I was trying to come up with a way to talk about the weekend before last without it coming off as drunken debauchery, but I don’t think that’s really possible.
Wednesday
Mik’s birthday. We sat around on the second floor and drank beer. It would have been an unremarkable evening, but at some point we transitioned into the sort of old school No. 6 conversation we haven’t had in a while. It’s not really significant what we talked about, it’s more the depth to which we analyzed and debated things. We derived, for example, the conditions for negative population growth given rates of adoption by gay parents and an imaginary fraction of adopted children 'going gay'. Sapo, Anton, and I lasted until after sunrise, then went to sleep. I skipped all of my classes. Oops.
Thursday
On Thursday night I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I was feeling energetic, so I figured I might as well take advantage of the situation and do something productive. The plan was to go home afterwards and study Chinese. My motives, obviously, were pure and noble. I got back from the gym, a little bit wobbly from 2 hours of picking up heavy things and putting them down again, and as I walked into my hall Anton, Sapo, and Mik informed me that we were going to the Thirsty Ear (the grad student pub just down the street) for karaoke night. Thirsty Thursdays have been a tradition for us for a long time, so I’m not really sure why I thought this one would be any different. I guess usually we send out an email to the list sometime in the afternoon declaring that we’re parched or dehydrated, and that’s taken as a statement of intent. We didn’t do that this time, so I naively thought I’d be doing homework.
The Thirsty is under a grad student dorm. You go down some stairs and into a side door and you’re in. There are no signs; it's all very speakeasy. The Thirsty's appeal lies in the facts that it’s less than a five minute walk door to door, that we know half of the people there, at least in passing, that you can show up in anything from preppy chic to your pajamas, and that a pitcher is $7. The karaoke is incidental, and we don’t usually take advantage of the opportunity until we’re several pitchers in.
On Thursday we closed the place. That’s not uncommon for us, but when I say we closed it I mean that very literally. We bargained with the bartender to give us a couple of free pitchers well after last call in exchange for stacking the chairs and moving the tables to the sides. When we got back to the house we continued to drink, and an inspired someone had the idea that we should go streaking across the soccer field next to the house. The plan appealed to me very much. Streaking seemed like classic collegiate buffoonery that I should at least be able to cross off of the list. So before we could think about it too much we were running downstairs and out the door, removing clothes as we went. Unfortunately my compatriots are not fellow countrymen, and they started bitching about maybe losing their visas if caught. I tried to convince them that it wouldn’t happen, but in the end we settled for running across the field in boxers and boots. Anton and I knocked on the windows of the dorm on the other side, surprising a few people, and then we ran back. The rest of the evening was spent watching scenes from Top Gun and debating which song was the theme. It’s not, as we originally suspected, Danger Zone. I’ve always felt that the iconic song from the movie was Take My Breath Away. Went to bed during sunrise number 2.
Friday
(Most of this is sort of a list. I think I’m writing it too long after the fact to really get into the storytelling, so you get a recitation of events.)
Went on a liquor run and a grocery store run for supplies for Saturday’s Founder’s party, then came back and sat around drinking. I didn’t feel like joining the crowd going to see Fast Times, the local cover 80s cover band whose shows we frequent, so I sat on my bed with Adri and Lizzie drinking and reading old letters written by Sixers in the 40s. Lizzie was working on her speech for Founder’s Day, so she was trying to come up with ways the house had changed. Some of the letters were pretty cool; one written in 1962 or 63 was talking about the formation of the Peace Corps, and all of the problems they thought faced the then-new organization.
The crowd at the bar had met up with the New York Sixers who’d come up for the weekend, so when they came back after closing time a party immediately started downstairs. My evening gets pretty fuzzy from then on, but I know it involved streaking across the field (for real this time) with Anton and Dimitrios. As we started running, having just abandoned our clothes at the fence around the field, I turned to Anton and said, “You know, when we come back those clothes aren’t going to be there.” We made it to the dorm across the field and back, and sure enough we were conspicuously naked and our stuff was gone. As we hunted around the house for our clothes there were an awful lot of cameras and flashes, so I guess running for public office some day is out of the question. I wore a piece of paper and Anton had on a shower curtain until someone took pity on us and gave us our pants back.
More drinking ensued. Sunrise number 3. Sleep.
Saturday
I started my day by making homemade sour mix, which is really simple and tastes awesome. I ran some last minute errands to set up for the Founder’s party, organized the bar, and started mixing drinks. I learned how to make a pretty good Manhattan and an excellent Cosmo, two drinks I’d never served before. It’s a lot more fun to bartend when you have a stocked bar and people want cocktails. The stuff I serve at our open parties is all plastic-handle dreck with coke or juice in a red Solo cup. Even using real glass makes a difference. Whatever… I guess I shouldn’t worry about serving the 17 year olds with fake IDs shitty drinks, they don’t know any better, anyway.
Dinner was prepared by Kenji and was nice, but other than that I spent most of my evening making drinks rather than consuming them. My drinking goal for the evening (yes, I sometimes have those) was to expand my horizons, so I drank gin and tonics until I didn’t hate them quite so much anymore. I’ve found that the secret is a squeeze of lime and drinking it all while it’s still really, really cold.
The night was made a bit weird by a visit by an asshole, powertripping MIT cop and some intra-house conflict. Rui and Conor nearly got into a fight when Rui got pissed off at him for stealing his cigarettes and started shoving him. Conor doesn’t smoke; he was just fucking around. Also, Conor’s a pretty competent judo practitioner (judoist? It should be), and in his defense he didn’t break Rui, he was just sort of keeping him away. Hashem and Evros were fighting about something, too, but I don’t really know what. There are a lot of people living here who don’t like each other, but it almost never results in real anger and certainly not violence. This was also weird because these aren’t people who don’t like each other, they usually get along fine. I’d say that there was something in their drinks, but I probably mixed them. So I’ll blame the food instead.
I went to bed before sunrise. I also got up and went for a run on Sunday, which surprises me.
Anyway, that was my weekend.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Monday, April 16, 2007
Center of the Universe
In addition to all of the more philosophical (pretentious) stuff I just posted, this is also a journal, and one of the things I really wanted to talk about was this past weekend. On Friday I drove down to NYC with a few friends from No. 6, partly to go to the Annex party at the Sixer apartment in the Upper West Side and partly to get out of the house while we hosted prospective freshmen during campus preview weekend. They annoy me with their bright, "We got into MIT!" faces. Also the house is dry while they're around, and my liver demands consistent exercise. It's like walking the dog, only with more slurred speech.
I'm not even entirely sure what to write about. I know that every time I go to NYC I love the place more and more. I grew up as every good kid who likes to think he's from Boston does, hating New York very passionately. It's just that I try to think of myself as a scientist, and this unsubstantiated ideology demanded testing that proved it to be unfounded. I love New York. I love that it's open all night, and that it's huge and busy and chaotic. I can picture myself living in a few places I've been to. Berkeley for sure. Maybe Tuscany. The idea of Vancouver sounds nice, but I've never been. But I feel like I could absolutely live in NYC. One problem is that I have a biased opinion of the place. I tend to go on weekends, with friends, to have a good time. I've never had to work there, for example, so my memories of the place are all happy and fuzzy. Well, the fuzziness is probably more the booze than anything else.
So this trip had a few high points for me. The first was on Friday night. We went to a bar in the Upper West, and then a few people expressed interest in dancing, so we went downtown to a place called Home. Three of us taxied down with Conor, who as we got out of the taxi told us to have $20 ready and to only talk to the transvestite, but not really anything besides that. So we walked straight past the winding line and Conor palmed the be-lipsticked and fur-hatted man a $20. I guess he was more of a doorman than a bouncer, he wasn't very intimidating. But he said, "4 people is an awful lot for $20", all the while looking with disapprovingly-pursed lips and a frown at my jeans and t-shirt. So I wordlessly hand him my $20 and walk past him. Now, the other two guys with us could have followed me right in, but since Conor had told them to be ready with $20 they each handed him the bills they were holding as they walked in. I think they thought they were paying a cover, the idea of bribery hadn't quite sunken in. Ah well. The inside of the club was really upscale. The people were all attractive and rich, the decor was red and leather and decadent, and the place was packed and bouncing. The DJ was playing 80s music layered with hip-hop beats, think Sweet Child of Mine meets Mos Def. This was also the first place I've ever been to (anywhere) that ignored the public smoking ban. I don't really dance much, so I decided to justify the cover with the fact that Conor was buying the drinks and that I had an opportunity to play anthropologist. I spent a long time watching guys with popped collars get shot down by girls with short skirts. There was everything shy of actual intercourse happening on the couches and against the pillars around the room. My favorite, though, was watching the other wall flowers. I feel like I was having a lot more fun than they were. They seemed to want to be dancing or flirting or whatever, but for some reason weren't. I, on the other hand, knew that I was completely and utterly out of place, and that somehow freed me from feeling uncomfortable, which was pretty cool. After the club we got pizza at the Pizza Bar, outside of which a homeless(?) guy hit me up for a contribution to the Rockefeller Negro Pizza Fund, which is apparently a common line, but it worked on me for a buck. I have a lot easier time giving money to people who make me smile than to people who try to make me feel pity or guilt. Anyway, that night was great.
We followed it up the next day with a an Irish pub brunch that started at 2 and lasted until 6. We rolled into the pub 9 deep, so they opened up the glass doors for us and we basically owned the place for a few hours. We lingered after the meal and had a few pints. I don't normally drink during the day, but there was something so appealing about sitting around after eating, watching people pass on the street, and chatting with friends that justified an exception for me.
We left the pub and I split up with the group to see Ting Qi, a girl I'd met at a party in Cambridge the previous week. She's four degrees of separation from me, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, from Taiwan to Costa Rica to Wellesley. Her friend (3 degrees) hooked up with Anton when they were at the house last week, and Ting Qi and I spent the time while she was waiting chatting in Chinese. She goes to NYU, and I mentioned that I would be going down the next weekend, so we decided to get dinner.
I had some time to kill after the pub and before meeting her, which I managed by wandering around Chinatown. That was the farthest south I'd ever been in NYC; I tend to stay more uptown. It was awesome; the feel is completely different. I'm amazed by how quickly the neighborhoods change. You cross an avenue and all of a sudden all of the signs are in Chinese. You cross a street and you're in Little Italy and the restaurant window decorations are signs for cappuccino rather than roasted chickens.
The Grand Street subway station in Chinatown comes up in a park. I saw a big crowd watching people playing handball (which I'd never seen before), so I stuck around. I figured out by watching that this was a grudge match, as far as I could tell between members of gangs. The people on one side of the court all seemed to be wearing blue hats of different types and people standing on the other side all had clothing with hearts on them. There was lots of shouting, some of it angry, and a lot of the spectators seemed to be from the neighborhood but not directly connected to the players. I wish I'd asked someone to tell me what exactly was going on that made this game so important, but I felt like too much of a voyeur and a tourist. So I just watched. I don't know anything about handball; I was trying to figure out the rules as I went, but everyone else seemed to think that it was a really well-played and close game. Only when one team finally won did it occur to me that maybe I didn't want to be around to see the fallout. Nothing dramatic happened. I watched a lot of side bets resolved; big wads of money changed hands. One of the losing players, the guy who missed the last play, walked off quickly, to my mind trying to avoid eye contact with his 2 little children following him out of the court. That handball game is my archetype of New York. There was a tight, local community that I didn't quite understand, a subsection of this huge city that I didn't even know existed. It was a street event that I just stumbled on while wandering around. It was diverse and urban and maybe a bit seedy. I loved it.
So I waited a bit longer, then met Ting Qi and a couple of her friends at the subway station. We walked a few blocks to a Cantonese restaurant, where there was a long wait for a table, during which I recognized several faces from the crowd at the handball game. Dinner was good, and apparently authentic, and my Chinese is definitely getting better, even if we did spend almost all of the time speaking English. After dinner Ting Qi and I went uptown to the No. 6 Annex party, which was fun if unremarkable. Ting Qi went home to Brooklyn (which I've still never been to) at 3 or 4 just as the party began to die down and it started to rain (which hasn't stopped since). The Annex Sixers managed to fit 10 guests on the couches and a small blowup mattress, we watched some Aliens on TV, and all fell asleep.
So that, and a long drive back in the pouring rain and heavy traffic and the dark, was my weekend.
I'm not even entirely sure what to write about. I know that every time I go to NYC I love the place more and more. I grew up as every good kid who likes to think he's from Boston does, hating New York very passionately. It's just that I try to think of myself as a scientist, and this unsubstantiated ideology demanded testing that proved it to be unfounded. I love New York. I love that it's open all night, and that it's huge and busy and chaotic. I can picture myself living in a few places I've been to. Berkeley for sure. Maybe Tuscany. The idea of Vancouver sounds nice, but I've never been. But I feel like I could absolutely live in NYC. One problem is that I have a biased opinion of the place. I tend to go on weekends, with friends, to have a good time. I've never had to work there, for example, so my memories of the place are all happy and fuzzy. Well, the fuzziness is probably more the booze than anything else.
So this trip had a few high points for me. The first was on Friday night. We went to a bar in the Upper West, and then a few people expressed interest in dancing, so we went downtown to a place called Home. Three of us taxied down with Conor, who as we got out of the taxi told us to have $20 ready and to only talk to the transvestite, but not really anything besides that. So we walked straight past the winding line and Conor palmed the be-lipsticked and fur-hatted man a $20. I guess he was more of a doorman than a bouncer, he wasn't very intimidating. But he said, "4 people is an awful lot for $20", all the while looking with disapprovingly-pursed lips and a frown at my jeans and t-shirt. So I wordlessly hand him my $20 and walk past him. Now, the other two guys with us could have followed me right in, but since Conor had told them to be ready with $20 they each handed him the bills they were holding as they walked in. I think they thought they were paying a cover, the idea of bribery hadn't quite sunken in. Ah well. The inside of the club was really upscale. The people were all attractive and rich, the decor was red and leather and decadent, and the place was packed and bouncing. The DJ was playing 80s music layered with hip-hop beats, think Sweet Child of Mine meets Mos Def. This was also the first place I've ever been to (anywhere) that ignored the public smoking ban. I don't really dance much, so I decided to justify the cover with the fact that Conor was buying the drinks and that I had an opportunity to play anthropologist. I spent a long time watching guys with popped collars get shot down by girls with short skirts. There was everything shy of actual intercourse happening on the couches and against the pillars around the room. My favorite, though, was watching the other wall flowers. I feel like I was having a lot more fun than they were. They seemed to want to be dancing or flirting or whatever, but for some reason weren't. I, on the other hand, knew that I was completely and utterly out of place, and that somehow freed me from feeling uncomfortable, which was pretty cool. After the club we got pizza at the Pizza Bar, outside of which a homeless(?) guy hit me up for a contribution to the Rockefeller Negro Pizza Fund, which is apparently a common line, but it worked on me for a buck. I have a lot easier time giving money to people who make me smile than to people who try to make me feel pity or guilt. Anyway, that night was great.
We followed it up the next day with a an Irish pub brunch that started at 2 and lasted until 6. We rolled into the pub 9 deep, so they opened up the glass doors for us and we basically owned the place for a few hours. We lingered after the meal and had a few pints. I don't normally drink during the day, but there was something so appealing about sitting around after eating, watching people pass on the street, and chatting with friends that justified an exception for me.
We left the pub and I split up with the group to see Ting Qi, a girl I'd met at a party in Cambridge the previous week. She's four degrees of separation from me, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, from Taiwan to Costa Rica to Wellesley. Her friend (3 degrees) hooked up with Anton when they were at the house last week, and Ting Qi and I spent the time while she was waiting chatting in Chinese. She goes to NYU, and I mentioned that I would be going down the next weekend, so we decided to get dinner.
I had some time to kill after the pub and before meeting her, which I managed by wandering around Chinatown. That was the farthest south I'd ever been in NYC; I tend to stay more uptown. It was awesome; the feel is completely different. I'm amazed by how quickly the neighborhoods change. You cross an avenue and all of a sudden all of the signs are in Chinese. You cross a street and you're in Little Italy and the restaurant window decorations are signs for cappuccino rather than roasted chickens.
The Grand Street subway station in Chinatown comes up in a park. I saw a big crowd watching people playing handball (which I'd never seen before), so I stuck around. I figured out by watching that this was a grudge match, as far as I could tell between members of gangs. The people on one side of the court all seemed to be wearing blue hats of different types and people standing on the other side all had clothing with hearts on them. There was lots of shouting, some of it angry, and a lot of the spectators seemed to be from the neighborhood but not directly connected to the players. I wish I'd asked someone to tell me what exactly was going on that made this game so important, but I felt like too much of a voyeur and a tourist. So I just watched. I don't know anything about handball; I was trying to figure out the rules as I went, but everyone else seemed to think that it was a really well-played and close game. Only when one team finally won did it occur to me that maybe I didn't want to be around to see the fallout. Nothing dramatic happened. I watched a lot of side bets resolved; big wads of money changed hands. One of the losing players, the guy who missed the last play, walked off quickly, to my mind trying to avoid eye contact with his 2 little children following him out of the court. That handball game is my archetype of New York. There was a tight, local community that I didn't quite understand, a subsection of this huge city that I didn't even know existed. It was a street event that I just stumbled on while wandering around. It was diverse and urban and maybe a bit seedy. I loved it.
So I waited a bit longer, then met Ting Qi and a couple of her friends at the subway station. We walked a few blocks to a Cantonese restaurant, where there was a long wait for a table, during which I recognized several faces from the crowd at the handball game. Dinner was good, and apparently authentic, and my Chinese is definitely getting better, even if we did spend almost all of the time speaking English. After dinner Ting Qi and I went uptown to the No. 6 Annex party, which was fun if unremarkable. Ting Qi went home to Brooklyn (which I've still never been to) at 3 or 4 just as the party began to die down and it started to rain (which hasn't stopped since). The Annex Sixers managed to fit 10 guests on the couches and a small blowup mattress, we watched some Aliens on TV, and all fell asleep.
So that, and a long drive back in the pouring rain and heavy traffic and the dark, was my weekend.
Blog, Round 2:
The last time I posted regularly on a website predated common use of the term 'blog'. I hate the word, if not the idea.
So I'm finally starting up again for two reasons. First, I'm about to graduate, and I feel like it might be smart to write down some of my thoughts and perspectives at this point in case they decide to change quickly and radically, as I they do. Second, I'm about to leave the warm, nurturing embrace (which is the polite way of saying cruel, vice-like grip) of the United States to seek my fortune in far away lands. There may be some of you out there who care about me, maybe even some who will miss me, and this 'web log', if you will, is for you misled fools as much as it is for me.
So, to begin.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about how people's perceptions of me affect who I am. It's very Heisenberg; the fact that you're watching me changes what you're seeing. I was thinking about it from the perspective of fashion, the idea that the clothes that I wear and the way I look have a very immediate impact on my behavior. I think a part of that is because of the differences in the way other people see me and interact with me, which seems common enough. I sort of like having to fight harder for respect when my hair is pink, and I like the surprised look that old people have when the kid with the funny hair is actually pretty fucking smart. I think people perceiving me as rebellious encourages me, at least a little bit, to actually be rebellious in the same way that dressing off the shelf at Wal Mart for a couple of years led me to shut the hell up and be boring. Another, maybe equal part of the change in my behavior is probably driven by personally feeling different. During my stint in theater it was always amazing to me how changed the first rehearsal with costumes was from the one immediately prior.
I haven't decided quite what content I'm going to include here, and for that reason my name has been left off the site and I won't be giving the url to my parents any time soon. The title, "Lei Nuo", is my Chinese name, which translates roughly to "Portends Thunder". I've always been a fan of Native American names, or names that contain meaning from other cultures. Sure, they pop up from time to time in English, but broadly speaking any meaning has been lost in depths of translation. Adam, for example, is Hebrew for 'man', which makes perfect sense, but no one thinks of it. Albert is from the German Adalbrecht, from 'adal', noble, and 'beraht', bright (or 'bright nobility'). A quick Google search told me that our names do indeed have meaning, but they've been convolved and forgotten. In Chinese the modern day language goes straight into the names. You are Bright Flower, or Strong Hero. I didn't choose my Chinese name, but I'm happy and I'm keeping it.
I've recently realized that I don't like a lot of the ways that I've changed since I got to college. A lot of them have been positive. Mellowing, if you will. But the mellowing means that the sharp edges that I look back on and smile about have been ground down. I'm not proposing that I become who I was in high school, just that I might be able to learn something from who I was and maybe regain some of what I miss. With my impending graduation and 7000 mile move I feel like I have a golden opportunity to reinvent myself, and so I'm taking it. I bought cherry red Doc Marten's. I pierced my eyebrow. It's superficial, but it's a start. And, to go along with the new person there's a new name, too. One that, if you will, suggests that just maybe a storm's a comin'.
So I'm finally starting up again for two reasons. First, I'm about to graduate, and I feel like it might be smart to write down some of my thoughts and perspectives at this point in case they decide to change quickly and radically, as I they do. Second, I'm about to leave the warm, nurturing embrace (which is the polite way of saying cruel, vice-like grip) of the United States to seek my fortune in far away lands. There may be some of you out there who care about me, maybe even some who will miss me, and this 'web log', if you will, is for you misled fools as much as it is for me.
So, to begin.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about how people's perceptions of me affect who I am. It's very Heisenberg; the fact that you're watching me changes what you're seeing. I was thinking about it from the perspective of fashion, the idea that the clothes that I wear and the way I look have a very immediate impact on my behavior. I think a part of that is because of the differences in the way other people see me and interact with me, which seems common enough. I sort of like having to fight harder for respect when my hair is pink, and I like the surprised look that old people have when the kid with the funny hair is actually pretty fucking smart. I think people perceiving me as rebellious encourages me, at least a little bit, to actually be rebellious in the same way that dressing off the shelf at Wal Mart for a couple of years led me to shut the hell up and be boring. Another, maybe equal part of the change in my behavior is probably driven by personally feeling different. During my stint in theater it was always amazing to me how changed the first rehearsal with costumes was from the one immediately prior.
I haven't decided quite what content I'm going to include here, and for that reason my name has been left off the site and I won't be giving the url to my parents any time soon. The title, "Lei Nuo", is my Chinese name, which translates roughly to "Portends Thunder". I've always been a fan of Native American names, or names that contain meaning from other cultures. Sure, they pop up from time to time in English, but broadly speaking any meaning has been lost in depths of translation. Adam, for example, is Hebrew for 'man', which makes perfect sense, but no one thinks of it. Albert is from the German Adalbrecht, from 'adal', noble, and 'beraht', bright (or 'bright nobility'). A quick Google search told me that our names do indeed have meaning, but they've been convolved and forgotten. In Chinese the modern day language goes straight into the names. You are Bright Flower, or Strong Hero. I didn't choose my Chinese name, but I'm happy and I'm keeping it.
I've recently realized that I don't like a lot of the ways that I've changed since I got to college. A lot of them have been positive. Mellowing, if you will. But the mellowing means that the sharp edges that I look back on and smile about have been ground down. I'm not proposing that I become who I was in high school, just that I might be able to learn something from who I was and maybe regain some of what I miss. With my impending graduation and 7000 mile move I feel like I have a golden opportunity to reinvent myself, and so I'm taking it. I bought cherry red Doc Marten's. I pierced my eyebrow. It's superficial, but it's a start. And, to go along with the new person there's a new name, too. One that, if you will, suggests that just maybe a storm's a comin'.
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