About Me
I’m a tech nerd trapped inside the mind of a biochemist. I used to be a PC enthusiast, going crazy in the realms of DOS back when I could use it to bend Windows 98 to my will. I’ve recently been converted to a Mac enthusiast, acquiring first an iPod 5th Gen, MacBook Pro, iPod Nano 2nd gen, and now my baby is an octo-core Mac Pro. The only drawback of such a beautiful conversion is that all my cool little software tidbits for chemistry and biochemistry work is near non-existent. It drives me mad!
Anyways, I’m a graduate student in Buffalo, NY, working towards my doctoral degree in biochemistry. I work in a DNA replication & repair lab, while I’m totally intrigued by how we transition from initiation of DNA replication to the elongation (polymerization) state of DNA replication. So many questions to ask, not enough time (or help from my experiments) to ask them all!
Random tidbits about me:
I grew up an hour away from the geographical center of North America.
I love to cook, and can quickly become engrossed in the making of a meal (Thanksgiving keeps me pretty crazy, even with only two people).
I have to pop a little melatonin if I want to get to bed earlier than midnight.
I love nearly anything blueberry-flavored.
I don’t have a crazy sweet-tooth like many people. Might explain my lack of cavities. Go go teeth!
My music tastes are all over the wall sometimes. Check my Last.fm if you don’t believe me!
I love to bike around with no real destination in mind.
Notoriously a do-it-yourself’er, I have a horrible urge to take stuff apart just to learn how to fix it.
I’m probably mildly obsessive-compulsive, leading to a perfectionist attitude of both bane and boon.
I am a neat freak. During college, many times I would have to clean my apartment before I could even start to study.
I’ve been called an elitist. I probably am.
I despise mainstream trends, yet am in love with random semi-mainstream items like Apple products, Volkswagens, and Ikea.
I’ve been to Germany and the Czech Republic. I love their metro transit systems about as much as I love the architecture there (which is a lot).
I listen to music at ear-bleeding volumes to relieve stress in a genre-independent fashion. Classical or rock, doesn’t matter.
Sometimes certain songs will well up a huge emotional response and make me feel like I’m going to cry for no good reason. I entertain the thought it might be a brain tumor trying to mess with me!
Clam chowder has been a favorite comfort food for I don’t know how long. Got me through high school and college whenever I needed a hot five minute lunch meal.
I’m growing my hair out for the first time as of early 2009. It is pushing ~3 inches long and still going strong. Scratch that. It was driving me nuts. Keeping it at more manageable lengths now.
I have a strange desire to understand how people think or respond to things. I think it’s part of a deep-seated curiosity to understand how people tick.
I get lost in thought pondering how things can turn out. If I reminisce in good or bad memories, my brain runs rampant with more scenarios about what could have happened. Strange form of creativity, I must say.
I’m a visual learner. Very much so. So much that I can be very descriptive and graphic in my regurgitation of a mental scene if I’m focused/paying attention to it.
A combination of the above three lead me to daydream about random fantasies, realistic or not. It’s easy to get lost in these overzealous thoughts sometimes. I hear it’s a fatal flaw of Pisces.
I apparently had a bad case of bronchitis when I was younger. It rears it’s scarring effects whenever I get a cold/sinus infection and it migrates to my lungs. It leaves me with an inflammatory cough for weeks, despite the illness being long gone. Happy times, I tell you.
I never dated at all until college. Once I did, it made more sense why people got those starting steps out of the way with in high school.
I always do my dishes in the same order: silverware/utensils, cups/glasses, plates/bowls/other similarly-shaped objects, food/storage containers followed by the pots and pans.
I love watching the violence of nature. Thunderstorms, blizzards, you name it. I’ll go trekking through a white-out blizzard to just sit in a local restaurant/coffee shop to enjoy a hot drink and watch the weather, or sit out and watch a lightning storm until it’s too rainy to comfortably watch.