Well, I sent out my solicitations to professors on Monday after much formatting and printer problems over the weekend. Twenty-three profs at thirteen universisities in nine states should be receiving my pleas for sponsorship at any time. Wish me luck.

In related news, the Fall semester begins tomorrow. I have an Italian Renaissance history class in the morning followed by a pre-birthday "mini-celebration" with my friends Jack and Diana (no, I'm not making that up). I may or may not be going to my book club in the afternoon, but I certainly will be going to my Plant Physiology course in the evening. This last is taught by one of my very favorite profs in the Department of Biological Sciences. Dr. Ray Fox is one of the most difficult instructors from whom I have ever taken a class, but I can honestly say I also have an extremely high retention rate since class is never boring. He's a funny and delightful man who's always ready with a wisecrack or a wise word of advice. He's also the individual responsible for my smooth transition into the bio department at a big university from a rinky-dink community college (he was assistant chair and coordinator of undergrad studies when I came for a campus visit back in late 1990 or early 1991). And if that weren't enough, he hooked me up with my undergrad advisor who later became my thesis advisor who will always be my hero and mentor and good friend -- Dr. Karen Brown Sullivan. Ray still refuses to take responsibility for that last, but I remind him of it every chance I get.

I'm looking forward to being in a science class again. It's my life, folks, and I miss the opportunity to keep up on the latest hypotheses. I'm a geek, what can I say?

I was just reading The New York Times online, and I came across this editorial about the widening gulf between intellectual and religious thought. The author points out that three times more people believe in the virgin birth of Jesus than believe in evolution.

Why do people insist on making belief in Deity and belief in evolution mutually exclusive? Case in point -- a sermon at a local Southern Baptist church a couple of years ago was entitled, "God is right, Darwin is wrong." I know plenty of people who believe in both, that one stems from the other. I just so happen to be one of them. My brother made a very good point a while back in a heated Bible study. A devout church-goer loudly proclaimed, "God created the world in six days!" My brother calmly replied, "Yes, but how long is a day to God?" How long, indeed? And why would we be given lovely and complex brains capable of inductive and deductive reasoning if we weren't meant to use them?

What many people don't realize is that Darwin wasn't some rebel trying to undermine church doctrine. From what I have read and learned, he didn't announce his ideas for quite some time because he knew people in the church wouldn't understand what he was trying to do and attack him as Godless. Evolutionists today are still attacked as Godless heathens who are seeking to undermine the faithful. Yeah, we're a bunch of guerrillas running around with our dinosaur bones and our fossils held out before us like automatic weapons, telling the faithful they can't believe in God AND understand Darwin. The problem is that many people I know who believe in evolution are some of the most faithful people I've ever met. I could ask each one if s/he believes in a higher power, and each one would resoundingly answer, "Yes!" Darwin was a religious man who read the clues God left just lying around for us. New scientific discoveries shouldn't be seen as an attack on religious faith but rather an enrichment of it, because each new discovery is a testament to the beauty and complexity of the Higher. I'd rather embrace the Great Spirit's gifts than argue about them.

I've been so obsessed worrying about grad apps and whether I'm getting financial aid that I've been remiss in posting the pics of my newest niece, Romana Nichole Maynard, daughter of one of my bestest buds in the whole wide world, Zabrina. Be sure to check out Romana's hip, baby tie-dye threads on the "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night" page, lovingly made by Aunt Dawn and pal Maria.

The book I'm currently reading while waiting for advice on my grad school letters has shot me down memory lane at 167 miles per hour, back to the days of middle school and early high school. The Center of Everything is a coming-of-age tale about a girl growing up in small town Kansas. I can imagine Laura Moriarty digging out all her old diaries to write this one, because she mentions things I had forgotten -- I mean, I thought I was the only one who had ever watched Voyager (the time-travelling tale, not an installment in the Star Trek saga). Herione Evelyn mentions nearly everything we went through in the early to mid 1980s, from pictures of C. Thomas Howell and Ralph Macchio in Tiger Beat magazine to the Contras in Nicaragua. Evelyn was forbidden by her mother to watch The Day After, but I was allowed to watch it, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. I remember raising money in my eighth grade history class to send to Ethiopia. But the history takes a back seat to the everyday occurrences in the book, and some of Evelyn's experiences are funny reminders while others are painful. I too was a free lunch kid and didn't realize that that meant my parents were poor. I nearly cried as Evelyn watched her first crush's eyes turn to her best friend. I watched her cope in the same way I always did -- in homework, the only area of my life in which I seemed to have any control.

The story so far has done a lot to remind me of who I was and how far I have come. I've often said that you couldn't pay me to go back and live over those early days of adolescence, but I'm sort of doing just that by reading this book. I'm reliving the envy of not being able to afford the hip clothes, the pain of unrequited love, the embarrassment of being different. I'm also reliving the satisfaction of occasionally being told that being smart is a good thing, the realization that the pretty girls had their own sets of problems, and the joy of knowing that this too shall pass. Growing pains, they called them. That was an understatement if I ever heard one.