this is going to be amazing

you get an email from your future PIs informing you that they want your summer project to result in an abstract to be presented at a conference in hawaii (complete with student travel stipend).

oh i hope this works out! i've never been to hawaii.

when you need to find out who the daddy is!

so i caught a plane from manchester to baltimore yesterday to return home from the family ski trip to vermont. i made the stupid mistake of forgetting my ipod for the trip so i had nothing to do during the flight other than to peruse the magazines in the seat in front of me for a soduku or interesting article or something.

and oh did i find something interesting.

should you find yourself on southwest airlines anytime in the near future, flip to pg. 147 of their airline magazine.

you should see an advertisement something along the lines of "grow young with HGH."

so if you're not familiar with HGH perhaps you've heard a bit about scandals in baseball with all kinds of players using illegal drugs and steroids. HGH has come up in there a few times because players inject themselves with it because it supposedly helps them recover faster from injuries and provides other general maintenance of a "healthy" body type benefits. i have no idea if there's any truth to those claims, i just know that i've only ever heard of HGH being indicated in cases where the genetics are such that the body inadequately produces HGH and the hormone is prescribed to help one achieve more normal growth.

ok back to my point. why the hell is HGH being advertised in an airplane magazine? ok, technically they are not selling HGH. if you read through the entire text of the advertisement, they're selling GHR, which is what supposedly stimulates release of one's own HGH. they go on to claim that this product does such things as regenerates the immune system and normalizes blood pressure and does all kinds of amazing things to make an 85 year old feel 20 years old. they even go on to suggest that since prescription drugs (like anti-hypertensive medication) are so expensive for seniors that this drug can be a solution for that problem since it is less expensive and yet still effective. obviously this is all a load of bullshit. how can i believe anything without proper references? the ad alludes to several studies performed researching this drug and the wonders of it but as you would expect for an advertisement, there's really no data to support any of the claims or even references to where one could find such data. but that's all besides the point.

bottom line: HGH should not be advertised on an airplane. stick to travel stuff. or at least put some massive bold print saying "Southwest Airlines does not endorse the following advertisement." they have all the advertisement and "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" fine print - but the airline needs to distance itself from that kind of ad further if they're gonna run such a load of bullshit.

title is self-explanatory.

i'm going to game 2 of the ALCS with my dad on saturday!

woohoo!

i get the 2 things i love most next weekend, red sox october baseball and eric.

so happy :-)

The Red Sox better beat the Angels and make it to the ALCS.

Why, you ask?

Daddy got us tickets to Game 2 of the ALCS at Fenway, and obviously the game will only happen if the Red Sox win the Division Series.

They're standing room only tickets - but that was all we could get and I don't care, if I get a chance to go to that game I just know it will be worth the experience of seeing a playoff game at Fenway even if I have to stand the whole time. There's also a bit of family history involved in SRO tickets turning out to be worth every penny. My Dad went to this game with an SRO ticket in 1975, and it was arguably one of the most exciting baseball games ever played. So yeah, I'm hoping a) that the Sox make it there (though I may have jinxed them for already getting the ticket) and b) that the game has some kind of super awesome amazing crazy last second heroics. Although its only Game 2 and doesn't have the same do or die implications as in a Game 6, I'm still excited.

i want to be done with this test (and done studying for it) so i can put the rest of the week on fast forward and be in boston in no time.

the end.

you would think that the area right behind my house here is really bad because a week ago on sunday there were 15 cop cars in front of the 7-11 and miles of police tape blocking off the scene, but baltimore is actually deceptively amazing. every saturday morning (year-round) there's a farmer's market held in a community parking lot about a block behind my back door. i hadn't gotten the chance to check out the market yet because i've been busy the past few saturday mornings but i made it this week and i definitely was not disappointed. i pretty much could have done all of my grocery shopping there. the mounds of great looking fruits and vegetables were something that i had anticipated after hearing people rave about the market but i was equally impressed with everything else there too. local bakeries had huge selections of bread and pastries. there were refrigerated trucks with meats, eggs, and cheeses. there were also a number of people serving up all different kinds of ethnic foods: ethiopian, indian, and so many other things that i can't quite recall. i can also still here the guy playing his heart out on his trumpet through my windows. so yeah, basically, the waverly farmer's market is fantastic.

i think one of the things that i really love about baltimore is that a lot of the city neighborhoods are so heterogeneous. there were tons of yuppies there perusing the organic food, but i also noticed that the market had signs all over saying that they accepted WIC (federal government program of subsidizing food for low income families with young children). i wish that baltimore was more like that all over. there's an increasing trend to yuppify certain neighborhoods and then push out the families without the same means further into the city's not so great neighborhoods. so what happens is that you get pockets of good and bad and everyone's afraid of everyone else. i think if this city really wants to get better it's going to need to find ways for people to live together. you can't just force the people who've already been screwed over by life enough into worse neighborhoods. it only makes things worse. the other thing that kind of makes me sad about the city is that there are all these really great examples of gorgeous architecture that are falling to pieces because the neighborhoods have been abandoned. the abundance is vacant housing is pretty ridiculous when you consider how large of a homeless population exists here. so yeah, the farmers market made me happy because i saw it as kind of a way to bring people from different backgrounds together. i wish there was more of that here. it would be a better city.

courtesy of my little brother.

awesome.

i've been on the cape for a week and a half now.

vacation has been pretty relaxing so far. i haven't done much but read harry potter and sit in the sun. jess came up on monday and stayed through today. kim came up for the day today. we've had lots of good food (with the exception being dinner last night - ugh worst wait staff / kitchen ever). it rained a bit last week but the weather has been perfect so far this week. tedy bruschi (patriots player) has been sighted around the town that i'm in right now but i haven't bumped into him yet. i suspect he's back in boston though since the patriots training camp starts friday.

today was probably the best beach day i've ever had up here. i knew it would be good when we were driving up route 6 to marconi and the park service sign said "Marconi: LOT FULL." in my entire 22 years of existence, my parents swear that the sign has never said Marconi was full. normally most people would see that and go, shit, can't park at the beach. but my daddy kept going cause we have a season pass and there's usually a fair amount of lot turnover. didn't have any trouble finding a space and i couldn't believe how perfect the water looked as we were walking down the steps from the dunes. it was almost as clear looking as the water in the bahamas (ok so that's a slight exaggeration but for the cape this was amazing). there was virtually no seaweed in the water and the waves were just about perfect. i didn't get in the positively balmy 60ºF water for that long since jess was screaming her head off at how cold it was and kim got thrown by a wave pretty much the second she got in so i hung out on the sand for most of the day. i will probably hit up race point tomorrow and go running in the second i hit the sand cause i didn't get enough of an ocean fix today.

i love the cape and don't really want this vacation to end. at least my next trip out of baltimore is a visit to the pacific northwest so i can see a certain someone who i haven't seen in entirely too long.