White Noise

(also an old draft that never got posted)

This is the only thing I can think of that would be constructive in focusing my mind currently.

Laura is busy on a spring break trip, potentially exhausted from her day of working to serve others. Rob I believe is in class until about midnight. My lady is in the Tartan land until tomorrow night, and I miss her sorely.

I am in a colloidal state where all my emotions are tossing themselves about in chaotic motion that refuses to settle upon either one direction or another. I feel like an idiot right now, unable to comprehend or remember some crucial details right now. Did I turn in that homework assignment two weeks ago? I found the answer sheet for it crumpled in with other papers, unfilled. I don't remember doing the assignment at all... but how could it have slipped my mind to turn in a prelab?! Of course the grades for the paper lab are not posted online, and I want to blame the idiots in charge of posting grades for my current confusion over whether I should be frustrated and discouraged right now over these potentially lost easy points. I guess I might find out on Thursday in lab.

Other parts of my life are going successfully. I finally got to reconnect on a fairly deep level with my two best friends over break and learned more about them in the process. I feel less alienated from them, and less intimidated by them now. I am still insecure in myself when around them, but at least external intimidation is not so much a part of these woes anymore. I got to reconnect with my parents, my grandmother, my aunt, and most importantly to me right now where I'm at in my life, my nephews. We shot some hoops over break and had a blast with it. I got to watch Topgun for the first time with them (though they had already seen it before... which I did not know whether to interpret myself after as overly sheltered, under-cultured, or over-worked). In any case, I loved the movie and recall seeing bits of it in the past, probably with my older brother Mike who has been into airplanes since he was a zygote. Work is going well. I made a breakthrough in my search for regulatory sequences and transcription factors that coordinate the expression of the potassium channels of interest to me now that I found out how to compare the homologous genes between rats, mice, and humans. I finally brought my ergonomic keyboard down to school so that my wrists do not hurt anymore. I still need to find a mouse for the same reason, but that will take some searching.

Now to enumerate my failures... or at least those which appear as such. My hand seems like its on fire with the unknown disease that plagues it. I don't know if this will heal or when it will heal, but it's really dragging me down that it is just always there... neither getting better nor worse in any predictable manner. I didn't get any homework done over the entire week of break, which means that it is sitting like a ton of bricks upon me right now. This is the only break from such work that alleviates the stress it causes me. It's painful to me that I'm noticing my own language turning very simplistic, losing whatever artfulness it ever possessed. I guess I'm just out of practice, or haven't read enough lately to whet my style. Syntactically I've always been a bit awkward I guess, because I notice formal ambiguities in the way dependent clauses and appositives may be placed. Comma under use and over use is a symptom of this, though I usually err on the latter just to be safe.