Atlantic City, NJ

i've never been to vegas, but this is supposed to be close. what to say about AC that's original? not too much. think neil gaiman or michael chabon writing about quintessential america and you pretty much have the idea: gaudiness glorified, the only thing too loud is silence etc. the housemate unembarrassedly brought his camera and took shots from the roof of caesar's hotel, a bit much even for me. i finally got to see the real boardwalk and park place and all the rest of them, which was strangely cool. i'll never outgrow geekhood.

dinner: all-you-can-eat, of course; we all took turns insisting that it was part of the definitive supererogatory experience until we realised that no one was actually dissenting. closed our eyes and picked one of the 29 places that had proclaimed themselves the best buffet in town, and the housemate had dessert first, and alyson picked at things, and i had too much mashed potato. buffets make me so ill, but i can't stop going to them. i want to go to vegas right now and gain 20 pounds.

casinos. i always tell myself that i'm never one for gambling, not a risk-taker etc. and then find out that i am. surprised anew. or at least -- that i enjoy it, different perhaps from actually wanting to take risks, hedonic value vs rational desire. the tables have $10 minimums, which for a grad student = "would you like some ramen with your ramen? for the next 8 years?", but we sit down anyway and ss bleeds away $100 and then we go and play video poker, and i try and do a lot of sums in my head and fail. there is plenty of winning and losing and at one point a slot machine mysteriously gives me a lot of money for no particularly good reason, but at the end of the night, i think we're pretty much down, except that we've had lots of free white russians.

and to end on a super-geeky note: go read about the kelly criterion, and be a little more educated.

cultural prostitution

as much as i disliked better luck tomorrow and finishing the game, i assure you that i will hate ping pong playa about ten million times more.

oh wait, i'm not going to watch it. well, that solves that problem.

tokyo pictures (iii)

after an extremely long and warm walk through the nakamise dori, we landed ourselves in an even warmer okonomiyaki restaurant (sometaro) where we sat cross-legged on tatami mats and gulped down ice tea and sweltered. the mother didn't care too much for the place, but i've wanted to cook my own yakisoba onnahotplate all my life, so *raspberry*

for neuroimage

i'm just about done with my third (fourth if you count the cheating internet one) paper -- have given it over to hy for fact-checking, following it which it goes to the senior authors to be mutilated beyond recognition. i hear that the advisor actually edits pretty heavily on the occasions when he actually gets round to reading the paper. let's see whether this will be one of those times.

i've been working in geoff aguirre's lab for the past couple of days because it's one of two places on campus where i can get access to a software package i need, and the other is IRCS (ugh). it's interesting and notable to me that geoff himself seems to spend a fair bit of time in the room working with his (i think) post-docs, being jocund and affable and imparting nuggets of wisdom, and it almost makes me wish i had a young, enthusiastic advisor. almost -- i do realize on a little bit of reflection that i'd probably go mad working for a young advisor almost immediately. the ex-boss is about the limit of what i can endure.

new treadmills

the gym closed for the weekend and reopened with spanking new equipment, including shiny new treadmills that don't creak and bounce around and sound like they're going to explode. also: touch screens. Also: a place where you can hook up your ipod so that you can access your playlist on the touch screen. ALSO: the option to watch videos from your ipod. if you know me, you know where i'm going with this -- i sense that running is going to be a lot more pleasant this year.

semester the fifth

i have one more seminar to take, which i will, grudgingly. no teaching, though, which is a blessed, glorious relief -- grading is just the devil, and not really as gratifying as you would imagine.

we're getting to the stage where what i'm doing resembles what a phd student is actually supposed to do -- what we're not supposed to do is freak out over admin and write papers about things so far out of our field that even a cross-eyed umpire would call it and drink five cups of coffee so that we can work into the early hours of the morning deciphering the illegible handwriting of our kids.

to accomplish: a paper off for review within the next 2 weeks, enough work on a chapter to get second-author billing, try to make my patients happier, or at least not so sad, and get going on the meta-analysis i want to do for my quals. or at least 3 out of 4 of those. or 2.

tokyo pictures (ii)

gonpachi (yakitori restaurant)


appetizer at gonpachi


giant gold parsnip




the mother, looking at snacks


probably the most dog soft toys you'll every see in one place (also my current wallpaper)

tokyo pictures (i)

this is the map we consulted when hopelessly lost on our first day there (looking for our ryokan). i still don't know what the cat represents.



maybe him



onigiri



a supposedly traditional japanese garden, less well-tended than one might expect.



non-traditional garden



meiji jingu shrine. was a bit underwhelmed by the shrine, possibly because i was v hot and not in right (reverential) mood

bloody americans

i thought i was done with sorting out british from american idioms, but when i spoke of marc c and his advisor getting along "like a house on fire" last night at dinner everyone thought i meant exactly the opposite of what i did. which, ok, at a table full of grad students -- not so cool. someone needs to teach people in this country how to speak english.

philadelphia

three of the five people who used to occupy my office are now gone, and only one new person has come in -- this gives me a huge luxury of space, as well as a sense of deep loneliness during working hours. jared is forever off at the hospital or in some mysterious quarter hammering away at his dissertation, which leaves me and the strange new guy who always seems to be doing something on his iphone (how many functions does that thing have?) -- he has not spoken two words to me in the last three days despite my friendly overtures.

i guess it's a big contrast from the ex-lab as well, which was all gregariousness and happy lunches; in the lab here people are old and serious and sad, which i shall have to accustom myself to again. more hanging out with the grad students i guess -- if anyone is reading this, tropic thunder on saturday?

Tokyo, Japan

There will, eventually, be lots of pictures, because those tell the story far better, and frankly I'm too overwhelmed by life to write anything of substance.

I managed to steal a few days of actual vacation from my vacationless summer to go with the mother to Tokyo. For the longest time, I had been feeling embarrassed about the fact that I’d transited through Narita Airport more times than I could remember without ever actually stepping on Japanese soil, and this seemed a fine chance to remedy that.

The experience was, as one may expect, exhausting, but in an entirely good way, a lot of tearing around and navigating the byzantine subway system in order to take in everything we possibly could. What won me over: the people (sort of), the sights (yep), the food (definitely), but above all, the fact that the place was culturally honest, the polar opposite of Tijuana, like what you would expect japan to be, but unostentatious and real. Also: I've never seen so much manga in my life. If only I could read it.

Photos to follow.

we've established by now, i think, that i blog very little while i'm in s'pore.

the summer's gone, i have my data, i've eaten way too much for my own good, and it's time to return. every new year that starts in grad school brings a little more assurance and a lot more fear, the fear because: i have less and less excuse for not being competent, i need more and more desperately to produce good work, and the time is fast approaching when i need to figure out what happens After.

for now: i'm awfully glad i pulled off this stunt -- 24 subjects in 2 months is no mean feat, and to be able to hang out with old friends afterward was just as special.

ok. back to the old snark.