HEC weekend, overview

I mentioned that I have no regrets about spending fourteen hours running up and down stairs, hauling ridiculous amounts of lights and wires around while running up and down stairs, taping dozens of meters of wires, and occasionally getting yelled at*.  In other words, working HEC weekend.  That’s because this is college, my opportunity to make dumb decisions experience new things.  Plus we got free food, and the desserts were so worth it.

For those of you who don’t know, HEC stands for Hotel Ezra Cornell, and it’s the hotel school’s event of the year where important people come to cocktails and dinners that have been designed by the school to show off what the hotel students have learned.  The presence of these important people mean that HEC is a high profile event, which means that the whole thing is high stress for anyone in charge of anything more important than making sure no orange wires are showing.  (Guess what I was doing all weekend.)

If you guessed covering a lot of orange wire, you’re right.  As HEC weekend was exactly my second time working and first time setting lights up, I spent a lot of time with the gaff tape and comparatively little time with the actual lights.  Somehow, most of my extracurricular activities seem to believe very strongly in learning on the job.  For example:

Pep band: We haven’t actually rehearsed this song this semester, but let’s play it anyway.  Sight read it and if there are any horn moves, follow an upperclassman.

Rock climbing.  First class, after signing the waiver(s): This is the wall.  The yellow line is the bouldering line.  Go climb anywhere, as long as you don’t cross the line.

Cornell Productions: Here’s a light.  Here are the bases and some extension cords.  Set up the lights.  That’s honestly pretty much what happened when I showed up for my first shift during HEC weekend.

It’s been a lot of improvising, and a lot of learning.  Besides finally sort of figuring out the layout of the Statler (it’s one of those buildings where you can only get to certain rooms using specific staircases . . . kind of like my dorm), I also learned the following: how to mount lights when you run out of washers, ways to minimize gaff use when you only have one mostly used roll left, and what happens when you have to mount a gel without a gel frame.  If you couldn't tell, HEC weekend required a lot of equipment.

Next time: down time at HEC (hint: food and homework), and after that, what I was actually paid to do, including, but not limited to, taping orange wires.

*Not of the “You’re terrible and you’re doing everything wrong” variety. More like the “We have ten minutes before the event starts; gaff everything right now” variety.

Why I Don’t Wear Nail Polish

Three reasons: Hezekiah, the Lindseth climbing wall, and the general state of my nails.  Reason three is probably caused by reasons one and two, but I’m still counting it.

Reason one: As a clarinet, Hezekiah happens to have a lot of little screws and pins that can be quite sharp.  As a clarinetist, I manipulate these screws and pins, and in the process have more than enough opportunities to scratch my fingernails.  Any nail polish on them would come out looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Reason two: Since I started rock climbing, besides discovering various muscles in my arms, I've been using my limbs in some unusual ways.  As it turns out, you can lift your leg to your waist while balancing on an outcropping of rock approximately half a centimeter wide.  And a pocket (a type of hold that looks like a hole in the wall) is sloped the wrong way for you to find a fingerhold?  Just shove your whole hand in there.

That technique is known as a hand jam.  To hand jam, simply slide your hand into the desired hold and make a fist.  Your hand is now wider and hopefully will hold your weight.  If it doesn't, well, that’s when you may lose some skin off your hand and quite possibly any nail polish you have on.

Which is why I just avoid the problem by never painting my nails.  They’re already decorated with scratches from my clarinet and a layer of dirt, which leads to reason three: in general, my fingernails aren't in a state to be painted, and if they were, I’m probably about five minutes away from going to play in a mud puddle or something like that.

Basically, I never paint my nails because I’d destroy them within ten minutes of the nail polish drying, but for those of you who do, don’t worry, I’m not going to go around throwing nail polish remover on peoples’ hands.   But let’s not go into what I think about fake nails.

No fingernails were intentionally harmed in the production of this post.  Legitimate Photographic evidence can be supplied at request.

[In other news, I just survived working HEC weekend. Details will follow, but suffice it to say, it sure was an experience. And now, this coming week I have two prelims, a pep band trip, and an essay to write. Was it the smartest idea to work all three days of HEC weekend? Probably not. Do I regret it? Not a bit.]

161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do, #92

#92 – Hike in one of Ithaca’s beautiful parks

Now that it’s April, that means that spring has arrived, and brought with it sunshine, and warm temperatures, and rainbows and butterflies, right? Wrong. It snowed twice in three days at the beginning of April, so I thought I would remind myself what things look like when it’s warm.

The summer before my senior year of high school, my family and I took a road trip through New York and Canada to visit colleges and see the sights. Along the way, we visited RPI, Cornell, and RIT, and got the chance to camp and hike in some of the state parks around Ithaca.

We hiked through Buttermilk Falls, Watkins Glen, and Letchworth (closer to Rochester), and even though I wouldn't have called Buttermilk a waterfall (by the middle of summer, you could get more water from your shower), they were still some nice hikes. Buttermilk Falls in particular is really near to Cornell (and the only park that fulfills #92 on the list of 161 Things since the other two aren't actually in Ithaca).

Since I don’t have a good picture of the waterfall (i.e., one with water), this is what the gorge at Buttermilk looks like further up:

If you've ever heard that New York is gorges, this is what it means. The Finger Lakes region of New York is full of gorges like this. 

Watkins Glen is another state park that features trails right along the gorge. Also a nice hike, and the trail passes over and under various waterfalls. Lastly, further north, Letchworth is known as the Grand Canyon of the East (apparently?) and features three waterfalls. Although the middle falls had the most water and visitors when we were there, this picture of the lower falls is still one of my favorites from the trip (most of the rest of my pictures were of lampposts . . . don’t ask).

O spring, where art thou?

(Update: After snowing twice in the first three days of April, the last two days here have been absolutely fantastic shorts weather . . . as in, over forty degrees.)

O the Humanity(s)

As we've been going through our Civil War monuments unit in my writing seminar, I've started thinking about how we’re secretly being taught history and literature at the same time. For one thing, this is multitasking I can handle. For another, in some high schools, instead of taking English and history separately, students take a combined class called humanities. The high school that I attended started giving freshmen an option to do this during my sophomore or junior year.

Thinking back, I’m wondering if I would have liked that better than doing English and history on their own. Somehow things make so much more sense in context. Like knowing who Robert Gould Shaw was makes poetry about him understandable, plus I now know about the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth (some of which may come from the movie Glory).

To go with all this I decided to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin while home for spring break. (Side note: Who needs Caribbean cruises and Florida beaches when you can enjoy fresh New England snow instead? Not me, apparently.) I liked the book, and it provided another perspective on slavery, abolition, and some of the racial interactions going on in the mid 1800s. Lots of interesting characters, although most of them were pretty clearly defined to be good or bad.

Still not as bad as Hawthorne’s characterizations in The Scarlet Letter. First off, some background – Hester Prynne has committed adultery, has a daughter named Pearl, and is forced to live as an outcast in a hut on the outskirts of town. Throughout the book, Hester is supposed to be viewed negatively for having committed adultery while Pearl is the innocent result of her actions.

A slightly paraphrased scene:

Pearl is playing in the sun in the forest. “Mama, come play with me,” she says.

Hester walks toward Pearl. As soon as her foot touches the sun-covered ground, a dark rain cloud sprouts up over her head and thunder sounds. Hester looks up and sees lightning forming above her head. “Uh, I’m kind of hot in the sun, Pearl. Maybe we can go play under that thorn bush?”

Yeah, symbolism much?

One final note about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it’s a comment/complaint about the introduction, mostly pertaining to non-author written introductions:

Dear famous authors who are asked to write introductions to books,

It would be nice if you didn't tell me that the main character dies on page 117. You may think I've read the book, but in the case that I haven’t, I may have been hoping to find that out for myself. I thought I’d read the introduction for some background information so I’d understand the book better, but apparently I didn't notice any of your nonexistent spoiler tags. Next time I might as well read the last page of the book first.

Sincerely, your sadly uninformed reader who in fact did not know that the main character dies on page 117

In my Mini Fridge: The Insider Edition

Before we get started today, I have to say that I think mini fridge should be one word. It’s not, at least according to spell check. But then again, spell check doesn't think carabiner, spectrophotometric, and icosahedron are spelled correctly either. (For the record, they are, and strangely enough, icosahedrons is fine.)

That said, this Monday I was in charge of bringing snack for my rock climbing class.  I picked up grapes from Appel (the small round purple ones . . . my favorite kind of grapes), carrots from RPCC, and strawberries from Target.  Then I had to fit all this into my mini fridge.

Normally I only use my fridge for milk, pudding, and applesauce, so it’s pretty empty.  By shoving the applesauce and pudding into the back of the fridge, I could then jam all the fruits and vegetables into my fridge with minimal fridge Tetris.

I could have posted the picture of the mold I found in my fridge
after winter break,but I think I deleted that one.

Currently, I have five different kinds of fresh fruit in my room (apple, orange, pear, strawberries, and grapes).  This is actually exciting because I’m a college student with no car or fixed income and I like fruit.

As an added bonus, here’s a picture of my corner of my dorm room:

Highlights include my lunchbox, AAIV quartercard (they were actually the only Christian fellowship on campus to quartercard me), stuffed dog (yes, she came to college with me), picture of my brother in a Viking hat, and the periodic table. And don’t worry. My desk isn't always this neat.