School

Class is back in session, which means I have lots to learn and lots of work to do.

• Organic Chemistry. Somehow we only have 12 people in my organic chemistry lecture, so we’re all going to be very good friends (or enemies?) by the end of the semester. I’ve discovered that I really like interpreting NMR.
• Probability Theory. I feel underequipped for this class: I was, apparently, supposed to take real analysis first. I found this out when our professor mentioned three facts from analysis that we should be familiar with. I think my saving grace in this class is that I’m alright with basic combinatorics. The problems have been fun, but this will probably be my hardest class this semester.
• Cellular Biology. Very excited about this one. I like the professors and the textbook and the material, which sounds like a recipe for success.
• Linguistics. Introductory linguistics has been great thus far. I’m learning the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and we get to do a sort of mechanistic study of language. If I hadn’t gone into biochemistry, I would have probably chosen to major in linguistics!

Research!

I’m in that exciting phase of project development where I get to do a bunch of pilot experiments. Maybe the data will show the results as worth pursuing, and maybe it won’t. But in the meantime, I’m happy to have more things to work on in the lab.

I’m also trying to be more careful about the papers that I read: focusing in on the most relevant research rather than whatever drips into my feed.

Reading

I just finished City of Last Chances, which was a lot weirder than the last few books I read by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I admire his writing style—Tchaikovsky keeps a menagerie of characters with disparate motivations and backgrounds, and still keeps everything coherent. I’m looking for the next book in this series now!

Also recently finished Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr, which was amazing. It made me sad and it made me laugh out loud, and I adore that kind of emotional range in a novel.

For better or for worse, I do a lot of multi-track drifting when I read. I’m usually jumping between three or four books at a time. Currently: Neurotribes, Braiding Sweetgrass, Catch-22, and Ink Blood Sister Scribe.

Cooking

I recently started paging through Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat, and I feel a lot more confident in the kitchen now. Maybe it’s just because I felt like I needed permission to deviate from recipes and mess around with the ingredients I have, but in the past month I have done a lot more “cooking by taste” than I did all last semester! I’m also happy to show off my new mini cookbook website.