Go test yourself!

Have you ever wondered why, when so many people claim not to hold discriminatory attitudes there still is evidence of bias in so many aspects of life? One possibility is that people are liars, that they say what they know is "PC" while believing strongly the opposite. Another is that although people can consciously and strongly believe they hold no biases (e.g. racism, sexism, heterosexism/homophobia), they hold implicit negative attitudes.

Want to test your implicit biases? You can do a demo or register as a participant here. More on the project and implicit biases is available on the project's information site.

(From "About Project Implicit")
Project Implicit
Findings observed in seven years of operation of the Project Implicit web site
* Implicit biases are pervasive. They appear as statistically "large" effects that are often shown by majorities of samples of Americans. Over 80% of web respondents show implicit negativity toward the elderly compared to the young; 75-80% of self-identified Whites and Asians show an implicit preference for racial White relative to Black.

* People are often unaware of their implicit biases. Ordinary people, including the researchers who direct this project, are found to harbor negative associations in relation to various social groups (i.e., implicit biases) even while honestly (the researchers believe) reporting that they regard themselves as lacking these biases.

* Implicit biases predict behavior. From simple acts of friendliness and inclusion to more consequential acts such as the evaluation of work quality, those who are higher in implicit bias have been shown to display greater discrimination. The published scientific evidence is rapidly accumulating. Over 200 published scientific investigations have made use of one or another version of the IAT.

* People differ in levels of implicit bias. Implicit biases vary from person to person - for example as a function of the person’s group memberships, the dominance of a person’s membership group in society, consciously held attitudes, and the level of bias existing in the immediate environment. This last observation makes clear that implicit attitudes are modified by experience.


Some news stories on implicit bias and its real world effects:
See No Bias (By Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, January 23, 2005)
Tests of ER trainees find signs of race bias in care (Stephen Smith, The Boston Globe, July 20, 2007)

(Un)easy bake

Oh this brings back memories....

Easy Bake toy ovens recalled for second time this year
WASHINGTON --The Easy Bake oven, an iconic toy with a four-decade history, has been recalled for the second time in less than a year, government safety advocates announced on Thursday.

In February Easy Bake's parent company, Hasbro Inc., recalled 985,000 of the toys because children were getting their hands and fingers trapped in the front opening, and some were burned.

I had some such toy as a child. I think it was a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven.

My nineteen seventy something model cooked the...er... food with light bulbs as opposed to the plutonium which is apparently used as a heating source in the modern versions of the oven. (Actually, it's an "electric heating element" - ultimately a lightbulb could be called an electric heating element too but this is a matter of deeper semantics than is justified here I think)

As they do now, my oven came with cake mix packets. I recall they tasted a bit fucked up, as if sweet plastic were a key ingredient. But we mixed them all up anyhow (I believe they were all of the "just add water!" variety).

Then we ran out of mixes. So my sister and I experimented with our own mixes. No clue where the 'rents were for this fiasco. Absorbed in some martini fueled drama no doubt (these were the gin years).

It must have been winter since although I think we started when there was still light coming in from the kitchen windows, I have this sense it got dark fast and early. Most of my memory of the easy bake disaster took place in an increasingly dark kitchen. By the time we put the cakes in the oven, the only light in the room, in fact the only light on that floor of our house, was what seeped out of the little "smoked glass"-like plastic windowed casing enclosing the super hot 60 watt bulbs - which were slowly cooking our itty bitty cakes.

I recall the cakes smelled pretty good until the batter rose high enough in the pans to engulf the bulbs. Then it smelled less good.

My recollection is that we did not repeat this experiment. I don't know if we were simply unable to clean all off the cake which had been well past overcooked on to the insides of my easy-bake. My sister has the better memory for this sort of thing.

AM, what happened to the oven?

what's this coffee spoon stuff?

I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 2002. Since then, I've not felt well. I was unfortunate enough to have some other medical problems prior to that but mostly they were episodic. Since 2002, there hasn't been a single day when I have felt well. Always there's some level of the "post lyme" which could be chronic lyme or could be an autoimmune disease. Sometimes on top of that are the migraines, or the endo, or the intestinal problems, or the out of the blue shit like my hip going out. Sometimes it's everything at once.

I do write about these things here, but I don't write about them as often as I feel them. It seems overwhelming, not simply to me - I mean I will live with that regardless of what other choices I make. What I find mostly overwhelming is other people's responses. I sometimes write about those responses and how they affect me here too, but again, not as often as I encounter them.

There's a social proscription against too much complaining, and complaining of a certain type is especially proscribed. My god, I'm an abuse survivor, an incest survivor, a feminist, and what is most quickly summed up as a liberal. I've got way too much complaining to do already without adding in the sickness stuff.

So lately, I've been posting the medical stuff more on a blog I devoted entirely to medical stuff. I figured that blog's title, description, and content would help self select for readers who are less likely to have that automatic reaction healthy people have. Oh yes, they do tend to have it. And I deal with it enough in my outside life. I dealt with it once here and I didn't like it one bit. The Tea Room blog has a lot of other stuff on it and most of my hits are from people looking for that more general stuff. I find that some days I just don't want to deal with the ignorance which is likely to come from someone who would see the illness stuff as the final bit of evidence that I am inherently weak, not here at least.

What makes me mention all this now is - well there are a couple of reasons. One is that I feel like shit today, felt like shit since Wednesday of last week in fact. Not the cramps and endo whatnot, just shitty. For the first time since getting Lyme, I almost had to call someone to come rescue me because I felt so unwell I was worried about driving. Who needs the details? Me and my doctor I suppose, no need to list them all here. For here, it's enough to say I feel like shit. So it's on my mind.

Another reason is that I have been recently struggling with my faculty about what having a chronically ill grad student means. Does it mean I get the same standards for evaluating progress as my mostly healthy peers? Does my having three times as many publications as my peers prior to getting sick count for anything or will faculty continue to look only at my current rate of progress now that I have so little reliable stamina? Does being so sick mean I get allowances or accommodations only if I ask specifically for each of them in turn, in advance, and of any and all faculty and staff who might be involved in the relevant decisions? Are there limits on what accommodations I can have? Do I need to show documentation? All of those are good questions, and none of them are ones I've been able to ask because the people I need to ask them of have been dodging me since the end of the semester. Possibly it means what my advisor said to me when we were having one of what I now realize were casual discussions about it. That I'm not just not healthy enough to work at a research university. I might not be healthy enough to work. Her casual assessment of my employability was such a gem that this topic also has been on my mind since she said it.

The last reason I bring this up now is that I just found this truly excellent essay about living with illness and disability. It's called "The Spoon Theory". I posted about it on the blog I started for my health related stuff, and I decided to link my post about it here because the essay title and topic ties back in with why and how I chose my blog url for Do Not Enter The Tea Room. The "and coffee spoons" address for this blog is an indirect reference to the notion of being someone who has "measured out my life with coffee spoons", c.f. T.S. Eliot and Crash Test Dummies. The author of the essay does not reference the quote of measuring life in coffee spoons, however her Spoon Theory is exactly right, and it happens to tie together both of my blog-worlds.

Scurvy

How I came to be looking up scurvy is a long story which begins with looking for information on prolactin, dopamine, oxytocin, and porn. The path from there to scurvy was not direct and is probably more due to individual "click" interest/preference behavior than to anything linking the topics of neuroendocrinology and vitamin C.

Still, there I was. Looking at the symptoms of scurvy. And here's something I found very interesting (from the link):

Some other important symptoms of scurvy are gradual weakening, pale skin, sunken eyes, tender gums, muscle pain, loss of teeth, internal bleeding, and the opening of wounds such as sword cuts that had healed many years before.

So I'm thinking, who the hell was this written for? The opening of sword wounds is not just any old symptom, it's an important symptom.

I'm imagining the exam, a third year med student standing there nervously glancing between the chart, his notes, and filthy pirate wearing a drafty gown and sitting on the paper lined exam table.

"Ok Mr. um... Mr. Yellow"
"Arrgh, me given name's 'Yellar'. 'Beard' is me surname. You can just call me 'Matey'!"
"Er...Yes. So uh, Matey. I notice your gums look a bit spongy and...oops, there goes a tooth."
"yarrrrr..."
"I need to ask you, have you noticed any old sword wounds opening up again lately?"

Swimming

At some point in my childhood, it was decided we children should have swimming lessons. My recollection is that the choice was related to our parents wanting to rent a vacation cottage on an island off the coast of Maine - although I may misremember. Sometimes our parents got it into their heads to enroll us in sporty activities for no apparent reason.

Like ice skating. Every saturday morning one winter we were packed up and sent off with my dad's already rather senile father who drove us to skating lessons at a local rink. My guess is the skating lessons were meant as a substitute for saturday morning TV and to give our parents "adult time". Despite knowing how to skate, the activity never really grabbed any of us, but I still had skates as recently as last year. Since I can now no longer walk from the garage to my building on campus without joint pain, I sold my ice skates last Fall.

I can and do still swim though. I never was a champion swimmer. But the freedom to move, float, cruise, or chug along in the water is wonderful. Now that I live in a town with a pool (that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get access to), I think the next time I'm feeling well, I'll go check it out.

Nice chat

I had a nice chat with a faculty member from another group in my department today. It was unexpected and very cool. I just wanted to share this since usually I crab about how much grad school and my department suck. Sometimes you remember there are good people too. We connected on the "is everyone here on crazy pills?" feelings experienced by a nontraditional student who is struggling with the decision to keep going (or not) for a brass ring which she strongly suspects is less a ring and more a ringer. Conversations with people like this help me feel less totally misanthropic.

It was just in time too. I was feeling pretty hateful about my department today.

let them drive Lexuses

Stuff like feeds my hatred of the rich.

From The Boston Globe:
Last year, the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay fought a court battle with the MBTA, alleging that the T was violating historical preservation laws by adding elevators to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

For some context: back bay is the area of Boston where Newbury street is. Here are examples of what it costs to live in this area.

When I was a youngster, my friends and I would go more to Harvard square, central square, or walked around the common and gardens eating, smoking, and feeding squirrels (faneuil hall was on the list too since they were less likely to throw us out of the stores than other downtown establishments, plus there were usually some cute local guys working there).

Now and then, we'd venture over to Newbury Street or the Copley area. Since we couldn't even afford to browse, mostly our Newbury Street activities included walking around eating ice cream, laughing and yelling at "eurotrash", or being entertained by our friend Jenn's peculiar brand of "street theater". Jenn made a habit of literally chasing after spandex clad men who jogged or biked past on the sidewalk. She would stand at the windows of restaurants and stare hungrily at the diners. I remember one time she flashed an entire section of a restaurant, a TGIF I think. Whichever restaurant it was, a part of it was below street level. This subterranean area had a sort of solarium/sky light thing right about at bench height just off the sidewalk. My sister can help me out here about which restaurant it was since I think she was with us the day Jenn whipped up her skirt and sat on the skylight.

Back bay's always been for and of the rich fucks. Tourism in the area is in fact half rich person/home/things sight seeing. Does what we were doing count as tourism? I'm not sure. I think if you live within a certain number of miles of a place, it's hard to be counted a proper tourist. But I got the sense that the cultural climate of the Back bay was closer to L.A. than where I grew up.

So I'm wondering about the historic preservation vs T improvement: Are piss smells and rat sightings something we should expect the NABb to fight for should the T ever try to clean up a bit? Would they go to bat to keep the Orange line shootings and Red line stabbings?

reminisce

"What is 'reminisce'?" a coworker asked me once. We were working at the hippie import clothing store in Ann Arbor, folding indian and grateful dead print "tapestries". I thought for a moment. She had a habit of stumping me with these questions about English. It was a good question though. Not an easy concept to describe to a non-native speaker.

I got out something like "Reminiscing is like remember, but more conscious. It's what you do when you recall a time or experience, usually from a distance of time or period of life. Often it's used when you're sharing the memories with someone who was part of what you're remembering, who shared the experience with you. And sometimes there's a tinge to it, something not always 100% happy, a little dark in there too. So like if you and I run into each other many years from now, we might 'reminisce' about working here at the hippie import clothing store".

This seemed to satisfy her.

What made me think of reminiscing and my definition of it is what I found on the hard drive of one of the lab computers today. I had just put in a work order on the computer and decided if someone with master administrator privileges was going to be digging around in it, I should probably get some of my stuff off.

I don't make a habit of keeping personal files on the school computers, but until rather recently I didn't have a laptop and consequently I would sometimes transfer stuff to a lab computer. Usually meaning to promptly transfer it off. And sometimes I'd forget. I knew this. It's been kicking around my mind, but my account is password protected and no one in the lab knows how to navigate the admin privileges well enough to get in around it. But today it occurred to me I should probably go clean it up.

So I went in and looked through my folders to make sure there was nothing too personal on there. Not too bad. Some music files, a couple of pictures a friend sent me, and three recordings of the Christmas eve radio show I did in 2004.

This show was on the local campus radio station where my friend B___ and I had an every other week morning show on Fridays. It was mostly about labor and education, with a focus on academic labor. I think the tag line was "news and commentary on labor and social justice". Very leftist. Since neither of us wanted to talk for two hours straight, we mixed in music.

On the Christmas eve show, B____ was out of town. I loaded up the playlist and brought some company to the station so I wouldn't have to do all the work. My company was my ex, T____ and my current partner A____.

And I have recordings of this show.

I've heard some of the music I used to listen to then and it always recalls the feeling of getting up and going to the show that day, wondering if this was my last christmas with T____, and all sorts of other not pleasant remembered thoughts and feelings. We've all experienced this, right? The music which hits you with recollections of a time when you were feeling things very strong and not very good.

I'm playing it back now, trying to decide if I should keep it or delete it. We're at about half way through, a Christmas blues song is playing with a deep voiced woman singing about how much Christmas sucks. "Don't give me none of that 'Tis the season to be jolly'. No it ain't!"

These recordings provide not just the music but also the voices from that time. I was lead on the mic, with A___ and T___ reading news items, weather, and providing the back and forth you generally hear on a talk show. We had sleigh bells (we had stolen them from a faculty Christmas party), which you can hear now and then when we get laughing.

And even though we laugh a lot, I can hear the strain in my voice. I don't think it's obvious to the uninformed listener, or if it was any cause might have been attributed to my disliking Christmas (which I mentioned, quite a lot). But boy, that tone jumps right out at me.

I wrapped up mostly smoothly and we close on "Christmas in Heaven" from Monty Python Sings.

tag'd

I've been tagged, by D at Lingo Franko. Problem is, I don't know 8 bloggers (well enough) to send this to. I'm planning to compromise.

Tag Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.


(my) Eight

1. I floss.

2. A non-intimate who casually touches the top of my head (or reaches as if to touch) is at significant risk of sustaining personal injury.

3. There are two stories about how I got my first name.

4. One is that my parents named me after a woman who was the focus of a certain long dead Italian poet.

5. The other is that my first name is the feminine of my father’s first name. Had I been born a male, my parents told me, my name would have been the masculine of my mother's. Thus, by just one bit of chromosomey goodness, I narrowly escaped being "Charlie".

6. I have been to Graceland.

7. I draw during academic talks. “Talks” include colloquia, tenure talks, so called ‘workshops’ (just another name for a lecture), job talks, conference talks, and sometimes even classes. It helps keep me awake if the speaker is a droner or otherwise unskilled orator, and oh so very many of them are. Sometimes I write notes in the form of speech bubbles in my drawings. More often, I draw concepts I’ve found interesting or amusing for one reason or another or I draw pictures of people who are annoying me. This habit has the undesirable effect of sometimes sending me into a snorting, choking fit of suppressed laughter.

8. I avoid direct sunlight.

I'm tagging...
cjblue
J
Triticum Turgidum
Reverse paranoia
A_____

And now I’m stretching…
Rosie (this one’s cheating somewhat but what the hell)
My sister (who will have to respond via comment)

Democrat from Ohio

As a presidential candidate, Representative Dennis Kucinich interests me. (It's koo-SINN-itch I think - I get more of my news in print than TV so I had to look it up to get the pronounciation)

I know he's got a bit of a rep, but I'm not sure this is deserved (and I'm not sure how much of it is based on western stereotypes like the ones which link personal power and competency with physical attributes). We'll see. I just started researching him. Background-wise he seems interesting, and he's one of the few who isn't equivocal on gay marriage (and wasn't even back in the last presidential election). Oh, and he voted against the PATRIOT act (senate roll call, house roll call).

I am not a single issue voter. But a candidate's position on a topic, if too far from what I consider reasonable (and also if not outweighed by other attritubes) can break support for me. Lack of support for ensuring safe, funded, and effective reproductive freedom and for protecting the privacy of reproductive health decisions is a definite deal breaker for me. So I looked the candidates up on the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

NARAL presents a selection of statements from each candidate on abortion and reproductive freedom policies in the US.

Kucinich:
"What the Supreme Court did was quite invasive of that very sacred sphere of a woman's health and privacy… But if our society is truly committed to life, then all of us need to close ranks behind a program which will show real concern for life. And that includes prenatal care, postnatal care, child care, a living wage, universal health care -- and the end of war,' he said. 'Then we will have achieved a much more tolerable expression of support for life than the Supreme Court did.'"
[Carla Marinucci, Abortion Ruling Puts Candidates on the Spot, San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2007.]

One thing which struck me in reading the statements is that I don't see anything in the Kucinich collection which evokes the necessity of god and religion as part of this particular health choice. I noticed the lack of this in his statements after I noticed the presence of it in the statements of the two media and money favored candidates (Clinton and Obama).

Clinton:
Abortion "should be a constitutionally protected decision made not by the Government, not by the majority … but between a woman, her doctor, and her faith in God."
[152 Congressional Record S35-07, January 25, 2007.]

Obama:
"You know, I think that most Americans recognize that this is a profoundly difficult issue for the women and families who make these decisions. They don't make them casually. And I trust women to make these decisions in conjunction with their doctors and their families and their clergy."
[Transcript from Democratic Presidential Debate in South Carolina, MSNBC, April 26, 2007.]

Whatever happened to the notion of "keep your rosaries off my ovaries"? That wasn't just a catchy protest chant. It had a point. This "and god" shit annoys me - and I find I am consistently more tolerant of religious belief than most people in my particular age, education level, socio-economic class, and region cohort. I think religion is a kind of principle and value system. It is a tool for exploring and developing applications of moral reasoning, principles of human interaction with one another, with other organisms, and with the non-animate environment. It's not nothing and I am not dismissive of religion or religious people, not out of hand at least. But what drives me right up a tree (and down the other side) is the tendency in a religion-saturated society to reverse this relation. That is, rather than view religious belief and study as a type of value system, the tendency becomes to see value systems as a whole as a kind of religion. And that's just fucked up.

The candidate statements on reproductive health choices include god and the ministers of god. On one level, this inclusion rather innocuously (in and of itself) suggests to the public that the candidate believes in god or at least understands a great number of the public believe in god. On another level, the one I see it on, it is a pandering to the notion that someone might not be able to make this decision without appealing directly and specifically to a higher moral authority than their own. Again, keep in mind that for those people who are religious, that individual religious belief is part of the personal moral authority.

Having to say it, putting it in there explicitly, is at best redundant. At worst, it suggests the candidates who have to include it are using it as a subtle qualification which is meant to resonate with the religious among the voters - the qualification being "I support a woman's right to choose a path which is correct based on what her religion tells her". And this is tacitly empowering religious leaders and institutions with a say in not just the choices of the women who CHOOSE to follow that particular religion or who CHOOSE to involve that religion's teachings in this choice, but a say in how and what all women decide.

We sure don't need more of that. At least I don't.

I know Kucinich does not have a career long history of pro-choice ideology. But his statements on the issue of abortion access and abortion as a procedure in general simply strike me as relatively sincere and considered.

(here's a discussion on Democracy Now involving Kucinich, among others, on the war in Iraq)

character

Cheeerist, I hate Connecticut.

From the Journal Inquirer
VERNON - The McDonald's restaurant on Route 83 is looking for more than a facelift as corporate owners are hoping to tear down the existing structure and construct a more modern building complete with two drive-through windows. But the [proposed] futuristic design is causing concern among the town's Design Review Commission, which is calling for a more subdued, New England-esque look.
...
[Design Review Commission staff liaison] Rodriguez said..."A lot of this is about what you want the character of a community to be."

Happy Birthday!!!!

We celebrated my sister's birthday on her actual birthday this year, July 4. Since I haven't been very travelworthy the last few years, she's had to make the trip down here from Boston. It was good to see her, and my brother too.

Here's a picture of little brother lighting candles on our sister's birthday cake.

Missing the point

I'm not sure how this guy got to "there isn't any benefit of early integration" (benefit relative to segregation that is), even from the US Supreme Court ruling. (NY Times article on ruling and FindLaw's summary and opinions)

Challenge to Lynn's race policy is revived
High court buoys foes of school transfer rule
By April Yee, Globe Correspondent
July 5, 2007

Lawyers representing a group of Lynn parents who began challenging the city's desegregation plan eight years ago revived their legal battle this week, days after the Supreme Court declared similar plans unconstitutional in Seattle and Kentucky.
...
Chester Darling , the lawyer who previously brought a suit by Lynn parents all the way to the Supreme Court, hopes that a successful challenge will prompt other Massachusetts school districts to end their desegregation programs.
...
"We want to go in there and have the district court judge in the federal court say, 'OK, you're right,' " Darling said yesterday. "What benefit of integration in kindergarten do you get if you force a white kid to sit next to a black kid? There isn't any."

Oh onion,

How I love thee.


New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

don't stop

Just because it's not unexpected in the context of the current administration, I have resolved to not stop feeling outraged when I see shit like this.

Bush commutes Libby prison sentence
By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush spared former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby from a 2 1/2-year prison term in the CIA leak investigation Monday, delivering a political thunderbolt in the highly charged criminal case. Bush said the sentence was just too harsh.
...
"I respect the jury's verdict," Bush said in a statement. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison."
...
he added: "Others point out that a jury of citizens weighed all the evidence and listened to all the testimony and found Mr. Libby guilty of perjury and obstructing justice. They argue, correctly, that our entire system of justice relies on people telling the truth. And if a person does not tell the truth, particularly if he serves in government and holds the public trust, he must be held accountable."

Bush then stripped away the prison time.

To adapt a saying popular in Fall of 2001 - if we stop being outraged, then the douchebags have won.

Say it in portuguese

A native english speaker acquaintance who was taking classes in Portuguese called it "the language of the damned". I did not know him or the language well enough to know if his humorous characterization even approached an accurate assesment of the complexity of the language or if it was more a reflection of his language learning skills.

In my limited contact with Portuguese speakers speaking Portuguese (Brazilian), the language has proven to be a bit odd to my ear. Odder than Italian and Spanish but not quite as odd as French or Japanese (the latter I simply cannot follow, not even a little). I'm not knocking the language - by "odd" I don't mean bad or ugly or negative. Odd means, here, something more like unpenetrable, inscrutable, veiled. Some languages you hear and you get this sense that although you don't understand them, you should understand them. Patterns pop out, you hear sound combination here and there repeated but maybe with a slight shift. They start to draw your attention and serve as windows into other aspects, like speaker variation versus lexical variation. You have no frikkin clue what it means but you do hear apprehendable elements of structure and you might even start to make some generalizations. German and Russian sound like this to me. But not Portuguese. I'll think structure is starting to come, and then it throws me a serious curve ball. I lose the thread, uncertain if the structure deforming moment was just a consequence of the conjunction of the particular speaker's personal style and my ignorance of the language or if it was something important, some step which one must learn but which I cannot possibly follow.

If you want to listen to some samples of Portuguese dialects, the wikipedia page has a few links.

All that above is in fact preamble for the issue of the word "saudade". I ran across saudade and was thinking about Portuguese because I was spending some time not making measurements, instead I was looking up music. I found a remix of some Cesaria Evora songs, which lead me to the word "sodade" and the European Portuguese equivalent, "saudade".

So what does it mean? According to whoever wrote the wikipedia article, "Saudade is generally considered one of the hardest words to translate." I find I usually enjoy words like this. There was one from Japanese a friend described to me a while ago. I think I posted about it. I'll go look. It was a great word.

But back to saudade. Here's a stab at a translation and context for the word, from A.F.G Bell, via Wikipedia and a shit load of other sketchy references (found a JStore book reference to Bell, his book, and the word, but I'm not logged in so I can't read the context of the Bell/saudade reference).

What you get online:
"The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

If this is accurate, I believe I have a translation to add to the pot. It is PhD student-osis. More specifically, it is "(what is felt by) a disenchanted PhD student as she approaches her sixth year"

Mika Brzezinski kicks ass

I've seen some comments deriding Brzenzinski for taking shit from her co-hosts, who I noticed were acting sort of frat boy-ish. I think if she had turned around and blown up at them, it (unfortunately) could have served to provide invalidation for the incident and her commentary on the producer's selection of lead story. You know, "just an angry woman", that sort of thing. Then we wouldn't be reading about how a newscaster was driven to extreme action by the stupidity of the news she is asked to read but how a lady newscaster lost her shit. The point would be lost. So in terms of finding a way to make her point and keep it salient, I think she did an excellent job. Very well done Ms. Brzenzinski.

What I find most admirable is that she later explained her motivation by saying "I have nothing against Paris Hilton". She went on to say she was reacting to the fact that the Paris story was repeatedly put in the lead position.

sky

The view of the moon from my window right now made it worth being up so late. Full moons always look better to me when there are clouds.

And the neighborhood fireworks (why I am still up) seem to have finally ceased, which means it's not only pretty but peaceful.

bang

Hey! Did you know fireworks are legal in CT?
This is natural selection at its very best.

veggie what?

While I certainly feel bad for anyone who eats this product, I have to wonder - why would you eat something called "Veggie Booty" in the first place? It seems like a lexically motivated natural selection may be at work here.

(From WebMD)
Veggie Booty Recalled Due to Salmonella
FDA Reports 52 Cases of Salmonella Illness from Eating Veggie Booty Snacks
By Miranda Hitti
June 29, 2007
The FDA is warning consumers not to eat Veggie Booty snack food because of possible contamination with Salmonella wandsworth, bacterium that causes gastrointestinal illness.

adjustment

It's fucking hot here. Very uncomfortably hot.

It was too hot in my office to work today and too noisy to move my set up into the air conditioned living room. The maximum volume on the computer is barely enough to get those little bits of speech I need to hear, and when there's an old air conditioner chugging away in the room, it's hopeless. So I decided I'd venture out and run several air conditioned errands. Pretty much up to this week, since the surgery I was having too many bouts of bad pain to go much of anywhere on my own, so this was the first time I was out and about by myself. It felt nice, emotionally.

Physically, it was not so great. My car's air conditioning is going. Or rather the whole temperature thing is a problem for my car, running the a.c. only makes it more likely to overheat. With the window down, I was able to get some air which was slightly cooler than an oven blast in my face. Still, I mostly enjoyed being out doing things for myself by myself for the first time in a month, even with the heat. It wasn't until I was at the fabric store that I started to lose my steam.

The fabric store had not been as air conditioned as I had hoped. I was hoping for arctic blast level chill. What I got instead was the slightly cool but still muggy feeling of standing in the shade at a park. Additionally, by the time I got to the fabric store, I was experiencing some feminine discomfort.

This is obviously the appropriate name for it, right? It's like "feminine products" or "feminine hygiene", or "feminine napkins". The last term calls to mind images of lace and gingham, possibly a nice crisp linen folded into a fan and placed in a glass on a table with tea cups. There might be a small vase of violets, possibly cucumber sandwiches, a bowl of berries, and the faint sounds of chamber music.

There would not be anything like the warm, wrinkled wad of cotton which was working its way onto my mind as I waited for the lady at the fabric store to cut me a 2 and 1/2 yard swath of cream colored vinyl.

"Ooops, this one's just about 2 yards..." she said after unrolling the cream colored vinyl off its cardboard spool.

Shit.

She waited while I trotted back to the bargain fabric table and searched for a roll that looked like it had more material on it. Passing over the ample bolts of superman blue and black leather-like textured vinyl, I grabbed a bolt of smooth pink and marched back to the measuring table.

"This one's 2 yards and 2 inches...will that work?" she asked with genuine sweetness, which is the only reason I didn't erupt into a stream of frustrated swears.
"That's like 74 inches, right? No. Hang on there was another one."

At this point, I was genuinely in serious feminine discomfort but god damn it I had errands and I was going to get them done.

I hunched down to get the last roll of not hideously colored vinyl from the discount table. Bending and hustling back and forth from the measuring table to where the fabric rolls sat was making me more warm. The white leather-like textured vinyl stuck to my arms as I threw the massive roll down in front of her. I apologized, feigning something like weakness of arms to excuse my abrupt motion and the thud the vinyl made as it hit the table.

"So...what are you making?" she asked pleasantly as I stood there wondering if there was any way I could possibly sneak a subtle adjustment in before I had to start screaming and jumping up and down.
"Oh, uh, well it's for my air conditioner. It's a curtain, to put over the doorway."
She looked confused and was still measuring, so I continued.
"It's so the cat can get in and out of the room with the air conditioner. I can't shut the door on him, but I don't want to air condition the whole apartment."

In the car, I managed to subtly adjust the dreaded feminine device into a less intimate position. Carefully, quite furtively, achieving something not very effective but at least different. No matter, one more quick stop at the 7-11 and I was home.

At the 7-11 I parked in the shade of a white van in front of the store. There was a man sweating in front of the open hood of the white van. He stood looking hot and frustrated on the walkway. He was staring quite intensely at whatever it is people stare at when their hood is up. He did not look up as I approached. I noticed he had one arm behind his back and when I got around him, I saw he had this arm stuck way down the back of his shorts, up to about his elbow. The arm was rotated such that the interior aspect of his forearm and hand had to be in contact with his ass. The motions of the part of his arm which was not submerged in khaki made it clear that his hand and forearm were seriously working down there.

Sweet jesus.

This man seemed completely oblivious to the context of his hand in pants behavior. I wondered if he was doing it unconsciously, if there was in fact even anything he needed to adjust or if having his hand halfway up his ass was simply his prefered stance when looking under the hood of this or any vehicle.

Since then, I've been considering how much of the behaviorial contrast, my reluctance to adjust despite a discomfort which approached pain versus this guy's shameless store front ass-mining expedition, is gender based.

If women were allowed to walk around shirtless in the sweltering heat, or to generally care less about the view their bodies inflict on others, I suspect there would be some who would not hesitate to reach down and assertively adjust what needs adjusting - pad, thong, whatever. Would I be one of them? I'm kind of prissy, so I doubt it. It annoys me though, that I can't know whether my being at least in some ways very much a linens, violets, and berries kind of person is a product of years of social conditioning or some property I would possess regardless of that.

appearances

I was recently told that my blog color scheme is a brain burning combo.

I've been considering changing the drapes here. The black sometimes seems overwhelming. But I sort of like the dark, and no I'm not saying that in some kind of goth/emo "my soul weeps black inky tears" way.

Really, it's not that.

When I wrote my qualifying exams, about halfway through I changed the document background to something approaching charcoal. The black font on white screen was making me want to pull my eyes out of my head. I had an eye exam around that time and I happened to mention to the opthamologist "you know how sometimes your eyes hurt so much it's almost like you want to take them out and massage them?" (She looked alarmed for a moment then said "Err, no.")

I am at some point planning on changing the format here in no small part because I sometimes think the black all over does give the impression of black inky tears and whatnot. But that's for later. Right now I finally have DATA to analyze. Which means waveforms and spectrograms are what I'm searing into my brain for at least the next week or so.

June 29, 2007
Update: As you can see, I've changed the color scheme. Also I switched to a new template. Most of my content didn't transport automatically so I had to put it in manually, but overall the transformation wasn't as much trouble as I thought it would be.

Victoroscartangoindianovembergolf...

Hey it's a news story on politics, language, and Boston. I just can't resist.

Ballot translations could mean too much
By Frank Phillips, Globe Staff June 26, 2007 Mitt Romney could be read as Sticky or Uncooked Rice, Fred Thompson as Virtue Soup, and Tom Menino? Rainbow farmer -- or worse.

That's one translation of their names into Chinese, according to Secretary of State William F. Galvin, and if the US Justice Department's voting rights division has its way, that is how they could appear on many Boston ballots in 2008.

Under a 2005 agreement, which Galvin is now challenging in court, the federal government required Boston to translate election ballots -- including the candidates' names -- into Chinese characters in precincts with prominent Chinese-speaking populations.

Galvin said that he has supported, even pushed for the ballots to be printed in Chinese, as long as the surnames remain in Roman letters. Translating them into Chinese, he said, would create chaos and imbalance in an electoral system that needs to be as precise as possible.

The problem, he said, is that there is no actual translation of the names. Instead, the Chinese translate English names phonetically, by finding characters that most closely match the sound of each syllable in the name. There are many different characters that could be used to capture that sound and many different meanings for each character, creating the possibility that the Chinese voters could read something quite other than "Romney" or "Thompson" when they read the ballot.

You know how sometimes when you need to spell a name or word over the phone and you have to give phonetic context words for the letters to clarify? ("That's 'S' like Ball..."). Using this algorithm with the English phonetic context words, we get a spelling for the word VOTING as "victoroscartangoindianovembergolf"

That's sort of how the candidates' names are being proposed to be spelled, except in the case of the proposed character forms, the phonetic context words would represent a syllable of the sound of the target word - like "MEH" from "Menino" - rather than representing a sound segment of the word - like "M" from "Menino".

I'm taking liberties, but overall I think the analogy is more or less sound.

My limited understanding of Chinese characters is that while they can encode sound elements of a word, they did not develop to do so and consequently they do a very bad job at it.

One might be tempted to make a similar point about the English writing system too. But the writing system we use for English is at least meant to encode sounds - it just doesn't do a great job 100% of the time when it's applied to English. It's not the writing system's fault. The mismatch between our current English writing system & spelling rules (a.k.a. "orthography") and spoken English words is due factors like the apparently very high appeal posed by England to would be invaders. We can also put some blame on the monks. Can't forget the monks and their damned roman alphabet and assumption of "when in doubt, go Latin" - which brought us such grammatical fuckery as "To whom do you wish to speak?". But anyone who's got some literacy experience with Italian and Spanish knows that the roman orthography certainly can do a rather excellent job when applied in a less haphazard way.

Not so with Chinese languages and the traditional Chinese writing system. At best, you can squeeze some syllable sounds out of Chinese characters, but you're still working with a writing system that developed to favor encoding meaning over sound. Needless to say, encoding meaning in the writing presents a problem for widespread literacy. Think about it for a second and you'll probably start to see why (I'm not going to summarize a topic which has inspired dissertations, massive research grants, and many years of study to even elucidate). To remedy the literacy problem posed by a non-sound based writing system, several types of phonetic scripts have come into use for Chinese language(s). The most popular and current is Pinyin, which uses roman script to encode the sounds of Chinese words. If you are literate in Chinese, you almost certainly are literate using the Pinyin orthography.

So Chinese can be written using the symbols of the roman alphabet. So why not just put the candidates' names on the ballot the way they are always spelled? Skipping over the fact that the spellings of people's names hardly ever match up 100% to the way they are said (e.g. "It's spelled L-I-P-S-H-I-T-S but it's pronounced 'leep-shech'"), for a writing system to ever have a chance of systematically representing the sound(s) of a spoken word, there need to be accepted rules or conventions for which letters are going to stand for which sounds. These are the familiar spelling conventions like " I before E, except after C... (hey you know who to blame). Pinyin, the writing system which uses roman script for Chinese words, has its own spelling conventions. Thus, putting candidates' names on ballots in a language which would be readable for someone who is Chinese language literate could be as simple as writing them in roman script but using the Pinyin spelling conventions for the sounds of the candidates' names.
Here's my somewhat underinformed first attempt

Romney - Romni
Thompson - Tomsen
Menino - Meninou

I'm sure these are not 100% accurate. For starters, Chinese languages use pitch in ways English does not. These spellings have no tone/pitch indicators because I have NO idea what tones a native speaker of Mandarin would assign to the names. I also don't know for sure that the syllabification native speakers of English give these names would be stable when the names are spoken by a native speaker of Mandarin. But presumably a Mandarin-English bilingual, biliterate individual could be consulted to produce a decent, nonambiguous transliteration (in Pinyin). Although all of this does raise an interesting point - should the written name more closely encode the way the name is said by the person whose name it is or should it represent the way a native speaker of Mandarin would say it?

Possible slight imprecisions in the mapping between the spoken word and the printed word seem so very minor when compared to the large scale lexical ambiguities which are raised by using a non-sound based writing system to encode a (non-native) word's sounds.

The silliness of using traditional chinese orthography to print the sound equivalent of names - most of which aren't even "English" but which appear exclusively in English - is striking. It makes me wonder why one of the underemployed linguists out there couldn't have been consulted before the federal government made this language stipulation.

Red line versus Green line

Usually the red line wins, but not when this fellow is around. Should we call him Karaoke Karl? My sister got an earful of Karl this weekend.


Contrast this with the Green line's "DJ Nitetrain", who - it would seem - rocks.


Damn, I miss Boston.

political news

New Yorkers crowd White House field
By LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - New Yorkers: They're smug, egotistical, and already think they run the country (if not the world). So what's the rest of the nation to do now that three of 'em are mentioned as White House hopefuls, ready to swap Penn Station for Pennsylvania Avenue?

Cringe? Clap? Or just consider somebody else?
...
The specter of an all-New York November 2008 was raised when Bloomberg, a titular Republican since his 2001 mayoral run, announced last week that he was quitting the GOP to become an independent. His predecessor, Giuliani, is running for the Republican nomination for president, while second-term New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is among the Democratic hopefuls.

While New Yorkers are all too aware of the differences between the Big Apple's big three, folks beyond the Hudson River were not as certain.

"I think basically they are the same candidate," said Bob House, a Republican from Des Moines, Iowa. "We all love New York. But when our options are New York, New York, New York, I think people want to see a different life experience."

These kinds of news stories always bother me. They encourage thinking about something rather important in superficial, largely fabricated terms. I mean, why not write an article on how many of them prefer tennis to football?

The crux of my irritation is that the mainstream news coverage tends to set the tone and topics for the national discourse. It's not that this kind of reporting encourages what could be strictly defined as ignorance. There is information being conveyed. The mainstream media habitually focus on irrelevant details to the exclusion of reporting on relevant issues, but these outlets do convey information to the public - information which includes such hard hitting facts as knowing where each candidate lives, what the candidates' spouses' names are, how many children each has, and what the candidate's favorite sandwich is.

Strictly speaking, I suppose someone with a head full of this sort of detail is debatably (at best) "ignorant". However, I feel very comfortable applying the term "fucking moron" to a person if these superfluous bits of fluff and stuff are all he knows and (crucially) all he cares to know about the candidates and the upcoming presidential race.

For the sake of argument, let's entertain the subject of this article, briefly. Consider Senator Clinton - a "New Yorker" according to this story. She didn't live in New York until she was running for office. Before that, she lived in D.C. for the two terms of her husband's presidency, and before that she lived in Arkansas for something like 17 years. She was born and raised in Illinois, went to school in MA and CT. So how the hell does a couple of years living in Chappaqua make her a New Yorker? It doesn't. Dubbing her such reflects a desire to group candidates based on one superficial, personal aspect of the candidates.

This grouping and the story about it has got fuck all to do with any substantive similarities or differences between these candidates. Further, the subtext of this article reinforces some truly moronic (and ignorant) views of New York - that NYC is the same as NY. NY is essentially two different states - economically and culturally speaking. You don't believe me, go visit places like Elmira and Candor NY, then go to NYC.

I'm gonna get preachy for a second here. If you want to research the potential presidential candidates, look for older news stories about them - from before they were considering running for president (or in Clinton's case, before Bill was running for president). If they've held public office (and they almost invariably have) look up their voting records, their campaign donations, and summaries or texts of speeches they made before they started a national campaign. Also, consider putting a little of your attention on the other races where your vote really is a vote. The press pushes the presidential race like it pushes the olympics. It's a fucking dog and pony show, barely better than a season of American Idol. It's certainly important, but not so much so that we should only know about this race. If ever you are in doubt regarding the possibility of other branches of government making newsworthy fireworks to rival any presidential campaign, recall that the Senate shares responsibility for staffing some of our courts (take Supreme Court nominees Rehnquist, Thomas, Alito, Scalia, please). The exclusive and silly focus on the presidential race and office has helped to create an uncomfortable consolidation of executive power, and that has gotten us nothing but trouble.

ugh

I was contemplating what to ask for in terms of a teaching responsibility for the Fall semester. This news item may have made the decision for me.

Older siblings really are know-it-alls, study finds
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

Is big sister always telling you what's best? Does big brother seem to know it all?

Instead of stewing in resentment, maybe you should start listening when they dispense smart-alecky advice.

Turns out, they really are brighter than you, by and large.

A massive study by Norwegian scientists appearing in today's edition of the journal Science concludes that a child raised as the eldest has a higher intelligence quotient, on average, than younger siblings.

Stories based on this research study have been floating around. The non-scientific media claims keep growing, e.g., the headline has mutated from "families' eldest boys do best on tests" (with the buried caveat: "...the Norwegian analysis focused on men...") to "oldest children are smartest". I'm waiting for the headline which reads "Youngest Girls: Why Bother?"

When I see this sort of malarky science reporting being given high press value, it makes the notion of teaching methods to students who will have been exposed to it without innoculation seem quite a bit less enticing. Such articles are likely to enflame what are even now flickers of a will be research topic in the undergrad major come Fall, who if experience is to be any guide, will come in wanting to prove things liek their own personal take on a long standing family grudge about who's best.

The family ones are only a little less troublesome than the people who want to "prove" gender stereotypes. Oh here's a tip on that one. Tell the students if they want to use male/female they have to either (a) call the variable"sex" or (b) measure "gender" explicitly because they cannot conflate gender with sex. It does help, mostly I think because they don't like having to write the word "sex" over and over.

On the brights side, seeing this sort of article does make the notion of teaching intro somewhat more appealing. I feel like some kind of magpie, plucking up the garbage which has been given the glimmer of "science", and flying off to line my nest with it, or in this case, to add into my lesson plan on *scientific*literacy*.

I am armed with library access to many journals. (Hey, one nice thing about being an academic. I found one thing I still truly inherently enjoy Jay!) I can't wait to read the article on this "Massive study by Norwegian scientists". We can just be happy it wasn't "a team of Norwegian scientists". You just can't argue with the findings of a whole team of scientists, can you?

Oh my...

You know what's embarrassing? When your advisor emails you a week after you have surgery and says "I'm trying to find those files, the stimuli from 5 years ago...When you get a chance," and you don't get in for 1 and 1/2 weeks later and it turns out she still hasn't been able to find them anywhere. You talk, catch up, do all the coordinating that needs doing, and she leaves.

One cigarette break later, you get to work looking everywhere. You look on all four work station computers, on every cd you can get your hands on - even the ones which are labeled for something else. You coax the various computers to open the various zips and you find nothing.

You look in all the drawers and cabinets to see if you missed a cd or a zip but you just can't find them. After about 40 minutes has passed in frantic, fruitless searching, when you're sitting there pondering a pile of floppies and Jaz disks you found in a dusty cardboard box on the floor, you know you're in trouble.

Then a thought strikes you. You enter your advisor's office. You turn on her computer, feeling a little guilty for going on there when she's gone and feeling quite furtive about logging onto her personal computer. You tell yourself she wants the files and you don't want to come back empty handed without having turned every damned stone and you just seriously don't want to bust out the floppies. You search for probable names of the folder the files would be in, starting with the most obvious.

And you find it, on the first search. The folder, the files, the meticulous notes you made on the creation of the files, detailed documentation of "to do" and "done" tasks relative to the files when they were last your responsibility. You find all of it just how you left it five years ago - wrapped up nice and neat.

Now that is embarrassing.

Not for me. For me it was kind of validating. And I can honestly say, after being made to feel like a useless husk of a PhD student for the last two years by my department head, it felt kind of good to call my advisor from her office and leave this "You'll never guess where I found those files..." message on her answering machine.

Wal-mart pays $2M for...uh...um...er....

Fired Wal-Mart pharmacist awarded $2M
Associated Press
June 20, 2007

A pharmacist who claimed she was fired by Wal-Mart after asking to be paid the same as her male colleagues has won a nearly $2 million award against the retail giant.

A Berkshire Superior Court jury concluded Wal-Mart discriminated against Cynthia Haddad and awarded her nearly $1 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages Tuesday.

"It sends a message that you can't treat people poorly because of who they are," said David Belfort, Haddad's attorney.

Great ruling, but what is up with the lawyer's remark. "...You can't treat people poorly because of who they are"? What can you treat them poorly for then?

This wasn't about "Treating people poorly". This was about discrimination (as a legal term, not psychological). While discrimination includes treating someone "poorly" (usually), I think you'd have to agree that simply treating someone bad is not sufficient to cause discrimination.

For example, one could say I treat The Fluffy Professor in my program poorly. Or that I treated my mother poorly. In neither case would I be open for a discrimination law suit.

I'm sure what the fellow meant to say was "sexism is bad", or at least that's what he would have meant to say if it weren't forbidden by an increasingly strong taboo. To claim sexism (even when a jury was pretty convinced of it in fact if not name) is to invite invalidation.

Friendly's sold

Of all the things in the news today, the one which immediately drew my eye was the headline "Friendly Ice Cream Corp. Sold". It's a local story. Along with the story is a link for readers to share their "Friendly's memories". Personally, I find it hard to wax nostalgic about Friendly's. This is not to say I haven't got any Friendly's memories, just not any of the sort which I think I'd want to share in a pleasant trip down memory lane context. More evidence of my jaundiced views I guess.

I should back up. Friendly's is an ice cream/family restaurant chain. Of all the local chains of my childhood, Friendly's has never stood out as anything special. Compared to the occasional local dairy farm run ice cream stand/shop (of which there are usually a couple in any New England region), Friendly's is downright nasty.

It's not so much the ice cream which makes Friendly's nasty, and possibly in a town where there are many more choices for restaurant than Friendly's, Friendly's wouldn't seem so, well, wretched. But living in Buttfucknowhere CT for 9 years now has made me sort of loath Friendly's.

The only chain which outnumbers Friendly's are Dunkin Donuts. I do not feel a similar loathing for Dunkies because they are not a "restaurant". They don't try to be, even with all the silly shit they keep adding to the menu. You can still treat them like a coffee shop. Friendly's, on the other hand, is a restaurant. Because it is a restaurant, it occupies a dining niche which, were it not for Friendly's taking up that space, might be filled by something (or some several things) else. Something better.

In one of the three strip malls which border my university campus and which count as the commercial district of the "college town", there is a Friendly's. There used to be a nice little coffee and donut shop in this strip mall. According to the campus police (the ones I liked, yes, I'm the kind of tool who talks to police officers - the decent ones at least), this coffee shop had the best coffee. I used to go there. They had chess board table tops and games you could check out. It wasn't great, it wasn't bohemian. It was a regular working class local privately owned coffee shop and it went out of business a few years ago.

The space stood empty for some time. Two women I knew who ran the coffee truck on campus considered moving into the space the nice locally owned coffee shop used to lease, but they dropped their plans when they were told by the owner of the strip mall that they would have to limit their menu due to a deal with Friendly's. That is, Friendly's wouldn't allow any shop to move into their strip mall if that shop planned to offer menu items which might compete with the items Friendly's offered.

Talk about fucking collusion.

Needless to say, the space is still empty. It was occupied for a short while by a nice enough coffee shop - although the atmosphere left something to be desired ("ugh, who ever heard of painting a dining room BLUE?!" my brother yelled when we ate there once). But they went out of business about a year ago, leaving the empty space and yellowing "for rent" signs up in the windows.

Friendly's, however, remains - offering such delightful menu items as the "fishamajig".

I recall going to Friendly's with some school mates when I was in my former graduate department. It was me, another American (Kelly), and a young woman from Spain (Emma). Emma had only been in the country a few months. We looked over the menu and Emma asked "what is 'fish-a-ma-jig'?"

Kelly and I laughed and advised her NOT to order it. "See, it's like fish and whatever. Or whatever kind of fish," Kelly said.
Emma was confused.
"The suffix "ma-jig", in English, is added onto words to denote a sense of non-specificity," I explained.
"It's like 'fish or something, but we might not know what'," Kelly added.
"Oh," Emma said, staringt at the menu.
"So you probably shouldn't eat anything that has the morpheme 'ma-jig' or 'ma-bob', that's another one that means sort of the same thing."
"And don't eat something that has a 'whatsit' in it either. That would be ill advised also."

I wonder if Friendly's will change their menu now that they have been sold. I wonder especially if they will change their atmosphere. The one across from my campus has a chronically grease-slippery floor, an ordor of bleached french fries, and acid-like pictures of giant ice creams photoshopped into photographs of New England landmarks. The ice creams seem to be lurking, waiting for an unsuspecting tourist. Also, the local Friendly's plays just truly wretched music from the late 60s/early 70s. I mean BAD music. Muskrat Love, Neil Diamond, John Denver, all the worst of course, bad bad music.

Lyme Disease in MA

Lyme cases in Mass. go up 50% in one year
By Felicia Mello, Globe Correspondent
June 15, 2007

The number of Lyme disease cases reported in Massachusetts jumped by about 50 percent from 2004 to 2005, a single-year increase that prompted concerned state health officials to say they were stepping up efforts to educate the public about prevention of the disease.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yesterday that 2,336 cases were reported in the state in 2005, compared with 1,532 the previous year. Nationwide, the number of cases rose to 23,305 from 19,804 in the same period, an 18 percent increase.

update and caveat: The exerpts below are from a CNN story on Lyme cases nationwide in the US. I don't recommend the story for a source of accurate information on symptoms or treatment since it is in fact misleading in those areas. But the information about the infection rates is important. Knowing that this disease is becoming so common is crucial if you or someone you know starts having symptoms that suggest Lyme. Medical providers are still a little behind the ball on the prevalence of the disease and therefore they tend to underassess the risks any particular individual has of having caught it. Decent info on Lyme symptoms and treatment can be found at the CDC site on Lyme and the Mayo Clinic's Lyme info pages.

CDC: Lyme disease cases double in U.S.
June 14, 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The number of cases of Lyme disease has doubled in the United States since 1991 and these numbers are probably underestimated, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

More than 21,000 cases of the tick-borne disease are now reported every year, the CDC said, making it the most common illness transmitted by bugs or animals in the United States.

The northeastern states had the most cases, with 2,335 cases reported in Massachusetts in 2005, 3,363 in New Jersey, 5,565 in New York, and 4,287 in Pennsylvania.

Post-op

I had my post op appointment yesterday. I think I left my book in one of the waiting rooms. My gynecologist's office has two waiting rooms. One is the main outer reception area room. This is the standard waiting room featuring a TV, a somewhat surly receptionist sitting behind the sliding glass window which is typically slid shut, and many many parenting magazines. I consider the parenting magazines to be truly cruel, as this gynecologist is not a typical OB-GYN doctor but a specialist in "reproductive endocrinology". In normal person terms, this means he's the guy you go to see if you can't make, carry, or have babies.

Thus, a waiting room which is practically plastered with magazines featuring glossy images of smiling children and parents, while potentially quite relevant to many of the patients sitting there, seems like it might be a source of anxiety or possibly sadness.

Consider if you were going in because that last set of tests came back and you've got a feeling the news isn't good. I think I'd probably be sobbing. If I wanted kids that is. It does bug me that my female specific health issues are important to address only if they are couched or approached in the context of my reproductive abilities. But that's how it is. And the reality is that most of this guy's patients desperately want to conceive and give birth to a child.

This potentially insensitive magazine selection extends into the inner waiting room. The inner waiting room has an old research poster up on the wall showing the percent mean changes (and standard deviations) in lipid panel levels for women receiving various forms of hormone therapy. It is an old poster, printed out on multiple piece of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper (landscape formatting) rather than the more modern and highly popular posters which I have come to think of as "wall sized". Something about the old fashioned poster comforts me. It feels more humble and therefore somehow more reliable than the wall sized posters which preesnt both impressive and non-impressive research endeavors with equal overwhelming grandure.

Apparently it comforted me right into leaving my Joyce Carol Oates book on one of the happy child and parent strewn tables. I felt stupid last night when I realized I may have left the libaray book there. I hadn't even really liked it very much, I was having a hard time connecting with the characters, the subtexts, or even just the scenery. I brought it just to have some distraction since I found the baby/parenting magazines insipid in the extreme. It did occur to me this morning though that the book might have been a source of even momentary salvation for some woman pondering an outcome which would make looking at glossy smiling baby faces unbearably difficult for a long time.

Given how the visit went, I think it was understandable, possibly even likely, that I would leave a piece of me behind when I left. I was in a total of two waiting rooms three times, thus the book was in and out of my bag repeatedly. I sat in the inner waiting room once when I was first called back, then again after the exam but before the "wrap up". The second wait was longer than the first. The first, I think I had barely taken the book out before my fella and I were summoned by the resident who was working with my doctor that day.

The resident struck me as a bit tight lipped, nervous and hiding it reasonably well, although not as well as she thought. She wore open sandals like flip flops but in nicer materials. I strongly disapprove of open shoes in a hospital, and the doctor's office is IN a hospital - you go down the hall and turn left and you can easily access two different inpatient units. Christ, you can see straight into a patient's room from one side of the bank of elevators you have to take up to get the office. The idea of wearing anything other than a full coverage shoe in this environment was shocking to me. I wonder when I see them, do the people who chose such footwear walk in some kind of bubble which preserves them from encountering spilled sharps containers, bodily fluids, and the more than occasional poorly driven stretcher or wheelchair? I cannot imagine sacrificing so much necessary practicality and utility for fashion unless one was completely unaware of the sacrifice.

The resident was not very good with the exam. She was sporadic on her warnings for touches, and gave none when she inserted the speculum. I should say "tried to insert" because whatever she did with the first attempt to get it in failed. I heard it clatter out of control for a second, pinching bits of me in it. I shrugged my left foot over, stopping just short of kicking her in the shoulder and glared down over the sheet for a second. She looked up after a moment and said "sorry..." Despite her leisurely tone, I wanted to believe that she was very very sorry, not because I was feeling filled up with human kindness milk or honey or whatever fluid it is that human kindness comes in these days, but because I had to believe she was sorry or I might get pissed off enough to kick her and you don't kick someone who has metal instruments in you.

After sucessfully inserting another speculum, she began poking about for the strings which were supposed to be the visible evidence of my IUD.

"Can you find them?" my gynecologist asked. He leaned over her left shoulder since my foot was close to her right.
"Uh...I think..." came her voice from behind the sheet. "Oh yeah, there, I think there they are" she said finally.

I released the breath I hadn't been conscious of holding.

"They're really..." she said and I felt the sensation of internal digging about "short. They keep slipping," she said with something between slight alarm and frustration.
"uh..." I said, foot poised. My other foot was thudding against the stirrup in the uneasy rhythm I maintain when something uncomfortable is happening to or in me. It's more than discomfort, it's not emotional but it's not totally physical. It's that "ishk" feeling which moves from your gut to your head and makes your hands tingle. It's a little hard to describe because the triggers are different for everyone, and I suspect the manifestation varies a bit too.

Consider the things that make you sort of shudder. How it feels when you think of being catheterized, for example. Or someone digging about in your arm to find a good vein. Or what happens after you put you hand down on a sewing needle, what happens aside from the pain of course. Or the feeling you get when steeling yourself to pull a splinter out of a toe. Or maybe to insert something into your eye. We all have different boundaries of that feeling, some of us being able to tolerate even a painful experience with no such sensation only to find ourselves close to swooning over something only mildly painful but UNcomfortable in that way.

Her digging was UNcomfortable like that. She stopped for a moment, I think I had begun humming tunelessly and rolling my head about a bit. My doctor handed her an instrument. "It's easier if you use a forcep sometimes," he said, and quickly added "gently" as she inserted it, again with more clattering.

But once she gained her comfort with weilding the forceps, she seemed to locate the string relatively quickly. "Don't pull hard," my doctor told her when she annouced in a victorious voice "I got 'em!"

Then it was time for the ultrasound. He let her start. "Slowwwly..." he said and I watched a blur of ghost insides images on the monitor, resolution swaying in and out uncontrollably.
"More slowly," he said to her and it sounded like he was laughing a little. I didn't mind since the ultrasound is truly not painful unless someone chooses to grind down on a tender spot with the probe.

Finally my doctor took over the exam. He moved the probe around in slight angles making crisp, meaningul images clearly and easily on the screen and taking a few stills here and there. We had the usual "your left ovary has a cyst" "My left ovary ALWAYS has a cyst" conversation.
"That's good!" my doctor said happily. "It means it is ready and working to make a baby." He didn't say this with condescention but I heard it and bristled nonetheless. I tried to remind myself that most of this guy's patient population would give their right ovary to hear someone say "your left ovary has a cyst" and this helped me feel less cranky.

There was some fluid (which you know, to me seems like it might have some relevance when taken in conjunction with that constant left ovary thing but what do I know, I'm just the patient). Mostly what he was interested in was making sure it didn't look like his serious cutting and sewing had come undone and in making sure the IUD hadn't worked its way up to my esophagus or something. All was good, and I am happy for that.

The pain, he said, was from the cutting and sewing and also from the IUD. The IUD was to be checked again in 3 months, according to the manufacturer. I had intented to make the appointment when I was leaving but the surly secretary was at lunch.

Making the appointment for the 3 month checkup is like a promise, or a hope. Hopefulness that it won't need to come out before then. That I will tolerate it, that my body will learn to tolerate it and stop trying to expell it. I don't know that I do believe this, but I am practical and I know if I don't make that three month appointment soon, I will forget. I mean to call today, to make the appointment and ask about my book.

If I consider it too long, the thought of the IUD inside me, strings hanging too short to grasp even with me cranked open wide, is a little creepy. I know it would disturb me less if it were less trouble, less painful. I talked with my doctor about the pain. "It's going to take a little while, but it really should get better in a couple of weeks," he assured me.

My god I hope so. Last night was HORRIBLE. Fresh blood instead of old, but not much and that is a good thing. But the pain, god almighty it was bad. I took 400 mg of celebrex (do NOT try this at home) and I was still having these waves of profoundly painful cramping - worse than any menstrual cramps, and I get bad menstrual cramps. Fortunately the wave pattern of the pain meant I had some in between times when I could carry on half conversations with my fella or pat my cat or read. For this I was relieved and thankful, not thankful to anyone in particular, just feeling a sense of staggering and nonspecific gratitude.

I took another pill before bed, took a hit of benadryl to put me out (again, don't try at home - my family history as medical professionals makes me probably a bit stupidly fearless with mixing meds - I do check for interactions and contraindications before I do this but it is not a practice I advocate at all).

I woke up without pain today. Nevertheless, I'm planning on staying totally drugged for at least the next week. No, these are not the fun drugs. The fun drugs fuck up my intestine, that touchy fucking tube of hell. The only side effects of my current pain med is a risk for kidney failure and ulcers, and an increased risk of having a cardiovascular "event". Nothing even remotely cool, oh yeah, except for the coolness of not literally grinding my head into the floor, my nails into my head, and frantically pounding on things with my fist while muttering "fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck" like a mantra while it feels like something with dull, wide teeth is chewing its way through the deeper parts of my pelvis.

It's after four, I just now realized on my most recent trip back from the bathroom. I also realized I haven't called yet. I will call when I am done with this post. After this next cigarette. No more pain pills until 10:00 tonight, and although I remember looking at the pill bottle this morning at 10:00 AM, the twinges of pain I felt just now make me wonder if I did in fact take the 10:00 AM pill. This poses a conundrum. Which do I believe? Do I trust my memory and, by extension, my sense of reliability? I explicitly recall holding the pill bottle this morning, but I don't have an explicit memory of taking a pill. But why else would I have been holding it if I hadn't taken a pill? I'd like to believe I am not so flakey that I'd pick it up, look at it, and then put it back without taking the med. But flakey is alluring because I don't want to believe what my body is starting to whisper, that I hurt even though I have 6 more hours to go until I'm supposed to take another pill. I want to think that I must not have taken the pill this morning since it shouldn't have worn off so fast.

It occurs to me as I sit here typing and not calling for my routine 3 month appointment and not knowing where my book is that the question might not be so much "what do I believe" as "what do I believe in?"

Tenure or Titanic?

Oh this is just perfect. I was looking over the news again this evening when a little tidbit article caught my eye. One of those fluffy bits on the Jobs page of The Boston Globe. It's called "6 Myths About Work". I clicked and skimmed it, then laughed out loud when I got to this one, myth number 5:
Going to grad school open doors.
Grad school generally makes you less employable, not more.
For example, people who get a graduate degree in the humanities would have had a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenured teaching job.

Gay day (II) in MA

I am all about direct citizen involvement in the political process. This means I am, in many cases, for giving more power to the electorate rather than less. However, I have to agree with MA House Speaker DiMasi on the issue of putting the equal rights of a minority group up for a popular vote. Especially when that minority group is a set of individuals who are stigmatized and often vilified by massive, non-local based campaigns.

So YAY MA!

From The Boston Globe
Legislators vote to defeat same-sex marriage ban
A proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was defeated today by a joint session of the Legislature by a vote of 45 to 151, eliminating any chance of getting it on the ballot in November 2008. At least 50 votes were needed to advance the measure.

lynch the landlord?

My landlord started painting the kitchen in the apartment upstairs at midnight last night and finished at 3:30 AM. He was here last night too but finished much earlier.
When I went up at 1:45 to ask when he'd be done and to tell him his bumping and thumping around was keeping me up he whined "But your bedroom isn't under the kitchen!"

"It's intermittent noise...at 3:00 AM. That's the worst kind because everything else is quiet and that intermittent thudding and banging and scraping is so intrusive" my fella noted. Indeed.

Landlord will be back tonight. He told me this last night in his, what? excuse? Argument? He always debates. I'm not looking for tail between the legs obsequiousness. Just not a debate about how he didn't think he was making that much noise or where my bedroom is or that he "just opened a restaurant" The restaurant is relevant, he believes, because he's "been working 18 hour days. I don't want to be here at 2:00 AM either, but I have to. It's just economics."

Ok, so here's a guy who can barely manage this building - and he opens a restaurant. The upstairs apartment has stood empty for months - he's been losing rent for MONTHS while there are plenty of folks who'd have painted it for a song, during the day, months ago. And this is the way of doing things that makes the most sense. This let it stand empty for months then paint it at 2 AM shit.

Recovery

I think the surgery recovery is going well. What's problematic seems to be the IUD. At least that's the going theory. It's been giving me serious hardcore cramps, which means more drugs than I or my body wants, and that (I think) is screwing with my intestines. Significantly. Last night featured three near passouts from intestinal cramping. It was miserable and I think my fella was pretty traumatized by watching me roll, gagging, shaking, and sweating on the bathroom floor. He's been quietly working in his office all day after sleeping in with me.

I should be working but instead am finding myself seriously distracted. No small wonder, but knowing why doesn't make the experience any better or easier. I was really hoping that IUD would work. So the question is how long do I give it before I tell them to take it the hell out?

Gay bomb

No, really. And not in like nineteen fifty-bigot, this was in 1994 according to this story.

For as long as it stays up, here's a blurb from network coverage on the Pentagon's Gay Bomb project.