Strange encounters - 2: The story of Jean-Paul Sartre and the free swipe to Late Night

Ten days ago, I wrote about how I was rudely interrupted at lunch by a girl (a complete stranger) who foisted her phone number - unsolicited - on my sudoku-deprived soul.

Writing about that encounter inspired me to write about a few more. Whereas the lunch incident was just plain bizarre, the one described in this post was pleasantly out of the norm. Coincidentally, this one happened in De Neve dining hall as well.

For years one of the major attractions of De Neve has been the availability of delicious fast food after hours i.e. from 9-midnight. This service, called late night, is enormously popular among starving (and not-so starving) UCLA students who flock there like moths to a light source, especially during finals week. Even apartment dwellers congregate here owing to the general cheapness of food.

One fine night my roommate and good friend JP and I walked up the hill from our apartment to avail ourselves of some burgers and curly fries with parmesan and a giant container of sprite. As we waited in line, I ignited a complicated philosophical debate. Around that time I was suffering through my "Sartre phase". Jean-Paul Sartre was a French post-WWII philosopher, public intellectual, litterateur, and an all-around badass who is arguably France's greatest gift to the thinking world. He provided a major boost to the philosophical movement of existentialism through his now seminal lecture "Existentialism is a humanism", and later through his numerous plays and novels and a largely unreadable opus "Being and nothingness."

In those days, I was valiantly wading through his book of collected essays and was naturally itching to discuss some of the stuff with someone. My closest target being JP (BTW I just realized my roommate and Sartre share initials, sort of), I took my aim.

Close encounters of the third kind in De Neve

What do you do when a complete stranger walks up to you and gives her number - unsolicited - in the dining hall, of all places?

Answer: You push the incident to the attic of your mind for nearly a year until rummaging through old text messages revives the memory, and blog about it.

This, dear readers, is a thrilling tale of one man and his quest to finish his sudoku and how he was so strangely interrupted.

There I was, on a pleasant September afternoon, minding my own business and having a quiet lunch at UCLA's famed De Neve residential dining hall. The new academic year had just begun and one could still sense the excitement in the air. I don't recall what I had for lunch that day but for the sake of completeness, let us pretend I had a bowl of pasta, a plate of cheese pizza, a plate of garlic bread, a banana, a bowl of pudding (I always get dessert first before ravenous hordes of over enthusiastic freshmen and battle hardened upperclassmen raid the stores) and a glass of water sitting on my tray. A well-used copy of the day's Daily Bruin, the school's esteemed student newspaper, sat clumsily folded in front of me. I was knee-deep in the sudoku puzzle, ominously marked "fiendish." Since I had already completed the crossword, I was forced to confront this fiend. I nibbled at the bread now and then, but my attention was mostly on the empty grids. I was about to enter sudoku nirvana when...

"Excuse me, where did you get the paper from?"

The speaker was female. I looked up to see her smiling at me. I had a strong urge to blurt out the first thought that crossed my head, which was the paper is all over freaking campus;are you blind? Politeness and restraint prevailed, however, and I replied, "I got it right by bruinwalk. There is a stack of them outside De Neve too."

Club B-cafe

I am glad I am a regular patron of this club:




Remember kids, the fourth swipe will get you another f**king bagel and there are no bathrooms...

WTF Pictures! - 3: A very unique proposition

UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, is hardly the beacon of true journalism. While the paper serves its own, limited purpose well, let us not pretend that its news will bring about earth-shattering changes. Which is why it was hilarious when, a couple years ago, they featured a massive front-page ad by ice-cream specialist Haagen-Dazs and then promptly condemned its own decision in a very solemn editorial. 

Anyway, this ad caught my eye today and I thought it would make a great installment for my new series (plus, it saves me the effort of writing some new and original):

 

Now I have seen my fair share of ads that are weird, but this one clearly wins the award for the most bizarre ad of the year.

Wednesday morning rant: Trader Joe's

Last night I stepped inside a Trader Joe's for the first time in my whole entire total life. A friend of mine wanted to do some shopping so I tagged along.

Now I've heard quite a few good things about the establishment over the years from a number of folks.

Including, but not limited to, the following:

"Trader Joe's has naan!" or

"Their chocolates are soooo good!!! :) =) " and

"Trader Joe cookies. Oh yeah!"

Obviously, I went in with obscenely high expectations. I was already imagining myself as little Charlie in the gargantuan chocolate factory, swimming in delicious pools of molasses and caramel, watching oompa loompas party it up and all that. Instead, my oversized expectations were roundly booed off the stage like Charlie Sheen's lame act. They wilted like day-old marigolds and melted like a shitty wax candle.

They sell legitimate items like milk and eggs as a shameless ploy to hide their true motives: peddling overpriced junk to boisterously enthusiastic college kids.

Palm-sized packets of Trex mix for an astronomical $4?
An embarrassingly normal-sized swiss chocolate bar for $3? GFTO! I can easily buy ten cartons of delicious KitKat for that at Walmart!

The only thing TJ's has going for them is the free stuff. There is a cozy corner at the far end of the store where a bubbly fellow in a Bruin apron serves up bite-size delicacies for free every day, ala CostCo. Resting merrily right next to him is a comfortable pot of freshly brewed coffee.

Some day I will camp out in that corner and drink free coffee and munch on free food all day long.

The trainwreck ends

Hoo boy. The thing that captivated us so mightily for much of last week is finally and mercifully coming to an end. Hopefully. Alexandra Wallace, youtube uploader extraordinaire has issued a very contrite sounding comprehensive statement declaring that she will no longer be attending the university, UCLA's student newspaper Daily Bruin reports.

The exit is to the left of the stage, my friend. Interestingly, she calls the disastrous video a humorous attempt. A humorous attempt at what, exactly? If that was funny, I guess I spent 21 years of my life completely in the dark about the meaning of that good word. Though let me add (as emphatically I can) that the fact she got death threats is distinctly not cool. At all. People who did this are morons. And they need help.

Great to know the tireless truthseekers and muckrakers at the Bruin are spending their finals time covering this hot topic.

That will be all. Too much has been made of this issue (I am guilty of this as well - after all, it does garner a ton of hits for my blog), but it's time to focus on more meaningful things in life. Like college hoops. Or spring break.

And let us also do all that we can to help the victims in Japan. Donate!

And thus descended the trolls

In his farewell speech, President Eisenhower spoke of a military-industrial complex, a shapeless entity that he thought would come to dominate the political field in coming years. I am going to talk about a controversy complex, a vibrant, often creative side industry that merrily springs up around a major controversy, and disappears almost immediately afterwords - like an ephemeral moment of joy.

Like vultures feasting on a carcass, trolls, hackers, and general internet lowlifes have gleefully descended on the facebook page of our dear chancellor. Taking full advantage of the anarchy and reigning chaos, these greedy opportunists have swamped the wall with senseless rants, (hopefully) intentional bad grammar, and quasi-existential non sequiturs.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the finest specimen, the sultan of trolldom:

At least he is honest about his, ahem, movie choices

In such a perfidious and noxious environment, can the Emperor Palpatine stay behind?

Come to the dark side

And very recently, some fellow called Charles Edward Shumar IV (and nowwwwww presenting, his royal highness) has been posting this verbose message on every single post: ( I suspect he is using a bot)

Oh for the days when I went to UCLA and cell phones were just a tech-geek's fevered dream. Now, is there any chance at all Ms. Wallace knew what she was doing and is angling to get a reality show? Or an invite from Charlie Sheen to be one of his new "goddesses" over at Sober Valley Lodge?

Well played, "entrepreneurs" of this dubious side industry.

Update on the Asians in library rant

Wow. This issue has taken on some epic proportions. When I first found out about the Youtube rant by a female UCLA student yesterday, I thought it would be contained within UCLA. But this morning, I woke up to posts about this incident plastered all over the internet, in places as diverse and distinct as twitter feeds, news blogs and message boards. Even the tabloids took a stab at it. To my utter amazement, she even made it across the pond, where the Daily Mail wrote up a blurb about it. Move over, Charlie Sheen.

Meanwhile at UCLA, hundreds of students clogged up chancellor Gene Block's official facebook page with comments and long-winded opinion pages. Although many comments got pretty out of hand and some students took the opportunity to troll around and have some perverse fun, most were pretty much on track.

After hours of waiting, the good chancellor finally released an official statement about the incident, both via an email and through his facebook page:

To the Campus Community:

I am appalled by the thoughtless and hurtful comments of a UCLA student posted on YouTube. Like many of you, I recoil when someone invokes the right of free expression to demean other individuals or groups.
This one act certainly does not represent the views of our UCLA community. Our community is built on mutual respect and civility, and we are committed to fostering an environment that values and supports every member of the community. It is most unfortunate that a single clip on the Internet undermines that environment by expressing hurtful and shameful ideas about others in our community. I believe that speech that expresses intolerance toward any group of people on the basis of race or gender, or sexual, religious or cultural identity is indefensible and has no place at UCLA.
Let this incident serve as a reminder of our collective responsibility to confront hateful and ignorant speech and to uphold UCLA’s core values of respect and integrity.
Sincerely,
Gene D. Block
Chancellor


A very eloquent, appropriate and tactful message by the Chancellor. 

Some enterprising soul has capitalized this opportunity to sell t-shirts. The website claims it will donate all profits to the tsunami victims in Japan.

 
 

Asians in the library? How dare they!

A remarkable youtube video has been circulating today, and it has kicked up a veritable shitstorm. The video features a female UCLA student ranting about how "hordes of Asians" living and studying around her need to learn "American manners" like how to fend for themselves and how not to talk loudly in the library. Among other things, she mentions how she is tired of seeing families of these students flock to their apartments every weekend to cook, wash clothes and help around. Yes, how unusual of families to want to visit their kids?

But that's not her main offense. Midway through the rant, she starts complaining about how these hordes have no respect for proper library etiquette. She does a crude imitation of a generic "Asian" accent.
 
The original copy of the video got deleted but by now there are duplicate copies floating around:


Naturally, the enraged mobs are out on the streets vilifying her as a racist. I don't know if this is necessarily racist (IMO, the word racist/racism - both of which carry very heavy connotations, are woefully overused and abused in our society), but it is bewilderingly crude, offensive and ignorant.

Too much to ask: a faint damnation of finals week

Finals week oh finals week

You make us so weak with your heartless streak

Is it too much to ask to spare us once?

End of every quarter

A span that is ten weeks long

You are here before too long

Flashing in front our eyes without fail

Your remarkable periodicity makes me frail

Is it too much to ask to spare us once?

End of every quarter

Undergrads crowd libraries 

To worship your many vagaries

In quiet desperation we persevere

Always hoping you won't be too severe

Is it too much to ask to spare us once?

And although there is light at the end of this plight

We wait in the dark too damn long

Really

Is it too much to ask to spare us just once?

Pardon my contorted plan to make the verses rhyme. There is only so much time to goof around.

(Not)On the road - 9: The Homefront - You. See. El. A

Last installment of the series
Part 7(Harvard, Boston) is here and part 8(WashU, St. Louis) is here.

So as you can see from the title, not really a on the road post. Well technically, I was on the road. For 12 minutes, which is about the time it takes to walk from my apartment to the admissions office at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. That's quite a mouthful. You'd think a guy donating hundreds of millions of dollars to have the naming rights to a medical school would be kind enough to call it by something short and sweet. Like Dreamworks school of medicine.

The medical school, for those not in the know, is located in one of the nicest parts of Los Angeles in an area called Westwood. The famed beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu are not very far, which in LA parlance could mean anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Bel-Air hugs one part of the larger UCLA campus, and Beverly Hills is a stone's throw away (if you are Michael Vick). Pretty safe neighborhood and unless you do something incredibly stupid, you can walk around freely even at odd hours of the night. I have done it, with no problems (the waking around, not the doing something stupid, obviously). If you are into that sort of thing, you can spot multiple celebrities from multiple fields. A lot of my friends brag about seeing the Chicago Bulls or Adam Sandler in the gym playing basketball.

Now it is no secret that the med school building is nowhere as fancy as some of the others across the country. It is located in some cramped corridors of the ancient Center for Health Sciences building, sharing space with the dental school. To compensate for this, the spanking new Ronald Reagen UCLA medical center opened up just across the street a couple of years ago.

This much, I knew. What I didn't know was the med school has a first-class top-notch A-grade student lounge that looks like a boring arboretum from the outside. This swank piece of work boasts multiple flat screen TVs, a Wii console and ping-pong tables. Our tour guides touted its exclusivity and its opulence quite a bit during the tour. The library is equipped with an exclusive study lounge as well. The school has the added benefit of being surrounded by multiple research buildings. Keep your friends close, your research closer - as the famous saying goes.

All in all, a damn fine med school.

Anyway, that's the end of the on the road posts. Hope you (and I mean my one and a half readers) enjoyed them. As the looney tunes used to say: That's all folks!

Sayonara, goodbye and so long

What has two thumbs and just got out of the last o-chem final of its life? This guy! The last organic chemistry class/lab/instructional yada yada of my life. Done. No more. Clearly, a very poignant moment. So poignant, in fact, that I am going to take a break (no literally, I will make a line break here) to symbolize this sublime moment.


Although I like organic chemistry (a lot), I think O-chem labs are a complete waste of time, effort and talent. They are very shoddy, shabby and hilariously dumbed down. Dichloromethane? Oh no no no undergrads you can't use that! DMSO? Too expensive to let klutzy undergrads handle it!

As a result, we don't end up learning anything useful (as opposed to just the o-chem class where there is some good theory to learn). It becomes a chore to do lab reports and I can't even describe how absurd it is to "reference"  your professor's own course reader when writing up a post-lab. We are obviously writing Nature caliber reports here, right?

Our professor was actually a very nice guy (which made the class oh-so slightly tolerable) and was pretty generous in holding office hours, review sessions, and so on. But that's not enough to overcome the mind-numbing drudgery of decoding noisy IR spectra and hustling in line to get to the reactant first. A freakin' rat race in lab every week!

It's not like this is a sour-grapes type post because I am actually pretty good at o-chem and really enjoyed my normal o-chem classes. I am merely allergic to mindless labor that is not going to lead anywhere anytime soon, and writing endless pre-lab reports comes under this category. If this wasn't a requirement for medical school, I would never have taken an o-chem lab. Would I have taken an o-chem class? Yes. It is a lot like calculus and I love me some calculus on a fine day...

Up in the air, down on the ground - a veteran sure and proud

A while ago, I saw the 2009 film Up in the Air, starring suavemeister George Clooney. It was your typical Clooney film, meaning it was slightly quirky, used a lot of close shots of his improbably perfect stubble, and exploited his prodigious talents in making mundane dialogue somehow seem interesting.

The movie has an interesting plot. Basically, Clooney plays this high-flying executive whose only job is to "consolidate" badly performing firms. If you haven't figures it out yet, it's just a nicer way of saying his job is to fire people. See, the company he works for specializes in this sort of thing (a repo agency for firms, if you will) so anytime a firm is not doing so hot, it will hire Clooney and Co. to come clean up. Clooney is your seasoned veteran: he has a gazillion frequent flyer miles (towards the end of the movie, he gets a special gold-plated card by American Airlines for becoming one of the very few people to accumulate ten million miles), and an equal number of club cards, credit cards, hotel discount cards and so on. Long story short, he has a change of heart, one predictably disastrous love affair, and decides to change his life for good.

The reason I brought up this movie is that lately I have been feeling like a veteran too. I may not have the same number of frequent flier miles that Clooney does, but I have certainly done more than a fair share of flying. Medical school interview sure have familiarized me with a LOT of airports that I would otherwise never have gone to. Since all of my interviews usually end around 4 pm in the afternoon, I end up taking the late evening flight back to LAX. That means I get to my apartment by 11 (on a good day) or midnight (on a mas o menos day).

And let me tell you something: no matter how much I hate the ridiculously long lines, no matter how irritated I get at the byzantine security procedures (I am severely glaring at you American for moronically counting my garment bag as a "third carry-on" bag), I definitely breath a nice, long sigh of joy and relief when I get down the escalator and see the giant pic of our esteemed mayor giving a wholesome grin. Damn it feels good to be back each and every time.

To round this off, here are some interesting tidbits from today:

• God I had this kid patient once and he had severe foot odor. He had sweaty feet! - overheard at Northwestern med school. 
•  My faculty interviewer was roommates with noted neurosurgeon Keith Black at the University of Michigan med school. He also partied hard with Magic Johnson when Magic was at Michigan State. Best quote from him: "We needled Keith a lot when he appeared on cover of Time." Medical celebrities!

Happy rollerskates

Today I was having dinner at Chipotle with two friends and this mother and her little son sat down on the table next to us. The boy was probably around 4-5 years old, and he had extremely adorable unruly curly hair. His mother bought him some foodstuff, but he was barely even looking as she noisily opened the brown paper bag full of textured, processed nacho chips.

That's because he was staring intently at a colorful box sitting in front of him. It was adorned with tantalizing pictures of a giant, loopy race track, and it depicted sleek, modernistic cars zipping through the impossible curves of the structure. He tilted his head a little bit and gazed at it in infinite wonder. Irresistible. He looked at his mother, who delicately opened the box as he held on to the edges, perhaps afraid it would crumble.

Out it came - bright yellow pieces of plastic, four tiny cars with microfeatures carved on them. He was smiling now. She assembled the thing, pieces satisfactorily clicking into place. And the 5-year old boy had his first grand prix, right in Westwood in the middle of a bustling restaurant.

But the main reason I wrote this is the toy reminded me, all of a sudden, of this very similar penguin roller coaster I used to own as a kid. Basically, there were these little penguins on tiny wheels that would climb on a motorized escalator, and once at the top they would roll down on a bunch of loops.

(To my incredible surprise, I googled "penguin roller coaster toy" and this amazing video popped up. It shows how this great toy worked)



That little boy made my evening.

Do NOT feed the construction workers?

So there is a lot of construction going on around the campus for the past few months. The powers that be decided to demolish our perfectly fine bombshelter (actually it's just a food court designed like a bombshelter. Tour guides and orientation counselors fool gullible freshmen with apocryphal stories about how it doubled as a bombshelter in WW2) and replace with an environmentally friendly student center. This student center is going to feature a rooftop garden (ooh! very fancy of them), and the same restaurants as before.

Anyway, that's just background. Since there is a lot of construction, there are also a lot of warning signs posted around the chain-link fences covering the area. One of them caught my eye:

Should have added "Don't feed the workers" as well

Several things that bother me about this:

• No foul language: Really?! Have you ever set foot on a college campus? They reek of foul language.
• No contacts with students: I can hear the perky tour guides saying in stage whisper: "No touching or provoking or eye contact with construction workers." What is this, a freaking zoo? They are not prisoners, you know. 
• No music: Looks like someone got rejected from Julliard and took it way too personally...

And finally on a completely unrelated note: I enjoyed the Wayne-a-rooni. Way to go Wayne.

Squirrelus Bruinus: here, there, everywhere

I have nothing against animals. I am quite happy to live alongside them in perpetual peace and harmony. They nibble and scurry around in their own little worlds; I do the same in mine. Unlike some people, however, I do not melt like a BaskinRobbins cone in 90 degree heat the moment a furry being (or something resembling one) appears in my field of vision. I am mildly fond of dogs, see cats as furry, devious creatures, and have no use for spheroids like hamsters. I am no animal hater. Just a trifle ho-hum about their beady eyes and soft, warm fur.

I used to think of squirrels in the same abstract terms, until I came to the horrible realization that they are giant, marauding anarchists. 

If you have been around UCLA in any capacity during the last few years, you know exactly what I am talking about. These squirrels are freakishly brazen. They are not intimidated by human presence in the slightest. In fact, many of them systematically gang up on an unsuspecting freshman quietly enjoying his greasy pizza, causing him to flee in alarm. Then these thuggish balls of fur gleefully dismantle the giant slab of cheese and pepperoni. I strongly suspect UCLA is their natural habitat now. I wouldn't be surprised to see, twenty years from now, an enterprising graduate student study these squirrels as a research project.

Now just to make sure you folks don't think I am joking, I am posting a picture I took today of a squirrelus bruinus boldly bouncing around the Court of Sciences. Today was a rainy day too, but that clearly didn't faze this tough guy. Plus, posting this picture also allows me to flaunt the amazing abilities of my brand new iphone.

Aggressively nonchalant

Ice cream, pizza, bread, naan - you name it, they eat it. I have seen these wily creatures tenaciously drag 56%-eaten slices of pizza out of trash cans. That must be at least a month's worth of food. The campus authorities seem to have noticed these problems as well. Food courts now have ominous signs forbidding students to feed these squirrels because (and I am quoting now) "this is not their natural food." If only you had a chance to see these posers gorging on an ice-cream cone at 1 pm on Bruin Walk.

Even pigeons don't like these fellows! Citizen Lafayette and I had the rare privilege of seeing a pigeon chase a particularly obstinate squirrel around the coffee house for over 20 minutes.

These anarchists will not sleep in peace (or more accurately, crack nuts in peace) until they succeed in destroying every semblance of order in our society. There is a specter of anarchy haunting UCLA today. And we must unite!