prospective weekend again (II)

we didn't host anyone this week, but there is someone new applying to our lab, which is very exciting. for one thing, i won't be the baby of the lab any more, but on top of that he does cognitive neuroscience research, which means that there'll be at least one person in the lab with whom conversations about work are not like me standing atop a very tall mountain sending semaphore messages with 5" x 3" flags. his name is jared, but since we already have a lab jared, he will be jared II and lab jared will be jared I*. jared I hosted jared II, which i hear led to such interesting e-mails as:

Dear Jared,

that sounds to great to me,

Regards,
Jared.

in any case, i interviewed jared II before lunch and he seems like a great kid, and without saying too much i hope he gets in because he deserves it and i don't want to be lonely in the office.

after lunch i tried to work and couldn't because writing reports about people who have 6 anxiety disorders all at once is really depressing. instead, i futzed around with my data and labeled all the variables, and made sure all my files were in alphabetical order with no repeats, and went into each folder and ARRANGE[d] ICONS so that they were perfectly aligned.

by 4, it was time for happy hour because it was friday and dr. sb had just turned in a grant and jared I had collected his very last dataset for this weird project he's doing**. i like happy hour. i had a vague feeling that it was going to be a bad idea to have happy hour starting at 4 right before the party for the prospective students, and i was right, but i would totally do it again.

new deck! RODPFBSE (leffe: my new beer of choice). syl told us about her trip to hong kong and macau and it was awesome in every way except for the fact that they only ate mcdonald's. i'm getting very good at submerging my disgust re: such disgraceful behavior. america has trained me well. we have another beer, and then a SoCo shot, and we all start getting wistful about the fog-covered future, which is a really bad sign, so adrian buys us another beer. norah arrives, and we drink to her internship placement at b____, and then suddenly we're exchanging puke stories, and i find myself telling everyone about the time in sec 3 gep camp when elwin (BONDED) had the bunk above mine and was sick in the middle of the night.

things kind of get fuzzy from this point on. i think having eaten only 2 chicken tenders and a handful of nachos did not help. jared I and i left for the prospective student dinner, where i talked to a lot of new people whose names i no longer remember, although the substance of our conversations was, in approximate order: "sleep/learning/memory consolidation is THE hot topic nowadays, and this IS the place to study that" (jared II), "have you done your cultural psychology homework?" (the housemate) "does the sensation of conscious will reside in afferent brain signals, efferent brain signals, or neither?" (christian), "should i have a reuben?" (thomas) "this reuben is delicious!" (andrea) "are we ever going to graduate from here?" (melissa p.) someone pressed a drink ticket into my hand, so i thought it would be an awful pity if i didn't have a glass of merlot.

then we were at the usual house for the party, and it was really loud, and i kept eating peanuts, and people were drinking flaming dr. peppers, which mysteriously do actually taste like dr. pepper. at some point, i got it into my head that i really wanted to go home and watch four weddings and a funeral, which i had just downloaded, and the thought blossomed into an obsession in the way that they do when you're not really thinking straight. and the housemate wanted to go home too, i think, so we did, and instead of watching four weddings and a funeral i went to bed and slept for a rather long time.


* incid., i'm not sure i've mentioned that lab jared has exactly the birthday as me. i'm slowly becoming convinced that the advisor does not in fact accept students based on merit, but because he's trying to win a bet by stringing together a succession of students who have particular things in common, like those games where you try to morph ANGEL into DEVIL in 5 steps.

** which involves showing people a saturday night live sketch about penis cream. don't ask. also: my blog is going to get 8,569 hits tomorrow.