Living Small

I *heart* Starbucks

Yes, I know this is a politically incorrect sentiment, and that I should be supporting local coffee shops instead of mindlessly bowing down to the large chain.  And for a long time, I did make a point of going to Espresso Royale or Sweetwaters or even Cafe Ambrosia for the sole purpose of avoiding Starbucks (and because I love the wall of windows at Sweetwaters), but I have gotten very tired of drinking the dishwater those places pass off as coffee.  One exception, of course, is Zingerman's, which does serve excellent coffee, but charges $2.50 as opposed to $1.85 for a 16-oz cup.  Actually, Starbucks coffee ends up being less expensive than any other coffee shop in town because of the economy of scale on which it operates.  I'm sure I have blogged about my Starbucks habit before, but my love for the evil empire was reignited by two events in this past week.  Actually, the fact that this happened twice in one week probably means I go there far too often, but here is the story:

One thing that ensures a good cup of coffee every time one goes to Starbucks is that it never sits around very long (I know this because I used to work there, though I can't remember exactly how long a pot of coffee is kept after it is brewed).  When a new pot is brewed, a timer is set, and when the timer goes off, the coffee is dumped and a fresh pot is brewed.  This probably isn't an issue for people who drink regular coffee, because any place with enough business will have a fairly rapid rate of turnover, ensuring a pretty fresh cup of coffee.  But I am one of the few people who drink decaf, and that stuff can sit around all day.  Twice in the last week, I walked into Starbucks just as the decaf was expiring.  The first time, I was told that I could either wait four minutes for a fresh pot, or have a decaf Americano for the same price as brewed decaf.  The second time, my options were to wait four minutes or have a decaf Americano for FREE!  Really, how can you beat a free cup of great coffee?  Does this make me a complete corporate tool?

Placebo Effect?

As everyone knows, taking a medication can make a person feel better, even if the medication itself doesn't really work, or even if the pill doesn't actually contain medication.  For this reason, new drug trials have to prove that the drug in question works better than a placebo (or better than the existing best treatment, which had already been proven to work better than placebo).  The placebo effect also works with surgery, as studies have shown that in some instances, a person having had a fake surgery will feel better (I apologize for not actually having a citation for this).  I even heard on NPR that when an infant is given a treatment, the placebo effect can work on the parents, with the parents either perceiving improvement, or attributing any actual improvement to the treatment, whether the treatment was effective or not.

My question today is whether the placebo effect can work in reverse.  For example (not hypothetical), if I am taking a medication that I believe is making me wake up every day at 4am, and then one day I don't take the medication, and I sleep until my alarm clock goes off at 6:30, is that a real effect of not taking the medication, or is that a placebo effect of not taking the medication?  In other words, did I sleep better because the medication had been waking me up, or did I sleep better because I had attributed the waking up to the medication?

I'm So White

I guess you can tell that just by looking at my photo, but today David sent me a link to this, which I guess is his subtle way to comment on the fact that I have been wearing my pashmina shawl around my neck just about every day since I stopped wearing my spring jacket.  David had told me about the Stuff White People Like blog, and I had even heard the guy interviewed on NPR, but I hadn't gotten around to actually checking it out.  It is actually quite funny and pretty accurate, and I love the pseudo-ethnographic writing style (especially today, when my work has me digging through old anthropological articles).  So how white are you?

Happy Birthday To Me!

Today I am twenty-nine years old -- officially entering the last year of my twenties.  I have to admit that I'm not feeling sad or nostalgic about being almost done with this decade.  It has certainly been an exciting nine years, what with international travel, moving from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor, meeting and marrying my husband, and finally starting a career, but I also feel as though I wasted a lot of this decade slogging through and dropping out of grad school and being sick and unhappy.  Though maybe I had to go through all that to gain the self-knowledge that I have now.  In any case, today has gotten off to a wonderful start, despite a severe drop in temperature that had me worrying about frostbite on my morning run.  Nonetheless, I did my five miles, showered, and opened presents from my husband (thank you, David!).  By the time we walked in to work, the sun had come out, though we were still fully bundled!

Check This Out

I found this through Kisha's blog.  It is a vocabulary quiz and, for every word you get right, the website supposedly donates 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program.  I'm finding it rather addictive, especially since I realized that it scores you.  I got up to level 45 on my first go, but that is still only 840 grains of rice.  How much food is that?

Eating In My Sleep

For the last few weeks, I have been waking up daily at 4am.  Not for any good reason, and not intentionally, but just because my body seems to think it is a really great time to start the day.  Sometimes I get back so sleep and sometimes I just resign myself to being awake, and then I go downstairs, make a cup of tea, and knit.  I don't know why it took me so long, but over the weekend, I finally figured out what it is that wakes me up -- hunger.  Now there is absolutely no reason for me to be hungry at 4am.  I eat close to a thousand calories between 8pm and bedtime (yes, exactly what the diet experts say you aren't supposed to do, but I am living proof that it is a myth that eating before bed will make you gain weight -- a calorie is a calorie no matter what time it is), continue eating right up until the moment I brush my teeth and get in bed, and usually go to bed rather full.  Really, no reason for me to be hungry at 4am.  It just so happens, however, that this waking up business started right around the same time I began a new medication, one that I already noticed was making me hungrier during the day.  Again, I don't know why it took me so long to figure it out.  So on Sunday night, I put a Larabar next to my bed and, when I awoke ravenous at 4am, I just ate it right there in bed.  Sure enough, I was back to sleep pretty quickly.  I don't know that taking food to bed with me is necessarily a good long-term solution, and I can't help wondering whether the wrapper rustling woke David up...

Auctioning My Youth

I am not an E-bay shopper.  Aside from the fact that I just don't like shopping, I don't have the patience to browse through hundreds of items and then bid and bid on something I want until the auction closes.  I would rather just go to a store, buy it from Amazon, or lust after it for a while and then forget I ever wanted it.  But I keep hearing on NPR about all the bizarre things that go up for auction.  The other day it was spare parts for old military fighter jets; today it was the ferris wheel from the Santa Monica Pier.  That's right, the ferris wheel I spent quite a bit of time riding in high school is now available for purchase for $50,000 (pickup only).  Now, the ferris wheel does not carry nearly as much iconic value or nostalgia as the carousel.  In fact, the ferris wheel was only installed in my adolescence, as opposed to the nearly 100-year-old carousel, which I rode as a very small child.  But it is a landmark nonetheless, and hearing that it was up for sale on E-bay just boggled my mind.  The question I can't help wondering is whether the fact that it is from Santa Monica increases the value of the ferris wheel, or whether a ferris wheel from a pier on Lake Erie would fetch the same price tag.

Acquisitions

After actively not buying much in 2007, I seem to be acquiring quite a bit of new gear in 2008.  I think it all started with my knee injury, which first required me to buy a new pair of running shoes (I had been trying to run in 3.5 year-old trail shoes), and then a pair of running shorts for my physical therapy sessions.  Now I find myself desiring yet another pair of running shoes so I can keep one at home and one at the gym, and why not a few more pairs of shorts and some technical shirts?  I'm also lusting after a pair of non-running shoes and a watch/heart-rate monitor/distance and speed tracker.  I got a new umbrella last weekend and, on my way home from work the other day, I picked up an Ann Arbor city water bottle, so I can now drink my tap water with pride.  My favorite new acquisition, however, was a gift from my mom -- a cow keychain that moos when you press its head.  It is actually really cute when I press its head and make it moo, but sometimes it catches against something in my bag just the right way to make it moo on its own, which can be quite embarrassing!

April Showers

Last night I went to a wedding shower for a friend from grad school who is getting married next month.  It was a small party at another friend's house, but a lot of fun.  We gave the bride recipes and a box to hold them in (and demanded that she invite us all over for dinner after the wedding), quizzed her on trivia about her fiance (and made her add a stick of gum to her mouth for every incorrect answer -- 10.5 in all ), and made wedding dresses out of toilet paper.  This was only the third shower I had ever attended, which is probably much fewer than most twenty-eight year old women have under their belt.  Especially married twenty-eight year old women!  I have also been to many fewer weddings than most people my age.  There are probably many reasons for this state of affairs -- having gone to grad school put me in a peer group that just marries later overall, and for some reason many of my friends have either eloped, had tiny courthouse weddings like mine, or married quickly for immigration purposes.  And maybe it is all somehow self-perpetuating: even when we buck the trend by refusing to have big, costly, fancy weddings, we are all just doing the same thing as one another and participating in a different kind of trend!

Where I Have Been

No posts in the last week!  Where have I been?  The really sad thing is that I have been right here, sitting at the computer, not blogging, all week.  What was I doing if I wasn't blogging?  I was dealing with miserably intractable data.  Data that made me want to cry and pull out my hair.  I'll spare the gory details, since it won't make much sense to most people, but I'll just leave you with two questions: 1. Why can't the Census just ask the same questions every ten years and publish the results in the same format?  2. If an organization (not the one I work for, but one I'm getting data from) can provide one data product in a glitch-free, easy-to-use format, why is its other data product such a pain in the neck?  The first question has an easy answer -- different issues are important at different times, and the Census needs to keep up with those issues.  If it counted people in the same way it did back in the first census in 1790, we would still be counting quadroons and octaroons.  The second question I'm still struggling with.

But it is true that I haven't been staring at the computer screen nonstop for the ENTIRE past week.  After all, the last two days were weekend and I did manage to stay away from the office, even though the data woes were never far from my mind.  But I'm glad I stayed away because it was an awesome weekend.  The weather was just gorgeous, and I spent much of the weekend outside: hiking with friends from work on Saturday at the Waterloo Recreation Area, running on Sunday morning in the Arb, and enjoying Festifools on Sunday afternoon with friends from grad school. 

I had a great time with my friends, both hiking on Saturday and gawking at giant puppets on Sunday, but I must admit that the run was the highlight of my weekend.  I hadn't planned to run at all over the weekend, since I did a 35-minute "long run" on the treadmill on Friday morning, but I had been reading about running nonstop since Friday night (yes, I'm now at the research stage with my running -- I'll get over it soon, I'm sure...), and I just couldn't wait until Monday.  I was up at 8am on Sunday and dying to get out, but my running shoes were at the gym.  So I walked to the gym, arriving about five minutes before it opened, donned my running gear, and went back out.  Fortunately, the arb is only about a five minute walk from the gym, so I was all warmed up when I got there.  This was my first time running outside.  Not my first time this year, but my first time EVER, and it was so awesome to just see the world go by.  Granted, I was going pretty slowly, but the world was still going by faster than if I had been walking.  As I ran, two thoughts kept alternating in my mind: first, "this is so cool," and second, "I can't believe I'm doing this!"  My goal was to run for forty minutes, and with the exception of a bit of walking on a very steep uphill, I did it.  The fact that my radio battery gave out around minute 28 didn't even slow me down, though that may have been because it is pledge week at the local NPR station.  When I got to minute 40, I was tired but didn't want to stop.  I stopped anyway, though, figuring it was better to stop before I wanted to than to keep going to the point where I didn't want to run anymore.I couldn't believe how good I felt when I stopped.  I just wanted to do it again.  Right away.  I think it was my first experience with the elusive runner's high.