Pop Quiz!

Q: What’s worse than spending two and a half hours copy/pasting information from a website into a spreadsheet?

A: Spending two hours formatting said spreadsheet.

FIFTEEEEEEEEEEN

Yeah, clearly being a grown-up is fun! Seriously though, despite the monotony of my task, I’m enjoying my internship, and I don’t spend the whole time wishing I could go home anymore. Some of that’s simply because I’ve become more comfortable with the adults, because I don’t have to meet so many more new people, and because my mentor’s out of town for a week so I don’t have to deal with her. But mostly it’s because I have my own little office and I get to listen to iTunesU while copying and pasting. Having finished my MIT intro psych class, I started a Yale one. I’ve also got courses on Ancient Greece, France, the Structure of English Words, and the Representation of Time in Memory. Exciting!

I’ve finished my first project (in about 36 hours, rather than the two weeks that they thought it would take), so I’m moving on to the second, which basically involves taking lots and lots of data, graphing it, and fitting a curve to it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a high school-er in a program for college students, or because I’m working for the government, or what, but they do seem to overestimate the difficulty of what they assign me. Seriously, it does not take anywhere near three hours to graph a data set; I really need more assignments than that to take up my work-day after lunch. Thankfully, I’ve now got plenty to do, pain-staking and boring though it may be.

I also have summer reading! I’d forgotten how much I like to read. Well, I didn’t forget exactly, but I’m actually getting to do it, instead of just remembering that it was nice. Since I can’t read under the desk or during recess anymore in school, and I actually have friends to socialize with at lunch and between classes now, most of my reading time has disappeared. Here though, I get to do it at lunch and occasionally while I’m waiting for IT to set up some computer things for me (i.e. about half of last week). So here’s what’s on my night table right now:

Obasan, by Joy Kogawa

I’m about half-way through, and it’s so sad. It’s the story of the Japanese-Canadians during WWII. Growing up in America, and as a Yonsei, I know quite a lot about the internment of the Japanese-Americans, but I didn’t even realize, I’m ashamed to say, that the Canadians (and other countries!) did the same. So I’m learning a lot. I haven’t cried yet, but it looks like I might soon.

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

Also SO sad. Everyone in it is so unhappy. But it’s really really good too. I love the writing–it switches perspectives subtly, so you don’t notice at first, but then you do and it’s AWESOME. It’s also making me want to look up Indian history, so I guess wikipedia is also on my night table? WHO KNOWS. Either way I just want Biju to get his green card.

The Mabinogion, compiled/edited/translated by Jeffery Gantz

I am basically done with this, I just haven’t quite finished “Peredur,” which is basically the Welsh equivalent of “Percival.” Essentially, mythology is cool, Welsh mythology is sexy, and beautiful Penguin Classics translations of Welsh mythology are so awesome they make me want to pee my pants in joy.

The Fall of the Kings, by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

This is the sequel to Swordspoint, and our library at home doesn’t have it, so I am so so so happy to have gotten it here! Regency England-esque magical fantasy world with scholarly research and political intrigue (and sexual scandal!) is like my favorite type of book EVER. What a win.

Parisians, by Graham Robb

A birthday gift from a pretty cool dude of a friend, I’ve only just started this, but any book that starts with Napoléon losing his virginity has got to be good. Also it’s about PARIS which is you know basically a win.

YAY for books. What’s in your bookshelf?