billions&billions

it's a good book

brainy/baldy

Here are some MRIs of my brain... it's a weird feeling, when you first look at scans of the inside of your own head; as if upon seeing them, some deep je ne sais quoi life questions will be answered. Must be some kind of uncomfortable recognition that I'm looking at the biological foundation of my Self. "Hi brain! I mean, hi, thing that houses my thoughts! I mean... um... man, that looks just like all the other brains, oh well."

Ah who am I kidding, it's cool as hell!!

a message from my 18-yr-old-self

I used to submit anonymously to this Cornell group called The Public Journal (www.thepublicjournal.com/cornell) and I found some pdfs off the main site recently, copies of the really old issues(it was just starting up when I was a freshman). I was surprised to see my name included on the contributor page, since freshman year feels like ancient history and I didn't remember submitting, but sure enough, this was buried near the back of the issue... an embarrassing example of early writing, but I love it because it made me slam back into that exact moment when I wrote it (still in high school, oy).

"2/21/04"

Hello, danger/pleasure thing. There's no escape from this. Like when you're out on the road during a snowstorm; that kind of beautiful snow that glitters in your headlights like a starry vortex. Somehow, the biting cold numbs your thought process, and the reassurance of steel and four-wheel-drive beneath you grant a sense of false security. Under the snow and slush, a slick layer of ice gloats at your naivete... and that logical part of you knows it so well. Caught up in the moment, you kick caution to the abandoned curb, crank up the volume of the melody to drown out conscience, and push the pedal to the floor.

...It's the hollow, still cold that brings us closest. The kind that freezes in your lungs. Cold that seems to sip away at light and color -- not even the icicles forming in lashes cast glinting sparks. Streetlamps become pillars to the sky, stairways to star castles. And all I can think, as ghostly headlights peer past me in the night, is how it would feel to ascend.

If it gets cold enough, does time stop here?


(www.thepublicjournal.com/thepublicjournal2.pdf)

I will always remember driving into Batavia on my way to Main Street Coffee one particularly frigid February night during my senior year of high school, coming over the bridge to face hundreds of light pillars vaulting up into the darkness from every light source--it looked apocalyptic! Later I found out that it's a rare natural phenomenon (http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/pilpic18.htm).

one extra hour never meant so much

I'm pretty sure this is up there with one of the longest days of my life. Halloween was awesome last night but 8am wakeup to go to a 5-hour liquor license certification course was not. I came away with a single outraged question repeating in my head: "are you KIDDING me?!!"--I could have read that booklet and taken the test in 15 minutes!

I sat in the sun on Lomas for almost an hour, uncomfortably hot and exhausted enough to pass out on the tiny hard bus stop bench. When I finally got on the right bus, it was cool and quiet. The driver took one look at my face and waved me along without asking for my fare. Needless to say, I was late for work at Yanni's. Poor Davlena had to see me at my franticmost, rushing around and cursing and fighting the urge to lock myself in my room and sleep. Forgot my damn bowtie and server apron and had to borrow Panos' car to come back and get them (thank the stars I got all proficient at driving stick shift this summer). My shift felt good, and not too hard, I'm just not good at the timing. Dolmathes and greek salads and bread baskets flying everywhere, trying to get used to the micros order-entering system that has thousands of buttons and options and makes my eyes hurt... I wish I could skip through learning the painful specifics and just wait tables. The shift ended after what seemed like forever--I volunteered to stay and help close following the manager's somewhat dubious and patronizing praise. I don't like being patronized. But, the little things help to balance out my frustration; it felt so good to bike home in the cool air and I finally gave the new Ryan Adams and the Cardinals album a couple of solid listens on my kickass new Grado headphones (waahahaha it's amazing!! I love the song Cobwebs)

Oh and I just compiled these jpegs, because I think it is amusing:



(haha, hi Emma hiding in the background of that photo)

stumbling into my 23rd year

Only 6 days post-event posting! That's pretty damn good for me. I tried to put these in chronological order, but I think most people could figure out the progression of the night pretty easily (e.g., guess which came first: the car bombs or the drawing on my face?)

There were a lot more photos than this (Dae Il was nothing if not prolific in his documentation of the evening), but it takes forever to upload them to blogger. My birthday was amazing, thank you to everyone who showed up!







The next three pictures are definitely chronological, but spaced apart; they go from "yayyy car bombs!" to "wooo roomies!" to "Emma your hair is SO PRETTY NOW I SHALL FALL ON YOU"















There were about 12 of these of Kevin. I'll try to add more


Tribe nose-paintings and a sparse goatee. Totally normal. Birthday: success!!

here comes the bride

birthday photos are impending, but here's something to tide over anyone who actually reads this blather of mine. i got an EEG today. So in my Life Plan, I think I'll include wearing one of these nets to my wedding instead of a veil.

In other news... more important news, that is... SARAH IS HERE. She interviewed at the Mind today. I am so proud of you Sararrrrr, you are a little prospective-job-machine!

Oh! AND. Senator Barack Obama is going to be in Albuquerque tomorrow, so it looks like camping plans are being put on hold again. Which is ok, it's not like we're running out of time, not directly anyway.

How am I supposed to get work done when I feel so happy? It really is true what they say about positive affect decreasing productivity.

a warning

...do not click on this link with anything in your mouth. Do not click on it if you are particularly afraid of spiders.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/10/22/easpider122.xml

if i saw that in my back yard, I would leave the country.

whatever that shot was... um... don't go to that bar on your birthday

ooo boy i am avoiding facebook right now. birthdays equal wallpostonslaught!


so i'll skip to other news. josh and i hiked the sandia crest on Sunday, despite my pathetic limp slash broke-ass-foot. (josh, i maintain that i was SPRIGHTLY on that walk). it was so awesome. one minute the forest smelled like early spring with melting snow, the next it smelled like happily disintegrating fall leaves. the views are pretty much impossible to describe, and i'll include a photo, but it won't do anything justice.




that photo stolen from googleimage because my camera currently has no lifeline to the macbook. must get that taken care of. ergh. more posting soonish. i have to sleeeeep.

"excuse me, sir? ...ma'am! hello, ma'am, would you mind taking our picture?"

"it's a beautiful day for flying!" proclaimed the cheery voice on the answering machine recording at 4:58AM this morning.

Two hours later, the same voice announced that the weather was not turning and that there would be no propane supplied this morning. Meagerly caffeinated and disappointed, we snapped a photo to prove we tried and headed home to sleep all day.

on the upside, though, we learned some things! We came upon the secret meeting of the ballooners around 6am and learned about all of the winners and giveaways announced by that same voice again--the weirdly palin-esque soprano of the BALLOONMEISTER. (I kid you not)

AND OMG WE SAW WHY BALLOONS DON'T FLY IN BAD WEATHER LOOK AT THE GIANT CRASH AAAAAA!!



In other news, considering my furniture collection is confined to an air mattress and a suitcase, I spent an evening watching a bad movie (Starship Troopers) and cutting out rasterbations. Makes things feel a little less anonymous in this spartan room of mine.




Roomies and I have been delightfully lazy since waking up in the early afternoon. Three cheers to Sunday.

competition

between softball and "geeks who drink" trivia night, my confidence is down. i partially blame Josh for dragging me along! (oh wait... I enthusiastically begged to be included, didn't I? I blame hubris!).

i don't have anything else to say, just wanted to show some degree of faithfulness to this blog. if i had the energy to write, key phrases would include adam, debate, josh, leslie, air mattress, dinosaurs, brain injury pathology, bike helmet, hills, dodgeball, kevin, nick&norah, MRN.

work is good. circadian rhythm adjusting to earlywakeup. night, internets...

Should have won that photo contest...

Senator Obama is so charming... look how he puts up with us.

Do I Need To Wash These Walls?

Yesterday I found a house. It's awesome and close to stuff (work) and cheap and my room is big and sunny. Roommates are awesome--Emma trains dolphins at sea world sometimes, Davlena studies photography and forensics, and Harrison is Davlena's kickass dog.



I am feeling very on top of things! Today I opened a bank account, registered to vote, and cleaned my new bathroom because it was grrrr-oss. I'm told that the former tenants were insane and did not clean anything. Not to mention that Davlena told me the girl who used to live in my room was a rather large BDSM Master with a transsexual boyfriend Slave. I was almost skeptical until I found a pretty serious looking cat-of-nine-tails hanging on the back of the door under some forgotten clothes. So there's that.

Josh and Leslie, who I stayed with when I got here, are so great. The night I flew in Josh made awesome pasta and we drank wine and played Taboo with their sort-of roommate (rents the adjoining apt), Lani. Good people.

Tonight I am going to a party to watch the debate. I am going to Be Outgoing and Make New Friends!

My life, updated, informationized, whether you read it or NOT.

In a few minutes, I'm going compile a list of people to email the link of this blog to. I feel very securely that it's the right thing to do, because I suck at staying in touch with people, but the internets is a great communicative device that doesn't carry too much obligation on either end. So there you have it. I'm having some anxiety about the list of people I'm emailing, because maybe someone out there is going to tell their friend they got an email from me with my blog link, and that friend is going to be like all "omg wtf idk what you're talking about does she hate me?" (all of those acronyms pronounced fully, of course). But I am deciding at this moment to not worry too much and be content with the fact that I am Putting Myself Out There.

So, bookkeeping first: I spent almost the whole summer in Ithaca, NY, adding data and analysis to my former thesis project. That was good and all, but I felt deeply pulled to move away from Ithaca for a while before I thought about loving it properly. I have been bouncing between home and Sister for a month or so, but on Tuesday I am moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico. See older posts (below) for some annoying (read: I'm psyched about it) stuff about that place. I'll be working at a place called the Mind Research Network, where I will be a 9-5 Research Assistant slash fMRI Cowgirl. I'll probably be there for two years, but I will definitely be there at least for one. At this point, I would like to give a shout out to Dr. Geoffrey Miller, for serendipity's sake (and for: thankyouthankyou); I remain amazed that things have worked out so well in terms of how I landed this job. And thanks to Rex Jung for thinking I was worth his while, I'm mad excited, won't let you down :)

Take-home message: I live in the city of Albuquerque, if you are passing through or need any kind of break from the place you are in, VISIT me. We can go chase roadrunners, coyote style (official state bird, hell yes).

Anyway, at the moment I'm chilling on my bed in the house that I grew up in. My geriatric and awesome cat is here, and the fan is on, and I smell like campfire because I spent the evening chilling around one with my Mom and Dad, and with Mr. Vickner (hi, Irene!).

I also feel the need to relate what I consider to be a shocking incident that happened to me this morning. I rolled over in bed and kicked something, and suddenly a voice near my foot was saying, "yo rachael happy twenty-first birthday you old motherf-"--I am not an early riser, and I have rarely bolted upright with that kind of urgency. Story goes, Micah McLaughlin gave me a build-a-bear for my birthday two years ago, and that's what its voicebox said (apparently build-a-bear did not allow swear words to be sold on voice boxes, it literally gets cut off--or, he did it on purpose. Micah, if you ever read this, please weigh in). Anyway, it scared the bejeeeeesiz out of me, but then I was just happy that I had found it (my bed at home is a veritable field of pillows and blankets and stuffed animals that I have collected over the years at college).

Maybe the point of the story is that, here is me and the bear:





(Happy saturday, happy Cornell homecoming... time to binge on my sister's Californication DVDs... also Aaron I hate you for being at the Ryan Adams concert only I don't really hate you I just WISH I WERE THERE...the following is mostly for me, and partially explains the name of the blog, sort of. yeeeah.)




Cards Live from Wilson Wolf on Vimeo.

state nicknames

New Mexico is officially nicknamed, "The Land of Enchantment".

Okay.

Unofficial nicknames include (but I will see to it are not limited to the following):
Cactus State
The Colorful State
New Andelusia
Land of Sunshine
The Outer Space State (YES)
The Spanish State (I WILL LEARN)

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_nicknames

(note that New York is the only state on the list with only one nickname... what up with that?)

More facts! Albuquerque is known as Bee'eldííldahsinil in Navajo. Oooooooooo

and, it is home to the world's largest hot air balloon festival, which is next week, which means I get to go! They fly hundreds of glowing balloons at night and everything oh man it is going to be awesome.

inspired by Foggy

I get this feeling, right before a big trip, this weird sense like a space inside of me has shifted states without my permission. It isn't that a part of me is already navigating the waters far away in the place that I'm traveling to, not quite--it's more like something inside me that is normally bouncing off the walls just gets really quiet, like radio static not quite tuned to the right frequency.

(hey, I think I just got a whole extra understanding of that THS song "Stuck Between Stations")

I'm also doing that thing where I push the clock back farther and farther every night until my body settles on its (apparently) innate preference: to bed at 4am, to rise at 1pm. When I get up, breakfast food feels ridiculous. Today I woke up and ate a peanut butter and cucumber sandwich for "lunch".

I haven't been doing much at home. I run, I watch tv on hulu, I read, I invent new ways to use the overabundant supply of tomatoes in the garden. I learned to crochet hats, but anyone who knows me will tell you that for all of my excellence in acquiring a skill and beginning a project, I'm not so hot on the follow through. There are about 6 different spools of yarn lying around my room with little round doily-looking hat-tops hanging off of them--but no hats--so sad.

Today I went with my mom to look at new cars for her, and then we visited my sister and ate mexican at one of those awesome tiny-and-dirt-cheap-pay-at-the-counter places where they serve your food in baskets lined with wax paper. I want more now.

In moving news, my temporary housemates seem awesome. They are going to be lucky to ever get rid of me after saying on gchat that their weekend plans were, "a nice cigar, scotch, and 'The Last Unicorn'" I almost fell off the bed.