Thinking about England again

When I first got back from England October last year. I was homesick for the place as if I had lived there for years. I listened to the song's on this band stornoway's myspace page and lilly allen's myspace page and vampire weekend's myspace page over and over again, just because they made me feel like the place. Dunno why, but they did. I have since gotten over this. It almost seems like a hassle to go back right now.
Until recently.

Now it all seems just right.

I've started listening to Stornoway again.

FUEL UP - Stornoway

Curled up in the back of the car
Nine years old you don't know where you are
And your head's on the window, your eyes are just closed
There's a voice in the front and a hush on the road
You're a passenger but your mind is travelling on.

Open your eyes and you're nine years older
Hands on the wheel and you're racing on over
To lie with your first love, you can't wait to see her
You borrowed the car and you think you're the driver
But now you're the passenger to your own heart
and it takes you travelling, travelling on.

When the morning broke and the sky fell down
It went black as night and the wind blew round
And stole your directions, you lost your way home
And you felt like a passenger left by the road
But I'll tell you the reason you couldn't get home
Cause there's nowhere you've been and it's nowhere you're going
Home is only a feeling you get in your mind
From the people you love and you travel beside
You may feel like a passenger but now you're the driver
You've got to go travelling, travelling on
Because if you break down, it's a cold, hard shoulder

So fuel up your mind and fire up your heart and drive on
Drive on, drive on
And when your days are darker, put your foot down harder
Drive on, drive on.

And it's nine more years you've been driving now
But tonight you're stumbling through your old town
You met up with a schoolfriend who's still just the same
And you talked all the same shit you talked in those days
And now you're drunk and you're sad for the old times passing you by
For there's no rewind so you might as well play while your time is rolling away
And get back on the road, it's a beautiful day
Pick up all the friends you can find on your way
And if you lose direction they'll be there guiding you on
Guiding you, guiding you on.
Because we're all going the same way down this long road
Yes, we're all bound the same way down this long, long road.

So fuel up your mind and fire up your heart and drive on
Drive on, drive on
And when your days are darker, put your foot down harder
Drive on
Fuel up, and drive on
Fuel up, and drive on
Drive on.

I like blogger

So I'm in the process of trying to make like... a "public persona" on the internet. It's so bizarre to like... decide which parts of me should be shown to the public and which shouldn't. The weirdest part about it, is that the people whose tweets I follow and whose blog posts I read occasionally really seem like they leave nothing except their exact name and location at the door. But it's obviously not the case.

It's confusing.

Anyway, dunno if this blog will continue, or if I will decide to use IT as a part of my public persona. But then I'll have like four million avatars. Maybe I'll migrate this blogspot thing to "frostedbeagels.blogspot" so that my frosedbeagels twitter coordinates to my personal blog and my thegreatantidote blog coordinates to my dagreatantidote twitter. One public and the other private. Note: there is apparently a character limit on twitter account names, such that I had to use "da" instead of "the". When I realized this I got a little happy inside, cause it meant that I could use the nickname "Lady daGA". Lol. Dork.

Also. I like blogger. I've been checking out posterous and wordpress for this more professional internet Sonya, and so far I am not impressed. We'll see. I feel like blogger is increasingly becoming extinct, but I'm not quite sure why.

At least it's not Xanga.

Not about women and kids

I almost posted this as a comment on someone's blog who was legimately having a conversation about it and talking about women and kids and work and whatever. Really I respect that, but this is more about the conversation in general than the place of women and kids, which I think is a much more complex issue.

I just want to say this, almost to see if I'm the only one who feels this way. I just started grad school a year ago, and at that time the place I'm at had all these things about the "work-life balance" and I thought it was great. I was like "yay, they DO care about me." Now one year in, I'm pretty tired of hearing about it, and am not looking forward to having the discussion every year of grad/postdoc/assprof/prof as if it is some sort of new phenom that is exclusive to academia. It's just life. Work is a part of life, if your having a problem and wish you watched more TV with your hubby, then do it. If your job doesn't let you do that and you want to, find another job. I don't mean to sound bitter, but I guess I am reminded of that time when I was a senior in high school and there was a "what to expect in college" forum for a bunch of us nerds, and this girl asks if there's time to have a social life in college, and the guy just looked at her as if she was crazy.

I think I just got something...

So Coach Taylor in Friday Night Lights likes to talk about, you know "Going back to why we PLAY football in the first place." It's just a game, it's just for fun. We PLAY it because we like it, because it's a game kids start to play after school in the yard. Forget all this politics and crap, and play the game you love.

I think it's the same with scientists (and probably any other field, too). It's all just a game, just puzzles, just problems you have fun solving. Like a crossword or chess or sudoku, or trying to guess the end of a movie. I think all too often people get bogged down in the seriousness of it. In the money, in the personal reputations, in the livelihood they hope to gain from it. Joy is much simpler than that.

Anyway. I think I've still got that UAH shooting on my mind. Crazy shit, that.

First official work day of the week...

... AND IT'S FRIDAY!



I've been going a little nuts. Just you know... where you start getting pissed at people for no real reason, and get a little passive aggressive. It's happening right now between me and my housemates because we're not used to spending this much time together.

Pictures are from a walk with housemates on Saturday.

Snowed-in Thought of the Day

If Dan is right, and he may just be, especially considering the recent supreme court decision, consumers should seriously be thinking about where they spend their money. I'm not sure exactly how I started thinking about this just now, but part of the development of my train of thought took me back to some stuff in the movie Food Inc. that rung particularly true. Consumers need to treat every dollar they spend as a vote. If you buy a Big Mac, you are saying it's okay for the owner of McDonald's to determine national policy. If the placement of power is determined almost solely by the placement of money, we really need to seriously consider how and where we spend our earnings.

It is possible that a consumer shift toward more responsible companies (I don't know what this would actually entail) could help prevent future fiscal crises. I guess the main problem with this is that if a company (like McDonald's) offers things cheaper than anyone else, than people are more likely to spend their money there, whether or not the company has integrity, especially if they are poor. An interesting problem, though it could probably be better articulated. Anyone have arguments or comments? Economists?

FYI: You can check out the pdf version of the article below here. It just came out last week.

Something wicked this way comes.

I said I'd do it so here it is: the article I just finalized for the Oxford University Biochemical Society's termly magazine Phenotype. The editors were oddly professional, I was rather impressed. You should eventually be able to see this article along with its friends here in the Hilary 2010 issue. There was a lot of other stuff I wanted to talk about like open access journals and the use of blogs etc at conferences, but I was given a word limit, so what can you do?

Welcome to the future.

I was just invited by Heather to write a "Young Lady's Guide to Science in 2010" for the newish blog she is doing with Erin and Courtney. This prompted me to catch myself up on what they've been writing lately. In the process I came across a video mash-up of the major pop songs of the year in Erin's post 'Wrap It Up, 2009', and realized how much more I can link experiences to pop music this year than usual. And it is TOTALLY a good thing. I highly suggest you watch the video (DJ Earworm - United State of Pop ...) , cause it made me super happy about 2009, however morally depraved it might have been. Between ill-advised encounters with boys, a rave, beer pong, spontaneous dance parties, the Gold Room, Hawaii, Oxford, NaNoWriMo, the Pac-10 tournament, making out with a basketball player at the tournament in Minneapolis (oops), Graduation, Obama becoming president, driving to 'work' in Beverly Hills over the summer, the fact that the band is actually going to be on Glee, and realizing that I can use twitter for science, everything seems very incredibly surreal and amazingly possible.

I know all of these things are super shallow, and not really important. But they still make me happy. Another thing that makes me happy: dolphins are people, too?