Blue Roses

The things we own

It's interesting to watch your stuff trickle away during a protracted move. First you get rid of things that should have already gone - clothes you've owned since high school, tennis balls long since gone flat. But you keep the jeans that might fit again soon, the jacket you wear occasionally, the shirt you'd forgotten you owned, but you used to really like it.

Then you pack. Cookbooks? Here. Poetry books? In a box. Pyrex cups? Here. Knives? In a box. And suddenly I had five boxes winging their way toward Boston, a little piece of my shadow pinched off like dough to live in S's basement.

Next, you downsize. I sold my living room and half of my kitchen in one fell swoop, a two-hour moving sale where most of the action took place during a frenetic 20-minute stretch. Dining room table, gone. Lamps, gone. Bookshelf, gone. Free stuff? Weirdly enough, most of that stayed. I ended up donating some of it and trashing the rest. I could feel myself getting lighter.

Then there was a move, from North Berkeley to North Berkeley, the reason I could sell so much stuff without spending two months urban camping. I left a TV stand on the sidewalk, Craigslisted my old skis, and sold off my vacuum cleaner after I used it to clean my old place for the last time. I pinched off four more boxes and sent them to the Boston basement, more shadow gone.

Then I had to wait for Passover, so I could use my folding table and chairs for the last time. After the seder, I packed up my seder plate and lugged it to Boston with 90 lbs of luggage, 40 lbs of which, including my skis, ski boots, ski helmet, ski pants, ski socks, long johns, small camelback, hair dryer, a purse, and a witch's hat (I wore it while climbing at Concord one Halloween) were all stuffed, remarkably enough, into my ski bag. I can't imagine what the TSA folks thought of the collection, or how they got the bag zipped up again, but the boots weren't sticking out at the same odd angles when I arrived at Logan last Friday. I cried when I packed them last Wednesday.

Being in Boston was weird, lots of here/not here, done/not done, leaving but coming back almost alarmingly soon, and leaving behind more of my shadow with the suitcases and the skis. And then it was over, and now I'm back in Berkeley, savoring my Hungarian coffeecake from Masse's and selling my table and chairs on Craigslist, making bambi bolognese from the venison Jevan gave me before he left last week. I try not to think this way, but everything tastes like leaving now.

Halfway house

Well, I've managed to move again, more or less. This time it's a fairly temporary stop on the road to Boston, which turns out to lead through my good friend Christina's apartment in North Berkeley. It might sound ridiculous to move so soon before I'm leaving for real, but I've viewed this move as an opportunity to shed baggage before I leave California (and to eliminate the need to pay double rent on my old place, since Suchi moved out a few weeks ago). Last night I sold lots of furniture - who knew that lamps were such a hot commodity? - and I've mailed off more than 200 lbs of stuff to live in S's basement for the next few months. I'm trying to give away clothing and unwanted kitchen items, and I've gone on a veritable frenzy of throwing things out. Admittedly, my new place - which I'm struggling to refer to as mine, not Christina's - is still filled with boxes, but a lot of them are empty, and Christina's two cats are having a blast with them.

Unfortunately, the downside of simplifying my life in May is that it's done the opposite for March. I haven't worked on my thesis in nearly a week, though I did analyze a chunk of data over the past few days, and I haven't been to the lab in quite a while either. My goal for today is to finish the first draft of my intro chapter so I can focus on my final sets of data (particularly critical since I don't know if I have enough yet!). We'll see. So far my major breakthrough for today was to realize that I am now only two block from my favorite Berkeley bakery, which makes it the perfect place to go when I need a break from not working :-)

Release

I never thought I'd be relieved to realize that something I'm trying to do is impossible, but it's true: if the task is simply impossible, you don't have to try anymore. I didn't make a conscious decision; I just woke up and knew. It's a release, of sorts, and I celebrated this weekend by going on a bike ride Sunday afternoon. It was lovely: turns out there's a tiny town called Canyon on the other side of the foothills, and the main road through town (Canyon Road, fancy that) starts in a canyon and winds its way up the hill through a grove of redwoods. The area looks and feels, as Kristin pointed out, exactly like Marin, right down to the cool damp air and the stream burbling next to the road. We also passed by the saxophone house on Old Tunnel Road, a fantastic(al) piece of architecture that I'd also never known about. I've decided that when I move to Boston, if I don't have a job, I'm going to spend my free time biking around the city to get to know all the neighborhoods and their quirks. I just hope I get the chance to explore more of the Bay Area before I go.

Crosswise to the world

Do you ever get the feeling that you're lying crosswise to the world? I think that's a Pratchett quote, but it's an apt way to describe the wrenching disconnect of etching samples in lab while the rest of the country watches the Super Bowl, or parties on a Saturday night, or celebrates Christmas while you're on a plane somewhere over Nebraska. I admit that these have individually been voluntary decisions on my part - I went to lab today so I could go skiing tomorrow when the resorts open up after getting a few feet of snow over the weekend - but nonetheless the disconnect is real, and not voluntary.

The other day S was telling me about his latest project, and how he'd been rooting around online and had gotten a bunch of books from the library to do a bit of research. I sort of abruptly realized that I couldn't imagine having time for things like that anymore; I've been living in a world where I do laundry on Friday nights because I can't come up with a better time, I buy lunch every day because cooking seems to mostly happen to other people, as does grocery shopping for that matter, and it's a luxury to leave the lab at 7 to go to the gym.

Of course, I know that it's just grad school, that it will end soon enough, and all the rest. But the end is almost worse: the jarring transition from twelve-hour days to unemployment, as I don't have time to look for a job right now. I'm starting to feel that the Berkeley world is pushing me out: my access privileges at a lab I never use were "terminated" last week, and the guards at oft-frequented LBL confiscated my "suspended" badge yesterday. I'm not a student anymore, I'm a netherworld resident on filing fee, no longer eligible for the bus pass I never used, nor the gym membership I did. And I'm four thesis chapters and numerous experiments away from a real ending, which is looking more and more like an abyss. It definitely makes me wonder what I'm working for.

Remember Me?

I think I've spotted (experienced?) a new trend: the blast from the past. In less than three weeks, I've received emails from three old friends with whom I'd completely fallen out of touch, but who all spontaneously decided it was time to reconnect. And, lest you think that maybe they'd gotten the idea from each other, think again: one was from high school, one from college, and one from grad school. None of them have ever met. One found me through a mutual friend on Facebook, another Googled me and popped up this much-ignored blog, and the third noticed my name while rifling through his email contacts list.

I'm not going to pretend I know why everyone is looking for me all of a sudden - the last time I got an urge to reconnect, it was a day or two after 9/11, a pretty straightforward motivator - but I'm quite flattered by the attention, and I have genuinely missed the faces coming out of the woodwork. So if any other long-lost friends are out there, here I am! At the current rate, I'll be expecting your email sometime in the next week or ten days :-)

On a totally unrelated note, I just came back from a fantastic weekend of skiing in Tahoe: lots of powder, lots of ski buddies, and lots of chances to prove that my (relatively) new skis are positively awesome at floating through powder and keeping me from falling, despite some pretty good attempts. Even better, the floaty powder action kept me firmly focused on skiing, and therefore mercifully distracted from my thesis - or, more precisely, my lack of data with which to write the rest of said thesis. Sigh. Back to the lizard lamp tomorrow.

Blog, blog, blog. I just got back from an intramural volleyball game, where my team shockingly won our third match in a row. I can't actually recall being on a winning team before in any sport :-)

Speaking of sports, I had another awesome bike ride this weekend, this time over the Golden Gate Bridge and around the Marin Headlands. Spectacular weather and my longest ride ever, 25 miles. That said, my crazy ride two weekends ago, which involved accidentally going down the wrong side of the foothills and having to bike right back up, was definitely harder. But on Saturday I got to try out a road bike briefly, and it was pretty cool, if a little unnerving in terms of balance. Very smooth though.

So it's 9:30 at night and I'm going to leave lab. Here's the big question: do I...
1. cook the bundled kabocha squash, broccoli rabe, etc I got from Trader Joe's on Saturday so it doesn't go bad
2. try to figure out another peak-fitting program to do some long-overdue data analysis
3. flop on the couch and stay up too late doing absolutely nothing?

Mmm...summer

I just made a really simple, satisfying, summery dinner, all cooked on my trusty little propane grill:

a strip of tri-tip, very briefly marinated in soy sauce, cracked black pepper, and sea salt
an heirloom tomato, cut into thick slices and sprinkled with cracked black pepper, sea salt, and oregano
an ear of corn, unadorned
a glass of red wine, a cab franc if I recall correctly

I'm now contemplating making cookies. Ah, cookies.

Whirlwind weeks

I just finished a serious cleaning frenzy, and I'm delighted (if a tad embarrassed) to say that after more than four years of living in apartments with crappy trap-every-molecule-of-dirt textured linoleum kitchen floors, I've finally figured out how to clean them. Apparently you spray them with Windex and then - this is the important bit - scrub the living daylights out of them, in at least two directions, with a stiff plastic bristle brush. Note: this apparently causes "noises" in the apartment downstairs. Sorry, neighbor.

On the upside, cscrubbing for an hour has allowed largely-unsupervised reduction of a whole lot of ancient red wine, which I'm hoping means I'll end up with a lovely rich syrupy sauce base that I can freeze and use for speedy delicious dinners down the road. I'll report back later on how that goes.

But on to the whirlwind past few weeks:

1. Nearly a week in Jersey to attend my cousin's wedding (a black tie optional affair that involved my whole lab voting on a dress I then didn't choose, don't ask). S came down for the weekend and had such abysmal luck with his flights that he ultimately arrived about 15 hours late, and had to take the train back to Boston. Sigh. But I did get to see my family, walk Comet, and go to a They Might Be Giants concert with Rie and Jamie, thanks to Jamie's boyfriend kindly letting me use his ticket. Much appreciated, Nate.

2. Rock climbing in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite with the crew: Kristin, Christina, Joel, Dan, and Barbara. That turnd out to be more of an exercise in conquering my fear of heights than actual physical exercise, but I'm glad I went. Yosemite was beautiful, as expected, and I felt like I got to appreciate the park in a very different way from someone who goes and looks at the pretty waterfalls from the valley shuttle. Anyway, Joel collected a bunch of our pics into an album, so check it out!.

3. Hiking, biking, volleyball, dancing, you name it. This past weekend in particular involved a ridiculous amount of physical activity, lamentably at the expense of sleeping. But I was paticularly happy to go swing dancing again for the first time in years.

And, of course, I've also been working non-stop, planning experiments 2-3 weeks ahead, saying in lab untl 8 or 9 or 11 pm, and trying to troubleshoot about ten things at once. My current grad school mantra: I'm sure it's going to work one of these days...

The curious affair...

...of water falling from the sky: a phenomenon only because this simply doesn't happen in Berkeley in the summer. In fact, it was barely enough to even be called rain, but that didn't stop a pedestrian from pulling his jacket over his head and exclaiming "But it's July!" in seriously indignant tones.

On an unrelated note: if anyone who knows anything about image processing would like to help a novice work out a methodological problem, I'd really appreciate it. I'm doing something analogous to trying to calculate how tall the Grand Canyon is, but encountering the issue that the river bed isn't flat, and I don't know how to (non-arbitrarily) decide where the river bed stops and the canyon walls start.

A week in the life...

...of a very busy grad student: mountain biking, hiking, writing the outline for my first two scientific papers, and 4th of July, Berkeley style.

Mountain biking was also a first. We rode to Tilden Park, a fantastic regional park nestled into the foothills, and biked a route that the guys (my labmates Alastair and Eli, plus another grad student named Jennifer) insisted would be easy. They were right...except for the wrong turn that got us onto such steep single-track that not only did we all walk our bikes up the last part, but Alastair actually carried mine for me because I was having trouble pushing it. But I had fun anyway, and the views (especially at the top of the super-steep part) were fantastic. Afterwards, half-dead from exhaustion - I'd never biked more than 10 miles before, and we rode about 20 - I rushed home to make ratatouille with a bunch of friends before watching the eponymous movie, which was great. I highly recommend Clothilde's recipe on Chocolate and Zucchini.

For the rest of the week, I worked hard to finish an outline of the two papers that will comprise the bulk of my thesis research, and I'm excited to say that I might be close to writing one of them, my first-ever first author paper. Trust me, this sort of thing is very exciting to a grad student.

However, I took the 4th of July off for entirely different excitement: a lovely day of hiking near Mount Tamalpais in Marin, which we concluded with the best strawberry ice cream I've ever eaten, from a little scoop shop in downtown Fairfax, followed by fireworks at the Berkeley marina. The Berkeley show is only so impressive when you've been to fireworks in, for example, New York, but for a 100,000-person town it was quite nice. Even better, we had the rare clear-and-not-too-chilly evening in Berkeley, so we could see the fireworks from what seemed like half the municipalities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, which puts on a really long, multi-barge show. But in addition to the views, what made the Berkeley celebration truly unique was fact that instead of having a local band play the "Star-Spangled Banner" and other patriotic fare, the city left the musical accompaniment up to its citizens. So we walked away from the marina after the fireworks to the sound of half a dozen people drumming and chanting "Hare Krishna."

Only in Berkeley.