Letter from Boston A Fresh Start By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
きれいさっぱりしてスタート 大学院で研究に追われる毎日を過ごす雅子さんは、肩こりに悩まされたり、研究室の夢を見るなど、ストレスがたまっていたようです。このストレスを一掃して新たな年を迎えるため、今回の冬休みには、いつもより長く休みをとり、家族や友人とのんびり過ごしたり、韓国式エステを体験して存分にリラックスしました。

I hope all of you have had a nice winter holiday. I, myself, had been looking forward to this winter holiday for a long, long time. I had been having a few too many dreams of life in my lab, and spending a few too many dollars on massage and other physical therapy treatments to alleviate the tension in my shoulders.

In the past, I' ve tended not to spend too much time vacationing, since I find sightseeing tiring and I can't help feeling that the time would be better spent at school. However, I decided to take a bit more time off this winter so I could really take a rest.

I have this habit of thinking that I must show up to school all the time in order to be a good student. Indeed, this was considered a good trait in elementary school and high school, and I never missed a day. However, in my fifth year of graduate school, I have finally realized that showing up at school all the time does not necessarily help one's research.

In fact, there are a few excellent researchers in my lab who take a few months of vacation time every year and these breaks seem to be doing them a lot of good. Of course, there are also a few researchers who stay up for days on end to do their work, and they are also very good.

The bottom line seems to be that the quality of research doesn't seem to be correlated with vacation time. So, I decided to take a little over two weeks off this winter. Of this vacation time, I spent five days visiting my parents in New Jersey and hanging out with friends around New York.

Unlike many of my classmates in high school and college, I don't think New York is the greatest place on earth. Or, rather, even though I admit this might actually be true, it doesn't make me want to go there. The loud noises and crowds make me tired. I always find that I need an additional vacation to recuperate after taking a vacation in New York.

For this reason, I carefully planned a very stress-free vacation this time around. I managed this by eliminating everything that I don't like about the area — tourist-trap museums and monuments for clueless out-of-towners, trendy restaurants and bars for yuppie natives, noise and crowds and traffic all around — and concentrating on what means the most to me: friends and family.

A couple of weeks before the holidays, I started to make plans to visit friends who still live in the area. I had not contacted some of them in five or 10 years, and it made me very happy to think that I'd be seeing them again. I was able to see my friends in between eating toshikoshi soba and watching Kohaku Utagassen on cable TV. It was the kind of vacation that I usually prefer to visiting ruins, temples or mountains.

Another thing that I splurged on for my relaxation trip was a visit to a Korean spa. New York is one of the big centers of Korean immigration in the States (unlike Boston, which has a huge Korean student population, but no real community) and there are plenty of services geared specifically toward the Korean population.

I was interested in visiting this spa because it has the full-body skin-scrubbing service that Korea is so famous for. The visit cost $100 (¥11,400) for a body scrub, shiatsu massage, cucumber facial, shampoo and sauna treatment. This is certainly not cheap, but it's not as expensive as flying to Korea.

The body scrub was so intense that I could see little, gray piles of dead skin and dirt collecting around the table that I was lying on. This usually happens, even if the customer bathes every day.

The massage was equally intense, with the staff member climbing up onto the table and using her feet to give a more powerful massage. I couldn't imagine it being a very pleasant job, but she was extremely efficient and professional.

It was great to forget about intellect and wit, and even interpersonal relationships, for a while and tend only to my body. As a matter of fact, I didn't even have to do that, since the woman at the spa did it for me. All I had to do was lie there and enjoy the ride. I came out as clean and pink as a baby. There must be something to the saying "cleanliness is next to godliness," since I felt clean and pink inside as well. It felt as if I'd gotten rid of a year's worth of grime and tension. It's a good way to start the New Year.

Shukan ST: Jan. 12, 2001

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