We're having lovely weather. It's December 1st, which is not really the first day of Advent, but it's the first day of Advent Calendars, so I'm going with it. I hold special superstitious high regard for firsts of the months and Saturdays so today's a triple threat!
I went to sleep last night with the thought that if I didn't know who to vote for for President, one thing that would help me decide is if I could watch a show where they were all given $100 to spend at the grocery store, and I could see what they bought. As I drifted off into slumber I was so impressed with this idea that I tried to see if there were other everyday tasks I could think of, or other contests, that would give me some truth about these people. But I nothing else that came to mind seemed quite so good.
This stems from watching the debates
(I'm the only person I know who does this? Thank god for the people who leave comments on Wonkette's live-blogs or I don't know that I'd even admit it online)
and reading articles about how candidates don't get to eat healthy on the campaign trail since they have to eat every damn thing placed in front of them by an American in public for over a year. And for my enthusiasm for Joe Biden's candor, and John Edwards bizarre shiny country-ness and Mike Huckabee's born-again healthfulness. And from the paper I read that said you can predict the winners of 2-candidate political races by just polling people completely ignorant of that race about who looks more competent. I showed this paper to Stevan and he was like "duh."
I don't subscribe to tabloids but I do sometimes read them at the grocery store while the cashiers are busy looking up my produce that they don't have memorized. I like to look at the best and worst dressed, and I also like the "celebs, they're just like us" or whatever the hell that feature in US weekly is called. I don't really think it's sick to enjoy seeing pictures of people who are famous picking fruit or locking their car, and maybe this is naive because on their end it makes their life truly less livable.
But I think it's consistent because my favorite photos of friends and family are also not their prom pictures or their headshots for work or the smiley-it's-girl's-night-out-let's-take-new-facebook-photos ones where they are looking their ostensible best - it is always the ones with no makeup and a t-shirt they got for free, where they are laughing at something funny their cat is doing in their parent's backyard on Labor Day, because in those sorts of pictures you can actually learn (or if you already know them, love) something about those people.
And I also know that if I were to judge political candidates based on what they put in their shopping cart, I would be biased and think those who bought Nutella were fey and those who bought the crappy-smelling (well not CRAPPY-smelling but the cheap stuff) laundry detergent probably didn't do any of their own laundry ever. But I have biases even when I allegedly process information about foreign policy in an intellectually methodical way.
oh i just realized i also thought of this because Sean was arguing with me that it's difficult for true scientists to engage in politics because it's not logical, and i called bullshit because all people, even scientists, are sometimes illogical.
Anyhow, my point is, things like YouTube debates are cool with me because they get a few more people interested in politics, which has always been an M-E-S-S. I don't know if politicians have always had talking points and people who themselves "triangulate" calling them triangulators, but it certainly seems hard to get a straight answer out of them. One thing I know about people is that you can figure them out best when they show, not tell, you stuff. And I love looking in people's kitchens even more than their closets or their bookcases. So that's my idea.
Cane toads are these huge amphibians which were imported from South America to Australia. The people who brought them hoped that their huge appetite for bugs would foment a drop in the pest population there, but they actually turned out to be pests themselves.
Invasive species like cane toads are sort of surprising - it's counterintuitive that a living thing that gets wrenched from it's natural environment and plopped down somewhere new is going to thrive, much less start outcompeting the indigenous populations (unless they believe in Jesus, and Jesus believes in them). But certain species are hardier and more flexible than others. Or... they just try harder.
Researchers at the University of Sydney recently showed (in PNAS) that cane toads, especially the big and adventurous ones, are totally stressed out (,dude). They surveyed toads in the Northern Territory, and found that many of the largest toads, and the ones who travelled furthest, had severe spinal arthritis. The authors say that its harder for these arthritic toads to hop, but that in the field, they travel as far, if not further than, their healthy, smaller brothers and sisters (they posit that it probably hurts them to hop!). These intrepid pioneers are the ones directly responsible for territory cane toads creepily cover today.
The tone of the paper is sort of queerly sympathetic ("not only does the invader have to cope with novel challenges in its new environment, but the invasion process strongly favors individuals on the invasion front") and I can't help but form anthropomorphic allegiances as well. I mean, these toads are SUCCESSFUL. They have surmounted a big old stack of odds piled against them. They seem to have some sort of primal work ethic. And damned if they don't actually eat hella bugs like we hoped they would. But they are also totally burning themselves out.
I've had two "fun weekends" this month, once to go home to a wedding and once to go to Milwaukee for Thanksgiving. I got to see snow, buy a beer from a hole in the floor, and see some fledgling "grownups" I went to high school with do the "Soldier Boy" dance (?). But despite these nice breaks, I'm totally freaking miserable w.r.t. grad school-job right now. It's making me grumpy at school, despondent about next semester, and positively frivolous once I get home. When I read about little cane toads and their furious industry, I think of how much I am like a little toad and wonder if my story at a distance looks so earnest but unsound.
Sometimes I write down a blog title thinking it will motivate me to write the blog post more speedily. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't! Today is November 17.
I had a fun time during my TA office hours yesterday; it was a group of 7 or so girls and they were laughing and talking while they worked on their homework together and asked me questions when they got stuck. It reminded me of being back in Charlottesville and having Wayland Hall Girls' Dormitory Duty during Study Hours. I capitalized those phrases with the Emphatic Capital Letters of Nostalgia. I'm not sure if it was because I got to go on a mini-vacation this weekend, or because there were a manageable amount of students, but I was in a great mood during these two hours, and it made me feel like someday when I am not a Head TA anymore, I will like being a teacher again.
I came back from California with the requisite
1)bag of food
2)bag of clothes.
I had left at home the also-requisite
3)bag for thrift store donation (dropped off personally by me lest my mother "rescue" weird purple teddy bears and tiny jewelry boxes from it)
and
4)bag of garbage.
No matter how long I am ever home for, I must always perform the ritual cleansing. Dangling preposition. My dad showed me a claymation video on YouTube about Larry Craig and the men from YMCA and my grandmother offered the fact that "St. Anthony is the patron saint of husband-finding. I meant to tell you earlier but you never really seemed interested."
Monthy blog posts: maybe I could try to be a tiny bit more prolific.
All set to write an upbeat, good old-fashioned life-blog
(Life-blogging is at least as interesting as pseudo-journalistic-blogging, I mean it's personal experience vs. opinion about someone else's personal experience, so why not go with the primary source?)
but I'm super grumpy today for some reason. The reason is possibly too much sugar lately - I had some cherry coke, and some grapes, and a weird starbucks-drink and some cookies today, (the last two sort of coercively, but I believe in free will so that's not an excuse) and I also ate some Whoppers yesterday...I think maybe some rock candy is crystallizing in my brain blocking serotonin receptors or something.
That's not a valid hypothesis. The cover of Science this week has a very hilarious rendering of some high speed Nerds candy zooming into each other and this is meant to represent "Cell Signalling." Because of my bitter mood, I laughed sarcastically at it, but maybe that's what's literally going on here!
Listening to the new Fiery Furnaces album, I have only today realized that I have always really liked them because of the way they almost always sound like the Beatles song "Hey Bulldog." (This is sort of how I like soca music because I like the Beatles song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" - that's not meant to be offensive, only to be self-critical of my supposedly eclectic musical tastes)
Okay, throwing in the blog-towel here, 'cause I am getting the sense that more computer time is only exacerbating the fructose-grumps. I have noticed multiple times in the past week (saying bye to Tyler at kickball, high-fiving my boss about something silly, etc.) that I often have rougher hands than guys whose hands mine are touching. Is this female-empowering? Or female-embarrassing?
Lastly, it occurred to me a few days ago that one think I like about getting older is that people my own age, who I am just meeting or who I am getting to know better, actually have good stories to tell about themselves. They no longer reflexively reference college, or high school, or "stupid/crazy" ways/things they were/did when they were younger to establish some weird kind of street cred. People my age have done cool things in earnest. Excellent.
When my father finally comes to visit Austin after not to moving here in 1973
(geez he would have been so hip if he had moved here instead of Southern California)
I am going to impress the chorizo out of him by taking him on the three "shortcut" streets I know of, where red-light-apoplexia, from which he suffers terribly, can be minimized.
They are not real shortcuts, but they are trip-pleasantifying, nonetheless. One is taking Holly then Cesar Chavez, to get from the middle of town to the east side. The other is taking San Jacinto down from campus to downtown. The last is to take Airport from hyde park to the east side. In writing this, I have now expunged the huge embarrassment I felt my "freshman" year of grad school when I was driving Bryan around and used I-35 to go south 3 exits, and he just laughed and said "Whoa you really are from California." Even though I definitely still do that, it is also true that now, this Lady Loves Cool Side Streets.
When I was driving these various streets this evening, I pulled up behind an amazing optical illusion. There was a Jeep from Hawaii, and so it had its license plate high up and on the left side, rather than the middle, of the car's backside. And this Jeep was turning left, as was I, so its left blinker was on. And so there was a sort of very slow red strobe on this rainbowed license plate, which was old enough to still have the embossed metal numbers and letters
(Screw you, Indiana, and all your followers in the flat license plate fad!)
and the effect was that the numbers and letters positively throbbed out at you with each flash. It was very cool and made me want to follow the Jeep and also maybe go to a gay bar (ACTUAL THOUGHT) and also, in the near future, write someone a note that involves shading in your own shadows to the backs of your block letters.
Augh! Blogging at work is poor form. However, I am really backed up writing-wise, preferring to "book-blog" on goodreads lately, and also because I'm writing more poorly-grounded music reviews for the radio station again since it's fall.
Anyhow, I know I have time to write this shorty-short one while my "beads" are "swelling" and I wait for my "sleepyhead" "labmate" to "freaking get to school already" so I can train him.
Angel was the art director at Austin Fit, so I artfully navigated my way into the world of freelance by (duh) answering an email from her boss that wondered if I would write an article about genetic engineering. I don't think I did much to clarify all of current applied molecular biology it but perhaps some of the vignettes are amusing. (The blurb accompanying the beer photo is wrong, the beer is not healthy yet.) You'll have to look for the Oct. 2007 issue and find the link to "genetic engineering" - it's one of those nutso nested magazine-y type pages it's hard to link to. Apologies.
The first rule of freelance is you DO talk about monetary freelance compensation for your labor ahead of performing said labor. I broke the first rule of freelance. Am I kicked out? Will I discover I'm not Brad Pitt? Angel has decided to leave Austin Fit for parts exciting and unknown, so it's like I had a weird awkward one night stand with a friend's roommate and then my friend moved out of that apartment. This relieves a lot of the awkwardness. Although in this situation the roommate thought I was a prostitute but got it for free? What a vulgar metaphor! Apologies again.
Less meta, and less to apologize for, soon.
The last article I wrote for the Times appeared yesterday and here it is:
Aug 27: Kids get brainwashed early
One good thing about being back in Texas is:
A box of Cracklin' Oat Bran does not cost 6 dollars here.
There's something wrong with my car (it won't get out of first gear and does not respond to gas pedal pressure in a linear fashion) so my summer love affair with bike and bus riding continues. I took the bus to church and the grocery store this week, neither of which I had ever done before. I was set to be unimpressed with the Capital Metro bus system simply because it lacks polymorphous transit (no subway/light rail/weird dedicated bus lane? Lame.) but it's won some award (I know this because all the buses have stickers telling me this) for the best system in Texas. I spent some time looking at the schedule Sunday and realized that you can really tell a lot about a town by looking at its public transit system (Duh). For example, there are specific buses in Austin that serve the elderly community and the disabled community - which I guess means they all live in the same area of town (is this odd or common?). I have not figured out the reason for the "paired bus lines" yet, but I will. Also there is a day labor bus!
That paragraph had entirely too many parentheses.
Also on Sunday, a man ran off the bus to put my bike on the bus's front rack for me. This Texas/California difference is almost as good as the Cracklin' Oat Bran one except that I think it comes with more gender role baggage.
My radio show has become bonafide prime time. ER/Law and Order prime time at least: It starts tomorrow and will be every Tuesday 10-11 Central Time at kvrx.org.
No more riding HOLLYWOOD buses for me. I am back to spotting little foxes while riding my bike through the graveyard. Austin seems impossibly small at the moment, but my big city ego will shrink over time, I am sure. I AM happy to ditch the daily moisturizing regimen.
My official career as a writer is over (ummm... or on hiatus as we say in the biz) and today's my day to reenter the world of "hydrophobic bonds."
Here are my "clips" from this summer. There were a few more, about the energy efficiency of walking upright, and why today's horses are so fat, but they "expired," so if either of those sound interesting, too bad!
June 15: Breaking multiple bad habits
June 18: Foie gras amyloid proteins
June 20: Irish drunkards bite each other
June 21: Ladies, keep pounding the milk
June 22: Cute, but obese, zebrafish
June 25: College students are unhealthy
June 26: Microbial communities inside babies
June 27: Kids will believe anything
June 28: Jellyfish into plowshares, etc.
June 29: Doctors stab themselves with needles
July 2: Bacteria that steal cholesterol
July 6: Liquid calories are invisible
July 9: Use smaller plates, silly
July 10: Shameless Harry Potter newspeg
July 11: Shameless "giant microbes" promotion
July 12: Glamour shots of food
July 23: Sorry, tomatoes, you suck
July 30: All about my blood clots
July 31: Twinkie Ingredient Book review
August 1: Sour-cream-and-onion driveway
August 2: Bean lectins cause barfing
August 3: Insomniac kids addicted everywhere
August 6: Plastic surgery reality TV
August 7: Pre-packaged dinnertime in LA
August 8: John Lavigne's bad-fish detector
It's almost time for me to leave LA again. Kind of a bummer. I should start recording good things before I forget them, since I've done a really subpar job of that so far.
A) #1 Best thing about the LA Metro Transit System:
The way every bus that goes down Hollywood for any period of time announces "HOLLYWOOD and blah_blah_street" in a ridiculous announcer voice, but ONLY for the word "Hollywood." Taking the 217 is particularly amazing because it does this about every 20 seconds.
B) #1 Best grooming tip:
Use your flatiron, either before, or after "doing" your bangs, to iron the ribbon on your blouse. I don't care about the crispness of most things, but a wilted bow or sash makes me want to cry, at times. The flatiron's no good for whole garments, but its handle allows you to iron skinny stuff with some tension and it works really well. Fact-checked by my mom.
C) Talent List for forthcoming "The Peanuts Movie" (Brian Bradford, co-producer):
Charlie Brown: Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Snoopy: John Malkovich
Linus: Gael Garcia Bernal
Sally: Reese Witherspoon
Lucy: Parker Posey
Peppermint Patty: Kim Deal
Marcy: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Pigpen: Jack Black
Schroeder: Crap, I forgot!
Directed by Harold Ramis, Screenplay Steve Martin.
Well, this is a cop-out post for now until I can figure out a better way to save this info:
Here's everything I've written thus far for The Bottle-Blond Lady this summer.
Since that's my "job" now, I'm not sure how often I'm going to update the bloggy, which means if you want to know what I'm doing other than writing about liver fibers and baby germs, you should send me your (physical) address at my (noncorporeal) address.
Now that I've actually written that down, it's possible that I'm going to actually start blogging regularly again. Ira Glass is on my advertising sidebar. That guy...
