...and for everything else you have Mastercard!
Solving mouse problem a Penn dorm...a few mousetraps provided by Penn housekeeping.
Killing 16 mice for RNA extraction and pathway signaling experiments...3 hours of time and a loss of appetite.
Ability to be freinds with someone one was intimate with...Priceless.
Today has been an odd day. It started around 11pm the previous evening when my roomate Kalyca called me to let me know, in a very high pitched voice, that we had mice. After discovering that part of her wall was indeed hollow and attempting to stuff plastic bags into all obvious mouse holes (creativity was indeed lacking at that late hour), I returned to my own only to witness two gray mice of my own exploring the inside of my shoes...GROSS!!! After a restless night of both Kalyca and I succumbing to intense paranoia, which resulted in us frequently waking up to mice scratching in our walls it was off to work by 8 am. True to my luck, however, every available door to the lab was locked and instead of starting the experiment I had woken up at 7 am to do, I ended up sitting in the freezing lounge and analyzing data until lab members started showing up. Of course at that point I had missed my assigned time with the Q-PCR machine, which meant I had to stay until almost 7 pm to finish up..and anyone who knows me even a little will remember how incredibly cranky I get after 11 hours of work. The day continued with me having to walk, in the pouring rain (of course), to the opposite side of campus only to be told that my ID card was perfectly active and that someone just accidentally pressed the wrong button (due to Penn's insanely high security measures I need the ID to get into my dorm and a week ago it was deactivated for no apparent reason)...yay for beauracracy! The day culminated with me using one of the cruelest methods imaginable to murder 16 mice because it seems that my lab had run out of the drug used to put mice to sleep before the actual breaking of the spine, but since data needed to be collected mice had to die...humanely or not.
Still despite all of these minor annoyances, the thought that bothered me all day was "Can one really be freinds with someone one was intimate with?"...really freinds, not just "we kinda talk, but really I want him to hurt as much as he hurm me" mentality that many of my sex addopt. From personal experience, I have not managed to remain close freinds with any of my non-gay intimate past involvements. Every intimate connection (I don't want to use "relationship" here because not all of my "significant" experiences have been with people I was "official" with) that ends does so for a reason and that reason is rarely pleasant. So not only do the two people have to get over that reason but they have to ignore the very basis of why they were together...be it sex or some other form of physical intimacy, but if that intimacy was at all significant it's hard to replace it with the platonic "hey, I'm happy u're now intimate with someone else". Still the basis of any real freindship is honesty, which is exaclty the thing that is lacking in freinships between ex's and people who shared this physical intimacy. It's an odd place to be...you can talk and laugh, but somehow you're so very aware that the intimacy is gone and often knowing that the physical will never be prevents platonic intimacy.
Elliot, Juhi, Lauren, Kim are all people I love deeply but they are also people I have never been physically intimate with and our intimacy is based solely on platonic closeness. The very immage of them in a sexual situation is a bit on the disturbing side. This is not the case with someone I have really "been" with. Somehow, despite the fact that Juhi and Kim and Lauren and Elliot know me so well they will never know the side of me that my lovers have seen. I don't know how to go from having myself so completely open to someone to pretending that this person suddenly doesn't know every side of me...but they do. There's something very powerful in sharing both your body and your soul...my platonic freinds know my soul, my hoock-ups got a glimplse or even an eye-full of my body...but the combination of the two is a very powerful and dangerous thing. On the primal level...its all about power. Sharing just a part of ourselves, allows us to keep a significant portion of that precious control and thus keep that power over ourselves. Sharing it all means surrendering that power to someone else and once given up, that power is hard to take back. It's always a risk when we give up this elusive power and a severing of physical intimacy forces us to retract to our basic instincts - protect ourselves, take back that power and keep it!
From this we must conclude: Is the decision to remain freinds simply a form of masochism? Is it the ultimate illogical act because instead of severing that connection forever, we continue to tease ourselves with reminders of what we no longer have? If, however, one decides to take the optimistic track, who should make the effort? Should it be equal? Or should the person who did the rejecting make that step forward...show that the power they were entrusted with won't be misused? On a personal level, should I try...having taken the first...and then the second step I'm wondering if my faith has failed me once again. I'm a pretty forgiving person and I'm all for allowing people the benefit of the doubt, but should I try to keep him in my life even if the fundamental reason for why we ever attempted the sharade of friedns in the first place is gone forever? Should I ignore what happen? Or cut my losses, leave him in my past and one day hope that I will remember with fondness a boy I once loved, who gave me an amazing summer and who never really asnwered the questions I asked...
Killing 16 mice for RNA extraction and pathway signaling experiments...3 hours of time and a loss of appetite.
Ability to be freinds with someone one was intimate with...Priceless.
Today has been an odd day. It started around 11pm the previous evening when my roomate Kalyca called me to let me know, in a very high pitched voice, that we had mice. After discovering that part of her wall was indeed hollow and attempting to stuff plastic bags into all obvious mouse holes (creativity was indeed lacking at that late hour), I returned to my own only to witness two gray mice of my own exploring the inside of my shoes...GROSS!!! After a restless night of both Kalyca and I succumbing to intense paranoia, which resulted in us frequently waking up to mice scratching in our walls it was off to work by 8 am. True to my luck, however, every available door to the lab was locked and instead of starting the experiment I had woken up at 7 am to do, I ended up sitting in the freezing lounge and analyzing data until lab members started showing up. Of course at that point I had missed my assigned time with the Q-PCR machine, which meant I had to stay until almost 7 pm to finish up..and anyone who knows me even a little will remember how incredibly cranky I get after 11 hours of work. The day continued with me having to walk, in the pouring rain (of course), to the opposite side of campus only to be told that my ID card was perfectly active and that someone just accidentally pressed the wrong button (due to Penn's insanely high security measures I need the ID to get into my dorm and a week ago it was deactivated for no apparent reason)...yay for beauracracy! The day culminated with me using one of the cruelest methods imaginable to murder 16 mice because it seems that my lab had run out of the drug used to put mice to sleep before the actual breaking of the spine, but since data needed to be collected mice had to die...humanely or not.
Still despite all of these minor annoyances, the thought that bothered me all day was "Can one really be freinds with someone one was intimate with?"...really freinds, not just "we kinda talk, but really I want him to hurt as much as he hurm me" mentality that many of my sex addopt. From personal experience, I have not managed to remain close freinds with any of my non-gay intimate past involvements. Every intimate connection (I don't want to use "relationship" here because not all of my "significant" experiences have been with people I was "official" with) that ends does so for a reason and that reason is rarely pleasant. So not only do the two people have to get over that reason but they have to ignore the very basis of why they were together...be it sex or some other form of physical intimacy, but if that intimacy was at all significant it's hard to replace it with the platonic "hey, I'm happy u're now intimate with someone else". Still the basis of any real freindship is honesty, which is exaclty the thing that is lacking in freinships between ex's and people who shared this physical intimacy. It's an odd place to be...you can talk and laugh, but somehow you're so very aware that the intimacy is gone and often knowing that the physical will never be prevents platonic intimacy.
Elliot, Juhi, Lauren, Kim are all people I love deeply but they are also people I have never been physically intimate with and our intimacy is based solely on platonic closeness. The very immage of them in a sexual situation is a bit on the disturbing side. This is not the case with someone I have really "been" with. Somehow, despite the fact that Juhi and Kim and Lauren and Elliot know me so well they will never know the side of me that my lovers have seen. I don't know how to go from having myself so completely open to someone to pretending that this person suddenly doesn't know every side of me...but they do. There's something very powerful in sharing both your body and your soul...my platonic freinds know my soul, my hoock-ups got a glimplse or even an eye-full of my body...but the combination of the two is a very powerful and dangerous thing. On the primal level...its all about power. Sharing just a part of ourselves, allows us to keep a significant portion of that precious control and thus keep that power over ourselves. Sharing it all means surrendering that power to someone else and once given up, that power is hard to take back. It's always a risk when we give up this elusive power and a severing of physical intimacy forces us to retract to our basic instincts - protect ourselves, take back that power and keep it!
From this we must conclude: Is the decision to remain freinds simply a form of masochism? Is it the ultimate illogical act because instead of severing that connection forever, we continue to tease ourselves with reminders of what we no longer have? If, however, one decides to take the optimistic track, who should make the effort? Should it be equal? Or should the person who did the rejecting make that step forward...show that the power they were entrusted with won't be misused? On a personal level, should I try...having taken the first...and then the second step I'm wondering if my faith has failed me once again. I'm a pretty forgiving person and I'm all for allowing people the benefit of the doubt, but should I try to keep him in my life even if the fundamental reason for why we ever attempted the sharade of friedns in the first place is gone forever? Should I ignore what happen? Or cut my losses, leave him in my past and one day hope that I will remember with fondness a boy I once loved, who gave me an amazing summer and who never really asnwered the questions I asked...