it's been a busy two days - i probably drove around 300+ miles in 48 hrs, but it was a great time. on thurs night, i went to SF to see jeremy denk perform with the SF symphony and michael tilson thomas. it was great - i loved jeremy denk's transparency and his love for music - he completely embodied the music. it was also a treat to see michael tilson thomas play the piano. i had some problems with the programming (trying to capture mozart's life in two hours?) but in general, it was great to get a sampling of mozart's choral works as well (and to watch a few choral members falling asleep during the orchestral moments...). i also realized how mozart was really great with the clarinet, out of all instruments, listening to the woodwind serenade, in combination with the famous one and only clarinet concerto he wrote. after the concert, i also got to meet jeremy denk - what a treat! it's always fun to tell someone how much you enjoyed their performance, the only fear is, of course, sounding like a giddy gushing fan and not as an intelligent human being. ^^ i told him how i loved his hilarious story of the "I love NY" umbrella he accidentally bought. probably every new yorker's nightmare, the horror!

i was hoping to take it easy on friday (it's been a hairy week) but ended up going back to my alma mater again, to go to the stanford shopping center and to the church which i wasn't able to visit earlier. memchu (as it's known to students, short for stanford memorial church) is definitely on my list of my favorite places. so many memories there as well.


a place of prayer, esp before organic chemistry midterms...

friday night, i went to see my sister in King and I again for the second time - the performance was just as charming the second time around, and I picked up on a lot of things that Sarah had told me about, the inside jokes, of secret snickering in the back, etc. ("et cetera, et cetera~") there are two casts of children in the show who play the royal children, and five child actors who weren't performing that night were sitting in the row behind me. they preempted all the actors' lines about 2 seconds before it was said on stage, giving everything away. miguel told me i should have punched her out. ;) my favorite part in the play is the ballet of uncle tom's cabin - maybe i do like dance better than musicals after all??

it's such a joy to watch my sister in a great theater piece, but surprisingly, it was just as fun experiencing the joy of the audience in the people around me, as they enjoyed the performance just as much as i did. The two women next to me cried during "We Kiss in the Shadows". i also made a brief appearance at the cast party afterwards before driving home in a record time of an hour and twenty minutes.



the evil simon of legree (danced by michael balderrama) in the ballet of uncle tom's cabin

what a great weekend. reality set in when as soon as i woke up this morning, i got a call from work saying that i need to go in right away while i was in the middle of making myself a big batch of pancakes made from scratch. i guess my "weekend" had to end sometime.

past and future

i met up with some fellow MD/PhD-ers today, who are eighth years in the program. Eighth... that's a long time to be anywhere. they were talking about how their fellow classmates, who they started med school with, are now their attendings (doctors) in the hospital who are earning $300,000 a year. How depressing. Am I going to be like them in four more years?

I have to say tho, the past three years have passed fairly quickly. It feels like it's been fast, but also feels like I've been here forever. i hope the next 3-4 yrs will pass by quickly as well.

going back to stanford this past weekend was really good. i talked to my senior yr roommate on the phone today, and it was good just reminiscing about the times we used to pull all nighters after we picked the locks in the cafeteria (it's a great place to study!) and to talk about the men we crushed on, or crushed on us. ^^ i took pictures of our senior year dorm - we got really unlucky in the housing lottery and ended up basically in a dorm full of freshmen, who were partying all night long while we old seniors were getting ready to go to bed at 9 pm on a friday night. :) looking back on pictures, i forgot how ghetto our room was! so many memories there. that was a great year.

walking around campus, i was really struck most by how naive i was when i attended here - i was amazed to be at such a wonderful place, but at the same time i feel like i took a lot of things for granted. it's like living in the moment, yet looking back and wishing you had lived more in the moment, so that memories would be more vibrant, more colorful, and more real.



our corner room on the second floor! the current residents still kept the closets in the same place - liz and i have a feeling that no one's moved the closets since we moved them five years ago.


we paid $35,000 a year to live in a place like this?!?

a weekend at the bay

what fun. i visited my sister who is in san jose for a month. it was like a nice vacation - got to sleep in, and spend some quality time with my sister. aside from running grocery errands for her and stocking up her fridge (she is the epitome of the starving artist) by running to the korean market and costco, i got to do some things for myself as well. i've always wanted to go back to stanford since i graduated five years ago (eek), and i found a walking partner to do it with. hehe. sorry A, for making u walk so much! but it was fun, exploring and breaking into buildings, like classrooms where i used to have classes at 9 am every day for a year (humbio core), and previous dorms and peering into our old rooms. i went to kimball, my first dorm, and got to tell the girls there, living in my old room (our quad), that i lived there eight years ago. they were so nice, they replied, "you don't look old enough to have lived here eight years ago!" they are all so fresh faced and look so *young*.

also ran into two stanford grads! awesome, amazing to think it was five years ago since i saw these people.

also got to attend ballet class today in SF at the SF Dance Center which was such a treat. it's a beautiful dance space, with lots of room to dance and beautiful windows and supposedly in a historic building. it was beautiful and class was really fun. i've never taken ballet class with so many guys! only in SF. ^^ everyone was so gung ho and great.


this is the classroom where i had class with robert sapolsky. one of the biggest classrooms at stanford, and a hard building to break into b/c it's a room that's a part of the engineering dept (biology buildings are easier to break into ;)


older and much wiser.


hallowed halls of learning. on the right was where my japanese class was.


drinks at nola, where i went once during my stint at stanford, but it was a memorable night - i went here for dinner after the culmination of my honors thesis. i love the artwork and the ambience.


place where i took ballet class, picture courtesy of kristin sloan of the winger.

"Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, while students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D.

Other poor performers in the study were Yale, Duke, Brown and Cornell universities. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the tail-ender behind Cal, ranking 50th. The No. 1 ranking went to unpretentious Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn."

we beat cal! hehe

interesting, i was listening to npr last night where they were rehashing this statistic, and it was a bit biased b/c they asked experts from berkeley and cal that said that we have a higher percentage of pre professional students who are so highly specialized in their education that going to college isn't going to increase their knowledge of american civics. i agree, going to stanford didn't help my knowledge of the New Deal or the political parties in Iraq.

article here.