More Interesting Things from Scientific American.

Something I have really never understood is why people think that watching someone who gets hurt, frightened, or both is funny. America's Funniest home videos featuring drunk relatives falling off of furniture is innocent enough (especially when they stand back up and laugh) but what about people who fall off roofs? You know - the ones that need to be hospitalized? Hilarious. I know, maybe put the camera down and call an ambulance.
Better yet, maybe convince your friend not to do the crazy stunt in the first place.

Immediately you're thinking "wow, this post is totally killing my Tosh.0 induced humor-buzz." But before you get defensive, chill. I did some research, and this is actually really interesting.

Also, you will be impressed to know that this post spans my knowledge of theater history AND psychology.

First of all, physical humor involving violence and injury has been alive in performance arts since the rise in popularity of Commedia dell'arte in Italy during the 16th century (side note, Commedia dell'arte also gave us other elements of modern entertainment such as the 'stock' character and sketch comedy).
In fact, the term slap-stick comes from this early form of professional theater, and is linked directly to the sort of humor I'm referring to. The "slap-stick" is actually a tool called the bataccio. It's comprised of two flat pieces of wood that, when smacked together, sounds like someone getting popped in the face. The slap-stick was used to create this sound effect so that the characters could feign over the top violence and injury without really hurting each other to create the appropriate stage sounds.

So clearly, people have found pretend physical violence and injury funny for a long time.
Why?

Lets turn to some humor research to find out.
According to a short article published in Scientific American, a certain level of incongruity must be established for a joke to work. The punchline is unexpected, and surprises the joke comprehender. The punchline is incongruent to the set of for the joke.
Here's a good one
"Knock Knock" "Whose there?" "cash" "cash who?" "no thanks, but I'll take a peanut!"
During the set up of the joke, the comprehender focuses on the separate words "cash" and "who", and  two separate constructs represented by the words rather than the sound they make together ("cashew"). However the end of the joke is inconsistent with the assumption that "cash" and "who" are separate entities, and that they can have a relationship to one another: "who is this "cash" and what is his first name?" Rather the punchline introduces an entirely different way of thinking about the sounds uttered rather than their meaning, which takes the comprehender by surprise and leads to a giggle. Or maybe an eye roll.

According to Scientific American, physical humor may work the same way. Falling is incongruous to everyday experience. Think about the number of times in a day that you fall -- I don't know about you, but mine is usually 0. So as someone is walking along and suddenly trips and falls, the punchline (represented by the fall) is incongruous with the everyday experience of walking, and thus the onlooker is taken by surprise and laughs.

Another component necessary for a joke is that it must be established in a frame of reference that is relatively consequence-free. With no (or few) consequences, we can suspend the usual empathetic reactions we may be more prone to, and laugh at the person who is now laying on the floor.

So whats the problem? Sounds like laughing at people's pain and humiliation is pretty natural.
Well...no.

To be fair, the slap-stick humor is understandable. Unreasonable levels of violence and injury can be funny in a play, because it is an inherently consequence-free environment. Thus, because we are overtly aware that the proceedings are false, we can laugh at the "joke" freely.
This can be extended even to extreme examples, such as T.V shows like Family Guy and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I personally have trouble watching it regardless, mostly because I am overly empathetic. I cry easily in dramas, I get very easily scared by horror movies, ect.

However, the featured videos on shows like Tosh.0, Tru TV and the like are NOT slapstick. They appeal to the same type of humor, but they do not occur in a consequence free environment.
Perhaps the setting is misleading. Many of us are accustomed to seeing things on TV and in movies that aren't real. While this is pure speculation based on two paragraphs published in SA; what if this is happening: because the video of the real event is presented in the same format as the event that we know is not real, we don't bother making a distinction between real and not real events where humor is involved.

If that's the case, I think that's a little dangerous. Do we really want to train ourselves to laugh at some of this stuff?
Just food for thought.

And if you're interested in reading the article, it's called "Ask the Brains: Why Do We Laugh When Somebody Falls". Google it!

It's Spring Break

Midterms are finally over.

and all I can think about doing is one thing....

looking for cute pictures of puppies....

And sleeping.

The next few days will still be full of work. But for right now, I'm taking an epic nap before getting to work on all of the research projects that I have been neglecting for the past week.

oh...and my thesis

Two Ladies get Adventurous with an Exacoknife

I found this online a few weeks ago and decided it was the perfect quote to sum up why Liz and I are best friends. 

As many of you know (if you've been reading my blog that is) Liz was my "randomly selected" roommate freshman year, and my current partner in crime for the last four. 

This weekend she came to DeKalb to cure me of my statistics midterm blues (Wednesday was rough this week) and to help me find all of the fun DeKalb stuff to do. 

I'm going to be honest....DeKalb can be a bit of a drag in the winter. Summertime yields nice hiking paths and outdoor shopping downtown, but winter is a different story. Luckily, Liz and I have been finding fun things to do together since we moved into the North C building at the beginning of our GVSU education. 

Both Liz and I had a few things to accomplish in the near future. Liz needed to acquire clothing that was acceptable for wearing in Africa when she joins the Peace Corps. in May, and I needed to find something to do with all of the ticket stubs I had laying around in boxes that my mom delivered from the house when she moved. 

So our first stop was taking some advice from Macklemore and going to Goodwill. 

Goodwill is one of the best places to find light flowing skirts that hang past the knee (because honestly, where else can you even buy those right now? the long peasant skirt is a bit of a dead trend). We found so much more however...while looking through t-shirts to match to the suitable peace corps attire, I found a Free People shirt that looked as though the tags had recently been removed. Sometime you really can find some great treasures in the most unlikely places. 

After Goodwill hunting it was time to tackle the issue of the ticket stubs. As I posted about last time, I have a really hard time parting with items that represented fun things I've done in the past. Although I have all the pictures from Italy, I also have the menu from the restaurant we visited almost every day, the bus tickets we bought, the airline itinerary, and museum tickets. I couldn't just throw them out! What if I want to go back someday and I can't remember the name of the guy that ran the family owned pizza place on Borgo Pio that we went to almost every day? (it's Luigi, by the way). At the same time, they couldn't very well sit around cluttering my living space (which is extremely limited). Thus, it was time to consult pintrest for a useful way to use these paper memoirs. 

Tada!!!!

from the craft kitchen of Lillian Asiala, I give you

ticket stub coasters!

Pretty cool, right? 

And they were relatively easy to make. After taking an exactoknife to our walking tour maps, tickets, and restaurant menus, we collaged the pieces together, sealing the final pattern with Mod Podge over a couple of 11 cent bathroom wall tiles. The "recipe" called for a piece of plastic over the final product, however the plastic sheet wasn't binding with the glue, and the result was a "protective" cover that is very easily peeled off. Googling a fix for this problem directed us to ditching the plastic cover idea and using polyethylene spray which is both expensive and extremely smelly. Thus, for now our coasters aren't entirely safe for use. I'll have to wait until spring, when I can turn this into a back deck project and let them dry in the sun for a little while. They do, however, look very cool. 

The coaster on the right is mine. On the top left corner is the spot on the map where one could find Saint Peter's Basilica (our apartment was only about three blocks from here). Directly next to the map on the top right side is my ticket to the Vatican Museum where we saw the Sistine Chapel. Below is the top of the menu from La Romanella. This was a family owned pizza place on our street that we visited the first night we walked around the city. We came back several times over the course of our trip -- the owner was very nice to us and the pizza was amazing. 

The white block on my coaster is my attempt at collaging my airline itinerary to the tile. Unfortunately you have to look very hard now to see the schedule, but even after mod podge it's still there. Detroit to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Rome (May 15th 2009). Rome to Amsterdam , Amsterdam to Detroit (May 25, 2009). 

Liz's coaster features a map of the colosseum and the surrounding ancient ruins. On the bottom you can see the maroon and black stripes of the Roman bus tickets, the zoo ticket, and our pass to enter the "time elevator" which was an extremely touristy attraction that taught us all about the history of Rome in a 60 minute movie complete with moving seats (think the intro dinosaur DNA ride from the movie Jurassic Park). Thinking about it still makes us laugh. 

For good measure I included an action shot.

I am so excited to make more of these! By the time I'm finished (with Italy, England, and Germany) I should have a whole set! And besides being meaningful relics of past adventures and excellent conversation starters...

They just look awesome.

Things you Find in a Move

I contemplated calling this post "Why I am Destined to Live Among Clutter" but I figured this title was a little more positive.

As many of you know, my mother recently sold my childhood home. As anyone who has ever sold a  house knows, it is a massive project, and I am so very proud of the Madre for managing to sort through, organize, and pack everything up to give away, sell, or move to the new place.
We had some great memories in that house. My parents took me home from the hospital to that house. We had birthday parties, cats, and serious life lessons at that house, and I am going to miss it now that a new family has inhabited it.

However, in the move, there was a significant amount of random junk of mine that Mom didn't know what to do with, and so she brought it to my house in DeKalb to sort through. I figured I'd take some representative pictures of pieces of my childhood, adolescence, and early college years. Because it's fun. :)

This is the good, the bad, and the stuff I just can't throw away (no matter how ugly). Some of it is embarrassing. But it still brings a smile to my face whenever I see it.

Childhood

So, I'm not sure if you knew this...but I was the most BA 3 year old on the planet.

look at this! Ray Bans. waayyyy before my peers were rocking them. Talk about a trend setter.

Speaking of trend setter....bangs are back!!! And so is Lisa Frank. For 4 year olds anyway. Or 5...this may or may not have been my first day of kindergarten.

Prom

This is my junior prom portrait! That is a city triangles dress in "watermelon" (hahaha did a 16 year old pick that??) but I swear that if I ever got nominated for an academy award I would wear that color again in a heartbeat. I went to junior prom with a football player from my high school named Ben, a super great guy who sang in Varsity Choir with me. We had such a good time I hardly noticed that someone else wore my dress....

p.s that corsage was gorgeous. I dried it, but a couple years later it got tossed anyway because most of the rosebuds had returned to dust. But thats what we have pictures for.

College

When I graduated from high school, my twin cousin Olivia gave me a scrapbook with pictures from photo shoots we had taken as kids, posing in outfits of our own design (for your sake, I won't post those disasters). This is the note on the front of the book.

the book was a look back and a toast to the post high school life
"here's to college and jobs, all nighters, and buying houses and cars. I can't wait to keep going!"

me either :)

I didn't just go to college and get accepted to grad school (and pull a few all nighters along the way) but I also went to Italy with my amazing college roommate.

In the move, I found this watercolor of the Trevi Fountain that I bought when I went to Rome and had the best two weeks of my entire life with Liz and our friend Ana. I tossed two pennies into the fountain when I visited. One was to make a wish, and one was to ensure a return to the fountain someday (as is tradition). While I have to keep the exact details of my wish a secret, I'll have you know that my wish came true about 4 months later, but I have yet to return to the fountain. Regardless, that wish making at the Trevi is serious business.

But before I knew it, our family was changing in a lot of ways, including the arrival of our Chinese brother (YFU exchange brother to be exact)!
Clark lived at our house for a year, and attended high school with my sister while I tackled sophomore year as an undergrad at GVSU. This gorgeous Chinese hand mirror turned up in the boxes from the house that my Mom recently delivered. Looking at it reminds me of the Christmas vacation and summer I got to spend with him.

And speaking of sophomore year, it was this year that I met
(drumroll please)
ERIC! ...and lots of others whom I love.

In the move, I found ticket stubs everywhere. I still have no idea what to do with them, but for now I hope you enjoy the pictures.

The first I'll feature is the ticket stub from the time I went with Eric and his family to see Atlas Shrugged. That night Eric and I were supposed to meet his family at the movie theater, and while we were driving there, the breaks on the Buick park ave.  he was driving gave out! Luckily there was no oncoming traffic and we were perfectly safe. However, the Buick took us on our last adventure that night :(

The next is from the time the Titanic exhibit came to the Henry Ford Museum.

Each of us got these boarding passes that detailed who we were on the ship. At the end of the exhibit we found out if we lived or not.

I was Mrs. John Jacob Astor. On the plus side I was apparently very rich, although I think my person was also pregnant, so everything really equaled itself out in that scenario. Eric was a third class passenger, so we were a regular Rose and Jack Dawson! Well, except I was married with a kid on the way. And Eric didn't make it. And they never met.
We clearly had WAY too much fun with this.

Finally, I dug out this little treasure.

No this isn't a ticket stub. It technically wasn't even lost, but when my Mom dropped off the boxes, I found a pretty little travel jewelry box, and decided to use it for our trip to Chicago. This bracelet was the first thing in the box, because I love wearing it. I got this for my birthday from my sister Caroline. They are glass beads from Italy, which she bought while touring Europe for a school trip. I has every color and goes with everything, so I end up wearing it all the time.

Moving is a pain in the butt. But in a house that was inhabited for as long as it was (by our family), I was bound to find some interesting stuff from the past.
While all this stuff is hard to organize and at times hard to part with (although I'm keeping a lot) the last 22 years have been pretty cool. I'm so excited to see what will come next.

So here's to getting jobs, buying houses and cars, having more adventures, and accumulating more ticket stubs.

Disaster Dinner

"Tuna is Blue

  Merlot are Red

  Sushi is hard

  Let's do carry-out instead"

Above is a picture that was taken at Maru, a great sushi place on the east side of Grand Rapids. There is no question that Eric and I love going out for dinner. But we also have just as much fun cooking food for ourselves. Most of the time our projects turn out great! Last time we got adventurous and tried a new marinade for chicken and made a garlic sautéed broccoli. Our other creations include classics like fried chicken and burgers, spicy jambalaya, stir fry, and quesadillas with any interesting thing we can find to use as filling (my personal favorite being the breakfast themed quesadilla with scrambled egg). 

The last time I was in Grand Rapids, we went out for a beautiful anniversary dinner at a well known Italian restaurant. For this Valentine's day weekend however, we decided to stretch our culinary experience beyond our comfort zone and make sushi. 

How hard could it be? I mean, we had a book written for novices!

The first step was to find a place where we could buy "sushi grade" fish. Nearly all fish at meat markets and grocery stores has been handled in a way that cannot be consumed safely in an uncooked form.  Before this endeavor, Eric and I needed to do some serious research on the possibilities of food poisoning from bad fish and how best to avoid getting sick. On our end, the kitchen had to be neat, spotless, and completely sanitary in every way. But half the battle was finding "safe" fish. So for this select piece of meat we needed to go to a very select store. 

Enter Inboden's Market. I was referred to this store when I asked around at NIU to find out who had made sushi before, and where they got the fish for the raw rolls. We asked to talk directly to the butcher, who showed us the perfect tuna steak to use on our sushi. 

He also gave us some advice on cleaning the utensils and kitchen surfaces. 

This mostly involved washing everything in hot water and rinsing it boiling water. 

The most important step to making sushi is the perfect sushi rice. Now, I am absolutely terrible a cooking rice on the stove. But I tried my hand at some stovetop rice anyway, figuring that if I followed the recipe perfectly, my rice should be fine. 

Well, here was our rice. 

I'm not sure where we went wrong, but it was WAY too soggy to use, and there was just no drying it out. Despite it's less that ideal texture however, we decided to use it anyway. After all, it probably wasn't going to be that bad. 

So we chopped up our ingredients, prepared our bamboo mat, and rolled the first roll.

Here's our final product. Doesn't it look great??

Well unfortunately, it didn't taste nearly as good. 

I will say that the flavors were all there -- we had the right combinations of everything, including that delicious tuna steak! But alas, my rice was just plain wet and downright inedible. After a couple of tries,  we couldn't help but laugh at the state of the kitchen. So much effort for so little gain! After a couple of tries with our rolls, we agreed on cutting our losses, cracking open our Valentine's Day merlot, and popping the rest of the tuna into the oven. 

Luckily once the tuna was baked, our dinner was delicious. However, try to imagine for a moment sharing that fish between two people...needless to say, we were both hungry after our fancy tuna "snack". Thus, we threw in the towel, settled into the living room, tuned into Netflix, and ordered the rest of dinner from Lukulo's. 

And it was delicious. So what did we learn?

1) Just because you read a book about it, doesn't mean you can do it. 

2) You can have fun even when dinner is disastrous. 

3) I am still bad at rice. Seriously, how does one cook rice!? I need a lesson or a rice cooker.  

4) Sushi is better left to the pros. 

In the future, I imagine we'll probably stick to the food we know how to make for all major holidays. However, nothing beats an adventure in the kitchen.

 

Milestone Moments: 1st Conference Submission

The last two weeks have been very intense in just about every way possible.

Weather-wise, DeKalb had some of it's coldest weather all year, with some of the nights reaching as low as -2 degrees...and we were all feeling it. Students were texting and emailing that they couldn't get their cars to start, the roads were so icy that no one drove above 30 mph, and my bed (which is right next to the two very large windows in my bedroom) was covered with every last one of my blankets (including the sleeping bag that I normally reserve for guests).

I also hadn't seen my boyfriend in an intensely long amount of time.
We said goodbye in the very beginning of January and didn't see each other until the first weekend of February.
Naturally, a reunion after 4 weeks necessitated a three day visit and really really good Italian food to celebrate a milestone for us... three years together as a couple! A couple of what, I'm not sure, although 'pranksters' seems to fit pretty well, as you know who asked me to write directions to the restaurant we went to with a trick pen that delivers a painful electric shock to the thumb of the person trying to open it. What a jerk!

We also had a lot of chill time with friends. This is me trying to drink something with my feet during the Super Bowl. My lack of flexibility failed me, but it was a valiant effort encouraged along by Eric. Maybe we're a couple of dorks?

However the most intense part of the last week or so for me was a conference deadline that was fast approaching (whether we were ready or not). The lab that I work in often has a myriad of projects that at any one time are in different stages of development (anywhere from conception and literature review to manuscript editing). I happen to be in the data collection phase of the newest project, and was given the task of turning our study into a tangible experiment description...you know, with like..a prediction. And a hypothesis. And and feasible abstract. No big, I wrote the application to get the study approved, this should be a piece of cake...

Ha.

It's not that I've never done this before, this is how research is accomplished. It stars with an idea, the idea becomes a proposal, the proposal gets approved, it's set into motion through data collection, blah blah blah. But as an undergrad I had someone holding my hand through it all. I could sound as fancy as I wanted saying I worked in a lab on a grant as an undergrad (which I did) but lets be real: I collected data. I shook the participant's hand and I explained the study. Data collection is the easy part (thats why they let the undergrads do it). Being in charge of writing up a project for a conference submission was a brand new experience that had me banging my head on the keyboard of my laptop more than a couple of times over the course of the week.
Nothing sounded right. And I don't even mean stylistically right, I mean straight up correct. It's so amazing, the difference between a surface level understanding of a complex study, and truly deep understanding of the same project. Through writing this, however, I learned something things about my own work ethic I didn't know previously.
1) I work best in the morning

2) with coffee
3) and silence
4) I have to take a minute to think about what I want to say, and then write for about 5 minutes without rereading or editing anything
5) Then I get up for a second (get a pop tart, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, refresh my coffee)
6) and go back and edit whatever I wrote.

Normally the thing that I wrote in that 5 minutes was terrible. However, editing (no matter how much editing needs to occur on the product itself) is so much less dubious than a blank screen. I soon figured out that with a tangible product, I was making real headway with this draft!


So there you have it. Another milestone moment in the grad school baby book of milestones = a halfway intelligible project write-up to send to a conference! I've had so many this year. Looking back, I really do feel like a completely different person than I did a year ago, after receiving my acceptance to grad school. Little did I know, I had no idea what I didn't know. Pretend that made sense.

Liv and Lil take Chicago

It sounds like a new name of a great new reality show, right?? Watch out, Kardashian sisters.

This weekend, my favorite twin cousin came to spend the weekend in my neck of the woods and we conquered the windy city, having a fantastic time in the process.
Yes, you read that correctly: twin cousins. Thats an odd term - I will explain it's origin. First of all, our dads are brothers. (p.s I saw this picture for the first time at my Dad's funeral and about died laughing -- and impressive feat given the circumstances, look at my uncles glasses!!!).

But perhaps more importantly, Olivia and I were born within about 36 hours of each other, within about 36 miles of each other, one magical mid-July weekend in 1990, and have been great friends ever since.

Here's a great picture of us at our grandparent's anniversary celebration at crystal mountain.

Here are some more great picture of us at my high school grad party.

 We're really photogenic.

When the two of us went off to college it naturally followed that we didn't see each other much, and since getting real life jobs and working on graduate degrees, that free time has become even more restricted. So naturally when we both had a free weekend this January we knew exactly how we wanted to spend it.

Trains converged at union station, where the adventure began. After hitting up a few ideal shopping spots (including but not limited to the Urban Outfitters book section), we caught the nearest cab and journeyed to the north side of the city to Beat Kitchen.

Beat Kitchen is this great little restaurant with a relatively intimate performance venue where we saw three performances:
- a coed duet act (a guy with a guitar and a girl)
- a soloist from ann arbor
- and Jenny Owen Youngs

Jenny Owen Youngs is friends with Regina Spektor, so obviously I was expecting a lot. And Jenny Owen Youngs did not disappoint. After getting back to DeKalb, I looked Youngs up on spotify, and if you haven't listened to her before, I recommend the "Take Off All Your Clothes" EP. She was great, and we had the best time listening to some good song writing, while being able to sing along with covers like "Ring of Fire" and "Colors of the Wind" (yeah. from Pocahontas).

The next morning our plan was to check out the ice sculpture exhibit at the Navy Pier, but 5 minutes in the beginning of the intense ice storm to follow was beginning in the form of giant heavy drops of freezing rain, so our ice sculpture expedition instantly turned into a game of "find the nearest Starbucks".

Overall, our Chicago adventure was a highly successful one! There is nothing like a fun weekend with family to recharge your week.

happy Monday!