it's in the trees! it's coming!
FINALS!
blah, blah, it's that time again, carrying on about school per absolutely no one's request. this week's damage: one final essay on ethical dilemmas associated with research studies that seek to explore potential biological causations for homosexuality. on the upshot, i remembered at, like, 4:30 on the afternoon the essay was due that co-worker!n wrote his master's thesis on gay twin studies, so i made him come over to my desk and summarize about twenty years of fucked-up freudian research in twenty minutes.
eventually, we started talking about how the more you attempt to study anything involving sexual orientation, the more you realize it's completely pointless. this is the thing: when your demographic can only be assembled through self-disclosure, your sample population is always going to be fucked. not to state the obvious, but studying gay people is not like studying red beetles and blue beetles: you can't just look at them and tell what color they are, they have to tell you, and sometimes a beetle tells you that it's blue when it's really red, or, you know, purple.
and really, i'm getting off easy, because public health is primarily concerned with operational and behavioral orientation and mostly glosses over perception and desire and whatever else, because what do you do with a beetle who tells you it's red even though it's thought about being blue?
but i digress.
when this quarter is over, i will have two more quarters of study, and then i suppose i will actually have to start writing about this stuff. this week, i'm all hung up on the idea of writing about my master's thesis about absolutely nothing else but flaws in the techniques used to recruit participants for studies of the sexual risk behavior of men who have sex with men. the abstract of the study would read as follows: blah blah NO MORE GAY BARS OKAY? blah blah. awesome. i'm making progress already.
still not packing. still watching a lot of baseball. saved just enough time and energy to be completely outraged about project runway:
1. HOW IS VINCENT STILL ON MY TV SCREEN WEEK AFTER WEEK? HOW?
2. and for that matter, how did that overall abortion thing angela made not land her in the bottom three?
3. seriously. vincent. why.
i want to make a post at some point about reality television personalities and the need to peg everyone into their archetypes, but for now i will say:
laura & michael : project runway :: steven & harold : top chef
blah, blah, it's that time again, carrying on about school per absolutely no one's request. this week's damage: one final essay on ethical dilemmas associated with research studies that seek to explore potential biological causations for homosexuality. on the upshot, i remembered at, like, 4:30 on the afternoon the essay was due that co-worker!n wrote his master's thesis on gay twin studies, so i made him come over to my desk and summarize about twenty years of fucked-up freudian research in twenty minutes.
eventually, we started talking about how the more you attempt to study anything involving sexual orientation, the more you realize it's completely pointless. this is the thing: when your demographic can only be assembled through self-disclosure, your sample population is always going to be fucked. not to state the obvious, but studying gay people is not like studying red beetles and blue beetles: you can't just look at them and tell what color they are, they have to tell you, and sometimes a beetle tells you that it's blue when it's really red, or, you know, purple.
and really, i'm getting off easy, because public health is primarily concerned with operational and behavioral orientation and mostly glosses over perception and desire and whatever else, because what do you do with a beetle who tells you it's red even though it's thought about being blue?
but i digress.
when this quarter is over, i will have two more quarters of study, and then i suppose i will actually have to start writing about this stuff. this week, i'm all hung up on the idea of writing about my master's thesis about absolutely nothing else but flaws in the techniques used to recruit participants for studies of the sexual risk behavior of men who have sex with men. the abstract of the study would read as follows: blah blah NO MORE GAY BARS OKAY? blah blah. awesome. i'm making progress already.
still not packing. still watching a lot of baseball. saved just enough time and energy to be completely outraged about project runway:
1. HOW IS VINCENT STILL ON MY TV SCREEN WEEK AFTER WEEK? HOW?
2. and for that matter, how did that overall abortion thing angela made not land her in the bottom three?
3. seriously. vincent. why.
i want to make a post at some point about reality television personalities and the need to peg everyone into their archetypes, but for now i will say:
laura & michael : project runway :: steven & harold : top chef