Potato boy

From bash.org:

#151227 +(8019)- [X]

IronChef Foicite: well, there's a lot of reasons
IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a couple weeks
IronChef Foicite: and that's if you leave them in water
IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty
IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying
IronChef Foicite: "my love for you is transitory and based solely on your appearance"
IronChef Foicite: but a potato!
IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fucking ever, man
IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they actually grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack
IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good symbol
IronChef Foicite: but there's more!
IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato! you can even make a battery with it!
IronChef Foicite: and that's like saying "i have many ways in which I show my love for you"
IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they're still awesome
IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying "it doesn't matter at all what you look like, I'll still love you"

Steven is my potato.

I bet it's going to be a week before he reads this.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

This is me, firing an Uzi in automatic mode:

(The gun belongs to Steve's cousin Michael, who DOES have a permit for it. I wish Steve could have caught the look on his face as he comes up behind me, convinced that the skinny little girl holding his expensive gun is going to topple over backward. We watched this video about five times just to laugh at how funny I look.)

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It's been an exhausting week. I was taking the Emerging Techniques in Protein and Genetic Engineering course at the BTCI, which was great but ran from 8:30am to 7pm every day, plus emailing 2 scientists I've never met (emailing strangers makes me nervous as hell) and trying to rewrite my Master's research proposal.

Then today (Saturday) I learned how to shoot. Steve's dad and cousin, who are both gun nuts (Michael until recently owned a gun shop) said I did a good job. More photos later, featuring more of the Uzi, an AK-47, an M-17, a Ruger .22, and an old .22 pump-action. I'm a happy kitty. ^_^

Bailey's Irish Oooooh yeaaaaahhh

Cranky Friday

I did my first mutagenesis and transformation ever yesterday. Looked at my plates just now...no colonies. *cry* The mutagenesis protocol was from a kit, so we have to order more before I can try again.

(Transformation is the process of introducing foreign DNA into cells. This can occur spontaneously, or you can make cells take up DNA by shocking them with electricity (electroporation) or heat-shock. The plasmid I was supposed to put in yesterday contained, aside from the gene of interest, an ampicillin-resistance gene as a "marker" to separate transformed from non-transformed cells. Then I spread the cells on agar plates containing ampicillin. Since they're all dead, I don't know whether the transformation was unsuccessful or I just killed all of them -_-;; )

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Also, the weather is shockingly cold today. It's the depth of cold that makes breathing - normal breathing, not even panting or hyperventilation - painful, and makes your fingers hurt within seconds of exposure. I'm truly glad for my Seirus balaclava. When you have it over your mouth and nose, it gather condensation from your breath, so the air you inhale is humidified and warmed. It's basically an artificial extracorporeal heat-exchange membrane.

Steve has a really awful sore throat and fever though - he's gone to the doctor twice in two days, and despite this had to teach three physics classes yesterday. I feel almost guilty for having such a good immune system...you'd think kissing would transmit anything infectious but so far it hasn't. Plus, I registered to go on the Grad Christian Fellowship's women's retreat to New Glarus tonight. We're going to stay in a nice lodge with a hot tub, which is a nice place to be with the coldest temperatures of the decade rolling into town, but I still feel guilty for leaving.

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On the bright side, two funny things: For my cell biology course, we had to read a paper about a protein called XBP-1. Did I mention that I hate cell biology's sense of naming conventions or lack thereof? They make acronyms upon acronyms, and they're all unpronounceable, so people will insert random vowels in order to say them. Well, what does XBP-1 stand for?

X box binding protein, that's what. Someone sue Microsoft.

The X box is actually a DNA sequence that's involved in the expression of certain immune-system related (MHC) genes, but now XBP-1 gives me a mental image of a gaming console covered in green slime or something. Or fanboys.

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The other thing is, my boss gave Keith (our lab's "old guy who knows everything") a Spanish-English calendar for Christmas. Today's sentence:

Hace un tiempo horrible.
The weather is horrible.

I couldn't agree more.

Hybridisation

Some science fiction story I read a while ago (I think it was David Brin's "The Uplift War" proposed that in the future almost everyone will be a near-uniform shade of light brown - that is, ethnic groups will pretty much disappear due to mixed marriages. I doubt that will happen. I don't have any structured argument as to why...just a feeling that people will cling to ethnicity and race will persist long into the future.

Even space exploration and colonisation, should they ever happen, will tend to follow rather than erase ethnicity, since nations will end up claiming planets and constructing space stations by themselves, once there's enough to go around.

What I've been noticing is that certain kinds of mixed relationships tend to be unidirectional for the most part. There are lots of East Asian women (ethnic Chinese, Japs, Koreans) married to white men, but no E. Asian men married to white women that I know personally, and only one such couple that I know of. On the bus and around town here in Madison, I see lots of black guy - white girl couples, but I haven't seen any going the other way.

I don't know enough about black and white culture in the US to speculate about the latter, but I can come up with theories about the former till the cows come home haha.

I dunno lah...if I'm going to fulfil any stereotypes about Chinese women and white guys, let me be the arse-kicking kungfu assassin babe.

There's a frigging EPIDEMIC of yellow fever at my church. It's kinda funny.

On my mother's side, my sibs and I are the only Chinese grandchildren because my mum's younger sisters married, in order, an Englishman, a Malay, and an American. It's rather ironic that it's my Malay cousins and not us who can speak Mandarin, however, because they went to Chinese school. I feel so bananafied.

It's Cwismas!

I'm at Steve's house for Christmas. Didn't want parents to go around telling church people that I have a boyfriend (in 2003 I brought David back; people are still asking me about the "Mat Salleh boyfriend" two years later), so anybody who asks is going to be told I'm staying "with a pastor". Which is more or less correct [cough cough].

Steve's mother's cat is fantastic. It's only 6 months old but it's enormous even for a regular-sized adult cat. I think our typical shorthair mongrel in Malaysia would take one look and slink off. He's something called a Norwegian forest cat. They're like the St. Bernards of cats or something, huge feet with fur between the pads like a snowshoe hare. Ultra cute.

Anyway...I'm not the kind who typically likes to quote the Bible a lot, scared of sounding too holy (which is stupid of me), but it's Christmas, and there's this paragraph from Paul of Tarsus' letter to the church in Ephesus which I like a lot:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.

The "two" he talks about are (AFAIK) Jews and Greeks, but you can think nowadays of so many polarities among people - ethnic, political, national, sexual, economic, educational - that are confoundingly hard to reconcile two individuals across.

Any time you have more than one human being in a situation, there will division, there will hostility, somewhere, regardless of how much goodwill there is otherwise. We're all designed to fight each other. Humans are competitive, bearing the seed of evil, Darwinian. Even relationships as close as sister against brother, son against father, friend against friend, lover against lover, are full of hostility, overt or submerged. There are so many solutions proposed for peace at various levels of human interaction, but the only universal one is love.

He is our peace, who has destroyed the dividing wall... Merry Christmas everybody, and to my non-Christian friends, Happy Arbitrary Westernised Midwinter Festival. A public holiday is a public holiday mah =)