Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

As I was hurrying to get home from work today, this guy was completely holding up the line of people filing down the subway stairs. He had stopped on the way down to touch a deteriorating part of the ceiling and mutter “morons” to himself. I thought perhaps he had his definition wrong.

By the time I was seated in a pleasantly uncrowded F train car I had forgotten all about the guy. Then, just before the doors closed, he walked on to the car and took his place in the middle, where people usually go to beg for money for some reason or another.

This guy was different. He started off with something about how dangerous it was using MTA and pulled out a piece of the subway wall from some concealed spot to show that the subways were in disrepair. He shouted that someone (possibly a political figure, though I wasn’t familiar with the name) didn’t care. Then the best part: He held up the piece of wall to the ceiling of the subway car and told us to imagine if it fell on a little baby. [I would like to add that he told us that he pulled this wall piece from the L subway stop at some location I don’t recall; the only way it could fall on anyone is if he dropped it while vandalizing the station.]

And what has caused the subways to be in such a dangerous condition? Apparently, it’s the Daily News. He said something like, “If you want to save [money, right? No…] people’s lives [ha!], don’t buy the Daily News.” You meet all sorts of crazies on the subways of New York.

What makes this all the more entertaining is that on the street on the way home from my subway stop, I passed a guy handing out free copies of the Daily News. Influenced by the guy on the subway, I didn’t take a copy; that, or I just didn’t have an easy way to dispose of newspapers.

I’m taking Calc I, which should be pretty easy since I had a lot of it before. Still, calc was my worst subject in high school, so I’ve been worried about passing it with a sufficient grade. It’s even better that our only grades come from two midterms and the final. The first midterm was Thursday. I studied for probably four hours total (that is so much time compared to my usual studying) Wednesday night, but I didn’t know how to do one (simple) problem, and the chain rule had been giving me a lot of trouble.

So today the professor emailed us the results in a list. I first looked at the score for a person with a very similar NYU ID—F. I almost panicked, but then I realized that the A underneath that score was attached to my ID. Yay! This is silly bragging, I know, but I’m excited. The curve on that test was very reassuring. I could have gotten a C with 55%; passing didn’t even require having half of the answers correct.

I recently acquired the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. While I was listening to it, I realized two things:
1. Unless FFVII is re-released, my little brother (who is eight today) will probably never play it. If he were to play it, the inferior graphics would detract from his ability to like it. His first experiences with video games, after all, were on the PS2.

2. That was the only Final Fantasy game I played long enough to beat. Back then I had priorities; now sleeping and homework get in the way of my playing video games. In an effort to fix this problem, I hereby resolve to beat all of the Final Fantasy games (including VIII, though that could take a while) that I have to date, as well as any that I may purchase in the future.

[Note: I didn’t feel like thinking up a title for this one. Luckily, WordPress did it for me, though this is not my actual 42nd post.]

First
NYU’s CAS Silver center is connected to two buildings: Waverly and Brown. Brown used to be the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the very same in which all of those workers were trapped and died in the fire at the beginning of the last century. Today during Lit Int a boy interrupted the class about what he suspected was an alarm. The professor determined that since the alarm wasn’t sounding on our floor and no one else was leaving, we would stay. As soon as she finished saying this, the alarm rang a few times more audibly, so we had to leave. It was a very irregular alarm, though, staying constant for a few seconds and beeping a few more times before stopping, and then starting again. We all casually stood up and gathered our things and turned in our papers before heading out to the crowd in the hall waiting to get into the Silver stairwell. If it had been a serious, real fire, people probably would have died. Taking the Waverly stairs is definitely a quicker escape, even with the slight disorientation at coming out from a different stairwell on the ground floor. Still, the fire escape routes here do not seem much improved.

Second
1. One of the black belts brought (presumably) his child to stretch class last night. It almost made me want (to adopt) a baby. The kid, who couldn’t even walk on his (her?) own yet, wore a little gi complete with a white belt. He (she?) was probably the most adorable baby I’ve ever seen.

2. Slightly worrisome: A sensei (4th dan) is leaving the Seido organization, and not just because he is moving. He assured us at the end of class that there was nothing wrong with Seido and encouraged us to keep training. He said that it was time for him to move on, and though the path would change, the love of karate was still there. So maybe he wants to start his own school? That’s what Kaicho did when he withdrew from Kyokushin. But Kaicho withdrew because he disagreed with the choices made by and the new beliefs of Oyama Kancho. In reading Kaicho’s (probably biased) autobiography, I realized how fortunate it was that I was turned off by the kumite emphasis in Kyokushin (which had seemed highly appealing until I observed a class) because I too disagreed with the principles of the grandmaster. So if a sensei is leaving Seido forever, does that suggest that there are now such flaws in my style? It does not seem possible considering how strong Kaicho’s feelings were just 30 years ago. Still, I must be alert to changes in the organization and not continue training blindly if definite problems make themselves known.

Today is already probably my least favorite day of the week because it means I have to catch up on all of the homework I didn’t do all weekend and I have to adjust my comfortable sleep schedule (bed at 4am, wake at noon) for the coming four days of school and work. This particular Sunday shouldn’t have been too bad, though. I actually got up and made it to an am class of Seido. So I stayed for two classes, both taught by the same instructor. One of the girls who took the class—who happens to pronounce her name the same way I pronounce mine, though her spelling is quite unusual—kept talking after class about how “fabulous” the instructor was. Hmm. I rather disagree. He was late for the 11am class and made us start another kata at 12, when the next class was supposed to start, so the following class ran over, too. It was supposed to end at 12:45, and at 12:53 he said something very along the lines of, “Well, this class ran over, too. We’ll do one more kata. Is anyone late for an appointment? They can go.” So I left, not just out of principle but because I was actually supposed to be somewhere at two.

And that two o’clock event, which should have been the subject of this blog post, was the PAS Mini-mini-con I. When I was at my dorm preparing to head over to Brooklyn, my RA dropped by to do the one-on-one survey thing. She did say that she was considering running a ski trip, and I told her I’d go on that. Then she wanted me to give her an idea for a program that I would attend—like knitting club or getting together in Starbucks (heh) for philosophical conversations. Uhh…. So I had to tell her I’m not really into that socializing thing, by choice, but I don’t know if I’m going to get away with not going to any of the floor’s activities for the rest of the year. She’s probably a really good RA; I just don’t necessarily want to hang out with anyone.

Anyway, back to anime. So I made it to Brooklyn just fine and, with a little help from one of those corner shop salesmen, found my way to the hall where the convention was to be held. The guy at the front desk said he didn’t know where it was (that was okay because I did), but that some other guys were in the building trying to find it, too. So I go up to the fourth floor and I passed the room where the video games (including DDR) were supposed to be. That room was empty and dark. Still optimistic, I figured maybe not too many people showed up, so they condensed all of the activities down to one room. I got to the other room—the one for showing anime—and found two guys sitting outside checking their cell phones and talking about the PAS. We introduced ourselves and discussed the lack of a convention. The trip wasn’t completely a waste, though. We talked about anime, etc. The older guy was very knowledgeable. They recommended things to me, too. People are so helpful. After about half an hour of waiting, we all left. They guy at the front desk talked to us for a little while before we left, and he told us about this website, which he made it seem like he wrote, though I couldn’t be sure.

I had hoped this excursion today would have lasted until 8 or so, and then I would have to come home and have dinner and do homework and sleep. But now I’ve got time to procrastinate.

202913456473103

I suppose it might not be tricky for number people to understand, but it’s taken me five months to figure out what the constantly-changing red numbers on the outer wall of the Circuit City on 14th St. meant. It’s pretty impossible to miss—a string of fifteen numbers with the middle few rapidly changing and affecting the outer numbers [Note: My representation of the middle ones may not be entirely accurate; it’s difficult to see what they say since they change so quickly]. It had always seemed like some sort of clock, but it distrubed me. Not knowing what it really was, I imagined that it counted something morbid, like deaths versus births (though I had no idea in what part of the world or over what time period). I’d considered asking the people in Circuit City what it meant, but I never did. Once I was fortunate enough to overhear some boy telling his female companion that it counted the hours in the day. Still, for several more months after that I could never get it to work out right.

Then tonight! I finally got it. The left side counts how many hours have passed in military time; the right side tells how much time remains until midnight. The thing is, the right side doesn’t read backwards totally. The two digits on the very right count hours, the next two count minutes, etc., but within each two-digit segment the numbers must be read left-to-right to make sense. I think I had so much trouble with the clock because I expected a greater symmetry.