sg

fs tells me i'm not to remind him that this place exists, but it's going to be hard pretending i'm in nicaragua.

i'm back. i managed to get on one of the northwest planes without the small individual video screens, and the sound stopped working on the common screen halfway through the bucket list. does morgan freeman die in the end?

will be in malaysia over the weekend.

i'll be out of here shortly, but first, a song that makes me think of airline terminals and jet lag, and the melancholy of international air travel. have a great summer if i'm not where you are!

If you hate the taste of wine
Why do you drink it until you’re blind?
And if you swear that there’s no truth and who cares
How come you say it like you’re right?
Why are you scared to dream of God
When it’s salvation that you want?
You see stars that clear have been dead for years
But the idea just lives on

In our wheels that roll around
As we move over the ground
And all day it seems
we’ve been in between the past and future town

We are nowhere, and it’s now
We are nowhere, and it’s now

You took a ten-minute dream in the passenger seat
While the world it was flying by
I haven’t been gone very long
But it feels like a lifetime

I’ve been sleeping so strange at night
Side effects they don’t advertise
I’ve been sleeping so strange
With a head full of pesticide

I got no plans and too much time
I feel too restless to unwind
I’m always lost in thought
As I walk a block to my favorite neon sign
Where the waitress looks concerned
But she never says a word
Just turns the jukebox on
And we hum along
And I smile back at her

And my friend comes after work
When the features start to blur
She says these bars are filled with things that kill
And you probably should have learned

Did you forget that yellow bird?
How could you forget that yellow bird?

She took a small silver wreath and pinned it onto me
She said this one will bring you love
I don’t know if it’s true but I keep it for good luck

(bright eyes: we are nowhere and it's now)

memorial day

some belatedly-uploaded photos from the memorial day cookout at jared's. by the bye, i've been very remiss with the 2-year-old promise of more photos on this stupid blog, which i will work very hard on changing. i permit you to scold me severely if i continue to default.

alyson, steven, nuwan and eranda

(weird)nick, eranda, alyson

grace and waldo

morning glory

while sabrina's cafe still is the undisputed champion of brunch in philly, and rx holds a special place in my heart, i would highly recommend morning glory, which has the fattest, fluffiest, most gorgeous biscuits i've eaten in my life. get there early, though -- kinjal and i waited almost an hour to get a table, a good part of it (unfortunately) in the rain. (for a full review and pictures, go here)

there was a mini-conference at penn yesterday at which i presented some of my results -- the last major thing before i leave this place on monday for my summer of fretting and anxiety. the talk went well, and i was settling down to enjoy the rest of the proceedings when some effing jerk of a doctor came over to me and started asking a whole bunch of questions obviously designed to expose the ignorance he must have thought i had. while it is true that many people nowadays are doing fmri work with no clue of the limitations of the methodology, i'm well beyond being one of those people, and seriously resented the implication. i've mentioned recently that respect is the currency of academia, and i feel that for all the suffering i've been through to get here i should be given a little bit more of it, absence of letters after my name notwithstanding.

the after-conference was great -- drinks at la terrasse, apparently known to all but me as LT, thus reestablishing one of the more peculiar motifs in my life. dr. sb got a bit tipsy and started bitching about lab members present and gone. our lab has a very unusual history -- our PI used to be the famous martin orne, who did a lot of the pioneering (and highly controversial) research on hypnosis and false memory. events in the 70s and 80s leading eventually to the advisor's takeover apparently involve deceit and betrayal worthy of the great soap operas, but all that history is highly secret, and guarded closely by mysterious elderly people in our lab who are still on the payroll even though they don't do any work. it's all highly thrilling, and every once in a while i get a small tidbit, which i squirrel away in memory for the day i publish my shocking expose. incid: someone should print out this entry so that if i'm found dead in a gutter somewhere one of these days justice can be sought.

we had more beer. R(s)ODPFBSE appeared, then happy hour ended and we decided we would much rather drink jared's tequila than buy $6 beers. plus: he now has molds for making ice shot glasses, which are so awesome i almost feel i shouldn't be writing about them. the housemate ended up tagging along, and (weird)nick and laura and christian. and we stayed out till pretty late, and ended up outside the cvs singing irish songs at 2 in the morning and somehow not being killed.

the unfortunate truth

i saw some rather amusing data today that suggests that scientists only actually read 20% of the articles that they cite in their papers, this discovered by tracing citation errors as they're transmitted through the literature. i freely admit here that i'm probably one of the culprits, although i'll also say in all honesty that i try to at least have a copy every paper i cite (and read the abstract). also, i'm certainly batting more than a .2 average. give me a few more years though...

the recent study that came out my lab(s) has been all over the news the past couple of days...here's the cnn video if you're interested.

(the media, as I'm sure you've guessed, has completely trivialized the findings, not to mention put up horrible and inaccurate brain pictures, but c'est la vie).

John Horgan:

There are moments when I teeter on the edge of belief that nature cares. The occasion may be mundane. I may be raking leaves of a gray fall day, drinking a glass of wine with my wife, Suzie, on our deck at sunset, waiting with my son and daughter at the end of the driveway for the morning school bus to arrive. Gratitude wells up in me as a kind of yearning, as strong as hunger or sexual desire. I want to thank someone, something, for all that I have ...(Yet) a God who deserves thanks for my good fortune, I had to remind myself, also deserves blame for the misery of countless others. Thanking this God for all I have would be obscene. I would be saying, in effect, "Thank you, God, for not screwing me like you've screwed all those other poor bastards.

after watching iron man and the new indiana jones with jared and co., i think i can safely conclude that summer movies just aren't the same without the passing of snarky comments, and having someone's fingernails in my flesh at each cheesy line uttered.

today

i sat at the the bar all alone for fifteen minutes waiting for my friends and sipping scotch, and for a fleeting second felt like humphrey bogart in casablanca, just before ilsa lund walks in.

i'm done with clinic hours for the year, and would just like to wrap up by saying that it was, in many ways, what i expected. scary, primarily; i don't think any of us really felt like we knew what we were doing until fairly late in the year, and the supervisor was not one for positive feedback and support. but many other things too: moving, and sad, and life-affirming, evidence otherwise unobtainable that for all the blackness in this cold world, people still struggle on and claw their way inch by inch towards whatever redemption may be given them.

i think this is because there's something very powerful about sharing stories, and really, in the short time i've had with each client this year, that was one of the key things i had to get people to do. so i've listened to many raw, true stories, told by people who knew we were ethically bound to never pass them on, and being in that assessment room, listening to those narratives, not holding them in judgment, has been one of the most real things i've ever had to do, and i almost felt sometimes that i didn't want to taint them by writing them down, generating a report, diagnosing, arranging the clutter and mess into something organized and meaningful. that was my least favorite part of the job: interpreting. no, nothing compared to the moment, the struggling with words, the tears and the closeness. in my life so far, i don't think anything else has ever been quite so true.

if you have several hours to kill (this is good for wasting time surreptitiously in the office, but you didn't hear it from me), may i recommend alter ego (based on real psychological principles!)

the last time i saw han, we were cooking dinner, and discussing the human genome project, and generally feeling that those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end, and so forth. a very long 4 years have passed since then, during which time he moved to missouri for grad school, and i suffered through my trials and tribulations, and we sent messages to each other on AIM once a year saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY and MERRY CHRISTMAS and HOPE YOU'RE WELL and other such platitudes.

so han's in town now to see his brother graduate, and duke WH and i met him for dinner and drinks at nodding head and schubert's symphony in c major* at the kimmel center. he's hale and hearty and completely the same as he ever was; plus ca change, etc. i miss duke. penn's having its reunions now, and everything's red white and blue balloons and fight songs and hugs and misty eyes, and that's helping none at all.


* schubert was very turquoise, very controlled. it was christoph eschenbach's last concert here, and in true american hypocritical form, everyone stood and clapped for him for a million years even though they all hated him when he first arrived. another reason to be filled with self-doubt here; you never know when people truly think you're good, or if they're just filled with the occasion.

the housemate successfully defended his master's thesis on wednesday, which was a cause for much rejoicing and a trip to marigold, where they have tiny portions of very delicious food at exorbitant prices. i was assured, however, that all produce is purchased locally, from to farm to your plate, etc. highlights included some most excellent ham ("wigwam") in an eggs benedict-like creation, chicken liver pate on brioche, and sublime poached salmon.

classes: done
grading: done
clinic: one more bloody report to write
research: more or less never-ending. having to worry about the the summer project i'm running in the ex-lab is wearing, and it doesn't help that there's no one else to worry with me about it. i need to stop, and do some reframing. i need to feel...like this is exciting, and not just intensely scary. i need to feel that, if nothing else, in a few weeks i'll be able to get prata, and hang out with people, and possibly get a little sleep.

a plug for a new documentary by the other housemate's friend, which looks utterly gorgeous and is most worthy of your attention.

so i have, finally, watched citizen kane, and now know the significance of why rosebud was his sled. one small candle. if you haven't watched it yet, i'm going to spoil the story for you here (sorry) because it's the whole point of this post. in brief: charles foster kane is abandoned by his parents, is reckless and controversial and bipolar, grows an yooge newspaper empire, is rich beyond his dreams, marries several times, builds xanadu, retreats into his pleasure dome, and dies uttering the single word 'rosebud'. which, as we have said, was the name of his sled when he was just a little boy, asking his mother 'what will i be?' what does a man profit if he gain the whole world but loses his life, etc.

because this really is an archetype for this kind of story, it started me thinking, and contrasting it with all the research that says that really, the moral of such tales is not true. rich people don't have any more existential crises than poor people; there's no necessary correlation between wealth and the sort of shylock misery that's portrayed in these stories. and the same thing goes for people who go chasing rainbows and waterfalls and breaking themselves apart for the things they call dreams -- they don't necessarily end up happy; sometimes you get right back, coehlo-style (ugh) to where you began, and find that what you were chasing wasn't what you really wanted.

yet the rainbow-pursuing life is painted as the ideal, and i think that's because it's such a dominant narrative, so readily accessible in people's minds. it's not that the other stories are not there -- think sally in forrest gump, or emile hirsch in the recent (and wonderful) into the wild*, in which, yes, it is your prerogative to give away all your money and go live as an eremite in alaska, but most of the time when you do that you waste away and poison yourself on inedible berries.

but that's not the story that sticks with people; the two dominant narratives are citizen kane, and jeff bridges in lebowski: be rich and lose your soul, or be picaresque, and paint with all the colors of the wind, and really be true to yourself, and live a glorious, irresponsible life. which brings me to the point, and the issue that minz and i were discussing a couple of days ago, which is that just because we're doing what we want to do doesn't mean that our lives aren't fricking hard. happiness, self-actualization, both of those are unrelated to the daily grind, and (i painfully admit), doing "meaningful" work does not give you a leg up to achieve either of them. and i apologize if i have to say this a hundred different times in a hundred different ways on this blog, but this really is one of the very central things to me, and it helps me if you ponder it, and understand, and remember.


* please do yourself a favor and go see this movie if you haven't. if for no other reason than to see that emile hirsch can actually act, and that the person who persuaded him to do speed racer is truly trying to screw up his career. also, if you went to see speed racer, i don't want to know about it

from last night's house (4x14):

EVAN
They told me I have an autoimmune disease, like lupus or sarcoidosis.

HOUSE
That's what we're here to find out

EVAN
You really as good as everyone seems to think you are?

HOUSE
You really as miserable as everyone seems to think you are?

EVAN
I just want to do something that matters.

HOUSE
Nothing matters. We're all just cockroaches. Wildebeests dying in the riverbank. Nothing we do has any lasting meaning.

EVAN
And you think I'm miserable?

HOUSE
If you're unhappy on the plane, jump out of it.

EVAN
I want to, but I can't.

HOUSE
That's the problem with metaphors; they need interpretation. Jumping out of the plane is stupid.

EVAN
But what if I'm not in a plane? What if I'm just in a place I don't want to be?

HOUSE
That's the other problem with metaphors...yes, what if you're actually in an ice-cream truck, and outside are candy and flowers and virgins? You're on a plane! We're all on planes. Life is dangerous and complicated and it's a long way down.

EVAN
So you're afraid of change?

HOUSE
No, you're afraid to change. You'd rather imagine that you can escape instead of actually try, because if you fail then you've got nothing. So you'll give up the chance of something real so you can hold on to hope. Thing is, hope is for sissies.

i know it's terribly wrong that i take so many of my life lessons from tv and the movies, but can you really disagree when hugh laurie says something like that to you?

made paella in commemoration of the mother being in spain -- it's true; the burned bits at the bottom of the pan are indeed the best part.

department of complaints and (slight) melancholy

1. an article came out today in nature neuroscience by someone i know (a singaporean) reporting very exciting findings on pre-conscious neural activity (an extension of the ben libet/dan wegner experiments, but with a sophisticated and very cool new method). this meant a whole day spent in moping and jealousy and talking to minz and daniel for comfort, as well as agonizing about the fact that no one else would really understand why this was causing me so much grief.

2. today was the last day of classes. the semester on the whole has been unkind to me -- too much time spent doing utterly useless classwork, and grading exams, and being accosted by stupid-ass undergraduates. i've also come to accept that i'll probably never be steady and competent, and need to have a brilliant idea fairly soon if i want to have a career, or not starve.

3. also today: ben and jerry's free cone day. every other fellow in the line was a homeless person, which made me feel extremely depressed. not because homeless people disgust me or anything -- i'm rather fond of buying them sandwiches -- but because there something just totally antithetical to the spirit of free cone day about that happening.

4. once you start reading nutritional information, you pretty much can't eat anything.

murderous rage

i swear to god, if i get one more piece of spam entitled "order a phd"...

(as roy clark sang)

Yesterday, when I was young,
The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue,
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game,
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame

The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned,
I always built, alas, on weak and shifting sand,
I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day,
And only now I see how the years ran away

Yesterday, when I was young,
So many happy songs were waiting to be sung,
So many wild pleasures lay in store for me,
And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see

I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out,
I never stopped to think what life was all about,
And every conversation, I can now recall,
Concerned itself with me, and nothing else at all

Yesterday, the moon was blue,
And every crazy day brought something new to do,
I used my magic age as if it were a wand,
And never saw the waste and emptiness beyond

The game of love I played with arrogance and pride,
And every flame I lit too quickly, quickly died,
The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away,
And only I am left, on stage to end the play

There are so many songs in me that won't be sung,
I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue,
The time has come for me to pay,
For yesterday, when I was young

Surprisingly poignant: One Sentence. On a similar note, check out Duke's Me Too blog.

smashing pumpkins

fantastic

oh cp can it be 10 years ago please

Muppet Danny Boy

just like old times

From Peace On Earth, Stanislaw Lem

Professor Tarantoga is of the opinion that people need two things. First, an answer to the question "Who is responsible?" and second, to the question "What is the secret?" The first answer should be brief, obvious, and unambiguous. As for the second, scientists have been annoying everyone for two hundred years with their superior knowledge. How nice to see them baffled by the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, and the emotions of plants, and how satisfying it is when a simple middle-aged woman of Paris can see the whole future while on that subject the professors are ignorant as spoons.

primary

if you're in pennsylvania, you should be voting instead of reading this blog you irresponsible bum.

i've developed what i think is called bruxism from the stress of grad school, and have to do exposure therapy on myself 18 times a day to make sure that i still have teeth by the time i graduate. i can recognize the triggers: presentations, having to run review sessons/teach classes, in-class exams, and, after all this time, clinical supervision. i don't know how much the working people get this, but it's a horrible feeling to be constantly judged; loving the work is not the same as loving assessment, and the assessment, it never ends.

had my committee meeting in the morning, in which geoff and martha took turns ripping my study design into itty bitty pieces, and then setting those pieces on fire. even though this was precisely the reason i wanted them on my committee in the first place, it still hurts when it happens. in much, much better news, i finally summoned up the courage to ask if i could use the review paper i wrote as part of my qualifying exams, and the answer was that i most definitely can, which significantly reduces the amount of ass-busting i need to do next year. round of drinks for everyone!

dan dennett gave a talk in the evening on memes and cultural evolution -- he has taken richard dawkins famous idea and run with it, perhaps a little too far. in the very first place, i'm not sure i accept the strong form of human exceptionalism, and without that piece i just can't buy into cultural evolution superceding and overriding genetic evolution. i'm willing to be persuaded though -- i'm sure that von knows a lot more about the topic than i do, and perhaps we shall discuss the particulars some day soon.

thomas managed to snag tickets for yesterday's taping of the colbert report in zellerbach -- it's the first time they've brought the show on the road, and they're here to cover the primaries (april 22nd) and be generally awesome. i wouldn't say that i was the world's hugest fan of stephen colbert before this, but i do love seeing the stuff that happens behind the scenes on tv shows, which explains the one time i suffered through the who wants to be a millionaire taping in singapore with fs, in which we try our damndest to provide the wrong answer every time they polled the audience (it failed.)

even with pre-ordered tickets, the line for admission began at 4 pm, which meant i had to invent an excuse to get out of class early. i normally would have no qualms about this, but our 2-5 class on mondays is ethics. you can go figure that one on your own. anyway, i chose to live with the guilt, and we joined the line, and ate big oversweet almond cookies, and enjoyed the spring sunshine. with the metal detectors and whatnot, it took about 2 hours to get inside. the circular daily show desk had come on the trip from new york, but everything else on the set was custom-made, including a colbert report kite, and a fake 18th-century escritoire complete with quill.

they had a not-very-funny comedian warm us up, and then after a million years stephen came out and answered a few questions while not in character ('have you had a cheesesteak yet?'). he's not altogether unlike his onscreen persona, just...less so? i think it's the voice that makes him. anyhow they started taping, and the first surprise was that the show is edited together pretty much on the spot -- WYSYWIG. he did a duet of the star-spangled banner with penn alum john legend before the cold open. michael nutter and chris matthews were guests, and it was let slip that both michelle obama and hillary were going to be on later in the week, which kind of sucks balls, since we had a choice of which day we wanted to go on. there was a lot of frantic rewriting during the breaks, and i fell even more in love with the job of tv writer, which is on the list of careers i'll pursue if i drop out of grad school (somewhere just after selling beach umbrellas in koh samui).

it was a pretty cool evening, something different from going home to read endless journal articles anyway. more like those, please?

i have saved percy 3 long enough, and can take it no more.

with the semester winding down, the undergrads have begun their extended pre-summer/graduation festivities, which seem to consist of dunking, free concerts, and a lot of beer pong. also: not going to class, which annoys me far more than it should.

as i was explaining to norah the other day, you either get to complain about the amount of work you have or take four-day weekends, but not both. that's the ivy league sense of entitlement -- not that life shouldn't be hard, but that life should be easy yet have the facade of being hard so they can complain about it. it's the exact same deal with asians fighting the overachiever stereotype. i was watching better luck tomorrow* the other day; its protagonist is the top-scoring asian kid who makes the basketball team, experiments with coke and runs with a bunch of hooligans who go around scamming other rich californian kids. in other words: i have to attempt to wreck my life so that i can lament about how stereotypes have ruined me. i just have very little sympathy for that kind of thing, although i allow that it might be a part of adolescence, and try and muster up kindness towards its perpetrators in that way.

* despite the good reviews, i also thought it was a pretty terrible movie in general.

we're having a rash of really good lecturers come along: first christoff koch who talked about the neural correlates of consciousness, and now steven pinker, who was guest lecturer at an award ceremony for students of exceptional talent (not me). the room was full of non-science types, so he had to give a somewhat non-technical talk that was not terribly informative but highly entertaining. he's recently turned to studying innuendo and swearing, and led off byspeaking about the FCC's uproar over bono saying "fucking brilliant" on live tv in 2004, an act of miscreancy that provoked conservatives to present this bill to the house of representatives:

To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting `(a)' before `Whoever'; and
(2) by adding at the end the following: `(b) As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.

hysterical. i just love watching people getting their knickers in a twist over this stuff, mostly because it doesn't do an ounce of good anyway. (for the true dregs of what america has come up with, check out the parents television council.) plus, they don't get to watch dexter, which is the awesomeness, and in which the word 'fuck' is used in ways you would never have imagined.

at the end of FNL 2x08, when landry turns himself in, there's this song by sea wolf playing in the background: "well I woke up this morning/and I made a resolution/
I said: never going to sing another sad song again./I decided I'd admit it/I'm not an intellectual/Though the words never come easy unless I'm singing them/And the hills that I was born in will never leave me/No matter how hard I try." it's really quite lovely, and yet another reason to adore the show, and be constantly grateful that it's been renewed.

some days all i want to do is make lists: places to see before i die, books i read in primary school, people i know but have not seen for more than 5 years, bands i would like to see perform live, scientific theories i think are both aesthetic and have genuine merit, times i've broken the law, restaurants i'd like to eat in, songs whose lyrics i can recite perfectly, secrets, times i've wanted to just let go and scream, ice cream flavors, NCAA basketball champions since 1939, rich people who don't deserve to be, days when i've woken up in the morning thinking: "today is going to be a good day", things i would not do for a million dollars, people who i would like to shake until their teeth rattle, monuments, museums, saints, airports i've been in, nights without sleep, canteen uncles and aunties, movies filmed in hawaii, presents that truly meant something to me, times in my life when i stopped and took a deep breath and actually saw the world for what it was and was still grateful to be alive, songs in A minor, gyri, brands of deodorant, bridges, sources of deep and indelible embarrassment, movies i like because i like them and not because other people do, five things i would ask for if stranded on a desert island, people in my CMC platoon, subatomic particles, things worth living for, things worth dying for.

funnily, pineapples have figured in my life for the past 3 days -- thursday: as a motif in chungking express, friday: as a snack during the battlestar galactica season 4 premiere, and saturday: at a fake luau that the hawaiian housemate rounded us up to attend. said luau was filled with undergrads, and the few of us who went all felt like we were 58, and i had to call fs midway through for solace.

Learned Hand, on voting:

I don't know how it is with you, but for myself I generally give up at the outset. The simplest problems which come up from day to day seem to me quite unanswerable as soon as I try to get below the surface... My vote is one of the most unimportant acts of my life; if I were to acquiaint myself with the matters on which I was willing to risk affairs of even the smallest moment, I should be doing nothing else, and that seems a fatuous conclusion to a fatuous undertaking.

John Searle, on constructing social reality:

If, for example, we give a big cocktail party, and invite everyone in Paris, and things get out of hand, and it turns out that the casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz -- all the same, it is not a war; it is just one amazing cocktail party.

check out the gorgeous website of per se in new york, where i will dine at least once when i am not poor.

kinjal just got back from a one-week trip into the rainforests of costa rica, a remarkable act of daring considering that her qualifying exams are less than a month away. a week without e-mail or cell phone contact at any time of the year seems inconceivable to me now, but i'm always open to accomplishing the impossible. she looks so refreshed that i've almost convinced myself that it's something i need, what with exhaustion threatening to overcome me so much of the time.

i'm taking our required ethics class now, which has put me to thinking about priest-penitent privilege and its various ramifications. even in the old days, this was one of the things that always made me a little uncomfortable -- that priests are legally obliged to uphold the seal of the confessional no matter what the crime. in the united states, the clergy are the only people for whom this applies -- secrecy is mandated even in cases of reported child abuse or homicidal intention. for now this is only changing at the state level, but when, as will happen, the matter reaches the the supreme court, a decision either way is going to be serious business. one way, child abusers go free, the other, the church is forced to ante up its parishioners' souls. this sounds a bit like a false dilemma, but i think it's nearer the truth than you might suspect, and certainly something to think about if you're of a religious persuasion.

i've had a thing for walter moers for a while now, but i have to say that the city of dreaming books is probably his best novel to date. particularly because of the section on booklings and orming. booklings are cycoplean creatures who live deep in the catacombs under Bookholm, and devote their lives to memorizing the complete works of an author after which they're named. i don't know how this was accomplished in the german, but in the english translation (of the german translation from zamonian), the booklings' names are anagrams of the names of real-world authors. thus: Perla la Gadeon:

Hear the loud Bookholmian bells --
brazen bells
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
how they screamed out their affright
Too much horrified to speak,
they can only shriek, shriek...

and Bethelzia B. Binngrow (an albino bookling with a watery red eye), among many other delightfuls. this guy here has compiled a list of all of them -- i confess that there are a few which escape me, but i haven't given up yet.

things that made me unhappy this week

1. horrible undergraduates (now and forever)
2. 450 pages of reading
3. uncooperative custard (why didn't you set?)
4. wvu 73 duke 67

spring break's over. my aim for the next 6 weeks: have enough time to eat and sleep.

(st. paddy's day was fun, though. no green beer, but hookahs at byblos made up for that.)

ok, so you know this one, but i've never blogged it, and it speaks to my feelings quite well.

       The Stranger Within My Gate

The stranger within my gate.
He may be true or kind.
But he does not talk -
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well.
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
We do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates.
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control -
what reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
May repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least they hear the things I hear
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf - And the grapes be all one vine
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

               Rudyard Kipling

wallet

i found a louis vuitton wallet outside the gym today.

(it irks me when things like that happen. if i ever lose my wallet, especially in west philly, i just know that it's going to be picked up my some schmoe who will proceed to spend the cash on crack and throw everything else away. i expect that, not because i'm a cynic, but because of statistics; there are just more schmoes than non-schmoes. it's the asymmetry that irritates me. if you're the kind of person who would not return a wallet you found on the street, then you're not going to be as annoyed when no one returns yours, because that's your worldview -- you would have done the same. on the other hand, if you're the kind of person who wouldn't think twice about turning in a wallet, you're unhappy even if you are aware of the odds, because others are not doing unto you as you would have done unto them. there's an inherent unfairness which doesn't get rectified, unless you believe in karma, in which case i have some tea leaves i'd like you to read.)

anyway, i searched the wallet to try and get the name and address of its owner, and found two things of interest: (1) a licence to carry firearms, and (2) a handwritten note from his girlfriend saying (among other things) that they had won a significant amount of money in the lottery, and that she was giving him the ticket so that he could go claim the winnings. ok. no lottery ticket in the wallet, though, which fortunately relieved me from a rather terrible moral quandry. (honestly, what would you do if you found a wallet with a ticket worth, say, half a million dollars in it? isn't that the kind of thing that only happens in movies? which reminds me, a simple plan is a pretty good film on just that subject.)

the next thought that crossed my mind was: this is a little suspicious. who writes notes like that? and where else would you keep a lottery ticket besides your wallet? the situation was beginning to resemble hornstein's famous experiment*, where they left wallets with letters in them (from a "previous finder") all around new york to see whether similarity between previous and current finder led to a greater likelihood of a wallet being returned. the wallet was right outside pottruck, the amount of money in it was about right, and it seemed like the perfect manipulation to make you less likely to return it (less cognitive dissonance because: "bah, he doesn't need the money anyway.") i was about two blocks away from the gym by the time this occurred to me, and i considered going back to look for an undergraduate surreptitiously taking notes across the street in an unmarked van, but by that time i was hungry and very near the curry shop and decided that i was being ridiculous.

over briyani, i considered this further. if i really did believe that the whole affair was a setup, should i keep the money? i've done lab experiments before that involve the dictator game, which i'll let wikipedia describe because i'm tired of typing.

In the dictator game, the first player, "the proposer," determines an allocation (split) of some endowment (such as a cash prize). The second player, the "responder," simply receives the remainder of the endowment not allocated by the proposer to himself. The responder's role is entirely passive (he has no strategic input into the outcome of the game). As a result, the dictator game is not formally a game at all (as the term is used in game theory). To be a game, every player's outcome must depend on the actions of at least some others. Since the proposer's outcome depends only on his own actions, this situation is one of decision theory and not game theory. Despite this formal point, the dictator game is used in the game theory literature as a degenerate game.

This "game" has been used to test the homo economicus model of individual behavior: if individuals were only concerned with their own economic well being, proposers (acting as dictators) would allocate the entire good to themselves and give nothing to the responder. Experimental results have indicated that individuals often allocate money to the responders, reducing the amount of money they receive. These results appear robust, Henrich, et al. discovered in a wide cross cultural study that proposers do allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the responder.

i can tell you that the feeling of wanting to share the money is very compelling, but knowing the literature has completely hardened my heart, and on the two occasions i've had to play this (both times i was the proposer, luckily, enough), i kept everything (which is the normative thing to do). wouldn't this be an analogous case if i believed it were an experiment? i re-read the note, and looked through the rest of the wallet (business cards, check card, health insurance, supermarket discount card), and decided that if it were fake, it was nevertheless very convincing. ah, well. the powerball jackpot is at $275 million this weekend. maybe i'll get in on some of that action on my own.

* you need to have APA subscription to access the full article, unfortunately, but e-mail me if you want it.

insult

From U.S. News and World Report:

Overrated Career: Clinical Psychologist
By Marty Nemko
Posted December 19, 2007

The Appeal: You'll work one-on-one with clients in a private, peaceful setting, helping them conquer their inner demons.

The Reality: Research is revealing that many psychological problems have physiological roots, taking some of the luster off traditional psychotherapy. Some psychologists end up questioning their own value. Also, people are turning toward short-term cognitive therapists or personal coaches, who focus less on analyzing your childhood and more on developing pragmatic, step-by-step plans for solving problems, moving forward, and reaching goals.

You know, it's not that I even really consider my profession as clinical psychologist (to be), but I wish he had at least gotten his facts right. It's incredibly insulting to suggest that psychodynamic therapy is all that clinical psychologists know how to do -- it's probably one of the things I'm going to end up not knowing how to do. And who does he suppose provides CT? ExRP? Interoceptive exposure? Has he even heard of those things? Also, the students in our department probably know more about the physiology of mental disorders than some psychiatrists. So really, Mr. Nemko, you can take your opinions and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. That is all.

In the absence of anything interesting to say (it's spring break, and my mind has gone very soft), i'll leave you with 10 questions that you should consider so that you don't get caught off guard if you should one day have to answer them. In order of seriousness:

1) If you were given the option to be cryonically frozen after your death, but before the point of information-theoretic death (with the understanding that you'd be resuscitated once medicine could revive you), would you take it?

2) What about being a brain-in-a-jar (like in Roald Dahl's William and Mary?)

3) Uploaded onto a computer?

4) Memory enhancers that allow you to recover memories you thought were lost. Kosher?

5) If offered to you, would you take Ritalin?

6) Modafinil?

7) Undergo gene therapy to enhance your cognition?

8) Would you rather be paralyzed from the waist down, or lose all your autobiographical memories?

9) Would you agree to learn how to dissociate so as to create an alternate personality that was more assertive/congenial/diplomatic/aggressive/whatever character trait you're lacking in, with the understanding that you could switch back and forth between personalities at will (without any between-persona amnesia)?

10) If you were told, and believed, that we were indeed in The Matrix, would you take the red pill?

social psych went all the way till 7:30, by which time everyone decided that they had had it for the week. (that the undergrads were fleeing town en masse for spring break was also a contributing factor). we converged on lolita, a mexican BYOT, the T in question being tequila, of course, though not patrón as jokingly promised (boo!). there were people at the table who were not psych grad students, so the rule was instituted early that talking shop = take a shot, which led to people becoming very drunk very fast. weirdest penalty of the night given out for: "barry manilow t-shirt" (if you can tell me where that came from without googling it you get a prize the next time i see you). lolita has really good food, although in retrospect i would not have ordered the pechuga de pato (fried plantains, jicana-radish slaw), which was not really what i wanted. (steak would hve hit the spot.) the appetizers were superb: orange-ginger glazed carnitas with guacamole and pico de gallo, a soupy thing with chicken and huitlacoche (sort of like a stringy xue er), and warm, exceedingly fresh tortilla chips.

we went to a rather pathetic pyb after that, and i got the hiccups, and people starting dancing spastically. there was a live band, and they were alright until "don't stop believing", at which time i had decided that even $1 beer wasn't going to keep me there, and that i had better be reasonably sober to do my mri scans, which i discovered to my alarm were about 6 hours away. the housemate and rebecca and i escaped in a cab, and r. taught me the BEST TRICK EVER to get rid of hiccups, which is concentrate on getting your pinky fingers as close together as possible without letting them touch. and then it was 2, and then i had to get up, and i did my stupid experiment hung over, though fortunately no one noticed.

run #9

we discovered a big dark spot on the structural MRI of one of our subjects, about the fourth time this has happened to me since i started doing this kind of research. i've come to understand that these funny patches are nearly always benign, but having to go to a radiologist and wait for judgment to be passed is still a nerve-wracking experience. this time round: fatty deposits. net result: 2 hours of extra paperwork on a wednesday evening

a bunch of people weren't free to come to reading club, so we sat in elisabeth's house instead and ate homemade mapo tofu and leftover fried rice and had intelligent conversation. elisabeth is studying hebrew and arabic and other such lit-ty things, and is currently translating her way through the book of ezekiel with a small group of brave souls. they're also learning new (hebrew) vocabulary at the rate of 100 words/week, starting from the most common and working their way down. (me: "what is the most common word in the bible?" her: "and.")



following which we watched the first six episodes of the tick, which is so awesomely bad that it's good. ("you know, when a tomato grows out of your forehead, it gets you thinking. what do we know about anything? life is just a big, wild, crazy, tossed salad. but you don't eat it, no sir, you live it! isn't it great?")

dissertation tip #8

prospective weekend again (II)

we didn't host anyone this week, but there is someone new applying to our lab, which is very exciting. for one thing, i won't be the baby of the lab any more, but on top of that he does cognitive neuroscience research, which means that there'll be at least one person in the lab with whom conversations about work are not like me standing atop a very tall mountain sending semaphore messages with 5" x 3" flags. his name is jared, but since we already have a lab jared, he will be jared II and lab jared will be jared I*. jared I hosted jared II, which i hear led to such interesting e-mails as:

Dear Jared,

that sounds to great to me,

Regards,
Jared.

in any case, i interviewed jared II before lunch and he seems like a great kid, and without saying too much i hope he gets in because he deserves it and i don't want to be lonely in the office.

after lunch i tried to work and couldn't because writing reports about people who have 6 anxiety disorders all at once is really depressing. instead, i futzed around with my data and labeled all the variables, and made sure all my files were in alphabetical order with no repeats, and went into each folder and ARRANGE[d] ICONS so that they were perfectly aligned.

by 4, it was time for happy hour because it was friday and dr. sb had just turned in a grant and jared I had collected his very last dataset for this weird project he's doing**. i like happy hour. i had a vague feeling that it was going to be a bad idea to have happy hour starting at 4 right before the party for the prospective students, and i was right, but i would totally do it again.

new deck! RODPFBSE (leffe: my new beer of choice). syl told us about her trip to hong kong and macau and it was awesome in every way except for the fact that they only ate mcdonald's. i'm getting very good at submerging my disgust re: such disgraceful behavior. america has trained me well. we have another beer, and then a SoCo shot, and we all start getting wistful about the fog-covered future, which is a really bad sign, so adrian buys us another beer. norah arrives, and we drink to her internship placement at b____, and then suddenly we're exchanging puke stories, and i find myself telling everyone about the time in sec 3 gep camp when elwin (BONDED) had the bunk above mine and was sick in the middle of the night.

things kind of get fuzzy from this point on. i think having eaten only 2 chicken tenders and a handful of nachos did not help. jared I and i left for the prospective student dinner, where i talked to a lot of new people whose names i no longer remember, although the substance of our conversations was, in approximate order: "sleep/learning/memory consolidation is THE hot topic nowadays, and this IS the place to study that" (jared II), "have you done your cultural psychology homework?" (the housemate) "does the sensation of conscious will reside in afferent brain signals, efferent brain signals, or neither?" (christian), "should i have a reuben?" (thomas) "this reuben is delicious!" (andrea) "are we ever going to graduate from here?" (melissa p.) someone pressed a drink ticket into my hand, so i thought it would be an awful pity if i didn't have a glass of merlot.

then we were at the usual house for the party, and it was really loud, and i kept eating peanuts, and people were drinking flaming dr. peppers, which mysteriously do actually taste like dr. pepper. at some point, i got it into my head that i really wanted to go home and watch four weddings and a funeral, which i had just downloaded, and the thought blossomed into an obsession in the way that they do when you're not really thinking straight. and the housemate wanted to go home too, i think, so we did, and instead of watching four weddings and a funeral i went to bed and slept for a rather long time.


* incid., i'm not sure i've mentioned that lab jared has exactly the birthday as me. i'm slowly becoming convinced that the advisor does not in fact accept students based on merit, but because he's trying to win a bet by stringing together a succession of students who have particular things in common, like those games where you try to morph ANGEL into DEVIL in 5 steps.

** which involves showing people a saturday night live sketch about penis cream. don't ask. also: my blog is going to get 8,569 hits tomorrow.

i want house back

run #8

this is about the halfway point of my big study (n = 15; 1 dropout so far*), which i will drink to, even if no one drinks with me. completing/publishing this experiment (august '09, i hope and pray), plus the slightly ass study that i did last spring**, plus the soon-to-be-run follow-up to the slightly ass study, plus the work i'm going to do this summer***, will hopefully work out to at least 90% of a dissertation. the work done so far would have been of much higher quality were i not forced to take classes, but so it goes, and i still have a chance to go back and hammer it into shape. all in all, i hesitantly declare that things are going ok on the research front for now.

one of the subjects i have in this run is a screenwriter (!). for tv? i ask hopefully, but no, he writes movies, small independent films so far, although a major studio bought one of his films right after the strike ended. this was Interesting. we discussed kauffman, and tarantino, and dr. sb weighed in with her very strong opinions on what makes a good zombie movie****, and so on. it's been a good run so far. no one has needed tylenol, they do my tests quietly and properly and the rest of the time play madden nfl '08 on the x-box 360 and (critically) don't complain. i'm very easy to please that way.

* this is a phenomenal retention rate, even for me. since no one is patting me on the back for this, not even the advisor, i shall do so myself, because between claustrophobia and low morale, it is hard as quantum physics to get people successfully through a sleep deprivation/fMRI study

** i don't understand what's going on with the manuscript for this. i wrote a chunk of it last year, then handed it off to hengyi for editing and to finish off the figures, and it seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. meanwhile, daniel and the committee chair have stolen him off to their own lab for some VBM bulls*** that they're doing. i just don't understand this, because awful as our experiment was, it's at the very least more sexy than damn volumetric work, which to me is about on par with studies about the geologic age of rocks in terms of interest.

*** please keep your fingers crossed for me, by the way, that this experiment actually works. from my point-of-view, connectivity analysis is akin to boarding a space shuttle to mars.

**** strong opinions in general because as you know, mr. sb does animatronics for industrial light and magic. which means, incidentally, that he's 1/1274 of an oscar nominee, although he did not get to go to the ceremony. just as well. at world's end was kind of crap. oh, and also, he got asked to do effects for indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull but had just taken on another project. idiot. but i digress:

(1) the zombies must lunge, not lurch.
(2) the annoying people must die in satisfyingly horrible ways.
(3) there has to be some reasonably cogent explanation as to why there are zombies in the first place...
(4) but this explanation must not be cerebral

etc.

interviewing prospectives really drives home the asymmetry of the process -- they sit on the other side of the table sweating bullets, while i'm in my skin (a) completely not caring, and (b) fully aware that my opinion doesn't count for nuts in who gets in and who doesn't.

i begged off my undergraduate class in the morning and brought our prospective student on a little walking tour of west philly and the campus. we stopped off for a good long while at the center for cognitive neuroscience (which his potential advisor works out of) to escape the cold and sip coffee and talk about the research that is conducted within, including a project mysteriously titled "purple carrots". the other housemate was there, and ben, and we google-earthed the island of jersey, and myth-busted the transatlantic rail, and generally prevented anyone in the room getting work done for a good hour.

we left late morning and married up with grace and the person she was hosting (south korean) and went to see if anyone from the brainard lab was in. they were not. dave brainard and co. study the psychophysics of color vision, and are beginning to join forces with the cog neuro empire to understand neural dissociations between perception and interpretation of color stimuli. from what i understand, the project is a tour de force of engineering, biology, psychology and linguistics, the meeting of several mighty empires, etc. it's also highly uninteresting to me, but i find nowadays that every other person i talk to seems to be involved in this work, including the south korean prospective, the other housemate, and a large number of the very serious neuroscientists who roam the top floor of solomon and steal our beer from the department fridge.

more wandering, then kinjal joined us and we had a late lunch at marathon where i bitched about our DCT and got sympathy, and we told the prospectives about how great the penn program is, except for the parts that are not. i still hate marathon. we split up, and i read articles for an hour, and then we had social psych led by todorov which went the full 3 hours and nearly killed me. social is a gigantic seminar that has attracted wharton (i'm going to singapore!) graduate students, nefarious individuals who want to talk about subliminal advertising and unconscious manipulation and raping your mother. gross; and we're only a quarter way through. anyway.

the day closed with us going out to dinner and the department picking up the tab: pietro's with the prospectives and nick and ben and the housemate and the other housemate and grace and ewa and a neuroscience student who got invited by accident but turned out to be cool. almost despite itself, our department has really good people in it, and it shows when we have guests. if i were them, i'd want to join us for sure.

prospective weekend again

didn't i just write about this? differences: this year i have the space to host someone, and i am, one m.c. from oxford who's asleep on the futon, this being 3 a.m. in the UK. he's good-mannered, and nice, and brought harrods fudge, which automatically scores 3 points from me in the book of "would you recommend this fellow for admission?". more points for: being british, and having a beautiful accent, and admitting to "being a little peckish".

*

in preparation for hosting, i took half the afternoon off and swept and mopped and dusted and cleaned a month of grease off the stove. everything smelled like pine-sol until i foolishly decided to cook a pot of curry for dinner, after which time it did not.

*

the day otherwise was not very pleasant. i saw an extremely anxious client in the morning and spent a good hour-and-a-half trudging through the ADIS. i despise structured clinical interviews, especially with people who want nothing more than to tell you that they have everything. supervision followed almost immediately, and i was the only one with anything to present, which meant that our DCT could indulge in one of her favorite activities: making me feel like an idiot. i've kind of habituated to this over the months, and all of the other students know that she's being unreasonable, but it's still kind of irksome. on the plus side, i think i'm learning more than anyone else, so whatever. also: my diagnoses are, on the whole, actually right, thus, dear DCT, please shut up about that. thank you.

because we shouldn't be miserable all the time

          The Open Window

My tower was grimly builded,
With many a bolt and bar,
"And here," I thought, "I will keep my life
From the bitter world afar."

Dark and chill was the stony floor,
Where never a sunbeam lay,
And the mould crept up on the dreary wall,
With its ghost touch, day by day.

One morn, in my sullen musings,
A flutter and cry I heard;
And close at the rusty casement
There clung a frightened bird.

Then back I flung the shutter
That was never before undone,
And I kept till its wings were rested
The little weary one.

But in through the open window,
Which I had forgot to close,
There had burst a gush of sunshine
And a summer scent of rose.

For all the while I had burrowed
There in my dingy tower,
Lo! the birds had sung and the leaves had danced
From hour to sunny hour.

And such balm and warmth and beauty
Came drifting in since then,
That window still stands open
And shall never be shut again.


                Edward Rowland Sill

have a go at some implicit association tests (one of the more fascinating try-it-at-home psychology paradigms, i find)

9 exam "strategies" which undergraduate think are smart but in in actuality are just a royal pain in the ass

1) I don't know the answer to this question, so I'll do a question that I do know the answer to instead.

2) I have no idea what I'm talking about, but if I fill the entire page with words in very small handwriting maybe you'll give up and give me some points.

3) I know exactly what I'm talking about, and I'm going to give you the answer to this question as well as reproduce word for word the contents of chapters 1 through 4 of the textbook.

4) If I do both parts of an either/or question, you'll think I'm really smart and hardworking.

5) Instead of writing my answer down from left to right and top to bottom on the page like a normal person, I'll draw arrows and asterisks and hieroglyphics and make you chase my text around like a Saturday night high.

6) Smiley faces and facetious comments will make my grader happy.

7) If I say one thing, and then say the exact opposite, I will surely get some points.

8) Using the lightest pencil in my possession and possibly in the history of the universe will force my grader to concentrate real hard on my script.

9) Complete sentences are for 9th-graders.

i hate grading

with the intensity of a trillion white hot suns

another thought on tmt

i think terror management is certainly one of the driving forces behind why i'm doing a phd; i suppose that somewhere at the back of my mind is the quaint illusion that no matter how insignificant my work is, at least it will be there after my death, in contrast with money or power or what-have-you. this is a useful justification only until you see through it, upon which it immediately collapses in the face of the very true argument that you get immense pleasure driving a beemer now, and no pleasure whatsoever from anything after you're dead.

filling my quota of one a year for shows-that-i-care-about-which-get-cancelled

well, we're dry of new episodes of just about everything, and even though it looks like the writers are going to be back at work next week not very many shows will be back till the fall. or, in some cases ever, judging from what the newspapers are saying about friday night lights. if 2x15 turns out to be the series "finale", i shall at least enjoy the irony that its very last line was jason street saying: "give it a chance".

capogiro last night had papaya gelato and numerous people having crises of faith about their research. it's universally acknowledged in psychology that almost everyone has something to hide in their work, and the corresponding maxim that Makes It All Better. in daniel's case, it's Averages Are Your Friend -- this because of the notorious unreliability of cortisol data which spikes and plummets at the slightest perturbation, and differs from person to person by an order of magnitude. the broader version of this problem -- that virtually all measurement in psychological experiments is unbearably coarse -- has plagued me since my early days in college. and, as if self-doubt weren't bad enough, it's the main broadside of both the anthropologists and the biologists; the former want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and give up entirely on abstraction and generalizations, and the latter think we're a mess because we can't achieve anywhere near the amount of reduction they're comfortable with. i don't have a very good reply to either of those salvos except: we're doing the best we can. you try giving someone else a several-hundred-year head start and see how well you do.

someone called me dr. lim today, and i had to explain to them, in a slightly pained way, that: no.

avenue q is doing a run in philly, and some of us went to check out the greatness. some of the broadway cast is here, including the people performing the leads (princeton and kate monster), so except for the fact that we had nosebleed seats it was a pretty sweet time. muppet sex! also, as i continue to think about the sentiment that the more you ruv someone, the more you want to kill them, the more i think it's absolutely correct.

melissa headed home, and the rest of us situated ourselves in a pub and watched obama and clinton slug it out for delegates and made fun of the latter-day saints. does anyone else have the sinking feeling that if clinton gets the nomination it's going to be mccain who takes the prize? these were the terrible thoughts that wondered through my head after a couple of beers. i was making small talk with one of my clients the other day, a young, middle-class white guy who told me, conspiratorially, that he "really hopes we don't get a black president" -- this in philadelphia, pennsylvania, USA, in the year of our lord 2008. i despair, gently. also: if you advertise that you have leffe on tap, you should please either have leffe on tap, or let me know before you bring it to me in a bottle. thank you.

el azteca, on 9th and chestnut, with nick and the two housemates. as far as mexican food goes, it did set itself apart from the crowd. the nachos tasted homemade, and my carnitas were not too salty, which is sometimes all you can ask for when you eat out. everyone seemed to be having a birthday, the colorful sombrero being passed from head to head like an anointing. we considered faking one for ice cream in a tortilla bowl with a sparkler stuck into it, but did not.

NASA beams Across the Universe into space

For the first time ever, NASA will beam a song -- The Beatles' "Across the Universe" -- directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4.

The transmission over NASA's Deep Space Network will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding and the group's beginnings. Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe.

I'm sure there are people who study this, but I really like the idea of missives that are absent one of their critical components -- sender, message or recipient. For example, and in order, messages in a bottle, burned love letters, and this: radio transmissions into space. I think there's a special kind of tension created by this topos*, a suspended chord that can stay unresolved for years, centuries, forever, and in that suspension hold all manner of rich emotion: hope, love and longing.

And what a container to choose -- the poetry of Paul McCartney. Nothing's gonna change my world. A beautiful irony considering that, if a recipient is ever found, and the chord resolved, everything will change. And give new meaning to this: Limitless undying love that shines around me like a million suns/ It calls me on and on across the universe.

* minz informs me that i mean topos, not trope, and she is, i think, right.

dissertation tip #7

IF YOU THINK IT'S TOO LONG, IT'S PROBABLY NOT LONG ENOUGH.

i'm not sure when this started happening, but college students now treat their TAs like wikipedia. they expect two-paragraph answers from two-line questions, and utter not a word of appreciation once the answers are received. i swear to you, the first class in college needs to be life 101: introduction to life, where undergraduates learn that TAs are human beings, and the words 'thank' and 'you' exist in the modern lexicon.

*

in happier news, my latest patient is nice and normal and very sympathetic, a welcome change from the borderline-y folk who seem to have flocked to our clinic in droves recently. we're more than halfway done with this practicum, and my next, for the fall, has been lined up -- CBT of mood disorders with [eminent person in the field]. this is treatment, not just diagnosis, the talky stuff you may be familiar with from TV, the stuff that's supposed to actually make people better. i'm not at all convinced that words coming out of my mouth are going to change anyone's worldview for the better, seeing as how i send most people i talk to in the opposite direction, but there's a manual, and people kicking you in the shins if you do anything wrong.

Some arguments against the logic of Pascal's wager

not new, but well put

From Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer:

I don't love you he told her one evening as they lay naked in the grass.

She kissed his brow and said. I know that. And I'm sure you know that I don't love you.

Of course, he said, although it came as a great surprise -- not that she didn't love him, but that she would say it. In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women had said I love you without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you

I'm My Own GrandPaw

Many, many years ago when I was twenty-three
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her and soon they, too, were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life
For my daughter was my mother, 'cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became a brother-in-law to dad
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
To the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my step-mother.

My father's wife then had a son who kept them on the run
And he became my grand-child, 'cause he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue
Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother too.

If my wife is my grandmother, then I am her grandchild
And every time I think of it, it nearly drives me wild
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw
(This has got to be the strangest thing I ever saw)
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpaw.

Chorus
I'm my own grandpaw
I'm my own grandpaw
It sounds funny I know
but it really is so
Oh, I'm my own grandpaw.

TMT

am reading about terror management theory, which explains motivated human behavior based on the fact that

"many psychological needs are ultimately rooted in the existential dilemma into which our species was born. Although humans share with other forms of life a basic instinct for self-preservation, they are unique in their possession of intellectual capacities that make them explicitly and painfully aware of the inevitability of their mortality. Because of this juxtaposition of animal instinct with sophisticated intellect, humans must live with the knowledge that the most basic of their needs and desires ultimately will be thwarted. Knowledge of the inevitability of death gives rise to the potential for paralyzing terror, which would make continued goal-directed behavior impossible."

thus, all behavior that is not directed towards mere survival (and some behavior that on the surface appears to be) is ultimately energy spent towards creating and maintaining a "cultural anxiety buffer" that serves to manage and suppress this terror. we don't realize this because every behavior has a train of hierarchical motives behind it, and we keep pay attention to only the most salient and proximal of these. terror management, its proponents suggest, is the superordinate goal of virtually everything we do.

i find this idea fascinating. unlike other theories i've found to be romantic, this one actually seems like it might be correct as well. i particularly like the fact that it explains, simply and completely, why humans have this funny notion of "justice" that has put millions of lawyers into business. you can ponder that one on your own, and, if you're a lawyer, then go and drink heavily.

during the course of fixing my plumbing problem, it crossed my mind to ask alyson, one of the other owners-not-renters in the department whether being the one in charge causes her to have any more anxiety, on average. her answer was an emphatic 'no'. why? because the convenience of not having to go downstairs and put quarters into a laundry machine every week counterbalances the inconvenience of having to call a plumber every once in a while. because the feelings of self-efficacy cancel out the annoyance when the floorboards accidentally get scratched. and because landlords can suck, and when you're us, the person you most trust is often yourself.

i'm still undecided as to whether this being a landlord business is, on the whole, going to be a positive or negative experience, but i do know this: if anything is going to tip the balance it will be that i'm responsible for the complaints of two other people, and nothing offsets that weight on the other side of the scale. now perhaps the debt has been paid in other ways, but objectively, considering only this endeavor, that's the score. and we'll leave it at that for the time being.

From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard:

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: "This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is."

black music for white people

what i can't figure out is -- rap songs that make it onto the charts, artists that everyone has heard of, tupac and jay-z and 50 cent, are those all for white people pretending to be into black culture because it's phat, or whatever? like, real rap for black people consists of stuff that i've never actually heard of? or is everything nowadays just one homogeneous cultural pudding, cf. ben folds' social commentary via their cover of bitches ain't shit? i ask purely out of curiosity and ignorance, since i'm completely out of touch with whatever the music "scene" is nowadays, and would like to get this clear so as to be generally well-informed.

the drain pipe from the other housemate's bathtub is leaking, which, while not a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, is a dratted inconvenience. i wasn't happy with either plumber who stopped by to do an estimate today -- one of them tried to convince me that i needed to rip down the tiled walls of the room (wtf?) -- and now need to call yet another few companies tomorrow. when you run stress paradigms on rats, all you have to change are little things -- marbles in their cage, an unfamiliar odor on their straw bedding -- and cortisol levels go through the roof; i thought this was a rather unusual phenomenon till today, but now am far more sympathetic.

because someone made me think of it today

i do worry about money. i don't covet it, but it does occur to me dimly that i'm going to hit the age of 30 with very little squirreled away and a rather uncertain career ahead. i've tried several times to figure out how much i should be expecting to earn when i'm done, and have come up with estimates all over the map from dismal to pretty reasonable.

and no, i still wouldn't have had it any other way, but the feelings are complicated and will be till i graduate; and there is ever the fear that, in monetary terms alone, this is irresponsible and foolish; and that i've made some terrible mistake which will cost me dearly further down the line.

10 ways to entertain yourself while the TV writers are striking

With the exception of certain personages who believe that fictional characters are not important, I believe I speak for many of us in saying that the TV writer's strike has left us with plenty of free time we otherwise would not have had. To fill those hours, i offer the following suggestions:

1) Instead of watching C.S.I...

... plan the perfect murder. I've done this on numerous occasions, and it's a most enlightening exercise. The rules: the victim has to be someone you know, and you have to have a reasonable motive for wanting to do away with him or her. You must not get caught and convicted. You can assume reasonably good luck to be on your side, but cannot break the laws of physics.

2) Instead of watching Lost...

... check yourself into a hotel for a few days and see how long it takes for someone to call the police and declare you a missing person. once you find out, you'll learn a lot about your self-esteem ("You took how long? Don't you love me???"), and/or reveal that your family is a bunch of pot-smokers ("I'm home!""You left?")

3) Instead of watching Heroes...

... play this game with a friend. Each of you takes it in turn to walk up to a random stranger and yell 'Yatta!'. First one to get beaten up by a skinhead homophobe loses.

4) Instead of watching 24 ...

... make it the goal of your life to reduce your commute time to under 13 minutes no matter where your starting point and destination. Because if Jack Bauer can do it in L.A. rush-hour traffic, gosh darn it, so can you.

5) Instead of watching The Office ...

... bring a video camera disguised as a pencil sharpener into your office and film random 10-minute snippets of every day. Watch them at home at night. Weep when you realize the clips are indistinguishable from this show.

6) Instead of watching House ...

... buy a cane sword and teach yourself how to fence. En garde!

7) Instead of watching Battlestar Galactica...

... build a real-life model of a Raptor using only items currently in your home. You may, if you wish, break down appliances for scrap metal.

8) Instead of watching Grey's Anatomy

... get together with someone, then break up with them, then sleep with their partner, then get together with the original person you were with and cause your best friend to break up with her husband, then steal an ambulance and crash it into another one in front of your local hospital's emergency room.

9) Instead of watching Samantha Who...

... wait you watch Samantha Who? Clearly you're not someone I know.

10) Instead of watching Friday Night Lights...

... go now, and buy this poster, and hang it on your wall, and put on your Dillon Panthers jacket, and pretend that Matt Saracen is singing Mr. Sandman, and melt into a small warm puddle on the floor.

tomorrow is TTT, or train-the-trainer, an exercise where senior lab members go to the hilton and teach very properly-dressed science types how to administer neuropsychological testing, and eat a rather good dinner for free. big pharmaceutical company, important collaboration, make a sterling impression, etc.

so we have a preparatory meeting cum dry run, and i get to the conference room where a thousand assessment sheets have already been color-printed, stapled, and laid out in order of serial number all ready for dissemination. they're really rather nice, professional layout and glossy paper and all, and it's in a very soft and sorry voice that i have to point out to daniel that the name "merck", on every cover page, in 24-point font, really should have the letter "c" in it. at which point the entire room falls silent for about ten seconds, before someone intones with great solemnity: "fuck".

clear blue sky billboards in the netherlands:

i have been informed, in confidence, that one of the third-years was asked to take a leave of absence, largely because he spent the last 6 months, more or less, completely slacking off. this is the fourth person on the program to be on the ropes since i've been here (2 have been kicked out), and it pains me personally, not just because i think he's a nice guy, but also because it does nothing for my it-could-happen-to-you anxiety.

semester the fourth

i will be good, and finish my classes, and not complain too much, even though social and cultural psychology are going to be force-fed down my throat. it's rozin for cultural, who is supposed to be awesome, not to mention famous, so perhaps the material will be palatable. social, however, is taught by a rotating crew of princeton faculty, the thought of which is already making me feel slightly green. why breadth requirements? he laments, before remembering the resolution just made.

teaching: a small class led by a post-doc, mcq exams (i'm told) and only office hours to conduct, so hopefully the experience will be less painful than last sem. also: the last semester that i have to teach, and god bless the advisor for having the money to allow me to do that. in future, it's my way or the high way -- i.e. i teach neuroethics/cog neuro or nothing at all.

research: mostly preparing for summer, and of course i go on seeing my weird assortment of patients -- next up a lawyer who may have borderline pd. smart clients suck, because they're not too busy drooling to tell when you're screwing up.

all in all, things look like they'll be a little more manageable than last semester, which is good because i anticipate that this summer business is going to be a pretty big headache, what with having to coordinate the logistics across continents. thus, things looking up, except for the big nasty that is the writer's strike, and having to wait till april for battlestar galactica season 4.

pa

1. hopefully my blog will not go so neglected this semester as the last.

2. i would be a liar if i said i didn't enjoy the fawning and attention when i go back; i would also be a liar if i didn't admit that it's also slightly embarrassing.

3. breaks are still eerily the same: the restaurants, the conversations, the pining for what might have been. i have a sneaking suspicion that they will continue to be the same until i graduate. this is either very good, or really bad.

4. despite myself, i'm enjoying the rick riordan series.

5. we will, shortly, discuss semester #4.

the usual retrospective nonsense

while 2006 was the year i actually left to do my phd, 2007 marked the beginning of what things are going to be like until i graduate. the plan for my research coalesced. i foolishly took multivariate statistics, and went to new york a bunch of times, and reaffirmed again and again the fact that graduate school is hard as hell and that, unlike the sometimes posturing as an undergrad, work on a phd may actually crush you if you let it. i got a my master's degree after being given a very silly committee who variously knew too much or nothing at all. the advisor was good, is good, and for that i'm grateful, because there were and are living examples of people in the department for whom that is not true.

i got to spend a summer living in the united states, as opposed to simply residing there, exploring the farmers' markets and cafes and sampling america without the structure of a semester or classes, without time being marked by the due dates of papers and final exams. it was exceedingly hot. the mother came, and there were rats , and furious quarrels with the contractor, and it was stressful.

through grace alone i found the housemate and the other housemate and persuaded them that i was trustworthy enough to be given $x a month in exchange for a roof over their heads. i moved into our new place. clinic duties began, and teaching, and the next 3 months passed by in a blizzard of caffeine and sleepless nights and never-ending reports and pushing daisies and reading club, and i tell myself again and again that next semester will be easier, but that's not true.

it was an important year, i suppose, in that things moved along, but i can't say that i'm too displeased to be done with it. i guess that's kind of critical though -- if you can't have a fun year, or a meaningful year, at least let it be important, and move you further along the track towards wherever it is you think you're going.

so, to one and all: happy new year, and may it bring you forward, and peace.

although it will never quite be the same for me, merry christmas to everyone, and may your day be as perfect as it gets.

sg

after 3 days of rather intense catching-up, i realize that i'm not as young as i used to be, and it comforts me little to know that every time i come back from now till i graduate will be more and more exhausting. this as the little police state gets increasingly crowded, and not just in the malls, but everywhere, and everyone so young and blithe. i can deal, but not as a young person; i feel now more than ever that i have to go around in long sleeves and tie and hang in snooty bars and coffee houses where they charge $9.50 for a latte, regardless of whether or not my stipend can support that, because of, you know, no longer seeing through a glass darkly. there is something i've missed by not being here consistently since '01, some transition that people in nus law and medicine make that i just completely bypassed, where you learn to vanish into secret places in roads only accessible by car and sip dark wines and make quiet conversation. i need to have more money. i need to stop getting caught in liminal spaces.

I admit it: there were a lot of bloggable things that went unblogged, but the impetus is lost now, and the semester just about over. I'm leaving on Wednesday morning, and working virtually up till when I have to go -- final exams from my undergrads come in Monday, and I have a client to see on Tuesday morn. Right now, the only thing I have on my mind to pack is the DVD I've burned of QI Season 5, so I shall try not be surprised when I get back home and have Stephen Fry to watch and no underwear or toothbrush. Priorities.

committee

we're supposed to meet once a semester starting from this one so that all involved know that i'm on the right track and not spending my time learning llama herding or getting fluent in pirahã. to clarify, the committee i have now is different than the one with which i defended my masters' thesis. most notably, i got to choose the people on it, and so no longer have the gorgon lady but three reasonably nice and very intelligent people. aside from my advisor, who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus, i have someone who's more a psychology type, and someone who's more a neuroscience type, thus balance to the force etc. we had a very civil meeting, where i got to speak without interruption for a good long while before getting comments on how my stats were wrong (my stats are mostly wrong). still, i was let down gently, which was appreciated, and scary remarks were made to the effect that i could try and graduate in 4 years, to which my reply was 'are you $%#^ing out of your mind?' you get lucky with one set of results. expectations must be moderated; this semester was like a punch to the kidneys, not an experience worth repeating if at all possible, and i know i say this all the time, but it's time to slow things up.

after playing for many years with quantities of sugar/butter/etc., i think i've finally come up with a brownie recipe that i really like. important quantities -- 8 oz chocolate: 225g sugar: 375g butter + cinnamon + cayenne pepper + other mysterious secret things. i know that su-lin already disapproves of the cinnamon + cayenne pepper + other mysterious secret things, but i don't care, because IMHO they are outrageously good.

ethnic potluck

-- was a great success, one that i would have written about earlier except that my schoolwork consumed every waking moment of last week. anyhow, it's now too distant for me to feel inspired to talk about it except to say that there is a shocking amount of culinary talent in our department. in brief:

1. chlebièky: potato salad and cold cuts on sliced baguette
2. latkes
3. polish red cabbage soup
4. cheddar cheese and beer soup (oh yeah)
5. moussaka
6. chicken adobo
7. vegetable tikka masala
8. soy meat curry with coconut sambol
9. thai chili shrimp
10. whoopie pies
11. red velvet cake
12. pumpkin pie

autism