Tail End of the Eastern Coastin'

Tuesday was my last day in Boston, and I had a pretty eventful day. I went to a class with Andy, and then I went to the weekly Tuesday lunch talk which was about epigenetics this week. They have burritos for lunch beforehand, which ended up being a total disaster for me because I usually conk out a little bit after having a good-sized lunch. I was kind of nodding off during the talk and certainly wasn't engaged - whoops! Gotta have my siesta...

Later I ended up meeting up with two awesome people - Peter DeScioli and Kyle Thomas. Peter DeScioli is a really interesting human who I met at the 3UC conference in SLO who does experimental evolutionary psychology and is in the economics department and psych department at Brandeis University. He studies friendship, morality, property rights...he also is an aspiring evolutionary revolutionary ninja, like me. So yeah, Peter and I have great talks and I was so glad that we were able to hang out. As we walked back to Harvard, we ran into my friend Kyle Thomas (very small academic world - Kyle is student of Steven Pinker who I met at HBES 2009 and he also did his undergrad at UC Santa Cruz). which was really funny because I was planning on meeting up with him later. Peter and Kyle are working on a project together - and Kyle recognized him from across the street. We all met up with some of the human evolutionary bio people and got beers and dinner.

I had to leave dinner early because I had scheduled a casual meeting with Steven Pinker (I know, so cool). I didn't think he would meet with me because I emailed him the night before, kind of on a whim... just figured, why not? He responded to my email, signed off as Steve, and was happy to meet with me. He [quite adorably] barely talked at all and just wanted to keep asking questions about the Agta and Mamanwa. He seemed like a sweet man.

Later that night we all (minus Peter) went to see live bluegrass and drink beers at the Cantab. Fun.

Sleeeeeeeeeep. welllllllllllllllll.

Wed. Wake up too late. Andy helps me get out the door. Waiting on wrong side of street for the bus to south station. Get to s. station too late. Miss my bus. Call Claudia Valeggia (UPenn potential future PhD adviser). Immediately buy a ticket to NYC.

Get on a bus to NYC. Terrible Chinatown bus. Crazy bus ride. I'm in NY!!!! I'm in the middle of Chinatown in NY. Wow. Walk around Chinatown trying to find a ticket to Philly and no one speaks English and I almost pee my pants trying to find a clean bathroom. Find a bus leaving in 45 minutes. Get on the bus to Philly.

Arrive in Philly. Hang out with Claudia's grad student Kevin, who is rad.

Thurs.Meet with Claudia Valeggia in the morning. Claudia, in a nutshell, is awesome. Academically, she is well rounded, respected, and does research that I am interested in. Socially, well, everyone loves her - and I understand why. She is totally funny, fun, and extremely sweet. She has a way of making you feel comfortable and relaxed, which is great. When I knew I missed my bus, I called her to tell her and she said "first thing: relax. Lower your anxiety levels, everything is going to be okay." HAHAHAHA. I loved it. We speak Spanish together. It's fun.

She is really into appliance which is AWESOME. Most scientists feel like appliance is entering murky water. Claudia collaborates with people in public health/population studies and does some appliance. There is a program called LACTAR which promotes breastfeeding in Northeastern Philly.http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~valeggia/Programa%20Lactar.html

She is Argentinian and so is her husband, and they have three kids (boys!) together. They co-teach a class called sexuality and human nature. I sat in on the class and it was a lot of fun. What could be more fun than a human sexuality class co-taught by a HILARIOUS Argentinian couple (who speak English perfectly but with the cutest little Argentinian accents) who have been married for 27 years and have 3 kids together? Not much!

After that I spent the night at Claudia and Eduardo's house which was great. We had Indian food and watched futbol. Life, again, is good.

Fri. Wake up early. Catch 6:50 train to 30th St. Take bus to DC. Arrive in DC. Find out how to take the train to gw from a man in an interesting trenchcoat listening to a DISCMAN drinking mountain-dew-like liquid from a water bottle.Take train to foggy bottom (GW university). Hang out at GW. Meet with Robin Bernstein to talk about breastmilk, the Aeta, and going to the Philippines. Drink beer with hominid paleobiologists and Maxim (rad San Francisco native who went to UCSB and worked with HBE people there and is living in DC).

Tomorrow I will go to museums and hang out in DC and hopefully do cool things. On Sunday I have a very early flight out of DC, so I am hoping to just stay the night in the airport tomorrow night - because I don't trust myself to wake up early and catch public transportation to the airport in time.

In general, my time on the east coast has been good. In general, there are people living in big cities from all over the place - more so than in California. There are a looooooooooooooot of California transplants here. There are a lot more blacks (yes, blacks, some are from the DR and Haiti, and don't call themselves African Americans) on this coast, in general. Lots of people speaking Haitian creole, which is cool. Most of the Spanish spoken is island Spanish, coming from the DR or Puerto Rico.