Lena Goes Undercover

I had a rather spicy day, assuming variety is still the spice of life. Studio 5 interview in the morning, a visit to the Super Colon in the afternoon, followed by a pub crawl—all in the name of work.

Here’s the super colon, if you’re curious:




Yes, it’s a big model of a colon. The gut kind, not the typographical kind. It’s to educate people about colon cancer. It wasn’t my idea.

Also for work, we’ve been preparing for a media event relating to secondhand smoke. We flew in a researcher(from your alma mater, Tim and Jess), who studies the effects of smoke on air quality, and we decided to make the most of his presence by doing a little bar hopping so he could do what he does.

Our ivy league professor, N, turned out to be quite young and fun and in a band, etc, and after a few drinks shared some excellent stories about his mildly misspent youth.
A few of us went out to dinner, then to a series of increasingly smoky bars, with an air monitor stashed in N’s bag, and me writing notes on our progress.

“I feel so subversive,” I said, taking notes surreptitiously.
“Really?” He said, a little dubiously.
“Well, I WANT to feel subversive. It makes my life seem more exciting.”

We went to increasingly smoky bars, with only one slight hitch, when one bouncer wanted to keep our prof’s bag. “Er, we’ll go and put that in the car...” we then went out and put the equipment in our purses (N noted that bouncers appear a lot less suspicious of we innocent-looking women than of him) and came back.

We stank of smoke by the end of the evening, and I’m a little worried that our prof will be a bit hungover for our event, but it was a good evening of data collection. N. was impressed with our conscientious scientific method (although he noted that it probably helped that I wasn’t drinking). And we ended up with satisfyingly shocking results.

Smoky bars=bad for you.