blog & collective

Post-MCAT, I drove up to San Francisco with Melissa and Thomas to see Something Corporate on their reunion tour.

Together again!

I find it weird that bands I listen to are already having reunion tours. When I told my dad I was going to a reunion concert, he said:

Dad: “Who’s Something Corporate? Why don’t I know them? How long have they been broken up?”

Me: “You wouldn’t know them. They broke up 5 years ago in their early-twenties. Now they’re in their mid- to late-twenties.”

Dad: “Oh. Well that’s lame!”

Thanks, Dad. Well in any case, they still play a damn good show. And the lighting was awesome at the Warfield. Anyway, good concert, fun people, happy times!

D: Well… have fun taking the MCAT!

T: I don’t think “fun” is how I would describe it…

D: Are you kidding me? I’ve heard it’s super fun! Like taking E!

T: … that makes me never want to try ecstasy EVER.

D: That’s a good thing. Later!

T: ………

For TiffHu, who had a spastic episode in the comments of the post in which I had a photo of these cookies.

Yummy puffy deliciousness!

Originally from: http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/mrs-siggs-snickerdoodles/Detail.aspx

Ingredients
1 cup butter (2 sticks), room temperature
3/2 cups sugar
2 eggs, room temperature
2 tsp vanilla extract
11/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp ground cinnamon

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix thoroughly.
3. In a medium bowl, combine flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. Blend into butter mixture until well-combined. Shape dough into 1″-2″ balls.
4. Mix the 2 tbsp of sugar with cinnamon. Roll balls of dough in mixture. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets.
5. Bake 8 minutes. Remove immediately from oven and let cool 2 minutes on baking sheet before transferring to wire rack to cool.

(Makes 3-4 dozen)

Notes

• The original recipe calls for 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup shortening, but all-butter worked fine for me.
• One of the reviews I saw recommended using room-temperature eggs and butter, which worked excellently.
• Supposedly, using an electric mixer will give different results — I used a wooden spoon to cream the butter and do the rest of the mixing. It wasn’t difficult at all, but then again you’re talking to someone who’s mixed a ridiculously heavy (and delicious) pound cake by hand.
• Years of snickerdoodle-making has taught me that a good sugar-cinnamon coating method is as follows: put the sugar and cinnamon in a tupperware container, drop the dough ball in there, put the lid on the container, and shake it around like a maraca (but maybe a little more gently than that).
• These snickerdoodles puff nicely without spreading too much. Unlike the recipe I used in my childhood, these don’t need any pre-flattening.
• Also as recommended in one of the reviews, bake for 8 minutes exactly — they’ll look a little rotund in the upwardly-puffy direction, but after cooling for a minute or two, they’ll calm down a bit. 8 minutes will also keep them from getting too dry or burning.

SNICKERDOODLES (in case you missed this photo last time around)

So far this summer it’s been like reading a tour guide to the MCAT and watching some sort of documentary on MCATland, but with less than a week left to the day of doom, after which the fate of my career in medicine will be determined, it’s time to get down and dirty with the MCAT.

Luckily, I have my handy friend Princeton Review (also dubbed “Le Prince de Review” avec son ami “Le Barron de Kaplan” roughly 4.5 years ago… let’s not revisit those times, shall we?) to kick my ass into gear as I navigate these treacherous lands.

The conformation of the enzyme prior to substrate binding, with low substrate affinity, is sometimes termed “tense,” and the conformation of the enzyme with increased affinity is termed “relaxed.” ³¹

³¹ Imagine a group of people who can’t get any dates. They are all depressed about it, and they keep each other depressed, which makes it even less likely that any will get a date. They are tense, “turned off,” and inactive. Then one of the depressed group gets a date and gets so excited about it that all the other friends in the group get so enthusiastic that they get dates too. They are “turned on,” relaxed, hip, groovy, and active.

Thank you, Princeton Review. I understand allosteric binding that much better now. I may also go shoot whoever wrote that footnote.

Anyway, it’s time to move into a nice little villa in MCATland and study some more. Friends, you may not hear from me much for the next week — but hey, after that I am down to party.

Really quick, two other accomplishments of August: Extempore Literary Magazine, and these delicious and puffy and amazing snickerdoodles I baked today.

SNICKERDOODLES

It’s the kind of place where you can sneeze and no one will say, “Bless you.” Some days it’s because everyone else is working from home, some days simply because no one dares disturb the silence. I spend all day with headphones in, living in my own little world filled with music and sound, wondering what would happen if I just unplugged the headphones and sent OneRepublic or Anberlin or Spoon spiraling over the quiet hum of computers and typing. But the air conditioning is cranked up so cold that it makes a fair excuse to wander outside at noon to thaw in the California sunshine over lunch.

I sit at the entrance to the pod, facing a blank expanse of whiteboard marred by the faint, unerasable remnants of protein binding interaction diagrams, reaction free-energy coordinate plots, and Big O notation. Some day I’ll bring a dry erase marker with me to work and draw a porcupine dubiously eyeing O(n²). Maybe someone will notice. Not that they’d say anything. I could take over the desk behind me (the one with an extra monitor and shelves) and face windows instead of this whiteboard, but somehow there’s a sense of security in facing the same direction as the post-doc who’s overseeing my project. He never really turns around, yet I’d prefer that I see him on Facebook than the other way around.

I start each workday the same way. Before sitting down, I stow away my keys, pull out my laptop and charger, set my work notebook and a pencil down on the desk, plug my laptop charger into the outlet in the floor then my laptop, and put my backpack on the ground. Then I spend approximately the next 8 hours wondering if anyone can see my feet from the hall, and why I’m here instead of modeling this beta-1-adrenergic receptor from home. I guess something about the silence makes me feel obligated towards productivity.

So here’s to another day at work.