i have been definitively spoiled by the luxury of space in our house in philly; the room here feels small, and is filled with stuff that is Not Mine. also, for the first time i'm noticing how many cars go by on the expressway, day and night -- and what a silly thing to "notice" for someone who's been a city kid all his life! -- but it was quiet in the mews, except for the ambulance sirens at night (not kidding). i suppose it will become background before long, but for now the traffic is a constant symphony, motorcycle crescendoes on top of a recurring motif of growls from the trucks and public buses. i slept with the window open last night and woke in some confusion at 6:45 to its already-furious pace, not entirely sure where i was; the sky was just turning light, i was desperately hungry, and home -- whatever that is -- was never further away.

a new chapter, a new template. sidebar won't be 100% up and running for a bit though.

back in the police state. the more times i come and go, the more life seems like one colossal joke, which i suppose is not the worst thing. have a lot of stuff to do, but everything is kind of interlaced like one giant LSAT logic puzzle where some events have to happen on certain days, some must precede others, but only on a saturday etc. also: frighteningly poor until my first paycheck comes in, which is not until the end of august. ugh.

have already begun to realize that folks here don't understand the concept of doctors who aren't medical doctors -- it's like minz's recent experience of no one knowing what an alumnus is, a hole in the web of knowledge that you can stick your finger through and wiggle. i really should have bought that phdcomics t-shirt that says DOCTOR on the front and OF PHILOSOPHY on the back. or one that just says YOU IDIOT. anyway, resolution #1 of living here is that i will save my high-blood-pressure episodes for the most dire of circumstances lest i end up being hospitalized with an aneurysm before hanukkah. to help cope, i shall hire underlings as soon as possible and make their lives a living hell. what goes around, etc.

A Farewell, Charles Kingsley

I

My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey:
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day.

II

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever
One grand, sweet song.

it's come to the point where i've realized that i can bring so little with me that i'm just letting go entirely, and treating it like starting anew, ala israelites in the desert. went for one last dinner with WH a few days ago and he looked absolutely crestfallen when i told him i was leaving most of my books behind, as if that was the moral equivalent of killing kittens. what i will undoubtedly end up doing is buying doubles of everything in a frenzy of insecurity, and then ruing it when i next relocate to tanzania or wherever the hell it is this stupid life brings me.

and, to you-know-who-you-are, from the power and the glory, graham greene:

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times; even in danger and misery the pendulum swings

First Sunday-sized puzzle. Difficulty *** (out of 5)





Incid., I really wanted to get BYE BYE BIRDIE as a theme answer in here, but ended up leaving it on the cutting room floor. Alas. Still love the title though :)

not having to be in the lab every day is taking its toll on me. i hesitate to use the word withdrawal, but there it is. spent last sunday to tuesday in san antonio, where i had a ridiculously large room overlooking the alamo all to myself, and drank a lot of shiner, and gave a highly unscintillating talk to a room of very bored people. re: the alamo, always thought for some reason that it involved armies of thousands when really there were only several hundred combatants in all. weird. i blame hollywood.



oh, and philly beer week wasn't all i hoped for, but i did get my brewdog stone bashah, which will do for now.

one of the (many) things i'm going to miss when i leave is the incredible variety of beer there is in east coast cities. was telling the mother the other day that my general experience with beer before the age of 23 was that it was foul-tasting water, more or less. only over the past few years has it come to me that microbrews all over the united states and europe are making incredible, affordable stuff, next to none of which is available in south-east asia. boo.

apropos of that, philly beer week starts tomorrow, and i'm on the hunt for:

* brewdog stone bashah (apparently delicious)
* either brooklyn chocolate stout or ommegang chocolate indulgence for the mother
* stone arrogant bastard
* dogfish head chateau jiahu
* gouden carolus from brouwerij het anker (not hard to find, but exceedingly delicious)
* anything and everything from the lost abbey

come along if free!

apparently in 59 days i become an illegal alien.

graduation pictures to follow soon.

so tomorrow it's official, the chips get cashed in, and so forth. as for right now, i'm quite full of bananas foster, and thinking not of past or future, a quite satisfactory state in which to be.

the adviser referred to me in an e-mail today as dr. ___, which, aside from the fact that there are 8 days till graduation, just feels so very wrong. as i was articulating to the brother, it's like how after we graduated from ri/rj we continued to address all our teachers as mr. or mrs. x; hierarchical relationships once established feel like they should be immutable, once ones adviser, always ones adviser, etc. minz says this is very asian, and perhaps she is right, but it still feels that it's the way things should be.

in other news, i would like to make cassoulet, so if anyone has a good recipe please e-mail it to me.

vichyssoise

-- is fun to say, but even more fun to make.

i think the liminal times are often hard to get through -- all ones rhythms go out of whack, all the routines vanish, you're here, you're there, you're packing, then you're gone. i feel, simultaneously, that i should be working and relaxing, which is an excellent way to get nothing done at all.

i will say this: san fran last week was a blast, in that four guiltless days without work was something i had not had for probably almost a year. the ardbeg uigeadail featured prominently, and was delicious, and generally helped me to forget that i'm once more plummeting headfirst into the unknown.

what happened

one of the primary thoughts after getting a phd for me turned out to be: chances seem very good that for this to balance out karmically i'm going to walk out of the psych building and immediately get run over by a freight truck, or abducted by trafalmadorians. instead, there was a light drizzle, and walking uneventfully to mid-atlantic, and eating fried clams as the adrenalin slowly ebbed away.

as usual, there was drama: after my experiences with my masters thesis and qualifying exams, you would think i'd have at least one oral at penn that proceeded in a calm and orderly fashion. instead, the worst was saved for last when i learned 45 minutes before my talk that geoff had been called away for a family medical emergency, and that we may have been able to proceed at all. i've come to believe that after all these years he doesn't quite understand what a phd is, because he also sent a text message to my committee chair to "congratulate" me on being done. point of order: first you defend the dissertation, then the congratulations are due. anyway, the department secretary and our DCT, who both deserve to be canonized, spent the next hour making calls to just about every damn person in the school to figure out what was to be done*, and although there was a 20-minute span where things looked especially grim, and where i was starting to resign myself to Doom, in the end the dean came through and blessed the occasion, essentially forcing our stubborn-as-a-mule director of graduate studies to capitulate, and the rest, as they say, was gravy. well, almost -- because of the fiasco there was no time to buy coffee (thanks to the housemate for stepping up and doing that**), and by the time i actually began my talk, i wasn't no longer actually thinking about the talk at all. naturally, this meant it was one of the best talks i've given in my life. as for the private defense, i've had time to meditate on it, and have decided that it's not the kind of thing one should discuss, its contents sort of like what transpires in a confessional. like, everyone knows it happened, and that (obviously) it wasn't easy, but the actual process is -- well, it literally is a modern-day rite of passage, and like all good rites of passage should not be spoken of lest the magic flee the tribe.

it's been quite a ride. i found myself quite unexpectedly tearing up on my final slide, my acknowledgments slide, and had to take a short but very important moment as the thoughts caught up to the emotions: this much is Done, and new things lie ahead.


* none of this would have been quite as bad had the deadline for defending not been the 26th.

** no coffee = very cranky advisor. no, seriously. you don't know my advisor.

in the words of dr. seuss

"Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one."

here goes nothing.

i defend on wednesday, maybe get a phd, then go out to california on fri. after practicing the talk today, i've sort of realized that the dissertation seminar is a cross between an abomination and a farce, for the following reason: the 3 studies i've done are different enough that there's no way to either use them to tell a coherent story or adequately explain each one in the time given. the antidote, as it has been quite often in grad school, is basically to say heck it, and ride forth on a crest of assumptions and unexplained premises and glossy pictures.

much more importantly, i have yet to figure out what snacks to bring. i'm thinking the canelles from metropolitan bakery, as they are Very Tasty.

how does it feel? was what almost everyone asked me last night, and honestly, it's quite hard to say. i can tell you how it doesn't feel. it doesn't feel like when i finished my last exam as an undergrad and drove back to duke from beaufort with mamie in joy and fear. i'm not sure i would describe happiness as coming into it at all, really. it's like -- it's like in those vampire shows where the protagonist lets her vampire true love feed on her because he's dying, and then she's on death's door herself but has Saved him. or in les miserables, where eponine's been shot, and she's in marius' arms, and she's like: it's all good. or like: "o captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done". something like that. and somewhere beneath all that, you want to laugh at how silly and melodramatic that sentiment is because after it's bound and shelved, the years will bury it, as they'll bury hundreds and thousands of other theses from now until the end of history; i don't think they even last in the way that we would romantically like to believe that memories do, or love, because the specific way you thought about your little problem is for no one else to share, so that even as the knowledge may be transmitted, and may even be important, no one will ever get to experience the unique relationship between you and your ideas that formed and grew in those late nights, early morning hours.

holy *&@%^

my dissertation is turned in. and i'm freaking out just a little bit.

ok. everything gets turned in next wednesday, but i think i'm going to make it on time. there's one more figure i have to make, and some bits are too stylistically ugly for even a mother to love, but i think i'm going to make it. as i said to minz the other day, i almost don't want to look at it any more for fear that it will burst into flames (DISSERTATION TIP #11: your thesis will not burst into flames) but for now, it's there, and exists, in some form that has a non-zero chance of being acceptable to the committee.

i checked the website for doctoral candidates planning to graduate (omg) and discovered at 4:45 pm that 5 pm on april the second was the deadline for ordering regalia, which necessitated the quickest dash between my lab and the school bookshop ever, and on the warmest day of the year so far. the robes are royal blue. nyce. while waiting in line, i mused over how much i miss just browsing in a bookshop, and promised myself that doing so would go on the list of things to do muy rapido after i defend, probably somewhere after "drink lots of beer with friends" and before "go to san francisco and do bloody nothing for 4 days".

in other news, it's spring.