[january] [february] [march] [april] [may] [june] [july] [august] [september] [october] [november] [december]
After sitting for two hours and 226 other numbers, I obtained the last outside single in Dana at housing lottery this evening! I'll be living on the first floor, with my crazy-yet-cool ex-neighbor John Lavinsky as an R.A., which should be awesome. I'm glad to have it all cleared up - now all I need to do is get into all the classes I want for next year and my senior year will be set up and ready to go. If I ever feel personally prepared for it to be my last year at Swarthmore, that is.Yesterday I was in Cornell all but two hours it was open - and I spent those two hours eating. I did go see "Amistad" in the evening after the library kicked me out for the evening - what a terrific film. Powerful and biting, with amazing cinematography and some great performances all around. To decontract from the serious/sad tone we went dancing afterwards - nothing to make you feel not serious like a little bopping to The Spice Girls or the Jackson Five. It was a pretty good day!
It's a cool, rainy april day here at Swarthmore, and I'm in a good state of mind. I finished a rough draft of my English term paper on monday and met with my professor about it today, so I'm a bit less stressed about that impending deadline, and I haven't started stressing too much about the Biochem and Physics exams I have next week.In Cell lab, I'm screening putative aromatic amino acid mutants and soon I'll be dissecting tetrads in anticipation of complementation testing of the new mutants to strains we obtained from the stock center. The semester is coming to a close pretty soon, however, so I need to start working on summarizing the work I've done this semester into a final paper. That is going to be quite a task...
This evening the campus film is "L.A. Confidential", which I saw saw over winter break, and it's really well done, so I think I'll be heading off to see it again. I'm just in a terrific mood. I'm not sure why, but why worry about the why of it? =)
I'm in the midst of a severe case of writer's block on my term paper for Age of Austen. I've been attempting to formulate a close-reading thesis for four straight days and getting nowhere. I feel like I've re-read Emma entirely by now, and the more I look at it, the more diffuse my ideas become. If I could I'd ignore it for a while and come back later, but that isn't really an option...In more fun news, I'm having a great time in independent lab at the moment - I'm screening for new aro- mutants from my EMS mutagenesis cultures and crossing strains for future complementation testing. I also found a summer position at NICHD working with a Swarthmore alumnus on really interesting cell research, so that's pretty exciting. I still need to find housing in Bethesda, though...
Returned last night from an absolutely terrific spring break in California! Hung out a bit with Dom and lots with Jove, watched movies, visited UCSF, and stayed up late - it was just great. I miss it already. We also went to see the Smithsonian exhibit Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which was very cool. They have costumes and lightsabers and speederbikes and a little guided tour on a computer thing with quotes and a Jedi Quiz. There will be a page up about the great times as soon as I get my pictures developed...
Actually, it's just barely wednesday, since it is really very early in the morning and I'm on because... well, just because I am and I thought I'd write something.I'm busy studying for my english mid-term (Age of Austen), which is a rather confusing task for me. I'm used to more organized modes of studying - my notes from english are all over because class is so much a discussion that I only get to jot down things the majority of the time. I love the class, though - I get the feeling that we could talk about everything so much more than we have time to do, and it's interesting because I feel invested in the novels (read: I actually like them. a lot.). So studying is rather disorganized, but fun. I also haven't taken a sit-down english mid-term since high school, which is quite a long time for me. Should be interesting...
I filled out the NIH application on the web today - now I just need to get my transcript sent off and I'll be finished with 5/6 of my applications. Alleghany is the only one I haven't sent, although it shouldn't be too hard since I'm in practice now. Then I'll just concentrate on my work and hope really hard.This week my focus is writing a biochem report that is due after break and studying for my Austen midterm. It's been a while since I had a mid-term in an english class (well, since high school), so I'm trying to formulate exactly how I want to go about it. It's mostly writing essays on the spot, by hand that I find difficult. Lack of cut/paste editing capapbilites is stressful. As the week before spring break goes, however, this is rather mild. My mid-terms were actually spread out this year, which is a relief.
I need to head off to the darkroom to mix up some chemicals. The Photo Club is off to a belated start this semester, but we look forward to some exciting prospects, including a speaker, some toning workshops (to supplement the usual developing and printing ones) and maybe a trip to Philly to see an exhibit at the art museum. Should be great!