Alexander Shulgin in NYTimes

I’ve been pointed to a pretty good article about Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin in the New York Times. It’s surprisingly sympathetic, given that Shulgin is directly responsible for most of the psychedelics that have fascinated so many curious souls lately.

Gratifying to me personally is the way that the D.E.A. is painted in the article: as people tasked with an impossible, misdirected war-on-drugs effort who have gradually bought it wholesale. People who raid homes and labs and clinics, at times doing good work but mostly employing scare tactics, propagating misinformation and hindering research. People who will destroy your property and arrest you if you give plant parts to terminally ill patients. People who help the federal government in its attempt to bully states that disagree with its stance on what’s dangerous and what isn’t.

But back to Shulgin. His contribution to the modern exploration of our own minds has been astounding. He is almost 80 years old now, and it’s unlikely that I will ever meet him; a pity, because like hundreds of thousands of people he’s affected I am deeply grateful for his insatiable curiosity and his celebration of humanity.

A few years back I borrowed PIHKAL from a friend, and it changed my life. Having never formally studied chemistry of any kind (stupid of me, but physics was more interesting and the school only required one), I began to gather an appreciation for the delicate chemical balance within which our perception of reality floats. To think that a few micrograms of a substance can make everything seem different!

Because of how little it evidently takes to alter one’s perception of reality, I became convinced (and still am) that reality has many faces, and that they’re worth exploring. Researchers claim that many of the chemicals people play with are modified versions of what’s already present in our brain; so it’s no surprise that meditation, breathing in patterns and persistent curious searching have revealed more to me about me and my world than my government’s educational curriculum can hope to.

It’s not all roses. Some substances are addictive; hell, I’ve had sleep and mental-acuity problems related to caffeine addiction, and that’s a forgiving drug. Others aren’t so forgiving. Research is needed, help is needed for people whose lives have been ruined… I always ask myself: what could possibly go wrong if we dedicated half of D.E.A.’s budget to humane rehab and to research? Instead of paying men and women with guns to go rid San Francisco of the “menace” of pot [which has been used for millennia, and look, we’re still here!], why can’t we pay researchers to find out what’s really going on?

Well, it’ll happen. We’ve already won a struggle with nicotine-distributing companies, so that at least they no longer actively make cigarette smoking look cool to teenagers. We’ve got a ways to go with alcohol, at least in this country, where making it taboo only contributes to the frat-party culture in which young people die from alcohol poisoning on a dare. There’s a longer journey for other drugs; I just hope I live to see a society where exploration of our chemical surroundings is done curiously, knowledgeably and responsibly. In other words, where humans are educated and then given some credit.

Isn’t it sad, how much we can’t blog? Freedom of speech, indeed.

White, green and bike

I like to ride my bicycle, I like to ride my bike…

Today I didn’t ride, but I’ve an excuse. Yesterday I did ride, seven miles instead of the five I’d been doing, and although the total is on the low side, it still feels good. Then, later last night, I went out to take a walk and ended up shoveling out a path from our porch to the road as well as the entire space around and on the car. It felt good! Aside from the fact that the people in whose driveway we parked (long story) were complete asses. But the actual physical work felt really good, and let me tell you, it doesn’t get much better than Peter Mulvey and Morphine on the iPod while shoveling metric %#@!tons of light fluffy snow.

Today, we shoveled again! The snow was much heavier by the time we got to it, and it was a different driveway, the one where we’ll be parking from now on (see above). But we also got to be genial with the neighbors, and although there was no iPod, there were two of us and thus bits of winded conversation were possible.

My back hurts like nobody’s business, and I don’t feel guilty at all for not biking. Will do it tomorrow. Oooh, I’m liking the physical activity gig. Really, really hope it lasts.

Here’s a gift from the green god on a white and sky-blue winter’s day:

Take come crushed coriander seeds, some garam masala and some black mustard seeds. No precise measurements, I went with about a tablespoon of each of the first two and 1.5 tbsp of the mustard seeds at first. Oh, and a dash of good chili powder. Heat up some fat-of-choice (olive oil and a bit of butter, here) and fry the spices until they smell amazing, and the mustard seeds are popping.

Add a large plastic package of frozen spinach, not the square-package kind but the kind that’s already broken up into clumps; dump in a bit of water; stir well; cover. Steam-fry, stirring occasionally, until the spinach looks unfrozen. Take off the cover and adjust seasonings (at this point I put in salt, garlic powder and more garam masala): you want the spinach to taste just a little bit overspiced. Fry some more at higher heat until it’s no longer watery. Let cool.

Open up a package of silken tofu and drain it as much as you can. Dump the cooled spinach and the tofu into the food processor and whirr until it’s all uniformly colored. Taste, adjust seasonings, refrigerate until tomorrow when you can dip carrots and anything else your heart desires into it.

Good night!

Snowy photos

Roundly chided for my laziness in learning how to upload pix from the camera we do have, I went and did it. Some blizzard photos are here.

unbearable whiteness and caloric intake

Snow! Oh my, the snow. I would like a small, lightweight digital camera that makes it trivial to transfer images from its card to my laptop, so that I might share the vistas with you. (This is a wish E. and I have had for a while, but other expenditures have taken priority. It’ll happen, though.) Meanwhile, our street looks something like this. (Image of Providence courtesy wunderground.com.) Not terrible, but considering this is how much snow we’ve gotten in the past twenty hours, pretty impressive. They don’t seem to be plowing the residential streets much: there’s no point until later today, when the snow and the wind stops. The wind is sending whirling clouds of minute dancing snowflakes flying all around, such that it’s hard to tell whether any new snow is coming down at all. Total accumulation, as per Wunderground, is 18 to 28 inches in Providence. Damn, do I ever wish I had cross-country skis!

Went clothes-shopping yesterday. We don’t do this often, and it was all kinds of fun – even though we did go all the way to Boston despite the blizzard warning. We managed to get back home before the worst of it hit, mission accomplished and even some food shopping done. The Garment District is an impossibly good second-hand store; next time either of us is jonesing for a change of wardrobe we know exactly where to go.

In other news, I have successfully bicycled several times already, thanks to the bike trainer we took off Molly’s hands. It makes me feel so good. I’ve finally found a gym-like contraption that I enjoy using, and can use without regard for the weather outside. I’ve long been complaining about feeling weak and blah, and have been gaining weight I shouldn’t be gaining – nothing tragic, just enough to make me feel sluggish and want to hibernate. Since today’s pace of life hardly permits one to hole up for the winter and suck on a paw, I’ve decided to set a specific weight-loss and exercise-gain goal for the next two months. Really, the wedding is just an excuse, a convenient chronological target in that it isn’t negotiable.

To this end, as of this morning I’m monitoring caloric intake, and also limiting it a bit. I’ve never done this systematically, and am curious as to what will happen. Hopefully in a week or two I’ll have enough data to be able to predict about how many calories I’ll need in a given day depending on the projected activities for that day. There’s some possibility that I won’t stick with it, but since I am loving this stationary-bicycling-and-iPod-listening thing, and also have a love who can nudge me when needed without making me feel bad about myself, optimism runs high. Plus, it’s two months. I’ve been wanting to change my health habits for a while now. If I stick with it for this long, perhaps maintaining in the longer term will be easier!

Doing things that make my body feel active and alive makes such a huge difference in how I feel on all levels. It’s time to live in the moment, I think.

Edit: Uni is closed tomorrow! W00t, I feel like… like… like I’m nine years old! SNOW DAY!

(Okay, I still get to work. But it’s at home, in PJs, with tea and hot chocolate and biking breaks.)

Making waves

I’ve just posted some thoughts about different approaches to presenting and distributing academic knowledge. Please opine if you are so inclined. I have a feeling I’ll be roundly chastised for some of the things I said, but discussion is sort of the idea. :)

50 Shekel

He’s a musician, a highly entertaining one, a Jewish rapper. Don’t miss “In Da Shul,” it’s hilarious.

But what touched me was actually “We Miss You.” [mp3] Comedians who can pour their hearts out and make you want to cry are rare and precious.

Surface, breathe, sync

My cousin from Australia is visiting the Boston area and staying with us. She’s a fun chyk, just graduated from Melbourne U’s law school (!), will be starting a job in March, and in the meantime is seeing the world. It’s good to meet her.

Last night I didn’t sleep much. When I did sleep, the dreams were mostly nightmares about: (a) wedding planning and food not quite going as planned; (b) stories of the Japanese ambassador and the entire associated wedding party being poisoned; and (c) the church grounds suddenly being as large as a large high school, and myself being lost and pursued.

Hm, time to chill out. Unfortunately, it’s also time to do wedding planning more quickly.

In two days, I participate in the Teaching in the Digital Age Faculty Showcase. Should be awesome.

The first draft of my very first semi-annual interim report to the NEH is complete. Seeing as it’s not due until the 31st, I’m rather proud of myself. Of course, we’ll see what my boss says; but it’s always much easier for me to revise than to write from scratch.

I feel numb.

What the hell?!

We bomb an Iraqi house by mistake, fourteen people reportedly die including seven children, and we apologize for the loss of “possibly innocent lives”??

Un. believable.

Good weekend. No, great weekend, thanks to the kindness and all-around coolness of a friend and his stunning video art. More later.

Born Digital competition

I’ll go back to the food porn shortly. (Yesterday evening I had an excuse for not writing: a hot date. Today I have no such excuse.)

Meanwhile, there’s a competition going on at futureofthebook.org:

Our first competition calls for a reinvention of the illuminated manuscript. How will this ancient art evolve as multimedia begins to take a central role in our reading experience? Send us a single illustrated page that exploits the unique possibilities of the digital medium while preserving the classic illuminative relationship between text and image.

Nice! Were I at all good at graphic design or video work, I’d totally go for it with Roland. As it stands, I’ll sit back and watch the results, which should be beautiful.

Meme! Because I can.

This is no LiveJournal, so I’ve no clue how many requests I’ll get from this, but why not. Courtesy of my friend Molly, who rocks my socks. (No, really. She and socks have a special relationship. She’s got the coolest socks of anyone I know, and wears them with the most unabashed grin. You should see it!)

Comment on this entry, and I’ll tell you:

1. What color you make me think of
2. The first word that comes into my head in association with you (sequitur not guaranteed)
3. A food that I like!
4. [edited] Two fun facts about a country I select, which may or may not have any bearing on you at all.

I really should install the threaded comments plugin. For the moment, you’ll have to check back or subscribe to the comments feed.

It’s the new year already! (NYC)

Hello, world.

Thanks to the generosity of our Brooklyn-residing friends who just happened to need catsitting, Mindlace and I went to New York [Fuckin’] City for a week.

(As an aside: there’s something incredibly cool about referring to Ethan by his middle name in writing. When speaking, however, I never do it.)

I’ve been procrastinating on writing about it, because there’s just so much; so it’s unlikely that I’ll write more than one post about it. Most of it is food porn, so I’ll summarize the rest quickly.

Twenty-fifth was spent with friend Sean here in Providence in the morning and then driving in the afternoon. By the time we got to New York we were fairly tired, and lo, found that Stacy and David had left us a bottle of wine at their place. They surely knew our hearts; we drank the gorgeous red and watched movies.

Twenty-sixth we spent largely at the new and improved MoMA. My, but the building is gorgeous. Tall ceilings and entire walls of glass looking out onto the sculpture yard and over the city. One of the glass walls was frosted with very narrow translucent lines, sailor-suit-on-acid-style; so that when you walked up the stairs several feet away from it, it looked like it was snowing outside. For part of the day, it was lightly snowing, which made the sport of guessing the weather even more fun. In the evening, we met up with GHW at Strand bookstore, browsed around, bought a book on East European cooking…

…remind me to tell you about tonight’s soup. omigod. …

…and went for coffee, subsequently relocating to a beer pub. A fun time was had!, and also we spoiled ourselves by buying PixelBlocks. Hey, you’re only in New York once. Toys are paramount. That, and knife sharpeners.

This isn’t going to be a quick summary, is it?

Twenty-seventh we went to Fleur de Sel for lunch. About the best midday meal I’ve ever had, about which later. Continuing in the vein of vaguely traditional New York vacation, in the evening we saw a performance by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre. I highly, highly recommend this activity for young and old alike. These people leapt soundlessly across the stage; I had to strain to hear them move, and we were sitting four rows away from the stage. Beautiful performers and soul-baring choreography; no photograph does justice to the live performance. As a bonus, they inspired me to take up yoga again. Soon, strength training too. Holy god.

After the show we met up with Lune, walked through Times Square (it was great seeing Ethan experience Times Sq at night for the first time!) and dropped into a crazy tourist bar named Mars 2112. Cheese factor extra-high, but they make one tasty cosmopolitan. Okay, two. Following that was the Library bar somewhere on the lower East side, a seedy and most fun establishment with skulls on the wall, death metal roaring from the jukebox and a Godzilla movie projected onto the back wall. A perfect way to end the ev… greet the morning.

We paid for this on the twenty-eighth. Met my brother and family for lunch at 2nd Avenue Deli. We had to wait a little, and they fed all the waiting folk little chopped-liver-pate sandwiches. Although they were cute and very tasty sandwiches, and my lunch was also superlative (but only for nostalgia’s sake: this sort of food would be too heavy to eat more than once or twice a year), the noise and general mayhem of the place didn’t impress me. We came out with our ears buzzing; no doubt the five hours of sleep didn’t help, so we begged off for a nap. In the evening, dinner and merriment was had at Z & Jo’s Dobbs Ferry apartment, where we ate very tasty bean soup and – halleluia! – a simple, fresh salad. Ethan sparred with four-and-a-half-year-old Tesher, and then we crashed back in Park Slope.

Thirtieth: met Jo and Tesher (Zhenya was working) at the Museum of Natural History. Saw a butterflies exhibit and another one of frogs. Frogs bear a special mention: well-presented, loads of information, fun! Beautiful frogs, and the second case you saw as you walked in had poisonous frogs inside, with clouds of billowing steam all around them. Spectacular! The rest of the museum was great too, and I also highly recommend going to that place with a wide-eyed kid with impressive stamina for someone so young. The museum excursion ended with a planetarium show, and we proceeded back to Park Slope to meet friends for sushi at Geido. Mmm, fresh tasty fish and catching up with people, one of whom I hadn’t seen for something like seven or eight years. We hadn’t been that closely acquainted in the first place, Dr. Memory and I, and it was fun to talk to him more. His ways around language and irrepressible grin are great fun. After dinner, I sent Ethan off to play some more and headed to another Brooklyn residence to visit Lindy the attention-starved cuddle-puddle kitty on crack. We bonded; it must’ve helped that I smelled like his ex-roommate River. When I returned back to Park Slope, River the Cat Who Hides And Then Yowls For Unfathomable Favors definitely noticed that I now smelled of Lindy, and proceeded to allow me to pet her for longer than usual. I, for my part, proceeded to sneeze a lot. Someday modern medicine will get rid of allergies; until then, give me that Claritin, because I’m certainly having trouble staying away from aminals.

Thirty-first! Friday! We took it easy that day, went to Beacon’s Closet for thrift-store shopping fun. I got a bright brownish-orange very warm knit dress with a very poofy fake-fur collar and sleeve cuffs. Very unlike the rest of my wardrobe, but comfy! Haven’t worn it yet, but will post a photo when I do, just for fun. Also, got slinky black dress with – wait for it – black fringe and rhinestones going diagonally down from hip to the opposite knee. Oh yes. It was beautiful, and I had occasion to wear it that evening, as we went to a speakeasy-themed New Year’s Eve party at a bar in Williamsburg. The band was amazing (holy god, that violinist rocked! I mean, jazzed! who were these people?), the friends and conversation were all great, and we stayed until sufficiently late to be Very Tired but not late enough to stay up all night.

January the First, two thousand and Five, we took Liberties With cApiTal leTTers… just kidding. We slept in a little, got up to meet other friends at Russ & Daughters, but failed to meet with them due to excessive partying the night before. Ah well; it was New Year’s. This didn’t stop us from going to the famed deli, where we purchased ohmygawd-amazing smoked fish, chocolates and dried fruit. Oh, and salty-liquorice fish candy, the real kind, which was tasty.

This fun was followed by more fun, as we strolled on over to M. and K.’s place. I’d only met M. virtually, through blogging, but she’s an amazing mind and delightful spirit. Plus, not knowing me from Eve, she returned my email requesting restaurant recommendations with a detailed, multi-paragraph treasure trove of reviews. My kind of person, I figured; so we went over for hors d’oeuvres and movies. Both were exquisite, from fried goat-cheese balls and runny cheese to the original Stepford Wives and the Mexican wonder that is Aventurera. Successive Bollywood musical and accompanying commentary were priceless.

From there, we went to Applewood for dinner. I… don’t know what to say. I’ll say it in another post. Really.

January Two we drove back to Providence, stopping by Ess-A-Bagel on the way for a dozen bialys and another of hot bagels. I haven’t had bagels this good in a long, long time; and Ethan finally understood the transcendent experience that is the New York bagel. With bagels and salty fish in hand, not to mention pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, we stopped by Z & Jo’s again for brunch, a fun, family-oriented affair.

We came home and more or less crashed, but not before catching up on the internet (geeeks) and unpacking. I got a bit subdued. It was the fourth anniversary of my father’s death.

Okay, so this didn’t turn out short at all. But here it is, New York, sans food pr0n reviews. Those are a whole ‘nother post.