I have officially begun calling myself a Boston gal. Not because I was born and raised here, but because I have spent the last four years of my life here. There is also a slight possibility that I hate Connecticut and only spent my first four years of life in Queens, NY, therefore making me feel like an imposter if I call myself a New Yorker. To me, Boston is a smaller much more managable version of New York and I have grown to love it. The power of a city exhilirates me… the ability to have almost anything delivered and picked up at anytime, being able to just quickly run outside your apartment for a pack of butts, and always having your friends very close by are all things that I have grown accustomed to… possibly a little too much.

I have spent most of my summer indoors, isolating myself for no particular reason, but spending most days inside. The convenience of the city had gotten the best of me and I have found myself beginning to resent it… I don’t get the charge that I used to get from Boston and since I am not a drinker and rarely, if ever, go to bars… I dont have a lot to say about being over 21 in Boston. I suppose it doesn’t really matter what age I am… I find myself in a jaded state of mind over Boston.

My most enjoyable moments of the summer were actually spent outside tanning and swimming in small-town rural New Hampshire… not in a fast-paced city. I didn’t want to go back to Boston, but was convinced to do so for the Fourth of July. I dragged my feet on the issue ever moment, although I purchased a grill and everything needed for a BBQ, I didn’t want to spend my Fourth in a city I had grown to hate. I hate to use the phrase, but my day sparkled. I loved being on the roof of my apartment building over-looking all of Beacon Hill… and when the fireworks with the Boston Pops started and I had a front-row seat and I remembered why I fell in love with the city in the first place.

To me, in the world of networking sites, Facebook is the be all and end all. Facebook provides its users with necessary facts about friends, birthday reminders and even precise stalking ability. Facebook never ceased to make me feel warm and bubbly inside; even those times when sitting alone on my couch… I always had a friend in Facebook. That is until I logged into Facebook and could not recognize the face of my reliable and old cyber friend. Facebook has been changed… and not for the better.

After the intial shock subsided, I took a deep breath and promised myself to make the best out of a very sad situation. Unfortunately, my anxiety mounted as I fruitlessly searched for friend’s pictures and statuses. I was simply unable to locate anything. I felt out-of-control. Tears began to well in my eyes… I couldn’t even find the “about me” section in my own profile! How was I to know what I liked and I didn’t? How would I know what movies I would like to watch? What music I preferred listening to? My identity was gone with one swift key-stoke from a very bad and very mean website graphic designer. I resigned that the only way to remedy this situation was to find this man… or woman… and kill them in the name of the original Facebook.

After realizing that this would probably not be the best course of action, I sat back down and slowly opened my laptop, secretly wishing that I would find the old Facebook smiling back at me. Sadly, I did not, but I did spend some time begrudgingly looking around the new website. After several hours of painful research, I can now say that I have figured out the new Facebook… but I’m still not happy about it. Although, you will never find me joining groups like, “One Million People Sign Up To Bring Back The Old Facebook!!!”, I still would very much like to see the old Facebook to come back.

As a child, I have fond memories of fighting my sister for the opportunity to play one of the many games my parents had lovingly purchased for the both of us. My sister, Aviva, would often take the various games -Connect Four, Monopoly, Candyland- and hide them in her room, a place where I never dared to venture as it would certainly result in my demise. One of these games, Operation, seemed to have a certain power over Aviva, because it was the one game that remained in the family room. At first, I was elated that Aviva had decided to keep that particular game out of the dark tresses of her room, but soon afterward, I began to understand why…

Everyday after school, I would walk the brief ten minutes home looking forward to a bowl of fresh fruit and an afternoon filled with Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Duck Tails. This was our routine everyday after school until that dreaded game came into our lives. Now, I would walk the too brief ten minutes home and before opening the door I would hear that horrible buzzing and I would know Aviva had been practicing since she got home from school. I would be forced to sit in front of that idiotic looking patient and watch as she seamlessly put the funny bone into place, followed by the “butterflies” and the “adam’s apple”. The “wish bone”, the most difficult of parts to replace on the already scattered patient, was the bane of my existence. I was promised that if I was able to replace our patient’s “wish bone”, I would then have permission to never look at that terrifying game again, but, alas, my hand proved to be less steady than Aviva’s hand. This tradition went on mercilessly for almost six months until the day I finally put the “wish bone” into place. I jumped up with sheer joy and went to the T.V., praying that this was indeed the end of this torture, but as I walked away I knocked into the game and knocked out the funny bone. To this day, that funny bone still haunts my dreams as it led to six more months of medical school taught by my sister.

Now, Aviva and I don’t play too many games together anymore, we’d much rather sit on the couch with Chinese take-out and watch Law & Order, but when Aviva left to start her surgical residency in Atlanta, I ventured up to the attic and found our old Operation game and forced her to play one last time before starting her real surgical career. It took me exactly five minutes to beat her… and it was the best send-off I could give her.