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