Yule!

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Since I don’t have the mailing addresses of everyone who reads my online drivel, allow me to provide all of you with the holiday letter that everyone whose address I do have received. Pretend that you received this sandwiched in a square card displaying a close-up of Santa’s face done in sort of a non-threatening watercolor type of thing. Are you there? Theater of the mind? Got it? Okey dokey, then.

Dearest Y’all

My belief in and appreciation of brevity compels me to not waste time on lamenting how much I miss being close to you and yours. I mean, seriously. Duh. So, allow me to get right to the point.

As you may recall, I’m involved in medical research, currently as a Ph.D. candidate in Biochemistry. The primary goals of life as a graduate student in my field are to 1) Publish relevant findings that hasten the neverending pursuit of solutions to all of life’s problems and 2) Not starve. I’m happy to report my success in both fields to this point. Regarding the research, I specifically tackle ailments attached to autoimmune diseases like lupus and a few other lesser-known, but equally devastating disorders.

Some work that I did this year was published in a peer-reviewed science journal, which was a huge and somewhat unexpected perk. As a mere graduate student still relatively new to the world of biomedical research, such publishing bona fides qualify as a rather gratifying success. Additionally, our particular area of expertise has recently been implicated in disease pathways directly related to HIV/AIDS, which has expanded the scope of our research exponentially. The moral here is that I’ve found myself actively involved in the search for explanations to clinical suffering in ways I’d previously thought unimaginable. This is gratifying in a number of nearly miraculous and unexpected ways. So, there’s that.

I also turned over a new leaf this year in the area of physical training by deciding, in a truly groundbreaking maneuver, to train for something without doing damage to myself. My track record to this point had been monopolized by an insistence upon breaking, straining, pulling, or otherwise maiming some part of myself during the course of any kind of training, military or otherwise. Upon having sufficiently healed from a foot-related disaster the previous year, I started training in the Spring for a marathon that I’d planned on running in the Fall. After a couple of REALLY long runs that made me question the point of running for a seriously long time, I said something that rhymes with, ‘Fullslit’, and proceeded to sign up for and complete a half-marathon in North Carolina’s outer banks in November.

Let me simply say that my competitive nature will be killing me before it ever does me any good. I started the race way too fast, drank and ate nothing during the early stages, died with gusto just over halfway through, and finished at around 2:04 (2 hours, 4 minutes), which was ~15 minutes slower than I’d planned. Things for which I’m thankful:

I finished.
I didn’t hobble myself in the process.
I didn’t fling myself into the briny deep as I climbed the steep bridge over the Roanoke Sound.
I lived to fight again.

Silver linings!

The next year will consist of many half-marathons, to say the least. I have the bug. Something is daring me and I have to respond.

Finally, I’ve been writing more after a very long hiatus. Mostly just essays, one-pagers containing primarily baloney from the recesses of the brain that don’t get used during days spent slinging chemicals hither and yon. Still, it’s a much-needed outlet. At some point down the road, this may end up manifesting itself as a full-time gig explaining science to people, which would be nice. If I’ve learned nothing else as a full-time elderly student of the sciences these last six years it’s that the world is in constant and desperate need of an understanding of the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of biomedical science. The nutshell explanation is that mammals are complicated. Quite frankly, it’s a wonder any of us survive. And yet, we do. This is also miraculous in it’s own way. I believe that constitutes two things qualifying as ‘miraculous’ in a single holiday letter. A rare thing, indeed.

Of all the things that have become clear during the course of my work this year it’s how fragile and blessed a thing good health can be. I genuinely hope that your reading of this letter finds you and your family in good health and spirits and that the coming year brings nothing but continued health and happiness to all of you.

With sincerest best wishes,

Sir @ December 22, 2011

Cosmos

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‘The heart is the brightest’, she said.

Reclining in the summer night, eyes cast north, she began outlining the constellations for the boy she loved. Aligning her arm on Serpens, she pointed to the east and west, describing the head and the tail of the serpent coiled around the body of Ophiuchus. ‘The Romans called him Asclepius, the healer, which is why there’s a snake wrapped around the staff in our symbol of medicine.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever get better’, he stated matter of factly.

She knew so much about so many things that suddenly seemed pointless, but this one thing she didn’t know. ‘I don’t know’, she said after a moment, defeated.

‘I’m not sure I want to, he said. ‘It hurts to live. I can’t get past the pain. Being alive isn’t really living anymore. I don’t think things are going to get better.’

It destroyed her when he talked like that, so much older and more mature than his single-digit age should allow. But there he was. It was as if he’d learned things from some unseen tutor since being diagnosed.

‘How do you know things won’t improve? Give it time. Have faith. Believe in yourself.’ She was begging now, pride having long since taken a back seat to desperation.

‘The heart has eyes that the brain knows nothing of’, he muttered, almost imperceptible. ‘I heard someone say that in a dream last night.’ He sighed and focused on the gleaming heart of the constellation’s serpent, a dying star that suddenly seemed like a kindered spirit to the boy looking at it. ‘My brain says keep going, but my heart doesn’t see the point.’

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Grace challenged me with, ‘Cor Serpentis’ I challenged Amanda with a quote from Jean Paul Sartre that screams ‘HOLIDAY CHEER!’: ‘Hell is other people’.

Sir @ December 15, 2011

Deadly Cuddly

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Need is too tame a word to describe what it feels like.

When I’m awake, I feel incomplete until they give me a reason to feel anything at all. And even then, I don’t feel much, but what I do feel is always enough. At least it’s enough for awhile. I know that I need help, but I don’t know it. I feel lost, so I fall into the same traps again and again in order to know where I am. And that’s the insidious thing about it. The only time I don’t feel lost is when I’m in the middle of being lost.

Pride kept me from admitting that I was powerless. In the end, I had to crash so hard that other people got hurt. The sad truth is that sometimes the only way out is through someone else’s pain. But I warned her. From all the way down the aisle, I screamed at her to get away from them. She didn’t listen, I can only assume because she was as consumed as I was. As I am. As I’ll always be.

She didn’t die. I suppose I should feel lucky, but honestly I don’t feel anything at all. I’m working my way past my insatiable need, this obsession that has ruled my life for so long, but only half-heartedly. I acknowledge that it made me stomp a woman into a coma in order to get at what kept calling to both of us. She muttered something about ‘…doing it for her kids’. Kids don’t deserve their perfection. They can’t appreciate it. I don’t remember when beanie babies became the sun around which my world orbits, but it doesn’t matter. They own me. The bitch had it coming.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Lisa challenged me to, ‘Write a story about a character who is addicted to something. It can be a serious piece where they are addicted to something obvious like alcohol or drugs or it can be a fun piece where they are addicted to something strange like McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys. Be as creative as you wish with the addiction!’ I challenged Michael with, ‘You can’t fight genetics’.

Sir @ December 8, 2011

Progress

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I could talk about any number of profound things to round out the month, but my brain is fried. I acknowledge the benefits of annually stopping what I’m doing and spending quality time diving into the scientific literature in order to remind me of what I do know (a fair amount) and what I don’t (dear God, so, so much), it’s a bit of a butt kicker. The devil as always is in the details and in science, everything is a detail and, therefore, a devil. And when you work on things that actually afflict people, talking about the devil sometimes seems like it might not be entirely hyperbolic.

It’s easy to look past the clinical stuff when you’re focused on the things working at the molecular level, but when you back away from the bench and immerse yourself in journals in order to learn the background, what you find are case studies. Under my research umbrella sit a lot of sick people, an inordinate number of whom are kids. The sickest of them are infants who die within months of being born. They die primarily because their body’s immune system, itself young and naïve, more or less commits suicide. Another group are suddenly and relentlessly afflicted in their 40s or 50s. They lose their eyesight, then their minds, and in the middle is maybe a stroke or two. It has a 100% mortality rate within 5 – 10 years, but I’d wager that most feel that’s a long time to wait.

It’s unfair. One can argue that the folks who have lived a life prior to being struck down by their genetic anomaly are more fortunate than the newborns who never had a chance. I’d say that this is wrong. Does the newborn know what’s it’s missing? Can the newborn see its own deterioration in the mirror everyday or feel his or her mind slowly pulling away to an unknown destination? There’s no need for scales to measure how fortunate one is over another when both people are dying.

I’m not doing this stuff out of selflessness. I came to it completely by accident in a way that would likely force people to sit down and have a drink in order to process it all. What matters, all that matters, is that I’m doing it. Reading the scientific literature has gotten easier over the years. This talk I’m giving tomorrow is already so much better then previous years’ that I’m almost embarrassed that I ever gave the old ones at all. I’m starting to publish things and think in ways that are making people rub their chin and nod. Progress is the reward, not success. Success in this line of work is too vague a term. You make progress. Forward momentum.

I remember reading this and thinking first how remarkable she is and second what a blessing it is to know the difference between what’s important and what’s extra stuff sitting on life’s periphery. That knowledge seems rare and usually hard won. Huntington’s Disease, Tay-Sachs, Aicardi-Goutieres, systemic lupus, HIV. They’re all just stuff to read about until you start to understand them on a deeper level, whether that be through research or a relative who’s afflicted. Diseases like these don’t fight fair. There are no Marquess of Queensbery rules. But you fight anyhow. That’s progress.

Sir @ November 30, 2011

Dislogic

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I extricated myself from the hospital this afternoon to the main campus in order to take advantage of the huge library. The hospital’s library is fairly tiny and primarily caters to the medical students and their frantic, desperate attempts to learn everything in as short a time as possible. Trying to get anything done there is difficult due to its being crowded with people wearing the shorter white coats that mark medical students, coupled with a faraway look that verges on hopelessness. Staying in the lab is also a poor idea when one needs to concentrate, as things are always happening, chemicals being slung, random cursing, people walking around and talking like the inconsiderate bastards they are.

Also, I miss spending time on an actual campus. True, I can walk ~50 yards from the lab and find myself next to the hospital’s morgue, but that’s a really empty victory. So, I went back to the main library, a huge place normally ripe with open places to sit and quietly attack whatever cognitive baloney needs attacking. This afternoon, however, the weather was cold and wet and apparently that meant that all of the undergraduates felt the need to warm their precious tootsies in a place full of books they’ll never read, commandeering the cushy chairs that all private college libraries are required to have, and talking in starts and stops about nothing in particular.

I finally found my way down to the basement, which is one of the nicest library basements you’ll ever see, and spent a good number of hours wrapping my noggin around how HIV cleverly treats people like its bitch. At one point, I glanced at the stacks to my right and saw an anthology on logic written by a dude named Dagobert D. Runes and thought, God, what a sad and pointless name I have in comparison. Then I considered what a sad and pointless vocation Logic would be in today’s world. There was a time when you could focus all your time on stuff like Logic and Rhetoric and Philosophy, but now you’re lucky if you can get a smattering of philosophy, lower-case ‘p’, at even universities with enormous endowments.

Logic is a lost art, assuming it ever held much space in the collective psyche. I’ve read a lot of history in my life and logic has rarely been much of a priority. Human nature trumps logic at every turn, despite supposed ‘progress’, intellectual or otherwise. Take our current crop of politicians, specifically the republican contingent. That such people are allowed/encouraged to talk out loud in front of other people and sometimes children is devoid of logic. At the same time, history is teeming with political dipshittery. Spend some time in the U.S. Congress of the 1840s and 1850s. Holy shit, yo. It was like giving a baby a squirt gun full of gasoline and Bic lighter. John C. Calhoun makes all of the current republican hopefuls look like a bunch of ideologically moderate scholars.

Anyhoodle, back from the tangent. This is more or less what it looks like when I just start typing without thinking too terribly hard about what the words look like. It’s not that bad, really. I’ve written worse, I suppose. For the time being, however, I need to get my ass back into the PowerPoint saddle until the wee hours yet again. The good news is that the REALLY complicated stuff has been tackled and overcome, leaving me only the complicated stuff to deal with, which is completely doable in a reasonable amount of time, I think. Famous last words, etc.

Sir @ November 29, 2011

Pro Crastinator

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You’ll be happy to know that I’m still enough of a perfectionist to make my life a living hell. Why you’re happy about this is beyond me. You’re just awful, I guess.

I periodically talk about my research to groups of people who know stuff. This isn’t technically that big a deal. I know what I’m doing, what I’ve done, what it means, etc. The process of creating the slides, though. It’s not unheard of for me to spend an entire day on four slides, painstakingly second guessing myself into a wall. Tonight I’ll likely be up until the sun rises having slap fights with myself over how to talk about a detail or what I can do to make a graph suck less. The seminar is Thursday. Do you see the problem? I should be able to slap this baloney together in a day or so, but I should’ve started last month, knowing my handicap. Why didn’t I? Next paragraph.

And I’ll clarify the opening sentence by admitting that I’ve gotten much better over the years. I’m considerably less of a perfectionist than I once was. It was debilitating, while also being a recipe for success. ‘Success’ needs to be in quotes here, of course. In any event, the point is that I’m much better now, thanks, even though I still drive myself batshit insane. My favorite device for the insane driving is to try to imagine every possible question that might arise as a result of something I say and to prepare the slide/talk in such a way as to address it. One favorite and effective way to deal with this impossibility is to procrastinate and not do anything involving the slide show at all. At the moment, an effective form of procrastination is typing gibberish onto a screen while listening to the wind and rain pound on my windows. This is currently very effective. Very. Effective.

To my credit, I’m not drinking anything brown and laden with alcohol. This might help for awhile, but the line in this situation between ‘helping’ and ‘doing more harm than good’ is paper thin. So, my only saving grace at the moment is that I’m not throwing back the devil’s mouthwash like a drunken cowboy. This isn’t exactly a win. Or ‘grace’. Also not a win: I’m still typing this.

Sir @ November 28, 2011

Ballad

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Lo, but I am profoundly pooped, ye verily.
Driving ~20 hours in three days;
A horrendous idea that is
Truly for the birds.

This is a falsehood.
Birds would never do such a thing,
For they lack the self-hate
Required.

Not that I hate myself,
Mind you.
It’s just that I’m a
Crappy poet.

Actually, that was a wasted stanza.
What I meant to say in verse was
That I’m not motivated by hate,
Except for when it’s convenient.

And hate is never convenient,
Though it certainly can be cathartic.
Listen, I’m not advocating hate, it’s just that
I’m really tired.

So tired, in fact,
That the simple act of rhyming
Would overwhelm my enfeebled
mind at the moment.

And there you have it:
The worst excuse for a poem ever.
I can’t believe that you
Read the entire thing.

Fool!

Sir @ November 27, 2011