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

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

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

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

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

conversations in the lab between grad students

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

e.g.

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

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

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

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

what happens next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johann Sebastian Bach

defense (short version)

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

defense (longer version)

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

defense (the god honest truth)

Dramatis Personae:

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

---

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

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

The Committee eats.

The Student: Art thou pleased with this humble repast?

Committee Member #1: It is tolerable.

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

The Student: Thou are most gentle and kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, lightning shards pierce the room in a crackling chirascuro

The Student: I submit to thee that reality exists.

Committee Member #1: This is an unsubstantiated claim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Advisor: He speaks the truth.

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

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

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

The Student: I listen.

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

somewhere in all of this is beauty

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

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

-- which leads to Marlowe being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski:

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

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

first things first:



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

but yes: it's over, for now.

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

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

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

rant

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

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

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

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

8 days. it doesn't necessarily help that i'm surrounded by overachievers who are voluntarily turning in their projects early. whatever happened to solidarity in at least pretending that you're dying?

---

i have one last section to go, a bit that is proving very hard to write. it has to say, approximately, the following:

* i don't believe my results one bit because they are as reliable as the saharan dunes
* not that there was anything i could have done about it
* it's the effort that counts

---

the undergrads are beginning to move out. i see them when i emerge from my lab/ apartment, which is seldom, and feel sort of hollow. it's been one academic year, fall and spring, and i knew at the beginning that it would feel like no time at all, and it did.

---

stats final on tuesday, mock defense of my project on thursday, last-minute panic from friday-monday interspersed with heavy drinking, kinko's, running around campus to turn everything in by 4:55 pm, and then more heavy drinking, and possibly poker. and then much blogging about everything i learned this year, which was a lot, and not all to do with factor analysis. can't hardly wait

On Growing Old

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;
My dog and I are old, too old for roving.
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nore share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.

Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power,
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower.
Spring-time of man, all April in a face.
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts, or loiters, or is loud,
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain when the summers parch.
Give me but these, and though the darkness close
Even the night will blossom as the rose.

John Masefield

12 days. i wish i had a t-shirt i could walk around in that says this is graduate school. you know, there are exaggerations, and jokes (thank you, minz, and other people, for thinking of me), and false bravado, but there's no honest way of disguising the fact that this is hell. i wake up, i drink 2 cups of coffee, i don't even really stop for lunch (food just seems to happen, somehow -- i'm not dead, so clearly nutrition must be coming from somewhere), and the rest of the time i'm just submerged in this thesis, or studying for my statistics finals, or being bombarded with e-mail. the weekend was fantastic, admittedly, but i'm 48 hours into the week, and it was only a couple of hours ago i realised it was tuesday. and when i go to bed, in the early hours of the morning, i dream of microsoft excel.

singapore day

Manhattan, NY

I went. I wasn't going to -- the project is due in 2 weeks, and there is a lot left to be done -- but I was feeling really burned out and incapable of working through Saturday. Also, they flew Makansutra hawkers in to cook -- PSA complex bak kut teh, Adam Road Nasi Lemak, Casuarina Road Prata -- so even though I didn't admit it to myself there was no real hope of resistance.

Besides, I figure that it's time to start healing, to start being a little bit more sanguine about my cultural identity crisis. Not that I see myself ever endorsing what we are told is "Singaporean". I don't think I'll ever not being at harsh odds with a culture so simultaneously false, hypocritical, conservative and smug. The critical thing for me, now, is to not be angry, because, really, it's not a fault. Some people are hurting, but on balance, from a purely utilitarian perspective, the vast majority of Singaporeans are getting what they want, and loving it. Where in the world don't some people hurt?

It's not a fault, it's a cultural, collective, and conscious decision, and anger does nothing because I'm getting angry not on behalf of anyone, but at the idea that people would want to live that way, much the same way you feel frustrated at a child for not understanding something that is patently obvious to you. It doesn't even have to be painful, or pitiable, or worthy of scorn. It's just...if anything, it's small. It's like...take all the rhetoric and propaganda and economic success and realise that it's all just one thing, one idea. Everything -- HDB estates, National Service, flag waving on August 9th, Phua Chu Kang, bringing satay to Wollman Rink on a sunny day in April -- for the purposes of "feelings towards Singapore" it's all quintessentially one thing, and if you can see it that way then the issue takes on manageable proportions, because now you're not getting angry with 4 million people and 40 years of public policy, but a solitary idea that vanishes in comparison to the infinity of everything else. Better still, the idea itself is circular: this is my country, this is my flag, this is my future, this is my life. Singapore is Singapore, in the way that God told Moses "I am what I am" at the burning bush. When you define a thing as "everything that you could possibly want", it's a necessary truism that you won't want anything else.

So now, as you can see, New York and the Ivy League are part of Singapore -- and I say this almost literally, because I'm not talking about the physical places, but the concepts of what they are. All borders nowadays are ideological anyway (which is why no matter where I live I'll not be Singaporean; the ethos does not encompass me). So we lined up in what may as well have been Adam Road, to all intents and purposes, and got our nasi lemak, and I called Von who was disbelieving, and anyway late to go build his table. There was a goody bag with a Bread Talk voucher ("for when you come home") and a packet of rubber bands in it, which I actually need rather urgently (the rubber bands, not the flosss). And Wong Kan Seng, and a million gay performers on stage, and finally both Kinjal and I bumped into someone we knew with the small world anthem running in an endless midi loop through my head as i nodded and smiled.

We met up with Grace and her brother for dinner much later on, after a failed trip to Serendipity Cafe (1.5-hour wait. Did you know that Kate Beckingsale was in that? It's scary how I have absolutely zero recall of that movie even though I remember with perfect clarity the details of the day I went to see it.) Grace was in town to watch Kevin Spacey on Broadway, and we had a nice normal conversation and drinks. Which brings us back to why I don't want to be angry -- because it's very tiring, and vexatious, and I talk about my frustration in 15 billion ways on this blog and to people and nothing ever comes of it, when most of what I want in life comes with nice normal conversation and drinks. The issue has been talked to death, and I'm tired of it -- and yet there's so much more, miles to go before I sleep, the quest to calmly, impartially ask: Why? Why did this single idea work so well? Why were you in Central Park that day?

the usual disclaimer: if entries are sparse, i aten't dead, just overworked.

Etiquette

The Ballyshannon foundered off the the coast of Cariboo,
And down in fathoms many went the captain and the crew;
Down went the owners--greedy men whom hope of gain allured:
Oh dry the starting tear, for they were heavily ensured.

Besides the captain and the mate, the owners and the crew,
The passengers were also drowned excepting only two:
Young Peter Gray, who tasted teas for Baker, Croop & Co.
And Somers, who from Eastern shores, imported indigo.

These passengers, by reason of their clinging to a mast
Upon a desert island were eventually cast.
They hunted for their meals, as Alexander Selkirk used,
But they couldn't chat together--they had not been introduced.

For Peter Gray, and Somers too, though certainly in trade,
Were properly particular about the friends they made;
And somehow thus they settled it without a word of mouth--
That Gray should take the northern half, while Somers took the South.

On Peter's portion oysters grew--a delicacy rare,
But oysters were a delicacy Peter couldn't bear,
On Somers' side was turtle, on the shingle lying thick,
Which Somers couldn't eat, because it always made him sick.

Gray gnashed his teeth with envy as he saw a mighty store,
Of turtle unmolested on his fellow-creature's shore.
The oysters at his feet aside impatiently he shoved,
For turtle and his mother were the only things he loved.

And Somers sighed in sorrow as he settled in the south,
For the thought of Peter's oysters brought the water to his mouth.
He longed to lay him down upon the shelly bed, and stuff:
He had often eaten oysters, but had never had enough.

How they wished an introduction to each other they had had
When on board the Ballyshannon! And it drove them nearly mad.
To think how very friendly with each other they might get,
If it wasn't for the arbitrary rule of etiquette!

One day when out a hunting for the mus ridiculus,
Gray overheard his fellow man soliloquizing thus:
"I wonder how the playmates of my youth are getting on,
McConnell, S.B. Walters, Paddy Byles, and Robinson?"

These simple words made Peter as delighted as could be
Old chummies at the charterhouse were Robinson and he!
He walked straight up to Somers, then he turned extremely red.
Hesitated, hummed and hawed a bit, then cleared his throat and said:

"I beg your pardon--pray forgive me if I seem too bold,
But you have breathed a name I know familiarly of old.
You spoke aloud of Robinson--I happened to be by.
"You know him?" "Yes, extremely well" "allow me, so do I".

It was enough: they felt they could more pleasantly get on,
For (ah, the magic of the fact!) they each knew Robinson!
And Mr. Somers' turtle was at Peter's service quite,
And Mr. Somers punished Peter's oyster beds all night.

They soon became like brothers from community of wrongs:
They wrote each other little odes and sang each other songs;
They told each other anecdotes disparaging their wives;
On several occasions, too, they saved each other's lives.

They felt quite melancholy when they parted for the night,
And got up in the morning soon as ever it was light;
Each other's pleasant company they reckoned so upon,
And all because it happened that they both knew Robinson.

They lived for many years on that inhospitable shore,
And day by day they learned to love each other more and more.
At last, to their astonishment, on getting up one day,
They saw a frigate anchored in the offing of the bay.

To Peter an idea occurred. "Suppose we cross the main?
So good an opportunity may not be found again".
And Somers thought a minute, then ejaculated "Done!
I wonder how my business in the City's getting on?"

"But stay," said Mr. Peter: "when in England as you know,
I earned a living tasting teas for Baker, Croop and Co.,
I may be superceded--my employer thinks me dead!"
"Then come with me," said Somers, "and taste indigo instead".

But all their plans were scattered in moment when they found
the vessel was a convict ship from Portland, outward bound;
When a boat came off to fetch them, though they felt it very kind,
To go on board they firmly but respectfully declined.

And both the happy settlers roared with laughter at the joke,
They recognized a gentlemanly fellow pulling stroke:
'Twas Robinson--a convict, in an unbecoming frock!
Condemned to seven years for misappropriating stock!!!

They laughed no more, for Somers thought he had been rather rash
In knowing one whose friend had misappropriated cash;
And Peter thought a foolish tack he must have gone upon
In making the acquaintance of a friend of Robinson.

At first they didn't quarrel very openly, I've heard;
They nodded when they met, and now and then exchanged a word;
The word grew rare, and rarer still the nodding of the head,
And when they meet each other now, they cut each other dead.

To allocate the island they agreed by word of mouth,
And Peter takes the north again, and Somers takes the south;
And Peter has the oysters, which he hates, in layers thick,
And Somers has the turtle--turtle always makes him sick.

W.S. Gilbert

25 days left. the combination of sleep deprivation and a carousel of aimee mann on the ipod is bringing me to the verge of hallucination during my waking hours. my first task of the day was to boil 6 eggs and 3 pounds of potatoes; this turned out to be the most exciting event in a day full of misregistered images, bad-tempered baristas, and grey drizzly skies.

in the tradition of camilla parker bowls:

shout-out

-- to the other brother, who is going to boston college once he finishes his national servitude/slavery/sycophancy/[insert joke of choice here]. congrats! (even though you read this blog once every two years).

(minz: i know it's early, but let it be said that i'm putting it upon you to show him what there is to see.)

In case you've ever wondered how the date of Easter Sunday is calculated, you may edify yourself here. Quite interesting! Especially, the "April 19 is the mode" fact:



Happy Bunnies Day!

30 days. the data is all in, now it's a question of making something of it. i had 4.5 hours of class in the afternoon, by the end of which i was alternately doodling, dreaming of puppies, and doing the pavlicek bridge quiz -- anything to not have to think about linkage methods in cluster analysis. fridays this month are brutal.

during the break, the present for one of the birthday boys arrived at the department office, necessitating some misdirection and skulduggery as ewa and i smuggled the 4' by 2.5' by 2' box to a suitable hiding spot. i love how amazon ships their stuff in containers that are at least 16 times the size of the product. we had a little debate as to how ewa was going to get the present to the party, and not one graduate student suggested opening the package to see the size of the actual damn thing; instead, we wrestled with the box all the way to the trolley stop, and held up rail traffic for several minutes when it jammed in the doors.

it was a bread maker; the other, more manageable gift the talking heads brick, and the cake was actual several dozen Symbolic Cupcakes with depictions like the sri lankan national flag and "positive psychology" (don't ask). daniel managed to make an appearance, despite his busted leg, and traitor joe, on rotation back from princeton. i ate too many mini-pappadums. the theme of the night was the 80s, and there were too many leotards, and a vigorous, overlong debate about whether lynyrd skynyrd was 70s or 80s (if you think the answer to that is obvious, try another one: pac-man. unquestionably 80s, right? but no! the arcade version first appeared in 1979. point: decades are no longer defined by years). there was also too much discussion of work and research, and you could sense people frantically trying to get drunk to put a stop to that. and still: just before i left at 1, i overheard a conversation about randomized controlled trials, and the problems associated with.

i don't believe we moved house and i wasn't even there.

anyway. from if not now, when, primo levi:

"I studied various things," Mottel replied smugly. "I also studied the Talmud, and you know what the Talmud says about women? It says that you should never speak to a woman that's not your wife, not even in sign language, now with your hands or your feet or your eyes. You mustn't look at her clothes, even when she isn't wearing them. And listening to a woman sing is like seeing her naked. And it's a grave sin if an engaged couple embrace: the woman is then impure, as if she had her period, and she has to cleanse herself in the ritual bath."

"All this is in the Talmud," asked Mendel, who hadn't spoken before.

"In the Talmud and other places," Mottel said.

"What's the Talmud?" Piotr asked. "Is it your Gospel?"

"The Talmud is like a soup, with all the things man can eat in it," Dov said. "But there's wheat and chaff, fruit and pits, meat and bones. It isn't very good, but it's nourishing. It's full of mistakes and contradictions, but for that very reason it teaches you how to use your mind, and anyone who's read it all --"

Pavel interrupted him. "I'll explain what the Talmud is to you, with an example. Now listen carefully: Two chimneysweeps fall down the flue of a chimney; one comes out all covered in soot, the other comes out clean: which of the two goes to wash himself?"

Suspecting a trap, Piotr looked around, as if seeking help. Then he plucked up his courage and answered: "The one who's dirty goes to wash."

"Wrong," Pavel said. "The one who's dirty sees the other man's face, and it's clean, so he thinks he's clean too. Instead, the clean one sees the soot on the other one's face, believes he's dirty himself, and goes to wash. You understand?"

"I understand. That makes sense."

"But wait, I haven't finished the example. Now I'll ask you a second question. Those two chimneysweeps fall a second time down the same flue, and again one is dirty and one isn't. Which one goes to wash?"

"I told you I understood. The clean one goes to wash."

"Wrong," Pavel said mercilessly. "When he washed after the first fall, the clean man saw that the water in the basin didn't get dirty, and the dirty man realized why the clean man had gone to wash. So, this time, the dirty chimneysweep went and washed."

Piotr listened to this, with his mouth open, half in fright and half in curiosity.

"And now the third question. The pair falls down the flue the third time. Which of the two goes to wash?"

"From now on, the dirty one will go and wash."

"Wrong again. Did you ever hear of two men falling down the same flue and one remaining clean while the other got dirty? There, that's what the Talmud is like."

Palm Sunday. We had a visiting priest talk about how suffering is meaningless without Christ's passion, an argument that I strongly dislike, for 2 primary reasons:

1) I'm not sure it's true. "Meaning", as we usually think of it, is probably a human creation anyway, and non-religious people can (and do) find all sorts of meaning in their suffering if they choose. One could even make up an evolutionary story -- suffering is "meaningful" because those who suffer the least incur the fewest fitness penalties etc.

2) Even if it is true, it makes an assumption about the causal direction -- that is to say, it's equally reasonable to say that maybe religion only exists because suffering does. This is the Stark and Finke argument, essentially -- we believe, and invest in belief, as advance payment for the mitigation of suffering on earth. It's then utterly necessary (and, the skeptics would say, very convenient) that our suffering is arbitrary and orthogonal to the strength of our belief, because otherwise, there would no longer be any need for this external and inscrutable source of meaning to exist. Thus, at the very best, religion and suffering are symbiotic -- if we could directly negate our suffering with good acts, if there were any correlation whatsoever, there would be no need to appeal to (a) (G)od for our lives to make sense.

It's very clever really, because here you have one piece of evidence that can be used -- equally convincingly -- both for and against the existence of God. Not that you would ever hear this coming from the pulpit, but I thought I would share.

run #4

wednesday: my subject starts hyperventilating when we put her in the scanner, and for a moment it looks like i'm going to lose the whole run. luckily, she's persuadable, and calms down long enough for us to put her back in and discover that the scanner coil is not working (phase ghosting, or what a brain would look like if drawn by jackson pollock). then, my account gets frozen because of some administrative cockup entirely out of my control, and i decide that it's probably just about time to get back into bed.

thursday: bard's. adrian and i discuss jesus camp. he thinks that all religions should be classified as cults and banned. you know, i've been wondering lately exactly how liberal one can get. i mean, it must be theoretically possible to reach a state where pretty much everything is up for discussion -- not, i stress, that one would necessarily endorse everything (that's just ridiculous) -- but a state in which one could take fanaticism, radical skepticism and everything in between as reasonable -- and be able to announce to everyone honestly and with candor that i don't necessarily agree with you, but i can see where you're coming from. the questions being: (1) is that state in itself reasonable? (2) is that state achievable? and (3) is it desirable? incid.: note to self -- find time to read paul feyerabend's work, in which he criticizes the notion that the scientific method is the best (and only) one for discovering and accumulating knowledge. no one really buys into it, mainly because it leads down the path of babies and bathwater, but still, it's intuitively appealing because it contains, i think a grain of truth. as i was explaining to a. on the way to DC last year, scientists have to believe in a null hypothesis, and the null hypothesis of any physical causative chain is God. which is not quite like a god-of-the-gaps argument if you think about it, because it's an a priori statement, a non-moving goalpost. and for that reason i like it, and am surprised more scientists don't like it as well.

friday: end of run; n=7. i spend the morning googling the lyrics of we didn't start the fire. all those years wondering what the hell "children of the little mind" could possibly be. idiot. this is like kristen's "totally blitzed by a fart". also: they run in chronological order! we went to a very cheap (but pretentious) place for dinner, and i had "capon" with unidentifiable stuff, and felt a little sick eating it because it looked so much an animal.

saturday: 37 days to go. DISSERTATION TIP #5: IF YOU MUST PANIC, TIME IT WELL. but, oh! it's been weeks and weeks and i'm still writing the methods section, which is the easiest part, and exams are fast upon us again, and friday night lights episodes look at me accusingly every time i turn on my computer.

i was going to give you homework, our stats professor said, but because it's such a nice day out today, i'm not. and well, it was, the first real day of spring, as in no jackets, golden retrievers frisking in the park, shirtless guys playing volleyball on the quad. the return of good weather has more significance for me this year. for the first time in a while, i've been in a temperate zone all winter, and it was a moderately rough one by philadelphian standards (i think) -- at least three snowfalls i recall that gave folks serious pause when stepping out of the house. but i think we're truly done with that, and everyone was out, even daniel who busted his foot a couple of weeks ago, and there were no excel worksheets, just milk chug and spaghetti tops and sunshine streaming down.

the twop forums are down and i cannot scream to [people who care] about the battlestar galactica season finale!!

(also: friday night lights is terrific, but i cannot get hooked on it now. please let me be good.)

also --

-- it would have been ok except that i have this deadline like the bloody sword of damocles over my head. 6 weeks to go.

after a long period of working elsewhere, i returned to the cfn this morning to do my data processing, only to strengthen my hypothesis that no one ever does any actual work there. there was music, random tracks from a hellishly schizophrenic itunes playlist, going from tupac to pachelbel and phish to a philharmonic, everyone's adrenaline pumping and heart rate going a hundred a minute from the mood changes and people yelling at each other about kal penn as adjunct professor and which fruit salad truck is the best and makeup applier that looks just like a biro. and then suddenly indiana jones and the last crusade was put up on the widescreen tv and it was that scene in the library with harrison ford and the piledriver. the server crawling like a dying man in the desert, and then koch's for lunch (emily's treat) and 3/4 of the day gone with only 2 datasets processed. not good. not good at all.

the unfortunate truth

the answers to the questions "is research important?", and "is your research important?" are often not the same.

one more word on going back for the summer. the dialectic -- of place, and being a stranger, or whatever have you -- is an intriguing one, and, knowing that everyone has to be saddled with some kind of struggle, i'm not entirely unhappy with what i got. it's definitely more interesting than starving on the streets.

i dreamed last night that i was a contestant on big brother (even though i've never watched a full episode of the show). it was time for the immunity challenge, whatever the hell they call it, and julie chen brought in a vat of ladybugs, which she proceeded to dump all over the floor. it was completely unclear what we were supposed to do, and some of the women began screaming, and then all of a sudden the ladybugs began swelling up until they were as large as beachballs, and furry, and i woke up convinced that my bed was full of them. diagnosis: too much wii before bedtime.

i've started making tentative summer plans -- back home for a few weeks in august, i think, and maybe a short trip in may if i can afford it. i've been soliciting opinions about whether it's weird to travel alone, since certain parties have sold me up the river. you know, when you read the blogs of people who travel solo, the instinctive thought is "cool" -- but i suspect that that's only because you become their companion by dint of reading the blog, thus mitigating the weirdness of the solitary journey. or maybe i'm just thinking about it too hard.

home. it's strange to think of it. when i was at duke, and was back in singapore for 3 months of the year, it seldom felt that i had truly left -- i was always either coming or going. and now -- it frightens me a little, all those things i was worrying about last august, bifurcating trajectories and so forth. and i kind of understand not wanting to face that, wanting to believe that memories might be enough, that reality is only perfect when it's frozen.

i have allowed myself, over the past few months, to like my life here. in college, as an undergrad, i found it hard to let go -- the breaks were lilypads, so that even while i was enjoying myself i thought of it as just an enjoyable (3-year) vacation from "real life". and i'm slightly ashamed of that, and i know that many singaporeans -- i've met lots of them (BONDED) -- take this to extremes; they "like" their overseas college experience only because at the back of their minds, they know that they're going to go back home and lie through their asses to everyone about what a fantastic, awesome, eye-opening, life-changing experience it was and have a billion public flickr albums with bulletpoints detailing exactly why this was so. the next step, of course, being angst -- why don't i like it as much overseas? what's wrong with me? i can't possibly actually like singapore more. i've been there. i just read a blog entry about someone in sydney who is there at this actual literal moment.

it's a conundrum, and has something to do with "to thine own self be true" or whatever, and i think that the light at the end of the tunnel is when everything unravels and you see the goddess and realise that anything higher than "i'm happy", or "i'm miserable" is, from the standpoint of living day-to-day, largely unimportant, and the unfortunate byproduct of an overlarge frontal lobe. so here it goes. i like it here, i truly do, even though i have crappy days and weeks. and -- at the same time -- i'm looking forward to going home. it will not be like before, ever again, but if you screwed a confession out of me, i'd tell you that i miss people too much to care. and so it goes, and so it goes, and you're the only one who knows.

run #3

so much work for so little data, but at least what i have so far seems to be assembling itself into some kind of sensible story. 50 days to the deadline. we've started the too-scary process of talking about committees and what the defense is going to be like. everything's moving entirely too fast, how did so much time go by?

st. patty's day. by 2 pm, drunk, green-shirted people ("RUB FOR GOOD LUCK") were already staggering around UC, and lines were forming outside the blarney stone and smokey joe's. i got into a rather brief and pointless discussion with a colleague about what st. patrick actually did to be canonized, pointless because neither of us knew anything beyond the fact that he's either the patron saint of ireland, or beer, or both (wiki tells me that he may have driven the snakes out of ireland and resurrected some dead people).

we declined the mid-afternoon drinking and went to eat at the newly-reopened samosa on 13th and walnut. the service was terrible -- one gay waiter who wrote our orders down, repeated them (2 mistakes), disappeared into the kitchen, reappeared 5 minutes later to repeat the order again (2 more mistakes), and then proceeded to bring out the wrong appetizers. fortunately, this meant they were free, and also very good. the vadai was unusually crunchy, although i will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that the novelty was intentional. the pakoras won points for not tasting like they had been fried in three-day old oil. coconut chutney and thin but flavorful vegetable curry came on the side. the indian/sri lankan people, ewa and stephen had dosa with various permutations of fillings, i got the bangan bhurta with naan, and alyson to my disappointment ordered a lasagna (but i am good at swallowing my tongue nowadays, and proceeded to do so with great enthusiasm). i snitched bits of dosa while waiting for my food to appear (it took ages), and regretted not ordering it -- i think it's their specialty, and only $4.95. my naan turned out to be hot and fresh and light, but the curry was very non-descript and completely uniform in texture. oh well. i do want to go back to try the prata at some point.

it was still early, and people had not decided if they wanted to brave the pubs, so we adjourned to naked chocolate for sweets and making stephen suffer because he had given them up for lent. they had new cupcakes, and a four-foot chocolate bunny. now that i've been there a bunch of times, i think i'm ready to say that i don't like naked as much as bakerzin (sic) or even (glug) TCC, notwithstanding the 1.5 million schoolkids who seem to pack the latter places 24/7. and, since it's going to be spring (4 inches of snow on thursday!), i'm officially ready to move on to capogiro as being my dessert place of choice.

we eventually decided that we should just go back to the hangout house and play poker, so that we did. as it usually happens, the one person who had never touched a deck of cards in her life (who will remain unnamed) cleaned almost everyone else out, leaving stephen and myself to slug it out for second (drowned by the river twice, don't ask. does anyone know where the terms flop, turn and river came from? i'm sure von knows the answer.) a lot of white russians floated in from the kitchen, which led to a few eastern european jokes and someone confessing that they were almost named "nadine". i'm glad that the mother and the father decided on good, sensible names for all of us; i don't think i would ever have recovered from romulus, or henry.

there's an article recently published in science going around the lab with some very interesting findings on sleep and memory consolidation. these guys made their subjects play a matching game with a 6x5 array of cards before they went to bed (turn over pairs of cards to try and find matching ones), and asked them to memorize the positions of the cards for the following day. while they were doing this, they squirted a rose-scented aerosol at them to form a stimulus-context association, and then put them to bed. the experimental group got rose aerosol puffed at them during periods of slow-wave sleep (the deepest kind), while various control groups got no puffing during the task, no puffing during their sleep, puffing during REM and so forth. the group that was puffed at during SWS performed significantly better than all the controls (and i would say, looking at the numbers, that they were practically as well as statistically significant).

now, while this is very cool from a scientific standpoint, just think about the real-world implications. the task isn't so far removed from things you actually need to do -- i would say if you were comparing performance on it to, say, studying for an exam, you'd find that it's a pretty valid instrument. and think how easy it would be for an engineer to rig up something for make use if this information at home. all you need is a simple 8-electrode eeg system hooked up to a custom-made glade air-freshener doodad so that it spritzes the scent of your choice in your face every time it sees delta waves. then, inhale huge amounts of that scent while you're studying, and go to bed. instant memory boost! the marketing potential is staggering. why don't i ever come up with experiments like that? i want to retire at 35 too.

From On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:

In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part For the Gods are everywhere

The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to features of their work that would ordinarily not be visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences. So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps say, there was no bullshit.

It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods as in some way analogues of bullshit. But in what way? Is it the resemblance that bullshit itself is invariably produced in a careless or self-indulgent manner, that it is never finely crafted, that in the making of it there is never the meticulously attentive concern with details to which Longfellow alludes? Is the bullshitter by his very nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined? The word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who -- with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth -- dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

run #2

-- has begun. there are only 3 runs of any importance in a study: the first run, the second run, and the run with the one idiot outlier that you have to explain away or hide under the carpet. this last one is going to be soon in coming. the room for my subjects had been thoughtfully heated to about 110 degrees, so that was an issue for a while, but i'm getting used to pulling my weight and (per the advisor) making sure i act like i run the show. director of the thermostat, that's me.

our lab is in the process of acquiring a new mr-compatible eeg system. simultaneous eeg-fmri experiments to date have been, on the most part, hopeless, for a number of technical reasons i'm not going to go into, so this is no low risk investment. i'm actually quietly pessimistic about the whole endeavor, but (a) this has nothing to do with my thesis, and (b) it's not my money being spent. in an exact repeat of my first days in the ex-lab, hengyi sent me a gopher e-mail asking me to lend them my head, which meant a morning looking at the inside of the scanner bore and the rest of the day walking around with conductive paste in my hair. this turned out to be unexpectedly gratifying; pan-clinical was right after, and the first thing hilary said to me when we were done was that my hair looked really good. now, people who know me know that i don't really give a crap about styling my hair, so this was like george w. bush receiving a compliment about his penetrating insights into how to fight the global war on terror. i would have dismissed it as facetiousness, except that dr. sb said exactly the same thing a few hours later, and we all know about lightning and striking twice. there were a few mad moments of temptation, but i came home and washed my hair, and will not be spending several hundred dollars on gritty electolyte gel because (a) it costs several hundred dollars, (b) it's a really stupid idea, and (c) i have too many weaknesses already to add vanity to the bottom of the list.

i woke up today and decided that spring break ought to have at least one day of actual break in it, even for graduate students. so i went to the mall and bought new shoes.

i met adrian in the break room at lunchtime today making a ketchup sandwich. he must have caught me staring because he immediately looked sheepish and explained that he had intended to go out to buy deli meats but had run out of time. embarrassment all around, and then i pulled the shasta-and-her-meatless-cheeseburger story out from the collection of old stories that really shouldn't be told anymore, and we both laughed nervously, and i almost felt bad enough to run out right away and bring back a slice of bologna.

From The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno (quoted in Paradise News, David Lodge)

In the most secret recess of the spirit of the man who believes that death will put an end to his personal consciousness and even to his memory forever, in that inner recess, even without his knowing it perhaps, a shadow hovers, a vague shadow lurks, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty, and while he tells himself: "There is nothing for it but to live this passing life, for there is no other!" at the same time he hears, in this most secret recess, his own doubt murmur: "Who knows?..." He is not sure he hears aright, but he hears. Likewise, in some recess of the soul of the true believer who has faith in the future life, a muffled voice, the voice of uncertainty, murmurs in his spirit's ear: "Who knows?..." Perhaps these voices are no louder than the buzzing of mosquitoes when the wind roars through the trees in the woods; we scarcely make out the humming, and yet, mingled with the roar of the storm, it can be heard. How, without this uncertainty, could we ever live?

Slowly, stealthily, spring is arriving. Friday was Dianne's exam, which was intensely boring, and then glorious release into the sunshine, and spring break. I did my time at the beaches as an undergrad, but as you grow older, there's a trick you can learn so that Cancun and the like become less geographical places, and more states of mind. Spring break -- whose origins, I am old, were in Ft. Lauderdale, 1885 -- is exciting not because of the exotic escapes, but because of its position in the narrative arc of the academic year -- it's the caesura right before the final swell towards finals, coinciding with winter's thaw and the symbolic renewal of the world. Its power comes from its situation in time, and the rest is a facade. Fortunately, one doesn't have to realise any of this to get drunk and sunburned and have the time of ones life.

I picked up a copy of The Time of Our Singing from Last Word on the way home -- my third (one went to Yen and the other is god knows where) -- and spent a while just reading random bits of it and having small prosegasms. I haven't read anything new for almost 2 weeks now -- on Wednesday I abandoned studying at about 10 and picked up The Tempest, which I've reread with unhealthy regularity since J2. More recently, I've begun to think of Prospero's magic as science (per Asimov's quote), which will be my way of keeping myself honest once I publish a few papers in Nature and win the Nobel Prize. (Right.)

The evening was prospective's party round #2 (electric boogaloo), which was at Jared's place in West Philly, Crime Central. These were mostly folks in experimental psych with dull-as-ditchwater research interests. I just can't get into basic cognitive psych -- it feels so passe, somehow. Kinjal and I had made a pact to do our first Irish car bomb together (as an early St. Patrick's day thing), and the assertion that it would taste like chocolate milk turned out to be exactly correct. Between The Pogues, Flogging Molly, and Bailey's, I would say that the Irish pretty much have a monopoly on the good things in life.

Break is promising. I'll go to New York for a bit to visit (duke)ailian if she's free, and make root vegetable casserole, and write my thesis. and 300 is coming out on Thursday. And then back into my hole, and seven weeks of escalating complaints until my defense in May. But first, a pause.

unproductivity

time spent browsing through this site today: 90 minutes.

# words of thesis written: 145

(my favorites are these:

She was like celsius: has a lot of degrees and is still not employed in the U.S.
He was like a toilet seat: constantly being put down by women
He was like a water cooler: drunk at the office

and

She was like a treadmill: inclined to make things difficult)

flies like an arrow

prospectives visited us yesterday, which means that very soon i'm going to be a second-year, which is terrifying beyond all measure. the day started promisingly with a talk by marvin chun on boundary extension, and ended with a party where i tried, and succeeded, in killing a headache with vodka. i also uncovered further evidence for why sean m. is my clone, and the continuation of bad movie night is on the cards. (first up: troll)

"Scrod" was one of the answers in the NYT crossword yesterday. This was a new one to me, apparently a Bostonian thing:

(from Boston Online)

SCROD: A small, ambiguous piece of fish that never knows if it's cod or haddock. Some people claim that "scrod" is a young cod, while "schrod" is a young haddock, but, in fact, there's no difference - it's basically whatever's cheaper at the fish pier that day.

"So a guy lands at Logan and gets in a cab and says to the driver, 'Take me somewhere I can get scrod!" And the driver says, "I've never heard anyone use the pluperfect participle before!"

(cp: tell me you don't love that.)

I realise with no small measurement of disappointment that in the last 6 years, my favorite movie among the best picture nominees has only once won the prize (LotR: RotK). I liked Traffic, LotR: FotR, The Pianist, Sideways and Brokeback Mountain more than the eventual winners, and this year, that tally is going to grow when Little Miss Sunshine loses to The Departed. I blame the Republicans entirely. (This is also the implicit reason why a show like 24 gets renewed for 68 bazillion seasons while Arrested Development is ignominiously canceled in its prime).

friggin' typos...

happy new year!

we congregated for the surprise party slightly before 9. there was a superabundance of cookies, and a "birthday princess" paper tiara (no sash), and a cake that looked like it had tomato paste for icing. (one of the twins -- he lives in the same house as kinjal, the birthday girl -- nearly ruined the surprise earlier in the day by bursting in on us having lunch, high on painkillers and icing sugar, and announcing that he needed to go and buy eggs.

kinjal: but we still have a few in the fridge.
a.j.: oh! but i don't want to go all the way home.
n.j.: wawa! wawa has hard-boiled eggs.
kinjal: cold, gross ones.
a.j.: i love cold and gross! here i go!

the cake was caramel. the surprise was...more effective than these things usually are, in that the lights stayed off till the right time, and there was a minimal amount of schoolgirl giggling. after that, there was lots of chocolate, and a good time was had by all. much later on, mary (the only other chinese person there) and i started talking about CNY, and how horrible it is to spend it in a place where the crappy cultural steamroller always comes along and squashes the holiday (either that or it gets ignored entirely).

we did decide that the least we could do was eat real food, so the next day we grabbed joe from the ccn (mary's boyfriend) and one of his research assistants, and a bunch of law students, and went to chungking, where they have leng3pan2 and huo3guo1 and a hearty disdain for caucasians. it's a b.y.o.b., but we had all neglected this fact, so no o.b.s had been b.ed, and we decided to send a contingent down the road in quest of pinot grigio.

the food was good, on the most part. the honey walnut prawns were an absolute dead ringer for the salad prawns at swa garden. there was tilapia, which are apparently capable of transitive inference, which is very interesting if you're a cognitive scientist, and also shows that they are smarter than babies. the cong1you2bing3 was too greasy, and also too insubstantial, but it's usually the triumph of hope over experience that makes me order that anyway. there were various vegetarian things, and a huge tureen of suan1 cai4 tang1, and gross dumplings that would have made the baby jesus cry, especially if he had ever gone to margaret drive.

the lawyers were a more interesting bunch of people that you usually get if you put your hand in a barrel and scoop out a fistful of them. larry in particular has had quite a life -- he lived in beijing for several years (and speaks fluent mandarin) before deciding that doing a JD in china was beyond even his linguistic capabilities, and moving back to philly. he is also a big fan of chinese punk rock, which quite frankly i wasn't even aware existed. there were vague threats of karaoke, but despite the wine, cooler heads prevailed, and we were spared that particular ordeal. we didn't once have to talk about my research, which was fantastic, but between the salad prawns and talking about cate blanchett/judi dench i was also reminded one too many times of people i'm not getting to see this CNY, which was not.

nevertheless, happy pig year. be prosperous, as always, and eat without guilt. there will come a time when the goodies will catch up with you, but by then, you'll be too dead to care.

we were still suffering from the aftershocks of the snowstorm on thursday. by mid-morning, large chunks of ice were starting to melt and slide off the roof of huntsman hall, and after several near-calamities the police cordoned off a slice of the 38th and walnut intersection, backing up traffic several blocks. despite the housing laws, there was no shoveling of sidewalks in evidence, and it took me several minutes of slipping and sliding before i decided i was not going to navigate the probably-impassable stretch of road leading to my lab, and parked myself in cereality instead (stopping for an hour in the bookstore to read travels in the scriptorium, which was a lot like, but not quite as good as, the new york trilogy

i've started plugging away at my masters' thesis. i can already tell that it's going to be too long, and deadly boring, but i don't care. given that i don't actually get to choose my first-year committee, i feel that it's only fair that i get to inflict whatever i want on them in the way of writing. while working, i drink coffee until i can't, and then i grab anything nearby that's bite-sized and sugary and continue with that, until my eyes are as big as saucers and i can't physically sit still, and then i go run for an hour or till i'm exhausted. it's like the kreb's cycle writ large. i'll detox in may.

the most anti-love film we could come up with was some like it hot, a good movie, but a very poor attempt at the theme. far more unromantic was trudging through six inches of slush the entire day, and stepping into a freezing puddle that came up to my knees.

so this is richly amusing. i was talking to the mother the other day, and she told me that james cook university, one of the places i briefly considered attending in my hour of darkest desperation (you remember it), the school which informed me flat out that i had "insufficient research experience" to begin work with them on a clinical psychology phd, had the gall, the temerity to call and ask if i was interested in enroling in their masters of guidance counselling program. the mother talked to them and was completely diplomatic, which is very lucky for them, because if they had somehow got to me first it would have been a bloodbath.

snowing all day, but in my heart it's warm

battlestar galactica renewed!

i liked this little scene from danny boyle's millions (conceit: the kid talks with dead saints):

DAMIAN
St. Peter! Died A.D. 64?

ST PETER
All right, don't remind us.

DAMIAN
The money...it's robbed.

ST PETER
I know. Patron saint of keys, locks and general security, man. Including up there. I'm on the door.

DAMIAN
Is it still all right? If it's robbed? Can you still do good with it? Or should you give it back? I thought it was a miracle. But it's just robbed.

ST. PETER
Damian, listen. One day I was with you-know-who. Jesus. And he went up into the mountains and thousands of people followed him. The police said five thousand. Pfft...five thousand.

DAMIAN
Everybody knows this story. Loaves and fishes.

ST. PETER
See, I knew you'd say that. That's what everybody says ... Anyway, this kid comes up to us. About your size. His name was...no, I've forgotten. I still see him sometimes. Anyway, he comes up with these loaves and fishes. Sardines. And Jesus blesses them and passes the plate round. Now the first person he passes it to passes it on. He doesn't take anything, he just passes it on. D'you know why?

DAMIAN shakes his head.

ST PETER
'Cos he had a piece of lamb hidden in his pocket. And as he's passing the fish, he sneaks a piece of meat out, and pretends he's taken it off the plate. D'you see what I'm saying? And the next person: exactly the same story. Every single bastard one of them has their own food. And every one of them's keeping it quiet, looking after number one. But as that plate went around with the sardines on it, they all got their own food out and started to share. And then, that plate went all the way around and back to Jesus, and it'd still got the fish and the loaves on it. I think Jesus was a bit taken aback. He says: 'What happened?'. And I just says: 'Miracle!' And at first, I thought I'd fooled him. But now I see it was a miracle. One of his best. But this little kid had stood up, and everybody there just...got bigger. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

DAMIAN
Not really.

ST PETER
I'm talking about you.

DAMIAN
Now I'm really lost.

ST PETER
You're trying too hard. That kid -- he wasn't planning on doing a miracle. He was planning on anything. Except lunch. Something that looks like a miracle turns out to be dead simple.

found poem

(in my lab's bathroom -- for real!)

if you cannot be clean and neat
and not get urine on the seat
of the toilet or the floor,
please use another facility.

one man's opinion

i think samoas are the best of the girl scout cookies, but i'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Run #1 ended, and I happily kicked my subjects out. Once they were gone, Hengyi and I started talking analysis strategies and getting excited in a geeky Chinese sort of way, and proposing about 5 additional projects that we want to start planning next week. This is why Asians are going to take over the world.

---

Also: V-Day. I was desperate to not stay at home, but everyone else was going to The Vagina Monologues, so it was a tough call. The first time I went to TVM being performed it was at Duke to support Grace and her coming out as a feminist, and I think that was entertaining more because of people in the audience desperately trying to screw themselves into their chairs during the "cunt" monologue than than the performance itself. I miss the American South. (Jared was telling me during intermission that some people in Arkansas have probably never even heard the word "vagina" emerging from someone's mouth. I advised him to buy a bumper sticker.)

You may recall my feelings about feminist poets in singapore; here, I think it's a different story altogether. The problem with Ivy League college students performing TVM to other Ivy League college students is that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, and the players know that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, but everyone has to pretend that no one does. Which means, essentially, that the performance is reduced to ranting and cheap laughs as everyone, especially the men, struggle desperately to feel the pain of women on a level that's at least somewhat real. It's very hard to both fully understand the problem of sexual inequality, while treating women as women, much the same way that it's very hard to understand economics and be a good businessman. Theory gets in the way of reality, and then everyone has to fight extra hard to relate to things emotionally and practically, and really, it's all downhill from there.

as you might expect, the neuroimaging group is full of people from china and taiwan, and they plot and scheme all day long, in chinese, about their grand plans to usurp the PIs and take over the department (sometimes, i'm given to understand, in the presence of said PIs). (if i do drop out of grad school, by the way, i'm going to write a pilot for a sitcom based on these machinations, sort of ricky gervais meets barry evans meets mark lee). hengyi and wenchao were having one such conversation in front of me in the scanner room this morning, and about 5 minutes in, it suddenly occured to wenchao that i could probably understand what they were saying. a spy! he says, hilariously, and i promise on my life that i won't tell, and he offers me a ferrero rocher that's been sitting in his jacket pocket for goodness knows how long.

a little later, hengyi and i started talking about post-penn plans, whether or not i intend to go back to my police state, and he suggested i join a chinese university and try and get tenure there, listing a multitude of good reasons for doing so (money! fame! resources! red dragon rising!) it's a far-out, almost inconceivable, but extremely intriguing notion. i think it would make me both successful and miserable beyond anything i've ever known.

(the scans went well, in case you're wondering.)

Run #1

-- of my study is underway. The day started at 6:30, when I stepped out of my apartment into the coldest predawn of winter so far, several degrees under zero, and the wind like icicles stabbing into my lungs. There was no one else out and about, no food trucks with steam and good food smells, and by the time I reached the hospital I was in a very miserable state. With no time to thaw, I stuttered my way through the nurses' briefing like an apoplectic, and got an A for looking like a complete idiot. So much for good first impressions.

The rest of the day was running up and down locating missing signage and battling Matlab with spears and trying to reassure The Advisor that I know what the hell is going on with this project. I sense looming catastrophe, and all because of a very simple formula: Successful Research = constant - k*number of people involved*chance each of those people will perpetrate a FUBAR. Now, (1) there are too many people involved in this project, and (2) judging from past experience, k, which is variable between but stable within individuals, = about 18,214 for me. In the ex-Boss' lab, there were very few people directly involved with data collection: me, and WC, and M____, and maybe one or two other interns that I could bitchslap around, and who didn't really count as people, so there was enough in the way of damage control to prevent the last project I did from being a total disaster. This is a whole different kettle of fish: undergraduate work-study students (OMG), pre-med interns, and nurses with minds of their own. Basically, I'm screwed.

I was supposed to meet Ewa in the Green Line after dinner to discuss the regression problems for tomorrow, but she called to cancel because SAS is still kicking her butt. I thought this was good news in terms of keeping warm, but the central heating in the apartment isn't coping too well with the weather, and cold is seeping in through the walls and floorboards, so that anywhere outside of a two-foot diameter of the radiator is intolerable. It's exhausting. I'm going to make hot tea, and not do any more work today (although I should). I picked up, at random, The Minus Man, by Lew McCreary; I'm going to crawl into bed with it, and hope that it's as good as the blurb suggests.

i do love doing groceries at trader joe's. they've really cornered the college student market, and entirely through their packaging -- looks like gourmet food, but costs no more than the stuff you find in local supermarkets. it's a simple idea that some very successful companies have managed to grasp -- if it's cheap, college students will buy it; if it's cheap and makes you feel like a rich person, college students will buy it en masse.

Punxsutawney Phil was wrong. It's going to be winter forever.