One other thing I meant to have noted from Mean Genes is the unusual fact about beauty. It talks about how the idea of beauty has changed over the years and one example it cites is the Miss Americas. Even though their sizes have changed considerably over the years, all the women have had one thing in common. Their waist to hip ratio has been between 0.69-0.72. So is Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Twiggy, and Elle Macpherson. No matter what your opinion of these women, I think that was an interesting fact. (And of course, the first thing I did was to measure myself and, yep, I am pretty much in that range, heh!) The book explains that women with that ratio are the most fertile, therefore most attractive.
I spent most of the day studying Japanese. It seem that the more I study, the more I forget. I can’t even remember basic words anymore. Maybe it’s time to stop. Not yet. Only one week left.
I used to avoid reposting links that are commonly available at the most popular logs and metafilter to not repeat the obvious, but I decided against that. A few months down the road, I might want to revisit a certain link and might not remember where I’d seen it and since this is my log, I figure it’s only fair that I put links that I enjoy. Just letting you know in case you notice the appearance of those.
I am totally addicted to Cosi sandwiches. I eat a real plain one with just cheddar cheese, lettuce and tomato, but I can eat this sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s incredibly delicious. I’m not sure if the stores are only in New York City, but if there’s one near you, I highly recommend you give it a try (or maybe not since they are so addictive.)
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Back in New York. I think the combination of severe allergies and extreme cold didn’t treat me so well.
One more week and I will get to relax for a few weeks. Yum.
I finished Mean Genes. If you’re interested in genetic behavior and whether our genetic makeup can be connected to the lack of ability to save money or lose weight, you might find this book interesting. For some reason, it was a long read for me but I really enjoyed the book. I can’t vouch for its accuracy or the data’s validity but it did give me some to think about so it was well worth my time.
Almost 20 days after the election and we still don’t have a president. I think the situation has gotten so ridiculous that the outcome doesn’t even matter anymore. Either way, people are going to whine and argue for the next four years. On the other hand, I’m delighted about the 50-50 senate. Especially if the presidency is gonna end up the way it looks like it will. I think it’s wonderful that the American public has been completely calm and willing to wait things out. Considering all the mess going on in the courts, I think the public has been amazing. If this were Turkey, I can’t say the public would have been equally sane. I’m still crossing my fingers for my candidate, tho…
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To all the Americans out there, Happy Thanksgiving. Make sure to take a moment to remember what you’re giving thanks for.
Jake and I are at Martha’s Vineyard and while it’s freezing here, I still feel the delight of being far away and relaxed. This is my fifth (or maybe sixth) Thanksgiving here with Jake and his family. Thanksgiving here is nothing like what American television depicts. Jake and his two brothers get along quite well with their parents. We spend most of the day in front of the fire (since it’s always freezing cold this time of year) and we chit chat, read, and mostly doze off. Often, a bunch of them go for a walk on one of the beaches and then we lazy around for a while more till we all sit for dinner. No TV here (actually they don’t have a TV in any house) so no football. Just good old fashioned family chats.
I remember these Thanksgivings always as calming and low key. Each time, I have an enormous amount of homework to do since Thanksgiving is about two weeks before finals time. Actually, last year, I remember thinking that one of the greatest things about working is that I didn’t have any homework over thanksgiving. But, this year, I do. Next week Sunday is my Japanese exam and once that’s over I’m all done for this semester. Pass or fail, I can take some time off and I must admit I need it.
I passed my Sign Language test! I’m on to level 7, except for they don’t offer it on a day I can take it next semester so it might have to wait till Spring. I have already started looking at next semester’s classes tho and I’m thrilled about this class on the human brain that NYU is offering. I’m so excited that such neat classes are offered and I can take them! I think I will prolly take the next level in Japanese too, but no more exams for a few more years.
Till then, I’m off to memorize those new words. I hope you have a most wonderful Thanksgiving and even if you’re not American, take a moment to notice things that you would give thanks for. We often take things for granted so it’s good to ponder for a moment or two.
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One of the greatest side effects of taking so many classes and learning so much is that you start feeling invincible about learning. The more you learn, the more you feel capable of learning. When I fist came to the United States, I was overwhelmed and intimidated by my classmates who seemed to have been born with a keyboard attached. Many of the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science students start programming well before they get to college. I, on the other hand, had never seen anything more advanced than a Commodore till the minute I stepped on campus. During college, I somehow figured out that the only difference between me and these people was a few months/years of experience that I could catch up to much more quickly that I’d imagined.
Since graduation, I took classes in Italian, French, Sign Language, Yoga, 3-D graphics, Art History, Novel Writing, Alexander Technique, and Japanese. At least six of those were subjects I’d never previously been exposed to. The neat thing is that the more classes I took, the more I got inspired to take. Next semester, I want to start learning how to play the saxophone, and take cooking and ballroom dancing classes. A few years ago, all of these would have sounded implausible to me. I have no ear, I am extremely clumsy, and I definitely can’t cook. The difference is that less than a year ago I felt equally hopeless about Japanese. When I got the offer to go to Tokyo, Jake and I opened the language portion of Encarta and listened to a voice pronouncing the first ten digits and I told him, “There’s absolutely no way I’m gonna learn that language.” Today, numbers are the least of my problem.
The more I learn, the less I fear learning. I feel powerful and invincible. I feel like the only difference between me and a doctor is that he chose to go to medical school and I didn’t. I feel that these options are available to me. If I wanted, I could be a lawyer or a doctor or a pilot. With the right amount of time and practice, I could be whatever my heart desires. Anything.
Isn’t that a neat feeling?
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I saw Bounce last night. If you haven’t seen this movie and plan to, you might not want to read on. I don’t think there are any major spoilers coming up but I can’t be sure so I thought I’d warn you anyhow. A quick peek at imdb will let you know that it’s about an advertising agent, Buddy, who gives his first class plane ticket to another passenger to do him a favor (and he wants to hook up with another traveler who’s stuck in an airport hotel for the night). The plane crashes and everyone dies. (All this is in the preview, so no spoilers) Buddy goes through some personal crisis and then start looking for the other passenger’s wife and family to subtly help them. As you might be able to guess, they fall in love, etc, etc.
Let me get to my point. At one point Abby, the wife, tells her best friend that she doesn’t want to be with Buddy she’d be with him cause her husband died and she doesn’t want to be doing that. Her friend, quite wisely, says, “Whether it’s Buddy now or another man one year later, you’ll be with him cause Greg died.” To me, that was one of the most brilliant lines of the movie, cause while her friend was totally right, I’d never thought about it that way. It made me realize how shortsighted I’d been.
The movie sparked up a lot of interesting thoughts in me about how every single choice we make affects our life. Most importantly, the choices we don’t make do, too. The path we decide not to travel and the options we pass on. Every single thing we do and don’t do has a bearing not only on our lives but possibly on many other people’s as well. Kinda freaky when you think about it…
My friend, Steven, emphasized a sad fact about my personality, recently, when we talked about my upcoming Japanese exam.
He asked, “So, what happens if you fail this exam?”
“Nothing.”
“So what happens if you pass?”
“Nothing.”
Talk about self-inflicted stress…
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Thoughts
Starting at age 11, I wrote in my diary every single day. So much so that my friends would make fun of me. To top it off, I was a very private person and shared my feelings with no one, which made these diaries even more precious. My friends would tease about having read them and I’d fly off the handle, as they wanted me to.
The greatest thing about having written years of diaries is that I can now go back and read them all. Amidst the childish blabber, I find some gems.
During the last years of high school and in the beginning of college, I used to ask people to write me letters. Handwritten ones. As much as they whined about it, I have all these amazing letters now. Trust me when I say that they are much more precious than email. I had this theory (which I still believe in) that people feel more comfortable writing things down as opposed to vocalizing them. Somehow when we write them down, things become easier to say. We can talk about our feelings and our disappointments, etc.
When you write things down, you don’t have to worry about the opposite party’s reaction. You don’t have to worry about their disappointment, lack of excitement, disapproval, anger, bewilderment or anything else. You just pour things out, writing to a faceless entity. I’ve found that this process makes people more honest, more open and more at ease. Don’t believe me? Give it a try!
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Just finished watching Frequency. If you can get past the unbelievable parts, it’s a neat story. It’s like a long Early Edition episode with lots of twists and turns. Overall, a good Friday night movie. It does bring up some interesting thoughts about what would happen if you had the ability to change your past. Would you?
Too tired to have pithy thoughts tonight. I think I am going to go to bed so I can get up and get some work done tomorrow.
I have some strong opinions about what weblogs are and are not but I will have to save them until I have time to sit down and type legibly. Let me just say that no one is allowed to tell you what you can or should put on your web page. It’s yours dammit. You get to decide all of its contents.
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My mother does house finishing. She goes to people’s houses after they’re furnished and gives them a ‘feel’ (yep, she actually gets paid to do that). A few weeks ago, she was asked to do a restaurant and we were very excited. She started really small, doing the houses of friends and grew bigger with the word of mouth and this restaurant was a great deal to me. She was really excited and spent a lot of time perfecting her vision for this place. The night before the arrangement, she brought all the paintings and pieces to the restaurant and went back home. That night, the place burned. Yep, burned. Well, mostly the attic, which was full of offices, burned but since the building is really old (a historical sight actually) they had to shut down the restaurant and they’re not sure if it will ever reopen. Amazing, how your life can completely turn around in a split second.
I was going to write a long diatribe about this but I decided not to. I am not on any list and I don’t personally know any of the people who are mentioned and I’m not sure I want to start some major thing, so I will keep my thoughts on the matter for now. But I might come back to it. If you have an opinion you want to share, you can post on the MetaFilter thread or mail me and I’ll be happy to share my thoughts privately.
I have an oral exam in my sign language class on Monday. (Yes, I do see the humor in that sentence.) It’s my final class for this level and my little story will decide whether I pass or fail. I am to come up with a 3-minute talk using the vocabulary learned in this class. The subjects we learned are; years (telling a life story thru years), different countries, describing shapes of objects, cooking related signs, and food related signs. If you can come up with a story using those, please please mail me. I will be eternally grateful.
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I had all these interesting thoughts today that I planned to write about and now I can’t remember any of them. That should explain how long my day was.
Millions of people have already linked to this 13 Myths About the Results of the 2000 Election story that Derek originally linked to at MetaFilter but in case you haven’t seen it, I wanted to make sure to point it out. One of the most interesting points, to me, was the 13th. I never really thought of that and it’s an interesting point. The entire piece is quite thought provoking actually.
I’m still reading the political issue of the New Yorker from a few weeks ago. Today, I read the Joseph P. Kennedy letters. They were beautiful. The two I found most touching were the ones relating to the deaths of Joe Kennedy, Jr.and Kathleen Kennedy Hartington. It seems he was quite religious. Even though I’m not, I liked his strong emotions and eloquent wording. Here’s the one he wrote to Kick (Kathleen) 30 minutes after he found out about her death:
To Kick:
No one who ever knew her didn’t feel that life was much better that minute. And [ the word probably with a slash mark through it] we know so little about the next world that we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves. We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves.
Here’s another part from a letter to Cissy Patterson, editor and publisher of the Wahington Times-Herald about Joe’s death.
I still find it very difficult to get over Joe’s death. God in His wisdom ordained so well that the young soon forget the sorrow of the death of older people, but I don’t think that the older people ever get over the death of the younger ones.
He also has a humorous letter to Teddy, correcting his broken English.
All in all, a very interesting read.
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So this afternoon I’m in a cab, going to class, down Broadway. In the middle of a stoplight, this woman opens my side of the door and looks at me as if I’m going to be getting off. I look at her with, “What the fuck’s your problem?” considering I was blocks away from my destination. She’s not fazed. She says “Where are you going? I need to go down to Wall Street.” The cabbie tells her to hop in on the passenger’s seat in the front and she does. Several more blocks and I’m at my destination where I pay my fare and get off. If this were Turkey, I wouldn’t have been surprised a bit, but in a city where people don’t even look at each other in the eye, the entire experience was all too strange for me.
While writing the next scene in my novel, I started thinking about shrinks and how the relationship is so one-sided. Here you are pouring your heart to a person whom you know very little about. You don’t even know if this person is married or has children. They never relay any personal stories of their own, yet you sit there and tell them every little thing about your soul. You pay them to listen and, hopefully, give you some clues into your problems and ways to find resolution. I’m sure this is no news to anyone, but it just made me think today.
In my art class, we looked at different paintings depicting the same story. It was interesting to see how the same biblical story was shown in so many different ways. Actually, the similarities were more interesting. The pose in which a character stood over and over again regardless of painter or period is really fascinating to me.
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If you’ve been here before, you might notice the small face lift. Feel free to let me know what you think. I have plans to add more to it, but I’ve been meaning to do the reorg for a while now, so I’m glad I finally got to it. I’m hoping this will motivate me to write the pieces I’ve been meaning to.
I can happily say that this has been a good weekend so far. I’ve written over 4,000 words of my novel and studied quite a bit of Japanese (not as much as I should have but still, I’m not complaining) and I got to do some of my redesign. On top of that, I went out to dinner with Jake and his parents last night and we got to see Mike and Steve today. All in all, a very successful weekend.
Last night, after dinner, the four of us walked over to the Empire State Building which is a few blocks from our house. If you ever visit New York, I highly recommend going there at night. Most tourists go to the building during the day, but the view is much better at night. Actually, it’s breathtaking. From that level, all the lights look like candles and the moving cars make a beautiful picture. I remember the first time Jake and I went up there and I saw the enormous Pepsi-Cola add. It’s so large that there is no way to ignore this terribly distasteful ad.
Checkout CNN’s election page. They took New Mexico’s electoral votes away from Gore but they forgot to decrement his “states won” section. It still says 19 states when it should say 18. Heh.
Apologies for not having an excerpt today, I still have several hours of writing and studying to do and it’s already almost 11pm here.
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Last night, Jake and I watched Hoosiers. A movie about coaching with Gene Hackman in the lead role. If you’re into sports movies, this is a true classic. It’s well acted both by Hackman and Dennis Hopper. It talks a lot about how close minded people are in small towns, a major reason I like living in the big city.
I spent the entire day writing my novel, literally. I started at 10am and wrote all the way till 5pm. It was draining but I wrote the most important chapter. I figure if I can write this chapter, I can write this book. So I think I can say that the day was successful. Yeay.
We also watched Microcosmos an amazing movie about insects. If you like animals as much as I do, you can’t miss this movie. I first saw it with my mother in London and I was so awestruck by it that I’ve been recommending it ever since. It’s truly a work of art. Trust me, you’ll love it.
I was talking to a friend the other day about the elections and he mentioned how different life would have turned out if Nixon hadn’t conceded in 1960. What would that have meant about Vietnam? Could Kennedy possibly still be alive if he hadn’t been president?
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projects for twenty twenty-six
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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