Planet Olin

Tuesday evening my Aunt Yuko (and her husband and two kids) hosted a ton of local relatives at their pool. Guests included Aunt Suzanne and her three kids, my Aunt Denise with her husband and three kids, my Aunt Nobuko with her husband and two kids, my mom and my stepfather. I arrived as soon as possible after work and jumped in the pool for about five minutes before leaving to get some dinner. At dinner, my cousin Kei pointed out that one of my eyes was red. I said it was probably a bug bite or chlorine reaction. People standing around looked at me, said it was probably fine and would go away on it's own. I swam for quite a while later, and took a shower. When I finally took a look at my eye, there was a giant red spot in the white of my eye, sort of like the image below, except a lot of it was underneath my eyelid.



I freaked out. People looked at it again, and most of the adults said it should be fine. I stand there worrying about driving back that night, whether I needed to go to the emergency room, what to do about work the next morning, if I somehow had a blood clot or other serious health injury to deal with, etc. However, after independently confirming what people told me, it seems like my eye thing is a subconjunctival hemorrhage, i.e., a broken blood vessel in the eye. Apparently it's as close to nothing as you can get. A smoke and mirrors issue. It looks bad, but is apparently trivial (and even common, though I had never heard of it before). The medical recommendation is to do nothing and wait for it to go away, which it should in about a week.

Wednesday morning I was still pretty freaked out. I also felt pressure behind that eye, and that freaked me out more, because none of the websites say anything about that and it isn't supposed to be at all painful. I called work and said, "I can't come in today; my eye is bleeding." How weird is that?

I was in today and did fine. No complications. It looks much better, but I'm sure I could still freak out a little kid with it. I never expected to have hemorrhages, no matter what kind, at 21, even if it is a trivial kind that afflicts people of all ages. I spoke to my mom, and she says that she gets them, too, so maybe it was caused by some inherited factor. Or possibly by all the heavy lifting I do at work or at the gym. Or something. At least my preferred method of dealing with medical complications (ignoring them until they go away) was the correct one in this case.

Also, I caved and finally got some Caladryl today for the vicious mosquito bites and poison ivy that have been plaguing me.

I'm not playing the catchup game right now. I haven't posted because I've been busy and haven't felt like it, but I hate playing catchup and I refuse to do it right now. Right now my life is going through a series of highs and lows. Hopefully it will average high. I just wanted to get a post in and assure people that I am, at least in some tenuous fashion, alive. More news later -- peace out.

As I live in an urban area, there isn't too much to see in the way of native flora. Unfortunately, the only exception are specimens of the six-legged variety.

The mosquitos here are gigantic, and there's one flying around my head. Seriously, one bite from one of these suckers and it would be like donating a pint to the Red Cross. Luckily they don't like me as much as American ones do, so I've yet to be covered in welts.

The beatles here are also enormous. There's one that's hanging out in my bathroom, and from tail to antennae it's got to be at least 4 inches long. At first I thought it was a weta (or a cockroach, because I can't always tell the difference), then I remembered wetas don't like places that don't start with an N and end with a ew Zealand. It's in the process of kicking the bucket, but I can't stand the crunch that insects make when they meet the bottom of my shoe, so I think it's just going to chill out for a while longer in the bathroom...

This evening I read a few hundred pages from a novel. It was depressing, but good once I got over the depressing bits. I ate a little bit more, but not a whole lot. I was supposed to get together with HS after he finished working, but it's 10:30 and he's just now finishing up in the lab.

Yay! After tomorrow the temperature isn't forecast to go over 90 for another week. Reversed seasons be damned, I'd really like to be in the New Zealand right about now.

Work today wasn't very interesting. I wasted half my day because the Vulcan was too busy to help me set up an air hose in the lab, then it took an hour to get it set up because he didn't think much about what he was doing. But even though my experimental results suck, I'm not too worried because I'm an intern, and no one cares much about interns.

- go jogging, right now
- go shopping
- do laundry
- clean up my room
- brew a pot of coffee
- identify bioengineering programs to research
- have tea and cake with the vicar

scene!


Saw AYLI on the Commons last night. Way, way not my favorite Shakespeare comedy.

On the line "newfangled as an ape":

newfangled: c.1470, "addicted to novelty," lit. "ready to grasp at all new things," from adj. newefangel "inclined to take" (c.1386), from new + -fangel, from root of O.E. fon "to capture" (see fang). Sense of "lately come into fashion" first recorded 1533. (dictionary.com.)

So he's calling her easily distracted. Huzzah!

This next semester is going to be generally pretty intense. I'm registered for 20 credits, but I knew that wasn't going to last and I think I'll drop HDK's phage class unless the syllabus seems unusually compelling. Also, if I keep having to talk people down from hysterical and uninformed accusations of my incompetent, elitist failure, being CORe VPSI is going to take a bigger emotional toll than I really want it to. We'll see how that goes. Alisha (Olin BioE prof) and I met at Ula Cafe in JP yesterday and talked about grad school and SCOPE and confocal microscopes and faculty drama and it was good and grounding and purpose-giving. Not that I really know what I want my life to look like, but I have a better idea of how to take the first steps. Also, noticed that I have unrealistically high expectations for myself and corresponding insecurity in essentially all aspects of my life! Should work on that, somehow?

Okay! Let's make this happen.

The trucks here play Fur Elise when they back up, instead of going BEEP BEEP BEEP. It makes me smile whenever I hear it.

We got magnets at work today. They're written in Hangul, except where it says one of Samsung's mottoes, "Passion and Pride." The background of the magnet is primarily pink, so my first thought was that it was a gay pride button of some sort, even though Korea is generally not all that friendly to gay people. Ji Min was nearly rolling on the floor when I told her what I thought it was, so I guess I wasn't the only one to be given that impression.

It has been a Long Weekend of Action! (tm).

Friday, 7/4: Project Best Idea Ever 4.0.
This is maybe the most awesome thing I've done in Boston yet. Man Hall alumni, ring-led by Anthony Roldan and Andrew Coats, organized a flotilla of more than 20 inflatable rafts on the less toxic than previously! Charles River for the fireworks (which, for the uninitiated, are launched from a barge on the river between the Harvard/Mass Ave and Longfellow bridges, thus making the river itself an excellent viewing point). We assembled at Beef & Beer house in Somerville to receive our life vests and flags, MBTA'd it to the BU Bridge to pick up our rafts and head down to the BU boathouse (perhaps illegally crossing Storrow Drive in the process -- shh), where we inflated our watercraft, entered the river, and headed east. We paused at the Mass Ave bridge to wait for the stragglers to catch up and enjoy hot dogs, grilled on the water by Anthony and Coats with camping stoves jury-rigged to a canoe (!), before continuing to our anchor point at the edge of the restricted zone.

It was a beautiful evening on the water. Experiencing a sunset on the Charles is [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED] -- it set up this awesome orange glow on the water and over the MIT dome. The goings-on were sufficiently amplified that we could clearly hear the Boston Pops and the utterly inane radio announcers (who we mocked without pity). On the other hand, we could also hear Rascal Flats, so I guess it was sort of a mixed bag. The fireworks themselves were almost overwhelming in their sheer volume, both audibly and visibly. 22,000 pounds of explosives (per the Globe) puts on a hell of a show. I think the jellyfish/Pac-Man ghosts were my favorite, though the upside-down smiley faces were pretty awesome.

Afterwards, our exit was facilitated by a convenient dinghy dock at the Esplanade, where we deflated our rafts and dripped our way back to the Red Line. Somewhere on Beacon Street, a woman in the mold of a Boston Brahmin, observing our life jackets and oars and our direction of travel (away from the water), jovially asked us where the boat was -- I pointed to the folded raft my boat buddy Alorah was carrying and said "right here!" She laughed bemusedly. I grinned.

All in all, a brilliant success. I've never been prouder of our national pyromania. Beef and Beer folks deserve "mad props" for flawless execution.

Saturday was a bit less eventful, in that I woke up at 11, sat in my room all day, and posted journal articles to my tumblelog (kumokasumi_tmbl). Oops. George S. dragged me out of my apartment for dinner at Nine Tastes in Harvard Square, which was tasty.

Sunday, I headed up to Diesel in Somerville to check it out and chat with Chris Morse before he leaves town for a puzzle conference. It's probably my favorite coffeehouse yet -- large and well-lit, with ample seating (apparently it wasn't very crowded this morning) and well-executed decor. And good coffee! -- they serve Intelligentsia. How can you lose? Then I met up with spiraloflife, who also had a quiet Saturday and was in the mood for Action. We went to an Indian restaurant in JP for the lunch buffet and then hit up the Museum of Fine Arts (for free!) for the afternoon. (Colonial portraiture is kind of boring. American impressionists are more fun. Japanese art is pretty. The end!) Then, I came home, scribbled down some notes about CORe, and biked over to Harvard Square to meet up with cat_bird and her beau Simon for a showing of "Blade Runner: Final Cut" at the Brattle (awesome) followed by ice cream at Herrell's (not bad either).

Anyway, it's past my bedtime. Supposed to be warm this week -- ew. Tomorrow I get to sit at a microscope for most of the day, which at least means I can commune with my Zune without appearing antisocial. Hurrah!

My trip into Seoul yesterday was good. I went to Itaewon as I had planned. It was like the American equivalent of Chinatowns in the US. There were a lot of American soldiers there (there's a military base somewhere in that area), so after hearing the soldiers talk I finally realized why so many people assume that I'm English, not American.

Today I just hung around my room, since I was feeling rather tired. I've been reading a book about Korean, and pretty much the gist of it is "Korean is impossible, so just hope that everyone around you speaks English."

Mission: "Get the Hell Out of Texas"
Objective: Move from Dallas, TX to Boston, MA
Distance: 1,834 miles
Driving Time: 29 hours
Travel Dates: Monday to Wednesday
Trip Route:



Monday
My aging Nissan Altima '94 had died just 2 weeks before my planned date of departure and since I wouldn't need a car in Boston I decided to donate it to NPR and get a rental car for the trip. I picked up my Chevy Impala from National Car Rental (cheapest rates for a one way, but got me in the end with extra fees, Grr). Packed up all the crap, which fit very comfortably into the rather large car and set out just after noon accompanied by my beta fish, my worm bin, and an audio book of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. On the first day I made it out of Texas, through Arkansas, and into Tennessee. Everything was flat and pretty boring, actually.

Tuesday
Tennessee is too long. Even the name is too long. Long and boring. I was very happy when I made it into Virginia, which was very beautiful. I decided to embark on a side mission and visit Virginia Tech (VT). I am planning on applying to VT for MS/PhD in EE this fall and I'm specfically looking at the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES). I snooped around the building where the lab was located and happened upon a graduate student who worked in the lab and gave me a very quick tour. I was pretty impressed by the size and resources. I also thought the VT campus was beautiful. Definitely a place I would like to go for grad school. After the quick visit I continued for a few more hours and stayed the night in Staunton, Virginia, where I slept very well; driving all day is oddly exhausting.

Wednesday
My last day on the road turned out to be the most frustrating. It was supposed to be 10 hours of driving, which is really no problem for me. The way I do road trips is with as few stops as possible. I usually try to go at least 3 hours before stopping sometimes 5 or 6 hours. I just want to get there and be done with it.

As I was nearing New York city I decided to take an alternate northern route to avoid lunch-time traffic. Unfortunately, I ended up in complete dead lock on the highway in the middle of nowhere. (Maybe due to an accident in a construction zone. I never found out.) Eventually, I had to take another side road through a bunch of tiny towns before I could get back onto the main highway. This little detour added an extra hour to my trip, which made me very annoyed, but I powered through it. :P

After 12 hours of being on the road and two very short stops, I made it into the Boston area. The insane driving tactics of Massachusetts residents becomes very clear once you reach the Mass Pike, but luckily I remembered how to drive like a Mass hole. At 8 pm on Wednesday, exactly 12 hours after I started driving that morning, I reached Jon and Drew's apartment where I was greeted by not only the wonderful Drew and Jon, but a delicious dinner as well. Feels good to be back!