Questions

Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying is the "most emailed" article today at the New York Times. What to do if the answer is, "We both aren't sure right now"? Where's the guarantee that you both will come to the same conclusion about that question after many years of marriage? I'm continually amazed at couples who stay happily married for their entire lives, because they've obviously mastered the trick of growing up and changing together. Maybe some of it's luck, but what's the rest of the secret? People change, develop different interests and hobbies, and come to expect different things from their partner, so it's easy to see how a couple could grow apart. Maybe that list should be titled "Questions Couples Should Ask Continually Throughout Their Marriage."

1. Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
2. Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?
3. Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
4. Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?
5. Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?
6. Can we comfortably and openly discuss our sexual needs, preferences and fears?
7. Will there be a television in the bedroom?
8. Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?
9. Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?
10. Do we like and respect each other’s friends?
11. Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?
12. What does my family do that annoys you?
13. Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?
14. If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?
15. Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

Christmas lights

Every year, the city of Boston puts up lights along the Commonwealth Avenue mall. This year, since we live right in Kenmore Square, I'm lucky enough to see it right out my window every night.


I also managed to catch a teeny-tiny sliver of the moon last night.


It's been feeling very un-Christmas-y over the past week or so though because the weather's been so warm. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but it's a little weird to be able to go running in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of December.

I'm really looking forward to going home next week. My thesis advisor, on the other hand, wasn't overly excited to hear that I'll be out of town for two whole weeks. I'm not really planning to get a lot of work done while I'm at home, but it's amazing how unproductive December will end up being with my final project (completed and turned in yesterday), my final exam (coming up on Tuesday), and losing the last ten days to being out of town.

Oh well. I'm sure my thesis will be able to sufficiently ruin my life for the next 5 months, so why have it ruin the next two weeks?

In doing some online Christmas shopping tonight, I realized that I don't really have many hobbies anymore. At least, any hobbies that require purchasable stuff. I blame this on school. In many of my interviews over the past couple months, I've been asked how I feel about going back to school, continuing my education, etc. Obviously, the correct answer to this question is that I would always be open to getting more education, especially if it would benefit The Company and myself in my job.

Except... this is absolutely the worst time of the year to ask a student how they feel about continuing their education. I have to bite my tongue to stop from yelling, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME??" When faced with all the final projects, extra reading, last problem sets, and final exams that this time of year has to offer, I just can't imagine subjecting myself to another round of school. And yet, somehow by the time the beginning of the next semester rolls around, choosing new classes always seems exciting again. "Ah, THIS semester I'll get all my work done on time, do the reading before class, never fall asleep in lecture, and ask lots of questions when I don't understand the material."

But that feeling usually lasts about two weeks.

Anyway, I also think my lack of interest in stuff outside of school has a lot to do with my eyes. A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend who had just gotten into kayaking - he was taking classes in the pool to learn how to safely roll a kayak, and he was spending most of his weekends on the water in Maine. He was also playing IM soccer, hockey, softball... As he was talking, I realized that I can't do any of those things right now because I'm wearing my glasses. Yeah, okay, I could get one of those uber cool rubber straps that goes around the back of my head to keep my glasses on while I ran around, but my eyesight isn't good enough to do any of those things without my contacts. And I still can't wear contacts for any real portion of the day (although it might be okay if I just had them in for a 90 minute soccer game). I haven't even been interested in doing any photography for the school paper since I stopped wearing contacts.

Around Thanksgiving, I made an appointment Josh's eye doctor because Josh and I were having similar eye symptoms, so I wanted to know if it could be from a virus or something else that we both had. The doc didn't think that was the case, but he spent almost an hour just talking with me and listening to my description of everything that's been happening since last March. He examined my eyes and tried to flip my eyelids inside out to check for giant papillary conjunctivitis (unsuccessfully, because I'm a big baby), and ultimately determined the following:

I probably had a mild case of GPC early last spring, and I also had a severe allergic reaction to an unknown something while I was in England. The unrelated medication that I was on taking up until the end of this September probably changed the pH of my skin (causing the weird acne I was getting) and of my eyes. Inflammation in the eyes, particularly if it's prolonged, can cause changes in the cornea, making it more difficult for the eyes to stay moisturized. The good news is that since it's been so long since I wore contacts on a regular basis, any GPC that I had is probably gone. It's also possible to help my eyes get better at keeping the moisture level up, by doing obvious things like drinking lots of water and washing my eyelids with very mild soap, and also by eating more foods that have omega-3 fatty acids. Fish are a big source of this, which is unfortunate since I hate fish, but flaxseed is also a decent source of these fatty acids. So I've diligently been eating my flaxseed every day.

I'm also supposed to lay off the coffee and soda, and get as much sleep as I can. So with that, good night.

Are you from Wisconsin?

Apparently my 18 years in the Midwest have only a marginal lead in my speech over my 6 years in the Northeast, at least according to this quiz.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I've started a bunch of posts over the past couple weeks and never got the chance to actually finish and post any of them, so now I'm writing one of those posts that's just, "Yes, I'm alive, just busy."

So, there it is. I'm still around, just crazily cramming everything in before the end of the semester next Wednesday. I've got one more project and one more final exam, then this stupid semester is finally done. It'll be nice to actually remember what I'm doing for my thesis after that. It's definitely gotten the short end of the stick recently.

My interview last Friday in Maryland went pretty well, I think. It was a 10 hour day, but it was worth it to talk with as many people as I could about their work. The majority of the groups that I interviewed with do missile work for the military, but I did manage to get an interview with the space group as well. I was expecting to be pretty ho-hum about the military work and really excited about the space stuff, but my actual response was the opposite. I did interview with the space group really late in the day, so I'm sure that was a factor, but it just didn't grab me like I thought it would. I was actually a lot more interested in some of the missile work, as well as the opportunities to travel and interface with some big names in Washington.

The tricky part is that now I have to rank my group choices for the HR department. Overall, the company would be a fantastic place to work (hello, $2 for $1 company 401(k) matching!), and I think I would be happy moving between several different groups over the next several years to try out many types of work. There's one group I could throw out, but that still leaves 5 for me to rank. And I have no idea.

Caffeine buzz

*jitter*

Woof. Way too much coffee this afternoon. One of the big boss men stopped by our office today to let us know that one of the staff members in the Operations Research area was giving a short presentation on how to structure a thesis and how best to use Word to write it up. I went because it seemed like one of those things that I shouldn't skip, even though I'm not doing anything related to Operations Research and I'm planning to write my thesis in LaTeX, not Microsoft Word.

I picked up a couple useful things about Word, but overall the meeting was sort of a bust. Afterward, I got some coffee with another girl from the meeting that I haven't seen in a long time, and it was really nice to catch up. I haven't met many new people in grad school, but there are a couple people that I think could be really good friends if we had more time to get to know each other. I haven't been drinking coffee much lately because it dries out my eyes, so my caffeine tolerance, much like my alcohol tolerance, is at an all-time low. So now my feet and fingers are jittering like nobody's business, thanks to the medium mocha.

The good news is that things may finally be looking up in thesis-land. My advisor is out of town at a meeting this week, but I'm hoping to have a lot of good data to share with him when he gets back.

~~~

Josh came to visit this weekend, and while most of it was blissfully uneventful, we did get out to see Babel on Friday night. It's essentially this year's version of Crash, except it was a lot more depressing and featured a lot less underwear. The cinematography was really cool in parts, but it was heart-wrenching enough that I probably wouldn't watch it again.

It's hard to believe that next week is already Thanksgiving. A couple months ago I bought a plane ticket to go to D.C. for the holiday, but a few weeks ago, an unexpected opportunity popped up to visit my little sister in Spain during that week. My dad is already going, and he generously offered to help pay for my ticket if I decided that I wanted to go also. I considered it pretty seriously, because it would be a fantastic opportunity to get a personal tour of Seville, complete with bilingual tour guide :), and it would be really neat to see what Laura's life has been life for the past few months. But by the time I actually looked at tickets, they were already over $1000, which seemed excessive for a 5ish day trip. On one hand, it's an opportunity that, in all likelihood, I won't get again, and I do have the money to go (although it would eat into my savings for the potential post-graduation trip), but the idea of paying that much for such a short trip, not to mention the expense of eating out and staying in a hostel for the whole week, just seemed like too much. So Laura, if you're reading, this means you should live in Spain again sometime, preferably when I have the money, vacation time, and good sense to plan ahead. I'm still keeping my eye out for last-minute deals for next week, but it's looking unlikely.

Professionalism

We've gotten a lot of rain recently, the kind of rain that necessitates stripping just inside your front door, because if you don't, you'll leave a trail of leaves and dirty water anywhere else you walk. Usually, I don't bike in the rain because in addition to the regular amount of wet socks, wet shoes, and drenching that occurs when your umbrella flips inside out while walking, you also get splashed with wet road grime when cars, trucks, and busses drive through ginormous puddles on the road.

Today the rain had stopped, so foolishly I decided to ride my bike to work this morning, forgetting that the ginormous puddles remain after the rain, and they have an irritating tendency to splash water in a neat little line up your back tire and onto the seat of your pants when you bike through them.

So now I'm walking around at work with a giant wet spot on my butt. Real professional. To counteract this, I feel compelled to sneak the words, "I rode my bike here," into every conversation with anyone at work, just so they don't think I peed in my pants.

And just to add that extra level of embarrassment, I noticed when I got up just now that the wet spot on my pants has partially transferred itself to the seat of my fabric chair. So now it looks like I peed on myself AND the chair.

Great.

One of the many reasons I should stop watching "Extra" while waiting for my dinner to cook

My dad occasionally has celebrity dreams. He meets all kinds of famous people in these dreams, both living and dead (I think), and the next morning he'll regale us with adventures and conversations he had with these people the night before.

I don't know many other people who experience this sort of thing - I definitely haven't - so I chalked it up to one of those things that just happens to you or it doesn't, sort of like dreaming in color.

So imagine my surprise when I met not one, not two, but THREE celebrities in my dream last night. First I met Angelina Jolie. I went over to her house to borrow a textbook, and I ended up babysitting her three kids. Except that her youngest was that African boy that Madonna just adopted, not the baby that Angelina just gave birth to. I don't remember meeting Brad Pitt (too bad), but I do remember her house being surrounded in the front and back by paparazzi. Eventually Angelina gave me the textbooks that I needed and told me that I didn't have to return them if I didn't want to because she had hundreds, so I left her and the kids and got into a taxi.

At that point, it was somehow decided that I was going to attend Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's wedding. ?!? No one was supposed to be there, but I ended up getting there some boat with three women from People magazine. Once we got to the wedding site, they wrapped themselves in sod to blend in with the grass so that Tom and Katie wouldn't notice them on the way to the wedding. Once we got to the ceremony, however, Tom and Katie didn't seem to mind that the women were there, along with some random Asian family and a couple other people I didn't know. If this wasn't weird already, here's where it becomes completely random: After the ceremony, I gave both Tom and Katie hugs, but when I hugged Tom, he somehow morphed into my 7th grade band teacher. On the way to the reception, I sat with Katie in the back of an enormous van while Tom and the driver sat up front. At that point, Katie confided to me that Tom could be "a little harsh" sometimes, and so I asked, "so why are you marrying him?"

So either I have a hidden desire to attend celebrity weddings and play marriage counselor, or my brain was just so scrambled from the day before that it needed an opportunity to wrap people in sod to let off steam. It reminded me of one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons:

Madlibs

Earlier today I was looking around online to find the entry downranges for the various Apollo missions - actual, not design constraints. (By the way, no luck there, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, I'll send you cookies in the mail.)

I did, however, come across the Apollo 15 Flight Journal for the last day of the mission, which appears to be just a transcript of the communication between the astronauts, flight controllers, and various recovery teams. Some sections have better comm than others, though, so in some cases the words were unintelligible and are just left out:

Recovery: Apollo 15, this is Recovery. Roger your [garble] on 243.0.
Scott: Recovery, 15. We're in good shape.

But it gets worse. Which, of course, means that it gets funnier.

Recovery: We're in contact. We're in contact.
Recovery: [garble] copying you loud and clear, [garble]. Okay, ARIA 1.

After a while, whoever's doing the transcription just gives up.

Recovery: [Garble.]
Spacecraft: [Garble.]
Recovery: [Garble.] Over.
Recovery: All right. [garble]

Googleable

My site is result #11 on Google! Haha, probably because I keep Googling it to see if it shows up, rather than anyone else actually looking for it. Oh well.

Maryland

Free trip to DC! The only catch is that I have to go to an interview. Just kidding! I'm interviewing with a company in Maryland at the end of next month, and I just got off the phone with their travel office to make my arrangements. It seems like a really good company to work for - their representatives at the career fair were incredibly nice, and they couldn't stop talking in these amazed voices about all the benefits that their company provides. It's a relatively small place, which I like, and they're a non-profit, which I also like.

The only downside is that I think the work may be a little too established for my taste. The projects seem to be very long-term, at least in the fields that I'm interested in, and due to the nature of the work, relatively inflexible to big innovations or other things that might gamble with the reliability of the system. But this is all what I've heard from other people, so it'll be interesting to find out what the deal is for myself. I'm just not looking forward to the 8 hours of interviewing.

The last time I flew to an on-site interview was three years ago, and it was really stressful. Spending the afternoon, evening, and following morning in a hotel room by myself was really unnerving, and I spent the entire time just getting nervous about everything that was coming up. It was a half-day affair in which each of the interviewees got passed around between several different employees, but I completely relaxed by about the third interview when it became abundantly clear that I didn't want to do the types of jobs that they were hiring for.

I'm hoping the Maryland interview will go well, but I'm also hoping that I might be a little more relaxed, considering that right now I don't think it's the job that I'm dying to have. But I'll have to try hard to remember that when I'm sitting in my hotel room alone, getting nervous.

My homework

It turns out that I have nothing more interesting to write about than my homework solutions. I have two midterms this week, so all I've been exposed to since Friday night are the walls of my bedroom and the inside of the grocery store. And, of course, the internet. Which brings me to my story...

The professor for my aircraft controls class recently hired a TA, a Korean grad student of his, so the homework solutions from weeks ago were just posted over the weekend. The first question on the first problem set was, "What is your favorite airplane and why?" I had decided to write about the Embraer 145 Regional Jet. Kinda lame, right? Well, I chose it because it's one of those planes that has two columns of seats on one side of the plane and only one column of seats on the other side, so by sitting on the one-column side, you can be sitting in a combination window/aisle seat. So there's no one to step over when you have to go to the bathroom, no sticky drink that gets dumped on you when the flight attendant passes the window person their Coke, and you don't have to jockey for a position on a shared armrest.

I was partially serious, but I also knew that everyone would write about the F-22, the SR-71, or some other military jet, so I wanted to be a little different. And furthermore, if the prof's going to ask a semi-ridiculous question, I'm going to give a semi-ridiculous answer.

Turns out I wasn't the only one. I was looking at the TA's solutions on the class website, and instead of skipping the "solution" to this question like any boring person would have, he writes: "T-50 advanced trainer, because it is the first jet fully developed by KOREAN technology."

Space debris

I was doing some research this afternoon on the company that I'm interviewing with on Tuesday, and they have a short animation on their website that shows all the tracked objects that are in orbit around the Earth. It's really crowded out there! Okay, yes, I understand that it looks more crowded because it's a 3D projection onto a flat screen, but still! It would be interesting to know which ones are actually in use and which ones are just space junk.

Can't sleep

My head is swirling and I can't shut it off. I don't know how to put it on a shelf for the night so that I can get some sleep. My mind is racing, but I can't focus on one thing long enough to understand it, to solve it.

I'm worried about everything. I'm worried about how I'm doing in my classes, I'm worried about my research. I'm worried that I won't graduate in time, I'm worried that I won't get a job. I'm worried that my eyes will never get better. "At least you have your health!" they always say. But I don't. It's not terrible, but it's always there, in the back of my mind, giving me an unsettled feeling that I haven't been able to shake, even when I can't always put my finger on it for a few seconds. Why do I feel weird? Oh yeah... that's right.

You should never go back to grad school after working full time, because when you work, you get tricked into believing that you have free time. How do I meet these people who say that grad school was the time of their lives? I do research all day and homework all night. A break for running, sometimes, and a break for dinner, maybe a whole day free on Saturday. I don't mean to complain because I think many students handle this better than I do. I'm not sure how they do it. I'm 24 years old and I make ten dollars an hour. I'm not looking forward to becoming a slave to corporate America, but at least then I can go on vacation.

My mom has a "critical mass" theory about stress - you can handle a certain number of things for a certain amount of time, but then just one more thing gets piled on top, and the whole thing comes tumbling down like a ton of bricks. Suddenly all the things you were so expertly juggling become debilitating.

My alarm clock is making crackling noises. I hope it doesn't die and/or explode in the middle of the night.

1992

Remember the group Positive K? Of course not. Nobody does, I think, except for me. Back in 1992, they had a one hit wonder with "I Got a Man." I remember taping that song off the radio, B96 in Chicago, when I was, jeez, 10 years old, because I liked it so much. Anyway, we never had MTV growing up, so I never saw the video for this song. That is, until just now. It's on YouTube, and it's hilarious. It looks like it was filmed in someone's backyard, it showcases nearly every awful clothing style from the early 90's, and the lyrics are just ridiculous.

As a side note, I can't believe some of those fashions are actually coming back. I am officially old. But for the record, 14+ years does NOT make the clothing look any better.

How to annoy me

First, walk around the office with the loudest shuffle imaginable, almost as if you are a gorilla who was accidentally let loose from the zoo to wander among computers and normal human beings. Second, take every opportunity while scuffling around the hallways to clear your throat. Use high tones and low tones, many times together or just one at a time here and there, but never use this opportunity to clear your throat hard enough OR ACTUALLY COUGH so that you don't have to do it again in 30 seconds. Just keep making the wimpy noise at irregular intervals. Third, listen to your iPod at 8am and SING ALONG TO IT AT WORK. Everyone knows you have a terrible voice, so why not let everyone hear it? It's not like you'd ever shut your office door to protect the innocent from your screeching.

We've all grown accustomed to respecting each other's personal space, right? Why isn't audio space included? Why do people think it's okay to whistle, hum, or sing along to the music in their head while surrounded by other people?

What I learned in school

Nerd alert!

Yesterday in my optimization class, we learned about the integer knapsack problem. The basic idea is that you have a fixed volume to fill and you want to maximize or minimize, depending on your problem, the total cost of the items that you choose to fill the volume.

Okay, seems logical enough, although maybe a bit abstract. To help us understand the problem better, the lecturer gave an example. Here's where it gets weird - instead of using any number of generic examples to explain the problem, he starts out like this: "Imagine you're a thief."

Hmm.

It actually makes a lot more sense that way though. Imagine you're a thief. You break into a store and you want to steal as much stuff as you can, but you only have your backpack to carry stuff out in, so everything you steal has to fit in there. Obviously you want to turn a profit, so you're going to grab expensive stuff. But you're not going to steal the big TV because then you won't have room in your backpack for anything else. Given a fixed number of items each with a fixed cost, there's actually an optimal method for filling your backpack.

The funny part was that there are numerous examples that the lecturer could have chosen that would not have involved explaining the optimal way to commit a felony. Filling a backpack with the most essential items for a hiking trip, grocery shopping on a budget with a fixed amount of cabinet space, filling up your iPod with songs... but no, he chose the thief.

Long day

This has pretty much been the longest day on record. This will be followed by the shortest weekend on record, all courtesy of the fact that the boyfriend is arriving today and staying for the weekend. The extreme highs and lows of long distance dating really suck, so to make it through all the emails, phone calls, and weeks without seeing each other, I suggest you pick the best person on earth as your significant other. And no, you can't have mine.

Yesterday I got a new officemate. Yay! The only real perks to having my own office were that I could make personal phone calls whenever I needed to and no one tsk-tsk'ed if I watched movie trailers at lunch. But over the summer especially, days would go by where I wouldn't talk to anyone while I was at work. I don't work with other people on my project, and I felt a lot of pressure to get all my work done in such a short period of time, so I didn't have a lot of time for miscellaneous chitchat with my coworkers. Things are still really hectic, but at least now I have more of a social outlet here.

Well, I have nothing else interesting to talk about because I babysit Matlab sims all day, and it's almost time to go home. Happy Friday!

Amazing

Last week in Brazil, a Boeing 737-800 collided in mid-air with an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet. In a collision between a big plane and a small plane, you'd expect the big plane to fare better, but incredibly, the Embraer 600 survived and the 737 did not. What's even more incredible is that the pilots of the business jet were able to safely land the plane, and all the crewmembers and passengers walked away completely unharmed. Joe Sharkey, a New York Times reporter and a passenger on the Embraer jet, wrote this article about the collision and its aftermath. I know I keep saying this, but it's incredible.

My idiot day

Yesterday I brought my gym clothes to work, like I usually do, because I often go to the gym after work. But yesterday I had to run an errand at the mall before going to the gym, so I gathered up my stuff when I left work so that I could go straight to the gym afterward. Except when I got all the way downstairs and outside, I realized that I left my shoes in my office. *sigh*

Not a big deal, I'd just stop by my office on the way back - it's mostly on the way anyway. So I went to the mall, didn't find what I was looking for, of course, so then I biked back to work. Picked up my shoes, got back on my bike, headed over to the gym. After locking up my bike, I failed miserably at trying to cross the street - some other girl and I managed to hold up four lanes of traffic as we crossed. So then I got all the way into the locker room and realized that I had left my rear bike light on. UGH. So I trudge all the way back to the bike rack (no traffic hold up this time), and discover that I had, in fact, turned the light off. Yay! But boo for wasting all this time and energy walking back and forth.

So I get back to the locker room, get changed, go to the mirror to put my hair in a ponytail, and realize that I didn't bring a hair tie. ARGH! I shuffled through my backpack to find my extra in-case-of-emergency hair tie, but alas, it had served its purpose during the last one of these moments and had promptly made its way out of my bag, onto my head, and then safely home. Out of my backpack. I looked around the locker room to see if there was another girl who might have an extra one that I could borrow, but today of all days, the locker room is completely empty except for one girl who's in the shower. And I'm not interrupting anyone's shower.

So I shoved all my stuff back in my backpack and headed home. By the time I got home, I realized that the reason I hadn't left my rear light "on" was because the batteries died, and I had just biked all the way home, in the middle of traffic, with no rear light. Lovely.

Party

I've decided that if I can ever wear contacts again, I'm throwing the biggest, craziest party ever. Lots of food, tons of alcohol, insane amounts of music and dancing, kisses at midnight, sparklers, party hats, cake, candles, pinatas - everything. Everyone's invited!

Headlines

5 of the 13 headlines seen on CNN just now:

+ Did Terrell Owens attempt suicide?
+ Squirrel jumps boy in park; rabies suspected
+ Porn star candidate campaigns on campus
+ Charlie Sheen to become highest-paid sitcom star
+ Ashton Kutcher tells secret to Ryan Seacrest

Either I'm turning into a cynical senior citizen, or CNN is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for news.

What's in a name?

I've been reading this string of comments about women changing or not changing their last name when they get married. I have several feminist tendencies, I think, but this falls under the category of Mostly Unimportant as far as I'm concerned.

Granted, I'm not married and not about to be married, so I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about it. I also don't yet have a strong professional identity to consider, and that would be a larger factor if I were getting married later in life. It also gets trickier when there are children to consider. Keeping my name would seem very natural if it were just the two of us, but I feel strongly that my imaginary children should all have the same last name. Whether that's mine or his doesn't really matter, but I don't think some children should have one name while the rest have another.

Several commenters brought up the fact that the spouse that's changing their name can feel like they're losing their identity. I think I would feel a little sad either moving my current last name to my middle name or giving it up altogether, but it's not like I would lose my connection to my immediate family or extended relatives. Sure, I wouldn't have the same name on the family tree, but I wouldn't feel any less a part of it. My name is how the rest of the world addresses me; it's not the way I know who I am.

Again, a caveat here is that I have a pretty generic last name, and I suppose I might feel different if I had a very unique name or something that was very representative of my background. And maybe if my imaginary husband had a very ethnic last name, I would feel a little like an imposter taking on a name that presumes I'm much different than my regular white American self.

I want my family to be a cohesive unit, and I don't want there to be any confusion if I need to be with my husband or children in the hospital and we don't share the same name. So if that means me taking his name, him taking my name, or choosing a new name altogether, great. But I don't want to hyphenate, and I don't want to keep my name and then be forced to carry around a copy of my marriage certificate all the time so that I can prove that I'm a part of my own family. So if that means I become Melanie Y instead of staying Melanie X, so be it.

It seems like several years ago more women were keeping their names when they got married, and now the percentage of women who do that is down. This seems to outrage many women, but I don't really understand the drama. The feminist cause has bigger fish to fry than getting women to keep their names.

Interviews

I have two interviews scheduled for tomorrow!! Both are with defense/intelligence companies. When I budgeted time to go to the career fair today though, I forgot about the time that I would spend catching up with old friends who are now recruiting for their companies. :) I love running into people I haven't seen in a long time, and somehow none of those conversations today felt contrived or fake. I wish I knew how to surround myself with more people like that - friendly people who tell it like it is. No sugar, no fake smiles, no exaggeration of how close we were when we went to school together. I'm sure it helped that several of these friends worked for companies that I have no interest in working for, so they didn't have to give me their regular recruiting pitch. And it helps that we've all grown up a little bit.

One of the things I disliked the most about my first full time job was the fact that there was very little communication from the management. Everything was rumors. I would hear about agency changes from news headlines and blogs before, if ever, I would hear anything from my supervisor or the head of the agency. News of new projects would go like this: "There's been a buzz about some new work coming down the pipe..." I hated that. "Down the pipe?" It seemed like no one person or group was ever associated with a particular policy change or analysis request. I felt acutely aware of just how big the gap was between the decision makers (them) and the lowly laborers (us). To be fair, it's an extremely large workforce, so all-hands meetings to explain changes or answer questions are often unrealistic. And it's a government agency, so engineering development and Congressional policy get tangled up as motivations for change.

I didn't realize how much I disliked that type of company communication until just a few weeks ago. The engineering VP of my current employer sat down with each group individually (15-20 of us) and discussed how things around the lab would be changing with our new president coming in, what hiring changes were happening, how the company was growing, what new projects were coming in, and why current groups and divisions are set up the way they are. He explained things as they were, even if that meant admitting some shortcomings or areas in which the company needed to improve. And when he was finished talking, he spent the next 45 minutes fielding questions from our group. Granted, it's a lot easier to do that sort of thing with a smaller company, and I'm sure that the VP lost a complete day or two just going around to all the different groups to explain the same things over and over. But at least for me, that sort of communication has an incredible boost on my morale and feeling of worth in the company. It's nice to be informed, and it's nice to feel like your suggestions or questions have at least some, however small, impact on how things are done.

Thursday thoughts

+ Today is the career fair. I'm nervous. And there are a lot of companies that I want to speak with during the two hours that I can be there.

+ I've lost weight since I was living in Houston. All of my dress clothes are now baggier, especially in areas where I don't want them to be baggy!

+ My brass rat feels extremely heavy compared to the small silver ring I've been wearing lately. I used to love wearing my class ring - everyone at school bought one and wore it as a badge of pride for having survived the most academically difficult 4 years of our lives. After I graduated though, I wore it less and less because it didn't seem to mean as much to me when I wasn't surrounded by other MIT grads. Looking at it today though, I miss wearing it, but not enough to give up wearing my silver ring. I never thought I'd be back here after I turned my brass rat around at graduation.

+ The radiator in my bedroom is on already. We live in an old building, so the boiler distributes heat to every apartment in the building, which means that we don't have our own thermostat. So my radiator is on when it's September 21st and it's 70 degrees outside.

+ I must start going to bed earlier.

+ 95% of the kids in my Feedback Control Systems class are first year grad students, which means that they don't have much research work to do yet. I miss the days of getting all my homework done at work and then being able to leave at 3:30 to go to the gym.

+ I need to go the gym.

+ I see my roommate for about 5 minutes a day, if that.

+ My mom is visiting this weekend, and we're going to the Cape! It might rain though.

+ Dude, Grey's Anatomy almost made me cry last night. Maybe I can see the attraction with that show.

+ I've become a lot ballsier about biking in traffic now that I've started wearing my helmet regularly. Ironically, I think I was safer when I wasn't wearing it.

+ I miss having an officemate. Well, except for this morning when I could change clothes in my office instead of having to go to the bathroom.

+ My newest theory about my eyes being retarded is that it's caused by another medication I'm taking. My eyes didn't start freaking out until about 3 months after I started taking the medication, which is about how long it takes your body to adjust to the new levels of drugs. Plus, I've read that one of the drugs in the medication is known to cause dry eyes. It was hard to believe at first that my eye problems could be caused just by dryness, but I've started putting in re-wetting drops several times during the day, and it seems to be helping, so either they're just dry or the extra moisture is helping flush out whatever allergens might be in there. I have a doctor's appointment on Monday to see what my other medication options are.

+ My new favorite blog to read is Everyday Goddess.

+ I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get all my thesis research, analysis, and writing done before May 11, 2007.

Units

A little background: my thesis work is building on another student's work from last year, and when she started out, everything was done in SI units. When she presented her work to NASA however, word got back that she should really convert everything into English units to be more consistent with what NASA is used to. So she did, and now I'm trying to sort through her work and keep straight which stuff was done before the switch and which stuff was done after. Additionally, as any recent engineering graduate will tell you, English units just generally suck, so keeping track of everything in BTUs per foot-pound and is it pounds-mass or pounds-force? is a big headache.

Older engineers have much more experience and therefore intuition about how big or small things should generally be (typical heat rates, downranges, etc.), so I can appreciate how it's nice to be able to evaluate a new design or additional analysis in units that you already know. But, since I have pretty much no engineering intuition and very little experience, I'd rather stick with metric units because everything's divisible by 10 and there's no confusion between things like a short ton and a long ton. And really - bushels? Furlongs? Give me a break.

But I digress. Sorry about the rant. Anyway, I was looking for additional articles online this morning and found a copy of the "Apollo Experience Report - Mission Planning for Apollo Entry," published in 1972. I noticed at the beginning of the document, right before the abstract, there's an additional note that reads:

"The MSC (Manned Spaceflight Center) Director waived the use of the International System of Units (SI) for this Apollo Experience Report, because, in his judgment, use of SI units would impair the usefulness of the report or result in excessive cost."

30 years later and not much has changed...

Resume writing

Tonight I spent way longer than necessary updating my resume for the career fair next week. It's amazing how long you can debate between "action" words to describe things you've done at work... developed, produced, constructed, determined, analyzed, performed... bleh. And I also can't decide if I want to keep the objective on my resume - on one hand, it gives the reader an immediate idea of what field I'm in, but I always feel like my objective sounds stupid and completely obvious, since I can't come up with anything more creative than, "To obtain a challenging full-time position in aerospace engineering." Double bleh.

Tomorrow is my last day of work/class this week because I'm leaving on Friday to go to Indianapolis for my cousin's wedding. Yes, to be a hot pink blob. The wedding is going to be a lot of fun since I haven't seen much of my extended family in a while, and Josh is able to come too, so I'll have a date. :) Of course, the downside is that he'll have to put up with my crazy family for the weekend. And I may have to wear my glasses during the wedding since my eyes are still messed up. Still. STILL! But that's a story for another time...

Anyway, going home to the midwest for the weekend. I'm excited. :)

Overweight? Congratulations!

Seen in this article from the New York Times about the rising number of diabetics in India:

"In perverse fashion, obesity and diabetes stand almost as joint totems of success.

Last year, for instance, the MW fast-food and ice cream restaurant in this city [Chennai, formerly Madras] proclaimed a special promotion: "Overweight? Congratulations." The limited-time deal afforded diners savings equal to 50 percent of their weight (in kilograms). The heaviest arrival lugged in 135 kilograms (297 pounds) and ate lustily at 67.5 percent off."

Registration Day

I got to campus early this morning to talk to a professor about being my faculty thesis advisor, but I still have another 10 minutes or so to kill before meeting with my regular academic advisor to register for my classes. I love Reg Day though - the excitement about taking new classes is still greater than the dread of the work that comes with them, and you run into all sorts of people that you haven't seen for months. Well, maybe just I feel that way, since my office is off-campus and several of my old friends from undergrad are in on-campus labs.

Anyway. I'm registering for a math class called Optimization Methods and I'm still deciding between two aero/astro classes: Feedback Control Systems and Aircraft Stability & Control. Feedback would be easy, I think, but it meets MWF from 2-3pm (bad for leaving early on weekends) and has a final exam (yuck). Aircraft Stability & Control would be harder, which might be a lot to handle with the optimization class, but it has no final and meets Tu/Th mornings. So then I wouldn't have class on Fridays. :) Yes, I realize these are terrible ways to decide which class to take. But I shop around for classes every term, so I guess this one is no different. In any case, I'm excited that this is my very last semester of classes!

Goodbye Marlborough St.

It is officially September 1st, which means I am officially squatting in my own apartment. Technically my lease ended at midnight, but I can't get my keys for the new apartment until 9am tomorrow at the earliest. And since I have no plans to sleep on the street tonight, my junk and I are staying here illegally. I've had these unsettling dreams the past couple nights that the current tenants in our new place don't return their keys on time and I can't get my stuff out of here... hopefully reality will be a nice change tomorrow.

Anyway, this past year on Marlborough Street with Glenn and Phil has been a good one, except for moving in last September. That was awful. And just for kicks, the internet has decided not to work since I (gasp!) unplugged the modem from the power strip and plugged it into the wall, so I'm stealing wireless from some other sap in the building. And now it's time for bed, since I need to be up in five and a half hours.

Cleaning

It's been a mostly boring evening - cleaning the microwave, cleaning the toaster, cleaning the bathroom... I also threw out a bunch of old stuff and left a couple things in the entryway of the apartment building, which has become part garage sale and part dumping ground. A few days ago I left some books and a coffeemaker; today I left a broken chair and table but picked up a fan. Very handy.

Tomorrow NASA will announce the prime contractor for the newly-named Orion crew exploration vehicle. The company I work for is on one of the teams that submitted a proposal, and everyone in the lab is excited about the announcement. The company has done some very important work in space exploration over the years, but lately the work has been on much smaller projects, so this contract would be almost like a revival of the 1960's. I'm really pulling for the company because my thesis is based on the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and although I'll still have funding even if the lab doesn't win this contract, it'll be much more educational and a lot more fun if I'm working as part of a team instead of on my own.

Last weekend my little sister left for Spain to start her semester abroad in Seville. She seemed a little apprehensive at first about getting there on her own, meeting the other kids in her program, and finding out who she'd be staying with (she chose to do a homestay, but they don't find out anything about their local hosts until they arrive), but I think she's settling in well. She's started a travel blog about her semester, which is here if you're interested in reading.

Speaking of traveling, Josh has been gone for almost three weeks now, and he won't be back until early next week. We've been able to talk on the phone a couple times during the brief times he's popped up in civilization, but mostly I've been sans boyfriend for the past three weeks. It's been sad. I never realized how often I called him for no particular reason at all, or how I unconsciously store away funny things that happen to me during the day so that I can tell Josh about them that night. But I've also realized that I've let him become my social crutch, so it's been great to hang out with some old friends again.

Packing

I don't think anyone should pack alone. Even if the other person who's packing is in another room in your apartment, on another floor in your house, or down the hall in your dorm, they should be there. This is for those "Ohhhhh!" moments when you discover your high school track shorts crammed in the back of your closet and realize that since the elastic is now so brittle that the shorts would fit a 200 pound man, you have to throw away this piece of your childhood. Since my roommates have all left, you, dear reader, are my audience. Your line is, "Awwwwww."

Thanks. :)

Also, it turns out that my most recent roommate used up all our packing tape when she moved out last week. She bought another roll to replace it, but it turns out that she bought the cheap, flimsy stuff that twists around and sticks to itself better than the box. And the cheap tape doesn't come with a dispenser. Argh!

I buy a lot of generic, cheap stuff instead of the name-brand stuff, but I happily fork over the extra dollar to get the thick tape that comes with a dispenser. I think everyone has those few things that they won't compromise on, and in addition to the tape, my list includes running shoes, ziploc bags, and toilet paper. I may have used furniture in my bedroom and no-name spaghetti sauce in my kitchen, but darn it, I buy Charmin toilet paper!

Blockbuster

Yesterday I looked at my credit card bill and saw four mysterious charges from Blockbuster on it. Two debits about a week apart, then two credits on a later day. All told, it says I owe Blockbuster $11.64.

Today I got a friendly postcard from Blockbuster reminding me to return a disc of 24 that I rented, along with The Ringer (didn't rent this) and some movie called Grandma's Boy (never rented this one either) on the same day. So I called my local Blockbuster and explained that I had only rented one movie when I came in that day, and was there some mixup to explain why I had been charged for not returning these movies that I didn't rent? I eventually talked with the manager who told me that never would one of his star employees have messed up and done something like accidentally left my account open while someone else was renting movies. So then, I asked, what should we do to resolve this? I rented the movie with a free coupon, so unfortunately I don't have a credit card receipt for it. He said that the only thing he could do was look through "the tapes" early next week and see if he could verify that I, in fact, rented only one DVD. I'm assuming this is their security video, but I'm not really sure. Anyway, since they're a "very busy store," he couldn't be bothered to check right now. Apparently I forgot how much of a madhouse Blockbuster is at 7pm on a Wednesday night.

This is really frustrating. I realize that it's only 11 dollars, but I did not rent those other movies, and I'm not interested in paying Blockbuster because someone else didn't return their DVDs on time. But I don't really have much leverage here. I can see that from their point of view, the computer says that I rented these movies and returned them late, so they assume that I'm lying to get out of paying the fees. I should have kept my receipt, I guess, but who keeps a receipt for a movie they got with a free coupon over three weeks ago?

I didn't like the fact that I had to give Blockbuster my credit card information to open the account, but I can appreciate that it's the only way they have to charge delinquent customers. But if they can't keep their stuff straight, then I'm not interesting in keeping an account with them.

Women be shopping

Yesterday my older sister, my mom, and I drove out to David's Bridal in Westland to get bridesmaids dresses for my cousin's wedding next month. Debbie choose the color azalea for our dresses but let each of us choose any style of dress in that color. Seems pretty flexible, right?

Wrong! Since the wedding is only a month away, the saleswoman told us that there wouldn't be enough time to order dresses, so we should both try to find something off the rack. The problem was that there's not much ON the rack in azalea (hot pink). So Katherine and I tried on a handful of dresses and vetoed everything because it was too big or too strapless (chests large enough to hold up such articles of clothing, unfortunately, do not run in our family). After we concluded that we'd have wear potato sacks to this wedding, the saleswoman reconsidered and thought that just maybe we'd have enough time to order dresses before September 16th. So we stuck with the styles we'd tried on that we liked but ordered them about 10 sizes smaller. So this is what I'll be wearing, as long as there's no ordering mixup. Then I'll have to pull out the pink potato sack.

Being in the store gave me a small glimpse of the stress and anxiety that can be caused by planning a wedding. The list of things that need to be written, bought, sent, arranged, and paid for seems endless, and the money is flying out of your hands faster than if you stacked up the dollar bills in front of an open window with a stiff breeze. Is there a point along the way where the process of creating the perfect day is more important than the fact that you're actually getting married? After watching a few friends go through this, it seemed like there was no way to plan a wedding that was both classy and inexpensive. So I began to think that maybe the best way really was to run off and elope - you eliminate the hassle of planning and can put the oodles of money that you or your parents don't really have toward buying a home or going on a nice honeymoon. After all, it's just one day. The marriage is what lasts forever.

I recently finished a book called A Walk Down the Aisle. It's about a couple who'd been living together for seven years before deciding to get married, and the author (the bride) talks about why she and her husband wanted to marry when it wouldn't have made any real change in their everyday lives. But although they already had a home together, they wanted to make the commitment to each other, in front of friends and family, to be together forever, not just while the relationship was easy or convenient. She also talked about how they struggled to decide which traditions to keep, which ones to toss, and how to create a wedding that felt honest and significant without being generic or cheesy.

So after reading the book, my cynical view began to soften a little. It's still just one day, but it's to celebrate a lifelong decision. And there are weddings I've been to that were classy and, I think, relatively inexpensive, so I guess there's still some hope that it can be done.

But I'd still rather spend the money on a trip than a dress.

They just keep on leaving

I met Greddy at 7 this morning to bike down to Carson beach and the JFK Library. I grumbled a bit getting out of bed at 6:30, but the ride was totally worth it. I've decided that August is officially the best month of the year in Boston - June was too rainy, July was too hot, and I don't have a car so I can't drive through the Berkshires to admire the fall colors. That sort of thing is pretty boring anyway unless you're hiking, camping, canoeing, or doing some other actual outdoor activity instead of just ooh-ing and ahh-ing from your car. But I digress. This August has been absolutely beautiful. Very sunny and warm without being hot.

So we biked for about two hours and then when I got back to my apartment, June was getting ready to leave for the airport. First Phil, then Glenn, now June is moving out. My little apartment is lonely again. It was nice to have some female company this summer after all the burping, football, and conversations composed entirely of movie quotes with the guys. I love them, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it would have been nice to have another girl around to balance things out.

~~~

I got a package slip in my mailbox last Wednesday, so on Thursday afternoon I trekked down to the post office to pick up the pillows I bought in Houston that Josh had sent to me. But when I got there, I was told that the package hadn't gotten back in yet, so I should come back the next day. I came back on Saturday and was told, again, that the package wasn't there, but if I could leave my phone number with the post office, they'd check their other nearby offices to see if my pillows popped up. This morning I called again to see if my long-lost pillows had shown up, and the guy I spoke with said that they had. Yay! So I can go pick them up this afternoon and toss out my old crummy ones. (Side fact: According to this website, up to 10% of the weight of a 2-year-old pillow is dust mites and their poop.) The dude told me that there was some confusion with my box because there was another name on it besides mine so someone might have assumed that was the recipient. "The name?" I ask. "Uhh... N-A-S-A," he says. "Anyone you know?"

Important?

Over the past week and a half, I've been asked to be the in-case-of-emergency person for Josh while he's tromping around in Peru, an executor for my parents' will (although low on the list), and a bridesmaid at my cousin's wedding. The first one makes my chest tighten, the second one makes me feel a little unprepared (the extent of my tax knowledge ends with the 1040EZ), but the third one should be a lot of fun! My cousin Debbie only recently decided that she wanted to have a couple extra bridesmaids, so it was a little last-minute (the wedding's in a month), but I think I'll still have time to get everything sorted out.

And although the first two things are a little morbid, I'm flattered to have been asked to do them. And I do think that I would be able to handle that sort of responsibility rationally if I ever needed to. I'm not sure if I like what that says about me though.

Lazy

The past two days have made up the laziest weekend I've had in a long time. On Friday, I was in bed by 9:30. On Saturday, I was woken up at 10am by the maintenance crew who had come to replace my bedroom window. (On the 4th, the glass shattered when I was trying to close the window. Turns out smashing a window isn't as hard as it looks in the movies! I got away with just a few scrapes on my hands and arms, but I went through a significant number of bandaids that weekend.) Anyway, one benefit of renting an apartment is that it usually comes with a maintenance crew, and the guys for my building are, thankfully, prompt and thorough. They removed the window frame and boarded up the hole over the weekend and then came back on Saturday to replace the window.) Anyway, after that I figured that I couldn't go back to bed (sleep more than 13 hours??), so I got up to run some errands. But after I got home, I spent the rest of the day reading, watching a movie, and going to sleep early - again.

On Sunday I woke up late and read some more, then biked out to Fort Independence. The actual fort was closed by the time I got there, but it was still nice to wander around Castle Island (not an actual island at all). On the east side of the island, there's a hill that slopes down from the fort to the water, and it immediately reminded me of Gas Works Park in Seattle. Ahh, Seattle... There was also an enormous cruise ship leaving the harbor, which was pretty cool to watch, and a reminder of Galveston, the only other place I've seen cruise ships up close. I've only seen them leaving their ports though, when everyone's cheering and excited about leaving on their trip. I wonder what everyone looks and sounds like when they get back... depressed that vacation is over? Glad to get out of their tuna-can room? Seasick?

Anyway. I also saw World Trade Center last night. I was prepared for it to be sad and depressing, but I wasn't prepared for how graphic it was. Definitely not a movie for the claustrophobic. I thought the movie was done well, but to me, the more powerful "movie" to watch is HBO's 9/11 documentary. I guess I was expecting World Trade Center to seem more realistic, which now seems silly, considering that it's still a Hollywood production.

Clarification

I should be clear that in the previous entry, my hangups come from the label and what other people will think, not the decision itself. I should also mention that this decision is by no means one-sided - we're both moving from different cities/jobs to be together.

The reason

As graduation looms on the horizon, I've gotten a few more questions about what I plan to do after getting my degree. There have been some subtle hints from a couple full-timers here about staying (which I don't want to do), and I feel I can get out of that relatively easily by explaining that I've spent over 5 years in Boston and am ready to move to a different city.

Of course, the next question that comes up is the our-group-in-Houston one: "Do you want to go back to Houston? Hopefully we'll be staffing up a lot down there over the next year." Well, that gets a little trickier to decline. I may very well be interested in a position with my current employer in Houston several years from now, so I don't want to burn any bridges, but I'm not interested in moving back to Houston right away. Not sure yet how to decline that one gracefully.

Which brings up another question that I'm not quite ready to answer: "Are you going back to JSC after graduation?" That ranks right up there with, "How did you like working at JSC? What was it like as a civil servant?" Again, not sure how to give an honest answer on that one that fits into 25 words or fewer.

I'm planning to move to Washington, D.C. after I graduate. Even if I didn't have personal reasons for moving, I love the city and I'd like a chance to work in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. If, however, I were only making the decision based on the job I wanted, I would be considering a handful of areas around the country, not just D.C.

But there are personal reasons involved. I'm moving there to be with someone that I've been away from for the past year. To me, there comes a point in any long distance relationship in which one or both of you have to move to make things work, and I really want this to work, so I'm going to move.

Unfortunately, there's still a small part of me that doesn't like how that sounds. When I was in high school, I knew plenty of girls (mostly) who went to specific colleges only to follow their boyfriends, and halfway through freshman year they were miserable because the school didn't suit them and the relationship had ended. Even though I know in my heart that this is different, I still feel like other people will judge the situation this way when I tell them about it.

Is this crazy? It's not like I'm moving to D.C. to become a 1950's housewife. And maybe everyone else that I talk to, especially at work, will understand my reasoning, and it's just me who views it as a jaded high schooler. I guess I just never thought I would move across the country for a guy, and it's taking me a little while to get used to that. However, I also never thought the best part of my life would be 1,800 miles away, so maybe I should just throw my high school brain out the window.

(Yes, I realize I'm breaking all the blogging topic rules - work, love life, etc. Too bad.)

JSC FCU

I am still a member of the JSC Federal Credit Union even though I'm no longer an employee at a qualifying institution or even a resident of Houston. This is primarily due to laziness on my part, but it's also because they have good rates, convenient online services, blah, blah. Anyway, I was checking my account this afternoon to make sure my direct deposit had gone through when I took a closer look at the banner on their website:


So they've got a little flash movie of some Star Trek Enterprise-inspired thing floating over the Earth instead of, I don't know... maybe the Space Shuttle? How about the International Space Station??

I guess I can add "sense of humor" to the list of things I like about the credit union.

My latest body jewelry

Before going in on Monday, I wondered what it would feel like to have these panels taped to my back for 48 hours. Turns out it feels pretty much how you would expect that much tape to feel: itchy. But the patches were removed and read today, so I only have one more trip to the dermatologist's office on Friday before I can shower again! The bath thing takes way too long. Plus, I've ended up dumping a lot of water on the floor while washing my hair in the sink, and my upper back is perpetually sticky. Definitely looking forward to the shower.

I didn't end up having a reaction to the contact lenses or the solution, but since that part of it was a pretty ghetto experiment, I'm not sure how much to trust the results. I had a couple weak reactions to two of the other substances on the regular patches though, indicating that I have contact allergies to colophony (also called rosin, which comes from pine tree sap) and black rubber mix. I got some information sheets from the doctor to explain more about what these substances are found in and how I can avoid them. The black rubber mix is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case a patient is confused, the sheet has some handy advice:

In general, avoid contact with black and dark gray rubber. If an object looks like it is made of rubber and it is black, it will probably be a problem.

Colophony is a little trickier. It's in many cosmetics and several industrial products like adhesives, varnishes, asphalt, soldering materials, drive belts, and linoleum. Kinda makes you think twice about using makeup if it's equivalent to rubbing asphalt into your cheeks.

The sheets also have some advice on how to test a particular product on yourself to see if you're allergic - put a small amount on the same patch of skin every day for a week and see what happens. The sheets caution, however, that you shouldn't do this for things like varnishes, solvents, or RUBBER TIRES.

Home

Just bought a plane ticket to go home from August 17th - 22nd. Yay! Plus, the fact that Spirit Airlines now has a direct Detroit-Boston route has given Northwest some competition, so both airlines' flights are cheaper than usual. So of course I'm flying on Spirit to help the competition. :)

Weekend

Over the weekend, Josh came to visit. Which meant that it poured. Whenever one of us travels to see the other, we always manage to bring along rain, snow, sleet, hail, or hurricanes in our carry-on luggage. So this time it thwarted my plan to spend the weekend on the Cape.

In any case, we still managed to fit in the usual things, like eating lots of ice cream and going to the movies. We saw You, Me, and Dupree, which had some good moments, but was too long. At some point over the past few years, it was decided that movies starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, or Will Ferrell, would extend past the appropriate 90 minutes into 2+ hours of seat-squirming. Somehow they didn't get the memo that the "plot" can't really support a 2-hour movie. Lance Armstrong's cameo was pretty funny though.

I also got a new TV over the weekend, to replace the behemoth one that my roommate took with him to DC. (He also took the TV stand and the couch, so the living room is pretty ghetto these days.) Josh and I also installed my air conditioner, which, happily, will make napping that much easier.

So today it's back to work, although it feels a little like the day after final exams, because we just finished our big trade study report on Thursday. Now I should be moving on to some new stuff, but procrastinating is a whole lot easier.

The one where you stop reading because all I talk about is my eyes

I know, I know... skip it if you don't want to hear about the latest episode of Days of My Eyes. We're going on four months now. That's what I told my doctor, and to my dismay, he didn't sound very concerned.

Anyway. The last time I wore contacts was two weeks ago, and up until Monday, my eyes weren't clear enough to wear contacts again, but they weren't so bad that I scared small children when I walked down the street. But they weren't really getting any better, and they started to get worse on Sunday. I started to scare small children on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday I woke up to discover that there were no longer any white areas in the "white part" of my eye - it looked like they had been bathed in red paint. I called my ophthalmologist's office and made an appointment for that afternoon, and when I finally got in to see the doctor, he gave me blah, blah talk about allergy flareups, nothing serious.

Believe me, I am the first one to be grateful that this is not a serious medical problem, but I don't think my eye doctor understands that this is still a huge deal for me. For one thing, he wears glasses, not contacts. I don't think anyone who hasn't worn contacts is aware of just how much contacts are a lifestyle, not just a convenient way of correcting your vision. And I'm sure that I'm not the first person to come into his office with this sort of problem, but it doesn't help when he brushes off my concerns about it, especially since I don't see other people on the street whose eyes look like mine. He seems to be interested in only treating the symptoms, not the root cause.

Bad beside manner aside, he wrote me a prescription for some weak corticosteroid eye drops, which I've been taking for a couple days now. Yes, contrary to everything that I learned in 9th grade health class, I'm taking steroids. And let me tell you, they work like magic. Their purpose is simply to inhibit the body's processes that cause inflammation though, so I'm not exactly cured, but hopefully the drops will jump-start my eyeballs. I'm supposed to use the drops for two months, so maybe by the end of that time, my eyes will have remembered that their purpose in life is to work for ME, not the other way around.

Boston bricks

Several months ago, I got a Boston guidebook so that I could read about all the things that I haven't seen/been to/eaten during my past 5 years in Boston, hoping that I could cram them all in by next June. Last Sunday I made it to the Boston Bricks, a little public art in Winthrop Square. After wandering around the square for an embarrassingly long time looking for these arty bricks on the wall, I gave up and turned around, only to stumble over them on the ground (literally) on my way back to my bike. The bricks show different places and events unique to Boston, and so in tourbook fashion, I took several pictures before leaving. :)

First, get your bearings.

Next is the Longfellow Bridge, whose supports sort of look like salt & pepper shakers. It looks a little more like this in real life.

It's made of cheese!

Every good city needs a clock tower...

...and a way to measure the length of a bridge. Smoot was a short dude, an MIT fraternity pledge back in '58, and his frat buddies decided it would be a good idea to use him to measure the Harvard Bridge. The length: 364.4 Smoots + 1 ear.

Operation Stop Putting Acid in My Eyes

This past Thursday I had an appointment with the allergist on campus. It was refreshing to talk with someone who was interested in hearing about ALL of my symptoms related to my eyes, not just brushing it off as one thing or another after hearing about a couple of my symptoms. It turns out she can test for environmental allergens, like dust and pollen, and could confirm my raging allergy to cats. She could not, however, test for allergies to things like contact solution or contacts. But the dermatology office can test for that stuff using what they call a patch test. They put two big patches on your back with several different common allergens, leave them on for two days, take them off and look for allergic reactions (swelling, redness, etc) and then you come back two days later and they read it again. This way they can test for contact allergens and things that produce a delayed reaction in your body.

I looked over the list of common things they test for, and I explained that I was really in there to determine if I was allergic to my contacts or the solution, not to see if I was allergic to random things like nickel or latex. She said that was fine - if I brought in some solution and a contact, she could add those to the patch to put on my back. Makes me wonder if I could just cut out the middleman (woman?) and tape a contact lens to my arm for a couple days and see if it gives me a rash afterwards. Not very controlled, obviously, but this patch test doesn't seem very high-tech either.

Anyway, the worst thing about the patch test is that it's a week-long, no-showering-allowed affair. I come in on a Monday to have them put on the patches, then come back on Wednesday to have them removed, then come back on Friday to have them read. The patches cannot get wet because that could reduce the allergic reaction and make it harder to read, and then your back can't get wet between Wednesday and Friday because that could also decrease the allergic reaction. So I can shower Monday morning and Friday afternoon, and in between I'm gonna stink. And it's the end of July.

The other lovely side note to this whole process is that I can't take any antihistamines for a week before the regular skin test, which will be a couple days after the patch test. So it's entirely possible that my eyes will return to all their red, itchy glory during the last week of July. I can't wait.

But even though I'm not looking forward to being an itchy, stinky mess, it'll be nice to have some answers. Seasonal allergies run in my family, and I've never been tested before, so I'm looking forward to actually knowing what I'm allergic to rather than just guessing. The patch test is a little different, I guess, because it doesn't seem like there are as many options for medication or treatment if it turns out I have an allergy to contacts. Solution, yes, but contacts, no. At least none that I know of.

But there is one way around this whole thing, and it stems from the fact that my mother is a certified genius. At least in my book. We were talking on the phone yesterday and she asked if there was anything else that was coming in contact with my eyes - makeup? lotion? I'm not much of a makeup wearer under normal circumstances, and I can assure you that nothing unnecessary has been coming near my eyes since March. But then I thought of one thing - my facewash. Back in November I started taking a medication that made my skin break out like crazy, and although I was able to switch to something else a few months ago and my face has calmed down, I've continued to use this soap that has some lovely acne-fighting acids. Of couse I avoid sticking the stuff directly into my eyes, but no matter how careful I try to be, somehow a little sneaks in every one in a while. Then it hit me - I've been putting ACID in my eyes twice a day for the last four months. No matter what other problems my eyes might have, this most definitely does not help. So I've gotten rid of it and am hoping that my eyes will at least improve some, even if it doesn't completely fix the problem.

Volunteering

A couple days ago, I volunteered for the first time at Planned Parenthood. There are plenty of ways to volunteer at the organization, but what I'm doing is pretty low-key: a handful of us show up on Wednesday nights for a couple of hours to do paperwork, data entry, make phone calls, or do other various administrative things. I was pretty excited about volunteering after going to the information session a couple weeks ago, but I was a little disappointed after leaving on Wednesday because we spent the whole evening alphabetizing returned mail so that doners' addresses could be updated in the database. To give you just an idea of how much returned mail, there were five of us sorting the mail, and it still took us about an hour and a half to do. And we only separated the mail into stacks of each letter of the alphabet, we didn't fully alphabetize them.

Anyway, I knew that the Wednesday night volunteering wasn't going to be very hands-on or a great way to become intimately involved with the organization, and that was fine because it was only a 2 hour/week commitment and I wasn't sure how much time and energy I wanted to devote to this or how much I would like it. But I sort of wish now that I had more time to volunteer doing something more interesting than sorting mail. I think after filling out the application and having to clarify in my own mind what it means to be pro-choice and why I wanted to volunteer at all, I was hoping to be able to put that into action. (In case you're curious, here's the short mission statement of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts)

I've been asked by a few people why I want to volunteer at all at the PPLM. The most obvious reason is that I am pro-choice. I don't think abortion is something to be taken at all lightly, but I think every woman or couple has the right to decide for themselves whether they are healthy enough, financially prepared, and emotionally ready to be good parents. I'm well aware that plenty of unplanned pregnancies turn into happy, healthy babies and families, but I think every woman should be able to consider every possible option for herself and her partner.

The other main reason that I support Planned Parenthood is that I believe that everyone, regardless of age, gender, or income, should have access to information about sexual health and contraception. I know way too many college women who are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant, but they don't want to go on the pill because they don't want their parents to find out and they're still covered by their parents' health insurance. In addition, not everyone goes through a comprehensive sex education class in high school, and it's important that they have someplace to go to learn how to stay healthy, regardless of whether they're sexually active.

An interesting tidbit: the employees at Planned Parenthood refer to people on the other side of the abortion fence as "anti-choice" not "pro-life." I had never thought about how the term "pro-life" is subtly influencing, even if you had no idea what the two sides were debating. Everyone likes life, right?

Another interesting tidbit: the employees at Planned Parenthood are nearly all female, which is a nice complement to my nearly all-male environment at work. This means that men's restrooms don't exist there - instead, there are a couple of unisex bathrooms.

Cape

I was doing a photo search for Cape Cod but wasn't coming up with anything desktop-wallpaper-worthy, so I searched for just "cape", and this is one of the images I found. Hopefully someday soon, I can go to the Cape of Good Hope and stand on the edge of the Africa and look out on 270 degrees of water. *sigh*

Nice

Whatever ill will I had toward work over the past week or so (caused by it gobbling up my weekends and weeknights faster than I could shove more Matlab simulations down its throat and walk away for several hours) evaporated this afternoon because people here are just so... nice. On Monday I got an email from a man I've never met asking if I could release one of the 4 optimization toolbox licenses that I was monopolizing (out of the 7 total that the company has) so that he could do his work. I explained that I had been running simulations overnight and had gotten a bit greedy with the licenses and kept using them during the day, but I quickly apologized and logged off one of the machines and told him that I could release more licenses if he needed them. Instead of the sarcastic "thanks a lot for hogging all the machines" reply I was expecting, I got a quick, "No worries. One is all I need. Thanks!"

Round 2 came this afternoon. I got a phone call from another guy that I've never met, explaining the same situation: "I've been trying to run my simulations, but I can't because all the licenses are taken and you've got 4 of them checked out." Whoops again. So I gave him the same spiel and quickly logged off, which was met by a pleasant, "Thanks!"

I'm not sure why I was expecting everyone to be so mean about it (or maybe they were just doing a good job of pretending), but in any case, it's nice that people here are so cooperative. It makes up for that crack between the ceiling tiles and the wall that separates me from the loudest conference room on Earth.

Blogs and the World Cup

I was at REI during the final moments of the World Cup game yesterday, so I didn't know who won until I was biking home and I saw an SUV driving down Comm Ave with a giant Italian flag waving in the wind and heard the two guys in the car yelling something unintelligible (to me) in Italian. Later that night as I was walking down Newbury St, I heard a car down the street honking his horn in a sort of rhythmic way, not just the familiar 'hooooooooooooooooooooonk!" of a Bostonian who's mad at a tourist that can't navigate the city streets and traffic lights. Anyway, as the car got closer, I could see a guy hanging out the window, dressed in the Italian flag, screaming, "It-al-ia! It-al-ia!" along with the "honk-honk-honk" of the car horn. Not quite as crazy as this, but it was still entertaining.

Earlier that night, I was watching bits of Dateline as I waited for my laundry to dry, and they had a short story about how people in the U.S. haven't been watching the World Cup and aren't really that interested in soccer. I suppose the World Cup hasn't really reached the status of the Superbowl, but I read in the New York Times that World Cup viewership in the U.S. was up 126% on ABC and 70-something% on ESPN over the previous World Cup. Dateline, however, said that even with those increases included, U.S. viewership didn't amount to a large percentage of the total population. From my limited vantage point though, people have gotten into it a lot here - everyone's been coming to talk to my office neighbor (the resident Italian) about what's been happening in the World Cup over the past few weeks. My roommate went down to Fanueil Hall yesterday to watch the final game, and she said that after the game ended, the entire area turned into a crazy mosh pit. I suppose I'm not really a good counter-example to Dateline because I haven't been watching many of the games, but I don't really watch much football either. I only watch the Superbowl for the parties and snacks, and so that I don't look like an idiot when I come to work the next day and people ask, "Can you believe what happened in The Game yesterday??"

In other news, my friend Angela is currently in South Africa, spending a few weeks there sight-seeing and doing some animal conservation-type stuff. I think it's really cool that she's taken the plunge to go there without knowing anyone in her tour group, and it sounds like she's having a really good time. She's been keeping a travel blog here, if you're interested in reading about her adventures with cheap wine and elephants.


I stumbled across another interesting blog while reading a New York Times article about travel writers. The article focuses on how many people think of travel writing as a glamorous way to get paid to go on vacation continuously, but the reality is usually starkly different. It was interesting for me to read, considering that I'm one of those people who thinks travel writing would be one of the coolest jobs ever. The article mentions Leif Petterson, a travel writer currently in Romania, who blogs about his adventures here. I haven't read much of his site, but from what I have seen, it's pretty entertaining. My favorite quote so far: "I will do my best to not suck and provide insight into this low paying, exhausting, yet bizarrely fulfilling journey."