the merriest Christmas.

I had lofty aspirations of spending four hours every morning studying for the MCAT during my Christmas break. However, the postal system failed me and, 14 days after shipping, my study materials still haven’t arrived. So like any great best friend should, Bee gave me a creative assignment to keep me occupied: create a holiday film in her honor to be unveiled on Christmas eve.

I hope you have as much fun watching it as we had making it.

A special thanks to the whole Turner clan for contributing their top notch acting abilities.
[The soundtrack is “Christmas in the Room” by Sufjan Stevens.]
(For an explanation of the Megabus cameo at the end see this.)

Merry Christmas, one and all.

Don’t Drink Out of The Paint Cup.

On the morning of December 13th, there was a biostatistics final.

On the evening of December 13th, there was a raging painting party in a basement on Main street.

Sounds about right.

My international health cohort organized a party at this wonderful place called the Paint and Pour, an instructional art studio that encourages you to bring wine and your friends. So we did just that. It turned out to be an excellent way to blow of some steam and get some quality time in before powering through the rest of our finals and heading home for break.

I think the beauty of the whole thing is that it takes people who perceive themselves to be void of artistic skill and makes them all creative and stuff. Three cheers for broadening our horizons.

Oh, and, in case you were wondering, this one was mine. It’s leaning against my wall because I may have cracked a little plaster trying to hammer a push pin into the wall to hang it up. Oops.

Happy Sunday.

Throwback to Thanksgiving.

This year I have been tasked with creating photo books for my grandmothers using whatever tidbits of photographic evidence of the exploits of the Turner family I please. There’s nothing like reviewing all of your mother’s iPhone photos from the last year to make your heart feel full.

I’m writing to you from my favorite coffee shop in my favorite city in the world, fresh off my first set of grad school finals. And before I begin having new ludicrous adventures in this lovely little town, my hard drive is itching to get the ones from my last visit to our fine city off its chest.

Got my Thanksgiving break off to an excellent start by saving some lives. Let the record show that I can be counted on to offer some blood when pie is on the line.
And I savored that little thing while I pretended I hadn’t just watched a documentary that revealed the gargantuan bricks of shortening that go into making Sara Lee pies. It’s difficult to have your pie, know everything about it, and eat it, too.

Always count on the Turners to make a U-turn for the Krispy Kreme hot light.

I love them so much sometimes I think my heart is going to explode.

Unquestionably, this is not the face of someone who’s contributing significantly to the transport of a sizeable pine tree.
This year we actually retrieved our holiday shrubbery over Thanksgiving weekend. We always have lofty aspirations and say this is how it will happen. However, we almost always fail and find ourselves selecting a Charlie Brown-esque oversized twig with needles from the leftovers at Fruitbasket Flowerland on December 20th. One would assume this is an improvement. Unfortunately, I think we all found the possibility of infinite choice to be overwhelming. Thankfully, we managed to pull it together and this guy is now cheerfully twinkling in our living room.

Amy and I used the last of our season tickets and ventured back to Ann Arbor for the OSU game. Totally awesome experience. School spirit is infectious. Surprisingly, this was not covered in my course on infectious disease epidemiology.

This year I’m most grateful to be living closer to home. Which allows for frequent visiting and impromptu trips to the Big House. And, four days and a short car ride later, more visiting and more impromptu trips for warm donuts.

And once I got back to Ann Arbor, I hit the ground running head-first into finals week. I tried to keep things interesting by conducting a search for the best café miel in town as I traversed the coffee shop circuit trying out new study spots. Pictured above is Mighty Good Coffee’s submission to the competition. This was the only edible entry; the rest were blank stares. Apparently this divine nectar isn’t as wildly popular as I imagined it to be. It’s a shame. Truly.

Cheers to delicious coffee, donuts fresh from the fryer, and family that makes your heart feel whole.

Happy Saturday.

Fires by [David Ramirez]

Last week I purchased a ukulele. I've consequently started spending my evenings strumming and humming and nursing some very sore finger pads. And appreciating musicians who are exceptional at their craft. Like this fellow. Just listen to those lyrics. Ugh, be still, my heart.

Happy Monday.

Don’t be sorry. This life is beautiful, too.

When I came home from my semester in Denmark, I received a lot of apologies. Not as the long-anticipated resolution to a series of feuds that coincidentally happened immediately prior to my departure with everyone I cared about. But because people felt badly that they had to welcome me home from four months of gallivanting through Europe to a city as “boring” as Grand Rapids. This seemed ludicrous to me since I had spent the last two weeks before my return dreaming of sunning myself on the shores of Lake Michigan, dining out for less than eight dollars, and chocolate chips (No, they don’t have chocolate chips in Europe. Anyone considering moving across the pond should take this very seriously. And consider setting up a black market chocolate chip pipeline.).

I think there’s something very obviously damaging about falling into a thought pattern where apologizing for your home seems logical. How tragic that we might feel ashamed of where we live because we don’t think it’s as cool or foreign or cultured as somewhere else. Continuity and history and familiarity can limiting, sure. But they can also be such a privilege.

People travel for gobs of reasons, and I’m positive escapism easily makes the top five. I’m grateful I can say I’ve never gotten on a plane for the sake of putting distance between myself and some person, place, or thing I desperately wanted to forget. But I recognize that “I just had to leave everything behind” has a meaningful place in the travel vernacular.

Every trip I’ve taken has been superficially motivated by something different.
“I want to be deeply affected by building a church in Mexico.”
“I want to learn about the Polish health care system.”
“I think I will only ever live half a life if I don’t seize the opportunity to eat gelato four times in one day.”

But at the end of the day, I decided to travel because it just felt natural. I can’t imagine a life for myself that doesn’t involve getting on a plane within the next calendar year. But I also can’t imagine never being able to come home to Grand Rapids. So no need to apologize: it’s just as great to be in Michigan as it is to be carting a 50-pound suitcase named Andy up a hill in a Barcelona suburb.

Nonetheless, I feel incredibly blessed having been endowed with a soul that’s equal parts voracious-appetite-for-all-that-is-new and still crazy about sucking the marrow out of the time at hand.

On Monday, my “marrow sucking” looked like needing to stop and capture the beautiful everyday-ness of my life right when I needed to hop on my bike and head to class. But sometimes piles of blankets, a well-formed curl, and your kitchen need to be documented.

Show your home some love today.

Happy Wednesday.

Identity crisis averted. Also, Artprize.

I have returned from my unannounced hiatus. My extended departure from what I know is a riveting weekly read is attributable to two factors.

• First, it was midterm season in Treetown. This has now ended and blogging can go back to being a relaxing form of creative expression as opposed to a stress-inducing procrastination tool. Creativity flows much more freely with a cup of hot coffee in one hand and the burden of proving myself as a student removed from my shoulders.
• Second, I’ve been struggling for a while with a perceived contradiction between the things I create and the way they’re presented (i.e. the blog title and my published “purpose” for writing). As I’ve explored blogging and the process of creating comprehensive artistic pieces, my intentions for doing so have evolved. So I spent the last week doing what I hypothesize would be called “rebranding” were this something more significant than a creative outlet for a student whose life is ruled by numbers and statistics.

And now I return with a new name and the blogging equivalent of a cut and dye job. From here on out I’ll be posting under “the wanderlove chronicles”, a title I feel better captures what this blog has become: a sort of captain’s log in which I narrate my adventures, both near and far, and accompany them with photographic evidence. I’m excited about this. I hope you are, too.

Now, because my life over the last few weeks has been dominated by binomial distributions and attack rates and directed acyclic graphs, my customarily overflowing fount of adventure has been running pretty dry. However, right before I jumped into the belly of the beast, I made a quick trip home to enjoy something that has become a highlight of my West Michigan fall over the last five years.

ARTPRIZE.

Artprize is a radically designed art competition that takes over the city of Grand Rapids from mid-September to early October. Entry is open to anyone over the age of 18 and venues can be found within a three-square-mile swath of downtown designated the “Artprize district”. Artists come from all over the world. People come from all over the world to see their art. Monetary prizes are awarded on a juried-basis and on the basis of a popular vote. It makes art accessible to the public. It offers the city of Grand Rapids an opportunity to strut it’s stuff. And it’s been an integral part of the survival of Grand Rapids in the height of the 2008 recession and the post-recession period. These are things I’m all about. Ergo, I am all about Artprize.

This year I had the privilege of spending a leisurely Saturday taking in the art, breathing in the crisp Michigan-fall air, and sipping a café miel with a dear friend. When I wasn’t looking at art, I was sneaking in some homework time at any of my favorite downtown coffee shops. Even if you’re not looking at the exhibits themselves, it’s a great time to be downtown. Because you get to watch other people look at art. Which is a thing of beauty unto itself.

Cheers to hometown pride, trips home that refresh the soul, and the best of company.

Happy Tuesday.

If you’re not going to sleep enough, at least wear protective headwear.

My inability to commit to anything until my last two years of undergrad for fear of spending too much time away from my chemistry book has paid off in exactly one way: I still have four years of eligibility to play college ultimate frisbee.

Thanks to my formerly reclusive self, I get to spend my Monday and Wednesday nights kicking it with Flywheel, the Michigan ultimate team. While the “kicking it” is actually happening, I think this is 100% awesome. However, on Thursday mornings when my alarm goes off at 7:00am after a practice that ended at 11:30pm the night before, I realize Wednesday-night-ultimate Kati is a fool.

Thanks to gallons of coffee and short naps, I have been able to manage this cycle relatively well. This morning that stopped being true.

My alarm jolted me out of deep sleep and into panic-stricken crisis mode. After realizing the only crisis was my impending two-hour biostatistics class, I was able to begin shuffling about getting ready for the day. I thought I was in good shape when I remembered to make some changes to my homework and print another copy without the aid of a helpful post-it. But then I decided to brush my teeth.

Everything was going swimmingly. It was plaque removal like you read about. Then I happened to catch my reflection in the mirror. There was something weird about my hair. So I stopped brushing my teeth to fix it. But instead of gently placing my brushing implement on the sink, I just let go of it mid-brushstroke as if it would remain suspended in front of my mouth without my assistance. Obviously I was wrong about this and instead my toothbrush plummeted towards my shirt and actually managed to adhere itself by the bristles. So now my reflection is looking back with unkempt hair and a toothbrush swinging from its front.

I managed to remove most of the evidence of my screeching mental halt and the rest of the morning proceeded rather uneventfully. Until I was preparing to leave for school on my bicycle. Thankfully my routine involves donning my helmet before I maneuver my bike out the door, down the stairs, and onto the sidewalk, because I somehow managed to bang my head on the doorframe and nearly trip over my bike, my own feet, and the old red chair on the porch. Thankfully the residents of my street consider 7:50am to be an ungodly hour for people watching. Otherwise they would all be wondering where that girl who just moved in across the street was planning on drunkenly riding her bicycle to at such an early hour.

Thankfully there is no photographic evidence of my remarkably shambly morning. Instead, enjoy these uproarious photos from this spring’s From (this is frisbee prom, not a glorification of the word “from”, though I understand how you may get that impression).

Cheers to teammates and adapting to catching fewer Zs.

Happy Thursday.

Happy monthaversary.

As of, Thursday, I have lived in Ann Arbor for one month. So last night I celebrated with a photo walk around my neighborhood. At 7:00pm.

When inspiration and the urge to move hit, I don’t ask questions. I just start strollin’.

And it turns out strollin’ was a good idea. Because now I have all these dusky pictures of my new home.

The past month has been an exercise in learning how not to feel trapped without a vehicle at my disposal. I think I’m hanging out in the B-/C+ range. A couple weekends ago, I was overcome by an intense need for yarn and size 9 knitting needles. So I looked up the nearest Michael’s on Google maps. Five miles. No problem.

At least three of those miles were ridden on my bicycle alongside this.

[source]

Oh, and it started raining on the ride home.

It’s a different life on the seat of a bicycle. But it’s a beautiful one, full of weird stories and overly-defined quads. When you love living life on the go as much as I do, it’s hard to all of a sudden find yourself confined to the space within a five-mile radius of your house. But I don’t think there’s a five-mile radius filled with more awesome stuff than mine. I’m a lucky duck.

Cheers to using the legs the Lord gave me and learning to love the short game.

Happy Saturday.