Written in the stars.

Do you believe in astrology? I'm not really sure if I do yet. Mostly because whenever I see horoscopes in newspapers or online, they always say something stupid that could apply to everyone, like, "Don't go near monkeys today. While they're tossing their poop to each other in their cages it may fall out and land on you due to the fact that Virgo is in the 84th house."

No but for real though, horoscopes always end up giving you some nugget of bullshit wisdom that should be a common sense thing that EVERYONE, regardless of their sign should follow, such as:

"

Although being responsible doesn't sound as much fun as chasing a dream, the rewards should justify your total concentration." (and this one is real, by the way).

Whatever. I'm not elaborating on this. Maybe later. I'm sick right now and my argumentative powers are not what they usually are.

I particularly like these horoscopes though. They're Mad-Libs, and they're great. I'm a Libra, so I particularly like the wisdom they have provided for me.

Aries — Ram (March 21-April 19)
Someone you know may be feeling appetizing. Stay out of the way!

Taurus — Bull (April 20-May 20)
Don't run in public. It could prove embarrassing.

Gemini — Twins (May 21-June 20)
Control the urge to kiss. Sneeze instead.

Cancer — Crab (June 21-July 22)
Bending too many grapes will leave you exhausted!

Leo — Lion (July 23-August 22)
A loved one thinks you are sexy. Do not be taken in by flattery.

Virgo — Virgin (August 23-September 22)
Eat in private when possible. It's difficult to concentrate when people are watching.

Libra— Scales (September 23-October 22)
Avoid farting calculators.

Scorpio — Scorpion (October 23-November 21)
Never loan money to atrocious camels! They are poor credit risks.

Sagittarius — Archer (November 22-December 21)
Today is a good day to ruminate a clock.

Capricorn — Goat (December 22-January 19)
You may receive some sheep from a secret admirer! Water them every day, and they will last a long time.

Aquarius — Water Bearer (January 20-February 18)
Unless you organize your vacuums better, you won't get anything done.

Pisces — Fish (February 19-March 20)
A good friend will give you $4 to buy new beans. Be sure to thank your friend.

Chemistry time. PEACE AND BLAYYSINGS.

Sticks and stones may break my bones...

I'm a big fan of whatever's going on in the music industry lately, because a lot of artists seem to be shifting towards lyrics with lots of positive reinforcement of their audience, telling them not to be ashamed of who they are. Firework by Katy Perry, Who Says by Selena Gomez, Pretty Girl Rock by Keri Hilson, Raise Your Glass and F***ing Perfect by P!nk- even if Firework's execution leaves a little to be desired ("Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?"), the messages in all these songs are loud and clear, and I love them.

However, I do NOT like the reasons for which all these songs are suddenly becoming more and more necessary.

My mom told me she was talking to my orthodontist while my brother was getting his braces, and he said that he would hate to have been in middle school or high school in this age. I have to say that I agree with him. Kids, pre-teens and teenagers are all becoming more superficial, and the mold that acceptability and being "cool" can squeeze into is becoming tighter and smaller. Contrary to expectation, globalization and the flattening of the world does not seem to be making our youth more accepting, tolerant or open-minded. If anything, kids these days appear to be getting more close-minded, and bullying seems to be getting more and more widespread.

I had my share of getting picked on when I was a kid. I got made fun of for my glasses, because I had hairy arms, sometimes because I pronounced words funny- all manner of things. But if I look back, I think I got pretty lucky. Not once did I get made fun of because of my race. Not once did I get made fun of because I didn't have a boyfriend or because I didn't have any experience with guys. And I wouldn't know this as a fact because I didn't have personal experience with it, but homophobic bullying, cyberbullying and sexual bullying were extremely rare occurrences.

I don't really think it's like that anymore.

I see some kids getting rocks thrown at them and being made fun of for their ethnicities. I've read countless times about cases of bullying where the kids were made fun of and threatened for being gay. I've heard and seen girls being jeered at for not having experience with guys or not having a perfect body (although honestly, what do middle school girls know about perfect bodies anyway?) I've seen kids gang up on one person and whisper and exclude them. And even if it's not out loud for everyone to hear, it's just as relentless.

And apparently, it doesn't seem to stop after grade school either.

In 2010, in Rutgers University, Tyler Clementi jumped off a bridge and committed suicide after his roommate broadcast live feed of him having a sexual encounter with another man in his room.

In 2006, Megan Meier hung herself after being cyberbullied through Myspace and being called names like "fat" and "slut" through a fake Myspace account- created by a mother of one of her friends, no less.

In 2009, Jaheem Herrera, aged eleven, hung himself after constantly being called "gay" and "ugly".

Tell me something. How much despair and desperation do you think it takes for an 11 year-old boy to THINK about hanging himself, let alone actually go through with it? For ANYONE to hang themselves, come to think about it?

I remember reading a Facebook status of one of my friends in high school. It said,

"This goddamn school has a way of making you feel insignificant, unneeded, and in fact just plain lonely."

How long can people who feel like that be impervious? How long can they sit there and tolerate that, day after day, yearning to say something but unable to, lashing out at no one but themselves? How long can they carry that burden before they snap? How long can they just sit there and bottle it all up, tell themselves not to feel anything, tell themselves that it's not worth it? Soon, it becomes a test of Herculean endurance- and it never ends. This world is so full of ignorance and fear of the unknown that as soon as one bully is out of the picture, two more crop up, like Hydra heads. It's extremely difficult to defeat. Bullies are the most despicable people on Earth for systematically picking out anything that's different about people and shining a glaring spotlight on them for the entire world to see, making it impossible to ignore.

If they had it their way, the world would be molded to their liking- an Asimovian I-Robot-esqe army of beings characterized by homogeneity. Everyone else- the ones who are different, the ones who are perceived as weak, the ones who are perceived as black sheep- are shoved to the side, fed a dark, icy river of cruelty, injustice and intolerance until eventually, it floods out of their every pore and suffocates them, DESTROYS them, leaving the bullies completely untouched.

Honestly, I don't care if the bully's intention was never to cause their victims to commit suicide. The fact remains that they brutally, mercilessly, indefatigably made a career of tormenting someone- that they CHOSE to make life a hell for someone. Just because they were different in some way. That is one of the lowest, most shameful, most despicable acts, and no matter what the intended or unintended consequences were, I will ALWAYS believe it to be so.

And to all you underdogs, all you people who are different who get shit for it- it's not a bad thing. It is a gift from God. And no matter what anyone says or does, you should never, EVER be ashamed of who you are.

So in the words of Eminem: Don't let 'em say you ain't beautiful. They can all get fucked. Just stay true to you.

Humans and animals are closer than we think.

Yesterday, after four hours of sleep and getting the most painful cramps of my life and having to TA a class all by myself because my co-TA had a stomachache (oh boo hoo), I had to come back to the apartment and study for my synth lab practicum and written final, as well as finish two lab reports for this same class.

I basically have a love-hate relationship with synth lab. I actually really like it when I'm in there doing the experiment and I love the hands-on part of lab. But then, when it comes to writing the lab reports and I've been busy or procrastinated, I despise the whole writing-them-at-1 o'clock-in-the-morning part of synth lab.

So I came back to my apartment. It was a beautiful day, extremely warm and sunny, and there was a carnival going on in the quad, with cotton candy and obstacle courses and goldfish and everything. I resisted the temptation and went up the stairs, feeling extremely sad that I was going to miss everything, but as soon as I walked in, one of my roommates yelled "LET'S GO WIN OURSELVES A GOLDFISH AT THE CARNIVAL!"

So much for self-restraint.

So we went downstairs and I raced my roommates on the inflatable obstacle course, stumbling through it and falling all over ourselves, and we won ourselves a goldfish, got FREE STUFF (every college student's dream) and ate cotton candy. At this point of my day, I was having about as much fun as these guys!

After lengthy discussions about what to name our TWO fish (which finally ended in us choosing the names Sir Waffles Spankalot and Lady Pancakes Spankalot), we got to work. This was the easy part. I was basically describing the procedure and my results and was listening to GloZell in the background for entertainment. Work was getting done pretty easy (mainly because I was basically copying stuff from my lab notebook) and I was accomplishing things like a boss.

But then, synth lab threw me a curveball. I was supposed to be doing a cost-

yield analysis for which compound would have been better to use. And this is where I was completely lost. Our product yield was completely messed up, we had no clue how to calculate and shit was not cool.

I could relate to this guy right about then:

I figured the rest of the lab report would be easy. But obviously that wasn't the case (this is Tech we're talking about). They decided to throw a zinger at us at the very END of the lab report by giving us two bullshit post-lab questions that made absolutely no goddamn sense. And I KNOW they didn't make any goddamn sense because Yahoo! Answers, my Holy Grail for finding answers to chemistry questions I don't know the answers to, only had one answer to the question and it was "I'm in CHEM 2380 right now too, and I'm still working on it." This entire time, I'd been sitting there working and trying to stay awake, so much so that I basically looked like this poor baby. That was it. I reached the end of my tether.

This fact, combined with the fact that I had a written part as well as a lab practical and I was scared shitless about it, and also because I was starving and had gotten no sleep in the last two days, resulted in a minor meltdown in which I just grabbed a pillow and screamed into it as loudly as I could. When taking a break, I saw this guy and decided that it would do us both some good to sit down and have a little bonding time and let out our problems.

After a while, I was able to calm down and get back to work. And even though it took forever, we finally did all the practice questions, finished all the calculations and wrote both our lab reports with as much grace and dexterity as this panda.

And now, I'm finished with synthesis lab for the rest of the semester (and for the rest of my LIFE) and am finally going to do this:

Good night :)

Hi, I'm an engineer and I don't know how to use a toilet!

I am a proud student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Our biomedical engineering program is ranked #3 in the United States. Our College of Engineering, as a whole, is ranked #4 in the country, and is ranked as the 13th best engineering and IT university. Our school is crawling with engineers. It's commonplace to build your own computer here. Georgia Tech's Ovarian Cancer Institute has developed a test that is 100% accurate in testing for ovarian cancer. For God's sake, our bookstore is called Engineer's Bookstore.

Our campus has so much smarts that people here are sometimes lacking in interpersonal skills.

So then, why the hell can we not flush our goddamn toilets? I'm in the Honors Program, and all of us lived in the same dorm our freshman year. I remember getting to know people that first week and being completely blown away with what everyone had accomplished. I remember sitting with people for help with chemistry and being amazed at how clearly they explained the material (even when the professors had failed to). All of this is great.

Why is it the same people who make and innovate these do not know how to use them?

But that still doesn't explain why they don't have the common sense to flush.

I can think of a few reasons, none of which are satisfactory. Students here are so burdened with their heavy workloads and heavier expectations that they wander around campus, lost in thoughts of how to improve their research, how many lab reports they have due and how to make the world a better place that they just don't have time for such trivial, petty tasks as, I don't know, aiming into the toilet and then flushing the toilet.

Maybe students here are just so curious and inquisitive that instead of flushing, they can't resist and get lost in the intricacies and structural properties of dookie.

Or maybe students here are so worn-down and beaten by Georgia Tech that their refusal to flush is a kind of small pleasure for them. It is also a big f***-you to the institution- a tangible and olfactory metaphor for the shit that Georgia Tech incessantly drops on them without flushing.

I don't know. But whichever reason it is, what I do know is that this place is stressful and terrible, and one of my own small pleasures is to be able to use a public toilet without being afraid to get diseases from it. I realize that I'm so busy that I don't always have time to work out as much as I would like, but the burning in my quads that results after hovering over the toilet when I pee is not one that makes me go, "Yeah! I feel super sexy and skinny now!"

So whoever is reading this- even if you're NOT at Georgia Tech- please. For the love of God, have the courtesy to aim INTO the toilet when you're doing your business and flush when you're done.

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. If that cat can flush the toilet, you can too.

The most amazing man I know.

Even though my dad turned 46 today, he certainly doesn't act or look like it. He's still an extraordinary bundle of energy and he's got a certain youthfulness that will probably never go away. He can do practically anything he sets his mind to, and the best thing about him is that even when he's 60, he'll probably be going crazy with my grandkids the same way he challenged my brother and me to keep up with him when we were younger.

When my dad was a kid, he was flying a kite on the veranda of his house. He got so into it that he didn't realize that the floor didn't stretch out infinitely, and he ran out of ground and fell. He has a gigantic scar on his knee because of that fall. This was 38 years ago.

And I can still see him doing this.

About 7 or 8 years ago, my dad broke his fingers going down a water slide. I'm still not entirely sure how he managed it, but I think it had something to do with him falling off his raft thing and landing funny when he fell off the slide. I remember my mom taking him to the doctor to get his finger bandaged temporarily, and after he left the office, he said, "Let's go again!"

Every few weeks for the last 5 years, my dad has come home with sprained ankles, messed up wrists and dislocated fingers (the same ones he broke on that water slide. They seem to be permanently cursed). This is because he plays cricket and tennis every week, and because he plays basketball with a bunch of college kids who are all at least a foot taller than him.

Yesterday, my dad came home with a lip a little bit smaller than a golf ball. When asked what he had done to his lip, he told us that he'd been missing too many catches so he'd decided to try to catch them with his mouth instead. And the best part of this is that no matter how many times he gets hurt, he goes running back to the courts every week.

My dad is persistent, extremely stubborn and creative in the sense that he comes up with ridiculous nicknames for my brother, my mother and me, such as Wally Walrus, Anaconda, Grasshopper, Shamu the Killer Whale and Poncho. He's never boring to be around and he's unfailingly optimistic (and sometimes idealistic). He's the best dad I could ever ask for, and I'm always going to want to have him around even when he's 60 and old and cranky (even if he's not as bad-tempered as normal old men, he'll still be a little cranky).

Happy birthday Dad. Here's to you =)

This is basically me and my dad.

The classes I'm GOING to take are so much more important than the classes I'm taking now.

So one fine day, when I am the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, I'm going to make it so that people don't have classes the first week of registration. Everyone's always on OSCAR anyway and no one pays attention to what's going on. I know that's what I do. Instead of paying attention, I'm always in Excel or on schedule creator websites filling in the classes I intend to take and reveling in delight at possible perfection.

I woke up the morning of April 6th, 2011, feeling refreshed and hopeful (this never happens). I woke up to one of the most beautiful mornings I've ever seen and jumped out of bed feeling excited and ready to go. I was especially looking forward to 2:15 pm that afternoon, because it was going to be the best time of the entire week. Why?

Registration.

All throughout organic chemistry, I impatiently checked the clock on my laptop, occasionally listening to the professor drone on about keto and enol structures. Then, as the clock struck 1:45 pm, I was suddenly struck by a pang of anxiety. What if I didn't make it back on time? What if the bus took forever to come? WHAT IF there was a 3 car pileup in the middle of Ferst Drive and the bus couldn't get back to North Avenue?

Could I camp out at the Student Center and wait for my registration time there? No. I was hungry and I'd been spending too much money lately. I would have to go back to my apartment. No matter what the circumstances, however, one thing was certain- failure to get to my apartment and be logged onto OSCAR at 2:15 pm on the dot was not an option.

It took me 8 minutes to get up all the stairs to North Avenue, climb another flight of stairs to get to the second floor (as you'll find, this was a strategic move- the elevators are slower than taking the stairs. Taking the elevator when you have to get somewhere fast at a decent hour when people are actually USING the elevators is a rookie mistake), unlock the door, take my shoes off and bang my knee on the coffee table while trying to sit down. PERFECT timing.

And I registered for 80% of my classes. IMAGINE MY HORROR when the last class I tried to sign up for was closed. Despite my careful planning and strategic coaxing friends to hold classes for me using my cuteness and deer eyes, this bioinformatics class and the 0 available spots indicated were leering at me with cruel smirks and eyes as cold as steel, challenging all my core values (not having classes before 10 AM and getting professors with decent GPAs) and threatening to steal everything I held most dear (a schedule with one easy class on Tuesdays and Thursdays that made it so I only had 29 hours left to take before graduating).

My plan for the day had been to go straight to the library after TA'ing and study for my upcoming chem exam. This bioinformatics class had wrecked my carefully laid plans. This had to be fixed. A table in the library became my situation room of sorts as I perused the course catalog, trying to find an interesting class with an average GPA above 2.7 that counted as a biology elective.

Finally, I hit that trifecta when I found an astrobiology class which unceremoniously banished bioinformatics from my schedule and replaced it with panache. Here ends the saga of Fall 2011 registration.

Summer registration wasn't so bad. Maybe that's because I was only taking two classes.

After that, I got to work on chem. 6 hours and 5 front-and-back sheets of paper later, I was reduced to this:

And it's gonna be the same thing tonight. But I'm going to go own this test tomorrow afternoon and then die in peace, so it's all right :)

First post!

I'm going to take a quick break from orgo and post this real quick =) I have an organic chemistry test on Friday and I'm kind of tired of the world of carboxylic acids and proton NMRs, so here we go.

I'm Kshama, I'm a second-year biology major at Georgia Tech, and I'm extremely short (as you may have seen from my URL). I love playing the piano and running, and I love singing, especially a capella!

Whoever is reading this (if anyone is actually reading this), if you're a fan of jazz or piano, you probably know George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Even if you don't really listen to a lot of jazz, it's pretty famous and you've probably heard it somewhere, even if you haven't recognized it. He wrote it when he was on a train to Boston. It's one of my absolute favorite pieces. He's just got one thing wrong. Although my life is full of reveries, rhapsodies, fantasies, nocturnes, waltzes and the occasional funeral march, it's a different color and a different hue every turn you take. It's vibrant and beautiful and crazy and scary and wondrous and screwed-up and magical, and I want you guys to take the ride with me.

And now, back to acetoacetic esters.