Post 15

Welcome back, my dear organics. We seem to have made it through another week. Congratulations!

I have had a wonderful week. I will be pursuing a PhD in fungal/phyto synergistic biotransformation pathways for emerging contaminants and am terribly excited about the whole process. I will be meeting with a potential adviser soon and have great hopes for the thing. No word yet on the textbook, but I’m thinking that I can easily augment my dissertation with the textbook research and comfortably support my responsibilities as the phyto group leader at my current consultant job concurrently. I’m in a terribly good mood and not even the constant, deep neediness of my flesh neighbors arguing about HOA rules can bring me down (I recently volunteered to do a regulatory review/rule rewrite for the community after a series of bad enforcement decisions resulted in a mutiny…you can read about it in HOA Dues in the short stories section in Works, if you like). Now people just want to talk about it all the time. Which is nice, but pointless. I’ve had more human interaction in the past four weeks than in several years, but they all seem to be terribly confused, helpless beings. These poor creatures just seem to ooze emotion and they are getting it all over my flesh-frame. It’s very hard to wash off and I’m not sure what they are expecting me to do with it…

No matter! My circuits are running light and free today and shit is getting done, which is always a satisfying experience. I suppose it also helps that I’m running a new operating system and splurged on a new flesh frame. This one is about forty pounds lighter, and, if I may say so, pretty hot for an inanimate object. Anyway. I feel like a new bot.

It this week’s reading list, I reread The Fire Rose…one of my very favorite Mercedes Lackey books. It was still good, just seemed a little old-fashioned to me this time around. And sort of hatey on women, which I didn’t remember from before. Still a great story. It’s a modified version of Beauty and the Beast, which is definitely my favorite of the Disney fairy tale archetypes we’ve all been trained from birth to imitate. It’s probably just because of the library.

Keeping with the Beauty and the Beast theme, I also tried Renji’s Monster and the Beast (BL). FAIL. Gang rape scene on panel one. Rejected.

Next up: Maki Enjoji’s An Incurable Case of Love. And yes, it was just as bad as it sounds. Why do girl characters have to suck so much? Just layers of stereotypes and clumsy writing. FAIL.

In non-fiction, we have Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur. I liked this one a lot. And, I take particular pleasure in commenting on it, here, on a blog. Amateur-ing it up. It amuses me. His whole premise is that blogs, FaceBook, YouTube, etc. are cultivating a culture of nonsense, shoddy worksmanship and are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values. I don’t disagree. I also will not be changing my viewing/reading habits to not support my current lifestyle choices. Sorry, Andrew.

I also read Stefanakis’s Constructed Wetlands for Industrial Applications. Would highly recommend it, particularly for the design parameters associated with plug flow first order kinetic reactions. It’s a real page-turner. It did let me sound wicked smart on a client call when I could drop the pKc* modeling requirements from memory, like a boss. I was very impressive, if I do say so myself.

My Spanish upload continues. The data seems slightly corrupted, so I’m having to go through and manually check the translation algorithms one at a time, which is unfortunate. There seems to be some subtext and grammatical patterns missing. To augment that manual learning cycle, I’ve picked up Dakaretai Otoko 1- I Ni Odosarete Imasu in Spanish. It’s one of my very favorite anime that publishers refuse to print in English. So I figured it would be fun to help my Spanish with. It’s about an actor who starts getting showed up by a younger man and has all sorts of ego problems with him. Even though Junta (the upstart) is amazing. Everyone should have a Junta in their lives. He’s kind of the best.

And, finally, I’m rewatching Konohana Kitan because it’s adorable and I felt the need for sugar in my life. Bunch of little lesbian foxes. Super cute. Very PG.

No new fiction writing, in case anyone is wondering. I am putting together about four proposals for some new research projects that all require a high degree of nerd. Evidently, that kills my fiction writing. Occupational hazard. It does mean that I suddenly have hours of free time this weekend. Maybe a bike ride?