SEX!

Ha, fooled you. this post isn't about sex at all. I just really wanted you to read it, because it's got all kinds of important stuff like how I'm moving back up to Minnesota very very soon(!!!). And hey, studies show... as far as eye-catchers go, SEX! is pretty much the title you go with.

So to begin... don't really know how much of this I've let on via blog, but moving out to Roswell pretty much turned out to be a huge disappointment. When I write, I like to throw up stupid stories and stuff that enters my head, and the negative stuff (rightly) doesn't make it to the surface. Hey, I didn't start a blog just so I could bitch about things all the time.

So, seeing as how a great majority of my very best friends are still in Minnesota, as well as my parents, why not move back?? I'll be living right around Dinkytown, with the lovely Alan Stout, David Moon and Nicole Peterson! YYEAH!

I'm leaving Roswell on September 12th, then, well, doing a whole lot of traveling out west before I get back. Colorado, Utah, and Oregon. Why? Mostly awesome peeps I happen to know in those three locations, and pretty much, i see those as places out west where I could actually thrive
and flourish (unlike rural New Mexico). So... a scouting trip, between obligations in New Mexico & moving back to my glorious home state.

I didn't actually "quit" my internship, i just cut it about 2 months short (from 5 months to 3). Lizard-catching season is pretty much winding down anyway, and it seemed like without lizards, the bosses here would just scramble something together for me to do. For another two months. Nah, I decided, my future's not here, and I'd rather go home.

So what don't I like about Roswell? Well, first allow me a graphic that illustrates everything Roswell isn't:




Roswell, a teen sci-fi-ish series (think Smallville) that lasted from 2000 to 2003 on the WB, does an outright horrible job accurately portraying life here. The clean, attractive young people shown above don't seem to be gang members at all. I bet half of them haven't even tried meth, let alone made and sold it. They're probably tolerant, upstanding people who don't own attack dogs, drive around drunk, and say incredibly racist things. And, of course, they're aliens. I haven't met one stinking alien here.

wow, this is turning into the post where ben vents. calm...

Okay. I'm coming home very soon (probably move into the Cities around October 1st), so if you're around and reading this you should stop by and hug me. And then we can hang out!

What's Ben going to do for a job once he's moved back?, you may be thinking. If you are, cool! I'm thinking that too.

Brains make you dumber.

Hey all,
Well, during in my time in Roswell, I've been trying to pick up on subtle differences between academic, biological science and biology for practical purposes (such as occur at the BLM). I found something interesting in talking to my boss Steve. They're doing interviews for a new Wildlife Biologist position opening up in Roswell (a spot i declined interest in), and Steve has interviewed a handful of guys. He refers to the by their GPA's in college: "Two 4.0's, a 3.6, a 3.2, and a 3.0" And he's showing preference for them in inverse order. Yep, favor based on low GPAs, so far.

To those of you who've just graduated college (most of you, i'd imagine), this must offend the hell out of your scholastic sensibilities. The reasoning for it is this: the higher the GPA, especially with anyone insane enough to have a 4.0, the higher the ability to use high-end, complex reasoning skills and brown-nose your ass off. Big frickin whoop. This is the real world, Commie. The worse you did in college, the more time you presumably (pending interview) spent gaining valuable social skills, doing things you weren't instructed to do, or things you were instructed not to do, and gaining real world skills. And the more likely you are to operate a truck without needing "instructions."

And you know what, he's right. Me and my education get the damn truck stuck in the sand far too often, and for the other guys I work with, pulling a truck out of the sand is just called Saturday. Hey, any idiot can catch a lizard. To do so without suffering a critical existential crisis WHAT AM I DOING HERE takes at most a 2.6 GPA.

I went to Carlsbad Caverns & the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas today! The caverns are HUGE, sweet, and limestone-y. The mountains were good, a nice little hike and a jaunt into neighboring Texas. The Caverns are about 2 hours south of here... pretty much something i had to do during my time in New Mexico, and I'm glad I did it. As time might be winding down, hey, time to exhaust any cool things around here to do.

Aw, Now I'm All Warm On The Inside

Hey Friends,
Man do I feel great after some time home! Big thanks to everyone who played a part in that awesomeness, and, for those whom I haven't seen in a while, here's hoping our day will come soon.

To clarify, I got to spend a day or two in the Twin Cities, bus over to Milwaukee for a week to attend an ecology conference courtesy of St. Olaf, and then a couple days split between the Twin Cities and home before flying into Roswell tonight. MAAAN that felt good. Felt nice and warm on the inside, as opposed to here where i only feel warm on the outside.

Ecology conferences are great. More generally, I'm a fan of any gathering that reeks of science. I loved the symposium each spring at Olaf, and this ESA meeting was pretty much that, but more intense and lasting a week, the content of which covered pretty much all research contemporary in ecology. sweet! I'm finally feeling very, very motivated... like, grad school motivated. Seriously.

My rationale for taking a job in monitoring (as opposed to research) was to see another side of what people do with biology degrees. College is great for getting a thorough look in how people are using their degrees, at college. And in regards to biology, that's going to be research and teaching for the most part. Yet there's a slew of other stuff, the non-ivory tower stuff like catching lizards with sticks and getting your truck stuck, that just doesn't get represented. perhaps rightly so. and you know what? I really haven't cared to advance in monitoring, at least based upon what I've experienced so far. But now i know. So... grad school?

I told myself I'd have to have a real passion for something before pursuing it at the graduate level. And, I think ESA might have opened my eyes to something. Firstly, how confusing and convoluted the field of ecology is! Many if not most of the research presented at a place like ESA goes something like this.

So, I draw inferences about (hypothetical construct) and support the current model of Dr. So&so et al. (year), based upon the past (3 - 6) years of my life spent bent over a patch of soil observing (latin name of organism, probably 30+ letters and uninteresting) as a case study.

Not to diminish research in ecology (heavens no!), or to suggest it should be done any differently. That's just how a great deal of it runs. Doing something not terribly interesting to people at large (i.e. sampling soil, counting maggots, measuring carapaces, etc.) to support or refute some construct developed by someone else twenty years ago. As a result, a lot of biologists I've met have an organism that they've pretty much banked their careers on (at Olaf for example, Freedberg = turtles, Crisp = leeches, Porterfield = fish esp. long-eared sunfish, etc). I'm not sure I'll ever have a passion for any particular case study like that, but you never know. I see myself more as a theory guy.

And, I love evolution. yep, at a personal level too. Feel it pretty much explains everything, and when I think of academic biology in my time beyond St. Olaf, its pretty much always geared toward applying evolutionary theory somehow. It's a definite grad school possibility for me, though yeah, vague at this point. I found myself gravitating towards the evolution-related talks at ESA, and was interested to hear that the evolution guys have their own conferences as well (according to one ecologist I talked to, evolutionary biologists are seen as more competitive, and less collaborative, than ecologists. That natural selection, i tell ya. gets into your brain.)

So for now.. yeah, more stuff to figure out. Viva la evolution!