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November 19th, 2009
01:23 am - cynical or just old
or do the two necessarily go together? I sort of link youth and optimism (uh, is that a reasonable antonym for cynicism?), and although I was never super optimistic -- that's totally my mom's role in life and thank God for her -- I'm definitely more cynical than I used to be. Is that just part of getting older or is it only part of me getting older?
I used to believe in "The One." You know. As in, "he's The One for me." And I remember very clearly both my mom & I using that term in discussing the first boy I thought I would marry. Actually she used the term before I did, which I remember was surprising. Partly because my parents didn't (and don't) really like the guy, but also because both of my parents have always always stressed that marriage takes a lot of work from both parties. I sorta kinda remember them campaigning against the whole "there's only one person out there who's perfect for me" concept, saying that any number of people could work out in a marriage. Some might be more successful than others but still required work; and some might not succeed at all no matter how hard each of you worked at it. Which I think is a really healthy approach to marriage, I do. But...I sort of miss believing in the fairy tale. Which is stupid. *sigh*
and just as a fun side note -- I was thinking today that no one -- no one -- in my family has been divorced. Both sets of grandparents, great-aunt, aunt, uncle, parents, two cousins, sister...how unusual is that??? Pretty rare these days I think. So where the eff has all this cynicism come from???
my random thoughts of the night, brought to you by a really screwed up sleep pattern and a heavy dose of dissertation procrastination.
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August 13th, 2009
12:45 pm - girls rule and boys drool
we have a bunch of undergraduate interns here for the summer, working on research projects. Something like 12 guys, and 1 girl. Which, seems a little weird (the boy/girl ratio of grad students is just about 50/50, which is great and has given me the false impression that that's normal), but could be just chance and that's fine.
here's the thing that pissed me off today. The interns have been giving their "What I Did with My Summer" presentations, and from the interactions today, it was very obvious that the 1 girl intern has been totally excluded from the social aspect of the intern group. Not like they go out for dinner or drinking or hiking or biking, but they all work in the same room, with not even cubicle walls to divide them, so it's pretty chummy in there...but they fully ignore her. I don't really think it's intentional, or mean, they just don't think to include her.
I'm mad. Seriously, isn't computer science any better today than it was 40 years ago when my mom was the single female in her department? Really. It's ridiculous. Grr grr grr.
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August 12th, 2009
12:53 pm - ask the right question
well helloooooo poor neglected sad and lonely journal, how are you???
so the little epiphany I had last night, which I wanted to have recorded somewhere, went something like this:
I fully believe in trusting your gut. (haha I mistyped that as "guy".) And when I'm hurtling along a path that my gut disagrees with, I get terrified. Especially when I can't see my way off of that path -- or at least, not without disrupting my life to a degree that I'm totally uncomfortable with. So I resolve to stick it out, which is maybe stupid but oh well that's how I live.
but last night, I changed the life-question that I've been asking myself for weeks now. And was surprised by the answer. Which made me ask myself another question. And was again surprised. And now I know more about myself, and where I think my life is headed, and how it might all turn out. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ekkiikke wanted me to clarify, so I'll add this: Which makes me so happy! All because I found the right (or at least, a better) question to ask. Neat.
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September 25th, 2008
10:12 am - patch of blue
I biked to school today in a patch of blue sky that was mine all mine. Downtown was all cloudy when I left, and I debated just riding the train all the way out to school, especially since I (raced and) caught a Hillsboro train. But autumn is definitely here, I skipped the gym last night to keep working, and my bike hasn't seen a whole lotta lovin the past few months. So I hopped off at Sunset and biked my butt to school.
blue sky above me the whole way, with dark ominous clouds on every horizon. And a rainbow in front of me while I biked down Barnes Rd. omgz rainbow!!! :) omgz morning rainbow!! I didn't know those even happened. ;)
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August 11th, 2008
10:37 pm - it never pays off
for all my long hours, my frustrations, and my hard work, I have...exactly nothing to show for it.
someone here at the lab just made a totally fascinating discovery. The senior researchers on his team are all freaking out. And he could care less. He's bored, tired of working on this, and just wants to leave. I never make fascinating discoveries, and really, I never will. That's not my lot in life, I'm certain of that much.
so why do I put in these hours, when it's never going to be worth it?
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August 4th, 2008
08:47 pm - shinier
zomg fireflies!!! They're back! My cousin said that fireflies tend to only be around for about a month, from mid-June to mid-July, which made me sad. But this evening, on my way back from a covert steal-stale-cookies operation, I saw four sweet bright little fireflies. Yay. Totally brightened my day. Which is a good thing, as today has royally sucked, and included bouts of weeping, cussing, and other such girly stupidities.
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August 3rd, 2008
08:07 pm - blood and glory in a skirt
so, it's been muggy and gross here the past couple of days, but last night was freaking beautiful. Walking back from the lab at midnight (no, not alone, I'm not completely stupid, though I haven't actually had any safety concerns the whole time I've been on this campus), I thought that it was absolutely the perfect weather for a run. But, uh, I don't run at midnight. In Baltimore. Without a big burly running partner. So I went on my merry way, played poker & drank (yay!) with some other workshop attendees until 3 am then tumbled on into bed.
didn't set the alarm, for once, but woke up at the decent hour of 10:30 and really, really wanted to go for a run. Outside. Which I haven't done in...oh, months. So, I drank some water to chase the dehyd headache away, gussied myself up in my running skirt, taped my toes, and headed out, telling myself that if it was actually muggy out (can't always tell from just looking outside) then I could try out the apartment-gym (which just re-opened, w00t! just in time too cuz the campus-gym is shutting down Aug 8-18 boo).
it wasn't muggy. Yay! Also not as gorgeous as last night, but oh well. I set off for a 2.4 miler (that I mapped out at home, though I didn't take my phone with me...). Headed up University on my way to the Notre Dame College campus. University, it turns out, is uphill. And it was humid enough that my asthma was pretty borderline right away. But I plugged along, and finally saw a stoplight ahead. I'm squinting at it, hoping & praying that it's Cold Spring Ln...and just about the time that I realize it's not, the sidewalk suddenly tips itself up at a 90* angle and takes a good whack at me. Okay okay, actually I tripped, the sidewalk (probably) didn't move itself...but I did smear myself all across the sidewalk. Scraped my hands and bloodied my knee. And to add insult to injury, in trying to brush the gravel off of my knee, I stupidly transfer the gravel on my hands onto my knee instead. Durr.
I sit there for a bit, pouting. I'm barely 1/4 of the way through my run, I was sooooo excited to be running outside...and now I have to turn back? Lame. And then I decide that since I'll have to walk/run back home anyway, I'll be running with a bloodied knee regardless...so I may as well finish the run. :D Make my way up to Cold Spring, go up-down in the punishing sun but delightful downhill...and realize that I've forgotten what my next turn is. I continue on, figuring that there'll be a sign for the college...but I never did see one. When I came across a cute little park, I turned in there. And probably scared more than a few kids with That Giantess Woman running by with a Bloody Knee.
the street on the other side of the park looked to have a familiar name, so I turn down it, and am feeling like I'm going parallel to Cold Spring, so in the right direction at least. Also it's a friendlier street with less traffic, wider sidewalks, and more shade. Then lo and behold, I eventually pop out onto University...probably right about at the point that I took my spill earlier on the run. Ahh irony. Made it home and cleaned up -- my knee is throbbing even now, but my foot feels great and my hip feels about the same as it has for about a week (which is to say, not fabulous and pretty snap-crackle-pop-y, sigh).
so I'm proud of myself for doing the run, even dripping blood, even at a stupid-slow pace. (I just found out that one of the guys here at the workshop runs a 5:40 mile. O_O) For reward (okay, actually just because I felt like it and I'm in a spending mood today), I used some birthday money to buy myself this adorable running skirt. Squee!! I ordered it to be delivered to Baltimore, I sho' hope it gets here before I leave. *anxious*
speaking of which -- I'm homeward-bound in 13 days, start the countdown!!!
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July 26th, 2008
10:19 am - watchin the world go by
sitting on the train, from Baltimore to Hartford, and it is a stunningly beautiful day for a train ride. It started out at the ungodly hour of 6:09am -- which hurt a lot after my poor poor decision to stay up til 1:30a last night -- and of course you know I had to get there super early, since I missed the last train I tried to catch. Noticed a few pretty pink-edged clouds through my sleepy haze as I waited at the station, but was too tired to watch more of the sunrise and instead snuggled down into my seat as soon as I got aboard. Snoozed off for a bit until BAM!, brilliant orange sunlight fills my vision and I open my eyes to see the rising sun as we're crossing the harbor. Stunning.
it's been a lot of fun to watch the countryside go by. I was even awake enough to see the NYC skyline as we apprached; I love that skyline.
when I first realized that it'd take me 6 hours to get from here to there, I nearly called it off -- after all, that's about how long it takes me to get home (no layovers or arriving early to get through security), and dang I'm tired of long travels. But as it turns out, the views from a train are way more interesting than from a plane :D so I'm having a good time.
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July 24th, 2008
10:29 am - man down
our machine cluster is down. What's a girl to do? We've already taught each other all of the cool easter eggs in emacs, I have no new mail to read, and all of my data is on the cluster because I'm dumb and trusting like that. Actually it's pretty interesting to see what people do when they've arrived at work only to find that they can't do any work. Lots of surfing, IMing, and paper-reading going on around here. A bit of sudoku as well. Yay geeks.
8:52 is my new mile, though I nearly threw up after the last little sprint. And my face was uber-red for the next half hour. I looked like a very weird tomato, everyone in the gym was looking at me all funny. Ran another v slow mile on top of the first, and it turns out that 2 miles is too far for now -- my hip is all snap-crackle-pop-y today, though my foot still feels pretty great.
the three grad students on my team had lunch together yesterday and we decided to start our own little project, which I think is super awesome and exciting. A bit more work but it should pay off in the end, it's a very-needed software implementation. Also we're being a little bit sneaky about it, not including any of the profs or undergrads, so that's fun too. :) Dang I wish there were more students at my school, we could be doing this sort of thing all the time. This is how academia is supposed to work!!!
I'm toying with the idea of selling out to industry -- it does seem as though the Google-folk (pretty much everyone else here are academics) have more fun, and more freedom to pursue the interesting ideas. But at the same time, that just doesn't have the same prestige as academia, somehow. I'm really really stuck on the idea of being at my 20th (15th? 25th?) high-school reunion and telling people that I'm a professor. I think that probably makes me a snob. :( There are other things that I love about academia, though that's hard to separate from research -- I do love going to conferences, and the fact that attendance at those conferences, and workshops like this one, have made mine a tightly-knit but far-flung community. I think that's awesome. But there will be no academic jobs for me in Portland, which I'm missing a lot, and sad to think of moving away permanently next year-ish. Will I fall just as much in love with my next city as I have with Portland? Hmm.
guess I ought to go work on my reading or dissertation or something productive-like. Or I'll just go spam all of your LJs. :D
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July 15th, 2008
11:08 pm
9:03.
that's my newly-timed mile.
yes folks, that means I. AM. RUNNING. AGAIN!!!!
holy mother of God I cannot express how happy that makes me. I'm going to be very very good about slowly increasing mileage and speed (hey _fool I have an awesome track here for speed drills, can you point me to some urls?). I swear I will behave myself. Um, also? Last I checked I was barely under a 10-minute-mile. Hell yeah!
this message brought to you by the magic of athletic tape. Who needs doctors and heel lifts when a wee piece of paper tape makes everything suddenly and instantaneously better?
p.s. okay I had other maybe-more-interesting things to write about today but fuck that shit I'm finally a RUNNER again! yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
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July 12th, 2008
10:20 pm - the sad, the work, & the worry
for no particular reason, I'm all sad this week. Is worse in the evenings. I'm lonely, for sure, which I think has been intensified by Tristan's visit last weekend. But it feels like more than just loneliness, and it's been a bitch to kick it. Got a little bump up yesterday with a free *bucks frapp, and extended the bump with a beer at the local bar. I'm back down again tonight though. I'm just so very...lackadaisical. (durr, I had to go look that up to make sure it was right.)
the workshop is going okay. My supervisor here was out of town for most of the week, so there was no physical presence to fear-motivate us. I dunno if I've gotten enough done. I did manage to teach myself python (ok it's not hard but it's nice to have under my belt), fixed three stupidlamegodforsaken bugs in this open-source project that we all use (which involved me hacking some perl code to death, ohjoy), and tested the crap out of two of our clusters. Haven't finished the lit review though and didn't have any inspirational thoughts about score interpolation. I'm just...not really sure what it is I'm supposed to be doing. I feel like I should be working harder. Or smarter. But on what? And it doesn't really seem like anyone else is, so...should I be saving my energies for later weeks? *worryworryworry*
well. 3 weeks down, 5 to go. Geez, 5 is a lot still to go. :( But I'm going home next weekend, yaaaaaaaaaaay! It is very possibly the world's most insanely short trip -- I haven't added up the hours but I think it's entirely possible that I'll actually be traveling for more hours than I will be at home. Ah well. I miss all of my friends so badly, it'll be good to see them and hang out at my house.
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July 4th, 2008
03:10 am - failed myself
I just submitted a sub-par paper to a conference. It's not actually my favorite paper I've ever written, and honestly I wish some conference, any conference, would accept it so I could get it off my plate.
but.
I wish I'd given myself more time to work on it. I just barely reached the point where I was able to see exactly how much better the paper could be...but I simply didn't have time to get it there.
bummer.
in related news, the lab that I taught today went really well, and several of the students came up to me afterwards to compliment me on it. :D
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July 2nd, 2008
10:03 pm - identity crisis
for the geeks.
my login out here differs from my login back home only by the position of a single character. It'd be like going back and forth and forth and back between kdaisy and daisyk. My brain and my fingers cannot handle it. Argh.
that's all. Wish me luck for tomorrow, I'll be doing a bit of teaching and I'm nervous about it. Also I have another paper deadline tomorrow midnight. Sigh. Would somebody pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease make all these pesky deadlines go away? thankyouverymuch.
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01:46 am - floaty
I spent much of the afternoon feeling super light-headed. We think because I wasn't eating enough -- had a yummy massive $4 bean burrito at the vegan cafe by my apartment for dinner (which was really bad of me because I bought lunch out too, as well as dinner last night...but fixing food fell to the bottom of my priority list), and I felt better after.
but now I'm feeling floaty for an entirely different reason. And to spread the web-comic love: this xkcd is me tonight. Let me tell ya, kids, if you gotta be coding at 2am on next-to-no sleep, Python is the way to go.
srsly. I may never, ever, ever program in anything other than Python, ever again. holy hell I'm in love. :)
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July 1st, 2008
12:15 am - birthday month
happy birthday-month to me.
you'd think I'd stop celebrating birthdays, since I've started lying about my age. but I think I might go back to telling the truth this year. twas really only last year's age that freaked me out... besides which, I'll always be an 8-year-old at heart, and we love birthdays!!
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June 29th, 2008
10:56 pm - shiny
(+2 if you get the shiny reference -- though I believe I'm spelling it wrong -- by the end of this wee post)
ok, so the work is pretty tough here -- and we haven't even gotten to the hard part yet! -- and I miss my home & my friends terribly.
but.
the weather actually isn't too bad! (Uh. Yet...) The humidity hasn't made me want to kill myself, which is pretty impressive for this desert-lovin gal. And we have thunderstorms most every afternoon, which I love & reminds me of Denver. And...
THEY HAVE FIREFLIES HERE!!
omg. So awesome. I luuuuurve fireflies. omg omg omg. :D
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June 27th, 2008
11:37 pm - the worst of me
excuse me while I whine for a minute. I've the feeling that out here, I'm coming off as the worst aspects of myself -- whiny (yes I know, the irony...), bossy, impatient, workaholic.
nobody out here likes me. And I guess I can't really blame 'em.
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June 25th, 2008
09:44 pm - welcome to the neighborhood
random comments on my new city. Holy crap taxes suck here!! I swear it's something like 30%. (Okay I could go look that up but I'n lazy.) Which is a nasty, nasty change from Portland's 0% taxes. :( But gas is cheaper! I found a few places where it was under $4! Which doesn't help out carless me a heck of a lot. But still interesting to see. And holy hell the roads are craptastic. Supernasty pot holes, big ol gappy grates, mean ol drivers. But, terrifying as it was to be out on those crappy roads on my less-than-awesome bike (for which I bought new tires today, which actually did improve the ride much to my surprise), it was nice to see a bit more of the area I'm living in right now. I had been feeling a bit like this; I knew the path from my apartment to lab & lecture, and that's it. I didn't even know what else might be nearby. Yay exploring. And while we're on the topic of phdcomics, I got my lab keys yesterday...and they're shaped just like my apartment key. Which can only lead to this.
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June 24th, 2008
06:20 am - give back
or, quit while you're ahead. I'm actually pretty good at that -- while playing the slots in Vegas with Tristan, I was nearly always the one to say, ok, you've hit the big one on that machine (or as big as you're gonna hit today on that machine, anyway), time to move on to something else.
but I was terrible at realizing when a machine just wasn't giving anything back. I remained ever-hopeful, and Tristan was always the one to say, hey, that machine sucks, why don't you move on to that one over there. (Also, he was excellent at sending me off to a winner of a machine. Twas awesome.)
it's just occurred to me that one of my projects for my dissertation -- my MT project -- has never, ever given anything back. And it sucks all of my energy. And it's buggy. And it's confusing. And it takes forever to run the simplest thing.
should I move on to something else? Can I?
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June 23rd, 2008
07:27 am - tucked in & tuckered out
when I was a child, I used to like to sleep with the sheets & blankets tucked tightly in all around me. I'm not sure when I stopped, but sometime in college. My college roommate used to make fun of me for making my bed, and while I never did give that up -- I still make my bed most mornings -- I did stop being so anal about it. My bed here was all made up hotel-style, all tucked in all around, and I immediately & unthinkingly pulled the blankets out along one side. Maybe I should go back to my childhood ways this summer.
brought to you by my sleepless night.
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