The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2014 edition

In an effort to get caught up with my usual end of semester posts, I started thinking about what exciting things I did in the past semester . . . and I couldn't come up with anything. Well, not totally nothing, but not much. I spent a good portion of the semester in class, at office hours, working on problem sets, and generally not getting enough sleep. There were, however, some less mundane events. Here they are.

1. Intramural soccer – I played intramural soccer for my dorm again this fall. For whatever reason, interest in playing for the team was drastically less than last year, and at our last game, only three members of our team decided to show up. After we forfeited, we were initially going to combine the two teams to scrimmage but we didn't even have enough players for that, so we played world cup instead. To play, you have a goalkeeper and pairs of players all trying to get the ball into the goal for their team. Last person to touch the ball before it goes into the net is credited with the goal. If the goalie saves the shot, he kicks the ball back out onto the field. As the teams score goals, they leave the field and move on to the next round. The last team who hasn't scored is eliminated from the game and a new round starts with the remaining teams.

I ended up with one of the players from my house and we started out by almost getting eliminated in the first round. Almost, because then we got the ball into the net and moved on. And kept moving on until we reached the final round. We began the final playing two on three but to make the teams even, we added the third player from our dorm to our team. We won, which was a happy end to a frustrating season. And then I went to office hours.

2. Ice skating – During finals week, the pep band and the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams hosted a charity skating event at Lynah Rink. Although I have spent dozens of hours in Lynah, I had not yet ice skated there. In fact, I had not ice skated ever before in my life before deciding that I could not spend another hour studying for my orgo final and that I should take a break by going ice skating. The rink turned out to be pretty busy, but it was a lot of fun, and I would go ice skating again.

3. Madison Square Garden – Over Thanksgiving break, I went to MSG with the pep band again, except we won this year. It was a come from behind victory and completely worth the nine hours on a bus.

4. Thanksgiving – Although I was abandoned stayed voluntarily at Cornell for the Thanksgiving break, I still got plenty of Thanksgiving food. For lunch, I went with people from my dorm to one of the North campus dining halls  where they were holding a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Later that day, a couple (ChemE) friends and I were invited to another (ChemE) friend’s dinner. They had cooked at least half a dozen legitimate dishes, plus dessert. All the food was great, plus I drank the most alcohol I’d ever had at once. A whole three ounces.

Then there were the usual ChemE happenings: We stayed in Olin past midnight working on problem sets (over five straight hours). We had a late night dinner in which we discovered that a dish called the triple crispy consisted of two plates – one was a plate of rice; the other was a heaping plateful of a variety of fried meat. We set record low means on our prelims and finals (41% on the orgo final). We ate, worked, slept didn't sleep, struggled, lived, and hung out together, and we’re going to do it all again next semester.

Two Years

I realized recently* that I've been writing this blog for two years now. This will be my 161^st post in twenty-four months, for an average of 6.71 posts per month. That average, however, is brought up by a spring semester freshman year in which I only took four classes - Intro to Microeconomics, a first year writing seminar, MATLAB, and differential equations. Econ was less than two hours of work a week and I did all my essays for my writing seminar the morning night before they were due, so I was essentially taking two classes. Maybe two and a half.

With my relative abundance of free time, I went to every pep band event, went rock climbing two or three times a week, and blogged. I averaged 13.5 posts a month during that semester, and without those numbers, I averaged 5.35 posts a month over the past two years, which is slightly high compared to this year’s average (3.83; 9.33 in 2013). Here’s a graph, because I like graphs:

Particular months to note: this April I only wrote once because of the impending doom known as finals while having fluids and pchem problem sets due every Friday, with the additional possibility of also having bio problem sets due on – guess – Fridays. The only month in which I wrote more this year than last was July, due to the fact that I spent this summer in Ithaca with what was essentially a 9 to 5 job. Instead of having classes from 9 to 5 and then working on problem sets for another six hours, I worked from 9 to 5 and then was done for the day.

This past semester while I was trying to pass two ChemE classes, two chem classes, and a liberal studies class that actually took time all at once, I wrote less in the entire semester than I did during a single month of spring semester freshman year.

So in the past two years, I've survived four semesters of college, living in an apartment with my cooking for three months, and affiliation with Chemical Engineering, and written tens of thousands of words about my questionable decisions good life choices, adventures, and epic quests. Next semester I have four ChemE classes, a liberal studies class, and a ChemE seminar. It’s going to be interesting.

*Actually recently, not I-meant-to-post-this-three-weeks-ago-and-didn't-edit-it-recently.

First to Five

Yesterday, for the fifth time, the New England Revolution found themselves playing for the MLS Cup, and for the fifth time, they found themselves in second place after two hours of soccer. And it hurt.

Why, you may ask, do we care about grown men and women chasing after balls and waving sticks in the air? Why do we find ourselves overly emotionally invested in games that are, after all is said and done, exactly that – games?

Maybe we see something when we watch players gut it out, grit their teeth and get down to work to get the ball moving away from their goal to the other side of the field. Maybe there’s a little bit of magic in watching the soccer ball leave a foot and a puck leave a stick and knowing they’re going to hit the back of the net. Maybe the celebrations and pain and everything else we feel as a result of those hundreds of square meters remind us of the best and worst of the rest of the world out there. And maybe we just like watching a good hockey fight or grown men head butting each other.

One of my favorite movies is Miracle, which is about the 1980 United States Men’s ice hockey team. Besides the fact that the games were played at Lake Placid, a few hundred miles from Ithaca; and Ken Dryden, arguably Cornell’s best goalie ever, was the color commentator at the Olympics; and Mike Eruzione, the captain, was born and raised in New England; it’s about a team that nobody thought could win. But they did. It took months of hard work, but they finally turned into a team that beat the best in the world and went on to claim an Olympic gold medal.

I guess I was hoping for some of that for the Revolution, who now have sole possession of the most number of times losing MLS Cup. I listened to the thirty minutes of extra time on the radio, and they didn't give up or bunker down to make it to penalty kicks. They fought for a goal, left it all out on the field. After following the Revolution through the past five or six years, I thought this might be the year they finally got the cup. They’d been building up a team of college kids from the drafts and local academy products, backed by Revolution veterans and coached by a player who had played in every minute of the Revolution’s previous four MLS Cup losses.

I followed the stories as they started out hot, then lost eight straight games in the summer, then started – and kept – winning up until losing MLS Cup yet again. They didn't have the high budget roster or international signings to match their opponent, but they had a team.

I've been on the other side too. Sometimes we weren't quite the underdogs that the Revolution were, but sometimes we were. I watched Cornell score an overtime goal against Harvard in the last home game of the season, which was also the last game the seniors would play in Lynah. I spent two weekends watching the women’s team become ECAC champions on late goals in four consecutive games. I saw Cornell come from behind to beat Penn State at Madison Square Garden and fight to a win against the nationally ranked University of Denver at Lynah.

Do I wish the Revolution had one of those happy endings? Well, yeah. But they went further than a lot of people thought they could, and they did it with their usual low budget roster (plus one major signing from the USMNT) while playing in a cavernous football stadium in the miserableness known as New England weather. So here’s to you, Revolution. I’ll see you next season.

Hey, Ocarina

While I was at Cornell for the summer I took advantage of the moderately decent weather to visit the farmer’s market on multiple occasions. There was the time I walked to the farmer’s market after walking to Cass Park from Collegetown (four miles total, because why not?). There was the time it started pouring right after we left. There was the time I got my very own ocarina.

Thusfar, I’d only spent money at the farmer’s market on food. There’s a really popular Cambodian food place that I tried. I had rice with potatoes and chicken in some sort of curry-like sauce that was good. Another time a friend and I had peanut lime noodles and corn fritters from another place that were really good, followed by a strawberry lemonade and a raspberry chocolate shortbread bar that I saved for later (both also good). The only thing I’ve eaten at the farmer’s market so far that was disappointing was a samosa. The filling was bland even though I dumped in several spoonfuls of sauce.

But back to the ocarina. Thanks to The Legend of Zelda, I already knew what an ocarina was when I saw them at the farmer’s market. I decided that I was going to spend my hard earned money on something other than food because 1) The Legend of Zelda and 2) obscure woodwind instrument. First, The Legend of Zelda is my favorite video game series; my brother and I first played through Wind Waker and Four Swords Adventure, then my brother played most of the old Zelda games, after which Twilight Princess came out, and finally Skyward Sword. I’ll always remember Wind Waker as the first Zelda game we beat, but the dungeons in Skyward Sword rival it, plus Skyward Sword has (finally) an orchestral soundtrack and benefits from MotionPlus on the Wii. Also, Link is originally left handed and my favorite character to play on Super Smash Bros. Second, I appear to be starting a collection of instruments, including my clarinet, a recorder from third grade music class, and a tinwhistle. With that kind of solid reasoning behind my choice, I decided to buy an ocarina to add to my collection.

The ocarina I got is a five hole ocarina, and I currently know how to play a major scale on it. I can play most of Davy (the fight song) and O Christmas Tree the Evening Song. I’m thinking ocarina Christmas caroling in a few weeks. Who’s with me?

The View from Saturday (and All the Other Days)

When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite books was The View From Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg, who also wrote From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, another book I really liked. I’m not sure why I liked it so much, because it’s about a middle school quiz bowl team, sea turtles, and tea parties, and not mountain climbing or ukulele playing goats*. But I recently (last year?) found The View From Saturday at either a book sale or picked it up for free and reread it, and I still liked it.

Maybe it had something to do with the point in my life around middle school where I decided that I didn't like fantasy books (don’t ask me why) and preferred reading realistic fiction. I have since progressed on to reading anything, including the fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings, most of the Harry Potter series, and this summer, American Gods and the start of the Discworld series, as well as my lease and software agreements.**

On a tangentially related note, I also just realized that the bus scene in The View From Saturday is a lot like the opening of Park and Eleanor, which I just read for fun because young adult novels are marginally easier to read than my organic chemistry textbook. Both scenes are about the new kid trying to find a seat on a bus with already established seating. I rode the bus to and from school for nine years straight (fourth to twelfth grade) and kindergarten on occasion (back when there were still more students enrolled in half day than full day kindergarten). People sat in different seats every day and the only year my stop was at the end of my driveway was fourth grade. Then there was the late bus, which was only obligated to drop us off within a mile of my house and preferred to leave us to walk home from the end of the street. So I've done my time on the school bus.

Finally, the point of this post was not to discuss my weird reading habits or bus stories (I've got more for another time), as interesting as they may be. What I actually wanted to talk about was the view from my dorm room, which I get every day, not just Saturdays. (See the connection?) I moved to the fifth floor of the same dorm I lived in last year, to the suite that is as physically far away from the laundry room (in the basement) as possible. On Tuesday when I did laundry, I counted and it took over 300 steps to get to the laundry room. Multiply by six and that’s what it takes to get clean clothing.

To recap: what I wanted to do was show some pictures of the view from my room but I did so in the most complicated way possible. And here are the pictures taken through my window.

The Cloud that Ate Ithaca: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Pre-winter at its finest

Good morning, Cornell University.

*Note that I have not actually read a book about ukulele playing goats.
**Note that I do not recommend the last two for leisure reading.