There are 60 days until the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. For an athlete, 60 days can be an eternity in the blink of an eye.

There is something incredible about watching the Olympics; about watching pure human potential exist in front of you. When you know what it takes to get there, it’s hard to watch and not feel inspired by every performance. The years of preparation, and thousands of hours in training. In gymnastics, the events are over in seconds. A vault takes 15 seconds to perform. But it takes years, for the chance to perform it.

Canadian amateur sport is underfunded. Many athletes fund their training themselves, they do it without any guarantee of return. They travel, compete, buy equipment and dedicate themselves to representing our country on their dime, and if there are poor results, we complain.

It’s time for us to show Canadian athletes that we value their determination, and respect what it has taken them to get where they are. CANFund has been funding Canadian athletes for 10 years and has a fundraising campaign called “$8 for 08.08.08″. The goal is to have 50,000 Canadians donate $8 to the Canadian Athletes Now Fund. So skip the Tim Horton’s for this week and get that money into the hands of an athlete!

In what has been a marathon competition, frustration has finally defeated productivity. In what must be the longest match in recorded history, productivity finally surrendered to frustration’s poisonous tactics and crazy-making strategy. When approached for comment on its brilliant defeat, frustration, standing over its noble opponent, laughed maniacally.

I can’t explain the frustration of knowing you can do something better than you have been doing it, and not being able to get it out. It feels like I have been staring at the same data for a few weeks now, and all the things that made sense about it before, are nowhere to be found. Did my brain get replaced by a Chia Pet while I was asleep one night?

I set a pretty high standard for myself. And for the most part I am something of a perfectionist; especially when it comes to my work and my contribution to the world. In my head, I see these things in a very particular way and am incredibly frustrated when I can’t get it out like that. One day, I see things clearly. A week later and all insight is missing in action.

In those times of frustration, even where nothing seems to work, I try to make it happen. I sit down, and try to piece together things that used to seem related but now, seem as similar as quantum mechanics and jello. It’s slow and tedious.

Today, I hit the wall. I sat down to work and just couldn’t get anything out. This isn’t me. I can do better. I will do better. Just have to figure out how…

Congratulations are in order; my sister is a university graduate. But, like anything my sister does, she not only graduated, but did so at the top of her class, with Joint Honours in Political Science and History, at McGill University. Incredible!

For that occasion, I spent the weekend with my sister in Montreal. And aside from some frustrating weather, it was fun to get out of my life and hang out in hers for a while. Life lesson #2: There is an age when it becomes possible to eat too much poutine. And as old as it makes me feel I am actually craving vegetables and things whose nutritional value extends beyond the deep-fried and gravy-laden. I really need to get out for a run. Seriously, you just wake up one day and you are suddenly old. How did that happen?

I’m currently on the train somewhere between Montreal and Toronto, attempting to post this from my BlackBerry. Technology is amazing!

The Balloon Man has posted some tips for incoming graduate students. He has taken the noble route providing encouragement and useful advice; things learned in the trenches, tips that will make research easier. After nearly five years as a graduate student, I’ve decided to take another route. Judge for yourself…

Going to graduate school is choosing to enter a dysfunctional relationship. No sane person would consider a graduate level degree if they knew exactly what they were getting into; unless it came with a continually refilling prescription for Vicodin. But like any new relationship, the beginning is wonderful. It is filled with hope for the future and a warm, fuzzy-feeling of goodness. Everything you read about your work is new and exciting. You feel privileged to join the academic elite and that you, a mere mortal, has the chance to work on something cutting-edge. But like the paint on a new car, eventually a bird craps on it, and things don’t shine like they once did.

The real trouble doesn’t really appear until later. Any new graduate student will be lulled into a false sense of security by things that they recognize. First off are the classes we got used to as undergraduates. The only difference is now grades are, more-or-less, arbitrarily determined and really pointless. It isn’t as though we are going to apply for more schooling to need real grades. If you do choose more schooling after grad school, then I really can’t help you. You have reached a level of insanity that even I can’t fathom.

Slowly you work your way to the thesis project, which is like the bathroom remodel that is never finished. It seemed like a good plan on paper until the third week of using a bucket instead of a toilet and taking a shower in the yard, where you want to shoot yourself and anyone who told you that this was a good idea to get into. And like the bathroom remodel, it will always take longer than you think it will and it will never go according to plan.

Next comes the peculiar inter-personal relationships you get to have with your immediate supervisor, and later the Committee. We all recognize familial dysfunction. This is no different. Your immediate supervisor becomes akin to an adoptive parent. At first, you constantly want to please them and then later want to torture for trying to make you eat broccoli, or in this case for having to show what you have been doing for the three weeks he was on vacation and you were trapped in the lab. Disappointing you supervisor is like disappointing your parents; initially, you would rather cut off your left arm with a dull knife but later you realize that their disappointment in you is something they should get used to.

The Committee is something else entirely. It is your extended your family come home to visit for the holidays where they insist on staying at your house and on discussing the current state of your relationships (your work) and when you plan on getting married (writing your thesis) and having babies (having a defense).

Your friends, who tend to be limited to the people you see in the lab, are more like your partner’s mistress, because for the most part you all have the same supervisor. If not, then you are all third cousins because you all have the same Committee. And you know how much you like mistresses and third cousins; you’ll talk to them rather than do any real work but you honestly have nothing to say to them beyond mundane observations on the weather or weekend binge drinking expeditions.

You get paid just enough to think you have a job but not so much that you can actually do anything. You stay because you can’t get a real job without the degree that you still can’t figure out how to actually get and because getting a real job is scarier than staying and putting up with the crap you have finally figured out how to deal with. You deal with the long hours and social isolation because really finding new friends is just more work than it’s worth because once you’ve found them you realize that you still don’t have any time to actually hang out with them. It is this vicious, self-torturing, cycle.

If you ever meet someone who is actually considering entering graduate school give them this advice: don’t. And if they are persistent (read masochistic) and choose to go against these wise words then share these helpful pieces of information.

1. Learn to love coffee. If you don’t drink it, start. It will be the most guaranteed way to ensure procrastination. Going to get coffee, drinking coffee, and the ritual of coffee has ensured that PhD’s take 4 years.

2. Your supervisor is not your friend.

3. You will both hate and love what you do with remarkable intensity.

4. You will be poor.
5. You will be a loser.
6. Your supervisor will consider you a moron.
7. Eventually you will not care about points 4 through 6.

And always remember: Graduate school is the dysfunctional relationship for the academic world.

I have spent the last few days away from home; the entire family piled into the car on Friday and drove 9 hours, ultimately landing outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Important lesson #1: Adult children trapped in a car with their parents for 9 hours should not expect the uneventful. That being said, I am certain it could have been much worse.

It was a wedding that brought us here. The oldest son of a family friend got married today. It’s scary when your friends start getting married. You’ve crossed the line into adulthood when your friends start getting married. And when they have babies there is no turning back.

Luckily, there haven’t been that many weddings…

I’m still undecided about the whole marriage thing. The party seems like fun. Good presents, good food, the occasional open bar. It’s the whole life-long commitment, eternal partner, love, honour and cherish part that I’m still figuring out. It seems like a big thing to promise, especially when there are times my attention span rivals that of a preschooler.

Authors who write novels with short chapters are evil. They could be the single, most-significant cause of sleep deprivation in modern history. Or at least, they are to me. See, surrounding my bed are a number of books; piles of novels, biographies, non-fictions and the occasional textbook which have taken the place of bedside furniture. Inevitably I reach for one (which may be my initial error) and begin reading. Now this is not a problem in and of itself. The problem arises when arriving at the end of a chapter and the rather flawed decision making process of whether to keep reading surfaces. Using the length of the subsequent chapter as the most decisive factor, I ultimately continue reading if the next chapter is fewer than eight pages postponing the real decision for the next break. At the next chapter, one of two things can happen: the chapter will be excessively long which means I will get to sleep at a somewhat reasonable our or the chapter will again be short, meaning I will keep reading. If there are a number of short chapters back-to-back, I will eventually fall asleep three hours before I am supposed to wake up with both the lights on and the book on my face.

Some may argue that the problem is not actually that there are short chapters but rather with my apparently lacking self control and non-existent decision making skills. There are reasonable people (I imagine) who say to themselves upon beginning the book that reading will cease at a fixed point in time, allowing said reasonable person to appear the next morning as though they have slept. I, on the other hand, end up needing more coffee than can be physically consumed and appear to the world with the eyes of a stoned, alcoholic rock star (Luckily I remember to put undergarments on before leaving the house). Yet, for all my education and supposed intelligence I repeat said stupidity again and again until the night I forget to pick up the book in the first place (probably the result of thinking clouded by too little sleep) and sleep like a somewhat reasonable person.

Of course, this all goes out the window when the book is so good you have to get to the end regardless. God, I hate those books.

This morning I sat down with a head full of things I wanted to say; grand ideas of how I could finally contribute something of value. But as always, the more there is to say, the harder it is to get anything out.  In my head I can see how I want things to come out — all the pieces are there — but something happens en route. Instead, I’m writing about the frustration of wanting to write, but not being able to the way that I know I can, with the hope that eventually something intelligent will make its way forward.

Then again, maybe not.

I wonder if the decline in voter turn-out (the massive turnout for the Democratic Primaries in the U.S. being a strange exception) is somehow related to the rise in popularity of reality television. Could it be that we suffer from voter fatigue where we are required to vote too many times for absolutely inane things that we just can’t be bothered? I hate reality television; I watch television to escape from reality not to take part in it. If I wanted to see fame-seeking, talentless individuals eat worms or select a mate I would go out, likely to a bar, where one can observe all of these situations without the pane of glass separating these lunatics from whatever comments I feel obligated to throw at them. When I watch TV I don’t want to vote, or send a text message or go online to participate. I participate too much in my own life. Let me just watch TV without asking for my help.

It was bad enough when there were those telethons where we should call in a pledge our support to some starving family from some poverty stricken part of the world most people couldn’t find with an atlas in their hands. Now, I have to call in to pledge my support to some moderately talented wanna-be who, because of my support, could end up making more money than I ever will. TV has become so reality focussed that watching the real world on TV doesn’t even seem real. It used to be that there was a clear distinction between TV and real life. Real life was limited to the news, or some documentary on the public broadcasting stations, or a god-awful Hallmark movie “based on actual events”. You could tell what was real and was wasn’t. Now it all seems unreal: politics, news, natural disasters, American Idol. And I’ve been asked to vote, take action and lend my support so many times that I just can’t be bothered to do it when it matters…or maybe I can’t tell when it matters anymore.

If you want more people to vote, I suppose you have to make it like American Idol. Each candidate gets a toll-free number and each voter is given a pin code (because we should only be able to vote once) and when the phone lines open after the broadcast, we can furiously type in our pin numbers and cast our votes for the politician of our choice. Then next day, after Ryan Seacrest and Ben Mulroney battle for ultimate host, the winner will be revealed and the public will have spoken. Then again, knowing what kind of people vote for a singing Idol, we should just let them keep voting for an Idol and leave the real work to people with half a brain who complain about reality television. What elections really need are skill testing questions but I can’t figure out if the candidates need to be answering them or the voter…

What happens when you wander around the world with a head full of things to say and no one to say them to? Apparently you start blogging…

I won’t promise genius, or remarkable brilliance of any kind, although I may stumble upon them. I won’t promise regular posts; occasionally time gets away from me. The only thing I can promise is that this blog will evolve into whatever it needs to be. For the time being, I have no idea what that is…or even what it could be.