retro-spective

In 2011 Gotye released Making Mirrors, and some of it harkened back to the songs that were on the radio when I was a kid. I like it.

Old school Phil Collins.

Old school Peter Gabriel.

vacation kitchen board

Contending with an assertion by my husband (while standing in the Home Depot aisle) that we lacked direction in our current renovation, I spent some hours yesterday gathering pictures related to my ideal kitchen finishes. Highlights include slate grey concrete counters with embedded sprokets, medium finish cabinet doors with gothic style mullions and a light finish plank floor. Back to real work on Monday.

Happy New Year

I hope 2012 is full of awesome shots and tiny little fist pumps :)

MashedMush

I wonder if those people who create beautiful mash-ups using three or more songs have brains that work like this ragtime piano player interviewed by RadioLab.

Christmas Cheer

So what happens when you live in a tiny town, and you think of the perfect gift for your father-in-law but nobody within an hour's drive carries said item?

Why, you call up a friend from Grad School Days, who happens to be driving many hours from the city where I did my last degree to his village of birth (conveniently stopping in my current tiny town right off the highway) to exchange the gift he bought at a specialty store on my behalf.

Then I hand off the cup cakes I baked him as a thank-you, and send him off on his merry way.

I recently found a video I made of my old lab on my hard-drive while looking for something cool to post to my Google+ account (which failed, ps). The quality is absolute shite, otherwise I might post snippets of it. And last week I schlepped an entire box of thesis drafts and annotation rough notes from my attic to my lab....thinking it might be more useful there? I just can't get rid of it yet.

Oh Land choose your own adventure

As a blonde with strings

As a brunette with beats

such conspicuous self improvement

December usually prompts me to do the rounds for eyes/teeth/body check-ups that I've otherwise been ignoring all year long. I suppose this is lay-over behaviour from when I had a student insurance plan that allotted a certain number of dollars for each calendar year.

New eye exam, new set of contact lenses, teeth whitening regime and regular flossing. The gym is more-or-less a regular occurrence. Indeed the shower-only-at-the-gym trick is working, although I am feeling more grubby than I normally do in general because of it. Although my clothing is no looser fitting than normal, they aren't tighter than normal either...admittedly a feat during the holiday party season. The students are all gone, so I can go anytime of day to the campus fitness centre without sharing.

I contacted a local instructor for Aikido martial arts, since I might be getting even klutzier with age, and feel an eight week program might improve my body awareness. This past Saturday was a dress-and-dance party at a friends place, and at the end of evening I was speaking with someone so animatedly I hit his tumbler of red wine out of his hands (my husband explaining the next day "you're so French"). It went careening across the room, crashed to the floor and splattered red wine in a TEN FOOT radius in all directions. Floor, ceiling, next room over...the host kept saying over and over "I've never seen a spilled drink cover so much area". Of course the entire party stopped to observe the red wine massacre and laugh at yours truly for a few minutes as I was scrubbing frantically at the plaster walls in my party wear. It's lucky no one lost a limb.

Reproductive Health Day

Yesterday I bounced from clinic to hospital for a few hours, being manhandled in the name of reproductive health. Since I have to travel for such appointments, I try to bundle them on the same days. Convenient but also tiring. A had a follow-up MRI done and noticed this painting in the waiting room:

A close-up:

Somebody tell me why anyone in their right mind would put a macabre image of a ghost grey "after shot" rose with a blood red stem in the waiting room of an MRI? Oh thanks hospital peeps for making me ponder my mortality. Gold star to you.

Saturday Morning Tunes

I woke up with this song in my head



Also listened to Q with Jian this past week, which featured both Bon Iver and The National. Check it out.

[I DIDN'T KNOW BON IVER WAS DATING KATHLEEN EDWARDS, HOLY CRAP AWESOME]

Tendrils of culture and science

Ever since reading the book Sex at Dawn, I've been finding tendrils of it's tenets in several unexpected places. I think it's a good indicator of successful scientific writing when a reader easily amalgamates the information, links it to other peripherally related topics and then ponders those disparate topics more thoroughly. The book describes evolution of sex in humans, but the broader narrative is really how hunter-gatherer societies likely differed from our own and the scientific evidence supporting it. Unlike the terribly boring "Guns, Germs and Steel" (which I bought but couldn't even finish! As an interested scientist! I even tried twice!) that deals with many of the same topics (namely how our society changed when we adopted a settled agricultural lifestyle over a hunter-gatherer one), Sex at Dawn uses cheeky prose to address some of our culture's most rigid ideologies - patriarchy, monogamy, human brutishness.

So back to the opening sentence of this post, what tendrils am I speaking about?

The first was this video on human child rearing that I came across on some random comment board somewhere on the internet. I don't agree with everything (or perhaps, even most) of what Gabor Mate says, but he is nonetheless quite compelling. In the embedded video he mentions the old way of child rearing (the whole village) and contrasts that to the nuclear-family-in-a-suburb method we are using now (...guess what he thinks of each):



The second, nebulous instance of "tendrils" was in relation to this advice column on Salon about dealing with patriarchy. It basically admitted that one needs to remove oneself from society in order to get away from patriarchy. I'm a feminist, I meet with a group of female friends at least once a week to talk about women's issues/sex/books/etc and I'm still forming my opinion. It was the way that Sex at Dawn connected the (inevitable?) development of patriarchy with hereditary land ownership that struck a particular chord with me. These are things I think about now as a whole, and sheds a different light on many of the articles, online blog posts and other content I read on a daily basis.

Finally, last week we listened to about 8 hours of RadioLab science podcast while working on the house. The topic was "patient zero" & disease in humans. The case study was HIV, and how it spread from monkeys to chimps to humans, which was amazing in it's own right but it was the visceral description of hunting chimps that really brought me back to Sex at Dawn. Chimps are brutal hunters - they apparently eat their prey alive, searching for the tastiest organs to devour first while the victim screams, getting covered in blood during the whole process (and thereby aiding the spread of monkey-to-chimp SIV). SO. Sex at Dawn goes into compelling detail about how our OWN view of human nature may have been swayed by the early discovery of our closest relatives the chimpanzees (with all their nasty violent tendencies) and the comparatively late discovery of our equally related (but oft ignored) primate relatives the bonobos. Bonobos are peaceful little hippies compared to chimps, and it boggles my mind that how we view the inevitabilility of human brutishness might just correspond to what we thought (for a long time) was the inevitability of primate brutishness. Such fleeting, stochastic factors might have lead to justification for some pretty abhorrent human behaviour. Fascinating, hun?

I heart you

CBC Radio 3 R3-30 line-up is particularly fantastic this week.

December Sixth

One crazed man acting out our worst fears, our worst fears starkly illuminated on one horrible day.

Clarity

I went to the gym this morning. When I get bored on the elliptical I start dancing (true story). I'll probably end up warping my knees from the wiggling motion, but whatevs. I'm still young. Then I went to the shower room and felt like an IDIOT when I couldn't figure out the nuances of the motion detector shower head.

Update: Then a I ate onion rings for lunch. /Groan

Update 2: I'm not showering at home therefore the ONLY WAY to get ungreasy is to get to the gym. Let's see how long this method lasts.