3/5/01

Work is bumming me out these days. First, I agreed to do an experiment with a postdoc in the lab which involves taking measurements every few hours. I'd known since Friday that this would mean that I'd be spending every evening and every early morning in the lab all week long, which meant that I wouldn't be able to have a social life all week. But even worse, today we decided that the experiment would have to be extended through the weekend, so I'm not going to be able to do anything then, either.

I guess giving up my social life for one week isn't really such a big deal, but I work really hard and going out with my friends is one of my few outlets. I live by myself, and my lab is kind of isolated, so I don't get a lot of social interaction at home or at work. Plus, there was this cool-looking surfing movie I really wanted to see playing over at the Red Vic, and now I probably won't get to go.

And then today I met with my boss to talk about who I want to be on my orals committee (that's the committee of faculty who will evaluate and question me about my thesis proposal in a couple of months). I'd already kind of made up my mind about who I wanted, but then he asked me not to include the person I'd actually planned on asking to be my committee chair because she's a competitor of ours and my proposal will obviously contain information about what our lab is planning to do.

It is, of course, understandable that he wouldn't want a competitor to have that kind of information. But it's frustrating for me, because now I don't know who to pick, and I want to get this all done as soon as possible, so I'm feeling kind of stressed out.

I had a pretty quiet weekend, because I was trying to catch up on sleep. I didn't sleep much when I was up at Lake Tahoe, and then I never really had time to recover during the week. Friday night, Alvin and I went to go see "Requiem for a Dream," a depressing movie about drug addiction. Alvin liked it a lot, I thought it was kind of manipulatively sentimental, but both of us agreed that it was a great big bummer of a movie.

Saturday I had to be in the lab at 6:30 a.m., so I went in for a while, and then just went home and waited for the stupid rain to stop so I could go running. The weather has really been making it tough for me to stay motivated to keep running. I took five days off last week--the longest break I've taken since I started running seriously back in November--because I was so sick of running in the rain. Anyway, now I'm back on the wagon running-wise, but the weather still sucks.

While I was waiting to go running, I read my two new books: Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. They're both OK, I guess. The Angier book is pretty interesting--Natalie Angier is a science writer for The New York Times and the book deals with random aspects of the human female body. The big problem I have with it is that it's written in a very flowery style and tries a bit too hard to assign poetic explanations to evolutionary phenomena.

Fast Food Nation is an "expose" of the fast food industry and the fatty, highly processed, homogenized food they serve. I didn't really find much in it that surprised me, though. I mean, doesn't everyone already know that fast food is prepared by poorly-trained, underpaid teenagers? Don't we all take it for granted that the food comes from huge meat-packing plants staffed by poorly-trained illegal immigrants who work under hellish conditions (but is there really such a thing as a meat-packing plant where it's pleasant to work?)? Don't we all know that a diet of hamburgers and french fries is an effective means of achieving obesity and premature death?

It was pretty entertaining, though--it was interesting to read about the history of all the various chains and the people behind them. And I was surprised to read the statistic that "in 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion." I don't think that figure is adjusted for inflation, but even so, that's a pretty impressive rate of growth.

Anyway, that's how I spent most of my weekend--reading about the female body and the evil fast food industry.

I did go out again on Sunday night. My friend Katie and I went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant in the Lower Haight. It's a really good restaurant, and as a result, it's packed just about every night, so I called ahead that afternoon to make a reservation. When we got there, it was, indeed, packed, so I was glad I'd made that reservation. That is, I was glad until while we were waiting for our table and the host seated another party of two who had arrived after us and didn't have a reservation. The couple seemed like maybe they knew the host, so we kind of shrugged it off. But then the host seated another party of two with no reservation ahead of us. At that point, I chased the host down and yelled at him. He made some lame excuse about thinking that we were a party of four, and then gave us the next available table, but he never apologized and it took us almost half an hour to be seated.

We had terrible service throughout dinner, too, with our food arriving all at different times. I was kind of surprised, because I'd never had bad service there before, but then I realized that the last time Katie and I had gone to dinner we'd had bad service at that place, too. I was really surprised the last time, because we'd been at a very nice restaurant where the service is usually excellent, but at the time I'd figured it was just a fluke. But of course, all the bad service led us to speculate that it was either on account of our gender or our height (we're both short). Usually when I eat out, it's with a man, and it's rare that we have problems with the service.

A couple of weeks earlier, Alvin had mentioned that one of his friends always managed to get seated quickly at crowded restaurants, even if he'd never been there before. Alvin figured it was because he "looked important." At the time, I didn't think there was much to it, but now I'm starting to wonder. I guess Katie and I don't look very important.

After we finally finished our meal, we headed around the corner to a bar I know to grab a drink, but when we walked in, the atmosphere inside was very strange. There were people there, but everyone was completely silent. Then I noticed that everyone was watching the TV. At first, I thought maybe there had been some big breaking news story because everyone seemed so somber, but then the commercials ended, and I realized that the reason why it was so quiet was because they were all watching "The Simpsons." I'd never watched the show in a bar before, but it wound up being really fun. After it ended, the bartender turned the channel back to some sports thing and turned the TV sound off and the music off, and the atmosphere went back to being more like a normal bar.

In the forum: Fast Food and Getting Serviced.