facebook is so cool

i'm sure even the most computer/internet illiterate of you folks have heard of the awesomeness of facebook. reconnecting with old friends, staying in touch with distant friends, being able to plan events and send messages and post pictures...it's pretty amazing. recently i had one of the most awesome facebook experiences ever. i became "friends" with my favorite author. no, not c.s. lewis. he's so dead. the other one. the great donald miller.

personally, i've been a fan for a while. since high school sometime, with the glorious "prayer and the art of volkswagon maintenance." after i read it, i wanted more. i remember years of mindlessly checking the "christian inspiration" sections of book stores, habitually looking in the M section for a new book. it took quite a few years, but one came. "blue like jazz," which most of you probably have heard of, because that one actually became popular. and then a couple more followed.


i actually did get a chance to meet him. he spoke at harvard, at the veritas forum. i went up and shook his hand. i remember thinking, well, it's not every day that you get to meet someone who wrote something that has changed your life. i almost said it to him, but i don't think i did.

i joined a group on facebook for fans of his books and ideas. there was an update that don miller himself joined the group. i thought, "hey, why not? lets see if he'll let me be his friend." so i asked. and he accepted!

i think the funny thing is that i really do have access to him now. like, i could write on his wall or send him messages. and keep up on his day to day stuff. oh, he has a girlfriend, by the way. and tonight he's doing his laundry. see, this stuff is awesome. and i'm not even really stalking, because he is allowing me this access. isn't that cool? not like i'm actually going to write on his wall or anything. i don't know. or maybe i will. either way, i'm excited.

it's a whole new world.

things that always deserved to be posted on

1. winning the world series.

i love saying it as if i, personally, won the world series. my friend congratulated me in class yesterday, and i joked, "yeah, it was tough, but i just held on and kept working hard." why do we do that? anyway, i was immediately homesick after the game on sunday. you would be too, if you were watching it alone in your living room while doing homework, streaming the game on your computer--making it super-low def, i might add.

i wished i was anywhere else. especially that i was with someone who cared about the game. there are red sox fans in my class, i'm just not really friends with any of them. my friends can't believe that i watch baseball games on purpose. they think it should be solely as punishment. whatever. serves me right for befriending a bunch of canadians.

then i think of 2004, how i watched the game with everyone else at my school, and we celebrated into the night. and how i went to the parade to cheer with the rest of boston. i wish i could do that. so, actually, i've been a bit of a funk since the world series ended on sunday. it's just not the same out here, in medical school.

at least i'll have more time to study now.

2. actually, i just didn't want to end the post with a downer. so i'll just write about how i bought tomatoes at a farmer's market on friday, and really enjoyed adding them to every dish i've made since. grilled cheese, pasta primavera, salad, another pasta dish i made tonight with ground beef. i also recently bought some herbs, and the basil and chives have been awesome. also adding those to everything i make (see above list).

grand day out

i had an exam on monday. it was a beautiful day out. i wanted, needed, no--required--a bit of time outside of the city. it's hard to stay here in syracuse day after day. first of all, even in my apartment i can hear the highway all the time. it's never quiet. and especially right now, when i'm feeling distanced from new england and the enjoyment of new england sports with family and friend (go sox), i needed to get away.

afarin was with me. but of course, the boys were much too preoccupied with a little game i like to call halo 3. because that's the name of it. anyway, enough about those losers. so afarin and i went down to lafayette, pretty close to the apple place pete and i went to. we actually stopped at the store there and picked up some apples and cider and stuff. anyway, i took a couple random turns and ended up in the middle of some beautiful rolling hills.

here's me enjoying the leaves. they smell so good. afarin was a little skeeved that i immediately just laid down in a pile of leaves. she had such a sad childhood. apparently there's not a very good fall in iran. i guess canada isn't bad, but she didn't move there till she was 16. too late to get used to the wonderfulness of fall leaves under your head.

i feel very proud of this queen anne's lace. it shows the power of perspective.

blue and orange go well together. just ask any mets fan (there's always next year).

i hope you enjoyed this bit of respite. i know i did. even thinking about it right now reminds me how good it was to get away, even for an hour.

a little late is better

i had a bit of time on my hands and thought i would update with some pics i took the last time pete was up and we went apple picking.
we found a few apples..and a whole bunch of empty trees. heres pete trying to find the rest of the apples.

ahhh, here they are. lots of apples. good job, pete. way to not give up. these were empires. we got some macs too.

here you can see a bit of the view from the apple orchard. it was on the side of a hill with a great view of the countryside that surrounds syracuse.

i thought i should also show a pic of the bookshelf that pete made for me. isn't it lovely? there's all books in it now. i'll have to show it again, maybe i'll have an entry with a pictoral tour of my apartment.

purple soup

i watched the movie "ratatouille" today, which was very enjoyable and quite inspiring. quick summary: it's about a rat who likes to cook and gets to be the secret chef at a fancy pants parisian restaurant that makes all the good food, while hidden by a hapless busboy (seriously, i feel like i only see the word "hapless" during movie or book descriptions).

anyway, i was inspired. also, i have an exam coming up in a week, so this is one of the last real free time (obviously i don't mean real free time like normal people have it...but whatever) i have to spend some time cooking. soon it will be back to the frozen burritos and ordering in.

so i thought i'd make soup. seemed like a good day for it. this being the third time i've ever made soup, and the first time without a recipe, it was an adventure. basically i just threw in everything i had. onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, beans. a can of chicken broth. garlic. every spice i own (all three of them) including a couple secret ingredients. and some milk.

at the inclusion of the last ingredient, something strange happened. the slight pink tint due to the pink beans, with the white of the milk, and who know what else, turned the soup a rather unappetizing shade of purple. or more of a lavender. or kind of grey. anyway, i was amused.

oh, it still tasted great. i'm not exactly like bridget jones...she got colin firth. though pete says he likes me just the way i am....

anyway, my mind is running away from me. i hope everyone has a good week. i'll be spending my time trying to study amidst the playoffs.

the only thing to look forward to...

it's sad when you have people planning on coming to visit you, and then they do, and you realize that you have no one else to visit until the exam. that's how i am.

pete came up the weekend before, and then my family came up this weekend, and it was all very fun and well and good, but now i'm left with nothing to do but study. it's very depressing.

so i'm trying to do other things. today i went to a writing workshop, which was very interesting. a poet came, and the few of us there did some writing exercises. she was talking about techniques to get the most therapeutic advantage out of writing, like journaling and stuff. some of it was a little loopy, but fun. like try writing with your non-dominant hand. it slows things down, and is harder, so you really parse your writing, distilling it to the important stuff only. ahh, it feels good to get on here and stretch all my good old typing muscles. i can just talk and talk for ever....

i'm just kidding.

med school is ok. discouraging, time consuming, overwhelming. what else is new.

i went swimming today. that was fun. arlin, who still lives in clark tower, next door to the pool, let me keep my stuff in his room to dry. so i didn't have to lug home my wet towel. which was good, cuz my bag was heavy and i was carrying a platter of leftover thai food from the workshop. and it was raining. i would not have been happy with one more thing to carry.

i hope everyone is doing well. feel free to comment, especially if there's something i haven't talked about in a while you are interested in. i would be happy to oblige.

oh dear, watson

yesterday my mom clued me in that james watson, of watson and crick (remember, DNA?), was on "on point" on npr. seeing as i subscribe to the podcast, i synced my ipod up and listened to part of it on the way home.
it brought back some funny memories. my junior and senior year of college, the biology students were required to go to a certain amount of seminars, i think so that we would learn about how to give seminars ourselves. something like that. anyway, one time junior year, noah and phil and i went to a lecture at harvard by the aforementioned james watson. and it was...interesting...

first of all, the place was packed. but he didn't seem like much of what you'd expect from such a big name in science. he gave a tangled autobiography, interspersed with sudden bits of advice. he said he was writing a book, which just came out. it seemed like he was pulling stuff from that.

anyway, we ended up leaving the lecture early so we could head back home. we had to do a writeup on the lecture, which i remember being difficult to do because of the lack of real information he imparted. no current research, that sort of thing.

i guess that was the point. on the radio, he seemed to be saying a lot of the same things i remembered. so i pulled up my old write up to compare. thought you might be interested (note: we weren't being graded on how well we wrote, it just had to be one page long):

"April 19, 2005

Jr. Seminar

Seminar writeup

On March 22, I attended a seminar given by Dr. James Watson at Harvard Medical. He is well known for discovering the structure of DNA with Francis Crick. He received the Nobel Prize for his work, and the discovery completely changed the direction of biology in the past century. The title of the talk was “My life with DNA”, and was based upon his autobiography which will be coming out soon.

He discussed his early childhood, especially his boyhood in Chicago. His mother was nominally religious, but his dad was not. At around the age of eleven he decided to be an atheist. At the seminar, he recommended being an atheist Democrat. He went to college at the University of Chicago, and studied zoology. He then became very interested in genetics, and went to Europe to study it in detail. He spent eighteen months with Crick before they made their discovery.

He gave much free advice at the seminar. He discussed the phenomenon of having more than one Nobel Prize winner in the room. He admonished against, saying it would just be too boring. He also said to not be the most brilliant person in the room. He seems to have been in rooms with lots of brilliant people. In the biology research world, he urged the audience to talk to your competitors.

Watson did a lot of work with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is well known for having an uncanny sense of what is going to be the big field of study for biology, and people who have not taken his advice say they wish they had. Biology now would be a very different place if he had not been here."