Wednesday, May 24, 2006

thinking aloud.

ever wonder what education does to you? for me, 16 years of education, i ended up with a brain that cannot think, a total lack of humor and creativity and a spirit that is barely alive and does not want to know anything more

rethinking my life.

the rethinking came from a conversation i had with a postdoc today. I was telling him (ok i'll just abbreviate him BC) that i don't know what project i would be given for my honours thesis.
ME: i want a bite size project!
BC: what do you want to know?
ME: what do you mean what i want to know. i want a project.
BC: well if you don't want to know anything then you should go work in a bank. no point doing science. you only do science if you want to know something.
ME: erm. but i'm just a little person. how am i supposed to know what i want to know. and whether it'll work out in ONE year. i'd leave it to my PhD career to train up my "question asking".
BC: nah.. you'll be saying the same thing in your PhD. and your postdoc.
ME: ...
BC: there's no "little" or "big" person in doing science. only in technical competence. since you don't want to become a technician, start asking the questions now.
ME: ...
BC: so what do you want to know? come on. science is only about asking the questions.
ME: er well. i am interested in general how sensory perception works. in this lab obviuosly all i can work on is taste.
BC: ok. so what do you want to know about taste?
ME: erm. how it works? (at this moment, obviously i have honestly no idea what i want to know about taste.) receptor?
BC: no. no way you can find another receptor in a year.
ME: ok.
BC: ok. go home and come up with 10 questions about sensory perception. by next monday.
ME: ...er.. o-kay.
BC: wait, make it 5 questions about sensory perception. the other 5 questions that you want to ask that have already been answered in visual perception but not in taste.
ME: ...
BC: or you can become a technician. you know. maybe with a "professor" tagged in front of your name.
ME:...ok...
BC: Think about it. (whch another postdoc MG also told me to do, about why small tendom repeats in a stretch of nucleic acids like ACACACACACACAC is hard to transcribe/replicate accurately. ) and let me see the queations on monday.
so yeah. i ended up with this homework. sometimes i wonder if i really don't have the time to think, or just lazy. but the result is the same. no more contemplation, no more thinking. no more wondering. merely coping with school work. what is the point? maybe i really should take next year off work and devote it to thinking.

MG: how much do you sleep everyday?
ME: 5 or 10 hours. depending if it's MWF or TTh.
MG: you sleep too much.

so why does cortex have maps anyways?

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

My Birth Report (Sample chapter duh)

Chapter 3. Your Inner Self and True Nature

Because you are supportive and nurturing, and also practical and well-grounded (as described below), you are a great source of solace and emotional support for other people. You are actually more stable and solid than your rather soft appearance would indicate.

You are a steadfast and patient soul, capable of tremendous devotion, dedication, endurance and constancy. The ability to follow through and stick with things is one of your greatest assets. Once your course is set, you pursue it tenaciously until it is completed, stubbornly resisting any attempts to sway you from your purpose.

You have a very practical nature and want to see concrete, tangible results for your efforts, and you are not one for spinning wild dreams that are unlikely to come into fruition. Most of your "wild dreams" have to do with material achievements, well-being and security, for you have a great love of the physical world and you want to experience and enjoy it to the full. Though you will work long and persistently, you also have a strong sensual and comfort-loving side, and you want to enjoy what you have worked for. In fact, you can be enormously lazy at times and have a tendency to overindulge in good food and other earthly pleasures. You also love the beauty of the natural world and probably prefer a serene country setting rather than an urban life style.

At heart your needs are simple and you are easy to please. You have a strong desire for security, stability and peace, and will rarely make changes unless you are forced to do so. You are not very demanding emotionally, though you do crave lots of physical closeness and affection. Because of your faithfulness, emotional steadiness and gentle strength, others often depend upon you for support. Though you hate upheaval and sudden changes, you usually maintain your poise and equanimity. You also have an innate sense of harmonizing with nature, allowing things to grow and unfold in their own time, and the patience to nurture something into being--be it a garden, a child, or some creative project. You make an excellent mother or father, especially if you follow your instincts more often than "the experts".

You have three major faults: one is your bullheaded obstinacy. The second is your unwillingness to deviate from your safe, predictable routine. And the third is your tendency to always insist upon realism and undervalue the imaginative, speculative, and fanciful--in other words, you lack the ability to play with ideas and possibilities, to open your mind to the new.

Leading groups and classes, and being involved in community efforts, social activities, events or movements are areas where you really shine and express your creativity. An awareness of politics or the larger social impact of individual actions is natural to you.

You are assertive, energetic, active, courageous and vital. You have a very strong physical drive which expresses itself as sexuality and passion, a desire to compete with others, and a tendency to fight. You have a victorious spirit and the will to win.

what?


i have callouses on my fingers, from pipetting?!

Thursday, May 11, 2006

bday


A trillion thanks to buddies who came today. and for the wonderful wonderful surprises!!!! the cd's really nice!!! thx jess..and man that bike's cool.. with that pantie ribbon lol... yay this is the best birthday! :) fantastica.. yoohoo!






















Thursday, May 04, 2006

share your calendar

being a slow tech user as i am, moved myself onto 30boxes only today, (omg i haven't been blogging for so long almost forgot how to put links.) share your calendar with me, and feed it into your google home. :) and have you been on the quest?

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

I don't mean to rant

i don't mean to rant really. haha. there's a group on the facebook called "i'm taking too many units and now i'm f***ed." i would've joint the group if not for the very obscene profile picture. lol.
life goes on with me packing myself to max. even i don't know why i'm donig that.. well. at the same time the temptation of laziness and decent social interaction is like flies buzzing around my head. most of the time deprivation of sleep catches up as fast as school starts. sometimes i confidently think of dropping a particular class and smile at that very glorious decision, in a semi-conscious state when i'm about to pass out or before i fully awaken. only to realize that it is not as realistic as it appeared after i regain my consciousness, together with the realization of the coming of another disastrously prepared midterm to be taken one hour later.
i'll work.lol. i'll work.

on a lighter note, another reason why i'm feeling so slack might be that spring is finally here. well, it's been here for about a month or so, but lately the weather has gotten so warm that people've started wearing dresses and skirts. i love it when girls come out in skirts. :) with the sun and all, it just feels so refreshing. lovely sun...

and our spring has been fun, hiking and all into the warm sun in the montains and deserts near san diego. can't wait for summer to come and rid the place of that ramaining chill!

Sunday, April 16, 2006

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Friday, March 03, 2006

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

friendship day was fun. so got a rose from the guys justs like last year. and the rose was pretty.. thx :)

Thursday, February 09, 2006

flunked cell bio. ate nothing. swam 750 meters today. ah life sucks.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

for the first time, i envy those kids born in a country other than their parents'. they are so lifted from their cultural space. they don't have a history because they are not obliged to know any. they thus shed all burdens, which come penetrating into me from my place, my people, my history. i used to think of myself as being fortunate for the exact same reason, but now i don't any more. i envy them instead.

then this thing about cultural and socio-historical niche. i feel that this is what holds me back. nationalism and ethnicity. both hold me back from being completely freed into general objectivity. i cannot shake off prejudices and preoccupations because i was born and have been living with them. continue to fall into the trap of relativism. continue to discriminate. continue to be a hypocrite.

but i try very hard... :(
check server

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Thursday, February 02, 2006

the sunset is so nice


that i feel compelled to post this picture once again. oh geisel.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

i was going to convert my air ticket from usd to sgd... and was too lazy to open calculator in my comp... so i was sorta thinking, google should be able to do it.. so i typed 1193*1.7 into the google search box on my safari. and the answer just loaded... cool
from the beautifully informative wikipedia:

The name Montparnasse stems from the nickname "Mount Parnassus" (In Greek mythology, home to the nine Greek goddesses — the Muses — of the arts and sciences) given to the hilly neighborhood in the 17th century by students who came there to recite poetry

Like its counterpart, Montmartre, the neighborhood of Montparnasse became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as the Années Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. In the years between 1910 and 1940, Paris' artistic circles gradually moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse.

Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, writers, poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated "studios" often as not overrun by rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse. First promoted by art dealers such as Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell in the millions of dollars. (how romantic! i wish i lived there..)

They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe, from across Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chile where the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Moise Kisling, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, Andre Breton, Pascin, Salvador Dalí, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joan Miró and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.


Montparnasse friends. In the 1915 photograph in front of La Rotonde seen here, is (left to right): Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Henri-Pierre Roché (in uniform), Marie Vassilieff, Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso


Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Leger virtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and jew". They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.


more things to add on to my 1/23 post
come to think of it, i think the translation is crappy. the interpreter might have read too much into the poem, and said too much out loud. thus losing the poem itself. i shall get a dictionary and translate it myself. esp the last verse.

but oh, the more i listen to it the more i love it!

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
i'm editting this post so that i can add in stuff.

the following poem is what i'm singing now. a poulenc setting on apollinaire. the poem talks about a poet, from Leipzig... curiously leipzig was described as "a small paris that educates its people".
why is the poet from Leipzig exploring paris?
of course there's the very familiar concept of the "gaze" which definitely reminds one of "flâneur" and every 20th century french artist. the unpredictableness. the eyes.
but why? where is there anything to do with bearing fruits? planting oneself?

and who is the bearded angel?

Montparnasse
--Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky

Ô porte de l'hôtel avec deux plantes vertes
Vertes qui jamais
Ne porteront de fleurs
Où sont mes fruits? Où me planté-je?
Ô porte de l'hôtel un ange est devant toi
Distribuant des prospectus
On n'a jamais si bien défendu la vertu
Donnez-moi pour toujours une chambre à la semaine
Ange barbu vous êtes en reálité
Un poète lyrique d'Allemagne
Qui voulez connaître Paris
Vous connaisez de son pavé
Ces raies sur lesquelles il ne faut pas que l'on marche
Et vous rêvez
D'aller passer votre Dimanche à Garches

Il fait un peu lourd et vos cheveux sont longs
Ô bon petit poète un peu bête et trop blond
Vos yeux ressemblent tant à ces deux grands ballons
Qui s'en vont dans l'air pur
À l'aventure (goodness! that glissando poulenc wrote! it's enchanting! )

Montparnasse
--Apollinaire

Hotel door, amidst verdure
Verdure never to produce
Vast, luscious bouquets
It must vex me - shall one bear fruit? can one plant oneself?
Hotel door, a lone angel stands adjacent
And issues prospectuses
Virtue's never been so protected
Allocate me a small weekly room for ever
Unusual bearded angel, in truth
An eloquent Leipzig poet
Sent on a momentous quest to explore Paris
Be sure not to step upon lines on the pavements
And dream of
An exquisite Sunday rendezvous at Garches

It turns excessively humid, long-locked
Juvenile poet, jejune and so pale
An unusual gaze resembles a pair of vast, oversize bubbles
Set to venture upon pure, tranquil air
With evasive, quiet unpredictableness
i know what's wrong with aroian. he looks like mr bean

Monday, January 23, 2006

From wikipedia:

His inclination towards relations with younger men was relatively well-known, the first such relationship having probably been with Robert Ross, who proved his most faithful friend and would be his literary executor. Ross, a boy of seventeen when Wilde met him, was already aware of Wilde's poems and indeed had been beaten for reading them. By Richard Ellman's account, Ross, "...so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce [Wilde]."

the last sentence... i don't know why. there seems to be such beauty in what's described... gave me the shivers when i read it.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Poems. 1881.

32. Chanson


A RING of gold and a milk-white dove
Are goodly gifts for thee,
And a hempen rope for your own love
To hang upon a tree.

For you a House of Ivory 5
(Roses are white in the rose-bower)!
A narrow bed for me to lie
(White, O white, is the hemlock flower)!

Myrtle and jessamine for you
(O the red rose is fair to see)! 10
For me the cypress and the rue
(Fairest of all is rose-mary)!

For you three lovers of your hand
(Green grass where a man lies dead)!
For me three paces on the sand 15
(Plant lilies at my head)!

from wikipedia: After graduating from Magdalen, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met and fell in love with Florence Balcome. She in turn became engaged to Bram Stoker. On hearing of her engagement, Wilde wrote to her stating his intention to leave Ireland permanently.

this poem must have been written then. i was guessing at the masterclass today that this poem should not be read as morbid, because wilde is such a person who would beautify and romantisize death. looks like it's only an ordinary love poem and indeed should be morbid. but undeniably, i think wilde is romantisizing the whole out of love business, and making it sound more morbid than it actually is. in fact, i read a seduction in the lines. the seduction of death, and a bewilderness, rather than morbidity. well. depends on how you look at it.