The Great American Road Trip: Day 75

Saturday I finally gave in to that lingering feeling of guilt that follows me around and worked on my applications, sending out a few more requests for recommendations, drafting some of the essay questions, and even getting in touch with people to figure out who I was staying with/seeing when I arrived in NYC and Philly in the upcoming weeks - yay productivity! I always feel so much better when I spend time working on my to-do list, but unfortunately it seems to involve a lot of sitting down for long spans of time with my computer, which really cuts into my "I'm in a new place for just a few days and I really want to see lots of places and hang out with lots of people!" time. I didn't finish the blog entries that I intended to finish, nor did I reply to the many emails/messages that I've been wanting to reply to, but I promise, I will write you back! It just might be another few days...

I had talked to Mya about going to the science museum, but she wasn't really in the mood for it so she suggested window shopping along Newbury St. Around 1:30 I had reached a decent stopping point in my work, so I walked out to the bus and headed into town. We met at the Downtown Crossing station where the orange line (mine) and the red line (hers) meet, and took a nice walk through the huge Boston Public Garden towards the fancy shopping district. We wandered up and down a few streets in the area, stopping in to admire some of the clothes and shoes in various shops, chatting away the whole time. We stopped for an early dinner at Parish Cafe, a fantastic restaurant on Boylston known for it's extensive gourmet sandwich menu that features creations by different chefs from Boston as well as all over the country. Mya branched out from her usual and ordered The Vieira - flank steak marinated in soy and garlic with roasted red peppers, watercress, and basil aioli, so I got her usual order of Le Mistral - medium rare garlic and rosemary beef tenderloin with caramelized onions, chive mashed potatoes, arugula, truffle aioli, and crispy onions. Both of them were incredibly tasty, it was hard to not immediately devour the entire plate simply because you didn't want that delicious taste to ever end.

Mya and I met at Mount Holyoke our first year, on the crew team (doesn't it seem like most people graduate and move to Boston?). I had never rowed before but she was a coxswain in high school - as a novice rower it was such a gift to have a cox who could tell you what you ought to be doing just by looking at your oar in relation to all the others! Not only a great athlete, she's also crazy talented at Chemistry, the subject that was absolutely my downfall every time I happened to encounter it in college. She's worked in pharmaceutical labs since graduating, and is now researching cell metabolism at a small pharmaceutical company running the super fancy, rare, expensive machine whose abbreviation I forget, coming up with new ways to measure previously impossible to detect biomarkers in cancerous tumors so that they can see if a drug is working and doing what they think it is (that's the gist I got - I hope that's about right Mya?). I'm so glad I have smart friends!

We finally called it an evening and walked to the nearest subway, taking the green line back to Downtown Crossing. She headed home and I went back to Kathryn's to get my car and meet her at her friend Jen's house for their weekly game night. I believe they usually continue one of several RPGs, but since a few of their usual crowd were out of town, they went ahead and stuck with board and card games. I got there just in time to start "Once Upon A Time". It's a card game, where you're each given the ending to a story - "And it fit just perfectly." "And thus the prophecy came to pass." etc - and you each get seven cards with a mix of characters (the Queen, a Beggar), places (river, island), actions (poisoned, disguised), items (sword, bird), and emotions (greedy, lazy). You begin telling a made up story using your cards, it doesn't have to make sense but does have to be vaguely "fairy tale" plausible, and if you get to a point where you can't really continue with the cards you have left, you pass the story to the next person and draw a card from the deck. Other people might be holding "Interrupt" cards that allow them to steal the narrative from you before you're ready to let it go. The goal is to direct the story to fit the ending card you have - it's a little trickier than I expected, and resulted in some pretty crazy and funny stories!

We ended the evening with "Pandemic" a board game where you all work together to beat the game and save the world from being overrun with diseases - Kathryn and I might have been a little overly excited about it but everyone had a good time. Jen attended UMass-Amherst, so we also had a fun time reminiscing about the Pioneer Valley (and ragging on each other and the other three schools from the consortium we were all part of). But even laughing about student fees for stolen dishware and sledding mishaps on various hills, we did manage to save the world before going home to bed!

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