from the desk of stinkpot

someone‘s going to med school next year!

during the summer me and exercise were starting to get real intimate. then came the unpleasantness.

i’m glad to report that my body and i are starting to make nice again. i joined a frisbee team in the fall. i also rediscovered tennis, something i’ve been meaning to do for a while. tennis has been far better to me than i have been to it; teaching tennis remains by far the most lucrative job i’ve ever had (perhaps the only job that’ll pay a 16-year-old $22-an-hour and doesn’t involve trading brown paper bags under shadowy street corners.) it’s also nice to have a job where your tan comes from the sun, not an lcd screen.

and i digressed. point being, i’ve been playing a bunch of tennis lately and it’s been very fun. what’s helped is playing with an intramural team here at the ‘tute — i’ve hooked up with a really pleasant group of biological engineers. more importantly, of course, is that they’re tennis animals. together, we just won our league championship on sunday.

in celebration of eternal tennis glory, we proceeded to ruin a tennis court with puddles of cheap, sticky champagne. i smelled like a lousy new year’s party when i got home. hooray!

the impending cold here in boston makes me miss two things: the summer and new york. i thought it’d make me feel a warmer to go through some photos i took in chinatown this past summer; and, it worked. ironically, however, my favorite photos from that roll almost all take place indoors.

our gerbils are multiplying like rabbits.

this is all sort of according to our planned gerbil parenthood, of course. as our beloved pets have matured and slowly approached the ends of their little furry lifespans, we’ve worried about replacing them.

i don’t think we could just bring home some new gerbils from the pet store — human-gerbil love doesn’t work that way.

instead, we decided to do the poor man’s cloning experiment: we found a male gerbil and set him out to stud.

lo and behold, our gerbil ‘pumpkin’ pooped out these little martian vienna sausages a couple of weeks ago:

somehow, the miracle of development left behind those hairless pink things and arrived at the creature below.  if being cute was like releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, the baby gerbils would be china.

the catalyst for this post: frisky little pumpkin had her second (and last, as we’ve moved the gerbil stud “pretzels” to a new aquarium) litter today. it’ll be a long time now, before we run out of gerbil.

saturday was eventful. it began with a 6-hour frisbee tournament, played in a cold mist in suburban massachusetts. our team won the consolation bracket.

that night, chris and i, along with some friends from the lab, attended a pairs-themed costume party. i think the pictures do a good job of showing how good a time we had.

[i went dressed as me and chris was a "nerd groupie." her sign, cut-off in the photo, reads: "talk nerdy to me!"]

other friends had less calculus and more killing power:

jesse and hillary went as “the patron saint of bearded ladies and her disgusted suitor”

there was much merriment:

and i play dead:

as usual, the night ends in wigs

oh, the perils of hosting your webserver in your pantry.

my dsl upload connection was broken all week (consequently taking this site offline).

after hours calling tech support and waiting for technicians to arrive, i think everything is finally working again …

it’s late and i’m hungry, as i forgot to eat breakfast and dinner today. and now that it’s close to midnight and christina is asleep, there’s no point in going through the hassle of preparing a proper meal.

what i need right now is the balut man.

i learned about him the last time i went to the philippines. the balut man is sort of like a milkman who takes orders on the fly; he’ll walk by your house in the evenings screaming, “BALUUT, BALUUT.” of course, it being the philippines, what he’s selling isn’t quite as harmless as pasteurized milk. instead, he’s carrying a heated basket of 9-day-old fertilized duck eggs.

upon first learning this, one would think that the last thing you would want to do is get the attention of the balut man. but, seeing how hungry i was one evening, that’s exactly what my lola (tagalog for grandmother) does. she runs to the window and screams, “BALUUT DITO!” (which i’ll loosely translate as “balut me!”)

i swear, that’s how it works.

the balut man saunters into your driveway (to help wash down the duck eggs, he’s got fried pig skin and boiled peanuts in those plastic bags):

[click photo to enlarge]

apparently, he sells quite a bit of balut each night:

lola gets me and balut inside and begins to smirk as we unwrap the eggs. my appetite feels like it’s walked in on a bank robbery: scared, but a little bit intrigued.

and i’ll confess that further inspection challenged my digestive fortitude. for god’s sake, you could see the duckling’s eye and beak!

i go in like my first kiss — eyes open in shock.

i’m sure you can guess the end of this ugly duckling story: begins with d, and ends with delicious. think boiled egg, but with a slightly chewier, and much richer yolk.

hmm, maybe i’ll just boil myself an egg now for dinner …

ugh, it cost me two hours of sleep, but i finally got lightbox and gallery doing something that doesn’t suck.

check it out! [click on one of the images]

update: in another colossal  waste of several hours, i’ve finally wrestled the lightbox script into working with images linked from blog posts.  clicking on images in posts is now much more pleasing, as photos [especially landscapes] can easily be seen at resolutions that don’t suck.

a morale-challenged friend forwarded this to me today:

about 307,000 google results for: i really regretted quitting my phd

about 1,090,000 for:  quitting my phd was the best thing i ever did

i love mit and the characters she breeds

for instance, i played tennis today with a skilled, but a little out of shape alum. a former student, he was also a member of the inaugural mit blackjack team. i thought at first he was referring to the teams in “bringing down the house”; he clarified, “no, those guys were cowboys — the 10th generation or so. they were just playing around. they weren’t there to make money.” badass.

in any case, he goes on to tell me stories about what it was like to work in a 1980s software startup, way before the internet bubble: “we used to write drivers and sell them for $50,000; today, they give the damn things away for free!” evidently, he must have sold a couple of drivers — after starting and selling “a couple of startups,” my new acquaintance retired sometime in his mid-30s. with a tennis court in his backyard.

note to self: look more seriously into entrepreneurship. any job that leads to a tennis court in the backyard is worth doing.