Bigger is Better

"At last, I think I know. The past is where we keep what might have been, but it's best to let it go because we'll never be December boys again." -- Peter Cincotti

I'm fastidious about food and choose freshly prepared dishes filled with quality ingredients whenever possible. That is, until it's time for dessert. Marshmallow Peeps, the infamous "mystery pastry" my hospital serves during Grand Rounds, anything made by Hostess -- it's all fair game. Oddly enough, I grew up with diabetics on one side of the family and pastry chefs on the other side; if I ate dessert at all as a kid, it was prepared by a master. I wasn't corrupted until I started high school and met The Big Cookie.

The Big Cookie was a lunchtime legend: six inches in diameter, loaded with chocolate chips, burnt around the edges, raw in the middle, and so buttery that the grease would soak through the wax paper wrapping. I delightfully consumed one of these monsters every other day or so for four years and would practically start experiencing withdrawal symptoms during long vacations and summer holidays. Even after I graduated, I'd make pilgrimages from college every few months to pick up a Big Cookie or two.

Then, about three years ago, my high school switched cafeteria companies and The Big Cookie went the way of the dodo. Students protested and alumni ranted, but nothing could be done. Every once in a while, the administration heralds the return of The Big Cookie and we all rush back to campus... but they always hand us a small, crisp, dry, inferior cookie and pretend like they can't see the difference.

My college's chocolate chip cookies were a decent enough substitute, but since I graduated, I've been on a mission to find a beautiful, perfect, crave-satisfying chocolate chip cookie recipe. This week, I gave my quest another shot using a modified version of a recipe I found online.

Trouble was, my culinary experimentation coincided with a telecast of Dancing with the Stars. Thus, Gilles Marini sensuously dipped his partner and I boiled my butter instead of melting it. I added it to a bowl with sugar and vanilla anyway and started mixing the ingredients. Then Dmitry Chaplin sashayed around the dance floor with half a shirt on and I let the mixer run for five minutes. When I came to my senses and checked the bowl, I had a thick, viscous, caramel-colored goo instead of creamed butter and sugar

I had inadvertently created butter toffee. And because I wanted chocolate chip cookies more than I wanted toffee, I continued with the recipe (with the addition of some chopped almonds to enhance the toffee flavor). I ended up with something unbelievable: a rich, complex chocolate chip cookie that's soft when eaten hot and brittle when eaten cold. It's not The Big Cookie by a long shot, but it's a keeper.

[Insert yet-to-be-chosen recipe name here]

1/4 cup + 2 tbsp salted butter
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 tbsp vanilla
1 egg
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup crushed almonds, pecans, or walnuts (if desired)

Mix sugars and vanilla in a large bowl. Melt butter in the microwave or in a small saucepan until it begins to bubble, then add it directly to the sugar mixture and mix for five minutes. The mixture should be thick, viscous, and similar to caramel in color and consistency. Add egg, then add flour, baking soda, and salt, mixing after each until fully incorporated. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts, and if you have some time to kill, refrigerate the dough for a few hours before baking.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Drop spoonfuls of dough onto a greased or lined cookie sheet. (They will spread out in the oven, so make sure to leave 2-3 inches of space between spoonfuls.) Bake for 18-20 minutes or until edges are browned. Yields ten big cookies, twenty medium-sized cookies, or a ton of small cookies.

Dream On

"Half my life's in books' written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages. You know it's true; all these things come back to you." -- Aerosmith

Six years ago, when it came time to choose classes for my senior year of high school, I petitioned for permission to take more classes than normally allowed. My request was approved, I carefully chose my five-and-a-half classes, meticulously plotted out my schedule... and was foiled by timeslot conflicts. I was left with half a class to fill after I rearranged things, and motivated solely by the Honors curve it offered, I chose Psychology in Literature.

"I was in an outdoor cafe and the sky turned red. I looked to the west and saw a mushroom cloud. A fireball started towards us, rolling across the land. Some dude in the cafe started chanting 'USA! USA!' which struck me as the downright worst thing to say or feel at the moment." -- 12.20.2003

I don't remember too much about the class, but I'll never forget one of the teacher's weirder requests. On our first day of class, she introduced The Metamorphosis by discussing the importance of dreams to writers. Then, as a tool for inspiration and self-analysis, she asked us to start recording our dreams.

"I was in the desert at dusk with a machine gun. Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, the entire family from 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding,' and I were camped out on the highland, while Louis XIV, Lucius Malfoy, some storm troopers, and my old lab partner were on the lowland behind a rock." -- 11.03.2003

Every day for eight months, I kept a notebook and a green pen next to my bed and wrote down anything that crossed my unconscious mind. The practice stopped once I finished high school, and almost as punishment, my ability to recall my dreams diminished as well.

"He ran up to me, started telling me about this petite blond girl that he met, and asked me to help him find her. I agreed to help and off we went, wandering the streets, calling her name. I was searching half-heartedly because I was upset at the prospect of handing him over to someone else, but I just wanted him to be happy." -- 09.29.2003

I dug out my old dream notebook today, just to see if my seventeen year-old subconscious was more insightful than I remember. The entries shocked me; apparently, I was dreaming about dilemmas, crushes, and life crises weeks and sometimes months before my conscious mind acknowledged their existence. (Some of the stranger and/or more insightful entries are scattered between these paragraphs.) Sparked by this realization -- as well as two recent dreams on two consecutive nights that were so strange and interesting that I can't get them out of my mind -- I resumed recording my dreams this morning.

"I was a contestant on The Apprentice and had to search someone's living room for index cards bearing my name. No problem, I thought... then Donald Trump stole my glasses." -- 03.19.2004

In Thursday's dream, a man and I walked through a small-town street somewhere in the south. We entered a store filled with nothing but tomatoes and tomato products and started kissing between the beefsteaks and the heirlooms.

"Then I saw a man in black climbing the stairs to my new apartment, and I knew that the mob had hired him to kill Johnny. I had no idea who Johnny was and had never seen him before in my life, but my dream self seemed to be pretty attached to this guy. I snuck up on the assassin, disarmed him, smashed his head against the banister, and flung him over it." -- 09.23.2003

In Friday's dream, I was staying in a cabin in the Catskills, heard a weird noise in the bathroom, and walked in on someone horrifying in the shower. I freaked out, but my shower intruder locked eyes with me, spoke rationally, and I calmed down instantly.

"I went to spend the night at Columbia University and forgot pajamas and a change of clothes. I was staying in a room with eight other girls and all of them were borrowing my toiletries but refused to help with the clothing situation." -- 04.13.2004

My notebook and green pen are next to my bed. I'm looking forward to what tonight may bring.

"I was in school and my kidneys disintegrated. I ran to JS for help and he massaged my back so I'd live for five hours rather than three." -- 10.12.2003

Better Than Ever

"I'm twenty-two for a moment. She feels better than ever... and we're on fire. We're making our way back from Mars." -- Five For Fighting

I became an engineer to put my talent for innovation to good use, to help people without having to directly interact with them, to satisfy my curiosity about the way things work, to play with fire and electricity and chemicals and really cool machines, to solve problems, to fix things that are broken, to "improve" things that aren't broken, to feel like a total geek and a total badass all at once, to live on the cutting edge.

Those are the basics. The specifics have changed a few dozen times during the last fifteen years and will undoubtedly change a few dozen more times before I retire, but last weekend, I was forcefully reminded of what started it all. I spent a few glorious days in DC with a few old friends, and despite meals, movies, Mythbusters, and many other fun experiences, we still found time to take a seven-mile walk around the city. We didn't stop for too long at any point along our stroll, but we did duck into the National Air and Space Museum for a few moments.

I walked through the doors. The security checkpoint was new, but the Gemini command module still loomed to my left, the moon rock still sat on my right, and The Spirit of St. Louis still hovered overhead. I was nine years old when I first set foot in that room and recognized my destiny in its contents. Biomedical engineering didn't really exist back then, so instead, I wanted to be a rocket scientist.

Specifically, I wanted to be John Aaron. Never heard of him? Not surprising, since he's the most perfect example of a true engineer that I know -- he made a career out of creatively fixing other people's messes from the sidelines. Aaron graduated from college in the early 1960s, and armed with nothing more than his physics degree, he took a job at NASA on a whim. Six months later, he was working for Mission Control handling flight operations for the Gemini missions. While nationally recognized heroes like Gus Grissom, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong were out testing the limits of space, Aaron was one of the many faceless men keeping them alive from behind his computer screen.

I was obsessed with the NASA of the '60s and '70s during my childhood. How thrilling it must have been to explore space when space exploration was still so brand-new, and to actually have the ability to get your hands dirty in it! Troubleshooting efforts in those early days -- astronauts fixing broken lunar rovers with old maps and duct tape, flight controllers trying to make CO2 filters out of tube socks -- always sounded like so much fun to me. John Aaron was the unequivocal master of troubleshooting, and his common-sense cleverness saved the entire space program on more than one occasion. He was the guy who figured out how to bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth using only 12 amps of power. He was also the only person able to teach the crew of Apollo 12 how to reboot their electrical systems after the spacecraft was struck by lightning, saving the mission from certain abortion. How? Years earlier, he had heard of a similar problem during an obscure test mission, researched it to satisfy his own curiosity, and consequently became the world's only expert on the issue.

John Aaron made himself superhuman using only his brain and his ingenuity, which has elevated him to Batman-esque status in my estimation. He was my hero for most of my childhood and adolescence, and he's one of the main reasons why I had my sights set on a career with NASA for so many years. Problem is, there's no place at NASA for Aaron's brand of quick-and-dirty, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants brand of engineering any more. Everything is planned, budgeted, methodical, and triple-checked nowadays. It's neater and probably more efficient, but it's not nearly as fun.

It's not exactly better, either. On my way home from DC, I read an article on Project Constellation, the new NASA missions that plan to return humans to the moon by 2019. I learned that NASA plans to phase out space shuttles during the next few years and begin using Orion spacecraft -- which bear an eerie resemblance to the Apollo command module I wandered past in the museum last weekend. Seems like Aaron and his fellow engineers were more right about things than any of us could have guessed.