Lepaking

"Lepak" is a Malay verb that has roughly the same meaning as the American expression "hanging out". It took on some negative connotations in the 90s when the government started a campaign to stop youths loitering around public places, but what-evah.

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I went out with some new friends, M. and T., after church yesterday. I've only known them for a few weeks but they're great. It turned out that Mag (who's from Jakarta) was my college friend AT's classmate in boarding school in Singapore...small world indeed.

Lunch at International Club in the church basement was fun because Steve B. and his Korean girl SJ also came...so with the six of us in a corner it was like the Club of Asian Girls Who Date White Computer Geeks. Steve had to leave early for lab stuff, but M. and T. invited me to go for a hike so we ended up strolling around Governor Nelson State Park for a couple of hours in the golden fall sunshine.

M. and T. are newlyweds and it's so cute watching them together (and watching T. get all excited over M's pregnancy) that it doesn't feel annoying as public displays of affection normally do (no "GET A ROOM!"). She still wants to go to graduate school for maths next year. That baby's going to be amazingly intelligent and will probably rebel and become a guitarist or something. Nevertheless, we bought them this maternity shirt, too bad M's not showing enough for the joke to be good yet:

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Today I also had dinner with my former roommate Bunnylady. Bunnylady was a playwright and stage manager in New York who's switching careers in midlife, having decided that despite what she was told in her youth, she really does want to be a veterinarian. Her first year of vet school when we were living together with my undergrad classmate SN were pretty bad and she was a nervous wreck...not to mention that SN was going through a horrible breakup and I felt guilty because I was the only one enjoying myself. How do you deal with a woman who's old enough to be your mother who's falling to pieces over exams?

So it's good to see her on her feet and doing all right in her second year. She still has her older black-and-white rabbit Seneca, although the nameless Little Brown Bunny who was the bane of SN's and my electronic equipment died. Her replacement is snowy white, named Thumper, also female, but large enough to eat my cat alive.

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I'm also in a Grad Christian Fellowship Bible study group. It's a manuscript study, which means that we dissect scripture line...by...line. At times it seems tedious, but it's a good way of getting insight/analysis/inspiration from other people that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. Especially if you're like me and have grown up with the Bible so it sounds like "same old, same old."

We spend about an hour doing said textual dissection then have dessert and hang out and pray a bit at the end...I think people are trying to outdo each other with the desserts. I made an awesome banana custard pie a couple weeks ago ;-)

One of the new girls, who just started grad school and moved to Madison with her boyfriend at the beginning of the fall, mentioned that she's been mostly either studying or hanging out with him because she doesn't have any good friends in town yet - "you know, someone you can just call and be like 'Hey, wanna watch some TV?' 'cause you're too tired to do anything else."

I think I'll email her about watching some TV, because I know what she means, and what M. means, and what K.J. means when they say it's great to be with someone but you don't wanna see them all the time. I feel like I've gotten more fresh air these past few days.

It's okay sweetie, I still like you! =)

Moms have super vision

This morning I almost missed the bus to work because I'd left my bike at lab yesterday (when one rides so much that one almost forgets how to walk, one also tends to forget to get up earlier to catch the bus). I sat next to a bespectacled young woman with a blonde pixie haircut and two little boys, for whom the ride was clearly not routine.

As we went up the hospital loop, the younger one asked "What's that?"
"That's the Waisman Center," his mother told him.
"There's a lot of ambulances."
"How did you spot them? They're all behind the building."
"I have X-ray vision."

Not to be outdone, his older brother proclaimed, "I have reading vision."
"Mama, I have reading vision and X-ray vision AND laser vision!"

The mother looked at me as I began to break down giggling and sighed, "You guys are good. I only have reading vision. What do you use your laser vision for?"
"I use it for all kinds of creepy things," said the little one.
"So it's a weapon then?"
"Yep."

They went on in this vein for several more minutes. I got off at my stop and, still snickering, left the bookworm and her two little supermen, but what I really wanted to tell her was, "You don't just have reading vision. Mamas have super vision."

Acquisition

I made a request to the UW library to get a copy of Amir Muhammad's Lelaki Komunis Terakhir [The Last Communist] and they got it from Singapore in a WEEK. I think it was my appending "this film was banned in Malaysia" to the acquisition request that might have sped it up ^_^ I like the little pomelos on the DVD cover and poster. Will watch and let you know what I think.

They also got Syed Akbar Ali's "Malaysia and the Club of DOOM" for me fairly quickly, as well as James Rennie's "The Operators" for Steve. Operators is a non-fictional memoir about British special forces in Northern Ireland and it's great if you like Tom Clancy kind of stuff. Rosei and Johnson's "Survival Skills for Scientists", the only thing I requested that wasn't purely for leisure, actually took a bit longer to get here.

Especially after Karcy/Cat told me how it can take UM (Universiti Malaysia) effing months to get a book - because of the approval process! - I'm glad I'm doing my graduate studies in the US... But I still want to go back and FIX the system. I hate stuff that's broken. It's not like we're some kind of banana republic wallowing in mud. We HAVE the money. We HAVE the tech. It's just not being used!

A survival skill for scientists: not screwing around blogging the morning right before a midterm exam, which skill I don't seem to have...

Chameleon

I just realized I talk to my cat in my "American voice". that's kinda weird.

New old phone

I'm no longer a slave to Verizon Wireless. Two years ago, my college friend/housemate and I got in a "family plan". A couple of months after that, we added her boyfriend to the plan. He turned out to be a jerk and - to make a long story short and to respect other people's privacy - they broke up. Moral of the story: don't get in a family plan with someone you're dating. Or to quote the Bible, He who puts up security for another will surely suffer, but whoever refuses to strike hands in pledge is safe.

She dropped out of the phone contract later in order to sever all links with her ex - even paying the $175 early-termination fee - so I was stuck with being the account holder. It was ridiculous because the ex and I had 700 minutes/month between us. I generally used less than 200 and he didn't use an awful lot more.

What also sucked was that I got used to SMS-ing a lot in Malaysia. Hotlink Prepaid messages are 15 SEN. Verizon messages are 15 CENTS - yes, one of the skills you have to learn as an international student is to not convert currency otherwise you go crazy, but it's still damn ex.

I'm on Einstein Wireless now. It's a small Wisconsin-based GSM provider. I wanted to be on a GSM network so I could use my "new" phone, which is a Sony Ericsson T610 which I bought secondhand in Low Yat Plaza last year. Ironically it was already several years old at the time, but still far more advanced than the primitive Nokia that came with my Verizon plan...

At the moment I'm just trying out Einstein's prepaid cards. The nice thing about having an unlocked phone and using prepaid with no contract is that if you don't like your provider, you can switch easily.
Silly Americans =)
Farking Verizon >(

No idea why, but I can't receive incoming text messages even though I bought the Feature Card (for data), although I can send them all right. So, until Einstein customer support gets this sorted out, if you're a friend who knows my phone number you can SMS me from the internet here.

Packing on the pounds

I've just weighed myself to see how heavy the cat is (if this doesn't make sense to you, try getting an animal to stand on a bathroom scale long enough for the needle to stop moving. You have to tare yourself, then pick up the animal). Unfortunately she's quite stable at 8 lbs, which is under the UW Vet School's 10 lb cut-off for feline blood donors. Drat - they're offering free food, vaccinations, deworming, dental care, and flea and tick repellent for donors.

What sucks even more is that I'M down to 102 lbs (46.3 kg), which makes me technically underweight (BMI of less than 18.5). This is at a time when I'm trying to save money due to having had to recently pay over $400 for this semester's uni fees...so it's not like I can afford a lot of rich food. Actually meat is remarkably cheap here but that would be at the expense of cutting down on fruit and veg, which I like a lot. I'm also trying to cut down on cheese because my dad said cutting out dairy helped his sinus congestion clear up - not that I'll say no to a big ice cream on a hot day.

I already eat several big bowlfuls of rice or pasta daily, so I obviously need more help than just starch. When I Googled "gaining weight" one of the tips that came up, courtesy of the US Army's fine medical officers, was "Spread peanut butter on anything with which it is compatible."

Spread peanut butter on everything? Caaaaaan. ^_^

(Also, just noticed that Lina looks remarkably similar to the imaginary cat in my self-portrait which was drawn a good four years ago - dark, thin, fluffy with green eyes. Kinda freaky.)

Study break

I'm checking my email and taking a study break - the first Immunology midterm is today. Since I went to a small college, I don't think I've EVER had an evening exam.

General Virology last Friday went very well - only one person scored higher than me, one scored the same, and they were both fellow grad students. I don't like exam-based courses though, because they do nothing whatsoever to improve my appalling lack of academic discipline. I'd rather have a course with assignments that force me to do work.

FlowerMoonFish, who's a much better Christian than me, says she would purposely study MORE than she had to in junior college so that the less smart girls in her dorm wouldn't feel bad if they saw her relaxing before exams. I think if I'd done JC in Singapore, I'd just have used the extra time to go kai-kai to get away from the insanely competitive atmosphere.

The Ebling Library near the university hospital is a great place to study. Rows of desks with outside views, a sort of study "bar" facing the internal gallery of the Health Sciences Learning Center building, and MASSIVE glass windows for sunlight. Since it's further from campus, there are fewer annoying undergrads around =)

Quote of the day

Splitter: But there's no lab animal model for it.
Talaat: In the vet school, cows are considered lab animals.

(This was in the middle of a discussion about how to determine whether or not Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis is the aetiologic agent of Crohn's disease in humans. If you click on the first link, the September 1 news article is the review paper that was under discussion. We kinda came to the conclusion that the only definitive way to determine this would be to kidnap a bunch of preschoolers and force-feed them MAP-tainted milk.)

All we wanna do is eat your brains

I'm not a huge fan of zombie culture (like the "protest lurch" that was held in Madison last year), but this article from MSNBC was too good to pass up (click heading for link to full story)

6 Die From Brain-Eating Amoeba in Lakes

PHOENIX - It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

And if you haven't seen the machinima music video of Jonathan Coulton's Re: Your Brains that this brings to mind, it's worth wasting a few minutes of your life on.

So, uh, are you doing anything after the midterm?

I'm quite enjoying the Immunology course - there's enough new stuff to keep me engaged but it's (to me at least) simple enough to not make me sweat over Thursday's upcoming midterm. Last Monday, however, we had a "discussion section" in the evening outside class time, which the TA decided to make into a review session because a lot of people were confused.

After a very short time we came to the conclusion that he was a prat. I think most immuno newbies left more confused than they came in. As CS Lewis wrote of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he "had never learned to tell a story straight". For introducing people to immunology you HAVE to tell it as a narrative - what happens when a pathogen enters the body. He was jumping all over the place spewing out blobs of unconnected, and often irrelevant, facts. I had an almost unbearable impulse to leap up and grab the chalk from him.

Anyway, the following email he just sent out has failed utterly to improve my opinion of him:

I hope your studying is going well (and just know that I’m around, and am flexible for the next few days if you want to get together). I also thought I would direct your attention toward the release of Matchbox 20’s new album, Exile on Mainstream. Anyway, it’s released tomorrow so you better appreciate that… or else.

Is he trying to ask the entire class on a date or what? *baffled*