iPod blues

(this is actually bob II's japanese cousin, but the family resemblance is striking and i don't actually have a picture of bob II himself. )

my ipod, bob II (named after my first ipod, bob I) has decided to pull a bob I on me and stop working. damn those wonderful, life-changing gadgets. i have the worst luck with anything electronic. maybe i have some electric force field thing around me that short circuits anything with a microchip or a motor. who knows?

in any case, apple was kind enough to send me a shipping box and now bob II is on his way to get repaired. halleluja and praise the lord!! but what, oh what am i to do in the intervening weeks? if you don't have an ipod then you will not understand , but i have become very codependant on bob II. i now live most moments of my life to a sountrack played through cute, little white headphones and i feel lost without my dear companion! so lost that (confession time) i "borrowed" my roommate's ipod today without asking. i couldn't help it. even though her music is different i needed something to listen to. it's not my fault! ok, maybe it is, but still...

anywho. i'm hungover and my brain isn't feeling up to par so i would like to apologize for the lack of literary merit contained within this post. the main purpose of writing anything is to let you all know that i'm about to blow this town and head up to the big apple. i'll only be gone for a few days but blog fans have a tendancy to be fair-weather about their devotion and i figured that if i didn't squeeze in at least one post before i left that many of you might wander off and forget about me. so i tricked all of you into sticking around with this shitty-ass post. i'm sneaky like that. (eyes shift to the right. then to the left).

well, i'll be back soon. hopefully with some new york-inspired stories. man, that place is nuts.

chow.

michigan?

well, this post is once again just me taking a moment to FREAK OUT! um, ok. i have two weeks to decide if i want to move to ann arbor, michigan in january with my major advisor and continue grad school there. two fucking weeks. here are my four choices:

1: stay in athens for graduate school, find a new advisor, and continue on the project i have already started. unfortunately my current research is very dull. but i am almost guaranteed to finish it within two years.

2: stay in athens but look for a new advisor and a new project to work on. this option is tempting but it might be hard to find someone with funding to support me and it would take me longer to finish school. on the other hand, i could end up working on a project that really interests me (evolution) as opposed to one that doesn't (soil nitrogen dynamics).

3: move to michigan, keep my major advisor (who rules, by the way), and go to grad school up there. this would, of course, require me to uproot my life, start an entirely new research project, make new friends, etc. on the other hand, it gives me a chance to move to a new city and have a guaranteed job (i can feel that driving urge to move on, to keep looking for something new waking up again. i try to ignore it, but i've never been able to do more than temporarily still that restlessness).

4: forget school, leave athens, go somewhere fun, get a useless job, hang out for a year and then go to grad school in the fall of 2006. in ann arbor maybe?

help! two weeks!!!!

outsmarted by a crawdad

so, back before athens had that nice greenway and the current greenway entrance on oconee street was a just crappy old salvation army store, there was a small tributary of the oconee river across the street. it was there that i found my pet crayfish, little guy.

ah, little guy. we had such good times together.

when first i rescued you from your beautiful, free home and forced you to live in a small fishbowl with two dirty old goldfish you were indeed little. but how you grew. catching all of those fish flakes in your claws and biding your time. you had a plan all along to regain your freedom and i had no idea. sneaky little guy.

i didn't think that crayfish were intelligent enough to plan, but i should have realized that something was up when you started stalking the goldfish. waiting on your rock for them to swim by so that you could jump on them and hang onto their tail fins. is that how you did it? it is just a small leap from the back of a fish to the top of the bowl. i wonder...

and still you grew. and plotted your escape. and still i had no clue. feeding you more and more fish food and remarking on how cute you were and how you were getting so much bigger.

then one day, the inevitable- little guy was gone. he disappeared. i still don't know how. i looked everywhere but to no avail. finally, i was forced to come to the sad conclusion that simon the cat had eaten him. poor little guy.

later that night i went out to the manhattan and ran into my friend ben who said that he saw the strangest thing earlier that evening. what did he see? well, he was out walking his dog on milledge avenue and saw a crayfish walking down the street. casually making his way along the gutters of milledge. now i know that it's improbable that the crayfish he saw was actually little guy. milledge avenue is quite a ways from carr street but still... perhaps it was more than just a simple coincidence. perhaps little guy made his break for freedom and headed off to sorority row for some good times before making his way back to the banks of the muddy creek where we first made our acquaintance. i'll never know for sure but i certainly like that version of the story better than the idea of him in simon's stomach.

little guy. the coolest crayfish i've ever known. perhaps because he's the only crayfish i've ever known but anyway, i like to imagine him dropping into the rain gutters of milledge avenue at sunset and spending the rest of his crustaceous life listening to the sounds of bad country music blaring from the frat houses and looking up the skirts of sorority girls as they pass by chatting on their cell phones. hell, i guess it beats living in a damn fish bowl.

*addendum: eli would like me to note that little guy was also his pet. this fact was omitted from the story for the sake of simplicity. i was in no way implying that eli was a bad crayfish owner or that he was not equally invested in the welfare of little guy (rip).

who? what? nitrogen? good lord, i need a beer.

i'm currently up to my eyeballs in papers about hemlocks, nitrogen, invasive species, earthworms, and fatty acids, among other fascinating things. too much to do. too many papers to write, no time for blogging fun. don't give up on me though. soon enough i will post something good. or maybe my brain will be so fried that i will just post the only thing i've written lately. my thesis proposal. let me tell you, it is a page turner. pray that it doesn't come to that.