Category: Uncategorized

… to all the folks in Tully’s coffee shop, 2104 45th St NE, Seattle WA, 7:15 pm, 5/4/2006:

“Shut the fuck up. I mean SHUT UP. If I hear one more stupid ass opinion from any of y’all, I’m gonna fart, hard, long and smellily.”

… made my 4 hour train ride, from Portland to Seattle on Sunday evening, completely miserable. The 35 year old, 250 pound, child proceeded to yell at oncoming trains as they passed, fall on other passengers as he walked down the aisle, and vomit on his (up ’till then) friends. I did feel joy when his ~18-year old, 120 lb, female supervisor, who had to come in from the adjacent car and met him right in front of my seat, told him to start acting his age and fired his ass without a second thought.

I smiled. I hope he saw me.

His termination, however, gave him the incentive to drink even more and become even more belligerent. Mysteriously, after we passed the stop in Tacoma, he never returned to his seat. I suspect he became well acquainted with Tacoma’s drunk tank. What a pity.

FRIDAY JUNE 18 2004 3:50 PM

‘Sup…

Yeah, I like ’86d my Crapcast internet connection at home so I’m not able to make enteries that often anymore…

All is well though. I just got back from SLC. I went to all the free Mormon movies I could at the temple visitors center… I learned that the Mormon generousity – on which they pride themselves – does actually have a limit, especially if they catch on to the fact you’re not interested in their ‘other’ testament of christ.

Heard this fuckin’ band that ROX on Austin City Limits, (Friday nights on pbs… yeah that’s right I watch pbs on friday nights, I’m still cool) anyway they’re called Spoon. I swoon when I hear spoon and I’m not even a girl!!!

Man… well that’s all for now.

If one day you come home and decide that it is more important that a drumkit occupy your kitchen than a table, no one is there to argue with you.

“Your page is complete, unadulterated, crapolla. It would brighten each and every one of my days if, when I log off of my hotmail account on a daily basis, my thoughts were no longer contaminated by the frivolous drivel that you apparently think well enough to publish. Thank you for this opportunity to express my opinion.”

My fall quarter rotation advisor came up to me after my winter rotation talk (for my winter rotation I had a different advisor) and asked me if I was interested in joining his lab. I told him that I would be quite pleased to do so and that I could start in the summer. He said that he has a great project planned for me that would entail stimulation of a “reward nucleus” in the primate brain that would be triggered by selected activity in the motor cortex – a sort of positive feedback loop a la brain machine interface.

The project he descibed is very much the sort of research I hope to pursue and I felt a great sense of relief to have found a lab. I thought to myself “finally my hard work has paid off”.

And then he says “… we’ll see.”

Talk about head games. Thanks for getting me all hyped up on a maybe.

Things are going very ok… I really can’t complain. I survived a rather harrowing last quarter. I gave a rotation talk went better than expected and I think I earned some respect from those whom I respect – which is always a good feeling. The systems neuroscience class that I’m taking this quarter is lightyears more coherent to me than the barrage of molecular biology that I was forced to confront in the fall. The list goes on. The short of it is, I should be happy with the progress I’ve made, and equally so, I should be happy with my scholastic situation as it presently stands…

So why do I feel SO EMPTY these days? I don’t really feel much of anything. I don’t enjoy music the way I used to and I seemed to have lost my comical view of things. It’s as though I’ve desensitized my capacity to feel to such an extent, as a means to get through hard times, that I can no longer detect the joy I should experience during good times.

I need to pay more attention to my own wants. Grad school be damned.

…It’s only been more than two months since I last posted.

Let me assure all of you readers (what’s left of you that is) that I’m alive. I had an UBERbusy quarter – not that that is in anyway an excuse for my lack of posting activity – the demands of which exceeded my capacity keep up with it I regret to say. At least I now know my way around the mammalian brain… not to the degree a neurologist does of course, but (hopefully) well enough to pass a graduate anatomy class on the subject.

For my rotation project this past quarter I learned the “bread and butter” technique of neuronal biophysics, patch-clamping; a technique which lead to the discovery of voltage and ligand gated ion channels in neurons (a discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize back in the day). I will not reveal how many rat pups were sacrificed so my klutzy ass could learn how to whole cell patch clamp. Let’s just say that if God has a preference to rats during my time of judgment, I face damnation.

After patch-clamping onto 3, layer 2-3, cortical neurons, I chose the best one and measured several of it’s dynamical properties so I could “fit” a simplified mathematical model to replicate it’s spiking behavior to steady input. Trust me, the process of “fitting” the model tested the limits of my sanity. But, in these few final days before I have to present my findings, I prevailed in solving for a set of satisfactory parameters so that I can now test the model’s response to dynamic input; the primary aim of my project. As I sit here typing this, I’m running analyses on my model simulations driven by white noise stimuli. The analyses will probably take longer than an hour and keep in mind this is on my new PowerBook G4. [This thing has already paid itself off and I’ve never been so in love with a machine before.] Secretly, I hope that the model is not sufficient to replicate the dynamic response. A negative outcome would make my talk buttloads easier. Below is a graphic of which I am quite proud. It depicts both the threshold response of my recorded neuron and that of the fitted simplified model.

This coming spring quarter, my final rotation will entail cognitive representation of complex visual stimuli in the IT cortex. My research interests are in movement, not cognition, and I know jackshit about this area of neuroscience so I have a lot of catching up to do. Who knows, I may even enjoy research on cognition, but the little exposure I’ve already had to this subject leads me to believe otherwise. My reasons for selecting this particular lab are more practical than anything else. I want to have exposure working with primates before I make the decision to land in a lab where such investigatory methods are used for studying movement (the lab of my fall quarter rotation does this, but the nature of my project did not involve working with primates).

Enough already. I hope that all of you are well. I miss you.

Leon says: “Hey R***! How’s school treatin’ ya?”
And I says: “Like a red-headed step child!”
Then he says: “He He. That reminds me of my boys: Rusty and Dusty.”
And I thinks: “That’s the worst offspring naming strategy since Brandi and Candi.”
And I says: “Oh really? How Come..?”
An’ Leon says: “Back when they was young they thought I didn’t treat ’em so good.”
Then he says: “Turns out I was just teachin’ em what they don’t teach in school; how to work hard.”
And I says: “I suppose that’s true.”
And he says: “What is?”
And I thinks: “Yep, that was too indirect a reference.”
And I says: “…that they don’t encourage hard work early enough in school these days.”
And Leon says: “Goddamn right!”
And then I says: “Well… how’d they turn out?”
And Leon says: “Who?”
And then I says: “YOUR BOYS!”
Leon says: “Fine, Fine. My boy Dusty was named football MVP for Klickitat Community College.”
Then I thinks: “I bet having a name that rhymes with his older brother’s necessitated his toughness.”
Then Leon says: “His coach came up to me one day and he says: ‘Hey Leon, how can your boys run so fast, considerin’ neither of ’em are taller’n 5 and half feet!?!'”
Then I says: “What’d ya tell him?”
And then he says: “I says: ‘I feed ’em horsemeat.'”