Cornell and Beyond

hockey rumble in the Cornell jungle, Part I

Hi everyone! Apologies for my MIA status, I had about 392834298734928 applications to make sure were finished in about a week. (And of course I’m not exaggerating at all.) Although I’m sure you’d love to hear all about that, I’ll spare you the gory details of me checking my e-mail/ application status pages about 25,000 times a day. (Again, not exaggerating in the least bit.) So instead I’ll tell you about my amazing plans for this weekend.

I’m getting season hockey tickets for men’s ice hockey this year! Just in case you didn’t know, ice hockey is the “it” sport at Cornell, as much because we’re actually pretty good at it as the fact that the Lynah (the ice rink) Faithful (the crazy Cornellian hockey fans) have made it a cult following.

Now, to make it clear off the bat, the process for getting tickets has been drastically simplified over the years. Ha!

The first step to getting tickets was simply getting a number that would give you a chance to have a chance to get tickets. Not even kidding. For about a week, you could go to Bartels and pick up a “line number” upon presentation of your ID card. Since I’m a senior, I got two line numbers, one general undergraduate line number and one senior line number. Just getting to this stage was painful enough, because you need to pick up your line numbers with people you want to sit next to. That meant we had to coordinate the schedules of 16 different people. I felt like a freshmen again, going to the dining hall with my entire floor! Somehow we managed to find a time that forced only a couple of people to be late for class. (Oh, the things you do for hockey tickets.)

Then, at the soccer game last Sunday, they drew random numbers at half time. About 800 undergraduates starting from that number were now eligible to go onto round two of tickets. (A number was also called for seniors, and 150 numbers from that number were eligible for senior tickets, i.e. first pick at seating.)

If you still follow, which I congratulate you if you are because I barely am, that brings us to tomorrow. Tomorrow, starting at 7 PM and throughout the night till Saturday at 9 PM anyone with called line numbers must camp out in Willard Straight. Random “line checks” are done, and if you are not there/asleep, your line number is invalidated and you are put into the wait list. One person may hold up to 4 line numbers, but only people with line numbers called may wait in the infamous Line. Finally, if you’ve made it through till Saturday night, seating selection starts in order of line number.

And I even left out most of the really complicated issues (”falling back” in line, sports passes, ect.) Needless to say, things are actually less stressful than they once were. Camping out used to be 3 days and stampedes were common as the location to get line numbers was randomly announced on the radio.

And on that note, I’d like to share a hysterical story about the “Lynah Faithful.” My coworker was on Ho Plaza one day when he saw people running madly through the campus in one direction. Guessing something important was going on, he decided to run with them. So he’s running, has no idea why, and he sees a girl in front of him with a laptop. She’s running, looks at her laptop, looks around, HURLS her laptop INTO THE BUSHES, and starts RUNNING FASTER. My coworker, realizing the situation must really be urgent, runs faster as well. Did he end up getting hockey tickets? Not even sure, but I thought that was a great story. Sports sure can do some crazy things to people

Stay tuned for part II as the saga of my time in the line continues.

hello world

This past Saturday I volunteered all day at the Enfield Harvest Festival, which was a fundraiser for the Enfield Community Council. It was a bar-b-q/carnival/silent auction/raffle type of event.

I actually had a great time because it was at an elementary school, which meant I got to hang out with kids all day. Being in college for the past 4 years I had almost forgotten that the real world includes people under the age of 18. The kids were all hysterical, as little kids tend to be, and although I was very numb by the end of the day I would do it again if I had the chance. (It was cold. Very cold. Thanks New York, for reminding me that it’s cold up here.) It was also so weird to be back in an elementary school, and it brought back more than a little dose of nostalgia for my own pre-middle school days.

We had a problem when one of our drivers didn’t show up, but fortunately a very kind fellow SACer saved the day and did two trips. It’s a good thing he came back for us too, as we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. (Please note that I judge the middle of nowhere from the fact that 4/4 cell phone networks were completely out of range. Probably not the best criteria for evaluating a location, but you get the picture.) On another tangent, since I don’t go on those quite enough, the drive to the Festival was amazing. Fall is just starting to show its colors around here, and the drive was 20 minutes through rolling hills, fields, pastures and a jagged backdrop.

Not to sound too corny, it was really great to get into the actual community and meet people outside of the Cornell campus. Freshmen year I left campus a total of about 3-4 times. I’m not kidding in the least bit. When nobody has a car and you don’t know left from right (as can be the case the first year) I just played it safe and stuck around campus. It’s not that I necessarily regret that, but at this point I’m ready to stick my head out of the Cornell bubble and shake hands with the rest of the world. To quote my wordpress blog template, Hello World.

a day in the life

A day in my life is not that interesting to me, but as a prospective student you might be interested to know what it’s like. I will choose Monday, through a completely random choice process/it being the first day in the week and not random at all. Please note that my current schedule varies quite a bit day by day since I’m taking 6 independent credits.
Monday
9:30AM Lab: Run experiments, collect data, analyze data. Usually find a break in the time to grab a quick bite to eat at the lab meeting. If need be, also make a coffee run. Good thing there are 3 coffee places within 50 feet of the building.
1:00 PM Study, look over Biochem notes. Make oral quiz questions for the TA meeting.
2:00 PM Biochem TA Meeting: Grill each other with oral quiz questions. Sizzle.
3:30ish PM Break, studying. Coffee refueling if needed.
4:30 PM Cornell Annual Fund Management Team meeting, with dinner perhaps munched on during the meeting.
6:00 PM Hit the libe, or work at the Fund, or do all those random things that need doing all the time.
10:30 PM GO HOME
You may have noticed that class is not explicitly in here, unless you count the TA meeting. That’s because I only have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with Wines on Wednesday afternoon. Don’t yell at me yet, I’m busy around the clock, working, researching, or TAing. Plus my days on Tuesday and Thursday include class from 9-415. My day typically lasts till at least 9 or 10 at night. Which is why I’m looking forward to tomorrow! I’m done at 5 (after an arduous 2 hours tasting wines) and then going to dinner with an old friend. Hooray for taking a little time out to relax and unwind : )

you mean I’m getting credit for a wine tasting? every week?

Wines, or HADM 430 as Just the Facts might call it, is the light at the end of the tunnel of angst filled classes, caffeine induced all-nighters, and hair-pulling prelims Cornell throws at you for 3 years. (I will refrain from blatantly referring to the irony that HADM 430 is, by Cornell lore, the most failed class at the school.) I first heard about it when I was calling alumni for the Annual Fund. Whenever I asked alumni what class they recommended, I would almost always get the answer of Wines.

I got my little black box with a set of three wine glasses that say “Wine Expert.” This made me feel important walking around Collegetown. But I digress. So picture the scene. I pick up my cafeteria tray outside, check my seat number (assigned seating), grab my wine glasses, and somehow manage to make it to my seat without dropping anything. As I scanned the room I caught sight of all these random seniors I knew from a variety of places. I caught sight of Life on the Hill’s very own Jenna just a few rows in front of me. Sitting in that class is kind of like celebrity sighting, but instead of celebrities it’s Cornellians who you haven’t seen for days/months/years. (Sometimes I blow myself away with my analogies.) But I digress again. After a few minutes of awkwardly trying to move my tray, bag, and little black box for every person that walked through my row, I finally settled in to enjoy my first wine tasting.

First we went through some necessary details about wine. Such as, did you know that the astringent tannins in red wine help scrape the fat off your tongue and prepare your palate for another bite of that delicious steak? They didn’t just pair red wine and red meat because it seemed like it would be a good color combination. There IS actually reason behind the madness!

We also got to smell some distinctive wine aromas, or more particularly, got to smell when good wine goes bad. (Since all wine is good wine, right?) I found out that acetobacteria create acetic acid, and that ‘corked’ wine smells exactly like, well, cork. I also was pleasantly surprised to discover that the very precise terminology about wine aroma and flavor (wild violets, raspberries, toast, diesel, you get the picture) isn’t actually completely ridiculous. For example, we smelled a wine that smelled exactly like green bell peppers! And here I was, thinking sommeliers had olfactory receptors gone berserk. (If you cracked a smile at that, congratulations, you are officially a science nerd.)

We got little plastic tasting cups, a spit cup, and a napkin. (Don’t get me started on my spit cup. I was trying to calculate the perfect position of the cup on my desk so that none of my adjacent seat mates would have to bear witness to my digestive excretions swimming in a blue paper cup.) We tasted the components of wine: alcohol, acidity, sweetness and fruitiness. (Did you know sweetness is a taste and fruitiness is an aroma?) We finished up the class with our first real tasting, a 2005 Pinot Noir from New Zealand.

I actually really enjoyed the class because I realized I could in fact taste differences like those between a dry wine and a sweet wine. I’m not wine-challenged! And hopefully I will even reach the lofty goal that the prof said most of us would reach. Being able to distinguish different wines by sight, scent, and taste alone. (And that doesn’t include looking at the label!)

So raise your glass to the class that has been hyped up for the past 50 years, a true Cornell classic: Introduction to Wines.