del gioco tra Francia e Repubblica portoghese

http://la-destinazione.livejournal.com/7938.html

del giorno bellissimo!

http://la-destinazione.livejournal.com/7812.html#cutid1

del calcio

ITALIA ITALIA!!!!!! DID YOU GUYS SEE BUFFON AND GROSSO AND DEL PIERO????? ITALIA ITALIA!!!! ITALIA PER FIFA WORLD CUP 06!!!!!!

della mia vita!

i find it really hard to use blogspot nowadays because the server is always slow and problematic! aaarggh.... anyway, here goes:

http://la-destinazione.livejournal.com/7350.html

Have a good week ahead guys!

this is unbelievable! brazil got knocked out by france! zidane was playing like a god! henry + zidane was actually better than ronaldo + adriano + ronaldinho! and wayne rooney really destroyed other's family jewels!
I really dunnoe who will win ger vs ita, but I do think that fra will take out por. Aaaaargh.... Now that brazil is out, at least the final results will be more exciting! Zambrotta and Toni rule!

of happenings

i have been on cloud nine since friday... after talking to the immunologist in my lab and listening to her advice, I feel that I am finally ready to adopt a less harsh attitude towards my lab work and getting published.

The chicago trip with rebecca was honestly too good to be true. Her parents were such darlings and the house and garden really swept me off my feet. Italian food was their favorite (though almost completely of german descent) and I really enjoyed the walk by lake michigan and the mozart concerto no 25 in c at the park.

Came back to saint louis and watched a ton of world cup (largely during work time, out of defiance towards ms klein). Italy was really the better of the two during the match against the socceroos, though they put up a good fight. Watched it with a group of researchers that I didn't know and I was positive that there were australians in the midst cos after I cheered with totti's penalty shot, 2 people shot me a deadly venomous glance. Made my exit promptly.

Had a good run in the evening, and then tennis with a few friends. A friend came over to cut my hair, which was pretty successful. Finally, ended up playing classical music, italian arias, spanish operas and 60s american blues on my gramophone (my new love) while having apple wine. Just looking at the vinyl records (which i got from a yard sale at chicago: $2 for the whole box of like 50) makes me go goo-goo-ga-ga. Unfortunately, my 4 yr old camera has finally decided to RIP (which explains the lack of pictures recently) hence no pics for now. Hopefully i can fix it soon.

I am positive that the good weather makes me more positive today. Oh, and I found out that rebecca has the original 1960s vinyl record of sound of music, and coincidentally, our favorite song is "Something good". Go listen to it.. honestly, there's something good in life, you will discover.. =)

i am off to chicago tmr... but thankfully not by plane, since the Curse of O'hare never fails to get to me...
it's probably a good time for me to think things over too.

By the way, even after brazil's stunning game today, I still think italy has a good chance at the world cup. Forza Italia!

larrionda jorge is such a shitty referee!

of regrets

I am a person that works on a parsimonious basis. To be clearer, I don't do things that I know I won't accept or want in the end. Which is why right from the start, after junior college, I didn't apply for med school, nor did I apply for Cornell (lousiest ivy league... CANNOT MAKE IT!)... I knew that I didn't want to be a doctor, nor did I want to go to a singaporen-scholar-dumping-ground school... I didn't apply for this certain phd scholarship in singapore either because I was pretty sure that I didn't want to do academic research. To me, this isn't a lottery where I apply for everything (which is what many of my friends did) and then choose the deal with the best prospects, but not necessarily being the one I actually want. I can't complain much because the research my current scholarship does is product based and definitely application-based, plus it is of a strong collaborative nature with engineers, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists working together on different projects. Plus it gives me the experience of studying overseas and learning in a liberal arts system (which is so important; it enriches the breadth's of one's horizons). Oh, and it pays for everything too, since no one seems to be working much at home after the retrenchments and early retirements.

A few year down the road, I feel a need to be completely honest with myself. I have been harboring ambitions of moving on to grad school for a PhD after I finish my honors here. One of my major advisors has been psychoing me that, if I am willing, she could write a recommendation letter that would send me to HYP (american slang for harvard, yale and princeton) based on my grades and research experience. It was very tempting because for a very long time, research has been my life. Unfortunately, things haven't been going the way I want them to recently. I need to admit that even if I made it to Harvard, I wouldn't be true to myself because I would be going in for a brand name only, plus the academic research thingy isn't what I want (and isn't completely relevant to my future path either). Secondly, I have strings tied to home. Thirdly, my scholarship hasn't been too flexible and it seems certain that I will be going back to work after my masters. Even if I self-finance my phd with a sship from the university itself, they want me to still do my masters, or if I don't, they would just continue to penalize me for a 6 year bond. On top of that, I need to come back to work for a year, and subject to their approval, possibly move on to a self-financed grad sch education before coming back to fulfil the bond.

There are a lot of issues that I have to consider here. The thing is, klein lab is making things so much harder for me here. After working for so long in this lab, I finally understand that sometimes sticking to something and persevering (which we all might think is a good quality) is actually BAD at times. I saw all the signs of her fickle-mindedness and temperament and lack of good guidance etc... but I was given more and more important projects and I just felt that I could achieve it soon and so I stayed on. Even after the post-docs in my lab told me to leave because they felt that I was completely being wasted and ill-treated in this lab, I still declined because I so wanted those few projects to work. Now, at the end of more than a year of working in this lab, I have no results that belong to me, and more importantly, no sense of self-satisfaction of all that I have done here.

This afternoon, I was doing plaque assays for one of my post-docs when I met this stellar grad student from the lab next door, which published 12 papers in 2 months time. Their professor had almost identical background as ours: harvard-educated, dual MD PhD degrees, young asst profs, west nile virus studies etc.... But he was different because he was a real scientist. He really understood how to do science and how to elucidate the whole picture. Most profs (including mine) nowadays, just keep catching on small points in research and holding on to it for their lives and reiterating and re-researching and re-examining that one little interesting point they found accidentally. It's like mining for gold. One finds a little gold at a spot and digs for his life there; the other understands the need to examine the whole plot of land and understand the grand picture. The graduate student asked me if I wasn't happy or doing well in my current lab, and suddenly all my grievances just poured out. She was very understanding about it and (unfortunately) told me I could have done way better under her prof, seeing the experiences and techniques I already could do. Thoughts of regrets really filled me then. When I got the fellowship from howard hughes, I should have considered that I had a trump card and that profs would be dying to get a howard hughes fellow for free, but instead, I chose to stick to my early decision of trying to work it out in this lab.

She must have sensed the regrets in me and she told me that she was actually accepted to harvard for phd studies a few years back. I was shocked: turning down harvard for washU? and she told me why: apparently, after she got accepted at harvard, the interviewer told her this:

"Melanie, even though you are from Idaho, we still think that you have a chance of succeeding here."

(for the uninformed, idaho is this small white state with like 1 million people and isn't very urbanized)

Yes, the east-coast-personality really does suck alot. But she made a good choice: she had the guts to turn down a top brand for something less because she understood what she wanted exactly. And I really admire her for that, plus she has been doing so well here.



At a time like this (certain events happened in my lab which almost certainly renders my summer internship here a fruitless one. let's just say that someone else messed up my mice but he has diabetes and I don't want to get him into trouble with my prof because he needs the job), I really really need to learn:

Sometimes, when it's time to let go, we really do need to let go.