Things that feel good

From the last few days:

-Full body massage. Get one, pay the premium price and enjoy the hell out of it. I've never had a better night of sleep than after getting a massage. If you are interested and in Ithaca, check the place I went to here

-Stopping for Krispy Kreme (are the K's right?) donuts while on a road trip and splitting a dozen between three people. Best, donuts, ever.

-Listening to Kate Bush while lying in the sun in your own backyard for a day, not having to think about work, life, friends, responsibilities or the future. Another week of this...

-Reuniting with a friend from 4th grade from Belarus! Holy cow I did not think this would ever happen but I'm meeting her tomorrow for a manhattan tour!

-Being able to go to bars and order drinks at restaurants.

-One of my best friends from high school told me of something really terrible that another one of our friends did. It almost shattered my brain...but it seems to be resolving itself now and hopefully I'll help it along as well. That feels really good.

Enjoy life while you can folks.

Plans for June 13th-20th week off

Seeing as how I will be home with no parents and 21,

-wine
-manhattan massages
-russian banias (saunas)
-delicious food
-some reading
-movies.

Gah only a week to go.

On the pleasure of reading

Here's an honest description of my (degrading) reading habits from elementary school through present day:

Elementary school: I would pour my heart and soul into reading famous short stories, memorizing poems by heart and reading out loud in class (albeit this was in Belarus). Whenever I came across something that had to be read, I would do it from first word to last. Reading assignments to me would mean read every single word and understand it. Obviously they were all simple, but that doesn't matter. I did not do any reading for fun as we had enough to read in school and I had better things to do like run around throwing rocks at random things.

Junior High School: Assignments became a bit tougher but my reading skills improved tremendously and I could devour books in days reading every word and retaining a lot of required information. We had less assignments to memorize passages or poems so that part of my brain kind of stopped working. I started reading for pleasure - fun stuff at first like treasure island, 20,000 leagues under the sea and so forth. I slowly matured to the Count of Monte Cristo and darker, more classical works. Of course I did have the occasional burst of energy reading through 50 goosebumps stories.

High School: This was my prime. English classes actually pushed you to make intelligent arguments about classic literature (Most of Shakespeare, random plays like Our Town, The Odyssey and so forth) and hold discussions tying works and themes together. Of course the pinnacle of it all was my AP English class where I got introduced in a very rigorous way to Crime and Punishment, Jude the Obscure, T.S. Eliot, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, etc. Each work was heavily analyzed and discussed in class. Opinions were shared among peers, some being completely insane (as in, tied together by spit - arguments that are held extremely loosely but are not logically "wrong"), others being plain wrong and lacking any comprehension of the material and of course some extremely insightful comments that even surprised the teacher (Ms. Kauffman!) I probably did the most pleasure reading at that point - I got through books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, American Tragedy, a whole bunch of sci-fi like the Wheel of Time series, Forgotten Realms books and short Shadowrun novels. It was a great time! I read quicker but I did absorb less information per book than previously. I think it's because the books were becoming more complex and had more pages!

College: Sigh...this is where it all kind of went downhill. Being a biology major leaves very little time to pleasure read and none of my classes required reading full length books. This made me lazy. I faked one of my freshmen writing seminars by writing a comparison essay between The Odyssey and The Aeneid only having read the Odyssey in High School. Pulled off an A- through clever use of spark notes and random quotations from the Aeneid itself. I began reading more online news and articles. Because most of them were longer than they needed to be, I learned to skim read. I could absorb pages worth of text in seconds by glancing through the paragraphs quickly. This habit did not help in actual reading. Over the summers I would try and pick up an actual book - Blink, Atlas Shrugged, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, The Idiot - and I would read it and understand it but retain very little because I skim read. That is not a proper way to treat a novel. An online blog post, maybe.

I am now trying to fix this. Using my trusty Sony Reader, I've read Mort, more Sherlock Holmes, Then We Came to the End, Breakfast of Champions, and The Golden Compass. I did this slowly and carefully, trying not to skip passages and read entire sentences.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I'm returning to my high school days, actually enjoying reading. Although it's now hard to discuss and analyze books since there is no more Ms. Kauffman to ask thoughtful questions =)

Go forth and read!

Saturday 1:00am research

Relevant comic: Back to lab - PhD comics

I am now one semester away from leaving Cornell (hopefully forever). I am also less than three months away from having to apply to graduate schools.

And I'm starting to wonder...it was about1 AM and I needed a walk to clear up my head from Friday night (don't ask). Most of the campus was dead - no lights at any of the dorms and nobody outside. The weather being perfect and cool so I took my time thinking about things as one must when taking such walks.

My path eventually led me to Olin lab and I wondered in. Given this is Saturday night and it's past 1 in the morning, I assumed the place would be deserted. Instead a whole bunch of windows had lights on and a graduate student wearing blue nitrile gloves holding a beaker of something streamed passed me with a very intense expression on his face.

And the question drilled a whole in my head - can I be that grad student? To be successful you must work hard - that is a given. Maybe a year or two ago I thought I could stay up until 5 am doing important research for a living. But now...I'm not so sure. I've never been to China...I've never explored the surely beautiful coasts of France...etc...

To be honest I'm a bit scared. I want to be a productive member of society. I want to help humanity achieve something it has never achieved before whether it be terraforming Mars or creating a cure for HIV (big dreams right ;p ). But the risk*reward for that seems so small in comparison to say finding a steady 9-5, settling down with a family that knows you will always keep them comfortable and having spare time to explore this planet.

It seems that for research to pay off, you not only have to spend countless hours in the lab you also have to be lucky! What if I spent 1000's of hours trying to come up with some new chemical that another person then discovered purely by accident literally a few weeks before I finished?

So do I suck it up, stop being a lazy bum and dive head first into grad school? Will I be happy?

It's strangely relaxing sitting in lab at 2:07 AM with everyone else gone...knowing that there is somebody a couple of doors down working very hard maybe to help create a miracle drug, or maybe to simply get his PhD, get out and do something completely unrelated.

Sigh...