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

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

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

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

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

From the applyingtograd forums:

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

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

the longer story

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

what has happened:

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

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

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

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

Ursula LeGuin:

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

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

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

real work

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

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

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

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

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

mental sums

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

nice retrospective on the sopranos from new york magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.