packing

I love packing. Ok so I know I'm not leaving for another week but I pulled my backpack out of the attic. That thing is awesome. There are so many pockets. And I put together all the clothes I'm going to bring which is
1 pair of pants
2 skirts (possibly 3 if the one I ordered from American Apparel comes in)
1 button down shirt
4 or 5 t shirts
1 long sleeve shirt
2 tank tops
1 pair of running shorts
pajamas (shorts and t shirt)
appropriate underwear and socks

All of that fits into about a third of my backpack and then I used these cool compression bags that micheal gave me and it condensed to about the size of a football. Which makes me so happy cause now I have the rest of the space to bring stuff for Stoops and Brett. And of course i have other stuff to pack for myself like toothpaste and immodium and bandanas and flashlights and lots of drugs and first aid stuff and a guidebook. But that won't take up much space cause i have tons of travel sized stuff. So I can bring the two of them everything I can think of like suduko and beef jerkey and hand sanitizer and tuna fish and presents.

I'm still trying to figure out whether i can get the whole bag as a carry on cause it can squish to the right size but not if i fill it up and then i wouldn't be able to bring my leatherman or silverwear. Such a logistics problem. Which is probably why i get so excited about planning for it. =)

yay christmas!

It's been a really nice couple of days chilling with family and catching up with friends. I really love Christmas. I wasn't ready for it when school ended, mostly because I spent Wednesday climbing and buying porn. Climbing was amazing though. Chelsea piers is amazing. If i ever have money, I'm totally getting a membership. Yeah so I totally wasn't ready for the holiday but then friday morning my dada nd I tore through the mall and get basically everything we could ever need. The only thing that threw me for a loop was that Dan sent me a present so now i need to think of somehting for him. Damn boys.

Yesterday I got to hang out with karen for a while and then my family went to Mass. I never wanted to be a Christmas/Easter catholic but that's what i am at this point. I still enjoy the ceremony though and I like being there with my brothers cause we start singing "jeramiah was a bullfrog" when the choir cues up Joy to the World. And we poke each other. Something about being at church makes us act like we're 10.

Me and Mikey made chocolate mousse last night that came out really well. Usually we make creme brulee but we decided to branch out. Then we get to open one present christmas eve so mine turned out to be an iHome which is pretty sweet. Mikey and E opened the one i got them which was a mini billiard table and a back massager. And it was great; my family just sat around in the living room playing with the billiard table and chatting and listening to my ipod. Even eric who usually runs away from family stuff.

This morning we were pretty slow getting out of bed. Me and Mikey finally had to go up to erics room and poke him with sticks (yardsticks) to make sure he wasn't dead and get him downstairs. Christmas loses some of the excitement as you get older. Most of my presents were extremely functional. Santa even left a bag of over the counter drugs from the medicine counter in my stocking. We're talking sexy stuff like imodium and band aids. But it did get a climbing harness and some nice clothes which i'm excited about and my mom will probably take me shopping at some point.

Since then, I've done nothing except eat the left over cheese and crackers from breakfast and watch clerks I and II in a row. Eric got Ninja Turtles I, II, and III so at some point we'll probably fire those up.

So yeah, break is awesome. I saw O Malley a couple of times before he went off to Germany, I saw Sarah a couple times which is great and I'll get plenty of Karen. We'll head out to pittsberg thursday to see the family and all the little ones (my dad and I had to buy presents for 11 children under the age of 7). I am so chill and I can't wait to start packing for uganda.

I'm DONE!.... oh wait...

I'm ALMOST done. I'm done with the hardest part. I took three finals in the last two days and i have to say, i was mostly prepared for everything; none of them were nearly as bad as i was expecting. And I did study hard. Linear, I worked at it for 6 or 7 hour and then lab i worked on the rest of the night. Controls I wasn't so hard core about cause i prefered to hang out with Aron. Especially since he was making me dinner. =)

Even with that distraction, the six of us (meaning my main group of mech E friends who I do everything with) went over basically everything that ended up being on the test in the 5 hours we did spend. Though we have a bad habit of lapsing into hypothetical questions when we get tired of studying. They start with questions like "if this exam is worth 40% of our grade and there are 6 questions and I have a 88, how many questions can i mess up" and then they progress to questions like "if I gave you $20, would you take a shot of tequila a half hour before the test?" or "i would pay you whatever you want if you shit in a blue book and then stapled it up and handed it in" (not my hypothetical) Which of course at 1 in the morning when we're trying to comprehend frequency response for the worst class ever is hysterical.

Yeah so I still don't know when I'm going home tomorrow. It depends on when I finish my take home and pack. Which won't happen until after I go ice skating and climbing. And possibly christmas shopping if i can figure out what do get my dumb brothers.

Oh man. I did more studying in the last 12 hours than i think i've done in weeks. Seriously, i studyed linear for 7 hours straight. And then studyed lab until now. Though part of that was spent exchanging back rubs for information. "I'll give you a 10 minute massage if you give me one for 8 minute PLUS a 5 minute lecture on natural convection on heat fins" I think I won cause in every exchange i got a back rub and some notes. =) Yes, my friends are huge nerds. They're probably over there right now talking about the effect of Mach numbers on the beta angle while listening to christmas music and smoking an old man pipe.

By 4 o clock tomorrow I'll be done with 2 finals with one Wednesday morning and then a take home that will probably take me another hour to kill. Not so bad. I can't wait til wednesday afternoon and all my platonic dates. Climbing at chelsea piers should be amazing. The pictures of the wall were so cool and after climbing all year at a little tiny place, it'll be nice to get some decent height. Hopefully i'll have enough energy for ice skating after.

Ok, need to finish my lab notebook and double check my cheat sheets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?ref=magazine

This article is amazing, first because what it suggests (rich people give away a certain amount of their money) is both so logical and so constraversial and second because of this line:

"Finally, the remainder of the nation’s top 10 percent earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average of $132,000. There are nearly 13 million in this group. If they gave the traditional tithe — 10 percent of their income, or an average of $13,200 each — this would yield about $171 billion and leave them a minimum of $83,000."

That blows my mind. Sometimes I forget how lucky I am. A minimum of 92,000 a year puts you in the top 10 percent earners? I'm starting with close to 2/3rds of that and if I do well and work hard, I could easily be there before I'm 30. Hell, its technically possible for me to get there in 5 years, given a good economy and smart choices. And I'm not unusual at columbia, at least in my engineering friends. The people who want to be there will get there pretty quickly. When this author is talking about "the rich," he's talking about us. That's a generalization of course. People make their own choices, but stuff like that reminds me that I really am starting on 3rd base.

procrastinating

Yeah I really don't like finite element analysis. I don't understand what's going on, so i'll just blog instead.

So if you happen to have met someone who seems interested in you and you're starting to hang out with this brand new person and they happen to ask you why you're still single, is it ever a good idea to say "well, funny you should ask. i may or may not be madly in love with a guy i haven't seen for almost a year. honestly at this point i don't know. ask me again in january and maybe i'll have a better answer."

yeah, i didn't think so. i don't think it will be an issue. and by that i mean, i'll pretend its not an issue for another month or so and then see how i feel. at some point, i just know i'm going to get torn apart.

I need to rant for a minute..... I HATE PEOPLE CHEATING!!!!

We have a final that's take home and the teacher gave it to us in a sealed envelope that said, "open book, open notes but do it alone and do it in one sitting, 150 minutes." Maybe those are silly instructions for a take home, but that's not the point. The point is that I was in the CAD lab yesterday and there were 4 or 5 people sitting there discussing problems. I was like "you guys aren't doing it in 2 hours?" and they said "no its too hard. i've been working on it for 2 days. everyone's going to cheat so it doesn't matter." I was just like "I'm not going to cheat. fuck you." and I didn't. I sat down yesterday and worked on it for 150 minutes, sealed it back up, and crossed that class off the list.

I think that's one of the worst things about SEAS, how much cheating goes on and how no one seems to give a damn. At Barnard, you sign the honor coade and if you cheat its a big fucking deal. In the mech e department at least, people bring notes into finals, stare at their neighbor's test, and do take homes together and some how they think its ok. It's not!

After writing this, I was trying to figure out whether I'm a hypocrit. I have collaborated on homework, asked people questions on the final project last semester (which might have been questionable) and I plan to copy people's note for my lab notebook cause I haven't been taking data. Yeah I don't think any of is the same as blatently cheating on a final exam. Fuckers. It makes me want to hit them for being terrible people.

I have such a ridiculous amount of things to do for school in terms of finishing take homes and studying for finals and finishing up a couple of labs. I'm totally not helping myself by continuing to schedule fun things in there. Like tomorrow I'm supposed to go climbing and then go to a team dinner and I have a review session which means that if I do all that, I only have from 9-3 to get any work done. Yes theoretically I could not go climbing. But I just read an article in the new york times about how, while people regret the time they spent playing when they were supposed to be working a week after the fact, five years after the fact they regret that they didn't play more. In other words, no one looks back on college and says "damn i shouldn't have gone out that night. I could have pulled the A instead of the B+" but people do say "damn why didn't i party it up more when it was socially acceptable? why did i miss that concert or that date to take a test that honestly doesn't matter anymore?" Of course that's only true up until a point. At some point it does start to effect the rest of your life. I mean, I kind of wish my grades were better so I could have had more job choices. But for the most part, I don't think that's because of my lack of work ethic.

So yes, I'm rationalizing.... =)

Wooohooo! Just finished my last class of my last fall semester. Not that that means I'm actually done with school or anything; far from it. But it is one step closer (to the edge, and I'm about to break...sorry, free association =)) Yeah so my countdown list is getting shorter which is excellent.

2 labs -one just correct a small part, one just write the intro
1 lab notebook- which I haven't been keeping all semester so I have a lot of data to invent
2 take home finals- I'd like those done by the end of the week
3 real finals- I have to study for all of them but only one should be ridiculously hard

That's not so many things. It'll suck a little bit since I'm pretty unfocused right now, but that's alright. I want to finish everything but the finals by the end of the day today. And we're having a party tomorrow! I hope its as good as last time only longer though I'm a little skeptical. So many people have said that they might come so its hard to know whether there wil be a real party or only 10 of us standing around.

This weekend was a lot of fun though almost entirely unproductive. Saturday my cousins came into the city and I went down to Bryant park to hang out. They were so ridiculous. Jesse hasn't been to NY since he was 14 (he's around 35 now) and all of the sudden he decides that he wants to take a bus tour from the middle of pennsylvania to new york with his wife and two young daughters for the day. It didn't sound fun to me at all; all they did was hang around places like Macy's on 34th and Rockefeller and 5th Ave. On a Saturday. During Christmas season. Do you have any idea how crowded that is? And it was cold out. I told them they should come back for a weekend and I'd show them around places that don't suck.

That night was also pretty cool. I went to a party that ended up being a ton of grad students including the TAs for two of my classes, but the people were all really interesting (investment analysts, rocket scientists, domanatrix....) and its the first college party i've been to that's served seared tuna. and salmon. and all kind of delicious things. I think it was worth missing a showing of wizard people for.

I am a horrible person. No that's not true. I'm a pretty average person, but I do things that I know I shouldn't because I have a very loose sense of morals based on nothing besidse a gut feeling here and there. Most of the time I'm perfectly fine with liberal relativism ("if it feels good and it doesn't hurt anyone, go for it"), but sometimes I just want someone to tell me "this is not alright, this is wrong." But no one ever will, at least not the people I like. Only iconoclasts and religious people will give me that kind of answer. Everyone else will say something like "well that depends." Most of the time I agree with that; circumstances in my opinion have a huge influence on morality. Only violent crimes are universally condemned and even some of those not universally. Killing people is wrong unless you're in a war and then its alright. Ok, clearly I'm not that terrible a person and I'm being melodramatic. But it would be nice to have a solid code of ethics sometimes besides the one in my own little head. But since that's not going to happen (unless I join a cult) I'll just have to cultivate my conscience.

So much of my life is so uninteresting. I don't feel particularly strongly about anything except the future. What's going on right this minute doesn't matter to me. Yes, I know I'll finish the assignment I'm working on, probably in the next hour. But I don't really care. I'm not worried about a deadline or excited to learn about fluid movement past submerged cylinders. I'll go for a run today if I finish in time but I don't really care about that right now either, though usually it makes me happy. Yesterday's scrimmage was fun but not life changing. I'm sitting in front of my computer trying to summon up some kind of strong emotion about something, anything that's going on in my life right now and there's nothing. It's a very empty feeling, like I've been drained dry and there's nothing left.

so weird

This weekend was so freakin strange, I still haven't gotten my head around it. No one was acting normal including me. Most of it was pretty harmless, but still. Yeah, I don't really feel like being specific. Saturday night especially kept surprising me. Every time I thought things had settled down, something else came up right up until the moment I crawled into bed and locked the door cause I was having flashbacks to a time in France that I haven't thought about in years. That was scary.

Sunday had the potential to be more normal; all I did was play soccer and do homework, but I'm pretty sure the guys I was playing soccer with were the same group of grad students that tracy and turtle used to hit on in 1020 two years ago. I realized it in the middle of the game when their names started to sound eerily familiar. I need to talk to tracy cause that would be so weird.

Yeah, this post doesn't make much sense. Oh well. My weekend didn't make much sense.

weekends

So apparently when I really don't want to do work, I go out two nights in a row with a third planned, sleep til noon and then waste the rest of the day. Go me. Both nights out were fun though which is a little unusual for me. Thursday, we went to lion's head after the co ed scrimmage which was really fun though I got there late cause I went to this event on microfinance.

As a side bar... microfinance is freakin awesome. It was this guy from Deutche bank explaining what he does and it sounds like all other kinds of banking except the results actually help people. I really liked how he was talking about how they charge the microfinance institutions in developing countries interest because a) it makes the handle the money more responsabily and b) Deautche bank gets the money they lend from coorperations who lend it to them because they're promised a certain return. So this guys basically acts as a liaison between the coorperate world and the philanthropic world and he speaks both languages. He goes to the coorperations and talks about sound investments and payment schedules and then he goes to the developing world and figures out what groups of small business owners or enterpeneurs are best suited to help their community. It sounds amazing.

Anyway after the scrimmage, people went to lion's head as usual but some how we lost the younger crowd. They might have gotten turned away while we were eating pizza. So it was just a few people, chilling and drinking good beer. I enjoyed.

Last night I went downtown after a lot of obsessing about what to wear. One of the companies that I got an offer from was having an party after their christmas party at some fancy lounge where you had to give the bouncer a password and then he showed you into the basement. It was cool. Tons of free alcohol and I got to meet a lot of potential future colleages.

Then I walked from 9th Ave to Ave B in the highest heels I own (ouch) to meet Elizabeth at one of her friend's b day parties. That was alright but the people weren't that interesting. One guy kept trying to talk to us about mechanical engineering except he didn't know anything. One guy started making sweeping statements about how "in the past hundred years, I feel like science and art and literature have all hit a paradox, like they've all become self referencing and now they can't go forward." Elizabeth is too much of a science person to even know how much of that statement is bullshit, so I was sitting there asking things like "what does that mean?" That's my least favorite part about liberal arts classes; the all encompassing statements that don't mean anything. Yeah, I kind of get what he was trying to say. I can think of a couple books and art forms that have started referring to themselves and are the worst for it but its not everything, its not necessarily a recent thing and how the hell is science self referencing?