mickey melchiando 

Bank accounts and typos

I love the pic of hunter I posted below. There's a story of a friend of his who is an English prof at some high ranking school in the east of this country, who would gather his most promising students for a trip across the US to go to famous landmarks that relate to writers, and to meet famous writers themselves. he took this group to see Hunter, and HST gathered up all of the kids copies of his books and took his shotgun and blew holes in them one by one.
rock on.
it is a fine day in the city of brotherly love. sunny, cool, 60's. I am cooped up in this hospital however, and am cowering if my cave of an office, no windows to see the outside. but boo hoo. 2/3s of the people in this country probably have no access to windows during their work day either. I spent an hour on the phone last night working out stocks, mutual funds, taxable events, S and P 500, Small Cap, Growth, etc. wine helped, but only so much. when I called my financial dude I was still buzzed enough to not be able to get my last name and social security number out without slurring it just a tad. name, rank, press affiliation. then my mind sharpened up however, and we talked bears and bulls. but alcohol makes life more bearable. that, and watching harold and kumar go to white castle while stoned.
oops, free lunch time, must cut the blogging short. final note.
there will be a "country western" day at my hospital tomorrow. where's "hip hop" day? and "indie" day? where's "let's give em small pox blankets" day? am I wearing enough flare???
yikes.
H

Hunter in rapture 

Caucasians and spatial attention

I hate being bombarded with ten things I need to be doing RIGHT NOW! within 15 minutes tonight I was reading up on a researcher I am interviewing with for a job tomorrow (journal article: "Tracking the time-course of attentional involvement in spatial working memory: and event-related potential investigation," yeaaaaaaaaaah) and then Gav-dog wants to talk about selling stock to buy this house we are in the process of negotiating, and then my dad calls to talk about car stuff, getting my car impounded, towed, assessed, junked, scrapped, and my going into the "other" insurance company's office who won't pay out, put out, pay up, with machine guns blazing, only to be replaced with razor sharp machetes when the bullets run out. goddamn auto insurance companies. life would be so much simpler if we just churned our own fucking butter, talked to squirrels and sold coke out of our buggies. so I wrapped things up with my dad, making the usual promises to call insurance companies, police, towing companies, to get this fucking thing resolved. I would rather gouge my eyes out, but hey, there's that whole character building thing that just keeps me going. gavin and I decided to junk the small cap funds with stock in shit like yankee candle co. for cold hard cash. and I finished the article, sort of. cognitive theory is the kind of thing that I have to read 1000 times. it's harder than most other psychological theories because you really have to visualize different planes of consciousness, allow for a separate memory area, and then there's attention, and distraction and little parts of your brain that light up like xmas trees when you look at a house. it's not like child psychology where you get to spend all day speculating whether or not having a sick child causes parents to be stressed out. looks like we need a couple of years to tease that one out.
rant rant rant.
I have nothing else to say. my white russian, sans vodka, as there is none in the house, is sweet and helping me not give so much of a fuck. I ate an oreo before, and gavdog went to see his brother, who looks and acts like ozzie in teh 80's. except brother has not done quite enough drugs as ozzie: he still has hand-eye coordination. plus he's really just a little jewish boy whose bar mitzvah picture I have seen, from the 80's with huge thick glasses and I can't possibly take him seriously as the rockstar he wants to be.
H
note to self: hearing the ice cream truck jingle outside at 10 pm just reeks of mischief.

pure bgnsh 

Ahh, Hunter, how I miss you 

me 

From the depths of the drill

First post...am at work, and the construction is going on pretty heavily underneath my feet. I could almost apply the term "can't hear myself think" to the loud drilling noise that feels like it is drilling in the depths of my abdomen.But nonetheless I hammer away at the little laptop, pondering the NICU which is hovering and humming behind me. I have gotten into this habit of always flipping from my various websites (none of them illegal or distasteful in anway, except for the ween forum every once in a while) back to my tidy Excel study tracking system file whenever I hear the door open in front of my office. curious eyes in this hospital. anyway, through those doors is the door to the NICU and where little babies remain on life support, with short gut and hernias and cystic lung and tons and tons of heart problems. and then there are the curiousities, like the undefinable gender babies, and the ones with weird growths on their bodies. it's reeeeeeeally hard not to stare and feast your eyes on this, because deep down, or sometimes not very deep down, we have a fascination with the morbid and grotesque. some people might feel it as deep as that noisy drill feels to my body, others, I think, know that this fascination is perfectly natural, and everyone with a healthy sense of curiousity wants to see what an imperforate anus looks like (I have still not had the pleasure). but then there are the wackos who get into these things in a really unhealthy way, and that manifests in murdering and mutilation.
so what is the reasoning behind active mutilation of other people's bodies, or the fascination with this? I think part of it could be linked back to the mind-body connection: how much of your mind/soul remains if your body is beyond recognition? are you still the same person or someone completely different (besides the obvious life changes that would result from such a mutilation)? what stays intact psychically, what goes? can this be achieved without mutilation? Also, mutilation is something very tangible. emotional damage is not. that is seen in cutters, for example. they want to physically experience something that haunts them without having substance. maybe mutilation reminds us of how we feel inside sometimes, how things rip us apart. it also tests us when we see others in these states: how would I react if that were my body? I think it makes us realize that the body is really just a vessel, and that we are not necessarily our body, but our body is us and without consciousness is really not us.
Yikes, I am getting to some really heavy stuff here.
but I am being very tangental. seeing little babies sick is NOT COOL on any level, although it is educational. the experience has strengthened a certain amount of prescription to survival theory for me: if someone is not really suitable for life, should we be supporting them artificially? there are plenty of people in this world who could benefit from the level medical care that we are giving a baby born with a bad heart that we know is going to die in the first month of life anyway. a million dollars could be spent on one death.
what the fuck is wrong with that picture????
wow, what a cheery subject for my first blog.
selah