Ok. That's it. I officially have spring fever. I'm instantly transported to grade school at Queen of Peace. It's June, it's hot, it's sunny. The windows are all open wide, and the lights are turned out (this supposedly made us feel cooler.) I can smell that they're repaving the parking lot and the classroom smells like fresh hot asphalt, mixed with old wood, Pledge, and ditto sheets. I have a worksheet of long division in front of me. I am laying my head on my desk, rolling my pencil around in the the desk pencil-holding-groove, and staring out of the window. I am thinking, No.

Now, instead of long division, I have pages of chromatograph files in piles around my desk. I am checking for point mutations and all I can think of is, No. Frameshift? Fuck it. I just want to think about next week.

I want to pack and clean out my closets. I want to look up things to do in New York, and make plans for meeting friends, old and new. I want to get in touch with a few Nashville peeps before I go. But most importantly, I want to spread the pure, unadulterated geek-joy I have about going into this fellowship.

I literally hopped around with glee after the first information manual came in the mail. Hopped. Like a rabbit. On a pogo stick. Just seeing the programs and schools that the other fellows are coming from -- all walks of science -- this whole thing just seems cool, and very interdisciplinary. A few environmentalists, some medical school folk, and a handful of chemists and engineers. There's another fellow placed at SciAm who is studying applied math. Besides shopping, I rarely apply math to anything (well, okay, a linear regression here and there, but still) so it'll be interesting to find out what other grad school research lives are like. Can you feel the science geek-joy?

I also got a fun care package from the executive editor of SciAm, with an advertising kit all about the magazine, a few issues, etc. More hopping ensued.

Next week in DC we have three days of writing seminars and workshops, with editors from publications such as the Washington Post and Science magazine. We get to tour NPR. And there's networking breakfasts and other meals scattered throughout Monday and Tuesday. Can you feel the I-used-to-work-on-my-college-newspaper geek joy?

I could go on. But I should get back to these sequences. Sigh.