Tag: ⍰

watermelon, grape?

watermelon: do you have a job? if so, what is your job title?

i do! i am an undergraduate research assistant at the moment, which in my case means that i have an independent research project in a dev bio/modeling lab @ my university. this is only a temporary title, however. someday, people will call me by my stage name: they will call me Doctor Worm.

i’m also a TA this quarter for the course my faculty mentor teaches, which, despite being the class i apparently did so well in that he offered me a job w/o me interviewing or even asking, nonetheless contains a great deal of math that i think i am being entirely incompetent at explaining. nonetheless i do… receive money in exchange for doing it, somehow

grape: if you could take a vacation anywhere in the world, where would you go?

…….back to LA which from my very biased experience is basically a magical world of beaches and museums and parks punctuated by waiting 30 minutes to go on a 90-minute train ride. but yeah site of five headiest most delightful five days of my life, check.

but no in the more pipe-dream-y/actual destination sense: some Grand Tour of Europe shit, probably. i miss fuckign…. salzburg, which is. wild of me

🌻

mochi is the most satisfyingly-textured food i’ve ever encountered; it feels like something i would wish existed and doesn’t, but instead it just does, and i can go get it in any grocery store in chinatown. my roommate describes it as sugar flesh but this brings me only more joy.

pomegranate, blueberry, kiwi, papaya, star fruit (hard mode: aside from the vampire squid)

honestly. how dare you. the vampire squid is the low-hanging fruit that i use when i can’t come up with anything better. i was into the vampire squid when i was 12. do you think i’m basic or something

anyway.

pomegranate: when do you feel the most confident?

while setting up a punchline in a group i have a good sense of already; when i’m discussing a journal article w other people; s*x, sometimes, tbh. basically situations where it’s not necessarily that i am exactly right/going to do everything right, even though there’s a decent chance i will, but that i’m sure that i can come across as smart and interesting and valuable regardless.

blueberry: what do you want to dress up as for halloween?

presumably as always i will try to come up with something charmingly esoteric and end up panicking and improvising with whatever i have in my wardrobe. if i’m really lazy or preferably doing several days of costumes then i may repeat last year’s Cambridge Youth Dying Of Consumption. 

kiwi: what’s something that fascinates you?

architecture & architecture theory, not that i like, know or understand anything about it.

papaya: what song describes your aesthetic?

aesthetically, i exist at the intersection of “kiss me, son of god” by tmbg and “staring at the sun” by tv on the radio. i am the middle of that venn diagram.

star fruit: favorite sea creature?

i appreciate the way that tunicates are extremely unlikely-seeming chordates that move from tadpole to notochordless colonies or superficially sea-cucumber-like organisms. plus it’s really cute to watch the backs of the larvae zip themseves up into tiny protonotochords!

send me a fruit

lilcoffinkitten:

peach: do you have any piercings or tattoos?

raspberry: favorite flower?

lemon: do you have any pets? what are their names?

mango: what is your trademark?

passion fruit: how would you describe your style?

pineapple: sexual orientation?

strawberry: favorite desserts?

cherry: can you play any musical instruments or can you sing?

grape: if you could take a vacation anywhere in the world, where would you go?

banana: favorite horror movies?

blackberry: is your life an action film, a comedy, a romantic comedy, or drama?

pomegranate: when do you feel the most confident?

cantaloupe: what are your parents’ names?

guava: dark & dramatic makeup or natural makeup?

tangelo: if you could be any mythical creature, which would you be?

plum: favorite clothing brands?

coconut: favorite perfume?

lychee: satin or lace?

blueberry: what do you want to dress up as for halloween?

apple: what do you use more, tumblr or twitter?

kiwi: what’s something that fascinates you?

watermelon: do you have a job? if so, what is your job title?

papaya: what song describes your aesthetic?

cranberry: favorite time of the day; morning, afternoon, dusk, or night?

nectarine: would you consider yourself an emotional person?

orange: do you have long eyelashes?

apricot: what do you do when you’re sad?

star fruit: favorite sea creature?

dragonfruit: do you drink alcohol?

🌻

as you know, bob, c. elegans roundworm are primarily self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, and males actually occur with a nondisjunction event– hermaphrodites are XX and males are XO, meaning the cell didn’t get all of the X chromosomes it was supposed to have at some point during division. this means that normally males are very rare (<1/1000), since in most cases (example exceptions: the worm sex thing, trisomy 21/down’s syndrome in humans) losing or having an extra chromosome is pretty disastrous for development, and so there are a lot of mechanisms in place to prevent nondisjunction. there is an exception to this, however: if you’re a scientist (as some people are) and want a lot of males so you can perform a cross between two strains, you can just leave the worms at 37˚C for a few hours, and a lot (25%ish ime) of the eggs they lay hatch into males, and these males can then mate with hermaphroditic worms of one’s choice.

this, of course, all just reveals the essential difference between worms and spaghetti: 

worms aren’t straight until you heat them up.

15 & 16 (but only as much as you want of course)

15. five most influential books over your lifetime.

[whatever the first dwj book i read was, probably howl’s moving castle] for highly formative tone/humor/writing-style-is-a-thing-that-exists reasons. a short history of nearly everything by bill bryson, the ideal book to make a trivia-loving vaguely science-minded 10-year-old read if you want to turn it into a scientist, provided you trust that someone will educate the Great White Men of History mindset back out of it later. crush by richard siken but also averno louise glück for the Oh– Hang On– Poetry?? moment. lolariously i read autobiography of red before either of those at age like literally 13 and it did nothing whatsoever for me. uhhhhh. i know i’ve read some real-ass serious books in my life that actually made me think differently but fuck if i know what they were. 

16. if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same?

i think i’d still have certain innate tendencies: anxiety depressive tendencies bookishness sickly etc. i think i picked up being funny/having highly specific taste very consciously so that would probably not reproduce or reproduce differently. i was a very abusable child; not that any child is more prone or more complicit or should be better able to resist any type of abuse, just that i continue to have the exact same desperation to please and terror of repercussions and as far as i can tell my environment was, if not actively not  encouraging that (that was encouraged at least somewhat), certainly not the most encouraging-of-terrified-compliance that it could have been, and i still ended up as a ludicrously high-scrupulosity mess for a lot of years. so i suspect i would have been like that anywhere and while there are definitely ways that could not have been made to hammer me so heavily and repeatedly, there are also a lot of obvious ways it could have been much much worse and i could have been much more blatantly exploited. so uh i could have become crazy way sooner and or been way more traumatized v easily. glad im not! glad i only had some of the obvious potential bad things happen.

i think i could probably have been pulled out of science and into art/writing as my primary field, since i’m basically 50% artist 50% scientist in my relatively recent family history; though it might take a moderately significant perturbation, much more than would have been needed for the trauma mess thing, given even my artist family’s feelings/priorities about art v science lmao

ask meme: 18, 19, 22, and idk whichever ones you most wanted to answer (i say this bc i feel like no one ever happens to pick the ones i most wanted to answer when i reblog these things lol)

18. what’s your patronus?

i don’t strictly know what a patronus is meant to signify about oneself– i mean, obviously i engaged with The Franchise, don’t @ me, but rather whether it’s supposed to be straightforward self-identification or somehow about one’s personal attachments/emotional landscape/representative of that from which one draws strength or desires protection. if the latter there’s an obvious answer i won’t make, and i’m going to pretend it is the latter since that’s more interesting and we all already know i’m a cat (and plus there’s all that stuff about tonks’s patronus and whether harry really identifies with his dad per se etc etc ok there’s my bona fides for you).

anyway eliding the long and obvious answer (that’s a pun and not actually meant to be obvious except to me, when i say obvious i just mean “embarrassing”), it’s like…. idk a really big snake maybe. or. hm. what animal represents the force of joy so strong it stands between me and the loss of my soul? a really good dog but like that’s what anyone would say. a dog that does weird annoying too-smart-so-it-loops-around-to-being-dumb-again dog things, but you love it anyway. 

19. which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle?

ravenclaw, probably, i’m not strictly speaking ambitious i’m kind but not really like that and i’m not brave. however i do love 1. reading 2. being a subject-matter and or technical expert 3. critical analysis 4. accruing enormous amounts of information about someone or something i care about in order to more ably care for them or carry it out. love is knowledge is love is power is knowledge et cetera.

22. list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.

1. reading (aggregate of tumblr + other blogs + various articles/stories found thru those blogs + school readings + dev bio journal articles + once a month or so an actual book) 2. sleep maybe?? not that i do a lot of it but it’s gotta add up 3. social time honestly i spend so much time w other people even if it’s just @ meals. i need lots of alone reading time but i also desperately miserably need social time with people it’s ridiculous. 4. homework/schoolwork/work-work 5. writing/Making for a lot of variable and variably silly definitions of making such as “curating blog”

25. do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?

honestly a lot of the time it is. i am fond of many things about my body– it has more and darker hair than i really want and the ribcage is honestly a total loss but i am Long and sort of androgynously constructed in a way that feels really soothing and harmonious with how i want to seem genderwise/aesthetically. my face is pretty good, could be better but i get a decent cute/exhausted/disdainful expression range and that works. i am … dealing with the clothes thing but i am often looking put-together in a mildly weird/gay/goth way or else doing Relaxed Genderfuck either of which are pleasant. mostly i want to look like a needle-sharp torpedo of infinite genius but like, one you want to make out with; and i think sometimes i’m not actually that far off.

5, 29, 30

5. do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

i think i identify myself mostly by the way i act/present myself? i don’t describe myself as an artist even though i sometimes make art, for instance. my self is about internal state/observations thereof plus how i present myself/act. this is in my mind somewhat materially distinct from being defined by my impact on others– which is not even slightly unimportant to me but i definitely think my essential self would still exist if i were in total isolation, even if many of the parts/effects of it that i care about would stop existing. i also don’t think i’m necessarily defined by the outcomes or results of my actions, which i think is what i would call being defined by “things i do”, even though i guess my actions-with-additional-intent are also self-evidently “things i do” and those do count as part of the me. 

i didn’t answer the question really. i guess even though i know what’s important on any material level is the doing, i do think i have a being in myself that i get to value just for the sake of valuing my own thoughts/qualia. anything else seems like it’s just totally subjugating the concept of me as my own person to the needs/will/totally uncontrollable perceptions of others. holding the latter view feels like it should be virtuous somehow but for me is in practice mostly self-immolating and inducing of total craziness.

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

“the last limit of bhakti”, the mountain goats
let me serve you until it’s all over./when the world is giving your secrets all away/let me give you cover

(i get some free tmg mentions right? anyway “song for an old friend”, “if you see light”, “thank you mario but our princess is in another castle”, great let’s move on) (also smog “to be of use” which i’m binning here bc for me same sentiment + i learned about it indirectly via jd)

“bike dream”, rostam
i’m sure that you’ll catch your breath/you’ll sleep into the day/to wake up with sunlight across your room

“i love you for psychological reasons”, they might be giants
lately i’ve taken to vacantly making repetitive movements mistakenly seen as improvements

30. pick one of your favorite quotes.

it’s going to be from a poem obviously, but:

“I don’t owe anybody for the bad thoughts I think
or will think.” (from I Will Make A Useful Manual For My Tasks and Hide It, laura eve engel)

😆 🌊 😀 🎉 🎶 🍳 👍

😆: You’ve made me laugh out loud before. 😍im so glad. i love being funny

🌊: You have a lot of personality. u and el both huh. id be like “is this a way of saying that i make too many personal posts” but you’d never say that to me so i assume it instead is code for you enjoying the uninterpretable tags i leave on things, or possibly my weird poems. and i appreciate that

😃: I love seeing you in my notifications! listen my favorite time of day is Michelle Idionkisson Just Logged In And Liked/Reblogged Twenty Posts Hour. i feel so constantly appreciated and validated by ur simultaneous good taste and indiscriminate enjoyment of everything i fling onto the internet

🎉: I get really happy when I see positive personal posts from you, even when I don’t fully understand the context! u 2 t b h. always

🎶: I associate you with a specific song or musician. :O WHO. no never mind i know it’s the mountain goats

🍳: This is an egg in a frying pan! fuck, dude. it sure is!!!!

👍: I like you. Just, in general. I think you’re a genuinely good person. no: you.