a few final things

1. geoff emailed me all yesterday to inform me that he had a scheduling snafu and will not, in fact, be able to attend my defense because he's in seattle. i think this is, on balance, good news, but am not yet sure.

2. have found four (4) mistakes so far in the 2 papers combined, none of them horrendous, but all displeasing to the eye. had an extended discussion with daniel in chipotle over lunch about whether to come right out and admit that i'm a moron, or brazen it out and hope they don't notice. therapy happened, and i got some good advice, and actually managed to feel more or less ok for about 15 minutes.

3. the anxiety is a horror. i feel, in my heart of hearts, that i have not prepared enough, will never have prepared enough.

4. to myself:

"Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits."

(all's well that ends well)

(i hope)

now soliciting

summer reading recommendations. anyone?

i find myself wondering what would happen to me if i ate nothing but ice cream for the next 3 days.

Don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,--
Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown,
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with fear at your frown?
In the old church-yard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone,
They have fitted a slab of the granite so gray,
And Alice lies under the stone.

Under the hickory tree, Ben Bolt,
Which stood at the foot of the hill,
Together we've lain in the noonday shade,
And listened to Appleton's mill.
The mill-wheel has fallen to pieces, Ben Bolt,
The rafters have tumbled in,
And a quiet which crawls round the walls as you gaze
Has followed the olden din.

Do you mind of the cabin of logs, Ben Bolt,
At the edge of the pathless wood,
And the button-ball tree with its motley limbs,
Which nigh by the doorstep stood?
The cabin to ruin has gone, Ben Bolt,
The tree you would seek for in vain;
And where once the lords of the forest waved
Are grass and golden grain.

And don't you remember the school, Ben Bolt,
With the master so cruel and grim,
And the shaded nook in the running brook
Where the children went to swim?
Grass grows on the master's grave, Ben Bolt,
The spring of the brook is dry,
And of all the boys who were schoolmates then
There are only you and I.

There is a change in the things I loved, Ben Bolt,
They have changed from the old to the new;
But I feel in the deeps of my spirit the truth,
There never was change in you.
Twelvemonths twenty have past, Ben Bolt,
Since first we were friends--yet I hail
Your presence as a blessing, your friendship a truth,
Ben Bolt of the salt-sea gale.

~~ Thomas Dunn

on friday morning i turned in my papers, immediately discovered a mistake in one of them, and then went to la terasse with kinjal to try and drink it away. there will always be something deeply unsettling to me about imperfection, which is why i'm in grad school. LT has burgers with gorgonzola creme, which by my reckoning is the 6th most fattening thing on earth, and almost unbearably delicious.

the afternoon was supervision, and then a nap, and then over to nuwan/eranda/stephen/pavel's place to sit in the back yard and enjoy one of the first days of the year where one could do that jacketless without turning into an icicle. about a year ago, a bunch of us were in exactly the same spot when we heard an almighty rumpus coming from one of the adjacent yards, which turned out to be a bunch of stoners trying to kill a pheasant for dinner*. this year it was darkness and smoke and pavel telling stories about being solicited by prostitutes in sofia**, which happens on a not-infrequent basis. things were nice and comfy, and then the landlord's brother, who lives in jersey, showed up, drunk, and started a lengthy and very serious discussion on why psychologists are all nuts, and how middle-class america is being thoroughly squashed by the Man. awkward. by the time he disappeared for pizza, we were out of beer, and the night was ruined. went home and tumbled into bed exhausted only to be awakened at 3:30 in the morning by a drunken couple having a screaming match in the street involving multiple bottles being smashed, and florid conjugations of the word 'fuck'. waited a while to make sure there weren't any gun shots, then shut my window, turned off my alarm, and slept like a baby for a very long time.


* where does one get a live pheasant, anyway?
** apparently, and i may have been lied to, the bulgarian word for 'sex' is 'sex'.

the week

the weather forecast says that we're headed from 40 and thunderstorms today to 80 and fabulous sunshine on friday in a linear, stepwise fashion, which will be, i think, an almost perfect reflection of my mood. wednesday is final edits, thursday i get everything bound, then friday morning i play delivery boy before meeting kinjal at new deck for midday martinis. friday is also the housemate's birthday, so celebrations will probably continue after that for a decent while.

DC

on the dual principles that (a) writing and editing can be done more or less anywhere, even speeding down the i-95 in the chinatown bus, and (b) rare events should be taken advantage of, i took off for DC last night to meet FS for dinner and general conviviality. he's on the east coast to present a poster about enzymes to bigwigs who don't understand anything and/or don't give a shit, which sounds sort of like what i do, except for the part about bigwigs. 1.5 hours of trying to correct my horrible writing left me half-blind, and the NYT saturday (byron walden) more or less finished me off. made it through the top half of the grid ok, and had some decent progress in the SE corner, but then i was left staring at 50 across ('Mechanical trade') for a good 10 minutes with TI***RT**, and the only thing i could come up with was TINKERTOY -- patently wrong. that was pretty much the end for me. (answer: TIT FOR TAT. won't be forgetting that one in a hurry.)

got in to DC late, and the only promising place nearby that had tables was vidalia, where i had garganelli pasta with rabbit livers, prime rib au jus (cioppolini onions, pommes noisettes), and an olive-oil panna cotta topped somewhat unimaginatively with strawberries. (also, a tripartite amusee bouche, which i only mention because i felt like typing that). we both sort of agreed afterwards that it was a tad too hoity-toity, and that at the end of the day there's a lot to be said for Simple Food Cooked Well. the selection of scotch was also a little disappointing (no talisker?). the only thing i can say i was madly in love with was the cornbread and apple butter. it's funny how i keep going to places where the bread is my favorite thing -- cf warm cheese bread at fogo de chao.

the catching-up was, as always, excellent.

fling

the sun is out, and spring is here, and the undergrads are having their annual festival of debauchery. from what i've gleaned from the student newspaper, the key ingredients of said debauchery are bouncy castles, fried oreos, and drinking nonstop for 72 hours. man, was my life that good when i was 19? (hint: no.) in case you think i'm exaggerating as usual: i was walking towards the gym to get a thing of sesame chicken for lunch when this hulk AEΠ guy comes up behind me on his cellphone all 'have you started drinking yet? DUDE?' and nearly bowls me into the street. there's no beating them, but there is joining them, as (weird)nick apparently plans to do. the second year of grad school really is a belated honeymoon. for some people, anyway. oh, and despite what you might take away from reading the '03'-04 entries on this blog, i didn't really drink all that much as an undergrad, and certainly never during the daylight hours, even during our equivalent thing with the bouncy castles. well, i lie. there was this one time which some of you know about -- the day before i was going to fly home for christmas in '03 (i think) when it starting snowing, and we had "leftover" tequila and schnapps and started making snow margaritas, which is apparently quite a good way to contract a fatal bacterial infection.

8 days to go.

the boring stuff that i need to say, but which you don't really need to read

the grant writing so far has involved a lot of copying of boilerplate text and finding synonyms and alternative sentence constructions, i.e. not the total hell i was worried it might be. also, the advisor is actually working on it with us, which is unprecedented (for me), and a little bit cool. the war has been going a little less well on other fronts, particularly with the ex-boss who is giving me all kinds of strange grief about reprocessing the data in 851 different ways. also, the meta-analysis paper is all kinds of horrible, and needs to be fixed post-haste. etc. aargh. AARGH.

[/end of cathartic rant]

1. apologies go out to all the people who have been ignored and snubbed by me this week.
2. the absolute only reason people drink pbr is because it's ass-cheap, right? someone please tell me there's not something i'm missing.
3. found a bottle of torres mas de plana '96 on sale for 20 bucks. awesome. am starting to stockpile for summer, when there will be plenty of occasion for byobs and armchair philosophy, and the shadow of this terrible time will become a distant memory.
4. to ls: thank you for the thing. it's been a good long while.

was doing a friday puzzle i missed a couple of weeks ago and came across "ledger with lines". answer: heath, which, ok...but was it only me thinking about other kinds of lines? a bit unfortunate, really.

so we all knew that the nih challenge grants are just the new alphabet soup, but it's only today that i realized that they don't actually want to hear about science in them. as in, the instructions are literally: make a huge parade float with pyrotechnics and a chorus line of nubile parisians in petticoats singing your research topic in eight-part harmony. and! create as many jobs as possible while you're at it, preferably jobs for hispanics, or lesbians, or people with no legs. sigh.

oh, and for those of you who get the rss feed and want to see the picture again:

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth,--the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

~~ Emily Dickinson

dinner was a slop of vaguely mexican ingredients that i threw together and called a casserole. am eating quite poorly, and a lot of cheese, but still running 12-15 miles a week so maybe that's a wash.

note to self. less:
1. blogging
2. instant messenger
3. fretting
4. sporcle
5. outright panic

more:
1. discipline
2. hours in lab
3. coffee
4. reminders of horrible terrible awful consequences of not meeting expectations of self friends mentors colleagues any omniscient being that may exist

19 days to go. we start writing an nih grant tomorrow, and it's due the 17th, the upshot of this being no sleep ever. also to be completed: a rewrite of the dratted manuscript from the s'pore dataset because the ex-boss has declared the first draft to be insufficiently conservative for these economically uncertain times (i know, right. wtf?) anyway, i have to retool some of the language so that it's less titillating/not as risque/please move the quilt up 2 inches thank you very much, which won't take all that long but is annoying as hell.

russ poldrack, whom i admire greatly, (and who you last heard of as inspiring a discussion about abductive reasoning and cows) gave a talk at the ccn today. he's still going strong with his beef about reverse inference, except that he's now powered up and started socking it to people who make these claims in the popular press to the collective horror of everyone who would like to use fmri to do, oh i don't know, real science. the more i go to talks by people like poldrack and morse and illes and gazzaniga, the more i realize that science+policy might be my thing. much as i love the basic research, i've also reached a point where i know i'll never be great at it -- and this isn't being defeatist in any way; it's just taking a calm look at the people around and ahead of me and realizing that if i only do basic research, i'll have a mediocre career at best. sidebar: i was pondering the other day on two of my favorite shows, house and battlestar galactica, and i noticed that one thing they had in common is that david shore and ron moore both managed to reach millions of people to deliver them this message: "don't be an idiot". and yes, bsg did it in a ham-handed way at times, and house occasionally goes off the rails because it's on the friggin' fox network which has gouged my eyes out again and again, but my point is that we need more of that, and better. this brain stuff, even stripped of its glamor and razzmatazz, is powerful, and we need more people out there saying hey, let's do this responsibly, we only get one shot at it.