So I just had a strange bizarre dream. When I woke up, I felt miserable. That may or may not have had anything to do with the dream.

I was back in New York, apparently riding the G train. The train went express for a few stops, headed for what seemed to me like the 63rd Street tunnel, and then we came to a sudden halt near a station whose name seemed peculiar. Despite that, I can't remember what it was. It sounded like a town in the Old West, or had connotations of such--maybe a cross between "Stealer's Wheel" and "Spuyten Duyvil." Anyway, we came to a stop near there. Some people wondered out loud what station this was, and I said, "Oh, this is the old Court House Square." We got out of the train--all ten of us, it looked like; and we emerged into a large cavern that, surprisingly enough, had adequate lighting, almost at mood-lighting levels.

We found ourselves sharing the cave with a couple of specimens of giant cockroach. I'm talking monster-size proportions or larger, with tong-like mandibular extensions à la Bart Simpson's giant mechanical ants that could chop a human body in half like a cigar cutter. And they looked hungry.

Also looking hungry were a couple of rather largish guys. A Domino's Pizza deliveryman showed up, asking if anyone had ordered a large cheese pizza. We look around, shrugging our shoulders. I thought maybe we should get the pizza anyway and feed it to the cockroaches, but no one was making a move. Since no one was claiming the pizza, the two hungrymen deliberated between themselves whether or not to take it. "How much?" one of them asked. "Five bucks," said the pizza guy. So they bought the pizza, and off they went. A friend of mine said to me, "Suckers. They got ripped off. Paul got a much better deal." I wasn't listening, though. I was too busy thinking about getting the hell out of there. Oh well, at least maybe the two guys with the pizza would keep the cockroaches busy--and perhaps serve as a meal if they indeed were as hungry as they looked.

Then I woke up.

posted by the n00v at 8:17 AM (email me a comment)

The next three days or so is University of Pittsburgh's "Arrival Survival." Now, I'll get to experience Oakland as a neighborhood teeming with....college students.

I was once a college student. I probably still look like one. I still dress the same as always. I don't think there's much I could do to change my appearance without buying a whole new wardrobe--which I intend to do, slowly, once my finances have settled into steady-state.

Confusion reigns, though. I go to work just like any other income-earning laborer. My ID clearly says "STAFF." But as far as the work's concerned, I'm a student. When you have a categorization system that's limited, the "student" label fits best. In the memo to UPMC HR requesting an ID card, I am described as a student.

The lady at the bank asked me if I was a student at CMU or Pitt. I said I was staff at Pitt. She said that I looked too young to be staff. I said that I skipped a year of high school and I just graduated from college.

After my stint here is over, I'll go back to being a student.

At work, I feel just about as helpless as the other grad students here. I just learned today that I'm not allowed to operate the scanner by myself. Fine, I guess. It's an expensive piece of equipment and you don't want just anyone operating it. But it's a serious impediment to the work that goes on. The research administrator here used to offer an operating course, but in the wake of losing a handful of MR technologists and some other personnel, apparently we are "understaffed" and "priorities have shifted."

When Philip was here, he told me how slow it was getting anything done to begin with because it was difficult to get good blocks of scanner time. You'd make some changes to your sequence in the comfort of your desk space and you could simulate the results, but to get any useful feedback you needed to run it on the scanner. And hell if I know how the damn place is run, but scanner time is a precious commodity. There are always other studies being conducted that seem to fill up time slots. During the short time Philip and I worked together, we'd maybe get a half-hour here, fifteen minutes there. Never got much of anything done, other than to see "Yeah, it's hard to get a good image using spiral on the 3T because of the inhomogeneities and the off-resonance" and "Still haven't gotten extended dynamic range to work with the sequence" and "Hey! The weave artifact's gone! No, wait, there it is."

Now, with Philip gone, I was all set to immerse myself in the work. I was looking forward to the new responsibilities. And then I'm told that I can't use the scanner on my own? I bloody hell well used the scanner on my own last year in New York. Dr. Prince was amazingly helpful when my senior project group stuck around late nights to do work, and would even entrust us to lock up when he had to leave early. I know what I need to do with the scanner for the spiral sequence. Dr. Wang would always ask Philip, "So, can Anthony run the sequence on his own?" Yes, I can. I've read the fsckin' EPIC programming manual, I'm familiar with the behind-the-scenes hardware and the godawful code that drives it.

But "there's no way to verify what I know."

I felt I was being treated rather prick-ish. But, to feel that way would mean that I'm prick-ish to begin with. I'll get to that in a second.

The advice given to me was that I should just "keep working with Dr. Wang" until things settle, the course gets offered and I get to formally learn what I informally know.

"Excuse me, Professor Brainiac, but I worked in a nuclear power plant for ten years, and, uh, I think I know how a proton accelerator works."

[maintainers needed for snpp.com. ooh....]

So everything feels more like I'm just another student. But I get paid. I am not taking any classes. I pay none of that ridiculous tuition that Pitt charges. $12k/semester for out-of-state residents and international students. Christ.

I deserve better. I'm special, dammit. I've been special all my life. Went to a magnet elementary school for gifted students (it was one of the few bright spots of the Chicago Public Schools system at the time, and I'm sure still is). Was good enough to skip freshman year of high school and go straight to the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a three-year residential high school that caters to the best and brightest of Illinois. We've got Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman as our Resident Scholar, for cryin' out loud. Went to Cooper, one of the best engineering schools on the eastern seaboard where every student gets a full-tuition scholarship. I deserve better.

However humbling it might be to work in the presence of medical doctors and Ph.D.'s (dammit, the title "doctor" should be reserved for MDs only--when I get my Ph.D. I'm not going to make anyone call me "Doctor"), I'm still smart and special. I am not one of the commonfolk. I don't deserve this.

This is why I wasn't going to deny being prick-ish in attitude. I smiled throughout and thanked the research administrator for her helpful information. Call me passive-aggressive, I guess, but there isn't much else you can do, especially when you understand the other person's point of view, no matter how you perceive their delivery.

Whatever. I'm still getting paid, scanner access or no scanner access. And I'll keep my holier-than-thou attitude for right now, thanks.

posted by the n00v at 11:15 PM (email me a comment)

The following was said by a friend of mine, but it might as well have come out of my own mouth:

...I'd say that, by and large, pretty much everything in my life is going according to plan, save for this delay in grad school, but nothing bad about that...
...and that I've worked to get the things I've wanted over the last few years and I'm rather content with where I am right now. The one thing that's missing is, of course, the obvious. So I told myself I should do something to remedy my female-partner-deprived life over these next few months when I have some free time...
...but then I realized this isn't a set of hot deals on computer components or a diploma...I can't "work" on this.
And hell if I know where to even look in my current vicinity. Sadly I tell myself that I must wait, I cannot force anything out of nothing.

It just got me thinking. I told him that in some way, it's a self-defeating attitude to have. You can wait and wait and wait; fate might work out your way, but it might not. Certainly if you were hoping to find someone where meeting them might come more naturally, such as during our four years of college, that had a slim chance of coming true; Cooper doesn't exactly boast a wide and varied female population. But there was the possibility of the future. You were young enough to feel that you had your whole life ahead of you.

Now, though, when you make your way out into the world, the opportunities to meet people with little effort exerted become slimmer and slimmer. It's up to you to create the opportunities. If you don't do something about it, you might find yourself suddenly transported back to an eighth grade school dance, where you found yourself without a dancing partner as everyone started pairing off around you.

But it's not time to worry just yet. There's a trend towards getting married later in life, so there's still hope--although I have a feeling that that doesn't hold true back in the Midwest. And when you go off to grad school, there's the chance that someone might just be impressed enough by your age and status as a grad student that she might say yes when you ask her out. From that point, though, it's up to you to make something of it.

Me, I don't worry, or at least I don't worry yet.

I'll tell you what I do think about, though. There's a wall that I've built up--I can blame it on living in New York, but if you like, I'll attribute it to other things--such that I've forgotten about love and its manifestations. Every so often, though, I'll be reminded of something good about it; I'll think of a moment that sums up the rewards of having someone that you care deeply about.

The most vivid image I have in my mind is of a time that I visited an old high school friend of mine, perhaps nine months ago. She was kind enough to host me in her dorm room (if I'm not mistaken, I'm still on her list-of-people-it's-OK-to-give-keys-to), and though she was extremely busy with work and stayed up nights to finish it, she did come back to her room early in the morning to rest for a few hours.

I woke up one morning to find her in bed, asleep. The sun had risen and was gradually brightening up the small room, casting its golden rays over her as she slept. Bathed in that light, she was the apotheosis of an image of peace. I could not help but gaze upon her, feeling the need to watch over her, protect her. Alas, she was not mine to protect.

It's the little things like that that remind me of what it was like to be intimately close with someone. And I miss that feeling.

posted by the n00v at 1:03 AM (email me a comment)