I'm reposting this (by alyxbradford , found through flemco ) because the next snarky prissy asshole who comments that either 1) we have no Christmas carols playing, and that's BAD, or 2) I have not wished them a Merry Christmas is going to get effing stabbed.
STABBED.
You heard it here first. Does it still count as premeditated if I warned people, even if it is done in a mindless fit of rage?

Jesus is NOT 'the reason for the season'! Now stop bleeding saying that, please, and leave me to my happy celebration of cookie-making, snuggles, and warming booze.

Since now I have previous and next links - thank you again, delta_mike - I am going to finally get around to saying something useful. Or interesting. Or maybe not. It snowed here Saturday, marking - in my mind - the start of the winter holiday season (first snow after Thanksgiving.)


So this is the requisite 'if you want a holiday card from me' post now - I'm screening comments so your address doesn't get out there.


(Entry with stuff in later today - after I finish my MATLAB code and go shopping for more presents. Presents acquired count stands at 2 of some-number-I-haven't-figured-out-yet.)

Last issue with this new layout having been rectified through the kindness of Sir delta_mike, I have another. (I know, I know, I'm just never satisfied.)
Where have my 'previous 20' and 'next 20' links gone, and what do I have to sacrifice to get them back?

...Frankly, I am remembering why I've never bothered with theming this with anything other than the lj-supplied options. It's a pain in my ass.

Okay, a question - I know there are some of you who read this that actually know CSS, and, more importantly, how to modify one's journal layout.
I decided this thing needed a revamping, which I duly have carried out. Since I know NOTHING about CSS, I am using this lovely premade theme to do it. However, in the interests of reading clarity (and because I am not a 12-year-old-goth girl, and dammit, I use tags and links for a reason) I want to change the text colour of the text over there - *points left* - to something that isn't black on a black background. Anyone know which variable I need to change?
This style being what it is, there's a dozen instances of black, so I can't even do my usual practice of identifying the colour I don't like and swapping it.
Alternatively, anyone who's particularly css- and photoshop-savvy and would like to make me my own theme for a small fee/internet cookies/ good karma/ the practice/ another remuneration to be named by you, I would deeply appreciate it....

5) Garlic soup from Pamplona, (a restaurant in Cambridge, MA). It's a tiny restaurant in a basement, and I have spent probably years now sitting in there while the snow piled up outside and the wind howled, smoking, arguing, and slurping down this elixir of life. Liquid heat, cheap, plentiful, and tasty as all hell.

4) Baklava.

3) Potato salad. Yes, I know I'm odd, but I would eat pounds of the stuff.

2) Banana bread. Specifically my mother's banana bread. Other people's recipes never properly cut it - they're too dry, too sweet, whatever. Hers is perfect and if I'm lucky, she'll make it.

1) Tea. Tea is the pinnacle of comfort food to me. I make tea for people (and other people make it for me) to fix sadness, sickness, melancholy, the works. I have different teas for different situations, but the purest form of teahug is waking up to sleepily mutter back and forth with a snuggly person about who will go turn on the kettle and who will actually make the tea.

(From this week's topic over at thewhyfive .)

Well, I figured out why I've been so short on energy for the past couple of days.

...I swear, if there's a next go-round, and if I'm given the option, there are days when I think I'll be picking the 'boy' checkbox. Grr argh. (And yes, I'm sure you all wanted to know. Whatever. I'm sure you've all heard far worse.)

I have eight days to do two series of all-day-four-days experiments (in situ hybridizations, the suck and bane of my very existence), complete a modelling project that's half in MATLAB and half in Compsol Multiphysics (let me correct myself here a bit - if in situs are not my bane, this fucking modelling program is. I hate it SO HARD.), and write a five-page paper on the same. Also, I still have to work and give three lab finals.
My brain has commenced alternating between running in circles flailing and shouting about death and refusing to do anything more productive than read fanfic (oh god help me). When pressed, the steering committee in there defiantly swears it's because there's too much to do, which is the kind of counterproductive logic my brain just delights in.
I think it's going to be one of Those Weeks.

On the upside, I have contacts again, and they're fabulous (OH FRABJOUS DAY!) and I can't even feel them when they're in my eyes, which is a) new indeed, b) awesome, and c) somewhat disconcerting. I'm always conscious of my contacts; my ability to blink them right out of my eyes drove a previous optometrist to distraction. These, I keep thinking I've lost because I can't feel them, but then, as I start to look on the floor for them, I realize that I can see the floor, which indicates that I've not lost them yet. Or that I'm going insane. Possibly both.

Must go bang head on computer now.

-Just got back from seeing Pirate Radio.It was awesome. I rather want the soundtrack. And at least three of their coats (Simon's at his wedding, Gavin's at the end, and also Gavin's when they climb the radio mast, if you're curious.)
-I also got approximately eight inches cut off my hair, which is awesome because it makes it move again. The chick who cut it was very sniffy about my (now greatly faded) blue, to which I can only inquire why the various people who feel the need to scorn it think I give a shit. Yes, I know you people are hair stylist types - random strangers all seem to like it, it's only stylists who dislike it - but what about the girl with the blue hair makes you think she gives a shit what you think of it? I like it, so you can STFU.
-Nick cleaned pretty much the whole house today, which is awesome because a) the house really needed a cleaning, and I was in the negative numbers as far as my own motivation went, and b) Tom has invited the parental types for an early thanksgiving tomorrow, and I personally would rather not let people I don't know that well see the apartment in the state it was in. Euugh.
-AND there was pumpkin ice cream from Cold Stone post movie!

...My headache is finally gone, so it's time for sleepings. (I have now been pretty much without caffeine for 21 days - I had about half of a DD small coffee Wednesday, but that's it.)

I had to shut the lab radio off today with my elbow.
It was the carols. I don't believe in Christmas crap before Thanksgiving at the earliest, but if it must be Christmas crap, can it please not be carols? I have about a two week tolerance on carols (less than that if they're being played in the place I spend all my working hours). Carols after that make me severely homicidal.* I was the only one in there, and someone had left the radio on and tuned to ohgodmakeitstop carols. I didn't want to be wearing headphones - more on which momentarily - so I simply had to suffer. It was "Silver and Gold" - that god-awful saccharine spewings of the horrible Burl Ives - that finally made me snap. I hate Burl Ives. Fucking singing goddamn snowman.
But I had Science all over my hands, so there I am, pen in my teeth, four falcon tubes and a pair of PCR tubes in one had, pipetter in the other, desperately trying to mash the off button with my elbow and not drop any of the stuff I have spent all day making.

Why no headphones, you ask? Because - and I'm not sure if I find this more hysterically funny or hysterically enraging - the building is shedding bits again.
Our building is new, right? (Supposedly) top-of-the-line green construction, wood everywhere, slate and brushed steel all over, and all the amenities scientists could want, yes?**
Anyway, I was sitting there waiting on the pre-hybe cooking timer to ding, when - from the direction of the exposed overhead piping*** - I hear ping ping ping crack BONG!, the unmistakeable sound of something metal falling off the pipes onto the metal shelving below, shelving that is occupied by a metric assload of glassware. (Of course, right?) I go fetch one of the grad students who actually works full time in that lab - it was three o'clock, so, of course, all the professors had already fucked off home for the day - and get up on a rolling chair and take a look at the top shelf**** and find, to my shock and dismay and increasing lack of surprise, the clamp part from one of the things that go around the pipes to attach them to the ceiling.
Let me say that again, in case it wasn't quite crystal clear - I am now holding the business bits of one of the things that keeps the pipes up. Gnang gnang gnang ptoooi.*****
For this, they stole a semester of my research time and hiked my tuition. The fuckers.
So I wanted to keep an ear out in case the pipe that was now missing its holding-up-parts decided to catastrophically not be held up anymore.

*This has caused problems for me in the past, most notably with an ex-boyfriend who would have happily sung Christmas carols year round, I swear. We actually worked out a strict schedule of when there could be Christmas music in the car and when I was and was not allowed to bitch about it / huck the offending device out the window.

**Oh, HA HA, it is to laugh. We have no air on the benchtops, no deionized water, one tiny autoclave for an enormous building - and for this we lost floor space from the old building?

***Why in hell do people do this? Is this supposed to be pretty? (Perhaps I'll ask the architect brother.) It's even odder in this building, where someone with seriously questionable taste decided to label the pipes, so in addition to things like 'protected hot water' and 'protected cold water' you also have 'lab waste' and simply 'waste water.' Does knowing that the pipe is carrying sewage somehow make it better that it's above my head and I already suspected it was carrying sewage? (The flushing noises are clearly audible, possibly because of the exposed piping.

****Also, in the WFT-ery of our building - why did they build in ten-foot-tall shelves and give us only rolling chairs? I love rolling chairs as much as the next girl - more, in all likelihood - but I want nothing to do with them when I have to stand on them to get giant glass bottles down from a high shelf.

*****Evocatively scornful spitting.

Flight. No question. I want to fly.
I don't even care if it comes with some sort of inconvenient physical wings. (That might in fact make it more awesome, clothing difficulties aside. I might like to have feathers.) No silly invisible plane crap, though - I want to fly under my own power, spread wings or arms or mind and just take off. Having to have some piece of silly equipment would defeat the purpose.
I want to fly.

This entry may seem like an empty gesture, I suspect.
Just something to say to say that it got done, that I had an entry in, right? Empty. But then I started thinking about what I was actually trying to accomplish here, and, well...

That's the thing about empty gestures, at least to me - they're not empty. Sure, the gesture may not mean what it seems, may not be sincere, may not help, whatever. Saying that one is sorry may have little to do with actually being sorry, sure, but it does indicate something else: a desire to be seen as sorry. This can be to the positive or the negative, too.
Empty gestures are all the little bits of social glue that hold together near-strangers. They provide words to say when one doesn't know really what to say* at death, at tragedy, at joy. Empty gestures keep people convinced that people who aren't polite are, that those who don't care at least care enough to pay lip service to the idea.
But they're also the shadows of what people should be doing, equally often. Sure, a shallow 'I'm sorry' suffices for a death related to someone you hardly know, but would it work for your best friend, for your lover? I should hope not. Flowers may be ample recompense for a tiff between a couple,** but not, I suspect, if it's something more serious than a fight over a missed dinner reservation.*** Sometimes they're a way to gloss over the social hole of knowing there's nothing one can do. Or worse, knowing that you've fucked up big enough that there's no way to fix it. Of course, sometimes, even when it can't be fixed, sometimes the gesture is what it takes to show, just enough, that you wish it could be fixed. Some times that helps.

They may not be sincere, but sometimes they're worth the doing anyway. Sometimes, though, you have to know really what to say.


*Like this. I have read some of the other entries - there's some terrible tragedies there. Deep secrets and darknesses of the soul that I simply Do Not Have. Truly. Nothing to compare, anyway: the most traumatic thing to happen to me recently was having to kill frogs for the lab I teach. Compared to things like 'I was raped, and my mother knew and did nothing'? Not even a blip on Life's Oscilloscope.

**Or whatever flowers correspond to in your relationship. YMMV.

***Again, I generalize (largely from television) as to what the Stereotypical Relationship (TM) looks like. Having never had it and never regretted it, I couldn't say.

Tracing out today's walking:
This morning, from the hotel out to Oak Beach, then up Lakeshore Drive to Lincoln Park. Then back down Lakeshore Drive to Millennium Park, photography there (I love the shiny bean thing) and onwards a few blocks to the bus stop by the Roosevelt University Library: 5.8 miles.
This evening, from the hotel back down to Millennium Park, more photography, then back to the hotel by a wandering route to maximize my time spent on bridges and avoid walking back past Reckless Records: 4.6 miles.
Various incidental walking about the hugeness that is McCormick Place, including the hike through the other buildings to get to Lake Michigan out that way.
Probably ten easy miles all told.

My feet kinda hurt - this was all in heels, and my battered and definitely no-longer-cushy old work heels at that - but it's a good kind of hurt. Gaby and Paola are being a bit lame and would not come with me, but that's nothing new. I love walking around cities, especially ones I don't live in, and I really prefer it alone, or at best with one very good friend. It's so freeing. No one knows you - you could be literally anyone. Anyone at all. All the baggage, the expectations, the weight of everything just falls away and all that remains is the person you can be when you don't have to worry about others' perceptions of you.
It's great. I love it. I want to travel every day for the rest of my life - always somewhere new.

Also, apparently my ideal travel kit has now coalesced. One (1) Dell mini9, running OS X because I'm like that. Cord for same. One (1) book, The Zonules of Zinn. (Substitute as necessary.) One (1) textbooky-type book, in this case Matlab for Neuroscientists. Fudge. Pens, moleskine, camera, external mouse because the mini's trackpad is crap. One small bag (with an octopus on!) to put it all in.
One happy Raven who can go anywhere.

And I also scavenged myself a new and shiny poster tube to replace the broken crap one. It's blue and double-layered and has metal endcaps and some maniac was going to throw it away. Bah. (I think I was someone's quartermaster in a previous life. I can scavenge fucking anything. I have no shame about this; I am actually rather proud. You want things, you come talk to me, honey.)

I presented my poster at SfN (Society for Neurosciences' annual meeting) and it went swimmingly. Lots of people came and talked to me, nothing burned down, I don't think I gave away anything I ought not have, and I met some staggeringly nice people! 
Then there was Armenian food for dinner, and custard, and ROCKET FUEL COFFEEEEE.
There are thirty thousand people here, and a large number of them are staying in our hotel. The shuttle to the conference center was a horror. But it's also twenty degrees F warmer here than it is in Providence, and it is Not Snowing, so whatever, you know? And the hotel is lovely, and I have a bed so I am not sleeping on the floor, AND we are on the fortieth floor and my bed is in the window, so when I woke up early this morning I just laid there and looked out over the pinkening sky and the gorgeous skyline and I could not find my cufflinks but I was wise to that possibility and brought a very nice spare shirt that did not require cufflinks, so all was well there and did I mention the coffee and I am going to the Shedd and for a great long walk down by the lake tomorrow and maybe the Art Institute on Tuesday? I do not know, but it is likely and I will stop along the way and probably get more coffee.

I skipped down Michigan Avenue for at least a block with my poster tube on my shoulder - I would have had it in my hand, but the plastic ends on the tube broke (both of them) which, really, if that is the worst thing to happen to me, I consider it a pretty damn red-letter day. I may have looked like a maniac. I did not - and do not - care. At all. 

'Scuse me now, I must go run around the building or some such, because I think Gaby will not let me back into the hotel room if I am still this excitable.



Gleeeeeee. 

How exactly does one introduce oneself when "Hi, I'm Raven," a handshake, and a grin aren't so much possible....

I'm a blue-haired neuroscientist. I'm a punk that doesn't much look the part. I'm an atheist that doesn't care what you believe, a hater of shoes and socks, a computer tech, a surfer, a crazy, a dreamer, a smartass. I love expensive chocolate and cheap wine, the scent of good books and the feel of sun-warmed hardwood floors, hot black tea and iced black coffee, gin and tonics under blacklights, long hikes and longer days at the beach, Firefly and Star Trek and the Fraggles. 
I hate willful ignorance, the smell of boiling chicken and burnt rubber, entitled people, and vegetables in brine.

Hi.

Friday: Found out that best friend is engaged. Twitched. A lot. Saw Inglourious Basterds. It sucked. Attempted to resist likelihood that I will get dragged (kicking, screaming, and biting) back into the dramafest that my gamer friends can be; suspect I may have just become (bizarrely) confidante to someone with whom I'm not even terribly well acquainted. 

Saturday: Worked, then party at computer job. Was less fun than last year: less drunk, less people, food not so good. Kicked ass at Rock Band, speedscrabble, got ass kicked at Battle Tetris and MarioKart. More time with lovely dog, though. Got home, crawled into bed, fell asleep for roughly an hour before being awakened by the drunk person in the kitchen shouting at the drunk people in the living room.

Sunday: Went to Garden Grille for breakfast - had spicy omelet size of head, ginger lemonade. Petted dog. Went to Honkfest with A; rode bike from Davis to Harvard in parade. Acquired pretty paper, socks with skulls and flowers, and stripey tights for possible Delirium costume. Resisted temptation of 125$-but-beautiful green suede Naot shoes. (Now wishing had not been so virtuous.)
Ate weight in ribs and tasty green beans. Survived food coma.
FINISHED POSTER FOR NEUROSCIENCES, after thirty-seventh version (don't laugh, I counted and had version numbers).

Going to go pass out now.

I thought it would be fun last year, while I was loving jfargo's writing for it, but I was too late to get in. This time I am not. Plus I need to write some more, need to start writing properly again. (I will probably not go back to fiction in the near future, as grad school demands too much of my brain to plot coherently, but decent memoir-style nonfiction, and good science writing, should not be beyond me.)
So.
LJ Idol Season Six is starting, and I'm playing.

-Bacon and avocado hotdogs for lunch. (When I break my no-hotodogs rule, there's a reason.)
-I crawled out of bed to a Tom that had decided to make pie. Apple pie. With crumbles on top.
-I finally hauled the Octane upstairs (though this caused me to discover that I do not, in fact, have the correct cable to hook it up to a monitor. Whatever, is no thing, eBay's got me covered.)
-Third cup of tea today, because we have milk. 
-I got some of those aquaglobe things, having finally admitted that I cannot remember to water plants ever, and if I want the Giant Plant Of Awesome to not die - which would be nice - I need to make sure that it's wet somehow.
-Did I mention that there's going to be pie later? Pie, bitches, homemade PIE.
-And now I am curled on my bed, in a massive pile of pillows, poking the internet and watching Bones, Warehouse 13, and Better Off Ted on Hulu.

All I need now is a purring cat for complete and utter contentment. Perhaps I may wander across the street and make use of the cat there. Hmm.



Psst. Pie.

In another increasingly-less-unprecedented Steffi-comments-on-fashion, can I just say that in no way would I ever ever ever take fashion advice from someone dressed like this?

So this individual is the 12-year-old Tavi somethingorother, who is apparently being hailed as THE up-and-coming fashion blogger. Okay, I realize that she's twelve. That's just darling. /heavy sarcasm
But she's still dressed like an idiot. The fawning love the fashion world is demonstrating toward a kid wearing what I seriously suspect is a rice sack may go a long way to explain why I can't find a pair of pants made for people-shaped people OR a fall coat that's stylish, waterproof, and warm.
Grrh. Aggablaggablaggah. /is frustrated.

The part of this that most saddened me is that this is Berk's, the little indie shoe shop on Thayer St. I remember I used to get the most amazingly weird shoes (and all my Docs) from their sister store in Cambridge - back in the day, there is no way a sign like this would have gone up in there. Too sheeply.
Also, ugh. People actually want coats that look like that? With or without crap sparkly vampires?

(Since you can't read the sign in this photo - I was trying to be unobtrusive and not use my camera's flash - it says "Bella's jacket from Twilight? Get it here!")

I just thought about this again - and I had meant to mention it, because it boggled me.

 

So. Last Saturday night, I was having a bit of a party. There were, if my count is correct, about sixteen people there, counting my two roommates and myself.

I have a Very Ratty Futon. Very. I got it from Craigslist, it didn't come with all the bits, you know, the usual 'I am damn tired of sitting on the floor and my roommate is in New York so whatever couch I find I am going to have to haul up three flights of stairs by myself in 90-degree heat' story. It had lasted for roughly a year and a half in my possession. (Collapsing three times, but hey, there were always enough bits of wood and screws and nails and whatnot to put it back together again.*)

Nevertheless, I told all my friends that the futon was rated for two butts. Any more than that, and the futon might explode.

Predictably, about ten pm, that's exactly what happened. From the other room, I heard a yelp and a thud - and came in to see the futon disintegrated and a large proportion of my friends trying to tell me that they had not been sitting on it when it happened.

 

But that's not the story. This is the story:

Clarissa, because of whose presence this whole shindig was happening, suggested that we all go get a new futon, pointing out that if everyone tossed in ten bucks or so, I'd have plenty of money, and hell, it'd be a Grand Adventure. We did, and it was.

 

Okay, I have digressed again and that is still not the story. At least, not the boggling one.

So there we are, all dozen or so of us, leaving Wal-Mart with the giant box that is the new futon balanced across the top of a cart. We're coming from the cash registers. We're not quiet at all, something that I suspect was due less to the various levels of drunk we were occupying and more to the fact that I seem to attract only a very few quiet friends.

And as we go out past the guy they station to make sure no one steals anything, said dude makes me find the receipt and prove that we have not shoplifted the futon.

Seriously? Do people try that? Stealing huge objects with a noisy entourage of a dozen? Really?

 

 

 

 

*Also, evidently, two golf tees. I didn't find them until Saturday, after the futon exploded.