I jotted down this quote from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series nearly three years ago (before I started at Duke) and it still rings very true:

"[Mortals] only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream. But the price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted."

Currently reading:
Siegfried - Harry Mulisch

needs:
a large bottle of whisky
sufficient quantities of soda
pen, and piece of paper on which to write out thought processes
coin, in case need for random toss arises
10 million dollars

cause: the management of bayer company has a shindig out on our lawn
consequence: we get ham sandwiches and leftover potato salad for lunch
booooo.

dryzek, summarized:
survivalists and prometheans - the former believing in the old malthusian philosophy that we are on the path to destruction, the latter insisting that mother nature is a cornucopia that can never be drained dry. look at the trends, the prometheans say, onward and upward. every time we think we're going to run out of a resource, we find something new, or we manipulate matter so that we get something for nothing. to hell with the 'apocalypse now' scare tactics; they're nothing but a political tool. look at reality, say the survivalists. a person driving a car at 60 mph towards a brick wall with his eyes closed is going to believe he's fine at every point - up until he hits the wall.

"...a good working definition of a catastrophe is an effect so large that even an epidemiological study can detect it..." ~ Wildavsky, 1995

Read Oracle Night by Paul Auster over the weekend, and if you haven't read City of Glass by the same author yet you really should.

In happier news, has anyone tried a McDonald's shamrock shake before? They serve them in the month of March for St. Patrick's Day, and they are green and minty and chocolatey and what's not to like?

Minnesota, MN

And so, after six months, eight applications, countless emails and numerous trips, it comes down to this: do I, or do I not want to study clinical psychology in the University of Minnesota?

I’ve operated on cruise control for so much of my life up till now that I find myself absolutely unable to make a decision. Significant life decisions made to date – probably one (not applying for a scholarship). Everything else – plainly obvious, falling into place like cutouts in a child’s matching game. Here, even not choosing is to choose. Either I enroll or I don’t enroll.

So what goes into it?

Pros:
* I do really like the program. It is, after all, one of the top 5 clinical programs in the country (and probably, by extension, the world, considering the state of affairs of graduate study in most other countries).
* I’d be able to pursue my interest in fMRI while getting a “useful” (always with the pragmatics) professional degree.
* The students are friendly and non-intimidating. Dr. Angus is a wonderful man who seems genuinely interested in having me join his lab.
* Minnesota is not at all ulu, unlike Durham, North Carolina

Cons:
* 6 years. Dear holy heaven.
* Abysmal stipend when compared to other schools, even when compared to other departments within Minnesota.
* -20F temperatures in the winter.
* No deferment. I would have to go straight in.
* Lots of work, all year round.

Isn’t the decision impossible? This should not be the something one is called on to decide at the tender age of 23. This isn’t something that one should be called on to decide at the age of 73. I didn’t want this blog entry to come out this way. I wanted to be all flippant the way I was after Hopkins, muttering on about inconsequentials like blueberry pancakes and artwork inspired by gel electrophoresis and Dr. Angus’ tangles with the Taliban. But I can’t. Instead, I’m sitting here agitated, overstimulated, on the carpeted floor of the Days Inn spilling my guts all over the Internet in the hopes that some divine presence will guide me towards making the right choice.

the north wind doth blow
and we shall have snow
and what will poor robin do then?
he'll sit in a barn
and keep himself warm
and hide his head under his wing
poor thing

Minneapolis this afternoon - no updates till Sunday.

Thanks in no small part to a wonderful second-hand bookshop just down the road, I am accumulating books at a rather alarming rate, something that is definitely going to come back to haunt me when it comes time to leave. As it is I forecast that my suitcases for Singapore are going to be stuffed to overflowing. And yet it's impossible for me to go into that shop without finding some treasure that I absolutely have to read and impossible for me to decline an invitation to go when someone is driving there. Plus - and here's the rub - they sell books at 50% of their list price and give you a credit of 40% when you return them...which you can only spend on other used books. Quandry!

I am not in general intellectually intimidated in class, and I certainly have not been in my time at Duke so far, but the population of grad students here is, I admit, beginning to overwhelm me a little. Clay and I are the only undergrads in Conservation and Development... and I would not mind that at all if I had taken classes in the subject recently, but no, everyone prattles along about CIDA and ICDPs and a slew of other abbreviations that mean nothing to me and I wonder if I'm not in over my head. I mean, Dr. Campbell is a wonderful professor and very engaging and not at all condescending to the undergrads but nevertheless one gets the feeling that one is the friend of a friend at a cocktail party where everyone mills around immersed in erudite chatter while all you can comment on is the weather or the niceness of ties. I even feel that it would help if I could remember some of the wonderful stuff I learned in 'A' level History about the IMF and the World Bank but all that has long since gurgled out of my head into the repository of Things I Once Knew. Perhaps I should have stuck in Rittschoff's class after all, even if it did mean two extra afternoons a week in class crushing snails and extracting pheromones. I don't know. I second guess myself too much.

Hush Puppies

Making progress with booking flights originating from Europe. After a few weeks of fussing around with this and that, I finally managed to find a couple of useful sites on the web that are giving me decently-priced tickets. I am chuffed. And much as I know how much people dislike it when I blow my own horn, this particular instance of savvy well warrants its own fanfare. Tan-ta-ra-ta-ra.

Every night with the Wendy's! How come no one goes out and buys a fresh garden salad or a tub of fruit when they're hungry? Why does supper food always have to be starch and fat laden and have smells that waft down the thermokline of our corridor into my room and drive me nuts when I'm trying to read?

For those keeping score, I'm in Minnesota, Harvard and Berkeley have rejected me, Illinois has (presumably) rejected me, and I have yet to hear from 4 schools.

i am convinced: there is no purpose to our ecology field trips other than to get us filthy. kirby-smith definitely had a smirk on his face today as he pilots us, on a motorboat, to some offshore mud flats - large areas of anoxic goop reeking of hydrogen sulfide and other nastiness. relevance to current class topic: none. our prof leads the way furiously for about 5 minutes chatting continuously about littorina snails, and by the time he finally comes to a stop, at least 2 girls have fallen over, one has lost her boot irretrievably in the slime and the rest of us are all stuck to greater or lesser degrees, suctioned to the ground, knee deep in mud. someone points out that if we have to fall, try not to do it on the oyster shells or they will slice our flesh open. the ones who eventually make it to the other side of the mud flat shout encouragement to those who are still wading through the muck. it is like a scene of sinners in hell. all the time, kirby-smith has this beatific smile on his face as if nothing could please him more than this monday nature romp in the 30 degree weather. next field trip: to be approached with much higher degrees of suspicion.

Currently reading:
The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl

And I'm back in Beaufort - until I leave again.

Something was fishy in Mass today. Our set of readings concluded with the Gospel from John 9 on Spiritual Blindness:

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world

Etc.

Wanting to look at the passage again, I went online to look for it and discovered that today's reading was supposed to have been on the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15.

I'm not on hallucinogens I swear, so can someone else who went to Church today please tell me what's going on. Father Joe's not the most organized person in the world, but I find it somewhat hard to believe that he would prepare a sermon for the wrong set of readings. For Sunday Mass. In Lent.

Quite honestly, Stanford going out in the second round of the NCAAs is the best news I've heard all month. BEST. NEWS. ALL. MONTH.

Discovery: being able to pick up and move from place to place across states and countries requires a degree of finesse that I have yet to achieve. I honestly envy people who flit, peripatetic, in a global foxtrot without so much as breaking a sweat. Less stress, less corticosterone, lower blood pressure, longer lives. Myself: I leave things behind, misplace tickets, get bruised and battered struggling overpacked luggage through crowded airports, miss meals, lose sleep. My first instinct when I encountered these problems in the States was to do the obvious thing and try and get more organized, but somehow it just doesn't work that way. Once flustered, always flustered. Nowadays I make a performance out of it, play the part of the big galoot who runs out of his house trailing important items behind him as he runs for his plane. At least it keeps me entertained.

You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal to me, I mean I'm usually fairly good at holding it together and it's not as if I ever panic or anything or mind missing flights and rides, but there's something about the physical dislocation that gets to me and makes me deeply unsettled. Like coming back here to campus - 3 hour drive, not a huge production, and still I tossed and turned and had a most uncomfortable time last night, only awake now thanks to large doses of caffeine. I really need to have a more zen-like approach in my philosophy of belonging to places - like the eremite in the Anthony deMello story: sits meditating in a log cabin; traveler comes by to ask for shelter for the night, sees that the holy man has no furniture; asks him where it is, gets asked in return: where are your possessions? Tells the holy man: 'All I have are the clothes on my back, I'm just passing through'; holy man replies: 'As am I'. Or something to that effect (people more well-versed in Jesuit writing will no doubt correct me). Anyway, that's the kind of spirit I need to have, water off a duck's back, special providence in the fall of a sparrow, etc.

the urchin's name, by the by, was poke the fatty. requiescat in pacem.

Heading back to main Duke campus tomorrow for Rhythm and Blue's Spring Concert. Nowhere to stay. Will probably end up miserable and sleepless in commons rooms for 2 nights.

Field trip #2 is to a wetland restoration project - whipping winds, deathly cold, and intolerable boredom as our guide prattles on about water tables, canal diversion and fecal coliform bacteria. He has a strange accent, pronouncing 'soil' as 'suhl' and stretching vowels into diphthongs. We are bored to tears in minutes and there are no alligators or cottonmouths to keep us entertained.
Mercifully, it is short.

Currently reading:
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

(Sorry for the whining and bitching of late - I should start writing these in the morning again when I'm in a more compassionate mood.)

We have aquariums in front of us during Marine Ecology, in which we put organisms (invertebrate only) that we collect on our trips, and today, we watch fascinated as the spider crab starts ripping chunks out of the sea urchin during Kirby-Smith's lecture and masticating them nonchalantly.

And when i say 'drunkards', I mean hard-core, full-on, start-drinking-at-5-in-the-afternoon, raging alcoholics.

for the love of Christ, why do people keep assaulting me with bad poetry that they've written? someone needs to stop this slaughter of the innocents.

p.s. if you wrote said bad poetry and are reading this, i apologize but i cannot lie to you and call you a friend.

There is constant eating here. Eating and mention of eating - I have had online conversations in the past 24 hours about mozzarella sticks, various kinds of preserved meats and whelk. There are the world's most delicious homemade oatmeal raisin cookies available 24/7 in the dining hall (heavy with butter, and also available in chocolate chip, M&M and peanut butter if such is your fancy). People run out at all times of the night on Wendy's runs for 99 cent chili and frosty dairy desserts and chicken strips. The kitchen staff have a pact to make all Beaufort students gain 15 pounds during the time of their stay, thus: rib-eye steaks, fat boiled prawns, crab cakes, twice-baked potatoes, vats of coleslaw, hush puppies, thick wedges of lemon meringue pie.

I mention this mostly because Minz wants me to do a food books sex ranking for the 'friends' bit of her webpage. I spoke of books a couple of days ago, and will have to refrain from discussing sex here because of certain people who read this, but I figured a paragraph on food might help me put things into perspective. It hasn't really. Rankings are inherently nasty things when it comes to matters of any subjectivity.

(Also to make people jealous)
(Also, to people with whom I had above-mentioned conversations: I'm not picking on you)

kirby-smith, on education:
"i honestly don't think you people have cause for complaint just because you have 9 a.m. lectures here. 10 years ago all of us had to be in class by 8 on the dot every day, and 20 years ago most colleges had saturday classes as well. and, in world war 2, they made officer cadets sit through 14 hour days, 6 days a week, so that they could get their degrees faster, so that they could be commissioned sooner, so that they could be packed off to europe to be killed."

upon which he leads us down to the oyster reef where we all sink up to our ankles in mud and ooze while he delivers non-stop commentary on algae, fiddler crabs, conch fishing, upstate New York, boots.

Books, per recommendation:
Flying to Nowhere - John Fuller

While the words rolled smoothly from brain to fingers to screen in Bermuda they have dried up here and left me groping a little for interesting things to say. Nothing has caught my attention. The converations feel like variations on a theme. The new people are drunkards. You can only watch reruns of The Simpsons that many hours a day.

Worst of all, I have nothing to read; the library here is Elysian...if you happen to enjoy reading about the physiology of echinodermata. In desperation I have purchased a number of books from Amazon.com but of course I have to wait for shipping and all that. The last volume of significance I managed to (half-) work through was The Least of These My Brethren, a 'Reader's Digest'-esque volume written by a philanthropic doctor who works with inner-city Aids patients, informative but not very satisfying (pulled off Han's shelf to keep myself occupied late Monday night). I should have had the sense not to ship all of my books home - at least then I could be amusing myself with a Vonnegut or something - but no, the only four books on my shelf now are:

* Marine Invertebrate Zoology, by Ruppert, Fox and Barnes
* Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, by Johnson
* The Concise Oxford Dictionary and
* The Bible

Ergh. With Mamie and Clay gone for the weekend I feel my sanity slipping away. Talk to me, people who love me.

Just bought tickets to visit Minnesota for the 25th to the 28th - even though I really don't want to travel anywhere at the moment. It's not so much that I don't want to see the place as that I'll have to spend 2 days grinning at the professor and all the grad students and having those awkward conversations that I always have with people I don't know. And then of course there's the usual sleeplessness that comes with being in unfamiliar surroundings and the hassle with airport security and - . Bah, I know I bring all these things upon myself but I'm never sure if that makes it better or worse.

oh, and minz says that she might come and visit and commune with jellyfish and dolphins as is her wont. i had no idea before i arrived, but it seems that there actually are dolphins in the ocean here. bottlenose.

Said it once, will say it again: Blogger.com can be annoyingly unreliable. As when it eats a post that you’ve just spent the last 20 minutes typing. Let me try once more, in short form.


What I really want now more than anything is to spend the next seven weeks as restfully as I possibly can. I realize that in Bermuda I was far more galvanized than usual in terms of going out and doing things, but now I think I could happily spend the time till graduation reading, doing some writing, studying occasionally and watching illegally downloaded movies. My working hypothesis places the blame for this ennui firmly on the fact that I’m back in mainland United States, the great melting point of whatever, although it could be the fact that the people who have joined us are hillbillies (and one sarcastic Belgian).

Whatever the case, we spent yesterday being oriented (does anyone else intensely dislike verbifying the word “orientation”?) and introduced to our professors. I have Kirby-Smith for Marine Ecology, Lisa Campbell for International Conservation and Development, and someone Cohen for a seminar titled “Light and Life” (which sends “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” muzak buzzing through my head every time it is spoken). Everyone on the staff here is mildly eccentric, having contracted what I suppose is the island’s version of cabin fever. Dan Rittschoff, in particular, is quite mad – he does part of his research in Singapore and teaches a lab class: Sensory Physiology of Marine Animals. I sat in on his lecture today and was amused by the fact that he brought along three bottles of Newater from his latest excursion (never thought I’d see one of those in Beaufort, NC). He shared it around (mild ‘coconutty’ aftertaste!) and we had our little moment of amusement before he explained the joke and launched into a highly entertaining discussion of steroid chemistry and water filtration in Singapore’s water processing plants. What this had to do with marine animals -- no idea. They have just gone out to watch the mating behavior of gastropods on Carrot Beach.

I have decided that there is a definite temperature gradient down our hallway. Just outside the bathrooms, it is, as the thermostat promises, a pleasant 71 degrees. Moving along 25 feet to my room, the temperature drops to about 50, and inside my room, you could start a Cryo lab without installing too much more equipment. I go to scavenge for more blankets.

I pondered this for quite a while before it hit me: the rooms here smell exactly like the rooms in the RI boarding house did when I stayed there 9 years ago. The similarity is astounding... I think I may start having flashbacks.

fyi: any mail/cards/gifts/gratuities should be sent to:

[systematically censored; 11/1/2006]
c/o Duke University Marine Laboratory
135 Duke Marine Lab Road
Beaufort, NC 28516-9721
USA

Beaufort, NC

han wakes me up this morning announcing that weatherbug has prognostications of snow continuing through tomorrow, throwing a spoke in his plans to give me a ride to beaufort and make a day trip out of it. in the end, we decide that the best thing to do is leave today; thus ensues wild packing of suitcases and flurried exit from duke campus so as to make it to the marine lab before the housing office closes at 4, during which time i leave behind:

* pillow, favorite,
* ethernet cord and
* assorted items of clothing, unlaundered.

about 20 miles out from beaufort, nc, a cop pulls us over and gives han a ticket for going 80 on a 55 stretch of road, which han protests with the somewhat lame excuse that he thought that the highway number (70) was the speed limit. no dice. arraignment. that puts a damper on the day, although i try my best to convince him that the courts almost always throw out first offences with a slap on the wrist at worst. i spend a little while feeling bad because i'm one of the reasons he's even out here in the boondocks in the first place, but the self-modulated guilt therapy quickly kicks in; he wanted to come, he was the one who offered the ride, etc. as a salve to my conscience i buy him dinner.


Beaufort is really different than when I visited it during my freshman year. The dorms have been renovated, new desks put in, the excesses of money in the school kitty finally being put to some good use, it seems. I have a single again, this time with a phone line and an ethernet jack. And three beds.

No one's around yet, so I've been in the computer lab for a while, responding to emails that don't need to be responded too and checking on internet forums every five minutes to see if anyone's said anything interesting, which mostly they haven't.

(Belatedly) changed timestamp to EST
Updated links.

Pseudo-philosophical babble, 1:13 a.m.

(preceding conversation deals with extinction-level events and the colonization of space)
- do you ever think about the fact that we were born during a really interesting time?
- no.
- in terms of opportunity, i mean. like if we had been laborers in 16th century europe our entire lives would have centered around work, church, work, church and we would have lived in the same 20 square miles of land for 40 years then died.
- i suppose.
- and now, here we are, in your apartment, drinking tea, 20 000 miles away from home, going to classes and learning things that no one even knew about 20 years ago.
- if i had been born 400 years ago, i would have been an emperor.
- you wouldn't have made a very good one, considering you're a vegetarian.
- why couldn't i be a vegetarian emperor?
- because emperors have to eat giant legs of meat off the bone and have painful attacks of gout.
- i could have been an emperor in india.
- there weren't any.
- well, a maharajah then, whatever they had.
- i guess.
- there you go.

The notable downside of our family's not owning a blender is that I am only now discovering the joys of homemade smoothies - ice cream, milk, yoghurt, frozen blueberries and half a mushy banana do combine to a deeply satisfying mix. The yoghurt, my friend explains knowingly, neutralizes the alkalinity of the banana, and you can hardly taste it in the end beneath the sweetness of the ice cream anyway. Deep. We ponder the biochemistry of bananas for a while before adjourning to our separate evening divertissements: Fitzgerald, old episodes of Charmed, and the painstaking restoration of the fossil of an extinct fish.

to anyone who thinks that i care: yes, i do, but i also made the decision entirely of my own volition and sponsored whatever actions were subsequently taken, the purpose of the whole exercise being that (a) i presently care, and (b) i shouldn't, because it's infantile. therefore, blame yourselves not.

Baltimore, MY

Baltimore, impressions: damp, dull - except for occasional oases of entertainment, neighborhoods chameleon-like, shifting in appearance every 4 blocks or so. Reminiscent of several other all-business, no-pleasure American cities I've been in, none of the quaint, D.C. charm spilling over the border.
Johns Hopkins, impressions: one of the more intimidating campuses I've been to; solid, uninteresting architecture, lots of construction, undergraduates scurrying to the library with the urgency that only pre-meds can muster (and they're all pre-meds).
Hotel: weird; long corridors reeking of paint, Chinese takeaway menus shoved under the door in the dead of night, flickering, idiosyncratic cable depositing picture onto random channels as and when it pleased.
Professors: altogether too smart, too obsessed with their research for my tastes (although I suppose that may be considered a good thing to most others). Many with ties to Duke: one Dr. Holland actually worked with Dr. Buhusi at Duke two years ago. Research: the whole spectrum of neuroscience topics - spatial learning, fMRI physics, ontogeny of birdsong, electric fish (from which neuronal activity can be measured from outside the animal. Repeated myself 6 times in 6 separate interviews, each time less coherent than the last (also with mounting desperation as I realized that what I'm interested in really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the research that's happening at the moment).
Grad students: close-knit, (artificially?) cheerful, rich - $20000 stipend for 9 months plus $7000 more if you teach a course - keen...if I may use the word.
Food: paid for. Mexican. Excellent guacamole. Mediocre sangria - not enough citrus taste in it.
Bakus still number one for sangria, IMHO.
Chances of getting in: slim to none

Caught, towards the end, in a frightening and dangerous storm, which nearly kept me stranded in Maryland for an extra day. This uncertain and itinerant lifestyle is wearing me down rather, and I really would like to just be in Beaufort, settled, even if only for 7.5 weeks (though I still don't know how I'm going to get there).

Books:
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald. Long in coming, really, considering how much I appreciated Gatsby way back in secondary school, but books like these tend to get backed up and glossed over in the list somehow.

For those keeping score, I'm going to be in Baltimore from tomorrow through to Saturday evening, whereupon I return to the relative comfort of being in my old room with Waihay for a few days. No updates till Sunday morn, then, Saturday evening at the earliest. Possibly no e-mail either. Hiatus.

The room I'm camping out in is Squalor Central. I cannot bear it. I've stayed in the library reading till midnight for the last 3 days just to avoid being there. I've seen my share of disgusting rooms in my time here (cf. Georgetown, Von's place), but this goes beyond being prissy to ohmygodpleasekillmenow.

Books:
Our Lady of the Forest - David Guterson

and i think:
- true, it's bad to be self-conscious, but then again, everyone wears masks; i'm someone different to everyone, slight though the difference may be.
- it's weird, this 21st century need to put yourself on display, be someone who you're not, or perhaps who you really are.
- why did i do that? and really, there isn't a very good answer
- writing is the last great distorter of truth, the first being perception
- hell, i'm an idiot, i know i am

From aforesaid book, on professional blackjack players:

The Life

6 An average day:
Waking at noon, the player breakfasts at his cheap hotel. He (profession 90% male) then
proceeds to the casino where he plays cards all day. Lunch and dinner are in the casino
restaurant. If there are other players in town, he may meet them after work to discuss
blackjack. If not, he plays and plays, until he no longer trusts his judgment. Returning to his
hotel, he soon falls asleep.
6.1 Dreams, in the main, center on blackjack.

7 Teams of players take all their meals together, and share rooms: saving on expenses is a
crucial part of pro play.
7.1 When the casino finally bars the team, they exhibit hysterical glee.
7.2 In a mood of careless jollity, they fly to a new exotic city, where the identical routine begins de novo
7.3 Casinos are open seven days a week.

8 It's a boring job with long hours.
8.1 Professional blackjack players curse and hate their profession.
8.2 "When are we going to be replaced with trained monkeys? Roll on the trained monkeys!"

9 Still, when pro gamblers leave the game, they will be found:
-- running racetrack betting schemes with computerized predictions
-- playing video poker machines, to an exact system
-- suing casinos which have illegally barred them