Run a Mile in Evan's Shoes

Since last week English got all the attention, and I am currently sitting in the computer lab after finishing my ITP-109 lab assignment early, I thought I’d give ITP some spotlight this week.  For those of you who are unaware, USC has a department called Information Technology Program, actually a part of the Viterbi School of Engineering.  I had no clue that this was here until last semester I was looking for a class to fill up the final two of my 18 units, and stumbled upon ITP-104, Web Development, in the Courses of Interest (these are intro-sorts of classes in schools and departments all over the university that don’t have any prerequisites.  So if you’re looking for something new to take, this can guide you to some history or art or whatever classes that you can take without repeatedly encountering the woes of D-clearance) on the Schedule of Classes.  One of the guys I lived with in the summer studied graphic design and he had been doing some web projects, which stimulated my interest.  Seeing him do the behind the scenes work of a website made me realize how I knew absolutely nothing about how the internet, such a pervasive force in my 21st century life, actually operated or how to do something cool with it myself.  So after deliberating between ITP and PE and Piano, I decided to do something totally new and try my hand at web design.  I also figured in the job market today, being able to design a website would be a useful thing to know.

From the first class about the basic operations of the internet and our first dabblings in HTML that involved such simplistic things as putting words and colors on a webpage, I loved it.

One of the ITP classrooms

When I opened my first window of Internet Explorer that had words on it that I typed, bolded as I thought appropriate and on a color background, I was having so much fun.  Although this wasn’t an arts class, it let me work my creative brain a little as well as learn how to program in HTML.  There are lots of aesthetics involved in putting up a webpage as well as the technical skill involved in doing so.  I like this merger of design and technology, just like I in general need both science and art in my life.

This semester I’m taking ITP-109, Introduction to Java Programming.  In high school, a friend and I did a little playing around with BASIC, building a car thing with some wheels and a circuit board (and a bunch of electrical tape and wires), with our physics teacher, but I didn’t remember much besides Hello, World.  In this class, we use Eclipse to program in and for our labs so far, we have done the pervasive Hello, World (of course), a Madlibs story, change calculator, and temperature converter.  I love when my program does what I want it to (just like when my websites would turn out looking like I wanted).  Quite a feeling of satisfaction.  These ITP classes have become some of my favorites at USC.  Who would have guessed that I would have stumbled into a new hobby with a random two unit class?  Planning on taking at least one ITP class for the rest of my semesters, including ITP-204, the follow up to my first web-design class.

          -Stephen Dedalus, Ulysses by James Joyce

Thought I’d take a moment this week to give an update on my English class, my first actual English class of college (not counting Thematic Option, of course, although my CORE 102 was taught by an English professor and was very simliar to this class in format).  Right now we are about halfway through that monster of a book Ulysses by James Joyce.  This was the book for this class that I was least looking forward to reading.  I’ve had a little experience with Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and it wasn’t pretty.  I rarely have given up completely on a novel, but this one I abandoned completely.  It may in fact be the first book that I ever did not force myself to finish.  I had to read it for my senior year high school English class and didn’t quite read it all and did a little bit of guessing and making stuff up on that essay.  There was just too much going on at the time with college decisions and my other classes for me to invest the time or interest in it.  I did resolve to go back and try again, as I hate leaving books unfinished.  I did try again, but got about halfway through again before I bailed on the miserable experience as a waste of time.  I had no clue what was going on and hated the protagonist.  Done.

To my great dismay, in about the third paragraph of Ulysses, who did I find emerging again, but Stephen Dedalus.  Despite being somewhat tempted to chuck the book at the reappearance of Stephen, knowing that I had a good class and professor, along with a decent literary critique of the book that breaks it down chapter by chapter (Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us) made me hang on.  Luckily, Stephen is not the only character whose head we get inside, and he is much more tolerable than small doses, not almost 400 pages at a time.

Ulysses takes place in the course of one day (yes, a 700 page novel about 1 day).  Joyce takes, as my professor calls it, a MAXIMALIST approach to writing about a day.  We get EVERY detail about the characters thought processes, centering around the two main characters, Steven Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.  Once I got over the fact that the novel is long and difficult and that I’d probably miss much of what’s going on, I actually started to rather enjoy reading it.  I like stream of consciousness novels and Joyce is very insightful about the human thought process.  I can see reflected in the characters the strange minutae of thoughts that stroll through my head throughout the day.  Things on the characters’ minds pop up again and again.  Their brains jump around from topic to topic.  They notice and wonder about things.  Letting the words wash over me instead of thinking I need to pick apart everything has made the book much more fun to read and not an ordeal.  Of course, having a group to chat with about it twice a week greatly improves the experience and helps me pick up much I missed or look at the things I did get in another way.  I think people want to mega-analyze a book like Ulysses, since it is considered a classic work of literature, and if they don’t feel as though it is speaking insights to them through every sentence, they have somehow failed as a reader.  To handle Ulysses, I just try to put myself inside the characters and experience as they do.  Just like in the real world full of stimuli, I have to filter some things out to prevent ourselves from going on information overload.  So I look at it as though I am looking at the world through someone else’s eyes.  I take in as much as I can handle and let the other details go.  Usually I get the core of it.  There are so many small details in Ulysses that one or the other will not make or break your understanding of it.  An interesting experiment would be to track what details different readers pick up and how that affects their overall response to the book.  Just like eye-witnesses might remember completely different accounts of the same event, each reader will take away something different from Ulysses.  This is an important reason to read the book in a class setting – to learn more about the book by sharing with one another what jumped out.

     I want to hold ‘em like they do in Texas please.
     Fold ‘em let ‘em hit me raise it baby stay with me

Probably not a shock to most people, but music can make a big difference in exercising.

     I love it

Coincidence in position?  I think not….

    I wanna roll with him a hard pair we will be
    A little gambling is fun when you’re with me

Imagine this.  Just shy of mile 8 of a 15.5 mile run.  Been running up a hill (a long long hill) on Veteran between Wilshire and Sunset.  This one cranks on forever.  Sheryl Crow crooning along to “My Favorite Mistake” in your ear.  Slow, steady, good song.   And then you hit the top.  The turn around.  And here she is, Lady Gaga.  GO!  Fly down that hill.

     I LOVE IT!

I usually listen to the radio when I run.  I have a trusty little digital radio that accompanies me almost every time I run.  The “almost” accounts for times in which the radio is either (1) out of batteries, (2) left at home by accident, or (3) dead.  #3 has happened only once, when my first Radio Shack radio stopped working.  I could hear something rattling around inside if I shook it, one of the springs in the battery compartment was a little bent, and the sound was in and out.  I imagine in a year and half of being thrown around in a backpack, dropped, carried in the rain, being sweated on, and enduring a couple complete wipeouts in which it hit the ground directly before my hand and skidded under my entire body weight, the abuse finally got to it.  For $30, it did pretty well!  I surely feel as though I got my money’s worth out of it.  While said radio was broken, I used a mix on my iPod.  This wouldn’t seem all that different, I guess, but there’s something about the radio and the COMPLETE unpredictability of it that beats even a 300 song playlist on shuffle for me while running, especially long runs.  The Radio Shack one has now been replaced with a $20 bargain from Target.  I suppose I should name it.  iTunes makes you name your iPod (mine is named after Fred Davis, USC senior tight end in the 2007 season, whom I have loved since I saw him do this –>
in the Washington State game in the Coliseum; jumping over a guy trying to tackle you…what could possibly be more awesome? and another slight diversion encountered while looking for an appropriately sweet Fred picture, can I get some shoes like these!?) , so why should my radio suffer with anonymity.  Both serve me well indeed and are an integral part of workouts (where would I be without my iPod to put spin playlists on?).

Running down that hill to “Poker Face” today was perfectly timed, as was getting “Evacuate the Dancefloor” in the last mile stretch along Ocean Avenue back to the pier.  Definitely got a little kick up there.  Too bad the song finished before I got to the end or I might have kept it up until the end.  As it was, I just slowed back down a bit, which was ok.  This morning’s run had an awesome soundtrack, thanks to a mix of 93.1 Jack-FM, STAR 98.7 , 102.7 KIIS-FM, 104.3 My-FM, and 106.7 KROQ.  I felt really good the whole way.  Last year on this same route, I was pretty tired by the turn around and had to work really hard to hang on for miles 8-12.  Training for my first marathon, when I was hitting these distances for the first time, I used to have my “death at mile 11.”  From mile 11-12, I always felt absolutely awful and wanted to stop, but once I pushed through and broke mile 12, I felt great.  Sure enough, last year, I declined steadily starting at 8, died through mile 11, got to 12 and (relatively) took off!  This phenomenon happened pretty consistently, but it was very pronounced on this route.  This year I have not had mile 11 deaths at all, happily.  I felt really good the entire way on this run.  Halfway did not feel like halfway and while I was tired at the end, I felt like I could have kept cruising.  I gotta give some credit to the music.  With the randomness of the radio, sometimes I get a set of music that is fine, workable for the run, but some days I get exactly what I need to hear.  It just jives the whole way and I can tune in, harness the music, and run it, run it far, far, far….

     Check this hand, ’cause I’m marvelous

This was the first week of classes for us at USC and things seem to be getting off on the right foot.  It’s a little hard to tell how much work the semester will bring since I have yet to have either of my lab sections yet.  Both Biochemistry and Chemical Engineering Lab (as the name implies)  have labs and I haven’t had to go to either yet.  So far the only work I have had is..READING!  I joyously began my English class (ENGL 467) and we are starting off with Ulysses.  Not the easiest of reads, by any stretch, but we are going to spend a good deal of time on it and a good professor and discussion group can make any daunting book manageable.  The language in Ulysses is challenging – it’s not entirely straightforward who is speaking or thinking or where characters are.  It takes a bit of getting used to and also an understanding that it is going to take a while to read through anything.  Besides just having a class which reads books, I went to the library on Monday (since I didn’t start class until noon) and emerged with 6 books: Out of the Silent Planet (CS Lewis), The Importance of Being Ernest (Wilde), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales (Stevenson), The Waves (Woolfe), Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), and Daughter of Fortune (Allende).  All random pulls from the bookstacks of Leavey.  I had no plan of what to get and certainly didn’t plan on getting so many.  Who knows if I’ll have a prayer of getting through them all.  In the meantime, though, they make a nice pile on my desk and it makes me happy to look at them there.  They’re like some good friends hanging around.  The weekend was all-around great too.  Friday night, movie at LA Live; Saturday, hiking, including some bits in the area that burned in the station fire; Sunday, marathon team long run (14 miles in Marina Del Rey) and Waking Life viewing followed by Catch Phrase with friends in the evening; Monday, no school.  I can say much about all of these activities, but I’m going to expound about Friday night and the movie we saw: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

First of all, LA Live seriously needed a movie theater to make it worth going to and boost business.  Before the theater opened, it was really dead up there.  Also, the USC Shuttle is something I thnk the LA Live people should have initiated immediately.  There were so many students wanting to use it; the shuttle we were on filled up to capacity and there were still more waiting.  Big draw for them.  Now onto the movie… (SPOILER ALERT! if you want to see it and haven’t, just stop right now)

Coming out of The Imaginarium, my instinct was to say that it was awful, really hard to follow, not much plot to speak of, the story all over the place, not particularly coherent.  However, this “terrible” movie has been on my mind since I saw it.  Which to me indicates that it was not actually a bad movie.  Good movies should make you think.  I think a bad movie has no plot and all that jazz and doesn’t make you think either.  One that depends 100% on special effects to be anything worthwhile at all, if you consider that worthwhile.

The basic premice of The Imaginarium is a choice, according to IMDb, between, “light and joy or darkness and gloom.”  Dr. Parnassus runs a travelling show in which audience members enter a mirror while the doctor is in a trance, enabling them to enter a world of their wildest imagination.  At the end of their vision, or rapture, or whatever this should be thought of as, they have to make a choice between Dr. Parnassus’s world of imagination and light or the dark, seedy pleasure offered instead by the Devil, Mr. Nick.   Dr. Parnassus, while a monk, was visited by Mr. Nick who asserts that people do not care about Parnassus and his order’s stories and wonder of imagination and gets Parnassus to make a wager with him that should Parnassus seduce 12 followers before the Devil inside the imaginarium, Mr. Nick will grant him eternal life, but any child to be fathered by Parnassus would belong to the Devil upon his or her 16th birthday.  (Yes, complicated and confusing, I understand.  I took me quite a while to figure out how to best write those two sentences and it still probably will require a couple read-throughs.  Just this should illustrate my frustration with the movie.)

Still with me?  Sort of?  So now, Parnassus won the bet but is now a miserable drunk 1000 years old and his daughter Valentina is just a few days away from 16.  In order to save her from the clutches of Mr. Nick, Parnassus makes a new wager that the first to 5 souls (in about 2 days) will keep Valentina.  In the meantime, Parnassus and his crew, Anton, Valentina, and the dwarf Percy, have rescued a man hanging (by his neck) from underneath a bridge.  This turns out to be Tony (Heath Ledger), about whose past we have no information and who appears to be suffering from amnesia.  Tony starts helping the show recruit new audiences and begins to fall for Valentina.  Finding out about Parnassus’ bet, Tony becomes determined to save, and thereby win the heart of, Valentina.  Anton is also in love with Valentina and very jealous of the dashing Tony.  Through this process, Tony takes a couple of dives into Parnassus’ mirror, and we thus learn more about his history.

As we in the world outside the movie know, of course, Heath Ledger passed away before finishing the filming.  However, it so happened that he had completed everything on the “real world” side of the mirror, leaving everything that occured behind the mirror unfinished.  So what happens when Tony goes inside the mirror, he changes appearance.  This actually suits Tony’s character well.  For reasons yet unknown to us, Tony seems to be rather on the run and not fully disclosing what he remember about how he got to be under the bridge.  We find out later that Tony was involved in some illicit charity operations and owes money to some Russian mobsters.  He’s on the run from the law, bad press, and the mafia.  What a a man who would want to change how he looks!  The later Tonys are Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.

So there’s a few of my jumbled thoughts about The Imaginarium.  One review I read thought it fantastic; another called it incoherent.  I think it is somewhere between the two.  There wasn’t much that approximated reason anywhere, but it made me think (extensively) as a good movie ought to do.  Should you go see it?  Hard to say, but if you do, prepare to be confused and to spend some time pondering it. 

For my last week of winter break, I flew back to Boston to visit my friend and former roommmate Sarah, who is a grad student in Astronautical Engineering at MIT. I had never been back to MIT, forgoing a visit as an undergrad as I didn’t get in and thus it would be a waste of time and money.  But now Sarah was there and it was the perfect time to go see her, check out MIT and some more of Boston and just get out of LA for a bit.  It was a fantastic trip!  MIT is in its winter interim period right now, so there’s not too many students around or things going on.  Sarah had to work during the week because her research group is going to have to present their progress in the next few weeks and apparently they have a little catch up to do.  This worked out pretty well though – I was able to roam MIT and further out into Boston during the day, just checking things out and going whereever the wind…or more accurately, the T…took me, which was great fun.  I like the freedom of being able to just wander around and not have to worry about a plan or anything.  One day, for example, I rode the T to Park Street.  Got off and was going to go to Boston Common, then after getting off the train, decided I would rather go check out Harvard right then instead, so I just got back on and went the other way to Harvard.  Despite my California cold intolerance, I did not freeze to death.  Actually with a pair of long underwear and sweatshirt and coat, 30 degrees is not so bad.  But once it drops below 27 or so, oh lord, it’s a whole different ball game.  The weather was pretty good until Saturday.  It had snowed before I got there, so there was still snow on the ground.  The first few days the weather hovered around 30.  On Friday, it snowed a little again.  On Saturday, it was very clear, but the wind finally picked up and it was in the high 20s, and at that point, it got too cold.  Really the problem was the wind.  Makes it feel way colder.  Luckily I was leaving that night and took the drop as my signal that it was time to head back to California.  Getting back to 64 degrees in LA was a beautiful thing.

Trip highlights:

• Day 1: arrive in Boston on the red eye flight on Tuesday morning.  Drop off my stuff at Sarah’s apartment.  Wander into an MIT building and happen to find the Visitor office and aquire a map.  Walking in the infinite corridor, I found Andrew, my USC CHEM 115 Supplemental Instruction leader.  I know all of 3 people at MIT, one of whom is Sarah, and I found another one within 45 minutes of being on campus. Went to Harvard Square and checked out the bookstore, which is the most amazing bookstore I have ever been in.  Like Barnes and Noble on steroids.  Rode the T to the end of the red line at Braintree just for the sake of riding the T.  Good public transportation is an amazing thing.  Went to dinner with Sarah.

• Day 2: MIT Museum.  Exhibit on Lego DNA take the cake of the whole museum.  Explained things well in the displays.  MIT Bookstore.  Rode the T to Boston College.  Didn’t stay long – dark, cold, no map.  The T was warm inside though.  Went to Sarah’s IM ice hockey game.

• Day 3: Campus Tour of MIT.  They tell the same story about the CalTech cannon that they do at CalTech, but with more glorification of MIT, of course.  Went to see An Education. 

• Day 4: Boston  public library.  Met my second cousin who lives in Boston on Newbury Street for coffee.  Sarah got out of lab early and we went to the Boston Museum of Science in the afternoon.  Saw Harry Potter the exhibit and, unplanned by us, got to take advantage of Free Movie Fridays for the month of January to watch Adenaline Rush in the 180 degree screen IMAX without paying extra.  The section on mathmatical models was the best of the place though.  Especially their demonstration of probability and the Gaussian distribution.

• Day 5.  Saturday, last day.  Kennedy library and lunch before heading home.

It struck me watching the movie Julie and Julia with my parents last week how egocentric a blog is.   In the movie, Julie starts a blog about her attempt to cook every recipe in the Julia Child’s cookbook.  Here I am telling you all sorts of random details about what I do and think, probably more than you could possibly want to know about me.  I think it’s really interesting as it is my life, which I spend the majority of my time in.  Maybe it is interesting, maybe not, but because I’m living it, it’s what I know best, so you will continue to hear about it. 

This week, though, I’ll diverge some from my own experience and relay one of the stories I was told Sundy.  I was not expecting Sunday to be a day of storytelling, but that is what it really turned out to be, starting with an immensely long chat with a cycling instructor at the YMCA after his class and finishing with my dad’s two oldest brothers at our house for dinner telling some old family stories.

I always enjoy going to Gary’s Sunday class because it is a good workout, I always take away something that I can apply to my own class (and improve it), and I always have fun talking to him after about anything and everything. It usually starts with cycling, but diverges to things like running, politics, science, family stories, you name it.  I won’t bore you with the entirety of our almost four hour (I’m not kidding. Have you ever had an experience of talking to someone and you just keep talking and suddenly all this time has gone by and you don’t really know how it happened?  If you haven’t, I highly recommend it.  Great way to connect with someone.)  conversation, but here’s my recount of the truly inspirational story he told me of when he was hit by a car.

Gary kept referencing “after I was hit by the car,” or “problems from the accident,” and such things, so finally I decided it would not be rude to inquire further about what happened and asked him about it.  He seemed to bring it up enough that he would be willing to talk about it.  And indeed he was.  In 1994, he was hit by a car while running in Pasadena.  He was training for a race with some friends.  He would lag behind the others, who were running at 7:00 minute mile pace, and then speed up and catch them.  He was catching up to his friends as they crossed an intersection.  They made it through the crossing, but as Gary came to the street a driver watching oncoming lefthand traffic made a right hand turn through a red light and did not stop or slow down, did not see Gary at all and hit him full on.  The last thing Gary remembers is seeing the car, knowing it was not going to stop, and jumping up because he knew he did not want to end up underneath the car (his mother was killed hit by a drunken driver).  He slid up the hood of the car, was thrown into the air over the car, spun three times in the air, and landed on his neck and shoulders.  Everyone who saw it thought he was dead.  But he wasn’t.  He did, however, have two broken legs, several broken vertebrae, and severe head trama to name the most glaring injuries.  The biggest issue was the head injuries.  For one thing, following the accident, he has had two strokes and went through a period where he could not form short term memories.  His family didn’t think he would ever come out right again.  But he did.  He didn’t give up and kept fighting to get back what he had.  Not only is he now functional and OK, he is a fantastic spin instructor.  He is quite high up in the certification ranks for Maddog (a spinning group) and is only not a master because there is a quota for each state and there are already too many in California.  High credentials aside, he is just a great instructor, who pushes and inspires his class.  I don’t need to see certification credentials to tell you who is a great instructor.  He knows a man who had similar injuries in an accident and is still in a wheel chair.  Why?  Because that man gave up.  Gary is truly a miracle standing before me and a true tribute to the power of an unwavering spirit.  Had it not been for a good post-spinning conversation, I would have never had a clue.  What a shame that would be, for it is a story that should be shared, and so I am sharing it with you in the blog-o-sphere.  Never give up, anything is possible if you put your mind to it.  And never think you know all there is to know about someone, because anyone might have an amazing story just below the surface, waiting to be told.

For the first time in quite a few years, my entire family, extended that is, was home for Christmas (I am an only child so my entire immediate family is automatically all home if I am home with my parents).  My cousin Christie and her husband and children moved to Texas several years ago due to a job transfer and her brother Tim and his wife and children moved to Santa Rosa to be closer to the in-laws.  This year they all came back for a family Christmas like we haven’t had in quite a while.  Chris has 3 kids and Tim has 4, including an infant.  For the past few years I have been the only one around under the age of 50.  My cousins are all much older than me (old enough to have spouses and multiple children) and their kids much younger.  I haven’t seen the Texas cousins in a couple years, and now they have gotten older so that our age gap has lessened.  The difference between 20 and 14 is much less than 14 and 8.  Now we have much more in common.  I no longer feel like I am just being shoved off with the little kids when I want to be with the adults and there are enough little kids for them to play together instead of me just being booted from the grown up table to sit with the couple little ones who won’t really listen to me anyway, because I’m not actually an adult.  I’m finally out of that weird liminal space and it makes family get togethers way more fun for me.  I can really enjoy the time with everyone instead of being constantly torn between the “big” people and essentially babysitting. 

Euclid Avenue

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were great fun.  On Christmas Eve, Teddy (7) was SO excited about opening presents.  He wanted to open any present whether or not it was for him.  Anyone who was opening anything, he would ask if he could open it for them.  A ton of people came to my aunt and uncle’s house on Christmas Eve to see the visiting kids and grandkids.  I got to chat with many nice friends of my aunt and uncle’s…including a woman’s who daughter is looking at schools, including USC.  So I even got to talk about USC, one of my favorite VSA pasttimes.  Besides that I met a man who is a chemical engineer who was quite interested in what I wanted to do and told some stories about what he had done, which actually ended up not including much chemical engineering although that’s where he started out.  I also met the priest who baptized me and married my parents, really talking to him for the first time ever (he has been in the Philippines for 6 years and I have never REALLY met him although he has known our family for a long time) and he runs marathons!  Did ~23 in 20 years, including Boston.  I loved talking to him and he gave me some good running tidbits and we talked about races and courses all over the place and prep for this year’s LA Marathon.  He also studied English and we talked all about the books for my English class next semester.  He is one of the best listeners I have ever talked to, and I want to remember how he listened to me whenever I listen to someone from here on out.  Christmas Day was just the family, another relaxing day and dinner together.  I managed to get a run in.  10 miles and a new route for me by my aunt and uncle’s house in Upland.  You can run up Euclid and it is a nice wide dirt path in the middle of the street, which rather reminded me of running up San Vincente, except dirt instead of grass.  Still good on the feet.  I really enjoyed it and never knew it was there before.

Christmas night I stayed over at my aunt and uncle’s to accompany the cousins to Disneyland the next day.  We had heard from Disney friends that day after Christmas is the worst possible day to go, crowd-wise.  However, this was the ONLY day that worked, because the Santa Rosa crew was leaving on Sunday.  Knowing this ahead of time and because of the fact that we have kids 14, 11, 9, 7, 6, 3, and 7 months along, the mantra for the day was “flexibility and adaptability.”  We’re not going to get to go on everything and everyone is going to want to go on different stuff, so just deal.  You might have to go on some things you don’t want to, but everyone will get at least something in.  And all the kids were good!  It was super crowded, but not as bad as I would have expected with all the prep for horrendous crowds from the Disney friends.  We didn’t get everything in, but did pretty good.  Got Star Tours twice, Space Mountain twice (thanks to extra Fast Passes for Molly (11) and me, the two fast ride lovers), Pirates, Buzz Lightyear, and I took Molly to Haunted Mansion and Matterhorn since she was looking for a bit more adventure.  We only had two bouts of ride induced crying from the little ones, with Teddy on Star Tours and Meghan (3) on Buzz.  But both of them made good recoveries once they got off the rides and I was very proud of them.  Other than that, everyone was in a great mood all day and even the baby did well.  We almost got off to a rocky start with some issues with prebought tickets, but flexibility and adaptibility prevailed and we got it fixed and moved on to a good rest of the day.  The end was a bit long and cold waiting for the Christmas parade, which to me wasn’t all that good, but seeing little Meghan’s face as she watched it, smiling and waving, made the hour and a half of sitting on a curb in the cold so we would be able to see worth every freezing second.  Afterward she was saying, “Santa waved right to me,” absolutely in awe, her whole demeanor saying, can you believe it?  That sparkle in Meghan’s eyes, the essence of family and Christmas, the cousins back in town made Christmas more special for me than it has been in quite a few years.

Want your bad romance!

Last night I went to the Lady GaGa concert at the Nokia Theater at LA Live.  fantastic.  amazing.  mind-blowing.  loud.  energized.  A few words that come to mind immediately.  What a show!  GaGa fully engages her audience – the entire venue is undoubtedly wrapped around her little finger.  Just as her fans are ecstatic to see her, Lady GaGa draws her energy from the screaming crowd.  At one point in the show, GaGa laid down on stage and told the audience that she is like Tinkerbell and we must clap for her or she will die.  Of course, we all happily obliged and soon she hopped back to her feet to continue the performance, but not without demanding a good rousing bout of screaming and clapping. 

 The show had a full two hours of Lady Gaga.  Concert started at 7:30 pm.  There were supposed to be two openers, but one was cancelled.  The reasons were undisclosed; there was merely a sign on the door saying that Kid Cudi would not be opening tonight.  Kid Cudi probably would have been pretty good – he does that song “Day and Night.”  Semiprecious Weapons, the remaining opener, was energetic, to put it nicely, but more obnoxious than anything else.  I quickly had had it with them.  Apparently, they have been opening for Lady GaGa for a long time.  Why she kept them, I’m not sure.  They played for about an hour (luckily we weren’t there for all of that).  After them, since there was no second opener, came a long set of Michael Jackson music.  Probably much preferable to an actual opener.  It was possible to chat with friends while enjoying the music instead of being blasted away by a band we weren’t there to hear anyway.  Some good entertainment during all the MJ was two screens where you could text in sentiments to Virgin Mobile and they’d display them.  Lots of variations on the theme of “I <3 GAGA” and “thnx for bringing me mom” and “kyle xy is here.”  Some were very funny.  Some were a little bit raunchy.  All wildly entertaining.

I went with my good friend and former roommate Sarah who is now a grad student at MIT.  Lady GaGa is our shared pop music guilty pleasure, so we were all hands down to go to her concert and especially stoked that it worked out so we could go together. 

And we were not disappointed.

Lady GaGa herself performed for two full hours.  Last concert I went to, the headliner only was onstage for maybe slightly more than one.  There were three screens onstage used extremely well to put up lights and images throughout the performance and between songs.  These were all perfectly synchronized and very artistic shots.  She used probably a relatively low number of stage props to maximum effectiveness. Other than the screens, she had a couple conveyer belts, a moving cube structure, a platform, and a spinning gyroscope that she could stand inside.  Quite a few costume changes running the full gamut in amount of exposed skin.

One of the most impressive parts of her show is a portion where she plays the piano.  About in the middle of the show, the screens went dark and they brought out a baby grand.  Lady GaGa proceeded to perform accoustic versions of Speechless and Poker Face accompanying herself on the piano.  She said that when people start saying that she “only makes dance music,” she likes to play the piano and tell them to shove it (in not quite as inocuous wording).  But truly, no one should dare speak against her musical talent.  Indeed, she plays well and has a powerful voice that can blow you away without back-up music or singers or anything.  The thing that impresses me most about Lady GaGa is that she writes her own music, she can perform her own music solo to great effect, and she is completely in control of her fans and her image.  Everything put up on the stage last night put the crowd in precisely the mood she wanted and all we saw served the image she has crafted for her stardom.  How close or not this is to her everyday, at home persona, I cannot say.  It could be her true personality, no strings attached, or it could be a complete invention or a little of both.  I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.  The thing that impresses me is that she has utter control over her stage persona.  All her performance caters to this character of Lady GaGa and it gives her an opening to push the envelope of music, art, and sexuality.  She throws aside cultural taboos and yet can do no wrong.  Some of what she does in and out of her music may seem crazy, but she can get away with it, just because she’s Lady GaGa.  Hard to imagine she’s just 3 years older than myself when I stop and think about it.

Before the show I had not ever listened to her full album other than her released singles, and I discovered some great new (to me) ones.  Of course, today I download The Fame Monster (Delux Version) in full and am listening nonstop now.  New favorites: Alejandro, Telephone, Dance in the Dark, Monster, Teeth, and Beautiful Dirty Rich. 

This semester of crazy workload is DONE.  DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE.  I feel somewhat like my brain has been run over by a truck, which backed up and did it again.  I am so mentally exhausted and not quite completely unwound yet.  I was going to stay on campus until Wednesday because I have Meet USC tomorrow, but when I got back to my room at 10 am from my last final I decided to come home (my hometown’s about 30 minutes from USC) and go back tomorrow for Meet USC and to get my stuff.  I needed to flee and decompress and I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at my school stuff long enough to organize it, which is what I had planned to do this afternoon.  The more time that passes since I finished, the more tired I am.  A long haul of a semester is catching up to me quickly.  I will sleep well tonight and be able to get up in the morning unencumbered by academic stress and have a bit of a new beginning for Christmas.  Planning to do some serious reading for fun and serious seeing friends and serious training (to make up for the lost days of running and bit of stress eating during finals week).  And a trip to Boston in January!

So having completed this huge courseload, I have some, um, closing remarks about grades in general.  More specifically, how I think they should be done away with completely and are, in fact, more likely to impede good learning than promote it. 

Coming off this semester, I don’t think that my grades are going to be very good.  I had very difficult classes and alot of difficult classes, and only math and science classes with not one balancing class.  I feel like any of those classes on their own and alongside non-engineering related classes, I would do great in.  But given the circumstances, I just did not have enough hours in day or the ability to ever step away from it.  As a result, my performance slipped in all of them when it came down to the nitty gritty details of essentially memorizing how to do almost any type of problem that could appear on an exam in order to snag an A, although arguably not actually learning and understanding anything.

Learning gets pushed aside when we end up spending hours reflecting on the grade numbers game.  And it’s not as though we have no reason to…we use grades to get jobs or into grad school, especially as many of us may not have other work experience or other unusual (and work relevant) skills developed in our spare time because we don’t have any because we spend so much time studying in order to play the grade numbers game.  These letters don’t even necessarily reflect the amount that I really learned this semester.  Because I really did learn alot.  I started to actually understand alot of what I already “learned” in previous semesters but what I really learned was how to do some math tricks.  This semester, like when Robert, a fellow ChemE also with the Biochemical Emphasis, and I were studying Reactors, I felt like I actually understood what was happening.  For example, why a reactor would act as it does.  Why pressure has a certain effect on conversion given a specific reaction.  How diffusion limited or rate limited give us different conversion results and the reason high or low values of the Thiele modulus reflect this.  And how smaller catalyst particles used to determine rates in lab need to be corrected when we have larger particles in the lab.  and why the expression we use to do so makes sense.  and how temperature can effect and mess up the whole thing that you just calculated as isothermal.  That whole bit doesn’t sound to me like it could come from a student who is highly likely to get a C in the class.  A C to me means barely knows what’s going on.  Just enough not to fail.  Failing is legitly having no idea, and a C is having some decent idea and I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea.  When it came down to Reactors exams, it was tricky math that is hardly possible to do in the allotted 15 min per problem time limit unless you are a frickin math major.  If I was that good at math, I’d be studying math.  I can do the stuff, but it takes longer than 15 minutes to think through it if you don’t spend your entire life memorizing integrals instead of only most of it.  In real life, math alone doesn’t cut it, you have to know if you make sense and think about it conceptually if you are ever going to actually DO anything.

Here's a simple example of some conversion analysis from Reactors HW early on in the semester.

That’s great, you might say.  It only works to take away grades if everyone is fully dedicated to learning the material.  What is the motivator to study?  How to differentiate who has actually studied and cares and who is just faking it?  Truth is, I’m not sure yet.  I’m still thinking about it.  Following the scientific method, a big part of solving the problem is pinpointing it.  I’m at that stage right now.

In the meantime, you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I’ll keep thinking.

Classes are finished and it’s a rush to the end.  My finals schedule looks ridiculous, of course, as has been the theme with all this semester’s classes.  It looks something distgusting like this:

Wednesday, December 9th: Physical Chemistry 11:00am – 1pm
Thursday, December 10th: Reactor Analysis 2:00pm – 4pm
Friday, December 11th: Molecular Biology 11:00am-1pm

Monday, December 14th: Nanotechnology 8:00am-10am (plus lab report due)
Tuesday, December 15th: Heat Transfer 8:00am-10am

The first week especially is going to be a nightmare.  There is so much stuff for MoBio that it CANNOT be left until post Reactors.  And Reactors is absolutely critical.  I am not in a good standing in that class.  I have not been doing well and I don’t really know why.  On tests, I think I get what I’m doing and I inevitably mess up something or get stuck or disaster strikes in some form anyway and I don’t do very well.  First test, I definitely just didn’t spend enough time studying.  I had another midterm that week and paid too much attention to one and not the other.  Completely my doing.  But the second one…I don’t know.  I thought I had it down.  and least much better than the first.  And I didn’t do relatively that much better.  Good news is the final counts for 40% of the grade so hopefully I can make up alot of ground.  But this requies a mass of studying.  And p-chem needs studying too and since it comes first I feel most obligated to pay attention to it first.  Hopefully I can get over than quickly.  Priority of attention needs to go: Reactors > MoBio> P-chem.   And then the next weekend is frantic studying for the other two.

In other mad dash news, I was initiated into Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honors society, Friday night.  As might be expected of such societies, such ceremonies are shrouded in secrecy, so I can’t say too much.  But, as also might be expected, it began with being blindfolded and lead to a secondary location with the initiates hanging onto each other’s shoulders dragging one another in line.  A mad dash, you might call it.  And, as expected, this involves lots of jostling and stepping on each other’s heels.  Which for me resulted in one lost shoe, on some unknown campus walkway.  I reached down and took off the other one so I wouldn’t lose it too and did the whole march barefoot.  When in the ceremony itself, the entire group got to see that I had lost my shoe and I had to shake hands with all the board and the faculty advisor wearing one shoe.  On the whole, rather entertaining.  (and the shoe was indeed recovered later by some other initiates, and really who would want to take one random black flat shoe anyway.  Not that there were many people about to snag it either)

Finally, I recently discovered this Iron and Wine song, called Boy with a Coin.  And I just really like it and am listening to it alot on repeat as I tend to do with newly discovered music that I like alot, so here are the lyrics.

Boy with a coin he found in the weeds
with bullets and pages of trade magazines
close to a car THAT flipped on the turn
when God left the ground to circle the world

Hey— Oh—-

Girl with a bird she found in the snow
that flew up her gown, and that’s how she knows
that God made her eyes for crying at birth
then left the ground to circle the earth

Hey— Oh—-

Boy with a coin he crammed in his jeans
then making a wish, and tossed in the sea
then walked to a town that all of us burned
when God left the ground to circle the world

Hey— Oh—-
Hey— Oh—-

And that’s all I have to say for now. Junior year was supposed to be (and it was) really hard in high school too, right?  Maybe it’s just a junior year theme.  I’m going to enter my study zone now…..”then God left the ground to circle the earth”