Who are you?

It's been a while. Last entry was in, let's see...September. Two months ago. It's not that I forget about my blog, I actually often jot down ideas on what to write about. It's just the task of sitting down and formulating a coherent entry, the fear of staring at my words, that's inhibiting the whole process.

Some topics I've considered writing about:

• The existential and depressing encounter with a caterpillar in a small town on Lake Como, just outside of Milan.
• I came home sort of drunk one night and wrote a nice rant on how I wanted to destroy the world.
• There's some note about walls in Germany. Not sure where that one was supposed to go. It just says "There's something about walls in Germany."
• An idea about fat vs. thin. Probably about women and maybe how the media/culture has shaped the ideal appearance. You know, how like we have these ancient Venus figurines which are said to be of the ideal female form of the times, and they're quite rotund. And these days we idealize thin. Although there seems to be a reaction against too thin these days, and there's that whole Dove ad campaign. 
• Sex and poop. Ah, that's one I'd really like to write about, so I will say no more.
• I could always post another story, but I assume I have to forgo publishing those stories. Which would mean I'd have to write entire new stories to publish. Well, speaking of publishing...

I submitted my first paper to a journal called Biotechniques. Science journals have this statistic called the impact factor, which is the average number of citations per article in that journal over the previous 2 years.  It's a measure of how "important" a journal is in the field. Some people are really concerned with the impact factor, other's not so much. Of course, everybody wants an article in a high profile (high impact factor) journal like Science or Nature, because it looks good on a CV and *can* mean that you're doing good science, or at least sexy science. And, presumably, low impact factor journals, the less important journals, publish more mundane or crappier stuff. So you write a paper and submit it somewhere you think is appropriate, and it goes through peer review and is accepted or rejected. If it's rejected, you fix some stuff and submit it somewhere else, probably somewhere less selective. Biotechniques doesn't have a high impact factor, but it's a technical journal which means it's articles are probably only relevant to a small niche of scientists. I figure with my paper, it being technical and all, people who are interested in the topic will find it through search engines. If it gets accepted. It's still in the review process.

Oh, perhaps a conclusion on the move. While I drudge up the details, here's the summary: the nightmare continued and died a slow horrible death over the next few weeks until everything was finally fine.

We left off with me about to go to Croatia on the same day as the move. Croatia was awesome. Intense is a really applicable adjective. Lots of science in the day, all day, and the necessary release at night. It ended with me blowing what was left of my Croatian money on strippers the last night.

While I was sitting pretty in Croatia, my roommates and those that came to help move were sitting pretty in the middle of a Leipzig street waiting for the movers who were over 3 hours late. From what I hear only two of them showed up in a tiny van. One of them was a crotchety old man who smoked the whole time and didn't help. The other was a gimp or something and sort of helped but not really. So roommates and friends had to do everything, all the moving from three different apartments, in one day.  I'm told it was horrible, wanting to quit after 2 hours but still having 6 more to go horrible. But they did it, moved it all in one day, and by the time I got back everything was more or less set up.

The dwindling part of the nightmare involved the apartment being dirty, the electricity not working and not having a functioning kitchen. H&J (the property managers, who are referred to these days as Hildefuck & Fucktards) reinvented their asshole approach to customer service by actually being nice and saying they'd hire a cleaner, only to tell us two days later that they are absolutely NOT hiring a cleaner. Somehow we got the landlords (the handymen) to come over, and they fixed a bunch of stuff and even did some cleaning. The kitchen remained in decreasing stages of disarray for a few weeks as it took a few tries to get the wiring rerouted and the plumbing all sorted out. It was finally completed when I hung this big Ikea shelving unit over the sink. This thing was hanging in one of the previous apartments and always seemed a bit precarious, but it never fell. So I, using the same materials used to hang it in the other place, drilled it into the brick wall and put all our glass and plastic cups in there. A few days later it's Monday morning and I get a cup and pour myself some coffee. I'm leaving the kitchen as my roommate walks in and three steps later there's a horribly loud, unbelievably extended crash. I sort of freeze, then turn back to the kitchen, glass still breaking, and see the shelf on the counter, contents spilled out, broken glass all over the place and my roommate, in her towel, huddled in the corner. "We had too much glass anyway" was the final agreement. The shelf is now sitting in the entryway, waiting to be used as a nice shoe rack.