Posts filed under 'Department of the Drama'
Ok. . . just a final reminder that I’ve moved to Scienceblogs, where I’ve just been welcomed by a flattering and totally undeserved accolade from the Neurophilosopher! I’m blushing.
Apologies to any of you who tried to click through last week and found the link to my new blog broken - we had a few moving morning snafus. The new blog link and the new RSS feed should both work now - go ahead and check it out. I’ve got new stuff over there. About brains. You know you want to look. . .
February 14th, 2008
That title sounds pretentious, doesn’t it?
I’ve decided to make a big change. As of today, bioephemera will be moving to Scienceblogs. I hope that all of you will join me there; please update your bookmarks to point to http://www.scienceblogs.com/bioephemera
The RSS feed should be http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/index.xml
but I’ve been told it may not be working yet (sorry - still getting the bugs out).
Never fear; the blog isn’t going to change very much. The format may take some getting used to - a generic, IKEA-esque white background! ack! - but I’ll keep the same categories and the same idiosyncratic mix of topics (which may or may not please you). And I’ll abuse the dashes, semicolons, parentheses and italics even more than usual - just to ensure you feel at home during the adjustment period. 
This site (bioephemera the elder?) will remain on line indefinitely as an archive of sorts, and I may update it periodically, but I’ll be calling Scienceblogs home.
Some of you may wonder why I’m making this change. No, it’s not for the money (I’ve never made money from this blog), although it will be nice to have my bandwidth subsidized, since y’all keep doubling my traffic! It’s not to score a big readership (see previous comment on doubling my traffic). I’m quite happy with the cadre of cognizant, witty readers I’ve acquired over the past year and a half. Moderating a zillion snarky comments has never been my goal. And it’s definitely not because I like Movable Type better than Wordpress; I have more grey hair than I did a month ago, and I still don’t have the new blog formatted just as I want it. Heck, I never got this one formatted as I wanted it, not really.
So why am I moving to a more prominent platform? Honestly, I’m concerned that science blogging is morphing into its own exclusive subphylum - blogs written by scientists, read by scientists. There’s a surfeit of intelligent, informed writing and debate on these blogs. Some of it is as good as peer review. That’s a wonderful development. But blogs that outcross science with other fields, like this one, have not been multiplying at the same healthy rate (could it be hybrid inviability?)
I don’t want the scientific blogging community to become isolated in its own quirky culture, or inaccessible, like a particularly esoteric Wikipedia article. I like science best when it’s informing other areas - art, humanities, policy - and being informed in return. I’m drawn to the interfaces between science and other domains of knowledge, because interfaces, as cellular biologists and chemists know, are where the most exciting, unexpected reactions take place.
Scienceblogs seems like the place to represent that type of interface - I’m very, very fond of Seed (Scienceblogs’ parent publication) and the mix of science, art, and culture it promotes. That mix is something I’ve been striving toward for a long time.
Going back to my very first post here at bioephemera:
If you ask a biologist why he or she chose biology as a career, I’ll bet most will cite a deep feeling of wonder and appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But that feeling is not so easy to find in the lab, where we try to be objective and logical (and efficient). How we can initially turn to biology for such emotional, unscientific reasons, and then neglect them afterward, is a puzzling thing. We may never have tried to formally articulate our wonder. We may enjoy the richness and motivation it brings to our work, without needing any articulation. Even so, since art is all about capturing inarticulate truths and inspiring wonder, art may have something practical to offer biologists - a way to recapture that original feeling of wonder and surprise that brought us here.
I haven’t changed my mind one bit.
On that note, please come join me at the new blog, and thanks so much for making the last year and a half a great ride.
February 6th, 2008
Friends & readers, I have to put bioephemera into stasis for a few days. I have a lot of topics backing up, so there is more coming, and I will update you all next week. Till then, hang tight . . .! (I probably won’t be answering emails or comments either - sorry.)
February 1st, 2008
Photo by Eugene Richards
From “North Dakota, The Emptied Prairie”
National Geographic Magazine
These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.
I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.
Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.
Photo by Eugene Richards
via
January 21st, 2008
I found this post on the NYT Health blog “Well”, by Tara Parker-Pope (when did the NYT switch to a blogging model? am I just oblivious?) Anyway, the post was mildly intriguing. But then I started reading the comments, and man, they just pissed me off.
The gist of the post is that some nutritional scientists demonstrated that, calorie for calorie, junk food is substantally more affordable than healthy food, especially fresh produce. This supports the premise that the obesity epidemic in this country - which disproportionately affects the poor - is at least partially due to the fact that the poor can’t afford to eat as well as the rest of us. (Other possible reasons include lack of education about nutrition, lack of time to prepare food from scratch, lack of access to quality grocery stores. . . need I go on?)
The annoying thing is that at least half of the comments are by people crying foul and calling the study junk science, because they, personally, are able to eat healthfully and affordably by doing such things as. . . .making large batches of lentil stew! Uh, yeah. The fact that you enjoy living on lentil stew means that junk food is really more expensive than it appeared to the researchers! Or something!
This is an example of a fallacy that simply must have a formal name, though I don’t know what it is: disbelief in the results of scientific research because the implications conflict with personal experience.
First, the validity of the science is independent of its political or social implications. Secondly, your personal experience, while no doubt extremely important to you, don’t mean diddly when addressing populations in bulk (no pun intended).
To balance the anecdote about living healthfully on the cheap by making bohemian lentil stew, I have a story about how my mom (a working single mother) used to serve instant (generic) gravy on (generic) Wonderbread when our money ran out. It wasn’t because she didn’t value health - this is the woman who didn’t let me eat sweetened cereal until I was 12 - but because she knew white bread was an extremely economical source of calories in a pinch. Why didn’t she make organic lentil stew by buying in bulk from Whole Foods? I know this is hard to believe, but we didn’t own a car, and there was only one supermarket in our town - hardly a Whole Foods. (Before you even start. . . no, there were no buses!) Given our impoverished state, did we eat at McDonalds? Rarely - because it was too expensive!
What is your immediate, knee-jerk reaction to that paragraph? Disbelief? Then I bet you’ve never lived in the middle of the country.
Believe it or not, there were and are large swaths of America without Whole Foods, public transportation, internet, cell phone service, Target, bagels, sushi, or farmer’s markets. Yet in my time living on the coasts, first left, then right, I have consistently run across something I call the Coastal Fallacy. This is a bizarre set of blinkers which compels people to deny the possibility of American lifestyles outside their realm of experience. They simply can’t imagine towns like the one where I grew up, because there aren’t any towns like that near them. It drives me absolutely crazy - except at cocktail parties, when I can make good use of the shock value in remarks like “my entire family has lived (or does live) in mobile homes,” or “I never met a Jewish person until college.” If you expect to understand this country as a whole, you need to accept that some parts of it are very different than what you’re used to, and that your personal experience does not define the opportunities available to others.
Tragically, most of the comments on the NYT post show minimal understanding of nutrition, science, or how the poorer half lives. And the commenters who give a location all seem to be, ahem, living on the coasts. But I was impressed by this comment, from msd:
One thing the posters here haven’t commented on is the feeling of psychological deprivation that comes with long-term poverty and how that contributes to poor food choices. It’s easy to live on rice and beans if you’re a grad student or a middle-class person going through a rough financial time. It’s another thing if someone feels they are part of a permanent underclass. It’s no wonder chronically poor people console themselves with of sweet and starchy mass-produced food. It’s the only way they can experience abundance.
That may not be scientifically supported, but it sure rings true, doesn’t it?
December 8th, 2007
First, I need to thank Mo at Neurophilosophy for tagging me with the Intellectual Blogger award. I don’t feel very intellectual lately, but I guess he’s cutting me some slack based on past posts? I’d better pick up the pace, read those back issues of the New Yorker, and post some meaningful something before I’m retroactively stripped of my title. I’ll post my choices for the award tomorrow.
Apologies to everyone who has emailed, or linked me in the past few weeks - I know I’m not keeping up on my correspondence. I have about 10K unread posts on my RSS feeds, and I think I just have to give up and start over. It’s been crazy out here in DC. You may have recently seen the poll indicating that DC ranks 24th out of 25 major US cities for attractive people, which is the only possible reason why I won “sexiest costume” at a pub tonight. Yay Halloween! (I personally think there are attractive people out here - but then I like nice clothing, and people here dress well - though not creatively - versus, say, Seattle).
Finally, I need to add a shout out to the Witless Wanderer - a short time ago I had the pleasure of meeting her on her sojourn in DC. We took a “bloggers-in-real-life” photo, but I don’t have it here, so let me just thank her for an enjoyable lunch with her friend GuiGrl. We laughed a lot, which is the measure of good company.
October 31st, 2007
I just finished Eric Kandel’s new book, In Search of Memory. For those of you who don’t recognize his name, Kandel won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for his work on the cellular basis of learning and memory. He is also the author, with Tom Jessell and J. H. Schwarz, of the definitive neuroscience textbook, Principles of Neural Science (often called simply “Kandel”). In Search of Memory is part memoir, part popular science, but entirely self-conscious, and it prompted me to think about the way each of us presents ourselves to the world in our writing.
There are two sides to neuroscience: the colorful, anecdote-filled side, and the truly quantitative, equation-filled physiological side. Oliver Sacks, prolific author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, etc., pretty much owns the world of anecdotes. He specializes in rare and unique case histories which fascinate and provoke new hypotheses, but can’t lend themselves to rigorous testing. Kandel’s Principles of Neuroscience rests firmly on the other end of the spectrum, on long, repetitive histories of experimentation in unglamorous model systems like flies, snails, worms, and rats. It’s a remarkably useful and comprehensive reference, but I don’t recommend it to any but the hardiest of science undergraduates.
In Search of Memory, like many popular science books, falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It begins with Kandel’s memories of the Holocaust in Vienna; although he and his family escaped to the United States, he uses his childhood disillusionment, confusion, and fear to frame (and justify) his professional quest to understand the human mind. As the book continues, it becomes a history of the nascent field of neuroscience - a lucid history, but one that inevitably revolves around unfamiliar names and places: so-and-so at Columbia, so-and-so at Harvard, etc. Almost all histories of science are recounted in this way, as a litany of names and places. Unless the scientists are made human and interesting, it doesn’t work, and it’s hard to capture personalities without becoming downright gossipy, as James Watson did in The Double Helix.
Kandel conscientiously tags each scientist’s name with a smatter of personality - this colleague played tennis, that one loved symphonies. These details are sometimes perfunctory, and rather disappointingly, the most memorable anecdote about his best female postdoc was apparently that she ran an afternoon daycare in the lab break room! But given the era in which Kandel began as a scientist, he didn’t have many female postdocs, and he always speaks of his female colleagues with respect. Professionally, Kandel gives scrupulous credit to his collaborators: I couldn’t help but notice all the meticulously grammatically correct usages of “_____ and me” or “I and ______”. He also admits his own failings as a father and husband. As he became increasingly embedded in his work, his wife Denise, a professor in her own right, had to take up the slack at home - at the expense of her own career. I’m not sure Kandel regrets this, given the outcome (he especially seems to relish that Nobel Prize ceremony) but at least he acknowledges it.
Upon finishing the book, my overall impression was one of a lively and humane mind, one perhaps more concerned with the minutiae of synaptic transmission than his kids’ school plays - but then, I expect no less from scientists, and Nobel winners at that. The book wasn’t as engrossing as an Oliver Sacks essay, or The Double Helix, but it was interesting, and refreshed my memory of the major turning points in my own field, neurobiology. It would be a good read for a non-scientist who cared about the topic of how neurons work, and was willing to give it reasonable attention. Well-punctuated with personal history, the tale unfolds at a digestible pace. In the end, I felt very favorably toward Kandel, and grateful for yet another popular science book I could recommend to students or friends. That’s when it gets interesting.
Many of my friends are also biologists. When they noticed what I was reading, they all said that Eric Kandel is obnoxious! They said he is the sort of self-important PI who disrespects his subordinates and pits them against each other, as well as many further complaints which, because they are hearsay, I won’t repeat here. One of them had met Kandel briefly and was downright hostile to him; others had heard stories through the everactive science grapevine. What to make of this new evidence? On the one hand, I couldn’t believe that the book I had just read was by the ruthless man they were describing. On the other hand, he had written the book - the framing was his. The winners write the history books, or the science books, as the case may be.
Had I been conned? Is Kandel’s book a self-redaction, a fictitious portrait edited for, and written for, history? I have no idea, because I’ve never worked with or even met Eric Kandel. I can only go with the impression I have from the book, which remains favorable: it’s a good book, written by an intelligent and accomplished man. But I’m disturbed by the failing I’ve detected in myself as a reader: if Kandel were a politician, I’d have opened his memoir with utter cynicism about his motives and reliability. If this were a novel, I’d go in positively gunning for the unreliable narrator. But he’s a fellow scientist! It never occurred to me to question his authenticity or motives. Even objectionable, bigoted scientists are openly objectionable and bigoted (see The Double Helix). Right?
The answer is No, of course not. We all frame our stories, consciously or unconsciously, to reflect those parts of ourselves that we want to share with our readers. I do it here, on this blog: although I believe that my blog “voice” on bioephemera is an extremely accurate reflection of, even insight into, my personality (those of you who know me offline can weigh in on this), it is by no means all of my personality. There are topics I explicitly do not discuss here, and opinions I do not share. Although not as organized as a memoir, each blog post, comment, diary, letter or classroom lecture is an act of editing: facts balanced with message for a specific audience. It may seem obvious, it is obvious, and yet, we too often suspend our skepticism for a trusted source - like a colleague or a friend.
As you probably know, framing science in the political sphere has been a huge controversy all summer. Just yesterday, The Scientist published another article, with editorial commentary, about framing. Should scientists deliberately frame their science? According to one opinion, If you don’t frame it, someone else will. True - if the science is important at all. But I’d argue that no one can avoid framing completely, even if they try; so we shouldn’t try - we should just be open and honest about it.
Everything we say and do is molded by our experiences, but perhaps more importantly, by the way we want and need others to see us. We all keep secrets. And it behooves us to remember that scientists are just like everyone else in that respect - fallible. Although the best of us try as hard as humanly possible to be objective, we simply can’t. Any self-aware, truly great scientist will admit this. That’s why science is a group activity: our individual biases will be diluted out and mitigated by our colleagues’. It will all come out in the wash. It’s reassuring to be part of that self-correcting mechanism: whether perfect objectivity is possible or not, we are doing the best we possibly can to be objective. As human beings, with our soft, squishy, fallible brains, we can do no more.
But a memoir is not science. Memory, as any neuroscientist knows well, is far from objective - those squishy brains of ours are idiosyncratic and troublesome, and whatever piquant neural correlates of memory we might find, we will never be able to directly compare our memories to anyone else’s. Eric Kandel laid the foundation for our understanding of how neurons learn, so it’s incredibly fitting that it is his memoir that reminds me today how fallible everything we perceive, learn, and believe can be. Whether he is charming or not, obnoxious or not, this book has been one of the most thought-provoking reads I’ve had in some time.
October 4th, 2007
Apologies for the downtime. I had a bit of trouble getting it through to my web host that I needed to upgrade my bandwidth!
Thanks for the love, y’all, but you just loved me into a hosting package upgrade - for the second time in a year. Dang!
September 24th, 2007
Tim Page has a remarkable essay in the August 20 New Yorker about his personal experience with Asperger’s syndrome:
In the fall of 2000, in the course of what had become a protracted effort to identify—and, if possible, alleviate—my lifelong unease, I was told that I had Asperger’s syndrome. I had never heard of the condition, which had been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only six years earlier. Nevertheless, the diagnosis was one of those rare clinical confirmations which are met mostly with relief. Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses, the simultaneous capacity for unbroken work and all-encompassing recall, linked inextricably to a driven, uncomfortable personality.
This essay blew my mind. Despite my reservations, I’m now pretty sure I have Asperger’s myself. Which may make it unwise to marry an engineer after all!
What makes Page’s account so startling is that he is a writer: a writer not of technology, but of arts and culture. He has an excellent grasp of language and social norms - he could not be more different from the inarticulate, socially unengaged, math-geek Asperger’s stereotype. I’ve never encountered Asperger’s from this perspective before; in fact, I thought writing an allusion-heavy, adjective-saturated, wry memoir for the New Yorker would be indelible proof one did not have it!
Like Page, I’ve never had any problem with language or art. Like Page, I still don’t know my right from my left. Like Page, I tend to be hypersensitive and emotional in disproportionate ways:
So preoccupied are we with our inner imperatives that the outer world may overwhelm and confuse. What anguished pity I used to feel for piñatas at birthday parties, those papier-mâché donkeys with their amiable smiles about to be shattered by little brutes with bats. On at least one occasion, I begged for a stay of execution and eventually had to be taken home, weeping, convinced that I had just witnessed the braining of a new and sympathetic acquaintance. Caring for inanimate objects came easily. Learning to make genuine connections with people—much as I desperately wanted them—was a bewildering process. I felt like an alien, always about to be exposed. Or, to adapt another hoary but useful analogy, not only did I not see the forest for the trees; I was so intensely distracted that I missed the trees for the species of lichen on their bark.
I don’t think that differs in any important way from the hysterical tantrum I threw in kindergarten at my friend Josh, who stomped on a colony of ants, or the time I burst into tears because another friend drew some birds so badly, they appeared painfully deformed. Or the fact that I sold my first car for $500, because I knew a buyer willing to pay fair market value for it would kill it, I mean, have it broken up for parts.
Autistic individuals are supposed to lack empathy. But perhaps in some cases of Asperger’s, the empathy is there and powerful, just slightly miswired?
And there’s this:
It was never difficult for me to articulate my feelings about anything external. I’ve rarely run short of opinions, well founded or otherwise. But deeper emotions reduced me (and, to some extent, reduce me still) to aching silence, especially when I feared that I would be exposed, misunderstood, or ridiculed. I empathized with Rostand’s Cyrano (a serious rival to Ferdinand the Bull in my private pantheon of literary heroes), who was too terrified to utter the crucial words to the woman he loved. . . Falling in love surprised me; I had never imagined sustained contentment, and certainly not in the company of another person.
Ahem. Been there, too.
There seems to be only significant way in which Page and I differ (besides his love of music - I gravitated toward the visual arts). I learned early on how to persuade myself into compliance with the boredom of school, and to dominate it. Page laments his inability to concentrate on or care about anything in which he is not interested; I can relate. I generally did the exact opposite of whatever I was supposed to be doing - drawing geometric shapes in English, writing poetry in math, always procrastinating until the last moment. But I could still inevitably pull out the A. I learned to please - professors, parents, adults in general - and made pleasing of such paramount importance that the terror I felt at the thought that I might not get an A overcame my distaste for any topic. This may have something to do with being female - pleasing others was always the primary function of women in my family, and the source of their self-worth.
Even so, everyone understood that though I could do almost anything well, I would willingly do it only once. When I figured a process out, I lost all interest and moved on to my latest delight. This was the kiss of death in graduate school, which was several years too long to hold my interest: I realized nothing could be more appalling than spending my life studying one thing. The horror, the horror!
ADD or Asperger’s - the effect is the same. I have just started my entire career over, have no idea what my new job entails, and couldn’t be more enthusiastic about it. I have also, like Page, entered a phase of intense reflection about what I need to make me happy. I’ve been unhappy most of my life, and the idea that I could and should be happy, rather than merely productive, is still new to me. And yet, this introspective process is far harder than acing physical chemistry (rather fun!) or the LSAT (invigoratingly terrifying!).
I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to find that one person who would understand me, simply because despite my brains, I could never understand myself at all. Putting a label on it doesn’t help, not really, but it does make me feel a little less freakish. So thank you, Mr. Page, for that.
August 31st, 2007
From one of the most personally resonant essays I’ve read lately, by Mary Ruefle:
I had recently one of the most astonishing experiences of my reading life. On page 248 in The Rings of Saturn, W. C. Sebald is recounting his interviews with one Thomas Abrams, an English farmer who has been working on a model of the temple of Jerusalem–you know, gluing little bits of wood together–for twenty years, including the painstaking research required for historical accuracy. There are ducks on the farm and at one point Abrams says to Sebald, “I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.” It is an odd thing to say, but Sebald’s book is a long walk of oddities. I did not remember this passage in particular until later the same day when I was reading the dictionary, where I came upon the meaning of the word speculum: 1) an instrument inserted into a body passage for inspection; 2) an ancient mirror; 3) a medieval compendium of all knowledge; 4) a drawing showing the relative position of all the planets; and 5) a patch of color on the secondary wings of most ducks and some other birds. Did Sebald know that a compendium of all knowledge and the ducks’ plumage were one and the same? Did Abrams? Or was I the only one for whom the duck passage made perfect, original sense? I sat in my chair, shocked. I am not a scholar, but for the imaginative reader there can be discoveries, connections between books, that explode the day and one’s heart and the long years that have led to the moment. . .
In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and our language, which we alone created, and without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written, or, once in a thousand lives–is that too much to ask?–retrieved, and read. Did I mention supreme joy? That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult. It’s a sincere desire, but a sincere desire always complicates things–the universe has a peculiar reaction to our sincere desires. Still, I believe the planet on the table, even when wounded and imperfect, fragmented and deprived, is worthy of being called whole. Our minds and the universe–what else is there? Margaret Mead described intellectuals as those who are bored when they don’t have the chance to talk interestingly enough. Now a book will talk interestingly to you. George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can’t read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write “The giraffe speaks!” in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?
From “Someone Reading a book is a Sign of Order in the World” by Mary Ruefle
Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life
Excerpted here
Discovered via AndrewJShields
August 30th, 2007
I was a little distracted, and completely missed my blogiversary on August 24. Bioephemera is one year (and four days) old!
If you haven’t been around that long, you might be interested to see my very first post. Looking back, I think this blog is pretty much what I hoped it would be from the beginning - except I should get more art done, and I have many more readers and friends here than I ever expected.
Thank you all! And please stick around for my second blogiversary. . . same place, next year.
August 28th, 2007
This is a good idea, but in practice it isn’t terribly accurate. The idea is to tell you whether the area in which you live is walker-friendly – how many stores, restaurants, bars, etc. are close to you? Unfortunately, Google’s database, the basis of the Walkscore algorithm, seems deficient. I live amidst a veritable explosion of eateries here in DC - plus, I’m within easy walking distance of the National Zoo. Lions and tigers! Pandas and elephants! A flippin’ baby giant anteater! That’s gotta be a triple walk score right there. Yet my score is only 82/100 - a B. Why?
So then I looked at the sleepy town where I used to live. My old house had a score of 60. WHAT? There was nothing to do there! That’s why I left!
A quick check of the destinations listed explained it all. I used to live very close to, yet inexplicably did not visit, the Young Marines, Municipal Building Maintenance, Municipal Park Maintenance, the Department of Fisheries, several long-defunct libraries and cafes, a catering establishment, and eight schools. And then there’s the slight problem of the RIVER between my house and half the proposed destinations. It’s hard to carry groceries while snorkeling. (These are all known issues with Walkscore.)
No algorithm is perfect, but Walkscore will not tell you if you live in a “good” neighborhood. Only visiting can tell you that. And I’m going to go visit the giant baby anteater.
August 21st, 2007
I just finished driving from Seattle to Washington, DC, which explains my neglect of the blog. I’ve been more concerned with straightening out last-minute snafus via cell phone, than with posting here. And sadly, I was traveling alone, so I couldn’t spare the time to pull over at each tempting vista and take photos, and I have no pictures.
Before Monday, I had never driven past Idaho. So as I left on my journey, I was naively hoping to “see the country” in some sort of enlightening, trans-generational, road-trip-through-Americana way. That didn’t happen. Cruising I-90 might allow one to view the panoramic vistas of the West, but those vistas look pretty identical until Minnesota. And in the Midwest, the tollways become downright boring. I could hardly see anything, even in Chicago. Chicago was two horrific hours of my life that I will never have back, for which I paid some $13 in tolls. Gah.
Certain trends were apparent: there is a strong linear relationship between progress eastward and the square footage of Wal-Marts. Meanwhile, any relationship between posted speed limit and actual speed collapses. People drove about 75-80 mph the entire way, but in Montana the speed limit was a realistic 75; from Illinois it was frequently 55. Call me provincial, but it was odd going 30 mph over the speed limit. Not to mention paying tolls every 30 miles or so.
In the West, driving is mostly toll-free. And it’s an entertaining experience, complete with gratuitous roadside attractions and bizarre signage. Idaho’s highway department wedges enthusiastic adjectives in everywhere: “Now Leaving Wild and Scenic Lochsa River.” Montana has a creative, rather touching collection of homemade anti-meth warnings. Roadside signage reaches its apogee in South Dakota, where there are literally hundreds of billboards advertising a rural Disneyland-cum-curiosity-cabinet called Wall Drug. I did not stop at Wall Drug, although it was mighty tempting; they promised 5-cent coffee (free to vets and honeymooners), a shooting gallery, and a 40-foot tall dinosaur! If I’d known how desolate the highways would be for the rest of my trip, I would not have passed up the Wall Drug experience.
Overall, the thing I noticed most was the physical change in the landscape. It got softer and lusher and progressively more claustrophobic, as the humid vegetation and remarkably low clouds closed in around the road. I have never seen so many deciduous trees in my life - rolling mounds of them, like green cotton candy. Lovely at first, sure, but then unsettling. By the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I had goosebumps, recalling the sinister vegetation of Lovecraft and Hawthorne. I have no fear whatsoever of forests at home - I’ve been camping in pitch dark and feeling my way tent-to-tent trunk-by-trunk since I was seven years old. But the trees in Pennsylvania were creepy. They felt off. Their shapes seemed feverishly primordial, in a way the much older conifers of the West do not. Which makes no phylogenetic sense at all.
Obviously the trees of Pennsylvania weren’t out to get me. So why did I feel as if they were? Was it too much Mountain Dew? Too little sleep? Or does our local version of “Nature” imprint itself upon us so strongly that foreign vegetation seems a little bit unnatural? I once took a road trip with a Wisconsin native who absolutely refused to leave the car in a patch of scrubby, burned-over Idaho wilderness. I thought he was a wuss, but who knows? Maybe he was tapping into some visceral, biological aversion to the unknown.
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll become a resident of Washington, DC, and will most likely be on the East coast for the next several years - plenty of time to adjust to crazy Lovecraftian trees. In the next few days I’ll resume the account of my trip to London. I have good stuff to share, but just haven’t had the time to write and upload photos. More to come - as soon as I’m moved in and have internet access, that is. . .
August 16th, 2007
A long daybreak jog around Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, while listening to Scissors for Lefty: sufficient dopamine for at least 24 hours. Not to mention the serotonin.
August 2nd, 2007
I’m way behind on writing, my laptop power convertor blew, and I now have 3500 (!) unread posts on my feeds. Apologies, everyone! But this weekend I did get a blogger’s treat - a real-world visit with another blogger, the charming (and hospitable) Neurophilosopher. I had an excellent homemade dinner with his family last night, and today we talked each other’s ears off over lunch before visiting the Chelsea Physic Garden.
Mo also helped me locate a power adaptor so I could get back on line from my hotel and resume posting. Blogging from abroad is fraught with unforeseen hazards, but on the whole, I do recommend it. Thanks so much, Mo!
July 29th, 2007
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