Habits

My teaching dance is like a drug addict selling to support his habit. I seriously think that I spend more on dance classes and clothes than I make. And yet somehow I am always out of shape and my clothes are always frumpy. My feet OD'ed on pointe yesterday, and while it was tons of fun, I am having trouble walking today. I bruised the edge of one of my big-toe nails and I have a blister the size of a quarter on the sole of my other foot. I would probably have more blisters, but I taped some of my toes before rehearsal started. On a happier note, Miranda's piece is seriously fun shit (as always). I think it's another one that I would happily do every day for the rest of my life...

I'm performing again!

Dance Prism presents Make Way for Ducklings on April 5th, 6th, 13th, 20th at 2:30 pm in various locations (click the link for details). It's a really cute ballet. Definitely fun and family friendly.

Essence of Grad School

marriedtothesea.com





Should You Go to Graduate School?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: maybe...

Click and read up.

Recent things that I have to laugh at myself for

I got soap in my martini last night. Where do I start to explain this?

I've been feeling kinda icky recently in a low-energy, might be getting sick sort of way. I sat on the couch pretty much all day Saturday and so on Sunday I booted myself out of the house to go to Miranda's ballet and jazz class. That thoroughly kicked my ass, in a good way, but I was still exhausted afterwards. So I went home, prepped for my class this morning, and made myself a drink. Then I decided it would be a really good idea to take a bath and read the rest of my book. That went really well. I lit some candles and turned bright red cuz the water was a bit too hot.

Things that didn't happen:
I could have tipped over my martini, which was perched on the side of the tub.
I could have dropped the book in the water, though I'm a fairly experienced bath reader.
The cats could have tried to either get in the tub or drink the water, which would have been really bad since I put epsom salts in the tub, and apparently their primary therapeutic use is as a laxative (who knew?).
I could have lit my hair on fire, since I was sitting next to two lighted candles (in holders, but I'm clumsy).

But no, none of those things happened. I figured that since I'd been sweating a lot, both before and during my bath, I should probably wash off before going to bed. So I soap up the loofah, start soaping, and PLOP! I get a dollop of soap right in my half-drunk martini. I was so bummed, I even tried a sip but decided that it was disgusting. So much for that...



PS- A guy just popped his head into my office to ask if I wanted to buy books or something. I have no idea, never seen him before. But during the 5 seconds he was in my airspace he managed to stink up my entire office! I hate perfume! It's disgusting! Just don't wear it. Don't. Bathe more.

Who's not surprised?

Apparently there is a correlation between drinking diet soda and "metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure." Really. They do point out that these symptoms may just be the lifestyle associated with diet soda drinkers, and not something directly caused by diet soda.

I'm not surprised. Unless you drink it for the taste, in which case your taste buds need some adjustment, you have to be pretty naive to drink diet soda. It's not any better for you (apparently, it could be worse) than regular soda. In my rather limited experience, people who drink diet soda tend to have intensely unhealthy lifestyles, characterized by poor diet and a lack of exercise. So any of you diet drinkers reading this, please switch to water and start exercising. Actually, cutting soda or diet soda out of your diet is almost guaranteed to lose you 10 lbs.

What am I actually surprised about? I'm going to San Diego for a week in July. I am the only graduate student in the Tufts chapter of SIAM (society for industrial and applied mathematics) who is neither graduating nor getting married this summer. Since someone from the club should go, that makes me it. May I point out that I don't do industrial or applied mathematics? I'm not even particularly interested! (I went to the meeting for the pizza.) But I've never been to San Diego, the chapter will cover most of my expenses, and at the moment I have nothing better to do this summer. So what the hell...

I found my sock

It had gotten caught in a leotard. Figures. I really hate getting up this early in the morning. Most of the time when I wake up and my alarm says 6:30, my first thought is, oh good, I get to go back to sleep. Now my first thought is, shit, I'm late.

I'm really tempted to purge my friends on myspace. I don't mind having a million people on facebook that I knew in college or high school (or even grade school). But for some reason, I'd rather not have people I don't know well added on myspace. Mostly, it's the stupid-ass bulletins some people keep posting. Now I really understand why there's the option at the bottom of a bulletin to remove someone from friends. A bulletin shouldn't be a survey, or chain mail, or random stuff that you do while you're bored. Those all go in your blog people. A bulletin should be an announcement, like that you have new pictures, or a show coming up, or that you're moving. I'm going to start deleting people if they frequently post annoying bulletins. You are warned.

On a similar note, I need more people to stalk on livejournal...

Small lists

Thanks for the idea Karen, though mine may be somewhat less deep:


BEST of today:
Two and a half hour nap after school
Yoga class down the street this evening
My check engine light turned off again (it's been turning on and off)
Snow melted during the day


WORST of today:
Waking up before sunrise
Nasty traffic during my morning commute (an hour and a half to get to school. it's usually 45 mins in traffic. needless to say I was late (only 5 mins))
Lost one of my favorite socks in the laundry (last night, but it's still on my mind)
There will be ice all over the ground tonight because of the snow melting

I'll post more at some point, maybe to give you background about the day's events, or maybe I'll forget until next week when today has faded into the irrelevant past and I'll tell you something about the future...

Happy New Year!

I'm going to spend today pretending to be Bilbo Baggins preparing for his 111th birthday. This is a way to make cleaning my apartment and getting everything ready for my party fun. Who says I've forgotten how to be a kid :) I definitely haven't forgotten how to be a geek...

New Year's Resolutions:

1) Have more fun. Primarily, go out and hang around with people.
2) Go to yoga classes. I found a good place down the street.
3) Do Pilates. There are amazing classes at Green St. but they're really expensive. Mostly I have to make myself do this.

I'll stop there. There are a few more things that I probably could add to that list, but I'm trying to be realistic and these are my top priority.

Happy New Year everyone! If I'm not seeing you tonight, I hope you have fun anyways :)

Crap, at least I dance a lot

Op-Ed Contributor
The Hangover That Lasts

By PAUL STEINBERG
Published: December 29, 2007
New York Times

WASHINGTON

NEW Year’s Eve tends to be the day of the year with the most binge drinking (based on drunken driving fatalities), followed closely by Super Bowl Sunday. Likewise, colleges have come to expect that the most alcohol-filled day of their students’ lives is their 21st birthday. So, some words of caution for those who continue to binge and even for those who have stopped: just as the news is not so great for former cigarette smokers, there is equally bad news for recovering binge-drinkers who have achieved a sobriety that has lasted years. The more we have binged — and the younger we have started to binge — the more we experience significant, though often subtle, effects on the brain and cognition.

Much of the evidence for the impact of frequent binge-drinking comes from some simple but elegant studies done on lab rats by Fulton T. Crews and his former student Jennifer Obernier. Dr. Crews, the director of the University of North Carolina Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, and Dr. Obernier have shown that after a longstanding abstinence following heavy binge-drinking, adult rats can learn effectively — but they cannot relearn.

When put into a tub of water and forced to continue swimming until they find a platform on which to stand, the sober former binge-drinking rats and the normal control rats (who had never been exposed to alcohol) learned how to find the platform equally well. But when the experimenters abruptly moved the platform, the two groups of rats had remarkably different performances. The rats without previous exposure to alcohol, after some brief circling, were able to find the new location. The former binge-drinking rats, however, were unable to find the new platform; they became confused and kept circling the site of the old platform.

This circling occurs, Dr. Crews says, because the former binge-drinking rats continued to show neurotoxicity in the hippocampus long after (in rat years) becoming sober. On a microscopic level, Dr. Crews has shown that heavy binge-drinking in rats diminishes the genesis of nerve cells, shrinks the development of the branchlike connections between brain cells and contributes to neuronal cell death. The binges activate an inflammatory response in rat brains rather than a pure regrowth of normal neuronal cells. Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making.

Studies have also shown that binge drinking clearly damages the adolescent brain more than the adult brain. The forebrain — specifically the orbitofrontal cortex, which uses associative information to envision future outcomes — can be significantly damaged by binge drinking. Indeed, heavy drinking in early or middle adolescence, with this consequent cortical damage, can lead to diminished control over cravings for alcohol and to poor decision-making. One can easily fail to recognize the ultimate consequences of one’s actions.

Does the research on rats have relevance for the more complex brains and behavior of humans? We have come to think so. Dr. Crews has shown that the cingulate cortex in the human brain shows signs of neuroinflammation after repeated alcohol binges, similar to that in rats. Sidney Cohen, one of the clearest thinkers and researchers on the effects of alcohol and drugs on humans (now deceased, he was at one time the director of the drug abuse division at the National Institute of Mental Health), pointed out that we are programmed as a species for accelerated learning in adolescence and young adulthood. This heightened capacity is the reason we go into apprenticeships or on to college and graduate school in these crucial years.

As Dr. Cohen noted, we not only learn specific skills during these years, with our brains having developed more fully, we also learn in a more subtle way how to deal with ambiguity. Ambiguity comes into play when the goalposts are moved. Can we change course? Can we deal with this ambiguity and with nuances?

The one piece of good news is that exercise has been shown to stimulate the regrowth and development of normal neural tissue in former alcohol-drinking mice. In fact, this neurogenesis was greater in the exercising former drinking mice than that induced by exercise in the control group that had never been exposed to alcohol.

So, some possible resolutions for the New Year:

•

Stop after one or two drinks. Studies of the Mediterranean diet have shown that one or two drinks on a consistent basis leads to a longer life than pure teetotaling.

•

If you must binge, start at age 40, not at age 16 — and always have someone else drive. Just as youth is wasted on the young, so perhaps is alcohol.

•

If you have binged excessively when younger, follow it up with some regular exercise. Get those brain cells regenerated.

As Shakespeare once pointed out without the benefit of studies on lab rats, “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”

Paul Steinberg is a psychiatrist.

Crossing my Fingers

Candidacy exam in half an hour. At least if I fail I'm officially part of a ballet company now :)

It's snowing again. And while it's not snowing it's been about 15 degrees out, so we have all the snow that's fallen so far this winter (is it even officially winter yet?). None of it has melted. It's snowed at least once a week for... a month? Am I imagining things? Maybe not that long, but at least 2 going on 3 weeks. Recently it's been snowing twice a week: usually a smaller storm followed by a bigger one a few days later. Fun place, New England...

Medication

My last performances are this weekend.

My candidacy exam is sometime this coming week (I'm still not sure which day).

I have all of my Christmas shopping done, though I still have to go with Kraig so he can finish his (he's doing the guy gifts, I'm doing the girl gifts, but technically they're all from both of us).

I had a seriously strange dream last night (this morning) about trying to find something on a website and being totally confused (I think my radio alarm was on for a good 20 minutes before I woke up).

I have a new year's resolution all worked out, but I'm not going to tell you about it until new year's. I've got to provide suspense sometimes....

Another gift idea

Lance Winters makes absinthe at the St. George Spirits distillery in Alameda, Calif.

A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Published: December 5, 2007

EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?

Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.

The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century.



Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it?

To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash.

Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.

“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?

“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”



Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”

After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.

Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban.

“They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.”

That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland.

I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were.

The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly.

With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away.

St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate.

While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.

One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet.

“I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.”

Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”

Here is your horoscope

for Friday, November 30:

Sometimes life gets overwhelming, but you know by now that it's always temporary.


Uh... yeah. It'd better be. Rather than feeling like it's a confirmation, I always get slightly freaked out when my horoscope turns out to be right on the nose.

I decided, or more accurately my adviser and I decided, that I'm going to do my candidacy exam the week of December 17th. Now I'm having kittens. It's been a while since I've had to give a presentation on stuff that I don't know like the back of my hand. This stuff's more like the underside of my nose... Crossman reminded me last night that I always pull it off, so I'm hoping that this is no exception.

But yeah, if I seem stressed out for the next few weeks, you know why.

The first weekend of Nutcracker shows went well (mostly). Aside from a few temper-tantrums, none of which were mine, and sprained ankles, also not mine, nothing interesting happened. We had eight (8) people in the audience Sunday evening. Three more weekends and I'm free (until the next show).

My cats are being fantastic. They're almost curling up in my lap now. They'll jump up or climb on, sit down, and then decide that it's scary and move somewhere nearby. I'm so wearing them down. This time next year I won't be able to sit down without a kitty in my lap :)

Sweet Child of Mine

I just kicked some serious guitar hero ass on that song. I think I'm going to play it a lot until I get it perfect. I had the whole last half of it without messing up once on my first try. Woot.

I'm going to bed now and tomorrow I am going to help Kraig cook all morning (well, I am also going to clean, because that's my job. foo). Then his parents are coming up and we're all going to my parents' house for thanksgiving dinner. My brothers are home and it's going to be a hell of a time. We have so much food in the fridge. I'm so happy. I'm going to eat so much tomorrow :)

Then I promise, I'm going to buckle down for the rest of the semester and work my butt off to get all of my work done and write out my presentation for my candidacy exam. That bitch is going down!

Nutcracker performances start this weekend. Come watch me dance! I think I actually know all 7 parts that I could be in :)

Wishlist

Hi everyone!
I have no idea who reads this, but I'm trying to reach as many people as possible without doing some random mass email (because I have NO idea who's in my contact lists...). So if I actually know you, what I'd like for Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever this year is a picture of you and your sig other/pet(s) that I can put up on my fridge. This means that you should take a photo if you don't already have one, and MAIL it to me. I can print stuff out, but I'd rather have mail trickling in. I'm not posting my mailing address, but if you comment to this or send me a message/email, I will send you my address. I want to have a fridge full of faces that are important to me. You could also accompany it with a letter if I haven't heard from you for a while :)

Thanks!
~Ellen

Hello World

It's almost 11 on a Wednesday and I have yet to do anything productive. This is not unusual. I would like to put away laundry, clean, vacuum, paint the dining room, and maybe try to get some of the layers of cat hair off of everything in my condo. Wishful thinking on my part...

For those of you who don't know me (why the hell are you reading this?) I'm in my third year as a PhD student in math at Tufts University. I'm also dancing with a ballet company and teaching ballet at a local studio. I live with my boyfriend and two cats in a condo that we just bought in April and are now remodeling to suit our picky tastes.

My goal for this blog: to try not to bore you to tears...