I'm in the mood to test limits at the moment.  The little battery outline is only half full, and I have no idea how much longer it will last.  I could easily forget that my computer isn't actually plugged in and lose this whole entry.  Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn't be better, if I kept to myself.  But I've become so accustomed to answering every knock on the door, letting everyone in.  Perhaps one could compare it to going out in public without any underwear on.  All someone has to do is unzip your pants and you're exposed, but people rarely unzip other people's pants.  I don't know where I'm going with this.  Maybe it's delirium brought on by the fever.

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We spent a lot of time with her this weekend.  The closest I've ever been to allowing myself the occasional daydream about the future.  I usually stifle my own selfish hopes and dreams as being completely irrelevant and impossible, but for some reason I can't seem to keep my pessimism going.  At the same time I'm extremely frightened that it's all some kind of cruel joke by the universe, tempting me into a situation I've always desired only to steal it away from me a few moments later.  And with universes who knows how long "moments" will be.

Are we interesting enough?  When you get past the initial shock (and shock induced interest), we're just a couple of boring, childish adults.  When I say childish adults, what I mean is that we still laugh at farts, but we've got are lives in order.  In our free time we play video games and watch the television.  We don't travel and not traveling doesn't concern us.  We are content to simply exist in our crappy apartment furnished by a capitalistic infatuation with material possessions that can be used to wile away the hours between getting off work and going to sleep.  Sure, I am into "interesting" things like martial arts and gymnastics and keytars and understanding the origins of existence and all that, but does that make me interesting as a person?  Or are those things interesting and I'm just a boring person who happens to agree with the majority of people that they are interesting?  By that definition, is everyone boring?  I've always considered myself boring, but perhaps it's because I'm me all the time and I've grown used to myself.  I just...I hope that she stays interested.  She tells me I'm not boring...but I find that hard to believe.  I'm predictable.  It comes with the territory.  I'm an asshole to people I don't like and a knight in shining armor to those I deem worthy.  I don't leave things unsaid.  In a mental sense, I'm never wearing underwear and all you have to do is get past the initial awkwardness of unzipping my pants to find out.

But that doesn't make for a very interesting person.  I'm no smokey eyed hipster sitting in the back corner of a dark bar, brooding over a cup of black coffee.  I'm more like the 14-year-old skateboarding down the sidewalk on the other side of the street from the bar, excitedly waving at my friends and proclaiming that I just grew my first pubes.  I may have deep thoughts, but they are always immediately elevated to the surface where I expel them as mindless prattling.  I may be funny for a while.  My candid nature has a tendency to put most people at ease and make them smile and laugh in some instances, but it ends up painting me in the wrong light.  "Big sister," I can read it in other people's eyes.  "Big sister always says what she means and knows herself so well.  I look up to her!"  But that's not what I want.  I don't need any more siblings.  I need more friends, and in some instances, more lovers.  Yet I rarely feel those kinds of deep connections, just because people aren't used to full disclosure except with select family members.  I confuse people, rather than connecting with them and getting to know them.  Maybe it's because my constant honestly is so alien to most people, because most people lie to you until you prove yourself to them.  Maybe people feel like my friendship isn't worth anything because I give them my honestly when I first meet them.  I don't know.

But enough self analysis.  What I mean with all of this is I'm frightened.  I'm frightened the initial enjoyment of my personality and gratitude for my "knight in shiny armor" demeanor will fade over time.  For my husband, it didn't.  He still appreciates it daily.  But will she?  Will little notes and comfortable hugs and gentle kisses be enough for her?  After she knows all my stories and thoughts and feelings and there is nothing more to learn, will it be enough that I am a rational person with a strong sense of honor, as it was for my husband?  I don't know.  I'm so fearful.  She's seen our day to day activities.  She knows that all we do with most of our time is sit around and play video games.  She spent an evening playing board games with us.  And she's still interested, or at least I assume she is.  The universe's moment seems to be longer than a few weeks in this instance, but when will it be over?  When will I have to go through the torment I've prepared myself for with years of self doubt and reevaluation of my concept of what a relationship is?  When will I have to say goodbye because what I want is impossible to obtain?  Or will I be pleasantly surprised and awestruck by the outcome of this little expedition into hopefulness?

Wow, this entry got intense quickly.  Sickness will do that I suppose.  All I can say is that I wish I had gotten this fever from kissing her instead of simply being near her.  Although, either way it would have been worth it.

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I attended a dinner party on Sunday, another in the series that I've mentioned before.  This time the host was a lovely, slender young lady who I tentatively assumed might be an amazing cook based on previous experience with her life outlook.  It's hard to explain, but she seems to favor the finer things in subtle ways, and as expected it certainly extended into the realm of cooking.  The food was absolutely delicious and we spent the evening talking about our oral qualifiers and a myriad of other topics including whether or not me wearing clothing meant for males was a disservice to the entire human race.  I was certainly surprised to hear everyone agree that my body was far to nice to be hidden by the clothing I was wearing.  I didn't really think anyone noticed, but I suppose they do.

It really struck me later that my weight loss is rather apparent, especially since I'm becoming toned in addition to losing weight.  Working out and eating more selectively is turning my body into a work of art, and I hadn't really thought about that fact impacting anyone but myself.  I was losing weight so that I could enjoy my own reflection while naked in my own home, but I suppose that concept has far reaching effects in public as well.  Even my husband, who isn't the most vocal about my looks has been telling me how beautiful I am and how thin my waist is when wrapped by his hands far more than he ever had before, even when we were first dating.

It makes me happy...but not in the same way I expected it to.  I'll try to think of a better way to explain it later.  My computer is dying now.

I wanted to make some kind of point when I sat down to write today, but instead all I can think about are the dandelions.  There were so many everywhere and I had the desire to roll around in them and jump through fields of them and take pictures of myself covered in their little fluffy seeds.  But then the rain came.  It destroyed them.  It crushed their fragile heads just as nature intended.  It left me alone, in a sea of broken corpses, forced to look upon my fallen comrades at every moment in every patch of grass.  There will be no rolling, no jumping, no pictures.  Only destitute wanderings remain for me in the apocalypse that is the days following a heavy rain in the world of dandelions.

I've been working really hard in the lab, trying desperately to validate my existence as a graduate student.  It hasn't been going well.  Biological processes are all series processes.  Each step depends on the previous one.  Every failure means that I have to start all the way back at the beginning of the process...which can sometimes mean I just did several days of work for nothing.  The second most recent attempt at the biological laboratory training protocol seemed so promising.  I actually completed the process!  However, my excitement was short lived when I came to find my petri dishes clean when they should have been coated in little bacterial colonies the following morning.  I sighed and tossed them aside.  But what went wrong?  Why hadn't it worked?  I went back through the steps and realized that everything had been confirmed successful except the last two steps, and after a discussion with my professor I realized I could easily figure out which of them was the failure.  This week I redid the protocol carefully, doing everything exactly the same way I had, except for one particular step.  And to my surprise, this morning my petri dishes were dotted uniformly with little living things.  I was elated...until I realized that every step was working...except for a key step, which I never successfully completed and which was basically the foundation for my real project.  So...I guess I'm happy I figured out what was wrong, but I'm rather frustrated because of the step that it ended up being.  I just feel so inadequate as a biological researcher.  It's so much more complicated than inorganic chemistry where nothing is alive.  I've never been a good gardener and I've killed several rodents as childhood pets, so what made me think I could succeed in a field where part of the task is to keep things alive?  *sigh*  All I can do is keep trying, desperately, frustrated, and eventually I'll succeed...but it may lead to a 7 year PhD.

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I intended to rant more about Twilight, but as time passed my anger has faded to a dull ache in the back of my mind.  The writing sucked, but I guess I can see where lonely 14-year-old girls and sexually frustrated women in their 40's could enjoy it.  However, I just couldn't.  The glaringly bad writing (and I'm not claiming to be any great writer, but I don't have a series of published books either) overshadowed any value the frail plot had to offer.  And I'll leave it at that.  I guess I don't have to feel guilty about making fun of it because now I've read it from beginning to end and I know it's bad, so there.

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I finished our ACen costumes, and I honestly don't know if could have done without the ability to use a sewing machine.  Rather than explain them, I'll just post a couple pictures:

Additionally, I'm bleaching my hair!  After coming to the conclusion that getting it done at a salon was going to be waaaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive, I started searching for cheaper alternatives.  Someone in my lab group suggested hydrogen peroxide, so I looked it up online and called my mom who also uses it to bleach her hair.  The process sounded easy so I tried it out.  My only complaint is that each application only lightens my hair in a very minor way.  I mean, it's golden instead of brown now, but that's after four separate applications.  But, for less than $5 how can I complain?  I'll post more pictures when I get my hair the way I want it.

On the downside, while I was working on the costumes I guess I bumped or kicked my gallon jug of distilled water for the iron and it sprung a tiny pinhole leak.  Needless to say, when I noticed, it had completely drained out all over the storage room floor and underneath the boxes of stuff.  And I noticed at 3 AM...so I spent the wee hours of Monday morning cleaning up the spill.  Thankfully the water didn't get to any of the boxes with paper things stored in them, but it was very annoying nonetheless.  It was very gratifying as I cleaned to find that there were no dead bugs under things and other than the water there really wasn't anything to clean up.  I was very sleepy in lab that day though...  Teaches me a lesson on distilled water storage I guess.

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I passed my oral qualifying exam.  Now I'm officially a PhD candidate.  I won't say too much more than that because it didn't go all that well, and even though I passed I'm not looking forward to the review sheet once it's in the hands of my professor...  I'll talk more about it when I know more.

There are days when everything falls into place effortlessly.  Saturday was one of those days.  As is my way, I immediately sat down at my computer upon waking and went about idly checking my intarwebs.  A wide smile crept across my face because the only person I'm excited to talk to on gmail chat was online.  I had hope that perhaps we could spend a bit of time together over the weekend and sent her a short message asking if she was free.  She wasn't, of course, what with homework and studying sucking up her time, so I sighed and resigned myself to relaxing at home for another uneventful Saturday.  But then she mentioned that one of her roommates was planning a barbecue, hinting that it would be a very poor study environment.  I saw my opportunity and quickly offered my barbecue free apartment as a study location.  She happily excepted and said that I could come pick her up after she had gotten off work.  I was ecstatic and started fussing about what I would wear and if my hair looked too stupid, even though she had seen me in my pajamas on one occasion when I came over to her place to borrow her sewing machine.

As her time at work came to a close I looked for her online and picked her up.  She offered to bring her sewing machine over and it was like she had read my mind because I had prepped a bunch of costume parts to be sewn together the previous evening.  We spent the entire evening together, first with me sewing furiously and she and the hubs watching television with some intermittent chatting, then dinner near campus after checking on my cultures, then respectful silence while she worked on her homework, I continued to sew and my husband played Pokemon with the sound off.  It all felt so right and natural, as though we had been spending time together like this for months.  I sneaked a few peeks at the two of them sitting together on the futon and stared happily for a few seconds at their focused faces thinking about how incredibly lucky I was to be experiencing this blissful Saturday evening.  But all good things must come to an end and eventually she needed to get home so she could rest for another long day of studying.  We decided to make a visit to Steak 'n Shake prior to dropping her off at home, and while our order took quite a while to come out I took this as a boon of extra time to spend.  I knew I had to tell her how I was feeling and as she left the car and waved goodbye I considered how best to do so.

Earlier in the evening we had been discussing rants, mainly because I had been ranting about how much I hated reading Twilight, and I said that I usually reserve ranting for my blog.  This seemed to catch her attention and she commented that I would have to give her the website for it.  A couple hours after we had gotten back home this thought occurred to me and I thought to myself, "Perhaps this blog would be the perfect way to let her know what a big silly 7th grade crush I have on her," because I had made an entry about it only a few days before.  So I sent her a quick e-mail and offered to share my blog with her, giving a disclaimer that it's mostly whining but also indicating that I had recently mentioned her in an entry.  She sent me a curious reply, but unfortunately told me that her internet at home had not been paid for so she wouldn't be able to be online very much.  I sent her my username and my condolences, wistfully wondering if this was the universe telling me that she wouldn't like what I had written.  To my surprise she sent me a message a little later telling me that her curiosity had taken hold and she had paid the internet bill (even though it was not her responsibility and her roommate was supposed to do it) so that she could read my blog.  I felt a little guilty, but as I read on that faded into sheer joy because she responded positively to the content.  I almost cried with relief.  Not only did she now know how I was feeling but she felt the same way!  I was in a fog the rest of the day, daydreaming.  I can't wait for the next time we see one another.  I'm going to wrap my arms around her and just hold her like I've been wishing I could since I met her.  Summer will be great, too, especially if my husband has quit his job, because we'll be able to hang out a lot more without schedules conflicting or lots of homework hanging over our heads.  Ah, I feel so lucky right now.

It's amazing how much better my life is when I focus on what would make me happy instead of pleasing societal norms.  I stop worrying over what my parents will say when my husband is jobless and my stress just melts away.  I ignore the taboo against polyamorous relationships and I meet the girl of my dreams.  I'm just...so satisfied right now.  I feel wonderful.  I had some more mundane things to talk about but they seem kind of silly now, so I'll just leave it at that.

Back again, waiting for my husband to get off work.

He's going to give his two weeks notice soon.  We've given up on the idea of starting a small business because it will be far too much stress for me to deal with.  After a lot of thinking, I've decided I'll only be satisfied with two scenarios.  1) He becomes a househusband, cooking, cleaning, and driving me to and from work, taking the pressure off of me to be both a responsible graduate student as well as an excellent housekeeper.  This would also afford me the pleasure of disregarding his work schedule, allow me to stay up until 6 AM, sleep until 3 PM and working until 11 PM as is my nature rhythm.  2) He gets a job at Volition, a video game developer right here in town.  While it may not be his favorite game company in the whole world or anything, it is still most certainly a step in the right direction toward eventually working for Blizzard or Bioware.  I looked at our finances and as long as we don't reproduce in the next few years we have nothing to worry about.  We can easily survive off of my salary alone and have already saved a fair amount for future use and emergencies.  Yes, yes, if he kept his horrible, boring, fruitless job we could save even more, but life is too fucking short to be frustrated for five years just because someone is paying you for it.  I'll be very happy when he tells me he gave his notice.  We'll probably go out somewhere fancy to celebrate...like Steak 'n Shake.

A very fantastic aspect of my life right now is love.  A few days ago I posted a facebook status:

Kathryn XXXXXX is madly in love with you.

It only applies to five people.  One of them reads this blog.  One of them is married to me.  Two of them will never appreciate my sentiment, but it's still there all the same.  The last is basically the female version of the one who is married to me.  She is beautiful, inside and out, in all the ways that I find most attractive.  We've hung out several times and each time I could barely leave her side when I had to go.  The most recent time I almost kissed her, but pulled back just in time for her not to notice.  I'm nervous and goofy just like I used to be when I had crushes in high school.  It's fantastic, honestly.  We craft together.  She helped me make my husband's costume for ACen, and as she leaned over the sewing machine that's when I almost kissed her.  Her neck was right there, asking for it, but I knew that would be absolutely the wrong thing to do except in my twisted little mind.  I'm not very tactful.  I have a lot of trouble not just immediately touching people I find mentally AND physically attractive.  So it's been hard.  However, it's also been extremely wonderfully amazing.  And it isn't awkward.  We've had dinner with her, my husband and me, and it felt like we were already a love triangle.  I just hope I don't mess it up by acting too quickly.  My fingers are crossed indefinitely.

I think that gets us up to date.  I'll do my best to post more regularly and live up to the little "Lifetime" box that appears next to my name.

And a bit more before my cultures are done incubating.

I've been sharing books with another first year, a bisexual, polyamorous first year who, despite being so similar in romantic concepts, is almost nothing like me otherwise.  She let slip that she viewed Robert Heinlein as a sexist writer at a dinner party (which I will talk about later) and I just couldn't put up with someone discounting amazing literature because it came from a less "progressive" era.  I forced Stranger in a Strange Land on her and she in turn handed me Ender's Game, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I let her know that she had my respect as a literary critic and I offered Time Enough for Love just to cement her new found enjoyment of Heinlein.  I received Twilight as payment.  After having made fun of it for so long I thought perhaps I owed it something, to read it and give it a chance, a handshake after a long and brutal battle of wits.  So I sat down one night and began, taking a deep breath and bracing myself.  I was hoping to be surprised, I suppose.  I was hoping that it would be good and I could understand why everyone was so enraptured by it.  Well...I was not surprised.  The characters (who are the story what with the complete lack of any real action or plot) are one dimensional and utterly boring.  I can't say they are predictable because nothing they do makes any sense, but in some ways that's worse than being predictable.  I get this feeling of pretentiousness overwhelming my senses when I read for more than a few hours, similar to when I read the bible, the feeling that if I commented on how bad it was people would retort with things like, "You just don't understand," or, "You aren't the right type of person to enjoy it," things that can't be reasoned through logically.  I've been thinking through what I'm going to tell her when I return the book to her.  I've settled on saying nothing, and when prompted for my opinion I will respond curtly and negatively, but not cruelly.  For example:

Her:  "Ohhh, Katie, did you like it?" *expectant face*
Me:  "No.  Sorry.  Here's your book back.  I would love to read something else, though!"

However, the dinner parties are grand!  There are six of us, counting myself and my husband.  We rotate dinner every Sunday and cook something for everyone else followed by sitting around chatting about this and that.  It's really nice.  It makes me feel like an adult, but not in that boring, responsible way.  Instead, I feel like an adult in the way that I can plan events and cook for others and have a home to invite them into happily.  It's really nice.  When my turn came up last Sunday I cooked manicotti and egg rolls and made boba and root beer floats for dessert.  Everyone loved it and I had so much fun.  If only I had a house and a dining room and all that, but I suppose it's really the people you are with and not the location that matters the most, and I really like the people I'm with right now.

And with that I must return again to my research, but I still have more so I'll return again when I have a chance to try and wrap it all up.

It's been a while and there is a lot to say.  I'm not sure I'll be able to get through it all in the 30 minutes I have, but I'll do my best.

I've been worrying a lot about death lately, my own death, the death of loved ones, just death in general.  The most unsettling part is the dreams.  Car crashes, murders, horrible gory accidents involving all sorts of machinery, I have one almost every night.  I don't sleep well and have taken to sleeping on the futon rather than keeping my husband up with my tossing and turning.  I've tried a lot of things to stop the dreams, calling my parents before I go to sleep to verify that they are living, holding my husband extra long before drifting to sleep, even making sure that all my close friends posted on facebook in that last few hours before sleep, but nothing seems to work.  Sometimes I have dreams where I don't even know the people who are dying, but I always have the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I jolt awake that I'm somehow responsible for their deaths.  I assume it may be just stress and this is how I deal with it, but my mother always told me that clairvoyancy and psychic tendencies ran in our family.  I always assumed she was just making it up to make us sound special, and I hope I was right.  I hope these dreams aren't some kind of warning, a warning about my life, a warning about my research, a warning about consequences...

Physically, I'm fine.  I've been working out more than previously, DDR on Monday, Aikido practice on Wednesday, Tricking on Friday, and more DDR on Saturday.  My muscles ache and I messed up my knee last Wednesday, but the result is an increase in energy and, of course, self confidence.  I did my first "real" handstand last week Friday and I'm getting close to doing my first cartwheel ever.  It feels...pleasant, for lack of a better word.  I've been trying to eat right, but stress isn't very useful in this endeavor and I find myself slipping often.  A little too much steak here, an uncomfortable evening of feeling overstuffed there, and they add up.  Thankfully, the working out has kind of balanced the overeating, so I haven't gained any weight really...but I haven't lost any either.  I'm still hovering around 118-120 even though I decided months ago that I wanted to get down to 110-115.  I'm not too worried about it as long as I don't gain any weight, and it's not like I look like a huge fatty or anything.  I look fine and my husband says I'm beautiful and that's good enough for me right now.  I'll work on the weight thing later when I'm feeling less overwhelmed by everything.

I almost switched out of my research group in the hopes of getting out of a chemical laboratory.  I've noticed, far more than I did in undergrad, that being in a lab every single day scares the shit out of me.  I'm constantly wondering who touched what where and with what horrible chemical on their gloves.  I think I might have a phobia of dangerous chemicals...google says it's called "chemophobia" which I suppose should have been obvious.  Heck of a thing to discover after getting into graduate school.  Regardless, I ended up deciding against switching out of the lab not because I think I will become less afraid of chemicals over time, but because the people in this group are amazing and I don't want to leave them.  As long as I keep that in mind, I think I can make it through the next four or five years.  Additionally, I did some research about different types of chemical laboratories, and biological labs are actually the "safest" of the lot, so that makes me feel a fair amount better.  If it wasn't for all the amazing people around me every day, I don't know what I would do, though...probably switch out of chemical engineering to something less dangerous, like electrical and computer engineering.  I don't know.

There is a lot more to say, but I have to get back to my experiments.  I'll continue later this weekend.