It's all fun and games until someone looses an

Written at my workstation paper forest on the 5th floor of the Science Centre at the University of Auckland

A month flies by, and another 1/36th of the allotted time for this little PhD has made memento of itself in piles of papers, a few more megabytes of data and rather a lot of small changes. Anyone who doesn't want to hear anything depressing skip to the life-spoiler-free line: it looks like this ☺ has got together with this ☺ and... got married, bought a house, got properly settled in - funiture and so on - and waited for a bit (+ 3 hot meals a day).

Something that has been building since arrival is the stress of being in a foreign country: being away from my darling brother and the rest of my family, even being separated from the minutiae of home - chocolate with high fat content, over-eager Easter advertising, music from proper on-the-corner pubs - and all the friends who have been scattered to the four corners of the world; every subtraction has had some form of compensation, but the legacy of all those things I miss is that nothing can quite replace them.

My housemates are lovely people, two of whom I'll be looking to house with in the near future, another lent me his jacket for my costume for the department pub crawl last night (more on that later), but the common area doesn't die until past midnight every night and the wall of my room does little to screen out background noise. Work is going alright but the lack of funding and managerial oversight (both of which aren't helped by the relaxed working attitude that pervades) make for a large number of irritating 'disconnects'... The University of Auckland doesn't even rank in the top 100 in the world for Chemistry, Imperial's up at #30, and yes, I know, I should be looking at the positives of being here however mustering the willpower to not be irritated by a chemicals and equipment store that's open for 2 morning hours only and a lab that's made my OCD snap on the marigold gloves and a hair-net. To be fair, there's nothing wrong or missing that takes anything more than patience - sometimes a lot of patience - to fix, and my own forgetful, fitful and floppy work ethic makes me feel like a mop made of rubber.

Well, I do get free coffee, so that's a plus, and top of the list of pros is my supervisor, a vibrant, intelligent veteran, a great carouser of science... but then he decides to visit Wellington for two weeks, and free coffee slides back into #1!

Having my girlfriend 34% around the world also sucks - that's about 15 hours by plane, 11 hours if I were a sound wave and 63 milliseconds if I were a happy photon in the world's most privileged optical fibre (thank you Wolfram Alpha). Things were really getting to a head, so I've started counselling: I can't say that talking all my troubles away is as good as cider, but 99% of Americans can't be wrong can they (they're never wrong, about anything, no, nothing... absolutely nothing, ever, they're Americans therefore they're not wrong, a country founded on rights can't be wrong, because they're American because they're always right*).

* [boyfriend disclaimer] Nothing directed at you honey, I've just been on reddit all afternoon and fuckers are trying to steal the internet... again!

Oh, and my laptop harddrive died and I lost my glasses.

☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺

Ah, onto the good stuff.

Last week was the MacDiarmid Institutes first Electrochemistry Boot Camp! It's alternate title is Cosmin Laslau's masterplan to get free food for the Easter weekend trip to a bach in Doubtless Bay with Monique, Anna, Jon, Karima, Tomas, Aphree, Hande, Dida, Vineet, Romel and Karthik... but the organisers thought that wouldn't fit on the programme. After an hour-long bus-ride up to the location in Huia Bay (a few rentable buildings overlooking a beautiful inlet, 15 minutes drive from the nearest store), it wasn't long before we were in lectures. My supervisor, David, a lecturer from Palmerston North, Simon, and a lecturer from Victoria University of Wellington, Alison, all delivered lectures over the rest of the evening and the next day: David asked for power (it went on the first morning), Alison asked for more time (but David and Simon stole it)... and Simon asked for wine (and, yes, he got it).

There was a lot of food: Cosmin, the go-to guy in the group for just about anything, had been charged with keeping everyone fed, watered (and ethanoled) and there was so much stuff left over at the end that the only thing that we needed to buy for our Friday-Monday bach trip was a bit of meat and... $250-worth of beer ☺. The boot camp had its free time, the surroundings yearned to be explored and a group of us hunted for the waterfall on the map on the outside of the kitchen and were disappointed by the two-foot trickle, that turned out not to be it.

The bus from the boot camp returned to campus on Thursday and, after a re-pack, all the aforementioned embarked on the 6 hour drive to Doubtless Bay. I figure at this point I should explain what baches are. They aren't long-lost brothers of the famous classical family, and they aren't a mis-spelling of where you might grow vegetables or flowers, or 'medicinal herbs'. A bach is the New Zealanders home away from home, a house for rent for weekends away. Doubtless Bay *checks wikipedia* is the reputed original landing of the Maori discoverer of New Zealand, a gorgeous collection of beaches and fun-to-climb hills. Baches dot the landscape.

Playing Irish Snap, Caps, cricket, The Resistance and going the beach, drinking beer, having BBQs.. it was a splendid break.

Getting back into the swing of things after basically a week off (uni was closed Tuesday) was slow, but I've finally done my first experiment! Of course, I'm now sitting here listening to Jim Carey sing with a lot of teeth on YouTube. There was also my costume to prepare...

The department costume party kinda exploded this year (so I hear). Twice as many people and some really epic costumes. From Tuesday to Friday, I was shopping and getting my costume ready, and I'm rather disappointed that I didn't take good pictures... I've dyed my hair black! I got hair gel, fingerless gloves, wire, aluminium foil and borrowed my housemate's jacket. I emerged as a pretty good Wolverine (a bouncer did tell me to take off my claws in one bar because I almost stabbed him in the eye). Romel and Tomas and Vineet turned out as a trio of mafia-style gangsters, Karthik's Clark Kent - with superman shirt underneath - was very cool, even beside the guy who came with full superman gear, cape and everything. Mars' was brilliant... anyone who hasn't seen Game of Thrones missed out, Mars' Khaleesi was amazing (come to think of it, the only thing besides a dragon on her shoulder would have been a horses heart slowly dripping blood onto the carpet).

Toodle-pip, let a smile show x

It's all coming together!

Written at my workstation, 301 Lvl 5 Chemistry Building, University of Auckland 

He stepped out of the lift. The doors clunked behind him. The card reader x-rayed the pocket of his cocked leg, letting out a gleeful beep as its ESP confirmed the presence of the card in the guy’s back pocket.

The level 5 door resisted, stubbornly waiting to be opened unlike every other foyer door; all the rest behaved themselves, heard the reader’s beep, and opened like good little automated doors. Once in the corridor the guy glanced left and right: normally occupied, the hospital-style 301 building was rather desolate. Two offices announced their occupation with flags of light on the shiny floor, the man knew who’d be in – they were always in.

Another card reader, another trill to signal one more portal open to the hands of the privileged passer: you may pass Into the PERC quadruplets of labs and the parent workstations! The guy sat at his desk, booted up the computer, his laptop and his brain (which, at this time of the morning, hadn’t yet upgraded from Windows 95 – this was going to take coffee). After a Skype date, displaying all the cuteness of a date-well-dated, exclamations of love, debates on meaningless subjects that nonetheless seemed to mandate contrarianistic fervour… there came some hours of work. Until…

“Good afternoon dear readers. It’s been about three weeks since my last update; I’ll have to check my calendar to see what actually happened.

I’ve started my PhD! That’s not quite the song-and-dance affair that I’d like it to be, it really means very little except that the reading I’ve been doing is now ‘official’. Now, I walk around with a suffusing glow of propriety counterpoised by the fact that being officially a PhD student… I can now, officially, screw up. Between reading and doing spectrometer experiments I thought that I was immune to anything going up the Schlenk tube and through the pump, but I’ve somehow managed to come up with a series of data that can only be explained by my using the balance wrong. It sucks. Once I’ve finished writing this, I’m going to be going through every sample to date to try and find another explanation.

Since my supervisor asked me to get acquainted with the basics of the techniques I’ll be using to make my polymers, I asked the teaching labs for materials and ran one of the syntheses used to teach the undergraduates. I rushed it a little, but came out with a polymer that looks about right.

Speaking of undergraduate labs, I’ve taken up my position as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, with 48 little students of my very own to nurture and educate, and somewhere along the line I’ll have to stop one or other of them from doing something stupid. They’re a good bunch: split in two, morning and afternoon, they’re manageable and while the first experiment was about as hazardous as changing a nappy there was a good feeling once everyone had got everything done and put all the equipment away. It makes me smile to think of how bloody eager they all are.

I remember way back when I was an undergraduate*, using all four colours of highlighter to demarcate equations/things of importance/quantities and instructions; my scripts were a merry playground of budding excitement at being at university… and were completely useless as summaries.

*Read this with the image of a narrator, reclined in a wing-back chair affront an iron-grilled fire, air tinged with the echo of tobacco smoke

Other things to happen in the last few weeks include a variety of MMA-related injuries – my toe’s still purple and bruised from Tuesday evening. I’ve also met a few more people satellite to friends at uni: at Karima’s BBQ there were a couple of people from England (bringing the total of homies up to 8), including Anna’s boyfriend (Anna’s a Pole who met John doing her Master’s back in the UK); for about 20 minutes, me and John batted British insults about this, that and the rest.

This brings me to a theory about British humour that’s been keeping my noodle busy for a bit: British humour is not simply a brand of humour, but a superior evolution displayed only by those who’ve had enough experience with the language. Humour arises from situations differing from our expectations, where our surprise is directed into laughter. At its most basic, humour is exemplified by the foundational peek-a-boo, and this seminal surprise translates with age into the use of puns and euphemisms – the ‘peek-a-boo’ of language.

British humour – the slap-stick, the insulting, insinuating, disgusting display of dispassion and false of Faulty Towers, Blackadder, Monty Python and more – is a development in humour that is contingent on an appreciation of multiple happenings of ‘surprise’. Physical, psychological, linguistic, relational and social humours come together in sketches like Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Fatal Beatings’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBeguUvuDzs) and Fry and Laurie’s ‘Your Name Sir?’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ); and being possessed of a great legacy of written humour, British humour has retained that splendour through memetic transfer to arrive at Black Books, Red Dwarf, Fools and Horses and a list of stand-up and acting comedians that represent the cream of side-splitters.

…

…

Or I’m biased because I’m English.

Why should Spanish humour, or Italian humour not exceed the madman in the corner of Europe, laughing away at his own jokes? Why can’t tribes in the Amazon have invented slap-stick before an Anglo Saxon invented the stick? Can I disprove that Neanderthals actually died out because they came across the original of ‘The Funniest Joke in the World’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM)? Regrettably, I can never fully realise my quest for the answers, since the best humour is intrinsic to the culture and language of the original source, and I’m terrible at languages (and I lack a time machine). But, as conclusion to this segue of cranial masturbation I will offer up the thought: maybe, because for a thousand years just to get by in a country that’s being constantly invaded, wrecked by civil war, fires, plagues, famines, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”, not to mention religious feuds between two sects of the same religion that both believe in the infallibility of the same damn book, that maybe someone somewhere, by chance, came up with the tenant that has become the cornerstone of British survival, the one thought that has allowed the Darwin Awards to flourish, British politics to maintain its unbeatable quality and dead babies to be nailed to trees and floors throughout the world: “Well… You’ve got to laugh.”

I think two pages are enough for one post, I’ve got samples to attend to. In addition, today is St. Patrick’s day and I have three Irish housemates so I better go home and go green.

Happy Pi day to those who missed it!"

Getting settled in

Written at 18 East Street - Room 8, Newton, Auckland

After three and half weeks, I’ve got my visa application in. Until the student visa displaces the working holiday visa I’m on now, I can’t start my PhD. While I’m waiting I’ve been doing work for one of the other members of the group… there must be some up-side to reading data off of a spectrometer as particles of carbon drop out of solution – I challenge anyone to follow Rule 34 up with “UV-Vis spectrometer” – but at the moment I haven’t found it. Granted, the results should lead to something interesting but this is my first view of what work is like divorced from the analysis: sample, dilute, analyse… deliver data.

Last Thursday I moved out of my room in the hostel. Goodbye Mel, Clem, Chloe, Launa and Nick! And Louise and Josh and plenty of others. Speaking of Josh: on one of my last evenings at the hostel, leaning against the handrail outside the front door, Josh – a guy about my age, curly hair, a Kent accent – asked me what my last name was. Out of the blue, I was a little surprised, and when I told him there followed a few moments of talking about ‘March’ and ‘Marchant’ it emerged that I knew Josh when I was in Sunday School. His parents knew, and maybe still know, my parents and we grew up together. Being 23, having travelled across 12 countries, the odds are probably for something like this… still, it’s pretty cool that in the two weeks I’m staying at a hostel of no particular significance, in a country that’s 18,327* kilometres from my place of birth that I bump into someone I knew when I had a horrific bowl-haircut and was always getting concussions.

*http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=london+to+auckland

My new home, a single room in a shared house, is quite comfortable (if a bit small). The bed has a couple of built in units – a chest of drawers and a set of shelves – and a desk attachment. It wasn’t until I started pulling away the bed to stuff my cases behind it that I realised that the desk actually rotates out from the bed, and the hanging set of shelves on the underside of the bed folds into the vacancy between the two units. Vwala! If anyone wants to come and stay, all I need to do is clean up the whole floor, the whole of the desk and then slide the desk into the bed frame… the floor space would accommodate one friend or two very close ones.

While work occupies enough of my time not to make life boring, there have been quite a few gaps in my social life…

The one lesson so far of swing dancing went rather well. Firstly, it was free – a great opening move to seduce a stingy student – and secondly, the other classmates were good partners, all except for one woman who, no blame to her, was way too short for me; I felt like I was dancing with a child and my shoulder dipped uncomfortably. The Charleston, the style of swing dance for this lesson, has a two-bar pattern with lots of standing-leg taps and flicks and counts on mid-air movements: the ‘swing’ really is the thing, I had to relax and go with it before it felt natural.

Running will always be my go-to when I’m in need of a fresh breath to clear my head. Auckland has hills that murder calves and puts another arrow in the heel of Achilles; taking a stroll has rapidly turned into a game of strategy, whereby one attempt to maximise the distance without contesting the elevation. When it comes to running, I’ve come up with a wholly different exercise:

I, Nathan March, vow to traverse every street in a 2 mile radius of Auckland CBD before the end of my first year. There’s a map up on my wall and a faithful pink highlighter that will bear witness to my journey.

Thirdly, I tried MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). To say the least, it was an experience: range martial arts like karate and Tang Soo Do are to MMA what Formula1 is to Nascar; they’re both fast, they’re both close-up, but the shine in MMA only lasts as long as the starting line. The very first move we were taught was a double leg takedown (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVi2pzMgt6U); within a minute of starting the class, I was throwing a guy who has 15 kg on me to the floor (and he me likewise). Ordered to grapple on the ground and maintain submission positions, like I was 8 and fighting my brothers all over again, my muscles were wrenched, squeezed and stretched like they haven’t been since Joseph would pick me up and throw me onto the sofa. 4 nights later? I’m still having trouble coughing, the tug on my stomach is pretty deterring.

Guess which one am I going back to? For two nights a week, before long three, I’ll be going along to Maai Hyoshi Dojo for a mixture of Muay Thai, boxing and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (BJJ). If I’m all healed by tomorrow evening I’ll have my second session.

What makes Brazilian Jiu-jitsu so attractive as a martial art to me is the constant validation it enjoys in the UFC – I could offer a decent breakdown, but most everything I know comes from a blog post from Sam Harris (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-pleasures-of-drowning), my original inspiration for finding a club. Simply put, if you don’t know BJJ or some similar grappling art you’re doomed in the UFC. I don’t plan to put any of this to the test, but I can understand Harris’s comments about the ‘delusions of martial prowess’ prevalent in formalised martial arts – Tang Soo Do may have taught me how to dismount a horseman, but even I have to admit that I’ve already experienced probably the most threatening behaviour from a mount that I’ll ever experience: this past summer the stallion ridden by one of my kids from camp opted to urinate, splashing my boots, while I stood beside.

In summary: I’m going to start work in a few weeks, I’ve found new and invigorating ways to get hurt and I’ve found a place to live that gives me slightly more room to fill than a sardine that’s kicked all the other sardines out of the can and hammered out the walls a little. 

What am I doing in Auckland?

Written at the Silver Fern Backpackers Hostel, Auckland

In the great portrait gallery of cities there is San Francisco, a Saxophonist breathing mist into Pacific sun; there is Paris, a Chef among his pots and pans, a mass of flavours, colours and delightful concoctions. London, the Dibler of the world, the jack-of-all-trades, his quick hand and his obvious tics only endear him. Dubai’s the toddler boy, obsessed with ‘shiny’ and ‘tall’; Rome, the legacy-laden geriatric begrudging modernity.

Among the army of the personified metropolises there is the care-free deserter, languishing prostrate on the beach, Auckland. The place where banks would drive John Cleese to  satire that would strain his every joint, that open at only those hours when everyone else is supposed to be at work; the city where if you want something done quickly, you’d best ask someone who’s fresh off the plane.  In contrast to Taiwan’s effervescent night- and day-life, Queen Street – the closest to Oxford Street, London, that Auckland gets – is comatose after 10, and at peak shopping hours you could still swing round a Koala holding a bottle of beer. Granted, the sparse population of the city streets could have something to do with the limited total population (a mere 1 million people, it’s still a whopping 25% of the country’s population).

The city of Auckland lies atop New Zealand’s north island, arms and legs jutting up and down and out. On the flight in, it was beautiful, and Auckland is supposed to be one of the least attractive areas of NZ. It took about 10 hours to fly from Singapore to Auckland and, while JetStar is distinctly cheaper than other carriers, the plane was reasonably comfortable. No meals on the plane and about 1 hour of sleep added a good meal and a nap to my to-do list… right at the top? Find my hostel.*

* I am pleased to say that I made it all the way to NZ wearing my PhD hat on every flight and in every terminal en route, for at least some of the time. The distinctive Britishness of the hat made me wonder what people were thinking: there’s a clot who’s about 100 years out of touch, how quaint?

Silver Fern Backpackers is a fairly new hostel, and at $27 a night it was among the cheapest in the area. Paying a full two weeks in advance had the bonus of a few extra 50 MB codes for the wifi:

Before I go on I should explain what wifi means to the underclass of cash-starved backpackers in NZ. It’s expensive, $0.10 per megabyte, that’s $70 to just download a movie (the exchange rate coming over was about 1.8-1.9 NZD to 1 GBP). Over my first few days I hunted for free wifi like I was searching for water in a desert. I wasn’t the only one. The Auckland Central Library has 100 MB/day free wifi, available 24 hours, the funny thing is that the library closes in the afternoon… a cluster of internet-hungry laptops swarm around outside for hours afterwards no matter what the day.

Back to the hostel: my first day you would have thought that I’d crash, and start work come Friday. Ahuh. Something about the sun and the novelty or maybe the exercise of getting my two cases around Auckland’s hills lit a fire under my feet, and by evening’s end I’d scouted out the banks and the phone vendors, explored the University of Auckland campus and Albert Park, and popped into a wine shop for a free taste of a very nice Riesling. I didn’t feel like buying anything at the time so I felt the need to excuse myself – that didn’t stop me going back the next day for more.

The hostel provided free breakfast from 8-9 AM, but what with the lack of sleep, all day walking and adapting to the heat I was too out to wake up in time the next morning.

Over the last few week I’ve met my supervisor (David Williams, apparently loaded, having once been the head of the research group that invented the pregnancy test), signed up for short-term work as a technician at the University of Auckland (UoA) and completed my enrolment. Regrettably, my supervisor twisted his ankle yesterday and hasn’t been around to fill in the final forms for technicianing or for my student visa. 

Hopefully that should all be done by the end of next Monday (today being Friday 10^th Feb) and then my fate will be in the capable hands of Immigration NZ.

Auckland is a little empty to be honest. There’s plenty to see, but not a great deal of variety. I’m sure I could find a great collection of bars, hairdressers and shops if I went out into the suburbs, and there’re are certainly places well worth a visit for the sake of photography, but even in central Auckland there’s only one museum I’ve run across, a cinema or two and there’s Queen Street which is a fairly typical high street. I have yet to explore K-road at night however (the night-club/red-light street), so called because it’s a long name beginning with K and no-one can be bothered to use the full name apparently.

Speaking of places well worth a tripod and a couple of hours of walking around, since I’ve been in the hostel for a week I am dying to find a proper place to live. There’s a housing crisis* at present, and I’m hunting at the same time as all the other students. One place that peaked my interest was in Mount Eden, a borough a little way out from central; the place turned out to be too far from central to suit me, but the house was great: raised foundations, clear line of sight to the top of Mount Eden (a dormant volcano, a luscious green-topped hill with a level top free of trees – perfect for night-time shots of the city, I hope), and the two women living there were great. I’ve been invited round for dinner, despite turning down the room.

*Is it bad that my first guess for the spelling was Crysis™?

Mission Bay, one of the many such bays along the coastline of Auckland’s wider circle, is 10 minutes away from Central by bus. I went along for one afternoon, alone, with A Clockwork Orange as company – come to think of it that’s a little suspect from a psychological perspective but I don’t give an in-out. The rest of Auckland is nice, but it’s ordinary. Mission Bay on the other hand, for a Londoner at least, is a beautiful prospect: an extended beach in easy distance, with a quiet beach-level walk all the way back to Auckland, with only a few people around even at the height of summer. While the bus took 10 minutes, the walk back took a lot longer, maybe an hour and a half? A lot of that time I spent absorbing the sea-front view of a good chunk of the east of Auckland. There was a particular outcrop supporting a restaurant of some sort gave the perfect view and I will be going back to take shots at night: the Sky Tower is clear, the water is gentle and the coast-line path meanders all the way.