Flying · in · a · Blue · Dream

When a giant iceberg is spotted off the coast of Australia and it's 70 degrees in December (in New York), how much more evidence do you need? Really.

She's quite amusing.

Last weekend was the one year anniversary of when I broke my neck. It's also been two years since my Uncle passed away.

Thankfully, this Thanksgiving was relatively uneventful. Spent it at my sister's with her husband and kids. Will probably have some turkey and mashed potatoes for lunch in a bit.

Two hours and 40 minutes after my manuscript was received by Neuropsychologia, the most widely-cited Neuropsychology journal, it was rejected. The following day, this past Tuesday, I submitted it as is to Brain and Cognition. I'm just hoping to get reviews at this point.

The semester is nearly over. I still have a silly paper to write and a final to take before I'm done. I've been looking for externship sites to apply to for the next academic year and have been collecting and reading articles pertaining to my dissertation topic. I have two more classes next semester and then I'm done with classes, at least until I have to take continuing education courses later on in my career. Thankfully.

I'm going to end up finishing my lectures in my Cognitive Psychology course a few classes early, so I've decided to add a lecture on emotion, which I know a little bit about, and perhaps cognitive therapies, then give them a day off. I'm teaching the course again next semester, a 3-hour Thursday night class. I like teaching Cognitive more than Learning, mostly because it pertains more to what I want to do as a psychologist when I graduate and it incorporates Learning anyway. Some of the topics I covered in Learning were so obscure and boring. With the exception of language and reasoning, which are pretty boring, and the latter of which I'm omitting, I like the domains covered by cognitive psychology.

We played a show (without Jason and with Mike's dad on keys) at Queen's College two weeks ago. The sound was horrible, but we still managed to play a decent show. I could only hear myself and the keys. We didn't tell Jason about the show. He hadn't been coming to rehearsals and we figured we were doing our own thing for now. Not long ago, he picked up his equipment from the studio, claiming he needed it for a show he was playing. I doubt it, but either way, he's gone now. As Mike's dad put it, he removed himself from the band.

Too Much Sin (no set lyrics)

Some more rough demos (including one of the songs posted previously):

What You Wanted

I Don't Know (I don't know about this title...)

Desert Highway

I hadn't realized DT released a new album. When I first heard the verse of this song on Pandora, I thought it was some cheesy Megadeth rip-off. Until it got to the chorus and I recognized Labrie's vocals. This is probably one of DT's "heaviest" songs. Their song-writing abilities still amaze me. Glad Labrie stays in his mid-range here and on most of the album. Petrucci is looking old.

I got the dumbest ticket I've ever gotten today. It will probably be the dumbest ticket I will ever get. I can't imagine getting a dumber ticket.

The psychological services center at St. John's is about a mile off campus and has no parking lot. Over the course of the past year, I've parked my car along side-streets. Today after my first therapy practicum of the semester, I returned to my car to finding a parking ticket. I was surprised to say the least. Then, pissed off. Apparently, alternate side parking regulations were in effect, meaning I wasn't allowed to park where I had parked during the time I was parked. The police officer who wrote me the ticket while I was in class must have that piece of information stored away in his/her memory, because although there's a post for some traffic sign, the sign that says no parking from whatever time to whatever time wasn't attached to the post. There was no sign. Just a metal post. The next (intact) sign was roughly 75 feet away. I took pictures and now have to print and mail them to the parking violations department.

I mean seriously, what kind of asshole cop would do that? I realize that there's this stereotype floating around that psychologists have telepathy, but I'm still only a psychologist-in-training; I have not yet mastered my skills in telepathy. How else was I supposed to know not to park there?

Sitting here, contemplating lunch. It's probably a bit early though, seeing as I only had breakfast at 10:30. Teaching at 4:40, have to settle some issues with financial aid (because they always screw up at St. John's) before that, or perhaps after, and then rehearsal at Mike's at 8:30. We've been working on new songs for a new album. I'm guessing we'll have enough material for an album by December. Not sure if Jason will be present.

I should probably vacuum my apartment. I came down with yet another throat infection or case of tonsilitis last friday. At first, I just thought I was going through alcohol withdrawal, but when the headache and aches persisted and my throat felt like somebody punched it and it became increasingly painful to swallow, I figured I was probably sick again. I called the ENT specialist to schedule a tonsillectomy over my winter break, but the secretary said I had to go in for a consultation, so I'm going to see him tomorrow for both a consultation and more medication. I had some medication left-over from the last time I had tonsilitis in July, so I've been taking those. They've helped to reduce the swelling, but this headache has not gone away since friday. Luckily, it's tolerable.

I'm really at a loss for reasons with regard to why I continue to get these throat infections. One in June, one in July, and now one in September. Maybe my apartment isn't clean enough? Maybe I don't wash my hands enough? Maybe I'm allergic to my girlfriend? Maybe it's because I started smoking cigarettes inside my apartment in June? These reasons can't explain the previous throat infections I've had, but could possibly account for the more recent string of outbreaks. Either way, these tonsils are useless and apparently, are a hazard of some degree, and are being removed.

I finally submitted the manuscript to Neuropsychology for publication. A second first-author publication will put me ahead of most of my colleagues in that respect, but as one of my supervisors at NYU noted, despite what my resume says, I need to work on being more professional. I'm sure teaching a class in a flowery Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops won't help, but these are the liberties I take when nobody is looking. That's how I roll. Especially when I'm ill, like when I told my supervisor at NYU to wait until I was finished eating before meeting for supervision. When I'm ill and at work and not getting paid, well, just consider yourself lucky I'm even there to begin with, especially if it took me an hour and a half. Next time I'll just stay home. Another criticism was that I told the neuropsychiatrist to wait for me while I got a coffee. I don't even drink coffee. Stupids. What I really said was, "do you want me to come?" in response to, "would you like to come with me to see your patient?" Apparently I was supposed to jump on that bandwagon with great enthusiasm. Ecstasy. Yes sir. And all that crap. It's not like I didn't know what an intake patient interview was like. Another criticism was asking to stay at home to work on a report - this I realize now was a dumb move on my part, and when I used the 2-hour commute card, I got the same thing back from my supervisor ("I have an hour and a half commute also"), who, of course, makes an infinite amount of money more than I do, so that comparison is kind of moot, but I wasn't about to knock her statistical analysis of that. Probably a good thing I didn't, either. And the other mistake I now realize I made was failing to study for the oral quiz we were given about the tests we were using, doing poorly on the exam, but persisting nonetheless. My supervisor's point was that -- well, really, I'm not so sure she had much of a point. Impression management perhaps. I was kind of bummed (and still am to a degree). It has made me re-think my career options. I'll show her.

HA HA!

(I'm very tall)

Maeve (my girlfriend) is back at school, at SUNY Purchase, about a 40-minute drive from here. I helped her move in and spent a few days with her. I had planned to visit my sister, but she got sick. It's different being at home without her here. She's a creative writing major and will be interning at a literary magazine in Brooklyn two days this semester, so she's going to spend sunday and monday nights here, as the commute from here to there is closer and easier than from Purchase to there. Well, at least monday nights now that I think about it. I enjoyed the 4-5 weeks we spent living together.

Basically, I'm finishing up my coursework this academic year. This semester I'm taking two clinic practica, one assessment (testing) and one therapy. I'm also taking two classes, social psychology and ethical and professional issues, the latter of which I took while at RFUMS. I'm going to get cranking on my dissertation and hope by the end of the academic year to have a proposal defended so that I can collect data next academic year when I have less to do. I'm also working on the ADHD and emotion project with Alice and the psychopathy project with Kate. I don't intend to do any testing of participants for the latter, as I have assistants helping with that one.

Did a lot of drinking and smoking these past two months, on top of going out to restaurants more often and not going to the gym at all. Certainly gained at least five pounds. I'm planning to curb that and get back to the gym once or twice a week to do some light lifting (toning). Glad that I don't have lengthy commutes and that I don't have to deal with sweaty subways anymore. Watched the first season of True Blood and the first two and a half seasons of Weeds. Highly enjoyed both. Went to splish splash and the beach. Played some shows. Wrote some songs, learned a few cover songs. Went to a small drum 'n' bass party. Set up our studio in Mike's parents' basement. Walked around central park. Shaved my head (not bald). Went on several dates. Spent too much money. Wrote a manuscript. Aced a class. Hung out. Jammed out. Had a lot of fun.

I say this nearly every summer and I'll say it once again: I can't believe it's already August.

I finished up the manuscript for my laterality study and sent it to my coauthors. I'm planning to send it out for publication by the end of the month, only several months behind my initial plans, but I'm happy with how it came out. I've come up with an idea for a dissertation and apparently can start this upcoming year, despite what I thought I was told by the program director himself. I'll probably have my assistants test participants for the larger laterality and psychopathy study that I'm working on with Kate. I was asked to teach cognitive psychology in the fall, to which I said sure. I got the book and am going to start putting together lectures slides--the most annoying and time-consuming part about teaching--next week after my neuropsych assessment class ends. I'm taking the final on Weds. The class is relatively easy. I got a 100 on the midterm, which is the first 100 I've gotten in a while. I've seen a few more cases at my externship and have been taking an express bus there and back, which cuts my travel time, but costs more than twice what the other route costs. I couldn't imagine standing in the subway waiting for trains in this hot and humid weather anymore. The last time I did, my entire body was covered in sweat, my shirt was sticking to me, and I was wiping sweat off my forehead every two seconds, only within a minute or two of being there.

Social Uprising got a wild-card into the semi-finals of the Long Island Music Festival. Apparently we were selected because of our musicianship. We're playing this friday night at a bar not far from me. Mike recently told me that he wants to try getting signed again. Jason has renewed confidence about our talent as a band too. I'm not sure how I feel about giving it my all again, especially now that I'm on this other path to becoming a neuropsychologist, but I would like to keep playing shows and writing material. About 50 people were at our last show. Had a lot of fun that night.

My girlfriend has been staying with me since last weekend after her grandfather told her to leave for some dumb reason. Kind of a serious move after only being together for 7 or 8 weeks, but I have no complaints or regrets. It's quite fun actually. She's going into her last year (as a creative writing major) at SUNY Purchase in the fall, which is about a 45 minute drive from here, so I'm not sure what's going to happen when she moves out at the end of the month and goes back to school. We've basically just been playing it by ear. I assume that's what we'll do come September.

The guys and I entered the Long Island Music Festival and are scheduled to play a 40 minute set tomorrow night at 10:30. It's basically a battle of the bands; whomever gets the most votes, advances to the next round. So, I was disappointed when I found out when and where we got scheduled to play, because none of my friends will be able to make it out to the middle of nowhere on a Wednesday night. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to playing a show after all these years. We got together yesterday and rehearsed a setlist of old songs:

Shine
Wash It Away
619
Question Reality
My World
Life in Technicolor II (Coldplay song)
White Lights

I voted for White Lights as our opener, but they all thought Shine would make a better opener.

We've also got a show scheduled for July 18.

Today was my first day at the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, bringing an end to my long--yet deserved--three week break. I decided to walk half a mile to the bus, take the bus to the subway, take one subway line to another, then walk about a third of a mile to the hospital. This morning I made the bus and both trains exactly on time and it took me roughly an hour and a half from apartment door to hospital door. On the trip back, I had a six or seven minute wait for my second train, so it took a little longer. I'm thinking it might be more efficient to take share rides or "dollar cabs" to the subway rather than a 20-minute bus ride; it would save me about 20 minutes (10 each way). All in all, this method will cost about $200 for the entire summer, which is much more cost effective than my other options. If money wasn't an issue, I'd probably take the Long Island Railroad to Penn Station, then take a bus to the hospital, which would probably cut my travel time down to an hour, but would probably cost close to $500. Or I'd just drive and park in a garage, but that would probably cost around $1000 and would still take around an hour because of traffic. There are another six externs in the program and three post-doctoral fellows; I'm the only dude and apparently the first ever from St. John's (well, at least since my supervisor has been there).

Being back on an inpatient unit, not as a patient but as a clinician, was a little awkward and brought back vivid memories of aimlessly wandering the halls of Yale on a million and one drugs while encapsulated in a halo. My supervisor could tell from my scars (not to mention the SOMI brace I wore to my interview in Feb) what had happened and on our walk to a case conference said having been a patient would probably provide me with a different perspective, perhaps a greater understanding of what the patients are experiencing. I think I didn't mind being at Yale because of the great nursing staff and the 12 or so oxycodones (2 every 4 hours, as per an e-mail I sent my friends from the hospital) and 6 ativans per day that I was getting. Being at Hackensack really sucked because I had to stare at a ceiling, have others feed and move me, and after a while I started vomitting from all the painkillers and was still in excruciating pain from laying on my back for so long while my attending took his time masturbating to my CT scans. Plus, at that point, being in a hospital with a broken neck was no longer new and "exciting" and I was pretty sick of it. I nearly left Hackensack against medical advice because my neurosurgeon was a bit OCD with my skull fracture and wanted to keep me there several extra days, which, at the time, I thought would practically bankrupt me. Luckily, $60k or so was covered by my insurance, leaving about $1k for me to pay (nonetheless, I still left before he wanted me to and was discharged by another physician instead).

A little over six months later, my neck is still a little sore.

These days I'm telling people "I broke my neck" instead of "I had my neck broken," or "my neck broke." In other words, I'm taking responsibility. If I hadn't been so tanked, that wouldn't have happened. Perhaps I had a seizure? My Dad is epileptic after all. Basically, anything could've happened and I might believe it.

I recently set up a profile on OkCupid.com. I went on a date last thursday with a girl. We both agreed that we didn't really gel. I'm going on another two dates soon: one on Thursday and one possibly on Friday. I mentioned to one of my classmates recently that I've had a tendency lately to evaluate potential dates in terms of how good they'd be as a friend/partner, wife, and mother. It's an odd departure from evaluating potential dates in terms of how good they'd be in bed. I guess I'm just getting older, have different goals, and sex is less exciting than it was when I was younger. This is, of course, not to say that sex is not exciting to me, just that it's less important these days. Nonetheless, I still occasionally draw distinctions by referring to women as "cute," pretty," hot," and/or "beautiful."

I should probably start writing that manuscript soon.

I saw memorial day fireworks with friends from out of town and a few others on saturday at a nearby beach.

Yesterday, I spent a few hours with Mike, Shawn, Christina, and Jen for a memorial day bbq. It was pleasant. Shawn and Jen brought their daughter Leah. She's nearly a year and a half now and has started walking around with support from tables and chairs. Quite adorable. Mike and Christina bought a kitten who's also adorable, but in a different way. He was sick, unfortunately, so we didn't see much of him. Mike played a lot of Coldplay and has gotten me into them recently. I really like "Daylight."

I left Mike's place at around 10. I took the same parkway home that I always take when going to and from Mike's. As I was driving, an undercover cop flies past a bunch of us who were going about 60 mph with his lights flashing. I'm thinking he's going to pull someone over. Instead, he proceeds to swirve from the left lane to the right lane and back many times, lights flashing, causing traffic to slow down to about 30-40 mph. Eventually I pull onto the exit ramp to get off the parkway and glance at him. I overhear him on his speakerphone (or whatever it is) call me a moron and yell other things too.

My initial thought was that he was drunk. Either that or someone hijacked the car and decided to go for a joy-ride. Or, that's some sort of memorial day tradition that I'm not aware of. Or, of course, a combination of the aforementioned.

Social Uprising got into the Long Island Music Festival. So we'll be playing at least one show this summer, and I'm optimistic that we'll get through the first round and play a second show. We got to the second round in 2004. It'll be nice to play a show or two again.

It's been a while.

In more ways than one.

These days, I'm realizing my financial limits more and more. And yet I continue to go beyond them.

So while my World of Warcraft takes its time updating itself, so will I. WoW is one of those ways in which I've gone beyond my financial limits. Old habits are another. Cigarettes. When they said that addictions were lifelong, they weren't kidding. (I should note, however, that I don't know who the 'they' are and acknowledge that 'they' could be wrong).

The price of living is supposedly going up and I'm not making any more money than I was a year ago. My landlord wants to charge me an additional $25/mo should I decide to stay here another year. My mom thinks he's just trying to swindle me out of extra money and wants me to see if I can find a better deal somewhere else.

The semester ended officially last Tuesday. Before it ended, I couldn't wait to have all of this time off before my externship at NYU started. Yet, since last Tuesday, I've found myself saying that I wish I had a paying job. One of the more humbling and yet annoying aspects of my life recently have been the words, "Mom, I need more money."

Other than financially, I'm doing good enough. I'm heading back to the gym for the first time in six months tomorrow and have a manuscript that I'd like to work on before starting at NYU on the second of June. Our findings on the laterality study turned out significant, but didn't conform to either of the prevailing theories of emotion processing, making the findings difficult to interpret. Alice and I submitted a poster abstract to the Society for Neuroscience about two weeks ago, which supposedly accepts poster abstracts automatically. Not sure if that's a positive or negative thing. Here's the abstract:

We examined predictions based upon the right hemisphere (RH) and valence models of emotion processing by testing immediate recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral verbal stimuli among 35 female right-handed individuals. Thirty words (10 of each valence) were presented one at a time to either visual field for 150 ms. The words were equated on word length and on ratings of frequency, imagery, and concreteness. The positive and negative words were equated on arousal ratings, which were higher than the arousal ratings of the neutral words. The words were vertically oriented and located 8.8 degrees from the central fixation stimulus. Eye movements were recorded. The words were presented three times to avoid possible floor effects. In total, there were 94 trials, which included 4 filler words to control for primacy and recency effects. Following the presentation of all the words, participants were asked to write down as many words as they could remember (free recall test). Then they were given a standard old-new recognition test, in which they were asked to identify whether each word occurred in the original presentation.

Consistent with previous findings that have shown a left hemisphere superiority for the processing of verbal stimuli, we found that words presented to the right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH) were recalled and recognized more accurately than words presented to the left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF/RH), and we found significant valence by visual field interactions.Consistent with the predictions of the RH model, we found superior recognition of positive and negative words presented to the LVF/RH relative to neutral words presented to the LVF/RH and no difference between recognition of positive and negative words presented to the LVF/RH. Furthermore, we found superior recall and recognition of neutral words presented to the RVF/LH compared to neutral words presented to the LVF/RH. Consistent with the predictions of the valence model, we found superior recall and recognition of positive words presented to the RVF/LH compared to negative or neutral words presented to the RVF/LH. One finding, however, did not support either model. We found superior recall of positive words presented to the LVF/RH compared to negative words presented to the LVF/RH. These results suggest that an integration of the two models may better account for the conflicting findings with regard to the hemispheric lateralization of emotional verbal stimuli.

The conference is in Chicago in October. I'm hoping that my decision to join Psi Chi will pay off and they'll cover my expenses. My former student from the past semester and research assistant on the project is the treasurer, so I'm optimistic that I'll get funding to go. I also befriended a former student of mine from the past semester who I took an interest in after she got the highest grade in the class (gasp). It turned out she has a boyfriend, which seems legit and not an excuse; ever since, we've been e-mailing each other back and forth, which is cool. I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to be teaching again next year because some of the core faculty didn't get grants, so supposedly they have to do more teaching instead. I should find out in June what I'll be doing next year.