sfn (iii)

13. on monday morning, i locate ex-lab people and we breakfast at richard walker's pancake house. it has mixed reviews online, but i really like it. my german pancake -- lemon, powdered sugar and syrup -- is very well done, and the coffee is the best i've had in a while. then again, pancakes please me very easily, so perhaps i'm biased.

14.1. research. there is a group at michigan doing work very similar to ours. i go up to one of the grad students standing at the poster and start babbling and babbling in what i can only assume is an attempt to prove that i'm smarter than her. after about 10 minutes, i realize that the words coming out of my mouth are barely even in english any more, and i stop, and sheepishly walk away.
14.2. their PI is someone who i respect a lot, and want to collaborate with some day. he's hanging around as well, so i go up to him, manage to be sort of coherent, and get utterly snubbed. that's the last time i try something like that.

15. hengyi gives our talk just after noon. it goes as well as can be expected. i have absolutely no sense of how important our data are; judging impact in science can be one of the hardest things.

16. the ex-lab-boss is there, and we have a long chat, and start to solidify plans for next summer. i am going back to the ex-lab to collect a dataset -- this is so i can graduate in fewer than 87 years: the pace of collecting mri data here is completely unreasonable. i promise him that i will have a proposal before the year is out, a promise that i have since regretted making. coming up with ideas for research is the worst. the happy medium between "that's an idiotically trivial idea" and "what is the meaning of life" is one i have yet to find.

17.1. hengyi wants chinese food, so we end up in red pearl for dinner. it seems entirely unpromising, but shockingly, the dim sum appetiser is quite superb (honest-to-god xia1 jiao3!), as are the two dishes we order (duck thai-style curry and a sweet potato concoction).
17.2. i have started speaking chinese with hengyi some of the time. it's sharing the pain, i guess; speaking english seems to be physical agony for him sometimes. what results are these super-weird conversations where both of us furiously engage in pre-forming sentences that melt like sugar pills on our tongues as the other person is speaking.
17.3. but still: we talk about visiting china, and bilingualism, and philosophy of the mind (not kidding).

(cont'd)