The Hard Problem Revisited

A Dualist's nighmare,
A Materialist's horror,
The phantom wailed
And writhed, helpless,
Dragged behind its shambling corpse, and
Screamed from the quantum void,
"Behold, the howling face of the sun!"

(Inspired by Keith Thompson's "Apollonian Wight")

Permanent Head Damage

We're alive.  And apparently, we are moving to Portland.

For those of you who may still check this blog every once in a while and have no idea why we are suddenly moving, perhaps I should fill you in.

It's over.  I finished my Ph.D. and am free from the soul-crushing depths of grad school.  After a frantic job search, I landed a job at an unspecified school that shall remain unspecified, and The Wife landed a really fantastic PT job.  We're looking forward to getting the hell out of the valley.  While our surroundings may be beautiful, the culture here is driving us absolutely nuts.

The Wife was joking that by moving from the valley to Portland, we would go from being considered some of the most liberal people in town to some of the most conservative in town without altering our political beliefs one bit.  So, you know, that dynamic should be really fun to play with.

Life after grad school has been... kind of weird.   I often compared grad school to living at the bottom of the ocean:  Dark and isolated, with bizarre surroundings, unpredictable life events, and an overwhelming sensation that your entire body is being crushed from all sides.  Now, life feels sort of... odd.  When you remove a great pressure, the sensory system has a hard time adjusting to the absence of the constant input from the cells that detected that pressure.  Or, when you get off a long train ride, your vestibular system may feel, at times, that you are still on the train and generate a ghost sensation of motion even when you're standing still.  The emotional system, unsurprisingly, is very similar to this.  For a while after defending my dissertation, I had moments where I would start to fret again about my experiments only to remember that I had defended and was done.  I guess it's a little like PTSD, but instead of flashing back to a combat situation, I flash back to a draft edit or a statistical analysis.  Or the defense itself.  It took me a few weeks to wind down properly after that one.  They don't let you walk out of there feeling very tall.

The last few months have been spent essentially recovering from grad school and preparing for my new job.  Emphasis on the recovery part.

One of my advisors said something interesting the other day, about how a Ph.D defense is one of the hardest,  most stressful events a human being can go through.  It's apparently right up there with giving birth and a death in the family.  I wonder how it stacks against being assaulted or getting shot?

The biggest lesson that I learned from the entire process is that I don't know anything.  At all.  You would think that having a Ph.D makes you feel smarter.  It doesn't.  More than anything, I feel dumber, unqualified, incapable, incapacitated, ineffective, impotent, perplexed, and overwhelmed.  I eat and breathe and sweat and spit weakness.  The entire process is designed to teach you how to really think, and it begins with crushing you until you realize that you don't know a damn thing.  And the process does this very well.  But what it does not do is put you back together.  I suppose that part is up to me, but I'm so damn tired that I hardly feel up to it.  Well, I suppose that I feel less tired and hopeless than I did right after I got my degree.  I think that it will get better with time, but I hope that I don't lose my grip on the fact that I don't know anything.  It seems odd to say, but really grasping that lesson and holding it close to your chest is worth all the anguish.  I know that a lot of academics never really get a good grip on that lesson.  Or if they did, they lose it.

Oh, God, I pray that I don't lose my grip on this.  I worked so hard to learn that I'm an idiot.  It's far too valuable to lose.

No, we are not dead

At least, I don't think we are.

It just feels like it, here at the bottom of the sea. I remember what the surface was like, back when we were just treading water. The sun. The waves. The salt in the air.

But that's all gone now. Here, we just have the murk of the bottom and the fear of the things that feed and scuttle and snap. Odd shapes lurk in the mire. Most of them take the form of smaller pests, but larger, more unsettling terrors swim these depths. They show themselves in flashes of teeth and feelings of uncertainty. We try to swim up for air, but there is none to be had, as strong tendrils drag us back to the bottom. Even our rest is restless, here at the bottom of the sea, as dark things creep in the long, black nights.

When I glance upwards, I see ghostly shapes. Shapes of things that we lost when the ship went down. Friends, family, places once called home, all distant shores long forgotten. They whisper and dance on the current, detached and ephemeral. I cannot tell if they ever existed. If they did, they seem little more than embers. It drifts by in the void, milky and viscous, altogether intangible and disconnected. I reach out for them, but I cannot grasp them. Some of them reach back. Some do not. Very few descend to our depths and walk with us in the dark mire, our footfalls disturbing the deep silt, clouding the fluid that surrounds us. We tell them that we are not dead. We swear we are not dead. But let's face it - we certainly don't seem to use our lungs all that much anymore. When the cloudy ghosts speak, we cannot draw breath to respond. And what would they know? They move through our depths occasionally, but never feel the pressure. They stay for a time, and then depart, leaving warmth in their absence, and the question of whether or not they even heard us. Are we as insubstantial to them as they are to us?

We do not know. And we hardly have time to think. The mountains here in the ocean depths are vast, and we must watch our footing. Our path looks to go deeper still before it turns up into shallow waters. We hope that when we come up to the surface, at long last, that we will find a world that can offer us even a scrap of familiarity.

We shall see. But for now, we must hurry. The waters are shifting, the current is picking up, and large things are beginning to move in the black. Large and hungry. We are, after all, not dead yet (are we? We can't be...), and to stay that way, we need to move. Now.

Congratulations Quijote and Ardrilla!

They were married last Saturday in Juarez, surrounded by friends and family. God bless you both in your new life together!

It was interesting to visit the El Paso/Juarez area, primarily because I had never been south of the border. Seeing the mountains that Cormac McCarthy imagined to be on fire when he got the idea to write The Road was pretty sweet... especially since it was followed by a discussion of The Road with Quijote and the dirty hippie.

The food was great, the hospitality was warm, the wedding was lovely, though I had to have Fernando explain some of the traditions to me. Such as the lasso. That was a new one to me, but was apparently a tradition older than using wedding rings. Basically, they had the couple kneel and they lashed them together with a lasso. When I first heard about it, I was hoping some cowboy would burst into the church and toss a lasso around both of them from the aisle while they struggled to get away, but that didn't happen.

Also, I loved the fact that they said each other's vows to one another in the native language of the other person. Behold, the foundations of a bilingual household.

Now, there is the subject of the reception. It was insane. I'm not going to sugar coat it. Three words: Surprise Mariachi Band. I think that pretty much sums it up.

In all, I wish both of you the best.

Now, Quijote, you just need to convince her to let you have a Corgi, and you'll be all set. Just remember the mantra: Cutest. Dog. EVER. ;)

Silence fills the empty tomb...

...but questions linger on.

Bones rattle. Dried, calcified fingers scrape the stonework. Ulna and radius rattle, shifting weight from arm to arm. Tattered graveclothes rasp and tear as dust falls from the limbs. With great force, the corpse pushes itself up, craning its neck, lifting its head towards the light. Empty eye sockets scrape the air, hungry for the sun. The dessicated mandible drops open, the memory of lungs clawing for air.

And yet, a breath escapes the maw of the skull, kicking up dust into the darkness. Impossible. No lungs expell it. No vocal chords give it vibration. No lips part to let it pass. Yet the husk exhales, then draws breath back in to empty ribs.

It rises upon frail femur and trembling tibia. Rags cling to the husk. Scraping across a dusty floor, it shambles with force far beyond what it's frail frame ought to facilitate. Phalanges old and dry grip the stone that seals the tomb and push. The air shifts and hisses as freshness and light pierce the crypt.

Out across the graveyard and down through the field, the ghoul staggers steadily. Down the road and to the sea, across the pier and past the docks, its empty eyes trace the outline of an old ship, long broken apart for firewood. It climbs aboard the vessel's memory and staggers to the stern. There, its claws grip the wheel.

The hanging jaw hisses a command. The sails drop. The anchor lifts. A wind, unfelt, fills the sails. The wheel spins, and the ship obeys.

Empty eyes, lidless and invisible, lock upon the open sea. Bones long dead remember the salty breeze. The trappings of life long left behind, with all its cares and worries and lies and politics, the dead man's heart begins to warm.

One thought echoes in the empty skull.

I live again.

The memory of lips peel back into a smile as the spectral hull crashes against the waves.

Never before has the dead man felt so alive.

Prelims: The Verdict

I PASSED!

Thank you GOD!!!

That means I'm an official Ph.D candidate!

Prelim Count: 4/4 - Testing Complete

The paper is done and turned in.

Thank you God that the tests are over.  

This has literally been the hardest thing I have ever done.

Please pray that I pass the tests.  The ballot meeting to decide if I made it through is this coming Wednesday at 1:00 p.m.  

I have never felt so spent.  

Prelim Count: 3/4

Three down. One to go.

Seven and a half ours, counting breaks. I think around six and a half without breaks.

Sixteen pages total. Closer to 15.2. Single spaced.

Glad that one's over.

Now, there's just the paper...

Prelim Update: Round 3

The last test is today.  But I'm not finished yet.  The paper has been extended to Friday.  It needs a lot of work still, according to my advisor.  

Ugh.

That means I'm going to be working on it all day tomorrow and all day Friday.

Don't expect to hear from me for a few days.

In the meantime, round three commences in two hours.  

And by the way:  Google Chrome, Google's new web browser, is totally awesome.  Go download it and give it a try if you haven't.  No time to post a link for it... just google it.  :)

Prelim Count Update: 2/4

Two down. Two to go.

Started at 8. Finished at 3.

7 hours. 6 and 1/2 if you cut out my lunch break. Closer to 6 if you cut out bathroom breaks and me just needing to pace because I was alone in a tiny room that was half-filled with file cabinets and I could hear my thoughts bouncing off of the walls and on to the blank page in front of me.

So, yeah. 7 hours. 6 hours actual writing time. Ugh.

13 pages (closer to 12.3), single spaced.

Felt a lot better about this one. There was one question that I'm pretty sure I got wrong, but the others I felt pretty good about. I even had a moment of brilliance on this one.

Ask me about it sometime when I'm not brain dead.

Second Round of Prelims

Getting ready to start in the next 20 minutes.

Looks like I'm in for another day of writing for eight solid hours.

Pray now.

More later.

Prelim Count Update: 1/4

One down.

Three to go.

After I was finished yesterday, I nearly fell asleep during dinner. I think I burned off about a pound via necessary neural metabolism (yes, your brain actually DOES burn a lot of calories during intense thought).

Eight hours. Of solid writing. And that doesn't count breaks. It was sixteen pages single spaced when I was done with it.

The next one is on Friday.

More later.

Prelim Exams...

...start today. My first one is in six minutes.

Pray that I do well.

Second one is on Friday.
Third is next Wednesday.
Paper is due any time between now and Wednesday.

More later.

The Neuron Doctrine Revisited

All of thought is but chemistry and electricity.

So why can't I explain these damn ghosts?

Published!

My advisor just called me to let me know that my masters thesis is getting published in the journal Memory and Cognition.

That means I have officially joined the scientific community by passing through the gauntlet of the peer review process.

She (my advisor) told me that my loving wife should take me out for dinner to celebrate... but we'll see.

I. Am. Super. Excited.

Soli Deo Gloria!