(no subject)

[rivka]

A peaceful afternoon in San Francisco. Alex is napping hard, and Michael has gone off to investigate the hotel's hot tub.

We just spent a few relaxed hours with my aunts Debbie and Brooke, their 10- and 12-year-old sons, and my brother and sister-in-law. I think it must have been... seven years, I guess, since I saw Brooke. (Debbie's more likely to travel to family weddings.) It was great to catch up. I am a little ashamed to be surprised that the boys immediately took Alex under their wings, playing with her and supervising her for most of our visit. Not something I expect from boys of that age, but apparently the older one is already babysitting. It was nice to have extra leisure for grownup conversation.

The conference has been fascinating. This morning I went to a panel discussion on manmade and natural distasters, and what behavioral medicine can contribute. One of the speakers was the first person ever to systematically study how children respond to natural disasters... and that wasn't until Hurricane Andrew hit, in 1992. Apparently, at the time she did her research, some people actually thought that children wouldn't really react to something like, oh, fearing for their lives and having their homes destroyed.

I've also been to some excellent HIV programming, including a couple of talks in which big names in the field made reccommendations that we've been battling about locally. That was great and affirming, although probably not much practical help in getting them implemented.

Yesterday I played hooky for a few hours. We went to a sushi boat place in Japantown, which was a lot of fun. Alex frolicked with a bowl of sticky sushi rice, eating big handfuls and getting rice everywhere in the process. She loved waving at the boats as they went by. I had something I'd never seen before - shark fin and jellyfish nigiri. It was (a) delicious, and (b) fun to look at and eat. (I took a picture, which I'll upload when I get home.) Then we went to Golden Gate Park and walked along Stow Lake, feeding the ducks. In the evening, patgreene and brian1789 came over and we had a great picnic dinner in our hotel room. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them.

My brother and sister-in-law took me out after my talk, for an amazing dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant called The Slanted Door. Their menu was... oh my God. We had spring rolls with spicy peanut sauce, cellophane noodles with Dungeness crab, claypot chicken with a chili-caramel-ginger sauce that made me want to roll around in my plate, scallops with spinach and spicy black bean sauce, and sauteed asparagus with black trumpet mushrooms. The restaurant is in the old Ferry Building, and it had enormous plate glass walls overlooking the Bay Bridge. It was a transcendent evening.

...Oh yeah, my talk. It went well. There was some Lydia drama which I will not go into here, but my actual talk went very smoothly and seemed to be well-received. I threw out some results that baffled us, and someone in the audience said she'd seen something lke that before - not in a "you ignoramus, that happens all the time" way, but in a "yeah, I saw that and now we're doing a big study trying to figure out what caused it, here's my contact info" way. And the chair of my session, who is kind of a big deal, had very nice things to say to me, before and afterward. That was nice.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Sounds like the talk went very well indeed. Congratulations, and yay for the affirmations that other people are interested in it too! (That's something that I always hope to get out of conferences; sometimes it happens, sometimes not.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yay! Seems things are going very well. Congrats on having your talk well received. I hope the contact leads to even better things.

[redbird]

That all sounds excellent, especially the food, the praise for your work, and the contact.

I would be dismayed that the person who spoke did the first systematic work on how children respond to disasters--in the 1990s--if I weren't unsurprised. Consider how long doctors insisted that children don't need anesthesia, not because it's risky in young children, but because those doctors managed to believe that children don't feel pain.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Mmm, Slanted Door. Loved that dungeness and noodles dish last time I was there, too. They have fabulous cocktails as well, try the Buddhadrop if you ever go back.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I was tempted by the ginger limeade: Kaffir Lime Vodka, ginger, and lime juice, served on the rocks. But we got a bottle of wine instead.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I've lunched at The Slanted Door. It is, indeed, terrific, and I'm so glad you got to experience it!

The Ferry Building is now the site of the big Farmer's Market, and the Saturday Market in the summer is a sight to behold.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Slanted Door is all that.

If you want a recommendation, go to Piperade. Best Basque cooking in the U.S.

B

[ewein2412]

you missed my husband by a day, I think; I'm guessing he stayed with the same brother and sister-in-law last night. small world!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

So I heard! Steve and Rachel left our lunch party on Saturday because he was about to show up. Funny that the times coincided.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great time all around! Today's WashPost had an article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032501272.html) (front page, above the fold) on how new AIDs cases are more than four times higher in DC than in the next highest (the list is in the right column partway down the article).

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

That's surprising, children's reactions to natural reactions not been studied until 1992. When we had the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, I was working at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. They had a professional come in to talk to us adults about lingering reactions after the quake. Several parents mentioned that they were having problems with their children, things like reversals in toilet training and, of course, nightmares. (I think we all were having nightmares for a while after the quake.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

There were existing clinical accounts - case studies, that sort of thing, describing reactions like nightmares and regression. But she and her colleagues got systematic data from hundreds of kids, and that's what hadn't been done. She found that, three months after the hurricane, 70% of the kids were having moderate-to-severe trauma symptoms and 40% had symptoms severe enough to qualify as PTSD. Those numbers faded as time passed, but about 15% of the kids had PTSD-level trauma symptomatology more than a year later.