A week of contusion...confusion...or was it both?

My dear sweet parietal lobes and I have had a rough week, sort of. As it seems, if you're not very good at skating and you're going at a considerable speed on the ice, and for a brief period you sort of drift and just enjoy the gliding and forget to concentrate on leaning forward, chances are that your head will have a very nasty confrontation with the ice. This might result in a few moments of pure synesthesia (it was nice to see the sounds around me in bright red and yellow spirals of color that were intertwined with a very black background, all this with my eyes closed), then 15 minutes of blackout, followed by a huge bump on the head and 85 euro for a 3 minute doctor consultation and a week of only being able to sleep, take pills and eat.

I was lucky enough that the three friends I was with, really took care of me. Two of them, with whom I also live, took turns to wake me from 2 to 2 hours the night after the contusion, so I wouldn't slip into a coma. Therefore I really owe them one, or two, or a couple of big favors :).

Now, for those of you who are better at the skating part than I am, remember: a helmet cannot hurt, but not having one can hurt a lot.

This week made me realize, again, how fascinating the human brain is and how cool it is to study it's inner-workings right at the point of damage, for lack of a better word. Reassured that my word processing abilities are not damaged, I am waiting to test my math skills as well, and I will test them starting tomorrow. With or without contusions, assignments still have deadlines, and these may be postponed, but not indefinitely.

While "enjoying" my recovery time, I stumbled across a very interesting parallel between creating music and managing a business or a country (thanks to a musical friend of mine), a different sort of synesthesia, as I like to abuse the term.




There is constant talk about interdisciplinary contexts and sharing information and data bases between and across fields, departments etc. and it's all, as it always is, linked to the mechanism that we are.

Deconstructing Fear

When I was little I could do anything I wanted, the confidence was enormous, there were no boundaries. Then something changed (I blame it on the horror movies I started watching at the age of 5) and I was scared of a lot of things, the scariest of them all was the dark, which later I interpreted as being the unknown.

There is a scene in Oldboy (2003) in which one character wants to avenge his teeth with another teeth pulling session done with a hammer. And he looks at the man who caused him several front teeth to be made from gold now and simulates a "hammer job" on one of his teeth. The future victim screams scared. But the golden teeth man does nothing, laughs and says that people tend to shrivel because of their imagination and if you imagine nothing you'll be fearless.

If we put the two paragraphs together and couple them with the TED speech below, we have a basic recipe for tackling fear, fear of anything: of public speaking, of people on the street, of relationships, of huge exams, of 2012 :)) etc. etc. etc..

The Amazing Human Brain and Humans' Common Network

Maybe less is more

Are we communicating too much? Because these these days, and by that I mean the holiday season, a lot of communication media (pl. from medium = way) become overused resulting in inefficient communication (e.g. messages are delayed, calls don't get through, bad connectivity etc. - this refers to cell phone networks and social networks, but if we think about it, it can certainly be extended to other "aspects" of life).

Anyway, you get the picture: conversations may become cumbersome this year.

The 9th floor, Oasis, cooking, Sweden and Sinterklaas

Hmmm, D. H. Lawrence was right about the marmalade and shredding oranges part ("I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor"). After I vacuumed the hall-way and I cleaned the kitchen and I made myself some poached eggs with tuna, rice and tomatoes, I felt better.

Why did I want to feel better?

Well, because I got a bit of "the blues" myself. A lot has happened these past few months (I meat a lot of musicians, I went to Denmark and Sweden and Germany in a flash trip, I acquainted myself to Sinterklaas - the Dutch version of the Romanian Sf. Nicolae - at his huge parade, I finally figured out what I want to research this year, I've been through a week of hell (class-wise), and I started getting used to the constant rain here...I repeat I started, I'm not fully used to it yet).

Although Malmo in Sweden really relaxed me, although the concerts at Prins Claus Conservatorium were a delight, although the Sinterklaas parade was awesome, although I'm very excited about what I want to research, although I made a looooot of friends here, although I am not that home sick, because Groningen is "crawling" with Romanian students :)) and I see Jeremiah on Skype all the time, although I have an amazing housemate from Romania who takes care of me from time to time :), although I have the distinct feeling that time actually past slower since I came to the Netherlands, well, I still "got the blues thinking about the future".

I think it all started when I my advisor asked me if I wanted to apply for a PhD program and after I spent a whole afternoon on the peaceful 9th floor of my university building. The windows there are round, like a submarine's windows, if a the submarine were at the Nemo ride in Disneyland, CA. Although there were 8 floors beneath my feet and the scenery from above had a certain charm to it, the distinct feeling of sinking surrounded me, and that's when "the blues" started and it's been lingering since.

I hope Oasis will get me into a state of "the blues" that will shock me out of "the blues", an over-dosage of "the blues" so to speak :) (like Seinfeld said talking about cough medicine: Figure out what will kill me, and then back it up a bit.)

For all of us I hope the winter cheer will be near this year :).

Harvie, Ryan and the Badger

In the south of the Netherlands

After traveling through the whole country - in about 4 hours - we managed to reach Maastricht. Maastricht is in a battle with Nijmegen for the title of the oldest city in the Netherlands. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Maastricht :).

Its cathedrals, tall buildings and clean, narrow streets, it's wall drawings, huge groups of tourists and small water streams under trees and streetlamps are just lovely.

The cities in the Netherlands are very well organized and even an easily-get-lost person like myself can get around. Plus they have delicious food and crunchy ice cream which help with the whole orientation process.

Here's a few pics from Maastricht, the city devided in two by the river Maas: