It's very windy here but the sun is bright. That's my contribution to the whole "it's not cold anywhere ahhh global warming" Christmas 2006 weather discussion. It's nice because it makes the inflatable snowmen on people's lawns dance pretty jazzily - I imagine over at the car dealerships it is a veritable discoteque. I went to have a Balboa Bar yesterday and it was delicious despite my pre-vacation conversation with Valerie that led to the realization that even though I couldn't care less if my butter is spreadable or not, the trans-fat gargoyle rules over my fascination with and consumption of ice cream desserts with a magic shell. Damn. My mother's 5th grade class did "internet research" the day before vacation and it was really insane. They each had a laptop and were supposed to look up, in an extremely unguided way, information about "holiday traditions" - such as Christmas, New Years, Channukah (it helped a lot when I decided to erase that from the board and spell it correctly) and Rosh Hahshanah (which was actually supposed to be Ramadan for better ethnographic coverage, so I erased that too, although when it came to the oral presentations it turned out to be sort of a drag in terms of dearth of ritualistic doodads and snacks)(it was also sticky when one of the kids asked if he could print out a picture that said "Happy Ramadan" with a picture of a suicide bomber burning in the background. I said no and made him go to wikipedia, sigh). I feel pretty lucky to be a little bit older than the internet, rather than younger or way older. Although we didn't have an encyclopedia, we did have a big dictionary which I loved to look at because it could answer so many different questions quickly, and I remember doing biography reports on Copernicus and Franz Liszt (it wasn't until middle school that teachers started always assigning the lesbian writers and artists to me?) which were of course wretched but which I was confident in. To me, it seems like it would be good to trust books and people when you are little and then build the skepticism in as you get older. And I think there are probably tools that make the internet smaller and more manageabe for little kids but my mom doesn't know how to use them. At the end of the day, my brother and I who had been highly amused but also slightly concerned at the rate at which "internet research" became "printing out pictures of light up gyroscopic dreidels for $9.99" and "being surprised at how many of the first set of pictures in a 'happy new year' google image search are sexually explicit" (the fact that the actually informative pages were definitely not 5th grade level a problem as well, but at least one I anticipated) finally found the encylopedia software which was installed on each of the laptops but not used. At the very least though, I convinced some of the kids to "recycle" their paper by double siding it back through the printer, and some of them thought that was cool.
There's something funny going on with my tooth. Or with a filling I guess. When I floss, the floss goes in, but it won't come out, and I saw it back and forth, and it frays and I have to go find my scissors and cut one end so I can pull the other end through. And then my tooth feels oddly dislocated, but not painful. I hope it's just loose ceramic and not that my real tooth is shrinking with decay or something.
Sorry. I'm sort of a tooth maniac.
Anyhow, I've been feeling the pull of work more lately. In a good way, like I am a sailor who is married to the sea. It hasn't paid any, like, dividends yet but it's a good thing to feel like you WANT to try hard, and then to try hard, and then to feel like that in itself was worthwhile. I feel sort of frantic at work sometimes, because working in a lab is kinda fitful-startful: you have to wait for things to stir, sometimes for days before they start to react, or because you have to use a sensitive instrument that takes a lot of coaxing to work properly, or you have to purify something and you know that doing that means you'll lose 1/2 of the stuff. And then when there is a problem and you think you need to give yourself time to do some of that back-of-the-brain processing to solve it... what should be in your forebrain? I get heebie jeebies about taking steps forward sometimes because they seem like such tiny steps that maybe I should just stay still and see how long it takes for someone else to notice? I've said this before but I have yet to embrace failure as much as is probably necessary to get anything great accomplished. But those antsy feelings at least for the moment have subsided.
It can get sort of easy to be swept up in little microcosm sociabilities and talking about random "current events" on MSN with people and lose the focus of why you're there at all. I mean I don't even drink coffee and thus don't go on those type of breaks, but I still waste time. And even wasting time is ok, but some things jar myself out of my purpose more than others - I don't know whether going to swim during the workday is such a good idea (convenient time to deliberate this as it's freaking cold outside finally). Therefore I've been trying to get some lab peace, sort of like John and Yoko's bed peace. You know - think about why I am in lab, and what needs to be done, and how I can spend that weird down time in between steps in a way that is a little quieter and less about taking breaks to escape and more about inhabiting labbiness in a happy relaxed way. And not being concerned about the other people around you either going about their business (or going about their distraction) - but not being a weird antisocial iPotty troll to them either. And staying late if staying late sounds good. Etc, etc.
I walked home from school yesterday and the moon looked like a sticker stuck on the sky. Not quite a glow-in-the-dark sticker, but it definitely had that puffy vinyl sticker sheen to it. Man, this tooth thing is still weirding me out.
I need to start writing some drafts of little science writing pieces to practice and have a pool to draw from for an application for an internship I want. I also need to ask my boss to recommend me for it, but he might Cookie Monster-style freak on me since it would mean taking the summer off. Just kidding my boss doesn't Cookie Monster at anyone which is part of why I picked him. But he might say it sounds silly and our cocrystal might fracture along a difference of opinion where he thinks I'm not a serious scientist and I get bummed that I'm not feeling supported. EMBRACE FAILURE though, right? Ok, yes, right. Lab peace.
One of the things I think about a lot is when it is a person becomes an adult - what are the little signposts beyond, and more believable than a party with a fancy dress, or getting in without a fakie. I go back and forth between considering myself extremely immature and relatively composed and responsible, so I actually got pretty excited a few weeks ago when I discovered that I am probably lactose-intolerant.
This is a pretty gross thing to be happy about, so let me explain. Lactose is a sugar found in milk, a molecule that has to be broken down into glucose and galactose molecules before your body can use it as fuel. People have an enzyme, lactase, that breaks lactose down when they are born, but as you get older, it's more and more likely that production of this enzyme will get downregulated. All this means is that your body has deprioritized lactase - it's decided that for whatever reason, it's not worth the trouble to make the enzyme anymore. The gene for lactase, on your 2nd chromosome, gets marked so that it doesn't get read as often, and less of the enzyme is made from its instructions.
As a marker of maturity, I guess it's as arbitrary and inexact as anything else because some people don't ever become lactose intolerant and some do very very early in life, but I like that neither I nor the advertising industry have any control over it. I'm sure I won't be quite as into needing a hip replacement, or menopause, but I guess because I still AM pretty young, I sort of relish my first step towards decrepitude (after the deterioration of my eyes). Some people say it's weird that human adults drink milk anyhow (though we eat plenty of weird stuff) because it's meant for mammals too immature to fend for themselves or work their arms to get food to their mouths.
Lactose intolerance wouldn't be so gross if it just meant lactose didn't get digested - it could go straight through you like Olestra. Unfortunately, if your stomach doesn't chop up lactose, though, bacteria further down your digestive track do, and they break the sugar down in a less efficient way that produces a lot of gas. AND, because sugars are highly polar polyalcohols, they hydrogen bond to water and prevent your colon from doing one of it's jobs, which is to remove water from what's coming through. And so what's coming through stays... watery. If you know what I mean.
Both my roommates are vegetarians and they drink soy milk, so I thought I could maybe switch over and become a responsible adult who doesn't consume that which she cannot process. But I just finished a bowl of generic Captain Crunch with good old, regular milk, because soy milk just clashes with all the things I want milk for. If I want to, I can start buying liquid with lactase in it, which I sort of think is amazing, but I think I'm going to wait and try to sort of experimentally determine the lactose load my body can handle without being totally grody - I might have enough lactases floating around that I can have one piece of cheese a day or something. I'll make a little chart.
Note to self: discuss non-proteinaceous forms of intolerance next blog.
I went to see Marie Antoinette tonight and by the end, I was never more happy to witness the arrival of a mob. I had read some reviews in advance which described it as slight, frivolous, and perhaps ghost-directed by Paris Hilton. But I thought that my scraps of remaining youthful perspective might inform my enjoyment of the film more than A.O. Scott's.
I was wrong though. Maybe because she let Scarlett Johansson wear pants in Lost in Translation I took Sofia Coppola for less of a cream puff than she really is. Or rather, I think of her as this mousy middle-parted intellectual, forgetting that the Daria-esque snaps my brain is referencing come straight from those stank Marc Jacobs advertisements or from the society pages of Vogue itself, buttressing its legitamacy with an illusion of literateness. So the pure undiluted materialism of this film should not have been a shock, even if it did make me nauseous. Whatever - what I resent is being expected to embrace as a heroine someone because they are beset by the burden of tradition (though they benefit from it), and torn prematurely from their childhood (though montages of wanton indulgence are the only reason this movie's made any money). And not for anything they actually DO! To not put too Christian a point on it, I pretty much think that anyone who gets petit-four topiary rewards on this side should take what they get on the other - chop chop. And if she's not a heroine, why am I watching this movie at all?? For the mini-dogs? I was creeped out by the redemptive-power-of-motherhood storyline as well, and I won't even touch the complete absurdity of the wheatpaste-flyer typeface or the horrendousness of Jason Schwartzman. Except to say that primogeniture is perhaps just as inappropriate for securing acting gigs as it is for ascending thrones.
I guess I'm just not that into the idea of a historical political snow job when I have to deal with a real one every day already. Historicizing noblesse oblige like it's an actual pitiable cross to bear? I pretty much rank that one up with George Bush saying snappily that the war in Iraq is "hard work" as if he weren't basically the last person on Earth to figure that out.
Something (I think it were it being the first day in a while waking up and not feeling sick in the head, though still sick in the throat) made walking home today instead of waiting for the bus a joy (it was also being properly layered with three shirts and a scarf, no gloves yet).
I downloaded some Lady Sovereign and it's so fabulous! I guess I won't mention which tracks especially and late-arrival poseur-ify myself even more, but when I was talking to Mike about her, and he said he didn't like the "boogie woogie" one, I did not quite admit that I LOVE that one in particular.
Usually there's a trickle of radio wending through the laboratory, and yeah, it's good to have music at your job, probably better than not, but sometimes, it just gets to me and I want some silence, so it was cool that I've been working in a different lab where I can have silence if I want. I actually love Austin radio stations a lot, almost any of them (when it's not morning drive) but I don't want sound to mush into wallpaper either. I guess this is why I will never buy an iPotty, and haven't gotten around to hawking my records yet, and sometimes physically restrain myself from opening up my Windows Media Player when I'm internet-blobbing out at home, and don't rip CDs I actually paid money for onto my computer. If a song is truly great, I somehow want to respect it enough to pull it off the shelf, checking the number and cueing it up with true agency. This is not practical for parties, or practical at all. So what.
I got really concerned the other day when I realized that I only ever get crushes on people after seeing, with my own eyes, that person in the throes of basically, intense nerdiness. This could be nerdiness about anything - rock music or emergency medicine or power point presentations or breakfast cereal or old people or dining cooperatives. I mean, I think this obviously makes perfect sense, maybe not "evolutionarily," (sorry, I hate all that "Naked Ape" bullshit) but certainly emotionally, because no one wants pale, wan, uninterested people as boyfriends or friends. But am I being some sort of Doubting Thomas, because to me, drinking a drink I don't really wanna drink in a place that exists for drinking, asking someone, usually very indirectly, what they really enjoy doing, seems like such a weird little mobius strip of a technique that's not gonna really work!! Because people don't wanna expose their nerdness to people they don't know, they want to seem cool, AND even if they did, everyone knows, you always need to "SHOW NOT TELL" to be really be persuasive. In summary, I don't get "nightlife" in general, and in specific, the Beauty Bar is totally beat. It's a CHAIN, people. Like PF Chang. Get over it.
When I was in 9th grade, I took Model United Nations/World History 9 because it was nerdier than World History Honors, and nerdy is how I used to ("USED to?") do. Looking back, it was truly one of those experiences that was way over my head - involving going to conferences, public speaking, wearing suits, and NOT speaking in a string of literary/Simpsons allusions and other inside jokes understood only by my friends. Any "refreshing perspective" I had as a result of creating fully formed fantasy worlds with my brothers or watching every episode of Monty Python and applying a post-MTV proto-proto-feminist worldview to it really didn't help me write (much less extemporaneously generate) a 5-minute position paper on, say, human rights abuses.
I think it's pretty safe to say that 12 years later, I live in less of a fantasy world, but I still often fail to test my pure untrammeled beliefs with the facts of life as much as they deserve. And as much as I complain about my representatives in that thing called government, I don't think I would be any better at that synthesis of pragmatism, thrift, statistics, and compassion that is public policy. It's quite possible that Clinton's welfare reform was not evil, but actually just smart - I don't trust myself enough to say.
This throws a wrench in aspirations I might have to one day work for the government as some sort of science wonk - just as in other arenas, my knowledge of science, is pretty untempered by what it's actually "good" (in the capitalist sense) for. The easy joke is that's what engineers are for, but if that's true I can't quite figure out what my point, professionally, is. I'm hoping that I really do have a talent for explaining this stuff to people who hate/don't care about it, but speaking scientific method to power will probably require an understanding of, rather than only a healthy skepticism of, power structures themselves.
So anyhow, one of the topics in MUN was always desertification, and I didn't understand that any better than I understood the World Bank. But a Nature paper from August helps to explain why it happens - why, if things get arid and dry and dead they stay that way for, possibly, ever. This is one of those reasons why people who say this global warming trend is just half of a sine wave aren't off the hook - even if they're right, such an oscillation could still be longer than our lifetimes, and the cycle probably DOESN'T end up right where it began each time. What the paper points out is that carbon, like water and nitrogen, is balanced, conserved, and recycled in ecosystems in a loop of physical and biological processes. Plants and animals break each other down, eat each other up, poop each other out, and some sort of overall balance is maintained as long as life thrives. What the Argentinian publishers showed is that once areas become water limited and ground cover percentage drops, carbon-based life forms start getting broken down by UV rays in sunlight instead of each other. This throws carbon-containing compounds (like, hey, maybe carbon dioxide and methane) into the air, removing them from the cycle and ultimately reducing the pool of molecules that living things can take advantage of. So, if it were 1995 again, I would say, listen United Nations, desertification is real, it's permament, and as the ambassador of Fiji, (which I actually was for a whole weekend once) I say we should think about this whenever we think about all the ways in which privatizing water resources is a terrible idea.
I went to a dance party at a bus stop on Saturday. This is the single best non-science innovation I have heard of in weeks.
I don't think I ever make New Year's resolutions, but it's not because I don't like thinking about what I should be doing differently (it's because New Year's Eve seems like a holiday people force themselves to enjoy). Anyhow, I have the equivalent of mini-New Year's all the time... there's always things I'm trying to get myself to do, or do more regularly - start bringing lunch from home again, stop buying so many damn clothes, try to "cook food" in a more sophisticated manner than microwaving a hot dog and slicing it up in a bowl with ketchup, onions, and sauerkraut (hot dog buns are gross).
The worst ones are attempted reclamations of good habits I used to have.
I think probably once a month, I recommit myself to writing down all of my purchases in my checkbook. I remember the day I found a twenty dollar bill in a pocket of some freshly washed jeans, and flashed back to being 14 and thinking what it would be like to be rich enough to have a twenty dollar bill go missing and not notice. But I'm not rich! I am just... lazy? Well, whatever, the point is I'm trying to recapture my status as a net saver rather than spender of money, and it seems like the best way to do that is to shame myself with a record of past purchases. If it works, I will go to Spain.
Here's a homework problem, not assigned to my students, from Pratt and Cornely's Essential Biochemistry (Wiley, 2004). It's one of those "critical thinking questions" you hear so much about:
"17. Membrane lipids in tissue samples obtained from different parts of the leg of a reindeer show different fatty acid compositions. The proportion of unsaturated fatty acyl chains increases from the top of the leg to the hoof. Provide an explanation for this observation."
I have enclosed a picture of some (rein)deer standing (in snow) as a hint. If you cannot see the snow you need to use your critical imaginating skills a little more.
One of the other things I always intend to do is write little science bloggies more regularly, since that is supposedly my chosen future career and all. Ahem.
Ben Polletta (of lived-in-a-quad-in-South-with-Alec-Leshy-and-broke-down-the-door fame, to me at least) came to Austin this summer to do some mathematical research having to do with knowing-where-you're-going-while-you're-going. Basically, if you know how fast you're going, and you know where you started, and all the turns you've made, it should be possible to know where you are, right? Even without landmarks. Ants are really good at this, which is why you can try to divert them or wet them or redirect them, and they can still get back home. Apparently, it's been known how they calculate their direction for some time, but how they know their distance has only recently been shown. Three groups of ants were studied: "normal", "stumps" and "stilts." These ants were sent out on a journey, collected, "operated" on, and sent back. Stumps had the bottom halves of their legs cut off, stilts had pig bristles glued to their feet to make them taller, and normals... um, nothing happened to them. Since, as hypothesized, the ants remembered not their "distance" but their "steps" traveled, the stumps stopped before they got home, since their new steps home were equal in number but shorter in stride, and the reverse for the stilts, who overshot. As for how they remember the number of steps, I have no idea, but I love the experiment (sorry PeTA) for the perfect simplicity of whacking off or sticking on crazy legs, and because I really like it when people show things that animals can do that people can't.
I watched Truffaut's Stolen Kisses last night and I liked how it did such a good job of teaching me how France and America are different. The story has much the same arc as The Graduate but is completely different in tone. I don't really have so much in common with Benjamin Braddock other than hometown but watching the way Antoine Doinel dines with Christine's parents just like they were his own, how he loses a job without a tear or a rant, and how he loves an older woman without a trace of vulgarity made me feel as crude and American as the dude who gives Dustin Hoffman career advice in front of that eye-stinging chlorine bath of a night-lit swimming pool. Even though Antoine and Benjamin face the same vast expanse of adulthood with the same measure of uncertainty, and they both end up with the girl instead of the woman, it's strange how much more romantic the French movie is, and how seedy the American one can be. One strikes a victory for love (quiet repast and broken toast at the breakfast table), and the other for youth (rebel escape on a bee-colored bus).
The Truffaut movie made me wonder: what is it about the American brand of capitalism that pits generations against each other? In the United States, parents push their children and use them as a measure of their own success in a way that creeps me out, and kids are basically taught to make fun of adults for being old as soon as they can paste a sarcastic sentence together (I can't think of anything I hate more than sitcoms with smart-mouthed neighbor kids). People spend so much time striving for greatness here, whether to honor or to show up the rest of their family, and I often wonder if I would like living somewhere else that isn't quite so competitive.
Whenever people start talking about the sleeping dragon of Social Security it strikes me as somewhat shocking the way people have and defend this collective generational identity that can almost seem to trump actual blood ties. I blame it on the demographic chunking of advertisers. My grandmother said to me once that I didn't really need friends because I had my family. I've recounted this to people my age before and they are usually really horrified in a way that my explanations about how, where my grandmother is from, basically everyone in your whole damn town is family, can't relieve. And I can't totally agree with her either, as there are broken links in some families that are better left broken, but there's still seems to be something really important about being forced to confront things you hate in people you love because you have to, because you're related to them. Not 'cause if you're nice to them till they die you'll inherit something cool (since the "Democrat Party" wants to take that away!)
I like celebrating other people's birthdays, but I definitely like my own best. The date is really nicely placed on the calendar so that I have the whole slightly-bored-with-the-end-of-summer captive audience. I like how word will spread even when I don't tell anyone about it. It's also nice to grab hold of that time to be egocentric and wring it for all it's worth.
I like how presents get better as you get older because there are fewer of them and they're not mandatory - it always makes me slightly depressed to hear of gift cards picked out for cousins or middling collections of not-that-cool not-that-personal toys paraded about for nieces and nephews on birthdays because, well, a poorly chosen gift simply detracts from the birthday-ee and makes it about the gift giver and how they "tried." That's bull, man.
My mom mailed me some gold sandals which I picked out while I was home, on our one day shopping spree (or "non-spree," as we traversed the whole mall and tried on the 100 most ridiculous things we could find, and those shoes were the only thing we bought. If you can't use the excesses of capitalism to entertain yourself, what is the point?) This month my boss's dad died, my cousin got divorced again, my senior labmate graduated, and my new roommate moved in. I remember when I was down in the dumps after college graduation - I was worried that I'd used up milestones in my youth and that adulthood was just a long stretch of road, a West Texas if you will, with a couple quick marriage-baby-death truckstops along the way. Milestones, however, seem to keep showing up every mile or so, for myself and for everyone else.
I contemplated buying hairspray so that I'd have it around if I needed it, today. What!
This would be great for the world's laziest elementary school teacher who has to do "Meet the Masters." And this will be great for me if I decide to become the world's laziest Biochemistry for Nonmajors TA next week.
I learned from a logic puzzle on Monday that a helter-skelter is just an English carnival ride where you go down a big spiral slide on a little raft. Everyone's got a bit of the mad Manson connotation when they hear the word or the song (which itself is a scary bit from that year of his life Paul McCartney wasn't completely adorable) now, it makes me pleased to know that at least there is a whimsical image behind it being inverted.
Every member of the American Chemical Society gets, for "free," a subscription to Chemistry and Engineering News. When I first started getting it in the mail, I don't think I even knew what a "trade magazine" was and I was confused as to why anyone would want to read about how much prices of chemicals went up and down and around, and about the state of employment among people with chemistry degrees. I still really don't care about that stuff, but what I do care about is that recently (in concert with the Editor's Page having swelled up in entertaining vehemence against the Bush Administration, about, like, everything, not just science-pertinent stuff like climate change and NCLB) the cover art has been excellent, reminding me of my favorite New Mutants comic books still poly-bagged in my closet in California, and keeping me from being embarrased about reading it anywhere outside of my bedroom or office. Seriously, people don't talk to you when they see you reading a magazine with a big fat cracker on the cover.
