You Can’t Be Mad About the Past

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

To Regret, Or Not To Regret? That Is the Question.

I’m sorry to make an immediate Harry Potter reference, but I feel it’s necessary.  In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore tells Harry the following:

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Dumbledore is very wise. 

Occasionally I have moments of profound introspection about my life.  This in and of itself is not profound or unusual - the more I talk to my friends, the more I realize we all seem to do this from time to time.  I always smile to myself after I’ve had one of these moments, because the cliche really is true: hindsight is 20/20.  There are loads of things I’ve done or choices I’ve made that if I had known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have done things the same way.  Again, not really a profound conclusion to reach. 

But do I regret anything?

My answer to that question historically has been ‘no.’  I think what we do with our lives ,and the experiences we have as the result of our decisions, make us who we are.  I would not be me if I hadn’t made mistakes and learned from them, or not learned from them.  And I think the same is true for everyone. 

So imagine my surprise over this past weekend when I found myself admitting that I regret something.  I will not bore you with the details of the thought process that led to this particular revelation – suffice it to say, I was thinking about college and courses and why I took what I took.  And it hit me: I went to an amazing college, and it took me until my final year or so there to truly take advantage of the opportunities that afforded me. 

So here it is: I truly regret not having pushed myself harder to try some of everything while I was at William and Mary.

I could have learned multiple languages – when I was there they offered about ten.  Instead, I took one semester of Russian and then wussed out and switched to Spanish so I could be done with my foreign language requirement.  I am kicking myself for that now.  I could have taken physics and therefore been eligible to apply to graduate programs in astrophysics, but instead I chose to only take biology and chemistry because that was the bare minimum required for my major.  Williamsburg is in a fantastic spot for really digging into (haha – Whitney, do you appreciate my play on words?) America’s past, but I avoided all courses that involved any type of work outside the classroom.  And if I hadn’t been so busy messing around, I would have switched majors much earlier and I would have been able to go on a major Alvin cruise with my eventual advisor – who took her entire lab with her on that cruise and made sure every student got to go down in Alvin to the hydrothermal vent sites at least once.  I missed that by only a year. 

So, while I know I did what I did for a reason, and that dwelling on the past is never good, I have to say I regret the way I handled my undergraduate experience.  I can never get it back, and that makes me sad. 

If you want to read Whitney’s take on regret, check out her blog here.

Patronus Quest

It’s Friday! Collective blogging day!

In case you don’t remember, this is an experiment my good friend Whitney and I are doing. Each week we come up with a topic to blog about, and then we write separate blogs on the topic. It’s a test to see how different our takes on certain things really are, and if we’d be successful writing a novel in this way for NaNoWriMo 2009.

This week’s topic: What Type of Patronus Would You Have?

OK. I realize I may have just lost a bunch of people. What exactly is this patronus thing you speak of, you might be wondering. To that I say this: you really need to read the Harry Potter series. It’s wonderful, and you are missing out by not reading it. But this post is not about the merits of Harry Potter, and I don’t want to digress too much.

Patronus: the result of the charm Expecto Patronum, a conjured protector that takes on the silvery, ethereal, semi-transparent form of an animal. The animal always has special significance to the conjurer (examples: Harry’s Patronus is a stag, which is the same as his deceased father’s; Dumbledore’s Patronus is a phoenix, which is symbolic of his pet phoenix, Fawkes.) These are especially useful for getting rid of dementors.

Did I lose you? Damn.

Dementors: soul-sucking bad guys in the wizarding world. They are initially presented as the guardians of the wizarding prison Azkaban, but as the books progress they join the evil Lord Voldemort and attack witches and wizards who are against their cause.  Dementors feed on happiness and good feelings, forcing their victims to relive their worst memories.  A Patronus cannot feel the devastating effects of a dementor and is therefore the ideal shield against a dementor attack.

The form your Patronus takes is incredibly symbolic. It is a direct reflection of y0u, your life, and your feelings – in some ways your Patronus is the very essence of who you are. It can reflect your true love (as in the case of Snape), your family (like Harry), and/or many other aspects of your personality. As such, a whole bunch of quizzes exist to try to help you determine what your Patronus would look like if you were a witch or a wizard.

When Whitney and I decided to write about this topic, I took a bunch of those quizzes. I was left completely dissatisfied. They told me I’d have things like a wolf, or a bear, or a deer, or an otter. I didn’t agree with any of them. Then I noticed that some of the quizzes are actually links to websites that talk about animal spirits and other new age, spiritual items.

I’m not really so much with the animal spirits and totems, if I’m being honest. I have trouble with the concept of animal energy and vortex power and crystal healing. Not for me.  This created a problem for me, because I still had not come up with anything I felt comfortable embracing as my Patronus.

Then, on a whim, I looked up what these websites have to say about flamingos. I have thought flamingos were the greatest thing since sliced bread my entire life. My parents tell me it probably has something to do with the teething ring I had as a baby – it was in the shape of a bird with one stubby little foot, and it was pink.  I don’t know if there’s anything to that, but I can tell you that flamingos have always been my favorite thing to see at the zoo.  And I took my fascination seriously – I posed for pictures in front of the flamingo exhibit on one leg proudly anytime I could.  Everyone in my life has at some point given me a gift that involves flamingos.  And the icing on the flamingo cake: my one tatoo is of a flamingo, standing on one leg in a small pool of water.  It was with high hopes that I read the description of what a flamingo animal spirit/totem means.  It would make so much sense if my Patronus were a flamingo.

Flamingo Spirit: is colorful, wild, and gives light.  The word itself is from the Latin word flame.  Flamingos have the ability to change colors and have a shape-shifter association. The Egyptians believed these creatures to be the living embodiment of their Sun God, Ra.  If you have a flamingo spirit, you are likely to mate and breed for life (like a flamingo), and you are likely to be dedicated to your choices and reach further than most are willing to go in order to achieve your goals.

Now, I’m not sure I fit ALL of that.  But I think I fit a good deal!  And given that a Patronus is supposed to reflect the inner you and/or the superficial animal you tend to gravitate towards, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable conclusion to reach - that if I were to wave my wand and utter “Expecto Patronum!” (with the proper concentration and focus on a happy and powerful memory, of course) from the tip of my wand would burst a beautiful, silvery flamingo, which would protect me while standing serenely on one leg.

If you want to read about Whitney’s quest to discover her Patronus, you can read about it here!

I Feel Pluto’s Pain

Remember how I recently said it is very hard to embarrass me? I think I said something about having a thick skin, the result of being dubbed a geek for most of my life. Well, last night my boyfriend proved that it is most definitely possible to embarrass me – and oh boy did he do it in style!

For the last month and a half, I have been looking forward to attending a lecture called “Witness to Demotion: The Rise and Fall of Planet Pluto,” to be given by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think Dr. Tyson is unbelievably cool – he takes unbelievably complicated astrophysical subjects and makes regular people understand them, and he gets you to laugh while he’s doing it. For one of my Christmas gifts, my mom pre-ordered his new book (The Pluto Files) for me because she knew how badly I wanted to read it. For the record, I think Pluto is awesome, regardless of its planetary status. The lecture, highlighting the book, was announced shortly after Christmas, and I jumped all over it – bought tickets to attend as soon as I could, and I told Nicole about it, too (a fellow Plutophile and Dr. Tyson fan). We have been plotting with each other about how awesome the lecture would be for weeks, and we sat and read the book together as soon as it was released.

A bit of background: Alex does not always see eye to eye with me and Nicole when it comes to the subject of Pluto.

So yesterday arrived. Nicole and I were prepared. Each of us had our books in hand when we arrived at the American Museum of Natural History for the lecture. The lecture was great. At the end Dr. Tyson announced he’d be signing books in the lobby for anyone that was interested. Everyonewas interested, which is a testament to how engaging this guy really is. And so we waited in the line of extreme longness to get our copies of The Pluto Files signed.

It was hot. It was crowded. Alex was a good sport and waited with us. As we got closer to the front of the line, I started to chicken out. This was one of my science idols. I wasn’t sure I could handle interacting with him. So I turned to Alex, handed him my book, and said he might need to hand Dr. Tyson the book for me. He found this bizarre, but took the book. Little did I know, the wheels in his head were whirling around at a dangerous pace.

And so it was that after about a 40 minute wait I arrived at the front of the line with my dear boyfriend and my book to have Dr. Tyson sign the front page. The following is an approximation of the way that interaction went:

Alex: hands book to Dr. Tyson, “That’s for Christina.”

Dr. Tyson: “And where is Christina?”

Me: “That’s me.”

Alex: “Yeah, you’ve got a disbeliever here.”

Dr. Tyson: “A disbeliever?” Looks at me with amusement. “What do you mean?”

Alex: “She’s not sure she believes this whole Pluto thing.”

Me: Speechless with embarrassment, can only open and close my mouth silently. I can feel my body start to overheat.

Dr. Tyson: Looks at me as if I have 14 heads sprouting from my left elbow. “I see… well let me check the page… Ok… and how do you spell Christina?”

Me: Barely able to spell my own name, wanting to crawl away and hide from the shame of Dr. Tyson thinking I am questioning his entire book. I am now sweating profusely, and a little bit wishing I had not asked Alex to hand Dr. Tyson my book.

Alex: “C-h-r-i-s-t-i-n-a”

Dr. Tyson: Signs the book, hands it back, smiling the whole time.

That’s it. Well, it’s not it. Because here is what he wrote:

“To Christina, We can surely agree on page 159. Neil deGrasse Tyson”

Want to know what’s on page 159? A comic from a newspaper in Montreal that contains a drawing of Pluto. The headline reads: “News Item: Now Pluto Is NOT a Planet” and Pluto itself is saying “Like I’m supposed to give a s**t?”

Mortified! Horrified! I’m not sure I can ever go to AMNH again for fear of Dr. Tyson seeing me and remembering I am the girl who thinks he’s full of crap! Alex will probably tell you he was trying to ensure Dr. Tyson interacted with me, and the best way he could think of to have that happen was to create conflict. He and I argue about Pluto’s status all the time – he is not as sentimental towards the now-dwarf as I am. I don’t think he anticipated my level of star-struck muteness when faced with the prospect of actually speaking to Dr. Tyson.

But at least my book got signed…

A Problem of Philosophy

I recently had a conversation about the merits of the statement: “You shouldn’t feel that way.”

I am of the opinion that this statement is a bit offensive.
Perhaps this is something you hear in everyday conversation and ought not to be viewed as offensive. Perhaps. Or maybe how a person feels is a completely subjective experience and ought not ever be invalidated by a statement like “you shouldn’t feel that way.”
By way of definition…

• Feelings are a conscious subjective experience of emotion. As such, feelings almost never give the feeler a perception of the physical world that would be considered a universal perception or reaction.
• Perception: the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. Perception is viewed as a result of the interplay between past experience, your culture, and your own interpretation of what you perceive.

Even the definitions of these words are open to interpretation, and will be judged based on each reader’s own prejudices, pre-conceived notions, needs, and past experiences. And just because the person who wrote the definitions of these concepts may have intended one thing of them, it’s very possible someone reading them will take them in a way not originally intended. I suspect this is the case with a lot of Shakespeare’s works, by the way.
Examples: No one is quite sure if we all experience the color red in the same way. It’s rare to find two people who experience classical music pieces in the same way. Culinary creations suffer from the same problem. You could make an argument that everything in life is subjective, there is no right and wrong, or black and white – only the explanation by each individual for how they perceive the world around them.
Which is the whole point. How can anyone attempt to understand the true nature of the world we live in or the universe as a whole if statements like “you shouldn’t feel that way” are deemed acceptable? That different people feel different ways and interpret things differently is what makes life interesting and difficult to unravel. If someone feels a certain way, that’s how they feel. One individual’s disagreement with that feeling is valid, but should not invalidate the original feeling. Everyone is entitled to feel what they feel and to not be told something is wrong with them for feeling it.
This quote probably says it better than me:
“People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole-shaped.” ~ Unknown

Starbucks Value Menu

I saw this article on AOL.com and found it intriguing.

Starbucks value menu?! I realize the article is really more cautionary than check-this-out, but I’ve got to say my curiosity is piqued…

Tag… You’re It! 25 Things About Me

I have been tagged a bunch of times for this Facebook thing now, so I figured I should just suck it up…

Here are the rules: you write a note with 25 random things, facts, ,habits, etc. about yourself. Then choose your closest friends to be tagged, including the person who tagged you.

25 Things About ME!

1. I am incredibly afraid of birds. Ironically, my only tattoo is OF a bird.
2. I am a perfectionist, and as such, my own harshest critic.
3. I have written one complete novel (chick lit) and one half-complete novel (science fiction).
4. I own a 5-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and spend a lot of time cursing the weather for interfering with my telescope usage.
5. I am learning to knit.
6. There are *some* people who say I am a control freak. They are probably right.
7. I often question the decisions I have made about my career.
8. I won’t buy or wear underwear unless it is from Victoria’s Secret.
9. I feel really bad for Brain. That darn Pinky needs to stop preventing him from taking over the world.
10. I think poo is hilarious.
11. I make lists for everything.
12. I’m a compulsive book-buyer. I have 15 books on my nightstand that I have not read yet, but I will continue to buy more.
13. My family and a select handful of friends mean more to me that anything.
14. I can watch season 3 of Alias over and over again and not get bored.
15. I make awesome cupcakes.
16. It takes me a very long time to trust people.
17. BonJovi rules.
18. Many people are either “scared” of me or think I am a bitch until they get to know me.
19. I am addicted to Cafe Mistos at Starbucks.
20. It pisses me off when I hear a person argue that life can’t possibly exist elsewhere in the universe.
21. I do not understand a damn thing about art.
22. I think it’s perfectly within reason to pay $100 or more for dinner if the food is high-quality.
23. I would travel into space if given the opportunity.
24. The only TV I watch regularly is the Food Network and the show The Universe on The History Channel.
25. One of the best moments in my life was stepping off the plane and onto the ground in Tahiti.

On the Merits of Homemade Tiramisu

Tiramisu

Ingredients
6 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
1 pound mascarpone cheese

1 1/2 cups strong espresso, cooled
2 teaspoons dark rum
24 packaged ladyfingers
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate shavings, for garnish

Directions
In a large bowl, using an electric mixer with whisk attachment, beat egg yolks and sugar until thick and pale, about 5 minutes. Add mascarpone cheese and beat until smooth. Add 1 tablespoon of espresso and mix until thoroughly combined.
In a small shallow dish, add remaining espresso and rum. Dip each ladyfinger into espresso for only 5 seconds. Letting the ladyfingers soak too long will cause them to fall apart. Place the soaked ladyfinger on the bottom of a 13 by 9 inch baking dish, breaking them in half if necessary in order to fit the bottom.
Spread evenly 1/2 of the mascarpone mixture over the ladyfingers. Arrange another layer of soaked ladyfingers and top with remaining mascarpone mixture.
Cover tiramisu with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, up to 8 hours.
Before serving, sprinkle with chocolate shavings.

The above-listed recipe is not one you are likely to hear me say I am craving, ever. On the surface, you would probably look at this seemingly-innocuous, traditional Italian dessert and think: cookies – good, chocolate – good, espresso – good, rum – good… what’s not to crave? I used to agree with you. I used to think tiramisu is the best dessert ever. In fact, there was a time when I would go to Olive Garden with the express purpose of ordering tiramisu.

Then I went to college and met Whitney.

One night Whitney and I thought it might be fun to make tiramisu from scratch. I’m talking make the custard, shave the chocolate , brew the espresso, all from scratch. We bought the marscapone and the chocolate and a few other things we didn’t already have in the kitchen. Please note: we were pretty sure we had eggs already when we made our trip to the grocery store. While at the store, we thought it might also be fun to make pitchers of mudslides while we were assembling our tiramisu. We returned to the apartment to find the eggs were slightly past their expiration date. Undaunted, we forged ahead, whipping up a beautiful-looking batch of tiramisu. Two pitchers of mudslides later, and a third pitcher spilled down the side of the couch, we began to eat our creation. It tasted… OK. In retrospect, it didn’t really taste quite right, and if we hadn’t been intoxicated on the mudslides, we probably would not have eaten as much as we did. Hindsight is always 20/20, right?

After an interesting evening of drunken debauchery… or as much debauchery as Whitney and I would really ever get into… we both went to sleep. And then we spent the next day puking out dark brown-colored nastiness. Yes, we had drunk far more than the legal limit of vodka and kahlua, but both Whitney and I had gotten far more drunk than that in the past with much less next-day woe. So we both swore off all things tiramisu – the flavor, the color, the smell, everything. I have stuck by that vow. I’m not sure if Whitney has done the same, see her blog (link above) to read her memories and impression of The Tiramisu Incident.

Perhaps we should have sucked it up and dropped the extra $2 on fresh eggs.

Reasons to Not Have Birds

Another reason birds are bad:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/15/new.york.plane.crash/index.html

Mercury and Zombies

Zombies just want to eat brains.

Everyone knows this about zombies. However, I could not figure out why zombies and their brain-eating habits were applicable to my hometown of Danbury, CT… until today.

I was perusing one of my high school friends’ Facebook pages and stumbled upon a comment alluding to the possibility of a zombie invasion in Danbury due to mercury poisoning. To be honest, I had no idea what the guy was talking about, and I failed to see a link between zombies, mercury, and Danbury. They just didn’t seem to go together.

Too bad I was wrong.

You see, for many years Danbury was a hat-making haven. The hats coming out of Danbury were so good the King of England banned hat export to Britain from the American colonies. During the Revolution, Danbury was targeted by British troops and burned. The hat trade survived the Revolution, though, and continued to fluorish until sometime in the 1940s when hat-making procedures changed, partially because of legislation, and fashion phased the hat out. Why would something as mundane as hat-making be subject to legislative change? you may be asking.
It was because of mercury.
Mercury was an essential ingredient in the hat-making process. Lifelong hatmakers often died of mercury poisoning as a result, others went mad (ever wonder where the phrase mad hatter really came from??). Mercury has some nasty-bad neurological effects, and the history of hat-making and mercury are discussed in a bit more detail in this article.

Suffice it to say, Danbury has some mercury pollution issues. I was unaware of this up until now. But it’s no wonder people who are less ignorant than myself would debate the likelihood of a zombie invasion on the basis of mercury-addled brains.

To Protect, Or Not To Protect?

You may have noticed an annoying box pops up when you connect to this blog now.

It’s a twitter authentication box.

It’s there because I can’t decide how sketchy it is to leave my twitter updates unprotected.

Originally I had them available to everyone so the feed would show up here without a problem. Then I started having bizarre individuals follow me on twitter, so I decided to protect my updates. Sadly, this means no one can see my updates on here unless they enter their twitter credentials.

Anyone have thoughts on how bad/good it is to protect VS not protect your twitter account?