Dreams of Borges

I had been laying with Ripley in bed, dozing after putting her to sleep, when I began a bizarre, Borges-esque dream.

In this dream, I was a sort of law enforcement agent, trying to catch a criminal. A group of us were undercover in a fancy Victorian mansion, with ornate and dark mauve walls. We had earpieces that kept us in touch with a central intelligence team that informed us of our target's every moves. We were told that it was time to apprehend the criminal, who happened to be monitoring us as well. We tracked him to another room, which we entered through a hidden, windowless hallway that did not exist in the architectural plans of the house. This hallway had multiple identical doors and was highly disorienting, as it was symmetrical, as a house of mirrors is. Entering in through a door, I found myself in a carbon copy room as the previous one; the same furniture, the same outlets, identical down to the most minute of details... though each was subtly different to the senses.

Suddenly, the criminal burst from a door into view, and I began pursuit after him. In the fervor of the chase, I followed him through other doors in yet other hallways, at times losing sight of him behind a closing door as we passed through multiple identical rooms and multiple symmetrical hallways, until I became hopelessly lost and alone.

At that point, I came to the realization that these halls were gateways to alternate dimensions, identical in nearly every way to my original one. And I had not kept track of which doors and how many I had gone through, even though the return path had not changed and was theoretically retraceable. However, I had gone through too many doors, and the number of possible return paths grew exponentially, such that it was a statistical near-impossibility that I would ever find my way home. In these alternate universes, I was fated to travel down a path different from the original one I was on.

Upon leaving the mansion, I suddenly realized that my fleeting memories as an infant were recollections of this very place, and that I had traversed between alternate dimensions many times in my youth. Somehow, symmetrically, when people made a dimensional jump, so did their dopplegangers, and paradox would never arise. The individuals who crossed dimensions had the subconscious knowledge that they did not belong in this world, but could never precisely pinpoint why that was.

Year of the Totoro (トトロの年)

My parents introduced Tonari no Totoro, or [となりのトトロ], to my daughter last summer while we were in L.A. for a vacation and wedding. She was just over 1.5 years old. We were in a Sanrio goods store in [San Gabriel Valley Square], and there were a bunch of large character pillows for sale; one of them was a big gray Totoro. It had two ears sticking out of it that I wiggled in her face, causing her to beam and squeal. My parents bought her that pillow, and she's used it to sleep on ever since. That, and her green fleece blanket, are her sources of security at night after we've tucked her in and covered her cheeks with kisses.

Shortly after our LA trip, after we had returned home to Pennsylvania, I obtained the Disney release of [となりのトトロ], with Dakota & Ellie Fanning playing Satsuki and Mei. It was the first movie she ever sat through in full concentration, a record at over 1 hour, 30 min. We must have watched it dozens of times already. She was just learning words at the time, and would call for it by name. Over the months, her pronunciation of Totoro has changed from "To-Ho-Ho", to "To-ah-Do", to its current version: "To-To-Wo". I wonder if my in-laws are the ones responsible for her Brooklyn accent.

We threw a Totoro-themed party for her 2nd birthday this past December, complete with soot gremlin cupcakes, blue Totoro cupcakes, and a small Totoro scene on top of a carrot cake. We used fondant icing and food coloring to sculpt the figurines the night before. When we brought it out of the fridge, one kid yelled out, "It looks like DisneyWorld!" None of them had had any exposure to Totoro.

I obtained the Totoro soundtrack to play while we were driving, for those stretches when she became impatient with sitting in her car seat. She would request certain musics by name. She used to ask for "To-ah-Do shewbick" (music), and only recently it became more understandable to others. One day out of the blue she said "music" in perfect pronunciation. I turned around and asked her, "Music? What happened to shewbick?!" and she laughed, and laughed...

Conversation With a Fifth-Grader

So an old friend of mine turned schoolteacher (Rosa; see the art gallery) asked me to speak to one of her students today, for a class assignment. The student was supposed to interview someone who held a job that he aspired towards. He wanted to be a neurosurgeon, but I was the best that his teacher could get for him (a neurologist and hopeful scientist). Funny how I just was in the same position getting career advice from a successful physician-scientist yesterday; I'm still a risky investment.

So I call my friend up, who extracts the kid from the current lesson. My friend puts him on the phone. His first quesion was: "What's the hardest thing about your job?" And I think about it a bit, then try to frame it for him, by talking about what neurologists and researchers typically do. Then I answer the question from the clinical angle (EVERYTHING is a struggle on the research side): "Generally, the disconnect between patients' expectations and what modern medicine can really provide." Then I launch into this diatribe, explaining about people's perceptions of medicine as (mis-) shaped by the media, etc. Throughout all this was just silence on the other end. Two minutes later, after I've finished, the kid says hesitantly, "So what did you say after the part about patient expectations?" And me, after a pause: "...Um, that modern medicine doesn't sometimes meet them."

As the interview went on, I got the strong sense that this kid was really concrete in his thinking. It turns out he was a fifth grader, I had thought that my friend taught high school students, and forgot that she was an elementary school teacher. Apparently he was making some confused expressions on the other end of the line. He must have thought I was some sort of crazy kook.

Python-Powered Site Revision

OK, it's been over 4 years since the last update. I must have lost all of my fans within that time, haha! That's OK. Well, I had been updating offline on the ol' hard drive... not with any content or news entries, but the website infrastructure. The challenge of web design is as enjoyable to me as the finished site itself.

Anyway, I had learned some PHP and had an offline LAMP setup on my Windows machine a couple of years ago, but things got busy and I've since forgotten PHP. Never really had a chunk of time to learn it again. This learning and forgetting business is a real problem when I code so infrequently.

I became a Mac convert over the past year, and with it, started to play around with Python as it came pre-installed on OS X Leopard. I'm a fairly good Matlab programmer, and Python seemed Matlab-like, so it was probably less of an adjustment to learn Python than PHP. Eventually I got to playing around with Django, the Rails-like web development platform for Python, and I was hooked. This current site revision is the result of that. A lot of links aren't working, but the website is being driven by a much more powerful and elegant backend. It'll take me some time to get the site in a mature state, with all links working. Maybe never, knowing me!

You can probably expect more frequent news entries, since Django makes the data input ridiculously easy and generates the bulk of the XHTML dynamically from templates. On the other hand, I will likely risk boring you to tears with minutiae about my life and opinions. For now, I hope you enjoy what you see so far. The prior pages were stylistically quite dated!