I talked to my sister. At her birthday they got into a discussion about the RNC protests--or rather, a yelling match. My mom is very sweet, so sweet that she naively thinks the police were trying to maintain the peace and the protesters were just trying to cause trouble. My sister is very smart, and realizes how she erred in letting the discussion get so heated, and asked my advice for next time. I said that if you know you can't talk about it unemotionally, it's alright to accept that and not talk about the issue. And if you can speak about it calmly, but know that the other side is too uninformed for an intelligent discussion (as was the case the other day), you can say something simple and end the discussion---for this, I would have, "I know innocent people who were harmed by the police [true!], but it wasn't reported on at all in the mainstream media--if you would like to talk about it later, you could do some more reading and then we could discuss the merits of different approaches."

I get some funny comments from people (in the horticulture department, no less!) when they hear I'm doing sustainability work. Nothing mean, just a little awkward--because many people are working on things like flowers ($$$) or turfgrass (for golf), so they feel funny when they hear about people working on deeper things (or that's what I'm guessing). 

I have too much work to do, and will the whole time I'm here. If I want to finish classes in two years, I have to work hard since I don't have a hort background. I will either get smarter/more efficient, use drugs (caffeine, Adderall) with a combo of reduced sleep (not possible, my body would break down after a few months of this at the latest), or have to drop something. There is no sense worrying about it. This is a great opportunity to sharpen my skills. I have to look at it that way, or dissolve into a pile of stress.

Classes are:

-ag machinery (where I drove a tractor)

-hort seminar (pass/fail--just sit and hear people talk about hort-related subjects)

-veg production (interesting, time consuming field trips first three saturdays)

-stats (necessary for a MS but lots of work, boring)

-soil science--an undergrad class. Hate the labs. Undergrad labs are a waste of time, but they don't offer the lecture without the lab.

I have lots of deep thoughts, especially when I am sleepy. The medicine I took is affecting me still, they say the spirit of the plant stays with you, especially the first few months after. It's hard in a sense because my thoughts often undermine what I am doing. Like creating a study design...thinking about how observing the subject affects the subject, how you can never truly randomize anything (literally, there is mathematically no such thing as random)...things like that. Truly, we should still be able to get some general, helpful trends out of the data. But these thoughts are also technically true. I have to be careful in how I let them go, direct them in a positive manner.