I got this from my graduate student association:

In the FY12 Budget released by the White House last week, two recommendations were made that directly affect graduate, medical, and professional students:

1.) Ending the in-school interest subsidy on student loans for graduate, medical, and professional students, and
2.) Consolidating the Javits Fellowship Program with Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) thus eliminating the only federally-funded fellowship program that specifically supports fields within the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

If you want to use my letter, you’re welcome to. You can use Salsa’s Tool to find out who your representatives are.

Dear [Senator/Representative],

I am a PhD student at Columbia, and I recently learned that the 2012 federal budget includes two significant changes that will severely affect the ability of many graduate students to pursue their education: First, the in-school interest subsidy on student loans is ending. This is a disaster for students like myself who come from middle-class families and rely on the United States student loan system. Second, the budget eliminates the only federally-funded fellowship program that specifically supports fields within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The contributions that will be lost without this program are inestimable.

Students are huge benefit to the future of United States economy and potential. Supporting graduate education is about supporting the future, and I urge you to fight for it.

Thank you.

I wish I could show you all our beautiful apartment! I know it’s awfully self-congratulatory, but Flame has such a great sense of interior decoration/design. Between the walls Flame painted our first week, the fabulous art and furniture she found in the trash, the fresh flowers, the endless books, and our new rugs and painted stoneware from Turkey, it would take hundreds of photos to capture the surprises here.

Short of that, here are a couple new additions, made by Flame and myself:

Flame’s painted outlet covers

Escher lizard switches

Love collage (from travel materials)

Map wall (5″ x 6″), in progress

The semester started quickly! Between a presentation of research interests to my program, and nine hours of extra classes (some of it “make up” for a TBD class the prof will skip), I’m glad it’s the end of the beginning.

Speaking of ends, I’ve been thinking recently about the purpose of life, and I think I have one answer. Life is many things to many people, and far be it from me to suggest that my own aspirations and avenues are a better answer than another’s preference. But there are a few things we all share: taxes, and death.

The Baha’i see death as a kind of next-birth. Just as a fetus develops eyes and arms which are useless in its mother’s womb, the Baha’i believe that we are developing capacities in this world for the next world. If someone were to try to explain to you in the womb that you would soon be in a new world with “things” to be “seen”, you would have no basis for understanding them. Similarly, for the Baha’i, the next world is not a heaven of perfection and paradise. We probably can’t know what it is, but it has a similar relation to this world as this world has to the world inside the womb.

Death, then, is a kind of breaking forth into the next world– the apparent shedding of this body is a projection of the shedding of the world itself. The purpose of life is to prepare ourselves for that transition.

Don’t take that suicidal-like. On his deathbed, Socrates said that the philosopher is ever expectant for death, but to take one’s own life is to flout the gods. A premature death would be like a baby engaging in self-abortion. The preparation for death takes time, work, experiences, and challenges (by Vedic philosophy, 75 years or so).

Who we fully are, and what we are capable of, we cannot know in this world. All we can hope to do is develop our selves the way a baby develops in the womb– by occupying a good environment, exercising all our capacities, and letting nature take its course.

It is time for our culture to embrace death, as a natural stage of life. We need to embrace it not only as a mechanism of hope for the future of our planet, but as both a personal driving force that can shape and inspire us.

In parts of the world where death is a constant possibility, life is said to take on a new vigor and crispness. If every street-crossing could be your last, you savor the times between more. In the West, our lives are characterized by boredom and itching meaninglessness. Media and commodities are designed to fill this hole in our lives, but they only feed our hunger.

I believe the problem comes from a loss of self. Death is one of the most powerful transformations of self– it is exactly that transition that we cannot do as a public. Death is a way of understanding ourselves, and situating our identity.

This re-enshrining of death causes certain upendings in our emotional lives. The classical personality type associated with death is the melancholic. Nowdays, the melancholic is often misunderstood: she differs from the modern depressed by virtue of an persistent unrest and a heightening drive for meaning– many poets and philosophers are melancholic. I believe that Freud is to blame for our loss of melancholy, by interpreting it as a less-healthy perversion of grieving (I have another rant on this). But melancholy plays a different role from grieving, and one which is at the heart of many cultures (see saudade in Brazil and hüzün in Turkey).

Melancholy arises from a recognition of life as characterized by death. It is a bittersweet emotion; a knowledge that what is is always coming to an end, and yet by holding it in our hearts, we turn that loss into a vitality. Melancholy is as close to a celebration of death as a people can get, and it is never far from the understanding that every end is a new beginning.

A friend just sent me this message:

Between today and tomorrow, the New FB Privacy setting called “Instant
Personalization” goes into effect.
The new setting shares your data with non-FB sites & it is
automatically set to “Enabled”.

To remedy :::Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant
Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.
BTW If your friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you
as well. Please copy and re-post.

I’m back in the country! Our last few days in Greece were sublime, with so many cute coffeeshops, and a culture that appears to spend all its waking hours in them, just nursing drinks and free cookies and talking. It’s also Flame’s birthday today, and the day before my classes start, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

Last night we had a birthday dinner with friends, and the topic of how Facebook has changed people’s lives and culture at large came up. Within our group, I noticed a big gender divide: not only did the men take a more relaxed approach to social networking, but they were much less concerned about the expectations, stalking, and panoptical potential of the site. I imagine that if you told a stereotypical man that someone might be watching his wall all the time, he would feel some flattery and some pity, but very little self-concern.

I was jumped on for suggesting that it was a gender distinction. The women, who have all studied gender (I have not), pointed out that it was probably more of an age distinction. While no doubt also a factor, I wanted to explore the idea further. I think I’m pretty aware of the complexities of gender identity, but I don’t know who to incorporate those complexities into this, so take it as rough generalizations.

Is it taboo to say that American society has a lot of gender segregation, at least for children? Compared to other cultures, we’re somewhere in the middle, between cultures which physically separate boys and girls, and those that draw little distinction between them until puberty. But I’m mainly concerned with how we are compared to how we might be, and what direction we’re moving in.

It seems to me that American society has very strong social barriers between genders. Flame loves to point out people who are biologically different from their gender identification, but for the most part it’s pretty easy to read someone’s gender: men and women and boys and girls wear different clothes and talk differently. Several professions are mostly gender segregated, including some new ones (e.g., CS and bioengineering). As children, boys and girls tend to live in very different social worlds, reading different magazines, participating in different activities, and with friend circles of typically of just one gender. If someone approaches you on an dark, empty street, you might worry differently if they’re black or white or sober or drunk, but if they’re female, you probably won’t worry at all.

So I wonder how new technologies affect that equilibrium. For example, I imagine that modern television has been a force for greater segregation among children, with advertisers and producers projecting and targeting very strong gender distinctions. How about Facebook? As a single forum with both genders, it might be a desegregating force, but I wonder to what extent the different emotions it engenders are the result of existing gender segregation and to what extend it exaccerbates them.

Egypt has landed on our vacation like a ton of jello. From Cairo to Aswan (our only two data points), Egyptians appear to be excessively noisy drivers and pushy shopkeepers, friendly but disrespectful, and helpful but they want their cut. Everything seems like a rip-off or a scam: “set” prices for tourists are at least doubled, and every ten feet some one will shout “Welcome! You want a [hotel, taxi, falucca, camel, donkey, guide, scarf, spices, or cigarette]?” Touts stand by the doors of tourists sites, demand to see your ticket, then guide you (all the while insisting that they are from the government, their services are free, and they just want you to be happy) into a waiting sale pitch. Flame is constantly getting cat-hisses, “I love you!”‘s, honks, and other attention that ranges from irritating to frightening. The most chilling part for me is seeing women in full black hajabs looking like specters of death. The streets are a nightmare, with cars that accelerate at people crossing, and frequently too many lanes of traffic to cross without weaving between headlight-less cars. Cars honk for every reason and no reason, creating a constant cacophony reverberating for miles even in the middle of the night.

All that said, we’ve managed to do quite a bit in four days, and I think avoided the worst of it. Egypt has been exciting and intense for me as a culture shock– a place I could easily imagine living, for all its problems, just to experience a life of such a different grit.

Our first impression of Cairo was of how dusty it is– at times you can’t see more than a couple of blocks through the haze. Our hostel in Cairo was super-helpful, calling dozens of other hotels to find us a room when we arrived too late for the one we reserved. That night we walked through a solid mile of clothing stands to the European expat island of Zamalek for some fine Italian dining at half the European price.

The second day was a huge string of successes. We uncovered the right bus and braved the camel-toting touts to see the pyramids. Then we used a microbus, a metro, and many people’s broken English to find a recommended lunch restaurant. Then we struggled through solid humanity and nameless alleyways to find our way into and back out of the Khan Al-Khanili Bazarre. Then we secured two sleeper car tickets to Aswan, the details of which (e.g. that we would need to get them today), we only heard over breakfast this morning. And we finished the day with tea and sheesha at one spot and takeaway Mediterranean food from another. And finally we stumbled to the safety of our hostel in one piece, with the possible exception of our feet and calves.

Day three was for the tourist-crawling Egyptian museum, with so much exquisite ancient art that every step I wished we were able to use our camera. After another visit to the island for French-Italian delights, we wandered around Cairo’s old city, a mix of cement-formed entrances to touristic markets, and a grid of run-down buildings, dirt roads, playing children, and hookah-smoking old men. The train to Aswan was a nerve-racking half-hour late (we watched each train pull out wondering if we should be on it), but an unexpected comfort as our hotel-room-on-wheels started and stopped without concerning us at all until the butler-like Joseph told us to pack our things out the next morning.

The area around Aswan is a fantastic discontinuity between barren desert and fertile farmland. The Nile is deep blue, peppered with small ferries and faluccas, and bordered with river-smoothed boulders and palm forests. The pedestrian market street down the middle of town is lively and colorful, but the attitudes of shopkeepers may have poisoned our experience there. We took the public ferry to Elephantine Island (we were the only ones who seemed to pay), and wandered blindly between mud-brick and herds of goats to Abu, a sprawling 3rd millennium BC city, lovingly excavated and reconstructed. Finally, a long walk along the hills south of town brought us within sight of the famed First Cataract at a quiet Nubian restaurant that all the tour buses had just left.

We find our heroes wandering about Turkey, in search of a cute coffeeshop and some decent vegeteryan food. We’ve now visited the phallic formations of Cappadocia, the whirling religionates of Konya, the mineralogical metropolis of Ephesus, and the seaside settlement of Ayvalik. As we turn homeward for a plane from Istanbul to Cairo, we remember fondly some of our best Turkish moments.

After scrambling over the hollow mountains of Goreme’s Open Air Museum, filled with 8th century fresco masterpieces and 10th century cave scribbles, we decided to visit one last cave-church. After trying the cave’s bolted door, we found the attendant, his dog, and his stovedrum boiling tea. The price, he said, was 8 lira, per person. We shrugged at his one mountain (we had just seen twelve such for 15 lira), and started to walk away. “Okay!”, he called, “For you, special deal– 8 lira for both.” We accepted, and he led us into the cave and explained the dilapidated frescoes. Could we take a picture? “Normally, no. Well, okay. You argue well.” As we were leaving afterward joining him for a cup of tea, he said, “You want to come back tomorrow? I show you The Secret Church, hidden. Special for you.”

In Konya, we were confused by the dedicated pilgrims at the former home of the whirling dervishes. Their mosque is packed with the trappings of dozens of these dancing scholars, but since when do performing artists get centuries of devotion? We didn’t think to wonder why the site is called the Mevlana Museum, until we sat for tea at a hotel (which had great food, which we had scoffed at earlier in the evening, when we were set on finding another restaurant and ended up a t a ghetto fast-food joint). They gave us a nifty pamphlet for the hotel since Flame wanted to know the Turkish names of every food. The pamphlet gave a brief history of Mr. Mevlana, father of a more open, accepting form of Islam. We could have learned something from him a few times that day.

We met a nice Brit, Ed, in Selçuk, who kept Flame company as I got lost among some forbidden ruins. As we were parting ways at the bus station, a bus agent approached him and asked him where he was going. “Pammukale,” said he. “Why don’t you give your bag– this is your bus!” the agent said. Ed protested: the sign in the bus window had it bound for a town on the way to Pammukale, but he had gotten a direct ticket. The agent stepped away and talked to the driver, who reached under his dashboard and pulled out a “Pammukale” sign and stuck it to the window under the other one.

For our bus from Selçuk to the Greek cobblestone maze called Ayvalik, we were first offered a price of 65 lira. A novice bargainer, but suspecting a gringo tax, I offered 60. The agent got on the phone, and after a long talk said that, seeing as it was the first of the year, he could make me a special offer: 55 lira. Okay, so I handed over a 50 lira note and a 10 lira note, and rather than give me change he took the 50 note and said, “That’s enough.” By now we realized we were paying way too much, but it wasn’t until the larger bus depot at İzmir that we realized how much. The driver walked us to the bus for the rest of our journey, where we got a new ticket: it said it cost 27 lira. And the bill that Flame saw the driver palm over for the ticket was a 20.

We just arrived in crazy Cairo, where the midnight sounds of honks and Arabian music echo all around us. The streets are a deathwish, which we’ve already braved more times than we ever want to remember, but tomorrow is a whole new day!

You could say it’s now Istanbul night two, but this was our first daytime here, and if it was our second day of international traveling, it was our first of walking around and exploring. I love its steep-and-narrow cobblestone streets, its stores overflowing with belt-buckles or socks, its endless cycle of doner kebab and cute cafe.

I feel like I grok this city’s energy, but there’s a lot I’m missing. Like, how do we get cups of tea in glass vases like everyone else, at restaurants, in stores, on streets? Why is there a chestnut roaster on every corner, when no one every buys? What makes shop keepers think that yelling “Want to see the menu?” (pointing to the enormous platform I had to step into the street to get around) or “Spend money!” won’t chase me away? And the language is big barrier (particularly to getting decent prices)– I only managed to successfully say the word for “thank you” on my 58th try.

I really like our neighborhood. We’re staying across the bridge from the old city, about 1 km from the super-busy Taksim square. A short trek up our street, past five bookstores, four relaxed-looking cafes, and three art galleries, is Istiklal street. Parts of Istiklal look like the main shopping street of every other large city, but local businesses far outnumber chains, and almost every person in the constant packed flow is Turkish (which could be a winter effect). The streets coming off Istiklal are much more interesting, though, filled with clubs, cafes, and restaurants and plenty of competition to have both good food and atmosphere. Our hostel, Neverland Hostel, is heel-to-toe with peace, anarchy, and anti-corporation murals and band posters, with a cafe-atmosphere common space playing international indie music.

Today was our Old City day: the Hagia Sophia was closed, but we exhausted much of the rest. The Blue Mosque is exquisite inside, with a seamless wall-to-wall rug that apparently hasn’t been spilled on once in centuries. The Grand Bazarre is suffocatingly touristy, but it’s also enormous: it took us a half-hour to make one path through it. After a long wander (including two more gorgeous mosques, and some hand-acted-out directions), we returned to familiar territory and checked out the more authentic Spice Bazaar. Then to Topaku Palace with a treasury of jewel encursted, mother-of-pearl inliad everything, and a harem completely detailed by the square-inch in vibrant colors– something like a mix between a convent and a castle. Finally to the Basilica Cistern, an enormous underground Roman koi pond, where almost every pillar was reinforced, but the constant drips from the rain puddles outside don’t stop you from wondering when it’s all going to cave in. Finally, dinner at a vegetarian cafe (Zencefil) back home near Taksim.

Tomorrow we explore the Asian side, and get on a train for Cappadocia! We made an important step in our planning today, buying flights from Istanbul to Cairo on January 3, and then to Athens on the 10th. That should give us time for a tight loop through western Turkey, before an Egypt trip including a couple days in Luxor and Aswan. Israel and Cyprus seem to be squeezed out of this trip, but I don’t think we’ll miss them too much.

They tell me the worst is over. Yesterday I took my last final, and today I turned in a decent essay and a bunch of research work that I’ve been nursing for the last month. Today I also finished a two year project transcribing all my todo notecards into my virtual reminder system. I’m exhausted, but I think everything turned out alright. I can’t wait to soak my feet in a steaming Turkish bath.

What’s next? Well, I think I’m going to focus on the Travelers Network while I’m in Turkey and Egypt, which will be a nice shift. I get back the weekend of MIT’s Mystery Hunt, and I’m trying to get a group together here to work on it. Next semester I want to run a “Friday Evening Experiments” meeting, just like the one that this year’s Nobel physics prizers had for trying out things that might go nowhere, but for looking at lonely parts of SD, building odd models, and playing around with data.

Personally, my goal is to put some barriers around my school life. I haven’t spent the time with Flame that she deserves recently (which is a lot, she’s been incredibly supportive). School consumed me this term– which was fun and all, but my virtual todo lists are awaiting!

Last Friday, just a hours after finishing my application to the EPA, Flame and I bought tickets to Turkey for winter break! Flight Finder found the deal for one date, and Flame found it for the perfect span: we’re leaving on Christmas from Boston (we’re we’ll be with my parents), and returning a few days before classes to New York. Minus a day of travel, we get 20 days to explore the middle east– or at least, those parts of it that Flame, with her Israel-stamped passport, can enter.

Our plan is to spend a couple days in Istanbul, go down the coast (Troy and Ephesus are both there), and take a ferry to eat in Cyprus for a couple days. We want to spend time in Egypt, but there aren’t ferries, so we need to go by way of Israel (which, conveniently, hops us over Syria, which Flame can’t enter). After a few days in Jerusalem, we explore Cairo and Alexandria for up to a week. Then it’s a flight to Athens for a spree, and a bus back to Istanbul. If we have extra time, we can take a side trip to Cappadocia.

Other ideas? We definitely are interested in recommendations within those cities; with this itinerary, we don’t have much time to squeeze in other cities, but the itinerary is anything but set. In particular, if you know another way to get to Egypt cheaply or interestingly, tell us!