Crossing Time Zones

I just did my taxes today. Apparently, I am getting a few bucks from the government back. That's always a good thing.

Last Friday, I went to the International Students and Scholars Services here in the university. I had some legal business to take care of. I needed to extend my legal stay here, and so I submitted some paperwork that they needed, and I will get the new paperwork back next week. Hopefully, this is the last time I will do this, as I am itching to earn real money and graduate from the program. Well, the good thing is that I seem to be on the right track with the proposal defense, and I am scheduled to defend my dissertation proposal in three weeks time.

Once I get my paperwork back from the ISSS, I need to take care of my visa application. I am renewing my visa for the USA this summer, so I am flying back to Manila to do that. I need to fill in some forms and schedule an appointment with the US Embassy in Manila. Yes, I know, it is a hassle, but unfortunately, I cannot renew my visa here in the United States. So yeah, I am flying back to do that, after all, I haven't visited the Philippines for the past 3 years.

So here I am again in my geeky mode. I am flying from Buffalo to Manila via New York City, Anchorage, and Taipei. This is going to be a long flight. As usual, I computed the statistics of my flight times, and after this trip I will have the following stats.

Upon coming back here, I would have flown 355.48 hours of flying time. That translates to about 14.8 days in the air, or 2.1 weeks. I would have flown a total of 152,483 miles, which would circumnavigate the Earth about 6.12 times. This is 0.638 the distance from the earth to the moon. The Boeing 747 is still the most frequent aircraft that I would have ridden, and Delta Air Lines is my most used airline. I would have taken off or landed in Buffalo Niagara International Airport a total of 27 times, while the second most-used airport is Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, with a total of 19 take offs and landings.

Ahh, the joys and pains of travel. No wonder I always fly with a good book in my hand.



(Morehead, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

Higher Ground

Ah, why am I getting excited?

Well, for once, things are making progress. I just spoke to my adviser and it seems that my defense will progress on schedule. I need to give my committee something to read a couple of weeks before the defense, and if the defense is scheduled to take place around April 15, then I need to get the draft ready about two weeks before that. And it seems that my adviser is indeed optimistic that this will happen. The thing is, as one only does a dissertation once in their life, I have no data point about this process from the past, and therefore I am relying solely on what my adviser and my department chair tells me.

Another good news is that the experiment that I have conducted over the past few weeks was finally done, and upon scanning the results, it seems that we have good results. It seems that the hypothesis was indeed borne out, and that we have data to contradict people that wrote something about the topic beforehand. Thus, the person that is supervising me (who is not my adviser) on this project told me that I could actually write this as a journal article. I and a fellow grad student would be joint first authors, and two other faculty members would be the third and fourth authors respectively.

Also, a conference that will happen in a country that I haven't been to yet is already open, and the abstract submission is getting near. It seems that I have two abstracts with my name on it that will be submitted, so hopefully, at least one of them get accepted. I somehow had the hunch that this would happen, so that is why I am heading back to the Philippines this May to renew my visa so I can get back to the USA again after attending a foreign conference.

So it seems that 2010 will be a prolific year for me academically. My adviser has stressed the importance of building one's vita at this point in the game, and so I think I am heading for the right track in this endeavor.

Oh, in case you all haven't noticed, I finally finished the Washington DC pictures. Starting from the previous post, I am now running the series of pictures I took from my visit to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I visited this university for a conference two years ago, which is in the same series of conferences that I had attended in New York City this past week.



(Old House, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

Book Review: Seeing by José Saramago

5 months ago, I read Blindess by José Saramago. I found that book extremely awesome and moving, that I decided to grab the sequel and read it as well. Thus, one day, I went to the library and borrowed this book.

So, this book picks up four years from where Blindness ended. There is an election, and the country has three parties. One rainy day, the election was conducted, but the capital faced a democratic crisis: more than 85 percent of the votes have been blank.

So they decided to conduct it again a week later, and lo and behold, the same result was garnered, that the huge majority of the votes were blank. The government then became worried about this anarchy-like tendencies. They decided whether to split it between the parties, and other tactics designed to scare the public away were implemented. They were basically worried because the blank votes essentially meant that the public do not support their government anymore.

So the government decided to abandon the city, scaring the people into thinking that anarchy would be devastating, planting guilt into their lives. But all the methods so far do not work, so the government resorts to dirty business, planting bombs and burglarizing the houses to make a point that a government is essential.

In the latter half of the novel, characters from Blindness appear again, with the doctor's wife emerging as the main suspect for the perpetrator of the blank vote movement. They eventually decided that this was due to the fact that she did not go blind four years ago, and therefore she must be the one to blame for the current crisis. There is a whopping fallacy here, and I am so angered by the villainous government that Saramago portrays here.

In the end, tragedy ensues, and as always, Saramago succeeds in painting a dystopian world that is meant to give us a warning against scenarios that might occur should one not keep ourselves in check.

I always like the premises that Saramago chooses for his novels. In Death with Interruptions, he discussed the idea what if death ceases to occur. In Blindness, it was the what-if scenario of everyone becoming blind and reverting to animalistic tendencies. Here, it is the scenario of people exercising their right to a blank vote and the anarchy and governmental control that might occur due to that.

In short, this is a very good book, and I wholeheartedly recommended this to anyone. 5 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(The Courtyard, from my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Series)

The Cabal Concluded

Ah, what a wonderful week.

It began when I headed to Rhode Island to take a break, and I enjoyed that very much. Then, I proceeded to New York City to attend a conference and tutorial session series, and that was very informative as well.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we attended the neurolinguistics tutorial sessions. These are four sessions that give the basics of how to do research on human brain and cognition using neurophysiological and hemodynamic methods. I learned about fMRI and MEG imaging techniques, which are techniques designed to make images of your brain depending on where the blood flows at the current moment. The main assumption here is that more cognitive effort in the brain requires more blood flow. Thus, if you can take pictures of where in your brain blood is concentrated at the current moment given a particular stimulus, then you would be able to localize certain brain functions.

I also learned about the basics of ERP/EEG research. This is basically measuring the electrical activity of the brain via recordings taken on the scalp. The brain emits a weak current whenever neural activity is present. The synapses between neurons emit an electrical current that can be measured. This is a week current in the magnitude of microvolts. Thus, one can measure these brain waves and see when things occur given a particular stimulus. This method is more used for timing issues.

Thursday to Saturday was the big three-day conference where the big boys and big girls of my field were gathered in one room. I was able to meet several people, including people from the Max Planck Institute of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in Leipzig; people from Northwestern University who does research similar to mine; a faculty member from UC San Diego; and various other interesting people. I suppose the goal is to bounce my ideas off people and get input, and also to portray myself as a promising young researcher so that these people might be interested in hiring me later on.

All in all, I am so glad that I went to this conference. Yes, I had to deal with my love-hate relationship issues with New York, but otherwise, it was all good. Where else would I be able to have authentic Japanese ramen, Moroccan lamb tagines, Vietnamese pho, and other awesome ethnic cuisine within walking distance of one another?



(Chandelier Glow, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Love-Hate Relationship

So now I am in New York City since Monday afternoon. And every time I come here, I get reminded of my love-hate relationship with this city.

How so?

Well, let me describe the love part first, then the hate part later.

I love this city because it contains basically anything you want. My sister and I went to the grocery store in the Upper West Side and they stack everything you could possible imagine. Tens of thousands of varieties of extra virgin olive oil. The cheese rack is splendid. The fruits and vegetables section makes you feel as if you are really in Asia buying those exotic fruit. They have Asian pears, star apples, and other delicacies that I normally would not see in Buffalo.

I also love the wide selection of cultural activities here. Theaters abound, and pretty much one has a choice of what to see every night. Buffalo only has a spattering of theater: there are available stuff to do, but not a wide selection.

However, there is also the hate part.

I hate the fact that there are so many people. I suppose the metropolis is just too big for me. There are people of so many types and tokens, which is fine, but sometimes, it is suffocating. It was an ordeal doing grocery-shopping when I still had my traveling backpack with me. I really feel like an ant whenever I walk all over the city here.

Space is at a premium. I was in a building in New York University the other day, inside a seminar room, on the seventh floor, and the view from the outside window was somehow cognitively dissonant with what I usually associate with views in a university setting. I do not expect to see tall skyscrapers just by looking out the window from a university building.

People are in your face. I rode the A train from Dyckman Street all the way to West 4th yesterday, and in that stretch, I encountered two subway performers. They brought their musical equipment with them, and just performed there. But here I am just wanting peace and quiet while reading my book. If I wanted to hear those type of entertainment, then I would go out of my way and pay in order to enjoy it. But the performers in the subway effectively put me in a captive audience situation, where I cannot do anything but listen to their performance.

So yeah, I know that there are plenty of people who say that New York City is awesome and all that, and I agree that it is to some level, but somehow, I do not see it as my type of city. I probably would go for something smaller.

They say that New York has streets that make you feel brand new, but somehow, I felt more brand new when I was engaged in oceanic adoration in Rhode Island this past weekend.



(Details III, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Book Review: Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

I revisited the short story genre again. And once more, I found one that I liked.

Both Ways is a collection of stories that deal with emotional and psychological conflicts across several people centered around Montana. Every story features two or three people dealing with romantic relationships, and the cute thing about this collection is that I am impressed with the way the author paints a complicated picture about these people in just 20 pages per story.

All the tension occurs at the psychological and emotional level, and perhaps, the most attractive thing this book has to offer is the fact that every story seems to begin in medias res and and ends abruptly. There isn't a build-up and a resolution. The reader enters the drama in mid-air. And perhaps, that is a way that the author trusts the readers, that the readers would be capable of building the relevant background needed to fully understand the drama.

The book consists of 11 short stories. It starts with stories relating to Montana, but somehow, this theme goes away near the end, and I couldn't see the connection to Montana for the final couple stories. But perhaps this is just a minor thing that isn't meant to be a flaw.

Another thing this book features is that it deals with the most complex human emotions in such a short medium. In Travis, B., the author paints the picture of long-distance unrequited love involving 8-hour drives across the state of Montana, and horse-rides in the middle of winter. In Two-Step, the story paints the picture of two women who are friends, and one of them opens her heart out to the other woman in order to complain about her husband who she suspects is having an affair. Little did she know that it is her friend that he is having an affair with. A little comedy is also in order, which is provided by the story entitled Liliana, which is about an old matriarch who was reported to be dead two months before, but is live and kicking in Los Angeles giving his offspring a visit.

In short, I believe this is a good book to provide one with a sampler of the complexity of human emotions, giving the reader a glimpse of every shade. 4 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Details II, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Jeeeeessssssuuuuuusssss!

So, I was watching a couple of episodes of the current Amazing Race season. And I cannot tire of being amazed at how people act when under pressure.

First, people get dehydrated. I suppose that's a natural occurrence, when you are in a hectic pace and you just have one goal in mind, to reach the finish line. And you forget to drink, and so you have to get to a hospital and get an IV drip.

Then, people sometimes resort to faith in order to accomplish tasks. There was a team who needed to lasso a decoy bull in order to get the next clue. They had to do a cowboy type maneuver in roping the bull, and then pulling it. The team cannot perform it for the longest time, so the person doing it decided to tell her teammate to pray for her. And so the other teammate did, and guess what? It worked. They were able to lasso the thing. They shouted Jeeeeessssssuuuuuusssss!

Wow. Classic case of the fallacy most known as post hoc ergo propter hoc.

And then people just stop being logical. They throw temper tantrums, they don't read the clues, and they just start acting stupid.

And what is it with Miss Teen South Carolina always worrying about whether everyone in the whole wide world still thinks she is stupid? If she is really worried, then start acting like you aren't dumb!

Somehow, this season doesn't give me a good I am rooting for this team! feeling. But perhaps that is the goal of the current season, to make it so unpredictable by having all these teams that are so heterogeneous that none stands out as a sure win.



(Details, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Unexcitement

So I am in Rhode Island.

A few days before this, I was telling the ninja that I feel like I am not excited for this trip, when I feel like I should be. I mean, hello, this will be the first time I would be using Providence's T. F. Green Airport, and that means I will be adding that to my collection of airports that I have passed. But somehow, I felt I wasn't excited.

Anyway, the ninja told me that maybe it is because I had so many things to do the days before, and I didn't even plan anything to do in Providence. I had been very busy with my dissertation the few days leading to the trip, that I didn't even make any plans, I didn't even allow myself to be excited because I never made plans to do things to be excited.

But, here I am, and so far I am liking my stay. I like the fact that I don't have to think for a while. I like the fact that I am just here in the house, chatting for hours, talking about us and friends, remembering about things past in a way that Proust would be proud of. And somehow, for once, I see the value of just being in a place that I haven't been to, and just spending downtime, eating breakfast in a local diner, fixing my friend's shower curtain and toilet, cooking in her kitchen, and doing other mundane things. I've finished reading a book that has nothing to do with my research or academia, and I am halfway through another one.

Sometimes, the brain needs a rest. And this weekend is definitely one such occasion.



(Under the Dome, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Book Review: Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

I suppose I should preface this review with a warning. This is an explicit book. This book has full of sex. And this book has no plot.

Ten years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. It opened my eyes. It was the first book that I read that had no plot at all, and I was looking for a story in the book, and yet there were none. It was just a three-hundred page rant about the traipsing of the author. I liked it.

This time, I read Tropic of Capricorn, ten years after reading the first book. And once again, I was amazed.

Why did I pick this book? Well, it was first published in the 1930s, but it was banned here in the United States for about 30 years, due to the sexually explicit content of the book. However, I suppose I like this book due to the fact that this gave way to freedom of speech and expression.

So, what is this book about? This is a narration of a character named Henry Miller and his escapades in New York City. He has sex with several women in the book, and it seems that he is the most virile character in literature that I have encountered so far. He describes in painful detail the encounters that he has with several women, Jewish women, secretaries, people he goes swimming with, and other women that intersect with his life. He describes how he is able to have sex with a woman who thinks that her genitals are too small for having sex, he describes how is has sex with a woman who has a fear of drowning in a lake, and he describes how he has sex with a woman who used to be his music teacher.

He has a typology of "cunts" and describes what these various types are, with the "supercunt" as the most elusive of them all. He is perhaps the most sexed up person in literature I ever read. But, as the narrative ends, I realized that Tropic of Capricorn is about Henry Miller's image of women, as the book ends with saying that if you want women to last, you should turn them into literature. And after reading this book, I am glad that I did pick it up, even though it was ten years after I read the first book. 4 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Dome II, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Downtime in Providence

Oh man, I was exhausted these past few days. Mentally speaking that is.

It has something to do with this dissertation proposal. Well, I think I had a final draft, but I had it as a goal to finish it by this week, so that I can hand it to my adviser for him to read while he is out of town next week. Then he will come back, I will revise it, and then give it to both of my other committee members to read. And then hopefully I get to defend it by then.

That places me about 5 weeks from now.

Yes, that means, I might probably be officially an ABD in 5 weeks time.

So yeah, I wanted to finish that draft, which is so different by the way from the form it had last summer, and yes, yesterday, I finished it.

I guess the hardest part of writing a dissertation, at least, for me, is the idea of the top-down model of research. The hardest endeavor for me in this one was coming up with a big picture, coming up with a story of my own, a theory in sorts, because the proposal I had back in the summer was just a collection of ideas for experiments, but they weren't tied together by a big picture. Now, they are.

But I have to say, it is indeed mentally taxing. So, I am so glad that I can finally enjoy Spring Break, and this weekend, doing nothing for the next few days.

I am heading to New York City later, but I am making a stop in Providence, Rhode Island. I am flying to Providence later tonight, and I will be staying with an old friend of mine. I haven't seen her in a while, so it's nice to catch up. The weather forecast says that there is a rainstorm this weekend, which means that we might just be staying in, which is good too, since for once, I want to do nothing, just nothing. Recharge.

So I will be with her during the weekend, and then by Monday I will take the train to New York City. It will be a week full of psycholinguistic fun and fanfare!



(Fountain View, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 18: Case

In language, one needs to know who is doing what action to whom. So, if I tell you the sentence John saw Mary, you understand that John was the one who did the seeing, and Mary was the one who was seen. In English, you know this information due to the positional configuration of the nouns: John appears before the verb, and Mary appears after it.

However, not every language has a verb that appears at the middle of the two nouns that one can tell which one is doing what to the other. Some languages have the verb at the very end of the sentence, like in Japanese for example. And some other languages have the verb right at the very beginning of the sentence, like in Tagalog and other Philippine languages.

So how do these languages mark who is doing what to whom?

Well, there is the concept of case. Case marking is the way languages mark the performers of an action. So, in Japanese, one have suffixes that can mark who is doing what to whom. The same sentence above in English can be said in two ways in Japanese.

1) John-ga Mary-o mikaketa.
2) Mary-o John-ga mikaketa.

The verb is the final word of the sentence, and as you can see, you can even switch things around, but they mean the same thing (well, technically there is a difference, but that leads to the realm of pragmatics, which I am not discussing right now). In both sentences, it is John who did the seeing.

In Tagalog, one can see the same thing.

3) Nakita ni Juan si Maria.
4) Nakita si Maria ni Juan.

Tagalog has these little words that appear before the nouns which in effect marks who is doing who. The verb appears at the beginning of the sentence, and you can scramble the nouns all you want, but you can still maintain that John did the seeing and Mary was the one he saw due to the case markers that are attached to the nouns.



(The Dome, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Moving Things Around

I am heading to New York City sometime this weekend. I will be meeting my sister again and bunking in her apartment, and I haven't seen her since September. Apparently, she has some souvenirs for me from her recent trip to the Philippines and Taiwan.

Speaking of which, it is interesting when one's family members are living in different parts of the world, and the way things are moved around.

One example I have in mind was when I went to Ecuador in 2007. I bought a couple of ethnic scarves for my mom and my sister, but at that time, my sister was living in the Philippines, and my mom was living in the Czech Republic. So, I bought the scarves in Ecuador, and took them with me to Buffalo. Four days later, I was scheduled to fly to Manila, so I took the scarves with me. I gave them to my sister, who was scheduled to fly to Prague a week after I arrived in Manila, so she took the scarves for my mom so she can give them to her.

So, my mom's scarves traveled about 18,579 miles from Quito to Prague, via North America and Asia. It passed through a total of 9 airports.

A simpler (note: this is a relative term) case was when I bought a poncho for my mom in Cusco, Peru. This time, I was delivering it to her personally. I bought it in Cusco, which I took back to Buffalo via Lima, Bogota and New York City. A month later, I was scheduled to fly to Scandinavia where I had attended a workshop. I flew to Copenhagen via Chicago and London-Heathrow. After the workshop, I flew to my parents, in Hungary this time. So I flew to Budapest via Brussels.

So, my mom's poncho traveled about 10,520 miles from Cuzco to Budapest, via North America. Again, it passed through a total of 9 airports.

I find it interesting to see how goods are moved here and there. And with a family that has members in various corners of the globe, it indeed is an interesting path.



(One-Half, from my Capitol Hill Series)

The Cabal

Later this week, I will be trekking down to New York City to attend the annual cabal of people having similar interests to mine. I just saw the program and the abstracts of the presentations and posters that will be featured, and so I got excited and made it a point to find and talk to several people that I would otherwise not have a chance to talk to.

So yeah, I am getting ready to pack my stuff, as I will be flying again. I travel light, so I don't have luggage to check in. After all, one pays for check-in luggage here in the US, and they don't even guarantee that your luggage will be with you when you get to your destination.

Anyway, I don't have a presentation in this cabal, unlike 2 years ago, in North Carolina. However, the fact that the cabal is pretty close, within the state that I am currently in, and also the fact that I have a free place to stay since my sister lives in Manhattan, and also the fact that they have free tutorials for students on neurolinguistic methods (methods on how to probe into your brain while the brain is processing language), then I figured it would be very beneficial if I took a little time off and attend this session. I attended it once 2 years ago in North Carolina, since I had a presentation, but I skipped last year, as I didn't have a presentation and that it was far, it was in California. This time, it was pretty close. I suppose this is one such conference that I can see myself attending every time it is held.

So yeah, I'll be in the Big Apple this coming week. I am also meeting a few old friends along the way, as I suppose a chance to see old friends from Manila and Guam doesn't come so often.



(US Capitol Building, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Parsing Miss South Carolina

I know this is three years late, but I only heard of this incident recently, when I started watching the current season of The Amazing Race. Apparently, one of the contestants is Caite Upton, who was Miss South Carolina Teen USA back in 2007.

And guess what? Apparently, she is infamous for making perhaps the longest non-sentential fragment ever recorded on national television.

So, back in the beauty pageant, she was asked why is it the case that one-fifth of Americans cannot locate the USA on a world map. Wow. Really? I never knew that was the case. So she answered the following, which is quoted verbatim:

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children".

Um, is that a sentence? A sentence should have a subject and a predicate, and the predicate should have a verb. But it turns out that this is not a sentence, but just one whole big fragment.



I found an attempt on a parse of this statement online, which is the one you can see above, and as you can see, this is not a full sentence. Enlarge the picture to see how it is parsed, and you can see that this is just a big fragment. I suppose this is what happens when you add pressure to syntax production.

Oh, and as a tangent, I suppose the reason why one-fifth of Americans don't even know where they are on a map is because it is unusual among the countries in the world where the fact that they have a status as a superpower fosters this cocoon-like existence. America is powerful, and therefore other people come to America because they need America. Heck, even I came here to get a better education. Americans who are here on the other hand have everything they need, so they don't need to get out and see what's out of their borders. If they need something, it will be delivered to them. They don't need to get out of their own backyard.



(Top View, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Secret Order

Yesterday, the ninja and I got complimentary tickets to the opening night of Secret Order, which is a play that is currently being produced by the Kavinoky Theatre in D'Youville College.

Secret Order is about a young cancer researcher who in the beginning, seemed to have potential, and because of that, was recruited by a dynamic administrative officer in New York. They had a good theory, and somehow the research looked promising, but through some twists and turns, the career of the young researchers goes downhill.

Anyway, I would not do justice to the plot just by repeating the events here, so I suppose the best way to understand this complex play by Bob Clyman is just to see it in the theatre. I have to say that I liked how the play was produced. The actors were very good in portraying their parts that I hated their characters. There is a melodramatic aspect to it, but I suppose that is the case because it is making a point.

Every character in the play has their own fault: Dr. Shumway failed to report adverse reactions in his studies and therefore that lead to complications later in the road; Dr. Brock on the other hand is full of energy but is full of faith as well, and never takes the initiative to check on his subordinates and supervise them; Dr. Roth is this silent yet powerful person who holds several positions in the board; and finally, the student Alice who is bright, but fails to follow protocol and doesn't know how to shut her mouth.

In any case, after seeing the play, I am glad that I am not in a field in which several high-profile factors are in play. There aren't any large pharmaceutical companies breathing down our necks and advocating for a specific result in a study that we conduct. There isn't the huge pressure to publish whatever findings we might get that advocates the human tenets on being fond of motherhood and apple pie. Science is one thing, doing it is another, and this play illustrated the aspect of science where politics can infiltrate it and lead to bad results.



(Hidden Rocks, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Up in the Air

Yesterday, the ninja and I watched a movie entitled Up in the Air. It was showing free in the Student Union Theatre and so we decided to watch it as well. I was quite excited primarily because it is a movie that heavily features air travel and airports, something that I am heavily interested in.

And I have to say, they did a very good job of portraying them. I saw air shots of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, and the ninja was laughing at me because it only took me 1 nanosecond to recognize that airport from an aerial view. They also featured other airports such as Detroit's McNamara Terminal, which I recognized upon seeing the water fountain, as I was there once in the past; and also St. Louis Lambert Airport.

However, there are a few mistakes as well. The scene that comes to mind was when they were in northern Wisconsin, where George Clooney was headed to Omaha but his date was heading to Chicago. I could presume that there is an American Airlines flight from that city to Chicago, but not to Omaha, as the scene suggested. American Airlines has no hub in Omaha.

Anyway, aside from the geeky aspect of the film, I enjoyed the film a lot since it was not predictable. The characters were complex, and there was no happy ending. I could identify with both George Clooney's character (Ryan) and Vera Farmiga's (Alex). Ryan is this guy who flies a lot, and because of that, he doesn't have relationships, and basically he does not have a home. Alex on the other hand has established a casual relationship with Ryan just to escape her normal life. So, I watched it thinking that they both sound like me, moving here and there, and at the same time, burying myself in books and taking the occasional solo trip to escape reality for a while.

So yeah, it was a good movie. If you still haven't seen it, by all means do so.



(Well Interior, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Almost There

This week has been an exciting week given my academic progress. I have met with my primary adviser, and he says that we can defend the proposal in 6 weeks. Yay! We are aiming for a mid-April date, and so I am doing my final preparations for that meeting, such as revising and producing a final draft, and giving it to all three members of my committee.

I have met my adviser and one other committee member this week, and they both buy the story I am arguing for. Good. That's two down, then all I need to do is meet with the third member and make sure that I am not doing something stupid. But, given that two of the three committee members approve of my story, chances are I am not doing something stupid indeed.

So yeah, I am excited, and stressed, as this is indeed a pressure moment. But hey, life is good, and it is worth blogging about.

Oh, I started my last series of photos from Washington DC, starting from the previous post. I promise, once I am done with Capitol Hill, the photos will come from somewhere else aside from Washington DC. I am sick of it too.



(Well Entrance, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Amazing Americans

So I am a little behind from watching my favorite show on the planet, The Amazing Race. I just finally watched the first episode. I know, I am 3 weeks behind.

But anyway, upon seeing the first episode of the current season, I am reminded at why I like this show. Because it showcases the amazing characteristics of various things.

First, the excitement. I always get excited at the thought of travel. There are these 11 teams, starting from Los Angeles, and they find out that they are heading to Santiago de Chile. Wow. To fly like that halfway around the planet into a different hemisphere, I suppose the excitement in flying will always be with me, no matter how often I do the route. It just has something to do with experiencing something that is not in the ordinary. Heck, I am flying back to Manila in a couple of months, and I am getting excited, partly because this is the first time I am flying via Alaska!

Second, the amazing stupidity of some Americans. I always enjoy seeing the faux pas and the blunders of the contestants. So, one contestant apparently was in a beauty pageant, and she was asked why 20 percent of Americans cannot even point where in a globe the United States is, and her answer was so idiotic. Wow. Another team figured that since they were going to Chile, they needed to change money, but they changed it to Brazilian money, not Chilean! Another team decided to just barge in a house and trespass and paint a wall when they were instructed to paint an outside wall, thus not following directions. What were these people thinking? It seems that their brains are turned off. It's as if they don't realize that there is a whole world outside their backyard!

In a way, I find it almost offensive that some people assume that the things they take as normal should also hold for a foreign country. Assuming that American dollars would be valid for Chile, assuming that Andale! Andale! would be comprehensible in Chile, assuming that things would always be the same in a foreign country, when the correct assumption to make is that things would be by default different in a foreign country. I find it difficult to grasp why people, Americans especially, make that assumption. When I travel to a foreign country, I know that that country would have its own currency, I know that that country would have a language of its own, and in fact, I would be surprised that my norm actually holds in a foreign country, such as when I first learned that Ecuador uses the American dollar as its own currency!

In any case, I love this show. I love the sights, and it gives me ideas on where to head to next when I find the time to traipse the world yet again.



(The Well, from my Capitol Hill Series)

Book Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I know. I usually read contemporary literature, as I am currently in my contemporary literature phase, but I figured I mix and match things a little bit. So, as an initial attempt in revisiting the classical literature again, I picked this book up for a reading.

So why did I pick up this book? Well, back in high school, I remember that in my senior year, my English teacher was reading this book. I later learned that this book was banned in the Soviet Union, and censored, so the desire to read it became stronger. I finally decided to pick it up last week.

So what is this book about? It is exactly what the title says. It is a narrative about one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Shukhov is a political prisoner who is stationed in a gulag somewhere in Siberia. The whole book is a narrative about his daily activities, from the time they wake up, to the time they sleep. And after reading it, no wonder the Soviet government would want to censor it. Because the narrative isn't a pretty one.

While reading the book, I learned about construction, I also learned about further evidence on why communism fails, and I also learned about further evidence on the theory that man is inherently selfish. The scenario that Solzhenitsyn paints here is one in which man is indeed wolf to another man, where a prisoner takes advantage of another prisoner, and the guards take advantage of the prisoners. It is indeed every man for himself in the gulag.

It reminded me of when I was in undergrad, when I was taking a required course by virtue of the Constitution: Philippine Institutions 100. This course was required of every student regardless of major, and it was entitled "The Life and Works of Jose Rizal" who is none other than the Philippine national hero. However, most professors who teach this has a different agenda of their own, and the professor who I took the class from was a communist. He basically forgot about Rizal and just tried indoctrinating us with the beauty of communism.

I didn't buy it. I wrote as a final paper how communism fails to bring forth the good for everyone, how mankind's predisposition to be selfish defeats the ideals of Marx and Lenin. I cited how Romanians back then survived with just one lightbulb, while the people in the party lavished in luxury goods because they were all smooching from the masses. Communism failed, and I cannot believe that the professor still held on to that ideal. I got an A-.

Anyway, this book is another reminder that that form of government will not be the right one. Humans are too selfish to be communist. I am glad that I read this book, even though it was a decade late. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Library Art, from my Library of Congress Series)