Things about grad school.

 

After this, I want to never ever use the term “exogenous” again.

 

Also, fuck regressions.

 

I’m pretty sure GPPI is the reason I’ve been reading more fantasy the past few years. I miss serious fiction. “The Year We Left Home” – I haven’t forgotten about you, I promise.

 

What if the whole program was just an expensive way to get invited to a Kathleen Sebelius speech? It may still have been worth it.

 

I think I miss going to shows the most. May cannot come soon enough.

Ok, that was probably wrong.

I probably went a little too far in suggesting some racial animus for the Whitney pushback. I mean, that exists, but I’ll settle for some kind of weird cultural bias.

 

 

Coverage of a dead black female entertainer? OVER THE LINE!

So, I’ve now seen two different things on Facebook that are a variation of, “Yes, Whitney Houston died yesterday – but these soldiers are dying every day! Where is the news coverage for them? Let’s remember the true heroes!”

Which, I mean, for fuck’s sake. Let’s think this through: the media constantly cover stupid stories. My first thought is, why aren’t you outraged when the media is covering tiger moms or Kate Upton or Giselle Bundchen criticizing Wes Welker? Is two days of coverage of the death of a black woman who was the most powerful entertainer on the planet for a few years really over the line?  In other words, the media were doing everything right until this, but it’s in the coverage of Whitney Houston that we see that the media have truly lost their way?

Secondly, as noted above, this person was fairly important. And she died the day before the most important pop music awards ceremony. Isn’t some media saturation to be expected?

THIRDLY! (I have a thirdly!) Remember how conservatives reacted when the media DID offer daily casualty totals? Didn’t conservatives criticize the media for focusing on body counts instead of progress? And let’s say the media switched immediately and started to offer detailed coverage of soldiers who died, what would we see? There'd be a campaign like, "This soldier died - RIP. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE VICTIMS OF OBESITY? WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THEM?" Or whatever. There's always someone else dying somewhere, and there's always someone complaining about the coverage being of the wrong dead person. 

So, this didn’t quite come out wrong, but in terms of inconsistent/bizarre conservative memes-du-jour, this someone seems to be up there.  

Does this make me a kiss-ass?

During my travels with my CEO last November, I discovered that she has awesome taste in music. She likes more adventurous stuff than most people I know – for example, she loves loves loves Animal Collective, who I really like too but who I basically wouldn’t recommend to anyone, even people I know who have fairly complex musical tastes. She also really likes Bon Iver, who are definitely a more accessible group but still sort on the periphery of being mainstream. Anyway, I was all excited and asking her if she knew this that or the other, and she didn’t, so I was like, “That’s it – I’m making you a mix cd.” And I finally did. Does that make me a kiss-ass? Making a mix for your CEO? My position is that it would be a kiss-assy thing to do if Karen were like, “Oh, I’m really into polka,” and I ran off and did all this research to pretend I was into polka, and then made her a mix cd of stuff I didn’t really like. (Though in fact, I should hasten to point out that I don’t dislike polka, but my polka collection isn’t really deep. It basically consists of this album, and a couple of isolated tunes like the Bluegrass Sessions band doing “Polka on the banjo,” or Faith No More’s cover of “Das Shutzenfest.”

 

So, for now, I’m going with “I am not a kiss-ass.” Feel free to disagree.

 

Did you know that today, the greatest Internet thing ever took place? It’s true. Behold, the health policy valentine’s hashtag.

 

Speaking of health policy, I am at a loss to explain why patients in states enacting tort reform are sicker, across the board, in the post-tort year. Granted, I’m looking at hospitalizations, so I can conjecture that possibly there is some work on the front-end, on the intake side, that is being postponed till patients get sicker (which would support what proponents of torts say) but that this in fact creates an unexpected high demand on hospital services on the backend (since total charges are up across the board for post-tort years.) But my advisor is hardly sold, and he’s right, since I can’t really show that there’s any causality there.

 

This weekend, I have one very exciting thing to do: making 1554 ice cream. Other than that, I will be reading about the Abigail Alliance’s doomed quest to either increase last-resort access to experimental drugs by terminal patients or to undermine the whole structure randomized controlled clinical trials, depending on whose opinion you take a shine to, and struggling with nearest-neighbor-matching techniques. You know you are wishing you were me. But I mean the opposite of what I just said, so like Elaine’s version of bizarro Superman, I should live underwater, be black, and say “badbye” instead of “goodbye.”

 

"Wanna shoot some hoops?"

 

I keep having this image of my sister, in front of my parents’ house. It comes back vividly, now that they are packing up the house to move back to Rio for a few years. I am home from college, maybe? And she is there in the driveway, under the basket, ball in hand, asking if I’d like to shoot some hoops. I probably made fun of her for using the phrase “shoot some hoops” because I’m such a dick and I was a terrible older brother.

 

Yeah, I’d like to shoot some hoops now. I’d really love to. Next time we hang out, maybe?

Mordred by John Ashbery | The New York Review of Books

This poem used to be on my fridge. Not because it has any relationship to food, per se. But it's a damn fine poem.

Mordred by John Ashbery | The New York Review of Books

Evidence of my lack of intelligence

Neighbor: So, I’m really worried about our president.

 

Me: Oh, I missed the condo association meeting. Is he ok? He’s not hurt, is he?

 

Neighbor: Yeah, he’s fine, it’s just that he might not win.

 

Me: Someone else ran for board president? How is the vote count taking so long?

 

Neighbor: No, not Matt. Obama.

 

Me: Oh. I’m not worried about him at all.

 

[Enter Matt]

 

Me: Hey Matt. Glad you’re not hurt and that no one is running against you.

 

Matt: What’s this now?

Records you should be listening to right now

The Cloud Nothings, The Water, Imperial Teen, Kathleen Edwards. Oh, and Das Binky.

This better not be one of those descriptions of nature where you use "funnel" as a verb to describe what clouds do.

But, that leaves me at a bit of a loss, since clouds sometimes do funnel. How else would you describe an arrangement where there is a discernible swirl, pointing toward a singular fulcrum (is that redundant, saying “singular fulcrum”?), that the eye is inevitably drawn to? “Funnel” it is.

 

Off to learn about Drug and Device law. I believe the term you are looking for in response is “boo-yah.”

 

 

 

 

 

Why are all these moms fighting Santa?

Best Buy or some similar store is running a bunch of commercials where a smug, aggro-mom is all about outperforming Santa. She smiles and eats the cookies and drinks the milk reserved for Santa, while a hapless Santa sputters and stammers on about how it looks like there’s not enough room for his gifts.

 

Is this really what mom-dom is about nowadays? Competing against everything, including Santa? It’s kind of abhorrent and probably a confusing message for kids.

 

It led me to think about this recent debate we had in my urban sprawl class, which I enjoyed greatly. The class was divvied up into three teams: one representing the traditional liberal viewpoint, the other representing the traditional conservative viewpoint, and the third group representing the family viewpoint. Just what that is should be evident in a few sentences. The topic, I think, was the definition of progress – each side had to present and argue for a particular viewpoint of what constitutes progress and what the future looks like in light of that definition.

 

So, you can easily imagine the conservative argument: progress is brought about by markets. It is efficiency that can only come from a decentralized economic system, and it allows individuals, according to their own hardwork or merits, to achieve wealth and preserve it for future generations, unmolested by the government. In this society, all can achieve wealth and purchase the things they’d like to own. The liberal viewpoint is that progress occurs when the government intervenes sufficiently in free markets to ensure that the rising tide lifts all boats: it’s vaccines, it’s public health initiatives, it’s appropriate regulatory interventions. With this, the liberals envision a future where the standard of living gradually improves, so that, in the future, all can achieve happiness, some degree of economic security, and purchase most of the things they’d like to own.

 

The family group went in and argued that progress is measured by familial relations. It’s a function of emotional growth, of knowing when you have enough to be happy, and of pulling back from the aggressive search for wealth in order to nurture those familial relationships, to give successive generations a moral center, to create good human beings. In terms of the world’s finite resources, it’s easy to see where the traditional liberal and conservative viewpoints put us in the same place, on a similar timeframe: all the resources get used up, and whether that happens in, say, 500 years or 700 years, it still gets us to the same final destination. The family viewpoint stands out, then, as a kind of antidote to using more resources and amassing more material wealth – in a way that’s entirely appealing, even for a careerist such as myself. (The conservatives did repudiate the anti-careerist tone of the family’s position, by the way.)

 

So, for me, the point of the Best Buy ads may be that they give us the dark side of the family viewpoint: the family as an a single economic unit, a tribe out to vanquish all enemies in the interest of its own self-preservation. A tribe that knows no idols, where traditions are just antiquated notions that deserve to be outperformed.

 

Also, the more I type the word “family,” the more I think about Mr. Bungle’s ‘Stubb (ADub).’