the commute

i've been listening to a new podcast that makes my commute to satellite campus feel remarkably short. i love the production on this show. the sound collage, the piecing together of words. the rhythm keeps me engaged, rather than drifting off into thought.

radiolab, from WNYC and NPR

protection

having just read this book, having just listened to the most recent episode of this very favourite podcast, a story from the author Joyce Maynard. the theme of love for and protection of children, the jumble between the two.

photo taken earlier this year in a late-afternoon playground.

end of summer

this weekend i ate the last of the strawberries i'd frozen for winter. they never last long.



at least there is still jam.

ow my most of me

so, earlier this summer i started rock climbing. this is not an activity that i would normally list on the "top 50 things to do in my life" roster, but one of my roommates was looking for a new climbing partner and she managed to convince me that there's nothing like the jolt of adrenaline when you fall off the wall 30 feet in the air (safely secured in your harness of course) to take your mind off things.

i comment on this now because i returned to the climbing gym on thursday after a 2 month hiatus. and man, i am aggressively reminded that this hanging on to tiny little protrusions from a tall vertical surface? this stuff takes muscles that i've never used before in my life. and being a dancer, i feel i can claim use of most of the muscles in my body.

allow me to borrow an image off the internet to elaborate.

(thank you http://www.andrewdiec.com/Anatomy/)



mmmmm finger pain.

but seriously, i do enjoy this climbing stuff. it has provided a situation in which i am repeatedly reminded of the fact that i can fail. and i do fail so often, in the sense of missing a hold and falling off the wall into my harness, that failing becomes not so frightening, not so alarming, not so bothersome. it's just inherent to the activity.

similarly, it's helped me get used to taking risks, since i know that my kind friendly climbing partner is sitting at the bottom of the course keeping my belay rope tight, watching to see whether i've had too much and need to be let down. attempting to propel my body weight up and to the right at a 45 degree angle in order to get the tips of my fingers around a shard of plastic becomes less scary. the outcomes are known. i will get it, or i will have to try again.

it's nice to remember this feeling back on the ground, when faced with more abstract decisions.

two windows

wow. it's been a while.

life since i last wrote is pretty much equivalent. still in grad school, though now a year closer to getting that Ph.D. and very much more looking forward to it. still in the same apartment.

here is the view from my dining room table, where i sit and check my email before going into the lab. the email checking has been somewhat prolonged today, mainly because it is so nice and quiet and serene looking out at the rusty golden leaves. the coffee here doesn't hurt either.

miss you all and think of you often.

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.