DAY FOURTEEN - HOW AM I DIFFERENT THAN A PERSON PAID TO DO NOTHING FOR SCIENCE

HOW MY JOB IS BOTH SIMILAR TO AND DIFFERENT THAN THAT OF A NASA PILLOWNAUT


Pillownauts are those people that NASA pays to stay in bed as some sort of experiment in low or no gravity simulation.  While wondering around the halls of the office today searching for sunlight, I wondered...how is my lot in life similar to and different from these brave souls who have sold their living bodies to science? Here's what I've got so far.

- We both get paid to do nothing. 

- Pillownauts make more to do nothing than I do. But perhaps not after taxes!

- Thrown off balance by the vortex of energy and spirit known as our respective workplaces, we both are prone to blog about shit most people don't really care about.

- While a NASA Pillownaut is paid to NEVER GET OUT OF BED, I am paid to never leave the office.  But I can leave my chair and hang out in the kitchen. And occasionally I need to get things from the copy machine.

- NASA Pillownauts are contributing to a growing body of knowledge about the effects of space travel on human beings. I am contributing to absolutely nothing.

- When the Pillownauts spend hours upon hours online to numb themselves to the boredom of their existence, they aren't blocked from accessing the best parts of the internet, i.e. tumblr.

- They don't feel guilty, I'm guessing, for watching movies at work. 

But how is my job different than this guy's? Unclear.

DAY FOURTEEN - BERLIN BOUND

This just in from the trenches!


TYCDIGS and comrade FTS are headed for Berlin this weekend. Reuniting with college friends, reuniting with expat friends, reuniting with tasty beers and quality footwear...

Yesterday in NON GRAD LIFE: 

shopping for overstocks and rejects in anticipation of warm weather, wandering, and hanging out at a metal bar relieved that the band actually just played rock.

DAYS ELEVEN AND TWELVE - BACKDATED

Hanging out in parks with over-priced baked goods, cafe-hopping with an adorable soon-to-goddaughter and her parents in tow, and too many evenings at Cheers.

I will otherwise remember this weekend with these two videos:






Following the failed bar crawl (maybe next weekend?) a new idea for a themed party:  Dress to be daggered!

DAY SEVEN INSTALLMENT TWO

TOWARDS A NEW GENRE IN TASTING NOTES
or, why I should probably just learn Italian instead


A recent language log post talks about text analysis by comparing ranked wines with the words used to rank them. Numbers...ick! But I'm just mostly interested in the 20 words most strongly associated with poorly ranked wines:

detergent 80.3
ungenerous 80.4375
shrill 80.5714
mean 80.6154
? 81.2
odd 81.24
meager 81.3333
sulfur 81.6333
aspirin 81.641
bobbing 81.6905
cardboard 81.7955
limp 81.8276
chemical 81.931
oxidized 82.0714
dull 82.1048
stemmy 82.1321
bite 82.1333
jumbled 82.2
scorched 82.25
tough 82.25
tired 82.2581


And I loved this example:

Hazy, pale golden color. Funky, old canned vegetable and lemon detergent aromas follow through to a bittersweet medium-bodied palate with wet hay, fruit stones, orange drink, and honey candy flavors. Finishes with a tannic citrus peel fade.

Funky, old canned vegetable? This reminded me of something. So I started cruising for cruel tasting notes. But then I realized that no one who was able to write a half-decent tasting note would  subject their pallate to Turkish non-exports. And people who write tasting notes dress up their contempt in such a way that it isn't really very satisfying to read - not enough zingers for my style.

For example...I read these:

Sarafin Shiraz 2007 Turkey 15 Drink 2009-11 
Contains 5% Cabernet Sauvignon apparently. 
Dark crimson. Rather reduced? And very taut and austere on the finish. Not much juicy fruit in the middle. Young vines and reductive winemaking?

Doluca, Kav Boğazkere/Öküzgözü 2006 Turkey 15.5 Drink 2008-10 

Boğazkere 55%, Öküzgözü 45%. 
Healthy red. Sweet and a little spritzy even with some rather obvious acid. You can taste the tannins and maybe some added acid? Not very harmonious.

Doluca, Signium 2006 Turkey 15 Drink 2010-12
Shiraz 54%, Boğazkere 33% (don't know what else is in this blend which was aged in a mix of American and French oak for 13 months).
Very dark crimson. Quite a bit of oak on the nose, lots of acidity and a bit of hole in the middle. Astringent. Not quite whole.

Doluca, Karma Shiraz/Boğazkere 2007 Turkey 15.5 Drink 2009-12
Shiraz 82%, Boğazkere 18% aged for 15 months in two-thirds US and one-third French oak.
Bright vibrant crimson. Full on, fruit-driven nose. Very direct, no subtlety and rather dry tannins on the finish. Very New World. 

Those are nothing compared to lemon detergent and funky old canned vegetables!

What I think the world needs is a new genre of tasting note - the burn. Like the one above but a bit meaner...this is pretty scathing...let's expand this to conform with the cultivated lexicon and formulaic style of the tasting note and we will have something fun for me to read at work. And to memorize and perform, a bit like a party trick but perhaps with an audience perhaps somewhat more limited than your average party trick. It will have a lot of shock value, because I am sure the trained ear it will sound quite horrifying.

I suppose on the other hand I could just learn more about wine and tasting notes and then perhaps the bitchiness in the above reviews will become more legible and they will be therefore more satisfying to consume. OR maybe I should just learn a new language. Although that might take a good deal longer than it would to be able to pretend I could talk about wine, I would be able to talk about a whole lot of things other than wine, so I think on balance it would be the better choice. So, clearly the answer is Italian.

DAY SEVEN

One theme of today at the office is "competing interests." This came up planning a Friday the 13th pub crawl. Let us say for the sake of this post that people go on pub crawls for two reasons*: a) to drink large amounts of alcohol b) to go to new places [that one would assume would also be filled with new people].

But a and b do not mix quite as well as grenadine in your shitty cocktail; showing up to a new-to-you bar you've "been wanting to go [to] foreeever" completely shitfaced may not be a very good idea.  This causes some difficulty when planning such an event, as prioritizing b [cool new bars] would seem to detract from a [getting shitfaced], but a can't really be compromised, because if you honestly after the vital components of b [new places and new people], wouldn't you just join salsa?

This reminds me of the sad, sad day I planned a pub crawl during GRAD LIFE.  We went to three bars, although at first we were going to go to four, because there were in fact four bars in the entire neighborhood. Unfortunately just two bars in we had to redirect our route because it turned out that one of the bars closed at midnight on Saturdays, so we ended up a bit early at Cheers, which that night happened to be filled with some kids from a midwestern university who unfortunately had decided to spend their spring break in a neighborhood with only three functioning bars.


*Please excuse the reductionism. STRUCTURALIST THOUGHT CAN BE HELPFUL.

DAY SIX

In my first dabble in grad school, I once listened to nothing other than Wye Oaks for almost a month because I didn't have time to make a new "write" playlist and I was starting to go mad from listening to Spain, Bibio and Nouvelle Vague on constant repeat.

Did you know there are many, many people in the world who only make playlists for the purposes of relaxation, dancing, social gatherings and sexual intimacy? There are people who do not only have playlists organized as follows: "productivity", "writing - thinking", "writing - concentrate", "reading - light", "muststayawake". For the next few glorious months, I am one of those lucky many!

Do you know anyone more adorable than Grimes? I thought that perhaps I knew one (Katie M) before I learned that this super-cute Canadian lost both her houseboat and chickens to the Minnesota police. Proof can also be found in this video at 0:41




I like staring at this next video almost as much as I liked staring at Rihanna in All of the Lights before I had seen that video, like, a thousand times.




Let's get bodysuits with cool backs, plz.






And now I want to vomit pearls and have ugly friends dance with me

DAYS FOUR AND FIVE

Weekend catchup.

DAY 4

Very cool visitors make weekends more fun.

I bought a bunch of trashy dresses on super-sale at a trashy dress store. Then I wore one of them and it looked pretty amazing(ly trashy).

[EDIT (15:23, 09.04.2012): One reader claims that one can most certainly wear trashy dresses in grad school, especially to "trashy dress parties." ]

I also met someone in the midst of the GRAD LIFE.

me: so what do you do?
grad boy: I study
me: where?
grad boy: in the US
me: where?
grad boy: in [city]
me: where?
grad boy: at [school]
me: um. what department?
grad boy: political science
me: what kind of political science do you do?
grad boy: political theory
me: who's your man?
grad boy: actually my favorite theorist is a woman
me: Oh, so you like Hannah Arendt.
grad boy: Um, yeah.

Oh, political theory boys! I love the delightfully predictable ways you think you're unpredictable.

DAY 5

Brunch on a sunny terrace, picnic in the park with a duckling.

One more friend arrives in town, and we must accomodate him by pretending Sunday night is still the weekend. But he is the best so we'll push through to Wednesday.

DAY THREE

Starved of intellectual stimulation, last night I went to a "poetry event," which, much like Frommer's list of the world's 10 worst airport terminals, was absolutely terrible. Text back and forth with the bffer beside you like you're 14 years old terrible. Constantly hold your drink up to your face because it is the only way to not crack a vicious grin terrible. While I can't wait until I go back to the comforts of intellectual elitism and spend all of my time with other people like me who hate on almost everything all of the time, there is a very special feeling that comes with knowing that you are too good for everything around you. I shall miss that.

Sigh.

DAY TWO

Everyone knows that any grad student with an internet connection is probably reading a good deal of online content at best tangential to their research interests (even you, media "scholars"). It even feels so good to do this when you know you have hundreds of pages of real stuff to read.

But it also feels so good to read article after article, post after post, that lives nowhere other than in the wide world of the web and know you have absolutely nothing of intellectual substance that you'll be needing to throw yourself into afterwards. It even makes you think about doing things that for people with actual time constraints are a complete waste of time, such as leaving comments, editing wikipedia articles, and keeping up with not only the newest music and film, but what people who keep up with that kind of stuff think of it.

And conducting this endless click and click and click again research to the tune of the guitar and accordion duo that wonders around the sidestreets outside the office and serenades the neighborhood's office workers really makes it so much better.

Would you believe that running up to Turkish President Gul's visit to the Netherlands, a museum exhibit to celebrate 400 years of Turkish-Dutch relations displayed a 17th-century drawing depicting a fez as a makeshift toilet and pages of the Koran as makeshift toilet paper? Would you believe there exists a clearly superior rival to the douchebaggery of Tucker Max? Would you believe that I do not find this person particularly impressive?

DAY ONE

So it is decided! Instead of starting a real career, I'm throwing caution to the wind and have decided to accept an offer to sit in a library to read, write and grade papers for the better part of a decade!

I don't exactly know where (therefore when) I will go this fall, so instead of counting down, I will count UP, describing my life, which is filled with all sorts of fantastic things you can't do in grad school.

I may also be drawing inspiration from a favorite blog of mine, but to CONCEAL MY TRUE IDENTITY I will restrain myself from linking!  But remember what they say about imitation.

So here it begins.

DAY ONE!

I sat at my desk where I should be working, but since I don't really have that much work to do, I read some Murakami. And when I needed to take a break, I gossiped with officemate for a long time about a variety of people I don't really care about that much. And some people I guess I kinda do. And when that got boring, I drank my free liter of freshly-squeezed orange/carrot/ginger juice that arrived one hour later but I still graciously received. Well I didn't drink the whole liter. Then when that got boring I went back to the most difficult task of my day: reading more Murakami.  No, he's not a particularly difficult author, but sustaining interest in a SINGLE story over 900 pages? Ugh!  Who has that kind of sustained attention? Not a non-grad!