Ugly Duckling Reflections

new place

2011-05-25T19:18:00.002-04:00

It's been an incredibly tumultuous semester. Intense classwork, labwork and prepartion for my (currently ongoing!) qualifying exams, intense new exercise program, caring for a sick friend, preparing for our wedding, family visits, moving to a new apartment, a new volunteer job, health challenges... Every time it seemed like I was going to get a break and some sleep, something new came along.

Things feel like they're settling down a bit, which is almost entirely a good thing. The semester is over, and I have only one 6-week class left to take as a graduate student. The new apartment is so much nicer than our old one. Unexpectedly, something ephemeral about the layout and ambiance of the new place has made playing violin and piano exponentially more attractive, and there's been a lot more music in the air. Harriet loves all the nice new windows, and has practically taken up residence in the front bay window, where her nose is inches away from a huge rhododendron bush that is crawling with bumblebees. Our tiny new container garden is planted and we may be overwatering it out of excitement. All the really important stuff for the wedding is all set. And half of my qualifying exam is done!

It's the other half of the qualifying exam that is going to dominate the next few weeks, punctuated by TWO out-of-state trips to attend friends' weddings. Studying for the qualifying exam requires a lot of discipline. The list of topics I may be questioned about is massive, and I have 7 completely full composition books of notes from the last 2 years that I am reading through. It's tiresome. It's really not surprising, given my tendency to over-organize, that I'm trying to devise some kind of "daily schedule", full of healthy things such as arising early, exercising before breakfast, mandatory reading and artistic betterment, and hours of studying without a computer to distract me. I have a history of such grand plans. They appeal to me so much - wouldn't it be nice to wake up at dawn, exercise and meditate when it's nice and quiet, eat breakfast in the garden, study in a relaxed, yet focused way for many hours, leaving time enough at the end of the day for a nice walk, a nice dinner, and minimal housework?

I'm never sure if I'm chasing after a pipe dream or not, and I know I tend towards wanting everything to be all set, just right, just so, picturesque and so on, before I really dig in and get started. But on the other hand, these are healthy habits I envision for myself! And even more pointedly, I know they make me happier and more relaxed. Why I don't choose them 100% of the time is both baffling and a testament to the enormous difficulty of changing habits. It's an awful feeling to want to get things done, but find yourself glued to banal news articles. It's terrible to want to exercise, but to feel groggy, stiff and out of sorts. And worst of all, it's terrible to feel like you can either be productive, or be relaxed. No, I want both.

I guess I'll keep chasing after my perfectly productive, perfectly relaxed routine. Because honestly, there's more than enough time in a day to get things done in a relaxed way. I think the problem is that often, the things that I think will relax me (oh, I just have to read this one more pointless thing before starting work... I really need a break in which to play solitaire... etc.) don't relax me at all. And the things that are truly relaxing seem, at first, to require more effort. I don't know why it's so non-intuitive. It's not that there's no place to listening to my own feelings and doing what the moment suggests - it's just really hard to tell when I'm fooling myself.

Wake up: 5:30

Exercise: 5:50-7:20 (sometimes done by 6:50)

Breakfast, Shower, Dress: 7:20-8:00

Work: 8:00-11:30

Lunch (and if home, housekeeping): 11:30-12:30

Work: 12:30-4:00

Music/art/reading/hanging out with Brian: 4:00-5:30

Dinner/necessary tasks/tea/meditation: 5:30-9:00

new plan

2011-05-25T19:12:00.002-04:00

I've decided to start using this blog for more prosaic purposes. I find I often get "blogger's block" because I can't think of anything interesting enough to say - and I'm done with that. Instead, I'm going to try to write short, frequent and possibly pointless entries just for the sake of getting things written down. Maybe I'll just write my to-do list. Who knows.

scientist

2010-06-06T17:43:00.006-04:00

After a 2-month spell of awkward hesitation, overthinking and worry, I finally decided which lab I wanted to permanently join as a Ph.D. candidate. Mercifully, things worked out - resolving at least a week's worth of unpleasant daydreams regarding my "inevitable" rejection - and I started work right away.

I hadn't anticipated what a difference it would make to be a Real Member of a lab, as opposed to a UROP student, intern or rotation student. Although my duties as a student researcher are not unfamiliar - and actually the project I'm working on is a direct continuation of my rotation project - the internal experience has proven to be entirely new. After a few days in my new lab, I noticed my attitude shifting. Somehow the time went faster. Instead of reading papers out of a sense of duty, I was looking them up for fun. I asked for extra background reading. Most of all, I found myself feeling irresistibly curious about my experiments.

It's not that I wasn't curious before. I was, in a removed way. But, as I've endlessly proclaimed in the context of early education, a lack of independence and ownership over one's work and learning dampens curiosity extraordinarily effectively. It's hard to be excited about doing exacting, repetitive work for a project that was created by somebody else, directed by somebody else, and that will be finished and celebrated by somebody else after you leave. In those situations, your ideas are of modest (if any) importance. You feel totally replaceable - and your curiosity begins to tend toward the hour, the contents of your lunch box, and your evening plans. I felt that way as a child so often, and yet somehow, I failed to recognize the same dullness of mind that had overtaken my scientific thinking as I pushed through my rotations.

So, I must say - it was wonderful to realize that my ideas are once again relevant and important. I feel twice as awake, and for the first time in years, I found myself wishing, on a lazy Sunday morning, that Monday would come sooner so I could hurry up and get some results! I might actually discover something! Imagine that! I might learn something that nobody on earth has ever learned before. Maybe it will open a door. Maybe, somehow, it will help people. That's what science should be about.

A few days ago, an essay edited by my new PI was returned to me, covered with correction. I realized later that I had expected to feel rather defeated by the sheer volume of comments - in fact, I'd almost been preparing myself for a brief period of embarrassed mourning. But as I through the paper, I started to smile. Every logical hole, sloppy reference and choppy description had been pointed out, and I suddenly realized that I was tired of getting away with those kinds of mistakes. I know better - every single error in my papers was one I'd thought about as I wrote it, and lazily decided to ignore on the grounds that nobody has ever called me on them before, so why bother? Well, I can't do that any more. Now I get to be a real scientist.

This is where things get seriously, though. Being a real scientist. Sometimes it's hard to know what that means. In some labs and institutions, being a scientist means being part of what is essentially a business whose product or brand is new information about a very specialized topic. And a couple hundreds of years ago, being a scientist meant you were a Thinker - and probably also an inventor, entrepreneur, philosopher, ethicist, radical or handyman! (And, possibly enemy of the state. Thank goodness for modern times.) This stark change is particularly evident in biology, which requires increasingly enormous amounts of money, specialized equipment, detailed background knowledge, and complicated techniques to do cutting-edge work. Although there's certainly nothing wrong with the "science as business" model, it doesn't appeal to me. What I LOVE about science is its way of calmly and rationally dismantling our frivolous hierarchies, irrational beliefs and false boundaries - along with our ignorance and suffering. Science is the great equalizer. We're all made of nothing but atoms - molecules, cells, tissues, organs. Our bodies constantly rebuild themselves, day in and day out. We aren't at all who we were yesterday - and we'll be different again tomorrow. The way we build our lives around certain power structures, our prejudices, our desires - it's a front and nothing more; a practical way to deal with the world so 6 billion organisms can have any hope of surviving together. I think it would be impossible for me to do good science while wrapped up in the illusion that I had to rise to the top. Because there isn't one. For me, what makes science go are the sparks of collaboration that set your mind wheeling off to new ideas, combined with a constant, sobering reminder, repeated ad nauseum, that new knowledge can be both helpful and dangerous.

As luck would have it, I have a feeling - though I'm wary of jumping to any conclusions this early on - that I have landed in the right place at the right time and, critically, with the right people, to figure out a way through this maze. I've got my fingers crossed.

fluffy little summer post

2010-06-03T22:06:00.002-04:00

So, we've consumed two entire watermelons in the last week. They weren't HUGE watermelons, but they weren't all that small, either. Today, we got stuck barefoot in a rainstorm... on purpose. Last weekend, we took a big bowl of cherries (no, really) and went walking to Harvard to buy a sunhat (I kid you not) and ended up finding a truck giving away free Ben and Jerry's ice cream (this is almost unbelievable). We sailed. We ate cucumber sandwiches. During our morning runs, we stop to smell the roses, which are pouring out over almost every fence in Cambridgeport. We fixed up our bikes (winter commuting is really harsh on the poor things) and pedalled around all freshly de-rusted in the late afternoon sun. The fan makes a racket in the window and papers flutter on the desk. The ice cube trays are refilled every day. The comforter is kicked off of the bed, so we can sleep like little children, all sticky-cheeked and warm and heavy, our legs hanging off the bed and our arms splayed out.

Summer.

dreaming in science

2010-06-02T20:38:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to come up with a Great Idea for my thesis. This is about as difficult as hunting endangered tigers. Great Ideas, it would seem, are not only rather nocturnal, but also elusive, and fond of inhospitable climates. I languish in the humid evenings, coming up with one terrible idea after another... and then fall asleep, and wake up tangled at 3 in the morning with a fragment of a brilliant plan which fades away in to only the most frustrating memory after a few seconds. Ideas also show up while I'm biking, or running, or in some complicated arm balance at yoga class - in short, at any time at which it is absolutely impossible to write them down. Lately I've even started to dream these ideas, but of course in my dreams they are confused, nebulous and utterly nonsensical, despite appearing with an air of certainty.

C'mon muses, would it kill you to visit me when I've got a pen in hand?

a bad day snuck in

2010-06-01T22:21:00.001-04:00

Despite a Herculean effort, I have not yet managed to force my capricious stomach in to obeying my every whim. This is really no surprise. What was I expecting, a bloody miracle?

But I'd be a damn liar if I didn't admit that it still throws me for a serious loop now and then. Yesterday was, unfortunately, one such example. By the end of the day I was gritting my teeth to get through every successive minute at work, with progressively less grace. Same old story, same old pain, and unfortunately, same old crushing doubts.

Though I'm not much of a fan of pain and nausea, it's the doubts that get me these days. Would somebody else give in as easily? Do I give up when others might only complain of discomfort? Am I subconsciously giving myself an excuse to fail? Who am I letting down by giving in? Will they even believe me? Will they ever trust me?

There are very, very few things that make me mad. This is one of them.

*****************************************************

Another cup of tea, another deep breath, and I begin again.

I try. I try so hard.

Harriet: the latest and greatest

2010-04-03T21:45:00.000-04:00

winter retreat (unedited)

2010-04-03T20:47:00.000-04:00

awake hours before dawn
and deep in to the night

the low sun passes over the snow
and every day the wind rearranges the drifts

covering my footprints in the field
while I sit on my cushion, wrapped in blankets and breathe

owls hooting outside my window
which I have opened, despite the cold

just to get a little more crisp air--
when you have time to smell it for hours

you realize just how starving you are
for every breath

I got lost in the snow, once
dazzled by the beauty of a hemlock tree

it was so, so quiet
and so in the quiet I tried an experiment --

what if you only had one more day to live?
it turns out,

that in the face of an imagined death
(less wrenching than the real thing, but still, I made an effort)

I love the blazing sweetness of sunlight
and the warmth of a lovely thought

and every breath turns out to be so overwhelmingly...
...wanted

it made me realize that when I convince myself that
our lives are too complex,

our existence too manufactured and removed from nature,
our purposes impossible to believe in,

it is just that I have momentarily forgotten
that everything in this world was made

to help people be juuuust that much more comfortable
so that they might be juuuust that much more joyful

oh, and we do get it wrong
but it's just so quaint and lovable

that we try at all --
it cures me

Valentine

2010-02-20T21:47:00.000-05:00

Blustery day on Nahant - clouds rolling in, air salty, birds wheeling overhead

A few days later, a different beach (Crane's), unseasonable warm and windless, walking through deep, soft dunes and admiring craggy trees and the utter blue of the ocean

home-made bagels and hummus

2010-02-07T12:24:00.010-05:00

Step 1. Make, rise and cut dough. It looks just like regular bread dough, but it's a little denser, and it contains a bit of honey.

Step 2. Shape dough in to a bagel shape.

Step 3. Put bagels in boiling, sugared water.

Step 4. Flip bagels.

Step 5. Drain bagels on towel.

Step 6. Put toppings on bagels!

Step 7. Bake bagels! First one side, then the other.

Step 8. Make delicious hummus.

Step 9. Make delicious sandwich. (Too bad we couldn't grow the veggies, too!)

exiting the cycle

2010-02-07T10:00:00.002-05:00

When we moved in to our apartment, we didn't own much. Or rather, we owned a lot, but not enough. It was sort of depressing, actually. We had boxes of clothes, books and music, school papers, art supplies and projects, sentimental odds and ends, and electronics that filled a large sedan - but no pots or pans, cutlery, plates or bowls, bed, mattress, couch, chairs, table, kitchen tools, shelves, bedding, dressers, towels, sheets, lamps... In short, we had almost none of the items required to live on our own. It made me feel rather guilty at first, owning so many boxes of books of THINGS and still needing more. In fact, for our first few days in our apartment, we sat on the hardwood floor and read books, ate peanut butter sandwiches made elsewhere, and purchased only one thing: a roll of toilet paper. And for the first few months, every time I walked out of the kitchen and left the stove, pans and tools unused, I felt terrible - a whole room full of useful things was being wasted. No two people need a kitchen entirely to themselves.

You see, coming from co-op life, we had shared almost everything for 4 years. Every chair, pan, and screwdriver was used nearly constantly by a community of 30 people. This made a lot of sense. We had everything we needed, and despite every item being shared, there was rarely a shortage of anything. Something about not personally owning so many possessions was freeing - I could easily account for everything I owned, and if necessary, I could pick it all up at once. Keeping track of possessions is actually stressful, and we had been free from that stress.

But it's not possible to live in a student co-op forever, and so we had to move on. With both of us headed for full-time graduate school, we needed a way to live that was relatively easy and convenient, so extreme living situations were out of the question. But neither were we enthusiastic about jumping in to the consumer world. We knew we were about to buy a lot of things - more things than either of us had ever bought or even owned. It was unavoidable, even as we did our best to look for second-hand goods, especially given our personal standards for construction materials (no formaldehyde, no pressed wood, no toxic stains or varnishes, etc) We were wary of joining the ranks of people who buy what is cheapest and most convenient, throw things away when they inevitably break, and buy new and better things as consumer culture dictates as soon as they are able. It looked like a trap, and we didn't want to get caught. We wanted a better way.

So we agonized over what to buy. We created spreadsheets and webpages. Whiteboards and scraps of paper were covered with ideas. We consulted relatives and friends. We searched the internet for weeks. In the end, we came up with a list of purchases that we thought would be sufficient, comfortable, and ethical. In our final spreadsheet, every item was accompanied by an explanation of why we needed it and how we would acquire it, even things like kitchen knives and sheets. A few items were given to us as gifts. Many we bought second hand from other people in the Boston area. For the rest, we found small retailers specializing in ethically and/or organically produced goods. Many were in the Northeast, and some were even within Boston. We didn't buy any "starter" items - only things we hoped to be able to keep forever. Although not everybody has the luxury of being able to make such purchases, it is far less expensive than one might think, when you carefully consider which purchases are actually necessary.

To some extent, the shock of owning so many things has worn off over the last several months. I no longer feel guilty when I leave the kitchen unused. But sometimes, I try to call that feeling back... even though we tried our best to make long-lasting, ethical choices, it's all too easy to get used to owning so many things, and I *know* it isn't necessary. Someday, I hope we'll be able to share more of our things, generate more of our own energy, and live more lightly in all ways.

chestnut farms open barn

2009-06-15T11:16:00.010-04:00

This weekend, a crew from pika headed over to Chestnut Farms, the farm from which pika buys meat, via a CSA.

About 6 months ago, after some serious research, I signed pika up to receive 40 pounds of meat every month from the farm. Given that I'm a very committed vegetarian, this may seem like a strange move. But since I live in a house of 30 people, about 50% of whom eat meat, and since we're a co-op, my housebill is used, in part, to purchase meat. Because of that, and because of my concern for animal welfare everywhere, regardless of whether or not I make any financial contribution, it made sense to try to work out a system that both made the omnivores happy and addressed some of my concerns.

Chestnut Farms was recommended to me by some old friends, and looking at their website and speaking to the owner on the phone convinced me it was a good farm. But I still wanted to see it for myself, and I felt I had some responsiblity to make sure that the deal I got pika in to was a really good one. It was somewhat sad to be there, knowing that all the animals I was playing with would end up butchered and shrink-wrapped in a big freezer in the basement. But that's the way things really are, and even for me and other vegetarians, I think it's important to see.

Overall, I was very impressed with Chestnut Farms. The cows and sheep frolicked in large pastures, the calves were not separated from their mothers, the pigs had a huge mud pit and field to play in (except for the pregnant sows, who each had their own "spa pen" in which to give birth), the chickens lived in a very large pen, in which sat a full-size school bus, converted in to a chicken-coop-on-wheels... It looked pretty idyllic. The owner, Kim Denney, took a great deal of time to explain how the animals are raised and handled, and the many steps that the farm takes to take care of the land properly and ensure that the animals are happy. She was unfazed and unoffended by the fact that 3 out of the 5 pikans visiting the farm were actually vegetarian.

The adult sows live in a very large pen that is partially a field and partially a large puddle/mud pit. All of the pigs were hanging out in the mud pit looking very happy. Pigs like mud because they don't sweat, so the must have mud on them in order to keep cool. The sows were actually remarkably friendly and gentle - they came right over to say hello to me, and they made all kinds of noise when petted and spoken to.
The rooster, crowing.
The sheep were the least entertaining of all the animals. They lived in a nice big field, didn't like people very much, and ran away when we tried to get close.
The chickens live in this large pen. Their nesting boxes are in the school bus, which actually still works - the farm drives it to a new location every now and then so the chickens don't mess up the land too much. (There are actually 2 school buses, each in its own pen.) Some of the chickens had been debeaked, but not all of them. This concerned me, so I asked about it, and it turns out that normally they don't have debeaked chickens, but they got some recently from a supplier that does debeak. :(
Chestnut Farms didn't used to have goats. All of the ones they have now are male "rescue goats". Male goats are not valued in the dairy industry because, of course, they give no milk, so male kids are usually clubbed to death at birth. Chestnut Farms got their goats from a neighboring goat dairy and they are now being raised for meat. Apparently goat meat is now in demand as people broaden their palettes and learn about ethnic food.
These are the cows in their pasture. They were pretty active, running all over the place. There were lots of babies left in the mix. The rubble in the foreground is from the old abandoned barn that fell apart when the current owners bought the farm - they have rebuilt a very nice, larger barn.
These were the hardest animals for me to visit.... this year's Thanksgiving turkeys (poults). Although nearly all the animals we saw on the farm were destined to be eaten, knowing exactly when nearly all of these birds would be roasted and eaten somehow made it worse. Especially when I got to hold one.
The piglets are really, really adorable. They're pretty shy, but if you stay in their pen for a few minutes they get curious and come over to sniff your hand and nibble on your pants.

Pictures, except for the last picture of the brown piglet (taken by me), by Brian Kardon.

summer supper

2009-05-19T17:44:00.003-04:00

I love cooking summer dinners for pika. Today we're having watermelon, braised kale with cherry tomatoes, little tiny salt potatoes, and a bean-corn-pepper salad. And lemonade! Perfect :)

retreat part 3: i know it when i see it

2009-05-14T14:27:00.002-04:00

One of the teachers pointed this out: the mark of a true thing is that when you hear it, you instantly feel as though you've always known. You integrate it in to your consciousness so completely that it's sometimes embarrassing to look back at how you acted previously ("how could I have been so ignorant?"). On the other hand, sometimes you look back and see that if only you had trusted yourself, or had some support in asking the questions you were asking, you might have realized the truth much earlier ("I *was* on to something!").

In some senses, being on retreat - and in specific, hearing the teachers speak - has been much like coming home after years and years away, and suddenly finding that I am once again - or is it for the first time? - not alone with my questions. I've had quite a strong sense for most of my life that the things I stay up late thinking about, not coincidentally things I write about here, are of much less immediacy to many people than they are to me. Fears about whether or not there is a reality? Weird, right? Wanting to live with the emptiness of the world? Utterly insane! But those ARE the very questions that are attended to in the context of a retreat. Mind you, nobody can answer these questions for you, but it hardly seems to matter, as long as the questions are honored...

Reading through this blog after having been in an environment where those questions are so respected, and where I have learned a new vocabulary to describe my experiences, has been quite a trip...

*****
From October, 2007:
A little bit later I realized that actually, I'm fine. The baby mouse was sad, and yes, I do cry about such little things, but that little sadness didn't have to ruin the day. I'm busy and tired, and sometimes I just want to go to sleep, but does that necessarily mean that I'm doing badly? I don't think so. I think I'm ok. Sometimes I get stuck in this strange frame of mind, where "good" is this unattainable state of rest and contentment, with no outstanding responsibilities to speak of. That doesn't happen here at MIT. But that's all right - there are other ways to define "good".

From October, 2007:
And then I suddenly realized I was being totally ridiculous. I spent all afternoon getting freezing cold and soaking wet on purpose, as part of my SCUBA lesson. I can take as many warm showers as I want. I have plenty of clean dry clothes. Was I really all that uncomfortable? Nah. I merely had stopped being aware of my surroundings. I had decided that biking in the rain isn't nice, and so of course it wasn't. Honestly, the rain was actually quite mystical and gentle.

Anyway, I decided my awareness needed some tinkering.

From September, 2007:
Sometimes I feel like the gain on my internal amplifier (please excuse the EE talk, it's all I've been doing lately) is turned up way too high. Sigh. Sometimes there's nothing to do about Life's Persistent Questions other than curl up in the dark, listen to the rain, and secretly fall asleep with your fingers crossed, hoping that it is possible, and worth the effort, to understand each other.

From September 2007:
And that might just sum up what I love most about the violin, and what makes me so resistant to the idea of super-accessible music making. What else is there these days that actually requires you to meet with a master, one-on-one, and try to do the impossible? What else takes 40 years to get good at? What else connects you with a whole world of other questers who are desperately trying to awaken something that a guy centuries ago imagined?

And is there anything as magical as taking out a funny-shaped, hollow wooden box, drawing some sticky horse-hair across it with everything you've got, and finding, in the end, that somehow you *have* managed to communicate something meaningful to other people?

From September, 2007:
Well, for starters, it does sometimes do exactly what it's supposed to, so score 1. When it's misbehaving, it gets me to slow down and realize that I must sleep, eat well, and take care of myself. Because of it, I now know a jillion things to suggest to anybody who needs help with a stomach problem. I know what it's like to feel stuck in a pit, unable to dig one's way out of the wrong perception that life will never be easy or cheerful again. Because of my stomach, I've learned a lot about the brain and how fear works. Perhaps above all, I've learned that when I see somebody sitting in a meeting looking distracted or unhappy, there are a thousand ways in which just being there, sitting in that chair, could be unimaginably hard for them. Actually, even if somebody doesn't LOOK distracted or unhappy, it still might be hard.

So.... hey buddy. Yeah, you, Stomach. I know you're tryin' hard. I'm getting someplace, I really am. Thanks for all the hard work. You can be quiet now. I'm paying attention.

From March, 2007:
If you really tried, could you stop being stressed? Imagine making a concious decision. Imagine some day, a month from now. You have 2 problem sets and a paper, all in one night. You could either feel horrible about it, stay up until 4 AM with a feeling of anguish because you know you can't do it all before you collapse of exhaustion, or you could stay up until 4 AM, realizing that worrying that you can't do it all won't make you work faster, and get the same amount done. The evening would probably be more pleasant.

And yet when *I* imagine this situation, there's a niggling feeling of guilt. I think I'd actually feel like I was telling the world "I don't care that I can't do this", and I guess I'm afraid to project that image. But it's not true - I do care, I just realize that worrying won't help the cause.

From January, 2008:
Hence I feel inauthentic, not-myself, not-really-who-I-want-to-be. I find myself talking to people and only afterwards realize that what I said was 90% idle chatter (most of which is funny, light-hearted, and kind of pieced together every example I've ever seen of how to be entertaining in social situations) and 10% Real Meaning. It's not that I'm making stuff up, it's just very superficial. I feel as though I'm in a huge crowded swimming pool, and everybody's splashing around and whatnot, and I've got my eyes closed and I keep wincing from all the splashing. It takes so much energy to keep the water out of my eyes and keep treading that I haven't managed to discuss much beyond the metaphorical equivalent of sunblock and potato chips. It's fun for a little while, but too much of it leaves a hollow feeling behind.

A whole post rom April, 2008.

A whole post from August, 2008.

retreat part 2: your animal soul

2009-05-14T14:25:00.004-04:00

Early morning, pouring rain, chilly. I was up early as usual. There were hundreds of worms on the driveway, escaping a flooded drainage ditch. I was taking them off of the driveway and placing them on higher ground. At first, I was an efficient worm-rescue machine. Moved 'em off the driveway and on to a raised patch of grass. Went back for more.

But then I got curious. The worms looked a bit pale, or perhaps a bit flushed - it's hard to tell with worms. They'd been practically swimming up on the driveway. Maybe, I thought, they are hungry. Or maybe their skin can't stand the open air like this. Maybe they are too weak to get back in to the earth.

So I dug some holes, and tested them out with some feisty-looking worms. No luck. My holes were not up to worm standards. Perhaps worms do not like holes that have been pre-made, lest the holes belong to somebody else. So I roughed up some nice dirt patches, the easier to begin digging, and put the worms in them. No luck. The worms oozed away. I tried covering them with leaves, in case they didn't like light. That didn't help. I was a total failure at worm rescue! It was just like trying to be witty in front of somebody important. There were those worms, staring at me without any eyes at all, forcing me to make excuses about my lack of knowledge about all things dirt.

So, after putting all the worms on high ground, I left. Twenty minutes later, they were all gone. No thanks to me!!

*****

Before dawn, in a tiny little gazebo, in the middle of the woods, I was meditating. It was extraordinarily windy, and there was a huge full moon. I was enjoying the sound of the howling wind when a new sound started up. Huge chunks of bark being ripped off a tree, not too far away. The sound of a powerful breath. A bear! A HUNGRY bear, looking for a snack! And there I was, all alone in the forest. My heart skipped a few beats. I was motionless, exactly like a hare waiting for the perfect opportunity to make a dash for her hole - except there was nowhere to go. I breathed silently. The noise stopped. Minutes passed. I was frozen.

Unexpectedly, my timer went off, indicating the end of my sitting. I opened my eyes. New sunlight was mingling with moonlight. The wind had stopped... and a doe was only a few feet away, eating sprouts calmly by my side, totally unafraid.

Who is the timid animal in the woods, exactly?

retreat part 4: rain or shine?!?!?!

2009-05-14T13:01:00.000-04:00

Things I Really, Really Missed While On Retreat:

-the weather report (somewhat hilariously - I had no idea I was so fascinated with the weather report, but almost every day I had some deviant thought about opening up my cell phone NOT to call anyone, but to send a text message to Google and get the weather report)
-fruit juice (particularly grapefruit juice)
-hugs (it's funny... it's not the silence, or lack of communication, or lack of technology, or physical pain, or relative lack of entertainment that gets to me... it's the lack of hugs)
-my cat (I even missed her meowing and trying to climb in to my lap while I'm meditating and digging her claws in to my thigh when I ignore her)

Things I Unexpectedly Didn't Miss All That Much While On Retreat:

-my phone (except for the weather report!)
-my computer (I thought about email all of twice, I think)
-eating (whenever mealtime rolled around, I'd think, what? again? I just ate!)
-talking

Things I Missed A Little But Didn't Feel Urgent About:
-running (there will be plenty of time to run)
-playing the violin (there will be plenty of time to play the violin)
-learning new stuff (Wikipedia, anyone?)
-people (in my darker moments, I missed some people terribly, but mostly, I felt as though I was doing the retreat for them... so it was ok)

retreat part 1: enough

2009-05-14T10:53:00.003-04:00

Another silent retreat. At the beginning you go in like a brand-spanking-new greenhouse, all glass walls and unsprouted seeds in bare dirt... and as time goes on, an atmosphere develops, and clouds form, and the seeds sprout and grow and bloom, and pretty soon you've got a whole ecosystem and condensation on the walls and broad jungle leaves blocking the view... Mostly, it's a very good thing, because it means you are alive and something is really happening, but it makes it nearly impossible to explain the experience! Like trying to explain how things are different after a spring rain...

At an afternoon sitting a few days in to the retreat, I started to feel sick. It's a familiar feeling, my stomach being the troublemaker that it is, but it's *really* unpleasant. And it makes it almost impossible to sit up or swallow. I tried all the tricks in my bag. First, I just acknowledge that I'm not feeling well and turn my attention to something else. When it gets bad enough that I can't pay attention to anything else, I try to dissect the experience. Which sensations are painful? Which are uncomfortable? How am I reacting? How very studious. Eventually, some little fuse blows in my mind and all my efforts to be calm and observant are out the window. I stay seated, but it's like trying to hold a squirming cat. And of course that's a losing battle... I was finally forced to get up and leave. In the middle of the sitting. In front of all those silent people sitting there, ears attuned to the tiniest of noises...

I got out of the hall and collapsed on to the floor, feeling sick, embarrassed, and cuttingly sarcastic with myself. Geez, said that nasty little voice in my mind, you might as well have busted out your toenail clipper, or power drill, or jackhammer. How considerate. Now they probably hate you. There is nothing you can do here to show your respect and concern for anyone except to not screw up, and you couldn't even manage that. I was lying on the floor listening to this voice - my own voice - taunt me like I was 8 years old again, cornered on the playground by a bully twice my size. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I started to cry. That nasty little voice became a whiny little voice. Listen to yourself, it said. You're treating yourself like rubbish. You're preying on your own weaknesses, and you're really, really good at it. How pathetic. Haven't you suffered enough already???

Yes, came a clear answer. Let's stop.

I opened my eyes. A new voice. My own voice, without a doubt, speaking in my own authentic way, from somewhere quiet. Not straining, not struggling, not trying to contort my experience in to something positive. Not trying to prove its kindness, not trying to be good, not trying to be better - just completely, utterly kind. There was no failure. Suddenly I felt the cool floorboards underneath me. I heard the silence all around me and felt the peacefullness that was still blanketing the meditation hall. I got up. I made tea.

I was fine.

conflict

2009-05-14T10:28:00.000-04:00

Some people complain that Westerners are going to Buddhism like they go to Wal-Mart, picking what they like, leaving an ugly consumerist mess behind.

I am, apparently, one such Wal-Mart shopper. You can pin me with almost all of those negative stereotypes. I'm a middle class intellectual who lives a comfortable life and is pursuing a PhD. I don't consider myself Buddhist. I turned away, by choice, from religion because I couldn't stand being told what to think or believe. One thing I like about Buddhism - well, let's be specific, the practice taught here that includes among other things vipassana and metta - is its rationality and openness. I view it as somewhat scientific. I feel there is something of unspeakable value to be learned and known, but I am not interested in becoming a nun. I dislike complicated or unexplained rituals. I do not wish to revere authority simply because I am told to do so.

From one perspective, a somewhat bitter perspective in my opinion, I'm just another greedy Westerner who wants to apply a feel-good salve to her broken Western life at the expense of Asian tradition. If I'm going to be involved with Buddhism, I should call myself Buddhist (out of respect?). I shouldn't "pick and choose" which parts of Buddhism I pay attention to - the thing exists as a whole for good reasons laid down by smart people, and I am unwise to leave out the traditional aspects. I shouldn't be grabby - either I can live my opulent Western life, or I can ordain or become homeless and discover the true meaning of the teachings. I should be laughed at, or at least corrected, for insisting that there is a scientific quality to the teachings. I should believe Buddhist scholars about what is ethically correct before I should be so cocky as to trust myself, because I haven't thought about things as much as they have. I should not fool myself in to thinking that what I am doing is as valuable as what a real Buddhist is doing.

Oh, this makes me sad. And it scares me. Truly. This is precisely why I do not call myself Buddhist, and why I do not identify myself by any other label. Please, world, I beg you - do not judge me for following my heart. I am trying, with more earnestness than I could possibly convey, to wake up, to find out what is true, to bring happiness to the world instead of suffering. You do not have to believe me. I do not want to take anything away from you. I do not want you to think I am noble or correct.

This is so similar to the complaint that surfaces in Christian communities every December. Non-believers flock to churches on Christmas Eve, apparently, it would seem, to complete their sordid Christmas shopping list by taking advantage of the beauty that true believers create on such a special night. There is such outrage that these "cultural Christians" take comfort in a Christmas Eve service. I can imagine ways in which these infrequent church-goers could be a genuine problem - perhaps they are disrespectful, noisy, or otherwise clueless about how to participate. But I think most of them are respecful people with a genuine desire to mark a special day in a way that means something to them. Why is there such an impulse to deny them that opportunity? I do not think that they degrade Christianity with their sporadic enthusiasm and sharing. I do not think that their happiness is undeserved.

In some ways, I think it's human nature to want others to follow our path. This is evident to me even in daily life. If I find, while eating dinner, that combining my salad dressing and my mashed potatoes produces a fantastic new dish, I am likely to tell everybody at the table. I want them to experience it. Maybe I'll feel disappointed when my neighbor decides that she's perfectly happy with her food the way it is. This sort of thing happens all the time. Have you ever read a really fantastic article, and wanted everybody you know to read it, too? Some people will find it boring. Others will find it thrilling. Others will read the first paragraph and then become distracted by something that is more important to them at that time. In those moments we can have such a strong sense that THIS article is THE MOST IMPORTANT, and that everybody MUST see it. It's very strange.

This, I think, is the danger of religion. People have profound experiences, and they want to share. Some are intersted, others are not. There is this terrible tendency to think that if another person is not interested in following your path, he or she does not respect the depth of your experience, or even worse, denies that your experience is valid. This becomes so complicated when it comes to religious traditions. It is so easy to assume that if your neighbor does not do things exactly as you do them, he or she is missing out, and will never understand the wonderful things that you understand. I think this assumption comes, fundamentally, from a warm-hearted impulse, but is among the most damanging thoughs a human being can act upon.

The Buddha said:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

This passage is oft-quoted by Western Buddhists, and perhaps they (I?) cling to it too hard, as proof that they are not being duped or brainwashed, as many fear. It may be that my love for this passage is merely a product of my cultural background, but if so, I am not ashamed, because I do not pretend to be somehow existant without a culture. I do think it is important. I think it invites us all to do that most vile deed, and "shop" for what we believe. I call it "shopping" in order to make a point, but I do not think there is anything consumerist or cheap about refusing labels and refusing to be told what to think. I realize that this very attitude, one focused on independence, is very Western, and that everything I say is being colored by it. There are no absolutes. I can prove nothing. I can only act.

But when one decries the intersection of Western ideals with Buddhist ideals, when one announces that Westerners can't possibly "achieve" anything with a watered-down Buddhism catered to their every desire... one misses the goodness that is already flowing in this newborn tradition. There is a certain sweetness here already. It is changing lives. Who cares whether or not it will "go as far" as Buddhism has in the East? We'll find out when we find out. Nothing is being desecrated. Right now - right here, and right now! - there is just a little more happiness. I've felt it - happiness isn't in the imagination.

In the end, we all want to be seen for who we really are. I am a middle class intellectual who lives in a co-op, organizes (among other things) for organic food to be delivered to my door, and believes strongly in living in a supportive, inclusive community. To the degree that I am able, I do not take part in consumerist culture, I tend the earth, I recycle, I reuse, I use technology responsibly, I take care of those around me, I take care of myself. I am pursuing a PhD in a subject which I truly believe will help relieve suffering. I don't consider myself a Buddhist because I don't want to espouse beliefs I haven't fully examined, and I don't want to be embroiled in conflict about which Way is Correct. I like the rationality and openness of Buddhist practice because I don't want to be a part of any belief system that is exclusive in any way. I view it as somewhat scientific because one's experience is not governed by the amount of one's faith. I am not interested in becoming a nun because I think I have more to offer the world on the path I'm taking and it would be false to abandon that notion. I dislike complicated or unexplained rituals because one can easily confuse the ritual itself with the quality of heart the ritual is supposed to invoke. I do not wish to revere authority when I am told to do so because I think there is more honor in being respected for a reason than for power.

That's all.

a friend took this picture of me

2009-05-13T16:13:00.002-04:00

...and I rather like it.

Emily

2009-05-13T15:50:00.005-04:00

Emily the Rat died on April 25th. She was euthanized because she had at least 3 tumors, one of which was inoperable and probably cancerous, and was unable to walk, groom or eat normally.

It was absolutely heartbreaking.

Emily in 2008, drinking mango juice out of a bottle cap.

The last photo of Emily, a few days before she died, curled up in her little house.

This seems like a good time to point out just how much I love this cat, Lilah.

She hangs out in the garden like a jungle cat.

She tolerates our affections.

And she really, really knows a good sunpatch when she sees one.

update #2

2009-05-13T13:39:00.004-04:00

Next year, I will be studying biomedical neuroscience and pharmacology at Boston University School of Medicine. I will have a good salary. I will have health insurance. This is a HUGE relief.

This acceptance was strange beyond belief. My application was discovered the day before the acceptance deadline, long after all the other applicants had been notified. It had been lost. Some very kind faculty called me up and we embarked on a bizarre week-long roller coaster of phone interviews, missed meetings, and extended deadlines before I was finally interviewed - unexpectedly - for a full 3 hours by faculty members. I was offered admission that evening. I accepted the next day. It's a good program. If you want to know more, here's a link.

The faculty members at BU were kind in many ways, but perhaps their greatest kindness was in helping me understand why I was not admitted initially, and why I was not admitted to other schools. As usual, with greater understanding has come greater acceptance of the unease of this spring.

I was honest. I spoke too much about interests other than science. I spoke too much about this year that I've taken off in order to examine my life. I did not "sell" myself. I wrote about my ethical concerns. I did not define a career path. I refused to be certain about what I want to do with my life. I wrote about my distaste for academic hierarchy and pecking order. I tried hard - too hard - to explain who I REALLY am, and it backfired. Instead of coming across as a thoughtful person trying desperately to make a choice that will benefit the world, I came across as a flaky person who could not be relied upon to deal with challenges. They did not trust me to finish the program. They wondered if I really cared about science at all, given how much I spoke about other things.

When I first heard this, I was incredibly frustrated. I put such a lot of effort in to authenticity, and not only did those efforts go unnoticed, I was regarded with great suspicion. Is there no such thing as a scientist with a heart and a mind for ethics? But the frustration faded in to... something else. I don't exactly feel as though I did "the right thing" in writing what I did on my applications - obviously I failed to communicate effectively about myself as a scientist. But neither do I regret not defining a career path or refusing to be certain about where I am going. I will not close doors now... not ever.

Somehow, this will work out.

cooking for pika <3

2009-04-06T12:02:00.003-04:00

Cooking for pika is a blast. You get to turn this lovely assortment of vegetables in to...

This lovely mushroom soup, made with home-made stock... I don't even like mushrooms and I like this soup...

These excellent baked red potatoes (organic, yay!)...

This cauliflower-watercress-chard stir fry...

And this tasty chocolate cake.

Nobody doesn't love good food!

ouch

2009-03-29T16:43:00.005-04:00

A few afternoons ago, my grandmother suggested (as we sat by a sunny window in the Museum of Science cafe, watching the river) that I continue to write here, despite having nothing sunny or insightful to say. She probably knows what she's talking about, being an octogenarian and all.

Well. In one big breath, I was rejected from all the graduate programs I applied to, I was rejected from all the orchestras I auditioned for, I'm losing money because my job doesn't pay me enough, I have no idea what I will be doing next year, and my health has suffered seriously under all this stress.

I've watched as almost everybody I know has gone through tense moments - waiting for graduate school admissions, job offers, summer opportunities, audition results - and emerged with nervous, relieved smiles on their faces. People knocking on my door late in the evening, holding tight to a letter, sighing their sighs of relief... It's not that I'm not happy for them - I am - or even that I'm particularly jealous. It's the feeling of shame that really gets me, watching everybody else emerge from their respective battles victorious. Makes me cringe every time. As if everybody I know is sailing on past me, catching wave after wave of hard-earned opportunity, while I sit helplessly with the rubble of my little shipwreck. Where did I go wrong?

My GPA was high enough, that can't be the problem. Had a nearly perfect GRE score. Very good recommendations (including the head of a department that rejected me), and they were all turned in on time. Few years of research experience. Couple of awards. I think the essays were OK. For the first few weeks, I mentally ran through my qualifications over and over, as if I'd suddenly realize, on the five-thousandth repetition, that I forgot to submit an application or that my GRE score was actually horrible. Of course, that didn't get me anywhere. But so far, nobody has been able to offer any insight in to the situation. I have no idea what went wrong. No idea at all.

Of course, it's not all misery and woe. You hear the news, you spend an afternoon staring out the window at the rain, and then you bounce back. The job hunt is on. Life hasn't stopped short. But neither has it really gone back to normal. People ask me how I am and I have no idea how to respond. The truth is that I'm constantly worried - about money, about getting a job, about what it means that I can't seem to do what I want with my life - and that I don't feel well. I feel left out, left behind, and just plain sick. It's been a month since I had a day during which I felt completely well, and eating has become difficult again. Sleeping, too. And I haven't been able to run for over a week.

On the other hand, last night I slept through the night for the first time in weeks, and on top of that, I didn't wake up feeling sick. I *am* trying very hard. Plenty of meditation, rest, vegetables, water, and rational reminders to my panicked self that this is not the end-all of anything at all. This is just another experience, another friend to meet along the road... and how I respond will speak more boldly about who I want to be than any letter of acceptance ever could. Maybe things are beginning to look up... maybe, as everybody keeps reminding me (much to my annoyance), this might be the best thing that ever happened to me. I have to admit that it sure doesn't feel that way, but it'd probably be good for me and everybody else if I stopped rolling my eyes at the suggestion ;)

PS. I already stopped rolling my eyes.

this old place

2009-02-25T20:28:00.002-05:00

I'm startled to find, upon opening my eyes and looking warily around, that I have somehow stumbled in to a very familiar, very unpleasant thicket. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I know some of the uglier scenery all too well. This tangled state of mind... I don't like it one bit.

I am not trying for poetry - this is simply difficult to explain. Very difficult. Like a word you just cannot bring in to focus, no matter how long you squint at it. Like a story you forget in the midst of telling. Like a melody you can imagine, but can't quite sing. Whatever I say, I hear my voice saying it in a casual, expository sort of way... it's a lie, a gloss, a colorless copy, a 3rd-hand rumor, somehow the authenticity is lost before I even form the words.

I know I've been here before. I recognized it right away when I found myself surfing the web obsessively, reading things I didn't want to know, things that scare me, things that I hate seeing. Why? I found myself falling asleep in a haze of fear, with some semi-conscious sense that I should remain vigilant in sleep against... what? Walking down the street, full of a sense of dread that... something is coming. There is a constant twisting pain I need to get rid of, but how?

It is easier to find your way out of a thicket with your eyes open than with your eyes shut. Here's to the strength to find the way.

retreat part 3: you're nobody!

2009-01-18T13:12:00.005-05:00

Buddhists are always talking about the concept of anatta, non-self.

Here's what I used to think of that concept:

Ugh, how horribly boring. Buddhists must think that we are all identical dolls, unpainted and unshaped, made from the same tired old mold. We're all blending in with one another, bland and uninspiring. What a depressing way to look at the world.

Here's what I think they mean now:

I am an instance of life. By which I mean, "life" is not a thing that exists outside of the beings that are alive. This is quite obvious when you think about it. But it's an interesting perspective to take. It means that I am not slogging through a chilly snowdrift of life, nor am I drowning in a bog of life, or mucking through a pit of life, constantly battling against it. Life is just living. And everything that is alive. Whatever our experience, very simply, that is life. We don't get to design a concept of Who We Are in some abstract pre-life greenroom, and then step out in to life in the character of who we want to be. It's already happening, it's already here. I think what the Buddhists mean by non-self is that we are all flickering, constantly changing, unique, beautiful apparitions of life. To hold on to an static idea of Who We Are can only be painful, because it can only change.

At first, I was really frustrated with that view. Am I not supposed to know who I am? Am I not supposed to understand myself? Am I not supposed to recognize faults and take steps to correct them? Sure seems like a lazy philosophy to me!

Perhaps it is obvious to everyone but me that discussion of Buddhist ideas often takes place on two different planes. (It took me almost the whole week to realize this!) On one level, they talk about non-self, but on another level, in order to navigate our lives as human beings, the self sure is a useful concept. I think it's all about taking ourselves with a grain of salt. We can observe ourselves, our tendencies, our strengths, our faults... all with the open-mindedness to notice when and if our tendencies change.

I think am beginning to understand why this is so important. A while ago I had a very difficult experience. A friend of mine informed me that I had not been a good listener in a conversation. I was absolutely devastated - even more so because I could see that she was correct. There is nothing I try harder to cultivate than good listening skills. I am very attached to my identity as a good listener. To have that identity shaken was very, very upsetting - I even had thoughts like "I have failed at the one thing I care most about". If I hadn't been as attached, maybe I would have been able to take my friend's comment with more grace and dignity, apologize more sincerely (instead of being so embarrassed that it was difficult to speak), and bring more awareness to the situation instead of avoiding conversation for days.

Einstein seems to have figured this out, among a "few" other things:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

**Discussion not included: how we are basically made of rearranged, and constantly rearranging molecules that have been hanging around on Earth for 4 billion years. It's cool to think that part of you was once probably in the tooth of a T. Rex, and that you're basically built of smashed stars and that you're breathing in molecules that were in the lung of the person next to you 2 minutes ago, and therefore we're all connected etcetera, and the geek in me loves it, but it didn't seem relevant.

retreat part 2: your own personal monster

2009-01-18T11:57:00.004-05:00

You know how, when you have an important conversation coming up, or an important meeting, or a special moment, you rehearse in your head exactly how it will go? You plan what you'll say, and how you'll act, and even what the response will be? Well, I do that, anyway. All the time, as it turns out. And... it NEVER works. I mean, sure, sometimes you get half-way through what you were going to say before the situation throws something unexpected at you, but oftentimes, you get 2 seconds in and things are already different. I don't think I had ever noticed before just how ineffective my planning is. In fact, this is what I thought was happening: I'd rehearse obsessively for some moment. Then the moment would arrive, and unfold completely differently. I'd feel very relieved that the moment was OK. I'd attribute its OK-ness to my rehearsing. Huh? That makes no sense!

At first, I was sort of terrified by the idea that no matter how carefully I prepare, my own life - even the words out of my own mouth - seems to be out of my control. All my care and concern isn't helping! I'm some monster that will just say ANYTHING! Oh no! But then I realized - I don't do that, either. I never just say any old thing. No one does. I say things that are in line with my intention, which is usually to be caring and kind or whatever. Somehow the monster that does all my speaking for me has a pretty good idea of what I want to say, but it never reads my note cards. It just ad-libs on a theme.

Have you ever had the experience of driving somewhere, and arriving at your destination only to realize you have no memory of the last 5 minutes or so? It can cause a panic - are you really sure you stopped at those stoplights? I think most people have had this experience one way or another. I have always been very unsettled by the possibility that I am not actually in control of my actions. I recently wrote about a study that showed that a brain scan can predict which of two simple options a person will choose before he or she is aware of having made a choice. I was seriously upset by that study. I even tried to talk to a few professors about it, who didn't quite understand how unsettled I was. Isn't it a horrible thought? To think that even when you think you're in charge of your choices, and you put your heart in to doing the right thing, you're powerless?

That study still makes me uncomfortable, but less so. One thing you do on retreat is establish the intention to keep paying attention to every moment as it is happening. You decide that you want to be paying attention. Invariably, your mind will wander and do things that are out of your control, including make decisions like "itch your left foot" and "time to take another bite of food" or "time to turn around and walk the other way". But somehow, your attention returns, over and over, out of that thicket, spontaneously. The direct experience of that attention returning gives me confidence that something I am doing, something deeper than fine control, is influencing my life.

It's kind of like realizing that you've never been a very good driver. For years, you've been priding yourself on your lack of accidents, for staying on the road in icy conditions, for not running over that cat, for avoiding those potholes. But then all of a sudden you realize that if you take your hands off the wheel, actually, the car drives itself. You can un-clutch your hands and lean back a little. As long as you've got your eyes on the road, the car takes care of the details.

The catch is, if you fall asleep, the car still crashes. Don't get too cocky - the AI isn't all that great. Somehow, it all depends on your attention...

retreat part 1: shhhh

2009-01-15T11:47:00.003-05:00

It's QUIET. Quiet so loud you can hear it. There were almost 100 people at the retreat, all not talking, all not reading, all not writing, all not listening to music, all being as outwardly and inwardly still as they possibly could. You sort of descend in to stillness, like going down in to a deep well. At first it was a scary prospect. I wondered if I'd suffocate down there, without words. But it turns out that the air down deep is cool and live. It's refreshing not to have to make small talk, or be pleasantly entertaining, or talk when you feel down, or explain yourself if you just feel like leaving dinner early.

I did get a bit word-starved at first. I found myself reading the label on my toothpaste over and over, without even meaning to. And of course, there were difficult moments in the retreat, when I was upset or scared, and I wished that I could talk, but in the end, I'm glad that I was on my own. I think that in a difficult moment, we all want someone to tell us that everything will be OK. It's comforting, but have you ever noticed how quickly that comfort evaporates? When there is nobody to reassure you, to tell you that you are all right, you are forced to look at your problem head on. And when you do that, it's never quite as bad as you thought.

Perhaps you can handle anything that comes your way, by yourself. Perhaps you are much stronger than you think.

why i could never be a doctor

2008-11-16T17:33:00.002-05:00

My job requires that I use splenic dendritic cells, harvested directly from the spleens of mice. The cells cannot be stored or cultured for any length of time because they mature and become useless very quickly. This means that every time I do an experiment involving splenic dendritic cells, a mouse must be killed, and its spleen harvested immediately.

I am already "exempt" from killing the mice myself - a co-worker does it for me. This was not always the case. At first, it was assumed that I was merely sentimental about rodents (on account of having them for pets) and that my discomfort would pass. (I am leaving my moral qualms with the use of animals for various human purposes out of this post.) Then, I proved myself utterly useless in the euthanasia process by crying so hard that a) I could not even SEE the mice through the tears and b) I had to keep taking off my surgical mask to blow my nose. Ok. So somebody else will do that job.

Now, I receive the spleens, which are approximately 1.5 cm, red, bean shaped organs, on ice immediately after they are harvested from the mouse. The spleens arrive with bits of connective tissue still attached. Before I begin to process the spleens (to extract the cells I need), I have to remove the little bits of fatty tissue. I do this with tweezers and surgical scissors. It takes about 5 minutes.

What has convinced me that I should never, EVER try to be a doctor is this: even though I've now processed more than a dozen spleens, I cannot get used to the sensation of pulling off the fatty tissue. I've always had a sense - unsubstantiated until now - that I would be unable to cut in to the skin of any organism, dead or alive. Many people have tried to convince me that performing surgery or autopsy or dissection is not as repulsive in actuality as it may seem in concept. This does not appear to be true for me. Every single time I clean those spleens it absolutely sickens me. I have no experience cutting any other kind of tissue, but something deep in my brain tells me that it FEELS WRONG. I just seem to have this built-in visceral knowledge that tissue is NOT SOMETHING YOU CUT, just like I have built-in knowledge that I should never break a bone on purpose, or never put my hand in a fire on purpose. I just can't get used to it.

Other people do not appear to have this mental block. This is a good thing, since if I ever need surgery I'd very much like to have a surgeon who is not freaking out. But man oh man... I'll leave doctoring to those with stronger stomachs than I.

thanks be

2008-11-04T23:54:00.002-05:00

MY COUNTRY, WE DID IT!!

OBAMA IS MY PRESIDENT!

I'm so excited I don't think I'll sleep all night.

Walden Pond

2008-09-09T20:15:00.000-04:00

We set out just as the sun was going down. It was a cool night, cooler than it had been since May. The roads were beginning to clear out, but the streets were full of people, overflowing from clubs and bars. We pedaled through the city, on our best Law Abiding Bicyclist behavior.

Once out of the city we picked up the bike trail. There was no moon and the trail isn't lit, so we were in total darkness, the way illuminated only by our own headlamps. The trail goes on for 15 miles or so, and although there were some people along the way at the beginning, pretty soon we had it all to ourselves. We took over the trail, flying in to the dark. The farther from the city we got, the clearer the stars became.

When I'm cycling along, time seems to pass very quickly. Almost two hours had gone by before I looked at my watch. We were in a rhythm, moving steadily through empty town after empty town. The air got steadily colder. In several places cold air pooled in valleys and as we glided down at 30 miles per hour we all got the shivers. The night was very live.

As soon as we got to the trailhead that leads to the pond, we switched off our lights - lest anybody notice us slipping down to the water - and quietly walked our bicycles in to the forest. The trail happens to be one of those trails that, despite having been there several times before, never quite looks the same twice. Maybe it's the dark, maybe it's the fact that one is always whispering to one's friends instead of paying attention to the route, or maybe the sprit of Thoreau himself cannot bear to see any adventure become familiar.

When the water was finally in front of us, it was gusty and chilly. We had cooled during the walk to the edge of the water and we were plenty cool, but you can't bike all that way to Walden and then sit out. We stripped down - there's really only one way to swim in Walden at midnight - and plunged in to the cool water. The pond was completely empty under the stars. Beautiful.

Once snacks were eaten, water gulped down, feet dried, and bicycles adjusted, we hopped back on for the ride back. There's nobody on the road late at night in the suburbs. We rode four abreast, bombing down the road as is every cyclist's dream. It was *cold*. We picked up the pace. We were flying!

The ride back puts you in a sort of reverie. You pedal on and on, mile after mile, in the still darkness. The bike wheels make a very comforting whirring noise, like a window fan on a summer night. When you stop at a red light, everything is still - there are rarely cars going the other way - and you can hear your own breath. When you start up again, there's no engine noise, nothing to break the stillness.

We rolled in without much fanfare in the early hours of the morning; the feeling of stillness sort of... sticks. Once in the door, we scattered, each of us putting away our helmets, fetching snacks and tossing our shoes off and falling in to bed.

Heaven on wheels!

oh, the places you'll go

2008-08-27T20:42:00.004-04:00

Lately, I've been waking up at strange hours of the night. For no particular reason. Usually from some strange dream. I lie in bed, staring blankly in to the darkness and thinking unimportant, sleepy thoughts. And then all of a sudden I'm blindsided by a fact. Just creeps up silently and springs over me. Lissa, you have no idea whether or not anything you experience is real. Everything you feel could be an illusion. The people you know could be figments of your imagination and you could be horribly, horribly alone. Or, Lissa, you have no idea what your purpose in life is. Or, Lissa, it is actually possible that everybody who says they love you is lying.

Um, what the heck? These are thoughts you need full body armor to confront, even at high noon in the best of circumstances. But half-awake and chilly in the middle of the night? You've got to be kidding me. It's impossible.

Seriously, what do you DO about that? Here I am, living my life. I get up, I do my thing. Once in a while I do something abstract and complicated and I call it "success". Once in a while I do something abstract and complicated and people are unhappy with me and I feel horrible. The things that I do are so incredibly specific to my situation, this ridiculously engineered existence that I live. It's incredibly hard to make any sense of it. In order to know if anything I'm doing is worthwhile, I suppose I'd first have to know if humanity is worthwhile, then if civilization is worthwhile, and so on with education and music and love and friendship and engineering, all the way to whatever my latest dilemma is. About something like whether or not I've called my grandmother recently enough. It's dizzying.

Of course I want to be right. I want it to turn out, in the end, that I did the right thing with my life. But the energy it takes to face up to the task of determining whether or not I'm on the right track is too much for me to handle. (Humor me here. I know I'm 22. But you never know what's gonna happen tomorrow.) So I lie there in bed and I just wipe away those thoughts. I tell myself that my senses do not deceive me, that my existence is real. That my life will be made purposeful if I live it well and that I should not hope for anything more. That I am not as alone as I feel. That it will be ok in the morning. I have no proof, but there are lies you have to tell yourself... there are things you cannot face alone.

When I wake up, and the sun is streaming in the windows and I can hear my housemates up and about in the rest of the house, and I can see B sleeping soundly right next to me, the world is a whole lot friendlier. But it does leave me with a feeling much like jet lag. I feel as though I've been away a long, long time. I sit at the breakfast table. My friends filter in. I'm so relieved. They seem so real in the bright sun. I want to jump up and hug them and tell them I made it out safely and how glad I am to see them again. But this seems silly and unwarranted. I eat my toast and smile.

a survey

2008-08-12T11:11:00.006-04:00

I don't know about you, but sometimes I go on internet-quiz binges. I'm most likely to take a lot of ridiculous quizzes like "which vegetable do you most resemble" (ooh, I hope I'm broccoli, the green tree of awesome!) or "which famous detective are you" (Sherlock? please?). However, once in a great while, I get serious. Today it's chilly and rainy and I've got lots of time, so...

There are a lot of different versions of the Myers Briggs Personality type tests on the internet. I often find the test questions nearly impossible to answer. For example, mypersonality.info's test asks whether you are more likely to "say things as they are" or "avoid conflict" in conversation. My goal is to do both! Similarly, the test asks whether I process information through "my 5 senses" or "my intuition". As far as I'm concerned, intuition and sensory perception are completely intertwined. Your intuition comes from noticing things - a posture, a tone of voice, a glance. I tend to find the tests frustrating.

So this morning, while feeling philosophical, I decided to take 6 different Myers Briggs tests. (Mypersonality.info, Human Meterics, Kisa, Personality Pathways, Similar Minds, and Know Your Type.) Are they consistent? Totally bogus? Does changing one answer give you a completely different result?

Apparently not! On all 6 tests, I came up INFJ (also see this, this, and this). Then I went back and retook each test, changing the answers to the questions on which I was completely split. The result: 3 tests came up INTJ. Two stayed INFJ. And the last came up INTP. These particular changes were not surprising. Some of the tests show you to what degree you are, say, Introverted instead of Extroverted, or Intuitive versus Sensing. For the first two letters of my type, I always scored very strongly "IN" (Introverted Intuitive), but the last two letters, T/F and J/P, the scores are more middle-of the road. Therefore it makes sense that, overall, changing the answers that I struggled with resulted most often in a switch from F (Feeling) to T (Thinking) and, slightly less often, in a switch from J (Judging) to P (Perceiving).

I have to conclude that there *is* consistency in these results. In all 6 tests, there were quite a few questions that I felt I couldn't answer truthfully, but in all cases, the answer I eventually chose, even while finding it inadequate, lead to the INFJ personality type. The INFJ type does, I feel, describe me fairly well, but as I read through it, I thought that several particular things were missing. Those qualities - broadly, interest in logic and technology and interest in math and language play - are hallmarks of the INTJ and INTP types, respectively. Even more interestingly, from the point of view of the INFJ, the INTJ and INTP represent "Companion" and "Compliment", respectively. (Other types represent "Neighbor", "Counterpart", "Contrast", "Cohort", "Pedagogue" and so on.)

I think it's probably rare that any one person feels totally comfortable being described by 1 and only 1 type. I think I'll call myself 70% INFJ, 20% INTJ, and 10% INTP. Wait - scratch that. Can I be Type Broccoli? Or The Next Sherlock?

Why I Love Brightwater

2008-08-10T17:26:00.006-04:00

When you get out of the car, this is the very first thing you see.

The trails around the cabin are covered in centuries of pine needles. On the springy pine needles, you can run almost silently.

This trail takes you to the top of Wildcat Ledge, from which you can listen to the ocean.

On the top of Wildcat Ledge is a flat forest completely carpeted in moss a full foot deep.

If you walk silently through the woods, you're likely to see a deer or a fox.

Back at the cabin, Harmony rocks at her mooring on a still afternoon. The mast makes a lovely clinking noise.

The sunsets can be spectacular.

Like lava in the sky!

doing "nothing"

2008-07-07T21:10:00.005-04:00

This summer I am not working, but as a friend of mine wisely said, "nerds abhor a vacuum". At the end of May I announced my intention to "do nothing", but somehow there is still not nearly enough time in which to do all the things I want to do.

But the pace of life certainly is different. No homework, no schedule. This leaves time for thinking. When I decided not to work this summer, I decided to *think* instead. I decided to use the summer to Figure Things Out - what exactly I was going to figure out was, um, undecided. I thought that without a crazy schedule, things might rise to the surface.

And they have. This is my mid-summer report on Figuring Things Out. Since Figuring Things Out is a subject notoriously difficult to convey - hey, if they were easy to write about, they wouldn't count - I'm posting a series of vignettes I've written over the past week.

It begins in a dark place. Warning: the following dream is very disturbing.

**********************************
#1

In the dream, I was in my grandparent's house, although my grandparents weren't there. Instead, in various rooms in the house, were all but a few of my closest friends, puttering around, reading, doing their own quiet thing. I was in the study, looking through my grandfather's old desk, trying to find something. I got distracted, though, by examining the many little things in the small drawers of the desk. I can only remember one of those objects - a letter opener with a wooden handle - but in the dream, I got completely carried away, poking through the drawers for hours. Then the dream made an awkward shift to the next phase. I was still standing in the study, and a sickly aura had enveloped the house. Everything seemed blue tinged and silent. When I breathed in the air felt slimy and wrong. I floated out of the study and in to the dining room. Hanging over one of the chairs was one my friends, swollen and limp and blue and purple - dead. My heart raced. There was poison in the air. I tried to run to the other rooms to alert my other friends. But I was frozen. I floated, with no sense of the ground or of force at all. I could move, but painfully slowly. The force my muscles put out didn't move anything, it just disappeared. I was swimming through the air madly when I finally got to the next room. The friend who was in that room was still alive, staring at me with little comprehension, obviously under the effects of the poison. I opened my mouth to give the warning, and found that I had two tongues. All I could do was choke. I tried to speak a few words, but my friend could not understand. I realized I wasn't speaking English, though what exactly it was I'm not too sure. I reached out through the inexplicably thick air and tried to grab my friend. But everything in the house, my friend included, seemed to be rooted to the spot, unreachable. Despite using all my energy I could not make any difference. I fought through the closing air to the next room. There was another friend sitting, facing away from me, looking out the window. I tried to make a sound - any sound, but I choked again. As I floated there, my friend slid from the chair to the ground. I was too late. I gave up. The dream made another abrupt switch. I was running across a wooden bridge that was covered with sand. I must have been somewhere in Maine. This time the air was almost nonexistent, hypoxic, thin. I ran effortlessly until I came to an empty wood cabin. I went inside. It was completely bare except for one man sitting at a desk in the corner. There was no other furniture. The man at the desk was bush with some paperwork, and gave me the sign to wait. I stood there for a very long time. Finally, he beckoned me towards him. I opened my mouth but found I still had two tongues. I couldn't speak. He sneered at me. "There was one you could have saved, sitting in the door way, near the fresh air," he said.

I woke up soaked in sweat. It was 5 AM and still hot outside. I had only been asleep for two hours. I took off my sweaty tank top and stood at the sink and splashed water on my face. I looked in the mirror. Only one tongue. Maybe nobody had died after all.

**********************************
#2

I started out on the run knowing I didn't feel well. I told myself that if I wasn't comfortable, I'd stop running. I always tell myself things like that. It doesn't make any difference.

A mile in, it hurt. Ten steps later, it hurt a lot. I leaned my head back to get a better angle on breathing. Swallowed hard.

As I rounded the corner and passed the sandwich shop, I couldn't swallow. I stopped running and walked a few steps. The seconds ticked by on my watch. 11 seconds. I started running. I felt like some strange LEGO person, cobbled together out of parts that didn't match. My legs were restless, my lungs healthy, and my stomach (for which running is supposedly no work at all) an ill-fitting piece, the weakest link.

I made it back home in 31 minutes. I was sure I couldn't have gone another minute, but that's what I thought at minute 26, too. I stood in front of the sink again and splashed water on my face, holding my neck back in a funny position so I could swallow. I looked at myself in the mirror. The pain was completely invisible.

**********************************
#3

It rained on the day of graduation. All 2000 of us lined up in 4 rows, in the athletic fields, our mortarboards shielding us from some of the rain. I didn't feel well. It was a big day, and I'd just spent 2 hours waiting in a hugely crowded, incredibly hot gymnasium (wearing my robe, of course), talking to dozens of students. The air was pretty charged. Graduating from MIT is kind of like taking the top off 2000 soda bottle that've been shaken for 4 years. Of course, put me in that kind of energy, and no matter how celebratory the mood, I'm like to go under.

I stood in line, moving forward every once in a while. We had about half a mile to walk to the lawn on which the ceremony would take place. Even 10 steps seemed like too much for me. I watched people jumping out of line to hug family members, people shouting across the lines to their friends. I took a few more steps. I couldn't swallow. Was this how I was going to graduate? Would my family line up with their cameras, tears in their eyes, to take a picture of me in this state, barely able to focus my eyes, wondering if I'd be able to hold on? Would I have to forgo shaking the President's hand, and slump in my seat as the next person in line collected my diploma? Is this really want I wanted to remember about my graduation?

Of course I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted to feel instantly well, I wanted the sun to come out and the rain to stop. But throwing hate at my kind of pain only feeds it. C'mon Lissa, I told myself. You've pulled through before. You don't have to give this up. You can just take one more breath. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine.

It took a quarter mile. I followed the guy in front of me and didn't look up. But when we neared the entrance to the lawn, I realized that I was actually... fine. I looked up. It was still raining. The grass was slick and well-trod and the entire audience was clad in identical MIT ponchos. But all of a sudden it looked beautiful. I passed through the entrance and in to the sea of people. I heard a shout. My family was to the right, all of them waving like madmen and yelling and snapping pictures. I smiled - and it was easy. Later, as I shook the President's hand, my sister jumped up in the audience in excitement and obscured the video my mom was making of the moment. No matter. The videotape wouldn't have shown how good I felt right then, anyway.

**********************************
#4

"When the spring comes, the grass grows all by itself."

a lesson

2008-07-01T16:42:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, in the sweltering heat on the 6th floor of the old Steinway building, overlooking the Boston Common, I had a violin lesson. Just a regular one. But if you've never taken a violin lesson, it's certainly not obvious what that means. Many people have asked me, over the years, what exactly happens during that hour-and-a-half. You already know how to play the violin, they point out, since you've been playing for 17 years. You already know how to read music. Don't you just have to practice now? Other people wonder if I learn some brand new note each time I go - say, an E-flat 3 octaves above middle C. Or maybe I just go for interpretation advice - play this note quiet, this one long, this one angrily, and so on.

The reality, of course, is very complicated. Because the violin is complicated. And because music is complicated. There are technical challenges to tackle, and the better you get the more there are (you never get to stop practicing the basics). And there's the huge emotional challenge of making a piece of wood speak.

So... in case anyone's interested, the following is an annotated description of my lesson. It will, of course, be full of technical descriptions that are bound to be terrifically boring if you don't play the violin. That's ok. You don't have to read it :)

At the beginning of my lesson, we chat about what's been going on in my life, and how things are going in general. I find it's easier to be honest about my life in a violin lesson than anywhere else. The sense of rapport and trust with one's teacher is critically important. There's unusual potential for a meaningful relationship too, since private music lessons mean that the student will spend about an hour each week as the sole beneficent of the teacher's attention. I ask about his upcoming performances, and about the summer camp he founded. We talk about my grandfather's death.

I start with scales. A-flat major, 3 octaves. I play the whole scale with 1 note per bow, then 2, then 3, then 4, and then he stops me before I get all the way up to 16. He compliments me on improving my shifting. It's better, but not quite there. I have a tendency to let my left wrist flop backwards a little bit when I shift, instead of keeping my wrist completely straight. The difference between "correct" and "incorrect" is so small that I can't actually feel it, so I stand in front of a mirror for hours and practice the correct movement. The wrist must stay straight, but the forearm must also rotate clockwise. And the fingers must bend. Ok. I'm keeping that in mind.

He says that he can hear all my string crossings (and that's not a good thing). There are two reasons for this. First of all, I am picking up the last finger on the old string *before* putting down the first finger on the new strings. The timing is a few milliseconds off, and it makes a difference. I must leave the old finger down until the new note has sounded. My right elbow is also a problem. When you move from a low string to a higher one, the weight of your right elbow should aid, and when you move from a high string to a lower one, you should hold your right elbow aloft so that it doesn't make the crossing difficult. I play the scales again, thinking of my left arm in the shifts, trying to keep my fingers loose but firm, keeping the old finger down until the new note sounds, making sure my elbow is assisting the shifts. He says it's better, but my tone is not yet liquid enough. My notes sound portato, not cantabile. In order to achieve a truly connected sound, I have to use the weight of my entire right arm to my advantage. I play the scales again.

We move on to arpeggios and thirds. He says that when I play upbows, my right shoulder hunches up and forward. I have to keep it down, but loose, so that the rest of my bow arm doesn't become tense. My posture, too, comes up. I've got all kinds of posture problems. I used to lean heavily on my left hip, which caused my entire torso to twist. I've mostly fixed that problem, but I still tend to twist my neck up and back, and my back is still too bent. I concentrate on keeping my head centered and down, and my back straight.

A discussion of intonation comes up. Intonation is no simple matter. For one thing, there are LOTS of tuning systems. Pianos are "even tempered", meaning that the frequency of a note must be multiplied or divided by the 12th root of 2 in order to get the next and previous pitch, respectively. This mathematical tuning is convenient for pianos, but doesn't work for violins. This is because the harmonics produced by any given note are, of course, pitches themselves - and they do not correspond exactly with the notes dictated by the 12th root of 2 rule. Close but no cigar. Therefore, if you play a note, and a third above it, where the third is dictated by the 12th root of 2 rule, it will sound out of tune, due to the harmonics of the bottom note not corresponding with the top one. On a piano you don't notice much, but on a violin, it sounds awful. So on the violin, every note you play must be tailor-tuned to match the other notes you are playing. If you play a G and a B at the same time, you'll have to play the G higher than the even tempered pitch in order to get the third in tune. But play a G and a D, and the G must be lowered again. The list of adjustments you must make is enormous.

We spend a while talking about the Bach Sonata #2 for solo violin, and the tuning issues it presents. I go through the piece, playing one note, then hearing the next note in my head before I play it.

At the end of the lesson we talk Mozart 4th violin concerto. I need to work on my bow distribution. In preparation for this, he gives me a number of exercises to do. I must play long, slow notes while sliding my bow between the bridge and the fingerboard, keeping it perfectly parallel to the bridge. It's supposed to make me more aware of my contact point. I'm also supposed to practice playing in a pattern: 4 notes to a bow, then 1 note to a bow. WITHOUT slowing down. This teaches bow control.

Finally we talk about how Mozart's violin concertos really harbor an element of opera. The key to playing them well is to realize that although there's only one solo violin part, that one violin must speak all of the operatic roles. The player has to be a quick-change artist, changing character and voice every time the concerto demands a new "singer".

The elevator attendant says to me, as I step in to the old-fashioned lift, "Rictor must be a very good teacher. Everybody always comes in to the elevator looking happy!"

The Far Shore

2008-06-12T01:13:00.003-04:00

When I got the call, I was underground. The subway was crowded, chilly and damp. The Green Line screamed around the bend so loudly that I actually had to ask my mother to repeat herself. She couldn't; once was hard enough. My father took over the phone. He began in his best "we-must-accept-the-inevitable" voice. Before I had time to respond, the train started again, and as the car dimmed my phone went dead.

Grandpa came out of his coma at the last minute to kiss Grandma goodbye. She kissed him, he kissed her back. She kissed him, and he was still, and she knew he was gone. The church had sent roses for their 57 years of marriage, and a candle burned in the corner. A group of singers sneaked in, just minutes after he died, and sang for them.

I slid off the train and walked over the bridge towards home in the fog, and in my own personal fog besides. The rain started and stopped every few minutes. My feet and my mind went numb.

Four days later, after my graduation had slipped by, we buried half his ashes.. It was a scorching hot day. Grandma tipped the urn in to the hole in the church garden and began to scoop the dirt back in to the hole with a clam shell. Each of us got a turn with the shell, as Grandma spoke to him. Bill, she said, we're burying your ashes here in this beautiful place, and we love you. Nobody else could speak. People walked by on the street, only 10 feet from our gathering in the garden, trying not to look at us. We couldn't see their faces through the tears, anyway. We left the clam shell in the hole, in the end. A piece of the ocean, to make him feel at home.

The rest of the ashes sat in a bronze urn shaped like a pineapple, on the wood stove. Grandma thought he'd get a kick out of that; living in a pineapple. I could almost hear his chuckle just around every corner. I kept expecting him to be seated at the dining room table, eyeing a plate of cookies keenly. His leathery, shaking hands would extend slowly across the table, so slowly that everybody else, engaged in conversation, hardly noticed. In this careful manner he consumed a diet that consisted mainly of dessert. Nobody would argue.

The pineapple will live in Maine, in our little cabin, where all our hearts escape to, until Grandma dies. Their ashes will be mixed together and spread over the forest, and out in to the ocean.

At the service, the next day, I played a little trio with my parents, for Grandma, who loves the sweet gentility of Renaissance music. Then Ashokan Farewell, a simple folk tune, for Grandpa, who sang everything off-key, but with an quiet, woodsy expressiveness that was unmatched. I looked out from the balcony at the hundreds of people in the chapel. I didn't take a deep breath before I started. I didn't even think. I just put the bow on the string, and drew it across.

His picture, a twinkly photo from 5 years ago before Parkinson's set his face like a mask, sat on the altar during the service. It seemed so horribly wrong to see him up there, in the little brown frame, instead of with us in the pew, nodding and sparkling at the people across the aisle. I couldn't look at it. The service wore on; it was more than 100 degrees in the church and I couldn't tell sweat from tears. Amazing Grace, his favorite song, began, but I couldn't make a noise. I mouthed the words.

At the end of the service, the minster read a poem that Grandpa had written, less than a year ago. It was for the grandchildren, but I'd never heard it. I think they were saving it for the occasion. The last line read, "I would like them to know that I am an honest man, who likes to help people in need."

Good enough, as he always said to me with an air of awe and appreciation. I can hear his thin, wispy voice saying those words perfectly, with so much grace. Good enough.

*This is the same Grandfather of this story. He only lived in the nursing home for a month or so. The family decided that he was not given enough respect or freedom there, and he moved back home, which is where he died.

in which I write on an awkward topic

2008-05-29T13:14:00.006-04:00

Walking through Boston yesterday afternoon, I had a rambling conversation with a female friend about body image. At first, we were totally engrossed in our discussion, and we hurried through the crowded streets, paying little attention to our surroundings.

We talked about what makes us each feel attractive or unattractive. Amazingly, we had almost nothing in common in this regard. I tend to feel most attractive after I've been exercising - right after a long bike ride, or a good swim, especially if I've taken a shower. That's when I feel the most confident. To my great surprise, she feels least attractive right after exercising. She said that no matter how well she's performed, she always feels as though she isn't in good enough shape and needs to do better. A constant pressure to perform better. It was surprising! Neither one of us had expected such a radical difference in perception, especially since the two of us have similar intellectual opinions about body image and women's health.

The two of us also have markedly different relationships with food, and with clothing. Both of us have struggled with food in the past; she with an eating disorder and I with a debilitating stomach condition. She now finds that she feels compelled to eat on a schedule, no matter what, a compulsion that developed as she recovered from her eating disorder. This habit now leads her to feel that she has, yet again, an unhealthy obsession with eating, and it worries her. Complicated!

I, on the other hand, being relatively free of pain only recently, tend to eat very erratically. It was only last year that eating any food at all was sure to cause me significant pain, and I dreaded eating, although I was very hungry, uncomfortable with my uncontrollable weight loss, and tired of having a fearful relationship with my lunch. Now that eating rarely the problems it once did, I find myself quite pleased with the ability to skip a meal, eat early, eat late, or otherwise get off schedule. This, however, sometimes triggers the very condition from which I was celebrating my freedom. Although I eat almost no junk food (I may be relatively pain free, but I have far more limits than most people) I could do with a few more rules. Again - complicated!

The contrasting relationships that my friend and I have with clothing was something that I also thought about as we walked along through the crowd. My friend is fond of dressing up. She has the flair of a thespian and can assume beautiful poses and expressions. She feels beautiful when she puts on her best clothing. I, on the other hand, am not particularly fond of dressing up. Sometimes, the idea appeals to me. But when I wear nice clothes, I don't feel beautiful. I feel self conscious and awkward, unable to sit or move in the ways that I normally do. I do not have my friend's flair as an actress. I can do impressions of people - pretty good ones - but they're not glamorous or even attractive. She's a graceful, poised dancer; I move with power but little grace. I feel the best in a plain tank top, plain shorts, and bare feet.

Each of us has a full set of strong opinions about the body image problems facing young women today. We are both keenly aware of the pressure that girls feel and we both try to of reject those pressures in our own lives. But, as this conversation made perfectly clear, our conscious rebellion hasn't entirely worked. We are carrying around all sorts of neuroses. Our daily lives are constantly impacted by these various inadequacies that we carry around with us all the time. The choice between a t-shirt and a low-cut blouse can take me an hour, and several tryings-on of various outfits, which surprises even me, given that I am usually dressed in under a minute. Every meal can present a difficult decision for my friend, a woman who is fully aware of the necessities of good nutrition. Both of us grew up in supportive, loving families. How did this happen? How do we start over? Will either one of us ever believe that we are beautiful? Perhaps the problem is trivial; we are MIT students, it doesn't much matter what we look like. Our friends are people we trust not to judge us by our appearances. Neither one of us depends professionally on good looks. But on the other hand, we are not women who want to live in shame of who we are, and the fact of the matter is, both of us, in complex, different ways, feel ashamed about our appearances.

By this point, we had gotten on the subway and off again, and were walking through a busy commercial area. My thoughts drifted towards the environment I was in. For a young female, walking through any major city without a male means that you will certainly get some "looks", regardless of how conservatively you dress. The best thing to do, of course, is ignore them entirely, lest you give the lookers (who are almost exclusively men) any ideas. However, I think this attitude of oblivion has given many men the idea that women do not notice their stares, or are not bothered. I have found that men in groups are especially unpleasant; they seem to feel as though being in the company of other men gives them the right to stare with impunity, as if their manliness leaves them no choice.

Beyond stares, a female is likely to hear a few cat calls, and observe a few rude gestures. I've complained about this already. Unfortunately, there is very little one can do to avoid this behavior. Almost anything that a female does can attract unwanted attention. Case in point: when I wrote the entry that's linked above, I could not, for the life of me, figure out why I kept getting catcalls while biking to and from my violin lesson. I later figured out that it was the shoulder bag that was the problem. I would bike with my violin on my back, and the shoulder bag, of course, over my shoulder. The placement of the strap was drawing unwanted attention to my chest. The ironic part is, I bought the shoulder bag specifically so that I could wear my violin on my back, instead of using the case's shoulder strap, which is very uncomfortable and only makes the problem worse. I just couldn't win. A heavy parka helped, and so I wore one, long after I needed it, until the heat was unbearable.

As we walked through the city, I understood more and more why my friend and I still struggle with body image despite our most sincere efforts to cleanse our minds of Seventeen Magazine ideology. We really are seen, all the time, as anonymous people who happen to have breasts and hips and long hair. It's almost impossible for us to hide behind our clothes; short of spacesuits, we're clearly women. And when we're anonymous, we are not treated with the kind of respect to which we've become accustomed in our personal relationships.

It would be naive to demand that no stranger on the street ever think a sexual thought while looking at my friend and I. Although it's certainly a bizarre and uncomfortable reality to ponder, I think it's probably safe to say that strangers on the street are probably thinking all sorts of sexual things about other strangers all the time. That can't be helped, and as far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly fine. But I do think that something destructive begins to occur when those thoughts, which I'll hastily attribute to the human condition and neglect to explain, are made public. When I feel the eyes on me, when I must remember not to smile at any men because it could give them the wrong idea, when I hear the catcalls... when I am actually molested on the train (this has happened, and it was disgusting).

These actions are so often brushed off as "normal human sexuality", or worse, "boys will be boys". Everybody agrees, of course, that it's never OK to molest anybody else on a train. If the victim is brave enough to speak up when it happens (I wasn't, and I'm ashamed of it), the others in the train are likely to stand up for the victim. But nobody cares if a man stands on a street corner making catcalls. It's not a taboo. No one will stop him.

And that's how I think it happens. My friend and I have learned that it's our responsibility alone to deal with the way these men make us feel. We should be confident and strong and love our bodies no matter what. Our body image problems are our own fault. We should ignore those men. We should accept that there will always be men like that, and that we can't do anything to change that.

It undoes my careful self-conditioning. The crawling, dirty feeling that remains on my skin after an unpleasant encounter overwrites the confidence-building talk I gave to myself in the morning. I feel ugly. I feel exposed. Yes, I have lots of personal battles to win, and those are my job to fight. But being treated by strangers as if my purpose is to be an anonymous sexual object in their world is not my battle. It's just one I choose to fight.

all grown up

2008-05-23T22:41:00.008-04:00

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

This is the sound of relaxation. I have just finished 4 years of MIT. Everything is squared away: no more projects, papers, exams, problem sets, forms, meetings - nothing except graduation, which, admittedly, requires that I get up very early, but that's really the only inconvenience. On every other day, I can wake up whenever I want, stretch, and decide to go back to sleep, or embark on some crazy adventure. It's a beautiful existence.

This luxurious life is one perk of having finished my undergraduate degree. Another perk is the respect it commands. People are very impressed by an MIT degree. Generally, I'm treated like an intelligent person in conversation these days, even when the people I'm talking to are much older or more accomplished than I. When I meet new people, they generally ask me about my interests, not just my classes. We find common interests and discuss them. Very nice. As it should be.

Compare this to how I was treated 12 years ago, when I was 10 years old. Now don't get me wrong, I was certainly never mistreated or abused by the adults in my life! But virtually every adult that I met asked me the same 3 questions: "How's school?" "What's your favorite subject?" and "How old are you?" At dinner parties, I was not invited to be a part of the main conversation. (Not that this is unusual - children generally aren't.) Very few adults inquired as to what my interests were or considered that I might have anything in common with him or her.

This sucked, and not just in retrospect. I attended countless dinner parties and felt very left out indeed; I wasn't much interested in watching cartoons (or whatever) with the younger children, and although reading on my own often suited me, sometimes I wanted to be a part of the conversations that the adults were having. Not just because I wanted to be "grown up", but because I had something to say. (Is that really so surprising? Children may think differently, but they certainly don't spend all of their time thinking about toys or food. There's depth, if not the vocabulary to describe it. And even as, say, a 17-year-old, when I definitely had the ability to articulate my thoughts, only very rarely was I considered an adult.) Due to the boredom, I was almost always ready to leave hours before my parents were, and I did my fair share of moping near the door and hanging on my mother's arm and whispering "can't we go yet", much to her annoyance.

I remember promising myself, as a young child, that I would never, ever become the sort of grown up who treats children as understudies, practicing to take over the role of a good adult some day. I was terrified that one day I'd wake up and find that I'd lost all memory and respect for the experience of being a child. One particularly hard day at school, I shut my eyes, crouched on the edge of the playground, and told myself over and over that I'd never forget how it felt to be treated as though my feelings were merely the side effects of the disease of childhood, to be brushed away and ignored.

Now that I'm 22 years old, with a completed college degree, I can stop worrying about what sort of adult I'll grow up to be. As a child, I imagined that when you became an adult, there would be some sort of ceremony, you'd solemnly receive your Adult Status, and you'd promise to stop trying out silly accents, stop loving plain noodles with just butter and salt, and stop crying when you hurt yourself. You'd be Different. Well, thank goodness that's not true. I still love plain noodles with just butter and salt, I still cry if something hurts bad enough, and I love silly accents just as well.

Happy as I was to realize that no cosmic force will prevent me from loving childish things for the rest of my days, some aspects of my transition to Official Adulthood have been disappointing. I am now 100% sure, for example, that my feelings now are not any more important or valid than they were when I was 10, or 5 or, 1 year old. I know more facts, and I'm wiser, but I'm not a different person - I'm the same person I always was, I just get more respect. I feel like shouting back through time, at my little 7-year-old self, huddled on the playground, not to worry, because I will not forget what it felt like to be that age. I was living life, not preparing for it. So are all children. And every adult was once a child - they must all have had this realization. Why, then, are children treated as though they are monsters in need of taming? Why is it acceptable to ignore the desires and feelings of children in favor of the staunch routines and rigid boundaries we are taught we must impose? It seems as though adults have collectively given up on trying to communicate with children. We are not so different, me and my 10-year-old self. A little respect goes a long, long way.

The day after I get my degree, I'll be having a little graduation party, and I've invited the people who probably care the least about my degree. Ironic, isn't it? But these are the people who took me seriously, right from the beginning. They will tell you that I am the same person I always was, and that my interests, though they've certainly developed over the years, have remained remarkably constant. They know this, because back then, instead of talking over my head about Things Children Don't Understand, they spoke to me directly, as an equal. The fact that I've gotten a degree from MIT doesn't change how they treat me, because it doesn't need to. They never needed any special reason to treat me with respect.

Now that I've finished, now that it's summer, now that I'm free and my mind is wide open, I find that the support that has meant the most to me over the years has nothing to do with any of the respect that I have won by being a student at a prestigious college. There is nothing that has meant more to me than unambiguous respect for who I am and what I'm about, regardless of age or accomplishment. Should you ever get the chance to offer this to a child, take the opportunity - the child, and the adult he or she becomes, will never forget it.

weather vane

2008-05-18T19:21:00.005-04:00

I was sitting on the porch in an enormous, decrepit easy chair when a cold front moved in. One minute it was still and warm, and then edge of the front crept over my bare legs and the wind started to blow. The sky dimmed and the smell of wet soil rose up.

When the weather's like this, I want to run late at night, cool air sliding across the back of my neck and feet pounding. Rain's not bad, either, if you're feeling stormy. There's something a little bit wild and desperate about running in the dark, with the wind and rain chasing. It gives you something to run from, something to fight. A challenge to rise to. It's a dangerous feeling.

Tonight, however, I will not be running; I will be reading through class notes, an experience which is, to the restless soul, the mental equivalent of listening to a voice speak in monotone in a language you do not understand, for hours. Tomorrow I will get up early, squint in the sun as I bike across campus, and immerse myself in my very last exam.

When it's all over, it'll be noon. The weather report tells me it'll be very windy, cloudy, with a bit of a chill. Stormy weather; dangerous weather; but nothing else will speak for the restless soul.

in the boat of myself

2008-04-30T23:23:00.007-04:00

Late at night, thoughts mill around in my mind like skaters on a pond. They drift across the ice, an endless kaleidescope. I'm there, weaving amongst them like a ghost. I can glide and breathe, spotlight on one skater, then another, blades glinting in the bright light. My own private peace.

And then without warning, a monstrous noise, the ice cracks, I slide beneath the surface, and I'm drowning in chill nothingness, this vast lake below my thoughts.

Or maybe it's not quite so instant...

Maybe you've felt it. Have you ever been on the edge of sleep, only to feel the bed disappear from underneath you, heart in your throat? Have you ever reached for a doorknob in the darkness, and found that you misjudged its placement, and stumbled forward? Have you ever woken up from a dream, reaching for something that wasn't there?

When I'm very tired, I'll lie in bed in the dark, mind pulsing with nervous energy and racked with exhaustion. I'll begin to think of all the things I have to do the next day. Must write this paper, must turn in this form, must email this person, must practice the violin, must clean the rat cage, must pay the library fine. I try to organize it all. Look, I tell myself. It's ok. You have enough time to get all of this done. Here's how it'll work. See? Now you can relax. Just push those thoughts away - admire the empty pond, look at the fresh dusting of snow - tomorrow is just another day. Take your life one day at a time.

But once the pond is empty, my mind is dangerously open and there is nothing I can do to stop the demons from arriving. It happens so fast. They melt the ice with their hot footsteps, and I'm breathing carefully, keeping everything steady. Why, they ask me, are you so worried about that library fine? It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. YOU don't matter. I brace myself. I've seen THESE fellows before. I'm here because I'm a human being and I'm a student and I'm learning what I need to know to do what I want with my life, I tell them. It doesn't help. Anything I say sounds petulant and defensive. The ice is melting and I feel a strange mix of hot tears and cold apprehension. Why? They ask me. Why are you living? What point is there in your life? You are a tiny, meaningless accident. Your life will be forgotten as soon as it is over.

And the ice cracks the minute I must admit to myself that I don't know the answer to any of those questions. There is a physical sensation of falling, my heart jumps and my mind grasps blindly for anything to hold on to, followed by a painful loneliness that blooms when I realize I'm truly lost. I have so many answers, but none to the questions that really matter. Ask me why and all I can give you is an answer I've constructed to keep me sane. I have no idea why I'm here, but I want so badly for it to mean something.

I can't replicate this sickening fall if I've been sleeping well. My mind is protected from those horrifying absolutes, most of the time. But a lack of reserve power, brought on by exhaustion, gives me these glimpses in to the world below my little skating pond, a vast, endless well. I try to live with that endlessness, but I don't think my mind is built to handle such things. I need something to hang on to, some assurance that I deserve this consciousness I've got.

The will to return, to pull myself out of the void, out of that hole in the ice, is just as strong as the will to breathe. I can't help it, no matter how much I want to live with the reality that I'll never know these answers. I fight my way back to the surface and haul myself on to the ice, cold and shaken. From the surface I can see clearly again, but I know I'm seeing only my little pond. Somewhere below lurks that huge loneliness.

I decide that I will make my existence worthwhile, somehow, instead of waiting for an answer.

"Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,

no light and no land anywhere,

cloudcover thick. I try to stay

just above the surface,

yet I'm already under

and living with the ocean."
-Rumi

gypsy airs

2008-04-22T17:33:00.004-04:00

It's recital time again.

I'm playing Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) by Pablo de Sarasate. It's a fantastic little piece. The entire thing is designed to look impressive, as well as sound impressive - Sarasate was a virtuoso violinist, so he wrote in all the most difficult-sounding things he could think of. The audience is supposed to flutter their fans and say, "Oh, my, that certainly was quite something, wasn't it Georgina?" It's the icing on the cake.

It's not the deepest thing I've ever played. If the Beethoven concerto is a bottomless well, this is a very attractive puddle. It's all pomp and circumstance, but it's also damn tricky. It is composed entirely of phrases, which, if they were merely a little part of another piece, you might think to yourself, "I better watch out for this line. It's kind of tricky. If I get nervous, I might flub it". Practicing, therefore, mostly consists of playing the runs and flying spiccatos so many times that your hands do it even if your brain is busily thinking about how long it is until dinner time.

So, Beethoven it's not, but it's still a great piece, and it deserves more care than just technical precision. It's not a very personal piece, though. You can't really play it from the heart - to do that, you might as well stand up and explain that you've got an ego the size of the Pacific. It's way to blustery for sincerity. So the decision I've come to is that it must be played almost as a soundtrack for somebody else's life. I can use the grandeur and over-the-top glamor that way.

'Course, I can't tell you who it's for, because that would ruin the magic. But the piece does lend itself nicely to a story. It starts out in a rage, then lingers around some seductive business for a while, gets all mournful, and then goes absolutely nuts in the scramble to the finish. A very interesting life indeed.

science education

2008-03-31T23:34:00.001-04:00

I'm going to graduate from MIT in a few months. My imminent release in to the Real World (out of the frying pan and in to the fire, really) has got me looking back on my scientific education so far. As it turns out, until I came to MIT, my schooling contributed almost nothing useful to my body of scientific knowledge - an interesting observation indeed.

I should define by what I mean by "nothing useful", or, in other words, I should state what I consider to be useful knowledge. It's actually a difficult task. Since a lot of scientific knowledge builds upon previous knowledge, I don't want to trick myself in to thinking I learned nothing in school, if in fact I was learning basic principles upon which later learning depended. So I'll have to dig deep in to the memory banks and figure out where I learned about truly essential stuff, like the scientific method, gravity, careful observation, the existence of cells, and so on. Once the absolute basics are accounted for, I can define useful knowledge more precisely: knowledge which, at some point after learning it, I needed. For example, when I was one or two, I began asking my parents how electricity works. (There's a note in my baby book that says I was "quite good at remembering explanations of what it does", although I still had to ask all the time, apparently!) It has mattered many times in my life that I understand how electricity works. So that information is useful. (Incidentally, it's also something I was never taught in school.) On the other hand, I learned about grasshopper anatomy in high school biology. I still remember it, but it's never mattered.* That doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be taught - but I think it's reasonable to assume that at least some of the things you learn in school ought to be useful later on, or else schooling has failed to accomplish its goal. The question is: did they fail?

*One might say, at this point, that learning grasshopper anatomy was a vehicle by which I learned deeper scientific lessons about comparative anatomy, dissection, and so on. I've considered this possibility, but I must conclude that the only reason I learned about grasshopper anatomy was because it was tested on the New York State Regents exam. The content was certainly not presented in any way which would lead me to gain greater understanding about comparative anatomy or anything else.

So. Like everybody else, I really started learning about science the day I was born, since one really can't help but learn while living, but in this post I'll be looking at the more concentrated chunks of scientific education in my life - momentous occasions in my learning, if you will. Where did it all begin?

When I was 7 or so, I was given a copy of the Dorling Kindersly Science Encyclopedia. It instantly became my favorite book. For years, until I'd read it cover to cover several times, my parents would come in to my room in the middle of the night to find me asleep on the open book, lights still on. As far as I can tell (and actually, somebody has commented on the Amazon page saying the same thing), the encyclopedia covers everything that is generally taught in grade-school science class. It also covers a whole lot more - there's a lot of detail in there that I didn't see in school until high school, at least.

Because of the encyclopedia, I can say fairly certainly that although my school did present some interesting and/or important science topics in class, very few of them were new to me. In first grade, I did learn a great deal about astronomy because my teacher (whom I loved - I have very few complaints about first grade!) had me draw charts of every constellation in the night sky and memorize them all - and to this day I can see that drawing in my mind every time I look up at the sky. In third grade, my teacher assigned me an "independent research project" while the other students did I-don't-remember-what (this will be a theme in this post, you'll see) and I learned a lot about puffins and presented my findings to the class, which was fun. But other than those two things, I don't think I learned anything in science in grade school that I hadn't already read. And furthermore, the amount that I learned in grade school was a *tiny* fraction of what I had read. So that encyclopedia was one major teacher.

(Not every kid likes reading a science encyclopedia, obviously, but this post isn't about every kid. Just me.)

In fourth grade, a friend of mine mentioned that her father, a mathematician, had taught her how to do a word problem with algebra. I had heard of algebra from my encyclopedia, but I didn't know much about it, especially since neither of my parents know any algebra (they're musicians). That afternoon, during recess, my friend showed me that you could use letters to represent numbers, and then move them around in equations. Similarly, another couple years down the line, another friend of mine (with a mathematician father again!) mentioned the quadratic equation in a sort of off-hand way one day. I asked what it was, and she told me - just like that. I have a feeling that a lot of learning goes on this way - under-the-table conversations between peers, fueled by curiosity - even when schools think that they've done the teaching.

The third way I remember learning a lot in grade school was from my parents. My mother especially has always been very interested in nature, and she taught my sister and I to identify birds, trees, and bugs. We never had lessons of any kind - we just went to parks a lot (especially this one), went to museums, and went walking in the woods. I never felt like I was being forced to learn anything. I was just having fun.

The encyclopedia, conversations at recess, walks in the woods - the three most memorable ways I learned in grade school. None of them happened in the classroom. Moving on to middle and high school... did school take over as my primary informant as the subject material became more and more complex? Did I find school indispensable?

Nope. I'm actually going to leave school classes out of this bit almost completely, because the only important thing I actually learned was how to identify minerals. Almost everything I learned came from a string of obsessions that I had, in to which I would throw my self whole-heartedly until something new caught my fancy. The first obsession was ham radio, which isn't particularly typical of 10-year-old girls, but hey. I took my operator test, which required me to know how antennas worked, which required all sorts of other knowledge about energy and waves and electricity. I was so in to it - and then all of a sudden I was in to dolphins and marine biology - much more typical of young girls! I had dozens of books on dolphins. I wrote letters to children's magazines about the plight of the Indus River Dolphin. It was my thing. And then in a flash my thing was astrophysics. I read Kip Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps". I rented Carl Sagan's video series about the cosmos (think "billions and billions") and was glued to the screen. I was terrified of nuclear war. I stared at the sky all the time and begged my parents for a telescope (it took 10 years, but I got one for my 20th birthday)! I was fascinated by black holes. Eventually, an awesome organization in Ithaca called The Learning Web set me up with an internship at Cornell's Spacecraft Planetary Imaging Facility. My job was to work with a cool guy called Rick on organizing all of the pictures that came in from orbiters and satellites. Which meant that I got to hang around with astronomers and play with the computer and use Adobe Photoshop, which I thought was the most exciting thing in the whole world. Even more thrilling was when the group allowed me to come to the midnight party that they held when the Pathfinder touched down on Mars in 1997. I showed up in my pajamas, having already slept for some time, and the grad students gave me grape juice and let me sit in the front so I could see the TV. It was incredible.

That same year, I was assigned a "research paper" in my 8th grade earth science class. I was supposed to research any topic of my choosing, write a paper, and present to the class what I had learned. I wrote a paper explaining what black holes are (with an analogy to a trampoline, which I think was actually moderately clever), how they form, what they look like, etc. I had a blast. I wrote this 8-page paper that I was really proud of, and I made a presentation to give to my class. I got up there and talked for my allotted 10 minutes, after which my teacher told me... that I wasn't allowed to present on topics that nobody understood. I was absolutely crushed, mostly because the entire point of my paper had been to explain black holes from the bottom up.

After I worked at SPIF, I got more and more interested in particle physics. I read Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe", a book about string theory. I didn't understand any of the math in it, but luckily the internet could offer some insight. I even wrote Brian Greene a letter asking him some questions, but unfortunately he never wrote back, though I waited for a response for months and months.

Eventually I got involved with the Learning Web again, and they set me up with an internship at the Cornell Wilson Synchrotron. I worked for a guy called Rafael, a retiree who'd gotten bored with retired life after only a week, and who'd returned to lend his considerable expertise to the operation of the particle accelerator. He was one of the people who helped build the synchrotron on the first place, and the only person still working who knew its deepest darkest secrets, so he was invaluable, but since he was technically retired, he didn't have specific duties. Which made him a great mentor - he had plenty of time to show me around. The facility is absolutely incredible. If you've ever been inside a particle accelerator tunnel, you know how cool it is - enormous bending magnets, cavernous detectors, massive boxes of electronics - it all looks like some fabulous science fiction paradise. I was a little out of place there, granted, being the only person under 25 around, and one of only 2 females, the other being a professor in her 60s, but physicists are known for being kind of aloof, and nobody seemed to mind too much.

Rafael had been a well-known lecturer in physics and electronics, which was absolutely to my advantage. When I first started working for him, I didn't know enough physics or electronics to build anything useful for the sychrotron, so he had to teach me. Which meant that I got private lessons in two-hour chunks from this guy. It was a great way to learn, especially since my new knowledge was immediately applied in the context of the project I was working on.

Later on in high school, when it came time for me to start taking normal physics classes, I found that I just didn't have any patience for sitting through dry, boring lectures with no fun projects in sight (neither did anybody else, I bet). I had also already taken calculus at that point, which made it a bit silly to take the physics class that my school offered, which attempted to bypass the calculus with long-winded, fuzzy explanations that obscured the math. So for the last couple years, I actually took physics, and later math as well, from a distance-learning program called EPGY. It worked out pretty well, because I could work at any pace I wanted, and it let me leave school after only 2 hours of morning classes.

Since I'm getting a degree in bioengineering, one might wonder why so little biology has appeared so far in this overly-lengthy narrative. It may just be blatant cynicism, but I think the reason is actually directly attributable to one person: my 9th grad biology teacher, whom I won't name.

Early on in the year, were were assigned a research project (oh no, not another research project...). I can't exactly remember what the constraints were, but I decided to test whether or not vegetables and fruits that had a bright red color had more vitamin C in them than paler vegetables and fruits. I did some very simple test (I think it involved iodine and potato starch), and found that indeed, the red fruits and vegetables I tested had more vitamin C than the others. My teacher refused to believe me. She hadn't heard of it being true, and not only was she was totally unwilling to believe that I had done a sound experiment (which is a legitimate concern in the context of a sloppy high school lab), she didn't even believe that I was telling the truth. She honestly thought I was fudging my data. We never got along after that. (Also, in her class, I was bullied pretty ruthlessly by 3 guys who sat at my table, and she refused to move my seat. So that didn't go over well either.)

(In case anybody's curious, my results were actually correct for at least one of the vegetables I tested. I had used orange and red peppers, and red peppers are now known to have 50% more vitamin C than orange ones.)

My interest in biology lagged for quite some time after that disastrous class. It only picked up when I was 16 so when I began to get interested in cancer research. When I first began reading about cancer biology and treatment, I became totally obsessed. I'd stay up all night reading. I'd download articles and read them on my laptop whenever I had a free moment - which I now realize is exactly my style. Complete immersion until I have the basics down, and I feel ready to ask questions, and talk to people, and understand the whole thing on a deeper level. (As it turned out, the way to understand things on a deeper level in the case of cancers was to get involved with the ACS and participate in the Relay for Life, which, if you haven't ever done it, is an incredible experience.)

After I had recovered from my bad introduction to biology, I started reading a lot more of it, and I got in to neuroscience and cognitive studies. And then I ended up at MIT, where I floundered around for my first year, unable to choose between physics, bioengineering, electrical engineering, and neuroscience. I feel that my education here has been very good. I certainly can't sum it up here, since it's really a whole 'nuther beast, so I won't try, but that's not the point of this post anyway.

The point I'm actually trying to make is that when I look back on my education, I find that I was incredibly fortunate to have opportunities to learn science in interesting and diverse ways. I am fairly sure that if I hadn't had the opportunities I've mentioned in this post, I would feel pretty negative about science. It would probably be lifeless and dull. I'm not even sure who I'd be today if these experiences hadn't been such a big part of my life...

Which really makes me wonder about education in this country. And if I had to answer my own question from the beginning of this post, I would say that yes, the schools did fail to educate me in science. Anybody who reads this blog knows that I have a lot of gripes about education, but I promise I won't go in to them all. Let's just say that public science education is... well, it's no fun. It takes a subject like physics - which is responsible for the Mars rover, and that magical party I attended in the middle of the night - in to an emotionless subject that exists between the cardboard covers of a (badly-written) textbook. It removes science from the forces that motivate it, all the emotion, passion, and urgency that scientists feel to discover and innovate, and isolates it in a small world of petty facts. It's sad, really - astronomy is so grand and humbling and biology is intricate and delicate and physics is full of explosions and bizarre theories... I'm beginning to think that we shouldn't separate science from science fiction, really. I don't mean to suggest that we should teach people science THROUGH science fiction - I'm all for keeping the facts accurate - but I think public science education has lost sight of the fact that science is what sends us to the MOON and builds mushroom clouds and saves peoples' lives. Where's the glory?

epidemic

2008-03-21T23:05:00.008-04:00

Because it isn't published yet, I can't say much about the work I did last summer on an HIV vaccine. What I can say is that the work wasn't particularly glamorous. I spent a lot of long hours mixing and measuring tiny amounts of clear liquid in tiny plastic tubes, which isn't quite as exciting as rocket science, but hey - that's bioengineering. Things that bioengineers think are exciting are generally about as thrilling as watching paint dry.

But damn, if it works... Imagine how it would change the world. Just thinking of it gives me the shivers.

HIV is a tricky monster. It attacks CD4+ T cells. Those helper T cells are supposed to activate B cells, which then produce antibodies, which bind to the virus, causing them to be endocytosed by macrophages. So if you don't have any T cells, you don't have any antibodies, which means that your specific immune responses are... zilch.

When it enters cells, HIV unpacks its (tiny, efficient, scary) RNA genome, uses an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to translate the RNA in to DNA (all the better to mimic human genes), and then inserts itself in to the human genome. There it lurks for years.

The virus can only replicate if certain transcription factors (molecules which bind the DNA such that transcription to RNA can occur) are present. (For example, in the case of HIV, one of the factors it needs to jump out of the human genome is NF-kappa-B. Sadly, NF-kappa-B is upregulated (produced more) when T cells are activated.) When such a transcription factor comes along, the viral genome is transcribed to RNA and translated to protein unwittingly by the body's machinery. The completed virus assembles, bursts out of the host cells, and goes on to infect again.

It's awful.

HIV is only made trickier by its tendency to mutate extremely quickly. The virus can change significantly within one person, within one month (this is mostly because the virus doesn't package its own proofreading enzymes, so when it transcribes its own genome, it makes a lot of mistakes). Which is part of the reason that no vaccine has been made so far - it's incredibly difficult to fight against a mutating enemy.

Therapy for HIV basically consists of anti-retroviral drugs right now. They work in a number of ways - they can inhibit reverse transcriptase, they can inhibit some of the viral proteins necessary for viron assembly, they can inhibit the protein that allows HIV to insert itself in the human genome, etc - but all of them focus on blocking the virus from doing what it wants to do. This means that all of them are dependent upon the virus not mutating so much that it becomes unrecognizable to the drug - and that's unlikely, given how fast HIV mutates. So lots of people become resistant to treatment, and then there's very little that medicine can do.

Most of my understanding of HIV and AIDS comes from a very scientific perspective. I know a lot about HIV surface proteins. I can go on about immune response. But the epidemic hasn't come too close to my life. It started just before I was born, and by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, it was a pandemic. Friends watched friends waste away. AIDS orphans were suddenly everywhere. The disease reared up from nowhere, ugly as hell.

I've never personally known anybody with HIV or AIDS. I've never even met anybody with HIV or AIDS (that I know of - though I probably have). Sometimes it makes AIDS seem so surreal. I've been hearing about it ever since I can remember, this hellish disease, for which we have no cure. I even forget, sometimes, that the disease is only a couple years older than me. How can it even be real? How can it have changed the world so fast?

Once in a while, I get a flash of understanding. Maybe I read something (like Susan Sontag's "The Way We Live Now" - not for the faint of heart), or overhear something on the T... Today, in a restaurant, just as I was leaving, I heard a group of people make a toast to a man who had died of AIDS. In those moments I'm reminded how blissfully untouched by AIDS my life has been, and how little I really know about it. And how very, very far we have to go before it can be forgotten.

animal testing

2008-02-29T18:16:00.005-05:00

I'm a bioengineer and a vegetarian.

This causes some interesting complications.

First and foremost, I oppose causing animals, or anybody else, to suffer unnecessarily. (This begs the question, is suffering sometimes necessary?)

But I also disagree with animal rights activists who jump to the conclusion that research on animals is always 100% wrong, mostly because their opinions seem to be build on shaky ground. Let's have a look at what PETA's website says about animal testing:

"Educating people and encouraging them to avoid fat and cholesterol, quit smoking, reduce alcohol and other drug consumption, exercise regularly, and clean up the environment will save more human lives and prevent more human suffering than all the animal tests in the world."

I think this is the kind of argument that loses PETA its credibility. It's true that promoting a healthy lifestyle probably would save more lives than animal research if we suddenly decided to spend all our animal research dollars on education. (In the USA right now, Lipitor, a statin, is making 14 billion dollars per year. Thats the size of the GDP of Tanzania or Senegal. And high cholesterol is greatly influences by weight, activity, and diet. So yes, it's a significant lifestyle problem.)

But that's not the point. Clearly, not all diseases are lifestyle related. People don't only get sick due to bad choices, they get sick because of all kinds of factors. I'm not going to flesh out an argument now for why we should save peoples' lives when they need medical attention, so I'll just leave that as a given.

PETA's argument is shallow. It implies that the only purpose of medical science is to save us from disease we should have avoided. The fact that this is so obviously untrue robs them of credibility.

Once we've decided to treat disease whenever possible, we are immediately faced with the question of animal testing. Complex, deadly diseases often require therapies which are themselves complex and dangerous. PETA says:

"If the pharmaceutical industry switched from animal experiments to quantum pharmacology and in vitro tests, we would be better protected from harmful drugs, not less protected."

Again, this is blatantly false. While in vitro testing is very useful sometimes, it just can't simulate the way a drug will act within the larger world of the body. There is no circulatory system in a petri dish, for example. No organs. While animal testing is far from perfect, it offers a much more realistic model of the human body. It's TRUE that animal testing sometimes results in a drug which appears safe for humans, but turns out not to be in the long run. PETA implies that this problem will be solved by using in vitro testing. That's just plain false.

There are currently some attractive alternatives to animal testing. I believe they should be used whenever possible. Some reputable sources, such as the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine think that animal testing is no longer necessary. Others say it's still irreplaceable, especially for animal models of certain diseases, and for testing "discovered" drugs, the mechanisms (and therefore risk factors) for which may be completely unknown.

Let's look at some reasons why animal testing is currently unacceptable. There are MANY.

1. Until 1989, veterinarians were taught to ignore animal pain. Many veterinarians practicing today were educated in this way. It is only very, very recently that any concern for animal welfare has been demonstrated, and standards are still incredibly low.

2. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) doesn't include mice, rats, or birds. In 2002, the AWA was specifically amended so as NOT to include those species. It also specifically excludes farm animals. Because of this, very few of the animals that are tested on are actually protected.

3. While pain management is now common in some veterinary hospitals, research animals are rarely given any pain medication. Sometimes procedures are designed to be less painful than they could possibly be, but painkillers are generally thought to be too expensive and difficult to control. It is legal to perform ANY experiment on a research animal as long as it can be scientifically justified.

4. Research animals are given absolutely minimal room or comfort. They live in tiny cages. While their cages are often clean, there have been many documented cases of research animals drowning in their own feces. They are not given toys, playtime, or attention. The difference in standards between standards of treatment for pets and standards of treatment for lab animals is enormous, even though the animals have the same needs.

5. Some animal research and testing is completely ridiculous. Skin products are often tested by injecting the product in to the eye of a live rabbit, and looking for swelling, oozing, and pain. This is ridiculous (there's even an approved substitute, EpiDerm, for use on human volunteers), but it's not the only example of such cruelty. And I think it goes without saying that we do NOT need to be testing eyeshadow on mice. There are plenty of substances that make safe cosmetics (minerals, mostly). And anyway, so many mainstream cosmetics are mutagens (one survey found that 884 chemicals in cosmetics are toxic) that we should rethink the whole process anyway.

Basically, I think that the pressure should be on and that alternatives to animal testing should be found within 10 years. I'm willing to believe that currently, some animal testing may still be essential. (I think this is largely because small animals like mice have such quick life cycles compared to human beings - you can get data about 80 times faster in mice. Once we get computer models of entire vertebrates, this will no longer be necessary.)

In the mean time, I think there is NO excuse for not raising standards of animal care significantly. Yes, it costs money, but what really infuriates me is the way Americans often pander to their pets - sometimes buying them diamonds and clothing, which I have yet to see any pet demonstrate affection for, by the way - and then completely forget that the animals being used for research (and, yes, FOOD) are so very, very similar. It's not just mice and zebrafish, people. Cats are frequently used in neurological investigations, half of which officially cause "pain and distress" (though that definition of pain doesn't include any suffering induced by boredom, poor living conditions, or neglect). Dogs, especially beagles, are used in all kinds of biomedical research.

Some people say that a measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable minorities.

**I have sources for almost all of the facts in this post; if anybody wants them, just ask.**

culture and innocence

2008-02-19T23:14:00.003-05:00

When I was 10, I bought an ASL dictionary, signed up for ASL I at the Finger Lakes Independence Center in Ithaca, NY, and totally fell in love with signing. I hung out with a bunch of Deaf 45-year-olds at FLIC and I volunteered at a Deaf school, teaching 4 and 5 year olds simple math. I signed my thoughts by accident on the school bus; I signed "Happy Birthday" to my father instead of singing; basically, I drove my family crazy.

This is somewhat remarkable. First of all, most 10-year-olds don't hang out with 45-year-olds. 10-year-olds are generally considered irritating. They ask a lot of questions and they are a bit grubby behind the ears. Most Deaf schools are not inclined to let 10-year-olds become volunteer teachers, either. And perhaps most strangely, I expect that most adult education ASL programs are disinclined to admit little kids.

But somehow, for reasons that I've never been able to explain, I was a part of the Deaf community in Ithaca back then. I had no obvious reason for wanting to be there (I knew zero Deaf people beforehand), and I had no practical goal in mind (still wanted to be a physicist), but it didn't seem to matter. I was a child, and nobody suspected any impurity in my motivation. I just liked it, that was all.

When, 2 years later, I finished all the ASL classes that FLIC had, I found there was no place else in town (except Cornell, which cost a lot) that I could study. I tried to find some kids my age who signed, but failed to make any contacts. The woman who'd been working with me at the Deaf school moved away. There was nobody to talk to, so I stopped signing. For 10 years.

Now, finally, I'm signing again. My reasons this time around are very similar. I love ASL - and I've missed it - and my face practically falls off from grinning so much every time I go to Deaf events around here. My interests haven't changed much since I was 10, honestly. Signing just makes me happy.

But I'm not a kid any more. I'm not a cute little 10-year-old. I'm a biological engineer now - scary! I'm 22, and my overloaded academic life has nothing to do with interpreting. I still don't have any practical reason to learn ASL. Nobody in Boston knows that I was once an accepted member of the community in Ithaca, of course.

So it's different. I find myself a definite outsider to a group I used to be part of, and that's weird. When I was younger - and fluent in ASL - I really felt as though I was "one of the crowd". That degree of comfort with the community is almost impossible for me to imagine now, but I guess it's a testament to the adaptability of children. These days, I'm incredibly conscious of the insularity of the Deaf community and the fact that I will probably never be "one of the crowd" again. It's frustrating. As a child, and as many children do, I plowed right through the cultural boundaries that I didn't realize existed. Now, as an adult, I can't ignore them, but that doesn't mean I've lost any respect for the group I used to be part of.

Obviously, in the process of growing up, I've learned that such boundaries exist, and that's been invaluable. There's no way I could have ever grown up to be an aware individual without recognizing the boundaries of the Deaf community (and others) for the ideals and causes they represent. But it makes me a little bit sad that I missed my window of innocence during which I could have settled myself in to that world, for no particularly good reason, and stayed.

It's not as though I'll never fit in again. There are a lot of steps I can take to bring myself back to the signing world - just as soon as I stop being shy about it! It may never be quite the same, but waving from the outside - or from a seat in ASL III here in Boston - sure is better than nothing :)

gratitude

2008-02-11T21:05:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to celebrate Valentine's Day. I'm not in to it, and I'm cynical about all the pink and chocolate and uncreative standard roses, so don't go and worry that this post is going to be all "I LUV U". (I do love you. Yes, you there at the computer. But damned if you'd ever get me to say it on Valentine's Day.)

Instead, here's a warning: I am about to reveal a totally pathetic fact about my past. Dangerously pathetic. Get your hankies ready.

When I was in third grade, I had very few friends at school. My best friend was (everybody *gasp*) a boy - this automatically made me the class weirdo - and my other friend was a girl from a different class. I was mildly acquainted with a boy who played the cello and a girl who'd been in my kindergarten class, but that was it.

So Valentine's Day was a bit of a sad affair that year. We made Valentine's Day "mailboxes" in class, and come the big day, we passed out our valentines, and then hurried back to our desks to see who loved us. My mailbox contained a few stock valentines - the sort that are ripped from larger sheets and sport pictures of superheros - and one actual, factual valentine. I think that each student was SUPPOSED to bring a valentine for everybody in the class (if they brought any at all) but clearly, that rule was not enforced, as some of the more popular girls next to me had overflowing mailboxes and packets of red-hots and candy hearts. Anyway, my valentine was from the boy who played the cello. I still have the darn thing.

Now, 14 years later, even though nobody I know (except my Aunt) actually gives valentines any more, I feel like a kid with an overflowing mailbox. I know people who actually *want* to spend time with me. Just because I'm me. I can't explain it, but I love it!

Often I find myself operating under the assumption that I am very unimportant to everybody else. This is mostly true, of course. But I am incredibly, incredibly grateful that it's not completely true.

Life is good.

THE RAMP

2008-01-30T12:41:00.002-05:00

(Note: Halfway through getting the pictures together for this post, I realized that Christine over at Cacophony, another housemate of mine, beat me to it. Oh well - can't get enough of this ramp!)

The Ramp to which I've been frequently alluding is now done, save for the handrail. The project, which has been a major part of my IAP, is one of the best examples I've seen of "can-do" culture, on many levels, and I feel grateful to have been involved.

The Ramp was first proposed some time in late November, when ismith decided to pledge pika. He uses an electric scooter to get around, and the batteries don't winter well, so he couldn't move in until there was some reliable way to get the scooter inside. Or house has 7 entrances, all of which are no where near ground level - so we put on our thinking caps. After much discussion, we decided to go whole-hog and build a 70-foot ramp (5 feet of rise) out of pressure-treated lumber.

Building a 70-foot ramp is a big decision for a little co-op (30 people) that has a very tight budget and is populated by MIT students (always busy!). It's not totally obvious that such a large project can be managed by inexperienced young people, but what I've learned at pika is that there's nothing so motivating as attempting the impossible. We attempt it all the time with our experiment in cooperative living - widely regarded as impossible by those who believe that trust is not a safe philosophy - but even so, it never ceases to amaze me what pikans are capable of. Or more accurately, what people are capable of, if they are part of an environment were "yes we can" is the dominant attitude.

The project was all about people. When it started out, it was about finding a way for our housemate to move in. And then it grew. It became a creative outlet for the considerable design talents of one mechanical engineer, a fun project for an experienced alum who helped us out, and an opportunity to become comfortable with power tools and construction techniques for many. Sure, people got tired and grumpy, and my fingers were freezing most of the time, but that's the reality of doing something significant (in the middle of winter...).

It feels really good to do something that *matters*! And it feels even better to do it with a light heart, with friends, and with an immediate reward - our new housemate.

****************************************
RAMP CONSTRUCTION PICTURES:

Stage 1: Drilling holes with this AMAZING DRILL.

Stage 2: Mix concrete to pour in to the holes.

Stage 3: Get a LOT of lumber.

Stage 4: Start putting up weight bearing posts.

Stage 5. Install crossbeams.

Stage 5 continued...

Stage 6: Install joists.

Stage 7: Lay down decking.

Stage 8: Ramp is drivable for the very first time!!

Stage 9: Install guard rails.

Stage 10: Add balusters - and voila!

suspended

2008-01-29T15:48:00.000-05:00

Suspended between three o'clock and four
with little to do and no time, anyway
I'm lost also on the winding path
between exile and welcoming,
between conversation and silence.
Balanced, with each toe in a different world
unable to slacken and sleep,
as if time froze in the middle
of a wide hurried step,
and I have been waiting
ever since
to arrive someplace,
limbs growing shaky.
I imagine a chair appearing out of nowhere
and a voice that says "this is yours"
and a long nap during which daisies grow around.

intuitive empath - gift or problem?

2008-01-27T16:24:00.001-05:00

Quiz: Am I an Intuitive Empath?

Have I been labeled as overly sensitive? -Yep! All the time. By almost everybody I know. Even by me!

If a friend is distraught or in physical pain, do I start feeling it too? -No question.

Am I drained in crowds, going out of my way to avoid them? -You betcha.

Do I get anxious in packed elevators, airplanes, or subways? -Mmm, not always. I do OK on airplanes and subways if things are settled. If people are shouting, or if everybody is scared due to some turbulence, then it gets stressful.

Am I hypersensitive to noise, scents, or excessive talking? -All three!

When I see gruesome newscasts, does my energy plummet? -Definitely, although I can't say this happens often, because I studiously avoid watching any sort of newscast at all - they are almost always gruesome.

Do I get burned out by groups, require lots of time alone to revive? -Yup.

*****************************************************************************

I found this quiz while searching for scholarly information about reading body language, per my recent interest described in this post.* The quiz was far from scholarly, but I was interested, so I kept reading. Pretty soon I discovered that the world of holistic healing/energy work/psychiatry is profoundly divided over whether or not being an intuitive empath is a gift or a major problem.

The web page that the quiz came from says that if you answer "yes" to one question above, you are probably an intuitive empath. If you answer yes to all of them then - uh oh - your tendencies are draining you of your life energy. Never fear, there is a list of things you can do to combat stress! Alas, I've been doing all of them ever since I can remember, and I'm not cured yet. What then?

Another test informed me that I am 100% hypersensitive (I answered "yes" to every single question). A pseudoscience article on About.com assures me that I have every single "symptom" of intuitive empathy.

On the other side of things, if you google for "intuitive empath", you will mostly find adverts for women who profess to be "intuitive empath healers". Some people offer training programs that teach you how to become more empathic (as a way to boost communication skills). My own mother thinks I'm psychic.

My favorite was the page that suggested that I am "allergic to life".

Some sources say I should be showering daily in order to wash away negative energy (I do, but I assure you, it doesn't work). There's a special diet for people like me (not interested). Some say I need therapy (been there). Energy crystals may solve this problem (no thanks). I need to rid my life of "energy vampires" and/or "energy suckers" (I don't think I know any). One even suggests that I am unconsciously in contact with the "oversoul" of everybody I meet and that I need to learn how to stop doing that.

I'm totally fascinated by this all, which I guess is only natural, since it's always fascinating to see one's defining characteristics listed somewhere, but actually I find it somewhat perverse. First of all, all those web pages have loads of suggestions for how to deal with life (stimuli, situations, etc), all of which I've tried, and most of which make only minor differences in my life. I'm guess I'm kind of off-the-charts-weird. Which isn't as comforting as, you know, finding the answer to life splashed up on wikipedia, but what was I expecting, really? Second, all the web pages I've seen are completely immersed in theorizing about chakras, auras, energy fields, religious healing powers, and so many other supernatural things I can't keep them all straight. As the articles all cleverly suggest, I am very drawn to the idea of healing - I don't deny it - but I complained about in this earlier post, I can't understand why these characteristics can't be described without immediately attributing them to the supernatural. Bottom line is, I'm interested to know if there are other people out there who are similar to me in this respect, but I don't really want to know how I can be saved from energy vampires!

*The paragraph that I originally found was this:

"Empaths often possess the ability to sense others on many different levels. From their position in observing what another is saying, feeling and thinking, they come to understand another. They can become very proficient at reading another personís body language and/or study intently the eye movements. While this in itself is not empathy, it is a side-shoot that comes from being observant of others. In a sense, empaths have a complete communication package." The source was a terrible pseudoscience paper which asserted that an "empath is able to sense [these] vibrations and recognize even the subtlest changes undetectable to the naked eye or the five senses", but if you want to see it, it's here.

authenticity

2008-01-27T09:49:00.000-05:00

I've been feeling inauthentic lately. It's probably because it's our rush period here at pika, which means that dozens of new people have been over at our house every day. This is really terrific from a rush perspective, but I kind of max out on it after a while.

Hence I feel inauthentic, not-myself, not-really-who-I-want-to-be. I find myself talking to people and only afterwards realize that what I said was 90% idle chatter (most of which is funny, light-hearted, and kind of pieced together every example I've ever seen of how to be entertaining in social situations) and 10% Real Meaning. It's not that I'm making stuff up, it's just very superficial. I feel as though I'm in a huge crowded swimming pool, and everybody's splashing around and whatnot, and I've got my eyes closed and I keep wincing from all the splashing. It takes so much energy to keep the water out of my eyes and keep treading that I haven't managed to discuss much beyond the metaphorical equivalent of sunblock and potato chips. It's fun for a little while, but too much of it leaves a hollow feeling behind.

It's not a comfortable place to be, really - I don't thrive so much on the "buzz" as I wither. Over the past few days, I've watched - as so many shadows and sunbeams passing overhead - various real things occur in my life, but I seem unable to make my way over to the side of that darn swimming pool and haul myself out in order to think about it. There are so many people in the way! And they're all my friends! Escaping one's friends, even for a little, is particularly difficult, seeing as one never wants to do it. But still, all my responses to the world are currently set on "rapid-fire"; it's as if I've momentarily forgotten how to seriously consider anything, so everything I do is sourcing from the easily-available repository of niceties. How boring.

Unsticking myself from this mess is proving difficult. At the end of the day, I find that the stress of it all has made my stomach complain, and so, instead of having a Real Conversation (which is what I actually want), or even just sitting quietly in the presence of another human being, I mostly flop in to bed and focus on feeling better, which takes just as much superficial energy as being a social butterfly. There's got to be some balance, but finding it requires a blend of will power, planning, and lucidity that I've been missing for a few days.

Maybe I should take a walk. Maybe that'll clear the brain.

"girl power"

2008-01-23T13:41:00.000-05:00

I can't even remember what exactly brought me to these two websites, but it had something to do with searching for power tools designed for people with small hands, or at least in the beginning it did. And then...

Holy chalupa! What century are those people living in???!

From the page about decorating bedrooms for girls: "Allocate space for playing with a doll house, small table and chairs for tea parties, child sized vanity for preening, stuffed animals, wall decorations and a splash of color."

From the page about decorating bedrooms for boys: "Boys bedrooms need a study area, social section, solitude nook and sports place. Be prepared to have the desk transformed into a media center, filled with electronic games and computer units. Sports equipment, also memorabilia will need to be stored."

I can't even begin to list all the things wrong with this. It would take me all day, and I've got places to be (three guesses - it's NOT a tea party - and it involves power tools). Among the most ridiculous are the ideas that girls play no video games or sports and girls don't need a study area. (I'm not even going to get started on the misconceptions about the poor little boys.)

Stuff like this reaaaaaaally pisses me off. Is that what young girls in this country are truly exposed to? How incredibly naive do you have to be to think that all little girls want tea parties instead of video games? That all little boys want sports equipment and not dollhouses? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!

Here at MIT, and more particularly at pika, I am proud to say we are doing things differently. You would not believe the girl power that has gone in to building our ramp. Fully 100% of my time working on the project has been spent working alongside competent, confident, brilliant women who I am proud to say never listened to any such nonsense about tea parties. Not that they don't have tea parties, or knit, or sew, or like stuffed animals... but they are equally at home on a construction site (with BIG power tools, I'm not talking about a few nails here), playing a mean game of ultimate frisbee, and messing about with computers.

MLK Day

2008-01-21T23:03:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has always been a really significant holiday to me. When I was 10, I won an MLK poetry contest, and I got to be *on TV* - very exciting. And until I graduated from high school, my choir gave a concert of gospel music on MLK Day, at a local community center, which marked the occasion well. It was always a major event.

When I was 10, I thought I understood Dr. King's message. My family had a recording of the "I Have a Dream" speech, which I'd listened to, and it all seemed so simple. Everybody deserves equality and justice; you should treat everybody with respect. Of course! I knew it was important, and I knew that in the past, people had been treated very badly. I thought the holiday was basically a warm fuzzy day on which we reminded each other that we should be nice. But I had no experience to prove to me that America was still full of racism (nobody told me it was gone; I just hadn't seen it), and especially, no concept of what made "I Have a Dream" a truly monumental speech in American history.

As I've gotten older, racism has creeped in to my life. I've lost friendships to it. I've seen the kinds of injustice I believed had been eradicated in the 60s. I've met people whose ignorant racist attitudes are silently poisoning their communities. I've even been hated for being White.

I was born in to almost every possible category of privilege except maleness. I'm White, from a stable, loving, educated family with a decent amount of money, straight, an agnostic, American, in excellent health but protected by insurance, etc. The list goes on and on. There have been a few occasions in my life when I've been in minority - as a White person on trips to South America and Asia, and while building houses in Arkansas. As a hearing person in the Deaf community. As a young person among much older people when I worked at labs at Cornell University. As a female in maybe 75% of my math classes in middle and high school.

Anybody who can recount all their significant experiences as a minority in a short paragraph is obviously not a minority. Therefore, anything I know from personal experience about racism is likely to represent only a tiny fraction of the true experience unfolding in America today. And that's a sobering thought.

Because racism, over the last few years, has really weighed me down. The enormity of the problem has really settled in. I used to believe that simply being nice to everybody would solve the problem; it won't. Now I realize that. I realize that there's no excuse for sitting by and watching racism happen, even if you're a nice person. More than anything, I now see and feel the racial tensions that I never noticed as a child. There's deep mistrust in this country.

With that realization, I think I began to view the fight against racism as increasingly hopeless. Every group seems suspicious of the other. Equality and justice are virtues frequently called upon in lawmaking, and racism is, of course, no longer fashionable, but where is the friendship? What happened to the part where we actually get along? It's good that our government isn't legally racist anymore, but individuals sure are, and we can't even talk about it - because "good" people are "never" racist.

Yesterday morning, for the first time I was 14 or so, I watched the "I Have a Dream" speech, and it totally bowled me over. I saw it in a completely new light. All the times I'd heard it previously, it had sounded a lot like "Hey America, stop hurting Black people. This is horrible. Treat us the way we deserve. Give us our rights." But yesterday, what I heard was "Hey America, wake up. We really can achieve unity. We can get along. We can overcome this."

Just what I'd almost stopped believing.

I think I understand better now what King was saying. He wasn't just demanding that Black people be given equal rights - though of course he did that. He was actually hopeful, he was the opposite of hate (even when he himself was hated), and was truly leading towards peace.

Of course, the world knows that. King said it himself! (Maybe I just wasn't listening.) He got the Nobel Peace Prize. Millions of people have written about his message. But the powerful, unexpected optimism with which he spoke didn't really hit me until yesterday.

After I watched the speech, I spent a tearful hour listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony, and realized that, like so much of Beethoven's work, the symphony only gets sweeter the more sourness you've experienced. It just becomes more and more sublime. The very end of the last movement - the one with "Ode to Joy" - offered up its words in a new way:

Finale repeats the words:

Be embraced, ye millions!

This kiss for the whole world!

Brothers, beyond the star-canopy

Must a loving Father dwell.

Be embraced,

This kiss for the whole world!

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,

Daughter of Elysium,

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods

UPDATE: My mother just forwarded to me a speech Obama gave at King's church in Atlanta yesterday.

Wow.

beethoven 7th, mvmt 2

2008-01-19T23:08:00.000-05:00

Beethoven's 7th symphony, movement 2: allegretto.

No matter what my mood, I want to listen to it, and it always shows a new face of itself, complimenting however I feel perfectly. Even when none of my 3000 other songs appeal. I never get tired of listening to it, and I've been listening for at least 7 years.

It's got to be one of the most perfect things ever written.

super powers

2008-01-19T19:31:00.001-05:00

I admit it.

I want to be a Jedi.

When I first saw Star Wars when I was 13, I was seized by a fervent desire to learn the ways of the force. Mostly, I wanted to read minds. I'd lie in bed creating these elaborate daydreams of what my life would be like if I could read minds. I'd never have any more awkward conversations, because I'd always know the right thing to say. Nobody would ever have to explain his- or herself if he or she was having a hard time - I'd already know the whole story. The daydreams were so lifelike that sometimes I almost tricked myself in to believing them.

Luckily, in the 9 years since I first saw Star Wars, I've realized that it would actually be terribly inconvenient to read minds as literally as I imagined at 13. Folks think a lot of stuff that they never say, and thank goodness for that - way more than half of what goes through my head is either ridiculous, embarrassing, tangential, or untimely, and I imagine it's the same for everyone else. It's definitely a good thing I can't read minds.

But I still want to be Jedi. Ok, ok, so I can't be. What then? Does my galaxy far far away offer any cool "super powers" that are within my grasp? Hmm...

A few days ago I was talking to a British friend of mine, and I was having my usual problem: I kept nearly adopting his accent. Every single time I spoke, I had to consciously remind myself to stick with my own accent. The incident got me thinking and for the last few days I've more consciously aware than usual of such occurrences. Like tonight at dinner, when the person I was talking to made a gesture, and without even thinking about it I made exactly the same gesture. Yesterday, I was writing on the same piece of paper as somebody else, and I kept accidentally adjusting my handwriting to match hers. And a yesterday night, when I was watching a video clip, and a person on the screen made a weird face - and I mimicked that face exactly. I do it *all the time*.

Lest this sound disturbing, let me assure the reader that I'm not a mindless copycat. These are cases of reaction to what goes on around me. I'm not confused in some pathological way about who I am. I think - and here's the interesting part - that such reactions are integral to mind reading. Maybe a super power (after a fashion) isn't so impossible after all.

Of course, I don't mean that by imitating somebody's hand motion I'm going to literally read their mind, and I'm also quite aware that I'm never going to have any real super power. But I still think this is really cool. It's subtle, but here's what goes on: a person (Sally, let's say) is talking to me. Sally and I are having a very interesting conversation, and by virtue of human nature and the existence of mirror neurons I am literally experiencing the sensations and feelings that she is describing. So it's only natural that when Sally gets to the point in her story where she makes a particular gesture, I follow her. It's as though I'm Sally's puppet.

What I'm describing isn't new or unusual in anyway (here's a well-known essay on the topic), and most people do it. But, what if you can hone that innate skill? Can you learn the language of off-hand gestures and facial expressions? (Do you have to re-learn it for each person?) Theoretically, if I had a very large number of mirror neurons, all of the things that I observed in another person would be neurologically recreated within my own brain. Would I then be able to piece together a person's thoughts from all of the observable ways that he or she expresses his- or herself? Could I "reverse-engineer" a thought?

At some earlier time, I would have said no. This sounds like a behaviorist theory to me - state of mind is entirely reconstructible by observing behavior - and I've always disliked those theories. I mean, there's just no way. How many times in life do we play 2o Questions with somebody who is obviously upset, but not forthcoming about the problem? If the behaviorists were right, everybody would be an open book. And clearly we're not. We can make ourselves as indecipherable as we please.

But I think the difference between behaviorism and this innate "mind reading" is that behaviorism is a relative system of interpretation (very faulty), and innate "mind reading" is absolute. If somebody pokes your finger with a needle while I look on, a part of your brain will light up, and the exact same part of my brain will light up. That's pretty remarkable. Even allowing for the vast range of human temperament and emotion, the fact that an experience, whether real or sympathetic, causes identical response in certain areas of the brain must mean that some thoughts - if thoughts are defined by brain activity (that's a whole other can of worms) - can be "read". I guess we generally only go in for reading ("reverse engineering") the really easy thoughts like "Ow, that hurts", "I'm happy" or "I am sleepy", but importantly, we don't always need to see the cause of those thoughts to recognize them. They have a familiar, nearly-unmistakable constellation of expressions.

So what about other thoughts? If Larry is my friend, and I'm very familiar with his facial/gestural/postural manners of expression, can I learn to interpret his actions (both conscious and unconscious) and translate them in to more complex thoughts?

My guess is that this is somewhat possible. I think it's impossible that we humans display a secret personal "alphabet code" that belies our every thought, if only the code-breaker is quick enough. But I think it's quite likely that we give away a decent amount (as long as we are not consciously trying to avoid doing so), and that serious neurological practice could indeed augment the human ability to read minds.

So, it may not be Jedi-cool, but it's pretty cool :)

Goodbye

2008-01-14T20:40:00.000-05:00

Maverick, my beloved white rat, died early this morning. She was two years old. She died peacefully and was attended by her friend Emily. Today, Emily spent all day sitting in Maverick's area in Maverick's blanket, and instead of escaping her cage whenever the door was opened (as she usually does), she shut her eyes and snuggled up next to my hand.

Maverick was buried in a little house, like the ones she loved to hide in, made of birch bark, in the woods.

The following picture was taken yesterday. Maverick will be most terribly missed.

the language of Alzheimer's

2007-12-28T14:57:00.000-05:00

My inner ear is not known for its cleverness in cars. On the ride from Burlington, VT back home to Marlboro, VT last night, I got spectacularly carsick (not unusual, sadly). I spent almost all of the ride slumped motionless in my seat, reminding myself which way was up and attempting to breathe. My poor parents kept trying to ask how I was doing, but all I could manage to do was mumble and wave my left hand in a feeble attempt at "thumbs up".

But even though my verbal communication was totally nonexistent, I was able to think about stuff during that car ride. We'd been in Burlington to visit my grandparents. My grandfather has both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Both are very advanced. He's quite shaky, and sometimes he can't remember how to walk or sit up, so he spends most of his time lying on the couch. Two or three minutes of slow walking exhausts him. He still speaks a little bit, mostly in response to questions, and occasionally on his own. He doesn't recognize anybody except for my grandmother, and he only recognizes her 50% of the time these days. But in so many ways, he hasn't changed. His expressions and mannerisms, though displayed on a failing body, are totally recognizable. He can sing along to almost any hymn - including all of the words. And, most significantly, his pronounced sweet tooth and fondness for dessert has only been magnified as the disease has progressed. He may not remember how to read, but ice cream? He knows all about that.

While we were visiting, I took a walk downtown with my family. As we milled around, I remembered that Amanda Baggs lives in downtown Burlington and I wondered if I was anywhere near her apartment. I remembered
reading a post somewhere on her blog that said that anybody friendly was welcome to visit her, which I thought was an disarmingly generous offer. Of course, I never did find her apartment (though I must have been close). But if I had found it, and if I had actually summoned up the courage to knock on her door - an unlikely prospect, I know, but it's just imaginary - and she had been in a chatty mood, we would have had an unusual conversation. She probably would have used her speech synthesizer, and I probably would have spoken out loud.

I saw Amanda Baggs' video "In My Language" long before I found her blog. In her video, she explains that her native language is not really English, but a constant interaction with every part of the world around her. Though she does speak fluent English, it is taxing for her when she types it, and nearly impossible if she tries to speak out loud. (Similar, I think, to the way I have increasing difficulty speaking my second languages as I get more tired.) I took her video as a challenge never to assume that any living thing (human or animal) is unintelligent or unfeeling on the grounds that he, she, or it cannot communicate in my language. In some ways, that's obvious - I don't assume a Frenchman is an idiot just because he cannot speak English. And one reason I'm a vegetarian is because I'm not fluent in the language of chickens, cows or pigs, so they can't tell me that they'd like a chance to keep on living, and so I defer to the (reasonable, I think) assumption that living things want to keep living. Because it's silly to assume that somebody or something you can't communicate with is less worthy of life than you are. (Don't get all cheeky and tell me I shouldn't eat plants because I can't talk to them either. Philosophy only goes so far - I will, in fact, kill plants to ensure my own survival. I like living too.)

But what about Alzheimer's? Is there a language of Alzheimer's? Should I have learned it long ago? So often, people speak to my grandfather like he's just a shell of a person, with no consciousness at all. His attention to the present time and place does seem to fade in and out, but I doubt his mind is blank during those times. What must he be thinking about? As his brain melts away little by little, is he creating a new language?

So far, I only know one word in the my grandfather's new language: dessert. That's my main method of communication. Ice cream, brownies, chocolates, pie, whipped cream. The deliciousness of these things is a point of understanding. A good bite of dessert, and there's a twinkle in his eye, a knowing look, a little nod of the head. Good communicatin'.

Emily in a hammock

2007-12-28T08:15:00.000-05:00

If I were a rat on vacation, and I could do whatever I wanted with my days, I think I just might nap in my hammock, too :)

recordings

2007-12-10T10:18:00.000-05:00

Available at http://web.mit.edu/lissa1/Public/Music/ are .wav recordings (done by Kontakt Player*, which is a crummy synthesizer) of my minuet & trio and art song**. PDFs of the music included for the curious. There is also a recording of a live - and professional - quartet playing my minuet & trio. Lastly, a live performance of my chamber group playing the Schumann piano quintet.

*The synthesizer recordings each have some bizarre hiccups in the sound that seem inevitable - my computer just can't keep up.

**Forthcoming: live performance of my art song.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

2007-12-08T12:34:00.000-05:00

This essay by Marc Prensky is really interesting. It's the first formal attempt that I'm aware of to qualify the difference in experience between young people interacting with digital technology, and adults interacting with digital technology. Much of the essay is about how "Digital Natives" now learn in a fundamentally different way, and the "Digital Immigrants" who are trying to teach them are going about it all wrong. I have my own opinions there (below), but first...

I expect that most of my fellow classmates here at MIT have, like me, been called upon by relatives - particularly parents and grandparents - to explain, fix or set up computers. We get frustrated phone calls about error messages, and during our trips home we often teach new computer skills and fix problems.

In most cases, us "Digital Natives" were not taught how to use computers. Some of us may have had Apple II computers in elementary school (used for playing Oregon Trail or other games), and some (like me) had typing lessons - but we are definitely self-taught. It it that learning how to use computers is like learning a language - it takes effort and structure as an adult, and happens much more organically as a child?

Perhaps - this article by Sugata Mitra is incredible. So often adults assume that complex skills, like using a computer, require regimented, segmented, carefully planned exposition in order to be absorbed by young minds. (Just look at how we teach math in this country! Or even reading for that matter! If you want proof that people can - and always do - learn to read with no instruction at all, look here.) Mitra's article shows just the opposite. Children (poor slum children, lest one suggest that only the privileged can master these things) given access to a computer, which appeared with no fanfare, instruction, or even the childrens' native language, figured out how to use it.

Three quotes from Mitra's article relating to Prensky's Native/Immigrant Digital Divide (apologies for the length, but it's interesting, you see):

"It was a social observation rather than a scientific one. Any parent who had given his child a computer would invariably remark to me about it. I could hardly ever find an exception. Within a very short period of time, the parent would be claiming that the child was a genius with a computer. When I poked a little further, I invariably found that the child was doing things with the computer that the parent didn't understand."

"Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, "What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?" He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, "Look here guys. I have a little problem for you." They read the questions and said they didn't understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, "Here's a terminal. I'll give you two hours to find the answers."

Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.

They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn't mean much. But I said to him, "Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject." So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, "They don't know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn't know.""

"I'm not even going to suggest that we use this [technique] for adults. The only reaction we got from adults was, "What on earth is this for? Why is there no one here to teach us something? How are we ever going to use this?" I contend that by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers."

So. Here's the real question - is there a *fundamental* difference between how adults and children learn to use computers? Or, as Mitra suggests, are adults taught that they need teachers?

******************************

I want to mention some of the characteristics Prensky identifies about Digital Natives, because although I think he brings up some really good points, I disagree with him on several counts.

Here's a quote from his essay describing what Digital Natives are like:

"Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work."

(Importantly to what I am going to say, he also mentions: 1) that Digital Immigrants have a tendency to assume that Learning Is Serious Business and shouldn't be confused with playtime and 2) that Digital Natives, widely assumed to have lost the ability to memorize anything because of the internet, in fact memorize lots of stuff - just not academics.)

As a Digital Native, here's what I think: Yes, I'm used to receiving information fast. I get irritated by slow internet connections. But take the internet away altogether - say, when hiking - and I don't go crazy. I don't think young people are dependent on the internet in order to think - which is an attitude I often hear, as if our brains have been outsourced. Why WOULDN'T we use it? It's a miracle tool! I think that teenagers often say things like "I can't live without my cell phone", when what they really mean is "I can't live without my friends", and that's certainly not unusual for a teenager of any era!

Do I like to parallel process and multi-task? Eh, sometimes. I don't really see what relevance this has to the debate. My mom multi-tasks just as much as I do, and she's squarely in the Digital Immigrant category. Do I prefer graphics before text? Not necessarily. While I do like pictures, actually, I find web pages with distracting images irritating. When I'm looking for information, I don't want extraneous pictures.

(In general I think Prensky's points about multi-tasking and graphics are somewhat prey to the stereotype of sugarhigh 10 year olds who can't be sedated except by jittery videogames and more sugar. I'm not sure these children actually exist. If there is actually a 10 year old who can't sit still for something he or she is interested in, I have yet to meet him or her.)

Do I prefer random access (like hypertext)? Yes! Absolutely. I think this is one of the most important points Prensky makes. If you have hypertext, you're not limited to learning things in a linear fashion. You can build a network of knowledge, at your own pace. If you learn differently from other people (which, by the way, is true of, well, everybody), you have the freedom to take your own winding path through information.

Now, do I thrive on instant gratification? No. Unless you count having a web page load as "gratification" - which I don't. This idea implies that Digital Natives have no goals that they are willing to pursue for any length of time, and that they crave less meaningful, more instant rewards. I think what IS true is that many young people are bored by textbook classroom teaching, which presents information with no excitement or joy. If pleasure in learning is what Prensky means by "gratification", then I think he's right. And then, I would ask, why should anybody put up with learning that is not fun, when it has the potential to be fun?

Prensky says that Digital Natives thrive on games as opposed to serious work. Well, good for them. Good for us. If learning and living can be more fun than it currently is in schools - and I can certainly attest to the fact that secondary education is NOT FUN - why on earth would we choose not to have fun? Some sort of puritanical guilt? Prensky and Mitra and Dodd (the author of the page on reading) all give examples of people learning without forced instruction, and having a good time doing it. Prensky points out that young people are pefectly capable of memorizing worlds of information about Pokemon, but seem incapable of memorizing the capitals of the world. The internet hasn't outsourced our brains or killed our curiosity - in fact, my personal experience would lead me to believe that it's given me more food for thought than any other resource I have. Thank goodness that young people today are realizing that we needn't divide our lives in to Serious and Fun.

a proud moment

2007-12-07T18:26:00.000-05:00

I had a proud moment today.

A while ago, I realized that a class I took for fun last year, 6.002 (Electronics+Circuits), counts as a Restricted Elective in my major. Great news - it means I have inadvertently completed all my graduation requirements (except the capstone project next semester), and can take basically whatever I want during my senior spring. Yay!

But, alas, I realized shortly afterward that since I took 6.002 Pass/Fail, I can't use it to count towards anything at all. I thought that was really a shame. It was doubly a shame because I know that I got an "A" in the class (my TA told me), and I felt stupid for passing up 15 units of Restricted Elective "A" credit. So I emailed my advisor and the administrators of my major, asking for my transcript to be changed from "Pass" to "A", and explaining that I'm really gung ho for some neuroscience classes next semester that I couldn't take if I was required to do another Restricted Elective. I pasted in the email from my TA in which he told me my grade.

And, to my wonderment and disbelief, they *all* wrote back within the hour. And this was on the Friday night of the busiest week of term. They immediately contacted my TA, who responded with helpful emails in which he explained that yes, he does remember that I got an "A", but that the professors probably have the official grade spreadsheets. He even said that if the professors don't seem to be answering, the head TA also has a grade spreadsheet.

I was in the middle of composing an email thanking them all for being so very helpful, when Linda Griffith, the chair of the Undergraduate Programs committee, beat me to it. Her email thanked everybody, and said that they "think the world of me" and were glad to help out.

Wow.

posessed

2007-12-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

I played the Beethoven on Sunday.

I took Monday off on account of achy tendons and mountains of schoolwork.

Last night - Tuesday night - I had a rehearsal with my quintet. I took out my violin, and it was completely out of tune. Not a half step out of tune, although of course that alone would make it unplayable, but more than an octave out of tune. My E string was so loose it couldn't produce a sound.

This isn't particularly unusual, because cold and lack of moisture, two recent problems here in Cambridge, very frequently cause violins to be out of tune (the pegs shrink in the cold and dry and twist in their holes). And of course NO violin ever stays perfectly in tune for longer than, say, an hour - the stress of playing changes so many things - but mine isn't particularly prone to slipping that far out, so it caught my attention, even though it's no big deal.

I tuned up, adjusted the bridge, which tends to tilt when the strings loose tension, and the quintet began to play. But I stopped about 2 minutes in to the first movement because something just didn't sound *right*.

I played a few scales, a little snippet of the Beethoven, some chords, some harmonics... the violin was just different. Something had changed. No matter how I checked it over, I couldn't figure it out. It's usually impossible to see changes to a violin, even significant ones, because moving this or that a millimeter can have a huge impact, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. The tone was just inexplicably changed.

Strange thing was, the tone is actually... better. My violin improved over the course of Monday. It's got a slightly fuller, darker tone on the A string now, and the E string seems ever so slightly louder. It seems just a little bit mellower - like a teenager who finally got over his angst.

It's well known among musicians - and it has finally been shown - that violins improve with time. I wouldn't be surprised if I found out that my violin sounds better now than it did in 2002.

But these changes aren't supposed to happen overnight! I think Beethoven must be possessing my violin ;)

2007-11-29T22:57:00.000-05:00

Here's what Joshua Bell thinks about playing the Beethoven concerto:

“It is as though I must succumb to this world that Beethoven has created, and I suppose I almost treat it in a religious sort of way. In the world of his music, Beethoven is God. I’d never thought of it that way before, but it is as though I begin to warm up to what religious people refer to as a loving God within that musical world. I feel as though I surrender to this. I feel that there is somebody who knows this world so much better than I do – and it is Beethoven himself, who created it – and there is something very comforting about that. Somehow that gets me feeling very relaxed. I think what a privilege it is to be a part of this great, beautiful piece of music. And this helps me get rid of my nerves and stops my extraneous thoughts about technical issues and what I did or didn’t do in the practice room.”

I thought about this all evening as I practiced. I recorded myself. Then I listened to the recording, and for the first time, some of it wasn't bad. When I listen to Joshua Bell or Isaac Stern or Itzhak Perlman or Jascha Heifitz play it, as I have so many times, I hear them shift in the same places where my shifts are audible. I hear their bows slide just a hair in the awkward passages. I can practically feel their hands moving in the places where the fingering is tricky. Of course they play so beautifully - and I'll never be that good - but it's comforting to know that even the masters have trouble with the same spots as I. And sometimes, for a few glorious seconds, the recording of me sounds just like Stern - or Heifitz - or someone. And then of course the illusion fades.

But maybe, sometime this evening, the spirit of ol' Beethoven hovered 'round.

down to the wire

2007-11-28T22:50:00.000-05:00

My performance of the Beethoven concerto is in 4 days. Today I had my last lesson on the concerto. Monday's rehearsal had gone well, and when I warmed up for an hour before my lesson I was really *on* - everything falling in to place and flowing along. Intonation was good. Bow control was good. I had this beautiful daydream in which the concert was a grand success and everybody was so moved...

But then I went to my lesson. I was reaaaaally nervous. I'd never played the whole movement for Rictor with piano before. So, of course, I looked panicked and sounded dreadful. When I'd finished, Rictor said that if he had never heard me play before, he would have concluded only that Beethoven is hard and I don't like it very much.**

Ouch. OUCH.

When I get nervous, I get paralyzed. My fingers curl up and won't relax. I twist my back and neck unconsciously - although if you saw the position I get myself in to, you'd find it hard to believe that it's unconscious. (I have had a suspiciously sore back, complete with a visible enormous knot on the left side, for a week now. Hhhhhm.) My fingers seem to move whenever they feel like it, not when *I* want them to move, and this of course is extremely disconcerting and means that fast notes or large shifts are often fumbled.

So it's down to the wire. I need to clean up a few little spots - a shift here, a grace note there - but the piece is largely under my fingers. Now I just have to play it so that other people can tell how much I love it. For me, that means remembering to keep my head (chin) down and not tilt it back, to move my fingers from the first joint (the one in the palm), to release tension, to shift with my whole arm and not with my wrist, and especially not to make the icky facial expressions I make when I screw up a note. Because I *WILL* screw up a note in performance. I have to get used to that. Not even the greatest of the great plays perfectly.

Performing is such a funny thing. You work for hundreds of hours for the privilege to stand up in front of an audience and play once - just once, out of the thousands of times you've played it - so that it will mean something to them. You don't get to explain. You don't get a second chance. You can't give a lecture on your piece so they'll appreciate it more. You've just got to feed so much soul in to it that nobody could possibly be left untouched.

And this is what I have got to do on Sunday.

**Later, at the very end, he said that if I was a conservatory student, and I was playing the concerto for juries, I would be just fine. And that was very nice of him to say.

my funny family

2007-11-25T15:19:00.001-05:00

My parents got a MacBook Pro... and look what happened.

We're rock stars!

Portrait of the Bird as an Old Man

2007-11-22T23:30:00.001-05:00

Scooter was born on July 4, 1999 in a trailer park outside of Ithaca, NY. During his infancy, he made his home in a small cage with myriad brothers and sisters. As the smallest of the flock by far, he was unjustly disallowed the full run of the cage, and spent most of his time on the floor.

In early fall, 1999, Scooter was purchased for $5 by four enthusiastic budgerigar aficionados. His charming demeanor and stand-out method of locomotion ("scooting" on the cage floor) immediately earned him his name, in addition to much affection. Scooter then boarded a grubby VW Passat for the journey to his new home. His brief (yet daring) excursion underneath the driver's seat was a sign of adventure to come.

Scooter's first days as a free bird were rocky. Affected by a mysterious lack of flying strength, and a possible eye condition, Scooter crashed repeatedly in to walls and windows, despite closed curtains and padded walls. A year or so later, an air sack injury resulting from these crashes kept Scooter in his cage for much of his first three years.

During the years in the cage, Scooter thrived despite room to stretch his wings. His interests and hobbies expanded to exclude toothbrushes, corn chips, hanging upside down, and vacuum cleaners. Scooter presided over his living room from a large forest-green cage, complete with adjacent space heater. Despite a somewhat quirky appearance, due to bald spots (left by wing feathers which never grew in) and a beak of unusual shape, Scooter dazzled his housemates with his iridescent teal back and sky blue belly.

After several years of civilized cage life, Scooter once again made his mark upon the wider world of the living room. Despite becoming lodged behind bookcases and inside pianos, Scooter soon became Bird at Large. His flying skills rapidly improved, and within months he was able to land on hands playing piano or violin, hands holding forks full of food, hands holding pens, and any other place where avian assistance was generally warranted.

The next half-dozen years of Scooter's life were filled with many delights. His conversational repertoire expanded to include such words as "pencil", "Scooter", "budgie", "goodnight" and many varied shrieks. His new hobbies included landing on exposed food, attempting to bathe in juice glasses, chasing pencils, attacking shiny objects such as rings and spoons, and hampering the doing of homework (and occasionally befouling it). In all situations Scooter prevailed supremely over all other members of his household.

Though times were generally good, Scooter survived several brushes with death. Two unidentified infections placed him in the ER, and he endured a feeding needle full of bitter medicine for two straight weeks. His housemates were twice prepared for his passing, but not one to be outdone by Death, Scooter pulled through and returned to his passion for chasing pencils within a few months.

Though Scooter was never a long-distance flier, he made up for strength in tenacity. Never taking no for an answer, Scooter was known for his trademark evasive flying, and would dodge even the most desperate attempts to return him to his cage in the event that guests unaccustomed to birds landing on their heads would arrive. And although such attempts were made in good faith, they were almost never necessary, as Scooter's good looks and impressive singing served to thoroughly charm every single house guest. Most endearing was his habit of riding on shoulders in the morning, and stylishly adorning winter hats.

Scooter is now nearly nine years old, and very wise in his old age. Having honed his methods of communication with his cohabitants, he is now able to dictate his every whim from his regal perch with only a few short chirps. He exits the cage when and if he wants to, and always makes his desires perfectly clear. Scooter still enjoys jaunts around the living room, though his flying strength only propels him a few feet, and standby rescue is necessary. Crashes, however, do not faze this sage. He chirps for help from beneath the table, steps regally on to a finger, preens, and resumes his reign. Most of his time is spent gracing whomever is present with chatty conversation and puffing his feathers agreeably.

Also as a result of his old age, Scooter cheerfully allows snuggling, as shown.

my housemates

2007-11-19T19:18:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I came downstairs in to the dining room looking visibly upset, which is quite unusual for me. Within a few minutes, I had unwittingly attracted 6 concerned people, who arranged chairs around me, brought me tea, chocolate, backrubs, cough drops (I didn't even have a cold!), hugs, and crackers. After 10 quiet minutes or so, somebody said, "We don't like a Sad Lissa! It scares us!" (Feeling rather guilty for having worried them so, I went upstairs, with my *4* different types of tea, so as not to disturb the peace.)

What wonderful people I live with.

brain weirdness

2007-11-13T22:30:00.001-05:00

So lately I've been composing a lot for my music class. I use the program Sibelius for notation. In Sibelius, there are 2 ways to enter in a note: you can either click on the stave where you want the note to be, or you can type the note name on the keyboard.

Being a fan of keyboard shortcuts in general I decided to type note names. But I was (and still am) really, really bad at it. For a few days, I thought I was just spacing out or tired or something, because I only typed the note I intended to about 30% of the time, and was constantly adjusting everything to make up for my mistakes.

But then I realized that each time I typed the wrong note, I typed it using the finger that would have fingered that note on the violin. So if I mean to type "F", I'd go for "D" instead, because in standard typing, "D" is typed with the middle finger, which is the finger for "F" (in the right octave of course).

Interestingly, this happened no matter what instrument I was writing for, or what clef I was using. Even if I was writing in viola clef - which is annoying for me to read - I would still make the same consistent mistakes.

Once I realized what was going on, I started thinking very carefully before typing each note. "Ok", I'd say to myself, "you want a 'A', so you'll have to use your pinky to type it". And then I'd go right ahead and get it wrong anyway. My brain just didn't want to be rewired.

This is related to another brain quirk that shows up in my mind, kind of like a lost traveler, ever once in a while: I'll be drifting off to sleep, and thoughts will be flowing through my mind. Somehow, in my sleepy state, I'll want to *play* the thoughts on my violin - sometimes it seems as though I should spell each word in notes, and sometimes it seems like each word should have a distinct pitch. Either way, after a few minutes, I realize that my fingers are moving, and that I'm trying to "play" something... but it never works, because obviously the musical alphabet only goes to G. After a few confused minutes, I wake myself up and laugh about it.

Very odd.

living scientifically - or not

2007-11-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

This is a very provocative post. It may not seem like it, at first - at least in the circles I run in, it's not, shall we say, terribly outlandish to suggest that Black people are as intelligent as White people. But this post goes farther than that.

[Aside, I must say that the following quote is worthy of, I don't know, some fabulous accolade: "Beardiness is very much like intelligence; all a bit fuzzy."]

Here's the interesting part: the post concedes that we can't be 100% sure that race does not influence intelligence. That's true. There are a lot of things I can't be sure of: I can't be sure that my chair will not suddenly disappear from beneath my rear (quantum coincidences are possible!). I can't be sure that all my experience is not a hallucination. I can't be sure that I am not currently breathing in pathogenic bacteria right now.

In life, however, it's generally known that if you go about assuming, suspecting, or even planning for the sudden disappearance of your chair or impending mortal illness, your life will be compromised. You cannot simultaneously live in all of life's possible paths. You have to "have faith" in a few things in order to avoid paralysis by indecision.

Wait, you have to have WHAT? Is this a religious discussion or a scientific one? Ahh, this is where things get complicated. Is it actually possible to live life without trusting that your chair will remain solid beneath you? The answer is very important. If the answer is yes, that means it's possible to reach a degree of zen such that the uncertainty associated with being alive can coexist with choices that ignore that uncertainty. If the answer is no, that means that our actions in life will be profoundly dependent upon which possible reality we use as a model.

I suspect that the answer is, in fact, no. I don't think we're capable of living life without faith in a few things . We seem poorly equipped to be continuously aware, yet unfearful, of all the disastrous twists and turns life might suddenly take. It's not that we're never aware of What Could Happen, but most of the time we choose to ignore most other possible realities. You don't consider that you might break your leg with every single step, do you?

So, the possible reality that we focus on influences the way we act. That means that if we focus on the possibility of Black people being less intelligent than White people, we will act accordingly. And, as a society, we do. This page lists 10 ways in which it is "proven" that Black people score lower on IQ tests than White people. Proven, however, in a society that focuses heavily the concept inherent racial inequality and acts accordingly. Reason #10 on this list above says the following:

"Do Culture-Only Theories Explain the Data? Culture-only theories do not explain the highly consistent pattern of race differences in IQ, especially the East Asian data. No interventions such as ending segregation, introducing school busing, or "Head Start" programs have reduced the gaps as culture-only theory would predict."

Do they honestly believe that all the cultural bias was removed when segregation ended? That "Head Start" can shield a child from all discrimination? That school busing can solve the problem? The only way to test whether or not culture is the culprit is to put the kids in a locked box or something, and I expect that would lead to much worse results.

Humans are not perfect scientists. We can't pick a hypothesis and then let the data roll in, impartial as you please. We can't even pick a hypothesis and dispassionately collect evidence.

This is a case for optimism.

balance

2007-10-26T10:56:00.000-04:00

Some days, I want to: recycle every piece of tin foil I use, carefully rinse out plastic baggies, turn out all the lights except for those I absolutely need, never waste any water while cleaning, answer every single email I get with full attention, do every single item on my agenda, keep on schedule, save even tiny quantities of food in miniature containers, pick up wrappers on the ground outside and put them in my pocket until I can throw them away, brush my teeth three times a day, hem my pants so they don't get muddy and ripped, bring an umbrella everywhere, and generally do my part to save the world one step at a time.

On other days, I want to: let the hot water run over my hands for way too long in the morning, throw away anything I don't want any more just so I can be rid of it, unclutter the refrigerator because I'm not going to eat that last bit of mashed potato anyway, let the covers on my bed become completely tangled, ignore the mail, sit and have real conversations late in to the night and ignore my homework, play video games and forget to eat, stand in the shower longer than necessary, linger over dessert, spend 3 hours on an extra credit problem that's interesting and 45 minutes doing a hack job on the required problem, and stay up late for no reason.

Louise Erdrich has a rather nice poem on the subject:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

The Wall, a case of the blahs, and a mouse

2007-10-23T23:32:00.000-04:00

I had a very blah moment this afternoon. Desi (the cat) caught a baby mouse - it wasn't even an inch long, but its eyes were open, and it was absolutely gorgeous - and broke its neck. When I saw the mouse, its neck was already broken, but it was still alive. I picked it up and held it in my hand. It took about 30 seconds to die - making these tiny little gasps, little mouth open wide. It was so incredibly sad. I put the baby mouse outside in a sunspot, and later I wished I had done something more ceremonial, and even later than that I realized that no ceremony would have been quite right, and that a sunspot was a good resting place.

The baby mouse made The Wall - this part of the semester where there's no break in sight, tests around every bend, and homework up to your eyeballs - look pretty bad. What a bleak day when adorable baby mice die in the palm of my hand for no good reason, not to mention the piles of work.

A little bit later I realized that actually, I'm fine. The baby mouse was sad, and yes, I do cry about such little things, but that little sadness didn't have to ruin the day. I'm busy and tired, and sometimes I just want to go to sleep, but does that necessarily mean that I'm doing badly? I don't think so. I think I'm ok. Sometimes I get stuck in this strange frame of mind, where "good" is this unattainable state of rest and contentment, with no outstanding responsibilities to speak of. That doesn't happen here at MIT. But that's all right - there are other ways to define "good". Like, this morning I made eggs on toast. And an old friend visited me. And I sat on the roofdeck in the windstorm and watched the sunset.

i love pika

2007-10-18T23:19:00.000-04:00

I walked in to the dining room just now, and there was a cluster of 10 or so people peering intently at a laptop, giggling. I asked what they were looking at...

"Chocolate trilobite monsters! Come see!"

I love pika.

educational philosophy: a rant and a rave

2007-10-18T18:35:00.000-04:00

First, the rant.

A few weeks ago I wrote that I was trying to be less crusty and cynical about my Ear Training than I was last year. And I really have been trying. As recently as last night, I renewed my dedication to finding the good in the class, viewing the teacher in a positive light, and having fun.

Somehow though, by the end of class today, I was so angry with the class that I had a terrible urge to slam the door on the way out, which, coming from me, is serious. On the bike ride home, I decided that the most positive way to deal with the situation would be to write about why the class irks me, and positive solutions I see to the problems.

Before I begin describing the class, let me first say that I am fully aware that Mrs. X (the teacher, name withheld for obvious reasons) is a well-meaning person who I believe cares about her students. I strongly oppose her methods, but I have no problem with her.

Before teaching at MIT (this is her 2nd year), Mrs. X she taught grade school, and BOY does it show. The atmosphere of the class is stiflingly sincere and slow. No humor is permitted or appreciated. Mrs. X plans the lessons in excruciating detail - to the minute - and does not deviate from her plan, no matter the circumstances.

Mrs. X feels the need to control all the students in the class to a ridiculous degree. However, her manner is extremely gentle. Too gentle, in fact - her demeanor is that of The Kindergarten Teacher, and it doesn't wear well on a bunch of spunky MIT students. This combination of softspokenness and control really rubs me the wrong way.

Case I: In our class, we have one particularly enthusiastic student, "Jimmy". Jimmy loves music, and is always overflowing with tunes and harmonies. He sings loudly, very often above the other students, and not always in tune. Jimmy definitely lacks social graces, but is genuine. He can sometimes be irritating, either because he tends to dominate the class, or because one tends to feel chronically embarrassed on his behalf. Today, we had to practice conducting in class. Unasked, Jimmy brought in a very professional-looking baton. Mrs. X of course noticed, and said, "Yes, it's ok if you use a baton, Jimmy", although she looked a bit ruffled. Then, we began conducting. After a little while, Jimmy began using two hands and adding expression in to his conducting. Mrs. X asked him to stop. She said, "Jimmy, please do not give me more than I asked for."

Case II: After singing one of the assigned melodies today, another student, "Bobby", noticed that the melody sounded a lot like a certain Broadway tune, which he sang quietly. He wasn't interrupting anything. In fact, his 10-second Broadway tune caused no inconvenience of any sort, as far as I can tell. But Mrs. X told him, "you may not sing any music in this class other than what we are working on".

Case III: At the end of class, we were sight reading a Bach chorale. It was sounding dreadful (which is not unexpected) and we were going sharp. In between phrases Mrs. X said, "it's out of tune, please try and fix it." In the midst of singing, I hit my tuning fork twice to figure out how far the pitch had migrated. I was listening very carefully to the other parts and trying to keep the group on pitch without "upsetting the apple cart". When we had finished singing, Mrs. X told me that I am not allowed to use my tuning fork while we are singing. She explained: using the the tuning fork is a visual reminder to the other students that we are out of tune. She said, "I want you all to suffer together until the pitch gets better. Don't try to change it."

Here are the positive responses I would propose.

Case I: So, you have a student who is too enthusiastic? Is there any such thing? Tell Jimmy it's really great that he's learning to use a baton. Ask him to tell the others briefly why he has chosen to use it. If he sings too loudly, say, "Jimmy, you must really love this piece. Let's hear your most soulful rendition. Remember, soulful doesn't necessarily mean forte or piano. This is your chance to put all of your musicality in to play." If he sticks out, let him! He obviously doesn't mind. There's nothing worse than telling a student to give less than their best. And in the case of Jimmy, trying to squash his personality results in overflow.

Case II: It's really cool when a piece of music jogs your memory and brings up another tune. Talk about it for a minute: is the difference an accident? Intentional? Is the chord structure the same? Does talking about this similar tune really detract from your lesson plan? I doubt it. When people make connections between what they are learning and what they already know, isn't that... well, learning? Also, "Bobby" was inspired by the lesson material. I think inspiration is pretty much the best response you can get out of teaching, and to forbid expression (when the expression is totally appropriate) of it is wrong.

Case III: If I had a student who had excellent pitch and could help an ensemble sing better, I would definitely encourage him or her to help, in a sensitive and tasteful way. Today, I would have appreciated a discussion about how to improve pitch constructively. I would have appreciated Mrs. X's acknowledgment that she had already informed us that we were out of tune by the time I began using my tuning fork, and that I was actually doing my best to improve the situation. Lastly, I think that it's crazy to say "I want you all to suffer together" to anybody. This is the mentality about grade school that drives me up the wall. Isn't school supposed to be about learning? Instead, it's all about suffering through it with other children your age, so you can grow up and tell stories about how much you hated it. It's akin to prison bonding, and that's no joke. Should children suffer through classes that are not useful or interesting to them (or that are at the wrong level) until the other children catch up? Should adults? Absolutely not.

The last thing I want to say about Mrs. X is that she has repeatedly told the class that the reason she teaches Ear Training at MIT is for her personal growth. She says that she's getting better every day at arranging music, sight reading, and solfege. She is becoming a better musician and she is enriching her life by teaching us the concepts of musicianship. She conveys this in a very intimate, humble tone, and I think she means to say that she isn't perfect, and that teaching benefits her, too. BUT! Never once have I heard her say that she teaches because she loves to, or because she believes in and cares about her students. Not once. Perhaps she thinks this is obvious... but every time she tells us that she's really "growing musically" (maybe 4 times this semester), I become more and more convinced that her attitude towards teaching is really too self-serving. This isn't to say that she doesn't care about her students - it just seems that her motivation for teaching was unrelated to her students.

Rather than ending here, I want to rave about my main music class, 21M.303. It is AWESOME. Our professor (Shadle) is a witty, smart guy who is willing to completely abandon his plan for the day in favor of exploring hidden music diversions. Last class, we talked mainly about a Mozart quartet, but somehow ended up talking about The Phantom of the Opera, the fight music from boss scenes in Super Mario, Brahms, descending diminished 7th chord patterns, and goodness knows what else. The students (most of whom are also in the Ear Training class) are totally awake and alive and making connections all over the place. Every time a student has an idea that differs from Shadle's idea, he takes it seriously and we discuss. He almost always ends up saying, "I can see that working. I can see where you're coming from. That interpretation is just fine." Even better, Shadle says he's learning a lot from our class - but not because it serves him personally to cement his musical knowledge - because the class is full of smart people from a different backgrounds who honestly want to contribute.

Heiligenstadt Testament

2007-10-04T17:42:00.000-04:00

In my last violin lesson, I was discussing the Beethoven concerto, which I'm working on, with my teacher. We had been working for quite some time on technical things, like the angle of my right thumb, the placement of my left wrist, and moving my bow from my shoulder to get a softer, more cushiony sound, and after all that work, conversation turned to Beethoven's life. My teacher asked me what I thought the concerto was about, and I stood there thinking, imagining all that I knew about Beethoven's life. The concerto is incredibly intimate and profound. It lacks the flashy technical passages present in so many of the great violin concertos, but many say it contains more soul than any other violin concerto ever written. The notes are soaked in meaning, that's easy to see - but what meaning?

I knew that Beethoven was a loner. I knew he was unhappy with Vienna, even though it was considered a musical mecca during his day. Beethoven had strange habits, few friends, and none of the social graces of, say, Mozart. He loved the outdoors. I knew he struggled with his deafness, especially in his later years, when he would play pianos that had metal bars attached to them so he could bite the bars and feel the vibrations in his skull. He tried everything that was available back in the early 1800s to hear better.

But what I didn't know about was the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Read it here.

And I am playing Beethoven's concerto, written shortly after that tortured document.

It's a big responsibility.

natural instinct

2007-09-23T23:36:00.000-04:00

One sometimes hears the argument that "doing x is good because it's natural" or that "x is good because it's natural" or that "it's instinctive for people to do x". (Or even the opposite: "you can do better than x. Now we have a modern way to do that".)

And at first hearing that seems to make sense.

But after rolling that phrase around in my mind for a few years or so, I don't think it makes sense any more. It's like when you repeat a word to yourself so many times you begin to question it ("wait, is that really the right word? it looks so weird"). The word isn't really weird, you've just bored through the top level of thought and discovered that the particular collection of letters has no intrinsic meaning, only what society has ascribed to it.

Same thing with "it's good because it's natural". In various circles one hears that it's natural for people to get seriously ill in old age, natural for humans to eat meat, natural for people to lose their tempers, natural to fight in wars. We hear that it's good to eat natural foods, good to give birth in a natural way, good to "get back to nature". Calling something "unnatural" is almost always an insult, and reflects curiously upon the speaker's personal discomfort.

Here's what I think: none of those things are really natural. None of those things are good or bad because of being natural. And unnatural shouldn't be an insult.

Let's define nature as the qualities and/or characteristics by which something can be recognized. In that case, something "natural" in this case would be something that bears the hallmarks of humanity. I don't think sickness in old age, fighting, or any of the other things I listed up at the beginning are actually descriptors of human nature. There are exceptions everywhere. And honestly, nobody wants to be summed up as "human: animal that gets sick when it gets old, fights within its species, eats food without or without pesticides, etc". Nah, humans are something more.

I think what really describes humanity is our ability to do "conscious evolution", that is, change our minds on the spot, have epiphanies, learn new behaviors within minutes (not generations), change our habits just because want to. We can decide what we want to do. If it's the middle winter and a person wants to lie in the snow in a t-shirt and shorts, he or she can. We can be as nonsensical as we want! Isn't that great?

Every person is free (to slightly varying extents due to circumstance) from what his or her ancestors did. This is not so for most animals, for whom instinct rules supreme. Humans may have an instinct for, say, fighting, but what makes us special is that we can override that instinct with conscious decisions - and not just once, but for our entire lives. I don't think we don't use our remarkable power of "conscious evolution" as much as we should. I don't think we should accept something or reject something on the basis of what's "natural for a human being" (we do this inconsistently anyway - of course nobody likes for a child to die a natural cancer death) . Maybe what's actually natural for a human being - that is, the action that truly identifies us - is to act on careful weighing of the facts, intuition, or whim - anything which allows us to break free of our instincts and go in new directions.

I realize some people feel uncomfortable with the idea of going against an instinct. But really, we seem to consider nothing more heroic. How about a fireman who runs in to a burning building?

It hasn't escaped me that one reason to call something "natural" is to designate it as an acceptable thing. We say, "sometimes jealousy is natural" and "it's natural to be afraid" and "it's natural to cry sometimes". I think what we mean in those cases is: "It's ok that you feel that way. Sometimes I do, too. So do most people. You're not weird. " And that's a comforting thing to hear. I just think it's better to say "it's ok to feel that way, sometimes I do too", seeing as our overall acceptance of "natural" things is pretty spotty.

Don't be afraid to decide who you are, and then become that person.

Disclaimer:
1. During the writing of this post, I did in fact experience the bizarre phenomenon of the word "natural" suddenly losing all meaning.
2. I feel rather compelled to tell you that I don't eat meat, do eat "natural" foods, try desperately not lose my temper, refuse to fight in any war, and do not expect individuals to die of cancer in at any age if they don't want to. But in all of those cases, I have reasons that have nothing to do with naturalness.

oh. my. god.

2007-09-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/09/mit_student_arr.html?p1=MEWell_Pos3

This arrest of Star Simpson is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Take a look at the pictures. It's several green LEDs in the shape of a Star - it is indeed her name tag. Anybody with 2 hours of electronics instruction should be aware that a 9V battery, a few resistors and several cheap LEDs *in a breadboard* are not dangerous. (Case in point - I blew one up yesterday in lab. Nobody was hurt.)

I can't believe that security people trained to recognize bombs are so ignorant of what a bomb might actually look like that they could mistake a flashy little nametag circuit as an attempt at terrorism. If a person is allowed to use deadly force in order to prevent a bomb from being set off, he better be incredibly well trained in the art of bomb-recognition. I just watched a news report where the Chief of Police described it as a "circuit board that actually lit up". Lit. Up. Imagine that! He even calls it "a device". Idiot.

What's more, I can't believe they didn't apologize to her after they realized what it was. Sure, it was exposed electronics, but living in a state of fear of anything with a visible resistor is not going to cure terrorism. Hey, mister police man, what's that clipped on to the front of your shirt? A radio? Hey, what's that inside - IS THAT ELECTRONICS? I mean, honestly, the only difference between the two is a plastic case.

If our law enforcement can be duped by the simplest of circuits, we're worse off than I ever imagined. What we need is people who are highly informed and equipped with the most sophisticated equipment for bomb detection, and who are experts in responding with as little force as possible.

I think that people should be responsible for their personal choices, but not for others' ignorance. If a police officer can't tell a bomb from a piece of electronic art, it's not Star's fault. People who make unusual choices can usually be expected to endure unpleasant questioning because society likes norms, but they should never be punished under the law for harmless self-expression.

"Had she not followed the instructions, deadly force may have been used." Our police officers (or at least the ones responding to such a call) should unquestionably have been able to tell, by the time they had her at gunpoint, that they had made a mistake.

Holy chalupa, as they say.

Edit: Here's what I think happened. At MIT, you see, you can walk around with a shopping cart full of capacitors and the only comment you'll get is something like "hey, want a plastic bag to cover your capacitors? it's raining". I've seen people with all manner of complicated, dangerous experiments in MIT's hallways and nobody gives a second glance. I've even walked around with a bread board, PRECISELY the same one that Star had (she probably even got it from the same class I did - 6.002) and the only thing people say to me is "oh, did you finish the lab already? what resistor did you use for the voltage regulator?". It's easy to forget that Logan Airport is a completely different environment where, apparently, carrying circuits is a crime.

Edit2: This article from South Africa makes my blood boil.

"A 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology walked into Boston's Logan International Airport on Friday with a fake bomb strapped to her chest and was arrested at gunpoint, authorities said." It was a name tag, not a fake bomb. It was not strapped to her chest - it was pinned with a safety pin to her sweatshirt.

"Star Simpson, who is from Hawaii, wore a computer circuit board, wiring and a putty that later turned out to be Play-Doh strapped over her black hooded sweat shirt and in plain view." It was a bread board, not a circuit board. I know most people don't care what the difference is, but they are NOT the same thing. The so-called "putty" was in her hand, not even touching her nametag. And yes, it was in plain view - it was supposed to be. How many terrorists wear their bombs in plain view?

"She's extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used," Pare said. "And she's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."

>.<

Edit3: Even Fox news is reporting that it "turned out to be a fake bomb". I've never been so totally aware that the news networks in this country are shot to hell.

Edit4: This is what they used when the surrounded her at gunpoint.

it is

2007-09-14T22:15:00.001-04:00

It is a blessing to be...
It is a blessing to be here...
It is a blessing to be here now...
It is a blessing to be here now, together.

"too fat"

2007-09-14T10:13:00.000-04:00

In continuation of my recent outrage at being harassed while biking, I was going to write yet another outraged bit about the latest of the never-ending Britney Spears snafus, but then I discovered that some woman in San Jose has already done it for me.

Read it here.

Or at least it mostly represents what I think. The article doesn't get in to the disgusting critique of every aspect of Britney's personal life, which is good, because I expect we're all sick of hearing about it. It also doesn't get in to a defensive "she's beautiful exactly the way she is right now, and if she lost any weight she'd be practically invisible" stance either, which I also appreciated because telling somebody that if they "ever change how they look they'll be unacceptable" seems pretty wrong to me...

However, I do sort of resent the idea that people shouldn't call Britney fat because more than likely, they are overweight themselves. Not so! People shouldn't call her fat a) because she isn't fat and b) because talking about womens' weight in such a nasty way is destructive for several reasons. First of all, it perpetuates the idea that it's ok to question 1 millimeter of skin in the "wrong" place on Britney, but it's never OK to speak (even compassionately) about the weight of a non-celebrity peer. Basically, it just cements peoples' perception that your weight is inversely proportional to your self worth and confidence. What, fat people can't rationally communicate about their health or appearance, and if you try you're a bad person? If that's even the tiniest bit true, it's the fault of catty media articles that call Britney fat and then expect us to love ourselves.

I'm on the fence about the author's choice to include the names of celebrities like Kate Winslet, America Ferrera, and Queen Latifah. On the one hand, it's nice to point out that they *appear* to be doing a good job of eating their Wheaties and so on (although of course we can't be sure, one's appearance is not always correlated with body acceptance). On the other hand, I kind of feel like shunning "hollow-eyed, emaciated starlets" like Nicole Ritchie and Keira Knightley in preference of women with "bootylicious" curves doesn't really do much good. That's just ditching one body ideal for another. Although I cringe to say it, nobody these days seems to really embrace the concept - so I'll say it: "everybody's different". Although Kate Winslet's weight might be vaguely more attainable for the average woman, we're not all going to be Kate Winslets any more than we'll all be Nicole Ritchies, no matter how badly we want to be.

And this just makes my blood boil: "In that ensemble, you just can't have an ounce of anything extra," said Janice Min, editor of the celebrity magazine US Weekly. "Many women wouldn't eat for days if they were wearing that."

I have nothing horrible enough to say about that.

And, let me just say, I watched the video of Britney performing on MTV after reading all those articles, and yes, it was a terrible performance. Then again, I never was a fan.

just not cool

2007-09-12T21:43:00.000-04:00

Every week I bike to Boston to have my violin lesson. I usually have a shoulder bag banging against my legs and my violin on my back, which in addition to my helmet causes me to have a strange ungainly way of cycling. I typically wear rather boring, nondescript clothes. My hair is usually rather messy because biking over the Harvard bridge is quite a windy experience.

So why is it that every time I leave my lesson, head filled with thoughts about fourth-finger vibrato, rolling my right wrist more, little snippets of Beethoven flying through my mind in the most sublime way... creepy guys hoot at me on the street?

It's not an isolated incident! It has happened 4 out of the last 6 times - and more than once on each trip! A few days ago, some college-aged loser made some weird hand gesture at me that I didn't understand, although it was perfectly clear that it was meant to be obscene. On the same ride, a guy on the Boston end of the bridge took pictures of me with his very expensive-looking camera. What is wrong with these people? What on earth is remotely attractive about some girl so completely laden down with heavy objects she can hardly cycle straight (not that this is actually the right question to ask)? A bunch of times in the past, some of these guys have actually managed to utter a few words in my direction, although I was a combination of disgusted and going pretty fast, so I have never actually manged to hear them, although I'm pretty sure I don't want to.

It occurs to me that when I leave my lessons, I am usually ridiculously happy and excited about the music I'm working on. Possibly, these people misinterpret genuine happiness in some sort of twisted sexual way? I'm not keen on thinking about it too much... but it's the only explanation I've come up with so far.

Either way, it makes me really, truly grateful that people on MIT's campus are, at least outwardly (and I suspect inwardly as well), respectful of women. What a shock to go half a mile away and end up feeling like a piece of meat instead of a person. Totally ruins my good mood.

the challenge of playing the violin

2007-09-09T22:27:00.001-04:00

I was having a conversation with a friend about music nearly a month ago, and it's stuck in my head ever since.

We were talking about how classical music is such an inaccessible activity, in that it takes so long to learn how to do it, or in some cases even to learn to appreciate it. [Not to mention the fact that most people find it full of social and economic barriers.] Normally, in such a case, one would immediately suggest (and in fact my friend did suggest) that we should make it easier to play and appreciate classical music. Why should instruments be expensive? Why should lessons be expensive? Why can't we have free online videos showing you everything you need to know? Why do we need to use instruments that are incredibly difficult to play? (Violin is a hell of a challenge, but there are computer programs that, with only the mobility of your mouse hand, you can use to create melodies, harmonies, counterpoint - a whole symphony.) Actually, what's so great about playing an instrument at all? Isn't the goal to *make music*? If you can make beautiful music on a simple machine that's easy to learn and operate, does that accomplish the same thing?

It amazed me how stodgy I immediately felt when my friend suggested that a big advance in the world of music would be easy-to-learn, easy-to-play ergonomic instruments. I mean, I'm no stranger to the fact that violin is not ergonomic - I have an S-curve in my spine because I've been playing virtually every day for the last 17 years of my life. I've gotten tendinitis, and I've pinched nerves in my fingers. So what's so great about this awkward, expensive piece of wood I play with all the time?

I have to ask myself if I'm only defending it because I'm used to it, and I would feel annoyed if suddenly the next generation of musicians attained a level of music-making after months that I only reached after years of hard technical work needed to even be able to approach serious music. And on some level I think that *is* the case - working very hard to be come even a passable violinist feels something like a badge of honor to me, and I like the challenge. I do concede that more ergonomic instruments probably wouldn't be a bad idea. But that's not the whole story.

Starting from the top, I feel there IS an intrinsic value in learning to play an instrument, as opposed to having a computer or other electronic device play the music you compose (whether in real-time or not). The connection between instrument and musician is, after a while, almost seamless, and the instrument becomes practically an extension of your body. Sure, it's awkward, but so are bodies to a large extent - we just get used to them. The important point is that instruments are unintelligent and unsuspecting (despite being crafted with incredible skill), and have no preconceptions about what music is. They are tools that become virtually attached to you, and like hands, with enough skill, they can do practically anything. Personally, it seems especially beautiful and poignant to struggle to eke out a beautiful noise from a 100-year-old piece of wood and a stick full of horse hair. With a computer, it's waiting for your input in a pre-determined form. It already knows what music is supposed to be. You can't fool around with it. And, although I suspect technology will fix these problems in the future, computers are not capable of producing even a fraction of the tonal variation of a violin (or anything else), are very difficult to improvise on, and don't let you spontaneously make music with other people. Yet.

Then there's the aspect of connection to all the others who struggle with the same instrument - and to the composers who first imagined the music we are struggling to play. How cool is it that some guy 300 years ago conjured up an entire concerto in his head, and these days we STILL struggle to bring that dream to life? It's such an intimate and meaningful experience to try to realize somebody else's dream, especially in the medium of music, where you infuse your own personality in to every single note. If we could all accomplish it at the touch of a button, would that diminish it? I feel like it would, but I'm not sure. Maybe it would simply mean that we would be incredibly fulfilled people. Or maybe we would find that only in the sincerity and hardship of trying to understand one another do we become fulfilled.

[Note to self: this is a seriously good question for debate. If we all understood each other perfectly, would we all be happy? In the past I have asserted that total understanding disallows hatred entirely - and I still believe it - but this assertion has also been based on my knowledge that we will never completely understand each other in every possible way. What if we all were in *perfect* understanding?]

Lastly, we get to the nitty-gritty stuff. Why are instruments and lessons (particularly when it comes to violins) so expensive? Why can't we learn from books, websites and online videos? This is the information age, after all! This I have more concrete answers for, and I think at least one of them is important. The less important part first: violins (good ones, not student ones) are expensive because they take about 200 hours each to build, and so far nobody has been able to factory-build a good quality violin. They just require a ton of personal attention. Lessons are expensive because playing the violin is an extremely complicated skill which takes (yet another) extremely complicated skill to convey. Good teachers are rare and therefore very valuable.

Now the important part: we can't learn from books, websites or online videos because as far as my experience goes (and also the experience of all the other serious violinists I know), it is *not possible* to accurately convey the concepts needed to play the violin without being physically in the same space. I say "violin" because I can't really speak for other instruments - but I suspect that the same goes for any instrument at a high level. Of course, it is possible to get *somewhere* by watching a video or reading a book. It's not that it's entirely impossible to figure out the instrument. But the violin is playable on many, many levels, and in order to become what my teacher calls "a real artist" (where people judge your playing by how much it moved them, not by how complicated it looked for you to do and how much you must have practiced), you really, really need somebody to move the angle of your wrist 5 degrees and tell you to stop twisting your left shoulder and maybe put down your left first finger a millimeter to the right. You need somebody to demonstrate for you, to fix your technique in real time, to show you how to use the violin in the most extraordinarily efficient way possible - and most of all, to push you to the absolute limits of your musical understanding. This type of guidance is not available through any medium other than plain old-fashioned sitting in a room together and trying stuff out. Even super-hi-res video conferencing doesn't work. You gotta have 3D. You gotta have somebody to actually place your fingers where they should be. It's a kinesthetic endeavor.

And that might just sum up what I love most about the violin, and what makes me so resistant to the idea of super-accessible music making. What else is there these days that actually requires you to meet with a master, one-on-one, and try to do the impossible? What else takes 40 years to get good at? What else connects you with a whole world of other questers who are desperately trying to awaken something that a guy centuries ago imagined?

And is there anything as magical as taking out a funny-shaped, hollow wooden box, drawing some sticky horse-hair across it with everything you've got, and finding, in the end, that somehow you *have* managed to communicate something meaningful to other people?

idiocy

2007-09-08T14:25:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I managed to put both contact lenses in the *same eye* without noticing. (For the record, the second one goes in just fine; it doesn't feel much different.) I stumbled around my room for a while, feeling off balance, and then tried to read an email on my computer and realized I was absolutely unable to focus at close distance and was completely unable to make out the words. It took me much longer than I'd like to admit to figure out what was wrong, because without the ability to focus close up I couldn't see that both contacts were in the same eye....

making friends

2007-09-06T14:57:00.000-04:00

So the thing I'm making friends with - yeah, it's a thing, not a person - is my own stomach. It seems a bit odd to only get friendly with your own internal organs at the age of 21, but what can I say... it's taken me a while.

Funnily enough, I don't think I've ever written publicly about this issue, which is odd because I've been dealing with it since I was 11. I suppose most of the time it's inconvenient or embarrassing to discuss, and nobody wants to hear about anybody else's stomach problem. (Additionally, the responses I get if I mention it are usually exactly opposite of what would be useful for me, not that it's any body's fault.) Not great conversation material. So if you don't know, I'll sum it up smoothly: my stomach is unpredictable, uncooperative, and generally causes me trouble, and the trouble is only compounded by my rather severe phobia. (However, the two problems are so intertwined that from here on out I will refer to them only as my general stomach problem.) The problem has ranged anywhere from a vague sense that I ought not to do handstands after eating (on my best days), to extreme pain and inability to eat for upwards of several weeks. The effect that it has on my life also varies a lot - these days, I don't have to think about it all the time, I can eat most foods, and I can do most activities. I still don't run or swim or sleep within several hours of eating, but that inconvenience is easily circumvented by planning when I'm going to run/swim/sleep and then not eating (duh).

But there are still bad days - even now. When I wake up feeling sick for no reason, or when I eat 3 bites of lunch, can't eat any more, and am immobilized for the rest of the day. If I get in to a patch of bad days, life suddenly becomes more complicated - I can no longer go anywhere without bringing a whole host of items (I think I am the world expert at curing stomach aches that have no apparent cause) with which to rescue myself from uncomfortable situations (like being at a meeting with 3 professors and being unable to concentrate long enough to form a proper sentence). It's awful to step out the door in fear, with the sense that I need a backpack full of rescue "tools" just to walk to the store or something - but it's a LOT better than getting there without it and suddenly needing those things.

It's not that I haven't tried to medically cure myself of this annoying bum stomach. I've seen at least 6 medical doctors about it, been poked and prodded and tested for a zillion things (no conclusive tests), talked to at least 8 psychiatrists, tried 6 major drugs, and tried at least 12 different natural stomach health products. While I've learned a lot, and I've picked up some "tools" along the way, none of these people or products has really done anything for me.

So, what the hell is wrong with me? Conclusion: nothing. It would appear that it's... "just me"**. Now, one might argue that this chronic nuisance is not something I should just accept - I've certainly been encouraged to try every possibly avenue of treatment - but frankly, the only one left is surgery and I'm not willing to go that way. So if I'm not trying to fix myself any more, I better start picking the good bits out of the lot - and that's what I mean by "making friends".

Now, I think that in general, the worst part of it is behind me, which makes the whole deal easier to make friends with; I don't think I'll ever spend another month desperately trying to eat a quarter of a banana while losing weight at a fast pace. I don't think I'll ever collapse outside the hospital again, or lie on the lawn outside the house for 3 hours until I feel well enough to get inside. I've got more control now than I ever did then, and heck - maybe someday I'll kick the whole problem.

Last year, a baffled psychiatrist told me that since I apparently can't be cured, I might start trying to figure out how this whole problem benefits me. A few weeks ago, I was at a talk by a Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, who themed his entire talk around an opening meditation: "Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I smile at my body". So, the signs are everywhere, and it's time to get thinking: just how does my little friend, my stomach, benefit me?

Well, for starters, it does sometimes do exactly what it's supposed to, so score 1. When it's misbehaving, it gets me to slow down and realize that I must sleep, eat well, and take care of myself. Because of it, I now know a jillion things to suggest to anybody who needs help with a stomach problem. I know what it's like to feel stuck in a pit, unable to dig one's way out of the wrong perception that life will never be easy or cheerful again. Because of my stomach, I've met some of the most accomplished meditators of the modern world and had a chance to ask them questions. I've learned a lot about the brain and how fear works. Perhaps above all, I've learned that when I see somebody sitting in a meeting looking distracted or unhappy, there are a thousand ways in which just being there, sitting in that chair, could be unimaginably hard for them. Actually, even if somebody doesn't LOOK distracted or unhappy, it still might be hard.

So.... hey buddy. Yeah, you, Stomach. I know you're tryin' hard. I'm getting someplace, I really am. Thanks for all the hard work. You can be quiet now. I'm paying attention.

**What exactly is it about me that causes this? For opinions from disparate sources, including my mother, a Buddhist monk-doctor, and my aunt, ask me.

Maverick the Muffin

2007-03-21T20:58:00.000-04:00

I couldn't stop laughing... That's her food dish she's sleeping in. And ballooning out of. And even better, I saw her deliberately settle down in there.

boy, they've got everything on the 'net these days

2007-03-17T16:34:00.000-04:00

I think I've been called "oversensitive" by most of the people I know - sometimes disparagingly, sometimes affectionately. Most people who know me well have observed that I have a really hard time in crowds or cities - spending any extended period of time in such an energetic environment leaves me physically shaky and weak. I've always described it as the "sponge" effect - I soak up what's around me to an insane degree. I plug my ears when loud things happen, like braking busses or jackhammers. In virtually any party situation, I can interact with the crowd for some limited amount of time, after which I always need to unwind, and retreat to my room to sit in the dark. I am completely unable to watch violence or tension on TV or in movies; during these scenes I usually plug my ears and shut my eyes; even when watching completely tame shows I find myself tense and stiff and really on the edge. Even if I *like* watching them, they do me in.

These weird traits have been interpreted in various ways. I think some people think I'm kind of faking it, like a lot of middle school girls fake being afraid of bugs just so they can all squeal in "fear" at the sight of one, which in some twisted way connects people socially. Others see it as a very negative thing; the result of my not watching TV as a child. Still more feel they have to be very careful around me, for fear of "setting me off" - that's not a great way to say it, but many of my friends do realize that I notice and respond to little things VERY quickly.

Well, it turns out there's actually quite some information about people like me. It's all over the web - search for Highly Sensitive Person or Intuitive Empath, and you can look through lists of traits that describe me in a nutshell. Most surprising of all was this site, in which the essayist also describes herself as a "giant sponge", a description I've never heard anybody else use.

I'm pretty suspicious, generally, of hokey spiritualist personality descriptions, in which the page seems sincere until you get to the bottom, and then they tell you that you're "most like the Elephant/Cockroach/Spiny Lobster" or "destined to be psychic" or "exhibiting extrasensosupranaturalistic mental techniques" or some other weird mumbo jumbo. In those cases the writer is usually somebody who has adopted an Indian pen name, puts a lot of sentimental .wav music files on their site, and has a picture of him or herself engaged in a little-known religious practice.

The author of the article linked above is an MD. She also asserts that people's bodies "are made of flesh and blood, but they're also composed of energy fields", and a section of the article is about Energy Vampires, who drain intuitive empaths of energy. Does this sound believable to you?

Think carefully. Personally, I have enough experience being *me*, complete with Issues in all their glory, to realize that a strict modern Western medical perspective is not enough to explain why I often feel the way I do, even though I am neither physically sick nor clinically depressed. But I find it incredibly irritating that people who try to explain these emotional tendencies and traits often use language like "Energy Vampires", which in most peoples' view robs the thesis of any credibility. This woman describes me very well, which by its very nature is bound to mean something to me - but her book categorizes people in to boxes like Drama Queen, Sob Sister, and Blamer. Why, once you've liberated a few confused souls from thinking they are incurably weird, must you go on to further categorize? Identification of a trait, articulating it so that you can state who you are to those who care about you, is important. Knowing that you are a Sob Sister, while your neighbor is a Drama Queen, and therefore you two really can't quite relate, is NOT.

I know, and my friends know, that the way I feel is CLEARLY influenced by the way people around me feel, to a very profound degree, and that I easily pick up on how people are feeling. It is also true that the more people there are, the more influence pours in, and I tend to get overwhelmed. But this doesn't have to be mystical, folks. It doesn't need to involve vampires. By describing it, you don't have to make a religion out of it. It's just how some people are.

introducing Emily

2007-02-09T15:48:00.000-05:00

This is Emily. Isn't she darlin'?

Getting her to play nice with Maverick has been hard, though. Or rather, getting Maverick to play nice has been hard. This is not entirely unexpected; introducing new rats to each other often takes time. One accepted strategy is to put dabs of perfume on the rats so as to mask their scents, and then introduce them in neutral ground. It's taken 4 days of doing that, but the two girls finally are able to stay in the same cage without fighting.

They have, however, constructed separate nests in far opposite corners of the cage. Ha!

UPDATE: They now sleep next to each other (aww), but they still fight over sunflower seeds.

dryness

2007-02-09T15:28:00.000-05:00

Boston is dry. Extremely dry. I sound like a frog in the morning, my throat hurts if I speak for more than 5 minutes. My hair looks suspiciously as if I have been hanging out with a Van de Graaff generator. My lips are split and sting horribly if I eat salty things. Even my hands are cracked and itchy. I've been drinking at least 2 liters of water per day, but it just doesn't seem to help... And there's no better way to appreciate how much your face hurts than to bike around Boston when it's 12 F, at night, in the wind.

extra terrestrials

2006-12-04T23:12:00.000-05:00

If you had a peaceful extra-terrestrial encounter, what would you want the aliens to be like? What kind of alien would make you understand the purpose of life?

Think carefully. This is peaceful, which means the aliens are not in any way trying to hurt you or Earth. (But they could, out of kindness or misunderstanding. If you've ever read Speaker for the Dead, there's a good example in that book of how what is highest honor to one species could be death to another.)

Would you be moved by the one-ness of life if the aliens were humanoid like us? If they had legs and arms and heads and made noises to communicate and saw in the visible spectrum with eyes? Would it fill you with a sense of understanding about the order of things in the universe?

Or, would you think it was more beautiful if they were completely different? What if they're not even made of carbon? Could they be metallic? Or silicates? Would you decide that humans are truly special and unique, and be thankful that chance (or God, I suppose) allowed us to be the way we are? Would you collapse at the feet of entropy?

Maybe you would see the aliens and realize just how unevolved we are. Maybe they are near-perfect machines. Maybe they aren't machines at all - maybe their bodies are useless and their brains are everything. Maybe they don't even have bodies.

What would you want their senses to be? Do you wish they could see in the visible spectrum so you could take them to your favorite place and show them how beautiful Earth is? Do you wish they saw in x-ray or infrared or something else, so they could tell you about the world you can't see? Should they be able to hear sound? Should they have sense we don't have? What if they feel cosmic rays pounding through their bodies? What if they feel emotions like we feel force?

What do you want them to think about us? Should they marvel at us? Should they be disgusted? Should they be confused? Why?

What would you say to the alien? What would you tell them about Earth?

Earth is the sacred and the profane. We are children of paradox.

ugh.

2006-12-04T02:30:00.000-05:00

Sunday I worked 7 AM to 1 AM with a 1.5 hour break.
Monday isn't looking any better.
Neither is Tuesday...

gooood morning

2006-12-02T11:21:00.000-05:00

orange

2006-10-29T13:09:00.000-05:00

I’m eating an orange shortly after waking on quiet Sunday morning. Outside the sun is bright and cold, and the leaves are falling like rain in a strong wind. Inside it’s still quite chilly, and I’m wrapped in thick blanket.

I don’t like the white rind underneath the tougher orange rind. I have to peel it off, strip by strip until the orange is bruised and the juice runs down my fingers and makes the hangnails sting. That’s good. It means the orange is perfectly ripe. I’m sitting by myself at the kitchen table. I’ve spread out paper towels over a wide area, and placed a bowl on either end. The left one is for rinds; the right one is for finished sections.

Peeling the orange takes at least half an hour and it’s not a painless process. My nails are too short to get each piece of rind, and so I must resort to a series of different knives, each carefully wielded so as not to puncture the fruit. Nevertheless, the juice drips down my wrists and gets my watch band sticky.

When the orange is finally ready I arrange the slices in the right hand bowl. I pick up the paper towel and the bowl of rinds and throw them away. At the sink I stand with my hands under the warm running water for far longer than is necessary, letting the warmth in to my bones. When I decide I’m wasting water, I allow myself twenty more seconds and I count down slowly, and then turn the water off.

Back at the table I sit cross-legged in the chair and arrange the blanket around my shoulders. I pick up a slice. My lips are cracked from the dry weather, and from smiling, and they sting with each bite, but the flavor is unsurpassed. More juice drips down my wrists. Between the third and fourth slices I wash my hands again. When the last section is gone I wipe down the table with a sponge and wash my face with hot water. I shove my hands in to my pockets and wrap the blanket around me and stand in the doorway to the kitchen, smiling. The room smells sharp and citrusy and the sun is weaving patterns on the table. My mouth still stings with flavor.

friends at crane beach

2006-10-29T11:21:00.000-05:00

cool topology puzzle

2006-10-26T11:29:00.000-04:00

The puzzle is in this picture. How can the two shapes in the box in the upper left be the same? Topologically speaking, they are *not different*.

So how does that work? You could look at my drawing, but it sucks, so I made a video of how you convert between one shape and the other using silly putty. The rules: you can't break anything, or disconnect and reconnect anything, and there must always be the same number of holes in the object you are manipulating (in this case, it's a double-holed donut). You are allowed to stretch and shrink the material as much as you want as long as you don't change the fundamental properties of the shape.

Video is here!

symphony

2006-10-21T10:20:00.000-04:00

Before the last note of the Hanson you can hear the entire wind section breathe in great quantities of air, some great many-headed monster preparing to breathe fire. The last note impacts like a meteor and there's a puff of rosin dust rising out of the violin section, broken bow hairs flying.

And in the Dvorak the cellos are swaying to their own beautiful melody; the orchestra looks like a colony of corals in a warm ocean current. The piccolo is the flashing of the small fish in the sunlight and the low brass and basses are the ocean floor itself.

It ends in a flurry of dancing, you're supposed to be swinging in the moonlight, arm in arm, spinning as fast as you can without falling over. The audience claps and the orchestra sounds like a herd of buffalo. The maestro bows three times and finally the lights dim on the stage.

Downstairs everybody is singing their favorite parts, putting away their instruments, polishing them, cleaning them, putting on their coats and smiling because they can't stop; because their faces have been smiling for so long and they are so full of nervous energy and so exhausted from the performance that they can't smooth out their muscles. We tell each other it went well and climb the stairs to the lobby where there the audience is waiting. Our friends meet us. They gives us hugs and shake our hands and we stand around talking about the music. Then we walk home in the storm outside, wind whipping our hair.

how your body adjusts your hearing

2006-10-15T07:47:00.000-04:00

Here's the set up of your inner ear. The tiny little hairs (cilia) in your ear each have a tiny spring attached to the top. When the hairs move around, due to sound waves, the spring stretches, and pulls open an ion gate on a neuron. Ca2+ flows in, and an impulse is sent to your brain, and you hear a noise.

(like this picture shows)

If the sounds you are hearing are too loud, or too soft, your inner ear makes an adjustment. The end of the spring is attached to that critical ion gate, right? So depending on how far away the tip of the hair is from the ion gate, there will be different tension in the spring, and it will take different amounts of force from sound waves to cause the ion gate to be pulled open.
Your body takes advantage of this. When it's really loud, your body moves the ion gate closer (by way of myosin and actin) so that only a HUGE, powerful sound wave can put enough tension on the spring to cause you to hear. This is why you go deaf after a party or a rock concert. If it's really quiet, your body increases the tension in the spring by moving the ion gate far away, so a tiny force is enough to trigger hearing. That's why you hear so well in the morning!

Pull for the Shore

2006-10-13T15:19:00.002-04:00

Pull for the Shore

Wilbur sits by the front window. He is wearing his down parka that says ‘1972 Olympics’ on the front. Perched on his head is his oldest ski hat. He is leaning over stiffly, trying to tie his heavy winter boots through thick leather mittens. His skier’s body is frail and desiccated. He is getting ready to go home.

He’s sure he remembers his home; a haven in a hazy mind. It was so recently – maybe yesterday or last week - that he was a young man and he'd ski through the freezing Maine winter, warm and limber. He doesn't know how he got this tired old body, these shaky hands, and these eyes that fall closed. He remembers trips to the mountains with his friends, raising an eyebrow in a silent challenge and careening down the slope faster than anybody. Even now he can feel the jumps and moguls in his thin knees.

Barbara appears before his chair. He loves her very much; but he’s confused. She could be his mother, his wife, his sister, his child. She asks him why he's wearing those winter clothes, and points outside to the green trees and overgrown lawn. He says he wants to go skiing when he gets home. Barbara holds his shaking hand and asks him where he thinks he’s going. He tells her that he’s going home to Maine. Barbara sits down across from him in the second velvet chair. She’s crying, softly, but he doesn’t hear. Wilbur decides that if it's warm outside, he'll go sailing instead. He thinks of the salty breeze and the feel of the wet mainsheet running through his hand. He hears the sea birds.

He takes off his hat slowly, reaching up in the air and finding the tassel. He worries immediately that once he gets outside it will be too cold. Barbara leans down and unties his boots and slips them off his feet. She shakes her head slightly at his two layers of woolen socks, but she lets him keep his leather mittens.

Wilbur looks out the window at the sky. A small grey arrow shoots through the sky and behind it, the blue sky turns an puffy white. He marvels at the strange things the sky can do, condensing itself in to these fantastic structures. He hears a loud buzzing noise as the structure grows longer. He’s glad to be safe from that power, at his home in his velvet chair.

Back in the kitchen Barbara has made 3 pies. There’s apple, in to the crust of which she has carved a heart, mincemeat, full of raisins and spice, and pumpkin, for which she is whipping cream. Her children are all with her. The oldest stands at the sink with her hands in soapy water. The youngest is drying dishes. The other two are quiet, watching her add sugar and vanilla to the cream.

Barbara has seen this day coming. She’s disappointed that it came when he still sometimes knew her name, still could whisper ‘good enough’ in response to ‘how are you feeling today?’. She’s crushed that it had to come at all, that somehow her strength was just not enough for the two of them, and that he’ll be gone in a few hours, leaving the house so empty.

She adds more sugar to the cream. One of her daughters is covering the pies in tin foil and carefully packing them in to a canvas bag. Grandchildren drift in, see her tears, and exit uncomfortably. She tries to tell herself there was no other way; and she goes through the days in her head.

On Thursday she woke up from a nap and he wasn’t in his chair, nor on the couch. She tore through the house, thought he might have fallen down in the street, or walked in to somebody else’s home – and then she found him, asleep in the grass, under the maple in the front yard. When she woke him up he didn’t remember which house was his.

Then it was 2 days later that he came with her to the store, and exhaustion overwhelmed him in the baking aisle. His knees shaking, his face in shame, he sat down and she couldn’t help him up. To be stranded at this routine errand, calling for help down 20 feet of sugar and flour...

Just yesterday he’d forgotten her entirely. He was worried that the fire in the stove would go out, and despite her reassurances that there was no fire, and everything was electric these days, he insisted that his wife would be unhappy if it were too cold. She held his hand and told him gently that she was his wife, and that there was nothing to worry about. He looked sincere and lost, shivering under blankets in the July heat.

And there’s the constant struggle to keep his failing body alive. He can barely feed himself, his muscles are wasting away under the Olympic parka, and his blue eyes are lost in wrinkles. She barely sleeps at night, lying awake waiting for him, to help him sit up, and steady his arm as he shuffles to the bathroom or gets a drink of water.

So there he is, in his parka, out there by the window. It breaks his heart that he’ll never ski again, and hers that he will sit in an unfamiliar hall with some young nurse who will help him lift forkfuls of those pies to his mouth, who will say to him, sing-song, ‘Wilbur, you must be such a sweetheart, look at all these presents!’. He will stumble further in to his thicket, far from any clearing of consciousness, until he is unreachable except by desperate methods of sweets and music. She knows she will see him sitting by the piano in that big hall, with the parka on, inexplicably moved by a song he can’t remember.

Barbara finishes whipping the cream and rises out of her reverie. The kitchen is warm and full of good smells. Her children surround her, carrying the canvas bag with the pies, and together they walk in to the front room where Wilbur is sitting. The grandchildren come, too, once they muster the courage to see his sad eyes and her tears.

Barbara sits across from Wilbur again. She tells him she’ll help him with his tennis shoes if he’s ready to leave, but he’s so comfortable, he can’t think why he’d be leaving home. ‘Where are we going?’, he asks. She says they're going to a place where everybody is trying very hard to help him be comfortable and well. Wilbur is sorry to hear that somebody is sick, but he tells her that he is ‘good enough’. He’ll be ok in the velvet chair.

She asks him if he'd like to bring his book of crossword puzzles to do in the afternoon. He nods gently and he smiles a little. He rises from the chair, elbows and knees shaking under his feather weight. Somebody is helping him up from behind and 'thank you' rises mechanically to his lips from a lifetime of sincere gratitude. An arm is on his shoulder. A blue velvet pillow to match his chair is pressed in to his hand. He sees a child in front of him holding a plate of cookies. The girl says ‘Grampa, it's your favorite kind.’

Somebody begins playing his favorite song, 'Pull for the Shore,' on the piano, and a flute and many voices join in. He stands there, stooped, in front of his chair, and listens. Beside him his children and grandchildren are watching his eyes.

‘Light in the darkness, sailor, day is at hand!
See o’er the foaming billows fair haven’s land,
Drear was the voyage, sailor, now almost o’er,
Safe within the life boat, sailor, pull for the shore.

Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore!
Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar;
Safe in the life boat, sailor, cling to self no more!
Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the shore.’¹

The tune swells to the refrain and Wilbur’s lips once again begin to move. ‘Safe in the life boat, sailor, cling to self no more’, he whispers, as the others stand around him and sing. ‘Leave the poor old stranded wreck and pull for the shore’. He holds Barbara’s hand and she leads him out the door. The air rushes in as the storm door swings open, and it’s a sweet summer day. He steps along the walk, brick by brick. The others surround him as he eases in to the car seat, and a hand presses his seat belt in to place. He feels the engine of the car start and somebody rolls down his window and shuts the door. Everyone is still singing. The song fades away as the car backs in to the street, and Wilbur gets ready for the voyage, and thinks of how happy he will be, at home, when it is over.

1. Words and Music by Philip Bliss.