In Which I Find A Renewed Appreciation for Parenthood
November 10, 2014
A huge highlight of Wednesday and Thursday was a chance to see someone from home. Dad. He had arrived a few days early before his conference in center city, in order to spend a little time with me and therefore I freed up my schedule as much as possible. Pretty much every meal we managed to spend together (with one or two exceptions).
Thursday afternoon was pretty busy, I first had a meeting with the director of Penn Global as part of ISAB. The meeting left me with more questions than answers but things were going in the right direction. Following the meeting I rushed off to the Annenberg Performing Arts Center to see a performance of Sweeney Todd presented by Penn Singers, the university’s light opera company.The performance was really fantastic and quite minimalist too. Two of the leads were the sole accompanists for the show, taking turns on a piano played centrally on the set. The stand out performance was that of Genna Garofolo, playing Mrs. Lovett. Nearly pitch perfect and full of character, she helped to carry the show. Another special mention to Eric Lifland who played a chilling impression of Mr Todd.
Friday was again packed full. Class, followed by a meeting with Nadia, lunch with dad, a rehearsal and then finally a sort nap and off to Hillel to meet Dad. Hillel was fairly deserted for dinner that night but Dad and I found company with a few others who had remained behind. I tried to get to sleep early that day but I was restless and couldn’t sleep for a few hours.
The next day I woke up late, still a little sick but a little bit better. I met Dad at Hillel and we talked to Rabbi Levi from Chabad for a bit. Lunch was with Ariella and Moe, and we mostly talked about differences between Australia and the US. My afternoon was quite delightful as I had the chance to read a book for pleasure, “The Rosie Effect”, gifted to be my Abi for my birthday. I really enjoyed the book and even finished it in time for a nap after.
After Shabbat Dad and I had dinner together and then went to see “Gone Girl” at the local movie theatre. While I quite enjoyed the movie, it was a little too gratuitously violent for dad. More than anything I enjoyed the sound design and scoring which mixed calming classical notes with staccato electric tones to provide a constant high tension, on-edge feel to the movie.
Afterwards, I worked for a little and went to bed well satisfied with my weekend thus far.
In Which I Enjoy Variations In My Path
October 29, 2014
Today I woke up late again, 9AM, after stupidly staying up too late the night before. I hurried to my lab and got a minor amount done before rushing off to my quantum mechanics lecture. The lecture today was really interesting with a introductory discussion leading into Richard Feynman’s path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.The basic idea behind it is that the location of a particle at an arbitrary time is determined by a summation over all the possibilities of the places it could have been in each small slice of time prior. It’s very fundamental to the structure of the universe and was a very exciting insight as it ties together Newton’s (more technically Lagrange’s) understand of the universe, with modern conceptions of it.
My afternoon was filled with meetings. First the security reading group, followed by a piano lesson, and then finally the dietitian. After that I was a little drained so I took an hours nap.
Following the nap I raced off to a lecture with the esteemed Dr. Emil Pitkin of the Wharton Department of Statistics. He was giving a talk on ‘garbage statistics’; common ways that statistics are misused. It was as expected, a most wonderful lecture and I found myself being held to attention for the entire time.
The rest of the evening was occupied by Glee post mortem and various other discussions related to club business. After that it was back to my room and then a little sleep.
In Which I Take Care of Social Needs
October 15, 2014
My Sunday was largely composed of travel time, with a quick farewell in the morning to Jeannine and Rocky. I got a little lost on the way to the airport but soon enough made it and had just enough time to grab a quick drink and a few bananas from the United Business lounge before hopping on for a jaunt back to Philly. When I landed I was fairly exhausted and had some pressing work, so I unfortunately did not make the regular glee rehearsal. However, for what seemed like the first time at Penn, I went to bed at a reasonable hour.
The following week was right back to it, with intense work required to catch up on missing the past few days of class. Additionally, I had two exams to prepare for, one in Machine Learning and one in Algorithms. Thus, most of my week went by without major event other than many intense hours working and studying, often with the other PhD students.
Two notable points were my short breaks with Steph Li (of previous blog fame) and, Amy Miller. I hadn’t had the opportunity to catch up with Steph since returning to Penn as both of us had been neck deep in work and other commitments, however as with most of my close friends, it didn’t matter that there had a been a time delay, we were still as close as ever. Thursday I caught coffee with Amy Miller, a wonderful woman working for Wharton who had previously helped me remain at Penn for a second semester after I had run into troubles arranging it. We went to a relatively new coffee shop around campus ‘HubBub’, where I had a delicious iced-tea.
Other than that, much of my week was in preparation for Yom Kippur and the further holiday to come ahead.