legionnaire

The SG news section is now up and running! So submit a bunch of articles to politics, so I don't have to keep writing them all .

Seriously, I think it's gotten off to a great start, in the span of less than one day there are a bunch of great bits posted on there, and Sean, s5 and Olivia have already fixed a whole bunch of technical problems. Go team!

I had a fairly easy day today. Having resubmitted my grant in early December (actually it was those long nights writing in November that got me to join SG in the first place. I wonder what the NIH thinks of that?) it's being reviewed on March 26, conveniently the day that I get back from Europe. In the interim period (the NIH forces you to meet these very strict submission deadlines - so your grant can sit in a storage room for three months) I have to put together a "supplement" for the grant. It's not required, but it's a helpful way of telling the reviewers "Look, I'm still working, and isn't all this so exciting?" It's just a page of two of supplementary data and other things that I either couldn't fit into the original submission or have done since then (unfortunately not a whole lot.) So I spent most of the day working on that (read: on the boards at SG) and getting some cell culture preps antibody stained for tomorrow. Those should be really cool, if I get any good pictures out of them I'll post them on here, they can be quite striking.

I also started a new book yesterday, having finished Lolita. The new one is called Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis. It's awesome. I've been so into it that I'm halfway through after two days. She starts with the rather unusual premise of "What if love were a bad thing?" and builds from there. She basically applies a Marxist argument to the concept of love and its effects on society, and her conclusions are pretty striking. The idea is that we spend all day working at our jobs (or school, you get the idea.) In America, we've decided that technology should increase work efficiency rather than leisure time - and we've extended this work ethic into our relationships. "A good marriage/relationship takes work." How often have you heard that cliche? So by extending the notion of work into the social realm, we spend all of our time working at something. This keeps us from thinking dangerous thoughts, like "Am I really happy? Is there a better way of doing things than this?" She goes on to define the constraints of the modern conception of a relationship (and how it relates to the "wedding-industrial complex," the best term ever) and how they seem to be designed to reduce our personal freedoms and stifle our creativity and energy. Her conclusion thus far is that adultery is the equivalent of being a social revolutionary, and that those who refuse to get involved in love are ostracized by the rest of society. I could go on and on and on but this entry is getting really long. Suffice to say - this book will sour you on the notion of a long term monogamous relationship as a good thing, but it's an amazing read nonetheless. Now that I think about it, I wonder if she'd do an interview? That would be fun....

Oh well, you've read long enough. I have more to say (there's always more to say) but you'll just have to wait until tomorrow.