One Last September Post

(Mother, preparing for her sermon on Saturday night)

Mother froze on stage this morning.  She was delivering a sermon at a church in Boston and suddenly forgot what city I was living in, instead she said, "My son flew back from California and my daughter from ... from ... from ... (and this point, her friends and I start snickering in the back pew) uh... Johns Hopkins."  You could say that she panicked in the moment.  You could also say that even now, I'm not sure that she knows where I live.  It took her awhile to acclimate to the fact that B'more is south of Boston.

(defending the integrity of her Costco-bought giant bottle of sangria)

Mother: Your Father and them don't like it, they think it tastes weird, but I think it's great.  

I Solve

Pretzels, I'm so proud of my investigative skills that I am going to put down my problem set for a few minutes just to tell you all about it.  I got a text about 30 minutes ago from a number that wasn't in my phone.  All I had to go on was that the person went to the Bo' (207 area code and you don't live in Maine?  You went to the Bo'), probably wasn't part of the JWo-VitaK crowd, and was in SF.

Not Jared.  Not Lily.  They would be in my phone.  Facebook told me that Zvi had just arrived in SF, but he should be in my phone.  A quick check, however, revealed sometime in the process of switching from one antiquated flip phone to another to another, his entry got deleted.  Then I checked his facebook profile and his number was listed there and I figured everything out.

OK.  That wasn't as dramatic as it played out in real time and maybe it didn't require that many skills, but let me have this one.  I certainly don't have my problem set figured out.

People in Glass Houses

Have really nice windows.  And views.  I would love to live in a glass apartment.  I felt bad about the low output this month (lowest ever! it's hard maintaining two blogs) and thought I'd share a quick, cheap anecdote courtesy of Mary.

Mary still works regularly with Doc Whitecastle and Doc Nice while I work with them only a couple of days a month.  As such, Mary has way more opportunities for ridiculous Doctor moments.  She happened to be in town on Friday and this was what I learned over frozen yogurt.

(discussing our low research assistant wages and how her raise had to be capped at 2%)

Mary: After my annual review, [Whitecastle] told me that I was lucky.  His annual raise is only 1%.

Sunday Routine

(I had to promise not to sell this picture for profit.  Ha.)

 Biscuits. Church. Homework.  That is essentially my B'more Sunday routine.  It may even be the order of preference for such things.  Every Sunday morning, I wake up, shower and whatnot, then go see some guys underneath the highway about some biscuits.  I used to roam the whole of the farmer's market.  I used to eat jerk fish and donuts and fried mushrooms (and actually buy produce from time to time).  Those were my B.B.-- before biscuit-- days.  In my A.B. days, I only go to first service now (they're always sold out by 2nd service).  And I eat too much simple carbohydrates.

Fishy Crabs

Last night, our cohort ('PhD class') tried to round up a big group to grab crabs.  Done in by problem sets, only 7 of us actually made it.  Given my work load, it was both the best and worst decision of my day.  Other than Tara and Greg, whose Mid-Atlantic + Pacific-Northwest upbringings gave them an edge, we weren't particularly discernible crab eaters.  We had trouble even finding crabs on the menu.  We were, however, wonderful with numbers and logic.  Much to the waiter's chagrin.

Julia (representing the table): How many crabs do people normally eat?

Waiter: Four to six.

Julia: When you say four to six, what size is that?

Waiter: All sizes.  Medium, large, or extra-large.  Seven of you here, why don't we start with two and a half dozen large ones?  And some appetizers?

Julia: Your estimates seem highly variable and unlikely.

(In the end, we got soups, fritters, and 2 dozen large ones, were all stuffed, and still had leftovers.  Nice try, Tricky Waiter.)

Big Bliss

(The title is a Say Yes to the Dress shout out.  It's OK that I watch that show, because I balance it all out by getting a PhD)  

Remember how I used to have a blog?  And I would tell you about my life in amusing vignettes?  I hardly remember it.  The past couple of weeks have been a blur of work.  I've worked so hard that I haven't read every human interest story in the Times for weeks now, hardly kept up with royalty gossip (except they keep losing their clothes!), and haven't worked on perfecting my weigh-your-own fro-yo combo since classes started.  

But yesterday, Miss Sachini got married, so I pretended I wasn't coming down with a cold and completely clueless about how to do my econometrics homework, and had me some fun.  I keep saying this about my friends' weddings because they keep having awesome ones, but this was one of the happiest, loveliest, most ridiculous celebrations I've been a part of.  This one had the added bonus of everyone on both sides of the family being as genuine, chill, fun, and lefty as the happy couple themselves. 

One of the many highlights of the wedding last night was that B'more finally cooled down enough to warrant long sleeves.  The realization that I might need sleeves, and thus needed to coordinate an extra piece of clothing, dawned on me 4 minutes before departure time and led to a frantic gchat with Liz in which we discussed "Is it OK to wear a light white jacket to a wedding?"  After I explained to Liz that, yes, the bride was wearing white and no, the bridesmaids were not (a la Pippa... and old time folks), we decided that it all came down to this:  is the bride crazy?

Well, you can see how we both felt about that question.

 

Au Contraire My Tear

For one of my relatively new research projects (in which I predict when you will die), I am working on a group with both Advisor Who and Professor Fudge.  Mostly Professor Fudge.  I catch a glimpse of Advisor Who once every 12-16 days.  Whenever I do, he assures me that he is working hard on the project.  I am never convinced.

Professor Fudge is mild mannered, understanding, and takes himself absolutely seriously.  In short, he's the opposite of every mentor I have ever had (especially one whose name starts with W and ends in Hitecastle).  Working with him has been absolutely encouraging and bewildering at once.

Today, our meeting ended with me in tears.  I have left many offices in tears, but never because I was sad.  Today was no exception.  It's my stupid dry eyes.  Like (really inaccurate) clockwork, my eyes dry up in the late afternoon/early evening daily and I have a little cry.  Unfortunately, the cry today came moments after we discovered that I messed up my analysis and would have to redo a couple of days of work.

With any other professor, it would've been "too bad, suck it up, bring me the new results and we'll go from there."  Not Fudge.  He felt bad.  He told me a really long story about how these professional survey people at a prominent university messed up their analysis.  And it was sometime during this story that my eyes started tearing up.

With any other professor, I would've made a joke and that would've been that.  Not Fudge.  When I told Fudge my eyes were dry, it just sounded like I was covering up.  Being the earnest man that he is, he felt even worse.  He told me that mistakes were a part of the process.  The meeting ended as all our meetings do: awkward, and with me breaking into a near run.

Reader, I've never had a mentor who did not put me down.  Now in 20th grade, I don't know if I'm ready for one.

Darn Yankees

We don't take good pictures of ourselves.

I would be really impressed if you could tell where we were just by the picture above.  I would be equally impressed if you saw the pictures below and couldn't make out where we were.  Though for very different reasons.

(we were really high up for a few innings)

A couple of days ago, Rachael tried to rally a group of us for baseball.  Everyone else had commitments so in the end, it was just the two of us, the Orioles, and the Yankees.  

Things I Was Looking Forward To Before the Game: 

Being able to afford a Yankees ticket.

Some monstrous hot dog topped with mac n' cheese and crab 

(or pit beef BBQ, I would've been happy with either)

Chen Wei-Ying!  (i.e. watching a healthy, decent Taiwanese pitcher have a good game) 

How the Game Turned Out:

Chen had a great night... for about 3 innings.  

Settled for a polish sausage with all the works.  Less special, but still delicious.  

Hours later, really settled for limp fries and cheese sauce.  Even less special, still hit the spot.

The Yankees come to town (and win) and the park wasn't full of obnoxious machismo, drunken bros, and the feeling that a fight is about to break out?  I love this park.  I want to go every week.  

Unlike my last visit, people actually filled the seats and watched the game last night (this being September, tied for first last night, and playing the Yankees might have had something to do with it).  I had great, fun.  Sure, singing Sweet Caroline is special and all, but everything is so much less crowded here, the seats more comfortable, and the fans (and staff) so friendly that one lady even stopped me to tell me to not carry my bag behind me lest I get pick pocketed.  Then again, chances of being pick pocketed much lower in Boston...

Reality Bites

(all ready for my first day of 20th grade this morning)

Today was a much more stressful first day of school than I had expected, despite the happy arrival of my new TV this afternoon, despite the delicious cherries I ate, and despite the sausage-leek-pasta I made tonight.  I don't know why, despite all these marvels, the day still produced an unsettling feeling.  That's why I am ending the evening reading about mosquito bites (abscesses in particular) and listening to rain noise.  Two of my favorite things to do to pass the time.  It was in all this googling about mosquito bites-

(Sidebar: Somehow, sleeping over Nish's immaculate, air-conditioned, 8th floor apartment in September, I managed to get 2 mosquito bites on my hands.  Needless to say, they are inconvenient, itchy, and abscess-y.  I haven't even scratched it.  The bites, being inconveniently placed, just keep brushing up against things that irritate.  So much so that I considered buying $70+ worth of herbal ointments from Hong Kong.)  

It was in all this googling about mosquito bites that I realized that I never told you about the Living Mosquito Bite that so marred my Malaysia trip last year.  I can't believe I never mentioned it. It only occupied 60% of my mind the entire trip.  Maybe Last Year Me didn't want to gross you out.  Present Me doesn't care.  

I won't show you any pictures.  What you imagine will probably be more horrifying.  I will say that my mosquito bite gone wrong reached such a point that when Dwight and I were touring the herbal garden, a woman who worked there pointed at it and animatedly discussed it with another man.  I thought she'd recommend some medicinal salve.  Instead, she just said, "You need to see a doctor."  

Malaysia: 0  Mosquito: 1  Moi: -3938