I have just been at my PhD program's retreat in Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod.
I feel like I have been beaten with cricket bats and stuffed in a barrel of rum. Good times, good times.
Highlights reel:
Biologists on the whole = less bad dancers than you might imagine.
Biologists on the whole = not the best singers. Except for (sometimes yours truly and) my classmate El Diablo and a guy we shall call Steve Perry. Last night there was karaoke, which was hours and hours and hours and hours of, for lack of a better word, entertainment. My ex and I sang "Tainted Love", which was not supposed to be a joke (I just like that song), but which everyone found very amusing. Steve Perry rocked some Coldplay: "The Scientist". Get it? Ha ha ha. El Diablo and I did a lovely duet of "Summer Loving". Annoying second-year girls sang many karoake standards in ear-splitting disharmony. Admin Goddess and gay German guy sang "Maneater". Admin Goddess, "But does she swallow?" Our program head sang "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" in the style of William Shatner. I found out later he was off his head after playing two hours of Flip-Cup with the fifth-years. It was the cutest thing I have ever seen.
Last year Steve Perry and I carried the annual comical musical show, and the year before that it was me and El Diablo. None of us did the musical this year so there weren't a lot of songs, but was still pretty funny. They always do a spirited, dorky pun-filled revue how wacky grad school is, etc., in song and dance. This year they parodied James Watson singing "I Like Big Genes" as the Wicked Witch of the West and Larry Sanders was the Wizard of Oz. Last year we did a spoof of reality shows and the year before that it was Grease.
Biologists on the whole = not the most attractive people in the world. The upside of this is that the entire curve is shifted such that the decent-looking ones seem way hotter. (However: there are many countires in the world where I am not a bit chubbier than normal, but none of those countries is in Asia. Lots of Asian women in science, in tiny tops and no bras.) We are all - by definition - huge nerds, so there is a level of nerd-comfort and lack of self-consciousness that is refreshing, especially if one has ever gone out in a city where everyone is glammed up to look like reality-show cookie cutter pod people.
No scandals that I know of, besides one woman licking my classmate's hairy nipple (caught on film - next year in the slide show!), but that doesn't really count. No one went in the ocean in their underwear (last year) or went in the pool (three years ago) or set fire to anything (two years ago) or spooned eight in a bed (three years ago) or got caught making out in the bathroom (every year) or compared penis sizes in the kitchen (this being P-town, after all) . . . to the best of my knowledge. I was absolutley hammered Friday night but it seems I didn't do anything too dreadful. Apparently I lectured my classmate, Pantene-Two-In-One (PTIO), about Camus and metaphysics for twenty minutes and could not be stopped. That's pretty embarassing, but at least I was fully dressed. Then there was some sort of passing of a poker chip between me and the nipple-licking woman that had the lads in thrall. Later this woman proved that she could put a piece of popcorn up her nose with her prehensile tongue - this was significantly less sexy. This one guy, Big E, brought porn ,which was really inapproporiate, but Admin Goddess threw it in the sea.
It's pretty juvenile, I guess. But we don't get out much.
There were also some talks. I put up a poster that I'd made at the last minute, forgot to put my name on, and then lost one of the panels. It didn't really matter, though, as I was more concerned with not passing out at the poster session than I was with the quality of my poster. Fortunately, I managed not to pass out and even to talk some science.
Our keynote speaker was J. Craig Venter, who I was prepared not to like, but he gave a fascinating talk and seemed like pretty cool guy. Sadly, he did not stay for dinner, as I was supposed to be at his table. They're doing this sampling of ocean water and finding tons of genes that are completely unlike anything we've seen before, and the diversity between sampling sites only 200 miles apart is shocking. They are also trying to make synthetic cells which I may chat about more later. He looks much better with a beard.
My classmates and I felt a bit like dinosaurs at this retreat. We have got the Scarlet Letter on our student IDs this year: G4+. We were remembering how old and scary the G4s seemed when we were little G1s, and how we didn't want to talk to them at the retreat. I woke up this morning thinking about my birthday - 24? 23? 26? Nope: 27.
Where the fuck did the last five years go? What the fuck have I been doing all this time?
I feel like I have been beaten with cricket bats and stuffed in a barrel of rum. Good times, good times.
Highlights reel:
Biologists on the whole = less bad dancers than you might imagine.
Biologists on the whole = not the best singers. Except for (sometimes yours truly and) my classmate El Diablo and a guy we shall call Steve Perry. Last night there was karaoke, which was hours and hours and hours and hours of, for lack of a better word, entertainment. My ex and I sang "Tainted Love", which was not supposed to be a joke (I just like that song), but which everyone found very amusing. Steve Perry rocked some Coldplay: "The Scientist". Get it? Ha ha ha. El Diablo and I did a lovely duet of "Summer Loving". Annoying second-year girls sang many karoake standards in ear-splitting disharmony. Admin Goddess and gay German guy sang "Maneater". Admin Goddess, "But does she swallow?" Our program head sang "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" in the style of William Shatner. I found out later he was off his head after playing two hours of Flip-Cup with the fifth-years. It was the cutest thing I have ever seen.
Last year Steve Perry and I carried the annual comical musical show, and the year before that it was me and El Diablo. None of us did the musical this year so there weren't a lot of songs, but was still pretty funny. They always do a spirited, dorky pun-filled revue how wacky grad school is, etc., in song and dance. This year they parodied James Watson singing "I Like Big Genes" as the Wicked Witch of the West and Larry Sanders was the Wizard of Oz. Last year we did a spoof of reality shows and the year before that it was Grease.
Biologists on the whole = not the most attractive people in the world. The upside of this is that the entire curve is shifted such that the decent-looking ones seem way hotter. (However: there are many countires in the world where I am not a bit chubbier than normal, but none of those countries is in Asia. Lots of Asian women in science, in tiny tops and no bras.) We are all - by definition - huge nerds, so there is a level of nerd-comfort and lack of self-consciousness that is refreshing, especially if one has ever gone out in a city where everyone is glammed up to look like reality-show cookie cutter pod people.
No scandals that I know of, besides one woman licking my classmate's hairy nipple (caught on film - next year in the slide show!), but that doesn't really count. No one went in the ocean in their underwear (last year) or went in the pool (three years ago) or set fire to anything (two years ago) or spooned eight in a bed (three years ago) or got caught making out in the bathroom (every year) or compared penis sizes in the kitchen (this being P-town, after all) . . . to the best of my knowledge. I was absolutley hammered Friday night but it seems I didn't do anything too dreadful. Apparently I lectured my classmate, Pantene-Two-In-One (PTIO), about Camus and metaphysics for twenty minutes and could not be stopped. That's pretty embarassing, but at least I was fully dressed. Then there was some sort of passing of a poker chip between me and the nipple-licking woman that had the lads in thrall. Later this woman proved that she could put a piece of popcorn up her nose with her prehensile tongue - this was significantly less sexy. This one guy, Big E, brought porn ,which was really inapproporiate, but Admin Goddess threw it in the sea.
It's pretty juvenile, I guess. But we don't get out much.
There were also some talks. I put up a poster that I'd made at the last minute, forgot to put my name on, and then lost one of the panels. It didn't really matter, though, as I was more concerned with not passing out at the poster session than I was with the quality of my poster. Fortunately, I managed not to pass out and even to talk some science.
Our keynote speaker was J. Craig Venter, who I was prepared not to like, but he gave a fascinating talk and seemed like pretty cool guy. Sadly, he did not stay for dinner, as I was supposed to be at his table. They're doing this sampling of ocean water and finding tons of genes that are completely unlike anything we've seen before, and the diversity between sampling sites only 200 miles apart is shocking. They are also trying to make synthetic cells which I may chat about more later. He looks much better with a beard.
My classmates and I felt a bit like dinosaurs at this retreat. We have got the Scarlet Letter on our student IDs this year: G4+. We were remembering how old and scary the G4s seemed when we were little G1s, and how we didn't want to talk to them at the retreat. I woke up this morning thinking about my birthday - 24? 23? 26? Nope: 27.
Where the fuck did the last five years go? What the fuck have I been doing all this time?
posted by Joolya at
12:52 PM
1 Comments:
I've also found that some people who don't seem very attractive at all on first glance tend to look better as you get to know them. That also, like all things, seems to work in reverse...
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home