Holidays

Ah, the time-honored tradition of the holiday text message. Whatever did we do without it?

Happy Holidays!

Irritating Things in My Life

Julianne Hough (dancer on Dancing with the Stars, aspiring country singer) is 20 years old. She has joined the ranks of celebrities that date people that are way too old for them. Her boyfriend is 29. That's a big difference when you're that young. Also, following the rules of "Half+7," the oldest she could go with out it being sketchy is 26, and that's pushing it. Perhaps I'm a big prude when it comes to these things, but that's like a grad student dating an undergrad. Ew.

I spent an hour trying to figure out my prescription drug coverage today. First, I went to the United Healthcare website. They made me create an account. Then I tried to see what drugs were listed under which tier (there's a three tier system of co-pays). I was directed to the Medco website (mail-in pharmacy), which made me create another account. To sign up, they requested a nine-digit member number, which was supposedly on my card somewhere or it was my SSN. There was no nine-digit number on the card, so I tried my SSN. That didn't work, so I tried every number on the card, none of which worked. Then I called customer service, which was closed for the day. That was fine, since it was 9:30 PM. I used the self-service menu, which gave me a phone number for the drug company, which I called. It was a different number from the first one, but somehow ended up directing me to the exact same menu I had just listened to telling me to call that number. I found another number to call in the information packet, and at that point I got to talk to a real, live person. He was very nice and set up an account for me. However, he kept calling me Mrs. Mahler. While I get that he was trying to be polite, he really shouldn't assume I'm a)married, or b)if I were married I would take my husband's name. He also called me Mrs. Paterno once, which was ridiculous. After all this, I found that every single long-term prescription that I have taken (nose spray, etc.) falls under the $30 co-pay and not the $10 one. I also found out that I should order my drugs online through the mail-in pharmacy, because it's cheaper.

After the whole ordeal, I still never got the information I was looking for. I'm trying to figure out if IUDs are covered by insurance, and nowhere could I find this information. Sigh...

Advisor

I have never felt so intimidated by someone in my life. I think I am a pretty confident person and that when it comes to talking to my superiors, I can usually express myself without feeling frightened. Not so here. I am genuinely worried that whatever I send to my advisor, it won't be good enough. Consequently, he probably thinks I'm not doing anything. I feel like every time I go talk to him, he will criticize something that I'm doing or make me feel bad about the work that I've done. There are also a few professors that I am intimidated by, but not to this degree. It's beginning to interfere with my ability to get things done.

How do so many people have the uncanny ability to know exactly when I'm about to step away from my computer to do something and choose that exact moment to IM me? It drives me absolutely insane.

I Think I Fail As a Girl

I don't have a favorite flower, and I think celebrating any type of "anniversary" that's less than a year (one month, six months, whatever) is kind of stupid. Granted, I keep track in my head, but I'm not about to go out and celebrate.

I stopped writing for a while. I tend to write less when I'm happy, I think. Not that I'm unhappy now, I just have A LOT of time on my hands. Mostly I've been "studying" for the qual, eating, and studiously ignoring the remaining few boxes that need unpacking. I just spent the last hour reading the livejournal of a girl I've met...once? twice? Hard to say. Also, in a weird twist, I realized that I was IMing with two ex-boyfriends and the current one at the same time. All physicists. Oddly, I don't speak with the engineer exes at all. Blah. Enough rambling.

Hair Cut

I want to cut my hair into a curly bob. Thoughts? I'm afraid I'll hate it, as I had "short" (for me) hair last summer and I didn't really like it at first, but I'm so sick of my hair. I thought I wanted to grow it out long, but it stops at a certain length. It's also dry and damaged and gets tangled easily.

The Horror!

Sarah Jessica Parker wore a dress to the Sex and the City premiere that had been worn before. The horror! Now, I understand that it's kind of annoying, but no one was wearing the dress that night. Her response: But what they did was so short-sighted. It's just unethical and disappointing that they would allow the dress to be worn again. Unethical? Really? No. Annoying, yes. Unethical, not so much. Apparently she had asked if it had been worn before and the designer didn't explicitly say yes, but still. In the grand scheme of things, much worse has happened.

My Office

There is a lot of drama in my office. I thought I was out of high school. Guess not. I'm glad I learned to think for myself and do what I feel is right when I was there, though.

High School Reunion

I went to my 5 year high school reunion today. While I was there, I figured out why my friendships have shifted since then. The people that I was close with in high school I am no longer close with, and people who I was friends with but not superclose with I'm much closer to now. This is because the ones I used to be friends with have no intellectual curiosity. They are content with the knowledge they have and have no desire to learn more. I don't understand that.

Worst. Homework. Ever.

This is the worst homework assignment ever. It's an exercise in stupid integrals and I'm not finishing it. I don't care. Chanan drops the lowest homework anyway. I've had the assignment for over 2 weeks and I'm still not done with it. It's incredibly painful. The only thing I'm taking away from it is that integrating in the complex plane is important and I shouldn't rely on Mathematica otherwise I won't be able to do it come test time (I know how to do it, I just can't be complacent). I've eaten half a box of cookies. I still have code to write, due tomorrow at 11 PM. I'm house-hunting again, because as of today I have no place to live come September, since I didn't renew my lease. I can't focus. What's wrong with me? I hate the quarter system.

An Open Letter

Dear Adrian Grenier,
You are SO FUCKING HOT! I think you are hotter than William Tell, Hottie McHottHott. So please, for the love of God, SHAVE YOUR FUCKING BEARD! It's fugly as hell. Go back to being the hottie you are and have always been.
kthxbye.
PS-Drive Me Crazy is kind of fabulous.

EEE

I HATE EEE!!!! It didn't save any of the grades I just entered, so I have to reenter them AGAIN. FOR THE SECOND TIME.


AG;SLIAWEPITHqa eopa;idsghapiA;EIGA'PEWGJAOSG AHISDG'H'APWEIOG ASDLGIJA S FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Breakfast

I used to not eat breakfast, mostly because I really wasn't hungry in the morning and the thought of trying to force something down made me nauseated (nauseous? I never know). In high school I got up at 6 AM so I really didn't want to eat, and in college I didn't have enough meals per week to go to the dining hall. Even though I had food in my room I just never really ate it. I would always be starving by the middle of class, though. I have started eating breakfast now, though, and it is AMAZING! I feel so much better and I get to try all these cereals that look fabulous as I walk through the grocery store (another thing I should never be allowed to do is go grocery shopping unsupervised. I buy the most random crap). Anything with freeze-dried strawberries is pretty much a guaranteed winner. In short, I have finally discovered the joys of eating breakfast every day.

If there's an earthquake in the next week (or, realistically, since I never clean my room, until I move) I'll probably die. All my plans to clean my room never really materialized. For someone who's so OCD I really can't fathom why my room is such a disaster. I can't do any work on my desk (in part because it's small), my clothes are all over the place, and the only reason the living room is clean is because I'm afraid of what Onnie thinks. SPOILED ONLY CHILD ALERT! I miss having someone clean up after me. I think it would be better if I had more space. Haha, that's a total lie.

I'm going to congratulate myself and say, "Yay, Rachel!" I did better this quarter than in the fall, and I raised my GPA (and passed my classes). I'm so close to keeping my money I can taste it. Here's to more improvement.

And now, a rant.

[redacted].

I thought better of it. I'm pissed, though.

Erm...

I had a lot I thought about saying, but I'll just be angsty for a bit.

One would think that in a male-dominated area such as physics the chances would be high of meeting someone you click with. As the saying goes, "the odds are good but the goods are odd." At UCI, however, the odds are not even good. Everyone I'm close with is in a relationship. There are guys that I am kind of interested in, but the physics department is so fucked up that I'm not sure I want to deal with that. I briefly alluded to this earlier, but there is/was/whatever a boy (Main Boy). One of the girls (Acquaintance) said to another girl (Good Friend) that they should set me up with Main Boy. The main players in this story plus others go out one night. Acquaintance pushes me and Main Boy together to dance, but by the end of the night Acquaintance and Main Boy are possibly making out and definitely holding hands on the car ride home. I would like to meet other people, but since I live in my office and do work all the time this seems less than likely. Plus I've only dated physicists and engineers so I don't know what I would do with someone that isn't in my field. The only times I've met people that I've truly cared about/loved romantically have been over the summer in Ojai. I suppose there was also Best Guy Friend, but he wasn't a physicist and that didn't work out so much. Dr. Zook has nine cats now. I don't want to end up like her. Nor do I want to end up like Bridget Jones (I watched Bridget Jones's Diary the other day, which prompted this wallowing).

Advice?

I don't know whom I should work for. Help me decide. Since this is what I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing, I need lots of input and advice. I don't want to get bored after six months like I did with my thesis.

I think I would really like to work for Aaron Barth. He does research on black holes, which are awesome. He also has a project with Carnegie (CINGS). It's hard for me to gauge what exactly his students do, though. I've also heard that by coincidence he only works with women. I get the impression that that might also be partly by design. It's a joke throughout the department. He's not theory, though, which I always thought I wanted to do. Also, Jonelle is always in her office working, and I don't want to be like that. I should talk with her and Carol about what they're doing. I've heard he can be a bit harsh, but he's always been nice to me, so...

Up next is Manoj Kaplinghat. His website is not very informative beyond the fact that he does theoretical cosmology. Maybe I should send him an e-mail. I'm scared about theory, though, because my programming skills are not that great. I suppose I can always work on that, but I'm still afraid. I should be more confident, generally. I think I would do better on tests. But back to Manoj. I have no idea what he does. Reading his CV and publications titles it looks like gravitational lensing and dark matter, which I am interested in.

Asantha Coray. His work looks interesting, but what I would be doing looks like straight up data reduction. So...boring. Also, he's in charge of the GAANN, and if I lose that it would be embarrassing to work for him.

I also think working with James Bullock could be interesting. I know lots of people working for him, but therein lies the rub. He has a lot of students working for him. Perhaps too many for him to take on more. He does theory, as well. I think mostly numerical simulation, which is not quite up my alley.

Lastly is David Buote. He does x-ray stuff similar to what I did at Carnegie. I'm sort of tired of that stuff. Apparently his last grad student did a horrible job and I've heard he's not taking more students (possibly because of that, possibly because of money). He seems weird.

I'm too tired to continue writing. I'm so tired all the time. If you have thoughts let me know.

Weekend Update

Friday:

Prospective students come. Dinner at Professor Barwick's house. Exact same menu as when I visited. This group seemed pretty cool. After dinner, we go to the pub, where one of the propies goes from cool guy to douche in a short amount of time. Apparently UW will give him a window and a computer. Then go to UW and stare at the gray sky the entire year. We don't like you, anyway. Prospective students leave. Shitshow. Special shout-out/thank you to Joe and Carl.

Saturday:

Do a few Jackson problems. Tire of that and watch Zero Effect with Ben Stiller and Bill Pullman. Jesi comes over so we can go to Erik's party. Right before we go, I ask, "Does it smell like burning candles?" Apparently the top of my Nalgene was on top of the heating coil in the dishwasher and it melted. Now I have no Nalgene. At Erik's, the heel of my boot breaks. Two weeks ago I ripped the corner of one of my fitted sheets trying to fit it over the mattress. Personal items damaged: three. I also got weirdly hit on outside the bathroom at Erik's. This guy was like, "I know this is weird, but I just wanted to know your name." He says this as I'm washing my hands. As he goes in the bathroom he says, "I also wanted to tell you you're really pretty."

Sunday:

Sleep until noon, which is rare. Read. Fall asleep reading. Don't get a lot done.

I want a Cocker Pug.

Blah.

This is the second time that someone has tried to set me up with a guy only to end up hooking up with him herself. The first time I didn't mind, since I didn't really know the guy, but this time I'm a bit irked. I feel like I'm perpetually the second choice, even with guys I have dated.

I don't feel like doing any work today. I just want to watch TV and dick around on the internet. Boo, school!

This has been one of the worst weeks I've had in a while, and it's only Tuesday. I fucking hate Valentine's Day, and E&M sucked ass. Fuck that shit.

The Perfect Storm

This week is going to be a perfect storm of suck. I have two midterms, one Tuesday and one Thursday. I have tutoring center Wednesday night, so studying for Thursday is going to be severely impeded. Thursday is also Valentine's Day, a holiday I hate more than any other. I HATE Valentine's Day. It sucks when you're single and is stressful when you're not. Does anyone like it? I also I have to teach Thursday and it's supposed to rain. Sucks for my students, because I'm going to be cranky.

I'm itchy right now. Stupid grass allergies. It's a bendadryl tonight for sure.

In case you were wondering, Bring it On: All or Nothing is not a good movie. I watched it the other night, and it was horrible. That's one of the problems with Netflix. I'll put anything in my queue, just because I can. Currently I have Hypercube. Coming is She's the Man. Quality films, I know.

Right now I'm listening to my Jimmy Eat World collection. I'll go to sleep before I finish it (I have a total of 3.7 hours on my computer), but I haven't done that in a while. I love them. Some of it is just so sexy. There's angst, anger, sex, happiness. Ok. Emo (although the new stuff is less emo). I also listened to all of my Something Corporate earlier. I was wallowing. I always have iTunes on shuffle, so that I don't have to listen to albums in order. I think that makes it better.

Last night my room was so cold so tonight I'm wearing flannel. And now to bed.

Time Independent Perturbation Theory: Nondegenerate Case, II

I'll start off by going back to the Two-State Problem. After attempting the homework problem on this, it makes a bit more sense, but not a lot. Basically Sakurai does perturbation using matrices. It still doesn't help me with the homework, though. Next Sakurai formally develops perturbation theory. He shows how to calculate the first order shift in the energy and the wavefunction. He then briefly does the higher orders. Next he renormalizes the wave-function, but I didn't understand this section at all. Basically, I don't understand Sakurai sometimes. This whole section is particularly dense. Then there are two examples.

I don't think I'll devote another post to the next section, which involves the degenerate case. Basically, you need to diagonalize the perturbation matrix. Only then will the degeneracy lift and you can solve the problem as in the non-degenerate case.

I think I will have to supplement with Townsend, discussion section, and banging through the homework as best I can. There is also Baym. Onward and upward.

Note to self: don't drink an entire bottle of wine (well, 2.5 glasses plus half a bottle) again. Even if you are preparing for your birthday. Perhaps you are not meant to drink to excess anymore. Blah. Yes I am writing this drunk. No, you can't really tell. Yay spelling and grammar! Or perhaps you can, because this is going to be rambling.

I watched An Inconvenient Truth the other night, and it was really good. I also watched Serenity, and that was really good as well. But back to Friday. If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, you should. It makes me want to really put in the effort to reduce my carbon footprint. Sometimes I think I should be more involved in politics to do something and change things rather than be a physicist. I really hope that things change in November. I hope beyond hope that a democrat will win the presidency. I don't really care which one. I still need to decide who I want to vote for in the primary. I think if I don't vote for Kucinich I'll probably vote for Hillary. I still love the Clintons, and there's something about Obama that rubs me the wrong way. I don't know what it is. Part of me wants to be contrarian and get Hillary in the White House after Iowa. I don't think she could win the general election, however. No matter what, though, I'm ready for a change.

Also, while watching the movie, Al Gore talked about growing up on a tobacco farm. It made me wonder who thought smoking would be a good idea. How did the thought process work? "I wonder what will happen if I light these leaves on fire and inhale the smoke?" It's fascinating.

Time Independent Perturbation Theory: Nondegenerate Case

So Jordan Glassman has decided to keep a blog to help him understand Jackson. I am hoping that if I do the same for quantum mechanics it will improve my performance in the class. I understand the concepts when we go over them during lecture, but then I don't do well on the exams. So here we go. I'm starting with section 5.1 in Sakurai.

The problem is thus: there are very few cases where the Schrodinger equation can be solved directly. Here we have a Hamiltionian H=H₀ + V, where H₀ is a Hamiltonian that can be solved analytically and V is a small perturbation. This is generally written as H=H₀ + λV, so that we can expand the energy eigenvalues and eigenstates in powers of λ.

I do not understand the next section at all. It is called "The Two-State Problem." It looks Sakurai has the perturbation as a mixing term. Then Sakurai uses the analogy of the spin-orientation problem, but I don't think I read that section, so that's not helpful. He then ends with a convergence condition for the perturbation.

I am too tired to continue right now, so hopefully I'll write about the rest of the section tomorrow. Also, I should probably do the problem set and read Baym, as well.

Now back to your regularly scheduled brooding.

ARG

A girl I went to high school with has started her own business as a teen counselor/advice guru/whatever. It's all self-proclaimed anyway. We were in the same group of friends, but had a falling out in 7th grade and I refused to suck up to her so our relationship was never very close afterward. I think her blog is ridiculous and that parents who buy into her crap are stupid, but up until now she hasn't actually done anything that could be construed as harmful. This week, however, she decided to hand out medical advice on celiac disease, which she apparently has. I call bullshit on this, having known her for 6 years and never hearing her complain about feeling sick. If she truly did, I'm sure I would have heard about how she was sick all the time. This is the girl who had a wheelchair after having bunion surgery so she could get around school. Why she couldn't use crutches I don't know. Also, I think she's a pathological liar. She has no qualifications to even suggest this to people. Last I checked, a BA in Chinese and International Relations did in no way qualify one to practice medicine. I'm closer to having a doctorate than she will ever be, and mine will be a PhD in physics. Also, both my parents are doctors. Perhaps I should go into the field of giving bullshit advice, medical or otherwise. I'm sure I'd be 100 times better at it than she is.

She also makes a huge deal about smoking pot. She has many a blog post of letting parents know the signs their children are smoking, and also how she knows how bad it can be because she had many friends in high school that "ruined" their lives by smoking up. From what I remember, she used to regale us with stories of how badass her friends outside of Marlborough were because of all the crazy shit they did. She seemed almost proud. I do like how there are always comments along the lines of "You're a dumbass. Smoking pot isn't bad for you, etc."

Upon further thought, being a vegetarian is just not going to work out for me. I'll just work on reducing my meat intake, especially red meat, not that I eat it all that often. I just can't figure out what to eat for lunch if I'm a vegetarian, since lunch consists of sandwiches and I don't feel like eating peanut butter and jelly all the time.

New Year's Resolutions

1. Eat healthier. Eat less junk food (cookies, etc.) and eat more fruits and vegetables. I'm thinking of going as vegetarian as I can the majority of the time. I don't really cook meat, either, since I'm paranoid about it not cooking through all the way. The fish selection around here is pretty poor, also.
   
2. Exercise more. We'll see how this goes. Hopefully I will be able to go to the pool more often and swim laps.
   
3. Put more effort into my schoolwork and do better in my classes. Hopefully I will be able to manage both teaching and schoolwork so that I can join choir in the spring. They're doing Carmina Burana.
   
4. Stop pining over a boy. Find a new boy to pine for. Or get shit going with original boy.
   
5. Figure out who to work for.
   

The last one seems the most feasible.