Another year older...

Perhaps the fact that I worked through the weekend before my birthday is evidence that I am truly a grown-up. The past week has been probably the roughest at work, as I spent the weekend fixing errors, and discovering that this job is more difficult than I initially realized. But, I did in fact fix things, and I think I will continue to slowly get the hang of things. However, I am very glad to have the week off. I'm not sure if it will exactly be a restful vacation, as I will be meeting about 30 of Isaac's relatives the day after tomorrow. My family is relatively small, and borderline anti-social. The largest thanksgiving dinner I've ever been to in my life was only 10 people, including me. So this will be a new experience for me.
It has been a pretty good, low key birthday. We went out to dinner to a Japanese restaurant, and went to barnes & noble afterwards. I had almost forgotten how much I love books. Although, I suppose I am currently reading three books. I've been reading A Canticle for Leibowitz for a while, but have found it difficult to get into. It has more than one plot line, and after the first plot line ended, it kind of lost my interest. But, Isaac says it's very good, and I have yet to read a book he liked that I didn't, so I will get through it eventually. I also started reading "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" almost a year ago. It is well written and captivating, but infuriating and quite long. I have a signed copy, as I actually saw Devra Davis give a presentation about her book at CMU. I found it quite inspiring, and ever since the topic of environmental health has become a bit of a hobby, and may become a career someday.

Odysseys in eating

In most large cities there may be a Chinatown or a little Italy, but in LA there is a little everything. Little Ethiopia, Korea town, Little Armenia, etc. Over the past few months living here in LA I have had a number of interesting eating experiences. This has included Ethiopian, Mongolian BBQ, Korean, which is completely different from Korean BBQ, fondue, trendy hamburgers (quite possibly the best ever), Japanese, sketchy yet tasty Chinese beef rolls, chicken and waffles soul food, Polish, Middle Eastern fusion (belly dancers included), and possibly more (I'm not sure that I remember everything).

The latest excursion included Japanese noodles followed by Pinkberry. I got hot soba (buckwheat) noodles with spinach, fishcake, and fried rice balls in Tokyo style broth. I really liked the flavor of the slightly sweet and savory broth and soba noodles with spinach, but the fishcake and rice balls were rather odd. The fishcake was a thin half moon sliver that almost looked like a radish slice, as it was pink on the edge and white in the middle. It didn't even really taste like fish. The rice balls were light and fluffy on the outside, but seemed to contain rice toothpaste on the inside. However, the noodle-broth-spinach combo more than made up for the strange fishcake and rice balls. Afterwards, we all realized we could still eat more, and there was a Pinkberry in between the Japanese restaurant and our parking garage. Frozen yogurt is very LA. There are numerous frozen yogurt joints all around the greater LA area, and Pinkberry is perhaps the most popular at the moment. It is a very simple yet brilliant business model. One main flavor, although I believe they've recently added two others, and fresh fruit toppings in addition to standard ice cream toppings. I had the original flavor with raspberries, mango, and chocolate chips. It was unlike any flavor I'd ever had before. It was a slightly sour lemony flavor with undertones of strawberry and other flavors I couldn't quite detect. It was quite tasty.

crazy chili recipe

This weekend I decided to make up my own chili recipe, and I have to admit, it turned out rather well. In the usual Danica style of cooking I looked at a bunch of chili recipes and mixed together all the ingredients I liked, plus a few other things. I have no idea what the actual proportions were for most things, but here is a rough approximation of my chili recipe:

1 lb bison meat
1/2 can kidney beans
1/2 can white beans
1/2 can corn
1/4 red bell pepper
1 small sweet potato
1/2 zucchini
4 cloves garlic
1 can diced tomatoes
1 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
black pepper
oregano
tabasco sauce

I cooked the meat, then added the beans, veggies (except the sweet potatoes), and spices. I cooked the veggies until they were tender and added various spices to taste. I put it all in a crock pot, cooked then added the sweet potatoes, left it in the crock pot for a few hours, then served over brown rice. And yes, I used bison meat. It is no more expensive and way healthier (no growth hormones or antibiotics), and presumably more humanely raised than beef. It might be more expensive and harder to find in other parts of the country. It could most likely be replaced with beef, ground turkey, or veggie crumbles (like from morning star farms).

Spiders and Ghosts

For the Halloween season, the LA Museum of Natural History had a spider exhibit. Many places have enclosed gardens full of butterflies, but this one was full of free roaming spiders. I was a little afraid that one might land on me, but I was more afraid that I might accidentally step on one.
The weekend after Halloween I went to an exhibit of supposedly authentic Polaroid pictures of ghosts. These pictures were taken before photoshop or any other digital editing technology existed. When it comes the paranormal, I tend to have a pretty open mind, but a healthy amount of skepticism to go along with it. The physical photographs looked like normal polaroids, but the pictures were not what I expected. They weren't images of translucent people, but of what looked like extremely thick white smoke that often formed words. There was a book that showed the questions that had been asked of the ghost, along with the photographs of the answers. The ghost, who said his name was Wright, answered questions in Latin as well as English. Whether or not these were authentic or a hoax, I always enjoy any experience that reminds me of the great mysteries of life.

Happy Halloween

For Halloween this year I went to the West Hollywood Costume Carnival. The event was basically a ton of people taking up an entire street dressed in crazy costumes. I went with friends who were dressed as a construction worker, Paul Bunyan, Two-face, a butterfly, and a samurai dude from Kill Bill. I went as a pirate. Before we went to the carnival we decided to go to Ihop.We had to wait over an hour for our food, which was completely ridiculous. But, while we were waiting, something utterly unheard of happened. There was a long line for the men's bathroom and no line for the women's bathroom. Apparently men in drag don't know how to take a leak in women's clothing. Our food finally arrived after Paul Bunyan tracked down our waiter. Apparently we were seated in the lumberjack section of Ihop, as we ran into another Paul Bunyan, but with a smaller ax and a fake beard. But the other Bunyan was with Babe the blue ox.
On our way to the festivities we passed a group of pirates sitting in a bar. For some reason this did not seem odd or out of place. As we approached the center of activity, it quickly became apparent that West Hollywood is a largely gay community. I later learned that this is a well known fact, but I was not aware of this at the time. There were lots of drag queens and people who were just obviously gay. (We even saw two guys in assless pants.) One of the coolest costumes had to be the transvestite owl with enormous wings. The picture really doesn't do him/her justice. There were really too many crazy costumes to list them all. Below is a slide show of some of the highlights.

My favorite website

I'm a bit of a wannabe health nut. I try to eat healthy and exercise, but I'm nowhere near fanatical or even terribly consistent. But I'm constantly on the lookout for good information about health and nutrition. And the best source I've found is http://drbenkim.com/ This website is in sort of a quasi blog format with lots of information about health and nutrition and recipes, and also an online natural health store. My boyfriend calls me a Dr. Ben groupie, and I guess I kind of am. I am a big fan of his overall philosophy about health. The more research I do about health care, and as a former pre-med student I've done a lot, the more convinced I am that simple steps to improve overall health are often the best and most effective. He advocates trying to make changes in daily habits or diets rather than turning to conventional medicine. Obviously, both he and I think there is a time and a place for conventional medicine, but perhaps I will get into that another time.

I first came across his website when I was just messing around looking for some sort of advice for managing chronic nose stuffiness. A number of years ago, I was diagnosed with non-allergic nasal rhinitis, meaning my nose was stuffy all the time for no reason. I tried a few different treatments, but none really worked that well, and I think my sniffles annoyed my family more then they bothered me anyways, so I just kind of lived with it. Then I came across an article by Dr. Ben noting that dairy allergies often caused chronic congestion. So, just for the heck of it, I tried cutting down on my dairy intake for a week, and magically, my congestion reduced. Now, I haven't tried to completely cut out dairy, so I still have some congestion, but it has definitely helped. So my non-allergic rhinitis isn't really non-allergic, it appears to be a mild dairy allergy.

He also stresses the connection between emotional and physical health--something I think is underestimated in modern medicine. However, I think this connection is slowly being given more consideration. I took a physiology course my junior year of college, and my professor was an endocrinologist. Whenever we studied a certain organ system, we would also study how it was controlled by the endocrine system, which is a very complicated system of hormones, chemical messengers, etc. And our emotions have a great impact over our endocrine systems. Perhaps sometime I'll write more on this. But for now I'd encourage you to go check out what Dr. Ben has to say.

Road trip

This summer, Isaac and I drove cross country from Minneapolis, MN to Los Angeles, CA. Here are some of the photos from our trip. I'm still getting the hang of this whole blogging thing, so these pics are in reverse chronological order. Most of them are from Yellowstone.

My job

So, since this thing is mostly to let people in my life know what I'm up to, among other things listed in my first post, I thought I'd write a bit about my job. For anyone who doesn't know, I work in a cancer research lab at UCLA, where I am effectively the lab manager, but my official title is staff research associate, which really is not very descriptive. While I don't think I'd want to do this sort of thing for the rest of my life, it's a pretty good job for straight out of college. And it's sure a heck of a lot easier and less stressful than college. It's kind of crazy that I replaced a guy who had been there for 16 years, which is kind of intimidating, but kind of cool. I maintain four mouse colonies, do all the ordering, monitor the lab's hazardous waste output, assist the grad students and post docs with a number of projects, and I have my own project that involves creating an assay based on microhomology-mediated recombination in yeast. Right now I am helping one grad student on a project to test the efficacy and toxicity of potential radioprotector drugs for chemo patients and astronauts, and helping another with a study on the effects of intestinal microflora on cancer risk. Some stuff is a bit tedious and annoying, but some stuff is really cool. But, really I feel like this job is helping me to figure out what I want in a career. I think I've at least tentatively decided to get a masters in public health. I may go on to get a PhD, but who knows. For a number of reasons I've more or less ruled out med school. Basically I'm just not sure I'd be happy living the sort of life that doctors must lead, and there are plenty of other ways I can use my talents to help people, and without going into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt or spending the next eight years in school. The field of public health has so many opportunities to travel, work, and live abroad, to help people, the opportunity to lead and organize things, etc. And, I can do any combination of research, writing, administrative work, etc. Basically, everything I'm looking for in a career. However, I have absolutely no idea how it will all culminate into a career path.

First post

Hello friends, relatives, and random internet people who might stumble upon this. I finally caved to the blogging phenomenon. For a while, I had adopted a holier-than-thou attitude towards blogging, that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed individuals putting their opinions out there for the world to see. Then, I started to read some of my friends' blogs, and realized that while there were certainly enough people out there who fit my stereotype, it certainly wasn't that way for many. And I realized how much I enjoyed reading my friends blogs, especially now that I no longer get to see them on a daily basis. Also, now that I'm done with college I really need something to motivate me to continue writing on a regular basis so that my writing muscles won't atrophy. I feel that I'm already quite rusty only a few months after graduation. Plus, my boyfriend just left for a week and I'm going to need something to do to occupy my time. So I hope you all enjoy my thoughts, musings, rants, random occurrences, and occasional waxing philosophical.