Noix de Coco

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:05:11 GMT

Autumn

"That's my roommate shivering" says J. into the phone, "he's wearing a merino wool sweater, a jacket, jeans and wool socks. And we still don't really have heat yet. They're putting in the furnace some time next week."

I pause in the middle of the living room to stare at him, then sit down at my desk and devour the rest of my mac n' cheese.

"No mom, it's okay - it's not that cold - oh c'mon really it's nothing..." his voice trails off as I close my door. Then comes the audible 'click' of the phone being closed before he yells through my door:
"Jewish mothers! They worry about everything!"

***

I went for a run through Northside on Sunday. It reminds me a lot of San Francisco - grungy, multiracial, a huge LGBT community, coffeeshops where the waiters are also the same people that lead your tri-weekly bike ride. It's also got a lot of dark haired, skinny-jeans wearing, tattooed cyclist chicks; as if the fact that the neighborhood is chillingly beautiful in the Fall isn't reason enough for tromping through the place.

My normal morning run takes me to a park about a half quarter mile east of Northside to a hill that overlooks the west side of Cincinnati. It's become such a ritual that random co-workers have stopped me to tell me that they've seen me.

"Hey N." said my boss.
"Yeah?"
"I think I saw you running this morning."
"Are you sure it was me?"
"Were you running down Ludlow this morning at 9am?"
"Yeah."
"I knew it was you!"

Honestly? It's nice to be noticed. But I'd prefer it were by a younger, more hip crowd.

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:22:34 GMT

The Minor Leagues^1,2

I'm coming off of a 14 hour shift in the emergency room; half a day of enrolling patients in trials, HIV counseling and being on my feet. There's a faint line on the back of my lab coat that wasn't there this morning, the off-white bisected by a brown streak of dirt and sweat. My handlers are still ambivalent on how to properly train me: half want me to go through a structured, three week program in which I learn all of the clinical studies we're running and shadow more experienced researchers until I get the hang of things. The other half want me to, in their words, "jump in headfirst" and direct my own progress. Lately the second group has been winning out on my treatment, and I'm slowly understanding that I learn more quickly when I have minimal hand-holding. So far it's been a rough beginning but I know I've got a long way to go.

I thought that interviewing would be easy - or at least easier than the first year of medical coursework. The truth is that it's not so much difficult as it is different; studying cofactors for ten hours each day requires a completely divergent skillset than is required to properly diagnose an illness or tell someone that they're now paralyzed from the waist down. There's also a huge difference between watching a physician convince a patient to join a trial and trying to do it yourself. The first time I tried to get consent from someone to enroll in our HIV study I failed spectacularly:

"Hello. I'm, um, a researcher in the, uh, ED and westudyHIVrisksandprevention and, um, isitokayifIaskyousomequestions?"

You could have heard a cricket fart in the room after I finished that sentence, it was so quiet.

***

On my first day I got an almost 80% refusal rate. It did wonders for my ego.

The truth: I wish I could do this almost every day.

_{1: Put your headphones on and crank up the volume before you hit |>
2: Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo are, right now, my favorite contemporary hip-hop production team. This beat is solid.}

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:53:21 GMT

At Sea (2/?)

I'm finding it hard to focus.

I get up early in the morning, go running, shower, eat. After that my day is wide open. There are things I want to do and there are things I should be doing, the most important of which is grinding through the pile of secondary applications on my desk. Ideally I am capable of finishing two to three per day but my current rate is about one every two days. I see enough people, spend enough days on the beach, enough nights in seaside cafes with teachers from my past talking about where we were and where we want to be. In the quiet moments of our conversations when neither listening nor talking matters there's a needle of guilt pricking away at the back of my spine, a voice in my head telling me that I ought to be elsewhere, my head buried in an application.

Self motivation is difficult, I think, because there are no longer set deadlines. It's a concept I've vocalized often enough but I'll mention it here: in school the transactions between student and teacher are carefully laid out. Complete a test to the satisfactory level and receive a grade in return. Syllabi are passed out on the first day of class with clear distinctions; follow them and get your due.

Life, though, isn't like this. Two weeks ago I was been working almost all day to fulfill the aforementioned requirements, corralled in the crushing but secure lagoon of academia and research. Then it was easy to fall into the routine of relentless studying: wake up, eat, study. Repeat until the program ended or you felt confident enough to drop out. Then I could get through two hundred pages of reading in a weekend and be able to restate the main points. Now I'm at my own mercy and am a tenth as efficient as I was with ten times the guilt, at least until I finish these applications and move on with my life.

But I don't think this problem will stop there.

***

Superficially, self motivation seems to be the deciding factor between those that succeed at their occupations and those that transcend work to become icons and inspirations to us all. The difference between a surgeon or family practice physician and someone like Atul Gawande or Khalid Hosseini. I'm aware that a certain amount of luck also defines where we get in life, but I'd like to think that with enough hard work in the right direction I could get somewhere close to where I want to be. The first problem is finding out what I want, what drives me. I think as soon as I do this I'll be able to get a more constructive plan down. Until then the best I can do is flail away until something catches.

Let's roll.

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:30:09 GMT

Abyss
I went to the beach on Friday.

One of my friends showed us a small, semi-private beach that she'd been to often as a child. In high school she said she was very selfish about the location - only taking boyfriends - but that as she's gotten older she's wanted to share it with everyone; I feel that I could write a lot on this subject. It's not something easily reached; to get to the beach one has to park off the Pacific Coast Highway on a private street and then walk a good mile down to the water, crossing under the highway via a concrete tunnel. It was surprisingly sparse for a Friday afternoon - barely a hundred people on an expansive stretch of off-white sand.

It was pleasant. We sat on the beach, ate nectarines, talked about our histories. It's been almost a year since we've seen each other, and for people who used to talk on an almost daily basis we had a lot to discuss. A lot of us are moving on to graduate school, foreign countries, adventures. It's easy to feel belittled in a group of achievers but I felt surprisingly comfortable - I'm moving on with my life, starting my own projects - things I always talked about doing but never put into action because I didn't have the knowledge.

***

From now on I'll just try to write as much as possible rather than waiting for a good idea to strike. This journal will then have less "writing" and more "journalling", but I hope that the quality will improve over a few years.

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:18:19 GMT

Have in your hold the great image
And the empire will come to you.
Coming to you and meeting with no harm
It will be safe and sound.
Music and food
Wil induce the wayfarer to stop.
The way in its passage through the mouth is without flavor.
It cannot be seen,
It cannot be heard,
Yet it cannot be exhausted by use.

- Tao te ching

***

For nearly the first year that I've been in this city I've been caged inside four blocks of concrete and textbooks, holed up in a monolithic, academic prison. When I came to Cincinnati I was equal parts excited and lonely - simultaneously thrilled to explore a new city but overcome at times with the melancholy that comes with leaving ones friends behind. I thought - perhaps naively - that I'd have time to get out and see Cincinnati, learn its history firsthand and meet people outside of my study group.

No dice, soldier.

The past ten months were filled with crushing amounts of work and my entire social circle was reduced to eight or nine people whose experiences were almost identically my own. We saw each other every day, ate at the same hospital cafeterias, took the same classes, even sometimes studied in the same digs. We slogged through the year, zombie like, trying to shove as much information as possible between our ears while making damn sure that little got between our legs. Alive but Lifeless, Sexed but Sexless.

There is something to be said for always being busy - for time planned down to the hour with lectures and seminars, early mornings and tired sunsets. But it wears a body down slowly, slyly, flesh against the millstone. And when it ends one is left with an almost perplexing sense of nothingness - time opening like a flower to yield only the emptiest void.

Mon, 04 May 2009 01:16:49 GMT

Einmal Ist Keinmal

Today is my birthday; I feel fragile.
My supplication: Please give me sincere advice. On anything, on anyone.

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:32:48 GMT

Arsenal

One of the neatest things about cooking is the personal encyclopedia of dishes each cook develops over the years. My mother, for example, can make almost any sort of Gujurati curry without even consulting a recipe book or measuring out her ingredients. It bothered me to no end when I would ask her about how much cumin, how many teaspoons of garam masala she'd put into a dish and she'd shrug her shoulders, open her hand and say "this much" - a small, colorful clot of spice on her palm. I wonder if things started that way - if she began making curry by carefully weighing out all the ingredients and over time unconsciously developed a method that didn't require careful measurements. In Khoja culture as with many other ethnic communities there are no real cookbooks - every woman (and it is almost always the women) learns to cook from her mother or sisters; I have a vision of my mother, under the watchful direction of her mother, peering over the metal rim of a sauce pot.

Learning the art.

I'm slowly developing my own library, shelving away sauces, spice combinations, techniques away in the back of my head and getting to the point where I can whip 'em up on short notice. Today I made a rather decadent macaroni and cheese and saw that the cheese sauce called for a starting base of flour and butter. A little lightbulb went off in my head when I read those two items, and somewhere in my brain an inner voice said "Flour and butter. That's a bechamel sauce. You know how to do that." And from that point on I didn't even bother to read the items as separate objects - they were just a bechamel sauce, two parts of a construction.

One of my friends introduced me to a Russian proverb last week - "Povtoreniye - Maht Ucheniya" - "Repetition is the Mother of Learning". It's strange how often I've repeated the same movements in cooking over and over again; cutting potatoes until I could get the pieces down to near-translucent slivers, boiling eggs until I figured out the perfect timing to get the yolks soft but not runny - the way my father enjoys them - or a host of other minutinae picked up over the years.

***

The first dish I remember consciously cooking without help was Yakisoba - Japanese fried noodles. Junior year of college; I was twenty years old and had just moved into an apartment four blocks from the beach after living in residence dorms. I'd just finished Kafka On The Shore and wanted pan fried noodles, so I drove over to Albertson's and picked up three packets of instant Yakisoba from their "Asian Foods" themed section (which as I recall was a 5'x3.5' refrigerated corner in one corner of the supermarket). I was elated - here I was about to cook my first decent meal.

When I made the first packet of noodles I neglected to read the directions.

It was disastrous. I remember scraping off the charred mass from the bottom of my roommate's pan and trying to figure out what in the nine hells had gone wrong. Then I read the small text on the back of the foil packet and "discovered" that I needed cooking oil - and remember thinking that it was a supremely dumb idea for a company to force the need for anything other than boiled water on its customers (exhibit A: Instant Ramen). So I tore open the second packet of moist noodles and tried again - boiling the noodles first, then putting them into a clean skillet and frying them, this time with oil. Half an hour and one pre-made "spice packet" later I had my first meal: rubbery noodles with gritty dehydrated flavoring. My roommates returned from the gym and immediately tromped into the kitchen, drawn by the salty smell of noodles.

"Wow - that looks good!" exclaimed one.
"Hey N. - you're a chef!" said the other.

I'm just glad they didn't look in the trash.

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:36:48 GMT

I go through my days thinking about things I might write, about subjects that could morph themselves into posts. I file them away in my head, save them for now, but when I sit down at my desk there's a complete blank space where there should be substance. I'm afraid of life - have been since August - and I think this is because I've spent the majority of my time shut up in the library, out of touch with just about everything.

Maybe, like Fellini, I'll make something out of this - write about the complete absence of inspiration - but it probably won't be as well crafted or beautiful.

So I'll start with a framework instead. There's been a random "25 questions" meme slinking, herpes-like, through the internet - now I'll bite.

1. I've never broken a bone though I've had my upper lip split, ear cartilage torn, teeth knocked out and been in multiple concussions. I'm thankful for this.
2. I'm the stingiest person I know - and my family will constantly call me out on it. It has its perks - I'm able to save almost more money than anyone else I know (I saved >40% of my pre-tax income last year) - but sometimes I think I should spend more and enjoy life.
3. I'm constantly hungry or eating. Think of Brad Pitt's character in Ocean's Eleven. I'm eating as I write this meme.
4. I have a love/hate relationship (can't think of any less-cliche-ey way to state this) with my height. I can barely reach the cookie jar.
6. #4 makes clothes shopping a chore; consequently when I find something that fits (e.g. a sweater) I'll buy three of them in varying colors. My wardrobe is a bit laughable - I own multiple copies of the same piece, like someone went a little CNTRL-C, CNTRL-Z crazy in my closet.
7. I don't think guns should be legal but (hypocritically) enjoy going to the shooting range.
8. I'm also the biggest (non-famous) hypocrite I know - and working out what I believe in and how I want to be seen by others is a constant concern.
9. Endurance sports are my thing; I've always wanted to do a biathlon but can't ski worth beans.
10. I really, really like to cook. There's an unbaked loaf of dough sitting in my fridge right now. It seems relatively simple - follow directions and have patience, and yummy things will result. Unfortunately this is not always the case...
11. I have nearly set the same apartmet on fire twice on two different occasions.
12. I've never had a one night stand.
13. I like to go through museums and art galleries very slowly. I have spent entire days at museums only to go back the next day because I only got through half of it. Strangely enough I can't remember a lot of the art I see, but if you show me a picture and I've seen it my memory will kick in and I can tell you where I saw it.
14. I've got a ridiculous memory for names, faces and clothing. People are sometimes amazed (I enjoy this).
15. I enjoy "making stuff" - whether by sewing machine, C++/Python or machine shop tools. If I had a chance to go through life again I'd be an engineer for this reason, but I feel my path will definitely revolve around creation.
16. I couldn't think of living by myself (i.e. without a roommate) because I enjoy being around people - but now that I have my own place I'd rather live by myself.
17. My junior year of college, my roommate (who is built like a Spanish Bull) put me on a bodybuilder's diet. I took vitamin supplements, glutamine, drank protein shakes every day and went to the gym five days a week for three months. The result? I gained five pounds and was still skinnier than a willow switch.
18. I get angsty when I can't exercise.
19. I want to become a physician because it will let me practice my trade anywhere in the world as long as I can communicate. The travel opportunities are nearly endless. Whatever you've heard about "altruism" or "healing the sick" is only partially true. I hear that the money's not bad, also.
20. I play my father's records (think The Doobie Brothers, Squarepusher, James Taylor, Abraxas etc.) more than he does - it's one of the first things I do whenever I visit my parents.
21. I like to throw dinner parties (in my parents house) and cook for others - I don't like to dine alone - someday when I have my own place I want to make this a weekly occurrence. Wishful thinking.
22. Children are fun and inquisitive when they're young but quickly become devils on two legs. As long as they're not mine, I'm okay with them.
23. I will usually bend over backwards to give other people the "benefit of the doubt", but if I mean to hurt you then I've probably done it on purpose.
24. I have a horrid habit of talking too much, inflating my own ego and trying to dominate almost every conversation I find myself in.
25. Humor, for me, is a huge shielf. Being the funny guy in the room stops me from having to think about serious conversation.

That was a lot.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:33:42 GMT

Einmal Ist Keinmal

Regular posting will resume tomorrow. I had a wonderful hiatus.

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:16:41 GMT

I keep coming back to A Love Supreme. I remember the first time I heard the first few bars - on Warren Olney's Which Way LA - almost every school day for years, driven home in my father's old, hideous maroon Toyota Camry with the dent on the bumper where the car'd hit a tree after my father forgot to set the parking brake while on a our sloped driveway. The car rolled onto the other side of the street and would have gone onto our neighbor's front lawn had their magnolia been absent.

I was in fourth grade and in the car for the entire thing. It was bananas.

But yeah - A Love Supreme. It sounds good.

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:40:41 GMT

Reflexes

The door zone is a three foot wide invisible space adjacent to parked cars. When biking I stay outside the door zone - closer to traffic but without fear of going through someone else's window. My attention is divided between watching for cars coming out of driveways - to my right - and traffic behind me. Opening doors are an afterthought - as long as I maintain the distance between my body and the closest set of tires.

There are, of course, problems with this system.

***

I'm coming home from breakfast - my stomach full of eggs, hash browns, buttered rye toast spread thick with strawberry jam - midway up a hill when a someone opens their car door and steps out onto the street. No problem, I think - and promptly veer a foot or two into traffic. They're a good fifteen yards in front of me, so move early to avoid any problems. Just to make sure I'm not about to become the next dent on someone's front bumper I lean out and look over my left shoulder.

There is a big fucking bus behind me. It is not slowing down.

I veer to the right.

And then I make a stupid, rookie mistake. I momentarily forget about the open car door ten fifteen feet from my handlebars, forget about the man stepping out of his car, a grocery bag held in the crook of his arm. I forget about the drawn breath channeling air into my lungs, the pressure between my teeth and I lean my body far to the left and turn my handlebars slightly into the road. I split the difference between the open door to my right and the bus to my left and pray that my bicycle misses both.

I'm too far to the right.

My right shoulder nails the edge of the door and the impact swings my bike towards the curb - miraculously, I don't go into traffic. I react unconsciously, in milliseconds, pedals churning, my mind empty. Somehow I right the bike, get it parallel to the road and slam on the brakes. I come to a stop a few feet from some trash cans and rest, one leg outstretched like a kickstand, and catch my breath for a second before continuing up the hill.

"His right hand was extended above him, flat. Across the extreme tip of his middle finger, he saw now as he lifted that hand, a faint sixteenth of an inch of black tread wherethe tire had touched in passing. He looked at that black line withdisbelief, getting to his feet."

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:31:16 GMT

Si se puede.

So,
What happens now?

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:23:44 GMT

Autumn in Cincinnati.

It's beautiful outside. Trees are changing colors, everyone's layering; gloves, scarves, boots all out from now until April when Spring trickles over the midwest. The summer humidity hangs around in small pockets like a will-o-the-wisp, sudden slow fingers of warmer air interrupting the steady cold.

I'm ill prepared for the change in weather. Between a single pea coat, a corduroy blazer, two old sweaters and numerous cotton t-shirts my wardrobe reminds that it needs updating with every chilly morning. Morning bike rides result in slow fingertip death from a creeping chill followed by massive swelling when I walk into any heated area. My clothes are like cheesecloth against the wind. I happily told one of my classmates that I was ordering a windproof coat and he told me that he owned six - and that all of them were bigger than me.

Six heavy winter jackets. If he'd said that in Southern California he'd be laughed at all the way to the ocean. And then buried in wet sand and left for drowning by the rising tide, murdered by the scorn of the semi-desert, sunshine state.

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:40:36 GMT

Seth Godin's article on effort as a choice made me think a bit about medical school and the suffocating feelings of insecurity within me. The article discusses outliers (those who are seemingly head and shoulders above everyone else intellectually, financially etc.) and the damaging feelings of self-loathing that result from constantly watching them; one quote that struck me from the article was:

"I think we've been tricked by the veneer of lucky people on the topof the heap. We see the folks who manage to skate by, or who get somuch more than we think they deserve, and it's easy to forget that:</p>

a. these guys are the exceptions
and
b. there's nothing you can do about it anyway.

And that's the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may bemore appealing than effort, you don't get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time. "

It's easy to find outliers in medical school - 100% of the people in a medical class passed high academic standards and worked hard to get there. It's easy for me to worry that I'm not studying hard enough or parsing my coursework correctly because there are so many people who have a demonstrated history of kicking ass. Even with luck involved, the outliers here succeed in no small part to long evenings spent impaling textbooks on their brainstems.

For me to whine about others' stellar performance is prodigal and gets me nowhere. The more medical students I talk to, the more I realized that they have the same dumb problems I do - passing their classes, worrying about groceries in the fridge, time management, being outshined by their peers. Even among the top performers I hear others talk the same talk I do - wishing that they had the intelligence or work ethic of their peers, constantly feeling like they don't belong. In reality, most of them are already there; they just need to listen to themselves.

I guess I'm not the only one. But for me to have thought that I was was an illusion in the first place.

***

This feels like the sort of entry I would have posted in high school, but then I realized - I've never really confronted myself on my own insecurities. I step around them carefully, a delightfully myopic waltz that brings them back every few years or so. I'm certain that this is a problem that will plague me for the rest of the year if I don't get it under control - and I think it can be channeled into something very productive. I need to stay humble, not let ego get the best of me, and (most importantly) keep my mouth shut.

I've got an entire museum chock-full of insecurities, though - and trying to deal with them all at once would tear me apart. Slowly.

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 03:53:35 GMT

Stay humble.

My pride's fractured. Midterms have come, gone and left me with honors in one class but barely passing grades in the two others, an imbalance that makes me question my ability to do well in graduate school. There's a long list of things I didn't do this block that I should have - review my notes more often, spend less time reading and more time internalizing the material and working on practice problems, work on my rote memorization skills, tie concepts together rather than attempt to learn every fact as an independent piece of information. It's only now that I'm learning how to study for these classes and probably shouldn't be worried unless I fail the second block of exams - then it will be time to panic - but for now I think that I'm all right.

Except that I'm not sure of myself.

I was eager to prove something, to manufacture some sort of understanding between the faculty, my peers and I that vindicated my acceptance into this program. Somewhere along the way I placed impressing my colleagues over understanding myself and have paid a heavy price for it. In retrospect I figure this is part of growing up; figuring out your own way of doing things and not relying on the words of others or transient opinions to shape your methods. At the end of finals the only thing that really matters is the number of questions you missed and how well you remember the information; worrying about whether or not people hate me and talk about me behind my back has almost no effect on performance.

So.

I'm going to shut up, quit having such a high opinion of myself, withdraw into a solitary womb and get through this. I think. Keeping to myself will be the easy part - mastering how to ace these difficult classes will be another battle entirely.

Stay humble, everyone.

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:39:52 GMT

Be cool

Ramit Sethi has an excellent video on what you can do to stay ahead during the current financial crisis. His advice is spot on - looking for blame is irrelevant, and the best thing most people can do is save, save, save.

American taxpayers are about to shell out a lot of money - the government has already bought out assets that went sour, and with the recent AIG bailout and the Paulson plan I think it's clear that the administration's not going to impose market regulations any time soon. For me the AIG bailout was a final checkpoint - determining whether the government would put an end to the payouts or try to slow down the decline by creating more credit. I don't like the idea of the government buying up bad assets because it sets a precedent of bailouts as the answer to the decline - and more companies would obviously accept government handouts rather than fold.

The new plan bothers me because of the complete lack of oversight that accompanies it the Paulson plan would claim to be immune from review "by any court of law or by any administrative agency". At a point where people have little trust in the government - with the decline in regulation that fuelled this destruction in the credit market, hefty executive payouts, the uncertain fate of healthcare and the Iraq war - I hope that this plan isn't strongarmed through Congress.

This American Life has an excellent primer on the sub-prime meltdown: here. It's an hour long but well worth the time.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:22:04 GMT

At Sea

"How long have you been here?" asks my classmate when I walk back into the study lounge.
"Oh, uh... I just got here."

The truth was, I'd been studying most of the day but didn't want to admit it because I felt like I was getting nowhere.

***

I get caught up in other people. In the way they live, the way they breathe. One of my classmates mentioned that he'd been working on practice tests (it is two weeks before the first round of midterms) and I sulked for a good half hour before one of my friends told me to relax. He was right, but through the entire process I knew I was overreacting and didn't do a damn thing about it. This is my bad habit. I can't stand to be behind other people in work. I need to be in front, to pretend that I'm somehow on top of my game when no one else is.

When I take a step back I think I'm working hard enough, and I think what will get me through this year will be to focus on myself and not others, to stay humble above all else and quit worrying about what other people are doing. I thought I had this down during high school, but it's frustrating the way that old traits sneak themselves back into my head.

I offer no apologies for the whining.

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:17:22 GMT

Hush.

"Those are lungs!" gesticulates the surgeon, carefully lifting up the ribcage the way a mechanic pivots the hood of a car. "I have some here for y'all to look at - pass them around."
I take one and over the coldness of the room, the sweat droplets under my latex gloves I can feel the tense, rubbery surface. Smooth and oddly soft, careworn through years of use, an anoymous organ sits naked in my palm. I give the lung a gentle squeeze and it modestly deflates.
"Ah," notices my professor, "Pulmonary alveoli are so small that they won't give up air easily unless they're pushed - they can hold air for a long time."

***
You will die. Someday.

After your passing - whether by pestilence or brutality, in anger or in love - a final breath will lie silent at the bottom of your lungs. Properly embalmed the tissues will evade decomposition for centuries and the air will stay trapped, motionless, imprisoned by your uninhabited flesh. Donate your body to a medical program and your lungs might be excised - displayed with hundreds of other lungs in large cases and shown off to ennuied third graders, warning them against the dangers of smoking, sending them into yawning fits with case studies of emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

And through it all your last unused pockets of air will be passed over for what they could have been - a scream, a sigh, a prayer - and will remain so along with hundreds of their counterparts behind plexiglass; a macabre display of actions untaken.

Man on fire

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:06:22 GMT

With a week to go before classes start, in an unfamiliar city, I'm numb and trying to figure out how to make sense of life. So I called my man David for a little help.

"You have a blank slate," He said.

It's true in so many ways. I've gone from gainful employment to unemployed, biking everyday to stagnating in front of my computer. I run with a crowd of nine hundred plus on facebook but don't have a single friend within a hundred miles. Et cetera, et cetera.

This is good - in time I'll build new connections, shuffle back into a rhythm, get my groove back.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:39:34 GMT

I am moving to Cincinnati.
Stay tuned.

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:43:21 GMT

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.

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:12:32 GMT

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."

Thu, 29 May 2008 07:53:09 GMT

Placeholder

Circumstances keep me in limbo. It's been like this for almost a year I and I am getting bloody sick of it.

Wed, 21 May 2008 07:26:31 GMT

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.

Fri, 09 May 2008 07:00:55 GMT

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?