It 
seems things have gotten quite busy, this side of 
New Year's. Time's actually begun slipping by quite quickly and I've seen a drastic change in my lifestyle, from going long stretches without anyone with whom I might share a conversation to suddenly not knowing where I'll make enough room for all my friends in my schedule. The change is much welcome, though I wish it could have been a bit less drastic. Nonetheless, I'll try to highlight a few of the major events of the past month:
-This weekend, I've been hosting Wendy, my very first MIT pre-frosh. (A pre-frosh is an accepted student who has yet to decide whether he or she will attend MIT-- I hosted Wendy during my freshman year CPW, or Campus Preview Weekend, when the legendary theft of the CalTech cannon occurred.) Wendy and I go way back and have a lot of connections. Not only did she end up going AXΩ, but she even joined my sorority family when she became Melissa's little sister. (Melissa shares a big sister with my big sister, and we all fall under the Sweet Pea lineage. Yeah, sororities...) I was still getting over my cold so I was not very
much able to accompany Wendy on Saturday but we made our best efforts to see all the highlights of Paris with the limited time we had.
-Back in early January (cough *the day after I returned from vacation *cough) I took my first set of French exams, complete with a reference to the chicken and the egg when considering a timeless question, "which came first" in response to a neuromuscular junction development question. My attitude was that if I were bound to fail the exam, at least I'd be able to say for the rest of my life that I answered a grad school question by discussing which came first, the chicken or the egg? And, to my credit, I did elaborate with three more pages of essay related to real neuroscience. Sadly, I'll still have another set of exams to take in March, regardless of whether I passed these guys, as I still have yet to receive the results. Got to love French efficiency.
-I began working in lab! This means that I will no longer have a life and that I have had to accept my renewed status as a vicious rodent killer. It's all in the name of science, I swear. I could hardly bear my first hands-on sacrifice since 2007, so I'll confess I kind of closed my eyes at the last second and performed less than optimally on my first mouse, but the second one resulted in what appeared to be a fairly respectable set of slices. Now on to the patch clamping and electrophysiology! This begins tomorrow.
-On an upside, lab is a pretty great place to be. (One would hope I'd think that given that I'm going to be stuck there for easily twelve hours a day starting soon.) Seriously, though, I've already done time in five other labs before arriving in France and, silly as it may seem, the most important thing for me to work successfully
is actually my team, not necessarily my research topic. As long as we're talking about brains and using cutting-edge technologies, you'll probably be able to keep me interested as long as I like the people around whom I have to work. That was a big reason why I got so excited when I found this lab back during my late 2008 grad school hunts: I was quick to note that everyone knew each other's preferences in alcohol and French pastries, and that their laughs seemed pretty genuine when they referenced amusing shared experiences. My assessment seems to have been fairly good: already, I've had to opportunity to share several sets of lab drinks and spend a Saturday evening with everyone from lab, including the professor and his girlfriend, 
making pizzas (with oh so delicious French toppings), drinking wine, watching Star Wars, and sharing a galette du roi baked by my professor's girlfriend, an advanced researcher herself. The galette du roi is a real French treat: it's an epiphany cake baked with a little toy, called a fèvre, inside. The youngest person in the room must sit under the table and assign pieces so that the winner of the fèvre (who becomes "king" for the day) is "fair." Being the youngest at our lab Star Wars party (yes! I have found nerds in Paris), I shoved myself as far as possible under a tiny coffee table. Given that my rib cage was just a bit too big, I lay on my back, feet sticking out of the other end of the coffee table like some Parisian Wicked Witch of the East (without the impressive stockings), pillow over my face, randomly pointing in odd directions in some effort to assign slices of cake. Most excitingly, I even got a fèvre! (In vein, our lab technician requested a second be placed inside to boost her odds of being crowned.) I enjoyed wearing
my little paper crown for the rest of the evening and was decidedly pleased with my choice of laboratories. Not many people like their lab enough to spend Saturday night with them.
-On a downside of my new life in lab, I've had to give up the Italian and Spanish classes, at least for a while. There's just no way for me to get back home before 19h, when the classes start. I've pushed my yoga classes back to the 20h sessions and I leave lab a bit early, around 19h15, on Tuesdays and Thursdays so that at least I'm
staying fit, even if my languages will suffer a blow.
-In an odd turn of events, my life is not to be completely devoid of interesting and diverse cultural interactons: I've decided to begin hosting couch surfers! I was looking for a host for Hanhan and me for our upcoming trip to Amsterdam. In the process, I discovered it was quite difficult to find an available couch and thought, hey, if I'm clear that I don't have that much space and that I only have an air mattress and a giant beanbag, not a couch, why not open my doors to travelers looking to stretch their budgets? (Of course I'm careful to lock up all my valuables and I'm not hosting people who don't seem to be safe and, for the most part, female.) Nonetheless, it's proven quite interesting! Already I've gotten to know a girl from Russia, a French person, and two Canadians. It certainly is a nice way to spice up life.
-On January 20, I joined in a Paris celebration of the Toast Heard 'Round the World, part of a series of IAP celebrations
held on the same day in many major cities worldwide to gather alumni in recognition of the good old days when January used to equate to IAP (Independent Activities Period), a month when our greatest responsibilities were to remember to wake up in time for wine tasting, robotics competitions, massage classes, the Mystery Hunt, or just an afternoon of playing in the snow. I was excited to get to find my MIT French connections. Unfortunately, most of the alumni were much further removed from IAP than I and, to my disappointment, I didn't even see very many brass rats.
-Accepting the untimely death of my first French pet Pinky the lithops (a succulent plant) over Christmas break, I finally went in for a new one. I've named this guy Crisps since it kind of looks like a pile of (green) potato chips, and in Britain those are called crisps, which never ceases to make me laugh.
So things have changed and not everything's perfect, but I'm definitely liking Paris and my life on this side of the Atlantic much better since I returned from vacation. I'm also trying to make an extra point to smile on the metro these days, even in the morning when I'm pretty sleepy. I've decided that this city could really use a few more smiles and you never know: I may even prove a bit infectious.
seems things have gotten quite busy, this side of 
New Year's. Time's actually begun slipping by quite quickly and I've seen a drastic change in my lifestyle, from going long stretches without anyone with whom I might share a conversation to suddenly not knowing where I'll make enough room for all my friends in my schedule. The change is much welcome, though I wish it could have been a bit less drastic. Nonetheless, I'll try to highlight a few of the major events of the past month:-This weekend, I've been hosting Wendy, my very first MIT pre-frosh. (A pre-frosh is an accepted student who has yet to decide whether he or she will attend MIT-- I hosted Wendy during my freshman year CPW, or Campus Preview Weekend, when the legendary theft of the CalTech cannon occurred.) Wendy and I go way back and have a lot of connections. Not only did she end up going AXΩ, but she even joined my sorority family when she became Melissa's little sister. (Melissa shares a big sister with my big sister, and we all fall under the Sweet Pea lineage. Yeah, sororities...) I was still getting over my cold so I was not very
much able to accompany Wendy on Saturday but we made our best efforts to see all the highlights of Paris with the limited time we had.-Back in early January (cough *the day after I returned from vacation *cough) I took my first set of French exams, complete with a reference to the chicken and the egg when considering a timeless question, "which came first" in response to a neuromuscular junction development question. My attitude was that if I were bound to fail the exam, at least I'd be able to say for the rest of my life that I answered a grad school question by discussing which came first, the chicken or the egg? And, to my credit, I did elaborate with three more pages of essay related to real neuroscience. Sadly, I'll still have another set of exams to take in March, regardless of whether I passed these guys, as I still have yet to receive the results. Got to love French efficiency.
-I began working in lab! This means that I will no longer have a life and that I have had to accept my renewed status as a vicious rodent killer. It's all in the name of science, I swear. I could hardly bear my first hands-on sacrifice since 2007, so I'll confess I kind of closed my eyes at the last second and performed less than optimally on my first mouse, but the second one resulted in what appeared to be a fairly respectable set of slices. Now on to the patch clamping and electrophysiology! This begins tomorrow.
-On an upside, lab is a pretty great place to be. (One would hope I'd think that given that I'm going to be stuck there for easily twelve hours a day starting soon.) Seriously, though, I've already done time in five other labs before arriving in France and, silly as it may seem, the most important thing for me to work successfully
is actually my team, not necessarily my research topic. As long as we're talking about brains and using cutting-edge technologies, you'll probably be able to keep me interested as long as I like the people around whom I have to work. That was a big reason why I got so excited when I found this lab back during my late 2008 grad school hunts: I was quick to note that everyone knew each other's preferences in alcohol and French pastries, and that their laughs seemed pretty genuine when they referenced amusing shared experiences. My assessment seems to have been fairly good: already, I've had to opportunity to share several sets of lab drinks and spend a Saturday evening with everyone from lab, including the professor and his girlfriend, 
making pizzas (with oh so delicious French toppings), drinking wine, watching Star Wars, and sharing a galette du roi baked by my professor's girlfriend, an advanced researcher herself. The galette du roi is a real French treat: it's an epiphany cake baked with a little toy, called a fèvre, inside. The youngest person in the room must sit under the table and assign pieces so that the winner of the fèvre (who becomes "king" for the day) is "fair." Being the youngest at our lab Star Wars party (yes! I have found nerds in Paris), I shoved myself as far as possible under a tiny coffee table. Given that my rib cage was just a bit too big, I lay on my back, feet sticking out of the other end of the coffee table like some Parisian Wicked Witch of the East (without the impressive stockings), pillow over my face, randomly pointing in odd directions in some effort to assign slices of cake. Most excitingly, I even got a fèvre! (In vein, our lab technician requested a second be placed inside to boost her odds of being crowned.) I enjoyed wearing
my little paper crown for the rest of the evening and was decidedly pleased with my choice of laboratories. Not many people like their lab enough to spend Saturday night with them.-On a downside of my new life in lab, I've had to give up the Italian and Spanish classes, at least for a while. There's just no way for me to get back home before 19h, when the classes start. I've pushed my yoga classes back to the 20h sessions and I leave lab a bit early, around 19h15, on Tuesdays and Thursdays so that at least I'm
staying fit, even if my languages will suffer a blow.-In an odd turn of events, my life is not to be completely devoid of interesting and diverse cultural interactons: I've decided to begin hosting couch surfers! I was looking for a host for Hanhan and me for our upcoming trip to Amsterdam. In the process, I discovered it was quite difficult to find an available couch and thought, hey, if I'm clear that I don't have that much space and that I only have an air mattress and a giant beanbag, not a couch, why not open my doors to travelers looking to stretch their budgets? (Of course I'm careful to lock up all my valuables and I'm not hosting people who don't seem to be safe and, for the most part, female.) Nonetheless, it's proven quite interesting! Already I've gotten to know a girl from Russia, a French person, and two Canadians. It certainly is a nice way to spice up life.
-On January 20, I joined in a Paris celebration of the Toast Heard 'Round the World, part of a series of IAP celebrations
held on the same day in many major cities worldwide to gather alumni in recognition of the good old days when January used to equate to IAP (Independent Activities Period), a month when our greatest responsibilities were to remember to wake up in time for wine tasting, robotics competitions, massage classes, the Mystery Hunt, or just an afternoon of playing in the snow. I was excited to get to find my MIT French connections. Unfortunately, most of the alumni were much further removed from IAP than I and, to my disappointment, I didn't even see very many brass rats.-Accepting the untimely death of my first French pet Pinky the lithops (a succulent plant) over Christmas break, I finally went in for a new one. I've named this guy Crisps since it kind of looks like a pile of (green) potato chips, and in Britain those are called crisps, which never ceases to make me laugh.
So things have changed and not everything's perfect, but I'm definitely liking Paris and my life on this side of the Atlantic much better since I returned from vacation. I'm also trying to make an extra point to smile on the metro these days, even in the morning when I'm pretty sleepy. I've decided that this city could really use a few more smiles and you never know: I may even prove a bit infectious.
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