Lush.

I am battling a crippling obsession with this movie, which, appallingly, I had never seen before Friday. I know my Shakespeare well enough to quote most of the dialogue, and doing so while Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes star-cross themselves against the color-drenched backdrop of "Verona Beach" only serves to spike my doe-eyed and acid-tripped adoration for Baz Luhrmann. Give me my sin again.

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and, of course, I remain obsessed with this city:

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Boston's so iconic. I saw Christopher Nolan's "Inception" this weekend (intellectual cotton candy, by the way, and not the kind you can only eat once) and fully three of the pre-movie trailers centered around my city. I love it here, whether I'm buying sliced mangoes at the market on the corner, reading on the grass in Harvard Yard, discovering shops and sights downtown, venturing all over on the T, sampling famous and expensive restaurants, walking home at midnight and watching the street performers (various musicians, a puppet-girl, and an angel are regulars in Harvard Square), feeling important and influential in the Longwood Medical Area with the Children's Hospital ID badge that proclaims me a Student of Endocrinology, sipping my favorite soy berry shake at Boloco, enjoying the company of my lovely lab colleagues, sucking down new and exciting scientific knowledge as fast as is humanly possible in Maxwell-Dworkin for my lectures in stem cell physiology, actually participating (and loving it) at Monday night FHE (all it takes is a small-group setting), or watching early-evening TV in my Cambridge apartment before dinner ("Jeopardy" is on series recording).

I'm fourth from left, if you don't know me.

And this delightful Utah-holiday-weekend (Pioneer Day!) consisted of a "Canoe-B-Q" (exactly what it sounds like: canoeing, a picnic, apple pie, and pioneer games) in Concord; paella for dinner, "Inception," and chocolate chip cookie ice cream with fellow HSCI interns (quote of the night: "I feel...slightly abused."); and a surprisingly spectacular Institute fireside followed by free dinner at the beautiful new Stake Center.

Loving life. Loving summer. Loving leading the life of an East-Coast-urban adult scientist. Miss my family...but I'd rather they come here than me visit there. Part of me thinks she'd do just about anything to make it back here for med school.