Well, I have officially accepted OHSU's Neuroscience Graduate Program offer. I'll be going there to start rotations in the summer.

It's feeling better and better.

2 graduate school applications down, 6 to go.

(panicpanicpanicpanicpanicpanicpanicpanic)

UrbanDictionary Meme

( As stolen from Scott. Cut for sheer absurdity )

I just had a dinner of scrambled egg whites, black beans, spinach, mushrooms, pesto and tofu. Can you say delicious, protein-fabulous and gluten free? Mmmmmmmmnomnomnom.

This has been your pointless post for the month. Thank you for tuning in. It gets lonely over here in Karen land - I have to share with someone.

In one of the more amusing turn of events in my life, I've been diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity. Let me tell you how dumbfounded this has left me. While it goes a long way towards explaining the eczema and possibly the migraine - which is great! - it also has me at a loss as to what to do. I'm told not adhering to a gluten free diet to this point will only make me worse. But then I think about my unused bags of King Arthur flour in the kitchen and my eyes start to well up. No more baking with real flour, no more microbrews, no more binges at the Montage with Michelle and Scott or at Shari's with Zoe, only select veggie burgers, aagh! But, to get rid of the migraines, the stomach cramps, the itchy blotchy skin, hell. Might be worth it.

So, for now, I'm diving in. I'll give it a month or so, and see how I feel. I may be able to find a happy medium, because right now I don't respond terribly the gluten (I don't think). But they can pry my Rogue Beer out of my cold, dead hands.

Please send help. Now.

( Guamy, part 2 )

I have to get an 83% on my psychopharm final to get an A- in the class. I have to average an 83 on both my psychometrics final test and the final paper to get an A- in that class.

Word, math gods.

Of course, I have to get a 100% on my phys class to get an A- in the class. 94%! I have to get a 94%! There's a little pressure off... And a -10 for taking a completely optional 400-level vertebrate physiology class... Go me?

We too have felt that burning pain in the side.

The joyful child in the pool has been scorched too and has cried hard over playground slights and betrayals, but joy has the power to sweep misery away. This is true. Nobody "gets over" anything, there is no closure, hearts stay broken for a long time. Love is a tumult and it's a wonder anyone survives it. But you look out the window and imagine joy is waiting for you somewhere. A long cathedral fairway between tall trees and a sweet shot with a 3-iron. The Pacific Coast Highway up through Mendocino. You and your beloved naked in Sorrento, making some finiculi-finicula. I hope you find it.

Garrison Keillor, Everybody in the Pool
From this week's Salon

At some point, long ago, the city of White Salmon, WA needed a road leading from the Columbia river up towards their city. Their local pharmacist, with his handy-dandy college education and a genetic predisposition towards throwing himself in to things he knew very little about, got himself a book on civil engineering and got to work. The road still stands today, as does the reckless abandon in his great-grandchildren.

I just wish my willingness to throw myself in to things I know nothing about had, you know, practical results. Or trackhoes. That'd be cool too.

It's getting late. Quarter to 1. And my alarm is going off at 7:30 tomorrow morning. I have to read a paper I'm leading a discussion on in class tomorrow (oops?), and I wanted to write this post and also catch up on Bones. I'm hoping I can multitask. We'll see.

So most nights this week and last week, I've stumbled home around midnight, taken inventory of my house, grabbed a bowl of cereal, and then fallen in to bed. The place is a trainwreck, and I've just been wishing I had more time to do things like watch Bones and bake. Bake baking, despite what my lab thinks. So I set aside a little time today, and snuck back home to bake some really scrumptious looking snickerdoodle muffins. How excited was I? Very.

Because one of my lab members (of the usual gang I inflict my baking on) is lactose intolerant, I decided to try to veganize the muffins. But I didn't want to have it end terribly, so I thought I'd do a batch regularly, and a batch veganed. I decided to do half-batches, so that I would wind up with less muffins in the end. The first one went fine. Despite the recipe saying it made 12-14 muffins, it actually made 12 cupcake sized goodies. I have yet to figure out the difference. The second one was going great, except I screwed up - I accidently added too much sugar, so I had to go ahead and make the full recipe. I replaced the eggs with soy yogurt, and the sour cream with tofutti sour cream. It was great. And instead of taking the time to bake two batches (I had to get back to work, after all), I decided to just to double to size of each cupcakes in the single cupcake pan. They turned out fine, even better than the eggy ones. Massive, but fine.

So really, at this point, I had effectively 3 batches of cupcakes. 1 dozen normal sized ones, and 1 dozen huge ones. And then I found a box that had been mailed to me on my front step. It was hidden behind my trash can (thanks, UPS!), which means, given the times and state I come home at, it may have been there for a couple of days. So what was the package waiting for me full of, you ask? More cupcakes. I now have four dozen cupcakes. I am a diabetic coma waiting to happen.

The spider saga continues.

I had hoped that humanely, as Nathan says, setting Guamy free in to my trash can would increase my spider karma or at the very least solve some of the problems. But instead, I seemed to have unleashed the spider mafia.

I arrived home this afternoon, grabbed one of Deschutes Brewery's delicious Cinder Cones, and plopped down on my hammock with a 4-month old copy of the Daily Wildcat a friend finally mailed to me. It was going swell, until I noticed a spider scurrying along my patio. It was another one of the big ones, but not nearly the size of the one last night - maybe only the size of a hamster. A scout, I suppose, in retrospect. I lifted my feet in the hammock, and realized that I was in the realm of the spiders now. They should be allowed to be safe outdoors, after all, I reasoned. But it got cold, I was mildly unsettled because I couldn't see it anymore, and so I went inside. Just because.

I went back to work, and came home around 11:45. I got to getting my salad ready in the kitchen tomorrow, when I noticed another rodent-sized spider in my sink. That was it. I'll tolerate spiders in the living room and spiders outside, but never in my kitchen. Besides, this was too easy. I just turned on the sink and -

They've developed Gore-Tex. The little fucker is waterproof. He's bothered by the fact he keeps getting swept away, but is otherwised unphased. So I bring out the big guns, and begin splashing large cups of water on him. When I'm satisfied that he's in a tiny little ball in my drain catcher, I go back to my salad, ignoring pangs of guilt. Until I go to wash the cauliflower, and I notice he's back up. The fuck. I repeat this process, and ignore the idea that he will continue to dry himself off and scurry out of the sink. If I can't see him do it, he's still in there. La la la.

I'm thinking about how odd this is that there are so many spiders, so I start to look around my house. Not seeing any, I look up. I've seen my share of horror movies. If you're set on ignorance anyway and there's one rule, it's to never, ever look up.

It was starting to feel like Arachnophobia. There were only two, but they were the same size as the rest. And it was no more Ms. Nice Girl. They had to go. So, as I thought about how to get rid of them - where's the can of Raid when you need it? - I found my Swiffer.

That's right. The swivel head for those hard-to-reach places was also particularly useful for grinding them in to the ceiling. Unfortunately, it does leave spidey-stains. I raced around my house, looking for more, but couldn't find any. I stood triumphant, not unlike the guy from Evil Dead, occasionally twitchy spider bits clinging to the Swiffer. But as I lie here in bed, I can only think about where those came from and where the rest are. And I realize that the scraping sound I've been hearing the last few nights that I had attributed to carpenter ants is probably a spider the size of Mongolia right inside my bedroom wall.

We'll see how well I sleep tonight. It may be time to make a phone call. Or fumigate.

When I stopped to grab lunch today at a different dining center than usual, I found that they didn't carry my usual low-calorie yuppie beverage of choice, Kombucha. I appreciate kombucha because it doesn't have artificial sweetener, contains just enough alcohol that I can sometimes pretend I'm drinking a beer, and has as many living organisms as my yogurt. Excellent. Disappointed as I was, I took the opportunity to try Pepsi's new zero-calorie yuppie beverage, Tava. I wish I had saved the bottle for the blurb on the side, which was something to the effect of "Ride a train to an art show. Rock your socks off. Experience the world. Sushi. Is your Tava open?" I was in the store when I read it, and I was pretty sure that qualified as shoplifting. I bought the damn thing anyway.

Much unlike kombucha, Tava is chock-full of artificial sweetener - 5th on the ingredient list, for the inquisitive minds - but it also tries to be healthy. Sure, it's not mold masquerading as a digestion stabilizer, but it's got vitamins! The flavor I decided to inflict upon myself, Mediterranean Fiesta, was a black cherry citrus sprinkled with vitamins E, B6, niacin, and chromium. I'm not entirely sure what any of these have to do with a Mediterranean Fiesta. Quite frankly, I was hoping for a sort of sangria with a light hint of citrus with oakey undertones and just a splash of raspberry. Sushi. But no, I get E, B6, niacin and chromium.

Let's dispense with the additives, shall we? Everyone knows that any lettered vitamin is boring. And niacin is just sounding fancy for vitamin B3. This leaves us with chromium. Why in god's name would anyone advertise putting chromium in a fruit drink, you ask? Fantastic question. According to wikipedia, chromium has some great uses in leather tanning, metallurgy, and is a useful dye. Hell, I use chromium potassium sulfate in the lab to make subbed slides for mounting tissue on. Granted, the MSDS sheet on it lists its health rating as 3 (of 4 possible) or "severe: "Short exposure could cause serious temporary or residual injury even though prompt medical attention was given." So you can see why I'm not exactly leaping at the idea of chromium being in my Tava. Sushi. Chromium is useful biologically in sugar metabolism, because it enhances insulin. Most people get all the chromium they need from foods like broccoli, grape juice, and somewhat ironically, red wine. Seriously, have you ever known anyone with a chromium deficiency? Didn't think so. In fact, too much chromium can cause cell damage, but I doubt it'll get you before the aspartame.

I checked out the Tava website to, you know, properly research this post. You'll be pleased to know that the makers of Tava even suggest food pairings for the different flavors. So what goes well with Mediterranean Fiesta Explosion? No, not sushi. BBQ spare ribs and dark chocolate truffles, with recipes already provided. Maybe this is why my Tava experience was less than satisfying - the Brazilian Samba is supposed to go well with a Thai-style shrimp and cucumber salad, which is almost like the garden salad I was munching on. That, or it was a chromium overload with all the broccoli also in my salad.

Sushi.

I came home from a lovely evening at the Beanery writing papers and chatting with Zoe to a spider the size of a basset hound on my living room wall. Really, that big, you ask? Yes, that big, but with twice as many legs and without the floppy ears. We sat and stared at each other for a few moments, not really sure what to do about each other. At least, there was uncertainty on my part - I'm fairly sure his thoughts were something along the lines of how on earth he was going to build a web big enough for me.

I frequently have these moments where I have flashes of my friends finding me in a week or two, the cause of my death being a combination of stubbornness and singlehood. They finally realize they haven't seen me around, the neighbors start to complain of a smell, and someone finally puts it together. In these scenarios, I'm invariably found half-eaten by a cat I don't have. They assume my place has been ransacked, until they can't find any sign of foul play and realize that I voluntarily live in disaster. I imagined it happening once when I couldn't get the lid off of the spaghetti sauce - images of my body clenching the bottle, detectives scratching their head while my cellphone sat two feet away, a cat mewling in the corner. And again with this spider. I imagined having a horrible infection from his bite, having to amputate my own arm in my bathroom using a home-made tourniquet and my serrated bread knife, only to die of sepsis a few days later anyway. And again, the scene with the detectives, the cell phone, and the mewling. "If only she wasn't alone," they'd say. "Alone?" someone would counter "- the fuck. If only she would have called for help."

Now, I've heard of these giant valley spiders before. But never them being the size of a Volkwagen Bug, like the one sitting quietly on my wall. I've even seen a few the size of a half-dollar and done the obligatory yelp before scooting them outside. I'd go so far as to say I consider myself a spider advocate. I pet Eric's tarantula's, I'd sleep on the floor of his apartment even though I knew they had escaped. I always let house spiders go outside or ignore the as they crawl across my desk/wall/whatever. But I was quite certain that an arachnid the size of a full-grown oak tree was not going to fit back under my couch, at least without me noticing. No how, no way.

As I search for a way to subdue him - shotguns, horse tranquilizers, explosive harpoons - the images of the DIY amputation come back and I swear I hear a meow. My first impulse is to call the nearest male I can think of to come take care of this, not unlike the spaghetti sauce situation. But then I imagine how stupid that phone call could be:
"Hello?"
"Hi. Can you come over?"
"Sure... What's up?"
"Well, I have this thing..."
"... Thing?"
"It's a spider."
"You're calling me for a spider?"
"It's the size of an aircraft carrier"
"Can't you just squash it?"
"You're underestimating the size of this spider. And even if I did, what happens when itbitesmeandthenI havetoamputatemyarmandthensepsisandIdieandthenthecateatsme?!"
"... ... When did you get a cat? Seriously, just have the cat take care of it."

I'm fairly certain at this point, the spider has eaten my imaginary postmortem cat. So I resign myself, grabbing a very large container from the kitchen. I'm pleased to see the spider hasn't moved an inch, no doubt deep in thought designing his master web. I sneak up on him veeeeeeeery slowly, put my container in place, and -thunk-.

Nothing to it.

I slip a piece of paper between the cup and the wall, and wrestled the cup-spider-paper sandwich outside. I hadn't realized that something the size of the island nation of Guam would fit so well in a 22 oz Starbucks cup, or so well in my trash can. Yes, technically he's alive and outside, but I figure this way I've saved the rest of the world. If the SPCA wants to talk to me, they're going to have to get through him first.

I recently stumbled across Ryan Adam's Suicide Handbook, a bootleg recorded probably between Heartbreaker and Gold. I'd looking for it somewhat casually for a while, and was pretty stoked to find it. There's some neat stuff on there, including an acoustic version of "Answering Bell," a personal favorite. But one song in particular blew me away, called "Miss Sunflower." Here's a link to the complete second disk, much credit to broadcaster house. Give it a listen - it's really sent me for a loop.

( Lyrics )