ika

Oh hell I think I'm in love.

San Francisco (and Berkeley, and UC Berkeley) is just full of unicorns and rainbows. You'd think it might just be new people enthusiasm, but everyone has been amazing, honestly truly without a single shred of cynicism, insincerity and sarcasm that characterises like, just every speech and thought pattern I've ever had.

There's a lot more applied than I'm used to, and just more exploring (aka farting around except we call it Science aka the real spirit of science) than focus, and initially I was like this is all rubbish let's get to the systematics but now I've been bitten by their mind leech and it's beginning to sound sensible.

So I met up with a stunning number of people today, including Tari!!!! (Hi Tari!) and gave her her present. It was great talking to you, I hope I didn't come off as too nuts or loud or what. In terms of people at Berkeley PMB, half of them were doing things so unrelated to what I want to do it's funny (corn paramutation???!?!?! transcriptor repression and activation of immune responses/pigmentation what? Environmental microbiology???) but they explained everything to me nicely and I just got excited everywhere by how new and shining it all was. I was so yay it makes me sick.

Starbucks (Where I met Tari) was actually cheaper than that in Singapore today, I got orange blossom tea (green tea, orange blossoms, wolfberries) for 1.99. Otherwise it was just lots of food all day provided by the university and/or faculty/grad students. Let's see...I ate a poppyseed bagel with cream cheese on one side and strawberry cream cheese on the other, some fruit salad, yoghurt with berries, fruit juice in the morning, half a turkey and cheese, most of a pickle, fruit salad and a chocolate cookie that I ate in installments for lunch (also I lost my water bottle at this time), and for dinner we went for a potluck thing at a prof's place where I had roast chicken, cornbread, some vegan spicy tofu mushroom thing that sucked (it had potential, and squandered it most shamelessly), and pasta with sausage.

Also I drank wine because it was the closest thing around and I was shouting, and since it was good, I drank a little too much and yes well. Do you know I get even more excited about science and unable to follow a single narrative thread when I'm tipsy? (As you can sort of tell from this post)

The Berkeley campus is very nice. Magnolias are flowering. Fat tame squirrels everywhere. Lots of appallingly fashion-forward young ridiculously attractive people.

Tomorrow = walking tour and creole food.