Grad school desk essentials: Edibles edition

• Jar of peanut butter. Preferably two jars: one crunchy, one creamy [for when you want a change of texture to liven up your snack]– but, just one jar will do perfectly fine. Remains perfectly content at room temperature and has a long expiration date. Also, full of good fat, fiber, and protein!
• Water bottle. I don’t ever drink soda [would you like me to measure out what 40g of sugar looks like? and that's just in one can of soda!], and water is a nice, refreshing, FREE, alternative. Not the water fountain stuff though– gotta go for the water cooler.
• Granola/Nutrigrain/Clif bars. Take your pick; rotate between a bunch of flavors unless you have careless tastebuds. Always a good staple for an any-time-of-day snack.
• Fruit. Usually apples, a limited amount of which they give away for free at the hospital cafeteria here.
• Condiments. Obtained from fast food places, the hospital cafeteria, boxed lunches… you name it, they go into my desk for later usage with miscellaneous food that needs extra seasoning. Soy sauce, ketchup, red pepper flakes, raw brown sugar, salt, and pepper.

And there you have it. Really, people who don’t have some sort of edibles in their desk amaze me.

Flying in 2011

24 flights.

Total of 54:11 hours flown.

19,996 miles traveled.

 

Yep, I still miss home a lot.

Quirks – things I try not to admit out loud

It’s been WAY too long since I’ve posted.

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Occasionally I log onto Quora just to read all the posts about ballroom dancing. I miss dancing to an unreasonable degree, but similar to good BBQ, it’s such a rarity here in the San Diego area. Yes there are [barely decent] places to go dancing, but part of the wonder of dancing is the atmosphere, the friends, and yes, having someone you truly connect with, leading you in a counter-clockwise, foot-based conversation around the floor. I hate making small talk at bars and dance halls–I’d rather be dancing.

I’m convinced that one of the most awkward places at work is the women’s restroom. There are only so many girls who work on my floor, and we all like each other fine. That said, there is just something weird about being in the restroom stall doing your business when you may or may not have an idea of who is around. I don’t want to go into further detail. I just think it’s really awkward. I especially run away from the situation of me brushing my teeth while someone else is in a bathroom stall; I come back later.

Because Scripps is so small and there is no Main Mall, sometimes one of the most peaceful places to read and eat my lunch… is in my car, lol. If the weather is nice, I’ll roll down the windows and enjoy the quiet and the breeze.

I will prefer cookies with MnM candies in them over almost any other flavor.

Every time someone slams my car door[s], I cringe inside. To me, it’s the same as hearing nails on a chalkboard. People, be gentle! You can close a car door with very little momentum needed. Slamming = unnecssary, and it hurts Trajan’s feelings.

Two of my favorite “tools” to use in lab are my glass cutter and the blowtorch. I could’ve been a Charlie’s Angel in a past life.

The Southwest Airlines game

While I enjoy doing sudoku puzzles a few times a week, there are other games I enjoy playing as well. One of those is “The Southwest Airlines game”, as I think of it.

You play it like so:

1. Countdown to the day when a new batch of plane ticket prices and schedules are released for a desired period of time.
2. Plan frantically in the few days following the release when you are flying, where you are flying, how long you are staying for, what airports to fly in/out of, and find the cheapest combination of all the above options.
3. Make expensive purchase on your credit card for services you will not redeem for nearly 6 months to come. Talk about advance purchases.
4. Check every fortnight on all the flights purchased to see if the price has gone down so that you can recover some of your money as credit for future purchases. This is time consuming, but oh-so rewarding.

Oh, life’s little pleasures. They ought to turn this into a board game or something– y’know, Monopoly but with airplane tickets.

Insights after a month of Bikram Yoga…

A little over a month ago, I thought that I would undergo a self-experiment or two since I tend to find myself in agreements to do things for periods of time [see: Photo365, PhotoPrime157, attempting to train and run a marathon during my first year of grad school]. Almost half a year ago I bought a Groupon for Bikram Yoga in La Jolla with the premise that once I finished classes I would have time to pursue other things I’ve been intrigued by but never had time to try out before.

 

With my Groupon days from expiring, I went to a Bikram Yoga studio in La Jolla [much closer to my apartment for this current school year] for the first time on a Sunday morning at 7:45am ready to try my hand at the infamously hot yoga that is Bikram.

 

Rewind a little: I’m a warm-blooded, no make that hot-blooded, individual by nature. For the first 22 years of my life I lived in Sugar Land, TX [close enough to the Gulf Coast to be inhabited by more mosquitos than human beings, at times it felt like] where people make it a point to spend all their time either at home, in a car, or in an air conditioned building because it is that hot for three-quarters of the calendar year. Also, I’ve made many trips to visit family in Taiwan, which is an itty-bitty island even more prone to mosquitos than Sugar Land, and there, central air conditioning is unheard of so people are sweating profusely at all hours of the day. Oh yeah, I was also in marching band for four years in high school, and those two-a-days on the parking lot in the blistering sun will train you how to handle the heat better than many other living creatures. Needless to say, I am no stranger to dealing with hot temperatures and humidity.

 

But, I have lived in Southern California for the last 12 months of my life, where my Texan roots leave me in need of a jacket most hours of the day. I think it is awkwardly chilly here most of the year, so I wondered what I would think of the hot yoga temperature.

 

Back to my first yoga class: [Having read a handful of Yelp! reviews before coming to class, I brought the necessary 1L bottle of cold water, yoga mat, and towel, not to mention I wore as little sports clothing as possible since the only thing worse than sweating a lot is sweating a lot and having loose, damp clothing flapping around your limbs and torso.] Walking into the yoga classroom, I could instantly feel the wall of humidity punch me in the face, but it wasn’t unbearable or strangling at all.

 

For my first class [and for about 13 of the 15 classes I ended up attending; aside: my goal was to attend at least 15/30 days that my Groupon would cover me for] I had a nice teacher who kept the class focused and instructed us on how to bend, compress, stretch, and tend our bodies into all sorts of poses. Said poses have all sorts of health benefits, which many of the instructors mentioned in class, but I am not one to concern myself specifically with massaging my ascending and descending colons; for the most part, I believe that yoga has fantastic health benefits, and I don’t find a need to know what every single one of them is. Coming from a most recently running-heavy background, I enjoyed the change of pace and meditative focus that yoga demands. Back in my pre-teen and teenage years, I did a little bit of gymnastics and have always appreciated the bit of acrobatic tendency that has stayed with me all these years, so it was definitely nice to go back to something that focused on stretching and strengthening my core. I have also managed to maintain a decent level of flexibility after all these years [although I was once able to do my left split and now have no chance in hell of doing so], so Bikram gave me a chance to recover a lot of that, especially since the temperature of the room majorly helped unwind my muscles.

 

A note about being a room above 100 degrees for 90 minutes at a time: you will sweat like a beast [that is, assuming you have correctly hydrated yourself the day before/day of]. This is nothing to be ashamed of [because there will always be people in the class who sweat more than you, I promise], and I discovered that my skin and pores actually felt fantastic against the cool winds after class because they’d been flushed clean. [Aside: I can't believe how much some men sweat. PUDDLES next to their mats after class. PUDDLES. Eep.] This is why you are supposed to bring a towel for your yoga mat and one to wipe your face/hands off with. I also don’t think the heat [as much as 99% of people cite their apprehension about being in a room so hot] will cause you to feel sick unless you have not hydrated yourself properly/gotten enough sleep.

 

I learned over the course of the month that my body did not like the hot yoga on mornings after nights of little sleep, days where I drank any coffee [because this dually dehydrated my body and meant I drank less water], or evenings where the yoga instructor had the room above 110 degrees. [113 degrees is unnecessary!] Perhaps my favorite classes to go to [as lame as this is going to sound] were on Sunday mornings at 8am and Friday evenings at 6:30pm. There’s something about a room half-full of focused people who truly want to be there to practice in earnest that unwinds your mind like nothing else.

 

So, after completing my self challenge of going to Bikram yoga at least half of the days of my month-long Groupon, I’m going to [finally] start running again after a few months off, and I am confident that my little stint into Bikram helped loosen up my muscles and joints in preparation to pack on the miles. Of course, I have another hot [but not Bikram] yoga Groupon in my queue for the winter months when the temperatures “drop” here in La Jolla.

 

Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to get my left split back. Namaste.

In a nutshell

Look, friends- here’s the deal. I love blogging. I’ve done it since I was in the 8th grade, and I intend to continue doing it for as long as I can keep it up. These days though, I’ve gotten bad about the actual act of blogging. I’ll think about post topics while I’m on my bike, while I’m in the shower, while I’m running reactions– you get the picture.

 

However, I never get around to actually typing out my thoughts. That’s my fault. Once upon a time, I even spent enough time on blog posts to include photos with captions and much more. Oh, those were the days. I promise I’m still alive though!

But, I’ll try to be better about this. I have a couple of worthy things to blog about, even. This post will not be about any of those worthy things. Instead, consider it a catch-all for the last few months of my life. A few tales, thoughts, random occurrences from here and there. Proof that I’m still a fully functioning human being.

//

Now that I’ve been in California for more than a year, I have a mental list of things I really appreciate/like about California. I keep this running list in my head because every time someone comes to visit, it’s always inevitable that he/she asks, “Don’t you just love this place?” I have to have something to respond with, right?

 

The list is as follows:

1. I have not seen a flipping mosquito, ever. Okay maybe once in a blue moon, but it essentially equates to never. Perhaps this is a function of the places I’ve lived and where I work, but this is a glorious, glorious thing coming from the humid bug-hole that is Houston, TX.
2. The sushi is superb. Thanks to guest lecturers at Scripps and friends from out of town on business, I’ve been able to eat [for free] at some unbelievably good sushi restaurants.
3. Avocado is king. In Texas they put BBQ sauce on everything; in California they put avocado on everything. Both are perfectly acceptable in my book.
4. You can run year round here, at almost any time of the day.
5. You can also find a multitude of cycling routes/lanes/roads/paths all around San Diego, and the cyclists all seem pretty nice.

That is about all I can really say for sure, always applicable, all the time. Occasionally I appreciate other things, but nothing else comes to mind as belonging on the ‘absolute’ list above.

 

Now to be fair and balanced, I will give the abridged version of things I cannot get over and will go on and on about if you let me.

1. The weather is, in a word, awkward. Yes, living in a bubble is nice for things like running, but I don’t like feeling cold to the bone in the middle of July. There are no seasons here, and I miss feeling appropriately hot.
2. The cost of living is ridiculous. Gas, rent, groceries, beer, cover… yes, I still clip coupons.
3. Southern Californians… don’t even get me started on the majority of them. I think there should be “Southern Hospitality” booster shots for all humans age 18 and older to correct their attitudes.

 

//

 

I go through pangs of, alongside missing things about Texas the state, missing Texas the school. [Duh.] I shall write a few sentences about those things.

 

I miss Camp Texas very much; it was something right up my alley, but the people I did it with were from all walks of life, from all parts of UT, and it was just one big party every Friday of the spring until August.

 

I miss 24-hour places. Coffeeshops. Grocery stores. Eatery diners. Friends’ apartments.

 

I miss yelling and cheering at the top of my lungs for Texas Volleyball and Football. No, you don’t understand. I would use my paycheck to buy expensive tickets to see Texas Volleyball play this year—that’s how much I miss seeing games live.

 

I really, really miss getting breakfast/lunch/dinner/coffee with people one-on-one and sitting in one place and talking about life for long periods of time. This used-to-be-a-few-times-a-week occurrence now happens once every few months. Sad.

 

//

 

In an effort to keep the pendulum swinging and the calendar turning, I plan trips to see people [boyfriend, family, friends’ weddings, reunions] periodically. These trips keep me sane. Perhaps on these trips, though, I come off as insane because I miss feeling as alive as I do when I’m traveling. Occasionally, fun things happen.

 

During one short weekend trip, I got to get dinner with one of my best college friends in the airport. That same night, I celebrated my boyfriend’s 21^st birthday with a bunch of CS majors. The next night, while wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, I was less than three feet away from Mark Zuckerberg in real life. I also rode a mechanical bull and did more country two-step/line dancing in one hour than I did in the last six months.

 

Until the next trip…

 

Refreshed.

I think one of the best feelings in the world is to know that the people you care about, regardless of how often you are able to see them, are doing well. It might be a few weeks at a time, a few months at a time, or even a year or two between times when I get to see friends from undergrad or even high school, but the time I get to spend catching up with people after not having seen them for a really long time refreshes my soul.

// stream of consciousness

A thought along these lines has been floating around in my head for some time now.

//

With all the hoopla that was 2010, I knew that 2011 had some big shoes to fill. I didn’t have expectations for 2011 to be filled with lots of travels or new experiences; turns out, what I’ve wanted out of 2011 is a sense of reassurance. A lot of the time, I find myself having thoughts that start with “Now that I’ve graduated from UT and have to deal with being an adult in the real world,…” and what I’ve learned over the last 7 months is that being an adult means you have to generate your own sense of reassurance– reassurance from no one else is satisfying enough. In some sense, I think that self-generated reassurance is a result of the fact that ‘in the real world’, no one is there to hold you accountable for anything you set out to do. Your parents aren’t around to collect your report card in the mail, your best friends aren’t always around to talk to when you need that pick-me-up [not at any fault of theirs, but 'in the real world', distance becomes an inevitability that you have to learn to navigate around].

Airport karma and its importance

As this week marks the first time that more than one person in my family has gone back to Taiwan and I have not [in other words, each of my parents has gone to Taiwan individually, but anytime more than one person goes, I have gone as well], I figure it is a good time to tell some tales of my adventures at the airport. I’ve done a lot of domestic flying in the last couple years, and as a result, I have quite a few tales to tell. As the title of this post suggests, I believe that having good airport karma is an important, useful, and stress-relieving thing to have in your back pocket.

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Act One: The “Special Line” through security doesn’t depend on your level of importance– it actually depends on your level of desperation

You know how parents tell little kids white lies just to get them to do certain things? Some thing to the effect of “oh, if you don’t clean your room, X-bad-thing will happen to you” or “if you swallow watermelon seeds, a watermelon will grow in your stomach”– well, to some extent, I believe that 95% of the time, you don’t need to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight leaves [unless you are flying internationally, to be clear]. Twice, at the Austin airport, I’ve had a flight scheduled to leave really early in the morning, and in all of my absentminded-brilliance, I arrived ~45-60 minutes before my flight’s departure time. The first time was en route to a grad school visit on the East Coast; I arrived to the airport the Friday morning before ACL… and chaos ensued. I checked luggage quickly and then felt overwhelmed by the security line… until I noticed the really short line off to the side and thought to myself “sure why not”. The second time was en route back to San Diego after a trip to Austin, and without any luggage to check, I was still way far way behind in the security line– and even after negotiating with the airline counter and asking them if I could pay $50 extra for an express pass, I just disregarded their looks of disapproval and ran off to the express line anyway.

And the outcome both times? I made it through the express security check line in a matter of minutes and scrambled at break-neck pace to my gate and got on my planes. Seriously, they’re playing mind games with the “express security check” line’s requirements. Maybe one just has to look very desperate…

Act Two: Another reason why I hate the cold

In every basic chemistry class, there comes a point where you teach students about different temperature scales. Right- we all grow up with Fahrenheit in our heads, and then we learn that Celsius exists… and then we find the latter is based on the the Kelvin scale? You then learn that zero Kelvin is the temperature at which all kinetic movement ceases. Well, there is some magical temperature temperature at which all airport check-in efficiency ceases and waiting in line becomes an infinitely long process. Of course, this situation happened to me on my flight back to San Diego after winter break… resulting in a missed flight [and thereby a missed connection], so I got put on a later flight that went out of the way [eastward then westward] which had a delayed second connection. AIRPORT EQUIVALENT OF ZERO KELVIN… guh.

Act Three: When you fly standby…

Flying standby is the number one way to cash in all of your good airport karma. Standby means you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders as you cross your fingers and toes hoping to hear your name called so that you can get where you need to go instead of sitting in those god-awful airport seats for another hour or two. Once your name gets called though, it’s like winning 100 games of BINGO back-to-back; yeah, it feels that good. Also, flying standby means that one gets very little sleep: not only do you barely sleep the night before going to wait in line for a standby flight, but you get in line at the crack of dawn before the sun rises in order to try and get on the least crowded flight of the day at some ridiculously early time. Still, I imagine winning the lottery must feel a lot like having your name called for standby.

Yes, I’m checking you out

Quick note on something that I’ve had running through my head for the last few months–

I have a growing bad habit of checking people out. I spend so much time in lab around the same people that I can characterize them based upon how they walk, what cologne they wear [I mean, I only work with dudes, what do you expect?], the condition of their lab coat and how many holes are in it, what kind of music they play… anyways, you get the idea. I’ve done an enormous amount of studying of the people I work with.

This means, when I’m out around ‘normal folk’ in public, I eagerly study them as well. However, I realized the last few months that I don’t exactly check out people in public the same way that I study my co-workers. I’m a very specific people-watcher… and depending on the environment, I check out very particular things about the individuals around me. I promise I’m not being creepy, but I’ve found there are characteristics about strangers that I’m extremely interested in. How do compare in the following environments?

• At the grocery store: I check out other people’s grocery carts to see if they have reusable grocery bags. I could care less about what groceries you’re buying, but I’m very curious to see if you have reusable bags. These days, you can get a free reusable bag just about anywhere, for doing just about anything– including, just asking! I also want to ask people who are dressed up to an unusual degree, ‘who are you trying to impress… at the grocery store?’
• Out on running trails/at races: I check out your shoes. Especially on the morning of races, I find myself staring at the ground quite a bit… I like to survey what brands of shoes people run in [and occasionally I see a pair of Vibrams], and also, I check out my fellow runners’ calves, a LOT. I think I instinctively look at people’s calves before I look at any other part of them when I’m in ‘running mode’. Lean, toned calves = much under-appreciated.
• Now that I own a bike: I look at your bike. I notice the name on it. I secretly dream about the invention of sparkly red carbon fiber bikes. I also think that if you own a nice bike, you should keep it clean! Reminds me of people who drive nice sports cars that are dirty as can be… tsk tsk!

So basically, for the most part, I now stare at people’s shoes and lower legs a lot. That is my main message.