John Petrie’s LifeBlag

When I heard that Pedro Martinez would start game 2 of the World Series for the Phillies at Yankee Stadium, I was excited to watch it, preferably with my other baseball-following friends. You can read a nice summary of Pedro’s relationship with the Yankees here and see the famous September 2004 press conference sound bite where he called the Yankees his daddies here:

After that press conference, the Red Sox ended up facing the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. That series is one of the most famous postseason baseball series because the Red Sox came back from a deficit of 3 games to none to win the series, 4-3. That’s the only time in MLB history that a team has won a series after being down 3-0. I never thought I’d see it happen. (It happened twice in the NHL and still hasn’t happened in the NBA). It was also famous for the two appearances Pedro made in Yankee Stadium, in which the Yankees’ organ player and 50,000 fans combined to rouse Pedro with their famous “Who’s Your Daddy?” chant. It started in game 2 when Pedro started and lost, and it continued in game 7, also at Yankee Stadium, when Pedro came in for two innings of relief with his Red Sox up 8-1. He didn’t pitch very well in that outing, either, giving up two runs before settling down and keeping his team up by a comfortable margin.

I tried as hard as I could to find a video of one of those two outings so you could hear the chant resonating through Yankee Stadium, but thanks to the idiots at Fox, it is surely unavailable to the human race forever. But if you’re not familiar with it, imagine what a chant of “Let’s go, Yankees!” would sound like, with the organ going, “Dun dun da-da-dun,” in between the chants, going up an octave each time, but the fans were shouting, “Who’s your daddy!” instead. It sounds just like the “OVER-RATED” chant.

I did manage to find a fan’s video of the “Who’s your daddy!” chant at Yankee Stadium this past Thursday when Pedro pitched for the Phillies in game 2 of the 2009 World Series. I’m sure this video doesn’t do it justice. It must have been louder than that, coming from every corner of the stadium. I couldn’t hear an organ, either, which gave it a nice, old-fashioned baseball touch in 2004.

I didn’t hear the chant on TV myself because I went downtown to watch the game at Bar Louie with five of my friends. It was a lot of fun watching it with them and all of us cheering for the Phillies. Pedro pitched well in Yankee Stadium for the first time since at least 2004, but he still lost because A.J. Burnett pitched better.

I wore my new red Detroit Red Wings hat because I wanted to wear a reddish hat that was close to the dark red of the Phillies to show my support for them that night. That sounds kind of lame because they aren’t even close to the same team, and Philadelphia fans, in fact, hate the Red Wings, but it’s the gesture that counts. (My red Georgia hat feels too tall and awkward on me, so I don’t wear it anymore, and it’s a brighter red than the flimsy, pre-faded, worn-out-looking Red Wings hat that I bought anyway.) However, my Red Wings hat came in handy in a very unexpected way. Near the end of our night there, after we had finished our meals and most people had finished their drinks, the waitress came over and said the bartender wanted to give us a free round of shots because I was wearing a Red Wings hat! Ha! We obviously laughed in disbelief about that. But not in front of the waitress. I’m not even a good Red Wings fan. I’ve never been to a game, I only watch them occasionally, and I only know their famous players. I jumped on their bandwagon and bought a hat so I could wear it to softball next year and because I couldn’t find a new copy of my flimsy, worn-out-looking Braves hat (which is smelly and dirty from wearing during softball). The shots were the bartender’s own creation, the first time he’d ever made it. I forgot what he called it, but I think it had triple sec and some kind of blueberry syrup in the bottom. We all agreed it was good.

While I was watching college football at a friend’s apartment, she brought out a few wooden 3D puzzles that her grandfather makes as a hobby, so we could fiddle around with them during halftime and when there wasn’t anything going on in the game and after the game was over. I don’t recall ever seeing any puzzles like this, but a Google search of woodworking 3d puzzles reveals that it must be a pretty widespread hobby.

They were really hard, to me. There were four such puzzles that we passed around, and I tried my hand at two of them over the course of a few hours. The other five guests, who had never seen them before, each solved two or more of them, eventually, and I didn’t solve a single one. One of them is demonstrated in this video, where the guy makes it look a million time easier than it really is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsXBLyiPzQo

The other one was even easier. It kind of resembled this, but wasn’t the same:

It consisted of six wooden rectangular planks each with a peg sticking out perpendicularly, either from the middle or from one end, and each wooden rectangle had two or three holes for other pegs to go into, and you had to put them together into a cube-like block with no pegs sticking out or visible anywhere. I tried that damn thing forever and came close so many times, but could never change my strategy enough to solve it.

I have never solved a Rubik’s Cube, either. I never owned one myself, so that could have helped, but I doubt I would have had the patience or the ability to figure it out. It would have taken years of diligent attempts, probably. I did own a similar puzzle called Square One, which is like a super Rubik’s Cube because its pieces are not all cubes; as you can see from the Wikipedia image, it contained mostly irregular-shaped pieces. Obviously I never came close to solving it, either.

I’m not sure if my problem is that I don’t have a good enough imagination or don’t have good enough spatial reasoning skills, but it’s probably both. Remember those standardized test questions, or IQ test questions, where you were supposed to imagine folding a piece of paper up a certain way and cutting it with scissors in a certain way, and then discern what the paper would look like after it was unfolded? Yeah, I was always kind of bad at those. I’m sure I could figure most of them out eventually, but they didn’t come easily. These 3D puzzles that I could hold in my own hands and fiddle with in any way I wanted and look at in real life and try and try again proved impossible for me. Everyone else had a pretty hard time with them, but like I said, they all eventually got a couple of them.

It just really depressed me. That is all.

These are a few musings I had that were unconnected except by virtue of the fact that they all have something to do with the homeless.

My favorite game or segment on all the radio shows I’ve listened to is homeless karaoke on the Regular Guys show, based out of Atlanta. I listen to them at RegularGuys.com. They are now the Rock 100.5 morning show, but I knew them as the 96 Rock morning guys in college. Back then, their producer and whipping boy, Southside Steve, would go around to the homeless people on the streets of Atlanta and get them to sing songs on his portable karaoke machine in exchange for a warm, home-cooked meal. Now Steve is one of the Regular Guys and so they get their new lackey/producer/webmaster guy, Sebastian, to record the homeless karaoke segments. The way the game works is that Sebastian will play the voice track of the homeless person without the music, and Larry, Eric, Steve, and Tim try to guess the song based on his/her aimless mumbling and humming. They are surprisingly good at it. It is so hard to make anything of the homeless person’s attempt at singing, but eventually something gets through that gives one or more of them a clue. Sometimes I guess right first, and once I even knew it from the very beginning and was yelling at my computer that they should have gotten it long ago (Blondie, “Heart of Glass”). Here is the most recent example of homeless karaoke, but it is definitely not the best one. (I wish I had downloaded one or two of the really good recent ones, but they disappear after one week.) I don’t know what makes one segment better than another—difficulty, coolness of the songs, multiple songs where multiple people all guess at about the same time, songs I would do well on if I were competing, I don’t know—but it’s still entertaining.

Interestingly enough, their webmaster and segment-recorder, Sebastian, or “Sebas”, is homeless. He lives out of his car and the radio station. His mail and his driver’s license have the radio station’s address on them. He sleeps in his car, in the station, at friends’ houses, in a ditch once or twice, and on random strangers’ front porches a few times. Larry and Eric bring this up occasionally and, justifiably, give him a good ribbing for it. Larry is convinced that Sebas wears his homelessness as a badge of honor, a kind of rugged, urban, free-living, anti-yuppie, street-cred-earning lifestyle. Sebas says he accumulated a lot of student loans and credit card debt during his four years at Georgia Tech, so he is being responsible and working and paying off his bills before he goes wasting money on rent. Well…I guess that’s one philosophy…but, like Eric, I think that’s not the best way to get your life together.

Speaking of homeless people, the street beggars in Ann Arbor are very nice and polite. It doesn’t engender a lot of pity. There’s this one guy I pass on Main Street occasionally who speaks very good English (not at all like the homeless karaoke participants) and says, “Excuse me, sir, can you spare a few cents for a hungry homeless man?” or something similar. I shake my head or look down and mouth, “No, sorry,” and he says very politely, almost cheerfully, “God bless you.”

When my dad visited San Francisco for conferences a couple of times, he said he loved the city and that even the homeless, of which there were many, had a lot of personality. He encountered one kind of unbalanced lady who would hold out her cup or her hand and say, “That’ll be 25 cents, please,” or, “That’ll be 50 cents, please.” I feel even worse for the crazy ones. It makes you think very little that happened to them is their fault.

The MSN homepage had a link to this article in Glamour magazine (I assure you, I would never go straight to Glamour.com on my own) titled “Five times you’re sexy to men”. It purports to inform women of the occasions or the actions that make men attracted to them—perhaps things that women aren’t even aware are sexy, the article’s tagline advertises. To save you some time, the items are: when they make eye contact with the man and smile, when they use flirtatious body language, when they don’t look like a stick-figure supermodel, when they are ovulating, and when their man is in love with them.

Now, this list is totally lame because it’s irrelevant and uninteresting. I clicked on that link expecting to find some things that were actually worth publishing an article about and that are actually unexpected to women. Yes, I know men find women sexy at those times, but it’s been written a hundred times before and therefore no one, especially women, (should) find it surprising or need to read an article about it.

But the advice to not look like a bag of antlers is pertinent. Women should listen to this advice and its corollary: a love of good food and a tendency to enjoy your meal when out on a date is usually a turn-on, or at least not a turn-off.

When I lived in Maryland, I was out for dinner with a group of scientist friends and their friends, and one of the guys, whom I had never met before and probably never saw after that dinner, gave his perspective on taking a girl out to dinner for a date. Especially a first or second date. He said, “It’s a huge turn-off when a girl doesn’t eat much and kind of picks at her food and acts really self-conscious about calorie consumption or something. Enjoying your meal, enjoying food, is a sign of enjoying life—it’s a sign that you are into your date, into your meal, into your life, and are actually living it and enjoying it, regardless of whether you fell in love at first sight with the guy or the restaurant wasn’t your first choice for a dinner date. Not being interested in your food indicates you aren’t interested in the date or in having a good time in general.” I had never thought of it that way before, but now I realize I mostly agree with him. Yes, I know counting calories helps you look sexy, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but, as with most things in life, there is a happy medium between depriving yourself of immediate enjoyment in order to benefit in the long run and enjoying your life while you’re still young. When in doubt, enjoy your meal!

One Sarah Wexler validates this position in her article Eating to score a second date. Money quote:

Men don’t like picky eaters. Dining out, like sex, should be a sensual, indulgent experience. Get too fussy at the table (dressing on the side) and they think you’re high-maintenance in the bedroom. It’s no wonder, then, that when men get a glimpse of my extensive food rule book—nothing spicy, no condiments, no red meat or seafood, no mixing of sauces—they flee.

Today is my 10k day: the 10,000th day of my life. I guess that’s almost as special as being born on the 4th of July. I was planning on it being a 5k and 10k day: run in the 5k road race that usually takes place in downtown Ann Arbor on July 4, and then go out and celebrate with my friends for Independence Day and my 10k day. But since there was no 5k this year and I don’t feel like celebrating lately, I didn’t bother.

If you want to find out your 10k day, go here. Sorry if yours has already passed (Kelly).

Last Fourth of July weekend was one of my favorite weekends I can remember. July 4 was a Friday, so it was a three-day weekend, and I didn’t have to go in to lab a single time. My girlfriend and roommate were both gone for the whole weekend, so I had no obligations and no disturbances. I ran a pretty good time in the 5k, and then came home and veged out in my bedroom and living room for three days. I remember watching about 10 or 15 episodes of season 1 of the X-Files. That doesn’t seem like the most summer-holiday-ish type of thing to watch, but I had gotten the first two seasons for Christmas and birthday and decided I might as well go ahead and put them to their intended use, so I thoroughly enjoyed those episodes all weekend. It was just glorious all around.

I’ve thought of myself as a pretty good writer since I was in elementary school, having been told several times throughout my life by people worth listening to that I had a talent for it. I just haven’t had any training in writing since 12th grade—writing, that is, for the general public on topics like history, culture, sociology, political science…you know, things you might write an English or History essay about—I have had plenty of training in scientific writing and, much to my pleasure, I have mostly excelled at that.

But sometimes I’ll read an essay online at a blag or a magazine that strikes me as very professional, very analytical but accessible, very thorough but easy to get through, and formal without being pretentious. The individual sentences and paragraphs are phrased well and the entire article is organized and flows well. They make their point convincingly without seeming biased or like they had to try overly hard to make it. I say, “I want to write like that. That’s professional writing by a well-trained and -practiced person who doesn’t let their love of their own writing get in the way of the content.”

The two main aspects of people’s writing that I see often on the internet that highlight their lack of writing talent are: bad grammar and punctuation (obviously), and over-use of florid language and fancy words. Being bombastic. I can spot a mediocre writer who’s trying to impress people with his/her allegedly fancy writing skillz from a mile away. Writing well rarely means using complex sentences or SAT words, and when those are involved they are few and far between. Everyone should take Louisa May Alcott’s motto to heart: Never use a large word when a small one will do just as well. No, this doesn’t mean you have to write like Hemingway, but Hemingway is better than Faulkner.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a perfect example of this type type of writing fallacy. Contrast the aforementioned professional writers who impress me and make me want to write like them to this self-absorbed, pretentious douchebagette who writes for The Atlantic. (I italicized that not only because it’s the title of the publication but also for emphasis: this pompous hack who is in no way, shape, or form a better writer, a better social critic, or a better person than you or me writes for the fucking ATLANTIC monthly. If she can do it, I sure as hell could.)

I first heard of this Sandra Tsing Loh character from Fark.com, where a recent article of hers made the main page and was commented on extensively. First, read the article and then read the comments from Farkers. At least some of them. Go on, do it.

Okay, now that you agree with me and them, I can quote a couple Farkers who hit the nail on the head in the discussion thread:

“Oh my LORD that woman is in love with herself and her vocabulary. I love big words and intelligent writing but I wanted to punch her in her martini-swilling face.”

“Ughh. I honestly tried to read that, but it was like eating five pounds of potatoes. The first paragraph or two were okay, but halfway through I felt nauseated and bloated and I couldn’t continue.”

“I got about 1/3 down the page before my brain just couldn’t parse anymore.

That essay is an abuse of language that should be punishable by waterboarding.

You torture us, we torture you. Now put down the Thesaurus and get back in your cave.

/Oh yeah, and the essay contents weren’t any better”

Yeah, the comments on the substance of Loh’s article were more insightful and important, in the grand scheme of things, than the comments about the writing style, but I’m writing about writing right now, all right? Lastly: this Fark.com thread does some good to dispel my impression of Farkers as bitter, hateful, spiteful, religion-hating, government-loving zealots who would scarcely be more pleasant in real life than they are in anonymous discussion threads. They still wouldn’t recognize a property right if it smacked them in the face, but they sure can hit the nail on the head about some relationship/sexual/social issues.

I can’t stand the NBA and especially not its playoffs. It drags on forever and I don’t understand why anybody gives a crap. I know there’s a lot more to it than this, but do you know what I see when I watch a basketball game? Dribble down the court, pass it around, shoot it, dribble it back down to the other end of the court, pass it around, shoot it, dribble it back down to the other end, pass it around, shoot it… It is the lamest sport there is. I would rather watch a scoreless soccer game than an NBA game. At least someone would be passionate about the soccer game. I don’t mind college basketball so much, not because the game is any different but because the atmosphere is different and school pride is on the line. The NCAA tournament is really the only time I pay attention to any basketball because there’s so much drama, so much passion, so much school spirit.

And look at the name of the NBA’s championship: the NBA Finals. Every single other sport has an actual name for its championship. The World Series. The Stanley Cup. The Super Bowl. But basketball is so retarded that the best name they could come up with was Finals.

Have you ever heard any statistics about the number of fouls called on home teams vs. away teams in a basketball game? In college and professional basketball, home teams average a lot more free throws per game than visiting teams. I have heard more conspiracy theories about NBA basketball than every other sport combined in my entire life, at any and all levels. This isn’t because there is necessarily a conspiracy to favor certain teams or certain superstars; it’s because the sport sucks and its “fans” can’t hold on to anything else interesting about it, so they are left to invent and ponder idiotic conspiracy theories that might be tainting a sport no one in their right mind cares about.

Basketball is far too high-scoring. No sport that could end in a 120-110 score could possibly be worth watching. Like monetary inflation, the more points there are, the less the points matter. I don’t particularly prefer watching extremely low-scoring games like soccer, but, again, anything is better than basketball. A sport that has a stronger defensive component is worth more to me. A basketball fan might say, “Of course defense is incredibly important in basketball; as in any sport, offense sells tickets but defense wins championships.” Oh, yeah? Then why are there regularly over 200 points scored in NBA games? Your position is disproved by simply looking at the scores. The point is that too much scoring is an objectively bad thing, and basketball has too much scoring. A game with a low but tolerable score like baseball or hockey is much more interesting.

I think these and other problems with basketball aren’t NBA-specific—they don’t (necessarily) originate in the commissioner’s office—but stem from the fact that basketball is an inherently inferior sport.

When you just think about the nature of basketball compared to most other sports, it’s obvious. Basketball sucks. Admit it. The NBA is the worst North American sport there is, nobody should care about the outcome of its championship, and in fact it’s quite offensive to me that I even care enough about its suckiness to write an entire post about it.

Last Sunday I ran in the largest road race in Michigan, the Dexter-Ann Arbor Run. All together, its three races (5k, 10k, half-marathon) have more participants than any other race in Michigan each year. I did okay, but I was about 4 minutes off my target time I set this winter/spring and a minute and a half slower than my 2008 time. So, I took 51 weeks to deprove by only a minute and a half! Great… Considering that I’m a year closer to being over the hill, that should count as like a one-minute improvement, right? No, I don’t feel too bad about it, but it is frustrating. I ran it in 52:44, compared to 51:07 last year. I seem to have reached a plateau of around 52 minutes.

I don’t know why I can’t run 10 kilometers any faster than that. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t get in that good of shape before reaching my mid-20′s, and so my fitness peak of the last year or so is the best I can ever do, whereas if I had gotten down to 48 minutes at age 22 it would have been easier (hell, possible) to maintain that fitness level, rather than try to achieve it here in my late 20′s. People always say, “It’s easier to stay in shape as you get older than it is to get in shape,” but that struck me as being more psychological and free-time-dependent than biological. Maybe it is biological, though.

My friend who read Born To Run by Christopher McDougall after I forwarded her an excerpt from the book (which I blagged about here) said part of the book is about how almost everyone has the capacity to be a great distance runner, and that 27 is typically the age at which we plateau in our physical fitness—but the key is that it’s a plateau, not a peak, so we can maintain our age-27 conditioning for 20 or 30 years.

Thinking about my long-distance running endeavors both before and after she told me that (I haven’t bothered to read the book myself; seems like I only read things online anymore), I still thought I ought to be able to improve my times considerably here in my 28th year. Maybe I reached my plateau at age 26, though. I’m not quite ready to believe that, so I’m going to train really hard this summer, not for any road race but just for my own satisfaction. I’m considering running longer regularly—say, 10 miles instead of 10k on the weekends. That might help. I have two 5k’s in the summer and fall that I want to rock, as well.

Even people who already are, or used to be, athletes who take up distance running as a semi-competitive endeavor, like me, can only appreciate how psychological of a sport running is after they’ve struggled through it for a couple months. It takes a lot of will to push yourself to keep going when you don’t feel like it and could very easily say, “Screw it, I’m walking.” You’re just out running on your own, right, so it’s incredibly easy to simply stop. It’s very difficult to increase your mileage each week, to tough it out when it’s hot and humid, or to stick to your plans even when it’s cold and rainy or you’re tired or stressed or busy or hungover.

But I’m almost convinced that, entirely aside from the conscious, psychological component to running, there is a neurological component that is completely out of our control. By that I mean it’s largely genetic, though it could probably be affected by our training during youth. Irrespective of your will to push yourself, to improve your times, to finish strong, to embody the mantra “no pain, no gain,” if your brain doesn’t tell your muscles to keep going a certain speed for a certain time, they won’t. Just like height, bone density, and propensity for muscle mass, the sympathetic tone to our muscles and our capacity for running endurance are mostly genetic. Sympathetic tone has nothing to do with an emotional understanding of someone else’s feelings; it means the level of neural activity that’s being sent to your muscles at a constant, basal, and involuntary level. Everyone has a different basal level of it and a different range through which it can be modified by training.

I think my sympathetic tone and my genetic predisposition to aerobic fitness are pretty good, but not great. It’s surprising because I’m pretty skinny despite my best efforts. (Hmm, well, not my best efforts, but I do have a hard time gaining muscle mass.) So I would have thought my high metabolism, low body-mass index, decent athleticism, and good sprinting abilities would make me a very good distance runner. I think when it comes down to it, when I’m out on the road or on a trail exhausting myself during a 10-kilometer run, regardless of how I push myself or how much adrenaline race day has given me, my brain just doesn’t feel like making my muscles perform faster or longer. I have three friends who are good baseball players, two of whom played football in high school and at small colleges, who got fantastic times in half-marathons recently. Two of them are pretty tall and strong, not skinny or lanky, and the third is thick and stocky, a real powerful guy. You would never peg them as great distance runners, and maybe one of them looks like a fast sprinter (and is). But with much less training than myself or my hardcore running friends, they got half-marathon times of about 1 hour and 55 minutes or 1 hour and 45 minutes. That annoyed the hell out of all of us. Just as they were born to be taller and/or more muscular than me, they were probably born to have a higher sympathetic tone (or something else) that allows their nervous systems, heart, lungs, and, especially, leg muscles to keep going faster and longer than us normal people. It is something separate from psychology and training.

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how I could design things better than the people who designed them. One example is food lines, like you’d go through at luncheons or cookouts, for example. They’re set up poorly every single time. My complaint is very simple and the solution is obvious, so I don’t know why people don’t realize this. The plates, napkins, and plastic utensils are always put together at the beginning of the line, but there is no reason napkins and utensils should be at the beginning. They should be at the end, for two obvious reasons.

First, so your hand is not burdened with the task of holding both the plate and the napkin and utensils while you’re piling food onto your plate, which makes it easy to drop one or more of the items, to have a precarious grip on your (flimsy) plate, or to leave the napkin or utensils behind because you can’t keep them underneath your plate while you put it down on the table because then it would be tilted and unstable, so you place them to the side and walk away without them. With only a plate in one hand and nothing on top of or underneath it, it would be easy to hold or set down your plate, add food to it with one or both hands, and pick it up and keep going.

Second, in lots of situations with many food choices, you might not know what utensils you need. Maybe you plan on getting a hamburger so you don’t get a knife, but you decide to get some additional meat that requires a knife, but you don’t have one. Maybe you thought you could scoop everything up with a fork, but upon closer inspection you decide something or other would do much better with a spoon. There is no problem if you can get a spoon at the end of the line instead of going back to the beginning and reaching in in between people.

Everyone’s first response is, “Oh, my god, why can’t you stop complaining and just deal, like every other human who has ever lived?” But inconvenience and spills are fairly common in food lines like this, and the solution is both simple and obvious. So I have a better response: Why the hell is it so hard to put the goddamned napkins and utensils at the end of the line? Cups and drinks are at the end of the line. They are no more required to select and obtain your food than forks, spoons, and napkins are. Why not put the cups and drinks at the beginning, too? Why should one set of items that is no help and is, in fact, a hindrance to getting the food be put at the end, but another set of items that is similarly incommodius be put at the beginning? Stop being a dumbass and move them all to the end.

A really good friend of mine has been engaged to a guy for about three years and has been in a relationship with him for a total of six or seven years now. They’ve been together since early–middle of college. Actually, I should say she was engaged to him for about three years because they aren’t anymore. They haven’t broken up that I know of, because they still share a bedroom and she referred to him as her fiancé just tonight, but I heard that when he said he wanted to postpone the wedding for the second time because he wasn’t sure about them and his life and their life and what he wanted out of it, she said that she didn’t consider herself engaged to him anymore.

I began to notice she no longer wore her engagement ring about a month ago. I just heard tonight that the wedding was canceled (not postponed), so I can only assume the cancelation and cessation of ring-wearing happened at about the same time, and I just didn’t hear any gossip about an official decision until tonight.

It’s also kind of weird that she would keep so many of her semi-close friends in the dark about the cancelation of her long-awaited wedding by continuing to live with him, doing everything with him, putting on all appearances of getting along with him just fine, and referring to him as her fiancé despite obviously stopping wearing her ring. Maybe she would tell me it’s none of my damn business or anyone else’s, but I’m not talking about her lack of desire to spill her heart to every one of us; what concerns me is their extensive denial—both of them—and their going about their lives as if their relationship is the same as any, with the occasional rough patch but everything being peachy otherwise. They’re not just keeping their private life to themselves and trying to avoid some public embarrassment about postponing/canceling their wedding for the second time; they are going about as if they can continue lying to the other or to themselves that things will all work out and nothing necessarily needs to change. She is devoted to him, to a fault, but he doesn’t want to get married yet and he pushed the wedding back (indefinitely) because he can and because he isn’t sure (or doesn’t care) what else to do about their relationship.

This is one of those moments in life where he needs to shit or get off the pot. They have two options, as I see it: get married this summer or break up forever. It reminds me of the 7th-season episode of Scrubs when Kim, J.D.’s baby mama, goes into labor and starts pondering/panicking about their relationship. She had crushed J.D. by moving away and telling him she miscarried, but after he finds out she is going to give birth to his son, they start having something of a relationship again, just to raise the child together. This seems to be okay for the both of them because they don’t really talk about it very much, but when she goes into labor, she gets down to brass tacks and asks him point-blank: “If we weren’t having this baby together, would you still be wih me?” J.D. responds soberly, “I don’t know how to answer that.” And so Kim says, “I think you just did.”

My friend’s fiancé has already answered the implied (or, maybe explicitly stated) question, “Do you still want to marry me?” If, after six or seven years he still isn’t sure whether he wants to marry her, then the answer is no. There are no cold feet at this point. There is only exploitation of a girl in denial about herself, her boyfriend, and their love, and denial on his part that he should be with a girl for any length of time who is overly devoted to him when he isn’t very devoted to her. Obviously they both think their current situation is good for both of them in some way, if only in the short run. It isn’t. What they both need is to break up and go their separate ways, forever. Her life is going to be so much worse if she doesn’t do it or let it happen sooner rather than later. It will be for her own good. I don’t think anybody is going to tell her that because it would cost them her friendship. I wouldn’t be the person to do it because I am not that close to her, but I hope it turns out that no one needs to tell her what to do.

I am not good at science and I don’t really like it that much. I think the latter is the cause of the former, but maybe it’s the other way around. It requires way too much time and emotional investment for paltry results and slow progress. It requires that you care about the most insignificant, minute things as if they affect anyone’s life outside of yours. You have to be satisfied with a success ratio of 10%. Everyone gives this advice to grad students: The 10% (or less) of the time you succeed has to ignite you and carry you through the 90% of the time things don’t work. It doesn’t, for me. I don’t like the physical act of doing the work, period. I don’t like having to attend to the minutiae of cell culture and other things on the weekend, which usually ends up disrupting other plans that I hoped to fulfill, as if I were a normal person in a normal profession.

When I look at the post-docs in my lab, I realize: I don’t want their life. Both grad students and post-docs are expected to work almost every day and sacrifice their free time to produce the occasional, small piece of data. To succeed in science, you have to be obsessed with it. I’m not being hyperbolic to make a point. Many people say you have to eat, sleep, and breathe science, to be thinking about it all the time and always coming up with new ideas and new connections—while you’re exercising, eating, sleeping, commuting, relaxing, whatever—in order to come up with the right experiments and to be passionate about them.

I guess I’m just not. I don’t have that obsession. I wasn’t that good at lab work in my undergraduate lab, and maybe I didn’t care enough to instill in myself the right habits and right attitudes to start being successful and working efficiently and making as much progress as I could each day. I also have bad lab hands. Some people can do things just right and produce lots of good, clean, tight data fast; I can’t. This isn’t a motivational issue, it’s just a matter of skill. I wasn’t born with a lot of it and I haven’t gone to enough effort to develop it, I guess.

I had my second thesis committee meeting on March 17, and it was easily the worst one I have ever even heard about. At this meeting, my mentor and my committee told me in no uncertain terms that if I don’t produce a substantial amount of good data and demonstrate more thorough, careful, Ph.D.-level execution of my experiments, they would kick me out of grad school. I’m pretty sure that’s what my mentor wants to do anyway, regardless of whether I improve or whether I want it or not. He says a Ph.D. advisor and a thesis committee would be doing a disservice to a student to let him languish in an unsuccessful thesis for years and never be productive, so he thinks it is for my own good. He could be right, but getting a master’s degree after a dishonorable discharge from a Ph.D. program in the middle of the Second Great Depression has a low probability of helping anyone, in the short term. It is in my short-term and long-term best interest to earn a Ph.D. and put those letters after my name and bring that appearance of prestige to any job I apply for; going into something non-lab-related after receiving a consolation master’s from your Ph.D. program probably looks worse than leaving science right after college and never gaining the experience of grad school to begin with.

I have heard about other people’s committee meetings, and I’ve never even heard about a bad one, much less two bad ones in a row or one that was this bad. My lab mate had his first committee meeting during my first full year in the lab, and he was very nervous about it because he didn’t really realize how formal it was and how much effort he needed to put into it until a week or two before it, but it turned out great and he said he got a lot of good advice and positive feedback. He said he was interrupted at least once per slide with questions, suggestions, different interpretations, etc. It was definitely a two-way discussion, not him presenting his experimental aims and his data to a stiff, judgmental crowd. And this is someone who often joked, when he had to present his data to our lab, that he had to gussy up his PowerPoint slides to camouflage his lack of data. He wasn’t the most productive, and he had a family so he didn’t even work as many hours as I do. But his committee meetings all went great, to the extent that they let him receive his Ph.D. after only four years of graduate school so he could enroll in dental school. He chose a good profession.

At least one or two other people told me about their first committee meetings, before I had mine, and they said they went great and their committee was positive about this or that, and they got good suggestions for what to focus on in the upcoming months and how to do it and so forth.

My first committee meeting did not live up to my expectations, based on the experiences of my friends. My committee seemed unimpressed and skeptical of my progress, my productivity, my knowledge, my results, and generally everything. They only interrupted me a few times during the entire presentation. Not nearly once per slide. I think they were just unimpressed with my intellectual progress in designing interesting experiments and my technical progress in getting the data. I hadn’t done enough, and what I had done, I didn’t do well enough.

My second committee meeting ended up a little worse, but I knew what to expect. My mentor had already dropped the “master’s” word in a one-on-one meeting with me the previous week. He had repeated a bit of valuable advice he received from some professor in college; in fact, he said it was just about the most valuable thing he learned in college: You can put forth 150% as much effort as your peers for a while, and stay competitive in something you aren’t naturally talented in for a while by sheer force of will and effort, but you can’t keep that up forever. It wears you down and eventually you will lose to the people who are naturally gifted at that profession anyway. Sometimes even more important than picking something you love is picking something you’re good at, and I’m not good at lab work. He said this to me. I already knew it. I already knew I wanted to take my Ph.D. and go somewhere off the beaten path with it. Anywhere but a wet-bench lab. I know I cannot stake my future professional success on my ability to produce data at the bench.

My committee basically agrees. Before thesis committee meetings start, the student leaves the room while his mentor talks about his progress and abilities and strengths and weaknesses and so forth, I don’t know what they talked about for 20 minutes, but it wasn’t good and it was longer than most of those discussions last, I can tell you that much. He probably told them basically what he told me the week before: He thinks I don’t put enough time and effort into things and I shouldn’t even be a scientist. Perhaps effort is a problem, but time isn’t. I spend a lot of time in lab and I always do the things I think I need to do in a given day, a given week. Despite never, ever wanting to, I always go into lab on the weekends, usually both Saturday and Sunday, to take care of my cells or my westerns or my bacterial cultures and make sure no neglect befalls them during the weekend. It’s true, I don’t usually do any real experiments on weekends or drive any project forward—I just maintain my cells or do what’s necessary to keep things from dying or overgrowing or take time-points of RNA or stimulate my cells at the right time or whatever—but I don’t think any more should be expected of me and I don’t think this makes me a bad student or a bad scientist.

I am in the middle of my fourth year of grad school. A four-year master’s would be worse than a two-year master’s from a Ph.D. program, and that’s the main reason I want to work really hard for the next four months and stay in this Ph.D. program until I graduate, not get dishonorably discharged with a consolation master’s. I want to as hard as ever to get that Ph.D. so that I’ll be in a better position to promptly leave research!

I chose Genetics as my major at the University of Georgia at the time I filled out my application, and I never changed it. I wanted to discover the genes that underlie human diseases and/or develop therapies to cure the humans suffering from them. Then when I got into my more advanced biology classes and into the lab, I realized there are very few monogenic diseases left to determine the causes of anymore (my future mentor Francis Collins had taken care of that!). As a scientist, you study basic biological systems—a gene, or its protein product, or a particular cellular process or pathway—that you expect to improve our understanding of the natural world, our own physiology, or future medical treatments. This didn’t affect my vision of life as a scientist or change my mind about what I wanted to do, but when I look back on it I really didn’t like undergraduate research very much. This was largely because I wasn’t good at it. Maybe the lab itself didn’t quite inspire me to develop into an expert experimentalist or to devote whatever time and effort and willpower were necessary to get good data fast, but the deficiency ultimately was with me.

My intellectual passion has always been political-economic theory, and I realized this in college. I thought basic biomedical research could develop into a passion of equal or nearly equal ardor, especially when I got better at it and I could make a living doing it. I reasoned that I should choose something with promising career prospects and learn to love, or at least like, it, rather than confining myself to a field I loved and slowly grow miserable in it as I struggled to make a living. Now I see I will be unable to make a living in the “safer” career field! And I don’t want to!

Part of me says I should listen to what Red Forman would tell me: “It isn’t supposed to be fun. That’s why they call it work. Dumbass.” Everything worth doing is hard, many other jobs (including some I’d like to have) consist of slow progress, incremental steps, etc. Many people, and many of my scientist peers, would rather be enjoying life than working in the lab, but the difference is they are kind of good at it, and their 10% success rate can get them through the all-too-frequent failures. You have to be passionate about the subject and about doing the day-to-day tasks that comprise your job. Either I am less passionate about them, or I don’t listen to Red’s advice as much as they do and just suck it up and do it, or I am less submissive to the idea of being a slave to science all my life—maybe I have higher standards about how much I should enjoy my work and my life, and how much my work should contribute to human society to satisfy me.

Either way, I’m going through a hell of a time in my professional and personal life because of too much self-doubt, too little free time, too much stress to succeed with too little ability to do so, and too few job prospects for a libertarian failed scientist in the Second Great Depression.

Whether I leave a few months or a couple years from now, I’ve decided I must switch gears to find my calling and pursue it with all my heart. I think this has to be in the field of political economy and public policy analysis. Obviously I love it enough (what I know of it) to devote my professional life to it—that’s what I want to do in my free time, instead of lab or a lot of other things. I’ve decided I need to find a way to make my passion into my calling, not try to make my current career choice into a passion to sustain me.