This is where I divide

This is the part where I die. Die? Perhaps divide. Divide? The part that lived. The part that lied. Burnt by countless hours. Incessant study is poor for the soul. Didn't He say that. Maybe? He said. I think. Too many minds. Can't seem to lock on in. Running like a wildefire. Burnt. Burnt? How? No real enemy this time. Just whats gone beyond. Where? Away. From here. No control like a nervous bird in a cage. Banging its wings on the frantic wire. The rythum is there. No words though. All gone. Burnt. This is the part where I die. Die? No. Divide.

What a Day

Today is a good day. I haven't been able to say that in a very long time and not be lying through my teeth. Today is a good day. I woke up at my buddies place, had some dd for breakfast and then proceeded to work out for an hour and a half. This was my last PE class and suprisingly...it was amazing. I was so sore by the time I got out of there. Wayne and I did upper body today and somehow we made it through all that plus the many laps of lunges and joking Father B made us do. Went to work and actually accomplished something for a change. I then went to baja fresh for lunch and sat on the beach for a bit. I went to my LAST CLASS AT GORDON COLLEGE in which I reviewed dna sequencing data cloned from my own body...actually really cool. I will have pics and info later. I then was dragged to the beach for a game a frisbee amoung the embracing sand, cold waves, good friends, and beautiful women... oopps...was I not allowed to mention that last one. I ummm, I'm not really looking...HONEST! :) I went back to gordon, chilled in the car with some toons for a bit, went to the bev farms library and got locked out with all my stuff in. O yeah, if you ever get the impression I have any personal pride left at all...well...its a huge lie. I have absolutely none. Now, I'm sitting in my back yard, under the gentle dusk light, talking with my redleaved friend here about all the birds and how excited they must be. Yes...and tonight is sushi with great friends and a semester survived of p-chem party. This all is not to say the amount of work that remains to be done is not incredibly huge and extremely oppressing and makes me sick to think about it or that most of today could have been spent doing that work, but I had a good day. A good time to remember. I've been called insane by several professors and insanely stupid by many friends for the work load I've had this past year. I tell you its nearly..okay has, driven my so far into the dirt I now have met personally several species of earthworm I never knew existed. But ya know...my God is bigger. Somehow...somewhere...something good is coming out of this year. I'm just hoping it happens before the goof offs at sallie mae realize my death was a rouse :) I know this year hasn't been all lost. I was suprised that at the senior formal last weekend I could walk around the whole room and meet and greet at least one person I knew at each table. I've developed so many amazing relationships this year I can't even express them all. I've also lost touch with a few too many people too...which makes me sad. That is what this summer is for. Sleep, friends, family, bbqs, weddings, beaches, woods, guns, bikes, gres, and hopefully hopefully hopefully some woodland training courses I would die to take. And especially friends. We'll see. The first week is going to be all sleep. Well, some rather loud people have just interrupted my peaceful introspective moment in the backyard. Was great while it lasted. The squirrel in my redleafed friend agrees...it's time for sushi. I love you all.

Long day

So, the next two weeks are going to be INSANE. I just really hope I can get it all done. I don't want another year like this one...no please. While I've learned more than I could ever tell you and grown in ways that scare even me...I'd rather not try it again. I just hope I've learned everything I was supposed to cause I'm generally terrible at makeup exams. I'm really really tired. I don't even think I can express how tired I am to you, but there are some good happenings in my life. I got to play in the sand yesterday and watch videos of my nephew and niece! After that, I hung out in the crow's nest of emery working on biochem labs with a couple gentleman interspersing work with snipits of return of the king on the projector...accompanied with pizza of course. At about 5 am I went to the house, cooked some buffalo burgers, and went back to campus to have a quick late dinner/breakfast/thirdsies whatever in the gordon tower. Went back to emery, worked for another hour or too...then collapsed in the penthouse for 20 min, in the penthouse, before waking up to go work out. Yeah...work out. Sigh. I have a super busy day today and not much time to sleep because tonight begins round two of the lab write-ups. 4 in all, an average of 15 pages each of nice and exciting technical writing, statistically relevant data sets and somewhat confident intervals. Scratch that. I'm not anywhere near a 95 % confidence limit. Last week, during my senior presentation, a professor asked me if I was confident in my data. I was quite frustrated, sleep deprived and delusional at the time and was very tempted to say...sir...I have just spent the last 45 min presenting terrible, non-significant, scientifically painful data gathered from an analytical machine that hates the mere notion of me being in the same building as it, in the nicest most professional and thorough way possible and the one thing you could possibly ask me is do I (after all this) have any confidence in these numbers? I've only told you a thousand ways to china no...could I save just a little bit of my dignity or ya gonna just drive that nail in too. O well, it's only the third time I've had to defend an experiment in which a hundred hours went into it and all I can say is here...look...I can say absolutely nothing that can be backed up by statistics in any way shape or form. I can't even tell you that my error numbers are right. Basically, I spent many hours mashing things up, dumping chemicals on them, blasting them into tubes and waiting for a bump on the screen. Standard strategy for presenting horrible data. Focus on theory and big picture. Make sure you tell them what you could have done with better data or would like to do in the event more time were available to you. Sigh. That's it. I love science.

One Art

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (WRITE IT !) like disaster.


-- Elizabeth Bishop





Every time I read this it becomes a little more intriguing and powerful. I have no idea why. I mean, I can resonate with so much of it (especially this year)...but I'm not exactly sure that's why I like it so much. I'm not sure. I think a couple of the things that attract me to this is her practical almost sarcastic approach to a difficult subject; loss. She works through the poem and begins to discover that the things she is losing do actually mean something to her...especially when she starts losing things that are a huge part of her life. She can't act or pretend it away anymore. It is so powerful she has to write it...write it. One of the hardest things to do when thoughts hurt a lot. Taking the time to stay stationary in silence (hardest part right there) and fight the little lingering voices of depression and doubt that incessantly rain blows upon your mind and try to write down the things that hurt, you know, the ones you don't understand is very difficult. Seeing them on paper is two fold. It gives you a certain power over them. Look!, there they are on the paper...I wrote you. I kennen "know" you. I can call you by name. On the other hand, now they are there as a reminder. What you do with that reminder is your game. The written word is powerful. The spoken word is holy. Do both. Marilyn Hacker wrote a poem in response to this one. It's called " Going Back to the River". Read it...took my brain to a crazy place.