The Handshake vs. Hug conundrum

I went to a graduation ceremony the other day, and it was all very nice, very solemn, inspirational speech by some distinguished old dude, all the bells and whistles. (Though I have to say, that "pomp and circumstance" music does grate after a while. Why don't people do something else? I heard that at Brandeis, they had Jai Ho (pussycat dolls version) to start things off, and the faculty arrived to a techno rendition of Hava Nagila. (Here is a pretty zany rendition, complete with sax in the background)

Everything was going according to plan with the hooding ceremony; bright young things would walk up, get hooded, shake hands with the preceptor, walk over, get their degree from the dean, and keep walking. One or two brought a baby, a couple waved timidly to the audience as they walked off stage. Ho hum.

And then came the brother. He had won some award, and was clearly a favorite of the faculty. And this dude was a sharp looking brother, dreads and all. Lady killer. And then the hooder did something that screwed up everything afterward. He gave him a brother hug. Which is like a handshake (fingers over wrist, not under) followed by a chest bump with the other arm draped over the shoulder.

the dude went his way, and so did the hooder. Up came the next pair. And then the mayhem started. The graduand went for a handshake; the woman hooding him went for a hug. Midway they tried to correct and went the other way round. And then corrected again. End result: woman having one arm around the guy's neck and the other holding his wrist as he held her waist and karate chopped her in the boob. And that happened ALL NIGHT. I mean, over and over and over. It was incredibly awkward. Plus the added confusion of "Do I go over to the right as I hug? Or left?" which is much more dangerous because if you get that wrong, you'd be locking lips with your thesis advisor in front of a thousand of your colleagues.

It was terrible. Fortunately there were a few who made it absolutely clear from the start; they'd walk up to get hooded with open arms, and you just can't shake hands then. Or they'd walk in with their one arm outstretched and (with the exception of a couple really determined members of the faculty) get a warm handshake.

Which brings me to my idea. You can either be blunt and walk up like those folks, which in my opinion is a little awkward because you don't do the hug/shake thing until AFTER you get hooded, or you need to have a secret sign - a little shrug of the shoulders and bat your eyelids means you want to be hugged. Or a little fist bump against your own chest means you get a brother hug. A tug of your gown means you want the occasion to be formal and not all warm and fuzzy.

That, trust me will save you and your advisor some embarassment. Though it will rob the event of some humor...

ps: Here is an AWESOME metal version of Hava Nagila

pps: Nicole Scherzinger (lead singer of PussyCat Dolls) is hhaaaaaaatttt.... Can't believe she isn't Indian... take a look at her in the Jai Ho video above. The dude who sings the "Jai Ho" is AR Rahman btw, the music director - won the academy award for SlumDog. Comes from my state :)

LAN party that I witnessed (but did not participate in)

This is the wikipedia definition of LAN party.
"...A LAN party is a temporary, sometimes spontaneous, gathering of people together with their computers, which they network together primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games. These local area networks (LANs) come in various sizes, from very small (two people) to very large (more than 10,000 people). Small parties can form spontaneously, but large ones usually require a fair amount of planning and preparation on the part of the organizer..."

And This is mine.

The hole in the retina story

So I slept with my lenses in last night, and when I got up this morning one of them had crept up and had gone way up in my eye socket. I kept trying to get it back, but all it did was to push it back farther and farther, and before you knew it, I had a contact lens in the back of my eye, out of reach. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable feeling, when its *just* out of reach, but you know its there, your eyeball is all bloody and bruised from your attempts at retrieving the damn piece of plastic... Well, anyway, it floated back on its own a few hours later, but all this reminded me of a little eye incident I had last year. Here it is.


It happened when I was playing indoor soccer – it was one of those league games where you got a bunch of teams with hugely varying skill levels. The good ones would sniff each other out during pick-up games, get each others’ numbers, and form a team which would annihilate the opposition by an average score of 22-0, and so they’d be happy. The really crappy teams were full of dumb blondes and hippy kids who didn’t care what the result of the game was. “Aw, we’re just here to have fun! (joyous clapping of hands).” “ Oooo, Emma, what pretty pink socks you have on today!” and so they were happy because they didn’t give a flying fuck. In between were teams like us, which had reasonably good players and a bunch of deadweights who scored every once in a while by pure chance. Like me. We were the perennially unhappy ones, because we’d lose to the good teams, and we’d only beat the lousy ones 5-2. We were also the only ones that actually showed up on non-league games to discuss strategy and try out set pieces. Yeah, we were that team.

Anyway, this one time, we were playing with a team of pansies, and this grossly overweight dude was flapping around like a beached whale during the entire game, flitting around the ball like a fifth-grader. This dude had the danger trifecta down - hugely obese, badly coordinated, and extraordinarily enthusiastic. I should’ve stayed away from him, but we ended up chasing the same ball, he got in ahead of me, and with a mighty hip heave, kicked the ball with all the force he could.

Right. Into. My. Eye.

It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to blink, let alone avoid the projectile heading right toward my face. The thing hit my eyeball directly, and I was blinded for a good hour in one eye; Some of the vision came back and the pain went away, but by next morning, I knew something was wrong; I couldn’t see out of the bottom of my right eye. (I would later learn that the jackass blew a hole through my retina). The doctor took one look at it and told me tersely that I needed to get surgery to prevent the whole retina from coming detached. So they wheeled me into the Operating Room right away.

Which is when it got painful.

They asked me if I'd want anesthesia delivered intra-ocularly. Which basically means they inject the anesthetic directly into your eyeball. I did a Sarah Palin (“Thaynks, but no Thaynks.”) because just the thought of an injection into my eyeball made me want to vomit. They said "Well, OK. No worries, its only going to be a little uncomfortable", so I said “Go ahead.” And gave them a cheerful thumbs-up. They turned the lights off, except for the surgeon’s lamp, a nurse wordlessly wheeled in a tray of instruments, and the doctor quietly started counting them off. All of a sudden, the OR took on the look of a cold torture chamber, but hey, these guys were here to help, right? So I took a deep breath, tried to take my mind away from my massively bunched up shorts, and attempted to relax. But it got worse.

First, they forced my eye open (like they did to Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange) so I couldn’t blink. And then they put q-tips and spatulas in the gap between my eyeball and socket, and leveraged my eyeball partially out of the socket to expose it. By this time, my sphincter was going into spasms, but I soldiered on. Surely this was almost over by now. But no, they then prodded it, poked at it, shone lights at it, and just when I was ready to pass out, they asked me "So, shall we start?" Oh, Jesus, no.

Which is when, dear friends, they turned on the laser (Giant exaggerated quotes). Now, this wasn’t some dinky ass light that you can use as a pointer, or to check out groceries, or use as a trip alarm. No, no, no. This thing could burn holes through paper held half a mile away. This is what they use to beam signals in binary code to extraterrestrial beings. This is what they used on Khaled Shiekh Mohammed’s ass when he was down at Gitmo. This thing was the Guns of Navarone of lasers. They turned it on (it was green. The 488nm kind) and shot it at my dilated pupil. Of course, since my eyes were forced open, I had no choice but to stare right at the damn thing as it annihilated my pupil, cornea, retina, optic nerve and the half of my brain that happened to be in the wrong half of my skull. Plus the damned thing came in these short pulses, each of which felt like someone was trying to nail gun my eye to the back of my skull.

The laser was bad enough that along with the left half of my face it also destroyed the manly ego that was my steadfast companion when I was wheeled into the OR. I had to tell them to stop after about 10 pulses. I asked (well, pleaded) for anesthesia, intra-ocular or otherwise. I was ready to take up a giant shot of morphine up the ass to stop the pain. “Too bad, yogi”, they said. “We've started this thing, we’ve got to finish this now. Sorry buddy. Well, here’s a wooden spoon. Bite on it, it might help.”

And then they go on to give me TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY MORE LASER PULSES. TWO. HUNDRED. AND. NINETY. By the end I had lost all sense of sight and sound (but not sense of pain, sadly), I was watering from every orifice in my body, and was pretty much ready to admit to being a North Korean spy, Mexican drug lord and Osama bin Laden’s man-whore all rolled into one. I mean, I was in some serious pain, while the jackass eye-surgeon was probably laser-etching his signature on the back of my eyeball… traumatic.

Anyway, all that stuff rolled through my head this morning as I was trying to grope around my eyeball to get to me lens, and I thought I should tell you all about it.

ps : Recovery only took a couple days. My other eye learned to compensate, and I really can’t tell anything's wrong except if I'm trying to read out of the bottom right of my left eye as I'm winking in the dark.

pps : When given the choice, don’t be a hero. Ask for anesthesia.

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING

My roommate just got pulled out of bed (midway through his law school assignment) by his girlfriend, and got dragged to her new swing dance session. Now, I love this woman; she's adorable and all that, but the guy can't dance if his life depended on it (by his own admission), and its 9:30 pm on a cold windy rainy winter day. I just saw them trot out the door - well, she trotted out and he shuffled out into the cold, looking like a broken man in his pajamas and slippers who just wanted to lay in bed and write his law school thesis...

So I feel compelled to sit down and write this post on behalf of all of my fellow brothers who absolutely HATE dancing but still go, because, well, we're awesome (and we're hoping you'll be um, nice afterward). Well, as usual, here it is in list form.

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING.

5. Women come in all shapes and sizes. This might look like it's stating the obvious, but nowhere is the difference in height and girth between you and a random woman more apparent than when that random woman is your dancing partner. Its bad enough having to try to twirl our woman around without send her crashing into someone else. But when we're up against a woman who's 6'7" and 320lbs (4'6" and 92lbs is equally bad), it sucks balls. I've had to twirl a really tall woman, and it nearly broke her neck and made me look like a poodle reaching up for a dog treat. I also had a tough time finding another plus-sized lady's hip. She finally had to put my hand in the general area, but I could tell she was all miffed. Too bad, woman. It would've helped if you have ONE concave curve somewhere.

4. Women come in varying skill levels. Its OK if she's worse than us, because then we can do little tricks and make her think she's opposite Fred Astaire. This is good for our ego, which we like. But this doesn't happen often, given that all women seem to have had at least 500 hours of intensive dance training under their belt at birth. So instead we get a woman who's just danced with the instructor and is all pissed off because she's now stuck with the lousy Indian dude who is trying, but still sucks. You know how sometimes you go on a crappy date and you just want it to end asap? Well, that's how these women act. You can tell they would rather swallow rusty nails than dance with you. Well, screw you woman; I wanted to be at home and watch football. And all that dancing with the instructor isn't going to get you shit. He was checking out my ass all this while.

3. Women outnumber men 10 to 1 at these events. Obviously, I thought that swimming in this sea of estrogen would be awesome. And initially, it was fun mingling with multiple women. But very soon it dawned on me that this also meant that I would NEVER get a break from dancing. I would just have finished five minutes of unpleasantness with the girl with unshaved underarms, and there would be ten others staring at me wide-eyed and transmitting massive "pick-me-for-the-next-dance" vibes. So I'd have to go with someone, and then someone else, and then someone else, and half hour later, I'm all worn out and bruised up, and sure enough, there's hairy girl again, looking at me beseechingly...

2. We hate leading. Hate. Hate. Hate leading. Listen, you're the ones all about dancing, why don't you make up some bullshit moves and lead me along? I don't care. You're all about women's lib and equality and all that anyway, so why don't you go ahead and take over the reins on this one? We genuinely won't mind, I can assure you. Instead, we have to think of something smart every seven seconds so that you don't get bored. And all you do is play along and stay mildly amused until we think up of the next trick. Its this neverending battle to come up with neat dance moves (which we men will always lose anyway, since the gay instructor dude will always pull some bullshit trick out of his ass which will make everyone ooh and ahh) that tires me out more than anything else. First, I get dragged out to waste time when I should've been on my couch watching the game, and then I have to bear the responsibility of keeping you (and your stupid dance crazy friends) amused? Go adopt a kitten or something.

1. But the number one reason men hate dancing is: WE JUST DON'T GET THE POINT. Listen. We don't enjoy this shit. Its a big fucking waste of time. We hate the music, because its usually gay shit that they should outlaw outside of old age homes and English-as-a-second-language barbecue parties. We hate the overenthusiastic women who swoon over the instructors. We hate that there's only water and no beer to rehydrate. We hate the excuse of "well, its a good workout!", because we do bench presses, bicep curls and 10k runs if we want to work out, thankyouverymuch. We hate the "you can be close but not too close to the other girls" rules that you make up before dance class. If the woman's hot, I'm copping a feel. But most of all, we hate it because we're wired differently. The only reason we dance is so that we can sleep with one of the dance-crazy-yet-coordination-challenged women who think we're awesome, or, if we're dating a dance-crazy woman, so that we can sleep with her after we get home. For most of us, all the sex we get is purely out of pity, so even though its incredibly demeaning, sort of like throwing us a dog treat, we do it. Because, as much as we hate dancing, we like sex even more.

So ladies, go ahead and abuse us. Insult us, drag us out at unearthly hours, embarrass us in front of gay instructors, critique our technique, make us dance with random women, but please, please, remember why we're doing it. And give us a little pity.

The Student Papers story

Here's a little piece of advice: No matter how smart you are or look, no matter how many lives you are going to save with your stellar research, no matter how far and often you travel, if you're an International student in the US, DO NOT FORGET YOUR STUDENT PAPERS WHEN YOU LEAVE THE COUNTRY. I did, just this once, in 2004, and boy, did they do a good job of making sure I never repeated that mistake again...

Here's the story.

This is their first trick - no one says a thing when you leave the US. Not a whimper. Just a "Hello sir, how are you. Have a nice flight." No mention of student papers. so you leave the US, fly by the national airline of some breakaway Soviet republic because they offer you the cheapest tickets even though it means three days of flying and six stops in countries that have landing strips in the middle of meadows. And you finally land wherever you're going. For my story, this was England to meet a soon-to-be-extinguished flame (which we are NOT going to discuss today). Now this whole flame story was burning strong back then, so I had a great three weeks without so much as a thought about the case in the bottom draw of my closet, which is where my student papers were stuck.

At the end of three glorious weeks, I head back to the States. We land, and I walk right up to the people at immigration counters with my passport in hand. I stand in line, looking at the people in front of me, the counters, and America proper in the distance, beyond the glass doors. Sure enough, I get pulled out of the line at random ("Uh, security procedures, sir."), and get sent to another line that also has randomly chosen people. They're all randomly chosen brown men. We're all standing somewhat nervously now, because our line clearly has beefed up security, a couple of not-so-friendly dogs, and their even more not-so-friendly handlers. Plus there was a huge poster of the twin towers burning with the caption "Never to forget". Aware that we were being watched really closely, I ignore the overwhelming urge to scratch my butt, lest they think I've hidden something up there, and try to look like a confident, erudite, yet non-threatening intellectual. I think I ended up looking confidently constipated.

Anyway, one of these officials walks past, giving individual passports a quick look through. Soon its my turn, and I hand mine over. He takes a quick look : "Kedar eh? (he pronounces it something like Kaydaah) Rhymes with Al-Qaida, eh? Haw-haw-haw!" I laugh nervously, but the line inches forward, so he lets me go without any further ado. The poor sod behind me is named Mohammed Iqbal, so that calms my somewhat jangled nerves. Eventually though, its my turn, and I put on my best smile, determined to be friendly as I walk up to this lady. She looks like a pibull that's just lost a close fight.


"Hey there, how are you doing dear?"

"Passport please."

"Uh, OK." And I hand it over.

"Student papers."

"W-what?"

And then she takes her eyes off her desk and looks at me. Right into my eyes. Through my eyes into my brain. And through my brain stem into the depths of my soul. I feel an icy fist take a vice-like hold of my insides.

"Student. Papers."

It takes about a second for my neurons to fire off three quick messages to my brain :

1. She wants your student papers.

2. If you don't have your student papers, you're screwed.

3. Your student papers are in the bottom draw of your closet with your underwear.

and then with the finality of a denial-of-visa stamp :

4. You're screwed.

The cold sweat, nausea and the giant block of ice in the pit of my stomach follow, but I manage to stay standing and stammer out "B-b-but I-I dont have my p-p-papers on me..."

Now I don't know whether she signalled by hand, or pushed a button, or blew a whistle - I was busy witnessing my life flash in front of me. Either way, I was surrounded by blue shirts before you could say Terror Suspect. The one guy is busy whispering to the others, obviously about how my name rhymes with a terrorist organization. I want to shove his baton up his poetic ass, but I realize I'm the one in trouble so I try to keep a brave face on what is a rapidly deteriorating situation.

So they lead me to the "holding area", which really is a euphemism for "Jail cell where we interrogate terror suspects trying to gain entry into and cause harm to the citizens of the United States of America". On my way there I see they've set the dogs on my backpack. Everyone in all the lines is trying to get a better look at the
potential terrorist that the vigilant immigration officials have successfully nabbed. They make me sit in the holding area. It wasn't quite the cement bed and iron bar look that I was expecting; there were a couple of couches and even a potted plant in the corner. Plus a couple of copies of "Immigration handbook for foreign nationals" on a table, just in case I wanted to read what was in store for me. I'm glad there are a bunch of rules, because the cops who had guns looked like they were itching to use them. I pick up the immigration handbook and pretend to read it. The way I saw it, I was going to be sent back to India on a rowboat, forever condemned to live my life in disgrace, forever known as the bright kid who threw away a promising scientific career because he forgot a piece of paper. Either that, or I was going to the Baltimore Supermax correctional facility, sure to become a man-bitch for Bubba. I pray for the rowboat.

Finally two cops come up and start talking to me. They want to know everything about me. I mean everything right from where I was born to what I'd had for lunch. And they do this classic good-cop bad-cop thing. McBride is the pleasant one (he tells me to call him marty). Lopez is the bastard. Each time this guy is yelling about how I can't trick him and how America is such an accommodating country and people like me are screwing it up and making his life miserable his eyeballs are an inch away from mine and he spraying bits of half-eaten doritos all over my face. I'm thinking the sonofabitch or his dad probably jumped a fence to get here, but I try to be as contrite and polite as possible. After a bit he takes a break and he leaves to go to the next room, leaving the door ajar. I'm sure he does this on purpose, because I can CLEARLY see a box of latex gloves and vaseline on the table. And this is where I have to admit, I really, really thought things were going to end badly. Missing papers or not, the possibility of a detention center rendezvous with Lopez and his vaselined glove was not the way I thought I would be welcomed into this country. Marty must've seen my ashen face, because he moves over to block my view and continues his questions about my work. This is where I get a gigantic break - as we chat he mentions his wife was treated for colon cancer at Johns Hopkins. I immediately tell him that my work may some day help find a cure for cancer (it won't, but I was doing all I could to avoid Lopez and his glove). We start chatting about it, and as luck would have it, Marty buys all my crapola, and leaves to talk to Lopez. Both come back, and Lopez grunts "OK, you get your one call". He's clearly disappointed he didn't get to do a cavity check.

The rest, fortunately, was easy if not quick. I called my landlady, an absolutely wonderful lady, and she rummaged though my underwear to get my little case that had my papers. She brought it over to the airport, and three hours later (glove box and vaseline untouched), I stagger out of Baltimore-Washington International airport and head back home. The air never smelled sweeter in the free world...

The Rock Concert story (2004)

From another mass mail (unsent, I think)

... which reminds me of my other adventure; the American rock concert experience. I have been to a few of these now, so I feel the need to tell the uninitiated about what happens. (Even if you aren't a rock concert virgin, read on anyway; this section will contain the word boob). Anyways, there are a couple of things you should know.

1. The air at any rock concert will be saturated with the smell of weed. You'd think with all the brouhaha about marijuana, there would be some control. There isn't. Which is OK if you're trying to bum a joint, but not OK if you're an ex-asthmatic actually trying to get a look at the stage through the haze. Short and shallow breaths work though...

1a. Watch out for the puddles of spilled beer/vomit/urine. There's a lot of alcohol at social events in America. And a rock concert is very social.

2. People will be dressed funny. Weirdness of attire is a function of hardness of music, as a general rule of thumb. Also when in doubt, wear black and include some metal. if you show up in bondage attire (whip and all), paint your face white and color your mohawk electric blue, you've arrived, baby.

3. Watch out for the surfers. Crowd surfing is becoming a bloody pain. Instead of people going from the front to back, its the reverse these days. Which is bullshit, because people are just hoping to get their asses carried by other people all the way to the stage. So as you face the stage, watch for flailing arms and legs as people get flung on you. Move if you can (there was this guy built like a house next to me and he kept throwing these surfers from 8 feet high. One chick was in mid air when the crowd in front of her parted, somewhat inexplicably. Chick met ground. S-p-l-a-t. She didn't crowd surf very much after that...)

4. Moshing. You need to know this to survive. Sometimes, in the middle of a concert, people will, for no apparent reason, start moshing. Now this isn't your usual jostling for space in front of the stage, oh no. This is people throwing their (and others') bodies around epileptically, to convey their heartfelt appreciation of the music, with scant regard for their own - or others' - safety. As this happens, well meaning and more sane people form a ring around these dozen-or-so morons and watch the fun unfold. If someone gets clotheslined and lands on you, you do your bit and helpfully push the poor sod back into the fray so he can get piledriven by some other socially maladjusted idiot. Alcohol numbs not only the part of your brain that makes decisions, but also the bit that senses pain, apparently. Awesome for the Indian dude who drew the short straw and had to be designated driver for the day. There are some rules, though. Punching and kicking is frowned upon, unless in retaliation, and biting is definitely a no-no, unless its between two lusting adoloscents (though with all that moving, you might rip an artery out, so masticating on your girlfriends neck is probably ill-advised as well).

5. You will see boobs, and sex in the bathrooms (you need to be lucky for the latter though). This bit is the revenge of the ladies. Since they cant mosh - well, a few do, but they're usually scary or ugly or both, and you don't want to see their boobs or have sex with them, unless you have NO other option - they will flash the star on stage. Or you, if they're drunk enough and don't know the stage from the parking lot. Either way, you get to see some. Or a lot. Which could be good (drunk hot college chick), or very, very bad (old ugly drugged out mosher lady).

And in the midst of all this, there's some poor guy whose trying to belt out his angst-laden lyrics while gyrating earnestly on stage hoping to convince you he's doing his best to justify the 50 bucks you coughed up to be there so he can pay for his next coke binge.

Fun, no?

Life of an Indian graduate student in America

You know what, I found a bunch of little things that I had written here and there about my somewhat eventful life here in the US the past few years here; perfect for my blog! ha!

Yr 1 of a PhD (2003)

I used to (and still occasionally do) write mass emails to all the people in my address book. This used to piss them off endlessly, and now I see why. I dug this email out from way back, and I present this gem of bad writing to you.

I used to be one angry kid back then.


So you've been wondering what I've been up to?

PhD, Hopkins, Baltimore. Waste of time and effort.

For all the work (yes, there was lots), I barely broke the curve in most exams (for the record, I didnt get a single A+ ; these were handed out to 5 people out of some 180, and we had about 15 asian students. So I didnt even try.) but I was enthusiastic enough in class that people invented a card game where the backbenchers would bet on most questions asked, worst dressed, loudest in class etc. I'm proud to say I was a star card ("most questions asked" category). Always the popular one...

Not so popular with the TA.

Me: Uh, you know, I could give you something really nice if you give me an A on that exam...

She: Scram,kiddo.

Me (persistent): Ahem, you know what they say about Indian men...

She: Yep. I know. THEY'RE TINY. HAHAHAHAAAAAA.

Me: Sod off.

I got a B-.


Still, as part of a PhD, you get to do a lot of lab work in addition to cramming or meaningless exams. I'm doing Immunology, so this has involved (at different times) staring at flourescent cells for hours on end on a microscope in a dark subterranian cubbyhole, injecting afore mentioned cells into the tails of very uncooperative mice - this, being a novice, I did horrendously - and then analysing survival curves, which basically means you watch the mice waste away and die a painful death as a result of your experiment. You note which day each one died, and plot these data. All this will somehow magically become a cure for cancer few years from now.

In addition to all this, there is this steady stream of

- talks (where you go for food and sleep/pick your nose for an hour as some idiot blathers on about how he's been wasting his time and his boss' money and ended up with crap results anyway),

- presentations (where you watch ingrate colleagues stuff their faces with free food and sleep/pick noses in full view for an hour as you try to explain to the imbeciles on about how hard youve been working and utilising your boss' resources in the pursuit of higher scientific goals),

- journal clubs (all of us pseudointellectuals trash some poor sod's data)

- lab meetings (we trash each others data, but more politely)

- happy hours (sad meetings of lab rats where we drown our sorrows - mostly ruined experiments and singledom issues - in an ocean of alcohol to the sound of 80s pop) These are the only gettogethers that last way more than an hour - unless you have a gel running - and where you learn more about anything than anywhere else. Lurid gossip about co-workers? Happy hour's your place, baby. Boss ran out of money? This is where you cry your heart out. Plus of course, all the women look vastly prettier after 4 beers...

So thats pretty much how a first year in a grad program in an elite university in the US looks, academically.

Right now, I'm settling in one of these labs (the only one that would tolerate me), working on something called "antigen presentation". The learning curve is steep. Of course, I've made a great start - I screwed up my labmate's experiment by swapping labeled tubes (honest mistake, I swear), and I also got caught by my boss looking at a pic of a naked woman - an attachment sent lovingly by one of my moron middle school friends. So clearly, they love me here already.

And I got 5 more years of this.