Emz-the-geographically-variable

I witnessed the end of 2007 with my head in a bidet, violently ejecting colourful fluids out of unspeakable orifices. How disgusting. But having that as a start, 2008 can only get better, and I since I accidentally started the year with a crash diet, losing 3.5 kg in two days, at least I’m on my way to getting in better shape.

 This year I decided to stay in Europe for the holidays instead of returning home to Canada, so my mum joined us in Leiden and after my exams, we all went to Italy to spend some time with the family in Milan and with some friends in the mountains. Milan still gives me the overwhelming impression of grungy greyness punctuated with inordinate numbers of dented European cars, creatively arranged on every imaginable surface, but my mum didn’t seem to mind it too much. It beats the inside of a bidet, anyway, and she managed to avoid our plague. Our flight home last night was about 5 hours late due to several snowflakes, which disturbed the European aviation personnel to an unexpected degree. We were given “light meal refreshment” vouchers for 4.50 euro as compensation or morale support. I asked The Meal Voucher Man what, out of curiosity, was the problem, and he gesticulated italianly at the nearby window and explained about how the incredibly bad weather was gumming up the works. I peered curiously out into the darkness, where a few small flakes were drifting serenely down to land, and melt, on the tarmac. My mum and I exchanged sighs about European concepts of winter, and were overheard and questioned by a couple of Californians. I translated for them too what the man had said, laughing at the pitiful amount of snow, but they looked back at me with very big eyes and said, oh, yes, what terrible weather and it’s sooo cold here! *sigh*

 School, since it has taken up a good part of my life in the past 4 months, probably deserves a paragraph. I have taken two more courses since last report, “Development and Plasticity of the Nervous System” and “ACMA”, whose acronym I have not yet worked out but has something to do with Multivariate Statistics. DPNS was a bit of a monster, involving two full days a week in class, half in lectures and half in labs. The first half involved reading and memorizing vast tracts of a textbook with the approximate density of Uranium, followed by an exam, and then moving to some recently published works on various nervous-system related diseases (Alzheimer’s, Schiz, mental retardation, etc.). (Aside: researchers of cognition are interested in what goes wrong for two reasons: you can find out some interesting things about how things work when they don’t, and because that’s where the pharmaceutical funding comes from and therefore is where most researchers are making headway.) We also cut up some rat brains and examined them in detail, stained some astrocytes and neurons with various things and peered at them, and even had a Brain in a Vat (haha, Dennett, for those of you who have studied philosophy), though in pieces – I held pieces of human brain in my hands! One of my classmates who studied biology previously has actually watched the dissection of a complete cadaver, and another attended a class where he got his own brain to investigate as he saw fit. The cadaver I think is a bit creepy but I wouldn’t mind doing a full brain! Fortunately my fascination with living systems quickly out-competes any kind of natural disgust I might have, so I could probably do the full cadaver. HOWEVER, my fascination with biology and particularly the nervous system has limits, which I found in a lab in Marseille, France. There I was introduced to animal research, and rats with Lego and wires glued into their heads with dental cement, with little screws that can be adjusted to lower electrodes through their brains a little more every day, until finally they are “sacrificed” so that the researchers can determine for certain what tissue they were destroying - blah. Whatever I will eventually be doing, it probably won’t be mutilating little furry beasts.

 Since I’m on the topic of Marseille, what a scum hole! So much for the romantic French Riviera. My first evening out I witness a snatch-and-run mugging, a car accident and ensuing brawl, some shady dealings in a back alley where I overheard a man say to another (in French) something about how they would be stupid to involve the police, and was finally followed a couple of blocks and around a grocery store by a really drugged up woman who didn’t make any sense in any language that I understand. Maybe it was coincidence, but I was not left with a feeling of security and good family values.

And now I am home, and that is all.