due to circumstances far beyond my control, the due date for my qualifying exam papers has been moved up to the 24th, which means that it's time for full metal panic (overload). i would like to class my feelings during this time as officially "overwhelmed", just for the record. i feel like you're allowed to play that card for sympathy at least a few times during grad school before the well of goodwill among friends and family runs dry, and seeing as how i've been (relatively) good thusfar, let me declare one played.

2 of the long center-of-the-grid answers in today's puzzle were AN AMERICAN IN PARIS and THE FRENCH CONNECTION, which meant that it was a very good day for a movie buff working his way through the AFI top 100. i just finished my 70th the other night (sophie's choice), and picked up a second-hand copy of the book on my way home today -- it's one of the styrons i somehow inadvertently missed in my youth. of course, a lot of that youth was spent not realizing that i was allowed to read novels by american authors, so i excuse myself on that count.

class on thursday was on linehan's dialectical behavioral therapy. i remember cp being particularly enamored of this several years ago because it's the closest empirically-supported treatment we have that even remotely resembles his idea of therapy, which is a swift kick in the pants (to be precise, practitioners are supposed to be somewhat irreverent towards patients, e.g. P: I really just want to kill myself; T: Well, why don't you then?) 5 years on, and there's still very little evidence that it works for anything other than borderline personality disorder*, so sorry cp, no dice. i will freely admit, however, that it often takes a fair amount of restraint to not say irreverent things in the therapy i do, particularly as there are many patients who more or less deserve to be clouted over the head with the dsm, twice.

*to be fair, it's just about the only thing that works for borderline personality disorder.

at koch's today, while buying a reuben, i got to observe an apprentice make his first sandwich* under the watchful eye of the master himself. it was a rather educational experience, in which i learned 1) when and why one cuts meat against the grain, 2) where wet and dry ingredients go, and 3) the art of pickle-slicing, among other useful things. incidentally, koch's was recently voted one of the 50 best places in america to get a sandwich. people like von who are obsessed with food in bread (and more well-traveled in the states than i) might tell me whether they approve of that list. my personal observations:

1) i've been wanting to go on a pilgrimage into NJ for the grease trucks** and fat sandwiches for ages. maybe this summer.
2) pat's king of steaks (#2)? i don't think anyone who's actually from philadelphia would agree with that one.
3) the momofuku website is really cute. i read about this place in (i think) the new yorker, and almost made it there once, except that a certain someone decided that it would be so-o-o-o much better to eat in a no-name thai place which gave us all diarrhoea.
4) baoguette! gotta go for the name alone.
5) have had beef on weck (#33) before. it might even have been with von. "kummelweck" is a fantastic word.

*a drexel special: corned beef, turkey breast, spiced beef, russian dressing and coleslaw in a toasted amoroso roll.
** i swear i've blogged about this before, but can't find it now.

have come to the final bit of the meta-analysis, where one looks for moderators, or other factors that explain the heterogeneity in the main effect. none of the sensible ones i've tested seem to be significant, and looking down the list of papers at the ones that are far away from the mean, i've come to the conclusion that the main variable that explains the spread is that the outlying studies were crap. unfortunately, i'm guessing this will not fly when it comes to peer review.

by the way, doing the NYT crossword is not a recent obsession; i've been at them since freshmen year of college, when i realized that "simple" crosswords can be anything but. it's that i recently started a subscription, which means i get the weekend ones which have words worth commenting on. if you're bored by that, well...i don't care :)

38 days. ugh. sunset doesn't last all evening.

from today's NYT crossword: "Manuscript marks noting possible errors." Answer: OBELI (sing. obelus; definition: a mark (− or ÷) used in ancient manuscripts to point out spurious, corrupt, doubtful, or superfluous words or passages.)

i bet you my left pinky that minz would have gotten that one right away. we need to team up to do the friday/sat/sun crosswords when i'm back in the country, except that we will all die at the sports clues. still.

woke up this morning feeling hollow because BSG is over for good -- i know that's quite a sad thing to say: it's just a tv show, but i have a feeling that by the end of my life it might still be the best series i've ever followed.

thomas brought me to a hole-in-the-wall indonesian mini-mart in south philly that sells boxes of freshly prepared, ready-to-eat meals. i was skeptical at first, but that all melted away when i realized that the store owners speak not a word of english. oh, and the food! goreng pisang! ondeh ondeh! kway teow goreng! gado gado!! bubur hitam!! at $4-6 a box, i bought all i could carry, and will return, many times, probably with brother in tow. i can't believe that i've been suffering through fake chinatown malaysian food every time i get the urge to eat something from our part of the world.

in the crossword today

50A: Oscar nominee for "Stand and Deliver".

Shout out to the BSG finale?

jeers (2)

whatever happened to the caped crusader part ii delayed till next month! DOUBLE BOO!!!

jeers

the tar heels are obama's pick to go all the way for march madness! BOO!

45 days. the excel dreams are getting alarmingly vivid, so much so that sometimes i feel like i'm in the spreadsheet rather than making it. weird, i know. two nights ago i dreamed of a mistake that i had actually made in one my formulae, which was fortunate, but also pretty disturbing, if you think about it.

***

the 1-across clue in yesterday's NYT crossword was "Park near Philly's City Hall, site of the LOVE statue" (JFK PLAZA). yes! it's amazing how one big gimme can break a puzzle. i seldom complete saturday, often because of answers like JFK PLAZA and TRITICALE, so it was a happy day indeed.

***

am trying to get grubby paws on some of mr. obama's stimulus money to NIH; fortunately, Other People are going to be doing most of the writing, lest i be completely crushed under the weight of multiple back-breaking assignments. hengyi is taking the lead on this one, and i'll be around to make sure that the document is actually written in english. also: that tables are double-spaced. i don't understand people who don't double-space tables. single-spaced tables are thickets of numbers that make my eyes water.

***

the housemate has stacked the fridge full of musubi. mmm.

i always figured that amaranth had to be some kind of precious stone or metal because of 'amaranthine', but no, it's actually a genus of herb. as i also found out from eleka last night, there are certain species of amaranth that are also consumed as grain, and are apparently quite delicious, although no one at the table had any notion of what they actually taste like. nor did anyone have experience with triticale, although 4/5 of us present had heard of it, which i thought was a fair achievement, and made me aware of how glad i am to spend most of my time among folk who are Educated.

random aches and pains department

i seem to have pulled one of the tendons on the dorsal surface of my right foot. it hurts when i go up stairs.

exactly 50 days till the papers for my qualifying exams are due, and i've already started having dreams of excel. not a good sign. have reached a rather tricky point in the meta-analysis where i'm trying to model the residual variance unaccounted for by sampling and random error. i should have thought this through a little more carefully at the start -- by allowing hours of sleep deprivation to vary between studies, i now have to build a sinusoidal meta-regression with an exponentially saturating component*, which i'm not sure is even technically possible. sigh. for a while in the 90s, math actually made sense to me. those were the days.

* this is not gibberish, i swear: see borbely, 1982 in human neurobiology

tried to make souffle as an experiment for a dinner i'm hosting wednesday. it didn't go horribly wrong, but it was insufficiently airy, and tasted a bit too much like egg. i know this is a funny thing to say since souffle is mostly egg, but all good specimens i've had have not been reminiscent of it at all. anyway, i gave it a C+, and commanded the housemates to eat the rest of it, and will probably stick with poached pears and creme fraiche for dessert (or something similar that i can't bollix up). alternatively, hints and tips from those in the know are welcome.

blah

have been in a foul mood for a while now, and i feel like it might help if i articulate why. triggers: jorge cham (of phdcomics) came to give a talk last week, and it was funny, but also quite painful, in the way that people who work in cubicles tell me that they can't bear to watch the office or read dilbert -- there was one bit where he goes on about calling old friends and finding out they have career/family/car/house/savings while you're sitting in lab at 10 pm eating ramen, and as i said to many of you before i even set foot in philly, my greatest fear in coming was that things would never again be as they were, that everyone would move on to a new stage of life leaving me alone, in the dark. anyway, that touched a nerve, and then reeves starts sending thousands of emails about humanz alumni things, which would have been nice except that it brought into stark relief the fact that yes, everyone else does have career/family/car/house/savings, and are doing nice normal things while i beaver away at my fucking horrible research that literally no one on this earth cares about, even me.

i think what it comes down to is this: there is no privilege in being a grad student, we're not heroes or martyrs, just people who have voluntarily cast ourselves into a no-status position for 5+ (+?) years in a quite-possibly-lunatic act of delayed gratification. and everything we tell ourselves during those five years is just a lie, cognitive anandamide so that we can get out of bed each day and go to lab and sit down and actually work instead of having our heads burst like grapes, but that's what it is: a lie, because there is no salvation in this until i'm sitting in my office, and "PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR" is printed under my nameplate, and my degree is hanging, framed, on the wall. until then, the dice are still in the air, and they may come down snake-eyes, and friends will whisper under their breath in smoky bars about birds in the bush, and applying 20/20 hindsight, and watching the wreckage of my existence like that girl everyone's talking about who got dumped on The Bachelor.

but what choice but to go on lying, thinking the good thoughts -- at least; at least -- and in that way get through another week, another year. it's easier when you first get here; there's the glow of being accepted, of feeling like you might actually matter. but really, you don't, you're just playing the game a different way, taking your best shot like everyone else, trying to remain intact and upright at the end of the day so you can face another one.

so clearly, it's not been a very good week for blogging. i was hit last week with 242 (!) midterms to grade, and have had very little time to eat and sleep, never mind come on here and recount my tribulations to you lot. in any case, i got done with the very last script yesterday, heaved a huge sigh of relief, and immediately went out and got massively drunk. good times.

it's going to be much of the same for the next couple of months until classes and my exams are over, upon which there will be delight and rejoicing and all that. in the mean time, i refer you to a story i heard on npr the other day about the plan to send microbes into outer space to test the theory of panspermia. apparently some astrobiologists are worried that the capsule will crash onto mars and contaminate the planet, or that the unicellular organisms within will eventually evolve into powerful bug-eyed life forms that will return to their host planet and exterminate us. or something. personally, i think it's pretty awesome to send anything into space, and would trade my human brain scans for that s*** any day.

(goes off to work furiously on his astrobiology grant.)