So I got my final grade back yesterday for the first term (aka three weeks) of the gen chem intensive, and I seem to have acquitted myself more or less admirably with an A-. The final, on which I made a C, was about as tough as I expected, but one question which I should have gotten totally threw me for a loop -- and that was because I came down with a cold the day before the exam, and came in slightly feverish and miscalculated the simple addition that should have given me the molecular weight of carbon dioxide. Oooops. C'est la vie. I had good enough marks in everything else that this didn't take me down too hard. (I thought she'd curved because I thought that mark would give me a B, but no, it turns out that the cutoff for an A- is a little below ninety.)

And then the next day after the finals - new term! Complete with a new teacher (who will, at least, teach us through the second two-thirds of the class.)

Yes, this is definitely chemistry for crazy people.

This morning, on the bus, I met a young OHSU resident. I'm always a little awkward when talking to people who are ahead on the trail (most of the ones I've met so far have been med students) but I think it says much for OHSU and Portland that they've all been quite gracious and not condescending. Heck, even the other pre-meds have been pretty nice. Most PSU professors seem to grade on a model where they will curve up a failing class, but will not curve down an "overly successful" one - and I can't help but think the other way of doing things, the competitive model, is just a total clusterfuck as a way of encouraging people to learn.

In the classes I've been taking, students are happy to help each other, which means that the total average knowledge and understanding of the class goes up. And frankly - given I haven't met a student in there who isn't a pre-health major - we want that. The world deserves doctors that know their stuff.

Tomorrow is the middle of the "term" for this class - that's right, ten days in! - and I think I'm having the kind of meltdown we used to get during MFA residencies, somewhere around the middle of the week: - sleep dep + paranoia + the inability to actually stop because one is in the middle of these ridiculous long days, so Everything Is Awful And They All Hate You And You're Gonna Fail (tm.) Mostly centering around lab stress and the report I had to pull out of my arse in a hurry. Which is a foolish thing to worry about, since even though the TA marks down for small stupid things, it's a pass/fail lab and takes 75% to pass.

So, um, WTF me. Glad I know how to recognize it. :P

As evidence that everything is not awful, they do not all hate me and I'm not going to fail, I got 109% on my first midterm! YAY! There was an extra credit question, and it seems as though I aced that as well as all the regular questions minus one part of one question, and I know exactly what it was and what I did wrong there.

So, in short, today I am splibby. What is 'splibby'? You know when a cat runs up to you and asks to be petted, then bites you, then begs for food, then ignores the food bowl, then gets all wild-eyed and attacks your hair? That is splibby. It means: "There is nothing actually wrong BUT I MUST ATTACK THE DRAPES!"

Word credited to someone in my immediate family/friends circle, not sure whom.

P.S. I am creating a "gpa wank" tag so that people know that all this is wanky! Hi!

P.P.S. In case anyone is wondering WTF is up with my normally mellow self, I've elected to go back to school for the fourth time in order to complete pre-health requirements, with an eye to maybe getting into med school*, and I'm taking this chemistry class that's three terms of Gen Chem in nine weeks, because I am just that crazy.

* - I'm still not sure whether that is what I want. I'm very conflicted between ambition and having a life, and actually more scared of success than failure, but I think I'm just stubborn enough to succeed anyway... And in between all that, I sort of feel weird and bashful about being back at school again. Though it helps that I'm not the only 25+ post-bac student in any of my classes, not by a long shot.

I'm taking a class that even the professor calls "chemistry for crazy people" - three terms of Gen Chem rolled into nine weeks - so here are some chemistry definitions for crazy people.



molarity*: The virtuous character of a chemical solution.

stoichiometry*: Molar equivalency and who do you think you're trying to fool, young man?

F ^-: Either a fluorine ion, or the grade you really don't want.


Note: actually using these definitions in class is not recommended. Except for the one for stoichiometry, which is pretty much accurate. Asterisks are linked to actual definitions, for people curious enough to want them.

...and now for something completely different.

Virgin/whore complex with extra helping of double standards meets snark.

Human history is the story of people doing terrible things to one another, and yet, when I read the fragments of this story, I feel like I'm staring into an infinite chasm, the unending expanse of time and space.

Somehow, this sensation is uplifting.

Perhaps it's the sense that by understanding our trauma, individual or cultural, by staring it in the eye, we gain pieces of ourselves back from it. I read about the Holocaust, and suddenly the irrationally deep fear of being ostracized and destroyed by those higher in the social food chain has meaning and context that I can integrate into my experience of the world. I read about McCarthyism and the scars it left on our society, and suddenly I can see pathos in the knee-jerk anti-intellectualism of American culture, and forgive my country, a little, for being brought up so badly.

Perhaps staring into the abyss that is the sum of our failures reminds me that I can't heal the world myself, that no one person can - which takes a burden from my thoughts, and at the same time, gives me permission to try.

More and more, it seems that cultural memory is extraordinarily essential - to healing, to progress, to life.

You might have noticed I haven't said much, about this and other major events...

This is large, too large, and far away, and sometimes, something happens and I just don't have much to say about it. My voice is just a distraction.

I hope very much that the people are heard and their votes are counted fairly.

...I just walked out of my pre-calc final. This is the class where the teacher's idea of preparing us for a test is giving us a sheet of sample questions and half the answers, many of which are things like "There's a formula for that. Use it." (To be fair, that was on a quadratic equation, so I totally got why. And yet...!) and telling us "Anything we studied in this class could be on the final. You can have whatever you can fit on a 4x6 index card for notes."

Not a bad teacher by any means; just a real hardass. The lectures were pleasant, but dense. I would recommend his class unreservedly to anyone pursuing a tough course of study, who expects to really need the math (such as me) - not so much to anyone who is taking it to fulfill the math requirement on a humanities degree and doesn't care about the material (me several years ago.)

Anyway, I finished all the questions, and checked my work, and although there was one I was unsure about - and sometimes ones I'm sure about bite me in the arse, here - I decided I'd done the best I could, and deposited it in the pile on my teacher's desk. And walked out of there feeling like it was my birthday and Christmas and Hanukkah and the end of a marathon, with that weight off my shoulders.

From what I know of my previous grade and what I can guess of my grade on the final, I probably pulled an A-. The worst I could have done is a B+, and there's a small margin of possibility that I made an A - only possible by a few points.

How much I used to not care about the difference between these grades!

Last night I went with some of my friends to go see a special showing of Missile to the Moon. For those not in the know, we have a lovely historic movie theatre, the Hollywood - my first introduction to Portland was going to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in 2002 in this building full of velvet curtains and weird angles. A group of musicians and actors called Filmusik sometimes does shows there where they play newly composed soundtracks to old films, and especially reclaim weird pulpy stuff.

I had fun with their interpretation of Plan Nine from Outer Space last week, so I came back for more. They showed a colorized print of Missile to the Moon and I showed up sleep-depped, as I'd been running on caffeine and damnedness since 7:30 AM.

Their music and acting was as good as the original movie was bad, and boy was it a stinker. Worse than Plan Nine. But it was sure educational.

Without further ado:

Things I learned from Missile to the Moon

1. Science makes a bubbling sound.

2. You can always tell an escaped prisoner by his immaculately slicked-back pompadour hairstyle.

3. Americans like to wave guns around. (Trufax!)

4. When the escaped convict with his perfect hair has just tried to rape you, and your sweetie's friend responds by engaging him in a match of fisticuffs, the correct response is "Boys, boys, stop fighting!"

5. There are creatures on the moon that look like the Geico Gecko in a KKK suit and indicate menace by doing this autistic-ish flapping gesture.

6. And a creature that looks like a walrus/terrier crossbreed with bits of tarantula and stag beetle grafted on.

7. There are also blue women. With pointy breasts. No men, just women.

8. They know how to belly-dance. And they eat regrettable fifties cookbook food, down to the grapes on toothpicks sticking out grotesquely in every direction.

9. When your husband-to-be has just escaped from kidnap and mind-control by an evil moon woman with awesome facial expressions, the correct response is "Is she prettier than me?"

10. When you put Junior Mints in your pocket and forget about them, they adhere nicely to the face of your cell phone. No, wait, I didn't learn that from the movie; I learned that from putting Junior Mints in my pocket.


Well, I hope you have found this educationally enriching! Toodles!

(If you are wondering what the subject line is about... you simply must read about this schweet act of culture-jamming. Now, to continue...)

I'm finding that I have a fair amount of ability for math, but it is NOT like riding a bicycle. The concepts fade quickly from my mind when I'm not using them.

Since the book only has so many problems to do, I'm signing up for a trial membership on ALEKS to generate daily brain snacks.

(Please, sir, can has moar?)

"Your new card will become active upon activation."

(Email about my PSU student card, through a third-party student banking service.)

http://www.cracked.com/article_17267_truth-behind-obnoxious-assholes-4-pie-charts.html

I'm doing statistics homework involving correlation, and now I have this song stuck in my head:


Something I can't comprehend
Something so complex and couched in its equation
So dense that light cannot escape from

In the dark your brain glows
And it goes way-um way way-um way-um

I know you're a supra genius
I know you're a supra genius

Will you shoot the blue earth down?
In the space station polishing the ray gun
You say correlation is not causation

In the dark your brain glows
And it goes way-um way way-um way-um

I know you're a supra genius


Public service announcement: Soul Coughing is good stuff.

My new job? Has an adding machine. That we use.

...to live in the age of the Internet. It's like concentrated library extract, whenever I want it.

I went to go make myself some black tea, saw we had English Breakfast and Irish Breakfast tea, and wondered, "What's the difference?" So I went and found out that Irish Breakfast tea has more Assam.

Yay information!

Portland State University is exactly the sort of place I would like to host a LARP game - but it would have to be really large-scale, or the players would never run into each other. You'd have to design it so that there were several other active game areas one could run into while looking for any given area. Because navigating the buildings involves getting lost a bunch.

First of all, the campus is part of the city. Which means that there are offshoots everywhere - for example, to get to Student Health Services, you have to cross a couple of streets and locate the office in a corner of a block also occupied by other college buildings and a McDonalds.

Second, the center of the campus is made up of three buildings - Neuberger Hall, Smith Student Union and Cramer Hall. On the ground floor, you walk outside to go between them. On upper floors, they connect via sky-bridges, and - this is the best part - in the basement, they connect via tunnels.

Every floor of each building has at least three separate corridors, which sometimes but not always connect using right angles.

And here's the best part: room numbers aren't always in any particular order.

It took me a week to be able to reliably find my classes. There are computer labs scattered throughout the place - not usually really well labeled with signage. At least twice, I've been on a floor looking for a computer lab I'd been to before and stumbled into a different computer lab.

They all take the same log-in, but it's very weird. You try to go to one place, and get another that serves the same function; as if the passages had changed in the meantime. It reminds me of the way buildings - Ways - are in the Courts of Chaos, from Zelazny's Amber series.

I think if I ran a LARP here, though, it would have to be Call of Cthulhu, and on an extremely grand scale. With scavenger hunt plot elements, and so on. Some oddball student group would be using the building shapes to summon ethereal eldritch horrors from beyond...

On the other hand, I love what it says about Portland that my holds are around 40th in line for geeky recreational reading - a couple of popular neuroscience books in the Multnomah County Library system. (This one, and this one, in case you're wondering.)

Now BED. Have to be up at seven tomorrow - yuck!

I've been looking up neurological topics, pursuing one of my usual obsessions.

Tidbit of interest, from a Wikipedia article on jamais vu, the opposite of deja vu:

Chris Moulin, of Leeds University, asked 92 volunteers to write out "door" 30 times in 60 seconds. At the International Conference on Memory in Sydney last week he reported that 68 per cent of his guinea pigs showed symptoms of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that "door" was a real word.

That's happened to me and I bet it's happened to you - primarily it's happened to me when doing graphic design, editing a font for one particular word on a flier. The word would lose coherence and meaning, and I'd begin to feel like there was something wrong with it.

Knowing this effect can be produced on demand is... to quote Keanu Reeves, "whoa."

In fact, I'm absolutely fascinated with how odd neurological states are triggered. Especially in a "normal" brain, like the one in my head, more or less.

For those of you who just tuned in - or haven't encountered one of my occasional posts on the obsession cluster I have had since the age of six or earlier, being eternally fascinated with seizures and seizure-like states, epilepsy, language processing, aphasia, altered states of consciousness, and related magiconeurological phenomena - well, I think I about covered it in the preceding sentence. And invented a new word, to boot.

Yeah. Um.

Lately I've been reading a lot of medical history, the kind that's written with the same awe and wonder I feel. Sit back and strap in, let go, watch the dots connect... What a rush.

I had a wonderful time at bonobo23's shindig last night at the Horse Brass. Lots of cool people and usually about three conversations going on simultaneously from any potential angle of view - about writing, science, wine-making, Scotch, family life, partying, polyamory and other pertinent things. Good stuff.

Something that struck me about the people there - a unifying characteristic, as it were - was that most of them had a sense of purpose and of going after that purpose. And had done lots of random quirky stuff along the way. I'm just sort of coming to a place where that describes *me*, and it's interesting to reflect off of other people about it.

Overall, a very pleasant evening.

Classes are starting off pretty well (I'm taking precalculus and statistics, in case anyone's wondering.) I'm coming to understand that I walked away from math in the past because I didn't care about it, not because it was too hard: or rather, the reason why it was too hard was because I didn't give enough of a shit to really sit down and dig in. And now I do, so. It might get more challenging in the coming weeks, but these classes really feel like something I can handle.

Also, I just painted the new divider wall in our downstairs area a pleasant shade of brown, and am going to follow up by doing the columns and overhang-thingy in a sandy color. Yay me! Mistint racks are my friend.

I should be packing boxes, but I'm digressing into my head: meanings and double meanings and Mobius loops of significance that come up when I think about what I want to next ink.

For a while now, I've been thinking of getting, across the back line of my shoulders, the T.S. Eliot quote: looking into the heart of light, the silence.

A lot of my mystical experiences have involved that silence, the void that gapes underneath all language and expression, and that line has always struck me as a deep understanding of the thing I am talking about. (Full stanza ahead:)

--Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.*

*(desolate and empty is the sea.)


Thinking on it again just now, I realize that to make this balanced, I should get something in front, in the area of my collarbones, to signify the shout - the artist's act of making sound against the silence, the hum of the Big Bang, the thing we do to fill empty rooms and empty minds. Maybe another line from Eliot, maybe something else...

I'll probably know the right thing when I see it, but any suggestions?

Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente (livejournal here) is a fabulous book, and it's not just about the things it appears to be about. It's about the inherent cruelty of a world where everything is alive (just like in this world, but made explicitly apparent.) It's about being a foreigner, about loss and identity and the nature of ritual, and the nature of meaning - and you can get it here or here, or order through your local bookstore. Highly recommended.