Jono and the Giant Apple: Dr Strangeblog (Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog)

Blogging is a pretty good analogue for living. At first, everything happens relatively slowly, and it is easy to blog about every day or every event that occurs. Thereafter, time dilates more and more rapidly, and blog posts come less frequently (similar to how a year flies by without you noticing, and how it seems to do so more swiftly every year you age). To an outside observer (or reader), however, that dilation must be relativistic, so I just appear to you to be getting lazier and lazier rather than time seeming to flow more rapidly for me.

Anyhow, weekend recap:

Overall summary: Snow. Lots of snow.

Friday afternoon was spent doing a stats assignment (which we subsequently got 20/20 for, so I suppose the effort was worth it). We then headed to a networking event with a bunch of alumni, where we met industry leaders for different sectors, according to our interest. Healthcare was a bit of a bust, but I met a very interesting lady who works in the New York Department of Education. We chatted about education reform and what's working and what isn't, and I'm looking into the remote possibility of going to do an internship somewhere like NYDOE over the summer or on Fridays.

After leaving the freezing networking event, I headed to Rachel and Clint's place for drinks, near Central Park, about 20 blocks downtown from me. They have an amazing apartment with big window, and beautifully decorated. Clint also has a really cool antique turntable and a bunch of records we talked about for a while - lots of overlap with Dad's records (although he had a fantastic collection of Elvis Costello, and lacks the Dire Straits of the Emmett Collection). They (the Topperts) are great; real exemplars of Southern Hospitality. Clint is a filmmaker who grew up in Florida and Texas, while Rachel is a native Texan who worked at Bain for a number of years. I get along really well with them - we bonded over wedding-type things, as I told them all about Dyl and Tas's recent celebration.

A few other people arrived, and we drank mulled wine and home-made cider until about 2am. I walked home then, which was a foolish choice, since it was by then about -12 degrees C. I slept in on Saturday, and then grabbed some lunch and went to meet Rutger from my learning team downtown at the Museum of Modern Art. We get free entry as Columbia Students, so we wandered around for two hours, looking at some marvelous stuff (some great Munchs and Monets), some stuff that has merit but is not to my taste (not a real fan of Matisse, Modigliani or Pollock) and some awful stuff ("Modern Art" covers all sorts of really artistically bizarre things). My favourite was a wonderful Klimt - see pictures. After MoMA we caught the subway up to 112th and Broadway for a party to celebrate Australia Day.

112th and Broadway is Natalie's apartment with her husband Shaun, who I met at the bowling evening a few weeks back. There was, semi-beknownst to us, a simultaneous Australia Day party being hosted by another Australian woman in our cluster at a bar near my apartment; Rutger and I headed for the quieter option at Natalie's. They were kitted out for a brilliant Invasion Day (as Native Australians might call it) party - huge cans of Fosters and Coopers, meat pies, roast chicken, Bondi Beach speedos hanging everywhere... We had a great time there, with a few other guests including Rachel and Clint and Allison from Bain Toronto and her boyfriend Nick.

Another late night ensued, and I was pretty exhausted on Sunday morning. Sunday I devoted to sorting out my room, which saw mixed success. Around 4pm I joined Clint to watch Zero Dark Thirty down at Times Square, which was intense. Zero Dark Thirty is one of the most challenging films I've ever seen - simultaneously hard to watch, and completely engaging. I suspect I will continue to have mixed feelings about it for a long time.

Sunday night was an early one, spent chatting with Uzayr and getting ready for class on Monday. Monday was the first day of proper lectures for the J-term, following on from last week's Stats and Accounting lectures. Nothing of note, except for the continuation of our Monopoly game in Accounts and the receipt of 20/20 for our Stats assigment.

Monday night involved trekking downtown to 101st St in the rain to have an Alphabet Soup Dinner (where two learning teams from different clusters get together to have dinner and chat). We went to Flor de Mayo, a Peruvian restaurant that serves the biggest portions of things I've ever seen. I had a great South American chicken dish and some pretty fantastic sangria. We called it a night relatively early, and I walked home to finalise the stuff in the apartment.

Uzayr, Nisha and I worked until about 2am unpacking boxes, packing cupboards, doing laundry, assembling beds and tidying up. My room now contains a bureau and my clothes are packed away, which makes everything a lot neater. The late night meant I was exhausted for class today, which was exacerbated by a challenging Corporate Finance class at 9am. We discussed discounted cash flows for 90 minutes, during which we also discovered that our final exam is a five hour case study analysis and valuation. Suffice it to say, I doubt I will be loving Corp Fin too much. Strategy after that was much better, being more suited to the high-level, ambiguous problem solving I prefer. Our learning team stayed behind for half an hour to finalise our team charter, and I came home.

Tonight is speeches for people contesting Cluster Elections (which I'm going to skip, needing a night in). I'm not running for any positions, since I'd rather exercise leadership in the clubs than in the cluster.

I'll post again soon, let's hope that the dilation of time doesn't make "soon" too far away for you...

Lots of snow heading down from campus