islanded in a stream of stars

I have to confess, being off LJ and other blogs for 2 weeks was gloriously liberating - so much time available for so many new experiences! I'm hoping to strike a happy balance between being sucked into reading interesting things online and achieving my (existentia)list goals for the coming academic year.

I just realized that I haven't updated in nearly 2 months, and while I don't lead a completely and utterly fascinating life, I do feel like thinking things out through the written word to process everything that's happened.

Short version: turned the year that's the winning number in blackjack, seriously questioned life goal of getting a clinical psych PhD, learned about doing geropsychology research at Stanford, hung out with mostly 70 and 80 year olds when I wasn't chasing after them with pedometers, cheated on Douce France at Coupa Cafe with dragonfly66 and shakeitdown, visited my NY relatives, and spent an enchanting week in Oregon before returning to college

I keep hearing that college graduation's supposed to be this pre-quarterlife crisis inducing transition, and quite honestly I don't feel in the slightest anxious. Then again, I'm sticking around another year for grad school and crossing my fingers that Rose and darklightluna will do their master's here, too, starting next fall, so that I won't be bereft of college friends (Gabe, I already know you're sticking around :P). Despite the pessimistic trends in American unemployment data these past few months, I'm feeling pretty good about where my life is going - and increasingly it's headed towards the workplace rather than into a aging-focused psych PhD program.

My intense love-hate relationship with research continues to be...cyclical. The prospect of my future career focusing primarily on research makes me want to bludgeon my head with the nearest blunt object. As fascinating as I find the culture of academia, it's mostly because I know enough now to legitimately snark at it. Thanks, Stanford, for showing me that bureaucratic pettiness is rampantly flagrant even in the best psychology department in the US. Though I am just a wee bit jealous that they actually pay *all* their participants $15/hour. The intellectual territory they explore is absolutely fascinating, but being the one who actually extracts all the data from those who inhabit it - terrifying given the pressure to produce publishable, grant-awarded results on a continual basis. I know just enough about doing research to sound vaguely impressive to undergrad business students (ie. my college friends), but I keep realizing how little I know about meta-level stats. I stand in awe of econometricians and demographers. I can do multinomial logistic regression now, which is the most complicated stats test I need for my thesis data, but I'm not fluent in SPSS syntax the way I wish I were.

On the one hand, I love my academic mentors and my thesis project, and almost all of my personal idols are/were professors or otherwise educators. But reading PhD Comics and reading Thomas Benton's columns in the Chronicles of Higher Ed have been playing legitimate devil's advocate with all these voices telling me to get a doctorate. I've come to the realization that much of the appeal of having a PhD is the prestige, as much as I genuinely love what I'm learning. I'm working past my intellectual inferiority issues about being dumber than all my good friends and role models. Growing up in Silicon Valley, which is the most intellectually snobby place in America outside of Boston, instills a warped sense of linking higher education at brand name institutions with being financially and otherwise successful. Alas, that's just not true these days. My friends who haven't gone to college are some of the smartest people I know (I'm referring to you, f-list), and I have to get over my incredibly classist notions that higher education is the Path to being a person worthy of deeper respect.

As to what I was actually doing, I'm too lazy to summarize it, so I have my grant app report (  here if you're curious )

Outside of research - I swear I will actually elaborate on the rest of these experiences in a later post, but that's almost dooming myself to never getting around to it. Given it's the 1st week of classes, though, I probably will actually write about them : )

Loved my first day of classes and can't wait for film music history tomorrow with Jon Burlingame, one of the best lecturers I've ever heard and the producer of the MFU soundtracks. Here's to an incredible (and hopefully productive) senior year.

I've never understood the vitriol about Valentine's Day. Sure, $14.7 billion spent on gifts this year as a proxy for love strikes me as patently ridiculous; what scares me even more is that total expenditures related to this holiday's festivities are at a record low. But the true sentiment behind the day shouldn't arouse so much bitterness and ire. Believe me, I'm as familiar with heartsickness as the next person, but I refuse to let that prevent me from recognizing all there is for which I'm grateful.

I see Valentine's Day the way I see Thanksgiving and Christmas: an opportunity to reflect on what I have that I all too frequently overlook. This day is a celebration of love; I just expand that definition of love to something beyond the romantic kind.

When I think of love, I think of my family and friends and the friends I secretly count as family. I honestly can't imagine what my life would be without you. Call me a romantic, but I find it tragic how often we don't notice or acknowledge all those things that make us smile as we realize that yes, someone out there does care about us.

Love is someone checking in to see how I'm doing after angsting about a bad day. Love is someone going out of their way to send you a DVD featuring your favorite actor or a CD featuring your favorite composer. Love is someone baking green tea pound cake just for the fun of it and not minding when you end up eating most of it. Love is someone letting you continually bum rides off of her even though she refuses to let you pay for gas. Love is someone writing you a story or sharing a favorite poem. Love is someone washing your sheets and remembering to stock up on your favorite snack every time you come home. Love is someone sending you ridiculous lolcat photos and random cartoons because he thought you'd be entertained. Love is someone you haven't seen in ages sending you a letter or a postcard. Love is someone reminding you to stop taking yourself so seriously and learn how to crack a smile every so often. Love is someone who means it when they urge you to take care of yourself on the days when you don't think you're really worth caring about. Love is someone teaching you something new that they thought you'd enjoy. Love is someone trusting you enough to share a secret. Love is someone sharing something they've created so beautiful that you forget to breathe for a few moments. Love is seeing someone you admire stand up for what she believes is right and inspire you to take action, too.

I may be single, but I do feel loved this Valentine's Day. Thank you for being there.

We all need people to stop us.

I have a tendency to dress up messages in formal language in hopes that it'll make me sound smarter. So much of the core emotions become buried under the abstractions that the impact is lost. So here I am, simply stated: thank you for making my world a better place and for restoring my faith that people really act on their intentions to do good for each other.


Thank you to the friend who went on Thunder Mountain Railroad with me four times in a row in Disneyland.

Thank you to the friend who snuck in turn of the century romantic adventure novels in my locker senior year.

Thank you to the friends who will let me ramble about Cronenbach's alpha and Piaget's stages of development because I like having someone to geek about research to.

Thank you to the friends who let me call our bell choir group the Electric Penguin Anarchists and politely never pointed out how I had no idea what I was doing trying to figure out our chime rhythms. Or that I always tried stealing the D5 and D6 bells because the hammer wasn't loose.

Thank you to the friend who was willing to split the tempura/sashimi combo at Sushi House.

Thank you to the friends whose families have treated me like one of their own during dinners and vacations.

Thank you to the friends who drove me around when my mother was sick and after my car accident.

Thank you to the friends who dragged me down the hill when I couldn't walk in Arlington Cemetery.

Thank you to the friends who put up with my driving the wrong direction in parking lots and speeding a bit too quickly around hilly curves.

Thank you to the friends who enjoy doing nerdy things like playing Trivial Pursuit, jumping on trampolines, beading and candlemaking with me.

Thank you to the friends who let me ramble about my inner geekdoms, film music and Doctor Who and James Bond and the Internet and so many other things.

Thank you to the friends who go out to dinner with me to explore random awesome places in LA.

Thank you to the friend who left me chocolate and roses by my door even when I wasn't talking to you. No words convey how sorry I am for treating you as I did.

Thank you to the friends who've cooked and let me shamelessly mooch their food.

Thank you to the friends who make APASS the wonderful, open and zany work environment that I'll always look for in the rest of my jobs.

Thank you to the friends who blurt out the awkward, hilarious things that we're all thinking but too shy to say aloud.

Thank you to the friends who make me laugh, even when I'm being emo as all heck.

Thank you to the friends who let me be a shameless gossip.

Thank you for the fact that I've never heard of any of my friends backstabbing me.

Thank you to the friends who've changed my view of the world and made me think about all of the beautiful and astonishing things in it.

Thank you to the friends who don't call me out on being a pretentious ass.

Thank you to the friends who don't give me a hard time when I screw up and deserve to be yelled at.

Thank you to the friends who listen and sympathize when I whine and angst about anything and everything.

Thank you to the friends who still put up with me even when I flake out.

Thank you to the friends who trust me with their secrets. I'm touched and honored that you respect me enough to share so much of yourselves when it takes so much courage to speak up.

Thank you to the friends who keep me updated on what's going on in their lives, even when I'm too busy/tired/lazy to write back. I do pay attention.

Thank you to the friends who want to reconnect weeks/months/years later without contact and having the same closeness as we did since we last met.

Thank you, friends, for being the people I hope I will be.

Thank you, friends, for helping me when I didn't know how to help myself or know how to even ask.

Thank you for being there in my tie of need.

Thank you for being there because I honestly don't know how I'd do it without all of you.


Happy Thanksgiving, my friends, and may it be a good one.

I was talking to laleia the other day about what it means to be an adult and how after hitting the big two oh we're reevaluating the way we think about the future. She was telling me about how after working this summer, her vision of the future was less about what she wanted to do during her vacation time and more about envisioning what her apartment would look like after graduation. The increased leisure and freedom we associate with having total control of our adult lives is underscored by recognition of responsibility and a desire to do something productive with our time. Erikson's life stages come to mind, with the middle adulthood phase focusing on generativity vs. stagnation. Some say that we're growing up too quickly as a generation, being forced into situations that require us to think in the long term (college debt, anyone?) before we know any better.

Adolescent psychologists love talking about how adolescence has become a prolonged lifestyle stage and that in Western/"developed" societies, there are few clear markers as to when we actually become adults. In the US, you can get a driver's licence at 16, buy cigarettes and porn and vote at 18 and drink at 21. Those are just your legal rights. A lot of us work part-time jobs but aren't financially autonomous. Our parents expect us to do more around the house, but some give more decision-making authority to their children than others. If a teen becomes a parent, it's generally safe to assume that the pregnancy was unplanned. All these milestones of what it means to be adult take place at different times nonlinearly. If it seems that my generation has problems growing up and moving out of the house, in our defense it's more challenging when none of us know what's supposed to happen when.

Hence the new "young adult" period that roughly marks age 18 to the 20's, the ambiguous span from when most enter college and slowly transition to some kind of general self-supporting autonomy. We have a vague notion of self-reliance (how very Emerson!) when it comes to delineating adulthood, but with a globalized intellectual property/service-based economy so many college grads are living at home and/or relying on parents for financial assistance even if they live apart. And to be honest, most people my age don't have well-balanced functional romantic relationships. Maybe we know how to conduct a t-test or write a paper that can garner an A, but sticking to a budget, assembling a bunk bed or managing time well often seems out of our intellectual reach.

To be honest, I don't believe that the jobs that most students have make them any better at managing their own finances or learn the value of money, because the research on middle class kids shows that they espouse more cynical views of the workforce and workplace ethics, become more materialistic and be more likely to engage in some forms of "deviant" behavior like drinking. Working (10+, if I remember correctly) actually diminishes academic performance. (Though personally, if researchers actually bothered to study teens from less wealthy backgrounds, it'd probably show different and more positive outcomes.) For one thing, many high school college students use the extra income from being office gophers or filing away library books to buy personal luxuries and things they don't really need. Combined with poor financial literacy and the astonishing availability of credit, it's no wonder that we're hopelessly ignorant when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

It's so easy to become arrogant, thinking that just because we've gone through so many years of higher education and taken tests measuring our likelihood of success in the education system means that we have any idea of what it means to be a successful, well-functioning adult. Sometimes I wonder if we, the entitled and neurotically achievement-oriented Generation Y, just have a massive lapse in emotional intelligence. Or maybe I'm just too timid to tell the kids across the hall to keep it down because some of us actually have to wake up at a decent hour of the morning tomorrow.

This isn't to say, of course, that Generation Y fails at life. We're more worldly, technologically plugged in and theoretically more tolerant of people from different backgrounds than ever before, and quite a number of us are finding creative new ways to save the world or at least dedicate serious time to volunteering locally.

Call it the burden of complexity that grows heavier with each decade and century. Sometimes I think we're so busy trying to fulfill an agenda that we forget about how valuable it would be to ask someone who's been through a similar experience already to help guide the way.

I need my older friends to gently smack sense into me when I'm panicking or approaching Hamlet levels of angst. It's much easier to listen to and accept the advice and guidance of someone who has the experience of your parents, being parents themselves, who doesn't have all the history of conflict and the traits that irk you about your own mother. In friendship, you can simply relate to each other as the people you are now. I guess this is my terribly convoluted way of saying thanks for putting up with me lately and serving as examples that yes, people do manage to happily survive these emotional quagmires of the teens and 20's.

I think I'm officially known at the Verona train station as that strange American girl who tried to reserve a spot on the Milano-Lausanne connection for a flying chair.

una sedia votelle: wheelchair
una sedia volante: flying chair

Ooops. This is what happens when you watch too many Pink Panther/Get Smart-ish things. The good news is that they gave me a refund on the tickets that I bought that were marked up ridiculously, although it was fun trying to explain the situation in my very limited Italian sprinkled awkwardly with French.

The people at the front desk of where I'm living are convinced that I slept with the friend who visited me this past weekend. It was the only way I could figure out how to sneak him in because technically we're not supposed to have guests stay over. Marco now gives me awkward winks, and I find it difficult to stifle giggling (yes, giggling) whenever I'm going in or out now. I've also come to the slightly depressing conclusion that the only way you can keep Italian men from openly oggling/calling you out is if you're in the company of another guy. The more awkward part was going into the cafés and random couples/parents looking at us, totally puzzled as to why we weren't holding hands or anything like that. I know Plato's Greek, but I would've expected that the concept of platonic friendship wouldn't be so novel over here, friends of different genders going out together. Or maybe I was just being especially self-conscious as my friend has a girlfriend but openly admitted that he's always liked Asian girls...and this was before he had anything alcoholic. Still, we did end up having a fun time.

I am convinced that we might've found the best gelateria in the heart of town near the Arena, but I think I need to go there more before I can be sure :D

It's quite possible I'm one of the few people who *isn't* picking up the last Harry Potter book. Ah, the joys of catching a morning flight to New York tomorrow! Family, friends and museums - what more could one ask for? It's a pity I won't be joining my "other" family with the ever amazing eyepiece_simile in Cape Cod this year, but we can always see about next year.

So, in the mail yesterday I picked up the most peculiar postcard, which featured San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts (which is roughly an hour's drive away).

"I want to buy your house. I am not an agent. Call me."

Well, you have to give this mysterious sender named Jason props for being to the point.

Today's equally unexpected postcard was of the Kremlin, straight from Moscow. Martina, a high school friend who's also at USC, sent it to me. It's been nice reconnecting with old friends lately - within the past week, Sophia and I checked out the Qwik-E-Mart recreation and walked around Shoreline, and I had lunch with PP (she who teaches choir and intro) yesterday when we ran into the class valedictorian and her mother. This afternoon I met up with Alison, whom I haven't seen since 5th grade though we don't live that far from each other. I hate borrowing clichés, but the two and a half hours we talked made up for those nine years apart. And as weird as it sounds, I actually like the meetings over at my boss's house - there's something surprisingly cozy about the start up environment when you've got three people jammed in a home office trying to figure out what went wrong again when rerecording the newest "how to" site voiceover.

But not all of these encounters have been that pleasant, although the one I'm thinking of is actually imaginary. I had a philosophical sort of nightmare straight out of Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) or the Prisoner episode "A, B and C" that involved me at a party in someone's rather bourgeois living room where I was trapped presumably for all eternity as my ex kept hounding me about why we broke up. I've been receiving some awkward messages lately from him; he really is a great guy, but all I want is for him to find someone else who'll really make him happy and appreciate him for who he is. The way things are now, the current extremes of awkwardness makes the prospect of being locked up with Inès or Number 2 an absolute picnic by comparison.

On a not-so-related note, I've been reading this fascinating and equally humorous book by Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, which focuses on the sources of our regular dissatisfactions than the title would suggest. His commentary about how insistent we are about how unique our perspectives and feelings are, leading us to mistakenly disregard the feelings of others when put in a particular situation as a poor predictor of our own when placed in the same scenario, really struck me. A wise and generous man once told me that I'd come to enjoy John Barry's chamber orchestra album the Beyondness of Things over Eternal Echoes. I found this remark rather strange at the time - considering we came from such different backgrounds, it seemed rather unlikely that we'd eventually come to have the same view. And yet as I've been reorganizing my soundtrack collection to accomodate some newer material and listening to works I haven't heard for some time, I realize how right he was. If the Beyondness of Things is a nostalgic view of life as we'd like to remember it, highlights of breahtaking and sometimes heart-wrenching majesty, Eternal Echoes recognizes the quiet beauty in our everyday lives. It takes a certain degree of maturity to appreciate the more ponderous tonal colors of Eternal Echoes, a deceptively sedate musical retelling of the moments that show us for what we are when we're in our element.

I don't remember what the point of that story was, but I do remember thinking that my own memory problems seemed to corroborate with the points Gilbert was making, which might explain why I'm willing to trust his argument so much.

( And last but not least, a totally unrelated LolCat meme )

Sophia: What holiday is in a week and a half?
Me: President's Day!
Sophia: Shut up...Valentine's Day.
Me: Oh, right...

Note: I started writing this yesterday but have only gotten around to posting it today.

Happy 4th of July and belated Canada Day! Once again, I'm reminded that Keith Lockhart of the Boston Pops is the cutest pro conductor ever. And the fireworks look amazing everywhere but here-this is the first time I've only seen three or four fireworks shows from my house because it's so hazy tonight. I think the record I've seen from the living room window was 24. Yes, I'm spoiled.

I look depressingly normal with my hair wrap cut off. My new hair cut makes me actually look a bit more mature. I'm getting off topic again.

Disclaimer: I can't help that I keep sticking in random pop culture references in my entries. It's like I've been brainwashed by Speedlearn.

The San Francisco Express

somewhatcynical (Annie) is in town at the moment, so her old roommate from last summer, eyepiece_simile, (Sophia) kindly invited me to join them on an expedition up to San Francisco on Monday. I tend to visit SF at most twice or thrice a year either with my parents, godparents or to visit a former English teacher for brunch-but that last one is a classic story of forgetfulness and awkwardness that I've told here before. At any rate, it's much more fun going anywhere with friends.

We took Caltrain up to Milbrae and then switched over to BART to get to the Powell Street Station (right across from the San Francisco Shopping Center on Market). After the SFO airport stop, there was a cute Japanese family whose patriarch kept asking us about which stop they would need to get to the Japanese Tea Gardens. The Caltrain stop that I took last time deposited me in a sketchy area near that "Is your dog bulimic" graffiti mural; I'm grateful that I didn't get approached by any strangers. Needless to say I didn't really want to repeat that experience even with a group, so my parents suggested taking BART into the city instead. I've never used BART before, but it was surprisingly clean and efficient, like a regional train service with subway/tram cars. It would be really nice if they had more stations in San Francisco proper, though, besides stretching out all over the North and East Bay. But despite those minor complaints I definitely would want to use BART again, perhaps to visit dragonfly66 sometime.

We got into SF at around 10:30 or so in the morning. Luckily I know the Union Square area very well as I've gone there every Thanksgiving except for the year my mother just came home from the hospital with endocarditis. There weren't any protestors for once (sorry, I can't help being facetious), but it was a weekday and they tend to come out later in the afternoon to pester the tourists waiting in line for the Powell and Hyde cable cars. We went into Union Square and acted touristy and stared at the random mini-palm trees at the corner facing Macy's. I have no idea how palm trees can survive the fogginess and semi-freezing temperatures of San Francisco, but apparently they can. And as Annie pointed out, the park benches there are an aesthetic attempt to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them.

One is always a wanderer; three are always going somewhere together.

After that we marched uphill and then downhill to Chinatown. We approached from the back side first as we wandered around the unofficial "natives only" stores, restaurants, temple-looking churches and the ambiguously named benevolent societies. Surprisingly enough, I've never been to the SF Chinatown before. I don't know how to describe it, really; it's not quite like Hong Kong (most of the SF Chinatown inhabitants were speaking Cantonese with the Guangzhou dialect, I think), and it's definitely not what one would call mainstream American. There's a sort of directness about the place, "what you see is what you get," no pretense about what it's like to make a life for oneself as an American immigrant. It's a heady mixture of pragmatism and nostalgia. The goods they sell-they're a sort of parodic representation of what it is to be Chinese-American, as if the image of China that they remember has become a farce in itself; they're selling and almost believing in the myth they've created for the tourists. It was all eerily familiar. The shopkeepers could take one look at me and knew that I couldn't speak their language; I'm as assimilated as they come nowadays. That was more embarassing than having to ask them to speak English. But I knew where they were coming from; I just wish I could've explained myself somehow.

We later moved towards the more touristy section where the store displays included antiques, higher class counterfeits and jewelry rather than groceries and cell phone charms. We randomly stopped for boba at a sushi place (?!) as Annie had never tried the drink before, but unfortunately it was way too sweet. Sophia got some firecrackers of dubious legality. Annie got some gifts for her family and a plastic sword, and I now have some mini paper lanterns for my dorm room next year.

The sort of do-it-yourself dreadful affair...

We climbed uphill a few blocks-San Franciscan hills feel like mountains-to catch a cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. We got smooshed into the back of the car and tried not to fall on top of each other whenever the cable car suddenly started climbing uphill or speeding downhill. The views were incredible, I'll admit: Coit Tower, Lombard Street and the Bay with Alcatraz dead center. We headed towards some kind of marina featuring historical ships through the ages. Annie and Sophia tried tying a bunch of different kinds of sailors' knots; may I say for the record, Annie is a knot-tying queen. Afterwards we browsed amongst the various little shops and stands-it's a capitalistic paradise but a fun one. There was this one store in particular that sold these intricate Russian nesting dolls of all different sizes. And of course we had to stop by Ghiradelli Square to get chocolate. At one point I swear I thought I was going to get trampled over by the chocoholics on the way to the register.

Almost-a word that sticks edgewise in the throat to strangle one. Still, it was a lovely scheme.

Being cheap and energetic (not to mention slightly hyper after the intense chocolate) we decided to eschew waiting in the long line at the Wharf cable car stop and go further up the hill to catch one without having to pay the five dollars. Well, we realized after passing the first two or three stops (conveniently placed every two blocks or so) that there'd be no way we could get on the still-full cable car, so we decided to go up a little further...and a little further...and a bit more up to the top, and so on and so forth. We'd randomly stop every once in a while to admire the view from a stationary position. By the time we reached the top of what seemed like the steepest, highest hill in San rancisco ("We made it! Oh wait...there's another block to go, but it doesn't look as steep, right?" x4) we pretty forgot about jumping on the silly cable car. A couple of blocks downhill never did anyone any harm, right?

If you must get us lost, could you do it a bit faster?

Well, a few blocks downhill soon turned into many. We stopped about halfway and debated about how to get back-there was no point in taking the cable car at this point as we hadn't seen any in a long time.

I'll be honest with you-I can get pretty arrogant when it comes to directions. If there's one vaguely useful skill I posess, it's my sense of direction that I must've inherited from my dad. This is probably why I tend to be the navigator on school field trips. Even if I don't really know where I am I can usually find my way back to where I started. Needless to say, I be very stubborn in thinking that my way is the best way to get somewhere. And usually it is. Luckily Sophia and Annie are nice people and put up with me and my reiteration of "we're almost there; only five blocks [down this direction]." We passed the time about talking about Lifetime movies and such-now I really must see Snow Queen sometime. Surprisingly enough I didn't feel the least bit tired, which is surprising as I tend to be the weakling. Maybe it's because I ate more chocolate than everone else.

We stopped inside Grace Cathedral to take a break and sat on the pews to admire the stained glass. I wish I could've felt the majesty of God or some higher power, but I couldn't. I can appreciate church architecture from an aesthetic, intellectual standpoint, but nothing more than that. I couldn't stop thinking that the money spent to erect this cathedral could've been used to help the people of the community-construct homes or fund schools or keep kids from getting into gangs. And you just know that the people who helped construct this cathedral thought that they were celebrating God. I didn't feel the least bit awed by God's presence. It seemed like such a hollow splendid empty gesture just wasted on me.

You'd never believe this, but if someone introduced me to religion at an early age and got me into the whole church youth group thing I'd be terribly devout. It's too late for that now. There's this horrible cold rational logic that interferes with my desire to have faith in something other than a secular, universal hope. But I'm getting angsty, and that wasn't the point of this entry. It's a lovely cathedral, I'll give you that. Somehow I prefer the missions, if only for the historical aspect.

We headed back into familiar territory as we approached Union Square again and miraculously (I'll try to cut out the sarcasm, sorry) managed to make the BART back in time so that we wouldn't have to wait 45 minutes to catch the Caltrain at our connection in Milbrae. For the first time ever I managed to do a decent amount of reading (John Le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy) while riding backwards without feeling any sort of motion sickness.

We could make our daring, resourceful and nauseatingly punctual escapes...if only the door weren't locked.

But the adventure wasn't quite over yet. We had a three minute time window to make the Milbrae Caltrain connection but it felt like way less. I was being an idiot and ccouldn't figure out which platform we needed to be on until Sophia pointed it out. By this time we had about a minute left and ran for our lives up and down the stairs to cross over to the other side. It really felt like something out of an action movie-the train conductor yelled something like "Last chance!" and we all practically jumped on. For a few moments I was afraid that Sophia was going to be left behind, but thankfully that didn't happen. And we had a very interesting conversation on the way back that makes me miss my friends from Harvard and the IHL already.

All in all, I had a lovely time with Sophia and Annie and would definitely want to do something like this again. Anyone else up to such an expedition, perhaps during a college vacation reunion? This summer is good, too.

Congrats to all of the Class Day prize winners! You all really deserved what you got :D

Good conversation always makes my day, especially when I get to talk to people with whom I normally don't have the chance to do so. At the same time I hate to realize that there are still so many people I'm only beginning to realize are very awesome whom I wish I knew better but have little time left now to spend with them. And yet I still hold on to the quixotic hope that perhaps it's not too late; it's never too late. We'll see how things turn out.

We won the FIRST Spirit Award at robotics nationals and placed 48th overall! You robotics people definitely deserve it after all of the hard work you've put in this season. I am in awe of your collective robot repairing, driving, bs-ing, animating, website designing and business planning skills :D