L'histoire de sa vie

Yesterday I finally completed (after nearly three years in NYC) my tour de boroughs by visiting Staten Island, the fifth borough, the one on which I had previously hoped never to step foot.

Unfortunately, fate was not too kind, and because my brother desired to see the Statue of Liberty, we took the Staten Island Ferry and found ourselves trapped in Staten Island for thirty minutes before another ferry took us back to pleasant, clean(er) Manhattan.

Staten Island actually smells like garbage, which is what I expected. Upon reaching the island, I was amazed that the stories of Staten Island being basically just a landfill (there’s even an ice cream flavor called Staten Island Landfill) were true.

Hopefully those thirty minutes will be the only time in my life I have to visit Staten Island. That’s approximately a whopping 0.00025% of my life thus far, a 0.00025% I will never get back.

My brother is in town, and since it’s his first trip to New York City, we’re doing all kinds of great stuff. Today he got his first “New York Transit Sucks” experience. Here’s how it went down:

We were on the F train because apparently the D is not running this weekend between 34th Street and Pacific Street. (Where is that even? Brooklyn? Come on.) Anyway, we were at West 4th Street, attempting to get back to Harold Square. The train began and then suddenly, after only about ten feet of motion, screeched to a sudden halt. Many people fell over.

The train didn’t move, and after a couple minutes, the masses (we were packed in like sardines) were restless. About five minutes later, a voice came over the intercom to explain the situation: “The emergency brake was pulled. Transit Authorities are investigating the matter. We will move momentarily.”

About fifteen minutes later, the same announcement was repeated. My brother and I began joking about the situation:

Ben: What does that mean they’re investigating the situation? Are they gonna go around asking people, “did you pull the brake?” Or maybe they’re reviewing tapes!
Me: They’re dusting for prints! “They got us workin’ in shifts!” [Pass or Play?]

People around us started laughing. We kept joking about all of the train’s goings-on, and about ten minutes later, they made another announcement, explaining that there was no power between 4th and 14th and that they would (finally) open the doors (we were still at the platform the whole time!) and let us out.

In combination with the ridiculous rain and wind we suffered, Ben’s only reaction was, and I quote: “Unbelievable.”

This is the final post from my week of hell. Midterms are over, I’m ready to relax, and I’m ready to rejoin the real world. Spring break begins now. My family is coming in. I’ll have plenty to talk about. But for now, this final brief post:

As part of my job as a TA, today I joined the other seven TAs and our professor in grading the midterms that the students took yesterday. Actually, I helped proctor the exam itself with my fellow TA Greg. The two of us sat in front of the class and ran around answering questions whenever they arose. As a result, we had an intimate understanding of the exam when it came time to grade it.

However, that intimate understanding did not stop me from making a poor decision as to which section I’d like to grade and as a result, I stupidly chosen to grade the “find the bugs in this code” section as opposed to the “define these terms” section that others more wisely chose.

After about three hours, I finished grading my section. After four hours, the full grading was done. In between, we had pizza, and great conversation, because frankly Professor Cannon (the professor of this class) is awesome. And thus my week of hell ended, and spring break began.

During my Midterm week of hell, my posts are a little shorter:

It snowed in NYC pretty hard on February 26, eleven days ago. It was a ridiculous snowstorm, called by the media various nicknames such as Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse. Because I don’t fare well in snow, I got sick.

But that’s not the point. I am now recovered from my illness. It’s in the 50s outside and I’m not wearing my puffy jacket anymore. It’s going to rain tomorrow. Spring has all but officially sprung.

Yet there are still, eleven days later, mounds of snow, covered with all kinds of nasty, all over the streets. This is ridiculous. Examples below:

First of all, let me say that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin may be the worst hosts I’ve ever seen. It was painful at times and even worse the rest of the time to watch them up there, thinking they were funny, being so unfunny.

Every year when I watch the Oscars, my favorite part is the “Death Reel” where they go through the list of all the important people who died since the last Oscars. This year they left out Farrah Fawcett but included some Public Relations guy.

This is the reason why it’s my favorite part. Every year I call my mom and we laugh about whichever the most ridiculous tribute was. PR was it this year. We always joke that they left out our favorite late Key Grip or Best Boy or Caterer.

After all, if some PR guy can make the cut, how come the 2nd Assistant Cameraman can’t?

I have to say James Taylor was not the best choice, as he managed to turn a beautiful song into a boring lullaby. Between his performance and Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, it was a shame there weren’t a few more names in the memorial montage.

A week of hell is about to begin, unparalleled by any midterms I’ve had before. I’ve stated many times that this semester is my hardest and will be so, but it’s not just a couple really hard classes. It’s also the workload from all of my different classes.

This week alone I have two database assignments, an OS assignment, a Computers and Society paper, an Astronomy Midterm, and an OS midterm. I have papers to grade for tomorrow, midterms to grade on Thursday, and at least two of the assignments above are group assignments, meaning I also have to work within the schedules of others.

It’s bad news. Even writing this is a way of taking a break from one of my database assignments, which I’m going to get right back to in a few minutes.

I won’t say that you shouldn’t expect the quality of posts to drop this week, because that’s pretty much inevitable. However, I will attempt to trade off size instead. So hopefully this week will be filled by good but short posts. Stay tuned.

First of all, I promised that this entry would come yesterday. But then I was hit by the life-changing qualities of Honey Bunches of Oats: Just Bunches and knew that I would have to postpone this entry. So for that I apologize.

When Adir and I visited Vancouver for the Olympics, one of the things he noticed is that every time we took a bus trip, I fell asleep almost immediately. He would attempt to fall asleep, but in the meantime, I had already dozed off, not to awaken again until we reached our destination.

See the trick is that I put in my ear-buds, attached to my now pretty-much-dead iPod, put on any album, and let the vibrations of whatever vehicle in which I’m enclosed lull me to sleep. This is true on bus trips, trains (I usually stand on the subway if I’m alone, so as to avoid missing my stop), planes (thank god – with the amount I fly, if I didn’t fall asleep I’d hate life), and in cars (when I’m not driving. When I am, I have a beverage.)

The combination of music and vehicle guarantees me sleep, yet you shouldn’t feel jealous. I pretty much never wake up feeling refreshed like after a nap. Au contraire, I usually awake more exhausted than when I began sawing logs. And if I’m with someone, I have to deal with the added guilt of having been able to sleep while they were stuck awake in the real world.

To add to that, sometimes I miss cool sights. I can’t remember the last time I flew and saw something interesting out of the window. By the time the plane takes off, I’m fast asleep, and I usually only awake for meals and after we’ve landed. In Vancouver, I missed the entire countryside between Vancouver and Whistler, which Adir informed me was splendid.

So there’s ups and downs. I don’t know which way I’d rather have because I’ve really only had it one way. What do you think? Do you sleep in transit or not? And either way, which way would you find better?

The following is the full text of an email I sent to Post Cereals:

Yesterday morning, I opened the box of a cereal I had purchased a few weeks back since it was on sale at my favorite neighborhood supermarket, Met Foods. It was called “Honey Bunches of Oats: Just Bunches.” The box showed a cute image of a fan blowing the flakes out of a bowl filled with HBO and milk. However, no matter how cute the outside of the box was, it was the inside that would change my life forever.

I poured a bowl of Just Bunches, added my 2% milk, and took my first bite. To say that I was amazed would be an understatement. It would be an injustice to the magnitude of that first bite. It would not come close to adequately explaining how different of a person I am now that I have tried Just Bunches.

The first bite tasted like pure honey. My milk had turned to honey. What I’m about to say draws on my experience of living in Israel for a year: it wasn’t until I took my first bite of Just Bunches that I truly understood the idea of “Milk and Honey.”

My taste-buds were in for a wild ride, as each bite tasted like the amazingness of a milky, honey-y deliciousness combined with the crunch of a bunch of oats. In fact, it was the crunch that I noticed most as I took further bites. See, Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds, please) is easily one of the best cereals yet there is one problem: the flakes. The flakes get so soggy so fast. And frankly, they aren’t that great. They’re not even frosted. They’re just a waste of space and sog.

So when I say that Just Bunches is infinitely better without the flakes, I’m again understating the importance of this invention. Post Cereals, you’ve outdone yourselves. Please allow me to (virtually) shake your hand. Thank you.

I will freely admit that Sunday’s post was created for one reason and one reason alone: flow charts! In fact, when Yoni approached me suggesting that he didn’t care about which side of my bread I spread, I responded with this exact excuse.

See, it’s been a while since I started this blog, and when I began it, I promised you, the audience, that I would have more than just “Superfluous Paragraphs.” (Okay, actually I made no such promise. Actually it was pretty much the opposite. But I guess in a way I’m making it now.) Part of this promise, in my mind, was images, and part of this subcategory of images was self-made flowcharts.

Until two days ago, I had failed you. And for that I apologize. But this shall not be the case in the future. Whenever I see an opportunity to make a flowchart, I will do so:

See? This post is already infinitely better!

Anyway, I don’t just love flowcharts, but rather charts of all kinds. I’m a big fan, for example, of charts of songs, and even made a pretty detailed set of charts for the first verse of N.W.A.’s “Gangsta Gangsta” after I had a dream about said flowcharts. These are lost somewhere in the depths of my hard drives, but it’s worth discussing the dream, because I rarely remember dreams and as you shall learn, this particular dream was quite pleasant.

In the dream, I was talking to Jacob Slosberg, and telling him “I think someone should graph ‘Resemblance to Ice Cube’ and ‘Ideal date of prison release’ on a line graph.” This, of course, corresponds to the first lyrics of the song. He started laughing and I started laughing, which caused me to laugh in real life, loud enough to wake me up. I woke up laughing. That’s it.

Speaking of sleeping, stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on how my sleep patterns and vehicles get along unlike that of most people!

This will be a quick entry because I have very little to say except for this: apparently I pronounce the word “syrup” differently than others.

Throughout my time outside of Texas, I’ve noticed that there are many things I say differently than others, such as the days of the week, the word “display,” “descent,” “umbrella,” and other things. This doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve come to expect it.

But yesterday in Talmud class, I was talking to Arielle about fruit cups and stated that I like the peaches better in syrup rather than water. Tani freaked out: “What did you say?”

“Syrup,” I responded. [Sir-Up]

Apparently outside of my region of the country (aka the region that matters), these ridiculous people pronounce the word differently. Something along the lines of “See-rup.”

This has almost no effect whatsoever on the Kanye West line: “I drink a boost for breakfast, an ensure for dessert, somebody ordered pancakes, I just sip the sizzurp.