before i let go of the subject, i'd like to make one general observation on what we've suffered through over the past few months: that bullshit comes in grades, and your response to it has to be calibrated accordingly. in my life to this point, what has been fed me -- by teachers, the singapore government -- has been bullshit with insight, purposive if you will, crafted. for example: a country, any country, is worth defending. "to build a democratic society, based on justice and equality". if you do well in school, your happiness is secure. and i'm not saying that you should react in any particular way to this -- i guess most of it is benign -- but getting angry would probably be a legitimate response, thus suffragettes, we shall not be moved. if the bullshit is exploitative, and if you rise to the level where you can see it for what it is, then indignation and outrage are surely the way to go.

but then you have your low-grade bullshit, the kind that follows not logic nor direction, unpremeditated, bare-faced and desultory, spouted by fools trying to be wise. and much as you want to become angry when you get hurt by it, the trick is to see this: that it's beyond your control, that there's no mens rea -- you accomplish just as little as getting angry with a tree for falling on your car. there's no sense railing against what cannot be changed. and -- let's face it -- there are crooks out there, but for every one crook there are a hundred stupid people, a hundred people who don't even realize what they're doing when they stab you, who will blithely wreck your life and not even be aware. and there's no point getting angry, because then they've won.

your options? (1) get very rich. (2) take sweet, dispassionate revenge.

and that's the last i have to say about that.

i find myself very sleepy; it is my body responding, i think, to coming down from months of chronic stress. i slept 9 hours last night, and 2 more in the afternoon, and i'm still looking forward very much to going to bed.

the work finished today, and the relief is enormous. the housemate and i went to the mall, and i felt encouraged enough to buy things i had been holding out on -- a cookie pan, and a welcome mat (GO AWAY).

we started this project almost a year ago, and despite everything, i feel -- notwithstanding anything that may happen in the near or distant future -- i feel today that it was all worth it. not just because having high ceilings and a brand-new kitchen and nice housemates is wonderful, but also because just by itself self-efficacy is worth its weight, and since winter last year i've been reaping it, day by day, in not insignificant amounts.

first client

it's a tragedy that a person can go so awfully misdiagnosed for so many years -- can see numerous doctors in multiple hospital departments and still not find out what's wrong with him. you know, people laugh at psychologists -- i laugh at those in our profession a lot -- but when something so glaringly obvious -- even to my inexperienced eye -- gets lost in the shuffle, i may have to upgrade the value of what we're doing. 40 years of waste because no one could spend two hours with the patient and spot the pattern, connect the dots. and this was someone smart, and likable, someone who would have made a success of himself if he had just gone to someone who could sit him down and say: look, you have such-and-such a condition, and you need meds. it's slightly heartbreaking, and this is just the beginning.

self-doubt

I concede: standing in front of a class for an hour-and-a-half and being in charge is difficult. The stress equation I had in mind was:

Anxiety [teaching] = Anxiety [giving a presentation] - [undergrads are not really that smart] - [I'm the one grading your test papers].

No. The stress of standing in front of a classroom is qualitatively different from the stress of giving a talk, and I've pinned down why -- it's because I'm desperate for the kids to like me, and the difference between that and simply wanting respect because I have a handle on the material is enormous. The feeling must be gotten rid of! If there ever were a time for high ideals, surely this is it, passing the torch on to the next generation, the teacher represents the institution not herself etc. Or is that misguided? Is it that being liked is integral to the classroom dynamic -- not liked by each individual necessary, but by the vox populi?

And science classes are tough to TA -- when you ask a question there's little room for discussion, you get it right or wrong, and no one wants to be wrong. On top of that, I'm not always sure I'm right -- it's been a long time since I considered neuroscience at the level of neurons and systems -- and so whenever anyone raises their hand to ask a question I go all tingly in case it's the one I should know how to answer but don't. All in all, it's more stress than I bargained for, and I already have to set exam questions which is going to take me all bloody night.

so yes, you've been DYING to see this fantasia that i've purportedly moved into, and now you will get ONE photo, of my room, and the rest in good time. i live down the stairs from the front door; there's an adjoining bathroom to the left, and the curtains you see on the right are in front of a pair of french doors that opens out to a small yard (in which, hopefully, i'll be able to coax flowers to grow in the spring).

Re: routine -- how splendid that the fall TV season is once again upon us.

i can't believe it's been a week since i've blogged, and an eventful week at that. i *think* i'm almost back in business. having to wear three new hats -- teacher, therapist and superintendent -- all at once has proven almost overwhelming -- and this isn't even taking into consideration the nightmare voyage our contractor has put us through, but i think i'm beginning to see, for the first time in many months, a glimmer of hope that the chaos is coming to an end, that the anaesthetic of routine will soon begin to kick in.

---

the mother has come and gone without seeing the job complete. we have gone over the deadline by a week now, but all the major work is done, and the rest is touching up and making the place livable. well, almost all of it -- upsetting things include a non-flushing toilet (mine), a door that won't close and needs planing (mine), and a shower stall that is being assembled at a snail's pace. i am hoping that the final screw will be turned on wednesday, but we shall see. i absolutely promise that there will be pictures once it's all over.

---

the housemates have been most stoic through all of this. medals all around.

---

on the therapy front: i have my first client, and will be seeing him next wednesday. the dread that i felt all last semester has been eclipsed by my other current worries, so for better or worse i'm going to go into this session having not ruminated about all the possible ways in which i could fail. i'm not very sure how much i can eventually say on this blog without committing any ethical violations, but i'll see what i can manage.

the mother is in town till next friday, and i'm exhausted (not related), too exhuasted to give you a blow-by-blow. i will say this -- i've been eating well, which counts for something, and so far have sustained only minor physical injuries.

Baskerville and Rowlf, in The Muppet Show 1x06:

[???]* corner
Foggy night
Passing crowd
Electric light

German chef
Can of ten
Sausages are
Boiled within

Yeller dog
Nearby prowls,
Smells a sausage
Softly growls

Clumsy man
Wooden leg
Upsets the boiler
With his peg

Spills the sausage
Scatters wurst
Yeller dog
He gets there first

Grabs the sausage
Splits the fog
It's another case of
Dog eat dog

* I couldn't find these lyrics online anywhere, and can't make head or tail of what Baskerville sings here. Really, it's the performance that makes this brilliant, and I'm mostly posting this to remind myself what episode it's in.

BUT -- we're moved in, which is big, and i'm not sleeping on the floor any more. once i get my act together a bit more, there will be pictures.

we got back into the house on monday, labor day, and starting the process of trying to haul furniture up- and downstairs without putting huge holes through the new drywall. a lot of stuff had to go over the bannisters, which was kind of like repeated shoulder presses now that i'm not in exquisite pain and can think about it.

not done:
bathrooms
back yard fence
roof

saturday -- yesterday -- started promisingly enough. the hardwood floor fellows -- three indistinguishable vietnamese guys in their late 20s -- appeared on my doorstep at 8 in the morning and kicked me out of the house so they could start sanding the floors and be done by noon. i moseyed down to bucks and grabbed a coffee and a rather cold and unappetizing croissant, and then went to meet grace and kinjal and the housemate who were headed down to ikea for a furniture run. (incid: they don't have ikea in hawaii, or target, which i find incredibly bizarre. those renegades! i bet dubya doesn't realize hawaii is part of america.) the mall was packed with rich penn undergrads throwing wads of cash in the air and watching the bills float to earth like confetti on the fourth of july, and fussing parents with enveloping archangel's wings. welcome to one small handcrafted section of my own personal hell.

ihop, then back to the house where i was hoping we could sit down for a while, but the floor guys had decided to be all gung-ho and start the refinishing ahead of schedule, which meant the place was a poison gas chamber and no one could go inside. at almost exactly the same time it dawned on me that the housemate and i were out on the streets for the night, the other housemate showed up with his parents and a trailer full of barang in tow. we had a little monty python moment out on the sidewalk where grace and kinjal and the housemate and the other housemate and the other housemate's parents and i all introduced ourselves to each another while trying not to choke on the acetone smell that had now started permeating the entire compound because of the industrial-sized fans the vienamese guys had turned on to ventilate the house, and then we decided that at the very least we should try and get the other housemate's furniture into my room (downstairs) so that they wouldn't have to drive the trailer all across town again. this meant Being Busy, always a good thing in times of awkwardness, and i put on my very best "I'M IN CONTROL AND KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON" demeanor, and yelled at the floor guys, and called the contractor and yelled at him for no real good reason, and bristled like a boar, and carried very heavy boxes up and down stairs, and nearly threw out my back. this was a rather impressive display, even for me, and everyone left happy, even the other housemate who had to squat illegally at his old apartment last night without a bed.

this only left the problem of not having anywhere to live for the night. fortunately, kinjal was nice enough to offer up her futon bed (god bless her soul), and her place doesn't become truly crazy until today, when three more people descend on her looking for sanctuary. the floor guys finish today, and hopefully the air in the place will be breathable by tonight, or else i may have to get kicked out to jared's or something. i console myself with the fact that this is very close to where the madness ends (although it's also very close to where school and eight billion responsibilities begin, but that's another worry for another day).

TA training

I still think teachers are born, not made. You can learn how to speak clearly, and organize your thoughts more effectively, but that makes you a better presenter, not a better teacher. You can learn how to handle conflict and control dicussions, but that makes you a better mediator. You can learn how to be a better administrator, a fairer grader, and you can spend more effort and time getting to know your subject matter so that you don't look like an idiot. But teaching is something else, something almost spiritual, the ability to read your student and connect in just the right way in a multitude of different situations, and either you can do that, or you can't. i don't know whether all the actual teachers i know agree, but that's where i am right now.

(I'm the only other second-year student who actually has a recitation to lead and teach this semester.)

i submitted the review paper. it's good in certain bits, and (i think) very deficient in others. i don't have a good enough grasp of neurochemistry to say anything beyond x accumulates and does this to y; i don't have a conceptual understanding of what's going on, so those sections tend to be laundry lists of results with a dithering statement or two tying them together.

wednesday

no ceiling

no carpets

on tuesday i left the house at 6 and worked on my paper for 10 straight hours.

the housemate had arrived in philly the night before, and we had arranged to get dinner and see the place. i spent the entire walk up spruce st. preparing him psychologically for the wreckage, but like the other housemate, he seemed completely unruffled by the state of affairs,* and was in fact rather pleased with the size of his room. there’s definitely something strange happening; i’ve gone down the rabbit hole to a place where everyone defers to me and thinks that i’ve somehow got everything under control, when in actual fact i’m mere moments away from doing an ophelia and running through campus with petunias in my hair**.

i walked back with the housemate to the hangout house to say hi to kinjal, who was in the middle of one of those 45-minute showers that women take. we hung out downstairs waiting for her and discussed rice cookers and flat-screen tvs and wii sports, and then kinjal appeared sans dinner and we went with her to get fried chicken. grace had invited some of the new grad students to her place to watch high fidelity (used to be one of my favorite movies while i was at duke; have gotten over it a little), so we clattered along and disturbed her advisor and her advisor’s dogs***, and watched john cusack being awesome, and i forgot for a little while that i was going half-mad and pretended that i was a college freshman again on the grotty blackwell sofas with han and kwonie and all the rest, thinking: ”now is the time. now is the time i get to figure things out”


* still no ceiling, no carpets, no fully functioning bathroom, unfinished floors, incomplete electrical fixtures, etc.

** the housemate, incidentally, is from oahu. he’s lived there all his life, including his four years in college, and this is his first time away from home and family. this tacitly, automatically and unquestionably makes me the big brother (again). to make matters worse, the other housemate has moved to the mean streets of west philadelphia from nowheresville, ohio, and although I haven’t had a chance to speak with him much yet, i do know that he’s fresh out of college and potentially very blur. i have a bad feeling that this entire enterprise is a house of cards built upon a chocolate teapot, but for now i’m going to shut up and pray that providence will guide our ship through stormy seas.

*** i’m not sure i’ve said this before, but grace lives on the top floor of her advisor’s house. her married advisor, and their 6-month-old son. go calculate your own weirdness quotient on that.

lucid dreaming

i got a chance to have a chat with the advisor about this while we were waiting for my protocol to be reviewed. he thinks that all dreams are lucid dreams, that steve laberge is rubbish and should not be taken seriously, and that people should do real science rather than try and make the headlines with sexy, unfalsifiable nonsense. i asked him to clarify what he meant by "all dreams are lucid dreams", and he said that beyond a certain developmental stage, we are always able, at the point of self-reflection, to distinguish dreams from reality, and that moreover there's always a "meta-awareness" within a dream that is making the distinction (which is why when we "die" in a dream, we don't really die). this seemed to me to be finessing the definition more than anything else, but the advisor was unmoved, and i had no particular interest in trying to disabuse him. i am very curious now though to get other experts' opinions on the matter, because i had been given to believe that laberge was at the very least not doing psuedoscience. that shall be my mission for the neuroscience conference this year. i hope tononi doesn't think i'm an idiot.

on monday, i woke up at 6, freezing. the contractors are leaving the AC on 24/7 so that the paint can dry (fs points out that this is going to cost me an arm and a leg), and all the cold air in the house sinks down to my room -- this is fine in the evenings when it's 80-something outside, but by the early morning it's hyperborean, and my duvet is stashed somewhere completely out of reach.

i went back to the old apartment, and took a shower, and cleared out the last of my stuff, a process which involved a tearful parting with half a tub of breyer's peppermint chocolate-chip ice cream that i never got round to finishing. there was also 7/8 of a bottle of tonic water, and 2 bottles of sam adams, which i pressed onto a random and rather bemused stranger in the hallway.

---

i had mixed feelings returning the keys to that apartment. on the one hand, i was really growing to hate it towards the end, what with the rodents and trash outside my window; on the other, it represented freedom from responsibility, the ticket that meant that, in one aspect of my life at least, i could just say "screw it". renting fosters apathy. renting hardens you to certain things, but it also makes you soft. at least, i think so. the keys are gone now, and i'm on the wire, and i suppose i'm soon going to find out.

i moved out of my old apartment on sunday. moving house is a completely different kettle of fish when you have furniture, all calluses and crushed fingers and imprecations. thomas gave me a hand with the heavy lifting, and i got a u-haul and wondered how i ended up with so much junk (how is it that i own so much tupperware?). the new place was far from ready. all my crap went in the garage, and we did 2 trips, and i learned that driving a van on the right side of the road is nothing like driving a car on the left, and that parallel parking, difficult for me at the best of times, is a monstrous bitch when you can't see anything that's behind you.

the renovations are horribly behind schedule. on sunday, there was no hot water, only one functioning toilet, and no ceiling or lights in my bedroom. also, my room was freezing despite the central air being off, and i was tempted for a while to set up a bivouac on the lawn until reason prevailed and i remembered that i was in west philadelphia. darkness fell. i read the new yorker by torchlight on an inflatable bed amid plaster and plywood, and thought about the new espresso maker i wanted to buy, and said a little prayer that everything would be all right.

the contractor got me up at the crack of dawn to go pick out a fridge. he's italian and fits all the stereotypes from the mile-a-minute mouth to the meatball and sausage gravy simmering at home ("that's-a spicy meatball!"). we got onto the i-95 with the rolling stones on the airwaves and the contractor talking nineteen-to-the-dozen about wayward family members, the philly mafia, and the fallen state of humankind. it was hazy over the schuylkill; that and the jet lag and the conversation combined to make everything seem extremely surreal. made a stop at the dump in north philly along the way. "welcome to the badlands", said the contractor, and proceeded to recount the time when a gang of thugs beat him half to death for his truck 15 years ago. ah, real life. "people here have no work ethic," the contractor explained. "they get up at 11, collect their welfare, down a handle, then go out and shoot each other up. fucking animals." i nodded in agreement, while trying to look as inconspicuous as possible in the passenger seat.

we were in and out of the dump in 10 minutes, then did a wawa stop for coffee, where the contractor proceeded to flirt with (i think) an old friend -- a busty woman resembling faye dunaway wearing cut-off everythings. i was starting to warm up to the situation by this point -- you may not be aware of my chameleonic nature -- and back on the highway it surprised me not at all to learn that the contractor

a) got someone pregnant when he was 16, and had to drop out of high school to get his GED because of it
b) dated governor rendell's sister and spent a month in nassau and a week in the best suite in the plaza hotel in manhattan
c) was in the navy for four years, and
d) shot a man in reno just to watch him die

well, not the last thing, but maybe. i countered with several made-up stories about myself (and some not-so-made up NS stories). we really do get along splendidly.

at the appliance shop, the contractor nearly got into a fistfight with a burly fellow who must have weighed at least 250 lbs, and who wanted him to "slow the fuck down" while coming down the driveway. the contractor counterargued that we were doing "fucking 5 miles per hour", which was not at all true, and things kind of took their course from there. i was totally in the game by now, and waltzed into the shop completely unconcerned while various insults were hurled back and forth, and had almost picked out the fridge by the time the dust had settled (stainless steel: 68.5" x 33" x 32").

it was almost noon. we got to ikea, and i broke myself in two hauling furniture around, after which i went to the other green line and found minz on msn and spent spent 5 hours revising my stupid paper .

the day ended with a very warm cocktail party at grace's (no central air) (minz: no parties! do more work! you can only leave for 1 hour!), where i was very, very good and did not have any irish car bombs, just a rather weird tasting whiskey sour mixed by kinjal, and talked to peter about lucid dreaming and met a few of the new incoming students, one of whom asked me if i had "any advice for first-years" (OMG). and then i went home, and clocked in with minz (2 hours 24 minutes), and stared at my tiff files wondering why in blazes i had made them in color when the instructions had explicitly told me not to.

in the morning, i wrapped glasses in newspaper, one by one, and picked up all the dead flies from my windowsill, and stubbed my toe several times. i replied to a lot of e-mail (i don't know why, but everyone seems to want you when you're on a plane and completely unreachable). i discovered to my disgust that TA training (29th - 31st) is not strictly compulsory, but that the professor of the class i'm teaching insists we go anyway.

i went to see the new house. it was madness inside -- a confusion of debris and tools and soda bottles and spackle, and our contractor screaming and screaming, and it's a week (less!) till everyone moves in. i'm given to understand that renovations are like that, sort of in the style of cp's cooking, where everything looks like it's going to explode until about three minutes before dinner, at which point perfect duck a l'orange appears out of seeming nowhere, and so i shall be encouraging and gently goading and generally hopeful. the other housemate came by to take some measurements for his room, and he seemed completely unperturbed by the chaos, which is either affirming or means he trusts me too much.

otherwise: it's very hot, and i'm terribly jet-lagged and putting caffeine into my system in unhealthy amounts. sleep is not for the weak, but this is one time i can't give in; tomorrow is furniture and a billion phone calls, and i have to finish making all the figures for my paper before monday or face the advisor's fiery wrath. it's going to be rough.

year 2

first and foremost, they haven't kicked me out yet, so that's blessing number one.

the main excitement for now is settling into this new house, turning it into a home, and making sure the housemate and the other housemate (there are two now) don't run amok. i have a feeling that this is going to be a very tall order, but we'll see. the whole new drama probably falls under the unfortunate category of "interesting", as in "may you live in interesting times", and can probably also be filed under the heading "growing up (at last)". that drawer has been untouched for a while.

(incid: msn conversation with su-lin last night --
me: (10:28:07 AM) i'm not sure i can look after a house
me: (10:28:27 AM) i'm not grown up yet
su-lin: (10:29:20 AM) i'm starting to realise that growing up is what you do while trying to figure things out
su-lin: (10:29:38 AM) rather like yen and her nus grads and the manuals and the course
su-lin: (10:29:54 AM) you don't grow up first and then do things
su-lin: (10:29:59 AM) does that help?
su-lin: (10:30:00 AM) (:
me: (10:30:08 AM) not if the house burns down
me: (10:30:10 AM) but sort of
su-lin: (10:30:40 AM) think of all the years you would save in the growing up
su-lin: (10:30:47 AM) if it does)

and besides tenants, i have kids this year, and sick people to look after, and an independent study student who had better not be needy. it's funny to think of so many different groups of folks depending on me in one way or another, because i don't think i feel the weight of that responsibility. you always think: if i disappear, the enterprise doesn't fall apart, and it doesn't in the sense that you're more or less replaceable, but it does in the sense that you're here in the present doing things. many people can teach a batch of kids, but i'm just about the only person who can, in penn psychology in fall 2007, teach this batch of kids. and this isn't self-aggrandizing in any way -- i'm very consciously trying to avoid that -- but maybe it's like the de-motivator i gave cp several years ago -- "just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important" -- but flipped: "just because you're not important doesn't mean you're not necessary"?

---

year 2 is supposed to be the easy year -- no major project due at the end of spring, no terribly important clinical responsibilities. it's the year for making sure you know what the hell you're doing in the way of research methodology (do i?), and generating ideas, and making certain you're capable of coherent original thought. progress without milestones. the scariest kind.

---

i was thinking of this song on the plane, as i thought of year 2:

Take the last train to Clarksville
I'll be waiting at the station
We'll have time for coffee-flavored kisses
And a bit of conversation

i'm not very sure why.

Portland, OR

blogger swallowed my post last night, and so i say a belated goodbye from pdx. coming and going so often gives you perspective on goodbyes, anyway. perhaps there's only one that really matters.

the world is undulating gently -- i've had about 3 hours of sleep in the last 36, and only starbucks is holding me upright.

prata at holland v with wc and m_____, both of whom have left the ex-lab and moved on to far more lucrative things. wc, in particular, is making pots of money for doing practically no work, and spends his time practising the saxophone by the seaside in the hopes of one day bringing jazz to the singaporean masses. it comforts me somewhat to know that these things do occasionally happen to the good guys. i think we're all far too scared off by the generalization that smart people never make pots of money by taking chances, that thinking too hard dooms you somehow to making cash the slow and painful way, and it is good keeping in touch with wc to remind me, in principle at least, that such an actuality need not necessarily come to pass.

a final word on this snippet, after hearing the opinions of people who think the sentiment is bunk: it seems to me that there is a philosophical gap between believers and non-believers that just can't be bridged by argument -- it comes down perhaps to whether you think we're of the earth or of the angels (to put it poetically). and if you can't see your way to my side, then you'll just have to believe that my endeavors are purely onanistic, in which case i hope you're very jealous, because i get to pursue them, and you don't.

to dorcas:

it's a rare thing for me to see friends truly happy, happy in a way that's unadulterated and real, not the cynical half-happiness of intellectual triumph, or pecuniary gain, or moral oneupmanship. i almost hesitate to say anything about it, because any opinion or sentiment surely cheapens the emotion; the penumbra surrounding anything so good must needs be talk of its transience rather than the celebration of its preciousness. so, no, rather than empty wishes of the impossible, i want to wish you this: that the memory of your delight will be as clear today as always, and that you know this happiness truly and deeply, whatever you may feel in the rest of this hope-filled life.

congratulations, and all the best for now and always!

have been trying to make up a lease agreement for the housemate and housemates-to-be by lifting wholesale from the document i signed for my present apartment. this is not as great as it appears. everything sounds cold and litigous, what with threatened evictions and confisactions of property and similar draconian punishment. there's a fine line to be walked -- obviously i don't want to run the place like a penintentiary, but ones interests have to be protected. specific problems: do we charge for washer and dryer use? presumably not. put in a clause about loud noise? i would like to think that this is something that can be sorted out amicably, but perhaps that's too optimistic? the crux of the matter is this: in the utopia i construct in my mind, living together in a house is entirely different from living in separate apartments. specifically, common space breeds common responsibility, and social reciprocity and threatened tit-for-tat in a repeated game is enough to enforce a basic level of cooperation among players. also, to the best of my ability, i'm going to try not to get people off the street (or craigslist) and stick to folks who are minimally friends of friends (of friends). is that totally naive? i don't want to evict anyone! there was a notice taped to the door of my apartment complex when the mother and i returned home from dinner one evening a couple of weeks ago -- someone in the block had defaulted on their rent for 2 months -- and it was just the most humiliating thing, worse than a pig's head, i think, all official and stamped and signed. it's like this: i'm cynical about humanity, but i don't put the people i know into that category. is that an awful failing? and -- even more frightening -- isn't the alternative -- not fully trusting anyone, never thawing the final layer of frost -- isn't that alternative far, far worse?

it's the old sheryl crow thing.

you know

if it makes you happy,
it can't be that bad.
if it makes you happy,
then why the hell are you so sad?

Walter Moers' new book is out...I like the premise, and if it is less desultory than Bluebear I think I'll enjoy it.

big news writ small

the rest of the anxiety, for those who still don't know, came from the denuouement of the long and exhausting tale known as "the mother and i buy a house in west philadelphia". chapters: all the good ones sell like hotcakes, doing this across 12 time zones is not a good idea, and the seller is a bankrupt with no scruples.

i was going to spin the whole (extra-long) yarn for you on here, but frankly i've been too exhausted to write, or do much else during the day besides surf blankly through the web. the upshot, really, is that i'm moving into a new place, with all attendant perks and responsibilities, and will have at least one housemate (known heretofore as The Housemate). drop in if you're in the neighborhood, and i'll mix you a mojito.

for the record

Singapore

back, and internal clock almost reset. it was a shock having to adjust to a different apartment on top of everything else. i've been relegated to a sofa bed in the living room, and go to bed at night with the sound of traffic roaring past on the ECP. the light switches are in odd, unfamiliar places. the sunlight comes into the flat strangely, as if filtered through thick gauze.

summary thoughts, year 1

(I)

From A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt

"So how would you educate the young?”

“I wouldn’t. I’d give them their freedom . To find out what they want, when they want. You only learn what you desire to learn.”

“And things like science? That need technical knowledge –“

“Listen, darling, science is a Bad Thing. The planet is going to kill itself dead with science. Probably they’ll blow us up with nuclear mushrooms, and if they don’t, they’ll burn away the earth’s crust with napalm and extinguish the fowls of the air and the fish in the sea with pesticides. Oh yeah. Science is for two things, human greed and human blinkered arrogance. Don’t teach little kids science. Teach them human things, making love, painting pictures, writing poems, singing songs, meditation. I wrote a poem against science. Do you want to hear it?”

“OK, if it isn’t too long.”

The metal men in coats of white
In shuttered rooms with shuttered eyes
Make metal death with metal claws
Block out the sunshine from the skies.

The children dance in forests free
They smell the sunshine and the rain,
They dance and sing the roots and flowers
Weave magic circles whole again.

The metal men are full of hate
They bind the children with a chain
They clang the institution’s gate
And box the children up in pain.

The children’s eyes are red with rage
They burst the prison-gates and chain
They burn the spectacles and coats
The men go naked in the rain.

The children teach the men to play
They teach the body’s ancient truth
The naked men kneel down and pray.
Rainwashed to innocence, and youth.

“So you think the young may be able to save the world from scientists?”

“Listen, I know. They are saving it. It’s happening. They’re saving it by natural spontaneity. They are putting the blast of the orgasm against the radioactive spout of the bomb. They can do this by just not giving in. By changing our consciousness completely. We will make everything new.”

---

(II)

From The Varieties of Scientific Experience, Carl Sagan

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

because i kind of don't believe it

i'm actually going back to singapore. the anticipation of that -- and i'm sure there would have been a good measure of it -- has been lost among the rest of the madness.

but you know, i've accomplished stuff this academic year. not enormous strides in absolute terms, but considering i had classes to worry about, and settling in, and other miscellaneous aggravation, it's not been too bad. perhaps forward momentum is lacking, but the direction has been set, the course plotted. which is something? maybe?

(incid: despite everything, i have a draft of the book chapter. it is, i think, a reasonable first attempt, and i'll pick at it some more when i have time.)

for the eighth time in 6 years, i'm packing most of my earthly possessions into boxes in readiness to move. this is where the chest-of-drawers and assorted sundries come back to haunt me. what i need are one of those coffeehouse cards where you get one stamp for one cappuccino, except that instead of cappuccinos it's new residences. prize: free membership in peripatetics anonymous.

---

it's been an awful 2 weeks, with absolutely everything that could go wrong going wrong. the story -- well, the full story comes later, but perhaps an aperitif for now. i had rodents in my apartment on saturday, two big, oily, brazen rats scuttling around my kitchen in full daylight. the first time this has happened to me, and only, of course, when the mother is here and sharing the very small studio. screaming, multiple calls to the landlord ("our hours of operation are monday to friday, 9 to 5:30. if this is an emergency --" OF COURSE THIS IS A &*^#ING EMERGENCY!!!). traps laid down, bloody useless (inhumane) ones with peanut butter that the rats come out and feast on and don't trigger. more screaming. 24 hours later, after erecting barricades and fortifications and actually considering doing guard duty in my own apartment, one of them gets its back broken and the other one runs for the hills. all quiet on sunday, then on monday a carpenter comes and boards up the hole with wood that looks like it came from the raft of medusa.

wednesday: the mother says something smells.
thursday: the mother says something smells.

i was clearly in denial or something, because it's only today, with actual flies buzzing around the apartment, that i finally admit that yes, something smells like it died. i call the landlord ("our hours of operation are monday to friday, 9 to 5:30. if this is an emergency --" OF COURSE THIS IS A &*^#ING EMERGENCY!!!), and they say they'll send someone and here i am now 3 hours later with a dead rat boarded up in my kitchen, and a very long night ahead.

and this is just the tip of the iceberg, but you'll only hear the rest later. i'm tired, and i have to pack, and i have a plane to catch on monday.

From the applyingtograd forums:

weakknees:
If you won an Olympic gold medal, would you mention it on an application to grad school? On the one hand, it's not relevant (maybe to kinesiology, but let's say you're applying to, oh I don't know, history) but then on the other it's a hell of an accomplishment!

apptake2
It really depends on the event. Because of medal inflation, it isn't necessarily a remarkable achievement any more. A friend of mine had two Olympic golds and was rejected from every school he applied to because it was a middle distance event (not very glamorous) and, on the second occasion, he failed to beat his own world record. Really, unless you're a world record holder and have multiple golds in a top-tier event you're not going to stand out from the competition. Bottom line: one gold won't hurt your application, but it won't help either. Having said that, I do know that for most top-25 schools, an Olympic medal of some sort is seen as the absolute minimum (along with an 800 on both sections of the GRE) for admission, but if you want to be competitive for funding you'd better back it up with a 4.5 GPA.

the longer story

i don't like blogging about things as they happen. it's unfair, and asymmetrical. or rather, it's not a drama, it's my life.

what has happened:

i. today: nathan's farewell dinner. ocean harbor on race, decent overall, superb cui pi dou fu. capogiro afterwards: dulce de leche and coconut milk gelato, and cancerous ferrets, and how to cremate a dead billy goat.

ii. last sunday: the mother breezes into town, fresh as a daisy after 30 hours of traveling. we should all be so lucky.

iii. tuesday: mixto, which i now find everyone on earth has gone to except me. perhaps credit card debt really is your friend. incredible plantains.

iv. in between: work -- mostly boring. 2 sessions left of clinical training, and then we're supposed to be to see real patients. they're going to give me a borderline as my first case, i can just feel it. hi, my name is OHMYGODGETTHATKNIFEAWAYFROME. right.

Ursula LeGuin:

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

From A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain:

Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.

real work

gave my first lecture ever on thursday. it went pretty smoothly except for one absolutely egregious mistake in my slides which i didn't catch until it was all over. i have taken to giving myself cognitive therapy instead of vicious beatings when things like this happen (too frequently), which is hard, but i reckon better overall for my mental health. besides, i think the kids were entertained, and i admit i did enjoy myself; this speaks well for when i get a class of my own in the fall.

apropos of harry potter & TDH, i have decided to order my copy off amazon instead of wandering around in west philly in the middle of the night. they guarantee delivery on the 21st, and ups usually gets to me before noon, but that still means potential spoilage (remember su-lin's "snape kills dumbledore" story? yes). formal request, therefore: 24-hour blogging moratorium, and no sudden popping-up on IM with OMFG messages, and the like. can? this is the last time.

watching federer-nadal installment umpteen while running on the treadmill today, i was struck once again by how all of us are wrecked by the bell curve. in any field, just by the nature of the distribution of anything, there are going to be one or two people who are so far out in front they're going to be practically untouchable. and sure, you can be good, but you're still going to be there in what we fondly know as the human morass, while year after year those same people, the ones who are operating on a different plane altogether because of good genes and how statistics works, those people are going to swoop in and take all the glory.

i advise you not to think about this too hard, because it's extraordinarily depressing.

at traitor joe's farewell party last night, i learned that paul theroux's son, louis theroux, made a documentary about the bunny ranch in nevada in which he actually stayed with the girls for 6 weeks to get to see them in their day-to-day lives. i was immediately reminded of john irving's a widow for one year, a book i had forgotten i'd even read. this was all apropos of one of the ccn's RAs planning to pull a similar stunt, having already done post-katrina new orleans, and giant redwood trees in the american northwest. i wish my life were unbearably cool too, but alas.

mental sums

lately, i find myself staring into the cart of the person in front of me at the supermarket checkout, trying to figure out what kind of life they lead from the kind of food they buy. trying, i think, to come up with the answer, "less fulfilling than mine", as measured by: tins of chef boyardee ravioli, absence of fresh produce, number of boxes of lean cuisine (extra deductions for getting a week's supply of the exact same meal).

nice retrospective on the sopranos from new york magazine.

[David Chase] was willing to give us what we didn’t want. There are many breeds of TV auteurs: the great mythologizers, Buffy’s Joss Whedon and Lost’s J.J. Abrams and The X-Files’ Chris Carter; the quirky dialogists, like Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and the maddening David E. Kelley; deadpan craftsmen like Dick Wolf and sadomasochistic visionaries like Tom Fontana and California dreamers like Alan Ball. There are the utopian solipsists (okay, just Aaron Sorkin). But they all share an essential love for their characters—a natural side effect, one might imagine, of building one story for many years. Their protagonists suffer, but they rarely corrode.

In this sense, Chase was a true iconoclast, a prophet of disgust. He seemed determined to test TV’s most distinctive quality, the way it requires us to say yes each week. To be a fan, we needed to welcome Tony Soprano again and again into our homes, like a vampire or a therapy patient. Chase gave that choice a terrible weight.

... [The Sopranos] was, in fact, truly revolutionary, but not because it was adult or novelistic. [It] was the first series that truly dared us to slam the door, to reject it. And when we never did, it slammed the door on us: A silent black screen, a fitting conclusion to a show that was itself a bit of a long con, that seduced us as an audience, then dismantled its own charms before our eyes.

While I just can't bring myself to watch John from Cincinnati, I do declare that The Wire is a very good show. Caveat: the writers have no qualms whatsoever about killing off likeable main characters in horrible and unexpected ways, and I'm only halfway through season 2.

i had the meeting. the advisor looked at my outline, suggested the reason i was having difficulties was that i was attempting to write a 5,000,000 word review on the sum total of all knowledge acquired across human history, and applied the shearing scissors. (DISSERTATION TIP #6: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL KNOWLEDGE ACQUIRED ACROSS HUMAN HISTORY.) so i feel a bit better, and plus that i now have figures.

---

pep talk for self: no more excuses; i have to get writing. i have 4 more weeks before i leave for sg, and i do not want to be fretting over this paper while i'm there. i will write. i will go to mark's, or the other green line, and sit there, and turn off messenger, and write. i will write at least 2-3 double-spaced pages a day. i will not check my e-mail every 2 minutes, or read twop forums obsessively, or go on one-hour hunts for the release date of super mario galaxy. i will not read every review for live free or die hard on rotten tomatoes. i will write carefully and steadily and accurately. i will finish updating my experimental protocol and submit it by next week so that i can collect data in the fall. i will do my clinical homework so that when i finally do see patients i can actually help them. amazon.com is the devil's playground. youtube is instant death.

---

in other news, the lab has given me a s'porean undergrad (BONDED) as a personal lackey. i set him to work on spreadsheets, which i don't have time for and hate, and which hopefully will not be bollixed up when i next see them.

why ratatouille rocked (minor spoilers)

i've never been into movie reviews (though i watch a lot of films nowadays), but for pixar i must gush.

so you know how in the witches the protagonist gets changed into a mouse halfway through the book, and suddenly everything changes -- for him, because he now has to navigate being a creature in a human's world, and for us because we have to readjust our expectations of what's going to happen next? well, ratatouille does that trick multiple times, elegantly walking the very fine tightrope that makers of cartoons always dread, the one where animals/inanimate objects have to interact and coexist with human beings. there's remy in the rat's world, and remy in the human's world, and yet the entire piece feels natural and complete seamless (nerdy exercise: when the dvd comes out find all the splice points. i warrant there are dozens more than you noticed on first watching. make it a drinking game!). on top of that, all this is stirred in to a rather complex plot (for an animated feature), with a sly and amusing script. it didn't have as much heart as nemo, and it wasn't quite as fresh to me as cars, but i think that of all the pixar films so far, it may well the most significant in moving the genre forward.

i hardly need to praise everything else, but i have to express gladness that janeane garofalo is continuing to do amazing things post-felicity, and that sir ian holm, as always, deserves encomiums that the english language cannot provide. and pixar, i reaffirm my willingness to follow you wherever you may lead. wall-e: summer 2008!

Dr. SB's Hollywood husband got to watch the Transformers premiere WITH FRICKING GEORGE LUCAS. SITTING NEXT TO HIM AND SHARING HIS SNACKS. two degrees from anthony minghella pales in comparison to this.

one of the first-years had a pretty huge falling-out with her advisor and is now wandering from lab to lab in search of a new one. we were on the roster today, and doing everything in our power to dissuade her from joining us, not because we're mean, but because the advisor's hands-off (as in, across continents) mentoring style would not suit her at all. i tell this story because it's a very real, very frightening this-could-happen-to-you scenario -- not because of fallings-out, but, other unforeseen events; for example, dr. sabini passed away suddenly 2 years ago leaving his lab to scatter to the winds. i often wonder how it must feel to be a grad student of one of those 90-year-old nobel laureates, every day the feverish race, the silent prayer: please, not today.

i intended to work at home all day, but the heat is intolerable in my apartment, so here i am in the other green line goofing off and reading the new yorker. the review paper proceeds at an impossibly slow pace. i read 3 papers in order to write 2 lines, and the whole thing feels like it's falling apart at the seams. i have decided that as soon as the advisor returns from amsterdam or wherever it is i'm going to call an emergency meeting and break down in tears in his office. this will certainly be the last review i agree to write until i'm at least midway through my 3rd year -- what i really should have done is turned this one down and planned to spend the summer hammering down the foundations of my knowledge, instead of slapping together this piece of work in my current uninformed state. in fact, i've been a year now without anyone telling me THIS IS HOW IT IS, and i really need some of that, someone to sit me down and be didactic. THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW; THIS IS WHAT WE DON'T. you get some of that at least while doing a phd, right? or do they just allow you to go off the rails and redo experiments that have been done and write reams of nonsense and then at the end of 5 years tell you that you can't grdauate?

after a rather random and bizarre concatenation of events, i got to meeting this guy in old city to look at some of his art. he's leaving the states next week to return to korea, and is giving away a bunch of things, which i may or may not claim to bedizen the new pad, when we finally do get it.

artists are just about the only people who are, in real life, exactly like how they're represented in movies (i.e. incessant smokers, incredibly incisive, and either say 'fuck' a lot or act as if they're restraining themselves). this guy was also a stickler for not interpreting his own pieces, (there's only the art and the viewer! the art and the viewer!) as well as slightly sensitive when i offered my own. one example -- he admitted that people had called his stuff 'disturbing', but wasn't very happy when i gently suggested to him that the reason for that might be that they were falling in the uncanny valley. ah, the pitfalls. (plus...isn't "disturbing" a good thing? they are very...t.s eliot? we are the hollow men/we are the stuffed men/leaning together/headpiece filled with straw?)

also:

me: i do admire artists though, regardless of the quality of what they make. you guys make it worthwhile being human, you know?
him: actually, i think we're just fucking selfish.

just like the movies.

note to self: potbelly sandwich milkshake, this weekend.

a lot of the questions i get from outsiders have to do with people killing themselves. is it your fault? do you feel endless remorse? the short answer to the first question, apparently, is no. beyond a certain point, if someone is sad enough, and sick enough, and wants to kill himself badly enough, he'll find a way, no matter what you say or do.

i suppose this is true, although it does also hint at a built-in justification for incompetence. it's also very hard to accept, no matter how many times you say it to yourself. sometimes people just die. i was flipping through complications, by atul gawande the other day; his thesis is that we, as society, find mistakes by doctors and nurses impermissible, and by doing so hold them to essentially impossible standards. which is true, and perhaps even necessary. there's such a fine balance here; on the one hand, health care professionals are (tragically) human, like the rest of us, and on the other, if we draw the line anywhere beneath perfection, how do you ever define the criterion point for acceptable, especially with our modern insistence that a human life is of either undefinable or infinite value?

as for remorse, that's a deeper question. on house last season, foreman screws up and kills someone, and hugh laurie tells him at the end of the episode to go home, have a few drinks, come back the next day and do it all over again, that he can't offer forgiveness because there's nothing to forgive. i think what is closer to the truth is that forgiveness isn't possible if there's no clear concept of what sin is. medicine, flawed as it is, at least attempts to define what can be cured and what can't, when it's reasonable to pull the plug. psychologists have coarse instruments, "clinical judgment", and worse still, for people who are poorly-trained, half-baked, superstitious notions of a patient's prognosis. and people kill themselves, sometimes out of an orange-colored sky, and you wonder: is there anything to forgive? do i take this guilt upon myself? and sometimes, i think, you just really, really don't know.

daniel and wife laura had a bunch of department people over for sangria and mexican munchies. i swear to you, they make the best pico de gallo in the entire world; it makes me want to swear off store-bought salsa for the rest of my life. it was all very summery, very rachael ray, with the languorously-turning ceiling fan, ice melting in glasses, and a bowl of dark, sweet cherries, picked from a new jersey orchard not two hours before.

and one more thing

-- i have finally convinced myself that people do have hypnagogic imagery of video games they've played during the day, even though this isn't something i've personally experienced.

(except for that one time when i dreamed i was in the mushroom kingdom, but i think that was because i ate cheese before bed.)

APSS '07 (5)

my talk was scheduled for thursday, the very last day of the conference (of course). this meant no sleep on wednesday night, despite my best efforts to convince myself that it didn't really matter, nothing really matters (anyone can see; nothing really matters to me). it's funny how your mind can just lose control of your body when you're anxious. i really pity people with GAD.

the actuality of it wasn't bad at all; all the things they say help really do -- looking for the friendly face, being yourself etc. q&a caught me a little bit off guard -- i was so relieved to be done that for a moment i forgot that people get to ask me questions. fortunately, i'm quite aware of the all-time #1 piece of advice for fielding questions from the audience, which is to preface every answer you're unsure of with "that's a very good question". that way, the questioner is too busy basking in the warm afterglow of being called smart to actually pay attention to your subsequent answer. works like a charm.

APSS '07 (4)

they bring us up to the 52nd floor of some swanky hotel, and unleash us on an open bar, and pretty much all hell breaks loose. people start telling me stories about the history of the lab that i don't think i was ever meant to hear, and i kind of grin stupidly, and nod very slowly. for the longest time i'm sure i have it under control, but the champagne is slow-acting, and soon enough i catch myself telling gurpreet how much i admire the works of khushwant singh and r.k. narayan, a bad sign. i compensate by eating more -- the bacon-wrapped scallops are very good. our server is roxanne (you don't have to put on that red light), and she refills our glasses too often, and flirts with mb. i hear someone try to tell someone else about an upcoming research project and making little to no sense. "but the wheel's off!", is, i think, the appropriate exclamation, but who ever comes up with these things? the sun sets, slowly, and late (it's nearly the solstice), and i feel like i want to retire to a balcony, glass in hand, and just say to someone, anyone, who's out there: "i say, my good fellow, isn't it simply a splendid evening?". and he would say, in reply: "it most certainly is, dear chap, it most certainly is."

APSS '07 (3)

we went to hell's kitchen* twice, because it was nearby, but also because it was that good. highly recommended: lemon ricotta pancakes (melt-in-your-mouth), the all-american breakfast with bison sausage (8,000,000 calories), mahnomin porridge, and the walleye b.l.t.. minus/weird points: we were told there would be a 5-minute wait the first time, and waited 20, then were told we would have to wait for 20 minutes the second time and were seated in 5. i would have waited 20 both times, though.

* no relation to the TV show

APSS '07 (2)

to be honest, from a scientific standpoint, i wasn't terribly impressed with anything that i saw. in the first place, there are so few groups doing research directly related to mine that i tend to already have tabs on their work; in the second, i think it was a slow year for sleep and neuroimaging. still, i continue to enjoy the fact that the pond is small; at least this way people know i exist.

APSS '07 (1)

Minneapolis, MN

Unless you're bloody rich, a lot of the appeal of travel is purely romantic. The reality everyone knows. Having your sense of time and space get thrown out of whack, living out of a suitcase. Getting lost. Unwholesome food. My romantic self, though, always seems to have my sense of reality in an armlock, which is why I would unhesitatingly get in a time machine and visit the 16th century, or, as the case may be, not absolutely dread flying out to the Midwest.

annoyance

"When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again"

i get to give a full WAIS tomorrow for the very first time, with all the real equipment and everything. i know it's lame to say so, especially since in our police state they inexplicably allow fresh grads to administer it (wtf?), but it's very exciting, and i shall make like a real professional and do it with aplomb.

zot, in society hill, is one of the better belgian pubs in town, with a classy location and a drinks list as long as your arm. i met thomas and ewa there for a We Love Summer dinner -- all of us will be away for mostly-non-overlapping periods during the break, and figured we'd better get our jollies while the going was good. thomas, unfortunately, loves beer but has the Asian gene, which usually means three ecstatic sips and then a long mournful evening of passing his glass around the table. someone needs to manufacture an aldehyde dehydrogenase pill and make a killing in china, stat (p.s. if you do this, some of those billions are mine). i got to try gouden caroulus, which was just amazing, sherry-sweet and very pleasant. also, petrus (rock? or wrong language?) and leffe, both very nice. totally going back just for the beer, or maybe to eulogy where the list is as long as both your arms, and the tables, i'm told, are coffins. the food wasn't too shabby either -- herb crusted bone marrow, potatoes in various guises, mussels in a tarragon creme sauce. tom wanted waterzooi (he had actually planned the trip for wednesday in particular because it was their special du jour), but they were out, so he had a rather morose beef stew instead. there was no chocolate, which made me sad, and reminded me of the fullerton chocolate buffet which made me even sadder. alas. we walked down penn's landing after the dinner and stared out at the delaware, and thomas said it reminded him of looking across from sentosa to the mainland at night, which it did -- black, bottomless water, and the warm promise of the other side.

clinical training started today. there was no grace period, no how-tos for dummies, just the high-wire and no net beneath. learn by failing. learn by saying the wrong thing. look a total stranger in the eye, and control your terror, and try and find out what's wrong with him.

i think i'm afraid i'll be bad at it. not afraid to try, but afraid that this is finally something so massively beyond me that i'll wade into the ocean and never touch bottom. that the thing i reassure myself with -- that i and everyone i know are damaged, fucked-up, struggling for the surface, and that when it comes to clients it's just a matter of degree, a tendency not a diagnosis -- may not be true, is not true, that there really are more things on heaven and earth that are dreamt of in my philosophy. that i'll be too empathic, or not empathic enough. that people who try to help others should not themselves be desperately trying to keep it together, beating it into themselves that it's ok as long as you let go of it all and not take anything so damn seriously.

how seriously to take it, that's the thing. that's the trick. i can't take it absolutely seriously. i can't take anything absolutely seriously any more, because that's how you truly go mad, like soldiers in wartime who can't find a way to make light of the situation when their brothers-in-arms are blown to bits by a claymore. perhaps that's the thing to hang on to, that yes, many things are horrible -- people slashing their wrists, starving themselves to death, following the voices in their head onto the railway tracks -- but ultimately, there's either God, in which case all is well, or oblivion, in which case all is meaningless. and either way, it's possible to imagine a large-enough space that the sum total of all uncured mental illness, no matter how awful, is still nothing, insignificant, lost among the vastness of whatever infinity is real.

i wish i could go back to college. in college you know who you are.

conversations in the lab between grad students

me: i don't believe it. we're almost halfway though this year.
daniel: which year?
me:this one?

---

me: look at this cool textbook. i got it for free.
daniel: where'd you get it?
me: i just picked it up.
daniel: you do realize that's called stealing.

rouge on rittenhouse square has an extraordinary cheese platter at only $18 late nights, 10 varieties with fruit and caramelized walnuts. i wish i knew how to identify cheeses; anything beyond cheddar and brie is just either Tasty or Not. fortunately the deficiency has at present no practical consequences, but if i ever do have money to spend on nice things (unlikely), cheese gastronomy is something i want to learn.

The Advisor summoned me today to discuss what i'd been doing the past couple of weeks (nothing), and what i was planning to do with the rest of the summer (write this very intimidating book chapter, finish my data collection for our smaller study, prove the Riemann hypothesis, climb K2, win the Tour de France). Somewhere during the course of the conversation he said something like: "As you start thinking about your dissertation...", and i didn't really hear the rest of it because i went into a kind of coma. I'm definitely in denial that I'll ever actually produce a dissertation; it is one of those mythical events so far in the future as to be inconceivable, like the colonization of Mars. What does a dissertation even look like? I refuse to believe that it's merely a bound collection of paper. In my mind, it's like whatever was in Marcellas' suitcase at the end of Pulp Fiction, incandescent, not fit for the eyes of mortal man.

it's been an uneventful week. wayne persuaded me to head up to the 'burbs with him on memorial day, which i thoroughly regretted. you wouldn't think it, but venture outside of philly and chances are good that you'll land in hicksville. despite spending so many years in this country, i still feel all the old allergies come on when i'm in the hinterlands, that feeling that someone's going to jump out of the bushes and frisk you for harry potter books. why can't we all just get along?

to be fair, it was pretty -- how long had it been since i'd seen open spaces? i just can't do it too often or i'll get republican cooties.

---

and while i'm thinking of memorial day: there's something genuinely stirring about the concept of a "tomb of the unknown soldier". and not just the surface meaning of it, but something deeper, something to do with our ability to elevate ourselves into significance after death, when we can almost never accomplish that in life. anyway.

---

in the mail: you are cordially invited to attend an Interactive Dinner Symposium: Restless Legs Syndrome. um...no thanks?

---

clinicals start next week, which means that in a few months i can start diagnosing people. the line forms to the right.

while the criticisms are true -- that a large percentage of psychology experiments are conducted on the most-unrepresentative population of college undergraduates -- there's also a lot to be said for having subjects who follow your instructions, and show up.

(Read minz's post first, on how "students learn nothing about the methodology and principles of whichever discipline they have chosen, nor the history of the development of said discipline as discipline.")

Further thoughts. Principles are not taught in grade school for 3 reasons.

1) The argument you always hear from the teachers:
Content must precede context. However, by the time my kids have enough content for me to start dealing with context, they are 18 and have graduated.

2) Teachers don't know how.
--> and most (I believe) just think it's a bloody waste of time.

3) All roads lead to "What is the meaning of life?"

e.g.

Q: Why do we study psychology?
A: To understand the mechanisms and causative relationships associated with cognition and behavior, and subsequently be able to make predictions about these phenomena.

Q: Why do we want to make predictions about these phenomena?
A: So that people can use this information to better the quality of human life, in material, or non-material ways.

Q: Why do we want to better the quality of human life?
A: [insert your personal MEANING OF LIFE answer here]

and similarly for all other disciplines. And it's hard to go down that road, and people just don't want to. Better to pretend it doesn't exist at all.

what happens next

so now that my burned offerings have been accepted, i get to stay in the program at least 2 more years unharassed, and also get to start seeing patients. norah had me tag along on thursday to do intelligence testing, something which sounds terribly glamorous when you first start out in the field, but is actually just a pain in the ass. (incid: this actually works out great for "psychologists" in singapore, because they get to shunt all the neuropsych testing onto the wet-behind-the ears fresh grads, with nary a complaint heard.)

i don't know if you've ever considered this, but giving someone an oral intelligence test is highly embarrassing for everyone concerned. (i certainly hadn't thought about it before i did some testing myself in my old job). with pencil-and-paper tests, there's a degree of separation: the candidate never has to see you while you're doing the grading. but with the WAIS, you're right there hammering the poor examinee with mental math and those horrible spatial rotation puzzles i could never do. so there's the guy being roasted, and you're not allowed to offer any correction or feedback, just "mm-hm", and "ok" and other non-commital grunting noises. and they're like: am i a jackass? am i mentally retarded?. and you're like: i dunno? next?

and furthermore, most of the tests i'd administered before were on people with alzheimer's or traumatic brain injuries, so it's not so bad if they're a disaster because you expect that. when we run studies in the lab, we of course have normal people, who grin at you sheepishly as they tell you things like the sun rises in the north, doesn't it? and all i can do is look down at my instruction pad, and continue reading in a monotone. it's like watching two dancers perform, one who's a paralytic, and the other who doesn't know the moves.

i've not reported this here before, but thomas has a little storyreading club going on at his place on thursday nights (this was where i encountered the holy tango, and etiquette). it's a nice small group -- usually 8 or so of us -- a few linguists, a few psychologists, a philospher, and one very quiet girl who knits and reminds me of minz (an english major, i'm sure, but i haven't gotten round to asking). we've had to stop for the summer because people are going to bulgaria and belgium and such, but when we resume in the fall i think it deserves more of a place on this blog. i don't often get to hang out with people who read real books here, and certainly not with the frequency that i used to hang out with the human-s* crowd (who, incidentally, managed to kill our book club before it even started). my love for the group was cemented last week when someone brought anne fadiman's ex libris: confessions of a common reader and read "insert carrot here", but even before that we'd had thurber and asimov and all manner of delightful authors.

* i refuse to type out "humanities", but i really must be befuddling people like lz and a. sorry, guys.

From Crash Course, in The New Yorker, May 14, 2007

In 1969, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy held a hearing at which the physicist Robert Wilson was called to testify. Wilson, who had served as the chief of experimental nuclear physics for the Manhattan Project, was at that point the head of CERN's main rival, Fermilab, and in charge of $250 million that Congress had recently allocated for the lab to build a new collider. Senator John Pastore, of Rhode Island, wanted to know the rationale behind a government expenditure of that size. Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?

WILSON: No sir, I don't believe so.
PASTORE: Nothing at all?
WILSON: Nothing at all.
PASTORE: It has no value in that respect?
WILSON: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture...It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about...It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker

Whene'er I take my pipe and stuff it
And smoke to pass the time away
My thoughts, as I sit there and puff it,
Dwell on a picture sad and grey:
It teaches me that very like
Am I myself unto my pipe.

Like me this pipe, so fragrant burning,
Is made of naught but earthen clay;
To earth I too shall be returning,
And cannot halt my slow decay.
My well used pipe, now cracked and broken,
Of mortal life is but a token.

No stain, the pipe's hue yet doth darken;
It remains white. Thus do I know
That when to death's call I must harken
My body, too, all pale will grow.
To black beneath the sod 'twill turn,
Likewise the pipe, if oft it burn.

Or when the pipe is fairly glowing,
Behold then instantaneously,
The smoke off into thin air going,
'Til naught but ash is left to see.
Man's fame likewise away will burn
And unto dust his body turn.

How oft it happens when one's smoking,
The tamper's missing from it's shelf,
And one goes with one's finger poking
Into the bowl and burns oneself.
If in the pipe such pain doth dwell
How hot must be the pains of Hell!

Thus o'er my pipe in contemplation
Of such things - I can constantly
Indulge in fruitful meditation,
And so, puffing contentedly,
On land, at sea, at home, abroad,
I smoke my pipe and worship God.

Johann Sebastian Bach

defense (short version)

it was incredibly stressful, but i got through it with a simple, preordained strategy: realize throughout that no one in the room actually cares.

defense (longer version)

the worst part, i think, is when they make you wait outside in the hallway at the beginning and the end while they discuss in hushed voices whether or not you're worthy to pass through the narrow gate, and burn their ballots to see what color smoke arises or whatever it is they do. you're out there, there's nothing to fidget with, you can't read because your heart is racing at 160 beats per minute, and they go on talking and talking for one billion years as solomon laboratory and the entire upenn campus and the mountains themselves crumble to dust around you.

defense (the god honest truth)

Dramatis Personae:

The Student, or Me, or the One Drowning in a Sea of Bewilderment
The Advisor, or the One who Lobs the Occasional Softball, but Otherwise is Just There For the Show
Committee Member #1, or the Insider, or the One Personally Supervising the Drowning of Me in the Sea of Bewilderment
Committee Member #2, or the Outsider, or the One Who Has No Idea What the Hell is Going On, and Has Probably Not Even Read the Damn Paper

---

The Student sits, waiting. Enter the Committee, in flowing white robes.

The Student: Prithee welcome. We are gathered here today so that thou noble selves may deem the worthiness of a poor graduate student to proceed, in future years, to waste more of thy money on matters of Scientific Inconsequence. But first, if thou wilt, please partake of this Caffeinated Beverage and these Petit Fours which I purchased yesterday from my meager stipend at considerable price.

The Committee eats.

The Student: Art thou pleased with this humble repast?

Committee Member #1: It is tolerable.

Committee Member #2: We accept your offering, modest as it is.

The Student: Thou are most gentle and kind.

Committee Member #2: It is in our very nature to be so.

The Student (aside): Though thou liest, I must yet hold my tongue.

The Advisor: So pray, enlighten us on your Scientific Progress this twelvemonth past.

The Student: I would be delighted to, my liege. See here, how I come well-prepared with visual aids and Powerpoint slides that strike to the very heart of the matter. Did I not slave for hours and hours to ensure that their composition was pleasing to the eye? Do they not succinctly capture the essence of my manifold labors?

Committee Member #1: In five minutes, if you will.

The Student (aside): Would I were dead, if God's will were it so. For what is in this world but grief and woe?

The Advisor: But come, tarry not, let us hear of your merry adventures.

The Student: Twas August last we summoned from a pool of subjects that we had recruited...

Commitee Member #1: Nay! I accept not your premise.

The Student: But I had not yet started...

Committee Member #1: You assume too much. What is a subject? What is a subject pool? How do I know we divine the same meaning from this symbolic language which you are using? How are you certain that the concepts you are presenting are represented similarly in my mind's eye as yours? You cannot do this; we do not share a consciousness. Why, what if here and now I denied your very existence, and the existence of reality itself?!

Here, lightning shards pierce the room in a crackling chirascuro

The Student: I submit to thee that reality exists.

Committee Member #1: This is an unsubstantiated claim!

The Advisor: Come S____, let us not quibble over trifles. Here, have one of these Mini-Cheesecakes.

Committee Member #1: (chewing) Indeed, they are creamy, yet their creator had a light touch.

Committee Member #2: Then onward! I have much to do. Tenure does not grow on trees.

The Student: So from these graphs so intricately plotted, we see a lucid pattern doth arise. Confusion falls! The clarity of theory and empirical data once more shine their light on lands we hitherto dared not traverse.

Committee Member #1: So you are well-versed, I understand, in the substance of these matters.

The Student: My knowledge is but a pea in the vast stewpot of thine unimaginable wisdom, but I will answer any queries best I can.

Committee Member #1: What is the capital of the Faroe Islands? Name the next prime number after 1 trillion. What were the significant turning points in the Battle of Puebla, and what were its historical consequences? Describe how the socialist leanings of the Manic Street Preachers influenced and shaped the thoughts of the working class in the United Kingdom in the late 20th century. Account for the weakness of the gravitational force in our 3-dimensional universe.

The Student (groveling): O! Stop! I'm fat and scant of breath!

The Advisor: Our purpose is to build you, make you wiser.

Committee Member #1: What does not kill you only makes you stronger.

The Advisor: Now then. Tell me what you know about sleep.

The Student: When people sleep not they grow mighty weary.

The Advisor: He speaks the truth.

The Student: And by a sleep to say we end the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that human flesh is heir to is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Committee Member #2 (aside): Alack! He has discovered my purpose. I must forestall him with a question:

Committee Member #2: If I may, a word.

The Student: I listen.

Committee Member #2: Could you mayhap explain to a poor Outsider the clinical significance of your research?

somewhere in all of this is beauty

james clavell's king rat, if you haven't read it, is a story set in a malayan prison camp during the japanese occupation of wwii. much is made in the book of food and cigarettes, in particular how much eggs were prized among the inmates:

The King was pleased. "You wait till I finish. Then you'll see the goddamnest egg you've ever seen." He powdered the eggs with pepper, then added the salt.

-- which leads to Marlowe being

...pacified by the glory of the sizzling eggs.

this goes on for some pages. later on, the men trade in eggs, argue about them, accuse each other of stealing them, and so forth. ok.

in victor frankl's books about his experiences in the concentration camp, he often says things like this:

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. We were glad when there was time to delouse before going to bed, although in itself this was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where icicles hung from the ceiling. But we were thankful if there was no air raid alarm during this operation and the lights were not switched off. If we could not do the job properly, we were kept awake half the night.

similar quotes have to do with the joy of having extra potatoes, or looking up from time to time into a clear sky.

so you could go on looking for examples all day, but my point is that the extraction of exquisite pleasure from the utterly mundane is something that's been written about a lot, and something that i'm sure most people experience at some point in their lives (particularly if you went through ns, but i'll spare you those recollections).

now take that feeling a little bit further, and remove as a necessary quality its positive valence. remove also the necessity for it to have any specific proximal cause. now what you're left with is something like c.s. lewis' Joy, a feeling desired, but not necessarily pleasurable, an underwelling, a spiritual sensation, a notion that beneath the surface characteristics of the mundane is something infinitely powerful.

so, it may just be that i've been smoking crack, but the more i read and talk to people, the more i sense that this is a very common human experience, though one that is incredibly hard to put into words. maybe it's a zen thing, that it defies description because the notion gets more slippery as you try harder to verbalize what it is. in any case, it's (to me) one of the big psychological mysteries. what is that feeling? is it religious? is that what people mean when they say they're experiencing 'God' (the honest ones, not the fruitcakes). is it something that emerges because of our cognitive biases to categorize things and draw connections? and, in the frame of your choice, is it important, or just a feeling like any other?

the fall-to-spring academic year has a tempo completely different from the january-to-december academic year we grew up with. both are pragmatic, but the american system has stronger parallels to a narrative, a sense of beginning, middle and end. and, as eliot once said, the end is the beginning, the sending-forth; but the beginning for many people is also a kind of end: of imagining life will always be the same, of the wish that home is forever, and that the people you love will never change.

i was going to stay at home and lounge around reading today, but by 10 being alone in my apartment was making me think of drug suicides and motorcycle emptiness, so i went to my lab to surf amazon.com and fiddle with my conference abstracts. summer is here, and the undergrads are gone. we had a farewell lunch for them yesterday on the penthouse level of brb: baked ziti and stromboli and a large ebony-and-ivory cake ("CONGRATULATIONS, SENIORS!"). people come and go so often in modern life. we must come into contact with tremendous numbers of people compared to humans just a few generations before us, and they appear and disappear with frightening suddenness. i wonder if that doesn't put a lot of stress on us psychologically. if you count up all the fake 'how are yous', over the days and weeks, that has to take a toll.

From The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski:

A common procedure, when there is room of course, is to put one's finger on the top of a book and pull gently against the headband to rotate the book in its place until its top corner projects out enough from the other books on the shelf for it to be grapsped and removed. Martha Stewart Living does not approve: "Never hook your finger over the top of the spine." The problem with doing so is that it can lead to broken fingernails or, perhaps worse, to torn book bindings. As a nineteenth-century "handy-book" warned, "Never pull a book from the shelf by the head-band; do not toast them over the fire, or sit on them, for 'Books are kind friends, we benefit by their advice, and they reveal no confidences.'""

i was looking through what i'd written over the past few months and figured it was time for a short break from wordy expositions. so, just for a change, here are some pictures of flowers:

first things first:



right. binding costs $2.95 a pop at campus copy -- not morbidly expensive, but enough to give pause. bribery and impression management: the hidden underworld of graduate school. i'm not even kidding: the next thing i have to worry about is what kind of coffee the people on my committee particularly fancy, and whether or not pistachios are appropriate. maybe some boston creams? i hear that too fussy is no good, but then aren't all distractions from the actual product beneficial to the cause? how can they see with sequins in their eyes?

but yes: it's over, for now.

i found myself with about an hour to kill before my presentation today (!), so i went into the bookstore and read the first few chapters of douglas hofstadter's i am a strange loop, which was entertaining but completely antithetical to what i believe in a number of ways. his stand, which seems to resemble that of many philosophers of neuroscience nowadays, is that the vertical integration of neuronal, systems and cognitive theories is neither possible nor desirable. i say: nonsense. inconceivable at the present moment, maybe, but so were bullet trains a hundred years ago. the gestalt of consciousness from matter, the explanation of how that occurs lurks in the interstices, the sticky places that neuroscientists and psychologists alike are wary of exploring. and i shall control myself here by not talking too much about fools rushing in, but you know what i mean*.

and then came the presentation, which was shit, and has convinced me that i need to make a bullet-pointed script before i go into my defense on the 15th. the difficulty is that all of our committees have one "outsider", someone with no background in the subject material, and so we have to pitch the talk at an appropriate level while still hitting all the high points. this was impossible to do on the fly, as i discovered, and i'm glad i had the opportunity to look like an idiot among other grad students before i did so in front of my advisor.

* and to be fair, his point is that we can all live and read good books and smell the coffee without understanding the (sub)atomic world, which is true, and cheerfully anti-reductionist, but also immensely unsatisfying.

rant

if i get the question "what practical significance does your research have?" just one more time there's going to be a chainsaw massacre in the department. do people not know that asking that is taboo? the brother and i had this conversation, like, 2 years ago, and he was an undergrad at the time -- you would have thought that grad students would have figured this out by this stage in their lives. you just don't get to ask that. my work has no external or clinical worth, and that's just how it is, and i'm certainly not going to "frame it in a larger context" in my paper. or, if you really must have a story, 150 years down the road bioengineering and neuroscience are finally going to be wed, and all this information about neuroanatomy and physiology will be used to build fully functioning artificial brains capable of interfacing with machines, and then we'll have cylons who nuke the planet and send the vestiges of humanity into outer space, and that's the practical significance of my work. there.

"clinical research", i think, was created to ease the guilty consciences of people who have realized, and are petrified of the fact that science is a societally acceptable brand of onanism. you play in your own little sandbox, and spend taxpayer's money, and feel smart because no one else knows what the hell it is you're doing, and it's ok. and then there are a few ways things can go -- you can justify it to yourself by using the tongue-in-cheek cylon argument above, who can say where the road goes? all we can do is what we can do. or the monkeys on typewriters argument -- with enough scattershot science we're bound to find the Universal Theory of Everything sooner or later. and finally: my research has "clinical relevance", which is intuitively admirable, but rests on about a billion assumptions about the whole enterprise, the least of which is hume's is-ought problem. it's a guilt complex, i'm telling you, like people who bring their paychecks home every month and then scream about how the money is tainted because they had to work for The Man.

besides, if human advancement is both an offshoot and a stimulator of research, and modern pathology/discontent/whatever is at least partially a symptom of human advancement, you now have a self-referential loop, where the clinical researchers are both fixing, and contributing to the self-same problem. Which means that the net advancement afforded by these people is at most slightly above 0 (and possibly negative). so now you have people spending money to do little more than assuage their own guilt. moral of the story: all these stupid studies of whether caffeine is good or bad for you, comparing CBT and IPT ... i'm not even saying don't do them, but at least own up to the fact that research, like almost everything else you can choose as a career in life, is done mostly for selfish reasons. and the reason that we get paid less than what we're "worth"* is not that we're martyrs burning ourselves at the stake for the cause of future generations, but because it's rewarding -- and if you believe that economics has got it right, more personally rewarding than a corporate career. but there's the rub -- it is rewarding. so there you have it. my work is pure, and hopefully one day it will be beautiful too. and i'll feel good about it, no justifications or practicality necessary.

* yes, whole new can of worms, but let's hold to present, and not utopian ideals of worth for now