It's Friday
Thank you to everyone who has commented on my blog this week; your thoughtfulness has encouraged me to blog even more often!

Ha ha. I know only like 3 people read this and Billy is the only one who comments. I'll have to think of some more blatant Billy-bait (that Company thing worked pretty well).

First: Employment News Flashes
I'm at the end of my 2nd week of this 4-week deployment. Actually the people and the work atmosphere here are very nice. In contrast to most other offices I've worked in, the people here seem to be awake and competent and engaged in what they're doing. They think for themselves and encourage others to do so as well. What a concept. I wonder how it's done, because this is a very big company and what this department does is pretty boring.

Yesterday my supervisor was out sick, but I had enough tasks to do until about 4pm. I even finished labeling all our files. He's back today, but still getting things organized to the point where he can delegate something to me. That's the first sign of anything remotely troubling I've seen in 2 weeks.

In other employment news, I was turned down for one of the part-time jobs I applied for (they found an applicant who knew QuickBooks) and haven't heard back from the other one I applied to at the same time. Since then I have applied to 2 or 3 more, and I have 2 more I want to get out today. One of the applications is a little involved. The counselor I talked to at the UCB Career Center said it's not unusual to send out 15-20 cover letters before getting a bite. Ugh.

Ok, now for more interesting stuff.
Personal Media Consumption News Flashes:

Saw two movies last weekend (hint, neither one was Yentl). One was 1936's Follow the Fleet with Fred and Ginger, and the other was 2004's Bride and Predjudice from everybody's favorite British Indian woman director, Gurinder Chadha.

• About the former, I have to say the following: Fred & Ginger dancing, horny sailors, monkey in a sailor suit--what's not to like? The songs were not very memorable, and Ginger is clearly a much better actor, but it was still hella fun.

• Regarding the latter, I have to say the following: It definitively anwers the question: "What would a Bollywood-style version of Pride and Predjudice be like," though I'm not sure it points to why the question would be asked in the first place. I have to say I'm consistently impressed with Gurinder Chadha's ambition and her...um...persistence in bringing her personal viewpoint to the screen without compromising. It can't be easy for a British Indian woman filmmaker to get a movie made in the first place, but she never seems to stoop to dumbing-down or homogenizing. For example, she could have set the movie in Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay or somewhere people know of, but she set it in Amritsar; and on that note, she could have made the characters generically Indian but she made them Punjabi Sikhs, true to her roots; she could have made a fluffy romantic comedy (in a lot of ways she succeeded in that) but she did also address issues of globalization and cutural colonialism (at least in one scene). And finally, she could have left the traditionalists in the audience only mildly uncomfortable with the interracial relationship (btw, how was that such a non-issue?), but no, she had to go and have old lady make the "I heard in America the girls are so untraditional some of them even become lesssbeeeeaaans!" First of all, does anyone actually think/say that? The incident reminded me of the whole unnecessary gay friend subplot (not to mention the mistaken lesbian identity complication) in Bend It. In both cases, of course, I am really glad she did. She didn't have to, but she risked the audience's discomfort to increase LGBT visibility. (Mel Brooks, if you notice, does this in many of his films too, but it's kind of a mixed bag. Yes, gay people exist and are not evil or weird! But they certainly are funny and strange.) And finally she could have made the musical numbers more accessible, but except for being in English, I found them pretty much like songs in a Bollywood movie--complete with implausible dancing, inane/melodramatic lyrics. Like Follow the Fleet, the tunes were mediocre at best, but I guess not everyone's an A.R. Rahman or R.D. Burman. I also liked how (in some scenes, anyway) it really looked like India--the first movie I remember seeing like that was Fire, and I've only seen a few others since. (There's more about that--e.g. bovine visibility in this interview). Finally, I have to say the barat band playing the marching arrangement of "Laung Gawacha" at the end was a nice touch. I'm really interested to see what she does next--Dallas??? wtf?

• I read the New Yorker's review of Phillip Roth's new book. Looks like one I'd like to read. I stumbled across Sabbath's Theatre a few years ago and was really blown away by it, and last December I read Portnoy's Complaint and understood why it has the place in this history of American Lit that it does (though I enjoyed Sabbath better). I haven't read The Plot Against America, but the new one actually sounds more interesting to me. I have actually been sort of looking for some sort of exploration of how we relate to our bodies and their functional shortcomings, and I think Roth's treatment will be thorough.

- posted by k @ 9:47 AM

 
News You Can't Use
1. Today is Barbra Streisand's birthday! I'm sure she would love a note from you, so click here.
I guess people have forgotten the campy fun that Yentl can be, or maybe I'm just not inviting enough people who like to watch celebrities cross-dress. In any case, next year I will maintain an annual observance because traditions are important, but I will feature something other than Yentl (like this?) Or maybe I will just invite more people who like watching celebrities cross-dress. Saturday was also Earth Day.

2. Sumana and Leonard got married! He proposed on his blog and she answered in kind. I know it sounds geeky, but these are people whose primary means of communication are probably new electronic media, so that was probably the most sincere way for them to do it.

(I can't accurately say that Sumana is a close personal friend of mine, but we had been hanging out more and more until she decided to screw that up by moving to New York for a fantastic career opportunity. She was just a year ahead of me at Cal, I think.)

What else? Well, I'm trying not to be down about the fact that I'm neither bilingual nor experienced in bookkeeping software or SAS/SPSS, nor do I have 12 Early Childhood Education credits, nor do I have a teaching credential, and I also do not have more than a year to commit. So I might as well go to grad school, except now I'm scared I won't get in. My GRE scores were good, though. yarrgh.

I was offered a full time, 4-week, very well paying temp job and I have taken it, but with mixed feelings. I need to focus on the least profitable thing I'm doing now, which is my lab work, because I think that is what's going to help me most with my long-term goals (such as getting into grad school). It's counterintuitive, I know. What I really need is a steady part-time gig, but you can see in the paragraph above why it's not as easy as I had hoped.

Happy Monday. I wonder if that guy who writes Get Fuzzy really does have a video game addiction or something, because his writing is so inconsistent. I really wish he'd get a collaborator, because I always admire his artwork and how he pushes the format.

Next time (which I probably won't get to) I'd like to bring your awareness to the War On Body Hair.
- posted by k @ 1:20 PM

 
I'm not a lawyer, but I did take 8th Grade Civics (and Heckert's awesome Govt Class)
Ok, this news story, is stupid and upsetting. I try not to have a lot of political stuff on my blog, but I need to vent about this a little. I'd much rather be weighing the evilness-or-not of Starbucks, musing over the manyrecent spelling-bee themed media entries, or drooling over cog neuro books I saw at CNS and want to buy, but instead I am going to say the following.

First of all, the idea of religious freedom is pretty much married to the idea of separation of church and state in the First Amendment. Also, I think freedom of religion applies pretty much equally to Christians, people of other faiths, and--guess what--atheists or non-religious people.

So to say that a public university's not funding a group because of its mission is discrimination is just not sensical. It doesn't make sense for public institutions to fund religious groups! Of any kind! Of course, I realize as I am typing this that we have a top-down effort to fund faith-based initiatives so wtf, maybe it's too late already to make a technical point.

And if this girl is South Asian, I'm ashamed. Somebody on Sepia Mutiny should complain.

Ok, and it's just inaccurate to call a Coming Out Week committee a sex club. People who are involved in organizing don't have time for sex! Sheesh. She could at least get her facts straight, no pun intended.

War on Religion? Please!

Jesus Christ! Save us from your followers!

I mean, what would Jesus actually do in a situation like this? This is a guy who extended himself to the lepers. Don't get me started.
- posted by k @ 2:41 PM

 
Dalai Lama Meets With Muslims in Calif.
By JUSTIN M. NORTON, Associated Press Writer Sun Apr 16, 8:47 AM ET
SAN FRANCISCO - The Dalai Lama urged religious leaders Saturday to reach out to Muslims, saying Islam is a compassionate faith that has been unfairly maligned because of a few extremists. "Nowadays to some people the Muslim tradition appears more militant," the 70-year-old exiled monk said at a weekend conference, which aimed to bring Muslims and Buddhists together.
"I feel that's totally wrong. Muslims, like any other traditions — same message, same practice. That is a practice of compassion," he said.
Event organizers say the Dalai Lama interrupted his schedule to fly to San Francisco and meet Islamic scholars and leaders from other faiths to discuss reducing violence and extremism.
Security was tight at the invitation-only event, which drew about 500 religious leaders and scholars. The conference included speakers and presenters from numerous faiths and roughly 30 countries.
The Dalai Lama told the audience that many people see and hear news of suicide bombings in predominantly Muslim countries but don't hear about how Muslims often work with the poor.
He said all human beings are prone to violence if they lose control of their emotions and not to judge an entire faith based on a few people. "A few mischievous people are always there," he said.
The Dalai Lama, who was awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, fled Tibet in 1959 following an aborted uprising against Chinese rule in the territory and now keeps an office in exile in the Himalayan town of Dharmsala, India.
The Dalai Lama also told conference attendees that religious traditions must work harder to live together in peace, citing religious violence in Northern Ireland, Pakistan and Iraq.
Hamza Yusuf, founder of the Zaytuna Institute, a Hayward-based center for Islamic study, said the conference could help build relationships between Buddhists and Muslims and promote a greater understanding of Islam. He noted that Muslims and Buddhists lived together peacefully for hundreds of years in Tibet.
Yusuf said the Dalai Lama's participation in the event could warm Americans to Islam, since many Americans have mixed feelings about the faith but are receptive to Buddhism.
"He wanted to meet us in solidarity as a community because he felt like people were attacking Islam," Yusuf said.
Seyed Ali Ghazvini of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno said he hoped the conference would encourage Muslims to be more visible and active in the United States.
"This is a matter of necessity," said Ghazvini, who gave the Dalai Lama a set of Islamic prayer beads. "It's not an option to sit alone in our own community and our own mosques."
- posted by k @ 7:56 PM

 
CNS Review
To be fair, I should say that I don't really disagree with Rabbi Lerner or find his messages inherently humorous; it's just that he comes on so strong.

In other news, the CNS conference was very exciting. I saw 2 former bosses, 2 former CSSA members, 1 coworker, 1 former thesis advisor, a bunch of people whose papers I've read or even cited, and several people I might want to work with in grad school. I had emailed one person in particular who told me where I could find him during the poster sessions to chat about grad schools. He seems like a great guy and gave me some good tips.

I went to 3 or 4 symposia and saw more posters than I can remember. It was really interesting to see the difference between speakers' styles. I think the ones whose talks were easiest to follow were conversational and humorous. Also, all that immersion in Cognitive Neuroscience topics has given me a better sense of the "outline" of the field, including what techniques are used and how, what kinds of questions are included, etc.

It looks like a lot of the work being done on reading right now is being done with ERP (event-related potentials; a kind of EEG). The reason is that reading processes happen in the brain much quicker than current functional imaging methods can capture. On the other hand, spatial resolution of EEG is pretty bad and, well, it's hard to know exactly what the signals are correlates of (whereas with fMRI we know the BOLD signal is related to the hemodynamic response--i.e. changes in cerebral blood flow related to changes in neural activity). I did talk to one woman who's studying reading with functional imaging.

Besides the overview of the field, probably one of the most important things about being at the conference for me was seeing the other researchers there--especially the grad students--to see if I could picture myself as one of them. There were a lot of women, which was reassuring, and a wide variation in dress and deportment.

Oops; I have to get ready to go tutor now. Next time I hope to blog about the vendors at CNS.
- posted by k @ 1:58 PM

 
Rabbi Michael Lerner on Passover and Easter
This guy cracks me up. I wonder if he's ever done any coalition building with UUs or vice versa.

"[...] for many American Christians the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, so beautifully affirming that the powerful forces of empire cannot defeat the God energy within us that was embodied in the Jewish prophet Jesus so exquisitely, feels deeply tarnished and perverted by the appropriation of this spiritually engaging story by a Religious Right that uses the story to validate a vision of a muscular God who will return to harshly judge all who do not follow the path of the Christianfundamentalists. How it undercuts the hope of resurrection to see it used to justify the power of the powerful as they proceed to kill tens of thousands of people in Iraq, cut the taxes on the rich and the programs for the poor, and preside over the continuing erosing of environmental protections and the dismantling of civil liberties.

And yet, progressive Jews and Chritians will not allow those beautiful symbols and the stories of hope to be the exclusive property of those who distort them to justify oppression and insensitivity to “the Other.” That’s why we will build our Passover Seder (see the downloadable version of Tikkun’s liberation Seder at www.Tikkun.org) and our Easter celebrations in ways that affirm the liberatory message that was learned by the Israelites as they were freed from Egypt, and our Easter celebrations to affirm the hopeful message of a world that can overcome its death-orientation and renew the life forces and the yearning toward physical, spiritual and emotional renewal that is the God energy of the universe. "

In other news, I am spending most of today and tomorrow at the stomach-churning excitement of the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (in SF again this year, downtown at the Hyatt). Have been taking some notes--hopefully a more detailed post will follow.
- posted by k @ 2:34 PM

 
It did not rain yesterday AT ALL!
And so far it hasn't rained yet today, though it's in the forecast. I think it's getting a little warmer, anyway, and the sunlight is nice.

The downside of all this sunnyness is that things are blooming and so, basically, I am in sinus hell. I am going to go ahead and take a decongestant as soon as I find one because left untreated these sinus problems could lead to fatigue, opportunistic infection, and acute crankiness.

So in other news, today I have an appointment to finally get a California Driver's License. An interesting fact from the CA DMV website: Did you know you could take the written test in a language other than English or even as an audio test? The available languages include Hindi and Punjabi! Cool beans. I wonder if the available languages are based on any kind of census data about languages spoken in CA.

By the way, apparently our Friday Five group died since no one posted new questions. Maybe I will think of a new Friday blog ritual for myself.
- posted by k @ 9:56 AM

 
Come on over for dinner...
Well yesterday I went to the Asian Art Museum for the first time. I really enjoyed it, especially since it was free (the first Tuesday every month is free, and Thursdays after 5pm are discounted). I think I will blog about it a bit later.

Now, however, I will blog about today. In about an hour I have a typing test for the City and County of SF employment pool, so this morning I decided it would be good to make sure I can type. I played a few rounds of Typer Shark while listening to the original cast recording of Company on Napster (I averaged about 75 wmp @ 95% accuracy. The test only requires 50 wpm).

I've seen 95% of a student production of Company when I was at Berkeley--I think they did a great job given the challenging nature of the material, but I had to leave 10 minutes before the end to get to a meeting on time.

So of course I'm sure you've heard the rumors that originally Bobby was gay but they had to change it. On the sondheim.com website there are actually some "essays" (I'm not sure who wrote these--directors who staged it?) that address the issue. Here is the paragraph that I think gets to the meat of the matter:
One of the central questions in an audience member's mind is "Why won't/can't Bobby commit?" Perhaps in the 90's the answer seems obvious, and he doesn't seem so unusual, but in the 70's, to be anti-marriage and commitment implied that there was something "wrong" with you. Audiences and critics began inventing reasons - that Bobby was a closet homosexual was the most obvious. This would not work, of course, since such a pat reason for Bobby's doubts and fears would negate much of the message of the play. Sondheim and all of the original creators have repeatedly said that this isn't the case, but the rumor continues. Apparently, early drafts of the show had a scene where Bobby mentions past liasons with men to Peter, who promptly propositions him, and is turned down. One can imagine that the scene was originally there to give Bobby the opportunity to examine, and remain unfulfilled by, ALL forms of romantic committment. One can also imagine several dozen reasons why the scenes may have been cut, but the least inflammatory and probably most true would be that to drop a bomb like that without examining it would be too distracting, and that examining it would pull the play off course.

Juicy news about Bobby's tearoom antics aside, I think that's an interesting question: is there something wrong with you if you don't eventually partner up? Is partnering up something cultural or something biological (my two sisters can probably tell you why that's a false dichotomy at least)? Have our cultural views on partnering up really changed that much? A woman has written a book now on "starter marriages." Hmm. Is partnering up really a necessary step in a human's development?

And on a wholly unrelated note, here is my original haiku for Springing Ahead:


- posted by k @ 12:05 PM

 
Anytime the rain wants to stop
I would be A-OK with that. I guess this must be what it's like to live in Seattle. Seriously, I think the paper said we had 28 rainy days in March.

Well, in the meantime, I will blog about something I learned recently. I was watching part of a PBS program on Samuel Goldwyn and one of the stars he helped to launch was Merle Oberon, who, it turns out, was born in India! IMDB says she was of "mixed Welsh-Indian parentage." She starred in The Dark Angel and Wuthering Heights under Goldwyn. This was back in the 30's! There was a (partly, at least) Indian actress starring in American movies! Wow, who knew?

She passed in 1979, but the show included some interview footage of her talking about Goldwyn, and she did have a slightly Indian/British accent and mannerisms, and openly talked about the fact that she was Indian (in discussing how she was cast first as an Asian character and then as Caucasians).

I know there are now many South-Asian-Americans working in Hollywood (e.g. M. Night Shyamalan, Jay Chandrashekhar, "Kumar" from Harold and Kumar, and that guy from The English Patient, and now since my parents have moved down there, there may be a danger of two more), but I found it surprising that in that era such a thing was easily accepted by the movie-going public. Maybe she wasn't "out" as Indian until later? Or they marketed her as some sort of exotic person?

The other most surprising South Asian American in Hollywood I found was stunt-man Deep Roy, late of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame (though apparently he even had a role in The Dark Crystal).

I guess that's the American Dream thing at work. Move here as the child of two doctors and you're free to throw away your life making disgustingly profitable cheesy horror movies and looking really hot in an American Express commercial.
- posted by k @ 9:29 AM