Day 28: THE T

Aaaaand we're back to your regularly scheduled programming.  Well sort of.  Actually we are back to that programming on crack -- it's the three-day-doozy I have been dreading for sometime.  Today wasn't so bad, honestly -- at the (almost) end of the day was my first exam this week, the lab practical.  It was pretty wonky -- 24 stations with diagrams/dead animals/EKG traces/etc., with a minute and a half at each, the TA timing us and calling out "Switch!" every 90 seconds.  Sort of surreal.

Prior to that was an unfortunate delay on my flight from Chicago by 3.5 hours, nullifying the point of me getting up at 4:30 in the morning to race to the airport by L (El?).  It all ended fine, though -- which brings me the point of this post: THE T (in particular the red line) in Boston (and it's speed of transportation to/from the airport) can be phenomenal, despite what this website would have you believe and despite the fact that it closes an hour before bars.  Hop on, hop off right by my car.  Speed to work.  Work.  Cram.  Exam.  Then to MIT to work on talk.  Serious day.

Best part: sushi while finishing writing the talk.

Day 17: Genki Ya

 
Poem: Ode to Genki Ya in Eight Lines.

One word: Sushi.
Two words: Best sushi.
Three words: Best cheap sushi.
Four words: Best boat of sushi.
Five words: Best cheap boat of sushi.
Six words: Best boat of sushi in Cambridge.
Seven words: Best ten dollar takeout sushi in Cambridge.
Eight words: Best sushi across the street from my workplace.

Or, perhaps you like a Ryan-Gosling-style haiku better:

Hey, sushi, sushi
Yellowtail and salmon fish
Avocado, too

I mean honestly you can't describe the deliciosity of sushi in words, so why even bother?

*** Late-night edit (please excuse poor quality of photo, but it seemed so necessary).

The night turned more epic than expected.

As per usual, on a Thursday night when only normal events occur, I head over to Asgard for the LBK scene. Tonight, only one of the typical LBK-goers could make it (apart from me, obviously). As he noted, the band (namely the lead singer) seemed a little lackluster, though ever-enthusiastic when the two of us went on (my first song was great crack: "This Love", by Maroon 5, a karaoke first for me; my second was a standard and strangely enough, also a first for me, though it worked -- "Stand By Me").

Karaoke ended a touch early tonight, and since I had worked until after 10pm, I was ready to be out for a bit to offset the mind-numbingness of working 12 hours straight. With very little convincing, my fellow LBK compatriot and I set off down the road for the Cantab to see the Thursday-night glory which is the Chicken Slacks (to which a full post will be devoted I HOPE soon), and the epicness of the night had begun. It turned out that it was the last night with the 'Slacks for the last *original* remaining member of the band (a nothing-if-not-legendary fixture of the Cantab's) . The keyboardist, in fact. So it was quite bittersweet.... even though the Chicken Slacks as it currently stands is not what it used to be.

The best part of Central Square is that a random-walk home can be so serendipitous. Ours involved buying chocolate Cheerios (force-fed chocolate Cheerios, in my case), half participating in an offering of said cereal to stranger and having the entire box nipped, running into two men who were excited to celebrate the date and offered to share their enthusiasm with us (it had already become 4-20 at that point; no, the offer was not accepted), an encounter with a mayonnaise-eating musician at Hi-Fi, and a brief conversation about a potentially epic road trip to Nova Scotia / P.E.I. (a dream of mine since always). This night is just another reminder that I will be obnoxiously depressed to leave Cambridge.