You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

I can happily say that I have checked off a few things on my to do before I die list since my last post.
Really, all these experiences deserve their own separate posts. So, although I’m writing about them at about the same time, I’m going to divide them up into three separate stories in three separate posts.

Story #1

I visited the memorial for John Lennon in Central Park last Saturday! The garden is called Strawberry Fields, named after the song and the orphanage. We took the subway to central park and walked around through it till we found Strawberry Fields. While we were still looking for it, I was really in no hurry to find it. It was a pretty day and we were frolicking around Central Park; really, how much more can one ask for. We stopped at a couple of places to listen to random musicians, watched people roller skate, took pictures, and ate unhealthy food. All was calm until I saw the 72^nd Street and Central Park West intersection. That’s were Strawberry Fields is. Then, I became really restless. I just wanted to be there, and I didn’t much care about anything else. After a little confusion, thanks to my complete lack of a sense of direction, we finally ran into the sign for Strawberry Fields. Ah! I could’ve died. It was impossible for me to wrap my mind around how amazing that moment was. I had been looking forward to visiting this place since I first listened to “Imagine” in 9^th grade. And to finally be there! It was incredible. I just felt really really close to John Lennon, and that was before I even walked into the park! It’s really a pretty garden and the Imagine stone mosaic sort of pops up without any warning. One second I was staring at the grass, the next I was standing right beside the mosaic. I could have died all over again then. Just staring down at the stones and flowers gave me a beautiful feeling. It was sad, and at the same time very empowering. Right then I felt I could do anything, and that made me want to do something great. Something that would make me worthy of all the great emotions I was experiencing. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but suffice it to say, I am in love with that place. I like the actual garden, but I love its other dimensions, I love the way it made me feel.

To add to all of that, a band was playing Beatles songs on a bench right beside the Imagine mosaic! I went over there and started to sing along with them. The third song they played while I was there was “I’ll Get You”!!! As I was singing along with every freakin word, an old guy standing in front of me turned around and gave me a funny look. He did this a couple more times during the song and at the end finally explained the looks by asking me how old I was. I said 20. “How do you know these songs?” he replied all shocked. I just smiled and said “I love the Beatles!” He then proceeded to tell his wife, who was staring intently at me that I was only 20 and knew all these songs =) That also made me feel really good. I stayed for about 5 songs. Seeing that I was about an infinity plus 2 times more appreciative of Strawberry Fields than all the other people I was with we had to leave after about 40 mintues. However, Ringo’s birthday is coming up and we’ll be returning to Strawberry Fields to celebrate that. Who knows, maybe Ringo will come by.

We then walked out of Central Park and went to The Dakota, John’s Lennons last home and the place where he was shot. I was at his home! I stood right where he got shot! And, Yoko still lives there! So yeah, I basically felt like a part of John’s life right then. Honestly, not much else feels that bittersweet.

Rain drops keep fallin on my head

“Don't ever change, don't ever worry
Because I'm coming back home tomorrow
To 14th Street where I won't hurry
Where I'll learn how to save not just borrow
And they'll be rainbows
And we will finally know”

- Rufus Wainwright, “14^th Street”

That is a verse from 14^th Street, a song by Rufus Wainwright. I have always loved that song, and now I know that it’s about 14^th Street in New York City(thanks, Wikepedia). That’s the street I live on! No matter where I am here, I feel a part of something bigger. So many songs, so many movies, so many great people, so many historic moments have graced the very streets I walk on every day. Every little thing feels monumental, and no matter what I’m doing, just the fact that I’m in NYC is enough to make me feel great.

Talking about things that make me feel great, we went to a great concert on Central park this past Saturday. It was a free concert, so we waited in a huge line under the smokin hot sun, and in the midst of some interestingly dressed people. A pair of orange leggings, some red shorts, and bright blue shoes seem to stick out in my memory. After an hour of standing in the line that moved about 4 feet, we finally made our way into the park, and it started to rain. At first it was all good fun. Things were starting to get damp, but it was a great break from the sun. But then, it started to pour and the umbrellas came out and it was really hard to catch a glimpse of the first opening band, whose name I can’t remember anymore. They were all right. We were soaked before the next act began. After probably more than an hour of downpour, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Everything wet just seems a lot prettier in the sun, and I love the smell of soil after a rain, so I was feeling great at this point. And my hair was staring to die, what more could I ask for? The second opening act was Kid Sister… Oh my god, she is the most annoying singer I have ever heard, and I’m counting my brother and Sophie in that. Thankfully she only did about 3 songs. 3 terrible, terrible songs. One of them was about getting a manicures and pedicures, so you get the picture. To everyone’s great annoyance, it started to pour again during the main act, Vampire Weekend. They’re a sweet indie rock 4 guy band. All the guys are Columbia graduates, and they’re quite cute, so I was thoroughly entertained. Definitely worth getting soaked twice for. Plus, all the people who stuck around through the rain were much more appreciative of the music. Overall, I give the experience a 10 out of 10. The rain, as annoying as it was, added a lot to the music and the waiting. It turned the concert into something special that we will all probably remember for a long time. And although I wouldn’t want to go through that again, I wouldn’t do it any different if I had to redo it.

That night after we dried up at home, we went to China Town to get dinner. And, it was raining all over again. Damn the rain. I was really tired to being wet by this point, but dinner was great. We ended the night with Little Miss Sunshine. One of my suitemates hadn’t seen it and that was not acceptable so we watched it.

Let me back track here a little bit, something quite interesting happened on Friday night. After work, four of us decided to go the Met for a couple of hours. Tickets were free for NYU medical center students/faculty! We spend a couple of hours there, definitely not enough, but we’ll go back. But anyway, as interesting as that was, the best (or worst) was yet to come. We got back all tired and had dinner and then decided to see what the other folks were up to. Turned out, many of them were waiting to get into a bar/restaurant, so we found them. We had asked for a table for 12, which we got after about 45 minutes of waiting on the street. Upon getting into the tiny, over-crowded, and over-rated place, we figured out that there were over 14 of us. So we all tried to sqeeze into the 12 kid sized chairs they had for us. But oh no, the waiters would have none of that. They actually refused to serve us because our group was larger then we’d told them. Basically, they either wanted some of us to leave, or for all of us to wait all over again to be served. Seriously, that has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever encountered. How does that make any business sense? We’d be the ones who’d be uncomfortable, and they’d be the ones making more money if they had let us stay. How does it make any sense to ask people who want to pay you to leave? I don’t know, but it was annoying so Jeannette and I decided to leave and watch Pan’s Labyrinth instead. It was a great choice, especially after I heard reports about the night from one of the two sober people present there.

New York probably has one of the heaviest alcohol consumption rates (besides New Orleans) in the country, but the bars around here are actually very strict about carding. It seems that going to a bar is all people (by people, I mostly mean students) do for fun in the evenings. That is, if you disregard all the touristy stuff and all expensive stuff. Still, access to bars isn’t nearly as easy as for underage folks as it is in Athens. That said, NYU itself is actually very open with alcohol. The Sackler Institute has a happy hour every Friday, and the Skirball Institute (the part of Sackler I work in) has a happy hour every Thursday. Both these events have free alcohol and no one cares who’s drinking it, as long as they’re students. Completely opposite from the way things seem to work at UGA.

After all the excitement on Friday and Saturday, Sunday was a pretty lazy day. I did laundry and bought grocery. Nothing much happened till around 4 p.m. when I got a call from… Chris Flippo! Also know as Chuck, but only by me. He was in the city for the Peabody awards and he came over for a few hours. Best few hours ever! We walked around NYU’s downtown campus, which I’m not that familiar with because I work at the Medical Center in midtown. It is so much fun to see friends in a completely different geographical setting! Ah! Melanie, KJ and Andrew are all supposed to come see me at some point. I can’t wait!

On Monday, after a hard days work, Bryan, Jeanette and I decided to go watch Dr. No at Bryant park. They do outdoor movies on Mondays during the summer. And guess what, it rained again! But this time it wasn’t too bad and we had all remembered to bring our umbrellas having learned our lessons from the concert. So it ended up being great fun.

And speaking of rain, we got rained on again today on the way to and from dinner. I’m tired of being wet and cold every time we go out. I wish the rain gods would stop already.

Featuring The Telectroscope and more

Hi and welcome back! I’ve now been in NY for a week and a half, and boy it feels so much longer than that. Many things have changed this past week, not the least of which is the fact that I’m not intimidated by the city anymore. Also, I’ve started to call U-Hall home, I more or less know my way around here, and we’re now regulars at a little bakery across the street (there’s an example of a poorly constructed sentence for you). All of that amounts to one thing: I feel like I belong here. It would be one thing to visit New York and hang out for a few days, but I get the greatest feeling when I realize that I’m actually a working girl in New York. The city is not just some place I’m touring, but it’s my temporary home.

And, let me tell you, my room in this temporary home has the greatest view ever! Here’s a picture if you don’t believe me:

We live on the 11^th floor and I am sure that this is the best view on the floor. Everyone is pretty impressed by it. On our first night here, my suitemates and I just stared out of the window for about half an hour, and we still do this on a regular basis. I always eat my breakfasts and dinners by the window. The streets are always active and just starring at them strikes a major chord in me. I can’t help but feel happy when I’m looking down at it.

Despite that, we have managed to get out of the room and see a lot of Manhattan. This past weekend, most of us went on the Circle Line cruise on Saturday and Joel took us on a bike tour on Sunday. The cruise was chill. My favorite part was taking pictures of the city. Also, I finally got to meet Lady Liberty. She’s a hoot.

The bike tour was even more fun. Luckily, Manhattan is very flat, so the 15-mile ride didn’t feel bad at all. It was about 95 degrees throughout the ride, but that didn’t matter. We were biking around Manhattan, for pete’s sakes. We rode to a sweet park, some place where many of the cooking shows are shot, the streets where a lot of restaurant scenes in Sex and the City are shot, and by this palm garden near Ground Zero. We’re actually going to go to Ground Zero later in the summer. There is a great park close to there and its right by the water. Everything around there is so serene. Its hard to imagine what 9/11 would’ve felt like when you’re there with a ton of friends on a pretty day with happy people hanging out on the grass.

My favorite adventure yet happened before all of that. On Friday night, a few of us were hanging out in our living room all worn out from the day’s activities. Then at around 12:30 a.m., we decided to walk around. David had heard about this awesome awesome thing called The Telectroscope and showed me its website earlier that day. Basically, it’s a tunnel that connects New York City to London. So you look into it from here and see the Tower of London in real time on the other side. We had vaguely looked it up on the map, but hadn’t planned on going there till later. Somehow though, at 1 a.m., we ended up taking the subway to the Manhattan side of Brooklyn bridge. Then there was nothing to do but to walk across the bridge and try to find The Telectroscope. I’m gonna be honest here, I didn’t think we’d ever find it. We got to Brooklyn all prepared to walk around for a while, asked some cops about it, and ended up at the Telectrosope, without getting lost once. It was unbelievably amazing. There weren’t too many people on the London side of the tunnel. It was around 6 a.m. there and people have to pay a pound to look into it. It’s apparently being treated as an Art display in Brooklyn and it is right on the river. So the view from there is that of Brooklyn bridge and downtown Manhattan, with lights reflecting in the water. Absolutely breathtaking! And definitely worth the long unplanned walk. I wanna go back before I leave.

Besides all of that, work also has been a lot of fun. I am working in a Developmental Genetics lab on little microscopic worms called C. elegans. The first thing I had to learn was moving them from one plate to another. I was pretty sad when I squished my first one, but now I’m used to that. C. elegans don’t have nervous systems so they don’t feel a thing. But, to avoid too many squishing incidents, I have stopped drinking coffee during the weekdays. Because these critters are tiny, we have to work with a very thin wire to maneuver them around. My hands are all jittery if I drink coffee and that doesn’t fly, so I can either drink coffee or be good at my job. I like being good at my job and almost don’t miss coffee anymore.

And now I have to go work on a short research presentation for tomorrow. Later.

I'm in New York!

I wrote this post on Thursday night. It was very late and apparantly I was too tired to remember to put it on here. But here it is, 2 days later. I'll put pictures up shortly.

Hey folks! I have been in New York City for five days and Joel (Dr. Oppenheim) has already managed to spoil us a lot and show us a great many things. And, I have started working, and must say, my lab is amazing. So far I give my experience here a 9 out of 10. 9 because the weather has been muggy and chilly for the past two days.

Lets see…it’s after midnight and I have to wake up early tomorrow so I’m gonna write quickly about the past few days. I landed at the La Guardia airport at around 12 p.m. and then got a shuttle to University Hall, the NYU dorm that we’re staying at. The shuttle was over packed and, thanks to the terrible traffic, it took us over an hour to get where we wanted. Traffic was sorta like rush hour in Atlanta, but on a Sunday afternoon. Atleast there were cool things to stare at as the shuttle wove its way through the roads, going slower than a snail probably. I just don’t understand why anyone would want to drive around here, its effing expensive, takes up a ton of time, and has to be frustrating. Anyway, there was a guy in the shuttle who was also coming to U-Hall, and if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have had any clue about where we were. I got off the shuttle, not really knowing what I was supposed to do next, but Dr. Oppenheim was right there, at the stop, waiting for me! I gave him a huge hug, mostly out of relief and then he walked me to my room.

One of my suitemates, Nora, had already moved in, but apparently had gone out shopping. I met her later in the day and we went out to look for lunch. As it turned out, looking for lunch was much more exciting than actually finding lunch. We ended up getting take out food and eating it on Union Square park, which, by the way, is just across the street from our dorm. We’re on 3^rd Avenue and 14^th Street, smack in the middle of downtown Manhattan, with a lot of exciting things within walking distance. We met the rest of the SURPies later when Joel took us all out to dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant, which, I might add, had the best service ever. They had 25 people’s orders ready in about 15 minutes.

Monday was mainly orientation. We got a tour of the buildings that most of us were working in and then waited in a line for hours to get our IDs. Then my roommate Ugochi and I got take out food for dinner and ate it at a park bench beside some chess players. Y’know the street side chess players in all those movies that make a move, click the timer and do it very fast over and over again. Yes, we were sitting right beside them!

Tuesday we actually started working in the lab. And here, I got really really lucky. I fell in love with my lab as soon as I started. I’m gonna be honest here, although I have liked all my lab work, I did not enjoy my first few days in Scott’s lab and I definitely did not enjoy my first few days in Dr. Stice’s lab. Starting in a new lab is always frustrating, you have to read a ton of papers (a majority of which are incomprehensible), get used to all the lab members, feel comfortable enough to ask stupid questions and so on and so on. But here, everything fell together the moment I started. Ann, the post-doc that I work with, picked me up from the lounge that we were having breakfast at, gave me a pseudo tour of the building as we were walking to the lab, introduced me to all the other lab members and then told me about my project. And, I actually understood my project, every part of it. All thanks to my amazing Cell Bio class last semester!

In the evening on Tuesday, I saw my first Broadway musical!!! Spring Awakening. Wow! Everyone talks about how amazing these are, but I really hadn’t wrapped my mind around how amazing they really are until I saw one. I love good live music. Good live concerts are charming in numerous ways. Being at the musical, however, was almost better in the sense that it was like being at a good concert that also has a good plot! Y’know?

Yesterday we had dinner at the Katz’s Deli, the place where the infamous orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally was shot! The food was terrible. I still like saying I’ve seen the spot where Harry met Sally. On the way back we walked past the house where Will Smith lives in I Am Legend. Also, we walked past Times Square, the area where Bob Dylan hung out in the 70s, and where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived when they first came to New York. Yeah, it was a big deal.

I think those have been the main things we’ve done so far. We have stayed very busy this week, and it doesn’t look like that will change anytime soon. I’m okay with that

I think I’d like to go to sleep now. More updates later.