ow
Nothing stitches a brain back together like two cups of coffee.
May 11, 2008
April 23, 2008
time
There aren't nearly enough hours in the day to get the things I would like to get done accomplished. Perhaps another reminder to be learned from graduate school: nearly everything takes far longer than you expected. The same could be said for many of the important events of life; if you don't budget for accidents or interruptions, you'll never arrive on time. Of course, it never seems to matter when I plan anything. Reality is resistant to this. On the other hand, having occasionally tried to fly by the seat of my pants, I find that having some form of plan is better than no plan at all. At least then you have something to complain about when everything falls apart.
March 20, 2008
in his own words:
Until a few minutes ago, I had only heard excerpts and soundbites from Mr. Obama's speech on race. The chattering classes had provided summaries and commentaries on the event, all of which completely failed to capture the power and intelligence behind the text of his announcement:
Whoever wrote this piece was brilliant, placing Mr. Obama's words within a compelling historical context. One way or another, I would like to believe that this man will change America - and for the better.
March 16, 2008
yes, I really am that bad
For what little it is worth, I am much better with a sword.
March 15, 2008
getting older
Some time within the next two to three weeks, my car will turn one hundred thousand. So begins the end of the journey. My "new" 2002 racing stallion was purchased towards the end of 2001, which makes it almost seven years old. That is a little less than 15000 miles per year, which is a respectable bit of driving. We have come a long way together, and I would love to see it get another hundred thousand miles going forward. I have confidence in the engineers of Toyota, and some of my friends' old models lasted well over a hundred and fifty thousand miles before finally giving up their much beloved ghosts.
We shall see.
March 5, 2008
now gods, rise up for bastards
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, - often the surfeit
of our own behavior, - we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!"
February 10, 2008
a few things
So... I remembered a few things about myself this weekend. I have been housesitting for one of the folks related to the research station, and it reminded me of what I liked about living and working around a real home.
The first is that I really like stereo sound, and I have missed it terribly. I plugged my host's speakers to my laptop, and the improvement in my movie-watching capability was dramatic. Headphones are okay, but nothing beats the freedom a pair of cheap speakers and a small subwoofer can provide. I can only imagine how much better my surround sound system will appear to me when I finally return to civilization and a television that provides more than monaural output.
The second thing I have rediscovered is that I focus better with less white noise. I am okay with music blazing clear, or random nature rustling in the background, but the steady whine of machinery like the incubator beside my desk can be incredibly distracting. It gets inside my head and it grinds against my brain - and it drives me crazy. It makes me want to plug my ears up and go to sleep.
So I just need to find good clear sound for my brain to function right.
Muses, are you listening?
February 4, 2008
family adventures
Being a Derksen means never having to say that you are lost - you're just on another adventure.
January 29, 2008
right back where you started
"Without imagination we are nothing, and without bold ventures and risks nothing great of permanence is attainable."
- from the introduction to Jack Chalker's Lords of the Middle Dark
January 23, 2008
a little fall of rain
January 17, 2008
wild yeep
Folks who have known me entirely too long for their own good might be amused to take note of the following lab vehicle:
It is almost as old as my old yeep, and has just as many problems with the air conditioning, power steering, brakes, windows, engine, and oil - but it is also just as responsive as my old warhorse once was. In fact, when I first made its acquaintance, I was not completely certain that it was not my old beast. It would have been fitting and appropriate for us to have found one another thousands of miles from where we last parted ways.
For such a lunker of a car, it handles pretty well - and could probably manage any exit that the highway might provide.
Ignie Ferroque
You know, there is something to be said for striking while the iron is hot. Lately, I've been entirely too distracted for my own good. This leaves me full of ideas and potential... that are sadly often left incomplete. I am trying to put the pieces back together into the semblance of a human being, but there are fits and false starts. It is going to take a lot of personal effort to finish this degree while simultaneously trying to figure out where I am going next, and why I will be going there - all while trying to retain or manage the ghost of a personal life that might give greater meaning or purpose to the whole process of human existence.
There is also something to be said for productive slacking. Yesterday evening, my roommate and I tore out of here to see a concert. I did not get anything degree-related accomplished last night, but I have been remarkably productive thus far this morning. I may be easily distracted, but if I am at peace, I can focus on completing even a distasteful and uninteresting task.
I obviously need more slack in my life. As always, I am open to suggestion.
December 25, 2007
have a merry (cockroach) christmas, y'all
December 13, 2007
hit and run
Last night, I had a little trouble picking my roommate up from the airport.
To be perfectly honest, it wasn't that bad a collision. Traffic stopped on 826N, and so did I... but the truck behind me carried too much inertia into my rear bumper - where it did its job admirably. I didn't even get knocked into the green Saturn that had stopped in front of me.
No one was injured, and I suppose that is all that matters - but it does irritate the heck out of me that the other driver chose not to stop and share their insurance information, and that my passenger and I were too jazzed and too surprised to get their license plate number as they barreled past on their way to wherever they were going.
Of course, the trunk doesn't really open or close that well anymore, and the left rear brake light is no longer functioning, and I have no idea what else may be stressed in the general frame of the car. I know that I am stressed, because I live in Miami, a city in a state that requires all persons to be insured to carry a valid driver's license, and where half of the people in the county are uninsured. As a result, my insurance has a thousand dollar deductible for uninsured or hit-and-run motorists, and I am not a happy camper.
But no one is injured.
Maybe. My neck feels a little stiff, but sorting signal from noise is difficult: I am not sure if this is from staring into a microscope all of yesterday afternoon, or from the sudden bump at the end.
December 3, 2007
just for reference
I often find that knowing the answer to a question is not nearly as important as knowing how to find that answer.
November 30, 2007
an improvement?
Well, for whatever reason, last night I only woke up at six in the morning. I missed my three AM appointment with insomnia. Lucky me. Let us hope that tonight is better.
November 29, 2007
who needs sleep?
For the last four days, I have found myself rising spontaneously from sleep at approximately three and six in the morning. This is unsettling, and it is not dependent on the time at which I went to bed. Given its regularity, I suspect that there may be a mechanical inspiration; perhaps there is some machinery lurking within the bowels of the trailer that upsets my rest at regular and three hour intervals?
Whatever the source, it is driving me crazy.
November 20, 2007
lunchtime, doubly so
Yeah, a prolonged silence from my person is generally not a good sign. On the other hand, it has recently occurred to me that it is no joke when I say that I want the title "evolutionary biologist" on my nameplate, and that anything which stands between that goal and my person had best stand aside or expect to be trampled.
Something about how the brigade will draw sabre, and prepare to advance.
Sometimes an obsessively single-minded focus can be a good thing, right?
October 8, 2007
motivation and drive
"You don't work hard because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life."
- Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
October 3, 2007
gather ye rosebuds while ye may
As you can see, I am making as much of Time as I can. The thrips seem to be making better use of such time, as their populations are recently rebounding on my rosebuds.
October 1, 2007
culture shock
So... tonight I had a halting discussion in Spanish with a Brazilian who only spoke Português and some Spanish and English with the aid of a Colombian who spoke fluent English and Spanish about group selection and whether certain models of sexual selection are appropriate to apply to human social models. With a background in anthropology and evolutionary biology, these are two topics that really interest me and will get me excited, no matter what the language. I can only hope that we were all on the same page and talking about the same thing, and not arguing past one another like ships in the night.
thirty to thirty
This weekend, I needed to run to WalMart to buy a lamp so that my humble room would have light to read by. As I approached their establishment, I found myself incapable of stopping, and instead kept driving. I just kept going until I hit a beach and its accompanying mangrove swamp. Walking amidst the wind-swept mangroves, I found peace for a little while. That, and I chased these poor things all over the park trying to get one or two good shots.
September 12, 2007
reboot
So lately there has been a minor technical difficulty with the server that hosts this mindless page you read before you, and all of it might have been wiped out. While it might have been interesting to start again with a completely blank slate, I would have missed this. I am a man who likes to carry a sense of personal history, and for what it is worth, this site does provide that context to me; helping me to remember who and where I was - or what I wanted to be.
This site contributes to seven or more years of my personal extended memory, and occasionally provides a sense of outreach to those who need to keep track of me.
Soooo...
I'm back, and for most of you, I suppose it is as if I had never left.
September 5, 2007
seeing the world differently?
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then a new pair of glasses must be a bit like remodeling the front of the house with nice new victorian picture-windows. I can see clearly again and live without glare while driving.
Rah!
August 25, 2007
Hmm. Upgrades?
I have officially moved into new digs.
In some ways, they aren't much of an improvement. The walls are still choked with mildew and mold, and my allergies are just as outrageous every morning.
In other ways, there has been a vast improvement in my quality of living. I now have twice as much floorspace in my room, taller ceilings, and carpets. I also have one less roommate to share the main living space with. Not altogether unreasonable. I mean, aside from the purple carpets and the pink curtains.
Photos forthcoming.
July 23, 2007
Sons of Texas
I've learned a few things this weekend.
The first of which is that I need to plan ahead for whirlwind tours of places where I have too many friends if I ever wish to see any of them for a good and reasonable amount of time. I was irresponsible and easily distracted, and as such I failed to make good a few promises and a few meetings. I sorrow for having missed faces that I've not seen in a year who were important to me, but console myself with the fact that some day, I will be back.
Family curses aside, I must inevitably return if only because it seems that in spite of it all, I might just be a Texan. Sort of like Kinky Friedman, but without the musical or writing talent - or Chuck Norris without the asskicking. Or maybe more like Ann Richards without the political savvy and the snark.
What can I say? While I didn't miss the traffic on the interstate, I really did miss the food and the people. I plan on heading back to Austin in September for ACL, and we'll see what happens when next I am in my favorite town I never lived in. I've got such a strange history in my love-affair with Austin that it practically deserves and entry unto itself. Maybe some day soon it will finally get one.
July 22, 2007
back to the past
Friends are people with whom you fall back into familiar patterns even after ten years gone. They are good people, and they might as well be family... and you never realize just how much you missed them until they walk right back into your life - even if it is as if they never left.
July 21, 2007
gone to Houston
Returning to Houston after almost two weeks shy of a year gone is... unusual. It isn't quite home that I am returning to, but it all still feels terribly familiar. A bit like déjà vu: it is almost as if I have been here before.
The most unusual part of being back is the way I sort of know where I am going when I am driving around. I almost remember where I will have to turn if I want to get where I am trying to go to. It is an unusual sensation, as most of the time I lived in Houston - and certainly during this last year's upheaval and constant shifting - I had no idea where I was going most of the time, and had to rely upon a map to navigate my new environment. Perhaps this is because I have always been a visual sort of learner, and direct myself by landmarks as much as anything else. Little things, like knowing to turn right when you see the "handicapped persons ahead" road sign on Woodlands Parkway.
So now I run around like a madman, trying to overcome my limited planning and sleep, revisiting old haunts, and tracking down as many of my old friends as I can. Another thing that amazes me at being back is the sheer number of people who missed me, and how many I had left behind. I had a pretty reasonable social support network behind me when I was here... but I failed to properly appreciate or utilize them as I should have.
Too stubborn, too independent, and after a few years of disappointment at failing to live up to my own goals and standards... probably too frustrated and angry at myself.
July 13, 2007
tread separation II
Perhaps it is the miserably wet and tropical weather of Southern Florida, but it the shoes I have owned for less than a year are already falling apart under the strain of belonging to my feet. While they have not yet given way, they are well on their way to collapse - and once again, I find myself without appropriate time to search for a new pair. Interestingly enough, they are falling apart in exactly the same fashion as before, with the outsole peeling away laterally from the ball of my foot.
July 1, 2007
probable cause
I am not sure that my roommates and I have the same understanding of the word "hygiene".
June 10, 2007
beachcombing
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June 6, 2007
home sweet home
"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space."
- Hamlet: Act II, Scene 2
Thank heavens my sense of humor is still intact.
The locals remember when these trailers really were a place to crash at night after a long day of hauling discarded palm fronds out of the wreckage that used to be your living room. Now I complain that the distribution for the air-conditioning is irregular, and that the temperature can be freezing at one end of the building while tropical at the other. I guess what one really needs is a sense of perspective. I have the fishtank up and running, and I am putting in additional shelving. Rent is cheap, and I get free laundry, power, and water.
This does not change the fact that someday I would like to own a house with a kitchen large enough for two.
June 3, 2007
derksen in the lab
It is a good thing I like scope-work, because lately - I've been doing a whole hell of a lot of it.
May 13, 2007
and now for an encore
It seems that on my way back from the grocery store, I blew out a tire. This is quite a blowout. I must have run over a piece of metal from the numerous construction projects out here. I am only thankful that it happened as I drove back into the complex, and not somewhere considerably farther up the road. I've had to empty the trunk of the carload of things I plan on taking back into storage just to get the spare tire and jack out. It'll be fixed soon enough, and then I'll go buy me a new tire.
May 12, 2007
saturday morning cartoons
One of the advantages to my new home is that the sun peeks in through my window as it rises, and very little will keep its persistant determination from lifting the lids of my eyes for very long. As a result, I was up at what might normally be considered an unnaturally early hour of the morning for myself - especially on the weekend. Lacking anything better to do with my time, or failing to want to do anything more than get some breakfast and go back to sleep, I watched my version of Saturday morning cartoons on Google Video.
I put a bagel in the toaster, spread some peanut butter on it, and sat down to watch Craig Mello give a talk at Google corporate headquarters on his Nobel-winning research on RNAi as part of their continuing seminar series on emerging technologies. The tech talks are interesting because they give you a look into what the almighty Google is thinking about buying and turning into their next cash-cow. Dr. Mello's talk is interesting because he is a good speaker and does an excellent job of translating highly technical jargon into plain english that the layperson might understand and appreciate without feeling condescended to. That, and he is talking about RNA interference, one of the single most interesting and important topics to hop along through molecular biology in the last ten years. To say that I am excited by its potential application in various subfields of biology and chemistry would be something of an understatement.
If you have an hour and ten minutes to kill, I highly recommend that you check it out...
May 10, 2007
my new home?
Well, I guess it is official: I am now trailer trash living at the University of Florida's Tropical Research and Education Center.
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Ironically enough, the University has these trailers as FEMA leftovers from the last time an Andrew visited town. They maintain them because Homestead is an hour south of Miami, and even renting property in the ghetto is prohibitively expensive for graduate students. Of course, "maintained" is a term subject to qualitative observations, and it has been more than fifteen years and a few more hurricanes since these trailers were new. That, and apparently many graduate students do not take very good care of their living space. My share of the trailer is a 7x7x7 cube that I can almost turn around in. Thank god it holds the fishtank in a corner on top of a dilapidated dresser - but I miss my old kitchen (and my dishwasher!) already.
May 8, 2007
I hate moving
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate moving?
For the last several days, my life has been compartmentalized into a series of boxes - some of which I will take with me, and some of which will go into storage. It is difficult to let go of things to which you have become attached, particularly when those things are comforable furniture, or the bookshelves that you would like to put your recreational reading material or DVD library upon. That said, there have been a few bright moments.
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My friend Sheri had her brother in town on vacation, and he was kind enough to volunteer the back of his rented convertible Mitsubishi Eclipse to carry some of my shelves off to storage. It really does not look normal to see something that big crammed into something that small.
My fish are now living in a bucket. I made them a promise once: stay alive, and I'll take you with me wherever I go in life. Three of them have made a voyage of greater distance in this fashion before, and the prognosis for their survival is good. I hope they make it. While I may laugh and call them a primitive form of ultra-realistic and high-resolution HDTV, I have become quite attached to them. Like some of my furniture, they have always been there with me - reliable through turmoil and joy. I only hope that I can return the favor.
Last and not least, I remain amazed by the volume of stuff that one can comfortably cram into the 2002 Toyota Camry, and still be able to see out your rear-view windows. That said, I did manage to come uncomfortably close to obscuring all of my blind-spots. When planning out my packing strategy, I had forgotten to include the fishtank for the aforementioned fish, and found it occupying a surprising and irregular volume in the backseat of my car.
I had not realized just how much stuff I really do own. Given that I've tried to shake the load lighter on at least two occasions now, and that I will be moving into much smaller accomodations, I wonder if the next packing trip is going to be as bad?
March 15, 2007
Maude's
Sun, iced and spiced coffee, David Bowie on the radio, and another four hours of hammering at my proposal. I've managed to refine it to three major topic areas, but defining specific questions to answer and hypotheses to test has proved somewhat difficult. I am a creature prone to wandering from one idea to another as part of an interconnected whole, but science is better written when it is focused and addresses particular details instead of drifting aimlessly across the map. It does not help that at least two of my major topic areas experience some significant overlap, and extracting the effects of particular variables is either going to require a lot of little experiments or one massive multivariate mess that may not be able to extract the significance of any particular element. In this light, writing my proposal has been a bit like biking uphill: you'd best switch major gears before you get there, because changing topics in the road is likely to slip your chain and find you going nowhere.
March 3, 2007
forwarding the future
There is a certain truism that I have been loathe to admit: for all my frivolity, I am not an impulsive man. I often achieve a realization about six months before I react to it. These range in nature from matters of the human heart to the purchase of significant household electronics, but I stand off and do not act until my certainty builds to a critical mass. I do not know whether it is reluctance or caution that holds me from direct action in response to such a decision, but I will prevaricate and avoid committing myself to a decision already made. Perhaps this has saved me from making a few too many impetuous advances, but it has also been used as an excuse allowing me to avoid certain unpleasant facts. Refusing to face them does not make me immune to their consequences, just incapable of dealing with them.
March 2, 2007
think about the future
You know, after considerable thought on the subject and some reflection on the desires of my past, I have arrived at a conclusion of sorts: if I could say something about the future trajectory of my life based on where I have been and what I would like to be doing, I would like to be responsible for developing and releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment for specialized functional purposes.
February 20, 2007
armadillo in the dark
February 17, 2007
two things
- Florida isn't supposed to get this cold. There was ice on my windshield when I went out to my car this morning.
- I have a steak waiting for me in the freezer. It has been marinading for the past two days, and it wants to be turned into fajitas.
February 12, 2007
know your roots
"My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known."
- attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester, in reaction to the infamous debate between TH Huxley and the Bishop Wilberforce
While I do not subscribe to the "great man" theory of history, there is no question that Charles Darwin happened to be the right scientist in the right place at the right time. Spurred on to publication by Alfred Russel Wallace, the "father of biogeography", his observations from years of collected research led him to conclusions that shook the foundations of biology and the society built atop that platform. His work brought forth a mechanism by which the whole of diversity might be explained within the context of geological history. When linked to the evidence of heredity first explored by Mendel, and then confirmed at the molecular level by Watson and Crick (and Franklin!), it provided the unifying synthesis of modern biology.
As I am dedicating my life to following the science that he helped to establish, it is with some interest that I note that my own life has from time to time, accidentally fallen into Darwin's footsteps. I have touched the same armoured glyptodontids that he helped to unearth in Southern Argentina at the Museo de la Plata. I have stood in the home he kept, and looked through the study to the desk at which he wrote much of his work. Lately, I have seen the villainous vinchuca that was to bring him low in his later years with Chagas disease in a new light, and finally, I have stood atop his grave at Westminster Abbey in London.
Everyone has their heroes.
Happy Darwin Day, everybody.
February 11, 2007
eventually homeless
It appears that my apartment complex has realized what a relative deal living here offers. They have raised the monthly rental rates by nearly a hundred dollars. Should I care to renew my lease now, only six months in, they will shave fifty dollars off of that final rate. I guess it is time to start looking for a new home, which is kind of a shame because I have come to like it here. Possibly more important to consider is the thought that my master's funding will last at most one more year - by which point I should be done and ready to move on to a doctoral program - and probably somewhere far far away from here.
February 6, 2007
still under the weather
I don't believe that I am entirely over this head cold I've been fighting with for the last week. I fell asleep on the floor beneath my desk for about two hours. It was oddly comfortable, as there is a considerable pile of paperwork hiding underneath there to nest in, and I had my gym bag as a pillow. Still, I need to get up and moving and more work done.
January 29, 2007
black monday
Well then.
This morning at around nine AM, my old company elected to fire off eighteen percent of the workforce as part of a massive reorganization strategy. It claimed large portions of my old department, and a few of my friends are out of a job. My heart goes out to them, and I wish them only the best - many of them were good and capable people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There but for the grace of graduate school go I.
God bless - and good luck, guys.
January 23, 2007
random acts of campus beauty
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January 21, 2007
well, that was... unexpectedly interesting
Hoy la tierra y los cielos me sonrÃen,
hoy llego al fondo de mi alma el sol,
hoy la he visto... la he visto y me ha mirado...
¡Hoy creo en dios!- Gustavo Adolfo Béquer, "Rima XVII"
January 15, 2007
here is looking at you
Someone asked me if I had a recent headshot. Turns out the MacBook has a pretty decent video camera as part of the frame.
feed me, derksie
Cooking for large numbers of people is a challenge that I have recently enjoyed again. It is at once easier - and yet more difficult than cooking for the self alone. You no longer concern yourself with producing too many leftovers or leaving ingredients out to spoil, but instead begin to worry that you have insufficient kitchen space to maintain and process several dishes. An interesting complication has been th