too bad it's Monday

It is a chilly (bone-chillingly chilly) day, and it is dark and dreary. I have accomplished the VeggieTales inverse-goal (they were the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, after all, and not the Pirates with a Very Nonsensical List of Goals) of being in Boston in the fall.

It is now Boston in the winter.

The gas bill was very expensive, last month. We think it’s a combination of trying to heat a relatively sizable apartment to a civilized temperature and doing a lot more cooking in the winter. It is hard to be motivated to eat a salad or some other unwarmed meal when one is already bundled up and shivering at one’s dining room table.

We turned the heat down but then we turned it right back up because it turns out we can’t actually stand having it at 60. We are babies. Also my futon is nestled back into fairly drafty bay windows.

This is going to make summer really difficult, because the apartment will be unseasonably warm and we will not be thankful, only irritated. It is somewhere between 70 and 73 at work most days, and this is pretty nice. I guess.

I am also very dehydrated this winter, which I blame on the unsporting rule of no food or drink, yes, even water bottles, at our desks. Some people have desks in rooms that are away from the lab, and they can have water at their desks. I am slowly shriveling into a raisin. I don’t like raisins.

And when I’m home, I don’t think about drinking water the way that I do in summer, because it is cold and water doesn’t warm my bones. I am getting a lot of use out of slippers this winter.

Unrelated: I like my Mac, but the next time I actually buy a laptop, I think it will still be a PC. I don’t like that the Mac makes it almost impossible to troubleshoot, and I also don’t fully understand how to use it to its best advantage, which I guess makes it a good thing that it’s basically an email and word-processing machine.

Naively, I thought that I had finished my Christmas shopping last week, but the Amazon system is apparently a bit too clever for its own good, and decided that the combination of my name with my parents’ address was clearly wrong. So the packages that were supposed to arrive in Illinois before my own arrival have arrived in Boston, saddling me with their presence and the question of how best to transport them alongside me.

I emailed Amazon’s customer support, and received a reply from an accommodating fellow who didn’t seem to have fully understood my email query or really much about the issue at all.

I have now been issued a full refund with instructions to refuse the package from the driver, then to place my order again with Amazon. They offered me free one-day shipping for my troubles.

Unfortunately for this fellow, I clearly stated in my email that I knew where the order had been sent because I had received the package, and I had not refused to accept it from the poor middle-man of a delivery driver. So now I have money credited back to my Amazon account, gifts in my possession with an uncertain fate, and I’m supposed to place the order again. One-day shipping is not all that attractive to me – it’s not as if the calendar is threatening to roll over to Christmas Eve.

I don’t know what to do with the merchandise that I currently have. Admittedly I have never worked customer service for an online retail giant, but it seems to me that the reasonable thing to do would have been to either offer some financial incentive for the misstep and leave me to my own devices to get these things to Christmas, or to send me some materials for returning the merchandise and to send new merchandise to my parents’ house and not bother with this refund deal.

Right now the most tempting thing to do is take the refund and run with it, but I’m not certain about how legal that is (and I do get 5% cash back at Amazon this quarter, I guess). So I probably have to call them tonight. Shipping things, for whatever reason, is never easy for me.

I want to make Christmas cookies next weekend. Tis the season, and it is the last full weekend when I’ll be in town, which seems to situate it nicely for cookie-baking.

Thanksgiving: a harrowing tale

This is an entry that I wrote while sitting in a McDonald's fused to a Mobil station somewhere in the westernmost tip of New York on the evening of November 27: Thanksgiving proper.  I considered giving it a once- or twice- or thrice-over before posting it, but then I thought that maybe it would be better to post it the way that it poured out of me while I sat, shivering, in a McDonald's with bags and a pillow and a large decaf coffee, two creams, on Thanksgiving night while people filtered in and out, making blase conversation about the weather and road conditions and asking each other 'well have you even driven in the snow before?'

I would like to preserve the integrity of this work as the product of the event and the representation of my state of mind at that time.  So here it is.

I accomplished a couple of life goals I didn’t know I had today, but I guess I can cross them off of my bucket list.

Today is Thanksgiving, so it’s important that I look on the bright sides.  Besides, all of this happened less than three hours ago, so I’m too close to it to really feel much of anything.  Tomorrow I will probably be unhappy when the adrenaline wears off, and I finally dealt with that sore neck.

I crashed my car.  This wasn’t the goal.  We’re calling the goal a discovery.  The knowledge of the ultimate freedom of just driving your car off of the highway and down the hill that it (the highway) is perched atop.

In retrospect, having accomplished this discovery goal, this is not ultimate freedom.  The feeling is a weird calm and resignation, because panic kills.  I was weirdly resigned to the fact that I was going to leave the highway.  I even, dully, sort of wondered if I was going to die, and thought about how everything just seemed so awfully slow.

I felt the traction go as I was on a curved portion of the highway, and the car continued in the wrong direction.  I wrenched the wheel, which was probably the wrong decision, but at this point nothing was going to stop the fishtail train.

Seatbelts, folks.  I was convinced that the car had actually busted through a guardrail, but the very nice policeman informed me that I had just missed the guardrail and the impact I was thinking about had probably been the ground.  I wouldn’t know, all I could see was the smoke that my bizarrely tiny airbag had punched into my car.  My seatbelt held.  I stayed upright.

The car slid sideways for a while.  Everything was so slow-motion that I just sat and observed, wondering how on earth I was going to manage to not ruin everyone’s Thanksgiving.  I wondered if the car was going to roll over and I’d have to climb out upside down, like in the movies.

The car did not roll over.

I sat, the calm in my stomach roiled, and suddenly the panic burst through.  I couldn’t start the car.  I could barely force the car into park.  The windows weren’t broken.  I stared at the smoky airbag.  It was smaller than I would have guessed it would be.  I looked at the broken plastic around the bag and tried, halfheartedly, to stuff the bag back into the steering wheel.

My music wasn’t playing.  Why had my music stopped?  Where was my phone?

Half-sobs, panic without tears, burst from my chest as I scrambled to find my phone, which had been torn from its cable moorings as the car slid down the embankment.  I called Dad, half-insane with fear, stranded here down a hill in the snow with a car filled with smoke.  I jumped out of the car into the muddy snow, and stared at where the front end of my car used to be.  Now there were only wire ends and boxy under-the-hood things, no headlights, no license plate, no bumper.

I called AAA.  AAA called me back – well, my tow truck contact called me back – quite displeased with my inability to tell him exactly where I was.  I called 911, and they were way more helpful.  Would definitely call 911 again.  10/10 stars.  And they had GPS, so I didn’t even have to try to explain where I was.

The cop and the AAA guy showed up, and I achieved unknown life goal number two: sit in the back of a police car.  There was no grating separating me and my boy in blue, but the door did not have a handle.  I learned this when I wanted to get out and find out what was going on.

He took my keys to engage the emergency brake, I think.  I don’t know.  They winched my car up the hill (AAA guy: “uh, I can tell you now, AAA won’t be covering this.”  Cop: “it’s okay, that’s why she has insurance.”)

Everything was quiet.  I watched while they pulled my car up the hill and out.  The cop gave me some commentary on various things.

“We saw you from over there.  Thought something bad might have happened ‘cause you took quite a dive.  Called it in for EMS and they said no, they’d talked to you, you were fine.”

“Oh.  Wow.  Your front end is gone.  That might be totaled.”

“You know, people get really angry that we ticket so much for not wearing seatbelts, but this is why it’s so important.  You would have had a head injury if you hadn’t been wearing yours.”

I ran back and forth, grabbing my things from the car and moving them to the backseat of the police car (he had to let me out).  I asked if I needed to talk to the AAA guy.

“Nah,” said the cop, “He doesn’t need anything from you.  Your insurance will find him.”

“But,” I said, “I need some of the keys on my keyring.”

“Oh, you do?  Go talk to him.”

So I did, and AAA guy was also sort of nonplussed that I needed keys back.  I took my bike key, my apartment key, my tags for Stop & Shop and my ESF lanyard.  I headed back to the police car and the cop handed me my accident report and dropped me and all of my things off at a McMobil.  I am sitting here now with a huge decaf coffee.

I didn’t need any more stimulants.

I am perversely excited to see the seatbelt aftermath tomorrow across my chest.  It is already a little tender and there’s a tiny little burn where it dragged across my skin.  I am not excited at all to find out how much pain I’m going to be in.

The AAA guy just called me.  He wanted to know who my insurance company is.  “You’re not gonna have to worry about this car no more,” he said, laughing a little.  AAA guy isn’t mean (he grew on me eventually); that’s the way I feel too.

We laugh because it hurts, we laugh because it’s absurd, we laugh because we don’t want to cry in a McMobil right off of the highway.

I typed 'Christmas' a ton of times in this entry

I'm a little off-balance this year.  In my defense, it's been an uncharacteristic year.

Are any years characteristic when you're 25?  I'm not sure when life settles down.  Often, I wonder whether or not life will ever settle down, or if I will spend the rest of my life waiting for it to settle down.  This is something that I've been worried about since I was fourteen and crying in bed at night because I didn't want to grow up and go to college.

Hindsight, huh?

My neck has been out for a couple of days.  I toughed it out on Wednesday, stayed home yesterday when I found myself unable to hoist myself out of bed without the painful tightening of everything north of my ribcage.  Eventually I bundled up and walked the half-block or so to CVS, where I eventually found these Salonpas patches that Mom sent me out for.

Returned home and slapped a couple of those babies onto my neck, where they immediately smelled comfortingly of menthol (minty!) and started tingling away my pain.  Since this morning, I've had much more range of motion and fewer moments of searing pain, and I peeled off the old ones and slapped on a new one.  It makes me feel like a bionic person.

I know that's weird, because the patch isn't really any sort of robotic thing, but it makes me feel like a bionic person.

It makes me remember the preview for that movie "Meet the Robinsons", where a women has blanketed her arm in caffeine patches: "Each patch is the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee.  You can stay up for days with no side effects!  AHHH!  Sorry."

They make me feel ALIVE!  Although I did poke at myself a couple of times last night, between the patches, and tried to figure out if that was my skin.  I guess the NSAIDs and the menthol really numbed me up.  It was awesome.

I've been listening to Christmas songs a lot earlier this year, but it's not really a Christmas spirit thing.  I think Pentatonix got me in the mood when they released their second Christmas album and I stumbled across pieces of it in various places.  I also keep thinking Thanksgiving is over already because of the Thanksgiving dinner that Kate and I hosted (the joy of double Thanksgivings!  I love Thanksgiving!!), which is definitely going a long way toward pushing me into the Christmas spirit.

For once, though, I have attempted to take the bull by the horns and get Christmas presents all sorted out before December 20th, before I have to ask everyone in the family what they want for Christmas.  Happily, I think I am almost done figuring out what I want to gift.

I'm not sure what I want for Christmas.  Honestly, the thing I remember most fondly about Christmas is the togetherness: the contagious happiness pouring out of everyone's sleepy smiles in waves as we organize the gifts into little piles and start taking turns opening them.  The smell of breakfast baking and coffee brewing, the warm quiet of slippers and pajamas while we all find places to sit and delve into books rich with the new-book-smell.

It's harder to remember specific gifts I've received, because that's just not the point.

I have this song on right now, partly because I love Sara Bareilles and partly because I guess I'm kind of in a Christmas mood.

love is not a toy

and no paper will conceal it

love is simply joy that I’m home

true crime

It rained last night.

I noticed it, pattering quietly against the windows in my bedroom, as I paused on my journey toward sleep to crane my neck around and identify the noise.  It was so soft that it almost sounded like a crinkling or a fluttering, and then I thought maybe it was water in the pipes from a shower upstairs.  But it was rain.

The weather is becoming more aggressively cold, a reminder that winter follows too closely on the heels of autumn.  I am resisting the ritual suiting up in all of my wintry gear because I don't want to jump the gun on it; I want it to be delightfully warm when I finally give in.

This means I wear a lot of pullover hoodies these days, carelessly casting off all of the advice about dressing for the job that I want (or am I? maybe what I want is a job that lets me wear pullover hoodies, hmmmmm?  HMMMMM?).  Sometimes I take a scarf, and sometimes I don't.  My fingers are usually cold, wrapped around the tupperware in which I carry my lunch.

This morning, when I and my pullover hoodie, Kate's computer (gotta help a sister out sometimes), and my lunch arrived at the T station, I found myself frantically presenting my Charlie card to the turnstile, again and again and again, as it buzzed nastily and told me alternately "SEE AGENT" and "NOT ENOUGH VALUE".

Unfortunately for me, my hoodie, the computer and the lunch, no agent was in sight.  Particularly distressing when the "SEE AGENT" is refusing to resolve into the usual "ENTER [valid until 11/30/14]" that I have seen for the past two weeks on this monthly pass that cost me $75.

I looked around, at the dark kiosk where the agent presumably ought to be, at the Dunkin Donuts bustling with coffee-drinkers and (apparently) cronut-eaters ("the cronut is here!!"), at the turnstiles, each of which I had tried in turn.  I walked back to the card-feeding station, that small contingent of boxy machines that plead for my credit card.

I swiped my Charlie card.  $0.25, it said - a residue from the days it was cheaper to load money onto the card because I didn't need the MTBA in any kind of daily fashion - and down below, monthly pass valid until 11/30/14.  THIS machine knows that I have paid for the privilege of riding the T this month.  Why doesn't that one?

I tried again and again, wondering if, for some reason, the turnstile was registering the quarter's-worth of value on the card before the monthly pass, if there were some way to strike those twenty-five cents from the record.  Finally, the frustration hit its peak.

Holding my wallet firmly in hand (I am a good citizen who has paid for my T pass, not a sneaky one trying to backpack on your ride), I entered closely behind someone else, touched my wallet to the contact as I passed through the gate, and it belatedly tried to close on me, buzzing insistently, now, and angrily.

I, with righteous adrenaline coursing through my veins, courtesy of my rapidly beating heart, passed through to the other side and boarded the train as the buzzing quickly faded out behind me, lost in the noise of the morning commute.

After all, if someone had been there to stop me, I wouldn't have had to sneak through in the first place.

I hope it works tonight or I'm destined to live a life of faux-crime until December.

so she doesn't feel left out!

The gift idea for Dad has fallen through a bit.  I am going to have to dedicate some time to brainstorming.  Thanks to Mom for her excellent recon work, though; she helped me avoid accidentally getting a less awesome gift for him.

HOWEVER.

I have come up with an awesome gift for Mom (specifically for her birthday, but I also know what to get her for Christmas).  I am exceptionally pleased with myself.

future planning

I am very pleased with myself because I have planned out my father's Christmas present, and he is always the hardest to shop for.

It is a good one, I think.

weekend, incomplete and inchronological

With the advent of November has come a sharp decrease in the temperature.  The walk to work this morning was blustery and cold, wind slipping through the open zipper of my black leather jacket, fingers tingling when I had to remove my hand from my pocket to replace the slipped strap of my purse on my shoulder.

(again and again and again, it slipped, and the stiffness of the coat makes the replacement more of a chore than anticipated)

October went out with a bang, small possies of small costumed children looking down at the bowl of candy with the requisite "trick or treat", Kate in a Luigi hat and Ben in his inflatable man-riding-dinosaur costume, slippers and microwaved apple cider with cinnamon, macaroni and cheese in the oven with browned and bubbling provolone.

My phone stopped responding to my finger, and the slow horror of realization chilled the warm food in my stomach: an iPhone that doesn't recognize touch is nothing more than a pretty watch, a glorified news-ticker.

I didn't trade it in for the $9 when I went to the AT&T store just outside of the Central T stop, figured maybe I could pull some pictures off of it, maybe I could pull the treasure trove of videos of Laura (and sometimes Jon) dancing, Jon goofing around last Christmas break when we all sat by the piano (DJ at the keys) or singing 16 Tons.

I'm still becoming acquainted with my new phone, bells and whistles and fingerprint recognition.  I input my thumbprints but rarely remember to use them to unlock the phone, the rote memorization of my passcode burned into my hand.  The old phone sits listlessly by my bed, coming to life at 8:00am on weekdays to sing my alarm tone.

It is an alarm tone that I cannot dismiss, not even by force restarting the phone (the only trick left to me with the neutered screen), so I suppose that I am lucky to have picked a relatively inoffensive tone, not a song or dogs barking or alarms blaring.  I also suppose that I will have to wait until the battery finally gives out, which could be weeks from now, to dismiss the alarm forever.

I had to go to work on Saturday in addition to the AT&T store for my emergency phone replacement, so our original lunch plans of grilled cheese on homemade bread and homemade tomato soup were slightly thrown off-kilter.  I made a loaf of inoffensive white bread, halved the recipe but forgot about that when I added the yeast and the sugar, decided to run with it (how bad could it be).

The dough rose, I punched it down, stretched it out into a rectangle and rolled it into a tiny loaf, dwarfed by the loaf pan that I laid it in.  Then I covered it with plastic wrap, slid it into the fridge, and wrote out directions for Kate to bake it the following morning.

She baked it while I was out, and she and Ben assembled the tomato soup - the Pioneer Woman recipe, with sherry and heavy cream, and petite diced tomatoes and a diced onion.  I came home with an umbrella in one hand and the bag containing various phone accessories from AT&T in the other (the poor girl at the desk did the best she could for us, and she did pretty well, considering, and then she suggested a case for the phone that was cheap and included a screen protector and she meticulously applied the protector for me).

We talked about the phone for a few minutes, and then Kate said "oh, I underbaked the bread, and then I didn't know if we could put it back in, so..."

I'm still not certain that the bread was underbaked.  It may have been the extra yeast and yeast food.  All I know is that we had a moist loaf of bread that, when sliced semi-thickly and toasted up in butter, agonizingly slowly, in a nonstick frying pan with a couple of slices of velveeta (only the best for our grilled cheese days), it was the most delicious grilled cheese I have ever eaten.

But scarf weather, man.  She is upon us.

PS I know inchronological is not a word but I'm being snappy, not rigorously correct.

bread bread bread

I am now 25 years old.

Twenty-five feels round and comfortable.  No sharp edges, just five by five, neat and orderly.

I keep waiting around for milestones that may never come.  Birthdays lose their charm fairly quickly as we transition to adulthood.  The rabid, drooling anticipation from childhood is gone.

I made a cheesecake on Saturday.  I'm not sure how "real" it was, in the authoritative rankings of authentic cheesecake recipes, but I made a cheesecake.  I acquired a springform pan - a fancy one, a nine-inch pan with a tempered glass bottom and a red silicone ring around the outside that seals like a dream.

The recipe didn't use anything earth-shattering.  A lot of cream cheese and a few eggs, some sugar and some vanilla.  I boiled down some frozen strawberries into a syrup with some water, a little more sugar and some cornstarch, and ended up with a surprisingly purple result.  Swirled it into the cheesecake batter with a knife until I was afraid the purple and the white would bleed together, then popped it in the oven.

It tastes like cheesecake, anyway.  And like strawberries.  Onwards and upwards.

Laura got me a loaf pan for my birthday, and it arrived a couple of days before.  I opened it on my birthday-proper after returning from having tostadas at a Mexican place with most of the research group, and before I had a Skype call with Mom and Dad.

I got around to making bread on Sunday, breaking up the recipe that Mom left me on an earlier blog post, reducing from three loaves to two loaves and splitting those into separate bowls, using honey as the sweetener in one and molasses in the other.

The dough, turned out onto the counter on a bed of flour, was sticky and coated my hands, so I added more flour to it until I could just get it to pull away from my hands.  I kneaded it on the counter in a rhythm that was calming, and then draped wet paper towels over each bowl, one rounded ball of dough slightly paler than the other.  I played Mario Kart while it rose.

An hour later, I punched one of them - the darker one - down, watching the dough deflate (but only slightly).  I had to look up how to roll dough into a loaf.  I had always sort of assumed that you just dumped it right into the pan.  I rolled it, I draped, I left it there to rise, and I moved the other dough to the refrigerator to wait for the loaf pan to become free again.

The bread baked up perfectly in the oven, and I touched it when it came out, the crust satisfyingly stiff, the loaf a very bread-like color.  I turned it out of the pan.  I rolled the other dough out - the honey dough - and put it into the pan to rise.  I came back to the loaf I had removed from the oven and cut a thick slice of bread from it; I set the end piece aside to cap the loaf with.  The inside of the bread was intensely satisfying to me.  It had a deep caramel color to it, a not-quite-brown.

Raspberry jam is one of my great loves, I suppose.  I found a jar of seedless jam (my one complaint about raspberry jam is that I always get seeds stuck in my teeth) that had survived my move to Boston and spread it over the butter that was already melting into the slice.

It doesn't taste as yeasty as homemade white bread, and I think part of that is the whole wheat flour I used and part of it might be the natural sweetener.  There's something perfect about homemade bread, something that makes the crusts just as lovely as the insides.

I'm still waiting for some kind of birthday landmark, because all of my birthdays have felt sort of rote since probably 21.  Not in a bad way.  If my car insurance rates would drop, I'd definitely settle for that.  But otherwise, I celebrated with Mexican food, with cheesecake, with freshly baked bread.  The comfort in that kind of a celebration is quiet and soothing.

I'll probably make a cake, too, one of these days.  In the meantime, I'm happy to carefully work my way through the ingredients in the kitchen and the pantry.

Friday update

I get way too many emails now.

None of them are emails that I want.

The USPS has failed me again. I ordered Laura a birthday present and it was undeliverable for no reason that I can discern. I have been in negotiations with them all day today so far.

These negotiations have consisted of me calling that local branch of USPS, being told they'll look for it, and then calling back to discover that they still haven't looked for it. Also they are very grumpy so I am trying to stagger my calling to minimize my discomfort without allowing that package to get on a truck to "return to sender" bound for -

- you guessed it -

New Haven.

Happy Friday.

heartbeats & daily deets

I just have to say something.

Today has been a weird, adrenaline-y day.

I arrived at work, I had my morning coffee, I went back to my desk and read my ASAPs - that's "as soon as published", for article abstracts. I keep them organized in an RSS feed so that I have access to all the most happenin' science as soon as it happens. Or, more correctly, many months after it happens, but as soon as it becomes available online.

We had lunch together in the lounge. Most of the group is here that's going to be here, and we still seem to be on a lunch schedule that is similar to the schedule we all had back at Yale, so I took a walk with Clark and Denise down to the carts that lurk behind the Kendall/MIT T stop, then back up into the workplace to settle in the lounge and eat the salad that I'd packed, and Kate, Ben, and Steve joined some time later. I had another coffee.

Exhausted as I always am by the prospect of having to meet new people and make new connections, this built-in legion of our research group is really nice. Large lab lunches at tables in kitchens is something we've been doing for a few years now. It feels comfortable and familiar.

A person from IT came up to my desk with an absolutely monstrous monitor (24") and an adapter for my computer, a mouse and an expanded Mac keyboard. The keyboard makes me feel a lot better, because it has a real delete key and not just a backspace key that has 'delete' printed on it instead. It also has 'home' and 'end' buttons. The buttons you don't know you need until they are gone.

I sent off an email to my old housing contacts, because I still haven't received my security deposit from my old apartment and I was more than curious about that. Adding that deposit to my financial security blanket is something in which I have a substantial interest.

With a few of my transplanted labmates, I headed to a meeting that fell under the heading of 'science of therapeutics'. There were some mini-talks about small molecules and their gene targets by current graduate students and postdocs, and more importantly, food and coffee. So I supplemented my lunch with whatever the food was (most of it was sort of unrecognizable... various toppings on flatbreads, something that might have been a poor man's approximation of falafel, something that was probably gyoza of some sort, but it all tasted good) and another coffee.

This coffee turned out to be a mistake. My heart started racing in the middle of the first talk, and I made a mental note that three coffees by 3:00pm is apparently my limit. This is, I feel, probably a good sign for my health, but is unacceptable in terms of graduate student coffee intake. Hopefully we can avoid heart palpitations in future.

[Aside: when we were in New Haven, packing up the lab there to move it here where we will have to unpack it (BIG NO here), Andy bought us dinner. We sat around over our Chinese takeout while he regaled us with stories about bicycling competitively. At one point he mentioned that he had never taken anything stronger than caffeine as a performance enhancer, and then he followed it up by saying he took 6-10 grams of it. Later I broke in to register my astonishment that 6-10 grams of caffeine doesn't immediately blow out your heart, and to make a statement that if I had guessed the lethal dose of caffeine in humans, it would have been somewhere before SIX GRAMS of the stuff. His response? "well, I can tell you that 10 grams isn't lethal, but it felt awful."

I still don't believe him. Maybe he built up a resistance to it. End aside.]

Then I checked my email on my phone between talks, and found that my deposit has not been released to the welcoming arms of my checking account because they do not yet have my keys.

Dear reader, let me tell you a little story.

When I was moving out of my apartment, my moving team of coworkers and I first moved all of the things out, and then I went back in and cleaned it as thoroughly as I could with what little energy reserves remained in my tired body. I did a good job.

I then read the instructions on the envelope given to me for the express purpose of holding my keys. I had done as much as I could for the apartment, and now I had to relinquish the keys. This was hard for me. I felt a sentimental attachment to those keys, because I was still attached to the apartment, which I had finally come to think of as 'home'. Still not there in the current apartment, even though it is more homelike in every single possible way than the one I recently vacated.

The envelope instructed me to drop my keys inside and then to take them to the dropbox located by the mailboxes in Bellamy Hall. So I headed over to Bellamy Hall, wondering all the while whether or not I could remember Betsy telling me to just leave the envelope outside of my door, and then rationalizing (like a RATIONAL PERSON) that if these directions were printed on the envelope I'd been given, I should just follow them. Who could blame me?

I located the dropbox and tried unsuccessfully to put the envelope through the slot. The keys didn't fit. There were three of them. A building key, an apartment key, and a mailbox key. Finally I took them out of the envelope and off of the keyring, and then put all three keys and the keyring back into the envelope. I dropped the envelope into the locked box, and then left the building. I couldn't go in anymore. It was time to drive northeast!

I tell you this to register my frustration and disbelief that somehow housing does not have my keys, as I put them in an envelope, followed the explicit directions on said envelope, and put it in a dropbox to which presumably only housing has a key. WELL.

My security deposit hasn't been refunded because my keys haven't turned up, and I can't stress enough how much this is not my fault. I worked myself up into a righteously angry lather, not just because of these reasons but also because

1. if you can't release my deposit to me because you don't have my keys, and you've rented that apartment to someone with start date August 1 or 15, you know I am not there and you have no excuse for not contacting me to tell me that you don't have my apartment keys.
2. I paid a key deposit of $30 on top of my one-month-rent security deposit, and you're telling me that those $30 are holding up the rest? really?!?

So as my anger contributed to my fluttering heartbeat, I kept hearing a buzzing very close to where I sit, like a fly against a window. I couldn't identify the source.

"Kate?" I asked (I moved into the desk next to Kate's when its previous occupant vacated, and there were no keys OR security deposits involved, and unfortunately my desk phone found me soon after), "do you hear that?"

Kate listed for me a number of things that she heard, but a fly buzzing was not one of them.

"Really?" I asked, as the buzzing began anew. "You don't hear that?"

She shook her head. I felt like a crazy person.

I lifted the black desk organizer that sits across the borderline of our desks. There was a little piece of styrofoam...

AND THERE WAS THE BIGGEST BLACK FLY I HAVE EVER SEEN. Literally at least 300% the size of a regular housefly. Terrifying.

"I'm not crazy!" I yelled at Kate. I mostly yelled because the fly had chosen to buzz off of the desk, now freed from its plastic desk-organizer jail cell, just as I started to tell her sort of calmly that I wasn't crazy, and it hitched my voice up into fifth gear. The fly decided to chill out behind my newly acquired monitor, back where I couldn't get at it, but Kate pulled a blue-and-red running shoe out of her backpack and handed it to me.

The fly buzzed around amidst the cables and behind the monitor. It turtled for a while, struggling on its back. (This was weird. I have never seen a fly behave this way before.) I set the shoe down calmly and walked away.

It was the kind of fly that you don't want to kill because it's big enough that its guts will probably go everywhere and be gross and leave a greasy fly smear across everything.

I came back a minute or two later, and the fly finally flew drunkenly off of the desk and onto the floor. Maybe it was disoriented by all of the light after living (days? I have no idea how it got beneath that organizer!) in perfect darkness. Maybe it had forgotten how to fly in its exile. Kate handed me the shoe, and I smashed the fly.

Job done.

Then she handed me one paper towel so I could scoop the fly into the trash instead of leaving its huge insectile corpse on the floor by my desk as a warning to all future flies that dead flies buzz no tales, especially not here. And then she looked at the fly, looked at the paper towel, and grabbed me about five more so that I didn't have to feel the crunch of its exoskeleton. I picked it up and put it into the trashcan, with a little eulogy. I don't remember what I said. It was dumb, but it was appropriate.

Honestly though, I am kind of in chemistry so that bugs aren't in my workplace. Eeeeeesh.

I've come down off of the adrenaline now, and just feel a little bit tired in my bones. I will update about the security deposit enigma as I feel led.

newly established: Boston thoughts

This morning, as I walked down the bike path to the T station nearest my apartment, I noticed a man biking along. He had installed a little shelf behind his bicycle. I’m not enough of an experienced bicyclist to know the terminology for this shelf, but it was the kind of modification that people generally put a little basket on, for carrying things like groceries.

He had strapped a two liter bottle of Diet Coke to this little modification. The bottle was probably 75% full. I wondered, briefly, what his motivation was for carrying a bottle of Diet Coke down the bike trail. I also wondered if he’d just done it to confuse people like me. Alas, I never got my answers, but I did get to the T station, swipe my CharlieCard, and head off to my workplace.

It is hard to explain how I feel about being here. There are small pleasures. I have an official ID card, with my picture on it. The picture is terrible – we are all familiar with this requirement of photo IDs. I was given one of those clips for it, where you can stick it into your front right pocket and the little tether that unwinds and rewinds itself to keep the card close also allows me to swipe myself in and out of the building.

There’s a strange sense of satisfaction that I get from swiping myself into the building, swiping past security, and particularly for swiping myself into the elevator. Without an ID card, you can only visit the ground floor. This presumably allows anyone who has forgotten an ID to not be stuck in the building until people show up again.

The building itself is quite impressive. There are places to sit everywhere. The conference rooms seem to all be glass-walled, and most of them have curtains around the inside that can be drawn. There are at least two Keurigs per floor, and the Kcups are provided as well as a true arsenal of cream and various sugar and sugar substitute packets.

At my desk, I have my own phone, which naturally is on the verge of being a constant source of stress to me. Luckily, it never rings. The desks are at the back of the lab space, and the lab space is one continuous array of benches and hoods that transition from biology to chemistry as you move on through. They (the desks) are arranged in fours, each little module cozied up to the adjacent units, and open to the lab space.

I hate that they are open to the lab space. I am not allowed to have coffee or water at my desk, and I am particularly upset about the water. I used to go through a lot of water every day as I sat at my desk, and now I have to go to the lounge to have a drink. That sounds very indulgent, but it isn’t, not really.

I have not been assigned a hood yet. A friendly woman named Bridget walked Kate and me around the lab and pointed out three unoccupied hoods that had been left full of stuff by their previous occupants. We nodded, but ultimately did not resolve anything. It’s okay; our chemicals haven’t been moved here from Yale yet, so there’s a distinct dearth of research to be done at the moment.

That, too, is all right. I’ve been coming to work anyway, attending some meetings, generally making myself available should Andy walk through. I see him a lot more these days, too: his heart has been in Boston for at least the past year, and his body’s been following.

I have been set up with a computer as well. This is one of the more exciting perks of the move. Andy advised us to go Mac instead of PC, which was a big move for me, but when it’s not on my dollar… so we’ve been established here with brand new, fifteen-inch Macbook Pros with retina display. I didn’t think retina display would be a big deal.

It’s a big deal.

On Wednesdays, there’s a farmer’s market in Kendall Square. I have stopped by it several times, wandering around the tents. There’s a tent there that sells fruit vinegars, and I bought a couple of them: a white peach, and a blood orange. The girl who sells them is very friendly, and she has little plastic cups like communion cups that she offers samples. While you taste them, she makes recommendations (“This one is great for chicken or fish, this one is great for salad dressing…”). I bought them with the intention of switching up my salad dressings and the secondary intention of maybe trying them over chicken breasts.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to open them yet, so they’re just sitting on the counter, tall, slim bottles of earthy jewel tones in warm oranges and orange-yellows, waiting for me to make a decision. Maybe when I run out of white balsamic.

Last night, Emily (Kate’s sister) and Max (her boyfriend) brought pizza from Regina’s to our apartment, and we sat around the table and ate it. Then we played a few rounds of Clue – they left it with us – and Kate and I made a quick batch of peanut butter cookies. We only made peanut butter cookies because we were out of chocolate chips, but they were actually delicious, and I usually am no particular fan of peanut butter cookies.

Kate and I set ourselves up a little assembly line in the kitchen, sort of similar to the way Laura and I used to make cookies. After we whipped up the dough, I formed them into little balls and dropped them into the little bowl of sugar that Kate had set out, and Kate made sure they were coated, then dropped them on the cookie sheet and pressed the fork into them twice.

I am thinking that maybe we will be able to make cream wafers this way, and I can share my favorite Christmas cookie recipe. In the meantime, I need some recipes to use up the rest of the yeast that I bought for the cinnamon rolls that I baked, three days into the apartment. I could just make more cinnamon rolls. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.

hot spots & song thoughts

Nica’s Market is a hub of graduate student activity, conveniently located in the heart of East Rock (colloquially: “the grad student ghetto”). I live just above East Rock. I think of my location as above East Rock mainly because you have to go up a hill to get to it.

We all know about Nica’s, probably because of its location. We all visit Nica’s about once a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. We find ourselves gravitating toward certain items on the extensive menu, certain things in the display case, goodies that we know we can find in the claustrophobic little shelves.

It was toward the beginning of my tenure in the Phillips group that I headed to Nica’s with a collection of my coworkers, tentatively becoming friends, filtering through the aisles. Kate mentioned that she liked the breakfast sandwich, which was something that I had discovered with my mother when we were apartment-hunting. A steal, because for $2.50 you could have a buttery egg on a hard roll or whole wheat bread with a slab of cheese melting on it and several thick slices of bacon.

But Kate swore by the croissant, and I had to give that a try. Because for an extra $1.50, you get your egg concoction in between layers of buttery, flaky croissant. And it is grand.

Other items of note include the lovely mozzarella salad (with halved grape tomatoes and basil), the chicken parmesan sub with breaded chicken breast drowning in melted mozzarella, and tomato sauce on an oven-crisped sub, any of the paninis, and the cheesecakes (but only on special occasion).

Nica’s also has fantastic gelato in the summertime, and you can buy a little cup of it for about a dollar – better deal than the $6 pints of Ben & Jerry’s in the side freezers. And coffee, all the time. They have a hazelnut blend that I love, and sometimes if Kate finds herself in Nica’s in the morning, she’ll pick me up a hazelnut coffee that has a generous helping of half and half in it.

Segue!

On this month’s edition of “songs that are not about God so please stop pretending they are” we have our most two common offenders.

Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen. This song is about a broken relationship. Don’t let the lyrics about David fool you, because the fourth verse is about sex, the fifth verse is about how love hurts, and the sixth verse is about not knowing the name you’re taking in vain. Don’t sing this in church.

It’s a well-written song, it’s clever and beautiful, and the play on the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift will never get old. It is not a song to glorify God. Knock it off with that.

Bridge over Troubled Waters, by Simon and Garfunkel. There’s some argument about whether or not this is about heroin. I think it is about heroin. Of course they aren’t going to tell their listeners that it’s about drugs. Sail on silver girl seems far more likely to refer to a hypodermic needle than to a girlfriend concerned about finding some grey hairs.

It is a beautiful song, though. It also has a very gospel-type feel to it. So. There’s that.

This entry was written in two pieces, and it reads like it was written in two pieces.

I forgot the best line of all

Recent, from the pop-culture genius that is Lady Gaga.

one minute I'm the Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me
pop culture was in art, now art's in pop culture in me

hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahaha

ahhahahahahahahaha


hahahahahahaha

So pretentious.  I love it.  Own it.

It's sort of even funnier if you imagine she's saying Koontz, like the bad writer.

I only ever read one Koontz though so maybe that's not a fair assessment.  It was a suspense novel about a heart transplant patient.  It was stupid.  But hey, if it pays the bills.

sha la la...

Winter just feels desperate now, here in the end of February, as the dry sidewalks are lined with mounds of mottled gray and white that are more ice than snow. It’s hanging on until the next snowfall, when it will look a little less clingy.

I’m over both it and the next snowfall. Bring me some spring. I can do without the rain, though.

That song brown-eyed girl is playing on lab Pandora right now.

Do you remember when? We used to sing? SHA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LALA TI DA SHA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA TI DA LA TI DA BROWN EYED GIRL. YOUUUU MY brown-eyed girl.

Something about it. That is really how I imagine the punctuation in the lyrics. And the capitalization.

You might say I’m punchy and you might be right. You may be right, I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.

I really like lyrics. I don’t like super repetitive lyrics, but I like most lyrics, I suppose.

That’s a gross simplification and not particularly true.

Sometimes I like a line even if it doesn’t mean anything, like Rihanna’s “yellow diamonds in the light.”

Who even wants a yellow diamond? Not me. White or bust. Or pink. But just not yellow. Maybe I just like the melody. Maybe I’m not great at distinguishing the two. Touts les deux. (That doesn’t make sense, it’s just the French for “both”.)

Today I felt as though I needed a donut. Here is a life pro-tip, free of charge. You never need a donut. You literally never need a donut. Donuts never bring anything except short-lived happiness followed by hours of regret. I picked up a donut and a dunkaccino on a run to Dunkin Donuts, and I drank that syrupy goodness down and ate the donut.

Then I spent the next hour wishing I had not done that because the syrup at the bottom of a dunkaccino is super gross and donuts are never a good idea.

Now I know. Maybe I can make myself a little resolution and stick to it about not getting donuts anymore because of the regret. That’s why I swore off Buffalo Wild Wings. BWW was a little bit different because not only does it always deliver sweaty, middle-of-the-night-style regret, but it also begins less than auspiciously.

The waiter gets your order wrong, sometimes multiple times. The chicken is usually gross or dry or mostly absent. And then, after being ignored for over an hour, you (if you’re anything like me) stick it to the man with your tip. You know. By tipping 17% instead of 20%.

Goodness. Swearing off BWW is the best thing I ever did.

Do you remember when? We used to sing?

smoothies

It was very warm and sunny yesterday. If it hadn’t been for the snowbanks lining the paths and parking lots, I would have been able to believe that spring had come upon us. I went grocery shopping in a hoodie and no coat, and even turned the air on cold in my air.

I tell you this because New Haven is something else.

I realize that we are due for more snow later this week. Wednesday, I think. Despite the inevitability of the snow, it has been (comparatively) warm and sunny since the last time it snowed, which was last Tuesday.

So the fact that you can’t find a road in New Haven with more than a lane-and-a-half plowed (that is 1.5 lanes on a two-lane, two-directional road) is kind of frustrating. I realize that the on-street parking doesn’t help with the snow removal problem, but it also exasperates the problem because now cars are parking next to mountains of grit and ice that already occupy half of the lane. So, effectively, we have less than one lane on a bunch of roads.

I know they do the parking ban thing here. I just… it makes me feel cranky. But the roads otherwise and outside of New Haven were clear and dry and I enjoyed my jaunt down to get a new shower curtain liner, a 2014 calendar (finally), and a few bags of fresh vegetables.

I made a smoothie yesterday. I’m thinking seriously about pinning Mom’s smoothie recipe – or at least about printing it out and putting it into my recipe binder. It was a nice smoothie, because I’d remembered to pick up plain yogurt and I had frozen fruit and orange juice in the freezer.

I think I’ve discovered that frozen bananas, when blended up, have a lovely ice-cream-y texture. They also don’t taste half-bad. I used to get so mad at Mom when she would make us a chocolate milkshake and blend a banana into it.

I’ve realized that it wasn’t the taste that I objected to (although there IS something about creamy chocolate milkshakes that sometimes deserves to be left unadulterated), but the texture.

I’m told that when I was little, I was given orange juice with pulp and as I tried to drink it out of a sippy cup, I cried. There were worms in my orange juice. I have the oddest memory of the texture, and I suspect I might have been slightly less upset if the “worms” hadn’t become pinched in the spout of the sippy cup, to wave around against my tongue.

Anyway, banana isn’t quite like that, but it is still a texture issue that is entirely solved simply by freezing the banana first. And since I’m utterly incapable of eating anything in a timely manner, this is two birds with one stone.

My smoothie came out like ice cream or frozen yogurt, and I ate it with a spoon. I have a tendency to be heavy-handed with the frozen fruit. I ate it, and I was happy.

I think I will have another when I go home tonight. After all, I’ll need something to do besides bite my nails when Syracuse plays tonight.

…in five minutes. I’m out.

nailbiters

The weather outside is grey and gloomy, and my attitude lately has been following suit. In short, it stinks.

Every team that I have been even half-heartedly rooting for this week has lost. The first and worst was, naturally, Syracuse’s tragically epic upset to Boston College. Following suit, we have USA women’s hockey falling to Canada in the gold medal match. Not super sad because I don’t follow hockey, but I do have some Team USA spirit.

Well, you know, except for that time last winter Olympics when I was pulling for Plushenko. Dude owns his ego and it’s sort of inspiring.

Then, last night, I made pasta sauce and had decided to root for Duke in the rivalry matchup of Duke vs. UNC last night. And Duke tossed it away in the second half. I did feel slightly conflicted. I still want to win on Saturday. My temporary allegiance doomed the Blue Devils.

And today, the USA men’s hockey team lost the semifinals to Canada. Twice to Canada. I suppose it’s unsurprising.

To be honest I’m even a little bit scared to cheer for Syracuse tomorrow. Maybe I should have a change of heart, you know, for my team and root for Duke, thereby dooming them to failure at home and assuring a win for my soon-to-be-team-again.

You know what the Duke game made me think of? Another silver lining to our loss to BC at home. You see, when you lose at home, no one storms the court. I thought of this as I watched the students at UNC storm the court, swamping their own exuberant team and Duke’s utterly defeated team, and I was glad that whatever else had happened on Wednesday, at least we hadn’t had the court stormed by screaming students clad in red.

Not a big fan of court-storming.

I think that maybe I will go out and purchase myself some Chipotle before the game tomorrow night. At least then if we lose, I will have a delicious Tex-Mex style salad in which to drown my sorrows. I suppose as it stands, my tentative plan will be to head to work in the late morning, get some reading and hopefully a little brainstorming done for a few hours, and then leave around 5:00 or so to ready myself for another nailbiter of a game.

Let me tell you about my nails.

I have been so good about not biting them until sports showed up in my life, and suddenly I have only two of the ten left. I exercised enough self-control to not bite them down to the quick, so their length is actually fairly optimal for daily operations (they were pretty long). It helps that I bought a little box of disposable nail files and have stashed them in convenient locations. I’m finally getting better at this now.

I like to paint them sometimes, but nail polish is almost preternaturally transient in my work environment, and I’m so bad about picking at it that my life is simpler when I leave them bare. On the other hand, I’m better at leaving my fingernails alone in general when they’re painted UNTIL they start to chip so I have maybe 36 hours of relief before the cycle begins anew.

So maybe I’ll paint them before the game tomorrow night. Then, on Monday, I’ll soak a little cotton in acetone and strip it all right back off. Protecting groups for your fingernails.

Goodness. I think I’m done for today.

things that are cold, part deux: ice and Syracuse basketball

This morning when I walked to school, the sidewalk was a continuous sheet of ice.

Back in the beginning of January, I allowed some of my anger about ice to spill out after I took my own spill down a set of twelve or thirteen very icy steps outside of my apartment.

This morning was nothing like that. I remained upright, feet spinning out only once in a while, and I didn’t have more than a few feet to fall, if indeed a fall was imminent. I still felt frustrated with the current state of affairs. These thaw-freeze cycles are really murdering the pedestrian conditions (and, probably, the motorist conditions as well, but I haven’t felt inclined to take my car out in the past couple of days).

Apparently Connecticut is in the throes of a “salt shortage”. I realize that the preferred salt for roads and sidewalks is calcium chloride because you get an extra ion to further plummet the freezing temperature, but you’d think that in a pinch, good ol’ sodium chloride would do.

I just personally do not understand how we can be in a salt shortage when the ocean is LITERALLY RIGHT THERE. Note my correct usage of ‘literally’. Go get the salt water and pour THAT on the streets. Honestly.

Been bumming because Syracuse earned itself the dubious distinction of having the greatest discrepancy in ranking for an upset loss basically ever (or maybe just for an undefeated team, but that can only help the difference) last night to Boston College. Embarrassing and frustrating. I should have made cookies instead, or something.

And here I was, all prepared to suffer our first loss at Cameron this Saturday, with a few benefits. We won’t be undefeated anymore, which is actually the worst. It’s the best, but it’s the worst. Everyone stresses. Stupid games like Boston College at home get in our heads. A loss to Duke at home is a respectable loss. DJ, who will allegedly be wearing orange to the game and perching himself in the student section with his pro-Duke peers, is likely to escape the game with nothing worse than a “BEAT DUKE” shirt that smells like beer.

But now I want to win pretty badly.

I know. It’s a hard life. But if we’re being honest, I would have wanted to win this one anyway.

I think that one of my goals in life is to pull together a pretty impressive collection of hoodies. Pullovers are warmer, zip-ups are more convenient, and I actually really like to wear the hood while I sit at my desk or while I watch the Syracuse game. Sniff. It’s nice. Probably makes me have to wash my hair more often, but honestly, I’ve managed to spread out hair washing to once a week, more frequently if I do something that makes it gross earlier. And that’s pretty great.

1 reason why list articles are the worst!

Actually, I have many reasons why list-articles are awful, but they all stem from the same one reason, and I don’t want to write a list-article critiquing list-articles because I’m not really ready for that kind of meta, palate-offending irony.

Is it irony?

Let’s not get into that. Especially because definitions are more fluid than ever in this day and age. Literally is literally being given a definition that means the exact opposite of literally. (See what I did there? I caaaaan’t stop.) And it makes me sad that the definition of literally is beginning to mean not-literally, beginning to mean practically or virtually instead.

Apparently this is totes cool because “it’s hyperbole.”

NO.

You don’t get to use a word in the exact WRONG way and call it hyperbole. That is not hyperbole. Hyperbole is saying “the spotlight was brighter than the sun,” not “the spotlight was literally as bright as the sun.”

Plus it takes all of the fun out of reading statements by people who don’t know how to use the word correctly. For example, I have a facebook friend (distinct from friend-on-facebook, because I haven’t talked to said facebook friend since early 2007) who was once very excited. She was so excited about something – I think it was concert tickets for her favorite artist. And she managed to nab some tickets, and she posted about it and then said “I LITERALLY pooped my pants.”

Editor’s note: she didn’t say pooped, but we try to keep it G-rated here.

Anyway the idea of this facebook friend literally defecating in her pants due to her excitement sent me into a fit of giggles for a few minutes instead of making me angry and disenchanted with the general human populace. So that is why changing the definition of literally is going to be no fun.

Now, the one (umbrella) reason why list-articles are the worst is because they are so incredibly lazy.

No, seriously. It’s like the authors are all teenagers, surfing tumblr for really funny and contextually appropriate (if you’re lucky) pictures to slap under a list item that more often than not is not even a complete sentence.

In fact, buzzfeed list articles probably rarely crack 200 words. No kidding dude. I’ve already written way more than a buzzfeed list article. (I got tired of hyphens because they require some extra exertion in my typing fingers.)

And even when the lists have complete sentences in them, they lack any cohesiveness. There’s no segue to the writing. Point. Point. Point.

And the agendas that are being pushed in them are really ridiculous. There’s this trend lately that I’ve mentioned where the single-and-apparently-loving-it Millenials are pushing back against their contemporaries who are getting married and having children.

“23 things to do when you’re 23 that are not getting engaged.”

You really couldn’t just title that “23 things that are great about being single”? Same idea, slightly (SLIGHTLY) less offensive. In the aggressive way. “23 things I like to do by myself.” And they’re always stupid things that have nothing to do with being single. They’re just bitter.

I have abruptly lost interest in this discussion. Maybe I just had less to say than I thought I had to say.

In other news, I am freaking out about being an adult and needing to do my taxes. I think I just freeze up and I’m being a big baby about it. I won’t even look at anything which probably does not bode well for me. I just don’t handle stress well, which is unfortunate, because I am a graduate student. Life is hard.

social media blues

I hate facebook.

No, I really do. I am just not even kidding a little bit.

I check it incessantly, continuously, always navigating to see if anything new has been posted. Hoping for a diversion, I suppose.

It is such a wasteful time sink.

Facebook makes me despise human beings. It makes me judgey. Some of my actual thoughts about facebook even just today have been along these lines.

“Ugh. She is so annoying. Why do I even keep her on my friends list? She abuses exclamation points. She literally punctuates everything with an exclamation point. Is her life really exciting?”

“Wow, has she even worked a real day in her life? I mean, other than a quirky part-time job that bolsters her hobbies but doesn’t do a thing to advance her career. How does she afford all of this useless stuff? I understand being an enthusiast but seriously, where does she get the money for this? Concentrate on your career path so you can afford this stuff and stop mooching off of mom and dad. [beat] My mom and dad would never let me spend their money this way, because it is ridiculous.”

And eventually I catch myself in these angry thought spirals and I wonder why it bothers me so much that other people broadcast themselves as happy and enthusiastic about parts of their days. Facebook ruins everything. Especially my disposition. I am apparently a mean person.

I think I would like to take mine down, especially because I really don’t use it much to communicate with people from the past. There are other, less rage-inducing methods of contacting people. I keep in touch with Justine through facebook messages, and I feel a wonderful, warm sense of camaraderie after Syracuse basketball games as I scroll through my newsfeed.

Sports bring us together, man.

I’ve just been thinking about this now, because facebook made me feel grumpy when I was checking it. Maybe I could leave it up and just try not to check it compulsively. (ha. haha. ha.)

I like to believe that stupid internet quizzes are the harbingers of social media doom. It is probably not true, but I like to believe that it is.

I think stupid internet quizzes are that thing that everyone does, but only some people are proud to admit it. I have taken a few stupid internet quizzes, myself, and I have never, ever, ever posted the results to facebook. I just don’t want anyone to know that I have moseyed on over to Buzzfeed and clicked on some picture-squares to answer some questions, feeling ultimately unsatisfied and sort of dirty because I couldn’t answer the questions honestly because the multiple choices were all terrible and unrelated in any way to my life or perspective or even my favorite color.

They’ve been making the rounds on facebook lately. Maybe this can be a two birds with one stone kind of thing and take down facebook and buzzfeed at the same time. It’s funny, right, because facebook used to be this sort of exclusive club that you could only join with a specific (and then non-specific) .edu email address, and now anyone can join, and it’s not that I’m all for exclusivity but the demographics on facebook just don’t appeal to me anymore.

Buzzfeed, on the other hand, was mildly entertaining at the beginning, capitalizing on both people’s love for moving pictures (.gifs) and apparently people’s love for list-articles (see also: thoughtcatalog [or, you know, don’t]). Now it’s stupid and repetitive, which, when you think of it, is actually the only possible endgame for something like buzzfeed, and apparently now filled with 10000% more quizzes! (yay) I guess at least quizzes aren’t list-articles. Maybe I’ll write more about list articles later. I have feelings, you see. I don’t know if you could tell.

Back in the day, quizzes were really big on blogs. You know. Blogs. Greatestjournal (now defunct), xanga, livejournal, myspace blogs, you name it. Blogs have become less an expression of teenage angst and (apparently) more a career move.

Hey man. I don’t judge.

I LOVE cooking blogs. I follow a bunch in my RSS feed. It’s the best. They’re the best. These people with their beautiful clean, spacious kitchens and gorgeous photography. They make me hungry. They make me feel inspired.

But blogs aren’t social media anymore, anyway, no longer a hotbed of badly punctuated teenaged angst, and no one likes myspace. So I’m hoping that buzzfeed quizzes might take down facebook and do the dirty work of disengaging for me.

Well, quizzes and the bizarre new design choice where facebook automatically starts playing videos in your newsfeed for you. But WITHOUT SOUND.

I have some feelings on this. Would it be annoying if the videos autoplayed with sound? Yes. Yes it would. It would be highly annoying, which is why I assume that idea was nixed. But autoplaying videos on mute? Where if you decide you want to watch it, not only do you have to click unmute, but you also have to manually restart the video from the beginning? What is the POINT?

I think the question I am trying to ask is WHY WOULD YOU AUTOPLAY AT ALL?

I assume this all has to do with facebook finding itself incapable of making money. Well. That is okay.

Do you know what I like? I like email. I like email, I like texting, I even like google chat (google hangouts for google+ which is never going to happen, but the hangouts app is pretty slick). I like streamlined, simple services that do one job and do them well. I do not like facebook chat. I don’t like that facebook not only rolled chat and messages into one and the same, but that it has also made it well-nigh impossible to access your messages inbox.

WHY?!

I think I am going to go home. This has been a social media rant from a grumpy 20-something.

In other news: SU beat NC State by the skin of their teeth (I hate last-minute plays... you know, unless the game is good, which this wasn't) to remain undefeated.  This is good.  It snowed AGAIN today.  This is... neutral.  The snow is pretty.

metaphor

I want to say something noteworthy or at least interesting, but some days I dredge right down to the bottom of the barrel and end up with nothing but sludge.

Today at lunch we were discussing Boston and Andy’s decision-making process, because he has been sending cautious emails to group members to try and test the waters.  He wants to figure out the temperature of our mood-o-meter re: his possible move.

He is always very careful to emphasize that he has not made his final decision yet.  Trying not to read into that.  Hard to know what it means, if anything.

“He’s playing his cards close to his vest,” said someone, and I was struck with the kind of silly laughter that you can’t rationalize.  It was the kind that bubbles up and makes you feel like a crazy person while you laugh helplessly.

“If he was playing them any closer,” I said, “they’d be sewn INSIDE of his vest.”  Kate and Ben joined me in laughter.  “And – and – do you know how we know he’s playing cards?  If he didn’t have cards in his hand, this whole metaphor would just completely fall apart.”

I don’t know why we all thought this was so funny, in retrospect.  Examining things has a way of robbing all of the humor from them, but in the moment, we cackled until I finished washing out my dishes in the sink.

The sink was unclogged today.  That was pretty exciting, and it is admittedly a little bit sad that it was so exciting that the sink was not full of water.  It made dish-washing a much more pleasurable task.  It’s not so bad in the first place because the building is always quite chilly and the warm water is nice.

Those brown paper towels don’t have much absorbent value, though.  They are almost no good at all.

I should do my laundry.  Now that I’m all recovered from my sickness, I am realizing that I would like to reset the dirty socks and underwear counter.  Not in trouble yet, just starting to pile the clothes up in the hamper.

On the plus side, I’ve been sleeping really well lately and since our last winter storm (Tuesday?  Wednesday morning?), the weather has been cold, crisp, and clear.  Blue skies and dry sidewalks; can’t ask for too awfully much more than that.

400 words is what you get today; I’m uninspired.

Monday class

I’m feeling much better. I just have a bothersome tickle in my throat now, made worse because my cough is so dry. It’s not even satisfying. But it’s better than the pain of a rattling, hacking cough, so I’ll count my blessings.

I also have the sense that I am going to have a hard time figuring out what to write about today, and I know I’m not obligated to write, but sometimes you like to have that little item on your mental to-do list checked off.

Andy’s class seems to me to be leaving the realms of usefulness, at least for me personally, as it coalesces into the class that I took two years ago.

[obligatory panic break for TWO YEARS AGO?! where’s the time gone?!]

We spent some useful time talking about protecting group strategies – although he was out of town and one of the new professors taught for him, pinch-hitting by reading through the notes at the front of the room and annotating as we went along. It was (surprisingly) a really effective way to learn the material, and there was a level of focus there that is ordinarily absent.

Plus we were treated to quotes like “and now we leave the comfort and joy of the silyl ethers for the pain of the MOM ethers,” and he giggled a lot when he struck himself as funny. Giggling fits will probably never not be contagious.

Since then, we've talked about aldol reactions and their close relatives, crotylations and allylations. Andy was convinced that Diane had done a crotylation, staring her down from the front of them room. “No,” said Diane, laughing nervously, “I never ran one.”

“I ran a crotylation,” I finally said, letting Diane off of the hot seat, and ultimately no conversation even came of the topic, so I confess to being a little bit confused about the need to establish who had run one before.

But now we’re sliding into discussions of total syntheses and these I’ve had before – same slides, even – and I’m not sure the utility of the course is there for me anymore. I think Andy might be sad if I stopped attending class, though, so I suppose it is what it is.

And it is what you make of it, so it could be all right.

Lunch was a long-ish and mostly boring affair, punctuated by some discussion of Ben’s difficulty making it to the end of Ender’s Game (the book, not the film adaptation) for his second time. The sink in the kitchen is hopelessly clogged, and even when I mustered up the fortitude to put my hands into the clammy water and to try to dislodge whatever lumpy, water-logged object was blocking the flow, I couldn’t find anything.

So I guess it needs some Drano. But I’m not going to deal with it. So I washed my bowl and spoon over a tepid sink of half-hearted soap bubbles, and then headed back to my desk.

Lab seems slightly dimmer and more subdued without Jen around.

Happy Monday.

Jen's dinner

I slept in today. I slept in and woke up, too hot and sleep-satiated under all of my blankets, woke up without the tinkle of my alarm going off near my ear, woke up mostly content. I also woke up a little bit congested for the first time since being sick, so I guess this is sort of like the aftershock.

My cough doesn’t hurt anymore, but rattles some congestion deep in my esophagus and sounds like it has some depth. I’m not tired yet today, because I had my fill of sleep.

I drove in to the office today. I drove because I didn’t feel like walking and because it is Saturday and the parking lots are open. The weather is cool and dry – cool being a relative term, as plenty of people would rightly call 28F cold and plenty more would call it warm – but relatively-speaking, as one always must be when talking about the weather, it’s a sort of pleasant cool compared to the more aggressive cold of last night.

Can I just say that for some reason I love when I’m the only person in the office? I just do. It feels liberating.

Last night we celebrated Jen, and today she is on her way to Pittsburgh and her new job. We ate at the Cask Republic. As the name suggests, it is a bar, and as the name suggests, it deals primarily in beer. The beer menu was quite expansive.

The Olympics opening ceremony was playing on a big screen at the end of our mostly private room, and the 24 of us were sitting in two lines down the long expanse of cobbled-together two-person tables. While we were ordering our food, Steve called down several of the tables to me. “Shannon!” he called, “I think you should order the fish and chips!” Michal, who was sitting between him and her beau Santiago, nodded conspiratorially.

“Are you ordering the fish and chips?”

“Yeah, it’s Friday!”

This apparent non-sequitur is a Catholic no-meat-on-Fridays thing, which Steve and the rest of the current or ex-Catholics in the room kindly explained to me in my confusion.

Steve and I have apparently developed a rapport over fish and chips, and I am delighted by this. Steve came out with us when we went to an Irish pub on my birthday for fish and chips and trivia. Unfortunately, we did very poorly at trivia (who knew there were so many muppets? who even knew muppets could be obscure?), and Steve was unimpressed with the fish and chips, which he had also ordered.

“The breading’s too much,” he had complained, “And it gets soggy on the inside instead of staying crisp.” I couldn’t defend the meal (and didn’t need to – I didn’t make it); he was right. Usually his beef is with the chips, which are apparently somewhere between French fries and steak fries. Or possibly bigger than steak fries. He says if I ever come to England, he’ll show me proper fish and chips. Anyway, I didn’t order the fish and chips.

I drank water with my dinner, but Kate and I split two appetizers, one of chicken wings (I think they were supposed to be soy-ginger glazed) and one of pesto macaroni and cheese. When they came out, the plate of chicken wings was piled high – I think we had 12 for $10, which while not exactly a bang for your buck is a far, far better deal than you would otherwise find on chicken wings, which are inexplicably expensive across the board. They didn’t taste much like soy or ginger, but they were crispy and hot and came out with jalapeno slices and a wedge of lime, which I squeezed over mine after verifying that Kate didn’t want it. And they ended up being very tasty. The pesto mac was green and mild and delicious.

We also ordered duck confit salads, mostly because we were both drawn to the apple slices contained therein, and also because I have a thing for goat cheese. The salads came out with everyone else’s entrees, and were warm and piled high with arugula. They also had small grape and probably too much pungent red onion.

I looked down the table at Steve and his fish and chips, which looked oddly dark, and called, “hey Steve, how’s your fish and chips?”

Without missing a beat, he called back, “It’s the worst fish and chips I’ve ever had in my entire life.” Now, to my knowledge, Steve says this every time he has fish and chips in New Haven, so apparently Connecticut keeps besting itself, but this time I was convinced, because he continued by holding up a breaded piece of fish that, well… “look at it! It looks like a poo!”

And it did. I think Ben took a picture of it so there’s a good chance that the picture will never see the light of facebook, but a picture exists to commemorate the moment when I laughed myself into a coughing fit secondary only to the moment when Kate dropped a chicken wing, made a strangled noise deep in her throat, and it bounced off my fortuitously napkin-covered leg to be found moments later having made a home for itself in her purse.

Eventually we even managed to serve the chocolate cake, having badgered Lauren into asking the waitress for plates and forks because they’d diligently cleared all of our dishes. I cut the cake into 24 pieces and sent them down the table on plates with forks. All in all, it was a nice affair, and nicer still when we didn’t have any trouble settling the bill. (I was still glad to have brought cash).

Jen gave everyone hugs as we were leaving, and she informed me that I am now going to have to bear the mantle of the sole lab member in charge of baking duties. I suppose that’s all right. It was a good dinner.

Then I waited in the cold for 20 minutes for a shuttle to take me to the other side of New Haven.

It was a good day, and that is partly why I did not write yesterday. But look: you have 500 extra words to dull the pain. That’s an entire extra entry. That’s 3000 words this week! Hooray!

PS: the cupcakes also went over well.  I do feel like Denise might have gotten shafted a bit on her birthday, but Jen did get a job and you can't count on that happening every year like clockwork...

bake therapy

I missed yesterday, but yesterday I was sick as a dog, so I think I should be excused.

I’m neck deep in baking projects, because Jen’s last day is either tomorrow or Monday (you’d think I would know, but alas, I do not) and I was recruited to bake things for the occasion of Jen leaving or having a job, depending which spin you want to put on it. Two sides of the same coin.

The first ticket on the menu is split with Denise, on the occasion of her birthday, which is also tomorrow: a fortuitous occurrence. Denise specifically requested creamsicle cupcakes, which I made sometime over the summer because I wanted to try the recipe.

The recipe is fantastic, in case you’re wondering, and Denise’s request was echoed merrily and emphatically by the boys. Ben, in particular, was a big fan of the cupcakes. They are really very nice. You put a package of orange gelatin in with a white cake mix, as well as orange zest and substitute some of the water for orange juice. I use real orange juice that I squeezed from an orange, because I already zested it.

I zested the orange with a steak knife. It is primarily because I don’t have a zester, but hang with me here for a minute: it’s actually a great way to zest because you don’t get any of the stringy orange peel bits that the picky eater might pooh-pooh at.

Then the frosting is made with more orange zest, cream cheese, and orange extract (along with the other common frosting ingredients). Altogether, the cupcakes seriously live up to their name and I think that’s cool!

I should really pin this recipe because I always think I have, and then when I go looking for it, I have to search ‘creamsicle cupcakes’ on pinterest. I know, I know, not really a problem. If you look for them, they’re the ones with the adorable little flags stuck in them. Disclaimer: I do not do the flags. No one really cares about the inedible bits.

I used one of the fine mesh strainers that Jonathan got me for Christmas, and it filtered out the pulp and seeds beautifully! In the end, I probably had closer to 1/3 cup of orange juice than ¼ cup as the recipe called for, but I’m okay with that. I adjusted the water accordingly.

Then, when the batter was smooth and pale orange, I put it into the darling little batter dispenser that Laura got me for Christmas, and I have never in my life made neater cupcakes. I probably won’t even have to wash the cupcake pans. Game. Changer.

So now I’m in the process of baking the little boogers, and the first set of 12 has exited the oven. I invite you to imagine what kind of heaven my apartment currently smells like. It is a wonderful smell. I really can’t say enough good about this recipe. I can’t bake more than 12 at a time, though, and that’s an oven limitation because the bottoms of the cupcakes on the bottom rack always get burnt and I can’t be bothered to check on it early, so I just bake them in sets.

Then, tomorrow night, we are having a dinner out in Jen’s honor. It turns out there aren’t that many places in New Haven who can accommodate around 30 people (this count includes significant others), but Lauren found one! So we have a reservation for 7:30 and she asked me if I could make cake.

“Well, yes,” I said, “I’d like to make a cake, but are they okay with that? Since they make food for a living…?”

“Oh,” she said dismissively, “I’m sure they’ll be fine with it. Why wouldn’t they?” (This is quintessential Lauren.)

“Because they make food for a living…?” I repeated, laughing.

Later that day she stopped by and said, “They’re totally okay with it!” She asked for something chocolate, so I’m going chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. In no small part because it is easy and I could probably do it in my sleep.

Just watch. I’m going to botch it terribly now.

I have basically decided that even though layer cakes are more attractive and perhaps impressive, a cake baked in a 9x13 pan has (at the time of counting) two not inconsiderable advantages.

1. If there are 30 people in attendance, it is literally impossible to cut a layer cake into 30 pieces.
2. It is so much easier to travel with a layer cake. Or maybe I should get myself a cake carrier. But the point still stands: I do not currently own a cake carrier.

So in more science-related news, I had my first day on the mass spectrometer today. It was not nearly as exciting as it sounds. I ran about six hours of experiments on it, and found more or less what I expected to find, which means I don’t fail at chemical biology!

Not yet, anyway.

I will not be able to replicate what we did in terms of using the instrument again yet, though, so in order to familiarize myself with the instrument I will need to keep using it. Still, an auspicious beginning.

I saw Candice for the first time in a while (well, outside of group meeting, anyway… she doesn’t really talk that much at group meeting). I had a really nice conversation with her, actually. She’s frustrated with science (aren’t we all?) and also with Andy’s continual absence (aren’t we all?) and talked a little bit about her plans to leave in May 2015 no matter what, to perhaps join the Marines in some capacity, and to have three children.

Candice is much easier to get along with when you’re not sharing space with her, which is kind of sad because she is so very aware of the face that she’s hard to get along with when you’re sharing space with her. But today I remembered why my first impression of her had been so positive: she’s just a very open, friendly person. I was glad to have talked to her.

And then I wrapped up my 96-well plate, stowed it in the refrigerator, and headed back up to CRB to my office, to collect my things and head home to baking therapy!

At the time of posting, I'll have you know, the chocolate cake is in the oven and the cupcakes are out of the oven.  Perhaps I'll post pictures and since a picture is worth 1000 words, that will be two blog entries per picture of which I will have absolved myself.  That was a badly written sentence.  I probably won't do that anyway.  But I might still post pictures if the end result is pretty enough.

biology

After a long stretch of doing basically nothing, today I set up my first “bio experiment”. I call it a bio experiment because it involves protein and water and plastic things instead of organic solvents and glass things. It really is more of a biochemical experiment, or, if we’re doing the in vogue things here, chemical biology. So don’t get too excited. I am just trying to reproduce some (awesome) results that Jake had a number of months ago. I am taking his fragments and some of the protein that was stored at -80*C upstairs and incubating them together to see if the protein will make itself a sticky little ligand.

It was really easy to set up. I guess I didn’t realize, but nothing was particularly difficult. I used pipetters to get exact volumes and sat around doing serial dilutions so that I was only working with a tiny, tiny portion of what we had.

I spent a lot of time with those pipetters, and in a way it’s sort of nice, a repetitive task that’s fairly satisfying at its core, but the arm does tire after a while. After what seemed like an endless series of tasks – check the fragments to be sure they haven’t decomposed, dilute all solutions, let the protein thaw on ice, dilute the protein, plus a little bit of math and establishing a key so that I know what I put in which wells on the 96 well plate.

Eventually I had the plate – I was only using 24 of the 96 wells – all finished, and I capped it off with the very satisfying task of sealing it with an adhesive foil, pressing it down so that I could see each little well as an imprint in the silvery seal. Then Jake and I took the plate upstairs and put it in an incubator at 37*C – or roughly body temperature. It will stay there until Thursday, when we have time on one of the mass spectrometers, and Jake is going to show me how to use it.

It is kind of exciting, and it is definitely nice to feel legitimately productive, even if I’m just currently working on reproducing results.

Then I set up those same reactions in my hood without any protein, dissolving them up in toluene and putting them into little glass vials (the organic chemist in me sings!), rigging up a clamp to hold four little vials stirring merrily away, and I lowered them into an oil bath set to 110*C (the boiling point of toluene). I wrapped the tops with Teflon tape, because the solvent will want to boil but the container is closed.

Usually we don’t do that, heating a sealed container, but these reactions are so tiny that we don’t have a reflux condenser small enough to attach (and I have four reactions, so the logistics would be difficult). I am hoping that they do not explode. It would be especially nice if they didn’t explode and also worked, but you can’t have it all. So I guess we’ll see.

I am almost certainly getting sick and it is manifesting itself in a weird sore throat (much lower than usual, almost feels like a catch in my chest) and fairly severe muscle aches. I have done a decent amount of work today, so I think I might head home and crawl into bed with a cup of tea. Sometimes, life is hard.

resolution: success

It is February 3.

That means that I have completed the one-month blogging challenge.  The 500 words 5 times a week challenge.  If my math holds up, that’s roughly 11,500 words.  And that’s not too shabby.

Some observations (as a good scientist does…):

It is really, really hard sometimes to write 500 words.  Sometimes I am in a slump and feel like literally nothing has happened and maybe rehashing things from my past that I’ve rehashed about 8 million times doesn’t really do it for me anymore.  Sometimes I have a bad day and don’t want to stew in it.  Sometimes I’m hurting for material, man!

When I do have something to write, it’s hard to exercise brevity.  I think that the bite-sized stories are probably more palatable to the casual reader, but I have sometimes found myself nickel-and-diming to try to stay below 750 words or so.  Well, I think that only happened once, and it was good for the entry in the end.

It has been a really nice exercise in general to have an attainable goal and to accomplish it.  I think there were only one or two days where I found myself slipping my blog entry in just before the clock struck twelve.

I have written more in the first month of 2014 than in the previous three years combined, and only in 2010, when I was experiencing a lot of undergraduate angst, did I write more in the entire year than I did in this first month.

Some of the entries that I wrote are real stinkers.  They are boring and uninspired.  But I think that the rote nature of writing every day, whether or not I felt like I had material, made me better equipped to write about the material that I did have.  And that is kind of nice.

I expect that I will not keep this up as a five-times-a-week thing, but we’ll see how often I can make it happen.  Writing has always been a good outlet.  I’m doing it now, even if only as a sort of reflection on the past month.  Kind of cool to have “achieved” a new year’s resolution.  Maybe if more resolutions were achievable, we’d stick to them better.

After the monstrous, momentous Syracuse-Duke game, the Super Bowl was a total letdown.  I did feel kind of bad about it, as we sat around the television at Kate’s apartment.  We stayed cheerful, and there were chicken wings and chili, guacamole and buffalo wing dip, salsa and celery and cupcakes in blue and orange that said ‘GO BRONCOS!”

I wore a tank top under a blue sweater, a tank top I bought at Walmart on a whim for $3.49 with bold, thick horizontal stripes alternating orange and a sort of off-white.  I figured the Syracuse colors were repurposable.

Then the game started, and the safety off of the botched snap basically set the tone for the whole game.  By the time the evening ended and the Vince Lombardi trophy was awarded, I was playing a little half-hearted solitaire on my phone while the Broncos fans around me yelled in agony.

But hey – at least my team won.  Hoping not to jinx us for our Notre Dame game tonight…

And it’s always fun to get together for the Super Bowl, anyway.