Deliberation over words = Indicator of age?

I recalled my NS days as a clerk, typing away as the high-ranking officers met and discussed. One thing I used to be intolerant was how they agonized over the choice of words, which, to me, were nothing but synonyms of one another. E.g.

Officer A: I think the mission should be 'To maintain and protect XXX'

Officer B: I disagree. You have to protect first and then maintain. I would go for 'To protect and maintain XXX'

Officer C: I think 'To defend XXX' is better. It encompasses both the 'protect' and 'maintain' aspects and invokes the emotion that you are fighting for the good of people you want to protect.

I used to go like "Duh.... all sama sama la, go for the one that sounds the nicest, has all the alliteration, rhythm and whatever. Time for tea break?" Intriguingly, this very delibration over words, which I ridiculed, is coming back to haunt me. I was preparing for a presentation very recently and I caught myself being so cautious in choosing my words as well. "Two mechanisms opposing each other in a post-stroke setting, no no no, opposing is too strong, facing each other? or co-existing? Hmmm, sounds too neutral though, arrghhhh"

Sometimes I wonder whether it is an "age-thing". The longer you live, the more you have experienced people's reactions to what you say and the more cautious you now become. Even more subtly, maturity has perhaps allowed you to understand the mentality of others better and everytime you choose a word, you subject it to the evaluation by a few different mentalities and you just want to find one which fits all. Fortunately, something is still true no matter how old one gets: when you agonize over words too much, go for tea break la...

Btw, if you are reading this before Friday Sept 11..

.. please pray for our driving tests.

.. and that we get a good deal when we buy our Yaris/Prius. :)

Snapshots from the end of summer

With the campus teeming with students today, I just keep getting reminded that I am no longer the fresh-faced first year graduate student. It doesn’t help when the two engineering classes we are taking are core classes for first year graduate students. Oh well. I’m grateful, though, that unlike last year, I am now settled in a friendly lab with an amazing boss. :D

Nonetheless, it still saddened dc and I that summer was coming to an end, yet we didn’t have much of a break-break except for the two weeks spent back home. It was wonderful to have lots and lots of old friends moving to Boston, but quite frankly, after all the weekends spent helping people move and hanging out with friends, dc and I were kind of craving some alone time. (Not to say we didn’t enjoy your company – you all are wonderful!) So last Thursday, dc and I decided to take a day off lab (bosses, if you are reading, please click the back button on your IE now) to explore what’s north of Harvard Square T station, notably Porter Square (Jap food court!) and Davis Square (Family Dollar!).

Who knew there’re be such a quaint Japanese haven in the first floor of a building called Lesley University? It’s like a mini-Japanese food court, complete with ramen shop, don shop, sushi/sashimi shop and even a Japanese crafts shop. Aww! dc did his homework and we made a beeline for the highly-reviewed ramen shop.

dc’s getting annoyed with my multiple attempts at forcing a flash with my feeble Sony Ericsson camera phone. (Argh I forgot to bring my camera!)

Yay lunch is served! I ordered curry ramen, which is really a dash of Jap curry in the soup, but I really like the hint of Jap curry taste! The soup is claimed to be made from pork and chicken and full of collagen, and it’s immediately apparent from the thickness and viscosity of the soup that the claims are most likely right! (Side point: I love the Jap chilli powder.)

Cute chilli dishes!

Sorry, the ramen soup was so good that I left nothing behind.

For some reason, dc and I notice a consistent pattern in our dates. The focus is usually on food – we will go for something really exciting (like the discovery of Jap foodcourt!), and then usually follow up with some ‘auntie-uncle’ shopping. :) After lunch, we headed to Davis Square where the nearest Family Dollar (yes, I’m not ashamed to admit that dc and I love cheap stuff) to us is. We also checked out the meat shop next to Family Dollar, where Leonard buys his delicious marbled beef steaks. The ooh-so-succulent and tender beef chunks that had dc and I swooning over at Leonard’s house. Eventually I curbed myself from buying the steaks.. I realized that my love for beef (steaks! 牛腩!) and red meat is going to kill me someday (unfortunately I have yet to convince myself that all the chocolate and ice-cream are going to do the same), so I’m trying to cut my beef intake. Ironically, women do need more iron and not so much chocolate. Booo.

Speaking of not being able to curb my sweet tooth…

We found a crepe cafe!!! Voted the best neighbourhood cafe in Best of Boston, I convinced dc to check it out with me. Lets drool over the hazelnut crepe with coffee heath frozen yoghurt.. ahhhh. 

Saturday: dc made a huge batch of chicken rice and invited yk over for dinner.

Hainanese chicken, chicken rice, chicken soup, complete with ginger-scallion sauce, improvised chilli sauce, sweet dark sauce, and oyster omelette!

yk bought cheesecakes for us! Sugar overload – woohoo!

yk, coming from Stanford, dreaded the New England winter (the cold is already fast settling in) and so invited us to check out Boston’s beaches on Labor Day. Though we really should be working in lab on a public holiday like all graduate students do, dc and I scrimped off for one of the last few sunny and sufficiently-warm days at the beach.

Kelly’s Roast Beef flagship store at Revere beach – we found out that they are famous for their roast beef sandwiches only after we came home and read up on them. Nonetheless, we thoroughly enjoyed our fried clams, fried fish, clam chowder and double cheeseburger!

Cute puppy :)

I like this photo :) (Shoutout to Dom: Rule of thirds!) 

yk’s terribly amused that the three of us are sharing his beach towel (hence we’re all sitting so close together on the sand).

The two hawt guys.

chyan ying moment (noun):   an incident in which a soon-to-be perfect result is thwart by chyan ying’s blurness, causing the user (usually chyan ying herself, sometimes others as well) to be amusely frustrated (or frustratedly amused).

Hee love dc’s candid expressions.

The birds came near enough because dc tossed them a grape and told them ‘Go fight for it, man!’. (SPCA please do not arrest my husband.)

Pretty wispy clouds! I considered approaching the couple sitting there to sell them this photo, though it's going to be hard to convince them that it is them in the picture.

Yay for the beach!

Heh and below are some of the other photos that I took with my idiot-proof camera, praying hard that they *might* turn out somewhat artistic looking.

(Special note: This Baby-G was a gift from my uncle when I left Singapore for undergrad. It’s still working great and I wear it to lab everyday.)

  (Rule of thirds again!)

Divergent seagull prints.

(I don’t know if I should be happy that the bird is not in focus.. I guess I can argue shamelessly that I meant for the waves to be the subject? LOL.)

(Completely unintended, but I somehow find this photo has a certain ‘National Geographic’ swing to it.)

Ended the week with baking banana bread, and here’s the little bear doing his part for food.

Fall 2009 starts in one hour!!

And so, here ends our summer of free-and-easy nights, going-around-to-play weekends and churning-out-data workdays. Here on, cydc shall immerse ourselves in the world of thermodynamics and fields-forces-fluids (or FFF), learning how cell membranes arrange themselves and how heart attacks stem from turbulent flow in blood vessels. The last two classes of our Technical Quals; pray we score both As else we will never get to see our thesis proposal committees..

Microscopic middleground: Neoplastic growth and regeneration

Kicked off by the short discussion on bittersweet-ness, it comes to my mind that I have been thinking about another topic which lines up with the theme. Once again, a weeny, tiny point of unstable equilibrium between two drastically different outcomes, which are often opposite of each other and life treads on this middleground, rather dangerously. This would be no other than stem cells and their role in cancer and regenerative medicine.

Stem cells, which are cells that can differentiate into various cell types, are promising entities to many diseases and injuries. As we begin to appreciate our human bodies more and more, we realize that stem cells are everywhere, standing-by somewhere, waiting for an injury to happen and springing into action to try restore homeostasis. Yet, many tumors hijack these mechanisms and "coax" the stem cells to join the dark side and fuel the growth of tumors. In fact, they are so successful that if we can mimic them in harnessing the potential of stem cells in regeneration, we can possibly extend life expectancy significantly. On the other hand, cancer biologists and bioengineers need to mimic the injurious environment, which is quite successful is thwarting the good plans of stem cells to restore injury. Funny as it seems, but our job as scientists or researchers can therefore be easily summarized as bringing ourselves back to the unstable equilibrium. We definitely don't like the unstable part, but equilibrium is always good.

Bittersweet

As the saying goes "Item X and Item Y 往往只在一線之差", many things in life are really in a microscopic middleground between two stark contrasts. Bittersweet is one of them. How can something be bitter and sweet at the same time? Yet, we can think of many examples where bittersweet rises up to the occasion as a good description. Say, for example, dark chocolate. I love dark chocolates, because your taste buds are thrown into a turmoil as both of the sweet and bitter receptors fire wildly away. In the process, one is thrown back and forth, back and forth, just like a see-saw, going up and down, up and down. It's repetitive, rhythmic and almost silly, but yet, very satisfying for some unknown reasons.

Recently, we managed to catch video clips of the Mediacorp show "Life transformers". The family in the show is undergoing great sufferings to the extent that bitter is really too mild a term to describe their circumstances. Yet, simple acts that the show volunteers did quickly tip the situation over into the "sweet" regime. Their flat was improved and intriguingly, life just changed. It's as though someone just put a small dash of icing sugar of their lives and it was sufficient to make them sweet again.

As the summer rolls into an end and night falls earlier and earlier, we look ahead, apprehensive of the crazy engineering classes we are taking again. Keeping our eyes open in lectures, struggling with integrals and differentials, scribbling over draft paper with so much mathematical symbols that if the paper drops somewhere on the street, someone may contact NASA that we have established contact with extraterrestrial life and of course, late nights just to push our solutions towards the grand answers one line at a time (accompanied by Trader Joes granola, C-mart instant noodles and random junk food). But of course, we always know that in the midst of "bitterness" we define for ourselves, we just need to fall the other way and it's sweet.

Chilli Plants revisited

It has been a while since I last posted an update on the chilli plants. Since their "dou gey" days, the plants have grown steadily into fine, young shrubs. In fact, the one and only propagating center of a shrub (housing all the goody goody stem cells) has split into 4 propagating centers, each of which seem to be sprouting a flower bud! Way to go! Can't wait to eat our own organic chilli.