Dur to a conversation in class today I decided to see what craigslist offered in the way of interesting people in my area... What do I find but someone with a lactation fixation who doens't want anything sexual? Interesting. Strange, but interesting.

Of course it's not as strange as the guy that knits bondage gear.

When I worked my benefits were pretty standard; although, due to the nature of the work we did get free allergy and asthma care and treatment for employees and family. Also, we got yearly flu shots even if we didn't have much patient contact.

But the husband's company is different. There's the standard package including pension, but then there's also different things. They pay for Triple A each year, and apparently they pay up to $40 a month for gym membership. It's neat. I've never heard of a company in this area doing nice little extra things like that. I really like them.

Since labs haven't started for the semester I had one class today from 9:30 to 10:45 on the 4th floor. Halfway up the stairs I run into classmates coming down the stairs. They tell me there was a big sign on the door saying no class today.

Dammit.

I could have stayed at my house with my family for another day if we'd been told in advance.

Plus I feel like today was wasted because I didn't learn anything. :(

Today was my first day of classes and I am a total brown noser, suck up. I can't help it. I don't mean to be, it's just the kind of student I am. I answer teacher's questions and I nod when they're talking and pay attention.

On the upside I have good rapport with my teachers. On the downside I don't necessarily like that about myself.

Like today I had Food and Dairy Microbiology which is a class that has a lot of Food Science majors in it in addition to Micro majors so the class size is maybe 3 times that of a normal micro class. The teacher went around the class and had everyone say their name, year, major, and then something about food related to the class. So a lot of people said they like cheese, yogurt, beer, or wine because they could say those foods are fermented. That got really old after 20 people or so, and the teacher got irritated because those people didn't even know which bacteria types were used to create those foods (I did though, so I answered when she asked because I can't help myself.). Then it was my turn and I discussed how I don't like tailgates because I fear S. aureus in my food. She was happy because someone said something other than cheese or alcohol, but I know people who don't know me were muttering "suck up" under their breath.

I'm actually really interested in my classes, so the result is that I end up a teacher's pet. I think they respond to someone wanting to learn and in return I feel more obligated to do well in the class so I study harder and I am always in attendance.

After people get to know me, then they realize that I do well because I study and I work at it, and that I can be laid back and joke around. Also, I'm always willing to share notes or things like that.

Oh well. I'll try to resolve now to moderate myself and not talk so much in class and to wait and give other people a chance to answer teacher's questions before raising my hand.

I started taking better care of myself when last semester ended. No big fanfare to it, just decided it was time. I'm down 14 lbs and much better moisturized.

I'm going to be taking better care of my skin and I'm making it a point to smell nice. Not that I've been offensive smelling in the past because I believe in bathing but I've only smelled decent, now my goal is to smell sexy. Or at least girly. It's just a small thing, to be scented nicely. And a woman in a store today complimented me, which made me feel nice.

I'm still not going to wear makeup everyday. The way I figure it is that if someone wears makeup all the time then that is the baseline normal for their appearance and that's what people expect them to look like. If they don't wear makeup then they look strange, usually washed out or sick. But if you don't wear it all the time then it has more of an impact. I may one day change my mind about this and decide it's worth it but right now I think I look nice enough with out it.

So I don't have resolutions as such, but I am making some changes and I will be sticking to them.

Myles took a step! He took a step, stood there for a second looking surprised and then sat down. It'll still be a while before we get proper walking but it's still exciting!

I admit that I worship at the alter of Alton Brown, but it is a platonic way. If I had to chose a chef to run off with, it would definitely be Anthony Bourdain.

I was giddy to find his show on the Travel Channel while exploring our new satellite channels. I first discovered him when Food Network aired "A Cook's Tour" and was then initially impressed with his ability to eat literally anything served to him. And I think that is the quality that attracts me to him. His approach to appreciating food is what interests me now. It is sensual and unpretentious.

But no running off to be a food groupie for me. He'd never accept me as a worshiper. I don't think I could bring myself to eat fried frog skins or a seal eyeball even for him.

This is the first week of my Christmas break from school, so I've been trying very hard to do as little as possible. Last week was horrible with seven straight days of 12+ hour days and lots of driving and everything was due and professors suddenly remembering we were supposed to have 6 grades for the semester and so were 2 short and so we had to have a test the last two days the class met.

I busted my ass last semester, but the pay off was being able to exempt all the exams where the teachers offered exemption which is why I'm off this week instead of stressing out and pulling marathon study sessions. Good for me. Plus it's nice being secure in my A's and not having to worry about how this one test will impact my final grade.

Next semester should be interesting. I'm essentially taking every Microbiology course offered except for the one I've already taken. I also have the MCAT classes a couple nights a week. I really have to ace the MCAT if I'm going to get into medical school. Even if I swing 4.0's my last two semesters my GPA will still be shit.

Medical school admission insecurity is what triggered my last JE. I love my bridge piercing and I've had it for my entire adult life. I really can't imagine myself without it. I usually wear a retainer in it, but people still notice it (Picture) sometimes and it would be very difficult for me to take it out.

Is medical school more important? I want to say yes, but I don't know that I'd be able to follow through with it if/when the time comes to take my bridge piercing out. I don't know that I really can explain it to people. It's part of my psyche and I would mourn the loss of my bridge piercing. I would feel like I'd lost something. It's hard to explain it to someone who doesn't have something similar... Think of older women who long after nature has said otherwise, still view themselves as blonds.

I wanted to say thank you to everyone for their opinion. I know it's strange to thank of slashdot folk as normal, but honestly everyone else I know is either a college student, heavily modified, Mormon, or has worked with me and so has had their probably based their opinion of the modified on me.

Would you trust a professional with a facial piercing?

Would you go to an accountant with tattoos? A doctor with a pierced tongue? A lawyer with a mohawk?

I need opinions from normal people and /. is the closest thing I know to normal people. So please answer seriously.

Yesterday I thought I'd finished my Christmas shopping but the necklace I bought for the pendant I purchased for my mom didn't suit it, so I returned the necklace. I used the proceeds to buy food to donate (they're collecting it at tonight's microbiology society meeting) and a gift for the child of friends whose birthday party I'm attending tomorrow.

To be honest, I really don't like buying her a present. She has a lot of toys already. A lot. It isn't that I think she is undeserving of toys, just that I don't think one toy more or less would make any difference in her life. I'm actually rather hoping she already has one of what I've gotten, then it can go into the Toys for Tots collection.

For quite a few years when I was younger my family volunteered with the Toys for Tots distribution. Some of those people were so grateful it made me want to cry, others so greedy that it made me angry. The kids weren't allowed to come, so it was just their parents or guardians and a list of the children they were getting toys from. There were tables labeled with the age groups and genders, racks of clothes of various sizes, and usually some other merchandise like a Disney themed bedspread or sheets. It was a good experience, except for the greedy people, but that's why each person has a Marine to escort them to the stations and to help them choose appropriate gifts for the children on their list. It worked out well in the end.

http://www.weffriddles.com

Where was I at 5 am this morning? Walmart.

I know, I know, Walmart is evil... But 40% off what I was already planning to buy plus no tax when we're on a budget is really, really tempting. The sick thing is that except for other people making it hard to get around the store (because it is really hard for them to see where they are pushing their carts when they are loaded down with video game recliners and 3 20 inch flat screen TV's I went for basically one thing and I got the last one. There's an odd sort of triumph to getting the last one of a hot item.

In my English class we've been reading various short stories and novels and watching movies. It seems like my instructor has a preference for crazy people, but non-functional crazy people. Yesterday in class I finally said something about it and I'm glad I did because apparently a lot of people in my class felt the same way. We're all moderately to very annoyed by the characters we've seen this semester.

But then also I was talking to my sister-in-law last week and she said I should go into psychiatric medicine. She's actually on mental disability because she's a wee bit crazy so I'd think she'd know me well enough by now to know that I would never be able to do that.

It isn't that I think that mental illness doesn't exist or that people are just making it up to get attention or whatever. I know it's real. I've gone crazy where for a period of time very bad ideas seemed like what I was supposed to do. I've been medicated and I've been hospitalized, and I know I wasn't just making it up. But at the same time I couldn't tolerate having to work with people who were mentally ill.

I don't know if it is because I played sports as a child and we were taught to "walk it off" or because my attitude when everything is going wrong is to suck it up and deal. I had a very abrasive horrible doctor and I loved him because he called everyone on their bullshit, even me. I needed someone to do that and I needed a job that forced me out of my apartment and into the world where I had to deal with other people and actually had to accomplish something during the day. It made me pull my head out of my butt and think about something other than myself.

I admire people who are depressed and still get shit done. Or people who have emotional issues and make an effort to overcome them. But for people who just lock themselves away from the world and stay in their apartments like hermits, then I have no patience for them. I know it's hard to get up early, get dressed, get composed enough to face the world and then actually go out and fight your way through the day, but you're never going to get better wallowing in your own mental illness, turning your thoughts over and over and thinking about nothing but yourself.

Well most of my classes for my major.

Long Hall (seen here) was built in 1937 and is named after William Williams Long (Seriously, William Williams). It is old, but with charm. There is another building on campus built 20 something years later that looks like a block of apartments built in some communist country. Just looking at it sucks the spirit away.

It is 4 stories but the ground floor is 0 so when you're on the 3rd floor you're really on the 4th, but only 2 rooms out of all of those that fill those 4 stories are used by the mircobiology department: 216 and 220. The 3rd floor has been converted into laboratories which required them to add a lot of plumbing to support the sinks in the labs. This plumbing festoons the ceilings of our classrooms so that if something interesting gets washed down a drain, class is disrupted until the flow of purple water through the pipes above our heads is stopped.

Throughout the building there is molding. It is dark stained wood against off-white walls. The base boards measure 8 inches or so, and three feet above them is a 5-6 inch chair rail. The floor-to-ceiling doors and surrounding casing are stained the same deep brown, but there is no crown molding.

Instead suspending 18 inches or so from the ceiling in the halls is a foot wide metal track that supports the miles and miles of bundled cables. They are a new addition since I first started college here in 1998. All of the classrooms though dusty and still tiled with the original 1937 industrial floor tiles and filled with extremely uncomfortable desks bolted to the floor are now "smart classrooms" fitted with digital projectors, wireless internet, technology that allows teachers to poll the students, etc.

In between classrooms and down side halls are professor's offices, narrow cluttered rooms. Lining one side of the wide halls are various forms of administrative debris. Discarded desks that someone might someday want. Antique file cabinets with big hand written signs taped to them describing the wrath that will be unleased if someone touches them. Broken chairs supporting overflowing boxes of rolled charts and stuffed file folders.

This is my academic home. Next semester I will have three classes in a row in room 216: Bacterial Physiology, Food and Dairy Microbiology, and Industrial Microbiology. I will have Virology on a different day in the soul sucking communist building because the only thing approaching a virologist on staff is actually a Physics professor with some strange hobbies (he is also my Cancer and Aging professor this semester).

There is another building where I will have the labs that go with my science classes (except for Virology which has no lab and for that I am grateful. Virulent substances make me nervous.) Labs are held in room 204, that's the room given to the microbiology department. The clock is broken in there, it is always half past but the hour hand moves. I like it though, I'm familiar with it.

I don't know why I'm writing. I like this building, I like my major. I'm glad I'm in school.

I've had a good day in Las Vegas. This morning at an early hour I took a $10 voucher left over from last night's playing and a $20 bill out of my room. Several hours and many hands of blackjack later I returned with a $14 voucher and $90 cash.

Then in the afternoon, I went to learn to play poker carrying $60 or so. The game after the lesson had a $20 buy-in which I promptly lost but I used another $20 to keep playing. At one point I was up to $61, but couldn't help playing "just one more hand" which knocked me back down to $44. Still, I was up $4 so I was happy when I left and I stopped to get the husband a cigar. That was $3. I took my remaining dollar and dropped it into a video blackjack machine and left with $2. So I returned to the room with my original $60 and a $2 voucher and had an enjoyable couple of hours.

The husband and I had show and dinner tickets, so we left the room with those, $30, and a $14 voucher from the weekend. The tip for dinner and drinks was $6, the drinks were $3. We cashed in the $14 voucher, added a dollar and went to play with that $15 dollars. At the first game we ended up with $20 which we split between us. I suggested playing one hand of blackjack each with a $10 bet. I hit a blackjack which paid out $15, the husband had 11 so I gave him $10 to double down and he hit 21 and ended up with a $20 payout. That put us ahead $40.

If only I had stopped there. The timing was right, I knew we should leave the casino but I couldn't stop myself from betting $5 on the way out. I lost it, then between money spent on drinks and losses everything disappeared except for 2 $20's I kept in my purse (I like to put money away so I can't gamble too much at a time) and $4 the husband hand in quarters, which means we returned to the room with $44. Since that is what we left with I'm pretty content with the evening. We had a great time, spent a lot of money over the course of 5.5 hours, and still returned to the room no poorer than when we left.

We're not going to get rich here in Vegas, but we're doing a little bit better than breaking even. I'm slowly learning to quit when I'm ahead. Just get up, leave the table and be content. It works for me, and as long as I manage to do that my modest winnings are adding up.

I don't plan to gamble much tomorrow at all. I think I'll probably lose $20 learning roulette and then come back to the room to finished a book I'm reading for one of my classes.