Waiting for wonderful smelling sponge cake to come of the oven so that we can start on homemade tiramisu. Made with real Grand Marnier and mascarpone cheese, and almost with cognac as well except that it was rather too expensive.

What makes a bad book? Evans (I think) once told us that bad books are those in which everything happens for the purpose of plot, that any development of character, theme, mood etc. is incidental and subordinate to the Story. The Hollywood Syndrome, if you will, where "if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last." [Anton Chekhov] I wonder sometimes if this isn't just snobbishness (snobbery?), because while it's true that a lot of bad books fit this mold, what of classic hard-boiled American fiction, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain et al.? Not to mention top tier SF writers who produce largely plot-driven books which critics would still consider objectively "good".

I ask because I feel like I was on shaky ground last night in a conversation about Dan Brown, specifically the fact that one of my friends is rather inexplicably on her second round through his books. Was one round of the vapidness (vapidity?) insufficient? Or am I just not allowed to offer an objective opinion that his books are bad because she thinks that they're the best things since Marble Slab Creamery? No matter how much hair-pulling you engage in, there's always the brick wall of "but I like it", and all you can do is bite your tongue and pray that people will experience enlightenment like Saul on the Damascan Road.

I freely admit that in some subjects (specifically: books, TV, movies) I'm awfully hardnosed, but surely one has to have conviction in some matters; if you stand for nothing you will fall for everything, etc. What I need is some kind of Grand High Authority, a catalog that I can flip through. It will have the following categories:

1) Books that you May Read Once, and Quickly, perhaps when No Other Books are Available, and Never Again
2) Books that you May Read if You are Stranded On A Desert Island with No Other Reading Material Available and Even Then Think Twice
3) Books that you Should Under No Circumstances Touch With a Ten Foot Pole
4) Books that Should Never Have Been Written and Whose Authors Should Be Roasted Over A Slow Fire for Inflicting Such Dreck on Humanity

etc.

Was clearing out my hotmail box when I found this contribution from a Raffles Voices alumnus. It reminds me of a cappella warm ups (and it's tricky to get them in time so they harmonize exactly)!

Over dinner last night, we mused over dubbing Han with a Christian name, and someone suggested Cole, so he could be ColeHaan like the shoes. We also pondered why Americans actually manage to say his name right (rhyming with barn as opposed to van) and decide that they probably would not have before Harrison Ford was Han Solo in Star Wars and everyone took to that pronounciation.

That was moderately uninteresting.

Anyway, we returned to his apartment at around 10 to get a party started - a farewell cum birthday party which Han threw in honor of himself, even buying his own cake. That's one way to make sure no one forgets your birthday. Other lesser contributions mostly came from Karen, and consisted of everything that had accumulated in her refrigerator over the course of the past two semesters, including: exceedingly moldy gruyere, garlic and feta cheese dip, 6 boxes of Table Water (half-eaten), a box of Familia Swiss Muesli (no added sugar) and several questionable oranges (a la Monica's on last week's Friends, which was the second last one and which no one in Singapore has seen yet neener neener). Han broke out the umpteen cans of Busch Light which have been sitting in his own refrigerator since before I left for Xmas break and practically begged us to drink them. (No one did). After that: gin and tonics, gin rummy, South Indian techno tracks, faux-Cosmopolitans, and finally falling into bed at 3:30 in the morning when the last of the crowd had drifted away to get a few hours shuteye before early flights to places distant.

And so begins the series of goodbyes. I don't think I'll cry, but if I do, I'm not going to admit it.

Blogging from public computer clusters really is one of my least favorite things, but I do have a half hour to kill so I'm going to take the plunge. The reason for my dislike isn't so much the lack of privacy as the unfamiliarity of the keyboard. It's one of those ergonomic deals and half the keys are further right than I expect them to be, resulting in such wonderful sentences as: "b;ppomg frp, [in;oc cp,[iter c;isters rea;;u os pme pf ,u ;east favprote tjomgs""

Anyway, the last of the exams ended this morning and there were cries of merdeka from the rooftops and the usual wild rejoicing before we started packing in earnest and getting ready to depart. We did a round robin of goodbyes, and then people dribbled away - Miranda, Anne and Kelly back to Wittenberg (where they will go on to the Bahamas where they're doing a summer program), Clay to a weekend at a friend's house, Lori to an internship in Ohio. Mamie and I made the boring 3 hour drive back to Duke (which was a 4 hour drive because of massive roadworks along 70) and mused about what lies Beyond, the usual suite of anxieties about all the tomorrows to come.

Am getting dinner with Han and staying his apartment until parents arrive (and I get to sleep in a bed again. And eat food. God I'm poor.) so I'm sure the travel blues will have sorted themselves out by then, good company being the remedy for those, in my experience. Also very pleased with birthday present (thank you Justin!) and for FINALLY receiving the by now mythic pineapple tarts (and other goodies) which are not at all moldy and quite tasty (thank you Minz!). And another copy of Penelope Fitzgerald which means that I now not only have more books than I care to be hauling around with me but doubles. Nonetheless, I am pleased, yes indeed.

I'd like to say thank you to all the people who have said nice things about this blog the past few days. It means a lot to me, and all of you are either funny or insightful or just wonderful people in some way. I usually try to stay away from the touchy-feeliness here (no 'college retrospective' in case you were hoping for it) but I'll make an exception in this case. Thanks.

...with college.

*shudder*

I'm done!

*happy dance*

Incidentally, the reason for "wurms" in the blog title was not to be clever or anything but because the correctly spelled alternative was already taken when I got here. Annoyingly enough, you might also notice that it hasn't been updated since 2002.

24 hours, 2 more exams and I will be done, praise the Lord Jesus and all his good works. As for sleep tonight? Probably not so much.

I have two lots of music on my playlist at the moment. Studying music is Bach's Art of Fugue - which I took a fancy to after reading An Equal Music sometime last year - good because it is melodious but not distracting. For the times in between when I feel like I'm going berserk I have Irish punk band Flogging Molly (From the east out to the western shore/
Where many men and many more will fall/ But no angel flies with me tonight/ Though freedom reigns on all... Walk away me boys/ Walk away me boys/ And by morning we'll be free/ Wipe that golden tear/ From your mother dear/ And raise what's left of the flag for me). No one like the Celts for beer and blood and hate and catharsis.

was unaware that su-lin is a blog vigilante, and will henceforth write in short, complete sentences. unlike these two.

re: urchins, as one of my professors so wisely put it, it's not called 'manipulating the results', it's 'massaging the data'.

10 indicators that you are playing too much Spider Solitaire

10. It is open in your Explorer Bar 24/7
9. You have planned breaks in your schedule explicitly to get in a few games
8. It shows up in hypnagogic images just before you fall asleep
7. You realize a minute after you have given up on a game that it might have come out had you done something differently after the second deal
6. You know your win/loss ratio by heart
5. You begin to wish that you could change the background color because green is getting boring
4. You start visiting the message boards on GameFAQs in the hope that people are posting about their addiction
3. You obsess over getting the stacks out in an aesthetically pleasing order, preferably all the reds before all the blacks.
2. And give yourself mental bonus points for doing so
1. You can actually think of 10 indicators that you are playing too much Spider Solitaire

In a phone conversation last night, Shaun and I started talking about "the way we used to write", that stilted, overformal style that I still use when I need to produce an essay on autopilot or in a very short amount of time. Apart from improving my ability to be succinct, I don't think college has done a whole lot for me in terms of changing the way I write, and that depresses me. Back in the day, when I first became conscious of the fact that writing well was important to me, I did what many of us (I'm sure) have tried to do - that is, attempt to make my writing sound genuine, switch from imitation to creation. It's tough, and the ever-present temptation for us, the Internet generation, is to retreat into the save haven of no-caps, indulge in an orgy of sentence fragments and ideas that trail off into nowhere. To brandish solecism like a sword and hide beneath the excuse that everyone else is doing the same thing. (No offense intended - as you can see, most of my blog is written in this fashion.)

While I was in R.I., I remember reading a book on style which asserted that if you master the rules of grammar and the principles of cadence, and have a wide enough vocabulary, you will, with enough practice, find your voice. It will, so to speak, ying2 ren4 er2 jie3, manifest itself unexpectedly like a Magic Eye picture from the graininess of your knowledge and technique. Whoever it was who wrote that is a liar, or at least it certainly hasn't happened to me. When I look at my writing, I feel that there is nothing beneath the words, whereas when I look at good writing, I sense a presence, something moving in the deep that tells me not only what the author is trying to say, but who he is. As a corollary, I look at the papers I have written for science classes, and I think (if I have to say so myself), that they're really good, one or two worthy of submission to journals. And that's the case because there does not need to be anything beneath the surface in a research article. All one has to do is say it like it is. Whereas, in humanities classes and in the rubbishy writing I do to amuse myself in my free time, there is nothing substantive within, just like those huge Cadbury eggs you expect to be filled with chocolate but which turn out to contain tinny plastic toys instead.

I guess college teaches you what you can't do as much as what you can. Perhaps what it should do as well is give the really hopeless people a good box on the ears and tell them to stop trying.

on su-lin's behest, i tell you about our new sinful dessert. they come in individual pieces, about the size and shape of a madeleine but made of dark chocolate. inside: warm and gooey, outside: slightly firmer than a mousse. indescribably delicious, yet impossible to eat more than one of at a time - besides, like lewis' perelandran fruit, having more than one at a go just seems unthinkably wrong*. had one after dinner yesterday and today and a whole tray still waits in the fridge, leftovers from a shindig had by professors and vips over the weekend. happy.

* although, unlike the fruit, one after every meal seems just about right.

Currently reading:
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Oscar Hijuelos

Departed Days, by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Yes, dear departed, cherished days,
Could Memory's hand restore
Your morning light, your evening rays,
From Time's gray urn once more,
Then might this restless heart be still,
This straining eye might close,
And Hope her fainting pinions fold,
While the fair phantoms rose.

But, like a child in ocean's arms,
We strive against the stream,
Each moment farther from the shore
Where life's young fountains gleam;
Each moment fainter wave the fields,
And wider rolls the sea;
The mist grows dark, -- the sun goes down, --
Day breaks, -- and where are we?

weeks later, the promise to be added to minz's friends page has still not been kept. i am snubbed.

my paper is not done, and i have identified the culprit as spider solitaire

does anyone else think the worst part of a southern barbeque is actually the pulled pork? beans, coleslaw and potato salad are all right up my street and usually very good but at the same time the meat is always somewhat suspect, especially when they do it with vinegar.

All Is Well, by Arthur H. Clough

Whate’er you dream, with doubt possessed,
Keep, keep it snug within your breast,
And lay you down and take your rest;
And when you wake, to work again,
The wind it blows, the vessel goes,
And where and whither, no one knows.

'Twill all be well: no need of care;
Though how it will, and when, and where,
We cannot see, and can't declare.
In spite of dreams, in spite of thought,
'Tis not in vain, and not for nought,
The wind it blows, the ship it goes,
Though where and whither, no one knows.

Happy Green Day! Isn't it funny how the only Green Day song most people know is Time of Your Life? I suspect that in Singapore part of the reason for that is that they play it all the time over trailers of that silly teenybopper show that no one ever watches. Goodness knows what it's called.

Green Day. There was parking and walking to class which I obviously could not participate in. And there was vegetarian pizza, which I dislike because something as blatantly fattening as pizza should not have its glorious unhealthiness befouled by things like spinach and zucchini, although perhaps artichokes are OK. As a general rule, I say that fast food should not be adulterated for the sake of salving people's consciences. Take this whole McDonald's thing with the salads and pedometers - it's obviously all PR and pussyfooting around the real issue, which is, to paraphrase Deuteronomy, that we have before us life and death, good and evil, watercress soup and dripping cheeseburgers - and you pays your money and makes your choice. If you're going to be bad, why sully your enjoyment of the deed with lettuce leaves? And if you're going to be good, don't even think of stepping into a fast food joint, even for a salad, because that's just leading yourself into temptation.

Matt and I actually had an extended discussion of the above on the way to Hardee's last night. We also bemoaned the general poverty of service at drive-through windows, Matt citing in particular the countless times he had asked for no mayo on his sandwich and still ended up with it. I remember when I was young that there were always damn pickles in the McDonald's cheeseburgers no matter how stridently I insisted they not be there. I've since discovered that I do like pickles, just not inside of sandwiches. They have to be good crunchy pickles though, squishy ones are just nasty.

You wouldn't think that it would be hard to eat 6 Saltine crackers in 60 seconds*, but it really is.

* No washing down of crackers with water or other liquids allowed.

Went to the NC tax refund FAQ website just now and discovered that refund checks take 10 weeks to arrive in the mail from the time of filing. 10 weeks! I didn't bother checking on this before I filed my return, so now I'm going to have to get one of the staff members here to forward the check to wherever. Hate that...especially because I rather do need the money.

I give up on these dratted urchins. It's time to engineer some results.

Could people please not construe remarks on this blog as mortal insults to their being? Thank you.

Duke responds to the misreported sleep-deprivation story.

So it seems that people in Brazil traditionally eat turtle on their birthdays. The fact came up during a class discussion of turtle conservation and CITES, and while I know that eating an endangered, charismatic species isn't funny at all, I still can't help but chuckle at the image of birthday turtle, lit candles sticking out at odd angles from the creature's carapace. Turtle, according to people I know who have actually had some, tastes like chicken, although I can't imagine that it has the same texture. I kind of want to say that they'd be slimier, though that's probably because I imagine them mucking around in algae and being generally very gooey beneath their shells. Like snails - which, come to think of it, are really quite firm and chewy. So maybe I'm wrong.

Also - did you know that indigenous people in Costa Rica who harvest turtle eggs are actually helping nesting populations? Clever biologists figured out that Olive Ridleys are actually overlaying in Cosat Rican National Parks, thus attracting more predators to the site and losing more eggs to them than they otherwise would. The extra, rotten eggs also contaminate the viable ones still in the nests. Anyway, this new international law designed to protect turtle species is calling for the harvest to be stopped (something that will obviously hurt populations) and the local people are up in arms. And that's why we all love bureaucracy. I wish there was an online petition I could point people to, but I couldn't find one - anyway, the name of the convention is the IAC (Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles) so if you ever see news articles about them remember to boo because despite their good intentions they're still destroying the world.

Think what you will

Has it hit me that only a week and a half remains of my life as an undergraduate? Not really.

Also:
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring is really worth watching if you get the chance. One particular reviewer said it best when he described it as more like a meditation than a film. It's gorgeous and hypnotic...and downloadable on suprnova if you can't find it in cinemas.

Kind of an outdated thought, but it occurred to me that I have a lot of non-Christian friends who went to see Mel Gibson’s Passion in the past few weeks and was just wondering why. Quite apart from the strange phenomenon of it pulling in a large non-religious audience, the entire film was something of a mess of contradictions both inside and out. The trailer resembled that of an arthouse film yet it was marketed on a large scale, to a Hollywood-viewing clientele. Gibson chose to pair ancient languages (and no subtitles) with very typical syntagmatic structure and strong inter-scene suture. The themes of hope and redemption that run as an undercurrent in the biblical text were almost smothered by the sometimes-gratuitous brutality. And a film that should ostensibly only appeal to the faithful ended up pulling in more than US$400 million dollars at the box office.

I suppose that a large reason for the film’s U.S. success was simply its controversy, but I’m a little more skeptical that the people I know were drawn in by that alone. Any insights? I’m not just talking about people who read this blog either; I get the impression that some of my other (non-Humans, non-GEP, non-RJC non-critical-thinkers-about-the-aesthetic-experiences-they-choose-to-
sample-but-still-entirely-good-at-heart) friends waltzed into a cinema on a Friday night and selected Passion on the basis of it being the popular movie to watch at the time. And I’m a little puzzled as to what they got out of it. Gibson as filmmaker is also Gibson as accuser – and if I found myself being accused of the horrendous crime being perpetrated onscreen I would have walked out within five minutes of the first sight of blood. For Christians, I suppose watching the film is equivalent to our usual masochistic penance, the self-administered dose of remorse that gets doled out once a year around Easter time. Heaping on the guilt that is (and has always been) the unfortunate glue of the Church. (Apply your own non-cynical spin to this if you’re offended.) But for non-Christians? All that’s left is the insult, and presumably the voyeuristic sense that one has been privy to a scene not meant for ones atheistic/agnostic eyes.


On the flip side of the coin, how is it that so many of us did not enjoy Kill Bill Vol. I? If Pulp Fiction was the definitive guide to how to write a movie script, Kill Bill is its companion: how to film a movie. It’s as if Tarantino has single-handedly negotiated the free trade agreement of cinematic language. It erases the borders of genre. It has a soundtrack that includes Nancy Sinatra, trashy J-pop and (if it isn’t, what sounds an awful lot like) Mariachi music (played over the Uma Thurman-Lucy Liu fight at the end). Best of all, Tarantino pulls all this off with no hint whatsoever of satire or irony (one of my favorite expressions nowadays, culled from a friend, is to refer to a movie as being “cheesier than the Armadillo Grill". Which makes absolutely no sense if you have never been to the Armadillo Grill, but anyway.) Kill Bill is the encapsulated history of the action movie, a high proof distillation of the goodness of 50 years of B-grade cinema. It makes it acceptable for one to be “lowbrow”. (The last film to do this was probably The Fifth Element)

Anyway. I’ll defend Tarantino to the death so if anyone wants to pick a fight do email me and I’ll make you a convert. Promise.

With parents coming for graduation and all, my thoughts naturally drift from marine ecology to planning the menu. Initial thoughts/suggestions:

1) Four Square Restaurant
Up the road in Chapel Hill. Excellent dining, beautiful decor, highly recommended by everyone I know who's been. Also, horrendously expensive, thus probably incompatible with parental parsimony.

2) Magnolia Grill
Brilliant steaks, from what I hear, though also too upscale for me to have wandered into with friends on a Friday night. Also, a very traditional choice for post-graduation dinner.

3) Foster's
Great for brunch, magnificent selection of quality sandwiches and desserts.

4) Pao Lin
Best Chinese food on 15-501, IMHO. Ingredients are fresh and chefs aren't too heavy-handed with the MSG.

5) Bakus
Mentioned in some previous entry (Ruth Day brought us there at the end of Fall 2003). A cute little tapas bar on Ninth Street with miniscule (but delicious) portions and superlative Sangria.

6) Honey's
Quintessential Duke student's hangout, open 24 hours a day. I guess the food isn't really anything special, but it's one of those places you get nostalgic for after you leave. Their strawberry shortcake is an incredible dessert though, and probably contains about 3500 calories.

7) Maggiano's
Best. Italian food. Ever.

8) Mad Hatter's Cafe
Exquisite crabcakes with orzo pasta and red pepper sauce (have I mentioned them?) The fattest slices of cake I've ever seen served in a bakery. My favorite place to hang out and study, so we're going there by default.

Obviously, I could go on for a while, but I'll desist for now. Back to urchins.

Currently reading:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Strange people from the West Coast have docked at our port, unable to get around Cape Hatteras because of bad weather, and they're sitting in the boathouse watching our television. Watching incredibly crappy shows on our television. The impudence. Anyone who enjoys The Bachelor honestly operates on cognitive processes way beyond my understanding.

On Weird Al's new album (Poodle Hat) there's a song about the Spiderman movie set to the tune of Billy Joel's Piano Man. It's not as good as some his other songs about films, but I was tickled by:

Now Norman's a billionaire scientist
Who never had time for his son
But then something went screwy
And before you knew he
Was trying to kill everyone

I think "screwy" is just an inherently funny word. Like "kumquat".

Currently reading:
The Tenth Man - Graham Greene

Yes, the story of Billy Budd is a recapitulation of the death of Jesus Christ, but it should also be required reading for everyone enlisting in NS. Because really, could anyone produce a more perfect allegory for action and consequence in the SAF?

Finally done with the excursions (the last one today being to a rather putrid smelling salt marsh), I can at last settle down to do my project. Do any topic you wish, Kirby-Smith exhorts, and on a whim I decide to investigate sea lettuce. Why not? It doesn't bite or nip or run away and you don't have to get waist deep in mud to collect it. All positive things. Now all I have to do is figure out what it can do. Taking up space in the lab has been its only destiny so far.

Currently reading:
Billy Budd - Herman Melville

But why do we cleave the world into black and white, right and wrong, PhD or NIE? Surely there are vast territories in between, perhaps even oases of happiness? Surely they aren't polar opposites anyway. Talking to my mom last night, I ask her if reliquinshing my opportunity here isn't somehow a sin of omission, potential unfulfilled, and she points out most correctly that we are all (especially us) multi-talented creatures and that there are many ways for us to become what we can be. So maybe it's not a clean dichotomy. And maybe we really are very hard on ourselves, and I would prefer not to be because I bruise easily and would like to not spend my whole life nursing wounds.

it is done.

please please please let me not regret this.

So I'm on my way to the Post Office for 37c stamps, and lo and behold! what should be parked in front of the First Citizens Bank but a bright red caravan and a large painted sign announcing: BOOK SALE As it is there is no hope of me resisting, but the 50c wagon-wide pricetag definitively seals my fate. I have about 6 Graham Greenes in my arms and am moving on to the next shelf when the voice of reason finally kicks in, reminding me that (a) I'd hardly had any time to read over the past week and probably won't have much time until classes end and (b) as I have mentioned, my suitcases for the return trip will already be stuffed to bursting as is. Reluctantly, I put most of my hoard back, and, largely by averting my eyes from the shelves, manage to restrict myself to grabbing only two more books on my way to the counter. I explain my predicament to the lady as she is ringing up my purchases and she is heartily sympathetic but only succeeds in making matters worse by informing me that they set up there and bring new books in every weekend. Leg restraints, I think, may be necessary.

Happy Easter, y'all!

i wake up
i think: ok, i will turn down grad school for now, and make the best of it in singapore for the time being
because: i am not sure, and the bio grad students i have got to know here tell me that if i am not sure, the best thing to do is give it time.
work.
get some non-academic experience.
and then, i start reading through email from friends and family who feel otherwise, and that all makes perfect sense too, and i mull over what life will be like in minneapolis for an hour or so instead of doing my research paper which really ought to have been done yesterday but isn't
and i think: hmm. the thought of continuing to be a student is sort of comfortable
like macaroni and cheese from boston market
or a new fleece
and then i go to church and realize how insignificantly small this decision is against, say, christ's decision to hang on a piece of wood for several hours to redeem mankind, or pontius pilate's decision to make christ hang on said piece of wood.
and then the nice lady who gives me a ride home tells me that i do, indeed, have much to ponder over and i want to break down right there in the front seat of her car
and everyone tells me to do what makes me happy, except god knows i've been trying to do that all my life with end results that do not correlate at all with the effort i put into acquiring this happiness

bah.
this will not hang over my head beyond sunday. i promise myself that.

lest people think that the cake discovery is an indication of backsliding morals, i think it needs to be known that the perpetrator of the deed was grad student josh, not myself. in any case, anyone who knows me will attest to how scrupulously honest i always am in all matters pecuniary (although not below taking advantage of the occasional freebie) and especially now what with it being easter and all. anyone wishing to secretly knock frosting off cake in their local grocery store does so at his/her own peril, and certainly must not point fingers at me should aught go awry.

Discovery du jour:
1) Pick up a cake in Food Lion.
2) Out of sight, shake it about and dislodge some of its frosting.
3) Show it to a salesperson.
4) Get a 50% discount on the cake.

Once, a very long time ago (primary school?), I used to be able to reproduce a farily complete diagram of the nitrogen cycle; for today's midterm, less successful. All I remember from my ACPS textbook is that it involves cows and lightning, although I don't think the two interact.

i cannot understand why american express keeps giving me grief with my credit card - every other purchase i make results in it being cancelled and my having to call them to get it reinstated. their only saving grace is that they have impeccable customer service, none of this 'please hold the line, all our representatives are busy [beethoven's ninth]' business, just immediate connection, please fix my problem, thank you very much. nevertheless, they really ought to get their act together - especially for time-sensitive purchases like the one i just had to make (airline ticket, price increasing possibly as i write this).

oh well

in the immortal words of eric idle:

al-ways look on the bright si-ide of life

doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo

Swear that this is not to elicit sympathy or anything but this grad school business is really getting me down. I stare down a long list of pros and cons and no decision is forthcoming, nothing seems to tip the scales one way or another. And crunch time looms. And it's all well and good to talk to other people (and friends and family do have wonderful and supportive things to say) but in the end of course it's just you and the minotaur at the center of the labyrinth.

If it's just a question of courage, I tell myself that I have screwed that to the sticking place before. Martyrdom for the sake of growth and self-improvement, "getting outside the comfort zone", to drag out the cliche. Building character, a la Calvin (as in and Hobbes). What does not kill me makes me stronger. Matthew 5:14. If I've done it once I can do it again.

If it's a question of happiness - I think I can make myself happy wherever I am, but who really knows? There is a long and complicated and very tiresome argument I make to myself in my head over and over again about what I presume will make me happy, an argument I don't have any desire to subject the rest of the world to.

If it's a question of utility, how does one find a common currency for the myriad things I'm going to receive and give up either way? And anyway, it probably isn't a matter of utility.

If it's a question of "doing the right thing", there really isn't a "right thing" to be done.

Distress. But as I said, don't be sympathetic. I bring it entirely upon myself.

I look with horror upon the amount of work I have due this coming week: presentation/seminar on Tuesday, midterm and independent study proposal on Wednesday, lab report on Thursday, 8-page research paper on Friday. Minz points out to me that I had plenty of time to relax in Bermuda - which is true - but that deal was supposed to last the whole of the semester, not just part of it. I feel conned. I was promised lazy hours contemplating the ocean in the brochures, and damn it, promises ought to be kept.

in my defense:
i did try to get a boat
there was no gun to anyone's head, no coercion or undue pressure
everyone acted of their own volition
it is very windy
and we would have been very seasick
scopolamine notwithstanding.

Minz is here, safe and sound, curled up in bed as Duke lost their Final Four game. Heartbreak, etc. It's so much harder when you're a senior. People have dispersed to seek appropriately tall drinks.

Currently reading:
Gain - Richard Powers
American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater - Calvin Trillin

Once upon a time (the storyteller said) there was a boy who lived on the outskirts of a small town with his mother and his father. The boy was an inquisitive but pensive lad, forever exploring the byways and niches of his little neighborhood, poking and prying to see what he could see. He loved his little suburb, but even more than that, he loved the town and waited anxiously for the day when he would be permitted to walk its streets on his own. His parents would tempt him often with excursions into that fantastic world, holding his hand as they wandered past stores that seemed to sell Magic and Wonder itself. "Soon," thought the boy, "soon I'll be old enough to come here alone." And sure enough, the day came when the boy was summoned by his parents and told that he could go, unchaperoned, into town for the afternoon. They gave him one shiny dollar to spend on whatever he wanted, and the boy skipped off happily on his adventure. In town, he wandered into all the stores that had previously been forbidden to him, trying to take in all the sights he could before the day was over. All the time though, he also thought long and hard about how he wanted to spend his dollar, for he had only one to spend.

Eventually, the boy chanced upon the local ice cream parlor, its tempting flavors lined up in bins like paint on a palette - strawberry pink, cool minty green, bubblegum blue, and he knew that this was the pleasure he wished to partake in. The longer he stared into the window, however, the less certain he was about what flavor among this bounty he was going to choose. One moment, the raspberry ripple would draw his eye, the next, it seemed like all he wanted was chocolate fudge. The harder he tried to make his decision, the more it seemed to him that any decision at all was impossible, for having one flavor would mean abandoning all the rest.

And he looked mournfully at the dollar clutched in his palm, and then gazed towards the rapidly setting sun.

Oh yes, and food.

I have hopped onto the carousel of good intentions-broken promises that everyone in Beaufort is always in line for. I intend to eat healthy. Sly cooks food so good it would break your heart to waste it. Good intentions get washed away like detritus on the shore.

Ribeye steaks! Eggplant fritters! Hot brownies with ice cream! Is resistance even possible?

Several of my classes have been cancelled over the last couple due to an exodus of grad students to Durham and Kirby-Smith not wanting to go out in a thunderstorm (which never actually happened). As one might expect, the spare time got filled in with (a) movies and (b) eating. On the movies front, 21 Grams is a film I can certainly recommend. Its Memento-like gimmick nearly does it in, but I thought that by the end it had delivered its message (mainly because of Benicio del Toro who has been brilliant in everything film he's been in to date). It was nice to see Clea Duvall again in between seasons of Carnivale, and Sean Penn managed not to annoy me as much as he sometimes does. (I Am Sam? What was he thinking?)

The Passion of the Christ sits on my computer making me feel guilty for having downloaded it (but what was I supposed to do? No one else wanted to go see it).

And...I am trying to get people together to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but if anyone has bad things to say about it please sound me a warning.

I jotted down this quote from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series nearly three years ago (before I started at Duke) and it still rings very true:

"[Mortals] only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream. But the price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted."

Currently reading:
Siegfried - Harry Mulisch

needs:
a large bottle of whisky
sufficient quantities of soda
pen, and piece of paper on which to write out thought processes
coin, in case need for random toss arises
10 million dollars

cause: the management of bayer company has a shindig out on our lawn
consequence: we get ham sandwiches and leftover potato salad for lunch
booooo.

dryzek, summarized:
survivalists and prometheans - the former believing in the old malthusian philosophy that we are on the path to destruction, the latter insisting that mother nature is a cornucopia that can never be drained dry. look at the trends, the prometheans say, onward and upward. every time we think we're going to run out of a resource, we find something new, or we manipulate matter so that we get something for nothing. to hell with the 'apocalypse now' scare tactics; they're nothing but a political tool. look at reality, say the survivalists. a person driving a car at 60 mph towards a brick wall with his eyes closed is going to believe he's fine at every point - up until he hits the wall.

"...a good working definition of a catastrophe is an effect so large that even an epidemiological study can detect it..." ~ Wildavsky, 1995

Read Oracle Night by Paul Auster over the weekend, and if you haven't read City of Glass by the same author yet you really should.

In happier news, has anyone tried a McDonald's shamrock shake before? They serve them in the month of March for St. Patrick's Day, and they are green and minty and chocolatey and what's not to like?

Minnesota, MN

And so, after six months, eight applications, countless emails and numerous trips, it comes down to this: do I, or do I not want to study clinical psychology in the University of Minnesota?

I’ve operated on cruise control for so much of my life up till now that I find myself absolutely unable to make a decision. Significant life decisions made to date – probably one (not applying for a scholarship). Everything else – plainly obvious, falling into place like cutouts in a child’s matching game. Here, even not choosing is to choose. Either I enroll or I don’t enroll.

So what goes into it?

Pros:
* I do really like the program. It is, after all, one of the top 5 clinical programs in the country (and probably, by extension, the world, considering the state of affairs of graduate study in most other countries).
* I’d be able to pursue my interest in fMRI while getting a “useful” (always with the pragmatics) professional degree.
* The students are friendly and non-intimidating. Dr. Angus is a wonderful man who seems genuinely interested in having me join his lab.
* Minnesota is not at all ulu, unlike Durham, North Carolina

Cons:
* 6 years. Dear holy heaven.
* Abysmal stipend when compared to other schools, even when compared to other departments within Minnesota.
* -20F temperatures in the winter.
* No deferment. I would have to go straight in.
* Lots of work, all year round.

Isn’t the decision impossible? This should not be the something one is called on to decide at the tender age of 23. This isn’t something that one should be called on to decide at the age of 73. I didn’t want this blog entry to come out this way. I wanted to be all flippant the way I was after Hopkins, muttering on about inconsequentials like blueberry pancakes and artwork inspired by gel electrophoresis and Dr. Angus’ tangles with the Taliban. But I can’t. Instead, I’m sitting here agitated, overstimulated, on the carpeted floor of the Days Inn spilling my guts all over the Internet in the hopes that some divine presence will guide me towards making the right choice.

the north wind doth blow
and we shall have snow
and what will poor robin do then?
he'll sit in a barn
and keep himself warm
and hide his head under his wing
poor thing

Minneapolis this afternoon - no updates till Sunday.

Thanks in no small part to a wonderful second-hand bookshop just down the road, I am accumulating books at a rather alarming rate, something that is definitely going to come back to haunt me when it comes time to leave. As it is I forecast that my suitcases for Singapore are going to be stuffed to overflowing. And yet it's impossible for me to go into that shop without finding some treasure that I absolutely have to read and impossible for me to decline an invitation to go when someone is driving there. Plus - and here's the rub - they sell books at 50% of their list price and give you a credit of 40% when you return them...which you can only spend on other used books. Quandry!

I am not in general intellectually intimidated in class, and I certainly have not been in my time at Duke so far, but the population of grad students here is, I admit, beginning to overwhelm me a little. Clay and I are the only undergrads in Conservation and Development... and I would not mind that at all if I had taken classes in the subject recently, but no, everyone prattles along about CIDA and ICDPs and a slew of other abbreviations that mean nothing to me and I wonder if I'm not in over my head. I mean, Dr. Campbell is a wonderful professor and very engaging and not at all condescending to the undergrads but nevertheless one gets the feeling that one is the friend of a friend at a cocktail party where everyone mills around immersed in erudite chatter while all you can comment on is the weather or the niceness of ties. I even feel that it would help if I could remember some of the wonderful stuff I learned in 'A' level History about the IMF and the World Bank but all that has long since gurgled out of my head into the repository of Things I Once Knew. Perhaps I should have stuck in Rittschoff's class after all, even if it did mean two extra afternoons a week in class crushing snails and extracting pheromones. I don't know. I second guess myself too much.

Hush Puppies

Making progress with booking flights originating from Europe. After a few weeks of fussing around with this and that, I finally managed to find a couple of useful sites on the web that are giving me decently-priced tickets. I am chuffed. And much as I know how much people dislike it when I blow my own horn, this particular instance of savvy well warrants its own fanfare. Tan-ta-ra-ta-ra.

Every night with the Wendy's! How come no one goes out and buys a fresh garden salad or a tub of fruit when they're hungry? Why does supper food always have to be starch and fat laden and have smells that waft down the thermokline of our corridor into my room and drive me nuts when I'm trying to read?

For those keeping score, I'm in Minnesota, Harvard and Berkeley have rejected me, Illinois has (presumably) rejected me, and I have yet to hear from 4 schools.

i am convinced: there is no purpose to our ecology field trips other than to get us filthy. kirby-smith definitely had a smirk on his face today as he pilots us, on a motorboat, to some offshore mud flats - large areas of anoxic goop reeking of hydrogen sulfide and other nastiness. relevance to current class topic: none. our prof leads the way furiously for about 5 minutes chatting continuously about littorina snails, and by the time he finally comes to a stop, at least 2 girls have fallen over, one has lost her boot irretrievably in the slime and the rest of us are all stuck to greater or lesser degrees, suctioned to the ground, knee deep in mud. someone points out that if we have to fall, try not to do it on the oyster shells or they will slice our flesh open. the ones who eventually make it to the other side of the mud flat shout encouragement to those who are still wading through the muck. it is like a scene of sinners in hell. all the time, kirby-smith has this beatific smile on his face as if nothing could please him more than this monday nature romp in the 30 degree weather. next field trip: to be approached with much higher degrees of suspicion.

Currently reading:
The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl

And I'm back in Beaufort - until I leave again.

Something was fishy in Mass today. Our set of readings concluded with the Gospel from John 9 on Spiritual Blindness:

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world

Etc.

Wanting to look at the passage again, I went online to look for it and discovered that today's reading was supposed to have been on the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15.

I'm not on hallucinogens I swear, so can someone else who went to Church today please tell me what's going on. Father Joe's not the most organized person in the world, but I find it somewhat hard to believe that he would prepare a sermon for the wrong set of readings. For Sunday Mass. In Lent.

Quite honestly, Stanford going out in the second round of the NCAAs is the best news I've heard all month. BEST. NEWS. ALL. MONTH.

Discovery: being able to pick up and move from place to place across states and countries requires a degree of finesse that I have yet to achieve. I honestly envy people who flit, peripatetic, in a global foxtrot without so much as breaking a sweat. Less stress, less corticosterone, lower blood pressure, longer lives. Myself: I leave things behind, misplace tickets, get bruised and battered struggling overpacked luggage through crowded airports, miss meals, lose sleep. My first instinct when I encountered these problems in the States was to do the obvious thing and try and get more organized, but somehow it just doesn't work that way. Once flustered, always flustered. Nowadays I make a performance out of it, play the part of the big galoot who runs out of his house trailing important items behind him as he runs for his plane. At least it keeps me entertained.

You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal to me, I mean I'm usually fairly good at holding it together and it's not as if I ever panic or anything or mind missing flights and rides, but there's something about the physical dislocation that gets to me and makes me deeply unsettled. Like coming back here to campus - 3 hour drive, not a huge production, and still I tossed and turned and had a most uncomfortable time last night, only awake now thanks to large doses of caffeine. I really need to have a more zen-like approach in my philosophy of belonging to places - like the eremite in the Anthony deMello story: sits meditating in a log cabin; traveler comes by to ask for shelter for the night, sees that the holy man has no furniture; asks him where it is, gets asked in return: where are your possessions? Tells the holy man: 'All I have are the clothes on my back, I'm just passing through'; holy man replies: 'As am I'. Or something to that effect (people more well-versed in Jesuit writing will no doubt correct me). Anyway, that's the kind of spirit I need to have, water off a duck's back, special providence in the fall of a sparrow, etc.

the urchin's name, by the by, was poke the fatty. requiescat in pacem.

Heading back to main Duke campus tomorrow for Rhythm and Blue's Spring Concert. Nowhere to stay. Will probably end up miserable and sleepless in commons rooms for 2 nights.

Field trip #2 is to a wetland restoration project - whipping winds, deathly cold, and intolerable boredom as our guide prattles on about water tables, canal diversion and fecal coliform bacteria. He has a strange accent, pronouncing 'soil' as 'suhl' and stretching vowels into diphthongs. We are bored to tears in minutes and there are no alligators or cottonmouths to keep us entertained.
Mercifully, it is short.

Currently reading:
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

(Sorry for the whining and bitching of late - I should start writing these in the morning again when I'm in a more compassionate mood.)

We have aquariums in front of us during Marine Ecology, in which we put organisms (invertebrate only) that we collect on our trips, and today, we watch fascinated as the spider crab starts ripping chunks out of the sea urchin during Kirby-Smith's lecture and masticating them nonchalantly.

And when i say 'drunkards', I mean hard-core, full-on, start-drinking-at-5-in-the-afternoon, raging alcoholics.

for the love of Christ, why do people keep assaulting me with bad poetry that they've written? someone needs to stop this slaughter of the innocents.

p.s. if you wrote said bad poetry and are reading this, i apologize but i cannot lie to you and call you a friend.

There is constant eating here. Eating and mention of eating - I have had online conversations in the past 24 hours about mozzarella sticks, various kinds of preserved meats and whelk. There are the world's most delicious homemade oatmeal raisin cookies available 24/7 in the dining hall (heavy with butter, and also available in chocolate chip, M&M and peanut butter if such is your fancy). People run out at all times of the night on Wendy's runs for 99 cent chili and frosty dairy desserts and chicken strips. The kitchen staff have a pact to make all Beaufort students gain 15 pounds during the time of their stay, thus: rib-eye steaks, fat boiled prawns, crab cakes, twice-baked potatoes, vats of coleslaw, hush puppies, thick wedges of lemon meringue pie.

I mention this mostly because Minz wants me to do a food books sex ranking for the 'friends' bit of her webpage. I spoke of books a couple of days ago, and will have to refrain from discussing sex here because of certain people who read this, but I figured a paragraph on food might help me put things into perspective. It hasn't really. Rankings are inherently nasty things when it comes to matters of any subjectivity.

(Also to make people jealous)
(Also, to people with whom I had above-mentioned conversations: I'm not picking on you)

kirby-smith, on education:
"i honestly don't think you people have cause for complaint just because you have 9 a.m. lectures here. 10 years ago all of us had to be in class by 8 on the dot every day, and 20 years ago most colleges had saturday classes as well. and, in world war 2, they made officer cadets sit through 14 hour days, 6 days a week, so that they could get their degrees faster, so that they could be commissioned sooner, so that they could be packed off to europe to be killed."

upon which he leads us down to the oyster reef where we all sink up to our ankles in mud and ooze while he delivers non-stop commentary on algae, fiddler crabs, conch fishing, upstate New York, boots.

Books, per recommendation:
Flying to Nowhere - John Fuller

While the words rolled smoothly from brain to fingers to screen in Bermuda they have dried up here and left me groping a little for interesting things to say. Nothing has caught my attention. The converations feel like variations on a theme. The new people are drunkards. You can only watch reruns of The Simpsons that many hours a day.

Worst of all, I have nothing to read; the library here is Elysian...if you happen to enjoy reading about the physiology of echinodermata. In desperation I have purchased a number of books from Amazon.com but of course I have to wait for shipping and all that. The last volume of significance I managed to (half-) work through was The Least of These My Brethren, a 'Reader's Digest'-esque volume written by a philanthropic doctor who works with inner-city Aids patients, informative but not very satisfying (pulled off Han's shelf to keep myself occupied late Monday night). I should have had the sense not to ship all of my books home - at least then I could be amusing myself with a Vonnegut or something - but no, the only four books on my shelf now are:

* Marine Invertebrate Zoology, by Ruppert, Fox and Barnes
* Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, by Johnson
* The Concise Oxford Dictionary and
* The Bible

Ergh. With Mamie and Clay gone for the weekend I feel my sanity slipping away. Talk to me, people who love me.

Just bought tickets to visit Minnesota for the 25th to the 28th - even though I really don't want to travel anywhere at the moment. It's not so much that I don't want to see the place as that I'll have to spend 2 days grinning at the professor and all the grad students and having those awkward conversations that I always have with people I don't know. And then of course there's the usual sleeplessness that comes with being in unfamiliar surroundings and the hassle with airport security and - . Bah, I know I bring all these things upon myself but I'm never sure if that makes it better or worse.

oh, and minz says that she might come and visit and commune with jellyfish and dolphins as is her wont. i had no idea before i arrived, but it seems that there actually are dolphins in the ocean here. bottlenose.

Said it once, will say it again: Blogger.com can be annoyingly unreliable. As when it eats a post that you’ve just spent the last 20 minutes typing. Let me try once more, in short form.


What I really want now more than anything is to spend the next seven weeks as restfully as I possibly can. I realize that in Bermuda I was far more galvanized than usual in terms of going out and doing things, but now I think I could happily spend the time till graduation reading, doing some writing, studying occasionally and watching illegally downloaded movies. My working hypothesis places the blame for this ennui firmly on the fact that I’m back in mainland United States, the great melting point of whatever, although it could be the fact that the people who have joined us are hillbillies (and one sarcastic Belgian).

Whatever the case, we spent yesterday being oriented (does anyone else intensely dislike verbifying the word “orientation”?) and introduced to our professors. I have Kirby-Smith for Marine Ecology, Lisa Campbell for International Conservation and Development, and someone Cohen for a seminar titled “Light and Life” (which sends “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” muzak buzzing through my head every time it is spoken). Everyone on the staff here is mildly eccentric, having contracted what I suppose is the island’s version of cabin fever. Dan Rittschoff, in particular, is quite mad – he does part of his research in Singapore and teaches a lab class: Sensory Physiology of Marine Animals. I sat in on his lecture today and was amused by the fact that he brought along three bottles of Newater from his latest excursion (never thought I’d see one of those in Beaufort, NC). He shared it around (mild ‘coconutty’ aftertaste!) and we had our little moment of amusement before he explained the joke and launched into a highly entertaining discussion of steroid chemistry and water filtration in Singapore’s water processing plants. What this had to do with marine animals -- no idea. They have just gone out to watch the mating behavior of gastropods on Carrot Beach.

I have decided that there is a definite temperature gradient down our hallway. Just outside the bathrooms, it is, as the thermostat promises, a pleasant 71 degrees. Moving along 25 feet to my room, the temperature drops to about 50, and inside my room, you could start a Cryo lab without installing too much more equipment. I go to scavenge for more blankets.

I pondered this for quite a while before it hit me: the rooms here smell exactly like the rooms in the RI boarding house did when I stayed there 9 years ago. The similarity is astounding... I think I may start having flashbacks.

fyi: any mail/cards/gifts/gratuities should be sent to:

[systematically censored; 11/1/2006]
c/o Duke University Marine Laboratory
135 Duke Marine Lab Road
Beaufort, NC 28516-9721
USA

Beaufort, NC

han wakes me up this morning announcing that weatherbug has prognostications of snow continuing through tomorrow, throwing a spoke in his plans to give me a ride to beaufort and make a day trip out of it. in the end, we decide that the best thing to do is leave today; thus ensues wild packing of suitcases and flurried exit from duke campus so as to make it to the marine lab before the housing office closes at 4, during which time i leave behind:

* pillow, favorite,
* ethernet cord and
* assorted items of clothing, unlaundered.

about 20 miles out from beaufort, nc, a cop pulls us over and gives han a ticket for going 80 on a 55 stretch of road, which han protests with the somewhat lame excuse that he thought that the highway number (70) was the speed limit. no dice. arraignment. that puts a damper on the day, although i try my best to convince him that the courts almost always throw out first offences with a slap on the wrist at worst. i spend a little while feeling bad because i'm one of the reasons he's even out here in the boondocks in the first place, but the self-modulated guilt therapy quickly kicks in; he wanted to come, he was the one who offered the ride, etc. as a salve to my conscience i buy him dinner.


Beaufort is really different than when I visited it during my freshman year. The dorms have been renovated, new desks put in, the excesses of money in the school kitty finally being put to some good use, it seems. I have a single again, this time with a phone line and an ethernet jack. And three beds.

No one's around yet, so I've been in the computer lab for a while, responding to emails that don't need to be responded too and checking on internet forums every five minutes to see if anyone's said anything interesting, which mostly they haven't.

(Belatedly) changed timestamp to EST
Updated links.

Pseudo-philosophical babble, 1:13 a.m.

(preceding conversation deals with extinction-level events and the colonization of space)
- do you ever think about the fact that we were born during a really interesting time?
- no.
- in terms of opportunity, i mean. like if we had been laborers in 16th century europe our entire lives would have centered around work, church, work, church and we would have lived in the same 20 square miles of land for 40 years then died.
- i suppose.
- and now, here we are, in your apartment, drinking tea, 20 000 miles away from home, going to classes and learning things that no one even knew about 20 years ago.
- if i had been born 400 years ago, i would have been an emperor.
- you wouldn't have made a very good one, considering you're a vegetarian.
- why couldn't i be a vegetarian emperor?
- because emperors have to eat giant legs of meat off the bone and have painful attacks of gout.
- i could have been an emperor in india.
- there weren't any.
- well, a maharajah then, whatever they had.
- i guess.
- there you go.

The notable downside of our family's not owning a blender is that I am only now discovering the joys of homemade smoothies - ice cream, milk, yoghurt, frozen blueberries and half a mushy banana do combine to a deeply satisfying mix. The yoghurt, my friend explains knowingly, neutralizes the alkalinity of the banana, and you can hardly taste it in the end beneath the sweetness of the ice cream anyway. Deep. We ponder the biochemistry of bananas for a while before adjourning to our separate evening divertissements: Fitzgerald, old episodes of Charmed, and the painstaking restoration of the fossil of an extinct fish.

to anyone who thinks that i care: yes, i do, but i also made the decision entirely of my own volition and sponsored whatever actions were subsequently taken, the purpose of the whole exercise being that (a) i presently care, and (b) i shouldn't, because it's infantile. therefore, blame yourselves not.

Baltimore, MY

Baltimore, impressions: damp, dull - except for occasional oases of entertainment, neighborhoods chameleon-like, shifting in appearance every 4 blocks or so. Reminiscent of several other all-business, no-pleasure American cities I've been in, none of the quaint, D.C. charm spilling over the border.
Johns Hopkins, impressions: one of the more intimidating campuses I've been to; solid, uninteresting architecture, lots of construction, undergraduates scurrying to the library with the urgency that only pre-meds can muster (and they're all pre-meds).
Hotel: weird; long corridors reeking of paint, Chinese takeaway menus shoved under the door in the dead of night, flickering, idiosyncratic cable depositing picture onto random channels as and when it pleased.
Professors: altogether too smart, too obsessed with their research for my tastes (although I suppose that may be considered a good thing to most others). Many with ties to Duke: one Dr. Holland actually worked with Dr. Buhusi at Duke two years ago. Research: the whole spectrum of neuroscience topics - spatial learning, fMRI physics, ontogeny of birdsong, electric fish (from which neuronal activity can be measured from outside the animal. Repeated myself 6 times in 6 separate interviews, each time less coherent than the last (also with mounting desperation as I realized that what I'm interested in really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the research that's happening at the moment).
Grad students: close-knit, (artificially?) cheerful, rich - $20000 stipend for 9 months plus $7000 more if you teach a course - keen...if I may use the word.
Food: paid for. Mexican. Excellent guacamole. Mediocre sangria - not enough citrus taste in it.
Bakus still number one for sangria, IMHO.
Chances of getting in: slim to none

Caught, towards the end, in a frightening and dangerous storm, which nearly kept me stranded in Maryland for an extra day. This uncertain and itinerant lifestyle is wearing me down rather, and I really would like to just be in Beaufort, settled, even if only for 7.5 weeks (though I still don't know how I'm going to get there).

Books:
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald. Long in coming, really, considering how much I appreciated Gatsby way back in secondary school, but books like these tend to get backed up and glossed over in the list somehow.

For those keeping score, I'm going to be in Baltimore from tomorrow through to Saturday evening, whereupon I return to the relative comfort of being in my old room with Waihay for a few days. No updates till Sunday morn, then, Saturday evening at the earliest. Possibly no e-mail either. Hiatus.

The room I'm camping out in is Squalor Central. I cannot bear it. I've stayed in the library reading till midnight for the last 3 days just to avoid being there. I've seen my share of disgusting rooms in my time here (cf. Georgetown, Von's place), but this goes beyond being prissy to ohmygodpleasekillmenow.

Books:
Our Lady of the Forest - David Guterson

and i think:
- true, it's bad to be self-conscious, but then again, everyone wears masks; i'm someone different to everyone, slight though the difference may be.
- it's weird, this 21st century need to put yourself on display, be someone who you're not, or perhaps who you really are.
- why did i do that? and really, there isn't a very good answer
- writing is the last great distorter of truth, the first being perception
- hell, i'm an idiot, i know i am

From aforesaid book, on professional blackjack players:

The Life

6 An average day:
Waking at noon, the player breakfasts at his cheap hotel. He (profession 90% male) then
proceeds to the casino where he plays cards all day. Lunch and dinner are in the casino
restaurant. If there are other players in town, he may meet them after work to discuss
blackjack. If not, he plays and plays, until he no longer trusts his judgment. Returning to his
hotel, he soon falls asleep.
6.1 Dreams, in the main, center on blackjack.

7 Teams of players take all their meals together, and share rooms: saving on expenses is a
crucial part of pro play.
7.1 When the casino finally bars the team, they exhibit hysterical glee.
7.2 In a mood of careless jollity, they fly to a new exotic city, where the identical routine begins de novo
7.3 Casinos are open seven days a week.

8 It's a boring job with long hours.
8.1 Professional blackjack players curse and hate their profession.
8.2 "When are we going to be replaced with trained monkeys? Roll on the trained monkeys!"

9 Still, when pro gamblers leave the game, they will be found:
-- running racetrack betting schemes with computerized predictions
-- playing video poker machines, to an exact system
-- suing casinos which have illegally barred them