from the desk of stinkpot

blinded by desperation, i flung my hastily finished 20-page proposal into martin’s office early yesterday evening.

i’m finally done for the fall semester!

so much pent-up blogging, painting, and reading [and research, i guess] to do …

man, i remember now why i was so anxious to get out of undergrad.

end of semesters blow like a vacuum: papers, finals, and an all-nighter’s worth of problem sets to wrap up grading. on top of the research that you’re expected to be performing … clearly leads to friday nights painting the town red.

[note to self: never again volunteer to grade assignment that produces complex, stochastic output. (in other words, something that you can't use diff as a grading tool.) ]

to borrow a page out of one of my sleep-deprived 20.181 students’ e-mails, “i’m a sad (and sleepy!) panda.”

here’s a good eric-quote to take out of context:

“lawrence – you’re a pretty bad asian.”

[if there was an asian al sharpton, i'd be on the phone with him right now. i'd be demanding to know why he keeps going to that stylist who keeps dressing him in that creepy perm.]

as eric opened the door into his office today, i noticed that someone had slipped a red envelope under it.

me: “you better watch out eric – red means danger!”

our lab nemesis (we’ve been hoping to provoke one for some time) might have finally made the first move and declared war on our research group. i was hoping it’d be a joust.

in any case, i was fairly certain that a red envelope was a bad sign. think about it – only evil things paint themselves red: communists, republicans, devil worshipers, and those berries on your neighbors’ bushes that as a kid, you have to learn the hard way aren’t good for eating.

of course, it was immediately apparent to eric that the red envelope didn’t portend some kind of scientific doom; instead, it was actually an invitation to a chinese wedding.

the chinese, for some crazy reason, think red is a lucky color and so link it to auspicious events.

upon explaining myself and hearing eric’s deconstruction of the red envelope … [insert aforementioned eric quote here.]

good thing i didn’t go on to blurt out, “oh the lucky red envelope – i thought chinese new year falls around this time of year.” [it's not for another 2 months.]

slinking back to my cubicle, i thought, “how was i supposed to know these things?” i’m filipino dammit – where’s it written down that i’ve got to know about chinese lucky customs?

an extensive survey of the local filipino community (sample size of 1 christina), however, revealed that it is indeed common knowledge that red == good luck for the chinese. i was just being ignorant again.

sometimes, i feel like there was some universal memo that everyone gets to read around the time they get to middle school. in it are these sorts of universal facts: lucky chinese color = red; damon wayans and keenen ivory wayans are in fact brothers and not just 2 guys with the same stage names [only learned last year]; the stuff that makes your hair oily comes from your scalp, not from your shampoo [learned from a horrified christina 3 months ago]. needless, to say, i have yet to see a copy of this document. at least, i’ve got the small comfort of knowing christina has only read portions of it.

my favorite part of keeping a blog is scrolling through the archives and seeing the photos i’ve posted. it’s like watching a digital zoetrope. [took a lot of googling to find the name of those things!]

therefore, i’ve been very conscious of the dearth of recent photo postings. i’ve been snapping plenty of pictures – i just can’t seem to find the time to post them properly.

i’ve got some time now though to begin clearing my desk.

…

we caught the decemberists here in boston about 2 or 3 weekends ago at the orpheum. i’m in love with their “hyperliterate prog-rock” and their new single. it was the first time i’d heard them live – thankfully, they play and sing as well as they do on their cds.

luckily, i bought our tickets back in the days when i used to have good karma: we had amazing seats in the 8th row or so. i was able to take some wonderful pictures (especially considering how dark the place was!)

colin meloy’s indeed is a dreamboat. it’s hard to sail your eyes away from him singing in his rich, nasal (and yet somehow still mellifluous) voice.

although, given the opportunity to run off with one of the decemberists, it’d have to be jenny conlee. i’ve got this real soft spot in my heart for band members who passionately play their instruments out of the spotlight. and boy, did she play the piano, organ, and accordian with aplomb – from virtually behind one of the side curtains. sadly, those regions of the stage are rarely well lit.

being a TA is great: it provides so much fodder for this blog. (again, it’s starting to worry me how i subconsciously ascribe value to my life experiences according to their blog-ogenicity)

today in office hours, i found myself helping this sweet, somewhat bashful undergraduate student with her implementation of gillespie’s chemical kinetics simulator. to protect her privacy, let’s call her beth.

me: your coffee smells great – what is that?

beth: oh, that’s a soy chai.

beth’s friend sitting next to us: yea, she’s allergic to soy.

me: [confused] wait …

beth’s friend: beth only got 4 hours of sleep last night. she drinks soy when she needs to stay awake; the mild irritation helps prevent her from dozing off during the day.

—-

speechless and mouth agape, i suddenly noticed how sleep-deprived beth looked. quiet awe gripped me. i mean, i did an undergrad in engineering myself – i’ve seen kids binging on energy drinks and popping caffeine pills. allegedly, a friend of a friend even mixed ritalin and methamphetamines to produce the perfect drug cocktail for cramming [think OCD for reading textbooks].

but exploiting an allergic response to combat sleep deprivation – “the irritation prevents her from dozing off.” that’s badass.

[ there's this mild, playful air of masochism that floats above this campus and that all the students breath in. perhaps even more disturbing - you're conditioned to think that that atmosphere is beneficial, since more work gets done. hurm, and i'm only perpetuating it by glorifying a student's (mostly benign!) self-injury. bad TA, bad! ]

TA’ing 20.181 is often a joy.  case in point, lecture today.

drew endy: software engineers trying to outrace hardware engineers and moore’s law are like john henry trying to beat that tunneling machine.

student: who’s john henry?

drew endy: [slightly at a loss for words] … oh, you know, there was this mountain and there was this machine trying to dig through it … and one man was trying to stand up to them.

student: [with growing understanding] oh yeah, that was the matrix!

fittingly, even the class ended on a confused note:

drew:  “i shouldn’t have told you about those nuclear weapons lab simulations.”
[mind you, this is a biological engineering class.]

ugh. lost keys sometime before we went home this past weekend. thought i’d find them when i got back to my apartment.

i didn’t.

now, all sorts of worst-case-scenarios running through my head. (most involve psychopaths using the internet to find my address. you see, there was a scientific poster with my name on it stored on the usb key attached to my keychain.)

i know exactly how i earned the bad karma responsible for this mess.

i don’t think i can sleep with the previous post being my last of the night. recounting what happened last night has been in of itself a little traumatizing.

to return balance to the universe, i submit two of the cutsiest photos i’ve taken in months. in fact, if cute was measured in adipose cell counts, these photos are like starr jones (prior to the stomach stapling, of course.)

some background: we finally sold our beloved fish the other week. now, we’re proud owners of 4 adorable gerbils. they’re all sisters.

since she studies at home, christina probably spends more time talking to these gerbils than she does to me on a daily basis.

(for now, they’re still “the gerbils” – they’re “purebreds”, which means we can’t tell them apart. and yes, yes, we did in fact drive an hour each way to buy purebred gerbils. they were cheaper! in any case, we’re currently soliciting name suggestions that don’t draw inspiration from national steak sauce brands.)

it was late yesterday evening when i stepped out of office hours to take a call on my cell phone.

absentmindedly milling through the empty halls of parsons, my peripheral-vision suddenly started banging on the doors of my brain. i turned and looked through one set of windows into one of the graduate student mini-cube farms. and sure enough, i saw what my peripheral vision had been screaming about – a giant vagina on someone’s lcd monitor.

someone was looking at porn in the lab!

completely flustered, i ended my call mid-sentence and staggered back into office hours.

“guys – you won’t believe this, but someone’s downloading porn next door.”

5 minutes, 1-dubious-co-TA, and 2-confused undergrads later, it was confirmed: a grad student was watching porn in parsons.

this is madness. as a lab-mate of mine rightly put it – a sacred social contract binds everyone in our building. in exchange for the opportunity for research collaboration and the enjoyment of one another’s company we give certain things up, like the right to eat smelly foods at one’s desk or the right to have a loud personal cell-phone conversation in one’s cubicle. you don’t want to go about making your neighbors uncomfortable.

last night, someone took a giant dump on our beloved social contract.  (he peed on it a little too – i noticed him a couple of months back not wash his hands in the bathroom.  ewww.)
[ i feel like a magnet for this kind of stuff. a couple of years ago at columbia, i caught a perfectly normal looking adult man eating peach popsicles and watching porn on a public computer terminal in butler library. well, caught is probably the wrong word, since this fellow had his back to at least a dozen other horrified students; i don't think he was trying to hide anything.
what's with you people?! perhaps you consider it some kind of performance art, where you delicately play voyeur and exhibitionist at the same time? well, both last night and at columbia, you left me speechless.]

my missed connection yesterday:

while shopping for eggs and tikka masala sauce at shaw’s last night, i saw an old man in the pie section. he was tall and a blue cotton denim jacket covered what i could tell used to be broad shoulders; he must have been very strong as a young man. his face had aged well also: it was still rugged and bony. he looked a little like jack palance.

covering his thick white hair was a blue cap. written on it in bright yellow stitching was “uss lionfish” – below that were the years the boat was in commission. i didn’t get a good look at them.

i hadn’t seen a hat like that in years. my grandfather, lolo nick (filipino for “grandpa nick”) used to wear a hat just like it.  as he began to walk away, i realized that i really wanted to tell the old man:

“excuse me sir, you wear a hat just like my grandfather used to wear.”

lolo nick died last year and outside of my immediate family, i hadn’t really spoken about it with anyone, partially because he was a funny character who was a bit hard to explain. a lot of his stories though, revolved around his 30 (or was it 40?) years spent as a cook in the merchant marine service.

in any case, i suddenly thought that this complete stranger would understand everything.  it’d be like talking to my grandfather again.
i tried thinking of all the ways i could gain his attention. it being veterans day, i suppose i could have just walked right up to him and said “thank you.”
but i’m too shy to do something like that. i just tried standing next to him, hoping we’d make eye contact. when that failed, i tried waiting for him near the checkout registers – people love to small-talk while the cashier-cog slowly turns. i even waited a bit for him outside of the store – i often see old people walking home with their groceries. i could give him a lift.

instead, i saw him last as i pulled out of the parking lot. he finally appeared in the checkout line as i drove past the supermarket.

i’m still really disappointed i never said hello to him.  this always happens – i over-analyze stuff too much during the moment and miss out.