service of magnets

i'm sitting working on my laptop in the kitchen, and i realized that when 3 grad students share an apartment, there is a shift in priorities of what to display on the refrigerator door. to wit:

- print out from farmer's market with recipes using sweet potatoes
- clipped column from the Globe with a response letter from roommate's boyfriend
- discount card from Canadian Tire
- business card from neighbourhood coffee place
- list of cooking times for grains and legumes
- postcard from Guinness brewery
- handwoven doll magnet from Guatemala
- poem written during recent game of Cranium
- publicity magnets from 2 scientific societies
- whiteboard with list of communal groceries needed
- pictures of 1 roommate's brain scanned by other roommate for pilot study

studs

discovered a generous online archive of studs terkel today:

Conversations with America

i think i now understand what it means to be interviewed.

history ?

for just this one day, i wish i could be american.

please, america, don't be stupid.

endurance babysitting

this weekend i got an email from my supervisor asking me if i could spend tonight at her house, hanging out with her two daughters while she and her husband went to a show. i'm all about babysitting. i can tell stories about princesses and oversized vegetables. i can feed 1-year old twins lunch while keeping a 4-year old entertained with a pipe cleaner. since i am not yet a mom, and don't plan on being one for some time yet, babysitting reminds me of the lengths that any person or creature would go to in order to make their offspring smile, giggle, be warm, be safe, and fall asleep soundly.

that is: the lengths which include standing, holding, and rocking a 16-month old for about two hours. my arms are so tired that i can hardly type, and i can't begin to imagine how tired they would be if i was doing this every single day, but the fact is that in the moment, swaying that little curly-haired girl back and forth while lightly bouncing around the house on my tiptoes was keeping her happy and magically enabling her to fall asleep against my shoulder. and in the moment, that was all that really mattered.

unfortunately, 5-year old sister thought this was pretty boring. but that's a lesson of parenting i'm not prepared to tackle this evening.

écoute ceux-çi

in addition to david rakoff audiobooks, i've got some new tunes spinning. am totally pumped by these three albums at the moment.

1. the ting tings - we started nothing
2. yelle - pop up de luxe
3. amy winehouse - back to black

i admit that i was skeptical about amy winehouse until last night, since i'd only heard 'rehab' 5 bagillion times and was entirely sick of her, but have you listened to the whole album? freakin' amazin'! my labmate was blasting it in the car on the way home from the lab at a very early hour of the morning, and it changed my world.

my rakoff connection

when i find myself in the middle of a phase of much menial lab work, such as right now, i tend to also find myself in the middle of a phase of searching for new, brain-stimulating things to listen to while slicing brains, doing histology, tracing neurons, etc. so, last night i was poking around on iTunes looking for new podcasts, and came out with a very yummy david rakoff audiobook. suddenly brain slicing becomes not a torment, but hours of much-anticipated fun!

i should disclose that i feel a particular affinity for mr. rakoff because of his origins. it happens that his father, dr. vivian rakoff, is professor emeritus of psychiatry at u of t and was head of the clarke institute (former incarnation of the centre for addiction and mental health - camh) in toronto, which happens to be where i did my master's. because vivian rakoff was important around the camh, the lab where i worked for those years was NAMED after him. as in, The Vivian Rakoff Mood Disorders Laboratory. and, this one time, he happened to wander into our lab meeting, and i was like "you're THE vivian rakoff??" and did the celebrity jaw-drop thing.

needless to say, i think david rakoff is pretty cool by association. if you don't already listen to this american life, this is one of my favourites of his.

my thanksgiving

after spending a lot of september with friends, and taking a trip home to ottawa last week, i opted for a quiet weekend with some work and some media consumption. thought about making something thanksgiving-ey for dinner today, but the water supply to our kitchen tap abruptly cut out last night while i was doing my dishes. random dysfunction of kitchen appliances/utilities seems to have become a holiday tradition, as i remember the power going down on our section of the street last year just as i wanted to prepare my smoked turkey and wild rice with cranberries.

by consequence, i am thankful for my favourite thai delivery place.

this weekend i saw this company perform, read this book, and watched the final season of this show.

the oldest ones

very thankful that two weddings created an excuse to reunite with the 6 non-family people who have known me the longest. the past month has been a happy reminder of why i became friends with them all in the first place, and how well each of us are doing at finding our ways.

this photo was taken about 6 years ago:


and here are the other two of us, just last week:


love you all.

effective

what have i been up to since the beginning of may?

this:



ah yes. this is a beautiful thing.

golden boys

my roommate started a very ambitious-looking garden when we moved in 4 months ago. in the past weeks, we've had an endless supply of these sweet little things for our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. or, sometimes for our into mouth-popping, juicy burst of summer-feeling.

this whole growing food thing? i like!

similes

Two favourite comparisons drawn in books recently read.

The next morning I left the city in one of the blue vans that constantly circulate its streets, taking people to the airport like cells that remove free radicals from the blood.

from Grief, by Andrew Holleran (p. 150)

Hologram Boy saw God as more human than human, moving among subhuman beings like the weekly celebrity among the Muppets on The Muppet Show.

from The Accidental, by Ali Smith (p. 40)

new doors

all from my new apartment.

doc decadence

for the past week, my favourite of the many many toronto film festivals has been going on. hotdocs - all documentaries for 10 full days. luckily, the festival coincided with me being finished courses and having a flexible pre-summer-experiment schedule, and i managed to make it to 13 screenings. it was hard not to keep going, when every show before 6:00 pm is free for students, and when you show up for evening screenings and nice people happen to offer you their extra industry tickets out of the kindness of their movie-loving hearts.

figs

winter is over, summer is here, i'm feeling like keeping my hands busy in the kitchen.

these are delicious for dessert. sliced in half, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, roasted very briefly in a medium oven, eaten in one bite with a tiny spoonful of milanese vanilla gelato.

poor them, the taste-blind

after reading ruth reichl's 3 books of memoirs in a blink, i was trying to decide which food author to devote myself to next. should i pick the politically-conscious, eco-minded michael pollan, who i abandoned a couple of years ago because it felt a bit too much like reading science, or should i opt for something a little more pithy, a little more romantic. seemed the right time to make my way through m.f.k. fisher's body of work (spanning 1930 through 1978). should keep me busy for a while. at least through the summer.

for those not familiar, m.f.k. fisher is 'la grande dame' of food writing. lover of good foods, good wines, good conversation, and great men. ruth reichl describes meeting her in the second of her books (Comfort Me With Apples), and it sounds as though she kept these passions alive well into her later days.

here's my favourite snippet so far, from fisher's essay Pity the Blind in Palate:

Almost all people are born unconscious of the nuances of flavour. Many die so. Some of these unfortunates are physically deformed, and remain all their lives as truly taste-blind as their brother sufferers are blind to colour. Others never taste because they are stupid, or, more often, because they have never been taught to search for differentiations of flavour.

They like hot coffee, a fried steak with plenty of salt and pepper and meat sauce upon it, a piece of apple pie and a chunk of cheese. They like the feeling of a full stomach. They resemble those myriad souls who say, "I don't know anything about music, but I love a good rousing military band."

think i've stumbled upon the margaret atwood of food writing. hallelujah!

this particular essay is one of twenty-five included in Serve It Forth, 1937.

daily dose

in the spirit of frequent posting, another look through the microscope:



pyramidal neurons in the rat somatosensory cortex.

neuron-gazing

oops, there went two months.

...

it's been a bit of a course work frenzy, all stats assignments and reaction papers and readings and seminars. but i will be finished all (save 1/2 a credit) of my PhD course requirements in exactly one week! this is undeniably exciting, as it means i can go back to doing actual research on a full time basis. which is, you know, what grad students are supposed to do.

i guess there are a few exciting things that have happened since february 4th. i found a new apartment into which i will be moving with 2 grad student friends at the beginning of may. it is the most beautiful apartment i have ever seen in toronto, almost as beautiful as some of the apartments i've seen in montreal. very cute old little walk-up, well-kept, new track lighting on ceilings, little glass-doored cabinets in pantry area between dining room and kitchen, front balcony, wood-burning fireplace. i could go on. counting down the days til move-in, as i sit here listening to the house mouse scurry around in the ceiling over my desk.

second excitement is that an undergrad student from my neuroanatomy lab in the fall has secured herself some funding to come and do research with me this summer. reasons for my excitement include: (1) my first experiences with research took place around the same time of my undergrad under the guidance of some very enthusiastic and fun grad students, and i am looking forward to picking up the supervisory torch, (2) one of my favourite parts of doing scientific research is sharing the process with other students, and hopefully getting them excited about spending hours in front of a microscope, and (3) i was not in a position to supervise undergrad students in my previous lab, since the departments with which i was affiliated didn't offer any undergrad programs. and i guess, admittedly, (4) it will be nice to have someone around to help out with all the menial day-to-day tasks that comprise the types of experiments that i do. i am interested to see how i evolve as a teacher and mentor in my first *official* supervisory role. will update on this as it happens.

for now, i will go back to writing the first of two term papers, while occasionally glancing out the window at the for-now-still bare trees behind the houses across the street. since i started studying neuronal morphology in earnest (think back to that trip to india), i can't look at bare branches without automatically tracing them out in my mind like this:

a little beaver

i don't think i would be possible to have more things that need to get done this week. i'm reminded of my last couple of years in halifax, when i was managing to work several jobs, take courses, and do research. but it is all happy work. and there is always time to stop, breathe, and read a little about sartre and beauvoir's relationship:

The underlying existentialist philosophy of Beauvoir's memoirs -- it was also the underlying philosophy of her relationship with Sartre -- is that it is "bad faith" to look to another, whether a human being or a god, for a sense of salvation. As individuals we are free, and we act in "bad faith" when we try to avoid our freedom. It is not easy, freedom. It brings with it the anguish of choice. It comes with the burden of responsibility.

From Tête-à-Tête: The tumultuous lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
by Hazel Rowley

and a yummy new sweater.

every time i've moved to a new city, i am reminded of how difficult it can be to make new friends. friends of the sort that you'll want to keep around forever.

i had a lunch date today with two of my fellow psych grad students, both of whom i had a class with last semester. then i ended up in one of those afternoons where you wander around and window-shop and chat, and forget to even think of looking at your watch, and all of a sudden it's past dinner time. oops! seems i have managed to find a few more precious and wonderful like-minded lady friends.

friday afternoon

calculating expected cell frequencies by hand, on the 12th floor of robarts library.

(i.e. reading blogs and intending to work on my stats assignment)

competing perspectives

i am reading a deliciously well-written book about the brain right now. i first really took note of Jeff Hawkins when he lectured at the Congregation of All Neuroscientists in san diego this past fall. at the conference, he discussed the framework outlined in On Intelligence, which I impulse-bought a couple of weeks ago when picking up the text for my research ethics course. in his prologue, he raises several excellent points. among them:

... I refused to study the problem of intelligence as others have before me. I believe the best way to solve this problem is to use the detailed biology of the brain as a constraint and as a guide, yet think about intelligence as a computational problem--a position somewhere between biology and computer science. Many biologists tend to reject or ignore the idea of thinking of the brain in computational terms, and computer scientists often don't believe they have anything to learn from biology.

setting up camp on the fringes between disciplines has always appealed to me. serving as a bridge. a hybrid.

yikes

i just came across mention of the company 23andMe on blogTO. if you don't mind swabbing your cheek for a little skin and saliva, they will sequence your genome for the not unreasonable price of $999 USD. so, you can now spend money to figure out whether you have certain versions of certain genes, and whether these certain versions of the genes predispose you to developing certain disorders, cancers, or colours of hair.

interesting. despite my initial shock and trepidation, i can see this pushing the envelope a little further for personalized medicine. once people realize that they can gain access to their genome, the medical community will need to read up and take this information into account when diagnosing and treating.

in the mean time, i'll be interested to hear about the sorts of people who seek out this information just for the sake of it. bring on the genetic interpretation blogs and wikis!

also

percy says hi.

fresh life

basking in the glow of that 100th post was so delightful that i had to keep on doing it for 5 months. i mean, the Roundness of that number is supremely satisfying. now i will have to quickly work my way up to 200. or 1000.

so... for any loyal family members who still have an honorary slot for me on their blogroll, i am back. i'm no longer in vancouver, but rather sitting in one of my favourite toronto starbucks, in the most hidden corner, watching the snow pound down on the roof of the U of T bookstore. i don't come to this starbucks very much anymore, now that i'm working out of a lab at the scarborough campus. i was thinking earlier this afternoon that i've been coming to this starbucks for almost 4 years. i remember writing the manuscript containing my honours thesis data here in the fall of 2004, sitting across from my (now ex-) boyfriend [ed. note: that paper was subsequently published in april 2006]. i have read textbooks and journal articles here for 4 different courses. i've had coffee with at least 8 of my friends and colleagues. i've had a few moments of inspiration, each of which spurred a jog back down the street to my former lab. i wrote several sections of my Master's thesis here. i attempted to put together the first and second incarnations of a manuscript describing my Master's data here. neither of those were completed, but the third version of this paper was recently submitted [and, unfortunately, rejected on the first round]. i think that i've actually sat at each and every table here, at various points in time.

it's kind of too bad that i've done all of these things in this starbucks and not in an independently owned establishment. i've recently started frequenting a Much Cooler, Independent, Fair-Trade Serving Coffee Place in a different neighbourhood. they serve you coffee at your table, bring you glasses of water without your having to ask, and have shelves full of books lining the walls instead of vaguely ugly wallpaper sent from corporate offices in the states. i like the new coffee place a lot. in fact, i would say that it is my new toronto-location crush. i feel that i shouldn't go there too often, for fear that we might tire of each other early in the relationship. i'm restricting myself to one afternoon a week. perhaps in another four years i'll write a similar post and talk about the inspirations i had and papers i finished while sitting at the little table in the back with the wobbly chair. i'm looking forward to getting to know Much Cooler Coffee Place over the course of my PhD.

yes, i'm well into my PhD in my new lab with my new supervisor in the new department. it has made me so happy to return to a more traditional academic environment, in which all of the grad students regularly convene at seminars and colloquia. i've TA'd for the first time in 3 years, and managed to inspire a couple of undergrads to apply to come and work with me on my science. i took a course about food. i danced in a show. i love my new PhD life here, but appreciate the old Master's one now that it's over.