Wintersmith comes out tomorrow. I know I really shouldn't, but I confess right now: the temptation will prove to be too much, and that will be another afternoon/evening spent not working. My ruin is nigh.

irb application update II

11 pages, 13 with figures. i have to find a good place in van pelt where i can sit down and write. the cafe tables wobble as i type, the study carrels are too depressing, and the undergrad study areas have people walking in and out and yakking away on their cell phones and making general nuisances of themselves. as for other places, the other green line is too comfy (and i want it to be associated with reading fun things), and home doesn't work as i thought it would (the siren song of downloaded tv shows is too, too strong).

notes to self:
- add more figures, especially ones that take up lots of space
- at some point, the statistics section has to be written, so it may as well be soon
- blogging about it is not counted as progress

ignore if you hate math

-- and help me if you can.

say i have a function that is composed of (a) a sinusoidal component, (b) an increasing linear trend, and (c) gaussian noise. i don't want to make any assumptions about the phase of the sine wave, but i do have a definite value of its frequency.

i) how do i remove (a) from the function so that i can plot some sort of regression line through the residuals (and thus estimate (b) and find the variance of (c)).
ii) what's the easiest program in which i can do this calculation in large batches (say 120 datasets)?
iii) if i want now to say that the function is composed of a small number (n; say 1< n <4) of sin/cos waves + (b) + (c); is there an inverse fourier decomposition that works sort of like principal component analysis (in that it removes only the n waves of lowest frequency) while leaving the linear trend (and whatever other noise) intact?

(i'm not sure i expect to get any answer for this, but there can be miracles.)

#34 - Amazon.com and all accompanying goodies (especially free shipping and $0.99 used paperbacks)

#32

(With apologies if you know this story)

When I was 8, our family, and a group of other Catholics, mostly strangers, went on a trip to Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia (I think it falls into Bosnia now, but it may be Herzegovina). I suppose that for most of the adults it was a pilgrimage, but when you’re in Primary 3, the spiritual gains are incidental, and the primary force that hits you in a place like that is wonder. I had been to Europe, of course, but I think this was the first time in my life I felt like I was going someplace truly foreign: somewhere rural, somewhere with a polysyllabic name, somewhere where other the kids in school had never gone or even contemplated going.

We were put up, with a few other people, by a Bosnian family who spoke precious little English. My room had no adjoining bathroom, and every morning I had to scurry out with bare feet on the freezing cold ceramic tiles of the balcony outside so I could brush my teeth and get ready for the day. We always had to get up early – breakfast was served and cleared away punctually and remorselessly, and daily Mass dictated the schedule for the morning. We went in summer, and I remember the weather being gorgeous, day after day, riotous amounts of sunshine beaming through cool, unsullied air. On the way to church, we picked hawthorn berries, and ate them, first delicately, being city-slickers, then with more gusto when by the second day no one had keeled over. On the way back, the roadside food stalls would have opened, selling their hybrid Italian-Eastern European cuisine – lots of tomato dishes and pizza with an entire garden on it. And at night, our host family cooked for us – we always began with chicken noodle soup and unbelievably fresh bread, followed by an entrée – fish, or pasta – and a simple sweet. The meal was wholesome, and good, and very communal: lots of talk and laugher, or beaming from the parties who didn’t speak the language.

Mass, as I said, was daily, and the services at St. James not truncated like what we’re used to, but full-blown affairs. Some days we even went twice. It’s funny, but the more time I spend in church, the less impatient I am to leave it – or maybe it was because at the time there was nothing much to leave it to, except for my books and word searches (there certainly weren’t any other kids along on the trip). We climbed Mount Podbrdo – where the apparitions of the Virgin Mary reportedly occurred – and Mount Krizevac, where villagers had erected an impressive twenty-foot concrete cross. There was nothing else up those hills but treacherous terrain and the offerings of pilgrims, silence, and an aura of the sacrosanct. Climbing them was tough-going for an eight-year-old, but being at the top, even amidst all that nothingness, was strangely worth the ascent.

I’ve written all of this down because Medjugorje is one of the places I go in my mind when I need a bit of solace. It’s odd – I can’t be confident that I was happy while I was there – in fact I have rather little recollection of my emotional experience of the pilgrimage – and yet revisiting the place in memory does give me a sense of profound well-being. So – it gets to be #32, and as a bonus, I’ll tell you that #33 was this other, more recent trip to Redang, which I often think about, particularly things like SAFETY IS AT YOUR OWN RISK, and kayaking with the Other Brother on the most perfect day imaginable

:)

my paper has been accepted! *happy dance*

flying spaghetti monster

so brilliant it hurts.

irb application update

six single-spaced pages for the actual proposal, lots of italics for stuff that i'm not sure of, and big yawning gaps for things TBD and F[somebody's]NAP and suchlike. and a fugly .tiff file that needs a lot of work, but which got thrown in there because putting in figures means you've been Hardworking. addenda: descriptions of tasks, platitudes such as HIPAA, the canned version of why MRI scans won't fry your insides, or why PSG won't plant false memories in your head while you sleep.

there's a preliminary meeting tomorrow where all this junk (hopefully) gets assembled into some sort of a coherent structure. on the one hand: yay; on the other, i know that massive rewrites are coming up, and also at least a dozen things that i've missed/ignored. a working draft by friday is not happening, and i have reading to do for tomorrow, and i've just spent an hour on skype not to mention ten minutes typing out this incredibly uninteresting entry.

additions

yes, the poll idea may be a very stupid one, and i'll pull it if it gets boring, but in the mean time the lure of cute little radio buttons was irresistible.

it struck me at dinner today (nara: good japanese food -- uni even! -- but pricey) -- i can actually have interesting conversations with the other first-years in my department. and not just about psychology, also on topics that i could never, ever hope to talk about with so many other people (excluding you guys, and you, and you, and also you). the disconnect that i sometimes experienced at duke -- where i felt so culturally different from a lot of my classmates, particularly the americans -- that's disappeared...and i think (perhaps because of being more mature?) we have all tacitly tarred that over with the culture of being interested in each other. i can't even begin to tell you how excited this makes me, because getting along with random people, i've learned how to do that, but sitting down with someone and weaving a tapestry, playing a duet, knowing not just the chords but the harmonic possibilities: that's something you don't often find, and something you learn to treasure.

red tape

the first draft of my project proposal is due next friday, so It officially Starts. the honeymoon was nice, though, and longer than expected. the accelerator gets stepped on in psychology not because of reading (unlike in the humanities), but because of the logistics of working with human subjects -- U.S. institutions in particular make you jump through an infuriating number of hoops before you can so much as lay eyes on a human volunteer (we have the nazis to thank for this, by the way). i am glad, though, that it's not reading that i'm going to be crushed by -- vic tells me that he burns through about 600-700 pages of text a week, and although i'm sure that minz will tell me this is not uncommon, it is nonetheless staggering and not a thing i'd particularly relish doing.

the first-year project is due in may '07, which is a pretty short time, particularly for a multi-day imaging study. i foresee: 2-3 months for planning/back-and-forthing on the IRB and 3 months for data collection, minus the christmas break, which leaves frighteningly little time for analysis and writing. all this for a study that will likely not even be publishable because we will not yet have enough subjects for a random-effects analysis at the end of it. this is rather frustrating -- i'm used to having the peripheral bureaucratic annoyances kept to a minimum so that i can focus on the actual data, but penn apparently believes in such irrelevancies as "sharing equipment" and "ethics".

it is rather discomfiting when bits of the city you live in start blowing up.


the temperature crept its way down into the 50s today. for all its promise of good insulation, this apartment keeps in no heat whatsoever. this probably means that somewhere down the road, there will be a slice of time before the day central heating comes on in which staying indoors will be intolerable. (not that i'm unaccustomed to this.)

in any case, this was incentive to stay in the lab for most of the day, where i was good and read all my perfusion papers, even though i didn't understand half of what i was reading. i think i need to sit down with someone who knows this stuff and just spend an entire day asking him questions, because right now i'm sure that misconceptions are sprouting in my head like toadstools after rain. geoff aguirre or john detre would be nice, but i will settle for lesser beings as long as they know what they are talking about.

i was in the kitchen today chopping vegetables when it suddenly occurred to me that the last time i had done that i was being ordered around by su-lin amidst general chaos. chopping is not usually my job, but i was early to that dinner. my hands had smelled of onions for days after that -- i don't know if this happens to everybody, but no matter how much i wash the odor lingers with extraordinary tenacity. it stayed with me on the plane ride, and only disappeared a day or two after i arrived here, a frail olfactory filament dissipating with exquisite slowness as i made my way around the world.

#31 - Without a doubt, the Internet: for its ridiculous cornucopia of free entertainment, for putting infinite space in a nutshell, for being the enchanted place.

From The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg:

A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life. His model is the amateur naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like Gilbert White or collectors like George Eliot's Camden Farebrother. It often seems as though science in this century has little use anymore for amateur observers of this kind, that science has grown too institutional, too complex, to value the private watcher of a small patch of ground. It seems that way too when it comes to our own lives. They're cross-referenced, indexed, cataloged, and witnessed by the public and private institutions whose job it is to tabulate and codify us. Even the task of introspection has been jobbed out to the professionals. A personal journal in our time comes to seem less like a valuable cache of perceptions than a naive recitation of symptoms that the wroter lacks the authority to analyze.

But many of the great journals - I think especially of Samuel Pepys' seventeenth-century diary and James Boswell's eighteenth-century journal - are not marked by self-consciousness. They're marked by a dogged absence of self-consciousness, a willingness to suspend judgment of the journal itself, if not of its author, in order to keep the enterprise going. The value of Pepys's diary and Boswell's journal is the world they depict and only incidentally the depiction of their authors. Their journals weren't read until long after the authors had died. Both men wrote for an audience of one. Judging by my own fragmentary journals, that's one too many. It's not enough that I should be dead before anyone else reads them. I should be dead before I reread them myself.

#30 - Bach

Sleeping Beauty problem

Sleeping Beauty agrees to take part in an experiment in which the following things take place.

Sunday:
Researchers give Sleeping Beauty a drug that puts her to sleep. They then flip a fair coin.

Monday:
Sleeping Beauty is woken up. She is then adminisered a memory-erasing drug and put back to sleep, (without any memory of being awakened).

Tuesday:
If the coin flip came up tails, Sleeping Beauty is woken up again, and again put back to sleep.

Wednesday:
Sleeping Beauty is woken up, and the experiment is over.

When Sleeping Beauty is woken up for the first time, what should her degree of belief be (as a fraction) that the coin toss came up heads?

(If you care, you can check out current opinion on the answer here, and here, and finally here.)

can i just say, von, that i really very much envy your gastronomic adventures -- there is unbelievably good food in center city, or so i am told, but i will have to take it on faith until i find some rich patrons (now accepting applications).

in case you have not done so already

you should, indeed, go here, and click on it. it reminds me very much of the time when the other brother and i were trying to come up with lyrics for "there is a whiteness in god's mercy".

justifying my decision (to myself) (again)

there was a cookout today next to hill house, mostly singaporeans, but also free food, so it was a tough decision. my wallet won. a couple of first-year grad students were also there, so we stood baking under the sun (the temperature exploded into the 80s today), eating half-cooked hamburger and discussing why in heck we wanted to spend five years of our lives studying our own miserable quarks in the vast cosmos of scholarship (most probable answer: we're sad). victor is a history major, studying the spread of islam in china in the 19th and 20th centuries, and KS is in computer science, dealing with the mumblemumblesomethingartificialintelligencehebbianlearning- neuralsomething, and how to represent that algorithmically, and why deep blue is not blue, and whether robots will one day take over the world, so the conversation was desultory, its only real nexuses being traffic laws in manhattan (or lack thereof), why a*star sucks donkey balls, and episcopalianism.

it is comforting to know of people who made the same decision as i, and the more people i get to know the more comforting it is. it is funny what one will do to mitigate the sense of loneliness -- not physical loneliness, mind you, because i have met more people here in three weeks than i thought i would -- but the loneliness of being different, of being forced to belong on other people's terms. and the very fact of knowing that there are other people who left behind home, employment, familiarity to come here validates that decision in a way, and the more similar the person is to me, the greater the validation. this may seem ironic when you read this over -- is that not the very definition of belonging on someone else's terms? -- but the distinction is subtle -- the first instance being "me defined as grad student in the psychology department", and the second being "me defined as someone rejecting the well-travelled road of career, rat race etc.". the second, of course, being the critical decision (and thus, the point of commonality with victor and KS), and the first its logical, necessary but entirely incidental consequence.

so akeelah and the bee has restored my faith in how awesome laurence fishburne is, the matrix parts ii and iii notwithstanding. cp: how was othello?

it continues to amaze me that there is such a wide variety of quite decent food within a three block radius of my apartment. on 42nd and chestnut is a place called kabobeesh, a converted american diner that now sells fairly authentic tandoori and naan. admittedly, there could have been more meat, but it was the real stuff, and at $9, enough for two meals. next to it is a little indian minimart type thing that has such wonders as curry powder, gaulb jamun, frozen roti, basmati rice, maggi stock cubes, and horlicks. also: about eight shelves of bollywood vcds, which interested me not.

in other news, my kitchen looks more like a kitchen now, in that it actually has food in it, and things with which i can cook said food. this is good news for my body, which has probably doubled in sodium content since i got here, despite my best efforts. (how do americans not die at the age of 25?) i also am the proud owner of my first ever potato peeler (su-lin will attest to the fact that i had never used one before that last party with the gumbo and "fried""chicken"), which i will use with gusto, once i have some potatoes.

for su-lin:

the new ben and jerry's flavour is turtle soup, and i had a scoop while thinking of you. chocolate turtles!

friday night

four of the second- and third-year psych students occupy an entire house not 3 minutes walk from where i am. the owner of the place just graduated with a phd in medieval history, and is taking a year off to "find herself" -- obviously something only a person who owns a bloody house in the heart of university city (at the age of 30) can afford to do. there was a party there last night, and i got my first peek inside the building. the decor was mismatched, the furnishing eclectic, but all this is par for the course for grad-student-tenants i suppose. to be fair, all the rooms did feel lived in and homely. we packed the place to the rafters, spilling drinks and pepperidge farm goldfish all over the beautiful hardwood floors. there were too many limes, and too much chambord. also, the ice-cream drinks were brought out and consumed towards the end of the party, a fatal mistake for many.

i spent a lot of the evening in the kitchen, partly because it was rather difficult to get out of it, and partly because that was where the jose cuerva was. it was there that sean told me the Quite Interesting fact that dave brainard's other big achievement (besides creating psychtoolbox) was acting in the film fat man and little boy, starring paul newman and john cusack, in which he had a very important line counting down the alamorgdo, NM test launch. six degrees! (another quite interesting fact which i learned from richard powers: the trinity test site was named that by oppenheimer because he was reading a lot of john donne's poetry at the time, and had just got to batter my heart, three person'd god. digression: jy gets lots and lots of points for telling us the oppenheimer story while we were enjoying the sunset in angkor wat, the one where he tells how the nuclear blast reminded him of the bhagvad gita quote: now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, (a) because it was apropos, and (b) because i realise that we were all a little ignorant in not knowing that, and now we are a little less.) anyway, david brainard. searching imdb tells us that he was also in chicago hope and sex and the city, but i will take that with a pinch of salt until i get to ask him personally.

towards midnight, i found myself telling army stories about decapitations and sliced scrota (don't ask), which usually means that it's time to go home, but i was accosted by ewa and somebody's boyfriend at the door and got sucked into a conversation about whether it's better to live and work in warsaw or gdansk (answer: if you want the cultural immersion, gdansk). by the time i got walking, it was after one, and a light mist of rain was falling, giving the streetlights that lovely, hazy quality, like being in a poem. a group of intoxicated freshmen staggered by, singing the national anthem at the top of their lungs, and i thought: i could live here.

bsg webisodes

for the battlestar galactica fans not in the know, sci-fi is running a ten-part series of webisodes. new ones every tuesday and thursday running up to season 3. get excited!

eta: if you are not in the usa, you have to go here instead.

article in the new yorker on neuroeconomics. the subject matter is interesting (i.e. it's sexy science), but the piece has some distressing inaccuracies, so don't take it as gospel.

i have two offices - one in the psych building, and one in my lab; neither department, however, has provided me with a workstation, and if not for wanting to make my presence felt a little in the lab i would honestly prefer to work from home. (the psych department office is totally hopeless - collapsing shelves, a refrigerator from the 1980s, and large plastic storage boxes that no one dares to touch). maybe i will for a while: i have no data, and my advisor has gone gallivanting to austria or god knows where for the week. real work will take place, though. promise.

#29 - Travelling

the first-year advisors brought us newbies out to dinner at lemongrass, a thai place up 36th and lancaster. everyone was scrupulously late, except poor melissa who paid $9 for a cab to be 5 minutes early. melissa has, i think, the most interesting history among us, having lived in ireland for 7 years on an extended hiatus from real life. i can identify with the sentiment. we trooped in - almost 20 of us - and took up about half the restaurant. the food was very good, although as one might expect, not completely thai -- intrusions included something that looked and tasted suspiciously like siew mai, as well as orange duck. we coaxed grad school stories out of the professors, including someone's confession that he "doesn't give a shit about gerbils". (jason: that's ok, i don't think gerbils care very much about you either.) later in the evening, while asking someone about psychtoolbox (which i have been using for several years), i discovered that dr. brainard, its actual programmer, was sitting three seats down from me. i am very foolish. people started dribbling away after a couple of hours, leaving the stragglers to order dessert, which i did, for myself, in thai, "mango with sticky rice" being one of five things i can actually say in the language. (the brother and the other brother will laugh at me -- but come on: you guys have been there for years. also: one of the other five things is pineapple. i confessed all of this at the table.) hilary and sara had coconut-and-ginger ice-cream, and everyone else had chocolate cake, and everything was excellent, particularly considering that i'd been eating leftovers all weekend. and now to work.

II

But that is not the question. Why are we here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.

I

From Watt, by Samuel Beckett

(because of the centennial, and the strangely profound influence waiting for godot has had on my life)

But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such tidbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds’ eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouserlegs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative.

It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God.

running route

after some experimenting, have worked one out that involves minimal crossing of roads and pleasant scenery - 3 blocks south, into clark park past the farmers' market and family cookouts and multi-racial basketball games, over the trolley line into the university of pharmacy and science: brick facades, open spaces -- a couple of rounds there, then back into the residential area on 40th, up to market past the furniture stores, south again on 43rd and back home. i figure it to be about 3.5 miles, and i will use it till the winter forces me into pottruck and onto the treadmills.

#28 - Sitting in the stillness of an empty church

i found out just two days ago that marty seligman, founder of the school of positive psych, and president of the APA, also happens to be an avid bridge player and once-partner of the great paul soloway. this is very exciting to me, especially since his students insist that if i bring up to him the fact that i love bridge as well, i will get his immediate and undivided attention. as a matter of fact, his attention is often taken away from his students by online bridge, a distraction from work that i heartily approve of.

#27 - Free food, of any kind.

outlets of penang (the restaurant) are spreading like kudzu over the continental united states, and people keep wanting to bring me there. the branch we have here seems to be better than the ones i've been to in NC and NYC, although they did manage to ask us about a dozen times if we were done and needed the check (we weren't). the nasi lemak was tasty, and incredibly good value for money. out-of-town andrea showed up late because of a delayed greyhound, and picked disconsolately at the remains of a yam basket while we talked about the beckett centennial and N's bizzare love affair with the music of bob dylan. there were enormous bowls of green tea ice cream afterwards, which i could not manage because it was about my third dinner for the day. no one had a car, and to prove how safe the city is, someone insisted that we walk at least part of the way home, which we did, and it is.

#26 - Coming to the end of a physically exhausting day, and looking at bed, and contemplating what a wonderful, wonderful thing sleep is

boot camp works!

i don't know why anyone would care! but it does!

QI fact of the day

courtesy of daniel: thanks to ground beef, there is more feces in the average american sink than there is in the average american toilet bowl.

first day of classes

Philadelphia has an a east-to-west continuum of safety that starts at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell (arrested if you even think of the word bomb), and goes all the way down to 61st Street and beyond (personal firearms recommended). This is not as bad as it sounds -- at least it's an organised progression, unlike in certain cities where you may get caught in crossfire if you walk down a single wrong city block. Things start getting hairy around 47th, which is unfortunate because there is a fruit seller parked there who sells extraordinarily fresh produce at a dollar a bushel (figuratively). Also, at 50th is a very unique grocery store that has no (a) shelves, (b) organizing principles, (c) guarantee that they will have what you want at any given time, even if it happens to be peanut butter, or paper towels, or bread. They compensate for the fact by selling it all at about half the price you would pay at another grocer's. Long-term cost-benefit analysis may yet prove that it is worth the risk of assault to shop there.

On campus, a mere 2 miles away, everything costs the earth, except for coffee which is most considerately made free to grad students 24/7/52. Classes started today, and Melissa arrived in Stats clutching an $8 notebook she was forced to buy from the Penn Bookstore at the very last minute. Once again, the boy scouts win it all.

Stats is a Wharton class (OMG I'M GOING TO SINGAPORE). I suppose all roads to lead to Wharton at some point here, but this was rather soon. I was vaguely hoping that I could place out of the course, but this seems not to be an option at this point, unless I switch into Mathematical Statistics, which: I dohave my limits as well. So, first-year solidarity, etc., and at least I get a formal run-through of inferential stats, something the ex-boss never really bothered with, his policy being: do first, understand later. Taking the easier course also will probably free up some time for research and all the other junk I have to get done, so, yay for not killing myself 8 seconds after I got here.

#25 - Wireless hardware

I found this among the information in I-house on study abroad in NUS:

Students must be willing to live according to local conditions, which may lack amenities and differ from their expectations at Penn

Really? Makes it sound like we don't have running water or something. Unless by "amenities" they meant "human rights".

it transpires that for one reason or another i will not be able to take any neuroscience classes this semester. this is slightly ridiculous, given that i am a neuroscientist, but there you go. i say again: social psych is fluffy as dream whip (although the social people among the first years are admittedly rather cool. one is from poland).

across the street

-- and one block away from me is the other green line, a charming coffeehouse with free wireless internet, large cups of java, and mandelbrot, meaning it is my new Favourite Place. i sat there reading outside for about an hour before the sun started going down, and then went to quest for dinner. i didn't have to go very far -- next to it is koch's deli, where i bought the best hot pastrami on rye (with munster cheese) i have ever had in my life. the deli seems to be famous -- pat sajak has visited, and the cast of everybody loves raymond (yuk), and the walls are plastered with a zillion newspaper reviews and e-mail endorsements from penn graduates going back a good fifty years (the graduates, not the endorsements). lou, the original owner of the place, passed away a couple of years ago, and for a while there was doubt as to whether it would remain open, but bob, his brother, took over the reins, and was at the counter handing out free slices of salami when i went in. the sandwich took a long time to make, but that gave us time to talk about escalating rent prices, and the art of sandwich-making, and, very importantly, WHO THE HELL all these people were watching everybody loves raymond. some things in life will forever remain a mystery. i promised to return, often, and he made me promise to show him some singapore dollar notes (it is one of this Things to Do Before He Dies to see Singapore and HK). they have a chopped liver and ox tongue sandwich that i noticed only as i was leaving, and which is definitely what i am going to have the very next time.

#24 - Eggplant parmigiana, but only when it is done right.

WH and i went to pietro's for dinner - salad with mozarella slices and very sweet peppers, and a pizza so large we could barely finish half. WH is a second-year med student who works incessantly (and spends the time when he is not working fretting about it. you know the type). unfortunately, he has also recently discovered pratchett, so this is a bit of a crossroads in his life. the kicker, though, is that he has watched all the clips of QI on youtube, and was practically on his knees in the restaurant begging me to give him the three seasons that i snatched in a desperate orgy of copying from su-lin's hard drive 2 days before i left. if he does not get at least one B this semester, i will not have done my job.

#22 - When problems have elegant solutions...

#23 - ...which I am able to find on my own.

There was a Child Went Forth

There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many
years, or
stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of
the
phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal,
and
the
cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious
liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him;
Winter-grain sprouts, and those of the light-yellow corn, and the esculent roots of the
garden,

And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms, and the fruit afterward, and wood-berries,
and
the
commonest weeds by the road;
And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had
lately
risen,
And the school-mistress that pass’d on her way to the school,
And the friendly boys that pass’d—and the quarrelsome boys,
And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls—and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went.

His own parents,
He that had father’d him, and she that had conceiv’d him in her womb, and
birth’d
him,
They gave this child more of themselves than that;
They gave him afterward every day—they became part of him.

The mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table;
The mother with mild words—clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her
person
and
clothes as she walks by;
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust;
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture—the yearning and swelling
heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay’d—the sense of what is real—the thought
if,
after
all, it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time—the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets—if they are not flashes and specks, what
are
they?
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank’d wharves—the huge crossing at the ferries,
The village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset—the river between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown, three
miles
off,

The schooner near by, sleepily dropping down the tide—the little boat
slack-tow’d
astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away solitary by
itself—the
spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will
always go
forth
every day.

                                                 Walt Whitman

incid.

If anyone wants to see anything in particular in the little boxes with question marks on the left, please do leave a comment. All my ideas are horrible, but they will be used unless folks come up with things.

caving in to the hoarding instinct

rained the whole of last night and the whole of today as ernesto met the cold front coming from the northwest. this was extremely insalubrious weather in which to be hauling heavy furniture about, but the thrift store three blocks west of me was having a blowout sale, and i absoultely had to have a chest of drawers, von be damned. the trip was worthwhile -- everything was going at half-price, but only cash-and-carry. the cash part was ok, the carrying part a bit more of a struggle, but i made it, and now my socks and underwear have a home. i even went back for a second trip for an ironing board ($3.22), a small round skillet ($1.40) and a crimson-and-black bean-stuffed pillow ($0.86) that had been disinfected to standards acceptable by whatever federal agency it is that governs these things.

oh, and WH was not free today so i got takeout chinese and my fortune read: "Your home is a pleasant place from which you draw happiness."

#21: Going to church. It actually does. I know you're skeptical. You. Yes, you.

it's amazing how many things one uses in everyday life that one simply overlooks when they're there. trash cans, for example, and dish drainers. i have never in my life thought: wow, i really need to buy a dish drainer.

*

von called just now. i could not imagine who the call might have been from, and answered rather sheepishly with the expectation that it would be a wrong number.

von: you sound just like i did when i first came to the states.
me: what, completely at sea?
von: exactly.

advice from von: before buying anything, stop. wait two weeks. by this time you will not need it, and will have saved a lot of hassle and money. me: does this apply to trash cans? (i realise that i actually know the answer to this, but i will leave it to minz to link to the entry that tells you what it is because i can't find it in her blog). answer: yes. von is particularly proud of the fact that all his worldly possessions fit in the trunk of his car, this being, apparently, a badge that you have to earn at the School of Peripatetics, or something. me (ever smaller voice): i can at least get a chair can't i? von: get thee to a garage sale. and then he dashes off for a meeting, and i'm left contemplaing the emptiness of my apartment and how i now have to feel poor AND guilty whenever i make a purchase.