finally, an upswing

Nothing like a little tiny success in the lab to make the whole week seem like a good one. I successfully etched off a 160-nm layer of nitride after firing at 1350C in the furnace by undercutting the oxide layer beneath it! Fabuloso! Walking into the lab and seeing that shiny silicon surface at the bottom of the beaker just made my entire day. It also helped that I got to see Padma Lakshmi (of Top Chef!) give a talk this afternoon about her struggles with endometriosis, which I'd never heard of before, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see her in person! She is a great speaker - eloquent and lively, and I only hope I look that good when 7-8 months pregnant. I mean, who can pull off patterned lace tights under a sweater dress while pregnant? Kudos to her. ;)

Anyway, I also made some headway in the modeling part of my thesis work, with a little help from coding-superstar Tony. What would I do without him? I'm getting a little better at manipulating this Python code, which at first glance each time I open up the file still looks like a gibberishy robot language. Bit by bit I'm able to pick out pieces of the code that I need to modify to fit my problem, slowly starting to understand more of how it works and what I can do. I certainly don't feel like an expert, which I should get closer to if I want a PhD for this, but the small successes at least give me the confidence to think I can continue to increase my comprehension. I also got a super tiny boost from my advisor this week (I'll take what I can get) when he suggested that I could write three papers, one for each area of my research, and make those basically the three middle chapters of my thesis. Just the knowledge that he wants me to do this gives me so much motivation to do some publication-worthy work and do it SOON! Oh, brains, work with me now. Let's make this happen.

I've started really thinking about Christmas presents to give to my family. I want to get this stuff done early so I don't have to hit the mall craziness on Dec 23 in San Diego. All my favorite blogs are coming up with amazing gift guides for the holidays, but the end result is just me finding a bunch of lovely things that I want for myself and can't afford, things that I'm pretty sure my weight-lifting protein-powder-drinking doesn't-even-own-a-laundry-hamper little brother would not like to receive on Christmas day. Oh well, I still enjoy looking at these lists! I especially love this one by Creature Comforts or this funny one at DesignSponge. *sigh* Can one earn a PhD in Blog-Reading? Perhaps in Multitasking?

Anyway, we had a fabulous Thanksgiving celebration at Auntie Kumu's house in Connecticut, with many of the cousins and also the next generation, which currently consists of only boys. Someone had the brilliant idea to buy them Nerf guns, and an all-out war of capture the flag ensued one evening, engulfing both the little boys and the big "boys". Yes, pretty much anyone male could be found running around the house, hiding behind the kitchen table, panting and grabbing yellow foam bullets from the cracks of the sofa cushions. We dainty ladies tried to avoid being hit in the cross-fire while we put together a lovely countryside puzzle. Oh, it was quite a sight. After that exhausting weekend, it seems strange that xmas is only a few weeks away! Where did this semester go? Wasn't I going to have a lot more work done by this point in the year? Well, those questions can be answered later. It's Friday and I'm ready to cook a delicious meal with my good-looking crazy-family-tolerating boyfriend. Hooray!

how to get out of a funk

I'm feeling a major lack of motivation lately. Mostly research related. I'm incredibly motivated to knit wrist-warmers, to cook huge batches of winter squash soup or meringue cookies, or even to fold clean laundry. But research? I always feel like doing it tomorrow. Or maybe after the weekend. I think that one major reason for this is that my advisor puts zero pressure on me to get any results. He comes in maybe once a week and talks to me for about 10 minutes before he bolts from the room. I mean, he's incredibly busy. But if I'm doing research for him, and he seems not to care about it, how can I care about it anyway? I feel like a horrible scientist, like shouldn't I have research motivation woven into my DNA, like an innate drive to do experiments and answer the lingering questions of the universe? Shouldn't I be driven enough to lead my own research, regardless of what my advisor is preoccupied with? Sometimes I do get a good result, or a weird result, and it brightens my entire day - I sing out loud in the lab and bounce up the stairs. But the rest of the time I'm totally dragging.

A good chunk of my research goal is to create a computer model of the process I'm working on experimentally. Now, I really don't know that much about modeling or writing code, and my advisor knows even less (and isn't a big fan of it anyway), so when I get stuck, I'm just stuck. When I think back to why I volunteered to do this modeling project, I want to kick myself. I actually thought that I might be getting married at some point, and maybe I'd want to have some purely-computer work that I could potentially do remotely, if, say, I wanted to pop out a kid or something. Yeah right!!!! Looks like that is as far from happening as ever! I feel like all my plans have stagnated and I'm just stuck in this phd program that doesn't even excite me anymore. I'm too far in to quit but too far from the end to just duck my head and sprint it out. I want to just step off the track and cry on the sidelines for a while. And hopefully have a revelation of some sort while I'm over there.

things i ate last night that i've never eaten before

pork belly ravioli
sea urchin
squid ink
suckling pig confit
rutabaga puree

As a side note, I got an invite to see Obama's talk at MIT tomorrow! I'm so beyond excited!!

before my memory started

My dad has been on a crazy photo-archiving kick for the past few months. He's gone through a couple thousand old photos of our family and scanned them in to a Picasa album. Well, several albums at this point. Now he's gotten to some old 35mm slides from the early 80s, when he and my mom were living in Singapore and my sister and I were born. Some of these photos I've never seen before! There's a pic of my mom walking our old white poodle, Maggie, pregnant with me under a billowy blue dress. Then there are pics of 1-year-old toddler me doing various things like playing piano, holding a squash raquet, walking Maggie with a red leash, carrying around this blanket that I refused to give up for I-don't-want-to-admit-how-many years. I've seen baby pictures of myself before, obviously, but the ones that really strike me are those of my mom holding me, or taking me places that I no longer remember. Like a shot of Mom and me and baby Kim, sitting on a picnic blanket in a grassy field in Singapore surrounded by peacocks...! Or a family pic of my parents and Maggie and me, before I had any siblings. My mom looks so beautiful, with eyeliner and crazy-patterned dresses. I wonder if she felt scared, having her first baby in a foreign country with no family around, and I'm sure my dad was working long hours as he always did. Now I really want to call her. She really is the best mom in the world, and I've told people this - often they try to challenge me, but nobody's proven me wrong yet. I guess I've gotten used to living on the opposite side of the country from her, but I should really make an effort to call her more often. I'm the worst at calling people. But my top priority should be Mom!

comfort food

Leeks are amazing. They make my entire kitchen smell incredible! Why did I never know this before? I'm making a mushroom, roasted red pepper, and goat cheese bread pudding, which turns out to be a rather elaborate recipe with lots of chopping involved, but the aroma of my apartment right now makes it all worth it. Rainy weather like this really makes me want to cook, especially warm, veggie-filled dishes like casseroles or stews. Mmmm. I'm even more excited about this dish because I started off my Saturday by waking up at 5:30am and biking to the boathouse, where I proceeded to get into a boat in the pouring rain and row it to another boathouse, then de-rig it in and load it onto a trailer, all in the pouring rain. All the while knowing that everyone I knew was probably still asleep in their warm, dry beds. But now I have a delicious-looking casserole baking in the oven. Yay!

the ships are coming in

I have such a short attention span recently. Maybe that's why I can barely sit down to write out a complete thought here on this blog. I used to blog daily, and I'm not really sure why I don't anymore. I sort of feel like I have nothing satisfying to say. Maybe it's been a weird summer. I've gone through vague periods of happiness, discontent, and determination, without a real concrete grasp on why I felt any of those feelings. Sometimes you feel really happy, like everything is going your way, and you don't really stop to question exactly what caused the bliss, but you just want to prance down the hallway and sing songs when nobody's listening. And that's enough. When you feel vaguely unhappy, for a single day you can write it off to waking up on the wrong side of the bed, and subsequently eat a cookie and wait for the end of the day, i.e. your chance to wipe the slate clean with a good night's sleep. But when the unhappy feeling sort of lingers, on and off, for weeks, you start trying to identify it, which is actually really difficult sometimes. Maybe there are a lot of things in your life that are not as you want them - you want to finish school but feel like it's not imminent, your boyfriend lives in another state, you make much less money than your shopping habit would prefer, you want to make art/craft but lack enough time... obviously these things can be changed. On good days, you can overlook them and know that they will change. On bad days you start questioning your life plan, wonder if you are doing the right thing with your career, fight the thought of abandoning things that you've invested a lot of time in but are making you unhappy at the moment. I know that a lot of people really have no idea what they want to do with their lives at this point, and are graduating or changing jobs and feel apprehensive about not knowing what to do next. But I feel it's almost as hard to have a really exciting grand plan for years and then suddenly start to wonder if you want to change it. It's easier to stick with the original plan, but what will make you happiest?

Anyway, who really knows anything anyway. I harvested two giant pinkish heirloom tomatoes last week, the only two good ones I got off that plant whose seedling I bought at the farmer's market. The weather was far too erratic this summer for my tomatoes. When I sliced one open, it smelled like V8. I don't particularly like V8, but this tomato was delicious. I've gotta think of a better use for a freshly picked tomato than just eating it slice by slice...

I'm racing in a 4+ in the Head of the Charles Regatta in 2.5 weeks. I'm pretty stoked. Our lineup has not really found our swing in the boat yet, which makes for some frustrating practices, but hopefully we'll figure it out soon. I used to hate rowing in 4s because the set was always crap, and I'm hoping my mind will be changed soon. Seeing the sunrise over the Boston skyline in the morning is one of the most fantastically gorgeous things I see all day. Really makes up for waking up at 5:30am.

characters

Everyone knows that the people at MIT are not a random representation of the general population. I'm not talking about brainpower, but rather the cultural nerdiness that characterizes the entire campus. You can see it with your eyes just by walking through campus for 10 minutes, in the frequency of gangly gaits and high-waisted khaki shorts, the dishevelled hairdo with the pillow imprintation still apparent or the slightly-antisocial lack of eye contact with strangers. Sometimes I get tired of this culture, where the norm is to stay up all hours of the night writing some amazing code or building a crazy robot or running experiments in the lab. Sometimes I wish people would take care of their appearance, not look down their nose at new social interactions, and not make me feel inadequate by their sheer brilliance. I find myself feeling jealous of that world where people wear makeup or a tie to work, go home at 5pm, and go to happy hour at fancy bars on Thursday nights. But at the same time, sometimes I see the truly unique opportunity I have here to really meet some characters here. People who are not afraid to care about unusual things and don't feel ashamed to declare their nerd passions in public. They don't see a reason to hide their love of engineering and look like everyone else, go with the flow. They bang their hand on the table to emphasize their correctness on some science point, and it's so awesome. Maybe the person being proved wrong does not feel so happy about it, but sometimes it's really refreshing to see conventional uniformity go out the window. And it's certainly entertaining.