yo
DUDE I think I got paid for January, even though I didn't have to TA during January. AWESOOOOOMMMMMEEEE. Now I can buy a rug and a coffee table.
This week my mom came for like two days. I had a rather productive group meeting on Tuesday, but then she came and I couldn't really do any work, so that sort of killed the roll. It was nice to show her where I lived, but having my mom around is always sort of like having a 5-year-old that I have to babysit, except that the 5-year-old just happens to know how to make you dinner. Sometimes I think that her surgery made her dumber, but then I remember that she has always been this ditzy as long as I can remember. It's amazing to me that there was a period of time in which I actually lived at home and had to deal with my parents every day, because I can't even imagine not having the freedom that I have now to do whatever I want. On the other hand, I had a moment the other day when I passed by Simmons Hall on the SafeRide, and I had a flashback of going there for the first time during CPW, and I remembered how simple everything was back then, and how much fun high school was, and I longed to go back. So, I guess it has it's pros and cons. Really, I would love to go back to freshman year MIT, everything being new, nothing being old and tiring. I took a deep breath and tried to feel everything as if it were for the first time, and for a second I felt it, but I wish it would last always.
Anyway, I met my mom in South Station on Wednesday evening for a dinner in Chinatown to celebrate an early Chinese New Year. We went to this restaurant called Ocean Health, which had this special that if you ordered three dishes for over ten dollars each, you could get a lobster dish for ten dollars. The place was small, but the food was really really good. We had crispy tofu, steamed flounder, this crispy chicken stuff, and the lobster. The only unfortunate thing was that I hadn't eaten lunch that day, and my stomach decided to act up again, and this ended up in a severe stomachache last witnessed during Steph Wang's birthday party at Cactus Club. I don't know why this happens to me so often, but it's horrible, and it made me feel bad that I couldn't enjoy the dinner as much as I would have liked. I was somewhat full, so we ate what we could and packed the rest, and then I sort of crouch walked to the T and got home.
At night they were playing America's Ballroom Challenge on PBS, so Andriy came over, and the three of us watched it on the couch. I told my mom about us, which I always find slightly embarrassing, but I guess it has to come out sometime, so I was like fine whatever. The show was kind of weird, it's a broadcast of the Ohio Star Ball finalists, and then a showdance from each. This week was American smooth, but half of the couples did something totally not smooth related for their showdance, like this one couple who did a really bad chacha. WTF. I like couples that do something innovative, but still in the style, so I commend the couple that tried to do a hiphop smooth partly to "Gangsta's Paradise."
The next day we went to the Harvard Natural History Museum. I had a feeling that I had been there before back in the 1.016 days with Sueann and Amos, and I remember it was kind of boring. We got a little lost getting there from Harvard, and my mom had to go ask someone after I already got the directions from Andriy, which I hate because I hate asking people stuff because I hate looking like a tourist. My mom really wanted to go see the glass flowers, but the problem with them is that they are done so well and so realistically that they look too much like real flowers, and I just felt like I was in a flower exhibit, and it sort of lost that cool glass effect. It was still crazy the detail that was in them and the kind of patience those guys must've had to make them for however many years and years. Something else that was interesting was that the stamens really looked like penises, and they are technically, but I started thinking that humans are not so different even from plants, and then I realized whenever we pick up a flower and admire its beauty and smell it, we are really going, "Mmm... plant vagina..." and when we eat fruits we are like, "Mmm... plant ovary..." Disturbing.
We also spent a long time looking at the different stuffed animals. I found out what that crazy beautiful duck that I saw in Vienna was: the Mandarin Duck. I also learned some stuff about bird feathers, like that the iridescent colors come from tiny microscopic air pocket that scatter the light. I love animals, at least admiring them, though I don't particularly like handling them. And I renewed my love for the ocelot. But the best part was this photography exhibit by this guy Henry Horenstein. They were a lot of pictures of animals, but not just documentary-like, but the animals were more like models, and the shots were very artistic, nice composition, different sort of styles, close-ups, which made the animals look very human, like their own characters with personality. It's hard to describe, so you'd just have to see them at http://www.horenstein.com. Anyway, I went home and decided to save his pictures from offline and use them as a changing desktop. The thing that I like most is that the pictures are black and white, so it looks really nice with the rest of the desktop set to black and the middle pictures moving like a slideshow. Plus I threw in some pictures of ocelots and mandarin ducks, nice photographs of course. I really like these two ocelot pictures where I actually think they got an ocelot to model in one of those white backdrops that real models photograph in, and seriously, what an adorable animal.
After the museum we walked to Whole Foods, incidentally seeing Simon and Nora drive by, which was really random. Then we got a whole bunch of stuff, took the T home, and then my mom made some chicken soup with Chinese medicine, which is actually really tasty and really easy to make, so I guess I'll do that next time. Maybe today. It's nice having food in my fridge because then I feel like I have choices for meals, instead of just grilled cheese and canned tomato soup.
So we watched the "two-hour" season premiere of Lost, which was actually only one hour because the first hour was just a recap of the story (though I watched it anyway, since I don't really remember the story). I really like how the new episodes are all flashforwards instead of flashbacks, i think that is a cool way to change the theme while staying true to the format. I'm super confused as to what is going to happen though, and I wish that I had this season on DVD now so that I could just watch all of the episodes at once. Things that still make no sense: black smoke monster, Jacob, why that guy from the others doesn't age, what happened to Michael and Walt... Wikipedia says that Michael will return in episode 8... interesting. Anyway, it's sufficiently exciting for me to keep on watching, though I really want to see an action packed episode full of twists and turns sometime soon. After Lost I had standard practice with Andriy for like two hours. It's kind of frustrating, I don't think we're on the verge of breakthrough, and we should really practice more, but I think we're both just lazy...
Friday morning my mom left, and then I fell asleep again until about 1pm. Once that happens I'm screwed because I'm not super productive in the afternoons, so I just kind of killed time until 6:45pm, when I went to Kresge to watch 6.370. There was plenty of pizza beforehand, and then we joined Jaime and Sally in the auditorium. The guy who spoke from DE Shaw was such a mumbler, and then he was saying some stuff about the market, and that was dull, and then there were some technical issues with the projector, and they had to keep resizing the screen, but finally after a long wait the action started. The game was pretty cool because they had a 3-D view in the middle (centered on the "circle of awesome", which is apparently determined by some algorithm calculating where most of the robots and the shooting are taking place) and 2-D overhead views on the sides. I liked the team "Hey Guys," because every time they came up everyone would go "Hey Guys!" which was awesome, but they unfortunately lost both of their games. Other cool team names that were mentioned during awards were "I choose you, Pikachu!" and "Chuck Norris knows if a program halts" (the latter won the best name contest). One of my students was on a team that placed 8th, and the guy from my CG class who was really weird, this Singaporean guy, was on a team that placed in I believe 5th, and he just kept talking and talking in his funny Asian way. But that guy cannot even compare to the guy from the winning team "In memory of James Albrecht." That guy needs to become a professional commentator or something because he just LOVED to commentate. The annoying thing was, though, that he would only comment on what his team was doing, and what his strategy was, and the way he would say it always made it sound like they knew it all. The thing is, you could kind of tell that he wasn't being arrogant, but at the same time it came off as arrogant, and whether it was or not you just kind of wished he would give the other team a chance to speak. I guess they had a reason to be arrogant though, they only lost two games in all of the seeding and prelim and final rounds, and both of those games were to the second place winner, "SetBang!" SetBang had, as Jaime deemed him, the "trash-talking high schooler," who apparently did the competition last year when he was in high school and would always trash talk, but now he's a freshman and got scared, so he doesn't do it anymore. I really wanted to hear him trash talk though. His whole family was there, and his dad went up to take pictures of him accepting the prize. So cute. The final game was really close, so that made it exciting. It's fun to watch, even if it is pretty nerdy (as Andriy so aptly pointed out... he's such a closet nerd).
After 6.370, we went over to Artashes' new apartment for his housewarming party. There were a bunch of people there, mostly Russian or Ukrainian or Armenian, though they were all speaking English because someone else besides me (I suspect that was Ruben, who I think was married to Anna) didn't speak Russian, so that was convenient. We sat down and watched their game of mafia, which got screwed up because Pasha got the hand signals for "mafia" or "not mafia" confused. Then we played one more game, in which the mafia won again, because everyone kept accusing me, even though I was the sheriff, until the one guy named Vardges got on my side. But I ended up killed by mafia anyway. Well, it was fun though, cool people.
Yesterday I went to both Russell's advanced and intermediate classes. Sometimes I wish I would dance the boys part, because I just know that if I got used to moving a girl around I would dance it so much better than some of those boys. Anyway, after that I had a grilled chicken burger with Andriy in the student center before I went to the fencing room for the hip hop class. It was taught by Ted, to the song with Fallout Boy and Timbaland, and it was hard for me. I don't know if I'm out of practice doing choreography or what, but in the beginning I felt like everyone else got it but me, and I was really stressed out. I got it towards the end, but I still miss certain parts. It was fun though, I enjoyed doing it. I'm still not sure if I'm going to try out for DT this semester, I kind of don't feel like dealing with it, so maybe I'll just go to the classes, but I don't want to if I have to pay for it and not be in the show, but I kind of don't want to have to be in the show if I'm just doing one dance, and I don't have time to do many dances, so it's kind of a hard decision.
Last night I went with Sally and Jaime and Andriy to see Cloverfield. Okay Marcus and whoever else recommended this movie to me. BLECH! That movie totally made me nauseous from all the stupid camera movement, I couldn't wait for it to be over. I liked the concept, I thought it was cool the way they pieced together the story and the ending was a nice tie-in, but I hated not knowing anything outside of the tape, like where the monster really came from or what happened to Marlena, or if they got rid of it in the end. Also, there wasn't really enough action, I kind of felt like nothing had happened in the end. I would have really preferred seeing some other movie.
We went to Korean bbq at the Apollo grill afterwards. That was tasty, though it's a lot of meat, we should have probably balanced it better with some veggies. It was fun though, we talked a lot, even after we paid. It's the best hanging out with Jaime because I find that I'm always laughing at something or another, which I don't know if this is some development of his personality in the past couple years because I still remember to back really far back when we went sailing and he asked me, "If you were a tree, which tree would you be?" ... Oh man, that was really back in the day, awesome.
Sorry my entries are always so long.
This week my mom came for like two days. I had a rather productive group meeting on Tuesday, but then she came and I couldn't really do any work, so that sort of killed the roll. It was nice to show her where I lived, but having my mom around is always sort of like having a 5-year-old that I have to babysit, except that the 5-year-old just happens to know how to make you dinner. Sometimes I think that her surgery made her dumber, but then I remember that she has always been this ditzy as long as I can remember. It's amazing to me that there was a period of time in which I actually lived at home and had to deal with my parents every day, because I can't even imagine not having the freedom that I have now to do whatever I want. On the other hand, I had a moment the other day when I passed by Simmons Hall on the SafeRide, and I had a flashback of going there for the first time during CPW, and I remembered how simple everything was back then, and how much fun high school was, and I longed to go back. So, I guess it has it's pros and cons. Really, I would love to go back to freshman year MIT, everything being new, nothing being old and tiring. I took a deep breath and tried to feel everything as if it were for the first time, and for a second I felt it, but I wish it would last always.
Anyway, I met my mom in South Station on Wednesday evening for a dinner in Chinatown to celebrate an early Chinese New Year. We went to this restaurant called Ocean Health, which had this special that if you ordered three dishes for over ten dollars each, you could get a lobster dish for ten dollars. The place was small, but the food was really really good. We had crispy tofu, steamed flounder, this crispy chicken stuff, and the lobster. The only unfortunate thing was that I hadn't eaten lunch that day, and my stomach decided to act up again, and this ended up in a severe stomachache last witnessed during Steph Wang's birthday party at Cactus Club. I don't know why this happens to me so often, but it's horrible, and it made me feel bad that I couldn't enjoy the dinner as much as I would have liked. I was somewhat full, so we ate what we could and packed the rest, and then I sort of crouch walked to the T and got home.
At night they were playing America's Ballroom Challenge on PBS, so Andriy came over, and the three of us watched it on the couch. I told my mom about us, which I always find slightly embarrassing, but I guess it has to come out sometime, so I was like fine whatever. The show was kind of weird, it's a broadcast of the Ohio Star Ball finalists, and then a showdance from each. This week was American smooth, but half of the couples did something totally not smooth related for their showdance, like this one couple who did a really bad chacha. WTF. I like couples that do something innovative, but still in the style, so I commend the couple that tried to do a hiphop smooth partly to "Gangsta's Paradise."
The next day we went to the Harvard Natural History Museum. I had a feeling that I had been there before back in the 1.016 days with Sueann and Amos, and I remember it was kind of boring. We got a little lost getting there from Harvard, and my mom had to go ask someone after I already got the directions from Andriy, which I hate because I hate asking people stuff because I hate looking like a tourist. My mom really wanted to go see the glass flowers, but the problem with them is that they are done so well and so realistically that they look too much like real flowers, and I just felt like I was in a flower exhibit, and it sort of lost that cool glass effect. It was still crazy the detail that was in them and the kind of patience those guys must've had to make them for however many years and years. Something else that was interesting was that the stamens really looked like penises, and they are technically, but I started thinking that humans are not so different even from plants, and then I realized whenever we pick up a flower and admire its beauty and smell it, we are really going, "Mmm... plant vagina..." and when we eat fruits we are like, "Mmm... plant ovary..." Disturbing.
We also spent a long time looking at the different stuffed animals. I found out what that crazy beautiful duck that I saw in Vienna was: the Mandarin Duck. I also learned some stuff about bird feathers, like that the iridescent colors come from tiny microscopic air pocket that scatter the light. I love animals, at least admiring them, though I don't particularly like handling them. And I renewed my love for the ocelot. But the best part was this photography exhibit by this guy Henry Horenstein. They were a lot of pictures of animals, but not just documentary-like, but the animals were more like models, and the shots were very artistic, nice composition, different sort of styles, close-ups, which made the animals look very human, like their own characters with personality. It's hard to describe, so you'd just have to see them at http://www.horenstein.com. Anyway, I went home and decided to save his pictures from offline and use them as a changing desktop. The thing that I like most is that the pictures are black and white, so it looks really nice with the rest of the desktop set to black and the middle pictures moving like a slideshow. Plus I threw in some pictures of ocelots and mandarin ducks, nice photographs of course. I really like these two ocelot pictures where I actually think they got an ocelot to model in one of those white backdrops that real models photograph in, and seriously, what an adorable animal.
After the museum we walked to Whole Foods, incidentally seeing Simon and Nora drive by, which was really random. Then we got a whole bunch of stuff, took the T home, and then my mom made some chicken soup with Chinese medicine, which is actually really tasty and really easy to make, so I guess I'll do that next time. Maybe today. It's nice having food in my fridge because then I feel like I have choices for meals, instead of just grilled cheese and canned tomato soup.
So we watched the "two-hour" season premiere of Lost, which was actually only one hour because the first hour was just a recap of the story (though I watched it anyway, since I don't really remember the story). I really like how the new episodes are all flashforwards instead of flashbacks, i think that is a cool way to change the theme while staying true to the format. I'm super confused as to what is going to happen though, and I wish that I had this season on DVD now so that I could just watch all of the episodes at once. Things that still make no sense: black smoke monster, Jacob, why that guy from the others doesn't age, what happened to Michael and Walt... Wikipedia says that Michael will return in episode 8... interesting. Anyway, it's sufficiently exciting for me to keep on watching, though I really want to see an action packed episode full of twists and turns sometime soon. After Lost I had standard practice with Andriy for like two hours. It's kind of frustrating, I don't think we're on the verge of breakthrough, and we should really practice more, but I think we're both just lazy...
Friday morning my mom left, and then I fell asleep again until about 1pm. Once that happens I'm screwed because I'm not super productive in the afternoons, so I just kind of killed time until 6:45pm, when I went to Kresge to watch 6.370. There was plenty of pizza beforehand, and then we joined Jaime and Sally in the auditorium. The guy who spoke from DE Shaw was such a mumbler, and then he was saying some stuff about the market, and that was dull, and then there were some technical issues with the projector, and they had to keep resizing the screen, but finally after a long wait the action started. The game was pretty cool because they had a 3-D view in the middle (centered on the "circle of awesome", which is apparently determined by some algorithm calculating where most of the robots and the shooting are taking place) and 2-D overhead views on the sides. I liked the team "Hey Guys," because every time they came up everyone would go "Hey Guys!" which was awesome, but they unfortunately lost both of their games. Other cool team names that were mentioned during awards were "I choose you, Pikachu!" and "Chuck Norris knows if a program halts" (the latter won the best name contest). One of my students was on a team that placed 8th, and the guy from my CG class who was really weird, this Singaporean guy, was on a team that placed in I believe 5th, and he just kept talking and talking in his funny Asian way. But that guy cannot even compare to the guy from the winning team "In memory of James Albrecht." That guy needs to become a professional commentator or something because he just LOVED to commentate. The annoying thing was, though, that he would only comment on what his team was doing, and what his strategy was, and the way he would say it always made it sound like they knew it all. The thing is, you could kind of tell that he wasn't being arrogant, but at the same time it came off as arrogant, and whether it was or not you just kind of wished he would give the other team a chance to speak. I guess they had a reason to be arrogant though, they only lost two games in all of the seeding and prelim and final rounds, and both of those games were to the second place winner, "SetBang!" SetBang had, as Jaime deemed him, the "trash-talking high schooler," who apparently did the competition last year when he was in high school and would always trash talk, but now he's a freshman and got scared, so he doesn't do it anymore. I really wanted to hear him trash talk though. His whole family was there, and his dad went up to take pictures of him accepting the prize. So cute. The final game was really close, so that made it exciting. It's fun to watch, even if it is pretty nerdy (as Andriy so aptly pointed out... he's such a closet nerd).
After 6.370, we went over to Artashes' new apartment for his housewarming party. There were a bunch of people there, mostly Russian or Ukrainian or Armenian, though they were all speaking English because someone else besides me (I suspect that was Ruben, who I think was married to Anna) didn't speak Russian, so that was convenient. We sat down and watched their game of mafia, which got screwed up because Pasha got the hand signals for "mafia" or "not mafia" confused. Then we played one more game, in which the mafia won again, because everyone kept accusing me, even though I was the sheriff, until the one guy named Vardges got on my side. But I ended up killed by mafia anyway. Well, it was fun though, cool people.
Yesterday I went to both Russell's advanced and intermediate classes. Sometimes I wish I would dance the boys part, because I just know that if I got used to moving a girl around I would dance it so much better than some of those boys. Anyway, after that I had a grilled chicken burger with Andriy in the student center before I went to the fencing room for the hip hop class. It was taught by Ted, to the song with Fallout Boy and Timbaland, and it was hard for me. I don't know if I'm out of practice doing choreography or what, but in the beginning I felt like everyone else got it but me, and I was really stressed out. I got it towards the end, but I still miss certain parts. It was fun though, I enjoyed doing it. I'm still not sure if I'm going to try out for DT this semester, I kind of don't feel like dealing with it, so maybe I'll just go to the classes, but I don't want to if I have to pay for it and not be in the show, but I kind of don't want to have to be in the show if I'm just doing one dance, and I don't have time to do many dances, so it's kind of a hard decision.
Last night I went with Sally and Jaime and Andriy to see Cloverfield. Okay Marcus and whoever else recommended this movie to me. BLECH! That movie totally made me nauseous from all the stupid camera movement, I couldn't wait for it to be over. I liked the concept, I thought it was cool the way they pieced together the story and the ending was a nice tie-in, but I hated not knowing anything outside of the tape, like where the monster really came from or what happened to Marlena, or if they got rid of it in the end. Also, there wasn't really enough action, I kind of felt like nothing had happened in the end. I would have really preferred seeing some other movie.
We went to Korean bbq at the Apollo grill afterwards. That was tasty, though it's a lot of meat, we should have probably balanced it better with some veggies. It was fun though, we talked a lot, even after we paid. It's the best hanging out with Jaime because I find that I'm always laughing at something or another, which I don't know if this is some development of his personality in the past couple years because I still remember to back really far back when we went sailing and he asked me, "If you were a tree, which tree would you be?" ... Oh man, that was really back in the day, awesome.
Sorry my entries are always so long.