NEDC Blog Post 2

Hey from DC!

Technically we are in Virginia, but we're just ten min from Our Nation's capitol.

Post will be brief-on Mom's pre, which is annoying to type on. Will publish better post tomorrow.

Woke up at 4 am to catch flight. One stop along the way. Met Peter, our amazing team capt, and his mom at baggage claim. We took the metro to the hotel, and found Kai along the way.

Checked into hotel @ 1:30, then went to Potbelly's for lunch. Came back to hotel and worked on our device (which included the ladies going to mall to find supplies.)

Kai worked on programming, so I couldn't do much with the glove (explanation to come), so I practiced violin.

Hotel lobby-skyped with old OHS friend, then Trevor arrived. We all went to dinner, came back to continue work on device. Sophia, with all her exuberance, showed up. We finished up the device and editing our presentation

Now I'm all cleaned up ready for some zzzzs.

more details tomorrow.

NEDC Blog Post 1

OK, all you nonexistent friends who read my blog with whole-hearted devotion. I'm going to Washington DC tomorrow for the Junior Engineering Technical Society's (JETS) National Design Engineering Competition (NEDC). I plan to update this blog with pictures and words while on the trip.

The past few weeks have been crazy. I would liken it to a death spiral, except instead of spiraling downward it goes upward, culminating in the NEDC Adventure with little plastic models of thumbalina, ramen noodles, and all the horrendous mementos from my childhood swirling around me, representing the everlasting circle of eat, homework, practice violin, and sleep.

(Please forgive my weird, sarcastic, and cynical descriptions. I've been sick and I'm just getting better. I think the evil little viruses have concentrated their missiles on a few of my precocious brain cells.)

Today mom and I sashayed our way to the Banana Republic for a little last minute shopping. I had a suit, but no shirt. The problem with Banana Republic is that there definition of "color" is a small splash of pink mixed with tonal greys and purples and tans. I'm as white as wonderbread, so bolder colors look better on my skin. Eventually, we found a top. It's blue and white, almost just like the shirt I bought with the suit years ago for my Bat Mitzvah.

I have to pack tonight, which I've barely started (DON'T tell my mum!), but that's OK since I'm a master at last minute tasks. Though secretly I'm masking a gnawing worry since mom and I leave tomorrow at 5 am.... no time at all to think of forgotten items...

I'm going to run. Mom knows I haven't started packing.

每逢佳节倍思亲

Love Song to Prufrock

Originally this scene was going to be all in pencil, but I couldn't resist a little color.

I've decided not to organize this blog by days, but other than that everything will be the same. My goal is still to have 201 posts by the end of the year 2010.

Today in English class we are reading TS Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock." The poem read merely for enjoyment is beautiful and provoking. Eliot has a wonderful way with concrete imagery. Some of my favorite lines:

"Like a patient etherised upon a table"
"sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells"
"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes"
"as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen"

I love how a surprising description sits in my mouth like candy. For class, of course, our reading is more cerebral. Here are some of my notes:

"Prufrock" criticizes and confronts modernity. Although the poem's form is a dramatic monologue employing stream of consciousness, Eliot has modernized the dramatic monologue by concentrating on Prufrock's interiority, rather than the audience. It is unclear who Prufrock is addressing, but it could be an interior monologue.

In "Second Empire in Baudelaire," Benjamin explains how Baudelaire is a hero of modernity. The hero's task is to define or come to terms with modernity. However, Prufrock claims that he is not a hero; instead he is the Fool (from Shakespeare's plays). Prufrock wans to obtain the ideal - a woman - but the pleasantries of modernity (tea and cakes, petty criticisms of appearance) are distracting and get in the way.

Prufrock is frustrated with the modern individual. He views the world as beauty with little substance ("sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells"). Instead, he wishes to be a crab, the scavenger who finds beauty in trash. This is similar to Baudelaire, who finds beauty in ugliness and is able to both praise and criticize it. However, Prufrock is stuck in limbo between two worlds - modern life, where his desires (the woman and aesthetic) exist but he is unable to move to get them and the world in which he is able to move, but is old and ugly.

Read entire poem here.

Day ??

1:55 - eye yai yai...

So.... I kinda fail at this blog. Not cool. I'll have to figure out what to do about all the missing days.

Eyes have always creeped me out. When you look at them from the side, they flick back and forth and the cornea sticks out. The eye doesn't look human. It nestles like a foreign body between folds of skin. In Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card describes digging out an eye like pushing through cottage cheese. Doesn't that make a wonderful mental image... an eye crumbling and dripping out of the socket in little clumps...

Ok, that's morbid. It's probably more like the consistency of those little plastic semi spheres that you push one end in, lay it on the ground, and then when it pops back the entire body jumps.

I'm very happy that my nikon's higher res allows for detailed pictures. All I did with this image was fiddle with the contrast to bring out the colors.

Day 19

1:22 - dead pens

I collect dead pens and pencils. It started when I began high school and decided to buy colored pens to color-code my classes. I hand wrote most of my notes, so I drained the ink from pens pretty quickly. I guess I find it really satisfying to see all the writing utensils that I've completely used up. 23 pens and and 10 pencils!

What odd things do you people collect?

Day 18

9:36 am - clean me!

I really need to clean the table...!

Day 17

11:36 am - bartle-doo?

Brother watching Mumbles, a character from one of our favorite youtube comedians, Ed Bassmaster. Ed's a great actor and he plays hilarious pranks on people while secretly filming them.

I can't say I've done anything quite like Ed, but while we were vacationing on Sanibel Island, my cousin and I decided to play a prank on Joey, who sells ridiculously priced hot dogs and sodas from a pontoon boat. Here's how it went:
Joey: Hello.
Me: 你好！ (ni hao, translation: hello)
Joey: .... half-smiles, confused
Me: 请你给我一杯可乐. (qing ni gei wo yi bei kele, please give me a cola)
Cousin: She wants a cola, and a sprite. (I had forgotten to ask for that too, haha)
Joey: still half-smiling in puzzlement, grabs the drinks, hands them to me That's four dollars.
Greg: 四个. (si ge, four)
Me: [hands Joey the money] 谢谢！(xiexie, thank you)
Joey: Uh, sure.
Me and cousin: run away giggling, totally not looking suspicious.

We came up with elaborate plans afterward, but didn't get a chance to carry them out. :(

Here's another prank I came up with and the boys carried out:

Cousin: What movie is playing tonight?
Hotel Receptionist: I think it's G-Force.
Cousin: Oh really? Isn't that the movie that got negative reviews because of explicit sexualization of female animals?
HR: .... Um, I don't decide. I just work here.

We were trying to get them to play a different movie, but it didn't quite work out. And according to my brother, who is a movie buff, it did get bad reviews because of the negative portrayal of female hamsters.... sad.