Author Archives: Elizabeth Heon

My Coffee Anecdote

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At the “Ithaca is for Coffee Lovers” event, the GRF’s asked us each to share an interesting or funny coffee anecdote for our lives. I didn’t end up sharing one, as the conversation got side tracked by a very involved discussion of Harry Potter, so I thought, in fairness to those who did open up, I would share my one coffee anecdote:

I’m not a coffee person. My mother didn’t allow me to drink it growing up. She always said it would stunt my growth (with an average height of five foot even, the Heon women do not have many inches to spare).

I started going to coffee shops only when I started interviewing for colleges, so my experience of Starbucks is tied up with a lot of trauma. I’m going to take a minute here for an unrelated rant about college interviews. Namely, that they are pointless and accomplish nothing. I should mention here that I was waitlisted or rejected by every college that granted me an in-person interview. I probably only made it to Cornell because their interview was by phone, though I somehow managed to direct the conversation to how, specifically, I would build the space elevator (ummm….carbon fiber?? Maybe?)

This particular interview was for Yale. I arrived at our local Starbucks 10 minutes early, as I believed etiquette required, thinking my interviewer would be there too. I looked around for someone of the appropriate age who looked “Yaley”. I finally approached a woman I believed to be my interviewer. After some mumbled introductions, which led me to believe that I had found who I was looking for, we exchanged pleasantries. I thought the interview was going pretty well, until she pulled out and iPad and said something to the effect of “So, about the wedding blog…” At which point it became very apparent that this was not a Yale interview, and I had somehow convinced the woman sitting across from me (apparently also named Elizabeth) that I was the photographer for her wedding blog.

Long story short, I spent my real Yale interview hiding in a corner booth from wedding blog lady, who hopefully did find her photographer.

Bread and Windowsill Plants

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According to their advertising, all of the vendors at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market produce their products within 30 miles of the market location. Consequently, I didn’t know what to expect. How many farms are there in the Ithaca area? -a surprising number (at least for me).

At the farmer’s market, I found not only vendors selling produce, but also honey, dairy and meat products, fresh flowers, bread and baked goods, soaps, jewelry, and gifts. There were also several restaurant stalls. The first lesson I learned was that I have been seriously underestimating our agricultural community.

Mine is not a farmer’s market going family. I had always believed they were essentially an outdoor Whole Foods-everything is beautiful, and it’s probably better for you, but who has that kind of money? The prices I saw at the market were surprisingly reasonable. Of course, you also get the benefit of knowing where your food came from, and the opportunity to purchase organic products. I don’t know that most “mid-range” grocery stores stock much organic produce-Wegmans might be an exception. But I do know that, when you can find it, it tends to be considerably more expensive than non-organic alternatives.

I live in a dorm, and my ability to cook is limited right now, but if I ever get an apartment, this is somewhere I can seem myself shopping on a regular basis. Not only is the farmers market a good place to go to get groceries, it’s a great way to get off campus for a while. The pavilion is located right by the lake (inlet?, river? Do they call it something else once it makes its way into Ithaca proper?) and there is a seating area and a dock in back. For my own part, I bought a banana and nutella crepe after I was finished browsing, and enjoyed the water view. I also grabbed a loaf of bread to bring back to my dorm. Cornell’s food is generally pretty good, but I feel like you can’t get good bread here.

One final advertisement: If, like me, you have a windowsill garden that is rapidly getting out of hand, Ithaca Farmer’s Market has something for you. I bought both a succulent and a passion flower, and, if there was more time left in the term, I definitely would have started some dorm-room herbs.

The Professor: An Interesting Film

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For me, documentary films are always iffy. Some filmmakers create a strong, compelling central narrative, that ties together the various clips and characters that make up a film. But other films just feel like a two-hour flood of facts. I wasn’t sure if I would like “The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West”-even from the title, it sounded like a niche film, something that would only be of interest to martial arts fans.

I needn’t have worried. The film does a good job of explaining Tai Chi to a lay audience. It makes good use of archival footage, showing Cheng Man-Ching and his students in their studio. I especially enjoyed watching the “forms”. As someone who had not seen Tai Chi before, this was not what I was expecting. I believed Tai Chi to be a martial art, but the forms seemed like something different, elegant. The closest thing I can compare them to is yoga, but that’s not really an accurate comparison. Yoga is stretching and posing, this seemed more fluid. The film also showed footage of “Push Hands”, in which the Professor would unbalance his students, sometimes bounce them up against the walls of the studio, without seeming to use any force.

While “push hands” and forms are two specific aspects of Tai Chi, for Cheng Man-Ching, it seems like Tai Chi was nothing so much as a way of life. Cheng Man-Ching was also a painter, who had his students practice drawing straight lines for weeks. Cheng Man-Ching saw Tai Chi as a way of keeping healthy, an approach to life. Learning about his philosophy and about what he taught his students expanded my views of what Tai Chi is. It doesn’t seem like “just” a martial art any more.

However, this didn’t feel like a film about Tai Chi. It’s a film about a group of people, and the effect one man-the Professor-had on their lives. Most of the film is comprised on interviews with his former students. A lot of them describe being “hippies” or “weirdos” when they came to the Professor’s studio. It was interesting to see how, many years later, the Professor’s students still seemed to know each other, and how many of them still taught Tai Chi. Watching the film, it was obvious that Cheng Man-Ching had a dramatic impact on their lives.

I would recommend this film to a friend, and I would say to someone considering it that you don’t have to know anything about Tai Chi to enjoy it. In part, this is a film about martial arts history and philosophy. But, it is also a study of a community, its relationships, and the very interesting, very impressive man who brought it together.

 

Dr. Strangelove-Cheering for the End of the World

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I was fully prepared not like Dr. Strangelove. I am not usually a fan of movies which are, for lack of a better term, weird. Last semester, one my classes showed us the clip of Dr. Strangelove’s alien hand choking him. I don’t recall how this tied in to what we were learning, but I do remember thinking to myself that this was not a movie I needed to see more of. I should not have judged a book by its cover, so to speak.

Dr. Strangelove is an undeniably funny movie. But, some of the films funniest moments are also some of the most unsettling. The film works so well because it gets us, as viewers, to feel both amused and disturbed simultaneously.

My favorite scenes were those involving the B52 bomber crew. If you had to choose who in Dr. Strangelove is the “protagonist”-the one whose story we as the audience are following, the one who strives-I would say it is the bomber crew, more so than the cast in the war room or at the base. To me, the protagonist is the character with whom the audience is asked to identify. The President and his generals are played as jerks and fools-you wouldn’t see yourself as one of them. I suppose Lionel Mandrake’s actions are the most hero-like, but he spends most of the story locked up with a crazy general, and bogged down in a lot of awkward references to said general’s “essence”. He’s played more as pitiable. In any other film, the B52 bomber crew would be the ones you root for, hands down. Their story line-scrappy American underdogs defeat long odds-is a mainstay of American cinema. We come into the film hardwired, so to speak, to like these characters. We feel sympathy for them-when a missile almost destroyed the plane, I, at least, crossed my fingers for it to miss-even though we know the success of their mission will bring about the end of the world.

Kubrick is making a point about the stupidity of American nationalism, and he does it very well. Perhaps the most effective moment in the whole film comes when general Turgidson explains to the President that, even with the entire Russian air force looking for them, there is still a chance the bomber will slip through.  He’s holding his arms out like a plane, proudly bragging about the superiority of the American bomber crew. Then, his face falls, when he realizes that if the plane does get through, the result will be the end of the world.

In the doctrine of MAD, Americans essentially believed that the way to keep ourselves safe was to keep building deadlier and deadlier weapons, to believe in and to maintain our military superiority to Russia. Kubrick suggests that what we were really doing was rushing headlong into oblivion, with Russia right behind us.

Ultimately, the mark of a good film is whether you find something new every time you see it. The Dr. Strangelove Wikipedia page says that the last scenes from the film are the explosions from the Russian doomsday device. I guess I must have misinterpreted the last few lines of dialogue-I thought it was America bombing Russia, trying to avoid the “mineshaft gap” by obliterating Russia, so that we could inherit the world, once the radiation subsided and humanity could emerge again. Which would have been perfect, considering America spends the rest of the film trying desperately to not bomb Russia. But, knowing that’s not how it really ends, I guess it will feel like a whole new film the next time I watch it.

Bird watching: A Great Hobby

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I don’t remember when or why I started bird watching. I do know my middle school science fair project was about whether expensive bird seed attracted more birds than the bargain brand, thus justifying the extra expense. Result: Maybe, if you believe a seventh graders science. (I did get to make an awesome stacked bar graph, breaking results down by number and species.) I haven’t been “birding” much recently, and visiting the Cornell lab of ornithology reminded me of why I started birding in the first place. So I’d like to use this blog post as something of a PSA for why everyone should birdwatch.

Firstly, birding is a great way to relieve stress. It gets you out in nature. Also, birds are both cute and charismatic. Our guide at the lab of ornithology talked about the value of anthropomorphizing birds, so that you can recognize and remember them by their personalities, rather than relying on field marks. And, to someone with experiences, birds definitely seem to have unique characters. Blue Jays are loud and abrasive, sort of bullying. Mourning doves have a slightly goofy, pigeonish thing going on. Cardinals move with quick, jerky movements that sometimes seem almost robotic.  Getting lost in the world of birds is a good way to distract yourself.

But, you can also get super competitive with your birding. A lot of birders keep “life lists” of all the species they have ever seen. It’s kind of like Pokémon, except that with thousands of species worldwide, it isn’t really feasible to catch them all. Or, you could go with more of a Moby Dick metaphor, chasing down that one bird that alludes you. For me, it’s the Brown Creeper. They smallish, with white bellies and brown wings. They climb trees in a characteristic spiral pattern, using their tails to prop themselves up as they go. And I would very much like to see one. According to the range maps, they are fairly common in Ithaca and its environs, and yet I cannot find them.

Our guide also said that learning about birds helps connect you to the natural world. It provides a sense of constancy when you travel. Ithaca can be very different from where I live, but the birds are see here are all the same ones I observed for my bird seed science fair project. So, I would tell everyone, at least learn a few birds, the ones you most commonly see. Especially during the spring, it’s nice to know which birds you here singing as you walk around campus (a lot of times, it’s robins. They have a nice, musical song).

If I can go further, I would suggest that if you only learn one local bird, make it the Chickadee. They have a sort of cream color on their bellies, grey on their wings, with a black beard a black cap on their heads. They have a roundish body, golf ball size or thereabouts. Birders often use mnemonics to describe bird songs, which for the most part I cannot make heads or tails of, but chickadees honestly do say “Chicka-dee-dee-dee”. They’re probably my favorite backyard bird, because they’re adorable and gregarious, usually the first to discover a newly set up feeder.

I believe the best reason to go birding is expressed by something I learned at the end of my tour. Our tour guide told us that the statue in front of the lab is of a passenger pigeon. I say we should all appreciate nature now, because as the passenger pigeon proves, there is no guarantee that any species will persist forever.

Gattaca: Could be better

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I did not enjoy Gattaca. I found the acting forced, and the writing clichéd. I suppose, based on the subject matter, that this might be the result of intentional stylistic decisions, but I disliked it nonetheless.

I struggled to sympathize with the character of Vincent, though he was ostensibly the protagonist. His character was closed, angry, and one-dimensional. His anger was, of course, understandable, and justified. Because of his “inferior” genes, Vincent was denied the opportunity to join Gattaca, despite being-it would seem from the film-more than qualified. He was forced to take on the identity of another, and suspected of a crime he did not commit simply because of his genetic identity.

While I understand the plot of Gattaca is supposed to be a demonstration of power of the human spirit, Vincent struck me as being a “power feminist”-one of those women who have incredibly successful business careers, and write books about them, and are supposedly feminist icons for doing so, but who don’t really do anything to change the status quo. Vincent made no attempt to change the system in which he lived. Instead, he found a way to cheat. I think that of undermines whatever allegorical purpose the film intended. It seemed like it was saying that discrimination is bad, but so long as you try hard enough (and borrow someone’s blood) you can be whatever you want to be, anyway.

Near the end of the film, there was a moment when the Gattaca doctor revealed he had known Vincent was not Jerome Morrow for a while, and implied Vincent made him believe in the potential of his son. But really, this just proves Vincent could come back from his space mission, say, “Hey everyone, I’m not Jerome Morrow, I’m a normal person”, and actually change a few minds.

I know I am reading a little far into the “meaningful themes” aspect of this film, but as I said, as entertainment, it is abysmal. So I hoped the message the film told would be redeeming.

Cooking at Cornell

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As an engineer, I like cooking. What other activity combines trial and error experimentation and food? But, unfortunately, I have a limited repertoire. I spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect home fry recipe. As it turns out, there really isn’t a trick to it. The secret is butter. Just a huge, very unhealthy amount of butter. I took this cooking class hoping to learn some healthier recipes.

I should mention right off that I chose to make lasagna (baby steps). I liked the recipe I was given, but there are a couple of improvements I’d like to try. Firstly, get rid of the mushrooms. Mushrooms are awful. Secondly, maybe use a sharper cheese to add more flavor to the ricotta mix? You could also probably sneak some spinach in there, to make up for those evicted mushrooms. I’d also like to try my hand at making my own pasta sauce.

I also learned some useful skills. The food lab volunteers showed us the proper way to slice and peel an onion, which I appreciated, because I can never make equally sized pieces. They also talked about selecting pans and other cooking tools, which is useful for me, because I am considering moving off campus, and that means I will need to stock a kitchen. Lastly, it was a chance to practice my skills, which I don’t get to do so often at Cornell. Partly, it’s because I’m so busy. Also, I’d never used an electric stove before coming here (our stove at home is gas) and I’m deeply afraid I will set off the fire alarm and force everyone to go stand out in the cold.

While I enjoyed cooking for myself, the best part was seeing how everyone else did. As a group, I think we did very well. Everything I tried was excellent. I especially want to try making the spinach pasta. I’m looking forward to April break, when I will get a chance to try out some recipes and practice my new skills.

Cat Videos: Good when they’re for a good cause.

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One day during finals last fall, I got a text from my mother. It said “Look who I brought in from the cold.” Attached was a photo of a black cat. According to my mother, the cat was feral, and had been poking around the house for couple of months. It was one of the coldest days of the year, so she had brought him inside, worried he would freeze to death.

My initial reaction was something along the lines of “ha ha ha, you really think you’re keeping that?” Little did I know, because a little over a year later, the cat who came to be known as Midnight is still happily sleeping on the back of our couch.

Our relationship with cats is weird. Dogs were bred to herd livestock or pull sleds; we brought them into our lives for a purpose. But what do we get out of owning cats? I can tell you that it’s not pest control; if you’re cats are anything like mine, they love nothing more than to bring dazed mice into the kitchen, drop them on the floor, and stare confusedly while they dash to safety under the oven (why is the thing I’m trying to murder running away from me?) If you really think about it, the only thing we get out of the human-cat relationship is cat video worthy moments of humor.

Our relationship with cats brings out the best and the worst in us. On the one hand, a lot of people, my family included, really love their cats. On the other, as cat videos bear out, we also seem to really love torturing them. What are cat videos, really? A lot of them are humans purposefully annoying cats, or scaring them. We love our cats, but it doesn’t seem to bother us to do things to them that they cannot possible enjoy (see attached photos of Midnight in outfits). What we have with cats is not so much a symbiosis as a truce.

And yet, if the relationship between humans and cats is a conflict, we clearly have a massive strategic advantage. We put down millions of cats every year, and millions more are in shelters. I argue that, if a cat’s choices are living in a metal cage for most of its life, or living with a human who’s cool for the most part, but sometimes provokes a war with the CD tray to film it and put in on the internet, the choice is pretty clear. If cat videos help cats find loving homes, more power to them

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The Nature of Genius

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Genius is usually seen as something you are born with. It’s an innate quality you simply possess. It’s just what you are. Our narrative of genius essentially posits that either you have it, or you don’t. You cannot claim genius, no matter how hard you work, or become a genius. Genius is conceived of as effortless.

“Shakespeare in Love” is not the sort of movie I would chose for myself. Romances of any sort are not my speed. But, it is interesting in the way it conceives of genius. As “Shakespeare in Love” tells it, genius is not so much an innate characteristic as something which happens to you-genius, it seems to say, arises from brilliant experiences, rather than originating in the self. In the film, the young playwright William Shakespeare draws heavily upon his lived experiences while writing Romeo and Juliet. As the film tells it, the great love story in “Romeo and Juliet” is so meaningful because it is inspired by the real life love between Shakespeare and Viola de Lesseps.

While the actual movie is somewhat tacky, its narrative of the creative process and of the nature of genius is compelling. It is far more democratic than the traditional narrative. Of course, you can tell yourself you are a genius-but there are a lot of other people in the world, all of whom are free to tell you that you’re wrong. But, no one can really stop you from seeking out brilliant experiences. If genius is experiential, anyone can be a genius. You can try and fail, and fail a lot, and still be a genius, once you find the right story (or idea, or experience, etc..).

All said, I enjoyed this movie. It presented a unique take on the creative process, and on the nature of genius. It was also a fairly effective love story.

 

Rose House History

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Though I have enjoyed many of the Rose Scholars events which I have attended, last week’s talk on Flora Rose and Martha van Rennselaer stands out as the best, for the simple reason that no other event has taught me as much about the history of Cornell, or of Rose House in particular.

The stated intent for the building of West Campus was to create residential communities such as exist at Yale and other universities. Honestly, I do not feel we are succeeding quite yet. I live in Rose, but I don’t really feel like a part of Rose House, more so than any other part of West Campus. The Rose pride is lacking. I feel like our houses have yet to develop unique identities-something in which we, as residents, could be invested.

Before last week, I did not know who Flora Rose was, or what she had done to merit having a West Campus house named after her. Today, I can say I have a little more pride in Rose House, knowing who we are named for. I admire Flora Rose’s commitment to education, her diligence, and her accomplishments. It is fairly amazing to know everything that she did-including that she was a regular correspondent of Eleanor Roosevelt-and to also know that almost no one has heard of her.

It was also fascinating to hear about the history of the College of Human ecology. I had always found the mix of disciplines contained within it-human development, nutrition, public health, fiber sciences-somewhat arbitrary, but now, knowing that the College originated as a school of home economics, it all makes sense. It is especially interesting to know that the College was, for a period, exclusively staffed by and attended by women.

After hearing this talk, I am resolved to visit the Cornell archives. I have had several opportunities to visit, all of which I have passed up- which I now regret. It is my hope that I have the opportunity, during my tenure at Cornell, to conduct research in our archives. It is also my hope that we will have more events that focus on the history of Cornell.