Welcome / Happy Veterans Day!

Happy Veterans Day to everyone!

I've wanted to start a blog for a while now, but have wavered on the name, subject, and pretty much everything else for months.  Finally I've decided to just throw all of my interests into one place, talking about my life as a Neuroscience graduate student in the great city of Ann Arbor.  I'm planning on recapping concerts I go to, trips I take, new (or old favorite) restaurants I visit, new music / TV I find, brain research I find interesting, and pretty much anything I find worth reading about.  This might make things super messy and/or complicated, but hopefully everything will have a nice theme tying everything together (just don't ask me what that theme is).

Although the title of the blog is ArborCentric, my first few posts will be from Washington DC.  I'm attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting Saturday through Wednesday with ~31,000 other neuroscientists who all know way more about everything than me.  Hopefully it will be fun, and I'll learn a couple things.  I'm planning on writing about interesting posters and presentations I see, as well as recapping restaurants, food trucks, bars and clubs I visit when I'm not in the Convention Center.

As one final note, I'd like to thank all the veterans who have sacrificed so much to protect our freedom.  My favorite writer and Iraq veteran Matt Ufford (of Warming Glow and Kissing Suzy Kolber) wrote a great piece for The Classical that I think everyone should read. Puts everything in perspective on a day like this, when as many people are posting about 11/11/11 (how silly!) as Veterans Day.

I don’t begrudge sporting events their brief nods to veterans; a brief, pro forma remembrance is better than no remembrance at all. But that sanitized teaspoon of patriotism shouldn’t obscure the grim reality of the veteran suicide epidemic or increased domestic violence or rampant alcohol abuse or skyrocketing divorce rates for veterans returning to their families. Not everyone comes back broken, but nobody comes back whole.

The echoes of war last a lifetime.

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