influx

2007-11-09T15:07:00.001-05:00

The Westin in Detroit is a very nice hotel. Which is good since I'm working from it today. Instead of flying home this weekend, Aron is flying out to Detroit to hang out with me. He's got a friend in Ann Arbor so we're staying with his friend for the weekend which should be fun. It's nice that I don't have to get on a plane this weekend but it kind of sucks that i'll be out of New York for 2 weeks straight. But then Thanksgiving week I don't have to travel which should be awesome. If I stay in NY and don't go home to Boston early, it will be the first Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I've been in the city since the middle of August. That just blows my mind. I will have traveled every week for the last three months without a single week of reprieve. And some people do this for years and years, leaving behind families every week. I can't imagine.

My job itself is fine. If I were doing it in New York, I would be happy (or at least unhappy about something else). But this constant feeling of displacement is just too much. I'm going to give it a year (until next July) and then re-assess. I'll hope for a local project. Last night i was having the beginnings of a quarter life crisis, thinking about what I want to do with my life, where I want to live and work. And I just don't know. My brain traveled from city to city, industry to industry without settling on anything. I don't know what I want to do or where I want to be. I don't know how much energy I want to put into work as opposed to friends and other priorities. I don't know how important money is to me.

One of the directors on the project, his wife just had a baby a couple months ago, and she's unhappy about going back to work. And he was talking about how they both feel trapped in jobs they don't love because there are so few positions that will pay them enough to keep them at the life style they enjoy and pay their expenses. This is a guy who probably makes 300-400,000 a year and his wife is probably at 100-200,000. How do you get to that point where you need 500,000 to support your lifestyle? I guess you start by living in New York. I don't want that trap. I want to make enough to save. But at the same time, it's hard to resist. If I just make anotther 5,000, 10,000, 20,000..... And then where does it end? There's always someone higher up.

I think I could be good at consulting in the right situation. I'm pretty good now but not amazing. But that's not because I'm doing bad work. In a large part, it's because I don't fit in with the team. They are all guys, 10 guys, and they communicate by talking about football, basketball, baseball. They follow teams and compare fantasy draft picks and talk about players. It's either sports or work talk almost all the time. When we get on interesting topics like politics or religion or business or the news, I do fine but I feel excluded from almost all of the small talk that goes on and I really think it works against me. If I stay in this industry (manufacturing) I'm going to have to pick a fantasy football team. Which is too bad because I like manufacturing, especially operations.

It sucks too because my job has become almost the only thing in my life. I have very little going on outside of it. I feel narrow and boring 90% of the time. I don't want to live like this forever.

roller coaster

2007-11-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

My moods follow a 7 day cycle.

Monday: relaxed, back on the road, enjoying chatting with work people
Tuesday: starting to get stressed out, get some sleep
Wednesday: starting to get tired and crabby, sleep deprived, irritable, anxious
Thursday: ridiculously happy to be going home in the evening, more and more anxious as my flight get delayed, wound tighter and tighter until the littlest thing (long cab line at the airport, being forced to check a bag) set me totally over the edge
Thursday night: totally crazy and stressed out
Friday: in the office, don't do much work, start to calm down
Saturday: happy and relaxed
Sunday: starting to tense up with the anticipation for doing it all over again

It's not fun. I have not been able to handle stress well at all. By Thursday I'm just totally out of control and the weekend isn't long enough to counteract that. It's hard to focus on anything, I start forgetting things, I can't stay at a task for very long, I lose things. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind.

This week I'm going to do better. I'm going to sleep and stop worrying. I have to. I'm not being healthy right now.

2007-10-23T23:31:00.000-04:00

Consultant humor is weird. All I can say is that my team cracks me up and absolutely none of the jokes translate. They usually involve sound effects, economic references, and a constant understanding that the work we're doing here is out of control and ridiculous.

This week is better than last week. Last week was hell, professionally and personally. And I forgot my mother's birthday. Not even a glimmer of a memory til my parents called me over the weekend cause they hadn't heard from me in days. I had no less than three meltdowns (probably more), one involving the fact that the airline made me check my carry on luggage. Interestingly enough, I didn't have a meltdown when my flight on Monday was delayed for 5 hours. Anyway, this week is better, so far. There's a lot of big shots coming down to nc tomorrow so there's a pretty strong possibility that it will get tough.

And some how, I find myself writing bad poetry late at night.

work and play

2007-10-14T11:12:00.000-04:00

I wonder if everyone is always stressed by work no matter what they do or who they are. I am. Not because my job is particularly hard. I mean it keeps me busy and I have to think a lot. But the stress comes from the amount of uncertainty I go through in any given week. That's mostly specific to my project. The client doesn't like us (his boss pushed us on him) and is trying to find ways to make us look bad. Unfortunately for us, the project has been mismanaged and that's not hard to do. Most of that doesn't get down to my level. The higher up people have to deal with the consequences of that.

But what does get to me is that on any given week, i don't know what part of the project I'm going to focus on and it frequently changes. On any given week, I don't know where I'll be traveling to the next week. And I don't know when the project will end because none of us do. Part of the project is scheduled to end Nov. 2nd but me and one other person we're supposed to stay til Dec. 15th. But now that's unclear. I'm comfortable with a degree of uncertainty but I have to say that constant changes of direction and a total lack of control over my environment does stress me out. I come home on weekends feeling drained and empty.

There's also not a lot of job security at my company. People get fired or counseled out pretty regularly. So if I'm on a couple of bad projects or rub a couple of people wrong, that's it, i'll have to start polishing up my resume. I think I'm doing ok but combine that with the fact that I have to spend 12-14 hours a day with the people I work with and it means that when I'm on the road, I always have to be on. Which is also tiring.

Next week I have to go to Detroit. I hate being in Detroit because it's cold, the building we work in is a dump, the Sheraton doesn't get Comedy Central, the team there works much longer hours and then goes straight to dinner so I can't run in the evening, it's dark in the morning so I can't run then and there's no really nice Y to swim at like there is in North Carolina. It's those little things that can make me hate an entire city.

One random North Carolina story..... we had dinner one night at a place called the Steak Barn where the parking lot was full of pick up trucks. I was in the back seat yelling "veto!" but the guys didn't listen to me. Stupid guys. So four of us, me, my manager, and the two associates, sit down and the food is awful. It's terrible. But THEN, the waitress comes over and starts talking. My manager is Indian. He was born in the US and he lives in Ohio but he is of Indian decent.

So, this waitress starts talking, "where are you from?" she asks him. He tries to say Ohio, but she won't have that, "No, where are you FROM?" He concedes and says India. "Oh," she starts, "We have Indian people here. They move down and open convenience stores in the ghetto. They make so much money selling fried chicken to black people. Those poor people love their fried chicken. The Indians make more money than KFC. And they sell cigarettes one at a time, because you know poor people can't afford the whole pack. But those Indians aren't very nice to their wives are they? I know one that got mad at his wife and made her wear that outfit. Why do they do that?"

The worst part about all that racism was that she thought she was being really welcoming and friendly. It was totally and utterly shameless. She just kept talking about the Indians in the ghetto and the time she lived in the big city of Durham. I don't know what she would have said if she had found out that the associates were both Jewish or if my director (who is black) had been there. It was ridiculous. Because of that and because our project is going so badly we went from there to the Applebees and got hammered.

I guess this post was all work and no play. My weekends aren't very exciting if things go according to plan. When I come home I don't want to do anything. Last weekend was kind of exciting I guess. I flew home to Boston and hung out with my mom and then came down to the city where my dad and my brother were visiting. That was fun.

Hampton Inn

2007-10-01T22:34:00.000-04:00

I have to say I'm pretty impressed by the Hampton Inn. Free breakfast, cookies at night, and today they upgraded me to a suite with a huge ass whirlpool in the middle of the bedroom. Seriously this suite is bigger than my apartment. This week looks like it's going to be a little calmer than last week mostly because the very highest up guys don't seem to be around.

This weekend did not feel long enough. Mostly because Friday was so long and I didn't sleep enough. I was just trying to do too much. I didn't relax enough. I just don't feel right yet. I'm going swimming tomorrow morning. 6 15. Gross.

new apartment

2007-09-22T20:55:00.000-04:00

I realized that I haven't posted about the fact that I'm in a new place. I am! Me and Leora moved into a 1 BR convertible on 90th between Columbus and Central Park West. In the last month, we had the wall put in so that it became a 2 BR and we moved stuff in lots of stages. First a little of my stuff, then all of her stuff including 9 sections of a sectional couch (we got rid of 5 of those), and then my parents came down last weekend or the weekend before with a mini van full of furniture, including an 8 ft tall IKEA wardrobe to be my closet and dresser all in one.

It was pretty intense moving and putting together furniture, but it seriously looks awesome now. The living room is a good size and it looks so much like home. Couch, chair, bookshelf, end table, lamp, dining room table and chairs... it looks really good. My mom loves shopping at the salvation army and she picked up some great stuff for me. She had a week at work where she had to be there but she didn't have any appointments, and I swear she spent the whole time on the IKEA website. I'd get random messages ("Nicki, 20 by 30 rolling kitchen cart. Call your mother" ), but I couldn't have done it without her. I think leora and i are going to finish hanging pictures this weekend. My room is small but now that the furniture is in place it looks good too. It's really starting to feel like an honest to goodness, grown up home, that I look forward to getting back to. I'm still getting used to the kosher kitchen, but I love the space and I love having all of Leora's books here.

2007-09-22T19:35:00.000-04:00

I was reading Mara's blog about the school v real world debate, and right now, my vote is strongly with the real world. Yes traveling is hard and I work a lot of hours, but I feel like my life has simplified. Some of that is bad- I hang out with much fewer of my friends and much less frequently. But some of it is really relaxing- I have very little to actively worry about. I have to do good work on the job; I have to make time to run; I have to stay as connected as I can to my friends and family. My efforts are so much more focused. It's especially nice compared to when I was looking for apartments.

But I remember school as a time of fractured attention and constantly being pulled in different directions. Always having something I should be doing or some where I should be, either socially or academically. Where I am right now, I have enough money that I don't have to worry about it and I have a finite and known set of demands from one sources (work) rather than a million different classes and projects. I feel more streamline. I wouldn't say I'm doing well on the keeping in touch with people thing, but it's a work in progress.

I have a feeling that from now on, I'm never going to have the time to post anything very often. I can say I'll post once a week or once every two weeks. But when you're on the road and with people all the time, it's hard to carve out time.

I mean, this past week, I went to Chicago last Sunday and got back yesterday. I had training there from Tuesday through Friday and I went early to hang out with Aron (who was in Chicago for a wedding) and meet some of his friends. And it was fun. But I was so ready to be back in my own little apartment in my own big city. The week before that I was outside Detroit at a different site for the same project, but with entirely different people. Is it bad that I'm really looking forward to being back in familiar North Carolina with the 3 guys I'm used to working with?

Training was intense. They take you through a sample case from proposal to completion in 3 days, so you learn stuff in workshops but then you have to immediately do it. I think it's a great model for a training, but they gave us no personal time at all. We went all day (8-6) and then straight to dinner or happy hour. I only ran once in 6 days. I also had regular work that I needed to be doing, so a couple nights I was up late trying to finish stuff.

Since I got home this weekend has been awesome, just what I needed. Aron and I had a rough couple weeks when I first started traveling. There was two or three weekends in a row where we wasted the little time we did have together with stupid fights. But I feel like we're starting to get the routine down. Last night I got in early (the greatest gift that the airlines can give to anyone), and actually had time to take a run before we went to our Friday night dance lesson. I've really been enjoying dance lessons. I suck at them. But it's just a fun way to spend an hour, and it turned into a great date with a long, conversation filled dinner and a slow walk home. Today I've done very little and it's awesome and tonight I get to see Leora. I haven't seen her in 2 weeks cause she's gone home for holidays the last 2 weekends.

2007-08-26T16:45:00.000-04:00

So in the last 9 days, I have been pulled over 3 times. I wasn't driving any of those times. Each was with a different person. Before the week, I've never been pulled over or been in the car when the driver was pulled over. Apparently, I've suddenly become very bad luck.

1. My manager on the way to the airport last Thursday = 20 miles over, mandated court date
2. This random guy who drove me up to Wudi in a X4 BMW convertible = 40 miles over, got off with a "passing on the right violation"
3. Aron on the way up to Tanglewood = new york state doesn't tell you the fine amount

I enjoyed this weekend. I had so much fun going to governor's island. I love that place. And Tanglewood was great. Totally worth the drive. And it was so nice to stay over with Carol and David rather than drive back that night.

Oh but some guy was a total asshole. We were lying on a mat together during the concert (me and Aron) and we were talking between pieces and whispering to each other. So this guy turned around and told us to be quiet. So we did and it was fine. But THEN this guy came over during intermission and said "You two think you can keep it down during the second half" and we were like "yes of course" and THEN he says "or go get a hotel room" and walks off. What a jackass! And totally unnecessary. We were having fun and giggling, but we shut up after the first request.

Yeah I think the hardest part about travelling is the pressure it puts on the weekends. If I don't do what I need to do or if things aren't perfect with aron I don't get a chance to fix things until the following weekend. It's like the time I'm in North Carolina is a dead zone in which nothing good can happen. It's a state that can be neutral or negative but never positive. Nothing good happens during the week. Nothing to help my social life, friendships, or relationships. Just things that keep them in a holding pattern.

2007-08-22T21:43:00.000-04:00

My job is so random and the weirdest things about it are hard. Yesterday, we left the hotel at 7:30, worked at the client site until 7:30 and then went out to dinner until 9. Then I did work until midnight. That means I spent close to 14 hours with the same 5 people either in a small conference room or at dinner. Yes we had a lunch break but it was 30 minutes long and we went to lunch together. So there was literally no time when I could just play with my hair and scratch my ass and not be with people. It's exhausting.

Today was better because this morning we got this random question from someone really high up about switching aluminum parts for titanium where titanium is more expensive and heavier but much stronger. So if you get huge monetary penalties for excess weight, how much less material to you have to use if you switch from aluminum to titanium to break even in cost? Which is a fun optimization problem. Of course, there's no reason that we should have been thinking about this. First of all, it would cost so much for them to change their whole design now and second of all we're not engineers. But no one really likes to do things at this client so the consultants end up with random tasks.

A little more about where i'm working.... I can't say much cause it's confidential. But i'm in North Carolina working with a company that makes componants for airplanes. They've agreed to design and produce a system for an airline contract that goes for the next 10 years. Anyway, they're way behind schedule and still trying to get prototypes out but the design keeps changing and they don't have any materials or pieces ordered. So part of our project is to get them back on schedule so they can meet their deadlines, but the part i'm doing most of the work on is trying to get them the parts and materials they need so when the design is finalized they can actually build it.

I don't know if that sounds simple or hard, intersting or deadly boring to anyone else. For me I'm learning so much that every day is different. I can see how it would get boring after a while because this kind of sourcing doesn't vary a lot for company to company. But it's important for me to learn because it's one of the best ways that consultants make money. They always save the client tons of money by making sense of the purchasing process for the client and there's a concrete result at the end of the project. For us the concrete result will be that they'll be able to build part of a plane while without us, they've shown no indication of being able to. This particular project is much bigger than anything the client has handled in the past, and they're drowning.

Anyway i'm just happy i've been able to run twice this week. As long as I can keep running and get some evenings to myself (today we left at 6 30 and i skipped the social dinner) i'll be happy. And tomorrow i'm back in nyc. Shit i need to start thinking about moving...

Alive again

2007-08-18T21:24:00.000-04:00

Ok so I fell off the edge of the world for a while. It's hard to blog from work, especially from a client site. There always feels like there's some one looking over my sholder. And when I stop working for the night, the last thing I want to do is be on my computer. Even when I was in New York, looking for apartments took so much time. It was ridiculous.

So key updates....

I signed a lease Friday!!! I've been looking non-stop for two weeks, one week with Leora and Tracy and then one week with Leora. I think I experiences more emotional ups and downs in those weeks then I had for the proceeding month. No less than 3 times was I convinced I had an apartment only to have it yanked away either by us or by them. I'd leave work early and go running to look at places for hours and then spend hours on the phone with Tracy and Leora. I wish we had communicated more before we started. If we had, we might not have had to back out of a 3 BR on 73rd after we had made a lease signing appointment.

The result is good though. Me and Leora are sharing a 1 BR/ Convertable on 90th between Amsterdam and Columbus. Apparently, right next door to Sasha. =) It's a pretty nice place. The down side is that I'm going to be spending a fair amount of money for a place where I will be staying no more than 12 days a month. It's a little ridiculous.

The job is taking some getting used to. It's hard to be on the road four days a week. I mean I knew that that's what I was signing up for, but the reality is.... interesting. I worry about boring things like how to get out of eating 2 huge meals a day and how to find time to run. I spend so much time trying to sort information and figure out what the hell i'm doing. I have no idea most of the time. It leaves me drained. I feel like I'm in a long distance relationship.

But at the same time, it's exciting. I'll be at this company for 12 weeks total, and if we do a good job, they won't lose their contract and they won't lose shit loads of money. If we don't do a good job.... we have to do a good job. Consultants always have to justify the money the client is spending by doing a ridiculous amount of work and making everything go as well as possible. I guess I'll write more on it later. some of it is confidential.

My life just feels like it's changing so fast, too fast. I'm just trying to hang on for dear life until I have time to think.

first week down

2007-07-21T11:48:00.000-04:00

So dispite how utterly terrified I was, the first week went pretty well I would say. Two other women started with me. They're both associates out of business school and the three of us had orientation all day monday. I thought that I would be staffed on a project right away but they didn't really have work for any of us. So really I've been doing my own thing all week. There are about 45 people based out of the new york office but almost all of them are staffed at any one time, so this week there were probably about 8 people around because they were between projects. It seems like a pretty social office. Everyone goes out and gets lunch together and then brings it back to eat in the conference room. I brought lunch cause I'm a cheap bastard and I make good sandwiches.

As expected, I didn't buy what I needed to wear. I bought suits and knit shells to wear under them but the women mostly wear button downs, but not ugly ones. They're pretty stylish people in a Brooks Brothers type way. There are also a lot of women in the office which is nice and lots of them are young.

So what did I do all week? Whatever I wanted. But what I wanted was to learn all the shit I'm going to need soon enough. So I brushed up on my excel and powerpoint skills, did a little random internet research for people, and spent a lot of time researching business concepts. Everyone has an MBA and I feel really behind. What do I know about balance sheet or porter's five forces? But wikipedia is a glorious thing. Friday there was a strategy training session from 4 to 8 and then a happy hour. The strategy thing was so interesting. I'll write more about actual consulting later.

I guess I'm most proud of the pure number of people I've talked to this week. That sounds silly but to me any social interaction with strangers is an effort and I made the effort over and over again. And I didn't cry once.

well fuck it....

2007-07-12T23:25:00.000-04:00

I will be more open to people, solutions and experiences. I will listen better and approach problems with flexibility and without bias.

I will see my family, friends, and boyfriend as the cornerstones of my life and make investments in them freely and without expecting any return. I will love.

I will respect the choices of others and not judge the actions or thoughts of those closest to me. I will practice patience, gratitude and understanding.

I will dedicate resources to the improvement of my health, knowledge, and personal growth. I will have a sound body and will expand my mind and heart at every opportunity.

I will treat money as a tool and not a goal. I will plan wisely and realistically for the immediate and long term future without forgetting that the present is to be lived and enjoyed. I will travel.

I will improve my athletic abilities and choose teams that suit my needs and style. I will contribute to those teams with my skills on the field and my attitude off it.

I will develop a career path that positively impacts the greater world. I will choose jobs that I find personally fulfilling.

I will recognize my ability to choose in every situation and take responsibility for my actions. I will work to the best of my abilities at every task I encounter and strive to continually learn from my triumphs and mistakes.

I will forgive myself and not dwell on my own shortcomings. I will control my fears and anticipate positive outcomes.

2007-07-12T15:50:00.001-04:00

I'm sure people must be dying for news of me. After all, I've disappeared for a very long time. There's a lot less internet access when you're camping in maine or at the cabin with your family. Camping in Maine with karen was awesome. We really got a chance to talk and we were able to bike and hike in some beautiful places. Also, we bought a lobster down on the docks for $6 and then bought a bucket and then boiled it over a camp fire. And then I ate it. =)

The last few days I've been home, but it's been to hot to sit in front of a computer for very long. And I've been busy getting everything together to move first to aron's for a week, then to tao's for a month and then to a real place in september. There's been a lot to do but it's all coming together. I've been mostly worried about outfitting myself. I have clothes and shoes and I bought a nice watch yesterday and today mikey bought me two bags for birthday presents, one for this year and one for last year.

I've been really nervous about starting. Really scared. There are just so many unknowns. In response I've been focusing on the details, the shopping and the financials, the first day and the tax forms rather than the big pictures. I took a much needed step back last night and spent some time thinking through and writing down my values in a series of statements. I came up with a list that encompasses how I want to think and behave when I'm by myself, with my friends, with my family or at work. I felt much better when I had. If I have a clear idea of my own values and ideals, then I can make smaller decisions that reflect them and be more purposeful in my actions. For example, before I went through that process I had already made a budget for the year, but after writing my values down clearly, I could change my budget to reflect that. So I allocated more money towards seeing my family for example. I guess I'm trying to use the time I have to be introspective so that I'll have something to fall back on when I get busy. Maybe at some point I'll post the statements I wrote, but for now, they're still a work in progress.

2007-06-26T14:06:00.001-04:00

I've had surprisingly little internet access for the past week or so, first because I was at a tournament and then because aron kept his computer at work all week and then because I went up to rocester for a wedding this past weekend. I'm still in the city until we get the couch from tammy's apartment to aron's tonight, but I went to mudd to steal some internet. The point is i'm not sure where to start....

ommegang
In general a fun tournament because there was camping and beer involved and because we had a 3 hour bye in the middle of the day and we went swimming in a lake. That might have been the highlight of my weekend. Levitation holmes can be frustrating because there doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on what kind of team we are. My summer league team knows that it's casual so people play more relaxed, move the disc fast, and take every player for what they are. Parts of levho want to be competitive and parts of it want to relax and i'm not sure that the two parts are ever going to agree. Also we hold the disc too long.

monday- thursday
I kept very busy for someone who was a total bum. I had lunch dates every day and babysat max every afternoon and then played frisbee 3 days out of 4. Max might be the cutest 4 year old I know. He kept me busy though and I had a lot of explaining to do...

him: where did the universe come from?
me: people disagree and no one really knows but scientists think that there was a particle a long time ago that exploded into the universe.
him: where did the particle come from?
me: umm.... no one really knows. some people say god made it.
him: what's god.
me:.......::::oh shit:::::.......

a couple days later....
him: when the particle exploded, there were people in it, right? really little people?
me: well first there was nothing then there were animals then there were monkeys and people came from monkeys
him: (points at 2 blind people) why do those people have their eyes scrunched like this? (scrunches nose up)
me:........

Yeah so I had a good time hanging out with the 4 year old. Aron was working really long hours so after wudi I'd pick him up in yorktown and we'd make dinner. I was pretty domestic this week all around. It was nice to be in the city with not much else to do so i could see people and play frisbee and climb. Oh and I talked to leora and tracy and there's officially no place in new york that we can all live and afford. I'm screwed.

Friday-Sunday
Friday aron took off work and we drove up to niagara falls cause he had never been. It was still pretty impressive but I've seen it a couple times. It was a long drive and then we had to go another 2 hours to our hotel in rocester and then another 45 minutes to the groom's house for a pre-wedding party. One of his friends from undergrad was getting married in east bumfuck upstate.

The wedding sucked. Not to be mean but it was just about the opposite of any wedding I would ever have. The ceremony was very catholic and focused entirely on the community and god and very little on the couple. The bride was spazzing out up there. There was an awkward amount of time between the wedding and the reception. The reception was at a tacky place in a strip mall and involved a buffet and bad meatballs. On the upside, it did have an open bad and lots of dancing. But mike lui's wedding is basically my new standard for really good weddings and this came no where close. Aron's friends were all pretty cool but he hasn't kept in touch with a lot of them so i got to listen to a lot of mildly awkward conversations. All in all it was a pretty good weekend, but not how I would ever get married.

So now I'm back in new york, looking up apartments on craigslist and getting depressed. I'll probably drive back to MA tonight after couch moving. Tammy's just giving away this sweet black leather couch so i'm taking it. screw charity. But i don't have an apartment so aron gets it. lucky guy. =)

2007-06-26T14:06:00.000-04:00

I've had surprisingly little internet access for the past week or so, first because I was at a tournament and then because aron kept his computer at work all week and then because I went up to rocester for a wedding this past weekend. I'm still in the city until we get the couch from tammy's apartment to aron's tonight, but I went to mudd to steal some internet. The point is i'm not sure where to start....

ommegang
In general a fun tournament because there was camping and beer involved and because we had a 3 hour bye in the middle of the day and we went swimming in a lake. That might have been the highlight of my weekend. Levitation holmes can be frustrating because there doesn't seem to be a clear concensus on what kind of team we are. My summer league team knows that it's casual so people play more relaxed, move the disc fast, and take every player for what they are. Parts of levho want to be competative and parts of it want to relax and i'm not sure that the two parts are ever going to agree. Also we hold the disc too long.

monday- thursday
I kept very busy for someone who was a total bum. I had lunch dates every day and babysat max every afternoon and then played frisbee 3 days out of 4. Max might be the cutest 4 year old I know. He kept me busy though and I had a lot of explaining to do...

him: where did the universe come from?
me: people disagree and no one really knows but scientists think that there was a particle a long time ago that exploded into the universe.
him: where did the particle come from?
me: umm.... no one really knows. some people say god made it.
him: what's god.
me:.......::::oh shit:::::.......

a couple days later....
him: when the particle exploded, there were people in it, right? really little people?
me: well first there was nothing then there were animals then there were monkeys and people came from monkeys
him: (points at 2 blind people) why do those people have their eyes scrunched like this? (scrunches nose up)
me:........

Yeah so I had a good time hanging out with the 4 year old. Aron was working really long hours so after wudi I'd pick him up in yorktown and we'd make dinner. I was pretty domestic this week all around. It was nice to be in the city with not much else to do so i could see people and play frisbee and climb. Oh and I talked to leora and tracy and there's officially no place in new york that we can all live and afford. I'm screwed.

Friday-Sunday
Friday aron took off work and we drove up to niagara falls cause he had never been. It was still pretty impressive but I've seen it a couple times. It was a long drive and then we had to go another 2 hours to our hotel in rocester and then another 45 minutes to the groom's house for a pre-wedding party. One of his friends from undergrad was getting married in east bumfuck upstate.

The wedding sucked. Not to be mean but it was just about the opposite of any wedding I would ever have. The ceremony was very catholic and focused entirely on the community and god and very little on the couple. The bride was spazzing out up there. There was an awkward amount of time between the wedding and the reception. The reception was at a tacky place in a strip mall and involved a buffet and bad meatballs. On the upside, it did have an open bad and lots of dancing. But mike lui's wedding is basically my new standard for really good weddings and this came no where close. Aron's friends were all pretty cool but he hasn't kept in touch with a lot of them so i got to listen to a lot of mildly awkward conversations. All in all it was a pretty good weekend, but not how I would ever get married.

So now I'm back in new york, looking up apartments on craigslist and getting depressed. I'll probably drive back to MA tonight after couch moving. Tammy's just giving away this sweet black leather couch so i'm taking it. screw charity. But i don't have an apartment so aron gets it. lucky guy. =)

2007-06-15T10:58:00.000-04:00

A week in MA has not given me much to write about. I talk to people on the phone and try to think of something interesting I've done lately.....nothing. I get up in the morning late, have a cup of tea, do the suduko and then either read or shop or clean. In the past week I've finished The Confusion, Pride and Prejudice, The Passion Dream Book, the entire Harry Potter series, a couple of Louisa May Alcotts, and now I'm two books into the Chronicles of Narnia. All of those are re reads except the Confusion and the Chronicles, so its easier to fly through them.

I've been nearly as productive shopping as I have reading though its not nearly as fun. I now own 4 new suits, 3 dresses (2 for work, 1 cause I look hot in it), and a couple of shirts. I still need blouses and shoes but I'll do some of that when I'm in new york. And I helped eric buy lots of polo shirts when he was home even though I'm not such a fan of polo shirts.

The cleaning part has been because when I move out this time I'm going to actually move out and because I need to make room for new purchases. So I've been going through drawers and papers that haven't been touched since I was 13 or 14. Some of the stuff is fun; I've found old letters from karen and o malley and pictures from middle school; every one of my nails is a different color right now because I found all the crazy glitter polish from when I was 12; I made micheal put on a glitter butterfly tattoo with me so we both looked ridiculous. I like throwing things away too. It nice to know I never have to feel bad about not wearing the sweater my aunt gave me years ago; poof, its all in the trash. When I move to new york next, it will be with only the stuff I need and use.

Speaking of new york, I'm going to be in the city all next week. I'm driving to cooperstown today for the tournament this weekend and then I'll drive down to the city monday. I'm babysitting Max for a couple hours every day and I'll go to my first summer league games and try to have lunch with as many people as possible. Then friday me and aron are driving up to rochester for one of his friend's wedding. It's a hard week to pack for between camping, playing, being, and wedding. Should be fun though.

splitting time

2007-06-06T08:50:00.000-04:00

I'm back in new york for the day and possibly tomorrow but then I'm heading back up to MA cause eric is going to be home. It's weird commuting between two cities. I've already done three back and forths in the last 2 weeks but they've all been for specific reasons and mostly quick. I'm not sure how many more I can do. It's a pretty expensive trip for one thing and I have no money. I'm glad I stuck around MA for easterns though. That was a lot of fun though we didn't win nearly as many as I would have liked. And I am sooooo out of shape. Tournaments usually don't feel that bad to me. Oh well, a couple weeks of running will clear that up.

More about Ireland....=)

Aron put up his pictures here http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajahmadia/tags/ireland/ but most of them are pretty bad. We took a lot of pictures of random landscapes and unimportant buildings and then forgot the camera at key times, like on our second hike. Most of the pictures of scary ridges and mist are from the first hike. Oh, the one of the giant cross is at th summit of the highest mountain in Ireland. Most of the really nice views are from our campsite and the pictures of us on horses are awesome.

Where was I? Wednesday? Wednesday was a travel day and therefore boring. We did our laundry and had a beer (one of many Guinesses). Thursday turned out to be another travel day. We were trying to see the Cliffs of Moher but it was so foggy that even standing at the top of them you couldn't tell if the drop was 1 m or 1000 m. We had worked really hard to fit them into our schedule too on the way up the coast to the second hike, and the weather was not cooperating. Oh well. We took a picture in front of the mural in the visiters center. That night we got into westport and the bus driver not only recommended a b&b, he dropped us off at it after everyone else had unloaded.

Friday: Our second and last hike up Croagh Patrick which is a historic pilgramige site. Pilgrims climb it barefooted on a certain day which has to be painful because its a real mountain and the ground is rough. We did a slightly different path which was beautiful but really windy. The mountain is just this giant lump right on the coast and there's no vegitation on it so the winds just whip off the water and pummel you the whole time you're climbing 500 m. At least it was a clear day and there was no chance of getting lost. The last 100 m especially was painfully windy and all up loose rocks. At the top is a chapel and a route with stations of the cross (7 our fathers, 7 hail marys, 2 creeds, walk around the chapel 7 times etc). Catholics are funny. On the way down I was trying to remember as much of the creed as I could. I wasn't doing so well (we believe in one god father almighty creator of heaven and earth....eternally begotten of the father god from god light from light...begotten and not made one in being with the father through him all good things come for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven and became man...) I got more of it than that. Parts of it our really beautiful and the cadance is clear in my head even when the words fail me.

Oh I almost forgot. We were going to walk back from the hike because it wasn't that far but the road got really windy and narrow so aron stuck out his thumb and we totally hitchhiked. A carpenter picked us up and drove us the couple miles and chatted with us about the election that day. We were so proud of ourselves. Of course when I told my parents, they were like "did we ever tell you about the time we hitched a ride on a freight train in germany...." They had to show me up. =)

Saturday night we were supposed to stay with one of the ultimate players we had met the weekend before but the plans fell through so we ended up just crashing in a hotel near the airport after I bought presents for my family and aron bought a really beautiful chess set for probably too much money. And we flew out sunday and played cards the whole plane ride back. It was a good trip.

back in the US of A

2007-06-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

Actually I've been back since Sunday but I went up to MA on monday and then back to ny tuesday where i didn't have internet for a few days while i was staying at my cousins and then I went back up to MA thursday and now its friday.

Ireland was incredible. It's a great country and everything actually worked according to plan, including the plan that said that aron and I were going to get along really well for 10 days. This is as much a record for me as for anyone else because I was really bad about writing in a journal this trip, mostly because it was so wet most of the time....

Saturday: landed in Dublin, took a walking tour of the city that involved castles, went to a camping store to buy me a rain coat, realized that one euro was worth approximately $56, fought off jetlag and managed to stay away until the late hour of 5:30

Sunday: packed up our backpacks and walked around dublin, found a pick up ultimate game, played for 2 hours, got beers with ultimate players who are awesome, got on a 4 hour train to Killarney in the southwest of ireland

Monday: One of the best days ever.... 3 hour guided horseback ride in killarney national park to a castle with a really nice swedish girl and beautiful weather. So then we wanted to spend the afternoon getting to a campsite at the start of the trail we were going to climb the next day, but the closest bus only went to a town about 6 miles away. 6 miles didn't sound like much in the US but it sounded like more when we were actually in Killarney thinking about walking it with packs. After looking into all the options, we were like "fuck it, we'll walk" so we got on the bus to the nearest town (Kilorglin). We were just getting off the bus and getting our packs on when an older english couple started asking us where we were going and how we were getting there. When we told them, they volenteered to give us a ride even though it was out of their way! It was such a warm, fuzzy moment and they were so unbeleivably nice and they dropped us off at our remote campsite that overlooked mountains and lakes and we were the only ones there. It was pure joy. And then aron found out he passed qualifiers. Best day ever.

Tuesday: Climbed the tallest mountain in Ireland. Which was a terrible idea but really fun at the same time. It wasn't raining much at the bottom but when we got up around 500 m we were in the mist. There was no trail up the first part so we were going through bogs and following sheep trails and our feet were soaked. Despite our map, compass and altimeter, we climbed the wrong mountain. Finally we got on track and started really climbing and the mist increased and everytime we thought we were getting to the top, another ridge would appear. Finally we reached one summit and I started having intense virtigo because there was just white and nothing on all sides and the rain was starting so the trail was wet and treacherous.

Despite that, we kept going along a ridge that led to the tallest mountain, mt carentohil. It was much farther than we thought and it was along a ridge with drop offs on both side into pure white. Scary. About an hour later, we made it to the real summit at 1071 m and took a picture near the huge cross at the top. Then we started walking down. The wrong way. 300 m down the wrong way. Oh shit. It's getting late, its getting dark (or more misty) and we have to climb back to the top of the mountain to find the right trail. So we climbed the highest mountain in ireland twice. I was freaking out. We had left aron's pack at the first summit so there was no question of just picking a side and going down. We had to retrace our steps.

Obviously we made it down alive but we probably wouldn't have without a map, compass, altimeter and dumb luck and we didn't see any other hikers all day. I'm glad we did it, but i was terrified for about 80% of the time.

Ok, my chocolate chip irish cream pound cake needs to come out of the oven and i need to clean this house because levitation holmes it staying tonight and tommorrow while we play easterns but i'll continue the story later.

2007-05-17T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's been a week since my last post and I guess a lot has happened, most of it having to do with the men in my life. And graduating. That's a big deal I guess.

Aron is taking the qualifiers as we speak (or as I speak) and here's hoping he passes with flying colors. He's been so stressed out lately (though not nearly as grumpy as he told me he would be) and he find out whether he passes in Ireland which means that i am crossing my fingers and my toes. If he doesn't pass, he doesn't get to do a PhD at columbia. He'll have a masters and he'll be able to find a good job, no problem, but its still a big deal. Neither of us slept my last night. I wasn't going to stay over but then my key fell out of my pocket somewhere between columbia and 94th where i went to dinner with Drew, Adrienne and Chris so I didn't have a lot of choices.

Stoops has been around all this week and I had forgotten how much I missed hanging out with him when he was gone. He belongs here, hanging out with me and then heading over to Taos and then watching south park and then stealing flags with Gabi. I missed him and it was good to see him and I'm going to miss him again. I don't know what else I can say about it. I feel lucky to have spent as much time with him as I did, and its good to know that he's still one of my best friends.

Ireland is going to be amazing. I'm pretty much done packing but my bag is still too heavy. I need to figure out whether i need both guidebooks or a camelback. We have the first 4 or 5 days totally planned and then after that things are a little more flexible. Today I need to do a lot of last minute errands like buying traveller's checks and printing out itineraries, but I'm ready to leave tomorrow at 7. Planning for this trip has been kind of stressful because there's no guidelines at all, other than the fact that we want to do a couple of hikes and I had to make a lot of decisions myself because i've had more time than Aron has. Despite that though, it will be so much fun to be on the road again.

Graduation is at the end of this post for a reason. I'm not sure why i did the ceremonies again. They're pretty boring. I guess I just wanted to be there with my friends. But two years in a row is too much, it loses its meaning. The cliches don't sink in and time drags on. I kept forgetting that I was graduating until someone would be like "we're leaving in a few." My parents came down yesteday and sat through it again and helped me move out before the skies opened up. Move out was actually really smooth and i appreciate them coming down to help me. I don't really feel like i got to say goodbye to anyone because everyone was busy with their families. I hope i see them again.

2007-05-10T10:54:00.000-04:00

HEHEHEHE!!!! WHHEEEEE!!!

Last night was every bit as amazing as I had hoped. I can't even express how awesome it was to watch people's faces as they went through the thought process "stoops can't be here....wait, that looks like stoops....HOLY SHIT!" I couldn't stop giggling for the longest time. Gabi's face as she stood up and looked around the resteraunt while her eyes got all shifty.....oh man that was awesome.

The whole day was incredible. There aren't even words big enough to fill it. I met stoops at 72nd at around 8:30 and we chilled and hung out in the park and talked and ate ice cream until I had to go uptown to take my last final at 1. Which sucked a little bit but whatever, I'm done. And then there was tons of intrigue cause we wanted to go surprise tao but when i called up to see when it would be a good time to "umm....measure the room for a bed that i'm thinking of buying" he was like "yeah i'm home. goose is coming over soon." mayday mayday!!!! goose wasn't allowed to know stoops was home until DBQ. After a lot of diliberation, we called tao....

me: i'm going to make a series of odd requests. i'm going to put you on the phone with someone and you can't express any emotion when i do. Don't say anything except "uh huh" and do not reveal to goose the identity of this person. do you agree to those conditions.

hehehe, it was so sketchy. I put stoops on the phone and about a half hour later, tao called to say goose had gone home. We were pretty sure tao had said something like "you know what would be great right now? if you weren't here." So we went over there and then i went home to get pretty and meet everyone to go down to DBQ. About part way through the meal, stoops made his grand entrance and seriously, if anyone reading this ever goes to africa (or japan) for two years and wants to do something funny, surprising your friends by showing up on a continent that you're not supposed to be on is a great idea.

It was a great night and totally full of old people which was fun. Kelsey and corey and eliza and max and amanda murphey and vicki and paul jawlik up for maryland and eyton and of course stoops. it's just so good to see him.

2007-05-06T22:18:00.000-04:00

By wednesday i'll be done. I'm so excited. And I'm happy that i'll get to see so many old friends that night, though organizing is a little complicated. After that i'm busy in an entirely different way. I need to plan ireland, pack for the trip, pack for real, move out, write to brett, plan go running more often, go to Fairway and cook lots and lots of food, hang out with my friends, play more ultimate, go climbing. Oh and graduate. I'm looking forward to that kind of busy.

2007-05-03T10:29:00.000-04:00

The last thee days have been just as aweful as I anticipated. 14-18 hour days in Mudd trying to do all the tests that still needed to be done and figure out why the wind turbine didn't work. And then there was the final report which i was in charge of compiling that meant that every time I got into my own work, i'd have to stop to fit someone else's section into the framework and then edit and then go back with comments for them and then make sure they changed it..... it was exhausting. There was just so much to do and even though I knew it would all get done, i've still been flat out since sunday.

Even yesterday, which I expected to be at least a little relaxing was stressful. I thought we'd turn in our paper at noon and then people would come look at our giant blue wind turbine. Instead, I was still working on the paper at 2 and at 2:30 around 25 or 30 judges showed up. Some of them just came over, looked, wrote down a grade and left but many of them asked questions, some of them nicely and some of them not so nicely. Some of them would tell us about their columbia careers (there were a lot of old columbia alums) but some of them would rip us apart. They'd point out flaws in our design or tests we should have done or question us about the physics of it. After 2.5 hours of that, I was exhausted. If i had to explain one more time that the reason it wasn't generating much energy was because we were only putting it in front of 7 ft^2 of wind when the turbine swept out an area of 36 ft^2 I might have screamed. By the way, that's only one of many reasons why it didn't work as well as planned, but my team totally convinced ourselves that the design was perfect and only the wind was lacking. In our defense, we did everything we set out to do: we built a wind turbine that generates energy. It's not important that it only generates half a watt.

Compared to other projects, I think we did really well. Our project wasn't quite as complicated as some but it was pretty respectable and we were one of only two groups that actually had their thing entirely working. One group of total slackers was still building during the expo, like machining and designing. We had ours done last thursday. It was amazing looking around at noon and realizing that we were the only ones not tinkering with anything (except the report).

The team dinner last night was a lot of fun too. I'm glad they just handed us presents at the end. I remember last year people read mara and lesser poems which were awesome but i think i would have been entirely too embarressed to appreciate them. The presents are also awesome. I now have a disc with me on it! how awesome is that? And i love the books of pictures because i take so few myself. I need to rely on other people for my memories.

One day of rest and then to virginia on friday and then studying starts hard core. Even today i can't really rest. Too much on the to-do list.

2007-04-29T12:34:00.000-04:00

I really should be writing my section of the design report. Especially after i gave my team such a hard time about not handing their parts to me yet. But I'm still feeling a little fuzzy from last night. That was more out than I'd been for a while and I've gotten out of the habit. Unused, i guess. I enjoyed though. Arena football was a lot of fun thought honestly i was more interested in the cheerleaders than the game. Not because I was ogling-most of them were pretty normal looking. But I was really curious about what makes you decide to be a cheerleader at a some crappy arena football game? The most I could conclude was that if someone paid me to play ultimate on a regular basis, I'd do it in a minute even if it involved skimpy flame costumes, so maybe they like dancing the same way. The game itself was fast moving but i wasn't so impressed by the players.

After that I went to steve's b day which was a lot more fun than i was expecting. Some of his friends were really outgoing and we got into a case-like discussion on how manysingle girls there were in new york on any given night looking to get laid. I was entertained. I screwed up when i handed steve my credit card and let him order two shots of tequila cause he was closer to the bar. He ordered Patron, that fucker. It was pretty delicious but so expensive. I can't really get mad though cause he's treated me to dinner so many times and it usually involves us spliting a bottle of wine and i don't think i've ever returned the favor.

The bar gabi's party was at was really nice, big and open with a pool table and places to sit and bar tenders that led the bar in a drunken rendition of happy birthday. I drank much more than i planned. I'm not sure how i agreed to take three shots and then i left my credit card there when i left to help take gabi home. Luckily goose was there to close my tab. I'm not sure what the damage was from all those shots. Oh well. It was fun.

Today's the big soccer game. Aron's ridiculously excited. He keeps talking strategy with me and i can't complain because before sections i was obsessing about rutgers ("and then amanda throws it to vanessa and then the tall one runs deep and that's a ho stack.......").

2007-04-27T12:07:00.000-04:00

I'm glad I'm not going to be here next year. I've wavered on that statement in the past couple months, but going into all the meetings tonight, I'm glad I'm not going to be here for the fall out. The problem is that I can see people's points despite their behavior. I can see the changes that are coming and I don't see how everyone is going to be happy no matter what happens tonight. All I can do is try to guide the team to a reasonable solution. That sounds arrogant but at this point, i think my main role is to try to make sure that all options are outlined clearly and the team can make an informed decision not just on captains but on all the baggage that goes along with it. I am 100% sure that i will offend people tonight no matter how nice i am, because i'm going to ask the hard questions and if people can't answer them that's their problem. And I can do this because it doesn't matter if people hate me. I can only do what i can and say what i think needs to be said, and i'm glad i won't be here next year.

2007-04-26T18:56:00.000-04:00

Our wind turbine almost works. It's so exciting. We have it all assembled and we put in front of the wind tunnel. First we got it to turn just on its own, then we attached one chain sprocket system and had to deal with the friction of that. Then we attached it to the generator and had to make a bunch of adjustments before we got that working. When I left, it was still able to turn with some resistance on the motor but not enough to power anything. Either way, I think we'll be able to fix all the problems before tuesday when its due, and the whole thing looks so pretty. We also seem to be way ahead of most groups which is reassuring in kind of a mean way. even if we do get it working, it will still only be under really artificial conditions.

I'm all the way done with one class. Turning in the wind turbine will mark the end of another class. Then I've just got two more to knock out, fluids and econ. Neither should give me much trouble, though the trip to Virginia Beach over the weekend might cut into my studying time.

I really don't want to go to the scrimmage tonight because my sholder hurts from climbing yesterday. I'm glad i went cause it gave ben and i a chance to argue a bunch of things through, but i was reaching for one hold over an overhang and i think i strained something a little bit. I'm also starting to worry more about the meetings friday. honestly i have no idea how its going to turn out or what's going to go down and i don't like that feeling. I have a sense that everything will resolve itself tomorrow and i'll feel better once its resolved. Still, i'd like to have a hint of what the outcome will be.

2007-04-23T11:46:00.000-04:00

Some times I totally suck at life. It's so depressing when I'm moody and bitchy and irritable and I can't handle the simplest situation. I have to keep telling myself, I have one week left in classes and two weeks and 2 days til i'm done with school. But it's not really school that's stressing me out. It's everything else. I mean school I have two problem sets due today, one probably due next monday, one take home final, one regular final and a wind turbine. Actually the wind turbine is pretty huge especially since it comes with a 75 page paper attached. My point is, it's all going to get done and i'm not worried about it. It's no excuse for how mentally unstable i've been lately.

i have to stop breaking my own rule. the one about not saying anything to/about yourself that you wouldn't say to your best friend (if you expected to stay friends).

2007-04-20T18:58:00.000-04:00

It's beautiful out! I got to wear a skirt and get my feet dirty. Really all I can ask for in a day. I didn't get a chance to go for a run, but I'll go tommorrow. I've been slacking for the last week, giving my body a chance to recharge so an extra day won't hurt. I'm so excited for summer in the city. I love new york when it's warm.

2007-04-18T16:59:00.000-04:00

I don't know why i'm so tired and headachy today. I thought it was the ridiculously strong epoxy fumes this morning but I was like that before I started gluing air foils. The epoxy was kind of cool though. You mix these two componants and then you have almost exactly and hour to use it before it hardens in to a red useless ball. Which we thought was funny when we read it on the directions, but it literally heats up and then solidifies within 30 seconds when you're over the time limit.

Anyway, that's not really important. I think i'm just coming off an emotional let down. There's been so much drama this week both on a personal level between the team and Henelopen and on a bigger level with VT stuff and the journalism student. I think it just wears me out. Like you get a rush of adreneline from dealing with "emergency" meetings but then when that dies down, you're just tired and worn down.

Sectionals was the same way. I got so hyped up for it, rutgers in particular and then it all just fizzled. Actually I don't feel so bad about that because I feel like I played my best and it wasn't good enough. That sounds like it should make me feel horrible, but i think it's worse when you have a tight game where if you had played a little better, it would have made a difference. Nothing I did would have made a difference. I was also really happy that my parents came out to watch and really happy that aron came up and really happy that they all seemed to get along and we had a nice dinner. My dad was having a great time talking strategy and zone. My parents seem so happy these days. aron thought they were putting on a show cause he was there, but really i think they just really like their life. They go to concerts, they travel, they putter around the house and work 4 days a week. My mom rows crew, my dad plays basketball, they're going to England soon, they have a better social life than i do. It's cool.

Sunday was fun in an entirely different way. It was pouring rain and I was a lazy bum. Except for going to DBQ. I'm starting to get into true senior mode though not too bad. I haven't really worked hard for a while so I'm not tired of it. I just have to get though another 2.5 weeks and I'm fine.

Oh more drama, me and leora had our big housing meeting and we made some key decisions and put together a time frame for making the rest of the desicions which is all I wanted. Mostly we decided that we'd hold off on any major choices until she finished interviewing for the other job she wants, and that we would look for a place that starts in september. Which means I have to take care of the summer, but i'm not that worried about it. I know i can find some place. I felt a lot better after we talked things through, even though a lot of variables are still on the table. I know we'll figure it out soon.

Not to obsess, but the thing with the journalism student just scares the shit out of me. Both the sadisticness of it and the randomness. It makes me never want to live alone and never trust anyone again. The VT thing scares me too, but honestly i have less of an innate horror about being shot then i do about what happened to her.

2007-04-12T13:13:00.000-04:00

It's kind of nice that the parts can't get welded today and we don't have a level. It means I have no reason not to sit in my room with a cup of hot chocolate and read the omnivore's dilemna. Don't read that book unless you want to feel bad about eating for quite some time. I've been thinking a lot about my eating habits lately. I've been going more and more vegetarian lately but I guess i haven't been doing it right cause i've been hungry a lot and i've been a lot more tired after practices and workouts. I tried to add more protein to my diet but i've read so many different numbers for how much protein you should get, every where from 60g to 180g and about what sources are good for that. Anyway i just want to make sure i have enough energy in me the week before sectionals to be able to play my best.

This semester is just gliding by. I do a little work, I saw some boards, cut some airfoils, solve some fluids problems and then go home and chill. It's pretty nice. I don't have any papers to write. I'm going to have one take home and one regular finals. I think i've got another 4 problem sets coming to me and of course my huge senior design project will take more of my time as we get closer to the design expo. It's hard to beleive i'm almost done.

I'm nervous about sectionals but i'm trying to focus on only good things.

2007-04-08T11:09:00.000-04:00

Fucking Harvard. Fucking Yale. We played four games up at yale yesterday, and surprisingly enough I enjoyed most of them. I mean, I usually enjoy playing but we lost every game and I don't enjoy losing. But every point was hard fought and seemed like it could go either way; it just usually went to the other team. I don't know what it will take to get this team to the next level, where you go from saying "oh we played so well. I wonder why we didn't win." to actually winning. I feel like we've been on the brink of that for a long time but i don't think i'll be around to see the tipping point. More experienced and more intense people, i guess. An attitude that's a little less forgiving of missed practices and consistant mistakes. A team that expects itself to win.

Anyway all that is not why harvard sucks. Harvard sucks because after we had read the bracket ("columbia plays at 1 30") and called the yale captain ("yes you guys play at 1 30"), harvard dropped out of the tournament and yale had to reschedule everything so we were supposed to play at 9 30. Yale sent us an e mail last night but we didn't check that e mail address last night. So we had no idea until they called gabi this morning asking where we were and whether we could get from new york to new havan in a half hour. No, no we can't. And if you're only guarenteeing us one game if we do ask our coach to get on the subway for an hour, gather all our girls and get to yale in three hours, we're really not going to make the effort. Which sucks cause we paid 275 for the tournament.

On the other hand, I do have a lot of work I should get done today and last night I got distracted and watched the painted veil instead. That's a really good movie. I totally recommend it.

Oh and I lost my room key somewhere in new haven. I don't have a good chance of finding it so I guess columbia's getting another 50 from me. booo.

On an unrelated note, I've decided my tolerance for drunk people has gone way down. Friday I was at a party with aron and one of his friends had brought a girl. The two of them were out together for the first time and the girl got so drunk that she puked in a gutter. Disgusting. Yes there was good liquor at the party, yes, she was asian, and yes, guys were encouraging her to drink. But honestly, you have to know your limits and you have to tell people to fuck off if they try to push you. Which is hypocritical of me because I've definetely bought people drinks that they probably shouldn't have had (this week even). But I'm beginning to wonder whether I should be worried about my friends. Drinking and puking and passing out and doing things you later have to apologize for (I've had apologies from two friends this week alone for drunk behavior)....at what point does it become a problem that should be dealt with and not a source of entertainment at parties?

2007-04-03T13:14:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure how I got to be so popular. Wedding sunday, sedar last night, party thursday, party friday, tournament this weekend. Tonight and tommorrow I need to get a lot of sleep. It's all fun though. The wedding was great, well, freaky that mike lui is married but a lot of fun in terms of dancing and drinking a ridiculous number of French martinis. I saw the pictures though and man, i think i had one big meal too many. Which makes sense considering what i've been up to lately. Which is eating. a lot.

Last night was sedar in Forest Hills which is always cool. Leora's family is hysterical. Her immediate family is awesome but her extended family is awkward in a really funny kind of way. Some how I got in a discussion with her aunt and cousins about where me and leora should live next year and they all had ridiculously specific suggestions ("so this building has roof access but no pool....") and her aunt wanted to know how much I was going to make next year. ("umm....its respectable"). Sedars also last approximately forever. I can't beleive the rest of them do it two nights in a row. I didn't role into bed until 2:30 AM. At least I managed to go easy on the wine this year. My stumach wouldn't have been able to handle much after the vodka bar sunday night.

Anyway i should stop napping and work on getting through my to do list (request van, write stoops, study french, post wedding pictures....) Maybe a cup of tea will wake me up.

2007-03-31T10:35:00.000-04:00

It's amazing how much better I feel after a few good nights of sleep. I spent so much of this week going to bed at 1 or 1:30 (silly disc golf) and getting up at 7:30 (stupid econ midterm and foam buying). For me at least, that's not what you would call sustainable. But the last couple days I've gotten to relax which is nice. Thursday was probably the best. I was laying around after a shower reading and drinking tea before going to the colbert report. It feels so nice to do nothing.

By the way, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report were both amazing and I think I like Colbert better. First of all, I was in the front row and he totally touched my hand (sigh) and second of all, he just says shit that people can't get away with saying. Though the daily show had a great segment on the ban of the n-word. And both Steward and Colbert came out before the show to talk to the audience and they're both really sharp and quick thinking. It was great.

Last night I should have gone kareokeing. I told my engineers I'd hang out with them but they were totally lame and boring and wouldn't stop talking about baseball stats and how they're kept. I don't even care about baseball let alone the stats.

Also I'm ridiculously excited about my prom dresses which are now normal dresses. Unreasonably excited. Mostly because I liked them so much at the time (6/7 years ago) and never got to wear them again. And now that they're cut off at the knees, I can. Which is also good because it means I didn't have to buy a dress for mike lui's wedding tommorrow.

I'm freaking out about housing for next year. There are so many variables and I can't work with all of them including....

Knowns:
Start date = July 16th
I need an apartment

Variables:
Location: brooklyn v. UWS
Roommates: me OR me + leora OR me+leora+tracy
if leora and/or tracy, then the apartment/ neighborhood needs to be kosher
if leora then the rent needs to be under $700
Time frame: july OR aug OR sept and if aug or sept then....
Summer sublet: full summer OR one month

It got much more complicated when aron decided to stay in his apartment for the summer instead of moving to westchester so I can't sublet from him unless I want to move in with him and I don't. Which means I have to get a place earlier than I planned which stresses leora out because she has less time to save money and she makes so little of it. And now she's talking about bailing on me which is fine if she does it now and not so fine if she does it in a month or two. AHHHHHHH!!!!

2007-03-26T10:25:00.000-04:00

This past week (last week I guess) went by in a blur. Not in a good way either. A couple of hours after my last post, last monday Jen called to tell me that Tracy's mom died. It was the worst news I'd heard in a long time. Every time I thought about it, I thought about how I would feel if it was my mom and I broke down. I think all of us were upset for tracy, yes, but also for our own families and the inevitable future.

The funeral was aweful. I'd never been to one that had such raw emotions. I was so young when my grandparents died, and it seemed natural because they were so old. My aunt jo's death was long expected, and the memorial services I've been to have been a little time after the death. This was the day after and she died suddenly. The family had no time to process and the ceremony was so intense. Standing outside at the burial, listening to dirt fall on wood was one of the worst sounds I've ever heard in my life. Afterwards me and turtle. and sarah went to V&T and sat for three and a half hours decompressing and catching up and arguing with a little old italian waiter about our order.

I spent most of the rest of the week completely losing track of all of my classes and driving up to westchester. Sarah was already in from seattle, anna flew in from tucson and sheera from LA. It's strange to think that that's how we're going to be from now on; we'll get together for weddings and funerals and not much else. Despite the circumstances, it was good to see everyone.

Friday and Saturday the family was shabbatting it so they weren't accepting visitors but I still ended up in westchester both days, friday to check out IBM Fishkill with aron because he's working there over the summer and saturday to go golfing. It turned out to be great that I had a car this week because I wouldn't have been able to get up to the funeral or the shiva so many times without it, but I'm glad my mom took it back. It's a pain in the ass to find parking.

In other news, Saturday night, 5 members of the frisbee team got written up by the cops for 3 seperate offenses. And we got kicked out of a bar. That was ridiculous. I hadn't even wanted to go downtown cause I had just been down there having dinner with my mom, but I'm glad I did. I also gradually worked up to telling my mom that I'm going to ireland with aron. Well, I didn't exactly tell her but i dropped hints that I might so it won't be so much of a shock when i tell her that i have tickets.

2007-03-19T14:21:00.000-04:00

Back from spring break this morning at 4:45 am. Man that trip was exhausting. I ended up driving the first 4.5 hours, resting for 4, shot gunning for 3 and then driving for 3. Which means I was awake almost the entire time. The last leg into new jersey, everything was blurry; I couldn't tell what lanes the cars in front of me were in and I couldn't read the signs at all. But John and Goose were in worse shape and jamie disqualified herself when she fell asleep as shotgun so for the third year in a row I drove into manhattan.

I was not expecting much from this spring break but it turned out to be awesome, one of the best ones I've had. I really like being a captain because I like making decisions and being able to set the tone for the trip. For me that means, morning practices, evening work outs and lots of chilling in between. I liked that it was a diverse crowd with some people going crazy and some people chilling out. I also liked that it was warm sunny right on the beach and beautiful. And that I didn't get arrested for supplying alcohol to minors. It hadn't even occured to me what a risk I was taking until we got kicked out of the house on thursday and i realized that someone could have called the police and then i would have been screwed.

I have to finish my french essay and ask for an extension on my fluids homework and despite my five hour nap this morning its still hard to see straight. I'm skipping econ for sure. Sarah's in town the week so I need to hang out with her. Anyway this week will work itself out if I can get through the next few days.

PS

2007-03-02T23:42:00.000-05:00

To complicate my gender aware weekend, I just went to Eunji's blog and I love that quote.

time to start this shit up again....

2007-03-02T23:30:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to try to go through a play by play of the last few weeks. They've been busy and fun and stressful and relaxed and whatever. But now I'm sitting at home in Medfield, my dad and I just finished watching the illusionist which is an excellent movie, and I feel like posting. So there.

Happy B Day Karen!

I'm having a gender aware weekend. Meaning I've had several conversations with people where they've said things and then apologized for offending me by being sexist. Usually some comment on a girl's looks or a joke about something or other. None of their comments offended me because they came from people I knew who I know for a fact respect me and respect women. At least most of the time.

But then today, I was clicking around on Amazon looking for something else entirely and I ended up in this religious marriage help book section where everything had titles like "The Surrendered Wife" and "Liberated Through Submission" and goddamn did that push every single one of my feminist buttons. Even more so because they say enough true things to draw you in and then come to a conclusion that I disagree with entirely. Like for example....premise: constant power struggles erode marriages....conclusion: man = right, woman = silent. In my book, premise = true, conclusion = false. Friendships don't sustain themselves by having one person always in control. It's a constant balance which almost never makes a difference especially if both people are pretty laidback. Why should relationships be any different?

On the other hand, I think personally I've been being pretty bitchy lately to a lot of people. One of my personal goals is to stop being so negative all the time.

Anyway that's my rant for the day. In other news, I think its really funny that the Swiss just invaded someone by mistake. That totally ruins their perfect record.

2007-02-18T17:22:00.000-05:00

So apparently I missed the best part of the party. Goddamn it. It got broken up at around 12 15. Well, security didn't tell us we had to break it up but they told us that if they came back again, my suite would be in trouble and there were way too many people to quiet down for that to be an option. I hadn't even had a chance to enjoy it because there were too many people to be signed in and the guy at the desk was being really strict so I had to beg all of my engineering friends to sign people in. So we kicked everyone out and we started cleaning and mopping the floor before it had a chance to get sticky. The rest of the party moved to goose and tail's suite and I was going to go up there too, but before i had even finished cleaning sasha called to say that that had gotten broken up and people were moving to lion's head. There was no way I was going to lions head in the cold to pay for alcohol, so i chilled for a while with aron and suitemates and then went to bed.

And I missed the party! And there was crazy drama and drunkenness! So not only did my team lose at frisbee but I wasn't even there to help win the party! I'm pissed. If I had known people were still up in 1206.... It didn't help that I lost my phone at some point (it dropped under my bed) and I was too lazy to look for it. I hate missing out. There were people I liked there. It would have been fun. Goddamn it.

tired

2007-02-17T19:28:00.000-05:00

There's going to be a party in my suite in a couple hours and I'm so tired. I just want to nap and chill by myself for a while so that I'll be in a good mood when people start coming. When i haven't had time to settle and recharge i get so much more irritable and easily frustrated. Not that the last couple days weren't really fun. I just get drained if i don't have some time to myself.

I've been hanging out with aron a ton which is a lot of fun. He can be a little intense to be around. It's been a long time since I talked to someone this much. Its like how i remember when i first made friends with karen and we talked all the time and walked each other back and forth between our houses and then talked on the phone some more. It's a good feeling and scary all at the same time.

It was a kind of random week with valentines day on wednesday. Which usually doesn't even register with me as more than a minor blip but was pretty amazing this year. Then Thursday i went over to brian and jake's suite and they were watching pirates. Not pirates of the caribbean. Pirates the porn. I watched for a while but there were too many fake boobs and the dialogue was just as horrible as i expected. You'd think for being the highest budget porn ever or whatever they would have less boring sex or a more interesting plot/ fight scenes or both. Then on the other end of the spectrum, last night i went to vagina monologues. I enjoyed it but it definetely made me think about experiences that i don't ever think about. Which was also intense. There are large parts of my past that I almost never remember. Not that i have any deep dark secrets; i don't. Just some things get glossed over until an outside force triggers a memory. Vagina monologues triggered a lot of memories, some good some not so much. Its clearly been a sexual kind of week.

I hope the people that need to be signed in come early so i have time to chill. With a theme like global warming, i practically have to wear a bikini so going to the front desk many times is going to be especially painful.

2007-02-12T20:13:00.000-05:00

I'm pissy. And moody. And I plan to stay that way. At least until I feel like stopping. So there.

What day is it? Monday? I spent so much time in class today. Class is lame. I stayed up so late last night, the first part deriving the continuity equation for cylindrical coordinates (or trying) and the second part talking about feelings. I don't know which is more tiring. Coordinates? Feelings? Fuck that shit.

Now, potlucks. Those are a good idea. Always. It was funny how many people brought totally cold weather food, heavy starch and soup type stuff. Usually I love hosting them because the more random people show up and bring the most random things. I think we had 30 people. Maybe more. Probably more. There were a bunch that i didn't even know. But then my foot started really hurting and i remembered all the problem sets i had to do so i just decided to be anti-social. I'm pretty sure my foot isn't broken though because it feels better today and not worse. And I'm not pregnant. Two good things. I still probably shouldn't run tonight but at least i can get a decent lift in.

Damn i meant to study for econ before practice but as usual i got distracted. It'll have to wait til after. Oh i watched the Pursuit of Happyness (a while ago now) and i really liked it but man was it depressing. Yeah you knew that things were going to work out for will smith in the end but it didn't make it a happy ending. It just made it a slightly less sad movie.

2007-02-07T16:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't felt like posting lately, mostly because there's so much I don't want to talk about. But I was sitting in the B school library and listening to a couple of students compare travel stories and work experience, and I was struck with a sense of loss. It took me a while to figure out why, but i realized it was the same feeling when i chose no to go right to college and when i sent back the letter saying I'd go to Barnard. Not a sense that I had made the wrong choices, but a sense that my options are continually contracting. Every choice that I make has a series of paths that I haven't taken and I feel the loss of all of those. All the jobs I'll never take and the places I'll never live and the places I'll never go and the people I'll never meet. Sometimes its impossibe to be satisfied when I think about how small a portion of the world I'll ever get a chance to see or know.

That being said, I have been pretty satisfied lately. I had a really nice birthday Friday. I made myself French toast and then went to moma to look at the photographs and then chilled at Barnes and Nobles. I met aron for dinner at mesa which was delicious, and I'm really proud of the book I bought him for his birthday which is my birthday. Then I went and chilled with Tracy and Daniella for a while which is always a lot of fun. We did the OK Go dance and made turtle try on tracy's shirts and drank godivas liquor. The bar was a lot of fun and I was really happy to see so many people there but by the end of the night I was totally crashed out. And a couple of people were being jackasses. But mostly I was just tired because we got to the bar so early.

The rest of the weekend was pretty solid. Winter league saturday and we actually won a game. Yay! Babysitting at Tammy's which is the easiest money I'll ever make and I love the kids. Super bowl party at Goose and retail's. That was a lame super bowl though. The commercials were unimpressive and the game itself sucked. I got bored and started reading whatever susan sontag book was lying around. Something about war and empathy. Nice light reading.

I actually got a lot of work done today which was good because i only had one class. I don't even know what day it is. Wednesday? Yeah it must be because i have track tonight. And because i had dinner with leroa monday and dinner with tracy tuesday and that gets us to wednesday. Tracy said she might be up for moving to brooklyn with me and leora next year which would be sweet. I just need to get stupid archstone to tell me when they want me to start. And figure out when i want to start.

If my parents are willing to lend me money and they said they are, i'm really thinking i want to travel for a couple of weeks before i start either a road trip or south america with elizabeth or maybe a short european thing like biking across ireland. I have to figure things out though. I'd love to go with karen but she works and so does leora. Anyway, I'll figure it out.

perception v reality i.e. naval gazing

2007-01-31T13:10:00.000-05:00

I don't think of myself as a social person who needs to be around people all the time. I think of myself as an introvert who needs time by myself and independence to read and run and chill. But yesterday it occurred to me that that is not how i've been living my life, at least not lately. Lately, i've been almost complusively calling people whenever i have a free moment and making dinner plans and going out plans and feeling bad about the people i've been neglecting. I think part of is because i have nothing worthwhile to do with my alone time right now and part of it is that i'm afraid if i don't keep seeing people, i'll wake up one morning and not have friends. I also don't think of myself as someone who needs to have a guy all the time; i feel in myself some contempt for girls who do. But at the same time, I've spent very little time completely single and unattached. Since i got to college, i don't think i've gone more than a few months without some guy in my life in some capacity, maybe not as official boyfriend but as something. I'm not sure i like what that history says about me.

I guess this was brought on because yesterday i helped aron move and then we made dinner together. This friday is both of our birthdays so we're going out to dinner and then hanging out at a bar with all our friends. At least all my friends, i don't know who he invited. Those kind of things feel so serious to me even though they're not and we're not. It at least feels like we're heading in that direction, and i don't know if i like that direction. And if i do like that direction, what kind of disloyal slut does that make me? Besides the fact that my feelings are still pretty complicated, i don't like who i am in relationships. Ok that's not true entirely. I didn't like who i was in my relationship with steve; being a girlfriend seemed to make me unreasonably, demanding, irrational, and generally unsatisfied. On one hand, i could never seem to get enough of his time and on the other hand, i resented the loss of independence. Part of that might have been the inmaturity of a first relationship. I liked who i was when i was with stoops but i think a part of that is that we didn't label if for so long so i didn't have an expectations of what we, as a couple "should" do, of how a couple was supposed to act. So i could just be me.

So I'm extremely wary, both because my feelings are so unsettled right now and because when i think about relationships (except stoops), my strongest feeling is one of low-level resentment.

2007-01-28T14:01:00.000-05:00

I didn't take nearly enough pictures of Africa. Most of what i did take was just me and stoops hanging out and messing around with the camera, but there are at least a couple good ones in there. I couldn't really take pictures of Africa. I probably could have but i didn't really feel comfortable drawing any more attention to myself.

In order from the top, we have...
Brett in her kitchen with her cute gas stove.

Brett and Stoops at the source of the Nile.

Stoops glaring at his cat.

The picture of me in the window is taken from Stoops' backyard. I'm looking out his bedroom window.

The one of the two of us was taken at the Bahai temple in Kampala which is a beautiful building.

I have a bunch of other pictures of Stoops' site and the classrooms and one picture of a group of teachers, but i want to see if blogger can handle this many photos before i start adding more.

Wicked....

2007-01-27T11:06:00.000-05:00

...is so good! I was so impressed. I've been kind of let down by a lot of broadway shows (I'm looking at you Movin' Out) and others have seemed anticlimactic because they're so familiar (Spamalot and Producers), but Wicked was up there was Avenue Q as a totally worth it show. I really liked the music, the set was amazing, and I thought all the preformers were excellent. I liked. =)

I'm also excited about winter league. I got drafted 5th which cracks me up cause that's totally overrated, and I really like playing with most of the guys on my team. I'm just mad that berger got drafted before me. Not because i'm better than him. Just because it was so funny last year when he got so mad. Yeah, on paper our team isn't going to do so well but winter league is all about luck. I'm just worried about how out of shape i am.

Yesterday was almost entirely unproductive. Well, I did meet with my design group to talk about turbines. I'm supposed to research the generator so I started looking on line and there is an amazing number of people out there that build things like wind turbines and alternators for fun, in their garage. I'm so impressed by them. I guess i was social yesterday, that's something. And I had a really nice dinner with steve in the village, which was fun. I'm going to have to take him out for dinner at some point; I feel like i'm pretty far in debt as far as paying for things goes. i never plan to be; it just happens and i guess i'm a mooche.

Oh, I wanted to write about the documentary i saw, the Invisible Children one. It made me feel so cynical. They showed the film that these three college kids had made about the effect of the LRA on northern uganda and it was really sad, but i was familiar with the story so not shocking. But then they had a film on their fundraising drive and about how many books and computers they had sent over there and about how many kids were now in schools. And that's great, i know that's great, but i couldn't help thinking about the storage closet full of computers at stoops' teachers college and the shelves of books and classroom resources that apparently never get used. So while these guys were making a perfectly reasonable pitch- "$3 a week can make such a difference..."- it made me uncomfortable to think that people were giving this money and patting themselves on the back for it when who knows for real whether any of that equipment is getting any use at all. I wish i wasn't so cynical.

2007-01-24T18:43:00.000-05:00

I am entirely too stupid to blog. I can't figure out how the hell to delete the dumb comments without hiding all of them. I turned the moderate button back on so now comments won't show up right away but i'll filter them. At least I think that's how it works. For an engineer, I suck at this. Mostly because i'm too lazy to spend any time on it. Despite the fact that I'm bored right now.

My schedule still isn't set so i'm not really doing reading or homework for any of my classes. I feel like that's a nice compromise. That way none of them will feel left out. I should do the reading for my global economy class, but i'm not going to buy the book so i'd have to go to uris and i don't have that class til Monday. Instead i'm going to go see Invisible Children, which is about how the LRA terrorizes (terrorized?) northern Uganda, go to track practice, and watch Batman Begins (you hear that, stoops? and maybe, just maybe, i'll see the other ones that don't suck too)

I've been cooking a ton cause i have the time. Yesterday I made this really good mushroom dish and a pecan pie and over the weekend I made the coconut/almond bar things and i think tonight or tommorrow i'll make coconut macaroons. I have a lot of coconut still left over, despite my attempt at coconut-curry this evening. Also, its really hard to stove-roast a pepper without tongs because you're not supposed to break the pepper's skin but you're supposed to constantly rotate it over a fire (or gas burner). So you end up trying to hold a pepper with two spoons which totally doesn't work or really lightly with two forks which is also way too hard. I gave up on that one. This suite needs a broiler pan.

Tomorrow I get to see Wicked! I'm so excited. I've put my name in for the lottery at least 3 times and never gotten anywhere. It should be great. I know the story cause i read the book and because me and leroa listened to the sound track together and she narrated it for me. Which was entertaining enough in its own right.

adjusting

2007-01-22T12:25:00.000-05:00

I just spent an hour in a class called Pirates, Merchants, and Slaves. The economics of piracy in the 17th and 18th century. Ha! Yeah, my schedule is not very set right now. I'm signed up for 6 classes and i have 12 on my list of possibilities but right now I'm thinking Pirates, French, Global Economy or Social Entrepeneurship (depending on what i get into), Fluids, and Senior Design. All of those should be just fine except for fluids which will suck, but all of the mech E electives suck and I like the guy who's teaching that one.

I'm actually pretty happy with my senior design project. The night I got back elizabeth knocked on my door and said "wanna ditch all our friends and be in a group that's working on putting a wind turbine on the roof of Mudd?" I said yes for a couple reasons. First of all, while I love my engineering friends, the group had no idea what kind of project we wanted to do and everyone had totally different interests. The chance of getting a project that made 6 of us happy was very small. And if elizabeth ditched me, it would be me and 4 guys. So I decided I'd be happier with her and a wind turbine.

This weekend was pretty solid actually. I made a good attempt to see everyone all in a weekend, and I think I did a pretty good job of catching up between the fajitas Friday, the brunch and sugar cookies saturday (seperate events with seperate groups), and the football game sunday. And it kept me busy which is always good. Yesterday was pretty awesome actually. I spent the morning doing laundry, looking for jobs, and generally being productive and then did a pool workout. Pool workouts always make my body feel so good and then i spent the rest of the afternoon baking stuff for the football watching party that i was going to. I love baking when i have plenty of time, but i'm pissed about the patriots. Fuckers.

I've got more serious stuff on my mind too but blogs should be used judiciously.

back in the US(S)A

2007-01-18T09:47:00.000-05:00

It's nice to be back in the land of reliable electricity and running water (that you can drink!). I got in last night so i'm definetely still adjusting, but its good to be home. So many mzungus around though. =)

I'm not sure how much i want to write about my trip. It was a lot of fun, totally worth it, and i'm really glad i went. But trips like that are so hard to describe or explain, and i'm starting to think that i've been too quick to talk about everything. Maybe i'll try later.

For now, i'm going to go grocery shopping and then start my usual round of class shopping. I'm sure its fine that i missed the first two days of classes, but now i have to make up for lost time and figure out what the hell i'm doing with my schedule. French, senior design, entrepenourship, and religion and human rights today. We'll see what sticks.

obsessed

2007-01-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

I can't think of anything besides my trip for more than about five minutes at a time. I was in Pittsberg for four days and last night was new years and i've seen tons of people and had a lovely week. But the only thing I've been able to focus on is packing and thinking about all the different scenerios that could play out. I'm pretty sure its not healthy. People keep asking me if I'm excited, but I don't think that that is what this feeling is. It's a combination of anxiety, nerosis, single mindedness, and blind panic. It's living in the future, even if that future is only a few days ahead. It's not a pleasant feeling exactly but its strong.

I've packed my bag almost entirely just to make sure it all fits. It does with plenty of room to spare but its far too heavy for my taste. Which means I can lift it with no problem at all and I could carry it all day. Most of the weight comes from presents so I won't have to worry about that for long after i get there. I should weigh it.

A couple days ago I had a total panic attack, convinced that everything was going to be aweful and that I'd either die on the way over or spend the whole time deathly ill. Funny how I never worry about the plane crashing on the way home, just the way over. Also funny and a little bit sad that I spend 90% of my time anticipating disaster and only 10% thinking about how much fun it will be. When I know that once I get there I'll probably have 90% fun and 10% disaster.

....ok nicki try to think about something else....

Happy new years! I ended up being in MA last night which was nice cause i got to see karen and sarah. Though hanging out with my cousins would have been fine too. I like them. The little ones were out in force with 11 of them under the age of 7. We kept them busy though and managed to not injure any of them perminantly. Which doesn't sound impressive but red rover is a violent game. One poor little one got completely clotheslined and went flying backwards but he bounced right back up. Which is good because his mother was laughing too hard to be helpful. =)

The basketball game was pretty lame this year. My dad and his brothers are getting old and injured and my brothers are both injured and lots of the cousins had their own kids to watch. We still had enough for a full court game but not many subs and it was pretty poor quality. Me and Eric were teaching people to throw a flick so maybe we'll be able to start an ultimate game at some point. If we teach them when they're young, they'll be ready for the ashcroft wildwood team in no time.

There that was five whole minutes of non-uganda thought. Now to go figure out what kind of food i'm going to bring on the plane.

packing

2006-12-27T22:46:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-12-25T16:30:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-12-20T11:52:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-19T00:22:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-17T12:30:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-15T11:30:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-15T10:12:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-14T09:48:00.000-05:00

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.... =)

2006-12-11T12:55:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-09T11:52:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-04T12:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-02T13:15:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-11-28T15:09:00.000-05:00

It is getting harder and harder to do any work. I'm just entirely and utterly uninspired. Someone inspire me! Part of that is the fact that, as I think I'm mentioned before, I have two job offers. =) Part of it is that I've been disgustingly sick with that icky kind of cold where you don't even want to be around you. Just three more weeks of school; I just got to get through them. And I guess a semester after that but I'm not so worried about that. Too many things to look forward to before that even happens. Speaking of which, I've gotta call the travel doctor. I need my rabies shot.

I've decided to experiment on myself and keep track of how many colds I get, how long the last, and what kind of things makes them either not happen or go away faster. My mom and I both have terrible immune systems when it comes to annoying colds. I think every time a germ looks at either of us, our nose starts running. So maybe if I turn myself into a science experiment, I can prevent a lifetime of kleenexes.

Also, I was clicking through facebook and I was on Jess Silverman's pictures and there was a picture of Lauren Burchill only her last name wasn't the same. It was listed as Lauren Something funny that Starts with An L. She got married! Yeah I know I haven't talked to her in a million years, but its pretty bad when facebook is the one to tell you that one of your high school friends is married.

Weekend salvaged

2006-11-26T01:27:00.000-05:00

Yeah last night sucked, but it got mostly redeemed when karen came over. After a bottle of wine, I was having a great time trying to figure out how many people from high school we actually cared about seeing. Going through the yearbook, we counted 35 out of 140.

Tonight almost was a reunion. My friends and I went out to a movie and then to a local bar and there were tons of medfield people there. But mostly it just reminded me of why I like Columbia. My close friends are great and these comments don't apply to them at all. BUT...(elitist alert)... I love how at Columbia I will never be the smartest, most talented, or most motivated person in a room. There were rooms in high school where I could be all three. At Columbia, I don't think about that at all; everyone is working hard and everyone is a huge nerd. But many medfield people seemed to have kept the anti-intellectual prejudice that I remember from high school. When a conversation goes something like this....

Them: So where are you living?
Me: I'm still in New York at school.
T: Oooo fancy, new york. What are you studying?
M: Mechanical engineering right now.
T: What a smarty! I mean I don't even know what that is! What is that? Do you know what that is? Man, I'm over at whereever state college and I don't even know if we have that.

Way to make me self conscious. I like having friends that I have no chance of impressing because they're equally impressive.

so pathetic

2006-11-24T20:44:00.000-05:00

I am so pathetic right now. I'm sitting at my computer in medfield while my high school reunion is going on in boston. Right now. As I'm blogging. And I'm not going. This has been the worst evening I've had in a while.

It started ok. I drove in to Laura's at 5 and got a little lost. Not too bad. Lu helped me find her place in one piece. So it was nice. I got to catch up with em and katheryn o and esther and lu and plaudits. I didn't know a lot of what was going on with them.

Then at 6:30 I left to go to the airport. Karen's flight was delayed but Sarah was coming in around 7 so I was going to meet her and then go to the reunion. The first problem was with katheryn o's GPS. It seemed like a good idea at the time to let me borrow it but it wouldn't accept logan airport as a location. So we just put in the hamilton inn at logan figuring it would be close.

So off I went, following the GPS commands. It was only when i hit everett on the border of revere that I started to get worried. For non-Bostonians that meant I went from south of the city to north of the city with no clear way to the airport. Meanwhile, I am having a terrible time driving. Everytime I see anything move out of the corner of my eye, I picture that SUV hitting me. So I'm checking eight times before i change lanes, driving at around 40, avoiding left turns. Basically driving terrible and freaking out doing it. And it turns out that the Hamilton Inn at Logan is not at logan. Shit.

I finally made it to the airport and illegally parked. Karen is still in Philly so I try sarah a bunch of times. I finally get a hold of her and she's having as bad an evening as me; she was sick the whole ride back and for obvious reasons doesn't want to go to the reunion. Fine. I'll go by myself and meet up with lu and crew.

The mass pike, however, disagrees. It only wants to run east today. I can't get on 90 west. The GPS keeps yelling at me as I try to follow the damn detour though boston paranoid, jumpy, lost, and really freakin upset. I finally found it and only then realized that there is no exit for fenway going that direction. I can't get to the fucking bar where the reunion is. I'm freaked out, I'm crying, I can't even deal with the idea of finding parking near fenway. I wouldn't even be able to drink cause I still have my damn car. I just keep going west on the pike.

Which is how I ended up home at 9 pm feeling sorry for myself. Also my feet our cold cause i wanted to take a walk before i went inside but i had heels on so I took them off. Bad idea. They're still numb from cold. I'm entirly pathetic. Uncle Jerry just brought me some bailey's though. mmmm. I hate me sometimes. like now.

oops

2006-11-22T22:58:00.000-05:00

I got in my first car accident today. I was pulling out of Nye Road to take a left and there was a long line of cars going right. I thought I checked and I was inching out slowly when an SUV totally nailed me from the side. The passenger side window shattered and my car got pushed into another car. I could see that I was going to be hit a split second before it got me, and it felt like such a long second. And then I could see that I was going to hit the other car and it felt like slow motion but I didn't have time to react. It was a very strange experience. So everyone was fine and my car wasn't totalled but it was pretty banged up. It just scared me.

I had been home for literally all of 10 minutes. My mom picked me up at the train station at 1:20, we had lunch then got home at 2:30 and at 2:40 I left to get to a doctor's appointment. Pulled out of my driveway and wham, by quarter to three I was brushing broken glass off my leg.

ok so I'm dumb

2006-11-21T13:55:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Gabi, for explaining to me why I never had any comments on my blog ever. I guess I had some weird moderate comments setting on without knowing it and I never knew that there were comments for me to moderate. I turned that thing off so hopefully all will work well now and I just read though all the comments that people had already made. Thanks guys! All this time I just thought no one loved me =)

hehehehehe

2006-11-20T19:40:00.000-05:00

I have two job offers!!! So I called the company in jersey city and told them i had an offer and could they tellme whether they wanted me or not and the woman said she couldn't tell me anything but then when i came back from chilling with leora, i had an e mail telling me congradulations and that the details would be in an e mail tomorrow. So i have two job offers!!! 0 to 2 in 6 hours. That's pretty good I would say.

wooohoooo!

2006-11-20T15:14:00.000-05:00

I've been afraid to post about it for fear of jinxing myself but now I can. I have my first job offer!!!! They called like 15 minutes ago. I was freaking out all morning because I had the interview friday and I thought it went really well and I've always been able to tell so far, but I was still nervous so I was freaking out all morning until they finally called. The conversation started like alot of the rejections ones I've had "we enjoyed talking to you friday and we think you have a lot of good experiences..." but then instead of saying "...unfortunatly we will not be able to extend an offer to you" they said "...and that is why we would like to offer you a position for next year" !!!! The salary is competative but a little bit low so I'm hoping I get another job offer and then i can go back to the company i like and say "hey can you match this?" and then they will and it'll be awesome. God I'm so glad that interview went well; it had so much potential to go badly because a) I slept through my alarm, b) when i woke up it had suddenly turned into, ummm...a bad time of the month and c) a sea gull almost shit on me while i was waiting for the interview. like it landed 2 inches away from where i was sitting.

In other news.... well i have no other news. That is my big news. This weekend was a lot of fun especially the warrior-poet party where I did not eat 5 packages of pringles because after i ate one i couldn't look at them without wanting to puke. that party was so funny because people were acting ridiculously drunk but it was off of food and not alcohol. And then we took forever getting back to manhattan cause we went the wrong way on the A and tao had to go outside to pee at 14th st.

The theme of this week has been gluttony between the all you can eat sushi wednesday or thursday, the warrior poet party friday, the fake thanksgiving saturday and my suitemeates and i went out to symposium yesterday to mourn Drew's lost rhodes scholarship. I guess its ok cause i haven't gone grocery shopping in a very long time.

GPA

2006-11-16T15:23:00.000-05:00

Alright. My GPA is entirely calculated now after an hour with a spreadsheet. And don't just tell me its one number. I have a Barnard one, a Columbia one, a cumulative one, and a Columbia one as it would be if the engineering classes i took while at Barnard were counted. And no I wouldn't actually fudge it in an interview. I would say "at barnard i had a 3.76, at columbia its a 3.5, cumulative at 3.7. BUT if they give me a hard time about why my SEAS one is so much lower, at least I'll be able to defend myself better. That crazy woman yesterday pissed me off so much. If a 3.7 isn't high enough, don't call me in for an interview.

In other news, I had a great time at the sushi thing last night and ate entirely too much. Also I am so looking forward to thanksgiving. We're going to have so many people over. Tammy, Adamn and their two, Ellen, Dale and their two, Aunt Nicki, Uncle Jerry, maybe Dale's parents, and of course my immeadiate family. Any my reunion is that weekend. That should be pretty funny/ awkward. I'm in touch with like 3 people.

more interviews

2006-11-14T19:47:00.000-05:00

I am ridiculously tired cause my valve group made me stay up til 4 in the morning to work on a presentation that it turned out we didn't even do today (half the groups presented this morning at 9, half will go thursday; he picked out of a hat this morning). I like my group a lot but I hate group project. I don't stay up late to do work! I just don't. I need my sleep, I plan ahead, I do things in the morning, whatever it takes to have me tucked in by midnight or 1. So I was just getting bitchier and bitchier as the project dragged on and people got even more ADD and anal retentive. Just cause you're all night owls, why are you making me suffer? So now I'm tired as hell and therefore moody and depressed.

Mostly depressed about jobs. It seems so unlikely that I'll ever find anything and I have three interviews this week, one tomorrow morning at 9:45. I know I'm going to bomb it which is making me depressed. And the one I have Friday (8:30 AM on wall street, shoot me now) is basically my last chance. Its the only second round I have left and the only other two companies that haven't rejected me, one is human resources consulting which is basically just firing people and one is the company steve works for so even if i get the job i can't really take it. So I have to do well at my second round on Friday but i've been rejected so many times, I feel like there's no way they're going to make me an offer. I'm doing something wrong cause I'm getting tons of interviews and I'm blowing them and its so upsetting. Cause once you've had the interview, it's no longer "oh there were 150 resumes for 20 slots, its not personal". It's they met you, they talked to you, and they don't want you. So out of two first rounds this week and one second round, the second round is my last chance and its so scary and so depressing.

I spent linear algebra class trying to figure out whether i want to do peace corps. If i do, I'll be 27 when i get back. 27! And I'll have no job, no money, no relationship (most likely). I'll be just as poor and unattached as I am now. I mean, I know I'm going to be 27 anyway, but I can't commit 2 years to something that intense if its going to feel like losing time to me, like putting my life on hold. I'm already 2 years behind where I "should" be and most of the time I don't regret that. But to wait another 2 years before I settle down and get some stability in my life seems like way too much. 27 is old. By that time, I want to have money saved, i want to be with someone special, i want to be looking at real estate and giving back to the community locally. I don't want to get back and find that my friends have moved on, I'm coming up on my 10 year high school reunion, and I still have to find my first "real" job.

On the other hand, it's not like its a waste of time. It would be an incredible experience and more and more I'm interested in international development, non-profits, and socially concious business. It wouldn't be a waste. But 27. I just don't know.

blah

2006-11-13T14:04:00.000-05:00

This isn't worth posting on the newsgroup but sometimes people make me so angry. Last year, all I heard from the guys team was "why don't the women post?" "why don't the women come out?" And no matter how many times I explained that the newsgroup was a pretty hostile environment and that none of the new women really wanted to meet the men, partly for that reason, people kept yelling at me everytime i went out: "where are the women? where are your rookies?"

This year, the newsgroup is totally new and therefore not hostile and look what happened? Women have been posting and women have been going out. Huh, I wonder how that happened. So why do some of the guys want to bring it back to last year's environment? I'm not that easy to offend and I don't really care what people say about me, but I don't understand why the guys can't see the connection between having a decent social life on the team and not being assholes on newsgroup. Look, this year the rookies want to be part of the team and meet the men. Last year they ran away from the men screaming and only socialized at women's only events. Maybe I will post this. But then Berger will just yell at me for not having a sense of humor.

In other news, I have resolved to:
a) stop talking about the country of Uganda or any resident therein so I don't bore my friends to tears.
b) start looking for other jobs not in consulting cause I've pretty much given up. All the rejection is really starting to wear on me. The first couple I didn't mind but gradually, one "fuck you" at a time, its starting to get to me. Bridgespan especially was a harsh rejection.

boooo

2006-11-10T16:00:00.000-05:00

My favorite company in the whole world didn't even call me to tell me whether I was rejected or not. They were supposed to contact all canidates between Nov 1st and 3rd. It's now the 10th and I haven't heard anything. I called yesterday and someone took my name, but I haven't heard back. I really want to call again today but I don't want to be pushy. On the other hand, they clearly have no intention of hiring me right now so I have nothing to lose.

home

2006-11-07T16:34:00.000-05:00

I voted today. Did you?

I'm home for another half hour or so and then I'll head back to new york and face the two midterms and one interview that I've got coming. Hopefully I'll be able to study on the bus.

I'm glad I came home for break. I needed the rest and it was nice to see Karen and Sarah at least even if I didn't get to see everyone I wanted to. And my parents. It was nice to see my parents. It's so weird how big and empty our house is now with all of us off to school.

They reacted to my travel news better than I expected considering I promised my mom I would never go. Well actually their first comment was "Bring a lot of condoms." Exact quote. My parents are weird. Today, my dad talked me through a selection of the things that could go wrong, which isn't such a bad thing. I do need to consider all the possibilities.

Besides thinking about that, I've spent the rest of the break either playing ultimate or thinking about ultimate. I really enjoyed the tournament a lot. The first day I was getting really frustrated cause sometimes when we're losing, I try to play for the whole team. Not for real, but on every point I'm concentrating on what everyone on the field should be doing which makes me play worse and makes me yell more. Not good things. We shouldn't have lost a couple of those. But there were so many people and we haven't played that much together. I had a lot more fun Sunday when we played all our rookies. They're so good and they were having so much fun. And our sophomores really stepped it up too which is awesome. Spring's going to be amazing.

I have a computer now, on loan from my parents. That's going to be nice to have. Of course now I'm never going to be able to do work in my room again. But I won't have to live in the lab either. I'll take that trade off.

AHHH!

2006-11-03T12:58:00.000-05:00

HOLY SHIT I JUST BOUGHT A TICKET TO UGANDA!!!!

Oh my god I can't beleive I just actually pressed the finalize button and spent $1400 on a ticket to uganda in january. What the hell am I thinking? How did this happen? I know I was planning on it, but I actually have a ticket.

I'M GOING TO UGANDA!

There are so many reasons why its a terrible idea and none of them even matter anymore because I already bought a ticket. AHHHH! I'm totally freaking out right now. Who does that? Who buys a ticket to Africa? I'll be there for 12 days. I'm missing the first 2 days of class but I'm ok with that. I'm going to Uganda.

I can't decide....

2006-11-01T14:42:00.000-05:00

I've been obsessing about this for the last two weeks and I'm no closer to an answer. Do I go to Uganda in January or May? I don't fucking know. January is sooner, cheaper, involves shorter flights, and I know that Stoops and Brett will be free. But I could stay for longer in May and I would be able to relax on my winter break. If I go in January, I would probably leave the 3rd and come back around the 13th. So my break would be:

Dec 22: finish finals/ go home
Dec 26/27- Jan 1st: in Pittsburg
Jan 3-13: Uganda
Jan 16th: classes start again

That's cutting it really close. I had this same problem when I was thinking about road tripping last summer; I need a certain amount of time to chill with my family and do nothing or I get stressed out. But I don't think I need that much time. Last break I had visitors nearly the whole time. And I really want to go soon and sometime when I know that the timing will work out for them.

BUT
If I go in May, I could give myself even more time and maybe do some siteseeing in Europe as well. The plane ticket is the only expensive part so it seems a shame to be over there for only a week.

BUT
Stoops might not be free in May. And may is really far away (in time).

I DON"T KNOW!!!! And I have no way to decide; no tie breakers or criteria that's helping me out.

oh man

2006-10-29T22:54:00.000-05:00

This weekend was a little nuts. Karen and Sarah were in town which was awesome. We just went from one meal to the next and hit up basically every corner of new york in between. Midtown for the cheese resteraunt, Soho for the shopping, Canal street cause I got lost, east village for the peanut butter resteraunt, the Met cause karen had never been. All in on and off rain. That was a lot of walking. My favorite was probably the Egyptian temple in the Met. I don't know how I had never seen it before but that whole room is amazing and huge. Oh and rocky horror picture show was fun but it made me feel old.

I have mixed feelings about the Halloween party. On one hand, I thought my costume was amazing (great idea, anne) and it actually was a really decent party with a lot of people. And I really enjoyed the old person party afterwards, especially since frisbee people and engineers seem to mix pretty easily. But on the other hand, I felt like I kind of dragged karen and sarah there so I felt bad. Until I had more liquor and then I only felt bad when I remembered to. It's not the kind of night that the three of us usual have. Which is strange cause I guess it reminds me how different the three of our college experiences were/are, where our high school experiences were so similar. I never would have thought that I'd turn out to be the party person out of the three of us. I felt like we were more back to normal today when we were just chatting.

I had stuff that i should have done today but I did almost none of it. None of it is really that urgant. This sounds terrible, but I wish I had more to do sometimes. When I have this much time, I get lonely. When I'm busy I don't remember to be lonely. When you've got a boy (or girl I guess), you have someone to fill in the spare minutes or call if you get bored. You have someone who wants your time. I don't have that right now. I have to fill my own spare minutes.

I think by the end of the week I need to decide whether I'm going to uganda in january or may. There are pluses and minuses to both. I'd prefer January, cause its closer and cause I don't know what might be going on in may. But if brett's not allowed visitors or to leave site in january, I don't want to put her in an awkward situation and make her break the rules. I should call her this week.

job count

2006-10-25T18:18:00.000-04:00

The current count is 24 resumes out, 7 rejections without an interview, 2 rejections with an interview, and 2 in process (second rounds coming up). That leaves 13 companies left to hear from. So if my current rate holds, I can expect a lot more rejections in the coming few weeks. Of the second round places, one I really like and one I don't at all.

But I do have a new selection of brain teasers, some of which I got, some of which made me cry.

If you have 100 balls, 50 red and 50 black, how would you place them in two bags so that you maximize your chances of picking a red ball no matter which bag you picked from?

If you have 15 horses, how many heats would it take to find out which horse was your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place horse? Assume you have no watch or timing device, you can only race them 5 at a time, and no horse ever gets tired.

You're in a room with 2 ropes and a box of matches. Each rope burn completely in an hour. How would you measure 45 minutes? You cannot assume that the ropes burn at a uniform rate or that they are the same, just that the total time is an hour.

Some easier ones...

Say you have a cube of 1000 smaller cubes so 10x10x10. If you peal off the outer layer of cubes how many cubes are left?

If it is 12:20 what is the angle between the two hands of the clock?

Now do them while imagining someone staring at you.

mikey

2006-10-24T12:52:00.000-04:00

So whenever me and Eric would go to see micheal high jump which was whenever we were home, we'd heckle him. That's basically why we went, so we could yell things like "mikeeeeey you lanky son of a bitch" or "he's so tall! why is he so tall?" or "chicks dig scrawny pale guys!" or, our favorite, "stop sucking! jump higher!" All of which sound a little mean but the worst it ever did was make him laugh really hard.

Anyway, he's high jumping in college now so today he had a meeting with his coach just to check in. His coach asked him what kind of things he should say to motivate him.

Mikey's offical personalized UVM cheer? "Stop sucking! jump higher!"

slow to finish but I'm quick to start

2006-10-22T11:40:00.000-04:00

I have two assignments due tomorrow, both of which I'm almost done with but I just....can't....seem....to kill. I've been almost done with them for about a week now. Hopefully I'll have one done within an hour and the other I'll finish with my suitemates tonight. After I see Leora and do a bunch of calculations with my lab group.

I got two more first round interviews and one second round next Friday. That should keep me busy. At some point I should get my suit washed but I think its ok for a little while longer. I only wear it for 45 minutes at a time. I did a lot of nothing this weekend. Yesterday I went climbing with Ben which was really fun cause I managed to get up this wall that has a major overhang. I had to do this crazy thing where I switched hands and then kind of jumped. Ben couldn't do it cause his hands were too big. Then when I got back to campus people were playing pick up which was so fun and funny. 4 person zone, anyone?

Oh and me and Elizabeth discovered this special interest housing group that holds potlatchs every Friday so we brought our vegan food and went. Which was awesome cause its hard to meet new people at Columbia when you only go from EC to Mudd everyday. It was a bunch of dirty hippies and I got into a really good discussion on socially conscious business with a guy who starting a group to work on that. I think that's definetely what I want to do. After that me and Tracy went out and drank too much which was fun in a different way. Actually I should see what happened with her and Rob cause me and Goose wandered off early.

Ok I really need to finish machines if I'm going to head to queens and call stoops which I also need to do cause we keep getting cut off before I can ask him about visiting.

2006-10-19T10:39:00.000-04:00

After some interuption, I'm back. You can blame Dan for my slackerness. He visited me last weekend so I spent the week before trying to finish everything before he got here and the last couple days freaking out with the amount that I still had to do. Doing absolutly no work Friday, Saturday and Sunday can really kick you in the ass. It was really fun though and we did a ton of stuff all over NY. He'd already done the tourist stuff so we got to do fun things.

A brief list
Moma
St Patricks Catherdral
Greenwich village (all of it)
Magnolia Bakery
Coney Island
Brighton Beach
Prospect Park
Brooklyn Bridge
Upright Citizens Brigade

In addition, we got drunk at McSorleys for goose's b day, had bagels from H&H, carved a pumpkin that is going to be delicious pie very soon, and saw The Departed. It was great to get out of morningside heights for a while and it was really nice to see him. I think I freaked him out a little by how much of a student I am. Dorms and signing in and twin size bed and classes makes me seem a lot younger than I did in Seattle when I was a real person. Oh well, its not my fault he's old.

Oh and Rutgers was this weekend. I'm really glad I went sunday cause we beat rutgers and I hate them and it was a really close game. And I think we could have beat NYU too if things had gone slightly differently.

Also I've started getting interviews. I met with one company last friday and even though I'm pretty sure they're huge tools and I never want to work for them, I got a second interview. I'll probably go too just to get an offer. I've got another one tonight and another tomorrow morning, both with companies that I'm more interested in. I need to practice interviewing and cases a little bit to make sure I don't blow it. I want as many job offers as possible. Especially the one Friday cause they have a non-profit division that sounds awesome. I was really proud of myself cause one company called me and I called them back. That doesn't sound like a big deal but I am so terrified of calling people.

Karen and Sarah are coming this weekend which means I'm crazy busy trying to finish things before Friday. I did most of machines and controls but I need to finish those and do linear and CAD so I can relax for a couple days.

failure

2006-10-08T18:52:00.000-04:00

I'm grappling with the possibility of failure, mostly in my job search but also kind of in life. So far, I don't think I've ever failed at anything important to me. Like when I decided I wanted something I generally have gotten it. I mean I've had setbacks and rejections of course. But in a broader sense, I've always ended up about where I wanted to be.

So going into the job search, I have this innate belief that if I just want a job enough, I'll get it. But on a more rational level, I know that that's just not true. There are a million people who want things very much who don't get them. I've just been really lucky so far. And I define my goals broadly enough that I can usually hit them (i.e. get a job that I'll be excited about) rather than specifics ("get a job with this particular company").

But there is a real possibility that I will not get a job I'm excited about, no matter how hard I try. Does that mean the last five years of college and twelve years before that in school were a waste? I mean that's practically an american guarentee- work hard enough and you'll get what you want. But its not always true. it's just not, not for everyone.

Things will probably work out. They usually do. I will consider myself a success if

a) I find a job that I want to tell everyone I know about cause it gets me psyched
b) I continue/ begin to be the kind of person I would want to talk to at a cocktail party. That's mostly how I judge myself: in a crowded room, would I want to talk to me? Am I interesting?
c) I do NOT get competative with the people around me. Especially elizabeth. no counting interviews or comparing offers. Only support.

climbing

2006-10-07T17:29:00.000-04:00

I got up the wall today! The one me and Ben had been trying to climb all last time and I did it. Without chalk too. Besides that though, climbing wasn't that much fun. I went down with the climbing club cause ben wasn't around and it was really crowded and I ended up partnering with someone who had just started climbing. Which isn't bad but it was kind of painful to watch him throw himself around the wall with no sense of center. Ben and I are more evenly matched.

McSorley's was cool last night. That was the first time I had been downtown in a really long time and inevitably I/we drank too much. I stopped pretty early but its hard to stop at McSorley's. Goose ordered "two" and the guy brought him 8 beers. Which he and retail drank. That can't be healthy.

I'm trying to finish as much homework as I can this weekend before Dan comes but I keep getting distracted. Elizabeth got me and her cheap tickets for the ballet tommorrow which I'm really excited about and today I really wanted to climb and its Rob's b day party later. I'm excited to see Dan and I'm glad it worked out with the tournament so I can still go to Sunday's games while he visits friends on long island.

Columbia's been so contentious lately with the riot at the minuteman event. I have such mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I don't think a group of vigilantes should be positioned at our border shooting people. On the other hand, they are "illegal" immigrants for a reason.

rejections

2006-10-05T10:39:00.000-04:00

So I've gotten rejected from three jobs in the last 24 hours. Those sad e mails "while you are wonderful in every way, we are unable to offer you an interview." Two of them I don't really care about cause I knew I didn't have a chance and I didn't really want to work for them but one of them I'm kind of upset about. Oh well, the search continues.

2006-10-04T10:40:00.000-04:00

So this is the first week that has actively sucked in terms of school work. I had two problem sents due today, one yesterday, one the day before and tommorrow I have two group projects due and an exam. And of course there's a million other things that want to eat my time. Like more cover letters and buying new cleats and returning people's phone calls and getting my computer fixed.

I guess I'm not even stressed cause I know stuff is going to get done and its not the end of the world if it doesn't. It just makes me tired.

Yesterday's practice was a lot better which is good and I had a lot of fun playing at Yale once we got there. Club sports is such a pain in the ass though. We did everything we were supposed to do to ensure that we would have a van ready and waiting for us at 6:30 saturday morning. And then it wasn't there. So I'm stuck explaining to 16 girls who dragged their asses out of bed on a Saturday morning that we have no way of getting to New Haven, except a combination of squishing into two cars and metro north. Once we got there though, we played pretty well considering the amount of rookies. Personally, I have to stop throwing it away but i did have a couple nice lay outs including one that I had to kind of twist my body backwards to get to.

Last friday was a career fair so I hit that up hard core. I mostly found a lot of companies that I thought I wanted to work for that it turns out I don't. But there were one or two that sounded really good and you never know what'll turn up. I got my internship last summer through a job fair even if it was indirectly. And that company wasn't even the one I was most interseted in at the time. I did look pretty snazzy in my suit too.

Oh saturday night my suite through a party, my first real party ever where you buy lots of alcohol and see who shows up. It was awesome. We had a ton of people from different groups and they were all mingling and having fun. And then we got shut down. At 12:30. By security. Apparently there were lots of alums on campus for homecoming so they were shutting down everyone. They didn't seem to care how loud we were or how many underaged people were there. They just said they had orders to shut everyone down. Which totally sucked. The rest of the night kind of went downhill. I'd been awake since 6:30 and while I loved seeing leora, steve was pissing me off and I hadn't even had time to enjoy the party cause i'd been signing people in and buying mixers.

2006-09-28T18:33:00.000-04:00

It's harder to post when you don't have a computer. Not that I don't still spend most of my day sitting in front of one but usually I want to get in and out as quick as I can. Not that that's always possible with my valve group, but with them I have to act busy. Eunji said that either she or someone she knows can fix it for me which would be absolutly amazing. Right now I have all my files (cover letters, resumes, etc) saved on the computers in the CAD lab so they're fine but I already spend way too much time in the CAD lab. It's such a mech E hang out though so its alright.

I've spent most of this week going to employer presentations and applying to jobs. It's a full time occupation right there. Maybe someone would pay me to do that. I've done some school work too but so far nothing's been really hard or stressful. The machine shop was a little annoying today cause we kept finding out that our design couldn't be manufactured. Copper is a bitch to work with and we're working on a pretty small scale and we don't know what we're doing so basically, we're fucked. Oh well. I have fun messing around with the power tools, as long as no one expects good results.

Dan's coming to visit me in two weeks or so. That's pretty exciting. I didn't expect him to actually go through with it. You know how people say "yeah I'll totally come to NY" but they don't actually mean it. It should be a good time.

Oh and I could kill club sports. Why would you give a 15 person van to the sailing team and the hiking team when the sailing team only has 6 people going and you don't know how many people are going for the hiking team when the men and women's frisbee teams both submitted rosters of 15 people? And why would you give us such a hard time about it and not confirm our reservations ever. It's such a little detail until we end up walking to yale.

What else it going on... I don't actively hate any of my classes which I consider a real blessing. Some of them are actually kind of cool which is unexpected. I can get through this semester I think and hopefully by the end of it, i'll have a job so I'll be more relaxed. I'm still wicked psyched about non-profit management consulting, but even if i don't make it work this time, I'll get there.

I'm less lonely now that i've settled into classes. Not happy all the time, but living next to elizabeth helps and i've been trying to hang out with people more. me and goose still have to watch the rest of shalin soccer.

That's my week/life in a nutshell and next week will be more of the same. More job searching, more school. Lots of the deadlines are in the Oct 2 to Oct 7 range so that will be fun.

2006-09-20T21:10:00.000-04:00

Non profit management consulting! I think I've told everyone I know about it. I didn't even know it existed until yesterday but now I want to do it. It's such a relief to be actually excited about a job that I'm applying for. That sounds horrible, but that's the first time I've been like "wow I want to do that." Everything else has been like "well I guess that wouldn't be so bad." So now I have something to work for. And if something else comes up then so be it, but now I have a plan A which I was seriously missing.

2006-09-18T22:38:00.000-04:00

Panic just set in. I missed my first deadline for a consulting firm. Granted its not one I was particularly interested in, but still. Things are suddenly moving too fast for me. I had no less than three involved conversations today with various people on the topic of "what do I want to be when I grow up." I wish there was a way to take myself out of the situation like I did when I decided I didn't want to go right to college. Like find an alternate solution that's equally acceptable but not nearly as stressful.

And I have to get my computer looked at and I just don't want to bother.

I'm retarded

2006-09-16T15:59:00.000-04:00

My computer won't turn on. At all. Well that's not true. It'll get to the log in screen after about 20 minutes of trying and then it stops there. I'm hoping it can heal itself cause i miss it already. I get like a million e mails a day so checking it only a couple times a day can be quite a process.

That's not why I'm retarded though. I'm retarded because no matter how many times I knew it was going to crash in the near future (and its been on its last legs for a while), I've never back things up systematically. Like I have somethings saved random places, and there's not a lot on there I need. I have all my music on my ipod and most of my important documents on cunix. But there's lots of random stuff like photos and IM logs that I never backed up. Though actually most of the photos are still on my camera. Ok, so maybe it'll be ok. I just still feel dumb, cause I've seen it coming for so long.

I went climbing again today and it was fun though more frustrating than last time. There was one wall that neither of us (me or Ben) could get up but I got higher than him. He wasn't flexible enough to get past the first section and I wasn't strong enough to get past the top part. Oh the irony.

2006-09-13T16:25:00.000-04:00

This whole looking for jobs, planning for the rest of my life thing is really stressing me out. Not because its a lot of work and I'm going to get rejected a lot, though that's true. More because I don't know what I want. I almost always know what I want and then its just a matter of getting my shit together and getting it. But I don't.

Three weeks ago, before I moved back to the city, I would have said I wanted to get a real job, with a real income, and start settling down. Because the people I was hanging out with in Seattle had that, and I wanted it. Thinking about travelling made me a little tired, and I started fantasizing about 9-5s and stable boyfriends. I mean it makes sense. I was happy there, so I wanted to keep the elements of the summer that made me happy.

Now I'm back in New York, and I don't want to be here. And I'm not happy with my classes or my schedule or my lack of energy or my social life. So I'm restless. I want to move away. I want to travel. Peace Corps is starting to look appealing where less than a month ago, it looked exhausting. I want to change everything in my life so I'm not sucked into the boring funk that is Columbia. Now logically, you'd think I'd just want to go back to Seattle or somewhere and settle down if that's what was making me happy before. But some how I don't work like that. Mostly because I can't quite picture it, so I'm picturing settling down in New York and New York has bad associations for me right now.

But the problem is, how do I conduct a job search when I don't even know what end of the spectrum I want to be on? I'll apply for consulting jobs but with my GPA and lack of relevent experience, I don't have a great shot. And most of them are in New York. I'll apply for Peace Corps, but I don't know if that's what I really want. It's so confusing to feel such a huge change within myself in such a short time. I really can't handle it; I don't know how to figure it out; I don't even want to think about it, because it brings up such confusing gut reactions.

And it doesn't help that I have to keep squashing down the mental calculations, telling myself that it doesn't matter where I am in May 2008 cause its not going to happen.

2006-09-10T11:39:00.000-04:00

Don't kill me, busy people (mara) but I have entirely too much time on my hands this week. And I know that in two weeks I'll be wishing I had it back but right now its useless to me. School hasn't really started yet. None of the books for my classes are in the bookstore yet and I only just settled my schedule yesterday. I have one assignment due Thursday but its a group one and we're meeting later today.

Yesterday, I went to a career event briefly and then went climbing with Ben. City Climbers Club is so casual and the guy told me that if I bought a membership, I could always just use the gear with no rental cost. So I'm going to spring for it. $100 for 12 months is fairly incredible and I wanted to get more into it. I know I shouldn't spend the money but I'm rationalizing it because only have to buy one book this semester.

The stuff I should be doing mostly involves finding jobs, both an easy one for this semester and a real one for next year. All of the consulting firms recruit right now so I have to apply and interview and THEN figure out what I want.

Oh and it was so sad! I just bought a new suit like three weeks ago and I tried it on last night again to see if the woman at the tailor shop hemmed it right. Well she hemmed it right but now it doesn't fit around the waist! I hadn't been running for a week or so when I bought it and my cousins had been feeding me well and that must have made a difference. So now I have a beautiful suit that doesn't work. I don't want to gain weight but I need that suit to work. Could I still return it? I got it hemmed but all the tags are still on it and I have the receit.

eek

2006-09-06T18:08:00.000-04:00

Being at school defietely brings out my anxiety. I always have a distinct feeling that I'm missing something. Also, I don't trust Columbia to have my back. I knew at Barnard that if I asked my adviser something, she would give me the correct answer and if she said I was fine, then I was fine. Here, no one seems to know anything so I'm in constant fear that I'm forgetting requirements or misunderstanding something. I have three people that I can talk to about classes and they all know less than 1/3 of the story.

Columbia makes everything harder. Even opening a mailbox in Lerner is a huge deal. Despite the fact that there are at least 70 people that I know who need to open one this year, and 10 people I know that have ALREADY opened one this year, the people in mail services treated us like it was some new and uncomprehensible problem. I don't see why it is such a confusing request, but they've treated each person to ask as if it was the first time they had ever imagined that someone could ask for so much.

I'm still trying to figure out classes too. I have 4 or them all set but I need one more and I can't decide whether to knock off a tech elective or do something fun and trust that the tech electives next semester will both interest me and fit into my schedule. Those two things seem to be mutually exclusive this semester.

Practice last night was a lot of fun though. I hope more returners come out but I had a good time with the ones who did and the rookies who might or might not stay. I need to work on my throws hard core though.

Anyway, I have to stop stressing out when I have nothing to stress out about. Only things I need to do is figure out that one extra class and find a job for this semester. And find a job for next year. But I have about a week before recruiting really starts for consulting. Just enough time to update my resume and focus my search a little more. And apply to the Peace Corps. Ok maybe I should stress out....

New York

2006-09-03T16:20:00.000-04:00

I'm back in the city. Moved in yesterday in the middle of what felt like a hurricaine. It was so windy and rainy and gross out. Luckily today is nicer. I was moved in pretty early yesterday cause I insisted in getting her by 10 AM. I thought the process would be much harder and take a lot longer but it turned out to be fine. I spent the rest of the day unpacking and catching up with people.

It is so strange to be here without my Barnard friends. I mean I like frisbee people and engineers but the Barnard group was the one I relyed on. They're the ones that I could show up in their suite and do absolutly nothing. They're the ones I could call if I was bored and just wanted to grab a coffee with someone. I don't like not having them; it makes me feel alone.

I was so happy in Seattle almost all of the time. I think I'm going to have to work on that in New York. I don't know what the difference was but I have to figure it out. Cause I'm already feeling so let down being back at school. So I have to figure out what was making me so happy over the summer and how I can keep it up even as classes get hard and things get busy. I think one difference was that I didn't have to go to parties or interact with large groups of people. I would do specific activities that I wanted to do with one or two people that I liked. That's something that I can recreate in New York. Cause honestly, with some exceptions, parties kind of depress me. So that's one thing I can do- grab coffee with Alex, go climbing with Ben, do some exploring with Elizabeth, chill with Brian and Jake. Call up people I wouldn't normally call up.

In other news, I helped Karen move in last Friday and I love their new place. It's right on a lake and its so much cleaner and brighter and not student ghetto fabulous. I just have to figure out how to visit them easily.

2006-08-31T23:46:00.000-04:00

I come from a family of worriers. We're really good at it. Experts even. My brother once had a typo in a report on Navahos or Mohave or something and refered to "brave worriers" on some kind of raid. That's what we are... brave worriers. Anyway I usually try to resist the family trait but I've been really jet lagged. So I haven't been able to sleep before 3 or 4 in the morning even though I've been going to bed at midnight or 1. So to pass all that time I've been worrying about things. I think its been very productive. Pretty soon I'll have solved all of the worlds problems. Just give me a few more nights.

2006-08-29T14:17:00.000-04:00

It's nice to be home on th correct coast. I got in last night after a solid day of travel. I always forget how much I hate planes and plane travel. But it all went pretty smoothly for a change. Between my Seattle-San Fran flight getting cancelled and the San Fran-Sacramento train running 2.5 hours late, I was worried that there was some kind of transportation curse on me. And I'm an only child again cause eric's still in DC and Mikey moved up to UVM. First time in 20 years.

I had a really great time in Sacramento. Amy and Jon's house is a lot like mine in that, there were a lot of people wandering in and out, mostly friends of Kylie and Emily. That kind of atmosphere makes me really at home. Kylie's 13 years old so watching her and her friend reminded me so much of me and karen at that age. She was also in a play so I got to see her preform and it made me miss all my drama years and drama friends. Me and Amy and Emily had a good time shopping too. Me and Amy found me a nice suit and Emily had me try on the most sparkly dresses she could find. Emily is 9. It was fun. Then we went and got free stuff at all the make up counters. Amy's husband Jon runs a travel store and I want everything in. There are so many cool bags and gadgets.

Speaking of travel, one thing on my massive to do list for this week is Uganda. I need to sit down and seriously look at how I'm going to make that happen. Plane tickets are between $1300 and $1600. I have enough money right now but I'm going to have to stay on a very tight budget during the year. My biggest weaknesses are eating out and drinks so I really have to cut back on those. I also need to find a way to make around $50 a week. Obviously more would be nice but I don't think I can afford more than 4 or 5 hours a week. So I'm trying to brainstorm creative ways because most on campus jobs won't train seniors. It's not worth their time. So if I can cut my spending and earn some cash, I can do it.

Alright I should probably get back to the rest of my to do list. A brief excerpt....
get haircut
pack
sell textbooks
e mail advisor
catch up on frisbee stuff
call sarah
finish excel sheets......

2006-08-28T22:08:00.000-04:00

I"M HOME!!!!

and I'm back...

2006-08-26T02:34:00.000-04:00

For a little while. Until my battery wears out or I fall asleep. My cousin Robin took my out for a drink at the bar that overlooks the Pacific Ocean which probably would have been prettier if it wasn't so dark. Anyway I'm staying up a little longer when I drink water so that when my little cousins isabelle and brianna storm my room at 8 tommorrow morning, I'll be ready.

I'm feeling let down. I wasn't ready to leave Seattle. I was having fun. And I was busy. In the last week, there were plenty of days when I was running around til 11 or 12 at night, but running around with fun stuff. And all of the sudden I'm not busy in the same way and I'm just tired. Today I went downtown in San Fran to the museum and I could barely get the energy to walk through it. I also haven't figured out how much I'm going to miss people. There were a lot of people I really liked, but it was only three months. How much does it really matter?

I guess I've been kind of avoiding talking about Dan with any kind of specifics mostly because i don't know how much he matters so me. That's a weird thing to try to objectify. But really, he asked me out about a month ago so no matter how much time we spent together, it was only a month. I didn't get that attached. But at the same time, you always get attached at least a little. We spent Wednesday together, going to pick up at microsoft and then dinner and then we went to see Little Miss Sunshine (awesome movie, by the way. Almost as god at snakes on a plane =)). Yesterday, he drove me to the airport and then when my flight inexplicitly got cancelled, took me out to breakfast. He's great, we have a good time. But at the same time, I know that we wouldn't have worked long term even without the moving thing. It was interim. I don't know.

I probably shouldn't be writing all that in semi-public. I guess I'm a little tipsy and trying to sort things out. There are just so many people that you can like and so few that you can love. Sometimes its hard to wait for the latter when the former are there to keep you happy. Or happier.

And I'm....out

2006-08-25T00:06:00.000-04:00

I left Seattle this morning, so I'm writing this from my cousin's living room in San Francisco. Here til Saturday and then I'm up to Sacramento and then home. Maybe this shouldn't be the biggest thing to miss, but I'm really sad because my team made the summer league finals and they're playing right now without me. It is especially sad because we had an amazing game last night against a hard team, easily the best game of ultimate I've been involved with in a while and I played so well. No I'm not a modest person, I caught a lot of tough scoers and got some Ds but the whole team played so well.

I kept busy the last couple days in town. Monday, Morgan took me and Ben climbing which was a lot of fun. I got up a 5 7 no problem and I was almost up a 5 8 when my hands started slipping. Then the three of us and alison had dinner. Morgan is so funny cause he's this nice geeky guy who every once in a while comes out with the most inappropriate comments, usually about me. I'm like "if you weren't so nice I'd totally sue you for sexual harrassement."

Then Tuesday Brett came up from Portland and we had dinner and then I had my game and now I'm chatting with my cousins so more later...

counting down

2006-08-21T15:48:00.000-04:00

Down to my last four days in Seattle, and in true nicki fashion, its filling up fast. Tonight alone, I'm going climbing with Morgan and Ben, then me and Ben are going to grab dinner, then I'll probably hang out with Dan. Tommorrow Brett's coming up from Portland for dinner and then I have a semi-finals game. Ahh! I'm excited about all of it though.

This weekend had its highs and lows. I went to a tournament north of Seattle. Our team brought kind of a random group of people, so we played pretty badly which is frustrating. Also, my knee was hurting and then in the second game on Saturday I rolled my ankle so hard that I could hear it crunch. But strangly enough, it was that foot that started hurting really bad after that, like the whole buttom of it had a huge cramp. It was really slowing me down which pissed me off which made me play worse. By some strange chance, we won all our games Sat but lost them all Sunday, as we deserved to. It wasn't fun to play this weekend, not with that injury and that group of people.

So my team's play was a low. But at the same tournament, some of the best men's and women's teams in the country were playing. We're talking Furious George v Sockeye and Riot v Fury and tons of other really awesome teams. They were so much fun to watch. A huck would go up and you'd think "there's no way he can get that" but then this black streak would chase it down and layout in the end zone for the score. And that wasn't even a little bit unusual.

I am not ready for this summer to be over. Not even a little bit. But I do miss my friends and family, the ones I haven't seen in three or four months. I'm looking forward to seeing them. But I hate saying good bye to people here. I mean, I can't exactly say "see ya later" cause chances are, I'm never coming back.

2006-08-18T16:57:00.000-04:00

HA! My excel sheets are done! I just made 42 excel sheets and a manual on how to appropriately use them. (warning..nerd alert). Everytime you make a mechanical drawing of a building to indicate where all the ducts and vents are, you need to include a chart called a schedule that tells you all the equiptment you need and basic stats about it. Usually you have to make these charts in AutoCad which is probably the worst possible program to make charts in (maybe WinAmp is worse. maybe). So I made it so that you could make all the schedules in excel and then stick them in autocad and they come out all prett colors. Wheeee!

Not quite ready to go back to my spread sheets

2006-08-17T15:26:00.000-04:00

So I was reading over some of my posts for during the school year, and it made me realize exactly how unhappy I was last spring and exactly how relaxed I've been this summer. No wonder I don't want to go back to school. I was spending 16 hours a day in computer labs and libraries, fighting with Pro/ E, working hard on labs that I didn't do well on, struggling with concepts that other people seemed to understand. Add to that, not knowing whether I wanted to go back for another year, trying to figure out whether I was going to graduate, all my friends graduating, and of course, Stoops leaving. I have good reasons to get knots in my stumach when I think about Columbia. Yeah there were bright moments last semester (my amazing b day, disc golf, many hours spent playing on south lawn, hanging out with barnard friends, every time stoops visited), but for the most part, I was a freakin mess. I'm so chill right now. I don't want to lose that.

so anyway...

2006-08-17T14:51:00.000-04:00

What I was trying to say before I lost my brilliant post somewhere in the depths of the internet is.... damn, now I don't remember. It's hard to find time to blog when your only internet access is at work. By the end of the day, I just want to get the hell out of here so fast. And when I do stay, its because I'm working to make sweet overtime pay. But I've done a lot since my last post. I'm only in Seattle for another week which is making me really sad because I've had an awesome summer. Just in the last two weeks I've...

1. Bought crab legs and made a delicious meal
2. Went up to Victoria in Canada with my mom and did all of the cultured stuff that I wouldn't do with my friends like look at gardens and museums and have a wonderful high tea at the Empress Hotel
3. Went to a firing range and shot three different guns including a Glock that somehow cut my hand.
4. Saw salmon jump up a fish ladder
5. Went to a company picnic and taught 4 people how to throw a flick, two of them were even successful
6. Ran a lot. and well. I've been able to do like 5 or 6 miles at 8 minute pace pretty easily which makes me happy.
7. Saw Henry VI at a Shakespeare in the park thing
8. Had several amazing meals including one at a really fancy resteraunt. I looove good food.
9. Got totally and completely drunker than I've ever been before with my roomates playing a drinking game for So You Think You Can Dance? So fun and so miserable the next day.
10. Played a lot of ultimate though not as much as I'd like. The other day I went down to the fields but it was all dumb mens teams practicing.
11. Hung out a lot with Dan which has been a lot of fun cause we do cool things get along pretty well. Situational friendships are so strange and yet, I seem to aquire so many of them.

See that's a lot, right? On the more mental side, I've worried about my brother, though not as much since I talked to him and made a five year plan for my life.

Speaking of that....for the first time, I'm not sure I want to do the peace corps or go have an adventure after I graduate. I've really enjoyed working full time and I'm finding myself drawn towards stability. Its freaking me out. I've never wanted a perminant home with a steady job and paycheck before in my life and now I do. Is this really me? As an extension of that, I am dreading going back to school. I'm not good at engineering, I have to take so many classes, and I just know I'm going to be a terrible ball of nerves the whole time. Sometimes I wish I had quit last spring. But its too late now. I'll have to make the best of it and it will give me plenty of time to really think about next year. And try to deal with this stability craving. Maybe they have drugs to cure it and get back my wonderlust. It could also be a factor of how long I've been away from home without my friends and family. As much fun as I've had, its hard to be away for so long.