I really got a sweet bolster late last night, in the form of a rough sketch featuring one-third of a projected trilogy of ambigrams from my Love. The words are from the title of one of my favorite poems of all time, a villanelle that she wrote for me last fall. Mmm … what can I say .. she’s amazing ^^. Tonight, after I cook dinner, I shall work in earnest to complete a strange little wall-ornament for her I’ve been dying to make for a few days now.
Archive for June, 2007
Having recently backed up this blog, I’ve realized that it has amassed more than 600 pages in standard double-spacing. That makes it by far the longest story I’ve ever written. I sometimes wonder – what if I had spent that writing potential writing a single coherent effort? Wouldn’t it be better than having a lot of small fragments that will never have any continuity and that will never be published? And yet, I don’t think I regret it, spending my time and words writing here, because it preserves the memory of the life I know best, the feelings that I understand first-hand (or don’t understand .. first-hand ..). And no love story I create could ever match the beauty of the love over which I only have half a say =P.
Sometimes, you unexpectedly meet someone who changes your life forever, though you will never see that person again, and it’s in the most unexpected of places with that person under the guise of a perfectly ordinary passerby. And then you start talking, and something begins to resonate beautifully – you begin to see the person’s dreams and every word makes up a melody where formerly you could barely understand a word that person was saying.
Today, my last shift at my old volunteering job, it happened, just in the space of forty minutes. The building’s traffic was winding down, with not many new patients around, so I sat down for the second time with the voluble Ecuadorian immigrant I had spoken to – or mostly, listened to – a few weeks back. Evidently, she remembered me as vividly as I remembered her.
She began with a lament as last time, with the witty summary: “It’s expensive to live, and it’s expensive to die.” Sixty dollars for a bottle of eye drops that turned out to be the same size as a sample that her doctor gave her; $240 for four pills (a month’s worth) to treat osteoporosis. And as last time, she reiterated her homesickness and desire to return home, where she had not visited for 20 years. But her legs – and now her eye – might be keeping her here.
It was at this point that the conversation began to change. I had never known why exactly she wished to go back to Ecuador, and finally she began to talk at length about it. She told me how there were so many poor people in her home town, and how there were so many old people who couldn’t get from place to place anymore.
She told me about how the rich are always going on vacation to this country and that, all for fun and leisure, seemingly ignorant of the tragedies befalling so many people. “If only they could give me a sewing machine … I could sew overcoats for the women and work shirts for the men.” And she went on to tell me about her grand dream of heading up a new church with a big bell on top, that would cook meals and give free juice during ceremonies and have a space for weddings; that would care for orphans and transport the elderly who lost their means of going to church. There would be a rotation of movies played as well in LSC style, with one comedy for the kids and one serious movie for the adults, but only once a month since it’d probably cost money, and people don’t have that much money to spend on leisure. She even talked about bringing warm meals to the inmates at jails, along with sending prayers, so that perhaps the warmth might bring back the misguided people to goodness.
And she talked about community, too: how, in the United States, neighbors are so distant, sometimes complete strangers. How no one goes next door to ask, “Hey, how are you doing?” on a regular basis, how no younger ones come to stay and take care of the elderly. How she only asked one favor out of her neighbor – to bring her a bottle of milk – and the neighbor forgot. She reminisced on the closeness of family and community in her childhood, and smiled at the thought of having people over and such if she ever could find a new home.
All this generosity and goodwill … coming from a woman whose savings have been plundered by those she trusted, and who still must work despite her obvious old age and frail health because of repeated taxing (esp. by the Reagan administration, she noted, if ironically). From a woman who is not some rich entrepreneur looking for something fun to invest in and make her name famous for. She said she didn’t want her name associated with any of it – just the church – for she feared for her own safety if others thought she was rich.
But the contrary, she is not rich at all. When she finally stated how much money she had to her name, I almost froze. The possessions in my room alone total to a greater sum. And yet she never once mentioned something she wanted to buy for herself, except a home with a big kitchen – and even then, that would be for cooking meals for others. She never once said she hated those who had cheated her out of her money – the Lord would take care of that.
But I nearly cried when I heard all of this, because there was a twinge of “Death of a Salesman” in the whole dream … because it might never come true. Because poor health and dwindling savings eaten away by huge medical costs and a terrible insurance plan might prevent her from even stepping on the plane. Because maybe the rent money supposedly saved up by her niece might have all been spent already. And it was really then that it hit me, how much is left to do in this world that may seem to some to be already perfect and quite a nice place to live in. I realized that kindness is not just taking your family on a trip or giving a birthday gift to a friend, it’s also seeing the bigger picture, of never giving up on the possibility of bringing happiness to people you don’t even know, and maybe even people who have wronged you.
If an elderly woman with damaged knees, osteoporosis, and an infected eye, who finds cell phones and air conditioning to be luxuries, can still believe in the dream of building and giving happiness to those who need it most, I sure as heck better believe, too. Her accent was thick, her English broken … but every word that she uttered was crystal clear to my ears.
So I had a can of half-eaten pineapple; stuck it in the fridge for safekeeping … but the fridge was so cold, it froze! Oooooh what a nice dessert ^_^
There were lots of things I wanted to write about but I just … didn’t … ahaha! It’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? Today was the first time in a long while that I worked 9 hours. Hmm, it’s not really that much, but considering how I am so used to the thought of getting work done outside of lab, it’s a lot. Dinner will always take around 2 1/2 hours now taking cooking, eating, talking, and washing into account; however, I feel like it’s going to be a really enriching experience, and it’s definitely good for the soul to enjoy dinner at an actual dinnertable. I think I’m left with something like 3 hours in the evening to myself, plus whatever down time there is during lab. Today, I actually had very minimal downtime, and that which I did have, I spent trying to learn how to make GUIs in MATLAB. Hmm, it’s easy to make something visually appealing, but it’s not intuitive how to me how they want me to assign the functions …
Tomorrow, I hope to switch my volunteering time out from Tuesday so that I can finally enjoy a normal, uninterrupted work schedule. I’m trying to adjust to summer, but it seems harder than before to do so. I finally sent out my first e-mail as MIT’s blood drive volunteer coordinator. It’s .. not exactly a taxing position, but it’s important to be timely and organized. I am planning on adding an extra task to my job, which is to keep track of how many hours everyone is volunteering. I always wanted to know, but no one kept track at all, which made me sad.
A very generous labmate is willing to give me one of her many comforters ~ I was telling her this morning how I somehow get so cold at night because my blankets are so thin, and it’s keeping me from waking up since I just keep huddling in. I’ll probably be doing my laundry tonight, anyway, so it’ll be no problem to throw a comforter in for the ride as well.
I straightened out my desktop yesterday, so now it boots more quickly and has more programs working on it. I just have to somehow transfer my listening music there so that I don’t have to listen to the same songs over and over again :).
Mm, I was thinking, and this is sort of back to the first topic again (ahaha, this post isn’t very organized, is it? Well …), sometimes I feel a little sad at the lack of tutorial help I get from teachers/peers/TAs. Hmm, maybe I just don’t ask that often? Nevertheless … . I really appreciate great manuals, but honestly most manuals suck. MATLAB’s help included. It’d be nice to actually have someone teach MATLAB (and no, 10.10 and 20.320’s weak attempts at doing this don’t count – actually, by oversimplifying things, they did a lot of damage).
You see, the fastest way for me to learn how to make GUIs is not to stare at their metric to U.S. units / density converter code which is just sitting there with incomprehensible comments. There are exactly 2 things I need to know: (1) what is the proper syntax for referring to variables and storing them (including which property in the endless list of properties is actually its “name” rather than its display name), and (2) how I make the output of one action/object affect other items on the screen. I feel like whenever I ask people (teachers, friends) for things like this, they either cite an elementary example or direct me to a help page or something. I suppose that’s why I’m reluctant to ask in the first place.
Is it that hard to make a *general* statement? If I were to explain the particular for loop in matlab to someone (assuming they know what a for loop is), I’d say “for (your counting variable)=minimum value:maximum value (jumping by 1’s, or min:max:num to jump by num) [next line] whatever you want to do, which may utilize your counting variable [last line] end.” That way, you can always construct a new for loop and not lose track of what everything means, and you don’t end up making every for loop iterate over i or go from 1 through 10.
And also, when I was taught the plot function, I was told to do plot(x,y,’b-‘,x2,y2,’c-‘). No one ever told me you could edit a plot in the figure window. No one ever told me that plot has THOUSANDS of alterable options. So for years I was doing the stupid plots that you can barely see and that can only have 8 lines ’cause there are “only 8 colors.” After chucking all that BS into the trash, I’ve relearned how to plot and I can cycle through visually appealing colors using simple colormaps and the ‘Color’ property. Who the heck wants to look at cyan, yellow, or magenta lines on white background?! I sure don’t, and I cringe every time I see a graph that has those invisible lines on them.
One entry in my memory is one entry. plot(x,y,’b-‘) and plot(vector1, vector2 (equal length to vector 1),’Color’,[R G B (0 to 1)],’MarkerType’,’name’, etc. etc.) take essentially the same time to learn (actually, the ‘b.-‘ business was confusing as HECK for me because they use the same symbols for markers and line type, so I got the orders mixed up). I’m not living in some RPG, where I have to use a paper towel roll, then a stick, then a pipe, then a bokken, then a sword. I’d rather start with a small sword, then go to a larger one, then a larger one still. That is, I need to perceive the essence first, then the details are filled in. If I’m not going to use paper towel roll techniques when I become more experienced, I have no interest in wasting my memory learning about them.
KNOWING that I can put in ANY property into the plot function is *most important* to me. Knowing that ‘Color’ is one of them is secondary – I can look those up in help at any time, but if I’m ignorant that the properties exist in the first place, why would I even look in help for them?
One of the greatest pains for me in learning anything is the fact that so many teaching approaches want you to start within the first floor. Then you go to the second. Then the third.
What I want to do is start outside, see the whole building, go to the front door, learn which floors have the same layout, know where all the bathrooms are, and then start going floor-to-floor. Doesn’t that make sense? I’ve wasted three years learning in MATLAB what should have taken only a month. Why? Because they told me to open the program and start typing math equations, line by line.
This is what I *wish* they had said.
“MATLAB, which stands for matrix laboratory because of its strength at handling very large matrices (in any number of dimensions), is a program consisting of many built-in mathematical and analytical functions such as curve-fitting, image analysis, statistics, etc. To take advantage of these capabilities, the user has the option of using command line interface, programming scripts and functions, viewing and tweaking graphs and figures, and using GUIs. All of the latter can be created through a simple text editor. There are three main types of files, .m files (MATLAB programming language text files), .fig files (figures, graphics, and GUI layouts), and .mat files (matrices). MATLAB can be used in conjunction with external devices with which it exchanges data, such as robotics or atomic force microscopes.”
I’m sure some of you could write better, but you know what, I would’ve been happy with that. More than happy. I would have LIKED MATLAB instead of avoiding it like the plague. What I got instead was basically: “MATLAB is a program that lets you approximate the integrals of ODEs to compute how much chemical comes out of a reaction over time. You can also plot things kind of like how you plot them on a graphing calculator. Oh, and you can do 2-D matrix algebra, too.”
I should not have been shocked to see 3-D and 4-D matrices. I should not have been shocked to learn that MATLAB could be applicable to biology. I should not have been shocked to learn that strings can be part of a matrix.
But I was.
Good teaching is putting together everything conceptually so that you can present a finished painting to a student and not just a corner of a pencil sketch.
My friend from Harvard stayed over for a whole week, and it became so routine: he’d wake up while I was still dreaming and clang around for a bit before leaving while I’d be staring blankly out of bed; then I’d get back around 6 and wait for his phone call to let him in, and then we’d cook together, intermittently talking to the other crew that’s always down in the kitchen cooking chicken / onions / jello. We made … pork chops + carrots & scallions (plus broccoli), spicy curry, lemon-pepper chicken with Chinese celery, tortelloni (pre-made), and teriyaki salmon with bamboo/onion/cauliflower. It’d be around 8 or 9 when we finished washing all the dishes, and then I’d hop on the computer and watch anime or talk to my girlfriend (who’s far away for the summer, alas ..) while my friend would read manga (I swear, he read Azumanga Daioh 20x through … he claims it was only 2x, though). And then he’d take a shower and go to bed at around 11; I’d stay up til 12:30 or 1, completing the vicious cycle of staring blankly as he would clang around in the morning anew.
Now that there’s just a big gaping hole in the middle of my room, I can’t help but feel like it’s a little bit empty in here …
Another UROP in my lab has gotten me into playing this game … you just try to make words from a set of 6 letters. If you get one or more six-letter words, you can advance to the next round, so that is the main priority. The other words earn you extra points. My high score is 15,960 … let me know if any of you guys beat that ^___^.
[Edit:] Well, that was quick ^^. My Love went ahead and pulled off the rather “sexy” *wink wink* score of 20,860. @_@ whoot~! You go girl ^___^
Maybe the morning shower is what causes morning blogging … . Anyway, I wanted to highly recommend an old anime/manga called “Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou” (YKK for short). It’s a post-cataclysmic story set in a semi-submerged Japan, but rather than creating a world that is dark, gritty, and anarchic (God, I almost just wrote ‘apoptotic’ …), it conceives of collapsing humanity as one looking back on itself with optimistic nostalgia. Like an elderly person accepting his/her inevitable death, humanity and its creations (robots, vehicles, etc.) try to savor the beautiful elements of Nature and a nice cup of coffee in their last breath, fading slowly from existence.
Nothing really happens in this story … at all … it’s one of those art pieces that you just have to see for yourself to understand. The mystery of what happened is never quite revealed, though the lack of outward battle scars seems to indicate to me that it is more of an environmental disaster than world war.
I’ve been highly strange-feeling as of late, so I took several measures this morning to try to address the confusion/fatigue. I switched my shower schedule back to mornings, thinking that maybe a combination of automatic “wake-up-I’m-dirty” (vs. ahhh I’m all warm and relaxed and I want to stay in bed) and the morning head-stimulation may help me think more sharply. So far, that seems to be roughly the case. I also went and played violin for a few minutes, and that seems to also have helped.
I’ve decided to help out on my spring project for the time being, and in whatever other time, work on other projects and wrap up med school applications. I also want to try out the new Subway in Lobdell! (screw the roaches =P).
I just got an e-mail detailing an interesting summer cooking plan that resembles Pika’s system, where people rotate cooking/dish duty. I’m pretty eager to join, ’cause it’ll mean less strain (and less leftovers .. and less cost ..) on me, but at the same time, it sort of regulates what I can make. I might take some days off just to fool around with new recipes and such. Hmm! I wonder if this will work out?
On the fifth floor of the Yawkey building – the cardiology department – there is a piece of art that always irks me a little as I walk by it. It’s not what I’d deem offensive in any way, so please don’t take me wrong. But you see, it’s a rectangular display, mounted with six carved hearts that somewhat resemble the real thing (but highly stylized and elongated), one to represent each inhabited continent.
What bothers me is that there is a white heart over Europe, a black heart in Africa, a brownish-yellow heart in Asia, a tan heart in Australia … .
The heart comes only in one color, and it has nothing to do with skin pigments. The heart is pink. It has pink cardiac muscle with white connective tissue and red blood.
I’m not calling the sculptures out on biological inaccuracy. But the heart is the center of all humans, and it is a mark of unity. My heart is like yours, and like everyone else’s. Mine isn’t yellow just because my skin is yellow. Isn’t it about time that we realize that all of humanity’s hearts beat together to create the rhythm of our civilization?