Day 140: ArtBar and round 1 of goodbyes

Although leaving Cambridge has many disadvantages, one of its main advantages is that I have been making time to spend with close friends. And so have they. So tonight, T. took me out to dinner at a place he (and several other friends, actually) have been talking up for a while -- ArtBar, part of the Sonesta hotel.  The weather was being too unpredictable for us to be able to sit outside on the patio overlooking the Charles, but our table next to the window suited us quite well.

On the walk over (I walked to MIT to meet Tim, and then we walked the mile or so to the Sonesta), we crossed through the parking lot of a converted school (?) to business, which apparently happens to be the location where one of our good friends is now working.  Quoth Tim: "Oh look, that's where N. Works."  (Then point to the window:) "Oh look, that's N."  And so it was. He came outside and we chatted a bit then carried on to dinner.  Quite tasty, and with some sort of very festive drink dispensing device (see picture: that's what you get if you aorder a drink "for two").

After dinner, Tim walked me back to Cuchi Cuchi, where I was meeting the girls from my year at MIT for a drink (well, those who remain -- 2/5 of us are gone!).  It was really nice to be able to spend the end of the evening with just the four of us -- it seems that we had been trying to coordinate this all summer and it never quite worked.  Cuchi Cuchi was one of the first places we tried such a "girl date" in our first year... nice memories there.  It's less than a block from 905 Main and just a few blocks up from MIT.

Funny thing about whining all summer about how you're leaving is that when you're still here a few days into the month of September, you start getting people asking confusedly, "Aren't you supposed to be gone?"  Four days!

Day 139: River Gods

The moving continues!  This morning I shipped some extraneous packages that I had been hiding at MIT, and helped G. move some more things from MIT into their new place, as well.  But then it was back to the grind -- to work, then to Calliope.  It felt wonderful to have those tiny bits of sanity back in place, even if it's just for a few more days.

After choir D. and I looked at each other and asked, "Do you have anything planned tonight?" to the other.  It was in a state of shock we realized that there was nothing planned, and so we took the opportunity to go to one of my favorite bars in Cambridge -- River Gods, pictured above. Always cool music (you can't see it, but there is a DJ way up in the corner behind the bar, perhaps even poking his head out?), always cool (and changing) decor, depending on the season, and good veggie options for food (as well as good beers on tap).  The first Friday of grad school at MIT, I remember for some reason my adviser and his wife took me along to Trader Joe's (probably because we were all leaving lab at the same time and they had a car), and as we passed this place on the way back to my house they gave it a shout out.  Very good vibe there.

As D. was giving me some very good life lessons and suggestions for how to proceed in grad school tonight, I got a call from a friend of mine who lives in Colorado but who often travels to Boston for business.  I have been planning on staying with him one of the nights of my trip out west, but he was apparently also in town tonight!  So he swung by and said hi, was nice to see him.  Five more days.

Day 116: Keezer's Classic Clothing... and empty desks.

Today started out with a bit of relaxing and then the beginning of a quest for a tux.  I find it amusing that I can buy a long black $10 skirt at TJ Maxx or Marshall's or whatever and it counts as "concert black formal", but men are required to acquire something that is priced in the hundreds of dollars even for a rental to achieve the same bar.  It must be the only place in the system where fashion financially favors women (whoa, lots of alliteration there).  Anyhow, I felt it somewhat my responsibility to assist in the tux-searching process since I had coerced D. into singing in the Mercury Orchestra concert, and somewhat less so to join Calliope, both groups requiring fancy concert-wear.

Thus I stopped by Keezer's (cool name for a used tux store, eh?) by myself this morning and had a lively chat with a gentleman who was working there.  It was a pretty kooky and fun place to go, and I sort of wished I got to wear a tux myself.  It's like men just strap these things on and there's a transformation -- I feel like I have to pinch and pull at myself forever to get real change.  It turns out that buying a used tux at Keezer's is oodles cheaper than renting one, and it also turns out that I didn't really need to do a scope-out because they had oodles of tuxes.  And shirts.  And suits.  And other paraphernalia.  It's an adorable place!

The silliness of the tux store (let's admit it; tuxes are pretty ridiculous) was balanced out by the sadness of cleaning out my MIT office this afternoon.  Decision-making is often a difficult process for me, as I like to always choose the best thing, but it's even worse when the thing you are choosing is what to get rid of.  Some of the books will stay at BCS for whomever wants to use them, a few came with me, a couple sold back to Amazon.com, some gifted to Max (who bought me dinner at MoS in exchange -- see Max's story-telling salt and pepper shakers above, all within the territory of hanging out with developmental cognitive scientists).

Day 108: The yoga scene

Back in the day when I was a graduate student at MIT and therefore had access to all sorts of delightful perks, I would often go to the weekly group classes at the gym across the street from my building (in the Stata center, which you can see in the background image for this blog).  This mostly involved power yoga, pilates, and something called "PiYo" (an attempt at a pilates/yoga fusion).  Vinyasa yoga was incorporated in most of these (even in the pilates to some extent), but somehow most of the courses managed to avoid the true "hold-this-pose-until-your-muscles-are-burning" part of vinyasa that gives it its punch. [Also probably the case that you don't get the most advanced / difficult classes in the world at the Stata Center.]


When my friend Az asked if I wanted to go with him to a vinyasa class, I was excited -- in fact another friend had just thrown a free class pass my way a few days before.  So A. and I went to O2 yoga in Somerville this afternoon after work, and I must say the 75-minute class really took it out of me.  My body used to feel like a nice happy sack of goo after pilates at MIT, but after this class left me feeling more like a sad sack.  Well, not too sad -- muscles felt used, but in the right way (not the over-stretching way, which is why I used to stick to pilates over yoga), body felt completely mellow, and my brain really felt quieted.  I will have to re-visit.

Even with the very zen feeling, I managed to make the most of the rest of the evening and got to see a bunch of great folks at two of my favorite just-north-of-Central-Square establishments -- the Cellar and Cantab.  [One of my friends brought a girl who looked absolutely terrorized at the prospect of entering the Cantab as we approached the bouncer who was checking IDs and seeing the folks who were entering; we had to pay her cover and coax her in gently.  We all had a great time dancing, though!]

Day 70: The charm of the Thirsty Ear

This is the day when the idea of putting on a play with friends this summer became real, rather than just (very) wishful thinking!  After going back and forth with S. (who will act as director), it finally came to light that everything seemed a go with running the play in Georgetown, MA, where the Georgetown Theater Workshop S. has long been affiliated with is located, rather than somewhere in Cambridge. Pros: real lights and sets and things; cons: no AC, 45 min away; guess which won out?  As we had no prospects in Cambridge, it was quite easy to decide that Georgetown was a winner and that we had better act fast (groaning here; this one's for Ed) if this were to happen.  And after I finally got my hands on a copy of the script (Rumors, by Neil Simon) and read it through -- I was sold.

After work I planned to head to the Thirsty Ear to read through the script quietly.  [Aside: I tend to give the Thirsty more of a bad rap than I should, as it's a perfectly lovely venue to gather and has great beers.  This is pretty much only because my affinity lies with the only other MIT on-campus pub.  I like the more ruffian-looking crew gathered at the much more charming Muddy Charles, which has the additional perks of being both located in beautiful Morss hall on the Charles River and also the primary drinking site of the illustrious Straw Dogs.] However, the whole reason for choosing the Thirsty for this quiet evening was that a friend of mine was working tonight at the door.  It being much more fun to sit with him than on my own, and him being much more obliging than most, I was given the pleasure of reading the play in its entirety aloud to him at the door.  Our conclusion was that Neil Simon is a farcical genius and that this play must absolutely happen.

Day 64: Close Encounters of the Veggie Kind

Truth be told, I have put great efforts into discovery of the best grilled cheese and the best cheeseburger in Cambridge, but not until recently did I come to believe that a similar quest for veggie burgers might be in order.  Mostly because I feel like veggie burgers are usually crumbly bundles of poorly cohered beans and tofu - not so appealing, right?  Well, I stand corrected.

In addition to providing an edgy yet very Cantabrigian environment (complete with the fixture of a periodic table of burgers and other foods chalked onto its back wall and serving as the menu), the Miracle of Science also serves up a damn good veggie burger.  Saved by the grace of not being a vegan burger, some magical creamy sauce saves the day, and it's delicious.  I stopped by with a friend after our choir practice in the Back Bay, and at first we thought we could get away with splitting one... which turned quickly into two (and I'm pretty convinced he could have gone further if we'd have let him).

After a long day of work, softball (we came thisclose to not losing...), and singing some masterful pieces from a piecemeal mass (more on that later), Miracle was the perfect end to the day.

Day 61: Graduation/Tropical Mashup

Today I did something I nearly never do: skipped a party.  When I awoke at noon (I often sleep in but noon is pushing it for me), I went back to sleep for two more full hours.  I believe the last time I slept in till 2p must have been in college during finals week or something.

Even though I missed the Pride parade party on a friend's roof deck, there was plenty of celebrating today.  One of my MIT classmates was also graduating with a Master's degree this week, and his parents were in town so he through a celebratory bbq today.  Another classmate and I arrived at a standard fashionably late time, an hour after the start, and we were still the first ones there.  We continued on for many hours, which also involved the joining to the party of another displaced "tropical" party.  Apparently they started out at an apartment in Inman that was just too small and were digging the idea of a backyard bbq-style party.

It was great to see so many of the MIT classmates and friends I have met over the years.  The evening culminated in seeing a performance at the Cantab (downstairs) of a friend's band, dancing our arses off, and some nice late-night chats.  What a way to go out.

Day 60: Commencement

Lesson learned today: sleeping through alarms and phone calls due to karaoke-induced exhaustion and therefore arriving three hours late to your MIT graduation does not mean you cannot walk. It did, for me, mean that people were worried, but also that I got to stand in the shade with friends for 60 minutes rather than sit in the beating hot sun with people I barely knew for three hours and then slip into the line to walk across the stage to receive my diploma.


It was a beautiful day until about 3pm, well after graduation was finished.  Commencement at MIT is held in Killian Court, the lawn in front of the dome on Memorial Drive, on the Charles River.  Absolute perfection for a graduation ceremony in which everyone, undergrads included, gets to walk, so there is a lot of watching and waiting.

After graduation, I did a brief stroll around campus with the friends who came (E., T., and two of my roomies), which was lovely and resulted in many pictures.  Then to BCS, for a brief reception, and back home for some rest. Z. cooked one of my favorites, mac and cheese, for dinner, which was great, and then we all met up with some folks from my choir for the monthly karaoke sesh at Charles Playhouse.  Great end to a somewhat stressful day.

Cheers to MIT for being organized enough to remember to call the name of the girl who overslept by about three hours.

Day 58: MIT Optical

Today was yet another reminder of how things just WORK at MIT. Though I walk at graduation this week, the date on my diploma will say that technically I graduated in February, 2012. I'm not sure if it's just because MIT is fantastic to their alums or because I haven't really left the system due to graduation being later in the week, but at any rate, I am still in their system for pretty much everything other than health insurance (I guess you have to draw the line somewhere, right?).  Meaning that my card access still works, I still have space in the graduate lounge of the building I used to work in, and my student ID doesn't even expire until sometime in 2013.

Today I took advantage of one of those perks and stopped by MIT optical.  I had broken my glasses a couple of weeks back but kept putting off having them fixed because I was scared of what the cost might be.  So I meandered over to the student center on Mass Ave (anyway can go in there, not just MIT students) and headed to the basement where MIT Optical is located.  I have never actually purchased eyewear from the store, but the guys who work there are as sweet as can be and will give your glasses a "tuneup" for free (i.e., cleaning/tightening etc.). Usually my problem is that my glasses are too loose and fall off my face, but this time I was told that my glasses busted apart when dropped because they were too tight. The method the guy described for fixing them sounded pretty intense, I'll admit, so I was a little worried it would be kinda pricey. Newp. Five bucks.

Apart from relieving myself of eyewear, I also picked up commencement tickets. Not yet sure who is going to be able to make it, but they are pretty tickets [see above], so I have high hopes for the ceremony.

Day 57: The 'Snake

Tuesdays are serious days this summer.  In addition to Calliope (choir), which has always been on Tuesdays, the Straw Dogs softball games are also on Tuesdays this summer, meaning that I dash from the Fresh Pond area down to MIT around 4:30 and don't get home until 10p at the earliest, after Calliope.  Today was the first of such days, so I suppose I shouldn't be speaking in generics quite yet. However, I have a fairly certain feeling that getting home at 10pm on Tuesdays is not going to be the norm, due to the presence of a nice little place we like to affectionately call the 'Snake (the Rattlesnake, located on Boylston St. in Back Bay; pic above taken around the corner on Newbury St.).

It's just around the block from where the choir practices (at Emmanuel Episcopalian, a really pretty church which is beautiful on the inside... the kind of place I used to fantasize about as a kid who wished she went to boarding school; yes, weird).  And it's got some tasty stuff.  D., who just joined the choir after I pestered for a while, was fairly disgusted by my zest for the macaroni and cheese, which, in addition to being basically the antithesis of all things vegan, includes (along! with bacon) Taza chocolate.  Sound gross?  Maybe, but I find it almost as delicious as the peanut butter burgers at both Bukowski's.

Yay softball!  Yay choir!  And yay for adding more chocolate and peanut butter to the world. :-/?

Day 51: Building 9

First, a story of old. During my first week at MIT, in fact the week before classes even started, there is a week-long graduate student orientation.  This involves various activities including meet-and-greets, trips to go fruit-picking and boating on the water and the like, receptions with food, and the like.  Interestingly, ours also included a scavenger hunt.  If you read these three posts, you will know that I (and clearly many of my friends, as well) have a particular penchant for scavenging.  Our team did not do so poorly that year, but there was one spot that escaped us -- the "Holy Grail" of MIT hacking (see also this post). A little bird told us that it was located somewhere in Building 9, likely in a basement somewhere.  Now, if you've never poked around the bowels of MIT, you won't know this, but MIT can be pretty intimidating in its winding underground corridors stuffed with nuclear engineering labs and sub-basements, and our essential flaw was that we weren't quite cheeky enough to find what we were looking for.

Later that evening there was another event, a reception in Morss Hall, and it was very nice -- excellent food, cheap (well, free for us, technically) wine, and beers.  After, we crossed the Mass Ave bridge into Boston and went to a "bro" bar on the other side, the Pourhouse.

Well, as you might imagine, by the end of the night our spirits were fairly high.  We crossed back into Cambridge and decided that we would indeed find that item from our list.  So, we re-entered the basement, and apparently we had drunk our courage right up, because find the ORIGINAL hacker's code, we did.

Tonight, I saved my friends some drinking and some courage and re-found it for them.  We markered up the walls and enjoyed the small shrine of hacking that resides in ... well, I can't tell you exactly where :).

Day 46: City within a city

One of the clues on the Boston-based scavenger hunt we embarked upon last weekend was "A hidden village in the middle of the city".  The answer (guessed with a little bit of help from our friend google) was Bay Village -- which, according to Wikipedia, is "...the second smallest and arguably least-known officially-recognized neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts."


My favorite mini-city within the city of Cambridge is not quite a neighborhood, though it certainly can feel that way sometimes.  Do any analysis of free-association of words to Cambridge[, Mass.], and MIT has gotta come up.  The dome graces the Charles.  The Stata Center adorns the area between the highly-trafficked Mass Ave. and Main Street.  Burrito lovers know the student center for it's glorious Anna's Taqueria (and I know it for its 24-hour grocery with the sandwich bar).  There's now a fancy pizza place / coffee place across the street named for the crime/parking region in which MIT is located (Area Four -- also where my house is located).  I think full-time students (both grad and undergrad) often end up treating their school as though it's a micro-city, and that's certainly been my experience for large parts of my tenure in this city.

Although I'm officially done, my most recent desk still hasn't been fully cleaned out (including computer-y stuff, those ducks in a row, space heater, some peanut butter, the essentials) -- which means that every so often a visit to the graduate student lounge where it is located is in order.  I decided to work from there today in lieu of driving back and forth to Fresh Pond, and got struck by yet another pang of wow-I'm-gonna-miss-this-place -- but this one was just for the Engineers.

Day 43: Beautiful Waltham.

Second trip to Waltham this month -- and I'd never been before. When I drove with E. to pick up his parents for Mother's day a few weekends ago, I found the place to be very charming. They live quite near the main drag, and there was the "Watch City" (as it's called) Festival going on, with historical re-enactors abounding.

Today's trip was much less scenic, mostly due to the dreary difficulty of driving in the Cambridge rain.  It took L. and I nearly an hour to get there.  Our aim was simple: attend a Mary Kay party. Whatever that meant. A friend from choir recently began dating a girl who does Mary Kay professionally, full-time. I was very curious and told her I'd love to attend a party sometime.  I was thinking low-key, have a beer, watch some people play with makeup, easy.  I was not aware that it would entail a 2-hr commute and three hours of being told how to properly put on exfoliant and the like.  Nonetheless, L. and I agreed that it was pretty informative... and we allowed ourselves to agree to call a toll-free number to give some feedback on a promotion they are doing.

Well. After, we were feeling (or at least I was) the need for a relaxing beer, which was found at Ashdown (one of the campus pubs at MIT).  Then, we joined one of my roommates at Cantab for bluegrass night -- a very low-key way to end a somewhat high-stress evening.

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 24: The Wrong Campus Pub

Today, a friend of mine dissertated (!) and now has a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard.  Pretty sweet.

I couldn't make it to the actual defense because I had to work, but of course there were festivities afterward.  So after work, I headed over to Harvard's Campus to the Queen's Head, Harvard's answer to some combination of the Muddy Charlies and the Thirsty Ear (the "other" on-campus pub at MIT).  It turns out my memory had just re-written itself, overwriting "Cambridge Common" with Queen's Head. For so many reasons, Queen's Head was the Wrong Campus Pub.

I figured my mistake out pretty quickly thanks to my helpful friends who were already at the right location, and much fete-ing was done for the dissertee.  In fact, JR and I managed to persuade a big group of folks out for live-band karaoke later in the evening.  But while I was still at the Wrong Campus Pub, so many Wrong things happened. It's located in the basement of Memorial Hall (pictured above), and as you can see even with my crap-camera-phone shot, it's a lovely old building (albeit a shortened version of a lovely old building, according to the story whereby the Cambridge fire station located across the street sees a part of Harvard burning and lets it burn, an answer to a many-years-old standing feud between Cambridge at-large and Harvard at-small).  In the basement, there are some pretty narrow halls that contain several extra tables where one can drink beer purchased in the pub, but there is not much room between the walls of the pub and the exterior walls of the building.  For some reason, some Harvard folks decided it would be a great idea not only to throw some sort of rather-obnoxious-and-flamboyant-Oscar-Wilde-style-dramatic-music-ky thing inside the pub, but also to have its cast members darting back and forth wildly amongst beer drinkers in the hall.

So thing number 24 that is right with Cambridge is how deliciously *wrong* Harvard can be.  (But then again, it is, more often, right. :))

Day 23: Muddy Charles

Anyplace that claims it's a decent university has to have an on-campus pub.

MIT actually has two. One attempts to be social, but never has a good feel.  It's in a dorm, so it's mostly first-years and dorm hangers-on.

The other does not attempt to be anything other than a room in an old, old building across the Charles River from Boston (and right across from the MIT sailing pavilion), and it accomplishes that quite well.

Both have cheap beer, but the Muddy boasts free food (Wednesday is wings night) -- and you can bring your own.  I am never going to be able to portray the atmosphere right -- it's got a couple TVs, but it's got more wood than TVs. You can get a pitcher of Rapscallion for $12.  Down the hall is an enormous ballroom where there is often ballroom dancing being practiced.  Upstairs there is a climbing gym.  You can get up onto the roof on warm summer nights (and I have).  There are enormous pillars outside, in the entrance, above the stone steps leading down to Memorial Drive.

It's a pretty great place to go after sailing, or softball practice, or just a long day in lab.  Here's to you, Muddy Charles, for having such a great name and for being there.

Day 9: Harvard Coop

This morning on my way to work I very responsibly stopped by the Harvard Coop to pick up some lab goggles (which I had neglected to purchase before the heart dissection lab a few weeks ago, woops) for my biology class. Today we examined and stained some zebrafish embryos / larvae (see, for example, Mr. Z above -- I swear, the one we stained was identical to that image, which blew me away). I was pretty sure I was going to find this horribly dull, but it turns out that I find embryo development (at least of zebrafish) to be rather fascinating. And they do it all in like *two days* (well, almost).

Anyhow, the venture this morning into the Coop reminded me of how much I like it. I entered through the Brattle St. side entrance today, but entering the main drag off of Mass Ave is like entering into the library from the Disney animated version of Beauty and the Beast. It's seriously old-school, floor-to-ceiling books around the entire store, and if you're standing behind the cash register on the second floor looking out the front entrance, it's a pretty damn good view too.

I was also reminded of how Harvard includes MIT in its Coop in a special section: "Harvard graduate schools and MIT apparel". MIT doesn't do that for Harvard :)