De/evolution

Quotation Punctuation

2011-12-26T20:35:00.000+01:00

This is a stupid American thing. We're always taught that punctuation goes inside of the quotation marks, except question marks. I actually don't remember ever learning about the question mark, but it's the case that this, and the exclamation point, follow logic and go inside the quotation marks if you're quoting them, outside if you're not.

"Where are you going?" she asked. [quoting a question, inside the marks]

Have you ever heard him talk about his "Evil Scheme to Ruin Christmas"? [not quoting a question, outside]

Periods and commas though, for whatever reason, don't follow this logic.

"Wait," she said. "I changed my mind." [logical, quoting the comma and period, inside]

Oh, there he goes, talking about his "Evil Scheme to Ruin Christmas." [illogical, WHY?]

Is it worth looking stupid to break a silly American convention? I used to do just that in my writing class as a form of protest (and to try to make myself seem more interesting). My professor would simply correct it and write the rules in the margine. I realized he probably just thought I was an idiot, so I stopped doing it.

Something to rely on

2011-11-29T22:28:00.001+01:00

There are two annoying consistencies in my life, I get flat tires on my bike all the time and I'm always covered in fucking glitter.

At least once a month, at least one of my tires goes flat. For the last two weeks my bike tire had a slow leak, so I'd have to carry around my pump everywhere. Last week it started to go flat in between rides, and I didn't have time to get a new tube, so I'd have to pump it up every time I had to go anywhere, like to work, and home from work. Finally I picked up a new tube over the weekend, went downstairs to fix it yesterday morning, and the front tire was completely flat as well. I think I found the problem this time, the valve was somehow getting pushed to an angle and creating a tear in the tube. The flat tire before that was the exact same story. I don't think the valve is always the problem though. The roads suck here and there's broken glass every ten feet. One time I was walking home from the bar and we stopped in front of a club. While discussing whether we should go in, HISSSSSSS, tire goes completely flat. Just randomly flat. I wasn't even moving. I'm getting quite proficient at changing them, yippee, which could also be the problem. Maybe I just don't know what I'm doing.

The glitter. Jesus. It's always there in various amounts. If I'm lucky it's just a few specks here and there. When I'm unlucky I look like goddamned tinkerbell or [gulp] that vampire from Twilight. A lot of the time I have no idea where it comes from. It's like I'm some fabulous tranny version of Tyler Durden. I do know where the last batch came from. Three weeks ago I got major glitter bombed at a party (because they felt I didn't already have enough glitter on me). A full on handfull right in my hair and face. It's still not all gone and it made for an awkward next day at the gym. And proceeding weeks for that matter.
"Hey Jesse, did you know you're covered in glitter?"
"Why do you have glitter on your face?"
"Oh my god you're so sparkly!"
"Why do you still have glitter all over you? It's been a week."
"Have you tried showering?"
"Don't you clean yourself?"
"Oh! Oh! I found a piece of glitter! Two weeks later."
For the record, I do shower every day. With soap and water. And scrubbing.

So now that it's finally going away, I'm expecting a glitter cannon to go off in my face any day now. And a flat tire.

Who are you?

2011-11-23T22:24:00.001+01:00

It's been a while. Last entry was in, let's see...September. Two months ago. It's not that I forget about my blog, I actually often jot down ideas on what to write about. It's just the task of sitting down and formulating a coherent entry, the fear of staring at my words, that's inhibiting the whole process.

Some topics I've considered writing about:

The existential and depressing encounter with a caterpillar in a small town on Lake Como, just outside of Milan.
I came home sort of drunk one night and wrote a nice rant on how I wanted to destroy the world.
There's some note about walls in Germany. Not sure where that one was supposed to go. It just says "There's something about walls in Germany."
An idea about fat vs. thin. Probably about women and maybe how the media/culture has shaped the ideal appearance. You know, how like we have these ancient Venus figurines which are said to be of the ideal female form of the times, and they're quite rotund. And these days we idealize thin. Although there seems to be a reaction against too thin these days, and there's that whole Dove ad campaign.
Sex and poop. Ah, that's one I'd really like to write about, so I will say no more.
I could always post another story, but I assume I have to forgo publishing those stories. Which would mean I'd have to write entire new stories to publish. Well, speaking of publishing...

I submitted my first paper to a journal called Biotechniques. Science journals have this statistic called the impact factor, which is the average number of citations per article in that journal over the previous 2 years. It's a measure of how "important" a journal is in the field. Some people are really concerned with the impact factor, other's not so much. Of course, everybody wants an article in a high profile (high impact factor) journal like Science or Nature, because it looks good on a CV and *can* mean that you're doing good science, or at least sexy science. And, presumably, low impact factor journals, the less important journals, publish more mundane or crappier stuff. So you write a paper and submit it somewhere you think is appropriate, and it goes through peer review and is accepted or rejected. If it's rejected, you fix some stuff and submit it somewhere else, probably somewhere less selective. Biotechniques doesn't have a high impact factor, but it's a technical journal which means it's articles are probably only relevant to a small niche of scientists. I figure with my paper, it being technical and all, people who are interested in the topic will find it through search engines. If it gets accepted. It's still in the review process.

Oh, perhaps a conclusion on the move. While I drudge up the details, here's the summary: the nightmare continued and died a slow horrible death over the next few weeks until everything was finally fine.

We left off with me about to go to Croatia on the same day as the move. Croatia was awesome. Intense is a really applicable adjective. Lots of science in the day, all day, and the necessary release at night. It ended with me blowing what was left of my Croatian money on strippers the last night.

While I was sitting pretty in Croatia, my roommates and those that came to help move were sitting pretty in the middle of a Leipzig street waiting for the movers who were over 3 hours late. From what I hear only two of them showed up in a tiny van. One of them was a crotchety old man who smoked the whole time and didn't help. The other was a gimp or something and sort of helped but not really. So roommates and friends had to do everything, all the moving from three different apartments, in one day. I'm told it was horrible, wanting to quit after 2 hours but still having 6 more to go horrible. But they did it, moved it all in one day, and by the time I got back everything was more or less set up.

The dwindling part of the nightmare involved the apartment being dirty, the electricity not working and not having a functioning kitchen. H&J (the property managers, who are referred to these days as Hildefuck & Fucktards) reinvented their asshole approach to customer service by actually being nice and saying they'd hire a cleaner, only to tell us two days later that they are absolutely NOT hiring a cleaner. Somehow we got the landlords (the handymen) to come over, and they fixed a bunch of stuff and even did some cleaning. The kitchen remained in decreasing stages of disarray for a few weeks as it took a few tries to get the wiring rerouted and the plumbing all sorted out. It was finally completed when I hung this big Ikea shelving unit over the sink. This thing was hanging in one of the previous apartments and always seemed a bit precarious, but it never fell. So I, using the same materials used to hang it in the other place, drilled it into the brick wall and put all our glass and plastic cups in there. A few days later it's Monday morning and I get a cup and pour myself some coffee. I'm leaving the kitchen as my roommate walks in and three steps later there's a horribly loud, unbelievably extended crash. I sort of freeze, then turn back to the kitchen, glass still breaking, and see the shelf on the counter, contents spilled out, broken glass all over the place and my roommate, in her towel, huddled in the corner. "We had too much glass anyway" was the final agreement. The shelf is now sitting in the entryway, waiting to be used as a nice shoe rack.

Dancing Chimp

2011-09-26T11:20:00.003+02:00

My friends have far too much time on their hands.

Fick dich Hildebrand & Juergens

2011-09-25T18:15:00.000+02:00

Moving is a huge pain in the ass. That's the light-hearted summary of the clusterfuck of a move that's about to go down. And it's probably the least severe for me because I'll be snorkeling in Croatia on Friday, when the move will supposedly happen, if nothing else goes wrong.

A few months ago a group of friends and I decided it'd be cool if we all lived together. I think it was sort of a joke at first, but then it became a pretty convenient prospect due to all of our current living situations ending or being shitty. So we started looking at places. We needed 5 rooms and a moving date of end of September/beginning of October. We found a pretty nice one at the beginning of August and made an offer. The property managing company accepted us. They are called Hildebrand & Juergens. We got the contract and signed it. I handed over the signed contract to H&J at their office on August 11th. I remember that because it was the day I missed my flight back to the US and it's hard to forget a day like that.

So at this point:

1) We have an official contract for this new place.

2) My 3 new roommates all have to be out of their respective apartments by the end of September. The two who currently live together, MM, must hand over their keys to their landlord on the 30th, and the new tenants (who are total bitches, but more on that later) are supposed to move in the very next day. The other roommate is just renting a room, so she just needs to move out of the place, no key handing over ceremony or anything.

3) I don't have to be out of/can't get rid of my place until the end of November, so am potentially looking at 2 months of double rent.

Handing over an apartment means cleaning and painting and generally getting the apartment to look like what it used to. This is a perfect opportunity to get fucked over by the landlord, and I guess it happens often. These nit-picky assholes come scrutinizing the house looking for any damage, and they write it down. Then they compare this list to a similar list that was made at the last tenant changeover. If these lists don't jive they start subtracting from the security deposit. But it's not like an official, standardized process, it's just regular retarded realtors writing down vague descriptions like "slight damage to the baseboard" in whatever room. So yeah, maybe there are a few scratches or something, no big deal, and the 5 years you live in your apartment you don't do anything to the baseboards, there's no extra damage occurring. But then some other twat comes to do your moving out inspection, and they write something like "scratches on the baseboard." And they look at the lists and go "Oh, you damaged the baseboards, you're going to have to pay for that." And of course you disagree and look like an asshole when you say "it was already like that when I moved." Then they show you the list and say, that's not what our informations says. So whatever, they fuck you out of some of your deposit. Not unexpected.

Anyway, to avoid such a situation, we negotiated with our realtor, who is pregnant, for a moving date some time earlier than the 30th, so that MM can clean and paint. We all agree on a move-in date on the 27th. Great. Cool. I finally catch my flight home and have a nice 2 week vacation.

When I come back I start trying to find someone to take over my apartment. Even though my official move out date is Dec. 1st, I can get rid of it earlier if I find someone to take it over. So I show it to a bunch of people, but nobody is interested. Then this one guy comes. He's also an international student and works at the other Max Planck Institute. He looks around the place and says he'll take it. Like, not some equivocal "I like this place" sort of thing. I told him he can let me know by email or phone if he wants it and he said, right there in my entry way, "No, I can tell you now, I'll take it." So I initiate the paperwork and send this guy a couple of emails in the next few days. He ignores them. I'm starting to suspect that he's a bit shady. I send him a text telling him to get in touch with me. He responds and says he'll email me later that day. He did, and this prick tells me he hasn't made any decisions yet on an apartment and he's still looking around. And he hopes I'm not offended. I sent him the paperwork anyway, and told him to decide over the weekend. He did that too, and he backed out completely. I just...you know, what are you supposed to do in that situation? I can't kill him. And writing some personal indictment would just be a waste of time. Hey Charles, you're a huge fucking inconvenience and I'm really displeased with how you handled this transaction. Go fuck yourself. So, you know, I moved on and am still trying to find someone. No one is interested. It's not a bad place, but it's not that nice, and it's too expensive for what it is.

So there's that part. Now here's the better part.

I'm about to give a seminar to my whole department last Thursday, the 22nd. 15 minutes before I get a call and I understand that it's some guy from H&J. I can't understand much else, so I ask him to speak more slowly, he says okay and just keeps sprinting through his sentences. I go find someone who speaks better german and learn that this H&J guy is saying we can no longer move in on the 27th, but we'll have to wait till the 30th.

Oh right, some background. We had already schedule movers for the 27th and a guy to install the kitchen that day also. The kitchen guy is going on vacation on the 29th. We were going to spend the 28th and 29th cleaning and painting the MM residence. Their landlord had set the 30th at noon as the hardline time they had to be out and have the place clean. And he had the audacity to send them a letter explaining that the new tenants, these college girls, would be moving in the next day, and if the flat wasn't ready MM would have to pay for a hotel. Like it's their fault he scheduled the new tenants to move in right away. Brilliant move on this dick's park. These girls are the ones I mentioned above. The bitches. I'm pretty removed from this issue, you know, but it's just one more thing about this whole tragedy that pisses me off. At this point in the narrative though, we're just aware that they're also fucking flaky. They kept saying they'd buy furniture and really wanted this thing and that, and agree to a price, then 2 days later say, oh, we have some unexpected expenses, we'll just pay you half for all that shit we said we'd buy. More on them later.

My seminar. Now we can't move in until the 30th. Hopefully I've explained well enough that you understand why this is stressful. We have our new german roommate, who's on vacation, call H&J to work something out. They're unapologetic fucks about the whole thing. Our regular contact, the pregnant lady, was out on maternity leave, and this new guy more or less said he didn't give a shit what agreements we had worked out with her, she wasn't there and there's nothing we can do. Also, the reason we couldn't move on the 27th is because they hadn't started the renovations yet. Fucking...we turned in the contract on August fucking 11th and now, on the fucking 22nd of September they haven't even started fixing it. And there was no compromise or appreciation for the situation they put us it. Just a big fuck you. They won't even let us move our stuff in a few days earlier. Nope. Nothing, not even the keys until noon on the 30th.

On Friday we threw out a hail mary, one last gasping S.O.S. to some people at our institute. They confirmed that we are fucked. Their brilliant advice was to bribe H&J to get in earlier. Bribe?! Bribe?! Are you fucking kidding me. "Oh, it's common here for people to do that." What is this, fucking Africa? Goddamned Russia? Like we're just going to stroll into the H&J offices and say "Haha, thanks for trying to fuck us, here's a hundred euro." Get the fuck out of here. Bribe.

So the moving date is now on the 30th. Thankfully the moving company has been understanding (apparently they've encountered H&J before) and will still do the move. Of course, I'm not even going to fucking be here, so that's really nice. That's sarcasm by the way. I have a whole apartment full of shit that needs to be moved, and I won't even be able to help. So what'll have to happen is that MM, who are getting railed from both sides at the moment, and the german roommate will have to handle it. I mean, who the fuck knows what else will go wrong.

And these bitches, the new tenants at MM's place, they really are just the delicious icing on the fuck you in the ass cake. They've been emailing MM directly about the move. At first they were these bitchy passive agressive emails about how they need to know what's going on and what furniture they're going to get and it'd be really nice to have a response soon. They got increasingly bitchy and the latest one was actually sort of threatening, saying how MM better be moved out and have the place clean by the 30th because these girls have already arranged all the logistics for their move. Yeah, let us tell you how bad we feel and then show you some things about shit not working out. Grow up and fucking deal with it, and spare everyone you're condescending drivel.

Maybe you just read this and are thinking, "but Jesse, you don't really have it that bad. There's not a time constraint for you, and you won't even be there for the move." Well, you're right. I am not fully on the receiving end of this. It's just the way these assholes conduct themselves...it really pisses me off. And it's compounded by the fact that I can't really express myself to them. I can't have a rational discussion to understand and explain, can't make my point clear, I can't even yell and be a pest and ruin their day. I seem to have created this delusion that things here in Germany are perpetually logical and functional. So it's particularly egregious when things aren't functional. And then I'm aware of the delusion, and I hate delusions. And finally, it pisses me off that the best solution is to just take it, finish the move and get over the whole thing.

So there it is. Hildebrand & Juergens, eat shit and die.

Leipzig: The Anthropological Powerhouse

2011-09-22T15:48:00.002+02:00

I don't post much about work or my institute. Perhaps I should. So here's an article from Der Spiegel about MPI-EVA (where I work). The focus is on the Human Evolution department and how their advanced techniques are revolutionizing the field, and how they sometimes encounter opposition from colleagues. There's some good bits on Leipzig being a powerful and influential center of research, and they even mention my boss and the Neandertal genome!

Moldy Bread, Rotten Bananas and Nutella vs. Peanut Butter

2011-08-03T23:25:00.001+02:00

Bread is pretty cheap here, but it goes moldy fairly quickly. Less preservatives I suppose. I always buy bread but usually forget about it for a week until I need to eat a late dinner and there’s nothing left in the house. Then I see the bread, get excited, only to realize that it’s started to grow mold. I usually throw it out, but sometimes, those times when I’m really hungry, I examine each piece until I find one with little or no mold, then have a sandwich (I cut the mold off).

Bananas are just bananas here. The problem with bananas is universal, doesn’t matter where you are. You’re in a store, see some and think “yeah, a banana is a good, healthy snack. I can eat them in the morning, or bring one to work for later.” So you buy the bananas. I like them really green. You get home, maybe you eat one, but the other five sit on the counter. Two days later you haven’t eaten any of them and to your dismay they’re already brown and mushy. And then, who likes a mushy banana?

I have a fruit fly infestation in my kitchen. It’s a summer thing here, so far the only sign of summer. The weather really sucks this year. We’ve had maybe a week total of nice weather. The other months, just grey skies and rain. And, of course, the black swarm of insects in my kitchen. Everything was reasonably under control for a while, just a few of them buzzing around every now and then. But a week ago I opened the garbage can and hundreds of them flew out and scattered across the kitchen. All over the walls, the ceiling and the cabinets. I have a nice spider couple living in the kitchen also, which is nice in this situation, but they live quite uselessly under the lowest shelf below the sink. Fortunately I was informed about a fly trap using a cup, a paper funnel and some banana slices. I built that baby right up and within a day had most of the little bastards feasting on some banana, and, more importantly, TRAPPED! Problem solved, for the most part.

Today was a merging of the three. I had some bread that was about to go moldy any second, some brown and nearly too mushy bananas, and some roaming flies undoubtedly looking for a place to drop their loads of larvae. There’s all these tidbits about Drosophila sex flying through my mind right now. I know more than I care to. Also about duck penises, but that’s a different story.

What to do with bread and bananas? Why not have a competition? I’m sure I’ve had bananas and Nutella in a crepe or something. I know I enjoy a good peanut butter, banana and honey sandwich. But which is better?

Answer: Obviously, they are both delicious. It would be cliche of me to praise Nutella. It’s been done multiple times on numerous occasions. Chocolate and banana go well together. So there’s nothing to not like here. I can, however, imagine someone, somewhere, being suspicious of peanut butter and banana, or banana and honey. Or even peanut butter and honey for that matter. Well, those toppings are no less arbitrary than jelly, and a PB&J is a staple. I would recommend that a peanut butter banana and honey sammich be a staple too, because that thing is awesome and the winner of this competition. Yeah man, get some crunchy PB, cut you up some banana and drizzle some honey on top. That’s a tasty treat.

Wonder how many fly larvae I just ate.

Jealous

2011-07-22T00:21:00.001+02:00

I am the first one to see my best friend’s dead body. He is sitting at his desk, facing the computer. Behind his chair is a suitcase hanging an inch or so above the ground with a rope tied around the handle. The other end of the rope is tied to his neck, which is stretched backwards over the top of the chair. His pants are around his ankles and his dick is in his hand. There is semen everywhere, running down his stomach, hand and legs. His face is blue, but he looks happy. A porn movie is playing on his computer. Well, at least I was the first one to get there, I think. I shut down his computer and search his room for a rag. Cleaning up his semen I wonder if any of my friends would do this for me. Freeing his cock from the increasing rigidity of his grip I’m sure he never wanted to be in this position, me touching his dick I mean. I know I didn’t. Or maybe he would have thought it was funny. At least it wasn’t his mother who found him.

When I pulled his pants up it looked like he had only hung himself without any of that masturbation asphyxiation stuff. I remember a conversation we had a couple of days ago. He was telling me that jerking off was getting boring, that it was so not worth his time that he would end up laying on his bed starting at the ceiling or sitting at his computer staring at the blank screen. Instead of thinking about girls and penetration and all things erotic, he would think about how to make his life more complete and fulfilling. He said out of all the things he could be doing, he was sitting out home fucking himself. He said he didn’t even know how many hours of his life he had wasted doing this. I told him hey, you’re just getting desensitized, that’s all. You need to find more exciting ways to do it.

He asked like what.

I told him like doing it in public places or maybe with something other than your hand. Or you could go get a girlfriend. I’m sure she’d take care of your problem.

He said he’s tried all those things, well, not a girlfriend, but lets not push it.

I say, hey, have you tried choking yourself?

Now that my friend looks normal, at least as normal as a dead person can, I tell his mother that something terrible has happened and that I am sorry, but her son is dead. She must think I’m joking because she makes an accusatory face at me.

I tell her no, I’m serious, he’s dead, go look in his room.

She gets up with a placatory sigh and walks toward his room. The way she does this, I feel like a little kid trying to lure a parent into my room with transparent pretenses in order to surprise her. Even when she sees his body with the unnatural appearance of his skin and the awkward angle of his neck, she folds her arms across her chest and taps her foot in mock impatience, waiting for the punch line.

I look at her, then the body, and then back at her. There’s an uncomfortable air between the three of us and I’m jealous that my friend doesn’t have to participate. It’s silent except for the unusually loud tick of a clock that persists relentlessly fifty, now sixty, now seventy times.

Finally, she walks toward my friend’s body and tells him that he should take that rope off of his neck before he chokes himself. She touches his arm and freezes. Her face goes white and the clock starts ticking again as she sinks into a state of shock.

She looks like a marble statue, she’s that pale.

The steady beat of the clock is interrupted by a horrible noise. It is my friend’s mother; and though I’ve never heard a sound quite as lurid, it seems wholly appropriate considering the circumstances. A mother who is touching her son’s dead body must feel some sort of ineffable emotion, and though the noise probably was not an expression of this feeling, it did reify her despair to an extent that made me feel sorry for her.

Her hand starts to shake and she pulls it away from my friend’s body and up to her mouth. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. She makes that noise again, only this time it is quickly followed by sobbing and tears. Her attempt to deny what is in front of her fails, and she falls to her knees with the weight of reality. She grabs my friend’s hand and kisses it, then kisses it again, and then holds it to her cheek and cries harder. With her other arm she reaches around his body and pulls it toward her. Still holding his hand to her cheek, she buries her head in his stomach. And though his clothing muffles her screams, it sounds like she is yelling directly into my ear. She lifts her head up and looks at me. Her face is red with agony and blotchy from the tears. Her eyes are puffy and her mouth is twisted open in a gruesome grimace. I move toward her to comfort her, to maybe touch her shoulder or give her a hug, but I stop when I realize that the hand she is holding, which is now covered with her tears and slobber, is the same one that was covered in semen five minutes ago. Suddenly, this scene becomes too awkward and disgusting and I no longer want to be there. My friend’s mom is still looking at me, sobbing, and because she is on her knees, it almost feels like she is begging me to rescue her from eternal misery, like if I do not help her now, she will be lost to a world of grief and hopelessness. I want to leave, to go lie down somewhere and close my eyes, to avoid this kind of intimate compassion. But instead I hold my arm out and force myself to walk toward the broken woman on the floor. She bows her head as I put a trembling hand on her shoulder. Her sobs die down to barely audible whimpers and once again, she brings my friend’s hand, the one he had been jerking off with, to her mouth.

I am sitting on the couch at my friend’s house waiting for the ambulance and the police to arrive. His mother is somewhere in the house, not in the room with me. I stare at the blank wall and think of nothing.

The front door opens and my friend’s dad runs into the house. He does not notice me sitting there and goes directly to his son’s room. By now my friend is unmistakably dead and there will be no period of denial for his father, only stark reality. Within seconds I hear him scream and can imagine him, too, on his knees, eyes shut tight, kissing his son’s semen stained hand. I cannot help but think about how different this would all be if I had not taken the time to clean my friend up, how his parents’ lives would have been forever changed knowing that their son accidentally hung himself while trying to get off. I start laughing out loud and then the police arrive with the paramedics.

The police come over to me with their pads of paper out and the paramedics walk past them to my friend’s room. The police ask me who was the first person to see the body.

I tell them it was me.

Then they ask did I do anything to the body, anything at all.

I suddenly become aware of my hands and facial expressions. I cannot remember what direction people look when they are trying to recall something that actually happened, but since I am lying, I look in the opposite direction than where I want to look. I relax into the couch and try to keep my hands in a natural position. None of this works though. My movements feel forced and unnatural, so I say no and look directly at them, ready for the next question. Both of them pause, look at each other and then scribble something on their pads.

Behind them the paramedics are coming out of my friend’s room with a gurney. My friend is covered in a sheet, only his face is showing. The paramedics nod at the police officers and tell them that the scene was undisturbed, that it was a clean suicide.

The officers immediately close their pads and tell me that the case is closed, they wont be needing anymore information from me, I am free to go and thank you for my time.

I follow them all out to the front yard. The police officers get into their car; the paramedics load my friend’s body onto the ambulance, throw the sheet over his face, and shut the doors. None of them turn on their sirens, and then they are gone.

I am alone on the grass. I turn to look at the house. I do not want to go back in there. Not because my friend just died in there, but because his parents are still in there. I do not feel like being sympathetic, I cannot be sympathetic, because if they knew their son as well as I did, then they would have expected something like this to happen sooner or later.

My friend and I are riding in his car. He is driving. We are not going anywhere in particular, but on the way we pass a car wreck. It is one of those wrecks where the cars are so completely totaled that you know nobody survived.

“What a horrible way to go,” my friend says.

“What? In a car accident?” I say.

“Yeah, in an accident,” he says. “What a pointless way to die. I hope I never die in a car wreck.”

“Hey,” I say. “Camus said the same thing and guess how he died?”

“In a car wreck?” he asks.

“Yep,” I say. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s pointless at all.”

“Why is that?” he asks.

“If you think about it,” I say. “Life is pointless. There is no purpose to our existence, no underlying reason why we’re here. We suffer our entire lives, never understanding any of it, and then we die. Death becomes our liberator, it can’t be pointless because it saves us from pointlessness.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But there has to be a reason to live. What about hope and happiness?”

“Illusions,” I say.

“How can they be illusions?” he asks.

“They are emotions,” I say. “They are intangible, not real. Look at it this way. Would you say that more good things happen or more bad things happen?”

“Bad things,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “And when something bad happens to you, you feel sad and maybe even a little depressed. Now, good things don’t happen very often, they are sporadic at best. So, everything good that happens is surrounded by clusters of bad things, which means these times when you think you are happy are really only periods of decreased sadness.”

“Well, what about hope?” he asks.

“Hope,” I say. “Who needs it? What happens every time you hope for something? You get let down, that’s what. Without hope there would be no disappointment. When you blow the candles out on your birthday cake or throw money into a well, does your wish ever come true?”

“No,” he says.

“That’s hope,” I say. “It gets you nowhere.”

The conversation ended there, but over the following weeks I noticed a dramatic change in him. He did not seem to care about anything anymore. He lost all feeling for himself and for others. He became disenchanted with life and the world around him. People said he was starting to act like me, a shell devoid of positive emotions. It felt good, though, to have an equal, someone who could understand me, someone to validate my thoughts. He was a true friend.

At his funeral, everybody is there. The seats are all taken and many people are standing. Friends and teachers from school bow their heads in solemn remorse. Distant relatives dab at weak tears that trickle down their cheeks. Closer family cry and hug each other for comfort. His parents sit silent and motionless. They have the statuesque appearance of the emotionally barren; desolate and wasted by sorrow and despair.

I do not know how to feel or what to do so I am looking at everybody else, though I do not know why because seeing everybody else cry isn’t helping me any. All I can think about, for some reason, is my friend’s semen covered genitals. It feels strange to be the only person who knows the truth, almost like I am the one living a lie.

The funeral seems dry and impersonal. The preacher reads the same exhausted biblical passages that are read at every funeral. He makes vague and ambiguous statements about my friend’s life, some of which are completely untrue. It does get better when the podium is opened to any individuals who would like to say a few words. People line up to deliver their anecdotes on my friend’s life, little stories that tell about his chivalry, and his sense of humor and his willingness to help others, as if he possessed these characteristics everyday of his life.

I wait in line and when I get to the podium I look out to the audience. I did not prepare anything to say, though I feel like I should be the one who gives them the deepest insight into his life. What I want to tell them is that he was the strong one, the brave one. He had the guts to do what none of us could ever do. I want to tell them that his solution was the right one, the rest of us are just treading water. I want to convince them, as I did him, that life is a futile waste of time spent trying to avoid the inevitable. I want to tell them that I am jealous of his escape, but that it can never be mine.

Instead I mumble something into the microphone about how much he was loved and how much he will be missed.

I am the last one to leave the parlor. On my way out I stop at my friend’s casket and touch the lid. My arm starts to shake. Though a part of me wishes I were my friend, the coffin scares me and I am forced to walk away toward the door, pondering the extent of the suffering to come.

Meta-racism: Can a racist joke not be racist?

2011-06-30T23:43:00.001+02:00

I tend to find racist jokes funny. Actually, I usually find any joke funny if it’s at the expense of someone else, even occasionally at my own expense. In high school my friend Brandon and I used to have these exchanges during SSR (sustained silent reading, when everybody was supposed to shut up for 20 minutes and read a book). He’d whisper something like “Hey Geronimo, why don’t you go eat a fucking buffalo.” And I’d say something like “Can I borrow your spear you Swahili piece of shit.” He’d say something about a tee-pee or smallpox blankets, I’d say something about zebras and slavery, and we’d get louder and louder until everyone was laughing or getting pissed off. These types of exchanges would continue everywhere, in the car, in restaurants, with all members of the group, which was pretty diverse.

We’d all have a good laugh, then carry on. No one ever really got offended. Not Brandon when we’d call him nigger, not Eduardo when we called him spick, not me when they’d call me injun. We never could figure out an even marginally offensive name for Alex, but I’m sure we tried, and he never got upset. We said some foul things to each other and to the outsider it surely must’ve sounded like we hated each other. But we didn’t, and our trust in our friendship nullified the threat of our words. We existed in some strange harmony, predicated on pretend hatred, and our racist jokes were in fact comments on the absurdity of racism.

Or were they?

We were teenagers and had no discretion or tact, and I know that we were on more than one occasion called ignorant and accused of perpetuating racist beliefs. But who in that situation is most complicit in the maintenance of destructive beliefs?

I read a comment the other day in a discussion of putatively offensive beliefs where one guy argued that racist jokes are funny and that there should be more of them. He went on to explain that only when people aren’t uncomfortable anymore with the subject of racism will it truly be defeated. Something like forced acclimatization through comedy will take the power away.

It’s an interesting point, and you see it all the time with professional comedians. Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, Sarah Silverman, they all garner laughs, sometimes uncomfortably, through jokes about race and culture. It seems okay to laugh when you think the routine is engendered through some transcendent recognition of a singular humanity, that black, white or whatever, we’re stuck in some cycle of pointless reenforcement of superficial stereotypes. We laugh because we know that the joke about the korean store owner not trusting the black customer is true, and not true.

But is there a point where the comedian, or the teenage boys, are no longer novel and ameliorative, but instead fall victim to their “enlightenment” and effectively perpetuate stereotypes and racist beliefs? A friend once called it meta-racism, the nebulous possibility of being inadvertently racist by making fun of racism.

I want to agree with my teenage self and the internet commenter that having it out there to laugh at and force down the throats of people and their smug sense of propriety will eventually be beneficial. But that will only guarantee that we’ll all laugh at racist jokes.

Like any good movie, maybe we should look to Morgan Freeman for an answer. I saw a clip from an interview where he was disparaging Black History Month. He was perturbed, almost diametrically, by it’s confinement to a month, and that it existed at all. Well, just watch it, it’s not even a minute long.

(If you refuse to watch, or can’t, he says the way to combat racism is to not talk about race. Don’t call people black and white. He suggests calling people by their names).

Could that work? Probably more profoundly than calling your friends nigger and sitting bull.

Denigrating others based on perceived differences is what we do. If it’s not race, it’s class, or gender, or sexual orientation; ugly vs. pretty, fat vs. skinny, tall vs. short and angry little girls crying because someone else is dating Justin Bieber.

Since people are the problem and they don’t seem to go away, perhaps the best solution is to ignore everybody, or hate them all equally and then get over it.

Storytime

2011-05-22T17:27:00.000+02:00

While I work on some more posts, here's another story I wrote back in the day.

HOLES

I am sitting at the bar with an empty glass staring at my reflection in the mirror that covers the back wall. In the mirror, clouds of smoke drift toward me out of complete darkness. I can hear the loud and indistinguishable noise of everyone else in the club, I can feel their presence, I can even smell them, but I can’t see them. This begins to scare me so I look away. I hear a woman’s voice next to me order an apple martini. I look at her reflection in the mirror. She is looking at me, not knowing that I am watching her do this. She is young, brunette and a total hardbody. Her complexion is great, her face is symmetrical, her teeth are perfectly straight and white, and, oh Jesus, I can’t find a flaw. I quickly look down at her feet and relief washes over me as I realize her second toe is slightly longer than her first. I look up again into the mirror. She is looking down at her feet then she is looking up at me.

“What?” she asks.

Still looking in the mirror at her reflection, I don’t acknowledge her.

“What?” she asks again, this time in a more accusatory tone.

Slowly I turn my head toward her and raise my eyebrows in a questioning way. I am shocked when I discover she is even more beautiful than her reflection.

“Why were you looking at my feet?” she asks me.

“Did you know that your…” I start to ask, but decide not to finish.

“Did I know what?” she asks, tapping her foot with her hands on her hips.

“That…this mirror isn’t accurate?” I force, confused but pleased with my save.

“Oh,” she says, laughing uneasily.

An awkward silence follows in which I know I am supposed to say something but have no idea what and, thankfully, the bartender interrupts to give her the martini. The bartender lingers, looking at the woman and…waiting for something? She is sipping the martini and staring at me expectantly over the rim of the glass. Oh Christ, just like a woman, I think, as a pull a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet and give it to the bartender.

“Thank you,” she says as she moves her chair closer to me and sits so her leg is touching mine. She picks the toothpick out of her martini and slowly drags the olive off with her teeth, all while looking directly into my eyes. “So, what’s your name?”

“Milo,” I tell her, strangely aroused by the way she has taken control.

“I’m Stacey,” she says, extending her hand.

“It’s nice to meet you Stacey,” I say, taking her hand. I actually turn in my chair so that I am facing her, leaning on the bar with my left arm.

“What do you do?” she asks, taking a sip of her martini.

“I’m a…doctor,” I tell her, which is the truth.

Her eyes light up instantly. “Ooooh, what kind of doctor?” she asks.

“A plastic surgeon,” I tell her.

Her face is one you’d expect to see on someone who just won the lottery. I’m used to the reaction, though, and am completely incapable of judging her for it.

“What, oh Christ…” I stop disgusted that I am actually going to finish this question. “What do you do?”

“Actually, I go to school, but I do a little modeling on the side,” she says.

“Why not do modeling full-time?” I ask.

“Because, like, education is soo much more important,” she says. “And I don’t want to be a model for the rest of my life.”

I feel trapped, like this conversation has been written down before hand and I’m just reading my lines. I ask, “So what do you want to do for the rest of your life?”

“Right now I’m thinking sports medicine, but my backup is psychology,” she says.

I pretend to be impressed, but really I’m thinking of the medical joke that the bottom ten percent of the class in medical school is lobotomized and trained in sports medicine. Unfortunately this thought breaks the rhythm of our conversation and I can’t think of a response that doesn’t feel forced and contrived, although the whole conversation up to this point seemed that way. I quickly look at her hair, her eyes, her lips, her dress, looking for something to say, but I fail miserably. I stare at her shocked and in disbelief over the fact that I am trying to continue this conversation. She puts her purse on the bar and starts looking through it.

“That’s a…um…nice purse,” I say.

“Oh, thank you,” she says. “You like it? It’s a Prada bag. When I saw it in the store I just had to have it. I liked it so much I bought it in three different colors, black, brown and pink, and they weren’t even on sale!”

“Wow,” I say, mad at myself for bringing up purses in front of a woman. I tell the bartender that I’m going to need a couple of beers. I turn toward Stacey again, and, unbelievably, she is still talking about purses, or maybe shoes, I’m not too sure.

“…so then I saw these gorgeous open-toes with five-inch heels and two straps. They were so cute I had to buy them, but then I realized I didn’t have any clothes to match them so after hours of shopping I finally found a dress, Versace couture, that matched and a simply adorable scarf by Hermes that didn’t really go with the shoes or the dress, but was too good not to buy…”

I notice the bartender has brought my beers. As I pick one up and bring it to my lips, I imagine myself breaking the bottle on the edge of the bar and hacking her head off with it. Stacey is still talking to me although at this point I have completely tuned her out. As I sit, pretending to listen to her, I start thinking that if this woman was more intelligent and interesting, and less superficial, she would be perfect. She is already physically superior, if only her mind could be the same. I have no idea how to accomplish this, but I am willing to try something, anything.

“Hey,” I interrupt. “Do you want to have a few drinks at my place?”

“Yeah, sure,” she says.

“Great,” I say. “Is it okay if we stop at my office? I need to pick something up.”

“That’s fine,” she says, and then in a strange tone, “I’ve never been in a plastic surgeon’s office before.”

I drive her to my office with no intention of going to my house anytime soon. I give her the tour of the office, the lobby, the washroom and, finally, the surgery room. I am too distracted to notice if she is impressed by any of it. While she is looking at the scalpels and saws I use during operations, I walk over to the anesthesia controls and turn on the gas.

“Hey Stacey,” I say. “Come over hear, I want to show you something.” I am standing by the operating table, holding the mask that the gas comes out of. “Here, I want you to try this,” I say, handing her the mask. “We use it for anesthesia, but in small doses it gives you a relatively harmless high, comparable to getting a buzz from alcohol.”

“Oh, cool,” she says as she takes the mask from my hands and places it over her mouth and nose.

“Let me go turn it on,” I tell her. I slowly walk over to the controls and turn the knob as high as it will go. I tell her to take a few deep breaths then watch as her body falls to the floor. I lift her onto the table and leave the room to put on some scrubs.

Standing over her, I use a drill to make a small hole on each side of her head, about four inches above each ear. This is an easy procedure and there is little blood. I grab the defibrillator, which I have never used before and is only there because the medical board requires it to be, and pull the wires out of the paddles. I slide the wires into the holes I have drilled through Stacey’s skull until, I assume, they are touching her brain. I turn the machine on and nothing happens. I’m not sure if there is an electric current running through her brain or not, so I just stare at her head for five minutes. I leave to go make some coffee in the break room and when I come back I pull the wires out of her head. To make sure something happens and that this wasn’t a complete waste of time I stick a syringe into each hole repeatedly. Not knowing what else to do I fill the holes with plumber’s caulk and comb her hair over them. With the amount of anesthesia she inhaled, she won’t wake up for a couple of hours so I go in my office and take a nap on the floor. I dream about a beautiful woman falling in love with me after I save her life. In my dream this girl’s love is the only thing I want and when I get it everything else means nothing. And we live happily ever after. After I wake up I move Stacey’s body into the recovery room to remove any suspicion on her part that I did something to her. I am patting her forehead with a damp cloth when she opens her eyes.

“Oh, thank god, your awake,” I say to her.

“W-what happened?” she asks.

“I think you inhaled to much anesthesia. You passed out,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she says. She tries to sit up, winces, and lies back down. “My head hurts.”

“Yeah, you banged it pretty good on the edge of the table in there,” I tell her. “I’ll go get you some aspirin” I come back with a glass of water and two pills, one of which is an anti-inflammatory, the other is a painkiller. I don’t tell her what they are, I just give them to her and she takes them. She grabs my hand and holds it while we sit together in silence. I think about the irony in the fact that although the conversation we just had was fake, on my part, it feels like the most sincere we’ve had all night.

“Do you want me to take you home?” I ask.

“I thought…I thought we were going back to your place,” she says.

“We can, I just thought you wouldn’t be…up to it,” I say.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, getting up and walking around the room.

I take her to my apartment and we have sex and because I feel guilty about drilling holes in her head I let her stay the night.

She leaves the next morning after breakfast and I feel kind of sad. Over the following weeks, I think back to that night and try to figure out why I felt compelled to drill holes in her head. She was perfect looking, why couldn’t I be happy with that? She was perfect looking, but that doesn’t mean anything unless she has a mind to go with it. But the only girls who are intelligent or interesting are the ugly ones, there’s no such thing as a beautiful, intelligent woman. Anyway, what did I want her mind to be like…mine? A man’s? I realized that I do feel more comfortable, more natural, talking to men and that the conversations are always interesting. So what, I thought, am I gay? No, I don’t get hard-ons for guys. I’m attracted to women; it’s just that…men have the better, more attractive minds. Out of all this I come to the conclusion that the perfect woman would be a man’s mind in a woman’s body.

I am sitting in a gay bar determined to discover the accuracy of my conclusions. My plan is to find a man, drug him, take him back to my office and turn him into a woman. I’ve done plenty of sex changes before, so the procedure is nothing new to me, some breast implants, removal of the scrotum and testicles, a little reconstruction to form the vaginal canal, and then laser hair removal. I am confident in my skills as a surgeon and know that I can create a beautiful woman out of a man. I figure that although I can’t create the perfect mind, I can find it. I reasoned out that a non-effeminate gay man would be the perfect specimen, that his mind would fit more naturally into a woman’s body. Imagining a one hundred percent male mind in a woman’s body scared me, and almost stopped me from coming here. Since I am here for a mind, appearance is not important to me, though I do want somebody who maintains himself well. I suffer through countless flaming gay males flirting with me and hitting on me.

“Hey there handthome,” one of them says to me in a girly voice.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

“I’m doin’ fine now,” he says. “You look familiar, are you a model?”

“No, are…you?” I ask, completely confused as to whether I am flirting with him or not. He blushes and is genuinely flattered.

“Oh my god, I could never be a model,” he says, waving a limp wrist at me. “But I did try once and let me tell ya, it was thow embarathing, I thought oh my god I can not do thith, but I did it anyway and the director told me I had abtholutely no talent, but I didn’t really care because there wath thow many hot guys there…”

I roll my eyes and think no, abtholutely not, then realize I am lisping my words and walk away pissed off. I sit down away from the crowd and drink some fruity drink that’s actually pretty good.

“Excuse me,” a voice says behind me. “I couldn’t help but notice you from across the club.”

I turn to see a…very pretty man.

“Hi, I’m Michael,” he says.

“Milo,” I say, shaking his hand. I give Michael the once over. He has long, black hair down to his shoulders. His skin is great, with minimal hair. His teeth are extremely white and straight. He has a thin, yet slightly muscular build, almost like a woman’s. He is dressed impeccably and obviously pays attention to his appearance. He reminds me of Stacey, who I haven’t seen since that night six months ago, although I have tried to contact her numerous times.

He must notice me checking him out because he asks, “Do you like what you see?”

I try to resist and deny my feelings, but I can’t help it; I’m actually attracted to this man. I start feeling light headed, dizzy and very disoriented.

“Are you alright?” he asks me.

“Yeah, I’m fine, it’s just that…” I say.

“It’s just what?” he asks.

“I’ve never been…felt this way before,” I say.

“It’s going to be okay,” he tells me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” I ask him.

“Your feelings,” he says.

“My feelings about what?” I ask.

“Your attraction to me,” he says, smiling.

I tell Michael that I am not gay and that I have always been attracted to women. I also tell him that I came to the bar to do some research so I can more easily relate to some of my patients.

“You’re a plastic surgeon?” he asks.

“Yes, a straight one,” I say.

“Sure,” he says. “Let me ask you something, though. These relationships you have, do they last? Or do you find them meaningless and transient? I bet you have never connected with a woman before, you know, really found one that meant something to you.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Let me tell you my story,” he says. “When I learned that I was gay and how I dealt with it.”

“Alright, I’m listening,” I say.

“I was about twenty-three when I first realized it,” he says. “Up to that point I had been in numerous relationships with girls, but none of them meant anything. I always felt that something was missing from the relationships; that there was more out there for me. I thought it was just because I hadn’t met the right girl. Then, one day, I found her. She was perfect, smart and beautiful, the whole package. I was in love with her, and I thought she loved me. It turned out that she didn’t. The whole time we were together she had been cheating on me, in my house, on my bed. She slept with every guy, any guy, that she could get her hands on. She fucked me over pretty good, but leaving her was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I was depressed for months and thought my life was over. I tried to date other women after that, but none of the relationships lasted more than two weeks, they were as meaningless as ever. I became skeptical of women and didn’t trust any of them. I started to appreciate the honesty I found in men and realized I was attracted to some of them. What was hardest for me was the unnaturalness I felt. Being gay went against everything I knew, but it was useless to deny because it felt so right. Eventually I realized that being gay just affected my sexuality, it didn’t have to affect who I was and so I came to terms with it.” He shrugs and pats my shoulder.

I actually start to feel relaxed and comfortable around Michael, and begin to open up to him. We have a few drinks and talk about our lives and experiences. We laugh and commiserate with each other. A feeling of completeness washes over me and I am happy. I feel like I know Michael and am drawn to his confidence. I can actually be myself around him.

“Hey Michael,” I say. “Do you want to come over to my place for a few drinks?”

“Sure!” he says.

Driving, I decide I don’t want to turn Michael into a woman; I want him exactly as he is. We go straight to my apartment.

Once inside the door we attack each other, kissing passionately and stumbling to the couch. I’m on top of Michael, kissing him hard, and I rip his shirt off and run my hands down his chest to his pants. I undo his belt, unzip his pants and slip my hand inside. His pubic hair is shaved and I move my hand further down to grab is hard erection but instead feel only moisture and heat.

“Oh Milo, I wanted to tell you…” he says.

“No, it’s perfect,” I say, aroused by the fact that Michael has a vagina. I kiss him and roll over so he is on top of me, straddling me, riding me. Michael lowers his head to my chest and I run my fingers through his hair. As my fingers pass over the sides of his head I feel something, two little indentations above his ears, like somebody had drilled a hole there.

“Stacey?!” I ask in disbelief and excitement.

“Oh god, Milo, how did you know!?” Michael asks me, crawling off of me.

“You…there’s…I don’t know,” I finally say.

“Oh god,” Michael says, starting to cry. “I’ve been thinking about this moment since that morning I left. You have no idea how much I’ve wanted this.”

“So then…you’re really…a woman?” I asked, confused.

“No, what I told you was true, I was a man,” he says. “I told you I had a hard time dealing with the unnaturalness I felt, but I didn’t really tell you how I got over that. Getting a sex change was really the only option I had to make me feel natural.”

“But you acted like such a…woman at the bar that night,” I tell him.

“I acted like the type of woman I thought you would like,” he says. “But that night, after I passed out, somehow I realized that that wasn’t the type of woman you were looking for. I knew, I knew, that if had just acted like myself you would have loved me, but it was too late to show you how I really was. When I left that morning I decided that I didn’t want you to see me again until I could come to terms with who I was. I don’t know what happened to me that night, it’s like a light went on inside of my head. Whatever it was, though, it saved me.”

I look at him with a blank face. I don’t know what to say, but I do know that I can never tell Michael what I did to him. I start to laugh, though I don’t know why.

“I’m sorry Milo, I’m sorry,” Michael says. “But there’s nothing I can do about the vagina, it’s irreversible.”

“I know,” I tell him. “It’s great work, though. Who did it?”

“A surgeon in Palm Springs,” he says. “So you’re okay with it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Now I don’t have to be completely gay.”

Nostalgic Toothbrush, Reasons to close the toilet lid

2011-04-16T22:14:00.000+02:00

A few days ago I came home from work and my migraine pills were floating in the toilet. At some point since living in Germany I developed the habit of leaving the lid up. I never used to do that. I fished the pills out. They're sealed in some foil packaging so they probably survived.

Yesterday I fumbled my toothbrush while putting it away. I did a brief juggling act, failed, and the toothbrush went plop right into the toilet.

My first instinct while looking at my floating turd toothbrush was the 5-second rule. I darted my hand in there, grabbed the toothbrush and rinsed it off in the sink. Hot water should do the trick, I thought as I rubbed the bristles. It's just toilet water. It'll be a bit awkward in the morning, but in a few days it'll be fine.

Just as suddenly, I stopped rinsing, considered what I was doing and threw my toothbrush away.

The unceremonious casting away of my toothbrush reminded me of when I was younger, how I would be flooded with nostalgia every time I went to dispose of something, like a toothbrush, that I used daily for long periods of time.

"This is the toothbrush I used at Disney World."
"I went to Hawaii with this one."
"This one went camping with me. It's seen the wilderness."

I wouldn't end up saving these objects, for the most part. They would eventually get thrown away. But I felt the need to honor their service and participation in my life. Here were things that had been to the places I had, seen the things I had, and maintained for me a physical connection to my memories. They deserved a funeral.

Fortunately I've since come to terms with mortality and no longer need to eulogize my utensils.

More programming woes.

2011-04-14T20:52:00.000+02:00

I spent most of the day trying to take 33 files that look like this:

0
0
0
2
5
11
5
20

...and so on, all the way to 1000 lines, and adding the numbers then dividing each number by the sum. This is somewhat easily accomplished in excel, but it is tedious and takes a prohibitively long time. So I thought, hey, I'll just write a program that will do the calculations on the original .txt files. I am learning python, afterall.

I know enough to know conceptually what needs to happen. I do not know enough to translate that into reality.

What I wrote yesterday about someone who knows what they're doing accomplishing this in 5 minutes, yep:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

die "please specify file on command line\n" unless scalar @ARGV > 0;
open READ, $ARGV[0] or die "could not read file $ARGV[0]\n";

my @data;
my $sum;
my $header = <READ>;
while (my $line = <READ>) {
    chomp $line;
    unless ($line =~ /^\d+$/) {
    warn "line $line does not contain a number, discarded...\n";
    next;
   }
    push (@data, $line);
    $sum += $line;
}

foreach my $num (@data) {
    print $num/$sum , "\n";
}

5 minutes. Maybe 7. That's in perl. Looks like a bunch of dollar signs and slashes to me too.

One day I will know something, though I'm sure even then satisfaction will remain just as illusory.

Not so brilliant after all

2011-04-11T22:01:00.001+02:00

for i in *.bam; do (samtools view $i | grep -v "^M_SOLEXA" | cut -f 9 | awk '{ if ($1 > 0) print }'; samtools view $i | grep "^M_SOLEXA" | cut -f 10 | /mnt/solexa/bin/src/pipe_length.py) | sort -n | uniq -c > ${i/bam/lengths}; done

That bit of code took me the better part of a week to figure out, not to mention the downstream analysis it complicated for another couple of days.

It's the parenthesis that do it. So simple, yet so elusive.

What the code does is it takes multiple files of DNA sequences (and other info) and makes another file that contains the lengths of the sequences and how many sequences are of that length. Without the parenthesis I had to make two files. With them, it all goes into one.

Someone who knows what they're doing can do that in less than 5 minutes. They could even do it the 2 file way I was doing it, and still complete the analysis in a day, I'm sure.

I've got a lot to learn.

April 8th, 1985, a date which will live in infamy.

2011-04-08T01:26:00.001+02:00

It’s been a while, but what better reason to make a re-entrance than a special occasion.

Today’s special occasion: the day of my birth, 26 years ago (please see: Luke 1:14, Luke 2:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25, Isaiah 9:6, etc.).

“What, you were born?!” you may ask. It’s okay, it’s not an uncommon reaction. It is hard to believe that someone as superlative as me could be created through the same mechanisms that created everyone else.

"Don't feed the gremlins after midnight, don't get the gremlins wet. How hard is that?!"

But, I cannot take credit for that. The honor goes to my dearest Mother. She does all the work, I reap all the benefits. It’s a good system. But really, thank you to my mother, who birthed me and sometimes feels the need to tell me about it. Sadly she won’t get to spend the Anniversary of her Day of Great Achievement with me. Love you ma, miss you, and all that other mushy stuff.

So, back home on your birthday, people do things for you. Someone maybe bakes you a cake, your friends take you to dinner, buy you drinks and you get really drunk for free. In Germany it is the other way around. You bake your own damn cake and ply your obstinate friends to hang out with you by buying them booze!

Needless to say, there will be no cake for my birthday. I probably will be significantly poorer by the end of the weekend though.

Internal Farts: A German Phenomenon

2011-01-16T11:47:00.001+01:00

You can feel a fart coming. Normally you move to stop or stifle it by clenching your butt closed, and normally the fart goes away, or escapes silently.

There is no escape from a fart in Germany. Its german engineering precludes its failure. It was created to rumble, and no sphincter will stop it. What happens in a German fart, to my best guess, is it just goes the other way, back into the intestine (thus the "internal"). The kicker is that it achieves the same noise it would have had it burst violently from your ass (thus the "fart"). No weenie high pitched squeak, no mid-staff staccato quarter note, but a deep bellow like the noise the Earth would make if it groaned.

As you can imagine, this leads to some awkward moments.

You're standing in a room. It's not small, but there are a lot of people crammed inside. It's quiet except a guy in the front talking about the characteristics of the modern human skull. You're paying attention, but you feel a small rumbling deep in your bowels and a slight buildup of pressure.

No problem, I got this, you think as you clench shut.

Frustratingly, the pressure doesn't dissipate, but moves back inward, making an audible groan. It wasn't too loud though, and nobody seemed to notice. You're back to listening about the bipedal implications of some ancient hominin skull. But then you feel another rumble and another buildup of pressure, this time stronger.

Shouldn't be a problem you think again, as you take the standard preventative measures.

This one's a bit tougher, but you stave it off, sort of. It makes a louder growl as it retreats back inside. Surely someone heard that, you think, hoping that it'll pass as your stomach growling.

You rejoin the lecture, hoping the episode is over, but then you feel a third rumbling. It's magnitude doesn't bode well. You feel some pressure so you clench shut again, but it keeps building up, like the last two fuckers went and recruited some friends or a whole damn army.

It's getting hot in the room. The pressure is still building and you realize your puny sphincter isn't gonna do it so now you've upped your defense and are clenching your cheeks together. Big Bertha is putting up quite a fight though. You shift your weight and cross your arms. You're sweating now and your confidence in containment is starting to slip. The pressure continues to increase.

Hurricane Bertha is now rotating in your anus, category 4, big enough to wipe out some Caribbean island. You're clenching your butt so tight your legs are shaking. The lecture might as well not exist and you're starting to see stars.

She's category 5 now and you can't move, all your energy is laser-beamed to the battle zone. Containment is now a humanitarian effort; you're harboring a ball of gas that could put a hole in the fucking ozone layer. Your vision is fading and you can no longer breathe. You're rapidly approaching the limit of your abilities, the absolute limit beyond which lies a profound sense of helplessness, the defeat of your will and the reality of how utterly powerless you are. You're contemplating your demise when you feel a slight attenuation of your rectal supernova. You stop your thoughts of despair and wait for, yes, the pressure is subsiding. Bertha has given up. You have won. Your vision returns. You stop shaking and the world is beginning to come back into focus, just in time for the most obscene, god-awful groan ever emanated by the human body. It's not a stomach growl, but a muffled detonation. It's not a fart, but a partially anesthetized patient having their guts ripped out. It's an abomination of sound, made all the more loathsome by its alienness.

The fallout isn't nuclear, but psychological, as those present look around in distress for an explanation of the gruesome sound they've just been exposed to and the person who could be so callous as to emit it. They don't quite know what they've heard, but must suspect that it's implications can't be good.

You however can take comfort in the relief you've been granted and the fact that you've saved the room from the worst aspect of the internal fart. As a german invention, the internal fart is undoubtedly the product of a sloshing stomach of sausages, potatoes, sauerkraut and beer emulsified and weaponized by your intestines. Guess which country was the first to use gas as a lethal weapon.

The relief is short lived though. Bertha did not disappear, just spread out to recruit more troops. You got off easy last time. It's best to get outdoors immediately, because Bertha the Black Hole will be back.

A Haze of the Impenetrable Grey Sort

2011-01-06T20:11:00.001+01:00

I wake up over an endless expanse of gently rolling white clouds. They are a fluffy continuous sheet, like an ocean stuck in a moment; unmoving, calm and inviting. They sky above them is blue. The sun is shining brightly.

We jet along above them, descending slowly. We are an hour and a half outside of Frankfurt. Our descent plateaus above the cloud-line and we skit along the tops for close to an hour, reluctant to descend any further unnecessarily. Finally, with perhaps 15 minutes to go, there's a very slight weightless feeling and we begin the final descent. I take in the sky and sun purposefully. I don't know when I'll see them again, it could be months. The last sliver of blue is whisked away as we enter the clouds. I expect a discernable boundary underneath. I don't know why. Unlike the top, the story is now one of shades, and we descend through a gradient of grey. There is no sun here.

The last leg of my flight went well. They fed us, and, coming off the buzz I obtained in Charlotte, I fell asleep. I sat next to a window and a lady. Don't know if her nationality matters. Certainly not now that I'm sober (She was Portuguese, saw her passport). She was also a mouth-breather with horrible breath.

Despite leaving an hour and a half late, we must have made up some time. I had earlier resigned myself to missing my connecting flight to Leipzig, but managed to make it (without running or stressing) with 5 minutes to spare. Unfortunately my suitcase didn't (I'm told it will be delivered tomorrow, although I was told the same thing yesterday). The upside to that is that I didn't have to lug it all the way home.

So now it's back to the IGH. It's warmer here than it has been in Vegas, which means rain and ice. Here's a view from my window:

Fortunes out of Woes

2011-01-05T02:28:00.000+01:00

Sitting in the Charlotte, North Carolina airport. My flight to Frankfurt was delayed by an hour. Not to worry, there's a bar not 50 steps away from the gate! It's a nice little local brew too, Carolina Beer Co. Craft brews are something you can't generally find in Germany, and something I tend to miss while living there.

Flight from Vegas was smooth and even, with the help of some Razzies, thank god for those. There was a potentially dangerous urination episode where I waited too long on the plane, then was stuck in my seat for landing, taxiing and waiting for all the other degenerates to get off the plane. The misery is only equaled by the soul-pleasing release of piss once in the bathroom (in the pants just would've been embarrassing).

I'm what you might call accidentally buzzed at the moment. Just thought I'd pop over for a bagel sandwich and a beer while I waited. Naturally, one beer turned into 3, so far.

Whenever any airport worker pops up on the loudspeaker, they have this southern drawl. It makes me chuckle because they sound sort of stupid.

Before takeoff in Vegas I was sitting next to this Puerto Rican chick (yes, I can tell the difference) and she was yelling and cussing into her phone, in Puerto Rican spanish about how she didn't want to talk and argue, yet continued instigating. She'd hang up, then immediately be back on the phone. At first it was uncomfortable and totally cliche. You could tell others around were unnerved. But then the razzies kicked in and she eventually shut the fuck up. You can bet though that as soon as the plane landed she was back on that damn phone yelling and cussing again.

Here's to the mystery of the next person I'll have to sit next to for 8 hours across an ocean and into another continent!

Escaping 'Schland and a Vegas Story

2010-12-24T19:35:00.000+01:00

Despite being threatened with Europe-wide airport closures, flight delays and cancellations, I made it out of Germany and all the way to Las Vegas without any impediments. In fact, it was one of the most uneventful series of flights I've ever had. It doesn't hurt that I was zoned out on anti-anxiety pills most of the way. I don't even remember taking off on two of the flights.

I've been so busy with christmas and jet-lag that I haven't been doing much more than eating and sleeping. Did go out one night with the gang to Yardhouse (over 90 beers on tap!) and was reminded how much more expensive it is to drink here. For 5 beers the tab was over 30 bucks. The most expensive nights in Leipzig, which include 3 to 5 beers and a LIIT or 2, rarely cost more than 30 euro.

In honor of my arrival, and because I don't have any Vegas stories or other finished blogs, I'm going to post a short story I wrote for a creative writing class. It was also the last story in my undergraduate thesis. It's called Sic Transit Spero.

We go to Gameworks and up to the bar to play pool because it’s free if you buy drinks, plus Marilyn knows the bartender so drinks are cheap. Marilyn asks us what we want and I want Alex to try Rumpelmints and I figure I should do a shot with him, even though I hate it, so I tell Marilyn to get us some. She smiles because she knows, like I do, that Rumpelmints is strong and gets you fucked up quick. She brings three shot glasses back to the table and I pick one up and drink it. A horrible mint tastes burns my throat all the way down into my stomach and already I am dizzy. Alex likes it, and though I can’t understand why, he wants another one and I agree to do another one too. We do the second shot and I have a great buzz going. I look at Alex, who, on top of the two shots has already had four Guinesses and a Long Island iced tea, and he looks surprisingly coherent. I look at Raul and he is making out with his girlfriend, Casey, and there are already four empty shot glasses next to them. We play pool and then someone announces over the loudspeaker that it is last call. I say Jesus what time is it and pull out my phone. It’s only twelve thirty. Alex yells out what the fuck, this is Vegas, but nothing happens, the voice just says that they will be closing in ten minutes. Raul and his girlfriend look away from each other long enough to tell Marilyn what they want and then go back to making out. Alex wants a gin and tonic and a shot of anything and I tell Marilyn that I want a shot, no two shots of whatever. She comes back with everybody’s drinks and hands me a cup filled with a harsh looking red liquid. I say what the fuck is this, I wanted shots. She tells me to drink it and shut up. I ask her what it is and she just laughs. It smells like cinnamon. Apparently Casey has stopped making out with Raul because she’s laughing at me, like she knows something I don’t. She tells me to just drink it. I say no I’m not drinking it till I know what the fuck it is. Marilyn is still laughing, but manages to tell me that it is a four horseman. I say what the fuck is that and she, still laughing, can’t tell me because she doesn’t know, but says she told the bartender she wanted to get somebody really fucked up really fast and this was what he gave her. I shrug my shoulders and chug it. After it’s gone, she tells me what was in it. I feel like getting mad but think what’s the point so I just stand there and wait for something to happen.

The room starts spinning in what feels like three directions at once and the floor starts moving up the wall and I feel like I’m both standing and lying down at the same time and though I probably should move my feet somewhere to find an equilibrium I don’t because I know this isn’t real. Alex reaches up to the ceiling but his hand touches my shoulder and the room suddenly stops moving and I’m back on the floor and he asks me if I’m all right, because I was getting a little wobbly. I tell him that I think I might be fucked up and he sets down an empty shot glass, picks up the gin and tonic and says I know how you feel, man.

The loudspeaker voice says that Gameworks will be closing in five minutes and Raul and Casey continue to make out while the rest of us just stand around, waiting for someone else to do something. The five minutes goes by and Gameworks closes and we stand there for another ten minutes until Raul and Casey stop making out, then walk to the parking garage. But when we get to the car we realize that probably none of us should drive so we decide to walk down the Strip.

I’m intimidated by the steady stream of people moving along the sidewalk but follow my friends and get swept away. I’m torn between looking at the lights and looking at the people, end up looking at both simultaneously then realizing I feel totally out of place. Marilyn and Alex are in front of me, their arms around each other, and I’m pretty sure that Raul and Casey are somewhere behind me, but I can’t, don’t want to, turn around to see exactly where. I look at the ground and it’s covered with naked women, which turn out to be wallet-sized advertisements for hookers and call girls. I pick one up and am tempted to call Angela and her friend Felicity, two beautiful naked girls fondling each other, for some erotic lesbian entertainment but then wonder if they really exist because this is too easy to be real. I drop the card and it falls to the ground amongst thousands of others just like it. I catch up with Alex and Marilyn, who are staring at what looks to be the call girl classifieds and pointing out which ones are pretty and which ones Alex would fuck, which apparently are not mutually inclusive. A Mexican comes up to us and slaps what looks to be a stack of the little hooker ads into his palm twice, making a loud noise, and tries to hand us one. Alex and Marilyn keep walking so I take it. I take two steps and another Mexican does the same thing and I take that card. Six steps, three Mexicans and a few cards later I have a stack of porn that I have no intention of doing anything with. Alex stops and asks one of the Mexicans if she gets paid to do this. She slaps the cards into her palm and tries to hand him one. He asks how much she gets paid and is it hourly or what. She slaps the cards into her palm and tries to hand him the same card. He asks her if she speaks English. She tries to hand him the card. He throws up his hands and he’s yelling and asking her if she speaks English or Spanish or anything. She starts to slap the cards into her palm and he walks away. As I pass, she tries to hand me the card and I stop and hold out all the cards I already have and she slaps the card and holds it out to me and I try to give her my cards and say no I don’t need anymore and she pushes the card into my hand and I look at her and she’s already facing the oncoming crowd, slapping her palms, handing out another card.

I catch up with Alex and Marilyn who are standing in front of a tiki hut style bar that sells eighteen-inch tall margaritas in plastic cups shaped like guitars. Alex says to me hey man, we need to get a fucking margarita and I say but dude you’re still holding your gin and tonic. He looks at me then down at his hand and says oh shit. He drinks half of it then gives it to me and tells me to drink the rest, which I do. We go inside the hut. It’s crowded and Raul and Casey are sitting at the bar. They wave but don’t look surprised to see us, which I can’t understand because I’m shocked to see them and suddenly overwhelmed by how unnatural it seems that all these people from completely separate lives from all over the country, the world, can end up together in some obscure little sidewalk bar on the Strip in Las Vegas. I think about the word “unity” and how small the world is and it turns out that Marilyn went to high school with the bartender and I stand there, amazed and on what feels like the verge of an epiphany but I can’t quite make the connection and this inability sends me into a state of desperation, which I embrace and then maybe even start to feel a little bit…happy.

I sit down and the bartender is talking to Marilyn and staring at me and it’s probably just the alcohol but she looks somewhat attractive. I look away when she starts talking about her baby, but not before seeing her fill a margarita cup almost halfway full of tequila, the rest with the margarita mix, and hand it to Marilyn, who hands it to Alex, who takes a sip and brings it to me. It’s strong, man, he tells me and I take a drink through the straw and get a mouthful of tequila. It’s not appealing but I take another drink before handing it back to Alex and we both leave the bar.

Outside there is a guy with a bad twitch staring at the ground and talking to himself. We seem to be the only two who notice him. Everyone else just keeps walking, oblivious. Alex says something about the increasing popularity of meth and coke in this town and I say dude, that’s anywhere and he says maybe and we both lose interest and move on.

We’re in front of the Aladdin and Raul or maybe Marilyn yells for us to wait up and some guy walks up to us, drunk, and asks us where the closest bathroom is. Alex says probably in the casino and I say dude, just go in those bushes. The guy laughs and says hey man, I’ll fucking do it and I say go ahead and he walks toward the bushes like he’s going to do it then turns and goes into the casino.

Marilyn, Raul and Casey catch up to us and we walk to the corner and wait for the light to change. Two guys are standing next to us wearing those big foam hands that people wear at baseball games only instead of only the index finger pointing up, the pinky, middle and index fingers are pointing up and it says “The Shocker” across the palm. Alex looks over and says right on, the fucking shocker. The guys both look over and say, you know what the shocker is? Alex says fuck yeah and I say two in the pink, one in the stink, baby. Marilyn knows what the shocker is, too, and she starts talking to the guys and even Raul and Casey talk. The light changes and the guys tell us that we’re, like, the coolest people they’ve met in Vegas and they give us their room number at the MGM. Alex says something to them about playing ball in the mud, they laugh, I laugh, and then we cross the street.

We are in front of the Bellagio and even though we know they stopped doing the water show over two hours ago, we stand in front of the lake for the next thirty minutes. Marilyn talks, nobody listens, Alex and I pass the margarita back and forth and Raul and Casey make out. I leave with Alex to find a bathroom and for some reason Marilyn follows us and we walk into the Bellagio.

The bathroom is elegant and sobering and while I’m taking a piss I wonder what is the point and washing my hands I look into the mirror and see an unwanted permanence and I accept it because there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. I leave the bathroom thinking about futility and at the end of the hall that separates the bathroom from the casino, directly in front of me, is a girl, beautiful, playing on her cell phone. I walk toward her and I feel what I can only guess is hope and the word “angel” presents itself to me and I think, yes, and I walk by her without saying anything even though she looks up at me and smiles. The feeling doesn’t leave me while I wait for Alex and Marilyn, who eventually come out. We stand around, talking, Alex smoking a cigarette, and the girl walks out of the hallway with two guys, but she’s looking at me, smiling, and maybe it’s the tequila kicking in, but I get that feeling like the room is spinning in three different directions at the same time, but this time it’s continuous and faster and doesn’t stop until I smile back.

Alex finishes his cigarette and we start to leave and I see the girl again, talking to those guys, her back toward me. The room doesn’t spin but the feeling of hope surges as I get closer to her and she turns her head toward me, her hair whipping over her shoulder, and she’s smiling and as she does this the thoughts of futility come back because I know I am in control. I’m on the verge of another epiphany and with a chill it comes into focus and I’m finally able to articulate it. I look into her eyes and realize the tragedy of disorder, but it’s inevitable so I keep walking. My hope in all things fades as I go down the escalator, as her unchanging smile becomes more distant and I realize maybe it wasn’t even me she was looking at. Alex and Marilyn have their arms around each other again and I’m back to normal, maybe worse, as we walk out the doors and back onto the Strip.

A successful Thanksgiving

2010-11-27T16:59:00.000+01:00

Last Thanksgiving was sort of lame. I went to work, came home and probably had chicken nuggets for dinner. Those were the good days when the grocery store sold bags of frozen chicken nuggets. Those days no longer exist. I don’t have a freezer anyway, so I guess it worked out.

I was never really that into Thanksgiving, but always had a traditional dinner with the family. Mom spent the day cooking, I sat around watching t.v. or reading. We had dinner, sat around, maybe had a nap, then had dessert.

I missed having that tradition last year, so decided to organize a collaborative Thanksgiving dinner with the other Americans, half-americans and honorary Americans (Canadians).

I didn’t expect anything too formal or spectacular and figured something would be better than nothing. There were 6 of us, each cooking a traditional dish or two...turkey, mashed potatoes, candied yams, spinach casserole, stuffing, etc. I volunteered to cook the candied yams because candied yams are damn good and my favorite Thanksgiving food.

Perfection.

Since Thanksgiving isn’t a German holiday, one can’t just mosey on down to the grocery store and pick out a frozen turkey (I’ve since found out this isn’t the case, but they only have tiny little baby turkeys) so I contacted the Institute cafeteria about ordering fresh turkeys. Through some miscommunication, we were conversing in German afterall, they ended up ordering two 7.5 kg turkeys. That’s 15 kg of turkey, approximately 33 lbs! A bit too much for 6 people.

We ended up inviting the entire department to dinner, and had what turned out to be a spectacular Thanksgiving. For some it was their first Thanksgiving dinner, others had never even had turkey before. They seemed genuinely excited for the experience. It was the biggest Thanksgiving I’ve ever had.

We even had digital fire.

All the food turned out great. The turkeys were awesome. And, of course, the candied yams were a hit.

The Number Game

2010-11-09T01:10:00.000+01:00

Most of the time, over the years, we change into better people through a natural process where we recognize our faults and character flaws, and work to correct them. This is an admirable evolution. Sometimes, though, a good quality, or a powerful one, gets mistaken as a flaw and is excised through this process.

Back in the day I used to play this game called "The Number Game" with my buddy Terrence. How you played was, you see a girl and you rank her on a scale of 1-10. It was a fun game, and we were notorious for sharing a strict and cynical standard of grading. These numbers were no trivial metric to toss around. We took the game seriously, and measured as objectively as possible. Thought went in based on previous rankings as well as a full analysis of the current candidate. Discrepancies in rankings could be argued and discussed until a number could be agreed on. We were thorough and honest. As a result, I don't think most women would have been pleased with the game, or the results. It was only the most daring, curious or stupid that would come to us demanding to know her number. The rest just complained about how subjective and sexist the game was, and how disgusting we were. I think, though, they secretly enjoyed the attention.

I have two memorable experiences from the Number Game. The first is one of the most beautiful girls we ever saw, and the highest number ever given. A 10 was tacitly reserved for perfection (like I said, we took the game seriously), and as such an abstract concept, could never be awarded with certainty. So this girl got a 9. If we had played to the tenths, she would have been a 9.8 or 9.9. She was wearing a tight, sparkling dress and standing outside the Bellagio, on the north side of the lake. She had straigh, black hair. Long legs. Tanned skin. She wasn't overly made up or slutty like most of the chicks on the strip, but had a natural ease and beauty. She didn't seem to be seeking attention, wasn't flaunting anything, just comfortably radiating beauty. We stared at her in shock, not even hoping to find a flaw as we usually did for high ranking girls. When she walked away, she took the fun of the Number Game with her, and shortly thereafter we stopped playing.

The other memory is earlier and not as surreal. We were at a party in Reno. It was the type of night where I was carrying cans of beer in my pocket. We were playing the Number Game on the balcony. Our friend Cassie was also playing. She ranked a girl as a 6. I thought this was overly generous, as she was clearly a 3, maybe a 4. Her boyfriend, however, who had overheard, found this quite offensive. He confronted us, drunk and angry. Cassie escaped his wrath, I wasn't so lucky. I had no defensive ground to stand on since it was clear to me that in playing the game, I was the bad guy. So I tried to explain the game to him and that a 6 is actually a good number. His girlfriend agreed and tried to get him to leave. He wasn't having it though. He was drunk and I fully expected him to hit me, and could tell that he wanted to. Instead, he took the unexpected route and asked me how I'd like someone ranking my girlfriend. It's very rare where you're in a moral situation and have absolutely no claim to being right. There was nothing I could do but apologize and feel like an asshole. I would have preferred a punch in the face. Shortly afterwards though, someone tried to stab another guy in the kitchen, and my lesson was lost in a blurry memory of violence and cheap beer, and we kept playing the game until we saw the 9.

What reminded me of all this is that here we play a diluted, less obvious version of the Number Game. It works on a simple binary answer, 0 or 1, to the question, as my friend Brandon would ask, "Would you beat?"

Perhaps I haven't matured so much over the years, but somewhere along the way I developed a disgusting sense of empathy. Whereas, outside of the one incident where I was guilt-tripped by a drunk guy, I played the Number Game with complete disregard of the possible effects on those being judged, I can no longer play it as emphatically. And even now with the new version "zero" or "one" is said softly, under the breath. It seems like an enlightened view point, understanding how other people may feel and making an effort to decrease the negativity that may originate from you; doing your part to make the world a nice, happy little place. But sometimes I think back to those early days, to the kid who said what he thought with impunity. It wasn't my problem if you lived under the delusion that your reality was mine too. Those offended were out of touch and irrelevant, and I couldn't be held responsible for their reactions. Maybe I was mistaken, but I miss those days.

Some Vocabulary

2010-10-25T23:52:00.000+02:00

I took a beer class in my last semester as an undergrad. It was taught by one of the most unnecessarily pretentious and arrogant people I've come across, but as "professor" of the beer class (he was a bar owner) he was personable to the students, so he was tolerable. He would often say things that bordered on profound, but never quite crossed the threshold. Once he asked what the difference was between a doctor and a janitor. Education was only part of the answer, skill-set another, but the real, underlying difference was....vocabulary.

I've mentioned before college words, words that affix themselves to the lexicon of the general college population. Lexicon is actually probably one of those words, but there are other words like innate and all it's synonyms, society, per se, paradigm the get comically overused.

I'm certain this is true for any field, and only gets worse as the level of professionalism increases and the vocabulary becomes more esoteric. Law for example is peppered with words no one else would think, dream, want or be capable of using. Probably the same on a movie set. Science, it seems, is no different. Here are some often used science words:

Ascertainment bias: when there's a bias in the way the data is collected, or ascertained.

Parsimonious: the simplest explanation.

Sexy: there's a big movement to make science sexy.

There are many more, but of course I can't remember any at the moment, and it would get pretty boring, I'm sure, if I keep going. The point is, because these words are repeated so often, they act as an intellectual crutch for the new scientific mind, reaching, grabbing and struggling to make it's first foray into scientific discussion. If anything, you make sure you can discuss these concepts as they pertain to your research, because somebody will probably bring them up.

For me it's a platform of contention, because using these types of words feels contrived, but at the same time they're useful and expedient. Often times when I read a research paper, there will be concepts I don't understand because of the vocabulary they're using. After some reflection, I'll realize that the concept is actually quite simple, but they've complicated it by using lofty terminology. I think this is a danger in science, this pressure to elevate the subject through esoteric and non-intuitive language. At the same time, there are papers that use unconventional phrasing in a creative sort of way, that is equally hard to wade through. I suppose that means, in the end, a widespread, common vocabulary is the best solution. Or maybe some scientists can learn to write more clearly.

The NY Times Loves Leipzig

2010-09-17T13:01:00.000+02:00

Check it out:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/travel/04Next.html?pagewanted=1

Just Like the Old Days

2010-09-14T15:44:00.000+02:00

Back in May I wrote about an experiment I was conducting: not having internet access at home.

Well, that experiment has come to an end. Not an hour ago I acquired The Internet at home. I survived 4 months without it, sort of. I was away for probably a month of that time on various trips, during all of which I had internet access. I also went to work almost everyday, if not for actual work, then specifically to use the internet. So it wasn't the most robust of experiments, actually, it seems kind of stupid since millions, maybe billions, of people live their lives completely separate the interweb.

In any case, it was life without a routine convenience I had grown accustomed to and wasted a lot of time on. As I mentioned two weeks into the experiment, lack of quick access to the outside world was motivating. It forces one to look beyond the couch and computer for entertainment. I developed what some would call a social life over these last few months, going out, playing sports, or simply leaving the house. And when I wasn't leaving the house, I was cleaning it or fixing it (the constantly leaking washing machine).

But there were also these tiny, sporadic annoyances. Take a day like today for instance. It's been raining since I woke up. It's a work day so I had to trudge through it anyway, but say it was a holiday or a weekend. Can't go outside. Nothing to do inside. I end up laying around all day and lose the energy to even read. But now, the world is at my fingertips, and, with some newly installed software, I can even work from home. Yep, remote access to all my data!

It's also a pain when you need a phone number, directions, want to order a pizza, rent a movie, or call your family and friends, but can't.

What I hope is that I've successfully cut the ties to the bad habit of internet abuse, that I won't waste hours being totally unproductive. It's a delicate procedure sorting out the necessary from the unnecessary, and one can get easily swept away.

Of course, right now I'm looking out on the drizzly gray haze, the impenetrable haze, and am content to sit here, hypocritical and unmoving.

Back in Leipzig

2010-09-09T22:21:00.001+02:00

I was at the zoo the other day for the Welcome Day for new students. The Leipzig zoo is home to the world’s largest ape exhibit and participates in research with MPI. We got a free tour because we are privileged MPI students.

When a female primate is in estrus, undergoes circumanal and genital swelling to indicate to males that she is, at that time, fertile. While we were standing in front of a viewing window discussing chimpanzee behavior, one of the female chimps came galloping over and immediately turned around and pressed her swollen genital area against the glass. Our guide laughed, patted the glass and explained she was just looking for contact.

Swollen chimp genitals

It reminded me of this one night in Vegas a few weeks ago.

What normally happens at a bar in Vegas, with my group anyway, is we go to a bar, get drunk, look around, maybe contemplate making a move but probably instead justify our insecurities away, and then leave.

So we went to Firefly one afternoon for happy hour. Firefly is a popular little tapas bar and restaurant. Good crowd for the most part. We have a sit down at the bar and start drinking half priced pitchers of Sangria and by the third one the bar is full and a group, two chicks and a guy, sit down next to us. The way we’re sitting, I’m the furthest away, so when these chicks start talking to us, they’re mostly talking with my two buddies. I’m mostly stabbing at the small pieces of fruit in my drink and staring at myself in the mirror.

Somehow over the course of the conversation, and after switching to beers, I end up sitting next to the blonde girl. I’m shocked when I realize this because I hadn’t moved, and now she’s telling me about how she met her sort-of boyfriend who lives in Denver (she was at the pool, saw him walk by, grabbed his belt loop and pulled him on her lap. Forty minutes later they were having sex). I’m looking at my buddies for an escape, but then something strange happened, something that has never happened before; she bought me a beer. So I stayed seated a bit longer, continued the conversation, and then...she bought me another one!

Is it emasculating to have a girl buy you beer? I don’t know, but it’s free beer. I’d like to say it’s about time that the tables were turned, but I’m not in the habit of buying drinks for women. Maybe I should try it sometime.

Oh yeah, the monkey thing.

At some point in our conversation while talking about her boyfriend she began to aggressively make out with me. We were just sitting, having a chat and she got a text. I asked if it was her boyfriend and she dropped her phone and lunged at my face.

I’m not a fan of PDA, but she had been buying me beers and it seems as a guy I have a responsibility to be receptive towards the sexual advances of young women. It was only a few seconds and then she went right back to talking. Later, her phone buzzed again and she stopped talking to check it. I said, “ah, the boyfriend.” She dropped her phone and lunged at my face again. This pattern went on for a while. Everytime her boyfriend texted, she’d jump at my face. It got annoying.

I motioned to close my tab and something even more unbelievable happened, she payed it. All of it. Insanity. So I felt obligated to stay a bit longer. She told me that as soon as she had sat down she had chosen me. My friends told me not to go home with her. Good advice. If I had been considering it, it became irrelevant as we stood up to leave. She looked a bit like a linebacker. Maybe she wasn’t so big, but bigger than her face suggested.

Well, all right, if you're buying me beer.

Dammit.

In the parking lot she asked two guys if they thought I was gay (a topic that had been discussed at the bar). Before they could answer she did her lunge thing again. You would think this behavior would be a turn on. It was embarrassing. Sort of felt bad for the girl. She invited me to her place. I left her in the parking lot.

Two things strike me about this encounter.

One, I feel like a whore, enduring molestation for free booze. But at the same time I have no remorse. I got free drinks the whole night. I wonder if this is what chicks feel like. It’s almost enough to make me change my opinion on the whole bar scene male-female interaction. Almost. When things function the normal way (guy buying girl drink) I think there’s more deception involved on the girls part. Then again I didn’t go home with the girl. Hmm, I’ll have to think about this.

The other thing is her decision making, or just the process, in general, of making uninformed decisions. Out of my group of friends, I’m probably the biggest asshole, the most detached, and the least likely to care about...anything, certainly not about picking up chicks in a bar (although I’m not opposed to it, should it happen). When she first got there, she sat next to two perfectly acceptable dudes, nicer and more attentive, as evidenced by the fact that they started talking to her while I was making faces in the mirror and balancing apple pieces on my straw. Plus, my one buddy is a notorious serial make-outer. But she somehow methodically eliminated them both and trapped me in her net of free drinks. It was an expensive and anti-climactic mistake, and she lost out on what I imagine she was originally looking for.

The chimp at the zoo ran off to go press her swollen genitals against something else, which is what I imagine this girl did too.

How to avoid becoming a serial killer

2010-08-26T09:11:00.000+02:00

I'm reading this book called "Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer. The Death Row Interviews." If you know me, that shouldn't surprise you. If you don't...whatever. It's supposedly the transcripts of interviews he gave, though sometimes I question its legitimacy. But there's this quote that cracks me up, literally makes me laugh, which doesn't happen often:

I have always felt deprived of underwear. I always felt that I would have really made it if I had all the socks and underwear I could ever use.

He goes on to say that the only time he felt sheepish during his trial for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 12 year old girl, was when they were discussing the odor eaters socks they found in his possession. It was too personal for him.

Being Home

2010-08-25T20:21:00.000+02:00

First, the changes. I'm no longer a Fulbrighter, my grant period ended a month ago, so I figured it was time to change the "focus" of the design. Actually, I think it's stipulated somewhere by the Kommission that I am no longer to refer to myself as a Fulbrighter. Yep, my days among the academic elite are over, and now I'm just a plain old PhD student. Not much else will change though. I'll still be in Leipzig, still writing about probably the same old things. Hmm, maybe I should expand my purview sometime.

I've been home for about 2 weeks now, and have fallen back into the routine of lounging around not doing much of anything. My parents have a very large tv which I lose myself in front of every now and then. HD, clear picture, hard to look away. Started reading three books simultaneously, always a mistake. Now I won't be able to finish any of them before I leave. Maybe I'll have enough room to bring them back with me. It's a comforting feeling, being around books. One can never have enough. I have three or four boxes of textbooks from my 6 years of undergrad. Never got rid of a single one. I'd like to take them too. I have more of an interest in reading them now than I ever did when I was supposed to.

Speaking of school, I did manage to get up and visit UNLV yesterday. This week is the first week of classes. Still on odd feeling, when you know school is starting and you aren't going. I forgot how hot it is on campus, and how nice it is walking into a heavily air-conditioned building. As I was walking around in the glaring sun, reminiscing on the better part of a decade I spent there, I was surprised by how fortunate I felt. It's easy, and common, to put down UNLV for not being the best school, having a low graduation rate, not having a campus community, things like that. Those are legitimate drawbacks, and while it may not have been able to offer as much as other schools, going to UNLV enabled me to do a lot.

I stared off there quite begrudgingly after being rejected from other schools. It was considerably cheaper than the other schools though, so I was able to take my time, and a lot of classes. I technically started as a political science major (never took a single class in that subject in 6 years) but immediately fell into the aimless collection of credits, taking whatever seemed interesting and somehow satisfying all of the core requirements along the way. I always had a feeling that I had fallen through the cracks, there was never any administrative concern for my progress, although, why should there have been, I hardly ever "check-in" with any of my advisers. I didn't know what I wanted to do, so they couldn't really help me, although the Honors College did try (thanks Lisa!). I went off to Germany for a semester, which, as you may guess, started this whole affair (my current life). Finally, in my senior year, well, fourth year, I decided it was time to choose a major. I had been pursuing Anthropology, lazily and unofficially, for a year, but it was physical anthropology I was most interested in, and not the pseudo-scientific cultural anthropology program that was available. I also liked writing, so I narrowed the decision to English or Biology. Obviously I chose bio, but it was a hard decision at the time, and I still wonder, and sometimes wish, what if I had chosen English.

If I had gone where I wanted to, Harvard or Stanford, I would either be in some serious debt, or would've had to graduate in 4 years, probably as a political scientist, maybe English or Anthro, definitely not bio. I maybe wouldn't have heard of the Fulbright, and certainly wouldn't have been mature enough to get it. I hardly consider myself mature enough now. It seems more likely that it's all been a giant fluke and I've just somehow infiltrated the system.

I didn't get to see all the people I wanted yesterday, but stopped by the Honors College and had a nice catch-up with the Dean. The Honors College...it's a large factor of all that stuff up there and definitely enhanced my experience. I owe them a nice tribute, but another time, there's far too much sentiment floating around already.

A sleep deprived (and temporarily lost) farewell

2010-08-17T04:59:00.000+02:00

Well my friend, it’s been an epic summer. One for the ages, to look back upon in hazy recollection and satisfied approval. It is memorable not only for the activities, but also for the transition it represented for both of us, the end of one chapter, the beginning of another. We don’t have a clue about what lies ahead, but it looks bleak and grey. We have only a slightly better idea of what we did this summer as we lost ourselves in the best way for one to lose themselves. I believe, though, that we successfully stripped this summer of its poignancy, as it should be, through the nearly complete indulgence of our inherent degeneracy. We briefly weighed our options, then gave life the old middle finger. Perhaps, though, through indulgence we purged our demons, purified ourselves for a more optimistic, less cynical outlook. Yeah right, what we actually experienced is probably the closest to enlightenment we’ll ever get, and now we move on to something more dull and empty. A cruel joke of life is the hope for salvation, the light at the end of the tunnel. But maybe it’s more like the father and son in The Road and when you reach the end of the tunnel, you find that the light is actually a baby being roasted over a fire and what lies beyond is far worse than you imagined. Maybe the tunnel is our salvation and by losing sight of the light at the end, we found a path we could rejoice in. For a few months we did it right, we lived life.

Good and bad, here’s what stands out:

World Cup: It was, at the very least, an excuse to dive right into the action. How about those Germany games, horns blaring down the street, loud music, black red and gold everywhere. The one time they’re allowed to be patriotic. The games were a nice constant for a month. No matter what was going on, we had soccer to watch.

Berlin: I mean, for containing one of the most horrible decisions we’ve ever made, it was pretty fun. But we made it, and learned our lesson for future travels: never, ever, stay out all night just because you’re catching the early train.

Paris: We certainly saw a side of Paris most tourist, other than fellow backpackers, probably never see. I think we can put the middle east on the backburner now for potential vacation spots. But like most things new and bad, it exists, somehow, as a positive memory. We definitely found the low point of bitterness walking around the empty streets of St. Germain that night, but also, almost as a sign, found the brighter side not 30 minutes later.

Smelly Reudnitz: What a god-awful dump and terrible inconvenience. I suppose I’m partly to blame for procrastinating. Sorry man. If there’s one thing to apologize for, it’s definitely Reudnitz. It was so bad we instituted an anti-curfew, which didn’t help in the saving money category.

Killi Willi: Cheeky pints of Guinness and darts.

Safran: Get a little of that Murg Korma up in ya.

Park days: Frisbee, grilling, beers. What a life.

The lake: Leipzig has it all, even beaches. A bit awkward with all that nudity, well, the naked old men anyway.

Staubi: It takes 6 times to start liking that place.

Prague and Munich: the last hurrahs. Good relaxing times. Europe's finest brews. Destruction of our livers. Train fiascoes.

The Impenetrable Grey Haze: This will be the legacy, our gift to the world.

Munich: How many liters can the stomach hold?

2010-08-07T15:10:00.000+02:00

Last weekend we went to Munich for what was to be our last trip of the summer. We got off to a rough start, took the wrong train and ended up in Berlin. You see, it was early and we hadn't had any coffee yet. We got to the platform 15 minutes early and there was a train already there. I'm pretty sure the sign said "Arrival from Berlin," which is where our train would have been coming from. It didn't actually say anything about the destination, although we saw Munich written on the train. So we got on. And 5 minutes later the train started moving. German trains leave on time or late, they certainly don't leave early. We exchanged a glance of disbelief, which was enough to confirm that we were going to Berlin. The DeutscheBahn employees were surprisingly understanding and once we got to Berlin they let us ride to Munich without charging us anything extra. The little mishap only added an extra 3 hours to our trip, which we spent in the restaurant car drinking beer!


Train beer.

Mmm, Jaegerschnitzel.

After checking into our hostel (Wombats, not bad. Not great either) and getting our free 0.2L wee beer, we set out for some traditional bavarian food and real beer. Real beer comes in liter steins, although they call them Mass (pronounced like moss) in bavaria. I remembered there being an Augustiner beer hall to the west of the train station, so went that direction. Found an Augustiner restaurant and went in. Wasn't the beer hall, but turned out to be a nice place for dinner. We normally try not to order the same thing, but neither of us could resist the Riesenjaegerschnitzel, a giant slab of breaded meat with mushrooms sauce. Oh yeah, good stuff. Somehow we only got a half liter of beer, but dealt with it. We found out later that if you order a "grosses Bier" (large beer) you get a half liter. If you want a liter, you have to actually say "Mass." With nothing planned further than dinner, we decided to keep walking down the street to find the beerhall. A few blocks later, success! Found that beer hall and went right in. Weird thing about proper german beerhalls, or restaurants for that matter, you find your own seat. When the hall is full of cafeteria style benches, you gotta get a bit familiar with some strangers. The promise of large mugs of delicious beer is enough to help overcome any social anxiety though. What's amazing is that 2 liters of beer only costs about 11 euro. How about that America.

Of course, being in a german beerhall reminded us of our many fond memories of Oktoberfest nights at the Hofbrauhaus Las Vegas, and we decided we owed it to ourselves to see the real one. We weren't expecting too much, I wasn't anyway, because we heard that the Hofbrauhaus is full of tourists, very drunk tourists. Plus our Hofbrauhaus set a pretty high bar. Well, we were pleasantly surprised. Although it wasn't our wildest night at a Hofbrauhaus, we had a good time. Ended up sitting next to a large group of drunk Australians. They were comical, but they were also having a good time, so it was hard to hold anything against them. In any case, I get a kick out of watching the social interactions of drunk people, and there's no shortage of them at the Hof. It was actually these old men, probably regulars, who were the most audacious. One kept grabbing one of the Australian girls, petting her ass when she wasn't looking. She would get a shocked look, mouth open, eyes wide and slap his hand away. But then she'd let him do it again. Another old man was walking around grabbing random cups of beer and spinning them upside down. He came over to me and started talking a strong bavarian accent, which might as well be another language. From what I could understand he though I was someone famous. Also, the Munich Hofbrauhaus has these employees, the Green Shirts, whose job was to forcibly remove those deemed to be to drunk or unruly. Most of the old men became victims of the Green Shirts, and there was almost a fight when one tried to kick out a frat boy looking guy.

The next day, having had such a good experience in Prague, we wanted to go on a tour. Preferably a bike tour, but we couldn't find any information on one, just walking tours. But then, fortune is always smiling down on us and right as we left the hostel a guy handed us a brochure for Lenny's Bike Tours. Ah, quick note about the hostel. As we were leaving our room, right outside of the door next to ours was a pair of boxers full of poo. There was also some smears of poo on the door. Isolated event on our trip, though I imagine it might be more common than anyone would like. Also throughout our stay we'd get random whiffs of vomit. Not surprising, but still unpleasant. I imagine in a few years I'll probably be too old to stay in hostels. Poo and vomit just aren't that much fun anymore.
So the bike tour, we go on it and get to ride these sweet cruiser bikes with handle bars that made us feel like we were riding a chopper. We see the historic sights and learn a bit about the history, of course. There's no cute british girl involved this time, but we do get to stop for lunch at a beergarden in the very large park in Munich. This particular beergarden also has a chinses tower. I had been there 4 years ago and it was my favorite place in Munich, so I was glad to be back again. Had a Bock bier, 8%. The beer goes to work when you drink a liter of it. Finished the tour and went back for a nap to prepare for the night ahead. We weren't sure what we were going to do, but knew at least a few liters of beer would be involved. There were some pub crawls and beer tours we had heard about, but then we slept too long to make it to any of them. Instead we went on our own tour of famous Munich breweries.

First stop was the Loewenbrau brewery, where we got to sit in the lovely beergarden. Had a dunkeles Mass (dark beer). Mmm yeah, just the right amount of sweetness. Had a half chicken for dinner. Haha, earlier in the day, in the main square Marienplatz, there were all these animal activist booths for Animal Rights Day. Everywhere you go in Munich there are visibly cooking slabs and chunks of meat. The celebrate carnivorism hourly. Can't imagine it's a good town for vegetarians.

Next stop was Spaten. As far as we could tell they didn't have a biergarten or hall, just a smallish restaurant that had some beerhall qualities. Very nice place. Very empty. Not a problem. We made the mistake of order "large" beers, got the damn half liters. But hey, that just necessitated having another, real, beer. Spaten isn't the best beer, better than any "American" beer, but by our elevated palates nothing to celebrate.

We didn't know where the other breweries were, so we decided Hofbrauhaus was as good as any. What do we find when we get there? Locked doors and security guards waving us away. Bummer. Not being the club types, or knowing where a regular bar was, we went back to the hostel.

The next morning, Eric was struck by the great idea of going to the Hofbrauhaus for breakfast/lunch. "I won't let it have the last laugh," he said. It's possible that we've reached the level of degeneracy where we drink beer for breakfast, but fortunately it was 1130 or so when we got there. Ate some wurst, drank some beer and then off to the train station. We got on the right train this time and made it back to Leipzig in time for our traditional welcome back indian food dinner at Safran.

Prague Blog or Serendipity Drinks Liquid Luck Part II

2010-08-04T17:43:00.002+02:00

We wake up in the morning and have the tasty all you can eat breakfast at the hostel. It's a trend I kind of like, hostels having all you can eat breakfast, or "brekkie" as they often call it. It's a british thing I suppose.

We wonder the streets of Prague with vague plans to maybe go on a free walking tour of Prague. No upfront costs, just tip the tour guide if you feel it was good, that's what they advertise. We visit the Patagonia store where I contemplate getting a spiffy raincoat like Eric's. But then, Patagonia is much too expensive, even in Prague. Nonetheless it has that outdoorsy appeal. You know, like how everytime you walk in an outdoor store and they have all these cool solutions for the modern outdoorsman and you want to buy it all, even though you hardly ever venture into an occasion where you'd need it. Good to be prepared though.

We meet the tour at Starbucks. Despite whatever attitude people have toward Starbucks being an evil corporation and all, it has become quite a hub of authentic foreign interaction. You can guarantee that in any given touristy city, the Starbucks will be filled with people from all over the world. It may not be native to that particular culture, but it sure does cut through cultural boundaries. We could be snooty at sit in an authentic and empty Czech coffee shop, or we can be citizens of the world and be among our fellow inhabitants. Anyway, we meet the tour, have an afternoon coffee. Some guy offers me drugs.

There's a lot of people, it is a free tour afterall, and it takes a bit to get everybody in order. A cute girl with a British accent gives us a number.

One thing about traveling around foreign places, I enjoy people watching. Weird, I know, because I hate people. But it seems that in some way, by looking at people you're acknowledging their existence and that, to me, is satisfying and validating. Not specifically because it's me doing it, but in the sense that, for a moment, some random person from somewhere far away is thinking about you, looking at you and wondering what your story is. Every once in a while the person you're looking at stirs something in you and you feel an urge to do more than just stare, but to have a conversation. Of course, I never act on this because that'd be weird and probably futile.

This is what happens with the british girl, and it turns out she's a tour guide. Our numbers are too high though, so we end up with Daniel, who turns out to be a native to Prague and a pretty good guide.

The most useless clock in the world.

The tour is 3 hours and we go around the main attractions, learning the history of Prague and the significance of both the well-known and obscure monuments. It's quite an enriching experience, this tour and we wonder what Paris would have been like had we done a tour. Probably not much better we conclude. At one point Daniel does a pitch for the Pub Crawl the tour company puts on. He also mentions a Beer Challenge that he's giving later. Our ears perk up. We try to avoid Pub Crawls mostly, because we just assume they're full of drunk american college students (we find out later this is, in fact, the case), but a Beer Challenge is too intriguing to pass up. So we do it. A bunch of other New Europe tour guides come along too, because it's Daniel's last Beer Challenge. The british girl is one of them.

It's not really my style to mention transient attractions. It makes me feel a bit like an teenage girl, overflowing with emotion, writing in her diary. But I was feeling a bit bummed because this german girl I had been seeing in Leipzig had just broken it off. It wasn't a big surprise, so I wasn't seriously depressed or anything. But it doesn't take much negative influence to send me into that contemplative darkness I'm so often plagued by. I'm sure you see where this is going, into that ridiculous optimistic romantic cliche, guy is sad, guy meets girl, girl is cool and makes guy feel better. I won't bother trying to explain it more because I don't understand it. I'm in Prague, on a beer tour, drinking beer, but it's a girl who enriches the whole experience. How silly.

So it was an uplifting night for that simple fact alone. But the tour was really good as well. We went to 4 different Czech bars, one of them the brewery we had visited the night before in the rain, and where Eric had wanted to go to dinner on this night. Serendipity. The tour ended at a bar called Propoganda, which is decorated with authentic communist arifacts. There's a dancefloor there with a giant statue of The Joker looking over it. And there were people grinding against each other. Ah, the american dance style. Hadn't seen that in a while.

Refugee train

And so, we left Prague the next day with, of course, more train frustration. We had to sit in the conjoining room between two cars, right next to the bathroom. We weren't alone though. We shared our little area of floor with 2 other people and, in all the cars we could see, the aisles were full of the seatless. There certainly was no shortage of awareness of historical analogies to our situation: our refugee train full of the dirty and wretched packed in like sardines and heading to Germany.

Prague Blog or Serendipity Drinks Liquid Luck Part I

2010-07-27T19:42:00.001+02:00

I've never used the word serendipity or its derivatives until this summer. I swear, it is the best word to characterize what happens when Eric and I walk down the road not knowing what to do but having the intention of doing something. So...

Went to Prague this past weekend. I recently wrote about my trip there 4 years ago how much I disliked it, but I decided to give it another chance because 1) it's only 4 hours away from Leipzig and thus cheap to travel there and 2) it probably couldn't be worse than the first time.
I was a bit sceptical at first that it'd be any different. I was sure that my dissatisfaction was the city's fault and had nothing to do with me. I was also a bit excited, if anything for the adventure. We had also booked a neat looking brand new hostel with a much better location that stupid Sir Toby's.

The train ride there isn't too bad, though we sit in front of these annoying drunk guys, 1 american, 2 germans. Loud and obnoxious. The american wants to learn how to say "I want to sleep with you" in German, the germans are happy to oblige. The iPod drowns them out, but even the 2 seconds of silence between songs make me cringe. Eric must suffer the same intrusion as his head shakes in disgust every few minutes. But hey, we're going to Prague, what are you going to do.

One euro is equivalent to 25 Czech Koruna. We get 5000 of them and go on our merry way to the hostel. It's called Mosaic House and exceeds our expectations. It's more of a mix of a hostel and hotel. Quite nice looking, modern and energy efficient, all that sort of stuff. Our room has one of the nicest bathrooms I've seen. Weird thing to see in a hostel. Most of the time you're afraid to step barefoot in the shower (Paris), or can't have a poo without your knees touching the wall (Paris). So, for once, the hostel isn't a burden we have to suffer. We of course celebrate with a hostel beer.

A hostel beer

We wonder around a bit, heading toward the Old Town Square and looking for something to eat. It's such an easy task, walking in Prague, and we get there in no time.
It's a visually rich city, that I had already known. It offers a lot in terms of architecture and design. There's a lot of random statues on buildings of naked people.

We walk by Wenceslaus Square, start quoting Love Actually, move up the street to the Astronomical Clock and a large statue in the Old Town Square. Hunger is starting to creep in more heavily, so we consult the map and choose a restaurant describe as authentic called the "Hanging Garden." It's across the river and up the hill, but we finally find it and it's delicious. We had noticed along the way that at many places beer is only 29 Korunas. We do some quick math and it's like 1 euro basically. Holy shit! Our hearty Czech dinner and a few beers ends up costing around 200. 8 euro. Very dangerous.

We go into sort of a food coma and decide to make our way back to the hostel for a nap, with the intention of going out later for more beer. It starts raining though, which forces us to abandon our nap and prematurly enter whatever pub we stumble across. Turns out to be the oldest brewery in Prague, a destination that was actually intended for the next day, but it's raining and we're sure they have enough beer for us to come back tomorrow too.

What the rain makes me do

We start off with a Budvar, I venture into the Porter, Eric to the Oldgott. It's still raining so we have another and are entranced by the weird 80s music videos playing on the tv. Prague, it seems, has a great taste in older music. What we hear coming out of the bars and stores we pass, it's like walking through my childhood and I'm flooded with great memories of elementary school. Ah, the golden days!
It stops raining a bit, but not really. Eric is equipped with his spiffy rain jacket and is wrapped up like a condom, a very dry condom. I'm in a long sleeve shirt, which is only soaking up more water. His ideas are usually better.
We go to another bar called U Sudu, enticed by it's description as an underground labyrinthine bar compound. Indeed it is and we start buying rounds, which usually ends up out of control as we want to stay even on the debt, but loose track and just have to keep going till we don't care.
We don't even mind when, while sitting peacefully, we're overtaken by a hurricane of american study abroaders. We talk about writing with one of them until she starts saying "writing is hard" over and over. One girl aloofly and condescendingly remarks that "y'all sound american" in her Kentucky accent. One guy takes my chair while I'm up getting drinks, then refuses leave. As I sit down in the chair next to him he says "Hey bro, I'm not trying to disrespect you or anything." Eric astutely remarks that we just don't fit in. We go back to the hostel happy though that we're differentiable from the stereotype.

Jenseits der Stille

2010-07-11T17:35:00.000+02:00

I guess it's been a while.

A lot of fun life events have occurred, and have kept me quite busy. So a recap:

1) Old roommate and friend Eric arrived to stay for the summer. Despite his long journey we proceeded directly to the consumption of german beer, this being his first trip to Germany and continental europe. Well, first we met up with some other college friends who also arrived in Leipzig that very same day and played frisbee. Then drank beer. It turns out that drinking large quantities of beer does *not* help with jet-lag. In fact, he got sick, but soldiered through it, and things progressed in this binge-like fashion for the next few weeks.

We took a trip to Berlin for a weekend. We did some touristy things in the brutal Berlin sun. And then more beer. Hostel beers, Sony Center beers, park beers, etc. Favorite mistake: We decide we'd take the early train, 7:50, back to Leipzig on Sunday. Due to underage youngins, we couldn't get much sleep at the hostel anyway, so thought it an appropriate challenge to just stay out all night on Saturday, come back in the early morning to grab our stuff and then head to the train station. We thus explored the Kreuzberg area, an area I knew to be laid back and full of cool bars (see May Day post!). One bar, two bars, three bars...I do recall walking out on our tab in one bar, very poor service, and we did try for a good 30 minutes to pay. Our guilt was quickly forgotten in the next bar when we heard "Almost heaven, West Virginia..." come on the radio, unexpected but nonetheless divine. Hostel beers followed by a bout of misogyny followed by a lucidity-ending mojito...recommendedof course by a woman. An empty, dull club, in Berlin, the claimed cool club capital of the world, where we drank much too much and found refuge in the warm atmosphere of the tourist infested karaoke bar and then sat alone contemplating the weird ways in which life manifests its shittiness. The sun came up and we somehow made it all the way back to Leipzig, but not before completely losing it in a delerious fit of laughter, 2 sausage mcmuffins, 2 donuts and very large and hot coffees. Mission accomplished though.

2) Parents come for a visit. This was their first time to Europe. I say out of the country, but they've been to Mexico, which technically counts as a different country I suppose. They folded a visit to me in with the dream vacation to Paris. It was a strange collision of worlds for me, and I didn't handle it so well at first (sorry parents). After some time alone in the unfamiliar, it seems you develop a peace with the foreignness and make it your own. And without the influence of your previous life, it really does become your own. With the arrival of the familiar, you can't help but view it as an intrusion. Of course, you welcome the intrusion because you happen to appreciate and love it, and you brush off the thought as silly, but it does take some getting used to. Add to this a few liters of Germany's finest, and you get to a point where, out of necessity, you need to realign your outlook and tell yourself to calm the fuck down. It worked and things went much smoother. They did have a good time, and it was fun introducing them to my life over here, which must to them have seemed fake or at least somewhat abstract.

And then on Sunday, Father’s Day, we went to a beer festival. It had over 900 beers. What more is there to say?

3) Paris. Along with the visit to my neck of the woods, my parents took the opportunity to live out their dream vacation, Paris. Eric and I joined them a few days later. I had been to Paris before, 4 years ago when I was in Luneburg for my semester abroad. It was the first city I had been to where I wasn’t looking forward to the return to Germany. I remember it being an energetic, liberating city. And also, probably the biggest factor, the weather was extremely nice, sunny and warm, quite the departure from the cold and dreary German gray. That was in April 2006.
The experience in June 2010 was a bit different. Intense and exhausting. Full of tourists. And hot. Not like a Vegas dry heat, which is sort of tolerable, but a heavy, humid rainforest heat, like wearing a blanket in a sauna. Long days accompanied by a fountain of sweat and a list of things to get done. Oh, and Paris is expensive.
An important aspect of visiting a city is where you stay, and it has a large effect on your overall experience, even when in a big city like Paris, where you probably mostly aren’t in your room. One of my favorite trips was to Krakow, Poland, and there we just happened to be staying at The Stranger Hostel, which had been voted one of the top 5 hostels in the world. Friendly staff, easy location, and they even let us spend our last day sitting in the common room watching movies on the projector drinking vodka out of the bottle. And, of course, Krakow is a really neat city. For comparison, one of my least favorite visits was to Prague, a city about whcih I had and still haven’t heard much, if any, criticism. Nevertheless, neither I nor the group I was traveling with had a great time, and we all concluded this had a lot to do with the hostel we stayed at, Sir Toby’s. Facility-wise it was actually the nicest hostel I’ve been to. Sadly, decoration and design mean little when the location is terrible and the staff abysmal.
Paris, being the expensive tourist hell it is, has surprisingly little to offer the financially strained student backpacker in the hostel area. Most are located well outside of the main city destination, but smack in the middle of the multicultural ghetto. Our first day walking around, it was easier to believe we were in the middle-east than Paris. This wasn’t such a big deal, as it afforded us the opportunity to see a Paris that maybe most tourists don’t get to see. And there certainly was no shortage of internet shops. The biggest drag was that they’re a good 20 minute metro ride away from the center. Exciting at first, riding the metro, but then it loses its appeal and just seems pedestrian. And hot, packed with all those Parisians and tourists. We also had to change hostels every morning. The best, if you ever venture to gay Paris, is St. Christopher’s. It’s actually the farthest away, but the neighborhood is vibrant, especially at night. And it had little curtains on the bunk-beds.
We did all the typical touristy things while there, so I’ll stick to the highlights. I thoroughly enjoyed the catacombs. Not too much of a surprise given my healthy interest in death and other related macabre things. And it’s underground and dark. Oh, and full of bones, neatly piled walls of bones, decorated intricately with skulls. I must admit I was sort of expecting full skeletons and corpses lying in carved out holes in the wall. But I’ll take a maze of bones, and the anonymous hollow eye sockets of once living, breathing, and thinking Parisians.
For Eric, a student of American literature, a main attraction was the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, once the hangout of the American ex-pat writers. It’s not the original store that clairvoyantly supported struggling writers like James Joyce, but it does carry on this literary tradition. It’s a haphazard and disorderly collection of books, stacked wherever there is space, and has a nonchalant appeal because of it. As a shrine to the Beat generation, it just feels appropriate. Even the people, workers and patrons, were cool, and not the elitist literary types you’d expect. There was a simple and electric excitement for books, almost like a bunch of little children in a candy store.
The nightlife/bar scene is Paris is not as penetrable as Leipzig or Berlin, but more along the lines of The Strip in Vegas. Expensive, glitzy, selective. We did find some bars, low-key and relatively inexpensive. One night, wondering around St. Germain, both suffering from an intense existential darkness made all the worse by our inability to find a bottle or two of wine, we serendipitously walked into a block party. Mistaking it at first for a wedding reception, we watched jealously, angrily, as people danced to the live music, said fuck it and went into the first bar we saw. There we met 3 euro beers and found out it was a party for everyone, a block party put on once a year. We left exponentially happier than we had arrived. And to hammer the point home, on the metro we sat nearby a girl passed out alone, hovering above a puddle of vomit. Despite the circumstance she had a peaceful and uncaring smile.

Jesse Weighs in on...American Politics? Sort of.

2010-05-19T22:06:00.000+02:00

While living in America I wouldn't have considered myself particularly politically minded, or even aware. I prefered to remain willfully oblivious of political issues, partly out of laziness, partly out of exhaustion just from listening to debates and partly out of lack of demand. By that I mean no one there really seems to care what YOUR political views are, they just want to tell you what theirs are.

Then I come to Germany and something strange happens, I suddenly find myself paying attention to and caring about American politics. It's mostly farcical in my eyes, and I often find myself shaking my head and wondering what's going on over there. From a foreign perspective, America really does seem like some giant, powerful baby, an underdeveloped, stubborn and self-righteous baby, stumbling around naively.

I think, though, that this may be an effect of media bias. The, shall we say, legitimacy of conservative media outlets like FoxNews is well known here and is not much more than a bunch of clowns throwing tantrums and committing predictable and egregious logical fallacies. The liberal media is better accepted, but seem to report heavily on the latest "wacky" conservative movement. Come to think of it, that's not so different than when I was living there. The conservatives were running around in circles barking and chasing their tails, while the liberals were just standing around staring at things. This is why I don't like politics.

I still don't actually, but, for a couple reasons am more aware. One reason is that people here are more politically opinionated, actually they're more opinionated about everything, but politics is a prevalent topic. They're also interested in America.

Another reason is that, as an expat, the abstraction of "home" becomes reified as an object outside of your immediate existence. As a result, I've become more patriotic. I don't walk around with an obnoxious american flag umbrella (something I've thought of doing, just to be provocative) or anything like that. Mostly my patriotism manifests itself in heated political "discussions" with people who have a tenuous grasp on what America is and how it works. I haven't been able to convert anybody, but we do get to the point where we can respectfully agree to end the conversation. Except with the Canadian, he just wouldn't shut up and obviously thought he was smarter than me. He's just a mechanical engineer though, so one can't expect too much.

Jesus Ascends and We Drink Lots of Beer

2010-05-15T18:13:00.000+02:00

Forty days after Easter is Ascension Day, the day Jesus rose up to Heaven. I didn't know this until this past Thursday, which was Ascension Day.

I also didn't know that Ascension Day is when Germans celebrate Vaterstag (Father's Day). Here in Leipzig it's called Maennertag (Men's Day) and is celebrated, to the exclusion of women, with intense drinking.

The tradition goes something like a group of men gather in the park in the morning with wagons or bikes loaded with beer, and walk around all day pulling said wagons and drinking said beer.

Wikipedia sums it up nicely:

Many men will use this holiday to get very drunk, so usually groups of drunk people roam the streets all day.

It's an actual federal holiday, Men's Day, and I imagine that most people end up taking Friday off as well. By 7pm most men on the streets were stumbling around palsy-drunk. Some were falling off their bikes. Others had given up and were lying on the sidewalk. Those still lucid enough to walk were chanting songs and sloshing beer.

If you're wondering what women do on Men's Day, they seem to enjoy letting the men roam free on their bingers. Some throw cheeky "Anti-Men's Day" parties, wherein I imagine they also get drunk. I saw plenty of groups of girls walking the streets bar hopping with the rest of us.

Three cheers for city-wide drunkenness!!!

An Experimental Anachronism

2010-05-11T21:44:00.000+02:00

I sometimes get in moods where I like to deprive myself of things I want but that are readily available, things like soda, a cookie, or more serious things like not going on facebook, not going out for a beer (that doesn't happen very often). It's sort of a personal test to see if I can live without always indulging myself. The answer is yes, but until now, it's been these small things that, in the big picture, are completely irrelevent, because tomorrow I'll probalby have a coke, eat a cookie and go on facebook. And the day after I'll have a beer, or 3 to make up for the previous 2 days. The real idea, the source of this test that constantly lurks in the back of my mind is abandoning all modern amenities, living in the woods and becoming self sufficient. You know, like growing my own crops, killing my own food with a stick, not paying for car insurance and pooping in a hole.

As a first step toward asceticism, I've given up the internet. Clearly not completely, but at my apartment, the new one that I moved into two weeks ago. You see, German bureaucracy precludes the distribution of internet access for shorter durations that it would take to cancel the contract. What I mean is, for most house related contractual obligations (phone, t.v., power, internet) you have to cancel at least 3 months in advance. Since I'll only be living in this particular apartment for 2, at the most, I get to live those 2 months internet free.

Before you think I was forced into virtual isolation, there is a company that provides internet on a monthly basis. Hence the experiment, which implies a concious and voluntary decision, one made partly out of intrigue, and partly out of laziness. I thought, eh, what's two months without internet at home. I'll either enjoy it and become more productive, or I'll hate it and suffer (this type of suffering being the religious kind, borne from penitence and somehow ameliorating). Either way, I'll be a better person.

My analysis 2 weeks in: it sucks. I realize it doesn't sound like much of a change. So what Jesse, you don't have internet at home. You have access at work, and you're there much longer anyway. You're right, but in response, I'd tell you to try it out. Well, first, you'd have to set up a constant environment, which means you must move to another country, leave your family and friends behind, along with your sense of familiarity, move into a dark apartment with horrible carpet and no window coverings, with no t.v., phone or feeling of being home.

Or perhaps my previous daily routine, at the old apartment, where I did have internet,revolved to heavily around being on the internet. Wake up in the moring, eat cereal, drink coffee while checking e-mail, facebook and the news. Come home at night, check e-mail, write blog, watch online t.v. shows, and often rent movies from itunes. Then there's little things like maps, wikipedia for quick reference information, reading science papers, and, of course, ichatting with the family.

The positive aspect of this is that now I get to work earlier and stay later, and when I am at home I read more and write more. So productivity has gone way up, but it's all in the context of there being nothing else for me at home. Which brings up a point of clarification. If it seems like I'm whining about not having the internet, I'm actual whining about what having the internet has done to me. I'm reading more, writing more, working more, and, if I lived closer to the gym, I'd be going there more, all because I have no internet at home, which makes me feel like there's nothing to do there.

The hard part is not having the every day convenience of being attached to a universe of information. No ichat, no quick location checks, no instantaneous indulging of curiosity, no companion references to books I'm reading, none of my favorite humor blogs before bed. Unfortunately, for me, these conveniences go hand in hand with internet abuse: wasting hours on facebook and youtube and other web based distractions from life.

I imagine, given enough time, I'll find a satisfying equilibrium and once again fall comfortably into a routine, although this time maximizing my production both on and off the internet. Or, the more likely scenario, I'll come to the conclusion that having no personal internet access, no matter how deleterious, is entirely unacceptable in the modern world, and when I move, an internet provider will be the first number I call.

And just to note, it's 9:30 pm and I'm still at work, writing this blog precisely because I don't want to go home.

You Can Call Me "Doctor"

2010-05-10T19:55:00.000+02:00

I got accepted to the PhD program at the institute. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In the Department of Evolutionary Genetics. It's a mouthfull, I know. But there it is.

I remember 4 years ago when I first saw this institute online and found out they had a graduate school. I thought wow, awesome research, in Germany and they have a grad school. Perfect. But I'm sure I'll never have the opportunity to go there.

Interesting how things turn out.

A spontaneous adventure

2010-05-03T21:42:00.000+02:00

I received this e-mail from the US Embassy last Thursday:

This warden message is being sent to alert Americans living and
traveling in Germany about the upcoming May 1 Labor Day holiday and the
potential for isolated unrest in Germany. The May 1 holiday (and the
preceding night) has traditionally witnessed large scale protests and
wide-spread vandalism in certain areas of Berlin and other cities in
Germany. These protests are often accompanied by clashes between
demonstrators and police, as well as property damage, burning of cars,
and minor looting. While largely confined to the Kreuzberg neighborhood
of Berlin, acts of violence have spread in the past few years to other
Berlin neighborhoods. There is potential for similar violence and
property damage in other large cities. Berlin police expect an increase
in violence, and there will also be an NPD (neo-Nazi party)
demonstration taking place this year in the Pankow area with a large
number of anti-demonstrators and expected clashes.

The U.S. Government is urging its employees and family members to avoid
the following neighborhoods in Berlin and Hamburg from the night of
April 30 and through Sunday morning May 2:

Berlin: Kreuzberg, Pankow, Mitte (southeast portion), Prenzlauerberg (Mauerpark area

So like a good American, I went to Berlin on Saturday. To get the full experience of disobedience, I stayed in Prenzlauerberg and hung out most of the day in Kreuzberg.

It was actually a coincidence, this email and me going to Berlin. I didn't go because I got an email telling me not to. I went just to have a day of hanging out with a friend and some of his friends from London. Didn't actually remember this email till the train ride there and it became a running joke throughout the day. It was only a playful, though legitimate secondary hope that we'd run into some sort of Nazi/Anti-nazi riot. The reality of the situation is that, while neo-nazis do exist in Germany, for every 50 or so of them, there are thousands willing to come out and protest against them. It's farcical really, and the police, who line the streets in full riot gear in some areas, are really there to protect the city (and nazis) from the foaming aggression of the liberal demonstrators. Apparently violence and other riotous behaviors used to be a problem in the early 90s. These days they throw huge streets fests with infinite supplies of sausage, beer and live music. This approach has proved to sufficiently assuage the aggression, and I saw no instances of violence, broken windows or flaming cars.

I did see two anti-climactic communists marches. Basically groups of disorganized young punks walking down the street with signs reading "Make capitalism history" and other such statements. This was all taking place in Kreuzberg, which is in what you would've called west Berlin during the cold war. It was also one of the poorest sections of Berlin during that time. It's now morphed into a "scene," sort of a grungy, young, cheap, multicultural scene. It's not overridden with hipsters like Prenzlauerberg, as you may recall from a previous post, although I think Berlin, on the whole, is just a big hipster city. Anyway, it's odd to me that, in a city that was once the battlepoint between capitalism and communism, a place that knows first hand the nature and effects of communism, there are people marching in support of it. They aren't screaming out "Give us back the DDR," not that I heard anyway, but DDR style is becoming trendy. The drab, barren material designs, driving a Trabant, a tendency toward a communal lifestyle, all manifested through the creative edgy mind of the modern Berliner. It's a step in an interesting direction. The younger generations are crawling out from the burden of the German past and reacting against it. The war still seems to be a taboo with some people, but others, mostly younger people, will talk about it relatively freely. And you even hear the very rare Hitler joke.

In any case, most attendees of the Kreuzberg street fest were simply walking around eating, drinking and sitting in parks. It was very fun, relaxing and peaceful. A far cry from the apocalyptic warning I received from the US embassy. The lesson here is that the US government doesn't want its citizens to have any fun. Not really, I think it's more of a reflection of the cry-baby victim attitude of americans. If there was *no* warning, and something violent were to happen with a US citizen involved, the government would either be sued for not notifying the public of the potential danger, or at the very least be publicly criticized for not showing enough interest of foresight to protect its citizens abroad. I can see it now, some crass, smug, self-righteous overweight conservative walking around redfaced with a mix of hate and despair in his eyes, mumbling something about nazis and fantasizing about how he's going to let the embassy hear it tomorrow. Ha, there's a thought. It seems that half of the population, the US American population, is crying about the communist, socialist, and fascist tendencies of the Obama regime, in the same sentence nonetheless. I'd like to put them in Germany, which has quite the polarized political spectrum (parties in the government actually range from legit communists to legit neo-nazis) and see how they react. Would it open their eyes? Sadly, I doubt it.

On the topic of America though, we ended the night, sort of, at a restaurant/club called White Trash Fast Food. It looks like a really kitschy asian restaurant, but is actually a parody of american white trash culture, and, essentially, a burger joint. You can get an Elvis burger, a mexican burrito dinner ("The way they make it in LA!") or a Marquis de Fuck burger, complete with Fuck You Fries. We saw the most awful cabaret/horror circus show ever. It was actually insulting how bad it was. Like, you couldn't help but wonder how stupid they thought we were in trying to pass of their stunts as original and shocking. It almost nearly ruined the whole night. I mean, that's a serious negative vibe to subdue the drunken wave that had been building up over the previous 12 hours. But fortunately we escaped to the basement for some dancing and, at that point necessary hard alcohol.

I found out today that there were some minor issues that day with nazi marches in Kreuzberg, but they didn't occur until the evening, after we had left the area. I do recall though, as were were walking toward the U-bahn (subway) a line of about 6 or 7 police vans speeding through the streets, lights and sirens ablaze.

A German Joke...

2010-04-25T23:58:00.002+02:00

How many electricians does it take to change a lightbulb?

One.

Everpresent Uncertainty

2010-04-25T20:18:00.000+02:00

It's a great day outside, but today is all about taking care of business.

Originally I was going to stay in my apartment until sometime in December, at which point my roommate would be moving back to the states. The date was then postponed until February, and again until April. No complaints from me. If you've seen the pictures, I live in an awesome flat in a really nice area. But there was no deus ex machina this time and the impending move out day has been drifting ever closer.
Life took a turn for the real a few weeks ago as I started my apartment search. I often feel that I lack the experience and maturity to be considered an adult, so situations like this, where I'm forced to do things by myself, are quite interesting, amusing and overwhelming. I have the added predicament of not knowing where I'll be in 4 months, when I'm no longer on the Fulbright and my contract at the institute ends. I made known my desire to stay on as a graduate student a few months ago, broached the subject again a few weeks ago, again a few days ago, and should be hearing an answer in the next week. My move out date, however, is Thursday the 29th. As such, I need to find a place to stay at least until August, and perhaps, hopefully, longer.
My options, beginning 2 weeks ago:

1) Get a room in a WG. A WG is a shared flat. So each person gets a room, usually 3-6 per flat, and shares a bathroom, kitchen and large hallway. These are pretty cheap (100-200/month), as the total rent and bills are split between roommates. But then, there are roommates. And sharing. It worked out quite well this time around, and before in the dorms, so I'm thinking a horror story is bound to happen. Plus, there aren't many available WGs in the area I want to live in, which is the area I live in now called the Sudvorstadt (south suburb). I can only say with certainty that I'll be here for 4 months, and most aren't willing to rent to someone who isn't staying for a longer time.

2) Get my own place. This is a slightly more expensive option, but a more appealing one. There are some really nice 1 or 2 bedroom places here for less than 500 a month. So I start looking, following this option, and immediately see that there's an available place on the bottom floor of my building! Great, I think. I like this area a lot, and the building, and it's all familiar, and it's easy. Everything works out. It is a bit expensive, but I'm excited at the ease and quick solution. Then I look at the place. It's lame. Certainly not worth the price. So I keep looking, this time for something cheaper and bam, I find another place. Very nice looking, from the pictures. Attic apartment, comes with kitchen. Wood floors, 2 rooms (here 2 rooms means, usually, a living room and a bedroom), and a bathroom. I look at it in person and it's perfect. The big problem though, I wouldn't be able to move in until June. Also, something I was starting to anticipate would be a problem, I wasn't sure if I'd be staying longer than August. I applied anyway, but still needed to solve where I was going to move out to, somewhere I could stay for just a month. Finally my deus ex machina shows up, a bit later than usual. A girl I work with moved into a new apartment, but wasn't able to get rid of her old one. She has the contract till the end of June, and it's been sitting empty. She agrees to let me move in for May, or to even take over her contract if I want to.

The ending to the story, for now, is a bit anticlimactic. I didn't get the apartment (I'm racking up rejections here in Leipzig, colleges and now apartments). I'm still moving out to the new place, since I have no choice, and have spent the day packing and throwing away large amounts of things I don't want. I did buy/inherit some furniture. Two couches, a bed, a washing machine, kitchen stuff, among other things.
Since I'm not sure about my future, I'll hold off on the apartment search for a while, although I should find out next week definitively what my options will be. But it still all kind of worked out. I can stay at the apartment certainly until the end of June, and probably even extend that until August, should I find that I am no longer welcome here after August. If I stay, I can resume the apartment search, or just take over the new one with a promise for new floors!

The move out day is Tuesday. Moving is as enjoyable here as it is back home. Except, instead of a car, I have a bike. Will be renting a truck on Tuesday.

The Sweet Scent of Evening

2010-04-14T01:01:00.000+02:00

Everyday when I walk into the elevator in my building, I smell this perfume. If this was a old time novel, a classic, I'd know the exact name and would tell you, which would be completely pointless because really, who knows what Chanel No. 5 smells like?
This smell is sweet, floral. But heavier than the smell of a flower, and somehow calming. I stand in the elevator and melt peacefully into the walls.
It's an old lady scent, that's how I've always thought of it. It smells like a grandma who still wears perfume. Plus, my building is full of old ladies. And young mothers with screaming demon children. One has the freedom to smell like this perfume, I'll let you guess who.
So when I go into the elevator, and smell this calming fragrance, I always think of some old lady, gray hair, dainty, yet still in tune with this historical sense of propriety. She still does her hair, lays out her clothes and sprays this perfume, obviously too much, out of one of those bottles with the long tube and squish ball at the end. Until today.
I walked in the elevator today and smelled this perfume, but mixed with a faint tinge of cigarette smoke and was immediately, uncontrollably, transported back in time to when this old woman was young. She had neck length black hair (I'm not so into blondes, so they aren't part of my fantasy, even though in Germany, she was probably blonde) longer in the front than in the back. She was wearing a red dress, narrow shoulder straps, and red lipstick; sultry and alluring, in that rough sort of way. She was in a speakeasy, and wearing the same perfume that she wears today. She was a sight, undeniably beautiful.
Then the elevator doors opened, and I stepped out and realized the faint cigarette tinge was actually an acrid wafting scent emanating from my jacket (I was at the bar), no longer being disguised by the heavy old lady perfume smell. I coughed and was left simply with a feeling of transience.

Scientific Discovery

2010-04-05T13:15:00.000+02:00

A cool paper came out a few weeks ago from the ancient DNA group (the group I'm in) at the Institute. It describes, based on mitochondrial DNA, a potentially new hominin species, meaning it existed after the human-chimp split, but before the appearance of modern humans.

To sum up, we extracted DNA from a tiny finger bone (the tip of a pinky) we had from Russia. This particular bone had great preservation which meant a high amount of endogenous DNA (most of the time the DNA from fossils is upwards of 90% contamination from outside sources or bacteria that lived on the bone). We were able to sequence the mitochondrial genome to quite high coverage and then compare this to the mtDNA genome of humans, Neandertals and chimps. Through analysis, we can compare the frequencies of similarities and differences and arrive at an estimated divergence time, or how long it has been since the two compared species shared a common mtDNA genome (i.e. the last common ancestor). This particular mtDNA genome had a divergence time of about 1.3 million years ago. For comparison, it is estimated that chimps and humans diverged about 6 million years ago, and humans and Neandertals about 800,000 years ago. The implication is that this bone came from a presently undefined species older than Neandertal.

There are some limitations to mtDNA, however. The entire genome, including the nuclear genome, is made up of thousands of independently evolving segments of DNA. mtDNA is only one of these segments and as such does not tell the entire evolutionary story. It's also maternally inherited, so will tell only one side of the story. What remains to be done is sequence and analyze the nuclear genome to come to a definitive conclusion on what this is and how it relates to us.

Here are some links to articles about the paper:

Time
Nature
Discovery
and there's even a wikipedia page!

Random German Things

2010-04-03T00:56:00.000+02:00

Since I'm working on a bunch of posts but can't seem to finish any of them, here's a whimsical little post about oddities and differences I've noticed in Germany.

1. Vokuhila is the German word for mullet. It stands for vorne kurz, hinten lang, which means short in front, long in back. Many people here have trendy mullets. I do too.

2. For the most part, German girls don't wear makeup. That is to say, most girls don't wear any makeup. Some girls wear it all the time, and they stand out and look fake. They also have fake tans.

3. Traffic lights here are inconveniently placed. At home they are on the other side of the intersection, clearly visible. Here they are on the same side of the intersection that you stop on. So they are nearly directly above the car and you kind of have to lean forward and stare up through the windshield to see them. I've thought long and hard about this because it is so seemingly poorly organized in a country where you can find logical in most things. Still don't have an answer. Also, the light turns yellow before it goes to green.

4. They don't like lines. May have mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating, because this too, like the street lights, doesn't seem to fit the stereotype. There is no personal space here, so if you're in line but not standing/touching the person in front of you, they'll just assume you aren't in line and walk in front of you. This is only if there is a line, like at a cash register. If it's just a crowd trying to go through a door, forget about it. The worst is at a bar trying to get a beer. No line, no order, no mercy. Definitely can't be a passive customer here.

5. Walking in a crowd is difficult. No one is overly concerned with getting out of anyone else's way. Sometimes people will bear straight down on you, showing no signs of sidestepping, or concern about running into you. I haven't been able yet to maintain my wits and see what happens if I don't move. Will have to try this sometime. As it stands, I walk a very jagged path.

6. There's this food called Leberkaese, which translates to liver cheese, but which is neither liver nor cheese. It's actually meatloaf.

7. Speaking of meat, there has to be thousands of designations for meats and sausages. They take it seriously. And cheese too for that matter. Lots of cheeses.

8. A liter of milk costs less than 50 cents.

9. With numbers, the meaning of "." and "," are switched. So you'd write 1,000 as 1.000. And 5.99 and 5,99.

10. Refrigerators are small. People go grocery shopping every few days, sometimes every day. Don't know which one is responsible for the other.

11. Ice cubes are very rare. Even in restaurants, you get only one or two, if any.

12. Contrary to intuition, German construction crews are very slow.

Success!!

2010-03-18T14:24:00.000+01:00

Success in the form that it's over and I'm alive. There was no booing, sighing, name calling or punches thrown, so I guess it went well.

The Big Presentation....

2010-03-18T10:01:00.000+01:00

...is in 3 hours. This may very well play a role in my future.There's a picture of Dr. Evil and Wayne Newton in it, so it's obviously going to be fun. Oh, and the caveman from the Geico commercial.

Sauna Etiquette

2010-03-16T00:31:00.000+01:00

There's nothing like sitting in a steamy wooden box sweating your nuts off with a bunch of naked people. No, really, I'm starting to enjoy the sauna, although that sentence is quite true. Another tick mark in the Jesse is assimilating category.

I play soccer every Monday with people from the Institute at an indoor place just down the street. I call it football now though because soccer sounds dumb (it'll always be soccer to me, but it's easier to say football, me being the only American that plays). Since the winter started, 6 months ago, we go back to the institute and "have a sauna" as they say.

To an American, the sauna is quite a strange place. I mean, I knew what a sauna was, but had never been in one. Having never been in one, I was unprepared for some of the details, like being naked. Yep, no big deal for the Europeans, especially the Germans, as none of them have any qualms with nudity, unlike the puritans back home (biggest porn industry, but heaven forbid you show nudity anywhere. Oh, what will the children think?). So no big deal, just a bunch of dudes sitting in the sauna. Being freely in the nude is actually quite liberating. What is most strange to my innocent american sentiment, however, is that the sauna is unisex. It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while, there will be women in there too. Naked. Just hanging out, chillin. Here's the tricky part, right. You kind of figure, and it is a tacit rule, that it's no big deal. We're all people, and the people in this culture just accept nudity, so I should too. Then again, it's a naked chick. And in the spirit of all this openness, why lie about anything? It would be a black cloud upon the free and unified feeling of the sauna, a place where people can come together, strip down and relax and be blissfully hot. And if I'm restraining myself from looking somewhere, well, that's not very relaxed is it. Besides, after 1 minute in the sauna, all traces of a sexual tinge are gone. It's nearly 100 degrees Celcius and frickin humid. You sweat profusely and your blood pressure drops. Soon you're just hot and miserable so you run out and take a cold shower, which is actually what you're supposed to do. It's supposed to have all kinds of crazy health benefits if you do it regularly. But I'll tell you, I can't sit in there for more than 6 minutes (15 is the "normal" length).

Here's a funny story. I was out at the bar on Saturday with a bunch of people from work. One guy recognizes a girl he's seen before. He says he's seen her 3 times, each time in the sauna. They see each other and the girl says, "Hey, it's nice to finally see you with your clothes on." I know, I know..cool story bro. But those are the types of introductions you have when the sauna is part of your life.

Schwarzfahren and Racist Bavaria

2010-03-09T21:25:00.000+01:00

"Schwarzfahren" is verb that translates literally to "to travel black" and is designated for the savage crime of riding a train or other mode of public transportation without a ticket. A Schwarzfahrer is a black-rider, one who rides for free. This title stems presumably from the corresponding negative associations of the color and the action, black being a dirty color, and unruly cheapskates being dirty people, and has nothing to do with race (although I wouldn't put it past the germans). If this, however, sounds racist to you, just wait, it gets better.

A few weeks ago I was in Bavaria visiting a friend for the weekend. Bavaria, as the german sentiment goes, is not Deutschland. Even in Bavaria, you quickly gather that they think of themselves as Bavarians first and Germans second. I'd equate it to the American stereotype of the backwoods hick: backwards and useless in a comedic sort of way. Bavaria, outside of the big cities, is a bit rural. Lot's of rolling hills and farmland, but with forests. It's quite scenic and pretty actually.
My friend lives in a small town rural area I call farmville. These towns are quaint and peaceful, meaning absolutely nothing happens there. The closest main train station is a 20 minute drive away, so, when it's time for me to go back to Leipzig, my friend usually drops me off at a tiny town called Pressath on her way to work, and from Pressath I go to Weiden, the main station of the area. Pressath used to have a trainstation, if you could call it that, but now it's just an abandoned building, or house maybe, so you basically have to wait on the side of the tracks for the train to come. There being no station, there's nowhere to buy a ticket, save from a machine that doesn't seem to work (or maybe I just can't figure it out).
The ride from Pressath to Weiden takes maybe 15 minutes and at that time of morning the only passengers are me and a few highschoolers. Needless to say, since there's nowhere to get one, I usually don't have a ticket for this ride. And usually, there's no one checking anyway. Also, I'm pretty sure you can buy tickets on the train, so on this particular day I wasn't too worried about anything. I board the train and see a DeutscheBahn guy walking toward me, so I figure I can just ask to buy a ticket when he gets to me, which is in a matter of seconds. He appears to already of some sort of attitude when he asks for my ticket, which I just brush off as typical german friendliness. I tell him that I need to buy one (in German of course) and he immediately asks for my Ausweis (passport). I say "Excuse me?" and he spits out gruffly, without even looking at me, Ausweis, and begins rummaging through his bag. I start looking through my stuff for my passport and he keeps saying Ausweis in a crescendo and says something to the effect that he's giving me a ticket. He's being a jerk though, and I know that the fine for Schwarzfahren is 40 euro, so I ask him in the familiar, informal, overly direct way "Was willst du?" (what do you want). Unfortunately it has the effect I figured it would and he goes into scary german mode and I can feel the door to hell opening slowly. I hand him my passport and he tosses a form at me and tells me to fill it out. Others on the train are watching, and Adolf here won't even look or stand near me, like he's disgusted or something. I ask him a question about the form and he says "It doesn't matter to me, you can take it up with the police." As he promised, when we got to Weiden, the Polizei were there to escort me off the train and to the Polizeistation. Fortunately they were much nicer than the dick on the train and let me explain that it was a simple misunderstanding, I thought I could buy a ticket on the train. They seemed less interested in that and more concerned in what I can only guess was verifying that I wasn't a terrorist. Gotta watch out for those scary darkies on the trains you know. They let me go with no penalty, but I did get a 45 euro fine from DeutscheBahn. Schwarzfahren, it just doesn't pay.
On the way home to Leipzig I got asked 2 more times for my Ausweis by the on-board Polizei. How this works is there's a DB employee who checks tickets (I had a ticket for these trains) and also Bundespolizei (federal police) who patrol the trains en route. They walk through the cars looking around I guess for suspicious activity. Basically they look around for darkies and ask for ID. My proof of this blatant racial profiling? Being in homogenized Deutschland, I'm usually the only brown one on the train, or at least in my car and, coincidentally, I'm the only one they ever check. One time they hit the jackpot and a brown couple was sitting near me. Guess which people, out of the entire car, got ID'd? At first I didn't mind, it was so blatant I figured hey, it's the brown ones that keep blowing shit up, why not be cautious. But then, getting constantly stopped and being needlessly escorted from a train can change a man's perspective. Interestingly, all this "show me your papers" crap only happens in Bavaria. Once I get into Saxony, the state Leipzig is in, nobody seems to care about my Ausweis, and most of the time, not even about my ticket. So there you have it, racism in Bavaria.

Sadly, mostly for your time and patience, the story doesn't end there. This is the exciting story of german bureaucracy. I had to pay my 45 euro fine by online transfer. They gave me the account information, who to make the transfer to, and all that. I go online and do the transfer successfully. Easy peasy. Today, 2 weeks later, I get a letter in the mail from my bank saying DeutscheBahn didn't approve the transfer because they need more information. The bank has a policy of not giving out account-holder information without their permission, so this letter was requesting my permission. The important thing here is: DEUTSCHEBAHN DIDN'T APPROVE MY TRANSFER. And I didn't find out until today. In the meantime, the deadline for payment expired. So today, in my mailbox with the letter from my bank (they were touching each other) was a letter from DeutscheBahn saying 'You didn't pay on time so now you owe us more money.'
So tomorrow morning I get to march up to the bank and struggle through a conversation with an unfortunate teller and get it all sorted out. If this was America, a sane and customer friendly country, I'd call up DeutscheBahn and unleash my wrath. But this is Germany, whose motto is Exalt the rules, damn the customer. Me being a lousy foreigner, I'll probably just get thrown in some sort of dark, enclosed space. So I'll just bend over and take the 7 euro late fine.

And, for a nice ending, the original ticket from Pressath to Weiden only costs 5 euro. So instead of simply taking my money and printing out a ticket, the douchebag called the cops, fined me 40 and created this whole mess.

Leipzig In the News

2010-02-19T11:06:00.000+01:00

Little ol' Leipzig made the New York Times 'Places to go in 2010' list.

This article, about the Leipzig art and music scenes was brought to my attention last night, while, oddly enough, dancing in a basement to electronic music. I've heard about both the New Leipzig School of art and of the top notch orchestra. But I have no idea what the art school is about, or how the orchestra sounds. I guess I should change this. It seems this spring and summer will be my chance. Fortunately, I am well acquainted with the underground electronica scene. One out of three ain't bad.

Also, I've realized I haven't written much about Leipzig, it's history, appearance and interesting facts. I think I'll do this in the near future.

Cat Legs and the Underground

2010-01-31T18:06:00.001+01:00

I was sitting on the couch eating gummi bears, reading a book called Computational
Genome Analysis, and drinking rum and coke. It was 23:30 and I had given up on the night. I had heard talk the day before of two parties, one an after-party for the Argentinian film fest, the other a yearly party called Katzebein, described to me as "alternativ und illegal," which is german for alternative and illegal. I was mildly intrigued, especially since the location was being kept secret, but brushed off the fantasy that it would be anything more than a gathering of institute people with some beer and a few speakers.
I hadn't heard from anyone, so I surrendered to the fact that this Saturday night would be spent warm and comfortably reading about codon usage bias in the E. coli genome. I was feeling empowered and self-righteous, the delusions caused by reluctant self-sacrifice, when I got an SMS. "Hey j, we go to cee's party by car. Meet us at Arndtstrasse 31." This meant we'd be going to Katzebein, the alternativ und illegal party. Cee had helped set it up the night before, moving beer and the generator he'd said. Generator means there's no power, I thought. And that means no heat. I was quite warm on the couch, and the book was just starting to derive the equations for calculating the geometric mean of probability ratios for codon usage.
I sat at the table in Arndtstrasse 31 with some people from the institute, a Serbian, Ukrainian and a Spaniard. The Serbian and Ukrainian both knew french. The Spaniard was fluent in german. We drank Trappist beer and talked about film and music. It was a pleasant departure from the ubiquitous science discussions, but I couldn't add anything to the conversation except "Americans don't generally like techno and wouldn't know or care about the difference between Drum and Bass and Minimalist," and "Yeah, I liked Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."
The driver of the car we were going by to Katzebein arrived around 1:30. I learned that the location had been e-mailed to a select few, and those attending were instructed to not use flashlights or bike lamps, or, if coming by taxi or car, not to park too close.
Outside a certain radius, Leipzig fades into your standard deteriorating east german crap hole. We pulled into a dark, abandoned industrial looking complex. It had all the signs of decomposition, broken windows, graffiti, crooked doors and forgotten scraps of metal. On a wall was a piece of paper that said KB0110. We were in the right place.
We followed a winding path through dark and eerily silent complex. We saw an open door and walked through it into a pitch black room. We stood for a second, laughed nervously and left hurriedly. We turned a corner and in the dark saw a single green LED light with another KB0110 sign under it. Around another corner was a single blue light. From this light, turning left, was a dark passageway lined intermittently with these small colored lights. They weren't bright enough to illuminate anything, so we followed them blindly, tripping over unknown debris and unseen ice. Turning right at the end of this dark path, with the moon now visible, we could actually see what we were walking through: the terminus of an abandoned train station. There were more lights leading off into the darkness and as we followed them we began to hear a faint thud of bass. Finally, there was a single blue light above a dark opening in the wall that was once a window. The music was louder now. We climbed in and nearly fell down a dark, debris strewn stairway that led to a cold, dark hallway. There were people now and the music was fully audible, the bass nearly tangible. I ran into a broken pipe sticking out of the wall and tripped on a crate of some sort. We came to the end of the hall and turned into the soft glow of a vibrant and raucous party. Half of Leipzig must have been dancing in this concrete basement, connected by series of rooms and hallways. The only real lights were shining on a disco ball in the main room, the rays reflecting back into the pulsing crowd and visible in the smoke and haze. The hallways were lit by LED lights floating inside of balloons. People dancing still wore their hats, scarves and jackets. The air had a tinge of marijuana. In one corner a group of people stood snorting something out of their cupped palms. Some people leaned flimsily against the walls, eyes half closed and oblivious. Others were passed out in the corners and dark recesses of the bunker. Most were dancing. Packed tightly, feet moving, eyes closed, hands in the air. In a brightly lit corner on top of a giant speaker, next to the solar-eclipse shadow of the disco ball, sat a toy cat, smiling contentedly above it all.

Jesse watches Avatar, thinks about stuff

2010-01-27T23:49:00.000+01:00

It was in 3D, of course that's going to make me think. My final, departing though as I was leaving the theater: no matter what I accomplish in my lifetime, to 99.9% of people my greatest achievement will pale in comparison to this movie. Mind you, I'm not conceding that this movie will actually be better, what I'm saying is this movie has such broad appeal, and really is quite an accomplishment, that my little world of science, regardless of its implications on humanity, will be largely ignored. What did James Cameron do? He created a digital (fake) fantasy world that defiles Earth and causes people to long for something they can't have. What does science do? Sorts out reality and reports it to the world, and saves lives only to get spit on by religious zealots, criticized, or sued.
Anyway, the movie was really good, and very impressive. It was in german, and I understood most of it. But the movie isn't what I'd call dialogue driven and you could probably get 90% of the movie without actually hearing anything.
Another event worth mentioning, it was so cold on the way home from the theater that I had to stop at a bar and have a shot of whiskey just to make it home.

Oh yeah, I have a blog

2010-01-24T12:45:00.000+01:00

Well, let's get right down to it. It's been a month, a lot has happened.

I went home for Christmas, and it was a wonderful visit. Family, friends, and lots of food. A lot of times my vacations, after they're done, can be easily outlined by where I ate and when. In high school Alex, Brandon and I went to Orlando for a DECA competition. It was a week long event and afterward, the only way we could remember what we did and when was by retracing where we ate. When did we ride the go-carts? Well, that was right after the apple pie skillet at the mexican restaurant. This actually doesn't apply to this trip because I can't remember when I ate what. The point is, I thoroughly enjoyed eating all the familiar foods again. Jimmy Johns, sushi, Settabello, Panera, Del Taco. What stands out more from the trip is the people: you all know who you are. And the dogs too, Piper and Zoey. It's easy to take for granted the value of family and good friends. Moving to a foreign country where you have no family or friends really accentuates things you've come to value. Once the fairytale feeling wears off, and you enter disenchantment as I have, you're left with an empty shell of the life you used to have. This may seem uncharacteristically sentimental, but it's the way I feel so screw you. Anyway, it was quite nice to see everybody and spend quality time together, and definitely made me hesitant to return to Germany.

A brief interlude on flying: international travel is aweful and exhausting. Especially when things don't go right, which happened going both directions. Almost got stuck in Chicago on the way to Vegas. It's hard to describe the despair of that situation. The plane broke down so they had to look for another one, in the mean time hinting that the flight might be canceled completely. This was when the entire east coast was shut down because of weather, so O'Hare was a complete zoo. And I had not been exposed to Americans in a few months and was used to the quiet calm of Germany. America, in comparison, is quite tempestuous. Noisy, overbearing, interfering and full of savages and weirdos, but somehow endearing. I was also exhausted, completely exhausted. But they found another plane and I made it to Vegas only 40 minutes late. Going back to Germany, I got stuck in Houston for 5 hours. George Bush International is a hundred times more manageable and calm than Chicago, so it wasn't too bad. I found the bar and got drunk. By myself. In an airport. Check that off the list. Germany was freezing and covered in snow. Herzlichen Willkommen in Deutschland!

Fortunately, to ease my transition and postpone my lamentations of my lonely german existence (which really isn't lonely, but self-pity works best with exaggerated delusions), my friend Tim came to visit the day after I arrived. Tim and I studied together in Lueneburg 4 years ago and did quite a bit of traveling together throughout Europe. He arrived in Leipzig exactly on the 4 year anniversary of my very first arrival in Germany, in Lueneburg. We later came to realize that it was both a symbolic and nostalgic trip. We hung out in Leipzig for a few days, then traveled to our old stomping grounds in Niedersachsen: Hamburg and Lueneburg. After more traveling woes, this time unexpectedly with DeutscheBahn we arrived in freezing Hamburg. There we visited an old friend from Lueneburg and one of Tim's friends from high school. The true gem of the trip was our visit to Lueneburg, our picturesque medieval german hometown. After 4 years, it felt surprisingly like we had never left. Once our feet hit the cobblestones, all the memories came rushing back, and we were transported to the days of yore. That, or I guess 4 years isn't that long. We did our tour down memory lane then got wicked drunk at our favorite pub Maelzer. Maelzer is a restaurant/brewery and has what may very well be the best beer in Germany. The old joke was you can't just have one pitcher, as one turned into 2 or 3. And who are we to break tradition. We returned to Hamburg free of inhibitions and found ourselves, not accidentally, on the famed Reeperbahn, Hamburg's depraved sex district. It's a lot like Vegas, but more liberal and free. If it has to do with hedonism, especially sex, it's probably available on the Reeperbahn. We stumbled into a german stripclub and got a german lapdance from a german stripper, which was not unlike getting a Vegas lapdance from a Vegas stripper in a Vegas stripclub. Then we found ourselves back outside on a street lined with prostitutes. In some places, outside of brothels, the whores blend in, and in order to get what they're offering you have to play your cards right, initiate conversation, buy them a drink, compliment them and make them laugh. And even then, the odds aren't good. On this street there's no need for such speculation and game playing. Every 10 feet, on either side, or stunningly attractive women aggressively pursuing you for sex, clawing at your arm, caressing your cheek, one after the other. It's a gauntlet of seduction, and probably disease. We made it out physically unscathed, my mind wasn't so fortunate. As soon as I checked to make sure I had my wallet, I took a contemplative nosedive into an oscillation of introspection and consideration of the world around me. What had we done? We paid a girl, someone's daughter, mother, sister, girlfriend, to stick her boobs in our faces then walked down a street, full of more motherdaughtersisterwives more or less throwing themselves at us for sex. What fueled them? The need for money? The need for sex? Is it rude if I just gave them money and didn't take the sex? Can you really offend a prostitute and if you can, does it matter? How can anybody ever love them? How can anybody not love them? We ended up running back to the hostel. I fell asleep, Tim took a shower.
The trip, for Tim, and probably me as well, was an ending to that chapter of our lives, the chapter of young, carefree undergrads. We'll probably never see Lueneburg again or the people we knew there. It was a visit, but also a goodbye. Of course, I'm still in Germany and it's only a 4 hour train ride to go back there. But there's really no reason to. It wouldn't be the same. But that Maelzer beer sure is good.

So I'm back in the routine of things. Working and living day to day. I made a resolution to dedicate myself more to learning, both science and german. I raided the library at the institute and found an awesome book on computational genome analysis, which is basically everything that's going on at work. My hope is that it'll give me a solid leap in the amount of crap I understand. The german resolution isn't coming along as well. I mentioned before that I've begun the disenchantment phase of culture shock. It's a documented and normal occurrence for those living long term in a foreign country. First comes the fairytale enchantment phase, where everything is new, different and wonderful. Then those difference aren't so new and they start to grate on you, and just piss you off. This is disenchantment. This is where I'm at right now. But since I've been here, both in germany and disenchanted, it's somewhat ridiculous and comical. But still, the mere sight of a german makes me snarl and everything they do is annoying. It's fun to sit around with other ex-pats and make fun of all the stupid little german things we encounter. Their accent, unwillingness to wait their turn in lines, their smug self-righteousness and of course, their latent anger, that german flare that started 2 world wars. Oh yes, they try to suppress it, but it's there and once you get a german going on some issue they feel strongly about, they'll express their opinion with frightening vehemence. You can almost see the flames of hell in their eyes, and the solid unyielding tone of their devil-tongue. In this rage, though, they somehow seem chillingly relaxed and all you can think is holy crap, I'm in 1935.
Anyway, after disenchantment comes acceptance and enthusiasm. I'm more inclined to be negative, it seems to be my natural disposition, and, now that I think about it, I don't recall ever being enthusiastic about Germany while actually in Germany. I suspect that I really do like it here though, will come to feel that way again, but will still express my disenchanted sentiment.

Oh it will be nice to be home.

2009-12-18T18:38:00.000+01:00

Rode the bike into work this morning. It was 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside. That's 22 below freezing. My hair froze. My nose started running and then my snot froze. And the bike gets terrible traction on the ice, go figure.
This, of course, means I have to ride the bike home. Right now it is 34 degrees BELOW FREEZING. That's -2 degrees. I'll most likely be walking with the bike since that's probably the safest way. It kind of makes you really not want to do anything. The bar sounds fun, but getting there sure doesn't.
Right now it's 55 in Vegas.
I don't think I've ever talked about the weather so much. Someone asked me if people in Vegas talked so much about the weather. I said yes, actually. During the summer, everyday people walk inside and say, boy it's hot out there or I can't believe it's so hot.
It's neat though, being in such a different climate, seeing the weather change dramatically.

Der Schnee macht alles ruhig

2009-12-17T17:22:00.000+01:00

A melancholy mood proliferates as the german winter sets in. It's easy to recognize, difficult to escape. For a lot of things, recognition is the first step to healing. But when the temperature drops permanantly below freezing and the sun can't break through the infinite span of thick dark clouds, you can recognize all you wan't, but you're left with no energy or drive to do anything but pull the blankets closer or order another beer.
Thankfully I'll soon be heading home to the warm sunny desert to escape the mental desolation of winter for a few weeks. Family, friends, dogs, car; all the familiar places and faces. Joyful reuniting. Impertinent drinking. And actually knowing what's happening around me. I'm even looking forward to the annoying fake degenerates that frolic around my city unaware and oblivious. It's the Vegas vapidness that will surely propel me through the dark german winter that lies ahead. It may suck out my energy, but not my hope for humanity.

Residue of an Epiphany

2009-12-06T16:53:00.001+01:00

You ever get drunk, come to a great realization and forget it completely the next day? I do have the memory of having realized something though, which is nice but somewhat frustrating.
I watched a girl skillfully evade a would be suitor on the dance floor last night. She literally twirled and swayed across and around the entire dance floor for 15 minutes trying to get away, and he followed her, like a dog. It was pitiful to watch. And amusing. I hope to never be that guy, but then, maybe there's nothing wrong with being a clueless tool. At least he tried. I stood leaning against a post the entire night drinking whiskey by myself.
Some would say that I tend to have misogynistic views, and while it's true that I more readily express my negative view of women, my opinion of my own gender is just as bad, if not worse. Being a man, the actions of other men are mostly irrelevant and don't fall to analysis or discussion. But since we're here, yes, the actions of men are also lamentable. I don't even have the drive to describe why, so I'll just throw out words: use, lie, deceive, opportunist, sex, etc. It's enough to justify women's behavior. It seems there's a war going on between the sexes, each one reacting to the other in a race to maintain dignity and not be the one to get screwed over. The question is, do you suit up, prepare for battle and set out with the intention of being a destroyer, thereby perpetuating the war? Or do you play the peaceful savior, showing the battle-worn that there is indeed something good and true? In the way of an answer two things come to mind: nice guys finish last and even Jesus got crucified.

Where I apply to grad school

2009-12-04T10:51:00.000+01:00

It came down to the wire, but I submitted my applications to Berkeley and Stanford. Harvard isn't due until next Tuesday, so I took a bit of a breather after getting these two in. Everything is written now, so I'll just have to adapt the Statement of Purpose a bit to Harvard and turn it in. Easy peasy.
I talked to Dr. Paabo about possibly staying here to do my PhD. He seemed receptive to the idea and didn't give me an outright no. He encouraged me to wait a few months, see how I feel then about the institute and see where I get accepted to. Good advice I'd say. If I were to get into these schools, it'd be a difficult decision indeed. S, B and H are three of the top scientific institutions in the world and not only attract the best scientists but also the best graduate students. Many people at the Institute too have told me to not take the decision lightly. The benefits of staying here are similar though. We have some of the best scientists in the world, or access to them. The research is highly intriguing and exciting. And my PhD would be more self-directed, which is good and bad for me. I'd say I learn better when it's just me, however, in a directed environment, not just me, I'd learn more broadly, get that kernal of understanding an numerous fields. Of course, with a little initiative and ambition, I could learn everything by myself too.
Fortunately at this point this is all speculation. It could be that I don't get in anywhere and I can join the ranks of Fulbright burnouts. I don't know if they exist, but I'm sure they do. Not every Fulbrighter achieves victory, or wants to. I don't want that to be me. If I do get accepted anywhere, I can look forward to taking some trips for interviews and the like.

Where I go to Berlin, take the GRE, hate the world, have a beer and still hate the world

2009-12-02T10:58:00.001+01:00

I wrote this last week after returning from Berlin, but for some reason never posted it.

I went to Berlin a couple of days ago to finally take the GRE. Berlin is one of my favorite cities in Germany, if not Europe or the world, but after living a few months in what apparently is the calm, quiet east, it was shocking, the vibrant energy, the noise, the smell, the reality. What a city.

But first a note about trains. I took the ICE from Leipzig to Berlin. ICE are the fast, expensive trains, and they are way nicer than the other kinds. When I go down to Bavaria to see Ana, I have to take these RegionalBahn trains or other short route types. They are slow, therefore cheap, therefore full of savages and degenerates. The ICE was full of quiet, business people reading newspapers or working on laptops. The others are full of drunks and retards. Literally. And they stink. Not that it's too disturbing. I just have to pretend that I'm Henry Miller, willfully forsaking the comforts of life to experience the salt of the earth, raw life.

To continue with Berlin...I stayed at the Circus hostel, which is where I stayed 4 years ago with Tim and Shelby. Back then there wasn't much going on in the neighborhood. It was quiet, calm, underdeveloped. There was, however, a burgeoning avant garde vibe as it was a cheaper district and so was attracting artists and alternative types. Fast forward 4 years and I come out of the subway and don't recognize anything. It's a congested intersection with glaring lights, restaurants, bars and lots of construction. I have a test in the morning so I don't give it too much thought. These things happen. I do find a Currywurst stand across the street and get a free beer at the hostel bar. I note that I have already won Berlin.

I get up early to walk to the testing center in the morning. I feel special walking through Berlin. A citizen of the world, or something like that. Begin to take my test and immediately notice that my mind is blank. I struggle through the writing section, don't even finish the math, start to find the groove at the end of the verbal just in time to hit my stride in the EXTRA writing section, which I complete not without a heavy dose of sarcastic bitterness. I get my scores. They suck. I leave to find the fabled Maria Bonita mexican restaurant to cheer me up.

You know how when you're pissed off your mind gravitates toward thoughts that just fuel the fire? That's pretty much the main theme of my long walk to and from Maria Bonita. What follows is an indictment of the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, and hipsters in general.

I mentioned before that Berlin struck me as different, different than before and way different than Leipzig. After a few blocks of feeling bad about myself, I focused my attention on articulating what these differences were. The area I was in, the once quiet but subtly exciting artist district and somehow degenerated over time. I had heard the night before that in the last three years, all the artists that had settled the area had moved to a cheaper part of town and in there place had come the ever late hipsters. And what the district had turned into was a giant hipster ghetto. If the artists are the sharp edge of the blade that cuts through all the bric-a-brak, then hipsters are the top of the knife, the useless dull part that does nothing but follow those who pave the way. Of course, once they converge somewhere, the rest of the population, who are even more obtuse, swarm there too, to feel the diluted, second-hand intellectual vibes. The result is the commercialization of a disheveled lifestyle. Tattoo and piercing shops, hair salons, tobacco stands, hot topic boutiques, hip restaurants, ghetto bars and a lot of construction.

I find the restaurant and take a break from my bitterness. I have a couple of beers and chat with the American ex-pats who cook delicious mexican food in the land of bland meat and potatoes. If you're ever in Berlin, check it out. Maria Bonita, Danziger Strasse 33. And then I order a bunch of food to go for Ed, who is waiting excitedly for it in Leipzig.

Sometimes beer and food help, sometimes they just propel you further into caustic introspection. All this talk of hipsters and I started to wonder, what the fuck is a hipster. I have a concept of one. I know one when I see one, can pick one out of a line-up. But it's still somehow a nebulous concept. I look around and the people walking, to find a definition. Angular ironic haircuts. Okay. Wait. Shaggy hair with a beard and an ironic sports coat. Hmm. Tight pants. Sunglasses. A detached gaze in the eyes, but clearly in tune with fashion. Dark colors. Bright colors. Damn. I blame my inability to articulate a definition on the dilution of principles (later Ed would define a hipster as one whose exaggerated sense of irony applies to all but themselves). I see a chinese restaurant, complete with gold dragons outside. In chinese like letters, the restaurant is called "White Trash Junk Food." I smile, but realize this area has become to self-aware. I don't know what they call hipsters in german, but I'm pretty sure if I knew then all I'd be hearing was hey, hipster, I'm a hipster too, have a hipster day. And then bam, the difference between Leipzig and Berlin. If they were people, Leipzig would be the calm, humble one, saying Here I am, and Berlin would be screaming Hey I'm Berlin, look at my dick. That is to say, Leipzig has a concept of itself but does not broadcast it, rather it lets you discover it at your own pace.

I got back to the hostel and left Berlin immediately.
I still like Berlin though. I just won't be taking any more tests there.

Onward Toward Tomorrow

2009-11-17T10:35:00.000+01:00

I've decided, after procrastinating and forgetting, to get the ball rolling on these grad school applications. Now that I only have 2.5 weeks to get it all done. I don't know if it's always been like this for biology, but most schools don't offer a Master's degree, so it'll be straight into PhD for me. I hear the best way to go about this is to find people whose research you're genuinely interested in, contact them directly about their lab, express your interest, see if they have open positions, etc. I'm actually already at the place where they're doing the most interesting research, and they have a PhD program here, so ideally I'll just get to stay here and continue on next year as a student. It is, however, unwise to put everything in one option, especially the option you want most, so I'm applying to a few schools in the states too. And the schools that, as far as I can tell, are doing interesting research in the field of evolution, are good, and consequently where I'll be applying: just Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT. Yep, just like senior year of high school, aiming high. I did learn my lesson though, after multiple rejection letters, so I'll probably throw in a bit more reasonable school too. I'm not sure how much weight the Fulbright carries with it, but I'd like to think that with that and my experience here at Max Planck I'll be a pretty strong candidate. Despite wanting mostly to stay here, I also don't want to be rejected by a bunch of schools again. So I'll have to begin again the painful process of writing a Statement of Purpose as well as the beloved Personal Statement.
On top of all that, I'll be taking the GRE next Wednesday. Way to put that one off till the last minute too Jesse. It's hard for me to take these tests seriously, but I'm buckling down and studying as much as I can. They have no big study books for the GRE in this country, so I'm relying only on the internet. Took a practice test. Got a 1340. Don't know if that's good or not. I always say just get a 100%, then you know your golden. The math portion seems to be quite basic and remedial, but I underestimated it in the practice test. so I've been doing algebra and arithmetic problems in my spare time. Fulbright Fellow spends time doing 8th grade math. I also tend to make really dumb mistakes. The verbal portion is a bit more straightforward, you either know the words or you don't. The remedy, learn more words. I have to go to Berlin to take the test, so it could be a cool little trip. Go up on Tuesday, stay the night, take my test in the morning, maybe have a bit of a walkaround. I heard about this really good, authentic mexican restaurant there, the first of it's kind. Mexican food, or the American, is conspicuously absent in Germany. Not to say that there aren't mexican restaurants, but they're poor approximations to say the least. One of the major things that people, ex-pats, say they miss here is mexican food. I think this is cool in that it shows how, despite being AMERICANS!! we still assimilate other cultures and come to appreciate some of the things they offer. That this mostly applys to food, especially considering the conspicuous difference in personal width between home and here, is no surprise. But it's a touching realization nonetheless. So, I'll probably try to find this place and have a nice post-test fiesta.

He Remembers once seeing the Sun

2009-11-10T15:09:00.000+01:00

So, what's been going on...doing some pretty cool research with potentially interesting conclusions, that I won't really be responsible for. The way it works now is I do the lab work then the data gets passed up the intellectual hierarchy to those capable of analyzing it. With genomes there is so much information being generated that it's impossible to conceptualize with the naked human mind. Hence all the computer stuff I'm learning. This is, of course, on top of the profound understanding of molecular biology, population genetics and evolution in general that is required. I'm still struggling to grasp it all, still have a marathon or 5 to go, and so am quite happy doing my part in the lab. It's simple and grounded in there. It's when I sit down in front of the computer or listen to the doctors talk that I truly meet my limits. And that, my friends, hasn't happened to me very often. Here it's a daily occurrence. I'm happy to report though that instead of being discouraged, I'm inspired to learn more, read more and do more. It's certainly not an overnight process, like studying for a test, which is how I'm used to learning. It's slow, but there is progress. I still maybe understand 5% of conversations here, but that's much higher than when I first got here, which was more along the lines of understanding a few words but having zero grasp on the concepts. It's good company to be in; great people to learn from.

The sun was out for a few days last week for the first time in a month. It has since been blotted out, probably for the next few months. It rains a lot, which is not so annoying, except when I have to go to work or home, riding my bike, getting soaked. It's a strange effect the weather has on people. Very subtle, almost subconscious on a personal level, meaning you don't really notice it straightaway, but gradually come to realize that something is off, that people are a bit more moody, you're a bit more depressed, negative, lethargic, introspective. Not a good combination. It really shows how delicate our minds are. I almost said psyche, an over-used college word if there ever was one. I used to like all these words, but came to hate them in college because they are used as buzzwords for elevating the statement above the intelligence of the speaker. These are words like: society, inherent, innate, intrinsic (way to ruin the whole concept), per se, I really hate that one. I'm sure there are others, can't think of them though.

Went to this crazy party/club last Saturday night. I guess it's what happens when you mix an abandoned textile factory, a commune of artists and probably a lot of drugs, throw in a dj and some bars then open it to the public. It was like being in a mechanized Dr. Seuss book. There were metal tentacles wiggling on the walls. A giant couch that ate people. Beds that circled through the club on a track. A Star Trek like command post. Empty fountains that functioned as chairs. And the best part, three bathtubs arranged vertically to make a fountain that people were getting naked and playing in. It was so interesting that I didn't get home till 10 am. And what else is cool, you get a pfand (deposit) on bottles you bring back to the bar. So when you run out of money, you can go pick up or steal people's empty bottles, bring them to the bar and get free drinks!

In the News Today

2009-10-29T10:34:00.001+01:00

Vegas made it in the news twice so far today.

One story has to do with the rising number of homeless teens who've been kicked out of their houses by their parents who "can't afford them anymore."

The other story is about foreclosure rates. Vegas is ranked #1 in the country.

I'm so proud. To the rest of the world it now seems that in my dear home city to keep your house you have to get rid of your children. But wait, I didn't know people actually lived in Las Vegas. Aren't they all just blackjack dealers and prostitutes anyway?

Good job CNN.

Endlich, An Update!

2009-10-26T20:41:00.000+01:00

It's been some time, eh?
I've been pretty busy these last few weeks. Work is picking up a bit. I'm working on a new experiment, this time with Neandertal DNA! The last project was a success. It's being sequenced now. Actually, this most recent project should be sequenced this week too. Not sure still to what extent I can talk about these things, you know how it is. The competitive world of science. But later this week I'll be working with actual Neandertal DNA sequences. I'm getting nerdier by the day over here.
Went to Bavaria this weekend to visit Ana. The rest of Germany makes fun of Bavaria a lot for being full of country bumpkins, unintelligible dialects and lederhosen. It's not uncommon to here a "german" say that Bavaria isn't really Germany. I think Bavarians as well have a sense of prideful isolation. Bavaria, represent....that sort of thing. In any case, there's a noticeable change in the landscape as you enter Bavaria. For me, going south from Leipzig, it's a change from run down, half abandoned creepy east german towns to very green and scenic hills and forests. It's quite a scene actually, enough for me to just stare out of the window in awe. It feels so foreign, but inviting. And then, through the forests you come to these little timeless villages, shrouded in fog, quaint and rustic, but also slightly foreboding. We took a day trip on Sunday to two towns called Pottenstein and Gößweinstein. There's a pretty big cave in Pottenstein called Teufelshoehle (Devil's Hole). Interesting feeling, walking around inside of a mountain. Gößweinstein is the type of town you imagined when you were a kid writing a letter to Santa Claus. It has that warm, slightly surreal feeling of christmas. And a really big church. It's also on top of a big hill, so was obscured by fog. It's probably comparatively dull in the summertime. The sun makes things so much less mysterious. I imagine then it gives you that I hate visiting grandma feeling. Then we went back down the hill and I ate ostrich that I cooked myself on a rock.

And...

2009-10-15T13:14:00.001+02:00

It's snowing.

The old man talks about the weather

2009-10-14T10:32:00.000+02:00

That's because the weather is crazy. Not in the sense that it fluctuates, but it's what, a month in to fall and right now it's...37 degrees outside. Yep. 37. Oh, it looks nice outside. Blue skies, sun shining, trees changing color, but that hollow cold is waiting to slap you as soon as you walk out the door.
Yesterday was similar. The sky was blue after about a week of clouds and rain. Looked nice and inviting. It was 40 and as soon as I got on my bike to ride to work it started hailing.
The other day someone asked me how cold it gets in Vegas. I said, about this temperature. Not much colder except at night.
I much prefer the cold to the heat. Not that I enjoy being cold, but having to choose between the extremes, the cold is easier to deal with. You can bundle up, layer, take something off if you get hot. Move to get warm. Besides, when you freeze you get numb eventually and, I hear, experience a state of euphoria before you die. In the heat, you sweat, your armpits and back get all moist, you take some clothes off, still sweat, and then you burn. Then you get dehydrated. Nobody was ever euphoric before they had heat stroke. They were just miserable and then they died.
So it'll be exciting to see just how cold it gets here.

A Video Blog!

2009-10-11T21:59:00.000+02:00

Because I'm in the mood for something different, and in no mood to write:

Life Touches Down in Leipzig

2009-10-09T11:06:00.001+02:00

With no more big trips planned in the near future, I finally feel like I'm living here. Unfortunately this has so far turned out to be quite dull. To add something to my repertoire of going to work, occasional trips to the grocery store, and coming home, I finally sorted out the gym membership stuff and started going. It's nice to exercise again, lift the weights, run, ride the bike, and while I'm certainly taking the Greek 'cultivation of the mind and body' approach to life, it's entirely without the escape of some good, old fashioned hedonism and debauchery.
Add to that my still undefined position at the Institute, and my slow recovery from the Oktoberfest failure, and you can see why this blog has taken a dive toward the negative. Back to work, I'm beginning to understand that the project I originally intended to work on is pretty much over, so in terms of a project, I don't know what's going to happen. I've been doing lab stuff, which is good experience, can't complain there, but it's the capacity in which I'm working that concerns me. Then again, if I'm just helping others in the lab with their projects, that diversifies my experiences. I suppose it ultimately doesn't matter. I'm glad to be there, working and learning.
Which reminds me what all this is for, me being a Fulbright in Leipzig. Grad school! I need to get on the applications pretty soon here. So far I've been looking at some pretty top tier schools back home (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard) and also the program here. If I do well in my work here, the grad program seems like a pretty legitimate opportunity. But I'm still applying to schools back home, and obviously need to find some middle tier schools. Don't want a repeat of undergrad admissions. Rejection...rejections...wait list...oh, thank god for UNLV. Then again, that certainly didn't turn out badly. So, this weekend: start some applications. And probably next month sometime I'll have to go up to Berlin to take the GREs. The good, or bad, news is that I've already missed the deadline for the subject tests, so I won't be taking those. They're not required at any of the schools, but recommended. I took a practice one, it was difficult. Kind of glad I have no choice but not to take it. All this means I'll have to write a personal statement soon. Joy. I know I like to call myself a writer, but those just suck. But now I get to use pretentious sentences like "As a Fulbright Fellow..." "While in Leipzig..." You can't here the uppity, nasal accent I'm using.
Also this weekend I'll have to clean. The apartments gotten so messy that even I am moved to clean it. Scary.

Oktoberfest and the Tragedy that Ensued

2009-10-06T11:32:00.000+02:00

I'm sure most of you have heard by now that my Oktoberfest experience was disappointing, to say the least. Perhaps it's because I had built it up so much, took the Vegas festivities to be pale replicas, and, in short, had high expectations. But how could you not, it's the biggest beer festival in the world. I'd heard some tales, and seen the fallout on the german news. Blood, broken bones, life threatening BAC and belligerent behavior. On the subway on Friday night going to dinner, the Oktoberfest stop (Theriesenwiese) was unmistakable. All the Lederhosen, Dirndls and drunkenness. And there was about a 5 stop radius of vomit, urine and bloody tissues. Oh Oktoberfest was going to be a time. So yeah, my expectations were high. Plus, not being able to participate in the Vegas Oktoberfest tradition (really though, how could anything get better than that), I felt this one day would have to make up for all seven of those days, or at least come close.
So what went wrong? I mean, come on Jesse, you were at Oktoberfest where they sold over 6 million liters of beer, what's the problem. Well, it was a few things I think. One, that day, Saturday the 3rd, was a German holiday. Yep, the Day of German Unification, the anniversary of the wall falling and Germany becoming united. Pretty big deal. So all the stores were closed, no working, no shopping. Really, there was nothing else to do in Munich except Oktoberfest. Have a look at the picture:

Second, it was the last weekend of Oktoberfest. I don't imagine that even the Germans would spend Sunday in drunken debauchery, so probably Saturday was the last real day to do Oktoberfest.
Third, we got a late start, which was all right with me. We had stayed out the night before, so it was in the cards. We didn't get there till mid afternoon, probably at the peak hours of the day. From what I saw though, you'd probably have to get there at 9 or earlier. It was 3 when we got there, and there were quite a few people stumbling around with that scraggly red drunk look on their faces.
Fourth, we didn't have reservations. I hear this really is the way to go, although I saw a few people with reservations having a hard time getting in.

So here's how it all went, or didn't, go down. We got there and it was overwhelmingly full of people. I'm not a huge fan of large crowds, but I could make an exception for Oktoberfest. It took a bit of adjusting. We walked around for a bit, More getting pushed by the crowd than walking actually. Trying to get my bearings and all that. It was evident from early on though that I was seriously put off by the crowd. Whether it was for almonds, liquor or rides, there were huge lines for everything. I wanted beer more than anything so we kept walking, looking around. Then I saw the first beer tent, and the huge crowd pulsing and shoving around the entrance. Bad sign number one.
Thankfully all along the walkway they had stands that sold shots and mixed drinks. Stopped at the next one for a much needed shot. Chose escoreal, the strongest liquor they had. 112 proof. It had the potential, but the crowd quickly defeated my buzz. Stopped at another stand, got a rum and coke. It had no hope of doing its job. The only way to win this would be to sit down and devout some serious attention and time to drinking. And ridiculous volumes of beer. At this point I began to have the suspicion that the crowd was too far beyond me. You know how if you go to the bar late and everybody else is way drunk and you have to do a lot of catching up, but usually you just end up chilling with a beer being the sober outcast? That's what it was beginning to feel like.
We veered off toward a beer tent to remedy the situation. It didn't look good of course, but I had a feeling, or naive hope, that something good would present itself. We couldn't even find an entrance to the tent, and got swept away through the biergarten instead. It was mashed full of people, raucous and gone. Bad sign number two.
I had probably at this point mostly succumbed to the reality that it just wasn't going to happen. But I wanted to try again. So we stopped at another tent, this time at an entrance. Not really an entrance to the tent, but a roped of entrance to the area. They were letting people in slowly so I figured this was the way to go. There were only 3 of us, so maybe our chances would be good. We joined the crowd. After 20 minutes of being smashed, pushed and yelled at, we were in front. I was mostly at the mercy of my surroundings now. I refused to get excited at the prospect of getting in, but also was hoping...
They let us through the ropes and we were in! But then, not really. We went to the door and they were only letting in people with tickets, which meant reservations. Struggling to understand, I was again swept away by a crowd, through the biergarten, away from the entrance. I did see something cool this time. Two guys were yelling at each other at a table, apparently about the girl that was standing between them. The one guy, who must have kissed or said something to the girl, stopped paying attention to the other guy, the boyfriend. So the boyfriend walks around the table (they were both against a wall) jumps up on the table and kicks the other guy in the face. It was pretty badass actually. Then he picked up a Stein (they call them Maßes in Bavaria) and was going to hit the guy with it. He was stopped though. It was my consolation prize, but I took the whole failure to get in as bad sign number three, and started making my way toward the exit.
Oktoberfest was done for me. I was no longer in the mood for bratwurst, almonds or expensive shots in the walkway. No games, no rides, just the exit. Some may say I was pouting. I think it was a profound and justified sorrow. You don't pout when your dreams are shattered, you walk on silently as depression and despair wage war agains lucidity. You look at the crowd of people, the stammering drunks, the filthy germans and you hate them all. A tasty bratwurst, no thanks. Sugary toasted almonds? Fuck almonds. I want a beer, and I'm not giving one euro to support this madness. We're leaving.
And so it went. I didn't have a sip of beer at Oktoberfest.

Success on the other side: Jesse the International Student

2009-10-01T11:11:00.000+02:00

A particularly fitting role reversal occurred this morning. I managed to drag myself out of bed to go immatrikulieren (register with the university). I didn't want to, almost didn't, but realized the rules apply to me too. So, the role reversal. Before I came here I worked at OISS at UNLV, the international student's office, helping them do the exact thing I was doing this morning. Sparring you the in-depth details of the job, suffice it to say that during the beginning of the semester, the days were unbearably repetitive and frustrating, and although I was aware that each student was going through this separately, it was hard to empathize from behind the desk. Skip to today, and I'm on the other side, lost, confused and at the mercy of the administration.
I went to the wrong building first, because I can't read signs. Managed to communicate with people, in german and find my way to the right building and the right hallway.
There's something to be said about procrastinating. I've heard this process can take a long time, hours of waiting for your number to be called. People who do things in a timely manner have to suffer through that. Today was the next to last day to register, and the hallway was just about empty. All of my waiting, like 10 minutes, was because I took the wrong number. Got right in once that was all straightened out. 5 minutes later and bam, I'm now a student at the University of Leipzig. I get a student card and everything. Probably won't have anything to do with the university for the next year, but it's nice to be a part of something.
Went to the Geldautomat (ATM) after and then bought more minutes for my phone and was home again before 10:30, earlier than I usually wake up.
I know this may all seem boring, but it gave me an exhilarating feeling of accomplishment, so deal with it. It's a strange effect really. There's that cultural and communication barrier which causes this feeling that anything can go wrong and you'll have no idea what it is or how to fix it. It's something you have to champion everyday. Even buying toothpaste can cause this feeling of unease, mostly because something that is normally so simple, so plain, can now cause fear and anxiety and make you not want to leave the house. Lucky for me there's a store around the corner, but I can never seem to get there when it's open. This feeling goes away once you get into a routine, but there's always that new activity, just when you think you've assimilated, and that anxiety comes creeping back and you start to think about all the things that might go wrong. But the effect is diluted, you've become immune to anxiety. You still feel it, but it doesn't matter. Or you can just drink a beer and get on with your life.
Well, now it's off to work (bring it on Python) and then on to Oktoberfest.

You're never safe from Al Qaeda...

2009-09-30T23:44:00.000+02:00

This week I started doing actual work! The last few weeks have been mainly me sitting at my desk all day reading papers on the Neandertal project, Microarray protocol and population genetics. This week I started lab work on Honeycreeper DNA, which has nothing really to do with anything I've been reading about, at least not directly. I'm getting a lot of practice in the lab though with certain techniques and procedures.
There was a brief stint of frustration on Monday, when, at 2pm I was still reading crap. Not that reading is a bad thing, it's very useful, but I had been looking forward to starting the work. Fortunately I was invited to help dissect human placentas for RNA analysis. By helping I really just stood there while watching. David had given a seminar a few weeks ago about his project and taking a scalpel and hammer to the placentas and hammering away. I thought he was joking, but nope, that's what he did. They were frozen in liquid nitrogen, hard as a rock. But little pieces would go flying off as he hammered. The pieces would thaw and turn to specks of bloody tissue. Pretty exciting. Later I actually did get to start my own assignment, the honeycreeper stuff. Honeycreeper is a Hawaiian bird. I also found out how to work the espresso machine and I found the supply closet, which was probably the highlight of the day. It's like christmas, being in that room. All the pens, paper, and utensils I need. So I've been happily working in the lab the last few days. It involves a surprisingly large amount of pipetting. I've also taken on, as a side project, learning how to program. These days bioinformatics has become a huge part of research. The amounts of information being generated are just too much for the lowly brain to process. I'm told that learning Perl of Python is quite prudent. So I'm learning Python, because it sounds cooler. I started today. I think programming is one of the most baffling things I've encountered. I started at chapter 0 of this book, and halfway through it had absolutely no clue what it was talking about.

Change of pace, but tomorrow, after the ritual Thursday institute seminar, I'm heading off to Bavaria, to the lovely city of München, for a little festival called OKTOBERFEST!! Al Qaeda has threatened terrorist action on Germany and most are assuming the threat is directed toward Oktoberfest. But I say fuck 'em. I mean, I don't want to get blown up. I promised my mother (hi mom) that I wouldn't. But really, what better way is there to go out, drinking Steins of bier with crazy germans in silly clothes? Yep, none. Maybe a few, but I can't think of any.
I have to get up at an ungodly hour tomorrow to register with the university, so I will call it a night.

Election Day Deutschland

2009-09-27T18:37:00.000+02:00

Today was the german federal elections. Looks like the CDU won, so Angel Merkel will again be the Chancellorin. I'm not really sure about how the German political system works. The word on the street is that this was a very dull election. The current german politicians are very boring people. Nothing like the fireworks and excitement of the American elections. I think Obama being elected was probably celebrated more here than whatever the outcome of today will be.

Yesterday I went out to buy some stuff. It being Saturday, I didn't get out until 4 or so. The store closed at 2. And isn't even open today. There's something to get used to. It's easy to take things like that for granted in Vegas. Stores open most of the time. Grocery store open all the time. Can get booze whenever the mood strikes. You have to plan that stuff out here. I went for a bike ride instead of the store and found out there's a river just west of my place. Yep, a whole river. And a huge forest park running along it, almost the length of the town. There's a nice trail along the river, through the park, so I rode up that a ways. Had no idea where I was, but found out when I got home that I was just north of the city center. So that was kind of a surprise. It's a nice park too, lots of people sitting around, picnicking, playing, running. There's a fountain, and flowers, children, ice cream and coffee. Most importantly, there's a beer garden, or maybe just a cafe, but I'm sure there's beer there too. This is a testament to traveling with someone. Had I not been alone I would have locked my bike to a tree and drank a liter or two of beer, assuming my companion was in agreement. Of course, I wouldn't travel with anybody who would say no to beer.

Tomorrow I should start doing actual work at the Institute. Did some qPCR on Friday, which is mostly pipetting stuff into small tubes. Ah, I also have to get a BahnCard tomorrow at the train station. Hopefully that goes well. And Tuesday I guess I have to register with the university here because Fulbright told me so. Friday it's off to Munich for Oktoberfest, which feels like maybe one of the biggest pilgrimages I'll make in my lifetime.

Week 2

2009-09-24T21:58:00.000+02:00

My second week in Leipzig came and went. I need to update more often, since that is what this blog is for. I think though that my lack of action is due to me not having completely settled in. I still feel like I'm just visiting, hanging out for a few weeks until I have to return to reality. I know that's not the case, I won't be going home anytime soon, but I don't feel like I'm here yet. Two things are prohibiting that feeling of living here: not getting paid by Fulbright and not having a proper project at work. Fortunately I finally did get paid yesterday so I'm set financially. There was a scare there for a bit as I was running out of money. I had 30 euros left yesterday, so my monthly stipend came just in time. This allows me to pay for things I need, like rent, groceries and a bike. Oh, I did get a bike last weekend through the institute. It's kind of crappy, but it's free and temporary. A bike really is a nice option here, much quicker than walking or taking the public transportation. So the only thing really left is getting a project at work. I've just been reading immense amounts of research and publications, along with some books. I'm learning a lot, but I feel useless at work. The guy I will be working with is coming back next week, hopefully, so maybe then I can start being productive.
So, going back to last week, the big event was the Fulbright Orientation in Goettingen. Goettingen is a small university town and central, which I suppose is why the orientation was there. There were about 40 or so other Fulbrighters there, the other 40 in germany were in a language training program. The Fulbright Kommission put us all up in a hotel where we were to have 2 days of conferences. The orientation stuff was quite boring, especially since I was fortunate enough to have the Institute take care of most of the bureaucratic stuff the week before. Most other's didn't though, and I can only imagine how daunting it all must have been.
What was most interesting to me about the weekend was all the people. Obviously they were all intelligent and successful students in their fields. Most were in the humanities: philosphy, history, literature, etc. Only 3 others were scientists. Like with most conventions of that type, the conversations all began mechanically "What's your name, where are you from, what's your project, oh, what does that mean." Most of the time, in life, some of us yearn for more intellectual conversation. I had my share and more in those two days. It was delightful and tiring. The nature of most people's research naturally didn't allow for much discussion, since most of them were on elevated topics their fields. One guy, who already got into Yale for their physics PhD program is doing something on...well, I forget what it's called, but it has to do with the spin states of particles and how measuring the orientation of one immediately affects the orientation of the other, no matter what the distance between them. Other topics were slightly more obscure, like how music was used as propaganda by the Nazis, border integration between Poland and Germany, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, the effect of climate change on the chemistry of pine tree resin, black musicians in pre-war germany. I don't know, maybe you aren't interested in Fulbright projects. If you are I can tell you more. Anyway, it was awesome talking to other students about their interests. Which is saying a lot considering that I don't particularly enjoy meeting and talking to new people. I must say though that it did get a little tiresome on the second day. I got a little bored with listening to more and more details about things I didn't know anyway. Boredom turned into frustration and then they gave us free alcohol. Those who know me know how that turned out; people were soon talking about sex and other strange topics they felt, I guess, secure enough to share. We actually got 2 nights of free booze. The first night was slightly less slovenly, but there was a guy on his way into the disenchantment phase of culture shock. It's a hilarious process to watch, when people go on rants about all the weird, different frustrating things.
The only other memorable things were the creepy little east germany shithole towns we passed through on the way back to Leipzig. I'd rather go to Tonapah than one of those towns. Had to switch trains in one of them. Lucky to be alive I tell you.
Other than that adventure I've just been sitting around reading. Went out to a club one night. Not a glitzy fake club like in Vegas, but a german club. Germans can't dance. And beer is cheap.

Recapitulation of the First Week

2009-09-13T18:23:00.000+02:00

It’s been a busy week of exploring and getting acquainted, but I’m finding out that Leipzig is a really cool city. It’s a dense city, with a population of about 500,000, but a very walkable area. I live toward the south edge of the city and it’s about a 20 minute walk to the center. There is, of course, more city to the north, but really no reason I’ve discovered yet for me to go there. The public transportation is also quite good, but not free, so I’m hoping to get a bike soon. Well, the easiest way to describe the city is through what I’ve been doing, so here we go:

Monday: I think I posted what I did monday.

Tuesday: I didn’t think I was jet-lagged, but for some reason I popped awake at something like 3 am and couldn’t go back to sleep. So I made some coffee, went out on the balcony and read. I realize this is quite mundane, but at that moment I felt very cultured and worldly. There will probably be more instances like this, as even the most mundane thing here seems to be an accomplishment, so deal with it. Later in the morning I went with Ed to the Institute to do some administrative stuff. It’s a 25 minute walk, which I’ve been doing everyday and am getting sick of, so I’m definitely going to need a bike. The Institute is really nice and neat looking. It’s very angular inside, but open and clean. I’ll have to take some picture. I briefly toured my department, the Department of Evolutionary Genetics and found my desk. I was started to feel a bit overwhelmed at this point, being around this very scientific environment and having really no idea what is going on or what people were talking about. They speak english there, so that’s good. I hung out for a little bit, but didn’t have anything to do so I left. Walked up a main street flanked by large communist type buildings that are student housing I think. My goal was finding T-Mobile and a grocery store. I found T-Mobile and bought a cell phone and was quite impressed with myself. It’s important in a new country to just approach things second by second. Thinking ahead about the awkward interaction that is inevitably going to ensue helps with nothing, in fact, it may be prohibitory. You have to ignore your pride and dignity, but maintain your composure. Then it’s a lot of pointing, grunting and mumbling and mission accomplished, you have a new cell phone! I know, I speak German, and I am exaggerating, but it felt like something along those lines. The people at the store tried to speak english to me, but that just turned into me translating german words into english for them. Ha.
As you surely know, I didn’t find the grocery store. I had been in the city for 30 hours or so and had only had a doener to eat, so I stopped and ate another one. It destroyed my stomach and I vowed to find a grocery store the next day. I went home and watched TV.

Wednesday: I got up early to try to find a grocery store and a bike before I went into work. Failed on both accounts, as you may know from a previous post. I also didn’t get a bike because the bike store was closed. A completely wasted trip, so I just went to work. Filled out more paper work and sat around reading orientation material. I started to get a bit worried that I had know idea what I should be doing, or when I’d even find out. Ed had told me some ideas they’d been throwing around for projects I might work on, but nothing had been decided upon. The Institute seems to be very hands off as far as individual work goes. A plus for sure, like, for the most part, you can make your own schedule, as long as you’re getting your work done. In my case it was frightening. I did get invited to lunch and met some other researchers and students eased my anxiety. Also, it was nice to eat real food. I left shortly after to go to the grocery store near the Institute, which I had know was there, but was hoping to avoid it since the only way back was to walk. I manned up, did some shopping and trekked back. Woo food.
Ventured to the Hauptbahnhof (train station) to pick Ana up. The Leipzig Hauptbahnhof is said to be the largest train station in Europe. It’s pretty big, has about 23 tracks and a 3 story mall. We walked around a bit on the Karli, had a beer, then met Ed and his friend at a Mexican restaurant. Mexican food in Germany, for those in the know, mostly Americans who’ve had real mexican, is generally unsatisfactory, and so is met with some caution. This placed, Gonzales, was pretty good. They had Dos Equis and Tecate. I haven’t been gone from the states long enough to really miss those beers (if I ever miss Tecate), but it’s good to know. Afterwards we all went to an Irish pub called Killywilly to watched the England-Croatia and Germany-Azerbaijan games.

Thursday- Had an appointment with Deutsche Bank to open a bank account at 4pm. Had to go to the Institute first to pick up my passport, which meant a lot of walking. Got my bank account open, but they wouldn’t exchange my U.S. traveler’s cheques and told me I had to go to the Hauptbahnhof to change them. So we wandered to the train station through the city center only to find that the rates were shit. I would have gotten only 186 euro for my 300 dollars. I said no, so we went back into the city center and wandered some more, looking for food. The city center is a really neat area with lots of shops and restaurants. It’s more upscale and mainstream than the Karli, but still has a cool vibe with all the old buildings and nice stores. We found a sushi place which was really very good. We didn’t have sushi, but some squid and thai-curry chicken. Leipzig seems to be quite the international place. We were unsuccessful on the way home in finding a liquor store to do some pregaming, but found out from Ed that just around the corner, literally, is a small convenient type store that is open until 10. Hey hey! Got some real russian vodka that was dangerously smooth and tasteless. I fell asleep watching german dubbed american movies.

Friday- I had my first group meeting at the Institute. The department head wasn’t there, but I got to meet more people and discuss my project. This was a great relief, as I was getting even more anxious about not having anything to do or no idea what I would be doing. I don’t know to what extent I’m allowed to discuss my research, so I better refrain until I find out. Not that my work is top secret, but there does seem to be a level of competition in the ancient DNA area. Anyway, I was briefed on what is going on presently at the Institution and then was able to observe in the lab. I felt much better and confident afterwards and am quite excited to get started.
Met back up with Ana, who had been exploring the area a bit and we went to a biergarten up the street. It seemed a bit questionable at first, an extensive menu and 2.40 euro half-liter beers (hofbrau crowd, that means 4.80 euro liters. Yeah!). I’ve adopted an open attitude since I got here which is very helpful when trying new things. Live in the moment, deal with the consequences later; eat at the restaurant, if it’s bad then don’t go back. This place was good, and cheap and was my first traditional heavy german meal. I had Jaegerschnitzel with bratkartoffeln (meat and potatoes). It weighed a ton and later it felt like I had an anvil in my stomach, but it was quite tasty. On that note, pooping in Germany, at least for me, is an exquisitely wonderful activity. Yep, I said it, deal with it. I’ve constantly got what I call internal farts, which are build ups of pressure that, instead of moving outward toward freedom like normal farts, retreat with a great rumble back into my intestines. They sound more like my stomach growling than a fart, so that’s nice while in public.
We went to a bar later. It’s really nice to be able to sit outside and have some drinks. I don’t know how it’ll be in the winter, probably more going on inside, but for now it’s quite relaxing.

Saturday- Did some more sightseeing with Ana. We went to the Voelkerschlachtdenkmal (People’s Battle Monument), which is a monument to the Battle of Leipzig in 1913 where German and Russian forces defeated Napolean. It’s huge and tall and said to be the largest monument in Europe. It’s a massive concrete and granite structure that, as Ana describe, has Aztec and Viking characteristics. It’s got huge sculptures of warriors outside and inside. You can climb to the top up an endless twist of narrow, claustrophobic stairs. I did some heavy sweating and breathing both from the effort and a mild panic attack. Apparently tight unending spaces full of people make me nervous. Seriously, the walls weren’t much wider than my shoulders. The views from the top were spectacular though.
Ana had to leave shortly after the Denkmal visit so we went back to the trainstation. After her train left I had no choice but to go back to the exchange place to get some euros. If you ever travel, don’t waste your time with traveler’s cheques. I did some research and in Leipzig anyway, the exchange place at the train station is the only place they’re excepted. Needless to say, I got raped on the transaction. Only 175 for my 300. I went back to my apartment feeling quite sick.
Me and Ed went to check out the gym down the street. We did a test workout, liked what we saw and joined. The free-weight section is a bit ghetto, but the cardio equipment and the machines are nice. Also, I get free beverages for the length of my contract.
A bit after that I met two other Fulbrighters here in Leipzig for drinks. Well, one of them was a Fulbrighter from last year and is continuing her research here still. She gave me and the other new Fulbrighter some good insider advice on the program and Leipzig. At some point the week caught up with me and I got deathly tired. Upon returning home I turned down an invitation from Ed and Hernan (also works at the institute) to go out and dance and went to sleep instead. Definitely in strict violation of the Code, but I slept for 12 or so hours.

Today- I’ve done absolutely nothing today. A bit a reading, a lot of sleeping, and, of course, blog updating. I did make plans with the other Fulbrighter to meet up tomorrow for breakfast and to make the trip to Goettingen for the Fulbright orientation, which is to last 3 days until Wednesday. The previous Fulbrighter still here described it as a wine and dine. The Fulbright Kommission puts us up in a hotel, takes us on tours and feeds us, as well as walks us through the administrative stuff. It should be cool though to meet other Fulbrighters and get a feel for what is expected of us. So that’s that. It’s raining outside, after a week of blue skies and sunshine. Ed informed me that it gets fairly bleak in the winter.
I know this is long, but I probably won’t be giving a day by day update for much longer. Right now everything seems exciting and it’s a bit difficult to distinguish relevant, interesting information. If there’s anything you want to know, please just ask me.

Argh

2009-09-09T09:14:00.000+02:00

I can't find the goddamn grocery store. I just want some food, how hard is it? Google maps is a liar.

Here we Go! and Adventures in Traveling

2009-09-08T08:08:00.000+02:00

I wrote bits of this blog as my journey to Germany began and progressed, so just imagine as you're reading that 24 hours or so have passed between the beginning and the end.

Well, I’m at the airport, just about ready to go. It’s 5:30 a.m. now, I should arrive in Leipzig tomorrow at 8 a.m. Germany time. That’s 11 p.m. Sunday night Las Vegas time, so all in all, about 17 hours of travel time!

And now I’m in Chicago. They don’t have free Wi-Fi here, so I guess I won’t be able to post this until Germany. I have a 3 hour layover here, enough time to enjoy tasty airport food and whimsically spend the last of my soon to be irrelevant US dollars. Maybe I’ll find one of those oxygen bars and pay $10 for a few minutes of flavored air.
Leaving was a bit harder this time around, probably because I’m going to be gone a bit longer. Or because this may be the beginning of a change in eras. If all goes as planned, I’ll come back to the states in a year and start grad school somewhere that probably won’t be UNLV. Which means this time when I left I was really potentially leaving a lifestyle. Jesse: the Undergrad years are over, and I’m starting to feel strangely adultish.
It still hasn’t entirely sunk in yet that I’m moving to Germany and it probably won’t until I land in Leipzig. Much like a roller coaster when you don’t fully realize the reality of your decision until it’s too late. The first time I flew to Germany we were descending over Hamburg when I first though, “Holy shit, Germany is a whole different country, what am I doing?” The fun, of course, is dealing and adapting, conquering and progressing.

Jetzt bin ich in Deutschland! I just arrived in Frankfurt. It’s about 6:15 a.m. here, I’m losing hours like crazy. The plan will leave her in 45 minutes and I’ll have a whole, full day to be exhausted in Leipzig. The transatlantic flight was uneventful. I got to sit in an exit row, so the closest seat in front of me was 5 feet away. Not a bad deal. The flight attendant asked me if I was willing and able to carry out the procedures should the event arise. A strange question. Yes I’m able, willing is another story. That’s not what I said, of course. Then again, maybe you’d be willing but unable, like say you couldn’t breathe or were sliced in half by the food tray. Clearly all this traveling has gotten to me. I sure am hearing a lot of english for being in a german airport. I bet Leipzig will be different though. We shall see.
I started reading this book recommended by my dad called The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. Great book so far, kind of sucks you in. And kind of funny in an aloof intellectual sort of way. There hasn’t been any murders, rape or dismemberment yet, so not the typical Jesse book. Nonetheless, I like it so far.

I arrived safely in Leipzig. Compared with my last fiasco of arriving in Germany, this one seemed quite simple and natural. Someone from the Institute picked me up and drove me to my apartment. The apartment is nice and big and I think, is considered higher end. I met the roommate who seems to be a cool guy. I was going to go do stuff since it’s still early in the day here, but I laid down on my bed to write this and I think I will take a nap instead and post this later.

I am the champion! After waking up from the nap I video-chatted with my ma (pretty cool I must say) and then went out for a stroll. I pride myself on my ability to find the cool scenes in new cities (the restaurant and bar scene of course), and while usually I accomplish this with friends, I did it today all by my lonesome. It really involved nothing more that walking half a block to the main drag of the Südvorstadt (south suburb) Karl Liebknecht Straße and heading north toward the city center. Along the way there were quite a few nice looking places full of trendy europeans, which I guess, since this is Europe, isn’t a big deal. And of course I found an Irish Pub.
Being alone I didn’t go into any of these places, but I did stop and have a tasty Döner with curry sauce and spicy cheese. On top of that I found a few currywurst stands and some bakeries.
After enjoying my tasty Döner, my roommate got back from work and took me to the city center for a beer, which of course turned into 4 and some karaoke. I did not sing. We first went to this narrow street that was so full of outdoor seating for all the restaurants that you could hardly walk down it or tell what restaurant you were at. I don’t know what it is that makes europeans look european, but there were a lot of them. It must be the hair and the clothes. They really make us Americans look like poorly dressed savages. We continued on to a sometimes hangout of Institute people called Flowerpower and yep, there was a picture of Bob Marley on the door. There were no Institute people there, but Ed (roommate) and I had some beer and he sang Debbie Gibson’s Lost in Your Eyes. It was really quite good, you should have been there. Also, for the most part, German’s are not good at karaoke, well, these one’s weren’t anyway. One of them had a pretty good voice and started out with an excellent rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, but managed to screw it up and completely stopped singing at the “I see a little silhouetto of a man...” verse. I was shocked and appalled. Chuch, you would have been disgusted. Of course, we would have all been singing at the top of our lungs anyway, so who knows. Anyway, after Debbie Gibson we called it a night and here we are, up to the present. A pretty good first day I must say.

Final Approach

2009-09-01T01:14:00.000+02:00

The departure date is quickly approaching. I leave for Germany in less than a week. It’s slowly sinking in that I’ll be living in another country, that I have no idea what to expect at the Institute, and that my german is entirely inadequate. I’ve done it all before so I know I’ll survive, but the prospects of constant embarrassment and deflation of the ego aren’t particularly exciting.

I have enjoyed losing myself in the last few weeks though, in a relaxing scramble to accomplish those last hurrahs. Here’s what’s been going on:

Unemployment

I stopped working almost 3 weeks ago. A sad occasion to say the least. I started working at OISS 3 years ago, just after I returned from my semester abroad in Germany. How fitting that I left it to return to Germany. I matured a lot over those years. I don’t know if I can say that I crossed into adulthood, but I definitely grew up a little, came out of that “I’ve got it all figured out” facade. While there were certainly other aspects in life that were factors in this development, my job and school were the backgrounds over which it all occurred. This may seem overly nostalgic, but that is what I think of when I think of work. It was a good job.

Trip to Omaha and Denver

The day after my last day at work I moved into my parent’s house. No complaints here. Living on my own meant not eating regularly and having to buy, or mostly not having, those small incidental things like toilet paper, milk, drinkable water, etc. The day after the move I flew out to Omaha, Nebraska to visit my old roommate and his girlfriend. I had never been to Omaha and pictured a flat, boring landscape with a lot of corn and country folk. Despite this unappealing image, I thought it be cool to visit friends. I also felt that since I was moving to another country, I should see a part of my own country that I hadn’t before.
Omaha turned out to be quite a surprise. It was very green, hilly and quaint. It seems it had at one time been quite an industrial city with a lot of warehouses and factories. It is now in the intermediate stages of a cosmopolitan transformation, which lends the city this weird, dichotomized feel. Downtown has been remodeled into lofts and swanky restaurants and bars, still in the shells of the old warehouses and factories though. You get the modern design though, with the furniture, lighting and art work inside. It’s a cool mix, and much more approachable that most trendy cool places in Vegas.
Eric and Laura had the visit very well planned too. We hit the town one night, recovered the next day. Played some golf, had Fancy Beer night. Grilled some steaks, went to the zoo, had some Doeners and toured Creighton.
I planned the trip so that I could help Eric drive back to Vegas for school since it would help him out, save me money and help me “see” the mid-west. About 40 minutes outside of Omaha on I-80 heading west my misguided dream of Omaha became a reality. Pretty much the entirety of the 7 hour drive to Denver was through flatland with cornfields as far as the eye could see. So much corn, it was unbelievable.
We had decided to stay the night in Denver, both to break up the 20 hour drive and to take a small tour of some Denver bars. Denver was quite a surprise. I had been going there almost once a year for most of my life to visit family, but I had only been downtown on maybe 2 occasions. It turns out that downtown Denver is a vibrant area. We stayed in a colorful area just off the main drags and opted to walk the 20 or so blocks into the LoDo area. Since we had to wake up early in the morning to complete the remaining 12 hours of the drive, we told ourselves that we would take our time, go to 4 bars and have a drink at each. We found a Belgian Beer bar called the Cheeky Monk right off the bat. We had 2 beers each. Belgian beers are usually between 8 and 10%. Needless to say, we got off to a good start. We finished the walk to LoDo and found the bar scene. We went to a bunch of them, but I have to mention one, El Chapultepec. It’s a small, dingy diner looking bar that only accepts cash, but they have live jazz and it was awesome. At another bar we stumbled upon a burlesque fashion show which turned into a striptease. Later in the night, well beyond our 4 beer limit and halfway into mistakingly ordered liters we decided we better call it quits. On the way back though we were tempted into a club by loud techno music and no cover. We danced for a bit then finally made it back.
The final conclusion: We won Omaha and Denver. We also made the drive back.

Hiking Mt. Charleston

At some point along the drive Eric and I had decided we were going to climb Mt. Charleston, the highest peak in southern Nevada (about 12,000 ft.), when we got back. Eric had never climbed a mountain, and I hadn’t done it in 10 years, the last time I had hiked Mt. Charleston. That time I had used all energy to get to the top, was miserable and exhausted, and fell asleep while walking on the way down. This time I was in a little better shape, but not by much.
So last Friday, after a night of over-zealous drinking (of course) we started up the South Trail around 8 a.m. Most of the vertical distance in covered at the beginning and is quite steep, despite mostly being switchbacks. The trail was arduous and relentless. There was a lot of heavy breathing and complaining from us. After the switchbacks, the trail meanders through a nice flat meadow. We suddenly liked the hike a lot more. Based on our degree of exhaustion and time of hiking we figured we were pretty close to the top. At that point, after we left the meadow and entered what can most aptly be described as hell, the mountain was probably laughing at us. At the end of the meadow you begin another ascent above the treeline to the top of a ridge, thinking you must be almost there and that the hike wasn’t that bad. Then you round the ridge and see Mt. Charleston peak, off in the distance, about an hour away. The trail follows the desolate ridge in sharpe, loose shale. As Eric said, “We really are just walking along the side of a mountain.” The trail rounds the backside of the mountain and turns into the cruel, sharp incline of the final ascent. The peak taunts you as you struggle to breath and make it more than 10 steps before your legs refuse to move an further. We made it to the top a little after 12.
Starting the descent down the same trail we figured the hard part was over and downhill would be a breeze. It wasn’t. In fact, the descent, probably because we were already exhausted, was much more grueling than any part of the ascent. Talking fell to a minimum as we both lost any purpose except to get down. Our bodies were on auto-pilot and our legs were basically limp appendages being thrown out indiscriminately to prevent us from falling down the mountain. I would have sat down and cried for my mother except I was too tired and figured it wouldn’t get me down any faster. For about an hour we were sure the end was just around the corner. I don’t think I’ve ever been more relieved than when we saw the road at the bottom of the trail.
At the summit I had written in the log book, “Is that all you’ve got mountain!?” At the bottom I could barely hobble down the road to my car. I had stood atop the mountain, but in the end, the mountain won.

Impromptu Eye Surgery

Anybody who has seen me in the last 6 months or so knows I’ve been plagued by styes on both my eyelids. This last one was especially large and would not go away, even with antibiotics. I finally got my act together and went to see an ophthalmologist. She told me that my stye was, in fact, a chalazion. Since it had been there for 2 months and the antibiotics hadn’t worked, the next option was surgical removal, which involves clamping the eyelid, cutting it open, scooping out the bump causing material and sealing the wound with a hot wire. She asked me if I wanted to to it today, right then. I said yes, since I’m leaving soon, and, believe it or not, I didn’t enjoy having a large bump on my eyelid. So I had my eyelid clamped, cut open, scooped out and cauterized shut. I did get an anesthetic injection beforehand, though I’m pretty sure it hadn’t kicked in when she made the incision. I couldn’t help but think of 20 years ago when I mistook super-glue for eyedrops and super-glued my eye shut. I don’t remember it very well, but I had to go to the hospital so they could cut my eye back open. Anyway, today post-surgery my eye was leaking some pretty cool blood tears and I had a nice throbbing pain. And no more bump.

That about catches us up on the pre-departure events. This week will be the goodbye events. Some hanging out, some pubs, the Hofbrauhaus and a tailgate. I’ll have significantly less friends and family in Germany, so that’ll suck.

The Fulbright Story

2009-06-29T18:51:00.002+02:00

About a year ago I decided to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship to Germany. I don't remember how I became aware of the Fulbright, but I do know about 2 years ago I came across some research being conducted in Leipzig, Germany on the Neanderthal genome. This was fascinating to me and somewhat focused my academic interests. At the time I had just changed my major almost out of the blue to biology, after 4 years of liberal arts, and was still sort of wondering why, or at least trying to anchor my decision in something real. The Max Planck Institute was a unification of all my scientific interests, genetics, evolution and anthropology. In any case, I told myself that I'd like to someday go there.

After doing a bit of research on the Fulbright and speaking with advisors to see if it was a viable option for me, I tentatively decided to go ahead with it. I say tentatively because there was no denying my academic abilities, but I wasn't the most ambitious, proactive or even dedicated student. Some people called me the anti-academic in the sense that I enjoyed learning all subjects, but prefered to have no accountability for my knowledge. Needless to say, I hadn't accomplished much except good grades, and was a bit concerned with my competitive abilities.

The Fulbright application requires a Statement of Grant Purpose, a Personal Statement, 3 letters of recommendation and, to make the application as competitive as possible, a letter of support from the institution you'd like to work at. This, I determinded, would be a necessity for me, having never saved a developing community, started a NPO or even done undergraduate research. There were a few biology professors on campus who had contacts in Germany, so I tried, unsuccessfully, to develop a correspondence through them with their german contacts. After a month of back and forth stuff with my professors, and slightly losing hope, I decided to just contact some professors in Germany myself. Who to e-mail, who to e-mail? Since I was taking a shot in the dark, I figured I'd just go all out and e-mail MPI and Dr. Paabo, one of the most eminent researchers in the field (my Dean had laughed at me when I told him before that I wanted to work with Dr. Paabo). So I sent a letter asking if they'd be able and willing to support my research should I receive a Fulbright Scholarship. And then I waited.

My line of thinking, because I'm lazy, was that there was no point in doing any of the other parts of the application before hearing back from MPI. I wasn't going to waste my time writing research proposals if I wasn't even going to get to do research. I also didn't even know how to go about writing a research proposal or even what research I could do. A month went by with no response, so I wrote again asking if they could or would support me. The fall semester had started at this point and the application was due at the beginning of October. Another month went by and I was beginning to give up on the Fulbright. I was disappointed, but also, as bad as it sounds, relieved. I don't like being rejected, especially when it involves something big like life plans, and tend to avoid situations in which rejection is a possibility. And it's not like I hadn't tried. I made an effort, it didn't work out. There was also my appealing fallback plan of picking fruit in New Zealand, something I'd still like to do.

I gave it one last shot sometime in September (2008) and e-mailed the MPI again, informing them of the increasing urgency of a response and that my future was in their hands. At the beginning of October I had just about given up. I briefly entertained the idea of proceeding without the letter of support, but was quickly met with my inability to formulate a research proposal. Goodbye Fulbright.

It was Thursday, October 2nd. The Fulbright application was due Monday, October 6th. I was at work, probably researching how to go about getting a visa to New Zealand, and I got an e-mail. From Dr. Paabo. It said that after much consideration and discussion, they agreed to support me should I win the Fulbright (come to think of it, they had, at some point after the 1st or 2nd e-mail I sent them, responded, asking for a CV and transcript). 4 days, I had 4 days to get my application together, to get 3 letters of recommendation, write a research proposal and a personal statement and get the letter of support from MPI. Thankfully Dr. Paabo's lab was very cooperative and prompt. They faxed me their letter and even helped with the grant proposal (giving me ideas of projects to do, etc.) I got that written, sat down and pumped out the dreaded Personal Statement. As arrogant as I am, you'd think it'd be easy to write about myself in a meaningful way. I think composing a symphony would be easier than constructing the PS. And if you're writing a Personal Statement for a competitive award, don't look up statements from previous applicants/winners. They're deceptive and damaging. The Letters of Rec. were a bit more problematic, but UNLV gave me a 2 day extension for them. The first submission deadline was just for the university, so they have time to go over it, judge it and offer you criticism before the "real" Fulbright deadline, which is toward the end of October. On Wednesday the 8th, I got my entire application in.

The judging part of the post-fake, pre-real deadline involved an interview with UNLV Fulbright committee, a process that involved me basically being grilled about my research proposal by two disconcertingly awkward people who did not seem at all impressed with my application. I suppose it was more of a formality anyway, since, as long as the application isn't completely half-assed, they send it on to the Fulbright committee in New York. Mine was sent on, and I was informed that decisions are not received until the following April or May.

So I waited. I suppose it's worth noting that I simultaneously applied for pretty much the same type of scholarship through a different organization called DAAD, which is a german government program. The application requirements were all the same. I don't know many details about this program, like how competitive it is, etc., but it came to be my backup plan, because, for some reason, I didn't think it was as prestigious as the Fulbright (still don't) and figured I had a better chance of getting it. Well, I didn't get it, and I heard from them first at the beginning of April, which seriously deflated my hopes for the Fulbright. Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, either real or out of necessity, I had a feeling that I'd get the Fulbright. This feeling had been there from the beginning, during the application difficulties. I would think "if I can just get my application in, I'll get it."

The end of April came around. The Fulbright committee had released May 14th as the estimated notification date, so I really wasn't expecting anything. I was in California with Alex and Eric for a short vacation before finals. We were driving home and I got a call from my parents. I had 2 pieces of mail from Fulbright, one from New York and one from Germany. I figured this has to be good, there's no need for 2 rejection letters. I told my mom to open it, she read it to me.

"You've been accepted as an alternate candidate." What a completely dry feeling. "Should someone decline or back out of their awarded scholarship, you may receive the award." Maybe. Maybe usually means no. My instantaneous positive thought was you didn't get completely rejected, there's still a chance. My instantaneous negative thought, which usually beats out the positive thought, if it's even there, was they didn't even have the decency to give you a definitive decision. Now you'll just wait with diminishing hope until September, when it becomes harshly apparent that you didn't get the scholarship. Looking forward to it. And finals were in a week, so, yet again, I had this disappointment looming over me (a year before this, the girl I had been seeing broke it off the week before finals). I was finally graduating though, so that eased the pain.

The following Tuesday was Cinco de Mayo and my Immunology final. I knew my friends would be going to a bar and sure enough, Alex and Eduardo called after work on their way to Paradise Cantina. I had my final and a lot more studying to do afterwords so I said no. After my final I went to the bar, studying could wait, I deserved this break. On my way to the bar I got a call from my parents. I had more mail from Fulbright, this time 2 thick envelopes. This can only mean one thing. I told them to open it. Dear Jesse Dabney, you have been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship...!

Ah, it all comes together. I won the Fulbright and graduated 4 days later. It took me 6 years, but I now have 2 degrees (Biology and German) with university and departmental honors and a pretty sweet scholarship that will allow me to live and conduct research in Germany for a year. Not a bad ending.

Epilogue: I leave for Germany on September 6th. There's a lot to do still: Paperwork, finding a place to live, sorting out the details of my internship with MPI, learning German and all I can about molecular evolution. I have a feeling I may advance my knowledge more in my 2 fields of study in the next year than I have in the last 6. Once I get to Germany I'll face the tedious settling in activities, made infinitely more frightening and difficult by the fact that I'll be in Germany: open a bank account, buy a bike, set up internet, do the german bureaucracy thing (you have to register yourself in the country AND the city you're living in) and who knows what else. I wanted an adventure, and this will undoubtedly be and adventure in real life.

EDIT (07.06.11): I noticed this post gets some views from people presumably looking for information on the Fulbright. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. You can comment here or email me at jesse.dabney@fulbrightmail.org.

Word Play

2009-04-29T18:32:00.000+02:00

I want to cook you for dinner.

I want to cook dinner for you.

I write about booze.

2009-03-19T19:17:00.000+01:00

I've been writing for the UNLV student paper, the Rebel Yell, for just over a year now. Here's a link to my articles.

As you can see, all of my articles deal with drinking or the bar. Good deal I'd say. I get to do what I'd do anyway, then write about it and get paid. For example, two days ago for St. Patrick's Day I went out and drank all night. Then I wrote about what I did that night. When I get paid, it will reimburse me pretty much in full.

It's strange to me to say that I get paid to write. I mean, I do, and that's what's strange. Maybe surreal is a better word. It's wonderful. Writing to get paid. I like saying it. It's not enough to live off of, but good for paying the credit card or having some beer; supplementary income.

Anyway, if you'd like to see my progression as a "journalist," there are my articles.

The Price of Having Expectations

2009-03-09T21:13:00.000+01:00

Hemingway once said that every story ends in tragedy if you follow it long enough. Some you don't have to follow for very long, like the Rebels. I'm not one to generally follow sports or to have expectations (I try to avoid hope, and expectations seem, to me, to be an isomer of hope), but the Rebels are an exception to both.

Coming off two strong seasons, there wasn't any reason not to expect great things this season. The team looked good, there was a lot of hype and it's just a fun time of year, so, quite willingly, I jumped into the scene. If there was an article written, I read it, if there was a game on T.V., I watched it, if there was a home game, I was there 3 hours early, beer in hand. I defended the team to naysayers, critized those, shall we say, less dedicated. I cheered at wins, accepted losses, knowing we were the better team and that on any other given day we could get the win.

But then some started to happen. It was gradual, but the frequency continued to increase until it was painfully obvious. The Rebels weren't measuring up. It started with a few bad plays, here and there, missed layups, missed freethrows and it progressed until there was no offense, and, eventually, no defense. Fuck up after fuck up, and all we could do is sit as the Rebels wouldn't even help themselves. Pass the ball Wink, don't drive the lane Tre'von, ever. Santee, what are you aiming at? The only person I came to trust was Wallace. My faith in Kruger, gone.

We won such great games! And now this?

But we have to keep things rational. It's not the Rebel's fault. They are what they are, something was missing. Synergy? Chemistry? Ability? I don't know, but there's only one person to blame for the way I feel, and that's myself.

People say that hope is a powerful emotion, a defining characteristic of humanity. I tend to see it as a burden, something that, as Hemingway said, leads to tragedy. Of course, this is a bleak outlook, and because people glorify the ability to hope, I sometimes find myself giving into it. A rational outlook, though, is one based on the summation of empirical evidence and I've found that, more often than not, hope leads to disappointment. To avoid disappointment, avoid hope.

All is not lost though. One can still function without hope. Actually, you may find your life much more peaceful and less turbulent. I haven't given up on the Rebels. There's still a tournament to play and they may just pull something out of their asses. I'll root for them, support them, cheer for them. I'll take a win, I'll take a loss. Their success will be my happiness, but their inadequacies won't be my burden.

I look to the future without hope, but it's not dark, because anything can happen.

The Communication Problem

2009-01-06T22:14:00.001+01:00

I was listening to a song called "God is a Girl" by Groove Coverage on the way home from work today. Sometimes you just ponder lyrics and wonder what they mean because you're in your car and have nothing better to do. After months of hearing the lyrics but not really listening to them (it's a techno song, I was listening to the beat), today I took the chorus to mind. "God is a Girl, wherever you are, do you believe it, can you receive it...God is a Girl." This seems straightforward enough, God is a girl, that is, God, the entity, has a gender, and that gender is female. The ubiquitous, all powerful being that we look to for guidance and closure is a woman…a nice, empowering lyric (if you’re a woman).

So is this simply a song about God being female? Perhaps, but, for some reason looking for a deeper meaning, I came to another interpretation: God is a girl, as in any girl or every girl. The discrepancy comes from the noun phrase “a girl.” Generally, the indefinite article a signifies singularity, and therefore leads us to the conclusion that God is one girl, meaning God is feminine. The second interpretation contains the same supposition, God is feminine, but takes it further, applying God to the object girl, and therefore any girl.

It’s a bit tedious, but shows the flaw with communication. Communication begins with thoughts, which, like Plato’s Forms, are transcendent and pure. These thoughts are then expressed through semiotic and oral mechanisms, during which they are degraded and made ambiguous. The outside world receives a filtered and deluded expression of the thoughts, which are, in turn, interpreted by another filter, the receiver, according to unique functions and parameters. What you have left is a distant and poor translation from the original idea. An analogy: You’re recalling a beautiful painting you’ve seen and you want your friend to see it too so you draw a picture and give it to your friend. Your friend then draws a picture of your drawing and that alone is his vision of the beautiful painting.

The effects of the degradation of thought through language are far reaching, ranging from personal frustration to social discord. One can imagine the number of disagreements that have been based on misunderstandings and misinterpretations. What are the modes of communication? We have diction, tone, hand gestures and body language, all interacting to communicate to the listener. From these interactions you get subtleties like sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, things you have to understand to get and even then, delivery is everything. All these things though necessarily lead to the destruction of thought.

I tend to react to this circumstance in a negative way: frustration, disillusionment, despair, maybe not quite despair, but it’s a heavy thought knowing that, short of telepathy, we’ll never be able to communicate efficiently. Even on the most articulate days, the message still needs to be interpreted. Your ability to describe your thoughts is only half of the equation. On top of that, we’re absolutely powerless to change it. There’s nothing we can do. It’s an eternal flaw of our being. It seemed to me, for a while, that should this problem be remedied, life would be more enjoyable; people could express themselves accurately, honesty would be more prevalent, there’d be no misunderstandings and vodka would fall from the sky. It turns out that this was a naïve way of thinking.

While discussing the problem with a friend over some beer, lots of beer, and a game of darts, we came to the realization that the world would probably be worse off if everyone could articulate their thoughts, or we could read each other’s minds. The message would no longer be misunderstood, but disagreements would be more fortified in that they would no longer be based on a person’s words, but on the person themselves. The honesty is there, but the ability to accept honesty is to be determined. I vote no and imagine, in an exaggerated worst case, people walking around crying, disillusioned and alone because, with the exception of a few, everybody else harbors disdain or complete indifference toward them.

Perhaps the degradation of thought through language is a necessary buffer against thoughts themselves. Words, then, become the lubricant of society, helping people to glide (comparatively) smooth and frictionless against each other. Should we be grateful for words and our delusional state? I would rather know the truth.