Life

for so many reasons. Maybe, with all my escapades, it already is. I don't own a dictionary or thesaurus; someone should check it out for me sometime.

How's life? Wonderful. Horrible. I had a dramatic breakdown (school-centered) one evening last week. But mostly wonderful. I'm so lucky.

I'm looking forward to Lent/Easter. I think I like it more than Advent/Christmas. I'm an ascetic by nature (pure proof that I am my father's daughter), which is weird but something I have come to accept. And my second happiest memory ever (my wedding is the first) is of Easter Vigil, sophomore year.

Something just struck me: you know what I might be able to do next November? NaNoWriMo. I won't be in classes full time for the first November in six years, so it's conceivable I'll have a couple of hours to myself a couple of nights per week. Of course I can easily pick three (four? I'm not going to take the time to tease through them now) story lines that I've played out fully in my head, beginning around age 10, so it's just a matter of putting pen to paper--or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be.

Derek refuses to discuss baby names for our hypothetical future children. He says we'll have plenty of time for that once we actually start having kids. The baby fever has returned. Is it cyclic? I seem to remember feeling this way last winter/spring. However, I now have yet another reason to avoid childbearing at this stage in life: apparently stress causes a tendency toward the conception of more males than females, in a population. Given the hell-raising quality of my dear husband during his early years, I'd prefer a female first. Either would be belovedly wonderful, but I was as easy a baby as they come, and it would be nice to have an easy firstborn. Now = stress, so unless a happy accident comes along, no kids for me.

Speaking of hell-raising, the kitten attempted, and failed, to leap to the kitchen countertop this evening. However, he was not that far off. Soon I'll have to remember to keep all food away in cupboards. He's shown some persistence, too, with closed packages, so even those may not be safe.

He's a delight, by the way. He loves to attack Derek's feet when in "crazy kitty" mode (unfathomable mad dashes, leaps, and pounces), but not mine, which is heartily amusing for me and unfortunately painful for my mate.

Of course I should be studying. Story of my life. But a totally innocuous thing reminded me today that everything is going beautifully in spite of people on the East coast (friends, family, teachers, freaking doctors who should know better) always getting their knickers in a twist about my choices. So I'm going to be a total brat for half a moment and just let the world know that my marriage is incredible, I'm not pregnant, and I'm at an awesome university getting my PhD. Sure, things could have gone wrong somewhere along the way these past six or seven years, but I was a mature, intelligent young woman who took calculated risks and ended up as happy as I could possibly be right now. So quit being so narrow-minded, coastal world. There's not one pre-defined route to happiness that fits everyone.

Oh, and if you're reading this, I'm not talking about you.

Now I have to go knock on wood until my knuckles bleed lest this post cause catastrophe by angering the fates.

Advent is upon us. I quite like Advent. Unfortunately I have no Advent calendar, nor even a wreath with pretty candles to light, but neither of those is a terribly horrendous thing to be without. I do have Thin Mints, after all, so I really shouldn't be asking The Universe for anything more.

I am anticipating Christmas mightily, because it will be my first Christmas with the Benz family, and I do like them so much. I'm looking forward to learning the ins and outs of their celebratory practices. Also preparing Christmas food and/or cookies with Mom B will be fun. Their decorations, as I learned when I visited them a week or two after Christmas one year, are also a sight to behold. Lots of those little houses and people getting up to all kinds of fascinating antics.

Our decorations, meanwhile, are scandalously scant. We have a single 18 inch wreath with little lights on it, whose power cord is so short that we can't hang it more than one foot off the floor. It's therefore resting on the half wall between our dining room and living room. Around it are six Star Wars Christmas ornaments (one from my father, the others from some murky time in Derek's past), and in its center stands a Yoda dressed as Santa. That came from Pop B. And that's it. I've been aiming myself toward the Basilica gift shop over the past couple of days to get a nativity set (and maybe a kid-friendly one for James! Wouldn't that be adorable?), but work and school keep getting in the way and I don't get home until dark. It will take much more pressing matters than nativity hunting to get me out of the apartment after dark, when drug dealers and (probably harmless) homeless men tend to hang around the outer walls of the complex.

I should get back to my work. Work right now is grant writing, biostatistics, and this weekend, the structure and function of the auditory and vestibular system. Not bad work, all in all. Certainly I prefer it to my beloved's, which is studying for four more lawyerly finals (one down!).

and I'm still feeling overwhelmed. But tomorrow evening I will be able to breathe a well-earned sigh of relief that I will have zero (!!!) immediate assignments breathing down my neck. I think I will play Secret of Mana, clean the bedroom some, and catch up on grantwriting for IMP.
But for now, back to work on my journal club presentation for tomorrow. At least it's about telepathy, which is fun.

But I'm not. I will be very shortly. There's much to do, and little time in which to do it. Is it bad that school has barely started, yet already I'm overwhelmed? Dishes, meetings, this symposium thing, research, classes, funding, homework, cantaloupe, friends, all seem to demand my time. I think the problem is that I have too many friends. I've been trying hard not to accumulate them, but after twenty-three years of life one can't help but have a few. If I were a nameless desert hermit, neither friends nor cantaloupe would be on my mind. Maybe cacti would, though, so that's a net loss of only one time-consuming item.
By the way, if you're reading this post you're not the friends I'm talking about. And I do appreciate all friends heapily; it's just that some of them take up lines in my planner.
The actual problem is these Boy Scouts. Ten hours per week sounded a lot less strenuous when I was told I could do it on nights and weekends. But no, it's days and weekdays, which will be highly problematic until I can train myself to consider the first half of Saturday and the second half of Sunday (woe unto me who breaks the Sabbath) as workdays.
The other actual problem is that I picked up a book I liked. Hiss, fiction, how evil. The ultimate bane to a productive Heather.

(Prologue: Raise a bright girl feeling mostly isolated from her peers. Make books her early and primary companions. Introduce her to an author who is not only certifiably genius, but a prodigy on about three levels. Add to that the fact that he's an older, cultural Jew from New York--for whatever reason, her intellectual wavelength most aligns with older culturally Jewish men from New York--and you have the ability to implant within the depths of her soul a concept that will represent true love to her for all time. Realize that one of the ways her husband wooed her when they were younger was through this love.)

I think the subject matter of this post is something few people understand. I haven't met anyone yet who would, anyways. I mean, the words and the emotions will all make sense, but the gentle reader would never apply them to these circumstances. Oh well. Just pretend I'm writing about two actors--say, brothers--who have extraordinary charisma and charming voices, and only sign on for projects with great writers. Every line is perfect, and is delivered with such beauty that your day brightens instantly and wholly because of it. Note that they need not be physically attractive. Alright, without further ado:

I saw WALL-E last night. The moment I watched my first WALL-E preview, I knew this would utterly trump all other Pixar movies (which I quite enjoy) for me. I was rather disgruntled when not only Derek's mother, but his sister and my soul mate himself all declared it looked awfully silly. "Don't worry," I said within myself to the little WALL-E. "I'll love you." In circumstances such as these, you see, I believe in love at first sight absolutely. A story need have only a few instantly-recognizable characteristics for me to fall head-over-heels for it: cute, quirky robot with fun "voice"; love of man, man's works, and all creation; soul.

So Derek (bless his heart for giving up two other exceptional-looking movies to see this) and I went to see it last night. It was of course--take a quick peek at Rotten Tomatoes--superb. Beyond that. Instantly one of my favorite movies. I will buy it and start my kids on it when they're two years old. Maybe eighteen months. I have a desire deep within me to find a WALL-E toy.

Now those of you who are sharp will have figured this last bit out already. It was only after we'd seen the movie that Derek and I went puttering around Wikipedia and found the puzzle piece that completed the picture of "Why is this movie me?"

BEN BURTT (emphasis required), the sound tech who did all of R2-D2's "voicing," was also the sound tech who did all of WALL-E's. In the words of the director himself (and I quote Wikipedia), "I'm basically making R2-D2: The Movie."

A reflection of life after eight months of marriage and seven months of grad school:
It's nice. I am stressed a lot by school-guilt: "Am I working enough? I am not working enough! They're giving me way too much money for me not to be pulling three all-nighters a week and churning out papers and beautiful results and...stop. Take a chill pill. Slow and steady. It's a steep learning curve. You're supposed to be focusing on classes for now. You know nothing now, but a year from now you'll be an old pro...I hope." However, constant efforts to talk the guilt into a closet and engage myself in enjoyable activities with husband and friends have by and large made it manageable.

Derek is just as nice (or rather, rascally, exasperating, and entertaining) as he was before I married him. We're still definitely floating along our little honeymoon period, which I hope never ends. My primary effort over the past few days has been to get him to let me make sorta-sushi again. I think he fears the shrimp still. His view of shrimp was forever adjusted (to be more similar to my view of shrimp) when we bought 1.9something pounds of uncooked shrimp from the Korean market and dumped them in a pot. When they came out of the pot the smell was strong (which he didn't like), he had to pull the legs off all of them (which was tedious and a bit unpleasant), and I had to devein them (which repulsed him entirely). Of course, if this means he never wants shrimp again I'm in heaven--except that he only ate a half dozen or so that day, and we still have 1.8something pounds of frozen shrimp to get rid of. Oh well, this too shall pass. I adored my sorta-sushi that was just rice, cucumber, pickled ginger, and a dip's worth of soy sauce. Can't wait to have it again.

We watched Enchanted the other night--I could not remotely believe Derek agreed to do so, but he did--and we both really enjoyed it. For me it was a pleasant expectation fulfilled, and for him it was a total and complete surprise to find such a silly, girlie movie so humorous and enjoyable. I think our favorite moment may have been when Prince What's-his-name called the lawyer and his daughter "peasants" when thanking them for taking care of his fairytale bride-to-be. It was just such a perfect delivery. Anyways, all of this makes me hope that someday we'll watch another "girlie" movie. It's not that I mind having myself elevated by thought-provoking, critically acclaimed movies for the intelligentsia, or getting in touch with my masculine side by seeing high-intensity action flicks; it's just that I need a break from them every so often. Veronica Mars used to be that break, but we're deep into the third season and slowing down. It's not nearly as good as the first season.

Friends-wise, I have a really great group of fellow neuroengineers, most of whom are Catholic and one of whom is Mormon. This was a surprising and somewhat strange but pleasant enough discovery. My nerdy side is also very satisfied by (oh dear) our very own couples DnD campaign with two other couples/soon-to-be-marrieds. It's also devastatingly delightful to be near a whole gaggle of SRers, and devastatingly depressing to be so far from the Case crew. I did get to visit NC and Duke (my very favorite campus ever, even above Hopkins) and Srujana! There are also weddings that will bring us near Case people this spring, and thoughts about visiting John at Yale while Sandhya visits Elizabeth (her best friend) at Yale. Thus might the Utahan and the Marylanders convene in New Haven.

And then there's the social responsibility fulfilled by helping out the awesome Hopkins-tutors-disadvantaged-Baltimore-teens program. Yay for a really beautiful, happy life. So beautiful and happy that I'm pretty sure something tragic will have to happen soon in order to shift me down toward the peak of the Gaussian Distribution of Life, instead of where I am in my little tail several standard deviations of joy away from the rest of the world. If my metaphor made sense to you, let me know what chi-squared and p values are. I have to take a statistics class next semester to refresh myself on those, but all that could be avoided with a simple explanation.

I like furniture; it's fun. Our newest additions are a wall-mounted coat rack (does that even count?) and, at long long long looooong last, a chest of drawers. Both are of course from Ikea, which has my eternal and undying customer loyalty for its awesomeness. The chest of drawers means we have finally arrived at the point at which, under typical clean apartment circumstances, there need be no clutter whatsoever anywhere (somewhere in the background, angels are blowing trumpets and singing "alleluia"). Derek put it together, which earned him major brownie points.

My poor husband has caught some nasty bug or other and is suffering mightily, with noble and handy trashcan R2-D2 by his side to help out with the monsoon of Kleenex he's been producing. While I do my best to scrounge Dayquil and Pepsi for him, I have as many fingers as I can manage crossed so that I don't catch it. He thinks he got it due to karma for missing classes Thursday and Friday. In that case, I will definitely not catch it, since I've been spending more time in class and lab than ever before. That leads to the reason I can't afford catch anything just now: my major ate-the-entirety-of-January BME project is due on Feb 4th, along with accompanying patent and poster, and if that's going to happen there has to be so much productivity this week that Greenspan would be sick. The next week is no walk in the park either, since I have to totally revise a grant application I'm writing for this Hopkins group that does amazing work with flunking (possibly violent, drug-involved, troubled) high school students.

The BME project is also the reason I'm up so late. Today Derek and I broke out the black spray paint, shiny finish, and sanding block to make the casing prettified. It's been well blackened, but is still in the shinification process. The time between drying is annoying, but has given me a chance to catch up on my Google Reader. In fact, I'll go sand now, add some more shine, and then settle in for some sweet dreams.

On a parting note, though, I've really enjoyed this project. Getting the sound chip to talk to us, blinking little tri-color LEDs like Christmas lights, and playing with these awesome stretch sensors have been the highlights of the past month (other than furniture).