Thanksgiving

I love that the one holiday that is truly American is Thanksgiving. What a lovely concept encapsulated in just one word: giving thanks.

Let me be honest about something: I don't love the holidays the way most people do. I'm in that somewhat pitiful minority of the population that dreads the holidays because they inevitably bring with them filial strife. There is nothing intrinsically festive about the Christmas season for my family, and trying to bring a holiday spirit into the house during that time sometimes feels a bit forced, even futile. Layers of issues emerge during this time, not least of them the difficulty of being an immigrant family. So I always tiptoe around the holidays, because I never know what they will bring. One day the family could get along wonderfully. The next we could frown at one another terribly.

Let me be honest about another thing: it's been a tough year. I've cried a lot, questioned a lot of things I've taken for granted all my life, and had really high ups and really deep downs.

And yet.

I still want to give thanks. So here goes:

I'm thankful for my friends, who have proven their incredible worth to such a degree that I cannot begin to express my gratitude. I'm thankful for the family that could only cause me so much heartache because they have given me so much love. I'm thankful for college and all that it has taught me. I'm thankful for the words that help me make sense of this world. I'm thankful for the music that has so often been my loyal companion. I'm thankful for critical thinking. I'm thankful for being a medical student, difficult as the road may get. I'm thankful that despite legions of unhappiness, I am still surrounded by joy that can't be kept down. I'm thankful. And I'm glad there's a holiday that reminds me to take a moment, or a day, or a week, to give thanks for all that is good in my life, because there is so much. What are you thankful for today?

Selection Bias

I've been playing my iTunes on shuffle for the past three days, and I've been continually impressed with just how good the playlist has been. Owl City and Ingrid Michaelson and Imogen Heap and Kate Nash and Hellogoodbye and some great Tamil songs thrown in, along with some of the new Maroon 5 album. It made me really happy that such great songs were coming up on shuffle.

...

And then I realized that I'm loving all the songs that are coming up because they're, well, my library. Selection bias works its magic: I chose all the songs that went into my iTunes library, so of course a random playlist of them would be filled with all my favorites. It ruins the magic a tiny bit, but it also makes me smile. How circular our lives can be.

Another example of selection bias: patients on peritoneal dialysis are more likely to survive than those on hemodialysis, even though peritoneal dialysis is less effective at renal clearance than hemodialysis. Why, you ask? Well, because of many factors, including better retention of renal function in those on peritoneal dialysis, the lack of biocompatibility issues for peritoneal dialysis [unlike the ones rampant in hemodialysis], more cardiovascular complications on hemodialysis, and better clearance of middle molecules [which may be toxic to dialysis patients in the long run] in peritoneal dialysis. But most importantly, patients on PD might have a selection bias phenomenon: those who choose to do the more independent and demanding form of dialysis are likely to be better-educated (and thus take better care of their renal health overall), less sick, and have better family support.

^I wrote that entire paragraph to review something I studied today. Exams start in 6 days, and it's time for lockdown. Not long till I see the light!

Ostrich

Every once in a while I get to acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand. I get ensconced in my routine, used to the way I run my life, and fail to reach out and grab the chances offered to me. Meetings of interesting organizations go unattended, simple surveys unfilled, because I'm just used to the way I've settled into things, because Grey's Anatomy is on and I don't want to miss it. It's a ridiculous and infuriating tendency in me, this love of sitting back and relaxing. Life would be better if I were always on my toes, at the edge of my seat. When I was finishing college, I realized that though it might seem on paper that my hand was always in something or other (metaphorically, not literally), I really didn't do nearly as much as I could have or should have or might have.

Because of that realization, and because I don't want to have regrets when I graduate from medical school, I'm trying to live with the concept of doing more than you think you can. Like Imogen Heap sings in Tidal, I want to "do it for all the times we wished we had." And that means stretch myself academically, extra-curricularly, socially, and with new experiences. I've been doing all right so far, and it was especially easy to stretch myself out of some comfort zones while medical school was still new and fresh and I hadn't yet settled into a routine, but I'm finding myself edging towards that dangerous complacency now, and I want to avoid it.

Also like an ostrich with its head in the sand, I can be completely clueless sometimes. Case in point: this evening around 9:30 I realized that I had failed to attend the FIRST SESSION of an elective this afternoon. I was really excited about this elective, too: Art of the Human Body at the Museum of Fine Arts. But instead of going to it like a responsible student, I completely. Forgot. Instead, I took a two-hour nap this afternoon (glorious, but not exactly productive), studied some, cooked a tiny bit, and watched two premieres of two shows. I'm not saying it wasn't a good day overall. I'm just saying I need to get my head out of the sand (or my ass, or my routine) and take a look around every once in a while, because I miss important things when I get this way.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Best: I met Amy Tan tonight! I love her books, though I haven't touched one in ages, and I didn't even get to hear her read because I had to leave early, but meeting her was such an honor, and I got her to sign my yellowed paperback copy of The Joy Luck Club and take a picture with my sister and me. All in all a pretty great Monday night.

The Great:

1. I went to a reading last Tuesday evening by my wonderful former creative writing professor, Emily Fox Gordon (www.emilyfoxgordon.com). She is one of the most intelligent authors I've ever read--in my adult life, other than when reading, say Moby-Dick or Midnight's Children, never have I had to look up words so many times while reading a book. Emily's cadences are nearly always spot-on, and I am so proud to have been taught by her. She struggled with trying to write fiction for many many years before realizing that personal essay was the genre for her (and, I think, the genre for me--this is the class I took with her), but she had to write two memoirs and one novel (the last a triumph for her, because she never thought she could write fiction) before FINALLY getting to publish a collection of her personal essays entitled Book of Days. I bought this book at her reading and had her sign it, and she signed it "To Chaya, one of my very favorites," which made me feel really special. I'm hoping to have lunch or coffee with her some time in the near future. That reading came at the perfect time: between my first medical school exams. It reminded me that there's a whole other amazing and happy side to me and my life that isn't sciencesciencescience, and I had nearly forgotten about that aspect. So it was just. Great.

2. I've realized that I can count on my best friends to see through my facades and know exactly, exactly when I need them and to be there when I need them, and that is comforting in a way I cannot even express. I don't know what I'd do without the wonderful people I have in my life.

The Good:

1. I've made soup twice since moving into my apartment, and both times, the soup has come out great. Really, great. This is absolutely wonderful, partly because I love soup, but also because I've always, always wanted to be a wonderful recipe-less cook like my mother, and I'm finally starting to edge towards the possibility of that. I've eaten tons of sub-standard Indian food (prepared by myself) for the past few years as I've tried to find my cooking rhythm, and I'm finally starting to get that magical intuition that all Indian mothers seem to have. And my newfound cooking savvy seems to extend to pastas and soups as well! This is wonderful news.

2. I'm one block into medical school, and I've not only made it so far, but enjoyed it. I'm a little loath to begin studying again now that a new block has begun, but I'm hoping that my enthusiasm will grow slowly but surely.

3. The new Sara Bareilles album is filling me with great joy. How wonderful when an artist one loves proves her worth with a second album that is quite possibly better than the last.

The Bad:

1. It's 9:10 PM and I've only reviewed one of the four lectures I had today. And I wanted to go to bed early tonight as getting up early (after four days of vacation) was particularly difficult this morning.

2. Crazy as it sounds, medical school is the simplest, most manageable thing in my life right now. On the one hand, this makes medical school not so bad. On the other hand, it shows how much of a struggle many other things are being right now.

The Ugly:

1. I'm trying to write a piece for my medical school's literary magazine, and I'm running into problems from the outset. I haven't written anything worth anyone else's revisions in an incredibly long time, and I really want to make this piece great, because I know there's substance there. I just feel like the lolcat in that lolcatz picture, the one that's sprawled across a keyboard with the caption "Writer's block. I haz it."

2. I just want so badly to be substantive, real. I feel that I'm not really either.

Like a Duck to Water

Crazy as it may sound, that's the way I feel that I've taken to medical school. To be perfectly honest, I wondered for a long time whether medical school was the right path for me, even as I was interviewing and deciding where to go to school. Once I got here, though. I quickly [very quickly] learned that it was exactly where I wanted to be, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps it's just the excited flush of new experiences and new friends, or the joy of learning, or the even greater joy of finally starting on the path toward my chosen career, but medical school, though challenging no doubt, is proving to be much, much better than I had anticipated.

I've been taking classes for five weeks now (our orientation was six weeks ago), and it feels like forever. I barely have a memory of the summer that was before school began. We've covered in five weeks what a college course would have covered in at least 2/3 of a semester, encompassing two tests or more. And we still have one more week of classes before we finally have an exam over our first "block" of material.

When I was still in college [now that's a weird clause; I graduated from college almost a year ago. Imagine that!], I heard from a lot of friends in med school that trying to study all the information thrown at you is "like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose." It's hard to actualize that kind of workload until you're experiencing it for yourself, but I'll have to say that the simile is quite apropos. I would like to add one of my own, though: each week, I feel as if I'm stuffing more and more compressible cotton balls (information) into a container with a snap-shut lid (my brain). As the weeks go by, the volume of the container gets more and more filled, and each week I'm having to push the cotton balls down, compress them as much as possible, then pull my pressing hand away as rapidly as possible as I rush to snap the lid shut on those overflowing cotton balls. It's a set of expectations the sort to which I've never had to rise before, and it's not easy.

But.

I'm finding that I actually like learning about feedback regulation in glycolysis, the muscle that makes my knee jerk in that famous reflex, the tendons visible beneath the skin of my hands. I like my classmates. Their intelligence, while a bit intimidating, is inspirational. Medical genetics and embryology, basically classes about every way a human being's development can go wrong, make me grateful that my genes contain no deleterious mutations, that the oddly-named Sonic Hedgehog signaling protein was present in all the right places and in all the right amounts so that my neural tube developed properly less than three weeks after my conception. There is so. much. to learn about our bodies, but how amazing to know how our muscles contract, that there are tiny little fibers that "walk" across each other every time our motor neurons fire and excite a skeletal muscle? Every time I get to thinking that this is just too much, that no one person can do this, I try to remind myself that so many others have gone before me, so it's possible. More importantly, one day I could be taking care of someone's motherfathersisterbrotherfriendhusbandwifechild, and I want to know everything I can so that I can take the best possible care of that person.

And it doesn't hurt that I still have time and energy to go out with friends on the weekends, talk to my roommate about our respective days daily, see friends from college, visit my family back home, and, yes, waste time every once in a while. More often than I probably should, in fact.

I've been watching Saved by the Bell in the mornings while I'm eating breakfast before school, and I can't help thinking that the theme for "The College Years" episodes is rather relevant to my current situation: "I'm standing at the edge of tomorrow...the future looks bright to me." I am so excited to be starting this next stage of my life, and I can't wait to be a real MD, with all the knowledge--and responsibility--that entails. Not to mention, it'll be nice to finally be getting paid.

"We're young enough to say, 'Oh, this is gonna be the good life.'" Good Life-OneRepublic

A Primer on South Indian Temples

Finally continuing with my "Coming Attractions," i.e. blog posts about my time in India, I present to you pictures and information about what is probably my favorite part of going to India: visiting temples.

Let's start with the Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur, often known as the Big Temple. This is my temple in more way than one. Located in the town where I was born, this is the temple where I feel most at home in India. Its main tower, or gopuram, is impressively tall (216 feet, according to Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadeeswarar_Temple]), and it is the world's first complete granite temple, also according to Wikipedia. Both facts make it literally an architectural marvel. Commissioned by King Rajaraja Chola in 1002 AD, the temple is celebrating its millenial year in 2010.

Brihadeeswarar is the name of the form of Lord Shiva worshiped at the Big Temple, making the temple a Shiva temple (as opposed to a Vishnu temple, as you'll see later). Small Nandi statues line the outer perimeter of the temple grounds, as seen below:

Legend has it that the shadow of the gopuram never falls on the ground, falling only upon the tower itself--that's how tall it is. There is a tree behind the gopuram upon which a number of highly camouflaged lizards live. Legend also has it that if you can find a lizard on that tree with your naked eye, whatever you prayed for at the temple will be granted. This is the temple where I had my first and only ride on an elephant (it was a baby, and had prickly hairs on its back; did you know that elephants had hairs on their backs? I certainly didn't until I rode that one). This is the temple where my alternate name, Brihadaambal, comes from. [As per the tradition of my mother's family, girls are given unofficial names borrowed from a goddess worshiped in their hometowns to commemorate their birthplace. Brihadaambal is the name of Brihadeeswarar's consort, and her sanctum stands to the right of the main tower in the Big Temple.]

I love the history of this temple, the very smell and sound of it. For its size alone, it is not to be missed on a tour of temples in the South of India.

Here's one last picture, just to show the two massive gates that stand before the actual temple grounds:

With my great-aunt and great-uncle, I visited a number of temples in the villages surrounding Thanjavur while I was staying with my mother's family. Here are some shots I took in Mellatore, the ancestral village of one of my great-grandfathers, though for the life of me I couldn't tell you which one:

Above is a Vishnu temple (indicated by the chakram, naamam, and sangu sculptures on top of the stone awning) located at the end of the street where my great-grandfather lived with his family. Notice how this temple is brightly painted, whereas the Big Temple is the natural color of stone. I used to think that painting temples in bright colors was a recent phenomenon, but I think that most temples, ancient or otherwise, start out brightly painted, but the paint wears off with time, hence the color of most ancient temples--unless they've been recently renovated, as some have. Notice also the vertical white and red stripes that line the bottom of the temple structure. You'll see these on many temples and temple walls in South India. I have no idea why they're painted in this fashion, but they are.

This is a beautiful kolam I saw on the floor inside the Vishnu temple pictured above. A kolam is an intricate dot-and-line design drawn with rice flour on the ground for ritualistic and religious purposes. There are a number of standard kolam designs. They are made out of rice flour so that ants can eat them, or so my mother has once told me. I've been trying to learn how to drawkolams this summer, and it is not easy to draw out lines of rice flour with your bare fingers, let me tell you. The person who drew the one above is very skilled indeed.

I saw the above instrumentalists (the first playing the naadaswaram, a sort of Indian oboe, and the second playing a type of drum, the name of which I don't know) in front of a Ganesh temple in this same village. They were playing because an upanayanam, or sacred thread ceremony (a coming-of-age ceremony for males) was occurring inside the temple. You'll see instrumentalists like this, or at least hear recordings of their music, at south Indian weddings and other religious events.

Next on my temple tour was the Panchanadeeswarar Temple in Thiruvaiyaaru (literally, five holy rivers; my great-uncle told me this name came about because you cross five tributaries of the holy River Kaveri on the road to this town from Thanjavur):

The name of the deity worshiped here, a form of Lord Shiva, means Lord (Eeswar) of five (Pancha) rivers (Nadi). To the left of the frame is the main tower, or gopuram. Within the bounds of the yellow stone wall on the right of the frame is the large temple moat or well. Many temples have their own sources of water built onto the grounds. I'm not sure if the temples use the water in those moats anymore, but the moats still exist. The stone ground at this temple was searing hot even in February. I remember its being unbearable during previous trips here in the summertime. The idols of the God and Goddess at this temple are big and quite beautiful.

One of the things I liked most about this temple were the paintings (would it be correct to call them frescoes?) painted on the inside of the perimeter walls. I saw them while doing the ritual circumambulation (pradakshanam) of the temple. Aren't they beautiful?

On the same day, we also visited the resting place (samaathi) of the composer-saint Sri Thyagaraja, who composed many (many) famous and lovely Carnatic songs in his day. His resting place is located right on the banks of the aforementioned holy River Kaveri. Like in other ancient societies, bodies of water are highly revered in the Indian culture. Rivers are most often personified as female deities, and washing one's feet or body in the waters of any holy river, the Kaveri included, is said to cleanse one of one's sins. I'm not sure if I had ever done this before, though I'm thinking I probably had, but since we were so close to the river, my great-aunt and I walked the few steps down to the water and bathed our feet. It was pretty cool.

You can see the river just past the tree and the kids playing on the sandy ground. Those kids would later ask for water from my bottle and then proceed to pass the bottle around, nearly depleting me of my precious mineral water. They were pretty cute though, so I guess it was okay. You can also see the silhouette of my great-uncle in the right foreground of the photo. He has hairy ears, which I find highly amusing.

My mother was born in Thiruvaiyaaru and my uncle works in a school there now, making it yet another town to which my family is connected.

Leaving the greatest connection for the last, we come to Thirupponthuruthi (it's a mouthful, I know), where my mother grew up, and where I believe her fondest memories were made. This place is very much still a village, with picturesque palm trees everywhere and humble homes lining the narrow streets. There are a few things I don't like about the village, the lack of soap in public restrooms for instance, but it's quite a pleasant place, and has a number of temples as well. The only one I visited was the local Shiva temple. I'm not sure what the name of this particular deity is, unfortunately, but here are a few shots of the temple.
This is a mirrored, gold-plated, and jeweled palanquin used to convey miniature idols of the deities for temple ceremonies that involve parades. I thought it was beautiful.

My favorite part of this temple is the story associated with it. You'll notice a small yellow shelter in front of the main tower in the picture above. This shelter contains an idol of the bull Nandi, who is Shiva's vehicle--this is the same Nandi that lines Shiva temple walls. Normally, the Nandi shelter is located directly in front of the door to the temple, so that the Lord is always in Nandi's line of sight. However, you'll notice that the shelter is shifted slightly to the left in this photo.

Here's the cool story: legend has it that a great Shiva devotee came to the outer gate of this temple and began singing the Lord's praise. I'm not sure why, but he never entered the temple itself, so he was singing the entire time without a glimpse of the idol--and in Hindu culture, being able to see the idol is an important part of devotion. Seeing the deep faith of the devotee, Nandi Himself animated the statue of Nandi and shifted it to the left of the door, providing the Shiva devotee with a clear sight of the Lord. This is supposedly the only temple you'll ever see where Nandi is not located directly in front of Lord Shiva. Cool stuff.

I apologize for the length of this post, but as you can see, I really love the subject matter. I've visited many other temples during my multiple trips to India, but this was the first trip during which I made a conscious effort to remember all the things I saw and learned. I hope this post was educational and interesting and not boring!

Jury Duty = Staycation

Early last summer, when people were just beginning to realize that the economy was very bad, indeed, the term "staycation" came into vogue, showing up in the features sections of all sorts of newspapers. In a staycation, the articles explained, one explores everything one's own city has to offer in the way of culture and entertainment, thus simulating a vacation without having to pay for travel or a hotel stay. When I went to Chicago with a few girlfriends at the end of last May, I really enjoyed exploring that city's parks and museums and architecture, and told myself repeatedly that I would put together a Houston staycation once I got home, encompassing parks and museums and other landmarks. As is typical for me, I never turned my thoughts into action. And then fate stepped in.

Some time last fall, I received a summons for federal jury duty. Have never actually served on a jury before, and using the pop cultural reaction to jury duty as a guide, I was most displeased. I couldn't get out of it, though, so last Monday, I reported to the federal courthouse in downtown Houston--and got selected for the 14-person jury out of 42 possible candidates. Just my luck that the lawyers didn't think I'd be biased, right? Jury duty itself hasn't been nearly as much of a drag as I had anticipated; the other jurors are pretty amusing middle-aged people (12 of them women, including me, and 2 of them men), and there's never a dull moment in the jury room. The courtroom gets very cold and sometimes boring, though, and actually being a juror, ie having to decide on a person's guilt or innocence, is not an easy thing--and is actually much more trying than one might imagine.

For reasons somewhat unbeknownst to me, we tend to have many lengthy breaks during any given day, during which the lawyers work their lawyerly magic or shout at each other or something. These breaks give us jurors a chance to thaw out, (see above for reference to the courtroom's cool temperature) and have also given me a chance to check out the sights around the courthouse. There are two parks within two blocks of the federal building, and a third not four more blocks away. City hall is two blocks away, and the Central Houston Public Library one block beyond that. The library is particularly impressive: three floors high, an entire section devoted to foreign-language books, another to music, and displays of new books everywhere! I don't have a Houston public library card, but I might have to get one some time in the next four years just so I can take advantage of that sweet library. I'm hoping to explore the area a bit more tomorrow, including the tunnel system under the Bank of America building that contains restaurants, (I can now put names to a lot of the buildings I've admired in our skyline! How cool is that?) the entertainment complex Bayou Place, (which includes the Verizon Wireless Theater, where I saw Imogen Heap perform in concert less than two weeks ago) and the Hobby Center vicinity. Additionally, I drive through the quirky Montrose area on my way into downtown, and have pinpointed a number of restaurants, coffee houses, and possible study locations to explore at my leisure over my next four years in medical school.

Moral of the jury duty story: Life is exciting when one makes it seem so.

Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

I just finished Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman, which was kindly given to me by a friend who interned at Penguin this past semester.

A short summary: main character Cecelia Rose Honeycutt has looked after her psychotic mother for most of her twelve-year-old life while her father has been traveling for work--and also to get away from his family's problems. When her mother passes away in an accident, young CeeCee is whisked off to live in Savannah, Georgia with her great-aunt. Over her first summer there, she meets a host of eccentric and loving women who help her begin to heal all the wounds inflicted upon her by cruel circumstance.

The book is a love song to the South (and also a bit of a downer about the North, which I'm sure would rub a few people the wrong way) and a testament to the power of female companionship. It was a bit disconcerting, too, in that though it is an adult's book, it is written completely from the twelve-year-old main character's perspective, which means that sometimes the reader understands things the protagonist does not, and also that the writing seems a bit elementary at times, when really it's just reflecting the protagonist's point of view.

I was touched by the author's brutally honest descriptions of CeeCee's mother's antics, and of the pain that CeeCee feels because of them. A few quotable quotes:

"And now here I was...thinking about how much easier everything would be if my mother was locked up in a sanatorium. I sometimes even wished she were dead. It was terrible to think such a thing, but I just couldn't help it. I'm not saying I wanted to skip through life in a rosy blur from one Disney experience to the next--all I longed for was to know one whole happy day." (22)

"As I knocked on her door, begging her to let me in, I realized I had just taken my father's place: there I was, standing outside her locked bedroom door, frustrated and helpless and just plain tired. Tired of it all." (76)

"I wondered if I'd ever be so lucky to have a girlfriend I'd grow old with, a girlfriend who knew my secrets, my fears, my hopes--and loved me anyway." (111-112)

"I felt selfish and small as I watched my aunt from the kitchen window. She had given me so much, so freely, yet I was unable to do something as simple as sit at her side." (115)

"'But I guess some folks is willin' to pay anything for hope.'" (145)

"'Ain't no sun in the kitchen without your face lookin' up at me.'" (142)

"'Don't go wastin' all them bright tomorrows you ain't even seen by hangin' on to what happened yesterday. Let go, child. Just breathe out and let go.'" (290)

"'It's how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.'" (302)

Also, I'm not going to lie: with the book consisting of such a female-dominated world, I felt as if homoeroticism was the huge elephant in the room the whole time I was reading. Everyone's husband was dead or divorced with or absent in some other way, but there were just so many women. I almost felt like it was a slight cop-out on the part of the author. I'm not saying she needed some sort of graphic scene of homoeroticism, but she could have hinted at it subtly the way other things were hinted at in the novel. I do applaud her portrayal of free female sexuality, though.

Mahabalipuram

The first of the much-touted India posts!

On my first Saturday in India, I visited Mahabalipuram (now known as Mamallapuram), a coastal town located in the Kancheepuram district of Tamil Nadu. It was a 7th-century port city of the Pallava dynasty, and thus has zillions of amazing historical temples, carvings, and other marvels. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. [note: I definitely stole some of the above information from Wikipedia.] I'd never been to this city before, and I love historical places, so it was a real treat seeing all of the amazing things depicted in the photos below:

The first thing we saw at Mahabalipuram was the above bas relief carving, known as The Descent of the Ganga or Arjuna's Penance [thanks Wikipedia]. Notice the incredible detail in the carving. If you look closely above the small shrine carving (to the left of the largest elephant), you'll see a carving of an emaciated man in tree pose. This is supposed to be Arjuna, doing penance in order to receive a boon from Lord Shiva to help him fight the war in the Mahabharata, or Bhagiratha, also doing penance so that the River Ganga would descend from heaven to Earth and wash over the ashes of his ancestors.

Amazingly, this sculpture is monolithic--it was carved out of ONE rock!

I really like cooing over goats and calves in India, and I thought these goats with their heads together in the shade of this boulder were kind of adorable.

More bas relief carvings in a cave temple. The one above depicts the reclining Lord Vishnu, or Seshashayanam. He reclines upon a snake bed in the ocean, and is surrounded by attendants.

In this carving, Shiva's vehicle the bull, known as Nandi, leads an army. I don't know what story this depicts, but wish I did.

I found this tree, growing out of the side of a rock face, was pretty incredible.

I took the three pictures below while standing at the top of the ancient lighthouse near the cave temples. The Tamil Nadu countryside is breathtaking.


If you squint in this photo, you can see the tower (gopuram) of the Shore Temple (which will be featured below) near the horizon, about one-fourth away from the left frame of the photo.

Below is a photo of three of the Five Rathas, monolothic, un-consecrated temples. Tickets must be purchased to visit these, and the price varies depending on whether you are Indian or a "foreigner." My cousin bought Indian-priced tickets for all of us, and told me to keep my mouth shut until we entered the compound, because had I spoken, I would have outed myself with my accent. Humorous anecdote aside, these five temples are pretty amazing.

This is a carving on the side of one of the temples, depicting Ardhanarishwara, a deity who is half-male (the left half) and half-female (the right half). Apparently it's a really great example of Pallava sculpture.

Next we visited Shore Temple, a Shiva temple located on, well, the shore. Legend has it that this is one of 3-5 shore temples in total, and all but this one are no submerged underwater. Legend also has it that before the tsunami hit this coast, when the tide was going unnaturally far out, one or two of the other shore temples were revealed. Pretty cool stuff.

Hello, gorgeous Bay of Bengal

Because this is a Shiva temple, small Nandi sculptures line the perimeter wall of the temple. In this gorgeous shot, I was able to capture the silhouettes of these Nandis.

Beloved

It took me weeks to finish reading Toni Morrison's Beloved. I began reading it right as I was leaving India, and only finished it up last week. Chalk the slow pace up to its being a bit impenetrable at times. The book was very good overall, but if I were to try to piece together the plot meticulously, I'd still be baffled. Since I've chosen instead to focus on the themes presented in the novel and the moments of breathtaking writing in it, I'm mostly just happy I finished it. As I am wont to do with nearly everything I read, I dog-eared the pages containing lines that made me swoon as I read. Unfortunately, since I never underline or highlight said lines, I have to search for them on the dog-eared pages after I read the book and blog about it. So the following are (hopefully) my absolute favorite quotations from this book:

"...but even when she said it she was thinking how much her eyes enjoyed looking in his face." (46)

"She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite?...But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day." (70)

"He sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight his face, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart down." (71) I lovelove the cadences created by the first two short sentences, and then the concept of a face smoothing someone's heart down, the same way I love the concept of eyes enjoying looking at a face. The idea that beauty can be comprehended severally by your senses and not just in a lump experience by your brain.

"Sethe rubbed and rubbed, pressing the work cloth and the stony curves that made up his knee. She hoped it calmed him as it did her. Like kneading bread...Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past." (73) This excerpt ended a chapter. An ending like that--it just makes me go "mm."

"...she wanted Paul D. No matter what he told and knew, she wanted him in her life....Trust and rememory, yes, the way she believed it could be when he cradled her before the cooking stove. The weight and angle of him; the true-to-life beard hair on him; arched back, educated hands. His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well--to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other--the things neither had word-shapes for--well, it would come in time..." (99) What a fantastic description of the things one can love about a man, and the way lovers can begin to occupy spaces in one another's lives.

"I'll plant carrots just so she can see them, and turnips. Have you ever seen one, baby? A prettier thing God never made. White and purple with a tender tail and a hard head. Feels good when you hold it in your hand and smells like the creek when it floods, bitter but happy." (201) Who else could write so evocatively about a turnip, for goodness' sake! This excerpt makes me want to hold one, see one, smell one, so much.

"There are too many things to feel about this woman. His head hurts. Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. 'She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.'" (272-273) I so desperately want to be described this way one day, as a woman about whom there is too much to feel, a woman who can gather a man's (or anyone's, for that matter) pieces and give them back in the right order. Mm.

"He wants to put his story next to hers." (273) Again, an amazing way to conceptualize (ugh this is not the right term; where is all my language gone?) love and marriage--putting your stories together.

NOTE: Boldface and italics were added by me, and were not in the original text.

Now You're in New York

Just because I haven't blogged about my India trip as promised (so much for putting pressure on myself; who was I kidding? Seriously, though, I will blog about it. Someday.) doesn't mean I can't write about the trip I'm currently on: visiting a friend from high school (and middle school) in New York City for a week! I was really excited when I first scheduled the trip, and I'm still definitely happy to be here, but upon consideration, I've decided that my trip here is too long: it spreads out the excitement a bit too thinly. Additionally, going to a tourist mecca like New York and staying with someone for whom this is just home dissipates a bit of the excitement of being in said tourist mecca. Still, I'm enjoying myself here, and have seen some wonderful things. For which reason I'm writing this post. So here we go:

The first night I was here (Monday), my friend and I had dumplings in Chinatown for dinner, which was pretty delicious. We then had our obligatory bubble tea and then sat around her apartment for a while before getting dolled up for a [Monday] night on the town! It was the birthday of two of my friend's friends, so we went to an Asian-themed bar called Forbidden City, where I imbibed a little. One of my drinks, called the Red Lotus, is pictured below. It had a lychee at the bottom!

The next day was cold and rainy, so we spent it inside at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

This place is GORGEOUS, top to bottom. Beautiful architecture, amazing detailing in the ceilings and walls and everywhere, and the art is to die for. I really enjoyed this day, but by the time we got back to Katherine's apartment cold and a little wet, all I wanted to do was curl up with a movie and take-out, so we did just that: Thai food and The Time Traveler's Wife, which was a nice chick flick.

Katherine was busy the next day, so I ventured out into the city by myself. I was a bit nervous, but with the expert advice of hopstop.com, which gives public transit directions for many cities, I got to and from the New York Public Library, which took my breath away repeatedly with its sheer beauty, safely. The library is celebrating its centennial next year, so the front of it was covered in drapes while it was being cleaned, as a result of which I couldn't get a great shot of it. Notice in the picture below, though, the lion (one of two) in front of the steps leading up to the library. Mayor LaGuardia (whose namesake is one of the two airports here in NYC) named them Patience and Fortitude, because he thought those were the qualities New Yorkers would need to survive the Great Depression. I spent the majority of my afternoon in the library, part of it on a free public tour, and part of it just walking around and marveling. Trust me: there was much at which to marvel. Beautiful!

Thursday afternoon (we've been skipping breakfast altogether and starting our days around lunchtime), Katherine and I went to SoHo, a district known for shopping and food (sounds like a lot of other districts...). We ate fusion dosas (Indian rice crepes, often stuffed with curried potatoes) at Hampton Chutney Co. I wasn't terribly impressed with the food, but it was an interesting experience nevertheless. We then browsed the stores in SoHo. I bought a slightly unnecessary shirt at H&M, but not much else.
We swung by NYU, Katherine's alma mater, and Washington Square Park on our way back to her apartment. The park is really beautiful, with the gorgeous arch depicted below being the standout feature. Similar to our tradition with the Sallyport at Rice, students at NYU aren't supposed to walk under the arch in Washington Square Park at all until they've graduated. Katherine and I walked under it together, officially marking her graduation from NYU!

Special note: outside of Washington Square Park is one of my favorite things, so far, in this city: A DOSA CART! Two men stand there and whip up masala dosas (as I mentioned before, that is an Indian rice crepe stuffed with curried potatoes). I haven't tried out the cart yet, but I plan to before I head back home.

Next on our trip back to her apartment was the Strand, a bookstore the logo of which is very recognizable (red oval, white lettering, says "The New York City Strand: 18 Miles of Books"). This place had TONS of books, and as I was browsing the fiction stacks, I realized that they probably carried one of my favorite books that was stolen along with the rest of the contents of my friend's gym bag when I let her borrow it. So I asked the friendly people who worked there if they carried The Tale of Murasaki and they sure did! This was probably my favorite purchase so far of the trip. = )

Thursday night I had the best burger ever at the Shake Shack, located in Madison Square Park. This thing didn't have a veggie patty; instead, it contained a portobello mushroom coated in cheese...and deep fried. Sounds horrible for your health, and probably is, but it's also incredibly tasty. The Shake Shack also has great custard desserts called Concretes, because they're theoretically thick as concrete. They start with a normal flavor of custard, and you get to choose your "mix-ins." Amazing! Go here when you come to NYC.
Katherine was also busy on Friday, so I spent the afternoon (which started out so hot I really thought I would melt) in Times Square and Rockefeller Center. Here are the obligatory shots of the billboards and digital displays of Times Square:

I explored the flagship Toys'R'Us, which has an actual ferris wheel contained within the store. Kind of amazing. My favorite part of the store, though, was the public restroom on the top floor. I was beginning to get desperate when this one came into view. Yay for Toys'R'Us. I also explored the M&Ms store (three floors of merchandise dedicated to M&Ms! Amazing), which put the nearby Hershey's store (one floor and tiny) to shame. The other stores I visited (Gap, American Eagle) were not quite as impressive. I caught a glimpse of the inside of the under-construction flagship Forever 21, and it was CAVERNOUS. I actually thought I was confused for a second and was looking into an under-construction hotel lobby. That's how huge it was. I wish it had been open while I was in Times Square...

It took me a while to find Rockefeller Center, but with the help of the handy dandy map I procured at the visitor's center in Times Square (go there when you're here, too; it's useful for good maps), I eventually got there. Back in 2006 when I visited NYC with my family, my Dad and I woke up at 5 AM or so on two consecutive mornings in order to be part of the crowd that cheers during the Today Show. This show was a big part of my life growing up. I would wake up to the opening strains of the theme song every morning during middle school, and I almost always watched it in the mornings before going to school. I'm not as into it anymore (Katie Couric is gone, and she was my childhood idol!), but it still holds a special place in my heart, as does Rockefeller Center. So it was fun being there and just looking around. Also enjoyable is the NBC experience store, which contains memorabilia for tons of NBC shows, from The Office to Saved by the Bell to Friends to The Today Show. Check out the clearance section! Here's a shot of me in front of Rockefeller Plaza. I look a little dumb, but I guess that's okay. It was still very sunny and pretty hot at the time:

And that has been my trip so far. Think of this as my halfway-done report. I still will have to blog about today (Saturday), Sunday, and Monday. Sneak preview: today we saw the financial district in downtown Manhattan, and tomorrow we're seeing an off-Broadway play: Avenue Q! Exciting!

Note: Post title lifted from, of course, "Empire State of Mind."

In My Day...

Today seems to be the day to romanticize the past [and revile the present] in lab. As I walked by our second-year grad student at her lab desk, she stopped me to say that she just wasn't in the mood to do anything today, not work on her papers, not work on her presentations, not shop for furniture, and not even work on her computer. To put it simply, she's kind of in a funk. Not ten minutes later, one of our postdocs told me, "Chaya. Life just gets harder from here on out. I'm just telling you that right now. It just gets harder." As I told her, that's probably true. And as she herself admitted, there are also many good things that happen in adulthood, things that seemingly outweigh the difficulties. But to her, the difficulties still win out.

It is true that as we grow up and begin our careers and train for our professions, as we build relationships completely outside the realm of our lives with our parents and siblings, as we, effectively, develop our own personas, new and whole perceptions of who we are as people and how we fit into the world, our responsibilities grow. We take care of ourselves physically, financially, and in other ways: we do our own laundry, clean [or not clean] our apartments when and how we want, and take ourselves wherever we want to go [literally], instead of waiting for our parents to take us there. Yet with all this new responsibility comes so much privilege, so much power. Isn't it great to develop a stronger sense of yourself, to make deep and lasting friendships, to mold your opinions and beliefs and wash your own clothes and drive yourself wherever you want to go?

Why do we romanticize our pasts so much, anyway? Yes, life is hard now. There are always struggles. But wasn't life also hard three years ago, when I spent the entirety of my freshman year trying to figure out how to transition to college life, constantly sick because of the mold infestation in my dorm room, struggling with making friends and figuring out who I was? Weren't there responsibilities in high school, too, when I woke up at 5:45 (I can't believe I did that anymore) to get to school by 7:10, spent seven hours in school, drove home in a car without air-conditioning in Houston, and also had homework to keep up with?

I'm not saying that romanticizing the past is a bad thing. In fact, it's probably a great coping mechanism. If we don't pick out the best parts of our pasts to focus upon as we look back on different stages of our lives, we would probably have a pretty hard time moving forward, especially if we truly believe that things only get harder as we get older. Additionally, romanticizing the past is one way to help ourselves grieve the closings of different chapters in our lives. If I weren't convinced now, as I am, that South Asian Society (the club that has shaped my college career in deep, unalterable ways, the one I have loved for four years) is somehow "different" now than it was when I was a freshmansophomorejunior, then I would be devastated at the prospect of leaving it behind at the end of this semester. It helps to tell ourselves that things were better before, because doing so makes letting go easier.

But maybe we should go about all of this in the opposite direction. Rhapsodize about our futures instead of longing for our pasts. The truth is, the future is bright, and we have a lot to look forward to. Yes, we'll miss what we had before, but we'll also continue growing and moving and becoming the people we were always going to be, and that's a good thing, if you ask me.

Or maybe we should just forget about yesterday and tomorrow and figure out a way to love today for exactly what it is.

We Should Be Happy, That's What I Said from the Start

This morning I took a partially eaten box of Club crackers to lab. Starting two summers ago, one of my labmates, James, has consistently kept dark chocolate chips at his bench, and I spent many a quiet lab afternoon munching on those dark chocolate chips and chatting with him and the rest of my labmates. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a sweet tooth, and dark chocolate chips don't exactly fill me up. So forever, I've been telling myself that I need to bring savory snacks into the lab for everyone to snack on. Finally doing what I've told myself I would do for so long really felt good. Even better was that I finally got to snack on crackers in lab! And the best was that my labmates enjoyed [and are still enjoying] the crackers as well. I didn't realize until some time in my college career that I'm turning into my mother in the sense that I love it when people eat food I offer. So to see the cracker box slowly emptying brought me more joy than something like that normally should. Ha.

You know how people talk about the straw that broke the camel's back? I feel like eating three Club crackers on my way out to the parking lot after my day in lab was that for me, except in a positive way. It was the one incident in the day that made me realize that, once again, I'm happy today. There are just so many reasons to be joyous. The weather was beautiful today, and I ate lunch outside with two of my closest friends. I started a new mapping project in lab, and if things go well, I'll leave the lab [forever, which makes me sad] two weeks from now having mapped two mutations in about 10 weeks. Actually accomplishing things in my labwork makes me feel so good. I got to leave early today, and beat traffic coming home, but also managed to do real work in lab--yet another thing to be happy about. Last but not least, it didn't hurt that I wore a bright red shirt today that made me feel pretty. Course, I ruined the whole look (tunic and skinny jeans) by wearing chunky flip-flops, but said flip-flops are very comfortable, so I'm okay with that.

I very recently reconnected with two friends I haven't really kept in touch with throughout college (one via facebook message, the other via phone), an act definitely galvanized by the funeral I went to last weekend. That it was so simple to get back in touch with those two, especially one of them, that all it took was one facebook message, one phone call, made me feel...hopeful. It's great to make new friends, but the Girl Scouts weren't kidding when they said, "Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other's gold": there's nothing like the comfort of knowing that someone who knew and loved you back in your middle school dork days is still at least mildly interested in your life and your future.

And a lot of other things are going well in my life right now: my family, my future, my love life. There's just a lot going right, right now. It feels a little precarious, but hopefully life will stay this way. = )

"Hopelessly, the hope is we've got so much to feel good about." (Good Life-OneRepublic)

Note: Entry title is lifted from a line from "Happy" by Nevershoutnever, some of the lyrics of which confuse me, most of which make me, well, happy.

Good Week

I found myself unaccountably and unusually happy yesterday. Starbucks gave away free brewed coffee to every customer who brought in a travel mug, and I took advantage of that promotion before I left for work, which meant that I was sipping on an inordinate amount of coffee all day long. I've found that, oddly, caffeine tends to make me feel sanguine, so perhaps that's what spurred my happiness. Additionally, over the past two days, prospective students [high school seniors] have been visiting Rice for the annual "Owl Days" event. I love witnessing their eagerness and awe as they experience college--for many, it's the college they've already decided to attend--firsthand for the first time. I miss that feeling. Prospective students, or prospies, as we call them, always make me smile. It has also helped that in just the past eight days, I've:

1. Gotten my new cute netbook
2. Decided to go to Imogen Heap's concert--and purchased tickets for said concert!
3. Decided to go see John Mayer AND Owl City (it's like my dream come true!) in concert
4. Had dinner with an amazing group of friends who always have me laughing like a maniac and feeling loved
5. Booked a trip to New York City to visit a friend right after graduation
6. Had a ridiculously good end-of-college night on campus

Ostensibly, it's been a relatively good week. Then again, it's also been an unpleasant week in many ways. A friend of mine from high school passed away on Easter, and I went to his funeral and wake this past weekend. I've been to too many funerals for people my age, but this was the first one for a person I could truly call my friend. I have a lot of memories with this guy [granted, they're mostly from middle school, and thus at least 8 years old], and he was truly a nice person. I'm still sad about his death, but more than anything it's made me painfully aware of how precious my own life is.

It's amazing how forcefully perspective can be pushed upon you--and also how easily it can slip away.

New Toy!

I'm writing this on my new netbook, a yellow Samsung N150. See below for a visual aid:

(photo cred: http://tinyurl.com/y7uo6zp)

I've wanted a netbook pretty much ever since they first came out, so I'm really excited about this one. It has a 10.1" screen and is, well, super cute. I got this netbook in preparation for medical school. I've had my old laptop (an IBM thinkpad that's solid, but a bit of a clunker) for about five years now, and it's definitely time to upgrade, especially since the harddrive on my IBM is woefully small. My lovely father has decided to get me both a netbook and a laptop for medical school. I know the expense may seem a bit over the top, but I won my first laptop (the IBM) in a scholarship contest, so I figure the amount of money I would have spent on that first one for college can be spread over to my new netbook and laptop.

Anyway, while I'm super excited to have an adorbes new netbook, I have to say there are a few things I'm not so jazzed about. To run through my reaction:

Things I Love

• It's so small!
• Hello, it's freaking yellow! (the inside is white)
• It has a sweet mousepad (wait, what do you call the mice on laptops? Touch...mouses?), that pretty much does all the cool things that Apple products do with their touchscreens: scrolling with two fingers, zooming in and zooming out when you make the corresponding motions with your fingers, and even rotating photos when you make, again, the prescribed motion with your fingers.
• Its speakers are pretty sweet, especially compared to the ones on my previous laptop, which were, like the harddrive, a bit woeful.
• It has a built-in webcam! I totally did NOT have that on my previous laptop, so I'm pretty excited about being able to, you know, video chat and take mirror image photos of myself and whatever.

Things I Don't Love

• Because this netbook, like all netbooks, runs on an Intel Atom processor, I can only run Windows 7 Starter on it, and not the full version of Windows 7. When my dad and I were looking at netbooks online, I thought Windows 7 Starter was just some sort of trial version, that you could upgrade your OS later on once you had bought the netbook. Yeah, I was wrong. Windows 7 Starter is apparently designed for low-process (or something) computers, and it has some limited functionality. For example:
• I CANNOT CHANGE MY DESKTOP WALLPAPER. You have no idea how much this bothers me. This was the first thing I was excited to do once I began playing with my netbook (I should name it...), to make it my own and personalize it in some way. But yeah. You're not allowed to change the desktop background if you're running the Windows 7 Starter OS. Why they limited that function, I have no idea. I don't imagine it takes so much out of your processor to just display a photo other than the standard issue one as your wallpaper. But yeah. Since this was the first thing I wanted to do, and it was also the first disappointment I had with my netbook, I find it incredibly irksome. This initial disappointment led me to see other things I'm not terribly fond of on this netbook. Which kind of sucks. [seeing the disappointments, not the netbook itself]
• I feel like even though its screen is the standard size for netbooks, 10.1", mine doesn't seem quite as small as the ones I've seen before. Maybe I'm just being silly. In fact, hopefully I am.
• The battery on this guy is definitely a little bulky. The other netbooks I've seen, mostly Acer and Asus and HP ones, seem to be sleek overall, pretty planar with no bumps or anything, but the battery on mine sticks out a bit, which I imagine would make fitting it neatly into a sleeve a bit difficult.

All in all, though, despite my few disappointments, I'm still quite excited about my brand new netbook. I'll get over the unchanging desktop eventually, and on the bright side, I can still have a slideshow of photos as my screensaver. I'm sure this is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Spring Road Trip

Every year Rice gives its students a four-day weekend in early April, a break called spring recess. Freshman year, I went on a short trip to Austin during spring recess, to visit friends at UT. Starting sophomore year, I've gone on road trips with my incredible friends to various and sundry places in Texas: South Padre Island sophomore year (quite possibly the most epic spring recess ever), Corpus Christi/Port Aransas junior year (tons of fun, one highlight being that we saw real porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico), and San Antonio and thereabouts senior year.

It wasn't easy to get my parents' permission to go on that first trip in sophomore year. It was the first time I would be traveling such a long distance with friends, and it also was a trip involving boys, both facts which gave my parents pause. Thankfully, though, they eventually relented. It's funny to think back to the frustration I felt two years ago about my parents' worries, because now it's almost a matter of course that spring recess (and fall recess, which is the first semester parallel) means that I'm going on a road trip with my friends. I'm so happy I had these road trip experiences in college. It's these that cemented my friendships, and our trips gave birth to countless memories, quotable quotes, and new musical finds.

This year, as I mentioned, my friends and I (five of us total, which I think makes this our smallest trip to date) went to San Antonio. We'd already been there once before (for a fall recess) to go to Six Flags Fiesta Texas, so this time around we day tripped at Lake Travis and Enchanted Rock. I didn't join my friends at Lake Travis (met up with friends at UT instead), so I can't write about that, but I did enjoy Enchanted Rock.

Enchanted Rock is located outside of a little Texas town called Fredricksburg, known for its proud display of German roots and its antiquing. I think the hill itself is just a large rock formation made of pink Texas granite (which is quite lovely). The entire park is really well-maintained and pretty. We walked along really clearly marked trails to a pseudo-summit of sorts, and sat in the sun for a while to catch our breath. I felt a bit silly because there were a lot of older people walking up and down and around the hill fearlessly, but I was definitely treading with caution, especially on the steeper parts. Really there wasn't anything to be worried about, but it was just something I wasn't used to. So of the four of my friends, one started feeling a little sick when we were sitting at the summit, so she and I laid down in the shadow cast by a big beautiful boulder while the guys climbed further up and explored for a while. It was a really gorgeous day as far as the weather was concerned, so laying in the shade was absolutely glorious. We also got to take in an amazing view of the sky. There's nothing quite like a Texas sky.

After the five of us met up again, we all went back down the hill and waded in the small, clear creek at the start of the trail. The water was so clear you could see the pebbles below, and we saw quite a few tadpoles and some sort of tiny crustacean in the water. It was really lovely. We stopped in Fredricksburg for ice cream on the way back to San Antonio, which was a great way to end a really pleasant afternoon. Below are a few pictures from the day:

The beautiful sight from the beginning of the trail

The group, excluding me. It was a sunny day!

The guys on the climb down

The girls = )

Lovely deciduous trees--I missed these so much while I was in India!

Me and the best friend. We looked disgustingly like a couple with our unwittingly matching outfits.

Feet picture in the creek! The pebbles blend into our brown skin.

Okay this is blurry, but Texas wildflowers [this photo was taken on our drive back to Houston] are gorgeous.

A New Hole in My Face

I had no idea what to title this post. "I Got My Nose Pierced"? "Getting My Nose Pierced"? "Nose Piercing"? So I called it the most ridiculous (and true) thing I could think of. I do indeed have a new hole in my face. On the right side of my nose, to be exact. My mother tells me that the piercing is in the wrong place on my nose, that it should be a bit lower and more forward. Unfortunately, she [and a nice old lady that we're family friends with, and my gay best friend, all three of whom told me my nose was pierced in the wrong spot as soon as they saw it] is completely right. But since my piercing was four (or five, depending on which side of the international date line you were standing on) days old by the time my mom pointed out the problem, there was nothing I could do about it. It's all a bit upsetting, since I was really pleased whenever I saw my nose ring in the mirror before the misplacement was pointed out, but now when I see it I can't help wishing it were shifted slightly. I have to get used to it though, and I'm sure I will, because I'm stuck with this piercing for the rest of my life. All in all, I'm pleased; it looks much better than I thought it would. A recap of the experience:

I got my nose pierced in Little India in Singapore, at an Indian jewelry store called [charmingly] Ani Mani Porchalai. [and by charmingly, I meant slightly ridiculously] I stayed with my closest girlfriend from college and her family while I was in Singapore, so both she and her mother accompanied me to the jewelry store. The whole process was relatively unceremonious: we walked in, said I wanted to get my nose pierced, and the jeweler called over the resident piercer. I chose the nose ring I wanted (small, gold, with a diamond-looking stone) The piercer dude asked me which side, I said right, and he marked the spot with a pen [ah if only I had asked him to move it!] and then handed me a Q-tip dipped in anesthetic ointment to rub on the spot. I rubbed, the jeweler told me to close my eyes and brace myself, and the piercer began to pierce my nose. Without a piercing gun. Instead, he stuck a sterilized needle into the stem of my nose ring, and proceeded to poke a hole in my nasal cartilage with said needle. Since the outside of my nose was anesthetized, it felt at first like an ant bite, a prick:

[my friend has a fantastic SLR camera, so she took pictures for me]

But as the needle penetrated the skin and began going through my actual nose, I started to feel the pain a bit more:

It definitely got to a point where I was thinking "when is it going to end?!" as he was piercing. I'm proud that I didn't scream, but I definitely whimpered a little. Getting your nose pierced is no joke. It hurts. Thankfully, the pain of piercing is the worst of it; during the recovery period, the area around the piercing was a bit swollen and tender, but I was pretty much completely healed in four days. So overall: yay! I got my nose pierced! I survived, and it looks pretty good. Sadly, the nose piercer guy definitely said that I have a "thick nose" and it was a bit difficult to pierce. FML, a little. For most of my life, I've had a bit of a complex about my nose being large, so it was kind of the cherry on top of the sundae (in a non-good way) to hear that. I wasn't really hurt; I mostly found it funny, in a sort of wry way. I mean how many people are told that their nose is thick? Ha.

Aaand hopefully this is the first of many posts about my Asia trip now that I'm back home. Hope you found this one entertaining!