Bringing you up to speed, aka New Orleans

Starting January 25:

2 days in Richmond

3 days in Philadelphia

5 days in San Jose (3 midterms-- that wasn't very fun)

4 days in New Orleans

That about wraps up my interview season. No love from my November NY interviews though- one rejection and one waitlist. Sad face. Desperation.

After posting pictures (complete with historical/architectural commentary!) on Facebook (which you should totally take a look at because they're awesome and completely from my camera phone, so holler and I'll hook you up with a link, because gangsters are so generous like that), I am in no mood to recap my Richmond/Philly trip. But I MUST talk about New Orleans:

TOP THREE THINGS I LEARNED IN NEW ORLEANS:

1. Never EVER underestimate football in the South

Walking back to my hotel after my interview, I saw an elderly woman in the street dressed really elegantly, like the queen of England. When she turned around I saw that she was wearing a black and gold Saints jersey under her powder blue Chanel jacket. Likewise, the Brooks Brothers store on Canal Street featured a floor-to-ceiling banner that read, in five-foot letters, "WHO DAT!"

2. Centering your entire wardrobe around cute waist-belts is a HUGE mistake

My dad saw something in a New Orleans travel guide that we adopted as our vacation motto: Eat Until You Die. So even though my tiny stomach was begging me to stop, my mouth was saying, "Dude, you're never going to eat food this good again. Wolf it down, brah. Then order the crème brulée."

The seafood was phenomenal, there's no doubt about that. Oysters, dungeness crab, coriander and pepper-crusted tuna, sautéed fish Beurre Noisette. Mmmmmm. I was however, surprised to find two new "bests" in other culinary genres.

The Best Pasta, aka Superdome Seafood Pasta

I'm not a fan of pasta. I don't like onions or green peppers. But this pasta, that the chef made spontaneously on the spot JUST FOR ME, combined things I don't love (vegetables, esp. onions) with things I DO love (shrimp, crawfish, andouille) and some other magical ingredients (amazing cheesy cajun sauce, which my lactose-intolerant digestive system paid heavily for afterwards) to create THE BEST PASTA I'VE EVER HAD.

The Best Hollandaise Sauce, aka Breaux Bridge Benedict

My friend Nathan and I have talked about our long pursuit of the best eggs benedict, which is of course primarily dependent on the hollandaise sauce. I am proud to announce that I HAVE FOUND IT.

French baguette, American cheese, pork boudin, perfectly poached eggs, heavenly hollandaise, and smoked ham. I would have been perfectly satisfied in life if, two minutes after having consumed this, a coked-out hick shot me in the face with a sawed-off shotgun and harvested my organs with a biodegradable knife (100% corn starch!) to exchange for drugs on the black market. It was that good.

So it would be a ginormous understatement to say that restricting your midsection with a waist-belt in New Orleans is a 'bad idea.'

3. If you don't want your mother to be mooned by a shitfaced Southerner with a Saints helmet tattooed on his ass, do not take her to Bourbon Street past 9 pm. Better yet, do not take her to Bourbon Street past 2 pm.

I only have one thing to say regarding this matter: New Orleans makes Las Vegas look like an Amish settlement.

In other words, if you've never been, you need to fucking go.

Tired

It's just past midnight here in California. I have been up since 6:30am EASTERN TIME. I have been on board aircraft for seven hours.

This morning on the way to my interview a toothless wino called me a whore and demanded that I give him 50 cents.

I'm tired.

(And I did not give him the 50 cents.)

Workin' on my fitness

Since we've both been homesick for SoCal, Ell and I decided to make a trip (in APRIL, but a trip nonetheless) to do an event at Lake Elsinore. The event? WARRIOR DASH. Yeah. Fucking savage, right? AND THERE'S FREE BEER TOO.

The last time I did any serious running was the 5k Ell and I ran in the Long Beach Marathon to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. Neither of us did any training whatsoever and as soon as the race was over, we went to McDonalds and I got a sausage McMuffin and a hash brown.

During the first two years of college, I did Tae Bo because my roommates did. And because that's what you DO in L.A. You go to the gym. You work out. I mean, you wear your cutest little gym outfit (and if you're my roommate Ashley, you apply your evening face), but you GO to the gym. Think of UCLA as the state of Utah and the John Wooden Center as the nearest LDS church. I felt shameful if I didn't go.

At some point I realized I could lie on the couch all day and eat funfetti cupcakes until I poop sprinkles and STILL look exactly the same. And that was the end of going to Tae Bo.

So back to the Warrior Dash. I felt like I should at least make an effort (even a half-assed one) to train. This morning I woke up at 8:30 and dragged my loving brother along for a run. After 30 minutes, I was really really surprised to find that I wasn't sweaty. Like, at all. I'm not sure if I wasn't pushing myself hard enough or if I should be expressing concern over the possibility of a glandular disorder.

Even if I do have adiaphoresis (That can be your Learn Something New Everyday. YOU'RE WELCOME.), the most disconcerting thing about my run would be the alarming degree of ass jiggle I was experiencing. You know how having C-cups and running without a sports bra makes your boobs sore? Well imagine that feeling, but in your butt.

(Now, mind you, my butt doesn't LOOK like it jiggles, it just feels jiggly when I run. I would much rather you think I'm shallow than that my ass is unattractive. Which it is not. Or so I'm told. By everyone. Just kidding. Maybe every other person. Just kidding.)

I tried altering my stride so as to minimize jiggling, but the only thing that worked was running on my tiptoes. Which felt oddly familiar-- like running in heels.

So if you find yourself in the Bay Area and see some beezy jogging in bright yellow UCLA booty shorts and black stilettos, holler at your girl.

Ode to swimsuit

Saturday night, a little past 3 a.m. (so I guess it was Sunday morning if you want to be all picky about it... bitch), Ell and I ordered $140 in swimsuits and summer-related accessories online.

Do you ever wonder what you'll be like in 20 years? I don't mean where you live or what your career is or who you're married to. I mean what you'll BE like. Will you be kind to strangers on the street? Will you be socially and/or politically liberal? Will you have smoothed out all the neuroses of your 20s?

I can't really say that I wonder any of these things. I can't even see past May of this year, when I will know once and for all if I've gotten into medical school.

But when we were flipping through the Victoria's Secret swimsuit catalog, I found myself wondering if I'm going to become one of those middle-aged women who never wear swimsuits because they're self-conscious about how they look in general; self-conscious times a quadrupillion (REAL WORD) about how they look in a swimsuit.

This was a rather difficult task because, well, I LOVE WEARING SWIMSUITS. I love the beach. And the sun. And all those days I spent with the girls lying out at Santa Monica and reading. And I love throwing a football around at the beach. I love the hot tub at my old apartment and the makeshift poolside bar, and creating cocktails (THE JUICY FRUIT). I love how my tattoo sticks out just a teensy bit from the top of my swimsuit bottoms as if to say peekaboo! And I love that boys love that it does too.

Maybe one day when I'm old and jiggly and my skin is flappy, the love for swimsuits will fade. The classic black bikini, the cute and fun polka dot one, the sporty one that I wear when I bodyboard-- maybe one day they won't be in my closet anymore.

But today (and for at least the next decade), I will wear the swimsuit. I will wear it when I'm driving home from Santa Cruz, until I get into the city and have to put on a shirt because people are starting to stare. I will wear it under my clothes to the park for a water balloon fight. I will wear it proud, like a badge of honor.

LIVE ON, great swimsuit. Live on.

Edit: Justification for why I had to purchase said swimsuit at 3:30 a.m. and not the next morning: IKNOW,CUTERIGHT? Just pretend that's my body. Which it will be come summer. Plus tattoo and birthmark between my ribs.

The little things

Do you ever have a sudden realization about something that's been in front of your face all along? You know, one of those OHHHH, How did I not realize this sooner? kind of moments. Like when I realized that the cheese in a cheesecake is cream cheese. Or when I realized that the blue chick in Avatar is played by Zoe Saldana because the whole movie I kept thinking, Damn this blue alien looks familiar. Or when someone first told me that all the streetlights in San Jose are an orangey color so as to reduce light pollution for the observatory in the hills.

Anyway, I'm sitting on the couch reading My Sister's Keeper and my mother is on the other couch doing a word search. When she's not watching Korean dramas dubbed in Vietnamese subtitled in English, she's doing her word search. You know the ones I'm talking about--those small books they have at the supermarket.

The way we're positioned, I can see the pages of the word search book, but I can't see her face. For some reason the page caught my eye. # 64 KARATE. I kept staring at it. And I realized something. It felt very cinematic, like in a movie when a character has this fatty epiphany and the lighting gets brighter and brighter.

She's doing the word searches so she can learn English. Generally she can get her point across and my siblings and I understand her perfectly fine, but her vocabulary isn't so great.

It's totally stupid and I don't know why I thought of it, but it just seemed inexplicably profound.

Stupid, no. But a little crazy? Hell yeah.

So uh, hello. My name is Bex. I got my B.S. in physiological science six months ago and then I moved back in with my parents and now I'm taking 19 units at a community college, not one of which has any relation to my field.

Personal enrichment.

Personal enrichment.

Personal enrichment.

That's what I keep telling everyone. Those two words are absolutely necessary in making me NOT sound like I'm bat crap crazy because they accompany the words "I'm taking Spanish 5, French 5, Federal and California State Income Tax, and American Literature in the Postbellum Period."

Personal enrichment.

That's what I keep telling myself. I don't know if it's going to work much longer. In making me not sound freaking retarded, I mean. Because that's how I feel. But no one wants to hire me and no one wants to play with me, so a full course load it is.

Don't get me wrong- I'm going to handle these classes like nobody's business. I'm rocking the shit out of Dickenson and Whitman and I've only had one lecture of Am Lit. I guess I just feel useless when I'm not doing something sciency. It's been so long, I've almost forgotten the smell of cadavers in an anatomy lab. Or what epicardial fat feels like. Or how far to push in the swab when you're getting a vaginal smear from a rat.

Doesn't physiology just give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside? Like a lavender unicorn dancing on a rainbow over rolling green hills.

NYE 2010: Hilariously disastrous and I wouldn't have it any other way

When I met Team Saucy, before we actually became Team Saucy, I didn't like them.

We were in the same lab group and I HATE groups because I end up with the retarded kids who can't skin a frog leg to save their lives. One seemed stuck up and unfriendly, the other was always late to class (and being constantly late is far worse than being a snob).

Less than two weeks later I fell in love with them. I mean, for serious, yo. Like BRIDESMAIDS STATUS. Despite knowing each other for less than a year, our love is that legit.

When Team Saucy would get together, we would do one of two things: a) study, or b) binge drink and talk about boning dudes. And let me tell you, post-graduation, there ain't much studying to do.

We decided to do New Year's Eve together and I half had no idea what was going to happen, half knew EXACTLY what was going to happen-- we were going to get shitfaced and we were going to have some awesome stories.

To tell the full story of How Team Saucy Rang in 2010, I'd have to start another blog or write a novel, so this is the gist, a quick and dirty summary of the night's general events:

We pre-partied at one Saucy's aunt's multi-multi-million dollar vacation home in Manhattan Beach. Since no one could figure out the complex sound system, our entertainment was (very briefly) porn. On a 56" flatscreen.

I wore this Mickey Mouse cowboy hat to the club. It says Sheriff Becky on the brim.

When the ball dropped, I was in the bathroom kissing one Saucy and holding the other over a trash can with my hands locked under her rib cage. AWESOME.

We left the club early because Saucy was too trashed and as a result of her trashedness we couldn't get into her aunt's house because she punched in the garage code wrong and there were cops everywhere because there was a HUGE car fire around the corner and I feared for the safety of my own car and went to move it but my keys were inside the house so we had to call Saucy's parents to come and bring us the spare key (to the house, not my car) and they were pretty drunk themselves then when we finally got inside, there was a BLACKOUT, both in terms of electricity and Saucy's state of mind.

New Years never ever turns out the way you expect (hilariously disastrous, right?), but when you spend it with two of the best girls you know, it doesn't matter that you head home at 12:05am or that your feet are killing you because you spent part of the night wearing pointy red stilettos ON THE WRONG FEET. Just another great adventure to add to the Team Saucy memory books.

After carrying/dragging Saucy up a spiral staircase in pitch darkness, I climbed into the most comfortable bed my body has ever known. It was like floating on a cloud. A perfect, ergonomic cloud. I drifted off into sweet sweet slumber, concluding one hell of a Saucy NYE....

OR SO I THOUGHT.