October Frost

I spent the majority of this past weekend at the library writing a paper. Saturday evening, I took a break to grab a slice of pizza across the street with a friend. It was a warm evening, unseasonably so for this time of year, and the air smelled sweetly of decaying leaves. It was dark as we were walking back to the library and our work. On the way, there was a small group huddled around a dark mound wedged in between the curb and a car. As we got closer, we noticed a concerned, elderly woman standing just outside the group with her hands clasped tightly in front of her chest. Her husband had fallen into the small space at the base of the curb and a number of passers-by were attempting to help him out and up.

Our pace slowed, watching to see if we could offer our assistance. After some doing, the gentleman was on his feet, so we continued back across Comm. Ave. to the library. Comm. Ave. is a large, busy two way road divided by the T tracks. When we got to the median, I looked back to see that the elderly couple were beginning to cross. We waited for them to reach the median safely and continued ahead by a few steps, just in case. Once they were across safely, the woman approached us to ask if we knew where a particular conference hall was, where an Amnesty International event was being held. We did and we escorted them to the building in question, which was just a couple of blocks down. While walking, we learned that they had been married for over 50 years. The wife was born October Callum, but goes by Toby. Her husband is Wesley Frost. That makes her October Frost and that is just the prettiest name.

She told us about the time she drove from Boston to Alaska and how she'd like, one day, to drive across America and write about the names of places. I told her about my cross-country trips and we shared stories from the road. Before too long, we saw them back to their car and we parted ways as they effused thank-yous. My friend and I made our way back to the library and I sunk my evening in one of my last assignments ever, hopefully. It was a pleasant diversion and I imagined what it would be like not only to have lived such a long life as happily as they have, but to have gone the majority of it with someone you love.

School Year End & Sunrise

My first year of graduate school ended on Monday. It went by very fast, as these things usually do. There have been the standard festivities involving food and drink, but this morning some of my classmates and I went out to the Mass. Ave bridge to watch the sunrise over the Charles River. After a week of unseasonable cold and rain, it was warm and summery today and walking there at 4:30 am was quiet and relaxing. It was a great way to unwind.



We headed back around 6 and were pretty tired and hungry, but Andre wanted a picture of himself jumping over a bench.



I'm now on my first summer break since 2006. My plans aren't finalized yet, but hopefully I'll be able to do something productive and/or fun. I hope everyone else does as well.

Eye Of The Storm

I mentioned in the previous post that I'm done with my finals, but still have a comprehensive exam (a test that covers all the core econ material for the year and is a requirement for graduation) left. That's over a week away, so I'm doing my best not to think about it for a few days. A classmate had a big BBQ today at his gigantic house, dubbed "The Manor," a little out from BU. It's an old, stately looking house that creaks and has bats living in the walls, but the backyard is perfect for BBQs. The weather wasn't the best, but it was still a nice way to take our minds off of things.



My classmate and his roommates prepared the general BBQ fare (burgers, brats, ribs, and steak), but also somehow managed to ship 60 lbs. of live crawfish overnight from New Orleans. The afternoon became a swarm of people hovering over a table piled high with steaming crawfish, sucking the innards out of the diminutive crustaceans while their remains littered the floor around our feet.



It was a relaxing day. It'll be a few days yet before I venture back to the library, so until then I'll be catching up on sleep and doing absolutely nothing, while trying not to compulsively check for grades online.

Sail Away, Sail Away

A list of some of the words and names I'd like never to hear again: autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, polynomial distributed lag, Dickey Fuller, Breusch Godfrey.

I had my last regulation final this morning. I still have a take-home test due tomorrow and a comprehensive exam on the 23rd, but I have a bit of a reprieve now. A little after the test a couple of friends and I went sailing on the Charles River. One of my classmates had taken the sailing class this semester and is allowed to check out sailboats. So we spent a little while hanging out on the river. It was a nice way to unwind after a hectic week. It was a small boat so too much maneuvering wasn't really an option, but I took as many shots as I could without capsizing us. This was also the first time I've ever worn boat shoes on an actual boat.



The semester's not quite over yet, but it's close. Summer's around the corner and I'm not really sure what I'll be doing, but I'm looking forward to a break.

Semester End & Sunset

Had my last final yesterday. Semester one of graduate school is over. I've had enough of the library for quite a while. The past 4 months really flew by. Definitely an interesting experience. New city, new challenges, new friends.

The first real snow of the season started while we were taking our test. Some of my classmates from California had never seen a substantial snowfall before. There are some easy metaphors of the cleansing renewal of the soft blanket of white powder over the campus in there, but I'll leave them alone. We headed out to Sunset Grill & Tap in Allston afterward to celebrate. Like all hip places, the lighting was pretty dim so the shots are fairly grainy.



I'm heading home for a couple of weeks tomorrow. Having a winter break will be nice. I haven't had this much time off since before I started working 2.5 years ago. The holidays should be nice.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Young Me, Now Me

I haven't been very active here (or on Flickr) recently. A combination of the encroaching cold, midterms/homework, and having done the same things repeatedly with visitors has left me without a whole lot of new things to share. I'll have to be more creative in coming up with things to put up here.

The title of this post is a reference to the excellent blog/project, Young Me/Now Me, in which people recreate old baby/childhood pictures of themselves. Unfortunately, I have not done this. I do, however, have a bit of my past. On my way to Wyoming last July, I made a point of finding my old elementary school in Evanston, IL (just outside of Chicago).



I attended Willard Elementary from kindergarten through 2nd grade. I have some surprisingly lucid memories of this place. Recess in the snow, scraped knees, friends, bullies, Mrs. Bee (Bartholomew, really) and her bee themed room, and, of particular relevance here, where and how I hurt myself doing stupid things. The cement stairs pictured were where we lined up to enter the building. One morning I happened to be running up those stairs and slipped on ice which resulted in me cracking my chin on the corner of a cement step. I vividly recall making my way to the nurse's office trailing blood behind me. The swings at the bottom were where I attempted to imitate the older boys that were doing back-flips (sort of) off of the swing. I tried and, of course, failed. I landed on my chin, again, and somehow bit down into my tongue, immediately filling my mouth with blood. Once again, I made my way to the nurse spitting mouthfuls of blood everywhere. The yellow spiral slide is actually where my brother jumped off and broke his arm. I remember this because I thought it was great that I got to leave school early when my mom came to take him to the hospital.

As these things usually go, seeing this place again, I was struck by how small it all seemed. It's provided some interesting symmetry with some of what I've been thinking about lately. Being in graduate school, I'm constantly reminded of how vastly more intelligent or ambitious than me some people are. Not that this sends me into crippling self-loathing, but it recalibrates the expectations that I have for myself. Those swings were a major fixture in my life for a couple of years, but I outgrew them. Later on, as most teenagers tend to, I thought I was a lot cooler and smarter than I actually was. Now, it's both sobering and illuminating to be presented with another imposing obstacle. Maybe some years later I'll look back and marvel at how I could have been so daunted by it, but for now I'll just have to try and do a back-flip off of it.

The Emerald Necklace

So I've finished my first set of midterms. It's been a busy few weeks. Certainly an interesting experience to be reliving this part of student life again.

I made it out to the Arboretum today. Walked down the Emerald Necklace, which is a series of parks that starts from the Boston Commons and makes a 5-6 mile loop to the south. While it was very nice, I think I'm a little foliaged out.



On another note: there are a lot of things that I've been enjoying about grad school so far. I feel like it's been challenging and I'm learning valuable things. I've also been more social than I've been in the past. Boston's a nice town. But from time to time, the thought occurs to me that this is a very big gamble. There's no guarantee that this will pay off financially in the end. Not that that's the most important thing to me, but it is something to consider. Being in the Development Economics program, conversations about future careers with others aware of what development entails usually involve the preclusion of financial success as a motivator. So, the real question is whether or not this particular degree will pay off in the sense that I'll be able to make a positive impact in the world afterward. I think in college, the prospect of doing substantive work was never real to me because I always knew in the back of my mind that I'd probably be going back to school. Now that I'm here, I find myself having to contend with the fact that this is where I've cast my lot and will soon have to deal with the fruits of my labor, or lack thereof. It's a bit daunting, but not something I'm entirely unprepared for.

Corey Hill

I was going to go to the Arnold Arboretum today, but the forecast was calling for rain. As it turned out, today was a sunny and pleasant, albeit windy, Autumn day. Having already resigned to spending the day indoors doing homework and maybe studying for my midterms, I instead took a break and walked to Corey Hill Park. Corey Hill is a park at the top of a large hill about a mile from my apartment. You have to walk up Summit Avenue to get to the top of the hill and it's a bit of a hike. I don't envy the people that have to make that trip everyday.



It's a charming little park. The views weren't as spectacular as I was led to believe, but it was nice. There was a lot of nice light filtering through the changing leaves.

On another note, the past week has seen several late homework filled nights. With a couple more assignments coming up and midterms next week, I have, and will continue to, consumed an exorbitant amount of snack food (Trader Joe's Cats Cookies are crack). It's a little interesting to note how foreign doing homework felt at first and how quickly and naturally I fell back into a pattern of procrastination. It's not been too bad though and hopefully my first tests since May 2007 won't be either. YAY, SCHOOL.

(Definitely went a little bokeh crazy here.)

Harvard Square & Homework

Went by Harvard Square with a visiting friend today. The afternoon and early evening were fairly overcast, but I caught a little light through the cloud cover before dark.



In other news, I am now pretty bad at doing homework (or at least equally as bad as I ever was), which can be evidenced by the fact that I'm doing this while my books lie open in front of me. Also, relearning calculus is like riding a bike after a long time. A really crappy, uncomfortable bike with a chain your shoelaces keep getting stuck in.



That said, it's a little surprising how my memory of undergraduate economics is colored by the couple of weeks of graduate economics I've had so far. In my microeconomics class we've been going over identical concepts to the ones covered in my freshman microeconomics class, except the level of analytical rigor is so much greater. Instead of simply drawing supply and demand functions and understanding their mechanics graphically, we're now asked to derive these behavioral theories mathematically. I keep thinking about this particular xkcd comic:

Boston So Far

So, I moved to Boston on August 21 with the help of a few friends. Since then, my time has mostly been spent complaining about the weather, looking for good food, and wandering around the city and the surrounding areas by myself. Thankfully, the whipping rain and miserable heat (compounded by a lack of AC) have given way to the coolness of the onset of Autumn, I've found a few decent spots to grab a burger and pizza, and I've been pleased to discover that Boston is a nice place to walk around. It has the interesting quality of feeling at once decidedly urban and accessibly small. An abundance of historic architecture imbues a sense of history and narrative.



I'd grown somewhat tired of walking around the city by myself and I hadn't started class yet. Without the opportunity to meet and make friends, I'd lost some motivation to continue to explore on my own. Thankfully, a couple of friends, that I knew from elsewhere, were making a day trip on Labor Day to Cape Cod and were kind enough to invite me.



Cape Cod, as it turns out, is beautiful and exactly as I imagined New England beaches to be: clean, serene, and rich white people. Also, Provincetown is super gay. Pink houses with burly dudes in flamboyant costumes dancing on the porch to club music kind of gay. But, otherwise, a nice town.

I started class this Wednesday and it's been an unusual experience. Being in school voluntarily and being responsible for financing it is a totally different experience than it was in college. Also, getting back up to speed mathematically is giving my brain a workout it hasn't had in years. And, wouldn't you know it, instead of doing the readings for my lecture tomorrow, I'm spending time getting this blog back up. Nevertheless, I'll do my best to keep this space updated with the goings on here in Bean Town.

Homework time!