cont'd

sunday

6. jiat wakes up at 3 in the morning and potters around. i think the curse of my existence is that every single person i have to share a room with while traveling must have intractable jet lag (jiat lag...heh. *slaps self with a rubber glove*).

7. cliff saper is one of the featured speakers today. if you're starting in the field of sleep, his are among the first papers that you would read - he's figured out the neurobiology of the transitions from sleep to wake, and from REM to nREM, and all in the last 10-15 years. it's pretty awe-inspiring. he blazes through his speech like a chipmunk on amphetamines, and i bravely try to keep up with him while scrawling notes on my little pad. ink flies. paper tears. looking back over my scratching, i have no idea what any of the abbreviations stand for.

8. outside, there is capoeira.

9.1. we rendezvous at the cog neuro social – this is the ex-boss, jiat, geoff (whose hostel burned down last year), and the same three RAs who tagged along at the last conference to the Exorbitantly Priced Yet Entirely Mediocre French Meal. the social is disappointing; last year there were personalities like randy buckner, this year it's PRC grad students who hang around in large chinese-speaking clumps eating all the potato chips.

9.2. we make a quick exit and head for dinner. vickery's is a wonderful pub four metro stations away from the conference center, far enough away that it's not overrun by starving scientists. (also, for the GWTW lovers, it says on that webpage that "We called the place Vickery's after Margaret Vickery, for whom the house was built. Until the late 1970's, Margaret lived in and operated an antique and fabric shop in the house. Rumor, based on facts, has it that Margaret Mitchell used to visit Margaret Vickery for hours on end (in part because she liked Margaret Vickery and because she hated her own house up the street). Speculation has it that a great deal of "Gone With The Wind" was written in that house.") as it turns out, the theme of the evening is one of my favorites: R(s)ODPFBSE, and we start work on the sierra in earnest. the menu is pretty inspired for a bar: starters include grouper fingers, calamari in what tastes exactly like bottled thai chili sauce, parmesan artichoke dip with assorted dipping things, and fried green tomatoes with arugula and feta cheese (the best i've had since joe's crab shack in miami 3 years ago). i order the seared ahi tuna sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise and fried plantains, and it's v good: the tuna exactly how it should be, which is slightly blackened on the outside, succulent and raw about half a centimeter from any given surface. more pints of beer materialise, and i do an atkins and toss out most of the bread from my sandwich. jiat orders the grits without even knowing what grits are, and for the LAST TIME EVER, they're made of GROUND CORN so STOP ASKING. geoff cannot stop talking about orexin hypocretin. the ex-boss sits there looking very pleased that he has people from 4 labs sitting with him at one table, and who can blame him, i'd like to have an empire some day too.

9.3. jiat and the ex-boss depart at 10-something. the rest of us sit around for a while feeling rather bloated and talking about our various post grad-school plans (some of which are v exciting, but which cannot be discussed here. i don't have a plan at all, by the way, in case it sounds like i do. i just want to get through my midterms next week.)

10.1. after a while, we head back to the uiuc guys' hotel, and, as they say, hang. lucas starts doing somersaults across the bed, and i warn him that someone i know got a prolapsed invertebral disc doing just that, but he doesn't listen, and then geoff joins in, and it's like: ok people, we have had too much to drink.

10.2. so of course the next natural thing to do is to go out to a bar.

10.3. vortex is a mere three blocks away. it's horrible, and smoky, and the waitress is a pincushion of body piercings. we're joined somewhere along the way by a villaneuva student who does interval timing in rats, a north indian postdoc who looks like a jew, and one other random woman who is somebody's girlfriend, but whose i can't quite figure out.

10.4. people order strange drinks like pumpkin pie and beer cocktails. if beer before liquor makes you sicker, i would imagine that doing them at the same time is probably an even worse idea. but that's just my conservative side talking.

10.5. the random woman turns out, embarrassingly enough, to be a fifth-year psych grad student at penn. we've been to at least two socials together, but just never met. we finally get introduced, and naturally start complaining about how badly department unity sucks.

10.6. the bar kicks us out at some point, and i manage to get back to the hotel without getting accosted by too many homeless people. i really want to read tim powers, but two pages in i find that i'm passing out, and call it a night.