Talking to thin air

It is practically a miracle. I had to finish my paper on the Santalales for my plant evolution class, and just barely got it done. The actual paper is definitely not my best; I should have done more background research on other groups, rather than limiting it to the Santalales. Hopefully it is coherent, though. At the very least, I got to learn how to use LaTeX, which I have been wanting to do for a while! It is really easy, actually, once you get the hang of it. And it's a lot easier to not get bugs, so that's good.

Otherwise ... I am so far behind on NaNo, but I am close enough that I can practically taste victory!!! I got my NaNo poster today, and am now vaguely inspired to go off and write my remaining 9,000 words.

I really should clean up my room, though. It looks like a hurricane swept through it, and I don't really have anywhere to walk.

This week was absurdly long. I spent a lot of time in the lab learning more pollen processing, and got to look at sediment cores (!) on Wednesday. Wednesday night was the second Evolutionary Bio exam, so I spent a lot of time on Tuesday and Wednesday tutoring/TAing (or whatever it should be called). I spent at least three hours on Thursday evening working with one student who completely bombed the first exam, so hopefully she did better on the second one. She got to take it late because, on top of doing horribly the first time, she also had pneumonia for the past two weeks. Talk about a tough time!

On Thursday during Human Evolution section, we got to look at bones. BONES!!!!!!!! Okay, bones are really really cool. It's amazing how it's possible to look at a bone and figure things out about its history—not just in the evolutionary sense (is it a tetrapod? a synapsid?), but also in the forensic anthropology and taphonomic sense. I LOVE BONES. I tried to go to my professor's office hours on Thursday to ask about bones we didn't talk about in class, but he wasn't there; so, I'm going to go back on Monday.

I confess that my enthusiasm for bones makes me think that vertebrate paleontology might actually be something I'd want to study—after all, you pretty much get to spend a lot of time looking at bones. Unfortunately, you might have to spend a lot of time dissecting things too, which is not exactly something I want in my future. Alternatively, human evolution would be cool, but I do NOT want to go to grad school in an anthropology department, so I think human evolution is off the table. Finally, forensic anthropology would be SO COOL, but unfortunately I would have to 1) go to grad school in an anthropology department, and 2) probably have to dissect humans, which is even worse than other things.

Yesterday (Friday) I graded exams in the morning, then went for a meeting with Dimetrodon which she couldn't make because she was stuck in traffic, then went back to grade some more exams, then went to a TA meeting for Evolutionary Bio (whose exams I was grading), then went to class where we started to learn officially how to use Praat (which I already know how to use), then went to a meeting with someone who had worked at the Smithsonian as an intern five summers ago, then met with Dimetrodon about my thesis, then lost my keys and went traipsing around campus to find them before realizing I'd just left them in the lab, then saw a hawk outside of House and spent fifteen minutes staring at it, then went to dinner where I consumed copious amounts of ice cream, then went to the Juggler's a capella concert (she joined Disney a capella), then talked to the Tower for a little while about Merlin, then went to the Roommate's a capella concert, then went to bed.

It was a long day, as that extremely long run-on sentence demonstrates.

Anyway ... I finally this morning sent off an email to someone at the Smithsonian, so hopefully he will get back to me and I will have a job for next year! Of course, hopefully he will actually be able to pay me, but. The Roommate is going to talk to someone one Tuesday about what she would do at the Smithsonian. Hopefully everything will work out, and I will actually be able to call her my roommate without sort of kind of maybe lying.

And now, as a reward for finally finishing that email, I am going to work on my NaNo outline. I should do something important, but alas, I am not going to.

This was possibly the weirdest episode of Doctor Who I've ever seen.  ( Spoilers, of course. )

I'm glad that we have Doctor Who Sunday this afternoon, so that I can watch it again and hopefully get a better handle on what happened. There was so much switching back and forth in time that it was very confusing.

In other news, last night (yes, SATURDAY NIGHT!) I think I started to partially repair my relationship with one of my geo professors. We had a bit of a difficult time when I was in her class, because I like to ask questions and she thought my questions were stupid; whether they were or not I have no idea. But anyway, she came into the undergrad geo room to get ice cream, and I was there reading for Human Evolution, and we started talking. I explained about how I had started working on my thesis 1.0, and how I'd learned a lot about what kind of lab work I definitely don't want to do, but how I'd also figured out about how much I like doing research. It's all about the most tedious part of the job—if I can handle the most tedious part, it'll be fine. Anyway, it was good to know that not everyone in every department hates me. (Yes, I know, "hate" is a bit of a strong term; more, like they think I'm too much trouble. Which I probably am, but that's okay.)

Well, at least I know of a few professors who like me, and are willing to write me good recommendations. At a certain point, with all the switching around through departments that I've done, that's the most important thing.

After some back and forth on my classes, I've finally settled down to my thesis, phonetics, plant evolution, and human evolution.  Japanese has, sadly, been left behind.  After not doing any Japanese last weekend, and then panicking because I was supposed to write an essay for Tuesday that I didn't do, and after not turning in the homework on Monday, and after missing class two days in a row to go to the dentist ... it just didn't seem worth it.  If Japanese is going to be that big of a headache all term, it's not worth it.  I don't want to spend that much time learning to write anyway, and it meets every single day.

So basically, sad but pretty much inevitable.

On the other hand, that means that means that I am currently only taking three classes, because my thesis hasn't started yet; and one of those classes is Human Evolution.  The class must be filled with freshmen, because the professor thinks we're all idiots.  I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing; it is definitely too low level for me.  Hopefully it will just be this beginning section, where we cover basic evolution and genetics.

Anyway, this basically means that all my classes so far are easy, and I am actually ahead on the reading.  This is actually encouraging, because it means not only will I (theoretically, anyway) have more time to work on my thesis when my advisor gets back, but I also might not actually be totally crazy when I think that I might want to study evolution in grad school.  It depends a lot on how my thesis goes, and how the Year of Staring at Fossils goes (hopefully it will happen!), but I am encouraged by this admittedly short test period for me, studying evolution.

In actual news, I went to a talk yesterday by the authors of Stealing Rembrandts, and, in typical me fashion, asked a lot of questions, so one of the authors decided to give me a free copy of the book.  Yay!  It'll be like reading about White Collar, just ... real, and probably not so high-tech!