A little breather.
I feel like I have been running at break-neck speed non-stop for the last two and a half weeks, and only a few days ago did I finally get to stop and take a breath. After pouring all my energy and waking moments into making some sense of the last 6 years of research and trying to organize it into words and pictures to resemble a cohesive thesis, AND closing on our first property and taking a gazillion trips to home depot to ready it for its debut on craigslist, I spent the last few days post-thesis-turn-in recovering either breaking personal sleeping records or couch potato-ing it. After all THAT, it feels weird to wake up in the morning and not have to write 10 pages in the next few hours before going to our house to paint the living room. It feels weird to feel like I have the time to go to the grocery store and to think of what I want to eat, and even more strange to have the luxury of the time to cook whatever I want. It’s like I have to relearn how to be NOTat DEFCON 1 all the time. But, I have to admit, it feels AWESOME going to bed, knowing I am one day closer to getting the
P
h
D.
Well, so long as nothing goes horribly wrong during the public defense and they don’t absolutely hate my thesis (knock on wood). For the first time, in a very very long time, I am totally excited about what the next few months will bring, even though there will be a lot of change, a lot of new things, and a lot of unknowns (like a J.O.B.), but that’s OK, I’m just beyond glad to see an end to the graduate school chapter of my life.
For now, I’m focusing on remembering that it’s SUMMER (before we slip into fall and then into the season who shall not be named). You would think that last week’s FIERCE heat would have been sufficient to remind me, but you would be surprised what you can ignore when all your faculties are focused on the computer screen(s) in front of you for 18 hours/day. Anyway, this means eating all the fresh summer fruit that I can, walking everywhere instead of taking the T, grilling, evening walks to get fresh peach ice cream, and hopefully, a trip to a pick-your-own-fruit farm this upcoming weekend!
Holiday Fun
I always find that visiting Andreas’ family in Virginia is very much like being on vacation. They have a beautiful house on the water, we enjoy home-cooked meals, and there really is nothing more to do than relax, catch up on recreational reading, get to the next level of Angry Birds (hello my name is Crystal and I am an addict), and play with this guy, who never (EVER) tires of his aerobie:
However, this Christmas, we got more fun than we bargained for. A huge blizzard hit the East Coast (supposedly, the very same storm that almost drowned California earlier last week), and dumped an impressive amount of snow in Virginia. We hung out inside all day (not entirely by choice, the roads remained unplowed for a day and a half) and watched the snow blow horizontally. Eventually we ventured outside to regain our sanity help shovel the driveway, and Andreas’ enterprising brother committed himself to constructing THE BEST IGLOO EVER.
This igloo was totally state of the art: it completely insulated one from the chilly wind yet let in enough sunlight to bounce around the snow-white walls to brightly illuminate the entire space, had 2 custom-made seats with headrests molded into the snow walls, it comfortably housed 3 people (or 2 humans and 1 canine), AND had a fire-pit, Wi-Fi, and home theater system!!! OK, it didn’t have the last 3 amenities, but maybe in next year’s model!
a little costume inspiration…
Jack-o-lantern on a front stoop in Beacon Hill. Awesome, right?
You know how there are those people out there, who just LOVE Halloween? Like, have the PERFECT intricate, well-thought-out and clever costume picked out (or hand made), and have outfitted their apartment/house/living space with spooky, creepy decor? Maybe I’m talking about you, and if I am, that’s OK, I’m actually a bit envious of your creativity and your self-confidence to design and wear that “stimulus package” costume (yes, use your imagination), or the hot tub time machine, or double rainbow (complete with the drugged out dude filming)! But I am just not that person; I never even really cared about trick or treating (my parents would never let us have all the candy we collected anyway, and the candy we were allowed to keep was rationed out to us over the following YEAR- which averaged to about one piece every week and a half which was kind of hard to get excited about), and I especially did not care about dressing up. For a self-conscious, shy, and above all, indecisive youth like I was, Halloween is kind of the WORST holiday. More often than not, I ended up wearing some form of a pervious year’s dance recital costume last minute, because I just could not think of something else I REALLY wanted to be, and just felt totally embarrassed by my lack of creativity. It only got worse as I got older, as the selection for costumes seemed to narrow to two options: “sexy __(insert random profession here)___” or “unattractive boring other option,” and I was never excited with EITHER.
This year I got a GREAT idea from my super-creative brother- a costume that actually had special significance to me in two ways: something I love to eat, and a nod to where I am from. After about $26 worth of arts and craft supplies (colored foam sheets, upholstery foam, tissue paper, and glue), I left the apartment for a fun Halloween party next door, feeling pretty confident and excited about my costume as…
A CALIFORNIA ROLL!!!!!!
Hope you all had a great Halloween, with tasty treats, and fun costumes!
Things I learned at Trivia last night…
My friend Mark hosted trivia last night, and besides reinforcing how much he loves video games, sports, and 80s actresses/pop stars, I also learned a few things:
- Research In Motion (RIM) makes the Blackberry. I thought the name of the company that makes the Blackberry WAS Blackberry.
- Andreas thinks that any late 80s song with male vocals is sung by Michael Bolton.
- A 20 second clip of the song “All for Love,” the awesome “tri-et” sung by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting from the 1993 movie “Three Musketeers” can reduce 4 ladies in their late twenties to laughter and tears. You know you love this song too.
- Elton John has had at least one Top 40 hit every year from 1970 to 1999, the longest streak in chart history!
- I have been at MIT for almost 5 years now, and I still know almost nothing.
I wish the vending machines in my building had fresh fruit in it. Like in “The Office” when Dwight replaces all the junk food with fresh fruit when the branch competed in a weight loss competition. I bet if we were in Japan, we’d have a vending machine with fruit in it.
A New Year.
I have neglected this little space of mine since the holidays, but now I am back in Boston, resuming my east coast life.
A new year has begun.. how have two weeks already flown by???
2010. Doesn’t it sound so science fiction-y? For some reason it is more so than any other 200_ year we’ve had. I half expect to look out my window and see highways of flying cars (like in The Jetsons or Fifth Element)… or even some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario (a la Terminator or 12 Monkeys).
I am pretty horrible at keeping resolutions. I have never kept one for more than a month or so, and they have never been more interesting than “Floss regularly” or “Work out more.” Last year, I resolved to read one scientific paper a week, either in my field or even other fields of research in an attempt to broaden my scientific knowledge and strengthen my paper-reading abilities. That resolution never had a chance… I think I can count on my two hands how many papers I read in their entirety last year (hey, at least it’s two and not one!). I am really the worst grad student ever.
There is one thing that I really really really hope to accomplish this year though… I hope to get an idea of when (i.e. spring or summer 2011) I will finally graduate and earn my Ph.D. I am desperate to exit this “limbo” that I feel graduate school has become for me; a state of being where it feels like nothing really gets accomplished because there’s a million more experiments to do, where I’m apathetic and unfulfilled, where I spend the majority of the time in lab thinking of things I would rather be doing. Add to it that my nearest and dearest from my class will be graduating/leaving this year, and… well, I am not sure that I can continue to come in every day without them around! It is just time to figure out what I want to do with my Ph.D. and graduate and start the next chapter of my life.
For those of you who have never stepped foot inside my lab, this is my workspace, also known as “my bench”. It usually is not nearly this clean… I had cleaned and organized everything on top of, on, and below my bench, as well as my freezer and fridge, my desk, and even my notebooks before I left for California. I had hoped that returning in 2010 to a blank slate would motivate me to be a DATA-GATHERING MACHINE!!!!
In addition to trying to get things done in lab, I am also spending this month as an extern in an IP law firm in downtown Boston, learning what it would be like to go into patent prosecution armed with a Ph.D. in biology. It’s quite a different experience from benchwork, but more on that later. Here is my awesome view from the window of my very own office at said law firm.
Hello parts of Boston and Charlestown!
Anyway, I am pretty excited to see how 2010 unfolds… I think it’s going to be a good year.
Hello, winter.
Today’s forecast is “a high of 20 degrees F”. 20 DEGREES!!!!!! SOMETIMES WE DON’T EVEN ACTUALLY REACH THE HIGH!!! I also love the “feels like” part of the forecast.. as if 20 wasn’t bad enough, they’re telling me that right now it “feels like 0 degrees”. Awesome.
We had a weirdly mild summer and a long-lasting fall where for a few days in November, I noticed that the temperature was the SAME in San Jose, California as here, instead of the expected 20 degree differential. But this week, winter has definitely made its entrance and I won’t be able to leave the house without blow-drying my hair dry because wet hair WILL freeze solid here, or without the essential gloves, hat, scarf, and down jacket… for the NEXT 5 MONTHS. I have decided to start checking a more accurate Boston winter weather website until spring. (Thanks for showing me this site, Kate!)
And someone needs to let this tree know that winter is here. I have been watching this tree for the last three weeks or so, and those little flowerbuds bloomed and persisted through the drop in temperature (sorry the picture is so far away, the tree is quite tall and my iPhone has no zoom). It lives across the street from my building, and I’ve never noticed it blooming in the last four Decembers that I’ve been here. Maybe it’s just being optimistic this year.
