Today is one of those days when I wish a portal to another world would appear in my living room.  But then I remember... hey, that's not even possible, because I don't have a living room.  Well, sort-of.  Maybe the big room with the TV counts as a living room - I don't know how rooms are supposed to be named in apartments.  In fact, why do rooms have arbitrary names in the first place?  Can't I name my own rooms?  Hell, who'd stop me?  From now on, the room with my TV and couch is officially the REALM OF CHAOS.  (Actually, that description would more accurately match Anje's bedroom.)  Oh, the room formerly known as "The Kitchen" will now be called "The Bioweapons Facility."  I like it - it has a fun, dangerous ring to it, and it's somewhat accurate.

  So I spent an hour or so in Phil & Kaja Foglio's house a few days back.  I didn't even know who they were until I went to their home and saw some of their artwork... wow.  Coolest artists ever - and with a taste for interior decorating that matches my own, I might add.  (Though it's apparent that the Foglios have a much, much larger "odd artistic clutter" budget.  Instead of beautiful and interesting artistic figurines, I mostly just have old liquor bottles with candles in them.)

   Anyway, I recognized their artwork from various online sources and comic books I've read - that was a nice surprise, realizing that I'd just met two of the greatest artistic/comic geniuses of all time.  (Sadly, the realization was mostly after-the-fact.)  Oh, and I got to see some amazing original pieces of artwork - two of which Christine's stepsiblings' dad (Doug) bought for... well, more money than I've spent on artwork my entire life.  (Liquor bottles = decoration, remember?)  Not that I wouldn't do exactly what Doug did if I was older and richer.  Oh, Except that I wouldn't buy this piece:  (Doug bought the original artwork for this card)

 I'd buy this one, for which the original was also available:

  (It's a tiny sample of the picture - basically, the evil fantasy chick's magic mirror is busted - hence the redneck with the "gamer gurl" T-shirt appearing in the mirror, and the magic mirror repairman.  Er, repair-orc.  Whatever.  It's not as funny if it has to be explained.  Okay, time to buy a cheap replica of this painting for a few bucks, since I can't afford the thousands-of-dollars original version.)

  In other news (and because I feel like uploading more pictures for no good reason) I have an arm sprouting from my head.

PS: I really want a NO SNORKING sign.

  It's weird to think that a plant can starve to death, but that's what my poor bitey is doing (my venus flytrap.)  I just can't find any flies for her this time of year, and by now her leaf-traps are too weak anyway.  Poor girl.  I think I'll have to put her down soon...

  The last few days were pretty fun - some of Christine's family stopped by for her birthday.  She's legal drinking age now, yay!  ...of course, she still hates alcohol, so that doesn't really mean much.  We did get to go to a fun bar together, though.  (Normally wouldn't excite me, but we found a really relaxing, cushy bar in Wallingford with live music and huge couches with pillows and salmon-colored light fixtures that looked like crystal squid...)

  Christmas shopping is stressful when you're practically broke.  My next paycheck will fix that situation, but wouldn't you know it, I receive it on the 25th.  Great.  (Oh well - our family is doing Christmas on the 28th anyway, so I can probably squeeze in some last-minute "actually have money now" Christmas shopping on the 27th.)

  And now, as soon as my dad arrives from picking Greg up from the airport (he's only an hour overdue - that seems about right) we'll head to our Grandpa's farm - the last Christmas there before he sells it.  It's fucking BEAUTIFUL - really too bad it won't be in the family anymore.  Plus, Grandpa has colon cancer and will be in surgery on Christmas, so that's pretty shitty timing.  Poor guy.  At least we'll all be there for him.

  "I Heart Huckabees" - good movie, but painful to watch.  Both Christine and I hate embarrassing parts in movies, and that's pretty much all the movie was about.  (Random people having existential crises and completely embarrassing themselves.)  Very cool and philosophical... but damn.  Not watching that thing again.  Ouch.

  Meh... booooring.  Waiiiting... waiiiting to get picked up to go on an excruciatingly long car ride where I can wait for seven hours to get to my grandpa's place.  Bleh.

  Oh, um, merry Christmas-type holiday season thing, and all that.  Yay.  Yay for presents.  Except for the buying them part.  Giving would be a lot more fun if it weren't for the vacuum-cleaner-to-the-bank-account effect.

  So Dustin tells me I should move to a "real man's blog" at myspace.  But I am loyal.  I will not betray xanga.  Or perhaps I'm just too lazy, which is more likely.

  Speaking of betrayal - I have recently been betrayed, by Buddha's hand.  It sounds like a terrorist organization from the Far East, but it's actually a really damn strange fruit, related to the lemon, that looks like a scary fucking squid.  It looks amazing, it smells beautiful (like a lemon on steroids) and, as I recently found out, it has NO ACTUAL FRUIT PART.  Think of a lemon with ONLY peel... LOTS of peel.  And pith, or whatever that junk right below the peel is.  It smells amazing, but now I have nothing to eat... grrr.  Well, I tried eating the white pithy stuff, but it's sort of... not... good.  Apparently, this thing is only used for decoration, flavoring dishes and liqueurs that require lemony zest (it's got plenty of that) and its pleasant (and deceptive) aroma.  My apartment still smells like a horde of angry lemons viciously pillaged it.

(I cheated and did a google image search.  Yay.)

  Bleh, back to work.  Weekends are awesome, until the part where they're over.  Yeah, I know, it's probably the most common complaint in the world: "My weekend is over, boo hoo."  Another weekend will come, but like most people I'm impatient and I live in the present.  Presently, I need to go to work, and that bugs me.

  A few weeks back, I had the most ghetto shower in my life.  I jogged 7 miles (from the U to Christine's place and back), and decided to take a shower in the Chemistry Building so I could keep working that evening.  Problem is, the showers in the bathrooms had NO FREAKIN' SHOWERHEADS.  I didn't shower, exactly - I pressure-washed myself.  It hurt.  The headless nozzle was angled upwards, so it soaked the entire bathroom stall (walls and ceiling especially.)  It was also exactly 67 degrees.  I know this because the chemistry building is too cheap to heat its water for showers or provide showerheads, but it doesn't mind spending the money to install precise temperature sensors.  By the way, 67 degrees sounds like a nice warm day in late spring - but for a shower, it's fucking cold.  (It was nestled deep in the "blue" section of the temperature dial on the shower.)  I also had no soap or shampoo, and by the time I'd finished my shower, my towel and clothes were soaked (as was everything in the stall, including the toilet.  I can only imagine what the next person to use that stall thought...)  I would've had more luck standing naked in the rain - and I wouldn't have lost a layer of skin to the pressure-washer "shower".
  Going home this weekend... not looking forward to the drive.  But I suppose I don't look forward to any sort of driving, ever, so that's no surprise.  I think that, if I had the world's fastest most maneuverable car - with the capability of jumping over other cars and bouncing down the freeway and transforming into a giant robot and firing missiles and... yeah, I still wouldn't like driving.  (But I can definitely think of a few good targets for those missiles...)

  The Minnesota trip was fun - I got to meet Christine's family and friends, take some fun pictures in the snow (to be posted after Christine's mom works her magic with photoshop), watch some great live comedy acts (by the longest-running comedy group in America) and see the Harry Potter movie.  (It wasn't amazing, but I was impressed that they could fit the contents of a book that weighs almost as much as I do into a two and a half hour movie.  It would've been more like summarizing than film-making... not too unusual for movies, but this is definitely an extreme case.)  Christine and I found a strange Chess set while we were looking through her old stuff she kept at her mom's place - she was a trekkie way back (like me, but probably more so), and she had one of those weird 3-D chess sets from Star Trek Next Generation.  Of course, the freaky-looking multi-level chess board was pretty much just a prop for the show, and as far as I know it wasn't meant to be played as a real game.  As a result, the rules are pretty lame.  I'm in the process of inventing my own, despite the fact that I probably won't get a chance to play it.  (Even if I do, it will most likely be with Christine, who is a wonderful person who I love very much... but she spends hours deliberating every tiny little move from every game she plays!  Grrrr...)

  Some other stuff probably happened between now and... November 6?  Damn.  I haven't been very faithful with Xanga lately.  Whatever.

  So this is interesting - a week or so back, some ladies at U-Village (the yuppie outdoor shopping mall down the hill; Christine works there) handed me a flyer, and gave me a free pay-day bar.  Sweet deal - I suppose I shouldn't complain when pretty girls feed me.  But I did find it humorous that they were passing out a flyer on the wage gap between men and women at a shopping mall where most shoppers are pampered housewives.

   Here's the thing - I'm not going to deny that there is a wage gap, or claim that it's inconsequential, but as always the statistics can be misleading.  They indicate that the average woman makes less money in a given profession than the average man, and this is typically true.  However, they (in the flyer) place the blame on an unjust, unfair society (hey, what society isn't?) and lack of government intervention, when other factors are just as important.  For example, from a perspective of evolutionary biology, females are much more concerned with the amount of resources their potential mate controls.  Put simply, men have to be more than just pretty to attract a long-term mate - especially the shallow type whose behavior is dictated more by genes and instinct.  Today, as in the past, men who control more resources can choose from a larger selection of potential mates; for women, prosperity doesn't matter nearly as much in this regard.  This doesn't mean that men SHOULD make more, but it means men have more motivation to make money (money they don't always need) than women.  Here's another factor: women take maternity leaves, men don't.  While many companies could use better maternity leave policies, the fact remains that most women prefer to take some time off for their child during late pregnancy and the child's early infancy - and this is perfectly reasonable.  Even at a company that allows the woman to pick up her career where she left off (most companies have a policy like this), and even if the time off is minimal, it is still a statistically significant setback.  A third factor that contributes to the wage gap is a delay between society and workforce.  Even if all bias between men and woman was instantly eliminated, along with all other factors (such as maternity leave and extra incentives for men to get rich) it will take at least a generation for the wage gap to disappear, simply because men are already at an advantage in the workforce.  (For instance, a man wouldn't say to a female co-worker "gee, I got promoted five years ago and you didn't - you might have deserved it more, so I think I'll give you my position now.)  Thus, a large percentage of the current wage gap is a result of the bias of past generations, which I would argue is more extreme than bias seen in the workplace today.

   There are probably a lot of other factors too, including culture  - which is thankfully not so oppressively specific about the roles of men and women as it was a generation ago, but still manages to convince men that they need to be providers.  While the pressures on women to stay in the home have decreased significantly in recent times (in Western cultures) the pressures on men to make money and be providers have not, at least not to the same extent.  "Provider" is not necessarily a role that men must play - but it is one most men think they should play, for whatever reason.  (Their success at it, of course, isn't perfectly proportional to the role they envision for themselves - but the idealization is further motivation, at least.)

  Anyway, just a random rant inspired by misleading statistics.  Feminism is definitely a logical ideal, which makes me wonder why some of the feminists I meet are so illogical.

  Mwaha - I get another holiday in three weeks, and it's even longer!  And there will be even more food!  Mmm... food.

  Time to jog to Christine's place.

   If I ran a corporation, I'd love to be able to run an
ad like this one:  "USBank: we're the only bank on campus!" 
Basically, they're saying "You don't have a choice - deal with
it".  I wonder if USBank really needs to display that ad
in the first place - I bet they just have extra money and feel
like gloating.

   I think China is exporting its overpopulation problem
to my apartment building.  The unit next to me (and these aren't
big apartments; 2 small bedrooms, a living room, and a tiny kitchen -
meant for 2 people max)  Has 5 chinese guys in it - the one above
me has four, as do three of the units in the other half of the
building.  Kinda strange, but I guess if they can handle living
like that, it's fine with me.  Plus, it's nice having the building
smell like a good chinese restaurant.  Another bonus: none of them
have cars!  Otherwise, parking would be a complete bitch. 
Their bikes get in the way sometimes, but I've noticed that
it's easy to get an improperly parked bike out of the way
compared to an improperly parked car.

  Snow in the mountains... apparently the snow gods have been
appeased after the many sacrifices made to them last year, seemingly in
vain.  It'll be good to have snow again.  In the mean time,
all this drizzling sucks.

  Eh, time to do s'more writing.  Gotta have my game finished-ish by this Thursday...

  I'm really sick of having nothing to do at work.  It's an on-and-off thing - some days I have way more than enough, but some days... well, I just screw around on the internet, like I'm doing right now.  See, it LOOKS like I'm working - and if my boss notices that I'm NOT working (he doesn't seem to notice all that much, since he's hardly ever in lab) I'll tell him YES!  Thanks for noticing!  Give me something to do, dammit!  (Actually, as much as I need more to keep me busy right now, this is probably a risky thing to say...) Anyway... next Friday I have an NMR experiment to run, and I can make another peptide when our lab finally gets more HOBt or HBTU or whatever chemical it is that we're missing...   

  Heh, my boss has a bright orange hippie outfit he wears every halloween - partly just to prove that he can still fit in the same clothes he wore in high-school.  Despite all the smoking, he seems to be in really good shape.  I don't mind that he smokes - it lets me track him by scent.  ("Aha, he must have just been in the lab - if I follow him to his office I can catch him!")

  Today I decided: screw looking busy, I'm leaving work and going jogging.  So I jogged six miles and now I'm back - just a few more minutes and this CD experiment will be done.  (It doesn't involve any real work, I just have to turn off the machine and collect my sample when I'm done.)

  Okay, so I guess that was the official "boring you with my work" update.

  Halloween was cool - got to see the hordes of little kids and their adoring parents swarm across U-Village shopping center like locusts.  Wow, those kids scored waaay more candy than I remember getting as a kid.  I wish there were real shopping malls where I grew up...  anyway, I also did some greekwatching, that was cool.  Apparently the frat peoples use any possible excuse to go crazy and get drunk as possible; and the sorority girls use any possible excuse to wear skimpy outfits in their continual attempts to freeze to death while walking between parties.  Nothing new, but enhanced with a lot of really crazy costumes.  Fun to watch.

  Shit, my experiment won't finish - I'm in an air-conditioned room right now... which is freakin' strange (not to mention uncomfortable) since it's less than 40 degrees outside.  It's cold enough that the crappy heater on the CD can't get my sample to 85 degrees C, so... whatever.  Screw this, I'm done.  The last data point never really matters anyway, my peptides melt long before 85.  Goodbye work.

PS: Happy Birthday Greg!

I found a blanket flower growing in a nearby blanket forest.  Cutest thing ever.

  And in unrelated-to-anything-you-might-care-about news: MY SHMT REACTION IS WORKING!  Yee-haw!  Enantiomeric glycine, here we come!  It's always nice when something I'm researching (er... something I found in the literature and tried to copy, I mean) works.

  I Feel kinda shitty and purposeless right now.   I was writing fantasy-related stuff all day, when suddenly it just hit me: "Hey, none of this crap is real, and it never will be."  That obvious truth has never bothered me before, but for some annoying reason I can't stomach anything fantasy/sci-fi/unrealistic right now.  I mean... magic just isn't real.  Nor are portals to other worlds.  And you can't travel faster than the speed of light or violate the first law of thermodynamics, period.  Plus, Santa is a fake.  I feel empty inside...

  Wallace and Grommit "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" was entertaining enough, but it still gets the silver medal for "most G-rated movie ever made."  First place goes to the little-known "Kiku's Delivery Service", which is grotesquely innocent and childish, but will still not be watched by many children in this country because of how prejudiced and conservative parents are.  (The main character is a witch.  Well, sort-of.  A completely harmless, innocent, beyond G-rated witch.)  Anyway, Wallace and Grommit was an unusual choice for the night of a 6-month anniversary to be sure, but we were distracted well into the night by delicious (and expensive) food, so we watched the only thing showing late enough.  Which has me wondering - who the hell schedules a kid's movie to show in the middle of the damn night?

  I think that if I made a D&D character, it's alignment would be "Bob".  Then my enemies would ask "how the hell can your alignment be 'Bob'?  There's just the good-evil and lawful-chaotic spectrums, so you can't..."  Then BAM!  I would've distracted them long enough to launch a surprise attack!  But not in the game, in real life.  Combined with my baseball bat of +3 vs dorks, I could seriously reduce the gaming population - all for the greater glory of the Bob. 

  Actually, dorks are cool.  I'm just annoyed with overstructured fantasy worlds (like my own) right now.  Grrrr...

  Time to go running.

   I ate a square burrito today.  It was pretty cool.  I mean, it tasted like a normal burrito, but... it was square!  Finally, a burrito shape for my generation.

   Rice exploded across my kitchen an hour ago.  It's pretty much a bitch to clean, because it doesn't just infiltrate every possible surface and stick to anything wet, but it also covers the floor and makes you trip while you're cleaning.  Plus, there's nothing to snack on while you're cleaning - well, I tried regardless, but eating uncooked rice is pretty much like eating small pebbles.  Anyway, I don't know what the moral of this story is - maybe "don't keep rice in wobbly glass containers perched at the top of the kitchen", or possibly "the infidels must be killed - burn them all!" or something like that.

  Last Tuesday I saw April for the first time in about 8 months.  Felt kinda creepy, like meeting a ghost.  We chatted over coffee for a while and traded small gifts we were probably planning to give to each other on our birthdays (back in April, the month).  I think she found it more awkward than I did, I was mostly just disappointed that she was exactly the same... it might have been cool if she had a mullet, or she gained fifty pounds, or wore biker clothes or had a tattoo or two.  Not that I can really complain - I haven't really changed - a few extra pounds maybe (half muscle, thankfully), but nothing obvious.  She'd make a cool friend if I hadn't, y'know, dated her.  The position of "x-girlfriend female friend" has been filled a number of times already, I think I need to diversify a bit.

  Ooh, speaking of girlfriends (Non-X-girlfriends) Christine and I will have our 6 month anniversathingey this Friday!  Good food (the RAM) , a good movie or two, and good... uh, other stuff   Fun times.  She's a keeper, that one.  I think someday we'll write a fantasy book together.  (That's not some cheesy metaphor; we both like writing fantasy stories is all.)

  I need more food.