Spring Break Week!

Ahhh, Spring Break...

One of the perks of being a professor is spring break week. All of the students head out, there are no classes to be taught, and half of the staff seems to go on vacation as well. You would think that this would be an excellent chance for me to catch up on a lot of things that I have been meaning to do all semester, but haven't been able to.

I'll let you know how that goes at the end of this week. ;-)

This weekend was relaxing for a change...maybe it was because I knew I had this whole week to get stuff done, and therefore didn't bring any work home at all. Friday night the wife and I cat-sit for some friends who were out of town. Now, normally I don't consider myself a cat person. Every cat that my family has ever owned has been sort of stand-offish and aloof, so I have always considered cats to be somewhat boring. What fun is a pet if you can't play with it and have it do stuff with you?

In any case, this cat is still in the kitten phase, so it is a ton of fun. It runs, it jumps, it plays, and it fetches! I have no idea if it will grow up and morph into a boring aloof cat, but right now, this little guy is a lot of fun.

I always considered myself a dog person, and I still would like to get a dog someday (someday soon, I hope). Our current living situation doesn't allow for a dog, though, and since I don't see our living situation changing (damn expensive Boston housing market! But I digress...) anytime soon, I guess I will continue to be dog-less. I really would like to get some animal though, since they allegedly are very good at reducing stress.

Saturday we spent poking around...Lunch with my sister, then wandering around various places spending money on various things. I had some birthday money to spend, and I managed to finally find a place that had iPod Shuffles in stock. For those not in the know, the iPod shuffle is a very cool, very tiny music player from Apple. Now, I already have a regular iPod, but the shuffle weighs in at less than an ounce, and I told myself that it would be the catalyst that would get me to start going to the gym again. Again, check in with me at the end of the week to see if I kept that goal...

Lastly, yesterday I went to friends house to watch the Extended Edition of the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie. All 4 hours and 15 minutes of it. It kicks ass, especially on a nice big screen high-def TV life my buddy has in his living room. We were originally planning to geek it out hardcore and watch all three extended edition movies in order, but then we realized that was over 12 hours of sitting on our asses, and that, while we are big geeks, we may not be that big...Maybe some other time when we have 12+ hours to kill...

So here I am, Monday morning of Spring Break week...Let's see how it goes...

Only Tuesday...

Nothing terribly interesting happened today.

I feel like a lot of my days are like this - filled with the boring little inanities of daily routine. This is why I don't talk to my friends more often, I'm sure. I simply have nothing truly interesting to report. Sure, I could blather on about this and that, how my day was, and what I had for breakfast, but in all honesty, I barely care myself...

My sister talks to my Mom every day of the week. I have no idea what I would talk to my Mom about on a daily basis. I call her twice a week to say hi, and I often find myself struggling to come up with interesting things to say, or anything at all. A lot of my days are really rather "lather-rinse-repeat", and so I feel bad wasting people's time babbling about what inconsequential problems I have.

My friends have real problems. My one friend is CEO of his own company that makes incredibly cool high-tech devices. He worries every day about how his business is doing, whether or not he's going to have to fire people, and whether or not the company will go belly-up after many, many years of hard work and effort. He also travels all over the place trying to secure business deals, and has some really crazy people on his management team that make his life waaaay more difficult than it should be. Another friend of mine is in all likelihood getting a divorce. These are real problems. Interestingly, these people seem to never have a shortage of things to talk about. They have good stories. They aren't bitchy, or whiny, or complain-y though - they don't tell 'poor-me' stories, but the conflict in their lives does tend to make for interesting talk.

Seems like there should be a better way to have interesting things to talk about. Maybe I should start doing more interesting things.

Anyway. Only Tuesday...

Winter in New England Can Suck...

Sometimes I can't fathom why I came further north for graduate school, and then decided to stay and settle here. I guess it is because the summer's can be so fantastically nice that it lulls you into a false sense of security about the long, hard slog that is a New England winter.

I hate snow. I don't have a clear idea in my mind when I started hating snow, but I definitely do. As a child, of course, I loved it. It was fun, and it often meant a day off from school - a free play day out in this rare and wonderful stuff.

I never understood why my parents and folks older than me were always stressed out when it snowed. How could you not like this stuff? Now I know. When you are older, snow ceases to be fun, and is just another one of those things that makes your life more difficult. Most adults have plenty of other things that make their lives difficult enough without Mother Nature throwing in her two cents.

So now, instead of going out and having fun in the snow, building a snowman, sledding, having a snowball fight, I worry about shoveling all of it, getting it off of the car, and then praying that neither me nor someone else on the road is having a bad karma day and ends up totaling said car. No wonder my parents always dreaded the snow. It created a lot of extra work for them.

I have a feeling though, snow is one of those things you enjoys in cycles. When you are a kid, snow is great. When you are an early adult, it's just a pain in the ass. Then you have kids of your own, and it becomes fun again, because you get to experience it through your children. Then of course, your kids grow up and it re-becomes a pain in the ass.

For me, it's definitely in the 'pain in the ass' phase right now...

The Inaugural Post

Well, everyone else seems to be posting blogs these days, and I do enjoy reading them, so why shouldn't everyone else be subjected to my twisted, often boring ramblings as well?

A little background...I am 29 and a college professor at a University in the northeastern United States. Boston if you must know. Good luck trying to figure out which...you can't swing a dead cat around your head in this town without hitting a University...

I studied Chemical Engineering in college and graduate school. Somehow, somewhere, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a professor. I really enjoyed college and graduate school (in retrospect, of course - I tend to actually hate everything while I am actually doing it), and I always liked the idea of a job where I could pursue problems or ideas that were my own. I never thought that I'd do well in a job where I was being told what to work on, and that work being sacrificed on the altar of corporate idiocy and profit. I truly believe that Dilbert-esque bosses and situations are far more common than most people might believe, and that Scott Adams is just a genius.

So here I am, almost two years into a tenure-track professorship. And can I tell you, I do not have a f**king clue as to what I am doing... Sure, I show up for work every day, and I go through the motions, but I have absolutely no idea what being a professor actually means. If people think that their corporate workplace is bad, and that they would give anything to pursue ideas that were their own and of interest to them, let me tell you, it isn't all it is cracked up to be. A University can (and often is) managed by people who are incredibly incompetent as well, often rivaling their corporate counterparts.

Case in point: I am an experimentalist. By the very nature of that description, I need to perform experiments to do my work. I need to formulate hypotheses, and then carry out experiments designed to test these hypotheses, and gain knowledge from this. It is generally accepted that in order to carry out experiments, one needs a laboratory or other suitable facilities to perform the work in.

That is all well and good, and I would happily be doing experiments, writing papers, and otherwise advancing the cause of humanity and the pursuit of science, but for the little problem of not having a laboratory. That's right. I'm an experimentalist, been at the University for going on 2 years, and I still don't have any freaking lab space. Why you might ask? I can point to a variety of different reasons, but the most obvious is just gross incompetence on the part of the higher ups.

I literally have never seen a more dysfunctional management system in place than I have at my current workplace. One of my friends and colleagues who is a senior faculty member recently had a discussion with the Provost, and the Provost had no idea that I wasn't happily whiling away my time in my lab, churning out results. The f**king provost! The guy I sent letters and emails to this summer telling him about the situation, just magically assumed that in the intervening months, this group of morons, with no intervention, had fixed this sad state of affairs.

This is just one small example of what I have taken to calling the Theatre Absurd. The older I get, the less tolerance and patience for idiocy and incompetence I have, but sometimes, I really just have to laugh at how much of a joke this all seems.

And then I realize that I should probably just shut the hell up, because my problems are trivial in comparison to a lot of other things that people have going on in their lives.

Then again, here I am, 29, and I have no idea what I really want to do with myself, and somedays I just feel like I'm going a little crazy. Or alot.

I watched 'Garden State' with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman this weekend. I really enjoyed it, and it has a kickass soundtrack that I have subsequently downloaded from the iTunes music store. One thing I thought when I watched it was this: Who the hell has a life like this? I never once in my life went to party where people were taking bong hits, popping X, and playing spin the bottle...Maybe I just wasn't running in the right circles...

In any case, I think Zach Braff is awesome, both for this and his work on 'Scrubs'...