emotional relativity: i need dumber friends

quick update on work.

we ended up missing the ANTS deadline last weekend. alcherio said it was alright (which is good since he had said in the beginning that he knew it wasn't likely, and that was okay). but then he followed it up with rather extensive reprimand (one of his trademark lengthy emails). i know he's just tightening the screws because that's his job, and i also know that things generally find ways to work themselves out---but that doesn't make it any less crappy right now.

i remember i was reading in the news or something a while back that there was another one of those crack-pot pseudo-"medical" studies where they essentially "determined" that a person's happiness or contentedness with their life was most strongly correlated with their perceived relative intelligence to those around them. and in a messed-up sort of way, this almost seems to make some sense...

for instance, my parents, while relatively simple people (which is not a bad thing; i love them for it), seem to get by quite nicely (well, times when they fight with each other aside). and they're constantly telling me what idiotic things the people they know have done recently (i'm sorry, but there's no two ways about it: some of their friends are really scraping the shallow end of the gene-pool).

on the other hand, here's me. well, okay, most of the time i'm happy enough, but i seem to spend a huge percentage of my life stressed out or frustrated or worried about stuff, and most of it because i constantly feel like i'm just barely able to keep up with the people around me, if at all. i'm past actually thinking of myself as literally stupid (of course, i still have my moments, so except for certain times and on certain topics, si suppose), but i just feel like everybody else is better, faster, smarter, stronger, etc... and it wears me down.

anyway, i guess what i'm trying to say is that having someone else confirm these feelings of inadequacy by chewing you out for not being as stellar or productive as your peers, well, it sucks.

(yes, as a matter of fact, i do have a firm grasp of the obvious, thanks for noticing.)

with understanding comes despair

so last weekend i was whining about the whole trying to submit something to ANTS on a week's notice, right? well, i got permission from nidhi to re-use some bits of her technical report as a follow-up of her DARS paper. so we submitted a title and abstract by the sunday night deadline, and life looked pretty good.

well, now i've spent a week on it (or i suppose about half a week, since every day has included some kind of crisis that took at least have the day, but that's a different topic for me to bitch about). and the good news is, i think i'm finally beginning to understand the whole modeling schtick that alcherio is so keen on. the bad is, clearly, that with this newfound understanding, i'm now pretty sure that my original vision of what i wanted to write in the paper is basically just wrong---and i have little if any clue what i could actually write in order to end up with something remotely interesting.

and of course, it's due on sunday...

this is my "depressed and feeling worthless and stupid" face.

vino und fromage

cast (roughly in order of appearance):

me
thomas & laurent
pierre
jim
martin
fabius
marc & nicole
peter
ildar
yannick & the thai intern from his lab
sara
amanda

had another wine and cheese night yesterday. was quite nice; had a decent turn out and all. even got marc and nicole to come (people from the university choir), though the whole "mixing" thing didn't happen so much (mostly because a lot of other people prefered speaking english or swiss-german, so mostly i was talking with them in french, and occasionally someone else would come over and join us for a bit. also, i was a bit disappointed because i had spaced out at the store, and even though i had planned to pick up iced tea, of course i forgot, and so the offerings for non-wine-drinkers were somewhat [very] limited.

anyway, i guess there's not a whole lot to say other than we had a good time. i mean, really, that's the whole point, isn't it?

never forget what it's like to begin

i think i'm going to add this to my list of goals in life. probably it's little more than a corollary to "never stop learning," but i realized a subtile nuance in the latter last night that made me think, and ultimately inspired me to write this.

i went to the karate class yesterday evening. i almost didn't, since yannick wasn't coming (he'd been feeling ill the last couple of days) and i'm still a little scared of the people there (okay, so it's really just more that i feel like an idiot not knowing what i'm doing), but i forced myself, and managed to get there on my own.

the experience was somewhat frustrating, but probably educational, though perhaps not exactly in the way intended. in a way, yannick was right; the philosophy of karate is quite similar to yoga (particularly in that there are many things happening simultaneously, which must be concentrated on and done together), but the actual postures are significantly different. hence the "i don't know what i'm doing" feeling of helplessness that i'm currently experiencing.

probably today's thoughts are also influenced by the fact that i've been reading the book marcus sent me for christmas on behavior-based training ("don't shoot the dog" by karen pryor). in which she mentions (as is reasonably obvious when one thinks about it, and as i was reminded through firsthand experience last night) that it's really freaking hard to learn more than one new thing at a time. as a result of this, she advocates shaping each element of the behavior separately, and only later attempting to shape the combined final result. last night i found myself wishing that the instructors there had read the book, since every time i would try to concentrate on one thing, i would forget or become confused about something else, earning a frustrated look of disaproval from whoever i happened to be working with at the time. the more i think about it, the more it really seems like training environments such as this would make really excellent applications of the clicker stuff; somehow i doubt i'll have the wherewithall to suggest it, though.

anyway, back to my point, it seems like we (as humans) learn to be good at doing things, and gradually (perhaps inevitably) forget what it was like before we had learned it. case in point: i doubt anyone reading this can honestly remember what it was like not being able to read. sure, we can get a glimpse of that by looking at text in a foreign language, but even that's not really the same. or for me, i realized a couple of years ago that i have no recollection of the way i might have related to a piano before i learned to play; the pattern is so deeply ingrained that i look at the keyboard and see the notes instinctively, knowing which tones relate to each other in which ways.

and i'm starting to think that this might actually be a handicap, from a certain perspective. not merely because it makes it harder for us to teach others, having lost that ability to honestly empathize with the student, but also because we ourselves start to forget how to learn. we're human, we like doing things we're good at, and not so much for all the rest. if we let too much time pass just doing the things we've already mastered (or even nearly so), the "humbling" experience of learning can become so frustrating as to be even "humiliating" when we do finally try it again...

as i prefer the former to the latter, unpleasant though it may still be, i hope i don't let myself lapse too much ever again.

the "h" is for "hates"

last weekend i went to cambridge (england, for those of you more familiar with massachusetts) to visit mike and company. summary: it was awesome.

amoung the many highlights of the trip was friday afternoon, the two of us walking along the river, him pointing at the crew boats and explaining some of the rules and a lot of how the specific people we were seeing's technique really sucked (we think they might have been the third-string teams). at one point, he mentioned that the team in the next boat was "jesus" (from "jesus college") and the one behind it was "christ" (from "christ college"). what made this priceless, however, was that he then chose to add: "incidentally, jesus hates christ." to which i naturally responded: "oh, so THAT's what the H stands for!" (sorry, i couldn't resist; i found it incredibly amusing.)

[[ i promise i'll fill in the rest of the weekend soon, but now i'm going to try to do some more work, since lord knows there's plenty to be done... i just really wanted to get that anecdote down before i forgot it. ]]

continuing...

so, yeah, i got there on friday around noon after taking a bus from stansted, and wandered around town a bit like he had suggested since he had class until 1:15. there was a cool little market in a square near the center, and one of the guys was selling wooden puzzles and such---naturally i couldn't help myself, and even though they weren't exactly cheap, i bought one. it's a packing box with 25 identical pieces that fit together to make a 5x5x5 cube, and it's supposed to be fiendishly hard. i haven't had time to play with it yet, so we'll see.

luckily i had been warned beforehand, but they also have this peculiar draconian rule about not walking on the grass unless you are a professor emeritus or something---backed up by a fine of something like several hundred pounds... jeepers, and i thought the catch-all "$500 fine" at oxy (their empty threat for doing anything from picking the roses to graffiti) was extreme...

eventually i found st. catharine's, where he's staying and i was supposed to meet him. this was a little tricky since there are something like 300 colleges in this little tiny town, about the size of city blocks, and this one also happens to be completely unmarked. go figure. but i did find it, and we walked around town seeing stuff and enjoying the fantastic weather, during which the aforementioned anecdote happened. there was also the stop at the "free fudge shop" on the way back, where apparently the stuff is so good that they feel secure enough in their business that they don't even care if from time to time students come in and take a sample without buying a whole slice (though it goes without saying that every so often you probably should buy a slice, and it's so damn good that i probably would seldom be able to resist buying it anyway).

that evening, we met up with the other 5 caltech students and a cambridge student who had been at caltech last term (mark) and his girlfriend who was visiting from finland (katriina), and we went to a "formal hall," which is a nice formal dinner where everyone gets dressed up for no reason and even wears their graduation robes too. they have this curious tradition of "pennying" people's drinks, which apparently means "save the queen from drowning" (effectively "drink your fucking drink..."). this was somewhat amusing, if woefully unsanitary.

after which we made a pilgrimage to the local sainsbury's (grocery store), where i picked up some pg tips (tea for dena), mcvitie's (cookies for me), and got talked (by mark) into buying some generic pop in the flavor called "dandelion and burdock." the others bought massive quantities of alcohol, and we went back to pembrooke (jason's college) and had a grande olde time for the evening.

saturday morning, kelly, janet, and wendy joined us for a trip to "bury st. edmunds," a little town about an hour's bus ride away. it was cool; some ruins, several churches, and what was supposed to be a phenomenal art museum but was closed for renovations... hahaha. the return trip was a little annoying, since it was getting really quite cold outside, and the bus we wanted to take never showed up, so we had to wait another hour for the next one.

finally returning to cambridge around 6:00ish, we hit a japanese restaurant (fabulous food, by the way; i definitely need to learn how to tempura vegetables), and then caught a play in queen's college, where they were putting on a production of agatha christie's "and then there were none." the play was great fun, and the acting showed promise, even if the directing left something to be desired (it was pretty obviously directed by a student). great play; see it if you ever get the chance.

oh, and one of the most interesting characters in the play (shame he got killed off first, he was probably the best actor of the lot), had an interesting habit of referring to everything as "wizard," in a somewhat similar manner to how we used to say things were "wicked" around about the fifth grade. i thought it was kinda cool, though i doubt i'll be able to find much opportunity to use it (or that anyone would have any idea what i meant if i did)...

later saturday night, as we sat around and talked, i was a little thirsty and a little curious, so i opened one of the cans of "dandelion and burdock" pop. jesus, was that ever a mistake. i swear to god, the stuff tasted like bright pink bubblegum. it was really quite unbelievable how awful it was. think about how some people say grape soda tastes like cough syrup, and then multiply that by about 10,000. jeepers...

[[ okay, time to take another break. more later... ]]

let's get this finished up; it's been floundering for too long now.

right, so, sunday. in the morning we tried to rent a punt to go down the river to "the orchard" for tea/scones/lunch. since we were seven, and the boats only hold 6, and it's a long way there, and we didn't have any idea what we were doing, they succeeded in talking us out of it. we walked along the river instead, which was nice (about a couple miles), had really awesome scones (gotta learn how to make those), and then came back.

on the way back, we stopped on a hillside and set up jason's camera on mikes little pocket tripod so that we could spell "CALTECH" out of people (there were seven of us, after all). he later correctly pointed out that it looks a good bit more like "/^LTF/X" but hey, it was fun to act stupid for a couple of minutes.

upon returning to cambridge, adam left to do something else, so the 6 of us rented a punt after all, and just went up the river a little ways and back for about an hour, which was pretty cool. it's surprisingly difficult, though. mainly just because the pole is damn long, and once you get it all the way out of the water, it's (obviously) really fucking top-heavy. but once you get the hang of the basic controls, it's not so bad, it just requires a significant investment of exertion. (my biceps were pretty sore afterwards.)

after that it was time to collect my things and grab a few last-minute items before heading to the bus depot. got another slice of fudge to take with me, and tried to get an "ostrich burger" (which they said was supposed to be very good, but there weren't any left by the time we got there), and stopped into a whisky store to see if i could get me a bottle of the "ledaig" that i had tasted at sara's "movienight" a couple of weeks ago. embarrassed though i was, i spelled it for the guy, and he explained to me that when properly pronounced it apparently rhymes with "electric." there's some unholy's devil's dealings in there somewhere, i'm sure; because otherwise i have no idea how that could possibly work. anyway, i scored me a bottle (i am win!), caught my bus, and waited in the airport for the plane that was an hour and a half late. which was annoying, because if i hadn't been carrying on all my luggage, i probably wouldn't have been able to sprint to catch the last train back to lausanne. have i mentioned how much i hate easyjet? they are the evil that lurks in the night. i sincerely hope that someday they get what's coming to them. fucking bastards.

well, there you have it, i arrived home at around 1:30 monday morning, and went to work seven hours later. th-th-th-th-that's all, folks.

psychosomatic bone displacement?

okay, so this is going to sound really bizarre, but what the hell.

remember that time in the spring of 2003 that i collapsed in yoga class because i said it felt like i had dislocated a rib? and then felt stupid because we went to the emergency room and they took x-rays and then told me i was crazy because it's supposed to be damn nigh impossible to dislocate a rib, so i must have just pulled a muscle really bad?

well, i've lost a little bit of weight since then, and though i certain can't see my ribs (that would be as bad as it is improbable), this morning in the shower, for whatever reason, i was feeling them, and you can count them, you know? the funny thing is, i can distinctly feel that one of the lower ones on the left side (the affected side) is pointing in the wrong direction, and overlapped with the one below it, leaving a gap where it should be (where the mirrored one is on the other side).

there's no way i'm imagining this; there is definitely an asymetry between the two sides. does the placebo effect extend to relocating bones? i kinda want to request copies of those x-rays (since i was never shown them in the first place) to see if i'm insane or not...

((anyone with more medical knowledge than me---which means basically anyone---is invited and encouraged to please comment so as to help me understand this.))