"Who blacked your eye, Granger? I want to send them flowers." -- Draco Malfoy
Two years ago this month, my friends and I waited on line for our copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows dressed in outfits specially chosen for the occasion. One of my companions wore a cloak, Gryffindor scarf, and prefect badge while another sported an "I Heart Ron" t-shirt. My style has always been a bit more understated, though, so in honor of my favorite character, I fastened my hair back with a Slytherin necktie and wore a simple grey t-shirt with the words "Property of the Half-Blood Prince" calligraphed in scrollwork across the front.
In preparation for this week's release of the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I decided to dig up my old t-shirt. Problem was, I couldn't find it. Anywhere. That turned out to be an easily rectifiable problem, though.
First, I dug this old, faded, $7 H&M tank top out of my closet...
"I told you that our love would last forever, and even that the tears would end for good. I told you that we'd get through any weather. Baby, that didn't work out... but we did the best we could." -- Jamie Cullum
My musical tastes have always tended towards artists whose lyrics speak the contents of my heart. They come and go and change over the years, but one man has been a constant presence in my soul, iPod, and journal entries since I first heard his voice. His name is Jamie Cullum, and I grew to love him during the summer of 2004 when my place of employment, Barnes & Noble, played his album Twentysomething around the clock for an entire month.
From a journal entry dated 08/17/2004:
My "Currently Playing" was on the air in B&N during the entire month of July, and I never tired of listening to it each day. Jamie Cullum is an amazing British singer and pianist -- kind of a cross between Billy Joel, Bowie and Harry Connick Jr. -- and he has an unbelievably sexy voice. Too bad he looks like he's ten.
A year passed before Jamie garnered enough attention in the United States to play any shows here, and I was fortunate to see him live at Irving Plaza on his first trip to New York.
From a journal entry dated 10/12/2005, which morphed into a concert review that still appears on Jamie's official website:
I spent 2+ hours tonight standing ten feet away from Jamie Cullum the world-renowned British jazz pianist who has redefined the genre and never records a flop. He is 25 years old, looks like he's fifteen, acts like he's anywhere between five and fifty.
He crooned, he keeled, he growled and whispered and scatted and shrieked and moaned. Every note was perfect, every syllable was impeccably executed in that soulful, raspy, incredibly sexy voice that belongs only to him.
He tickled the piano keys with symphonic precision, only to bang on them with his fists a moment later. His hands would move slowly, gently, deliberately, then he'd stop and begin poking out rapid patterns of notes with two fingers. At one point he played the instrument with his feet and his forehead. Then he sat on the keyboard. Then he reached inside the lid and started plucking the strings. Then he stood on the lid and took a flying leap onto the stage.
The man can go from Harry Connick Jr. to Radiohead, from a rap to a disco tune, from straight jazz to Lerner and Loewe in two seconds flat without the slightest hesitation, which isn't as simple a feat as one would imagine.
I saw Jamie live again a few months later and the mastery of his performing style remained just as impressive as when I first saw him. Between then and now, I always gravitated towards Jamie's lyrics to commemorate moments of upheaval, change, and comprehension in my life. I cut an unhealthy ex out of my life on New Year's Day on 2006 and quoted Jamie when I told my friends about it:
"If there's one thing I must do, despite my greatest fear, I'm gonna say to you what I've felt all of these years next year."
I turned to Jamie again on March 28th of 2006 to help me work through some romantic confusion:
"Who knows the answers? Who do you trust? I can't even separate love from lust."
He even provided the soundtrack for my 20th birthday:
"Love ain't the answer, nor is work. The truth eludes me so much it hurts. But I'm still having fun and I guess that's the key. I'm a twentysomething and I'll keep being me.
I had the privilege of seeing Jamie Cullum perform live for a third time last weekend. (Many thanks to Rutila!) His music has grown more pensive lately -- his new album contains songs about self-reliance and longing and reflection, which shows that Jamie and I seem to have matured along the same lines. However, though "If I Ruled The World" and "Gran Torino" touched me, it was an old song -- the first Jamie Cullum song I ever heard back when I was seventeen years old -- whose newfound relevance to my life left me dumbstruck. The Quote of the Day borrows from it, and it can be heard in full below.
"It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me... and I'm feelin' good." -- Anthony Newley
Praise of the mundane will have to wait a while, since my past two weeks have been extraordinarily life-changing. Last Wednesday was my one-year anniversary at my job, and the following day, I left for my first-ever business trip. This was no run-of-the-mill jaunt, either: I got to spend six days at the largest cancer conference in the United States.
"For now there's life. For now there's love. For now there's work. For now there's happiness. For now there's comfort. For now there's friendship." -- from Avenue Q
Six other study coordinators were also selected to represent our department at the conference. We took turns driving, attended each other's poster sessions, stayed up until three in the morning confiding in each other, made each other breakfast, ironed each other's suits, sunscreened each other's backs, shared straws and clothing and bathrooms and beds, flirted and fought and compromised and laughed and took care of each other. Strangers often marked us as friends, relatives, or married couples... and we never made a correction or clarification.
"Anti-angiogenesis really works in TCC!!!!!" -- one of the presenting MDs
On the last day of the conference, I sat alone in the back of the biggest lecture hall I've ever seen and listened to three of our best discuss where our field is headed. A stupid grin was plastered on my face the entire time; two of the three speakers discussed my team's work as pivotal to the future of cancer care. My commute, my long hours, my diminishing knowledge of engineering... all of it became blindingly insignificant when I realized that the data flashing across the room's three projector screens was collected and abstracted by my hands. "I'm finding who I am! And for the first time, I have no doubts! Yes, for the first time, I understand!" -- Phil Collins
The day before the lectures, I stood in the exhibition hall for four hours. Six feet to my right sat an MD from my team and between us stretched a poster representing her brainchild and my data. Doctors, scientists, statisticians, and pharmacists asked me dozens of probing questions about our work... and I was able to answer them, converse with them, share laughs and oncologic commentary and moments of enthusiasm with them. I've amassed more knowledge about this stuff over the past year than I ever thought possible, and when asked to put that knowledge to the test in front of the toughest crowd imaginable, I was able to deliver. Once my initial nervousness subsided, I began to operate with a confidence so genuine that, one week later, people can still see it in my eyes.
"Time can never mend the careless whispers of a good friend. To the heart and mind, ignorance is kind. There's no comfort in the truth." -- Wham!
A long time ago, I wrote about the regulars, the people I encounter every single day on my commute. I've never mentioned Metro Man until now, though; he's almost always the first person I greet every morning, and he certainly deserves a blog entry of his own.
Metro Man wears an orange jacket, he stands at the foot of the staircase I use to ascend to the N train, and he hands out free copies of Metro newspaper. Every morning, he and I have the exact same conversation:
Me: Good morning. Him: Good morning lady. [tries to hand me a newspaper] Me: No thank you. Him: [mutters something unintelligible]
Metro Man's mumbles never sound the same twice; hell, they never sounded like anything. For months on end, I listened very intently to Metro Man to try and determine what the hell the guy was saying to me. I'm no stranger to hopeless causes, though, and this certainly qualified as one.
I gave up trying to comprehend Metro Man's speech a long time ago, but I kept my optimism. Instead of trying to understand the guy, I've turned his rambling into my very own private joke. I have zero idea what on Earth he's actually trying to say, so in my mind, that gives me license to invent my own interpretation.
As a result, Metro Man takes a few moments out of his day to try and tell me the secrets of the universe. Last month, he named Kennedy's assassin, the location of Bigfoot, and what's stored at Area 51. A week ago today, he whispered the location of Jimmy Hoffa and what happened to the dinosaurs. Yesterday, he taught me how to achieve perpetual motion. And today, he told me I looked really pretty in my summer dress.
"Nothing you have said is revelation. Take my blues as read! My consolation: finding out that I'm my one true obligation." -- Tim Rice
I don't work on Fridays, and since I'm lucky enough to have a few friends who share the same fortunate employment situation, we were able to spend the entire day lazing around midtown. After stalking an actor friend at his place of business having lunch at Ruby Tuesday's, discussing the men in our lives, and planning a camping trip or three, we caught a showing of Star Trek in IMAX.
The film is new, it's different, it screws canon to high heaven, it completely rewrites Star Trek history... and I loved every minute of it. The new cast kicked ass, the new Enterprise is stunning, Eric Bana made the sexiest villain since Khan, and the writers were able to include Leonard Nimoy in the film without campiness or contrivances. (Not to mention that I finally see why Rutila has loved Zachary Quinto for so long... he's talented, he's insanely hot, and his scenes with Zoe Saldana were way more intriguing than I thought they would be.)
We took a long walk after the film, went shopping for sheet music, and ended up meeting my coworkers at Butterfield 8. I had a few glasses of whiskey and a few laughs, scared off a few cocky bankers with the phrase "biomedical engineering," and handed my phone number to a couple of un-cocky scientists who didn't frighten so easily. I argued with a man who claimed that my straight hair and oversized sunglasses made me look exactly like Megan Fox. I watched the Yankees game, cheered and yelled and booed appropriately. I stood chest-to-chest with one of my colleagues -- a Twins fan -- as we screamed in each other's faces about whether or not Mariano Rivera has played his whole career for the Bombers. (I was right, of course; Mo is indeed homegrown.) Five of us went to Taj after that, then we went to a dive bar across the street after we were thrown out of Taj for wearing sandals, then we went to another dive bar half a mile away to sing bad karaoke. I hailed a cab on Park Avenue South a little after one in the morning, and while stuck in traffic, I watched a man throw a lit cigarette into a trashcan. He panicked as the contents caught fire and ran away as half a block's worth of garbage began to blaze. I could hear the sirens in the distance as my cab approached the Queensborough Bridge.
On my ride home, I thought about my incredibly full day and night -- the people, the moments, and, of course, Star Trek. And despite everything that happened over the course of the day, only two things really stuck out in my head: my lunchtime conversation and my in-your-face Mariano Rivera argument. The rest of the events and the individuals were interesting in their own right, but they were mentally expendable. To use a Star Trek analogy, they were my Redshirts -- or to borrow the term popularized by Family Guy, they were my Ensign Rickies.
For those unfamiliar with Trek lore, it's a fact of life that, on every away mission, the random dude in the red shirt always bites the dust first... and no one ever seems to care. It happened in the original series, it happens in the sequels, it happens in the old movies, and it happens in the new movie. And more and more nowadays, I'm starting to recognize Ensign Rickies in my own life -- people who serve a purpose at the moment, but if they were to encounter Nomad, the vampire cloud, or the orbital platform and vanish, I wouldn't be too devastated.
The complication lies in separating the truly expendable from the diamonds in the rough -- after all, Scotty wears a red shirt too. Thus, on Friday night, I made a conscious effort to fight the urge to only focus on the Spocks and McCoys of my day and take notice of the anonymous ensigns too, regardless of how little interest I initially showed in them. I thought things through, followed-up... and was pleasantly surprised. Twice.
"Then the night turned cold, colder than the moon. The stars were white as bones. The stadium was old -- older than the screams, older than the teams. There were three men down and the season lost and the tarpaulin was rolled upon the winter frost." -- Paul Simon
Last Saturday afternoon, I paid my first visit to the new ballpark where the New York Yankees play their home games. I can't verbally call it (and won't refer to it in print as) "Yankee Stadium," which should give you an idea of how I feel about the place.
That sounds a little cruel. The Yankees' new home is a beautiful -- no, downright stunning -- ballpark. Photos of Yankees legends are plastered everywhere, most notably in the Great Hall (where soaring thirty-foot high banners portray the greats in black-and-white on one side and color on the other). The fair portions of the field are the same dimesions, even down to the short porch in right. The exterior is resplendent with gold leaf and shining white limestone and cathedral windows and looks like Yankee Stadium did before its 1975 renovation. The facade crowns the seats instead of the scoreboard and Monument Park has been restored to center field, just as they looked in 1923. Most of the dirt was carted over from across the street, so today's Yankees technically play on the same soil that Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle did. The new ballpark is perfect, but nevertheless, it didn't feel right. I spent three hours sitting in a seat that's technically mine but felt nothing like my beloved Section 9, surrounded by forty thousand strong while a majestic deserted ballpark quietly rotted a few hundred feet away. I cheered and chanted and enjoyed the game, but I was always acutely aware that Yankee Stadium is supposed to sit on the opposite side of 161st Street.
The architects and designers of the new stadium tried VERY hard to pay homage to the history of the Yankees, but at best it all seems a bit cartoonish and at worst it feels like a slap in the face. To illustrate the former, consider that the foul territory has been cut in half to bring expensive seats closer to the diamond, the cathedral-esque exterior hides a shopping concourse, the gleaming white facade hangs over "cheap seats" that have been halved in quantity, and Monument Park is hidden under a corporate-branded sports bar.
I'll use a longer example to illustrate that slap in the face. When Thurman Munson, the famed catcher and former captain of the Yankees, died halfway through the 1979 season, none of his teammates could bring themselves to clean out and reassign his locker. It sat in the clubhouse untouched, looking exactly as it had the last time Munson hung up his jersey, for the remainder of that season... and the season after that and the season after that. For the next thirty years, Munson's locker was only disturbed for cleaning; the clubhouse was renovated around it, lockers were assigned and deserted and reassigned without heed to it, and subsequent Yankees captains were relocated to the locker next to Munson's. It was a private tribute made and maintained by those who shared a special bond with Munson, whether by friendship or by the ties of pinstripes. But when the Yankees moved across the street after the 2008 season, Munson's locker had to be moved as well.
The current captain of the Yankees dresses next to an empty locker before every home game, but it's not Munson's. The space adjacent to Derek Jeter's locker stands empty as a tribute to all lost legends... while Munson's locker stands upstairs in a museum, encased in glass, visible to fifty thousand people a day.
It's a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with the stadium itself. MyYankee Stadium, with its rickety frame and uncomfortable seats and peeling paint and quirks and nuances and undeniable baseball magic, has been replaced with a Stepford Wife fascimile and put on display for the world to gawk at. The Yankee Stadium I called home may not have had cathedral windows, but I worshipped there for fifteen years, poured hundreds of prayers into those walls, and emerged with just as many secrets and divine inclinations.
I'll get used to it eventually. I'll keep going to the games, and as my time spent in section 211 starts to approach my time spent in Section 9, I'll start to build a new set of memories to cherish and a new set of prayers to live by. But last Saturday, for the first time in my life, I sat in Yankee Stadium and felt homeless.
"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.
"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
"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.
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