Lunch

Neuroanatomy provides me with the breakfast of Zombie champions.

Change is a capricious process...

It’s been a strange month or so… I have gained back a friend I thought I’d never talk to again and I lost a friend I never thought I’d loose. On a 6 months level the same processes occurred: I lost a boyfriend and a network of people… a huge part of my life and soul was pruned away. But I realized what I gained may be much greater... pruning does have a purpose. I have a great set of friends out here I wouldn't have made unless I broke up with Mark, I wouldn't be the person today unless I had dated and went through a breakup with Mark. I'm in a rare period of my life where I feel understood and reciprocated... there's no striving to be something better than I actually am. I am myself again, and it feels pretty good.

I’m still on the waitlist at Cornell, but I’ve realized there really isn’t anything for me there. Most of my interactions would be with people who knew me as “Mark’s ex girlfriend” and with that would come a whole lot of preconceived ideas of who I am. Mark never understood who I was… some of my old friends from way back when only know who I used to be, and some people only know me through my family, or my old job at a restaurant.... I shed a lot of the surface personality traits pretty quickly, although the core remains pretty much unchanged. A lot of the surface topography can be misleading too... I like it that way. Unfortunately I feel very few people can see through that: in Ithaca I'd name about 2-3 who can.

I used to be a lot of things I am no longer. Going back to Ithaca would limit me. Originally I thought it wouldn’t be bad to face my fears: the sight of Mark still triggers a great deal of adrenaline and anxiety. But I think I’d probably be more likely an animal in too small a cage... I'd be that rat who last semester in a taste aversion study at EMU knawed it's tail off... I think it might bring out my worst rather than the best.

So I’ll be going to Vanderbilt. I have family there, I have a friend a weekends drive away, and I have another friend who might move out there eventually.

That being said, I’ve learned a lesson in spontaneity recently. Apparently one of my favorite professors met her late husband during her dissertation week in grad school when he was visiting from another school himself. (And if you don’t know anything about grad school, a dissertation week could be expected to be quite busy and stressful). Anyways, she and her husband were engaged within a week and married in two: they were married 26 years until his death.

It’s strange hearing that story from a scientific researcher. You might expect someone comfortable with naturalistic variables to be much more logical and methodical in her love life. She wasn’t, and it worked. I’ve determined that’s a good idea… at least for scientific minded people… to trust one’s instincts regardless of the logic. Whenever I let my logical side have a say in my love life, bad things happen... and besides, one thing I learned from Roberto is to live life with no regrets.

My instincts told me to go to Vanderbilt… they led me to break up with Roberto 3 weeks ago. Everything is much calmer now, I actually spent part of last night subtly helping him get with the girl he fell for before me… It seemed to work amazingly well... As Donald Miller said, "sometimes you need to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself"... I saw a lot in Roberto he didn't seem to have the confidence to see in himself. He's seen that now... and maybe although Lauren had previously never had feelings for him in the 2 years he had had feelings for her... she can also see through to him. We did manage to change eachother, and entirely for the better.

There is one particular whimsical jump I might take in the next week... but more on that later. In any case, I've concluded that as far as instincts and logic goes. sometimes the jump is worth the fall.

Choosing a Grad School...

So my grad school choices are down to 2 options right now: I just told Carnegie Mellon no because they wouldn't be able to let me start until September. Well I guess I'm actually at 1.5 options. I had a talk with David Smith at Cornell a few days ago, who will let me know for certain if he can offer admission in a week ... He did tell me it is a likely occurrence, but there's nothing solid yet. But if he offers me admission I'm not sure what my answer will be when he calls just yet...

So here's the pros and cons of what is left:

CORNELL:

On the pro side... Cornell has David Smith, a researcher who is not only the only one among the schools I was accepted to who is researching what I want to research, he is also new to Cornell. This means that where other advisors will have to take time for bureaucracy and committees, Dr. Smith will be investing LOTS of time into his research... and grad students. As one of his first students, my success is inherently linked to his... and he will want me to do well.

Aside from that I've talked to people who have worked with David Smith before... the good impression I had of him wasn't far off... he genuinely cares about his students and his research. He is certainly the most genuinely awesome researcher I have talked to thus far... he shares my worth ethic and sense of humor... so 60 hours a week in his lab wouldn't really feel like work.

Compared to Vanderbilt, I would also finish up my Ph.D. A LOT faster at Cornell... My background is much more suited to David Smith's research than anyone else's, and if David Smith will be ready to work very hard, I will be ready to keep up with him. I'd feel more ready to contribute sooner in his area than anything going on in Vanderbilt.

The downsides to Cornell? Those are only social issues. It's a small department, and though both Mark nor his new girlfriend are not in the Psychology department, they both started in it... and Mark's office is still 3 doors down from David Smiths. At least Mark won't be in his office very much... and I'm more likely to be in the lab rather than David Smith's office.

I talked to Mark and his new girlfriend when I went out for an interview, as well as tried to figure out how much social awkwardness would exist for me if i was in the department. His new girlfriend didn't really care at all... Mark thought it might be awkward for a few months... and being that I'm sure he tried to downplay that... it probably means it would be a bit worse. There would be at least 2 people aside from Mark I'd be outright avoiding, and a few more who would never be that close to me because I am Mark's ex girlfriend. Aside from that, I really don't have too many friends left in Ithaca... most of them moved away. What's left is a pretty stressful family. I'd be ignoring a lot of people in a very small town... I'd be choosing my hobbies carefully so not to overlap too much with Mark's. I'd be starting off a little more lonely because of that.

But then again Cornell offers a good stipend for such a rural environment. I could live closer to green pretty things which is quite important to be in the long run.... It means I'd be more likely to be able to have a pet or grow things in my front yard... it's easier to find green energy sources in Ithaca that are affordable. As far as environmental concerns go, Ithaca is great.

VANDERBILT -

Pros – Vanderbilt has a very strong program... on average ranking higher than Cornell's in Neuroscience. They have a lot of people with very diverse labs looking at very broad questions... unfortunately just not the ones I'm interested in. Still... I like how the department works and thinks as a whole, I'm sure I could come up with something. They don't have a lot going on in Memory research, and their next recruit in the next year or two will be a computational memory person. If I went to Vanderbilt... but I have no idea who this person will be or whether what they are doing will be what I want to do. I'd be taking some detours... I'd learn more genetics, I'd learn more chemistry... and I'd have some catching up to do. And once I got down to setting up a research committee, it would mean I'd need to find 2-3 advisors instead of one... I'd be piecing together knowledge and lab time from multiple people to come up with something related to the questions I want to ask in Memory research. The pieces are there, but it's safe to say that I may take 1-2 years more time in the Vanderbilt program than in Cornell. I'll be 25 when I start... at some point I'd like to be able to afford a house payment, half of a wedding... or perhaps children... all of those things seem a bit far off for now, but if I'm 32 when I get out of grad school, I'd like to think a lot would have changed.

Vanderbilt also would mean I'd be close to family... both my aunt and uncle and several cousins. I also have a friend in Tennessee 4 hours away who might consider coming to Vanderbilt in a year... and a friend in Michigan who'd be planning on moving out with me just to have a friend around as he goes back to school / finds a job in a better economy. As far as social considerations... I'd be great. Plus Nashville, from what I understand... is a fantastic city. It's warm, there's lots of local art and music...

I do get the idea that if I wanted to live next to something green it would be a lot harder, but with family in town it might be easier to help me find it.

Overall I've been told the best plan for grad school is to find a researcher you think is awesome and stick to them... David Smith definitely wins out... especially since Vanderbilt didn't have anyone in my area of research. I don't think there's an easy decision here... either choice will direct the course of my career and being that I will be 32 when I get out, it will probably determine who if anyone I'd get into a serious committed relationship with along the way... Either choice will direct my life, and either choice involves some seemingly big sacrifices.

But any advice you can offer is greatly appreciated =)

-Orriana

Neuroanatomy T Shirt

So my Neuro class is going to make T- shirts to announce our survival, and we were encouraged to submit ideas for designs. This was mine.

Just because...

That brings back memories...

Dinner with a Skeleton in my Closet...

Last night I had dinner with a skeleton in my closet. It was an odd experience… I think for the best… but still hauntingly strange.

If this had been the first time I interacted with this individual, I would have thought I had made a new best friend. This was another green-minded science oriented type… but with more artistic sensibilities. I can meet green-minded hippies, I can meet people who can appreciate science… and I can meet people who can look at the world around them and express it passionately from minute to minute. It’s really rare to find this all in one individual.... It’s a refreshing mix. Plus… he thought ninjas were cooler than pirates… definitely worth having another ninja in my circle of friends.

However this wasn’t the first time I interacted with this individual…. I was actually half expecting to meet up with this individual and drive off as soon as possible… or at least, I wasn’t expecting to feel like I wanted to make a new friend. This was an old friend and enemy: I knew him at a period of my development I usually don’t write about anymore, or think about more… who I was when I knew him, and even dated him… were very different from who I am now. 8 years ago I was an unabashed religious fundamentalist; I was a teenager trying to escape a rough childhood and adolescence through other people… I was more than a little removed from reality…. Ryan at this time was also more of a fundamentalist... and it’s safe to say we are both very different people now then we were then. A lot of things happened in that period of time and I believed a lot of things for which I am ashamed of…

It’s enough to say that when we parted… it was pretty ugly. I tend to stay friends with my exes… Ryan was a “Never talk to me again” interaction… more from him than from me, although both of us spoke those words. I remained obsessed with him even after the breakup. By the time I went to Malaysia (4 months later) that had faded.... and faded for good. Though the obsession ended, the nonresolution of who I used to be faded a little more slowly... Ryan represented many unresolved things to me…and an aspect of my self I definitely wanted to change out of… a scar, a lost friend... one that I had hurt... one that hurt me back. I did think about it again from time to time... but only when no one would notice.

Over the next six years I traveled… I dated… I fell in love with Mark. This part of my life became pretty well brushed under the rug. I don't think I told Mark much of anything of my fundementalist days.

After Mark and I had broken up I felt like doing something rash. That night I decided to full a “High Fidelity”. That is… since I had just blown things with the one I loved… I wanted to know how much of it was because of me being retarded. I felt the best way to compare current mistakes is to look at old ones… and that meant ex boyfriends. I wanted to know if any aspect of whom I used to be was still remaining…. I decided to hunt down Ryan… to perhaps find what happened to him, find resolution, and measure myself against his old perception of me back then. I looked around the internet and I found him… I’m not sure if I had fully reasoned through these things when I IMed him… maybe it was just the first rash thing that came into my head. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I had thought about doing such a thing in the past, but I was afraid it would hurt… a lot… Not much could really hurt me, but I felt Ryan knew about most of all of the things that truly could shame me. I contacted Ryan on a night where nothing else could hurt.

It was a good conversation… I was half expecting him to just block me if I IMed him… he didn’t. He was doing well… he had become a teacher, was getting back into writing, but had just come back from Minneapolis after his girlfriend had been cheating him. He was also now living in Ann Arbor.

Crap.

This was bad… and I guess I can’t tell you why without delving into some of the nasty things from back in the day. 6 years ago friend of mine at that point had had a dream he considered “prophetic” and from god. In those times I believed in such things. In this dream, God had said that I and Ryan were “made for each other”… presumably in a romantic sense. I had believed it. Ryan had known I had believed it… he didn’t believe it… for obvious reasons, and last he checked… I still did.

The last thing he wanted to hear from me was that I was in the same town.

I made sure he knew I didn’t want to meet up with him… I had called and gotten what I wanted to know: he was doing well; I got to apologize for who I was back then. But since I was also in the area… I’m not sure if he believed it fully. A few days later I found he didn’t.

A few days later I read his blog… his blog was part of how I ended up tracking him down… but I really shouldn’t have read it. Even so there was a post on there about me. He lamented to his friends that “the crazy” had re-entered his life (I had a nickname all this time apparently) and that she had probably been pining away at her computer wondering why he didn’t IM all this time… my words came out mangled and needy as he reiterated them. It was crap. I don’t remember the details… I didn’t go back twice.

Next time he IMed me for “pleasant” conversation, I ripped him a new asshole. He was upset I read his blog, but I was more upset by what he said… He then argued that he knew it was simplification, that he blogged for “creative writing” purposes. I argued that nothing was that simple… that his perceptions of me just cruel fantasy… But then again, here I was reading his blog… that was an invasion of his privacy.

He made some good points.

But whatever. I wrote him off as an asshole… we parted on neutral terms, he said I could update him once in a while if I felt like it… as long as it was in 6 months intervals or more. I didn’t plan on it. I felt his trespasses were much greater than mine.

He IMed me a month or so later, saying he was writing a book and I was in it somehow. I was afraid to learn the details… Was there an obsessed fundi girl stalking one of his main character? He explained not… that the book was about how people can perceive an individual in vastly different ways… and it can be the same person. In this novel we would be introduced to a character through other people, one stereotyped perception to another… and eventually the main character would become clear. It sounded kinda Citizen Kane-ish… it sounded like a great story and it also sounded like it was an attempt at an apology being that this sounded a lot like what I was saying in our last argument… I was glad he saw things a bit differently… but I still didn’t plan on talking to him again. I thought about IMing him to tell him not to talk to me etc again, but I didn’t. It would defeat the purpose to contact someone to tell them you weren’t going to contact them.

This weekend he IMed me again… He apologized for being an asshole. He also said he wanted to meet up before I left town. I accepted his apology… but I was skeptical about his motivations in meeting up… this had to be a bad idea. I explained I was worried that he would still see me as he had in this past… I wasn’t that person anymore… in the end I agreed to meet up… but as strangers. I figured the worst that could happen was he pissed me off, and I’d get in my car and drive home.

But I met a really cool stranger. …

I find myself thinking over his book plot… my old side of the argument. It would be really easy… really simplistic of me to say this guy’s an asshole underneath this façade… that it will fade and the past will explode all over again. It would be equally easy of me not to be his friend for fear of the past on my end… I believed some retarded shit back then, and hey… he knows about it. That shame won’t fade overnight. If he is truly how he presents himself then I don’t feel like I deserve to be his friend based on what I put him through. He expected me to hunt him down some day, looking him up on the internet… saying “guess what, I’m in town” or something. He got something pretty close to that… with key differences, but still… I could understand his fears. But I’m not how he perceived me, I am no more my past than he is his. Should I deliberately keep away from him regardless? I suppose it doesn’t matter too much, I leave town in July…

I suppose the creepiest thing is aside from the fundamentalist stuff, we had had a remarkable amount in common back then. Before he was my boyfriend… he was my “crazy twin”. We both had swords on our wall… we finished each other’s sentences… and he did a lot of things I thought were really awesome like have a rubber chicken on a noose in the corner of his room so he could be “choking the chicken” constantly. (None of you will probably get why that’s awesome, but I thought it was damn cool at the time). Though the two of us have both changed remarkably… he still has a lot in common with me. He’s registered green party and very into liberal and environmental causes… he’s a vegetarian (for those of you who didn’t know… I tried for a while, and I still don’t eat much in the way of actual meat). Oh yeah… he’s not a fundamentalist, he’s an atheist… although a happy one. I haven’t gone that far, but my parents do think I’m going to hell for believing in evolution. God is a hypothesis I cannot test, and if he does exist I doubt he wants to be tested… My ethics are pretty strong; my reasons for retaining them are much fuzzier. In any case… it seemed we still had a lot in common… we both evolved to a great extent, a lot of that evolution was congruous.

So I’d say it’s like having an old friend back… even an old twin… despite years of fluctuations and changes in our lives. But this was a part of my life I expected to have closed forever…. I wanted resolution, I never thought he’d be in my life… and possibly hanging out with my friends or mine with his in the near future. But here comes a ghost from my past with a new face, yet a familiar one in that we still have a lot in common… I’m not sure how quite to react…. It confuses me… greatly. A few months ago I was content to just know he was doing well, now that I’ve met up with him… I DO want to be his friend…. It’s just not logical.

Last night all of this was rolling over in my head and Roberto accused me of “obsessing”… He was acting well… jealous. He kept dragging it out of me and making me talk about it. Despite my affirmation that this particular ghost from my past was not going to be a source of attraction or competition (Based on the past Ryan is placed pretty high on the list of people to never have sex with… if this is a”last person on earth”scenario he’d win out over genetic family members, women and maybe Colin…)

Even so I was still trying to sift through what had happened and how to precede hours after the incident... Maybe Roberto is right… I’m thinking about this too much.

I am who I am, complications and all. What happens, happens…

poster child of the human condition

I've been thinking a lot about how intertwined my interactions with people have gotten... I've tended to be pretty pessimistic about human nature of late... and to some extent I'd been pessimistic about human nature my whole life. I figured that people were neither good nor evil... just neutral, but they do a lot of nasty things to each other: in fact if there were demons I'd say some humans should be at the top of the list. The fact that they do the bulk of their negative works unintentionally... that its the lies we tell ourselves that are the most pernicious... to me that made it worse and not better. Ignorance was just another point against us...

And so I find myself looking for the exceptions to the rules in my interactions with people... My friends are all very unique people who are difficult to get together for parties: either they would have nothing to talk about or Colin would tell another joke that makes everyone leave...The people I collect have nothing in common except for the fact that they have nothing in common, and they probably don't think the war is great or that we should invest in aerosol powered hummers. My closest friends were all people who I decided quite early were inexplicably unique: usually within a few minutes of meeting them for the first time I decide they are worth a bullet... a definite exception to the rule.

I've come to the conclusion their aren't any exceptions. We are all hurtful... we are all fuck-ups. Some are worse than others... or perhaps some disguise it better than others. And everyone else is looking around the world too, just a little leery... just as casual to trust. We just define trust a little differently, set the boundaries just a few paces off.

I've decided people aren't worth hating... Nothing is worth a grudge anymore. I can see the best in them yet not be disappointed by my interactions either... somehow. I'm not sure how this works, but I know that's how I feel.

There's been a couple of catalysts for that recently... one is my friend Tali... who tends to complicate as well as hold together a subsection of friends to which I hold another part... interconnected in a web of friends and enemies that runs something like an obstacle course.... people hate, are in love with and are actively avoiding eachother... sometimes a couple of these things at the same time. Some of the obstacles are pretty damn retarded... words taken to far, misunderstandings... I can't take down a lot of them, but I did decide to take down my own.

I forgave Mark sometime last week... I finally told him that in so many words... I have a lot more understanding for him than I used to... There's still a lot I don't understand... But I think if I didn't let him know that I have no regrets and no remaining bitterness... he'd beat himself up a lot longer than I would in the long run.
Something wise my friend Jesse said recently:

"most things meet in the middle anyways...
blame, fault, guilt, innocence are all relatives"

So yes... there's more example around these lines... but I'll save that for another day.

The Trade

It's been a while since I wrote anything poem-like. I'm sure this sucks... but it feels good to write it.

The Trade

Until then I was immortal

But you called me from the sky

It was worth it just to touch you

It was worth the fall to die

And when you caught me close beside you

I thought your breath could hold my wings

but the air that fills your human lungs

alters all to which it clings

However all my words are solid

all my life and love will stay

beneath your sky of sweet entrapment

in your lazy clutch of grace

I do not wake to see the morning

I do not sleep to walk my dreams

I merely move to keep on moving

( I know you can't see through these things).

Fall asleep with your ear towards me

and then I have so much to say

If you'd just close your eyes in darkness

I'll leave my star to guide your way

I give the last of of my faith to you

if vested eyes are clear enough

so the hellish path I wander down

could be the same to lead you up

May the wounds you gave me heal you

May the ghosts within you flee

May your heart be filled with trust and love

for a greater soul than me

I'm not sure if it's within myself

to someday find release

but may you find your resurrection

to you all passion, strength and peace.