the moment.

The career path I'm looking at right now is getting my Ph.D in parasitology or tropical medicine and working in a hospital as a specialist.  Maybe public health, though, and I could work with a Health Dept. and do some more epidemiological things...

Daily Silver: In fact, I do still exist, I merely spent yesterday in the real world.

What a tedious place the real world is.  I was writing the essay that I told you about not writing on Saturday in a rush of inspiration!  Yeah, if having it due the next morning can be termed "inspiration."  Anyway, it's done and I'm pretty happy with it, and now I can blog again!  For a while, at least...

So today was un-extraordinary.  Neurobiology this morning was pretty cool, because it's always cool when you understand the material.  Also, His Vexing-ness (you know, that kid in class that has to show off everything he knows and it turns out he just read the text but didn't understand the concepts?) was relatively quiet today.  Also, my friends and I asked a bunch of relevant, well-considered questions which is always a plus.  All in all, a good day in the field of Molecular Neurobiology.

Abnormal Psych was pretty ho-hum.  Not that it's a bad thing; certain classes, you just pray they're ho-hum.  Not that I don't like psychology (although see here and here) but this class is... I don't really know why, but I didn't expect it to be a study in suffering.  That's all it is, really; I'm not saying that's bad, necessarily, because my area of interest, parasitology and tropical medicine, is also full of such reflection.  The only way we can change our world is if we can understand it; the only way to help people suffering from blood flukes or from bipolar disorder is if we understand these afflictions.  I just... didn't realize it would be so depressing.  I really don't know why; I'm intimately familiar with many of the faces of mental disorders, but I guess I thought learning clinically about them could distance me or something?  Hmmm...  Anyway, today we watched a video, actually two videos featuring a woman with bipolar disorder, and pretty severe at that.  In the first she was in a depressive episode, and she had been hospitalized because she'd assaulted a little girl (we didn't hear the details) because the voices had told her to.  (NB I'm sure schizophrenia presents a very different clinical picture, but at this point I couldn't tell them apart except that our professor told us she had bipolar disorder.)  She was suffering from psychomotor retardation, which is when someone thinks, moves, and talks slowly, and she looked like she was going to fall asleep and go right off her chair.  But the combination of this movie and the next one was what was really disturbing.  In the next one, the same woman in the throes of a manic episode(a week later or so) was chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles, all while she was a spy for Jesus Christ and could call up wind, rain, or sunshine at will.  She reminded me of a happy-go-lucky thirteen-year-old girl, and she had that look on her face, the one of blank, almost fake happiness, just utterly pleased with herself.  It was disturbing on such a visceral level... you could just tell that something was wrong, could almost tell that this mania wasn't going to last and she was going to plummet deep, deep into the hellish vice of depression.

Sorry for the flowery language; it's late and you know what that means..!  (It means I start writing like a Renaissance poet.)  Mi apologia.

So that's it for today.  I do have to admit that somedays (usually concordant with large academic projects and looming due dates) I might not write.  I'll try, but it just might not happen.  In the meantime, I plan to be writing every day this week, because I don't have any papers due for a while!  (Huzzah!)  Buonanotte!

Daily Silver: "The weather did a complete 180" and other greatest hits.

As you have probably gathered from the title, the weather is no longer gorgeous.  In fact, I believe this phenomenon is known in certain scientific circles as "anti-gorgeous."  Like other "anti-" things, no one can actually come to a conclusion about whether it exists or not, but I'd venture today is a pretty convincing "for."  The kind of convincing that blasts you in the face with flying slush and sends it running down your back under your shirt in rivulets because it can.  The "convincing" also happens when pushes up under the hems of your pant legs and sloshes down your bare ankles and into your unwisely-chosen low-top sneakers.  Rawr.

Anyway, this glorious proof of... well, weather only touched me once today (actually more like thrice), when I went out to do laundry (blast you, laundry! *shakes fist at menacing sky*) because someone thought it would be a grand old idea to put the laundry for the campus townhouses in an entirely separate building.  In Geneseo.  ie 50ish miles south of Lake Ontario.  Ah, but life goes on and the laundry is never done...

I would like to point out that I am still in my pajamas.  Granted, I re-donned them after coming back from my latest laundry trek, but before I changed into more suitable winterwear I had been in my pj's all day.  Hear that: all frickin' day!  (eat it, slushy snowfall!)  It's one of those days, y'know?  So yeah, I woke up at a reasonable time (10:30) and proceeded to twitter (I know it's bad for me, Mommy, but it's just so good!) and Google Reader and all the goodness of internet procrastination (remember I was going to write an essay today?).  I watched some streaming Netflix (Mythbusters!) and spent hours playing with Chrome extensions... oh, and I did some laundry.  Actually, am in the process of doing some laundry--it's almost time for me to slog out for the last time to bring home my clothes all clean & dry!

Before I sign off, I'd like to say that my day was pretty ok.  I'm not a fan of staying in my pj's all day, but you gotta do what you gotta do.  Arrivederci! *looks out window, sighs, and puts on outdoor-clothes*

PS For your viewing pleasure... MYTHBUSTERS!

Daily Silver: Friday!!!

Today's silver is brief: it's Friday!  And it's nice out!  I am excited at the prospect of sleeping in tomorrow, but I am not excited about writing my humanities essay (due Monday morning).  My assignment is to write about how I think two authors (out of five or so choices) would react to people flying planes into IRS buildings.  Specifically Andrew Joseph Stack.  It won't necessarily be a hard write, it's just tedious and not what I want to be doing/writing about.

But about the weather: it's gorgeous!  If you're not from upstate NY or similar climes you may not understand my amazement at 50degF, but it's 50 freaking degrees in February.  This is a big thing, like jump-and-shout-and walk-around-in-shorts-and-a-tshirt-because-you-don't-have-to-worry-about-frostbite big.  The fields outside my window are green.  It's crazy.

So I leave you now to walk in the balmy spring breezes and cavort in the sun, because it's been a long winter (actually it's been a winter of average length, but you get the idea).