Trekked down to San Jose today, to talk to a professor at San Jose State University about doing an internship. Looks like it's going to work out! Another student from one of my tech writing classes and I will be helping this professor develop some educational materials for teaching college undergrads about flow cytometry, and helping out with a grant proposal to get more funds for developing more educational materials. Should be a hoot, and if nothing else, I'll get to learn some interesting stuff about flow cytometry.

Large stretches of 880 and downtown San Jose are under construction, which made the drive a little more interesting than it should have been.

I also wish drivers would pay a little more attention to the effects of their actions on other drivers. As I was returning to Berkeley along Martin Luther King, a pickup truck in front of me decided to stop dead in the right hand lane in front of me. I stopped, and put on my left blinker to signal to get around it. I looked behind me, and realized that I couldn't see a darn thing because of the truly enormous white VW EuroVan behind me. So, I pulled forward as far as I could to get a little more clearance, and dammit if the driver didn't pull the van up even farther, practically to my bumper. Then he starts *honking* at *me* because I haven't changed lanes, completely oblivious to the fact that I can't see anything coming up in the left lane because his gigantic van is filling up my vision like a whale coming down on the Pequod.

I did finally manage to get over into the next lane without killing anyone. It probably never even occurred to the driver that *he* was giving *me* problems. But c'mon people: if you're going to drive automobiles the size of small houses, cut us wee folk driving compact cars some slack.

Er, end rant.

So, after that I stopped for some popular science magazines -- Scientific American and something called Seed, which claims to be about "Science/Culture" and seems to focus on socially relevant developments in science, and on making science hip and sexy. It's actually kind of cool, though there are occasional inexplicable references to something called "Third Culture", which, as far as I can tell, are people who are fabulously hip enough to have transcended the stuffy old "two cultures" split between science and the humanities. Gee, when I was in college, the technical term for those of us who liked to study physical chemistry and differential equations and French literature and ancient Greek was "nuts." If only I'd known. "Au contraire," I'd have said. "I'm just so very Third Culture."

I also stopped at Blockbuster, and got more scary movies: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (which I'm kind of expecting will suck, but be entertaining nonetheless) and Candyman. I'm not sure if I'll have time to watch either of them tonight, since I do have to do some work on my opinion piece on GM foods, and write some fiction. But since they're not new releases, I've got them for a whole week.