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  • I want to make another entry right now.  I mean, I have the inclination, but I don't have the content.

    I can't sleep.  Last night I probably got a total of about three hours of sleep.  I just lay in bed wondering what will happen in the next few days.  They could be some of the most important days of my life.

    I can't decide if I should have my husband cut all the blond/pink out of my hair or if I should just keep it.  I wonder what Rose thinks of it.

    I wonder what Rose thinks of a lot of things.  Women turn me into such a coward.

  • I think today I have enough for a relatively lively entry.  Well, relatively lively in that I'm going to talk about my intimate relationships, which I always find quite a bit more interesting than anything else I discuss on a regular basis.  Anyway, here goes.

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    It's always strange when a numerical identifier of your existence changes and you have to resolve in your mind that it no longer applies to you.  I'm one of those people who has trouble remembering what year to write on checks after January 1st.  And now I am no longer a "first year," nor are many of my friends.  We can no longer refer to ourselves collectively as "the first years" and it's strange for me.  Now there are new first years.  We are now the second years.  A year has passed so quickly by.  I've met so many people, formed so many incredible connections, and made friends that I can tell will last a lifetime.  Yet one year ago I could hardly imagine leaving my previous friend pool behind and ever finding any place so warm and inviting as Columbia.  I suppose I am one of those lucky adaptable people who underestimates her own ability to rally people around her into a friend-family, regardless of location.  We see movies, we have dinners, we party, we SPEND TIME TOGETHER, and perhaps that is the ease of it all.  The familiarity that is born from proximity and duration is hard to avoid.  Even those you would originally never interact with become more agreeable as you get to know them.  You think that no one will ever be like those who have come before them, but deep down all humans possess many of the same characteristics.  Only the minor details change from person to person and contribute to what psychologists refer to as "personality" or the like.  Ah, but I'm rambling about things I don't really have the expertise to discuss.  My point is that I love the people I've met here and I'm so happy that I chose this place above others.  While I'll never know how happy I would have been somewhere else, I am happy enough here that I have no interest in knowing in the first place.

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    P90X is going swimmingly.  My husband and I are now into his 5th week and my 7th week of the program.  My entire body is muscular.  It's actually rather terrifying at times as I have developed the urge to get mugged to test my ability to combine the strength I have acquired with P90X and the agility I have practiced through martial arts.  Well, I guess I don't necessarily want to get mugged, but I want to be thrown into a situation where I can use my full strength to try and accomplish a goal.  My husband is even more intense.  Having been very skinny to begin with, his muscles show almost as soon as he builds them.  His physique has changed so much!  We are both, however, reeling with dietary difficulties:  i.e. we are both overeating.  I have gotten back on Weight Watchers (not going to meetings, but using the point system from back in 2008 or so) and have encouraged him to do so as well.  We've agreed to reduce the amount of junk food we buy, especially since he currently eats about half a box of Oreos a day.  Besides the health benefits, snack stuff is really expensive and not buying it with no other changes to our grocery list dropped the weekly cost of food by almost $30 (Yeah, I know we spend a lot on food, but it's the one thing I won't compromise on even though we're poor.  I like my fresh veggies, meat, and restaurant visits.).  So anyway, in concerns with overall health, this particular married couple is actually getting sexier rather than fattening up.  And in several more weeks I and the P90Xers of my department are all going up to Chicago to buy new clothing that actually fits, so I'll get even sexier in public!  No mom jeans for me, no sir.  I feel better about my body than I probably ever have in my entire life.  :3

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    Lately my husband has been doing a terrible job of coordinating his sleep schedule to any of those expected of a socialized existence.  The downsides to this are many:  he is rarely awake at the right time to pick me up from work and consequently I have to take the suddenly unreliable buses home or be forced to walk home, he doesn't do anything during the day because he is sleeping so all the chores are still undone when I get home, I don't get to eat lunch with him anymore, we don't share the bed much because I am sleeping while he is awake, etc.  It definitely gets on my nerves.  Today especially, I came home in a bad mood (after having to walk home) to a sink full of dishes, an unswept floor (even though I asked him to sweep several days ago), and all the laundry still dirty...  However, I discovered one upside:  when I am drunk at someone else's house at 3 AM he is awake to come and pick me up so that I don't have to spend the night.

    Speaking of which, recently I had a ladies' night with some of my best female friends from the first second year crowd and a girl I met on OkCupid, after which is when the hubs had to pick me up.  It was absolutely fantastic!  I can honestly say I've never enjoyed the company of several females more in my whole life.  We had a pregame at the domicile of three of the girls during which they helped me get fancied up for the evening ahead.  One girl borrowed me a dress and some pantyhose and did my makeup, another offered a pair of shoes, the last showed me how to put on mascara.  After they were done I looked better than I ever thought possible.  The only reason for anyone to not proposition me in that get up was because they were too intimidated by my incredibly good looks.  In addition to myself, these three girls also made up another of our companions who (like me) doesn't often give attention to her own looks.  She looked A-MAZING.  More on this in a moment.

    After we were all prettied up and ready to go, I and two of the other girls took several shots of rum each prior to heading out.  Almost immediately I was very tipsy as I'm rather a light weight when it comes to alcohol.  By the time we got to the local gay bar I was completely smashed and having a bit of trouble standing up.  I could feel myself wavering, but it was still really fun.  I danced until I couldn't stand up anymore at which time I realized the other girl who had been made over was holding her ears.  I stumbled over to her and asked if she wanted to go to the less noisy part of the bar and sit down.  I shambled over to a table and slumped myself in a chair, where I stayed until we left for Walmart.  One would think that siting around at a bar when dancing was a possibility would be less than ideal, but spending time just talking to people while drunk is really enjoyable to me.  All the things I normally wouldn't say come spilling out of my mouth, and since I don't have a lot of worrisome secrets it's quite liberating.  Once the other girls had joined us, we all started talking about our own sex lives and it was extremely interesting.  It was honestly probably my favorite part of the evening, owing to the fact that I love talking about sex and related topics.  On the drive to Walmart I passed out for a few minutes, but woke up again when we were nearing our destination.  We bought a bunch of frozen pizzas and chips and stuff and did cartwheels even though we had skirts on.  We ended the evening with more chatting and eating all the food we bought at Walmart.  Once I had sobered up a bit I realized my husband could pick me up because he was almost certainly awake and called him, subsequently crashing after a good shower.

    So all that is well and good.  I had a wonderful night with good friends and learned a lot about people they probably wouldn't have shared sober (one of the great things about being drunk in my opinion).  HOWEVER, the more important point I want to make about the night was that it solidified that I had fallen for her.  Over the past couple of weeks I had noticed a slight infatuation with the girl I mentioned sharing my fate as someone who had to be revamped prior to clubbing.  Let's call her "Rose" for the sake of concise sentences.  I found myself becoming more and more interested in spending time with her and I got butterflies whenever we were alone together.  I passed it off as an increase in familiarity leading to fleeting feelings of infatuation, but when the feelings didn't fade I began to wonder.  We share so many interests and her personality is one of the few types that makes a human viable for spending extended periods of time with.  Then I had a dream, thus the reason I give her the name Rose, in which I was the Doctor (from Dr. Who, a fandom she is quite involved in) and I sought her out as a companion in more ways than one.  Yes, a sex dream.  Now, I'm not one to deny that I have a lot of sex dreams.  In fact, I have a huge number of them!  However, very few include real people and most are actually about either video game characters or fake people my mind just makes up (insert random anonymous hawt chick), so I was taken aback.  I woke up confused and a little nervous.  It's a feeling you don't get courting people online.  When someone is online on a site like OkCupid looking for a relationship and displaying their sexual orientation for all to see, it takes a lot of mystery and fear out of the whole ordeal.  Probably one of the main reasons eHarmony is so successful.  But when you begin to fall for someone you know in real life, who is a friend, and who has unspecified desires concerning romantic entanglements...it gets a bazillion times more frightening.

    And then came the moment when I saw Rose in all the clubbing splendor that the girls had picked out for her and she tenderly pushed her glasses a bit farther up her nose as she asked what I thought of the dress she was wearing.  I melted.  I'm surprised I pulled together the composure not to fall to my knees and tell her I had fallen madly in love with her and that she looked more beautiful than any woman I had laid eyes upon before.  Instead I blurted out that it was fabulous and that she should tuck in her socks.  I'm so suave.  *eye roll*  Even more surprising is that as the night progressed and I became inebriated, I didn't spill the beans.  She gently stroked my hair as I lay my head on my arm at the table.  She got me water and took a sip from it after me.  She watched over me carefully the entire evening.  And as I handed her my keys so that she could move my car for me because I was too drunk, I whispered, "I trust you," and she nodded, probably having no idea the gravity of what I had just uttered.  That night I dreamed of her, and only her, and I knew that this wasn't some short lived crush.

    I mulled it over in my mind the next day and I couldn't come to a consensus on what to do about the situation.  I felt I needed input from someone else and called another one of the girls I deemed trustworthy with sensitive information of this type.  While she had little advice, she did give me her own insights into the situation and vowed to invite me on a hike with herself and Rose so that I could spend some peaceful time with her feeling out everything before taking any irreversible steps.  That will be this Saturday and I'm ecstatic for the sun to rise on that day, as well as very grateful to have chosen just the right person to share my problem with.

    Since the realization that I have strong feelings for Rose, it seems like every day she gives me new reason to believe she cares for me as well, the foremost of them being her offer to be my "designated skater who can just skate around majestically with me frantically clinging to their arm" as quoted from my e-mail.  But I don't want to get too hopeful.  She knows everything about me and my husband and our desire to have a mutual girlfriend.  It would be some kind of incredible, beautiful, awesome miracle if she were interested in such a thing...and I don't believe in miracles.

    And I'll leave it at that.  More to come in the next few days I am sure.  I usually don't last too long with my own secrets, even if I can keep other people's for years.

  • Monday and Tuesday were a huge waste of time, also known as TA training.  I've already been a TA several times in the past and as someone who speaks English fluently there was no point for me to be there.  Worse yet is that I happened to contract some kind of fever from one of the hundreds of people I walked past, bumped into, grabbed a donut after, etc.  Tuesday night my joints started aching and I chalked it up to feeling lazy and did P90X anyway.  Afterward I almost passed out and I realized something was wrong.  Check the temperature and sure enough I was sitting at 100.6 F.  I felt horrendous.  Every part of my body ached and my mouth was constantly dry.  The only way I was able to sleep was to take some acetaminophen and wait for the pain to subside.  I woke up Wednesday and took my temperature again.  I didn't feel any better, but I was down to 99.8 F.  I spent a majority of the day rocking back and forth on the bed with a Top Chef marathon running in the background to help distract me from all the pain throughout my body.  It was so bad that I couldn't even focus enough to play Pokemon.  I mean, holy shit, that game is easy and I couldn't play it!  My husband was such a wonderful nurse the whole time, getting me water, medicine, ice cream, whatever I needed and comforting me.  By the end of the day I felt quite a bit better, but still had to take an acetaminophen to be able to fall asleep.  And today I felt well enough to at least venture into the office to get a bit of work done.  I think I should be completely back to normal by tomorrow.

    Anyway, the main reason I'm making this post is that I haven't been that ill for a really long time, probably since high school, and it was weird to not have my parents around to take care of me.  I mean, I'm sure there were many times throughout my undergraduate career where I faked sick because I was lazy, but I was never actually sick.  This is the first time in probably 6 or 7 years that I've had an fever.  After 18 years of grape slushies, that one fuzzy tiger blanket and The Price is Right on the television, it was really strange and quite thought provoking to be sick again.  All I could think about the whole time was how my dad would tuck me in on the couch and my mom would cook me things and check on me throughout the day back when I was younger.  And then I started thinking about what it was like when my mom was in the hospital.  And then I started thinking about death and what I would have wanted to say to people before I died.  And all this over a simple fever.  Perhaps in some ways it is better to get sick slightly more often so that when you do it isn't such a mentally taxing thing.  I even contemplated if I had somehow contracted AIDS and that's why I had gotten sick, since my immune system seemed so strong as of late.  The mind does strange and horrible things when the body is weak and in pain, and I definitely didn't enjoy it.

    Well, I need to get back to my experiments.

  • It's been a while.  I think the problem is that my life hasn't been particularly interesting lately.  Not that that's a bad thing.  In fact, I much prefer when things are calm and predictable to when they are crazy and stressful, so there's that at least.

    I made a huge batch of tamales for the last dinner club meeting where I was the hostess.  I had never made them before and was concerned that they would be very difficult without help, so I invited a couple people over to expedite the process.  Together, we made a huge pile of tamales and it turned into more of a party than anything else.  It was so much fun!  I definitely want to have another tamale making party in the future!  Also, the tamales turned out really well.  Everyone said the vegetable ones were really flavorful and had a nice amount of heat to them.  The pork ones were my favorite, even though they were too mild for most people's taste.  I should have added jalapenos to them like I did for the vegetable ones.  And the third variety was just masa wrapped around some shredded Mexican cheeses, which, while simple, was still super delicious, kind of a cheesy corn bread taste.

    A few days after making all the tamales, my husband and I went on a trip to Missouri to visit our parents and I brought some along to share with everyone.  Sadly, I forgot them at my husband's parents' house and my parents didn't get any.  I promised them I would make even better tamales next time they came to visit us, and that will probably be some time in September, but I still felt terrible for forgetting them.  Ah well, what can you do.

    By the time we were traveling to Missouri I had been doing the P90X work outs for a while and had a fair amount of definition on my abs as well as sizable muscles on my arms.  I showed them off to everyone and my husband's mom impulsively decided to purchase the entire P90X program.  Here is my theory as to why:  She saw my abs and felt inferior, as though she had to one-up me to keep her son's (imagined) adoration of her intact.  She flipped out and decided that whatever I was doing, she could do better and then immediately made the decision to purchase the work out videos I had been using.  She wasn't even interested in watching one of the videos before placing the order, even though I had them on my laptop and could have easily showed them to her.  I really don't know what the hell that woman is thinking, but what I do know is that I really don't enjoy being subjected to it every couple of months.  Too bad my husband's house is on the way to mine, so we can't really give excuses like it's out of the way or anything like that.  And what makes it even worse is the way she lavishes her stupid dogs with attention while we are there, even though 1) her son should be more important and 2) I have a dog phobia which she knows about and apparently thinks is unimportant.  Whatever.

    Other than that little rant, life is fantastic.  At this point I'm nearing the end of my first month of P90X and I can really see a difference.  Every part of my body is more muscular and I don't get tired as easily anymore.  My abs are well defined now and the veins on my arms pop out when I'm just sitting around, which I assume means that my cardiovascular system is also running more smoothly.  I'm progressing (slowly) in aikido and hope to test for my first belt in a couple months if I'm lucky.  Piano lessons are going well (even though I don't practice as much as I should) and I've decided to make the jump from one hand to both.  Since I only have my keytar and it's not the best for two handed practice, I'm going to start heading over to the music building during long incubation times in the lab and using the free practice rooms when I can.  I mean, the music building is only like a block away from my lab, so it's really convenient.  I haven't gotten too far with my Mandarin yet, but I don't feel too bad about that because life has been busy (in a good way) and I've gotten a lot done lately.  So yeah, things are going really well.

    Like I said, not too much to report.

    <3

  • Okay, so here are the links to the two parts of my really really long vlog entry.  You better really enjoy this because it took me a million years (or what seemed like a million years) of downloading things and editing things and transferring things before I actually got the stupid video into two parts that were short enough for youtube to accept them.  You better REALLY enjoy them.

    (DELETED - If you want to see them again just ask me and I can e-mail them to you, but I took them down from Youtube.)

    In addition to what I talked about in the videos, here are a couple of other topics of interest:

    My hair is an absolutely fabulous mix of purple and blue.  A couple of first year girls came over and foiled it for me, for which I am extremely grateful!  It was a lot of fun and my bathroom rug now bears the battle scars of the first purple coloring as well as some new bleach spots from retouching the roots.  It'll be a history of my hair's grad school life.

    One of the first year's boyfriends has a copy of P90X (a work out program you would see advertised at like 4 AM once all the actual programming is over on TV) and shared with his girlfriend, who subsequently shared it with most of the first year class.  We plan on becoming the most ripped chemical engineering department in the country!  Every work out is extremely physically taxing and I'm still sore from the one I did a couple days ago, but it's a good kind of sore.  It lets you know you actually accomplished something.  I'm personally not doing the diet part because I like eating whatever I want, but I did take "before" pictures to massage my own ego at the end of the program.  My husband made the comment upon gently grasping my arm that I feel more muscley already, and I've only been doing it for four days.

    As a final comment I want to say that I feel better than I ever have in my entire life right now, so that's always nice.  Any grumpiness that came out in my video is a product of me trying really hard to think of stuff to talk about.

    <3

  • Too much stuff has happened since my last entry for a normal entry.  I think I may make a vlog entry on youtube and then link it here under these circumstances.  I will try to do so tonight or tomorrow.

  • In the past few days a lot of things have happened, but I'm just going to talk about the major ones.

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    My husband gave his two weeks notice at his office job about a month and a half ago.  We didn't tell our parents.  We thought it would be better to just let them think he was still working until such a time that his unemployment wouldn't matter anymore (like when I graduate and get a more "until retirement age" kind of job).  However, I can't stand secrets or misleading others and I just couldn't handle it anymore.  Bending the truth is just as bad as lying in my opinion and I didn't want to manipulate others through dishonesty.  I told my mother a few days ago over the phone.  She didn't take it well.  She went on and on about how selfish and childish he was being and how he would never grow up and it really hurt.  I tried to tell her we had made the decision together.  I tried to tell her it was the best option for both of us.  I tried to explain that I care a lot more about happiness than I do about money.  She didn't want to hear any of it.  My parents are very conservative in their views and they value a strong work ethic above almost everything else...except honesty.  So, not only was my husband a failure in their eyes, we had also lied to them about it for several weeks.  When I hung up the phone I was in tears.  In retrospect, calling right before I got on the bus to go to work probably wasn't the best idea.  I came into the office with red eyes and puffy cheeks and everyone wanted to know what was wrong.  I just didn't want to talk about it.  I spent most of the day sulking and then went home and cried even more in my husband's loving arms.

    A few days later my mother called to apologize for being less than understanding about the whole situation.  She reiterated that they were just very proud that we were (emphasis on "were") in a position to make almost $200,000 in savings over a mere period of five years, something most people don't accomplish within their entire lifetimes, let alone before the age of 30.  She was still rather negative, but after reassuring me that she didn't suddenly hate the man I married over money I felt a lot better.  Then she said something that really made me view her in a whole different (and more negative) light:

    "I know you aren't the most manipulative person, but I think in this case you need to tap into your manipulative side.  You need to get him to do what you want him to do instead of what he wants to do, because it's better for him."

    This was after I had said I wanted him to perhaps go back to school, but I wanted the decision to be his.  I didn't get into this relationship so I could lord over someone with my own opinions and force him into subversion (other than in the bedroom :3).  I got into it because I love him and he makes me happy and I care about him enough for his opinions to matter to me.  We are a pair and we make decisions as a pair and forcing him to do something he doesn't want to do just so we can have more FUCKING MONEY does not compute.  I was appalled at my mother for letting the words "tap into your manipulative side" pass from her lips, especially since we have both experienced the #1 manipulator in the entire world, my grandmother, and we both find her extremely frustrating.

    I sighed and told her I would think about it and then hung up the phone.  I set the phone on my leg and stared out the window of the bus I was riding, about to cry again, when the phone rang.  This time it was my father, calling to tell me that he still loved us both and he didn't care what we did as long as it was what we thought was right.  He added that he was only a little disappointed about the money thing, but far more disappointed that we had quasi-lied to him.  The tears sucked back into my eyes and I smiled softly.  My father is a very genuine person.  He doesn't say anything if he doesn't mean it, and he had just said exactly what I wanted to hear:  "We still love you, but don't lie to us ever again."  That's what I really felt bad about, not the money, not having a stay at home husband even though there was nothing to really stay at home for, but lying to people that I care about.  I told him I loved him, too, and hung up, feeling 1000 times better about everything.  They may not be 100% happy about the situation, but at least they could now begin to cope with it and it wasn't this dark spot in the back of my mind anymore.

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    I was going to talk about my husband's parents, but I feel like it might be in poor taste because of my opinion of his mother, so I'll hold off.  All I will say is that we believe his mother's controlling energy has moved from my husband, who is now out of the house, to her husband and it's affecting him noticeably.  He is sullen and cold where he used to be exited and jovial.  It's painful to watch.  I would prefer to stay out of it (and away from them) until they learn to cope with their "empty nest" as it were, probably a couple of years.

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    My undergraduate student, after a lot of changes to the protocol we were using and some additional ideas from me on what could be going wrong, finally got a successful ligation!  The morning I discovered his plates were coated with colonies I was all alone in the lab and I started dancing and shouting and I called him to share the good news.  This marks the end of my training!  I can now switch my focus to my actual research project and toward graduation!  I'm pretty excited and feel a lot better about things than I did when I made the last entry.

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    I completed the National Pokedex!  I caught all 493 Pokemon!!  I'm super excited and will try to post pictures later on this week or even this evening if I get motivated.

  • Tears are stinging my eyes.  I'm a failure.  I can't take this anymore.  I just want to go hide under a rock for the rest of eternity.

    If I ever see another clear plate again it will be too soon.

    I just want to run as far as I can until I just collapse and then lay there, wherever I fell, and die.

  • There are a lot of humans on this planet.  I often imagine that, depending on the personality and temperament of the individual, every person has between a 1:1,000 and a 1:100,000 chance of a compatible person existing.  I would place myself nearer the 1:1,000 set, but I certainly don't believe in a "one true love" scenario, not with billions of people in existence.  Anyway, I think this theory is backed up by my experiences on OkCupid.  It seems like for every person I find that I like, there are a couple hundred others who I'm either neutral or negative about.  And even the ones I find that I like usually end up having some scathing flaw about them, like they smoke or they are way too attached to their pets or some other random trivial thing that may not seem important but could cause friction later in a relationship.  Now don't get me wrong, these ladies would be good, maybe even great, friends.  In fact, I would say that OkCupid is an amazing place to make friends just because of the way it functions.  However, none of them seem like the kind of people I want to date.

    I've been talking on and off with about five girls.  They all seem like enjoyable people and I certainly don't mind getting to know them, but at the same time I can see that each of them, for whatever reason, just isn't the right person for my complicated tastes.  So maybe I was flattering myself above when I suggested I could date 1:1000 people.  Maybe it's more like 1:10,000 just because of all the requirements I have laid out prior to initiation of a relationship.  ...or maybe I'm hurt and frightened after being torn from a comfortable relationship by my husband's jealousy and my own foolish choices.  I don't want to cut out viable applicants just because I'm afraid.  I was never afraid before...

    Anyway, nothing promising at the moment.  I guess it will just be the two of us for now...

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    Long hours in the lab are really wearing on me.  I'm in the lab right now, actually, typing away on a computer hooked up to several expensive machines because I need to watch things and can't even go back to the office and my laptop.  I think I'm also inadvertently burning out my undergrad because he seems to want to emulate my verging on obsessive lab attendance.  He stayed in the lab for 14 hours on Saturday only to come in the next morning to a failed experiment.  I don't want him to feel like me.  He doesn't need to.  He's only here to help and learn, not to be bound irrevocably in the shackles of writing a dissertation in a few years.

    But a tiny twinkle in the darkness, a light at the end of the "training" tunnel, one plate wasn't clear.  I grew nine of them a few days ago, each with a slight variation, trying to diagnose my problems just completing a simple training protocol.  And one was not clear.  I counted the little colonies, only 11 sat happily on the plate, but anything above zero was an amazing surprise.  The differences were noted and today I have prepared a new sample with new thoughts in mind.  Tomorrow I will see if my thoughts have lead to success this time.  Tomorrow could be an amazing day, a day which I will celebrate for years to come.  Or it could be a monumental failure, one that I will not mentally overcome for several weeks afterward.  That remains to be seen.

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    I injured my right knee rolling over two other half naked people on my futon.  I came down hard on it and had mild discomfort for a couple days afterward.  I didn't think too much about it and just skipped aikido practice that week.  After a few days it felt mostly fine and I went back to practice and everything seemed alright with it.

    Then, a few days ago, I was carrying some cell cultures upstairs in the elevator and tripped on the indentation that the door slides through when closing.  Because my right hand was full I did not catch myself like I should have and landed hard on my right knee again, this time with agonizing results.  I could not bend the knee without pain.  Walking up and down stairs was torture.  I spent the next day at home with a heating pad on my knee playing Pokemon.

    I cursed myself that I had injured myself so close to the Kansas, Foreigner and Styx concert that I was planning on going to, but it couldn't be helped.  I went to the student health center and they took some x-rays and gave me a wrappy thing to keep my leg straight while walking.

    The next morning we headed off to the concert.  I stared disgruntled at my knee, but being so excited about the concert helped keep my mind off the pain.  Three of my favorite bands, possibly one of the last tours some of the members will ever be part of, and I had tickets with my husband and my parents (who exposed me to classic rock as a child and were therefore responsible for my enjoyment of it).  I was worried that the bands might have lost their sounds as time had passed, or that the singers would not be able to produce the same quality of performance as I was used to (I'm looking at you, Ozzy), but I was completely mistaken.  All three bands absolutely blew me away.  They all sounded perfect, and hearing them in person, being right there a hundred feet away from them was truly amazing.  And sharing the experience with my parents may sound corny and stupid to some, but to me it was very heartwarming and satisfying.  That feeling can't be replicated by anything else.

    Anyway, as the concert proceeded my mind went less and less to my knee.  At one point I actually removed the wrap so that it was easier to stand up and cheer when songs were finished.  And when it was all over and we were walking back to the car, my knee barely hurt.  I was rather astounded.  The next morning there was almost no pain, only a lingering "awkward" feeling when bending.  Today it feels normal, though I won't be going to aikido practice on Wednesday just in case.

    And I got to thinking, the music was so loud at the concert that at points my hair was actually moving from the sound waves.  Could it be that the sheer volume of the performance actually resulted in a kind of "sonic" therapy for my injured knee?  It's probably not true but that's what I'm telling everyone.  Rock and roll healed my knee!

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    I had many complaints about my hair, i.e. that it was fading and that I should redye it because it looked amazing, etc, etc...  After a lot of heckling, I decided that I would allow someone else to redye my hair for me.  As long as I didn't have to do it I would happily sit while others redid it to fit their tastes.

    And so there were two takers, two other females from the first year group agreed to come over and dye my hair again.  Long story short they did an acceptable job except that they kind of rubbed it into my scalp...and it's still purple.  I still have large purple spots on my scalp from almost a week ago at this point.  I told them next time they did it we would try foiling it all instead of just rubbing it all over my head.  I think that will work better.  I think I'll go with blue this next time.  :3

  • Reminders:
    - other girls
    - work sucks
    - work sucks slightly less
    - right knee
    - more purple hair
    - concert!

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