Things that might be decidedly odd…

Pre-Halloween Saturday

I spent most of the day cleaning up the house (specifically my bathroom) for the Halloween party my roommates and I were throwing. At 6, I met up with Steve and we headed over to Drag Bingo in Durham where we met up with James and Nick. None of us won, but I think we all had a good time.

From there, Steve and I drove back to my place, dropping James off at his dorm (his dad is coming tomorrow at 8am, so he wanted to get to bed). When we got back to my house around 11, the place was totally packed. I have never seen so many people in there before. Not too long after that, the crowd began thinning out, mainly I think because it was so crowded people just had to get out of there. After while, we were back down to a more managable crowd. Overall, it was an interesting night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my roommate Michael so drunk. He’s a pretty sloppy drunk actually. I also cut my hair into a mohawk for the hell of it. People really enjoyed touching it, which was fun too I suppose.

There are a few pictures here of bingo and the party, although others certainly took more.

Evening Out

I spent most of the day struggling through this MATH 221 assignment. I’m making progress, but at a snail’s pace. At this rate, I may have to just give up on it for a while. I need to devote some time to writing the draft of my integrative paper, something I need to complete in order to graduate.

Chris and I met up and got some dinner at Elmo’s in the Carr Mill Mall. In the past I’ve always had good experiences there. However, tonight left something to be desired. After I had eaten a good chunk of my food (the meatloaf), I started feeling nauseous–very nauseos, like I was genuinely going to puke. I swore I had gotten food poisoning and it was going to ruin the whole night. Fortunately, after a while it subsided. In the end, I didn’t finish all my food even. Chris also didn’t eat very much either, although he said he just wasn’t very hungry.

We paid the bill and then went for a walk towards Chapel Hill on Main and Franklin since it was only like around 8pm. Eventually, we got down to the post office and turned around to go back to the Cat’s Cradle. The walk was nice as we got some more time to talk. Upon arrival at the Cradle, there was a big line. I went to the front and asked the bouncer if there was a separate line for people who already had tickets. He told me that having a ticket did not mean you could cut in line and that we would have to go to the back. So, we go to the back of this long-ass line that is moving quite slowly. After a while (maybe like 20 minutes?) the same bouncer starts walking down the line announcing that if you already have a ticket, you don’t need to wait in line and can just go to the front right now. I swear we were the only people who got out of line. WTF? Did he just give me and not other people bogus info or what? Either way, we got inside probably around 9:30.

We danced some and took breaks at various points. He wasn’t much of a dancer, but he said he had a good time still. They played two Michael Jackson songs: “Thriller” and “Billie Jean”. Chris really likes 80s Michael Jackson, so I think that made him happy (: We danced pretty good facing each other during Billie Jean, which was fun. A while after watching the costume contest that ended around midnight, we started on our way out. He has to go to work tomorrow morning and while my ankle was doing ok, I probably didn’t need to be dancing for 5 hours on it or anything. I bought 2 t-shirts on my way out, one for myself and one for Kendra. She’s gonna swap me for this year’s KALX t-shirt.

Overall, it was a good night. Tomorrow promises to be action packed as well, what with Drag Bingo and the party at my place (which I still need to clean for).

On the Job Hunt and Other Stuff

So far this has been an action packed week. I hurt my ankle last weekend, officially announced my intentions to leave graduate school on Tuesday and this weekend is all booked up.

Originally, I was supposed to be meeting Chris (this guy I met at SHAH a couple weeks back) for the symphony tonight, but yesterday we figured out there had been some confusion. See, at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium it’s only $5 for students, but I guess tonight is a special performance at the Carolina Theatre in Durham instead which costs like $26 for students. We both decided that was more than we wanted to spend and that perhaps we should just plan on going another time. However, we did talk about going to the WXYC 80s Dance before and we’re going to do that and dinner beforehand. I’m really looking forward to spending some more time with Chris. Plus, the 80s Dance is usually pretty fun.

Saturday, I’m going to Drag Bingo at the Durham Armory, after which I’ll be attending the party my roommates and I are throwing at our place that night. Hopefully, on Sunday I’ll be able to catch up on my integrative paper, which is this thing I need to write to graduate and the draft is due next Wednesday.

I think I’ve already mentioned how I got a job interview with Microsoft scheduled for Monday morning. They’re a good company to work for, but I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about moving to Seattle. I’d be willing to move, but I’d rather exhaust my local options first. We’ll see how it goes though as I hear the interview process is very intense and selective. Yesterday, I sent a brief email and a copy of my resume to a former student of my advisor who works at a local company NDL, which recently merged with Emergent asking about possible job openings. Well, things seem to have gone over well because the VP of product development called my office phone at 9 this morning asking me for a half-day interview. That’s now scheduled for next Tuesday afternoon.

All in all, I’m very excited about looking for and finding a job, which I think is a good sign that I’m making the right decision to leave grad school.

Updates

First, my decidedlyodd.com email addresses seem to be working again. I noticed this morning that I was once again getting notifications of responses to my comments on LiveJournal.

My second meeting with my advisor yesterday went well. We talked about what I’m going to do for the rest of the semester (the same thing now, except I won’t be taking the lead, but rather following Vivek) and possible job opportunities around here and further away. She also encouraged me to take a one year leave of absence instead of just up and leaving. I got the paperwork from Janet afterwards too, so I’m probably going to take that approach.

Last night, I went over to Jason and Sarah’s for a night of pizza making and Spanish speaking. Originally, we had intended to watch Jamón, Jamón, but we never really got around to it. There was some good pizza though. Beforehand, I ran over to Ross in search of a pizza stone. Jason thought they might be able to use two to cook more pizzas faster. I figured since I wouldn’t mind having one anyways, I’d just pick one up for myself on the way over. I actually found a 38cm/15 inch one at Ross for $9. It’s pretty big though and it doesn’t really fit anywhere in our kitchen well.

Today after class I went swimming for the first time since I’ve hurt my ankle. In general, it went pretty well. Butterfly doesn’t hurt at all and the injury doesn’t seem to affect it. Front crawl hurt a little at fist, but over time the pain went away. It’s still sorta weird though, because I can feel that the joint is looser as I swim (my foot flops around a bit more). The danger with crawl though is doing flip turns. I had to make sure to push off totally straight and when possible tried to avoid using my right foot to push off at all. This made for some fairly bad turns. Backstroke hurts a bit more than front crawl, although the kick is actually similar. It’s still very tolerable though as long as I take it slow. Breakstroke hurt quite a lot and I stopped after doing about 2 strokes of it. So for now that one is off my list. I think it’s because the motion has a certain horizontal component to it (unlike the other kicks). I also made use of a pull buoy some of the time while doing front crawl and backstroke in order to take all stress off my foot. All told, I did 1200m trying to keep things on the less intense side until I see how that workout affected my ankle later today.

In general, my ankle is doing a lot better though. If I focus, I can walk normally without much of a limp at all. However, I have to concentrate and it makes the muscles in my lower leg a bit sorer than usual. Still, it’s definite improvement from the very serious hobbling I was doing on Saturday and Sunday. Similarly, the swelling has gone down quite a lot. Today while swimming, I felt around my ankle to see how the swelling was and it hardly felt swollen at all. The swimming probably helps in general though because it’s done in a horizontal posture.

The Bomb Drops

I just got back from telling my advisor that I’m planning to leave UNC at the end of this semester or whenever I finish my MS. Originally, I thought I was just meeting with her, but a postdoc I’d been planning to work with was also there because the three of us were going to talk about the joint research we’ve been thinking about. That meant I had to cut straight to the chase and spill my guts. I don’t know exactly what I said, but it basically boiled down to “I feel like I’m not enjoying this as much as I should be” and “I don’t have the passion for research that I’d really need to stick this out and enjoy it”. Some words of David X. Cohen’s (of Futurama, Simpsons and apparently Beavis and Butthead fame) on Computer Science graduate school ring true with me here,

Finally, I decided I should go to graduate school before I forgot everything I knew, with the idea that I could try writing later if I wasn’t sure I had made the right choice. After three years of graduate school, I felt I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I should, and that there was no end in sight, so I took a leave of absence…

To that, both her and the postdoc said everybody goes through a phase like this around the point I am in graduate school. I responded by saying I’ve lacked passion in just about any research I’ve done, although the situation has been decidedly worse over the past year. Phases don’t last that long; something else is going on. In the end, a PhD just doesn’t seem like it’s for me.

Overall, I guess it went well. She asked me if I had started looking for a job yet and I told her about how the Microsoft interview for a job or internship next summer should be able to be turned into an interview for a job starting sooner. She also wants to meet with me some more this afternoon to (presumably) discuss things like what I’m going to do for the rest of the semester and possible job opportunities.

I’m just sort of sitting in my office dealing with what has happened. On one hand, I’m relieved. Over the past few weeks this idea of leaving has become more concrete and began to feel more and more inevitable (in a good way). Still, it’s frustrating to make difficult life decisions like this, because I rarely feel 100% certain about them. That said, it’s definitely time to try something different as my current modus operandi just isn’t working. Graduate school hasn’t been as intellectually satisfying as I had hoped. I always feel like I’m never getting anything done, even when I am in fact making progress. The fruits of my labor seem so fake and unimportant. I find the topics I’ve worked on interesting, but not to the extent many of the people around me are completely engulfed by theirs. To me, it feels very much more like a job I have to do rather than an opportunity where I can focus on an obscure personal passion.

Looking back, I first came to graduate school because I wanted to teach. Even at the time, I knew this wasn’t enough to get me through because I was acutely aware that research was the primary purpose of graduate school. Mostly, I had hoped interest in research would grow on me to form the perfect job opportunity of combining teaching and research: becoming an academic. It was not an unreasonable hope though, because at that point I had really no research experience to speak of. While research never really caught on for me like teaching did, I didn’t find that out until I spent a couple years trying it out. Consequently, I don’t regret the decisions I’ve made over the past couple of years that have taken me down this path. I’d do it all over again, frustration and pain included. I got to meet great people. I got to live in Europe. I got to learn lots of interesting things from different perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, I didn’t rack up a bunch of debt doing it–almost everything has been paid for by fellowships and assistantships.

When I was teaching, I felt like I could do that job for the rest of my life and be satisfied. I remember telling Turadg once that I wanted to become a lecturer in Computer Science. His response was that I should really consider becoming an actual professor since the career of a lecturer is often fairly crummy (low pay, little job security, low man on the totem pole, etc.). Looking back, that’s quite possibly the point where I decided to go down the academic path, which of course brought me to consider the PhD.

Research (at least not in Computer Science) has never come close to achieving that same status for me. The reality though is that a research degree (PhD) is required for most high level teaching jobs even ones not involving research. It saddens me to give up on my goal of finding a good teaching job. However, I’m tired of suffering through research I don’t really enjoy for a job that might not even be there when I graduate. Academic jobs are not easy to get and then there’s the whole tenuring process once you’re in. Perhaps I can integrate teaching others into future jobs or teach a night class at community college at some point in the future.

I also talked to my mother about all of this last night. When I first told her I was considering leaving (about two weeks ago), she was fairly taken aback (”You want to do what?!?”). However, after reasoning through it all with her over the phone, she seems to understand why I’m making this decision. More importantly, going over it all with her has solidified my own understanding about it, which is definitely a good thing.

Ankle Status

This afternoon, I had an appointment with the doctor about my ankle. He sorta felt around and rotated my ankle and told me he didn’t even need to do x-rays since otherwise I would have been screaming in pain as he did the exam. Basically, he said to continue taking NSAIDs and elevating it. He said I could go back to exercising on it as soon as the pain is tolerable. I think I may go swimming tomorrow since that joint isn’t heavily used in swimming. Jogging will almost certainly be a tougher battle. Because the whole joint has been loosened somewhat and proprioception affected a bit, it can be susceptable to reinjury. Either way, it’s good to know nothing’s broken and that time should heal things up. Unfortunately, I guess these kinds of injuries heal at a fairly unpredictable rate. Serious ones can be jogged upon in 3 days while ones with minor swelling have sometimes taken weeks before they could be comfortable walked on.

Klan to rally against gay marriage in Texas

I came across this article today about how the KKK in Texas has obtained a permit to hold a demonstration in support of Texas’ upcoming referendum on a gay marriage ammendment. Now, I’m no fan of the Klan (and why did they decide to spell clan with a ‘k’ anyways?), but this whole thing just really draws the parallel between the struggle for equality rights of GLBT folks today and the struggle for equality rights of blacks in the past (although that process is still somewhat ongoing).

Of course, it also raises the question that if the KKK holds said demonstration, will it actually increase support for the ammendment among voters? It seems to me that if anything, attaching such a fringe group to that cause will only make it seem more radical and out of the mainstream. People who are against gay marriage and supportive (or even tolerant) of the clan won’t change their opinions one way or another. The same can be said for those of us for gay marriage and against the Klan.

However, you have to wonder for example if it might, for example, make a few conservative African-American Texas voters think twice about voting yes.

Mount Mitchell

Jason, Sarah, Paul, Henry and I all decided to hike up Mount Mitchell (the highest peak east of the Mississippi) this weekend. We took two cars and got separated along the way. Paul and I ended up at one campground, while Jason, Sarah and Henry ended up at another. However, we didn’t figure this out (because of spotty cell phone reception) until after Paul and I had setup my tent. More importantly, while we waiting around at the campground I hurt my ankle. I was walking around on this wooden block sitting in the campground, when it rolled out from under me. I fell to the ground but not before my ankle bent about 90 degrees to the side. It hurt, although it seemed like I wasn’t too terribly hurt.

Shortly thereafter we broke camp and headed down the mountain to where the other guys were at. Their campground was cheaper (free) and the weather there (at the bottom of the mountain compared to ours at the top) was MUCH better. As the night went on though, I realized my ankle was messed up enough to impair me from hiking the next day. This morning after breaking camp, I drove up to the top of the mountain and took some pictures many of which look something like this,

Here is proof that I hobbled the 100 feet from the parking lot to the top of the mountain,

From there I went to Asheville to grab some lunch before driving back home. Now, I’m home, tired, stinky (from the fire smoke mainly) and injured. I still had a good time, but it definitely would have been better if I hadn’t hurt myself. I can walk, but it’s slow and a little painful. I’m hoping it’s just a sprain because I can still walk and support my weight on it if necessary. It really only hurts when I move the joint. Tomorrow, I’ll probably go to the doctor to make sure everything is ok.

For those who like medical sorts of things, you can compare a picture of my left ankle (the non-injured one) to one of my right ankle (the injured one). Surprisingly, it hurts less now than it has most of yesterday and this morning. I never really got to see how swollen it was until I got home and took my shoe off, although I could definitely feel it swelling up shortly after I fell.

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

State Fair

Tonight, Jason, Sarah, Jeff T, Genette and I went to the NC State Fair in Raleigh. We had a good time eating, walking around, playing games and going on rides. The highlight picture of the evening was this “Say no to drugs sign”:

That’s gotta be the angriest looking cartoon character telling you to say no to drugs. I know I wouldn’t want to run into ‘Lil Pardner in a dark alley.

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

Nicaragua

I finally sent in my $300 deposit for going to Nicaragua around New Years, which means I’m now committed to going. It should be a really great experience. Now though, I’m looking at plane tickets. It’s going to cost $900 if I go from RDU or about $700 from Charlotte. My other option is to fly from LAX while I’m visiting the family for Christmas. That would cost $700 if I go on TACA (via El Salvador) or $620 on Delta (via Atlanta, which is way out of the way). I still need to figure out if it’s worth ponying up the extra cash for TACA. LAX also has the nice advantage of having my parents pick me up and drop me off, which definitely beats having to drive 2.5 hours (plus parking charges) to Charlotte.