dispatch from tha fahkin gahdin

it's true, I'm hollering at you from my back yard, can you sense the outdoorsiness? I just set up a little office out here consisting of a chaise lounge, beach towel, water bottle, and my cell phone. You know, in case I need to make any important business calls. So far, things are progressing nicely in my newly appointed zone of productivity. I just hope my little old lady neighbors don't come out to do any gardening, because I look like kind of a weirdo out here. Kind of.

so today was supposed to be my first day of work at a new job. I'd tell you who I'm working for but that would violate my self-imposed rule of Extreme Blog Anonymity. Anyhow, I met with my new boss last week and he gave me a bitchload of things to get started on and told me to show up at the office Monday morning (today) to get settled. I spent an hour this morning trying to read all the stuff I was supposed to be perusing over the weekend, then got myself all stressed out trying to figure out what to wear. i read an article in Cosmo yesterday (I swear I do NOT have a subscription to Cosmo, this was a momentary lapse of reason at the supermarket checkout.) so the article said that flip-flops are always inappropriate for the office. I didn't know that. I panicked. I don't own any summer shoes that aren't flip-flops. So I wore flip-flops anyways, and prepared to be judged.

I called the dude on my way in, because the building houses a nuclear reactor and you need a code to get in. Don't worry, my job has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear research. We'll all live to see another day. So the dude was not there, but rather getting his car fixed, and asked me to "refresh his memory" on why we were even meeting. Sweet. It appears this guy is a little different from some bosses I've had in the past. Some people like to keep a tight leash on their grad students and know where they are at all times, preferably within the bosses' line of sight, in case there's an extremely tedious and/or annoying task that needs doing.

This guy would be at the other extreme - he told me I can pretty much do whatever I want as long as the work gets done. While this is good on sunny days like today when I want to be in my outdoor office, or pretending to work when I'm actually at the beach, it's kind of a bad thing in general for someone like me. I tend to be pretty horrible at accomplishing things even when I'm two feet away from whoever I'm working with. I have a feeling I'm going to be doing a lot of procrastinating all week long then doing all of my hours at once in an overnight work extravaganza right before my meetings with him.

Eventually I did go over to the office, met some people, and saw the little grad student containment area. It actually has a window, with a stunning view of the student parking lot. Not as awesome as my outdoor office, but I think I saw a water cooler. Free water is the dopest.

So I decided to call it a day around 1pm, and made the rounds distracting people I know who work on that side of campus. When I got home I toyed with the idea of doing work, but decided it was more important to search for the sunniest spot on the property. A true grad student never quits researching. My findings: the front porch only gets sun in the late afternoon, the side porch only gets sun in the early morning, and the whole climbing-out-the-attic-window-to-sit-on-the-roof thing just seemed like a recipe for disaster.

Speaking of disasters and findings, my thesis isn't happening right now, so if people could just go ahead and stop asking me how it's going, that would be grrrrrreat. I saw a girl from my department today, she was holding that coveted box of watermarked paper, on her way to hand it in to the librarian. I felt a fleeting twinge of motivation to do something with my own thesis, but it was immediately replaced by "who the fuck am I kidding?" I didn't even consider going to get the transcribing machine, it just seemed way more important to work on my tan. And those are my priorities for the next few weeks.

Other than that, things are going well. The no-income thing hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be; my tax return only lasted a few days but two friends just moved away and left me an inordinate amount of free crap. I've been eating a lot of ice cream lately, but I've also been going to the gym. A few of you got introduced to (i.e. forced to feel) my guns on Saturday night, and my rock-hard abs should be ready for peer review in another week or five. Speaking of Saturday night, I'm never starting drinking at 6pm again.