The Kelsey Experiment

Study break!

2010-12-18T22:13:00.000-05:00

Some fun links for the day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0QXB5pw2qE&feature=pyv&ad=6968748230&kw=google

and

http://the3six5.posterous.com/december-18-2010-will-allen

And now, back to studying!

Whoops...there went November...

2010-11-27T02:18:00.002-05:00

Most excellent post on the3six5 for Friday; I only wish I hadn't been pressed for time when I was writing mine...or maybe chose a day other than Dept. retreat. Whoops. Here's the link to today's: http://the3six5.posterous.com/november-26-2010-cresten

Anyway. You're probably aware that it is the end of November, and I haven't posted in a while.

6 weeks in six lines:
Sciencing
Restoring SanitySurfing Reddit
Birthday parties
Fellowship writing
On the phone passed around the Thanksgiving table

And now, time for me to continue reading. Perhaps I'll start noting the books that I'm reading...once in a while. Recently finished Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future (Mooney and Kirshenbaum), currently finishing What the Dog Saw (Gladwell). Next on the docket: War and Peace (Tolstoy). That one might take me a while.

Soap

2010-10-15T23:24:00.001-04:00

My grandparent’s house is one of my homes, made up of the small details that accumulate after many years. The characteristic that stood out most to me was, oddly enough, the soap. The soap that in the last few years my aunts probably picked up from the grocery store shelf, paid for, filled the dispenser with, and placed on the bathroom sink. It’s characteristic orange color and clean smell. The soap currently in my bathroom.

The house is unlike any other I have ever seen. A mixture of exterior materials and architectural elements unique to his house, I’ve always wanted to preserve every detail in my memory. The stone, cement, brick, wide orange siding and narrow yellow siding on the middle upstairs room. Each room had a distinct style, chosen most likely by my grandmother, whose touches remained long after her death. The length of their marriage is something I can only hope to achieve.

Other smaller memories flit through my mind. Tiny little closets we could play hide and seek in. The green chair with the seat we could remove, and the Styrofoam hat model. My baby blanket a large enough hole I could wear it as a cape. The stack of books about guns and the booming CSPAN. His ninety years to my then twenty-two. Changes he saw. Changes he didn’t see.

All from the soap that will always remind me of my grandpa’s house.

the3six5!

2010-10-09T01:22:00.001-04:00

Friday was my day!

http://the3six5.posterous.com/october-8-2010-kelsey-hughes

The Relentless March Onward

2010-08-23T00:32:00.002-04:00

My apologies for the silence, I have been at a loss for words lately.

Since March, I spent the months of April and May finishing up coursework, practically living in my favorite Princeton coffee shop to get work done, visiting Will over my birthday, and joining my thesis lab. Following joining the lab, I spent June trying to get my feet on the ground and some experiments up and running. July was filled by a continuation of getting experiments together and a most excellent visit from Kathryn involving a trip up to Manhattan and over to Asbury Park beach on the Jersey shore. While this month is still in progress, it has mostly consisted of continuing to try to get my experiments to work--in general science moves slowly--and reading through several books.

The coming weeks and months are promising to be just as busy as ever, I'm giving lab meeting in a few weeks which involves putting together the work I've done thus far and presenting it to the lab. I'm also expecting a visit from one of Will's Oxford friends who is popping down to Princeton for a day during a trip to NY, as well as a visit from Will, and in a few weeks beyond that my parents! It seems that this summer is full of people visiting to see where I live and what I've been up to over the last year.

This summer has also evidently been full of love, I think every weekend an additional Facebook friend (or several!) is either newly engaged or married! Even people I knew in high school that I'm not directly friends with are popping up with wedding photos in their profiles. Congrats to everyone! Meanwhile, I will continue my engagement to science, as I have my general exam coming up in a few months (slightly over four! Eep!).

2010-03-27T12:04:00.000-04:00

If you haven't checked out the3six5 blog project, you really should. Each day, one person from around the world posts something telling the story of their day, and they're usually up by the end of the night or early the next morning. Yesterday's post was awesome: http://the3six5.posterous.com/march-26-2010-alicia-kan

2010-03-21T02:09:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I just can't shake the conversations I have with people. For instance, I had a long discussion with my mother around Christmas, and I'm still rolling bits of it around in my head, aging them until they're ripe for action.

One of those bits has been about writing. I had told her something about wondering if perhaps law school might be an option down the road depending on what I decide to do after this Ph.D., to which she responded with great surprise that I always hated my English and history classes. It's true, for a while I did. I'm pretty sure I have always complained about writing long papers, and only occasionally did I enjoy particular courses.

Lately though, it has occurred to me that I have always written, and enjoyed it. I just didn't like writing for courses because I was always trying to find my author's voice and say something more important or profound that other people would listen to.

It wasn't until about midway through college that I finally figured it out. When writing, I didn't have to try to be someone I wasn't. My largest hurdle was just getting the words out on paper--revision was a great thing. I began to enjoy ripping apart my own work and reworking it into something better. Such is the benefit of a great teacher.

That teacher taught me something else--that somehow had been missed during all those years of K-12 language arts, literature and writing courses--that I could break the rules. I'm generally a pretty big rule-follower. I like rules. Although sometimes, to get to something really good, you have to forget them all. Especially the ones you've written for yourself, like not letting other people read your work because you think it isn't very spectacular. Since I've been at sort of a loss for what to do with this blog, maybe I'll head in that direction. Or maybe I won't. We'll see.

Background

2010-02-03T00:02:00.000-05:00

Walking around campus, I frequently cross paths with groups of visitors taking pictures of buildings and statues. Whenever this happens, I find myself wondering if someday they will be flipping through photos and notice the people also in their pictures. If they will ask themselves who the people in the background were--how was their day going, who were their friends, what were their hopes, realities and secrets?

We so often only look at what is front and center that we forget to examine the background.

Updates!

2010-01-26T20:06:00.000-05:00

I promised Will a post about secrets. It's still in the works.

Dad: pathology reports and treatment plans are moving along. According to the latest report it's the step right before cancer with some parts that are invasive (read: better news than some could be, but still needs to be stomped on).

Grad school: First semester down, only a little more time left in this rotation before we change labs again.

Since things are happening with my Dad, I came home for a few days and was able to run up and visit my alma mater, Alma College today. I didn't get to see everyone unfortunately, but it was good to chat with those that I did get to see. It's recruitment week for the fraternities and sororities, which I always remembered as being busy, a little bit stressful and a lot of fun, especially when it was all over--good luck to everyone involved, especially my Phi Sigma Sigma sisters!

A big, ugly elephant

2010-01-13T00:27:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of cancer in my family. We added a new one to the list this week, in my Dad.

Now you've probably thought "OMG I'm so sorry! How can I help?" Admit it, upon first hearing this type of news you have this picture of me on the floor crying my eyes out barely able to function, don't you?

You'll have to forgive me for being functional. It's how I cope--all that energy gets channeled into thinkgs that I can control, like ranting to friends, studying, lab work, or just walking really, really fast.

This type of thing isn't new for me. The last four years have been a blur of health-related issues ranging from a brother with cancer and my own two surgeries as well as a couple of cancers in extended family.

We knew something was up a few weeks ago and still don't know a whole lot yet; despite what every medical show would have you believe, diagnosing these things takes time. Then there's staging, meeting with the oncologist, meeting with the radiation oncologist, talking to medically inclined friends, and surfing the web reading horror stories and depressing statistics.

Yes, I'm upset. Yes, I'm easily distracted. Yes, I'd say there is some anger going on at the moment. However, I don't want the "your life is turned upside-down and I feel badly about that" hug. I want the "I'm happy to see you, let's hang out and go do X" hug. If I even want a hug at all.

Yeah, there's an elephant in the room--forgive the lack of originality here--but since chopping it up is out of my hands, moving around it is the best option right now.

Next?

2010-01-04T22:59:00.000-05:00

When visiting family, the usual questions come up: how's school? What are you studying? What are you going to do with that? College, graduate school and fellowship applications ask similar questions: why do you want to attend/study/receive X? What are your career goals? How will X help you? What will you contribute to X?

Between casual questions, career days, aptitude testing and applications, there has always been a focus on what comes next.

Among other pieces of my childhood packed in boxes at the top of my closet, I have a writing assignment from early elementary school. The question, what do you want to be when you grow up, had been asked. On that characteristic-learning-to-write paper, in orange marker and crooked lettering, I responded along the lines of "I want to be a veterinarian and have employees and they will obey me." I've always preferred to be in charge.

I recently unearthed an old journal entry in which I revisited that question, listing possible careers. As a child with her very own toy microscope, the list contained a variety of unsurprising, yet very specific, aspirations: analytical chemist, biologist, doctor, forensic scientist, etc. This list also contained positions such as president and teacher, and was as far reaching--for me at least--as a chef. I can barely cook. At some point while making this list I grew tired, became realistic with myself and started eliminating jobs, crossing out those that I didn't have a strong interest in actually doing. What remained? Of course all the science careers.

So I started working. Working towards the 'next steps': getting into college, gaining research experience, and getting into graduate school. Now, having arrived at the latter destination, it's a little disorienting--suddenly I'm not twelve, sixteen or even twenty anymore. While I know I am still very young, suddenly the figure-out-your-life clock has begun ticking louder while days rush by faster.

It's a good thing I have a few years to sort through the dizzying array of 'next' possibilities.

Maybe I'll make a list...