If I had a million dollars...

The other day I was talking to a friend about all the things we would do if we were suddenly billionaires (I think we were watching a movie about someone that won the lottery or something... I don't remember). After talking about the places we would travel, the stuff we would buy (for other people) and the charitable organizations we would donate money to, I said "you know, I would probably still be doing exactly what I'm doing in my life right now. Except I would have a nicer bike." That's right folks, if I had nearly infinite amounts of money at my disposal, I would still choose to be a *grad student*. What's wrong with me?

But, I would have a nice bike, so it would all be worthwhile. :P

In all seriousness, though, how many people are lucky enough to be doing exactly what they want to do in life? I mean, I'm getting PAID to live in Denmark and do astronomy. I should be paying someone for the privilege of being able to do this! This is awesome.

seriously, sometimes I wonder why I have any friends

From a chat conversation earlier today:

me: why are you friends with all these Mormons?!

C:Because they friended meeee

I HAD to friend them back

or else I'd feel God's wraith

wrath

me: hahahahaha

God has a wraith?

does he use it for a hitman?

C: stupid

I corrected it

me: wraiths are scary...

C: it was a typo

stop teasing

me: I don't ever want to meet God's wraith

:P

C: wrath!!!!!

me: did you ever watch Stargate?

the one with the wraiths?!

FREAKS ME OUT!

My life is awesome

I've been walking to work because I don't have a bike yet and it cost about $3.00 each way to take the train + bus combination that gets me there and I'm poor. The walk is great, and less than 30 mins (not really significantly longer than it takes on public transit, really), and every day I feel like I'm discovering amazing things. Too bad I usually don't have my camera with me or I would have some great pictures to share.

I have some awesome secret projects that I'm starting and hopefully I will actually finish one or two of them so I can reveal them. :)

I wish I had brought my art supplies--all I have is one small sketch book and a pen--because I have a bit more downtime here than I am used to and I could be making art. I will perhaps get them when I visit Boston in Nov.

Denmark is pretty cool.

My life :P

hahaha.

-Garfield minus Garfield

Today I was...

...chatting with a French-Vietnamese grad student that I met at Potsdam... I started putting on lip gloss while listening to him talk about photography and he stopped, seeming flustered, and then apologized: "sorry, I just don't see a lot of astronomers do that!" me: "um, that's because not many of them are girls..." :)

i Danmark

Here is a mostly boring update of what I have been doing since I got here:

I arrived in Denmark on Wednesday morning at around 11:30--an hour earlier that scheduled. Awesome. I hung out until Jokke came to pick me up (in a car!) and then we took my stuff to Troels' house because I couldn't move into my new place until that night. We hung out for a while and then decided to go to the Taco Shop for lunch (met up with Chris there). So I ate Danish Mexican food for my first meal back in Denmark. Yum. Afterward I fell asleep during a movie and eventually my new roommate was home and we took my stuff over.

My new place is nice. My room is huge, I have my own bathroom (such as it is), and there is a pizza place on the corner across from me. That will definitely come in handy, I'm sure. I love pizza. My roommate is super clean and awesome enough to let me use all her kitchen stuff, so I will actually be able to cook! yay!

Speaking of cooking, I finally broke down and went grocery shopping today (Sat) because I decided to stop mooching off my friends. I am leaving tomorrow for a conference in Germany so I didn't want to buy too much food and then leave it for a week. But yesterday I found out that there is a boil order on the water in Copenhagen (due to some contamination because of all the rain and flooding lately) so I wanted to pick up some bottled water. Thankfully the store I went to actually had some. I grabbed a few other things too, and I spoke Danish the entire time I was in the store (mostly because I didn't have to say much other than "excuse me, yes, no, thanks, etc"). :)

The grocery store is a 7-minute walk from my house, and will be very convenient on a bike, whenever I actually get one. There is also an S-train station 5 minutes away from me, and of course Troels' place is about 5 minutes away too (where I am right now, coincidentally). Yay.

I went to Niels Bohr Institute yesterday to check in and get keys and everything. It was pretty cool. I saw some old friends and met some new people. I'm excited to start working there.

I was going to go to the police bike auction this morning at 8:30 am but then I decided to sleep in instead because I was really tired. So I'm still in the process of bike shopping and I will probably try to borrow one from someone for a little bit until I get my own.

That's pretty much it. I fly out to Germany tomorrow. Hopefully I can make it all the way to Potsdam and to the conference and not get lost or anything. Wish me luck!

the nature of God

Last Sunday at church we had an interesting lesson on the atonement, and, as usually happens, the whole justice vs. mercy thing was discussed. You know the drill. Mercy cannot rob justice; justice needs to be satisfied, so in order to have both justice and mercy a third party is needed. The thing that bothers me about these lessons is that almost inevitably SOMEONE will say "there are some laws that even God cannot break, and the law of justice is one of them." I hate this. While I understand what they are getting at, I feel like they are approaching it wrong. Saying "God is also subject to the law of justice and he can't break it" very much implies that there is someone else that is more in charge than he is, and that he has to obey their rules. In reality (and this is now The Gospel According to JM), the reason God cannot "break the law of justice" is because of the nature of who he is. God, as a perfect being, is perfectly just (and perfectly a lot of other things too, but justice is what we're talking about right now). Thus, he is preventing himself from being unjust because justice is a fundamental attribute of his personality. God can't break the law of justice because he IS just. It's not that he wishes he could, but can't because there is some greater law that he is subject to. He can no more be unjust than I can change the fact that I'm human. That's just how it is.

hmm... I promise in my head this makes sense. Anyway, maybe that's what everybody actually means when they talk about this and it just took me a while to get it.

Well, back to work I suppose.