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Phew, so where did I leave off... ok, NYC on Tuesday, stayed the night at Julia's.
So Wednesday morning we poked lots of people in NYC last-minutely lol. Had lunch with erf_-senpai in Midtown, chatted quite a bit about where we're at now, NYC, and NEHS stuff/third-culture-kid-ness/the overlap (and/or occasional lack) thereof.
erf_ made an interesting point about the Campbellian hero idea of "the village that the hero comes from at the start of the story, to which he can never truly return at the end due to the character-changing nature of his journey"... I pretty much felt like that when I went back to NEHS the summer after sophomore year, that this is clearly Not My Place anymore. And then later in Baltimore, when Albert and I were in the ACM talking about leaving our Boston friends behind on this move, Junks pointed out that we'll just have a "new old friends" category kind of like onion layers. And so I realized that man, my entire life has been a series of Campbellian villages, onion/Russian-doll style, to which I may go back and be nostalgic or marvel at how much has changed (so much new and finished construction at JHU and yet bits of Mudd hall are still the same, the memories rhyme but do not match) but never truly return. I've built my life around leaving these villages behind, never really putting down roots anywhere - y'know, in NEHS the expectation is kinda "oh well I'm going to America to go to college, what do I need Taiwan for" and that's shaped/warped my interactions with any place, especially since I've always had built-in deadlines. Ok, 4 years of undergrad, and then I'll flitter off to vet school. 4 years of vet school, and then it'll be something else afterward - aha, it'll be 3 years of residency in fuck-nowhere Kansas and we're already plotting our escape. Part of what kind of broke me this past winter in 4th year clinical rotations was the obsessive thought of "oh my god I'm going to be stuck doing this for the rest of my life oh my god THE REST OF MY LIFE oh my god everything sucks and there is no escape"... because there's kind of no in-between. Either you have all these built-in deadline escape hatches (marked by graduations, apparently) or else there is no freedom and you're chained, tied down to this one course of action with no reprieve. It's a false dichotomy born of limited experience, and I'm still in the process of counterconditioning myself out of it I guess.
Another thing that came up in conversation with erf_ was that instead of physical places as villages, us NEHSers/TKCs create and inhabit "villages" of people/friendsgroups. And hence the onion-layering of old friends, old-old friends, new-old friends... and I realized as the trip went on, that this entire summer has been me reconstructing my villages and regaining my sense of self thereby. Like, I have basically dropped all contact (or whittled down to minimal online contact) with most people over the past 8 years, especially in these last 4 years of vet school... even my family, really. So a month back in Taiwan to sort of repair my shattered roots, and then this roadtrip seeing people in-person and catching up with them and reminding myself of their existence (and them of my existence!), so now I have sunk tendrils back into Taiwan-family village, NEHSers village (more like vast-international-conspiracy-type-network lol), JHUACMers village, and a little bit Kyhmforumers village even lol.
So anyway long digression but back to the roadtrip yes. erf_ recommended a few places around midtown/southish to go, and among other things we did end up going to the Strand where I heroically restricted myself to a mere six books but went around squeeing a lot at all the others lol. We also bought an ink-pen-like drawing of basically a room solidly lined with bookshelves filled with books and cats (I was like "this is pretty much what the inside of my head looks like" and Albert was like "this store was made for you" lol)
And then we couldn't get ahold of anyone else so we had dinner at this sushi place in Flushing that our Bostonfriends had recommended, Mogu Sushi, which was indeed excellent and delicious :D And then went to s2always's place that evening, her apartment is HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE omgwtf. (Albert remarked that her apartment was bigger than the entirety of his old childhood home in California.) And had a huge comfy beanbag chair lol. So kinda chilled that evening with s2always and her roommate and listened to them evaluate potential apartments in NYC to move to lol.
Left the next morning on our way to Pennsylvania to meet up with Fern, who I'd known as a 6th year (or maybe possibly 5th year?) vet student in Thailand when I was doing my summer research in 1st year. (Thailand does the "no undergrad 6-year vet degree" thing.) So she'd been out of school working in sales for a vet pharmaceutical company for these past few years, but got restless and decided to quit (amicably) and come to America to try for an MBA. Had just arrived that Monday in fact, first time traveling so far (though she'd gone to Australia for a bit, hence her pretty good English ability) and had just recovered from jet lag a day or two ago. So we went to a Friendly's for American food because she hadn't had time to explore the area, and we didn't have any better ideas lol.
And then down to Baltimore! Drove around JHU for a bit because elentiriel wasn't quite done with work yet when we got there... it was SO WEIRD. Like, driving up the highway was already a little odd - we'd only ever been on highways a couple of times, when other people were driving us to other places. As Albert commented, "It's like piloting a spaceship across the surface of an alien planet." And then we drove around the periphery of Homewood, and that was even weirder because we'd always walked or took buses/shuttles. Judging distances and navigating was a bit tricky - one-way streets don't matter when you're walking, for instance XD But at least we still remembered the area well enough to be able to make detours. And so we swung up past the Waverly parking lot (what be the Waverly Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings) and up by Greenmount just long enough to poke our heads in and see a large handful of cops swarming the blocks and go "yep, still Greenmount" and promptly turned back for campus lol. And looking at Dell House, and Guilford Manor, and going around the back of campus (and being sad that Azafran is only open weekdays around noon) and fudging our way to The Avenue in Hampden kind of bass-ackwards (and then having to fudge our way out because I always cut through one-way streets and parks and stuff to get back home) and... and yeah, now I remember why we left this place and never intended to come back lol. Still a checkerboard of sketchy and rich suburb and generally overall shitty. Still tons of construction everywhere.
So yeah, then went to meet up with elentiriel and hang out in her apartment for a while, till theflyingkiwi and her boy finished work and we all went to Honeypig for shit-tons of Korean BBQ :D And also green tea bingsoo after, om nom nom tswah bing. And then we went back to theflyingkiwi's place and watched stupid Youtube videos till late at night lol. Saturday, Albert and I went to have lunch with my old PI and her husband (who I'd had dinner with in Taiwan just last month lol, my family is pretty buddy-buddy with them because everyone in Taiwanese academia are effectively 2-or-less degrees of separation from each other...) and then we went to the MDSPCA to reconnect with John-the-tech-who-basically-runs-the-spay-and-neuter-clinic and also happened upon Dr. Trembley, one of the vets who volunteers her spay/neuter services for the clinic. Holy crap I'd forgotten about her till I saw her and was like OMG I KNOW YOU :D And wow, the MDSPCA had a lot of construction done, everything is all different and new and pretty and expanded-space because they built an addition to the front of the main adoption building so there's much nicer and larger receptionist spaces. So Albert and I wandered around the grounds (and window-shopped for potential types of cats to adopt in Kansas lol) for a bit, and then we went back to JHU campus.
So throughout that day and the previous day we'd been poking people about meeting up for dinner, so we got to campus a bit before that so we could wander around... except we visited the ACM (old site that we remembered in NEB (which is now actually named after some rich dude I guess) which was really weird because it's all obliterated to make space for labs, and then the new place in NEB basement that Albert had been to and I hadn't) and found some of the younger folks there (Junks, Stump, newer kids that I don't remember the name of) and we fell into conversation with them and then qedragon arrived and then Albert pretty much didn't leave after that lol. I left to go check out Mudd Hall, and it had an entire... attachment? Siamese building? constructed in the back lol. It used to be so narrow but they knocked out the back wall and built a giant atrium thingie over Mudd Auditorium and an entire second building of teaching labs with massive glass walls (light! In what used to be a dim brick bio building!) and now I guess all the teaching lab stuff goes on there instead of crammed into Macaulay and random other buildings... and yet, the side wings were still exactly the same. The area outside the vivarium (I considered suiting up and going in to check the mice but decided against it) is exactly the same. The elevator with its weird surrealistic pictures is exactly the same (though the pictures are a bit faded now). My PI's office and lab look exactly the same from the outside (didn't have the keys to unlock it lol) aside from a few bits of new equipment, but seriously the somewhat grotty water bath that I used to use is STILL THERE. The first-floor conference rooms where us Masters students would meet to present our research and grade labs and such are still there. It's like a weird rhyme of Mudd, kind of still recognizably Mudd but too much changed to be the Mudd of my memory. Still same enough to give me flashbacks to Master's year, at least XD;;; And I still remembered how to use the legal tunnels to get into the other locked buildings (Mudd is usually left unlocked because people are in and out for checking up on experiments and it's too much of a hassle to lock it when you leave lol) so I checked out Macaulay (where I used to TA Biochem lab) and Remsen... walked across the Quad to Gilman which is also restored and shiny new, and through the tunnel and then back up and down the Breezeway just because I could lol. And it was like being surrounded by the ghosts of teeming undergrads (summer = nobody around).
So yeah, headed back to the ACM where other people started showing up, all the old familiar folks - rincebrain, royal_albatross, and Dragon Scott, in addition to the aforementioned qedragon and Junks and Stump. Seems like they all hadn't really been keeping up with each other either? So we had a grand old "so what have you been doing these days" catching-up, and when I made fun of them all for being ooooooold qedragon pointed out that I actually held the highest degree amongst all present, being an actual doctor. To which my reply was "OOPS." lol I'm so used to him being a Ph.D student that I keep forgetting that he doesn't actually have his Ph.D yet >_>;;; (If you're reading this - good luck! I'm sure Dr. Scott will let you escape one day "real soon now" XD)
Then we went to the Owl Bar for dinner, and then we went back to campus to check out the NEW-new ACM in the newest building on the Engineering Quad, so new that nobody had access to it, not even the security guard that came like an hour after we called them to let us in so we could bring a cardboard trolley of stuff into the new office, and that was only after qedragon actually physically went to the guardhouse to extract him - first he'd called the office and we hung around for a while chatting and wondering when the guard would get here, and then Junks made a disastrous 20-minute follow-up call and so we were like "well if they weren't going to let us in before, they're REALLY not going to let us in now!" and royal_albatross kept suggesting increasingly destructive methods of entering the building (qedragon (paraphrased): "The time for implementing those suggestions was before we called security!!") But anyway we got in eventually and hung around the (huuuuuuuge) new basement chatting (in the other ACMers' cases) and futzing around (in my case) and generally feeling like the clock turned back for one night - as I characterized it later, "ACM 一夜城". Just like the good ol' days, lol.
Then Albert and I went back to theflyingkiwi's house way late lol. The next day (Sunday) Albert and I went along with elentiriel to a random condo viewing just because, and then we three had lunch with Deewen shu-shu and Jean ah-yi and their kids Adelaide and Brian. Albert was surprisingly chummy with Brian, who was making little figures and figure-sized weapons out of twist-ties and kept asking Albert if he had any phone games. Albert tried to teach him to play 2048 lol. Adelaide had her dad's smartphone (I think? or maybe it was her own IDK) and was drawing a pretty good anime-style girl's portrait on it, though she kept saying it sucked and it's so hard to draw on a smartphone with a stylus... they're so big now lol, I still remember them as tiiiiiny. Well, Adelaide is pretty big, Brian's still kinda small lol. Deewen shu-shu looks older than I remember too - and holy crap, my family's known them since I went to CTY at JHU because that's when Mom reached out to the JHU alumni network to see if there was somewhere nearby where she and Doris could stay while I was at summer camp, and Deewen and Jean responded... so they've known me since I was, like, 13 or 14. Daaaaang.
And then elentiriel showed us Old Ellicott City which was pretty neat (they mark how many feet above street level the river flooded, at one point the street was 9 feet underwater holy crap) and then we went back to theflyingkiwi's place to kinda hang out and chill and play Mario Kart and The Wolf Among Us lol. Next morning I'd intended for us to get an early start but I ended up chatting with theflyingkiwi for way too long lol, so we didn't start out till early afternoon and just 飆車 all the way to dulcimeoww's.
Holy crap I had a lot to say about Baltimore. Guess I'll make the Midwest a separate entry then, it kinda deserves its own entry lol.
So Wednesday morning we poked lots of people in NYC last-minutely lol. Had lunch with erf_-senpai in Midtown, chatted quite a bit about where we're at now, NYC, and NEHS stuff/third-culture-kid-ness/the overlap (and/or occasional lack) thereof.
erf_ made an interesting point about the Campbellian hero idea of "the village that the hero comes from at the start of the story, to which he can never truly return at the end due to the character-changing nature of his journey"... I pretty much felt like that when I went back to NEHS the summer after sophomore year, that this is clearly Not My Place anymore. And then later in Baltimore, when Albert and I were in the ACM talking about leaving our Boston friends behind on this move, Junks pointed out that we'll just have a "new old friends" category kind of like onion layers. And so I realized that man, my entire life has been a series of Campbellian villages, onion/Russian-doll style, to which I may go back and be nostalgic or marvel at how much has changed (so much new and finished construction at JHU and yet bits of Mudd hall are still the same, the memories rhyme but do not match) but never truly return. I've built my life around leaving these villages behind, never really putting down roots anywhere - y'know, in NEHS the expectation is kinda "oh well I'm going to America to go to college, what do I need Taiwan for" and that's shaped/warped my interactions with any place, especially since I've always had built-in deadlines. Ok, 4 years of undergrad, and then I'll flitter off to vet school. 4 years of vet school, and then it'll be something else afterward - aha, it'll be 3 years of residency in fuck-nowhere Kansas and we're already plotting our escape. Part of what kind of broke me this past winter in 4th year clinical rotations was the obsessive thought of "oh my god I'm going to be stuck doing this for the rest of my life oh my god THE REST OF MY LIFE oh my god everything sucks and there is no escape"... because there's kind of no in-between. Either you have all these built-in deadline escape hatches (marked by graduations, apparently) or else there is no freedom and you're chained, tied down to this one course of action with no reprieve. It's a false dichotomy born of limited experience, and I'm still in the process of counterconditioning myself out of it I guess.
Another thing that came up in conversation with erf_ was that instead of physical places as villages, us NEHSers/TKCs create and inhabit "villages" of people/friendsgroups. And hence the onion-layering of old friends, old-old friends, new-old friends... and I realized as the trip went on, that this entire summer has been me reconstructing my villages and regaining my sense of self thereby. Like, I have basically dropped all contact (or whittled down to minimal online contact) with most people over the past 8 years, especially in these last 4 years of vet school... even my family, really. So a month back in Taiwan to sort of repair my shattered roots, and then this roadtrip seeing people in-person and catching up with them and reminding myself of their existence (and them of my existence!), so now I have sunk tendrils back into Taiwan-family village, NEHSers village (more like vast-international-conspiracy-type-network lol), JHUACMers village, and a little bit Kyhmforumers village even lol.
So anyway long digression but back to the roadtrip yes. erf_ recommended a few places around midtown/southish to go, and among other things we did end up going to the Strand where I heroically restricted myself to a mere six books but went around squeeing a lot at all the others lol. We also bought an ink-pen-like drawing of basically a room solidly lined with bookshelves filled with books and cats (I was like "this is pretty much what the inside of my head looks like" and Albert was like "this store was made for you" lol)
And then we couldn't get ahold of anyone else so we had dinner at this sushi place in Flushing that our Bostonfriends had recommended, Mogu Sushi, which was indeed excellent and delicious :D And then went to s2always's place that evening, her apartment is HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE omgwtf. (Albert remarked that her apartment was bigger than the entirety of his old childhood home in California.) And had a huge comfy beanbag chair lol. So kinda chilled that evening with s2always and her roommate and listened to them evaluate potential apartments in NYC to move to lol.
Left the next morning on our way to Pennsylvania to meet up with Fern, who I'd known as a 6th year (or maybe possibly 5th year?) vet student in Thailand when I was doing my summer research in 1st year. (Thailand does the "no undergrad 6-year vet degree" thing.) So she'd been out of school working in sales for a vet pharmaceutical company for these past few years, but got restless and decided to quit (amicably) and come to America to try for an MBA. Had just arrived that Monday in fact, first time traveling so far (though she'd gone to Australia for a bit, hence her pretty good English ability) and had just recovered from jet lag a day or two ago. So we went to a Friendly's for American food because she hadn't had time to explore the area, and we didn't have any better ideas lol.
And then down to Baltimore! Drove around JHU for a bit because elentiriel wasn't quite done with work yet when we got there... it was SO WEIRD. Like, driving up the highway was already a little odd - we'd only ever been on highways a couple of times, when other people were driving us to other places. As Albert commented, "It's like piloting a spaceship across the surface of an alien planet." And then we drove around the periphery of Homewood, and that was even weirder because we'd always walked or took buses/shuttles. Judging distances and navigating was a bit tricky - one-way streets don't matter when you're walking, for instance XD But at least we still remembered the area well enough to be able to make detours. And so we swung up past the Waverly parking lot (what be the Waverly Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings) and up by Greenmount just long enough to poke our heads in and see a large handful of cops swarming the blocks and go "yep, still Greenmount" and promptly turned back for campus lol. And looking at Dell House, and Guilford Manor, and going around the back of campus (and being sad that Azafran is only open weekdays around noon) and fudging our way to The Avenue in Hampden kind of bass-ackwards (and then having to fudge our way out because I always cut through one-way streets and parks and stuff to get back home) and... and yeah, now I remember why we left this place and never intended to come back lol. Still a checkerboard of sketchy and rich suburb and generally overall shitty. Still tons of construction everywhere.
So yeah, then went to meet up with elentiriel and hang out in her apartment for a while, till theflyingkiwi and her boy finished work and we all went to Honeypig for shit-tons of Korean BBQ :D And also green tea bingsoo after, om nom nom tswah bing. And then we went back to theflyingkiwi's place and watched stupid Youtube videos till late at night lol. Saturday, Albert and I went to have lunch with my old PI and her husband (who I'd had dinner with in Taiwan just last month lol, my family is pretty buddy-buddy with them because everyone in Taiwanese academia are effectively 2-or-less degrees of separation from each other...) and then we went to the MDSPCA to reconnect with John-the-tech-who-basically-runs-the-spay-and-neuter-clinic and also happened upon Dr. Trembley, one of the vets who volunteers her spay/neuter services for the clinic. Holy crap I'd forgotten about her till I saw her and was like OMG I KNOW YOU :D And wow, the MDSPCA had a lot of construction done, everything is all different and new and pretty and expanded-space because they built an addition to the front of the main adoption building so there's much nicer and larger receptionist spaces. So Albert and I wandered around the grounds (and window-shopped for potential types of cats to adopt in Kansas lol) for a bit, and then we went back to JHU campus.
So throughout that day and the previous day we'd been poking people about meeting up for dinner, so we got to campus a bit before that so we could wander around... except we visited the ACM (old site that we remembered in NEB (which is now actually named after some rich dude I guess) which was really weird because it's all obliterated to make space for labs, and then the new place in NEB basement that Albert had been to and I hadn't) and found some of the younger folks there (Junks, Stump, newer kids that I don't remember the name of) and we fell into conversation with them and then qedragon arrived and then Albert pretty much didn't leave after that lol. I left to go check out Mudd Hall, and it had an entire... attachment? Siamese building? constructed in the back lol. It used to be so narrow but they knocked out the back wall and built a giant atrium thingie over Mudd Auditorium and an entire second building of teaching labs with massive glass walls (light! In what used to be a dim brick bio building!) and now I guess all the teaching lab stuff goes on there instead of crammed into Macaulay and random other buildings... and yet, the side wings were still exactly the same. The area outside the vivarium (I considered suiting up and going in to check the mice but decided against it) is exactly the same. The elevator with its weird surrealistic pictures is exactly the same (though the pictures are a bit faded now). My PI's office and lab look exactly the same from the outside (didn't have the keys to unlock it lol) aside from a few bits of new equipment, but seriously the somewhat grotty water bath that I used to use is STILL THERE. The first-floor conference rooms where us Masters students would meet to present our research and grade labs and such are still there. It's like a weird rhyme of Mudd, kind of still recognizably Mudd but too much changed to be the Mudd of my memory. Still same enough to give me flashbacks to Master's year, at least XD;;; And I still remembered how to use the legal tunnels to get into the other locked buildings (Mudd is usually left unlocked because people are in and out for checking up on experiments and it's too much of a hassle to lock it when you leave lol) so I checked out Macaulay (where I used to TA Biochem lab) and Remsen... walked across the Quad to Gilman which is also restored and shiny new, and through the tunnel and then back up and down the Breezeway just because I could lol. And it was like being surrounded by the ghosts of teeming undergrads (summer = nobody around).
So yeah, headed back to the ACM where other people started showing up, all the old familiar folks - rincebrain, royal_albatross, and Dragon Scott, in addition to the aforementioned qedragon and Junks and Stump. Seems like they all hadn't really been keeping up with each other either? So we had a grand old "so what have you been doing these days" catching-up, and when I made fun of them all for being ooooooold qedragon pointed out that I actually held the highest degree amongst all present, being an actual doctor. To which my reply was "OOPS." lol I'm so used to him being a Ph.D student that I keep forgetting that he doesn't actually have his Ph.D yet >_>;;; (If you're reading this - good luck! I'm sure Dr. Scott will let you escape one day "real soon now" XD)
Then we went to the Owl Bar for dinner, and then we went back to campus to check out the NEW-new ACM in the newest building on the Engineering Quad, so new that nobody had access to it, not even the security guard that came like an hour after we called them to let us in so we could bring a cardboard trolley of stuff into the new office, and that was only after qedragon actually physically went to the guardhouse to extract him - first he'd called the office and we hung around for a while chatting and wondering when the guard would get here, and then Junks made a disastrous 20-minute follow-up call and so we were like "well if they weren't going to let us in before, they're REALLY not going to let us in now!" and royal_albatross kept suggesting increasingly destructive methods of entering the building (qedragon (paraphrased): "The time for implementing those suggestions was before we called security!!") But anyway we got in eventually and hung around the (huuuuuuuge) new basement chatting (in the other ACMers' cases) and futzing around (in my case) and generally feeling like the clock turned back for one night - as I characterized it later, "ACM 一夜城". Just like the good ol' days, lol.
Then Albert and I went back to theflyingkiwi's house way late lol. The next day (Sunday) Albert and I went along with elentiriel to a random condo viewing just because, and then we three had lunch with Deewen shu-shu and Jean ah-yi and their kids Adelaide and Brian. Albert was surprisingly chummy with Brian, who was making little figures and figure-sized weapons out of twist-ties and kept asking Albert if he had any phone games. Albert tried to teach him to play 2048 lol. Adelaide had her dad's smartphone (I think? or maybe it was her own IDK) and was drawing a pretty good anime-style girl's portrait on it, though she kept saying it sucked and it's so hard to draw on a smartphone with a stylus... they're so big now lol, I still remember them as tiiiiiny. Well, Adelaide is pretty big, Brian's still kinda small lol. Deewen shu-shu looks older than I remember too - and holy crap, my family's known them since I went to CTY at JHU because that's when Mom reached out to the JHU alumni network to see if there was somewhere nearby where she and Doris could stay while I was at summer camp, and Deewen and Jean responded... so they've known me since I was, like, 13 or 14. Daaaaang.
And then elentiriel showed us Old Ellicott City which was pretty neat (they mark how many feet above street level the river flooded, at one point the street was 9 feet underwater holy crap) and then we went back to theflyingkiwi's place to kinda hang out and chill and play Mario Kart and The Wolf Among Us lol. Next morning I'd intended for us to get an early start but I ended up chatting with theflyingkiwi for way too long lol, so we didn't start out till early afternoon and just 飆車 all the way to dulcimeoww's.
Holy crap I had a lot to say about Baltimore. Guess I'll make the Midwest a separate entry then, it kinda deserves its own entry lol.