The pride of Singapore

Today I got a semi-spam email about applying for research fellowships in Singapore.  Maybe it’s my politically correct American sensibility, but is it strange to you that all the white fellows are on top and all the Asians on the bottom?

A few days ago, I had a dream where I was being chased by a bunch of guys who wanted to kill me for some reason.  (I wouldn’t normally blog about a dream, but this one had real life consequences.)  I was basically cornered, but my pursuers still didn’t know exactly where I was.  I spotted one guy on his cell phone and figured that if I could take him out, I might be able to get away.  I swung my arm and…

My wife woke me up with a scream.  I had punched her in the nose and it was bleeding!  Hurriedly I went to grab a towel and some ice.  I googled for sympthoms of a broken nose just to make sure.  Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad.

It was an accident, for sure, and she didn’t hold it against me.  We racked our brains for preventative measures and decided to switch sides of the bed.  From the left side, any swings of my right hand would probably miss her.

Has anything like this happened to anybody?  What are some reasonable ways to prevent accidental noctournal violence?

When I started biking to work this morning around 9:15, my wallet was in my jacket pocket.  Unfortunately, my jacket was in the closet.  When I arrived at work around 9:45, I couldn’t get in the employee entrance because I didn’t have my ID badge.  I couldn’t get in the visitor entrance because I didn’t have any form of ID.  So I had to turn back.

I was thinking of working at home, but now I’m at home, I realize that there’s too much construction noise from the renovation next door.  It looks like I’ll go back to work.  I think I’ll take the metro this time.

You can say I’ve settled down.  In single and independent adulthood, I never felt like I had a real home.  My parents were always welcoming, but after high school, it wasn’t home anymore.  Neither were the series of living arrangements and roommates since; they’ve always felt temporary.  Now, my wife is my home.

On the other hand, we’re quite unsettled.  We stayed in my old basement unit for about a week, and now are housesitting at a three story house for a month and a half.  After that, we don’t know where we’re going next.  Even with a home, it seems that I’ve found a way to be nomadic.

It turned out that the speaker was a cartoonist, Dan Piraro of Bizarro!  He was going to do a book reading, but that doesn’t really work without the pictures.  So he cracked jokes, sketched pictures of audience members, and answered questions from his fans.

I wouldn’t necessarily go too far out of my way to see an event like this, but it was certainly a serendipitous occasion.

Being here brings back memories of a time when I was less confident in myself and my identity.  Now that I’ve returned, teaching new theory to professors who could have once taught my courses, I am especially grateful for how far I have come and how things have changed.

Substitute “theoretical science” for “campaign” and “permanent” for “temporary” and you have my life.  Akin to Michelle Obama’s confusion about her husband’s penchant for dish washing, my fiancee seemed pleasantly surprised yesterday to hear that I enjoy cooking sometimes.  What do I like about it?  Besides the concrete and edible results, I like the fact that it doesn’t take that long and if I mess up a little bit, it’s still all right.  After all, I’m not a gourmet chef and am not worried about building or preserving a cooking reputation.  Sometimes I like to create something that anybody can enjoy, opposed to crafting obscure articles that few understand.  It’s also a nice change of pace to work with my hands instead of my head, to take a reprieve from life in the abstract.

Don’t count me as a devoted SAM reader anytime soon.  Although it has the appearance of a comic strip, it has the unfortunate trait of not being funny.  I don’t mind comic strips dealing with serious issues like racial discrimination, but they still need to be funny.  They’re not called the funnies for nothing!  Boondocks was funny.  SAM, as not much.

Since I didn’t feel like reading the strip for too long, I read the Wikipedia article on it.  In the current version, it says, “The Asian part of his identity he considers practically meaningless, because of the diversity and distinctness of people it includes.”  This is an interesting, although by no means original, statement.  Is the pan-Asian identity an artificial construct?

Not entirely.  While there is great diversity, there are also many similarities between Asian cultures, in the same way that there are many similarities between European cultures.  Referring to somebody as Asian instead of Chinese, Indian, or Thai is just a different level of geographic or ethnic categorization.

The term Asian-American, as with other hyphenated labels, however, has the connotation of being somewhat foreign.  An American whose family hasn’t set foot in Asia in four generations has the same racial label as a recent immigrant.  This is somewhat problematic, but there is a simple solution.

In America, the descendants of immigrants from all across Europe are known as whites.  Those of African ancestry are known as blacks.  Thus, those of Asian descent can be known as yellows.  Rather than a hyphenation which prioritizes ancestral origins, it merely describes the skin tone of somebody who is fully American.

Snow girl and I were in the middle of a game of travel Scrabble and put it away for the day.  When we picked it up again, it spelled out, “(Snow girl), I love you. Will you marr_ me?”

“Hmm, interesting,” she remarked. Apparently she was thinking of how I could have arranged the tiles differently. After a seemingly eternal pause, she said “yes.”  Then she put down the tiles to say so.  Yay!

Recently, I’ve been blessed with one of these simple, elegant, and potentially useful ideas.  Unfortunately, there’s a flip side: if it’s so simple and good, why hasn’t anybody else come up with it yet?  There’s some security in complexity; if you’re adding another layer to a difficult subject, chances are that nobody else will have considered the same enhancement.  It takes a bit more chutzpah to believe that you can stand of the shoulders of giants and see something that seems obvious but is nonetheless novel.

I’ve been in the field and scoured the scientific literature enough to know that this idea isn’t out there yet.  There’s been at least a 10 year window of opportunity.  Yet, the paranoia remains.  Will somebody else come up with it independently (or God forbid, steal it somehow) and publish it first?  It’s not merely a matter of vanity; my career advancement depends on my publication record.

I’ll admit that this paranoia is one of my motivating factors; it makes me want to finish my work sooner than later.  It even enters my dreams (can such an abstract fear be a nightmare?), waking me at an unreasonably early hour.

Yet, recognizing paranoia for what it is and writing it down should help me sleep again.

Good night.