Stew's Blues

Sliver

2009-09-23T22:43:00.004-04:00

[After too many hours in front of a laptop with headphones in....]

I watched a sliver of the sky through the coffee shop window around the corner in the wall and surmised that the sunset had been brilliant. Lingering in the slivered sky was the warm grapefruit hue at the horizon fading into cyan with altitude. I thought about the buses running a few minutes' walk from that window and people huddled at home around dinner tables with roast beef somewhere out there. In the meantime the cold pixels of a scientific manuscript stared at me, the lines advanced one by one with great effort, a record of human thought but not of human warmth or generosity. What was paper worth held up to mashed potatoes and shared laughter?

Meditations on Meditations

2009-08-25T19:38:00.002-04:00

Recently I picked up a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. A collection of aphorisms written by the Roman philosopher-emperor, the work itself is good but mostly dry, morsels of Stoicism that are easily held and turned in the mind over the course of a day, like Proverbs for the pagan-set. One thing that attracts attention, though, is the acknowledgments.

As with any thesis, novel, or cereal box (if they came with one), the acknowledgments give insight into the character of the author, a place where the snow-job that follows is set aside and suspended, where the author steps from behind the curtain and talks directly (if cryptically) to the audience.

Here's a taste of the acknowledgments from Meditations (the George Long translation available here):

"From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.

"From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.

"From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.

"From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally."

And it goes on and on. In fact it's the whole of Book One, ending with "To the gods I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good."

I was thinking of writing my own acknowledgments (to what work, I don't know). But if I were to begin in the same style, my Book One might go like this:

"From my father I learned an easy way to make friends, how to laugh much and loudly, a sense of wonder for the natural world, and appreciation for the simple things.

"From my mother, attention to detail, a love of words and language, how to be a good host, and the danger of chasing after the opinions of others.

"From my brother, a lesson in gentleness, an appreciation for baseball on the radio, and a fondness for summertime comprising video games and idle pursuits.

"From Brad Newton, the encouragement that comes from a green light to whims, a love of baseball cards, and how to persist from great loss.

"From Colleen Webb, a love for etymology and the ancient world, a dry sense of humor, stern but gentle advice for the future."

My list would go on and on as well. It's a useful exercise to write the acknowledgments to a life's work, even if the rest of the work itself has yet to be written. We are all of us the sum of these experiences and repaying a great debt by the conduct of our lives.

Bus stop

2009-07-13T17:54:00.003-04:00

Clasping hands under the slate gray sky,
Drops of rain coming down our faces
In rivulets that open up and get tasted,
We navigate to the bus stop.
The puddles wide and loose up to the edges of our shoes,
Our umbrellas held aloft like Dumbo ears,
We take teaspoon steps and marsupial hops
Past the men in buttoned up jackets
Shouting, Get outta the way!
Zig-zagging along and making all this racket,
In youth that does not last
Long after the sun burns up the past.

after 408 days

2009-05-15T18:36:00.003-04:00

every once in a while i relive the horror of an airbag deploying, the silent shattering of glass, the effortless bending of metal, the effusion of bodily fluids and the tearing of flesh, and the stillness of 6 am in a grassy ditch while a soul left for heaven on an exhaled breath, the dew drops still on grass blades, the stars setting in the west a long long way from here, the limitless expanse ahead on which the pneuma will sail, going everywhere and nowhere, anywhere but here, because they will come and find only the body and wonder, like i have, what happened to the man

fiction stem

2009-04-24T14:40:00.002-04:00

i was having stupid romantic thoughts of taking her to old jazzy places where we'd order oysters and creme brulee just because of the way they sounded but then get up to dance before they even arrived leaving our glasses full of wine and empty of cares, hers stained with the rouge from her lips and mine smudged on the base with a thumbprint i'd made over and over while we were talking about the rain outside that still fell like a snare drum but not like the cascade we'd been caught in fleeing the theatre without an umbrella nor a taxi in sight, with eyes darting from dark street corner to corner searching from among the one, two, three lit facades in view, polling each other where we should go until we decided on this place that was illuminated at street level by just four neon letters, or actually three since the "a" was burnt out which left just a "j" and two "z"s which we were still laughing about when we walked in the half-submerged door like we owned the place.

Bus ride of conscience

2009-03-12T16:03:00.001-04:00

Today I was riding the bus in to campus. It was a clear, sunny day, I'd just had coffee at a shop a few steps from my apartment, and I had earbuds jammed into my ears which always gives me that closed-in, cut-off feeling no matter what's playing. Although it was just ten in the morning, the net effect of sun on skin, coffee in tummy, and muffled sounds, along with the rocking of the bus, soon put me to sleep.

I awoke at one of the stops when the bus knelt on its hydraulics to allow an old lady to board. Hanging onto her cane with a wobbly grip, she mounted the step then held a shaky hand full of change above the coin box. As the change clinkered in, I got up from the front seat where I'd been sitting and moved to a row two rows back. She teetered her head toward the driver, spoke a few words, then took my old seat and we were off.

When we got to campus and stopped at one of the stops at the edge of campus, the driver announced, "Next stop, hospital". It was clear this was meant for the old lady. At the next stop, the old lady got up, slowly made her way to the front door of the bus, and with the delicacy a child might apply going up stairs for the first time, laid foot on the sidewalk one foot after the other. I was awake to watch the whole process, and though it all only took a few seconds, I found myself impatient and burying myself deeper into what was playing on my MP3 player.

But in those few seconds, I also realized the hospital was across the street from the stop, and if there was a time when the archetypical good deed of helping an old lady across the street might be called for, this was it. Where did that call come from that sounded like a spike in my brain? And why was I not getting up at that exact moment when I realized this was the right thing to do?

By the time I summoned the will to do the action, the bus was off again. The next stop was the last, my stop, and if I'd been impatient before, I was even more so now. I wondered if everyone around me had had such thoughts, even as they looked obliviously away, out the windows. Before the bus even made the last turn and came to a stop, I was already at the back exit door.

The doors open, and I sprinted down the sidewalk. I thought about all those stupid workouts I'd done, out of vanity, out of self-concern, and the scene from Batman Begins came to mind, where Alfred sardonically tells Bruce Wayne lying under a burning log, "What good are all those push-ups if you can't lift a bloody log?". Bloody logs! Suddenly it became all-important to find this woman on the original side of the street where she was dropped and walk her across this bloody street!

I arrived at the crosswalk and slowing my breath looked across the street. No one at the stop. I looked down the road. No one with a cane. And toward the hospital. No one with a cane there either. I'd waited too long on a good deed, ran to make up for it, and come up short.

Afterward, I wondered, what is the lag between the right thought and the right action? At most times when I am not with people, or cut-off in my earbudded world, I am thinking of my own work, my own deeds, my own self. And then the opportunity arises to do something simple and good for others, and I take too long to pull the good trigger. I'm waiting now, for next time.

Fog

2009-02-05T17:16:00.002-05:00

Fog blanketed Vancouver several days last month, throwing everything a fair distance from visual perception behind layers of gray taffeta. People became dark silhouettes, disappeared into the mist, sometimes reappearing right next to you. Their features and faces faded away but their shapes remained, bobbing up and down slightly as they walked but rendering their direction -- coming or going -- impossible to tell. You had to concentrate and put and mental bead on them or else you'd lose track.

Everyone shuffled along like hooded monks to evensong.

After dark a foghorn sounds off-campus at regular intervals, and images of creaky hulls and sailor skeletons come to mind. Not a time for the superstitious. Breathing lungfuls of moist air, you can imagine the same droplets being exhaled from someone else, either still with us or already passed.

Trees stood out from their copses and outgrew their mosses.

Here are some pictures, like scenes from a zombie movie:

Simple thing

2009-01-02T03:45:00.001-05:00

It seemed like such a simple thing that he should walk in the garage door, put his bag down on the breakfast table, and ask my mom about her day, like he always did. Over thirty years I observed this ritual, except when I went away for college, teaching, or grad school. The light that came in the breakfast room window, hot and lazy on a Texas afternoon, imparting shadows on the curtains on the side, is still sharp in my memory. The sound that his bag made on the glass overlay of the breakfast table is also clear, as is the picture of my mother at the stove, cooking up a dish for dinner, sizzling vegetables in a pan. The smell of steaming rice coming up through the hind half of the house. The little interaction between my mom and dad that transpired in those few moments, concurrent with the bag on the table and the light through the window, a few choice phrases in Taiwanese, that was matrimonial harmony to me growing up. That he should walk in that door today still seems such a simple thing. A quick laugh, a stupid explanation, just a word or two that the joke's on us he was away these past nine months -- didn't we get the message from his workplace? wasn't it a coincidence about that accident the day he left? didn't we get the message? -- would redeem it all. But of course that simple thing has never been done past the date of a man's due. There are no mistakes there and no sound that seeps through the gate.

Coming back from Peter's

2008-12-20T15:31:00.006-05:00

This is Apollo's cart when it disappears under the horizon
A sled taking us through darkened streets
An electronic voice chiming out the names
A dozen club kids bombed out of their minds

At 2:45 a.m. the streets are slush, the driver's in shorts,
Dispassionate, holds no grimace or grin, and
Bears the bier with the kids in repose
Slumped deep in their seats

The grass

2008-12-12T16:47:00.000-05:00

Was there ever a time when the days seemed to last forever, in a good way, and the grass underfoot was soft Bermuda in the yard and the twilight stretched long past it had any right to, pumpkin orange then fiery red before slipping into navy blues and black? When the whirr of the lawnmower kept up long past dark, dad having started at sundown because it was cooler then despite the mosquitoes, and you heard it go round and round the house like a carousel? It got louder as it came toward your window, then quieter again, then louder as he turned at the row's edge and came back. Wait. Wait for the yard to be finished, you. He's going to be done soon. Listen for the next part. I know it's long past dinner time, when you came inside, being done with play, and he headed out. But listen. The lawnmower gets wheeled into the garage, past the creaky fence gate, through the loud garage side door, and now you can hear him pull the garden hose off the spool hanging on the fence. He drags it past the gutter pipe coming down from the roof which resonates like an organ bellows, picks out the right spot for the sprinkler head and stakes it into the ground. Now he comes back to the valve by the master bedroom, turns the creaky old valve, and the water encircles the house, comes in from somewhere out there, ramps up in noise, then starts the noise chk-chk-chk! Chka-chka-chka. Chk-chk-chk! That's the sound you'll fall asleep to more times than you can remember. Halfway through the sprinkler arc the water hits your window, reminds you of a car wash and you imagine it's cleaning your window of that Texas dust that gets stuck to it in the summertime, and you fall deeper and wonder how late your dad must stay up to turn off the water after the ground and good grass get their soaks. When was that? I wish you'd written down the date. It all seems like a fiction now.

More pictures

2008-10-04T05:47:00.013-04:00

Last Sunday I cycled down to the Vancouver airport -- about a 30-minute trip -- and stopped at the park located right next to the airport. "Right next" means you're sitting outside the barbed-wire fence boundary of the airport directly under the arrival path for domestic flights. Planes zoom and screech overhead at the tip of your nose. Some people lie on the grass on blankets, others steady themselves on their cars with their cameras in hand. Or you can go to a central cemented area where a compass has been painted on the ground giving such helpful information as:

I was glad to find this out. (Fact check: Google Maps says the distance is 3547 km walking. No word on how one burrows through the earth.)

Then it was on to the botanical gardens. The colors are starting to change, and the most delicate plants have already given up the chlorophyll ghost and are heading into winter slumber. If they were old men, they would be wearing stocking caps.

Sundown on Sunday at the garden always reminds me of how far I am from home. The gardens go bare around dinnertime, and the high westward bluff blocks the sun prematurely and puts a chill in the air. It hastens me to head out.

[Untitled]

2008-09-24T14:25:00.009-04:00

Something I regret is that we didn't talk more about death when you were alive. Sure, every once in a while we'd argue at the breakfast table on Saturday morning and you'd say, "When I'm gone...." But that never seemed real, and I always changed the subject.

I knew you thought about these things. When you tried showing me how to take care of my money, that was your way of preparing me. You'd also made a will, and I knew you'd planned ways to take care of mom, Stephen and me.

But beyond these things, I wish I'd said something like, When the time comes, if there's still a chance, I want you to fight with all you've got, and mom and Stephen and I will be fighting here with you. But if at that time, there's not a chance left and you know it, then I want you to know that it's okay to let go, that guh-guh and I will take care of mom and each other.

I hope you weren't scared. You'll never know how many times I've thought of that moment. Or maybe you do. Did you know "expire" comes from the Latin "to breathe out"?

On this rainy day in September, almost six months to the day, for some reason I'm thinking how I'll never know what kind of old man you would have become, what kind of habits you would have developed, whether there's some food you would have started liking or some TV show you would have started watching. And in a strange way, I wonder if I'll ever change in your mind too, if you've stopped seeing me and only remember me from the last time we saw each other. Will you recognize me the next time?

More recent highlights from the digital

2008-09-22T01:58:00.012-04:00

The last couple weekends I've been trying to take advantage of a membership I got to a local botanical garden on a whim. Summer's making its last stand, and I want to make sure I have something to remember it by:

Last Sunday I arrived just before closing time as the sun started to set:

In this next image I'm actually playing a trick on you. Can you see it?

This Sunday I arrived with time to spare. The sun was still high enough to cast an aura around some things:

And water curiously beaded on the leaves of one plant:

I'm always in a better state of mind when I'm leaving the Garden than when I arrived. I seem reset each time:

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world! / Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden..."

Berries

2008-09-19T00:31:00.007-04:00

I'm on my mountain bike descending into the brambles on a late September evening. Thorns catch my arms. The sun's setting and sends out jetties of light onto the trail.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of seeing the brambles in BC. They zip by and I can just see they're bearing fruit. Branches sag with clusters of red and black at their tips. Spiders are weaving their way through the branches and leave their lacework behind.

The calendar says it's not Michaelmas yet: the berries are still good to eat. I stop trail-side and tug at a berry that hangs at waist-level. It's too firm, and I know it'll taste sour but I taste it anyway. I spit it out next to my feet. Then I aim for another, this one too ripe. It explodes in burgundy all over my fingertips.

Finally I get one that's got the right amount of give to it. I blow on it to chase out any bugs inside, then I pop it into my mouth. It's an understated kind of sweet and I get swirl it on my tongue, swallow, and juggle a few of the remaining seeds between my teeth. I pick a few more, cupping them loosely in my hand, then push on down the trail and on toward home.

Recent highlights from the digital

2008-09-14T20:12:00.005-04:00

The hellish-looking coast of west Vancouver Island:

Tower Beach off the UBC campus on a halcyon day:

Pile of rocks that mysteriously stack themselves on Centennial Beach, one hour south of Vancouver:

Berries near Centennial Beach explode in late summer growth:

The future is quiet

2008-09-08T15:50:00.008-04:00

Cycling into campus today -- and by the way, did you know UBC was ranked the best place in Canada to do a postdoc by The Scientist magazine last year? -- I was enjoying the mild weather, the gravelly feel of the trail under my tires, and the running loop of thoughts in my head. This all made for a gentle whrring sound -- the gears on my bike, the gears in my head -- until I was interrupted. Trucks came grinding by, one after the other. And then I almost ran over horse poop. (The trail's multi-use which apparently means pedestrian, bike, and horse in Canada.)

This got me thinking about something I'd read before, about how the greatest contributor to noise pollution was the modern combustion engine. There just doesn't seem to be any way to convert fossil fuel into kinetic energy quietly. No matter how much technology you throw at it, you still fundamentally have to blow the damn thing up, and that makes noise.

Then I started thinking about how there's all this talk about hybrids and even (gasp!) fully electric vehicles. Have you ever ridden in one of these? If you have, you know they get eerily quiet at stop lights and intersections. I mean, suddenly you're just sitting there doing nothing. And if you're with someone you don't get along with, this is when it gets really awkward.

And that brings me to this, an unintended consequence of the eventual switch to hybrid and electric vehicles: The future is quiet. And with that quietude, I bet driving/riding fundamentally changes. Gets more relaxing, less stressful, maybe even more thoughtful.

The WHO says one consequence of noise pollution is "annoyance". (A quantitative study comes out in December.) Could this spell the end of road rage? Other studies point to a link between noise, cardiovascular disease, poor sleep, and (duh) hearing loss.

It's no coincidence that low rumbly sounds -- like the ones I heard pass me this morning -- evoke bad reactions physiologically. To our prehistoric ancestors low sounds meant thunderstorms, bears, and earthquakes. They're the go-to when sound engineers want to scare us at the movies. Take The Haunting with Liam Neeson. Audiophiles routinely test their subwoofers to the low growls from this movie. Take away those sounds and you're left with forgettable Sunday afternoon fare.

So it goes with our electric future. Imagine the road trip of the future: You won't hear the engine. You'll hear the wind as you whoosh through it. And the gentle whrr of those thoughts in your head.

"What could go wrong?"

2008-09-01T15:14:00.009-04:00

Today I was walking through the tony and a little-too-comfortable-for-its-own-good Kerrisdale neighborhood of Vancouver when I saw a woman dash into a bakery.

She left her baby stroller outside tied to a dog.

The question came to mind "What could go wrong?" followed by "Where does one even begin?"

It was a case of "caveat emptor" and "non sequitur" all rolled into one. A twofer! Sometimes you just have to laugh at the little things.

New words

2008-08-30T16:50:00.006-04:00

Peculiar phenomenon: Seeing someone who reminds you of someone you know. Looks mostly the same but not exactly. One thing could be off: age or weight, say. It's like an older version of your friend, or a portly one. Or maybe in a different ethnicity.

I've tried looking up a word for this, but the closest I get is lookalike which seems to fall a little short. It's not as specific as I want. Or as dramatic.

I thought there might be a foreign equivalent, but the closest I get is doppelganger, a German word. (I've recently become a fan of German words that have no English equivalents: heimweh, schadenfreude, that kind of thing.) The definition's "a ghostly double" and it's got a sinister connotation. The Norwegians have a similar word, vardoger. Same thing but without the sinister connotation. It's just someone who looks like you and does what you're going to do before you do it.

But how about this: olderganger? The meaning's clear, right? Or how about ethnoganger? You see where I'm going with this. Nothing too earth-shattering. Just one of those random Saturday afternoon thoughts.

Courtesy Wikipedia, you can take this concept one step further. What if it actually is the person you know, just in a different place? Or rather, two different places at the same time? Apparently it's a phenomenon known as bilocation. Saints do it.

Mist and gauze

2008-07-27T04:13:00.009-04:00

Missing my dad comes on now like a fog unbidden. Sometimes welcome, like a cooling mist. Other times foreboding, like gauze over the eyes.

Two times, the cooling mist. Once, working on the yard at my parents' house. His yard. The image of him in khaki shorts and a plain t-shirt, skin covered in fine grass clippings. The whirr of the lawn mower, the smell of spilled gasoline. He'd push on past dusk, and mom would ask me to call him for dinner. He'd stop, come in, and wash for dinner, bringing the smell of soap to the table. I thought of these things the first time I was out there -- after the accident, I mean. Holding onto the rake handle -- the breeze in the leaves of the pear tree above -- I felt closer to him.

The other time, just recently. Working on a calculus question posed by a student, wondering why there seemed to be two answers to the same problem. I must have worked on that thing for an hour, finally came to a good answer. Wanted to share it with him, know he would have gotten a kick out of it. Thought about how he'd made notes in the margins of his textbooks from grad school. Thought about the time I was in junior high and figured out why you wanted low friction tires on our model CO2 car but high friction tires on real cars. I woke him up to tell him that one.

Other times, the gauze effect. I can't shell a peanut and not think about him. How they made peanuts where he was from, laying them out on the village streets. How there are weevils in the last jar of peanuts we have of his at home. I get lost in that fog, lack a good way out. Am I supposed to avoid peanuts? Never attend a baseball game? I want to toast away each memory that comes, do it justice and move on, but there wouldn't be enough time. There are too many toasts to give my old man.

Books and covers

2008-07-25T10:19:00.006-04:00

Of course books can't be told by covers, but this week seemed to bring books that aren't even from the same library.

On the one hand, Obama in front of 200 000 Germans:

On the other hand, McCain slightly befuddled by technology:

"But," as LeVar Burton used to say, "you don't have to take my word for it." Check out Jon Stewart's take on these political images that couldn't be more different:

Hooked!

2008-07-22T00:45:00.010-04:00

Alright, I admit it. I'm addicted to the AMC series Mad Men. Set in the 60's, it follows a group of alpha males pushing the latest wares on an unsuspecting public. They're men behaving badly; they're ad men. Always with a ciggy in one hand and a Scotch in the other, they sit back and drop slogans like cookies off a Pillsbury roll, each busting with chocolate chips of bulls**t. Calling these guys fallible is too easy. As Ethan Hawke tells Nicholas Cage in Lord of War, "I'd tell you to go to hell, but I think you're already there." Exactly. But somewhere in there is truth too. And likability too. They know they're in hell. They know they leer, swindle, and lie. Telling them that is like showing up at an AA meeting and telling people they're alcoholics. Well, duh.

I imagine I'm sitting at their meetings. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and vaporizing pomade. Outside the room the typewriters clickety-clack away as an army of marms make Xeroxes the old-fashioned way, on Smith-Coronas. And I'm with these guys in their heads as they Jacque Cousteau their way into the American psyche, looking for that one turn of the phrase, that one image, that will convince people they need this to be happy.

The real question is why I find this vision so appealing. I like Entourage too, but that one's a little easier to figure out. Who wouldn't want to be the biggest movie star this side of Brad Pitt for a day? But why do I want to be an ad man in the 60's? The simplest explanation is that the show is really good. They all get more complicated after that.

Can I also mention how much I love this line from the commercials? Main character Don Draper tells a female client (soon-to-be mistress) completely straight-faced: "The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." Wow, bring on the apocalypse.

P.S. I also happen to love the theme song by electronic music artist RJD2. Give it a listen:

Lip to lip

2008-07-06T13:58:00.011-04:00

No. 34 from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (the 1859 Edward Fitzgerald translation, purchased at a yard sale here in Vancouver):

Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd -- 'While you Live
Drink! -- for once dead you never shall return.'

Today I saw a middle-aged man walk out of Starbucks with two coffees and hand them to an old woman waiting in his car. I assume it was his mother. Her hair was white, her frame bent over. She was connected to two nose tubes that spoke to a need for extra oxygen. She was frail and little, and had the car door been open a bit wider, I think she might have blown away.

As n goes to [sideways 8]

2008-07-05T19:27:00.011-04:00

As I've been preparing to teach calculus this summer -- amid the pressure and excitement to get things right -- I've been reminded of some of the beautiful ideas behind the big C. One of these ideas is that we little creatures of limited faculties -- who would destroy ourselves if we had the chance just to prove we were right -- might be able to predict what happens when some variable goes to infinity, like time. "Find the limit as n goes to infinity," the directions say. It's a bold claim, that we might be able to say anything about infinity. But all the same, it's a beautiful idea.

It's the idea of counting until you can't count anymore and then pushing on. It's taking measurements that are either so small in size or so large in number that you can't count them on your fingers, on paper, or even on a computer, so what's the use? but you do it anyway. You look for patterns. You stand on the shoulder of giants. You take a breath and make a guess. It's the idea of looking forever in the face and being unafraid.

Something about this idea -- or maybe something about the changes happening in my own life -- reminded me of that old PBS series Cosmos. With Carl Sagan and his sonorous drawl that issued forth science like depth charges. In one episode, he talked about the Hindu idea of infinity -- another beautiful idea -- that the universe exists as long as God is awake and ends when God goes to sleep. God wakes again, and the universe starts over. Expansion / contraction, the oscillating universe, death / rebirth. It's all in there: taking what we see, making a model (or a myth) to explain it, and asking what happens when n goes to infinity.

Tower Beach

2008-06-22T14:26:00.006-04:00

North of infamous Wreck Beach sits a less known but no less beautiful stretch of shoreline called Tower Beach. There's no sand here (pebbles instead), no real room to frolic, no real human accommodation of any kind unless you count weather-stripped logs to sit on and a WW II-era lookout which now serves as a concrete canvas for graffiti.

But the barren stretch also allows some weird things to thrive, like the occasional sapling poking out of vacated knots in the logs:

And a flower sprouting in front of a mossy outcrop of rock on the path back to civilization:

April 3rd

2008-06-20T18:18:00.003-04:00

In the days following my dad's passing, I often thought about how much or little I'd want to remember from that time. I thought about writing everything down, or at least as much as I could remember every evening (like a director runs the dailies), but there was little time to do that. Weeks later I tried writing about that first day, I mean the day I first heard the news, but that proved too hard. I still block that day out. But something easier to do was to write about the next day, April 3rd:

The next morning I woke in my old bed and thought it might be a weekend morning like the ones we used to have. For better than a decade -- until I turned eleven and Stephen went to college -- weekends at my house unfolded with a familiar pattern. My dad usually got up first, went out to get the paper, then read it at the breakfast table before any of us even stirred. I usually woke up second, but by the time I'd trundled my way from the bedroom to the kitchen, he'd already be well into the columns of the business section, scanning the numbers for something I never saw. I'd climb into the seat across from him -- some natural process that didn't need explaining -- and go through the rest of the paper until I hit the comics section. The news would chirp out of an old AM radio. My dad always kept it low; he didn't want to wake us.

On chilly mornings he and I would share a treat, hot chocolate. We'd get Nestle Quik down from the cupboard, spoon it into tall glasses, and pour in hot milk from the stove. If the milk wasn't hot enough, the mix wouldn't dissolve, and you'd have to stir until you busted up the clumps on the bottom. These were our mornings, this was my apprenticeship, my dad and me at the breakfast table, reading until my mom got up next and opened the curtains to let the sun in.

Years later, after my brother and I had both left home, my dad still got up early in the morning. I knew this because I'd come home from college and just lie in bed without the same enthusiasm for the comics that I had as a kid. By then my parents had had an alarm system installed -- changed the locks on the doors too so you needed two keys to get in -- until opening the door in the morning required ten steps. My dad didn't always remember the ten steps -- by then his movements had started slowing too -- and he'd sometimes go straight for the paper in the morning, opening the door before turning off the alarm. The siren would go off, this terrible whoop-whoop! you could all the way down the street, and I'd hear my dad fumble with the keypad, hear him say "oh-oh" like he did on minor blunders and the keypad beep in disgust when he entered the wrong code.

By then something else was undeniable: the dark centers of his eyes had started to cloud. I wondered if he still saw the world as crisply or as brightly as before. I wondered if he could still catch a bee like the hero of my youth, holding it in a loose fist until he got it out of the house and let it go, neither harmed from the experience. When I came home those days and met my parents at the airport, he'd still offer to take my bags but he no longer gave as much resistance when I refused. We'd hug, and I'd pull away and see tears in his eyes.

I lay in bed a few more minutes that morning, April 3rd, and wondered if everything I'd seen and heard in the last 24 hours was real. I rolled over on my side, waiting for the sounds of morning, my dad stirring in the kitchen: a chair backing up on the tile floor, a spoon clanging glass, the beep-beep-beep of the alarm as my dad went to check on the yard. But I heard none of these.

I lay still, not wanting to move, not wanting to risk setting anything in motion, until the thought of doing nothing seemed akin to not being able to do anything -- the thought of lying cold in the ground -- and that held its own particular terror.

Eventually I got up and made my way across the hallway into my parents' room. Around the corner, my mom lay in bed, half-propped against the headboard, her eyes half-open. She stared ahead without focus. Everything about her seemed to be pulled downward: all the features of her face, her clothes, her frame itself. Her arms appeared to drag on her shoulders. It was as if her skeleton had just given way.

I sat down beside her, asked how she was doing in a forced monotone, then lost it, sobbing uncontrollably. She touched my back and said, This is the way things will be. The sheets on my dad's side of the bed were smooth, his pillow undented. He'd left two mornings before and not returned.

Ame Hi

2008-06-15T11:23:00.006-04:00

Thought I'd share this with you all -- it's an ad for the US Air Force I saw while browsing around today.

The writing actually makes me disinclined to click on the link, as if doing so will permanently disable my browser from going to anything but the Air Force website. Get an editor, airman!

Remembrance

2008-05-31T11:34:00.005-04:00

A week ago I had dinner with a couple who knew my parents from back in the 70's. They'd lived in Dallas, had a daughter the same year I was born (whom I eventually went to college with), then a son a couple years later, then moved to Houston. Long history extended between us and them.

They'd come from Taiwan. The man had gone to the same college in Taiwan as my dad -- the same department even but a decade later -- and also worked for the same company in Dallas. So he knew my dad differently than I did. Well, that goes without saying. But I mean, the image that he had of my dad, the portrait associated with the name, was probably different than mine. A younger version of my dad. In the flush of youth. A family just seeded. A job at an oil company from the heady days of oil. The yard at our house with nothing but a couple saplings.

When I met them for dinner -- they were here on a stopover to catch a cruise on Monday -- we talked first about Vancouver, the weather, their kids. But then we spoke about my dad. About the funeral -- they'd been in China at the time -- and what I'd written, the commemoration my parents' friends had on Day 49 (a symbolic day), the one upcoming on Day 100 (another symbolic day).

Then we talked about their time in Dallas, when both he and my dad had worked for the same oil company. My dad was working in an off-campus extension, a little office by the airport. And he had a friend I'd never heard about, an Egyptian man working in the same office. They took midday walks, this man and my dad, around the cars in the parking lot. It was a jewel of a story.

When I thought about it afterward, I thought how funny it was that we may love a person but never know everything about that person, how we may, in the words of Norman Maclean, "love completely without complete understanding." I knew my dad only as my dad. But whatever he meant to other people remains just paper knowledge. As if I'd read a story in a book, and he appeared on every page.

Mirror

2008-05-29T16:10:00.006-04:00

Lately people I've never met -- or rather people I met so long ago I don't remember them -- have been coming up to me, judging my face from one angle then another, and telling me I remind them of my father.

One time the top half of my face was judged to be more like his, another time the bottom half. I've never seen much semblance either way, even when I hold pictures of him up next to me in a mirror and squint really hard.

But I'm okay with this, with not seeing what other people see when they see him in me but I don't. I'm okay with serving as a living portrait of him, in a physical sense or emotional sense, in a genetic sense, or in whatever other sense people want.

Lately I've been trying to think whether my father had any qualities that I wouldn't want, and I haven't thought of any. Maybe someday I'll be able to, recall a time he spoke words too harsh or made a judgment too rash. Or remember thinking, I'll never do that with my kids. But as of now that hasn't happened.

And so, people seeing my father in me, that's okay. In fact, some days I think it's more than okay. It's more than I deserve.

Onward

2008-05-20T10:53:00.016-04:00

Is it always best, at the least appropriate, to keep moving forward?

Life -- sometimes over our own objections howled into the rafters and dug into the ground -- finds a way.

Scenes from the UBC Botanical Garden:

The inukshuk at English Bay:

The docks at Steveston:

Sitting in my office

2008-05-09T16:00:00.009-04:00

Sitting in my office,
I poke at my side
Wondering how soft it's gotten
From two weeks at home
When everyone brought food over
And told me to eat.

I poke at my head
Wondering how soft that's gotten too
From a month of people telling me
How sorry they are
And to let them know
If there's anything they can do.

I'm sorry too.
That's my standard reply.

I poke at my side
Remembering how I used to wince
When returning from the yard
He'd have a cut on his thumb,
Make his way to the bathroom
And apply the red mercuric tincture.
How big a man could bleed,
It was a God-fearing wonder.

I poke at my head
Wondering how concussive a blow
Could snuff the light of so kind a man.

I die a hundred times a day
My father's death.

Ticketmaster, what are you trying to tell me?

2008-03-29T16:51:00.006-04:00

Philosophy -- the chance to press your nose against the side of the fishbowl and take a look outside -- seems to come at me when I'm least expecting it these days. I don't know -- maybe I'm just getting to be that age.

Take yesterday, for instance. I was on the Ticketmaster web site looking for tickets to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The VSO is having a Beethoven festival, and though it's been a long time since I went through that particular phase in my life -- always making sure I had at least one Beethoven piece to play on when I was taking piano lessons, wearing down my tape of the Fifth Piano Concerto, dressing up as Beethoven for Halloween -- I still retain a soft spot for Old Deafy. I'd gotten to the page where you're asked to enter letters you see on-screen to keep bots out (and to keep blind people from going to concerts, I'm convinced). But instead of getting random letters like I used to, I now was presented with two random words.

Here's the part that actually made me stop: they're real words. And as with any two randomly selected words, putting them together makes a kind of poetry (or at least a halfway decent name for a garage band album). I stopped, thought about the words I was seeing, then went back and reloaded the page a couple times to see what I would get. I started looking for sense and reason in the words I was getting. At one point I started wondering, like early Christians thumbing the Bible for inspiration, whether the Internet -- the deus ex machina -- was trying to tell me something.

I didn't write down the words I got at the time, but here are ten more pairs of authentication words I pulled up, just for you:

disagreements nine
Arab center
collect smashes
huddled submitted
Jeffrey already
Bellevue was
from destitute
street, slowing
find Lissner
stamp Gannen

Who's Lissner, and how do I find him? What about the odd and slightly conspiratorial "Arab center"? And if "Jeffrey already," does he still?

I encourage you to replicate this experiment. Go here and you too can be exploring the mysteries (while also looking for Jack Johnson tickets).

After four months in Vancouver

2008-03-09T14:12:00.006-04:00

"Routine" is too strong of a word, but living in Vancouver -- which for me consists mostly of waking up, going to work, working, and coming back from work -- has taken on the qualities of a beautiful tartan. There are many beautiful colors and the handiwork is interesting, but after a while I feel like I've seen it all. So the mountains... well, I depend on them to be there so I know I'm biking in the right direction. And the ocean... well, there'd have to be an unusual sheen coming off it to make me stop and stare when I'm walking somewhere on campus. And so even the most wondrous of places -- this intersection of mountain and ocean, of sea and sky -- seems to fade into the background of everday coming-and-goings.

If receptors on the cell surface can become desensitized after repeated stimulation, why not us as well? What are we but collections of cells?

Case in point: Walking around campus one night a couple weeks ago with RW, I saw signs posted up that said "SET" with arrows pointed west. On the median of Main Mall, the central thoroughfare through campus, I saw large white trailers parked. Large tents scattered around. Men in army uniforms milling about.

When I walked up to one of the trailers, I saw this:

It seems a movie was filming on campus: a remake of the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still". I'd seen the original in snippets back in elementary school when a teacher of mine, BN, a sci-fi buff, had shown it to us. An alien comes to earth with a large robot hoping to bring about peace. [The remake, I found out later, stars Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly and is set to be released December 12th, 2008.]

Two men came out of one trailer and walked alongside us. "Look at this place! Look at those mountains!" one of them said with outstretched arms. I asked where he was from. "L.A." he said.

It occurred to me afterward how strange this all was: To me, the movie trailers were the interesting thing. I'd never seen one before, much less one up-close, and I was angling my head to see the extras (the men in army uniforms) and look inside the tents (for catering and costumes). To the movie hands from L.A., the natural scenery was the main attraction. (Admittedly, Main Mall gives great views of the mountains of the North Shore.) And ironically we were both connected to a movie about an alien seeing Earth for the first time, an alien played by Keanu Reeves (who himself might be an alien, I'm 80% convinced). Funny.

Floating in ovalbumin

2008-02-22T18:43:00.004-05:00

As part of my research here at the University of British Columbia, I spend time looking at the sequence of the hen egg protein ovalbumin and wondering what an immune response to it might look like. (Not that a person would normally mount an immune response to it, but immunologists like to inject it into mice or give it to cells in a dish and see what happens. Probably, I'm thinking, for historical reasons: Egg whites are sterile, and ovalbumin is the major protein constituent of egg whites.)

Did I say I spend time looking at the sequence of ovalbumin (or OVA, for short)? I meant to say I spend a lot of time looking at the sequence of OVA. In fact, OVA is so well studied by immunologists that the first well understood antigen (that which triggers the immune response and specifically the creation of antibodies) was a portion of OVA known by its amino acid sequence, SIINFEKL. Pronounced sin-'feck-el, it also happens to make a handy proxy swear word of the "Oh fudge!" variety.

Inevitably, on quiet afternoons spent puzzling over the ways OVA might be engineered to test different hypotheses, my mind starts to wander. I've found that my mental wanderings aren't subject to neat stops and starts. They sometimes keep going long after I intend them to, like a flywheel that becomes detached and keeps spinning. Often those wanderings go off-track, outside the lines, and burst into parts unknown. So it happened with OVA too.

Two days ago I awoke in that gentle time of day when the sun starts to illume the ground and found myself cold and curled into the Star Child position from 2001. I was half-awake, floating in the turbid residues of a dream, and not at all sure how I was breathing, where I was, or how I'd gotten here. I felt hungry but no sense that lifting a forkful of food to my mouth would satisfy the craving. And knowing not in that moment how I kept myself alive, I thought -- I actually thought -- It's a good thing I'm floating in ovalbumin. (OVA provides the unborn chick with nutrients.)

Yes, I was floating in ovalbumin.

I thought ovalbumin would keep me alive.

I'm glad no one was around to hear any of that.

The thought lodged itself in my brain, and even after I woke up and roused my senses, the feeling stayed with me. I don't know what it means -- maybe I should work on another protein besides OVA, maybe I still want to study ornithology like I did when I was a kid, or maybe I should set an alarm to get up -- but the feeling of being in utero was unmistakable.

The start to my commute this morning

2008-01-30T21:42:00.001-05:00

Courage, lads!

Canadianisms

2008-01-22T00:30:00.000-05:00

One of the things that makes my life like The Twilight Zone is living in a place so similar to the U.S. that little differences can go unnoticed. Something's "off" once and I think, Huh, that's strange, and forget about it. But something's "off" twice or more and I start wondering, Hey, what's going on here?

Case in point: You walk into a coffee shop here in Canada and the first thing you're likely to hear is the barista calling out to you, "Hey dare!"

Huh?

The first time I heard this was at Tim Horton's on the UBC campus (affectionately called "Timmy Ho Ho's" by some). A middle-aged Asian lady was calling this out to each student at the front of the line to bring him or her to the register. What I heard was "Hey, dear!" and I thought, How cute, even How maternal, given how many students in line were the right age and race to have been her own. I thought maybe she knew these students personally -- had seen the same faces every day order a "double double" (Canadian for two sugars, two creams) -- but then I noticed she was using this greeting on everyone, including me. (I admit, I kind of liked it. It made me want to call my mom.) So, she couldn't have been saying this to only people she knew. Still, maybe she just wanted to pass out a little maternal love. This was Canada, after all: the Queen Mum, socialism, and all that.

Then I realized the other cashiers, mostly Asian as well, were using this greeting too. Maybe they all learned it from the first lady, the Madame Chiang Kai-shek of the UBC Timmy Ho Ho's? There was no way to know for sure (unless, I suppose, I asked).

And then I let the issue go. I discovered the math department lunch room houses a fantastic coffee maker, and I've been using that one now for weeks. So I forgot about Tim Horton's, stopped wondering what "Hey dare" meant, and got back to more pressing concerns, like work....

Until last Sunday when I was visiting a Starbucks near my apartment. I'd been riding my bike that evening and was on my way home when I decided to get something sweet. (Factoid: Starbucks gift cards work in the U.S. and Canada. Wondroid: Do they work in other countries too?) I was making a bee-line to the goody case, but then I heard the barista say very distinctly, "Hey there!" It was unmistakable.

And then it hit me: Was this what the Timmy Ho Ho ladies were saying all along? Was I mistaking "there" for "dear" all this time, mistaking their impersonal locator for a term of endearment? I started to feel like the pretty girl at school had waved to me then come to find she'd really waved to the jock behind me.

But maybe in the end, there's room for both explanations. After all, maybe to Asian ears new to the English language "Hey there" sounds a lot like "Hey, dear" and all those Asian baristas are saying the latter. I'm okay with that. As Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University, pointed out in a 2003 article in Natural History, there's a "pleasure of 'maybe'," that is, of keeping the possibility intact. Whether "Hey there" or "Hey, dear," either way's not so bad.

Top 5 suggestive Ann Arbor restaurant names

2008-01-21T13:54:00.001-05:00

5. Mysore Woodlands

4. Afternoon Delight

3. Sushi dot come

2. Rod's Diner

1. The One Eyed Moose (now Monkey Bar)

Neruda

2008-01-20T01:08:00.000-05:00

I've recently discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda. I can't say anything about his politics -- I can only hope it doesn't involve killing babies or kittens -- but I'm blown away by how he melds nature and human emotion. I was feeling down this Saturday afternoon, and a chance encounter in a downtown Vancouver bookstore left me feeling, if not better, at least empathized:

Inclinado en las tardes tiro mis tristes redes
a tus ojos oceanicos.

Have I shown you the late afternoon view out my office window? It faces west -- toward the ocean, though you can't see water -- and on those afternoons when the day's been cloudy and the sun comes out only long enough to say goodbye, when my spirit sags like basset hound ears, I think about casting my thoughts out on the water. I think of those I love, their distance from me, and hope they'll feel my mental mesh pass them by in the deep waters of the Pacific. Pulling up my nets I'm quarry-less.

I always thought the Retiarius -- the net-thrower -- had the worst chance of all the Roman gladiators....

Gray days

2008-01-06T17:36:00.000-05:00

On Friday the skies over Vancouver darkened, as if we were all in a movie theater and the movie was about to start. But the movie never started -- the previews never even showed up -- the lights remained dimmed, and the skies were blanketed gray the whole weekend.

For a few minutes, sunlight broke through the pall and limned the edges of clouds above and fence slats and building faces below. But as soon as the sight could be appreciated, the sun retreated, as if she were a beauty who shied away from the very attention she drew, and Vancouver returned to its natural state. Skies the color of mud.

I'd planned on going on a long bike ride or two, to see the city or even the ocean, but those ambitions faded whenever rain plinked my window and I thought of rain down the legs of my pants and mist on my glasses. I spent most of the weekend skulking on my haunches.

I live in the quietest of neighborhoods in Vancouver. As guidebooks are quick to point out, everything south of Broadway is residential and too quiet for its own good. On maps cartographers are wont to lay insets -- enlargements of the downtown area -- over the neighborhood where I live. They know there's not much to miss here, unless you haven't seen one-story houses lined up in rows.

And so I wait. The winter solstice having passed, I know longer, more pleasant days are ahead, when we in the northern latitudes trade 20-hour nights for 20-hour days and get back the bottle deposit we paid when we bought this six-pack of winter ail. I'll count the minutes the days lengthen: one or two minutes here and there, an hour each month. I'll wait for sunnier days.

Making up stuff

2008-01-04T20:47:00.000-05:00

What makes a good new word? I don't know for sure -- I'm no etymologist, no linguist either -- but how about this: immediate recognizability.

With that in mind, I give you -- no, I create for you -- this word: the snowhawk. No definition, just a picture:

Out the plane window

2007-12-30T08:08:00.001-05:00

Why, it's sunrise in Texas, darlin'. What did you think it was?

Sunsets in Vancouver...

2007-12-11T16:29:00.000-05:00

... are nice.

Wreck Beach (yes, the nude one -- just steps away from my office), November 21:

Granville Island, December 8:

(RW, wish you'd been here to see them.)

Thoughts on a dark road

2007-12-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

Biking home at night, I'm constantly reminded of how young a city Vancouver is, like many cities on the west coast, and how its frontier beginnings are still close at hand. My bike ride home takes me down the southwest side of Vancouver's Lower Mainland -- the fingertips on a mitten-shaped peninsula pointed left on a map -- and cuts through mostly undeveloped park land for the better part of four miles. (I realize I've left one mitten for another.)

On both sides of the road stand tall skinny pines packed so densely the view into them only goes only a few rows back. In daylight signs of civilization appear in plain view, and it's easy to regard the conifers objectively. "Those trees are twice as high as that light pole, and there's the trail head now, so I must be ten minutes away from campus." But at night signs of civilization disappear into darkness, and under the right conditions, the mind plays tricks.

It's amazing how a road you take everyday without a second thought can turn treacherous on a cold, rainy night. Your fingers begin to go numb, the muscles in your legs begin to stiffen, and -- the worst part of all -- your vision starts to fail. The rain quickly coats eyeglasses -- so simple and essential to modern living -- in a hundred little droplets. The world goes from Stieglitz to Picasso as shapes become blobs and the beams from oncoming cars get passed through dozens of little prisms. Soon you're steering just to stay between the cars passing to your left and the drop-off to your right -- the lights to port and the void to starboard. Trucks kick up road grime and Pacific sand, and each one that passes makes you turn your head and spit. It's like eating unwashed spinach that hasn't had the soil washed out.

Every once in a while, I'll encounter passersby on the shoulder of the road, pedestrians walking in the complete darkness. My headlight illuminates a disc ten feet ahead, but it's useless farther out. Ten feet gets covered in no time when you're going downhill, and sometimes I'll only know I've passed one of these journeymen by the change in the way the wind sounds. Two nights ago something leered at me from three feet off the road. I knew it only by its eyes and teeth. The wolf danced around me as I passed.

In the dark of a sliver moon when only the treetops are visible, I feel like I'm pedaling through a dream. The tall pines stand like elders in a temple, and I'm a neophyte scratching the ground in front of them. I realize how Miller saw the forests in The Crucible, how Myrick and Sanchez did in Blair Witch, and keep pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, until I get home and wake up.

Hamster wheel

2007-11-28T15:55:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I think about all the people working out across America (and now Canada), their feet going in neat ellipses, their hands reaching up and down, up and down. I think about how they're moving but not actually going anywhere, and I think about how the image is downright Sisyphean: repetitive movements that have no purpose but to exert the mover, like rolling a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down. (Come to think of it, Sisyphus must have had a great quads.) Some people (say, Dante) think this is the essence of Hell (where Sisyphus was): doing something over and over again whether you want to or not.

I think the pervasiveness of gyms must be a sign that we're living in an age of excess. We have so much extra energy (in the form of calories) hanging around our bodies that we have to go somewhere and do something to get rid of it. I never hear this argument brought up in all the environmental chit-chatter going around: Are gyms a waste of energy? Aside from the energy it takes to light and cool these cavernous spaces, there's all this energy people are expending, often to overcome the resistance of machines powered to resist them.

Every now and then, I hear of efforts to put this energy to use. The easiest way is obviously to bike, run, row, or whatever-you-do-in-the-gym your way to and from work, to and from errands, wherever the default would normally be "drive". With the suburbanization of our cities, though, and people living farther away from their places of work, I can see this often isn't practical.

Some engineers and would-be engineers have also tried to harness this energy by hooking up machines to other machines. Take these students from MIT, for instance. They're powering their laptops by biking. An interesting idea, though it's hard not to think of that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus talks about humans being used as batteries and holds up a Duracell.

But beyond these considerations, the main beef I have with gyms is that I think they actually undermine, yes undermine, the public welfare. As long as exercise comprises activities dissociated from our everyday lives -- monotonous activities at that -- it's always going to be something we can either do or not do. Drive to the gym, wait for a machine, strain and grunt for thirty minutes while people stare at me? Or stay at home and eat Cheetos? Hmm, that's a tough one.

Riding my bike to work, I can ride with either less intensity or more, but I can't not ride (unless I pay money to wait for then ride an overcrowded city bus, that is). I might sometimes skimp on the push-ups or sit-ups in the morning, but there's only so much I can skimp on a four-mile bike ride, especially when it's effectively my only way to get to work. What I'm advocating is this: Exercise as necessity, not just convenience. We need more than bigger, fancier gyms. Or actually, maybe we need less.

An American Thanksgiving in Canada

2007-11-22T23:51:00.000-05:00

Instead of home in Texas, an Asian food court just off the UBC (University of British Columbia) campus.

Instead of my parents and brother, a fellow postdoc, PB from Germany.

Instead of turkey and stuffing, three items (drunken chicken, Chinese cabbage, and broccoli with rice) for $5.75.

Instead of a slice of pumpkin pie, a pint of Canadian beer.

Instead of a warm snooze afterward, a cold bike ride back to the apartment.

Here I am in Vancouver, B.C., a million miles from home, on the third Thursday in November. I sit at my laptop, think of all I love south of me, embrace them in my thoughts, and wonder, What am I doing here? Do all expats feel this way?

Things you see along the way

2007-11-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

If you ever move to Vancouver as I have, here are some things you might see along the way:

Mount Rainier outside your airplane window as you descend into Seattle:

The La Quinta motel where you stay with your parents the night before you drive into Canada, reflected in the window of your rental car:

Your dad figuring out the lay of the land from a map you bought at a secondhand store:

An obelisk marking the boundary between the U.S. and Canada:

Your first street sign to Vancouver which you'll have plenty of time to look at during your first traffic jam in Canada:

Your parents waving to you after you drop them off in Seattle the next day and get on the shuttle back to Vancouver:

Your feet on a Canadian sidewalk wondering if any sidewalk ever looked as unfamiliar as this:

The road ahead which though unknown was chosen by you and therefore yours to follow:

An aside

2007-11-18T12:35:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago I moved to Vancouver, and like most who move anywhere but back home, I felt out of sorts, not myself, and light in the wallet. It's been hard not to carry that feeling into work each day. I'm enjoying the research projects I've got lined up here at the University of British Columbia, but I haven't been able to "lose myself" in them yet. I'm held back by baser matters.

Biking now, for instance, I see the savings whereas before I just enjoyed the ride: savings for my pocketbook (cheaper than riding the bus, certainly cheaper than owning, insuring, and gassing a car here) and savings for the environment. (Vancouver's greener than anyplace I've ever been -- at UBC you're responsible for emptying your own office trash.) Another upswing is that I'm healthier than I've ever been. Putting in at least eight miles on the bike everyday, I've got steel for muscles in my legs. With my habit of using the hardest gear I can take, I figure I'm burning at least 500 calories a day during my commute.

I'm also watching what I eat closely, not just for the nutritional benefit but because it's cheaper too. I'll typically have granola and soy milk in the morning then zap some oatmeal and top it with beans for lunch. Dinner's usually something along those lines too. I'm trying to eat for less than $5 a day, and in the process I've become a granarian. I've made some other changes as well: Instead of coffee, tea. Instead of meat, legumes. You get the idea.

There's a cold, hard calculus to my life that wasn't there before. But I guess that's part of becoming an adult -- here I am at 31 -- taking a stark look at your life sometimes so you can forget about it at other times.

Mission:Impossible, pt. 4

2007-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

[On a personal note, I'm back. Apologies for the longest break I've ever taken from the Blues, over a month now. In that time I packed up my things in Michigan and headed for Vancouver, British Columbia where I'll be for the near term. As a public service, I'm going to now finish these over-ambitious posts that I'd planned on international calls in quick fashion.]

The first option for making international calls has to be calling cards. Signs trumpeting their existence, along with rates listed down to tenths of a cent precision, are one thing I've found common to all grocery stores catering to foreign nationals. Asian, Indo-Pak, Middle Eastern -- it doesn't matter. If you find a store selling food from that region, you've also found a place where you can buy a card allowing you to call that region for 3.8 cents a minute.

I was almost set on buying one of these cards. I pictured going to Canada, buying a calling card there, and punching in 30 numbers just to call my parents in Texas for 2 cents a minute. But what would my parents have to pay? Where would the call appear to be coming from? And how much use would I get out of a Canadian phone plan otherwise?

I thought there must be better options out there. I went back on the Internet.

After more searching I found that the "card" part of "calling card" was dispensable. On some websites you can buy virtual cards which comprise code numbers you enter to route your call through who-knows-where for cheap. Here's one from a company called UWT, short for United World Telecom. It's a terrible name -- "United World" manages to sound both menacing and generic, like it's the cover for a crime syndicate in a Die Hard movie. I wasn't about to give these people anything.

But through this website I did learn about a second option for making international calls: the callback service. If "virtual calling cards" are shady, callback services seem twice as much so. You know the scene in movies where the mistress calls, gets the wife instead, and hangs up? That's what comes to mind. The idea is that you call a number, access some service that calls you back, and then call the real number you want to reach. Did you get that? You know what that makes you? The other woman! You have to love it when the one-question FAQ is "Is callback service legal?" and the answer is a link to an FCC ruling. That's not exactly "yes," is it?

[To be continued...]

Mission:Impossible, pt. 3

2007-09-25T10:20:00.001-04:00

There must be some mistake. This can't be right.

Those were my first thoughts upon opening my cell phone bill for the month after I returned from Canada. Vancouver's a mere 30 miles from U.S. soil, but the way T-Mobile and Catherine Zeta-Jones were charging me, 30 might as well have been 3000. Picking up the phone in Vancouver and calling the States had been akin to shooting myself in the leg while giving a classroom demonstration on gun safety.

Disbelief turned to outrage, and soon I was on the Internet looking for another cell phone carrier. I'd outed the smug Welsh voice from my head, and I was feverishly looking up "cell phone plan canada" and "north american cell phone plan".

Here's what I found: They're all out to get you. All your cheap minutes, free minutes, long distance, coast-to-coast minutes mean nothing once you cross that 49th Parallel. Only one cell phone carrier makes a concession, and that's Verizon. You can get a North American plan for $60 a month, but you'll get less than your usual bucket-load of minutes and you won't be able to roam into Canada. Thanks for nothing, 21st century! I felt myself floating down a current back to an earlier time of rotary phones and TV dinners.

Mission:Impossible, Pt. 2

2007-09-20T13:21:00.001-04:00

Are you familiar with the Moscow Rules? It's the first thing they teach you in spy school (according to the International Spy Museum gift store, at least). Here's your Moscow Rule for today: Assume nothing.

Before I arrived in Canada that day in July, I'd planned on making calls to the States on Skype, a service that allows computer-to-computer calls for free. As a bonus, I'd get to see at least one person I'd be calling because we both have webcams. Unfortunately my plan had one weakness, one chink in its armor that rendered the whole thing useless -- the requirement for an Internet connection!

My host had lodged me in a dorm on campus. I arrived with visions of blazing fast Internet connections in my suitcase, along with my interview suit and buck shined shoes. I saw data whooshing through the air, and my head swam in wonder at the 21st century world in which I was privileged to live.

In my room I uncrated my laptop with high hopes. I saw all kinds of wireless signals around me and one wired connection to boot. I clicked on the first AP I saw. Nothing. An hour later, I was still unconnected.

By that time, I'd begged an Ethernet cable off one of the other residents. I'd restarted my laptop several times. I tried parading around the room with my laptop suspended in the air at odd angles. Still nothing. The air felt hot and still, vacant of whooshing data streams.

The time now ticking -- a full three hours behind my East Coast counterpart -- the sweat beaded on my forehead and the tops of my arms. I was on the third floor of the building, and the heat of the day had seemed to rise and concentrate in my room. The window A/C unit, a massive wheeled beast, sat in the corner of the room sputtering in cold air slowly fed by a wide-gauge hose plugged in the window. I felt woozy.

In my delirium I cradled my trusty cell phone, the Motorola PEBL U6, with its reassuring curved rubber grip. I thought of better times. Of Catherine Zeta-Jones on T-Mobile commercials. Do it, Stewart, she said. Make the call, I'll give you a good rate like you've never had before. I heard the T-Mobile jingle in the background: beep-beep beep-beep. Or was that the Nokia jingle? I was so confused. Why was it so hot in here?!

Finally I gave in. Dialing the ten digits like I'd never left American airspace, I soon heard my contact on the other end. I sighed and soon spoke easily and breezily. My worries about the Internet connection faded into the background. I found a Zen-like place, and the 2500 miles that separated me from her vanished, and thoughts of cost seemed inane.

After the call I lay back, smugly satisfied. Nothing to it, I thought.

[To the tune of Mission: Impossible]

2007-09-19T17:15:00.001-04:00

Among the wonders of our time, one must be the ability to pick up a phone (your gum pack-sized cell phone will do) and call anyone almost anywhere in the world damn near instantly. Lickety split, it's faster -- and some would say easier -- to talk to someone halfway around the world than to nuke a bowl of ramen.

And just like a bowl of ramen, you might think that the specifics don't matter. Whatever phone (or brand of ramen) you use, the result's going to be the same. Same call quality. Same salty, vaguely bouillony taste. (That's the MSG you're tasting, by the way.) And you might think it's going to be cheap either way too. Phone calls and ramen are cheap -- why else would you want to live in the 21st century? At least this is what I thought before visiting Canada.

Back in July I visited Canada for a day and made a 15-minute phone call to the States on my cell phone. Oops. Ka-ching! That's the sound of the cash register at T-Mobile ringing up the cost of my call.

Lately I've been wondering how not to make that mistake again. I've been Googling upways and down, frontways and back, like Tom Cruise in Mission:Impossible before he types in "Job 3:14". And what I've been finding is a weird, wired world. One of quasi-laws and numbers that map to no physical locations. Untraceable cards and websites written in mangled English. The goal was simple: Call Canada cheaply. But now I'm watching my back because I'm afraid a SWAT team from a joint FCC/ATF task force is going to come take me away. I've started using an anonymizer to cover my tracks. I'm doubting everything I'm reading. And I trust no one, Mr. Mulder.

Cue up the music. I'm about to take you deep underground.

[To be continued...]

Outside Kroger on Plymouth...

2007-09-15T08:41:00.001-04:00

New green springs from a empty post hole in the concrete. (You haven't caught me yet, autumn!)

Decision

2007-09-06T17:00:00.000-04:00

I've made a decision about my future. It's not here. I start in November. I have to sell or move all of my stuff. I will say goodbye to the friends I've made here who are still left. I may shed a tear the last time I get on I-94 to head out of town. Being in Ann Arbor will cease to be the norm.

Yes, it seems I can list off adages all day. I should have been a greeting card writer.

Oh, I've forgotten to post some of the latest pictures from my summer. Here are a few.

In August I finally visited the northwest part of the state where lies Sleeping Bear Dunes. Rising nearly 500 feet into the air, it makes for dramatic vistas... and opportunities for ridiculous poses.

Here's your Blogger pretending to fall a long, long way:

You can tell this place was made for summer. You don't even need to face the water to see how. Face the leeward side, and you can see the attraction between land and sun. Tall grasses reach with fuzzy fingers into the sky:

Coming back into Ann Arbor, you see other signs of the last days of summer. Days spent quietly in the warm, sticky sun. (They're a little more contemplative now.) Soft nights that start at eight instead of nine. A bike or a run down a path you took earlier in the summer. A leaf on a tree that seems little less green. The earth curls into the decline of the season.

Song of the future

2007-08-29T15:39:00.000-04:00

Sitting in front of the screen open to the Blogger posting page, I wiggle my thick, oafish fingers and search for the right things to say, two weeks after my last post. O Muse of Six-Year Graduate Students, help me to sing the song of my last days here in Ann Arbor!

The paperwork for the PhD now firmly behind me, I've been preoccupied with thoughts of the future. Where should I go? What should I do? It's amazing how little some things change in my life between the ages of 18 and 31.

Those who know me know that one of my fondest childhood memories is of my dad taking me to the library on the weekends. I'd peruse books on airplanes and birds, photography and cooking, astronomy, dinosaurs, camping, computers -- in fact, just about everything seemed interesting. If someone had considered a topic interesting enough to write about it, it -- whatever "it" was -- could seem interesting to me as well. I was a bibliophilic empath.

Sometimes I'd feel overwhelmed by the choices at the library. And that's sort of what I'm feeling now. I'm sitting in a room full of gold. As a postdoc I won't live extravagantly, but I'll live well enough by the standards of human history and have the luxury of getting paid for doing something that I like. My basic needs will be met, my physical hardship will be at times of my choosing (say, while exercising), and most of my effort will be devoted to putting ink on paper. In short, the picture seems rosy if I count up from 0 instead of back from 100 and compare myself to paupers, not kings.

I have a leaning on which of the three offers I'll ultimately take. I have until tomorrow to decide. And if it seems like I'm sitting in a room surrounded by gold, where my opportunities are nuggets, then it's also clear I can't stay here. I'm going to have to pick one of the nuggets and go. Stay tuned for Stew's decision.

Up early in a dreamlike state

2007-08-11T06:18:00.000-04:00

Five o'clock in the morning, and I find myself awake. My brain seems to have decided that six hours of sleep was enough for itself and my body. My body seems to feel otherwise. It moves about with rebellious lethargy and resents that its decisions are made by the gray matter up top in tyrannical fashion rather than by a consensus of limbs. It's rule by fiat. Like workers about to strike, the eyes blink and the joints move with more resistance than they ought. But does my brain care? Not a whit. It's already taken off for the day, weighing decisions that it need not make for hours. For goodness' sake, it's five in the morning! The limbs whisper dissent, talking about a nap they're going to force the system to take later in the morning. It's a bad sitch.

Last night I saw the pompous mind-fricasseeing movie Fountain starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz on DVD. It's made by Darren Aronofsky whose short but impressive list of films include Pi and Requiem for a Dream. He's written and directed all three, impressive for someone under forty. The Fountain skips through time (1500, 2000, and 2500 CE), taking the audience with Jackman and Weisz's characters from Spanish conquistadors through modern day medical science to some weird, spaced-out future. It plays a little fast and loose with the basics -- the characters don't speak Spanish, medical research is done in clearly sub-ethical ways, and we're never sure if these characters are the same through time or just connected -- but for all its imperfections, it seems to have stuck in my head. Weird dreams the sleep after.

Well, it's cresting seven now, and the revolt seems to be in full swing....

Slightly shady

2007-08-01T15:25:00.000-04:00

The job search, like all hunts, sometimes takes you to weird places.

Take this company I found advertising on one of the bioinformatics job posting boards: AcademicExperts.

According to their website, they "provide academic assistance to high school students, college students and students in Master and Ph.D. programs."

You might think they do tutoring until you see the main qualification for those they're looking to hire: "High quality writing, up to 'A' standard of a relevant academic level."

Pretty much a dead giveaway they're cheating facilitators. That and the too-attractive photographs of the lasses who run the company. Real, I'm sure.

Reminds me of the time I got a speeding ticket in Louisiana. Upon hearing about it, several people in town offered to help me take care of it. A typical conversation went like:

Townie: [Leaning forward] "Do you want help with that ticket?"

Me: [Fidgeting] "Uh, I don't want to do anything illegal."

Townie: [Looking around then leaning forward again] "You're not hearing me right. Do you want help with that ticket?"

Me: [Backing away] "Uh, I really don't want to do anything illegal."

This went back and forth a few times, but what do you do when you're a high school teacher and the townie talking to you is the school janitor?

Well, so much for AcademicExperts. But then again, there's also EquityEdit. Now that might be okay.

Unfamiliar

2007-07-31T17:27:00.000-04:00

I haven't blogged -- I mean, really blogged -- in weeks. Sitting down this evening to type something out feels unfamiliar, like riding a bike after not having ridden one in years. I know I can, but I'm a little shaky starting out.

These past few weeks have seen a lot of changes, and I'll try to recap them just for those few who might be curious. This July I interviewed for postdoctoral jobs, held my PhD defense, and picked up an outstanding cold that's lasted for two weeks.

The job search has been fun -- I'm criss-crossing the continent again and meeting new people in my area of research -- but induces some degree of anxiety. I find myself fidgety about the future.

As for my PhD defense, well, I'm still trying to sort out what that meant. In the lead-up to the day, 7/11, I kept telling myself it was going to be just another day. And it was. But it was also something else that I haven't grasped fully yet.

And the cold, or should I say the Cold, lingers but reminds me every morning of constancy, the tendency of some things to stay the same. Deep down, maybe I'm still an asthmatic kid who breathes funny after running around too much.

I have an image of summer in my mind, but it's been frustrated so far, short of actualization. Summer brings to mind the cold underside of couch cushions, watermelon in abundance, and water sprinklers in the evening. I see my dad cross my bedroom window moving the sprinkler from one spot on the lawn to another after twilight. I see my mother cutting watermelon into cubes and putting them in plastic containers, then the containers on the top shelf of the refrigerator. And I feel the cold velvety surface of the couch that I would dive onto growing up. My dad doesn't have high blood pressure, my mom doesn't worry about my dad, my brother and I don't have school. Those were the days. Ah well.

Moblog posting from New York

2007-07-19T15:05:00.000-04:00

So what IS the UN responsible for then?

The day before

2007-07-10T11:45:00.001-04:00

Well, friends, the day has finally arrived.

Actually, it's the day before the day.

Tomorrow I get up in front of a live studio (okay, classroom) audience and talk about everything I've done here in Michigan (okay, not everything, just the academic parts).

I'm feeling okay, telling myself tomorrow's just another day. But still, regardless of how the defense goes tomorrow, I'll probably remember 7/11 as something more, the bookend to the shelf that started with 9/11.

9/11 occurred the week after I started grad school. I know the "war on terror" has been going on for a long time, because it's been going on for as long as I've been in grad school. And that's a long time.

Now, here at the end, a life that had seemed in slow motion is suddenly in fast forward. The pages that were turning over slowly, when there was time to read every word, are now flipping by quickly. There's a flip-book stick-man -- he's jumping rope, he's deciding where to move next, he's thinking about his parents getting older -- and that stick-man is me.

Okay, how about a pretty picture?

That's sunset over Ford Road just east of Ann Arbor.

And here's something else that's interesting:

That's one flavor of Doritos you can get in Vancouver (see "deciding where to move to next" above): "Tandoori Sizzler". Suddenly "Cool Ranch" seems downright dowdy.

Where have I been?

2007-06-27T17:09:00.001-04:00

I've been deep in the dissertation desert lately, but I heard this line recently, reminding me of more carefree days:

"The path to excess leads to the tower of wisdom."

(Sigh)

For God and... ?

2007-06-16T14:07:00.001-04:00

Ripped from the headlines... of the Milan (Michigan) News (ref).

Businessman completes 'rescue mission'
Don Kleinschmidt restores military display at Pioneer High School

I was scanning for news from around Ann Arbor when this item caught my attention. The name Kleinschmidt seemed to stir some memory inside.... What was it?

Then I remembered: Kleinschmidt used to be the name of an insurance company off Huron and Ashley, and its parking lot always seemed the sweetest of forbidden fruits. Ideally located between the Ann Arbor nightspots on Main and 1st, the lot had no gate to shoo you away, just a sign that warned you your car might be towed.

"Does that apply to just business hours or off-hours too? What are the chances? I mean, look at all these other cars." The discussion was maddening, but that didn't stop us from having it every time. (This was before I learned that the good people of Brewer's troll the lots of their clients looking for cars to tow.)

My memory spurred, I continued reading: This Mr. Kleinschmidt (who may or may not be connected to the insurance company) had found a tribute to servicemen alumni of his old high school tucked away in a janitor's closet. He then spent five years (one would assume off and on) working to restore the display which can now be seen once again in the hallways of Pioneer.

I really found the article compelling, or at least I did until I got to the end when it quoted one of Mr. Kleinschmidt's friends:

As an U.S. Army veteran, I can tell you that a tribute of this nature is an emotionally moving project. In the armed services you become aware of people that would sacrifice their life for their county and it's most fitting that those who died to preserve liberty are recognized and remembered. Their young lives ended so we could live ours to the fullest and we should never forget that.

You might want to read that again.

Here, I'll help:

...you become aware of people that would sacrifice their life for their county...

This little gaffe woke the cynic in me. I always like to think I'd lay down my life for country or fellow man if the situation arose, but would I do it for... Washtenaw County? Somehow it just doesn't seem the same. But, as Depeche Mode once said, "people are people," right? Why would it matter whether they're Americans or Washtenawnians?

Ann Arbor, to the tune of "Roxanne"

2007-06-13T21:56:00.000-04:00

Like a scorned lover coming back for more, I'm forced to admit: I find Ann Arbor pretty sometimes.

Tonight I wound up in Gallup Park, the unwitting captive of my friend JC's whim to take a walk after she bought me dinner. Oh fine, I thought.

But standing on the bridge that crosses the river in the park, watching the sun set upstream, even I started feeling the spirit of John Muir (ref):

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

Shy of nine, the sun disappeared behind a cloister of trees:

In the river's reflection, clouds became nebulae and air bubbles stars:

The illusion of stars was more apparent looking straight down into the water:

A kayaker passed underneath the bridge, rippling the water behind her.

And lily pads clustered in the shallows.

Snapping these pictures, I almost forgave Ann Arbor for her six-month winters.... The times I breathed her cold air and felt her needly frost-tips in my lungs. The times I slipped on her ice sheets and feared for my bones. The times her winds seared me at the bus stop like I was a piece of raw tuna.... Like I said, almost forgave.

I keep hoping she'll change, but even if she doesn't, I'll probably keep coming back anyway.

Happy Marry-Who-You-Want Day!

2007-06-12T22:53:00.000-04:00

Well, not exactly.

But it is the 40th anniversary of the so-called Loving Decision making today Loving Day.

Seems bizarre now, but before 1967, certain states (okay, Southern states) forbade mixed-race couples from marrying. The rationale often invoked God and comprised a dangerous mix of alchemical logic and selective readings from the Bible, as in this ruling by Circuit Court Judge Leon Bazile:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents.... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Caught up in this were Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, a black woman and a white man who'd married in Washington D.C. Upon returning to Virginia, they found themselves in violation of the state's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 then sentenced to one year in prison.

In contesting the ruling, the Lovings gave the Supreme Court the opportunity to strike down Virginia's statute -- in the so-called Loving Decision -- opening the doors for mixed-race marriages nationwide.

The tide was going in that direction anyway, like when the Florida Supreme Court decided three years earlier that a white person and a black person could be in the same room together (McLaughlin v. Florida). But without Loving, the tide might have taken longer to get here. Who knows -- it might not even be here today.

My borrowed summer

2007-06-12T13:32:00.001-04:00

This summer, as I've been finishing up research projects and getting ready to defend, I've had the nagging feeling I've been living here on borrowed time. Nothing's provided a clearer sign of that than what I'm seeing around town -- summer in full, blinding bloom. Things that I saw in the past and forgot about spur my memory and harry me when I see them again.

Here are some of those things:

Camera-toting tourists snapping pictures of the fountain in front of Rackham

Folder-toting freshmen getting oriented to North Campus

The sun dusking through my westward windows

Tents going up for Summer Festival

Blackberry stains on the cement

Friends on the move

Kids everywhere

My tan

Alack, my lack of alacrity!

Somehow seems apt

2007-06-11T12:06:00.000-04:00

'Cause I'm a man, not a boy
And there are things you can't avoid
You have to face them
When you're not prepared to face them

-- from "Fight Test" by The Flaming Lips

2007-06-09T01:02:00.001-04:00

In the restroom at Ashley's

Coffee shop dilemma

2007-06-07T15:15:00.000-04:00

Here's a situation I found myself in last weekend: You're sitting in a coffee shop, laptop out and doing work, with a cup of coffee on the table, and suddenly need to use the restroom.

What do you do?

Let's assume you didn't bring a laptop lock with you.

You could:

Quaff the coffee, pack up your stuff, and bring your stuff with you into the restroom (denying yourself the enjoyment of a slowly sipped coffee)

Bring the coffee along with your stuff into the restroom (exposing your coffee to undesirable restroom air)

Suck it up (just decide not to use the restroom to the possible medical detriment of your vejiga urinaria)

Ask someone to watch your stuff and then go to the restroom

I think most of us would go with D, and I was about to myself, until I stopped and thought about it.

Consider this: If I can trust one stranger enough to watch my stuff, why can't I trust all strangers and E, leave my stuff there and go to the restroom?

You could even make the case that asking one stranger to watch your stuff puts you in even worse position than just getting up and leaving your stuff. Now said stranger knows you'll be away and incapacitated for a good minute or so. That's a minute in which he (or she) could snatch your belongings (with your simulations and thesis stored on them -- oh wait, that's just me) and run out the door with nary a trace.

At least if you just get up and leave your stuff, you might be making a call or getting a sugar packet or better yet a napkin, keeping an eye on your stuff the whole time. You might be coming right back, and who wants to mess with Irate Napkin Guy?

I was really working up a mental lather over the whole thing and thought I'd hit on one of those situations that exemplifies how bizarre modern life gets sometimes. I pictured writing a novel based on the incident -- about a guy, no, a PhD student, whose life could have gone any of five ways based on what he decided to do here. There'd be a book tour, movie rights, hanging out with Paris Hilton, the works.

But by the time I decided to ask the stranger at the next table to watch my stuff, RW arrived and sat down across from me. Ah, the sixth option. That made the moint poot.

No new posts... why?

2007-06-06T11:06:00.001-04:00

The two or three of you who are regular visitors to Stew's Blues may have noticed that I haven't posted anything in a while. Truth is, I've been busy trying to finish up the thesis (defense date 7/11!) and apply for jobs, postdoctoral and non.

In fact, I've been so "in my head" lately that I've noticed that the mental checklist I go through in the morning has changed. As I was biking out of the apartment parking lot this morning, I realized the new checklist went like this:

Pants on? Check.

I literally looked down and checked. Now, I'm not shy about my body, but even I think it would have been hard to explain why I was arriving on campus pants-less. ("Oh, I thought it was Casual Wednesday?")

Contrast the new checklist with the old:

Stove off? Check.

I did take a moment, however, to notice that the weather in Ann Arbor today is beautiful. Google says 72 and sunny, so if you're here, I hope you're able to get out there and enjoy it!

Taking on the pavement again

2007-05-31T00:51:00.001-04:00

You know, I was just thinking the other day that it'd been a while since I'd picked up any new scars from falling off my bike. Turns out I was overdue.

Rain came through Ann Arbor tonight, starting around sundown. I was just leaving Silvio's, having finished off a couple slices of arugula pizza, when I felt the first sporadic drops hitting my arms. Actually, the day had been hot, up into the high 80s, and the moisture felt nice.

By the time I got close to my apartment, the rain was coming down steady. I was having trouble seeing the road through wet glasses, and periodically I tried ducking my head to shake the water off. As a last resort I'd go a few seconds at a time with my eyes closed, trusting my own memory of the road home.

I nearly made it there laceration-free.

On the last turn -- the one into my apartment parking lot -- the old, familiar feeling came back: The tires slicked out from under me, and I felt my unsupported torso heading earthward. Automatically I put my arms out, and my elbows mashed into the pavement. Right afterward I picked myself up, looked in every direction, and just like the previous times, sighed relief to discover I hadn't been run over.

In the end, my butcher's bill turned out to be manageable: two scrapes on the right elbow.

Hours later, I've still got a sting in that arm, but I'm no less ready to head out on the bike again, hollering: "Bring it, pavement! Is that the best you can do?"

2007-05-27T19:46:00.001-04:00

On the shores of Lake Erie (not me in the picture)

2007-05-26T14:30:00.001-04:00

On a ferry in Lake Erie

Garden state

2007-05-22T17:48:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of the University's Matthaei Botanical Gardens, especially during those times of year when you can actually feel the earth underfoot -- and not snow -- and breathe the air -- and not clouds of gnats and mosquitoes.

Right not we're having one of those times. Every plant or tree capable of blooming seems to be doing so, and the rest of the landscape is bursting verdant. The days are still getting longer, but even at night birds and animals chirp, buzz, or scuttle as you pass so you never feel the earth is completely asleep. In short, I can't think of a better time to be in Michigan. And if you're in Ann Arbor, it could be the best time of year to visit Matthaei.

I stopped by Matthaei last Sunday and checked out the Conservatory for the first time. I can't believe I've passed it up all these years. (In my defense, it closes at 4:30 pm every day of the week except Monday when it's closed and Wednesday when it stays open until 8.)

Among the wonders you can see there, this:

Sausage tree. Obviously. Anyone else feel like tea?

Worst product name ever

2007-05-19T23:45:00.001-04:00

Walking through Kroger tonight, I passed a stack of dog food and did a double-take. Now, I liked Old Yeller as much as the next guy, but I think we've got a marketing mistake on our hands here. I mean, isn't it a tad ill-conceived to name dog food after a movie in which [WARNING: 1957 movie spoiler alert. Highlight to view:] the dog dies an agonizing, painful death? [End of spoiler] Just sayin'.

Stew Quixote

2007-05-18T13:17:00.000-04:00

Last night I was biking home at sunset. I'd just left the State Street area where I'd met friend AB for coffee, and having doubled back to the Med Center, I was now well along my usual route home. All seemed completely familiar -- from the timed lights at Fuller Street to the bump coming off the curb at Maiden Lane Bridge -- until I beheld this sight:

A giraffe in Ann Arbor.

I could hardly believe it.

In my time here in Ann Arbor, all nearly six years of it, I'd never seen such a thing. I pulled on the brakes and quietly set a foot down.

The great beast raised on its haunches. Its neck telescoped to the top of the nearest tree, and with a slight and gentle oscillation its head bobbed back and forth as lips thieved the choicest leaves.

From where I was atop the bike, I heard not a sound, but in the fading twilight I discerned the movements of the jaw, the slow mastication of leaves that provided the displaced beast its nourishment.

The giraffe stopped chewing. Its head turned, its eyes trained on me. It looked left, right, then right at me again. I stopped. Had it heard something? Was a giraffe ever known to charge a man? A car passed behind it, and its head pivoted away. An ear flicked once, twice, and when nothing materialized, it turned again to the tree and resumed eating.

I snapped the picture, balanced myself on the bike, and with stealthy step pedaled the rest of the way home.

Use your illusion

2007-05-14T17:23:00.000-04:00

Bruce Campbell (of Evil Dead fame) has this great, snarky line in Spider-Man 2 while playing a theater usher with a god complex: "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. No one will be seated after the doors are closed. It helps maintain the illusion." Hold that thought for a minute.

Yesterday I went to see the latest production of Hamlet to come through the area, one staged by the Ann Arbor Young Actors' Guild. That brings to seven the number of times I've seen Hamlet performed since I started grad school:

Royal Shakespeare Company -- London, UK (2001)
U of M Department of Theatre and Drama -- Ann Arbor, MI (2002)
Great Lakes Theater Festival -- Cleveland, OH (2003)
Zeitgeist Theatre (as Hamlet Machine Hamlet) -- Detroit, MI (2003)
Actors' Theatre Company -- Columbus, OH (2004)
Michigan Shakespeare Festival -- Jackson, MI (2006)
Young Actors' Guild -- Ann Arbor, MI (2007)

Basically, if anyone puts on Hamlet within a couple hours' drive of Ann Arbor, I'm there. Some of these productions have been good, some not so good, and some downright awful. The best of the bunch was probably the RSC's -- big surprise, right? Samuel West -- who you might know from 2004's Van Helsing -- played a great Dane, though I never got over his resemblance to William Katt from Greatest American Hero. The one U of M staged in 2002 wasn't bad, either -- I'd never thought of Hamlet as a scrawny nerd, but I kind of connected with that.

The production yesterday wasn't bad at all, especially for high school kids. The guys who played the lead and Claudius were especially good. Except for this one scene...

At one point in the play, Hamlet writes something down. This might be it:

My tables, my tables, -- meet it is I set it down!
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain! (I.V.107-8)

In the YAG version, Hamlet sits down at the edge of the stage, takes out a piece of paper and a pen, clicks the end of the pen and starts writing. Did you get that? Hamlet clicks the end of the pen.

Hamlet uses a clickie pen?

Took me out of the moment, but it must be saying something about the production that I was in the moment to begin with. Mental note to self: If I ever play the Dane, no clickie pen! It helps maintain the illusion!

(For the record I'm still smarting over two productions that I missed in Illinois: one outside of Bloomington-Normal in 2004 and one in Chicago, 2006. But they were 5 1/2 and 4 hours away, respectively.)

A light appeared

2007-05-11T19:24:00.000-04:00

And all of the answers were made clear to me.

But then aliens came down and zapped everyone.

Thank goodness Tom Cruise made it out.

Running, of course.

[Taken along Washtenaw last night, 7-ish.]

Little cat feet

2007-05-10T13:54:00.000-04:00

Fog crept into the city last night, between the time I arrived at North Campus to do work and the time I left it. Walking out to the parking lot, I mistook the place for somewhere else. Things I'd seen a hundred times before were suddenly transformed. No longer the Midwest, now London Town. No longer electric lamps but gas.

The new Arthur Miller Theater, formerly a parking lot, seemed not the eyesore that I found it to be during the day. The suction cups behind the glass reminded me of water striders.

Through the rest of North Campus and down Plymouth Road, the rest of my drive home was like paddling through a ghost. A dream. Damp air came through the windows rolled down carrying the scent of trees. No students criss-crossed in front or behind. The car made its way softly, trying not to wake the nature that seemed now to breathe between the buildings. The hairs on my neck alerted me to the presence of things primeval.

The last part of my drive took me by Leslie Science Center. Looking up the hills, I saw the distant lights glow orange-red through the trees. The woods seemed afire, and the lights as eyes. I pushed gently on the accelerator.

I was glad to get home.

[The subject line, by the way, is from Carl Sandburg's famous poem, "Fog". "The fog comes / on little cat feet. / It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches / and then moves on."]

Phallic Chelsea

2007-05-06T19:48:00.001-04:00

UPDATE (05/07): I was in Chelsea, Michigan yesterday and snapped this picture on my cell phone. I have no idea what this building is -- okay, it's a clock tower of some kind, I got it -- but I'd pit it against Ypsi's Water Tower for the title any day.

Stupid Golden State Warriors!

2007-05-04T10:41:00.000-04:00

The Dallas Mavericks -- my Dallas Mavericks -- exited the NBA playoffs last night.

Depending on your point of view, you could describe last night's game as a "remarkable playoff immolation" (as SI's Chris Ballard did) or as a quiet and befuddling ending to an otherwise great season (as I do).

But I'm at peace.

I just happen to also be hoping that the Utah Jazz or the Houston Rockets -- whoever wins Saturday and advances -- hands Golden State's [fill in anatomical part] to them on a plate.

Triggers

2007-05-01T09:40:00.000-04:00

This morning I thought I'd work on North Campus for a couple hours before heading to the Medical Center for the remainder of the day. The drab lighting and drone of the air conditioner at the Medical Center make the days over there run long, and I thought the change of scenery would do me some good.

So I've come to the Duderstadt Center which acts as a sort of library-on-steroids for North Campus where the University has sequestered its engineers and artists.

I'm sitting in Duderstadt's two-story foyer, a bright, airy space with lots of natural light and human activity. In one corner a coffee shop supplies the delicious brown to a continuous stream of people. The espresso maker heaves and haws like an asthmatic Aeolus.

The rest of the space is occupied by hexagonal tables where groups of students mull over projects during the school year. The year being over now, most of those tables are empty. Each has only its complement of atomically yellow plastic chairs which are amazingly comfortable on the rear. I'm parked at one of these tables now.

Behind me a glassed-in elevator shaft whirs away quietly. And behind the elevator shaft sits the information desk clerk who either (a) has the easiest job in the world or (b) acts as the guardian of all stored knowledge at the University. Depends on how you look at it.

The phone at the information desk just rang. It sounded like the buzzer from Family Feud.

[You might have thought I was going somewhere with that elaborate description of the Duderstadt Center, but I wasn't. I really just wanted to say that the phone sounded like the buzzer from Family Feud.]

More La Loma love

2007-04-28T15:42:00.001-04:00

I'm happy to report that it is still possible to get a decent chicken taco in Ann Arbor (or at least Ypsilanti).

How does he reach the pedals?

2007-04-28T10:19:00.001-04:00

I guess Michigan will give a license to just about anybody.

(Taken outside of Northside Grill, Ann Arbor, MI)

Valediction

2007-04-24T23:28:00.000-04:00

Next week sees the departure of two of my favorite people from Ann Arbor -- one for the summer and the other for good -- BH and JC.

Since I plan to be moving away myself by the end of the summer, chances are I won't be seeing either of them anytime soon after this weekend.

Last night I had dinner with JC. Here's a picture of the two of us, taken on my birthday a few weeks ago:

Tonight I had dinner with BH along with a couple of other friends. She and I rode together in the backseat of our friend's car where I took this picture:

I don't know what it's like to have biological sisters, but I can't imagine it's any different from the way I feel about these two. Both have been privy to my rants and ramblings, and with either of them around, female opinion was never lacking. I recently introduced them to each other, and to my delight, they got along. (One never knows.) But of course, then the volume of female opinion doubled (in both senses of the word "volume").

Dinner tonight was at Dalat in Ypsilanti, and while there, I snapped this picture of jalapenos on the table. It seems an apropos tribute to both of their personalities:

I'll miss you guys!

Beautiful in the post-nuclear sense

2007-04-23T14:35:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I made it down to the nearest park located on one of the Great Lakes.

Actually, there are two parks that vie for this title. One, Lake Erie Metro Park, is located at the mouth of the Detroit River -- saying it's on Lake Erie is debatable and depends on where you consider the lake ends and the river begins. The other, Sterling State Park, is fully on the shores of Lake Erie but five miles down the road from Lake Erie Metro Park.

Both are a little short of the sand duney beauty of the parks alongside Lake Michigan on the other side of the state, but they do in a pinch.

Sunday I made it to Sterling State Park. Walking along its clamshell-strewn beach about an hour before sunset:

In the background, the cooling towers of the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant. If you don't look too closely, though, you can almost imagine you're on the ocean.

Wacky science illustration

2007-04-17T15:30:00.000-04:00

Does this look funny to anyone else?

Leave it to scientists to put a metal fez on a cat and sit it in front a TV.

P.S. If you're curious for details, you can check the original reference here. The pic above came from Figure 1.

A little post-tax day reflection

2007-04-16T18:45:00.000-04:00

One thing I always find pleasant about the Michigan tax return-filing process is coming up to the definition of "home": "the place you intend to return to whenever you go away".

As someone who tends to over-think things, I always stop and smile when I get here.

For one I love the careful legalese in the definition. When you leave home, or any place for that matter, you have no guarantee you'll return -- the definition doesn't say "the place you will return to". But you can always hope to return, and the definition captures this sentiment -- "the place you intend to return to".

If anything's lacking in this definition, though, I think it's mention of the time frame. Take my hometown of Carrollton, Texas, for instance. My parents still live there, and I hope to visit them for years to come. While I'm there I like to sleep in my old bed and see what's left of the old neighborhood, including the yards and alleyways I used to cut through when I was young, the fields I used to play in and explore, and the houses of old friends where I wasted lazy summer afternoons.

I'd never want to lose that connection. Being in Texas I feel grounded, in touch with who I am and who I was, conscious of the reference point against which I can measure how far (or close) I am to coming full circle and fulfilling purpose.

But all that's obviously long-term stuff -- I only go back to Texas once or twice a year. On a daily basis, I'm happy just to make it back to my apartment, crash on the floor to the sound of the TV, and have a few Baked Lays.

In defining "home," maybe a more useful question to ask is what constitutes "going away". Is that leaving my apartment in the morning or leaving Texas when I was 25?

Sticking up for Silvio

2007-04-15T20:14:00.000-04:00

Last Friday night -- sometime during that post-2 a.m. hour known as "after the bars close" -- I buzzed into Silvio's for a slice of pizza with my friend JC. One of Silvio's twin grown-up sons, Gio or Romeo (they're identical), was working the counter, and I was happy to see one of my favorites out, the margherita.

"Doo-eh mar-gaa-reeta," I said. Actually, I didn't say that, but I wish I had. Being in Silvio's always makes me wish I spoke better Italian.

JC ordered a slice of something too, and Gio (or was it Romeo?) put the slices on paper plates and slid them into the window to the back kitchen.

No sooner had the slices been coaxed into the oven than Silvio himself emerged from the back. He shook my hand, but there was only a trace of his usual smile. Something was clearly upsetting him.

In his other hand he was holding a newspaper. He shoved it into the space between JC and me.

"Greasy!" he exclaimed.

I had no idea what Silvio was talking about, so I started glossing the page. Pictures of pizza. Numbers. Pictures of random people. Okay, it was a review -- I got that -- and from Silvio's reaction I was guessing it hadn't gone well. (Here's a link to the article sans pizza pictures.)

Turns out the local community college -- a place I'd formerly respected and enjoyed (having taken tai chi and attended numerous book sales there) -- had rated a panel of pizzas from five area pizza places. Silvio's had ranked second-to-last, but most damning were the comments:

One reviewer, the college president, "rated Silvio's Organic Pizza as his least favorite amongst the pizza places reviewed, but found them 'most unique'".

Another reviewer, a journalism student, "ranked Silvio's last in all categories, and described it as a, 'slice of grease…it slid all over my hand when I picked it up'". (By the way, Mr. Fitzgerald, what's the "it" in that sentence? Your sloppy writing?)

Silvio informed us that he'd sent over a pepperoni, a margherita, and a truffle oil pizza. He couldn't understand where "greasy" had come from.

JC -- who I'd taken to Silvio's before and was also an ardent supporter -- launched into a tirade of four-letter words making it perfectly clear what she thought of this so-called newspaper, the people writing it, and anything else that happened to be related. Silvio started going on simultaneously about the quality of the ingredients he was using.

To me the problem was this: The reviewers hadn't ever seen REAL PIZZA. It was as if you'd taken a group of kids who'd grown up on Chicken McNuggets and given them Chinese drunken chicken.

Like I've pointed out before, the margherita has three things: tomato sauce, a few slices of fresh mozzarella (Silvio gets his from a small farm in Connecticut), and some fresh basil. It's simplicity itself. But when you take people who have been getting taste-bombed their whole lives by chain-store pizza scientifically formulated to elicit maximum neural response, how do you expect them to react?

Just take a look at the website of the winner, Benito's. It boasts the "Big Benito" with "20/Foot Long Slices! Over 100 Pepperoni!". I don't even know what "20/Foot" means: Is that pepperoni density? 20 slices per square foot maybe? Or did they mean "20 foot-long slices"? That doesn't sound good either. And let's not get started on how "pepperoni" is technically uncountable: You can't have 100 pepperoni. Pepperoni slices, yes. Pepperoni, no.

Garbage web authorship aside, the message seems to be "Get a huge amount of stuff". But do I have to eat a huge amount of it to appreciate it?

Now look at Silvio's website: "Silvio's sauce is based on fresh organic herbs and organic tomatoes. The flavorful crust incorporates fine olive oil and is made with organic flour exactly the way Silvio's father made it."

You can't expect people who grew up with a pepperoni density mindset to immediately appreciate "fresh" and "organic". It takes time, time to shift their taste buds out of fifth gear and go slow. You know, chew. Don't inhale pizza. Taste it.

I made these points Friday night, but in the end I don't know if either JC or I succeeded in making Silvio feel better. I know a ton of people like his pizza, but sometimes all the reassurances in the world can't beat out a few lines in print.

Luckily there are other reviews out there.

To the guy who called Silvio's "greasy": You can duke it out with the reviewer from The Michigan Daily who said, "I liked how clean the pizza was. Not greasy at all. And the menu is the best I've seen. There are a lot of really creative combinations that I want to try."

Don't worry, Silvio -- we got your back!

A day in the life

2007-04-11T00:47:00.000-04:00

I've been tempted lately. Tempted to think my life is normal.

When I first got to Ann Arbor, I had a pretty good idea of what normal life looked like. I'd been teaching for three years, and I had a routine down that included a shave every morning and the evening news every night.

I kept this up for a while when I got here, but eventually my routine started growing its own legs and hair, becoming more organic, fitting itself more to the work and less to the times that people see on the wall clock like 9, noon, and 5. Bedtime went from midnight to 2 am to 4 am and back to 2 am again. Meals were taken sporadically. TV shows became impossible to follow from week to week because I was never reliably home during prime-time.

Now that I'm nearing the end of grad school, I hope I've reached some kind of equilibrium, but I'm not sure I'd call my days normal yet. Feel free to register an opinion after reading these select highlights from my day yesterday:

8 am: Woke up, worked on PowerPoint presentation for lab meeting

12:30 pm: Biked to the lab

1 pm: Gave presentation at lab meeting

2:30 pm: Met with advisors, talked about presentation

3 pm: Had multiple cups of coffee, worked on laptop

7 pm: Discussed future post-doc positions with labmate JR

10 pm: Bought groceries at Hiller's (cold cuts, soup, cereal, yogurt), talked to friend BH on the phone

11 pm: Stopped by Silvio's for pizza, chatted with Silvio, worked on laptop

12 midnight: Had an espresso at Rendezvous Cafe, worked on laptop

1 am: Worked out at the gym (rowing machine, 30 minutes)

2:30 am: Got home, listened to podcast of the news, fell asleep

Sweet'N Equal

2007-04-06T17:10:00.000-04:00

"Makers of Artificial Sweeteners Go to Court"

I love this news item out of today's New York Times. (Stew's synopsis: The makers of Equal are taking the makers of Splenda to court over Splenda's claim that it's "made from sugar".) This story's got so many angles that pique my interest, I hardly know where to start:

It's high-stakes, like World Series of Poker Texas Hold 'Em on ESPN, except the stakes here make the million-dollar pot on WSOP look like peanuts. We're talking a $1.5 billion industry.

It's about language, grammar, words, all that good stuff that appeals to the Latin major in me. The Splenda people claim there's no way a person could mistake "made from sugar" as meaning Splenda is sugar. Hoo boy!

It's about science. Apparently there are dozens of ways to synthesize Splenda, and only some of those start from table sugar, a.k.a. sucrose. So, it's more accurate to say Splenda "could be made from sugar". Makes you want to bust open your organic chemistry textbook from college too, doesn't it? I thought so!

It's about the deceptions of modern living. Like the fake fireplace at Starbucks that burns but consumes no wood. Or the produce at Whole Foods that appears to be sitting in wicker baskets straight from the fields. Or TVs that more and more closely approximate real life -- which, ironically, occurs away from the TV. (Until there are TV shows about TV, that is. At which point I'll know I'm in hell.)

Check it out! (Here's the link again.)

Picture parade

2007-04-05T20:34:00.000-04:00

In lieu of any good stories lately -- which never seem to draw that many comments anyway -- here's a selection of pictures that have wound up on my Canon S230 lately.

The Anson Brown Building on Broadway here in Ann Arbor. You might be interested to know that this building is (a) the oldest commercial building in Ann Arbor and (b) reputed to be haunted.

The back of a door in the Undergraduate / Science library on Central Campus. I like the strong industrial design -- it almost persuaded me to go to the North Lobby even though that's not where I wanted to go. I also dig that Japanese robot anime look, like it came straight out of Robotech. Or a really bad sci-fi / horror / slasher movie.

Dim sum place-setting at Great Lake Chinese Restaurant on Carpenter Road between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Good lighting. Note the incongruity of the Starbucks cups of my coffee-swilling comrades. Way to fit in, guys!

Orchid (1/3) from the Palm Sunday Orchid Show in Livonia last weekend. My mother's a big fan of orchids -- she's got dozens of them in planters all around our house in Texas, many from her youngest brother in Taiwan ("Baby Uncle" we used to call him) -- and I've got to admit, I find them intriguing too. In a genetically freakish kind of way.

Orchid (2/3). Menacing. Like one of the monsters from that god-awful movie, Starship Troopers.

Orchid (3/3). Just plain ol' bizarre. Way to go, Mr. Orchid Breeder!

Kudos

2007-04-03T13:22:00.000-04:00

... to all of you who made it out this weekend for my birthday -- where we can define "weekend" as Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Special thanks to:

BH -- Did we really just have dinner together three days in a row? Love you, sis, but I'm going to need to not see you for about a month.

JC -- You also came through for me three days in a row. Loved hanging out with your family Sunday -- easy to forget what real life is like in grad school -- thanks for reminding me. Oh yeah, love you too, sis, but I'm going to need to not see you for about a month as well.

CS -- For trying to hook me up with the Korean bartender last night, despite knowing that she had a boyfriend. Not sure if that was for my benefit or for your entertainment. And for keeping your misogynistic tendencies and general craziness under wraps.

AB -- For following up on CS' efforts to hook me up with the Korean bartender by telling her she and I would have "beautiful babies". And for trying to class things up a bit whenever they threatened to go a little too prole.

SB -- For the nice phone call yesterday afternoon. I'm still sweating.

SM -- For pizza. And beers that came out of nowhere.

You're all aces in my book.

<-- || -->

2007-04-02T00:52:00.000-04:00

So ends Year 31 and begins Year 32. (This makes me 31 by the way most people account for age.)

I've decided Year 32's motto will be "Citius, altius, fortius" -- you can look it up if you're unclear on the meaning. As befits this motto, midnight passed with me on the rowing machine.

As I rowed, I thought back to people who helped me through Year 31.

Here are some of them, alphabetized by last name: AB, SB, JC, BH, YI, RK, JL, AM, SM, JR, CS, KS, MS, CW. Thanks, all. If I've left someone out, the culpability is entirely mine.

Anyway, keep your fingers crossed for Year 32 which should bring some seismic changes. As a fortune cookie I received recently said: "You will soon make an important decision." Really? Just one?

Real news, fake news, what's the [delta]?

2007-04-01T20:02:00.000-04:00

Okay, check this out:

I support the occupation, and the occupation alone, because when we start to support the troops, we pave the way for irrelevant concerns about their families back at home. Before you know it, questions about who is and isn't going to be home in time for Christmas will be interfering with the crucial decision-making process of our commander-in-chief.

Makes sense, right?

Guess where it's from?

The Onion, ca. 2005 (source).

You have to worry when fake news sounds as reasonable as anything in real news.

Better than caffeine

2007-03-31T13:15:00.000-04:00

Something I was thinking about last week is whether anger can ever do good. Most philosophers and practitioners of religion would say no, but it's hard to argue with the short-term results.

Take, for example, #24 -- Kobe Bryant. Last week the man was on a tear about one thing after another: the Lakers' losses, accusations of playing dirty, rumors that he was talking to a college player about going pro with a little help from Nike, &c. &c. (The LA Times called the situation "Kobe gone wild".)

But regardless of what was happening in Kobe's head, here's what happened to Kobe's game: He morphed into a one-man scoring machine the likes of which hadn't been seen since Wilt Chamberlain. As Marc Stein noted in his column on ESPN.com:

The Los Angeles Lakes have cemented their strategy for the rest of their season.

Pray for rage.

Find a way, in other words, to keep the game's greatest singular talent flat-out fuming.

Kobe has been openly angry for about a week....

The real volume, though, is in the point totals.

Sixty-five against Portland.

Fifty against Minnesota.

Sixty more Thursday night in a 121-119 triumph over the hapless Memphis Grizzlies.

I haven't seen a guy play this well when he's mad since John McEnroe went 82-3 in the 1984 tennis season.

I guess you could ask questions like What's this doing to Kobe's teammates' morale? or Is this a long-term solution? or even Is Kobe any happier? But the answers seem irrelevant.

From personal experience, I know nothing motivates you like a burst of anger. I mean, you'll go bats**t and supernova for a while -- and afterward you'll be tired and possibly regret some of the things you did like p**s people off -- but in the short-term you'll definitely get s**t done.

The real problem with anger is that it's hard to control and nearly impossible to direct. But somewhere in the course of evolution, or the Mind of God, or the fate of the stars, we picked up the ability to get angry, so why not use it once in a while? As if drinking water that's been passed through the grinds of the roasted seed from a cherry-like plant originally from Ethiopia is any more natural! Let's not forget the root of the word "organic" is "organ" and, really, what could be more organic than using the juice your own adrenals pump out?

My friend Silvio

2007-03-27T15:47:00.000-04:00

Around eight o'clock last night, the prospect of having another Saltine cracker out of the lab stash lost all appeal and I found myself yearning for pizza.

The weather's been so nice here in Ann Arbor lately, I didn't have to think twice about it. Down the stairs, out the door, and onto my bike I went, pedaling in the direction of Central Campus.

I was on my way to Silvio's, my favorite place for Italian pie since it opened a couple of years ago. I go three or four times a week and probably drop more coin there than at any other place in town. Every night I know there's going to be a nice spread and I know that spread's going to have something I like.

On the bike I started picturing what might be on the spread tonight. Maybe the margherita -- with its thin wisps of fresh mozzarella and basil. Or the Siciliana -- a no-cheese pizza that still manages to bite you with the tang of its capers and anchovy. That hussy. Or maybe an arugula -- piled high with the mustard green the Romans practically worshiped along with a few shards of prosciutto and Romano. And if I was really lucky, there'd be a seafood pizza and I'd soon be looking at clams, shrimp, and tuna on a sea of tomato sauce and crushed garlic.

I swerved to miss a group of kids milling about on the sidewalk. Outta the way! Comin' through!

When I finally got to Silvio's, I ran into disappointment itself: The doors were shut and a sign in front said "Closed for private party". On the other side of the glass, two dozen people were sitting, laughing, eating. My stomach complained.

Behind the counter and through the order window, I saw Silvio. He saw me, and I shrugged my shoulders.

But then he did something I won't soon forget: He waved me to the back. I opened the door, slipped past the party people, and proceeded behind the counter and through the swinging shutters into the kitchen.

Silvio Medoro is a big guy from the old country with a broad grin and thick fingers. He's got a talent for making great pizza and the patience to do it everyday for twelve hours. It didn't take long for us to become friends, and on more than a few occasions I've sat down with him, talked family or Italy or anything else that might have struck us on a slow night, and stayed long after I finished my usual two or three slices. One night I even delivered pizza for him -- okay, it was just for an hour, but his wife was sick and the man wanted to get home to see her. How can you argue with that?

In the kitchen Silvio asked if I wanted something to eat. I said yes, and he asked what I wanted as he lifted the lids on three stacked pizza boxes sitting on the counter, one after another. In the second box I saw something I was hoping for: margherita. He asked how many slices I wanted -- two? three? -- and I said two was fine. He scooped out two slices and slid them into the oven.

I'm not exactly sure what I was feeling at that moment but as close as I can tell, it was a mix of gratitude and utter cool. I've been back here before -- that hour I delivered pizza for Silvio -- but somehow this time seemed different. It's like I was sitting in his house. I offered to pay -- I knew two slices of margherita cost about four bucks -- but he turned me down.

Silvio took the two slices out of the oven and handed them to me on a paper plate. I took a seat on a wooden box and started eating. Silvio leaned up against a sink, thought for a moment, then started telling me the news of the day: The air conditioner had broken, and the guy who usually fixed it wasn't answering his phone. In fact, the phone number seemed to redirect to an automated message from the phone company. Had I ever heard of such a thing? He dialed the number and had me listen to the message.

Suddenly Silvio remembered he had people out front and disappeared to check on them. When he came back, he was holding two paper cups. He walked over and handed one to me. Red wine. Grazie, I said. He replied, Salute. It's about as beautiful a moment as two grown men can share.

The last surprise of the night was seeing Silvio's wife. She walked in from the front -- either I'd missed her earlier or she'd just arrived -- and I took a moment to look at her. I knew she'd been in and out of the hospital recently, but that night she looked as vivacious as I remember her: Her dark eyes were flashing against her auburn skin, she was smiling, and she was flitting from one corner of the kitchen to the other.

I asked how she was doing, and she said fine. I asked if she was still doing the desserts, and she said yes, everything in front. Then she walked over to a counter-top, and a tray covered in something baked and golden came out of nowhere -- a cake made with farm cheese, she informed me. She pointed to another tray sitting on the stove -- that one's ricotta cheese, she said, a little sweeter than the farm cheese.

Knife out, she began slicing up one cake then the other. She asked if I'd like a piece, and I answered yes. She turned around and handed me a slice of ricotta cake as big as a paperback book. Grazie, I said again. She replied, Prego. Seeing that Silvio's disappeared out front again, I began gathering my things to say goodbye and leave.

As I walked out after the final ciao, cake in hand, I had one thought left: how fortunate I was to know these people.

2007-03-25T18:55:00.001-04:00

Alternative view from the bike (not as scary as it looks)

2007-03-25T18:51:00.001-04:00

View from the bike (sunset and a biker I almost hit while taking this picture)

Medical Center Henge

2007-03-22T17:57:00.000-04:00

You might already know that yesterday was the first full day of spring.

And you might know too that on that day the sun rises due east and sets due west.

And -- bonus round -- you might have heard that Stonehenge and a few other ancient monuments act as giant solar calendars that line up just so on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

Looking out the nearest lab window yesterday, I noticed a little Henge effect of my own.

I took this just a few minutes before the sun worked its way into the lower right hand corner of my field of view and disappeared completely. Whatever that little nub is out there -- see it to the left of the smokestack-looking column? -- that marks due west from my window. And that means out there lies whatever else is 42 degrees and 16 minutes north latitude, including:

Rockford, IL
Sioux City, IA
Medford, OR
Muroran, Japan (on Hokkaido)
Najin, North Korea
Chifeng, China
Nomgon, Mongolia

If you keep going until you're exactly halfway around the world at the same latitutde -- as far as you can get before you start coming back around -- you reach a spot in the Tien Shan Mountains, extreme western China, just a hundred miles or so from the Kazakhstan border. At the moment I snapped this picture, someone there might have been watching the sun as well, except rising due east.

I don't mean to sound as if I'm high, but it's a beautiful idea.

Why we have radio

2007-03-19T18:19:00.000-04:00

Here in the lab this evening everyone else has finally gone home, meaning I can now crank up the stereo with impunity. I've currently got it set to radio, and the first thing coming out are these lyrics which you might be familiar with:

Life is too short so love the one you got
'cause you might get run over or you might get shot

Never start no static, I just get it off my chest
Never had to battle with no bulletproof vest

Take a small example, take a tip from me
Take all of your money and give it up to charity

Love is what I got....

I've had a thing for this song since it first came out in 1997, and it gained special meaning for me in 2001. That year -- the last that I taught -- I had one advanced class, an Algebra II class made up mostly of juniors. A great, great group of kids: mature, chill, focused. I treated them like they were an honors class, and they responded like one.

Anyway, one afternoon -- spontaneously as far as I could tell -- one, two, then the rest burst into song, and that song happened to be this one, "What I Got" by Sublime. Being good kids, they bleeped themselves out when they got to the drug references. And being still a teacher, I couldn't just condone long periods of song when there was work to do. But inside I knew they were happy, and that made me happy as well. I remembered how quickly the pendulum could swing from one emotion to the other at that age, and inside I hoped that the atmosphere I'd made was one where they felt, on average, happy and safe. I probably let them sing for longer than I should have.

Here in the lab, the song's now over. Another one's started up, and I've got more work to do myself tonight. But, God, I hope those kids -- wherever they are tonight -- are okay.

Weather or not

2007-03-16T14:50:00.000-04:00

Wednesday night / Thursday morning brought snow and hazy skies.

I walked out of my apartment and was greeted by this scene creepily reminiscent of 2005's War of the Worlds. Except with snow. And no tripod monster robots with disintegrating ray guns.

But it's okay, really. Spring, I know you'll come around.

Fire in the sky

2007-03-12T17:33:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go for a long bike ride. Well, relatively long.

Most real bike enthusiasts would frown on anything less than a 30-mile ride. But then again, most real bike enthusiasts are on road bikes that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars and take well-paved roads with little to no traffic on them. Makes for a ride that's perfectly safe, sanitized, and respectable. Like a Zingerman's sandwich.

But I prefer my rides a little more "real-world" -- dodging car and foot traffic, cutting on sidewalks and street shoulders, through the occasional gravelly construction site. Whatever gets me from A to B. I'm on the mountain bike I was gifted last summer, a non-branded thing that's too big for me, but I've put hundreds of miles on it by now and know it like an outgrowth. I trust it more than I do most people these days.

Yesterday afternoon I took the bike to Ypsilanti, spent a couple hours out there, and then decided to head back around 7. I knew sunset was coming around 7:30 p.m. and were I playing it safe, I would have headed back earlier. But I admit -- I like the risks that come with biking in near-twilight to darkness. Did I mention I keep forgetting to buy head and tail lights for the bike?

I was coming around the bend on East Huron River Drive that splits Washtenaw Community College from St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, still outside Ann Arbor city limits, when I noticed two things. First, how dark the sky was getting. And second, how hungry and tired I was. I'd stopped by Taco Boy on Golfside to get chicken tacos for dinner, and the styrofoam container was swinging from the handlebars, suspended in a plastic take-out bag. Car lights came up from behind me and to my left, and I thought about the five or so miles I had left to go to get home. I felt the familiar twinge of strain in the middle of my front quads that comes when I pick a destination too far.

In the middle of the bend I looked back over my right shoulder, from the direction of the disappearing twilight to the glim of the St. Joe parking lot. I'm still not sure what I saw next. A fireball? A meteor? Clearly one larger object with a long fiery tail and a second, smaller object off to the first's side. No noise, just fire in the sky. Just for a second. And then gone, like it extinguished when it reached the tree line, maybe fifty feet up. Did anyone else see that? I stopped pedaling. A UM Public Safety car came around the bend but kept going.

At the risk of sounding cliche, I know what I saw. I turned the bike around and headed into the St. Joe parking lot. I was looking left and right, to the landscaped trees within the campus as well as to the unmaintained trees beyond. I was looking at the ground, hoping to see something glowing. Meteor finds are rare, but I knew there was one out there somewhere, fresh.

I looked for about ten minutes, trying to rouse myself out of the stupor the cold, dark, and hunger were beginning to set upon me, but found nothing. By now only a thin streak of blue illumed the horizon to the west, and I turned toward it and made my way home. By 8:30, 8:45, in complete darkness, I made it home. So tired, I stripped down to next to nothing and collapsed on the floor. The chicken tacos were still sitting on the kitchen counter.