4 posts tagged “upenn”

I can't wait to get my life up and running!

Official training starts soon. One meeting more and we'll have concrete stuff to do for Int'l Student Council. I got my first fortnightly illustration published in today's Daily Pennsylvanian (the college paper). Mid-terms start next week. I've been to the gym 4 times this week.

I have a committee dinner tomorrow. I have tickets to see Anderson Cooper on Saturday. Next Sunday I have tickets to see Aqualung. Ít's getting colder and I must do more shopping.

Weeee!!!

I enjoy the independence and the responsibility of getting my business done myself. And everything's been perfect except for a few things, surmountable things.

Okay, so this is how my 1.5 weeks have been:

I painstakingly set up my room myself, which might seem unfathomable to most, but oh well I like my room now.

Essentially the view I get: A bird's nest on close-up, you can't see it here but sometimes I see squirrels.

I thought it might be nice to leave the windows open and have some natural breeze. But the tree outside happens to be the habitat to lotsa insects. The fugly ones. Sometimes there are nice ones.

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I moved in early, so I got to see everyone else move in on Thursday, the day I went out to run some errands (cancel phone line, make immunization appointment, get insurance card). Being a student in a school as big and as rich as Penn tends to make you feel very privileged and honoured. The first picture actually shows roads being condoned off especially for students moving in. Same thing happens for moving-out. Seriously. The rest of them minions have to detour.

We had talks, inspirational talks in a huge hall.

And in that same hall we had totally sophisticated comedians giving up stand-up on Comedy Night. (that was when I really felt special I think)

We had lotsa outdoor parties with lotsa FREE FOOD.

Actually you know what forget it you don't have to know everything. I'm way too lazy to wait for the other gedzillion pictures to load and to write about the gedmedbezillion other events.

But I did buy a new journal. The train metaphor I illustrated the cover with is quite literal I think. Could have done better. But didn't. So there.

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The Antonioni retrospective has sparked within me an interest in 50s and 60s cinema. This interest is by no means epicurist, but rather a childlike wonder at the alterity and enduring qualities of the times. This has been in tandem with another new interest in 18th and 19th Century England, what with my reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Sense and Sensibility. And now, I'm tuning into Turner Classic Movies like nobody's business! The channel is quite a treasure, if anyone should care to tune in every now and then. Beyond the value of screening classic movies, TCM screens them daily by themes. For instance, today they will broadcast movies by Stanley Kubrick, starting the day with a documentary on the director. Tomorrow their listings might include the filmography of Robert Wagner. The last few movies of the day will have both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in their cast, then segue into a day of Natalie Wood movies. This day will end with West Side Story, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, and proceed into the following day of Richard Beymer works. Marvelous!

I am juggling my movie-watching with another very time-consuming endeavour: reading. I finished Sense and Sensibility in the last 2 weeks, and now I must get started on Penn Reading Project's pick-of-the-year, Your Inner Fish, a book that all freshmen have been assigned to read and that we will discuss in clusters during orientation.

Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics)

Jane Austen

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Neil Shubin

When I was a kid and my mum took me out gallivanting, she sometimes bumped into ex-pals and ex-classmates. The exclamation of choice was always, "It's a small world after all!" And I would snigger. I thought such a notion was parochial and small-town. I didn't believe we were really all that connected. I simply believed we lived within isolated circles of friends, and that if you had maybe, 3 circles you would be the only common thread amongst all 3. So then, it was completely possible to assume different personas with different groups of people, and I mean radically different.

This has changed over the growing years, and I've been proven wrong time and again, and it's always been a pleasant surprise to discover overlaps.

A connected matter is that recently I've been mentally pre-occupied with sociopaths and self-validating internal worlds. Last night I watched Shattered Glass, and it gave me a portrayal of the effects of an individual who managed to create an internal reality and successfully projected it out onto the world. This doesn't just refer to his fabrication of news, but also to his personality and identity. Stephen Glass, the journliast, eventually got caught fabricating stories. Anyway I've been quite intrigued with Glass, and found out that he attended Penn! I know I know, thousands of people enter Penn every year. But hello, there're hundreds of colleges out there, thousands of publicized scandals, hundreds of movies, and I had to find a movie that a) I related to, b) was based on a true story, and c) had a protagonist who attended my school.

Amazing right? So anyway I looked up Penn's alumni, and stumbled upon some childhood heros of mine: Noam Chomsky, John Legend, and Stephen Glass!

Yeah great opening paragraph and discussion, but I really just wanted to state this coincidence.