The Awkward Phase

For all of you that have been wondering about my current state of hair re-growth:

Clarity

Oh to see the world with healthy eyes! The clouds are billowing pinkly upward, creating a whimsical city of sugar-laced skyscrapers. The brown pelicans, no longer nightmarish hunchbacks, appear to be silly old men--the kind that might wink as you walk by. Sunlight flashes off the sea's surface. "Wake-up, wake-up, wake-up..." the waves whisper.

I just spent the last week sick in bed, and just when I had almost completely forgotten what it felt like to be a functional human being, a pivotal battle was won in the war ravaging my immune system. Just to stretch out my toes and jump down from my top bunk with a clear head is beautiful.

Tomorrow I will deal with the fact that I am effectively three weeks behind in my research. Tomorrow I will consider for what else, beyond the creation of Easy Mac, I can use the laboratory I have been assigned to. Tomorrow I will see if these “scientist” shoes are going to leave blisters.

For now I’m going to curl up in my bed with my journal, and think about how much I love words like “confluence,” “delta,” and “estuary.”

Things that are blue

Today was the Marine Science Center's open house, and my (dubious) job was to pass out little blue baggies full of free things to the flip-flop-x-x-x-l-t-shirt clad visitors. I had my first real "Texas moment" when a lady in pink plastic sunglasses leaned over the pad of paper where I was keeping track of where all of the visitors were from and exclaimed, "Awww... Y'all are doin' an expearimeant!!"



I got to go out on one of the boat trips into the salt-marsh, too, and it was wonderful. The little boat skipped all over the water and the marsh-muck was particularly viscous and satisfying. I met my soon-to-be best friend the Blue Crab, got my hair all frazzled up into something crazily wind-swept, and had salt crystals caked at the corners of my eyes. Mmmm.


Yes, so apparently I'm going to be doing something with Blue Crabs and their larval distribution patterns. Not only does it sound interesting, but also I get to escape the laboratory and go on boat trips around the estuary to track down the areas where the baby crablets hide out. (By the end of the summer I'm sure I will be able to describe this in much more official language).

I'm still sick, though. My mom thinks I have mono, but I'm operating under the assumption that my refusal to believe that this is the case will make it not so. It's all very poor timing, though. I would much rather be familiarizing myself with the cloud patterns spiraling through this port town than the spackle on my cieling. Alas.

I will not end of such a sour note, however. I will end on an Indigo Bunting note, which is far from sour, and also blue:


Me and a lab-tech were talking about how beautiful Port Aransas is, and the bird migrations came up. It turns out that this guy was watching Indigo Buntings pass through Texas in March or so, while I stalked them through the Minnesotan prairie this May during my ornithology class. We might even have seen the same little bunting. These guys really do go a long way... Crazy. Birds are crazy! I need to get a hold of a pair of binoculars.

Books, Goals, and Dolphins

So, as I was struggling to write papers last term, I compiled a summer reading list and a list of goals that I want to accomplish before school starts again in the fall. Fortunately, I stumbled across the gmail draft where I saved these ideas--

Books to read:
The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins
The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
On the Blue Shores of Silence, Pablo Neruda
Fingers Pointing at the Moon, Wei Wu Wei
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Places in Between, Rory Stuart
The Gift, Hafiz (This book I actually take with me everywhere, so it will be a re-reading.)

Goals:
Learn something about biology
Rekindle my relationship with my paper journal
Keep a list of birds I've identified
Write Letters
Achieve harmonica competence

Am I overly ambitious? We shall see. If you have any burning suggestions for books I should add to my list, I welcome them.

Today, again, was a blur. I watched some people fiddle with a terrifyingly expensive piece of lab equipment, stood transfixed over a microscope looking at all of these mysterious zooplankton scoot by, and assembled a computer. I still have no idea what I'm going to study. I was feeling pretty awful all day and when I got back to my room it occurred to me that I might be sick, and it turned out that I had a 102˚ fever. That might explain, at least in part, why the dolphins playing merrily at the prows of the oil tankers seemed so much like a dream...

I'm here.

My mind is still whirling with finals and goodbyes, and my bag still hasn't made it, but my body at least is here. Warm winds, sand between my toes, phytoplankton, peeling paint, curious shorebirds with jet black heads, the Gulf of Mexico, hot kitchens and chicken sandwiches... It's all a lot to process. My research mentor, Ed Buskey, gave me a tour of his lab today--it was full of all of these bubbling vials and mysterious cultures. I nodded and smiled a lot while he talked about red-tide coastal dynamics and predator-prey interactions, but I was so tired that I'm afraid I didn't absorb too much. No one here knows that I declared a major in Religion.

"OK, Science Caitlin," I'm saying to the part of myself that enjoys the measurement of oxygen levels and finds perverse pleasure performing statistical analysis, "wake up and and get ready to wield your pipet with enthusiasm!"

Because, although a significant side of me laughs at the bitter irony of compressing this roaring forever of a sea into "data," there is a Science Caitlin. She thinks that biolgical analysis just might compound the mystery.

...this REU thing certainly will be an interesting experiment.