Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

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.

I finally got my blue belt at Seido tonight. It tied much better than I thought a stiff new belt would.

I’m feeling a bit sick. I hope it doesn’t progress to what my brother, who is now recovering from two days with a fairly high fever, had.

I discovered in the World Cultures recitation this morning that a girl who went to maybe two classes of the Speaking Freely Japanese is taking my WC as well. I think she lives in my dorm, too, but I haven’t talked to her since my first failed attempt to ask her about anime (her reason for taking those two Japanese classes). Anyway, this means I know three people in one class. Neat

Not that anyone cares, but Palladium had fish tonight. And they’re out of apple peach juice.

Ricky and I had World Cultures: Chinese and Japanese Traditions bright and early today. The professor seems to be a pretty cool person—he’s moving the lectures off campus until the administration becomes more sensible, and he changed the structure of the class so we have two tests and no papers; we only have to do one-page responses to all of the readings. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stay awake in the class without other entertainment, though; he’s one of those teachers that like to read passage after passage in front of the class.

I’m going to be a New Critic, for the semester, at least. My Literary Interpretation course, which I figured, since it’s required for English majors, would suck, is actually very cool. It’s more of a discussion than a lecture course, and it really has the potential to be like Connelly’s class. After all, I read over a fourth of the poems in high school, and I recognize most of the names from his class. The professor is young and has a nice accent, but admittedly she doesn’t compare (yet) to Connelly. Although we have six papers to write and discussion questions due every week, I predict Lit Interp (as she put it) will be my favorite class.

Calculus is very long—half an hour longer than any other course—but we get a break in the middle just like we used to in Mr. Miller’s. I didn’t have too much trouble following the class today (except for when he tried to show how Archimedes discovered pi); I guess even if I did throw out all of my notes I couldn’t rid myself of my knowledge of calc two years ago. I’ll probably keep the course, but I have to go to one more class to be certain. Reports on ratemyprofessors.com warn that he doesn’t teach and instead expects students to learn on their own from the book; we shall see.

Physics is more fun than biology. The professor for NatSci II: Brain and Behavior is from New Zealand and, like Olga from Lit Interp, has a nice accent. He isn’t nearly as engaging as Professor Adler (NatSci I professor), though, and he puts up outlines in a Power Point (or similar program) display. Not to mention there’s homework and classwork.

All in all, though, second semester seems rather good right now, but that’s probably because I’ve just done some English homework and, surprisingly, I enjoyed it very much. At the bookstore today I bought the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms—although I had intended to just look up words online—because the professor said we needed to buy it. I’m glad I did. It’s actually fun (No, it isn’t nearly as humorous as, say, our old AP Euro text book, but it’s got so much information). The other books were all pretty expensive; and I had to buy my calculus book packaged together with two books for levels of math I will never take, just to increase the price (and, I guess, make a nice purchase for the math majors). A girl from my summer orientation is in both World Cultures and Lit Interp with me; amazingly, I know people in three of my classes.

Discovery: I like ramen. I’d never had it before lunch today (when I copied off Dave and ate ramen while watching Naruto) because I worried that I wouldn’t like it, but apparently I needn’t have been so hesitant. Tonight before dinner I bought three more cup noodles; when I actually do go to the Asian Convenience Store I’ll see about getting some more authentic-seeming ramen.

In other news, Palladium has pleasant new apple peach juice, which is an improvement from the old kiwi whatever juice. It goes nicely with the salads I’ve started having for dinner to protest the damn nightly rotisserie chicken.

Spring registration: complete. I designed a perfect schedule about a week ago, and since then I’d worried that my courses would fill up. I didn’t have a very good alternative schedule, either. I could play around with the lab and the recitation, but if the actual class happened to be closed, my alternatives were the introduction education course from 4 till 6:35 Tuesdays and Thursdays (not very good for going home Thursday nights) and creative writing, which I don’t actually need. It turns out that the all the worry was for nothing; when Albert (NYU’s online registration system, among other things) finally let me on today, I inputted my classes’ numbers and got them all within a minute. That’s certainly a change from fall registration, when I was still dropping and registering courses two weeks into the semester.

Anyway, my courses: Literary Interpretation (the very first course for English majors); Natural Science II: Brain and Behavior and lab; World Cultures: Chinese and Japanese Traditions; and Calculus I (it’s bound to interest me more than QR, and perhaps I’ll learn it this time). Those last three fulfill my MAP requirements except for one course, which I won’t have to take if I minor in history; and the first lets me take real English classes (although, I’m already taking one) next fall. With this schedule, I can continue working 12 hours per week and have the ability to go to nine Seido classes, all between Monday and Thursday. Wonderful. But perhaps the best part is that I have World Cultures (hereafter WC: J&C) and Natural Science (hereafter NatSciII) with Ricky! So we get to be lab partners again. If only Steve and Dave could transfer for the semester….

The lines for the elevators in the Silver Center usually stretch all the way across the entrance floor of the building during the major breaks between classes. Once the lines came out the doors and circled around the corner. Yesterday I walked right in my usual door and all the way across the hall; no more than ten people were in line. Only about half of the usual thirty or so students in my Amfic class showed up. Could this have anything to do with the graduate students marching in a circle chanting “No contracts, no work, no peace*” to the beat of (practically) plastic pickle tubs outside of the entrances?

A number of TAs went on strike Wednesday morning at 8 to protest NYU’s refusal to renew their contracts that expired in August. Since the National Labor Relations Board reversed the ruling that private universities must recognize graduate student unions, NYU has decided that graduates are students first, and then workers, and as such have no right to unionize. The graduate students want contracts to ensure their health benefits and salaries; NYU refuses to negotiate with the union because it wants a say in academic matters as well.

Although I support my TAs and their strike, I still went to class. I’m not going to the classes that they usually teach if someone is hired to take their place (right now, my Amfic and ConWest TAs are striking; I believe my NatSci TA will continue to hold lab, though), but I fully intend to continue going to the classes taught by the professors. It is, after all, their responsibility to teach the students, and it is our responsibility to attend class and learn from them.

My mother seemed upset yesterday morning when I said I wasn’t going to to the two recitations. It is true that my scholarship is contingent upon my maintaining a certain GPA, which certainly won’t happen if I fail two of my classes for refusing to turn in papers to the scabs. Luckily, I don’t think NYU has had time to hire any replacement TAs yet. My Amfic professor had looked in to moving the class off campus, so she definitely supports the strike, and she said that she would not count absences from recitation during the strike against us. She also said she’d grade our next papers, which means we may actually complete the course. My ConWest professor also seemed in favor of the strike, so I hope she won’t expect us to go to recitations not taught by our TAs. I planned, after hearing my mother’s disapproving tone yesterday morning, to at least go to the classes for a few minutes to see if anyone had been hired and what we students were expected to do about it, but after seeing the TAs marching around like that in the cold, I decided that I could not. It would be against my moral standards to go, and I refuse to violate them. NYU has no right to put students in such a position that they have to jeopardize their personal morals for financial reasons. They’re just buying support based on the fact that so many kids need to attend classes in order to maintain sufficient GPAs.

Czech this out for a complete explanation of the strike.

*Not necessarily exact quotation—it’s difficult to distinguish words shouted en masse.
[Title for this post taken from Dreiser.]

A couple of years ago my parents were picking me (and probably Christina, though I can’t remember some details) up from skiing. At the base of the stairs to the parking lot was a fallen pair of goggles. Although the right thing to do would have been to turn them in to lost and found, my mother and I probably walked past, commenting apathetically about what a shame it was that someone lost his* goggles. My step-father, though, saw it as his gain, and he took the goggles. I’m not sure how he justified that to himself; my mother and I couldn’t believe he’d do such a thing. After all, those goggles belonged to someone else, and what if the person realized it and came back searching for them in vain? My mother and I, in later conversations of the found/stolen goggles, agreed that his taking them bothered us so much because either of us—especially me—could easily have been in the former owner’s position.

Last Tuesday at 2am I realized that my trusty TI 83 Plus (I never did upgrade to an 89) was not in my bag. It’s never anywhere else, and since I’d used it in my NatSci lab earlier that day, I knew it had to be either there or in someone else’s possession. There was nothing to be done at that hour, though, so I went to sleep, planning to go back to the lab to check for it before work on Wednesday. So I went back to the Silver Center the next morning and up to the lab room, but it was locked, and apparently no security guard in the building has keys to those rooms. Significantly more upset now that my plan was failing, I decided to call in late to work and wait around for the lab to open up at 9. When it did, the man with the keys—he might have been a kind of supervising TA or at least one with power, but he didn’t seem old enough to be a professor—said he hadn’t found any TI 83s. He opened a drawer and looked at the most recently lost calculators, one of which, he said, belonged to a girl and was lost just last week.

Then he went to another drawer, one filled with calculators. He picked up one, checked to make sure there was no name in it, replaced its batteries, and handed it to me, saying something along the lines of “so many people lose these calculators and never come back to claim them.” So I’ve basically adopted this orphaned calculator.

As I made my way through the park I couldn’t help thinking about possible scenarios involving kids and their lost calculators. Perhaps a student left his calculator because he was in a hurry to catch a train somewhere, and as he was rushing down the subway stairs he slipped and landed at the bottom with all of his bones broken. Naturally the kid would have to stay home in bed and wouldn’t be able to search for a missing calculator, and what if he didn’t have any friends or acquaintances who would be willing to retrieve it for him? And now I’ve gone and taken the calculator from this immobile, friendless kid. Thoughts like this kept plaguing me, so I came up with these justifications:

1. The calculator must have been there for a long time. The man who gave it to me would not give away the calculator that was lost only a week before, so mine must have been lost a while ago.
2. There is no name in it. Even if someone came back, he would never know whether the calculator he received was his or not.
3. I looked for my calculator. I was back at that building at 8am the next day. Surely if someone had looked for the calculator I now have, he would have found it.
4. My calculator now belongs to someone else. The number of calculators out there is still the same. Besides, there is a possibility that my original calculator is now in the hands of the person whose calculator I have.
5. I have almost exhausted all possible fates of my calculator. Tomorrow I will check with my other lab partner, and if the calculator is not in his possession, then I will accept that I am not likely to see it again. (Of course, if he does happen to have it, I’ll return the one from lost and found.)

I know that my reasons for accepting the calculator don’t fully negate my being a hypocrite, but what else can I do? This calculator might just have sat in the drawer until TI 83s become obsolete, never to be used again. At least with me it serves a purpose.

*The appropriate female word should follow an “or” here and in several other cases; to prevent overly-garbled sentences, I left that out.

NYU has a number of alluring extracurricular programs. I went to the club fair (which took up the entire open half of the fencing salle—there are a lot of clubs here) and put my name down on far too many email lists. The first table in the fencing salle was for some socialist club of sorts. That’s pretty telling about the political nature of NYU students. There was a surprisingly large number of fraternities and sororities; their tables took up probably 15% of the salle. Since I walked up and down the rows, and since there were a lot of people, I often had to go right up to a table to find out what it was. As soon as I saw Greek letters, I backed away quickly before they tried to get me to pledge.

I signed up for some literature things, but I probably won’t be able to go. So many of their clubs meet at the same time. I gave some clubs my email address simply because their representatives had gone through a whole excited explanation of the club’s activities, and I felt bad just walking away. I got an email about the fencing club, and it was like, “If you’re good, join the varsity team. Otherwise, there are some classes you can pay for.” So probably no fencing for me this semester. I might be part of their Hiking Club. They basically just go places in New York City and walk around.

I am part of their martial arts club. It offers free Tae Kwon Do three times a week (but one is an advanced class). The opening meeting last night was fun. For the first half of an hour, the club officers were just answering questions and getting these white cards from everyone. The white cards want to know such silly things as hometown newspaper. The boys sitting next to me were wondering aloud why they wanted to know that. One said in case you get famous, another said in case you die. If you want to test, you have to buy a uniform and pay for the tests. The boy president said that kids in the club would only test about once a year, but a girl later confirmed that students who want to test can usually get two belts (yellow and green, I believe) in freshman year. They only have five belts, she said. They kept us there for almost the full hour and a half last night, despite our starting late. My muscles didn’t even hurt that much today; I haven’t decided yet if that’s good or bad. There are lots of unexperienced people, and quite a number of girls, so it’s nice and not intimidating. The only downside is that I, as a beginner, can only go two times each week, and the Friday class conflicts with another club.

NYU has these Speaking Freely classes to teach kids (and maybe teachers, too?) basic communication in various languages, and there’s of course cultural stuff thrown in. I had Japanese on Monday. I’m not sure how much Japanese I learned there because she didn’t have a set plan for teaching anything, but she did go through some basic phrases. Supposedly there will be handouts next week. The Mandarin class on Tuesday was much more organized. I really liked it, too. There were lots of handouts with pronunciation guides on them. I figured I would take Japanese and Mandarin in preparation for this (required) World Cultures course I’ll try to take next semester. There are lots of World Cultures classes, but the one I really want is on China and Japan. That’s only offered in the spring.

Greenwich Village really is a good place to live. I’m near Union Square, and it’s very nice up here. It’s about 13 blocks, give or take a few depending on the exact location, from “campus.” I like my dorm. It feels like home. And my roommates are all very nice people, though there is a small, silent, and ongoing war over the thermostat. The food is good, too. Some of the places are All You Can Eat, which means get a sandwich and other food and take the sandwich back to your dorm. Plus, every meal comes with at least one piece of fruit. I’ll really have picutres of the area, et cetera, soon.

So that’s basically what I plan to do this year with NYU that has nothing to do with actual school. It all works in to a nice schedule, for the most part, but I won’t publish that here. I’ll put something up about my classes after I actually go to all of them. Until then.

[Note: Posts won’t always be this long about very self-centered things. Just this once, I promise.]