Springtime Fun - Japanese Tea Garden & Brakenridge Park

Shot with a Canon Rebel T1i and a 50mm f/1.8

Nostalgia is Netflix for Life

Last week was an emotional roller coaster. I hate roller coasters. Associated with roller coasters is the falling feeling. Your heart and lungs rise and push up against the top of your chest cavity. It's unpleasant.

Some family flew in from LA and it was great to see everyone, but under such circumstances, my mixed feelings were understandable. Then after all of the funeral ceremonies last weekend was Beer Bike at Rice, so I was reunited with old friends - oh the nostalgia. I love nostalgia.

I guess nostalgia is a mechanism that helps us adapt to change. Reminisce about the good times, yada yada and it smooths out the transitions between each episode that makes up an individual's life. Nostalgia is like Netflix for life. On the other hand, while we shouldn't dwell in the past, but being a seasonal tourist has its benefits. It keeps us grounded. The earth continues its rotation with or without you, so we might as well enjoy the ride. Try not to get too dizzy :)

Spring Break Photoshoots

Finally got to play more with my 50mm f/1.8! Wish Houston weren't so sketchy along Main St. and Downtown though. My friend and I walked to Discovery Green from the light rail and were hit with this reality.  Also, unless there's a festival going on, there's not much at Discovery Green to take photos of. Ended up at the Houston Zoo instead. Next day was the MFA.

Protip: Keep your college ID after you graduate. People usually don't check closely for the expiration date for discounts and free admission.

One of my favorites of the day. I really like the "realistic miniatures" style.

GEOMETRY

Year of the Horse!

So fierce

Should have carved my initials or something

Change of Scenery

"You haven't lived until you've taken random day trips"

Today, I didn't have to be anywhere specific, so I drove up to Austin - the drive takes a bit over an hour. The weather was perfect - 60F and sunny. Met up with one of my friends from undergrad and had lunch at this cute little shop/cafe called Momoko. When I pushed open the door, I had to do a double-take. Was this a tapioca place or a Japanese gift shop? It's both. After lunch, we loitered for another hour or so chatting about random stuff. According to my friend, all the girls who work at the shop are Japanese-speaking otakus...lol. From my first impression of the girl working there today, that's probably true...

FOOD

Regular Milk Tea w/ Tapioca (slight sweet) - I'm not a tapioca connoisseur, but it was pretty good here. This was the first time I was asked to pick a level of sweetness for a milk tea (I think). This time, I got a low-sweet and it was perfect.  All else fails, you can always add more sugar.

Beef rice bowl (highest spicy - which means mild for me) - good stuff!

Spent the rest of the afternoon at Bennu Coffee - ordered my usual dirty chai. Pretty good, but I still prefer Olmos'.  It's nice to be appreciated haha.

Lucy's Fried Chicken, off of S.Congress - bucket of chicken + mexican coke sweet potatoes

The Crazy Continues & Concert for Myself

Yup. Sneaked into a house and did some kid's Chinese homework from a magic book that made the same changes on a notebook quite some distance away. Afterward, while I was searching the house for valuables (I'm some kind of helpful burglar apparently), the house becomes under siege by people shooting chickens and cows at it with me still inside.

_________

The other day, I spent the morning and much of the afternoon at a coffeeshop studying / working on a presentation for my research project. Afterwards, I needed a change of scenery, so I decided it was finally time to sneak into an empty auditorium and play some music.

The doors to the actual auditorium are never locked,  but the ones to the lobby are. With some clever analysis of the building, I entered from the 2nd floor, through a corridor of offices. The next hour and twenty minutes were pretty fun. Muscle-memory is pretty ridiculous. Even though I haven't been serious about clarinet in over four years now, I still had all-state audition etudes and various competition concertos memorized. Unfortunately, your lips don't stay strong after quitting music and my lower lip was sore the rest of the night. Also, I found that while my fingering was still nimble enough to navigate the sea of black notes, my tonguing was struggling to catch up. Oh well. A certain degree of rust is to be expected. Still, even though I was the only member of the audience, it brings me a lot of joy to be able to express myself on stage.

Nostalgia - Can you see me?

DJ Okawari

Been spending a lot of time at coffeeshops and the library lately. Realized that I've been listening too much Bruno Mars & folksy female artists (along the lines of Ingrid Michaelson) and have begun to grow weary of the genres.

When all else fails, I fall back on my basics: concertos, symphonies, jazz, electronic and lounge. From my Shanghai Restoration Project radio station on Spotify, I ran into the work of DJ Okawari. I highly recommend it for study music.

Staircases: The Best Thing EVER

Six years ago, I discovered the serenity in monumental staircases. We was in DC for a week-long simulation peace conference for the National Peace Essay Contest held by the United States Institute of Peace (one person from each state). One of nights, we did an evening tour of the national monuments. We spent a good bit of time at the Lincoln Memorial so after taking all the obligatory tourist photos, some of us took a seat near the top of the stairs overlooking the reflecting pool and the Washington Monument. It was surreal. Imagine this view, but on a summer night.

Warm summer air greeted you like an dear friend. It was a comfortable warmth. The reflecting pool was a perfectly polished onyx mirror seemingly with a view into one's heart. Around us, tourists were buzzing with activity, but for these precious moments, we were in another place. The three or four of us talked about home, our families, our hopes & dreams. The Earth slowed it's rotation and for a while, we could simply appreciate life.

Technology has ruined some aspects of life. We're too wired, we're too rushed. There's no time to catch your breath and reflect for some perspective. Regardless if it's the Lincoln Memorial, the stairs of Columbia's library, ruins in Macao, or staring at the stars from the academic quad at Rice, the common denominators have always been the same: a sense of serenity and good friends.

Dreams

Dreams are weird. Or maybe it's just me...  For some reason, when I get stressed out, my dreams become really vividly clear. Same thing happens when I take 10 minute power naps, but I'd been taught that dreams only occur in REM sleep. Maybe it's because I only do the 10-min power nap each hour during my near-all-nighters (read as tired and stressed the hell out), I can reach REM after than a normal person? *shrug

Anyway, I've been having consistently vivid dreams this past week, but the catch is: I don't know what I'm stressed about. Time for some hypno-therapy? haha, I have no clue what's going on. I remember reading that keeping a dream log is one of the first steps towards training oneself for lucid dreaming. Maybe that explains some of these...

Suicide has an exceedingly high opportunity cost
So the first one in this series took place in pre- or post-apocalyptic world (something had happened and we were all just surviving, but apparently, another event was looming). Me and my family (?) or friends (?) were surviving from the bridge of a battleship. We were getting overrun by random people trying to get in, so we were pushing them out of the windows they were trying to climb through with metal lab stools (think chemistry or anatomy lab stools).

Suddenly, amidst the chaos, there was an oddly dressed intruder standing among us (the aura / vibe I felt was something similar to the tone of the bad guys from animated series I watched a while back - really dark and foreboding).

She & I get into a big argument. Her position was something along the lines of: there's no hope; suicide is the only way to guarantee an end to suffering and entry into Heaven.  I reply that the second apocalyptic event is not a certainty and neither is the afterlife. If you kill yourself, the only certainty is: you're dead. Hearing this, she takes a pair of dissection scissors and cuts my hand, between my index and middle fingers.  I don't feel any pain and simply wake up.

Interpretation: I saw Seven Psychopaths like two or three weeks ago and one of the storylines involved a Quaker who was looking to avenge the murder of his daughter. The murderer found religion in prison and was eventually released. The Quaker would stalk him and then disappear in a blink of the eye. Eventually, the murderer is convinced that the only way to escape was to commit suicide, guaranteeing himself a spot in Hell. The last thing the murderer saw before he died was the Quaker man pulling out a straight razor and slitting his own throat. Dunno where the rest of the dream came from though.

Okay, so this was a rather dark dream. Suicide is never worth the opportunity cost of living out one's life. And no, I have never seriously considered taking my own life. Maybe it's time to watch happier / less-violent movies...

Right afterward, I went back to sleep and had another dream:

Amusement Park Raid

I'm at some kind of amusement park ride with a queue to go fight monsters in a jungle environment. It is my second time getting into the queue and I get paired up once again with an acquaintance whom I met for the first time some 6-7 years ago. More recently, we'd been talking a bit on Facebook every few months - she was the organizer for the week-long simulation peace conference I participated in back in the day at the United States Institute of Peace (we solved Uganda & child soldiers on paper). But anyway, along the left side of the queue tunnel, there are piles upon piles of weapons. They ranged from longswords, katanas, and broadswords to nerf-guns, airsoft guns, and hunting bows. For this instance, I chose a black claymore (think William Wallace and Braveheart).

I swing it around a few times but the next time I turned around, I was holding a black office chair! WTF. I scramble out of line to go get something else, but found that nothing was worthy of my time / was functional. By this time, an unprecedented crowd had formed up in the tunnel and I was still trying to arm myself. Finally, the "raid" or whatever started and the gates opened up. From being picky, I ended up with a dinky wooden short-sword. I hop some fences to cut the line and get back to my partner. Unfortunately, my alarm goes off and I wake up before I got to kill any monsters. Damn.

Interpretation: I used to be a gamer and should learn to be less particular? *shrug

Loyalty

Recently, I received an email from the Orthopaedic Surgery Society regarding a research project that is almost finished, but needs a med student to do some number crunching for the paper. It was advertised as a timely and awesome opportunity for someone trying to add to their CV, since you should be able to get a publication out in a few months (not sure what your authorship status would be though). However, I'm already involved with a project in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery dealing with diabetic bone. Though this is a topic that I'm interested in, of course part of me is wondering about the workload involved for the number crunching project. A publication AND a conference presentation all within 4 months of one another? Yes, please. Of course, it's totally not feasible since taking on the second project would detract from my work on both.

In this dream, I figure since the PI I'm working with is also from the Ortho Dept, he'd be able to get me the other gig / give me his blessing. But for some reason, we're meeting inside the Astrodome (in this world, it's been converted to research labs). From here, we start talking about the physics behind the "railgun" (for those not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun) and before I even bring up the other project, we start building a railgun and to test it, we shoot a ring with a few knives attached to it through a 3ft concrete wall. Uhhhh......yep.

Interpretation: Railguns are fun. Some of us got to play with a miniature one, one summer back in high school. Yay for physics!

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I've also dreamed about magical mahjong matches, like something from a Japanese anime. I'm not crazy, I swear. Have y'all had ridiculous dreams lately?