Werk

I opted to work from home today, since it was snowing, and it was an open day sandwiched between days full of meetings. I managed to finish this paper that has been plaguing me lightly for years and heavily for a couple of months, and I was feeling good, and then I checked my messages and I was immediately depressed under the suffocating weight of everything that dissatisfies me right now. Home life is good, students brighten my day and make me feel like I know stuff... and the rest puts me in a funk. If change is coming, I'm inclined to resist it less and less.

I need to write papers and get them on my CV as fast as possible.

Waves tiny US flag

Metaphorically, since I don't have one here on my warm couch.

With the crowd practically up to my porch in Silver Spring, I opted to stay at home where Joe made me waffles and there was heat and no wind chill and only two people were using the bathroom the last four days. It was a good call.

We got our taste of Inaugural fever by braving the Metro Sunday for football first before heading to Dupont Circle for dinner. It was busy for a Sunday, and people from all over were being cute and asking everyone else where they were from.

I overheard someone talking about seeing Barack Obama, and it reminded me of the DNC in Boston in 2004 when a couple of friends and I went celebrity-hunting all day. We ended up in front of the Fleet Center where people were getting dropped off to go in. Barack Obama walked right by and waved to us, and we were probably just as excited to see him them as we would be today because we knew what was what.

Time for work -- watching whitehouse.gov for executive orders and proclamations while editing Joe's dissertation.

Gnocchi

In the past, Joe and I have purchased frozen or dried potato gnocchi from Italian food stores, and they've been tasty enough (they cook very fast too once the water is boiling).  Joe ordered some at Roman Hall over break, however, and it was clear they were in a completely different league -- soft, and not gummy or tough like the packaged kinds.

I procured Lidia Bastianich's big cookbook (we've been making her vodka sauce recipe from the web forever), and we decided that since we had all the ingredients, we'd make gnocchi.  I did the majority of it, grating the potatoes, mixing the dough, rolling and cutting and shaping.  And they turned out.  So. Damn.  Good.  Very similar to Roman Hall's.  It was kind of time consuming, but there's no way we're eating packaged gnocchi ever again.

Joe made a tomato sauce to go with it (the classic gravy), but as per Lidia'a suggestion, he added some cabernet, and it made the gravy ever so much richer.  I just had the leftovers, and they were delicious.

We also made stuffed mushrooms from the book last night... we could have made double, they were so tasty.

Going out to dinner is fun, but cooking together is romantic and hot.

Manuscripts

Making tables is fun.  Writing the text of the results section is boring.

Just read my tables.

The conundrums caused by doublespeak

The Pentagon has ruled that Purple Hearts won't be given to those suffering from PTSD because it's not an injury intentionally caused by the enemy. What are we supposedly doing again? Fighting a war on terror? A tactic used to intentionally produce... psychological harms? Decide whether the people we're fighting against are intentionally trying to cause harms or not and get back to me.

Friend of the Project

I just read something on the national communication obits that I think is a really great thought. Dawn Braithwaite writes that she once asked the late Dr. Ernest Bormann how a scholar handles harsh criticism, and he replied "that he appreciated criticism when it came from a "friend of the project." He went on to explain that a "friend of the project" is motivated to make the work the best it could be, rather than self-aggrandize." This is a a simple but important point, because too often people think that criticism has to be "harsh" to be criticism, which tends to bleed over into showing how smart you are compared to this poor person you're criticizing. But truely constructive criticism doesn't feel like criticism at all; it feels like scholarly dialogue. The critic for that moment becomes a partner in your project, wanting it to succeed just as much as you do. I had this experience during all of my oral exams, where people weren't trying to play gotcha because they were invested in making my project better and what I publish out of it more useful to the world. I think this notion is a good thing for all of us to keep in mind -- particularly when doing those anonymous reviews that can so easily slide into snark.

Follow-up to yesterday

I wrote a more thoughtful response on facebook:

"I get the rationale that it's mostly a spokesperson job, and Gupta has had his face on TV talking about health stuff a lot, but nothing in his training gives him any expertise in public health. His training isn't even in general or preventive medicine. Frankly I'm sick of MDs getting a pass into the public health world without the requisite training, and this is just such an egregious example."

I'm bothered by two things here, both of which converge in Sanjay Gupta. One is the tendency for cable news to rely on familiar faces to be experts in everything, instead of actually seeking out and talking to experts. While not every expert is super articulate and it may be useful in a TV format to have recognizable journalists distill expert opinion, that's not generally what I see happening. On health, education, foreign relations and almost any complicated where there do exist people who have devoted their lives to figuring out what works and what doesn't, you see talking heads yammering inexpertly like it's all just a matter of opinion. And that is so annoying. I don't want to see this tendency entrenched in government.

The second strand I refer to in my facebook comment, which is that all too often, people who are trained in the medical world are able to just dance over to the public health world, without additional training. Many docs have the sense to at least get an MPH (like my fine students), but there are a lot of folks out there who really don't have the cred. Maybe I'm extra biased because the social and behavioral sciences are a lot more essential to public health than to most areas of medicine (although medicine could use a little more understanding of people and society), but I don't think training in medicine (particularly in specialty areas) gives you any cred to talk public health.

That's all I have to say on that.

WTF

Sanjay Gupta? Are we kidding? I mean, I guess the guy's job the last few years has been to stretch beyond his narrow expertise (CNN: sure, a neuroscientist can comment on any topic in medicine or health! Who needs to call in the real experts!). But really. There has to be someone in the ranks of legitimate health-related institutions who could take this job!

I'm so disgusted.

Found!

The copy card I was convinced had fallen behind the (immovable) desk was actually holding my place in a journal I didn't finish browsing a while ago.

Yesterday I was peppy, and it was warm out, and I made it to the bus stop early, and the bus was there, and I got to work door-to-door in 45 minutes.  Today, tiredness and scratchy throat, rain, no bus (either left early or never came), much later longer bus, 90 minutes.  Boo.

So the plan is just to mope in the office, keep warm, and read journals.

2008 in review

2008 was awesome because:

1) I finished my PhD.
2) I got a job.
3) I moved away from Baltimore and in with the bestest boy ever!
4) The election season was majorly entertaining, particularly with our addition of tomato pie to all events.
5) I managed to see almost all my family and friends at least once.

2008 was lame because:

1) The lousy economy, although that will probably end up being a net plus for me going forward as I try to build retirement savings (unless the stock market just crashes entirely for the next 40 years) and think about buying a house (moving a lot more real estate into the affordable range).
2) My car got to be too expensive to fix and is thus dead, and the resulting exercise has done nothing for my waistline. And I've been missing out on social time with the TV Night crew.
3) I didn't make it to any football games this fall.
4) My bestest boy didn't immediately get a ton of job interviews, and the market sucks.
5) I didn't go home for Christmas for the first time ever, which made me sad, even though I have had fun here in NJ with my Joey.

2009 will be awesome as Joe finishes his PhD and gets a job (he'll get something, it's just a matter of time and probably more agony), and we can start making even more tangible plans about the future.