10/10/10

A day of 10/10/10 happens once every thousand years. It was a pleasant Sunday just like any other, but then a day just like it won't happen ever again.

My friend Shayna told me about a "diary project" by Irene (Zee) Zahava that would collect the entries of many Ithacans, and make a collage of sorts to see what typical Ithacans did on 10/10/10. I may be late in entering, and I can't resist letting my writings be known through my blog posts...

10/10/10 was a day of hanging out with three awesome friends Colwyn, Shayna, and Stephen. In the morning I woke up rather early for myself on a Sunday to go to Yoga Club (9 am, I know, I am lame). Yoga club was formed by my three awesome friends to practice Ashtanga Yoga. As a person new to Yoga, I am still learning how to control and live with my body and breath, and to deal with my very limited flexibility. Today was the first day I joined Yoga Club since they moved to a larger space at Jillian's Corners in the Commons. I am very glad to have this awesome Yoga club to go to and share a practice with friends. Although my legs were sore from hiking the day before, I enjoyed the stretching and breathing and the meditation at the very end.

After a challenging yoga practice, we went for lunch at an "Asian fusion" restaurant in the Commons. The restaurant serves Thai, Japanese, and Korean, and then bubble tea (which I claim to be Taiwanese). Ravenous from our workout we delighted in devouring our food, and then after our hunger had eased we exchanged gossip and philosophy and childhood stories and even thoughts on PMS. Shayna and I had green tea bubble tea, and we both agreed that it is the best dessert and drink rolled into one.

We hung out outside in the Commons after lunch, had coffee and drinks while chatting about all things under the sun. We watched cute little kids run around in the open space, and Colwyn and I longed for the days when we could run around and scream without feeling weird about it. So as we were leaving for our next destination, we put our yoga mats on our heads, and did some light running around, being silly. We discovered Stephen could hold his Yoga mat an amazingly long time on his head while walking.

After a good bake in the sun, we headed to the public library next since Shayna wanted to tell us about the diary project, and I wanted to find travel guides for upcoming trips to DC and Toronto. We sat in the library, Shayna writing about her day so far, me excitedly reading about my Toronto trip that is more than a month away, and Colwyn and Stephen drawing pictures.

We split ways after our quiet time in the library, Shayna had to head home and take care of pets, and I had to go to the garden to take care of my vegetables. My garden was in disarray due to 2 weeks of neglect, but I was pleased that the plants were still alive despite the cold weather of the weeks past.

Colwyn and Stephen invited me to have juice at Colwyn's place after my short gardening excursion. And with Colwyn's fancy juicer, we made a wonderful carrot, beet, apple, orange and ginger juice, which was spicy and refreshing and just the thing our thirsty bodies needed after our morning Yoga practice.

During our conversation about cabbages and kings and Colwyn's dvd collection, the vegan Stephen asked me if I loved animals. I, the shameless meat eater, pondered the question, and asked "I don't know what it means to love animals." How do we humans who take so much from the earth, find a balance we think is right? How do I, who is a foodie, who loves the taste of meat, become more responsible for what I eat and put in my body? These were very hard questions, and our discussion lightly grazed the surface of my troubles, gently stirring what I have been pondering for quite some time.

I went home for a light dinner, and later again joined Shayna and Colwyn for a warm evening of chatter and tea, surrounded by pets. Our chatter drifted from gossip to relationships to dating to Spanish... and sleepily we concluded the evening of 10/10/10 with me driving home at midnight, happy to have had the company of interesting friends throughout the day.

Strings and Space Time and All That

I went to a talk today and it sounded like science fiction to me... spacetime doesn't exist, we are all holograms... just so that black holes emitting radiation don't have the problem of clashing with quantum mechanics. Something or the other.

The talk was about was physics too, or some people believe, the frontier of fundamental physics...

And I felt like an outsider looking in!

Makes for a good story though. Something about hidden dimensions, multiverses, and us being holograms can capture the general public's imagination. I'm imagining if I were a 15 year old in the audience, I would wanna grow up and study that stuff. Of course now I'm grown up I realize that the day to day of that is some really difficult math, and not many ways (yet!) to check your answers.

The Coolin

We sung this piece by Samuel Barber at practice yesterday, it was just beautiful!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14srUr_8p0g

I love the lyrics (poem by James Stephens, this Irish guy) and Samuel Barber's chords...

Come with me, under my coat,

and we will drink our fill

of the milk of the white goat,

or wine if it be thy will.

And we will talk,

until talk is a trouble, too,

out on the side of the hill;

And nothing is left to do,

but an eye to look into an eye,

and a hand in a hand to slip;

and a sigh to answer a sigh;

And a lip to find out a lip!

What if the night be black!

And the air on the mountain chill!

Where all but the fern is still!

Stay with me, under my coat!

and we will drink our fill

of the milk of the white goat,

out on the side of the hill!

Ah...

Christine O'Donnell beats Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican Senate primary...

I understand some of the anger and energy against incumbents. Sometimes I too wish we could change all of the dysfunctional congress and put new people in their place...

But... can we have a better pick of alternatives?

Cycles

Another school year, another round of trying to juggle research, teaching and having a life.

I think I'm getting better at this time management thing. And that focus and concentration thing.

It's only been two weeks so far, but compared to the lazy summer it feels like it's been forever... I have nightmares twice a week that I've overslept and am late for my 9 am discussion section, which result in me waking up realizing it's only 6:30 am... Mondays through Thursdays are section and office hours and meetings and trying to squeeze in research in between all that. After yoga class or swing dance or tango practice in the evenings I drag myself back to the office and try to squeeze in another hour or two of work. After 4 days of such a routine, by Friday I'm usually too tired to think, and waste my day doing this and that (such as prepping for lab, or grading, or some type of housekeeping)...then 4:30 pm rolls along, and I go sing! And then after choir practice there's some fun activity in the evening. Last week it was weeding the garden with Amanda, then going to Wegmans and Greenstar to get ingredients for our pumpkin beef stew (which turned out completely amazing!). This week it was a beer tasting party, and then having dessert and gabbing at Madeline's with girlfriends. Then the weekend is a lazy combination of hiking and work(?) and swing dance class and socializing and thinking about possibly cleaning my room...

My life is filled to the brim. Yet I still want more. I want to have time to sit still and think deep thoughts and read all those books on my reading list and write better planned blog posts.

While in this week-to-week cycle, time goes both quickly and slowly. It seems slow while I'm trying to grade homeworks and debug code... yet it all seems so quick when I realize that three years have passed and there's a good possibility I'll be graduating in two years.

Seeing my senior lab mates looking for jobs is scary. This is what I'm supposed to be doing next year?! I do not feel ready for that, and feel very inadequate as a scientist- there's so much I don't know, there's so much I need to learn how to approach, how to think as a scientist, how to ask questions... and I'm getting quite used to this cycle of being busy, with school, with life, with friends...

But I will make the most of my final few cycles at Cornell. And look forward to whatever is next. Whatever exciting possibilities await.

Song

I am looking forward to this Friday afternoon! Because it will be my first Choral practice in years. I auditioned last week, and am joining a mixed voice chorus this semester!!

During the three times I went to bible study this summer, the part I enjoyed most was the singing in between reading psalms. I loved the mixture of different textures of voices around me. And the way when somebody with an especially nice voice sat behind me, I would tingle with pleasure while their voice filled my ears.

So I realized how much I miss singing in a choir.

I sang with the largest choral group at my university during undergrad, and I loved every moment of song during our practices. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. I never minded giving up Friday evenings to spend three hours singing. And even though before performing we had to go through an excruciating process of tests and extra practice time, I loved standing on stage under a spotlight, knowing that my voice was carried out with a hundred others towards the audience and maybe one song or two would resonate with them. Classical, new-age, local, international, all songs, I loved them all (well, most of them).

I never had a great voice, nor was any good at sight-reading. But it didn't matter, because singing with a chorus is a collective effort, and I like to think that over the years I slightly improved in recognizing a harmony (not so good at that either yet, but I try).

The audition process last Tuesday left me in a high. Mostly because I was flattered when the instructor asked me if I have perfect pitch after hearing me sing a few notes. But also because I was reminded of how much I enjoy the challenge of listening and singing. There was this test where you had to pick out the top middle or bottom notes from a variety of chords. For some reason, I always got the middle right, but had lots of trouble with bottom (all my years as an alto...).

Anyways, I'm looking forward to this Friday! Meanwhile, there's this piece I came across by the younger generation of my former chorus, which is simple but quite nice:

Eat Pray Love

Yesterday I went and saw the movie "Eat, Pray, Love" with one of my good friends. She was the reason I read the book, and so it was extremely appropriate that I should see the movie with her. (Although I had many many hesitations about seeing this movie, since they cast Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert...)

I remember it was a few months ago, just before my trip to Italy, that my friend and I were having dessert at Madeline's, and she told me I should buy this book and read it. I had been moping around for about half a year, and this friend was one of the only friends I would listen to when she gave me advice, partly because we had similar experiences. (All my other friends' efforts and kindness were often wasted on me. I dismiss whatever they said, because how could they understand what I was going through.)

So a few days later I bought the book, and it was one of the things I looked forward to in my day. Every day before bed I would share with Liz her experiences, and thoughts, and grief, and guilt, and healing. And I cried and laughed and laughed and cried, and wished I had Ms. Gilbert's gift of writing so honestly and with humor.

And I cried especially hard when I read her conversation with Richard from Texas in Chapter 48:

"... You're like a dog at the dump, baby- you're just lickin' at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you're not careful, that can's gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it."

"But I love him."

"So love him."

"But I miss him."

"So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it."

I am no longer the dog licking the empty tin can, but the movie used that last line 2 or 3 times, and each time I heard the lines delivered I felt tears well up in my eyes. But they were not sad tears, nor happy tears, but the huge emotion of remembering how I was moved by the wisdom of that statement, and marveling at how true it was.

And Julia Roberts was not half bad, although I can imagine if they cast somebody else, they might've bought a different angle to this movie. And the movie was not half bad either, although it only managed to capture a fraction of what was magical about the book, but that was all compensated by the appearance of Javier Bardem. (Or at least according to my friend.)

I enjoyed the scenes in Italy and Bali. Italy because every scene and street looked familiar like I had personally walked it. And Bali for all it's beauty, for it reminded me that there are still so many undiscovered corners of the Earth I'd like to see and visit.

On its own, the movie was not so great, I glanced at my watch more than a few times. But seeing the movie with my friend was meaningful to me because it reminded me of the book, and the book as a marker in my life. After the movie, I fondly thought of a certain someone, now 4000 miles away, now no longer a part of my life. And I smile when I miss him, and I send some love and light his way, and then I drop it.