january's a busy month. and i'm so behind in blogging, i'm totally ashamed of myself.
lemme see....
i went to the physics colliquium on thursday last week and this week as well. last week's lecture was on vulcanized matter. the prof was really good - his powerpoint presentation ran really smoothly and he was funny. he also had the coolest remote control for his laptop so that he could switch the slides without being hampered by a wired remote.
this week's lecture was by prof. shankar from yale (apparently quite a famous guy because his textbook is used for quantum mechanics). it was on quantum dots and it was quite amazing considering how even i could understand what he was talking about, and all he had with him was a piece of chalk and the blackboards. he was funny AND he dumbed it down - big time. it was awesome. stuff like "thouless energy", "random matrix theory", "normalization group theory", diagonalizing hamiltonians... - they were all greek to me but he explained it enough so that i actually came out of the lecture KNOWING something. or at least sounding like i know something.
seeing how awesome these lectures are, i think i'll be attending them every thursday now. they invite professors from various physics fields to give a talk and it's always nice to learn something new, especially since i miss physics and i don't have room or time to take any more physics courses.
aside from that, i've been getting used to my mondays during which i have a 6 hour gap between classes. i typically spend the entire time holed up in the library (usually the john w. graham) with an extracurricular book. i really wanted to get bachelard's the poetics of space at e.j. pratt, but it wasn't there, so instead i borrowed jacques derrida's on the name, figuring any philosophy was better than none. big mistake. i have never been so lost in my life. the man uses so much greek and latin that it's entirely inscrutable. that, and since it's translated from the french, the editor inserts bits of the french here and there to clarify translation choices. argh...i managed to get through it anyways and finally borrowed the bachelard this week so that i now have manageable - nay, EASY, extracurricular reading.
why all the extracurriculars? because i've got TIME this semester! the design studio which i anticipated to be the most hectic thing has turned out to consist of only 2 projects this whole semester. last semester, we had something like 5. oh, and guess what we're designing? INSTRUMENTS. as in, sound-producing instruments. the look of shock and confusion on our faces was like nothing else. how did designing buildings, landscapes, etc. turn into instruments?! drawings and modelling became...instruments. we totally did not expect that.
on another note, i woke up at 7 this morning and had my parents drive me down to the hummingbird centre for the 3rd year in a row so that i could line up for 18to29 tickets to gotterdammerung, the fourth and final opera in wagner's ring cycle. granted, in the COC (canadian opera company) production, it's actually only the third opera because they started off with the second opera first.
anyways, cut to me standing outside the lobby (they don't open the doors until 9:00) at 8:00 in the morning with one other person in front of me and - well, no one else. bizarre because typically there's at least 50 ppl in line already by 8:30. at 9:00 another person came in. then two more. so that when the box office opened at 10:00, there was around 7 of us in line. weird.
but hey, it just meant more swag for us ^___^. so i got my gotterdammerung ticket (centre seat for once!) and i didn't even have to stand in a long line-up. it was awesome being second in line. just feel kinda cheated for waiting that long when there was no one else to steal my spot anyways...still, it was warmer than last year. overall, good results! i just have to do this one more time for wozzeck in april.
if i haven't explained how 18to29 tickets work, suffice it to say that they're cheaper tickets for people within the ages of 18 to 29. you can get them online, but ticketmaster charges you and you have to go pick them up anyways. sooooo...i prefer waiting in line, meeting other opera buffs, and finding out which dates have better seats available.
i'm also in the midst of planning a choir reunion, of all things, with a former choirmate. there's a large number of us BCC (bach children's chorus) alumni on facebook (www.facebook.com - friendster for universities/colleges and high schools), so we thought that it would totally work if we could get everyone together again.
aside from that, life is as usual...lots of work, reading, sniffling from a bad cold, and sleeping.
Steph snoozed @ 21.1.06 |
0 comments
0 Comments:
|