Refraction

catherinette is a French word denoting an unmarried woman who’s at least twenty-five. I am quite aware that I only have a couple years before that will be me. Suitable, though, I guess.

Last night, my father seemed to take an interest in my romantic life for the first time ever, ¹I do not talk to my parents ever about anything really meaningful. and basically said he was afraid I’d become a spinster. ²I think I can pull off crazy cat lady okay, though.

“Catherine, if you have a chance to get married in your 20s…. do it. You don’t want to get to your 30s… [your older, single 30-something cousins], I don’t think they’ll get married…. You’ll never find someone who’s 100%, you know, everyone has their flaws and you just have to cope.”

All I can say in return is, “It’s a big step between, ‘Hey, I like you a lot’ and ‘Let’s get married!’ ³I confess that I never really thought I’d ever get married when I was younger.”

I don’t post about much these days; few things seem worthy of the trouble of opening up WordPress, and those that are I’d prefer not to discuss on an open blog.

But anyway. This xkcd comic is about the Henry Gates/James Crowley affair, and for that alone it’s pretty good… but the title-text puts it over the top.

My biology grad student friends tell me that different types of alcohol don’t actually have different effects. I trust their expertise, not because of the ‘biology’ part, but because of the ‘grad student’.

So remember the part where I’m a Gmail fangirl? Gmail has made me even happier with their new options for labels! I used to keep the labels menu closed by default since I had so many (I’d make one for each course I took…), but now I can keep only the active ones visible. Since I’m out of school, there are only three. 😀 Makes for a nice clean inbox, anyway, and I’m able to easily see just the messages I want.

I’m so glad I got my Gmail account when I did, so that I’m able to use my real name (sans numbers, etc.) Unfortunately, I seem to get a number of e-mails addressed wrongly to me. Some of these are amusing (booty call), some cause me a bit of concern (receipt for a plasma TV), some are oddly helpful (organic produce newsletter).

I can’t quite say the same for Facebook; I was beaten out to my real name (as a username) by someone else with the same name. Ah well. You win some…

Thinking back, I have definitely had better birthdays.

Ones that don’t involve babysitting reactions which look like chocolate soufflé but smell like concentrated vinegar.

Ones that don’t involve cleaning up said reaction after the oil bath overheated while I was in a meeting.

Ones that don’t involve said reaction mixture splashing onto my pristine lab coat and arms.

As my lab mate kindly pointed out: “Hey, at least you got a story for your birthday.” Thanks, R—.

(My lab mate is really good at chemistry puns, actually…)

Anyway. I’d like to think I totally rocked the conference–my presentation even picked up a prize, and I met some really awesome people (how could they not be awesome? They’re chemists!) Despite my misgivings about the small town of K—, it turned out to be irrelevant: We chemists know how to drink. And enjoy board games. Especially drunken board games.

I think xkcd has been awesome this week.

Reasons:

1. Um, hello, Firefly?
2. Do you really need any others?

I don’t know how healthy it is to admit that a friend and I sat down today to try and list all 150 (original) Pokémon.

We got up to 144.

I didn’t care about this before, but now that I’m on the cusp of leaving my undergraduate degree (last hurdle tomorrow) I realize just how AWESOME the open courseware that MIT offers is.

I can finally get a semi-proper foundation in linguistics! And … all that other stuff I always wanted to learn about. Cryptography. Economics. Anthropology. Maybe I’ll finally understand what political science is all about. Psychology. Cognitive sciences. Classical studies?!

Plus stuff that’s more relevant to my degree: Materials science. Chemical engineering.

This place is a goldmine.