This morning I ran for the first time in weeks. I did a slow, one-mile jog before the discomfort in my leg returned and I realized it would be a while longer before I would eagerly await the results of my Nike+ after a challenging tempo run or lose myself in a new neighborhood on the other side of the Charles on a weekly long run. The lack of the daily routine has eroded my discipline: I find myself accepting dinner invitations instead of problem sets, watching documentaries about innovative chefs instead of starting final projects, and reading business magazines in the airport instead of studying for my classes. My bedtimes are later and the no-caffeine experiment already seems like a distant memory. I feel like I will be a different person on the other side of this experience.
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December 10, 2008
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June 20, 2008
What Should I Do With My Life?
I've been asking myself that question a lot lately. In search of answers, I read the book of the same title by Po Bronson. I especially like the book since it doesn't offer any trite answers, only dozens of fascinating interviews that allow you to discover your own lessons. It also has some amazing quotes:
"After college, I worked for a year at an insurance company. I decided to go to Oxford for a year, because, well, it was Oxford. I told the other women at work, and one said, 'I wish I could just up and go to Oxford.' So I asked, 'Why don't you?' She said, 'I would, but I bought a couch.' I always remembered that moment, and I ever wanted to be that woman. I never wanted to be trapped by my belongings, my past, my commitments." - Heidi Olson in "The Boom Wrangler Has Many Reasons to Live"
"The stereotype is that domineering parents push their kids to succeed, killing their children's love for whatever they're studying. But the opposite was far more common - young people who were given too much leeway by parents afraid of being overbearing, when their children really needed help in identifying what was important to them." - Po Bronson in "The Chemical Engineer Who Lacked a Chemical"
"Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever. It is so, so much harder to leave a good thing." -Po Bronson in "A Billion Is Chump Change"
"You want to know where your fears are hiding? Tell me what you know about yourself. Tell me what you can't live without." - Po Bronson in "Where Fears Hide"
I still don't have the answer, but I am not going to buy a couch.
June 18, 2008
My New Favorite Quote
"The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all." - Seth Godin
June 11, 2008
The Fall
The quest for epiphanies continues, despite a nearly two-month hiatus in my blog posts. The transition back to life in New Mexico was more difficult than I expected. However, I can feel mental clarity returning and I plan to post more regularly again.
A couple weeks ago I watched The Fall by Tarsem, which is now my favorite movie. On the surface the film seems totally disconnected from my life, but at a deeper level I noticed several parallels. I highly recommend the movie and would appreciate any thoughts from people who have already seen it.
April 14, 2008
Hero of the Week: Johnny Bunko
During another battle with insomnia, I read about an intriguing career guide, written in the form of manga (Japanese comic), titled "The Adventures of Johnny Bunko." It was written by Daniel Pink, who has served as chief speech writer to Al Gore and as an aide to US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in addition to writing a "trio of provocative books on the changing world of work." I read the whole book in one sitting (or, more literally, standing) at Books Kinokuniya at Ngee Ann City this Sunday. The book had six simple, yet powerful lessons. I highly recommend reading it on your own sometime, but below is my interpretation of the author's main points:
1) There is no plan: I came to Singapore with the vague plan of "spending a year abroad" before starting grad school. As a result, my professor's plan for a research project became dominant. I deeply regret not being open to more options about how to spend my time. In particular, I really wish that I had become a private tutor (possibly in presentation skills), which could have tripled my monthly income and introduced me to many new Singaporeans, outside of lab.
2) Forget about your weaknesses: It's still hard for me to accept my "weakness" of working shorter hours than pretty much else in the group. However, things improved when I focused on my strength of giving effective presentations. After giving a lesson at group meeting about presentation skills, I am now helping edit papers, organize lab cleanings, and revise presentations, in addition to my research duties.
3) Persistence trumps talent: I don't feel like I have much innate talent for science, but I do believe that my persistence has been one of my positive qualities. I see it especially with my running, which can often make me feel like Sisyphus. Numerous times I have trained for months to build up to running a marathon, only to be struck down by a cold or other ailment, and needing to start back at the beginning.
4) It’s not about you: The most enjoyable times in lab have been when I have directly helped others: working with a grad student to improve her group meeting presentation, assisting a post-doc with his plans for a novel type of molecular motor, or using my skills as a native English speaker to help my professor edit various documents.
5) Make excellent mistakes: I'll need the benefit of hindsight to understand my "excellent" mistakes. However, I think this is an awesome piece of career advice.
6) Leave an imprint: As I've mentioned above, there is no way I can compete with the other members in lab in terms of the sheer quantity of experimental results. However, I hope that I can demonstrate some of the non-technical aspects of science that I have learned through various research experiences back in the United States.
April 02, 2008
Fleeing Comfort Zones
The past few weeks I have focused on escaping my comfort zones, through food, sleep (or lack thereof), and actual travel. I didn't always understand what I was doing at the time, but I have a better idea now that it is all over (except for a stubborn cold as a result of the process):
The first related to food. I was getting into a routine of making homemade powerbars for my pre-run snack, homemade granola for my post-run breakfast, and various one-pot stews, soups, and noodle dishes for dinner. I decided to try the opposite and eat as much local food as I could over the three day weekend. My gateway dish was kway chap, basically pig offals. I had a desire to try it out ever since Ruhlman's post about offal on his blog. This created an avalanche that led to yong tou foo (various types of fish paste-veggie combos in broth), various dim sum delicacies, durian juice (most amazing drink ever), soon kueh (a type of dumpling that I struggled to eat with chopsticks), peanut ice kachang (like an upside-down snow cone, but much better), bak kut teh (beef rib in peppery broth), curry noodles from a vegetarian restaurant (a mistake: not outside my comfort zone), soup toulang (a tribute to Bourdain, featuring mutton bone marrow in a nearly-addictive red sauce), and "carrot cake" (more like an omelet than anything from a bakery). After all that, it seems that the less-processed the food the better: durian thrown in a blender was the best, followed by leftover mutton bones in a red sauce, with various manual-labor intensive Chinese dim sum dishes being my least favorite.
The second related to sleep. I nearly always go to bed around 10 pm (+/- 1 hour), so I decided to try staying up all night watching movies at the 24-hour theaters on Orchard. I ended up watching Evangelion, a Japanese movie that made absolutely no sense in my sleep-deprived state. I considered having some chicken rice at the 24-hour Meridian restaurant or taiwan porridge at the 24-hour Goodwood Hotel cafe, but I ended up with the far less expensive option of the Newton food center, which was surprisingly lively at 4 am, where I had the identity-confused omelet.
However, I paid a price for my curiosity, and came down with a cold the next day. This actually didn't bother me too much, since I just found a blog post about various cocktails for treating colds. I attacked my viral invader with the full arsenal of salt water gargles, ginger tea, chamomile tea, nasal rinses, Zycam homeopathic oral mist, Emergen-C, oranges, and so on. Sadly, I am still sick.
The third comfort zone was breached by leaving Singapore for a trip to the Philippines. I visited my friend Emily, who is working as a teacher in Manila. I could easily devote a whole other post to the topic, but I will keep the focus on comfort zones for now. I was struck by how foreigners could move Manila and pretty much feel like they never left home: we visited malls that looked exactly like something out of Southern California and saw luxurious apartments that would fit perfectly in any US city. Moreover, the cost of living is so low, that one can live a five-star lifestyle for the same amount as a middle-class existence in America. However, one of the advantages of having a local guide was being able to see the real Manila. Riding in jeepnies (public taxis made from old US military vehicles), serving kids breakfast in the slums near Paco, going out to a birthday lunch with one of Emily's friend's family at a fast-food restaurant, and taking the light rail trains gave me an invaluable view into how most of the world lives.
Why did I wait until now to post all this? I didn't really understand my Makansutra-inspired, sleep-deprived expedition around the island until I left it temporarily. I am searching for something that I can't get from working 14+ hour days in lab like everyone around me. I can't always travel physically (although many of the American and European exchange students do explore new Southeast Asian beaches every weekend), so I find whatever substitute I can. I listen to podcasts whenever I am on public transport, listen to new music whenever I am doing repetitive tasks in lab, try out new recipes on my own and new food in hawker centers, and explore new routes on my morning runs.
March 21, 2008
Journey Toward Perfection
I recently finished reading The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman (see previous post for more). I was actually so eager to see how it ended that I woke up at 4 am to make it through the final section, "Journey Toward Perfection" about Thomas Keller.
I was fortunate to attend a Mechanobiology "retreat" at NUS. I can't write too much about that, since it was a closed meeting and I was present only due to an e-mail mix-up, but it was quite a thought-provoking experience. For instance, what would be the ideal research institute. Are there parallels with Thomas Keller's utopian vision of the ideal kitchen, as transcribed by Ruhlman?
In his ideal kitchen -- and since he always strives to fulfill ideals, he truly hopes one day to make this happen -- there is no head chef, no sous shef, no brigade. There are only five or six cooks [...] who share similar notions of perfection. Each day they will come into the kitchen and cook, just cook. There will be no plan. They will cook as the are inclined. Each cook, equal with all others, will be utterly free to experiment, to let his or her own individual personality and creativity truly propel him or her. The key element in this scenario is this: shared standard of perfection. [eloquently written examples from the culinary world.] In is ideal kitchen all that effort -- which depletes and enervates you, and yet that can be the main work of the day -- will vanish, and with the shackle gone, he believes, a kitchen could really cook.
That passage really struck me when I considered how much time professors spend dealing with bureaucracies, meetings, and inter-personal problems (e.g. different expectations for research than a student), rather than actually doing experiments. My adviser slept less than four hours a night for the past week due to an overlapping of classes to teach, grant proposals to submit, paperwork to fill out, and so on. It also made me ponder the effect that the personality of the professor can have on the group, a theme that Ruhlman also described:
...one notices the effect of the chef's mind on the staff. As the personality of a powerful CEO of a small company, a school principal, or a theatrical director permeats the entire operation over which that person presides, so a chef's mind and personality permeate a kitchen, determine absolutely not only is standards but also its tone and tenor. The people who work there are succesful in durection proportion to their willingness to embrace, to be infused with, the chef's personality. In a strong chef's kitchen those who resist the personality leave or are fired. The weaker the chef, the more nebulous this dynamic becomes.
Based on my research experience so far, I believe that the same can be said about research labs. I have seen how a grad student who thinks on the same wavelength (to use a physics analogy) as his professor can get several major papers published and move up in the academic world, whereas others with conflicting personalities may switch advisers, even after several years.
I also see similarities between how Thomas Keller sees food and how Prof. Osheroff at Stanford sees his experimental apparatus. To Keller, the key to great cooking is understanding every single step of your recipe and according to Osheroff (and countless other scientists, I'm sure) is understanding every single step in your procedure.
I could continue to elaborate on Ruhlman's observations, but I am worried that this is getting out of control. For instance, a recent post about offals on his blog sparked a craving for kway chap (see photo), which then escalated into a 36-hour exploration of Singaporean's culinary offerings (cuttlefish kangong, yong tau foo, tim sum, bao, ice kachang, and bak kut teh). My stomach is a wreck, but I felt that I got a deeper look into Singapore than provided by the standard shopping mall experience.
March 19, 2008
The Soul of a Chef
I am currently reading The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman. It's another deeply inspiring book by one of my heros. Every chapter of the book offers some unique insight, but the following selection (from Chapter Two in Lola) really grabbed me for concisely capturing an important aspect of the soul of a chef, as experienced by the author:
I couldn't write about people learning to cook with completely engaging myself in the process, as it turned out, that process was more like a force, one that demands not just your attention for eight hours a day but your whole being; learning to cook at that level changed how you behaved and how you perceived the world. I changed.
I learned efficiency of movement to minimize wasted energy and time, and the idea of efficiency of movement extended to intellectual work. I began to value speed of movement more than ever before. Also, precision of movement. Speed without precision is harmful, especially when knives and hot steel and scalding oil are involved. I learned mental flexibility: You can accomplish anything, anything at all, if you set your mind to it. Once must adopt a can-do-anything attitude. You were a professional. You didn't say no, not ever. You didn't complain. You didn't get tired. And you showed up, no matter what. You got there. Nothing but nothing kept you from reaching that kitchen.
You like it this way. You're a chef.
Wow. How does Michael Ruhlman write like that? I spent some time this afternoon trying to find out. In an interview with Adam Rogers (aka The Amateur Gourmet) I discovered the answer:
Amateur Gourmet: How has learning to cook affected your writing and vice-versa? Do you think there's a correlation between the discipline that goes into writing well and the discipline that goes into cooking well?
Ruhman: Yes! An issue near to my heart. I began cooking and writing regularly at the same time 4th-5th grade. They are connected some how--though the connections are difficult to get at. Writing about food forces you to pay very close attention to how the food behaves, and so you become a better cook. I can say that learning how to cook at the CIA changed my writing. Before I learned to cook, I couldn't write a book in four months. But once I'd become a cook, once I realized you didn't ever, ever, say no to a task, I knew that I could. I wrote making of a chef in four months because that's when the money ran out. I knew i could do it because I'd learned how to cook. Writer's block--it's a bunch of hooey, it's an excuse to be lazy. Imagine a cook using that logic. Chef: Ordering! One lamb shank! Line cook: Sorry chef, didn't get to the shank today, had cooking block. So yes, I've learned many things by learning to cook.
So it looks like there was a synergy between the writing and the food. It reminded me of Mark Bittman, who underwent a similar transformation (as described here in January Magazine):
A series of unrelated jobs -- from cab driver to radical community organizer -- saw Bittman move from New York to Massachusetts and back again, with the only connecting thread in his life being the food he increasingly enjoyed preparing. He did not, however, aspire to chefdom. "I wanted to write." And not about food. "What I really wanted to write about was politics because, after all, I knew how to fix everything. But, for some reason, no one wanted to listen to me."
A stint of stringing for various newspapers and magazines saw him covering everything from politics and labor to home repairs and the death of nuclear reactors. While Bittman was earning his bread -- as it were -- as a writer, he didn't feel he'd really found his niche. That changed when he started writing about food. "It was all sort of an immediate success. It worked. The column in The New York Times was suggested to me, but I'd been writing for 20 years by then."
Yet another example is Bill Buford, who started as a enthusiastic, though less the proficient chef, then, as described by this New York Times article:
Buford was smitten by [chef Mario] Batali's larger-than-life personality and considerable talent, a "crush" that not only landed him in Babbo's kitchen but led him on an increasingly obsessive nearly four-year odyssey that included stints with Batali's former teachers, indentured servitude with the crazy but gifted butcher of the subtitle and long hours learning Italian and poring over 15th-century manuscripts in an effort to find out when egg yolks replaced water in pasta fresca. Not surprisingly, along the way, he quit his day job — he had to. He started out, he says, as a "tourist," a journalist with a magazine assignment and then a book contract, who wanted to learn some basic skills and tell the tale. He does tell it, beautifully, but he is no longer a mere "author writing about the experience of the kitchen" — he is a proud "member" of the kitchen who has been forever changed.
The fact that I've devoted so much of this post to writers who have undergone life-changing experiences through working in professional kitchens suggests that I am yearning for a similar experience in grad school. One of the reasons that more students do not go into science is the lack of visible role models. I think that a scientific equivalent of The Making of a Chef (also by Ruhlman) could help to alleviate that problem. As with restaurants, there is a tremendous diversity, but I believe it is still possible to find labs that have a similar cast of characters with colorful personalities and a passion for their profession that exists in the top kitchens. My writing skills aren't up to the challenge (yet), but I hope that someone (possibly me in the near future), will write that story.
March 14, 2008
Film Festival
Last night I attended the 4th Singapore Short Film Festival at the Substation. Below are the official summaries from the website, along with my commentary.
1) Londres-London / United Kingdom-Singapore / 2007 / 11 min / Eva Tang
In a city that could be anywhere or nowhere, which at any moment could be destroyed, we discover Lisa in the midst of a break-up and the 7th July London bombs attack. This film was confusing and depressing at first, until the director explained how the betrayal in the relationship paralleled the betrayal of the city to its citizens.
2) Kichiro / Singapore / 2006 / 19 min / Kelvin Sng
Kichiro is a 16 year old surrounded by envious schoolmates due to his wealthy family background. His busy parents shower him with material needs to make up for not spending time with him. However, he is an unhappy boy who is obsessed with violence. Watching people cut off their earlobes or slice through their cheeks was not how I wanted to spend a cold, rainy evening. The director later explained how he was exploring the use of violence in film. I certainly noticed that the close-up shots that he showed were far more disturbing than the gratuitous violence that is commonplace in many Hollywood blockbusters. However, he also mentioned some of the fun times that they had making the film and using up so much fake blood.
3) Voor een paar knikkers meer (For a Few Marbles More) / The Netherlands / 2006 / 11 min / Jelmar Hufen
Four ten-year-olds are kicked out of their playground by two aggressive drunkards. When they realize their parents are not going to help them, there;s only one solution. They have to find a way to get the toughest boy in the neighborhood to help them. A former drama student that I spoke with after the film mentioned how much more money that European countries are willing to pay for the arts and it clearly showed with this film. The student now spends his days in the National Service, fixing tanks that aren't broken and have never seen battle.
4) Cyanosis / Iran / 2007 / 30 min / Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami
In Tehran streets, you can't find any working painter, except Jamshid Aminfar. Trying to promote his life and work conditions, his friends decide to organize an exhibition for his paintings in a gallery. While preparing his works, he falls in love with Alice, a French girl. This was an amazing documentary that made excellent use of animations of the author's paintings to show the world through his eyes. His interactions with the people around him were thought-provoking and the asymmetry in his relationship with the young French woman was quite tragic.
5) My Keys / Singapore / 2007 / 8 min / Ting Szu Kiong
Tim wakes up to prepare for a new day of work with enthusiasm just like any other day. To his dismay, he couldn't find his keys to get out of the house. Desperate, he turns to the altar and pleaded for help from the Goddess of Mercy. His fate lies in her hands. This was supposed to be a comedy, but I didn't think it was funny at all. I was locked out of my room once and it was no laughing matter.
