hates these perpetual
Sundays, hates
the repetition of his waking
to the vague,
pink clouds idling
above his house.
He's home
right now, chasing
the last fruit around
his bowl of cereal.
He's folded
a paper towel
lengthwise, placed it
under his spoon.
The possible husband
keeps himself
busy, tells his married women
friends he's chosen
to focus on his work.
He no longer predicts
a relationship.
Late in the afternoon,
after phone calls,
after staking his tomatoes or
checking that noise
his clutch makes,
he will come in-
to his rooms
for the weekly visitation,
a parade of chimeras
who perch shoulder
to shoulder on his beige couch.
Their names are
so harmless they lift
like feathers from his tongue:
Susan, Lisa, Rebecca,
Amy, Claire, Danielle,
Sarah, or Jane; a furious
choir, they all speak at once,
and each has since come to
resemble the others, as if
his past were a police artist,
told simply, "Draw her grief
so I can see it. More like this,
and this...now, draw mine..."
-Erin Belieu (from One Above and One Below)
Man, that one brought the zingers. I like it. I've always been one to applaud the sight of drawn blood in text.
Boy-becoming-tree poem got shredded to ribbons in workshop today. I read it over and realized that, truly, it had failed to effectively convey any of what I was trying to say. Once more I've gotten so engrossed in a metaphor I let it overwhelm expression. Shows how good my literary judgment is at 5AM, which is about when I finished it. There's actual substance behind the miscommunication, though, I'm sure of it--isn't that always the way?--so I'll probably give it another go. Probably from scratch. Another day...
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Postzombocalyptic
I just wrote a sonnet on how tutoring middle schoolers the summer after high school was like confronting a zombie apocalypse. I'm such a Scrooge. The rhyme scheme went aaa bbb ccc ddd ee, and the third and last stanzas rhymed amphibrachs. Just to mess with people.
Also, I sold my Music Man bass to Sterling for $900. It was worth too much to let sit in the closet when I didn't even play bass in a band anymore. I'll probably spend half the money on some cheaper bass that I could use for recordings. It was a great instrument--played nice, sounded nice--but it remained just that, an instrument, unlike my Jazzmaster, which to me epitomizes what a guitar should feel and sound like. But then again, I hadn't been playing the bass for five years.
Saturday night I went with the elder two Begans sisters, as well as Diamond and others, to the Lo-Fi Social Club to see Double Dagger. After they fixed their broken kick pedal, I slam-danced nearly the entire set at the front of the room while singer Nolen Strals wrapped his head in the mic cable and surfed into the crowd from the stage, screaming all the time of building ghost towns and the like. (Side note: what is it about Double Dagger mosh pits that attracts cute brunette girls?) It was intense enough that I still ached, from shoulder to neck to the other shoulder, on Sunday night, when I went with the Sarahs to see the Alban Berg Quartet playing in Shriver Hall on their farewell tour, and, sitting between old ladies who wore elaborate shawls and smelled of mothballs, watched them perform Haydn and Schubert in addition to Berg's Lyric Suite. Afterwards, we shared nachos and beers at One World. This is how I envision an acceptable way of life.
Friday night...let us not speak of Friday night, other than I went to a party at Patrice and Maura's and pontificated to Kav about the glory of Baltimore to such an extent we both started looking for a soapbox, and that I ran into the girls from my poetry reading last fall, who managed to wheedle some of the background behind the back-of-neck love poem from me. "Did you ever read it to her?" they asked. I didn't feel like telling them how pointless that would've been.
Also, I sold my Music Man bass to Sterling for $900. It was worth too much to let sit in the closet when I didn't even play bass in a band anymore. I'll probably spend half the money on some cheaper bass that I could use for recordings. It was a great instrument--played nice, sounded nice--but it remained just that, an instrument, unlike my Jazzmaster, which to me epitomizes what a guitar should feel and sound like. But then again, I hadn't been playing the bass for five years.
Saturday night I went with the elder two Begans sisters, as well as Diamond and others, to the Lo-Fi Social Club to see Double Dagger. After they fixed their broken kick pedal, I slam-danced nearly the entire set at the front of the room while singer Nolen Strals wrapped his head in the mic cable and surfed into the crowd from the stage, screaming all the time of building ghost towns and the like. (Side note: what is it about Double Dagger mosh pits that attracts cute brunette girls?) It was intense enough that I still ached, from shoulder to neck to the other shoulder, on Sunday night, when I went with the Sarahs to see the Alban Berg Quartet playing in Shriver Hall on their farewell tour, and, sitting between old ladies who wore elaborate shawls and smelled of mothballs, watched them perform Haydn and Schubert in addition to Berg's Lyric Suite. Afterwards, we shared nachos and beers at One World. This is how I envision an acceptable way of life.
Friday night...let us not speak of Friday night, other than I went to a party at Patrice and Maura's and pontificated to Kav about the glory of Baltimore to such an extent we both started looking for a soapbox, and that I ran into the girls from my poetry reading last fall, who managed to wheedle some of the background behind the back-of-neck love poem from me. "Did you ever read it to her?" they asked. I didn't feel like telling them how pointless that would've been.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
In Which I Do Not Study For My Friday Cell Bio Exam
Who said clicking on strangers' profiles on Facebook and then visiting their websites yields no treasures? In between long stretches of basement hardcore, this person's Flickr account reveals as riveting a vision of Baltimore as I have ever participated in. Aside from the obvious, e.g. the old folks line dancing in (what appears to be) a community center, the heavyset Hampden hairdresser, the shopping cart vagrants, etc., what particularly fascinates me are the photos, augmented by a liberal incorporation of shadows, of nothing in particular: rowhouse facades, half-lit neon signs at night, chairs against a cement wall, and so on. Photos which present no obvious subject, diffusing the focus of the image, or where a subject is apparent, but diminished and shunted aside. These are images which focuses one's attention on the negative space itself; either what is not reveals itself with the blurring of what is, or what is not looms large over and subjugates what is.
This is similar to the spirit of most photos I attempt to take (and would no doubt be more successful at taking were I less shite with a camera), and the spirit of Baltimore in my mind--the essence is in the unseen, silent, and intangible. Baltimore is in the abandoned and boarded-up houses, not the packed clubs; in the deserted street corner after midnight, not the bustling harbor; in the old people selling balloons and casting piercing gazes from unknown living rooms, not the front row scenesters on venue homepages.
The contraband One Hour Photo artifacts are just the icing on the cake. I need to see this city more often in Polaroid. Although some of the older, summery ones make the city seem like a faded frontier town, which perplexes me.
I went up on my apartment's roof tonight to see the lunar eclipse. It's a good thing the stairwell door was unlocked, because the fire escape ladder was iced over, and I wasn't about to risk climbing it five stories above ground level. I saw mostly the initial stages of totality, as the Earth's rust-colored shadow engulfed the last ivory tusk of the moon over about twenty minutes. (I think I saw the "blue light," which is sometimes caused due to a small portion of sunlight passing through the ozone layer and having the longer wavelengths filtered out, but since I have no idea what it's supposed to look like, I'm not actually sure.) It was cold up there, and quiet; I saw someone in one of the upper-floor windows of the Broadview looking out in the same direction, presumably also watching for the eclipse. A column of steam rose from the chimney of the squat apartment on the other side of the block. It was one of the clearest nights for quite a while, fortuitously, and besides the moon, I could see as many stars as I could remember ever seeing in Baltimore. And I wondered: how could I ever leave this place?
I talked to Sarah--of all people--last night in what ended up being a thinly-veiled confession of my neurosis toward grad school. It's ironic that I should have to ask anyone about this; you'd think I'd be the leading authority on moving on, given my history, but I've really grown attached to Baltimore in a way that I never really did with Minnesota, or Taipei, or New Jersey. I think it's both because of timing and the city itself. In childhood, one lives with one's parents and is not tethered to the earth by one's own roots; all connections to geography are filtered through the lens of familial life. And in New Jersey, I was in boarding school, so I didn't get out much, not that there was much to get out to: we were pretty restricted to a few shops in Princeton and a couple regular diners.
But Baltimore--I arrived just as I was learning to spread roots of my own to a city that, when it loved you, if it ever loved anyone, felt so much like it loved you and only you. Maybe your few close friends, too. Amber-tinted streets and fire escapes and freak underground DJ sets and band members who offer you appletinis when you go to see their shows. Who knew you couldn't hold without being held in return?
Anyway, Sarah brought up a point that nobody had actually raised thus far: that five or six years wasn't that long a time, in the grand scheme of things. Huh? I had never thought about it that way until then. It's true the average Ph. D. stint shouldn't take me farther than age 26 or 27, and I do expect to live at least a little longer than that. (Being only a rock star in pretense, I have no intentions of joining the Forever 27 club.) However, the whole problem with "this too shall pass" is that it makes falling into nihilism that much easier. I'm fairly sure I can get through the better half of the next decade however things go, but I don't know for sure, and I don't know at what cost to my general mental well-being.
I've no answers yet, but at least my anxiety has exhausted itself after leaving me in full-on Damocles mode the past two weeks. Checking mailboxes both physical and digital has more or less returned to the mundane routine it used to be. This is a good thing; I have things to do. Not that I'm doing them (see entry title).
Last night I stayed up until 6AM wrote a poem titled, "On His Twenty-First Birthday He Became A Tree" and it was about just that, more or less. Then after I turned it in today I found that one of the lines scanned more as tetrameter than pentameter. Real surprise, there.
This is similar to the spirit of most photos I attempt to take (and would no doubt be more successful at taking were I less shite with a camera), and the spirit of Baltimore in my mind--the essence is in the unseen, silent, and intangible. Baltimore is in the abandoned and boarded-up houses, not the packed clubs; in the deserted street corner after midnight, not the bustling harbor; in the old people selling balloons and casting piercing gazes from unknown living rooms, not the front row scenesters on venue homepages.
The contraband One Hour Photo artifacts are just the icing on the cake. I need to see this city more often in Polaroid. Although some of the older, summery ones make the city seem like a faded frontier town, which perplexes me.
I went up on my apartment's roof tonight to see the lunar eclipse. It's a good thing the stairwell door was unlocked, because the fire escape ladder was iced over, and I wasn't about to risk climbing it five stories above ground level. I saw mostly the initial stages of totality, as the Earth's rust-colored shadow engulfed the last ivory tusk of the moon over about twenty minutes. (I think I saw the "blue light," which is sometimes caused due to a small portion of sunlight passing through the ozone layer and having the longer wavelengths filtered out, but since I have no idea what it's supposed to look like, I'm not actually sure.) It was cold up there, and quiet; I saw someone in one of the upper-floor windows of the Broadview looking out in the same direction, presumably also watching for the eclipse. A column of steam rose from the chimney of the squat apartment on the other side of the block. It was one of the clearest nights for quite a while, fortuitously, and besides the moon, I could see as many stars as I could remember ever seeing in Baltimore. And I wondered: how could I ever leave this place?
I talked to Sarah--of all people--last night in what ended up being a thinly-veiled confession of my neurosis toward grad school. It's ironic that I should have to ask anyone about this; you'd think I'd be the leading authority on moving on, given my history, but I've really grown attached to Baltimore in a way that I never really did with Minnesota, or Taipei, or New Jersey. I think it's both because of timing and the city itself. In childhood, one lives with one's parents and is not tethered to the earth by one's own roots; all connections to geography are filtered through the lens of familial life. And in New Jersey, I was in boarding school, so I didn't get out much, not that there was much to get out to: we were pretty restricted to a few shops in Princeton and a couple regular diners.
But Baltimore--I arrived just as I was learning to spread roots of my own to a city that, when it loved you, if it ever loved anyone, felt so much like it loved you and only you. Maybe your few close friends, too. Amber-tinted streets and fire escapes and freak underground DJ sets and band members who offer you appletinis when you go to see their shows. Who knew you couldn't hold without being held in return?
Anyway, Sarah brought up a point that nobody had actually raised thus far: that five or six years wasn't that long a time, in the grand scheme of things. Huh? I had never thought about it that way until then. It's true the average Ph. D. stint shouldn't take me farther than age 26 or 27, and I do expect to live at least a little longer than that. (Being only a rock star in pretense, I have no intentions of joining the Forever 27 club.) However, the whole problem with "this too shall pass" is that it makes falling into nihilism that much easier. I'm fairly sure I can get through the better half of the next decade however things go, but I don't know for sure, and I don't know at what cost to my general mental well-being.
I've no answers yet, but at least my anxiety has exhausted itself after leaving me in full-on Damocles mode the past two weeks. Checking mailboxes both physical and digital has more or less returned to the mundane routine it used to be. This is a good thing; I have things to do. Not that I'm doing them (see entry title).
Last night I stayed up until 6AM wrote a poem titled, "On His Twenty-First Birthday He Became A Tree" and it was about just that, more or less. Then after I turned it in today I found that one of the lines scanned more as tetrameter than pentameter. Real surprise, there.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
San Francisco Franco/Is That What the Future Holds?
At San Francisco International, as Nels Cline and Mike Watt hit the stage with Banyan a mere three miles from the hotel I’d checked out of earlier in the day (I will be regretting my haste to get back to Baltimore for years to come), I discovered my flight home an hour delayed, an hour after I’d hastily departed and miraculously hailed a cab from UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, which is mere blocks from the San Francisco Bay, where no cabs ever go, that got me to the airport as fast as anyone had ever gotten me to any airport.
The cab driver was giving a lift to a friend of his who sat in the back seat and appeared to be headed for nowhere in particular. “You straight?” the driver asked his friend as I got in the cab. “Yeah, I’m straight,” the friend replied. A faint odor in the car hinted to me that this had not always been the case. About five minutes into the drive I realized I didn’t have the forty dollars cash the trip may cost. “You have thirty?” the driver asked. I did. “You’re straight,” he said, and so I was, as frustratingly so as Cobain ever was. In the backseat, the driver’s friend talked to someone on the cell about moving to Vegas and getting “a bed full of white ladies.”
It was a good weekend. I flew in on Thursday afternoon and shared an airporter van with a Japanese girl who was on vacation and had just flown in from Hawaii. The van driver was a Chinese guy who complained about how the airport ground transportation crew never helped the van drivers get any business, and asked me to teach him English phrases. When we were driving through downtown, he saw someone on the sidewalk who reminded him of his ex-wife, who had apparently “run off with a white man.” He then proceeded to ask me if I was married or had a girlfriend, and when I said no on both accounts, he tried to tell me where I could find a dormitory full of Asian girls.
I was so hungry after I arrived at the hotel that I ate dinner at the first food place I saw, which was a bar next to the hotel where Heinekens cost $4.50. I took a walk down Market St., which reminded me of New York City as much as any place I’d ever been in my life, that night. Among the things I saw: city hall; a bronze statue of Simon Bolivar; a dude on some stairs who asked if I wanted weed; a pension-aged couple making out in front of what appeared to be a strip club. Either that, or she was a prostitute; I couldn’t really tell. I stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in SoMa (which stands for “South of Market St.”), a stone U-shaped hallway in the middle of a park with miniature waterfalls cascading from the roof into a pool. While I was taking photos here, doing my best to remain inconspicuous, a guy in a red hoodie and headphones approached me and asked me to take his picture.
Sure, I said, you got a camera?
He did not; he wanted me to take a picture of him with my camera. “So you’ll remember me,” he said.
So I did, and so I do. It wasn’t until after he left that I began to be genuinely worried what he was going to do next, or what was going to happen to him; I hope he didn’t go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge or something like that. I hope I wasn’t the last person to see him alive. You never know, with such things.
Some time later I found myself in Fremont Square at the north end of Market St. It was utterly covered in dirty, trampled feathers. I suddenly understood why I had been seeing people walking through the streets carrying pillows all night. Tragically unbeknownst to me, the annual San Francisco Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight had taken place there mere hours before, and I was surveying the aftermath. A young couple danced around in the feathered square and skipped away down the sidewalk, holding hands. I realized I was very tired—it was 2AM in Baltimore—and decided to head back.
The interviews themselves were great, if exhausting; being serious and professional all day is simply not something I can effortlessly do. A couple of the professors I met with were applying really amazing methods toward a systematic understanding of macromolecular interactions; the ongoing fusion between the biophysics and bioinformatics branches of research, with both approaches projected onto the third axis of systems biology, was obvious. Some other professors were more interested in talking about the membrane biophysics research I’d done in the past year. I even talked to a graduate student who had studied astrophysics in college, and who was sympathetic toward my wish for a mathematically elegant understanding of biology.
UCSF Mission Bay is The New with capital letters. The campus had not even existed at the beginning of the decade; construction photos showed it bursting from its foundations like Athena from Zeus’ head. The buildings, half of which are still in the process of construction, are colorful, avant-garde in their geometry, and decorated on the interior with abstract paintings. They are also named after currently-extant corporations (e.g. Genentech) instead of long-dead white men (which may be either a positive or a negative, depending on one’s tastes). The Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology is, as far as I can tell, completely free of stubborn, elderly faculty and their entrenched modes of thought; all of the professors are young (by academic standards) and make no attempt to conceal that their grandiose ideals may never pan out.
At the party Friday night at a student’s house, I met our host, who ran an Internet radio station and musical promotions company out of his bedroom, which was equipped with Pro Tools and a MIDI fader board. I met a girl from my interview group who came from a town on the southern tip of Texas on the bank of the Rio Grande, whose parents had no concept of grad school and who was interviewing for Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis (and had already interviewed for the same MIT program I applied to, Computational and Systems Biology, who still haven’t written me back, at the end of January—I interpreted this as bad news for myself). Another kid from the group told me, as we lounged on the third floor balcony by the liquor table, that the worst thing one could possibly do is have an orgasm while high on ecstasy, as it would fry one’s serotonin receptors rendering one forever unresponsive to pleasure while sober. He told me he had a friend who had done this to himself and was subsequently forced into ascetic Buddhism.
I have to admit, all my experiences in San Francisco were pretty convincing. I’d miss the cold and the snow of the mid-Atlantic and all points north, but the city in the desert between the mountains and the ocean is beautiful in its own gloriously arid right, and promises a healthy fix of the crazy whenever I might feel the desire for it. The iPQB program challenges even MIT’s CSB program for progressiveness and innovative modes of thought. I really do hope they accept me. The lingering issue, of course, is that I’ll be two thousand miles from almost everyone I’ve known in the past seven years. It’s even more of a removal than from Baltimore to New York, where most of my best friends from high school had gone to college, and look at the consequences of a mere five hours’ bus ride: the only people from Lawrenceville I speak to semi-regularly anymore are Andrew and Nick. Though maybe that’s as much a consequence of the events of the past four years as of the physical distance. The other issue is the deprivation of deprivation which I have mentioned before. The age of the reclusive scientist-philosopher is over, and probably had been over for generations by the time I was born 22 years ago. In true anachronistic form,“work hard, play hard” never jived well with me; I’m used to having large quantities of “blank time” for reflection (hence these exceedingly long entries), but it seems “blank time” is increasingly discouraged as one moves into the real world.
Back in the summer after freshman year, walking with Patrice past a rain-soaked freshman quad we were leaving forever, I uttered, “This is the end of an old way of life.” I said it at the time mainly to sound cool (though it turned out to be unintentionally, and unfortunately, prophetic), but had I known better, I probably would’ve saved a phrase like that for the present day. I had hoped that the new way of life would be an expansion and refinement of the old way of life, but maybe it’s time to start accepting that may not be the case, that an agonizing dissolution of present comforts and modes of thought may be the form tomorrow will inevitably take.
On the other hand, maybe getting dragged into the future kicking and screaming is exactly what I need to have happen to me. I confess that I enjoy my current almost-asceticism, but some days I wake up and realize that it’s not enough, just not enough, and that deprivation keeps the demons out but does not actually fulfill anything. Discontent suddenly flares like a re-emerging tumor, and the depthless well of gentleness in my heart drains away to nothing, leaving a parched and brittle landscape. Then a few hours later I’ll calm down and return to favoring the silence and stillness again. I wish I could make up my mind. I wish I could know for sure whether I am what I am or still in the process of getting there. I suppose one never gets there.
This much is certain: that I can’t go on feeling like I’ve lost all agency in my future. Like the question of whether I’m happy, whether I will be happy, is determined completely by forces outside my ability to influence: other people, whether they sit on admissions committees or not, and their black box thought processes, both individual and collective. My happiness should not be decided by others’ responses to my hopes and dreams and my own unhealthy desire for things I can’t have—funny how unrequited crushes and grad school rejections converge on my life. I need to regain control of my life and how I feel about it—I just need to figure out how.
"Staring down the barrel of the rest of my life”—that’s another phrase I would’ve, had I known better, saved for my current situation.
The cab driver was giving a lift to a friend of his who sat in the back seat and appeared to be headed for nowhere in particular. “You straight?” the driver asked his friend as I got in the cab. “Yeah, I’m straight,” the friend replied. A faint odor in the car hinted to me that this had not always been the case. About five minutes into the drive I realized I didn’t have the forty dollars cash the trip may cost. “You have thirty?” the driver asked. I did. “You’re straight,” he said, and so I was, as frustratingly so as Cobain ever was. In the backseat, the driver’s friend talked to someone on the cell about moving to Vegas and getting “a bed full of white ladies.”
It was a good weekend. I flew in on Thursday afternoon and shared an airporter van with a Japanese girl who was on vacation and had just flown in from Hawaii. The van driver was a Chinese guy who complained about how the airport ground transportation crew never helped the van drivers get any business, and asked me to teach him English phrases. When we were driving through downtown, he saw someone on the sidewalk who reminded him of his ex-wife, who had apparently “run off with a white man.” He then proceeded to ask me if I was married or had a girlfriend, and when I said no on both accounts, he tried to tell me where I could find a dormitory full of Asian girls.
I was so hungry after I arrived at the hotel that I ate dinner at the first food place I saw, which was a bar next to the hotel where Heinekens cost $4.50. I took a walk down Market St., which reminded me of New York City as much as any place I’d ever been in my life, that night. Among the things I saw: city hall; a bronze statue of Simon Bolivar; a dude on some stairs who asked if I wanted weed; a pension-aged couple making out in front of what appeared to be a strip club. Either that, or she was a prostitute; I couldn’t really tell. I stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in SoMa (which stands for “South of Market St.”), a stone U-shaped hallway in the middle of a park with miniature waterfalls cascading from the roof into a pool. While I was taking photos here, doing my best to remain inconspicuous, a guy in a red hoodie and headphones approached me and asked me to take his picture.
Sure, I said, you got a camera?
He did not; he wanted me to take a picture of him with my camera. “So you’ll remember me,” he said.
So I did, and so I do. It wasn’t until after he left that I began to be genuinely worried what he was going to do next, or what was going to happen to him; I hope he didn’t go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge or something like that. I hope I wasn’t the last person to see him alive. You never know, with such things.
Some time later I found myself in Fremont Square at the north end of Market St. It was utterly covered in dirty, trampled feathers. I suddenly understood why I had been seeing people walking through the streets carrying pillows all night. Tragically unbeknownst to me, the annual San Francisco Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight had taken place there mere hours before, and I was surveying the aftermath. A young couple danced around in the feathered square and skipped away down the sidewalk, holding hands. I realized I was very tired—it was 2AM in Baltimore—and decided to head back.
The interviews themselves were great, if exhausting; being serious and professional all day is simply not something I can effortlessly do. A couple of the professors I met with were applying really amazing methods toward a systematic understanding of macromolecular interactions; the ongoing fusion between the biophysics and bioinformatics branches of research, with both approaches projected onto the third axis of systems biology, was obvious. Some other professors were more interested in talking about the membrane biophysics research I’d done in the past year. I even talked to a graduate student who had studied astrophysics in college, and who was sympathetic toward my wish for a mathematically elegant understanding of biology.
UCSF Mission Bay is The New with capital letters. The campus had not even existed at the beginning of the decade; construction photos showed it bursting from its foundations like Athena from Zeus’ head. The buildings, half of which are still in the process of construction, are colorful, avant-garde in their geometry, and decorated on the interior with abstract paintings. They are also named after currently-extant corporations (e.g. Genentech) instead of long-dead white men (which may be either a positive or a negative, depending on one’s tastes). The Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology is, as far as I can tell, completely free of stubborn, elderly faculty and their entrenched modes of thought; all of the professors are young (by academic standards) and make no attempt to conceal that their grandiose ideals may never pan out.
At the party Friday night at a student’s house, I met our host, who ran an Internet radio station and musical promotions company out of his bedroom, which was equipped with Pro Tools and a MIDI fader board. I met a girl from my interview group who came from a town on the southern tip of Texas on the bank of the Rio Grande, whose parents had no concept of grad school and who was interviewing for Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis (and had already interviewed for the same MIT program I applied to, Computational and Systems Biology, who still haven’t written me back, at the end of January—I interpreted this as bad news for myself). Another kid from the group told me, as we lounged on the third floor balcony by the liquor table, that the worst thing one could possibly do is have an orgasm while high on ecstasy, as it would fry one’s serotonin receptors rendering one forever unresponsive to pleasure while sober. He told me he had a friend who had done this to himself and was subsequently forced into ascetic Buddhism.
I have to admit, all my experiences in San Francisco were pretty convincing. I’d miss the cold and the snow of the mid-Atlantic and all points north, but the city in the desert between the mountains and the ocean is beautiful in its own gloriously arid right, and promises a healthy fix of the crazy whenever I might feel the desire for it. The iPQB program challenges even MIT’s CSB program for progressiveness and innovative modes of thought. I really do hope they accept me. The lingering issue, of course, is that I’ll be two thousand miles from almost everyone I’ve known in the past seven years. It’s even more of a removal than from Baltimore to New York, where most of my best friends from high school had gone to college, and look at the consequences of a mere five hours’ bus ride: the only people from Lawrenceville I speak to semi-regularly anymore are Andrew and Nick. Though maybe that’s as much a consequence of the events of the past four years as of the physical distance. The other issue is the deprivation of deprivation which I have mentioned before. The age of the reclusive scientist-philosopher is over, and probably had been over for generations by the time I was born 22 years ago. In true anachronistic form,“work hard, play hard” never jived well with me; I’m used to having large quantities of “blank time” for reflection (hence these exceedingly long entries), but it seems “blank time” is increasingly discouraged as one moves into the real world.
Back in the summer after freshman year, walking with Patrice past a rain-soaked freshman quad we were leaving forever, I uttered, “This is the end of an old way of life.” I said it at the time mainly to sound cool (though it turned out to be unintentionally, and unfortunately, prophetic), but had I known better, I probably would’ve saved a phrase like that for the present day. I had hoped that the new way of life would be an expansion and refinement of the old way of life, but maybe it’s time to start accepting that may not be the case, that an agonizing dissolution of present comforts and modes of thought may be the form tomorrow will inevitably take.
On the other hand, maybe getting dragged into the future kicking and screaming is exactly what I need to have happen to me. I confess that I enjoy my current almost-asceticism, but some days I wake up and realize that it’s not enough, just not enough, and that deprivation keeps the demons out but does not actually fulfill anything. Discontent suddenly flares like a re-emerging tumor, and the depthless well of gentleness in my heart drains away to nothing, leaving a parched and brittle landscape. Then a few hours later I’ll calm down and return to favoring the silence and stillness again. I wish I could make up my mind. I wish I could know for sure whether I am what I am or still in the process of getting there. I suppose one never gets there.
This much is certain: that I can’t go on feeling like I’ve lost all agency in my future. Like the question of whether I’m happy, whether I will be happy, is determined completely by forces outside my ability to influence: other people, whether they sit on admissions committees or not, and their black box thought processes, both individual and collective. My happiness should not be decided by others’ responses to my hopes and dreams and my own unhealthy desire for things I can’t have—funny how unrequited crushes and grad school rejections converge on my life. I need to regain control of my life and how I feel about it—I just need to figure out how.
"Staring down the barrel of the rest of my life”—that’s another phrase I would’ve, had I known better, saved for my current situation.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
This Is My Bloody Valentine
This year, I am celebrating Valentine's Day in a fashion most single people only dream of: by traveling alone to a strange new city where nobody knows me. If that doesn't elevate the stereotypical loner Valentine's Day fuck-you to a brand-new transcendental level, I don't know what does. I haven't had a proper Valentine's Day in two years, but I don't suppose there's a lot I can do about that on my own.
I'm flying out to San Francisco at 8AM. This means I have to leave my apartment no later than 6. These early flights always confuse me; sometimes I want to sleep early, but most often I don't sleep at all. Incentive: University of California-San Francisco Biophysics interview. I'm actually quite excited for this: I'd almost forgotten the UCSF Biophysics program is part of an Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology that also covers their bioinformatics and systems biology research, which is a godsend for eclectics who can't make up their minds, such as myself. I also have most of this evening to explore San Francisco on my own, and while I have no idea how to do such a thing, I'm looking forward to sampling the eccentricities for which San Francisco is known.
To be honest, I'm not sure what to expect from the interview itself. They said we have faculty interviews all Friday, but haven't sent anything detailing which faculty members we will be interviewing with, which makes it hard to do background preparation (though I might be too lazy to do it even if I did have the information). They also specified that we should not dress up for our interviews, unlike Vanderbilt, where all the interviewees looked like they got lost on the way to Wall Street. I'll probably still wear some sort of collared shirt, just in case. Finally, they have apparently arranged for us to attend a party at a student's house. This could either turn out really badly or really well...
Today didn't make preparing for travel easy, though. I'm always a little bit nervous the day before I have to travel anywhere, and get a kind of gut-deep nausea that makes me want to not eat and spend all day with my friends, yet when I'm with them, as I was with Jessica today, no amount of conversation can dissolve that lump in my stomach; even though I would like to express it somehow, it seems to refuse to even enter my throat, much less manifest as speech. On top of that, it seems it's always a rainy day when I have to go somewhere. As though the weather conspires, on the precise day that I need to be energized and alert, to make me want to do nothing but stay in bed all day. And get Beach House songs stuck in my head, which causes me to go all blank and melancholy. Not that I don't enjoy that--in fact, I probably enjoy it more than is healthy--but it's inconvenient when I've got timetables biting at my heels.
I was talking to Jessica today about how I was concerned, if I did end up in San Francisco, there would just be too much stuff to do all the time. It's analogous to why I probably can't ever live in New York City for an extended period of time: I wouldn't be able to stand having the city in my face all the time. Baltimore is dispassionate; it often sees fit to leave one hanging in a void, and I have come to take comfort in that void, which is the desolation of Charles Village late on a weeknight, the tranquility of Mount Vernon that enfolds one a few blocks after one leaves the clamor of Sonar or Talking Head on a weekend, the silence that is only infrequently punctured by distant sirens. For one, such as I, who thrives so much on deprivation, it would be the ultimate irony to be deprived of deprivation itself. It is absurd, the extent to which my mind has extended to wrap around this city, like one of those trick bamboo plants that twists and folds upon itself. It seems uprooting and relocating myself is getting harder as I grow older.
No further word from Boston, though there's little doubt in my mind there's a bullet out there, most likely two, possibly airborne as we speak, with my name on it, coming to deliver the deflating coup de grace to my visions of Boston. It would be hard to describe my apprehension each time I came home at the end of the day this week; the routine fifteen-minute walk has turned into a dreadful fifteen-minute ritual of steeling myself for thin envelopes, of which none have arrived this week, thankfully. The very act of returning to my apartment has become a source of stress, and it's making everything a little surreal. Fortunately, I won't have to worry about it for the next three days or so, but there's always the danger of having to come home to them after 1AM Sunday morning, which is when my flight back to Baltimore arrives. I suppose these things must be dealt with, one way or another.
Let's not end this on a dour note. Here is something Williamson gave us to read in class today, one of the best things I've laid eyes on recently and occasion-appropriate to boot:
For C.
After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning's crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.
On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye--
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,
Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.
We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,
And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
-Richard Wilbur
I'm flying out to San Francisco at 8AM. This means I have to leave my apartment no later than 6. These early flights always confuse me; sometimes I want to sleep early, but most often I don't sleep at all. Incentive: University of California-San Francisco Biophysics interview. I'm actually quite excited for this: I'd almost forgotten the UCSF Biophysics program is part of an Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology that also covers their bioinformatics and systems biology research, which is a godsend for eclectics who can't make up their minds, such as myself. I also have most of this evening to explore San Francisco on my own, and while I have no idea how to do such a thing, I'm looking forward to sampling the eccentricities for which San Francisco is known.
To be honest, I'm not sure what to expect from the interview itself. They said we have faculty interviews all Friday, but haven't sent anything detailing which faculty members we will be interviewing with, which makes it hard to do background preparation (though I might be too lazy to do it even if I did have the information). They also specified that we should not dress up for our interviews, unlike Vanderbilt, where all the interviewees looked like they got lost on the way to Wall Street. I'll probably still wear some sort of collared shirt, just in case. Finally, they have apparently arranged for us to attend a party at a student's house. This could either turn out really badly or really well...
Today didn't make preparing for travel easy, though. I'm always a little bit nervous the day before I have to travel anywhere, and get a kind of gut-deep nausea that makes me want to not eat and spend all day with my friends, yet when I'm with them, as I was with Jessica today, no amount of conversation can dissolve that lump in my stomach; even though I would like to express it somehow, it seems to refuse to even enter my throat, much less manifest as speech. On top of that, it seems it's always a rainy day when I have to go somewhere. As though the weather conspires, on the precise day that I need to be energized and alert, to make me want to do nothing but stay in bed all day. And get Beach House songs stuck in my head, which causes me to go all blank and melancholy. Not that I don't enjoy that--in fact, I probably enjoy it more than is healthy--but it's inconvenient when I've got timetables biting at my heels.
I was talking to Jessica today about how I was concerned, if I did end up in San Francisco, there would just be too much stuff to do all the time. It's analogous to why I probably can't ever live in New York City for an extended period of time: I wouldn't be able to stand having the city in my face all the time. Baltimore is dispassionate; it often sees fit to leave one hanging in a void, and I have come to take comfort in that void, which is the desolation of Charles Village late on a weeknight, the tranquility of Mount Vernon that enfolds one a few blocks after one leaves the clamor of Sonar or Talking Head on a weekend, the silence that is only infrequently punctured by distant sirens. For one, such as I, who thrives so much on deprivation, it would be the ultimate irony to be deprived of deprivation itself. It is absurd, the extent to which my mind has extended to wrap around this city, like one of those trick bamboo plants that twists and folds upon itself. It seems uprooting and relocating myself is getting harder as I grow older.
No further word from Boston, though there's little doubt in my mind there's a bullet out there, most likely two, possibly airborne as we speak, with my name on it, coming to deliver the deflating coup de grace to my visions of Boston. It would be hard to describe my apprehension each time I came home at the end of the day this week; the routine fifteen-minute walk has turned into a dreadful fifteen-minute ritual of steeling myself for thin envelopes, of which none have arrived this week, thankfully. The very act of returning to my apartment has become a source of stress, and it's making everything a little surreal. Fortunately, I won't have to worry about it for the next three days or so, but there's always the danger of having to come home to them after 1AM Sunday morning, which is when my flight back to Baltimore arrives. I suppose these things must be dealt with, one way or another.
Let's not end this on a dour note. Here is something Williamson gave us to read in class today, one of the best things I've laid eyes on recently and occasion-appropriate to boot:
For C.
After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning's crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.
On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye--
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,
Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.
We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,
And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
-Richard Wilbur
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Odyssey, pt. 2
This took entirely too long.
Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Days 4 + 5
Finally feeling something resembling alive after wandering in a waking-dead daze since last Monday. I don’t know where that godawful sickness came from. At least I was still able to leave my room, defend my poster, and pretend to listen to talks; apparently it got Lirong too, and she hadn't been able to leave her room from last Monday until when the meeting ended last Wednesday.
It was infuriating, being surrounded by all this amazing science, even if I didn’t understand over half of it, and being too scatterbrained from either the cold or the cold medicine—or both—to focus on any of it. I went to the Computational Methods poster sessions on Tuesday, which I had been looking forward to, and found I couldn’t even stay concentrated enough to finish reading an abstract. (I fared a little better at the Systems Biology and Bioinformatics sessions Wednesday, but then I ran out of time before the meeting ended.) I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything the past few days except curl up in bed and not think, but that was obviously not an option.
My poster defense on Tuesday went well enough, diseased respiratory tract and imploding brain notwithstanding; a few people came by and asked me questions over the course of about an hour, and a couple of them actually seemed specifically interested and inspired by my data. Pretty much everyone suggested I should run the experiment with peptides known to adopt barrel-stave pore structure in a membrane, such as alemethicin and melittin; I agree with this, though we do have data for gramicidin A already. As with the talks, there was a lot of accented English passing through: a tall Dutchman and a professor from Mexico were among the ones asking me questions about my poster. A German guy came by and grilled me on some details about the electrochemistry of the experiment, which was mostly Mikhail’s domain, so that caused some awkwardness. And then there was the Italian lady who tried to convince me our silicon substrate was leading to the formation of imperfect bilayers, and that we should try using a mercury substrate instead. She said all this in a spectacularly condescending tone and patted me on the shoulder before walking away. Later, Jesse and Edwin said I should have told her, “you’re not perfect either…have you looked in the mirror recently?” They then gave each other high-fives. I’m glad I didn’t have to co-defend with the two lab fratboys, even if one of them already has his Ph. D.
Tuesday night, Izzi and I took the metro up to Hollywood, passing by such notable musical landmarks as Compton and San Pedro (unsurprisingly, she didn’t know who Mike Watt was). She talked a lot about her cats, of which she had so many, after half an hour I decided she’d only had one cat which had lived about twenty different lives. We got off the metro at Hollywood and Vine and ventured into the cold to trace the Walk of the Stars: pretty much the only tourist-y thing I indulged in while in South California. Fun fact: Gene Autry is the only person to be honored in all five categories of the Walk, though I can’t remember now what those five categories are; the point is, we were puzzled from seeing Gene Autry stars repeatedly until a plaque next to the last one explained the seeming redundancy. Hollywood Boulevard is a strange strip; the décor seemed to transition from glamorous to gaudy to ghetto with every passing block, and there were an absurd number of sex shops and drug paraphernalia outlets. Izzi fawned over a glass bong in the shape of a pink elephant in a storefront window (it cost $120).
In a bizarre twist of events, we met up with Jill of Pretty Lush fame, and she took a stroll with us down the Walk of the Stars. Jill and I had been mutual blog-appreciators since long before the existence of Different Cities, or indeed of the term “blog” itself (“Opendiary” was the word); I was much more active with using blogs as correspondence back in those days. This was the first time I’d ever met in person someone I met via Internet writings, and it wasn’t until we recognized each other (admittedly with some difficulty) on a street corner across from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not with a giant plastic dinosaur on top that I realized what an awkward situation it would become if Izzi decided to ask how we knew each other; mercifully, she didn’t. I felt a little bad for making Jill drive out to do little more than meander, but she seemed cool with two Eastern scientist types going tourist on her hometown.
Wednesday wasn’t much to speak of. Went to a talk by the Sarah Rice lab, another by Hassane Mchaourab from Vanderbilt, lunch with the extended academic family of Professor Steve White, which includes all members of the Hristova lab, and then the poster sessions. Killed some time at the Aquarium of the Pacific, which has excellent exhibits of jellyfish and sea lions but also an abundance of small screeching children, with Mikhail. Finally, in the evening, Granger swung by again, and we set out toward Santa Monica after some persuasion on my part to visit Ben.
A little background is necessary here. Ben was a fellow resident of mine in Hamill House, and one of my best friends at Lawrenceville, a year above my own, until he was expelled three weeks into his senior year, and he was a rogue, he was a ringleader. Ben was the reason Hamill was cool in 2002; looking back, it seems as though he was a kind of face for the house as a whole, Head of State to Peter’s Chief Executive, an image reinforced in my mind by Baldwin’s favoring of him and frequent overlooking of his shenanigans. I was introduced to him by Patrick, himself a boarding school casualty, and he and his inner circle—Ben, Patrick, Karam, Eric, sometimes Peter, Ross, Marshall, and Mostoller, and later myself—defined what social interaction I had that first, bewildered, sophomore year. Much of the second half of the year found us gathered in Eric’s room, 314, chatting and listening to music, often after lights out. It was there I was first exposed to drugs and drink, though I never partook of any of it, and it was there that I took my first tentative sidesteps out of the mainstream boarding school culture, and mainstream cultures in general. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say Ben’s cordial invitation of me into his little group set me on the escape trajectory I’ve traveled on to this day. Say what you will about my idealism then (and now), but those stoned Hamillites huddled together on late nights were at the center of something; half of the Lawrenceville-affiliated people I interacted with after his expulsion (by someone who remains one of the most reprehensible faculty at the institution to this day, if indeed he is still there), including such key figures as Vladic, Granger, Emily, and Andrew, knew him either directly or indirectly, and his departure seemed to affect almost everyone on campus in some way. On the day Ben’s family came with a truck to take him and his belongings away, people I’d never met and would never speak a word with came from around the Circle to say their goodbyes to him. After that, I only saw him twice more, once near the end of my own high school tenure when he showed up in Upper randomly in the company of Karam and proceeded to sell drugs, and again for a few brief hours when I passed through New Jersey in January 2005.
Picture my utter surprise, then, when Granger and I stepped walked through a gated fence and front yard and into the one-story house he shared with his girlfriend Alyssa to find an impeccably tidy, if compact, living room, complete with preliminary Valentine’s Day décor, a workstation-style desk in the corner, small sofa with cushions intact, and a big friendly dog named Jolie. Ben had cooked baked ziti for dinner and gave me some red wine in a stemmed glass. A photograph of him and Alyssa was taped to the bathroom mirror. The only giveaway of his erstwhile life was a small glass pipe on the bookshelf; however, he told me he didn’t have any weed (after asking us whether we wanted any, which we didn’t anyway). I’d never once in the past six-plus years imagined I would ever find Ben in the center of a spitting image of domestic bliss, but there he was, sitting on one side of the sofa with Alyssa’s legs stretched across his lap as she reclined across the other side, Jolie climbing up and licking his stubbly face, in the dim glow of a standing lamp, empty glass and plate sitting on the coffee table, across which Granger and I sat and talked about a way-gone time in a way-gone place thousands of miles from southern California, and way-gone people, some of whom were ourselves. Later, as we were leaving, Ben bid us goodnight as Alyssa put everyone’s dishes in the dishwasher, excusing the early evening on his need to wake up at 5:30 to go to his job scanning documents for a shrimping company. They looked for all the world like they could be married by the end of the decade.
What, then, when kids who got straight A+’s all through college are swinging like monkeys through a jungle of professional connections and doing lines to stay awake, the kid who never got in trouble in high school is jetting across the country twice in two weeks wondering what the hell city he’ll live in next year, and the guy who got kicked out of boarding school for substance abuse has apparently uncovered a shard of the so-called American Dream in Santa Monica at age 24? Though admittedly not everyone who goes down his path could turn out as well; Ben told us Eric was up in San Francisco, giving rehab a second shot which will hopefully take.
Nashville Villain
Flew in to Nashville Thursday evening. The sickness was starting to lift by then, but somewhere in the decompression/recompression of taking off and landing the worst headache I have ever known set in. By the time I made it to the Holiday Inn room Vanderbilt had booked for me I was wincing in pain with every step I took and ready to crush my head under a window to make it go away. I went downstairs and bought a bottle of Advil to kill the pain. I never take pills; that's how bad it was. Apparently a bunch of high school athletes were staying in the same hotel; I heard a few of them partying in a room on the fifth floor when the elevator stopped there. I wonder how that turned out for them.
I woke up on Friday in silence, though I'd set the alarm clock the night before. With a chill in my spine I rolled over to see I had 15 minutes to get downstairs and catch the van to Vanderbilt campus with the rest of the interview group. I had never gotten so well-dressed so quickly. As a bonus, I discovered I could successfully tie a tie in about 30 seconds flat, though not very well.
The day began with a few presentations from professors in the Chemical and Physical Biology program; Mchaourab was there, as was Izzi's PI Al Beth, and Phoebe Stewart who specialized in cryo-electron microscopy. From there we were packed off individually for hour-long interviews that took me back and forth across the labyrinthine Vanderbilt campus. Compared with the grid-like layout of Johns Hopkins-Homewood, a walk through Vanderbilt, especially the densely-arranged medical campus, was like an expedition through a concrete-and-glass rainforest. New, shiny, hi-tech research buildings jammed up against older complexes cast in 1970s red-brick architecture, and in one case sprouted right up from the rooftop of one (MRB IV, on top of Light Hall) like a parasitic plant. In addition, the pathways wound in every direction but straight ahead and often made no sense whatsoever. Fortunately, this kind of maze-like architecture is just my thing; I'm a sucker for intriguing space.
They had me interview with four professors. First up was Philip Crooke, an older mathematician with no lab beyond an office and a computer, who specialized in collaborative efforts and the mathematical modeling of biological pathways. We talked a bit about the philosophical issues of making a living interpreting someone else's data. He seemed to like me enough to walk me to the next interview: Walter Chazin, director of the Center for Structural Biology, stationed in the glossy halls of MRB III. I didn't seem to connect with him very well, for whatever reason; maybe it was his complex-specific approach? But Jens Meiler, the first of my two afternoon interviews, clicked a lot better; and no wonder, he was a big-time computational biologist, not just in Vanderbilt but in the wider academic society. I liked the way his lab had many collaborative projects with labs doing all sorts of "wet" assays: x-ray, cryoEM, EPR, NMR, etc., the data from which can be incorporated into knowledge-based force fields. His German grad student Steffane, who was jointly employed by Meiler and Stewart and who was working on using cryEM density maps to refine computational models, talked with me a bit and showed me around the more scenic, less convoluted parts of campus. He then dropped me off at Alissa Weaver's lab in the cancer research building, where my final interview took place; however, Weaver had decided to interview four of us prospectives simultaneously, so the situation ended up being more one-sided than the others, with Weaver presenting to us some interesting projects on the modeling of tumor expansion.
There was a brief poster session, and after returning to the Holiday Inn to ditch our stuffy suits and pantsuits, the real fun began: a party at an assistant dean's manor-like home with the CPB and IGP interviewees, current students, and faculty. It was a literal wine-and-dine: there was good food, good beer, and plenty of professors to talk to. There was a membrane guy who referred to me as "the Hopkins guy," much to my dismay, who turned out to know my PI. A second attempt at conversing with Dr. Chazin fell on its face; I suppose some things were just never meant to be.
They talked about going out to a country music club after the end of the dinner party and the "official" itinerary, but by this point I was starting to get a little tired of seeing the same people and talking about the same things all day without pause. I decided to meet up with Izzi and go to an apartment party with some of her friends from med school. It was a bit of a crapshoot: partying with an apartment of people I don't know is usually not something that goes very well, but for what it was, it turned out alright.
Only thing was, they were like a bunch of fratboys. They smoked up and played Beirut, not necessarily in that order. If someone had told me I was in a frat party, I might have believed them. There was a lot of friendly heavy petting that, months down the line, will probably result in incestuous dating and massive group falling out (I confess to being cynical about group dynamics, as they were). I guess college takes longer to end for people who aren't as fastidious as I am. It was still a decent time, but after a long day and a few drinks I became tired and didn't want to speak to anyone anymore. We went home, and that was the last I saw of Izzi, after barely exchanging a word for three years and then seeing each other almost daily for nearly a week. I admit that I started to feel a big affectionate towards her at the end--that's what happens when she's the archetypal attractive TA--but it was hard to have a conversation that doesn't have anything to do with science or school, under the circumstances. Who knew common interests could become an obstacle? After I returned to my room, I scrolled through both the AM and FM bands of the Holiday Inn’s bedside clock radio to find a station to wake up to. Had one of those experiences where it seemed every single coherent sound fading out of the white noise seemed to speak to me personally, from the Eagles' "Desperado" to the call-in guy musing whether we'd all been cloned and seeded on an artificial planet by aliens from a dying planet, "like cattle." Settled on a bizarre evangelist talk show on a middle-of-nowhere frequency on the AM band, because there is no way I could possibly sleep through that.
Saturday was a tour of Vanderbilt campus and Nashville proper. Impressions: Vanderbilt and Nashville look nice. Very nice, especially when the weather was beautiful with a remarkably clear sky. Nashville's a fairly low-density city, unfolding in a loose, laid-back sprawl punctured by the occasional cluster of soaring skyscrapers, including a devil-horned AT&T/Bell South building the locals apparently have christened the "Batman building." Even the deep downtown area was very clean, and had the feel of a big town as much as that of a small city.
Here was my only issue with the Nashville aura: I didn't see any weirdness, nor any darkness. After nearly four years of living in Baltimore, I've come to expect every city to have an untold underbelly of teeming cultural fauna that isn't touched by the glossy media. This I consider to be the essential nugget of a city's experience. Maybe Vanderbilt simply chose to take us out on the scenic route, but in our drive, I didn't notice any spaces where such an essence might be found. Every part of town we passed was like the friendly part of town, and I found that somewhat unsatisfying.
Needless to say, when I found myself later that night back in Baltimore in the Floristree space with a couple hundred others watching Matmos perform electronic noise by processing the sounds of fresh roses being beaten against a table and an intrepid volunteer getting a real, live mohawk haircut from bandmember M. C. Schmidt, I felt like a beached whale getting hustled back into the ocean. I actually hopped around a little and clapped with glee when I got there; I'd missed the eccentricity of this city so much in the polish of Long Beach and the lightness of Nashville. I guess you just can't take the Baltimore out of the boy.
Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Days 4 + 5
Finally feeling something resembling alive after wandering in a waking-dead daze since last Monday. I don’t know where that godawful sickness came from. At least I was still able to leave my room, defend my poster, and pretend to listen to talks; apparently it got Lirong too, and she hadn't been able to leave her room from last Monday until when the meeting ended last Wednesday.
It was infuriating, being surrounded by all this amazing science, even if I didn’t understand over half of it, and being too scatterbrained from either the cold or the cold medicine—or both—to focus on any of it. I went to the Computational Methods poster sessions on Tuesday, which I had been looking forward to, and found I couldn’t even stay concentrated enough to finish reading an abstract. (I fared a little better at the Systems Biology and Bioinformatics sessions Wednesday, but then I ran out of time before the meeting ended.) I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything the past few days except curl up in bed and not think, but that was obviously not an option.
My poster defense on Tuesday went well enough, diseased respiratory tract and imploding brain notwithstanding; a few people came by and asked me questions over the course of about an hour, and a couple of them actually seemed specifically interested and inspired by my data. Pretty much everyone suggested I should run the experiment with peptides known to adopt barrel-stave pore structure in a membrane, such as alemethicin and melittin; I agree with this, though we do have data for gramicidin A already. As with the talks, there was a lot of accented English passing through: a tall Dutchman and a professor from Mexico were among the ones asking me questions about my poster. A German guy came by and grilled me on some details about the electrochemistry of the experiment, which was mostly Mikhail’s domain, so that caused some awkwardness. And then there was the Italian lady who tried to convince me our silicon substrate was leading to the formation of imperfect bilayers, and that we should try using a mercury substrate instead. She said all this in a spectacularly condescending tone and patted me on the shoulder before walking away. Later, Jesse and Edwin said I should have told her, “you’re not perfect either…have you looked in the mirror recently?” They then gave each other high-fives. I’m glad I didn’t have to co-defend with the two lab fratboys, even if one of them already has his Ph. D.
Tuesday night, Izzi and I took the metro up to Hollywood, passing by such notable musical landmarks as Compton and San Pedro (unsurprisingly, she didn’t know who Mike Watt was). She talked a lot about her cats, of which she had so many, after half an hour I decided she’d only had one cat which had lived about twenty different lives. We got off the metro at Hollywood and Vine and ventured into the cold to trace the Walk of the Stars: pretty much the only tourist-y thing I indulged in while in South California. Fun fact: Gene Autry is the only person to be honored in all five categories of the Walk, though I can’t remember now what those five categories are; the point is, we were puzzled from seeing Gene Autry stars repeatedly until a plaque next to the last one explained the seeming redundancy. Hollywood Boulevard is a strange strip; the décor seemed to transition from glamorous to gaudy to ghetto with every passing block, and there were an absurd number of sex shops and drug paraphernalia outlets. Izzi fawned over a glass bong in the shape of a pink elephant in a storefront window (it cost $120).
In a bizarre twist of events, we met up with Jill of Pretty Lush fame, and she took a stroll with us down the Walk of the Stars. Jill and I had been mutual blog-appreciators since long before the existence of Different Cities, or indeed of the term “blog” itself (“Opendiary” was the word); I was much more active with using blogs as correspondence back in those days. This was the first time I’d ever met in person someone I met via Internet writings, and it wasn’t until we recognized each other (admittedly with some difficulty) on a street corner across from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not with a giant plastic dinosaur on top that I realized what an awkward situation it would become if Izzi decided to ask how we knew each other; mercifully, she didn’t. I felt a little bad for making Jill drive out to do little more than meander, but she seemed cool with two Eastern scientist types going tourist on her hometown.
Wednesday wasn’t much to speak of. Went to a talk by the Sarah Rice lab, another by Hassane Mchaourab from Vanderbilt, lunch with the extended academic family of Professor Steve White, which includes all members of the Hristova lab, and then the poster sessions. Killed some time at the Aquarium of the Pacific, which has excellent exhibits of jellyfish and sea lions but also an abundance of small screeching children, with Mikhail. Finally, in the evening, Granger swung by again, and we set out toward Santa Monica after some persuasion on my part to visit Ben.
A little background is necessary here. Ben was a fellow resident of mine in Hamill House, and one of my best friends at Lawrenceville, a year above my own, until he was expelled three weeks into his senior year, and he was a rogue, he was a ringleader. Ben was the reason Hamill was cool in 2002; looking back, it seems as though he was a kind of face for the house as a whole, Head of State to Peter’s Chief Executive, an image reinforced in my mind by Baldwin’s favoring of him and frequent overlooking of his shenanigans. I was introduced to him by Patrick, himself a boarding school casualty, and he and his inner circle—Ben, Patrick, Karam, Eric, sometimes Peter, Ross, Marshall, and Mostoller, and later myself—defined what social interaction I had that first, bewildered, sophomore year. Much of the second half of the year found us gathered in Eric’s room, 314, chatting and listening to music, often after lights out. It was there I was first exposed to drugs and drink, though I never partook of any of it, and it was there that I took my first tentative sidesteps out of the mainstream boarding school culture, and mainstream cultures in general. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say Ben’s cordial invitation of me into his little group set me on the escape trajectory I’ve traveled on to this day. Say what you will about my idealism then (and now), but those stoned Hamillites huddled together on late nights were at the center of something; half of the Lawrenceville-affiliated people I interacted with after his expulsion (by someone who remains one of the most reprehensible faculty at the institution to this day, if indeed he is still there), including such key figures as Vladic, Granger, Emily, and Andrew, knew him either directly or indirectly, and his departure seemed to affect almost everyone on campus in some way. On the day Ben’s family came with a truck to take him and his belongings away, people I’d never met and would never speak a word with came from around the Circle to say their goodbyes to him. After that, I only saw him twice more, once near the end of my own high school tenure when he showed up in Upper randomly in the company of Karam and proceeded to sell drugs, and again for a few brief hours when I passed through New Jersey in January 2005.
Picture my utter surprise, then, when Granger and I stepped walked through a gated fence and front yard and into the one-story house he shared with his girlfriend Alyssa to find an impeccably tidy, if compact, living room, complete with preliminary Valentine’s Day décor, a workstation-style desk in the corner, small sofa with cushions intact, and a big friendly dog named Jolie. Ben had cooked baked ziti for dinner and gave me some red wine in a stemmed glass. A photograph of him and Alyssa was taped to the bathroom mirror. The only giveaway of his erstwhile life was a small glass pipe on the bookshelf; however, he told me he didn’t have any weed (after asking us whether we wanted any, which we didn’t anyway). I’d never once in the past six-plus years imagined I would ever find Ben in the center of a spitting image of domestic bliss, but there he was, sitting on one side of the sofa with Alyssa’s legs stretched across his lap as she reclined across the other side, Jolie climbing up and licking his stubbly face, in the dim glow of a standing lamp, empty glass and plate sitting on the coffee table, across which Granger and I sat and talked about a way-gone time in a way-gone place thousands of miles from southern California, and way-gone people, some of whom were ourselves. Later, as we were leaving, Ben bid us goodnight as Alyssa put everyone’s dishes in the dishwasher, excusing the early evening on his need to wake up at 5:30 to go to his job scanning documents for a shrimping company. They looked for all the world like they could be married by the end of the decade.
What, then, when kids who got straight A+’s all through college are swinging like monkeys through a jungle of professional connections and doing lines to stay awake, the kid who never got in trouble in high school is jetting across the country twice in two weeks wondering what the hell city he’ll live in next year, and the guy who got kicked out of boarding school for substance abuse has apparently uncovered a shard of the so-called American Dream in Santa Monica at age 24? Though admittedly not everyone who goes down his path could turn out as well; Ben told us Eric was up in San Francisco, giving rehab a second shot which will hopefully take.
Nashville Villain
Flew in to Nashville Thursday evening. The sickness was starting to lift by then, but somewhere in the decompression/recompression of taking off and landing the worst headache I have ever known set in. By the time I made it to the Holiday Inn room Vanderbilt had booked for me I was wincing in pain with every step I took and ready to crush my head under a window to make it go away. I went downstairs and bought a bottle of Advil to kill the pain. I never take pills; that's how bad it was. Apparently a bunch of high school athletes were staying in the same hotel; I heard a few of them partying in a room on the fifth floor when the elevator stopped there. I wonder how that turned out for them.
I woke up on Friday in silence, though I'd set the alarm clock the night before. With a chill in my spine I rolled over to see I had 15 minutes to get downstairs and catch the van to Vanderbilt campus with the rest of the interview group. I had never gotten so well-dressed so quickly. As a bonus, I discovered I could successfully tie a tie in about 30 seconds flat, though not very well.
The day began with a few presentations from professors in the Chemical and Physical Biology program; Mchaourab was there, as was Izzi's PI Al Beth, and Phoebe Stewart who specialized in cryo-electron microscopy. From there we were packed off individually for hour-long interviews that took me back and forth across the labyrinthine Vanderbilt campus. Compared with the grid-like layout of Johns Hopkins-Homewood, a walk through Vanderbilt, especially the densely-arranged medical campus, was like an expedition through a concrete-and-glass rainforest. New, shiny, hi-tech research buildings jammed up against older complexes cast in 1970s red-brick architecture, and in one case sprouted right up from the rooftop of one (MRB IV, on top of Light Hall) like a parasitic plant. In addition, the pathways wound in every direction but straight ahead and often made no sense whatsoever. Fortunately, this kind of maze-like architecture is just my thing; I'm a sucker for intriguing space.
They had me interview with four professors. First up was Philip Crooke, an older mathematician with no lab beyond an office and a computer, who specialized in collaborative efforts and the mathematical modeling of biological pathways. We talked a bit about the philosophical issues of making a living interpreting someone else's data. He seemed to like me enough to walk me to the next interview: Walter Chazin, director of the Center for Structural Biology, stationed in the glossy halls of MRB III. I didn't seem to connect with him very well, for whatever reason; maybe it was his complex-specific approach? But Jens Meiler, the first of my two afternoon interviews, clicked a lot better; and no wonder, he was a big-time computational biologist, not just in Vanderbilt but in the wider academic society. I liked the way his lab had many collaborative projects with labs doing all sorts of "wet" assays: x-ray, cryoEM, EPR, NMR, etc., the data from which can be incorporated into knowledge-based force fields. His German grad student Steffane, who was jointly employed by Meiler and Stewart and who was working on using cryEM density maps to refine computational models, talked with me a bit and showed me around the more scenic, less convoluted parts of campus. He then dropped me off at Alissa Weaver's lab in the cancer research building, where my final interview took place; however, Weaver had decided to interview four of us prospectives simultaneously, so the situation ended up being more one-sided than the others, with Weaver presenting to us some interesting projects on the modeling of tumor expansion.
There was a brief poster session, and after returning to the Holiday Inn to ditch our stuffy suits and pantsuits, the real fun began: a party at an assistant dean's manor-like home with the CPB and IGP interviewees, current students, and faculty. It was a literal wine-and-dine: there was good food, good beer, and plenty of professors to talk to. There was a membrane guy who referred to me as "the Hopkins guy," much to my dismay, who turned out to know my PI. A second attempt at conversing with Dr. Chazin fell on its face; I suppose some things were just never meant to be.
They talked about going out to a country music club after the end of the dinner party and the "official" itinerary, but by this point I was starting to get a little tired of seeing the same people and talking about the same things all day without pause. I decided to meet up with Izzi and go to an apartment party with some of her friends from med school. It was a bit of a crapshoot: partying with an apartment of people I don't know is usually not something that goes very well, but for what it was, it turned out alright.
Only thing was, they were like a bunch of fratboys. They smoked up and played Beirut, not necessarily in that order. If someone had told me I was in a frat party, I might have believed them. There was a lot of friendly heavy petting that, months down the line, will probably result in incestuous dating and massive group falling out (I confess to being cynical about group dynamics, as they were). I guess college takes longer to end for people who aren't as fastidious as I am. It was still a decent time, but after a long day and a few drinks I became tired and didn't want to speak to anyone anymore. We went home, and that was the last I saw of Izzi, after barely exchanging a word for three years and then seeing each other almost daily for nearly a week. I admit that I started to feel a big affectionate towards her at the end--that's what happens when she's the archetypal attractive TA--but it was hard to have a conversation that doesn't have anything to do with science or school, under the circumstances. Who knew common interests could become an obstacle? After I returned to my room, I scrolled through both the AM and FM bands of the Holiday Inn’s bedside clock radio to find a station to wake up to. Had one of those experiences where it seemed every single coherent sound fading out of the white noise seemed to speak to me personally, from the Eagles' "Desperado" to the call-in guy musing whether we'd all been cloned and seeded on an artificial planet by aliens from a dying planet, "like cattle." Settled on a bizarre evangelist talk show on a middle-of-nowhere frequency on the AM band, because there is no way I could possibly sleep through that.
Saturday was a tour of Vanderbilt campus and Nashville proper. Impressions: Vanderbilt and Nashville look nice. Very nice, especially when the weather was beautiful with a remarkably clear sky. Nashville's a fairly low-density city, unfolding in a loose, laid-back sprawl punctured by the occasional cluster of soaring skyscrapers, including a devil-horned AT&T/Bell South building the locals apparently have christened the "Batman building." Even the deep downtown area was very clean, and had the feel of a big town as much as that of a small city.
Here was my only issue with the Nashville aura: I didn't see any weirdness, nor any darkness. After nearly four years of living in Baltimore, I've come to expect every city to have an untold underbelly of teeming cultural fauna that isn't touched by the glossy media. This I consider to be the essential nugget of a city's experience. Maybe Vanderbilt simply chose to take us out on the scenic route, but in our drive, I didn't notice any spaces where such an essence might be found. Every part of town we passed was like the friendly part of town, and I found that somewhat unsatisfying.
Needless to say, when I found myself later that night back in Baltimore in the Floristree space with a couple hundred others watching Matmos perform electronic noise by processing the sounds of fresh roses being beaten against a table and an intrepid volunteer getting a real, live mohawk haircut from bandmember M. C. Schmidt, I felt like a beached whale getting hustled back into the ocean. I actually hopped around a little and clapped with glee when I got there; I'd missed the eccentricity of this city so much in the polish of Long Beach and the lightness of Nashville. I guess you just can't take the Baltimore out of the boy.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
New Rejections: Berkeley, Harvard Biophysics
I'm back in Baltimore, but still finishing up the super-entry meant to cover the rest of this past week.
Meanwhile, here is a belated New Year's resolution: stop taking shit from people who don't love me back.
Meanwhile, here is a belated New Year's resolution: stop taking shit from people who don't love me back.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Day 3 [truncated]
Due to general sickliness, inebriation, and exhaustion, I shall have to forgo my heretofore usual daily full-length entry concerning the Biophysical Society conference. Instead, all I shall say is this:
1. I have a fever, and my brain feels like it's turned into a glitch record. Feels like minuscule electric shocks nipping at my heels and the inside of my forehead each time I take a step. I took a nap in the middle of day and drank a Naked Juice "Well-Being," which seemed to slightly alleviate the symptoms, but not as much as a solid dose of alcohol. I am drinking more than I would if I were in school, and it seems slightly absurd.
2. I had a half-hour long metaphysical conversation (the beauty of serendipity or lack thereof, figurative "force fields" modeling the migration of sorority girls as a function of booze volume, etc.) on the phone with Jessica in a sprawling subterranean hall with signs reading, "Hair Extension Kits" in huge block letters nailed to the walls a dozen feet off the floor. (No hair extension kits, or kits of any other sort, were to be found anywhere in the chamber.)
3. I met a very cool professor (Sarah Rice) from Northwestern University. She was ranting to a few grad students, including Izzi, about the absurdity of the postdoctoral job search from the employer's perspective. It turned out she'd graduated from UCSF Biophysics, where I shall be interviewing next week. Her parting words to me were, "Rockefeller...are a bunch of snobs."
4. Biophysicists dance, too. Especially when drunk. Especially to bad cover-band renditions of Journey, AC/DC, and Beyonce. (I would go find the e with the accent aigu from the character map, but I'm too tired.)
On all other fronts, nothing continues to happen. (Sigh.) Tenser, said the tensor...
Apparat's "Komponent" does it right now. I must present my poster in 13 hours. Sometimes, when I think about it, I lead a pretty strange life.
Los Angeles tomorrow?
1. I have a fever, and my brain feels like it's turned into a glitch record. Feels like minuscule electric shocks nipping at my heels and the inside of my forehead each time I take a step. I took a nap in the middle of day and drank a Naked Juice "Well-Being," which seemed to slightly alleviate the symptoms, but not as much as a solid dose of alcohol. I am drinking more than I would if I were in school, and it seems slightly absurd.
2. I had a half-hour long metaphysical conversation (the beauty of serendipity or lack thereof, figurative "force fields" modeling the migration of sorority girls as a function of booze volume, etc.) on the phone with Jessica in a sprawling subterranean hall with signs reading, "Hair Extension Kits" in huge block letters nailed to the walls a dozen feet off the floor. (No hair extension kits, or kits of any other sort, were to be found anywhere in the chamber.)
3. I met a very cool professor (Sarah Rice) from Northwestern University. She was ranting to a few grad students, including Izzi, about the absurdity of the postdoctoral job search from the employer's perspective. It turned out she'd graduated from UCSF Biophysics, where I shall be interviewing next week. Her parting words to me were, "Rockefeller...are a bunch of snobs."
4. Biophysicists dance, too. Especially when drunk. Especially to bad cover-band renditions of Journey, AC/DC, and Beyonce. (I would go find the e with the accent aigu from the character map, but I'm too tired.)
On all other fronts, nothing continues to happen. (Sigh.) Tenser, said the tensor...
Apparat's "Komponent" does it right now. I must present my poster in 13 hours. Sometimes, when I think about it, I lead a pretty strange life.
Los Angeles tomorrow?
Monday, February 4, 2008
Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Day 2
I realized that although I brought, and have been using, my camera and spare batteries, I'd neglected to bring my USB cable for uploading photos. This means I can't post any photos from the conference until when I get back to Baltimore this weekend. Not that there's a whole lot to see; the sunsets are pretty, but if I tried to take pictures of the talks or posters they'd throw me out by the collar. So goes intellectual property.
Woke up early today at 7:30, though really it was 10:30 by my East Coast biological clock. Mikhail had already been awake and swimming in the heated outdoor pool(!?).
I went to a lot of talks today. The upshot of not having any concrete research interests yet is everything seems fascinating, and I walked from one symposium to another every half an hour or so. The downside is one always feels obligated to be listening to one talk or another, not to mention having to decide what to attend when several very interesting things are being presented simultaneously. As I sat in the talks, I noticed all the people around me scribbling notes on the presentations; these people probably had fixed areas of research already, and sat in one symposium on their chosen topic all afternoon actually getting inspiration for experiments and projects from the presentations, as opposed to people like me, who flit around to whatever's interesting and am able to stop at the fascination, and thus preserve it, if only for a while. Oh well. It's a luxury, to not have to worry about how things I'm interested in actually relate to the work I'm currently doing, but I don't suppose I'll have it much longer, so it's OK, perhaps.
I heard one talk about how gramicidin S promotes the activity of other antimicrobial peptides by reducing membrane flexibility--very relevant to the paper Mikhail and I wrote. I heard another about the structure and formation of pathogenic protein aggregates, implicated in everything from mad cow disease to Alzheimer's (coincidentally, two diseases I'm actually somewhat terrified by). There was a presentation concerning using molecular dynamics simulations to probe the structure of antimicrobial peptides, though that was surprisingly unexciting--equilibrate an initial structure in bulk water using Monte Carlo simulations, add lipid molecules and get the final conformation using MD, etc.; nothing particularly shocking. During the questions session one guy was very pushy about informing the presenter, a master's student from Toronto, that she would be able to scan a much longer time scale for one of the derivative peptides if she'd started with a helical structure instead of the solvated conformation (which made sense to me, since she equilibrated the initial structure in water), which was rather annoying to me. A Swede presented a bunch of computational data on the prediction of macromolecular binding structures, which went right over my head.
I feel somewhat frustrated that so much effort in computational biology right now seems to be going toward proving that computation can yield biologically relevant (i.e. in agreement with experimental) results at all; I'm waiting for this proof of concept phase to conclude already, since that will be when the real fun starts. Right now, the accumulation of data is so outpacing the theoretical comprehension thereof it's rather macabre from my perspective; people show off slides and slides of graphs and diagrams only to conclude with a handful of tentative, qualitative declarations. Meanwhile, theorists struggle simply to prove their own relevancy; but without them, how would any data be relevant, or relevant to the extent that it could be? Dialectics and disconnect once again.
Went to lunch with Izzi at a burger place across the street. It's actually very easy to keep up a conversation with her. We talked about whether it was OK to drink beer at 3PM (I questioned her decision to do so, while admitting that I was drunk in a North Ave. alley in the late afternoon over the summer, but rationalized it by saying I was at Artscape), the fallacy of health insurance, the impossibility of getting any decent psychiatric care that didn't involve getting pills jammed down one's throat at a university, the unbearable misery of med school courseloads, etc. We parted and then met again at the end of the talks, hung out at the bookstore where my mother called in a rather awkward moment making sure I wasn't continuing to have a breakdown, and then she left to meet up with an old friend, who she eventually confessed was someone she'd dated long distance while she was still in college. Shit. That put a real twist in my plans. Or rather, it would have, had I had any plans. Which I did not. Really.
It turns out it takes two hours to get into Santa Monica. So I probably won't see Ben until Tuesday or Wednesday. That's fine. I've waited three years; what's three days?
Tonight I went to the Irish pub across the street (the "Auld Dubliner"--unoriginal even for an Irish pub name) with most of the people from the lab, and Ingo, who is from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and who supervised Shannon while she worked there over the summer. The cost of living (drinking) here is ridiculous--I'd never paid six dollars for a Guinness stout before. Well, I paid $5.50 for one back in Cleveland, but then glass was two feet tall. That's Long Beach, I suppose; it's basically a monstrous Inner Harbor, a jumbo tourist trap. Anyway, Edwin makes some rather inappropriate comments once he got a couple tumblers of Bailey's in him. The place served some delicious Irish beef stew boxty. I introduced the word "Kafkaesque" to my colleagues while describing my typical restaurant-going experience, and Edwin and Jesse wouldn't let it go the rest of the night. On many occasions I actually had to correct them when they were attempting to use the word to describe a situation that was not, in fact, Kafkaesque. Somehow Mikhail, Edwin, Jesse, Ingo and I ended up in the lobby bar of the Renaissance hotel in what might be the very first true "dudes at a bar" moment of my whole life. I knew when Jesse started pondering what one's girlfriend would think if one asked her when their anniversary was that it was time to go home and sleep. (On a side note: what would be the proper response to such a question? As usual, I tend toward a tentative "it depends.")
Moral of the story? Scientists eat, too. And drink. A lot, sometimes.
Woke up early today at 7:30, though really it was 10:30 by my East Coast biological clock. Mikhail had already been awake and swimming in the heated outdoor pool(!?).
I went to a lot of talks today. The upshot of not having any concrete research interests yet is everything seems fascinating, and I walked from one symposium to another every half an hour or so. The downside is one always feels obligated to be listening to one talk or another, not to mention having to decide what to attend when several very interesting things are being presented simultaneously. As I sat in the talks, I noticed all the people around me scribbling notes on the presentations; these people probably had fixed areas of research already, and sat in one symposium on their chosen topic all afternoon actually getting inspiration for experiments and projects from the presentations, as opposed to people like me, who flit around to whatever's interesting and am able to stop at the fascination, and thus preserve it, if only for a while. Oh well. It's a luxury, to not have to worry about how things I'm interested in actually relate to the work I'm currently doing, but I don't suppose I'll have it much longer, so it's OK, perhaps.
I heard one talk about how gramicidin S promotes the activity of other antimicrobial peptides by reducing membrane flexibility--very relevant to the paper Mikhail and I wrote. I heard another about the structure and formation of pathogenic protein aggregates, implicated in everything from mad cow disease to Alzheimer's (coincidentally, two diseases I'm actually somewhat terrified by). There was a presentation concerning using molecular dynamics simulations to probe the structure of antimicrobial peptides, though that was surprisingly unexciting--equilibrate an initial structure in bulk water using Monte Carlo simulations, add lipid molecules and get the final conformation using MD, etc.; nothing particularly shocking. During the questions session one guy was very pushy about informing the presenter, a master's student from Toronto, that she would be able to scan a much longer time scale for one of the derivative peptides if she'd started with a helical structure instead of the solvated conformation (which made sense to me, since she equilibrated the initial structure in water), which was rather annoying to me. A Swede presented a bunch of computational data on the prediction of macromolecular binding structures, which went right over my head.
I feel somewhat frustrated that so much effort in computational biology right now seems to be going toward proving that computation can yield biologically relevant (i.e. in agreement with experimental) results at all; I'm waiting for this proof of concept phase to conclude already, since that will be when the real fun starts. Right now, the accumulation of data is so outpacing the theoretical comprehension thereof it's rather macabre from my perspective; people show off slides and slides of graphs and diagrams only to conclude with a handful of tentative, qualitative declarations. Meanwhile, theorists struggle simply to prove their own relevancy; but without them, how would any data be relevant, or relevant to the extent that it could be? Dialectics and disconnect once again.
Went to lunch with Izzi at a burger place across the street. It's actually very easy to keep up a conversation with her. We talked about whether it was OK to drink beer at 3PM (I questioned her decision to do so, while admitting that I was drunk in a North Ave. alley in the late afternoon over the summer, but rationalized it by saying I was at Artscape), the fallacy of health insurance, the impossibility of getting any decent psychiatric care that didn't involve getting pills jammed down one's throat at a university, the unbearable misery of med school courseloads, etc. We parted and then met again at the end of the talks, hung out at the bookstore where my mother called in a rather awkward moment making sure I wasn't continuing to have a breakdown, and then she left to meet up with an old friend, who she eventually confessed was someone she'd dated long distance while she was still in college. Shit. That put a real twist in my plans. Or rather, it would have, had I had any plans. Which I did not. Really.
It turns out it takes two hours to get into Santa Monica. So I probably won't see Ben until Tuesday or Wednesday. That's fine. I've waited three years; what's three days?
Tonight I went to the Irish pub across the street (the "Auld Dubliner"--unoriginal even for an Irish pub name) with most of the people from the lab, and Ingo, who is from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and who supervised Shannon while she worked there over the summer. The cost of living (drinking) here is ridiculous--I'd never paid six dollars for a Guinness stout before. Well, I paid $5.50 for one back in Cleveland, but then glass was two feet tall. That's Long Beach, I suppose; it's basically a monstrous Inner Harbor, a jumbo tourist trap. Anyway, Edwin makes some rather inappropriate comments once he got a couple tumblers of Bailey's in him. The place served some delicious Irish beef stew boxty. I introduced the word "Kafkaesque" to my colleagues while describing my typical restaurant-going experience, and Edwin and Jesse wouldn't let it go the rest of the night. On many occasions I actually had to correct them when they were attempting to use the word to describe a situation that was not, in fact, Kafkaesque. Somehow Mikhail, Edwin, Jesse, Ingo and I ended up in the lobby bar of the Renaissance hotel in what might be the very first true "dudes at a bar" moment of my whole life. I knew when Jesse started pondering what one's girlfriend would think if one asked her when their anniversary was that it was time to go home and sleep. (On a side note: what would be the proper response to such a question? As usual, I tend toward a tentative "it depends.")
Moral of the story? Scientists eat, too. And drink. A lot, sometimes.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Day 1
Here I am, at last the West Coast; I've never been here, outside of layovers en route to/from the far side of the Pacific, and that one time I took the BART out for a spin from SFO. I am in Long Beach, California, for the Biophysical Society meeting.
Yesterday, before I left, I had a day-long meltdown about grad schools. Rockefeller University sent their rejection letter and all of a sudden I freaked that I wasn't going to get into MIT or Harvard, that I wasn't going to Boston with everyone else, that it was going to be just like Columbia four years ago, like getting voted off the island. More than just a grad program is at stake here: I feel as though I'm not only wanting acceptance into certain grad schools, but also acknowledgment of my right to keep certain friendships and relationships I've painstakingly built over the past few years. Though it wouldn't be the end of the world if I didn't go to Boston. I know what exactly what will happen: I will go to some other school, I will be wiped clean, I will compromise, I will restart, I will adapt. As I have so many times before. It's not that I couldn't do it again; it's just that I desperately do not want to. Is this not enough? Am I not enough? Do I not deserve what I have found and made?
I have no answer for these questions right now, but I don't suppose I can spend too much time thinking about it; I have to stay lucid for a presentation on Tuesday and the Vanderbilt interview later next week.
Anyway. Considering this is the Biophysical Society meeting, there was surprisingly little biophysics involved today. We left Baltimore at 7:10AM. Arrived at Los Angeles a bit after 11, local time, an hour later than scheduled; I slept pretty much all of the way, as I didn't sleep at all last night. After checking into the hotel--real posh place, by the way, would never stay here unless it was on the university's tab--I grabbed the meeting schedule and some overpriced, lousy convention center lunch. I spent most of the rest of the day hanging out with Izzi, the attractive biophysics TA archetype, who is at Vanderbilt now, studying in the program I will be interviewing for in a few days. We talked a lot, about science of course, but also people's drug habits, and how everyone at the mixer seemed to know each other already and were impossible to talk to, for that reason, and also for the reason that many of them were speaking in foreign languages. We also talked about politics for a long time; she's more centrist than I am, but we share many similar criticisms of the status quo. I don't go so far as to day, "we're all fucked," though.
Granger drove up from Orange County to join us for a late dinner at a restaurant where two dueling (electric) pianists played the classics for the entertainment of the patrons. Near us were two tables of very, very drunk ladies, one of which reportedly had just won some sort of reality show. These people eventually began dancing all around the restaurant and even gave one of the musicians a lap dance (they played on). One of the ladies walked up behind an unsuspecting Granger, wrapped her arm around his shoulders and asked to rub his shaved head.
I'd expound more, but I'm still immensely tired from last night's lack of sleep. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to provide some proof that I'm not on some kind of pleasure cruise and am, in fact, here to do science. Or something resembling it.
Yesterday, before I left, I had a day-long meltdown about grad schools. Rockefeller University sent their rejection letter and all of a sudden I freaked that I wasn't going to get into MIT or Harvard, that I wasn't going to Boston with everyone else, that it was going to be just like Columbia four years ago, like getting voted off the island. More than just a grad program is at stake here: I feel as though I'm not only wanting acceptance into certain grad schools, but also acknowledgment of my right to keep certain friendships and relationships I've painstakingly built over the past few years. Though it wouldn't be the end of the world if I didn't go to Boston. I know what exactly what will happen: I will go to some other school, I will be wiped clean, I will compromise, I will restart, I will adapt. As I have so many times before. It's not that I couldn't do it again; it's just that I desperately do not want to. Is this not enough? Am I not enough? Do I not deserve what I have found and made?
I have no answer for these questions right now, but I don't suppose I can spend too much time thinking about it; I have to stay lucid for a presentation on Tuesday and the Vanderbilt interview later next week.
Anyway. Considering this is the Biophysical Society meeting, there was surprisingly little biophysics involved today. We left Baltimore at 7:10AM. Arrived at Los Angeles a bit after 11, local time, an hour later than scheduled; I slept pretty much all of the way, as I didn't sleep at all last night. After checking into the hotel--real posh place, by the way, would never stay here unless it was on the university's tab--I grabbed the meeting schedule and some overpriced, lousy convention center lunch. I spent most of the rest of the day hanging out with Izzi, the attractive biophysics TA archetype, who is at Vanderbilt now, studying in the program I will be interviewing for in a few days. We talked a lot, about science of course, but also people's drug habits, and how everyone at the mixer seemed to know each other already and were impossible to talk to, for that reason, and also for the reason that many of them were speaking in foreign languages. We also talked about politics for a long time; she's more centrist than I am, but we share many similar criticisms of the status quo. I don't go so far as to day, "we're all fucked," though.
Granger drove up from Orange County to join us for a late dinner at a restaurant where two dueling (electric) pianists played the classics for the entertainment of the patrons. Near us were two tables of very, very drunk ladies, one of which reportedly had just won some sort of reality show. These people eventually began dancing all around the restaurant and even gave one of the musicians a lap dance (they played on). One of the ladies walked up behind an unsuspecting Granger, wrapped her arm around his shoulders and asked to rub his shaved head.
I'd expound more, but I'm still immensely tired from last night's lack of sleep. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to provide some proof that I'm not on some kind of pleasure cruise and am, in fact, here to do science. Or something resembling it.
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