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vacation
On Sunday I took the train up to L.A. where I was met by Grant and Michael. Grant is my dear, dear friend from my first two years of grad school who left and moved to Austin with his girlfriend and Michael is his friend from undergrad who lives in L.A. and is also a dear friend. They whisked me away from Union Station to Little Tokyo, where we ate ( Read more... ) -
what i want the therapist to help me with
My father has always teased me for not having any sense of humor about myself. In relationships, I tend not to ask anything from my partners, except to stay with me more or less forever. Whenever I feel inadequate at some task, I feel like it's a sign that I shouldn't be doing it and need to go find something more rigorous, more serious to do ( Read more... ) -
blog city
so a couple weeks ago i decided that i would try to divide my online writing into 3 main blogs: this one, the Buribunk Machine, which is for mainly self-reflection; technomediatrix.wordpress.com, which is about technology and culture, especially that which I find out and about in southern california; and ptsdinthenews.wordpress.com, which is/will ( Read more... ) -
imperatives towards feeling better
I recently realized that I have been doing far too little to utilize the resources on campus. It occurred to me that when I moved here I was so adamant to "have a life" that I chose to live in a more lively San Diego neighborhood rather than grad housing or elsewhere in the cultural pit that is La Jolla, the area around school. But because of this ( Read more... ) -
Fort Hood - PTSD vs. Islam
I've noticed an interesting controversy in the news media/blogosphere regarding the incident at Fort Hood where Nidal Hasan, "a gunman, trained as a psychiatrist," as one New York Times article called him, opened fire on his colleagues. It appears that the army PR folks are offering the line that it was not Hasan's Islamic faith that led him to ( Read more... ) -
veterans day
Today I have been celebrating veterans day/working on my qualifying paper by reading political theorist Jenny Edkins' book Trauma and the Memory of Politics. She argues that traumatic events reveal to us that the social order is a myth, that we, as a society, do not even have language to express the horror experienced by some of our members when ( Read more... ) -
not to jinx it but
Things are looking up ( Read more... ) -
autism and vaccines
Oh! So this is why people think vaccines cause autism. Or at least Dr. Shiv Chopra, "Health Canada whistle blower" and author of Corrupt to the Core:
3. That it is these amino acids which after being absorbed into the blood stream are reconstituted into one's own proteins and it is these proteins which distinguishes every being of existence into ( Read more... ) -
brief update
apologies for the radio silence, but I haven't had much to say recently except "my, that was a lovely party," "that young man was very nice but..." and "omg I don't understand how to pass my quals. I should probably go kill myself." None of which, I'm sure, you want to hear about ( Read more... ) -
problem framing, not problem solving
From Simon Penny, artist, writer, theorist, at UC Irvine's Arts Computation Engineering dept ( Read more... )