it never fails...

most of the time, i'm in the lab at odd hours compared to everyone else. i am usually by myself, so i have the radio to myself.

but it seems that every time i happen to be in the lab first to claim radio control, my slightly elderly co-workers come in the lab to work, and the nine inch nails song "closer" never fails to come on. this happened today.

now, i know what you are thinking: i could easily NOT listen to a station that would play that song while in the presence of other people. there are many other stations to choose from, but if i'm alone, that's the one i choose. i am a courteous employee - i always ask my colleagues if the station is OK, if it's too loud, blah, blah, etc, etc. they always say the same thing: "this is nothing! i have teenage kids at home!"

even so, every time that song comes on, i can't help thinking "oh GOD, not AGAIN!" and i can't help getting the slightest bit embarrassed! :)

creepy crawly

i was in our department's biweekly meeting today, having just finished my presentation. discussions about my data were launched and our executive director began a spiel about his thoughts.

as i was sitting back listening, i felt something tickling my left hand, which was sitting on my lap under the table. since i was wearing a really fuzzy sweater which has a tendency to shed, i just brushed my hand without looking, thinking it was just a piece of lint. when the tickling happened again, i pushed my chair out from under the table and looked at my hand: there was a pincher bug on me!

needless to say, i leaped out of my seat and started flailing my arms around saying "oh my god, oh my god, there is a bug on me!", trying to shake the thing off. it landed on my chair, then crawled underneath it, out of sight. i was probably more dramatic than i needed to be, but that darn bug scared the crap out of me! we all had a really good laugh about it, and after i sat down, i had to bite my tongue for the rest of the meeting so i wouldn't have an attack of the giggles.

talk about professional!

concert review #1 - the lovemakers

so one of the reasons for this blog is to post my concert reviews! excitement!

last night i went to see the lovemakers at the great american music hall in san Francisco. an appropriate band to be playing on valentines day. after dining out at my favorite taco joint NCTs, we walked down to the venue. upon hitting the stage, scott and lisa (yes, i looked up their names) released a ton of red balloons into the audience with some cool synthesized music in the background. it was a cool effect when combined with the smoke. their stage presence was great – they acted their parts and were over the top with facial expressions and body movements. this is something i like to see because it shows that they are really into putting on a performance rather than just standing there and singing. and with this type of music, they can get away with acting kind of ridiculous. Highlights for me were “falling apart” (you can’t deny the catchiness of this tune) and “shake that ass”. the thing i like about their music is that they make you want to dance! the electronic/rock dance genre is totally making a bigger dent in mainstream music, with bands like every move a picture, panic! at the disco, ladytron, etc. it’s very high energy, let your hair down, and move that body kind of music.

the only thing i wish they had done was to keep the momentum going throughout the show by not pausing so much between songs. at the beginning, after releasing the balloons, they should have launched into the first song right after the synthesized music ended instead of chatting with the audience, etc. other than that, i think they’ve got a promising career ahead of them.

and i actually bought a t-shirt, something i rarely do at shows – how can i resist a baby-T that says “oakland is for lovemakers”. i’m not from oakland, but… whatever!

snow!

what a fantastic weekend! i was in the mountains with leslie learning to ski at kirkwood. there are a few things that i learned: a) skiing is fucking hard. b) hot guys are EVERYWHERE at ski resorts.

let's focus on point "b" for a moment. why did i not know this before? i was honestly shocked at the high concentration of good looking men skiing and snowboarding. seriously. and this includes the people who work there too. and they were from all over the world: australia, france, south africa, germany, sweden, ireland, russia, etc. etc. etc. clearly, i have been looking in the wrong places. i should have been going to ski resorts all this time!

as sort of a joke, i emailed leslie our goals for the ski weekend before we went:

1. teach denise how to ski.
2. find hot guy for denise.
3. find hot guy for leslie.
4. have hot guys buy us drinks after a long day of skiing.
5. make out with hot guys.
6. ski some more.

this gave us a good laugh, but we actually managed to accomplish #1, 2, 3, and 6. i had a half day lesson on saturday, in which i mastered the green slopes and turning while keeping my skis parallel (this was with leslie's help). i was feeling pretty confident by the end of the day. so sunday came and i moved on to some other green slopes which looked a LOT steeper to me. so i spent time getting the hang of that. other goals were accomplished when 2 french guys and a swedish one found us enjoying our beers at the pub on saturday night, and we (more like leslie) had some skiing buddies on sunday. the circle was then enlarged with the addition of 2 russians. this is how i got coaxed to get on an intermediate slope. it was 6 against one, and i'm sure if i refused, they would have all dragged me to the chair lift. so, white knuckled and scared out of my freaking mind, i managed to get down the blue slopes - once with leslie and the swede, and 3 more times on my own. i'll spare the excruciating details of how i got down the mountain, but let's just say that i made it back in one piece.

all in all, i would say it was a successful weekend. i'm sore as hell, but it was worth all the eye candy.

chemistry is cool...

citric acid certificate of analysis: PRODUCT IS DERIVED FROM FERMENTATION OF CORN STARCH & BEET MOLASSES

cool! i can picture gigantic tanks of corn starch and molasses churning at the sigma-aldrich headquarters. sometimes i look at all the stuff around me and wonder about the sources they came from. i mean, how much work does it really take to make a pen? or a hole puncher? all that plastic and metal has to initially come from some part of the earth that at some point was dug up and sent off to a factory to be "processed". who does the job of digging up raw materials that go into making all the crap that clutters my desk? hmm.

well, right now i need the muse of science to swoop down and give me some inspiration. experiments aren't giving me the results i want. searching the literature doesn't help b/c it's hard to research something that hasn't been done before. so it's time for new ideas and new methods. deadline is end of Q1. where is my muse?!

(check out ladytron's "destroy everything you touch")

funny stuff...

i am listening to the radio and radiohead's "creep" just finished playing. a girl called the station right after:

girl: "what band was that?"
DJ: "uh, radiohead!" (with a tone of disbelief that the caller didn't know this already.)
DJ again: "wait a minute - how old are you?"
girl: "i'm 15."
DJ: "ok, you're off the hook." (or something like that - i missed the exact wording, i was laughing so hard.)

well that explains it! HA! damn, i feel old.

my thoughts on coldplay

this week, i missed coldplay at the arena. i have mixed feelings about this, and on the night of the show, i tried not to think about the fact that i wasn't there. what it basically came down to was that i refused to pay $95 to see coldplay knowing i wasn't going to be within 50 feet of the stage. since i've seen this band perform numerous times and have met them on multiple occasions, i thought my money would be better spent on seeing 4 - 5 other new bands at 20 bucks a pop.

this decision, however, didn't take away the pain of knowing coldplay was only 5 miles away from me, and i wasn't there!

admittedly, i didn't like coldplay right away. i thought "yellow" (the song that made them famous) wasn't really that great and found it mildly annoying. so i never bought the album. andrea was a huge fan and had an extra ticket to their show in san francisco (summer of 2001, i think?). so i listened to the album the night before the show, thought it was OK, but nothing earth shattering. i saw them live, listened to "parachutes" again, and it started to grow on me...

as much as i love coldplay, i am let down. their 3rd album, X & Y, was utterly disappointing. weak lyrics, melodies and sounds borrowed from other artists, and horrendous song arrangement made this album fall very VERY short of what i had expected. i remember rushing to buy when it was released and as track one was ending, i thought "GOD, this is going to be good." but when i found myself skipping through "fix you" and "what if?" and hating how the album ended, my opinion changed. what happened to the sweet and somber melodies of "parachutes" or the edgy and thoughtful riffs of "a rush of blood to the head"? it's not that i hate this album - i can appreciate some of the songs. i suppose a band can't make a great album every time, and maybe it was wrong of me to expect that.

what i found utterly embarrassing about the whole thing was the enormous effort that went into promoting this album. previews claiming that this would be "coldplay's best album yet" and comparisons to U2 were serious missteps, in my opinion. has the general public come to expect less and less of music these days? i guess with all the britneys, jessicas, and avril lavigne's, maybe.

for coldplay to recover from this, they need to stop trying to make music that everyone will like. when you try to please everyone, something really really important is lost. so i will hope that this album will just be a fluke, and that the boys will get their creative juices flowing again for album 4, whenever that may be.