Just another day

So… I went skydiving yesterday. Check it out.

Questions and Answers for my aunt Kelly

Q- Hey Seth, how are you and what have you been up to?

I’m “good”.  I am going to school at BYU taking some really fun classes such as cell biology, physiology, and Chinese. I quit my job this semester so that I could focus on schoolwork since last semester I never had enough time to get everything done. I’m doing mentored research with Dr. Stark in the PDBIO department, the project is to try and come up with a better way to introduce specific mutations into the chicken genome, it is a lot of fun!  I’m also volunteering at the hospital as a Spanish interpreter and at an elementary school teaching first graders Chinese. Other than that I’m getting ready to take the MCAT this summer and go live in China for a year starting in the fall.

Q- So, let’s just get this out of the way…Are there any wedding bells ringing in your ears lately? Just kidding, you can reserve the right not to answer that if you don’twant to. I’m sure we’d all be interested to know though : )

Uh, not that I’m aware of? Don’t worry though, like any good Chinese I’ve got a five year plan and marriage is probably on it somewhere.

Q-Seth, do you remember when you used to press your extra-tough forehead against my rather soft head until you gave me a migraine? It was when you were about 3 years old. I think you should recall… Why do you think you liked to do that so much? It must have been painful for you too. What is your pain tolerance anyways?

You are making that up. No, but really. I have no idea what you are talking about. I have a pretty high pain tolerance though since you brought up the subject. Have you ever seen the movie Lawrence of Arabia? There is a scene near the beginning where an officer lights a cigarette and Lawrence takes the still burning match out of his hand and then just holds it as the flame burns up to his fingertips and then goes out. It’s really hard, but I’ve done it.

Q- How is school going? What are you studying? Do you find you have had anylong-term effects from pressing your head against things as a toddler?

School is going well, I’m double majoring in Chinese and neuroscience. I’m planning on going to medical school and earning a PhD at the same time. But I probably won’t apply until 2012. I was a very conscientious toddler and would never press my head up against things.

Q-How was your trip to China? Tell us what your favorite part was please?

China was absolutely fantastic. Picking a favorite part is going to be hard, there was the time that we hiked yellow mountain and did Taiqi moves on top of big rocks in the fog, there was our trip to the world expo in Shanghai, there was running at night with my roommate at the outdoor track, there was salsa dancing outside in the rain. I don’t know, I can’t pick a favorite.

Q- Tell us a favorite memory of Mexico would you please?

Favorite Mexico memory: catching frogs in the showers.

Q-How are you liking living on your own? Do you miss all the kids at your home?

It’s nice, but having to cook for myself is somewhat less than ideal. If you saw the enormous collection of empty pop tarts boxes that we have in our kitchen you would agree that my eating habits could use some help. It’s not that I mind cooking, it’s just so dreadfully inconvenient. I get to go home a lot so I wouldn’t say I really miss all the kids yet.

Q-Do you still rock out to Keane? What are some of your other favorite bands?

Keane fell into disfavor after their latest album, but I still like listening to their older stuff for sure. My new favorite bands are include: Feist, The Innocence Mission, Missy Higgins, Passion Pit, Phoenix, Sufjan Stevens, The Temper Trap, Two Door Cinema Club, The Weepies.

Q-You just had a birthday. Don’t you think November is the best month for a birthday and especially the 11th day of the 11th month? What did you do to celebrate it?

Well, my birthday was now a while ago, but it was sure good. We went to Pirate Island Pizza which was just incredible. I got to wear a pirate hat, Adam got to wear a pirate hat, the pizza had a piratey taste to it… basically everything was ideal. And then we played at the arcade and thanks to Adam’s luck, skill, whatever you want to call it, we amassed enough tickets to buy an enormous pirate flag that says “surrender the booty” on it. Classic. It is now hanging in our apartment. 11/11/11 is going to be such a big party this year. I can’t wait.

Q- I will be interviewing other relatives of yours in the future. Do you have any interviewing advice for me?

Hmm… nah.

Most people would call this month November…

…and that means it’s time for a blog post.  So to start things out here is an awesome picture.  I took it with my phone while I was driving down University Avenue on my way to work.  Um… I wouldn’t recommend that as being very safe. But it was a great picture opportunity and sometimes they don’t last you know?  Anyway, it’s November.  I’m not particularly happy about the fact but it is what it is, and what it is is not October and also just sort of a dreary month all together with the exception of Thanksgiving break.  Even that though is normally ruined because there is so much homework to do.  My roommate Hudson had his one Monday class cancelled and he doesn’t have classes on Friday he will get 10 days off for Thanksgiving this year. If I were him I’d probably forget to come back.

I went to the NCAA cross-country regional meet in Salt Lake City today to cheer on my best friend Alden.  I don’t go to very many of his races which I feel bad about.  He did very well and BYU placed 3rd overall so they will be going to nationals a week from Monday.  Well, the siren song of biochemistry is calling me back to the book that’s laying open on my lap and I can only resist it for so long.

Goals.

I’m overwhelmed by all the work that I need to get done. Moreover, the sobering fact that despite the tireless efforts which I feel must represent the hardest I’ve ever worked, the ostensible results of said efforts without fail fall well below my expectations for myself. Is it possible that I’m overreaching? Should I scale things back so that I can perform better?

I don’t think so.  Here’s why:

So what if I can’t handle everything I’m trying to juggle? I’d rather feel assured that I’m pointed in the right direction with respectable goals than to lower my sights and my expectations until they match my limited current capabilities. The later seems like it would preclude the possibility for progression, no? If not through stretching myself to the edge of a complete mental breakdown, how am I ever going to improve?

Perhaps I’ve seen my potential clearly for the very first time. Is it any wonder that I feel so incapable when I try to go it alone? I may not really understand what level I can ultimately hope to attain to, but I’m sure that whatever that is, I will need someone up there to reach down for me—my reaching up won’t be enough otherwise.

My posts were a lot more exciting when I was in China…

…and actually posted on my blog.

The best thing that happened this week so far was that I discovered that the write-up for my Ochem lab is not due today as I had previously thought.  I have until Tuesday to finish it, big sigh of relief…  So, now I’m contemplating what to do with my free hour and half which I had not planned out.  When I first got back from my mission I was rather OCD about planning out every hour of my day.  Actually, I still am, but the difference is I no longer write out back-up plans.  I was a weird RM.

I just finished 2 hours of 1-on-1 Chinese tutoring (I’m being tutored, not the other way around) as part of the flagship program that mandates 7 hours of tutoring a week.  That on top of class time and a not insubstantial homework load.  It’s a good thing I’m not busy enough this semester right?  ha ha.  There are really too many things that I would like to get done and my brain often refuses to work as hard as I typically require.  Fortunately I have an iPhone, and fortunately there is doodle jump to amuse me.

It’s convenient that there is a word counter at the bottom of this page.  They thought of everything didn’t they.  I have decided that if I’m going to blog I need to set a limit for myself on how much I can write.  Otherwise I will just go on and on and waste precious time that I don’t have enough of and could (certainly!) put to better use.  So if I’m going to start blogging I will use it as an exercise in being concise.  If I can’t say what I want to say in 200 words or less than I will not say it at all.  Or perhaps I will just stop mid-sentence.  I have no aspirations to be a writer and that is the only reason I can think of that I might want to use more than two hundred words to say… anything really.  Well, it’s been real.

To blog or not to blog?

After deliberating for quite some time, less than two minutes but more than one minute, I have decided to consider picking back up with the blogging that I started in China.  But only if a certain critical mass of people (six) are interested in reading it.  So, if you are someone that is awesome enough to be reading my blog, and if you think there is a possibility you might read my blog a second time, and if you are brave enough to potentially let other readers know that you have read my blog.  Then please comment on this post.  If in the next three weeks I get six comments I will start anew to chronicle the mundane details of my extraordinary life.  Feel free to comment multiple times with the names of fictitious people if you find that you are alone in responding to this.  I myself will comment with at least six assumed personas (mostly female) so as to conceal how few friends I actually have.

“Hello?  Is anyone out there?”  This feels like the Pioneer probe, being sent out into the great emptiness of space with very little possibility of being seen by anyone ever again. ” If you are reading this, I am out of cheesecake and need your help!”

S is for Shanghai

We had a free weekend last week.  So Mari, Will and I took the high-speed rail to Shanghai.  Mari’s roommate from college  is from Shanghai so we were able to stay at her house for free.

The high-speed was really that, at one point we were going 343 km/hr (213 mph) which is slightly faster than my previous land speed record in my honda accord.  Ok, quite a bit faster.  In any case, we got to Shanghai really fast so we had most of Friday afternoon and evening to go see the urban planning museum and eat hot pot.

Shanghai is very very modernized, almost to the point that the “futuristic” might be more accurate.  Driving around at night felt like we were in a sci-fi movie, which was awesome in case you are wondering.  After dinner we went to a jazz club.  I decided that the trombone is nobody’s favorite instrument.  So what is the point of having trombone solos?  Perhaps I am mistaken though, maybe some people just love the trombone to pieces.  I wish they would.

Cultural Exhibition Center

Will, Myself, and Mao

On Saturday we went to see Fudan University, the highlight of which was finding a large grassy fieldwhere we lied down for a while looking at the sky.  At around 3:30 we headed to the world expo.  After having heard for weeks and weeks how we would be waiting in line for 9 hours to see a single pavilion we were pretty surprised to find that there was hardly anyone there.  Maybe only a quarter million or so actually.  So we only waited in line about 5 minutes to see the New Zealand pavilion.  My favorite part about that pavilion was seeing a new species of pine tree that had been genetically engineered just for the filming of Lord of the Rings.  Then we hit up the Indonesia pavilion, this time we waited about 15 minutes.  Inside there wasn’t really anything interesting.  Next up we went to the Australia pavilion where the line was insanely long.  Despite the length we only waited 15 minutes before we were inside.  It was interesting.  By that time we were all hungry so we sat down in between the Czech Republic and Portugal and ate peaches for dinner.  We hit up the American pavilion last and had to wait almost an hour to get in.  It was nice though, it felt like we were back in America for the thirty minutes that we were there.  At this point the sun had gone down and we were kind of sick of going inside the pavilions so we just wandered around looking at the lights and the weird architecture.  That was the best part of the expo really!  When we had finally gotten back to the entrance we wanted to go see the Taiwan pavilion but found out that you had to buy a special ticket to get in.  So instead we did a loop around the cultural exhibition center that looks like a giant UFO.  We ended up sitting down on a wall next to the river to enjoy looking at the city lights.  While we were sitting there we were unexpectedly treated to a water show on the river.  It started with a rousing Tchaikovsky piece and ended with Pavarati singing Nessun Dorma which very much restored my belief that humanity deserves to survive.

On a different note, for some reason everywhere we went I kept mistaking everything for a touch screen!  I kept going up to random tv screens, backlit pictures, anything luminescent with a glass front really, and poking at them inanely to no avail.  It was pretty dang funny though I daresay.  I assumed they were all just broken.

On Sunday we went to the French concession which felt… French, I guess.  It didn’t feel very much like China at least.  We walked around there for a while looking for a internet cafe and a place that would sell us matching hair pieces.  We didn’t find either one, but we did stumble across the place where the communists held their first official meeting.  Then we tried unsuccessfully to rent jet skis.  And we got caught in the rain in a park with a pond.  That was not a beautiful sentence but it was a beautiful thing, getting caught in the rain in a park with a pond.

Park with a pond

Our final adventure in Shanghai before heading back was a a final desperate search for Cold Stone (we had already been looking unsuccessfully for two days).  We also wanted to eat Teppanyaki since Mari has Celiac’s disease and Teppanyaki would be a good gluten-free option.  To our surprise and delight we found a Cold Stone and a Teppanyaki restaurant in the same mall!  And we also met up with some of the CLS participants in the Shanghai program who are friends with Will.  So, it was a good day, and a good trip all in all.

Party in the PRC

So last week I went to Beijing.  And I also took a train in China for my first time.  (Those two things were connected).  We took a sleeper train which was fun especially since I was longer than the beds and so I had to have my feet hanging out in the aisle all night long.  It was good though.  Once I got to Beijing I went to stay with the Christensens but Joel forgot to get work off that day so I ended up just hanging out at their house while watching movies on my laptop with their cat Rochester.  That night we tried to go to Cold Stone.  Unsuccessfully I’m afraid.  Well, we were successful in going there.  But it was closed so our ice cream related dreams (the best kind of dreams arguably) were dashed.  So we went and bought some pirated DVDs and then watched Battlestar Galactica together until the wee hours of the morning.

Joel got the afternoon off on Friday and our mutual friend Oliver Palmer from the mission was in town so the three of us went to lunch together and then walked through one of the older neighborhoods of Beijing.  Oliver had an interview to do so he took off for a few hours while Joel and I went to see the bell tower and drum tower.  The drum tower had a rockin drum performance that made it cooler than the bell tower even though they were both cool, both favorites.  We bought some pocari sweat which is not real sweat — well actually I don’t know that — but it brought back lots of good mission memories.

Then we went to houhai which is a really famous lake in Beijing.  When we were renting a boat we had our choice of a battery powered boat or a paddle boat.  We figured that with the battery boat we would be limited as to how fast we could go, whereas with the paddle boat we could go as fast as our legs could propel us, and we flattered ourselves that that would be really fast.  Well, it turned out that no matter how fast we peddled our paddle boat, which was fashioned to look like a large white duck I should add, yes, as I was saying, no matter how fast we paddled our peddle boat it only went one speed which was somewhere between 0 and something really close to zero mph.  But we had a good time anyway.  When we finished we met back up with Oliver and the three of us went to a Tin Tin themed restaurant called The Blue Lotus which was probably the baddest restaurant I’ve ever been to.  And by ‘bad’ I mean ‘good’ in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.

On Saturday I was forced to hang out with our travel group so I said goodbye to the cousins and went to the great wall for the third time.  We also went to a Beijing Opera which was not nearly as bad as everyone makes it sound.  I mean the singing wasn’t good, but who goes to an opera for the singing right?  The original plan was to head home that night on another sleeper train but somehow our tickets had all been given away, so we stayed an extra day and they put us up in a five star hotel as an apology.  It wasn’t clear why they needed to apologize for extending our vacation and canceling Monday’s classes but we were all pretty happy with the arrangement in any case.  So on Sunday Will and I went to the zoo.  We were going to see the panda’s but we wanted to save them for last since they were probably the best.  Unfortunately when we finally got there it was six pm and the panda exhibit had just closed.

Sleepover with strangers

So this last weekend was interesting.  Interesting in the way that doing nothing really special can sometimes be.  As suggested by the title of this entry, I didn’t sleep in my normal apartment this weekend.  Instead the CLS program arranged for us to get an “authentic Chinese experience” by spending the weekend with some random strangers who were paid to take us in.  Well, it was interesting like I said.  I spent my weekend with a guy named Jack who although recently married was spending his weekend with me instead of his wife for reasons that we didn’t discuss.  On Friday afternoon he picked me up and we went to dinner with two of his nephews.  Jack was determined to speak English with me even though his English was virtually unintelligible so I spent most of Friday and Saturday not understanding more than 10% of what he was saying to me.  While he was ordering our food on Friday evening he asked me if I liked to eat mutton, but the way he pronounced it sounded exactly like “matong” the Chinese word for toilet.  Er… of course, toilets are my fav!  That evening we just chilled at his apartment watching Chinese TV.

On Saturday we went to KFC for breakfast which may have been the worst breakfast I have had since… since ever.  But it was a generous gesture since I’m sure that is not what he normally eats.  Since Jack was getting ready to go to Singapore on a business trip we had to go get his visa things taken care of.  I played Chinese checkers with his friend while we waited for him to finish.  The rest of the day was spent like this: eating, napping, eating, napping.  It was a moderately good way to spend a Saturday.  We ate at a very fancy restaurant for lunch with two of his friends.  I ate five duck tongues (really gross) but everything else was fairly normal and good.  Jack was telling me about one of his female friends who was at the table with us, saying “she is, she is eunich”.  It was pretty dang funny but not as funny as the fact that after I corrected his pronunciation of “unique” he kept saying “eunich” all day!  It was like one of his favorite words I guess.  The other exciting thing that happend this weekend was watching Jack apparently learn how to drive.  Actually, ‘exciting’ would probably not be the right word, something more along the lines of ‘terrifying’ would better describe it.

We also went to his friend’s house and watched the Germany vs. Uruguay game at 2:30 am.  It was good but I also had to stay up the next night until 5:00 watching that terribly disappointing final match.  So, I’m really tired right now.