The brain is on a forced march through mechanics and special relativity, but gosh, my mental energy's been exhausted on things like feelings. Icky feelings of dread spiked with a shard of hope.

Moving (Again) (For Real)

I've reached a sort of impasse with this blog. Sapped by school work and my "job blogs," I find tapping out anything more than 2 paragraphs here just too draining. It wouldn't quite be fit to call this a blog anymore -- it's a few sentences shy of a Twitterfeed. I find myself more interested in maintaining digital scrapbook than a blog these days, and Tumblr is the perfect medium. Should I ever find myself needing to write those long reflective entries as I did in the early days of this blog, I will occasionally return here. Otherwise, off to the Tumblelog.

So there's this guy here whom I've sort of rubbed elbows with. I wasn't very impressed when I met him, writing him off an arrogant jerk.

A couple days ago, I was reading the NYT essay about being Quaded (out of all things) that reviewed a couple of books about college admissions. The name of one student mentioned in the reviewed books seemed very familiar, so I had a sneaking suspicion it was him. A quick Google search affirmed the case.

Holy crap. He has earned very right to be an arrogant jerk.

Honest to Blog!

Did I seriously just quote Juno?

To the point - I've reread the past few entries and they've sounded all to negative. I'm a firm believer in the idea that you can't love something without hating it -- at least a little bit, at least some of the time. It's just that when I'm in rapturous states I tend to be running around doing things, but when I'm feeling not so rapturous, I pour my insecurities into the text.

Gotta bounce.

Seriously? Seriously?

I am not a big fan of the myopic politicos that run around college campuses. Usually though, I expect them to be students, not professors.

I am not a big fan of Hillary's fear-mongering Red Phone ad either. But this editorial, in the New York Times no less, is probably the most ill-intentioned, poorly researched, patently ridiculous piece I've read in a long time. (As someone who reads college newspapers, I already set my bar fairly low.) Patterson's editorial criticizes the Red Phone, out of all things wrong with it, as racist. His logic yields such gems as:

when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan

Oh boy, from Clinton to the KKK in less than one sentence. Major props. Professor Patterson, do you really believe what you're saying in this editorial? If so, I think "spending [your] life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery" has warped your sensibilities quite a bit. Leaving the ivory tower for some fresh air may help.

IvyGoss

I thought he was a huge tool this summer, and now my thoughts have only been further confirmed. That summer job taught be an invaluable lesson in how much I dislike corporate politics and ibanking-aspirants.

long long sigh.

This double coincidence of wants thing is terribly difficult.

New York, I Love You by LCD Soundsystem

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

Like a rat in a cage
Pulling minimum wage

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

New York, you're safer
And you're wasting my time

Our records all show
You are filthy but fine

But they shuttered your stores
When you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored
Once they'd run out of crime

New York, you're perfect
Don't please don't change a thing

Your mild billionaire mayor's
Now convinced he's a king

So the boring collect
I mean all disrespect

In the neighborhood bars
I'd once dreamt I would drink

New York, I Love You
But you're freaking me out

There's a ton of the twist
But we're fresh out of shout

Like a death in the hall
That you hear through your wall

New York, I Love You
But you're freaking me out

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

Like a death of the heart
Jesus, where do I start?

But you're still the one pool
Where I'd happily drown

And oh.. Take me off your mailing list
For kids that think it still exists
Yes, for those who think it still exists

Maybe I'm wrong
And maybe you're right
Maybe I'm wrong
And myabe you're right

Maybe you're right
Maybe I'm wrong
And just maybe you're right

And Oh..
Maybe mother told you true
And they're always be something there for you
And you'll never be alone

But maybe she's wrong
And maybe I'm right
And just maybe she's wrong

Maybe she's wrong
And maybe I'm right
And if so, is there?

Replace "New York" with "Harvard" and it's exactly how I feel about college right now. This whole summer apps business (PRISE, CARAT, OIP, HSS, internships, recommendations....ga ga ga ga) reminds me an awful lot of senior fall. Except worse -- at least I had some confidence in my college apps. Here, I such feel dumb and mediocre. I've reached a crest in my stress levels and a trough in my happiness ones, which, defying the physical properties of waves, do not cancel out but amplify into a mini nervous breakdown. Breath. It'll all be over in two weeks. And you'll always have Moscow!

Prince Rupert's Drop

Read this:

Prince Rupert's Drops are a glass curiosity created by dripping hot molten glass into cold water. The glass cools into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin, tail. The water rapidly cools the molten glass on the outside of the drop, while the inner portion of the drop remains significantly hotter. When the glass on the inside eventually cools, it contracts inside the already-solid outer part. This contraction sets up very large compressive stresses on the surface, while the interior of the glass is placed under tension. It can be said to be a kind of tempered glass.

The very high stress within the drop gives rise to unusual qualities, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, while the drops will disintegrate explosively if the tail end is even slightly damaged. When this happens, the large amount of potential energy stored in the drop's crystalline structure is released, causing fractures to propagate through the material at very high speed.

Watch this:


Read this:

It's brilliant. It's a tear you can stand a car
on, the hard eye of a chandelier
ready to break down and cry like a baby, a rare
birth, cooled before its time. It's an ear
of glass accidentally sown in the coldest of water,
that sheer drop, rock solid except for the tail
or neck which will snap like sugar, kick like a mortar
under the surefire touch of your fingernail.

It's the pearl in a will-o'-the-wisp, the lantern asleep
in the ice, the light of St Elmo's fire in your eyes.
It's the roulette burst of a necklace, the snap
of bones in an icicle's finger, the snip of your pliers
at the neck of my heart, the fingertip working the spot
which says 'you are here' until you are suddenly not.

- Jane Draycott

A Theory on Valentine's Day (Several Days Late)

Finding a significant other entails a double coincidence of wants. If this is difficult when you're trading apples and oranges, it surely becomes even more complicated when every person out there is in the worlds is his or her unique individual (so they say). So instead, we create "money," we quantify it. How many carats? How many dozens of roses? How much money in the bank account?

Deutsch.

If dinosaurs spoke a language, it would be German.

(Stolen from someone, but so damn true.)

Economics of Procrastination.

I've realized that procrastination makes perfectly rational economic sense. After all, we always discount the future.

Edit: Sadly, there is a flaw in my logic because we're maximizing utility, not leisure. Since utility is a function of consumption and labor, that means the optimal values of labor is not likely to be zero except in very very extreme circumstances that do not exist in real life. Darn.

Kurse

German Bab -- This class singularly responsible for my much improved sleeping habits. Not only do I have 9 am class every single day, but I have 8 am section on Monday mornings. Yay for sleeping early! More than half the class is grad/business/law students, many of whom can already read German, and somehow it didn't quite register with my brain until now that an intensive language course would be intense. Despite feeling stupid most of the time, I still really enjoy it.

Freshman Seminar: The Book from Gutenburg to the Internet -- A seminar. With Darnton. Fucking fantastic. It seems like a lot more work (readings, presentations, 20 pg research paper) than my last seminar, though I'm sure it will be worth it.

Econ 1011b - Does no one in the econ department speak English? One professor is Eastern European, and I can't decide whether he's a big Belorussian teddy bear or ex-KGD operative. The other is French, daffy in a particularly Parisian way. I can imagine him running around l'école Normale Superiore gesticulating wildly and shouting, "Les économiques! Les économiques!" His accent is so thick that I actually understand him better if I think about what he says in French rather than English. Apparently, they also don't really talk to each other because they have no idea what the other one is doing. Grrr. My TF is....just no. All he does is copy the lecture notes or the textbook on the blackboard. I still haven't quite figured out why I'm taking this class - as a badge of honor?

MCB 80 - I hope this class is easy. I hope this class is easy. I hope this class is easy. I hope this class is easy. Yet something tells me neurobiology will not be easy.

Gosh are we full of ourselves.

From The Harvard Crimson, February 8, 2008. "Clinton, McCain Carry Primaries." Front page, lead story.

Super Tuesday was not kind to Harvard graduates.

The presidential ambitions of former Mass. Gov. and dual Harvard degree holder Mitt Romney were hanging by a thread early this morning after his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Senator John McCain of Arizona, racked up big wins in nominating contests on both coasts.

In the race for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York edged Illinois Senator and Law School alumnus Barack Obama in the crucial northeastern states of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, while also capturing the biggest prize of all: California.

(Meta)physics

"Fate is less a force of nature than a Rube Goldberg device, an endless chain of tricky coincidences whose final result is utterly beyond prediction."

January 2008 Playlist

A collection of songs I especially like this past month. The order is arbitrary, determined only by the date I first became addicted to a particular song.

A Complete List of New York Activites in Incomplete Sentences

Tues, Jan 22
-Took the Greyhound bus from South Station. Got 25 cent rings from rest stop vending machine. Mine was pretty spiffy. Arrived in Port Authority. Got to NYU.
-Had surprisingly good, cheap sushi. I'm torn between whether the sushi restaurant had the best or worst marketing scheme ever. Basically, there were two price columns on the menu - "regular" and 50% off. Except the sushi was always 50% off...so it was the regular price.

Wed, Jan 23
-Went to Strand bookstore.
-Ate at Hayden (sp?), NYU's amazing all-organic, locally grown foods dining hall. AMAZING!
-Canal Street - Went crazy about scarves but only bought two pashminas. Followed shady shopkeepers through hidden back doors and cramped rooms to look at designer knockoffs. Decided I had horrible taste in purses and should just not buy anything.
-"Pretty ladies. Fake ID?"
-Watched a Strasberg production of The Glass Menagerie - AMAZING!

Thu, Jan 24
-Shopping in the East Village (?): Magnolia's Bakery for cupcakes, matching quintuplet Marc Jacob's sentences that say I Love You when you spin them.
-Screaming Mimi's vintage shop. $60 belts -- that's all I have to say.
-Walking about East Village being very very cold.
-Ate at Lucky Cheng's, a drag Chinese restaurant. It was $40 (ewww) and the food was bad. So bad it made be throw up. (See below). The erotic cakes were not erotic at all. The drag queens were sexy .
-Threw up on the cab ride in a Marc Jacobs paper bag.
-Rent at the Nederlander. Felt queasy the whole time. Blergh.
-Went back to NYU to collect stuff. Threw up again.
-Arrived at San Carlos Hotel -- boootiful hotel room. Threw up again in the middle of the night to celebrate.

Fri, Jan 25
-Read The Blind Assassin as the rest of the gang hit up Canal Street. Ogled their purchases when they returned. Fell in love with Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan should just get together and make literary metababies.
-MOMA. love love. Bought colored-flame candles. Wished I could have seen more.
-$2.50 falafel as a Greek cafe/hookah joint. The guy making our sandwiches was charmingly flirtatious and the falafel was the tastiest I've had. Definitely the meal with the highest yumminess to dollar ratio.
-Max Brenner's: Chocolate by the Bald Man. I don't care if this place is a tourist trap okay? I don't care if we had to wait nearly 40 min for a table. I don't care that the chocolate wasn't even that great. The fondue was that cool.

Sat, Jan 26
-Raped my bank account.
-Lincoln Center. Browsed the Hansel and Gretel exhibit while taking an obscene number of obscene pictures. Counted the number of Jewish names in Lincoln Center's benefactors. (A lot.) Found Carl Pforzheimer -- yes our Pforzheimer!
-New York City Ballet - Four by Four. A perfectly chose quartet of ballet pieces: one Balachine, one meditative modern ballet, one featuring only male dancers, and one comedic musical about sailors picking up girls at a bar. Even the fourth ring tickets were great, and we were on the fourth floor balcony.
-Central Park
-Alice's Tea Cup. Yummy scones that come with fresh cream and jam. Yummy tea. Yummy decor. Not so yummy albacore sandwich.

Sun, Jan 27
-The Met - saw the Egyptian temple, the Costume Institute (fashion may be frivolous but couture is definitely art!), clock exhibit....
-Jamba Juice
-Bus ride hoooooome.

The Prurient Interests of the French

Last night was serious studying crunch time as I ploughed my way through my 407 page VES 72: Sound Cinema sourcebook. Actually, it's 914 pages because the readings all come from books and it's copied two book pages per sourcebook page. Plus I had to reread through a comprehensive 788 page film history textbook, plus Chion's Audio-Vision, plus a book on The Blue Angel, plus a book on Ivan the Terrible, plus lecture notes, plus section notes. Whew. I can't believe I made it through all that.

This passage from Crisp's analysis of 1960s French cinema really cracked me up. It talks about the emergence of the French New Wave as part of the phenomenon in cinema's search for new audiences:

If the art-film, its existence validated by the middle-class intelligentsia, is the most widely acclaimed of these phenomena, it was by no means the most significant, numerically--the rise of pornography dominates French production statistics of the sixties.

I've always thought that there should be a course on the cultural, social, and economics implications of pornography.

Paper Coincidences.

I've spent the past few days writing a torturous research paper on Hiroshima mon amour. I finally turned it today and quite frankly, I think it's horrible. Hopefully my TF will not agree.

On a related note, a strange thing happened at breakfast today. I had dragged myself up for a early breakfast (8 am!) and sat down at Annenberg with Didaph and a few of their friends. During the breakfast chit chat, Dianne asked me to guess what movie they had watched recently. I honestly had no idea where to start guessing, and the first movie that popped into my head was the one I had spent all night writing about -- Hiroshima mon amour. It struck me as obviously wrong -- no one watches that movie for fun -- so I guessed some sillier things instead.

But one of Didaph's friends guessed , in a half-joking manner, "Hiroshima mon amour." I don't know him. He's not in my film class. Yet for somerandom, coincidental reason, he guessed that film. He didn't even watch it recently. (I think.) Folle a Annenberg. What a strange cosmic coincidence.

Addendum: A few minutes later, someone else mentioned he was writing an expos paper on music downloading and copyright. I too wrote a paper on that. My conclusion from these twenty minutes of breakfast conversation: I've written too many papers this term.

reading period, period.

I have finals in 6 days. What am I stressing about? Summer plans.
In January.
Oh Harvard.

1234 Tell me that you love me more

...because I sure hate your music video. To my utmost horror, Feist's 1234 music video is not only playing nonstop in Apple's iPod nano ads but up for a Grammy.

In it's defense, someone called it, "Busby Berkeley gone indie."

Just because Busby Berkeley is taught in film classes doesn't mean he has good taste.

I'd call it Busby Berkeley gone 80s. Which is a superexplosion of tackiness.

Two wrongs don't make a right

...but three wrongs do.

three left turns = right turn