new beginnings all over again

My second year in Louisiana.
My last year as a 20-something.

I entertained myself on the airplane trying to make a drawing. If drawing were a little easier, I would also try to show you the louisiana swampscape lit up by the flickering glare of huge refinery flare. I would make a little drawing of jake (thesnakr) picking me up at the airport in his green chevy malibu, and i would somehow represent the mind-boggling deliciousness of the seafood poboy at Louie's. There might be a frame saying, "Weather in Baton Rouge is 72° and smelly," in reference to the scent of hot petroleum wafting in with the refinery fumes and muggy air as we exited the airport.

My second year in Louisiana. This time it feels like I really live here. Last time it felt like a long visit. It's a little bit disheartening; I was only supposed to be here for a year in the first place, but one of the things you'll learn about grad school has something to do with the phrase "only one more year!" Also, I've only been back here a few hours and the crushing loneliness already shows signs of return. However, the sense of semi-permanency might bring some changes: trying to work normal hours rather than spending every waking hour at the lab. Getting a desk so that I can work at home too, on things that require thinking rather than tinkering and waiting.

Despite the above, I would say I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm taking a class that I expect to be interesting. (And another that I expect to be tedious.) I'm going to try to work much less and accomplish much more.

best idea ever: mad science week

My friend Alex thought up something really great, and then, most impressively, carried it out. It was this: Mad Science Week. He's in neurobiology grad school in Boston and so of course knows myriad clever people who are usually very busy hacking on their own particular research. The idea was this: everybody take a week off of the usual grad school research to put their skillz together to accomplish a Mad Science Task, a week together engineering something fun. They did this!

Here's what Alex has to say about it:

Last week was Mad Science Week, an event that's been in the planning all summer. The basic idea is to design and execute a Tobin-esque project in a week, using collective grad school power to do something interesting. Our project consisted of a musical instrument controlled by the power of light. What this translated to was a bicycle light, a webcam, and a software synthesizer. I'll try and get a video of it out at some point, but what's important isn't the project itself, but that we finally did something. A lot of my department is lots of talk and almost no action, so it's refreshing to move past that, and spend a week programming and hooking things up and being frustrated and figuring things out together. Working hard on a project I like is infinitely more rewarding than leisure. I'm crushed that I don't get to work on a project I like all the time.

I'm flattered that he called it a Tobin-esque project, especially since I only rarely work on such things myself anymore!