unproductivity

time spent browsing through this site today: 90 minutes.

# words of thesis written: 145

(my favorites are these:

She was like celsius: has a lot of degrees and is still not employed in the U.S.
He was like a toilet seat: constantly being put down by women
He was like a water cooler: drunk at the office

and

She was like a treadmill: inclined to make things difficult)

flies like an arrow

prospectives visited us yesterday, which means that very soon i'm going to be a second-year, which is terrifying beyond all measure. the day started promisingly with a talk by marvin chun on boundary extension, and ended with a party where i tried, and succeeded, in killing a headache with vodka. i also uncovered further evidence for why sean m. is my clone, and the continuation of bad movie night is on the cards. (first up: troll)

"Scrod" was one of the answers in the NYT crossword yesterday. This was a new one to me, apparently a Bostonian thing:

(from Boston Online)

SCROD: A small, ambiguous piece of fish that never knows if it's cod or haddock. Some people claim that "scrod" is a young cod, while "schrod" is a young haddock, but, in fact, there's no difference - it's basically whatever's cheaper at the fish pier that day.

"So a guy lands at Logan and gets in a cab and says to the driver, 'Take me somewhere I can get scrod!" And the driver says, "I've never heard anyone use the pluperfect participle before!"

(cp: tell me you don't love that.)

I realise with no small measurement of disappointment that in the last 6 years, my favorite movie among the best picture nominees has only once won the prize (LotR: RotK). I liked Traffic, LotR: FotR, The Pianist, Sideways and Brokeback Mountain more than the eventual winners, and this year, that tally is going to grow when Little Miss Sunshine loses to The Departed. I blame the Republicans entirely. (This is also the implicit reason why a show like 24 gets renewed for 68 bazillion seasons while Arrested Development is ignominiously canceled in its prime).

friggin' typos...

happy new year!

we congregated for the surprise party slightly before 9. there was a superabundance of cookies, and a "birthday princess" paper tiara (no sash), and a cake that looked like it had tomato paste for icing. (one of the twins -- he lives in the same house as kinjal, the birthday girl -- nearly ruined the surprise earlier in the day by bursting in on us having lunch, high on painkillers and icing sugar, and announcing that he needed to go and buy eggs.

kinjal: but we still have a few in the fridge.
a.j.: oh! but i don't want to go all the way home.
n.j.: wawa! wawa has hard-boiled eggs.
kinjal: cold, gross ones.
a.j.: i love cold and gross! here i go!

the cake was caramel. the surprise was...more effective than these things usually are, in that the lights stayed off till the right time, and there was a minimal amount of schoolgirl giggling. after that, there was lots of chocolate, and a good time was had by all. much later on, mary (the only other chinese person there) and i started talking about CNY, and how horrible it is to spend it in a place where the crappy cultural steamroller always comes along and squashes the holiday (either that or it gets ignored entirely).

we did decide that the least we could do was eat real food, so the next day we grabbed joe from the ccn (mary's boyfriend) and one of his research assistants, and a bunch of law students, and went to chungking, where they have leng3pan2 and huo3guo1 and a hearty disdain for caucasians. it's a b.y.o.b., but we had all neglected this fact, so no o.b.s had been b.ed, and we decided to send a contingent down the road in quest of pinot grigio.

the food was good, on the most part. the honey walnut prawns were an absolute dead ringer for the salad prawns at swa garden. there was tilapia, which are apparently capable of transitive inference, which is very interesting if you're a cognitive scientist, and also shows that they are smarter than babies. the cong1you2bing3 was too greasy, and also too insubstantial, but it's usually the triumph of hope over experience that makes me order that anyway. there were various vegetarian things, and a huge tureen of suan1 cai4 tang1, and gross dumplings that would have made the baby jesus cry, especially if he had ever gone to margaret drive.

the lawyers were a more interesting bunch of people that you usually get if you put your hand in a barrel and scoop out a fistful of them. larry in particular has had quite a life -- he lived in beijing for several years (and speaks fluent mandarin) before deciding that doing a JD in china was beyond even his linguistic capabilities, and moving back to philly. he is also a big fan of chinese punk rock, which quite frankly i wasn't even aware existed. there were vague threats of karaoke, but despite the wine, cooler heads prevailed, and we were spared that particular ordeal. we didn't once have to talk about my research, which was fantastic, but between the salad prawns and talking about cate blanchett/judi dench i was also reminded one too many times of people i'm not getting to see this CNY, which was not.

nevertheless, happy pig year. be prosperous, as always, and eat without guilt. there will come a time when the goodies will catch up with you, but by then, you'll be too dead to care.

we were still suffering from the aftershocks of the snowstorm on thursday. by mid-morning, large chunks of ice were starting to melt and slide off the roof of huntsman hall, and after several near-calamities the police cordoned off a slice of the 38th and walnut intersection, backing up traffic several blocks. despite the housing laws, there was no shoveling of sidewalks in evidence, and it took me several minutes of slipping and sliding before i decided i was not going to navigate the probably-impassable stretch of road leading to my lab, and parked myself in cereality instead (stopping for an hour in the bookstore to read travels in the scriptorium, which was a lot like, but not quite as good as, the new york trilogy

i've started plugging away at my masters' thesis. i can already tell that it's going to be too long, and deadly boring, but i don't care. given that i don't actually get to choose my first-year committee, i feel that it's only fair that i get to inflict whatever i want on them in the way of writing. while working, i drink coffee until i can't, and then i grab anything nearby that's bite-sized and sugary and continue with that, until my eyes are as big as saucers and i can't physically sit still, and then i go run for an hour or till i'm exhausted. it's like the kreb's cycle writ large. i'll detox in may.

the most anti-love film we could come up with was some like it hot, a good movie, but a very poor attempt at the theme. far more unromantic was trudging through six inches of slush the entire day, and stepping into a freezing puddle that came up to my knees.

so this is richly amusing. i was talking to the mother the other day, and she told me that james cook university, one of the places i briefly considered attending in my hour of darkest desperation (you remember it), the school which informed me flat out that i had "insufficient research experience" to begin work with them on a clinical psychology phd, had the gall, the temerity to call and ask if i was interested in enroling in their masters of guidance counselling program. the mother talked to them and was completely diplomatic, which is very lucky for them, because if they had somehow got to me first it would have been a bloodbath.

snowing all day, but in my heart it's warm

battlestar galactica renewed!

i liked this little scene from danny boyle's millions (conceit: the kid talks with dead saints):

DAMIAN
St. Peter! Died A.D. 64?

ST PETER
All right, don't remind us.

DAMIAN
The money...it's robbed.

ST PETER
I know. Patron saint of keys, locks and general security, man. Including up there. I'm on the door.

DAMIAN
Is it still all right? If it's robbed? Can you still do good with it? Or should you give it back? I thought it was a miracle. But it's just robbed.

ST. PETER
Damian, listen. One day I was with you-know-who. Jesus. And he went up into the mountains and thousands of people followed him. The police said five thousand. Pfft...five thousand.

DAMIAN
Everybody knows this story. Loaves and fishes.

ST. PETER
See, I knew you'd say that. That's what everybody says ... Anyway, this kid comes up to us. About your size. His name was...no, I've forgotten. I still see him sometimes. Anyway, he comes up with these loaves and fishes. Sardines. And Jesus blesses them and passes the plate round. Now the first person he passes it to passes it on. He doesn't take anything, he just passes it on. D'you know why?

DAMIAN shakes his head.

ST PETER
'Cos he had a piece of lamb hidden in his pocket. And as he's passing the fish, he sneaks a piece of meat out, and pretends he's taken it off the plate. D'you see what I'm saying? And the next person: exactly the same story. Every single bastard one of them has their own food. And every one of them's keeping it quiet, looking after number one. But as that plate went around with the sardines on it, they all got their own food out and started to share. And then, that plate went all the way around and back to Jesus, and it'd still got the fish and the loaves on it. I think Jesus was a bit taken aback. He says: 'What happened?'. And I just says: 'Miracle!' And at first, I thought I'd fooled him. But now I see it was a miracle. One of his best. But this little kid had stood up, and everybody there just...got bigger. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

DAMIAN
Not really.

ST PETER
I'm talking about you.

DAMIAN
Now I'm really lost.

ST PETER
You're trying too hard. That kid -- he wasn't planning on doing a miracle. He was planning on anything. Except lunch. Something that looks like a miracle turns out to be dead simple.

found poem

(in my lab's bathroom -- for real!)

if you cannot be clean and neat
and not get urine on the seat
of the toilet or the floor,
please use another facility.

one man's opinion

i think samoas are the best of the girl scout cookies, but i'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Run #1 ended, and I happily kicked my subjects out. Once they were gone, Hengyi and I started talking analysis strategies and getting excited in a geeky Chinese sort of way, and proposing about 5 additional projects that we want to start planning next week. This is why Asians are going to take over the world.

---

Also: V-Day. I was desperate to not stay at home, but everyone else was going to The Vagina Monologues, so it was a tough call. The first time I went to TVM being performed it was at Duke to support Grace and her coming out as a feminist, and I think that was entertaining more because of people in the audience desperately trying to screw themselves into their chairs during the "cunt" monologue than than the performance itself. I miss the American South. (Jared was telling me during intermission that some people in Arkansas have probably never even heard the word "vagina" emerging from someone's mouth. I advised him to buy a bumper sticker.)

You may recall my feelings about feminist poets in singapore; here, I think it's a different story altogether. The problem with Ivy League college students performing TVM to other Ivy League college students is that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, and the players know that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, but everyone has to pretend that no one does. Which means, essentially, that the performance is reduced to ranting and cheap laughs as everyone, especially the men, struggle desperately to feel the pain of women on a level that's at least somewhat real. It's very hard to both fully understand the problem of sexual inequality, while treating women as women, much the same way that it's very hard to understand economics and be a good businessman. Theory gets in the way of reality, and then everyone has to fight extra hard to relate to things emotionally and practically, and really, it's all downhill from there.

as you might expect, the neuroimaging group is full of people from china and taiwan, and they plot and scheme all day long, in chinese, about their grand plans to usurp the PIs and take over the department (sometimes, i'm given to understand, in the presence of said PIs). (if i do drop out of grad school, by the way, i'm going to write a pilot for a sitcom based on these machinations, sort of ricky gervais meets barry evans meets mark lee). hengyi and wenchao were having one such conversation in front of me in the scanner room this morning, and about 5 minutes in, it suddenly occured to wenchao that i could probably understand what they were saying. a spy! he says, hilariously, and i promise on my life that i won't tell, and he offers me a ferrero rocher that's been sitting in his jacket pocket for goodness knows how long.

a little later, hengyi and i started talking about post-penn plans, whether or not i intend to go back to my police state, and he suggested i join a chinese university and try and get tenure there, listing a multitude of good reasons for doing so (money! fame! resources! red dragon rising!) it's a far-out, almost inconceivable, but extremely intriguing notion. i think it would make me both successful and miserable beyond anything i've ever known.

(the scans went well, in case you're wondering.)

Run #1

-- of my study is underway. The day started at 6:30, when I stepped out of my apartment into the coldest predawn of winter so far, several degrees under zero, and the wind like icicles stabbing into my lungs. There was no one else out and about, no food trucks with steam and good food smells, and by the time I reached the hospital I was in a very miserable state. With no time to thaw, I stuttered my way through the nurses' briefing like an apoplectic, and got an A for looking like a complete idiot. So much for good first impressions.

The rest of the day was running up and down locating missing signage and battling Matlab with spears and trying to reassure The Advisor that I know what the hell is going on with this project. I sense looming catastrophe, and all because of a very simple formula: Successful Research = constant - k*number of people involved*chance each of those people will perpetrate a FUBAR. Now, (1) there are too many people involved in this project, and (2) judging from past experience, k, which is variable between but stable within individuals, = about 18,214 for me. In the ex-Boss' lab, there were very few people directly involved with data collection: me, and WC, and M____, and maybe one or two other interns that I could bitchslap around, and who didn't really count as people, so there was enough in the way of damage control to prevent the last project I did from being a total disaster. This is a whole different kettle of fish: undergraduate work-study students (OMG), pre-med interns, and nurses with minds of their own. Basically, I'm screwed.

I was supposed to meet Ewa in the Green Line after dinner to discuss the regression problems for tomorrow, but she called to cancel because SAS is still kicking her butt. I thought this was good news in terms of keeping warm, but the central heating in the apartment isn't coping too well with the weather, and cold is seeping in through the walls and floorboards, so that anywhere outside of a two-foot diameter of the radiator is intolerable. It's exhausting. I'm going to make hot tea, and not do any more work today (although I should). I picked up, at random, The Minus Man, by Lew McCreary; I'm going to crawl into bed with it, and hope that it's as good as the blurb suggests.

i do love doing groceries at trader joe's. they've really cornered the college student market, and entirely through their packaging -- looks like gourmet food, but costs no more than the stuff you find in local supermarkets. it's a simple idea that some very successful companies have managed to grasp -- if it's cheap, college students will buy it; if it's cheap and makes you feel like a rich person, college students will buy it en masse.

Punxsutawney Phil was wrong. It's going to be winter forever.