Senegalese Dinner in SF

The restaurant is called Little Baobab, located in the Mission in San Francisco.

Our waiter was French, and the other waitress spoke some French with him and with us as we ordered our food.

A drink with hibiscus and lime - quite lovely and refreshing! Also went quite well with the grilled lamb and couscous meal -- not pictured here.We ate everything too quickly!

Delicious  beer from Ethiopia!

A special birthday surprise (the chocolate cake is hidden behind the candle) for my dear friend Carly - it was her 22nd birthday, and our waiter even sang to her in French as he brought this plate over.

Erin and myself - a little pink and blurry due to the low lighting and red walls, but quite content! I know we both want to go back as soon as possible.

One more picture from the Pearl M lantern ceremony.

I just came back tonight from the senior recital of the lovely gal in the red dress  - a new and wonderful friend of mine, who it turns out, can sing more beautifully than I had ever guessed. She sang to the music hall in Italian, French, Hebrew, German, and English tonight and some was beautiful enough to bring tears to my eyes. Mills really does have some incredible people.

Pearl M Dinner

Every year at Mills, there's a dinner for the senior class and alumni of Mills - the Pearl M Dinner, named after a pin (with pearls, in the shape of an M) that is presented to one (in this year's case, two) student(s) who have shown great commitment to the college. There's a lovely backstory to the pin - starting in 1913 when someone sketched a design for one, and there was only one jeweler in San Francisco who was allowed to make the pins, and a Mills student had to go with a letter signed by the president of the college to said jeweler to be allowed to have one made, etc. Nowadays, various alumna donate their pins to the college so they can be passed on to new graduating seniors, and that presentation is made at the Pearl M Dinner. After the dinner, there's a procession with lanterns to one of the ponds on campus, we sing the school song, and then there's a champagne and chocolate reception afterwards. That procession is of both graduating seniors and the alumni who come back to Mills to share in the tradition, and it marks the transition of students to alumni, technically - though we have to wait 23 more days to graduate.

We had that lovely dinner tonight and here are some pictures from it!

Carly! Finallly caught on camera.

The lovely hall where we ate -a dining hall in one of the freshman dorms, actually, but one that I had never been in. The lovely Mills grad from years ago who sat next to me said that when she went to Mills, all meals were eaten in the dining halls in the dorms, not just in the central dining hall we have now.

Processing to the pond to sing 'Fires of Wisdom'  - the students used to walk around the lake on campus, but that lake is no longer in existence. Where it once was is still quite pretty, but alas, no water. It's part of my normal jogging route.

Lovely shoes of friends and the lantern we were carrying. It would have been a bit more dramatic had it been dark enough for the lights to really show from our lanterns, but then again, none of us will complain about it starting to be summer!

A friend of mine hiding behind the pile of chocolate at the reception!

Champagne, candles, and another lovely night full of reminders about this amazing event coming up!

Of course, the chocolate massacre. We did very well. Any tutees who come to my office hours will be rewarded with the spoils! I couldn't leave any on the table to go to waste.

Musings from a crazy day.

So, I was having quite the hectic day today - a hectic week, really, though full of good things. And as I was sitting with algebra in one hand, a text message in the other, somehow trying to hold on to a grapefruit I was eating, and looking for my iPod at the same time, I paused to write this down in my planner:

"It's really good for me to spend a solid five minutes untangling my headphone cords. Just like it's good for me to first write a blog entry by hand - by good for me, I mean I hate it. My head runs very quickly. Any friends who have ever listened to my train of thought (Gedankenzug - what do you think, German language? Can we make a new word?) know it. So I never go slow. And it's good for me to have to. When I go fast, I make mistakes - computational errors in algebra, weird sentences in an essay - generally tangling things up worse. It's good to breathe and go slow."

Fairly wise and only mildly pompous.

Speaking of things of that nature, another piece of my writing plus lots of other great stuff from other Mills students is on the Poetry for Scientists blog! Please do go check it out.

What a beautiful way to start the day.

Speechifying

One of the events at the Junior Senior Dinner the voting on the senior who will be the student commencement speaker. You write a speech if you want to be a candidate and email it in to the student government, they do a blind reading of them and choose four that will be read at the Junior Senior dinner, and then the seniors present vote between those four. Mine didn't make it to last night's voting, but I'd still like to share it, if you would like to read it. I'll post it below. (For non-Mills folks, the class of 2013 has the word 'fierce' as our motto of sorts since one can spell it F13RCE, which is kinda cool. Just so you know. ;) )

The first thing I remember is the eucalyptus trees.

I was wedged between two other prospies on the way from the airport, jetlagged, hungry, and hot. We tumbled out of the van and followed our tour guide around, utterly confused and surrounded by the buildings, the sounds and those – those infinitely older and infinitely cooler college kids.

I sat down in the corner of a room in Vera Long and listened to a man with a beard talk about Philosophy and during that one lecture, I fell in love with thinking. After that, back in my home town hundreds of miles away, I thought about becoming a Mills student.

I don’t know anyone whose plans didn’t change after they got here. Some had an idea of what they wanted to study and stuck with it, for the most part. Others, like myself, thought  we knew.

Most of you who know me know that I spend a great deal of time in CPM, our dear, charming, only mildly dilapidated Mathematics and Computer Science building. One late night during my sophomore year, I was alone in the computer lab of that building, two summer research program applications and a study abroad application in front of me in addition to a Real Analysis textbook. It was a Friday night and I was completely in tears. Any movement I made to accomplish one task was ignoring the rest, and the pressure of all the responsibilities pulling me in different directions made me want to run, sleep, eat an entire truck full of fudge and hide in a washing machine all at once.  I think my fellow classmates can relate. And for some reason,  I did something I’d never done before and something I highly recommend. I sent an email to myself with a timer so that it would be delivered to me in a year’s time. I still have it saved in my email.

“Hey, you,” the email says. It writes about the things I was stressed about, and then it said:

“And this email is to tell you that NO MATTER HOW HUGE THOSE THINGS SEEM TO YOU NOW, you obviously got through them.

And you know what, self? I bet you did pretty well. :)

So, like yourself today. Let today be one of those days when you look into the mirror, the mental and the physical one, and like what you see. 'Cause you can DO IT! :)

Love,

Emily”

Mills has taught me to love myself. It has taught me that I am so much more than capable. A Mills degree is nothing to sneeze at. In my math career here, I’ve turned in more than 200 homework assignments and taken 31 exams, and I know that commitment translates to other majors. We have WORKED for this. For four long, grueling and transformative years, we’ve worked and laughed and look at us now!

We are changed – we are older. Grown both more and less mature, gotten A’s and grades we’d rather not share, studied abroad, stayed here, fallen in love, fallen out – we have rallied and studied, lived off of coffee and brunch at Founder’s. We have goals, we have dreams, we have failures from which we have learned, and we are ready. Ready and positively, undeniably FIERCE. Thank you, class of 2013, for letting me be a part of you!

Last Few Week Shenanigans

So, we've had a lot of fun this past week. One night was a glorious night of hanging out and watching cheesy TV shows with my friends with lots of delicious food, and then last night was the Junior Senior dinner - also a lot of fun. It was great to hang out with other students in a non-studying capacity. Mills students tend to work a lot. The chance to kick back and hang out with a glass of wine and each other outside was really fantastic! Here are some pictures from both of those nights:

The aisles at Trader Joe's. We raided them for a friend hangout night.

Erin and myself waiting for the shuttle - reminiscent of a picture of us freshman year!!

The delicious haul... including wine, beer, bread with garlic baked into it, apples, grapes, brie...

Erin and myself at the Junior Senior Celebration!

Carly, such a dear friend, who doesn't like to be in pictures. This is my retaliation.

The tables outside where we were eating/hanging out.

Myself and my tango partner!

Some more of those daring ducks.

Senior Week

So, as per tradition, this week is Senior Week at Mills, which means that each day around noon there's a different activity that is used as a fund raiser for the senior class gift fund (each year, the seniors donate to a gift fund and then give something back to the college, so this year, my class's gift will be a scholarship fund for a new student at Mills next year).

Each of these activities is pretty silly. For example, on Monday, there was the adult tricycle race:

 

and then yesterday, the rubber ducky race. My friends and I bought a few ducks, put some nice designs on them so we could recognize them, and then sent them down the river. Unfortunately, our creek on campus was running a bit low on water this week since we haven't had much rain, so what resulted was the Great Ducky Pileup of 2013, pictured below...

But the ducks made it to the end nonetheless, and were greated by cheers at the finish line.

The event I'm looking forward to the most is the Junior-Senior Dinner, a dinner held for the seniors and given by the juniors, which is this Thursday. There will be pictures from that. :)

Euler's birthday!

Check out the google page, everyone! :)

Also, a friend french braided my hair yesterday! :)

Is it important to feel sad sometimes?

Yesterday, I was hit by a lot of sadness. It came on very suddenly. I was outside, sitting in the sun with some good friends, a successful week behind me and a free weekend ahead, graduation in 34 days - and all of a sudden, I just felt desperately lonely. Lonely while surrounded by people, people whom I like and who like me in return. It was the craziest feeling.

And it got me to thinking. I left those friends and sat in a café for a while, thinking about the definition of a Galois extension, copying the theorems and definitions from my algebra class in a nice color-coded fashion on to a sort of index/table of contents page I keep for my notes (as I am wont to do at the end of the week), and I realized that sitting alone in a café in Berkeley doing abstract algebra at 8 p.m. on a Friday seemed pretty pathetic. On the other hand, I do love math, so I wouldn't always think it was that silly and sad. But I had this damn loneliness hanging around, which colored the rest of the evening.

And I do think it is important to feel sadness. I mean, it feels like checking in with a part of yourself that you ignore a lot of the time. However, I think there's also wallowing in sadness, and I don't think that's helpful at all, but I also think that feels different. Sometimes "negative" feelings (anger, sadness, loneliness, general grouchiness) feel like a rut, a groove in the road that you get stuck in, and I am actually quite proud of my ability to get OUT of them when that's the case, when you have a choice. Does that make sense? Sometimes, there's this perverse pleasure in hanging on to a negative emotion - it feels good when it feels so bad, you know? That's part of wallowing. I'm not about that. I don't think those moods are good for much. That's giving your inner scumbag too much leeway. That's when it's important to pull yourself together.

I think what happened to me last night was the absence of the normal stimulation we receive from dawn 'til lights out. My friends were busy, I didn't particularly feel like seeking anyone out to hang out with, nothing too pressing had to be done - and I was writing notes, but that didn't take up too much of my brain. And when the everyday noise of the world and of my own head was gone, I realized that I was sad.

By the time I went to bed, I wasn't sad anymore. I had a very, very long texting conversation with an old friend during which he explained some of general relativity to me, and I explained the basics of field extensions to him, and it was positively thrilling.

Here's a good representation of my mood now. Generally happy, but introspective, and in a delicate minor key.

"Matter tells spacetime how to curve, the curvature of spacetime tells matter how to move."

Isn't this one of the most beautiful things you've ever heard? I think so.

An Update

So, it's April 11. APRIL. I feel like it was just January.

In any case, the semester is drawing to a close. Classes end on May 8th and I have my last final exam on May 11th. Then Graduation on the 18th.

Last night, I had an algebra exam - the 30th math exam I've taken at Mills. I don't have the grade yet, but I think it went pretty well. And now, I have a bit more brainspace to think about the rest of the week and maybe, maybe to a bit of long-term academic planning. It's very easy to treat assignments just like an hour in a batting cage - you only look at what's coming at you next and whack it out of the way but while it's coming towards you, you can't see what's behind it. So, an overview would be good. I will get on that.

Write to you soon!

Hihihi...

Interesting thoughts. Click here!

Carson helps me with my day...

He makes me smile.

Reminds me that it's going to be a beautiful day.

And helps me write a To Do list.

Weekend!

The sky that greeted me for my early-morning run on Friday.

Classic Cars West in Oakland  - a showroom full of fantastic old cars and some other artwork, plus a Biergarten outside!

Friends!

The view of San Francisco from the Bay Bridge as we went in today to continue an annual tradition: watch Forrest Gump at home, then go to Bubba Gump's in San Francisco and eat as much shrimp as possible.

Just a few pictures.

A few nostalgic shots from Mainz...

The Senior Wall at Mills, where every senior gets to paint something and it stays up for the following fall semester after we've graduated. Can you find me?

Some flowers that cheered me up yesterday when my day was getting a bit rough. It really is springtime here!

Musings from CA

So, it was a whirlwind and fantastic trip to Germany. It was a bit odd to have the extremely long day of the flight back - I prefer daytime flights to overnight ones, but still. The hours on the plane crawled by - 12 of them in total. I watched Anna Karenina (not bad) and Silver Linings Playbook (eh, also not bad) and did some programming, tried to sleep, got distracted - and all of a sudden I was in San Francisco. Instead of snow and the Straßenbahn, there was fog, freeway traffic, and the Bay Bridge. It was quite surreal on Monday morning to stroll to the pool at 10 in the morning and jump in the water in the bright sun outside after that cold weather last week.

Yesterday I went swimming a well and saw a really neat thing -- a ballet class rehearsing in the shallow end of the pool. I was completely shocked at first until I realized that that makes so much sense. Can you imagine all of the things you would be physically aware of while moving in the water? I bet it's incredibly informative in addition to being a great workout - it's much harder to kick and spin through water than air. It was really, really neat to see. Also a bit distracting. I looked at them twirling and laughing and doing all sorts of amazing things and felt rather boring as I swam freestyle back and forth. Also, I've decided that if they made the bottoms of pools into movie screens and showed, I dunno, Pixar films while I swam, I'd swim for a lot longer.

So, I'm back and back to my m.o., if you will: getting a cup of coffee at quarter to 7 and working on algebra as the sun comes up. It makes me so happy, I can't even explain.

In other news: 44 days until I graduate. !!