from the desk of stinkpot

claudi, a german masters student who’s joining my lab for the next six months, has just moved out of our apartment.  christina and i were lending her a bedroom for these past two weeks, as she needed a place to stay until a reasonable sublet could be found on craigslist.

i miss her already.  claudi: we will always remember how you taught us the correct pronunciation of heferveisen and how lucky americans are to enjoy cheap whole milk.

chris had a med school interview at u chicago a couple of weeks ago and i tagged along.  we had a lovely time hanging out with her cousin and cousin-in-law who put us up for the weekend.  and, while chris went to sweet-talk the doctors, i walked around town and took some pictures.  in general, i was really surprised: i wasn’t prepared for how much chicago would remind me of new york.  tall buildings, avenues like canyons, perhaps even better architecture.  and, pleasantly, far fewer tourists.  i liked the city quite a bit, and perhaps that reflected itself in my photos; i’m very happy with a bunch of the shots i took.

in honor of today’s unseasonable warmth (60F!), i thought i’d post some photos taken only about a month ago during a blizzard here in cambridge.  (these photos especially deserve posting, since they were taken with the 35mm lens i slightly maligned in my last post.)  that storm, i should mention, was a complete mess: people with 30 minute commutes need 3 hours to get home; one of chris’ co-workers’ 1 hr drive home turned into a 7 hour nightmare.

by far the best shot of the lot (the portrait of me) was taken by chris.  i think it’s a perfect example of that old photographer’s saying: “a great photo finds what’s important to the composition and leaves everything else out.”

ahh, so many photos to post and stories to recount from past 2 months! and, no time for attending to them!

what’s exacerbated the problem has been an increase in the rate at which i’ve been taking photos. you see, i indulged myself with a christmas gift this year of a new wide-angle lens (10-20mm); it’s been absurdly fun to use.

it’s changing so much of how i compose shots. for instance, i snapped this photo last year in grand central terminal with a standard 35mm lens:

that shot does a reasonable job of capturing the hustle and movement of rush hour, but it didn’t come close to doing the terminal’s architecture any justice. you don’t get a feel for the grandeur thats surrounding commuters.

but, with the new lens, i was able to stand in virtually the same spot i took the previous photo and instead produce:

it’s as if my camera used to have glaucoma or something.

our dinner plans foiled by the winter wonderland that is new england this evening, christina and i have stayed in and made sushi.  lucky for us, a terrific fish market is about 3 blocks from our apartment.  allegedly, japanese folks will call in orders all the way from albany and connecticut and then show up to get their fish.

it took me 20 minutes to get my fatty tuna; i got caught up talking with the old man who owns the shop.  he wonderfully fits all the grandfather stereotypes: wrinkles like a crumpled piece of paper, clothing item with bermuda written on it (hat), and purveyor of an unending stream of stories.

fun and interesting facts (do you always trust your grandpa?) he told me this evening:

• tuna weighs 80 pounds in the spring in bermuda.  by the time they migrate up to the new england area in the fall/winter, they can weigh up to 800 lbs.
• you used to be able to buy a 400 lb tuna for about $4,000 in the 1980′s.  today, that same fish goes for $20,000.
• the japanese buy freshly caught tuna here in new england, flash freeze them, and then send them back east.
• east cambridge used to be 90% italian only about 5 decades ago.  then, families either died out, or got wealthy and moved out to the burbs.  the portuguese next arrived; a similar exodus is currently underway in their community.  the current ethnic group replacing the portuguese: the yuppies.

the fish market in less arctic conditions:

1. i saw a remarkable overview talk today about the biodefense labs here at school.  it was given by one of the lab heads — a petite, middle-aged woman in a pretty skirt and wavy hair neatly pulled back in a ponytail. i think i described her to christina as looking like a gracefully aging hippie. which of course made her talk on things like toxin decontamination and adversarial weapons of mass destruction all the more startling. still, what i found most memorable about her talk was, well, her talking.

i don’t think i’ve ever seen an academic speak so crisply and with so much poise. i even counted — she averaged only one “um” every 10 sentences or so. i was blown away by how much her speech exuded expert! — especially since i had the chance to immediately contrast her talk with a typical grad student presentation given later that morning, the kind laced with crutch words such as “like” and “uhh” (words that i’ll admit my own speech is riddled with). note to self: start trying to speak with a more measured cadence and stop saying “um” every third word. maybe then people might think you know what you’re talking about when you speak.

2. chris and i saw the best opening act ever this evening. the band’s name is “le loup” and they opened for margot and the nuclear so and so’s (pictured below):

although most of the crowd had probably never heard of le loup (including us), they totally stole the show. there were about 8 band members on a 200 sq. ft. stage and guitarists were collapsing to the ground mid-solo (think michael j. fox at the end of johnny b. goode), a singer with tigers on his t-shirt was on his knees trying to beat the stage to death, and a french horn was even busted out. it was like watching the arcade fire playing on speed. they even sounded a bit like the arcade fire — le loup had this really big sound (a little less operatic though) that was quite special. (i honestly can’t think of another way of explaining it.) i didn’t take too many pictures, as i was having too good of a time. that and the lighting sucked.

during the bike ride home from the concert, chris and i reflected on how spoiled we are right now living in cambridge. one of the best rock clubs in new england is less than an 8 minute bike ride from our house; we never have to worry about things like subway schedules or parking lots whenever we want to catch a show. and, since the shows get out late and cambridge is sort of dead after 11 pm, we have the streets to ourselves whenever we bike back to our apartment. i hate to admit it, but this place is growing on us.

i tutor biology at the cambridge high school now. for the past semester, i’ve been waking up a little earlier twice a week and helping out a student with her homework and readings.

i decided to this for all the usual reasons. feelings of guilt induced by the inherent selfishness of trying to build a career. a desire to know that i have some practical utility. the satisfaction accompanying making someone else’s life slightly easier and perhaps even better.

what i didn’t foresee (and am so excited about that i thought i’d blog about it): how much richer my understanding of biology could become.

you see, i’d been so caught up in the minutia of my high school and college biology classes — essentially memorizing the names of enzymes in pathways or the precise number of ATP generated by certain cycles — that i kept missing the big pictures. for instance, last week, as i explained photosynthesis and cellular respiration to my student, i finally realized: life means turning light into carbon, and carbon into work.  that, in a nutshell, is what life is all about.

the profundity of that realization was awesome.  and, it once and for all organized all of those damn chains and cycles that i had previously memorized individually and therefore left unconnected, un-unified: the electron transport chain, the krebs cycle, the calvin cycle, glycolysis.  now, i could see the gears in the clockwork and appreciate their beauty.  walking outside and looking at a tree was suddenly like seeing the matrix.

scary to think that i could have gone through grad school without gaining an understanding of something so fundamental in biology.

still, tutoring hasn’t been all emotional fulfillment and intellectual gain: i dropped my breakfast banana on the ride into the lab from the high school on tuesday.

while walking past the brain and cognitive science building:

dude #1: you’ve been looking sick lately.

dude #2: yeah, i’ve got the flu or something — it’s no big deal.

dude #1: isn’t the flu at least going to slow down how much work you get done?

dude #2: shit, you’re right.  damn.

after going through some more snapshots from honduras, it’s become clear to me what’s holding back our currency: lack of spectacular facial hair.

say yeah!

i’ve got a gift for misreading the time and dates written on concert tickets. a couple of years ago, i managed to get chris to show up an entire week early to a rufus wainwright show in new york.  last monday was sort of a mini-reprise: i misread the middle east website and brought christina to a clap your hands say yeah concert an hour before the first act even came on.

you know what though — not such a bad thing.  of course, we lost an extra hour or two of our lives to sitting with our backs against a stage as a little indie/hipster fashion show paraded into the room.  but in return, we found ourselves close enough to the band to take photos like the one below.  that is, when we weren’t jumping up and down in the wave of amazing-music-and-maybe-a-little-bit-of-ecstasy-fueled-euphoria flowing through the crowd behind us.  i swear i actually heard the motors and gears whir in my brain several times that night, placing the sight and sound of the band playing and the crowd dancing at the top of the memory queue for “youth spent in cambridge.”