All The Trays

 On Friday, I had my last dinner I may ever have as a member of a dorm. We had to buy the graduate student dining hall meal plan, and I was really struggling to use up my meals at the end since I had been doing all this traveling during the semester. And there were several blizzards. And that whole Boston manhunt thing.

I have to say, I was never too enthused by the food in the dining halls. Though convenient and sometimes tasty, it was never that great. Plus, they had this system where we're forced to use trays, for disposal purposes, and after being totally converted to non-tray use during undergrad, it was hard to switch back. I  would automatically go for the food then have to backtrack to get a tray. Annoying.

As I slowly got used to using trays again (though I suspect I will always have some sort of aversion to them....darn you eco-consciousness), they began to be the highlight of my meal. Because sometimes, people would leave messages on their corners. Here's a compilation of all the ones I have found. I suspect they were not the only ones....

An unfinished specimen:

Also, this:

Research

I go to trivia every week. This week, we won! The team efforts were superb (we came up, after much internal debate, with both Shaun White and Whitney Houston), and it was the best round of trivia I had ever been to.

One does not have to study for trivia. It's kind of the thing that you pick up while watching stupid TV (Millionaire Matchmaker?!) or retained from APUSH (Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton). And if you're lucky, the questions fall in your favor and you win!

However, early next month, some of my friends want to do a "Geeks Who Drink" trivia featuring the HBO hit Game of Thrones. Now, even though everybody and their mother watches Game of Thrones, I had never gotten that into it, mostly because it's the kind of show where people make frustratingly stupid decisions that affect things like who rules the (Seven) Kingdom(s). And UGH if everything could not have been solved if Ned Stark wasn't so blindly loyal. Anyway, because up until last week, I had never watched an episode, I decided to do some research on the matter, because, as far as I can tell, Geeks Who Drink trivia is intense. And...TV research is frustrating. I can usually retain much more information about TV than I can reading papers (in much finer detail), but when I'm actively researching a TV show, I can't do it. If I like a show, I'll gravitate towards it and marathon and remember everything. But, like I said somewhere in the last couple of posts, you can't be into everything. And GoT is not....my jam. I'm too angry at too many people for it to work convincingly for me. Even though I appreciate the artistry, I'm all about people's stories and people here make too many bad decisions for me to respect them. That's kinda how I felt during Downton Abbey when my favorite character, Mr. Bates, became just....frustrating. BATES. WHY YOU GOTTA DO THAT.

I'm currently about 3/4 of the way through season 1. Will I watch the rest? Probably. Blegh. Peer pressure.

Lasts and Firsts

Last Thursday, I had my last class of my first year of graduate school. It's taken me a couple of days, a brewery tasting tour, a Game of Thrones marathon, and a movie watching extravaganza to celebrate. Or perhaps, the right phrase is "come to terms with this fact," the fact that I'm no longer a student in the lecture and final exams sense. And it was...anticlimactic. I think I was already so checked out after turning in my final proposals that I was ready to be done, and mentally I already was done. One of my classes was already done and I just had a presentation left in the other. And afterwards, I did as I do on Thursday nights and went to trivia and it felt normal. No big sense of relief, no jumping for joy. Just...normal.

Of course the weekend was much more exciting in that I had no schoolwork to do, so I definitely felt freer. But in big scheme of things I wonder if I have stopped being a "student." This thought scares me a little, but at the same time, it makes sense. For me, I am so inundated with facts and information that my brain filters the best it can. I can't be interested in every lecture that comes my way, and whereas a few years ago, I would have resisted and tried to force myself to pay attention to anything anyone in any kind of authority would say, I have now accepted the fact that if you want me to listen to you, you'd better have something really good to say or say it in a way that gets my attention. I have accepted that there are things I don't care about. These things may be very important to some people, and I am glad that they are important to these people, but they don't have to be important to me. And I know that now. And that's ok.

There's not really a conclusion to this post. Perhaps more of a beginning. It's the first Monday to work. Should be an interesting ride.

Five Years On

Last weekend, I was in DC for the National Science Bowl competition. I went back for the first time last year as a volunteer and relived a little bit of excitement and a little bit of bitterness that I experienced when I competed. I'll be the first to admit that I can hold a grudge forever and last year, the anger at the mishandling of science during my year of competing came back full force. Maybe it's because I recognized how much better things had gotten since 2008 and I still had the "what if" question in my mind. What if things had been different?

Actually, it probably wouldn't have changed my life too much, and it's not like I'm not pleased with the current trajectory of my life. But I still can't talk about that day without wanting to hit something.

However, this year, five years after I graduated from high school, all that drama in 2008 doesn't seem to matter so much. I think it's because I already gone back once before and met people who I consider more as friends than as competition. However much I loved competing, being on the other side of the competition, on a team of awesome alumni who don't take anything too seriously, is an amazingly inclusive feeling. In high school, I had never felt more included than when I was in Science Bowl, which I think was why I felt so much pressure to do well, to not let my team down. But the alumni at Nationals are so ready to accept newbies with open arms and it's so easy to bond with them that for me, the 4H Center no longer holds painful memories of losing the last 9 pm match, but of late-night sprawling on the floor of the lobby, of complaining about the terrible food while eating all the softserve possible, and of hugs and funny faces and obnoxious behavior during practice rounds.

Also, the knowledge that it's been five years since high school, which makes me too old to really have known anyone who is in high school now, gives me pause. It's hard for me to imagine being relevant to these high schoolers (and even more so, to the middle schoolers) and I know when I was in high school, I didn't really care about anyone else who was there. To them, I'm just another judge that they have to appease. I mean, do I really have so little going on with my life that I've gone back to judge a science competition?

I've tried, as most of my peers do, to separate myself from Science Bowl, to move on with my life. Yet  somehow, despite the seed of bitterness and regret, I found myself back there. What does that mean? I'm not sure yet. But I think I'll keep going back. After all, it's nice to see the kids squirm.