Perspective, or, "A Survivor's Tale," or "Post-Neuroscience Buffy .gif Overload"

A little over a year and a half ago, I broke up with my first "serious" boyfriend.  That was really hard.

Then, a little over a week after that happened, I moved to Hawaii for a year, a place where I felt the most isolated (both emotionally and geographically) I've ever felt.  That was also really, really hard.

However, something happened yesterday that made those two experiences feel like squishy little kittens of nothingness.

I finished Medical Neuroscience.

Oh, you don't think that's impressive?  Well, read on.

What is Medical Neuroscience, you ask?  Well, let's take a semester-long course wherein you learn about the entire nervous system and all of its functions and physiology and whatnot.  Sounds pretty hard?  Well, then you take that semester-long course and you cram it all into five weeks.

Yeah.

It was a really cool class; the material was wicked interesting and I learned a crap-ton about the brain.*  It's all so fascinating and brilliant, the way the nervous system works, and it gave me so much insight about the way my mind works.  However, I have never studied that hard for anything in my whole life.  I looked in the mirror one day and my butt was no longer there because I worked the entirety of it off.**  I clocked a ridiculous amount of time in the grad student study lounge, shutting myself away from all other humans (save my study group and two random Medical Sciences students who also lived up there) while I absorbed an entire textbook's worth of material.

I wish studying worked like this.

It was probably good that I stayed away from everyone though, because for those five weeks, grooming and all appropriate social demeanor just went completely out the window.***

This would have been right after the vestibular system lecture, I think. 

But seriously, it was so hard.  There were times when the whole thing felt incredibly overwhelming and I just wanted to die.

Sums up my feelings about the cerebellum pretty well.

But then there would be times when I felt like I understood the material really well and it was awesome.  At any rate, the final exam yesterday was a killer.  It was hard, but it definitely could have been harder which meant one of two things:  either 1) the test was just easy, or 2) all of my studying actually did something.  I'd like to think it was a little of both.  Regardless, it's over now.  I can't believe that it's over.  As I was leaving the test I thought, holy crap, I'm done with neuroscience; that was the hardest thing I've ever done.  So hard.  Of all of the things I was looking forward to about this program, this course was not one of them.  I'm a bone person, not a brain person.  I knew this class was going to be a killer, but guess what?  It didn't kill me.  I survived.

Of course, we didn't get our grades yet, so I very well could be jumping the gun with my very confident-sounding survivor's tale here.

*The fact that I now regularly use words like "medial lemniscus," "cholinergic basal forebrain," and "ventral-amygdalo-fugal tract" means that I have to balance myself out by using the words like "crap-ton."

**That's not true.  My butt is still there, and it looks quite cute in skinny jeans.  Probably because the stress of neuroscience cut my calorie intake down by a third while upping my metabolism by 15%.

***My current occupation is "post-neuroscience makeover."

What Should I Call Neuro Lab?

When people who aren't in our lab group are in our lab...

I want to be like,

But change "she" to "he"

Ideas for 2014

I don't like the idea of New Year's Resolutions.  I can commit to being a better person for three-to-four weeks without the influence of a major holiday.  Instead, I'm just making a list (because I love me some lists) of things that I am (probably) going to do in the year 2014.

1. Go to my ten-year high school reunion (provided it doesn't conflict with school).  I do this to honor all of the nerds/social outcasts who got hotter in their twenties who came before me.
2. Quit Facebook.  Honestly, I'm only still on Facebook because that's how former senior class president is going to get in touch with everyone about the aforementioned class reunion.  Other than that, it's just gotten depressing, what with everyone getting married and having babies and checking in on Foursquare when they're all hanging out without me.  So after I find out the where and the when of the big shindig, I'm out, at least for a little while.  The drawback to this is that I'll have to find another way to share my blog posts.
3. Go to California.  I've never been, but I really want to.  I want to see celebrities and eat weird food and check out the ocean and big trees and whatever else they have there (probably nothing Disney-related, though, because I'm still poor).
4. Go on (at least) twelve dates.  I decided for no rational reason that I want to go on one date a month.  Of course, in a society where it's still considered taboo for women to take control of their own romantic pursuits (come on, seriously, it's 2014), this might be tricky.  But if I'm ever going to develop normal human social skills,* I should practice dating.  I put my roommate Judy in charge of making sure I don't talk myself out of this
5. Stop drinking Diet Coke.  This is the closest thing I have to a New Year's resolution because in exactly three weeks I am going to say "screw it" and drown my sorrows in that sweet, sweet, caramel-colored aspartame.
6. Have four fancy dinner parties.  I did this in 2013 for Hanukkah and it was a success.  It was also exhausting, which is why I'm only going to do one every three months in 2014.  But when I say "fancy," I mean fancy.  I might even use cloth napkins.

I feel like I should promise a quarterly report or something on these.  I will say that I will much appreciate encouragement in the form of comments!

*And not have my next-door neighbors call the cops because they haven't heard from me in a while and now there's a weird smell coming from my apartment and the cops show up and find twelve cats (eleven of them mine, the other one climbed through the window because it had the hots for the blind one--did you ever notice how whenever a lady has several cats, one of them is always blind?) eating my decomposing corpse while a Dance Moms marathon plays in the background.

300

This is my 300th post and also the last post of 2013.  Usually when it's the last post of the year, I do a "Year in Review."  But as much of a stickler for tradition as I am, I'm not going to do one this year.  2013 has been the worst year of my life, and I don't want to spend several paragraphs talking about why.*

I feel like I'm walking on this wire dividing the Hope that next year will be better and the Fear that this year was only the beginning.  I guess the stroke of midnight will be toss of the coin to see what happens.  Either way, I'll keep on blogging.

Happy New Year.

A "fun" picture to lighten the melancholy

*This is not to say that no good things happened this year, but...yeah.

Restaurant Review: Washington Square Tavern

I grew up watching Cheers on TV with my parents, and then I spent the last nine (ugh) years watching How I Met Your Mother.  These shows were my original perception of what bars were like, and then I moved to Boston and actually started going to bars sometimes and I was like, television LIED to me!!!!  Real-life bars are not like TV bars and therefore I dislike them.  Here are the two things I dislike about bars:

1. They are full of noisy people trying to talk over crappy music.
2. There's always a TV playing sports.

Washington Square Tavern, however, is a bar, and yet has none of these things.  The music was soft and non-crappy, and there was no TV.  Instead, there was candlelight and there were old-timey books on the walls.  Granted, I went on a Monday night, but I get the sense that it's not noisy and annoying at any time of the week.

I went here last week with two friends.  We all ordered burgers, despite the plethora of other fancy-sounding things on the menu, because the sole purpose of the outing was to get burgers.  The burgers were delicious.  I ordered mine "medium" and it was very juicy (as we were told/warned multiple times by the server and host).  When I go again (and I will), I will take special care to position the first bite over my fries so that they will also be covered in juice, because it turns out French fries covered in what is essentially blood are delicious.  My only issue with the burger was in the shape of the patty which resulted in a rather tall burger, but I'm told the shape contributes to the juiciness, so I'll let it go and just fault my jaw for being non-detachable.

The service was fantastic as well.  The host was really nice and you could tell that he recognized the "regulars."  I hope to one day become a regular so that whenever I walk in I will immediately be presented with a Diet Coke and a burger.   

Washington Square Tavern is located at 714 Washington Street in Brookline, MA.  Find their menu here.

My Grown-Up Christmas List

This is not a post about one of the cheesiest Christmas pop songs ever written.*  Instead, this is my grown-up Christmas list, i.e., a list of stuff that isn't the fun, exciting stuff that a kid would want (like a chemistry set or a box of microscopes or a pony).  Nor is it some cheesy Amy-Grant-esque list of things that my superego tells me that I should want (like world peace or a husband or normal serotonin levels in my brain).  I'm talking about actual stuff, here, people.  As in the stuff that is my response when my mom asks what I want for Christmas.  So here it is:

1. Black boots, to wear on days when I can't wear brown boots because mixing neutrals still scares me a little.  I have to pick these out when I go home because my feet and calves are finicky.  
2. A bathrobe, to minimize my walking-around-naked time.
3. Season one of Grimm on DVD.  This is one of those things that I have to order myself because the parents haven't figured out Amazon, but that they're going to pay for and wrap and give to me on Christmas Eve.  Also my plan is to watch it at home with my parents to convince my mom that Grimm is better than Once Upon a Time.  Because it is.  So much better.
4. Black and blue Sharpie pens.  These are the best black pens and the second-best blue pens, though others may disagree.  But let's all take a second to acknowledge the fact that I'm asking my parents for PENS this Christmas.  #nerdalert 



These are the pens.  They come in a crazy assortment of colors,
as you can see, but that's a little too much for me.
But they've revolutionized my note-taking.

Maybe this is a lame Christmas list, but it's interesting because this is the first time in a long time that I remember actually asking for things for Christmas because I like being self-sufficient and taking care of all my own temporal wants and needs, so this is quite a big step in humility for me.  Finally, just in case there's a Santa Claus, these are just the things I'd like my family members to get for me, and if an awesome herringbone tweed blazer or some funky statement jewelry just happened to show up under my tree, it wouldn't be the worst thing.


*My sister owns an Amy Grant CD; it makes me a tiny bit embarrassed to be related to her, but I can forgive it because it was the late nineties and it was among the first three CD's she ever got.

My Music, December 2013 Edition

I haven't done a "My Music" post in a while, I realized.  Also, this will be my 297th blog post, and I think it would be cool to get to 300 by the end of 2013.  So here are my current "Top 25 Most Played" on iTunes:

1. "C'est la Mort" - The Civil Wars
2. "Poison & Wine" - The Civil Wars
3. "Hold On" - Mary Beth Maziarz
4. "How" - Regina Spektor
5. "Thursday" - Asobi Seksu
6. "Organ Donor" - Jeremy Messersmith
7. "Snow Day" - Jeremy Messersmith
8. "Look At Me Now" - Karmin
9. "Elsewhere" - Sarah McLachlan
10. "Falling" - The Civil Wars
11. "I Want You Back" - The Civil Wars
12. "Anything Could Happen" - Ellie Goulding
13. "My Eyes" - Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day (from "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog")
14. "Shake It Out" - Florence + the Machine
15. "21 Guns" - Original Broadway Cast of American Idiot
16. "The Call" - Regina Spektor
17. "Gravity" - Sarah Bareilles
18. "the zombie song" - Stephanie Mabey
19. "Skeleton Song" - Kate Nash
20. "Safer" - Krysta Rodriguez (from First Date:  The Musical)
21. "Timshel" - Mumford & Sons
22. "Promise Me This" - Pancho's Lament
23. "Homeward Bound" - BYU Singers and Concert Choir
24. "Explosions" - Ellie Goulding
25. "Falling Slowly" - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (from Once)

Confession:  sometimes I wish I felt more morally okay about resetting some of the more listened-to pieces on here, especially since they're not things that I've wanted to listen to recently at all.

Also I like that I have a skeleton song and a zombie song right next to each other.