Bucket List

By bucket list, I mean... things that I want to do when I'm retired. What I have in mind would require a significant amount of time, therefore I dont think they can be achieved on a simple vacation.

1) Truffled cheese tour

LOOK AT THIS!!!! Originally, I thought this tour would only take me to Europe, chiefly France and Italy, but this delectable item is a hot dog from HOT DOUG's in Chicago!!! (Port Wine and Confit Duck Sausage with Truffle Sauce Moutarde and White Truffle Cheese) Luckily for me, I am going to Chicago a few times in the coming months, so I will have to cross this one off my list. Oh my god, it looks incredible.

2) Chile beer tour

I love Billy's chilies. It is one of my favorite beers! Luckily for me, my bf's bro remembered my love for chile beer and brought me one from New Mexico! It is Rio Grand Pancho Verde chile cerveza! It is quite lovely and was actually the inspiration for this chile beer tour idea. Damn, this stuff is good! In all likelihood, this will be a US heavy tour, generally in the SW I imagine. No reason not to get started on this one right away, I guess.

3) Frambic/Sour Tour

YUM! I am lucky enough to live in Boulder, CO which has quite a beer snob population. Thusly, I was introduced to sour beers! Of course, I had happily consumed lambics before in WI (including some deletable fruit beers from New Glarus), but here I discovered the true sour. I imagine this quest will take me around the US and then to Belgium... home to those old breweries where the cultures literally inhabit the rafters... le sigh. I've had the one on the left side of the picture, Duchess, and she is delicious.

Less is More?

MANY of you may have seen the opinion piece in NYTimes recently, "The Joy of Less." I had wanted to comment on it when I first read it, and was reminded of it today when I was on this other site Three At Sea. (They actually call it Three@Sea, but I refuse to support that because the @ is WAY too tacky, and the people used to be in computers and stuff and well... Not hip, guys.) Anyway, its about a family who used to live in Boulder, but sold their house and most of their stuff and bought a boat and are planning on traveling around the world during their daughter's middle school years. THE POINT BEING: That these people have bucked the status quo and are living their own way somehow, with the lack of many material possessions (although they remain entirely wired to the rest of the world).

All of this sort of jives with the whole grad student lifestyle. I am poor, live in a small apt, no longer watch tv, and because of my whole environmentalist leanings, am also disdainful of the consumerist society we live in. That said... I have a lot of stuff. But I figure I may need some of it some day, so I have to keep it, because otherwise I would be feeding the consumerist beast, right? My life is less about the pursuit of things and more about the nurturing of the BRAIN. This is true with what I actually do for money, and for what I do in my spare time. Also, the pursuit of the body is in there somewhere, cuz I live in Boulder, and we are all fit and beautiful here. You could say this is also a mind-pursuit of sorts, as theres all sorts of thinking and refreshing you can do while youre working out, if youre not plugged in, which I rarely am.

Anyway, I am not so sure about the pursuit of happiness part being entrenched in these drastic lifestyle changes. It is true that hectic lives make people crazy. And that a more moment-to-moment life, like that achieved on a boat (OR being a forager/hunter/gatherer, my personal favorite escapist fantasy), where you have to be paying attention to your surroundings in order to live, seems more fulfilling than doing some drivel that you find meaningless. However, I am unsure about the necessity to buck the yolk of society in order to obtain happiness. I agree it is probably not found in things. Maybe too often people associate the obtainment of things with a typical American life, but maybe you can do the normal things like have a regular job and not be obsessed with the pursuit of things, and whatever happiness can be obtained that way. There are just a lot of people who seem to think something drastic needs to be done with their actual life situation in order to be happy, but maybe it is just the internal adjustment, which often accompanies that outward change, that is truly the key.

Or...

Is this how people talk themselves into settling down for a common life?

Eh heh.

Sorry I am so lazy. :-/

I read "Into the Wild." If I ever get the ambition, I will write about it. Talk about escapist fantasies, man.

In the sciencey bits, I am reading about CML, which is some sort of leukemia, and I can't remember what the other letters stand for, but it results from a chromosomal translocation that fuses two genes together (called the Philadelphia Chromosome, I remember that much). This sort of thing usually happens from RADIATION EXPOSURE. Anyway, this particular fusion results in a constitutively active kinase, which basically means that the gene has been truncated by the fusion, and it used to be self-inhibited, and now it is active all the time, turning all sorts of shit on, like a naughty toddler or something.

And suddenly, I am distracted by The Beatles "Something" that is playing right now, because I am all sentimental lately. Something of an honest confusing love song. (I do not suggest watching the video, it takes away from the lyrics, I think)

ANYWAYS. Um, so theres this kinase running amuck, that is normally involved in regulating the cell cycle and inhibiting the apoptotic pathway (which leads to CELL DEATH) upon DNA damage (that might occur upon radiation exposure). So you see, the kinase normally is involved in killing off sick cells that have DNA damage and may turn cancerous. When it is doing things wrongly, the cells don't die, and they proliferate uncontrollably, and in this case, you get all sorts of crazy unnecessary blood cells being made in the bone marrow, and I'm not really sure of the mechanism, but it eventually leads to death.

SOOOOOO, this is a success story, because someone figured, Dude, let's just inhibit the kinase. And they were able to develop/find a specific enough inhibitor that you are just inhibiting this particular kinase and not all the other ones that have to do other normal things. BTW, kinases are responsible for putting a phosphate group on particular amino acids on proteins. (I really am so out of touch with what terms laymen know, so this probably makes no sense to anyone outside the field. But oh well, thats what Wikipedia is for.) So, they actually have a super awesome, specific drug for this form of cancer. Honestly, if you were to get a cancer, I would choose this one. Cancers are a**-scary, but its nice that this one makes so much sense.

IN ANY CASE, one of the people involved in this whole saga, Jean Wang, is coming to give a talk next week and that is why I'm learning about sh*t, because I have to, because I'm on a training grant and this is what is expected of me. But it's pretty cool.

In other news, my car developed a nasty brake fluid leak and I think I am getting ripped off by the car mechanic man, but there is not much I can do about that now.

In some even more remote news, that is related to escapist fantasies, I am daydreaming about flying away to Munich, because it is less than $400 to get there, see. But this whole paying for expensive car repairs thing is not very conducive to that sort of thing. Ah well.

I might also mention that citing so many wikipedia articles is bad form for a scientist, but honestly, we all look at wikipedia. YOU MUST TRUST IN YOUR FELLOW MAN.

Oaxaca?

I read an article about Oaxaca and now I want to go there. Chocolate and archaeology?! Huevos oaxaqueños and adorable Mexicans making adorable crafts, living a lifestyle that I desire in my purest escapist fantasies?! Oh yeah, and theres a city, or something. Mostly the huevos oaxaquenos though. Holy hell, am I hungry.