back to da grind

Three days of work this week: today, tomorrow, and Thursday. I had yesterday off, and I don't work Fridays (YB Near isn't open on Fridays, anyway). My off-time was spent fairly constructively, studying GRE materials, etc. Can't say that I did anything special for Memorial Day, but on Sunday I did go to a "family gathering" of sorts with my brother David.

I'm still trying to figure out how best to market my speaking gigs. Perhaps the best thing to do is to hit up the local Korean community and start there, but I suspect that the primary audience for a talk about glioblastoma and the need for proactive patient advocacy will be found elsewhere. So as the marketers would ask: who's the target demographic? If you've visited the eBay listing, you know that I took a stab at what I thought the target market was: friends and families of GBM victims. But even though GBM is the most common of the various types of brain cancer, it's still fairly rare in terms of the entire US population. I can't possibly expect to gather those scattered folks together for a series of speaking engagements.

Hm. Puzzles, puzzles.

Meanwhile, back to the grind.


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inspiring

With thanks to Kelly Youngberg (a.k.a. Kangmi), who tweeted about this: an inspiring article by Earl Newton about pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps. This article applies to anyone who's down and looking to move up in the world-- not just to aspiring filmmakers.


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Memorial Day

I found this at Wikipedia:

Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. Service Members who died while in the military service. First enacted by formerly enslaved African-Americans to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War – it was extended after World War I to honor Americans who have died in all wars.

Whatever you may be doing this Memorial Day, I hope you'll take some time out to remember those who've fought and died in the service of our country.


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a year abroad?

A lunch date with family friends today brought us once again to the topic of working abroad in a country like Kuwait or Afghanistan-- this as a way of making a lot of money in a short time. For someone in my financial situation, such work is sorely tempting, especially when hearing the ridiculous salary figures. What's unclear, though, is what a guy like me would be doing over there. I understand that I wouldn't be leaving the military base, but how, exactly, does one earn $100,000 a year? Surely not by being a supply clerk or by doing minor data entry, right? It seems to me that the folks who earn the big bucks out in the badlands have specific skills, and are no slouches at what they do.

A quick online search shows that speakers of Pashto can earn in the neighborhood of $200,000 per year. Another search shows that some jobs require a person to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Honestly, I'm not seeing much that appeals to me, so for the moment, I think I'll stick with my current plan.


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27 out of 30

I tried the Mensa Workout last night and got 27 out of 30 right. Two of the problems that killed me were of the "unscramble the word" sort. The third problem I got wrong was... well, I got it wrong because I didn't think it through well enough.

I also made a second attempt at an IQ test that I'd found through Malcolm's blog. That test was a killer, and made me feel all kinds of stupid. Here-- you can feel stupid, too. Unlike the Mensa Workout, which is just for shits and giggles, this test dares to assess your IQ. Tell me if you beat 140, and then explain how you did it, because some of those problems were totally unfathomable to me. (Again, unlike the Mensa Workout, this IQ test doesn't offer explanations of the problems you get wrong. In fact, you're not told which ones you get wrong. All you see is a score. In all, a far more challenging workout than Mensa's.)


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vigil

Although I had a hard week, what with the slew of training sessions at YB, my discomfort is nothing compared to what the Parks family is going through.

Here.


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my buddy's embarrassment

I had to laugh when I read the latest email from my French "brother" Dominique:

ici c’est la sècheresse, chaud , pas de pluie, la France commence à s’inquiéter car on risque même des pénurie d’électricité car l’eau au niveau des centrales nucléaires commence à manquer...

sinon, je crois qu’on parle beaucoup de la France aux USA en ce moment....faut toujours qu’on se fasse remarquer !! désolé...

No, I wasn't laughing at D's reference to the possibility of blackouts-- that actually sucks. Instead, it was the final two lines that had me guffawing, as France is somewhat self-conscious about l'affaire Strauss-Kahn (he's known as DSK in the French news). Translation:

Otherwise, I think they're talking a lot about France in the USA right now... we always have to call attention to ourselves! Sorry...

Heh.


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estudiando

Studying. More soon.


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grammatical ideology

I have my biases when it comes to the way I evaluate a writer's style, diction, grammar, mechanics, etc. At the same time, despite my being something of a language Nazi, I don't call myself a total prescriptivist because I openly recognize that variations exist, and that certain current trends in language tend heavily in a particular direction, likely leaving curmudgeons like me behind one day (the fusion of the words "under way" into the odious "underway" is an example of such a trend).

Because my current job requires me to teach SAT test-taking strategy, I often find myself going through the "improve the sentence" and "find the error" sections with mixed feelings. The problem is that many of the "errors" on the SAT don't seem like errors at all, but are more like marginally accepted stylistic variants. This old article at Language Log expresses my frustration better than I can. Pay particular attention to the section on collective nouns. I often find myself telling my students that Yanks and Brits handle these nouns very differently, and that the SAT has a distinct (and understandable) Yank bias. That said, it's not always obvious that a particular locution is more obviously US than UK in nature, and vice versa, so if the SAT prefers one locution over another, this preference may be the result of a bias that has nothing to do with received US/UK English.

Here are some of the problems I personally have encountered while teaching parts of the SAT:

1. The "due to" versus "because of" distinction. The fact of the matter is that these expressions are often used interchangeably; trying to figure out which one is more appropriate involves more mental pretzeling than is justifiable on a test like the SAT. Oh, yes: "rules" regarding these locutions do exist, but those "rules" are far from indisputable.

2. Serial commas. My own strong preference is to include the comma, which comes right before a conjunction (e.g., and, or): A, B, and C. As it turns out, the SAT gurus agree with me on this: in the "find the error" section of the test, it's possible that a student will encounter a problem in which a sentence is missing a serial comma (e.g., A, B and C); if the student doesn't mark this as an error, he or she will get the problem wrong. As much as this pleases my own aesthetic sense, this sort of question makes me uncomfortable: in the world of style guides, it's by no means settled that a serial comma is necessary. As much as I hate it, the locution "A, B and C" is acceptable.

3. Abstruse rules about tense. In Korea, I made an effort to teach students the salient points about "if" conditional sentences, whose rules are fairly rigid in written English, though much more flexible in spoken English. (In spoken English, no one blinks if you begin a sentence with "If I could have...") But not all verb tenses are governed so strictly, and it's not always obvious that one particular tense must be used.

I agree with the Language Log post: the makers of the SAT have introduced "errors" that aren't really errors at all. To call them erroneous is to foist a certain grammatical ideology on the test-takers. The only errors that should appear on the test are the unambiguous ones-- the ones that are universally accepted as errors.


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shared consciousness?

The world is a strange and wonderful place. Here's an article about conjoined twins: two girls joined at the head. What makes them special isn't so much the nature of the conjoining as the presence of a thin, connective line that has been dubbed a "thalamic bridge":

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

While not exactly hinting at telepathy in the sci-fi sense, this phenomenon is still pretty damn amazing, to put it mildly.


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staring down the barrels of a 4-day weekend

YB isn't open this coming Monday, thanks to Memorial Day, so after working today, I've got a four-day weekend ahead of me. That means study time. I started going through the first of my GRE books yesterday; it was somewhat reassuring, after I perused some of the early sample problems in the intro chapter, to realize that my time at YB has made me a sharper test-taker: the skills that I've been teaching my high schoolers work just as effectively for me as they do for the kids.

This Sunday, I'm meeting one of Mom's old friends for lunch. I don't think this is going to be a happy discussion. She's bringing along her two grown kids (50-something and 40-something); my brother David will be representing our clan along with me. I'm just hoping to get through this as quickly and painlessly as possible.


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champing at the bit

You may recall that I'm currently working on getting hired with Manhattan GRE, a NYC-based test prep service that pays teachers $100/hour to present the company's materials. MGRE recently opened a branch in Washington, DC, which is where I'm hoping to work, despite the ultra-long commute. The first hurdle to employment, however, is that a candidate has to score in the 99th percentile on the GRE-- something I've never done, despite having fared pretty well on the test twelve or so years ago. The only way for me to score that high is to prep well and charge into the test with guns blazing.

Happily, my GRE prep material arrived a few days ago (thank you, Amazon!), and after this morning's final training session at YB, I found myself with an unscheduled day off, so now I'm going to begin studying for a pre-August GRE. I have only a few months to take the exam as it's currently formatted; once it's August, the GRE switches to its new, updated form. Luckily, I anticipated the change and also ordered study materials for the Revised GRE, in case I fail to obtain a satisfactory score on the current version of the exam before August.

So I'm raring to go, and looking forward to taking my first GRE since, oh, 1999. Back then, there was an Analytical section that was all about logic problems; in the years since, that section was replaced with Analytical Writing. I'm very curious to see what that section looks like; at this point, I have only the vaguest idea, based on the skimming of some online information about the current test.

Money, as always, remains an issue. The testing fee is somewhere in the neighborhood of $160, which is a goodly chunk of change. As things stand, when I have something major that needs to be done (new contact lenses and car repairs come to mind), I basically have to wait a month to do each thing: I earn just enough money to pay my bills and have a little left over for shopping and discretionary expenses. I've got to get contact lenses, but to do that, I have to wait for my mid-June direct deposit. After that, I've got to worry about getting my car's air conditioner checked: the A/C currently blows only warm air. Not good for a sweaty guy like me, dressed in a long-sleeve shirt, long pants, and a necktie that closes off any possibility of intra-shirtical aeration. (I drive with the windows open these days, but as the weather becomes hotter and more humid, even this solution will be problematic at best.)

So at the earliest, I won't be taking the GRE until sometime in July. That gives me only one shot at scoring in the 99th percentile on the current version of the test. After that, and assuming I fail to make the grade on the first try, I'll need to recalibrate myself and attack the Revised GRE. Luckily, I've given myself no fixed time frame for a switchover to Manhattan GRE, which takes some of the pressure off. After all, I need to prepare myself for the possibility that, even after five tries (you can take the GRE a maximum of five times per year), I still might not have scored in the 99th percentile.

Wish me luck as I begin studying. Here goes nothing.


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training

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, I'm involved in 3-hour training sessions. Blogging will be light until Thursday.


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results of official weigh-in

Here.


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my brother's finger

My brother Sean, a professional cellist, sliced one of his pinky fingers open two days ago. I learned of this through a text message he sent yesterday. He had to go to the ER, where he received seven stitches and was told to keep the finger dry during showers, etc. The finger-slicing occurred while Sean was washing dishes: his hand was inside a glass when, for whatever reason, the glass decided to break. The pinky was cut deeply-- deeply enough to cause some major bleeding. At that point, Sean wasn't sure whether the cut had reached bone.

The docs told Sean not to worry: the cut was merely a flesh wound; no bone or tendon had been affected. Sean also noted that, from a cellist's point of view, this was the best possible finger to injure: the pinky of his bowing hand. The incident occurred on Friday; Sean had two gigs on Saturday, which I assume he performed successfully. He told me that he spent much of Friday feeling nauseous because of how horrible the wound looked and how badly it had been bleeding. (I'm the sort of person who reacts with clinical fascination to his own injuries, so I find such nausea hard to relate to.)

Sean gets his stitches out in a little more than a week. After that, he'll probably have to make sure the finger heals properly, in a way that doesn't produce too much tightness. All in all, this accident could have been a lot worse. I'm glad he's OK.


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reply

For those who read my previous post on JS Allen's very personal account of his childhood, you might want to skip back there again to see the comments he appended today.


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Hermes' neuticles

For those of you who are into scriptural hermeneutics, I'd highly recommend Dr. Horace Jeffery Hodges's blog, Gypsy Scholar (see this post for a recent example of what I'm talking about). I never studied biblical languages myself (my ability to sound out Greek text doesn't count as knowing any Greek), so despite my fascination with the topic, I have nothing to contribute and can do little more than spectate. But I know some of my readers are more into hermeneutics than I am. If you, Dear Reader, are among that number and you haven't visited Jeff's blog, please do so. You won't regret it.


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become your own power source

This PhysOrg article talks about a tiny turbine that can be installed inside a blood vessel only millimeters wide, providing enough electricity for a patient to be able to power his or her own implanted medical devices. Incredible.


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are you prepared?

Are you prepared to celebrate Marissa Parks Day? It's today.


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fascinating, strange, and wonderful

A truly gripping post at Lower Wisdom. The opener:

This post is more personal than normal, and very long. The current medical consensus is that autism is caused, in part, by a malfunction of the mirror neuron system. My personal experience growing up tends to support this theory.

I was born with an over-active empathy system. I would look at a person’s face and feel exactly what that person was feeling. I couldn’t inhibit it, so I was at the mercy of wherever my eyes landed. This was very stressful, and I spent a great deal of effort learning to avoid these involuntary empathies. I have many distinct memories of this learning process. For a young person, the easiest way to control my feelings was to control my eyes. I only looked at faces I could trust, and avoided the rest. Looking at faces was dangerous.

We grew up without a television. It was only when I was 16 that my mother explained why. When I was two years old, my parents had a TV. Apparently, some of the people on the TV would set me off, causing me to freak out inconsolably. My parents solved the problem by getting rid of the TV.

You'll definitely want to read the rest. To be honest, I might have been-- at least in my younger days-- one of those narcissistic teachers (referred to later in the post) who would have assumed that such behavior was directed personally at me. I'd like to think that I've changed, but I've never faced this sort of challenge as a teacher-- although I did come close re: a girl with Asperger's back in 2005, during my first or second semester at Sookdae. In that case, I didn't take the student's behavior personally, but I was initially surprised by it, having never dealt with it before.

My question to Mr. Allen, though, is whether he believes his empathic experiences truly reflect the interiority of the people whose faces he has beheld (and still beholds, since he seems able to switch his ability on and off). I ask, first, because plenty of Koreans consider themselves gifted with nunchi-- a sort of socially oriented percipience that's all about reading faces and situations, and responding to them accordingly. I tend to think that the proportion of nunchi-blessed Koreans isn't as high as Koreans think it is. What's really happening, in many cases, isn't veridical perception so much as a "reading into." This is most apparent in intercultural situations, where Koreans think they know what the foreigner is thinking, but in fact are off the mark-- sometimes by a substantial margin.

I also wonder about this ability because of what Mr. Allen writes later in his post: he recalls feeling empathy for cartoon characters. To me-- and I truly mean no offense by this, because I'm trying to be as clinical as I can, here-- this indicates an inability (during Mr. Allen's childhood, but not now) to separate reality from fantasy, and calls into question whether a person can really "look at a person's face and feel exactly what that person [is] feeling."

I'm not discounting the possibility of such empathy; in fact, at the risk of sounding condescending, I think it is possible to be super-empathic. It would be inconsistent of me to write a post about how the similarities of our internal wiring point to the idea that we experience the world in very similar ways, and then to turn around and question whether super-empathy is possible.

But the question remains, and I ask it out of personal curiosity: to what extent does such a level of empathy lead to veridical insights about others' interiority?


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