I have learned so much in terms of life skills for the past 3 weeks. In fact, it’s quite a transformation, I think! The transformation is not so much how many things I can actually now cook, but the fact that I actually want to learn this stuff. 4 weeks ago I would have thought, “no way”, but honestly the cost of paying for every single meal does take a lot out of you. And so far buying groceries/cooking has definitely been more expensive/time intensive than just eating out, but it feels a lot more satisfying to spend $20 on groceries (which can make more than one serving) than $10-15 dollars on a dish you order at an overly-priced restaurant. 

The part that makes cooking more expensive for me in particular is that I really had absolutely nothing in terms of ingredients or cookware. In fact, up til today I had been borrowing all of my roommate’s pots and pans, but she’s a vegetarian so I couldn’t use her stuff to cook meat. So today I finally sucked it up and went to Chinatown to get some reasonably priced/reasonable quality kitchen supplies. So I got a pot, a frying pan, a knife, a wooden thing to stir ingredients with, a plate, a small bowl, and a set of 3 bowls that I just really really wanted because they made a really pretty set! The 3 bowls are all of different sizes and have matching colors! The smallest one is orange, the middle one is green, and the largest one is red. The red one will come in handy for mixing salads, the green one comes in handy for eating regular sizes dishes, and the orange one will come in handy for eating slightly smaller dishes. The small bowl I got for eating really small things like yogurt. The plate I got because I figured I’d need a plate every now and then.

Anyhow, I am also very clean about protecting the apartment space. Already I’ve taken out the trash twice (the subletters don’t do anything…), and I’m very OCD about making sure that every strand of fallen hair goes into the trash and not the ground. It is certainly a different feeling to live alone rather than at home with parents. With my parents it feels like it is “their” space and I am the little’un, whereas even though my rent is still being paid by my parents, it still feels more like “my” space because I’m fully responsible of myself in it. I can kind of see myself maintaining a home now…though the thought of children is still a stretch.

I really don’t understand people who say that they really want kids. I keep thinking about the ramifications of all that I will have to give up and it makes me cringe. One of the graduate students working in Sako’s research group is actually an adult with a child (apparently she taught high school for a couple years before deciding she wanted to pursue a ph.D.), so she leaves the earliest out of everyone to go pick up her child. The other graduate students stay until after 6 PM. Professor Sako apparently leaves at 5 every day too to pick up his kids or do other husbandly things. I mean maybe its a really nice thing to force yourself to quick work for a while and bond with the family, I wouldn’t really know. But at the same time you actually have to give up your time for someone else. So even if it is time that you willingly and happily give up (because human nature is to love one’s children), it still means giving up the things that you would have loved to do before kids popped out. 

Basically the psychology is this: Before kids, you’d have maybe taken every summer to travel to some place new for a week or two. You might have gone to the movies three times a month. You’d stay out late and go to the bar every Friday with friends or blahblah.

After kids: You can’t do any of the above (at least not for the first few years), but it’s ok because you love your kids and would rather watch them grow anyway. 

Except the catch is that you only love your kids because they exist. I mean you have to love them, thats the definition of parenthood and a consequence of maternal/paternal instincts. So you’d only “rather” give up things as a consequence of the existence of your children. Your ambitions in life change with the existence of children, it is not that you would actually rather have one or the other. At least that’s how I see it.

Well I don’t really want my ambitions to change. I don’t want to give up what I see now as a fulfilling life just to take come of some kids who will leave me once they turn 18 to pursue their own ambitions. 

But everyone who has both a heavy career and a family typically has a spouse who doesn’t do that much. Or they are just mega cool and can do everything. I don’t know if I can or want to do everything, and I definitely prefer to marry someone who has his own career. Aren’t people much more interesting that way when they have a job they really enjoy and are invested in? Then we’d have so much to share and talk about! Someone who just stays at home taking care of kids all day seems very boring, because what happens when our kids go to college? What will my spouse do with his time then? 

I can’t imagine being merely a housewife ever, because then my entire world is literally just myself. I mean your offspring carry your genetics so it is just breeding a bunch of you, and I don’t want to live in such a narcissistic setting. Because there’s so much out THERE. Science is so cool, it’s so much more than just my existence. Housewives or househusbands know and see such a little world, it’s kind of sad. 

But I’m also afraid that if I don’t have a family I’ll be left out of all of my friends lives since they will have their own families and I can’t exchange my own personal stories with theirs. And I think it’d be so annoying to attend get-togethers with friends and have their children flying around without my own children mingling in the mess. That way it would be funny; otherwise it would just be annoying that I can’t have alone time with my friends.

So I think the ultimate conclusion is that I will end up having a family, but certainly not til later. Definitely not until after I get my ph.D. Hopefully not even right after. SIgh where is my youth going? Why am I thinking of these things? Maybe because I’ve been around “mature” people the past few weeks. Literally everyone in Sako’s group are either married or engaged or in a long-term relationship. The youngest graduate student is engaged, and the other graduate students are all much older than me (around 10 years), so it makes sense for them to be either married or in a long-term relationship. 

In fact I am rather thankful that only 2 of the graduate student’s significant others came to the dinner on Friday, otherwise I would have literally been the odd one out. That would have been awkward. Ravi’s girlfriend is in some other place, John’s wife works really far away, and Matt isn’t even from around here (he’s only visiting to help with the research for a week). So it was Rachel’s fiance, Jen’s hubby (who works at Penn’s hospital as a research scientist) & son, and Sako’s wife and son/daughter who came. Imagine if EVERYONE’s significant other came. I probably would have considered not going, haha….too awkward…

Tonight after dinner I walked around…er…13th-18th street (that area) and it was SO NICE!! Certain parts of Philly can be really beautiful at night (and during the day too, but especially night). There was one particular street we walked on that had theaters everywhere, and then one building had BLUE lights emanating from the windows. It almost looked haunted, but in a very pretty way.

The night life there was amazing! We went to capogiro after dinner and all around us were other various restaurants and cafes and there were lines of people waiting outside and people were dressed very nicely and I really wish I could have hung around :(

I personally really dislike it when I hear people say they hate philly and that they will never come back here. I certainly didn’t think it was as nice as I’d hoped when I got here, but I’d seen enough nice ish parts to feel that I didn’t know enough of philly to judge. philly is not only big, but the east vs. west vs. north vs. south parts are all dramatically different from each other, so one really has no right to judge unless one has been everywhere. 

I especially started to change my mind when I went for the first time to old city. I went at night for some dinner thing, so I didn’t actually get to see much of it, but it was suuupper nice! A completely different style of city (i mean it is OLD city, meaning its architecture and buildings are from way back when). Then during spring fling I had a friend over and we went to explore old city for an afternoon together, and I got to see the famous independence hall and the liberty bell and ben franklin’s old neighborhood and all sorts of things!! 

Basically everything before 30th street is very nice. You will frequently encounter little streets and neighborhoods with tiny strange looking shops and cafes. Philly is nothing like the little suburban town I was from. Back in Cupertino, you can predict where everything is. Meaning a shopping center looks clearly like a massive, designated shopping center (i.e. Valley Fair Mall). Restaurant places looked clearly like restaurant places (i.e. gigantic plazas like Cupertino Village or that place with verde tea cafe and the elephant bar, which are just conglomerates of restaurants and grocery shops). And places like movie theaters were very obvious too (like AMC theaters and their huge obnoxious signs). But in Philly right around the corner might be some cafe or some random store or theater. Nothing makes sense, but it’s also very cool and whimsical that way! I really hope to visit more of the weird obscure places around town which might have some really cool things.

And man, the place I wandered around in tonight was so nice…if only I lived closer so that I could take random strolls during the night at will. In fact one of the grad students (I had dinner with my research group today) does in fact live there, and she says it’s very nice. I am jealous.

Also dinner today was a very strange yet normal experience. It was strange because when I stopped to think about it, it was such a random group of people I was with. I mean people choose to do research with each other for no reasons other than the research topic might be interesting and they need some research to do in order to get a phd or whatever. But it was also very normal because everyone got along and you could never tell how dramatically different all our ages were from each other.

Unfortunately three of the graduate students will be graduating next year :( so I won’t even get to know them for very long. I keep getting struck by how ephemeral relationships become as you grow older. That period of “oh everyone lives close to each other and is nearby” is truly a trademark of childhood where we all go the same three schools together (elementary, middle, and high school). In college, you meet people almost solely because of class or work reasons, but most people still live on campus so you will still have that “neighborhood” experience. But I think as you go to grad school and beyond people will literally just walk in and out of your life. 

Somehow most people seem to be fine with it but sometimes I feel pretty depressed because of it…whenever I say bye to people now I feel like it is for good. For example, I got to know Darci (person whose apartment I inherited) and her family for literally a day before they left to michigan. I liked them very much, but of course I hadn’t gotten to bond with them enough to miss their presence dearly, but I was still very sad when they left because part of me knows that the chances that I never see them again is much higher than the chance that I will bump into them somewhere. 

And there is also my current roommate, who also recently graduated but unlike Darci is staying an extra month to finish her thesis. I actually happen to really like her and we get along well, and I learn all sorts of cooking or whatever things from her. Luckily her boyfriend is doing MD Ph.D here so he will be at Penn for another 6 years (lol), so she will have to come back and visit or something (by the way her and her boyfriend are like the best couple I have ever met…I not only like them individually, but I REALLY like them together! Most couples are just like ok I see you guys are dating, but I don’t know what’s so special about the two of you combined. BUT THEY ARE SO COOL!).  

I guess I’m still not used to the idea of meeting so many new people all the time yet saying ‘goodbye for good’ to so many people as well. Somehow it really unnerves me. I’m really scared about what will happen in the future when people start getting married or having families, and I’m scared that I’ll get left behind if I somehow take longer to do both of those (particularly the latter of the two…). I don’t know. I know I’m too young to actually be worried about these things but I can’t help thinking about it sometimes. I actually really like a lot of the people I’ve met, and I don’t want to never see them again. 

Literally the only way for you to definitely stick with someone is if you are a family with them. Family sacrifices things to stay together, but friends tend to follow their careers and just facebook each other or maybe meet up once a year or something. Unfortunate truth :(

I can never seem to get enough sleep. As in I will get a good amount of sleep during the night, but no matter how many days in a row of good sleep I get, I STILL need my 8 hours for the following night. That’s so strange! I simply can no longer survive on less than 8 hours of sleep, which is why the past school year has been so painful because I will just feel like a zombie after those early morning vagelos seminars -.-

For example, this morning I totally thought I would wake up at 8:20, have time to eat breakfast since I’m trying to get into a habit of eating breakfast (and the previous day I had purchased these yummy mini croissants and a tub of yogurt to facilitate a quick and easy breakfast), go to the biochem seminar thing at 9, and go to DRL at 10. Instead I woke up at 8:20, felt miserable, went back to sleep, woke up at 10:30, and went to DRL at 11. D: What happened to all my planss….and I got 5-6 hours of sleep if I had woken at 8:20. In my high school days that would have been plenty. I don’t know what’s happened….

And also, going to lab takes a lot out of me. Or well today did. I went home with a huge headache, and it’s not even because I did much. I think it’s just very brain-power-dissipating when you’re struggling for hours with something you do not understand. So it turns out that a lot of research is understanding how to work with software other people wrote, and then debugging that software to get it to work on your computer which may lack certain files the program needs to run or lack the updated version required for various parts of the code to run (our problems today). All that took an entire day for me and the graduate student to work out, and for the most part it was another grad student who is a programming whiz (and also for some reason much older in age than anyone else) who worked it out. And it wouldn’t have been so annoying if I actually had had some experience with computers. Then it might have been more fun because I could have contributed more to the problem solving rather than sitting on the side watching/trying to learn through osmosis the way people handled these problems. It’s distressing how little experience I have with computers. I wish I had been coding since age 8. What was I doing at age 8? Oh, I remember. Nothing! (to be frank I actually cannot remember anything of my previous life as an 8 year old…what the hell was I doing?)

All this research is very annoying because I feel that I understand bits and pieces of everything but never the whole thing. Like even looking at the code, I could tell when say a variable was being defined or what variables a loop was looping over, but I had no idea what all the variables meant or what the code was doing. 

And I keep getting new articles to read on various research topics or instructions on how to use various software and I can always at most get only a vague understanding of them. Take for example this line of instruction regarding this strangely named GANDALF software:

“GANDALF is a direct fitting code designed to separate the relative contribution of the stellar continuum and of nebular emission in the spectra of nearby galaxies, while measuring the gas emission and kinematics.”

So the vague meaning I get from that sentence is that GANDALF separates some unwanted junk spectra from the stuff you actually want.  

But what is a “direct fitting code”? What does he mean by measuring gas “kinematics”? Kinematics is such a general term.

And then the next line:

“This is normally achieved by first fitting the stellar continuum while masking the spectral region potentially contaminated by nebular emission and by subsequently measuring the gas emission on the residual spectrum of such fit.”

Vague impression: Ignore/mask/hide rotten part of spectra and take data from the good part.

But what does he mean by “fitting the stellar continuum”? Fitting a light curve? What does “fitting” mean?? He uses that word in the first sentence too, and I don’t understand. 

It’s just so frustrating that all I have all these vague impressions but nothing specific to show that I really understand what’s going on. Anyway the rest of the instructions get much worse because they start talking about the actual parts of the code which uses even more jargon.

But at least I have a super nurturing, optimistic grad student to work with. She said to me after we got the code to work, “Are you ready to actually learn what it does tomorrow?” And I was like, “How are we going to do that?” And she said, “Teamwork!!” If I were working with me I would just sulk in a corner and develop massive headaches (I, like my mother, tend to get headaches very easily. Such is the reality of inheriting inferior genetics). 

Then by the time I get home I am really tired and don’t want to do anything, so I’ve started practicing unix commands instead since they are so simple and actually quite fun since it’s near impossible to screw something up since the commands are literally only a couple words long. I’ve been making new directors/files like a real whiz, and learned to write lists into files and combine two files into one big file and then sort them alphabetically and all that. It’s amazing how much you could do without pictures and a mouse. Very old school. So yeah, I try to make productive use of my evenings, but that’s not going so well.

OH but I have learned to cook some things lately! Very simple things, maybe it’s not considered cooking yet, but still I am proud. I’ve been asking everybody for recipes lately so I’m pretty serious about this. My roommate told me yesterday that she was very proud of my progress and said I was becoming “very domestic”. My parents haven’t called me in two weeks, and I really wish they would so that I could share with them this new personal growth. My mom never believed that I would actually cook, but clearly I am defying her negative thoughts about me.

I think the recent onslaught of Marvel movies is possibly the best series of super hero films ever!! Particularly because they are so well interconnected and very detailed in the backstories of every super hero. Imagine if Marvel just came out with the Avengers on its own. First of all they wouldn’t make nearly as much money, and second of all it would be so much less exciting to watch all our superheroes fight together without having made a prior connection to each of them.

Upcoming films include Thor 2 (2013), Iron Man 3 (2013), Captain America 2 (2014), and Avengers 2 (????). 

And on a similar note, the Dark Knight Rises and the Amazing Spider-Man is coming out this summer!! SO MUCH SUPER-HERO GOODNESS.

The amazing part of these modern remakes is just how…modern these superheroes are. As in you still expect an amount of cheesiness and some poor choice in costumes, but all these modern remakes have rendered these superheroes very human as well, as in you see more of their internal conflicts/internal mindset as well as their badass superpowers and all that. I’ve read a little bit of the comics and they’re rather dry in the sense that everything is very black and white and you don’t really see the personal side of these characters very much, but these recent screen adaptations have added a lot more personality and uniqueness and smarts to all these characters. 

The best part is that I find myself incapable of picking a favorite between these superheroes, because they are all truly unique in their own rights! Well I don’t really like batman and his dark/mysterious persona. the Dark Knight really bothered me because I have NO IDEA why batman did not kill the joker because he thought that that would somehow reduce him to the level of Joker. That made absolutely no sense. That’s like saying all murders are the same, which is clearly NOT TRUE (murdering a criminal is not the same as murdering an innocent child), and the fact that the killing of joker is equated to every other murder is just really stupid to me. So I think batman is dumb, and I don’t know why people keep over analyzing that scene where batman lets Joker go as being somehow really deep or thought provoking. 

So apart from batman (who isn’t part of the avengers anyway, in fact Batman isn’t even part of the Marvel franchise), I really don’t have a favorite. They are all so different and so cool! Like Thor is a demigod with long hair; spider-man has probably the coolest powers and costume of them all (so i guess he MIGHT be a favorite?); iron man is the smartest and has the coolest personality; the hulk is pretty much invincible and probably has the most difficult power to control; captain america represents something very profound of American culture and history (since he was invented during the time of WWII); and…yeah. They are ALL SO COOl, and they make the coolest team, and ugh Avengers was just so cool…

But the bad part about the avengers was that it felt a little like too much on one plate. EVERYTHING was going on. It is kind of strange that there are so many different types of superheroes in one story. You have your demigod (thor and Loki), your scientists (iron man and the hulk), your soldier (captain america), aliens (the enemies), and nuclear weapons too (a taste of american politics). In some ways a lot of these things don’t feel like they go together…I mean just putting Thor in with everyone else sort of trivialized everyone else’s problems. Like Tony Stark is a genius weapons engineer whose work obviously triggers military problems. Then you have Thor and his gang of aliens from other worlds. The two don’t even go together…and sort of eclipses Stark’s earthly issues. And all the other superheroes are earthlings so it’s all just very odd. But oh well, if you can suspend your disbelief a little bit then the Avengers is wonderful!

AND I HAVE TO SAY THAT these superhero movies are absolute proponents of science. At one point in the avengers Tony Stark and Dr. Banner (the hulk) have this highly technical scientific conversation (which probably made no realistic sense), but you see it makes so much more sense for scientists than say english or history majors to develop superhero or superhuman abilities. First of all usually contamination and stuff happens in labs, and second of all it takes a scientist to be able to create/innovate in order to harness his powers in a really cool way. So many of marvel superheroes are not only heroic, but they are SMART, technically minded people. The nonscientist heroes are more like pure soldiers (i.e., captain america, the black widow, hawkeye). You will never get a historian or english major to become a superhero.

As further evidence of this:

1. Batman: Bruce Wayne’s day job is to manage his parents company, Wayne Enterprises, which is a “technology and defense conglomerate”. And in the story, Bruce Wayne designs his own bat-mobile and weapons. That takes some technical genius.

2. Spider Man: Peter Parker is a science whiz, and he gets his powers by being bitten by some radioactive spider at a science exhibit.

3. Iron Man: Tony Stark is a genius scientist/engineer who leads Stark Industries and designed his own Iron Man suit from the bottom up. 

4. The Hulk: Dr. Banner is another genius physicist who designs some bomb which leads to his own over-exposure of radiation which leads to his becoming the Hulk.

5. X-Men: The leader of the X-Men, Professor Xavier, is yet another scientific genius who has some mutant mind and is the most highly regarded character in the Marvel Universe. 

6. The Fantastic Four: The four superheroes in this group gained their powers during some scientific mission gone wrong; The leader is Mr. Fantastic who is once again a scientific genius.

YOU SEE?! Marvel (and DC Comics, which created Batman) develops most of its superheroes from scientists (in particular physicists). And there is a clear reason for that. True superheroes have more than just superhuman abilities; they have to be smart and innovative as well. Knowing how to write poetry won’t win you any battles. 

Anyway there is nothing wrong with being able to write good poetry; that too is a rare talent. But I think there is an important point to be made about the power of science and engineering, for clearly scientists make better superheroes. 

Ohmygod, I want to be a superhero :(