Leap Day

Writing in your blog on Leap Day is obligatory so here is my attempt.

Wednesday was my first pass for signing up for classes for Spring quarter. The original plan was this:

10:00-10:50 PIC10b
12:00-12:50 French 3
1:00-1:50 Math 33A
2:00-3:50 Linguistics 20

As predicted this plan has miserably failed, this time because 33A with Laub and Linguistics 20 were both filled by the time my pass started. Now it looks like it will be the following:

8:00-8:50 Math 33A
9:00-9:50 French 3
10:00-10:50 PIC 10b

and I will have to wait and see what is left for my fourth class.

Yesterday we entered the stairwell on the way to dinner and saw a bunch of inspiring post-it notes stuck to the walls of multiple floors. I photographed as many as possible but there were 2-3 that I missed:
Whoever is responsible is my new hero, though I suppose this goes without saying.

March 12 is my second concert as part of UCLA Symphony. This quarter's program is as follows:

Glinka - Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla
Lots of nostalgia of Sophomore year marching band with this one. It sounds quite good at the moment; the only problem is that we're not playing at the hilariously fast tempo that makes this piece worthwhile. Even more disappointing because one of the two recordings we were provided with by our director was selected exclusively for its tempo ("They barely hang on, it's remarkable.")

Debussy - Nuages and Fêtes from Nocturnes for Orchestra
The biggest disappointment on the program is that we are not playing the third movement, Sirèns, presumably because it requires 8 sporanos and 8 mezzo-sopranos. The irony in this is that this quarter we are being conducted by graduate conducting students of the choral director here. You would think that it would be easy enough for him to find some singers. The second movement is a bit worrisome at the moment, particularly the middle section which features the trumpets, who were still struggling with the part last I heard them (two weeks ago). But I don't have any doubts that they will have it ready by the performance, they are excellent players. I would have preferred to play Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune but playing any Debussy is an exhilarating experience.

Schubert - Symphony no. 9 in C major - "The Great"
At 2000+ measures and 55 minutes in duration, performing this piece probably burns more calories than most people's daily workout routines. We have not actually played it start to finish yet. The final movement has some very awkward arpeggios in the string parts which some of us still need to work on. I am consistently impressed by Schubert, whose music is far more romantic than his contemporaries: a larger emphasis on melody, with hints of chromaticism in multiple places, and to top it all off, trombone parts that are actually significant. It should be a fantastic performance overall (we have been promised pizza), though it will likely be difficult for our audience, which struggled through Shostakovich's 5th, to sit through. But it's definitely a very rewarding piece to perform.


Today in Calc we had another substitute; apparently Rogawski doesn't like to come on Fridays. At least this time she was somewhat comprehensible, though I was unfortunately half asleep for the entire lecture and couldn't take advantage of this.

Tonight we paid $2 to see No Country for Old Men in Ackerman. Though a little too intense for my tastes, it was quite good. It also has the creepiest villain ever.

I have also discovered my new favorite question from Who Wants to be a Millionaire?:

February

Maybe I remember things incorrectly but it has rained much more this winter than in previous winters. It was supposed to rain on Friday but it seemed to arrive a day earlier than predicted. A highly appropriate quote was Quote of the Day sometime last week:

"The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it."
- Patrick Young

On Thursday amidst my usual afternoon boredom I looked to the right and saw that it was raining like mad, which improved my day to an extent. But the best moment was around 2:45 PM when suddenly the clouds disappeared all at once and all that remained was the largest rainbow I have ever seen (this photo doesn't really do it justice but I like it anyway):
Yes, this is the view from our dorm room window. I know, I didn't think this kind of thing existed in Los Angeles either.


Orthographically awesome French words:

• créée - Feminine past participle of créer, to create.
• mangaient - Third person imperfect plural form of manger, to eat.
  

Phonologically awesome French words:

• semblable - Because "blab" sounds like "blob."

My computer struggles have finally been resolved, after more than a month, and I got a nice 45nm processor out of it too. The old, presumably defective E6600 is currently being sent to Intel; hopefully they will replace it.

The rest of February was mostly spent failing midterms. PIC10a: 60%. Math 32B: 61%. PIC10a's was four questions, one of which revolved around information he taught THE DAY BEFORE THE EXAM. So we hadn't gotten a chance to try it out in homework or anything so of course I had no idea how it worked. I could have gotten like 75-80% otherwise. Calc was disappointing because I knew the material well enough, but I made a bunch of stupid mistakes, like wasting 30 minutes getting angry that my integral was so messy because something possessed me into thinking that the derivative of 1/u was ln|u| (I guess I confused it with the antiderivative). Fortunately I fixed this one by the end of the exam, but similar errors were made on nearly every other problem. Round 2 of the midterms for these two classes are this week - both on Wednesday, actually.

College is too hard. I'm transferring to NASCAR Technical Institute:

Picture Post

Some odds and ends from the Ruby's trip near the end of Winter break:

Here are two prepubescent children eating at Ruby's together while simultaneously talking on their cell phones to completely different people. Not pictured: A third boy doing the exact same thing.

We returned to Claire's house and played our usual game of Scrabble:

Left: The final board. Yes, we played upside-down, we are retarded.
Right: The final score. Needless to say, I won.

Left: The story of everyone's lives.
Right: My foot picked a strategic moment to strike. Only Claire foresaw the doom that would befall them all.

Jerel was sifting through the clutter residing on top of the drawers by the TV. We were aware there was a lot of junk there but nothing prepared us for this decrepit banana:

This discovery posed several questions:
1. Who nonchalantly discarded this banana here?
2. Why didn't they eat it before it was a revolting putrid mess?
3. How are we going to transport this to the garbage can?

None of us remember leaving the banana here (but judging by its age this is not too surprising).

Several days later Cassandra was eating from a can of mixed nuts and Phillip decided he wanted some. They were lying lid-side-up on the floor. He grabbed the can but unfortunately it was upside-down and all of the nuts fell onto the floor:

Cassandra of course does not remember inverting the can, but how exactly can one set a can of nuts upside-down on the floor without everything spilling out anyway? Fortunately, this created the perfect opportunity for Phillip to vacuum the floor and me to be unhelpful and take pictures. Of particular interest was the knob on the front which enabled us to adjust the level of shag:


Using my new camera I finally managed to take a picture of a lovely commercial played often on GSN:

I can't speak for everybody but I was a huge fan of Alka-Seltzer before it came with mucus and congestion! Now it's like three in one! Awesome!!

This Tuesday I was walking up the hill to De Neve when some Asian guy started yelling "Fusion lunch!! FUSION LUNCH!" at me. Impressed by his assertiveness and intrigued by the prospect of Fusion Lunch (the next generation of dining) I took the little paper he was trying to hand me. Glancing over the paper quickly I discovered he was actually saying "Free lunch!" or maybe something involving Quiznos, and I inevitably thought of Phillip and Cassandra who are devoid of the willpower to resist free food. Then I looked a little closer:

Yes, you read that correctly. This can mean only three things:
1. To some people applying for a credit card is as casual an affair as eating a toasted sub.
2. Credit card companies have reached the least common denominator of incentive possibilities. Furthermore, they have to limit it to UCLA Students only, as if without this restriction they'd have too many applicants.
3. Fusion lunch will have to wait :[

Two new faces have been discovered:


Left: Remnants of way too many baguette sandwiches.
Right: A hilarious orange.

And let's not forget the two faces of Claire's purse thing:


We have started to see how many desserts we can smuggle out of the dining halls. Today's spoils included the aforementioned hilarious orange and thirteen delicious cookie bars:

Winter Break

One initial purpose of this blog was to prevent me from forgetting all the little things that I do that break the monotony of everyday life. I am displeased to announce that over winter break this blog has miserably failed to do this. So now in a bleak effort to remedy the situation I will write as much as I can about everything I can remember doing in the past few weeks.

On Friday, December 14 I attended my brother's orchestra concert. As always they gave an absurdly good performance for a middle school orchestra, though the experience was somewhat dampened by the middle school kids hiding in the back of the theater who think that it's okay to be loud during a performance.

Wednesday the 19 and Thursday the 20 were Northwood's winter concerts, which opened with a great example of Mr. Case's eloquent speech: "Hello, my name is Mr. Case!" (But we still love him.) The lower ensembles Wednesday night sounded better than I can remember them ever sounding prior, leaving me quite impressed. Thursday concluded with a suite of music from Home Alone which put me to sleep, though more likely the fault of the music than of the performers. The Philharmonic also played relatively well the second set of Malcolm Arnold's English Dances, which I am fond of. Other highlights of the evening were a gorgeous arrangement of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel by the Chamber Singers, and six movements of Vivaldi's Gloria by an alumni choir. But the most memorable segment of the evening was a wonderful performance of David Maslanka's Give Us This Day by the Wind Symphony, which unfortunately came first on the program. The concert series was fantastic overall and it is reassuring to see that the new instrumental directors are living up to the legacy of the first few.

Starting December 20 I was blessed with the task of caring for Claire's cat Shako while she was in Northern California. Being responsible for the sustenance of a living thing for an entire week and not seeing it even a single time is a bit odd. The only evidence I had of his subsistence was the gifts he left for me in the litter box.

Christmas Eve, which was held at our house for a much-appreciated change, lacked the extravagance of previous years. Only two of my relatives came to eat dinner with us. Dinner itself was a feast on Costco lasagna, a testament to the changing trends of modern life...

Christmas #1 was a triumph: I received a new camera, which is why the rest of this post will actually contain pictures. Other spoils include these lovely band scores (Not pictured is Samuel Hazo's Exultate). Though you probably cannot read it in this photo, a disturbingly hilarious disclaimer adorns the front of the Rhapsody in Blue score: "GERSHWIN is a Trade Mark of Gershwin Enterprises. GEORGE GERSHWIN is a Service Mark of Gershwin Enterprises. All Rights Reserved."

Christmas #2, which was at my Aunt's house, began with the horrors of the Electric Snowmen Holocaust. The rest consisted of sitting on a sofa for two people with three people, listening to my uncle talk about Japan, listening to my cousin talk about The Beast, and watching Nolan in his native habitat.

We then proceeded to my Grandma's for Christmas #3, which consisted mainly of taking pictures of people taking pictures and a dinner which was basically Thanksgiving #3. I also wound up with a hilarious abundance of Reese's Fastbreaks and Sun Chips:



My arteries thank me daily for having only scratched the surfaces of these.

On December 28 I went to Phillip's house. He had a giant cookie that said "Happy Birthday" except it wasn't anybody's birthday so we can assume that it was half price on the reject rack. The picture to the left shows the cookie's remains after Charles and I cut some fun shapes out of it. The main entertainment was Phillip and Cassandra sorting through his ridiculous mass of coins (yes, those are all quarters), which Austin and Charles did not consider to be entertainment and consequently left early. After this ardor our boredom was cured by our discovery that Phillip gets the Game Show Network here in Irvine. We saw a lovely commercial with a horrendously terrible CGI fox who was allegedly good for small business. Dinner was Round Table's new monstrosity, the Meat Ulti-Meat pizza, with a name so hilarious that we could not resist making Phillip burst out in laughter as he ordered.

On Saturday, December 29 Claire and I took the train and the LA Metro to see Wicked at the Pantages. I made the mistake of making eye contact with the hobo on the subway and he asked me for money. The theater of course was very nice and the sets and performance were amazing but it is definitely not my favorite musical. Afterwards we ate dinner at this place on Olvera Street whose name I still do not know.

I spent New Year's Eve with Claire; we watched Amélie, a wonderful film we watched in French last quarter, which I had given to Claire for Christmas. I ate this amazing See's Candy with butterscotch, and I demand more.

I think I have almost reached my limit in terms of how much I can rip out of myself at the moment. I am resisting all the cliché within me, urging me to write some grandiloquent ode to the new year, but I will relent enough to say this: as Claire said to me last night, it will never be 2007 again. But I have yet to decide whether this is a good thing or not. The timeless inner conflict: "Yes, I've had enough of this, let's move on" against "what I wouldn't give to do it all again."

Relatively Eventful Irvine Day no. 1

Returning to bass trombone after months of playing a wimpy F-attachment tenor is a euphoria as close to heaven as one can achieve here. Effortless low Ds and Cs, pedal tones that actually sound like something. I had the chance to experience this today for about 30 seconds and it could not have happened at a better time. Today's visit to NHS met moderate success; I would like to have watched Philharmonic rehearse a bit (I suppose the concert on Thursday will suffice), and we forgot to show Mamer the photos with us and Dennis Kucinich's wife. But these setbacks did not prevent all enjoyment - it was a nice kind of nostalgia today, a welcome escape from the bitter and unsympathetic variety that trips to Irvine often instill within me.

The usual trips to the reject racks of Ralph's and Albertson's followed, but sadly there were no amazing bargains to be exploited today.

Breakfast was Mimi's Café, where a waitress angrily spat, "Who got the Belgian waffles?!" I of course took several seconds to respond to this, confused because while I had indeed ordered Belgian waffles, I expected them to be served sans attitude.

Weather

Those merciless meteorologists are still attempting to convince me that it might rain today, that there might even be thunderstorms. But I've had enough of their backhanded trickery. I've been betrayed for the last time.

Club Sandwich and Shostakovich

I was going to attend the UCLA Symphonic Band's concert at noon today but ended up just going to lunch instead. Normally I would be feeling guilty about this, but today De Neve had the most amazing club sandwiches on thick bread, which I ate two of along with the remains' of my friends'. Another exciting development in the world of UCLA dining is that desserts are now labeled; finally we know (at least vaguely) what we stuff into ourselves twice daily. Time will tell if this is a permanent change and whether or not it is exclusive to De Neve. Today there was a dessert called "Chinese Chew," which I found to be a misnomer because there was nothing Chinese nor chewy about it. However I have no idea what I would call it myself; apparently the dining hall staff don't either.

Last night was my first concert as part of UCLA Symphony. The program included:
Mozart - Overture to Don Giovanni
Rheinberger - Concerto for Organ no. 2 in G minor
Shostakovich - Symphony no. 5

It was probably one of the most enjoyable performances I have ever given, deeply reminiscent of my first concert with the NHS Philharmonic and Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony in Fall 2004. Something about Shostakovich's 5th is immensely moving to me. It doesn't quite connect with me on the same personal level that Tchaikovsky's music does - but what it does do is create sympathy, perhaps because it is so difficult to imagine a more perfect way to capture the suffering of millions at the hands of Stalin than with this symphony. I suppose Shostakovich is more difficult for the modern audience to understand than someone like Tchaikovsky, with over-the-top crowd-pleasing lyricism beginning to die out and modernism setting in. Plus there were a few bumps and bruises in our performance, namely at the end of the allegretto, where a missed clarinet entrance nearly resulted in a trainwreck. Despite this I believe we succeeded in conveying the proper atmosphere. The largo in particular is just absurdly tense throughout; and our director did such a fantastic job conducting it and drawing us into the music that it seems impossible that a single person in the audience could have not felt it.