Songs without Words

I revisited an earlier dreamworld today, something that I rarely do. This dreamworld is laid out as a highly scenic, very high resolution linear path with attractions as follows (and some of you may remember me talking about this earlier): first, a countryside path – dirt road, grass, trees; then it arrives at a giant South American stepwise pyramid that is at least 100 ft. tall and accessible from the outside, such that continuation of the path requires you to scale the pyramid and land on higher ground on the other side. Then, the road continues until it reaches a shoreline of a giant lake, where it becomes a set of zig-zagging bridges; unfortunately, after a few lengths of bridge, it ends abruptly where the road has been submerged in water. Around the left edge of the lake, there may be a small Talbot’s shop shaped like an old, vacated by kept-up house, and a park.

In any case, today, I was given a notification that I was summoned to a meeting at the new secret base, so I started walking along the path from my house. However, it got plainly too slow, so I whipped out my blue-and-baby blue-striped pillow and started to slide on it, which went wicked fast (I’d estimate, 25 mph – that was one intense pillow). In fact, I slid right up and around the pyramid and continued on towards the lake, with a perceived elapse of maybe 10 or 15 minutes before I reached the shore and then the very end of the bridges, just to realize that I had been enjoying the rush of pillow-riding to the expense of actually arriving at my destination, which was surely passed a long time ago.

I about-faced, checked to make sure the pillow was still smooth and in good condition, then took off again, even faster this time, around 45 or 50 mph. I arrived at the pyramid again, but this time, someone was waiting for me. He gestured at a poem in the ground and then read it aloud, and the pyramid opened in a bizarre set of sliding motions between the terra cotta-colored blocks that made a loud grinding sound with some high-pitched harmonics. We walked inside and I proceeded from chamber to chamber until I finally got to what looked like a sci-fi command center. There were thousands of people stationed, variously affiliated with the rogue organization that had discovered the pyramid’s long-lost technology.

I looked out the window and was shocked to the sky.  I at first asked them how the government never found out about this, but they replied that we were actually so far up, and that was the reason why.  Indeed, I looked out again and saw a vast expanse, through those giant window panes at least thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, of blue-and-pink sky, clouds dotting out a perforated floor far beneath our position.

I then saw giant robots flying outside, and they told me that there were magical blueprints in the pyramid that mass-produced these robots.  I went to a special room where a supervisor was making -03 type robots, which started out as wheeled capsules about 15 to 20 feet long.  They would be built according to a piece of parchment that began blank, then magically drew on additional parts that were also added in real life.  I watched as they came out of the lake, then drove on the bridge-road up and up the hill, rushing past any cars, and then leaping off into the air and transforming.  There were thousands of these, and suddenly, the army started coming after them and there was an intense firefight in the sky.

There was more about the weaponry and mysticism, but I can’t recall it so well.

Apparently, today’s dorm meeting revealed the worst of the recent trend in hostilities – there were apparently people near tears, and the housemaster was visibly upset.  There are allegations that a particular floor embezzled $2,600 from the dorm under the guise of a particular drinking party, and a good portion of hostilities exchanged today were about inappropriate handling of an audit of dorm and floor money matters.  To top it off, one of the floor chairs was successfully impeached and removed from office following his unpopular opposition to the appointment of a second auditor who was not politically linked to the accused floor in question, on the grounds of dorm constitutional law.  I’ve known, ever since becoming acquainted with finances, that corruption begins here, on the small scale, justifying robbery as being “for the floor.”  “For the floor” then becomes “for my friends” and then “for my family” and, at long last, “for myself.”  Even if it means changing the law to do so, we have to stub out corruption – it is almost too late, if it is true that about 10% of the dorm’s budget suddenly became a bonus to the most undeserving floor.

:D

After dropping off my bow to be rehaired (and getting scolded by the bowmaker … ask me for details if you’re curious about bow matters), I was rather hungry, as it was already 3:30 and I hadn’t eaten lunch. As I strolled north to get from the violin shop to the Public Library (using a mental map that turned out to be correct), I spotted a curious fast-food restaurant called “b.good” to my right that had an amusing ad postered outside, to the effect of not needing an industrial fry cutter ’cause they’ve got Ronaldo or some generic-named character like that. I looked over their menu, and it looked pretty gourmet, for a fast-food burger joint, anyway. Then I spotted the pricing – $5.95 – and the option of “crisp veggies” as a side … and believe me, I was sold. Mouth watering, I wandered inside, noting the signs of “free wireless” and a few curious posters that I’ll describe later on.

I ordered the “Adopted Luke” (you can go to their website and find out yourself why on Earth a BBQ mushroom-onions-‘n-swiss burger has that name) and a side of the veggies. Before sitting down, I grabbed a fountain drink — and to my surprise, they had unsweetened iced tea. It had been so long since I unsweetened iced tea was spotted alongside Coke and Fanta, and I was so overjoyed that I ran up to the counter and announced my joy and gratefulness, to which she brightened and gave her two cents on over-sugared confectionary tea. I then sat down, but within one minute, the food was ready and I brought it back to chow down. The burger was indeed delicious, not huge but definitely not puny, and with that hearty, beefy taste that only comes with using lean, fresh-ground meat. And the vegetables – fresh broccoli, carrots, and red peppers, lightly stir-fried in garlic and olive oil so that they weren’t raw nor over-cooked, and nowhere near bland – were scrumptious and a perfect balance to the burger.

Now, the posters: there was one about the turkeys they used in their turkey burgers, proclaiming that turkeys across the nation were addicted to drugs (read: antibiotics), but theirs were “clean and sober.”  Always a good thing.  Then there was one about their fries, and how they loved the fries so much that they didn’t dare to dunk them into a giant vat of reused oil (they bake them instead, making them about as healthy as the veggie mix, believe it or not).  And then there was my personal favorite (paraphrased): “Han Solo was frozen by Jabba the Hutt, and that sucked.  So we don’t do the same thing to our crisp vegetables.”

Ohohoho :)

And now the :(

Why the heck is the Boston Public Library so disorganized?  Last time I went, the French section (several shelves) was in absolutely no order – not by title, author, or call number.  And now the foreign films are just jammed together onto two shelves at pure random.  Ranma 1/2: Nihao My Concubine was right next to a film in Farsi and one in Hindu, and then there was a Chinese film to the side.  This place is either for those who know exactly what they are looking for and would stop at no length to obtain it … or those who don’t care at all what they get (like the other woman there, who had an armful of ten rather random selections).

The class of ’08 had some heavily subsidized tickets to go see Wicked (ten bucks a piece, definitely a bargain for musicals at the Opera House, where $35 is about as cheap as you can get — for obstructed-view seats), so my girlfriend and I sat at our computers, refreshing the ordering page constantly until sales began. It was definitely a vast upgrade from the hysterical stampede from real-life ticket sales in ages past.

She decided on the last day to dress up somewhat, which meant I had to quickly whip out a shirt and iron it. We happened upon other familiar faces – six of them, in fact – at the Kendall T stop — do great minds really think alike? I was actually amused at how similar all the girls’ shoes looked (although I must admit, I was partial to my Love’s).

The show was very crowded, but as always, the theater remained at a comfortable temperature, if not a slightly cool one. I always marvel at the homeostasis of such large halls, where the sheer number of people ought to heat the room by at least a few degrees.

Having heard the songs so many times before, I instead focused on the visuals as well as the personal twists on the songs. There were lots of little differences between this show and the original cast’s rendition that I picked up on, the unmarked decisions that make live performances so unique and human.  For instance, the moment at which Madame Morrible switches over from speaking to singing, or Doctor Dillamon’s accent, or whether Glinda seems to be deadpan/mocking or laughing out loud when she utters, “Don’t make me laugh!”  The melodies were as beautiful if not moreso than I had heard them before, and even though I felt that some of the singing sounded forced or more square, it also had an openness and resonant quality to it that had me mesmerized for the whole three hours.

The special effects were quite amazing, as expected – the Wizard’s robotic head and the giant dragon and the flying sequences were all beautifully executed.  Yet my love for this musical will always be because of the songs and their universal quality.  Elphaba and Glinda — and even the Wizard for a few moments — express feelings and ideas that are generalized enough, intentionally or not, to apply to almost the entire audience.  I doubt anyone will be a literalist and suddenly speak out against the caging of animals in zoos (although I am decreasingly impressed by the concept of zoos, despite how much I enjoyed visiting them, along with aquaria, as a child).  But especially for kids growing up “green” — the “teacher’s pets” who ironically grow up into the individuals who truly stand up for their beliefs — this musical is a great relief and venting point.  Sure, Elphaba “dies” (no, that’s not a spoiler – everyone in the world has heard, “Ding dong, the Witch is Dead!”), but only after singing some amazing songs and with a best friend (not to mention the thousands in the audience) by her side.

I wonder if everyone watching can catch all the subtleties of the plot, though.  For instance, it’s pretty hard to catch just from the performance that Fiyero was saved by having his body turned to straw (thus finishing the trio – the lion cub at Shiz becomes the cowardly lion who wants courage and Boq becomes the Tin man lacking a heart), or additionally that he takes advantage of the commoners’ mistaken belief that the witch could be melted with water (which is especially confusing since, in the book and in the original, she *is* killed through water).  But in any case, Wikipedia does a great job of clearing all that up :).

It was a wonderful night, and I was entranced by my girlfriend’s elegance and beauty, especially in her blissful “nap” during intermission, tucked under her quilt-like comforter.  Her curvaceous smile and long lashes were irresistably charming as she excitedly professed her fascination and curiosity for all things electrical and musical.  I smiled and laughed with her, and held her small hands that peeked out from below her jacket, and I think for the first time in more than a week, I could feel her signature peaceful, serene aura enveloping her delicate form and spreading like a magical wisp of cloud-mist over me.

Outside the Green Building, Bartlett Tree Experts are removing several sycamores and pine trees, continuing work from last year. The sycamores they’re cutting down aren’t really dead, a fact that probably no one else will notice. There are lots of little sprouts coming out from various points in the trunk, and I have no doubt that there have been for years, except that people keep pruning these little outgrowths (which come out from apical meristem left over after lower limbs are removed to give the trees the characteristic head-on-a-stick look that is among the most unnatural shapes for any tree to assume when given full sunlight and ample space). The upper branches of the sycamores all over campus have been sickly ever since I came here – perhaps it’s acid rain or something. No matter what, I’ve honestly never seen such shriveled, ghastly looking things. That’s probably why they want to get rid of them – not because they’re a risk if they fall over, but because they’re ghastly. No one wants ghastly trees on campus.

They’ll probably attempt to replace the trees, but if the pine project is any indication, they’ll screw it right up. Besides the fact that a baby sycamore will take our lifetimes to grow into the ones they’re cutting down, they also seem to have little understanding of tree species in general.  Indeed, I would not be surprised if they planted a few red maples or perhaps some tulip trees by mistake.  Instead of replacing the dead red pines with more red pines (2-leaf bundles), they replaced them with Eastern white pines (5-leaf bundles).  The two trees look nothing alike, and the wispy, dense, straight-as-a-needle white pines will never look like the sparse, shaggy, almost Asian-looking red pines.  While this is more of a landscaping issue than anything else, I think it reveals a great deficiency in basic tree training.  Perhaps I shall write a more extensive entry about species of trees in New England.

The creator of FMA has a new series, Jyushin Enbu: Hero Tales (http://www.jyushin.jp/top.html).  It looks like bye-bye to Europe for the time being, but some rather recognizably similar character designs dot the landscape.  A couple +1’s for the gals who prefer “gar” characters over bishounen =P.

I’m learning how to make red bean (hong dou, or azuki) soup today, and it’s a rather simple recipe that follows the main principles of bean-cooking.  What struck me first was advice from my girlfriend’s mom to soak the beans for 2-3 hours in water prior to cooking.  Then I read online to soak the beans overnight.  I talked to my dad this morning about it, and he said, “[We] never soak the beans, but we boil them and let them cook for a long, long time. [. . .] Do NOT add the sugar to the soup until the very end, or they will stop cooking.”  At this point, I suddenly remembered the lab I had just done on Friday, where we pushed cell solution at 1x PBS into a microfluidic PDMS trap and replaced the liquid with 0.1x PBS.  The cells bloated and bordered on exploding, with a 1.5-fold increase in diameter (coinciding with approximately a 3-fold increase in volume).  Yet another recipe I just came across warns you not to add any salt whatsoever to the soaking water – hard evidence that maintaining a strong concentration gradient is the key to cooking red beans.

Just as making crunchy Chinese pickles must be done by patting the cucumbers with loads of salt in order to coax the water out, to bloat and explode the beans so that they form that characteristic grainy red soup, one must only use pure, solute-free water.  Because the sugar (carbohydrate) concentration of in beans in extraordinarily high, adding sugar too early to the soup would be deadly – something that seeing the ingredients list off-hand would not convey.

Wouldn’t it be fun to compare the osmotically-driven expansion curve of the white blood cells in dilute saline solution (or even ddH2O) to the expansion curve of red beans in soup solution?

If you’re on the MIT campus and you haven’t seen this already, hop over to the Stata Center during sunlight hours and visit the far end, where there is the gigantic metal piece that reads “MIT” in bubble letters. Walk up very close to the upper crevice of the M and peer inside – you have to be rather close for this to work. If you don’t like what you see, clear out the debris in the crevice, pluck a few objects off of the ground, and drop them in (I recommend the clovers, and I’m sure flowers would be beautiful, too, but don’t kill too many of the garden plants =P). If you make new art, take photos of it and show me!

To see my picture: http://www.aquamarinestardust.net/images/photos/stata_kaleidoscopes.jpg

After a rather lackluster audition, I was fortunately saved from wallowing in despair by my girlfriend, who I accompanied over to Porter Square to visit one of her friends, who’s now a student in the Media Lab. We had a rather silly time together, eating a strangely green Asian pear, playing Black Box and Cross-the-River, then watching a few of his old film school projects. His visual effects skills, from 3D rendering to special effects and artificial lighting to layering of many filmed images, are immensely impressive, and certainly I took every opportunity I could to learn more from this master. We all had quite a nice laugh, too, at the spontaneous, occasionally intentional humor.

Following the visit, my girlfriend and I became hungry and ended up eating at Porter Exchange – a little shop in the food court called “Tampopo.” There seemed to be just two people working there, a middle-aged Japanese man in the cramped kitchen, and a young Caucasian girl who was the waitress (plus any other odd jobs). My seat was bizarrely halfway in the restaurant and halfway in the hallway, but it wasn’t altogether discomforting or anything like that. My Love amused herself by watching the various fishes in the shallow glass tank across the hallways (in a neighboring Korean restaurant): there was a clownfish, a blue tang (think Dory), a pufferfish, a lionfish, and an angelfish (maybe), among others that I couldn’t identify. She ordered the “tofu dynamite,” which was an interesting concoction that mixed tofu and various vegetables/seaweeds into a single puffy cake, and I ordered curry udon with tonkatsu (because I’m a huge sucker for tonkatsu, although this one was a bit thick and non-tenderized for a pork cutlet). The food was overall pretty good, and I strangely got a bonus miso soup, although I would’ve been a bit happier with a salad or at least something not hot / not salty. I embarrassingly didn’t have any cash on me, despite sort of being the one to ask her here, but Love was a good sport about it (thank goodness) and I promised to treat her to dinner next weekend ^_^.

After returning to MIT, we ended up touring the PDSI, trying out all the stairwells and exploring just about every nook and cranny on the four floors. I managed to be caught unawares by a random step on the first floor … twice … . There is an air of spaciousness to the new building, enhanced by the blurring of the outside-inside divide. Open skylights would open into the fourth floor, but then there would be carved-out holes that would also let the light shine down into the third floor. The second floor had cut-outs in its side walls, serving a similar purpose. The emphasis on natural lighting is a major part of why I enjoy being in this building – it is absolutely splendid at sunset.

Tonight, I inexplicably began watching the Japanese live-action adapation of Hanazakari no Kimitachi e. A few years ago, I came across this manga, not altogether that remarkable because of its similarities to other gender-bending series coming out at roughly the same time (there are plenty — Power!! (aka Girl Got Game), W Juliet, etc.) Nevertheless, Hana Kimi is unique in the spunk that it brings to the table, both through the characters and through the atmosphere it creates. While there are the inevitable crutches when the series employs the requisite awkward moments, a lot of the humor actually has very little to do with the heroine’s gender, and a lot more to do with the strange and bizarre cast that really lights up the scene in an amusing but wholly engrossing escapist take on high school life. There is a distinct lack, in particular, of any classwork or indeed professors of any sort – it’s just competitions, parties, and sports – and it’s better off for it.

Ashiya Mizuki, the main character, is a rather complex person. In some ways, her native “form” seems to be rather cutesy and feminine. However, she isn’t the type that ever needs to be protected or pampered, or even who might need to have a close confidante. Whereas other series might try to portray the “strong heroine,” especially of the cross-dressing variety, as either someone who is distinctly testosterone-driven or as someone who needs constant attention in spite of herself, Hana Kimi avoids this by having Ashiya’s strength transcend gender boundaries. She has courage and devotion, but it is not “manly” courage and devotion – it is just a strength that arises out of her, and a strength that would probably propel her to act, whether or not she was a girl.

Izumi Sano, the hard-to-catch guy with the trademark angsty past, can really be annoying and harsh (apparently the way shoujo manga-readers seem to like their bishounen). But to his credit, Ashiya really can be a pain at times. Despite his rather antisocial attitude towards his post-accident life, he’s still an easy one with whom to relate. He represents that little piece of all of us that we dropped somewhere along the way, finding some half-hearted justification for why we could no longer invest in it, or why it was no longer worth it. A childhood dream, maybe, or a talent or hobby; parents talked us out of it, or money convinced us not to pursue it, or it turned out to be too hard or too much work. We choose to give up things, and sometimes, like Izumi, we don’t want to own up to what we’ve done. Some factor or other is what made us stop, not ourselves. Izumi’s eventual feelings for Ashiya represent the resurrection of abandoned dreams in our hearts, and that may be what makes him more sympathetic than he otherwise would be.

For a shoujo manga that shamelessly exploits its pretty boys for plenty of girl-oriented fanservice, it is surprisingly balanced in its presentation, and I feel that Ashiya is just as attractive and sympathetic as the other members of the cast, in perhaps a similar fashion to Ouran High School Host Club.