A little more talk and all the wrong action

Earlier today, I took a break from painting my house and walked into my kitchen to throw an aluminum can in my indoor recycle bin (which is actually a trash can with a lime-green recycle symbol drawn on the lid in Sharpie). For some reason, my garish sign reminded me of the Disney movie WALL-E. Has anyone else noticed the irony in this phenomenon? This is a film based entirely on how consumerism, materialism, and a disposable culture ruin our planet and effectively turn us all into helpless little babies living in a container owned by a super-duper-huge retail corporation which we will get sued if we name so we will instead call it "Buy n Large."

And yet, Walmart and Target sell WALL-E products. Furthermore, the consumer products that were released in support of the film (which can only be purchased at Disney stores) are made of shiny new plastic. Like this:

Is the plastic used to make these things recycled? No way. If that were the case, Disney would want FULL

credit for it.

Birthdays are the final FUN-tier! It even comes with a vinyl tablecloth!

Seriously. Thank you, Disney, for preaching so loudly. The children of the world will thank you someday.

From a spaceship.

Owned by Wal-Mart.

Unacceptable.

There's a smaller message in WALL-E, too: maybe BnL takes over the world because the government just couldn't hack it. Today in the news, I read that a Federal Judge issued an injunction against the Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, almost directly after the Obama administration had made provisions for it. Specifically,

"[The Director of the National Institutes of Health] said 50 new grant applications up for peer review will be pulled. In addition, 12 grants worth an estimated $15 million to $20 million that have already gone through initial review will be halted, along with another 22 grants totaling $54 million that already are under way and scheduled for annual review in September, Collins said." (CNN.com)

It is important to not that not all stem cells are taken from embryos, and not all stem cell research uses embryonic stem cells. The NIH is still funding stem cell research with other non-babyesque sources. But let's just forget the political/ethical issue momentarily. The hours spent and the sleep lost over writing 84 grant applications (that are now completely useless) could have been used to find a real cure for cancer, to revolutionize burn victim care, or to provide a replacement for the organ transplant donor list, which is a death sentence for many. Congratualations, academia... you just got punk'd.

Love is Blind

It's a Monday.

And I feel like this: "Shooting Star" by Hyperbole and a Half

I'll be 26 on Thursday! The kids all tell me I'll be pushing 30 at that point. Thanks kids... I love you too.

I really want to go to this music festival on Saturday... wanna join? It's gonna be amazing (if you like the Mountain Goats). If not, Birds and Arrows is still going to be great!

Day of the Flying Mattress

I spent today helping one of my good friends move into her new apartment.

The truck that she borrowed to move with happened to be a short-bed Toyota with a toolbox, so it was basically useless. We stacked her queen-sized mattress and box spring on top of each other, wedged them into the bed and laid them over the cab. Then we strapped them down half-assedly with two leashes I pulled out of my trunk and tied together.

It looked kind of like this:

Not surprisingly, we got almost to her apartment and the mattress flew out onto the street. I was following the truck, so I pulled in front of the mattress and put on my hazard lights. Moments later I saw her and her brother sprinting back in my direction. They threw the mattress over their heads and carried it about 200 yards down the side of the road, back to the truck. I found another two leashes in my car and tied them together (sometimes it pays to be a dog addict), and we crossed the straps. The mattress did not come out again. On that trip.

I didn't know we were moving a second mattress, so when we finished moving her bed, I put the leashes back in my car, which was parked at her new place.

After we moved all of my friend's things, we drove over to another apartment complex and picked up a twin bed for her mother's guest room (she had to replace the bed that my friend took). We had no straps, no rope, no nothing. And shockingly, the mattress and the bedframe (which was on top of it) flew out onto the 4-lane road. So we picked them up and put them in the back of the SUV that was following us in the truck... which, obviously, should have been the original plan, but no one was upset. For the rest of the trip, my friend's mother rode in the bed of the truck to try to hold the box spring down, and sang the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies all the way back to her house. Luckily, no accidents were caused by either mishap.

Alternative blog title: Four small women and an even smaller truck.

We had a hell of a time trying to get the couch out of my friend's storage unit. The unit has an unreasonably tiny door that opens into a short, narrow hallway. And after several failed attempts to squeeze the couch out into the hallway, a frantic search for a screwdriver, removing the feet from the couch with only my green LED keylight as a guide, and some Twister-like maneuvering, I ended up ramming the couch with all my weight to get it wedged through the door. But we did it. At which point my friend's mother jumped up and down yelling, "Son of a bitch! We don't need any man to help us! Son of a bitch! We're awesome!"

We high-fived a lot. It was a pretty priceless moment.

On pretension and academia

So I decided that it's time for me to suck it up and get back into graduate school. As my advisor told me over and over.... "All jobs suck. Research sucks a little bit less." I hate to admit it, but wow, he was right.

So after applying for ten pay-the-bills jobs in my area (I'm averaging applications 6 a day), I was reading articles and looking through faculty websites, examining my options for potential advisors (or at least employers for a year-long fellowship). The following quote was on a faculty member's listing of research interests.

"Nonfiction, with its pretension of veridicality, and fiction, with its patina of verisimilitude, but no necessary pretension to accuracy, are popularly understood as distinct realms."

Seriously? Are you kidding me?

Let's try this again. So people recognize nonfiction - presented as a representation of reality - and nonfiction - presented as resembling reality - as separate categories. Wow. Thank you, researcher who shall remain nameless, for that nugget of eternal wisdom.

The last time I was in graduate school, I never understood why my advisor wanted me to use smaller words. Maybe I was still on a vocabulary binge from studying for the GRE, but I am over it.

Really, though... if you have nothing to say, please don't say it with really obnoxious, erudite language.

Culture Shock?

One of my roommates is a PhD student in Bio-neuro-chemistry (hyphens have been added for emphasis). He came to the United States from India for the first time on Thursday. He had never left India before that. His first meal in the US, at my mother's bidding, was Indian food (she wanted to make him feel at home)... And the first retail store he was exposed to here? Radio Shack.

Yikes.

He has spent a lot of his time in the last few days being visibly uncomfortable. Nevertheless, it's been amazing to watch him experience our culture for the first time, and to help him get along.

Today, I taught him how to shop in an American grocery store (Harris Teeter). Reflecting on this experience, I am amazed by the things I take for granted - bar code scanners, produce codes, automatic digital scales in the checkout lane; the location of tomato sauce in a very large store; how to use a self-checkout.

I am not surprised that he is often confused and flustered by our extravagance. For example, he was amazed at the number and variety of cartons of eggs available in the refrigerated case, and asked me if there's any recognizable difference between them all. I told him that some people have an ethical dilemma with buying eggs from chickens housed in an industrial farm setting. Those people prefer their eggs to be laid by chickens who are allowed to roam free and graze, like chickens on a small farm. "So," I said, "the ones on the upper shelves are 'friendly eggs' and the ones are the bottom are, well regular eggs. And some of them are laid by chickens who have been supplemented with Omega 3 fatty acids. Those eggs are sold under the pretense that they are healthier."

He looked at me and blinked a few times, pointed at a carton on the bottom shelf and said, "Are these white eggs? Because I don't like the brown ones."

This reminds me of some research I read by Barry Schwartz on consumer choice; he gathered a large amount of data suggesting that while too few choices are boring, too many choices can paralyze the consumer.

In America, you can buy friendly eggs from free-range chickens who eat a lot of salmon, or from free-range chickens who don't, or from regular chickens who eat a lot of fish oil, or from regular chickens who don't. Each of these can be purchased in either the white or brown egg variety. AGH

This is just disgusting.

Come on, people.

A camera with a slimming effect?

I am Terrible at Blogging

Wow, it really has been eight months since I posted.

Many things have changed. I have two roommates, soon to be three - all grad students at Wake. I also have a job now (since April); though it doesn't pay much, it's one I like a lot. I haven't quite finished with the house yet. I'm giving myself until Christmas to be totally done - a year isn't a bad window for one person to do a relatively large remodel. I'll post more pictures as soon as I find my camera...

Yesterday, in Roanoke, I went to the most amazing salvage store EVER. I'm pretty sure I want everything in my house to come from this place. Like a headboard made of an old piano harp. There's a big black lab who hangs out by the registers (it's called Black Dog Salvage - how awesome is that?), you get a discount for donating dog food, and a percentage of all profits goes to the local SPCA. Check it out.

Also went to the Taubman Museum of Art. I wasn't really excited about the premiere exhibit this go-round, which is entitled "Posing Beauty in African American Culture." When I got there, however, I was heavily impressed. You know it's a great installation when you find yourself thinking, "Wow, I never realized how much more extreme everything is than it was 50 years ago," or "Maybe Michael Jackson was miserable because he spent his whole life in the closet" or "I wonder what factors contributed to the rise and fall of the Afro as a fashionable hairstyle?"

And because I was feeling pretty crazy, I went to the Mill Mountain Zoo. Not that impressive... but gosh, are red pandas cute. I want one... or maybe I just want a Coatimundi!

Probably not. One more thing: LCD Soundsystem just released a new album and I was lucky enough to get it yesterday. Here's a sample of one of my favorite songs on the disc.