August 2009
6 posts
The Virgin Suicides
But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane...
My research cycles constantly from euphoria to...
My results are meaningful, my results are worthless, who even cares about my results? I sort and resort the datapoints to find meaning in the curve of a pixelated line, in the difference of a bar charts. Still the error bars denigrate my search - the signal is lost in the noise. It’s picking petals off of a flower - does he love me or love me not?
8-6-09
When I saw Lucas again I was almost amazed - this is the person that I’ve pined for all these weeks?
There’s just something about him - his curiousity and his sense of humor. We don’t always get along. I like to have these jokes that are crude and stupid sometimes - they’re just funny when you share them with another person. Aaron above all understands this about me. Lucas...
“In the morning Through the windowshade When the light pressed up Against your...”
I feel exhausted by life
The person that I have been seeing for some time is coming home in a few days. I don’t know how I will feel to see him again, and if I want to. I missed him so much while he was gone, but now that I’ve lived without him I don’t know if it will be the same: I don’t know that I actually need him and his physical presence anymore, now that I’ve gotten used to his...
July 2009
7 posts
Journey to the End of the Night
Wishing to take her by surprise, to ravish a little of her pride, of the prestige and power she had acquired over me, to diminish her, in short to humanize her a little and reduce her to our paltry proportions, I would go into her room when she was sleeping. At such times, Sophie offered a very different sight - more commonplace, yet surprising and reassuring as well. Without ostentation, almost...
I don’t really want to go on this date; I actually want to sit at home and mope about how I miss that someone and my lack of a master’s degree or German speaking ability.
I miss you so much it hurts
“I am half sick of data”
– Said the lady of Shalott.”
Tennyson
Sometimes I get so caught up
in coming up with systems to avoid doing tedious work, that I end up doing even more tedious work to design the system, and no useful work at all.
An Eliot Morning
*Frisch weht der Wind * *Der Heimat zu * *Mein Irisch Kind, * *Wo weilest du? * ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
I have some pressing questions
Such as, why are my cells not growing? Why does my PCR gel have two bands? Why do I have such specific and esoteric biological questions, that probably have no good or straightforward answers? I sit at my little table and furrow my brow, thinking about these questions.
June 2009
9 posts
“One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself....”
– Soren Kierkegaard
For-Profit Makes a Difference
Novogratz’s experiences eventually developed into the Acumen Fund>, a venture capital firm for aid. The idea is to invest *patient capital* in *scalable,* *for-profit* businesses that deliver services to the poor. The fund, for example, has invested in a firm producing drip irrigation systems in Pakistan, a Tanzanian firm that produces mosquito nets and an Indian firm producing...
Writing letters and not sending them.
Writing an e-mail that’s not meant to be sent has many advantages. I do it all the time, personally. We can let go of our petty, personal vitriol - the things that we plan to say to prove our superiority over the worm in question, this snake in the grass that has caused us such pain. We say these things and then never have to say them again, unless they really were necessary. It’s easy...
Week in Review, hour 8, 29 June 2009
The week is off to a good start. Today my roommate with the weird sleeping habits woke me up at 4 am washing grapes in the kitchen. My bed is over some water pipes, so I hear a loud rushing sound when people use the sink, and combined with the loud fan my landlord uses to create “positive pressure and natural air conditioning” in the house at night, I woke up. I think because I had...
Looking at the user instructions for the software...
I can’t help thinking “Some dumb intern probably wrote this.”
I told Babur about my research
First he said it sounded terribly boring. And then he said that I should have been a Biology major.
Markov Model Urge
I was reading a paper about high throughput phenotypic characterization and when it mentioned Hidden Markov Models I had a strong and inexplicable desire to eat the paper. I really can’t think what this is about, I’m not even hungry.
Keith Gessen is the new JD Salinger
What the hell is he doing?
My shoes are really squeaky today
that’s something I would put on Twitter if I had a Twitter.
May 2009
1 post
“Maybe I’m missing something. I will admit I am not the most plugged in...”
– Daniel Coffeen
April 2009
9 posts
In the Antalya bus termınal after a frustratıng day rıdıng publıc transportatıon and gettıng gratuıtıously lost, all I wanted was a nıce hot meal so I bought somethıng new, çorba ıskembe, descrıbed to me as a soup wıth meat. I got ıt and ıt was lıterally one of the worst thıngs I’ve eaten ın my lıfe. I soaked some of the complementary bread ınto ıt, whıch was unsatısfyıng because I’ve...
I've been writing all this because
I’m hiding in my hotel room until I can leave Pamukkale tomorrow morning. Istanbul > Selcuk > Denizli > Bursa > Izmir > Pamukkale I have found that I prefer to see Turkish people as they are instead of as hey are in trying to get money from tourists. This is something necessary that perhaps neither party essentially enjoys. Shopping in Denizli was pretty fun. Shopping in...
Yes, I'm a great hand at interpreting the...
I’ve been interpreting it for the last fifteen years. She agreed with me that we are living in the age of the third horse, the black one, and the rider who has the balance in his hand, seeing that everything in the present age is weighed in the scales and by agreement, and people are seeking for nothing but their rights - ‘a measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for...
I just bought the Turkish translation in a...
There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice looking, fairly intelligent and even good natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like other people.” To have a fortune, but not the wealth of Rothschild; to be of an honourable family, but one which has...
I'm kind of addicted to frequent flyer miles
It’s true.
In both Calvinism and Project Runway
You’re either in…
Or you’re out.
Auf Wiedersehen.
Kierkegaard and Khayyam
“No one comes back from the dead, no one has entered the world without crying; no one is asked when he wishes to enter life, nor when he wishes to leave.”
- Either/Or “Of all who went on this long road, Where is the one who has returned to tell us the secret? Take care to leave nothing for your needs on this two-ended way, You will not be coming back. Drink wine, you will...
Cultural comparisons
My Catholic grandmother has pictures of saints taped to her kitchen cupboards. My Jewish grandmother has pictures of Democratic politicians.
“- reduce your notes to a series of *questions* paired with *conclusions.*Between...”
– Study Hacks http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/04/06/4-weeks-to-a-40-streamline-your-notes/
March 2009
27 posts
In the throes of most exquisite yearning
Just finished “Speak, Memory” by Nabokov. I feel that I must invent words to describe how he makes me feel. He is like a most educated older friend that I meet time and time again over coffee, and he tells me with a gleam in his eye how silly I am. As I grow older the bashfulness and shame I feel dissipates until we simply share the joke of adolescence. Slowly, slowly I am starting to...
“Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the...”
– Pale Fire - Vladmir Nabokov
“In the England of Virginia Woolf, Nabokov found interwoven the two principal...”
– Extraterritorial - George Steiner
Good books and not good books
People keep asking me whether or not I like things. Books, movies, people, food, political institutions. Throughout my life I have taken this question very seriously, because it has always been the fact that what one says, to this, defines oneself in the world’s eyes. And this has always been a source of confusion to me because I have thought myself in poor taste. For example, I like to eat...
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when...”
– - Albert Einstein http://paulgraham.com/quo.html Right.
I am very sad because I don’t think that anyone will care for me because maybe I don’t truly care for anyone. I fear that my life will never know happiness, only distraction. Does distraction ever become true happiness? Does camaraderie ever become true friendship? Perhaps I am too caught up in absolutes to see the forest for the trees. I hear philosophy can do that to you.
Random Fax
x) Often as I drift to sleep I hear someone hock a loogie outside my window. Ah, Philadelphia!
What trickery!
An episode of Pinky and the Braininvolves the character Brain hatching a plan to construct an enormous series of Magic Eye billboards above the nation’s freeways, which deviously contain no hidden message at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye>
I'm not quite sure this isn't an Onion article.
The unmarried villagers were given hope that their access to potential partners would be eased during the last state assembly elections when, for the first time since independence, a party candidate on the campaign trail visited them. Ram Chandra Singh Yadav assured the village of 1,500 people that he too would not get married unless he could get a road for them. Believing his words, the...
“And he knew as well that he was a child compared to these various forces and he...”
– “All the Sad Young Literary Men” - Keith Gessen
“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own....”
– The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald Because I did not attend high school, I never had the pleasure of reading “The Great Gatsby” with the intent of writing a stupid paper about it. Liberated from this conceit, I found it to be an enjoyable book… although much shorter than I...
“It would seem that Pakistan is losing, quite rapidly, the battle against...”
– Fatima Bhutto http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/mar/09/terrorism-islam-sharia-pakistan
Kahlil Gibrain is not “emo”. Kahlil Gibrain is FUCKING BRILLIANT, yes?
“I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.
A tear to purify my heart and give me understanding of life’s secrets and hidden...
“I ought to have left Balbec, to have shut myself up in solitude, to have...”
– ~Marcel Proust
Minhazzudin: ” i didn’t understand the meaning of a single word you typed”
Say Anything
Today I sent a series of G-chat messages to a friend of mine: me: Minhazzudin me: In the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary to indulge in self-effacingly flippant conversation if only to convince one’s self that this universe has the meaning that we give it and nothing else neither depth, nor absence of depth a limitless horizon of wasted hours Sent at 10:58 AM on...
“Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done, in Earth as it is in Heaven. adveniat...”