Since I’ve Been Gone

Life in academia-land has gone on mostly as usual in the past month and a half. My last two days of classes required me to complete two presentations (polymers and transport), two reports (kinetics and polymers), and a problem set (transport), but I did it without losing too much sleep. The transport final passed without excessive trouble, then I spent the next month preparing for the candidacy exam. Spoiler alert: I passed, earning myself the right to spend four more years at the University of Michigan working toward my PhD.

In the meantime, there was also:
World Penguin Day (April 25)
National Star Wars Day (May the Fourth)
National Eat What You Want Day (May 11, but basically every day for me)
Mother’s Day (May 14) (Happy Mother’s Day. Better late than never?)
National Bike to Work Day (May 19)
Towel Day (May 25)

On the research front, the main news is that I passed the candidacy exam. I’ve also read more about CTAB, CTAC, CAPB, SLES, SANS, SDS, DPD, MD, the CMC, and related topics than I ever wanted to.

Since the weather’s gotten mostly nice, I’ve been biking to work, as well as to band, the grocery store, and the library (with stops at the farmers market). I’m at 84.5 miles for the year, and I’ve ridden at least once in every month of the year so far. It’s not a huge amount of mileage, but that’s 84.5 miles of not driving, not that I have a car. Also, I’m really good at just barely missing buses, so I’d rather bike than set up camp at the bus stop for an hour. Because if I left to go somewhere else, I’d get back to the bus stop just in time to see the next bus pulling away. Because that’s how my life works.

Ann Arbor Farmers Market

I had my last concert of the season with the Ann Arbor Concert Band. The concert included a march (“Paladin”), a slow piece (“Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon”), a trumpet feature (“The Three Trumpeters”), a trombone feature (“Shoutin’ Liza Trombone”), a bassoon feature (second movement of “Hungarian Rondo,” with the soloist being the winner of the AACB Young Artist competition), a whole band feature (“The Band Played On,” narrated by the mayor of Ann Arbor), and “Slava!” The first time I heard “Slava!” I was in ninth or tenth grade, and the wind ensemble played it before I was in wind ensemble. It’s a fun piece; the whole concert was a fun way to end the season.

I also baked a batch of snickerdoodles to use up eggs and butter, completed a jigsaw puzzle of the space shuttle launching, watched several movies (still working through the library's musical selection), read half a dozen books (nothing that great), cooked, cleaned, ate, slept, and did all the other necessary grad school-y things.

PS: The title is a play on the song “Since U Been Gone” which was in Pitch Perfect which was one of the movies I saw since I last posted.

Things That Annoy Me

I complain about a lot of things (for example, anything related to ChemE) but most of the time I do it because I like complaining. It’s a great conversation topic. After current state of being and weather, you complain about all. the. things. There are, however, some things that legitimately drive me just a little bit crazy. And yes, I’m sure I have habits that some people find horribly irritating too. This list will probably annoy someone.

1) Crossing the street wherever and whenever. I walk dozens of miles every month. To class, to and from the bus stop, to the grocery store, just because I feel like it. And I know what it’s like to be late to class and need to save twenty seconds by not walking to the crosswalk at the intersection. But running across the street is very different from strolling across the street. Without looking for cars first. While staring down at your phone.

2) Biking. Specifically, trying to bike anywhere that’s not a quiet, peaceful suburb or specifically marked in neon yellow paint every thirty feet as a bike lane or path. Ann Arbor calls itself a “bike friendly” city, yet the cars still freak out at bikes on the road, pedestrians freak out at bikes on the sidewalk, and half the bike lanes spit you out into traffic.¹ Don’t even get me started on making left turns in traffic.

3) People who are late to everything. I’m okay with people being 5-10 minutes late, even consistently, because I know it’s easy to go from “plenty of time to get there” to “running out the door about to miss the bus” just in the time it takes to put your shoes and jacket on and not forget your keys. I’m also okay with one-time “missed the bus” or “slept through the alarm” events. I’m not okay with consistently being over fifteen minutes late for reasons like “decided to paint my nails” or “thought I could walk a mile in five minutes.” We learned in band in middle school that early is on time, and on time is late. Words to live by.

4) Using “I’m lazy” as an excuse for not doing things.

5) Using “I’m lazy” as an excuse for doing things.

6) When air conditioning is set at sub-Arctic temperatures. I should not have to put my jacket on to go inside during the summer.

7) Celery in chicken salad. Raw celery is an abomination to food everywhere. Cooked celery is barely acceptable when boiled to a tasteless mush in soups.

8) Tight pants. Putting on pants should not take extra time to heave them over my calves and thighs. Wearing pants should not restrict my ability to bend my knee.

9) The dishwasher placement in my last apartment. Opening the dishwasher blocked the stove, the microwave, and three quarters of the available counter space. It was also as far away as possible from the sink, so whenever we put washed dishes into the dishwasher drying rack to dry, we dripped water all over the kitchen floor. And yes, we were all Asian.

10) The fact that if you go to the Arboretum, run by the Cornell Plantations, which supports the outdoors and nature and people enjoying the outdoors and nature, you will pass no less than thirteen parking lots but exactly zero bike racks. Apparently the lesson to be learned is only enjoy nature if you can drive to it.

There’s also short shorts, the decibel level in movie theaters, instant gratification, wet socks, people automatically assuming I’m right handed, and much more, but I’ll leave it at this for now.

¹It’s not entirely cars’ or pedestrians’ fault. I’ve seen bikers not wearing helmets, weaving in and out of traffic, breezing through stop signs, and going the wrong way on one way streets.

Ann Arbor News

New ID card. Yellow instead of blue. Still gets me into the ChemE building at all hours and onto buses any time, not just weekends and after 6 pm on weekdays.

New basement lounge. Different: no couches, lockers, or fridge. Same: windowless, full of ChemEs and hints of despair, confusion, and lost dreams.

New desk in a shared cubicle. Cubicles = maximum grad student packing in minimum space. Office accessed by basement but has a ground level window next to me. Can’t find a power outlet along my wall of the cubicle, but there is an ethernet cable for the ethernet port my laptop doesn’t have.

Olin Hall (Cornell)

New ChemE building. Two of them, actually. One old, classic engineering building cinder-block and tile construction. Stairs could use polishing, and maybe some fake wood panelling. One new, shiny and glassy with its very own cafeteria.

The North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) (Michigan)

New standard issue dorm furniture. Still using under the bed as prime storage space. Still cooking everything in one pot and one frying pan. Still don’t own an umbrella.

New band. Went from concert band to pep band and back to concert band. A return to tuning, dynamics besides triple forte, time signatures involving sevens and nines, key signatures with more than two sharps or flats. The sixteenth note runs remain. Getting reacquainted with old pieces and composers. Also miss Cornell sports.

New church. Found one. Has fed and driven me more than I deserve.

McGraw Tower (and Uris Library) at Cornell

New clock tower. With carillon, not chimes. Sounds the quarter hour differently. Rarely plays anything recognizable. Also no Jennie McGraw Rag, Alma Mater, or “O Christmas Tree” Evening Song.

Lurie Tower (and engineering quad) at Michigan

New grocery store. Wegmans is better. But Kroger has a free item every Friday.

No new hat yet.

Star Wars: One New Rogue Force Awakens

In keeping with our Christmas break movie tradition, my family saw The Force Awakens and Rogue One the past two years when my brother and I went home for vacation. I’m somewhere between a casual and hardcore Star Wars fan – I’ve seen the Anakin sand quote¹ make its rounds on the internet, heard the Jar Jar Binks Sith theory, and know about some of the more . . . interesting CGI effects George Lucas keeps adding every time he digitally remasters the series, but I can’t name every character in the cantina scene or recite the soundtrack listing from memory. That said, I liked both movies.

Spoilers from this point forward.

The main complaint I heard about The Force Awakens is that it was A New Hope with different characters. I think Rogue One makes that less of a problem – the trilogy movies can all follow parallel structure and/or ring theory² while the stand-alone movies are new Star Wars stories. The one thing that was a little much was the destruction of the third Death Star, I mean Starkiller Base. Seriously, the Death Star was already blown up twice; have they not learned their lesson about fatal engineering design flaws?

Apparently not, but other than that, my criticisms are mainly the Millenium Falcon coincidentally rusting on the same planet Finn and Poe coincidentally crash land on where Rey coincidentally is, and the lightsaber battle. Rey has never touched a lightsaber before but somehow manages to hold off Kylo Ren, allegedly one of the strongest force users in the galaxy. No matter how strong Rey is in the force, I feel like inexpertly waving a glowing laser stick around should have resulted in someone losing a limb. Finally, I don’t care that BB-8 couldn’t actually move an inch in the desert sand because he’s kind of adorable. Apparently I like small round things that make chirping sounds (Star Wars droids and penguins).

While the plot was a little stale (though executed well), the rest of the movie was good – the visuals, music, cast, BB-8. I like that the main cast wasn’t big name actors, and there’s a female (co?) lead³.

Moving on to Rogue One. Finally, a new plot. With male and female actors who don’t fall in love with each other at first sight, realize halfway through the movie that they’re secretly in love with each other, or have a sordid love affair just for the heck of it. I read a spoiler-free review of Rogue One that said it was overall a dark movie, heavy on the war part of Star Wars. Other people said they didn’t connect with the characters or care much about any of them. My take on these points: it’s definitely a violent movie, particularly the last third, but it’s not gory. And it is dark, but it has to be because it’s leading into A New Hope. As for the characters, there were a couple of the less-main characters that were kind of just hanging around, though they were important for the final battle scenes. I will say that as a group, Cassian, Jyn, K-2SO, Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze worked well together even if I didn’t care as much about some of them. Also, K-2SO sounds too much like potassium sulfate (K₂SO₄).

One note about the soundtrack. It’s not scored by John Williams, but by Michael Giacchino, who also composed the music for Zootopia, Inside Out, Star Trek, and a bunch of other popular movies. I didn’t find the soundtrack extremely remarkable, but it was well done. Giacchino used themes from Williams’s original music, including the perfect fifth that opens the iconic Star Wars theme, except then he composes a different melody for it. It’s painfully brilliant, because you want to hear the Star Wars theme, except Rogue One isn’t in any of the trilogies, so it has its own themes.⁴

I’ll end with a couple of my favorite scenes from Rogue One. First, the scene where Cassian and company are stealing a ship to steal the Death Star plans and are asked what their call sign is. That’s when Bodhi Rook replies with “This is Rogue One,” and when the group is really, truly, in it together. And second, the moment you realize that the Rogue One characters aren’t in A New Hope. Instead, they’re on a planet with seven million Stormtroopers shooting at the rebels in general, a desperate weapons developer shooting at Jyn and Cassian, and, oh yeah, a giant superlaser beam aimed at them. Painful, yes, but if you can achieve that moment in the middle of an epic battle scene, that is good storytelling.

¹”I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.” This line probably gets more flack than it deserves, but it’s a pretty bad line, and even worse used completely out of context.

²Ring theory says that the story comes back to its beginning at the end. For the first six Star Wars movies, this would mean that A New Hope (episode IV) and Revenge of the Sith (III), The Empire Strikes Back (V) and Attack of the Clones (II), and Return of the Jedi (VI) and The Phantom Menace (I) parallel each other.

³Just as long as they don’t force it to the point where it looks like a college brochure, as in one smiling student of each race/gender artfully placed on a lush green quad with bright blue skies and ivied stone buildings in the background. Because that totally happens all the time, especially when you go to college in the northeast and your quad is buried in snow over half the time classes are in session.

⁴You can hear the part (two notes) I’m talking about at the end of “A Long Ride Ahead,” the middle of “Rebellions Are Built on Hope,” and the middle of “The Master Switch.”

Eating Ann Arbor, Part 2

Here are the rest of my Ann Arbor restaurant ratings (part 1 is here and includes my rating system):

8. No Thai (Thai) – I overheard a very heated conversation about this place last semester. The consensus was that the food is Not Thai. It’s not. When I went with my parents, we ordered pad thai and green curry. I’m not sure what we actually got, but there was a lot of it, and it was edible.
Rating: 1.5/5

9. Palio (Tuscan – Italian) – I paid this restaurant a visit with some ChemE friends during Restaurant Week when they were doing two meals for $28. For $14, we got an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert to share. The tomato soup I started with was good, but nothing too special. For the entree, I ordered the veal tortellini, which I really liked. There were mushrooms, I ate all the mushrooms, and I don’t even like mushrooms. Then dessert was Nutella bread pudding. Nutella. Enough said.
Rating: 4/5 (This was the most satisfying meal I had all month. Meat that wasn’t dry chicken, dessert, free bread, and special pricing.)

10. Panera (American) – I am aware that Panera is a chain restaurant found across the United States. I like Panera. They make good sandwiches.

11. The Lunch Room (American – vegan) – Did not pick this place. Did not realize it was vegan until after lunch even though the cream cheese in my bagel tasted nothing like cream cheese because it was cashew cheese. I also accidentally ate blue cheese once, so that should give you some idea of how my brain reacts to my taste buds. As long as you don’t expect the vegan substitutes to taste like their animal counterparts or insist on meat at every meal, you’ll be fine at The Lunch Room. I’ve heard their desserts are really good though I haven’t personally tried any.
Rating: 3/5

12. Tomukun Korean BBQ (Korean) – Ate here after the Ford Museum. I don’t know if it’s completely authentic, but I liked it. They have a variety of soups, noodles, stir fries, and hot pot, as well as bbq. If I remember right, we ordered an appetizer, an entree, and one order of bbq.
Rating: 3.5/5

13. Tomukun Noodle Bar (noodles) – Ramen is pretty good, though the noodles and ingredients come swimming in a sea of broth that’s on the salty side. It’s also a bit lacking in meat and vegetables. I’ve had better ramen back home in New England. I’d go here for an easy meal but would otherwise try another place since there are so many restaurants nearby.
Rating: 3/5

14. Zingerman’s (American) – On one hand, they make really good sandwiches. On the other, they’re just sandwiches. That cost as much as a fancy meal at other places. Zingerman’s is Ann Arbor’s famous restaurant, and they do sandwiches and everything else really well, it just feels overpriced because I can make a peanut butter and jam sandwich¹ for less than a dollar and be only slightly less satisfied.
Rating: 4/5 (food), 3/5 (value – still worth going to so you can say you’ve been to Zingerman’s, but some of their sandwiches cost more than half of my weekly grocery bill)

Overall, excepting whatever was going on at No Thai, I haven’t paid² for a bad meal in Ann Arbor. I’m not super picky about authenticity, except if I’m trying to get closer-to-actual Chinese food³. I also don’t eat out that much so I don’t mind paying a little more for my meals occasionally ($15-$20 – I'm a single grad student with no car on a stipend, so money's not tight, but I'm not running around throwing $20 bills around like confetti either). So far, I’ve been happy with the variety and quality of restaurants in Ann Arbor. The only things missing are Dunkin Donuts and a waffle place, then I would be completely satisfied⁴.

¹With good ingredients, by which I mean not the super economy sized jar of hydrogenated fat peanut butter, high fructose corn syrup jam, or low volume fraction white bread.

²We had these research ethics seminars last semester and one of the times they gave us pizza, it was pretty lousy pizza.

³Pro tips: Cheese is not a traditional ingredient in Chinese cooking. Throwing bean sprouts (or water chestnuts, or bamboo shoots) over eveything doesn’t make it Chinese. And spaghetti is not noodles unless you’re a desperate college student.

⁴With my eating-out food options. I still have plenty else to complain about, because I’m a chemical engineer.