outstanding questions

* how come the death of superman and captain america got national media coverage, while no one cares that batman is dead and DC has cancelled half of his related ongoing series?

* what do you do with eight million pounds of leftover turkey?

* i would like to see equus...anyone else want to go?

* is it an absolutely terrible thing to put red wine in pancake batter? it sounds prety awful to me.

* bruce campbell: awesome or so last week?

thanksgiving

as i suspected, the meat thermometer was useless; either that or i was getting it into all the wrong places. nevertheless, the turkey was juicy and cooked through, and did not end up on the floor, and all the side dishes came out at approximately the right time, and i only burned myself a little bit once. what remained at the end was a feeling of satisfaction that i haven't felt in a long time -- not that this earns me anything like the rank of domestic goddess, but it is something to make other people full and happy and not alone when they otherwise may not have been; it also beats last year's experience in a dive bar by quite a bit.

d-1

i started to make stuffing and realized that i had not bought any spring onions; that, and the decision to add sausage means that i have more or less defiled the mother's (the maternal grandmother's!) recipe. mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. still, it tastes more or less like what i'm used to, and the house now smells rather good. i also spent a long time stewing fruit and talking with the housemate about random effects models, a queer combination if i have to say so myself.

*

the other housemate has gone back to ohio, which means i don't have to put up with football on the big tv all the time. yay!

*

have invested in a meat thermometer. i suspect that this is somewhat akin to buying beauty cream -- same outcome, reassurance that you did "everything you could". the bird sits in my fridge, thawing, and gives me small panic attacks every time i go to get a glass of water. no dinner rolls.

*

von messages me today to tell me, airily and nonchalantly, that he is hosting dinner for 23, and criticizes my menu choices for being "traditional" and "white". isn't that exactly the point? we flee from past oppression by being able to coolly and unironically do the very things that most typify those who have oppressed us. also, i really fraking like cranberry sauce, ok?

thanksgiving d-3

i decided that since i'm going to be in town for thanksgiving this year, i'd give back for all the times people took pity on my poor family-less ass by having the other left-behind grad students for dinner. i didn't really think this all the way through before making the invites, and am now seizing with panic at odd moments of the day and waking up sweating from dreams of inedible turkey and salmonella poisoning. does anyone have a good recipe for glaze? i started cooking yesterday in fright, making a quite-passable green bean casserole that did not start with mushroom soup -- su-lin warned me a few years ago against ever making things that have canned soup in the recipe, and i've taken the advice to heart. did the pilgrims eat green beans at harvest time? i wish i knew more about agriculture than i learned from the omnivore's dilemma. the more i think about it, the more i feel compelled to make about 8 more side dishes than i should, just because i'm sure they'll come out right. you can't mess up potatoes. (ok, you can mess up potatoes, but those were the old days.) i need to introduce so much food to the table that you can't find the turkey. i need an avalanche of bread rolls. either that or i'll invest in about 12 bottles of wine so that even if everything sucks no one will care. wine, and i'll bust open the good scotch i've been saving, and dim the lights, and put on tupac very very loud.

the elevators in our building have not been terribly efficient at the best of times, but at some point last week they (accidentally?) got set to "wheelchair access" mode, which keeps the doors open for 2 minutes every time they stop, and renders functionless the "door close" button. as one might expect, this has resulted in dozens of people milling in the lift lobby for half the morning before they can get upstairs to their offices, not to mention the extreme awkwardness of having to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers for what feels like hours before finally getting to ones floor. today, however, was different, because the elevators have now decided to ignore their passengers' instructions entirely, so that one seems to have an equally likely chance of going up or down no matter what button one presses before finally being let off at a completely random floor. unfortunately, the humor in this situation lasts a much shorter time than one might think.

half of the department was at the abct (association for behavioral and cognitive therapists) conference this week, making it a lonely and boring one on top of the rain and gloom. it didn't help that the conference was literally held in disneyworld -- i mean, weren't they going to at least pretend that actual work was going on? on thursday i made myself even more depressed by sitting in the office reading the wiki page for epcot and daydreaming about sipping harvey wallbangers poolside under sunshine and cloudless skies. the reality: sifting through the eight billion papers that have now formed mountainous piles on my desk to find the ones with the info i need.

there was the newness of becoming a third-year student, and having to give real therapy, and the historic election, but now that things have settled down i find that i'm a slow grinding war of attrition with my work, at one of those points where all past accomplishments seem futile and the future rises like an escarpment, the summit out of sight. i need to come up with one more good project, and soon, before the money runs dry, but i have no idea what to do -- i'm a little sick of imaging, the bigger questions i have are still intractable, and doing something unrelated to sleep at this point is probably tantamount to career suicide. i feel like i need a week or two off to just stop, and think, and halt the slow descent into panic.

i passed the 1000th-article mark for my meta-analysis some time on thursday, and have probably read the abstracts for more than half of those. i'm reminded of my rather painful time doing literature searches in NIE, except that then i was actually getting paid somewhat more than i am now (ouch). the tedium of this project has also finally convinced me that our qualifying exams are terribly designed -- any collaboration is disallowed, while in the real world no one does any science on their own. thus, one demonstrates not competence but the willingness to be beaten up by the system, a trait that we've arguably already shown by applying to grad school in the first place.

still waiting

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

~~ Pablo Neruda

marvel at the awesomeness that is smugopedia

i don't think anyone who reads this blog particularly cares about baseball (von? grace?), so you probably don't know that the phillies are one game away from winning the world series for the first time since 1980, and that the excitement in the city is reaching fever pitch. game 5 -- the deciding game -- began on monday, and was called at the bottom of the 6th because of rain with the score tied at 2-2. it rained yesterday as well (mercifully, or house would have been pre-empted, and i would have stomped around all night unhappily), but the teams are in business and playing the remaining innings now. i think christian and co. are out in a pub somewhere, but my plan is to avoid riots and drunkenness and getting trampled to death (i was in ten stone/bard's last thursday after game 2 and was already getting a little nervous). also: have never really understood the appeal of a sport where 98% of the time nothing very much happens. i tried to get daniel and stephen to explain the attraction before supervision on monday, and we got into a discussion about strategy and designated hitters and whatnot, and i came away feeling educated but like i still don't really care. i do, however, like hot dogs and beer, so maybe i'll tag along to a regular season game next year if anyone's going.

in other news, batman RIP + the movie franchise have made me decide to start buying comics by the issue again, so well done grant morrison and christopher nolan.

who would be a good robin in the 3rd batman, if, despite all of christian bale's protestations, there is one

sean faris: 9/10
joseph gordon-levitt: 7.5/10
ben barnes: 6.5/10
shia labouef: 0/10
zac efron: -∞/10

having to give therapy -- and having to get supervision for it -- is a completely different matter from simply doing assessment and diagnosis, an exercise where you see a person a few times and never have to deal with them again. therapy is unpredictable, taxing, and above all, terrifying on many different levels -- am i messing up the patient's life? am i saying stupid things on tape? do my colleagues and supervisor think i'm an idiot?

what ends up happening, therefore, is an exercise where, as you're trying to help the client, you're simultaneously giving therapy to yourself, trying to superimpose a framework of cold reason over the emotional chaos. the reality, hard to believe, is this: the client believes you're a real psychologist, which in itself is a huge effector of change; everyone thinks they've said stupid things on tape, and sometimes you actually have, but it's not a big deal; everyone is afraid that they look like an idiot without thinking anyone else in the practicum actually is one. and training in therapy is just that: saying these things over and over again to yourself until you believe them, so that you can focus on the client instead of your panicky, useless thoughts. terror is incredibly unproductive. i hope i get over it soon.

saffy

von tells me that he's not on the hilary mckay bandwagon after all, so i excuse him, with apologies. with some sadness, i confess that i don't really see what the fuss is about either, and will beg off reading the rest of the series in preference for delights such as Y: The Last Man, which i highly recommend to one and all.

american

i was eating dinner alone today after work -- salad with cold roast chicken, corn, black beans, croutons, hard-boiled egg, russian dressing -- drinking a glass of white wine (durbanville cab sauvignon '01), and reading the new yorker, when i was suddenly overcome with a feeling of how american the scene was, like something out of a nora ephron movie, the quintessential bleeding-heart liberal moment. very disturbing. i need to go listen to some j-pop or something now to cleanse myself.

the su-lin/minz/von gang have been badgering me for years now about the saffy books, how i have to read them, how people in remote amazonian villages have read them and pass the stories down to their kids, etc., so i finally caved and ordered a one-penny (w/o shipping) copy from amazon to see what the fuss is all about (the penn library doesn't have the books. would you believe that?) i tried to get the relatively adult-looking cover, but ended up with the hodder edition which is scintillatingly pink and very hideous. this now means that i cannot read the book anywhere except in my room under thick sheets with the door locked, which i will do tonight after the amazing race and if i can finish prepping for my client tomorrow.

***

in other news, obama was at a rally yesterday not 7 blocks from where i live. i was tempted to go, but a phone call to the other housemate, who was there, convinced me that the nearest i could get to the stage would be about a block away.

i realize now that this isn't actually very exciting, and stop.

although my heart does go out to anyone who may have lost half their life savings in last week's hurly-burly, i feel that it's only fair for me to comment that it was one of the very few times in my life when i was glad that i have no real money to speak of. given how much (unintended) gloating i've had to endure over the years from friends and acquaintances, i find it only just that i take a moment to revel in this bear market, at least until i discover i have run out of funding/don't have a job.

the other housemate is busily studying for his GREs, which means that the house is redolent with the smell of coffee, and every so often i reach behind the cushions or underneath the couch and pull out a flashcard that says PULCHRITUDE or ELEEMOSYNARY or FURFURACEOUS. oh, how i hated that exam. you would think that living with two grad students for a year would be a severe disincentive to anyone considering jumping into this particular hell, but apparently, we're paragons of mental well-being, or something. also:

still not working on my quals

the closest equivalent that science-type people have to minz/fadiman's handshake game is calculating our erdos number. according to wikipedia (the fount of all knowledge):

In order to be assigned an Erdős number, an author must co-write a mathematical paper with an author with a finite Erdős number. Paul Erdős is the one person having an Erdős number of zero. If the lowest Erdős number of a coauthor is k, then the author's Erdős number is k + 1.

although technically applicable only to mathematicians, the fact that natalie portman has one (apparently 7, not 9) makes me feel entitled to at least try calculating mine. the problem: unlike six degrees of kevin bacon, there is no convenient way of doing this. obviously, it goes me, the advisor, and from there probably to one of the two-process model papers he's collaborated on, those being the only vaguely math-y things he's done, but after that it's mist and fog.

in any case, the game can now be played with connecting me to famous psychologists through co-authored publications. people i'd like to try off the top of my head: miller, beck, rogers, lacan, zimbardo, james (??). i understand this is a bit of a cheat because i've published, like, nothing, but i'll count my upcoming neuroethics paper with martha and that will at least give me more than 2 launching points.

i note, with some small measure of dismay, that nothing of great interest happened this week. thomas and i went to hear neil gaiman do a reading of his new book; it is more stardust and less american gods, which is a good thing. he did a very funny q&a, and i have now promised to not diss him quite as much in casual conversation, and focus more on the fact that he has his not-uncommon moments of brillance. (last complaint: no spoilers on whatever happened to the caped crusader. boo.) on thursday, sarah palin did not make a jackass of herself. on friday, there was capogiro and nodding head and being bored to tears by baseball (again). could someone out there please give me a satisfactory explanation as to why they like baseball?

anyway, you're bored by things like that, so let's write about something else. i have a new theory that practically anything tasty can be made even tastier by transforming it into a casserole. i tried reuben casserole for the first time last week, and much as i love reubens, reuben casserole = win. mexican torta casserole > mexican tortas. turkey, cranberry, sweet potato and stuffing casserole > thanksgiving dinner (i'm not even kidding). why? -- because casseroles are liberating. they're not weighed down by tradition. you can put all kinds of extra layers of tastiness into them and there are no purists to cry foul. also: everyone loves bubbling cheese.

thomas and i sat at home with beer on friday night and watched the first presidential debate, the most distressing part of which was mccain stating that he would cut funding for things like studying the dna of bears in montana. you know, his point about wasteful spending is well-taken, or at least, taken, but that was a particularly poorly-chosen example (surely there are conservative basic scientists out there somewhere. you at the back?) i think last night more than ever i felt that mccain is just methuselah old -- alluding to russians in afghanistan cuts both ways; there's a fine line between experience and decrepitude, particularly from the vantage point of someone under 35. also, old politicians don't seem to me as eminent as old academics; i think this is something to do with the cyclical nature of history. what was it that one philosopher quipped: that the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn anything from it? i guess that's what cheapens the experience argument for me -- what's going to be important in the (quite clearly unpredictable) future is going to be discovered accidentally, fortuitously, and by a leadership willing to take chances on LHCs and wireless electricity and the investigation of near-death experiences. and yes, bears in montana as well.