Two Years Above Broadway

Graduation: Last Day of Class

2007-08-14T15:36:00.001-04:00

Welcome back everyone, and thank you for your patience. I said I’d try to get the final posts for graduation up by June and it is now halfway through August. But a lot has happened over the summer, there were some things I wasn’t ready to write about then that I am now, and the story is the richer for it. Some come join me now for the exciting conclusion (at least it was exciting to me).

A note about navigation before we begin. There will be a total of 10 posts, 9 of them with ‘Graduation’ in the title. The easiest way to read through them all will be to use the Previous Posts section on the right hand side of the blog, below my Profile and the links list. I’ve arranged them in descending order instead of chronological order, so you’ll want to begin with the post at the top (this post) and proceed down the list to the last post called ‘Graduation: Finale’.

Given that it’s August now, I don’t remember the last day of classes very well, but I remember it enough. It was Monday August 30, I had three classes: Chinese, Urban Economics, and Asian Art Humanities. I went to Chinese in the morning for our final oral presentation, which went easily for me since I’d spent a good deal of time memorizing my presentation. Chinese was a funny class in that I never enjoyed it as much as most of the other students in the class did, although I did learn an awful lot, and not just about Chinese. In spite of having a large class, we finished early and our teacher Ma Ningwei (Ni3 hao3 Ma3 Lao3shi1!!) let us go early, which was rare. The feeling that school was truly over began when I walked out the doors of Kent Hall.Urban Economics was very laidback for the last lecture, and again the class let out early. I was pleased that the class applauded our professor, something I think very important and respectful to do. (We applauded Ma Laoshi too, even though this is not something that is commonly done in classes in China. She was a little embarrassed, which was great) And if I remember correctly, the last day of Asian Art Hum I skipped, just because I could. It was a beautiful day outside; they were already beginning to put up the tents and the bleachers for the graduation ceremony, even though grad wouldn’t be for more than two weeks yet. But it was a very good day, and it was the beginning of what I felt then and see now were many good days to come.

Graduation: World Premiere of 'The Crown'

2007-08-14T15:35:00.001-04:00

During finals week, the first final I had was for my literature class, which was my favorite class that I took there at Columbia. I’ve talked about them before, but that group of people I became closer to than almost anyone else during my time there. For our final paper in that class, Prof. Muller had encouraged us to do something creative and outside the box if we liked, so I chose to write a play. During this literature class I came in contact with what became my favorite book, Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’. Since I have a whole post about that book, I won’t rehash it again here. I knew I wanted to use that book, and I knew that my other favorite book for that semester had been Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’. My play, ‘The Crown’, is an imaginary conversation between Raskolnikov, the main character of C&P, and King Lear.After reading it, it was Prof. Muller who suggested we get the class together and stage a reading of the play. (When she was talking to the class about the idea, she said after reading the play that it was “damn good”, which is very high praise from someone who is as well read as herself. It also meant a lot to me.) I thought the idea was a little silly at first but to my surprise people were genuinely enthusiastic about it, and we got almost the entire class together.Reading through it as a class, with my classmates and my friends was really graduation for me. We met up over at Talia’s place, which was near the campus, had wine and crackers, and did a reading of the play together. In this picture are (from upper left moving down & around) Justin reading the part of Watchman #1, myself reading Lear, Liz reading Raskolnikov, Prof. Jill Muller reading Razumikhin and who unfortunately is hiding behind Benjamin Muller’s head, who read Svidrigailov (and is no relation to Jill), Talia who hosted us and read Dunya, Aries who narrated for us, and Pi-Ta who I think wasn’t reading. Even though the official ceremonies were 5 more days away, it was after this extraordinary afternoon that I truly felt I’d finished school. My play was the project I’d completed there I felt the most proud of. It was the perfect ending to an amazing class that I won’t ever forget.

“To the players of Room 402. All my best times were spent here.”

Graduation: Sunday, Baccalaureate Service

2007-08-14T15:31:00.001-04:00

Hey, what’s going on here, where’s my brother? Graduation at Columbia isn’t really a single event, it’s a string of events culminating in the main campus graduation. The chain of events is started by the Baccalaureate service on Sunday. Originally started in England, it was the tradition for each graduating scholar to deliver a sermon in Latin (since most universities began as religious institutions). So this service/ceremony is specifically for honoring the undergraduates at Columbia. The ceremony was held in the chapel on campus, and has evolved into an interfaith service where a couple of students from the graduating class get up and read from various texts. (If I remember correctly, the four faiths represented at this service were Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism). The great part about this day was that my good friend Emilio. He chose to read from the prologue of John’s Gospel, which is my hands-down favorite section in the entire Bible, and I believe is among the most beautiful sections of writing, in English or any other language. Afterwards everyone piled out and was greeted by the University chaplain and several other professors and faculty, including the Dean of Students and the College Provost. The great part about this was that my brother Mark had already arrived in the city and was able to be there at the service with me (although he wasn’t sitting with me). He managed to mise and sneak in the back in the midst of the confusion. His presence, both there and throughout the week, made that time so much richer for me. I’m grateful that he came.

Graduation: Monday, Class Day

2007-08-14T15:30:00.000-04:00

At Columbia (University) there are four different undergraduate colleges: Columbia College (the main one), SEAS (the engineering school), GS (my program, for “non-traditional students), and Barnard (the affiliated women’s college). Each of these four colleges have their own private graduation ceremony, called Class Day, since it is the ceremony for each individual class. This is the ceremony where your name is called and your degree read. You get to walk across the stage and shake each of the dean’s hands, although they don’t give you your degree at that point. I remember the ceremony took a LONG time to organize, even though there were only a few hundred of us. But they got us going eventually, and they had a band playing for us (which you can see here). The speaker was a GS alum whose name escapes me, but she had graduated awhile ago and now worked as an IP lawyer in the Bay area. Her speech was good if not terribly moving (at least to me personally) but it was great to see what sorts of things other GS alums have gone on to. Going up and getting my name read was a bit surreal. I remember standing on the line, waiting for them to call my name, then I heard it and I began walking forward, and it was all kind of a blur for a few seconds. Going up there, I was trying to pay attention to the reading of my name because I wanted to hear them read out my Latin honors which I had worked VERY hard to achieve. But somehow, in the midst of that blur, I missed hearing it one way or the other. But my friends told me they did read it. And seeing my classmates graduate, watching them walk across the stage and hearing their names read was in many ways more gratifying than hearing my own name read. It was extraordinary being able to be a part of their lives and their moments, of being able to share that moment together with them. My brother Mark was already in town, but he’d left earlier in the day to go meet my dad at the airport. I hadn’t expected them to come back in time for the ceremony, but they’d made it back midway through and had a chance to see most of it. After the ceremony was over there was a reception on one of the lawns at the campus and it was a great time to mingle with my teachers, classmates, and family and have some great food & drink. We stayed fairly late talking with people and making introductions, and then my family and I went out to dinner. A great evening.

Graduation: Wednesday, Commencement

2007-08-14T15:29:00.001-04:00

Tuesday was a day of lull time, there wasn’t anything happening on that day related to graduation, but that worked out fine since my mom and my girlfriend were flying into town that day; it made for a nice break. But Wednesday was the big show, Commencement of the 253rd Graduating Class of Columbia University in the City of New York. We’d been told ahead of time that the ceremony would draw 40,000 people onto the main Morningside Heights campus, so it came as no surprise that the scene down on the street that morning was crazy. It looked like a Saturday market in some foreign country. I met up with my parents, my brother, and my girlfriend to take them down to the main entrance, and then I had to go to a separate entrance for the graduates, which was temporarily being blocked off by the Barnard girls filing in from the campus across the street. 3,000+ graduates, and they only have a single entrance onto the campus for the grads? Not good planning in my mind. But we finally got in.Once we were on the lawn, we had awhile to wait (we being the GS graduates in my class) and I realized that my classmates had been smarter about it than I had. They’d worn shorts and T-shirts under their graduation robes, where I’d worn slacks & a tie. But in due course of time after much fooling around, we got out onto the main seating area.It was quite a sight. The GS class was seated on bleachers to the left hand side of the center plaza. I was glad that we were seated on bleachers as it gave us a much better view of the proceedings, even though they had screens for the guests. All the graduates from all of the different Columbia programs were there: all four of the undergraduate schools, the business school people, the doctors, all the masters and PhD candidates, everyone. The ceremony progressed by having several people come up and speak, then the President of the University (Lee Bollinger, a great guy) gave out the honorary degrees to a bunch of folks mostly nobody knew. After this was finished, the tradition is that the Dean of each of the different schools comes up, gives a speech for why their program’s graduates are so fantastic, and ‘asks’ the President to confer upon them the degrees they have earned. The speech given by the outgoing Dean of the School of Engineering was hilarious, he called his students “solar powered, alloy outfitted, optimally engineered” and other things like this. His students all had noisemakers with them, so they were the loudest bunch and everyone was laughing with them, particularly at the end when the dean rushed back up to the podium and said, “I love you guys!!”Finally the President gets up and agrees to confer the degrees. There is a mace that is carried out of the library as part of the ceremony that represents the President’s power to confer the degrees; apparently it originally came over from England (since Columbia was originally King’s College and was re-established as Columbia after the Revolutionary War). He didn’t ‘wield’ the mace itself, which I thought was a shame, but everyone gets their degrees, and so it was all good in the end. As the ceremony was dispersing, U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ was playing over the sound system; I paused and just let it all soak in that I was actually finished. My girlfriend told me later that she could tell I was definitely ‘in the moment’ just then, which was true. There was too much emotion and too many different feelings standing there in the sun with my classmates at the end of this amazing journey to totally sum it all up. But that song, which is one of my favorite, hit it pretty close.It wasn’t until I picked up my actual degree right after the ceremony that it truly sunk in that I was finished. Holding it in my hands, something about having a tangible acknowledgement of all that hard work, almost brought me to tears. “My heart is aglow …”

Interlude: The Brothers K

2007-08-14T15:28:00.001-04:00

Wait, I can hear you say, this post isn’t a part of the Graduation series, what’s going on here? Fear not, faithful readers, we will return to our regularly scheduled Graduation series momentarily. But I finished reading Dostoevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov’ this summer after I got home, and given that this book was also something of an odyssey for me, felt I had to give it a review. Some context first. As a part of my effort to familiarize myself more with some of the great authors and with classic works of literature, I began reading this book last summer, between my junior & senior years, before I read C&P. I finished about 2/3 of it before fall of my final year began, and then once school got underway, especially with a literature class to read for, I just could not seem to get through it. I came back and picked it up a few times, but couldn’t make any real headway on it. I read C&P during the spring of my senior year, and had gone through enough of Brothers K to know I liked C&P better. But I still wanted to finish the other book. After graduation I returned home to Seattle with plans to look for a job in finance here on the west coast, preferably in the Bay area. During this downtime when I was considering my future direction and interviewing for jobs I finally finished it.I like Crime and Punishment better, for a few reasons. Brothers K is very sprawling, its as if Dostoevsky just gave himself permission to write whatever he felt like writing. D. is an amazing author, but he already tends to ramble just a bit sometimes in fleshing out his characters and dwelling on tertiary scenes. I felt that D’s writing benefited greatly from a slightly more structured format like the one in C&P, which is more focused and feels more planned.The other big strike against Brothers K is that I didn’t fall in love with the characters nearly the same way I did in C&P. D. still did an extraordinary job of fleshing the people in his story out, making them feel real enough to walk right off the page. But I found myself not really caring very much, especially since the book’s ‘big mystery’ of who killed the elder Karamazov is pretty much known to the reader. So it took out some of the tension. The final scene in the book however I found very powerful and very moving. I’m not event totally sure what it meant, but perhaps that mystery was part of the magic.Don’t get me wrong, this is a great book, and D. says some very important things through the mouths of his characters. The book is great if you just read Ivan’s speeches, who is the most philosophical of the three brothers. But if one was going to only read one of D’s books, I’d suggest going with C&P. Besides, it’s shorter.

Graduation: Fireball

2007-08-14T15:24:00.001-04:00

As you’ve realized by now in reading along, my graduation from Columbia was finished in the fifth post. But Graduation for me has really been a deeper, more powerful process that began all the way back when I first moved to New York City and really, for me, didn’t conclude until just a few days ago. This post is a part of that process. This post is my goodbye to something else that came to an end over the summer.
How does it happen that someone becomes a part of your life so closely and so powerfully, that they are there with you and there beside you one day, and gone the next?
Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? I believe it is. Is it true that love conquers all? The Bible tells us that it does, in many different ways. But people receive love in different ways, and sometimes we can find ourselves, or another, in a place in their own life currently where they are not yet able to love in the way the other person truly needs.
Is it worth waiting around to find out of they can get there? This is a question each heart can only answer for itself. Is it ‘worth’ it? Ultimately, finally, yes, it is. But there is a cost to waiting.
Someone once said, “The greatest prize in the universe is the affection of man.” I do believe this to be true. Love has both the greatest glory and the greatest weight. But love is always active, always provokes a response. And in some situations a person is not yet prepared to echo back that same response.
Why is it that we often cause the ones we love the most such pain? Pain in this life may be unavoidable, but we can choose the situations that we are more or less likely to encounter it. That choice is also one that only each heart can make.
To my Fireball, who another like her I will never meet
In everything extraordinary that you are
For everything amazing that we shared
Thank you could never be enough
Now be blessed in the hills
And blessed on the plains
Be blessed by the waters
In your lives, in your loves
Burning star, wild and free
May all your roads lead you to the love your strong heart seeks
You are forever burned into my mind, and I will never forget you

Steel Heart, Warrior Princess
1WR
Flash, Haste
When Steel Heart comes into play, it deals 2 damage to target creature or player.
1W: Target creature other than Steel Heart gains Absorb 1
2/2

Comets are fairly rare, and very few are at all predictable. But they say that if you’re watching carefully on a clear night, you might just see one shooting through your sky. I know the one I’ll be watching for is very rare, and in no way predictable.
But I will still be watching …

Graduation: Seattle

2007-08-14T15:22:00.000-04:00

OK, I have a confession to make. When I first got back here to Seattle, I didn’t want to stay.
There were a couple of reasons for this. Seattle is known for software and for coffee, not for finance. Given that I wanted to work in the fund world, I didn’t think there would be as many opportunities to do what I really wanted to do here. I figured I’d need to go to San Francisco or LA, or return to NYC. I also felt a good vibe from San Fran in the times I’d visited there for interviews, and I felt I wanted to have some more adventures. Seattle is my hometown, but I’m not ready to settle down quite yet, and there are other places I’d like to live. Seattle felt a bit … small, and slow paced, when I got back here, especially after living in NYC.
However, a strange thing happened as I spent time here at home. I found myself seeing all kinds of things about the city, about the beauty of this town and the area around me, that I’d never really seen before, not in all of the eight years I’d lived here previously. I feel I had to leave in order to be able to truly come back and see it again. I started remembering and seeing again all the things that make Seattle an extraordinary place. The water, the rain, the trees, the natural beauty of the city, the ethos, the pace of life, the tone, perhaps most of all, the people. I felt an increasingly strong sense of reconnection with my brothers too, but that didn’t surprise me, we have always been close. What surprised me was that I began to feel like I wanted to stay, that being in Seattle for the next few years would be great and full of unexpected opportunities. I’d promised myself that once I graduated, whatever city I ended up in, that I would invest myself into that place and those people. And now I felt that I wanted to get to know this city better, to really invest in it, become a part of the life and the culture here, get to know and embrace the city in a way that I hadn’t before. I started to feel that I really did want to stay.
But I still needed a job …

Graduation: Quellos

2007-08-14T15:21:00.000-04:00

And so it was to my surprise and extraordinary pleasure that I recently signed my letter of acceptance for a job doing exactly what I wanted to do, right here in Seattle. When I talked to my friends about staying and working here in Seattle, I told them there were only two shops (that I knew of) that I’d really be excited to work for. One of those two is the place that offered me the position I have accepted.
Quellos is a hedge fund in downtown Seattle that has been in operation for more than 10 years and has done well for almost all of those years. It has grown considerably both in head count and in funds under management, and was recently purchased by a well-known asset management firm back in New York City, giving it stronger ties back there.
After a month of interviewing and review on both sides, the offer that Quellos approached me with is an extremely generous one, and one that I am very happy accepting. At this point in my life and career, it is even better than the best possible opportunity I could envision. The only thing I’m even slightly unhappy with is the fact that their building doesn’t have its own parking garage, so I’ll have to bus to work if I don’t want to pay for parking. But considering all the benefits, this really is rather minor.
For this opportunity I find myself both feeling very satisfied and also very thankful. In many ways, it is the just reward for hard work well done, not only the two years finishing school in New York, but also putting myself through community college and all my work at Microsoft, which Quellos told me added value for them. But I realize it is also a gift. It is the good door I have prayed for. And I am going to enjoy walking through it immensely.

Graduation: Finale

2007-08-14T15:18:00.000-04:00

And that, my friends, is where this chapter of the story ends. I left Seattle two years ago lonely, often afraid, and feeling very uncertain about the future. I come back two years later knowing to the core that I am not alone, far, FAR less often feeling afraid, and certain that the future looks bright. I gave a good accounting of myself in New York, I return proudly with the degree I worked hard for, and now I get to stay for the next few years in the city I have come to love all over again, near my brothers and my friends here, doing something I have every reason to believe that I will love, and investing myself wholeheartedly into the lives and the community around me.
By no means is this the end. I don’t think that I have quite come home to rest here in Seattle just yet. There are several main cities that finance is practiced in around the world, and I would like to live in several of them before my travels are over. I’d still like to live in the Bay area, and I’d really like to live in Shanghai or Hong Kong as well.
After reflecting about it, I believe that I will continue to blog about my life and adventures, but this blog has served its purpose now. This blog was about my life in New York, and now that chapter is concluded, and it is time to begin a new one.
Once I have the new one started, I will return here and edit this final post with a link to the new blog. Blogger has been good but my friends are pushing me towards Wordpress so I’ll update things once I’ve figured it out.
Thanks everyone who has accompanied me and been with me as a part of this journey. To my friends in New York, I can’t wait for you guys to come and visit me here, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many of you again more closely a bit further down the road. To my friends here in Seattle, old and new, it is great to see you all, and I can’t wait to reconnect.
This amazing chapter would be incomplete without one final thanks in particular. To my father, who has made all of this possible, from the start to the finish. I could never have done it without you. You are the one who has made me, you are the one who stood by me and never gave up on me. You are the only one who was there in the beginning, and you will be there in the end.
Then David went in and sat back, and he said:

“Who am I that you have brought me so far?”

1:32:10
24:32:38-41

The story continues HERE …

NYSE

2007-05-06T11:47:00.000-04:00

Remember I mentioned that list of things to do while in New York City? One of them was to go and visit the Stock Exchange. I figure you can’t live here in the city and not go do that. Doing that has become harder, since the Exchange doesn’t give public tours anymore after 9/11, but one of the advantages of being a student at Columbia is getting the chance to do some things you normally can’t do. The trip was set up by a friend of mine in the junior class. Actually, it was supposed to be last semester, before Christmas, but at the last minute it fell through. My friend was persistent though, and they finally got it pushed through for the end of last month. They moved the date around on us a couple of times, and ended up doing it on a Wednesday, which I had to skip a class for, but when you look back over your life, what are you going to remember? That you attended one extra class, or that you went and saw the Exchange? Enough said.It took us awhile to get through security, which didn’t surprise me a whole lot. What did surprise me was that there appeared to be quite a lot of confusion about our group, we had three different groups of guards/officers/officials come and ask us who we were, who we were with, etc. Didn’t seem very well organized.The man who gave us the tour was actually hilarious once you got past the fact that he was quite rude to our group. It seems that he was under the impression that we were grad students from the business school; he kept asking if the guy who set up our tour was our professor. I thought maybe my friend had told him all this just to get us the tour, but I asked him later and he said no, he’d told our guide from the beginning that we were undergrads. At any rate, he was not very happy to be there with us, and through his tone and the kind of questions he asked us made it very clear he wished we weren’t there. At one point when he got up and left the conference table where our group was sitting, the whole table burst out laughing as soon as he stepped out of the room. The NYSE is undergoing some pretty significant changes right now; it was clear from talking to our guide there was a fair amount of angst & uncertainty about the future. The Exchange historically was a privately held company, and a few years ago it became a public company, which meant some important changes to the governing structure. The other big issue is the electronic trading system. Most of the other major exchanges in the world use electronic systems now, and don’t have what they call ‘market makers’, guys who work on the trading floor taking & making the individual orders. The NYSE recently set up an electronic system of its own, but it’s still running it side by side with the guys on the floor, though there are fewer of them now since the company is public. The trading floor itself was much less hectic than I’d imagined it; we were there midweek on an afternoon, so it could have just been the time of day, but it certainly wasn’t as berserk as the Mercantile Exchange was when I visited it. One good thing was we got to take pictures from the balcony, which we weren’t able to do at the other exchange. It would have been great if our guide had been more polite, but it was still very much worth doing.

One other note. This month of May is going to be very, VERY busy. I’ll be graduating 10 days from now, and with my girlfriend coming to town again and making preparations to leave New York at the end of the month, I won’t have much time to post. These two years have been an extraordinary and unusual journey, and it wouldn’t be right for me not to give this chapter in my life a proper ending. I won’t have time to put up the final posts from graduation until sometime in June, but stay tuned …

Breakfast carts

2007-05-06T11:45:00.000-04:00

This post is about a very important slice of New York City life, and one I’m going to miss very much when I leave: breakfast carts. Breakfast carts like the one you see in the picture are operated all throughout the city (or at least all throughout Manhattan, I don’t know about the other boroughs). Most mornings on my way to class, instead of eating breakfast in my room, I stop by one of these fine carts and get a muffin or a donut. Some of the carts are larger and have a range, so you can also get eggs, but I don’t usually order cooked food from these guys. Granted, you must have a license to operate a cart in NYC, and if you have a problem with one of them you can just get the license number and report it to the city. I’m sure they don’t do a bad job; I’d just rather get eggs from the deli I live above if I’m in the mood for eggs. The best thing about breakfast carts is that everything is cheap; $1 will get you whatever you want, or $1.50 if you want coffee with your pastry. What makes it fantastic is that everything is sold in single units; it isn’t like the West Coast where you have to go and buy a whole package of muffins. You can just get one, fresh each day. In a city where everything is so expensive, I enjoy every morning I’m able to have fresh breakfast from the carts. Plus, you’ll usually hit the same one or two, so you get to know the cart operators, and they get to know you. It’s a great part of New York life, and I’m really going to miss it. Maybe I’ll see if I can start up a breakfast cart business back West …

Juilliard

2007-05-06T11:43:00.000-04:00

The Juilliard School is one of the most well-known performing arts academies in the world, and it happens to be about 15 minutes (by subway) away from where I live. Going to see a performance there was another thing on my to do list before I left; I wish I would have had the time to see more than one. They put on some great plays and dramas, from what I understand, would have liked to taken in one of those too. A friend of mine from church was putting on a piano recital, so I went to join her for that. The school itself is undergoing some remodeling, so you can’t see much of it from the outside. But once Qing (pronounced “ching”) started playing, I could see why the school has the reputation that it does. She performed selections from Haydn, Brahms, and Schumann, none of which I was previously familiar with but all of which were extraordinary. One of the great parts about going to see a live recital is watching the performer. Being able to listen to a recording is nice, but watching the performer and the way that they play the music, the way they move their body, move their hands, the expressions on their face, gives you a greater sense of the feeling they put into their music. Being Chinese, Qing is a tiny girl, but she plays her music with an extraordinary amount of feeling. She shifted back and forth from playing softly, gently, with an almost featherlight touch to a furious intensity in other sections. I don’t play piano myself, but it was clear her technical skills are exceptional. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was that as far as I could tell from where I was sitting, she played the entire hour long set from memory, from her head. She didn’t have sheet music in front of her. Even the performer at Carnegie Hall had sheets, but Qing didn’t. A superior performance from an outstanding performer. I was glad to have the chance to see the performance there, and I wish Qing the best in her career going forward.

Chinese Indie Film

2007-04-15T18:10:00.000-04:00

There was a Chinese Independent Film Festival held here on campus this last weekend, and I had a chance to go see one of the films, which was a great opportunity. The one I saw was called “Walk on the Wild Side”, directed by Han Jie.
This film was a look at the lives of people living in a mining town in rural China, and at the lives of three young men in particular. Xiping (pronounced “shee-ping”) and his two friends Erbao and Liuliu are in a sort of gang together. What exactly the nature of this gang is, besides getting drunk and involved in hooliganism, is never totally clear (it isn’t a drug gang). The story follows the boys from committing a crime together which forces them to leave town, and what happens to them on the road in their travels together. Loyalties are tested, relationships are torn, and all three characters struggle to find their way, together at first and then individually in a country that is changing in many ways, and still highly traditional in others. Xiping himself returns home at the end of the journey, possibly having learned something, or possibly having decided that the world is the way it is and one cannot escape one’s past. The end of the film was interesting in that it was ambiguous and open-ended; it allowed the viewer to read into it heavily. (There was a Q&A session at the end of the film that I couldn’t stay for, but I wanted to ask the director what his intent or meaning in the film’s ending was)
The film was very rough and unstructured. The camera word appeared to be done primarily with handheld cameras, and the plot felt very loose and open. In many ways, both in terms of the dialog (Han Jie himself wrote the screenplay) and in terms of the cinematography, it felt like a documentary. The scenes and characters were shown frankly in their surroundings and actions; honest and unflinching depictions of adultery, families, sex, rape, loyalty, murder, theft, benevolence, all amidst a stark and very harsh backdrop of realistic poverty. The director (who said that he drew heavily on his own experience in making the film) did an excellent job of transporting the audience to this place and into the lives of his characters, of making the audience feel what his characters feel.
Though less structured, it isn’t to say the film was without some profoundly intentional moments. After a high school student gets badly beaten by Xiping and his friends, one of the younger students comes and puts his finger in a pool of blood, staring at it frozenly despite his teacher yelling for him to return to class. Later when Xiping returns home and the owner of the mine, who is the father of one of Xiping’s friends, asks where his son is, Xiping replies quietly after a few moments of silence, “We lost each other along the way. And Liuliu won’t be coming home again.” The most powerful and moving scene to me at the end of the film seeing Xiping break down and start crying while in bed with his girlfriend. The film had a somewhat bleak emotional tone throughout, and the Chinese in general are somewhat restrained; such a depiction of real emotion leant the film a powerful kind of honesty.
I felt the film really reflected some of the struggles of a society grappling to find itself amidst both growing wealth and persistent poverty. Getting a chance to see a picture of today’s China, away from the polished Hong Kong martial arts films and outside the glittering districts of Shanghai, was very powerful.

Spring Gala '07

2007-04-15T18:09:00.000-04:00

The Spring Gala was Saturday night, on Easter weekend, and as it was last year, it was a great time. But this time, there was one reason that stands out above all others for why it was so great. My girlfriend Stephanie flew into town to surprise me.
Last year’s event was a really good time, but I remembered when I was leaving thinking to myself, “I’m definitely going to have to try and find a date next year”. Having Stephanie be able to come was the best thing I could have imagined. She was only here for the weekend, but we had an absolutely great time together, and being able to get dressed up and go to the big formal event of the year here at my school together meant a lot to me. Knowing that Steph put a considerable amount of time & energy into the surprise, including taking a red-eye and flying all night, was just amazing.
As formal events (and Easter weekends) go, this was the best one I’ve ever had, and I will never forget this weekend.

Progress and Poverty

2007-04-15T18:07:00.000-04:00

My time studying Economics here at Columbia has been strange in some ways, as I’ve found many things in Economic theory to not be very good descriptors of the problems they’re trying to address. (An example, in my macro class, when addressing the issue of “where economic growth came from”, they’d studied it and broken it down into growth from labor, growth from capital, and growth from technology. The first two can be measured somewhat, but the third cannot, and this is where a very large portion of the growth comes from. So they defined technology growth as being whatever isn’t the first two types. And some genius got a Nobel prize for coming up with this. *shakes head*)
But recently, in my last semester, I came across a piece of work that makes all the pain and nonsense in some of the other classes worth it; it’s something that reminds me why I got into studying Econ in the first place. The book is called “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George.
Henry George (1839-1837) lived in California and was concerned with the question of why poverty seemed to be increasing and getting worse in spite of all the progress brought about through the industrial revolution. His answer, in simple form, was that poverty comes from landowners restricting access to land (and for George, land meant “natural resources”, so iron ore in the ground and a good fishing stream were all land in his mind), such that people must pay them for access, and landowners set the rates (collecting “rent”, in economic terms). He said most men, given natural resources, could make something out of it, at least enough to survive on and usually more than a surplus. But if they don’t have free access to resources, they’re in bad shape.
The answer to this problem for George was what he called the single tax. He proposed taxing the value of land (not real estate, which is land and buildings, but just the value of the land), and nothing else. This type of system has a number of advantages. In Economics, all taxes are known to have adverse effects, because they give people an incentive to use less of something. But if you tax land, people will still use it because it is in fixed supply. The benefits from the added value of some types of usable land (a mine is more valuable land than a desert) will go back to the community through the taxes, and basically helps to encourage better & more equitable access to land.
This system, which today is usually called Land Value Tax (LVT) has several other very powerful advantages, and it has very few drawbacks. The only real big objection is that it will decrease land values, which make up a large source of the wealth in any country. And those who own land have a strong incentive not to let this happen.
However, the important thing to consider is that much of that loss in value is just a loss in book value. And because there would be no other taxes, you’d be able to put land to more productive uses. And it could go a long way towards solving some very large inequalities.
I read through the book, it’s old but it’s well written and isn’t very long, and have been deeply influenced by the idea, the more I’ve thought about it. I’m planning to write a paper on it for my class, since this system is used in some places like Taiwan. It was very inspiring though to come across one big idea in my studies here that captured my interest; I’m glad to know it hasn’t all been utility functions and OLS regressions.

Wine in Harlem

2007-04-04T22:31:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I had a chance to go to a private wine tasting at a wine seller in Harlem. The event was only open to the GS class, and I had the chance to see a bunch of friends there I hadn’t seen in awhile. (Half the people in this picture are people I know) There are always a lot of events happening around campus at a school this big; one of the things you have to learn when you come to NYC is that you don’t have time to do everything you’d like to. But this event was important to me for three main reasons: because wine is good, because I needed to get out and see some friends, and because it was in Harlem.
My uncle Jon was the first person who really taught me to appreciate wine. I remember at a party he was throwing, he had opened a new bottle, but after tasting it he promptly took the bottle & poured it out. I was quite surprised but he just shrugged and assured me that “life is too short to drink bad wine”. I’ve tried to remember that maxim since then.
It had also been awhile since I’d gone out and done anything with my classmates. I’m realizing now that my time here at Columbia will be over far too quickly, and before I really know it. Especially as this was an event for GS only, being able to get out and do it was important to me, and I did have a good time seeing some folks I’d been a bit out of touch with.
The third important reason was because the wine shop was in Harlem. Harlem (which is just north of Columbia and the Morningside Heights neighborhood) is a neighborhood I’ve always wanted to know more about. It represents such an important & historic area for the development of black culture in America, and for New York City too. Harlem is another place that I’d wanted more of a chance to try and connect with while I have been here, and that has also been lacking. Part of it is due to time, but part of it is due to the historic tensions between Columbia & Harlem. I’m sad to say it, but this is one area our school falls way short; Columbia has historically not been at all a good neighbor to Harlem. When the neighborhood was in decline, the school really turned a cold shoulder to it, and recently as it has experienced a resurgence and boom in the real estate values, the school has moved to buy up a bunch of the land. Which doesn’t seem so terrible, until you consider that the community in Harlem fought through the tough times and invested into their land and their real estate, and much of the rest of New York didn’t want much to do with it, until it became valuable, and now they’re interested in annexing it. For all the smart people here at this school, they couldn't find a way to simply be a good neighbor to those near them; very unfortunate.
Even though I haven’t had the chance to connect with and get to do many events up in Harlem, I was glad to be able to do the things I could, such as this. Besides, how can you say no to good wine that's free? I’d still like to go to a show at the Apollo, the famous Harlem theater, where James Brown got his start, I still may go try and do that before I leave the city …

Pesach Seder

2007-04-04T22:25:00.000-04:00

Finally had a chance to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time while I was here in New York. I went and joined the main Jewish student group here on campus (Chabad) for Pesach Seder, or Passover Dinner. (Pesach means Passover, and Seder technically means “order”, so the literal translation would be something a bit more like “Passover Service”, like Easter Service in a Christian church).
Being a Christian, most of what I knew about the Jewish people before coming to New York was from the Bible, which is to say, I didn’t know much at all about how Jews live or what being Jewish is really about these days. For a long time, there were more Jews living here in NYC than anywhere else in the world, including Israel, though that has changed recently. But that still means there are a lot of Jewish people here, and trying to connect a bit and learn something from & about them was one of my real hopes & priorities in coming to NYC.
Sadly, up till now, I’ve found my time so dominated by studies and other concerns that I just haven’t had time for it the way I’ve wanted to. I have made some Jewish friends here at the school, in particular my friend Akiva, who is an amazing guy and someone I respect a great deal. Akiva is Israeli, meaning he was born & grew up for much of his life in Israel; it also means that he served the mandatory two? years in the IDF. However he is an atheist, so he couldn’t tell me too much about Jewish life. He also explained there is a significant difference between Israelis and other Jews, which made the whole affair even more confusing.
The Seder was an open invite that was sent out to the Columbia community by Rabbi Blum, who leads Chabad. The dinner itself was held in the rotunda in Low Library, which is where most formal events on campus are held. There were probably 40-50 people there, of which (as far as I could tell) I was the only non-Jewish person there.
The dinner itself was fascinating. There was a booklet laid out at each seat (printed in both Hebrew and English) that laid out the basic order of the service. The entire thing was almost 3 hours, but the condensed version went something like this: reading of blessings, ritual hand washing, drinking wine (or Martinelli’s in our case, since there were underage students there), eating the “ritual” Pesach meal which includes Matzah (an unleavened bread/cracker type thing), hardboiled eggs, potatoes, and bitter herbs (lettuce w/ horseradish), more hand washing, more wine, a real meal with chicken, vegetables, and potato cakes, more readings, more blessings, more wine, and finally a few more readings/blessings. The entire dinner was served by a wait staff, so the pieces of the ritual meal are already on the table and then everything else is brought out to you. The Matzah (and this is of course just my opinion) tastes pretty terrible, and I’m not big on horseradish so I wasn’t about the bitter herbs either. The traditional Pesach plate also includes a chicken shank, which interestingly the Rabbi said sits in the place of what would have been a nice fat piece of roasted lamb before the destruction of the temple. For whatever reason, since that time Jewish communities have used the chicken shank instead, which I feel is definitely a step down given that I love mutton and don’t like looking at bones of any type when I’m eating. The wine cups are set on little saucers because apparently it is tradition to fill the cup to overflowing, and then pour some parts of the cup out at different times throughout the ceremony.
The reading of the blessings was also very beautiful. I’ve always found Jewish songs and spoken oration to be extremely moving, they’re a strange combination of sorrowful and profound. Wish I understood Hebrew.
I was disappointed not to have gotten a chance to speak with Rabbi Blum, either during or after the meal, but it looked as though he was occupied and it was nearly 11 PM by the time it was finished. I’m extremely glad I had the chance to participate in it, I feel that I learned a great deal, not all of which I could put into words. I’d like to extend my thanks to Rabbi Blum, Chabad, the wait staff, and to two other friends from GS, Gabby & Danielle who kept me company while we were eating and helped explain some of the customs & nuances to me. It would have been quite a lot for a Goy to try and take in all on the first time …

The 300

2007-03-31T19:39:00.000-04:00

I realized today that it has been almost 2 full months since the last significant update. Mostly I’ve been very busy with schoolwork and the concerns of preparing for graduation at the end of May. There’s just a lot to get done with it all. Given that this is my final semester and I’m just busy focusing on other things, I’m not going to put up my usual post about how midterms went and all that. Long story short, they basically went fine. There are a few events upcoming that will be more significant, and more worth posting about, but for now I figured I would chime in with my thoughts on the film ‘300’.
I was kind of excited to go see this leading up to the release, especially when I found out that Gerard Butler was playing Leonidas. (He played the Phantom in the recent Phantom of the Opera movie) My Lit Hum class, which is far & away my favorite class here at Columbia, went to see it together as a group, which I'm sure would have been fun; I was planning to go with them but something came up at the last minute. Overall, I thought the film was pretty good. Now you have to consider, it is Frank Miller, which means a lot of sex & violence, so one should know what they’re getting themselves into.
This movie felt different than ‘Sin City’, Miller’s other graphic-novel-to-movie story. Sin City felt as though it were really telling a story, really saying something, or a couple of things, on a subtle level beneath all the carnage. This movie (and the graphic novel it is adapted pretty faithfully from) felt more just like carnage for its own sake. The movie tried somewhat to imbue it with some message about the defense of freedom against tyranny and all this, but as someone from my Lit Hum class pointed out, “OK, this is a civilization that practices infanticide. Not exactly the paragon of democracy that’s being held up here.” Interestingly enough, another student from the Lit class saw a subtext of the current US administration in it, which I could also see, except that it would have meant that Bush was out in Iraq fighting, which made the entire class burst out laughing.
Professor Jill Muller, our professor in Lit Hum, said she was a bit thrown off by seeing the Persian army including “the random assortment of orcs and other extras from the Lord of the Rings”, which after having seen the movie I thought was hysterical, and sadly accurate. In terms of differences between the graphic novel and the movie, Xerxes was depicted the same way, same with Ephialtes, and much of the dialog was fairly true to form. The subplot with trying to get the queen to convince the council to send the army was entirely new, as were the “orcs”. So it wasn’t as faithful a translation as Sin City was, but *shrugs* what are you going to do?
The sex is explicit only in a scene between Leonidas and the Queen, though there are some things hinted at in a couple of other scenes that made me a bit uncomfortable (though in fairness Sin City was that way too). The violence is … well there’s a lot of it, but honestly it was more restrained than I’d expected. It all has a very cartoon-ish quality to it, and most of the blood & gore is fairly stylized. All that being said, it isn’t terrible, but I don’t think it quite garners the hype surrounding it currently. If you wait for it to come out on video, you aren’t missing much. If you decide not to go see it, you aren’t missing that much.

Service Announcement

2007-03-01T08:29:00.000-05:00

I've had to turn off annonymous posting to my blog, as I was getting a lot of porn spam posted into the comments section. I don't have time now to go back through my old posts and root it all out (midterms), so if anyone runs across it in the comments, sorry about that. It shouldn't be an issue from now on.

Frank Zappa

2007-02-03T23:21:00.000-05:00

New York is a huge center for performing arts of all kinds, and to be honest, I haven’t had the chance to go see nearly as many shows, of any kind, as I’d like (though I have seen a few). Miller Theater is run by the Graduate School of the Performing Arts here at Columbia, and students have access to savagely discounted tickets. On Friday night, a group of musicians put on a performance of selected works by Frank Zappa, and it was an absolutely great evening.
Zappa (1940-1993) is a tricky figure to explain exactly. Basically, he was an extremely talented musician primarily from California who wrote, directed, and produced an extremely wide range of music during his life, but had tastes & vision somewhat outside the mainstream. In pop culture, he’s often best known for his works that were satirical, like his song “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”. But he worked on a wide range of things, and musically really was a genius in terms of the range of music and instruments he was comfortable with, and the depth of his understanding of music. He was a bit like Weird Al Yankovic in that regard; much of his stuff sounds silly, or non-sensical, but in order to be able to do all the parodies he does, it requires someone who actually is a very accomplished musician. I’d heard Zappa’s name before, and was curious about his music, so when I found out Miller was putting on a show of his work, I figured it would be a good opportunity.
I wasn’t disappointed. The performance started out as a winds quartet, moved to a strings quartet, moved to a full orchestra, had an intermission, and then ended in what I might best describe as a “jam session” with the following instruments: electric guitar, bass guitar, drums, cello, violin, sax, flute, & piano/keyboard. The performers were all fantastic, and really put themselves into the playing; the first chair violin in particular was excellent. The music itself would be a bit hard to describe; the friend I went with said it was “barely controlled chaos”. Try to imagine an orchestra warm-up session where people were all playing random notes and tones. Then try to imagine someone scoring something like that, and after you listen a bit you start to realize it isn’t all random, but it fits together in very clever ways. That’s what this was like (with a bit more structure, though the structure wasn’t always obvious). During the orchestra bit, the music went through a tempo shift to something that sounded more like a lounge tune, and some of the performers actually put their instruments down and started talking & laughing with each other, to simulate a noisy bar or club type atmosphere. But the thing is, you come to realize the music is scored that way, for specific effect, and lasts a specific number of measures, before the performers pick up their instruments again. That’s the type of genius I’m talking about.
It's admittedly a bit hard to describe, so I think the best example of what I'm talking about would be this ancedote from the program notes; this was written by the show's director (and bass player) Brian Coughlin.
"Until I got to college I never really paid much attention to Frank Zappa. (...) I only became acquanited with a different zappa as a freshman in college, when a friend instroduced me to a live performance of his verion of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven from the album The Best Ban You Never Heard in Your Life. My friend was delighted by the clever way in which Zappa lampoons the bombastic showiness of 1970 rock by using a jazz big band to play Jimmy Page's classic rock guitar solo. When the song gets to the point where, in the original, Page takes over with his usual guitar pyrotechnics, instead of the expected guitar solo, Zappa brings in the whole jazz band, but playing Page's solo, note-for-note. The moment is very funny. But as I listened to it, I began to realize that there was more to it than just a clever spoof of Led Zeppelin: here was a full big band of musicians who were playing Page's complex, virtuosic guitar solo IN UNISON. WHo was this crazy man who would go to all the trouble to put together and train a huge group of musicians to do something this difficult as a joke? (...) I soon found out that the re-orchestration of Led Zeppelin I had heard was only the tip of the iceberg. Though challenging to most mortal musicians, playing Jimmy Page's solo must have seemed like a walk in the park for Zappa's players compared to some of the other music he had them play ..."
It was a great show, and a great intro to a great composer. If anyone has interest, maybe pick up some of his stuff & give it a listen.
(Oh, by the way, this clever picture came from the promo stuff for the concert, I'm sure it's copyrighted by the folks down at Miller Theater or the School of Performing Arts OR the Zappa Family Trust or all three or something like that, I'm just a college student who appreciated the music, I don't have any money, I'm not claiming this as my own work, I didn't make this thing, I'm not promoting it for money, so don't sue me, etc etc etc ...
The same basic thing applies for the program notes I'm quoting.
Thank you for your cooperation.)

Crime and Punishment

2007-01-27T21:53:00.000-05:00

I finally have an answer to that age old question “What is your favorite book?” I finished C&P about a week ago, and seriously have never read anything else as good. (The Bible being an exception, but for me the Bible stands by itself in a unique category)
I’ve read most of Brothers Karamazov, so I even have another work by Dostoevsky to compare it with, and it was interesting to see that some of the themes were the same. But in this case, both the situation and the characters were far more compelling, far more gripping, than in Brothers K. This story is also more tightly focused in terms of structure, which I like.
It would be difficult for me to talk about all the things I like about this book without having this entry turn into a short novel of its own. Fundamentally for me, it was about the characters, major and minor, who truly lived inside my mind, of the power of the writing to put you in the scenes and settings he creates, to make you FEEL what it is the characters are feeling, his way with words and creating conversations through his writing, in the potent, almost violent intersection of Christ and the Bible among the poverty and ruins of these desperate people’s lives and the way that these characters wrestle and do battle with him, to the book’s final, extremely satisfying conclusion, that may be the best ending to a story I’ve ever read, at least in terms of my own personal taste.
No one should leave college without reading this book. If you’re out of college and haven’t read it, read it. If you have read it, read it again. Done.

Carnegie Hall

2007-01-27T21:52:00.000-05:00

It really is all about who you know. A good friend of mine called me up and said that he had $10 discounted student rush tickets to Carnegie Hall for a Bach performance, and it didn’t take me long to say yes. The performance was great, and the concert hall was a nice venue. We were up on the highest level, which honestly I didn’t mind at all. The seats had restricted legroom (they were behind a banister) which was tough with my friend and I being tall, but we managed. Surprisingly, the ushers didn’t make an issue out of people taking pictures, so I got to take several until I found a shot I was happy with.
The performer, whose name escapes me, did a great job, he was playing “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I”, so it was interesting hearing a collection of short pieces. It’s kind of crazy, given how complex the music was, to consider that Bach wrote these pieces as trainers.
The really interesting thing to note was that about half the people in the audience had their eyes closed while listening, and the other half were watching the performer. (I was among the later) Not that the sound quality was bad, but to me, given that this was a solo performance, watching the performer play was a very important part of the live experience. I can go home and listed to the piece on MP3. It was interesting too that people held their coughs, chair shuffles, and movements between breaks in the pieces; the performer would play for 5-10 minutes, then take a 1-2 minute pause before continuing, and the whole room would cough, move about, etc. It was quite amusing.
Unlike the Metropolitan Opera, this performance I really did enjoy, and would welcome and opportunity to go back again with friends.

Mayor Bloomberg

2007-01-27T21:51:00.000-05:00

Had a chance a few weeks ago to hear one of the last few speakers I’d been eager to hear before I graduate: Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Mayor Bloomberg is a great speaker. He came to the school to speak as part of a panel on democratic governance in a diverse city/society. He said a few things during his speech I thought were interesting. He talked about immigration & immigrant communities as being one of the real strengths both of America in general, and of NYC in particular. He said that security was of paramount importance, but that one of the best ways to achieve this is to include people in the social systems through the use of something like a national ID, a hard plastic Social Security card. He noted that many of the problems in immigrant communities have to do with their being undocumented, and so they’re not willing to come forward to report crimes or enroll their children in school for fear of discovery. But he also made note that statistically these communities have low crime; that these people are here to work hard, and that as long as they “play by the rules”, they should have the same opportunities as anyone else.
He also made a very frank statement that he publicly supported Israel, but he did it in a very smooth way; he came right out and said it, but the way it fit into his speech I don’t think anyone would have found it offensive, though I was almost surprised he came out and said it so directly.
It’s also interesting that in hearing him talk about certain reports that his administration set up that rolled up to the mayor’s office weekly or monthly, it was clear that he came from the business world (which I approve of).
His style of delivery was excellent, he kept eye contact with the crowd almost the entire time, and only looked at his notes very briefly. His delivery was clear, he knew what he was saying, and was in clear but comfortable command of the podium the entire time. And he kept his speech to time, which is something I always notice and appreciate.

RREEEENNTT!! On BROAD-WAY!!

2007-01-03T19:35:00.000-05:00

Had a chance last night to do something really fun in New York: I went to my first Broadway show.
A friend of mine called me up in the middle of the day to tell me that she’d been given orchestra section tickets to Rent for that night by one of her housemates, who’d won them in a raffle but couldn’t attend, and would I like to come with her as her guest? I had to think it over for all of half a second.
We went out to dinner beforehand and had a good time chatting before the show. The line to see the show was insane, it was wrapped around the block, which is really saying something because city blocks here in NYC are huge. Both of us were quite surprised, especially since the theater doesn’t look that big from the outside. But we got in fine once the line got moving, and our seats really were pretty good, floor level, right hand side, fourth or fifth row back, and on the aisle which is always a huge plus for me since I have long legs.
The show was a bit late getting started, and to be honest took me a little bit to get into. I often find that with musicals, it’s like Shakespeare, for the first little while the language bugs me until I get into the groove of it. This was the same, but by the first half hour I was enjoying it, and by the end I was really quite into it. I actually kept wishing time would move faster during the intermission so we could get back to the show.
The performers were all great, good voices, some of them very good dancers and physical performers, all of them looking as though they were having a lot of fun. The story was predictable in some places, but I can say I wasn’t sure exactly how it would end and was pleasantly surprised.
I did some reading afterwards about the whole bohemian subculture as it existed down in the East Village and Alphabet City before the gentrification, and was able to appreciate the play more that way in retrospect. At the time I didn’t understand many of the references and the social situations the play was alluding to. I told Amanda that I’d decided to go into it blind, not having read anything about the play beforehand, and I’m glad I did. It was fun and interesting to experience with no preconceptions. But I was able to reflect and enjoy it more once I understood some of the background and surrounding context to the show. It was a great introduction to Broadway though, one thing I didn’t know beforehand or expect is that the music is all played live too, by a small group of musicians up onstage, tucked away from the main sets but still visible.
It was extremely generous of Amanda to think of me when she got the tickets, and I really did have a good time seeing it with her and chatting about it afterwards. I’ll certainly have to take in one or two other shows while I’m here in the city.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2007-01-03T19:32:00.000-05:00

On the bus ride back from DC I read the book in question, which I’d received as a gift from Sarah’s family. And it was, in a word, awesome. It’s quite short, only 140 pages or so, I read it in just a few hours. Although the writing and the story itself are interesting in terms of the way it’s structured, and the writing is good, the real power of the book comes in the final chapter with Jekyll’s “discoveries” and musings about the nature of man. It has been a long time since I have read and enjoyed something so insightful, and so true.
I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky too, and Ivan is actually one of my favorite characters there because of his honesty. As someone who isn’t a believer, he is willing to be honest enough to push certain ideas to their logical end. Thus he is able to come to the honest conclusions that “if God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted”, and “it isn’t that I don’t believe in God, I just respectfully return the ticket.” Stevenson’s writing achieves this same kind of honesty.
In some ways, this book might be considered early science fiction. It’s using a fantastic plot device (the potion) to explore a profound moral question about the nature of man. It also reminded me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I enjoyed immensely too. It’s interesting to see that in her book, the fantastic plot device (being able to animate a body) is also present, but she doesn’t try to get into details about the process, and Stevenson also does not tell us exactly what’s in the potion or how it is derived, because in neither case is it material. What’s important is not the “technology”, but the question that the scenario created allows us to explore.
I really am finding more and more how much I enjoy a lot of classic literature. Between my Lit Hum class and my own reading pursuits myself, I've realized that many of these books truly are timeless in the questions about being human that they explore and the eloquence and relevance with which they still speak.

Christmas in Virginia

2007-01-03T19:30:00.000-05:00

A good friend of mine invited me down to spend Christmas with her family in Virginia, and I had a fantastic time down there. I won’t try and hit everything, but here are some of the highlights.
So much food, and so good! Sarah has a large family that has lived in the area for quite some time, so the gatherings were big, the parties were fun, and the food just kept coming. I really got to eat some fantastic stuff while I was there.
Her family was extremely generous with me. Sarah had warned me a few times that her family was a strongly loving, closely knit, and highly opinionated bunch, and that I might have to put up with some ribbing. But honestly everyone there seemed to accept me just fine, including her mom, dad, & brother. I went around on one afternoon with her Dad for awhile, and even the neighbors that we ran into were hospitable and gracious. It’s nice to see that southern-style hospitality is alive & well down in ‘ole Virginia.
Much of the time we spent just relaxing. Slept in late, drove around her county, got to see some beautiful country. Sarah took time to show me the area, places where her friends & family lived, where she grew up, etc. Much of the area there in New Kent County is extremely beautiful, and I remarked more than once how I could see why some of the first settlers just decided to stay there after they got off the boat.
We also watched some movies, among them Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Which was, I would have to say … weird. Saw part of the earlier version of Casino Royale and I’m not a huge fan of Peter Sellers, though I respect his abilities. But the movie itself felt very strange, especially the oddly abrupt ending. I felt I couldn’t get a good sense of exactly what the director was trying to say, other than perhaps a theatre of the absurd type of thing. Sarah told me his other films also tend to be kind of weird and have abrupt endings, so though I’m glad I saw this one, I don’t think I’m going to make an effort to see any of his other films.
We made our way back on the Weds after Christmas, on a bus that went between the Chinatown in DC and the Chinatown in NYC. (We’d driven up to DC from Richmond with a friend of Sarah’s) Sarah told me when we left that her mother had given me a standing invite to come back again, which was sincerely meant and no small thing, and I appreciate it fully.
It was a great time and I was glad for the chance to do it. Most of all I want to thank my friend Sarah for extending the invitation to me and for the great time I had getting to hang out together. All in all, a great Christmas.

( Additional Note: I was originally planning to do another entry on New Year’s Eve, but honestly it was a bit of a let down. I wasn’t planning to go down to the ball drop in Times Square, and so I met with some friends at a party up here around the campus. But I wasn’t feeling well that night and came home to go to bed early. So that part of things was pretty tame.
I did end up staying up late and calling a friend back in Seattle who had to work that night and wasn’t able to go out; that turned into a fun and slightly silly conversation given how late it was, and that we were both tired. Sometimes the simple joys in life far outshine any amount of excitement in Times Square. )

( Second Additional Note: This picture doesn’t totally capture the the essense of either the warm holiday spirit or the beautiful countryside that I found down there, but it was just too cool to not post up, mainly because they have an aviation museum with an SR-71 parked outside. I mean come on, how cool is that? )

Finals (Fall '06)

2007-01-03T19:13:00.000-05:00

Once again, finals have come and gone. And once again, somehow, everything got done.
It really is amazing to me, every semester I hit this point usually during the reading week that I feel like I’m going to flunk or throw myself out of my apartment window. But every time, it all gets done. This semester was no exception. And now, there’s just one semester left.
Anyways, here’s the rundown this time around.
Chinese:
I’ve never had a Chinese semester that I felt totally good about, and I think that’s something I’m just going to have to reconcile myself to. This semester was interesting because our teacher, who is from the Summer Program in Beijing, doesn’t really speak English. So we got to learn immersion style. Which started out terribly for the first few days, but then somewhere in there turned out ok, and I actually feel I learned more than I had the previous year, which was good. And our teacher was very reasonable in terms of her expectations of us, so it ended up working out.
The only downside was the final grade for this class, which was a B. I did poorly on the last regular test during the semester, but I did some work to make up some of the points, and thought that I did ok on the final. I did well on my oral final, so honestly I’m surprised I didn’t get a B+. This hurts too because this is a five point class, where most classes are three. I’m trying to edge my overall GPA up to 3.6, so the lower grade than I was expecting didn’t help matters any. But, all in all I can say that I gave it my best effort, guess I’ll just have to let it go.
Lit Hum:
This class was awesome, easily the best class of the semester, and quite possibly the best class I’ll have taken at Columbia. It’s a year long class, so I’m taking the second half in the spring, and really looking forward to it. The texts that we covered in it were pretty good, but the real thing that makes this class so great are the students, and our instructor, Professor Jill Muller.
I knew half the students in the class on the first day, so it really was like taking a class with my friends, which was very important to me to do at least once while here at Columbia. And the rest of the class bonded up pretty well, so we all had a good time together.
But the other factor that made this class work was our teacher. Prof. Muller is/was herself a GS student and had two young children when she was working through her degree, so she understands exactly how we all feel. And she herself said that she sees her job, and primary strength here at the school not as research, but as teaching, which she truly is gifted at. She was always fair and even-handed in guiding the class, willing to listen to & consider almost any reasonably articulated argument or perspective, and brought a tremendous amount of insight and wisdom to our group. A fantastic experience, not without its challenges, but the one class I knew I would be able to get an A in, which I did.
Economics of Money & Banking:
This too was a very interesting course, and easily the best economics course I’ve taken here. This course focused on understanding how banking actually works in considering the balance sheets of banks, and the idea that every asset (except for gold) is someone else’s liability. Which means that it helped us think about and understand a number of complex financial transactions, and who would be on the other side of those deals, which were important and interesting topics to consider. I feel like I learned a ton, and the professor did a great job of delivering the lectures, it is clear that he has an excellent mastery of his subject. I’d highly recommend this course to anyone who really wants to understand conceptually how banking works, and how it has changed in the last 15 years or so. And I recommending taking it with Mehrling, as his approach to the course and his material is quite unique.
I did well on all the homework, got a very good score on the midterm, and feel I did very well on the final. I was pleased & gratified to find I had gotten an A.
Oil and the Macroeconomy (Senior Seminar):
Seniors at Columbia in the Econ department are not required to write a senior thesis, that’s optional for the honors program, and really only make sense if one plans to go on and do grad work in economics, which I don’t. But they are required to take a senior seminar, which is a single semester, and write the seminar paper, which is about half the length of a thesis. The broad topic of my seminar was oil and the macroeconomy, and I chose to do my paper specifically on Brazil. Without going in to too much detail, Brazil has been cutting their foreign oil imports steadily since the late 70’s and replacing that consumption with ethanol, which they make from sugar cane. I decided to try and simulate what would have happened to their economy if they hadn’t taken that step, and kept importing the same quantities of oil. It turned out to be a fairly interesting paper.
The seminar classes are small, ours was 14 people, and they only meet once per week. Our class director was a visiting professor from Baruch College, but I very much enjoyed working with him. He helped direct our research, and encouraged us to take our ideas seriously. Some of the papers he’s suggested further work on so that they could be published in journals, which I think is great.
My paper turned out pretty well, and my presentation I think was good too. These were our only deliverables in class, so given that I feel I did well on both of them, and so once again the A was within reach, and achieved.
So overall, this was a pretty good semester, certainly my best one academically. Now I plan to enjoy the time off between now and spring, and be ready to plunge back in one more time for the final semester.

Zhang Yimou

2006-12-09T22:06:00.000-05:00

Had a chance this evening to see a speaker I’ve wanted very much to see for a long time: Director Zhang Yimou. (That’s him in the brown sweater sitting next to the woman)
Zhang Yimou is perhaps the most well-known and well-respected director in Chinese cinema today. His most recent films include ‘Hero’ and ‘House of Flying Daggers’, both of which were great. And for those who are more familiar with Chinese cinema, his most well-known work is probably ‘Raise the Red Lantern’. One of his real hallmarks is his use of color, both Hero and Flying Daggers are great examples of this. If you haven’t seen any of these films, I recommend you do so. (Though in fairness I have to admit, I haven’t seen Red Lantern myself, but it’s on my list to see over the Xmas break)
The man in black sitting next to Zhang Yimou is Tan Dun, a famous composer who did much of the music for ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. He and Zhang Yimou were at Columbia discussing their new opera, ‘The First Emperor’, which is set to open at the Metropolitan Opera here in New York very soon. (Actually, it might already be playing) The story is set along the same lines as the movie Hero, it is about the first emperor who united China during the warring states period. It’s the first opera to be put on at the Metropolitan that was produced by an entirely Chinese production team, and I would have gone to see it myself if it hadn’t been entirely sold out.
The talk itself was enlightening, Zhang Yimou seems like quite an interesting fellow. The woman sitting next to him is his interpreter; he doesn’t speak English, which was funny because some of the people in the audience asked him questions in Chinese, and when he would reply about half the audience would laugh before his reply was translated. (My own Chinese isn’t good enough yet that I could really follow what he was saying) He has a deep voice, but he’s soft spoken, seems very serious, and very modest. Struck me as a true artist, in every sense. A lot of what he talked about would only make sense in the context of the discussion about the opera, but it was clear that he and Tan Dun had really enjoyed working on this opera together.
I was extremely glad to get the chance to hear him speak. We found out that he has been put in charge of the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, which is really quite a vindication considering that Raise the Red Lantern was banned in China for a long time, as it was seen to have a subversive anti-communist message. That he is now responsible for representing his country on the world stage is quite a high honor. I wish him every success in his labors, and hope that I can be there that summer in China to see it for myself.

Thanksgiving

2006-11-26T20:18:00.000-05:00

Went out to visit a good friend of mine in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and spent the time with him and his parents, and a couple of mutual friends. Got in late on Weds night, and slept in quite late that morning. Woke up around noon, and Pete’s mom made us breakfast around 1:00, which was great, except for the fact that we then had Thanksgiving dinner (which was outstanding) at 2:30, so I wasn’t nearly as hungry as I would have liked to have been. But that’s fine too, since we just had leftovers for the rest of the day and the day after, which is a huge part of what Thanksgiving is all about to me, just being able to eat great food at any time you want.
We went to the new James Bond movie that night, which was actually great. I wasn’t sure about Daniel Craig as Bond going into it, but I was totally buying him from the first reel. Slept in late again the next day, and we went for a hike that afternoon out to a the granite quarry in the picture. Funny thing was, we started out at about 3:00, and the sun had gone down by 4:30-5:00 ish, and we got a bit lost coming back. But, thanks to the well-marked Boy Scout trail, we were able to find our way back to the main path without needed to call mountain rescue in. Had another great dinner, then woke up early to come back into the city on Saturday morning. Worked out well, all in all it was a great time.
I also had a series of conversations with a friend of mine that lasted late into several nights over the course of the holiday weekend, and after I got back, that were extraordinary, and meant a lot to me. In my experience in life there is nothing else that compares to the sheer joy of simply connecting with someone, and sharing close fellowship with them.
Like I said, it meant a lot to me.

Casino Night

2006-11-18T18:04:00.000-05:00

A few nights ago, the student council groups pulled together and put on a casino night, which I have to admit was absolutely a blast, and might be the best student event of the year. The venue was very classy, semi-formal dress was required, the food was great, they had a live band, it was just really very well done.
The entry ticket got you 200 chips to play any number of casino games (blackjack, roulette, poker, etc). I sat down to play poker, and had an amazing night. Of course, it helped that people were fairly inexperienced and playing loose, but I also caught amazing cards all night long. I never lost a showdown, knocked out three players, and by the time I was done had turned 200 chips into almost 2000. Now if only I could have cards like that when I’m playing for money …
The chips could be redeemed for a couple of different gifts, or for entry into a raffle for various prizes, among which was a flat screen TV and a couple of iPods. I didn’t stay for the raffle but I did spread some chips around to friends and my fellow players at the table, and picked up a $25 Starbucks card, which I enjoyed very much.
Only two complaints, and these are both from a semi-experienced poker player. They should have been running more tables; by the time I left, each poker table (which I’m guessing there were 4-5) had 10 players seated, and 10 more players waiting. Since Congress unplugged online poker, I think the council underestimated how popular poker would be. The other problem was fresh decks. At a casino, you switch to a fresh deck every hour, or sometimes even every 30 minutes, as the cards get beat up pretty fast. Here, each dealer had only one deck to last the whole night, which was just something I believe they didn’t think of. Given how much money they spent on the event overall, $20 would have gotten them an entire box of decks.
But, it was still a great evening, I had a really good time.
(The picture of course is not from the event; this is a screenshot of an online poker table. I had a friend who was going to send me some pictures from the event but he never got off his ass and did it … grrrrr …. )

Orhan Pamuk

2006-11-18T18:02:00.000-05:00

I don’t expect most people to recognize this name right away. Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish author & artist who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for his book Istanbul, which is a memoir of his time growing up in the city. I’m part of a student committee that is exploring some questions about what direction the undergrad curriculum should take in the future, and last Friday Mr. Pamuk came to speak with us, and give us his thoughts.
I hadn’t really been very familiar with him myself prior to this, but I knew he was an award winning writer, and besides I’m always up for hearing well-known people speak. It’s one of my favorite things to do, as well as being a benefit of going to this school. (So THAT’S what my outrageously expensive tuition is going towards, these world-class speakers!) I am pleased to say that I was not at all disappointed, and have included just a few highlights from the talk he gave.
-) He talked about in Turkey there being this very strange divide between the secular rich and the religious (mainly Muslim) poor, which grew in many ways out of the Enlightenment era. Leaders in Turkey saw the technological progress of the west and wanted to follow some of that, and so tended increasingly to see religion as an artifact of the poor. However, Pamuk talked about the fact that this isn’t wholly true, since the religion is still very much wrapped up in national identity there, and so politicians will still play to that as they campaign.
-) He also said that the east/west view of the city is really more of a pre-fabricated idea than a reality. Sometimes, both within and outside of Turkey, there is this view of the city as a place where the east and west meet (culturally), but he said many of the sensibilities expressed on both those sides have been present in the country for a long time.
-) He also expressed a number of thoughts about writing and as a writer that I appreciated deeply (being a writer myself). He spoke about this idea of the “morality of the writer”, which is something I’ve often thought of myself. He himself said that he wrote this memoir primarily as a work of art, not as a guidebook to the city. Now, he was smart enough to know that many people would see it that way, and so he said basically, you decide how you’re going to write it, and then be true to that, even as you’re aware other people will read it a bit differently.
And he talked about “all fiction being autobiographical”, and that “the core of your writing is always based on the core of your own experiences”. Both of these things are what I have experienced in my own writing, and what I feel makes my writing the best. So it was extremely heartening to hear some of these thoughts that I’ve had echoed by a professional writer who’d just won the Nobel Prize. I appreciated his time and his thoughts deeply.

The Garden Party

2006-11-18T17:29:00.000-05:00

Went to an interesting event the other night. Anyone here familiar with a guy named Vaclav Havel? (pronounced Vas-lav, with an ‘s’ sound) Long story short, he’s a Czech playwright who was imprisoned by the communist government for the subtle but noticeable anti-communist subtexts of his plays. However, after the fall of communism, he ends up becoming the first President of the Czech Republic. He’s here at Columbia this semester as a scholar-in-residence.
I hadn’t been previously familiar with his work myself, but our Lit Hum class is covering one of his plays, The Garden Party, in our class. So this last Saturday, we went to a production of the play at Miller Theater, the on-campus performing arts theatre. And it was … very interesting.
The play wasn’t really a play per se, it was just a reading of the play; you can see all the actors in the picture, and they just remained seating in their chairs reading the play from notebooks. This made it somewhat less impressive than it might otherwise have been, especially given that this play is very much theatre of the absurd, so the lack of the props written into the play itself did detract from the performance. However, hearing people read the play and watching them interact did help the play make more sense than it did when I read it beforehand; some of the dialog is very circular and absurdist, so it’s hard to get a sense of what’s being conveyed. The reading did help with that.
The play was optional for my class, but I decided to go, and afterwards our instructor Professor Muller and the rest of us went and had coffee and talked about our impressions. I’ll make a separate note on that class some time, it’s really an amazing group, and we had a good time together that evening.
Oh, and by the way, yes, that is in fact Dustin Hoffman in the picture, fourth from the left (blue shirt drinking the bottle of water) Everyone was very excited that he was in it, but I have to admit, his performance was a bit lackluster. He didn’t seem to be trying very hard, or putting himself into the reading much. Everyone agreed over coffee that several of the other actors did much better jobs. But, it was cool to get a chance to see him.

Midterms

2006-10-31T08:42:00.000-05:00

** Editor’s note: **
The last few weeks have been crazy, mostly crazy good, but still crazy. There’s been a lot going on, a lot I have to recount here. So tonight is going to be the lightening round; instead of doing longer entries as I usually do, I’m going to do shorter ones, but more of them. There’s going to be a LOT of new content tonight, so consider yourselves warned …
** End note **
Hurrah, midterms are over! Had three of them over the last few days, and while I really can’t complain since most of my classmates had more, it’s still good to know they’re in the past. On top of that, we have next Mon & Tues off school (I think due to Election Day) so I have that to look forward to as well.
I was fortunate in that I didn’t have any of my midterms on the same day as another one. My first was in Lit Hum, which went fine, but I mixed up two of the authors, stupid Greek names. I’m sure I did fine on it, and I got an ‘A’ on the first paper for the class, so I doubt I have much to worry about but I feel stupid for what I missed. My oral Chinese exam went poorly, but I have no one to blame for that besides myself. I should have practiced it more, but it’s not a very big part of the overall course grade and I had other priorities.
I just took my last one in Money & Banking this afternoon, and am pretty confident that I aced it (maybe less a couple points here & there if the professor is feeling nit picky). That makes me very happy, as I’d really like to have an ‘A’ in that class. It’s been a good class, and I feel I’ve learned a lot.
The REALLY crazy thing is to consider that there’s only 6 weeks left in the semester, and then it’s over. And then we’re into my final semester here at Columbia, and then I will be done! I think May 16 is going to come rushing up on me faster than I anticipate …

Comedy

2006-10-31T08:41:00.000-05:00

I’ve said many times before to people that I don’t like most comedy. Most of what other people find funny, I don’t, for various reasons. Most comedy I feel is either in poor taste, or is making fun of things that shouldn’t be made fun of, and is closer to being tragic than funny. The next obvious question is, well then what do you like? And I feel that I’ve never had a good answer to that, until now.
Here then, is my definitive answer. Conceptually, I like comedy that is ridiculous. I find the connection of things that are not really connected at all, or connecting outlandish things in an absurd way, funny. I like humor that’s intellectual, and gentle to a degree. Some satire is funny, but really the heart of comedy to me is absurdity.
As examples of my favorites, I would hold up the following: Monty Python, Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and the Onion. Monty Python is pure brilliance, and I’ve loved the wasteful boys from Oxford (& Cambridge) for awhile. MP occasionally lapses into the crude, particularly with sexual humor (I didn’t like Meaning of Life at all), but overall everything with them has a very silly, lighthearted touch, which I like.
Seinfeld … well, he’s Seinfeld. I trust I need say no more. I will say though that I heard that he once said that comedy that needed to go for the crude or vulgar was stooping and demeaned the art form. I respect and admire him BOTH because he proved that clean comedy can work brilliantly, and also because he’s funny.
Jon Stewart, I also probably don’t need to say much. What I like about him most is his style of presentation. He holds up certain things in our current political climate, then makes these faces with long pauses as if to say, “Does anyone else find this as absurd as I do?” It’s a great shtick.
The Onion is something I’ve known about for awhile, but only really discovered recently. I can pick it up near my campus, and I’ve taken to reading it during my short lunch breaks. I am impressed with how consistently it can make me actually laugh out loud. I don’t know where they get their writing staff, but I think they deserve a Pulitzer or something. I also like the fact their tone feels very neutral; they’re into equal opportunity skewering.
( Like I mentioned in my earlier post, this pic is from the Onion, copyright by the Onion, all rights reserved & stuff like that, which means please don’t sue me, I’m a broke-ass college student who enjoys reading your paper and I’m not doing this for money )
One person who gets special mention is Bill Cosby. I remember watching Cosby Show as a kid and thinking he was funny, but he hasn’t done stand up in a long time, which I would really like to see, I hear it’s great. Also in this category would probably go Richard Pryor, I should go and hunt down some of his early material, though I know he was a bit more edgy and I’ve found that comedians in the tradition of Lenny Bruce (like Sarah Silverman) I don’t care for as much.

Sunday @ Trinity Church

2006-10-31T08:39:00.000-05:00

Had a chance to go to a beautiful liturgical service at the historic Trinity Church down in the heart of Wall Street. (The location of the church has some very interesting metaphoric meanings to me, but more on that another time). The service is Episcopalian, and I found the entire service very different from any of the Pentecostal venues I’m familiar with, but also very beautiful. There’s a lot of mystery & symbolism wrapped up in the service, not all of which I understood, but it was neat; I particularly liked the censer and the reading of Matthew from a silver plated Bible held out by the vicar in the middle of the pews surrounded by people holding candles on long staves.
I went down there at the invitation of a school buddy; we went primarily to hear Dr. Miroslav Wolf speak, who is the Professor of Theology at the Yale Divinity School. Dr. Wolf delivered the sermon (which was very short compared to sermons I usually hear) and gave a talk over brunch afterwards (the brunch was excellent).
A man I knew whose learning I respect once talked about writing a book on the history of schisms within the church, and how to the denominations might be brought back together. I hope he writes it.
I’ll say this too, there’s a lot of stuff from the high church traditions that the church here in America misses out on. Those things, while not perfect, are a part of our heritage too, and we should be mindful of that.
I wish I’d had my camera, there was a fresco inside the church that was absolutely staggering, I had to settle for this picture instead. If I go back there again, I’ll be sure to take a better picture.

Halloween

2006-10-31T08:38:00.000-05:00

So, I went looking for this hat see? And I couldn’t find the right one but my buddy Vinnie down in Brooklyn, he calls and tells me he has these hats that fell off the back of a truck, says maybe I want to come take a look. I say hey, why not right?
Went out on Saturday night to three different parties, and decided that while I didn’t want to “dress up”, I did need a hat. The hat I had in mind I couldn’t find, but this one was perfect since it exactly matched the shirt I already had. The idea in my mind was Prohibition-era gangster, but I got a lot of Indiana Jones all night. I suppose the leather jacket was throwing people off.
I’m going to ignore the bit of self-aggrandizement here, I thought I would have appeared in a random photo from the parties taken by my friends but I guess not. It’s all good though, some of this is just expanding on the theme of not taking myself … So … Damn … SERIOUSLY!!!!

:)

( This is actually a theme that has been coming up a lot with me lately; you try and pay attention to what the winds are telling you … )

The UN

2006-10-31T08:34:00.000-05:00

On Friday, I had the opportunity to go and do something really fun and completely unique to NYC: I went and took a tour of the UN headquarters.
Found out about the trip through someone I’d had a class with, and although I didn’t really know anybody in the group, it was a great time. One thing that stood out to me as being very apparent is that in order to understand the UN, you have to understand it grew up out of the ashes of WWII, and that it was built by the victors of that war. The UN won’t make sense if one doesn’t understand that as a reference point. I learned so much more than I have time to put down here, but I will include a few fun facts.

- Because the UN represents all the nations, the UN itself does not belong to any nation. So technically, when you’re on the grounds of the UN, you’re in international territory. That means cops from NYC need special permission to enter the grounds.
- The UN has been responsible for setting some interesting de facto standards. For example, the official language of all air traffic controllers is English. You’ll never hear another language being used in any air traffic control tower anywhere in the world.
- The UN is very clever about handling diplomatic courtesies. For example, the countries in the general assembly hall are seated alphabetically, but each year the speaker chooses the name of a country out of a hat, and that country is seated first, in the front left of the chamber, with the rest alphabetically behind that one (and the order wraps around again when they hit ‘Z’). That means that Afghanistan isn’t always in the front and Venezuela always in the back. The flags flown in front of the UN are also in alphabetical order, and flown at the same height.
One other thing I’ll say about the UN, I got the impression just in the short time I was there that these people take their work very seriously. They really believe that they are working each day to make the world a better place, and that is something to applaud. Much of my exposure to the UN has come from my studies in economics, where we’re often looking at how UN development projects have been flawed or ill-conceived; this visit provided a good point of balance.
I got some great pictures, I have shots of myself in both the general assembly and also inside the chamber where the Security Council meets. I’ll post a link up to an online photo book once I get around to posting all the photos up (if I’m not too lazy about it …)

Nightlife

2006-10-31T08:33:00.000-05:00

This is kind of a general note, in this my senior year, I’m trying to make a priority of going out more and spending less time in front of my books. And because of this shift, I’ve had some really good times lately.
When I first got here, I felt I had to focus on my studies, given that this place is so demanding. And I don’t think that was bad, but I also missed out on a lot. It’s fair to say that getting adjusted here was harder than I thought it would be, and I only now feel like I’m finally starting to get more comfortable with it. It would be tricky to try and recount all the neat things I’ve had a chance to do lately, and all the good people I’ve met, because it’s less about any one specific event and more about atmosphere overall, about a certain feeling that is closer to me now than before. I like this picture because it’s definitely but blurry around the edges, and is a good representation of a mood or a certain shade of feeling. It’s from a really cool sushi place down near Chelsea; I was there for a friend’s 30th birthday party. The food we had was amazing, and it was just a good time overall.

The Jewish Museum

2006-10-31T08:32:00.000-05:00

NYC has a lot of famous museums, not all of which are of interest to me, but this one definitely was. And I was not disappointed at all.
I was planning to go anyways because I was curious about it, but I found out that they were having an exhibit of early comic book art by Jewish authors, which immediately drew me in because I have been (and really still am) a huge fan of comic books & graphic novels. Even though many of them can be pretty pulpy, I very much believe that the medium itself represents a serious and important art form, in the hands of a good author & storyboard artist.
Come to find out that a ton of the significant comic artists were Jewish. The creators of Superman, Bob Kane who created Batman, and a bunch of others whose names are escaping me, they had exhibits from all these guys, I’d never realized what a profound influence on the art form the Jewish community had. I feel like practically the only guy who wasn’t Jewish was Stan Lee, the creator of the X-men. Also found out that many of the early comics had storylines that pitted them against the Nazis; they had some great covers showing Captain America and the Human Torch fighting German stormtroopers. I hadn’t realized the extent that these books incorporated nationalistic tones.
Superman himself is interesting, as his Kryptonian name Kal-el literally means ‘all that is from God’. The exhibit described him as the ultimate triumph of the immigrant Jewish boy, which is an angle I’d never thought of before but completely makes sense knowing now the background of his creators.
Of course, comics wasn’t all the Jewish Museum had, and I thoroughly enjoyed the floors with the exhibits of artifacts from Jewish culture & history, which are far too rich & numerous to go into here. All that to say, I enjoyed my visit immensely, and may very well go back again.

The Guggenheim

2006-10-31T08:30:00.000-05:00

So you have to figure, if you see enough museums, you’re bound to hit one that isn’t so great. This is the first one of those for me.
The Guggenheim is a bit tough to describe, but I think it’s accurate to say it’s like a museum of modern art & architecture. So, in fairness, part of the reason I didn’t enjoy it so much is that this sort of thing … isn’t my thing. I really enjoy more classical art, like what you’d find at the Louvre or the Met, but with this stuff I felt like I didn’t really ‘get’ it. I wish I’d had someone there to help explain the significance of what I was seeing. As it was, I felt very lost; it’s all somewhat deconstructionist. This shot is from the ground floor looking ‘up’; the museum isn’t very big, and it’s built in kind of a spiral.
I went with a couple of school friends, and when we got there we’d been told that Columbia students could get in for free, but the lady at the desk said we had to have the sticker for the current semester on our IDs, otherwise we’d have to pay the regular student rate of $15. I thought this was nonsense, so I waited until that lady left, went up to the counter and asked politely if there was anything else that could be done. After a bit of back & forth, the new girl decided to just refund us our money, which I very much appreciated.
So, if any of my classmates are reading, be sure you have the current sticker on your ID before you go!

GDP

2006-10-31T08:28:00.000-05:00

OK, given that North Korea is a topic that is close to me, I figure I should say something about the recent developments there. And to be honest, I think this bit from the Onion sums it up best.
( It is fair to say that this criticism about how much GDP a nuclear weapon consumes could be fairly leveled at any country that has nukes, but most of those countries don’t have people starving by the millions; at least the nukes are within their budgets. )
To be honest, I was surprised by this act, for two reasons: firstly, because it seemed to be within their incentive to keep everyone guessing about the state of their weapons technology. International condemnation was swift, and all they seem to have done is put more people on the side of the US.
But the bigger & more immediate blunder seems to be the way it has rallied China and Japan. These two countries, for those who may not be familiar, have barely been on speaking terms diplomatically, mostly due to the fact that the previous prime minister of Japan Junichiro Koizumi (who only just stepped down) had been making annual visits to a shrine in Japan where some war criminals from WWII are buried, which infuriated China. The new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, had just take the platform and there was some uncertainty about what his policies would be, though he seemed to want to mend fences with China. Then NK tests their bomb, and the Chinese and the Japanese instantly are able to build repoire around that issue, as both have vested interests in keeping the peninsula nuke free. The Chinese government saw the test as a huge snub, and responded with the harshest diplomatic language it has used towards the North yet. Given that China is NK’s only real friend, this seems to be a very bad miscalculation on Kim Jong Il’s part. Conversely, it also encourages US military buildup in Japan and in South Korea; the missile technology NK has isn’t really a threat to the mainland US, but Japan is certainly within range. Even though Japan has reaffirmed that it won’t seek it’s own nukes, the US has begun shipping Patriot anti-missile systems to them, and other weapons & technologies will probably follow.
So, it seems that NK had everything to gain from not testing and far more to lose by doing so, and it seems to have opted for the less strategically sound choice. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out. I think that a war is out of the question, but I hope that things can get resolved somehow so that the civilian population of NK won’t have to continue to suffer such brutal conditions.
( This picture is of course from the Onion, copyrighted by the Onion, made amazing by the Onion, nothing commercial is being bought or sold on this blog so please don't sue me by the Onion, am a broke-ass college student who likes the Onion, etc etc ... )

GDP, part 2

2006-10-31T08:25:00.000-05:00

This is another bit from the Onion that I just find hysterical and expresses well (in my opinion) the madness of the current situation.

Fearless

2006-10-14T11:29:00.000-04:00

Going to see a wide-release movie in a theater (as opposed to some small indie film) isn’t usually something I consider blog-worthy, but for this film I’m going to make an exception. I went to see Fearless about a week ago, and was really very impressed with it; I felt the movie said a number of important things in a clever and subtle sort of way.
** Note ** This entire post is going to contain potential spoilers from this point on, so if you’re planning to see the movie and don’t want to know anything about it, don’t read any more until you’ve seen it. If you’ve already seen it, you’re set. If you’re not planning to see it … you should change your mind. *s*
I’ve been a Jet Li fan for quite some time, and watch most of the movies he brings out. Interestingly, I tend to like his earlier films done in China far better than the US release ones. The big exception to this is Hero, but that one was a lot more like Crouching Tiger so it had the feel of a Hong Kong/foreign cinema film. As a tangent, Jet Li was actually offered the role of Li Mu Bai (the swordsman) in Crouching Tiger, but he’d made a promise to his wife that he wouldn’t do a film while she was pregnant, and so he honored that promise and the role went to Chow Yun Fat instead. This was all for the best for two reasons: it gave me an enormous amount of respect for Jet Li, and Crouching Tiger was better because Chow Yun Fat was better for that role, mostly because he was taller. Jet Li would have been about the same height as Zhang Ziyi, which would have made the dynamic between them much different. So it all worked out for the better.
Anyways, so this movie is about the heavily-fictionalized life of a real Chinese hero named Huo Yanjia, who lived during the earlier part of the 20th century. He was a martial arts master who defended China’s national honor during a time when China was seen to be weakening in the eyes of foreign national powers, and thus went down in the annals of Chinese history with great fame and renown.
Several things about this movie were very cleverly done, and made it far more than just a martial arts film, but the most notable one was the way they set up the tension between the Chinese and the Japanese. There is an ancient historical rivalry between these two countries, and prior to the N. Korean missile test, current relations between the countries were not fantastic; there had been some ugly outbreaks of nationalistic violence in China a few months ago. So, it’s very easy in film for either side to use the other as a convenient “bad guy”. This film didn’t really do that. There are two main Japanese characters, a fighter named Tanaka who is the final challenger for Huo, and a politician who sort of “hatches the plot” to humiliate the Chinese by defeating their fighter. All along though, the two fighters have only the highest respect for each other, and there are some neat interactions between them. When it becomes apparent that Huo might very well win, the Japanese politician has Huo’s tea poisoned during his match with Tanaka. It becomes quickly apparent that Huo is in bad shape, and Tanaka offers to let them resume the match later, but Huo chooses to press on. In the end, Huo gets in a blow that could have been potentially lethal, but chooses to pull his punch at the last minute before succumbing to the poison. Tanaka realizes this and declares Huo the winner. On the way out of the arena, Tanaka is confronted by the Japanese politician, who is freaking out because the Chinese have won and undone his plan. But Tanaka, realizing it was he who poisoned Huo’s tea, slams him up against a wall and tells him that he is a disgrace to Japan.
So the movie didn’t choose the Japanese people or the Japanese nation as “the bad guy”, it chose a Japanese person. And it set him in counterpoint to another Japanese person who was upright and honorable to the end. found this an extremely clever way of putting the plot together.
I also liked it because the movie was really about Huo’s evolution & journey as a man, from being a reckless hothead to being able to see a bigger picture beyond himself. There was a particularly touching scene where he goes to his parent’s grave and expresses something very much like repentance. He says to his father, “I understand now why you held back the final blow. You are the true champion of Tianjan (the province Huo lived in)” It was really neat.
Also this was a great film for Jet Li to be able to do as his final “martial arts” film, in giving this nod towards a great Chinese national hero and being able to make the film about more than just fighting. And he really was perfect for it since Jet Li has himself been a Chinese national wushu champion many times over in the past; since he is an expert practitioner of the form, it lends a realism that boots the film considerably.
The only small complaint is that they did play quite loose with the historical details, most notably that in the film Huo’s only daughter dies, meaning he would have no descendants, but in real life he had a few sons & daughters and has grandchildren who are alive today. I felt this was a bit silly, but given all the things I liked about the film, I’m willing to overlook it.
It’s a great piece, especially if you like a good story and good action. I recommend it highly.

New Jersey

2006-09-24T20:27:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I had the chance to go out to the ocean in New Jersey for the first time, and I had a blast. I went out overnight on Friday with a group of people from the church I go to (Redeemer Presbyterian) for a weekend getaway at a bed & breakfast. It was nice mostly just to be able to go and relax, get out of town for a little while, but the highlight for me was definitely the ocean itself.
The ocean has always been a powerful symbol for me personally, for reasons that are too complex to go into here. But it is a powerful symbol in a good way. The last time I went to the ocean was about three and a half years ago, when I was still living in Washington State. But I didn’t swim that time, since the beach that I was on had a lot of debris near the water, and I didn’t feel like swimming.
This time, in New Jersey, I did go swim, in surf that from what I was told by people who swim on the East Coast frequently, was pretty intense. And it was … in a word … awesome. I got smacked around, turned upside down, pulled under by the current, and even had a few seconds that I thought I might be in real danger (since I was under the water and couldn’t tell if I was being pulled towards the shore or away from it). I probably swallowed a gallon of seawater. (Which by the way really is salty, I mean, seriously salty! I’m sure anyone reading this who knows the ocean well is thinking ‘Duh!’, but not having tasted the ocean since I was very very young, finding salt crystals actually clinging to my skin after I’d dried off was really quite a novelty) When I dragged myself back onto the beach after 15 minutes or so of swimming, I felt like I’d had the shit beaten out of me.
I can’t remember the last time in my life I had so much fun.

Limited Strategies

2006-09-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

One of the things I’ve mentioned before that is cool about this school is that since it’s in NYC, we get speakers who come here and talk that we might not get at many other schools. Since it’s near Washington DC, we also get a fair share of government type people. A few days ago, I had a chance to hear Dr. Andrew Scobell, who is a senior advisor & researcher on East Asia from the War College (in Virginia I think), come and give a talk on North Korea. The thing that was perhaps most fascinating is that the conclusion he came out to, was pretty much the same conclusion I’ve been hearing all along for the last 3 years: we need to do something, but there isn’t much we can do.
In a nutshell, the problem is this. The US has a vested interest in North Korea (NK) not having nukes. The government there also brutally oppresses their own people because Kim Jong Il (the head of state) is a despot, so there are good reasons to be concerned about NK even without nukes being the issue. However, the other major player in the scenario is China, and they have a different primary interest. They don’t really want NK to have nukes either, mostly because it would encourage their ancient rival Japan to nuclearize, which they would rather not have happen. However, their overriding interest is to not have the country collapse and descend into anarchy, because it would send millions of starving North Korean refugees flooding into China (and also South Korea) and throw the entire region into chaos. So, they have something of an incentive to prop up the regime there, even if they don’t like the behavior.
( This picture is a real NK propoganda poster, by the way … )
NK knows both these things, so of course they have an incentive to play coy about the state of their program and keep everybody on pins & needles and guessing. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il continues to starve and torture thousands and perhaps millions of his own people (numbers are hard to come by since the country is so closed) while everyone stands around looking stupid. Military intervention isn’t really an option, since NK has a large conventional army and the country is very mountainous so it’s built like a bunker. If anyone attacked them directly, most analysts figure they would use regular artillery and shell Seoul out of existence as their first move. And economic sanctions aren’t much of an option either, since NK gets most of its aid from China. And China, as we discussed, does not want the country to collapse. And so we’re back to square one, with no good options.
Everything I’ve written here I have learned myself simply by reading news publications like the Economist and Time. Mr. Scobell is a senior policy advisor to the military and I believe also to Congress, and the fact that basically what he was saying was the same thing that I’ve been reading in the news and concluding myself was very interesting to me. Now, let me be clear, Mr. Scobell was articulate, a good presenter, and from everything I could see really knew his stuff. I’m not knocking his presentation or saying he’s stupid. What I am saying is that I think there is a common perception that people higher up in the government have this wealth of knowledge about geopolitical situations that the rest of us don’t, and that they have tools or options available to them that they choose not to use for conspiratorial reasons. When in actual fact, much of the time the situation is closer to this one; the people in government know most of the same things that we the public do, and despite (in the case of the US) having the considerable policy tools that their disposal, still find their hands tied. The best thing that could be said at the end of the talk was, ‘It’s a tricky situation, we have limited strategies available, and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out’.
Sometimes, even when you’re the biggest or the most powerful, you still find yourself without any good choices.

Stiglitz

2006-09-24T20:24:00.000-04:00

Last year, about this time, I wrote about getting a chance to go hear UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speak here at the school as a part of the World Leaders Forum that Columbia hosts. They hosted the forum again this year, and while I didn’t consider the list of attending dignitaries to be quite as compelling as last year, two people who I went to hear speak did stand out to me. The first is Joseph Stiglitz.
( I apologize for the fact that these next two pictures are poor, the auditorium I took them in makes the lighting hard. )
Those outside the Econ community may not know who Stiglitz is, but most of those within the community will. Among other things, he has served on the President’s Council of Econ advisors (under Clinton), been Chief Economist of the World Bank, and received the Nobel Prize in Econ for his work on asymmetric information. (In simple terms, he explored some of the implications of economic exchanges when two parties do not have the same information about that exchange). He also wrote a book called ‘Globalization & Its Discontents’, which I’d read parts of back in my econ classes at BCC. Smart guy, for sure.
I always like getting a chance to hear these well known figures speak, so I was interested to see what Stiglitz would be like in person. He was speaking that evening about his new book, ‘Making Globalization Work’, which I haven’t read (but I imagine is good, or at the very least well thought out). He struck me as a good guy, obviously very bright, decent speaker, articulates his ideas very clearly. One thing that did strike me as funny is that he comes across a bit as the genius but absent-minded professor; he had this strange habit of taking long pauses for no apparent reason in the middle of his talk, and then resuming again where he’d left off. It also appeared that he was reading from notes or a prepared speech, something I always find a bit disappointing. But it wasn’t a bad presentation, and I was glad to get to hear him talk, even though he didn’t blow me away.
But the main reason I was there that evening wasn’t to hear Joe Stiglitz. It was instead to hear …

Soros

2006-09-24T20:06:00.000-04:00

As in George Soros, the billionaire financier. Soros is a name that nearly everyone in the financial community will know, and that many outside the community very well may.
To go backwards for a minute, when I was in community college back in Seattle, trying to figure out “what I wanted to be when I grew up”, there were two men who’s writings and examples deeply influenced me. The first of was George Soros. (The other was Robert Kiyosaki, author of a well-known book called ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’) I’d read about men who’d worked on Wall Street, made a ton of money, and then became philanthropists and gave most of it away, but I’d never read about anyone doing it with such sophistication as Soros did. He didn’t just find aid agencies and cut them large checks, he actually looked for creative programs he thought would make concrete differences in people’s lives, or where they didn’t exist, created his own. One thing I’ve noticed (and this is changing more & more) is that many people want to donate money to ‘a good cause’, but figuring out how to achieve the objectives can often be tricky. As an example of what Soros did differently, he’s originally from Hungary and grew up under the Nazi occupation, so when he started working in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, he knew he wanted to work against the oppressive governments there. Instead of trying to organize protests or arm freedom fighters, he did something very clever; he bought all the universities in those countries a large number of photo copiers. He knew that there were people with ideas other than communism, but information dissemination was hard. So he found a seemingly harmless way to begin to open up those societies by promoting the spread of information.
Now, I know in some places Soros is not at all very popular. He made a lot of his money in currency speculation, and has been accused of such things as insider trading and contributing to the East Asian Financial Crisis. I’ve also heard some people here in this town say that much of what he did was just clever insider trading, and that he’s really not as smart as he’s cracked up to be (and by extension, not such a great guy). Honestly, some of these critiques may be fair. I don’t know enough yet to properly evaluate them myself, but some of what I’ve heard seems plausible.
Regardless though, his example inspired me when I was younger, and while I’d feel sad to find that his methods were not ethical, I still draw inspiration from what he did. So I was VERY excited to hear he was coming to the school to speak.
His speech was interesting, he speaks with a very strong accent (I assume it’s a Hungarian accent), and while he isn’t the greatest speaker I’ve ever heard (that honor goes to Bill Clinton, as I talked about in a previous post), he was articulate, passionate about his ideas, and pretty natural all things considered; he knew what he wanted to say & didn’t read from notes. He said a few things I thought were interesting. (If you’re not interested in Econ or Finance, these things might seem obscure so you can skip to the end of the post if desired)
- He feels that most of the problems of poverty and misery in the world are the fault of bad governance. This isn’t surprising coming from him, since his Open Society Foundation heavily promotes democracy and governmental accountability. But I didn’t expect to hear him pin so much on bad pols. I wish I’d been able to read ‘End of Poverty’ by Jeff Sachs, so I could know if Sachs agreed with him or not. I’m not sure I’d go as far as this myself, though bad governments certainly do a lot of harm, and in some places are the worst problem.
- He feels one of the biggest problems with globalization is the asymmetry of labor and capital. One of the ideas behind globalization is that labor and capital can move around freely, and thus more efficiently. This is certainly true for capital, given how interconnected the banking system is now. But it is certainly NOT true for labor. I might be a manufacturer in a third world country, who knows he could make more if I produced and sold in another market. But I may not be able to just move to another country or market at will, for a number of reasons. (Having enough money to afford the move, getting a visa, other governmental issues, language, etc) So while capital is free to move, labor often isn’t. This was a good insight to me.
- He also thinks (speaking about Stiglitz work) that asymmetry of info isn’t as important or relevant in financial markets, since a large part of finance is trying to anticipate the future. (Will the market go up or down?) This was also a good insight that wouldn’t probably have occurred to me.
Even though he didn’t talk for long, and even though he was mostly commenting on Stiglitz’s book, I still felt it was a privilege to go and hear my other great hero from my earlier years speak. (I’d heard Kiyosaki speak before)

Senior

2006-09-24T20:03:00.000-04:00

Ah, here we are, back at it again. The fall semester of my senior year is in full swing now, and after the strange registration dance, which every student goes through in the first week or two of classes, I find myself facing the following courses. (The registration dance, BTW, works like this: you sign up for more classes than you actually plan to take, check them all out in the first week, then drop the ones you decide you don’t like. You also usually try to have to get into one class you aren’t actually registered for, which is always interesting. This is why week one is so busy, even though there’s no real homework, because everyone is trying to jockey for position & figure out where they’re going to end up.)
Chinese – Yup, intermediate Chinese. Have to take it this semester and next to fulfill the language requirement. The section I’m in has an instructor from the summer program in Beijing, and she doesn’t really speak English. Which means, she’s teaching the class immersion-style, Chinese only. Which, at first, terrified me. However, after the first day or two, I actually found myself able to follow most of the class discussion. And I feel that I’m actually learning much more. It helps that our instructor has a very good sense of humor, and doesn’t pile homework on us. I consider the workload very reasonable, so it isn’t too bad. I actually think the class could turn out to be enjoyable.
Lit Hum. – Literature Humanities. Or, more specifically, Masterpieces of Western Literature. This course, in short, has been and will continue to be a blast. It’s a year long course (literature is also a graduating requirement), and in the first semester most of our reading will be the old dead Greek guys; we’ve finished the Iliad, now we’re doing the Odyssey, and other things like Herodotus’ Histories and the Virgil’s Aeneid are upcoming. The thing that makes the course amazing is the fact that I’m taking it with a bunch of my friends; there’s half a dozen people in the class that are good friends of mine. I really wanted a chance to take one class with some friends, and since this one is a discussion class, it’s perfect. Plus, the teacher we have for it is great too.
Money & Banking – This is an Econ elective course on basically the history of … money and banking. And it’s already fascinating. Getting into some of the issues about what money actually is, now that we’re off the gold standard is so interesting. This course shouldn’t be much work, and I’m enjoying it already.
Oil – The name of the class of course isn’t oil, but that’s the topic. Seniors in the Econ department are not required to write a senior thesis (though they can if they want to do the honors program), but they are required to take a senior seminar. Oil and the effects of oil on the macroeconomy is the topic of the senior seminar that I’ve chosen. The class is great so far, we’ve read some outstanding papers on the subject, such as papers prepared for Congress, and our instructor is a great guy originally from Nigeria whose background is in oil. This class is also small, which helps a lot. I should be able to spend a good amount of time working with him individually.
So that’s my semester outline. This year already feels much better than the last one. I know a bunch of people, the place is more familiar, I’m not a total stranger here anymore. Plus, it’s my senior year. May 16th is a date burned into my brain; the end of the journey, the goal line, is now in sight.

Vacation

2006-09-03T17:04:00.000-04:00

I’m back in New York City now, I arrived in town yesterday. Classes start tomorrow, and I’m basically already signed up for everything I’m going to take. (The trick here at this school is to sign up for everything you think you’re going to take, and then drop the extra classes once you’ve made your final choice.)
Had a good vacation, all in all. Got to rest, got to relax, got to see friends, just got to chill out. My time in California, I’ve already talked about. In Seattle, honestly, I didn’t “do” much. It is my hometown after all; many of the things one would do if they were from out of town, I’ve already done previously. Besides, the priority was really just seeing friends & family, which I did have ample time for. A bit part of it all was just the sense of getting to kick back & relax, not having my calendar as jam packed as it tends to be during the school year. I didn’t schedule much while I was in Seattle, other than seeing friends. And the friends I did get to see, it was great. Even though some things have changed, much of it remains the same, and it really was outstanding to get to see people. About the only thing I didn’t get to do was finish ‘Brothers Karamazov’, which was my summer reading project (my own, not for a class). I’m better than halfway through it though, and enjoying it immensely. I think I will be sad when I do finish it.
Two things about my trip are worth mentioning. I got to watch some great cinema while I was there. I’ve been building a list of movies I wanted to see for some time now, and I used the time I had while I was there to work my way through parts of the list. I’ll comment on a few (not all) of the more notable ones I saw.
Casablanca – If you’re going to watch ‘classic’ films, you might as well start with this one, right? Watched it and understood why people like it. Also understood, after watching it, where a lot of ‘classic’ Hollywood lines come from; they come from this movie. (Here’s looking at you kid, could be the start of a beautiful friendship, etc) Honestly, I had a hard time getting into it at first because I didn’t like Humphrey Bogart’s character. But by the time the end of the film rolls around, I realized he really was a pretty decent guy. I also liked how they resolved the movie at the end; after Rick pulls the gun on the inspector, I really wasn’t sure how things would turn out, given that this was classic Hollywood in that era so you knew Rick couldn’t die or get carted off to the concentration camps. All in all, really a great film, well acted, well shot. I can see why so many people like it so well after the fact.
Citizen Kane – So then, you have to watch the OTHER ‘greatest film of all time’, right? And this one, I didn’t care for, though I’m glad I can say I’ve seen it now. Frankly, the story isn’t all that great, though the real-life tie in to Hearst is interesting. (Apparently he offered RKO Studios $800,000 to destroy all copies of the film, and then had Welles blacklisted in Hollywood) From what I understand, this movie is a milestone on a technical level; several things were done with it, cinematically, that hadn’t been done before and heavily influenced all the films after it. But story-wise, it was lacking, although it was certainly well-acted.
Farewell My Concubine – OK, this movie was FANTASTIC. I’d been meaning to watch it for awhile, and wasn’t disappointed. This movie is classic of Chinese cinema, and is well worth the watch for anyone interested in foreign film. Gut-wrenching to watch at times as it follows the main characters through China’s turbulent years from 1910 or so till after the Cultural Revolution and a bit shocking at its portrayal of some things that generally aren’t shown in film here in the West (amputating a child’s fingers), it was extraordinarily moving. Also, I’ve basically fallen in love with Gong Li, who (for those who don’t know) is generally considered to be the finest Chinese actress of her generation; she was basically #1 before Zhang Ziyi, who played the main female character in Memoirs of a Geisha (and interestingly, Gong Li played her rival in that same film). She’s amazing, I’m going to go find a few of her other movies.
Les Miserables – This is one I probably wouldn’t have picked up on my own, but my younger brother Ben recommended it highly. After watching it, I’m not at all sorry that I did. Liam Neeson & Geoffery Rush were set against one another perfectly, they both inhabited those characters. I even liked Uma Thurman in it, who I don’t usually like. Very powerful, very moving, very well acted. Some people I’ve talked to say the play is better, but I certainly had no problems with this adaptation.
Phantom of the Opera – OK, for a long time, I had zero interest in seeing this. I knew it was a very popular musical, and I’d read that many people considered the film poor. Given that it was directed by Joel Schumacher, the same director who brought us such luminaries as Batman & Robin, I really had no interest.
Then my entire family watched it (on separate occasions) and recommended it to me. Especially given that my parents liked it, I figured I’d give it a go.
I’m so glad that I did. I still may go and see it on Broadway, but I think I’ll have a very hard time seeing any other actors in the roles of the Phantom and Christine, those two were perfectly cast. Very, very moving, I can see what people like about it so well.
*** Brief spoiler ahead *** However, I did find out that in the original book that both the movie and the play are based on, the Phantom dies at the end of the story, which I felt made much more sense. The rose at the end of the movie was a great sentimental touch, but it felt out of place. I mean come on, where is the Phantom going to go? *** End spoiler ***
The other notable thing that happened while I was home was golfing. At least sort of.
I’d been trying to think of something that I could do with my brothers Mark & Ben while I was home that would be fun, inexpensive, and a bit outside the realm of what we’d usually do together. None of us golf, but going to a driving range and hitting a bucket of balls seemed like it could be a good time. I decided to press for it and they were amiable, so we went.
And actually had a fantastic time. It really was fun, and we were all of us basically terrible. We did hit some of the balls pretty well, all of us got a couple of shots to the far end of the range (out to 200+ yards) but I’d say half our balls didn’t even make it past 50. We were laughing so hard watching each other shoot we had to stop sometimes. Ben even broke the driver he was using; I watched his ball fly out onto the range followed directly behind by the head of the driver. (They told him in the clubhouse that driver was already cracked) It would be hard to explain exactly why we had so much fun, I can only say that we did. It reminded me a lot of the golfing scene in that old movie Navy Seals with Charlie Sheen, we were purely horsing around, probably horrifying the serious golfers who were there to practice their technique, and we couldn’t have been having more fun.
A special note of thanks goes to my two brothers. Ben let me stay with him most of the time while I was there, and also went out of his way to help with some behind the scenes things in order to make my stay more enjoyable. Mark also let me use his car while I was there, which saved me a ton of time & made some things possible that otherwise might not have been. For Ben’s above and beyond efforts, for Mark’s graciousness, and for both their hospitality, I am grateful.

California and the Getty

2006-08-16T22:55:00.000-04:00

Spent a few days in LA with my sister Jenn, and had an absolutely great time. We had the chance to go and do a couple of different things, but the highlight of the trip (aside from just getting to see & spend time with her) was the trip we took to the Getty Center.
The Getty Center/Getty Museum is one of the best known, if not the best known museum in LA.

It was founded by J. Paul Getty, a wealthy oilman who bought an extraordinary piece of real estate in the hills above LA and set up a trust to fund it. The museum’s ‘mission’ is to expand exposure to the visual arts, so that includes things like photography and sketch work in addition to the usual things like paintings & sculpture.
Having been to both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and to the Louvre in Paris, I wasn’t expecting I would be impressed, but once again, I was surprised. The museum had a very respectable collection of arts and sculpture, thought not very large. (In fairness, most of the sculpture exhibit was offsite that day). And they had some art deco stuff from the French period of Louis the XIV, also known as the Sun King, that reminded me very much of some of the stuff I saw in France.
But the impressive thing about this place was actually the museum itself. It was designed by an architect named Richard Meier, and the place really is a work of art. It’s a number of interconnected buildings built out of this nice whitish stone called travertine. The museum is designed as several smaller buildings around an outdoor courtyard and a number of other open air spaces, like the food court which you see in the picture. So walking around outside the museum and in between the buildings was in many ways as good as seeing the art inside. In addition, there are a couple of rather impressively designed gardens on the grounds, and they’ve done some very cool things with water and with fountains, giving the entire place a manicured yet somehow natural feel.
One of the exhibits that particular struck me was one on Rubens and Brueghel. These two artists who worked in Antwerp actually created paintings together, as a collaborative effort. (Generally what would happen was that one of them would paint the backgrounds & settings, the other would paint the primary figures, then the first guy would come back and touch things up to make sure the figures fit in properly with the backgrounds.) It was fascinating to see, as I had no idea such collaboration even existed.
The weather was beautiful, the time was relaxing, and it was great to see Jenn again for a few days. I’m in Seattle now, and I’ll be here until I return to NYC over Labor Day. I imagine there may be a few noteworthy experiences here too, but given that I’m vacationing, I may just decide not to post again until September …

J. Paul Getty Museum

http://www.getty.edu/museum/

Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot

2006-08-16T22:50:00.000-04:00

Went and did something really fun this evening. (Technically it was last Friday evening, by the time I get around to posting this). A friend from my community group made a list of things she was interested in doing in NYC this summer on the cheap, or fairly cheap, and one of them was this thing called Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.

A lot of people have heard of Shakespeare in the Park, which I believe is done in Central Park and is of course what this thing was taking its name from. This wasn’t anything nearly so grand, but it was still a ton of fun.
It was a free performance of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, performed (as I understand it) by actors from a couple of different venues & production companies; the organizing production group is called the drilling company (linked at the bottom). They took out space in a parking lot at the corner of Ludlow & Broome on the edge of Chinatown. I think there were a total of about a dozen different actors (a few of them played multiple smaller parts), and there were I’m guessing 60 or 70 people attending; those who got there early got the thirty or so chairs brought by the drilling company, and everyone else either brought their own or sat on mats.
I’d never seen this play before, and I decided against reading the Cliff Notes before the show, which I ended up being glad for. I won’t spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the show really was very entertaining; it’s a lighter piece, similar in feel I think to ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.
The great thing about this performance is that even though the dialog was classic Shakespeare, the costume design was a little unorthodox. Orlando, the male protagonist, was dressed like John Travolta from Grease; the Duke and his men were dressed like Prohibition-era gangsters, and Rosalind (the female protagonist who might really in truth be accurately called the ‘main character’) wore a button-up sweater and a poodle skirt. There was also a character dressed like a cheerleader. It reminded me of some ways of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Leonardo DiCaprio, which had the original language in a very unorthodox setting. It sounds strange, but these actors were both very enthusiastic as well as very talented, and they made it work. It helped that it was clear they were having a good time with it as well.
To be honest, if I were still going to be in town (I’m leaving on Thursday to go back to Seattle for the rest of the summer until Labor Day), I’d go see the performance again.
One of the really interesting things was that the audience was very respectful; the only real disturbance we had was the garbage truck across the street being so loud that we couldn’t hear part of the dialog. (But I guess that is a risk you take with a street performance). I was honestly a bit surprised; the crowd was very mixed, you had the entire range from people who looked like they were regular attendees of professional Shakespeare productions to homeless people right off the streets. I felt sure that there would be at least one person who would disrupt things in some way, shout out some silly remark at the actors or something. But it never happened; the entire audience was very respectful of both the performers and each other. In a strange kind of way, as I looked around over the crowd at various times, I’d almost say it was like a bonding experience. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was really into the performance, and I saw people afterwards having conversations with people they would probably never otherwise have talked to. It brought people together in a really neat kind of way.
And it reminded me again how good the Bard really is.

the drilling compaNY
www.drillingcompany.org

Sunday in Queens

2006-07-30T13:46:00.000-04:00

This last weekend I had an opportunity to see something that I’ve honestly not seen before.
This picture is the front door of a church. I know, you wouldn’t think it just to look at it (I sure didn’t). The first thing that I asked the friend that I went with was, ‘Why is there a statue of an elk outside your church?’ Turns out the building used to be an Elks lodge, but now the church owns it. It’s been in my mind for awhile to visit some other churches here in New York, for a couple different reasons, and this one I went to with a friend that I’d taken a summer class with.
I’ve been in many different types of churches, but the atmosphere in this one was not like many I’ve been to. Striking a balance between spontaneity and order when it comes to singing is a difficult thing, but this church did a very good job. The preaching was ok, but the speaker was a visiting pastor, not the church’s regular pastor. Apparently, it is very common here in NYC for the senior pastor of a church to take the summer off.
But the thing that REALLY struck me was the sense of community.This church is in Queens, which is the most ethnically diverse of New York’s five boroughs. Now, from what I’ve seen, usually, churches fall pretty neatly along ethnic lines; you have a white church, a black church, an Asian church, so on and so on. Of course, lots of churches have scatterings of other races, but the only ethnic groups I’ve ever seen mix in large numbers in a single service at the same time are some white and Asian congregations. This church (and the service was fairly large, several hundred easily) had what appeared to be an almost even mix of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. I’m completely serious. And they actually mixed; you could look around the room and see them blended in terms of seating, not sitting in large clusters. (Which, even the white/Asian mixed congregations I’ve seen tend to do, you’ll usually have large sections of Asians and large sections of whites.) Everyone seemed comfortable, everyone seemed happy, everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy being there around the other people.
Then it got really crazy. After the sermon the church had people who I assume were elders or deacons standing up front to talk to and pray with people. And the insane thing was, nobody seemed to discriminate who they went to talk to based on race! I wish I could have taken a photo of this (and if I didn’t feel it would have been somehow disrespectful to do so, I would have), but I seriously saw, at the same time, a white man praying with an Indian woman, a black man praying with an white woman, a Latino woman praying and crying with a black woman, and an Asian man praying with a Latino man. I’ve never, NEVER seen anything like that. It was extraordinary.
Then, after the service, the friend I’d come with (who is an Asian girl) invited me to come out to lunch with a group of friends, and I think the group (which was at least a dozen people and probably more) had again almost equal parts whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos. And everyone enjoyed themselves, and everyone had a good time, and everyone seemed to be enjoying one another’s company. Given that I’ve seen a lot of churches, I’d say in general it takes something unusual to impress me. This (in my own experience) was definitely something unusual.
The church is called New Life Fellowship, and if anyone is ever out in Queens and looking for a church, even after having been there just once, I’d recommend this one.

http://www.newlifefellowship.org/

MoCA

2006-07-22T12:02:00.000-04:00

This summer, I’m doing an internship with the Weatherhead Institute, which is the East Asian studies department here at the college. More specifically, I’m working for a group within the institute called ExEAS, which stands for ‘Expanding East Asian Studies’. The work has been pretty standard so far (data analysis, random tasks, etc), but I wasn’t looking for something terribly challenging, and I’ve met some interesting people there.
On Friday our boss Heidi took us to MoCA, which stands for Museum of the Chinese in America. The museum is a kind of history of the Chinese experience here in America starting back around the mid 1800s. They also had a fairly extensive slideshow about the history of Chinatown here in NYC. Although the characteristics of the neighborhood have changed significantly and are much improved from 150 years ago, the area still serves for many as a kind of gateway for immigration into the country. Men & women from poorer families will come to Chinatown to begin working here, sometimes sending money back home and often eventually moving out to different parts of the country, and into better jobs.
One piece of history in particular that I didn’t know about was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, which severely limited Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese from becoming US citizens. The reasons for its passage were various, but mostly it seems to have stemmed from the same type of knee-jerk racism that has met a number of immigrant groups coming to this country. The Exclusion Act made life & times for the Chinese in this country difficult, and it wasn’t repealed until 1943 during WWII when China and the US were allies.
I want to particularly thank the museum for letting me take pictures of their exhibitions while I was there. The museum actually let us in for a private tour an hour before they normally open since we were from the Institute, but photography is prohibited. When I told the guy at the desk that I wanted pictures for my blog so that I could share it with people back home, he actually went and asked the managers if they’d make an exception for me, which they did as long as I didn’t use the flash. I took a number of really great & interesting shots; this one I felt represented the museum the best. I wouldn’t have been able to take them normally, and I am grateful to the museum for their generosity.

Weatherhead Institute
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/

ExEAS
http://www.exeas.org/

MoCA
http://www.moca-nyc.org/MoCA/content.asp

Weddings in Vermont

2006-07-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

Had an interesting weekend this last week, a friend of mine and I went up to a wedding in Vermont.
The bride (in the picture) is a friend of ours; she and I took Calc III together, and I’m honestly not sure if I would have passed the class without her help. Plus, we had a great time working together. I met Noah, her now husband, a few months later, and he and I also hit it off; I don’t think there are very many couples you could honestly say that you’d be friends with both of them even if they weren’t together.
Michael is a fellow GS student and a mutual friend of the three of us, so he and I had planned to drive up to Vermont (a six hour trip) for the wedding on the 15th. He decided to bring his girlfriend Abby along, who was really cool and I’m glad I had the chance to meet & talk with, but it changed the nature of the trip in a few ways. I of course had to get a hotel by myself, and I did feel a bit like a fifth wheel at times. I think I’m not going to go to weddings by myself anymore.
The wedding itself was great, very short ceremony, and this may be the first time I’ve seen a wedding with more groomsmen than bridesmaids. (11 vs 7) Jenn & Noah have been together for awhile, so even though the wedding was really top notch, they were after short & sweet with the ceremony so that they could get on to the after party. The wedding was held at this great old mansion out in the country, really a nice spot, except that we were miles from an internet connection and even cell phone service was sketchy. Dancing and drinking lasted late into the night, and overall it really was a fun time.
Saturday night is when things started to get interesting. Michael decided he wanted to make a day trip out of the journey back to the city on Sunday, stopping by some state parks for fishing, canoeing, etc. I’m also getting the feeling he wants to spend some time with Abby, and I need to be back earlier, so I have to try and find a ride. Which I do, I find a guy going back to the city on Sunday morning at around 10:30, which should be perfect. Except that he leaves without me. So I have to scramble to find a ride AGAIN.
I find three girls who are going back and are willing to give me a lift, and although they were quite polite to me, I think they might have forgotten I was in the car 15 minutes after we got underway. So, I got to listen to six hours of uncensored ‘girl-talk’. I’ve always been curious what girls talk about among themselves, and now I know. Most of it revolved around their relationships with their past 2 or 3 boyfriends, their mothers, and other people’s relationships. It was a fascinating bit of insight, but after six non-stop hours when we finally got back to New York I felt strongly in need of some type of rough masculine sport like boxing or rugby.
It was a very insightful weekend, and I’m glad that I went, especially for Jenn & Noah’s sake, I think they would have been disappointed had I not come. I learned some very interesting things too, and I’ll bear them in mind for the next wedding I go to.

Fourth of July

2006-07-10T18:18:00.000-04:00

Had a chance to go see fireworks here in NYC for the Fourth of July, and it was a good time.
They do fireworks in a couple of different places in the city, and it’s great because since the city is a port, they can set them off over the water, where it’s safe, and people can see them from multiple boroughs.
(Quick lesson in New York city layout, the city is divided into five major areas called boroughs; they are Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Easiest way to visualize it is to think of Manhattan Island in the center with Staten Island off its south tip, and the other three arranged around it.) So, if they set of fireworks on the Hudson, those fireworks can be seen from Brooklyn and parts of Queens. The fireworks are set up on barges on the water, and everything is controlled electronically. It was a good show, maybe not quite as spectacular as I’d thought they might be, but still very good. One thing to consider is that there are several barges stationed at different places in the city, so everyone can have a chance to see them, and each barge does a complete (and identical) show, which is the equivalent to a city fireworks show you’d see almost anywhere else. So, I suppose really it’s fair to say that NYC puts on 8 or 9 firework shows, instead of a single really extraordinary one. Interestingly, I found out the show is primarily sponsored by Macy’s, the same ones who put on the annual Thanksgiving Day parade.
It would have been cool to have gone and seen the fireworks barge down by the Statue of Liberty, but the place would have been a madhouse and that wasn’t where my friends were going anyways, so maybe next year. We got going a bit late, but we still found a pretty good spot. They’d closed down one of the major freeways by the water, so everyone just filled up and spread out there. We had a good time that evening.
My friends in the picture are, from the left: Ron Steckly (a fellow student and good friend), Will Melendez (another fellow student and DJ), his wife Caroline (not a student, she’ll be doing law school shortly), myself, and Bobby (friend of Will and Caroline, also not a student).

By the way, I think I may have found a way to share more complete sets of photos. Facebook is a site that connects current students and alums from different universities, it's a little bit like Friendster but more snobbish (I guess ...). Anyways, I've set up an album with more of the photos from this outing on my Facebook site (since the uploading app they have there is WAY slicker than blogger) and I think that this link should allow anyone to browse to it. Does it work? Let me know! Is it busted, does it not work? Let me know ...
Cheers,
http://columbia.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031119&l=d9398&id=121067

Picture, Tea and Tolkien

2006-07-01T20:01:00.000-04:00

Here's the one of Tim Keller, the pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian.

Picture, #42

2006-07-01T19:59:00.000-04:00

Finally ... man I don't know what has been up with this thing ... But, at last we get it up here after all.

A note on pictures

2006-06-18T09:36:00.000-04:00

I do have pictures for both of the last two posts, but Blogger is having some issues right now, so I'll come back and upload them as soon as I can. (Cause you can't have a good post without a picture.

Tea and Tolkien with Tim Keller

2006-06-18T09:32:00.000-04:00

I just came back last night from one of the most interesting and creative events I’ve ever seen a church put on. It was stimulating, fascinating, and honestly just a lot of fun.
Tim Keller is the senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian, the church I attend here in New York. (I’m not sure if ‘senior pastor’ is his title or not, but he’s the lead pastor, and the one who does most of the preaching Sunday to Sunday. He’s also the founder of the church.) The church put on an evening for members to sign up for that, as the title suggests, they could join Tim for tea and discuss Tolkien’s works. We found out that Tim is a HUGE fan to Tolkien’s; he preempted the obvious ‘how many times have you read them’ question by saying that honestly since he first picked them up in college he has never stopped reading them. He reads them cyclically, along with all of the other work available on Middle Earth, such as the Silmarillion and the multi-volume encyclopedia of footnotes and unfinished material that Tolkien’s son published.
Hearing an analysis of the work from a seasoned and brilliant reader who is a pastor no less, was just outstanding, and I gained a couple of interesting insights during the evening (in addition to thoroughly enjoying myself)
-) Tim said that the primary influence in terms of Tolkien and CS Lewis, who were friends & contemporaries, and a part of a literary circle at Oxford known as the Inklings, went from Tolkien to Lewis. That is, Tolkien and his material had a far greater influence on Lewis than the other way around. It is worth noting however that while Lewis loved LOTR, praised Tolkien lavishly for it and during his readings, encouraging him to continue writing it, Tolkien basically hated the Narnia books (from a literary standpoint). Tolkien strongly disliked allegory, so the Aslan-as-Jesus character was a bit too much for him; it offended his sensibilities because it was so obvious. (Lewis rebutted this by saying they were children’s stories and the overt symbolism would go over their heads, which is pretty thin argument. My mother read all of the Chronicles to me when I was young, and it was VERY obvious to me who Aslan was.) He also felt that Lewis’ Narnia wasn’t consistently put together, that he borrowed to liberally from too many different mythological traditions. If you look at LOTR, most of the myths he draws from are very old Northern European traditions, things like Beowulf. But with Narnia, which has elves and dragons and fauns and centaurs and almost everything else, Lewis felt it turned into somewhat of a menagerie and became rather silly.
-) I had the chance to ask Tim a question, and I asked him who the character or characters were he most closely identified with. He said he couldn’t really answer that directly, but he did give some interesting commentary on some of the characters and on the races, particularly the dwarves, who he said he often feels like on his poorer days as the dwarves often fall victim to being too much in love with the work of their own hands. But he did say that, commenting on the movies, he’d liked them very much, and although there were some characters not as well done as the book, a few he felt the movie helped him understand even more or better. One of these was Sean Bean playing Boromir, and as soon as he said it I knew what he meant. Bean nailed Boromir’s very nuanced character so precisely that I have a hard time now not picturing his face when I think of the character.
-) But the most interesting insight Tim gave was this: he explained, in a way that no one else ever has been able to, what the ring of power actually is, what it represents. He spent a lot of time discussing & analyzing the themes & symbols in the story, so it was inevitable we should come to the ring. “The ring,” he said “In reality, is an idol magnifier. It draws out and amplifies the idolatrous desires in each character’s heart. That’s why Sam sees himself as the ultimate gardener, and Gollum dreams of eating fresh fish every day, and Galadriel would become dark and terrible in her beauty.” But ultimately the ring corrupts both the desire itself as well as the person wielding it. It is the tool that allows for the actualization of that very dangerous wish, to have what it is one most wants above and beyond all laws or limits. Above what is legal, beyond was it moral, outside the scope of what is good and right and holy. I’ve never heard such a good answer to the question of what the ring actually symbolizes.
-) One other thing that’s very interesting, and this speaks to both the power of the work and to the subtle Christian themes that are woven into the fabric of the tale through and through. Tim said he started reading them for the first time in college, when he was still a young Christian. At that time, he said, he was still very immature, still wrestling with a lot of sin and foolishness, but he said that whenever he would read Tolkien, he came away from it with a desire “to be holy”. The books inspired him to try and do better, to be a nobler, better man, that they stirred his heart and gave him the courage to believe, and to try again. I was glad to hear him say this; I know that there are a couple of works that when I read them, I feel much the same way.
One of the things that made this event so extraordinary is that Tim is a well-known pastor of a large urban church. As such, he is responsible for the preaching, and for leading the church, but due to practicality and logistics, he is not able to spend much time with his congregation in a more direct, personal way. I don’t fault him for this at all, I understand there is only so much of any one man to go around. However, I do think there is a danger in pastors becoming so popular that they remove themselves entirely from their congregations; that they never do more informal events where they take time to greet people, shake hands, chat, etc. This event was the perfect counterbalance. I was deeply struck by the level of Tim’s service to his people. I arrived at the church offices a few minutes early, and as I watched, it was Tim himself who made the tea, set out the cookie trays, got everything ready for the people coming, really served them. He didn’t do the event as a ‘preaching lite’, didn’t wait in the background for everyone else to do the work, show up and give his talk, and then disappear afterwards. He was involved in the whole thing with his own hands, start to finish, and he stayed for a while afterwards just to shake hands, meet people, chat with them, really interact. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and as I said, it was I felt the perfect balance against the normal duties of his job. All in all, a great evening.

#42

2006-06-17T20:44:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I had another opportunity to hear someone speak that I’ve been curious to hear for a long time: Former President Clinton. And I must say, I was very, very impressed.
Mr. Clinton has his offices just up the street in Harlem, and came to the school to speak during a large gathering promoting public service. Hillary was also here, speaking on a different day, and so was Mayor Bloomberg, but I didn’t get a chance to hear either of them speak.
Bill Clinton is probably the most naturally gifted speaker I’ve ever heard. He strikes the perfect balance between many different aspects of public speaking that are, admittedly, hard to balance. He sounds very smart when he speaks, that he is cultured and knowledgeable about relevant issues, but he never sounds condescending. He’s able to be immediate, to connect with his audience and use language that doesn’t sound snobbish, but he doesn’t do ‘folksy’, the way Bush does. He tells jokes, but he doesn’t deviate too far off topic. And perhaps most impressively of all, he maintains excellent eye contact with his audience. You feel as if you are in a room with him and only a few others, and that you have his full attention. He very rarely looks down at notes, which gives the strong impression that he’s speaking naturally, that he isn’t just reading a prepared speech. I’d always sensed that this would make a huge difference in public speaking, and does it ever.
I came away very impressed by him, and I also realized I think that I have judged him too harshly. People seem (to me) to fall into two camps related to his affair with Lewinsky: those who say it didn’t matter at all, and those who feel it was the only thing that mattered about his presidency. Neither of these are accurate. I myself tended to fall on the later end of the spectrum, and I still do feel a leader is called to set an example, and he set a very poor one in many ways related to that. But he did strike me as someone who does care deeply about this country, about the world, and still very much wants to do some good. I’ve also been inclined not to give credit where it is due related to some of his good policy decisions while in office. So all in all, it truly was a great learning experience.

Dark Side of the Moon

2006-06-17T20:32:00.000-04:00

Has everyone out there listened to this album? I mean … seriously!
They say that college is a time to experiment, try new things, blah blah blah, and one thing that students often branch out on is music. I’m in a bit of a different spot as I’m older and have a better feel for my musical tastes, but I still like listening to new things. I don’t remember exactly what got me thinking about it, but I kept hearing about how great Pink Floyd was, and how DSOTM was their definitive album. So, I had a friend hook me up with it, and I gave it a listen this last week.
And it is amazing! I can see now what everyone likes about it so well, it’s just a great, great album. The sounds are very unique, the pacing of the album is fantastic, in that it isn’t in a hurry to get somewhere, and the themes and the way that they’re relayed are just very, very creative.
It’s impressive that more than 30 years after the album was first released that it still continues to be so popular. For anyone who hasn’t heard it yet, I highly, HIGHLY recommend it.

Game Theory

2006-06-17T20:29:00.000-04:00

I’m taking two classes this fall, Econometrics, and Game Theory. Econometrics is basically applied statistics with respect to economic problems; it’s mostly very boring and our professor is not the best lecturer I’ve ever had. Frankly, I’ll be pleased once the course is over.
Game Theory though has proved a bit more interesting. One of the cool things that we learned about is what a Nash Equilibrium is, named after John Forbes Nash, the guy from Ron Howard’s ‘A Beautiful Mind’. And interestingly (but not surprisingly) the movie portrayed the idea incorrectly.
Here’s the basic premise. Suppose you’re playing a two player game. A Nash Equilibrium (NE) is a strategy for each player, and an outcome of that strategy, such that neither player could play a different strategy and do better, as long as his opponent played the same strategy. It would be a bit easier to explain on paper, but in simple terms all it says is that a game will calm down and everyone will be ‘content’, more or less, once all the individual opportunities for advancement have disappeared.
Simple enough, right? It’s actually a very powerful concept. The distressing thing is that the example the movie used is not a NE. The prettiest girl comes into the bar. She’ll refuse everyone if they approach her at once, and then none of the guys can get another girl, because nobody wants to be chosen second. So, they all have to ignore the pretty girl, so that they can all get a girl. However, the prettiest girl is still available, and under the premise that everyone would like to dance with her, somebody will, in effect, “cheat” and go ask her to dance. As long as she doesn’t have a partner, all the other guys are basically tempted to try and ‘do better’ by asking her.
It would have been easy to come up with a better example, and it’s irritating that Hollywood once again can’t seem to get certain technical details correct. But at least my class is interesting …

Central Park

2006-06-17T20:28:00.000-04:00

I had the opportunity to go down to Central Park for the first time since being here a few weeks ago for a church picnic. It was a really good time, the park itself is quite beautiful. It’s very interesting because once you’re in the park, everything around you is lush and green, trees and rolling hills. The only thing to remind you that you’re not in fact in the countryside are the skyscrapers that can still be seen above the tops of the trees.
It was a great afternoon, and I got to meet some good people, but the one downside was somehow, I forgot my camera. Which really sucks, because it was a beautiful day and would have made for some great pictures. This one was taken by someone else there; it’s kind of a fun action shot, but it’s not as good as some of the others I could have taken with my own camera. The next time I’m down there, I’ll make an effort to remember to bring it.

Internship

2006-06-17T20:24:00.000-04:00

Started my internship with the Weatherhead Institute a few weeks ago, and so far it’s been pretty good. The Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) is the East Asian studies department here at Columbia. Much of the institute’s work is research at the graduate level, but they’re trying to promote awareness and cross-cultural learning on a number of different levels. Part of the reason I was recruited is to help serve as a liaison to my school, General Studies, and to help promote their offerings at the undergraduate level.
( A quick aside, Columbia University has four distinct undergraduate ‘schools’ under its umbrella, along with a number of graduate schools. The four are Columbia College, Barnard, the girls college which was started back with CC only accepted males, SEAS, which is the school of engineering, and GS, which is the school for ‘non-traditional’ or returning students. )
Anyways, the particular part of WEAI that I’m a part of is called ExEAS, for Expanding East Asian Studies. They put together these great course curriculums for use in other courses to teach people about different aspects of Asian cultures. So far I’ve been helping compile some usage reports from their website on which modules are being used the most.
Originally I thought I had a summer internship with Merrill Lynch lined up, but at the last minute it fell through. This one presented itself fairly unexpectedly, but it’s been very convenient, being located right here on campus, and it pays a little bit of money, which is quite helpful. It should also be a good reference when I’m interested in traveling to China to do business. Given a couple years of college language and the experience here, should be good.

I’ve included the main WEAI website, as well as the one for ExEAS. Go take a look at the undergraduate interns page on either one …
www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/
www.exeas.org/

362 days

2006-05-18T00:33:00.000-04:00

That’s all there is left folks, 362 days until Commencement of the 253rd graduating class of Columbia University, of which I will be a part. This last Tuesday was graduation for the class of 2006, and watching the campus transform for the event was … a little eerie, I gotta tell you. It was the first time since being here that it really hit me that I’ll be graduating next year. It was an inspiring feeling.
Sen. John McCain was invited as the primary commencement guest speaker for Columbia College; I didn’t have a chance to go to the speech myself (security on campus gets pretty tight, for understandable reasons, an average graduation includes as many as 30,000 guests) but both the text of the speech and the webcast for it are available on Columbia’s website (which I’ve linked at the bottom). I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, one of the really great things about this school is the number of “famous people”, to use the term loosely, who come through here to speak. Having heard a lot about McCain and having respected the things I’d heard, I wanted to hear him speak, and the webcast I found quite suitable in lieu of going in person. (This picture is from his regular work on Capitol Hill, as I couldn't find any good ones taken at the ceremony. This picture is ALSO reflective of the way I feel about school here; a good, worthwhile, and necessary thing to do, but still makes you grimace from time to time.)
The first half of the speech I found a little boring, and a little predictable, but he ended on a strong note. I don’t like the fact that formal speeches are read from notes, which means the speaker spends most of their time looking down instead of at the audience. Come on guys, we know the speech is prepared, but lie to us a little and at least pretend like it is spontaneous. He talked a bit about his life, his role in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, why disagreement over the war was a good and even necessary thing, and finished with a solid reminder that he himself believed (as a supporter of the war) that it was about ideals, about right vs. wrong, freedom vs. tyranny, extremism vs. tolerance, and exhorted people to remember that even those countrymen with whom they bitterly disagreed were not their enemies, but their fellow citizens.
McCain carries a bit less gravitas than I thought he might, and he is certainly showing his age a bit. However, he still clearly possesses an enormous amount of energy and a focused mind. I wasn’t blown away or overawed of him, as I thought perhaps I might be, but I still regard the man with high respect.
The choice to have him come speak was an interesting one, given what a liberal school Columbia is (and it is very liberal, believe me). From what I understand, Barack Obama and Former President Clinton were invited first, and McCain after they both declined. I also found out that McCain has seven children (Seven! Seriously, where does one find the time to have a career in public service and have seven children!?), and that one of his daughters is a student here at Columbia. I’ve also heard that she has been harassed and heckled on campus because of her father’s stance on the war (I’ve never met her and have no idea what her own political views are), which is very unfortunate. One of the strange things about some liberals is for all their championing of tolerance, how in practice what seems to be the rule is tolerance for anything except a conservative view.
One other note of interest, for any of those who watch the webcast, you will see from time to time these orange & white umbrellas poking up into view of the camera. A fairly large contingent of (I would imagine) liberal students decided they wanted to protest his being chosen as a speaker. They organized under the slogan ‘John McCain does not speak for me’, and decided to wear orange buttons with this slogan, and also to carry the orange umbrellas. However, I was quite impressed that as far as I can tell, they were perfectly respectful of the senator as a person, and were polite and well-mannered during his speech. The only part that got significant reaction was when he stated publicly (as he has before) that he supported the war, which drew equal parts cheers and booing; he smiled and took it all in stride, I’m sure he knew it would get some kind of reaction. But the protesting students were orderly, respectful, and acted in every manner I feel is fitting for a student of this college. I’ve got no problem with people making a statement in a respectful way, and given some of the rancor I’ve seen here on campus, was pleased this was not the case here.

Link to speech:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/06/05/mccain.html

Finals

2006-05-13T11:46:00.000-04:00

Ahh … finals are over at last.
Actually, they’ve been over since Tuesday, I got out of my statistics final (which was my last one) at about 9:30 pm Tues night. I don’t even remember what happened to Wednesday, I think I slept most of the day. I spent Thursday getting my head screwed back on straight, and didn’t start planning what I was going to do over my break until Friday. My finals period was particularly grueling, for a few reasons. First of all, I had six finals; none of my other friends had so many. (I’m only taking 5 classes this semester, but Chinese has a written and an oral final) The way finals around here work, the last day of classes is on a Monday, then students have the rest of the week, called the Reading week, to study & prepare for finals, which start the following week, and students have tests throughout. From what I understand, it is against the rules to schedule finals during the reading week. However, someone forgot to tell this to the Chinese dept; both my Chinese finals fell on Weds of the reading week. So my prep time got cut in half. Plus, my other four finals were all on either Mon or Tues of finals week. Good side, it means I was done early. Bad side, very intense, and less time to prepare.
However, as it says in Ezra & Nehemiah, “the gracious hand of our God was with us”. In spite of feeling under prepared, and feeling that at least one test went very poorly, things have turned out well. I will review each class below.
Chinese: As I mentioned, I had far less time to study than I wanted to, and I could have made an issue about their scheduling had I chosen to. However, my instructor this semester, Prof. Li Jinghua, had been very gracious to me on a number of occasions. One of the big things she did was instead of making me attend the mandatory drill sections, which are an hour per week each and in my opinion, not a good use of time, she agreed to let me spend 15 minutes per week one on one with her TA. This is just one of many such examples. So, I went ahead and took both the exams on Weds; the written one went fairly well. I was actually taking it early due to a scheduling conflict with another exam, so Prof. Li agreed to meet me early, 7 AM in her office, and let me take the exam there. It says something about the level of trust/confidence she had in me that she actually stepped out of the office a few times, leaving me there taking the test alone. The oral final actually went much better than I thought it would, and afterwards one of the other instructors complimented me in particular on my tones & pronunciation. Even though my tests during the semester were not my finest work, I pushed hard at the end, and I believe the instructors saw that and made note. I expected to receive a B+ for the course, so I was surprised and extremely pleased with the generous grade they actually gave me. Especially since Chinese is a 5.0 credit course (most courses are 3.0), this helps my GPA significantly.
Final Chinese Grade: A-
MicroEconomics: There were two different instructors available for Micro this semester, Prof. Miyagawa, and Prof. Susan Elmes. Miyagawa is known for being less difficult in terms of material, but I’ve heard that his English is not quite smooth enough that there aren’t some difficulties in understanding him sometimes. (I do not know him myself nor have I heard him speak, this is based on reviews of him I read, and from things I heard from others.) Prof. Elmes, on the other hand, has no such language difficulties, but is known for being VERY tough in terms of the course material. In particular, she’s famous for giving out very LONG and COMPLICATED problem sets, which I found to my dismay was not an exaggeration. So I had the choice between two … seemingly less than optimal choices. I chose to take it with Elmes, since most of my friends were taking it with her as well. I was never quite as on top of the material as I would have liked to have been. Some of this is due to a bit of laziness on my part, and the fact that there was much in the course I didn’t find very interesting. I also had other time demands, and think the homework was pointlessly long, I don’t think it made for good learning. Though I did come away from the class with one major insight, and that is that price in the long run is not driven by demand; it is driven by COSTS. Demand only drives quantity traded/sold in a given market. This was very interesting to me. The final went about like I expected, perhaps slightly less well, I came out of it knowing I’d fumbled things a bit. A B+ was what I was both hoping for and expecting, so I feel that given my efforts and work throughout the course, it was a perfectly fair and reasonable grade.
Final Micro Grade: B+
Statistics: Stats was … strange. This is actually the second time I’ve taken stats, having taken it before at BCC, where I got an A in it. (I had to take it again here because many of the micro courses require Stats w/ Calculus as a prereq, and the stats I’d taken before did not include Calc) However, I didn’t really understand then much of what I was doing. I was able to do the calculations because I’m fairly good at math, but I had no idea where most of it came from and what much of it meant. Sadly, I’m afraid to say the same thing is somewhat true here. I’ve come to the conclusion that Stats is just a difficult course to teach. Conceptually, it often doesn’t make much sense, and requires a specific way of thinking.
Prof. Hernandez was a really good guy, and both the tests he designed were very fair. However, I didn’t always get a lot out of his lectures, I generally got more out of going to his office hours and talking with him there. He was also a bit disorganized near the end of the course; he promised he’d post up guidelines and practice exams, which were then late or never showed up. This made studying for the final a bit tougher, and there was one entire question I missed because I didn’t find out until 3 hours before the exam that it would be on there. (It was a fairly complicated derivative-type proof). However, I had perfect homework and a perfect midterm going into the final, which I thought went much worse than it actually did. I fumbled it somewhat, though if I were to discount the question I missed entirely due to not knowing it would be there, then I didn’t fumble so badly. The final grade hasn’t been posted to the transcript yet, but I know what my score from the final was, so even without any curve, an A- is certain. I would have liked an A, but in fairness both exams could have been much harder, so I am still satisfied with a slightly lower grade.
Final Stats Grade: A- (anticipated)
Music Hum: This was a sincerely enjoyable course, from start to finish. I was recommended this professor by a friend (thanks again Sagit), and I wasn’t disappointed. Exams & assignments were easy, Prof. Josh Walden was quite easygoing and made the class fun, and we got to listen to some GREAT music. (Even though I deplore the man’s politics, I think I’ve fallen in love with Wagner’s music) One of the real highlights was that when we got to the course section on jazz, rather than lecturing about it, he got a live jazz quartet (piano, upright bass, sax, and drums) to come and play for us, which was absolutely OUTSTANDING; probably the single best lecture I had all year. I got A’s on every paper/assignment, and we had a very good idea what would be on the final, so it was an easy coast to the finish. This was the only final (finals are normally 3 hours) that I really smashed; I walked out after only 70 minutes, and knew that I had aced it. This was the one grade I was certain of.
Final Music Hum. Grade: A
Frontiers of Science: FOS is an interesting course; or perhaps rather I should say, it is a great idea but not yet a very good course. Basically, it is a survey course of a couple of different disciplines (earth sciences, biology, quantum physics) and where the most current research is going on. The tested content itself though is more about scientific habits, or the scientific method. As far as the work went, the course was very easy. However, the main lectures were often quite distracting because it is a huge course (500 some students), all undergrads, and all VERY immature. Sometimes the talking was so bad I couldn’t get much out of the lectures. Science, I’ve also realized, is just very hard to teach; people either tend to be turned on to it, or they aren’t. This is unfortunate, because like statistics, it is becoming more and more important to our world. In ancient China, civil servants and rules were required to pass certain examinations in order to qualify for service in government. Usually these exams were in writing, classics, military tactics, ect, but there’s no reason the same type of thinking couldn’t be adopted today for our government. Entrance exams could be designed for things like sciences, stats, math, language, and others in order to insure lawmakers are knowledgeable in important subjects. But I digress.
I didn’t learn a whole lot from this course, but the work was easy, and it knocks off the last science requirement for my curriculum. The lecturers were rotating, depending on the topic, but we did have a regular section leader who evaluated our homework, and our final. I would like to say a special thank you to Dr. Michelle Buxton, my leader, who really did bend over backwards to help the kids from my section learn and do well. I didn’t require much help myself, since many of the basics I’d covered before, but I was struck by her dedication and passion for her subject, and I hope she continues on as an instructor. Her students will be fortunate to have her. Grades haven’t been released quite yet, and my final wasn’t perfect, but since I anticipate a curve and my coursework was very good, an A is quite possible, and an A- is fine too.
Final FOS Grade: A or A- (anticipated)
So that was my semester, and now it is over. I did better than I'd hoped, and better than I thought I'd do; I expected A's in FOS, Stats, and Music Hum, and B's in Micro and Chinese, so the fact that I got an A in Chinese will really give a good boost to my GPA. I'm quite pleased that I exceeded my own expectations. This semester had it's own challenges, but I'm glad that I was able to turn in a superior performance to last semester, especially given that I was taking an extra course.
The REALLY strange thing is to see all the preparations for this year’s commencement, and realize that in 367 days, I will be a part of that commencement. It will really feel downhill once I finish my classes this summer, I’ll be taking Econometrics and Game Theory. Once they’re behind me, it’s two semesters left and then I’m done. I have another week before summer classes start, so if I do anything memorable in that time, I’ll post it up. I may not do any more updates until my summer classes are over, since they are intensives, it’s basically a semester’s worth of instruction in 6 weeks. And these two subjects are not known for being easy. So I may not have much time. But, they will be over by June 30, and the rest of my summer should be more relaxed before classes start again in the fall.
A final note about the picture. I’ve told many of my friends that Columbia has a very ‘old world’ or ‘classic East Coast’ kind of feel to it; this is a picture of a very standard classroom. Notice two things about it: the fairly uncomfortable wooden seats (which for some reason are actually bolted to the floor), and more importantly, the chalkboards. Yes, that’s right, chalkboards. Not whiteboards. I have no idea why they still use chalk here; every professor I’ve ever had in every class here always ends up covered & smeared with chalk dust at the end of every lecture, it’s a horrible mess, whiteboards are far superior and the only reason I can possibly think of why they have not been replaced is that the school wants to preserve some kind of ‘classic higher learning’ motif. Every institution has its quirks I suppose, I’m just glad I’m not a lecturer here …

The Lost Entries

2006-04-22T23:07:00.000-04:00

Hurrah, at long last! I finally have the pictures from my spring break a few weeks back (actually several weeks back, now that I look at it), and here are the posts that go with them. Bear in mind that I actually wrote these posts back at that time, and was just waiting on the pictures. So if the timing seems a bit off in the posts, that's why.
This is a picture of a sarcophagus from the Met that I was really blown away by. I couldn't find a tag for it, so I'm not sure where it came from or who was supposed to be in it, but it looks pretty impressive, doesn't it? I was very impressed ...

Barnard Talk

2006-04-22T23:03:00.000-04:00

So classes are over for the break tonight, and this is the first evening looking forward to a week without school. It seemed appropriate that I begin the week with something VERY different, so I went tonight to hear Professor Jennifer Flynn Boylan speak at Barnard College, which for those who might not know is the college across the street from Columbia. Barnard was originally started by a President of Columbia, because up until the 80’s, Columbia didn’t admit women. Incensed that he couldn’t convince the board of regents to admit women, in a fit of pique he went across the street and started a school for girls. (Strangely, Columbia does of course now admit women, but Barnard does not admit men. I have at times found it very strange that such an uproar is raised over all-male institutions like West Point, yet places like Barnard still exist. This is especially strange to me given that schools like West Point come under fire from the angle of ‘equality’, or ‘equity & fairness’. I think one has to wonder at what point what’s fit for the goose is also fit for the gander …)
At any rate, Prof. Boylan is an English instructor at Colby College in Maine. (I was going to include a link to her site, but I can’t seem to find it right now). She was on campus to do a reading from her book “She’s Not There”, in which she talks about her journey from being a man to becoming a woman. And yes, I mean that literally; she was born a man, and at 43 had surgery to become a woman.
Honestly, it was a fascinating evening, from many different angles. I found her to be funny, very articulate, thoughtful, and she raised some very interesting questions. During & after the book reading, much of the discussion focused on issues related to transgendered persons, which is an umbrella term that could loosely (yet politely) be used to describe persons from cross dressers to those who have had sexual reassignment surgery like Ms. Boylan.
One of the reasons I went to the talk was to gain some perspectives that would be very different from ones I had encountered before. I really appreciated her wit and humor, because she touched on this very thing with a really funny anecdote where she said (and this is going to be a paraphrase quotation), “People have a hard time approaching, talking about, or even thinking about transgendered persons. I mean they’re almost like aliens. People’s first three questions usually seem to be, ‘Why are they here, what do they want, and do they mean us any harm?’” She really hit the nail on the head; everyone laughed good-naturedly, but what she said was so true.
I sent her an email afterwards and thanked her for coming, which she replied to both quickly and graciously. It would take far too long to get into here all the things it gave me to think about, but it was a very illuminating experience, and I appreciated her willingness to share a bit of her life with us that evening.

The Met

2006-04-22T23:00:00.000-04:00

Today is/was Tuesday, and my buddy Levon and I went down to the Met, which is short for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s one of the best known Museums here in NYC, along with the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art (which I’ve also been to and decided I didn’t care for very much). The trip was particularly enhanced by the fact that admission is free for Columbia students. Tough to come up with a good excuse not to take advantage of that.
Now, I’ve been to the Louvre in France last summer, and was absolutely blown away. I didn’t think any museum after that one had the ability to impress me … but I must admit, this one did. It’s also quite large, larger than I thought it would be, and had a great collection of all kinds of stuff from many different periods in history. Including a very respectable Greek sculpture garden, which to me might almost represent the highest form of ‘classical art’, if I could call it that. The realism one finds in those statues, the way they look as if they could walk right off the pedestals, is extraordinary. I was deeply moved when I saw them at the Louvre, and was moved to see similar works here. They also have a very nice Asian wing, with art & artifacts from China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
This particular piece caught my eye, as I've never seen a sculpture set out in front of such a lush painting like this with such great effect. I'm not sure if the pieces are actually tied together historically or artistically, but if not the people in the museum did a very good job laying things out.
All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile trip. I highly recommend it if you’re in New York and museums are your thing. You won’t be disappointed.

Grey Lady

2006-04-22T22:54:00.000-04:00

On Thursday, Levon and I went to the Statue. You know, THE statue.It worked out a little differently than I’d thought it would. To go up inside the statue (which I very much wanted to do) you need a time pass. The time passes are free, and you can get them with your ticket. Here’s the thing though, they only have so many of them, and they’re given out on a first come, first served basis. So generally, if you want a time pass, you have to reserve your tickets in advance, because they don’t often have extras if you’re buying your tickets onsite.
Weds night, I call Levon & suggest we go to the statue on Friday, which means we can buy the tickets online and reserve our time passes early. He says yeah fine, let’s do that. However, Thursday he calls me up and asks if we can go today, because something has come up for him. Being the good friend that I am, and since I was planning to do homework and could switch the days easily, I said yes. However … what that meant was, no time pass. Now, I’m sure I’ll be back there again, but I did miss having the chance to go up.The day was windy & cold, and we had to wait for almost 1.5 hours from the time we go the tickets till we got on the ferry to go out to Liberty Island. And we had to pass through a security checkpoint that was like the ones at the airport, but much less efficient. And the guards didn’t have a good handle on what they were doing. (I asked the guard ahead of time, do you want me to take off my belt and/or my shoes. He waves me forward. I walk through the detector, which beeps, and get yelled at for not having taken off my belt.) But, guards & weather aside, we got out there ok.
And it was impressive, I must admit. The view of the city from the island is really cool too. It’s one thing to see her in pictures, but quite another to see her in person. Levon complained that she wasn’t as big as he’d imagined or been hoping, but I’d say she was about the size I would have imagined. (Although I have always thought her face doesn’t look very feminine, and I thought that again when seeing her there in person) The most deeply moving experience I’ve ever had at a national monument was at the Lincoln Memorial in DC when I was there some years ago, and I don’t think anything could top that for me; that one was almost like a religious experience. This wasn’t overwhelming, but being there and thinking about what she has meant & what she means today, was very cool. So it was a good spring break week. Got to catch up on work, chill out a bit, and have some good adventures. Other than the food poisoning bit at the end, couldn’t really ask for much more. (Although Levon and I have decided that next year we’re going to go somewhere and do something crazy during the spring break of our senior year. That’s something else I’ll be looking forward to …)

True Patriotism

2006-04-22T22:50:00.000-04:00

It would have been impossible for me not to put this picture up. This was taken inside a shop on Liberty Island; Levon is clearly having fun goofing around. Who says that foreign nationals can't be patriotic?

Trading

2006-04-21T18:57:00.000-04:00

Two years ago, my economics professor encouraged me to apply to some of the larger schools, and took me on a trip to see NYC where I first had the chance to visit Columbia. He has continued to do the NYC trip each year, and this year he asked me to come meet his group of students and talk to them a bit about my time here in NYC. It was a great day, we met up on the top of Rockafeller Center, where you really can see almost the entire city.
Then as an additional favor, Phil got me on the list to be able to go in and see the trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYME) from the gallery. The Merc Ex is much like the stock exchange, but instead of trading shares of ownership in a company, the NYME trades in commodities like oil or precious metals. Being able to see the trading floor was crazy, it was like some type of crazy bazaar, buyers and sellers shouting, getting in each other's faces, throwing order tickets ... Just nuts.
Unfortunately they didn't let us take pictures while we were inside (for security reasons); this shot is of Two World Financial Center, to which the NYME is connected. It's also an impressive building, many of the large financial houses maintain offices there. I'm not sure that I'd want to be a trader, but it was a cool experience and I'm grateful to Phil for getting me on the list. I'd also like to thank Warren Hochbaum (a friend of Phil's who works for the state banking department) for his help with getting in, I understand he had a lot to do with it as well.

Trinity

2006-04-21T18:41:00.000-04:00

This is a picture of Trinity Church at the intersection of Wall Street & Broadway. You can't see the church itself much at all (it's hiding behind the trees on the right), but it was a beautiful day today when I was there and I felt I had to get a shot, which turned out even better than I'd hoped. The cemetary you see here is in the churchyard on the northern side of the building; some of the gravestones go back to the 1600's and the Dutch settlers who first settled Manhattan Island. (New York's original name was actually New Amsterdam.)
It is somehow interesting to me that this famous church has remained here while the temples of capitalism grew up around it. The churchyard is entirely surrounded by financial institutions on every side, in the heart of the bustle of the city. And yet somehow, there remains a peace and tranquility to it once one steps inside the gates.
A few other fun facts about the church: The church that is here now is actually the third 'Trinity Church'. The first one burned down in a fire just before the start of the Revolutionary War; the blaze spread from another nearby building and wasn't contained quickly enough because all the firefighters had followed George Washington to fight the war just days prior. The second church was torn down after being weakened by heavy snows during the winters of 1838-1839. Columbia University, which was originally called King's College, held its first classes here before moving to the campus in Morningside Heights where it is now. Alexander Hamilton, who dropped out of Columbia to 'go do more important things, like help run the country', is buried here. And at the time the church was chatered by the King of England, the official rent was one peppercorn per annum, payable to the English crown. When Queen Elizabeth II visited the church in 1976, she was paid an honorary 'back rent' of 279 peppercorns.

Street Fair

2006-04-16T19:01:00.000-04:00

Street fairs are kind of a cool thing. They seem to pop up mysteriously a couple of times each semester like the caravans of the Silk Road, and they take over the street for several blocks when they appear. They’re really quite fun, and you can find some good (if overpriced) food as well as all kinds of other interesting stuff. This one was being held yesterday, and it was fun to go and wander through.
A bunch of new material today, use the sidebard to get to it all, as it doesn’t all fit on the first page. The last of the new posts from today is entitled ‘Ravi”. I didn’t mean to let such a glut build up, but I’ve just been busy. There have been more than a few noteable events, and I’ve been glad to have pictures to put up with them. One other thing, my posts from spring break are written, but I don’t have the pictures yet, since I took them with Levon’s camera. He keeps telling me he’ll get to them and then putting me off. Hopefully in the next week I’ll get them, and I can put the posts up.

State of the Planet

2006-04-16T17:45:00.000-04:00

Two things happened this week (or actually last week, by the time I’ve gotten around to writing about it) that deserve mention.
I wholeheartedly enjoy skipping classes from time to time, especially if I have a good reason. Professors often seem to forget that we are the ones paying them, and that if there comes a day that we have something better to do with our time than be in class, that is our prerogative. Attendance policies that are built into course grades are two things: tyranny and cowardice. Tyranny, because nowhere else would you find a class system that you sign up for, pay money for, and are then charged fees if you don’t show up for class. And cowardice, because good classes don’t need them. I’ve never taken a math class that had one, because with math, unless you already know the material, if you don’t show up to class, you’ll fail. It’s as simple as that. So they don’t need something as artificially punitive as grade docking to see that students show up. The only classes I’ve ever had that require them are ones like humanities and languages, and frankly I think in many cases they are nothing but smokescreens that let instructors pressure students to attend in order to prop up their own somewhat shaky egos and feel better about themselves, because they actually aren’t very good teachers and wouldn’t be able to get students to come any other way. Utter nonsense …Anyways, back to SotP. SotP was a two day conference held by the Earth Institute here at Columbia, which is headed by Prof. Jeff Sachs, who is pictured below. I won’t go into all his accomplishments, but I’d known about him before coming here and have found him even more impressive in person than I’d hoped. Briefly, he is an economist by training who worked with some of the very difficult transitional issues in the eastern European nations after the fall of communism, and now focuses mostly on Africa. He is a brave, modest, and brilliant man, an excellent communicator and speaker, and someone who cares deeply about what he does. I respect him greatly. This conference was organized by him primarily, and invited scholars & leaders from around the world to address a number of very important topics that affect us all, such as global warming & sustainable economic development. (IE, econ. development that won’t destroy our planet in the long run) The topics covered would be too numerous to address here, as would be the impressive list of speakers and the things I learned. (Among them that the issue with fossil fuels isn’t availability, there is still plenty of oil around, but pollution, if we don’t change something soon the global warming will have serious consequences. Also that ‘socially responsible investing’ is going from being a niche market to something that brings in serious dollars for companies like Goldman Sachs) Long story short, this was a great learning opportunity, and on these two days a far better use of my time than being in class.
I should say too, in order to be fair, that my instructors were all very gracious when I told them (not asked, told) that I would not be in class those two days. I still think attendance policies are head-hammeringly stupid, but even a bad policy can be applied with decency, and all my instructors did so with me. This was a great event, and I’m glad I had the chance to go and learn.
I just saw that much of the content from the lecture series is available online. Anyone interested can go check it out at www.stateoftheplanet.org

Jeff Sachs

2006-04-16T17:43:00.000-04:00

Professor Sachs really is an extraordinary man (he's the one on the left with the red tie) Anyone who is interested in developmental economics, I highly suggest looking up or reading some of his stuff.

Peter Singer

2006-04-16T17:42:00.000-04:00

One speaker deserves special note. That speaker is Peter Singer, the Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton.
Mr. Singer is primarily a philosopher. I was previously familiar with Mr. Singer’s work from my days at BCC where I read an essay of his taken from his well known book that I believe is called “Animal Rights”. In this essay, the main thrust of his argument was that all people everywhere in the world are morally compelled to become vegans. I’m not going to go into all the things I found wrong with his arguments, except to say that I came away from the article feeling that the man was a stone’s throw away from utter lunacy, and was shocked that someone would have printed his work.
When I found out that he was speaking at this conference, I was very curious to hear him, and I must say that I was not at all disappointed. He was thoughtful, articulate, a very good orator, good speaking voice, and did a very good job of staying on target. His talk was only 20 minutes or so, and he presented a basic argument for why we should be morally compelled to help in places like Africa, where people still die from diseases that are easily preventable. (Basically, to boil it down, he took the argument that if you saw a child drowning in a pool, and you could save the child’s life, assuming the only cost to you was one of convenience, i.e., you’d ruin your shoes & pants, you should do it, because his life is worth more than your pants. Expand & extend, and you have the idea. Much of the death in Africa is easily preventable at fractional costs, therefore we in the West who have so much should do so.)
Even though I still completely disagree with him related to animals, I was glad to hear him speak, was impressed with his presentation, have a healthy amount of respect for him now. I see that I was out of line to have thought so lowly of him previously, and have been glad for the chance to have my mind changed.

The Opera

2006-04-16T17:31:00.000-04:00

After the SotP conference, and before the Armenian Festival, I had a chance to go to the NYC Opera and see a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni.
I'll grant you, I wasn't terribly looking forward to this to begin with. This trip was part of a class assignment for Music Hum, and while I'm glad they want to take advantage of the city and use it as a learning tool, I wish we could have gone to a different opera. This one is a story about a shameless womanizer who gets chased around because of his villiany and eventually goes to hell as punishment for his misdeeds. And then the story ends. I've heard it's supposed to be a sort of 'dark comedy', but I didn't find it particularly entertaining. (I actually left during the intermission, but don't tell my instructor that).
After having been there, I can comfortably say that opera is just not an art form I enjoy very much. Oh, and someone apparently forgot to tell the ushers there that the highbrow/lowbrow distinction in art is gone now, because they were quite rude to me. I assumed that I couldn't take pictures during the show, but why not take pics 15 minutes before the curtain goes up? It's a beautiful building (this is a shot of the main stage taken before they shut me down). After I took it, I was told by two different ushers quite pointedly that pictures were not allowed in the auditorium at ANY time. I wasn't given a reason. Because I was there for a class, I decided not to make a scene. I just also decided not ever to go back.
I hear opera in NYC is very good if it's your thing, but if you've got limited dollars and time, go for Broadway or something else and leave this to the snooty upper class and their killjoy rules.

Armenia!

2006-04-16T17:28:00.000-04:00

Levon, my best buddy here at school, is from Armenia, and a few days after the SotP conference, the Armenian club held a festival in the main part of campus that was really quite impressive. I’ve put up here a few of the pictures I took, but they don’t truly reflect how great an event this was. They had Armenian food, traditional dancers, historical notes, the entire thing was really beautiful. They truly are a beautiful culture and a beautiful people.Levon has been doing a good job of schooling me in Armenian culture & history. Armenia, for those who don’t know, is located next to modern day Turkey, on the eastern border. It is an ancient culture, going back some 3,000 years. It has fluctuated in size over time, and been subject to conquests by a few different empires (Mongols, Persians, etc). Ethnically, the Armenians are their own people, I think they are more closely related to Russians & the people from the steppes than anyone else, but I can’t quite remember. And they have a culture that is also quite distinct; it has a near-eastern feel to it, but they aren’t Arabs and there are significant differences. Getting to know Levon has been one of the highlights of my time here, and I look forward to being his friend even once he returns home to his country. We joke that he will one day become the President of Armenia, but we’re only half kidding. Levon has a deep love for his country and his people, and they will be fortunate to have him serve them in any capacity. He worked hard to pull this festival together, and it came off great. The fact that the weather was beautiful helped too, but mostly it was Levon. *grin*

Armenian Beauty

2006-04-16T17:25:00.000-04:00

These two girls were among the dancers at the festival, and graciously let me take their pictures when I asked. The girl on the left is actually applying to Columbia, so I spent a few minutes talking with her about it and giving her some tips, for whatever it was worth. I hope she gets accepted.
(The hair, while lovely, isn't real BTW ...)

Armenian Dancers

2006-04-16T17:23:00.000-04:00

There were several different dances, and different types of dancers at the festival, all of which were great. I didn't have a chance to get pictures of all of them, but they were all beautiful. Some were women only, some like this one were mixed. All were very well done.

Armenian Flag

2006-04-16T17:14:00.000-04:00

The colors in the Armenian flag are:
-) Gold, which represents the wheat of the land, because Armenia has a long history as a prosperous and bountiful agricultural society.
-) Blue, for the sky, which I'm guessing represents hopes & dreams, this one I didn't get explained specifically.
-) And Red, for the Armenian Genocide at the end of the First World War. The genocide is a VERY controvertial topic, it was perpetrated by the Turks, but Turkey today still disputes the facts of the matter bitterly with Armenia (they say it was due to the chaos of war, that it wasn't a directed campaign of extermination, and that the numbers have been exaggerated.) I won't get into it all here, but suffice to say that hundreds of thousands of Armenian lives were lost during that period of time, and the country has never forgotten it.
Incidently, this also means the flag was not used until after 1918, Armenia has a crest that is much older that sometimes appears on the flag when one sees it in Armenian homes, to represent the country's long history.

Ravi

2006-04-16T17:11:00.000-04:00

Columbia has been an interesting experience so far. There have been high points, and low points; some ups, and some downs. There have been setbacks, and there have been some fairly serious disappointments. However, one thing that has NOT been a disappointment has been the speakers who have come through here. In some ways, I’d almost say the speakers have been among the highlights. And this week, I had a chance to hear Ravi Zacharias speak. And it was extraordinary.Ravi, for those who may not know, could best be described as a Christian apologist and philosopher & thinker. He’s spoken around the world at places like Oxford & Harvard, and has written a number of books, including “Jesus Among Other Gods”, which compares the claims of Christianity with Islam, Hinduism, & Buddhism. He’s a powerful speaker and has an extraordinary mind; I haven’t been so impressed with a thinker since C.S. Lewis, and believe me, that’s saying something. He’s known for being thoughtful, brilliant, and for doing Q&A sessions at the end of his talks in which he pretty much takes all comers. Additionally I think it is significant that he isn’t white; he’s from India originally, which gives him (in my opinion) an especially valid platform to do analytic comparisons with Eastern & Western religious traditions. He has also been able to draw out some very powerful insights from the Gospels that would not be obvious to Western minds.
The first night here, he spoke on God and suffering, and the second on his topic Jesus among the Gods. I was late to the second night and only got to hear the second half of his speech, but I had front row seats to the first night and wasn’t disappointed. A great speaker, fantastic orator, excellent diction, and did a very effective job of balancing appeals to the head and engaging one’s feelings on a matter. I’ll include here a few of the things he pointed out during his first talk that were illuminating to me:
-) That ‘evil’ is not just a problem it is a mystery. A mystery is such that a problem encroaches back around on itself and the questioner eventually becomes the object of the question. None of us can ask about ‘evil’ without both the question and the answer involving ourselves. [As a further illustration, he put it this way: Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery.]
-) No worldview poses an answer to this problem without smuggling in, implicitly or explicitly, and answer to the purpose & meaning of life. Any worldview must encompass four things: origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. [Where did I come from, why am I here, how should I behave, where am I going?]
-) The statement, ‘There is no such thing as truth’ is meaningless because the statement itself purports to be a true statement which it cannot be by its own definition. In the same way, without some sort of framework, one cannot even talk about ‘evil’, for how does one define what is evil? In simple terms, if ‘evil’ is defined by people or by groups of people, then no one is in a position to criticize ethnic cleansing when it is done by the majority; in other words, we have morality by vote. If evil is absolute, if some things are always evil everywhere, then one must appeal to a super-human standard. Such a standard only makes sense if there is a God. Ravi went a step further to say that since moral truth and absolutes do exist, therefore so must God. I’d personally always felt this was where the analysis comes out, but it was refreshing to hear it confirmed by someone who is much smarter than I, and has spent more time thinking about it. -) He said that if love is the supreme ethic, which he believes it is, then the freedom to reject love is systemic, i.e., it must be a part of the system or the framework.
-) And he said that if the object of one’s love is forced, i.e., if love is not a choice, then the lover suddenly finds themselves alone.
It was a great evening, and I had a chance afterwards to go and have him sign a book for me, and get a picture with him. I would consider him to be perhaps the greatest apologist alive today, and would highly recommend him to anyone who wished to see him. He’s well worth the time.

Bonus!

2006-03-26T12:02:00.000-05:00

By the way, for those of you movie buffs out there (who have DVD players available to check this sort of thing) the book from Good Will Hunting that Matt Damon’s character mentions is “People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. A big shout out to my buddy VelvetJones, for providing me with this timely fact.
My group from the Gala; from left to right starting in the back: Lauren McFall, John DeSerio, Michael Park, Lydia Nelson, Lauren Bedrosian, Heather, Kendra Sarah King, Miriam Aarons, Akiva Zablocki, and Austin.

Gala, '06

2006-03-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

I just came back from one of the best nights I’ve had in quite awhile. Tonight was the annual GS Spring Gala, and it was a ton of fun. The Gala is like a spring formal (the question that everyone jokingly passed around was, ‘Are you going to prom on Saturday?’) put on by the student council. (Actually, about that, one of the deans told me he thought perhaps the popularity of the event was due to the high number of GS students who didn’t go to their high school prom, which I found interesting) The event was black tie optional, with formal cocktail hour, followed by three course dinner, live entertainment (that was really quite good), open dance floor, and a great after party down at one of the local bars. All this for tickets at a very affordable price.
I almost considered not going, and now after the fact I’m ashamed to admit it, because I really did have a great time. I’d just bought my first suit for interviews that I’ll be taking later next month, so this was the perfect opportunity to give them a dry run, which I felt went well. It’s fun to get dressed up once in awhile, and I found that I actually kind of like wearing a suit. (Don’t look half bad in one either)
I’d asked a friend to come with me as my social date, she decided not to go and to study for the MCAT instead (a shame, as I’m sure the evening away from chemistry would have done her good), but I decided to go anyways, and I’m not sorry that I did. There were plenty of friends there to see, and our group staked out two tables so it ended up being really a very fun time. I was also pleased to see that much of the faculty turned out too, so it really was an event for our whole program.
Even got out and danced a little. Figured out that the key is to wait until later in the evening when everyone has had plenty to drink, then you just go and boogie because nobody is really paying very close attention. I’d say only a quarter of the people out there actually knew how to dance, but everyone was having a good time. (I have every intention though of joining that quarter though; the more I dance, the more I find how fun it is).
Oh, and one other thing. I got numerous compliments on my tie, which I picked out myself (and figured out again how to tie) after not having worn a tie for years. The girls all told me that purple makes a great statement, and like my brother Mark told me, in the end, if you’re simply feeling a tie, if you feel good when you wear it, and it makes you square your shoulders and hold your head high, then it’s a good tie for you. I was definitely feeling this one.
It really was a fantastic evening.

Weight

2006-03-21T16:45:00.000-05:00

There’s a line from ‘Good Will Hunting’ where Matt Damon is in Robin William’s office looking at the books on his shelf. He comes across a history book, remarks that it’s one of the “wrong f#cking books”, and then comments, “You want to read a real history read [so and so’s People’s History], that book will knock you on your ass.” Good Will Hunting is among my favorite movies, and I’ve always loved this line for how well it articulates that feeling. I’ve only read a few books that knocked me on my ass, but I’ve just finished one and I pass it along with Will’s exhortation.
C.S. Lewis has been one of my favorite authors since I was a child, and my mother used to read “The Chronicles of Narnia” to me early in the mornings before school. In the last few years I’ve spent much more time with his non-fiction writings; Mere Christianity is simply extraordinary. The depth of the man’s thought and insight, and the way he asks so many of the ‘right questions’, is staggering.
After MC, I didn’t think I could be as impressed with any of his other works, and then I read ‘The Abolition of Man’; only one other book in my collection has as many highlightings and underlines as this one. So after Abolition, I REALLY didn’t think he’d have any more tricks to impress me with.
I should have known better.
I just finished reading ‘The Weight of Glory’, which is a collection of sermons and addresses he delivered, most of them during WWII. Incredible. It’s been some time since a book knocked me on my ass, but this one did. The copy of ‘Weight’ that I read (checked out here from the university library, which I have found to be extraordinarily well-stocked) was an old one and contains only five sermons, as compared to the nine included in the most recent printing you’d buy off Amazon. Of those five, one is a bit mediocre, three are excellent, but it is the first and title sermon that really packs the punch. I won’t spoil it for anyone who takes the time to read it, but I highly recommend it. It isn’t long; you could even take 20-30 minutes, pull a copy off the shelf at a local bookstore and read it there.
One of the really interesting ideas I’ve encountered while being here in New York is that in the Old Testament, the Jewish Tanakh, the word for ‘glory’ carries this meaning or connotation of weight. Which makes a lot of straightforward sense, at least to me. And that’s part of why Lewis’ sermon is so impressive and aptly named, because it takes that weight and slams it into you, and makes you realize something (if you follow and concur with his thinking) that is so central to everything that it’s amazing.
It’s worth the read.
Oh, and those other posts from Spring Break? Don't worry, they're coming ...

Delayed

2006-03-19T16:30:00.000-05:00

My plan was to take an hour or two on Saturday to talk about my time over the break (which has been memorable) and to upload some photos (which I have some good ones) However ... something about those best-laid plans that go astray ...
Friday night I ate Taco Bell, which I've done many times before, except that about 2 hours afterwards I got violently sick, which hasn't happened in many years. One of things going through my mind while I was in the throes of compulsively throwing up was, 'Wow, I'd forgotten how much I hate throwing up.' I was sick all night that night, and spent almost all day Saturday in bed. I'm over it now, but given that I lost an entire day, ran a bit short of time to post things up this week. Look for the updates during the week, or more probably next weekend. Best to everyone, and remember, don't let food poisoning happen to you ...
(In case anyone is wondering about the logo, I was trying to think of a picture that would fit the theme. I was going to go with the Mr. Yuk symbol, but I found out to my surprise that it is actually copyrighted by its creator, the Children's Hospital of Pittsburg. Skull & crossbones was the next best thing I could come up with ...)

Break

2006-03-12T16:21:00.000-05:00

Midterms are over.
Actually, midterms were over on Thursday, or even Wednesday, if you want to get really technical. (The last test that I took on Wednesday was my final midterm, I had a test on Thursday, but it was not actually a midterm in the sense we have tests in Chinese every few weeks, but the Micro midterm counts for 35% of the course grade) Friday, I’d planned to take the entire day and just unplug, and this entry was meant to go up on Saturday, but it didn’t due to the fact that my room didn’t have power all day. Yes that’s right, just my room. The power main coming into my building went down, but it affected the building strangely. Some floors had power, some didn’t. Some, like mine, had partial power. My room was the only one without it. Which meant that I couldn’t access anything on my computer.
Extremely aggravating.
But today, all is well. My tests are over, and my two big ones in Stats and Micro I felt went very well, I might even have aced the Stats test, depending on how a few things break. And many of the students in my class didn’t finish the Micro exam within the time allotted, so even though I know for sure one question was wrong, I still may end up near the top of the curve, we’ll see. I’ve realized that spring semester here is immeasurably better than winter, because we have the week of spring break just about exactly in the middle of the semester to break things up. Which make a big difference, there aren’t many holidays during the term, and the intensity of the work wears you down. Having this week to refresh is … outstanding, and that’s an understatement.
The weather on Friday & Saturday was unbelievably beautiful, first time I’ve gone outside without my jacket since September. (The kids that were still here and not in Florida or the Bahamas had the same idea, as you can see. You can always tell when the weather is nice when people hang out on the steps in front of Lowe Library.)
Thursday had an interesting experience to kick off my week of break, but I’ll save that for the next post. There will be more new content coming this week, so stay tuned …

White Lady

2006-02-12T13:27:00.000-05:00

Is she cold, or is she in fact wearing a beautiful mink coat?
I knew that this would make a good shot, but I'm even more pleased with how it turned out than I thought I'd be. I didn't see the ambiguity until I loaded the picture on my computer. Plus you can see the driving snow too, which doesn't show up quite as well in the others. It's a fun shot ...

White, Part 1

2006-02-12T13:25:00.000-05:00

New York City (and much of the east coast, from what I understand) has had an unusually mild winter so far. It’s only snowed once, back in early Dec, and I didn’t get pictures. I told myself I’d go out the next day, but it didn’t snow much, and by the next day most of the snow had melted off. My friends told me that we were supposed to get snowed on today, between 3 & 6 inches. This is what they’d said last time, but given how mild it’s been, I didn’t believe it.
This time, they were right.
It started snowing at about 7 PM last night, snowed all night, and is still snowing as of noon today. But this time, I went and got pictures. There are several posts below these that have pics, and some fun ‘before & after’ shots. Even though my Canon Powershot is a little bulky, I continue to be impressed by the pictures it takes.
Snow and I have a funny relationship. I lived in Texas, where it snowed heavily, but I don’t remember it being bitterly cold, my friends and I played in the snow, and I remember it being fun. When I lived in central Washington State as a child, it snowed there too, and I remember climbing up the mountains of snow that the snow plows would push together in parking lots and playing king of the hill. (These were good mountains too, let’s say at least 12 feet high, some higher) Then my family moved to Canada for the last three years I lived with them before moving out, and I learned a new definition of snow and of cold. It snowed a ton where we lived. And it was cold. I’m talking negative forty degrees cold (which by the way, is the same measurement on either Fahrenheit or Celsius scales) where it would stay for weeks at a time. The place we lived in Canada was very rural, and I was always lonely there. I came to associate snow with those feelings, and I grew to hate it.
In Seattle, where I moved to after high school, it almost never snows, let’s say maybe once or twice a year, and never very heavily. And it’s never cold, not by the standards I knew. It was great. But I always resented the snow, even for the day or two it fell, as if it were interrupting my life in some way.When it snowed here back in Dec, my resentment of it came through loud and clear again, but as I wandered around campus and looked at things, I realized it was actually kind of pretty. The way it fell and stayed on the buildings, accenting things, kind of cool. Plus, they have the good, heavy-duty snow removal equipment here in the city, so the roads were plowed the very next day. And it wasn’t so cold. I decided to get over my grudge with snow.
So today when I went outside to take pictures, I found myself enjoying it. That’s saying something.It’s still very dry snow, powdery, like flour, so you can’t make snowmen or have snowball fights. But I saw more than a few families out with sleds, and I thought it looked like fun. You never know, it could be a good time …

White, Part 2

2006-02-12T13:21:00.000-05:00

I’d mentioned in a previous post which classes I am taking this semester, but I didn’t talk about them much, mostly because they hadn’t really started yet. Now that we’ve been going for a month or so, I can put down some thoughts.
Statistics: I took stats before, back at BCC, but it was without Calculus, so the department here won’t accept it. It’s probably better that I retake it anyways, I got through the math ok, but I didn’t understand much of what I was doing. Stats is an important part of Econ, so I should have a more solid handle on it. It’s not tough so far, but I need to stay sharp, as I’m fairly sure it will become tougher.
Micro: Intermediate Micro is a lot of work. The instructor I have is known for being tough, and she gives out HUGE problem sets. (5+ hours of work to complete). One thing I’m realizing is that I actually don’t care much for large segments of Econ, they’re a bit too theoretical. I’ve been told though that once you get past the prereqs, the Econ electives are more fun, and easier.
Chinese II: I like Chinese, but I don’t like the program here. Too much drilling, not enough time focusing on the things I’d like to focus on. (The book we’re using is old, from Mao’s era, and I don’t care to memorize the characters for ‘Soviet Union’, or ‘party cadre’) However, they’ve been willing to let me modify a few things, so they’re trying to be accommodating, which I appreciate.
Frontiers of Science: This class has been fairly cool so far, workload is easy, lecture topics have been a bit boring, but they’re going to do nanotechnology later in the semester, and I’m looking forward to that. Although my discussion section instructor has an issue with me leaving class 10-15 min early, which I think is nonsense, but I’m not going to go into a rant on attendance policies and all the things that are wrong with them. *muttering under breath … ‘Freaking Bolsheviks’ …*
Music Hum: This class, which covers the history of music in the west, has actually been pretty cool. I finally understand what the Baroque period is, when the great classical composers lived, and so on. Plus we’ve listened to some GREAT music. We’re going to go see an opera in about a month, I’ll be sure to post it when we do. The first three subjects chew up the most of my time, the last two are fairly easy. One of the difficulties I’ve discovered is that I’m busy enough going to class, recitation, turning in assignments that I sometimes don’t have much time to just think. To sit down and learn, think about & absorb material. Which is a problem. But I think I’ve finally gotten a feel for how I need to budget my time, so I believe this will improve.

White, Part 3

2006-02-12T12:19:00.000-05:00

Last night, I went out and did something I have been meaning to do since I arrived in the city, and really long before that even. I started learning to dance. And it was amazing.The church that I’ve been going to, which is a great church from what I’ve seen, has a kind of dance club, and they had an event last night. They were teaching tango, and my real interest is swing, but I figured it would be fun to just jump in and get started. I’m glad that I did. Tango is fun, and not too difficult I’d say. The steps aren’t that bad if you’ve got a decent partner. The music doesn’t have much of a beat though, so feeling how to step in time with the music takes a little doing. I’d say there were maybe 50 people altogether, different ages. I ended up spending most of the evening hanging out with a group of students from NYU. They were all a bit younger than myself, but they were fun and energetic, it was a good time. I danced with a few different girls, the instructor had us switching partners constantly, but one girl in particular stood out. Her name was Leah (sp?). She was one of the NYU students, I ended up getting paired with her and then she introduced me to the rest of the group. She’s tall, six feet without heels, so in the dance shoes she wore, she stood just about eye to eye with me. And I found that there were some real advantages to dancing with a girl who’s the same height. With all the other girls (who were shorter) I had to step more shallowly to not overwhelm them, but with Leah, I could step fully, naturally, and she could follow me without any trouble. She also just really enjoyed dancing, she was energetic, always game to try the new steps the instructor showed us, and wasn’t at all upset when we crashed into other people a few times. (I’ve heard it suggested that girls have the harder part of dancing, because they have to do everything the man does, but backwards. I’d just like to say, leading isn’t as easy as it might seem either. You’ve got to pay attention to where your partner is, help her keep her balance, not overwhelm her, etc. But you also have to be watching out so you don’t crash into things, and you have to plan your steps ahead if there are other people on the dance floor. It can be tricky.) I had a great time dancing with her, and meeting the other people in that NYU group. I’m still all about learning swing, but I think I may learn tango and salsa too, which seem to be the other two major “groups”. I enjoyed dancing even more than I thought I would, and I’m definitely going to make a point of doing it more.

Busy City Streets

2006-02-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

The streets of New York aren't normally like this. Usually you have a seemingly endless river of taxis ... unless you want to catch one, and then they're all taken. So to have streets this quiet & empty, you have to wait ... well, for a snowstorm, apparently.

Before & After

2006-02-12T12:09:00.000-05:00

Sorry about that guy standing in the first one, I don't have Photoshop loaded right now or I'd edit him out ... or at least replace him with someone who's better looking ...

Ignore this post, Part 2

2006-02-12T12:01:00.000-05:00

Here's another fun one ...
you can go back and see the earlier "Ignore this post" for reference ...

Remember this guy?

2006-02-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

More fun to come ...

Picture

2006-02-01T22:49:00.000-05:00

I'd meant to start including a picture with each post, makes them more colorful that way, here's the one from the last post. This is a shot of Riverside Church, an old and pretty well-known church just down the street from my building. I've always had a thing for old churches, and this one is pretty impressive. One of my good friends told me that it has a great pipe organ, I still need to go check it out.

Useful outside New York

2006-02-01T22:44:00.000-05:00

Something useful I found to pass along to others ...

My aunt sent me an email to let me know that starting today, Feb 1, cell phone number lists are being made available to telemarketing companies. However, you can place your cell number on the Federal Do Not Call list by calling the number below, or going to the listed website. (I used the phone number, only took a minute or two) The number, once registered, will remain on the list for five years.
I always hated getting those calls when I had a land line, and the last thing I'd want is to get them on my cell.

888-382-1222
OR
www.donotcall.gov

A New Year

2006-01-29T16:01:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? New Year’s is a good time to brush up on things, set stuff in order, get a fresh start. I was lazy about updating my blog last semester, so I’ve given it some exciting new content (pictures!) and my intent is to update this semester more regularly, I’m going to shoot for once a month at least.
When last I’d left off, it was early December, just before finals. I finished my tests, and a few hours after my last one, started my journey back to Seattle in the midst of the Transit Strike here in the city. Which actually didn’t affect me too much; I took a taxi from my apartment down to Penn Station and was fine. What was a problem was that I had to fly out of Islip on Southwest. Islip is out on Long Island. Islip is not LaGuardia or JFK. Two enormous airports in one of the largest cities in the world … and SW doesn’t service them. Go figure. But I made it ok in the end, after a full day of flying.
My time back in Seattle was good, but it didn’t quite go as I’d planned. I unintentionally did something that badly upset a group of people who have come to mean more to me than I can adequately express, and I had to leave the city before things had gotten totally straightened out. This group had done nothing but show me extraordinary generosity in all the time I’d known them, and they will never completely know just how badly I felt knowing they were hurt. Being an analytic and a problem solver by nature, it’s an astonishing thing to find that sometimes things happen that you can’t quite fix. You’d always like to think if you try hard enough or just apply enough diligence you can straighten it out, but that’s not always so, especially when it comes to relationships. But … I can be grateful that everyone in this group is held and bound together by Someone who CAN ‘unbend’ things. And my hope remains that he will. If anyone from that group of people happens to read this (and one person in particular), just know that I’m sorry, that I miss you all, and that I pray for you all every time you’re in my thoughts.
When I arrived back in NYC, I was only registered for 2 of the 5 classes that I needed. My grades had come in from the winter term, and somehow I’d managed to survive Calculus III, which meant that my life would go on. And, by some additional miracle, I managed to get into the other three sections that I needed for this term, which means my schedule is: Statistics, Microeconomics, Chinese II, Music Humanities, and a really interesting course called Frontiers of Science, in which they have leading researchers from a number of different fields come in and share what’s going on in their work. Now that the bane of Calculus is over, I think this semester should be much more enjoyable.
A few brief lessons from the last term. 1) Don’t ever take mathematics here, if you can help it. If you’re transferring in, take all the math you need BEFORE you come. It’s hard here. Really hard. (Honestly in some ways I think harder than it needs to be, though there were some students who did well in the class, so maybe it’s just me). 2) Register early. 3) Bring a laptop, otherwise you’ll be chained to studying in your dorm room. 4) Get out a little more. That one I’m still working on myself. Honestly, this school is a lot of work. I kept hearing that it would be, but I wasn’t totally buying it, until I got here. It is. Believe it.
This semester I think is going to be very much about personal growth. Which, as I’m learning, is often very painful. The things that happened in Seattle were really hard for me, but it highlighted some issues that need to get straightened out with me, and probably have for some time. I’ve turned the page on a new chapter in more than one way, so I’m … curious, to see what this year ends up looking like. Sometimes, in order to find your way, you have to let go of a preconceived idea about the destination. You have to stop fighting with the tides, railing at the storms, or breaking out the oars. Sometimes all that you can do is set your sail, and let the Wind take you where it’s going. But I think sometimes it is in that way that you end up in exactly the place you needed to be, all along.
The pictures are all downloadable; I’ve started off with some shots I took back in September around campus and there will be more to follow. I was planning to set some snow shots, but its only snowed here once this season, and most of it had melted off by the time I was ready to take them. We’ve been having a really very mild winter, but I’ll take some if it snows again. The odd-looking blue-green picture is from the doorway to the cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is just down the street from here; there’s a whole set of panels on the door that depict the creation from Genesis. And as I noted in my new profile, no, those guys aren’t me. I had a great shot I was planning to post, but Blogger has a 50K size limit, and I haven’t figured out how to shrink any of the shots I’ve already taken. Finding a small enough pic was actually very hard, so you work with what you’ve got. Oh, and I’m really not digging the sort of aquamarine border around the picture, have to work on that …