More here.

I already posted this on Flickr, but I wanted to share it here as well because any excuse to tag an entry with “Food” makes me inordinately happy.

To make Tea Eggs, gather the following:

Serve with zhok or bak kut teh.

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I have been working on taking links off the side blog menu and putting them on separate pages; have you noticed? I am quite proud, even though the pages themselves aren’t necessarily that interesting at the moment. Eventually I’d like to move everything except entries off the main page, so that I can use all the available horizontal space for posting slightly larger photographs (question: does anyone really like seeing what I’m reading? Because that might have to move off the main page, too).

In the process I am teaching myself (more) xhtml and css and having minor meltdowns every now and then because:

a) I am learning things as I need them, and there’s not a lot of method to my madness. Every question I have turns up more things I hadn’t realized I didn’t know.

b) Since this is all so unfamiliar, my brain doesn’t possess the requisite compartments in which to put the information I’m learning. In teaching school they call these “schema” — existing frameworks upon which you can hang new ideas. I’m putting up the architecture for understanding web development as we speak, and the building has lopsided windows and doors falling off its hinges.

c) There are sixteen different ways to accomplish any given goal, and every source will tell you their way is the best. The internet is a confusing place. I know lots of you do this for a living or just for fun, and are very good at it — and I am immensely impressed with all of you. It’s more and more clear to me that programming for the web is fantastically easy to do badly and really quite difficult to do well. I bow to your skill and ask you to please never peek at the source code of my pages; leave my ragged typings unseen.

d) I am impatient.

But there is still one more tea egg in the fridge.

In addition to seeing patients, taking care of all the administrative red tape that comes along with being the head of the therapeutic radiology department in Singapore’s National Cancer Center, and acting as a full-time storytelling grandfather, my dad is also the chairman of the Institutional Review Board at the NCC (between him and Jenn, I have no lack of overachieving role models ;-)). That last position means he spends huge amounts of time reading voluminous reports on proposed medical research trials and deciding whether the purposes and practices of any given study on a new means of treating cancer in humans falls within the boundaries of certain ethical guidelines. If you’re interested, you can read an article about that part of his job here.

Coincidentally, when Molly was with us the other day the three of us had drinks with a friend of hers who serves on a similar sort of board for a major research hospital in Boston. We talked about his perspective on medical research trials over Dark and Stormys and a rather fancy cheese plate, and it transpires that while he quite naturally thinks that this kind of research is indispensable, he generally dissuades friends and family from signing up to be subjects in studies because — he says — he’s seen a lot of healthy people experience rather unpleasant side effects, potentially long-term ones as well as temporary discomforts. He also thinks that the safeguards in place to protect research volunteers — the kind of ethics board evaluations that both he and my dad participate in, for instance — aren’t powerful enough, at least in the limited experience he’s had (we wondered whether perhaps the guidelines for human studies were more stringent in Singapore). One of his arguments was that informed consent is a good goal but a difficult one to achieve when you can’t be entirely sure of the effects the treatment will have. Ultimately, he believes, if you don’t have a personal investment in the particular disease in question, there’s no reason to play with fire.

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about that perspective, because one of the unfortunate results of compensating people for their participation in medical trials (the more they offer, Molly’s friend grimaced, the wider a berth you should give a study), at least in this country, is naturally that people will volunteer for no other reason than that they could really use the money. That means in many cases medical trials tend to be filled by those parts of the population with the fewest resources and the weakest support systems, as well as those who are the least likely to have done a lot of research into potential side-effects. In other words, people who might be signing up because they don’t have a lot of other options. Which kind of makes the system seem a little broken to me — in a way, it can’t help but make use of the most vulnerable segments of society as a testing ground for everyone else. On the other hand, I think compensating study volunteers is in general a very good thing. I’m curious now about the differences, if any, between the ethics board process as the NCC applies it and as it is applied at this Boston hospital. It’s entirely possible that because the board my dad is on only has to evaluate cancer treatment trials, it’s easier for them to create and make use of stricter, more specific rules.

So at the end of all this I’m still trying to decide whether or not to volunteer for a HIV vaccine trial, which is something I’ve been thinking about for over a year now. Because these studies are long-term ones, requiring about a 12 month commitment for each subject, I couldn’t sign up now for a Boston-based trial. But it remains on my mind.

I know; you come here for the words (or possibly the ice-cream cake. Wait, there’s no ice-cream cake? What am I doing here, then?). But I’m looking with an editor’s eye at three different people’s words this weekend, and there isn’t room for my own to crowd them at the moment. I am sorry. Sunday maybe? My dad was in the Singapore papers a couple of weeks ago and I have some thoughts about that, plus a picture of him looking dashing as usual, to share. So hopefully then. I trust you’re all having lovely weekends — we are! God, I love holidays.

Edited to add the following before pictures. Not shown: stuffing, gravy, rolls, salad, cheesecake, pie, the obscene amounts of butter, half and half and sour cream that went into the mashed potatoes.

I’ve been wearing my winter coat for the past two or three days — it’s long, very structured, and extremely red. Molly says it makes me look like a movie star; all I can think of when I’m walking through the subterranean corridors of the T in the mornings is how safe and self-enclosed it makes me feel, like I’m making my way through the universe ensconced in my own private cloister made of wool. In the summer I am open and awake and vulnerable, bare skin exposed to the air and skirts fluttering about my legs. Something in the warmth of the world connects me to everyone else. In winter I am wrapped in a blanket I carry with me everywhere I go, separated from other bodies by a protective layer and still half asleep despite my daily dose of hot black coffee.

Happy Thanksgiving, darlings. We’re making turkey for the very first time tomorrow. Wish us luck!

The time had come, Sally felt, to pull up those socks of hers and make an escape plan. She knew it wouldn’t be long before the doorknobs on either side of her would both turn — at precisely the same moment, as they always did. She breathed in and out to still her heart and thought carefully behind her curtain of hair about how she ought to proceed.