To Sound Out Loudly
My typing hands are reaching puberty, but their lack of skill is kinda Alzheimerey. The more I type, the worse I get. My fingers slack off because the feel of the high impact plastic keys is so familiar and boring, and goddammit they ain’t gonna perform unless it’s a challenge. Most recently, they’ve totally given up on the ‘c’ in .com. Every domain name I type ends up with the sanskrity .om ending, instead. What is required, I think, is a more exciting keyboard. Astroturf. Deep pile. Something like that.
I’m free! Ish. I passed my A exam last week and spent the next four days slacking off down and out and about and around in Manhattan, with G. It was glorious. Of course now all my attention is getting redirected onto the spoilheaps of real work, which got neglected during the exam prep process.
But my evenings have returned. Instead of wandering through the back through the rain into lab after dinner I can do less useful activities, like tidying my room, and amending my tax return, and watching stuff on the internet. Like Primer (which is Netflixable, digital kids), one of the best science fiction films I had never heard of. It combines the most accurate depiction of what doing science is like (except for the slightly too snazzy dressing and groomedness), with the mental loop-the-loops of Mulholland Drive. It also cost less than $7000 to film.
You know it’s gotta be fantastic when the plot is explained like this:
Lots of thumbs up! Except if they are hitting the spacebar.
More soon…
Pre-Capped Edges
My seat is warm. My newly revived, re-batteried laptop radiated into it like a huddled puppy. Visualizations are falling and firing all over the front of my monitor, over there on the desk.
My exam is almost over. Almost. I need to shore up some simulations of DNA getting stretched, and rescale some graphs, and describe everything in a few thousand words… but the bulk of everything has happened already. I don’t miss the three weeks of 11 hour days.
It is nice in lab at night though. We work in a large basement. A very large basement. At the beginning of the year we irregularly get undergraduates wandering lost into the lab, begging for directions to the exit. During the not-seeable daylight there are gallons of physicists filtering around the corners and doorways and pipe-chases. After 8pm the numbers drop off. I can walk down the long corridor while pretending to draw in the far wall with my thoughts, without anybody interrupting the line of sight.
Late, alone in the lab I’ve been cranking out mad tunes:
Well, not Glenn Gould… but that Liszt transcription of Beethoven 6. I used to not like the 4th movement as much as the 1st and 3rd, and now its starting to become my favorite. Well, second favorite. Those first few notes still reign supreme.