outstanding questions

* how come the death of superman and captain america got national media coverage, while no one cares that batman is dead and DC has cancelled half of his related ongoing series?

* what do you do with eight million pounds of leftover turkey?

* i would like to see equus...anyone else want to go?

* is it an absolutely terrible thing to put red wine in pancake batter? it sounds prety awful to me.

* bruce campbell: awesome or so last week?

thanksgiving

as i suspected, the meat thermometer was useless; either that or i was getting it into all the wrong places. nevertheless, the turkey was juicy and cooked through, and did not end up on the floor, and all the side dishes came out at approximately the right time, and i only burned myself a little bit once. what remained at the end was a feeling of satisfaction that i haven't felt in a long time -- not that this earns me anything like the rank of domestic goddess, but it is something to make other people full and happy and not alone when they otherwise may not have been; it also beats last year's experience in a dive bar by quite a bit.

d-1

i started to make stuffing and realized that i had not bought any spring onions; that, and the decision to add sausage means that i have more or less defiled the mother's (the maternal grandmother's!) recipe. mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. still, it tastes more or less like what i'm used to, and the house now smells rather good. i also spent a long time stewing fruit and talking with the housemate about random effects models, a queer combination if i have to say so myself.

*

the other housemate has gone back to ohio, which means i don't have to put up with football on the big tv all the time. yay!

*

have invested in a meat thermometer. i suspect that this is somewhat akin to buying beauty cream -- same outcome, reassurance that you did "everything you could". the bird sits in my fridge, thawing, and gives me small panic attacks every time i go to get a glass of water. no dinner rolls.

*

von messages me today to tell me, airily and nonchalantly, that he is hosting dinner for 23, and criticizes my menu choices for being "traditional" and "white". isn't that exactly the point? we flee from past oppression by being able to coolly and unironically do the very things that most typify those who have oppressed us. also, i really fraking like cranberry sauce, ok?

thanksgiving d-3

i decided that since i'm going to be in town for thanksgiving this year, i'd give back for all the times people took pity on my poor family-less ass by having the other left-behind grad students for dinner. i didn't really think this all the way through before making the invites, and am now seizing with panic at odd moments of the day and waking up sweating from dreams of inedible turkey and salmonella poisoning. does anyone have a good recipe for glaze? i started cooking yesterday in fright, making a quite-passable green bean casserole that did not start with mushroom soup -- su-lin warned me a few years ago against ever making things that have canned soup in the recipe, and i've taken the advice to heart. did the pilgrims eat green beans at harvest time? i wish i knew more about agriculture than i learned from the omnivore's dilemma. the more i think about it, the more i feel compelled to make about 8 more side dishes than i should, just because i'm sure they'll come out right. you can't mess up potatoes. (ok, you can mess up potatoes, but those were the old days.) i need to introduce so much food to the table that you can't find the turkey. i need an avalanche of bread rolls. either that or i'll invest in about 12 bottles of wine so that even if everything sucks no one will care. wine, and i'll bust open the good scotch i've been saving, and dim the lights, and put on tupac very very loud.

the elevators in our building have not been terribly efficient at the best of times, but at some point last week they (accidentally?) got set to "wheelchair access" mode, which keeps the doors open for 2 minutes every time they stop, and renders functionless the "door close" button. as one might expect, this has resulted in dozens of people milling in the lift lobby for half the morning before they can get upstairs to their offices, not to mention the extreme awkwardness of having to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers for what feels like hours before finally getting to ones floor. today, however, was different, because the elevators have now decided to ignore their passengers' instructions entirely, so that one seems to have an equally likely chance of going up or down no matter what button one presses before finally being let off at a completely random floor. unfortunately, the humor in this situation lasts a much shorter time than one might think.

half of the department was at the abct (association for behavioral and cognitive therapists) conference this week, making it a lonely and boring one on top of the rain and gloom. it didn't help that the conference was literally held in disneyworld -- i mean, weren't they going to at least pretend that actual work was going on? on thursday i made myself even more depressed by sitting in the office reading the wiki page for epcot and daydreaming about sipping harvey wallbangers poolside under sunshine and cloudless skies. the reality: sifting through the eight billion papers that have now formed mountainous piles on my desk to find the ones with the info i need.

there was the newness of becoming a third-year student, and having to give real therapy, and the historic election, but now that things have settled down i find that i'm a slow grinding war of attrition with my work, at one of those points where all past accomplishments seem futile and the future rises like an escarpment, the summit out of sight. i need to come up with one more good project, and soon, before the money runs dry, but i have no idea what to do -- i'm a little sick of imaging, the bigger questions i have are still intractable, and doing something unrelated to sleep at this point is probably tantamount to career suicide. i feel like i need a week or two off to just stop, and think, and halt the slow descent into panic.

i passed the 1000th-article mark for my meta-analysis some time on thursday, and have probably read the abstracts for more than half of those. i'm reminded of my rather painful time doing literature searches in NIE, except that then i was actually getting paid somewhat more than i am now (ouch). the tedium of this project has also finally convinced me that our qualifying exams are terribly designed -- any collaboration is disallowed, while in the real world no one does any science on their own. thus, one demonstrates not competence but the willingness to be beaten up by the system, a trait that we've arguably already shown by applying to grad school in the first place.

still waiting

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

~~ Pablo Neruda