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Accomplishment

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Etcheverry Hall, UC Berkeley -- On that last day of Laura's official employment at LBNL

My experiment is working!!!

and they gave me a research grant to for two more months collect data. Yay for me!
Fusion chamber, here we come...

ps. sorry no column. i started this great one about losing my identity, but making stuff funny takes such a long time for my amateur self. plus, i read a great Dave Barry column that made my attempts at comedy seem rather pitiful. maybe i'll regain some more motivation later. (like in two months.)  ¶ 5:03 PM 2 comments

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Good Enough

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Berkeley, CA – Laura receives criticism for her closed-minded attitudes towards poetry.
I’ve always tended to be a little bit narrow minded about poetry as a worthwhile art form. For the most part, I have categorized poetry along with a group of other things that I don’t care for much, such as 96.5FM’s “love songs in the dark” (or whatever they call it) in which anorexic Celine Dion types go on about their hearts and how sad they are for Leonardo Di Caprio who is drowning in the ocean. I guess this might seem a bit insensitive to those people who find love songs and romantic movies to be very beautiful, but in response to those who would view me as callous, I confess that when I watched Titanic, I sincerely felt sad for Leondardo at that moment when he was drowning his popularity down to the level of the prepubescent, twelve-year-old heartthrobs. You just didn’t realize I felt this way because I haven’t expressed my emotion on KOIT’s “Light Rock, Less Talk.”

Anyway, the reason that I am writing about poetry is because I seem to have made a mistake recently that has brought some new challenges into my life. For several years now, I have been focusing on my engineering career and have begun to view to the world through perfectly functional, but non-romantic means such as nuclear energy and McMaster Carr orders. It is because of this that I seem to have made a minor momentary mistake recently in which I referred to the notion of True Love using the unfortunate (although adequately descriptive) phrase of “good enough.” (My bad)

Although my thermal-hydraulics research associates would agree that this is only a minor miscalculation and that my error should be therefore negligible, the person that I said this phrase to was deeply offended by my statement and is now taking drastic measures to cultivate some kind of a romantic germ somewhere in what he sees as my well of bad attitude. As a result of this, I have had more poetry shoved down my throat in the past week than I have had in the other 22 years of my life put together, and the excess of knowledge about old English lover-compasses with floating gold dust has begun to take up space in my brain where perfectly good pick-up lines and dirty words could be getting stored. I see this as some kind of punishment for my lack of respect for the world’s more meaningful emotions and admit that one may be fair to criticize me for it, but still. Old English is painful.

As a result of all this, I would like to confess to both my poetry teacher and all of my readers that despite my hesitations, I too have always kept a bit of poetry with me. My favorite poem which I have read and reread many times is not only dear to me, but actually plays a meaningful role in my life. Above and beyond its spectacularity as a piece of writing, I actually strive to live each day much in the way the author conveys through the moods and images described in his poem. I If any of you ever get the opportunity to acquaint yourself with the timeless writing of “Sick,” by Shel Silverstein, I am sure you will understand.  ¶ 5:12 PM 8 comments