?!! Sexual innuendo much?!

Come on. I can’t be the only person who thought so when I heard this.

MODERATOR: The Nobel Prize-winning African-American author, Toni Morrison, famously observed about Bill Clinton, “This is our first black president, blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black president?

[blah blah]

OBAMA: I have to say that, you know, I would have to, you know, investigate more of Bill’s dancing abilities.

(LAUGHTER)

OBAMA: You know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother. But…

(APPLAUSE)

MODERATOR: Let’s let Senator Clinton weigh in on that.

CLINTON: Well, I’m sure that can be arranged.

(Transcript.)

“OTHER STUFF“? That needs to be investigated? Like what, exactly? We already know about the fried chicken and the soul handshake (scroll to the end).  And he DID marry a white girl.  Hmm, what else could there be, I wonder?

I await the Message‘s take on this.

Like omigod it is sooo cold! And: an apology to my friends.

I reeeeeeeeally try not to rag on DC for its weather-related skittishness. It’s just too goddamned easy, and boring. But, come the fuck on. Did people always make this big a deal out of 20 degree weather? 20 DEGREES. We’re not traversing Antarctica here. Wear a fucking hat.

It’s times like these I feel most Midwestern. I have five trusty Weather Dashboard widgets set up, one for each place in the country where I have family. The “Stepfather” one tells me that it’s 10degF in Michigan. The “Grandmother, Aunt, Uncle, and 3 Cousins” one tells me that it’s 1degF in Wisconsin. Now THAT is some weather, people. One fricking degree. My cousins — ages 7, 5, and 1 — are being raised RIGHT. That’s not “you can’t go out and play, because I’m cold” weather. That’s “you can’t go out to play because you will get frostbite” weather.

I am sure my sister disagrees. She never felt the cold to be character-building, although that may have been because in the Midwest she bark-coughs like a seal from November to March. So she moved to Northern California. Where it’s now 20 degrees. Neener, seester. (And to round everyone out, it’s also 20 degrees where my mom is. She was raised in the Midwest but is now in Connecticut. How bout it, momb? Are they wimpy about 20 degrees there too?)

I was unfortunate this evening, when, failing to turn the football game off in a timely fashion, a local newscast bounced some photons off my retinae. No worries, first-degree burns only, I changed it quickly…but not before I got a nice strong dose of schadenfreude watching a newsperson interview a shivering frat boy, wearing on his head only a baseball cap, who admitted that it is too cold to wear on his head only a baseball cap. I hope his boyz don’t see him on the news, because based on the aggressively-worn T-shirts I saw the frat boys sporting on the streets last night, admitting to feeling cold practically makes him gay.

In very sad news, my text messaging appears to be broken. I’m not sure how many days now. I am lost without text messages. Seriously. My Google Calendar texts me reminders (and God knows I need a lot of reminders, what with this sieve I call a brain). I already missed at least one, and I suspect two, social engagements because people are used to not having to call me. So, I apologize to all of youse whose messages I have missed. It probably hurts me more than it hurts you!

the coffeeshop matrix

Once, this blog broke ground with its characterization of the “Woo Girl.” The post made quite a splash, but as is common in science, following up is harder than it looks.

Let’s explore a new idea. I’ve been working more at coffeeshops the last few months and it is time to do a rigorous comparison. By which I mean, graphs. All we need is 3 variables, and we can graph coffeeshop quality. In 3-D And color.  In 3-D color! Maybe even rotating 3-D color!! Doesn’t that thrill you? You can even pick the colors.

And all we need to make it happen is your data! In the comments, please classify DC-area coffeeshops that you know well on at least these three measures:

• Ambience
• Internets/work
• Fare

We can, of course, think of many other judging criteria: we could break any of those categories down into their own three subgroups, for example. But at a minimum please at least give a 1-10 rating on the above three factors for each establishment.

Here is an example.

CRUMBS AND COFFEE: Adams Morgan, on Columbia above 18th

• Ambience: 3. Fluorescent lighting, soft-rock music station, small, not terribly comfy chairs, fluorescent lighting, and does not make you feel all “I’m cool, I’m in a coffeshop, I have tattoos and a think tank job which lets me telecommute and I am blogging RIGHT NOW,” which another area cafe, which shall remain nameless, aims for. No, it doesn’t go for anything ambience-wise (which of course makes today’s creative class hipster feel an “I’m too cool to care about tattoos and blogging, and also, actual workmen who do actual work come in here every now and then which makes me feel like I am communing with the working class” ambience). In the plus column, smallness is such that it never really feels crowded, non-chatty counter service, large windows mitigate the lighting, and you’d be surprised how often a soft-rock-station tune will make you sing along or at least send you down memory lane.
• Internets: 6. Great free wi-fi which is on 7 days a week, unlike another area cafe, which shall remain nameless. Outlet situation moderate to good although some serious tripwire situations can occur (yay, MacBook Pro with the magnetic power dingus). Tables and counter a bit too high and close for comfort.
• Fare: 7. Ice cream as well as the regular array of pastry/sandwiches. Unpretentious selection but lackluster presentation. I don’t think I’ve actually had the coffee, I’m transitioning to tea…but I can report that they don’t use cereal-bowl-sized cups like another area mugs, which shall remain nameless. This is much of the reason for the high score, in fact.  I hate those mugs with the passion of, hmm, let’s say 19 suns.

Let’s hear it! Science needs YOU!

Easily impressed, or, it’s the little things

PART ONE

No point in regaling you with the story of my holiday travels. You don’t care, and nothing bad/funny/interesting happened to me, anyway. So I’ll just tell you about the wine bar at BWI that restored my soul:

Click through and you can also read about how much I love Southwest. I even love the unassigned seats!

PART TWO

As I deplaned* at BWI, a boy no more than three years old caught sight of me. His eyes went wide, he pointed and yelled at the top of his lungs “aaaaah!!” Disconcerting. Then again, each time more and more excited: “Aaaaaaah!! AAAAAH!!”

I was the first adult around to figure it out: I was wearing my red Incredibles logo shirt.

I saw it last year, but you know, you forget exactly how it goes, and these things make bigger impressions on kids anyway. Having happened to catch it on network tonight**, however, I had a new appreciation of just how impressed that kid was.

——————————————————————————

*What a dumb word.

**This is the first time I have watched a non-”Ten Commandments” movie on network this millennium. Or longer.

The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art?!

F’reals!!

The knitted brain–holy shit. The quilt is groovy, but I’m a knitter, and I love the 3D aspect. No experience has been as important to my understanding of neuroscience and neuroanatomy as dissecting a brain in my first year of graduate school. Which is kind of “duh”, I know…but to handle a human brain every week, cut away pieces and really see how it was put together…

OMG! A zipper as the corpus callosum (the structure that links the left and right lobes of the brain). Bril.

There is a disclaimer:

While our artists make every effort to insure [sic] accuracy, we cannot accept responsibility for the consequences of using fabric brain art as a guide for functional magnetic resonance imaging, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, neurosurgery, or single-neuron recording.

Good thing they covered their asses there!

I found this page through MindHacks, a fun blog based on the O’Reilly book of the same name; both aim to provide “neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what’s going on inside your brain.” And they do it well–I haven’t bought the book yet, but I paged through it a few years ago for a friend who asked me to vet the neuroscience, and IIRC I was impressed. Hardly a shock considering the publishing house, which is known in the tech world for its high quality.

Today the MindHacks folk featured Blue Jean Brain II by artist Lee Pirozzi.

Which reminded me of LAST week, when they had me humming “if I only had a brain handbag”:

Designer Jun Takashi has created a high fashion handbag, shaped like a brain. Why? You ask. Why not? I answer.

At this point I would like to make it clear that the idea that we only use 10% of our handbag is a myth.

Scientific studies have found that all of the handbag is in constant use, although some parts may be more active than others.

(I like how they debunk the ridiculous 10% myth. It might be true in the Angel from Montgomery sense*, but not in the neurological.)

The Wizard of Oz joke up there is that I have a lot of bags. By which I mean purses. I blame the DSW Shoe Warehouse in Chicago on Clark and Wellington, which was not only within easy reach of public transportation but had free parking. (I got a lot of shoes there too, but those are more socially acceptable, and I tend to purge shoes more as they age, but bags don’t wear out as fast.) I remember one day when I came home to Chicago Ex and said, “Look at this bag I bought!” “Oh good,” he said, “You needed more bags.” I was flattered that he’d noticed, a second later I figured out I was being teased. These days, with every new bag I acquire, Reaganite slightly-sardonically asks “So….is THIS one the Perfect Bag?” I have to explain that the perfect bag is a platonic ideal**, and that different needs require different bags, so no one bag can ever be perfect, so it is not an answerable question. He laughs at me anyway. Perhaps he has never taken philosophy.

Here is the ironic part: I have a dearth of luggage, the most useful type of bag. I also have no professional-looking bags for interviews and other sorts of days when I need to look like a grownup. Purses, purses everywhere, and not a one to take to San Diego for a conference.

I tried to take a picture of the closet that has most of my purses in it, but it didn’t really get the point across. I have them all hanging on racks and hooks on the back of my front/coat closet door, and well, let’s just say that the door basically has to be forced closed.

Maybe I should shoot each one and make a grid of them, or something. That WOULD help me purge, as some of them are probably embarrassing, stylewise. I could try to do them chronologically, then I would have an excuse.

You know, because I don’t have enough to do.

———————————————————————————————-

*”How the hell can a person/Go to work in the morning/Come home in the evening/And have nothing to say?“

**Have you ever noticed that every time the Platonic ideal idea is explained pedagogically, the teacher uses the example of a chair? 4 out of 4 times in my academic experience. Bizarre.

Sunday miscellaneous

– Why does Google still list itself as being beta??

–The sadness of losing DST and having it get dark earlier is mitigated for me by pomegranates. The Trader Joe’s in Chicago had the bad pomegranates while the Whole Paycheck had the best, but in DC up is down and black is white, and so yesterday at TJs I scored two huge, perfect, just-on-the-verge-of-overripeness 16-inch-softball-sized fruits.

I had my first pomegranate as an adult, I’m not sure how I was introduced, but bless you, whoever you were. This meant I was spared in my childhood from wondering how the fuck Penelope could go to Hades and eat only six pomegranate seeds. (I used to read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology a lot.) As friends can verify, once I discovered them I used to inhale them in one sitting.  They would even use this for amusement: buy Techne a pomegranate and get contact joy.

These days, on the advice of a Lebanese friend and coworker, I am less gluttonous. She watched me devour one at lunch one day and showed me how good the seeds could be with a little salt, so now I butcher them into a tupperware thingy, salt them just right, spritz maybe a little lemon or lime juice, and eat the seeds with a spoon. This means three fruits can last me a week, instead of three days. Which is cheaper; jeez, I’m not that old and I remember when you could get ‘em for a dollar.

–Amy Winehouse on SNL next week! Have you SEEN the videos of her moving on stage? I have never seen anything so bizarre. Come off the crack honey, we miss you. (MOM: listen to that album before SNL!)

–Today I was reminded yet again of why I hate running in DC. Chicago is blessedly flat, but my neighborhood is on a hill, and all the quiet, smog-free streets run downhill and the busy ones go uphill. Whenever I get a leeeeeeeeetle bit of willpower to run outside, it gets torpedoed by this fact. Today I was extra-dumbass and ran in the spaghetti tangle of streets that is the Adams Mill area, and got stuck at the bottom of a hill just as I was getting tired. (The hill Dr. Birdcage used to live on.) Yes, I could run across the bridge, but I walk that way TWICE A FRICKING DAY, and I am so over it by now. (Hyuk!) I wish I had a good elevation map of my area so I could plan routes.

Where I’ve been, and about James Watson

OK, so I missed the first day of NaBloWriMo.

OK, so there ISN’T even a NaBlogWriMo.

I can challenge myself anyway, right?

So, I know you all are wondering…where’ve I been?

At conferences. Five weeks, four conferences, three involving overnight stays, two involving stays of more than one night, and one in the Western time zone. The biggest one was #2. I presented on the first day, in the plenary session after the introductory speaker, who was…Jim Watson. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Fifty years ago he and others divined the structure of DNA in a perfect storm of insight, ambition, office politics, and teamwork. Two weeks ago he ended his career in disgrace…but ENTIRELY PREDICTABLY, in a way that surprised ABSOLUTELY NOBODY WHO’D EVER MET HIM. And I’m gonna tell you why, and give you a front-row seat–literally–on his behavior.

When you are precocious enough to earn your BS at 19 and your Ph.D. at 22, ambitious enough that you decide at age 23 that you will solve the biggest scientific problem of the day, intelligent enough that you DO SO by age 25, and important enough to the field that the insight wins you a piece of a Nobel at age 34…well, this is not a recipe for modesty, and modest he’s never been. He has accomplished a lot with his scientific capital, such as starting the human genome project (until politics forced him out) and leading the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to prominence in the genetics field. But he has also not had to edit himself for nigh on 30 years, and got in the habit of blurting out ideas that…might not have always been appropriate. And as he’s veered into the crochety-old-man-with-cushy-job phase of life, he’s gotten more and more outrageous.

The race stuff he said wasn’t too far out of the ordinary for him–just two things were different. First, it was about race, not about ugly women or fat people or stupid people, as it’s been in the past. Considering genetics’ history with eugenics, this naturally sits more poorly with people than the other viewpoints, which are more easily laughed off. And secondly, he said it to a member of the press on a book tour, not to a room of star-struck scientists whose reaction to him, for decades, has been “*roll eyes* That’s Jim!”

I went to three genetics conferences, which got progressively more general. The first one, featuring my BIG PRESENTATION (a whole other post), was the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics, in NYC this year–a grand name for a medium-sized meeting of 1000 people. As I said, Watson opened it with a half hour or so of chat. (I was in the front row, hence your front-row view .) Remember, this was PRE-brouhaha, although listen carefully to his media interviews up to that point and you’ll hear previews of what was to come. And indeed, this meeting was a preview. He was talking to, you know, psychiatric geneticists, so his comments focused on that instead of, say, race or attractiveness. What we do is so important, he sez. So many families have pain over this sort of issue. he himself has a schizophrenic son and a friend has a bipolar son who killed himself. Our field is heading in great directions, and being an old man he hopes we can develop, say, tests for psychiatric disorders…in a time-frame he can witness! (audience chuckling.) Such test scould be ever so useful, he goes on. For families, you know, and prenatal diagnosis.

Excueeze me? I baking powder? Prenatal diagnostic testing for MENTAL ILLNESS?

We’re not talking about horridly painful diseases that kill all affected kids before they turn 3 or whatever. We’re not even talking about Down Syndrome or Huntington’s Disease–diseases for which the genetic tests are definitive, but in which people can and do live full lives by almost any standard you apply. We’re talking about illnesses with unknown cause–illnesses where reasonable experts may not even agree on whether a person HAS it or not!

I was livid, as you can probably tell, and for two reasons. First: we have no idea what is going on genetically in these disorders. Take it from me, because I just published a major study in the area and spent 3 weeks absorbing the work others have been doing, and I can tell you for sure that knowing all the genetic everything that we know right now about someone will predict their odds of illness no better than will taking a simple family history. OK, I know that was a confusing sentence, so, an example. We know that if you have an aunt with schizophrenia, your odds of being schizophrenic yourself are one to four times higher than the general population’s odds. The absolutely MOST MOST optimistic spin on the genetics we know right now can’t do better than odds of 2. That means that just by asking for a family history, you can know more than if you do a genetic test. (Yes, some people don’t have anyone in their family with the illnesses…but this is rarer than you might think, especially once you start digging, and hear tell of that weird great-aunt who spent her life in a home or the boisterous cousin with the 5 divorces and so on.)

The second reason is, well…I had been to the Holocaust Museum the week before this conference, and seen this exhibit. (A summary: “The ‘Law for the prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases,’ proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation (‘congenital feeble-mindedness’), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism.”) It was a hell of a juxtaposition.

I felt conflicted after his talk. Sure, we scientists knew to roll their eyes, but the guy had a LOT of credibility among influential people, and there is already pressure in certain privately-funded corners of psychiatry to develop “definitive” psychiatric diagnostic tests. The imprimatur of a guy like him, I imagined, could mean a lot to decisionmakers–it had done a lot for the Human Genome Project, after all. What could I, a lowly postdoc, do? Where did my power lie? Anywhere??

So I was actually pretty glad that Watson dug his own hole. He’s not the first prominent person to shoot himself in the foot like this…the dude IS 80. It’s an unfortunate end to an amazing, and, personally, inspiring career, but I think–I hope–history will be kind.

Next time: How Did Techne’s Talk Go??
(Preview: They laughed, they cried, it was better than Cats)

NaBlogWriMo?

NaNoWriMo for blogs…..

*sigh*

is addiction a disease or a personal choice?

Via MindHacks, a very good post about the question of whether addiction is a disorder of the body or of the will. It is very creative in its use of what is often thought of as a 100% physiological and genetic disease as an example.

This topic is much in the media recently (perhaps someone is plugging a book and I have missed it?)  I recommend the post as an orientation to the issues.

Life, backyard, Baltimore

Life, backyard, Baltimore

Originally uploaded by techne.

A fun Flickr meetup last night inspired me to get back on the photo editing horse. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.

Admire my hot boyfriend, please.

frosting, flickr, and a dream about bees

About every other lip gloss I try smells like frosting. It’s distracting.

In other news, the government has returned flickr to the land of the open internets. Whew! There’s a meetup tomorrow, first one in a long time. Dr. B, will you be there?

I am sorta taking pictures again, but my latest mental block seems to be editing. I get bored before I even begin. Well, not bored, but I feel guilty about using my work computer for photo editing. I hope to get over it soon.

Speaking of guilt, I had a dream last night wherein I was in charge of a beehive (this was inspired by a recent New Yorker article from Elizabeth Kolbert about the bee collapse). I know exactly which line inspired the dream; it’s been bouncing around my unconscious for a week:

I set up my hive at the edge of a small brook that runs through the back yard. Within a day of being installed, my bees—Italians—were hard at work. They could be seen zipping out of the little opening in the front and returning with yellow wads of pollen stuffed into the baskets on their legs. Even my teen-age son found the sight of their proverbial busyness hard to resist. On returning home from school, he would lounge against a nearby tree and watch.

In the dream, I was in my boss’ backyard, in a rush to catch the train to southern England. (This trip was a whole other thread of the dream which I’ve mostly forgotten.) I have this hive and I take it out of the fridge, where it is resting, cause I am too curious to see the bees, real quick before I leave. I open it, trying to ignore the tickly on my hands from the bees walking on me, reminding myself that these worker bees have no stingers (dunno if it’s true, but it calmed dream-me enough to proceed). I’ve never been stung (in my waking life) and I don’t wanna start now. As I get used to the feeling I look and see that the bees are leaving legs and antennae on my hands as they land, which continue to tickle even when no bees are on there.

The hive seems almost empty. I put it down and turn it over and see the queen (cartoonishly large and colored) but I see that the nurse bees are prepping another queen, to replace it since that one isn’t working, I guess. I feel sorry for Old Queen for half a second, then I get distracted by the activity around New Queen. They are attaching all this stuff to her posterior (think the queen in Aliens, but smaller) and I can see it growing right before my eyes. How cool is this! I marvel. New Queen is swelling, she’s all soft and gel-like as if she’d just molted and is hardening. I can’t resist touching the queen even though there is an insistent dream-voiceover, as in a nature documentary, lecturing that touching them when they are soft like this is likely to kill her, especially (as I touch the wings) if I touch the wings. The voice is about a half-second behind my actions, but even if it weren’t I probably wouldn’t have reacted in time. I am sort of compelled to touch her and, having touched her, to put her down gently, which is when I touched the wings. I put her down and hope the universe didn’t notice and that she will work the odds and survive.

The hive gets wet somehow — I think due to my actions, not sure. I go inside. Everyone is washing dishes and cleaning up before the train. I think I’ll wrap the hive back up and put it in my boss’ fridge while I’m/we’re gone, I hope he won’t mind but I don’t plan on telling him anyway. When I go outside the hive is a soggy mess. Note here that I have NO idea what I am doing what with the apiary maintenance, and I am acutely aware that I am totally winging it. (I’m not too anxious about it though, they are only bees.) I pick it up anyway and set it on the counter next to the fridge and begin looking for Tupperware to put it in…but before I find anything it spills or decomposes or something, and honey runs all down the side of the drawers and into the drawer I had open. The drawer was on the bottom, was only around 8 inches square, and it had a chef’s knife (pointing up at about a 45deg angle, oddly) and some other utensils (strewn along the bottom) in it. Not a large volume of honey spilled, just enough to make it sticky, not enough to pool up or anything.

So much for the hive. I mentally write it off (I am even relieved that it took care of itself and became a non-problem, instead of needing more care from me) and turn my mind to getting the drawer unsticky before the train arrives, so when Boss returns he will not find a mess. This is everyone else’s objective also, but MY mess wasn’t in the normal course of things, it was extraneous to whatever had been going on to produce the other, more manageable mess, so I feel extry-responsible while they all just feel the obligation of the post-get-together guests. I take the drawer to the sink but someone is there. They seem almost done but there are only 5 minutes before the train.

I think the moral of this dream is that I should get back to work.

damn you, governments

They have blocked flickr.

Maybe this is a good thing but C’MON!

I WON A CHESS GAME AGAINST REAGANITE!

It was a timed game and I had 8 minutes to his 5 and his time ran out.

HE SAYS IT STILL COUNTS!

Speed games are the shit, because you can’t not make mistakes. Even if you are Reaganite.

Usefully, it also gave us my handicap. I had 1:40 left on my clock when his ran out, so now we play 7min to 5min games.

Endgame is a problem for me. I get down to the pawn-rook-king level, and R. is always at least a bishop up on me. And I’m not sure how to proceed with 5ish pawns on the second rank.

I’ve also heard of giving piece advantages, like the stronger player starting without knights. What do you say, R.? (Not for speed games.)

The latest obsession: chess

Yep, chess. Actually, this is a revisit. I first got into chess during the Kasparov-Deep Blue games in 1997, in which the best player in the world lost to an IBM computer. I followed it like it was the World Series, which it sorta was, what with the commentators and the Java applets to follow along in real-time. I read webpages until my brain filled up, I lost to the computer a few times, I had a lot of fun with the psychological and neuroscientific implications of the match. And then it was over, I had nobody to play with and no chess set or anything, so it all kinda faded.

This latest interest was prompted by running into a chess club playing for donations outside the Gallery Place Metro a few weeks ago…and THIS time, I happen to be dating a high school chess team veteran. Yep, R. and I are having fun getting re-involved and have played a few games so far. We are currently debating whether we should play all-out, leaving me to make mistakes slowly, or playing teaching or speed games so I get more games under my belt. Before we played a game I made him show me the famous 4-move checkmate that embarrassed me once in high school. (The chess dork who used it on me rubbed my “stupidness” in for days. Hypothesis: high school boys are responsible for turning high school girls off to chess.)

Where was I? Oh yes, not in high school anymore. R. and I have been to the park, where he played some kind of savant in a 1-minute game that moved so fast that pieces fell off the board and neither guy noticed. In two separate games, I had R. sweating for a bit, which I consider a great victory considering the years he has on me chess-thinking-wise. ‘Course then I’d make some big mistake that’d cost me the game….but hey, I’m making them later and later!

I can’t stand playing online, and R. can, so he brought his set over to my house. As it turns out, the cats are naturals at chess: T-Bone ALWAYS gains control of the center (by lying down on it) and Sue is a fount of innovative, unexpected moves (such as “king’s rook to carpet”).

That’s it for the obsession check. Look forward to some chess photos this month sometime.

More posts, need more posts.

Yes Hymes, I know….if only I had as much to say as you do!

Where to start after a long silence such as mine? I hate it when ppl apologize and make excuses for blog silence, so I won’t do that. If you’re sick of loading an unchanged page, I have one word for you: RSS. (Mom, I’ll help you set it up.)

Well, this blog is about my latest obsession, so how about an obsession check. First, the usual cast of characters.

Photography: Stagnant — sigh. Should get better when I visit my family at the end of the month, because my aunt wants me to do portraits of them. I find it hard to keep my eye open (if that makes sense) if I don’t carry the camera every day, and I find it hard to carry the camera every day when my eye isn’t open.

Baseball: On an upswing. You see, it seems that the Cubs are in second place and have a bit of momentum going into this here All-Star Break. And they were in town last week and I went to three consecutive games. I knew from experience that this is about 0.5 games too many, but I had been so baseball-deprived that it actually felt really good. I hadn’t been following too closely before that. There are so many new guys I had never seen play…and it’s hard to keep up with who’s who when all you have is names spoken on the radio….but now that I’ve seen (and scored) a few games, they are a lot easier for me to follow. Boy, was I spoiled, a season ticket holder living walking distance from Wrigley Field. Not to mention the hot dogs. Maybe there will be nice-enough housing near the new stadium in DC….but then I’d be even farther away from NIH.

In AL news, I actually have some. I finally made it to Orioles Park/Camden Yards a few weeks ago, on an invite from a Yankee-fan friend (the visiting team). The game was miserable. It would have been a good bit of baseball to enjoy, except we got there late, there were two rain delays and it was ultimately postponed, in our haste we parked very far away, and on the way out there was a comically slow-moving train blocking our egress (47 cars, yes, I counted). But it’s a very nice park which contrasts beautifully with RFK’s shitholishness. And during one of the rain delays they showed a documentary on Cal Ripken Jr, about whom I knew only a little. Apparently he was the second pro baseball player to actually be an indestructible robot. (And it could be argued he’s the first, what with not yet dying of a degenerative nerve disorder.)

Knitting: Ha! It’s summer. And as much as I think every fall “Gee if only I’d started knitting over the summer I could have so many awesome Christmas presents,” mittens are far from my mind right now.

Blogging: As if you couldn’t tell where this one has been on my list.

Music: Hmm, maybe I should refill my iPod. And listen to it sometime.

Politics: Fuck them fuckers. (I’m still in outrage fatigue. Thank goodness for Comedy Central’s news shows.)

Research: Ah, research. Lots been going on. Collaborations mostly, all stemming from the paper and how to take the data to the next level. In a nutshell, in that paper, we looked at one type of genetic variation in two samples. Now a third sample is publicly available AND there are other types of genetic variation to look at, not to mention the stuff that is publishable but didn’t make it into the first paper cause we were in such a hurry. I’m doing all 3 of those things, as well as trying to finish a paper that I really oughta have finished last year before I started the now-published paper. So now it’s a year out of date, which doesn’t help anything. Lessee, four papers in the works…how’re we doing on those clones?

Yoga: If I left work just a BIT earlier, I’d make it to yoga more often. But, see above. Also, I drag my feet because I’m SO out of shape that I feel embarrassed about going. How ridiculous is that?? I’d like to run, but it’s 750 degrees in DC these days, and I have asthma, making it hard to breathe unless I want to run at 4AM. Which I don’t. In case you were wondering.

That’s all the obsessions I have tags for in my sidebar. Stay tuned for tomorrow, in which I reveal…the current obsession!

“So, what are you doing next?”

So: this afternoon, when there was a lull in Science, Dr. Scientist (me) started a post about how crazy is the life of Dr. Scientist…but then Dr. Scientist got too busy to finish it.

Yep…I have been meaning to post about my big paper which came out last week, which is the thing I have been working on, but couldn’t talk about in detail, for the last 18ish months. It was a big secret, see, because we were trying to be the first group to publish on the topic (which, you’ll recall, is the genetics of bipolar disorder). Well, IT WORKED, y’all! Yay! All that work! Not for nothing!

We have surprised everyone. In fact, we have it from the head of NIMH (who’d be Boss’ Boss’ Boss’ Boss) that an even bigger bigwig (let’s call him BaB, for “Bigwig Among Bigwigs”) called him after reading the paper, saying “Why didn’t I hear about this?!” Heh.

This would be a day or two after I ran into BaB (at a graduate student poster session, of all things; I was there as a judge). Now his friendliness is legendary and I am not one to be intimidated by bigwigness, so I walked up, introduced myself and gave him the elevator pitch about the paper. A few hours later he called my boss and arranged permission to mention our paper in a Congressional subcommittee hearing on Monday. (Lest you think this was ALL because of me, BaB already had the paper, but his staff said he was not going to have a chance to look at it in time for the hearing. But probably when a young enthusiastic postdoc waylays you at a poster session and tells you she found a result for a psychiatric disorder that’s more significant than any that’s yet been published, it pushes the paper a bit more to the front of your mind.)

This whole bleeding-edge thing is new to me. Heck, in grad school I never even imagined I’d be doing science at the cutting edge of ANYTHING. I thought I had gotten used to it while writing the paper and nervously trying to figure out if we’d been scooped yet, but that was only the beginning. We had a little celebratory party last Wednesday, ~24 hours after the paper came out. You know how it is, “Yay us, our hard work paid off, let’s have some sandwiches.” And even there, EVEN AT THAT PARTY, sandwiches in hand, someone — who meant well, surely — asks me, “So Techne! What’s next??”

(Actually I was eating a brownie. Oh the weight I’ve gained in the last few months of sitting in front of the computer.)

More tales to come: tales of bigwigs and the science rat race, from the life of Dr Scientist. Just as soon as she gets a fucking minute to breathe.

Peer pressure

“Techne, going to the talk?”

It’s 11:50 and due to government hoop-jumping I only got in an hour before and so I’ve barely done anything yet. Talks really fuck with my flow in general, I’m sorta — you’ll be shocked to hear this — ADD/hyperfocusy when it comes to work. And I didn’t mark this talk in my calendar, which means it didn’t catch my eye.

But jeez, the whole lab is going! Our PI. All 3 other fellows including the one who barely speaks English. One of two technicians AND the senior non-PI scientist. IOW, everyone who’s in today who isn’t tied to the bench by a timer.

“Um, what’s it about?”
“Schizophrenia, cortical activation something.”
SCZ (as we abbreviate it)? That’s not even my area. That’s not anyone’s area in our lab. I ask who’s giving it and the talk isn’t familiar. Of course, me having a bad name memory and not “doing” SCZ, he could be a Nobelist in the damn field and I’d barely know. And “cortical”, that doesn’t sound too genetic. Sounds like all the cell biology stuff I ran screaming from in grad school. Yeah, definitely a talk I’d skip under normal circumstances, and my feet already hurt from my morning adventures in walking-all-the-hell-over-NIH.

“Where is it?”
“[Halfway across campus.]“

Sigh. My feet can just barely take that, and it’s SO damn nice out, and EVERYONE is going and look they’re already out the door. I pick up my notepad, which this week features a list titled “OMG I have so much to do” and has 10 items already, and join the crowd. After all, if everyone is going, maybe it will be good, right?

Yeah, you know what that sentence means as well as I do. Worst. Use. Of an hour. Ever. Some better uses of my time would have been:

Sleeping at my desk. It would at least have been restful, more restful than lecture-naps. Everyone has nodded off at a talk at one time or another, but once in grad school I got called out for snoring during a talk. That was seriously embarrassing, and now I live in fear of doing it again. Luckily nobody I knew was at that talk, but this time both Boss (PI) AND Boss’ Boss were there. (‘Course, Boss was sleeping himself. Later we traded staying-awake-through-lecture tips. I usually bite my hand as hard as I can stand, and kick myself/step on my toes under the table if there is a table. Along the same “pain” lines, he pulls the hairs on the back of his neck. Oh, the things one learns in one’s postdoc.)
Staring into space in an empty room. I could have meditated. Net gain in relaxation.
Poking myself in the face with my pencil. This could have gotten me injured and given me a good excuse to leave the hall, albeit a hard-to-explain one. Hmm, why DIDN’T I do this?

Now, don’t get me wrong. The talk was a perfectly decent talk for someone in the field or who cared about that sort of approach. It just wasn’t at all interesting to me. I have a hard enough time learning to be a geneticist, faking my way through electrophysiology is not something I’m into. I spent about half the talk trying, about another 1/3 biting my hand as hard as I could stand, and the last bit doodling. Here is what is written in the doodle-space of my “OMG I have so much to do” list.

• A very tiny stick drawing of a female figure, with hair sticking out in all directions and her hands on her face and a word balloon saying “HALP.” (This ungrammar is inspired by the weekend I spent reading lolcats.)
• Very tiny writing recapitulating what I remembered of the lolcats:
  • “WHAT R U DOIN? I’M STANDIN“
  • “OK, YOU GOT ME: I CAN’T READ“
  • “YEP, IT NEEDS MOAR INTERNETS“
  • (a favorite) “HAY GUISE I’M AN INDIAN LOL” (here are some other favorites which I did not recall)
• Very tiny writing saying “OH NOES I’S TRAPPED IN BORING”
• Very tiny writing saying “HALP I NEED A HALP”
• Less tiny writing saying “stand up for what U Need next time”
• Primary list of ppl for whom I need to buy Mother’s Day cards
• Secondary list of ppl for whom I need to buy Mother’s Day cards

Talk protocol is such that if you look like a grad student who might be mid-experiment you can leave whenever, but you need to have positioned yourself unobtrusively for people to buy it, and we all were sitting mid-row. You best believe I would have worked that shit had I been better positioned. It FINALLY ended, but the questions, of course, went on and on. All I could think was: great, now I am wasting MORE than an hour at this talk. (I wrote most of my lolcat phrases on my pad during this period.)

Protocol specifies that you can leave after the applause and before the Q&A, whoever you are. But I was mid-row and went with a large group and protocol FURTHER specifies — OK, strongly recommends — that you not leave individually if you all came together. I kept my eye on the three dudes at the end of the row who were blocking our egress and when they finally left I oh-so-subtly pointed it out to my PI.  “Look,” I said. “Those guys left, we’re clear.” “You guys are,” he said ruefully, “I’m stuck here. I’m having lunch with the guy.” (Lunch with a speaker is a tradition, there are anywhere from 2 to 15 people in attendance, so this doesn’t mean they were buddies.)

The next questioner’s question was an annoying non-sequitur, and I’d had enough. I got up and left without listening to the answer, walking over all our lab’s attendees as I went.  Even though it was probably the last question, I didn’t want to have to deal with being social with the labmates. I walked back to the lab all pissed off at the waste.  Well, it WAS a nice day, anyway.

Other members trickled in after me, and to the tech I said something like “Wish I hadn’t gone to THAT talk,” and he said “Me too.”  Wait.  Him too?  “Why did you go?” I asked. “‘Cause everyone else was?” “Yeah…”

Ding! I put two and two together as the light went on, illuminating the puzzle pieces as they jumped into focus.  Tech and I went because a critical mass had formed.  The mass formed because a few people were joining our PI, cause when the PI goes to a talk, it’s usually important.  The PI didn’t want to go, but the speaker was hosted by his boss, whose field the talk WAS in. I could just imagine the email from his boss encouraging him to come and lunch with this faboo researcher.  It was all just one long chain of peer pressure!

This is probably some kind of definition of power.

things that are awesome

Today’s laundry expenses: $15.00

Amount found in pockets: $23.42

It’s not every day one can make a profit on one’s laundry!

wasteful

From artist Chris Jordan, an art project about waste in America. Look at them all. (I had to shrink them to fit in the blog, so they are even more impressive than this…)

(zoom)

(more zoom)

Days of Our Internets: Life in the Tubes. Today’s episode: “Spam.”

From: Dan
Subject: Hey it’s Dan

My first serious boyfriend was named Dan. We haven’t spoken in years, not for any fighty reason, just how things go. Hmm say I. Wonder what the story is?

The gmail blurb: “Thought you should know of a new music site I stumbled across.”

Oh well.

Maybe I should email Dan.

Psychophobia

Friend hymes of blog Charlottesville Prejudice Watch is an advocate for the rights of those with psychiatric disabilities, and works to oppose forced treatments. She has a nice rant up about the VT shootings and how ridiculous some of the proposals for preventing such events in the future have been. An excerpt (emphasis mine):

…They also claim that changing the standard for commitment in this state would somehow have prevented this tragedy when no one even tried to have this guy committed since 2005. If he had been committed to an inpatient unit in 2005, he would have been out at least a year ago…

It is as if people with psychiatric illness are not people nor fellow citizens to these folks, let alone most likely members of their family… It is also as if psychiatry had superior[ity] to other medical specialties scientific methods of determining who is ill, what their illness is and what if any risk they might pose to themselves or others. That is a myth. A dangerous myth to people who daily die from the side effects of psychiatric drugs or from being restrained in state hospitals…

Even more amazing is folks denial that they could ever themselves be the subject of a psychiatric intervention…Are we so complacent about our liberties and the good intentions of our federal government these days that we want to trust them with more opportunities to lock up inconvenient or troublesome citizens?

I’ve been trying to keep in mind, as I hear people scramble around for someone to blame this tragedy on, that it’s merely human nature and this response will subside. After all, nobody REALLY thinks there is a way to reliably predict who is going to commit a violent act, and that administrators and authorities in Blacksburg were negligent in doing so…do they?

What do you think, readers?

gun control and suicide

Recent gun-related events virtually ensure an encore of one of America’s traditional performance art pieces in response to tragedy: Guns Don’t Kill People, Teenagers Kill People (introducing…the 2008 Presidential candidates!). Well, at least it will be marginally more informed than will the next potential performance, Video Games Made Him Do It. (And let’s hope we can avoid Who Let Them In Here, Anyway? especially since Geraldo and Bill O’Reilly knocked that one out of the park so recently.)

Well, I got no particular knowledge about all those phases, but I do have a gun control-related angle.

US residents of all ages and both sexes are more likely to die from suicide when they live in areas where more households contain firearms. A positive and significant association exists between levels of household firearm ownership and rates of firearm and overall suicide; rates of nonfirearm suicide were not associated with levels of household firearm ownership…the availability of lethal means increases the rate of completed suicide.

The finding got a big yawn around my lab, but then maybe the common wisdom about suicide isn’t as well known in the blogosphere as it is here in a lab full of psychiatric researchers. Commence lecture!

1. Suicide kills over 30,000 Americans a year. (More statistics can be found here.)
2. You may wonder why I use the passive voice up there, don’t people do the killing? Yeah: depressed people. You can’t talk about suicide without reference to depression/mental illness, and the decisions people make when depressed are (duh) not necessarily the ones they’d make when healthy.
3. To commit suicide is usually an impulsive decision. As a result it’s a common cause of death in young males.
4. The idea to attempt suicide is more viral than you’d think: it spreads like a meme. When a suicide is reported, there are often local methodological copycats (educating police forces and newspaper editors NOT to publicize details can cut down on this substantially). A particularly awful example of how fucked up this can get is the story of Golden Gate Bridge suicides, which I can’t even reread, it’s so depressingly infuriating.
5. Choice of method is opportunistic. (See above article.)
6. People’s estimates about a method’s lethality are not accurate. This has a lot of implications, among them the fact that women are more likely to attempt, but men are more likely to succeed. In large part this is because women use less lethal methods (pills) than men do (guns).*

The author of the study puts it simply: “In a nation where more than half of all suicides are gun suicides and where more than one in three homes have firearms, one cannot talk about suicide without talking about guns.”

Now, it’d be a helluva public health measure to void a constitutional amendment just to prevent suicide. I’m not advocating this as why you should support gun control, I’m not completely on any particular side of the issue. Just keep in mind, when the NRA types get rabid about their purported “rights,” that lots of these people have depressed kids at home who know where the ammo is. What are the 2nd amendment absolutists doing to prevent having to pry their own guns from their child’s cold, dead hands?

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*Because pills are such an ineffective way to commit suicide, there is a sexist misperception out there that women (who tend to use pills) intend suicide less seriously, and are just doing so as a “cry for help” or to get attention. But there is no correlation between lethality and seriousness: since suicides are so often impulsive and opportunistic, seriousness is hard to judge from the outside, easy to lie about from the inside, and impossible to determine for the successful. Nonlethal attempts are judged as less serious than lethal suicides because all lethal suicides appear seriously meant, whether they were or not.

give humans a break

I of course agree with this sentiment about the recent events in Virginia. (If you are too lazy to click on the link, the sentiment is: this is nothing compared to what’s happening in Iraq.) On the other hand, I think it is a bit harsh to judge the coverage in this way. Virginia is closer then Iraq. Americans are more likely to know the dead people there than those in Iraq. Is this a sin? Humans were ever so. We pioritize what and how we care about things based on their proximity to us and our interests.

(Ioz has more understanding of human nature than most bloggers, so I don’t mean to pick on him, his was just the first expression of the idea that I saw.)

On a lighter note, here is an image sent my way from Reaganite.

Jackie Robinson Day

So today Major League Baseball celebrates the 60th anniversary of its integration. If you don’t know the story, yet would like to call yourself an American, go read about it ASAP.

At the 50-year mark, MLB retired the number 42 for all teams, but apparently Ken Griffey Jr. had the idea for players to honor Robinson today by wearing 42. The idea has spread around the league and morphed into either “one dude on your team wears the number,” “a few dudes on your team wear the number,” or everyone on your team wears the number.” Personally, I prefer the last of these options, and think the position stated by the Twins’ Torii Hunter in the article — that it somehow dilutes the tribute to have too many people wear the number — is ridiculous. If only one or a few players get to wear #42, it’s then about those players — but it should be about Robinson himself. Here’s a shout-out to the teams that are all wearing #42 today:

Astros: All players
Brewers: All players
Cardinals: All players
Dodgers: All players
Phillies: All players
Pirates: All players

(Ahem. All National league, thankyouverymuch.)

I’m glad I don’t have tickets to any such games, because seeing 18 or 22 guys (if the coaches wear it too) all wearing #42 would make me ridiculously choked up. Things DO change here. Just ask Don Imus. Call me an idealist and/or a moderate, but it’s nice to pause every now and then from the struggle and take a measure of how far we HAVE come. Yeah, I know the changes are incremental (“with all deliberate speed”), often oddly motivated (women and the Civil Rights Act of 1964), and often have harmful unintended consequences (affirmative action and black students’ self-confidence). But as a member of a group that benefitted from the last century’s civil rights advances, it’s my opinion that one should take what one can get and turn it to one’s advantage, even if the motives of the givers are suspect. Half a loaf, and all that.

One suggestion I heard last season sometime about what to do with #42 is to begin a Jackie Robinson award for…I dunno how to phrase it, some sort of public antidiscrimination service/work undertaken by a baseball player or coach. It needn’t be awarded every year, just when the league/voters felt someone deserved it. Said person would get the honor of wearing 42 for the year. As nice as a day of remembrance like today is, that seems a deeper one: a daily reminder of the debt we owe to those who came before. Of course I’m also the person who thinks the DC baseball team should have been named after a Negro League team. But I guess more influential folks feel that systematic racism wasn’t SOOOOO bad of a sin that we need to be reminded of it every freaking DAY.

(OTOH, perhaps such measures would fade into the background. Hmm.)

Here’s an even more community-minded idea for honoring Robinson, from Forbes magazine. Maybe the league could honor the player who gave the most money to this fund with the right to wear #42. Even more interestingly, they could honor the player who gives the highest percentage of his salary, which would give a better chance for a younger player still under salary caps to give back and get recognition.

The neuroscience of loss, and egocentrism

Scroll down for the cheesecake. Keep reading for some meat.

Got an interesting idea from this post:

When people speak of losing a part of themselves when a loved one dies, they are speaking quite literally, since we lose the ability to effectively use the neural patterns in our brain that had self-organized to interact with that person.

What a great and accessible application of a neuroscientific idea to explain a psychological phenomenon — and it doesn’t even rid that phenomenon of its substance and depth.

I recently read Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking, which is an extensive exploration of the psychology of grief and loss (I recommend it). If you read it with this thought in mind, I think it will give you an interesting angle on why grief can take the shapes it does. This certainly makes me think of how the same book could be written about the neurological changes Didion underwent in that time…and how that’d be a completely different but also valuable book.

I, for one, have gotten value out of both approaches, at different times. In difficult emotional situations I fixate on coming to an understanding of WHY — what could lead a person to do act X? Only later can I process them at a more emotional level. In the train ride to my parents’ house the night we got the news of my aunt’s suicide, I read this book like a novel. It provides an exhaustingly comprehensive psychiatric perspective on suicide’s origins, from the personal all the way to the epidemiological level. It’s written by a clinician/researcher and popularizer who’s respected in both areas, which is no easy feat. It’s later now, and so Didion’s book has been important to the current stages.

While I’m making book recommendations, I found the suicide book a bit too depressing before I had a particular reason to read it. On the other hand, Jamison’s memoir of living with bipolar disorder is gripping and of general interest.

The rest of the ideas in the post are the standard kind of annoying “we’re so close to developing supercomputers that we can download our brains to, and therefore use to live forever” crap we can expect from a certain stripe/era of AI research. Oh, so many issues I have there. A few:

1) One of my favorite neuroscientific truisms is “if the brain were simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.” Where would a bit dump of our brains/minds even BEGIN? The upper-left-hand neuron? (What about cultures that read right-left?) Memories (“I was born a poor black child”)? And which historical point in time to capture? Should we do backups to keep it current? Save older versions, perhaps to retain health, and ditch the body once deterioration sets in? Not to mention the utter meaninglessness of a consciousness without physical input. Just look what sensory deprivation can do to an embodied brain.

2) Metaphors squelch understanding and new ideas, and all the more so when they try to cover more complex phenomena. “The brain is a computer” squelches understanding of its function because it ignores a lot of the types of connections made between neurons.

In fact, it’s just this disconnect between computer simulations of brain function and the actual functioning of the brain that switched me from computer science geekery to neuroscience, lo these 10 years ago now. In a Neural Networks class, I kept trying to make my network’s neurodes more like biological neurons, and got more and more impressed with the impossibility of the task and how it revealed how little we knew about the brain. Considering that each year of biological education teaches you more and more about what the last class didn’t even get near, to have finally run up against the limits of knowledge in a field was heady stuff. I switched majors posthaste.

N.B., the metaphor of DNA as blueprint/book of life is similarly harmful to the understanding of genetics. But that’s another post.

Yeah, I fully and humbly acknowledge that these objections may someday seem as hilarious as “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” and other statements are today.* In fact, one of the coolest things about extended lifespans, to me, is getting to see so many new things developed and so many old things proved wrong. Not to mention the chance that I could see the Cubs win the World Series, although my brain may need to be in a computer for that one.

In other news, vote for me for DC’s Sexiest Female Blogger. Here is some cheesecake to encourage you.

No, I have no idea who nom’d me (Reaganite swears it weren’t him), why I care, or why I would be OK being associated with some of the most gossipy damn people in the DC internet tubes. Since becoming aware of the Best DC Blog site on Monday, I tried to figure it out by reading a few comment threads there and “DC blog wars” posts on BigHeadRob’s blog, and I tell you whut: I’m never getting that two hours back.

Here’s another perspective though. While I had fun comparing the bizarreness to junior/high school on Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday we spent an hour in lab meeting discussing some psychiatric-genetics-research-field politics. And as any DC resident knows, politics is high school. When I tell him some of my hair-raisers, Reaganite assures me that scientist politics is not substantially different in form from Hill politics. So when we tell the poor kids who find themselves at the bottom of high school food chains that “it’s not always like this, it gets better, people grow up,” we are lying. Lying lying lying!

Other reasons I care. Well, I’m self-centered. Show me a blogger who isn’t. Heck, show me a human being who isn’t. I’m competitive too, in weird indirect ways that are hard to describe: more against past versions of myself than other people. In my defense, I think people who know me will agree that these are not my mortal-est sins. (Guess which is!)

Also, as a child, I was an ugly duckling. Glasses filling half my face, feathered hair, not grown into the nose yet…maybe if I win I’ll post a photo of those days. Yay for the exorcism of childhood demons. And how better to prove the old saw that DC is Hollywood for ugly people?

Also also, it’d make a truly hilarious addition to my imaginary business card. Dr. Scientist. Photographer. Sexiest Blogger DC 2007. OK, only sorta hilarious.

Yeah, I’m in Florida. Reaganite’s mom and I get on fine, as I knew we would. But we are all tired and stuff, and R. has to do some work, which is why I have all this goddamned time to blog. Shouldn’t have much more until I get back–going to Disney tomorrow, for the first time ever.

Vote for me!

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*As you may know, Bill Gates denies saying “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

Thanks, Gene

So yesterday leaving the Woodley Park Metro I see a trumpeter and a saxophonist playing jazz duets, and I’m all paranoid. Is this another experiment? Is that Wynton Marsalis? Am I on camera? Do I have time to stand and listen? Do I even like jazz??

Reader, I went to CVS. But! I walked slowly.

Someone at the best DC Blog voting likes that I have a thumbnail headshot. Well, because I like it so much, here’s the image in all its glory, where you can really appreciate the expression, earrings and dress combo. I really love the hell out of this dress, although nobody else does. Well, to hell with that! I’m going to Florida this weekend to meet Reaganite‘s parents….apparently it’s 80deg there. I shall pack it!

Hmm. Not the sexiest expression ever. Sorta weird to put up during a sexiness competition. Well, perhaps it counts as “vivacious.” We’ll see how quirky a sense of humor the nothing-to-do-at-work DC blogger community has. Anyway, I do have a secret weapon photo. And two cats.

I should really update my blogroll. Right after I do my taxes, find summer clothes that fit me and are nice enough to Meet The Parents in, get a present for The Parents, prepare my bod for the Florida beach, finish my Artomatic installation, pick up cat food, and correct the galleys of my article before I leave. Oh and somewhere in there I should be solving the mystery of the genetics of bipolar disorder (including the enigma of functional intronic SNPs), processing my pregnant friend’s wedding pictures, sewing up her baby’s booties, mailing it all off, calling her to catch up, and mailing two other packages back to the companies that fucked up the orders — but these can wait until after the trip.

Did I mention my taxes? I had it all scheduled for this weekend. One day of Artomatic, one of taxes. Except I sorta had an Artomatic meltdown on Saturday. 21 feet of wall space I had to fill. 21 FEET!!! Well, not only do I not have the money to nicely frame that much stuff, but I simply have not been shooting long enough to even have the catalog of images I’d be proud — or even simply “not embarrassed” — to display. I had one idea for filling it but in the end it didn’t look good at all. So I went back on Sunday and changed spaces. Thanks to epmd for his proxying and selection of a large space though–if I’d'a thought I’d'a had the option of such a big space, I might have asked him to pick a smaller one, but it didn’t even occur to me that they’d have room like that given what I’d heard about past shows! Actually, I owe a lot of people for AOM favors: miscelena and kneb, bsivad, birdcage and the AOM board, furcafe…the usual cadre suspects. Gee, hope I didn’t forget anyone.

I’ll have to lay in much cash for all those drinks I’ll be buying them at the AOM bars.

uh…I’m nominated…

UPDATE: OK, I wasn’t eliminated. Time for my ego and I to check out, especially as now it becomes clear I AM filler (of the innocuous kind, which is fine by me). Indeed, it’s hard to escape the impression that the whole BDCB site is filler for the “DC blog wars.” I was vaguely aware of them when I was attending more meetups and happy hours, last winter and spring, and I thought they were a fluke of some kind, or something that people had outgrown…apparently not. Anyway, the less said about them, the better. My snark skills are NOT up to the task, esp not at midnight.

Don’t vote for me right now, because it’s an elimination round.

Apparently the nom procedure is not as rigorous as all that. Whatevs.

Scarily, the competition is now for “the BEST and the SEXIEST.” Now that’s a higher bar.

Possible Best DC Blog nod…Sexiest Female Blogger???

I only half-follow the Best DC Blog site. I should RSS it, it’s often amusing — I haven’t so far because it’s so often got that slam book snarky vibe that reminds me of the junior high whimpering on the bed that I used to do. Anyway, this morning I noticed a link from it in my logs. How odd, I’m not a commenter there or on their blogroll. Well, it seems I have been nominated for Sexiest Female Blogger. By Michelle Malkin no less! (OK, really a Michelle Malkin hater. That’s 2 points in your favor, Michelle Malkin Naked.) Another mystery wrapped in an enigma. Have we met, MMN?

Perhaps I am meant to be filler for the list, and would be crossed off at an early stage with a snarky comment. Crossed off eventually would be OK, as I’m unlikely to win where there are far more exhibitionist types in the DC female blogger community. But to be first to go….ouch. The junior high bed-whimpering instincts are strong, but I got the psychological and physical chops to play this game now: confidence in myself, 20/20 vision, boobs, relatively flattering clothes, all the stuff I didn’t have back in the day when “She’s Like The Wind,” “Together Forever,” and “I Wanna Have Some Fun” were on Z95* and vests and bubble skirts were in…the FIRST time.

So, let the objectification begin.  Or, rather, resume: I have after all already posted/blogged this image.

That’s about all that’s PG rated (or is cleavage PG-13 now?) that I will share, image- or story-wise. After all, my mother reads this blog. Hi Mom! (Although she gets far less grossed out by these things than my sister does. Hi sister!)

Would it help to make an appearance at a blogger happy hour, in a nice little v-neck and heels? (I Blame the Patriarchy readers: they will, of course, be comfortable heels. I don’t own any other type. Hey, I never claimed to be a radical** feminist. Unfortunately for me, Katie Roiphe was an influence at this tender age too…although I’m also not a lipstick feminist.)
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*I owned all of these songs. If you wish to mock me, I’d like to hear YOUR Worst-Of of what you were listening to in 1988. Anyway, I mark this as a dark era of prehistory to my musical awakening which began in 1991 with REM’s Out Of Time and Primus’ Sailing the Seas of Cheese. Also, during the late 80s my mom played a lot of Leonard Cohen and WXRT, which was at its peak then. This made me much cooler later on.

**I typed “radial feminist” at first. Heh.

LASIK notes

Immediately afterwards, the difference was apparent. Instead of focus dropping off over distance, the blur was the same throughout the range, like I was looking through Vaseline’d lenses. Direct light glows like a chintzy wedding portrait artist’s filter. The effect diminishes every day. Despite night vision complaints being the most common at this point in recovery, I haven’t noticed much difference. I always saw a lot of glare at night, especially when inside a car. I suppose there is more, but irritating is irritating, y’know?

The morning after I was 20/20 at least, in fact I’d say they were 20/20 the first night. I wasn’t tested any higher, although to be honest I am hoping for overcorrection and super-vision. The painful bits of the experience were only the stinging as the anesthetic drops wore off post-surgery. That’s where the Valium really helped, in getting me to sleep when I got home. When I got up things were fine.

Note my eye hickey, from the machine that immobilized my eye to make the flap:

OK, you all think that’s the height of gross, but at least it’s not a decapitated rat’s head. You should thank me, Dr. Scientist, for small favors. Like not showing you both eyes.

It feels a bit anticlimactic, to be honest. I feel absolutely no different, except every 2 hours I have to put eye drops in. It’s like wearing contacts. I imagine the differences will accumulate as I get used to the lack of the contacts-specific drawbacks. For example, I’ve never liked naps much, because taking them in contacts means you wake up with your eyes all natty gross, and even wearing glasses the last few years, my habit against naps is sorta engrained. It’s a lot easier now!

I wake up at night and read the clock to my boyfriend. Because I can. I’m really looking forward to the week point when I’m out of the danger zone of sweating into my eyes and can go to yoga and be able to see the instructor.

And that’s my LASIK report, submitted on post-surgery Day 3.