This blog post brought to you by this song, on repeat forever:
Meghan Trainor - All About the Bass

I just got back from babysitting Sola, Harrison and Rocket in Colorado. The trip was the perfect shot in the arm; I feel eleventy-billion times more energized and focused than before I left.

The second day there (Thursday) I had to help Harrison with his math homework, which he seems to dread. He's in seventh grade and his class is learning how to add and subtract fractions expressed in various forms (mixed numbers, fractions, and decimals). He was panicked for the first hour or so, thinking that we wouldn't finish before bedtime and he'd get no time to go play outside. It took a lot of patience and ordering him to focus and try again, but once he picked up how to convert fractions to decimals by long division, he was so excited he seemed to forget about playing outside. There were many high-fives involved.

Like so.

After we finished and he was putting his papers away, he stopped, threw his arms in the air and yelled "Fractions!"
     It was gratifying to make so much progress with him, but in addition to that, even when he was having a hard time I enjoyed teaching him. The more I tutor math, the more I love it; I feel totally in my own element. Each person offers a new puzzle of finding the right way to communicate, and I'm good at it. So gratifying. I think I'm going to post some more flyers on campus offering math tutoring.

So that was Thursday; skipping ahead to Saturday, I went to the dog park with Julie and Denny -

I left off the blog post here but I'm not gonna finish it now. Too long ago. The dog park was awesome. The end.

     So I guess this is going to be a once-a-month sort of deal. Except it's November now. You may assume this means absolutely nothing happened to me in October. Except I quit the lab I was working in, I flew to San Francisco for fleet week and probably ran a couple of miles up and down the stairs at Dad's place, Ellen came down to UCSD and applied for their med program, one of my roommates suffered a severe tragedy, and I went to a spoken-word concert that kicked ass! But besides that, absolutely nothing happened in October.

So right, November! I started practicing piano again in the past week and I can't believe I've taken this long. The third floor of UCSD's music center is made entirely of piano practice rooms! The only caveat is they're pretty packed with actual music majors most of the time, but I get in when I can. Just practicing scales, chords and posture so far, but even that's gratifying.
     I was in a pretty good mood coming back from campus today until I got to my car and saw that I'd been left a ticket for "no registration showing." It's for $37.50 which, after living in San Francisco, seem pretty light. Normally I'd only be a little aggravated except:
A) I have updated registration stickers on my rear license plate
B) They wrote me the same ticket two months ago and I came back to the police station and got them to sign a correction waiver which reduced the fee to $10, and I paid it.
C) The ticket has a comment that says the "NO TEMPORARY/CHECKED ALL WINDOWS" which means it's definitely bullshit.

     See, I don't have stickers on my front plate. I don't know if there's a law that you have to have them showing on front and back, but I might have thought that's what the ticket was for. But the fact that he remarks that he checked for a temporary registration means he supposedly looked for any evidence at all that I had a registration. As if, had I shown that I had a temporary, I would not have received a ticket. But the sticker on my REAR LICENSE PLATE wasn't sufficient proof that my registration is up to date?
    So now I'm pissed, cause I think this cop (or these cops, I don't remember who wrote me the ticket in September) is just fabricating tickets cause he knows it's my word against his. I'm going into the station tomorrow to talk to them about this. Fingers crossed they'll just void it and give that officer shit about his bullshit ticket writing. I don't want to go to court to challenge it, but I will.

That Maddening Itch

I remember Dad taking us to the archery range when we were kids. During one of these excursions, several of us were sitting in the field watching gophers pop in and out of their tunnels while Julie practiced. Dad was recounting his experience after moving to California, when he was still searching for a job and fighting to make ends meet. He told us that when you’re really struggling – when all your life seems to be falling apart – your worst enemy is your own mind. If you can’t calm your mind – if you can’t stop yourself from dwelling on all the problems you have to solve – your body will practically eat itself alive. You’ll stop sleeping and eating as well, and you’ll never quite be able to fully relax. That’s one of my most poignant, distinct memories of Dad’s lessons.

But not quite as distinct as this.

I’m glad to say that my life is not that bad by any stretch. But I often struggle with not being able to quit thinking. For instance, I’m at Starbucks right now, reading Atlas Shrugged. I love this book, and in any case I need to read it for a scholarship essay. I also have the next four days off, and I’m not even in the middle of a quarter.

That being said, I still have this perpetual nagging feeling in the back of my mind, this mad itch to achieve something. I skip fleetingly between various ideas; part of me wants to learn everything I can about tax law – to start the project of creating a comprehensive map of the entire tax system in the U.S. Part of me wants to design some kind of circuit – any kind of circuit, as long as it has some function. Part of me wants to study MySQL. Part of me wants to work for Charter. I keep having these brief thoughts interrupting my reading, and as a consequence I end up re-reading sentences or paragraphs when I realize the for the past several seconds or minutes, I’ve been reading one thing while dwelling on another.

I know the difference too, between how I read now and how I read when I’m fully focused, because when I’m completely focused on a book I burn straight through it. This is why I started a journal, in fact. I have a written and electronic journal. Writing clears my mind, as if I’m literally emptying my thoughts onto paper (or in this case, into the internet).

There’s a dude wearing headphones sitting about three feet in front of me. He keeps rubbing his temples with his eyes closed and an intense look of…some kind of passion, it seems. He looks pretty damn focused on whatever he’s listening to.

In the Friggen Beginning

Hmm...blogging. My sister Julie does this and I thought, "Hey. Great idea. Why haven't I started this already?"

Well the short version is I don't imagine I have the time and I'm not practiced in sharing information about my day-to-day life with people. For instance, right now my panic level increases by 1/1000 of a unit per word I type, because I have five readings to complete for my Philosophy of Mind class before next Wednesday and probably a chapter of microeconomics to complete by Monday. Also, I should be finding time to work for Charter more cause I need that cash money. Cash money is only second to chocolate money.

Fact: Life does not get better than this.

But you know...screw it. I'm gonna do this anyway. It will challenge me to have something new to report at least once a week just so I have something to write about. Most of my weeks look something like this:

Ballpark, anyway.

I really enjoy the lab I'm working in. They study hematopoiesis in zebrafish, which for all intents in purposes means a lot of molecular biology work for me. I've learned how to perform PCR, run electrophoresis gels, screen zebrafish (adults and embryos) for fluorescent tags, isolate plasmids from bacteria cultures, and prepare a hell of a lot of stock solutions for the lab. But the truly awesome part of working the lab is working with Claire. She's very direct and immediately calls you out when you make mistakes. That might sound harsh at face value, but it also means I never have to wonder whether or not I'm doing well because I always get immediate feedback from her. She also seems genuinely interested in acting as a mentor, not just having an undergrad to work for her.  We take time on roughly a bi-weekly basis to discuss the big picture and all the science behind her experiments. I'm constantly learning.

YAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!

This blog entry is taking too friggen long. I'm done now.