Back in the Saddle

Oi Vey! Yeah, it's been a while since I've gotten around to posting a new entry. There always seemed to be some terrible horrible no good very bad engineering work getting in the way. (As well as mindless hours of facebook). At this point in winter break though I feel like I've made up my fair share of laziness and its about time to get back to blogging. Its a little pointless in a sense though because as of January 18th, I will be leaving the country for the first time in my life to study abroad for the semester at Tel Aviv University in Israel. I'll be starting up a separate blog to keep those who care up to date on all the happenings and mis-happenings in the holy land but if I do come up with some nuggets of truth not related to my travels it'll probably end up here. Apparently the academic atmosphere there is pretty laid back so I'm sure I'll have time to clean the dust off of "Notes" every now and then. Happy 2010!

Some West Wing Enlightenment

The West Wing is one of my favorite shows of all time. I was watching it on Bravo the other day and part of the episode really caught my ear. In it, the character Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), the Deputy Chief of Staff, is doing research to get some more funding for NASA and he's trying to come up with some sort of heartwarming story to drum up public support. Then he starts reading about Voyager 1...

"Voyager, in case it's ever encountered by extra-terrestrials is carrying photos of life on Earth, greetings in 55 languages and a collection of music from Gregorian chants to Chuck Berry. Including "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" by '20s bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, whose stepmother blinded him when he was seven by throwing lye in is his eyes after his father had beat her for being with another man. He died, penniless, of pneumonia after sleeping bundled in wet newspapers in the ruins of his house that burned down. But his music just left the solar system."

This was just one of those "wow" moments that make you stop and think for a few minutes. I don't know why, but this concept seems to epitomize the reason I want to be an aerospace engineer. I just really liked this part of the show I guess, thus I'm sharing it with you.

My First Bill

The response e-mail I recieved was short and to the point:

"** Please do not respond to this automated message. **

If you have questions regarding this email or your account,

please log into your online account atwww.SallieMae.com.

This email serves as confirmation of your online payment.

You can monitor the status of your payment online.

We appreciate the opportunity to serve you.

Customer Service

Sallie Mae"

However it might as well have said, "WELCOME TO THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!", because this now-monthly student loan interest payment was the first in a long line of bills I'll be paying for the rest of my life. Under the assumption that the payments on my sophomore year's student loans would be deferred until after graduaton like last year's, I applied for a new type of loan from Sallie Mae and in one click more than doubled the amount I owe to that company. Soon enough I discovered that this type of loan requires me to make monthly interest payments to the tune of around $40. Inititially dismayed, I soon took the optimist's approach and convinced myself that although its an inconvenience now, it would probably save me thousands of dollars in the long run.

But the fact remains: it's $40 a month and I'm a college student.

I thought about this whole situation and I guess its one of those various "turning points" we have in our lives, though I never considered it as such before. If you'd asked me a month ago I would have said learning to walk is a turning point, your first job is one, so is high school graduation, and your first kid too. It wasn't until I checked my "Payments Due" tab on my loan account that I thought, "Whoa, I start this and things will never go back to the way they were." Unless I run away to the Canadian wilderness that is, which may become an option with the state our economy is in.

Nonetheless, before I finally clicked "Submit Payment" today, I had a slight urge to wait, as if I was subconciously trying to preserve as much of my childhood as I could, though as many people who've graduated college and gone on to have get jobs and buy houses and whatnot have told me, this is akin to bailing water from the Titanic. I value my teenage (and often childish) freedom. I've resolved to try to retain it as long as I can because I know it'll be one of the aspects of my life I will miss the most when its gone. I don't think I'm alone in this. My generation as a whole seems to want to stay young and free longer. I guess this stems from not having to work at a factory when you're 12 or having to raise brothers and sisters yourself because Mom and Dad work all day every day. It's as if each generation stays younger and younger as they get older and older. Now, I'm not suggesting that the youth stays irresponsible as we age, but it just seems to me that there's less, "You're a 40 year-old man, now act like one" mentality in today's society.

I honestly hope this idea of staying "young" sticks around because I intend to take full advantage of it.

Swine Flu: A Survivor's Tale (Well Not Really)

Though it is now dying down, the swine flu epidemic that never quite was hit home for me two weeks ago. I was still up at BU, finishing my freshman year of college. It was crunch time though, with finals only days away and summer in my grasp. Swine Flu was all over the news. It was being labeled a "pandemic" by the World Health Organization. I discovered that for the spread of a disease to be officially called a pandemic it has to fulfill certain requirements. I just thought there was a guy over at the WHO looking through Roget's Thesaurus for the worst synonym of "bad". Anyway I paid it little mind. Swine Flu was in Mexico and a couple places around the U.S., (including a couple of kids on Lowell, MA). I had work to do.

And there I go, letting my guard down because hey, this stuff doesn't happen to anybody I know, let alone me. Unfortunately, fate had a little blessing in disguise prepared for me. Sunday. I'm feeling fine until about 4PM, at which time I start getting a bit of a headache. 10PM. I start feeling a little more body and back aches, my girlfriend's roommate has been feeling sick and I guess I could've caught something there but my symptoms are nothing I haven't fought off before with couple of ibuprofen tablets. Oh how wrong I was. Fast forward to midnight, I've got a fever for sure. The aches are worse and I'm freezing and sweating at the same time, wrapped up in sweatshirts and blankets. I decided I'd go to Student Health Services the next day and hope that I could get some antibiotics which would make me comfortable enough to study again and maybe even go back to my early-morning math tutor job to get one last paycheck before the summer.

The next morning I wake up with a sore throat, fever and aches again. I do some work, run some errands and around noon take my temperature. 100.4. Yeah, its a fever, but nothing too bad. I head off to a Physics review session and it is only after that, around 5PM, a day after my symptoms first show up, that I make it to Student Health. I get a text message from my girlfriend, her roommate was here earlier and had some sort of virus they gave her antibiotics for. No swine flu though. Great. At this point my sickness was interfering enough with my studies that the outlook for my back-to-back finals did not look good. Maybe... just maybe I could get sent home, doubt it though.

So my name is called, I get up and go into a nurses office. She goes through the motions, asks questions about symptoms, some tests, yadda yadda yadda. Then comes the temperature taking. I was up to 100.4 a couple hours ago so maybe I'd get up to 101 now. That would be on the high side of a low fever but then again, nothing to get sent home with. The beeping goes off. Oh boy, 102.3. I'm on fire! That was something I did not expect. With the whole swine flu craze scaring city-folk, the nurse states she wants to give me a flu test, something they even have a special room for. I go in and wait for the nurse ti come back. Soon enough she does, except she's all dressed in sterile gear: gloves, harinet, mouth cover, the works. They sure don't take any chances there. Now, keep in mind, I had no idea what a flu test entailed, but I quickly decided I did not like them when she said, "This will only be uncomfortable for about three seconds." Doctors are nothing new to me and I quite aware of their tendencies to understate the painful. (Remember when your pediatrician used to give you a shot: "This will only hurt a bit...") The nurse pulls out what seemed like a six-inch long sick with a cotton-y Q-tip head on one end and asked me to tilt my head back. She then proceeded to stick the end of it up into my nose further than I though was possible. I began to worry that she'd start to poke my brain! Just as the discomfort became unbearable, (a mix between gagging and sneezing), the nurse pulled it out and left the room probably to stick my snot in some expensive flu machine. And there I waited.

I pondered the possible outcomes of the test while I waited alone in the room and played games on my iPod. Maybe I'll just have that same dumb virus my girldriend's roommate has. That'd be a bummer. I lost quite a bit of study time. Or on the other end, maybe I legitimately have swine flu! Maybe I'll have to be whisked off to be quarantined in Beth Israel or Massachusetts General Hostpital! Oh God, I'd done everything you're not supposed to do when you might have a contagious illness today! I ate in the large dining hall, I took Boston's subway system, I'd sat in a lecture hall for two hours with a couple hundred students during phsrics review! I could be spreading swine flu to hundreds! I'd run through the scenarios once or twice in my head when the door opened. It was not the nurse who came in this time but another woman. She sat down in the chair and started speaking. "My name is Doctor..." That was all I needed to hear. Now, Boston University Student Health Services isn't a fancy hospital or clinic. As such, most of the workers are nurses with a few doctors on staff. When you see and actual M.D., you know theres trouble. She proceeded to tell me that although my flu test was negative, (there goes my fame), the high fever and body aches indicated that there was something messed up in my system. And as a student in the fourth-largest private university in the country and in the middle of the most densly populated city in New England, the BU administration had instricted Student Health to immeidiately isolate any students with flu-like symptoms. The term "isolation" came to mean that yes, I was being sent home, miss my final two exams and stay away from groups of people for at least a week.

I left Student Health with a skip in my step and jubilation in my heart. I could wait to retake my exams and reschedule them in a more convenient way, rather than a day apart as I would have taken them. Nevertheless, I soon relaized that they did not diagnose me with anything, nor did they give me any medication to counteract my aches or fever other than Tylenol. Lame. On my way back to the dorm to contact my parents and begin packing up, I called my girlfriend who at this point probably had a 50/50 chance of having already caught what I had. Needless to say, she was not happy when I started with, "You're not going to believe this...". In a quick response she said, "No, you do not have swine flu!" I told her I didn't, but that I would be going home ASAP, either that night or early the next morning. With that she became even unhappier as we had planned to hang out a little before she got on a flight back to her home in South Carolina on Saturday. We'd basically been inseperable for months and the fact that we had barely twelve hours or so to say goodbye didn't sit well with either of us. But, that was the way it would be. I said goodbyes to the guys on my floor, some of whom I'm rooming with next year and proceeded to pack that night and the next morning for my trip home.

My mom had to take a day off from her job as a middle school teacher to drive the two hours from Berlin, Connecticut to pick me up, all the while mentioning how ridiculous it was for me to be sent home during this swine flu scare when the test showed I didn't even have the flu. I definately had something though because for nearly a week and a half after I got home I was plagued with sore throats, coughing fits, and overall fatigue. It was at this point that I decided that it was possible I really did have swine flu. After all it was a different viral strain than regular influenza, (the test for which I was given), perhaps it doesn't show up as well in the tests? I may never know the truth. But what I do know is that it is Saturday night right now, my first re-take exam is on Tuesday and I'm shaping up to be just as prepared for it as I would have been the first time around. Funny how that happens.




Oh and remeber how I said BU is the fourth-largest private university in the country with 16,000 undergrads on campus? Well this article came out in the BU newsletter about a week after I got home.

"Flu numbers climb a bit, Fear lessens a lot"

Now, guess who the "one of the three students" in paragraph four is...

Culture Shock in New Jack City

I guess this entry could be considered Part 2 to the NYC weekend saga. Anyway, I just thought I'd spill the beans on a few more of my experiences in New York. I spent the day after that gut-wrenching Yankee game with my old school pal John, who goes to NYU. Since there wasn't much to see as far as a campus goes, we decided on a self-guided walking tour of the neighborhoods around NYU. We passed by the dozens of local street vendors, Thai's selling Thai food, Native Americans selling junky clothing including the token "Original Homeland Security" t-shirt, etc. From here we made our way through St. Mark's Place in the East Village, one of the areas famous for its anarchistic punk subculture. John told me though, that this was becoming one of the areas that was no longer "legit", just an imitation of what it used to be. I could sort tell. There were only a few dives on the street, with a bare minimum of punks and hobos hanging out along the way. (Though it was a nice day, they were all probably hiding out in some dark basement).

After St. Marks, we came into a small Puerto Rican neighborhood and passed a large wall with murals on it. I might add that one of which, the largest, was one of the funniest depictions of Barack Obama I've seen. It may not have been a Monet, but I must say, it had the same level of impact on me as that Shepard Fairey "HOPE" poster thats been damn near everywhere for the past six months. I guess its not until you see this sort of thing without an MSNBC ticker underneath that you realize that '08 election really mattered to people you wouldn't normally expect it to. Imagine an urban neighborhood painting John Kerry's face on a mural back in 2004. I can't either.

So we were parched and headed into a local grocery store to get some drinks. That Arnold Palmer really hit the spot as we sat in a nearby park, shooting the breeze and quietly making fun of people walking by. People watching really is a fun thing to do. Try it sometime. And commentary always helps. Even if it just involves talking about what would happen if you walked over and punched a random person in the face, or what would happpen if you ran off with a bum's bag of cans, or even making your own humorous interpretation of the conversation two people are having twenty feet away. Yeah it sounds dumb and immature, and it very well may be, but when you do it you know you'll laugh.

Following our little rest, we went in search of Chinatown. Now, John doesn't have the best sense of direction, but we still found our way there. A few storefronts with chinese characters signaled we were getting close and soon enough we were there. Not simply content with walking the streets, John and I popped into several random stores which looked interesting, the first being a music-ish store with shelves of CD's and DVD's. I say "music-ish" because none of these local retail establishments sold only one type of thing. For example, this store in particular had its chinese porn section right across from a shelf of canes and walkers. There's something you won't find at Wal-Mart. We then left this establishment and made our way into... well I'm not exactly sure what you'd call this store. It was full of dried sea creatures and herbs. Need dried shark fin? They have it. How about some dried sea cucumber? Well it doesn't smell to good but they have it as well. And of course they have the required, almost gag-gift funny, asian aphrodesiacs. I could not help but snap a picture of the funniest of these, the box labled "Best Penis" with a picture of a burley chinese man on the front. And I thought those Cialis commercials were ridiculous!

Slowly but surely we moseyed out of Chinatown and into Little Italy. Now I might add that one of the most interesting things I saw during this transition was that there really wasn't much transition at all. The only way you could really tell the demarcation line was where the little chinese lanterns that hung above the street stopped and the stringy red, white, and green italian decorations began. Beneath this, chinese shops became intersparsed less and less with the numerous italian restaurants until it seemed as if every storefront was some sort of bistro. With so many eateries so close together, the owners resorted to stationing a member of the wait-staff outside of each restaurant, beckoning couples and tourists to choose their place for lunch. Of course, no one stopped John and I. We didn't really fit the tourist look and had we been a couple, I doubt any restauranteur would want us to eat at their establishment anyway.

That was basically it for Little Italy. I'm sure we could've taken in some more but it was getting late. We headed back through the street vendors near NYU and grabbed some good ol' Pad Thai on styrofoam plates and fried oreos for dinner. I insisted that we sit on benches in Washinton Square Park that had a good view of a group of NYU students practicing dramatic readings. The "stage was set" for yet another session of people watching and quiet mockery.
"What if we ran up and stole their books?"
"What if we started belting out that Macbeth passage we all memorized in 10th grade?"
"What if we just stood up and yelled 'YOU SUCK'?"
The hypothetical ideas bounded back and forth until we were scratching the plates where our Pad Thai had once been. With another hilarious day in the books, I bid John adieu and headed for the Brooklyn-bound F Train that was calling my name.

...though it may have been more fitting to have said "Ciao!" or "再见" or "ลาก่อน"

In a New York minute... err, weekend.

So I had the pleasure of spending this past weekend in New York City with my girlfriend. I hadn't been to the city in years and believe me, it was quite a refresher from weeks of oppressive school work. One of the more exciting things we did that weekend was attend a game at the new Yankee Stadium, a belated birthday gift from my girlfriend. The place was an absolute cathedral, a monument to players of the past and future. Along with the ballpark staples of hot dogs and pretzel, there was a deli counter, sushi stand, southern BBQ booth, and even a small window where onlookers could watch a man chopping up choice cuts of meat. I guess when you spend $1.5 Billion on a new stadium, it comes with a few extra amenities. Now with all this in mind, I have yet to mention which exact game I was at. With a heavy heart I have to admit that I was there for the April 18th game against the Cleveland Indians.

We got to our seats in the level below the grandstand, right on the third-base line. Not bad seats at all. There is no way to describe how elated I was to be there. The third regular season game ever in the new Yankee Stadium. This is the kind of thing you tell your grandkids. Unfortunately for me, I may not want to remember this game myself. First Inning. Cleveland is up. One, Two, Three, Chen Ming Wang shuts their lineup down. I was worried since he had been pitching like crap every game so far in the short season. Bottom of the First. Mark Teixeira snaps a two-run homer out right and I was almost surprised when it made it over the the center-right fence. Boy, was that an omen of things to come. With the Yankees lineup retired, the dreaded top of the second inning begins... and never ends. Home-run. Home-run. Grand Slam. They kept coming. After the first couple I was swearing Chen Ming Wang up and down. But as the Cleveland score reached double digits, it was almost as if I went numb to the horrible pitching. Wang is done, and in goes Anthony Claggett. Who the hell is that? Turns out the boys in blue were worried about not having a reliever should Wang play shitty again and they pulled this Claggett fellow out of triple-A Scranton. He didn't fare much better, although he did record one more out than Wang did.

The end of the second inning was the beginning of two things. One. The chant "We want Swisher" started to echo through the stadium and would remain for the rest of the game. Two. A mass exodus of fans out of the park began. Following each inning, as the Yanks remained in a double-digit defecit, the stands became more and more empty. But I stayed. A real Yankee doesn't abandon his team when the going gets rough, but then again, perhaps I was just deluding myself. Before too long Jeter and Teixeira were pulled from the batting order. I saw my heo, Derek Jeter himself, on the massive 110' screen, dressed in a polo and leaning over the dugout fence. Makes sense, they really didn't have much of a chance. But the fan that I am, I continued to hope that the home-run wind vortex in center-right field would pull about twenty Yankee runs over the fence even at the very end of the game... alas. As the game quickly became comical, with few innings left, my girlfriend and I made our way from out upper tier seats down to the near-empty bleachers. At this point I was in one of those "Whatever" moods and decided it would be fun to heckle the Cleveland outfielders. The very next play became my highlight of the game as the right and center fielders for the Indians slammed into eacho ther and the wall while attempting to catch a fly ball. It was one of the few moments of baseball joy I took from that game. The game was fun, I had a good time. Now it would have been better if the final score had been the other way around but eh, what are you gonna do?

Following the bloodbath in which the Yankees set a franchise record for most runs scored against them in an inning, we made our way out to the street. As a sort of nostalgic sentiment I suggested that we walk around the old stadium before getting on the Metro. There it was, the "House the Ruth Built", to be torn down slowly over one to two years. The gates were all closed, the ticket counters shut, it really was a sad sight to see. But I've moved on. The new ballpark across the street is beautiful, a testament to what it is to be a Yankee and a Yankee fan. I just hope that my Bronx Bombers can turn things around and put a little heart into the new stadium, so that its more than just a pretty building on 161st Street. A ballpark is more than luxury boxes and sushi bars. WIth that sentiment in mind, "The House that Steinbrenner Built" doesn't quite has the same ring to it as "The House that Ruth Built". There will always be the memories of what happened across the street, but I have great confidence that the Yankees can bring as much to the plate in the new stadium as they ever have.