Future Comestible Experiments

• ostrich egg omelet
• boot of butterbeer
• self-cultured kombucha
• a whole pig’s head
• eggplant desserts

Ghost in the Machine

Now that we live in a world where machines can predict movie preferences with 10% more accuracy, I await the day when my computer can pinpoint best friend candidates. Soul mate matches would be welcome too. Until then, Facebook’s suggestions are wildly and laughably off.

In an effort to boost wall posts, Facebook has been suggesting I “reconnect” with certain friends. The same handful of people keep popping up; one of them is a girl who committed suicide last year.

It was her birthday recently, so I had looked at her profile prompted by Facebook. There was a long list of birthday wishes, and I wondered if anyone had reflexively posted a birthday note, not knowing that she was no longer with us. Her wall aside, the rest of her profile is frozen in time, as if she had simply decided to stop using Facebook.

How do you feel the loss of someone with whom most of your interactions were digital? It’s unreal.

Update: Oh boy, there’s already Time magazine article on this. Is the realization that none of our experiences are unique comforting or crippling?

Tipping Point

Being a bad tipper is not the same thing as being stingy. Let me put it this way: if a guy pulled out a coupon to pay for dinner, I would be personally offended, but if he did not tip well, I would be morally affronted. Tipping well is not a matter of social graces but of being considerate to other people.

On my birthday freshman year of college, I went out for hotpot with a group of new friends. It was less than a month into the school year: friendships were only nascent, and we were all still sizing each other up. The service was poor and slow, not unexpected at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place where the waitresses speak neither Mandarin or English. One of the hot pots leaked, and some of the raw meat slices were stained blue with dye (the kind used to stamp meat). At the end of the evening, one member of our party insisted that we do not leave any tip. I reasoned we should leave at least 10%. But he enumerated and parsed in the voice used by ibankers (a tone still novel to me at the time), and I could not argue over him.

The waitress chased us out of the restaurant and told us to never come back again. A deep sense of shame wallowed in my stomach.

Freshman year continued and we went our separate ways. I occasionally encounter people from that dinner and we chat in the manner of acquaintances. I only ever talked to him once more — a lunch sometime sophomore year — and he had the same ibanker voice.

—-

But it is possible to be a bad tipper out of sheer ignorance. I try very hard to avoid this. When I was in Europe this summer, being unfamiliar with the rules of tipping put me quite out of balance.

Once, I alighted upon the meaning of life

To struggle against the second law of thermodynamics:

The entropy of the universe is always increasing.

When we lose — because ultimately we will all lose — the molecular structures encoding our memories unravel, and the tissues of our bodies meld into a soup. The atoms that that made you — ordered, definite, tangible you —disperse across the universe. We die, and we succumb to entropy.

But we do the best we can in our open systems, expelling entropy from our lives. We try to keep our bedrooms neat, we organize our calendars, and we make sense of the chaos that is reality: an infinity of subatomic particles, interacting with each other through forces we do not understand. Abstract experiences, somehow, become encoded in the physical structure of our brains. Creating bureaucracies, the Dewey decimal system, organized sports — these are all in the name of decreasing entropy in our existence.

It is important that a human being is not an isolated system. I mean this in literal and in other ways.

pARaNoiA

*CARCINOGEN* ethidium bromide *CARCINOGEN*

While making a gel last week, I microwaved the agarose with ethidium bromide, releasing nasty carcinogenic vapors into the air and giving everyone in lab cancer. I only realized this today and had a Freak Out Moment™. All of a sudden, my head started hurting, my stomach felt queasy, and my hands wouldn’t stop itching — surely symptoms of exposure to hazardous materials.

Then I turned to my ultimate resource — Google — to figure out exactly how many years I shaved off my life. Well, apparently ethidium bromide doesn’t vaporize at 100 C, and some people add it directly to boiling water. As much as I distrust lab protocols on the Internet, I realized surely someone out there has microwaved EtBr before and survived. It’s definitely not recommended, but this one instance probably did less to harm my health than those 15 fried wings I ate yesterday.

(Ethidium bromide is technically classified as a mutagen, not a carcinogen. But we usually treat it as a carcinogen….because do you want to be the one to prove the classification wrong?)

My head hurts because I haven’t been getting enough sleep, my stomach was growling because I only had 1/2 a piece of toast for breakfast, and wearing latex gloves makes my hands really dry. Paranoia makes you think in strange loops.

The best vices to cultivate have elaborate, fussy rituals.

The enjoyment comes less from the vice itself (alcohol, nicotine, sex, etc. ) than from the atmosphere of their indulgence. No fun to rush it — it’s all about the foreplay.

That’s why the flaming sambucas with CA were so much fun. A flaming sambuca is nothing like downing a shot of vodka, which is simply a vehicle for alcohol. There is heat and the tactile sensation of suction on your palm, the sweet aroma of liquorice, a happy glow in your tummy, and finally, perhaps, a wooziness in the head.

Bonus: your burps taste like candy.