Forgotten Stories

Sometimes I have an overwhelming urge to tell someone once close to me a story, a thought that I think they would enjoy hearing. Only, the relationship is such that I can no longer discuss these sorts of things with them. These sorts of thoughts sit like so many letters addressed to a man who has long since passed... urges that are never meant to be satisfied. At times, indirect methods are employed, such as sending art, poetry, music, or stories which mirror your own, in an unconscious attempt to activate the same desired patterns in their mind, while remaining innocent and blameless. Relations with that person may be kept on a cordial level, or may even be nonexistent, yet if one listens closely through the careful restraint, a glimmer of the underlying bond that once existed sparkles through like a diamond in the rough.

Mail-Order Degrees

I was in Los Angeles for a short vacation in October. I forgot how smoggy the city is. The days were very hazy, and the sunrises and sunsets took on a surreal orange hue.

My dad drove me around the old neighborhood while I was home. I hadn't been here for over a year, and many things have changed. I saw the old school that I spent part of my 3rd grade in, students practicing afterschool sports in a high school we used to play tennis matches against, and other places where I used to hang out as a teenager. It seemed like an eternity since then, and the memory brought back intense feelings of nostalgia. I wonder why nostalgia feels sad, reminiscent of something irrecoverably lost.

While I was at home, I received my Caltech diploma through the mail. Another mail-order degree... my Duke diploma was mailed to me last year. The reason why it came in the mail in the year 2001 (rather than 1996) is that I had lost the original one, and requested a duplicate; it was sent to me a year after my request had been made. The only thing that is a little disappointing is that the Caltech presidents have changed since my graduation, and the new president's signature graced my mail-order diploma. The current Caltech president (David Baltimore) is arguably more prestigious, since he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. However, because of that signature, I know I would get a nagging sense of inauthenticity when I look at my diploma, like listening to the beating of a tell-tale heart...

I met an old high school friend up in Boston this past weekend. It was great to catch up with him, we talked at length about the meaninglessness of life and our individual wanderings through its labyrinth. I bought him a book I thought he might enjoy. He treated me to the most expensive meal I've ever had in my life, at a fancy French restaurant. (Only a month prior in L.A. had a common friend of ours treated me to what is now the second-most expensive meal in my life, at a sushi place in an unassuming strip mall... possibly the best sushi I've ever had.)

Boston is superficially a very nice city in terms of architecture, affluence, and intelligence, but I can't stand the cold weather and the pretense. Give me the energy and urban edge of NYC, the blatant hedonism and cultural wasteland of sun-drenched LA, or better yet, the contrast of ancient Japanese tradition, western capitalism, and underground fetishes in the technological megalopolis and crush of humanity that is Tokyo.

The World Trade Center Incident

Forgive my overwhelming laziness, for I haven't updated in a while. Maybe it's because I lead a boring life.

Although I try not to let the real world intrude on my private pages, one thing that deserves mention is the World Trade Center tragedy. Seeing the towers fall, knowing that so many people were trapped inside terrified and dying, was one of the most gut-wrenching experiences I've felt. On a more abstract level, it was probably the most prominent skyscraper in the US (next to the Empire State Building)... gone in a wink. A symbol of American prosperity, the destruction of which wounded the spirit of its nation. It was profoundly saddening.

I've never understood the passions that have ignited a war, but a glimmer of it surfaced in my mind on that day. I wonder if only religious conviction could have caused such a tragedy. The fact that the enemy feels that they are waging a holy war, with their God behind them, is frightening. That sort of thinking can lead men to hijack civilian planes and turn them into kamikaze missiles. I've never believed in a God, and while religious fervor is rather repugnant to me, it hasn't really played a role in making me a nonbeliever. However, it certainly doesn't plead its case.

Forgive me for writing the above, because I used a public tragedy to preach a private point of view, which is insensitive and which no one really cares about anyway.

In other news, I'm officially a neurologist. And I'm enjoying thinking about brains. I'm working at Pennsylvania Hospital, the oldest hospital in America, this month. It is 250 years old. Parts of it look like a museum. It is UPenn's affiliated community hospital, which is slower-paced and has less interesting cases... but still an improvement over internal medicine, in my opinion.

Before I started neurology, I went to California in June... to visit Chris and Ruth on their wedding day, in Sacramento. The bay area was beautiful. I drove through wine country and across the Golden Gate bridge to San Francisco, in a small rental car, bossa nova jazz blaring away. The views of the bay, of Sausalito and San Francisco, were breathtaking. There is so much beauty on Earth, it can be startling to the point of tears.

I spent my day off today reading poetry on a park bench, in Rittenhouse Square. I've discovered Pablo Neruda, a poet of truly extraordinary power. Some of his poems are in the [Books & Music] section now. I also bought All the Names by Saramago. I am looking forward to reading it, though it will be hard to top Ricardo Reis.

"Flash"ed Audio

I added a small music player to the [Books & Music] section!! Designed from the ground up by yours truly, with Macromedia Flash 4.0. I've tested it on MSIE 5.01 and Netscape Communicator 4.7 on a Win98 Platform.

The assortment of songs is pretty random... most are pieces from the CDs I mention on the music section of the page, but there are a couple that are from different sources. Any requests for specific player features, or any song requests?

Space Aliens

I recently read [The Man Who Fell to Earth] by [Walter Tevis]. It is a SciFi novel about a humanoid alien who comes to Earth to save his own people, but during his stay he gets effectively persecuted and crucified. The novel really conveyed a sense of loneliness and alienation. The book blurred the line between science fiction and literature. I think there was a film version of this in the '70's, starring David Bowie.

Have you ever thought about space aliens? I once read an argument by a physicist that went like this: given the average length of time that it takes to develop intelligent life (using the evolution of intelligence here on Earth as "average") and broadcast a "message", the average lifespan of a species (a million years or so), and the number of possibly hospitable planets, it is likely that if there were ever multiple intelligent lifeforms out there, they've probably missed each other. We've only been listening and broadcasting on frequencies strong enough to penetrate deep space for less than 100 years. Our message hasn't even made it out of our own galaxy yet! (The Milky Way is 1000 light years thick and 100,000 light years across.)

Let's suppose a message from one alien race reaches another and efforts are made to visit. Wouldn't that suck if you embarked on a journey at relativistic speeds to make first contact, and en route you find out that their sun had gone supernova?

Sure, the concept of "species" is pretty nebulous; maybe we would evolve into another species that'd live another million years (let's hope it's not a dumb one). And maybe in the future wormholes could be harnessed for faster-than-light interstellar travel... yeah right. I just wanted to communicate the magnitude of the problem.

What's the Point

I just had my last call night for intern year. It wasn't too bad... actually it was a fairly easy night. Only one moderately sick guy, that a nervous nurse kept paging me about. One more year of in-house call, then afterwards I never have to spend the night in the hospital again... unless I'm the one who's dying.

I was bored, as usual, and started searching the web for things called "blogs" or weblogs. They're personal journals that people maintain on the web. Kind of like this site. It was depressing. Each page was poetic, witty, or bitingly sarcastic. Most of them were overdone. In their own way, each person appeared to be a genius when you read their unopposed words on a static page.

I can't say that these pages are any less cliché. I vaguely realized how little people really cared. To be fair, there have been strangers who've contacted me through these pages, with friendly messages and encouragement. That always left me with mixed feelings... pride and embarrassment at how infantile I knew this gig really was. I never responded to them. I'm not sure what I'm looking for in the maintenance of these pages.

Bonked with a Frying Pan

I spoke to an old high school friend (FJX) about a week ago, reliving some entertaining events that occurred when we were younger. One particular story involved the parents of a common friend who is getting married soon. It was about his mother knocking his father out with a frying pan during an argument. I'm actually going to the wedding. I'd tell you the guy's name, but he might get pissed off about the frying pan thing.

Anyway, I was originally invited only to the reception, but since I was flying across the country for the event and was staying only for one weekend, I weaseled my way into seeing the ceremony as well (the groom figured it wouldn't have interested many people outside the immediate family). It's going to be Chinese-style, with the groom and bride going to each other's houses and paying their respects to the parents in a sort of tea ceremony. At least that's what I think will happen; I've only been to one other semi-traditional Chinese wedding. The groom wasn't too sure how it was done either. We asian-american kids generally just listen to our parents when it comes to things like this.

I may have been hasty when I spoke about Murakami in the last editorial. I just read one of his books, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and it was great! Very haunting book, it leaves one feeling a little unsettled. I can see it really hitting the psyches of middle-aged men. There should be an excerpt in the [Books & Music] section now.

I've been having an easy time recently with work; I even took a week to go to the American Academy of Neurology's Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. It sort of rekindled an interest in neurology and neuroscience. I guess you need this occasionally, when real-world medicine has been battering you to the ground. I bought a couple of texts, one on clinical stroke and the other on basic neuroscience. The latter has little practical value in day-to-day medicine, but ultimately it's more fun to think about.

I've been reading more novels in the meantime too. I've recently finished two books by Haruki Murakami, called Norwegian Wood and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I can't say that they were the most meaningful books I've ever read, but they were original and entertaining. The former was about a college kid in Japan and his tragic first love, a girl who gets progressively withdrawn after the death of a common friend. The second one is about a man who loses his wife, and in trying to recover her, he uncovers a world of political espionage, psychic prostitutes, and disturbing chronicles of Japan's invasion of China during WWII. They had a distinctly asian feel to them; this was a little nostalgic for me, because I feel anything but in touch with my culture these days. And I'm not even Japanese!

I've also gotten back to reading some SciFi, which was the genre I had read originally as a kid. SciFi is very entertaining reading; it stimulates both the intellect and imagination, and sometimes has great social commentary.

Lastly, I finally got a selection of Fernando Pessoa's poetry. I had been waiting to get it for some time, ever since I read Ricardo Reis (who was a heteronym of Pessoa). You'll probably see some of the selections in the [Books & Music] section shortly.

I'm moving in late June, after intern year. I got real tired of living in my >200 square foot apartment, despite the cheap rent. Believe it or not, this is my sixth move in six years! I'm not leaving the address online for security reasons. It's safer to be on the paranoid side. Should you need it, send me an email inquiry!

I'm going to get another pet rat when I move into the new apartment. I was thinking of getting another Sprague-Dawley lab rat. They're basically inbred clones of one another, and you can order them from labs all over the world. I was going to call him Wiggin again, but for some reason that idea wasn't very well-received amongst my close friends.

"Steve" Marley

Happy Mother's Day!

This is an old story but nothing interesting has been happening recently, so I thought I'd relate it now. Several months ago during the wintertime, Jamie and I went to NYC on a free weekend to visit my brother and his gf at the time. We went to a jazz club (Sweet Basil), and then afterwards to a hip-hop, rap, and R&B club (The 101 Club) across the street. There were these talented live performers / comedians there that night. They audience was singing along to the good old songs from the 80's and 90's, which they played remarkably well. All this was interspersed with great comedy and audience participation. We were lucky and got seats relatively close to the stage.

During one act, the M.C. began affecting a Jamaican accent. This was the segway into the reggae portion of the act, and the band played a Bob Marley song. Afterwards, the M.C. looked out into the audience and said there was a special guest, the cousin of Bob Marley, present. All of a sudden the guy pointed straight at me and said, "DERE HE EES! Bob Marley's cousin!!"

Immediately a light was trained on me, and crazy music and drums boomed. "Come on up, Bob Marley's cousin!" the M.C. shouted. The crowd laughed and cheered. Knowing that I didn't really have a choice, I stood up, made my way through a narrow passageway that had cleared in the crowd, and walked onto the small stage, all the while sporting this ridiculous grin on my face. The M.C. asked for my name, and I lamely said "Steve". Maybe he was expecting "Wang", or "Lee", or "Chan". "STEVE MARLEY! Steve Marley, ledeez and gentlemen!" I looked through the bright stagelights and dimly saw my brother and our gfs cheering me on; at that moment his gf screamed, "PASS HIM THE MIKE!" Everyone started laughing. Eventually the M.C. said, "What do you tink about 'aving Steve Marley 'ere seeng a couple of Bob's songs?" The audience went nuts. Before I knew it, a couple of bandmembers behind me grabbed my jacket, peeled it off, and began playing "No Woman, No Cry". The M.C. sang the first few phrases (lucky for me, since I only knew the title lyrics).

Then he passed the mike to me when it came time to sing the chorus. Having gone this far, I gave it my best shot. I closed my eyes, put an exaggerated effort into the performance, and bellowed out the words, "No woman, no cry... NO WOMAN, NO CRY!!" Over and over again, in a bad Jamaican accent. I even started swaying my hips and bobbing my head. Here was this asian geek attempting to be a hip Rastafarian, like a modern-day Long Duck Dong from the movie Sixteen Candles, or like the chinese kid from the movie The Goonies. I thought, what the heck? The audience response was overwhelming. They joined in the singing and were cheering me on; women were screaming and clapping, guys were pumping their arms above their heads--it was like nothing I had ever felt in my life. It only made me make more of a spectacle of myself.

At the end of the song, there was a big musical crescendo. The M.C. indicated for me to follow his lead, which was a big jump targeted right at the finale. Like a klutz, I missed the first one; they did a retake, with the music timed to my jump rather than vice versa. When my feet hit the ground the audience went absolutely wild. "Ow 'bout a beeg 'and for Steve Marley!" While I was getting my jacket amidst the applause, a couple of girls ran up to me shrieking with laughter... I couldn't hear what they were saying but it was either "You were great!" or "How about a date!" (I like to fancy that it was the latter.) I just said, "Uh, thanks!"

I was suddenly very glad to have practiced karaoke in the past. What a night.

Architecture, Literature, and Web Design

Happy Chinese New Year! (I haven't updated since last year and I had to shout it out even though I'm nearly 2 months late.)

I'm in the process of making semi-major revisions to the pages. Optimizing my code, adding more flashy DHTML, and making the pages more cross-browser compatible (which turns out to be the biggest headache if you're anal like me). The work behind the scenes is quite substantial, just for the sake of consistency.

I added heirarchical menus on the left, a sitemap above, and a few new pages. I updated the "links" section. Although technically jazzed up, there is still no meaning nor contribution to society here; these pages were framed solely by vanity and boredom.

I've been reading quite a bit of literature lately. A great read is The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, by José Saramago. Such a wonderful, lonely tale about a man who wanders the streets of Lisbon in his last year of life who is visited by the ghost of a dead poet. Reis is a doctor by day, a lonely poet by night. I really love sad stories. If you stumble across my peurile column, Dr. Saramago, my thanks, I wish there were more works like this one in the world. Another author who has been intriguing me lately is Yasunari Kawabata. His books read like delicate haikus, if I were better at Japanese I might grasp the implications and subtleties which translation does not adequately convey; you kind of know you're in for illuminating second reads with his novels.

I had a short vacation recently so I went to visit a couple of houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in western Pennsylvania: Kentuck Knob (Hagan house) and Fallingwater (Edgar J. Kaufman house). Some pictures from postcards are in the random image display at the top of this page. I never thought much of Fallingwater from pictures, but actually walking the grounds and seeing the house is much more impressive. If you're in the area and have only the slightest interest in architecture, it's a very worthwhile weekend excursion.

Medicine is the same as ever. My life hasn't changed.