4...3...2...1...
i am now 27 in new jersey time. so finish your taxes and come celebrate tonight!

drunk dialing & txting
breathalyzers should be attached to all cell phones and internet accessible computers.

it's now april 15 in new zealand and in all of the first time zone in the world to see the new day. april 15 is slowly creeping up on eastern standard (daylight?) time; my birthday is slowly creeping up on me, hour by hour, like a flashlight shining on a turning globe. like the sun shining on the rotating earth, except it's all dark. i want to take a shot for every new time zone that sees my birthday but i have to sit in on a couple law school classes and figured that chugging liquor would be bad form.

i like boston. i'll like boston even more when it's not pissing down rain. i can't believe this is the city of my future.

...
i have such a big mouth.

my new mantra
drive right, drive right, drive right -- that is what i am chanting to myself as i drive around. i am going through that readjustment period, where driving on the right side of the road from the left side of the car becomes natural again, where my body actually follows the sun here, instead of halfway around the world.

i took a red-eye flight from la to nj. i hadn't really gotten off of nz time in la, but now i'm in nj. i've had 30 minutes of sleep in the last god knows how many hours, and in this state i must make a very important decision: WHERE I AM GOING TO LAW SCHOOL. turns out i was rejected from my top two choices, and i basically have to choose from two. either way ...

I'M GOING TO BE IN BOSTON IN THE FALL!

unless i decide to do something crazy, put it all on hold or throw it all away to live in a yurt in wyoming. at least there wouldn't be traffic or rude people. i am so relaxed right now, listening to other people complain makes me stressed. but back in suburban driven hell, i can feel it accumulating, the interactions with people who are needlessly, senselessly rude. alas.

weddings
i have three weddings to attend in august. and somehow, tonight, i ended up at a gathering in the inland empire for a wedding i'm not even invited to. the bride and groom weren't there, but a lot of their friends from high school were and i got to tag along. it was nice, actually. but going to weddings, i'm obviously confronting the issue of marriage full-on, in the sense that i can't really put it away in the back of my head. and not that i'm really confronting it, but the whole idea of getting married is right there in front of you, walking down the aisle and pledging their everlasting love on an altar of some sort. my point is, tonight i kind of had to confront it mentally without the pleasure of getting to eat wedding cake in the very near future.

i'm okay. i know i'm okay. i love my independence and i love my life. i am so grateful for the experiences that i've had, that i've had the freedom (and resources) to have them. not just abroad, but all over the states too. in short, i've been very nomadic and transient in my lifestyle lately. it's actually, objectively speaking, very priveleged and, well, nice. they've helped shape me into the person i am today, someone who is self-aware, acknowledges a MULTITUDE of flaws, and tries her hardest to change them.

but i can feel my body yearning for children. mentally, it freaks me out and i can logically talk myself out of having kids, at the very least adopting when the time and situation are right. but i see pudgy, rolly, sweet-smelling babies, even obnoxious kids who run around and kick your seat on the airplane for 12 hours straight, all of it, they make my body physically yearn. i try to explain it away as biological, but maybe it's more mental than i'm willing to give it credit.

truth be told, i'm PETRIFIED of making myself vulnerable to another. and maybe i cling to my independence, my free-spiritedness, my adventurous lifestyle as a justification for not having to open myself up. not really such a bad thing, but what if i miss THE opportunity? surely i have more faith than that...

i have decided that moving to boston will be the best thing for me. three years, law school is. even if i study abroad for a semester, i am essentially in ONE PLACE for THREE YEARS. not since college have i done that. it'll be more stability, more continuity. and also, i'll have a community of close friends and acquaintances in boston, something i know i need. i lean heavily on my friends and it'll be so nice to be able to pop over to a friend's house and say, hey, i'm feeling down, let's have dinner. and finally, i'll be in new england. traveling this last month has reminded me how important nature is to me -- wide open green and blue spaces. it's like as soon as i alight my eyes upon such a glorious sight, everything within me realigns to right. like, all good and copasetic, man. hopefully the universities will agree with me ...

so why am i rambling here. yes this is a journal but as of late, i haven't been ranting here too much. well, it's jet lag. horrible obnoxious jet lag. i've ALWAYS had more trouble traveling east, because i'm kind of a late bird to start with, and when i travel east, i often find myself staying up until sunrise, sleeping until 4pm. i've had the screwiest sleep schedule since i've gotten to l.a., the details of which i won't bore you with here. in short, my internal clock is FUCKED.

i leave you with a new thing i learned today. on my cellular plan, i can txt anyone in the world for 15 cents. on the plan i had in new zealand, a txt anywhere in the world costs NZ20 cents.

jet lag discoveries
i should be sleeping. i've only slept four hours in the last 48 or something obscene like that. but my body is confused and my head is being nicely occupied by this nice, new computer of my friend's, which he's left in the room i'm staying in for a few days before i head back to nj. and for lack of better things to do, i googled myself. about a year or so ago, all the results used to fill two pages. now ... there are well over 10, and i think most of them are due to some dutch guy (my last name happens to be dutch!) and porn. see for yourself. weird.

back in the u.s. of a.
i've had like twenty minutes of sleep and lived april 7th twice, but here i am, alive, showered and with my teeth brushed in the good ole city of angels. SURROUNDED BY MOUNTAINS OF CRAP I'M NEVER GOING TO GET HOME. but never mind that now.

i have mixed feelings about being back, but it's sort of pointless thinking about it because there's nothing i can do ... except go back to work and save up more money so i can jet my ass of somewhere else when i feel like it, at the first possible moment. so now i think about all the stuff i have to do. but the lesson i have learned this trip is when you make plans, STICK WITH THEM. i have tried on four separate occasions to change flights, both internationally and domestically, and i just haven't been able to. so don't even think about it, enjoy the time you have, and spend your money wisely. i've got five days on this left coast before DUM DUM DA DUM the real world returns. i haven't the faintest clue what i'm going to do, really, as i'm only needed at most two days back at the taekwondo gig.

in summary, i've had a great trip. i'm reminded again why i love new zealand so much. the people are so durn friendly, and the scenery is so durn majestic. it takes like four hours to drive from one of the sunniest places in the country, of endless beaches, to a rainforest and glacier. it's like taking all fifty of the united states and squishing them into a totally manageable size. and, as a bonus, you lose a lot of the hicks in the middle of the country. but don't get me wrong. there's all that funny business in new zealand, too. i've heard about westies ... they like to play the game that the "whole family can play", if you know what i mean. (hey ... this is straight out of the mouths of new zealanders, ok?!)

eventually, i will have some pictures up at my other site.

cheers and all my love.

delaying marriage even longer
Study Casts Doubt on Limits to Fertility

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A01

For more than half a century textbooks have taught that female mammals -- be they mice, cows or women -- are born with all the eggs they will ever have.

The result is one of the great sexual disparities: Males, who make fresh sperm daily, can sire children at virtually any age, whereas females gradually deplete their limited supply of eggs to the ticking of the biological clock.

Now Harvard researchers have come to the radical conclusion that female mice produce a constant stream of new egg cells as adults -- challenging a central dogma of reproductive biology and raising the heretical possibility that women, too, clandestinely produce fresh eggs for at least the first half of life.

The findings suggest the possibility of extending fertility much longer than was thought possible and even restoring fertility in women whose ovaries have shut down.

"I'd regard this as one of the most significant discoveries in the reproductive field in the past several decades," said Duke University developmental biologist Haifan Lin, who studies egg development. "It provides a new potential opportunity for prolonging the reproductive span of females."

After all, Lin and others said, if women are busily making eggs for their first 40 or 50 years -- rather than simply spending down a nonrenewable endowment -- then it may be possible to tweak that egg-production machinery in ways that can keep it going a decade or two longer.

It may even be possible to transplant into older or chemotherapy-damaged ovaries some egg-producing cells that have been frozen since youth, restoring a woman's lost fertility.

Those options could have profound social impact by granting women more freedom with regard to the timing of careers and parenthood. Even if women chose not to have children later in life, an extended period of fertility could have significant health implications -- perhaps delaying the onset of heart disease, osteoporosis and other ailments that become more prevalent after menopause but also possibly increasing the risk of other diseases, such as breast cancer, that have been linked to years of exposure to the hormones the ovaries churn out.

Experts warned that the study, led by Harvard developmental biologist Jonathan Tilly and published in today's issue of the journal Nature, will have to be confirmed by others.

"At this point I'm agnostic," said John Eppig, a reproductive biologist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. "My mind is racing."

But Tilly said his group already has completed an added study that supports the idea that women, too, are still making eggs as young adults.

If doctors can learn how to tap that egg-making capacity to delay menopause, said Marian Damewood, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, "that could be the most significant advance in reproductive medicine since the advent of in vitro fertilization more than 25 years ago."

Scientists in the early part of the 20th century went back and forth on the question of whether mammals could make fresh eggs after birth, but a 1951 journal article seemed to settle the issue in the negative, and few revisited the question after that. By examining ovaries retrieved from experimental animals -- or from cadavers and surgical patients of various ages -- scientists documented a declining number of egg cells with age.

In humans that decline starts just five months into fetal life, when the number of eggs -- each nestled in a hormone-secreting niche called a follicle -- peaks at about 7 million. The vast majority are gone by birth, and the last typically disappears in a woman's 40s or 50s, prompting menopause.

Tilly's work shows that the daily rate of egg loss is actually much higher than scientists knew -- at least in mice -- but the loss is largely masked by simultaneous production of new eggs.

"As much as we still ourselves are in disbelief that the dogma is wrong, it's very real," said Tilly, director of the Vincent Center for Reproductive Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "The dogma is wrong."

The new view that eggs are being made every day even as a somewhat larger number of them shrivel and die could resolve some seeming contradictions.

For one thing, Tilly said, "it makes no sense to have a fixed population of eggs that have to sit around for decades until they are used," accumulating mutations and other problems along the way. In less complex animals, including insects, females as well as males make sex cells into adulthood. It is gratifying, Tilly said, to see mice following that sensible pattern.

In one set of tests, Tilly's group showed that on a single day as many as 1,200 egg-encasing follicles were dying in the ovaries of young adult mice -- far too many for the initial supply to last a reproductive lifetime. The group also identified a population of what appear to be egg stem cells -- the self-replenishing kind of cell that makes egg cells -- in one region of the ovary. Each ovary seems to have about 63 such cells -- few enough to have been missed by early ovary gazers.

Another experiment showed that meiosis, a process unique to the production of sperm and eggs, was occurring in the ovaries of adult mice. The team also used molecular markers to show that some stem cells in adult mouse ovaries seemed to be growing into new eggs.

For one strain of mouse, the team calculated that about 77 new eggs are produced every day -- not a huge number, but infinitely bigger than zero.

"Seventy seven eggs a day! That's just unbelievable," said Hans Scholer, a University of Pennsylvania mouse stem cell expert. "That's really a major finding."

To get a sense of whether women may also be making eggs, Tilly looked at the incidence of premature menopause in cancer patients treated with various cancer drugs. In results not published in the Nature paper, he found that 106 of 107 women treated with busulphan, which specifically knocks out cells making eggs or sperm, went into premature menopause, compared with only 69 of 140 treated with different drugs. That difference suggests that egg production was indeed going on in the women's ovaries, Tilly said.

The new thinking has quickly raised new questions, including why egg stem cells die or shut down in middle age and whether drugs or other stimuli might keep them going. Scientists already know some of the hormones that insects use to maintain egg production in adulthood, and similar hormones have been identified in mice and humans. Scientists said they were now eager to test the effects of those hormones on mammals.

Extended fertility would have its ups and downs, said Judith Houck, a historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Historically, in the 20th century, menopause has been seen as the moment when women finally get to live for themselves . . . a time when women could look more carefully at intellectual interests, take up painting, go back to school," Houck said. Delaying of menopause could mean delaying that transition, she warned.

"On the other hand," Houck said, "more and more women are choosing to have careers, and the most convenient way to do that is to leave childbearing until at least their 30s. So it may help them replicate the male model of success."

dream come true

I HIKED ON A REAL GLACIER YESTERDAY!!! AND I EVEN GOT TO "SWIM" (i.e. JUMP IN AND GET THE ROCK OUT AS QUICKLY AS MY NEARLY FROZEN BODY WOULD LET ME) IN A "POOL" (i.e. A GIANT CUP OF GLACIAL ICE WATER).

i have had this dream the last several months of walking on a glacier and i did it. i feel somewhat fulfilled. as for the swimming, when my guide asked us if we wanted a swim, and no one responded, he then started singling us out. so as i approached this pool -- essentially water filling a crevasse in this glacier -- he asked me, how 'bout a swim? i assessed the situation and said, only if you go. because no one else was game, he said bloody hell i'm going. and i had to live up to my word (americans are not well respected in international circles and i feel it's important to act as a sort of good-will ambassador in my travels :) ) and i went in too. BLOODY HELL IT WAS COLD! let me describe this to you.

See, franz josef glacier is a "mild" glacier as it reaches down to pretty temperate zones. i doubt the elevation was much above 1000 feet, so we're not talking about leaving the troposphere. well, with the sun baking this thing, the top of it melts and runs off, creating these braided rivers downstream. but on the glacier, the water can accumulate in crevasses, as water will go where it wants to go and gather where it wants to gather. so here we have melted glacier accumulating in a giant cup made of ice, and into this we jumped.

brr.

back to the north island tomorrow. i do and i don't want to come home. can i put myself into debt just to avoid living with my parents?! sigh.

detour
rafting yesterday was awesome! i'm quite glad i got to do it, and the people were friendly, the guide was competent and nice, and not sleazy at all, as river guides are known to be. i even jumped off a 30-foot ledge! go me! of course, i would have felt horrible if i didn't; this 40-something year old lady, who'd never gone rafting much less done heaps of adrenaline type activities, went first and jumped nearly without hesitation. but ooh those nasty sandflies!

today i've taken a detour to franz josef glacier. as of late i've had a dream to stand on a glacier. i didn't think i'd get it in this time, but then with global warming, who knows if the glaciers would be here the next time I'm here. so when i showed up in greymouth and found out it was only two hours more to franz josef, off i went. and here i am. tomorrow morning is the big date. i'm so excited!

so ... let's just say, there are certain aspects of my vacations that truly define my vacations. WHY AM I SO PREDICTABLE? WHEN WILL I EVER STOP BEING A COMPLETE IDIOT? crikey.

thus with my heart mildly scathed, i am quite looking forward to coming home in 9 days.