June 2010
73 posts
2 tags
I wish I had this kind of confidence
Melissa: How was your job interview?
CT: It was a swift and painless slaughter.
Melissa: Oh no! It can't have been that bad..
CT: Who said it was me being swiftly and painlessly slaughtered?
2 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“The night I met you I wrote ‘It is possible I have imagined my entire...”
– from ‘Address To An Absent Lover’— Sarah Manguso
2 tags
7 tags
Les Champs-Élysées Joe Dassin (via...
2 tags
4 tags
We are intrepid
The days melt into each other, and when I wake it’s to a cold, dark sky and the hush of rain as it comes down in sheets. Sometimes I curl back up to sleep, the familiar smell of my own duvet, last night’s dream, warmth spreading across my neck that I’ve shrunk back in the sheets.
An epic meeting unfolded itself last Thursday in Professor R’s office — the same...
2 tags
3 tags
5 tags
“He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine...”
– from ‘Pacsirta’ (Skylark) — Dezsö Kosztolányi. (via sashawantsmore)
3 tags
6 tags
'Extreme solitude', by Eugenides →
-A short story by Jeffrey Eugenides (of Middlesex and Virgin Suicides fame), published in ‘The New Yorker’, 2010.
“Are you calling for a reason?” she asked.
“Yes. That Fellini film? I was hoping you might, if you’re not too, I know it’s bad manners calling so late, but I was at the lab.”
“I don’t think that was a complete sentence,” she said.
“What did I leave out?” Leonard ...
6 tags
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
Coffee, life plans, and how everyone wants to be...
Hi! A quick update from medical school (I know I don’t write much about my academic life, being in a deadzone at the moment):
Job interviews for final year medical students are starting up, and coffee with friends tend to be more about interview preparation and preferences for next year, which I’m kind of relieved about. Previous conversations for a while had mostly been anxiety...
2 tags
5 tags
“One of the hardest things in life to learn are which bridges to cross and which...”
– Oprah Winfrey (via thoughtsdetained)
4 tags
10 tags
Why Does Love Do This To Me The Exponents
I was...
3 tags
3 tags
7 tags
A neurologist's notebook: the abyss →
An abridged version of a chapter of “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sacks titled “In The Moment: Music And Amnesia”, published in The New Yorker in 1997.
In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He...
5 tags
The velluvial matrix →
Atul Gawande’s Stanford Medical School commencement speech last week.
For medical students. It’s pretty cool :) I wish someone gave us a speech like that when we started.
[Edit (26th June): Hey! Someone posted this on MUSO today…:D I’m not the only one who reads the New Yorker].
2 tags
3 tags
“Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to...”
– Aristotle (via kari-shma)
I am, and have always been, really bad at this my whole life.
3 tags
4 tags
4 tags
3 tags
4 tags
Origami
Sundays are awful days for people without cars. If you want to go anywhere, you have to plan ahead by hours, sometimes even blocks. It’s a problem if, for instance, you become hungry in the afternoon and realise you have no food left; worse, the outside is cold and in your half-starved state you begin to dread trudging through winter chill (which, to me, always has a gritty quality to it).
...
2 tags
4 tags
So proud of New Zealand tonight!
Melissa: Did you see the NZ vs Slovakia game?
Ethan: Yeah, the last 15 mins. Amazing play on the NZ side!
Melissa: I know! Last minute equaliser. To be fair, we weren't playing very well that game. I think a lot of non-New Zealanders don't get why all of the New Zealanders are so excited about a draw. As the underdogs, draw = Oh my God, Christmas is here!
Ethan: Yeah to be honest, I never imagined you guys to actually win any match.
Melissa: Hey, we're an honest nation. We don't expect to win any match. We're the happy-go-lucky, love-that-we're-even-there, everything-is-amazing country. That's what makes it super awesome when we get anything.
6 tags
3 tags
Just Before The Rain Dutch
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
Snapshots of the city
There was a cute couple on the train today - they couldn’t have been more than 16, on a first date over the long weekend.
Remember those silences when you were so happy to be in the presence of the other person that you thought you could burst but you were terribly afraid and didn’t know what to say. They were sitting next to each other sharing earphones. Their knees touched (whether...
4 tags
4 tags
“Everyone of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost...”
– from ‘Kafka On The Shore’ — Haruki Murakami (via kari-shma)
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
Let the right one in
Watching Will grow up has been a pleasure, from the strabismus plagued child with glasses that magnified his eyes tenfold to now, pulling up near my house, fresh from class, Year I medical school, in relatively preppy outfit and a gangster cap (“I got it from America”).
I took him to lunch because he’d turned 19 this past weekend, amidst the mad scramble for HREC module 2...
5 tags
5 tags
Underbelly
Steven: How are you?
Melissa: Stressed. And grumpy. My project has come to an unexpected paperwork wall.
Steven: What does that mean?
Melissa: That means that R. was trying to sneak what was pretty much a clinical trial under low risk ethics and quality assurance. The ethics lady put her foot down, and now there's extra paperwork and a lengthy review process, as well as some other admin complicated by the fact that the company manufacturing the compounds gave us a bit of a grant. Therefore, there's added ethical issues.
Steven: If only they gave you cash.
Melissa: Ha!
Steven: In a brown envelope
Melissa: Under the table.
Steven: On a rainy day at the bar under the table
Melissa: Wearing black coats and sunglasses, despite the weather.
Steven: Not a black coat actually. That's a little too suspicious.
Melissa: A fedora then?
Steven: ...yes.
Melissa: What are we talking about again?
3 tags
2 tags
Lemonade CocoRosie (via negativemonkey)
4 tags
