I now own a hot pink wig!!!!!!!!!
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

For Halloween I'm going to be an anime jedi. Basically pink-haired and silent. I haven't gotten this excited about Halloween in many years. The last real costume I remember having was a Big Bird suit that was about three feet tall. How things change.....well, I guess I'm not that much taller.

The quest for immortality takes an interesting turn, as an artist decides that he wants his brain to outlive him. If your brain is still alive and thinking, are you still alive? I guess that's the whole "immortal" part. Fascinating that he considers his brain to be a work of art he created "thought by thought".

It was fun to get an extra hour on Saturday night, and I went with some friends to see Intolerable Cruelty. Fantastic movie - you HAVE to see it. Especially if you are already a Coen Bros. fan (Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou...etc.). The trailers all make it look vaguely like a teenage girl movie. But, I heard it was different, went and saw it, and it couldn't be farther from bubblegum. More like excessively sour candy that makes your eyes squint. Funny and twisted!

Now, despite that extra hour, the depressing reality of shorter days is apparent. Yesterday the sky was a dark gray at 5pm. This is a good time for the beautiful Festival of Lights to happen, and so it is. Light a lamp/candle.....and hopefully some of the darkness in the world will be washed away with brightness and good things. Happy Diwali!

How much are YOU worth, my friend?
I wonder about it sometimes, when I get to thinking about how much debt I'm going to be in. Apparently I could get more than a couple million. But I'm unsure about what you do with the money once you are sold. Does it belong to you? Or your owner?

Ok, I had to share. It's so cool - in Norway, a witch has received government money to start her own witchcraft business. She's allowed to do that as long as she doesn't try to hurt people, like she's taking the hippocratic oath. Are witches the new doctors? Ok, I just looked up the hippocratic oath online to read the whole thing, because I was curious - and there are so many versions! I just found one that includes a promise to never help a woman with abortion, and another one that says not to "play at God". Maybe I should look into what version Harvard uses. It's probably so politically correct that it will be hard to tell if it's for doctors or aerospace engineers.

In other news, I'm really craving some kind of breakfast sandwich. So off I go.

I went and saw Lost in Translation.
I liked it. BUT...I don't know if I would recommend it.
It's a very beautiful movie. Like moving art. The whole movie is like that - a painting that captures the moods of characters by showing us the surroundings as they were seeing them. It portrays well, I think, how being in a place where you feel isolated and lost can bring you close to people that normally you would have nothing in common with. There is, however, no plot and no action really. So it makes it hard to call it a movie. It's a beautiful music video? Although I don't remember much of the music. So that doesn't really work. I guess I can't say that the characters' lives changed in any way because of the experiences we saw. That makes it oddly boring from a human point of view. But on the other hand, there is a lot of subtle storytelling that I appreciated. Like character development that is based on very small moments captured like photographs.

Next on the list - Kill Bill, Intolerable Cruelty.

In the end, I just have to accept that the only reason I ever watch baseball at all is that I don't get to watch cricket. What a beautiful game - and so misunderstood.
Anyway, I am happy because I am out of the mists of my illness, and India are batting well against New Zealand, and it's a Saturday.
Also, lovely orchids have bloomed from a plant that seemed to be dying last week.

You know what? The Sox are still a great team, and Boston rocks. That's right.
Sox management on the other hand - well, some decisons are not worth crying over, but some ARE.

I have a weird headache that goes away when I smile really hard. But it's an excessively manic smile that I can't really do in front of people. Hmmm. I'm trying to figure out which part of the smile helps - I think it might be the eye-squinting, which is easier to pull off in public without appearing crazy.

Let me pay tribute here to the new Indian purple frog.

I've spent the last few minutes comparing Utah with India. Either way, the photo of the day site remains my favorite internet time suck.
Soul Calibur II is my new thing that I want to spend more time on. I played it for a few minutes last weekend, and I got to beat the daylights out of people much bigger than me. It was fun, and it looks really cool. My friend has it at her apartment and I think I might have to start camping out there more often.

Oh weird dream - I was in the shower in my apartment in Calcutta. But all the people from my med school class kept rushing into the bathroom to do powerpoint presentations on the nervous system. I recall being irritated, but they seemed surprised that I was inconvenienced.

I got an email from a good friend who is going to Game 7 at Yankee Stadium this evening dressed in Red Sox gear.
To directly quote him: "The only question now is how much Sox garb I can pull off without getting my ass pounded into the pavement, Bronx style."
I'm asking that question too. Good Luck to you, Dunpass! Maybe they'll show you on TV (hopefully still in one piece).

I have a viral flu-like illness. It's quite miserable. The only good thing about it is that it makes me feel justified in not studying. Instead I am lying in bed watching TV. Today I finally got around to watching some great baseball. The Red Sox won! I watched the game in a room full of people clutching anatomy notes and nearly ripping them apart in anxiety over the game. It's been a long time since I've watched sports in a big group. Probably the last time was the Cricket World Cup in the spring. India vs. Pakistan. Oh, also the final against the Aussies, but I don't like to think about that game. Baseball has the same feeling though in some ways - a team sport with a strong spotlight on individual performance. Now there will be a stressful game tomorrow. A Cubs-RedSox ending would be lovely. I also found a book by someone called Eric Lustbader in the kitchen. I think the book deals with some kind of international conspiracy involving the KGB and some Japanese underground warrior sect. It's quite different from neuroanatomy, so I'm pretty excited.

Mother Teresa is being beatified this Sunday by the Pope. They have also opened a musical in Rome with a singing and dancing Mother T with a chorusline of nuns. Strange.

A friend of mine called last night and we were talking about my blog entry from yesterday. He asked me, "Who are you fighting?" And I realized that I sounded sort of strident. And that's silly, because there's no reason for me to. So I thought I'd clarify. I'm not really mad about this. It's just a tendency I've noticed in the world (and that includes myself). I actually love some of the changes that have happened that have brought several cultures together. I just hope that we can keep some of the nuances alive without melding them into something monolithic like Global Pop.

It's a beautiful sunny day today, and I have a cold, so I am going to go with a beloved friend and get some matzoh ball soup!

Some friends and I were talking about interracial breeding. And I thought, does the future of mankind look homogenous and boring? Is it inherently contradictory to cherish diversity, and to promote interracial marriage/reproduction? With culture becoming more and more integrated (e.g. "World Music" - what is that?), perhaps it's not surprising that people are also finding more and more in common with people from "other lands". People keep telling me the world is getting smaller. But is that really true for the majority out there? Most people I know in India have never left the country, and the borders between India and her neighbors are very real. The world is still pretty big for them.

The "global culture" being promoted through the TV and movies and internet is not reality, right? It's the advertising and entertainment industry. So on some level, the whole world is watching the same three shows. On another level, the barriers between faiths and races have never been so daunting. There are a handful of countries who live in a hyperspace connected by wires and planes and satellite. The dominant western culture becomes the staple, spiced up with bits and pieces of "world" culture that is the other 90% of Earth. That's how you get labels like "world music" at huge record stores. There's American/European music, and then there's the rest of the "World" crammed into one aisle. Thats the sort of misrepresentation that exists in the popular view of the world. It's the attitude that creates a facade of respect for diversity, without having any true appreciation for the subtlety of all the flavors that exist.

"Ethnic". "Exotic". "International". Apply the words to clothes, food, music, dance, and suddenly it's acceptable to be ignorant about the differences between Afghani food and Indian food, Vietnamese dance and Chinese dance. The sad thing is that so many aspects of culture in various countries around the world are on the verge of extinction because they can't be assimilated into the media/mainstream/World phenomenon. I don't want to pretend that this is just a Western problem. In India, I've watched many people happily equate all Americans and all Europeans into the same cultural mold. I'm also not saying that I personally know most of the different nuances that exist - all I'm hoping is that people will be aware that they exist and that they are important. Without that awareness, "diversity" becomes a hollow form of work-avoidance.
"Sure - it's different, and it's diverse, and I respect diversity, so what's your problem?"
Well, the first step is accomplished - many people are not automatically afraid of the different anymore. Next lesson: You know all those things you said were different? Well, they're not all the same.