Thanking the Good Lord…

That I actually got some press!

From Slate.com’s sister site:

http://www.theroot.com/buzz/black-immigrants-overrepresented-ivy-league

My Master’s Article, Truncated Version

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyn-hsieh/barack-obama-has-broken-r_b_217965.html

If anyone has ideas on getting it wider exposure, please let me know.

The Future

It’s been a crazy fast month since I graduated….

And an obvious hiatus from documenting my New Yorkian adventures here.

Now that I’m in Boston, I’m wondering if I should keep updating this blog, start a new one, or desist for awhile….

Graphic Material

One of my favorite classes, if not my favorite, ended today.  For the last day, our Information Graphics class went to the New York Times (where my teacher is a graphics editor–she does this column) and had our final projects critiqued by graphics staff.

For my project, I decided to do a graphic on university patent grants/inventions and R&D expenditures (fun fact: UC patented Hep B vaccine and 2 strawberry kinds, and UCSD leads the main campuses with most patents. Go Tritons! ), which was critiqued by one of the online graphics staff. Turns out he went to UC Davis! So we bonded over the UC connection. All those hours spent in Excel and Adobe Illustrator paid off.  My classmates had amazing work. What a great day!

Here’s me and my graphic at the Times.

My graphic: finaluni1

Bloomberg headquarters, New York Stock Exchange

In what was the last field trip of the year, my business reporting class and I went to Bloomberg and the NYSE today.

Bloomberg, located on the Upper East Side, is a financial information and news provider, maker of these. The building was amazing- it knocked the socks off the WSJ and the NYT buildings. Curved glass, beautiful sculptures and art that actually makes sense to normal people, and koi fish tanks everywhere. Plus, every room is see-through, to go along with the company’s “transparency” theme. This probably increases productivity and cuts back on shadiness. A la Google, all the food is free– including a snack bar with all the vending machine goods and organic yummies  you can ask for- plus GRIND IT YOURSELF peanut butter, Newman’s Own pink lemonade in a pitcher and potato-starch biodegradable silverware. Truly.

A Disturbing Episode on the Subway

I was riding the subway today, when a woman stepped into the train and asked me if it was going uptown. It was.

She started complaining to me about her day. About how it possibly could not go any worse. About the fact that nobody would read her poetry. That nothing ever went right.

I told her tomorrow was a new day. And saw her eyes roll. Wow, taste of my own medicine.

I asked her what could be done to make her day better. I had just returned from Trader Joe’s and mentally did an inventory to see if I could give her anything. I hadn’t bought cookies, so I couldn’t offer her one of those. Spinach, no, granola, no, cereal, no. D’oh.

She said “Believe me, if you want to know, you’d have to call the police.”

At this point I couldn’t tell if she was disturbed or not, based on her appearance. She was middle aged, with frazzled brown hair, eclectically dressed, but many New Yorkers were. I began to think that maybe she had a difficult background.

“Nothing goes right for me. Everything is wrong. No one will ever listen to me,” she said.

Hmm.  Earlier this evening, on another subway, I had been reading a book about conversations and finished the chapter on listening. No joke. I guess this is my chance to practice.

“When was the last time something went right for you? What was it?” I asked, trying to get her to focus on something positive while I mentally ran through potential platitudes to offer.

She mentioned her kids as the only redeeming thing in her life. She also started complaining about how no literary agent would look at her poetry, how no one would treat her with kindness, and how some man would tear her down constantly about her life. She described him using several expletives.

Then she said she wanted to sit down. I motioned to an empty seat, but she said she was too fat to sit down. (Though she wasn’t). “Nothing goes right for me, ever.”

All of a sudden, a tall old man with a yarmulke storms into our conversation and starts yelling at the top of his lungs. Something about how the woman has no business talking to me, and talking badly about him.

They seem to know each other, and he just starts berating her as she backs into a corner and yells back.

“She’s the only one that will listen to me! She’s the only one who cares!” she screams, as she shoots me this incredibly lonely look with her tired eyes, like an “I told you so.” I won’t forget that look anytime soon.

I try to intervene at this point, telling the man it’s okay for her to talk to me, but he ignores me. I don’t know if I should step into the space between them. I reach out to touch his arm, but rescind it. He moves in closer on her and the entire subway car is staring at this scene. “Why the hell isn’t anyone else trying to intervene?” I think. I figure it’s because the fight is still verbal, and can only elicit intervention if it becomes physical.

Several others around us shoot me glances as I step forward to intervene again. They also shake their heads, as if saying “Don’t do it.” So I don’t. I stand there, tense, with my groceries, as I get to my stop. Should I get off, or should I stay here and… do something?

I get off, I touch her arm, hoping it brings her reassurance. I excuse myself of this episode.

I stumble onto the street, feeling shaken up, and with a million thoughts. I hope she’ll be okay. I hope she won’t get hurt. I hope she will feel joy in the coming week.

I think,  there must be so many lonely people in this city of 8 million. We all sit or stand together silent in a train, with thought bubbles full of struggle, torment, joy, and wonder. We’re encapsulated in our own invisible boxes, mentally separating us from the strangers a few inches away. When a day comes such as today, when those boxes open and interaction occurs, it comes as such a surprise. It catches you off guard. Talking to another human being feels… foreign, if only for a moment. That’s New York for you. That’s this world for you.

Please secure your seatbelt tight and low across your lap. (And wave your hands in the air!)

When one thinks of public transportation, the words  “enjoyment” and “awesome,” don’t usually come to mind.

But add singing, and that mundane bus or plane ride all of a sudden becomes pretty fun, not to mention memorable.

Here’s one clip of a flight attendant rapping the in-flight instructions to a flight bound for Oklahoma City, which we all know of course is the thriving rap capital of the United States. That would explain the measured reaction of the passengers. Shoot, if it were me on that plane, forget the fasten-seat belt sign, it’s time to boogie. Put your hands up, people! And of course this takes place on a Southwest flight.  Sure, I like my 36 channels of  JetBlue satellite TV, eye masks,  earphones,  and selection of Terra Blue chips, animal crackers, gingerbread biscotti, Doritos Munchies and….oh wait, what was I saying? I must be hungry. Anyway, still, nothing can replace the homespun quirkiness  of Southwest Airlines. LUV as a stock ticker? Brilliant. I remember more than one comedy routine during their flights (flight attendant: “Please put on your own oxygen mask before assisting your child or husband.”), which made all that pre-boarding stress melt away.

Here is also another clip of a opera-singing NYC bus driver, featured in the New York Times.

Sadly, musicians on the subway are dime a dozen, and rarely does anyone take much heed then.

Overall though, these welcome intrusions into otherwise routine, tiring, and sometimes frustrating bus/air travel make me smile. They also inspire me to sing more next time I drive- with passengers or not. 

Southwest Rapper:

Opera Bus Driver:

Addendum

I found out today that smashing a cockroach the way I did, and wiping its remains with my shoe on a carpet like I did, is a terrible idea. Why? Because if the cockroach I killed was female, I most likely spread her eggs around- which can still hatch.

That’s about the nastiest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Diary of a Cockroach-Killer

The very first day I arrived in my dorm, a small brown mouse greeted me from underneath my desk. “Welcome to New York,” it seemed to say before scurrying off to welcome other suitemates, no doubt.

Well, the mouse and its brethren continued to make frequent visits, at one point sampling 10 of my granola bars (and forcing me to take a hiatus on my granola bar and squirrel food consumption since the mental association was too much).  Daily screams could be heard throughout my hall, as the mice paid visits to other female suitemates. The security guard would run in, be ready to use his/her training, and then dejectedly walk out upon discovery that it was just a mouse sighting.

After spotting mice regularly in the kitchen and in the bathroom, my suitemate decided to plant some poison. Since then, haven’t heard from any mice.

So I was dismayed when I heard scurrying around in my room again. I was working on an assignment, listening to Janet Jackson on Pandora, and heard the scurrying. I put the music on mute just to make sure it wasn’t a sound effect. And to my horror, there was a huge cockroach exploring the smooth terrain of my plateware next to me. Fabulous.

I didn’t scream. This was it. This was the moment when I would transition from being a newbie to a true New Yorker (never mind that I might leave). Like… becoming an adult. Or puberty.

News Buffet

After taking a 20-minute scan of the weekend’s NY Times, I found a few things share-worthy:

1.  Obama is speaking at Notre Dame. And Arizona State, and the U.S. Naval Academy. I’m sort of surprised that Harvard didn’t snag him, but it did get Steven Chu! That should be really fascinating. I hope I’ll have the chance to catch Dr. Chu’s speech in person (and watch my former roommates graduate). Will he continue the “Do Good” streak to which Bill Gates and JK Rowling contributed?

2. Everyone is atwitter about Twitter. While I am still somewhat skeptical of its overall social value, this article about Twittering for traveling advice made a lot of sense. You blast a request for advice and instantaneously get recommendations. Who needs Yelp? One guy actually traveled from England to New Zealand solely on the advice of his fellow twitterers. Now that’s trust.

3. Short-selling, as I understand it, is betting against a stock and making a lot of money off of it. One of the major short-selling hedge fund founders quoted here, Jim Chanos, came to speak to our class tonight about that and Enron. He was one of the first people who suspected Enron’s shadiness and catalyzed events that led to its demise. I’m not sure how much I can quote of what he said, but he basically outlined what industries he thought were cresting and his reasoning as such. His primary advice to us: take accounting classes, because then you won’t be punk’d when you try to figure out businesses.  He challenged my idea of what a hedge fund founder who spends his life betting on others’ failures might look like. Actually personable, not stuffy or arrogant, and “interested” in transparent companies who do honest business. Or maybe I just drank his PR kool-aid.

Seriously, though, as is evident from several of my posts, encountering all different sorts of people this year really does a great job of dismantling the categories and stereotypes I’ve so carefully constructed, consciously or not, from consumption of biased media or being raised in a certain class stratum. Over the weekend, I organized my browser bookmark folder (yeah, it’s fun, ok??) and reflected that people, like websites, just can’t be put into just one or two folders/categories sometimes. Obvious, yet not.

4.  A NYTimes blog, melodramatically titled “The Choice” details college admissions. I found this post about applying to college by a senior who got into every single one of his 12 schools particularly instructive, not only for high school kids, but for everyone- in terms of how to view our lives and balance expectations and our own passions. His insights are simultaneously wise yet simple. The future is safe if it will be run by youth such as these. The gist: Take ownership over your work, learn constantly, and take responsibility for your life. He’s only 18!