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

Snow on the Columbia campus

 Snow on lower campus

I'm sure you get the picture... lots of snow

Outside my apartment

One night of snow = car owners unhappy

 Down my street at night

 Up my street

Beautiful old building on the Upper West Side

Helicopter in MoMA

Full Fathoms Five by Jackson Pollock

More Pollock

Huge pollen artwork, that gets more vibrant the higher above it you climb

Mondrian

Monet

Monet (Japanese Footbridge)

One of the big waterlilies panels by Monet (22 are at L'Orangerie in Paris)

Matisse

Picasso sculpture of an absinthe glass

Crowds around "The Scream"

Beautiful Edvard Munch drawing on the reverse wall of "The Scream"

Picasso

Van Gogh's Starry Night

Gauguin

The most incredible piece of art I have ever seen - "Hope II" - Gustav Klimt

Cezanne

Seurat

Warhol

 Random view of the Apple Store at the south-eastern corner of Central Park (~E 57th)

Moving a sleeper couch from Uzayr's old place to the new apartment via the subway

 I guess Madiba has universal appeal

Roadside stall selling child education materials - says interesting things about the value of education in the US

Prohibition and the first week of classes

The last few days have flown by. The weekend came and went, and the first two days of class have gone by extremely quickly. A quick recap of the last little while:

Friday was the last day of orientation, and concluded the programme. We then were supposed to have a huge party at a club downtown, but I decided to give it a skip and head to dinner with Uzayr and his dad instead. It ended up being the three of us, Uzayr's friends Nick and Sarah, Sarah's mother from Sydney and Nisha. We had delicious Italian food in Harlem (and it only cost $35 - this city is ridiculously expensive).

We got home around 1am, so I headed to bed. (Please note that at this stage I was still sleeping on the mattress of the sleeper couch).

On Saturday morning I headed to the Lower East Side to sort out a bed. Joule (pronounced Jor) from my class was looking to sell his, so we met for brunch. Brunch in the US has two major differentiators from South African brunch:
1) It appears to refer to the nature of the meal, rather than the time. In SA, brunch is a meal eaten chronologically between a usual breakfast and lunch, thereby combining the two. In the US, if you skip breakfast, lunch becomes brunch.

2) It is liberally dosed with booze- bottomless brunch doesn't refer to endless food, but endless mimosas and screwdrivers.

After brunch, I went to his incredible apartment on E 31st St. His place is on the 30th floor, so the views are amazing. He was moving out, so he was selling his furniture. The rent there was $4600 for a small two-bedroom apartment. I spent an hour on his couch trying to organise movers, all of whom had hidden costs and sudden changes to quotes. We finally got it organised, for transport on Sunday morning. By late afternoon I headed back to the Upper West Side. I hung out at home before heading back east to Alphabet City where Thomas and I had a drink at an awesome Middle Eastern place called Kazuza. I headed back home, and fell into bed.

Sunday morning dawned, and I slept in. I wandered around in the morning, sorting out admin issues with banking and school documents. At 2pm I walked up to W 109th St, from where Uzayr had ordered a coffee table (He's out of town, so I went to pay and collect). I ended up carrying it several blocks before getting a cab the rest of the way. It is supposedly some designed table they bought for $2 000 (that we picked up for $75). The agony of carrying a heavy table 10 blocks and up 5 flights of stairs has yet to wear off. Even worse, after the coffee table debacle Nisha and I carried some things from her current apartment to the new one. I think my arms nearly fell off doing so. After the movement of furniture, we headed to Jacob's Pickle (a really hipster restaurant opposite our apartment) to meet Nisha's friends, and then went to Prohibition (84th and Columbus). I think Prohibition is going to be my favourite bar in NY - reasonably priced beer, good atmosphere and great live music. I met Nisha's friends, and got home at about 2am.

Monday was Martin Luther King Jnr day, so we had the day off. I woke up late to a message from Joule saying that his move had become complicated, and he needed his furniture. Ah, this was the beginning of Act 3 of the classic Shakespearean tragedy "The Wrangling of the Bed" (Perhaps The Taming of the Bed? MacBed?). After much headache, I bought a bed from Sleepys down the road. I initially planned to carry it, but changed my mind and got delivery instead (after the coffee table incident). I went home, did some stats studying, and then had dinner with Nisha at Celeste, a little Italian place on our block. As I explained to Jo, it was super weird to have dinner with someone who was not her. I am supremely unaccustomed to having dinner with anyone else. (I'd far rather you were here to have dinner with me, Jo). Anyhow, pizza was good, and I did some stats studying before the first day of lectures on Tuesday.

Tuesday dawned, and I did not dawn with it. I was running a few minutes late, so I rushed to class. I then discovered that instead of 9am Accounting, we had an excel review from 9-10h30. Given that I am relatively proficient with Excel, I wasted a precious hour of sleep! Accounts was next (I am going to have to work hard at this), and then Stats. I enjoy the lecturers for both, and think that I'll be fine as long as I stay on top of the material. Tuesday afternoon was bed delivery, and I popped to KMart just beforehand to buy some linen. The delivered my bed at 7pm, and I headed out for a beer with Rutger (from my learning team) at Prohibition. I learned a lot about him, like his two years in Barcelona, or the fact that he played hockey for the Dutch junior national team. I was a little intimidated at that tidbit. While there, the couple at the table to my right were repeatedly fighting and breaking up. It was progressively more sad and hilarious as they were doing so while getting more and more drunk, so the cursing and admonishments got more and more inventive. After heading home, I finished up some prep for Wednesday's class, and fell asleep.

(Side note: the past few days have been colder than I could believe. It physically hurts to travel further than one block because the exposure chills me that much. This is despite the fact that it is sunny and quite pleasant-seeming until you step outside)

Wednesday (today) was round two of Accounts and Stats. Both are going well, and I feel that I'm progressing adequately. After Stats our group worked for two hours on some prep for the weeks ahead. I'm now typing this, about to go off to a soiree where we meet the Executives-in-Residence (famous business people who keep office hours at the school so students can go chat to them and discuss ideas and problems). After that is cluster elections, where we choose the Treasurer, Academic Rep and Cluster Chair for our cluster. I've decided not to run for any of those three - I think I would rather look for leadership opportunities in clubs I care about than in bureaucracy and administration for our cluster. I'll keep you posted on who get's what role. Early bets: Chris T Poon for Chair, Fabien for Academic Rep, Melissa Foo for Treasurer. Let's see how accurate I am.

After that will be some work on a Stats assignment, and then some sleep in my marvelous new bed.

I'm enjoying it here, by the way, despite missing Jo and folks back home. I suppose it is now fair to say that despite the frustrations and busyness, I <3 NY.

Random thoughts:

- My current NY soundtrack:
Reverend and the Makers, The Temper Trap, The Black Keys, Fleet Foxes, M83, Hot Chip

- Things still to do:
Brooklyn, Trips out of state, Running in the park, Staten Island, Spend more time downtown, Travel to limits of the 1 Train

Deceptively sunny day

Cold but sunny day from my fire escape

View to the east (That's the East River and Brooklyn) from Joule's apartment

 View to the west

View north of Midtown East and the Upper East Side (note the Chrysler building on the left)

Slightly NW (Again Chrysler Building)

 The view south from his roof deck

View SW from roof deck

View west from roof deck (Empire State Building)

View west of Empire State from inside the apartment

In contrast, my building (my room is where the second-from-top fire escape is on the left)

Macy's on 34th St (opposite KMart, where plebs like me shop)

The Coffee Table of Doom (designed by Jonathan Adler, built by Satan)

My face after carrying the coffee table

Random ideas are daily bread at B-school, so Thomas and I were brainstorming high-performing teams over a beer

 Ready for first day of lectures! (yes, I'm in the bathroom taking this)

The stop at Columbia for the subway

Empire State at night

The soft-shell has been christened due to freezing temperatures

 Deceptively blue skies belying icy cold

 In the subway on the way home after the first day of lectures