Life or something like it by Mollie B. '06

Sometimes I secretly wish for exciting things to happen to me so that I can write some sort of blazingly exotic blog entry full of exclamation points and intruige. But alas, my life is full of the same sorts of things every day:

School. Drop Date, the last date undergraduates are allowed to drop a class without penalty, was last Wednesday, so I’m in all my classes for the long haul. (Truth be told, I’ve never dropped a class here. But it’s kind of nice to know that I can until almost three-quarters of the way through the semester.) Most of my classes are going along swimmingly; for example, we had a great discussion in 7.31 (Current Topics in Mammalian Biology) about stem cell research with Professor Jaenisch, who is basically one of the gods of stem cell research. The man is a pioneer in his field, is routinely quoted in the New York Times, and he knows my name. So cool.

Work. My postdoc and I are trying to finish some experiments with publication-quality data by Christmas so we can hopefully get published by the time I graduate. Luckily I’ll be at the lab 40(+) hours a week during IAP, so whatever doesn’t get finished before Christmas can definitely get finished in January. I have a lot of neurons to image on the confocal microscope between now and Christmas.

Cheerleading. We have three basketball games to cheer for this week (one was tonight). I went straight from the lab to the game, and changed into my cheerleading uniform in the lab bathroom. Of course, according to Murphy’s Law, I passed two professors in the hallway after changing into my uniform. Sweet.

Christmas? It was 60 degrees in Cambridge today, which makes it hard to listen to Christmas music on one’s iPod. It just doesn’t feel very Christmasy. Nonetheless, the intrepid Adam hung some lights so we could tool in the semi-dark. He also decorated our suite door.

Grad school apps. Seven are done, one just needs about another half-hour of work (I need to look through faculty bios and pick the professors with whom I could see myself working). My transcripts are in, my GRE scores have been sent, my fees have been paid, my letters of recommendation have been sent (except for one of my writers… and I reminded him nicely yesterday to GET IT DONE). Now there’s nothing to do but wait. Um, boo?

That’s pretty much it. But hey, I’m kind of okay with that at the moment.

Questions and other such things:
1. War of the Worlds. Ben forgot to mention the major plotline of the movie in which Dakota Fanning screams. A lot. I’m with Ben in that I fully believe that anyone capable of planting machines in the earth a million years prior to taking over said earth would be fully capable of marching into any doctor’s office and raiding their stash of penicillin. Let’s not even touch my pedantic bio nerd point: it wouldn’t have been possible a million years ago (or, like, 100,000 years ago) to predict that the human population would have experienced such a huge population explosion. Harumph.
2. Clark notes that Christmas tree hunting would be a great deal more entertaining if the trees would just liven up a bit. I have to admit that, although I’m not a fan of indiscriminately mopping living things (I am, after all, a quasi-vegetarian), it would be pretty sweet if the trees ran around a little and we could stalk the wild evergreen in its natural habitat.