the deal

i think i have now alluded to the fact that there has been a recent development in my life plan. it's likely that most of you family or friend-type people who continue checking back here already know that i'll be moving, but here is a quick summary of my plans for the next 8 months or so.

i found out in early september that my supervisor accepted a very impressive and deserved job offer from the University of British Columbia. when you have a lab, and you accept a job at a different university, your lab will typically move with you and continue on in the same vein of research. by consequence, your lab at the old university will close. this meant that before next June, the deadline that was set by the hospital/institute where we conduct our research, i would need to find a new home. i had a few options: (1) i could remain a University of Toronto student and just go finish up my projects in Vancouver with current supervisor, (2) i could try to orchestrate a transfer from the PhD program in Medical Science/Neuroscience at U of T to the PhD program in Neuroscience at UBC, or (3) i could drop back into the Master's stream here and defend my existing work in order to start fresh in a PhD program at UBC or elsewhere. after some very careful consideration, i decided that (3) was my best option.

i have had a really interesting experience working in my current lab with my current supervisor, especially in the fact that i've been directly introduced to the realm of psychiatry. because my research addresses questions about mental health and psychiatric disorders, seeing how the field of psychiatry works has opened my eyes to the challenges i'll face in my career, as i plan to interface my basic science experiments with the clinical and patient-oriented side of psychiatry.

with that said, i've also learned over the past couple of years that i think more like psychology, rather than psychiatry or molecular biology. neuroscience, or more generally the study of the brain and what it does, is a tricky label for a lot of interesting stuff that's going on right now. if you think about it, neuroscience is probably one of the only broad fields of study that incorporates measurements at the level of the single atom or molecule, of the single cell, of a set of interacting cells, of a set of interacting groups of cells, of a whole organ, and of the behavioural output of that organ. as cool as that is, a lot of the people who study the brain at these various levels come from backgrounds that predispose them to thinking in certain ways, as differerent branches of science have specific ways of viewing the world. this means that everyone working in neuroscience has a unique perspective and set of skills to offer, but also that it can sometimes be difficult to communicate in a common 'language' or paradigm.

to bring this back to me and my choice, i feel like it's important for me to get my grounding in psychology before i go off to be an independent scientist. i had a taste of psychology in undergrad, but thought at the time that i wanted to explore the molecular details of what was going on in the brain rather than the conceptual aspects of behaviour. as you may have gathered, this is what i've been doing here in toronto: measuring how stress and/or drug treatment changes the expression of molecules in certain parts of the brain. this is pretty dandy in its own right - i mean, only in the past 30 years or so have we figured out ways of detecting single molecules in the brain! but, i personally think that studying these molecules is most interesting when you consider their changes in the context of what the brain is doing. in other words, look at the molecules and look at behaviour. then use carefully designed experiments to figure out if changes in molecules relate to changes in behaviour.

and so, i'm applying to re-start my PhD next September in Psychology. i'll finish up a few experiments that i had been working on for my PhD here, and then write them up as my Master's thesis. i should be able to defend that thesis next May or June, and then i plan to move out to Vancouver to work with a new supervisor at UBC. although this change of plans is a bit on the unexpected side, i'm looking forward to the change of scenery and will be proud to say that my studies took me all the way from Halifax to Vancouver.

mmmmm... all-you-can-eat sushi.

doctor auntie lorna

this past friday my aunt (i.e. younger sister of my mom) was conferred her PhD in Nursing by the chancellor of McMaster University. i snuck out of the lab for the day to attend her convocation, and was treated to a whole 24 hours with my cousins, cousin's girlfriend, aunt & uncle, granny, mom, and various others intermittently. i am so proud of her for this accomplishment, and for her choice to also complete a post-doc at McMaster and continue her research. she studies issues surrounding quality of life in individuals with dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

congratulations auntie lorna! :)

i have discovered over the past few years that i am a total sucker for ceremony. i cried through the entire first half of the convocation, just as i cried through my brother's entire high school graduation, my own undergraduate convocation, and my cousin's undergraduate convocation. something about the organ and the bagpipes and the academic robes and the guy who carries the sceptre... what particularly got me is the simple act of a supervisor placing the hood around the graduating student's neck. to me this represents the transition from a mentor-student relationship to a colleague-colleague relationship, like the official welcome to a circle of individuals who have a little fire burning within themselves over the pursuit of knowledge. despite the minor setback that has emerged with regards to my PhD studies (more details on this next post), i am more excited than ever to continue being a part of the academic world and to achieve all that the PhD entails. maybe one day i'll get to carry the sceptre. ha ha.

remember me?

so... haven't been around for a while. seems i last posted at the end of august, and i've been pretty much in the grant writing and experiment zone since then. as you might recall, the funding proposals i was working here did not get me any $$, so i've been aggressively putting together 4 (yes 4!) PhD funding apps this year. just submitted the last of them on Friday.

i have to get back to the lab to do a whole bunch of stuff, but to appease everyone who's been waiting for news for the past 2.5 months, here is percy in all his adolescent glory. with a decorative autumn gourd.

victoire

my old friend regine and her friend katie opened a store this summer, and i am so proud of them for pursuing and attaining their dream. there's a little blurb about them in Fashion18 magazine this month:

Blurb about Victoire.

'redesign'

look what i figured out how to do. custom mastheads at last! this initiative was inspired by my latest foray into writing code; i'm starting a new experiment in the lab and need to teach myself how to program a piece of equipment. unfortunately, the equipment is about 15 years old, and uses a weird sensical-at-the-time, but not-so-sensical-now custom language. looks like my one year of java won't be of much use to me now...

i really enjoyed travelling this summer: to saskatoon, vancouver, and whistler in may for visits and a conference, to montreal and ottawa in june for more visits and a conference, and to new york and new haven in july for yet another few visits and a workshop. i was also lucky to have a lot of visitors over the summer - friends from ottawa, and montreal, and as far as new zealand. it's been a long time since i've seen some of the people i got to spend time with this summer, and each of them reminded me of how valuable friendships can be. thanks everyone. let's do it again soon.

this month has been, overall, a return to feeling (and actually being) productive, in the lab and work sense. i really needed some low-key time this summer to figure out the grand master plan for the rest of my PhD, and those travelling breaks seemed to do the trick. now that i'm back in toronto and not going anywhere for a few months (the carnival that is the Society for Neuroscience Meeting will go down in atlanta in mid-october), i've had a chance to seriously start two new projects. i love the feeling of getting something off the ground, and the time at the beginning of a project when you are organizing lists of supplies, scheduling each stage that needs to be accomplished, reading background literature to establish what you are going to measure exactly and how to go about measuring, and sitting down to learn and practice new techniques. i love this part so much that i've been spending most of my energy there this week, and ignoring the discussion of a paper that i really should be finishing. maybe in the next few hours i'll try to tackle that...

more travels

took my final mini-break of the summer this past weekend. i attended a workshop in new haven, CT on friday, and then hopped a commuter train back to new york to stay with good friend martha and her boyfriend, thomas. being my first time in the city and all, i was treated to a very exciting two days of walking past famous/notorious restaurants. on the list: pastis, babbo (one of mario batali's), per se (one of thomas keller's), masa, jean-georges (i.e., vongerichten), and spice market (also belonging to j-g vongerichten). apart from this culinary landmark-spotting (or as thomas put it, gastric tourism), i adored the architecture and feel of the brownstones in chelsea and the west village, the sense that everyone walking down the street is on their way to doing something Incredibly Important, the tendency to relax on the front stoop of your walk-up with the morning paper and a starbucks as the garbage trucks and yellow cabs whip by, and all the boys dressed in their nice clothes. apart from chelsea, where i spent the few nights, i got to see park slope in brooklyn, where my other good friend anna is hanging out in a gorgeous studio/loft for the summer. sunday was spent lying around in the grass in central park, attempting the NY times crossword.



and now, back to work.

value village impromptu

took a july wednesday night outing with friend craig to see poet Lisa Robertson perform a reading at value village, to launch her latest book, 'Occasional Work and Seven Walks From the Office for Soft Architecture'. for a remarkably surreal 20 minutes, we wandered among the aisles of pants organized by colour in rainbow order to the sound of her essay 'The Value Village Lyric' over the PA. some of the patrons were less than enthusiastic, but the hipster kids who turned out were all digging. kind of re-defines the poetry reading. and reminds me of those times in high school dance composition class when we would choreograph pieces that integrated through different locations around the building. including the girls bathrooms.

then, in a particular moment of brilliance, we spotted a south indian corner take-out/sit-down place where i enjoyed my first masala dosa since bangalore! 'twas positively delicious. their coconut chutney was the REAL DEAL. and the mango lassi i washed it all down with was stellar. have to go back to this place: South Indian Dosa Mahal. they even have idli! those sweet fluffy breakfast rice cakes that go so perfectly with a saucer of cardomom-scented coffee... sigh. heaven.

lately

it feels like i just updated last week, but realized today that it has actually been a month. i've been going in cycles of preparing for trips, traveling, and catching up after trips - makes for dropping of most normal day-to-day activities, including laundry and blogging.

i also realized it has now been a year since i started this blog. 'twas july 2005 when i made my first post about a summerlicious meal at Canoe. don't think i'll return to Canoe for summerlicious this year - the menu seems lacklustre. if i can rustle up a companion, i might attempt a reservation at Thuet bistro & bakery, but in the meantime i'm finally going to sample the amusingly described offerings at Czehoski on queen west. perhaps i'll have the "grain-fed cornish game hen brined, then cooked under heavy things with arborio nero risotto, spring garlic oil, baby arugula". snicker.

since june, i've been busy in the lab tying loose ends on my most recent project. finally have the go-ahead to write it up and submit, hopefully to be accepted somewhere before i apply for more grants in october (more papers i publish = more chance of getting funding). then i prepared for a conference trip to montreal (more about that later), and spent a week there before celebrating canada day back home in ottawa (see photo below, courtesy of marsha). this past week has been more catch-up, and a series of visits from friends. i was lucky to have my friend meredith come up for a day to toronto; she's home for a few weeeks from the University of Otago in Dunedin, NZ where she's working on her PhD in population genetics. then i got to spend most of saturday with friend jonny, who was a classmate in neuroscience at Dal. finally, i got to see my aunt and uncle this evening, after my aunt finished a long weekend of exhibiting at the toronto outdoor art down at nathan phillips square.

i have a few posts stored up that will get put up this week. but, for now, this is a few of us at the beer garden across from parliament hill on canada day. we were amazingly lucky to get a table - and didn't let it go from about 4:00 pm 'til after fireworks. now THAT's a proper canada day.

that's almost doctor to you

so yes, i've been away and not staying on top of writing about things. here's a quick summary of may: madly read and studied for Masters-to-PhD transfer defense, presented work at two departmental research poster days, spent weekend in Saskatoon visiting undergraduate research supervisor and friends, flew to Vancouver and visited other friends, spent week in Whistler at IBNS meeting, came home, defended my PhD transfer exactly 12 hours after my plane landed, became a PhD student.

two photographic selections:


on the road outside Saskatoon, SK.


detour through Stanley Park - view of mountains in Vancouver, BC.

elongation

i was recently in vancouver, and stayed with a friend who has two cats that look a lot like percy. i practically had a hernia when i realized they were only 1 year old, and looked like huge fluffy cat monsters compared to my little kitten. such is the accelerated lifespan of pet felines... so far percy just seems a lot longer: he can stretch across my entire laptop and then some, as opposed to neatly fitting on the keyboard as i try to catch up on e-mail. he also gets all sulky-teenager when i try to take photos of him.

Senate Report on Mental Health

This past week, the senate social affairs committee released a detailed report on the status of mental health care in Canada, and I was ecstatic to hear that among the 118 recommendations offered, formation of a Canadian Mental Health Commission was prominent. Good discussion of the report on Cross Country Checkup today (can listen here), including a closing comment from Shitij Kapur - Chief of Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto (also, where I work), and a Canada Research Chair at U of T. The full version of the report is available here and here, or an executive summary can be viewed here.

I wouldn't have expected, but the first thing that popped into my head when I heard about the call for formation of a Mental Health Commission was, "Can I join??" I wish such a body had been around when I was applying for random government jobs, back in the days of summers off. I think I'm catching the advocacy bug... as most people who are passionate about their work seem to.

autobiography of red

as a refresher between stacks of journal articles, i finished Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red this weekend. Carson is a poet and professor at McGill university in Montreal, and one of my good friends had been on me to check her out. i noticed on the book jacket that Michael Ondaatje also sings praise: "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today. She is a rare talent - brilliant and full of wit, passionate and also deeply moving."

evidence:

I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided.
Things good on the inside. [p. 97]

Wrongness came like a lone finger
chopping through the room and he ducked. [p. 136]

i have her latest (i.e., Decreation) on hold at the library.

big mistake

at the annual neuroscience poster day lunch yesterday, i grabbed what i thought were two half-sandwiches stuffed with lettuce, tomatoes, and turkey breast. a few pickles and cherry tomatoes for the side. headed upstairs to meander through the posters i had not had a chance to see. part-way through my first sandwich, i realized the deli meat was in no way turkey breast. removal of the top bun confirmed my dire suspicion: telltale orange casing. i had mistakenly opted for mock chicken.

individuals of my generation must remember mock chicken. when i was in pre-school i though 'mock' was a country, or style of cuisine, and that 'mock chicken' was simply a mode of poultry preparation, as per 'chicken cacciatore' and 'chicken kiev'. it was not until later that i realized 'mock' was a synonym for 'pretend' and 'fake'. i can imagine how this might have been explained to me, "when you play hairdresser, you are pretending to be a hairdresser. well, mock chicken is pretending to be chicken." what a concept.

this episode made me wonder: whatever happened to mock chicken's evil cousin, macaroni-and-cheese deli meat? apparently, still making it. how entirely unfortunate.

recent cat

not a cat blog... but he won't stop being cute.

percy, before yawn:

percy, during yawn:

percy, after yawn:

music note #4

my mom was here for a visit over Easter weekend, and we were wandering around the shops on Bloor in the Annex one day. at one particular shop, we were listening in on a conversation between two cashiers about 1) which two albums they would select if desert-island bound, and 2) what their last meal would be if they were about to be capital punished. since i could write a book on 2), i'll instead share my brief reflections on 1). it was an obvious choice for me.

1. Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon & Garfunkel)
2. Abbey Road (The Beatles)

both of these were always around when i was growing up, and then brought back out at various points in junior high and high school. i actually remember when my mom bought me the tape of Bridge Over Troubled Water; we were on a trip back to Waterloo, ON after moving to Ottawa. i think i must have gone through it 100+ times over the week that we were in Waterloo, and now i still get a feeling of coming back to something you'd left and missed a lot when listening to each song.

if i was allowed to add a third album, it would be:

3. Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 1 (Billy Bragg and Wilco)

and three weeks passed

i'm still here. i would say that i have been busy, but i actually don't feel that i've been accomplishing much lately. sitting in front of a computer all day and partaking in rapid fire e-mail with the faculty members of my transfer exam committee, in hopes of coming to a consensus on a date and time for said 'exam', doesn't exactly qualify as consuming work. but, this was definitely the major accomplishment of the past three weeks. you see, i am currently registered at U of T as a Master's student, but plan on sticking in grad school and finishing a more extensive series of projects (one of which involves the work i did while in Bangalore last December). instead of writing up a Master's thesis, defending the Master's thesis, applying to the Ph.D. program, and waiting to get accepted to the Ph.D. program, i can directly jump into Ph.D. student status by writing up my Ph.D. proposal and defending it to an examining committee. most of March was spent on the writing part, and now i've been going through the administrative muck of organizing the exam itself. seems it won't be happening on May 15, as i had originally hoped, but instead on May 29. fair enough.

apart from this exam bit, i'm also working on a few papers. counting some cells, to round out the project i originally had finished at the end of February. playing with a potential new experiment in the lab. planning a few trips for the summer. i'm heading to Saskatoon, Vancouver, and Whistler for a brief visit and conference for the last week of May (ironically, right before the transfer exam). then Montreal for a week at the end of June for another conference. then! i've managed to get myself sent to a microscopy workshop in New Haven, CT at the end of July. since it's 100% cheaper to fly to NYC than to anywhere in Connecticut, I'm going to do so and extend the workshop stay for a long weekend with a good friend who is living in Manhattan. this will (finally) be my first visit to NYC. i'm working on my restaurant & shopping list already. will accept suggestions from anonymous bidders.

percy is now almost 9 weeks old. i think he has doubled in length since i got him, though i can't tell for sure, and has recently begun engaging in adolescent-type behaviour. this extra length affords him the ability to shimmy up dangling towels and the back of the couch. he is currently licking my big toe.

it's a boy!

my life changed in a significant way this friday evening. for the first time in my life, i own a pet that doesn't live in a bowl full of water on my shelf. appearing below is percy, who is now 5 weeks and 4 days old. he seems to be adjusting nicely to a rhythm of sleep, play, eat, sleep, play, eat, sleep, etc. tonight, after helping out in the kitchen with dinner, percy feels like watching capote.

meet percy:

milestones

april 10 1982: born
june 6 1985: learns to read by watching wheel of fortune
may 24 2004: crosses stage and receives B.Sc. in neuroscience
march 21 2006: personal e-mail communication with science idol

yes, it has been a landmark day in the history of my life.

A+ for planning

from the new york times, thursday march 16:

in the rush to provide shelter for victims of hurricane katrina, FEMA has created what state and federal officials say is a new hazard. it's put nearly 90 000 lightweight trailers in an area that's prone to flooding, tornadoes, and of course, hurricanes.

windows open

today was that first saturday of the year when the sun shines and warms the local atmosphere to a temperature above 10 degrees Celsius (i.e., 50 degrees Fahrenheit). if you live in America, or anywhere else on the planet besides Scandinavia, Canada, or Russia, this is probably not a big deal. however, in Toronto, it means the windows can be open for the first time in 2006. look at the gorgeous blue sky! i walked around with mikey the cat and took some photos to document the occasion.



hopefully those trees will be full of leaves in 30 days or less.

where i am

good news! all of that counting of cells that was driving me to write bad haiku, eat couscous, and not update for the past 34 days? finished! finito! accompli! and the best part - i uncovered a novel, interesting effect by doing all of the counting of cells. the type of science that i do (behavioural neuroscience, with a slant toward understanding the link between stress and mood disorders) involves studying differences between groups. these can be groups that are stressed, versus not stressed. or groups that are treated with a particular antidepressant, versus not treated. for the first large project of my Master's, i didn't find any differences between groups. now, in this second large project, i have found that something which happens in the brain of stressed subjects can be prevented by treatment with a particular drug. conclusion? i can go ahead, write a proposal, and initiate a sequence of events that will lead to me being a PhD student.

hip hip.

in the meantime, i have been thinking about where i want this little journal to go. when i started writing last summer, i played around with posting recipes (not successful; realized i am more of an IDEA person in the kitchen), writing about food (never a problem), making lists of my favourite songs (also enjoyable), and generally blathering. india provided a focus to my efforts for a brief window of time, but after coming home i got wrapped up in work and dropped off. i honestly enjoy having this accessible way of communicating with distant people, and i love the thought of my grampa reading what i have to say every morning over his tim horton's coffee (hi grampa!), so i will definitely continue to write. but for those periods of time when i feel tied up with mind-numbing, time-consuming lab work, i have decided to give myself a mission statement: to spread the word on what's new in science, and why you should care. i keep up on these things as part of my grad student life, and i feel very strongly about making basic research findings (particularly neuroscience-related findings) accessible and interesting to non-science people (and perhaps even some science people). i had a team blog going with a couple of friends who shared this view, but we weren't posting very often - and i felt posting to multiple blogs was getting distracting - so it fizzled out. from now on, i'll put any material i would have considered scientifically interesting for that team blog on here instead. peppered, of course, with the occasional treatise on oyster mushrooms, and frequent lists of new favourite songs.

now, on to some light reading.

couldn't resist

to go with the couscous, i have a new favourite sleepy song.

somewhere - vic chesnutt & liz durrett

ok.. now really time for bed.

sleepy food

as evidenced by my absence from internet-world, i am still spending approximately 80% of my waking hours in front of a microscope. thanks to my "careful" planning, i think i may actually have enough data collected to analyze for an abstract deadline coming up on friday. but by writing that i have probably jinxed myself. at this point, all my poor grad student soul can ask for is a phoenix of a result, to assemble and rise from the ashes of my endless boring days spent counting cells on a computer screen. remind self: i love science.

in the meantime, i just came up with the best bed time snack of 2006 so far. leftover couscous with apricots and almonds, reheated. drizzled with a little of the trial size bottle of San Giorgio Morgeto olive oil that was kindly given to me by one of the olive oil guys at the ottawa food & wine show when i told him i was a poor grad student and could tragically only afford low-medium grade olive oil. then a tiny pinch of kosher salt. mmmmm. this is the BEST olive oil i've ever tasted. i may not be lying if i told you i actually drank a tiny bit. hey, i can think of MUCH worse things to drink.

time for bed.

inspired by sounds of cell counting: a haiku

click click click click click
click click beep click click click click
click click oops undo

stereological irony

realized i haven't posted any top music picks since pre-India.

top 7 80's new wave revival songs for cell counting:

1. tribulations - LCD soundsystem
2. international dateline - ladytron
3. pleasure and pain - rinocerose
4. take me home - don juan dracula
5. when? (demo?) - stars
6. i am not surprised - the organ
7. white light generator - ladytron

the best part is that design-based stereology (i.e., the cell counting protocol i'm using in my current experiment) didn't become standard practice until the early to mid 90's. so, in implementing my 80's revival playlist, i'm putting myself ahead of my time. ha ha ha.

my year in cities

saw this on kottke.org, and wondered what my 2005 in cities would look like. hmmmmmmmmm.

Ottawa, ON*
Toronto, ON*
Boston, MA
Halifax, NS
Montreal, PQ
Washington, DC
Bangalore, India

wow. apart from the India bit, this is really not that exciting. goal for 2006: get to conferences in better places. apart from places i know that i will go (i.e., Whistler/Vancouver, BC and Atlanta, GA - wholehearted 'yippee' on that last one...) my goal is to finally get to New York and possibly get to Europe. the Paris is calling.