The evermore squares
How my obsession with crochet helped me explore music and find moments of peace amidst the stress of grad school life
During quarantine, and especially during the era of Zoom classes, I became re-obsessed with crochet. I noticed that crocheting while listening to Zoom lectures helped me stay focused on the speaker instead of getting distracted by emails or other work on my computer. Having something to do with my hands gave me an outlet for […]
The breaking point
And the slow path to recovery
I got off the escalator and stepped onto the platform. Three minutes until the train, eighteen minutes until I get to MIT, twenty minutes until my meeting. My breath was a bit fast: I’d been walking briskly. Suddenly, my chest tightened, and no more air could get in. My first reaction wasn’t fear – it […]
An experimental study of the Holy Cannoli
The hunt for the greatest dessert in Boston
Introduction The Cannoli is a form of dessert, which, in its most basic form, includes a pastry shell wrapped around a sweet ricotta filling. Historians have long debated the origin of the cannoli. Some say the cannoli originated during the carnival seasons in Palermo, a city on the island of Sicily, Italy. Others say it […]
Getting back to reading for pleasure
…or an ode to now dead literary references?
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t read Harry Potter, Catch-22, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Count of Monte Cristo – there are a few references here that you may want to skip. If I were a troubled friend seeking advice, I might ask you to be the Jeeves to my Wooster, or if grad school […]
Reactivating
Mixing Metaphors with Meaning
As a budding biologist, I am familiar with the way metaphor is employed to effectively communicate scientific concepts. For example, the molecule of the moment is messenger RNA, whose name represents the fact that mRNA is a transient molecule that transports information from the genome to the ribosome (the protein-making machinery), where it is translated […]
