… it will probably be a miracle. Between multiple workshop papers, annotated bibliographies, and literature reviews, all due… well, now more or less, this is a whopper of a week. Thanksgiving in Chicago is on the other side, and I can only imagine I will have plenty to be thankful for. Provided I make it through this week.

In the meantime, please enjoy what I am declaring the cutest profile picture on Facebook:

David Fourel — I have no idea who you are (or how I even ended up on your profile), but bravo!

Driving away from UC Irvine’s campus, you only have to take a couple quick turns onto Newport Coast Drive before you find yourself racing down a hill towards Laguna Beach. Within seconds you will come around a bend, and the hills will open up to reveal an ocean so blue it is sometimes hard to see where the water stops and the sky beings.

This is where I live. Apparently this is my new home. With images like these, so stunning they are almost trite, the whole thing is hard to believe, but this is what it looks like. It is surreal. (more…)

Yesterday day was my birthday, and it was amazing. Rather than any large productions, it was a day of thoughtful generosities.

As midnight approached, Steve eagerly waited for it to officially be my birthday before he produced a gift. Simultaneously the most ridiculous and awesome gift ever, I got the world’s only internet connected bunny, a Nabaztag! (Really, it is kind of crazy, so you should just click on the link.)

After promptly naming him “Peru”, I struggled for about an hour to introduce him to his new Internet-based home (turns out that Airports need some extra configuration – why? No clue.), and then somehow let a couple more hours slip by teaching him to wake me up in the morning, play NPR, read Twitter tweets, and practice Tai-Chi. (You didn’t click that link, did you? You might want to now.)

(more…)

In one month I am leaving D.C. and, as if the city was helping me prepare for the move, my scooter was stolen this week. I walked outside one morning to find that “Gui” was simply not there. I stood there for a moment, as if his absence was a trick of the eye. However, despite how hard I looked at his typical parking spot, or how many times I blinked, he was gone.

Honestly, I think that Steve was more upset than I was. I promptly filed the event under “what can you do?” and “am I going to be late to work?” I then quickly checked my calendar to see when the day’s meetings were, and then my watch to see if I could catch the work-shuttle from Dupont Circle.

Don’t get me wrong, I was upset, but I didn’t really know what one could do besides twitter regret into the cloud:

Scooter stolen. Le sigh. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

On Facebook, my friend George (who seems to always have the best comments) wrote:

DC’s way of saying good bye 🙁

Carly was far more… emotive:

total effing crap. screw that city.

This wasn’t a surprise. (Love scooters? Read on…)

Much to my mother’s chagrin, I have never quite gotten into the habit of taking a daily vitamin. Now I am a fairly nutritionally minded individual (just don’t ask my gym buddy); this largely means I know my macro-nutrients, the details of the Krebs cycle, what a ketone is, and drink a protein shake after my workouts (most of the time).

But when it comes to a simple daily vitamin, I have never quite gotten there. Perhaps this the byproduct of a mother for whom one vitamin quickly explodes into a dozen more to supplement the first’s deficiencies. Perhaps this is a Pavlovian response to too much vitamin B dumped on a dehydrated and dancing body, and the inevitable sick stomach and vomiting the occurred to often during my undergraduate days. Honestly, the pills are huge, and they scare me a bit.

The vitamin search continues…

A lot has been going on lately. Graduations, birthdays (Steve’s), more graduate school on the way, and the summer’s crop of going aways — plenty of reasons to celebrate! It seemed a pity to prioritize one of these events over the other, so we went for the obvious solution:

A birthday party for my cat.

Yes, Minka celebrated her 16th birthday last night, and Steve and I were desperate to make it even more ridiculous than last year’s quinceañera (yes, also not a joke). When explaining the celebration to a cashier at the grocery store we were given a wide-eyed look of disbelief. When she realized we weren’t kidding, she had to excuse herself while recovering from a laughing fit.

In the name of such ridiculousness, I thought I would share a (sassy) photo posted on Facebook by Rick.

“PETA should be called…” commented one of Rick’s friends.

Yup. That is how I roll.

Oh, and by the way, it seems that racing down the street on your scooter with a dozen pink baloons is a sure-fire way to collect a bunch of smiles.

Last week, me and my best colleagues wrapped ourselves up in black polyester, walked across Healy Lawn at Georgetown, and after sweating for two hours in the sun, completed the last requirement for graduation.

I figured you might like some pictures.

See them all after the jump. (more…)

So the thesis is done, and life can return to normal, whatever that is. There is one piece of major news that has been noticeably absent from my blog over the last 20+ days: A Ph.D. decision.

I am going to UC Irvine!

Those following my twitter feed already have heard the news, as well as peers at CCT and the AAMC, and everyone else who has suffered through my never-ending love affair with anteaters (kind of one of those jokes that has taken on a life of its own). However, I realized I need to throw something up here once professors at various universities (you know who you are) started writing me curious about where I had decided to go.

This was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, but not for any of the trite reasons. After visiting programs I found myself wishing I could mash them up into one delicious mega-Starburst. I was also really upset at the prospect of not working with so many exciting classmates. “These are your colleagues!” my advisor, David Ribes, kindly told me during that fateful decision week.

So why Irvine? Surprisingly, not the weather. I am going to go work in medicine. Medicine? Yeah, that was my initial response as well. 🙂

UC Irvine’s Medical Center is in the process of overhauling all of their technology, including their electronic medical health records system (EMR). Yunan Chen and Gillian Hayes are doing a number of studies during this transition, and they kindly invited me to join them to pursue my interests in digital identity in a more institutionalized setting.

This could not be more perfect. My research has increasingly focused on the ways in which identity is categorized and institutionalized into things like software. At UCI I will actually get to sit down with developers and clinicians as they implement their system. It is a priceless opportunity. Needless to say, an EMR is a giant leap forward from Facebook and craigslist.

5 more years of details to follow, but for today, one last anteater:

I am a bit bleary eyed, but I am done.

I completely dropped off the face of the earth for the last month, but I am done!

Everything is signed, PDFs have been uploaded — I have finished my Master’s degree at Georgetown.

I owe you a blog post. It has been too long. My blog appears unkempt, more or less keeping pace with my bedroom.

I blame the thesis; nothing seems to exist beyond it. My mother called me today asking if I was going to send out graduation announcements.  I had to admit I had no idea when my graduation was. “May, right?”

So what are we missing?

• I owe you a review on that comic book based on Missed Connections. (good so far!)
• You might be wondering how my interview with craigslist founder Craig Newmark went. (great, but in none of the ways I anticipated.)
• I certainly owe my advisor more thesis writing. (umm…)

However, for the next couple of weeks, the dominant question is “Where will I be living next fall?” I am flying around the country visiting schools, and attempting to figure out (typically in 48 hours or less) where I would like to spend the next four years (roughly 34,944 hours, for you math types) of my life.

Where am I going?

(more…)