Winning

The Physics Grads Team won the May 6th Trivia Night at the Pub competition. Winning freally eels good. My life is now complete.

Lab continued

I found out that the post-doc in my lab has renewed her funding and will be here for I don't know how much longer (originally she was supposed to be done in May). This is a post-doc who doesn't speak English, doesn't talk to anybody in lab and monopolizes some of the equipment. Lab is going to be really crowded this summer with two (maybe three) more students joining. At least two of them are pretty cool and do things like speak English and attend pub nights so things should improve.

Life

Research is going fairly well. Slow right now (waiting on wafers so I can get new samples), but going well otherwise
My main problem is my adviser's apparent lack of desire to publish anything - it sucks getting good results, having my adviser tell me to write a paper, making figures and writing a draft, then having my adviser sit on it for a month and longer. Oh well.

crossword

The UCI student paper's crossword puzzle takes me an average of 10 minutes to do. I need to be able to waste more time than that on my various nonacademic pursuits.

Philosophy

When a broken heart heals, does it build up emotional scar tissue?

3:00 AM

The Major League Baseball regular season started today. Notice that it's almost 9:00 AM and I said "started." This is because the opening game was played at 3:00 AM PDT in Japan. I don't object to broadening the world audience, but it seems that MLB's doing this is a big digitus infamis to the fans in the US and especially those of Oakland and Boston (I won't discuss the ethics of torturing Red Sox fans or say "what Oakland fans?"). Also baseball is already very popular in Japan. Will playing a major league game there increase interest and, in the long run, revenues to MLB from Japan? I'm guessing maybe, but not much.

Game Theory meets Real Life

I feel like I'm stuck in a twisted, poorly played Ultimatum Game. [Explanation of the ultimatum game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game. Quick recap: Player A offers some fraction of a commodity to Player B, who then accepts or rejects the offer. If accepted, the commodity is split according to the offer; if rejected neither player gets anything. Since any amount of the commodity is beneficial, the rational choice is to accept any offer greater than zero.]
In my case the commodity is dates (not the fruit kind) and the two players are me and Girl X. I offer various dates - lunch, dinner, movie, party - and have my offers mostly rejected, usually not flat-out but with some sort of dignifier/apology (e.g. "I'd love to but I have to finish a project for class").
There are a few ways to interpret this.
One is that the commodity offered (i.e. time spent with me) is considered to have negative value. This is perfectly legitimate, but if it is true I'd like to know for my own benefit.
Another is that time spent studying/researching is considered more valuable than time spent with me. Again, I'd like to know so that I can stop worrying about the situation and move on with my life.
Another option is that she is insane. I don't know how to describe or deal with this possibility.
[Note: there may be other possibilities, but I think these are the main three.]

[Note: Nobody reads this blog, so I feel safe posting this stuff here. I'm debating posting this as a note on Facebook, at which point this situation would be visible to more people including Girl X. My current strategy is to lay low.]