BEDUS Day 14: Chinese New Year's Eve Dinner!

As a testament to how quickly the time passes, it's been two weeks since I've begun my endeavor to blog every day until spring break. Today is the eve of Chinese New Year and to celebrate, Kelsey and I got takeout to try to get in all the food groups that are required to have a great year.

We've got a seafood curry noodle soup with fish and tofu (from the dining hall), for surplus in the coming year (we even left over a little fish cake!). We've got pork and duck in the buns and chicken in the dumplings. And we've got little round ma tuan's. Mmmm...yumyumyum.

Let it be known that Kelsey and I don't eat out often, but the beginning of the year is often full of celebration times. The food turned out to be much tastier than expected, as well.

Happy Chinese New Year and let's get ready for school tomorrow.

BEDUS Day 13: SNOW!

I am currently sitting on the couch wrapped in my periodic table blanket, drinking hot chocolate, and wearing Kelsey's marching band SAX hat because it makes me feel cozy. Cause it snowed all morning and the outside looks like it's coated in fluffy marshmallow whipped cream.

The side of the head belongs to him.

I haven't gotten to reading The Fault in Our Stars yet because I've been reading a bunch of other things that I need to read (like folktales and information about maps!), but I'm super excited to read it. Likely, it will be  spring break before I get a chance to read anything that doesn't have to with chemistry or children (though it can be argued that The Fault in Our Stars is young adult lit, but we actually have a surprising large amount of reading pagewise for the Literature for Young People class I'm taking...) so I will definitely be reviewing it sometime or another. 

I realize that the end of last night's blog was a bit scattered because by the time I finished it, it was well past 1:30 AM, I had just had my brain melted by Black Hawk Down, and the conversation in the common room had taken a very political turn which just made me want to go to sleep. I am much more rested today, having spent most of my time reading folktales and analysis of tricksters. I'm now going to spend some time reading about maps. Yay.

It's been a while since I've written a daily theme, I know (which is why I'm glad I'm not taking the class) but I haven't been quite inspired to do the creative writings these days even though I love blogging every day. I've been pretty busy figuring out my class schedule, figuring out my traveling schedule, and, in general, enjoying life. My first trip will be to San Francisco next weekend, which I'm super excited about, and I find myself surprised that I'm at this point in my semester. January 30 seemed so far away during winter break, but it's 2 weeks into Spring semester already and I feel like almost no time has passed at all. It's finally feeling like winter with all the snow that's fallen today and it always takes me 5 extra minutes to get ready in the morning with all the layers I have to put on, but I feel more than ever that I'm grasping at the last bits of college life. I'm not ready to let go. It seems like just yesterday that I was high strung and neurotic about Science Bowl and about classes and couldn't let myself relax even though I had already gotten into college, but now, I'm content just sitting on the couch with my boyfriend, blogging when I could/should (you decide!) be reading, and getting distracted by Youtube videos.

Ok signing off now. Got lots of emails to send that should have been sent a while ago. Wah!

BEDUS Day 12: Speaking Up and Reunion Dinners

I was a pretty shy kid. This is not really weird to people who have known me a really, really long time, but eventually, I learned that you just have to go for things if you want people to take you seriously. However, I do tend to hold back until I feel confident enough to assert myself (this may take weeks or months depending on the situation). Usually, I start to feel confident when I am no longer the newbie on the squad (Science Bowl, past jobs, etc.), but in class, I won't ever not be the newbie, since we're all in the same class. The point of this whole thing is that I finally got the courage to say something in my grad class today (which has so far intimidated the heck out of me because...grad students!). And it was awesome.

I learned that first year grad students are only a year older than me, despite our differences in looks (some of them seem quite a bit older and some of them probably are quite a bit older) and know only a bit more than I do. They've taken Synthetic Methods already, and I haven't, but I've got a bit of intuition worth sharing, I think. The only thing I'm not well-versed in is the terminology. What's the opposite of cycloaddition? Uhhh, is it backwards cycloaddition? Or cyclosubtraction? (It's actually retrocycloaddition, or reverse cycloaddition, which is dubious to me because the term "addition" is in the word...) So I learned some of that today and had a grand old time.

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I also had a reunion dinner with people in my freshman year Chinese class. Adam, Alex, Frank, Jack, Juliana, Ray, and Liang LaoShi. The dinner conversation oscillated between slightly awkward and very informative and was great because many of us hadn't kept in touch for a while. It was also quite scary to realize that it had been four years since we had been in class together, had laughed together, had made movies together. We look the same, and we talk the same, but we've grown up.

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And then my suite watched Black Hawk Down. War movies. GAH.

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Oh yeah. THIS

BEDUS Day 11: Meeting Celebrities

CELEBRITY #1:

Today, I got up at 7:30 AM to go have breakfast with Melanie Sanford. Melanie Sanford is basically a chemistry rock star. She graduated from Yale in 1996, got her PhD at Caltech, and now works at the University of Michigan working, among other things, to functionalize C-H bonds. She's the kind of person professors compare you to when writing your letters of recommendation. "On a scale from 1 to Melanie Sanford..." Oh yeah, and did I mention she won a McArthur Genius Award in 2011? That makes her pretty much, what's the word, a GENIUS.

I'm definitely not a morning person, but the brisk 16 degree gusts definitely helped wake me up as I walked over to breakfast. (Earmuffs, please!) However, even as my fingers were not quite warmed up from my jaunt over, my brain woke up straight away when Melanie started talking. She was so approachable and full of energy and enthusiasm and told story upon story of her undergrad life, marveling at how things don't change as much as people say they do. So many of her experiences mirrored ours and we gossiped about professors and courses and the fact that she was on the gymnastics team while here. She was definitely more inspiring than I was prepared for at 8 AM, and I was buzzed from meeting her even two hours later (after which I promptly took a much needed nap).

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CELEBRITY #2:

JE had a Master's Tea (where our Master invites a cool person to come and drink tea, or in my case, cider, with us and chat about life) featuring Andy Sandberg, JE '06, a producer in New York best known for his work on the revival of Broadway classic, Hair. I had gone to see Hair with Chris last winter (January 2011) and was pretty blown away by the colors and all the hair and all the...well... only slightly veiled nakedness. I fell in love with Claude a little bit and my favorite song was by far "Manchester, England" (not an obvious choice, I know, but I loved it). Also, going up on stage and dancing with the cast was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. So of course, I had to go to the Andy Sandberg Master's Tea.

Now I'll be honest: I think the work Andy's done is amazing and it takes a lot of cojones to go into the theater business right out of college (and awesomeness to get your own wikipedia page), but the Master's Tea fell flat a little bit for me because the girl in front of me had kind of a big head and half of her head was blocking half of Andy's head so my eyes adjusted and everything got weirdly spaced. It's like when you hold a toilet paper roll next to your open hand and look through the toilet paper roll with one eye while keeping the other eye open and it looks like your hand has a hole in it. Well, it looked like that girl's head had a hole in it so I could see Andy, but I couldn't concentrate terribly well. Also, his theater stories had an inside joke quality to them that I wasn't terribly fond of. I think it might have gone better had Melanie not been so awesome this morning.

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CELEBRITYS #3-?

I know I should always take advantage of opportunities as they come and I'm trying harder to, I really am! So today, when the call went out for the Fellow's Dinner, I said, oh why not? A bunch of graduate students and some of my classmates and I? Sounds like fun. There will be a better dinner than in the dining hall, so I signed up. And...they weren't graduate fellows. They were Fellow fellows, like, people who had been fellows for about 40 years fellows. And they were very animated, wonderful people with whom I had great conversations and shared pretty good wine. I met a chemist and his wife, a musician and her husband, a professor of Islamic culture, and other wonderful human beings. Definitely going to be looking into more Fellows Dinners in the future.

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I think the theme of this blog post is to go out and do things. Meet people, even if it's inconvenient or cuts into your you-time. More often than not, it'll be so worth it.

BEDUS Day 10: Words I'd Like to Use More Often

I'm taking this class called Treasures of Yale where we basically go around to different archives, museums, and libraries and look at the cool things that we've collected over the years. Last week, we looked at illuminated Arthurian manuscripts which are so much more impressive in person and absolutely gorgeous, and this week, we looked at a bunch of original printings of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I don't know much about Walt Whitman (even less before I took this class), and I had never really been drawn to his "mentor" Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I found it really cool that he spent his entire life revising the already published Leaves of Grass so that there were many different versions. Even the 1855 first edition had different printings from when type broke and he had to replace it or where he stopped in the middle of the printing to fix things.

We got to see 5 of the 1855 edition, all with different covers (one in paperback!), as well as many later editions, and a lot of the Whitman fans were hardcore physically affected by being in their proximity (I'll probably be like then we go to the Peabody Natural History Museum). We also read a lot of opinion pieces on the business of compiling archives and databases and how browsing databases could never replace the thrill of going through archives of material. Although I did find the discussion interesting, one of the things I took away from reading these pieces was a list of words I would like to incorporate more often into my writing. They're not particularly fancy words, and none of them are especially arcane, but they're just words that I feel like would beef up my paragraphs. So here's the list of 10:

• cacophony
• funnel (as a verb)
• pigeonhole
• inchoate
• cascading
• peculiarity
• dovetail
• jagged
• grotesque
• marshal

Of course, it's not so much the words as they way they are strung together and I've read a couple of phrases that I thought were well put together. However, I find that the words above have a very sonorous quality to them. Say them and the sound almost reflects what they mean.

Alright, time to sleep. More on life tomorrow!

BEDUS Day 9: I'm on Fire!

Today, I got a Kindle Fire in the mail courtesy of some good family friends of ours. Besides feeling super excited because the Kindle Fire is an awesome piece of tablet, I am a bit overcome with the generosity of those around me. I've never really had money to throw about, which has always caused a bit of disconnect with some of those around me at school. That's not to say I've missed out on anything (in fact, I have been quite lucky to have lived quite a wonderful life full of wonderful toys thus far), but I would have never particularly felt the need to get myself a tablet/iPad because it's one of those things that's a luxury, not a necessity. That being said, my first impressions of this thing is that IT'S REALLY FREAKING AWESOME. OK so it must be noted that it's neither a Kindle nor an iPad. It's 7 inches, black, sleek, with a matte back that I absolutely love since even though I gravitate towards smooth and shiny things, I am very afraid to scratch them in any way.

I'm pretty enamored by the way it reads because that's what I feel like I am going to use the Fire to do: read books, papers, news, etc. The screen is really clear and the font, font size, line spacing, and color are all adjustable so you can adjust to your comfort. It's quite intuitive, though when you read books and want to leave the book, it takes a little practice to be able to push right at the right spot to get the menu screen to come up. It's got great color, which makes reading scientific papers a joy because, what's a figure without color right? And to my surprise, the sound system is really good, and it's quite easy to import your music into Amazon Cloud.

What's not so easy is to get documents into Amazon Cloud. Basically, you have to email them into your Amazon inbox and then it takes a bit for the to actually download onto the Fire. It's not that much trouble, and if I was traveling, it's not like I would have internet to download stuff straight onto the tablet anyways, but it just means I have to be on my game and put all my documents onto the tablet before going off on a trip. I've already been experimenting with the relative ease of reading PDFs and it's a pretty good deal.

Another gripe that people have is the limitations of the Amazon App Store. There are a bunch of ways to get around this by downloading apps that let you download apps, but to be honest, this does not bother me too much. I'm not too interested in gaming on my tablet because touch screens never really do what you want them to do, and I've always found a paper calendar works much better than an electronic calendar. I do appreciate the weather app and the Pandora app, and the Tumblr app (and I really wish that there was a Blogger app), but I do have Blogger on my phone, so I think that will suffice for traveling purposes.

Woah I just realized that you can make notes in your books and look up definitions to things. THAT'S AWESOME.

Finally, there's this thing about customization. Do I wish I could change the gray bookcase background? Yeah, kinda. Is it a make or break? Not really. I do actually like the lock-screen background pictures, but I could see how some people would want to customize those too.

Oh yeah, and the people whining about the on/off switch being on the bottom? What. Ever.

In general, I find the Kindle Fire a great tablet and know that I am super lucky to have one. And I know that I'm going to be happy not lugging my laptop around campus just to read things. :D

BEDUS Day 8: Snow!

Kelsey and I went out to dinner tonight to celebrate some things belated and recent, and ended up going to Thai Taste, our favorite Thai restaurant in the area. We've been there quite a number of times (the first time we ate out together was at Thai Taste, though let it be known, it was not a date), and though we've explored other Thai restaurants around here, it remains the best one we've tried.

Tonight, we had yellow curry (we almost always get curry, but rarely yellow curry, which is interesting because I love yellow curry. I think I don't get yellow curry too often because it has baby corns, which I don't really like...) and drunken noodle (I don't like drunken noodle as much as pad thai, but I also don't like the pad thai at Thai Taste as much as the pad thai at Win's Thai 2 back home, so whenever I get pad thai at Thai Taste, I can't help but be sad that it's not from Win's Thai 2.) and, because we're being fancy today, siam rolls (which Kelsey calls spring rolls because they are). We demolished everything in about 15 minutes because we were hungry hungry hippos.

This blog isn't really an insightful one because pretty much all I did today was tidy up my room and eat and read, but the fact that Kelsey is awesome at chemistry kinda deserves a props and a food entry since I really can't associate Kelsey with anything other than good food. :D

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OH YEAH. IT'S SNOWING. Feels like winter.