things I have learned since my arrival

Note: this was written a few days ago - a week? - and is, of course, not a complete list of all of the things that I have learned since my arrival. More will come in due time, as I have time to write it (and as things strike me as especially noteworthy). Although, I must say, I'm glad to be pushing that last entry down a peg. Every time I read the first line, I cringe a little bit. It was nice for a while, but now it just seems overwrought. Even if it was true. It was. I was having a rough emotional time!

All right. On to the entry.

I don’t know as much as I thought I did. At first, this induced much panic as I flailed around wildly, trying to get my intellectual feet under me again. Suddenly I settled into the understanding that not only do I not know everything there is to know, but also, neither does anyone else. The knowledge that these people have comes with time – a couple of years, a set of classes, and some experience in lab that makes you want to rip your hair out.

Everyone loves bacon.

If you have your music organized by play count, even if you have it set to cycle through everything before repeating, it will repeat songs. This is because the order changes as each song is played and gains another tally. This actually drives me nuts.

Related: I hate stressing about something stupid like play counts, but then I see a song that I used to love sitting up at the top with a lot of listens, and I feel bad for it because I don’t want to topple it from its position, but I just don’t feel like listening to it right now! And sometimes I find myself getting frustrated because the songs that I think are the best are not sitting up at the top of the list, and then I feel like the play counts are not an accurate measure of the song’s worth. Then, in a huff, I hide play counts from view and go along happily until I find myself eaten by curiosity – what’s number two now? Who do I listen to the most?

The problem is that I have enormous patience for ear bugs. If I have a song stuck in my head, I have no trouble queuing it up to play on repeat until I get tired of it. And I don’t tire of it very easily. Case in point: I have listened to Africa 34 times. That has probably been in the span of three or four days.

I don’t like sharing a kitchen. I stress about the refrigerator. I stress about the dishes. I wonder if these dishes really belonged to someone other than the guy I subleased from. I stress about cooking or baking because one of my housemates doesn’t have air conditioning. Possibly worst of all, I hated when my housemate had his (non-English speaking... okay I lie they spoke a little, but I don’t really know how much. Enough...) parents to visit and they sat in the kitchen until late enough that I eventually had to awkwardly break into the cozy family environment in the kitchen to make myself some food so that I didn’t starve.

As I did so, the conversation would abruptly switch from English to German, and they would sit around the table in such a way that I had to climb over one of them (the father, typically) to get into the refrigerator. I felt awkward about bending to retrieve my food because I didn’t want to stick my backside into someone’s face. One night, I was particularly tired and therefore exasperated, and my irritation had reached record highs, and finally I flipped the oven on and started to bake cookies while they were still in the kitchen.

That worked as nothing else had to push them back into the room that he rents for just himself (and, apparently, his parents and his girlfriend... don’t ask me how they all fit). I feel mildly guilty because of their complete lack of air conditioning. Actually, no. I don’t, at all.

I thought, for two glorious, bright yellow and orange days, that I loved quinones. Then they failed me, and have been failing me ever since, and I don’t love them anymore. But I would like to take this moment to point out to all those inorganic chemists: yes, organic chemistry has colors! Plus, we use your catalysts, and those are colored too. Just sayin’.

I know a lot of music. I know a lot more music than I thought I did. It’s sort of neatly organized into several categories that have more overlap than I’d’ve expected, but most of the Pandora stations that Sandra plays are familiar to me.

JACS is basically publishing nano stuff these days. Ugh. I wish I found nano more interesting, but alas, I just do not. How could I love nano more than this?!



I learned how to lock and shim the NMR probe-slash-field. It makes me feel accomplished, and the control panel makes me think of video games.

My back hurts. Just today, though. Maybe I slept funny. I managed somehow to invert all of my covers (ha, all two of them) last night and woke up trying to find my sheet because all I felt was duvet. Turns out my sheet was on top of my duvet, arranged rather neatly. This was not at all worrisome to me because it was 4am and I wanted nothing more than to roll over and go back to sleep. Which I did.

Last night I kicked the doorstop for the bathroom door (it opens into what I’m using as the bedroom). It’s one of those spring monstrosities that makes an ungodly amount of noise when disturbed, and I was unaware of having kicked it. I very nearly had a heart attack – I thought someone was in the bathroom and I was scared out of my mind. I had to sit down for a minute to try to filter some blood into the pure adrenaline coursing through my veins.

I am a cookie connoisseur. True story: I had no idea how to spell connoisseur. That is probably because it is definitely a French word and we definitely do not say it like the French would say it. I make a different batch of cookies pretty much every week (more or less). This week is a sugar cookie recipe that is surprisingly delicious and I am trying to restrain myself from eating all of them at once because my family is coming to help me move this weekend and I told them I would give them some sugar cookies.