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."

Houston

The best part of the last week was not the two-day work week, but the looong weekend I got to spend in Houston. I flew in on Friday night, apparently along with half of Texas. IAH was ridiculously crowded. On Saturday we met up with Sarah, Cari, and Gavin for lunch at Mely's and started drinking before 1pm. After my one margarita and a quick stop by JSC to see the shuttle launch get scrubbed though, I fell asleep for about three hours. Apparently my tolerance for alcohol has regressed to a new low. Don't even ask what happened after the bottle of champagne we drank on Saturday. But I was awake! for the delicious dinner that Josh cooked earlier that night.

Sunday was a day of errands, and on Monday we went downtown to the Museum of Natural Science to see the Body Worlds exhibit. I discovered, at the exhibit, that my queasiness of medical-related bloody body parts applied to dead stuff, in addition to alive stuff. The exhibit is pretty neat though, and it's definitely unique. I was doing fine at the beginning when all the dead body parts still looked fake, but then we got to the knee joint that's been mangled by arthritis - that's when my stomach started to churn. That was only the beginning of entire bodies cut apart to show various organs or a skinned man carrying, you guessed it, all his skin like a potato sack. And of course, no medical exhibit would be complete without a display of some lungs charred by cigarette smoke or in the advanced stages of emphysema.

After the dead people, we walked around Hermann Park a little bit and wandered through the Japanese garden. Then we went to The Chocolate Bar! Mmmmmm. They had chocolate-covered just about everything and 10-inch tall cakes, but we opted to just get ice cream. I think this place has my new favorite cookie dough ice cream. :) I had convinced Josh to go see Stick It with me at the dollar theater afterward, but we got there a little early, so we went next door to Slick Willie's to play pool and kill some time. We didn't do anything out of the ordinary that day, but it was really nice to just be able to go out on a date.

Tuesday was the 4th (hooray for Discovery!), and we met up with Laurie, Drew, John, and Anne for dinner at BJ's, and then went downtown to see Nick's new apartment. He's in a great location, and the apartment has an incredible view of the Houston skyline. There were just a few trees that obscured our view of the fireworks, so hopefully he can get those cut down before next year. ;) The fireworks were pretty cool, but I think Seattle's still got the best show that I've seen.

Josh and I both played hooky on Wednesday, lounging around until I had to go to the airport in the afternoon. The plane ride back was uneventful, but I did get to sit in the exit row seat with no seat in front of me, so I had plenty of leg room. But I spent most of the flight with my legs scrunched under me to hide the bag that I couldn't fit "under the seat in front of me" because there was no seat in front of me and I didn't want to leave my book and magazines in the overhead bin.

Anyway. Only one more trip to Houston, I think. I'll be in town again during the first weekend of August, but that'll probably be the last time for a while. It was a little weird to be back last weekend... I haven't been in Texas for a long time, and it felt somewhere between sad and happy, familiar and unfamiliar. It seems like my friendships with some people haven't changed at all, while others are completely different. It brought back a lot of memories of not fitting in, not feeling like it was the right place or the right time, and therefore happiness and some relief to be out of it, but there were twinges of regret when I saw everyone so excited about the shuttle flight. Although I'm happy with where my life is now, I'm realizing how impatient I was about everything back then. Things were bad, so I wanted to fix them immediately. My timescale was in months and semesters, but it should have been in years and projects. But maybe the line between wasting time and sitting on an okay job while you look for a better one is always blurry, no matter what your timescale.

Okay, enough philosophizing for one night. It makes me sleepy. Kind of like champagne.

It continues

In order to continue feeding my 24 addiction (still blaming Angela!), I'm thinking about signing up with Netflix to rent season 1 and the first half of season 4. I was comparing it to Blockbuster's similar plans, and it seems like Blockbuster has the edge because they also send you coupons for a few free in-store rentals each month. In the FAQ at Blockbuster though, they say that sometimes they have to ship a movie that's not first in your "queue" if the first one isn't available. It sounds like this happens on a fairly regular basis because certain titles are very popular, etc., and I would imagine this happens sometimes with Netflix too, but they don't advertise it. :) Any thoughts out there from those of you who aren't DVD's-by-mail virgins?

This afternoon I had an appointment with an allergist. I'm trying to pin down why my eyes have been freaking out this spring, and it would be nice to know what I'm actually allergic to and if there's a stronger medication or allergy shots that I can be taking to help my eyeballs. But when I got to the med center today and checked in with the receptionist, she gave me this weird look and started fiddling around with her computer and looking confused. "I don't see you on the schedule..." Crap. Did I write the date down wrong? "Oh, I see, it looks like you've been bumped." Bumped? Just what you want to hear when it's taken you two weeks to get in to see the doc in the first place. The receptionist never actually figured out why my appointment had been cancelled (isn't this her job as the receptionist??), but it sounded like the doctor had something personal that came up. So I now have an appointment for next Thursday, assuming that the doctor's dog doesn't develop the measles or something. I guess that's the risk you take when you go to a campus medical center that only has a couple doctors in each specialty.

This week has been great. Today is the first day I went to work this week, and it's already Thursday! And tomorrow I get to see more of Johnny Depp in eyeliner! Unfortunately, I just read a review on Entertainment Weekly that said the movie is pretty bad. However, I'd like to object. Nevermind that I haven't seen the movie yet. First of all, sequels are always worse than the original. Lower your expectations. Second, clearly you need a larger crush on Johnny Depp (or Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, take your pick). This way, you don't have to bother caring about the plot.