Grad school and free food

It sucks to live on a grad student stipend. It really sucks when you live in San Francisco. We only do this because we're supposed to be making cash when we get out. Hopefully, this will be true.

This is what makes free food in grad school so important. There's tons of sources: seminars, leftovers from other groups' seminars, vendors, etc. Today, the lab next to ours got like 20 pizzas from a vendor, and they were kind enough to share with us and other labs.

Here is my general schedule of free food (not including when vendors bring pizza or ice cream):

Monday: lunch (Biophysics Journal Club)
Monday: dinner (Program in Quantitative Biology student seminar)
Tuesday: snack (leftovers from neighboring labs group meetings)
Tuesday: lunch (group meeting)
Thursday: snack (Biochemistry cookie and coffee break)
Friday: lunch (leftovers from Biochemistry faculty lunch)
Friday: snack and beer (Research in Progress seminars and happy hour)

I figure this saves me like $25 a week, which adds up. If grad students didn't get all this free food, we'd surely revolt.

Basketball in San Francisco

The above title is a paradox: people in San Francisco don't play basketball.

Maybe it's because SF has to be the shortest city in America. At UCSF, we have three basketball leagues, Alpha (for the best players), Beta (which has become as good as Alpha with a couple exceptions), and no kidding, the 6' and under league. You are only allowed to play if you are shorter than 73 inches. How ridiculous is this shit? These guys need to learn to play point guard or just give it up and play badminton or something.

Not only is everyone short, but you can never find a game on the outdoor courts in the city. SF has 750,000 people in a tiny area, and only 50 play basketball. If 10 guys are out of town, then you have to pray for 1/4 of the basketball-playing population to show up at one of the 10 courts at the same god-damn time. You have a better chance of Xzibit showing up and taking away your '93 Civic.

What will happen this weekend? Probably the same thing as last; drive around half the city to settle for playing 3-on-3 with guys in their thirties. Fuck me.

Back, again.

Hence, I do not write about Enron or abortion or Afghan opium. I would rather write my columns about gay raves and incestuous romps over Thanksgiving because no one will find fault with my non-existent arguments. Hell, they might even read them on the way to the crossword.

This quote concluded my column that is also the source of the footer quote below. Now that I'm back, again, I'm committing myself to stop talking about all that serious shit. I therefore deleted all the serious posts. They're fucking gone.

A girl in the lab next to mine recently left to pursue another degree, and she made herself a little "yearbook" that included photos of all of us with an identifying phrase. Mine was "The Opinionated One." I guess I can't disagree. And being the only non-bleeding heart liberal in San Francisco will get you in more arguments that you'd like. However, that little phrase has bugged me for a while, and I finally figured out why. My old newspaper column and the evolution post below hit the nail on the head: people don't want to be confronted with different ideas. Oh well.

So, because I really want people to read this damn thing, I'll try to make it more entertaining and more conducive to a wider audience, like my old Hustler column. People actually read that shit on their way to the crossword puzzle. Or at least they recognized my picture because they bought me drinks at Bailey's and Buffalo Billiards. So let the fun begin.