I haven’t posted in a long time so I will just flood you with pictures of a cute doggie.

My cute doggie, to be exact. This is Jakie. He’s a ten-years-and-eight-months-old golden retriever who thinks he’s still a puppy. Despite the fact that his hips have gradually succumbed to arthritis, he loves hiking, swimming, and begging for bread. He’s very good at begging for bread because he knows who exactly in our family can’t resist him.

Jakie is exceptionally tolerant of my sister and me putting random junk on him. Like the blanket she made him for Christmas or my mom’s hat and sunglasses.

He also does the sad puppy face incredibly well. I know. I only learn from the best.

Regularly scheduled posting will resume…later.

Final streeeetch!

There are fourteen days left until I fly back to California for a much-needed break from this whole MIT madness. In these fourteen days I have:

• One three-page paper, 1.5 spacing, written in Chinese about the change in China’s societal structure as reflected by clothing of different eras
• One ten-minute Chinese presentation on the same topic
• One take-home Chinese exam, in which I have to translate the phrase “cultivation and molding of humanistic spirit, and the harmony of traditional and modern cultures” into Chinese. I don’t even know what that means in English Please don’t tell me what it means (that’s cheating :P), but feel free to laugh at it.
• One 7.10 pset, which should not have existed (as per the syllabus).
• One 7.23 final.
• Two piano recitals, during which I will be performing two different Bach concertos. I love Bach. He is my 17th century lover. (Sorry, Bobby. You didn’t exist bach then. HAHA FUNNY TYPO. I will leave it as is.)
• One ATS Xifan Sunday
• One TKD banquet, during which all the freshmen and/or new team members will present a skit roasting the seniors and instructors. I helped write it. It includes song and dance. It will be epic.
• One TKD cup party. (Did I mention that we won the league cup? No? WE WON THE CUP! IT IS, ACTUALLY, A VERY LARGE CUP. OF THE DRINK-OUT-OF VARIETY, NOT THE PROTECT-YOUR-GROIN VARIETY. I had to explain this to someone Michelle two days ago. Made for an interesting conversation.)

So basically, Chinese owns my soul, Bach owns my heart, and ATS+TKD nourish my (empty, empty) body.

Also, I’ve been eating yogurt + a crushed Nature Valley granola bar anda  Sabra pretzel chips + hummus cup for lunch every other day for the past week or so. It is delicious and nutritious and I don’t think I will ever get sick of it. Until I’m back home in California eating my mommy’s delicious cooking and wondering why the hell I ever put those things in my mouth.

Also also, I’m not sure why I only blog on Tuesdays.

Not the day to wear my good jeans…

The list of things they are now stained with includes but is not limited to:

• soy sauce
• almond tofu…juice
• coconut milk
• oil
• water
• red bean soup
• milk tea
• dirt and dust from our storage closet

Essentially everything event mildly liquid-y that ATS served at Strait to Taiwan yesterday, and then some. Annually, this is the most exhausting day of the year, but annually, it is also one of the most rewarding. When I hear people say “You guys should do this every day!”, I’m filled with an intense sense of pride in ATS, because this is an event that best showcases what the club is capable of. Sure, there are always setbacks (like us blowing every single fuse in the entire building and Facilities taking forever and a half to reset the circuit, thereby putting half of our booths out of commission for the better part of the morning…no I’m not bitter at all what are you talking about), but our ability to work through them is a hallmark of everyone’s leadership skills. I’m especially proud of the new exec members who’ve come so far, from being absolutely clueless about event planning to captaining an event as monumental as Strait to Taiwan.

Someday, years down the line when I come back to visit after graduation, I’ll be on the other side of the booth, waiting in line with tickets in hand for a grilled tofu kabob. Until then, though, I’ll have to remember not to wear my good jeans on Strait to Taiwan days.

Getting into MIT in the olden days + puppies

An old pistol team captain linked me to an exam that students had to take to get into MIT back in 1869. I wonder how well you’d have to do on them, because I’d fail the English one (linked at the bottom of the page) for sure. It’s interesting how different “general knowledge” then and now are.  Who the hell knows the area of England, anyway?

In unrelated news, Bobby took me to Cape Cod this weekend and it was cold, windy, and glorious. There were golden retriever puppies involved. I didn’t even attempt to contain my excitement.

“Live like you mean it”

That’s what the sidewalk told me to do on my way to class this morning.

I think you should, too.

(I’m in a really good mood because the sun is out and the chill is leaving and I can taste spring.)

The future

I’ve always wanted to be a veterinarian. I’ve always wanted to help animals. People. Things. When someone with an armful of groceries drops their car keys on the ground, I pick them up. When a stray cat is wandering around in the rain, I feed her and plug in a heater for her in my garage. When my stuffed animal falls off my bed, I put it back up because, really, they have feelings too.

It seems natural, then, that I would go into a profession in the healthcare field. To put it simply, all living things are happiest when they’re healthy. I’d like to keep them healthy. And I love animals (probably the most over-used three words in veterinary school application history, but that doesn’t make it any less true). I want to be a Veterinarian Without Borders and go to third-world countries and provide free medical care for otherwise neglected animals.

But I’ve been cooking and baking a lot recently and I’ve come to realize that I love food, too. Reading food blogs and watching Ace of Cakes has lit a little flame inside me saying HAY, MAYBE YOU WANT TO BE A PASTRY CHEF WHEN YOU GROWS UP. I’m a third-year biology student at MIT following the dream she’s had since she was a kid. What the hell am I doing having dreams of cookies and bread and three-tiered wedding cakes? Delusions of grandeur, for sure.

And yet.

My internship this summer at the NEA is only three days a week. For the other four days, I was originally planning on volunteering at the MSPCA and continuing my UROP in the Ploegh Lab. Maybe…maybe I’ll try to get a part-time cashier job at Flour Bakery or something for two of those days. After all, there will still be a need for pastries when I retire.

(By the way, check out Flour’s head chef’s bio on the website.)

Success!

Yaay! The New England Aquarium in Boston accepted me as a summer intern in their Animal Medical Center! Validation! I am not useless! Exclamation mark!

In all seriousness, I’m really excited to be spending summer at the NEA. The stuff they do is really interesting, and the aquarium itself is pretty cool. It’s tiny compared to the Monteray Bay Aquarium back home, but they have pengiuns, jellies, sea turtles, and tons of fish (obviously). Plus, I really wanted to spend one undergrad summer in Boston, and this is my last one (omg).

On a related note, I’m interviewing to be a summer RA for Next House tomorrow. MIT has an RAA (resident associate advisor) program during the school year which pairs an undergrad with a professor to advise a group of freshmen for their first semester. I’ve always wanted to be an RAA, but have never been able to make the time commitment. Summer RAs are slightly different because there’s no academic aspect, but it’s still an awesome opportunity.

Random: I love falafel. So. Much.

Why, no, I didn’t fall off the face of the earth

I was actually on a cruise to the Bahamas with fifteen of my ATS lovelies for spring break. Pictures are forthcoming.There was sun and sand and water and food and….

Oh, the food. Good lord, the food. There was a buffet open for breakfast and lunch with a surprisingly large vegetarian selection, plus a pizza bar open until 3am with enough cheese and tomato sauce to satisfy late-night cravings. Dinner was a gourmet ordeal — three courses with the option of ordering more (an option that most of our male contingent took to heart). Admittedly, there wasn’t always a choice for my entree, but the desserts more than made up for it. Tiramisu, cherry jubilee, chocolate cake, key lime pie, and more ice cream than you could shake a spoon at. Also, there was a cold fruit soup appetizer every night that, aside from the first evening’s watermelon-and-tomato oddity, was always very tasty. There was a pear soup the second evening that was essentially pear-flavored applesauce. Why nobody has yet marketed pear-flavored applesauce, I still do not understand.

Aside from stuffing our faces, the sixteen of us also jetskiied, parasailed, and generally chillaxed all over the place. The cruise docked in Nassau, Bahamas; Coco Cay (a private island owned by the cruise line); and Key West, FL. It was really windy the first few days, so we wore jackets over our swimsuits and only entered the (cold!) Caribbean waters with hesitation. However, Key West was a spring break dream come true. Gorgeous weather, a cute window shopping district, and an extremely chill Australian ex-pat surfer with the most adorable boxer mix doggie. He was a self-employed painter from New Jersey who decided to road-trip down to Florida for a vacation with his adopted rescue dog. We first started talking to him because we wanted to play with his dog, but ended up chatting for awhile about weather, high-strung people, and places we’d like to travel. In Key West, I had a second jetski adventure (after the first in Coco Cay) during which I saw a sea turtle and fell into the ocean after an uncontrolled jump (the two incidents are unrelated). My third large purchase, after a Steinway Model D and a Kawasaki Ninja 500, when I become a Real Person Earning Money will be a jetski.

We returned to Boston at 4am on Saturday morning. It was frigid. Today, it is raining. Sigh.

Awesome and not so awesome, but not in that order

For the past week or so, I’ve been sick, sick, sick-nasty sick. Fever, sore throat, runny nose, nausea, exhaustion, etc…I had them all covered. I do hope it goes away by this weekend, because I don’t particularly fancy sparring or trying to cheer people on at TKD collegiate nationals in my current state.

I woke up from a nap today to find an email in my inbox from my 7.10 professor saying that he missed me in lecture and asking if everything was okay. In a class of maybe forty or so students, he knew my name AND my face AND that I wasn’t in class. Granted, I had him for a class last semester, but isn’t he the most awesome professor ever? Besides caring about his students, he’s also incredibly energetic about everything he teaches, be it protein filtration or deriving Le Chatalier’s principles. My favorite professor at MIT, f’sho. Little ones, take note: take as many classes with Professor Yaffe as possible!

And now, to bed. Go immune system, go!

When mirrors attack

Today’s xkcd is awesome.

I have an unnatural fear of mirrors that stems from fourth graders playing Bloody Mary in the bathrooms at Weibel when I was a first grader and watching too many scary movies involving reflections having lives of their own. I’m terrified that if I look in the mirror for too long, my reflection’s going to walk off without me or reach out and stab me in the eyes or something.

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! Try not to get murdered by your reflections today.