Rough Day

I am my own person. I have a personality that is unique, and is no more influenced by others than anyone else's except in the fact that I am more open minded than many.

Why is this so hard to believe?

First, tonight, I was informed that I am gullible. Impressionable. Easily swayed by the will of others. I have no personality of my own, and I simply absorb the personalities of those around me. This will, inevitably, wind up with me becoming an apprentice to a serial killer, joining a cult, or killing myself when a man breaks up with me.

This was informed to me by my parents.

And then, when I sought validation that this was not the case from my significant other, I was informed that it was a "reasonable concern" on their part. In fact, said significant other in the past has expressed concerns about my lack of my own personality and the fact that I seem to simply become whatever those around me are.

I AM NOT GULLIBLE.

No, I don't have a unique fashion sense, so yes, I wear whatever people around me who I care about the opinion of tell me looks good. Want to know why? Because I DON'T CARE WHAT I LOOK LIKE, as long as I am not revealing too much for my personal comfort, I feel comfortable, and those around me consider me attractive. You know what else? I don't have a favorite color, really. I wear red because people tell me red looks good on me. So I say it's my favorite color because I wear it all the time. In truth, I don't give a shit what color I am wearing unless it is purple. I don't like purple.

So I'm not a fashion horse. I don't care if I express myself through my clothes. So what? I still want to look attractive, naturally, so I wear clothes that other people tell me look good. When I valued my mother's opinion on my appearance the most (read: no friends), I dressed as she wanted me to. When I valued my peers' opinion the most, I dressed as Vivacia wanted me to. Currently, the only person who I want to find me attractive is Ryter. So SURPRISE, I wear what Ryter says looks good. Do I have to have a fashion sense to be my own person?

And yeah, I listen to metal a lot now that I am dating him. I also still listen to country, and pop, and emo. Around him, I listen to metal most of the time because I don't want to subject him to music he doesn't like. I also listen to it on my own. Because he introduced me to metal. The truth is, I like music that has an effect on me. Metal has an effect on me emotionally. The music is emotional. For country and pop, the lyrics make me think, especially with story songs. For emo and some pop, I can't understand the lyrics anyway so I use it as background noise because it's not distracting. Different music serves different functions for me, just because I was introduced by someone in particular doesn't mean I am influenced by them, it means I share their taste in music.

My politics have always been my own. No influence there, at least not recently. Ryter and I disagree on McCain vs. Obama. He doesn't share the importance I put on sex education, science education, available and safe birth control and a reformed healthcare system. When it comes to politics, we have different priorities. I have different priorities from most people in my life.

And yes, I changed my career goal from "doctor" to "ecologist." Part of that was admittedly Ryter, in that I chose to become a doctor when I was convinced that no one would ever love me so it wouldn't matter that I wasn't going to be financially stable enough to have children until my eggs started to churn out clunkers. I have since realized that medicine is probably not the ideal career for me because I actually will be able to have children with a guy I love some day, and I'd like to do it before I am 30. In addition, it was pointed out to me that I don't handle stress well and I don't function well on very little sleep, and I'd like a career where stress on the job means a few weeks of studies get derailed instead of a person dies and then I lose my license because of malpractice.

Also, I hate willfully ignorant people. I'm not talking about people who have no access to education, that's not their fault and I can't hate them for that. I'm talking about people who are presented with evidence and ignore it or disparage it to fit their preconceived notions. I hate Creationists, and anti-vaccinationists, and HIV denialists. I hate anarchists and communists and fascists, and freegans and vegans (well, religious/moral vegans who don't try to pretend it's healthier or more natural are okay). I hate people who believe telling kids about birth control will make them have sex and people who believe kids who don't have sex education don't have sex. I hate people who think America has the best healthcare system in the world when that only applies to people who have good health insurance coverage, and everyone else gets screwed, resulting in our average life expectancy being lower than most developed nations (I will concede that for those with good insurance, it's probably the best you can get). I hate people who refuse to see reason under any circumstances because it contradicts what they want to believe.

This would not work well in medicine. I think I would stab a scapel into the heart of the first person I met who insisted vaccines were wrong while their toddler was in agony with pertussis. Not good for business.

This does not mean Ryter is controlling me. It means that I am learning who I am. Ryter doesn't care if a mother he doesn't know doesn't vaccinate their child. I do. It just happens that much of my self-discovery is coinciding with when I met Ryter.

I have a personality. I am both compassionate and passionate about causes I believe in. I am fiercely loyal to those who are loyal to me and I want to help everyone who cannot help themselves, and some who will not help themselves. I care intensely about the world around me and want to make a difference, and yet I know I am powerless in many ways, which disturbs me. I am silly and goofy at times, and angry at others. I am slow to warm up to people but will share anything once I am warmed up.

I like music that isn't rap, I like clothes that make me look beautiful to the man I love. I like dancing and singing, which I don't indulge in much for others' sake because I am not very good at either. I love to cook and love to see people appreciating food I have prepared for them. I love to learn about the medical world and read about the environment I would not do well in and yet can appreciate on an intellectual level. I like biological sciences and puzzles of biology and learning how the mind works. I like dark humor but not embarrassment humor, and I like good wordplay. I like technology and imagining the world of the future, I like anthropology and the history of human evolution, I like weird, rare languages and uncontacted peoples.

I like the outdoors. I like hiking and swimming and camping and skiing an riding horses on trail rides, but not in a ring. I like animals and plants and interesting fungi and stargazing and the process of forest decomposition and regrowth and encouraging life to grow on a petri dish, in a cage, in a garden, whatever. I like obscure and ugly animals and anything that lives it's life in the dark. I love viruses, as long as I don't have them.

I like to track diseases and find the patient zero and where they got it from, I like to rant about the way things should be versus the way they are versus the way they will be. I like drawing and sculpting and writing and attempting to recreate the images I see in my head for those around me, and for my own future reference. I like learning about religion and myth and why it exists and what it teaches us, and considering what my own beliefs are. And yes, I am a raunchy person and have my own likes and dislikes there too.

I don't like being around people that much, and I need a lot of down time to process everything around me. I don't like when people criticize my beliefs or try to correct me when I am not right or wrong, simply in disagreement. I don't like crowds or mosquitoes or taking pills every day, or unapplied math or sleeping in the heat or any time the air does not move. I don't like being interrupted, cut off, not allowed to finish a thought, not allowed to take a breath in conversation for fear of that being the case, or when people misinterpret my words, which happens often because I have a tendency to use words in a manner which is slightly unlike their normal use and not even realize it. I don't like roller coasters, horror movies, sudden movement in a quiet area or being touched by anyone I am not very comfortable with.

Not one of the above is influenced by Ryter, or anyone else for that matter.

I'm sorry, world, but I don't understand what the problem is. I don't see where I lack personality. I often change what ASPECTS of my personality I present to people, which is something I am actively attempting to change and which action I believe is what is leading people to believe I myself am changing. Well, no, I am not. I am simply showing you the real me instead of the custom-made-for-you me.

I can recognize when a person is attempting to control me and I will cut them out of my life as needed. I usually recognize it when they start to resent positive changes in my life and when they resent efforts on my part to reveal my true self to them. I can't really cut my parents out of my life yet. But I can still limit their exposure to me because they are a negative influence on my life. I know my parents want to control me, consciously or not, for a simple reason: They are resenting the changes in how much of me they see.

So please. Stop telling me that I have no personality of my own. I have one. I have likes and dislikes and values and priorities and they are all mine. I can recognize attempts to control me and circumvent them, except as regards my parents. No one's gonna talk me into smoking a joint, joining a cult, or eating human flesh and the fact that I have almost no friends outside Ryter has nothing to do with Ryter and everything to do with the fact that I am too shy to make friends or maintain a large social circle. I have almost always had one friend and built all other friendships off that, and right now, it's Ryter. Is it ideal? No. But it will not change any faster if I am living on or off campus, if I spend more or less time with him, or anything else. The only way that will change is if I can convince myself I care enough to change it. I don't care enough about it right now, I'm more concerned with school and my health and doing things I enjoy to change something which, while annoying, is not impacting my life except as a nagging "probably should get around to that" thought in the back of my head.

And if I am talking and talking and don't make sense, please, for the love of all that is good in this world, BE PATIENT. I have a point. But I don't think in words and phrases and I am trying to make connections between my brain and my mouth and convey how I am thinking, but if you interrupt me, you break my train of thought and then I can't finish it. I do have a point, I will get to it, but I do not have the communication skills needed to do so quickly. Please, just... be understanding.

I'm a little slow lately.

Now, finally, a week later, I'm putting these Intertidal Zone pictures up.

If you want to know where this was, it's Fort Stark in Newcastle, NH. Very nice place. Here are some "Look how pretty it is" shots.



The rocks had cool layers to them, like ribbons.


And now, the lab. We lay out two of these little plots and counted all the organisms in them-- the seaweed, snails, barnacles, and mussels. Look at all the barnacles! That was annoying to count-- there were over 400.


There were three kinds of snails. The one on the far left is a carnivorous snail, not native to the region. It eats by latching on to other shellfish and scraping a hole through the prey's shell. The next one is also not indigenous-- we know of it as the common periwinkle. The third one, the tiny one, is the native aquatic snail in this region, also a periwinkle.



Also, I found an empty sea-urchin shell.


It's a great area, lots of tidal pools and fun to explore.

Busy busy busy

I haven't been writing because I have an Organic midterm Friday and I've been assembling my costume, which requires lots of sewing on the cape. On the plus side, I have all the pieces and it will be awesome.

Sometime soon I will write about my trip to the ocean for lab.

And there weren't even any bears!

So about yesterday.

We went to College Woods for lab to identify and count trees. First he told us all about the different kinds of trees you could find in the area, most of which we didn't actually find ourselves. Then he had us each measure out two four meter-by-four meter squares in the middle of the woods, measure the diameter of each tree in them, and identify it. This wouldn't have been that bad except that your average 4m x 4m plot of woodland has about 30 trees, some of which are quite large in diameter and required multiple people to measure (our biggest was 79 cm in diameter) and all of which like to poke you. Some were hard to identify-- we had to look at my camera pictures and get some help to figure out the red oak-- but about 95% of them were eastern hemlock. I got really sick of hemlocks.

Here are the trees we found:


Also, some pretty shots of the woods:






I need to go there for walks more often. It's not that far from campus.

If I type "Lee Bog" enough I'll get even MORE visitors!

No real blog entry tonight, I had a big paper for Ecology. I do find it interesting, though, that in researching this paper, which is about Lee Bog, I typed "Lee Bog" into Google and got... my own damn blog.

I appear to be the foremost authority on the ecology of Lee Bog. At least according to the Internet, which we all know is God.

I only wonder if my classmates got shunted here as well. Don't rely on me! I'm not as smart as I pretend I am!

Bog Blog

So yesterday I went on a field trip in Ecology to Lee Bog. Which is a bog. In Lee, NH. More specifically, a sphagnum bog, protected by the town of Lee.

We got there and first he took us to this little place:


Which I was very proud of myself for knowing that it was a vernal pool, before he even said it. Vernal pools are puddles that always show up in the same spot. I thought the dip at the end of my driveway was a vernal pool, but it turns out it's just a drainage problem.

Then we started our walk. Thankfully it was not a hike. Along the way he pointed out a bazillion white oaks, which are some of the few plants we actually will have to identify for this class. This is a white oak and white oak leaves up close.












I can't remember the name of this next plant, but you can eat the little purply-blue berries. They're very bitter and usually only birds eat them.


This is eastern hemlock. Unlike the hemlock that killed Socrates, this is not poisonous, and is in fact edible. The leaves are, anyway.


This is Lee Bog. It's kind of pretty. The little scraggly evergreen trees are black spruce, which only grows in bogs, at the timberline, and in the tundra. They need it to be rather cold and harsh. Bogs are cold because the water in them is blocked by the vegetation, so it can't circulate.




Notice the other pine trees are kind of scraggly. That's because bog soil doesn't have a lot of nutrients.

This is the sphagnum moss, which is what creates the bog. Rotting sphagnum makes the bog soil jiggle when you poke it with a stick, like jello pudding. Muddy, stinky, freezing cold jello pudding.


The nearby trees are all yellowed because of chlorosis, which means they aren't getting enough nutrients.


Bogs are usually surrounded by plants that do well in tundra environments too. This is reindeer moss, so called because reindeer like to eat it.


We walked through the woods, too, and he pointed out the canopy effect-- plants can't grow because the caonpy takes up all the light.


This is the American Chestnut.


It's almost extinct because humans accidentally introduced a chestnut fungus to the New World that the European and Asian chestnuts were resistant to, but the American one was not. They are incredibly rare; apparently there are only about three or four trees that are known to be breeding and that's only because their root systems are all but immortal, so when the tree dies off from the fungus the roots send up new trees. Which then get attacked by the fungus. Sucks to be an American chestnut.

And this is the pretty foliage on one of the trees by Parsons Hall.

So that was my Tuesday field trip.

I got really PO'd at my RA too, but she may actually deserve it.

Good news. I got an 82% on my Biostats exam. Now to get through the Ecology one Wednesday. But I'm much better at retaining things from that class, at least.

I also took a Latin test today, but I'm not too worried. It was just a translation. I think I may have tripped up in some places but they were minor mistakes-- I got the gist of it, and we had to paraphrase too. Not a terrible worry. Except I forgot to record the homework for that class, so now I have to admit to my professor that I spaced...

------------------------------------

I'm depressed right now, and I don't know why. I've been crying a lot, over anything, and I'm moody. Plus it feels like everything people do bothers me. Not irritable-bothers, but just makes me feel sucky and upset. I noticed it with Ryter tonight, though I was suppressing it because he's in a lot of pain lately and he doesn't need to deal with me being moody and emo. Hopefully it will go away soon.

Honestly, I think it's a yearly thing. As much as I love fall, every year-- perhaps due to the return to academia-- I get depressed for a month or so. I actually think it might be a good sign for my own health that I'm getting upset at other people instead of myself, though. I mean, I'm upset with myself, especially in terms of my weight and academic difficulties, but I'm ALSO getting upset with others, when previously I would just take all that emotion and turn it in on myself.

This annoyance at those around me, while potentially a good thing, is also a bad thing in that I won't be very fun to be around for a while, and in that I have to talk to my parents about the Thanksgiving issue this weekend-- specifically that Ryter really, really wants me to spend Thanksgiving with his family, and my family has been increasing the importance of Thanksgiving since Shrewd and I went away to school. Which means that I will have to have my mom explain that we're a little young to be sharing holidays that both families celebrate (his doesn't celebrate Christmas, so that doesn't count), and more specifically, that this is "all well and good to date him but it's not like you're going to marry the guy" which is the one statement that drives me NUTS lately and I get it ALL THE TIME from family.

Basically, what they are saying is, they want me to treat this like a college fling, a starter boyfriend. Which I would NEVER do and I would discourage others from doing, because it is cruel and manipulative. If we don't wind up together forever, that's okay. If we do, that's okay too. I don't know. But if I did that, I sure as hell would know how it would end, and it wouldn't be fair if he didn't.

I'm still debating whether or not to talk to Ryter about the things that are bothering me. On the one hand, maybe they are legit complaints. On the other, maybe I'm making them up because I'm depressed and moody. On the third, creepily dismembered hand of some dead hobo I found, he's got a lot to deal with right now and probably doesn't need this too...

My crazy week

This is one of many new blog entries from tonight. Check the first one here.

----------------------------------------

Monday I learned I had the Biostats test, and promptly freaked out. That was yesterday. It wasn't too bad, but I did get a lot of studying in. But I went over to Ryter's and burst into tears anyway, because of it.

----------------------------------------

Tuesday was my field trip with Ecology to Blue Job Mountain, which is a protected wilderness area that used to be a blueberry heath, so it's a young forest. As my teacher is a bit of a naturalist type, it was very informative and interesting. As I had not anticipated climbing up a mountain, and had expected instead that we would drive up and wander around a small wilderness area, I did not have enough water and I am too out of shape, and I was dying by the end. But the views? Amazing.

At the top there is a rickety old tower from the 1910's that is used to watch for fires, I believe. We climbed up and took pictures from the top. That was cool, even if the narrow stairs did make me fear pitching forward the whole way down.

Of course, the best part was watching the "I'm only in Bio to do pre-med, why do I have to take Ecology, wah" types complain about the mountain and more specifically the wilderness, and the potential for nail-breakage.


----------------------------------------

Also Tuesday, I discovered that my lab partner in Ecology and I had managed to kill all of our Daphnia in our experiment over the previous week. Oops.

----------------------------------------

Wednesday was my 20th birthday. Yes, I am 20 years old now, and officially not a teenager. Two decades. Holy cow.

I didn't do much for my birthday on the actual day (we're going to the New England Center-- my family, Vivacia and Ryter-- tomorrow) but I did break from studying for a few hours and went to eat dinner with Ryter, who ordered a pizza, which was sweet of him. We also ate leftover pieces of a cake he had (yes he buys cakes randomly), which, we discovered, was decorated with magnets. Yes, what we had thought were merely decorative fish-shaped cake toppings were actually magnets, stuck on top of the cake... and we watched the baseball game (he's very into baseball, it's the playoffs). It was nice. I mean, it would have been nice to have a birthday wish and all but that sort of thing gets harder as you get older and people care less and less about birthdays.

I haven't forgotten, but I don't dwell.

The Ludi Romani continues.

---------------------------------

I was talking to Cellamica at dinner today, and the topic strayed over towards previous roommates, and she shared a very interesting story with me...

Imagine you're sleeping in a dorm room, and you wake up and the bunk is shaking. You look around sleepily, then, you happen to glance into the unfortunately-positioned mirror to see two sets of feet hanging out of the bunk over you, and a squirming set of bodies under a blanket.

Her roommate was having sex. In the top bunk of a bunk bed. While she was sleeping underneath.

I can't imagine what I would do in that situation. She said she just turned over and tried to not think about it, I mean, it's not like she could leave without it being awkward, and it was apparently really early in the morning...

I'm just amazed she didn't immediately request a roommate switch, I would have. But instead she stuck it out, and a while later she was working on her computer and her roommate had sex with a guy on the top bunk while she was in the room, and clearly awake. All that was covering them was a sheet.

God. That is just... man. Wow.

Best part? This girl is a girl that Ryter once mentioned to me before, in the context of "I once was attracted to her," so I got to inform him with a bit more glee than was probably fair that he was once attracted to an incredibly inconsiderate slut (to be fair, he stopped liking her when he started picking up on how obnoxious she was). Whee!

---------------------------------

My Ecology lab was outside today. It was raining. As in, downpour. It was depressing not only because I got soaked despite Cellamica loaning me her umbrella, but also because it was a really interesting lecture-- at least the parts I could hear while the rain drummed down on my umbrella and those of the people around me, and on the brook we were looking at. He was talking about invasive species, the species of plant that humans introduced to the area that have been damaging local environments, and he was throwing in survival tips as he went, like "This is poison ivy, note the shape of the leaves;" "Crush up the berries of this kind of sumac and you can make a kind of lemonade;" "The juice of this native kind of impatiens is an antidote to poison ivy," and "Do not eat any part of this plant or you will die immediately," which I kind of wish I could have heard the name for, in retrospect, especially after that lovely story about that gardener who mistook a root of it for a ground potato, ate it, and died.

Not that I normally go about eating random tubers I dig up. But knowing that the antidote to poison ivy grows all over College Ravine is useful. I just wish I could have listened to that lecture without mud in my shoes.

I remembered something odd today...

Fifth day of the Ludi Romani.

--------------------------------

So I was reading Fark and I saw an article about how kids don't have the "astronaut" or "ballerina" fantasies adults think they do, but just want to grow up to be happily married.

I read it it and I just thought, Well, yeah. I mean, when I was a kid, which was not all that long ago, honestly, I occasionally entertained the idea of being a famous ballerina, or singer, or Nobel Prize winner or whatever, but most of the time I just pictured my future as marrying a rich businessman and having like twenty kids (3 natural, rest adopted). I'd work as a teacher when my kids were older, but just to give back to the community and all, because my husband would naturally be supporting me with his bazillions (Incidentally, that's about how much he would have had to be making to support my little orphanarium there).

Obviously I grew up and realized that a) Most businessman-types are either jerks or at least unlikely to marry women with no social skills, as they are often socially adept themselves as a necessary aspect of the job and would not particularly appreciate a wife who spills the bisque on their clients; b) Contrary to family lore, it is not "just as easy to love a rich man," as rich men aren't really common; c) In the modern world, it is a foolish or very, very trusting woman who does not continue to maintain her own finances apart from her husband's so she is independent enough to survive a divorce (and I would never, ever take alimony-- child support is one thing, alimony is welfare for WASP women-- I don't care how much I hate the guy); d) teachers not only get paid crap, they also are TREATED like crap; e) Who the hell has twenty kids besides crazy Quiverfull people?

But yet, even once I grew up a bit, I wanted to be a doctor with a husband who had the kind of job that meant that he would be there for the kids while I was doing weird hours. So I still wanted the husband, and the kids. I just wanted a career too, and way fewer children. Then my self esteem plummeted and I pictured my future as a doctor, living alone with lots of cats but traveling with Doctors Without Borders when I could.

Still, I think every kid wants to have a family. Expects it, even. It's not until reality sets in that you have variations, people who DO NOT WANT KIDS EVER and people who may want a kid, but mostly just want to focus on their job. Mind you, reality sets in at different times for different people-- I'm pretty sure Vivacia (who claims she NEVER WANTS KIDS) was five going on forty-- but my point still stands.

I'm not sure where I was going with this. I think I just wanted to share that I used to want to have twenty children. God. Innocence of youth and all that. *shudders violently at concept*

---------------------------------------

I have heard the phrase "biological variation" so much between Ecology and Biostats today that I swear I am going insane.

Optimism

Second day of the Ludi Romani.

--------------------------------

Today after my morning classes I went over to try and sell back my old textbooks-- at least, the ones I didn't want to keep (I kept Classical Mythology, for example). Alas, the science books are "too old"-- I couldn't resell those. Unfortunate, as those were the expensive ones. I wound up only getting $16.

--------------------------------

I've had my first three classes (they're one right after another). Ecology looks interesting, and the teacher is the very image of a scatterbrained professor-- tie, slacks, button-down T-shirt and bright pink Crocs. Organic doesn't seem like it will be impossible and the professor reminds me a lot of what I figure last year's unfortunate Chem teacher would have been like if he had been able to control the class- very accessible, friendly, likes technology. And Biostatistics is only worrying me because he doesn't allow calculators for a lot of it. And yet again, I wish I could go back in time and learn those damn times tables when that's all I had to think about...

I can't do basic math, by the way. I use calculators. I can handle more advanced stuff, but ask me what 8 time 12 is and I will give you a blank look.

Latin was this afternoon, but I have the same Latin teacher I had last year that I liked, so I'm not too worried about the class itself-- except Ryter's ex, the ex he REALLY doesn't like because he says she used him and tossed him aside and denied they were even dating to her friends, is ALSO in that class. Yeah. Awkward.

--------------------------------

Last night I didn't wind up hanging out with Ryter, as I had dinner with my roommate then went to a rock-painting social for the dorm. It was cool. I have a pretty doorstop now. Ryter was a little irritated about it but he swears he's okay, and I spent tonight with him. He's been really stressed out lately and things are only going to get worse over the next couple weeks. Plus his lizard is sick.

But it will be fine. I know it will.