Well, I've moved once again, and am finally settled down, more or less. For the moment, anyway.

I ended up in a really cool farmhouse a little bit north of Cambridge. It's a giant house that was split into three different apartments, mine is a 3 bedroom (that's being generous, the third "bedroom" is pretty tiny) which is enormous by New York standards. The best thing about it is the location - even though it's only a 15 minute bicycle ride for me to get to work right in the middle of Cambridge, it feels like it's in the middle of nowhere, I'm surrounded by hay fields and a pasture where a few horses graze. So it's nice to have that settled.

I've also started cooking again which is a good feeling. Cambridge is sadly not a very good place to go out to eat, so not really having a kitchen was driving me insane. Now I've got a kitchen that's roughly the size of my old apartment, so I can make big meals every night.

On another note... after three and a half years together, Victrola and I split up. It actually happened about two weeks after I arrived in Cambridge. She called me to tell me she didn't want to see me any more. I have to say, I'm not especially happy with her timing - having just moved to a new country literally thousands of miles away from all my friends and family and tryin to start a new job, it was the last thing I wanted to deal with. So, suffice to say, she's on my shit list. Not to mention the fact that she still has a bunch of my stuff (including my cat) and owes me a ton of money, all of which is in NYC. But I'm working on getting all of those things back, and getting over it. I'm following the advice that I gave to a friend and his wife left him "fuck that bitch." And I've gone on a few dates with some British girls that have been fun. So life goes on I guess.

Hope everyone else out there is doing OK.

Well, now I live in England. Funny how something like that can happen so quickly.

I arrived on Friday morning after an uneventful flight on the not-so-lovely Air India. After sitting for 1+ hours in line at immigration I finally got on the tube to London, grabbed a train at King's Cross and arrived in Cambridge at noon. Checked into my room in the lovely Christ's College (yes I'm actually living here for the moment):



and went to work an hour later, where I finally got to meet my boss and coworkers. All of whom turned out to be really nice people. I'm pretty excited about my new project, I'm going to studying the relationship between Ih (that's the inward current resulting from a hyperpolarizing membrane potential in neurons) and neuropathic pain. It's far more applied than my previous research, so it should put a nice human face on things in a way that my other work hasn't.

Since then I've been learning the lay of the land in Cambridge, finding my bearings, and trying really hard to find a place to live. It's been harder than I thought because a lot of people seem deterred by my bringing Cassius, my cat (I'll post a photo once I have one, he's great) in August when he'll be formally eligible to clear quarantine. But I've seen a few places and have others lined up, and am hopeful to nail something down within the next few days.

I hope you're all well out there in porno-land, and anyone who's nearby., let me know and we'll grab a pint. Since the closest people I know are in Paris and Munich it would be nice to see a friendly face.

So, much to my surprise, I discovered yesterday that my account is apparently still active. I had no idea, i haven't logged in since last November.

How is everyone?

I'm moving to England in a month for my new job. Should be fun.

So I cancelled the rebilling on my account, as many of probably have deduced by now. It's not a guarantee that I won't be back, but right now I'd say probably not.

Regardless, SG has been fun, I've met some cool people and I'll miss many of you. Take care.

I've been on SG for four years. I've got to say, I'm not sure that I want to stay.

I've slowly come to the realization that there are a lot of things that I just don't have in common with the typical SG member. I'll list a few.

1. I'm in my 30's.
2. I don't think words are automatically granted special meaning because someone put them in a song.
3. I don't like burlesque. Never have.
4. I haven't made any effort to stay current on popular bands in about a decade.
5. I don't derive self-esteem from taking blurry closeups of myself on cell phone cameras and posting them here.
6. I don't think SGs walk on water. Having met plenty of them, I think they're just regular people who are naked on the internet.
7. I think education is important.
8. I try my hardest to back up what I say with logic and factual evidence.
9. I think being "punk rock" is not about how you look.

I accomplished my initial goal in subscribing to SG years ago, which was to make new friends and meet people. In that regard, my time on SG has been quite a success and I'm glad to have been here. But I think I'm finished with the site now.

So barring any major changes over the next few weeks, I will not be renewing my account at the end of the month. Those of you who would like to keep in touch and don't already know, send me a message and I'll give you my e-mail address.

Well, I'm now officially in my 30s. It doesn't feel so bad I suppose, but I guess it's a time to reflect on the things that I have and haven't done so far in my life.

Things I've accomplished:
Graduated college.
Finished my PhD.
Been in a relationship more than a year (almost 3 years now.)
Wrote a book.
Published several academic articles.
Traveled to Europe.
Traveled to Central America.
Driven across the USA (twice.)
Lived in San Francisco.
Lived in New York City.

Things I'd like to accomplish but haven't yet:
Buy a house.
Have a kid or kids.
Get married.
Be even marginally financially secure.
Run for public office.
Travel to Asia.
Travel to Africa.
Travel to South America.
Travel to Australia.
Go into outer space.
Get an appointment as a professor somewhere.


OK, so the lists aren't that comprehensive, but I could probably go on for endless pages and not even scratch the surface. I think I hit a lot of the major points. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the direction that things are going. I'm being recruited for several postdoctoral fellowship positions, which is a nice a feeling - I'll be traveling in San Francisco probably at the end of the month to check another one out.'

Anyway, as far as milestones go I suppose this one isn't a bad one. I still have a lot that I'd like to do, but at least I've gotten a lot done along the way.

Sometimes foresight is 20/20.

He should have taken his own advice:

What the hell has happened to New York City? It's like I went into hiding to finish all of my school work and research, and now that I've finally reemerged the city has been populated entirely by assholes (well, a new, more loathsome breed of assholes, anyway.)

Rather than waxing nostalgic about a place that clearly never existed, I'll freely admit that New York City has always had its fair share of jerks. That was part of its perverse charm. The intense geographic proximity experienced by everyone: lawyers, bankers, construction workers, prostitutes, cops, academics, wage slaves, crammed into a tiny space living togther put everyone on edge a little bit and slight insults rapidly erupted into shouting matches that just as rapidly disappeared. New York City used to be the living contrast to California, the capital of passive aggression, as a place where if someone didn't like something about you, they would say it to your face. There's an almost admirable quality to that degree of honesty, and I think it served its purpose as necessary safety valve, so that we didn't all just decide to kill each other one day.

But lately I've noticed a change in tone. I think I attribute it primarily to the vast infiltration of the city by fratsters - that is, post-college frat boys who work investment banker type jobs but on the weekends pretend to be bohemian and hang out in places like Williamsburg and the lower east side. My neighborhood, which borders the east village and the lower east side, has been completely overrun with this type of person, and it's a change that's even being reflected in the physicality of the neighborhood itself, with traditional small apartment buildings being torn down in favor of "luxury" high rise condos of the variety that cater to the fratster - overpriced "luxury" in the middle of an "Artsy, happening" neighborhood. So you can choose to fraternize with the common folk when you want to, and then retire to your castle overlooking the peons. Needless to say, this influx has completely killed anything that was ever fun about my neighborhood. But more than that, it's changed the way people interact with one another.

Wealthy, white New Yorkers have always felt that the world belongs to them. Nothing new there. But I think what used to temper interactions between those rich people and people from lower socioeconomic strata was a fear of reprisal. Twenty years ago, one did not walk around Harlem spouting racial epithets, it was an invitation to get stabbed or worse, and this led to rich people generally staying within a few distinct neighborhoods, to minimize their interactions with others not like them. But the modern day New York City, is, for all intents and purposes, essentially crime free. Attribute that fact to what you will (Rudy Giuliani will try and take credit for it), but I think it's been a major factor in the diaspora of fratsters from their former enclaves in areas like Murray Hill and the Upper East Side to the rest of the side. Now it's safe for these people to go wherever they want. And even more than that, that false bravado of the frat boy, the guy who "tries" to start a fight with someone while out with a bunch of friends, knowing that his friends will break it up and the "fight" will never go anywhere, seems to me (at least anecdotally) to be happening more and more often. Those "fights" can only occur in an environment where no one actually expects real violence.

An additional, enlightening effect of this demographic swing that I've observed several times now is the underlying racism that many of these individuals harbor. Wealthy, white kids from suburbia who probably grew up mouthing the mantras of diversity and tolerance, when push comes to shove, will spout the kind of racial epithets that would make a Klansman proud if they feel like they've been somewhat wronged. I've seen this with my own eyes, more and more frequently. All of which goes back to my original question: What the hell has happened to New York City?

NYC used to be a truly diverse city in the broadest sense of the word. Ethnically, religiously, culturally, economically, racially diverse in that every kind of person from every sort of background you could imagine all lived in one place, and while it was far from perfect, people managed to get along. Now? It has turned into a playground for overprivileged kids with cushy, corporate jobs to cavort while driving the prices up so high that no one from any other kind of background can afford to live in the city any more.

Given that the one of the primary underlying causes of this unfortunate swing in NYC culture seems to be the lack of crime, maybe we can do something about it. Who wants to start a crime wave with me? This city seems ripe for the picking.

Through an unusual series of events, I am writing this journal entry watching the sun set over the Pacific ocean from Playa Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Life is funny that way sometimes. But it works.

Well, it's all over. It's funny to think that you can work for years and years (almost six in my case) on one project, present it in an hour, and then you're finished and can move on to bigger and better things.

So rather than continuing to be cryptic, I'll just say that I finally defended my thesis on Thursday on, and passed the defense. Which means that I'm now officially Dr. Legionnaire, as odd as that seems (I don't know if I'll ever get used to hearing it.) Thanks a lot to everyone who sent good wishes, and for all of your support along the way.

It's really an odd feeling to not having anything to do now. I've spent the last three months working so intensely on my thesis and then my presentation that any time I didn't spend working on it felt wasted and I would immediately feel guilty for not being productive. Now I don't need to be productive any more, in fact I can feel free to lounge around and be lazy, sleep in, have drinks, and do nothing for a while.

I'm looking forward to it.