For Science!

If you’re on the East coast (or probably anywhere else that has 24-hour news channels) then you know that we’re expecting hurricane Irene this weekend. It’s big news mostly because it’s coming farther north than typical hurricanes and it’s passing directly over New York City, which could cause a lot of damage. In the Boston area, it’s not supposed to be all that bad, but we were encouraged to prepare for up to three days without power. We don’t have a TV in our apartment, so I’ve been spared the 24-hour news cycle of panic, but that hasn’t quite stopped me from taking my storm-tracking to an extreme level of craziness!

As I write this, it’s about 9:30 on the day of the storm. From what I can gather online, they’re not faring too badly in NYC and here in Boston, it’s hardly more than a little wind and rain. In order to curb my hurricane-induced insanity, I’ve forbidden myself from checking any more weather news until at least 11:00, when the worst of the storm is supposed to start in my area. I’ve been driving Rae nuts all morning with my constant descriptions of what the radar looks like now and reporting every eye-witness account that I read on reddit. She has started giving me a you-should-seriously-stop-now look, so I’m going to give it a rest for a while.

I couldn’t sleep last night because I had the same nervous feeling that I get the night before a really busy day when I have lots of things to remember. It’s nuts of course, because I don’t have anything to do today except stay indoors! I eventually got up at 7:00 and called my parents in upstate New York, who were experiencing “severe sprinkles” and thus breaking into their “emergency non-perishable crumb cake”. Despite the fact that the wind was barely blowing, I was paranoid about losing power, so I made coffee hours before Rae woke up. Whoops!

Despite all my storm obsessing, I’m not particularly worried about there being any hurricane damage around here. Mostly I just want to know the most up-to-date info on the storm for the sake of my own curiosity. I hate waiting around not knowing if the power is going to go off and not knowing how bad things are in other parts of the east coast. So far, my best source for news is the subreddit /r/irene. I thought Twitter would have good information, but the hashtags #HurricaneIrene and #Irene are mostly made up of lame jokes without any real information. However, @MattNoyesNECN, the meteorologist at New England Cable News, is tweeting up a storm (sorry, pun!). I also like looking at the data from NOAA, which has been much more useful to me than watching online videos of weather reports.

Time to get back to the storm. Stay dry everyone!

Since I’ve been living in Cambridge and have a fair amount of free time, I decided to sign up to be a participant in some Harvard School of Medicine research studies. Not the type of studies where they inject you with experimental drugs and perform psychological tests on you, but the ones where they need healthy control subjects to observe. I figured it would be more interesting than staying at home and I’d be helping someone’s research, which appeals to me. Plus they give you a few bucks for your time, so who am I to say no?

The first study was today, and it was… interesting. The research group studies vision using what the graduate students in charge of recruitment described as “boring video games”. The description was pretty accurate: I spent three hours in a small, dark room staring at a computer. What I didn’t expect was that the experiment were kind of tough. In the first one, I was shown a bunch of CT chest scans and I had to locate “tumors” as if I were a radiologist. The tumors were just grey spheres, but they were really hard to find! The software I was using was mimicking that used by real radiologists, so apparently I shouldn’t be a radiologist. All of my patient would have died. In the second test I “picked berries” by clicking on bright red squares while avoiding the dull red squares. They were practically impossible to tell apart. I really wanted to ask what that experiment was supposed to be testing, but I figured that, as a research subject, I probably wasn’t supposed to know.

Normally that would be the end of the story, except my appointment was made even more interesting because it was interrupted by an earthquake! It’s been a long time since I’ve felt one, so at first I wasn’t sure what was happening. I could feel the whole room swaying, but for some reason I though it was just a really strong wind. A moment after I realize what must be going on, a graduate student rushed in and asked me to come out of my testing closet an into the main room. Several students from California were discussing all the intense earthquakes they’d been through, but in the end nothing much happened. When we realized there wouldn’t be any aftershocks, everyone went back to business.

All in all it was an eventful day and I’d do it again (the vision study, not the earthquake). In fact they asked me to come back next week to do another three hours of different experiment. I’ll also be doing a sleep study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in September, so we’ll see how that goes. If you want to try a study yourself, here’s the website to check for openings: http://crnet.mgh.harvard.edu/.

This weekend I saw the revival one of of my favorite Broadway musicals: Anything Goes. My high school put on the show during my senior year, so if I was the kind of person to say that something “holds a special place in my heart” I would say it about this show. I played Reno Sweeney: sassy broad, which was a pretty big departure from Megan Roppolo: shy high schooler. However, the directors did a good job of getting me to channel my inner Ethel Merman and Patti LuPone, and in the end it went pretty well. These days I mostly just remember how much I loved the songs and how fun it was to hang around with my musical friends every day after school for those months.

Even though I’m extremely familiar with the plot and the songs from watching hours upon hours of high school rehearsals, I had never actually seen the whole show before. Sutton Foster is starring as Reno Sweeney in this revival, sharing top billing with Joel Grey as Moonface Martin. In case you don’t know (I didn’t) Joel Grey is most famous for winning a Tony and an Oscar for playing the MC in Cabaret. Personally, I thought he was just okay as Moonface. For me, the most interesting part of his being in the show was my aunt telling me a story about how my great-aunt was friends with Joel Grey and would visit him backstage whenever he was in a show in New York. This new information means I am only four degrees removed from Kevin Bacon!

Also of note from the cast was Kelly Bishop from Gilmore Girls and Adam Godley, who is that-guy-you’ve-seen-in-a-bunch-of-stuff-but-whose-name-you-never-knew. Adam Godley was second only to Sutton Foster in hilariousness for me. I almost cried from laughing during their scene together!

There are three previous versions of Anything Goes: the original 1934 version starring Ethel Merman, a 1962 version that I only just learned about today when I read the Anything Goes wikipedia article, and the revamped version from 1987 when Patti Lupone was in it. Each version is actually quite different in terms of which songs are performed and in which order. The wiki has a really helpful table that outlines all the differences.

This 2011 version was the same as the 80s one, though it seemed like they may have added more dancing (which was a good thing, because the dancing was incredible). I also loved how Sutton Foster brought a little bit of nerdiness to Reno that I hadn’t seen before. It suits her well since [spoiler alert for a show that is over 70 years old] Reno does get together with the nerdiest guy on the boat! I guess I wasn’t the only one who liked it, seeing as she won a Tony.

Hopefully the show will come to Boston eventually. I really want to see it again!

Back in college, I used to keep a blog. Actually, it was a Livejournal account, back before back before blogs were a thing and when Livejournal was still cool. Due to the lifetime Livejournal account that I purchased sometime around 2006 (a sound investment!), I still hang around there once in a while and read over the years of entries that I wrote. Mostly it’s just accounts of my day-to-day life, but there are also photos from trips, snippets of AIM conversations, and inside jokes that I hardly understand anymore. Only my friends and my Mom ever read it, as far as I know, but I loved writing it at the time and now I love having it as a time capsule of a particular time in my life. Which is not to say that I love it enough to let anyone else read it anymore. It is way too embarrassing!

Recently I started thinking about writing a blog again. This month I moved from Binghamton, NY where I had been living for just over six years, to Cambridge, MA. Aside from a few months spent studying abroad, this is the first time I’ve lived outside of New York and the first time I’ve lived in a large city. My sister and I came up with the idea around Christmas time that we would move to the Boston area at the same time and getting an apartment together. The circumstances aren’t perfect — I gave up a job that I really liked and my sister now has a long commute — but we have a feeling that it’s going to be worth it!

So this blog will be for this time in my life what my Livejournal was for my college years (but with fewer lame memes, I promise). I’ll be living with my sister, exploring a new city, and searching for a new career, so I want to be recording these times. You know — for science!