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[Jun. 27th, 2008|11:43 pm] |
Five in the morning finds me pedaling furiously, my legs burning and the cold air shearing against my skin. It is nearly thirteen miles from my shitty apartment to the train station and I am almost to the Micheltorena overpass, a bridge across the mighty one-oh-one freeway that constantly hums with the sound of traffic.
The squeal of brakes brings me to my senses. Ahead of me a biker cuts off a rusting Ford in crosstraffic - the car screeches to a halt just in time, nearly bouncing the biker off of the front bumper. The biker turns in his saddle and in a single motion gives the driver the finger.
"EHHFUCK YOU!" screams the biker before dropping back to his handlebars and continuing past me down the street, his eyes gleaming in an ironic mixture of fear and triumph.
Then something absolutely wild happens.
The driver crosses the empty intersection, swings his car around two hundred and seventy degrees and charges down the road towards me with his high beams on and horn blaring. The biker turns his head to see the oncoming car and lets loose with a string of curses, the boldness in his voice replaced by fear. Five secons later the car passes me and I can hear the driver screaming "YOU WANNA FUCK WITH ME? HUH?" over the roar of the engine as he bears down on the condemned biker, who nearly hits a parked car in his haste to exit the road.
I do not stop.
Before turning the corner to the overpass I take a look behind me and see the biker shielding himself behind his bike, illuminated by blinding headlights, trapped in a hostile triangle consisting of a dumpster, a tree and the hood of the angry driver's car.
The day is still young. |
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[Jun. 9th, 2008|01:12 am] |
Daedelus
"Is that an Indian name?"
"Persian actually," I smile, "I'm mixed, but mostly Indian."
"I went to India once," chuckles Thomas, "I went there to look for a guru to tell me the meaning of life."
His balding head shakes back and forth nostalgically, and I'm trying to focus past the pain in my thumbs and re-seat a particularly tight tire, the kevlar beads leaving dark red lines on my skin.
"How old were you?"
"Let me see, about twenty five - I'd just gotten out of college then. I thought I'd go into the organic farming business - worked on a draft horse farm for a bit, saved up some money, bummed around the country and eventually bought a ticket to India."
"How long were you there?"
"A month and a half. I left pretty quickly."
"Why'd you leave?"
"I found out that only one person could ever figure out what my life's real meaning was gonna be. And that person was me." |
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[May. 29th, 2008|12:51 am] |
Placeholder
Circumstances keep me in limbo. It's been like this for almost a year I and I am getting bloody sick of it. |
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[May. 21st, 2008|12:26 am] |
Ex Machina.
Life, a slow dance through the day. A long sigh as I sit in the recliner and watch time drip off the walls and slough across the carpet, under my heels, across the threshhold and lost in the world outside.
The feeling of limbo, of pause, soaks almost ever day. Work ends and I can't get the motivation to study or job hunt because my future is uncertain - I might get into medical school, I probably won't - and having to wait for decisions to be made for me by a faceless admissions committee is driving me up the wall. It could be a lot worse, I know. I could be in many worse situations with basic necessities being the least of my worries - that doesn't mollify the frustration that comes with waiting almost ten months for an acceptance or rejection. My problem has been that the prospect of less security - no knowledge of my future or where I'll be ten years from now - has got me in such knots that my ambition has shrunk to the point of paralyisis. I think the cure for this is to do some decidedly uncharacteristic things and force myself into a state where I need to work ridiculous hours and, above all else, act.
Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day. |
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[May. 9th, 2008|12:00 am] |
Chill'uns
How our brains learn behavior and analyze situations is an age-old discussion with far reaching implications. Simplistically people are divided into two camps: "Nature" and "Nurture". The "Nature" group argues that children are born with an innate set of tools, hardwired to think a certain way and act with predefined biases. The latter camp takes a tabula rasa approach, contending that behavior is learned (actively or passively) through interactions with the world. Reality probably lies somewhere between the two - we're not born ready to solve differential equations or remember our friends' specific social habits, but we may at birth possess a fundamental framework from which to construct our knowledge base and develop preferences.
Harvard's "Baby Brain Research Lab" has interesting findings regarding children and their ability to analyze situations. The lab takes children, hooks them up to sensors to measure brain activity and exposes them to a variety of stimulii - hoping to gather "how the mind makes sense of its surroundings". Of note are discoveries that babies have an "innate sense of numbers" - they can "add and subtract" - mathematical operations we don't actively comprehend until years later. This ability to quantify objects is obviously a critical part of interaction with the world, but it seems interesting to me that it manifests at such an early age.
What really interested me were the studies done on racial differences (the article labels this study as trying to find "the origin of bigotry"). Researchers found that:
"In the case of skin colour, newborns respond to individuals of all races equally. By three months, however, a baby from a Caucasian household will prefer to gaze at a white face, and a black baby at an African American face. By the age of two or three, they are drawn to their own gender, too." (Emphasis mine)
So then, what of racism? Surely there are arguments for raising a child in a discriminating household - I'm sure that one would find a higher incidence of bigotry towards blacks among children of Klu Klux Klan members - but if the findings hold weight then the inherent component to these biases cannot be ignored. Babies were also found to prefer faces of races they had been exposed to, using race as an identifier. Familiar language (i.e. English versus Turkish) was also found to increase attention span in babies.
***
Maybe the solution to disarming the "deep-seated prejudice" (perhaps) inherent in babies is to expose them to as many cultures as possible - have them play with children of different races, be carried through markets where many languages are spoken, etc. Of course, bias is an important part of survival - one trusts those of similar race, language etc. as the unfamiliar is often perceived as dangerous.
Thoughts, people? |
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[May. 2nd, 2008|09:27 am] |
"Kwizine"
Mark Bittman of the New York Times has a superb cooking column on their website. I enjoy his presentations because they fuse (often) self deprecating humor with an excellent guide on cooking with everyday ingredients. I also love his videocasts for the ten-second intros - they're hilarious. His newest video (Snap Peas etc.) has his best opening and shows how to create a very tasty dish. |
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[Apr. 27th, 2008|12:43 am] |
Meme(s)
(Usually) I'm not a fan of regurgitating memes on this journal, but as long as I'm writing something down here goes. I've been having a spot of trouble coming up with topics to write on, so maybe this will create some flow.
In no particular order, five (awesome?) tracks (thanks ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) katashi):
1) T.I.,"What You Know"
2) Iggy Pop, "Search & Destroy"
3) Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, "It's Like That"
4) Charles Mingus, "Open Letter to Duke"
5) No Doubt, "Excuse Me Mr."
bonus:
6) Rick Astley, "Never Gonna Give You Up"
***
Tomorrow I am going to UCLA's Hammer Museum for the Kara Walker ("My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love") exhibit. Thanks Yumi! |
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[Apr. 24th, 2008|01:21 am] |
To Be, Not To Seem
tagged by werido85:
Seven (7) Things About Me You'd Not Likely Guess:
1) I'm relatively straightedge in that I don't drink or do drugs, but other forms of vice make me less pure than others would believe me to be.
2) I got my first real job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory when I was seventeen. I was a pretty bad intern - I tried to use a lot of big words and thought I was the bees' knees at quantum computing, when in reality I should've just kept my mouth shut and listened. At that age working for JPL was awesome - I got to see the rovers Spirit and Opportunity being assembled and go to all sorts of interesting meetings, although I ended up falling asleep in half of them because I didn't understand the math. I returned two years later in a different division and got to see the Cassini probe approach Saturn - it was a good time to be a junior scientist. I also discovered how exercise and note-taking could help me stay awake during long meetings.
3) One of my huge vices is talking over people and hiding behind jargon when I don't fully understand/cannot answer a question ("so, if we look at the Pauli spin matrix and take the time-dependent Hamiltonian of..."); I'll try to dominate a lot of the conversations I'm in just to puff up my ego. This has cost me in the past, in the form of missed learning opportunities. To counter this I've tried to stay as silent as possible, admit to a lot of mistakes, ask many questions and say "I don't know" if I'm the slightest bit confused. Through this I've learned that it's very tough to change oneself. We shall see.
4) My longest relationship lasted two and a half years, my shortest eleven (11) days.
5) Secretly I want to become an entrepreneur and develop cool technology - my current fascination is with robotic limbs, which ties into my dreams of going to medical school. In truth I don't know what I want to do - personal finance, research & development, web applications, robotics, design and health all interest me but I've yet to find a way to tie my interests together. This is a source of great frustration and I think about it almost every day. If you see me with a look of concentration on my face, this is probably what I'm pondering. I'm very afraid that if I become a doctor I'll just waste away in a hospital performing procedures/diagnoses on patients - this isn't to say that medicine is a bad profession, just that I'm not sure it would take me where I want to go.
6) Competition is hard wired into my brain. In academia, sports, or almost anything else I can think of I love stacking myself against other people and finding out "where I stand". I think that the greater goal of this drive is to define metrics for my performance so that I can gauge how I'm doing in life - I think it's important to eventually let go of this but as I said in (3) it's pretty hard to change something that's a big part of me.
7) I love fashion and design, but I am tiny. Most menswear doesn't fit me, I refuse to wear boys/children's sizes (most are too baggy or have horrible cut) and I'm a size XS in American Apparel. Shopping is a frustrating experience and I usually do it alone to spare others the waste of entering a store and leaving empty handed. Learning garment constructon and making my own clothes seems like the way to go on this, but will take a lot of effort. |
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[Apr. 22nd, 2008|12:28 am] |
Missives
I wrote my mother this morning. Four months into the year and I have only written one letter! So, if any of you will post your address in the comments I will be happy to send you something: a letter and an accompanying photograph, drawing, postcard, sculpture etc.
Comments are screened. |
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[Apr. 15th, 2008|12:31 am] |
Are You Tough Enough?
Fear is a feeling that sinks into my stomach four thousand feet above sea level, in the California sun blazing across the mighty Pacific ocean to the West and scorching the moisture from every square millimeter of my bare chest. Fear trickles into my knees with every thump-thump of my feet against potholed asphalt, turns my calves into jelly and makes me wish I'd never committed to being out in record high temperatures running down the side of a mountain with no water and only the gorgeous scenery as a reward. I run my index finger down my spine and feel no sweat, the radiation and heat sucking all moisture from my skin and leaving my body dry to the touch.
I didn't expect this.
The thought hits me as I'm halfway down the slope on mile four, my knees screaming in their sockets. I trained poorly. I worked hills into my regimen but only ran up, expecting the succeeding downhill to be easy. The truth is that I completely underestimated the combination of dust, heat and nerves and ran my miles in the cool mornings and evenings, convenience taking preference over reality. I imagined the course and then twisted it to my own biases, turned reality into a picture of my own perceptions and in doing so royally set myself up for punishment once the real task began.
Lesson learned, the hard way.
I finish the downhill and promptly empty a bottle of water, a good two thirds of it going onto my head and torso. I complete the last leg of the race, a rolling four miles filled with small hills and cow pastures, at a blistering pace and collapse onto the grass near the finish line, my body spent, my spirit august.
***
We finish tenth out of seventeen teams with a total time of nine hours and twenty-three minutes, a decent time for a bunch of first timers taking on a sixty-five mile relay race. Fast forward to this morning: I am currently in more muscle pain than I've ever experienced, courtesy of a delayed onset of cramps. The one thing I cannot stop thinking about is how I should have worked harder and anticipated the searing temperatures and steep grades of the Santa Ynez mountains, instead opting for flat runs and less headache.
For the rest of my life I will try to train for reality as it is, not as I wish it to be. |
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[Mar. 24th, 2008|11:54 pm] |
Note to self:
Quit hating your job, you self-centered assclown. Rock that shyte. |
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[Mar. 22nd, 2008|12:11 am] |
Directionless, Unfantastic
Life outside academia is a bitch. In school there are grades, metrics for determining ones performance. There are lesson plans, specifically chosen subjects and directed teaching - all one has to do is open a book and spend hours in study or research. Most things are directed - and learning, while requiring active participation, is done under a tremendous amount of direction with clear benchmarks along the way. I failed miserably during my first two years of schooling to get my ass in gear and finish the last two in near spectacular fashion. My GPA charts the courses of two very different people: the former lazy and embittered by an inflated ego, and the latter a more mature boy with a ruthless streak and a work ethic drenched in motivation.
It's been a year since I graduated and I feel like a spectre, a shadow of that former self. I used to be fiendishly busy - spending early morning to midnight either in classes, study or lab. My days were packed with activity, and each night I looked forward to sleep as the end to a formidably challenging day. These days that feeling has vanished leaving in its place a sense of emptiness that stagnates in my brain, a void where activity once was. Where I once felt powerful and full of energy, I feel listless and mediocre. Lack of managed direction has left me hollow.
Life, perhaps ironically, isn't like college. Life demands direction, management, zest that must come from within the self to push boundaries and excel. Living within the university framework made me, in hindsight, dependent on others to chart my way and feed me information. The real world offers little in this way. This is a bit unsettling - I now have to create my own projects and become more introspective, mapping my own progress and asking for help along the way. No one will tell me if I'm failing or exceeding expectations - there are none.
When the sun rises tomorrow I think I will find myself busy again, trying to find my own way.
***
In closing, readers, I give you Waltz in B Minor (for Ellaine) by Bill Evans - one of my favorites. Good night. |
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[Feb. 13th, 2008|10:56 pm] |
Sawbones, in four-part harmony.
"If you haven't seen this before," cautions the surgeon, "you might wanna pull up a chair".
His message is clear - fainting volunteers are a royal pain in the ass, and I don't want to be made into a case study for future training sessions. Once, years ago, an observer lost consciousness and fell towards the operating table - the patient was saved from almost certain infection by a quick thinking nurse and a strong set of arms. We lost our operating room privileges for eighteen months after that incident and were warned ad nauseum about the dangers of fainting during a procedure.
I wait until he turns away, then scurry to a corner of the room and get a rolling seat from behind the Dalek-like vacuum stand. The surgeon looks as though he's about to begin, then pauses and frowns at me.
"You've been in surgery before?"
"Yes sir," I nod.
"And you can stand the sight of blood?"
"Yes sir."
"Okay then." He swivels back to the operating table and takes a pen from the scrub tech.
The patient is almost entirely draped in sterile cloth save for their exposed right leg, which ends in a short stump below the knee. At the end of the amputated limb is a foul smelling hole in the muscle tissue, the fibers gray where the infection has spread and yellowed with pus. The surgeon sticks his glover fingers around the abscess and stretches it open, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head at the damage. With his other hand he draws a set of lines above the kneecap and curves them downward to make a circle that ends on the underside of the knee. He looks up at the anesthesiologist.
"All right. Tourniquet on, please."
"Tourniquet is on - pressure is..." trails the reply.
The surgeon pauses for a few minutes, and I look over the operating tables next to him full of wicked looking medical equipment. Most of the items are familiar - surgical towels, a basin of water for irrigation, various metal implements - but there are a few on which my eyes linger. At the corner of the closest table is a bone saw, its horizontal blade dull under the fluorescent lights. Adjacent to it are what look like a trio of steaknives on steroids; ferocious steel tools, blades longer than my forearm, tapering to a razor sharp edge.
I snap out of focus to catch the first incision being made on the leg - above the knee, the inked lines turning into bloody channels under the fluid cuts of the surgeon's scalpel. Even with the tourniquet on, the capillaries in the leg slowly empty themselves of blood while the skin comes apart and the healthy pink flesh underneath is exposed. As the surgeon rounds one corner of the knee he hits the fermoral artery, and it suddenly hits me that I should have equipped a splatter shield when I had the chance.
Blood sprays fucking everywhere.
Ruby red, arterial blood gushes out of the leg and splashes all over the surgeon's face, his mask dotted with tiny circles from the continuing torrent. It pours out in a fountain, heading in my direction and stopping three tiles short of my shoes as I bring my knees up and backpedal in unconscious fear.
He presses on, cauterizing the flood and continuing to cut the leg apart, creating a connected avenue of blood all the way around the lower thigh. That done he puts the scalpel down and picks up one of the gleaming knives, severing through the powerful sinews with ease and working his way all around the leg until the bone is exposed and the wriggling flesh hangs down with little support. He stands up and presses his hip close to the patient in an odd, sensual motion - his blood spattered scrubs gleam for a moment before his arm descends and the saw begins its high-pitched whine, lowering in intensity as it shreds the bone into tiny pieces that fly in all directions and cover the doctor and attending tech in gruesome, confetti-like pieces of pink and white.
Fully disconnected from its healthy counterpart, the infected knee flops onto the operating table and is quickly placed into a large bag labeled "BIOHAZARD", then given to an orderly. It disappears from the room, headed to the bowels of the hospital for some sort of testing. The remainder of the leg is washed and looks like a surprisingly benign piece of meat - a circular section of flesh with the bone in the center, surrounded by three large flaps of skin.
Sutures are brought out and the surgeon begins to slowly knit the flesh together, the immense care in contrast to the previous near-savagery. Nearly an hour later the end of the thigh looks like a carefully constructed quilt; three hairlike suture lines run from the perimeter of the circle to meet in the center.
The end of the procedure ends quietly, the calm after a raging inferno of gore. The surgeon breaks out of his scrubs and regards leans over to me.
"How was that?" He beams.
"Wow." Is all I can come up with. |
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[Jan. 15th, 2008|11:03 pm] |
Today during surgery rotation (7am! I still don't understand why these people work such ridiculous hours!) I witnessed a neurosurgeon insert an electrode into a patient's brain, zap some cells and eliminate the chronic tremors that plagued the patient on their right side , thereby curing them of Parkinson's disease.
It was, to date, one of the more beautiful experiences I have ever been a part of. I promise to try and post more but I am damn tired right now and really want to read Blood Meridian.
Good night. |
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| Cheese. |
[Oct. 21st, 2007|01:27 am] |
I recently opened a retirement account (Roth IRA) with a management company. A lot of you reading this are probably rolling your eyes at me and thinking "oh come on, you should have had one of those ages ago" but the truth is that for the past decade I've been lazy. I'd originally planned to start one when I was 35, but a quick number crunch on an interest rate calculation program made me quickly change my perspective. The difference between saving for my future (at 7% annual interest) at 25 versus 35? Almost $700,000. That's a lot of zeroes, people.
If you don't have a retirement account, go start one now!!! Ramit Sethi has an excellent guide to retirement accounts on his website. Financial stability at retirement is something that I strongly belive an individual has to create for themselves - depending on social security, if it still exists in years to come, to provide a safety net doesn't seem to be a good plan.
Also - personal finance isn't necessarily boring; learning about how to effectively save and invest is probably some of the best learning I've ever gotten outside a classroom. It's also very, very empowering. I highly recommend this and this as primers on the subject.
Let me know how it goes, bbs. Srsly. |
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| Gladius. |
[Oct. 16th, 2007|11:52 pm] |
Tuesday night in the library, staring at black writing on a white page. I'm trying to figure out how bipolar junctions work when an intense feeling hits me:
I don't think I fucking belong here. Or, at least for today, I wish I were somewhere else.
When I graduated, I decided that turning down two job offers and taking a research assistant post at the university would give me the time I needed to work on graduate school applications, a decent paycheck and the opportunity to keep my social network intact. At the end of June I had so much motivation I could barely sleep some nights - I gave myself two days vacation after graduation and immediately started working on apps, beginning my lab work a week later.
Back to the point: This evening I saw hundreds of babyfaced undergrads in the library, necks craned over texts, studying for midterms the same way I used to do less than four months ago. And something about the situation made me cringe, because I think I should be doing something other than retracing my college life and waiting for medical school interviews while the rest of my life passes me by. Don't get me wrong - my days aren't empty - I'm holding down both a job and an internship, joining an emerging technology think tank, exercising regularly and making serious investing decisions. I think I'm working pretty hard.
But I often wonder how much better my life could be if I redirected my energies to something other than reproducing a carbon copy of my undergraduate career.
Maybe it's arrogance that makes me think I'm above my situation. Maybe it's fear of not "living up to my full potential", although the people I keep company with are already achieiving more than I ever could; my metrics for performance are more than a little skewed towards the superhuman. Either way, I need to do some serious restructuring - to shake my life up a bit, find out what I'd rather be doing, and then go to it. Tomorrow is going to be very introspective. |
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| A brief history of (my) time. |
[Oct. 2nd, 2007|11:29 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Daler Mendhi, "Phatte Chak" | ] |
A warning to everyone reading this: it's been a while since I've written anything significant, so for a few weeks anticipate a significant amount of daily drivel. Writing, I think, is something that must be developed with time and consistent effort.
***
Fall in Santa Barbara means classes resume but I'm no longer a student; instead I work a standard work week and audit classes, taking advantage of the free knowledge offered to me. In an engineering course the professor handed out a sign-up sheet for students crashing the course to sign, and when it came to me I smugly passed it on to the poor bastard in the next seat over.
I need a vacation. |
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| Eight weeks and a wakeup. |
[Sep. 24th, 2007|01:13 am] |
The last few months have been sunk in a rather inky bog of medical applications. There's something confrontational about med apps that forces me to do some serious self reflection. The questions that admissions committees ask (and there are many, many questions) are the sort of open-ended stuff - "what's a problem you recently encountered and how did you deal with it", "tell us your plans for the coming year", etc.
A confession: I enjoy answering these seemingly useless (and not medically relevant) questions because they force me to learn more about myself. In thinking about the answers, I am forced to deconstruct my past and motives, to put them together and draw conclusions on who I am now.
...and my professional opinion is this: I have changed a lot. |
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| Post-mortem care. |
[Aug. 6th, 2007|12:11 am] |
I am sweating. I can feel the moisture build on my hands, a sticky feeling that spreads from wrist to fingertips. The room is stifling although the air conditioning is on full blast. A disconcerting symphony plays over the speakers above my ears, cheery against the melancholy reflection on the back of my skull.
There is a naked yellow man lying on the table in front of me, skin contrasted against the hospital white of his bedsheets, lifeless but warm, one eye red one eye brown, silent. Plastic tubes snake from his body, some filled with nutrients and medications now useless. His excement feeds from his body to a collection bag hung over the end of the bed. His eyes are open and staring, mouth stretched in a silent scream, alive but lifeless as though he will wrest himself from the bed and wrap his slender fingers around my throat.
Fear tingles down my spine.
We remove the tubes form his body, one by one, the blood slowly oozing from the holes quickly soaked up by off-white wash towels. I lift his arm, ten pounds of warm flesh and silent bone, to roll the body over as a nurse washes his bare back. No one speaks. His mouth and eyes are closed, hands placed at his sides. Transport arrives with a body bag. The bag is, stereotypically, white and spotless like everything else in the building, the sterile framework of an institution working its way into the final vessel carrying the dead from treatment rooms to the morgue. He is zipped in, the only identification a small tag attached to the zipper of the bag.
The saliva collects in my mouth as I watch him wheeled out of the room. Later on, while driving home, the smell of latex on my hands gives me the shivers. I arrive at my apartment and turn on every goddamn light in the place so that I won't turn around to find his leering face staring out at me from the shadows. I wash my hands every half hour until the tips are wrinkled and smell like soap. In the shower I turn up the water temperature until it's nearly unbearable and scrub until my skin is red. That night it takes me nearly two hours to fall asleep.
When I wake in the morning I am more aware of my vitality than I have ever been. I stare at my reflection in the mirror and smile as my pulse resonates through my chest and the sound of seagulls carries in through the open window. It feels good to be alive. |
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[Aug. 2nd, 2007|09:25 am] |
Today I rediscovered this.
***
I'm walking down a black-and-white tiled hallway in the physics labs, paycheck clenched tight in my right hand, my mind a spreadsheet full of numbers. I nearly body-check her in my haste to get to an ATM, so focused on getting the money into my bank account that my eyes aren't functioning quite like they usually do.
She stops me with the palm of her hand, fingers pushing lightly against my chest.
"First of the month?"
"Mmm."
"How's things?"
I shrug. "Okay I guess. Work's sorta fun. Wish I could get more done."
"Well, you work hard, right?"
"Whatever. Look I have to get to something talk to youlatertakecareokay?" My final words are jumbled together as I flee the scene, my face beginning to burn. |
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