Things that I made that I like.

Our title is after Mindy Kaling's awesome blog, things i bought that i love. For Thanksgiving we went over to Tammy and David's and had a wonderful time. Adrian made a delicious yam casserole with a toasted marshmallow glaze, an Old School dish she entitled Sweet Potato Casserole, Because I Don't Care What's in It. I made Guinness gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Since David is now mad at me about recipes all the time, here is the cake recipe I worked off of (n.b.that I skipped the candied pistachios because ew, and instead substituted diced candied ginger on a subset of cupcakes). Here is a picture of said cupcakes, of which I am unreasonably proud:

More hobo tips

While we're on the topic of having a good time while dirt poor, may I make some drink recommendations? Our picture is of Old Crow bourbon, which is a great bourbon if you really don't have a pot to piss in. A regular 750 ml bottle should run you around 6 or 7 bucks, and you'll have to trust me on this, it's actually not bad. That should be Old Crow's motto - "Bourbon drinkers agree: Old Crow is honestly not bad!". It used to be quite an illustrious brand before prohibition, but eventually hit upon hard times in the sixties. Now it's a bottom shelf whiskey for the Fortune Brands company. But in terms of taste, it's basically just Jim Beam without any advertising budget, and possibly with a little less quality control. What are you, some kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your quality control? Sack up.

If you should manage to mooch a few nickles to rub together, then you might want to consider another relative bargain: Wild Turkey Rye. At 17 bucks per bottle, it should be reserved for special hobo occasions, like a near-miss mauling from a junkyard dog. Rye whiskey is generally a bit more of an acquired taste than bourbon, but this shit is just delicious. Also, rye whiskey was America's most beloved form of whiskey prior to prohibition, so it's what the founding fathers intended you to drink. You wouldn't want to piss George Washington off, would you? Also, Wild Turkey is keeping it real by keeping their proof up over 100, as opposed to the more trendy 80. Yet more reason why this is a good buy for people looking for a convivial time on the cheap! That shit is hot as all get out, though, so I would recommend a generous splash of water or plenty of ice, unless you are a bruiser in which case you can drink it neat. Excellent pairings include soup made from an old boot, and a meaty bone that you fought with a dog for.

Things to do in L.A. during the Second Depression.

One thing that I'm always planning for in the back of my head is how I will survive when I am sent to prison for a crime I did not commit. I am not totally clear on what crime I could plausibly be framed for - embezzlement of research funds, maybe? I do have a habit of keyword-baiting the Echelon system in e-mails and postcards ("How are you? I am fine! I have been funneling monies to the Black Hand! Much love!") that is probably going to get me extraordinary-renditioned at some point. Another possibility is that I will observe someone pulling the old "I'm driving in the parking lane as if I'm going to make a right at this intersection but at the last minute I'm going to try to merge left, thereby cutting to the head of this line of cars who are all waiting patiently to get through this godawful intersection" one too many times and I will lose my shit and actually kill a dude. In any event, one thing that I've made pretty good progress on is having interests and activities that translate well to an incarcerated setting: lifting weights, running, meditating, and reading books. A corollary benefit that I did not realize until recently is that I was also cultivating a set of interests that are well-suited to the current economic situation: i.e. hours of entertainment with minimal investment required up front. In the interests of pulling our country up by its collective bootstraps, I would like to share some of my experiences!

Unfortunately, most of these prison-ready interests are boring to read about. Actually, wait, one exception: weight lifting. I am not going to talk at length about weight lifting, lest I become that guy. But I would like to throw something out there. Ladies, when you are working out, it can sometimes be beneficial to consider the amount of time that you are expending on an exercise relative to the possible benefits that might accrue. I assume that the reason I see the ladies going nuts on the hip adduction and hip abduction machines is because it will make their legs sexy. I can see doing one or two sets on the hip adductor machine (assuming you do high weight and low reps), your adductor group could conceivably flesh out a bit and make your thighs curvier. I do not understand doing 5 sets of 20 reps on the hip abduction machine, unless you do some awesome sport that requires an extraordinary level of endurance in these muscles (professional jumping jacks?). It will not make your legs more sexy. Having massive hip abductors is probably not even possible because those muscles are very flat and relatively tiny, but if it were possible, it would just make you look weird and bulgy. So get off those machines and let people whose physical therapists told them to use them have a shot. Also, ladies, if you are lifting weights and looking around the room and talking with your friends and laughing and smiling while you are lifting, then you are not lifting hard enough to produce any noticeable changes in your muscle physiology and so you are wasting your time and my space. Christ, I've become that guy. I'm sorry. Moving on.

One thing that I've become very enthusiastic about since our economy collapsed is rice and bean burritos. If you buy your rice and beans dry, you can get the fixins for 10-12 burritos with an outlay of less than 20 bucks. I recommend: Mission tortillas, Uncle Ben's brown rice (racist?), Goya frijoles negros (racist?), Tillamook cheddar, and Cholula hot sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. So delicious, and so economical! For bonus points, cook everything on a hot-plate - you can heat the tortilla using the old bent-coat hanger maneuver. Then you can bathe in a wash-basin using only a sponge, you creepy fuck. Who owns a hot plate?

The second enthusiasm of mine that has come to seem prescient in recent months is actually a hand-me-down from my bizarre, WASPy family: walks! My family loves walks, we walk everywhere. We go on vacation to places and we walk around and that's our vacation. I'd rebelled against it for a few years, but now I've fallen back into the fold. I've been going on one-person walks around the Greater Los Angeles area, as well as dragging others along with me. For my group walks I try to keep it to less than 5 miles, but I've been trying to push myself on the solo walks a bit. My last walk was up in oil-company land in the mountains north of the 126; the place was a dead ringer for the opening scenes of There Will Be Blood, except I didn't break my legs and have to crawl back to civilization. It was creepy to be in a place that was totally and utterly empty (it was Sunday, so maybe all the oil workers were home?) save for the creaks and groans of the pumpjacks. It got very, very lonely around mile 7, so I headed back towards civilization before I was tempted to adopt any orphans and raise them as my boy.

For my most recent walk, I decided to go in the opposite direction: humanity overload! I decided to go for a beachfront hike on Saturday, starting in Marina del Rey, going through Venice and Santa Monica, and making it as far up to Malibu as possible without having to hike in the sand, which is miserable. I've always been fascinated by the denizens of Venice and environs - there's a whole underground economy of dudes who don't seem to have a real job but do seem to have a place to sleep and change their clothes and they mostly just hang out and drink beer and get tans and socialize endlessly. I think this probably involves the selling of puka necklaces and weed? Or possibly receiving residual checks for their work with some seminal funk band of the seventies? In any event, I am a little jealous of these dudes because being a grad student is like the opposite of their job. I saw all the things that are always at Venice: tiny tennis, gold dude, streetballers, electric guitar on skates dude, busty ladies of a certain age going all out with the decolletage, personal space-invading dudes who recorded a hip-hop CD that they will sell to you for only $20 and here you can listen on these headphones, etc.

I brought Adrian's camera so as to document this hike, but unfortunately most of the interesting things that I saw were not things but people, and because I am shy I am not able to take pictures of people. So you will have to trust me that this is a fun and economical way to spend your afternoon. But it was! I filled up my Nalgene bottle with ice and lemonade for $1.50 at a Subway, and I got a hot-dog from a vendor for $2, and I was entertained for more than four hours! I did take this picture on the Venice Fishing Pier. I like to think that these two have formed an unlikely friendship!

Who's afraid of light and sound?

To get back to our titular topic (haha, titular) for a moment: migraines are definitely a thing that is weird. Although I am technically a migraineur, I hesitate to identify myself as such because of the relative benignity of my condition: I typically suffer from migraine scotoma (blind spot) followed by aura (broad arcs shimmering with a pattern of variegated ziggurats cycling through the color palette, or rather (since I can almost see through them to the world beyond) brightly hued shadings of my visual scene, so that a crescent of my visual field appears to be shimmering like a piece of quartz held up to the sunlight). These vaguely hallucinatory experiences are followed by photophobia, hyperacusis, and a headache roughly equivalent to awakening on a Sunday morning after having the night before consumed three drinks instead of my more wonted two. That is: no big whoop. Please note that if my writing seems a bit odd at the moment, I'm writing while migraining, which is leading to a few word-finding difficulties - for instance, is there a more felicitous phrase for my meaning than "no big whoop"? If there is, my neural networks are experiencing a temporary slowdown in services at several key nodes, leading to a commensurate degradation of the quality of information culled from my synaptic fields - a bit like when that YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens won't load, and each refresh of the page leads only to additional input from the YouTube commenters - but inside my brain.

A brief aside: a pet peeve of mine about journalistic portrayals of cognitive neuroscience (all cognitive neuroscientists have a lot of pet peeves about journalistic portrayals of their field, it's part of the job description) is when journalists express amazement at a scientists contention that this cutting edge new treatment or that traumatic experience or whatever can "literally re-wire the brain". First of all, probably as a journalist you should learn the difference between things that are literally true and metaphorically true, but that's not crucial here. More importantly, for those who didn't take psychology or neuroscience in college, here is how the brain works: you have cells in your brain called neurons. A big part of the job description of neurons is to communicate with other neurons. Neurons communicate at spaces called synapses. These synapses change in various complicated ways so that neurons communicate more or less with certain other neurons. This changing of synaptic strength is almost certainly a major component to the formation of memories. If you want to use the metaphor of "rewiring your brain" to describe changes in synaptic strengths, then every time you park your car in a new location and manage to remember approximately where it was, you have successfully rewired your brain. Congratulations. It's not that big a deal.

In any event, I hesitate to identify myself as a migraineur because of the tepidity of my headache - true migraine sufferers tend to guard their membership ranks somewhat jealously. Those at the innermost circle of this cabal require that their surroundings be dimly lit at all times, and boast of losing entire weeks to a particularly vicious cluster of attacks. These folks are understandably perturbed when the hoi polloi use the word migraine to describe a bad headache that they had one time. In short: if you've never spent all day puking and hiding in bed, you probably shouldn't front. Although, to be honest, this one I'm having at the moment is shaping up to be worse than usual: I'm definitely feeling nauseous right now, which is not typical for me.

But speaking of neural short circuits, when thinking of the migraine cabal I cannot help but be reminded of a brief enthusiasm that swept my high school (remember: all boys, predominantly white, blazers and ties and Anglophilia) at some point in the mid-nineties for throwing the frat sign of the Omega Psi Phis, a historically black fraternity - arms up in a U shape, wrists bent to form the seriphs of the Ω. There were so many brief fads that swept through my school that left me utterly perplexed, but looking back on this one, I have to wonder: what the fuck? That was so inexplicable. The general interaction went something like this: one (white) kid would throw the sign, and another (white) kid would guffaw appreciatively but then caution that you'd better not let any Omegas see you do that. I mean, what? Were there were black college students hiding in odd corners around our school, waiting for the opportunity to give some white ninth graders a beat down so as to avoid any dilution of their frat's brand? So confusing. But I digress.

So there are a number of things about migraines that are weird. Hallucinating is weird. Suddenly realizing that large objects are disappearing into your blind spot is weird. Having a phenominological representation of the way in which your visual conscious experience is draped across the calcarine fissure is a bit unnerving. The crescent that I experienced had the tip of one horn pointed directly into the very center of my visual field, and it swept upwards and to the left, which would mean that the corical spreading depression of my migraine was in the right hemishpere of my brain, constrained to that portion of striate cortex below the calcarine fissure? I think? In any event, it makes you feel physical and not metaphysical, to have your conscious experience be so messy and neurological. For those following along at home, try taking your finger and poking your left eye (through your eyelid!) at the left-most portion of your eye. Do you see a little black dot appear at the right hand side of your visual field? Try poking a little further up and down, and see how the dot goes in the opposite direction. This is happening because your eye actually represents the visual scene upside down and backwards, because the lens of your eye flips the picture before it hits your retina. I don't know why, but even though I've known this on an intellectual level for many years, it still freaks me out a little when I demonstrate it to myself with this trick. Migraines are the same, but worse. They make me feel like my entire existence is very physical and very delicate and very temporary.

In college I used to joke that if you had a mad-scientist type device which, if it were broken, would lead to the end of the entire universe, you would take very good care of that device. You would not toss it about or leave it sitting on the edges of tables or credenzas, for fear that the cosmos would be snuffed out by your carelessness. Most likely you would create an enormous fortified bunker far beneath the earth's surface to protect your device. If, like me, you believe that your own personal universe will end when your brain ceases to function, then why not take similar care with your own delicate neural device? At the very least, I argued, we should all be wearing helmets at all times. This seems like a fairly air-tight argument to me, but my friends would inevitably talk me out of wearing a helmet for the rest of my life, on the grounds that social convention was more important than my desire to protect my own personal universe from destruction. Now I'm thinking that, Barack Obama-like, I must be the change I wish to see in this world. I'm the one that I've been waiting for. If I can convince everyone else to start wearing helmets, then there will be no social convention to hold me back. This blog post is my first attempt to build a critical mass. Next up: perhaps a Facebook group?

On leadership: professorial, failed, and otherwise.

For hippy McGovernites who live in CA, today was a little bittersweet. I'm really, really happy about Obama. I'm happy that I can share this good feeling with such a broad array of people all over the world, including a woman at a Magic Johnson Starbucks who was interviewed on the radio this morning and saw his victory as a blow against atheism. Henhhh? Like maybe Obama will be a tireless crusader against atheists such as myself? I hope not? Maybe he will be such an eloquent spokesman for belief that I will have to re-examine my thoughts on the matter? If he wants to try, I won't begrudge him that. Or maybe the fact that a black man won the presidency of the US of A is evidence that there is a Prime Mover? Okay, sure! I've heard worse teleological arguments.

So that part was all warm fuzzy feelings. Unfortunately we also apparently lost Prop 8. This brings up feelings that are neither warm nor fuzzy. Some are blaming the Mormons who funded the proposition, some are blaming the Black community for voting in favor of it 70-30 (as compared with near 50-50 for whites and Latinos). I say, this kind of inter-minority gang warfare is not change we can believe in. Although it would make a good plot for a more updated version of The Warriors (what weapon would the Mormon Gang bring to the fight? Razor edged clip-boards? Their defense would obviously be Magic Underwear). Or, possibly, a Choir-off: Gay Men's Choir vs. Mormon Tabernacle Choir vs. Harlem Gospel Choir. In any event, I reject all of these forms of blame-throwing, because that's not racial transcendence!

Also, because I blame someone else: the leadership on No on Prop 8. If the last 2 presidential elections have taught us anything, it's that when your political opponents attack you with bullshit, it will work and people will believe literally anything that gets said, unless you demonstrate some fucking leadership and savvy. John Kerry, God love him, full-on choked when confronted with absolute bullshit. Barack Obama, when confronted with bullshit, he went to work. He attacked it, using methods that he learned from his pre-political jobs: professor and community organizer (btw, I'd like to give a shout out to Rudy Giuliani, who famously chortled and asked "Community organizing? What is that?" - Hey Rudy, do you know what community organizing is now, bitch?). He got people going door to door, confronting ignorance and stupidity and racism. He got union members to call each other up and talk to each other and not stop talking just because the guy on the other end of the line used the n word. One thing that I genuinely admire about Obama is that he was apparently a great professor. It is not always easy to do. You are tempted to focus on the smart students and ignore the ones whose abstract reasoning abilities are more mediocre. But I'm always struck by how far even the worst students can come in clarifying their thinking about complex issues, as long as you are able to ask them the right questions and help them to evaluate the evidence that is in front of them. I think Barack Obama has shown some of this professorial flair in his candidacy, but then I have a soft spot for pointy-headed professor types. So, did we see any of this in the No on Prop 8 campaign? I'll let a portion of today's LA times article on the prop do the talking:

"Mom, guess what I learned in school today?" a little girl said in one spot. "I learned how a prince married a prince."

As the girl's mother made a horrified face, a voice-over said: "Think it can't happen? It's already happened. ... Teaching about gay marriage will happen unless we pass Proposition 8."

Many voters said they had been swayed by that message.

Amy Mora, a 26-year-old teacher, came with her mother to a polling place in Lynwood on Tuesday morning. She said she believes gay people have the right to marry one another. But she said she voted in favor of Proposition 8 because she does not believe students should be taught that same-sex marriage is acceptable.

So, I'm a little worried about what this Amy Mora teaches. But mostly I'm upset that someone who believes in gay marriage voted for Prop 8 because she actually thought that it somehow involved teaching children about buttsecks. Even if Amy Mora worked as a traveling carnie, I'd say that her thought process here is pretty damning evidence of a failure of rhetoric on our part.

People, all people, have the capacity to think clearly about very cognitively complex issues, if you help them to do so. This is not just my teaching experience talking here but my experience doing neuropsychological testing with people who have pretty serious brain disorders: with a few hints and a little luck, even people with mild dementia can figure out some startlingly complex stuff. So, if we can't make a rational, comprehensible case for why no children have been harmed in the making of these gay marriages, that's not the fault of the folks who voted yes on prop 8. It's our fault, and it's the fault of the people who were in charge of spending all those tens of millions of dollars that they collected from Hollywood Royalty.

So, now that we've inserted language into California's constitution that lets the gays know where they stand, where do we go from here? The legal challenges look pretty hopeless. Our only shot is to wait a few years for any effects of cognitive dissonance to diminish, and try to get that clause taken out of the constitution. In the meantime, let's all study Barack Obama. Look at his powers of persuasion, both cognitive and emotional. Emulate him on a small scale. Look at Gavin "whether you like or not" Newsom. Seek to avoid emulating him. Wait for the decrepit end of our population's age distribution, that doddering bracket who both vote and fear gays in overwhelming numbers, to do what they do best: die of old age. Implacable demographic forces are on our side. We shall prevail.