rats and neuroscience

i had a dream that mac was a rat-sized rat. i was on a bicycle and he was on leash. he was running along with me, keeping up effortlessly. i could hear the clack of his toenails on the ground. i reached down and held him up by the back to see if he would stop running, but he still reached down to the ground and kept running along. i think this dream is stimulated by the conversations i’ve had with people about using rats in experiments. i have a picture of one of kj’s rats on my wall. i don’t think i’d get a rat for myself, but i am fond of them. there’s something i need to do in the near future that would probably make more sense to do with a rat, but i might use multiple mice instead.

i’m at the last day of the society for neuroscience conference. it’s been a great conference, as was the one i attended immediately before it. both were in san diego. i can’t wait to get home and be alone with my dog. so much time with other people profoundly wears me out.

i’m about to transcribe my notes into the computer in an effort to consolidate my memories of the talks. no, of course this isn’t procrastination. i don’t know why you’d say that.

i'm so irritable that i am feeling murderous toward the guy sharing the table with me who bounces the table as he types. i took my laptop off the table and left my notebook that i'm transcribing from on it. now my paper notebook is bouncing around as he types. wow, i really need to spend time alone.

roberta got me the most fantastic birthday present: tickets to see dolly parton. now, no one i know (besides roberta) is a dolly fan, so i'll have to take someone basically against their will. but i love dolly parton! it's a brilliant present, because i would be unlikely to buy tickets for myself. thank you roberta!

what happens when you play a country song backward?

You get your girl back, you get your car back, you get your job back, you get your dog back...

For anyone who has doubts that I've gone into a serious profession, just take a look through the 2004 Ig Nobel awards which were announced last night. The award for medicine was for an article that found that "the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate." Other award gems were for patenting the comb-over, examination of the scientific validity of the 5 second rule about eating food that's fallen on the floor, a physics investigation into the dynamics of hula hooping, and the vatican for outsourcing prayers to india. The prize in biology was awarded for work on herrings communicating by farting. Which brings me back to the original topic of potty humor. Now that I've enriched your day, I'll be getting going.

potty humor

From a patient information leaflet:

YOU MAY NOTICE THE TABLET SHELL in your stool. This is harmless. This is only an empty shell. Your body has already absorbed the medicine.

This slayed me. Especially the caps.

In other news, I'm back from my trip. I hired someone to paint the guest bedroom and he did a great job, prepping 4 peeling doorways and repainting them as well as the entire bathroom. Mac was extraordinarily well cared for by all involved. I cleaned the apartment last night in a flurry before a roommate interviewee came over. She seems promising. It's nice to have the place clean. I feel so much better when I do things. I'm not sure it doesn't work the other way though: when I feel better, I can do things. In any case, I did something last night and I felt good about it. It's nice to be in a clean place. Now if only my bedroom were as clean and organized.

I listened to almost the entire presidential debate last night, a first for me. I typically get impatient listening to politicians and stop listening. It seems like they're rarely saying what they mean. I thought last night's debate was pretty good.

Ok, time to go to work.

there's a new sheriff in town

"Hey, did you see that CXT truck made by International. Biggest pickup/SUV ever made! Dwarfs the Hummer. A beauty. Hey I always loved the Scout. International Scout II is my baby. Where can I buy one of those? Loved it. Company says it's NOT putting those back in production. Too bad." -fortune mag

"The bad news is that this truck is unlikely to have the square bolts that so many grew to love about the old 50's Internationals. That is, of course, if you measure love by the curse words thrown at them...It looks more like a rig than a truck. It carries six tons, tows twenty and is nine feet tall. Yes, it is all wheel drive. International has entered if not jumped ahead of the SUV highway arms race." -some mag i never heard of

I find this especially interesting given the news that many SUVs are actually illegal on residential streets in many California cities. The SUVs include Chevy Suburban and Tahoe, the Range Rover, the GMC Yukon, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Sequoia, the Lincoln Navigator, the Mercedes M Class, the Porsche Cayenne S, the Hummer and the Dodge Ram 1500 pickup (with optional Hemi), per http://slate.msn.com/id/2104755/.

On a different note, I'm leaving going East for a week. Mac will be in the good hands of my lab mate and her husband. I'm looking forward to taking time off work, although I feel perpetually behind. I've been looking at a book called Getting Things Done. I think my system for tracking things I need to do is pretty good; I'm just not good at doing the things. Maybe I need to be more brutal about not doing things I don't like to do. I usually have energy for things I'm excited about. I was thinking this morning about how both my parents seem to be people who have energy to get enormous things done. I feel like I generally have little energy.

tv makes you think

kj and i passed a poster for a tv show today while we were driving to the ice cream store. i mentioned that, like the name of the show, my grandparents' names were jack and bobby.

kj: the premise of the show is interesting - what are tomorrow's future leaders doing today.
me: i've been reading a little bit of the clinton biography. the stuff he did as a kid was amazing. he went to regular summer camps and special leadership ones that involved real world-type coalition building and such. if you met him when he was 14, you would have thought, this kid is going to do something.
kj: and if you met george bush at 14?
me: even if you met him now...
kj: you'd never guess he was the leader of the free world.

1 H3art Junk Ma!l

harriet got me started on this project, writing a poem using entire subject lines of spam mail. here are her rules:

the only rule is that each line must be an actual spam subject heading in its entirety. repetition of the whole subject is permitted. [...]punctuation may be added for clarity (or what passes for clarity).

i get very little of the kind of spam that generates serendipitously lovely word combinations, so mine is many times over more pedestrian than harriet's.

lol, u just have a little little bro shanty bargepole

sorry you didn't make it.
u still angry me?
holdout, jive somnolent.
read about this
imitating
moravia. intensify pessimal raman
from mr. eli mast.
congratulations.

hey
can you come check me out,
look at this
ecclesiastic dodecahedron?

see this
interesting
afterword?

who cares?

look at this.

who cares?

[all sic]. i'll also share two of my favorite junk mail subject lines ever. the first is "viagra, it's for more than just sex." ok, what's it for exactly? increasing one's blood pressure? i would imagine marketing something directly connected to sex is pretty much the apex of the advertising job. sex is what everything else gets compared to. you're already there folks! you've already got the best tie in! i think they're only using this construction mindlessly (see entry below about what a tiresome person i can be, i mean about the inaccurate use of the word 'literally').

the other of my favorites is "go on a blind date with over 100,000 singles!" i think i've raved about this one online before. what could be a worse curse than to go on 100,000 dates, even if they weren't simultaneous? if i went on a date every day, it would take me 273 years to go on that many dates. if i lived to be a hundred years old, i'd still have to go over 4 dates per day to make it to 100,000 dates. socializing twice a week is enough to put a strain for me.

i went to gary and isabel's for a birthday dinner for gary, with kj coming as a surprise. it was lovely. i got to meet kj's squeeze too. i'm still feeling well. yay! gary and isabel have done many nice things to their townhome, and i'm feeling encouraged to do the same. first i must do some painting! that's next on my list.

homeowner needs

although i want to buy some tools for my house, this excavator is not one of them. make sure you notice the size of the cars and people right next to the machine. the scale is enormous.

i've been a bit blue lately, lonely. i think some of it is delayed/repressed frustration with the homebuying process, how hard it was and how most people do it with someone else. i have been intensely cheap since this process started, refusing to buy something at a price that i would be willing to pay if the seller weren't making so much profit. i think it's because i feel like i got such a raw deal in the homeowner process. i'm happy with the price i paid for my place, and i think it's a great home and a great investment. still, i feel that in many small ways i was undermined and misled. as a result i am especially mistrustful.

roberta and holly have separately informed me that i'm cheap (in a very supportive way, so much so that i know they must be quite serious). i know that i was raised by wolves and sometimes don't know how to provide myself with the necessities of life. i've gotten better over time. in college, julia told me about someone who wouldn't buy herself menstrual products. this kind of help is appreciated. holly and roberta convinced me that it's ok to buy a new refrigerator, that it's ok to buy a lamp, and gave me lots of other advice. i know i'm still cheap by their lights. at the same time as i try not to live like a depression baby, i'm proud of being thrifty. i do wildly detailed and extensive research before buying any product. i don't have a drawer full of string though.

today ended up being a nice day in spite of starting off blue like the last few days have been. i had a nice lunch with people from the lab. i learned a practical skill in the lab. i invited some people to go away for some unspecified future weekend, and they were excited. i interviewed two good roommate candidates. kj's coming tomorrow and we're going to a great dinner party tomorrow night. right now, things feel not so bad.

literally, an entry

i watched a lot of the prime time coverage of the olympics. one of my pet peeves was aired. one of the announcers, the guy who announced the diving, was talking about how strong the chinese fan presence was at the diving competition. he pointed out that you could see many red flags behind the platform. he said, imagine what it will look like in beijing olympics. "a sea, literally a sea, of red."

people have taken to using the world "literally" as some kind of generic word of emphasis. it makes me want to become a grammarian. i gaffe a lot, especially here, but it astounds me that people (professional announcers) don't know what they're saying.

olympic remodeling

today i changed a deadbolt lock for the first time. hurray. i made some progress with the house (by which i mean home/apartment/place) in general. who knew putting in drawer linings could be so rewarding? and i love my new vacuum cleaner. i bought home improvement for dummies. witness the new leaf.

i turned on the tv today for the first time since i moved. i love watching the olympics. there’s cable reception here even though i didn’t ask for it to be turned on, so i get a good picture. without the cable, there's no picture at all.

it reminds me of when galen and i got fancy cable at my place during the 2002 olympics. he brought over his old tv. we set them side by side, tuned them to different events, and gorged ourselves on olympic goodness. i’m not sure what it is about the olympics that is so appealing. i really like hearing the stories of the athletes, although it’s kind of disappointing to hear so little about non-americans. it’s cool that they put olive wreaths on the medalists. the cycle road race event today was really cool – an unknown, sergio paulinho, came in second.

i’ve rearranged my bedroom so that there’s a desk area. now i’m looking for a screen to keep it out of view.

i took mac to the vet today to look at a sore on his nose and a lump on his chest. the lump turned out to be a harmless fatty tumor, and the vet wasn’t worried about the sore. so it’s good. he’s taken to the walk-in closet. it’s his den, his lair. it’s pretty cute. i send him there when he barks out the window, and he retreats there on his own. friday holly and i came to my place for lunch. it’s great seeing mac more often.

hiroyuki tomita, a male japanese gymnast, has funny hair. aren’t you glad you read this entry?

Los Angeles, more alien than Mars

I guess one of the things I find odd about this is that they didn't know how to rotate the picture, so it looks like the rack is on its side. But what I find the most odd is this: "won on the Price is Right."

Brand New Wrought Iron Bakers Rack with wine rack - won on the Price is Right. 6ft x2Ft wide. Free delivery in Los Angeles or Orange County Area

Pessimism, the other white meat

Don't get me wrong, I'm ecscatic about my new place. Still, there've been some hiccups. Sorry about my long gap of no blogging. Mac's birthday is Tuesday (and Dad's too); I'm having people over. I'm also corresponding with a few people about being my roommate. I'll be showing the place in the next few days, boxes and all.

hi gia -

i moved in on saturday. the key pickup went perfectly smoothly - thank you. unfortunately, there are still a few things that need to be worked out. will you do me the favor of sharing this with george? thank you.

there's stuff that was left behind here by the sellers that i assume is garbage, stuff like a half-filled peanut butter jar, a half-filled syrup bottle, garbage can lid, etc. i'm not especially happy about that or the inch-thick cat hair and crusty cat vomit on the carpet, but when those were the only things i'd seen, i wasn't planning on bringing it up with the sellers.

that changed. i have come across a few issues that need to be addressed. these are: the missing refrigerator, a missing garage remote, and stacks of bricks and paint cans on the porch. i'm not willing to dispose of 30 bricks and 5 cans of paint. it's my understanding that the air conditioners were also supposed to stay, but i don't really care about those. this was my understanding because the escrow agreement has added, not boilerplate, language that says that the sale includes "any and all appliances." i'm working without a refrigerator, and two coolers of frozen fish and meat have gone bad. this is an expensive inconvenience.

the drains were not fixed, they're still really slow. i thought they were going to fix them and some other thing that was brought up in the pest report. what happened with that?

to resolve these problems, i propose that the sellers pay to have the carpets professionally cleaned, either give me the fridge that was here before (which i saw - i don't want some other old fridge) or reimburse me for a new one, bring by the missing remote, and haul away the bricks and paint.

i imagine that it sounds like i'm picking out every little thing, but there's a fair amount of stuff that i'm omitting from this message. i know moving is a hectic thing and we don't necessarily get to accomplish all the things on our moving list, but these problems are outside normal inconvenience. these issues would have come to light when i had more bargaining power been if the walk-through happened after the sellers had moved out, which makes me feel a bit taken advantage of, especially given that i didn't charge them for staying those extra days.

can you drop me a line monday to give me an update?

thanks,
holly

p.s. there are also some things here that the sellers might want: two drawers in the built-in dressers in the walk-in closet, 4 large canisters of powdered baby formula, a large box of sweet 'n low packets and some cans of liquid baby formula.

A new meaning to "elective surgery"

3 Accused of $97-Million Rent-a-Patient Scheme...Authorities say that more than 5,000 people, from August 2002 to April 2003, were taken to the Unity Outpatient Surgery Center, where they underwent procedures they didn't need, including colonoscopies and surgeries for hemorrhoids, pain management and sweaty palms.

Blogger's spellecheck wanted to replace 'colonoscopies' with 'salonkeepers.'

p.s. The self-loathing episode has passed. Phew.

What computer pros listen to, by job type

developers are headbangers, microsoft certified pros are britney fans, and management goes for mozart. linux users tend toward electronica, and security goes for the dead.

via slashdot.

lightening up with black humor

i was watching "i love the 90's" last night, a show that recaps the pop culture events of a particular year. the year in question was 1997, the year in which 39 members of the heaven's gate cult killed themselves in an attempt to rendez-vous with the spaceship they believed was trailing the Hale Bopp comet. all the cult members were dressed alike when they were found, including identical pairs of black nike sneakers. trey parker was commenting on this on the tv show. trey parker is the co creator and everything-er of South Park. i met someone who was a friend of his in high school who told me that trey had been my neighbor when i lived on brook forest road in evergreen colorado as a kid. so i was predisposed to like him. but his comment about heaven's gate slayed me: "what's tragic about that? dying in the hospital with tubes sticking out of you? that's tragic. go out in sneaks thinking you're going up in a spaceship? genius."

2 days, 18 hours and 22 minutes of self loathing

thursday i had class in the morning and the end of program banquet in the evening. i went home in the afternoon to buy dog food. i napped at home and woke up 20 minutes before i had to leave. i fed mac, did a few things around the house, and then left for school at around 5:40pm. i was headed east with rush hour traffic. i merged with slow traffic, which gradually sped up. i could see the traffic in my lane up ahead a little bit through the windows of the suburban in front of me. i watched the faster lane to my left in my mirror. when it looked plausible, i turned to see how fast traffic was approaching. it looked ok, so i sped up as i was turning forward and i hit the car in front of me hard. i'm guessing i was going 15 miles an hour and he was going about 5. the guy was really nice, although we were both shook up. my neck has been sore, but it feels much better today. i have a bruise the size of an orange on my leg. his bumper and back doors (it's the kind of suburban with two side-by-side barn doors in the back) are damaged. we've handed it off to insurance.

i feel like a complete idiot. when i rear-ended the little toyota (in february or march i think), the problem was a combination of impatient driving in heavy traffic and my miscalculation of scout's stopping distance. i was almost stopped by the time i hit the toyota. i felt like an idiot, but i could see what happened. here, i have no idea besides bad judgment. in hindsight, i should have just stayed in the lane i was in. i generally don't like to do that because there's lots of merging in and out of that lane because of the closely spaced exits through glendale. it's not one of the terrible highway areas that i am especially vigilant about on my regular drive - i don't usually drive that direction in rush hour. i'm immeasurably grateful that the other driver and i weren't hurt worse than we were (he said his neck was sore too) and that i'm moving across the street from school. did the stress of buying a home, firing my realtor, and teaching contribute? did the fact that i had a meltdown earlier that day about how disappointed i was about how the yess program was organized contribute? sure, but everyone has bad days and times of high stress. i really don't know what to do to address this. these are the only two traffic accidents i've caused in my life, and they are 5 months or less apart and they happened within 1/2 mile of each other, on opposite sides of the highway. they're both rear-end collisions while changing lanes. should i take a defensive driving course? in this case i don't think the collision would have been avoided if i wasn't in scout. scout was undamaged. i think if i had had a better seat belt i wouldn't have slid forward and banged up my leg. it's my experience that factory installed seat-belts keep you tightly in your seat. in this case i think the lap belt was a little high. also, it might have helped to have a higher headrest.

holly humorously suggests that the data supports my keeping scout. if i'm going to keep rear ending people, she says, at least only one car is being damaged in the process.

i'm really annoyed at myself, and it shows up in my dreams. the morning after the collision, i dreamed that i had a car that i couldn't control, and it rolled into people. i dreamed that in two separate dreams. this morning i had a dream that some guy (a stranger) didn't like my haircut. it's too long for you, can't you tell that? he said.

roberta suggested that i schedule a time for getting out all my annoyance with myself. not only was i not successful in postponing the onset of the annoyance, but i seem unable to shut it off. i guess it will pass in time. teaching is over, so maybe i'll start to feel less stressed. escrow closes next monday. i'm worried that everything won't be ready. ok, maybe stress won't decrease any time soon.

My realtor, Lu Gordon

I realized that she reminds me of the fairy godmother in Shrek.

We thought you'd be interested because...

Roberta went to the Amazon site the other day. Here's what she read:

My Life was released today; We thought you'd be interested because you bought Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. An exhaustive, soul-searching memoir, Bill Clinton's My Life is a refreshingly candid look at the former president as a son, brother, teacher, father, husband, and public figure....

Tearoom Trade is a commonly assigned sociology classic about fieldwork on the phenomenon of men who have sex with men but mostly live lives of married heterosexuals, which is interesting enough. But what connects it to My Life? Impersonal Sex in Public Office? If it was a goal of Amazon to titillate or provoke, I think they succeeded.

Zuma Beach and Spiderman 2

sunday jason and i went to zuma beach. i had a crappy morning before that - holly and i had taken the dogs to the park and her kouzo attacked mac. i think beast is physically ok, since i couldn't find any cuts or anything on him. he was stressed and nervous. poor baby. then i went home and felt too exhausted to plan a beach day, especially if it was going to be crowded and traffic would be bad. i lay on the couch and felt sorry for myself. i had been playing phone tag with my realtor, planning to fire her when i talked to her. the suspense was killing me, and i was unhappy already, so i called her again. the conversation went as well as it could have from my end. we agreed that her manager would handle the rest of the sale. i called roberta, for the 40th time that weekend, and she commiserated. i started feeling better. jason and i made plans to go to the beach.

glendale was hot, but by the time we got to santa monica, it was overcast and cool. we went past malibu to zuma beach, and the weather was perfect. when we got there we went for the parking lot, but then decided to get some deli sandwiches. when we got back to the parking lot, it was closed. we crawled along a small road with a million other cars. we passed a very small space which the jason's subcompact car surprisingly fit in. so we parked right next to the beach for free. we laid around eating for a while, then put all the stuff in the car and went for a walk. around 5, we headed back into the city and went to see spiderman 2. we went to the vista theater, which is awesome. i didn't like the movie hardly at all though. it was heavy handed and slow. j.k. simmons stole the movie as the owner of the bugle.

congrats to sam

when i was doing a rotation in richard andersen's lab at caltech, i was working with sam musallam. he published an article in science this week (subscription only, sorry), which he mentioned would also be covered in the wall street journal. but most importantly, it was mentioned on metafilter! here's an article in new scientist that's publicly available. sam's going to be looking for a job soon, and i think this will be great (flash) for him.

useful, hopefully

i have had a couple extra gmail invitations for a while. i heard about gmail4troops.com, which connects people with invites to military folks who want accounts. after i registered with them, i didn't hear anything for a while. yesterday i got two requests, and now i've sent off the invitations. the activity might be due to this article in the stars and stripes.