In Which I Meet and Miss Class
September 10, 2014
Today was my first 7AM wakeup for my 9AM class. After a good while of waking up later, it was unsurprising that I was drowsy and distracted for the duration of the class.
This possibly led to my further distraction during the day. My productivity was saved by a meeting with Nadia to discuss progress on the paper I was reading and additionally to make plans to help some of her other students. At some point she asked me if I had time to continue the meeting at which point, forgetting that I actually had class, replied that I had until the end of the day. The meeting was interesting and enjoyable, but when I later realized that I had missed algorithms, I felt more than a little guilty.
After the meeting I worked for a while in my office before TGIF in which the PhD students met up for some elements of food and drink. I had a good time chatting to Nadia and a few other students about fun things to do while at Penn and life in Philly in general, but soon enough I ran out of time and headed back to my room to get ready for the proceedings at Hillel that evening.
After shul at Shira, Rina Krevat (visiting from NYC), Elan Kiderman, Debby Greenstein and I went upstairs to the Hillel graduate students reception. I felt a little awkward striking up conversations left and right and repeating the same smalltalk over and over, falling back on my nationality as a talking point. Soon enough the four of us decided to go downstairs for dinner. However Hillel was pretty packed so we ended up taking our food over to the lounge. It ended up being a great chance for me to talk more to Elan and Debbie, who I knew but not nearly as well as I could have. I ended up chatting till well past midnight and only when I realized how late it was did I call it a night and head to bed happy.
Sunday/Monday – Day 160/161
January 9, 2013
Sunday was yet another day of the hard slog. However by this point I was starting to enjoy rehearsals more as we made a little more progress. I even managed the tap dance at the regular speed. However, the process was pretty exhausting and my this point it was wearing down even the most committed of clubbers.
Monday was much the same, nothing to report but feeling a little under the weather. However, Christian, another clubber was taking some fantastic photos available at the following link http://imgur.com/a/hgin1.
After our final fun-as-hell week rehearsal we all rambled over to the Glouse to have a few drinks and watch past shows, which was a bit of a party, that I left a little early to catch up on some sleep.
Monday/Tuesday – Day 155/156
January 4, 2013
Monday! NYE! My plans for today mostly involved catching up with friends and then seeing what it lead to. First step was to meet Ariel for lunch and then a walk around Times Square. By this point the area was already packed. Security guards and police stood around slowly closing off streets for the purposes of crowd control, allowing only people already in the areas to stay inside.
At some point in the afternoon, the main zone around 42nd street was closed off, just as Ariel and I were trying to get in. In our attempts to subvert the security we bought tickets to see ‘Jack Reacher’ at a theatre inside the closed off zone and were let through.
The movie was terrible. Particularly after reading the book. Recommend against seeing it. However, it was nice to be in the area after and at least get a look at the madness happening.
After that we attempted to meet up with Rigel, Paul M and a friend of Ariel’s (Anna). After much difficulty and around half an hour of walking we managed to find each other on the west side of Times Square. From there we realized we were all starving and started walking aimlessly in search of food. Being reasonably late on NYE, nothing was open and so we ended up tracing circles. After no further progress was made, we decided to head to Paul’s place in Manhattan, around which he knew a number of places to eat. On our way we did see the famous NYE ball that was too be lowered to usher in 2013 and were all shocked at quite how small it was!
Arriving at 86th Street, we decided to go into a diner that Paul knew would be open, where I had a bagel with cream cheese and lox, coupled with a vanilla milkshake. A good NYC speciality. After hanging out there for a while and tipping generously we went to Paul’s apartment to finish off the celebrations with a good bottle of single malt scotch and a visit from Nikki, Rigel’s girlfriend.
The New Year was certainly spent well in such good company and it was one of the most enjoyable I have in memory.
Tuesday, the next day, was something of a recovery day. All my plans fell through due to circumstances outside my control so I ended up staying in most of the day and reading a few more books. Not a bad way to spend the last proper day of my holiday. I was however, eagerly looking forward to resuming my time at Penn where I felt comfortable and more in control of my circumstances. Besides, there were friends I had been missing and of course, rehearsals by the day-load.