ludricious

Misdirected e-mails: greatest hits

2011-01-24T18:08:00.003Z

(cross-posted from Facebook)
I have a very common name. I have the most obvious e-mail address that could be associated with my name. Many people who share my name get confused and give out my address instead of their own; or possibly their correspondents guess wildly and never imagine that there could be a real person on the receiving end of their attempts at communication. Whatever the reason, I get a LOT of misdirected messages, sometimes with resumes, addresses, banking information, or naked photos attached. The following are some of the gems of my collection. It's text-only, but proceed with caution: some of the messages towards the end may induce mental images that cannot be mentally unseen.

------------------
[I really hope this wasn't an attempt to hire me as an assassin.]

"Ian Boots"
Philip to me

Hello Rachel.
I would like to use a photo of yours for a story on Ian Boots.
Though I can't pay for it right now, if you have a website, I would be more than willing to put your site on mine as a text link.
And of course, for next year, when I have the budget to pay for shots, I would hire you to shoot players for me.

Could you get back to me on this?

-------------
[isn't she sweet]

Merry Christmas!

Andrea to ...

Good morning ladies,

I was just called as a visiting teaching district leader and am lucky to have the opportunity to get to work with all of you! Hopefully you are all ready for Christmas and have been enjoying the Christmas season so far. Just wanted to send some Christmas wishes your way. May the Spirit of the Lord bless you and your loved ones this season and always.

Merry Christ-mas!

--------
[how do you get Postel from Lewis??]

Hello!
t***@columbia.edu to me

Dear Ms. Postel,

I hope all is well. I am a recent graduate (May 2, 2009) from Columbia
University School of Engineering currently searching for a full time
analyst position at Credit Suisse. I am currently working at the
Portfolio Group Analytics at BlackRock, Inc. I've learned a lot of
market fundamentals in this position and wish to further develop my
passion for finance at your firm. Based on my knowledge of the GMSG division at Credit Suisse, I believe my ambition coupled with my analytical and interpersonal skills with allow me to make a strong impact as an GMSG Analyst. I am inquiring at this time if there are any open positions within your firm, as I would love the opportunity to work for the GMSG group at Credit Suisse. I have attached my resume for your review.

Please feel free to contact me at any time via email or phone at
610-***. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best,
Frank

---------
[This is one of several messages about this event--they REALLY wanted me to come]

Nursing Times Awards 2009 - Guest Names Reminder

Dear Guest,

I hope you are looking forward to the Nursing Times Awards 2009 that are fast approaching on the 18th November.

Just a reminder that the deadline to submit your guest names for your table or seats is Monday 9th November.

Please fill your names in the spreadsheet attached and return to no later than Monday 9th.

Tickets have been dispatched today.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

thank you
Victoria.

----------------------
[One of many CVs that this ad got me]

Sales Assistant Vacancy

Hannah to me

Dear Madam,
Please find attached my CV regarding you current Vacancy in your Jewel Nation Birmingham store. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any further information you may require.

Yours Sincerely

Hannah

cv1.doc

----------
[and another]

sales assistant vacancy

Zoe to me

After our previous phone call i have e-mailed you with an attachment of my cv and covering letter

look forward to hearing from you.

Zoe.

-----------
[I would kind of like to be able to give a talk on pediatric cardiology]

RE: academic session

Next Tuesday, at 2 30PM, we will have 2 academic talks, Sarah Pasquale on KD and Rachel Lewis on ECMO in pediatric cardiology. It would be nice if we could have the ICU attendings come if possible for this teaching activity and discussion.
Thanks,

Usha

--------------------
[I wonder who Harrison and Eric are and why Harrison is so much better than Eric. The document had confidential banking information in it]

info you requested

Tom to me

I'm really glad to hear you have Harrison - I didn't know if I'd like Eric as well! Talk to you all tomorrow.

doc20090910201824.pdf

Same Tom:

Info we spoke about today

Tom to me

Rachel,

Attached is both Good Faith Estimates (Ooltewah and East Brainerd). They should certainly be very close to the actual numbers. Look them over with Harrison. Should you all have any questions, don't hesitate to call me on my cell after hours.

[I didn't call him on his cell after hours but I probably would have if he'd included the number]
-------------------

Syllabus

Robin to me

Rachel,
I don't have a syllabus for any humanities classes to date. The professors
usually produce them closer to the start date.

Robin

-----------------------
[I totally should have asked them to pay for my transportation to the interview]

Invitation to Interview

Barbara to me

Good morning Rachel:

I mailed you a formal invitation this morning to come and interview at our facility but I am emailing you a copy also to save time.
As the letter states, we interview on Tuesdays and will be interviewing through October. If you would like to accept our invitation please let me know what day would be convenient for you to come to Atlanta to interview and tour our facility.

If you need to reach me you may call my office at 404-*** or email me.

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta@Egleston

------------
[This one made me nervous--does he know something I don't know?]

David to me

I hope the move goes well and that you arrive in the US without incident! Talk to you when you get here.

----------------
[another interview offer: this Rachel Lewis seems to have given out my e-mail both while applying for jobs and when posting notices for available positions when she got a job as a manager. I wonder which other of her life events I'll get to witness.]

Invitation To Interview

Simon to me

Rachel,

As discussed on Monday I am delighted to invite you to a formal interview with HPJ Jewellers.

I will be interviewing you for the position of Designate Branch Manager on Wednesday 25th of March AT 0930hrs (Venue TBC).

Prior to your interview please give some thought to the following scenario:

Brief:

You are successful in your application and have successfully completed your probation period.
You are placed in a high profile Flagship Store as permanent Branch Manager.
The Store is seriously under-performing in all aspects of sales, service, operations.
The Store Team believe that all performance issues are because of the recession.
The Challenge:

What would you do to influence the Store Team to deliver better sales, service, operational performance moving forwards ?
How would you change the current Store Team perception that everything is Ok ?
I will confirm the venue for interview by the close of business on Friday.

Regards,

Simon.

-------------
[I wonder if she got in]

Columbia Postbac Premed Application

Amy to me

Dear Ms. Lewis:

Thank you for your application for admission to Columbia University’s Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program. In order for the admissions committee to review your application for the spring 2009 semester, the Office of Admissions must receive the following items without delay:
...

Unofficial copies of transcripts and test results may be emailed directly to me or faxed to 212.***. If you have any questions regarding your application or the admissions process, please do not hesitate to contact our offices at 212***.

Sincerely,

Amy
Columbia University School of General Studies

----------------
[this one may be one of my favourite exchanges of all time]

Tonight

***@***.ac.uk to me

Genevieve

Sending this from college email because the other wretched one is not
working again. So cannot read you messages from earlier yet!
I will work on the potential arguments, but without much conviction. You
do not really have to manipulate me, I am already round your little
finger.

I got home before herself, which is good, as it helps in being later on
other occasions.

Each time I see you it gets better, and the leaving gets worse. That's
just how it is and how it will be until something gives.
Thank you coming to see me, but mainly just for being you.
Will write in the morning, and in the meantime will just think and then
dream, and then think again, of you my Darling

Clive
xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Rachel to ***

Hi there. I just wanted to let you know that this e-mail is
misdirected. Perhaps you should double-check Genevieve's correct
address. In your situation it could be very unfortunate to have
e-mails go astray.
cheers
Rachel, not Genevieve.

***@***.ac.uk to me

Rachel (not Genevieve)

Thank you for your consideration! Duly checked and error identified.

Clive
[I was wowed by his savoir-faire--most adulterous professors wouldn't have the nerve to write back. Also, facebook keeps suggesting that I invite him to be my friend. That would be...awkward.]
---------------------

jthomasmobile: have you seen that?
me: I'm sorry, I don't understand
jthomasmobile: I just sent you an email which should have appeared probably six inches over my IM
me: I saw the picture but I didn't recognize the people or location
did you mean to send it to someone else?
jthomasmobile: it's Tony
me: I don't know who that is
jthomasmobile: oh damnit
jthomasmobile: do you have any idea who I am?
me: nope, sorry
jthomasmobile: I apologize, this must be the wrong email address
me: no problem. I get a lot of misdirected e-mails
jthomasmobile: you didn't go to Amherst?
me: nope.

-----------------
[Apparently there's a Rachel Lewis at JP Morgan. I got a couple of notes from her colleagues, as well as this.]

Resume

Alex to me

Ms. Rachel Lewis:

My grandmother, Rosalie, gave my resume to your mother earlier this summer, but I thought I would send another copy to you to make sure you received it and to tell you a little bit more about myself. I am currently entering my third year at the University of *** and will be starting the undergraduate program at the *** School of Commerce this fall. When I first heard about the abroad opportunities at JPMorgan, I was very excited and felt that this program was a perfect fit for me. I have always had a love of both finance and travel, and I feel as though your summer intern programs could be the ideal union of these two passions.

As a new member of the business community, I have a lot to learn. I will be spending the next school year with a community of talented and hardworking individuals, students and teachers alike. When I go into the working world, I hope to continue in the same type of dynamic learning environment. At JPMorgan, I have no doubt that this hope would not be disappointed. Throughout the company's website, the ideas of continuous leaning and challenging oneself are stressed. With JPMorgan's excellent reputation and energetic staff, I cannot think of a better group to train with toward this goal. I have seen throughout my life that the best way to gain knowledge is by working hands-on. By being immersed in the fast-paced business world like any regular employee, I will be able to challenge myself; I will learn both from my practiced colleagues and from my own personal experience. I will test what I have learned in the classroom and push myself to reach my fullest potential.

Along with learning from those around me, I know that I will be able to make my own personal impact on the JPMorgan community. One of JPMorgan's top assets is its ability to cooperate and work as a team. I have worked in numerous team-oriented environments, such as the Young Women Leader's Group and the Executive Board of Delta Zeta sorority. In these capacities, I have been involved in a variety of projects whose success hinged on an effective combination of individual and group activities. In addition, the McIntire School of Commerce is unique in its program of study because of its emphasis on group cooperation. All new students are divided into small teams which work together throughout the year for a common grade. This type of learning prepares students for the realities of the business world, where the group outcome is more important than that of the individual. Because of this I will be more able to quickly adapt to the team-based environment I am sure to find in your offices.

I would love to become a part of the JPMorgan team and learn the inner workings of major business functions through a summer of working and learning alongside your expert staff. I hope to hear from you soon, and am available at any time. Thank you for this exciting opportunity.

Sincerely,

Alex
Resume.doc

Rachel Lewis to Alex

Actually it's Dr. Rachel Lewis, and I have no connection with
JPMorgan. Perhaps you should check the e-mail address of your intended
addressee before you distribute your resume or other personal
doccuments.
all the best in your job search
the other Rachel Lewis

-------------
[Again I should have asked them to provide transportation]

See you at the Races on Sat - Epsom Derby

Rachel Lewis to Beth

Hi there. You are probably trying to reach a different rachel lewis.
I live in canada and would have a hard time getting to the races by
train. Cheers: the other rachel

--------------
[I wonder if she renewed her locker contract]

Locker Renewal

Xavier to ...

Hello DePaul Student,

This message is to remind you that your Locker Contract with DePaul
University will be expiring on June 15th 2008. Please make sure that you
empty out your locker before this date. We will be cleaning out the
lockers after June 15th, so if we find anything in the locker, it will
become the property of DePaul University. DePaul University will not be
responsible for any of your loss in this matter.

---------------
[maybe I *should* take spanish lessons....good idea, Rachel Lewis!]

Course Schedule

ELEBAIRES Español para extranjeros to me

Hola Rachel!

I just wanted to get in touch with you to let you know that your private lessons schedule will be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 13 until 17 hours. Please don´t hesitate to call or email if you have any questions or concerns. Enjoy your weekend!

Saludos,

Sarah

--------------
[I should have gone and brought her some edible underwear]

SAVE THE DATE-BRIDAL SHOWER

Please save the date and come!

You are invited to a
Bridal Shower
for
Beth
Charlottesville, Virginia

---------------
[I would like to pull credit, whatever that is]

NCO Credit Services

Lori to me

Rachel, can you please give me a call at 630-*** so we can get your account established so you can pull credit. Best regards,

Lori

------------
[I get tetchy when people get my title wrong]

Window Glass

Cooper to me

Mrs. Lewis,

Please see below the information pertaining to your window over your Andersen Patio Door.

Rachel Lewis to Cooper

Hi there. I think you have the wrong e-mail address. I'm not Mrs.
Lewis, I'm Dr. Lewis, and I do not own an Andersen Patio Door.
cheers
the other Rachel.

---------------
[I should have struck up conversations with all of these women and seen how long it took them to realize that I'm not the Rachel Lewis they think I am]

re: email addresses

Ladies:

Some of you had requested the email addresses of your fellow Women In Golf classmates. Well, here are the addresses that I have.

----------
[the first of several messages from what turned out to be a bot on a bdsm dating site--I still haven't figured out where my e-mail address comes into the picture]

Hey!

Jimmy to me

Hey there Rachel!

You definitely are a hotty! I go down to Austin quite a bit, so maybe we could get together one weekend! If you would like to chat you can e-mail or IM me at the address I just contacted you at. Hope to talk to you soon!

~Jimmy

-----------------
[number two]

whatcha doing?

Gary to me

Hi Rachel,

I am soooooooooo bummed out. You have not replied to my reply I won't hold it against you however, cuz I really want to get to know you better. Sorry if my first mail was a bit off color. Just having some fun using details off your profile.

So hot stuff, whatcha up to? How's things in the capital city?

Me? at work, as usual chasing down some problems we are having with the ultra pure water system. I am in semiconductors, something there is a lot of in Austin. I am a project manager/engineer at a defense contractor here in Dallas.

So what do you do to keep yourself busy? I can think of some stuff we can do together to stay busy.

Throw me a line, OK? I also like pictures.

Gary

Rachel Lewis to Gary

Hi there. I think you might be trying to reach someone else. I've been getting e-mails that are apparently directed to someone who has a profile on alt.com or a similar alternative dating site. I've got friends who use those sites, but I don't use them myself.
Good luck finding the right Rachel Lewis.

Gary Johnson to me

Hey so sorry. My guess is you have really bad friends who think putting your picture or a picture they say is you on a dating web site and then sending out come-ons to guys with your email. I have attached a copy of the picture for you. If this is you, you might know who's ass to kick.

Gary

Rachel Lewis to Gary

No, I don't know that person, but she's totally hot! :-)

Gary to me

Like a woman would say that.

[which raises the question: does he KNOW any women?]

------------------
[and now, the crown jewel in my collection]

Greetings from Sire Strict Love

Sire David
Hello rachel,

I did send you an email from alt... I take it that you probably didnt get it... so here it is again... I hope to hear from you soon.

Sire David aka Daddy

Hello rachel,

I saw your profile a couple of days ago (and winked) but wanted wait until I had the time to commit to do a well written, clear letter for you... I am also very pleased to see that you also had an interest and added me to your hotlist.

so anywho...

I am David.

I have been involved in the Ds/BDSM lifestyle for quite some time now (11+ years) and I am very confident in my abilities, but still strive to become better.

I can best be characterized as a "Daddy" Dom...

I take care of, protect, nurture, teach and even spoil my girl.

but on the flip side...

I also play with, use, discipline, punish, lecture and train as needed and wanted.

I have a strong belief in rituals and protocol.

What I am looking for in a slave/girl is desire and passion... I do not want to have to "break" her. I want her to do for me because that is what she wants to do... because in pleasing me she finds happiness and fulfillment within herself; and I will help her do that.

While I get so much enjoyment from playing with my slave/girl; the power exchange, the relationship, the connection is what is most important to me. If we don't have that then the play is meaningless.

I am all over the spectrum of activities enjoyed... there are some that I do more frequently and some things that are so hot that I don’t use them that often just to keep them special.
I like to play with different sensations ranging from tickling to paddles... rope bondage to shrink wrap... soft & sensual to hard & sadistic...

you list yourself as a switch, and that is fine... I don't think that a couple should ever limit themselves to what they can do together... if you wanted to play/top that may be allowed as a reward/gift to you.

on a "vanilla" note... I like to play the drums, camping, cooking (you can do the cleaning part LOL ), concerts, playing pool and working out, I am also competitive and like to play games.

Trust, honesty & communication are vital to the success of a D/s relationship.

I like a slave/girl that can be spunky or bratty at times... but she will know when it is appropriate to do so or be able to stop when commanded.

I believe in safe, sane and consensual...

I don't do scat or animals (I do like ponygirls though).

I am VERY protective... I will never hand you over to another Dom... I take exception to other people hurting and leaving marks on my girl...

I am not abusive... I am a Dom, a Master, a Daddy... everything that is done to you is because you want to be there and accept it, either because it is what you want for your pleasure or because it is what you want for my pleasure.

There may be things I ask/command you to do that you will not like... but it is those things that best prove your loyalty, passion and desire for me.

I will ALWAYS put your well being before my own, before your wants and before my wants...

Yes you are a submissive... and with that you are the most valuable thing in the world to me.

You are a LADY and will be treated as such and act accordingly (no matter how you are dressed). Behind closed doors you can still be my dirty lil slut though.

I am loving and caring... but know that I am also firm and swift. I have a low tolerance for disobedience.

I am forever forgiving... but that forgiveness will not come easy... it will be earned.

I can be silly and will make you laugh a lot, but I am as serious as heart attack as soon as you stray from the path of obedience and respect.

Also keep in mind that I want more from my girl than D/s and BDSM, I want deep friendship, companionship and love.

Well I think I said enough here.

I hope that you find further interest in what I said.

I think you are extremely beautiful and if your submission is only a fraction of that then you will be a very good girl to have.

I look forward to your response.

BTW You can also I'M me (look in my pics for the how)

Be good rachel...

David

posed031805.JPG
Sire11.JPG
shower031805.jpg

["Well I think I said enough here." <--file under U for Understatement]

The latest entry in the "I crack myself up" files

2010-07-27T06:00:00.001+01:00

http://twitter.com/BuddhistHulk

Everything is funnier in all caps.

Bhante Mixalot

2010-07-25T21:02:00.003+01:00

This manuscript was recently discovered in the jungles of Burma. The author (given the unusual name Bhante Mixalot) was clearly a devoted student of Buddhism, judging by his references to "vedana" (feeling tone), atimana (superiority-conceit), sakkayaditthi (belief in an independently existing permanent self), bhikkhus (mendicant monks), devas (celestial beings), yakkhas (demons), and kilesas (suffering states of mind). The song seems to be his complaint about the persistent seduction of mental proliferation, indicating that despite his ardent practice he had not yet made much progress along the road to liberation. There are several lacunae in the manuscript. Perhaps other scholar-practitioners will be able to form conjectures about the missing content of this verse

---------------

I like big thoughts and I cannot lie
You meditators can’t deny
That when a thought walks in with a pleasant vedana
and some sweet atimana
I get caught: I can’t help myself
Proliferating future selves--
Although I know I’m raving
I’m hooked and I can’t stop craving
Identity—I wanna become ya
I’m takin’ on ya
My teacher tries to warn me
But a thought comes up—sakkayaditthi!
Ooh--these sankharas,
sometimes they seem to have no end
but I'm workin', workin',
coz I ain't no uninstructed worldling.
I see thoughts dancin'
but I'm still advancin'
I just note it when my mind is racin' like a turbo jet.
I’m tired of magazines
Sayin’ self-improvement is the thing
Take the average bhikkhu and ask him that
He’ll say the self ain’t that.
So Bhikkhus! (Yeah!) Bhikkhus! (Yeah!)
Do you know your self ain’t that? (Hell yeah!)
Just shake it! (Shake it!) Shake it! (Shake it!)
Shake that sense of self
Self ain’t that!
(Got no use for sakkayaditthi)
…
A word to my kilesas: I'm gonna erase ya--
no time to waste here
But I gotta be straight when I say I wanna [OMMM]
Till the break of dawn
Got my sati goin' on
A lot of simps won't like this song
'Cause them punks like to sit and then quit it
And I'd rather stay all day
'Cause samadhi is strong
And I'm down to get my insight on
So devas! (Yeah!) Devas! (Yeah!)
You wanna cool your kilesas? (Yeah!)
Give it up! Throw it out!
Even yakkshas got to shout
Self ain’t that
Yeah bhikkhus—when it comes to rebirths,
this cosmos ain’t got nothin’ to do with my selection.
Identify with form, mind, consciousness? --Only if you want to suffer!
So your practice is really movin’
Your Chopra tapes are groovin’
But you’ve still got a self that you’ve improving.
My aspiration don’t want none
But libera-tion, hun.
You can do yoga and pujas
But don’t think your self is that.
Some bhikkhus wanna play that hard role
and say there ain't no self at all
so they get all nihilistic
but I keep an eye on my sila!
So greed says I need that
but I ain't down with that
Though the fires of greed may be overrulin’
I’m thinkin’ ‘bout coolin’
So I got some samadhi and pitti,
but I'm not stopping there
I'm on a mission to the unconditioned,
startin' with some bodhicitta
…
So bhikkhus if you're feeling caught
and you wanna really know what's what
dial 1-900-anatta: I'll tell you what it's all about:
Self ain’t that!
(No matter what you’re looking at your self ain’t that)

(This is the version performed on April 28 at DPP3 Dharma Follies)

Puss-in-boots, as told to my nephew

2009-12-27T18:57:00.000Z

Once upon a time there was a simple young man who inherited nothing from his father but an old cat and a pair of boots. This young man had fallen in love with the daughter of a wealthy merchant, but although she loved him too, he knew that her father would never consent to her marrying a poor man.
He was sitting in front of his fire one night, bemoaning his fortune, when his cat said, "Do not fear, master. I know how to help you marry the woman you love."
The young man exclaimed, "Aaa! A talking cat!"
The end.

The joy of roommates

2009-02-28T05:54:00.002Z

"Ah, you're done on the phone. Who was on the phone?"
"Me."
".....I meant the other end of the phone."

Buddhist Personality Types

2008-11-27T21:16:00.003Z

At the 3-month retreat at IMS in 2005, Myoshin Kelly gave a very funny talk on the traditional Buddhist personality types. (It was Hallowe'en, which seemed like a good time for talking about the masks we wear.) I was inspired by that talk to write the following quiz. Being me, I emphasized the funny side of the types; I also followed Myoshin's lead in breaking the aversion type down into anger and fear, which is not part of the traditional teachings. The text of the quiz is copied below; follow the link for a version with scoring.

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/the-buddhist-personality-type-test

This is my highly un-scholarly presentation of the traditional Buddhist method of classifying personalities. The categories (Greed, Deluded or Confused, Aversive-Angry, and Aversive-Fearful) correspond to the Three Unwholesome Roots. Everyone is greedy (angry/fearful/confused) sometimes, and everyone has the potential to be free from these causes of suffering. But when you start out on the journey of liberation, you need to know where you're starting from. If your natural tendency is to anger, different practices will be useful to you than if your natural tendency were to confusion. Ready to find out your faults? Let's go be spiritual warriors!

1 In school, I was always
chatting with my friends.
correcting the teacher.
sitting at the back hoping the teacher wouldn't call on me.
doodling.

2 When I get to the beach the first thing I say is
"Check out that hot lifeguard!"
"There's garbage lying everywhere!"
"Do you think there's an undertow?"
"I forgot my swimsuit...again..."

3 My morning routine is
extensive. I don't want to leave the house until I look my best.
hurried. There's nothing wrong with going out with wet hair.
never routine. My car keys are never where I thought I left them, so I'm always running late.

4 My wardrobe is
carefully chosen. I love to wear flattering clothes by prestigious designers.
functional. I mostly dress to be under the radar.
crammed with everything I've ever worn. It's so confusing getting dressed in the morning. Sometimes a friend will point out that I've combined stripes and plaid again.
basic. I don't waste time following fashions.

5 When a friend suggests an activity, my automatic response is,
"That's the best idea I've ever heard! Let's do it RIGHT NOW!"
"That is completely lame."
"It sounds dangerous," or "I'm not in the mood."
"I guess...if you want to..."

6 School. Extracurricular activities.
I was a cheerleader, duh!
I organized the Amnesty International club and hassled everyone to join.
I mostly stayed at home and listened to my Morrisey albums.
I did whatever my friends were doing.

7 School. Social life.
My social life suffered because I tended to steal people's boy/girlfriends.
My social life suffered because I alienated people by correcting their pronunciation.
I was pretty much a loner.
I hung out with the same group of people all the time.

8 People would be happier if
they took time to enjoy life. People don't focus on the positive side of things enough.
they lived better lives. How can you be happy if you're not doing what's right?
they just mellowed out. What's the point in making such a big deal out of everything?
they slowed down. I don't understand why most people feel like they have to take on so many responsibilities.

9 Shopping
is a sport, and I'm in the major leagues.
is a necessary evil. I go in, get what I need, get out again.
is a nightmare. With twenty brands of jam on the shelves, how am I supposed to pick one? And let's not even talk about clothes shopping. I daydream about having a personal shoopper who will tell me what I need.
is a necessary evil. I go in, get what I need, get out again, before someone pisses me off and I have to kill them.

10 At dinner time, I think
"Wow, this looks great! I wonder if there's more?"
about the calories and cholesterol per serving.
"It's dinner time already? Where did the day go?"
"The lettuce is wilted."

11 At the movies, I'm most likely to say
"That actor is totally hot."
"The script is totally derivative."
"Why are they shooting at that one guy?"
I prefer to go to the movies by myself, thanks.

12 My friends' affectionate nickname for me is
Sparky.
Eeyore.
Silent but deadly.
The Space Cadet.

13 My motto is
"Nothing succeeds like excess."
"If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."
"Look before you leap."
"When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap."

14 Okay. I admit it. Sometimes I can be
deceitful, if it will help me get what I want.
bitchy, when people aren't doing things right.
anxious and paranoid.
clueless--but my fantasy world is just so much more interesting than the real world.

15 What people appreciate most about me is
my fun-loving nature.
my penetrating intellect.
my easy-going, accepting nature.

16 When things aren't going my way, I figure
they'll improve as soon as I get that one thing I want (a raise/a new partner/a fancy dinner/new clothes)
it's someone else's fault, and I should help them see the error of their ways.
things are probably just going to get worse, and I should lay low for a while.
...could you repeat the question?...What are you talking about? Everything's fine. Really.

17 I think I'm probably
the greedy type--or, as I like to call it, the sensual type.
the aversive type--but it's not my fault I'm so fearful or angry: it's the fault of my upbringing. Or maybe I am just a bad person. *sigh*
the confused type. The situations I get into would be funny if they were happening to someone else.
...um...I see myself in all the types. I'm not sure. What do you think?

The proper use of technology

2008-11-17T02:25:00.004Z

Tonight I asked a friend to help me prepare for a class presentation. My presentation is on long-distance collaborations. I figured I'd tell them about some of the tools I've used over the years, like blogs and skype, and give a demonstration of a nifty skype add-on called Talk and Write by doing a live skype call with my friend, during which we'd collaborate on drawing a picture.

This is the first picture we drew together.

Perhaps we should draw something different for my class presentation.

nonself portraits

2008-08-31T20:01:00.002+01:00

This is a picture of me.

Or maybe it's a picture of my brother. My parents say it's me, but it was in with a bunch of pictures from the winter after my brother was born; and in any case one baby looks pretty much like another.

This is a picture of me.

Now the likeness is clear: the hopeful expression, the lopsided smile, the vast enthusiasm about food. But they say that every cell in our bodies changes at least every seven years, so in what sense is this eager little being me?

This is a picture of me.

It's from my days in a medical imaging lab. I liked to volunteer for scanning sessions in the MRI units; I found the confined spaces restful. This is from my very first session. The guy who was using me to test imaging protocols gave me some snapshots as souvenirs. I'm sure it's me in this picture; I remember the jokes I was cracking as I was strapped into the helmet. And yet, where is there any me-ness in this photograph? Looking at this image, do you say, "That anterior cingulate cortex is sooooo Rachel"? You have now gotten inside my head in the most literal way--and what is it that is there? Some mushy material of varying densities and textures.

This is a picture of me.

Well, not exactly. It's a picture taken from a fortuitously flattering angle at a party where I'd made a special effort to get all dolled up. It's also been edited to take out red-eye and to even out my complexion.

This is a picture of me.

Actually it's a photo of me fed into the aging simulator at http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk//
This isn't how I look--yet.

Best Foot Forward

2008-06-26T03:03:00.002+01:00

(An essay written some years ago by my great-aunt Mary, who herself lived independently into her nineties, about her mother Greta, my great-grandmother. May I be worthy of my brave and resourceful foremothers.)

There is a mirror in my front hall where I look to see if I’m presentable before going out. I’ve also noticed visitors stopping to take a quick glance and pat their hair in place.
The psychologist Carl Jung had a name for this common behaviour. He explained that we were putting on a persona—a mask.
There are other names for it. My mother called it “putting your best foot forward”.

Greta Ethel Jones was born in 1884 on a farm near a small town in New Brunswick. Life in those days was still ordered by the rules of the Victorian era: young women were carefully chaperoned, were required to sit stiffly upright on chairs, and never hung their undergarments on a clothesline without first hiding those unmentionables under towels or pillowcases. In Greta’s family such rules were all the more strict because her forebears had come as United Empire Loyalists from Boston, known then as the most conventional of cities.
In her family the women would work their fingers to the bone to cover up the fact that money was scarce. “We kept the house shining and always had fresh baking on hand for visitors. My sisters saw to that. They thought I was hopeless in the kitchen, except for cleaning up. I dusted furniture and plate rails, polished banisters, scrubbed floors and helped beat the dust out of carpets every spring. Most of the time we couldn’t afford a hired girl.”
Absorbed in the world of childhood, I paid little attention to Mother’s stories of her young days. Later I understood that not all had been well at her home. There must have been at least one family secret. When her father came in weaving unsteadily on his feet, probably no one would say a word although all knew he had been imbibing with the hired man in the barn.
Greta had three older sisters. There is a photograph of the family posed outdoors in front of the farmhouse veranda. Mother and daughters are seated in front of Father and a brother. The girls sit prim and ladylike, decorously clothed in long-sleeved, frilly blouses and dark skirts down to their toes. All four of them wear their hair in high puffs over the forehead in the fashionable Gibson Girl style of the day. Their mother, sitting stiffly erect, wears a black dress with high-boned collar. Father stands in correct patriarchal pose, thumb hooked into waistcoat above a gold watch and chain.
Masks are in place. They have all assumed their personae.
Since my mother never spoke about a brother, I had forgotten that she ever had one. Much later I found in her scrapbook of baptismal certificates and school diplomas a clipping from a Texas newspaper, the obituary of a Charles Jones. When I asked about him, she admitted that he was indeed her brother, written off long ago by his family. It embarrassed her even then to speak of the reason for his exile. His crime? His wife had divorced him. At that time the only legal reason was adultery. I think Mother somehow avoided using that wicked word.

I envied her childhood growing up on a farm. Imagine, being allowed at age fifteen to drive the horse-drawn buggy into town! There were other entertainments as well. She mentioned dips in the sea when she went “down to the Cape” in the summer holidays. One can imagine the ladies well covered in voluminous bathing costumes, including long stockings since legs—limbs, rather—were classed among the unmentionables. Back at the farm on hot summer afternoons they no doubt relaxed on wicker chairs in the shade, chatting as they bent over embroidery hoops. Greta would be doing fancy stitches on pillowcases for her “hope chest” until her mother sent her in to get lemonade for the visitors when the gossip began to get spicy.
It was winter fun that she enjoyed the most: riding in a horse-drawn sleigh with everyone singing, skating in the moonlight on a pond swept clear of snow, and, on Saturdays, skating to music in the indoor rink.
One winter, my sisters and I (all born in Vancouver) persuaded her to go skating with us on False Creek on one of the rare times it froze. We smiled at her old-fashioned skates, but in spite of middle age she outclassed us all. She was a girl again, whirling and dipping as if she was waltzing, with no lack of partners, to the music of a band.

Greta enjoyed school and developed an enduring love for poetry. As young ladies did then, she memorized reams of poems. She especially admired Longfellow. I remember, as a teen-ager, wriggling with embarrassment in case one of my girl friends should happen to hear her recite:
Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town
And my youth comes back to me.

She admitted that she had many “beaux”. The most devoted one (and the one she found least interesting) was Edward. “He used to moon at me with big sad eyes,” she said. She ignored him right up to the end of high school days, but at graduation they had to go up together to receive their prizes as the two top students.
She dreamed of travelling, but with no money that was impossible. With school days over she found a “position” in a jewellery shop. It must have been then that she acquired the red satin evening gown that, as small girls, we liked to use for dress-ups, though we always tripped over the hobble skirt.
“I went to all the parties with different beaux—chaperoned, of course!” said Mother.
“Did you ever go to parties with Father?” I asked.
“Oh no. He wasn’t a good dancer. If he were at the same party, he would stare at me from the edge of the dance floor. I used to flirt with my partners just to tease him.”
Edward’s father was a lawyer who saw little future in the depressed economy of the Maritimes. Like many others, he responded to the lure of the West and in 1908 moved with his wife and younger children to the growing city of Vancouver. Edward joined them after finishing an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering.
Before he left, he begged Greta to come out west to marry him as soon as he was established. She must have thought, an exciting new land to discover away from home…a husband with a good income…a fine house…. At any rate, she didn’t exactly say No and she apparently continued to answer his letters.
Perhaps it was Greta’s mother who pressured her into marrying Edward after his father was appointed a civil court judge in Vancouver. The marriage would give their family prestige and take one of the four daughters off her hands. At any rate Greta finally accepted Edward’s proposal.
When the news of the engagement was announced, her discarded beaux had incisive comments to make:
“He has a bad temper. He’s terribly spoiled!”
“You’ll never be able to put up with him!”
“I’ll give you one year before you leave him!”

Young ladies did not travel alone in those days, especially by train all across Canada. The family chose her cousin Henrietta, who was a few years older, to accompany her. “She was always the serious one,” Mother explained. However, I can imagine both young ladies flirting (discreetly, of course) with any suitable, unattached gentlemen aboard.
Henrietta had grown up in Greta’s family and received the same schooling. My sisters and I used to laugh to hear the two of them recite poetry together when they were peeling vegetables or doing other household tasks:
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
“Good speed!” cried the watch….
Henrietta remained Greta’s best friend and her most loyal defender. She put us properly in our place one time when we were criticizing the way Mother did her hair—long hair had gone out of fashion, replaced by short bobs—“Not one of you can hold a candle to your mother for looks!”
From her we learned episodes from Mother’s early married life that she herself had not seen fit to tell us. When she was a young newlywed, Edward’s excessive jealousy led to breaks with friends. What quarrels the two of them must have had at home after social occasions! With those big blue eyes, she was a natural flirt—even in old age. It didn’t take her long to learn what would follow if she even smiled at another man. Dances and parties dwindled to nothing, to be replaced by stuffy dinners every Sunday with her in-laws.
Mother told us that once Edward had said in a fit of temper, “I should beat you!”
“You do," she said, "and that will be the last you ever see of me!”
Edward never did any such thing, of course. He was not that kind of person, and in any case, he could not have lived without her. Emotionally, he was completely dependent upon her.

After Mother’s death, I collected all her old photos into one album. Pictures taken on a steep, wooded trail showed two young couples; mountain climbing seemed to have replaced sitting with embroidery hoops, even though skirts were still long. Edward and his friend Max, whom Henrietta had married, had earlier discovered the joys of hiking, and the four of them used to climb Grouse Mountain and Hollyburn ridge. That was before the babies came.
Father was deeply involved with photography, which accounted for the many pictures of children. In one photo, the young mother is pushing the first baby—myself—in a wicker stroller in front of the bungalow that the couple had bought in the Grandview area of Vancouver. In 1913 the east end of the city was a middle class residential district with some aspirations to upper-middle-class status and must have been quite an acceptable address. But Mother probably envied her friends who had made more advantageous marriages and could afford to live in the more affluent suburbs of Kerrisdale or Shaughnessy. Father had only a small salary and because of the Depression was afraid to demand more, although, as an inventive mechanical engineer, he must have been one of his company’s best assets.

In the photograph with the first baby, Mother looks elegant in a well-fitted tailored suit with skirt down to her ankles. On her head is a smart, narrow-brimmed straw hat with flowers and her arms are covered by gloves to the elbow. These must have been clothes that she brought from New Brunswick in her trousseau for I can’t remember her ever wearing new clothes while we were children. In fact, she wore the same felt hat during all the time I was in high school.
I remember her saying, “I had my hands full with four babies in eight years!” I was the eldest; then came my brother Kenneth and my two sisters. Actually after that there was one more baby, a boy, who died at six months from pneumonia—no antibiotics then. For several years after his death, early every Sunday morning she and Father used to walk to the cemetery—quite a distance—and after that long walk she had to get four children ready for morning church service. Tennyson’s words may have come to her mind:
Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
Grandfather, who was very fond of his daughter-in-law, must have seen that she was reaching a breaking point. To give her a holiday away from the demands of four young children and Edward (more oldest child than husband), he presented her with the train fare to go back to visit her family in New Brunswick. For a month, Greta’s children were distributed among family members and Edward had to come home to an empty house. No doubt he wept from loneliness.

By 1919 our parents needed more room for their growing family. They took out a mortgage on a larger, three-bedroom house only a few blocks away from their first bungalow. It had a handsome living room and front parlour and must have meant social prestige to my mother, but with the Great Depression of the 1930s it really meant doing without many things. Because Father feared being laid off, he was afraid to demand higher wages from his employers. Mother had to count every penny and work harder than ever to compensate.
To make clothes for the first two children she had been able to afford a dressmaker from whom she quickly learned the skills she would need later. Later, when the four of us came home from school, the sewing machine was nearly always open in front of the big window in the living room. Her children would be well dressed no matter what! She could do wonders with hand-me-downs and garments turned inside out and re-sewn when the colours had faded. A favourite dress I wore in high school days has remained forever memorable because it was actually made from new material, sent by her sisters “back East” who deplored Mother’s foolishness in having so many children.
“I don’t see old friends often now, the ones who live in Shaughnessy. No car, too little money, too many children!” She said that in fun to some visitor, but to her it was no joke.
Once a year she gave an elaborate afternoon tea for those well-to-do friends. She must have spent days house-cleaning, re-decorating and baking. Probably none of those visitors suspected that Greta herself had painted the outside steps and varnished the floor in the front hall.
She would lay a fine cutwork cloth on the living room table, and bring out the good china and the silver tea service that must have been a wedding present. On hand-painted, gold-edged plates, goodies of all kinds would be displayed—not the large oatmeal cookies that she made for us, but fancy delicacies like coconut macaroons. Just before the tea she would prepare tiny, open-faced shrimp sandwiches. Flowers from the garden would make the table look elegant. She had a way with flowers.

When Father came home tired at six in the evening, we were expected to keep quiet. Children never talked at the table. Father did all the talking, mostly about his bad day at the office. We were scolded for improper manners and fled from the table as soon as possible, outdoors or up to our rooms where we were to do our homework and keep out of the way. Mother had her hands full with Father. It upset her badly when he lashed out in anger at her or the children. I can see now why she became such an expert manipulator.
Sunday dinners were at the home of Father’s parents or alternately at our dining room table. “They had to make do with macaroni and cheese or scalloped potatoes with ham. I couldn’t afford their big roasts of beef,” I heard mother say.
The most relaxing times for her, as well as for her children, were the two summer months spent at Gibsons. Camping with the “in” thing in those days. Three families, all related, put up tents on waterfront property in Gibsons Bay. It must have been pleasant for Mother to have sisters-in-law close by for company. Other families camped around the bay, and the ladies had tea parties to which children were not invited. Adults went swimming in those droopy bathing suits that look so ridiculous now in photos and children spent most of their time in or on the water. There began my brother’s infatuation with the sea.
It amazes me now to realize how free from supervision we were as children at Gibsons. Did Mother worry about us if we were absent for half a day? I think not. She was busy again with friends her own age and with her flowers and a vegetable garden. From a small iron camp stove, apparently without effort, she produced pies and cornbread and her delectable chowder from clams that were there for the digging on the sand bar at low tide. The enormous washings she hung on the line in Vancouver gave place to a much smaller wash since her children lived mostly in bathing suits.
On weekends life became tense again when the “Daddy Boat” brought fathers up from jobs in Vancouver. Mother had to see that we wore shoes and clothes and were properly dressed for Sunday church. When the weekend was over, we were back in bathing suits and she had time to sit under the trees…
How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half dream!
or to sit by the shore…
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach
And tender curving lines of creamy spray….

Because of Father’s jealous nature, Mother’s friendships were restricted to women. She was by nature a sociable person, but since she had married into a rigid Protestant family, church groups were her main social outlet. For some years she was president of the Ladies Aid Society. She may not have been business-like in that office, but everyone liked her, and her skills at manipulation, learned the hard way, must have ensured harmony among the women.
Somehow she survived the years of our growing up with the attendant problems of lack of money, teen-age rebellions and the necessity of keeping peace in the family. Perhaps because she had lost a son in infancy and her own brother in time past, her only son Kenneth was very important to her. I remember Father saying, "Greta, you spoil that boy. He’ll never amount to anything!”

Eventually we all married and went our different ways. For her, life must have been easier for a few years with more disposable income and peace at home. The house mortgage was finally paid off and I wonder now how they had ever kept up with the payments when we were all to be fed, clothed, and educated.

As for many women, World War II disrupted her life since her son was the right age to enlist in the Navy. But how proud she was of him as he rose through the ranks to become Lieutenant Commander!—although she must have worried continually and prayed for his survival.

Then, one day in 1943, Father arrived home unexpectedly at noontime. “I’ve quit my job—can’t take it any longer. We’re going to sell this house and move to Gibsons.”
He was then sixty-nine and had already survived a heart attack. Always impatient, he sold the house at the first offer for far less than it was worth although this would be all they had to live on for the rest of their lives. Old Age Pensions were not introduced until a few years later—at all of thirty dollars a month.
The summer cottage, not well insulated, now became their home, and Greta commenced to turn the grounds into a beautiful garden. In spite of the hard physical work, her life must have been less stressful—except when her daughters visited with all their children. To feed visitors was not easy. She managed somehow, again making her famous clam chowder and pies from the fruit tress that Grandfather had planted years before.
She gained a certain distinction in Gibsons because of her son’s continuing letters from the Battle of the Atlantic. Acquaintances frequently asked, “Have you heard from Kenneth lately?” Because of the lack of war news his letters were eagerly awaited, and she must have read them over and over before she proudly let them be circulated among friends in the community.
Because of his bad heart, Father spent most of his time lying on his leather couch or sitting in the garden on warm days. To keep him from being bored, Mother urged friends to drop in; she enjoyed being hostess and offered tea and her coconut macaroons. There were always cards in the evenings; if there was no other company, Father and his sister—who after retirement came to live in the house next door—joined her in a game of rummy.

Five years after moving to Gibsons, Father died quietly at home. The daughters who lived far away came back for his funeral. There was grieving, of course, but Mother adapted to the change as strong women have always done.
Her much-loved son lived through the war, and Mother had even more reason to be proud of him when he attained the rank of Commander in the Royal Canadian Navy.
Then her life fell apart completely. After five years of surviving Nazi submarines, Kenneth was killed, not at sea, but in the air, in a plane crash near Toronto.
Mother never fully recovered from that tremendous blow. Whatever direction her conversation took, it always returned to Kenneth. But life had to go on, and she was to fulfill one of her dreams. When she was eighty-two, one of her sisters in New Brunswick, who has “married well”, died and left her some money with the proviso that she spend it all on herself, NOT ON THOSE CHILDREN! All on her own she arranged to fulfill her lifetime dream of travelling. This was not to be just a trip to the Maritimes or even to Europe but around the world by rail, ship, and air. In her album is a large coloured photograph taken in a dining saloon on shipboard somewhere on the Pacific. She is resplendent in a long turquoise dinner gown and is wearing diamond earrings, rings and bracelets, which had also come from her sister. (Mother always did love jewellery, and wore it with elegance.) Her companions on the ship must have seen her as a gracious, wealthy, elderly lady. She was all that; all except wealthy. Perhaps she had told them that she lived in a house by the sea in a beautiful garden. They would not know that the house was only a summer cottage, not quite warm enough in winter, and that her income was very limited. She would have no inherited money left after spending it all to see Mount Fujiyama and the Taj Mahal.
On shipboard she acquired another “beau”. In the photo he is sitting beside her at the table: a handsome, elderly man from New York; a retired magazine editor. After the trip he came all the way across the continent to ask her to marry him.
“Why didn’t you?” I once asked.
“I didn’t want another old man to look after!”

Even into her nineties, Mother managed to live alone, with some help from two close friends. She had lost the son who had promised to look after her in old age, and her daughters were too involved with their large families although we visited of course. She rarely mentioned the aches and pains that kept her awake at night. I was visiting her one day when her doctor called. The young man seemed to regard her as a special friend, even using her first name.
“How are you today, Greta? Can I do anything for you?”
“Oh, no, I’m feeling fine. Thank you for dropping by when you must be so busy.”
“Mother, I said, when the young man had left, “why didn’t you tell him about your aching bones? He could give you something to help.” She smiled and did not answer. Old warriors refuse to admit defeat.

In a local newspaper of 1977, a young journalist who was doing a series on pioneer women reported as follows on his interview with her:
She lives in a long, low house just back from the Bay in Gibsons. A small brook wanders through her property, making its way to the sea. Sitting in her kitchen you can just make out the noise of the water. Greta, whose lively eyes and quick movements belie the fact that she was ninety-four last October, likes the sound of her brook. “It sings to me,” she says. From talking to her you realize that, if anyone can hear a brook sing, she is the one. She’s a lady with a touch of poetry in her.

Greta outlived most of her generation. The old camping days were long gone and all the older folk as well, even her cousin Henrietta and the sister-in-law who had lived beside her for many years. A niece who now occupied the house next door looked in on her every day, and a friend stayed with her at night. I was away on the last day of her life in September 1979, only a month from her ninety-fifth birthday. It was from the niece that I heard the ending of her story.

She was having trouble breathing. I’m sure she knew she was nearing the end. I phoned her doctor and called the hospital, and then I helped her dress. A friend had come to drive her to Emergency, and the car was already at the door.
“Wait just a minute, dear," she said.
She started down the hall, and I followed, afraid she would collapse.
You won’t believe what Aunt Greta did! She went into her bedroom, looked in the mirror, and put on her earrings!

A Canadian WASP sings the blues

2008-01-11T01:10:00.000Z

On a recent flight I was listening to the blues music channel on Air Canada's "personal entertainment system". It cut out right in the middle of a good song when we started descending, and I felt bereft for a moment. "No," I thought, "Blues all gone! ... I'm sad! ... I have...no-blues blues.....heyyyyy...."
I should note that the Frantics sang a rather different song called "The no-blues blues" on CBC radio back in the late eighties.
I should also note that I personally own neither a Prius, an iPod, nor a condo.

Woke up this mornin':
Couldn't sing the blues.
You know 'bout that, baby--
Got them no blues blues.
I got me some money;
My man ain't done me wrong.
I ain't had nothin' to sing about
In oh! so very long.

I ain't got no street cred
cause I never seem to lose
my case of---no blues blues.

Got into my Prius
Drove on downtown:
Gotta see my accountant
'Bout my retirement plan.
He said, "Honey, you're laughin',
Got it made in the shade."
I asked him, "Should I be happy
With my mortgage all paid?

How can I be down and out
With brand new Prada shoes?"
Well, I got them---no blues blues.

So I turned up my iPod
'til I got to the mall.
If it weren't for good luck
I'd have no luck at all.
Got back to my condo
Put my key in the door:
There's my baby, vacuuming,
With piles of clean laundry all over the floor.

He says, "Honey, I missed you,
Now tell me, what's the news?"
Well I gots them low down no good---no blues blues.

I'm crying into my latte
'coz my life story is a snooze.
All us bourgeois bohemians got them---no blues blues.

Ex-scientist

2007-09-29T02:20:00.000+01:00

this rough magic
I here abjure; ...I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

So as of today I am an ex-physicist. I went into the lab for the last time to hand in my dosimeter and my badge. (The sweet receptionist asked if I was quitting physics to become a model. Now, people with family resemblances or ulterior motives will go so far as to say that, in dim light and with selective camera angles, I'm passable, so this is a bit of a surprise. She herself is quite lovely and is always very carefully dressed and made-up, so I wonder if her suggestion reflects her own secret desire?) It feels good to finally be able to let go of this part of my life. I'm sad that people won't say "wow" when I tell them what I do--"nuclear astrophysicist" is a very cool job title--and I'm still feeling apprehensive about having people laugh when I tell them that I'm working at Starbucks--but this is what my life is like right now. This is what I'm doing for myself. I'm not doing work that makes me miserable. I'm asserting that I don't have to be extraordinary in order to have the right to exist. I'm just doing an ordinary job, living an ordinary life--and that will be enough.

I got a right
I got a right
I got a right, Lord, to the tree of life.

2007-09-18T18:47:00.000+01:00

The first day of autumn
returning from alms round
I set down my bowl by the temple
to go play with the children.
Last year: a foolish monk.
This year: no change.

--Ryokan

anniversary poems

2007-05-12T09:30:00.001+01:00

So today is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. (I've written about them and their anniversary elsewhere.) 40 years is a big deal. Unfortunately, there's no real way for me and my brother to make a fuss about them right now. Some kids get to send their parents on dream vacations for a big anniversary--but not us. They've been sending themselves on dream vacations for quite some time now, having followed through on their lifelong plan to retire early and travel. (You have to check out Mom's blog--the sidebar calendar alone makes me weary.) And I'm not rich enough to buy them diamond rings, and they're too far away for me to make them fresh chocolate chip cookies (those being the two gifts that Miss Manners says are never unwelcome). So all that's left to be done is to write an anniversary ode.

Unfortunately, when the Muse speaks to me, these are the kinds of things she says....

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You are my dove
Or perhaps cockatoo.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You make me burn hotter
Than beef vindaloo.

Violets are blue
Roses are red
Life without you?
I'd rather be dead.

Roses are red
Daffodils yellow
One look at you
And I turn to jello.

The rose it is red
The leaf it is green
If you'd be my love
That sure would be keen.

Violets are blue
Except when they're indigo
Your rival may woo
But I will tell him to go.

Roses are red
Blue is the violet
I could fly high
With you for co-pilot.

Roses are red
Marigolds orange
I am a door
And you are a door-hinge.

Violets are blue
And so are hydrangea
I would be too
If you were a stranger.

Trees they are wooden
And so is a boomerang
You'll make me puddin'
And I will make you meringue.

Clouds may be grey
But their linings are silver
For you I would steal
--Well, maybe just pilfer.

Roses are red
Sunset is golden
My world is complete
When you I am holdin'.

So. Happy anniversary, my dear parents, wherever you are today.

It's that time again

2007-02-02T20:24:00.000Z

I'm going to be disappearing again for two months. I'm going here. So I'm not going to be posting here, because I'll be away, as opposed to the past few months when I just haven't been posting.

Middle English pronunciations of Britten's Ceremony of Carols

2006-12-18T13:19:00.000Z

Last night I sang in a concert with the Ebor singers. The first half was mostly Benjamin Britten's well-loved Ceremony of Carols, and the second half was assorted seasonal pieces, interspersed with the Advent ("Big O") Antiphons (O sapientia et al.). It was all quite effective, and very enjoyable. My biggest contribution was working out the approximate Middle English pronunciations of the poems used in the Ceremony of Carols. Here is what I came up with. (The document is in three-column format, with the texts on the left, the glosses in the middle, and a phonetic pronunciation on the right.) Others are welcome to use it; please just drop me an e-mail to let me know if it was useful to you. I drew on my (sketchy) prior experience with Middle English, and also a Google search, which yielded several webpages of which the most concise and helpful was at pronunciationguide.org .

All Souls' Day

2006-11-02T15:38:00.000Z

Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.

Scribere proposui de contemptu mundano
ut degentes seculi non mulcentur in vano

iam est hora surgere
a sompno mortis pravo
a sompno mortis pravo.

Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.

Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur
mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur

omnia mors perimit
et nulli miseretur
et nulli miseretur.

Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.

Ni conversus fueris et sicut puer factus
et vitam mutaveris in meliores actus

intrare non poteris
regnum Dei beatus
regnum Dei beatus.

Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.

Tuba cum sonuerit dies erit extrema
et iudex advenerit vocabit sempiterna

electos in patria
prescitos ad inferna
prescitos ad inferna.

Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.

teaching joy

2006-10-26T13:57:00.000+01:00

So I'm teaching the university's Introduction to Astrophysics class, completely unhindered by any prior knowledge of astrophysics. (I've made up a nifty little webpage for the class, using Google's Page Creator which is sheer joy to use.) It's going well so far. I'm bribing students with chocolate (Mars and Milky Way bars, naturally) to answer questions, and they're proving to be quite responsive. (Also v. young. They're all eighteen, which means...I don't even want to think about what year they were born in.) Also keen. One of them came up to me after class today and said, "I was reading the textbook last night, and I was thinking about some stuff, and I was just wondering,..." --and I had to get him to repeat what he said next because my brain had shorted out. Students. Reading textbooks. Thinking about what they read. Asking teachers interesting questions (it turned out to be, what would happen to the orientation of the Earth if it were to stop spinning on its axis, given its current squashed shape and the pull of the Sun and the Moon?). ...I don't think I can handle this much pedagogical joy all at once.

why I love my parents, reason #329

2006-10-13T13:59:00.001+01:00

Scene: driving in the outskirts of York, past a shop with a big sign that says "TYRES BATTERIES CLUTCHES"

me: Hey look! That shop sells ancient Mediterranean seaports.
Dad: And coastal gun emplacements.
Mom: It's a bit ambiguous, though, about whether it also sells evening purses or groups of eggs.
me: Either way, that's quite a diverse product line.

A very English day

2006-08-29T11:23:00.000+01:00

The other day I walked from Kilnwick Percy to Bishop Wilton. Along the way I stopped to chat with several people out for countryside rambles with their dogs (being careful, of course, to address their dogs as I would their children--thank you, "Watching the English," for that heads-up) and also to cause consternation in the world of sheep by bleating back at them when they bleated at me. I paused in Bishop Wilton to have lunch at the (elegant) village pub--strong orange tea, and the standard, quintessentially English dish, to be found at all eating establishments no matter how small or remote; I refer of course to chicken curry. (I also laughed my fool head off at the print on the wall showing three gentlemen fishing in a punt, wearing top hats and sitting on straight-backed chairs.) By the time I got back home over the fields I was in a Lizzy Bennet condition--my petticoats three inches deep in mud. (For petticoat, read jeans; for mud, read cow shit.)
And then I came back to the retreat centre and attended a Wish-Fulfilling Jewel Puja.
--okay, maybe that last part wasn't so typically English.

little-known historical fact

2006-08-14T14:25:00.000+01:00

During the later years of the Venetian city-state, it slid into corruption and decay. The city leaders became especially notorious for their greed, rapacity, and violence. It got to such a point, in fact, that some citizens put a sign up outside of town saying, "Beware of the Doge."

home dusty home

2006-08-06T07:20:00.000+01:00

me: Hey, wow, is this a new vacuum cleaner?
smart-ass flatmate: Well, yes.
me: Does it actually work?
s.a.f.: Well, no.
me: Why not?
s.a.f.: It's buddhist.
me: huh?
s.a.f.: No attachments.

Mondegreen Thursday, hard rock edition

2006-07-21T03:33:00.000+01:00

I want to rock and roll all night
and part of every day.
--Kiss

The walls start shakin'
The earth was quakin'
My mind was achin'
And we were bacon.
--AC/DC

designated French-speaker

2006-06-16T19:39:00.000+01:00

So now that our native French collaborator has left, I'm the most fluent speaker of French left working on the experiment. I'm actually quite proud of how I've done so far. I've managed to get a batch of targets made, to book taxis and hotel rooms, and to have a quite lengthy and detailed conversation with the police, all in French. Nevertheless, I have come out with some gems. Earlier today I found myself telling one of the administrators that "my boyfriend Alison and I have been expecting that the packet-parcel-thingy will arrive yesterday."

The only reason my French teachers aren't all rolling in their graves is that none of them are dead.

oh France

2006-06-09T12:37:00.000+01:00

Graffito on an overpass near the outskirts of Paris:

CECI N'EST PAS UN TAG

Even spray-paint artists here are witty.

What are we feeling that would be better expressed in German?

2006-06-02T22:18:00.000+01:00

...was the title of an Onion sidebar, many years ago. I can't remember their specific examples, but Elisa and I came up with several candidates this weekend:

the chagrin of realizing that you have once again left the house wearing your underwear inside-out.
the half-smug, half-abashed feeling that comes when you realize that your mother would disapprove of everything that you have eaten in the past twenty-four hours.
gloating over your secret plans to take revenge on someone by publishing a paper that invalidates an experiment they're doing.

...none of these are entirely hypothetical, as it happens.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions about the German equivalents?

conversation in a taxi

2006-05-25T12:02:00.000+01:00

"People nowadays give ridiculous names to their children. Why can't they stick with nice, sensible, Old-Testament names?"
"Yeah--like Nebuchadnezzar."
"Or Cain."
"Or Habbakuk."
"Who on earth is Habbakuk?"
"I'm pretty sure he's, like, a prophet, or something."
"Wow, you're, like, a biblical scholar, or something."
"Come on, girls, be serious. What about Samuel?"
"That would be perfect if you had twins."
"Twins?"
"Yeah. You could call them First Samuel and Second Samuel."
"You can't name your kids after books of the bible."
"Why not? You said you wanted Old Testament names. How much more Old Testament do you get than that?"
"Well, there's Genesis..."
"True. You could go in order. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua...actually Joshua's a nice name."
"Wait, you know the books of the bible in order?"
"I'm, like, a biblical scholar, or something, remember?"
"You girls aren't helping at all."
"Sorry, yes. Baby names. Biblical....Well, for girls there's always Jezebel."
"Or Delilah."
"Or, hey--Rachel!"
"Oh, now you're just being silly."
"Sorry."

A memo to the gods of English weather

2006-05-24T22:10:00.000+01:00

It is almost June. Do you think you could stop with the hail?

You'll notice that I don't ask for warm, pleasant weather. I wouldn't want anyone here to die of shock. But the hail thing--it's getting old. I suppose I should have been warned when, after a few days of pleasant weather a couple of weeks ago, people would say to me, "So, did you enjoy summer?" and I would laugh--and I would be the only one laughing.

I mean, honestly. It's nice to have a bit of foul weather, so that you have a ready-made topic of conversation and can bond with your fellow-sufferers...but enough is enough. So no more hail, okay? At least not until...July.

thanking you for your kind attention to this matter...

He wants to pinch

2006-05-16T09:48:00.000+01:00

[09:35] Corey: I want to pinch.
[09:35] Rachel: no, no pinching
[09:35] Corey: Maybe little pinch?
[09:35] Rachel: get away from me
[09:35] Corey: I pinch.
[09:36] Corey: *reaching for your ankle
[09:36] Rachel: I'm getting the tongs.
[09:36] Corey: !!!!!
[09:36] Corey: No pinch... no pinch...
[09:36] Rachel: you're just lucky I didn't have to tell your girlfriend
[09:36] Corey: What? That I pinch? She knows I pinch. She lets me pinch her.
[09:37] Rachel: that you pinch other people
[09:38] Corey: We have a very modern relationship. If I occasionally sink my sharp claws into someone else's ankle, she's mature enough to accept that.
[09:38] Corey: If I ever told her, that is.
[09:38] Rachel: I see.
[09:38] Corey: Don't tell her.
[09:38] Corey: Or I pinch you.
[09:38] Rachel: hey, I don't want to get pinched
[09:39] Corey: And yet I want to pinch.
[09:39] Corey: Such is life.
[09:39] Rachel: the perpetual problem:
[09:40] Rachel: how does any given pair of people (or indeed crabs) negotiate pinching frequency, given different levels of interest in pinching or being pinched?
[09:40] Corey: Basically, I don't tell you I intend to pinch. I just pinch.
[09:41] Rachel: ah. the stealth-pinch strategy
[09:41] Rachel: But then see I don't tell you I'm getting the hammer and tongs, and maybe a bit of dipping sauce.
[09:41] Corey: By that time I'm gone, pinching someone else.
[09:41] Rachel: typical.
[09:41] Corey: It's a perfect plan, really.
[09:42] Rachel: except for one thing:
[09:42] Rachel: my lightning-quick tempura skills.
[09:42] Corey: Uh oh.
[09:42] Corey: No pinch... no pinch...
[09:43] Rachel: --are you blogging this or shall I?

(watch this and then read this again. it'll make more sense.)

Mondegreen Saturday

2006-05-13T20:27:00.000+01:00

Kate Bush: I'll do it for you...I'll be Isildur or Marian for you...

She'll cut a Ring of Power off the hand of the Dark Lord for you? Aw. How romantic.

the politics of epidemiology

2006-05-13T19:09:00.000+01:00

I'm rather anxious about my parents. See, I heard that Bush is planning to take action to prevent the spread of bird flu. Knowing him, though, that means he'll mount a preemptive strike against Turkey.

(some people say he'll hit the Canary Islands first, but this seems more plausible.)

things I never expected to hear from my boss, part N

2006-05-13T12:26:00.000+01:00

Alison is my boss. Alison is a month older than me. Alison first met me when we were roommates at a conference, and a senior professor got us all drunk as skunks and I told her my entire life story. Alison has no illusions about me. Alison hired me anyway (go figure).

We were going to go out with another colleague yesterday evening, and since I still hadn't dried off after my wetting and I didn't have time to go all the way home to change, we stopped off at her place so she could lend me some dry clothes. We were walking down the street afterwards and she said, "You look better in my clothes than I do."

The list of things I never expected to hear from a boss just gets longer and longer.

voodoo umbrella

2006-05-13T12:16:00.000+01:00

It's raining today and it's all my fault. See, I have this umbrella, and it's small enough that it's easy to carry around in my backpack, but also small enough that it isn't much use for actually, you know, keeping off the rain. It's more a symbolic umbrella--an umbrella security blanket, if you will: it gives me the feeling that I'm Doing Something about the rain, which is comforting even if the thing I'm doing isn't keeping me dry. Anyway, the weather this week has been stunning, so finally on Thursday night I took the umbrella out of my backpack, figuring I'd free up some space for essentials like Hob-Nobs.

Well.

What else did I expect, really? But it was truly amazing: on Friday the thunder-and-hail storm lasted only about half an hour, but it coincided exactly with the only half-hour of the day when I actually had to be outside. (It was kind of fun. I very quickly realized that there was no way to avoid getting drenched--no evasive ducking-under-awnings moves I could make, no speedy sprints that would save me a wetting--and so there was no point in resisting it. I ended up feeling like a kid splashing in mud puddles.) And then this morning it started chucking down again right when I started walking to the bus stop (again sans umbrella) .

I must e-mail my friend who wanted to have a barbecue this afternoon and give him my sincere apologies.

slogan

2006-05-08T13:49:00.000+01:00

This might be the best bit of the cultural anthropology book I've been reading, Watching the English:

English protest march slogan:

What do we want? Incremental change!
When do we want it? In due course!

Mondegreen Thursday

2006-04-28T01:18:00.000+01:00

Song heard in the car just now:
I could never make you oh so lewdly happy...

Eventually I figured out that it was actually absolutely happy. Ah well.

I screw for a living

2006-04-20T04:04:00.000+01:00

So the past couple of days have been busy days at work. We're setting up an experiment, which means I've been running up and down ladders carrying equipment that is some combination of heavy, awkward, expensive, so fragile that it can be broken if you breathe on it, laboriously handmade, or irreplaceable. Oh, or radioactive. (It's somewhat less nerve-wracking carrying these things myself than watching other people carry them.) We've had to make a lot of changes to the set-up, which means I've been putting in and taking out the same twenty or thirty screws over and over again. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of these tasks this afternoon, it hit me: I screw for a living.

...although not perhaps in the way my mother feared I would end up doing back when I was eight and showing a marked preference for barbies and dress-up over trucks and lego.

blogging JOY!!

2006-04-14T02:49:00.000+01:00

I've just started a work blog. Like, a blog to help me keep track of my work, and to share my results with my colleagues. Whe I told Corey about it, he said that the only thing that could make it geekier, or less generally comprehensible, is if it were written in Elvish. I know that publishing the link is just going to get me more snide comments, but anyway, it's here.

The name comes from an Eddie Izzard sketch, about how he doesn't have techno-fear, he has technoJOY!!! and will recklessly install computer hardware without ever cracking open the manual. Similarly, I've got simulation JOY and will simulate breakfast cereal, given half a chance.

question

2006-04-12T19:56:00.000+01:00

How lazy does one have to be before buying new pants seems like a better idea than doing laundry?

Because however lazy that is, that's how lazy I am.

weekend quiz

2006-04-03T11:18:00.000+01:00

So I spent this weekend in London with my dear friend Elisa and her S.O. Alex. We hung out on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon with three of their friends. Among the six of us, we have at least eight advanced degrees (it might be more, not sure) in subjects as diverse as mediaeval french, physics, philosphy, and law, are natives of six different countries, speak six languages (not counting Latin), and have lived in at least two countries besides our native countries. What do you think the chief activity was, while we were eating sushi, drinking wine at an obscure-but-excellent wine bar, and watching the Cambridge-Oxford rowing race?
(a) Discussing current events and our own personal theories of politics, economics, and literature.
(b) Recounting stories of our many and diverse travels.
(c) Making animal noises.

While watching the boat race, the right sort of picnic is
(a) Kir and brie.
(b) Diet coke and Doritos.
(c) Kir and Doritos.
(I think that last option must be an example of what Annene-of-Orkut calls Dada food.)

And a personal question: I like to wear my hair in braids
(a) for the convenience of having it out of my face.
(b) for the alternative-skater-Lolita effect.
(c) so that I can hold the ends above my head and pretend to have antennae, or in front of my face and pretend to have a moustache.

The answers should be obvious.

It was a good weekend.

Input?

2006-03-31T16:01:00.000+01:00

Okay, so there's A Situation at the centre where I'm living. I've gotten a biased third-hand account of it, so the only thing I'm sure of is that I don't know the whole story. I don't think there's any point in going through the details here, but I'd like to know, those of you who have experience in living and working in spiritual communities (Mom and Shugetsu, this means you)--how do you preserve the authority of teachers without giving them a licence for emotional abuse? The situation here involves someone being told by someone in a position of power that telling her side of the situation would be divisive speech, which the Buddha prohibits. That strikes me as manipulative bullshit. So I ask: how do you balance authority with accountability, faith with mutual respect? How do healthy communities work?

too good not to share

2006-03-31T15:59:00.000+01:00

a comic strip on a friend's wall...forget the name, unfortunately

Dog: Dog food! Again! They know what I like! I feel so loved! I dance now! Joy joy joy joy joy!
...
Cat: Cat food. Again. They hate me.

--methinks there's a teaching in there on contentment and how our lives create the world, but I mostly just liked the way the dog was zipping around in the background all full of glee while the cat was glaring sulkily at the food.

jet-setter

2006-03-10T22:35:00.000Z

So tomorrow morning I set out on my travels again--Austria for a week (workshop at a ski resort, woo!), then Germany for a weekend with my dear friend Kate and her fiance, then to Gaia House for a ten-day personal retreat, then "home" for a couple of days, to re-pack for my next trip: I'm spending April in Vancouver. After that it looks like I may have as much as five weeks here before I'm off to Paris for a couple of weeks.
...so if you don't hear much from me for a while, that's why.
Question: How silly is it that I'm leaving my home at a retreat centre to go on retreat?
Answer: Very. Which is typical.

2006-03-08T10:20:00.000Z

Q: What's a zombie's favourite breakfast cereal?

...give up?

...okay, I'll tell you.

A: Brain Flakes.

AHAHAHAHAHA!
Honestly. I slay myself.

cheeky monks

2006-03-03T20:29:00.000Z

This evening's class was led by one of the monks, instead of the resident teacher. (He himself is one of the reasons I wanted to live here. The first time I visited the centre, I wanted to make a phone call and was baffled by the incoming-calls-only hall phone. This monk was walking by, so I stopped him and asked for advice. He was so helpful and patient and present that I figured that any place where people like that hang out is a place I want to spend time too.) At one point he was saying something about how on a spiritual path we learn entirely different ways of thinking about the world, and how we don't want to change our habitual ways of thinking, and so we struggle and argue every step of the way. Immediately, at the same moment, two monks on opposite sides of the room piped up and said, "No we don't".

Getting ordained doesn't mean you stop being a smart-ass, apparently.

culturally specific advertising

2006-02-27T09:53:00.000Z

There's a cereal here in the UK that's advertised as being "ludicrously tasty". Two things occur to me every time I see it in the supermarket: they would NEVER get away with that as a tag line in the States; and I can't help but mentally pronounce it "ludricious" even yet.

double structured procrastination

2006-02-27T09:45:00.000Z

So a while ago I read an article about "structured procrastination"--a technique that helps self-identified procrastinators become hugely productive. See, what you do is, you get some task that's large and daunting and amorphous and indefinitely postponable, and you're so turned off by it that you'll do pretty much anything else in order to avoid it. Your guilt makes you choose productive activities instead of surfing the internet, and so while you're avoiding the task you "should" be doing, you're actually getting a lot of useful stuff done. The down side is that eventually you may have to actually do the "motivator" task, in which case it won't be hanging over your head anymore--but there's always another task to fill its place.
A shorter-term technique that I've accidentally found is to tell myself that first thing in the morning I'm going to go to the bank/gym/whatever, but first I'll just do this one little thing. What inevitably happens is that I get so interested in what I'm doing that I end up working in a quite focussed and productive manner for hours, all the while saying to myself, "just five minutes more and I'll leave."
Right now I'm doing both of these things. I'm supposed to be working on data analysis for an experiment we did last summer, but there's a couple of interesting simulation problems that need my attention too, so I'm working on those instead, AND I meant to leave to go to the bank an hour and a half ago but I just can't tear myself away. There has to be a name for this, and it has to be less awkward-sounding than "double structured procrastination". Any thoughts?

walking meditation soundtrack

2006-02-20T16:41:00.000Z

... k.d. lang singing about faith, persistence, and contentment, in Bruce Cockburn's beautiful song "One day I walk":

One day I walk in flowers
One day I walk on stones
Today I walk for hours
One day I shall be home.

karma

2006-02-20T15:22:00.000Z

For my birthday last autumn, my lovely brother gave me a set of pencil-toppers shaped like fat happy Buddhas. I've got them on all my pens now (particularly the ones I use for marking students' papers, to keep me in a compassionate frame of mind). Just now I caught myself chewing on one absent-mindedly, and that made me wonder: What is the karmic consequence of chewing on a Buddha's head? I hope it isn't that I get reborn in a hell realm where demons chew on my head.

Then again, I was doing the chewing without really meaning to, so the consequences probably won't be too severe. The question I really should be asking is: what is the karmic consequence of shoving a pen up the Buddha's butt?

EEG experiment and aftermath

2006-02-18T14:52:00.000Z

I've changed my mind again, and now I think I will actually post some of my experiences from the autumn retreat at IMS. Let's start at the beginning...
Before the retreat I got an e-mail asking if I'd participate in an experiment designed to measure the physical and mental effects of intensive meditation practice. I do like being a guinea pig--so much more relaxing than analysing the experiments oneself--so of course I said yes.
The experiment is actually a bunch of parts: saliva tests to measure stress levels before, during, and after the retreat--see the physical effect of the practice, and how long it persists in "everyday life"; blood tests before and at 3 and 9 months after, to measure telomere shortening, a measure of aging: since stress hormones increase the rate of telomere shortening, thereby hastening cell death, meditation might decrease the rate and extend the body's lifespan (might--there's no evidence yet, as far as I know, but it does seem reasonable); and EEG experiments to measure the brain's ability to concentrate for long periods of time on boring, repetitive, and even annoying tasks. The EEG part was done at the beginning and end of the retreat; the picture is from the first session, with me looking pale and stressed-out. (I think it's really neat that EEG equipment is compact enough now that it's possible to pack it up in a briefcase and set up an experiment wherever.)
The blood tests ended up being quite entertaining: apparently my veins are small and floppy or easily torn (or something like that) and it's hard to get a needle in securely to get blood out; and when they were taking the needles out the blood level in them would actually go down: my veins were sucking the blood back into my body. "No! My blood! You can't have it!" Greedy veins. They clearly haven't listened to the teachings on generosity, or on non-self for that matter.
The EEG tests were fascinating. One of the tasks involved listening to tones (mostly 500 and 1000 Hz, with the occasional "different" one: 475 or 1050 Hz) and pressing a button whenever one of the "different" ones came along. At the beginning of the retreat, this task was extremely frustrating for me, because 475 and 1050 Hz are almost but not quite semitones away from 500 and 1000 Hz, and also the tones came at almost but not quite rhythmic intervals. By the end of an hour and a half of this my brain was having a temper tantrum. "Don't these people know that's NOT RIGHT?" I came out of the experiment madder than a wet hen. Doing the exact same thing at the end of the retreat was downright enjoyable. I'd just spent 3 months listening to sounds as sounds, and getting into intensely pleasurable altered states of consciousness listening to the rattle of the radiator, so I was able to hear the tones as tones, instead of as musical sounds that weren't correctly musical. Plus, the mind likes to concentrate, and here was a concentration exercise, oh joy! So instead of the test being a boring, taxing, ordeal, it was quite a pleasant interlude.
The experiments are overseen by Dr. Richard "Richie" Davidson, from the University of Wisconsin. He has been meditating himself since the 70s, and when he was just starting out in psychology research wanted to find a way to measure the effects of meditation on the brain; but at that point the tools available were just too primitive. Since the advent of fMRI, however, a lot more has become possible. Several years ago, he received a personal invitation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to come to Dharamsala to start doing research on Tibetan monks who were experienced meditators. The first trip was only partially successful. They brought over all their equipment, but although all the monks were very gracious about talking about their practice, none of them would consent to participate in experiments. It became clear that this refusal was just because the monks didn't know anything about science. When His Holiness heard about this, his response was to start a program called Science for Monks-- a yearly seminar for Tibetan monks, taught by Western scientists. Richie told us about this program during the talk he gave on one of the last nights of the retreat. When I first heard about it, I started hyperventilating. I had just that day been wondering how to combine my training in physics with something that is of actual benefit to humanity, and presto! here it is. I've sent out some e-mails asking for more information and am still waiting to hear back, but who knows? Maybe in December I'll be in India teaching monks how to do physics.

vignette

2006-02-14T11:14:00.000Z

Prisoner #1: Isn't it awful being stuck here in this dank, dark prison?
Prisoner #2: Yeah. I wish there were some way to escape.
Prisoner #1: Well, that's a stupid thing to wish for. We're chained to the wall hand and foot, there are bars on the window--there's no escape.
Prisoner #2: Yeah, there are bars on the window, alright--but hey, check it out: there's sunshine coming through the window...and a breeze too! There must be another opening somewhere. (looks around) Would you look at that! Not only is the door not locked--there IS no door. There just HAS to be a way out of here.
Prisoner #1: You're living in a fool's paradise. Look at these chains!
Prisoner #2: Yeah, they're pretty heavy...I wish I could be rid of them. (looks down) Wow! The shackles on our ankles--those chains don't lead anywhere: the other ends are just hanging loose.
Prisoner #1: Fat lot of good that does us if our hands are still chained to the wall.
Prisoner #2: ...but they're not, really. The chains wrapped around our wrists? We're holding them there. We can just let them go, see? (drops his chains, stretches his stiff fingers)
Prisoner #1: You're never going to get anywhere with this kind of thinking.
Prisoner #2: (isn't listening, but instead is walking towards the doorway, trailing the chains of his supposed captivity behind him)
Prisoner #1: ESCAPIST!

Moving day

2006-01-21T17:05:00.000Z

Here is a picture of my new home:

This is a picture I took last week, the first time I saw the place. (Note the flawless blue sky, most unusual for Yorkshire.) My room is hidden by the trees on the left. It's in one of the old stables, overlooking a cobblestone courtyard.
I'm still settling in. I've met most of my flatmates. They're from all over, and among them is a Chinese monk. How cool is that?
This is a very different Buddhist tradition than I'm used to, and I feel rather like a Lutheran in a Russian Orthodox church. The chanting sessions in particular will take me a while to get used to. Nevertheless, whee! This is exactly where I want to be.

Story time

2006-01-17T13:26:00.000Z

There was a great story (apparently true) told at my retreat, about a Zen teacher from China who moved to Tennessee. He bought a little old house with a big old oak tree on the front lawn. His neighbours told him, "That tree's gonna blow down. You gotta chop it down."

He nodded, in his inscrutable Chinese way, and said, "Good. I chop."

The next morning he went to the local hardware store and bought a hatchet. One of his neighbours came by and saw him chopping away at the biiiiig tree with the little weeny hatchet, and said, "Don't do it that way. It'll take ages. I'll go get my chainsaw and have the tree down in half an hour."

But the old man shook his head and said, "I chop."

His neighbour rolled his eyes, but left him alone, figuring that after a few hours of this futile chopping, the old man would have had enough and would come asking to borrow his chainsaw.

Instead, every morning at 9 am, for exactly an hour, the whole neighbourhood would hear a steady chop chop chop from the old man's front yard. It got so that if he missed a morning they'd come over to see if he was okay. He went from being "that crazy Chinaman" to being part of the community.

Eventually he explained to some of his new friends that this is how he taught meditation: every day you chop away just a little more, and sooner or later a great tree falls.

Well, after months of this it became clear that the great tree was due to fall. On the last morning the neighbours all gathered around to witness the last few hatchet chops. (I visualize a neighbourhood jamboree, with the womenfolk bringing sandwiches and jello molds, and the menfolk leaning on the fences and offering advice, but that's pure invention.) At last, with a mighty creak and splintering noise, the tree crashed to the ground.

After the cheering died down, someone asked the teacher what he would do now.

"Make firewood" was his reply.

Pārami

2006-01-16T11:53:00.000Z

(a collection of quotations illustrating the traditional list of the Pāramis, assembled by Steve Armstrong and other teachers)

Dāna (Generosity)

If beings knew, as I know, the benefit of generosity, they would not let an opportunity go by without sharing.

-Buddha

Sīla (Morality)

Virtue has non-remorse as its benefit and reward.
Non-remorse has gladness as its benefit and reward.
Gladness has joy as its benefit and reward.
Joy has serenity as its benefit and reward.
Serenity has happiness as its benefit and reward.
Happiness has concentration as its benefit and reward.
Concentration has insightful understanding as its benefit and reward.
Insightful understanding has non-attachment as its benefit and reward.
Non-attachment has liberation as its benefit and reward.
In this way, virtue leads step by step to the highest.

-Buddha

Nekkhamma (Renunciation)

True renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, but in knowing they go away.

-Suzuki Roshi

Paňňā (Wisdom)

All conditioned things arise and pass away. Understanding this deeply brings the greatest happiness, which is peace.

-Buddha

Viriya (Energy)

No-one succeeds without effort. Mind at peace is not your birthright. Those who succeed owe their liberation to perseverance.

-Ramana Maharshi.

Khanti (Patience)

Patience is the supreme virtue.

-Buddha

Sacca (Truthfulness)

Better than a thousand useless words is one simple word that brings peace.

-Buddha

Aditthāna (Resolution)

Let only my skin, sinews, and bones remain and let the flesh and blood in my body dry up; but not until I attain Supreme Enlightenment will I give up this meditation seat.”

-Buddha

Metta (Lovingkindness)

Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone. This is the eternal law.

-Buddha

Upekkhā (Equanimity)

The mind is like space. There is room in it for everything or nothing. We always have a perspective once we know that space of the mind, its emptiness. Armies can come into the mind and leave, butterflies, rain-clouds—or nothing. All things can come and go through without us being caught in reaction or resistance.

-Ajahn Sumedho

Can't talk. Crocheting.

2006-01-02T07:31:00.000Z

I'd love to give all y'all an update on the past 3-plus months. Unfortunately, I can't seem to put down the crochet hook for more than five minutes at a time. (I'm making a baby blanket for a new young friend who is due to enter the world in a few weeks, and I'm discovering that crocheting is more addictive even than Sudoku.) You can get the broad outline from my Flickr page, which is linked in the sidebar. I'm too lazy to link to it again.

Making progress
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

press release

2005-09-23T07:45:00.000+01:00

I've been quiet recently. It's gotten to the point that even the people who are closest to me have said things like "You're going WHERE for three months?" or "You're bringing WHO home for Christmas?" So here's a run-down of what's been happening for me and what's going to happen in the next while.

This summer I finished writing my dissertation and worked on experiments at a lab in Vancouver.

Over the past week I've done a lot of travelling. I spent last weekend in Ottawa with my baby brother (who is 28 and a homeowner) and his friends. It was my birthday on Sunday and we all went out for drinks. My brother's friends were the sweetest. One of them was charmingly astonished that I was actually turning 31. "I wouldn't have put you at more than ... (long pause) ... 30." Riiiiight.

As a birthday/graduation present, my parents gave me a stethescope--because how can I be a Doctor without one? I put it to good use when I finally met my long-time internet buddy Corey.

We are soooo cool--rockin' out in the Rideau Centre food court.

Travelling TO Ottawa was somewhat...problematic. The night before, my otherwise-lovely boyfriend tried to poison me. I'm not sure exactly how much I had to drink, but I learned yet again that any drink that includes both vodka and cranberry juice should be handled with extreme care because of the way that the cranberry masks the alcohol. About all I can say for myself on the plane trip to Ottawa the next day is that I didn't actually vomit into the first-class drinks cart while squeezing past it on my way up from the "Hospitality" cabin to the first-class bathroom. We of the Hospitalitariat have to line up for two little bathrooms while the first-class overlords have a bathroom all to themselves. Using their bathroom was a big enough act of class warfare in itself that I thought it was redundant to escalate hostilities by vomiting on anyone.

I got to spend a couple of days in New York after Ottawa, visiting with T-regina (whose birthday falls on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, yaarrrrrr) and with my friend Willem, his wife Debbie, and their new family member Isaac. His 84th-day birthday is today. When I told them my retreat is going to be 84 days long, they had a really visceral (literally!) appreciation of exactly how long that is.

At the moment I'm back in New Haven, sitting at my old desk in my old office. I got back here to find that someone had used the printer in the outer office to print out the results of a Google image search for "porn" with (get this) the Safe Search on. The results included things like images from the Muppet movie, for some reason. I'm hoping that this was a joke, because surely no physics grad student can be that stupid, but fearing that it really was just someone being dumb.

I'm packing up my stuff for my retreat. I'm leaving tomorrow and getting back on Dec. 16th. Lots of sweaters are going into my bags. (Also my wikkid-cool meditation cushion, which takes up a good chunk of space by itself.) Before I go, I'm going to hand in my thesis to the graduate school, and while I'm gone I'll be officially doctor-ified.

(And yes, the last paragraph does mean that I'm going to be out of contact until Dec. 16th. If I'm not commenting on your blog during this time, I'm not snubbing you. I'll catch up with you when I get back.)

I'm cramming for my retreat by listening to Leigh Brasington's Jhana talks. He just shared a brilliant quote: "You can't have a belief system without BS." har har har

After my retreat, I'm heading over to the UK to start my new job. I'll be working as a post-doc at the University of York. Before I start that, I'm taking a trip to Turkey to visit my parents, who are settling in nicely there.

So that's my life. Between that and my flickr updates, you know everything. Doesn't that feel better?

it just occurred to me...

2005-09-10T04:28:00.000+01:00

...that if my name were Katrina I'd be royally pissed at all the headlines about how Katrina is the worst disaster in the history of the US.

Also, everyone has to go read Waiter Rant's latest. Sample:

God suffers with us. He shares in our pain. If you’ve ever been to a child’s funeral you know the only thing you can do is cry. God is like that person weeping in the funeral parlor. It was God who was pulverized when the Towers fell, it was God who burned in the Nazis' ovens, and it was God who drowned in that nursing home in New Orleans.

Contrast this with Pat Robertson's usual pronouncements, and ask yourself which one of them should be talking theology in public.

(Don't even bother going to look at what godhatesfags.com has to say about the storm. It's revolting, as usual.)

(Oh, and my favourite bit of Pat Robertson? His "biblical" justification for why you shouldn't get a tattoo. "The Bible does talk about scarring and marring of the body and cutting the body. These are pagan customs, and the Bible condemns it. All these scars, you look in pagan cultures, they cut themselves. They leave great scars in their bodies. And usually it was a scarring to indicate their allegiance to some pagan deity. So that’s what tattoos are all about. Plus the fact, they’re ugly.")

This is what the era of small government looks like

2005-09-03T15:26:00.000+01:00

An online acquaintance of mine bragged yesterday that he had given "$250 EACH to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army". I had to step away from the computer and take a few deep breaths after I read that. This is someone who, like 16% of eligible American voters, voted for Bush, and who has made the argument that charity is "more meaningful" when the donors get to decide how to allocate their money.

To that latter contention, all I can say is: people are dying because of your sentimentality.

If you fight tooth and nail to cut the revenue of the federal government by cutting taxes, thereby undermining the kinds of services that could have saved thousands of lives this week in New Orleans, you are NOT the good guy when you donate money to the relief organizations. That money should have been contributed in the form of taxes and used to reinforce the levees. But as long as individuals, and not the government, get to choose which "charity" projects they're going to support, the projects that will actually save and improve lives will always be underfunded. For example: me. I give money to the Nature Conservancy, Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders...um, I'm missing a few, but one thing you'll notice is that there's not a single civil engineering project or water purifying plant in the list of the Causes I sponsor. People will donate to libraries and schools (both vitally important) before they'll donate to the things that actually make life in the developed world possible.

This somehow is connected in my mind to Salon's review of "The Dukes of Hazzard". It's been bothering me for weeks now.

The press notes for "Dukes of Hazzard" feature a quote from producer Bill Gerber: "I was searching for a project that really captured the American spirit," he begins. "The heart of 'The Dukes of Hazzard' is family and protecting what you love."

Is that really the "American spirit"--to fight for the people you are genetically related to, and to say to heck with the rest? Another name for that "spirit" is "tribalism". It's the system that the most regressive Muslim states effectively operate under; heck, it's the spirit that most social animals operate under. Is that really what America has come to? What happened to "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses"? Has that spirit really been replaced by greed, racism, and xenophobia? If they haven't, what explains the fact that some of the busses to evacuate the people without their own cars STILL haven't arrived--instead of having arrived in the days before the hurricane struck? Why have so many of America's own poor, tired, huddled masses essentially been left to drown?

I forgot one of my charities: Plan International (a.k.a. Childreach). It runs projects in developing countries where the governments don't have the money for social services because of corruption (giving tax breaks to the friends of the leaders for example) or because there's no money (in some cases because the entire budget goes to the military). Right now I have a sponsored child in Indonesia and one in Thailand. I wonder if they'll let me sponsor a child in New Orleans.

Done

2005-08-30T18:28:00.000+01:00

So the thesis defence was not all that traumatic. I quite enjoyed giving the talk itself, and the questions were on the whole manageable, although I did come out of there saying, "huh, I really don't know any nuclear physics anymore."

But anyway, I am now a Doctor. And I'm going to be absolutely insufferable about it. I will insist on being called "Doctor" at all times. I didn't slave away here for...god, don't want to think about how many years...to be called "Ms." or "Miss." I will refuse to answer to my name, first or last, or to any random salutation, unless there's a Dr. in there.

"Bitch, make me a sandwich."
"..."
"I said make me a sandwich, bitch."
"...oh, are you talking to me?"
"Oh, right. Make me a sandwich, Doctor Bitch."
"One sandwich, coming up."

Titles, and countdown

2005-08-28T23:17:00.000+01:00

The title of my dissertation, on my first progress report:
Levels in ²⁷Si that are resonances for ²⁶Al + p

My private working title of my dissertation, after I had the first good look at the data:
Levels in ²⁷Si that are NOT resonances for ²⁶Al + p

The title I was considering when I realized that I had 50 figures on 60 pages of text:
Baby's first illustrated guide to explosive nucleosynthesis

The "sexy" title that my supervisor suggested:
²⁶Al^m + p resonances in ²⁷Si

The title that I ended up putting on the title page of the document that got circulated to my committee:
²⁷Al^m + p resonances in ²⁷Si

...you'll notice that that last option involves adding 27 + 1 and getting 27. I'm looking for new and unusual phenomena, but not quite THAT unusual.

So, um, yeah. I'm sitting around, reading papers, going over my slides one last time, and watching the clock until it's time to leave for the airport. My thesis defence is on Tuesday (10 am EDT, if you want to burn a candle for me) and I'm having trouble sitting still. I know there's very little point trying to DO anything more at this point, but still I can't shake the feeling that there's one more paper that I can read that will make all the difference when I get asked a hard question.

tick tock tick tock

Pat Robertson: An embarassment to the Church

2005-08-25T22:25:00.000+01:00

Who would Jesus assassinate?

"I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger, and this is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, and we have other doctrines that we have announced, and without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another 200-billion-dollar war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

- Pat Robertson, advocating the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

This is from a Sojourners e-mail I just got. Pat Robertson is an embarassment to everyone who has ever been associated with Christianity or with America. It's time for him to do damage control, and I don't mean the travesty of an apology that he gave yesterday in which he tried to deny saying what had been captured on videotape. It's time for him to retire from public life.

Butts are funny

2005-08-24T21:00:00.000+01:00

Poppy Z. Brite's blog includes a passing reference to a puerile game she plays with a friend: replacing a word in the title of a book with "Butt". I'm still giggling about it...

Infinite Butt
Play with your Butt
Essays in Butt Astrophysics
Where the Wild Butts Are
The Oxford Butt Dictionary
How to Cook Butts

*snrk*...butts...heh heh

Welcome to my world!

ALMOST the perfect man

2005-08-24T06:13:00.000+01:00

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Out for dinner just now with K+A+T, the conversation turned to chocolate. A said, "T, you make truffles, don't you?" K chimed in: "Wow, truffles AND your famous margaritas--you're ALMOST the perfect man."

Once she realized exactly how back-handed that compliment was, K was utterly mortified. A and I tried not to laugh too much...we did! we tried! honest!...it might have been hard to tell that we were trying, granted, given that it took us five minutes to stop cackling and wipe away the tears, and that periodically throughout the rest of the meal we'd look at T and start giggling again.

He'd already said that he wasn't going to work on another experiment with A and ML, because of how much whispering and cackling they do, and he's comparing hanging around with K and A and me to being in "Macbeth"...pretty soon he won't be talking to any of us at all, let alone doing night shifts for us. We'd better get back on his good side pronto.

*sigh* Happiness is working with someone who makes you laugh until you cry.

Holiday! Celebrate!

2005-08-12T01:24:00.000+01:00

So I started my new job on July 4. Today the contract arrived in the mail. I leafed through it, skimming the bits about how working hours are "to be negotiated with your supervisor", skipping entirely the bits about pensions. What grabbed my attention was this:

"Holiday entitlement:
You are entitled to 38 days' holiday, including 8 statutory holidays, in any one year (commencing with the effective date of your appointment)..."

38 days' holiday, including 8 statutory holidays.

THIRTY-EIGHT DAYS. During a ONE-YEAR CONTRACT.

Having lived in the States for the past 7 years, I'm used to people complaining about how they don't get any paid holidays their first year on the job, and even after that they have to wheel and deal in order to be able to take more than two days off at xmas.

THIRTY-EIGHT DAYS.

Couple that with "working hours are to be negotiated with your supervisor" and I can essentially spend all next summer on the Riviera.

2005-08-11T03:15:00.000+01:00

I've got money in my pocket
I like the colour of my hair
I've got a friend who loves me
Got a house, got a car
I've got a good mother...

Canadians might recognize that bit of Jann Arden--Americans, think low-budget Melissa Etheridge. Anyway, that's the song that's been in my head today. I finally do have money in my pocket. It took close on two weeks, but my new boss figured out how to get me my paycheque to Canada from the UK. To celebrate, I paid off my Visa bill. I swear, any day now the "Girls Gone Wild" camera crew is going to start following me around.
I do also, as it happens, like the colour of the hair, but since I've never dyed it that's entirely fortuitous.
I have the use of both a house and a car, which strikes me as unutterably luxurious, most days.
My good mother celebrated her 59th birthday in Turkey on Sunday. Go wish her happy birthday.
My friend is about to cook some halibut for me, so I'd better cut this short and go try to convince him that he does in fact like beets. (He's skeptical, but keeping an open mind.)

Camping trip

2005-08-03T05:17:00.000+01:00

So this weekend we went camping. Like, real camping. Like, hike three hours uphill in the dark to get to the campsite without knowing for sure that there'll be anywhere to put up your tent when you get there.

...okay, I shouldn't try to sound like I'm Tough Outdoors Chick or anything, or my camping partner is sure to point out that (a) I carried nothing heavier than a sleeping bag all weekend and (b) I never once had to pee in the bush, there being nicely maintained outhouses all over the landscape. But still. Tent. Hills. Packing out garbage. And views. Like this one. This is what we saw at breakfast the morning after we arrived.

Garibaldi Lake is a glacial lake in Garibaldi Park (between Squamish and Whistler). Its waters look like this.

On Saturday morning the plan was to climb Black Tusk. It's the little nubbin in the middle of this picture. It doesn't look like much from down there, does it?

Near the top there's a sign saying (essentially) "Don't go past this point if you know what's good for you." My hiking partner went on (duh), I went for a nap. It was quite cozy, curled up in the sunlight there. Of course I missed out on the stunning views from the top, but at that point I was too sleepy to care.

...of course, even from where I was, the views were pretty impressive. We were looking down on our campsite, more or less.

The next day we went to Panorama Ridge. About 4 pm I was completely exhausted (which I freely admitted), and also very scared (which I fiercely denied). What I find interesting about this photo is the non-dorkiness of my expression. This is something that's practically unique among photos of me. I try to smile nice for the camera, I come out looking dorky. I try to look sultry? Dorky. I try to look like a respectable upstanding citizen? Dorky. But in this photo I just look normal. Tired and normal.

We were most of the way up the mountain, and we kept meeting people who told us how great it was at the top, but I just really didn't think I could make it the rest of the way up. It was shale scree. I hate scree. It disturbs and upsets me on some deep existential level. It's just so...hostile. It doesn't want to be walked on. Somehow my hiking partner calmed me down and coached me over it, and then he stomped out little steps for me on the bit of glacier we had to cross to get to the top.

From the top we could see...everything. This is looking down on Garibaldi Lake.

Black Tusk also looks much more impressive from here.

And then we went home.

That makes it sound a lot less effort than it really was. From the moment I first thought "That's it, I'm done" to the moment I collapsed into bed there were six hours of hiking and two and a half hours of driving (with a break for steak. mmm...steak...).

There was never that much physical exertion--mostly because of the patience and generosity of my hiking partner, who carried all of the heavy stuff and never complained that I was strolling instead of striding--but even strolling gets taxing if you do it for ten hours. But I was left with this wonderful sense of ...physical ease, I guess, the next day (once a little bit of stiffness wore off). Everything seemed like less work than it did last week--both physically, because now I'm used to climbing big things for a long time, and emotionally, because hey, I can climb mountains!

even more updates

2005-07-23T04:10:00.000+01:00

Things are good here.

...oh, you expected more detail? okay. Right now I'm watching someone make brownies, shirtless. He knows I'm watching, so he's pausing to flex from time to time. It's a good sight.

Earlier today I was laughing so hard I was crying at silly stories my new boss was telling. She plus her grad student plus me make a coven. The boys in the lab are a little bit overawed.

The harbour is glassy as we get closer to sunset. The adorkable little "water taxis" are making their adorkable little way back and forth across False Creek.

At lunch I went for a walk in the woods and stuffed myself on blackberries and thimbleberries. The brambleberries aren't quite ready yet, which is good: they'll come along right after I've eaten all the blackberries.

My dissertation defence has been firmly scheduled and my committee all have copies of my dissertation.

The cats that live at the place where I'm staying like to sit on my lap.

The experiment has finally started working, AND I don't have any more night shifts.

Next weekend I might be going paragliding (parasailing? whatever). After all this experimenting I deserve a weekend off.

more updates

2005-07-12T02:53:00.000+01:00

Unfairness of the day: Last night I had my first spider dream in months. They're not supposed to happen after stress goes away. It just ain't right.
What I find weird is that in waking life I am not bothered by spiders at all. There's a large spider living on the windowsill of my new bedroom (I think it's a wolf spider), and there was a large yellowish spider who seemed to spend most of her time crawling around the wall behind my bed in my old bedroom. The way I see it (when I'm awake at least) is that they've got their own spider plans and aspirations, and I shouldn't mess with them. When I'm asleep, it's apparently quite a different story.

Good thing of the day: Today was my first day working with my new boss. We'll call her Allie. She's a month older than I am. She's been a professor in the UK for a couple of years now. She's tremendous fun. It's gonna be great working with her. Today was a good day, because it was mostly manual labour: assembling delicate detector arrays, mounting them, connecting cables--the sort of thing that takes a lot of attention, but not a lot of thought, which is absolutely perfect after the strain of the past few days. Plus there was a beautiful moment when Allie and I and another female physicist (Italian, charming and sophisticated) were taking detectors out of their containers: to handle them, we put on latex gloves. I found myself thinking, "Three smokin' hot female physicsts (and yes I AM including myself in that category--got a problem?) wearing latex gloves...this HAS to be someone's fantasy."

it is finished

2005-07-11T07:08:00.000+01:00

Yeah, you heard it. I finished my dissertation.

...for some value of finished. I still have to upload it to the web so the long-suffering departmental secretary can print out copies for my committee (I'll send the link if you're interested in reading it...ha ha), and of course my defence isn't for six weeks yet...and after the defence there's sure to be changes to make before I actually submit it to the grad school. Still. Finished, even only approximately, feels...good. Very good.
...particularly after this weekend. It was a long weekend of frantic writing. Today my supervisor was literally standing over me in the control room where I was writing while I kept eye on the experiment. (Today it came in handy that I don't really know the set-up yet: when things went wrong I was able to claim ignorance and get someone else to do the debugging.)

I celebrated by buying myself flowers. They don't look like they'll last long, but for now they're making my room smell nice.

Other general updates:
I'm settled into Vancouver for now, after a weekend of enjoying being "of no fixed address". I have a cell phone that works nicely for short local calls, and I'm looking into Skype for long distance chatting.
I still haven't heard anything about the "real job" that I've applied for, but the more I hear about that department the less I want to work there anyway. They sound disorganized at best and possibly passive-aggressive.
I may start getting paid sometime soon. By my employer, I mean. My grad-school supervisor hasn't cut me loose yet, so I won't starve, but it's taking a while to figure out which hoops I have to jump through to get paid by the university in the UK. Apparently they want to deposit my cheques into a UK bank account, and I have yet to find a UK bank that will let me open an account from Canada. We'll see how that all works out....

I'm too sleepy now to tell you about my parents' adventures in Turkey. Maybe next time.

scenes from a roadtrip

2005-07-04T18:22:00.000+01:00

"Spiders are incredibly intelligent. Also evil."
"No! Spiders are nice!"
"Nice? They control our minds!"
"Yes, but it's for our own good. Bow before the benevolent spider overlords!"

...

"I don't want octopusses to be arachnids. I also want the plural to be "octopi"."
"You're not a revisionist historian, you're worse: you're a revisionist biologist AND a revisionist grammarian."

...

"Hoodoos!"
"Cool!"

...

"Hoodoos!"
"I bet I could climb that. Have to have multiple belayers, though."

...

"Hoodoos!"
"You should update your Orkut profile and put "hoodoo spotting" in the "interests" section."

...

"Hoodoos!"
"..."
"You know, hoodoos are often haunted. In Haiti, that would make them Voodoo hoodoos. I know you're keen to climb these ones here, but would you do voodoo hoodoos?"
"groan"
"It may also surprise you to learn that several years ago I participated in a UN mission to bring peace to Rwanda by broadening the cultural horizons of one of the warring factions."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. First we taught them ballet. That was a bit of a mistake because they were so taken with the costumes that they refused to take them off. Then we did a nature appreciation class with them. They were particularly good at imitating owls. Then we did a sightseeing tour of the Wild West, and they took to the sixguns-and-hipflask lifestyle immediately. And we capped it all off with a rockclimbing expedition to Haiti."
"uh huh."
"Yeah. You should have seen those rootin' tootin' hooting tutu-ed Hutus on voodoo hoodoos."

Hurray!

2005-06-29T02:42:00.000+01:00

Also just in time for Canada Day: Parliament legalizes same-sex marriages. (Still needs approval by the Senate, technically, but still--hurray!)

Just in time for Canada Day

2005-06-28T22:12:00.000+01:00

My brother writes:

My afternoon project was to keep putting O Canada through the Babel Fish online translator in spare moments. I've lost track of all the languages it's been through, but the result is pretty fun.

The result:

Canada! Our natural houses and land!
Them themselves where the love patriot until now we powerful north look at truth completely in order of the thy thread thee of increase,
without either the powder, are far, are large it is moved and the lever,
Canada because of us, finds with the adaptation of of safety for thee.
God he of our will from attentiveness is the gorgeous land!
Canada, because discovery of the adaptation of of safety for us thee.
Canada, because discovery of the adaptation of of safety for us thee.

I'm all choked up.

academia: a vignette

2005-06-25T02:36:00.000+01:00

After my second year of university, I spent the summer working in a research lab. My friend Tom was doing the same, but instead of sharing an office with other undergrads he shared the office of his supervisor's post-doc Bill. Bill was a curmudgeon-in-training. His favourite rant was about how academia is exploitative and unjust, and he had all these elaborate stories to tell about professors who made their careers out of stealing the research of their students. It was entertaining enough, in its repetitive way, but we generally managed to avoid eating lunch with him.

Well, one day we ran into Bill and he was just glowing. He spontaneously started telling us about how academia is really the only possible career choice for a smart person, because it's the only true meritocracy around. He went on in this vein for several minutes, then floated off, his feet barely touching the ground.

I looked at Tom. I didn't even have to ask the question. He said, "Yeah, Bill just won an award."

2005-06-24T02:43:00.000+01:00

Alex is very happy about his ten inches.

today's weirdness

2005-06-20T17:56:00.000+01:00

From a nuclear physics paper compiling spectroscopic data:

"This timeline shows the "Rise and Fall" (footnote 1) of the spectroscopy of light nuclei, a narrow peak in the years around 1970 with a height about seven times the 1995 publication rate."

footnote 1: From "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", W.L. Shirer (Secker and Wartburg, London).

uh. what?

freudian mis-hearing

2005-06-18T20:47:00.000+01:00

At a barbecue last night someone pulled out the 2006 edition of the GRE handbook. (I know, I know....) For some reason I thought they said it was the sex edition.... That would at least have made people's fervent interest in it a bit easier to explain.

good old Dan Savage

2005-06-15T00:14:00.000+01:00

From this week's column:

In other gay news: Last week, the pope condemned divorce, masturbation, birth control, in vitro fertilization, living together before marriage, and same-sex marriage. According to Bennie, all of the above add up to "anarchic freedom." The headlines the next day? "Pope Condemns Gay Marriage As 'Anarchy.'" The headlines should have read something like this: "Pope Condemns Majority Of American Heterosexuals For Private Sexual Conduct; Also, Gay Marriage."

Once again, he hits the nail on the head.

committee

2005-06-11T20:31:00.000+01:00

So I'm getting together my committee for my thesis defence right now. I've got an off-site reader, a theorist (known for asking soft-ball questions), and a couple of others--and I'm also thinking about asking this one junior (very junior--he makes the transition from post-doc next week) professor to be on the committee, just because he blushes and stammers whenever I make direct eye contact with him. Not only is that very entertaining but it lends itself to certain...abuses.

Scene: the examination after my public talk
Prof: Can you be more specific about the calibration (I show a little leg) meth... er... what?

heh heh heh.

flag

2005-06-11T17:25:00.000+01:00

The fire station that's a block from my place (right on my way to the lab) has a flagpole with a big american flag on it. Today it's at half-mast. (I don't know why--anyone have any ideas?) A few weeks ago, though, it was at three-quarter-mast. Either the firemen were too lazy that morning to pull it up all the way, or they were observing a National Day of Bumming that someone had declared, unbeknownst to most of the rest of us.

Gay men make the best wives

2005-06-10T03:20:00.000+01:00

So my dear friend A. is staying at my place right now. It's fabulous. I come home from work, he makes dinner, then he washes the dishes while we talk about boys and whether I should pluck my eyebrows. He's leaving tomorrow, which is sad; otherwise I'd have to buy him a frilly apron to complete the picture.

overheard at a restaurant

2005-06-03T18:28:00.000+01:00

"My doctor is the coolest ever. I had to do a drug test for work--they wanted to make sure I'd stopped smoking pot. When he gave me the results he said, 'Well, you tested positive for cocaine--but since the test was only supposed to be for pot, I don't think anyone needs to know about this.'"

darn it

2005-06-02T22:56:00.000+01:00

Last night I was antsy and not wanting to settle down to anything, so I started clearing out my bookshelves. First I picked out all the books I wanted to get rid of...all three of them. I realized a change of strategy was necessary, so I picked out all the books I want to either have with me this summer or store for a year or two. The ones I don't want to bother storing went into two big-ass canvas bags (there's probably another bagful or two that can still be weeded out) which I took to the used book store downtown this afternoon. Getting them there, on my bike, was a royal pain. They weighed me down and made biking precarious, and the straps were always threatening to slip off my shoulders. I distracted myself with thoughts of the quasi-philosophical blog entry I'd compose about the experience: I was anticipating the lightness of biking home emptyhanded, and making the obvious extensions to the the lightness of not owning much stuff, or at least of being able to walk away from it without regret...which would possibly lead to retelling the following anecdote:
A certain dervish was travelling through the desert, and stayed the night in the camp of another dervish. He was shocked to see the luxury of his host's tent--soft beds, colourful hangings--and most shocking of all were the solid-gold tent pegs. He upbraided his host:
"You call yourself a holy man? We must make a pilgrimage to Mecca, so you can purify yourself."
His host said, "Very well, let's leave at once," and began to walk. The traveller said, "--but aren't you going to pack up your belongings? What about those tent pegs?"
"They are driven into the ground, not into my heart."

So I was feeling quite excited and pleased with myself as I arrived at the book shop...and saw a sign on the door about how they're not buying any books for the next week because their manager is away.

Bother.

It just goes to show, I suppose, that it's possible to attach to anything, even the idea of getting rid of stuff.

why I love my family, reason #476

2005-06-01T01:09:00.001+01:00

I recently spent several hours in the car with my brother. Road trips with him are more fun than with almost anyone else. He's ready to switch at a moment's notice from unfeigned enthusiasm about the scenery, to earnest discussions of Canadian foreign policy, in which I invariably learn something, to gleeful random silliness. In a lull in the conversation, I started meowing a Christmas carol, and....

what?

oh fine. I'll start from the beginning.

Some years ago, T-Regina was given an...object for Christmas. It was a wall plaque with a dozen or so plush kitten heads mounted on it. They were arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree. When you pressed a button, they would all start meowing, and each of them meowed at a different pitch, and their meows were synchronized so that they would produce more-or-less recognizable versions of several Christmas songs. I have never quite recovered from their version of "Jingle Bells." I wouldn't exactly say that it's changed the course of my life; it's more that it's changed me. To this day, there are moments at which I'm compelled to start imitating the kittens' songs. Mostly people are so disoriented by this that they never do settle on a response. "You're meow...what...christmas...june...huh?" is the closest most come. My brother, on the other hand, joined in. Before I'd meowed my way to the end of the first bar of "O Christmas Tree," he was meowing along with me. In harmony.

The next day, the impulse seized me again, when he and our father and I were puttering about the kitchen. We had three-part meowing harmony going there for a bit.

(If Mom hadn't been reformatting her hard drive, it might have been four part harmony.)

this one's gonna lose me some friends, but the truth will out.

2005-06-01T00:42:00.000+01:00

My recent trip to a wine region of California made me think of the experience of a certain friend of mine, who would sometimes introduce the subject of wine at cocktail parties. Invariably someone would bring up the concept of terroir, that ineffable combination of soil and climate and tradition and je ne sais quoi that gives certain great French vineyards their cachet. He would always try to counter their assertions with the results of his own research into grape types and modern viticulture methods, as well as the actual drinkability of the products of pedigreed and unpedigreed vineyards--but to no avail. He found that anyone who would bring up terroir was immune to logic, and eventually he learned to avoid such conversations entirely; in short, he made it his policy not to negotiate with terroir-ists.

Dharma talks

2005-05-29T05:09:00.000+01:00

Here is an essay by Thanissaro Bhikkhu: it's an insightful piece of cultural criticism, on how the Western post-Romantic worldview tends to distort Westerners' perception of Buddhist teachings. Audio versions of this and his other talks are here.

Leigh Brasington works as a software engineer, and also teaches and leads retreats. He's one of the few people around who really teaches the Jhanas. The Jhanas are states of absorptive concentration that the Buddha described as being necessary precursors to mindfulness. Interestingly, the Pali word Jhana (from some Sanskrit root that I don't remember offhand) became Chan in chinese and Zen in Japanese.

His talks are fun to listen to because he sounds exactly like a software engineer. He'll say, "Now, many people underestimate the importance of practicing attaining absorptive states of concentration" and you'll do a double take because you were expecting him to complete the sentence with "defragmenting your hard drive."

Anyway, his talks on the Jhanas are here, and an essay summarizing his thoughts on the Jhanas and the Brahmaviharas are on his geocities homepage. (I find it rather touching that he's still loyal to geocities.)

and speaking of books...

2005-05-26T15:45:00.000+01:00

Photoshopped romance novel, from Longmire
"Their romance knew no bounds--but would it increase shareholder value?"

book meme (late and reluctantly; also continually updated because I am a big cheater)

2005-05-26T15:33:00.000+01:00

1) What is the total number of books I've owned?

Yes yes yes, we're all bibliophiles around here. But I don't think I've owned more than a few hundred. Not sure. I've moved around a lot, so I've had a lot of purges.

2) What is the last book I bought?

A few weeks ago I bought "The Feeling Good Handbook." It's been very helpful in my efforts to not completely lose my shit while I'm writing.

3) What is the last book I've read?

On the plane on Thursday I read Joseph Goldstein's book "Insight Meditation: the practice of freedom." On Tuesday on the way to the airport I read the latest book in the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series--"In the Company of Cheerful Ladies". (What a lovely series. Check it out if you haven't already.) The last thing I read out loud was a chapter of the first Winnie the Pooh book.

4) What are the 5 (plus) books that have meant a lot to me?

Two by CS Lewis: the Narnia chronicles and the Screwtape Letters.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull--my grade 4 teacher read it out loud to us in class.

Rosemary Sutcliffe's novels of Roman Britain made me want to study Latin.

Cyrano de Bergerac forever warped my view of romantic relationships. It also gave me my first glimpse of the joys and perils of translation. For a while there, every time I went into a book store or library, the first thing I'd check would be whether they had a translation I hadn't seen before. Eventually I had the French original and my favourite translation practically from memory. Ah, the joys of blank verse.

The Fountainhead--it blew my mind in high school, and I now think it's fuzzy-headed post-Romantic trash. Contemplating it and its "ideas" over the years has served as a useful barometer of my attitudes.

Paradise Lost. It's come up three times: first in high school, when I read it for a book report as a one-person protest against the slack academic standards at my school (or possibly just as a stunt; it's hard to tell with fifteen-year-olds); then in college when we studied it for real and my friends and I would take turns reading it out loud (we'd each read different characters' parts; Jesus got a special squeaky voice. ... Well, c'mon, he's incredibly smarmy); then in grad school when one of my friends in the dorm would recite the first book from memory, as a break from demonstrating his blowjob techniques on a winebottle. Good times.

Wislawa Szymborska's poetry, as collected in "Miracle Fair." It's the best thing to come out of my internet dating experiences.

Extra credit question, 'What book would you wish to buy next?':

I'm going to have to get the next Harry Potter book, so that doesn't really count. When I take a bunch of books to the local used book store to sell them, I'll probably end up taking store credit instead of cash and buying whatever catches my eye. mmm. books.

ooh, there's one that gets advertised on the Sojourners mailing list, "The Joy of Work" or some such, that I'm v. curious about. (Update: I've ordered it, also a hardcover copy of "Cauldrons in the Cosmos", THE book on experimental nuclear astrophysics, which is sadly out of print. I found it for a reasonable price. W00T!)

TAG! (5 people whose collections I want to pry into)

Corey, Julie, EvilScienceChick, Kevin and Christine Mitchell (is it cheating to tag both halves of a couple?)

best quotes from the workshop

2005-05-22T06:02:00.000+01:00

A rare moment of candour in a talk: "I don't expect you to be able to read all of this--it's just to impress you."

"People build Rayleigh-Taylor unstable stars all the time--until they're told not to."

A: "This is an anomalous nova."
B: "Every well-studied nova is an anomalous nova."

A: "In this class of novae..."
B: "Wait, that's a class?"
A: (pause) "...well, there's more than one of them."

"Here's the effect of metallicity (showing 2 dense pages of tables): there's no effect."

A: "According to 'theory'..."
B: (in his talk, later that day) "According to 'experiment'..."

"'Prompt' for me is less than a billion years."

A: "It's complicated."
B: (dripping with sarcasm) "Really."

and words of wisdom from Stan Woosley:
"We should all be drinking beer instead of doing numerical calculations."
(plaintively) "Why is everything so hard?"

By the end of the first day of talks, we young 'uns were a bit punchy and were tossing around ideas of how to liven things up. The keeper was to have the speakers don those sumo suits and have full-contact debates.
"I disagree with your rate estimate! RAAAH!"
"You've underestimated the impact of the boundary conditions! GAAAARRR!"
"The theory you're quoting is just gossip! OOOFFF!"

various things about church and music

2005-05-15T16:47:00.000+01:00

Aw. I'm so flattered. I was singing in the choir at church this morning, and at Coffee Hour afterwards a guy came up to me to say hi and to say he wanted me to autograph his copy of my CD. He likes listening to it because it reminds him of the song I sang at his wife's funeral.

The church is getting a new organ installed. At the moment there's an "electronic organ"--something with an ordinary organ console, but with sound put out by speakers instead of pipes. The organist last week was on a mission to demonstrate exactly how nasty this thing is. Most of the hymns sounded like they were being played on an ice-cream truck. It was also his week for startling reharmonizations. During the last verse of every hymn he would play a different harmonization of the tune, and every now and again he'd throw in a particularly bizarre chord, and the choir would react as if we'd all been simultaneously goosed. It must have been entertaining to watch.

Today being Pentecost, we had a procession. Processions at my church are fun. Besides the crucifer, there's four people carrying candles, one with a banner, and a thurifer (as well as three clergy-folk, the dozen-or-so choristers, and an MC to shepherd us all around). The thurifer who was on duty today takes his incense-making duties very seriously. As well as swinging the pot back and forth, he was doing round-the-worlds and over-the-head figure-eights. It's kind of unnerving to watch. It's a test of your faith in Newton's Laws: do you really believe that inertia will keep the burning hot coals from spilling out onto you as he goes by, or do you flinch?

word of the day

2005-05-12T01:24:00.000+01:00

coeval.

It gives me chills.

May 12, 1967

2005-05-11T02:50:00.001+01:00

Oscar Wilde is appalled by people who wash their clean laundry in public. Nevertheless, I have to take a moment to brag about my parents.

Thirty-eight years ago today, they got married. They were barely into their twenties (they'd just graduated from university, having started it early as precocious youngsters). It being 1967, the bride wore a yellow hand-crocheted dress, and the wedding photos were taken on the lawn of the Unitarian church they'd found for the occasion. They were still just kids. They freely admit that they had absolutely no idea what they were getting into.

They've kept the promises that they made that day.

...I'm trying to think of something to add to that statement. It stands by itself. It's utterly staggering.

Two things come immediately mind when I try to talk about their relationship. One is a line Mom used in one of her sermons, about how human love exists to give us a foretaste of God's love, and how she experiences God's love in her own life by means of the tender, steadfast love of her husband. (That one still makes me a little teary.) The other is Dad's habit of kissing Mom the moment he came in the door when he got home from work. I can't remember a single time, through a long career that often made him compare himself wistfully to Count Belisarius, when he let himself get too preoccupied to greet her properly.

When I start counting my blessings, sometimes it seems redundant to list anything except my parents. I didn't do anything to deserve to be born to people who would model for me whole-hearted ethical compassion, and who would show me how love can be used as the organizing principle of a life--one's own life, the life of a family, and the life of a community.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.

family, 1975

Mothers' Day

2005-05-08T23:22:00.000+01:00

Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870
by Julia Ward Howe

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! ...

Say firmly: "...Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe our dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace...

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient and the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Miracle Fair

2005-05-07T03:50:00.000+01:00

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree refected in the water,
and that it's backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

--Wislawa Szymborska

DIY rituals

2005-05-07T03:36:00.000+01:00

A couple of weekends ago I went for a walk up East Rock, trying to clear my head after a misunderstanding with a friend. All the way up to the summit I was disturbed and upset by my obsessive thoughts. Finally, as I started heading back down, I picked up a smallish, irregularly shaped stone from the side of the path. All the way back down I held it tight in one hand: "tighter, don't relax, don't let it go, you have to hang on, you have to keep this as close as possible; it doesn't matter how much it's hurting, how the edges are digging into your hand, how stiff your fingers are getting, or how much easier these steep steps would be with two hands free to balance; you've got to hang on tight tight tight."

On the bridge at the bottom of the hill I stood for several minutes, letting the sunlight warm and soften the hard knot between my shoulder blades. I held the stone in my open hands, thinking about all of the things I've been holding onto--this fear, this grudge, that desire, that image--and finally brought the stone close to my face to whisper to it, "goodbye, stone."

I threw it into the river and watched its ripples fade.

As I walked home, I picked handfuls of the flowers that had begun to bloom along my path.

2005-05-06T17:33:00.000+01:00

I've found myself recently fantasizing about the fall retreat at the IMS. It's a particularly ludicrous--sorry, ludricious--type of fantasy, because it can be distilled to, "Wow, won't it be great when I'm spending all my time being present in the moment? Yeah, that'll be great, when I'm just focussing on the task at hand...."

help with poem?

2005-05-03T16:44:00.000+01:00

For my 12th birthday party, many long years ago, I got a book from the library: The Witches' Handbook. It was illustrated comic-book style, and it had stories and poems and various silly things. In the "How to throw a witches' party" section it had recipes for "Earthworms in Bat's Blood Sauce" (spaghetti with tomato sauce) and "Dubious Trifle" (you make "squashed flies" by soaking raisins and then sticking sliced almonds in as wings and then you put the flies around the side of the glass bowl before you make the trifle). But the bit I'm trying to remember is one of the "Witch Sayings":

Monday's witch is foul of face
Tuesday's witch is lacking grace
Wednesday's witch is long of nose
Thursday's witch has extra toes
Friday's witch.....
Saturday's witch....
But the witch that was born on the Sabbath day
Tends to smell, so keep away.

Any ideas for how to fill in the blanks?

2005-05-01T17:44:00.000+01:00

In this article from Salon, Richard Dawkins eloquently addresses the "debate" about evolution. I respect anyone who will insult an academic adversary to his face. It's putting in place Miss Manners' advice that there should be less thoughtless rudeness around, so that insults can be restored to their proper function of expressing contempt. I also love the way he addresses the question of how to find meaning in life without recourse to supernatural beliefs. The idea that we should treasure life because of its statistical improbability is something that the Buddha said--but in Buddhism there are all these different streams of thought and practice, some of which put great emphasis on reincarnation. (I'm not sure about this, but I think that the argument can be made that the Buddha used past and future lives as a metaphor for cause and effect, and that folk-Buddhism latched onto the concept of rebirth as a way of avoiding having death be The End.)

"Unweaving the Rainbow" specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades -- before we die forever -- in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That's the kind of privileged century in which we live. That's what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it's the only life I've got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.

2005-04-28T03:16:00.000+01:00

Somewhere recently I came across someone's account of being advised by his meditation teacher to "sit as if you were about to die." The speaker puzzled over that advice for a while before realizing that it's just a variation on "be present." A dramatic variation, sure. If you're about to die, there's no need to worry about taking the garbage out, or to plan your next career move, or to wonder if your butt is too big. There's a lot less room for ego and a lot more room for noticing what's really happening. As Dr. Johnson says, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

I've been working with that idea the past couple of days. If today is my last day on earth, I don't need to worry about my committee laughing at me at my thesis defence. I don't need to worry about anybody laughing at me, in fact, because at the present moment nobody is laughing at me. (Ususally. That I'm aware of.)

I feel a little self-conscious at having re-derived the cliche "Live every day as if it were your last"--but then again, we've all heard it said, but how many times have you thought in detail about what that means to you?

If I knew today were my last day on earth, I would have taken a nap. I would have told a whole list of people that I love them. (If you're wondering if you're on the list, you are. I love you, man.) I would have listened to some good music. I would have picked some violets. I would have winked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I would have put aside worries and fantasies and regrets as much as I could and concentrated on the task at hand.

--so I would have done pretty much what I did today.

...Well, I probably wouldn't have had quite that much ice cream at the departmental lunch. Like Anne Lamott, I want to have eaten dessert on the day I die, but I don't want to have a sugar rush when I go.

If your sugar daddy is taking you to the Hamptons this summer

2005-04-27T03:13:00.000+01:00

...then you will want to get your underwear from Toot. If you're a seventeen-year-old Man-Vixen, that is.

There are many things to like about this site.

somewhat disturbing icons, including a teddy bear to indicate "snug fit"
extensive use of camel toe
Engrish translations of product blurbs. My favourites:

"Natural cotton stitch makes you feel pleasant."

"With improvement, innovated jock straps are back with 12 color variations."

"Please try this item with color-linking and full of originality. The completeness is quite high."

"Limited items for black tencel, pile processed, painted piece by piece, The two patterns would not be same. Please enjoy the dynamic expression and white hue." (well, okay, since you ask so nicely)

"The material of inside leg is mesh. The cup design protects your anxiety. sporty, sexy and ventilationa are excellent." (But I don't want my anxiety protected!)

"The hue of beige and blend is basie of TOOT. The color combination of waist and legth is so cute. "

"There are not too many left comparing with other items, only for membership holder. Oatmeal and red number show the confidencce of TOOT!"

"The number is 1,2, 3. With different color and diagonal way create demensional shade in original font."

"The best of TOOT! You'll want to experience the feel! The cut is small but you won't feel squashed in. This fine fabric is flexible, very natural, and the gauze stretch has a very pleasant feeling. "

"It is made with thin denim, full-flat of jean type. The stretch works perfectly.So simple, So cool!"(Oh good. I hate that non-functional stretch)

"One of Flat-type boxer. Botton taping in the frontal part,design creates sporty. Long time using will feel it's tasty. Hook under the taping, (Convenience?) . It was made shallowlly than any other Microboxer items, Much more Sexy!!"

"Sturdy denim stretch swim wear with expertise design. All 5 pockets are riveted, decorative loop stopper, side piping -Too much you say? But that's TOOT style for you."

"The stretch is perfect with marcerization material. Through it was made by cotton, but it is so elegant. Low-rise design." (Through it was made...sounds almost theological)

"Basic, *white underwear*, express the truth of TOOT.The material is tencel, more comfort! "

"The style of texture is gorgeous. It may not use for active sport supporter. Y-back, truth of TOOT was made."

"Just think about TOOT when You want to purchase pants." (Okay. I'm having the urge to purchase pants, but instead I'll think about TOOT. ... kinda like baseball statistics.)

"Our sizes are 3 sizes : S/M/L, but we must point out that "Size" have implied meanings, illusions and miracles." (it's so true.)

2005-04-26T04:42:00.000+01:00

Thinking of people I can't do without, my supervisor rocks. Without him I would vanish without a trace. Any prospective grad students out there? Make sure your thesis advisor rocks. No smooth jazz allowed.

2005-04-24T19:00:00.001+01:00

Abstinence only sex education, taken to its logical (/hilarious/dirty) end. (Someone also pointed out that by this logic strip bars should be renamed "abstinence bars".)

pwitty fwowers

2005-04-21T23:37:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was going to start complaining about the weather--something like...

Spring in New Haven is
(a) a time of renewal and rebirth
(b) an intoxicating season of freedom from winter's constraints
(c) April 19th

...because Tuesday was sandwiched between the near-frost earlier this week and yesterday's oppressive heat and humidity (culminating in the first thunder-shower of the season, which left us with an evening full of the smell of wet pavement, a summery smell if there ever was one).

But today was one of those breezy almost-warm days that has everyone walking around outside with these looks of amazement on their faces. There are colours again. After an endless winter in which we all worked very hard at admiring the austere elegance of bare grey branches against a flat grey sky, all of a sudden there are leaves on the trees...and they're green! And the magnoliae are candy-floss pink, and the periwinkles make your eyes ache with their supersaturated greens and blues, and the forsythias make me wonder who detonated the sunshine-mine.

It's all too much, all this exuberant verdure. We could make do with just a little bit of new growth, a little bit of joy. But this is the season when abundant life is poured out upon us, whether we like it or not.

(I do like it, by the way.)