Apply Head To Wall; Repeat

Face-melting Rants, Research, Science, Whatnot Comments (8)

*Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk**Bonk*

This is what it looks like in print when I bang my head against a wall. One thing that I don’t do nearly enough here is talk about what I do. Why do I feel like I need to do this more or even at all? Because going type-y type-y does less emotional damage than burying it, that’s why. Actually (Also), Biomedical research is fascinating stuff and I don’t think there’s enough out there to illustrate this fact. Or maybe there is, but it lacks a certain articulation that enables people not involved to understand and/or appreciate what a spiffy endeavor it is. This is ultimately my goal, I suppose, that coincides nicely with never working directly for anyone ever again as long as I live: Freelance-write science crap to help lay-people understand junk about both stuff and baloney. Articulate is my middle name, as you can see.

The shortest explanation for the bonking is that shit in the lab isn’t working. Actually, let me be clear on this point and let this be the first in probably many lessons bestowed here concerning research: Shit in the lab rarely works. And ‘works’ is an incredibly subjective term. An experiment might work perfectly, but provide a result that makes you stand in one place staring at a wall for hours trying to figure out what it all means. Just because the result makes you want to punch a nun doesn’t mean that the experiment didn’t work, technically speaking. My problem with the results that I’m currently getting is that I can’t duplicate them. I’ve pooped out all kinds of spectacular data, highly publishable stuff, groundbreaking, earth-shattering, bodice-ripping science, but the kicker is that if I can’t duplicate any of it, basically it never happened. Like a tree that falls in an empty wood makes nary a sound, experimental results that can’t be duplicated never really happened.

And the time that’s been spent. My God. Repeating the same things over and over again and getting slightly different results, while following the same damn protocols. Every day. Over and over. I recently heard a story about someone who walked away from a different biomedical graduate program to become a lawyer and when asked why, she replied that there came a point where she just got sick of always being wrong. This is completely understandable and it’s a good thing to figure out early in the game. My limited experience with how research works, in and out of the lab, has shown me that it consists of the following basic life-cycle, which has been confirmed, more or less, by people in the know:

wrong wrong wrong wrong nada nope wrong zip zilch OH! wrong wrong HA! wrong nothing no hmm, that’s odd crap IT BURNS! wrong wrong victory! repeat

And victory isn’t a given. It doesn’t even have a solid definition. For some it might be getting a grant funded or being given tenure at some university or perhaps just getting published. Whatever. The bottom line is that the entire process is a perfectionist’s nightmare. If you have a fear of snakes, throw yourself into a pit full of asps, a la Indiana Jones. If you’re afraid of failure, however, I HIGHLY recommend you start doing research and learn how to get over it.

So, here’s the thing: I’m working with ridiculously small amounts of stuff. Think about one liter of something. Thought about it? Okey dokey, then. One milliliter is 1000-times smaller. One microliter is 100,000-times smaller, a nanoliter is a million-times smaller, and a picoliter is 100,000,000-times smaller. I play with the nano- and pico-levels of this and that, which means that room for error doesn’t really exist. Everything I play with needs to remain frozen and if it doesn’t or if it’s frozen/thawed too many times, it might or might not be adversely effected. The variables involved in why a result might be ‘odd’ are endless. Also, and I’ve stated this here before, mammals are fucking complicated.

I realize that the word ’should’ can be both a dangerous and debilitating one in any walk of life. It can weigh a person down like an anchor. I have less than two years experience with being in a lab environment and, truth be told, have seen more success than abject failure. Given my comparative lack of background, I’d say that I’m ahead of the power curve, generally speaking. Nevertheless, and I say this with the keenest understanding of how ridiculous and pointless it is, but THIS SHIT SHOULD BE WORKING AND MY WASTING TIME REPEATEDLY HAVING IT NOT WORK BECAUSE SATURN IS IN THE FOURTH HOUSE OR A BUTTERFLY SNEEZED OR I HAD A DREAM WHERE A FAT DUDE HOLDING A BUCKET OF APPLES STARTED LAUGHING AT ME IS DRIVING ME BATSHIT CRAZY AND MAKING ME DREAM ABOUT PORTLY FRUIT-BEARING PEOPLE.

Getting back to my original point, I still love research and science is amazing, but it’s kind of like getting kicked around by a bipolar elephant. Nevertheless, this rambling screed seems like an excellent way to inaugurate the ’science’ category. Next time: What’s an enzyme and why are they so fucking fickle with their love?

Sir @ February 26, 2010

Hungarian Goulash

Food Porn, Whatnot Comments (7)

My mother used to make what she liked to call goulash by whipping up some tomato-based meat sauce and throwing it on top of macaroni noodles. And being a kid growing up in the midwest, for all I knew at the time that’s exactly what it was. So, I grew up thinking that this bland little exercise in frugal cooking was ‘goulash’. Then I went to Budapest and ate like a king for, like, $3.65/day for about a week in the mid-90s and was subject to a crash course in what goulash really was all about and why paprika is perhaps the most under-appreciated spice in the rack. Hungarian goulash is not good for you. Chicken paprikash is not good for you, either. Much of the Hungarian diet will kill you quickly and efficiently. In all cases, however, you will die happy. The paramedics may find you slumped over your kitchen table, hands clutching the shirt covering your chest, but there will also be a smile on your face. Having planted this picture in your frontal lobe, let’s make some Hungarian goulash*, shall we?

1.5 lbs of steak tips or flank steak cut into ~1” hunks
Flour
Olive oil
1 sweet onion
4 cloves of garlic
½ c sweet red wine or marsala
1 ¾ c beef broth
¼ c paprika (No, I’m not shitting you)
1 c sour cream (again….not a typo)
Noodles

Dump some flour into a bowl, then toss your meat (HA!) in the flour, coating it liberally. Liberally, I tell you! Heat up some olive oil in a dutch oven/cast-iron skillet, then dump your flour’d meat in and brown it over medium heat (medium is plenty, since these skillets conduct heat like something that conducts heat really well).

Remove the meat and set it aside. Cut up your onion and garlic and saute them in the olive oil/meat leavin’s in the skillet.

Add the wine or marsala and use it to deglaze the skillet. This is going to smell really good, so maybe just stand there sipping something for awhile, slowly scraping the bottom of the skillet, while soaking in the moment. After the moment has been adequately soaked, add your broth and the paprika and stir well, letting this come to a very low boil (still over medium heat) for ~5 minutes. Add the meat and allow the slow boil to work with the flour coating the meat to gradually thicken the sauce.

Let this gurgle over medium-low heat for ~15 minutes. Now, look at the sour cream and think about what you’re about to do. Meditate on it.

OK, now fold the sour cream into the sauce and lower the heat, allowing it all to simmer for ~10 minutes.

Use this time to boil the noodles. Spoon some of the heart-friendly goop over the noodles, grab a fork, take a deep breath, and proceed to give your taste buds an early Christmas gift.

* This is a modified version of a recipe that I found online a long time ago. Most of the stuff I cook come from recipes that I’ve modified for added awesomeness, so you can probably find something similar using your Google machine, but it won’t be nearly as good IMHO.

Sir @ February 19, 2010

Sigh Factory

Dogs, Whatnot Comments (11)

‘I haven’t sighed like that since the war’, I thought to myself after processing the sight of the carnage strewn about my backyard. ‘God, what a drama queen.’

The neighbor to my left (your right) up and moved away last week. He’d been offered a promotion in the Whole Foods franchise of wholesome food distribution market-like places and with the promotion came the opportunity to move up north closer to the kids and the grandkids. It was an opportunity too good to pass up. With the possible exception of me, no one could possibly find any reason why someone shouldn’t capitalize on such an opportunity. He stopped by to drop off my spare house key and say, ‘So long’, the night before he and his wife left.

Me (inner monologue): Well, shit.
Me (out loud): Well, shit.

They were the perfect neighbors. They’d rented the house, but as part of the rental agreement had thrown themselves into transforming both the inside and the outside, as well as the yard. Their garden won awards. They replaced the wiring and re-did the kitchen, the basement, and the bathroom, all in exchange for absurdly cheap rent. They loved my dogs and my dogs loved them. I actually miss the mournful AROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO of their elderly bassett hound, who’d waddle around their yard barking at not much of anything before collapsing in a heap to catch up on some much-needed shut eye. Their awesome quotient was magnified by the fact that my other neighbor is a surly lesbian. They were such great neighbors. Have I mentioned how wonderful they were?

In the days following their departure, passing the newly emptied house made me feel empty. It just sucks. You never realize the amount of comfort you unconsciously derive from living next to people that don’t suck. And believe me….that house has seen its share of shitty tenants on an epic scale. The landlady advertises the house’s availability at the hospital, since one would think that its proximity would invite some nice medical intern yearning to be within walking distance of his/her meal ticket. And yet somehow she managed to keep renting to sporadically-employed deadbeats until her most recent tenants arrived. So, I have no idea who’ll end up in there now. Probably some dog-hating Glenn Beck disciple who enjoys listening to christian rock with the volume cranked to ‘PROSELYTIZE’. Fucker (foreshadowing). The only way this might work for me would be if this guy and the surly lesbian kickbox or have slap-fights every other day in front of my house. And what are the odds of that happening? Poor, I’m guessing.

Which brings us back to yesterday morning. Weekend mornings find me ingesting large, unhealthy breakfasts (waffles one day, sausage-packed breakfast burritos the next), enough coffee to wire a rhino, the NY Times, and NPR. The dogs get walked, fed, then released out back to tackle each other. This morning, I’d forgotten that I’d left a bag of trash sitting on the deck, so later when I raised the shades in order to fill the room with glorious rays of life-sustaining sunshine, the sight that greeted me was a yard full of trash and two dogs suddenly frozen in mid-destruction, looking back at their benefactor holding his coffee and gritting his teeth.

After the sighing and the drooping of the head and the hopeless chuckle, I thought that now with the one set of neighbors gone, I could probably get away with mercilessly beating the dogs. I looked over at the empty yard next door, jealous of its lack of trash and with its dormant flower beds and garden, then snapped out of it. They really loved those furry little bastards. Violence isn’t the answer. Besides. Were I to raise the black flag and start kicking doggy ass, one or both of them would probably retaliate by killing me in my sleep or, worse, pooping in my shoes.

Facts: I really miss my former neighbors and their deadly bassett hound of death, scourge of mailmen and impetuous children, wielder of a single mighty bark that brought gods to their knees and required the dog himself to lie down and recover. My dogs are assholes, except most of the time when they’re not. I’m flanked by an empty house on one side and a surly lesbian on the other. Glenn Beck is an idiot.

Sir @ February 15, 2010

Pie > Cake

Food Porn, Whatnot Comments (11)

With the acquisition of the birthday camera*, I’m incredibly happy that I can now properly reinstate the ‘Food Porn’ tag, the contents of which are sorely lacking for someone who cooks so regularly. I’m also woefully behind Kat’s power curve of excellent food-based ideas. I can think of no better way to kick things off than with an open and honest discussion about the merits and methods for the creation of pie.

For the record, I have no personal issues with cake. I love cake. Among its many redeeming qualities are the fact that it acts as a willing substrate to tiny figures of brides and grooms (or brides and brides or grooms and grooms) or soldiers or clowns or whatever little characters one might feel the need to attach to the top of food. You can draw pictures on a cake. Sometimes, women in various states of undress jump out of them. Cake is also the name of an excellent band. So, cake is perfectly adequate for all of one’s dessert/entertainment needs. If there is one thing about cake that turns me off, it’s the frosting. Frosting sucks. Also, cake is not pie and vice versa.

Pie is the food of the gods. With pie, one may enjoy the health benefits of fruit (let us not speak of ‘the rhubarb conundrum’) with the bonus of a flaky crust. The foundation of any pie, that which decides its qualifications as either ‘adequate’ or ‘incredible’ (pronounced een-cray-dah-bluh), is the quality of the crust along with it’s ‘flake factor’. It is, indeed, the true test of a baker’s mettle. Crust recipes are generally very simple, but the trick is in the way one transfers words into action. The following is a primer on how to make the ideal pie crust, because no one should ever, EVER have to purchase a pie. Not when such things are so criminally simple to construct. Like all other things worth doing, this is worth doing well and practice, as always, makes perfect.

Let’s go ahead and make an apple pie, just because we can. BEHOLD!

Peel and core them suckers real good like and slice them into little hunks. Dump them into a bowl along with ~1 cup of sugar and toss them with reckless abandon. Once thoroughly tossed, chuck them into a colander and set it over a large bowl for at least one hour to let the sugar leach out the moisture. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up with apple juice all over the bottom of your stove and/or your crust will end up soggy and the apples will collapse into something that resembles fruit-like apple-flavored mush product.

El Crusto de los Pie-o
2 c. flour
10 tbsp shortening (I’m a butter-flavor Criso man,myself)
5 tbsp warm water

That’s it. Seriously. There are two secrets to turning this into a flaky crust: #1- Leave your spoons, forks, whisks, etc., in the drawers and use your hands like the cavemen did when they made their pie crusts. You want to combine the shortening with the flour in a bowl until it’s completely incorporated. Add the water and start to form the dough into a large ball. You may need to add a little more water, but do so only one tbsp at a time until the ball stays together. Secret #2: DO NOT OVER-MANIPULATE THE DOUGH. The warmth of your grubby little paws does things to the dough involving physical chemistry, so you want to form that ball of dough ASAP. Over-manipulation = A tough & chewy crust instead of a flaky one.

Separate the dough into a larger ball and it’s slightly smaller twin.

Flour up a couple hunks of wax paper, place the larger dough ball on them, put another piece of wax paper on top of the dough, then roll that sucker out in every direction.

Transfer and form the dough to the contours of a standard-sized pie dish, then dump the apples into the crust and distribute evenly. Throw some cinnamon and nutmeg and, what the hell, maybe a dash of cloves on top of the apples.

Roll out the other ball of dough and place it over the apples. Pinch down the edges of the top and bottom crusts, then you can either take a fork and poke holes throughout the top crust or take a knife and make slits in the top. It doesn’t matter which you do, as long as you do at least one of them.

Put your handiwork into a 425-degree oven for 15 minutes in order to let the crust know who’s boss, then turn the heat down to 350 degrees and let it bake for 45 minutes. Remove and LET IT SIT FOR AT LEAST 30 MINUTES. You want to give the filling time to form a semi-solid mass during the cooling process. If you cut too quickly, instead of using a fork to transfer your slab ‘o pie to a plate, you’ll need a ladle.

VOILA!

And finally, the only proper way for pie to be served:

* I clearly need to spend a great deal more time with this camera to figure out how to make the pictures less mediocre. It’s on my list of Things That I Need To Do At Some Point Down The Road, Sooner Rather Than Later, Ideally.

Sir @ February 8, 2010

State of the Union

Confessions, The Deep, Whatnot Comments (5)

Gather together a group of neuroscientists and ask them to describe the brain and the majority of them will likely say something sterile and scientific like, ‘It’s a ball of goo held together by magic’. Ask the same question to a philosopher or a theologian and they may answer with something along the lines of the mind being a union of the heart and the brain. Throw the word ’soul’ into the mix and things get chippy. Some philosophers scoff at the idea of a soul and some thelogians scoff at philosophy. It all seems to even out somehow in sort of a perpetual stalemate of gradually increasing narrow-mindedness. Personally, I can’t/won’t argue with the goo/magic hypothesis, but I’ve always leaned more toward the philosophical and, to this end, tend to agree with the union concept.

Lydia Davis wrote a poem called Head, Heart that floored me the first time I read it. I’m not usually a poetry groupie, but this constitutes an exception:

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

Without proper caution, words like these can set one to thinking deeply about things better left unthought. I can’t blame Lydia Davis for this, easy though it might be. The fact is that for the last six years around my birthday, contemplation of the state of my own head/heart union has been mandatory. It may not seem like the kind of thing that warrants conscious contemplation, but for some people, this union is perpetually in some varying state of peril. Her poem was an innocent bystander to my effort in Xtreme navel gazing and it ended up adding color to a normally very black and white endeavor.

My head is my heart’s over-protective big brother. It accepted this post very early in the game and in short order became an expert at detaching itself and its sibling from the world. There was never any negotiation; heart was in trouble and, yes, head really was all heart had. It’s a common refrain of mine that my head has reached down and plucked me from the abyss many times. Over time, this plucking has been complicated by the fact that my head decides when to pluck. Sometimes it just leaves me there for awhile to brood and sort of meditate on how I got there. This isn’t necessarily always a bad thing; it can be enormously instructive. Nevertheless, at times it can be a bit of dick, frankly.

Dick or not, though, I realize that it has my best interests in, well….mind. The goal has always been to protect me from myself and others and at this it’s excelled. The side effect of my head keeping my heart safe has been a kind of emotional isolation that results in my remaining a perpetually detached observer. I’ve been to a lot of weddings and funerals over the years. Thankfully, the former still outnumbers the latter, but time (and war, sadly) has a way of evening the score. At weddings, I’m happy, but never too happy. At funerals, I’m the stoic one that comforts the more demonstrative folks. I’m afraid that eventually I’ll have been asked to eulogize everyone I know due to the fact that I’m the only one capable of doing so without being interrupted by pesky emotions. But buried deep down, there sits jealousy on the part of both my head and my heart. The latter for the married couple because it remembers what love feels like, and the former for the deceased because the thought of being released from its self-imposed cognitive concentration camp seems genuinely comforting.

And the conundrum is in that comfort: My head knows what it’s doing to my heart, sees the folly in it all, and worries about whether it’s too late in the game to change. Heart understands and empathizes; it appreciates the fact that it owes every beat in recent years to head’s ability to endure things that heart couldn’t at the time. It’s a very complicated relationship marked by one not wanting to disappoint the other. Hope, they agree, is a powerful thing, which also makes it a dangerous thing to see slipping away. People ask me how it feels to be a year older. ‘The same as it always has’, I answer in the most unassuming way possible. I feel like I’m trapped on the inside looking out and the view is the same as it’s always been. Head fears that after years of neglect, heart may do something rash or, worse, nothing at all. Heart knows. It’s nothing new.

Heart is all head has. Help, heart. Help head.

Sir @ January 25, 2010

Guilty Pleasures

Confessions, Whatnot Comments (7)

The Collective has asked yet another question, the answer to which requires more than a mere comment that would take up too much room in a comment section. The question: What are my guilty pleasures? I have only one that I can think of and I’m not even sure that it counts as a guilty pleasure. It’s definitely a pleasure and I feel kind of guilty about it, but I probably shouldn’t. Oh, wait. I have two guilty pleasures if I count the person in the pit in my basement who steadfastly refuses to put the lotion on its skin, which inevitably results in it getting the hose again. It’s a simple request, the lotion thing. I don’t understand what the problem is. Just stubborn, I guess (pffft, women).

The other less oscar-winning guilty pleasure concerns my athletic ability. I’ve always sort of kept it in check because my head is violently opposed to me in a lot of ways. Nevertheless, I’ve been pretty good at a lot of things, and very good at a few things. I don’t really spend a whole lot of time on athletic fields these days due in equal measure to time and opportunity, but here’s the back story to my guilty pleasure:

People frequently underestimate me. This most recently happened during a little golf outing, golf being one of the things at which I used to excel (long story, future post, have the hankies ready). There was one dude, as there so often is, who felt like he needed to prove himself worthy of the state-of-the-art clubs that he carried and the pleated khakis that he sported and the wrap-around shades that he probably wore in order to properly read the undulations in greens that I doubt he knew how to read in the first place. Anyhoodle, we were talking about golf, as you tend to do when preparing to play golf, and I said that I grew up playing and had competed at various amateur levels, sometimes pretty successfully, but that I didn’t really play anymore mostly for economic and time reasons. I think he saw my assertions of past talent as both some weird sort of dare and a golden opportunity to make some money, because he challenged me to a friendly little competition involving a portion of our incomes.

To make a long story medium length, I proceeded to destroy him. Actually, I embarrassed him. It was over long before the 18th hole, and I just continued to pummel him (figuratively, of course). I think I may have even forced him to question his faith at one point. So, my guilty pleasure: Publicly annihilating people who sell my abilities (athletically, academically, Scrabble-y, etc.) short.

Yeah, this would’ve been a long comment.

Sir @ January 22, 2010