Top Songs of the Parking Lot Next Door in the Middle of the Night


1. I Didn’t Do Nothin’ to You, Baby

2. CRUNNCCHHH (tinkle tinkle)

3. Oh My God, My Dad’s Gonna Kill Me

4. No, You Shut Up

5. What Did I Do? You Tell Me, What Did I Do?

6. Who Do You Think You’re Talkin’ To?

7. Dude, She’s Not Worth It

8. Blluuuuaaaaaeehhhhhh…..

9. Yeah, You Go Ahead and Call the Cops

10. I Told You Man, It’s Not Mine

Because I compulsively Google any object that someone says "I wish I could have ______", I have noted that the calendar I saw on my trip is available on about a bajillion websites. (There's also this somewhat more glamorous '40s pin-up one.)

Okay, a bit of retroblogging, since so much has happened lately and I haven’t updated for a while. One thing that’s happened is that Clu definitely has a limited lifespan at this point. Over the weekend it became clear that his display problem has to do with the frayed, exposed cable, which means he can’t be moved without risking complete detonation. So I will soon be actually purchasing a new laptop, something I’ve never done before. (Luckily I have professional assistance in this venture.)

As for the internships, only one additional person in my cohort eventually got one through the clearinghouse. Last week was therefore somewhat traumatic for me and my peers. In the post-hoc analysis, it became clear that this wasn’t an unreasonable outcome for applicants in our position. Even if our program had already been accredited, most people seek internships in their 5th, 6th, or even 7th year, whereas we were applying in our 4th year. This means that in addition to lack of accreditation, we probably had comparably fewer cumulative practicum hours, publications, types of experience, and so on.

Basically, this all wouldn’t have been so shocking if we hadn’t been hearing since the day we interviewed for this program “Oh, when it comes time for internship, don’t worry—we’ll get you all internships [insert various reasons, such as the greater number of classes, the higher number of practicum hours required (for time spent), certifications, staff networked with at internship sites, etc. etc.]” I don’t think they were lying, but I think the expectations were quite unrealistic. (It also meant that we completely worked our butts off for three years trying to vastly surpass other applicants when it may not have mattered so much.) Unfortunately this makes me now doubt every bit of soothing assurance that I hear from the department about pretty much anything.

However, I have now digested the idea that I will be staying here for at least another year, doing clinical work and teaching.

My Florida trip was, as I may have mentioned, perfect in that it was rainy and overcast but warm. (I’m not sure that my fellow conference-goers felt the same way about that.) The streets were curiously empty of people, which may have just been because it was a downtown on the weekend. Still, that was a bit eerie. Also, the area around the hotel was like a giant gated community. It felt very artificial and claustrophobic. I can’t believe that people pay the toppest dollar possible to get into those kind of areas.

I used the power of MapPoint to find the nearest Kinko’s so that my friend/colleague (frolleague?) Melanie could copy her presentation onto overheads. We got slightly lost on the way, so I had to stop and view the map again on the way (see photo of me inside my portable computer-viewing booth [i.e. jacket]).



Later I escaped the conference to patronize a local bistro kind of place, where I had the traditional classy Florida lunch of chicken satay with a can of Boddington’s.



I also took a picture of the restaurant’s cool Vespa calendar specifically for Mark, but the low light made it blurry. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with the pint I drank.

I really wanted to visit the Aquarium, but by the time the conference sessions were over at 5 on Saturday, it was closed. (What kind of a tourist attraction closes at 5 on Saturday in the height of tourist season?)

Tampa has a convenient and quaint little trolley, which I took to the Latin Quarter (Ybor City). I think that was my favorite area there; the streets were blocked off and full of pedestrians. The populace was less uniformly white there, which seemed less unnatural. I also liked the cobbled streets and older architecture, even though the whole area had obviously been made into a giant tourist trap. There was a cool vintage store, where I bought a tie for the evening’s dance back at the hotel.






(As you can see, the tie really completed the effect of my suit. Annie Lennox, eat your heart out.)

A guy on a street corner in Ybor City enthusiastically offered me a personality test, which I declined, saying that I was a psychologist. When several of my frolleagues arrived, we walked past the same guy, and a few people thought they would go along with it for a while, until we realized that he was a shill for the Scientology storefront around the corner (they apparently thrive in areas where there are plenty of tattoo parlors.) When we then declined, saying we were all psychologists, he jokingly (?) made an anti-vampire kind of cross with his fingers at us.

We also saw a most excellent mullet, of which I managed to get a hasty photo.

This morning I was peacefully washing dishes while listening to a CD on my headphones (to allow TheLimey to listen to his beloved NPR while he works). Suddenly I was yanked from my Morrissey reverie (“…you see the life that I’ve had / would make a good man / bad…”) by TheLimey exclaiming something about scratching noises at my 3rd-floor window, which turned out to be the case. Apparently one of the phone-wire acrobat squirrels had made the leap to the window. Unfortunately, he leaped to the wrong window—the living room one without critter snacks instead of the kitchen one with critter snacks laid on. You can see his astonishment at this mistake in the photo below.

Okay, okay—now to the big stuff you’ve been waiting for. In reviewing my blog, I see that it’s hard not to notice the increasing presence of TheLimey over the past year. So it may not be an incredible revelation to learn that we recently decided to—ah, merge our files, as it were. (Probably late this summer.) I’d post the obligatory photo of the ring, but that part of the process is still being worked on. Let’s just say the decision involved a clipboard, an engineer pen, and a graphic representation of a timeline, rather than the default knee-ring sequence. (This really shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows either of us.)

I’m reasonably certain he was convinced by my inventing the onion-marmite-cream cheese bagel, whereas I was convinced by the three dry-erase boards in his home office (featuring short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals).

While traveling the 20 minutes or so from my place to TheLimey's last Friday (as is our wont), we saw a new antiques store (Near the Lord Fox, as matter of fact) that was open although it's a pretty rural location and it was after dark. We went in and perused their books, and he bought me two "antique" science magazines, one from 1948 and one from 1953.

Now that I don't have them with me, I can't remember which they were--Popular Science might have been one. Was the other Science and Mechanics? Anyway, they have really cool covers mainly depicting the kind of future that Americans were imagining at the time. Rockets and flying cars aplenty! I wanted to scan them immediately, but after some agonizing had decided not to bring my beloved scanner with me for the weekend. I regretted it immediately, as those covers are pretty damn cool.

Now I have them scanned, but have not had time to touch them up and smallify the files and so on. They would make fantastic posters.

One of the mags has an article about how to make one's own Ice Box or "Freezer" in order to take advantage of summer's cornucopia in the winter, and the other has an article about a way to Motorize a Wheel Chair.

Now that I've had a chance to get my head around a completely different life plan than I've had in mind for the past 8 or 9 years, I feel okay about the whole academic trajectory thing. I (representing the others in my cohort) met with our department head, director of clinical training, and another interested faculty member to discuss the ramifications for us, the students. It'll be okay, just--different. There are additional life-changing things going on that I'll talk about later.

Clu has been behaving very strangely; I am afraid he may be on his last...what, processors? I spent an hour messing around this morning just trying to get his display back to normal, as it would become progressively snowier and snowier with each little operation or physical tap on the computer itself, and gave strange unreadable messages about Windows. After a while it just got better, although some things like checkmarks, the mouse pointer, and scroll bar arrows still intermittently turn into weird fuzzy little objects . (That still work, but look weird.) I spent a couple hours this afternoon backing up everything, although I did already back up my important docs recently.

There is definitely a tinge of Spring in the weather--rain washing away big mounds of dirty, grainy snow. The wind smells like wet dirt again. And of course there appear to be some new young squirrels in the Squirrel Tree. Yay!

Welp, still no internship. This has definitely been a Titanic week.

One more person finally got one the other night--it was the one remaining place that had asked me for my application materials.

This basically means that now my entire life is going to be in limbo for yet another year. If I were ten years younger, this wouldn't be such a terrible thing, but I am turning 38 this year, and I have really been wanting to have kids sometime this life--not the next one (and I don't believe in long-term daycare for infants.)

Clearly I am going to have to drastically rearrange my expectations for some very important things in my life. I was really ready to be done with school after--what, ten years? So knowing that I will be doing this for at least another year, if not two, is a bit disheartening.

While I don't really think I feel that bad, I have had three nightmares already this week (I almost never have nightmares.) They are pretty classic, standard nightmares--I'll probably have the one about teeth falling out pretty soon if this keeps up, although I'm a little old for that one.

1. People are stealing my stuff!
A classic anxiety nightmare. This dream involves having all my most important and precious possessions with me in some really squalid environment, and I can't protect it from theft because the doors won't lock or even close, I can't carry it all around at once, and I have to get somewhere. At some point, the garbage workers come and haul away most of my stuff to the dump when I am trying to get my door to lock--that is, what's left of it after people on the street have already picked through it.

2. Bugs, bugs, bugs!
A classic creepy nightmare. (My apartment has ants, so of course they found their way into my dream, too.) I dream that while I am trying to get ants off my food, I realize that they are coming from a hole in my right arm!! I realize that while I wasn't watching they must have found a way into my arm and made a nest there, and all I can do is hope that I can get most of them out. (This is the dream that has found its way into the urban legend about face powder.)

3. Trapped underwater in car.
A classic panic nightmare. I am riding in a car with a friend, and while looking at some beautiful moonlit lakes next to the road, I suddenly realize that they are violently overflowing across the road at the bottom of a hill. It's too late to stop, and although we think we might be able to get through it, we are swept off the road by the torrent into the dark waters of the lake. Yikes!

Circumstances demand that I cannibalize an email to Argotnaut for a scrap of content:

I'm in the midst of the harrowing process of Internship
Clearinghouse. It's where all the leftover applicants who didn't
get an internship placement grovel via email to all the sites
that didn't get a match. I have been camped out at the visibly
smoky Internet cafe for 12 hours now, waiting with email fax and
phone at the ready, and I'll be back tomorrow morning.

Only one person from my program got matched. Nobody wants
students from a non-accredited site, but APA won't accredit us
until we have students in all levels of the program, including
internship.

I have applied to everything that isn't military or prison. Even
one in British Columbia. Even working with kids! In New Orleans!
For peanuts! (Almost literally.) I
am feeling kind of pessimistic, but maybe that's just the
aftermath of sending out 30 or so applications in 12 hours.

The site stats say there were 669 unmatched applicants, and 309
unmatched positions. So I guess all I can do now is wait. Bleh!

...The Florida conference was good, my presentation went extremely well, and I was accepted into the sisterhood of the crone or something. Tampa was rainy and temperate: in other words, perfect. Also took many pictures. Wanted to update about it, but Clearinghouse has taken over my life for a few days. Now I've been here for so long that it's time to go home and go to bed so I can come back here in the morning. Gah.

Heading off to Florida this weekend for a conference where I'll present my research on Gender Role Traits and Nutrition. This time, I get to use some data/results that I wasn't "allowed" to include in my thesis, so there will be more to present. Also, unlike the APA convention, I will be presenting a paper, not a poster.

Meanwhile, I have a ton of stuff to do but have been having trouble with spinning my wheels and overthinking things. There is a great speaker tonight at the Union (Tim Wise), but I may have to stay home and work on my diss revisions. I don't know; we'll see.

Now that my workload is merely busy and not inhuman, I paradoxically feel less compulsion to post. I guess I use it as an escape--a way to vent--and I just don't have much to vent about right now. (Similar to how so many of us wrote horrible poetry as teenagers, when we had all that angst to expel.)

Every few years I have a fit of looking for people I used to know. For example: people I knew while living in Norway. Since the advent of the "internets", it has become almost unfairly easy. The part that is unsettling for me is that the women have become harder and harder to find. A boy I sat next to in second grade? Easy. A woman I worked with ten years ago? Invisible.

That's one of those problems with the whole marriage and name-change thing, is that it makes women disappear. It may be bad for the present, but it's much worse the longer it goes, especially when we start getting into historic contexts. I have photos of women who are my ancestors, but I only know them as "Mrs. So-and-So". It makes it look as though my ancestry is composed of "men (and their wives)", thus chopping off half the roots of my family tree. It doesn't seem very fair.

I've already changed my own last name once in adulthood (not marriage but a different long story), and I decided to include the last names of both my parents, in a kind of Spanish fashion, I suppose (although I know of no Spanish heritage in my ancestry...at least in my male ancestors!) The Icelandic naming system seems quite useful, too, although it might only work in a tiny population on a remote island. Like...Iceland.

As always, following someone else's blog links leads to delicious time-wasting entertainment. I couldn't resist trying out the British Name Generator.

My very British name is Elizabeth Chamberlain.
Take The Very British Name Generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

(What happens if you put in a name that's already flamingly British?!)

Besides the squirrel-feeding trip, the weekend included one breakfast of Heinz beans and toast (prepared by Chef Limey, imported beans bought specially by me at the British imports section of Meijer), another breakfast delivered by a local Mexican restaurant (though I went traditional American and got pancakes and eggs), an afternoon at the Ugly Mug internet cafe, intermittent viewing of Jeeves and Wooster*, some moderate Meatball viewing (" 'Super ... bowl?' Wot's one of those?") with some colleagues of mine who were luckily more interested in chatting and drinking than in the game, and once or twice waking up before sunrise without the alarm (now that's an accomplishment!).

On the technological front, I figured out how to get those passport photos taken at home to print out razor-sharp, and I also spent some time finally burning a couple CDs and using my dorky (but fun!) little Afterburner CD-labeler. (While fuming at Amazon for posting "lables" on their listings for certain CD label packages.)

I tried to get TheLimey to post this in his blog, but since it's already two days later I've grown impatient and will post it myself. I agreed to take the Geek Test, which is (fittingly) in Excel spreadsheet format. Apparently it's from a friend of his back home who is about to marry someone who is a huge geek and scored an extraordinary, unheard-of 65% on this test! So, anyway. I took it and achieved a 75%. I guess TheLimey now has something to either brag about or cry into his beer over.

We found ourselves arguing over whether it was valid to check "yes" to a question about having attempted to build a robot, since we have not yet actually opened the box with the robot in it. Finally we decided that in the interests of absolute scientific accuracy, we can't take that point until we open the box and begin the actual building. (I think we should probably be gifted/penalized with more points, simply for worrying about whether or not that counted!)

I will let TheLimey tell you his own score. Let's just say I was surprised--not about either score particularly, but about our scores relative to one another.



*Punctuated amusingly by Someone's alternating great booming laughter and interjections of "Idiot!"

Look at this! I forgot about this blogshares ... game ... thing. At least I hope it's a game, and people aren't imagining that my site is actually worth $7,262.11.

This is nice to know in the same way that it's nice to know how much your body is potentially worth in component form.

Placed my ranked list of internship sites into the mouth of the Great Internship Ranking Program today. I hope it spits out the Ohio site, since Erie PA is not only depressing, but twice as far away. The Great Spittage begins on February 25th, when we discover whether or not we were matched to a site. Then, inexplicably, it waits until the 27th to tell us what site that might be.

Of course that weekend is the same weekend I will be in Florida at the Uppity Women Psychologists' annual conference presenting a paper on my research.

I don't feel too worried about the internship matching thing--not because I don't care about the outcome, which will determine a lot of my plans for quite a while--but because it's completely out of my hands at this point. I did the years of work, I underwent the application process, I did my best at the interviews, and now I'm done with my part. (Unless I don't get matched, but then there's nothing more to do until next autumn.)

Went on campus yesterday to get TheLimey's new passport photos (though we may simply redo them at my place, since my camera and printer have been producing such great images).

The weather was very strange and beautiful--just at freezing, and foggy, which produced ice crystal formations over all the trees (see below).

Of course I always have peanuts in my purse, so I dragged him over to the quad where he discovered the joy of hand-feeding squirrels.

First tentative squirrel approach:

I somehow "forgot" to mention to him that rather than holding peanuts out on the palm of one's hand, as for a horse, one must stick the peanut out between finger and thumb. Squirrels have terrible vision, and if your fingers smell like peanuts, they will think the first thing they encounter sticking out is the peanut. This led to a minor nibble. However, TheLimey was very brave and persevered in the feeding attempts.

He may have been paying the squirrels back for the nibble with this bit of squirrel teasing.

(Whereas I will actively go out of my way in order to get the peanuts to the squirrels:)



A serious and scientific examination of the curious crystals:




(Answer: it's H2O!!)

I still wish I could find that --what was it, the excuse generator? The version sung by a robot: "Jean, this is Craig Michaels*..." sung to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance.

Sometimes it gets stuck in my head for no reason at all.

(Wasn't that speech [speeach] program from some previous computer incarnation of yours, Argot? I think it was five years ago.)



*Craig Michaels always reminded me of a former coworker known (to me) as Wretched. I cAn rEaD knows who I mean.

For the linguistically inclined: 'Strine younger than thought.

Even in the '80s Aussies were still saying "be-ah" (and saying it a lot, if I remember correctly. Which I do.)

Funny; just this morning I was thinking that Aussie/Kiwi and even South African accents and cultural referents seem a lot more Englishy than American ones do, and wondering when the various sociolinguistic splits occurred.

Also I recently remembered a Norwegian friend's years-ago conjecture that the notorious American "arrr" (r) came from Irish immigrants, after we watched some movie with Irish people in it. Made sense to me at the time, though I don't know much linguistic history. (Linguistory?)

I bought 2 small packets of little mushy fruit gel things (candy, really, but supposedly with vitamin C) from the clinic snack shelf, and then put them on the kitchenette table while I made some (eww) ramen. Didn't remember them until one of the 1st-years came into the computer lab smelling of fake-fruit, as she was eating them!!

It's my own fault, because people sometimes leave things like batches of brownies for everyone on that table. But I can't help being annoyed, since that was an individually packed item that is for sale in our cabinet, rather than a big basket of homemade muffins or whatever. Darnit!

Trying to spend less time online, as I think it is depressing me simply through online inertia.