2/20/03

Thursday night. I'm making soup, and watching the Michael Jackson Interview with The Footage I was Never Meant To See. When the soup is done, I have to go back to work. I'd much rather just fall asleep, but I have to go in. I was in meetings almost all day, and got hardly any "real" work done.

I spent a good chunk of my afternoon today at an elementary school here in the city. Another grad student and I are going to be participating in a program which brings "UCSF scientists" into the public schools. So, starting next week, we're going to be teaching a series of four lessons to two classes of fourth graders. Earlier this week, we'd visited the classes to get a sense of how the classroom is set out and how the teachers control their classes. Today we went back to plan the lessons themselves. The theme of our lessons is going to be "Living in Water."

Anyway, I think this whole thing might be fun, but it's been a lot of work, and I'm more than a little nervous. Not only have I not worked with fourth graders since I was in fourth grade myself, but also, I have little experience with the looking-through-a-microscope-at-pond-water sort of science we'll be doing, and I'm afraid that our activities will go horribly wrong, and that I'll be humiliated in front of a room of 9-year-olds.

At least I'm not in the group that decided to do activities with fruitflies--an idea which seems to be inviting disaster considering the tendency of said flies to escape and permanently infiltrate whatever room you bring them into. I worked in a fruitfly lab for a few months in my first year of grad school and every time I opened a vial of flies, half of them would escape. And I am a trained professional!

Another reason why I'm kind of behind at work is because for the first part of this week, my mom was in town visiting. She arrived early Saturday afternoon, and we headed out to the Chinese New Year Parade that evening. I'd only ever watched the parade on TV before, and watching it in person was quite different. For one thing, it was raining. For another, it was clearly staged for the television cameras, which meant that parade continuity downstream of the cameras where we were standing suffered. The parade came to a halt at times while certain groups performed for the masses, and then there would be long gaps in the parade, often followed by the next bunch of people literally running to catch up. So, we saw several groups of children wearing dragon costumes or toting instruments run by at top speed, and a float full of beauty queens wearing strapless gowns in the cold rain and struggling to keep their balance as their float accelerated to 30 mph. You don't get to see that stuff on TV.

Other stuff I did with my mom: went to Alcatraz again, which was lovely and covered in flowers this time of year, went to see "Hedwig", which she didn't hate, much to my relief, and failed to get into French Laundry, but ate an amazing meal at Chez Panisse Cafe. I had the "Terra Firma Farm blood orange, fennel, and new onion salad with marash pepper" as an appetizer and almost cried because it was so good. I also had one of the best cups of coffee I'd ever had, and I don't even really like coffee anymore.

But, my mom left on Wednesday morning, and life is sort of back to normal now. And my soup is finished cooking, and it's time to go back to work. Ugh.