Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

That expression aptly describes how I felt this week. After nine days of relaxation at home for spring, returning to the busyness of Hopkins campus life this week was like jumping into a cold swimming pool on a hot day. It was refreshing, but at the same time, a little overwhelming. I wasn’t carefree in terms of academics, with homework assignments to complete and exams for which to study. In addition, while I love my extracurricular activities, they felt more routine this week than usual.

Don’t misunderstand what I’ve just typed. Despite the stress, I like my classes and activities! I’m just saying that nothing is completely peachy keen, my academic and extracurricular passions included. Okay, so what helped keep me sane this week? First, getting sleep whenever I could. Second, taking the time to chat with friends and acquaintances whenever I could. Third, playing piano at the Mattin Center’s practice rooms whenever I could. Furthermore, these are a few fun things that happened this week that don’t happen on any week:

1. FONDUE NIGHT: Last night, my RA held a small fondue party in her room for me and my housemates! She had banana slices, pretzels, and strawberries that we could dip into pots of melted dark chocolate, white chocolate, or vanilla dip. Yum! After a long day, hanging out with my housemates while eating banana slices with melted vanilla dip was a huge treat for me.

2. HOPKINS INTERACTIVE ONLINE CHAT: On Tuesday night, some of us SAAB-ers participated in a Hopkins Interactive online chat; the people who chatted that night besides me were JHU_Adam (albeit briefly), JHU_Andrew, JHU_Jackie, JHU_Liny, JHU_Ramy, JHU_Roxi, and JHU_Tanmay. I can’t speak for the others, but I thought it was pretty fun to be chatting with those of you who participated in it! If you weren’t in that chat but would like to talk online with SAAB-ers, visit this page for more information about future chats: http://apply.jhu.edu/hi/chat/chat.html

3. VIJAI NATHAN: Earlier tonight, I watched the comedienne Vijai Nathan perform a comedy routine and and her one-woman show “Good Girls Don’t, But Indian Girls Do” at the Bloomberg auditorium. The event was co-hosted by the multicultural sorority Delta Xi Phi, SASH (South Asian Students at Hopkins), and the fraternity Sigma Chi. It also ended up being like a mini SAAB event, since I saw both Ramy and Tanmay at the auditorium. (I think Liny was there as well!)

I’m tired, so I’ll go to bed now. Good night!

N.B. I got all of these photos from various websites; none of them is mine.

The last day of classes of the Fall 2006 semester was Monday, December 11; the first day of finals was Friday, December 15; and the last day of finals was Friday, December 22. Ending the semester meant much more than those three facts, though!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 4: This was a busy day for me! Immediately after my final class was a session of the JHU Tutorial Project. In the evening, I attended a meeting of the CSC Dance Program (“CSC” is the acronym for the “Center for Social Concern”), which is a volunteer organization whose members teach dance at Baltimore City elementary schools. We discussed how we could effectively discipline children while teaching them dance during the second semester. The meeting ran late, and then I went to some of the festivities for the annual “Lighting of the Quad,” but not before getting myself some hot chocolate to drink and seeing various people I know, including a few of my housemates, JHU_Blake and JHU_Jackie from SAAB, and a few people from the OLÉ Dance Group. (“Lighting of the Quad” was the ceremony in which holiday lights wound around lampposts at the Freshman Quad, the Lower Quad, the Upper Quad, and Levering Plaza were lit for the first time of the holiday season. Since then, they’ve been lit every night.) As much as I wanted to stay at the Upper Quad until the actual lighting, the other people from the OLÉ Dance Group and I had to head to the Glass Pavilion for the last dance practice of the semester before we could watch the actual lighting. At least from the Glass Pavilion, we were able to see the holiday lights in the Lower Quad get lit! As for dance practice, while most people there were the members who’ve been performing this semester (including yours truly), there were some new faces. We practiced some salsa, and we also tried doing rueda, a circle dance in which people switch partners after doing a certain move. In one move of rueda, the guys link their arms, the girls sit on the guys’ arms, and the guys lift the girls with their arms and move in a circle. It’s a rather tricky move, but we were able to do it several times without girls falling off guys’ arms. Whee! We’re hoping to dance more rueda in the Spring 2007 semester.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6: In the afternoon was the last session of the semester for Monday/Wednesday JHU Tutorial Project tutors and tutees. During the first hour was the usual tutoring, but during the second hour was a “graduation ceremony” in which tutors and tutees were recognized. Also, the last SAAB meeting of the semester was that evening, and to mark the occasion, we ate burritos and tacos from Chipotle in the midst of discussing various SAAB-related topics.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7: The last general La Organización Latina Estudiantil (OLÉ) meeting was that evening, and flurries fell outside towards the end of the meeting. So far, those two minutes of flurries have proven to be the only time I’ve seen snow in Baltimore.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9: Several members of the Filipino Students Association (FSA) and I attended D6′s semiformal at the Baltimore Hilton. D6 is an organization of Filipino student groups from colleges in the Maryland-Northern Virginia-Washington, D.C. area, and FSA is a member organization of D6. By the way, since the president of FSA, JoJo, is JHU_Roxi’s MAPP (“MAPP” stands for “Mentoring Assistance Peer Program”) mentor, Roxi and her friend Camilla were at the semiformal for a few hours. Talk about “SAAB-er sightings,” as Roxi would put it!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 11: It was the last day of classes! Out of my five classes that day, my most interesting one was Introduction to Western Classical Music. During it was the premiere of a musical work that was composed by a Peabody Conservatory student. We students in Introduction to Western Classical Music listened to the work being performed in class and took notes on it, since we had to write a review on the work and e-mail it to the professor by the following day (i.e., Tuesday, December 12)–this music review was the final assignment of the course, which had no final exam.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12: Reading period–the period between the last day of classes and the first day of finals–began, and MSE started staying open 24/7 that day. In addition, the Office of Residential Life held the annual “Midnight Breakfast,” which actually started at 11:00 p.m. that day and ended at 1:00 a.m. the following day (i.e., Wednesday, December 13). For $4.00, students could have an all-you-can-eat breakfast, participate in a raffle, and sing karaoke at the FFC. As you might imagine, “Midnight Breakfast” had a pretty festive atmosphere, and I found it a welcome break to studying. (By the way, I saw JHU_Michelle T. from SAAB there, since she was one of the RAs running the event.)

Until I went home for vacation last week, I spent the rest of my time at Hopkins studying and taking finals, so I shall end my post here!

N.B. The photo of part of the Upper Quad and Gilman Hall lit by holiday lights was taken by Shiv Gandhi for The Johns Hopkins News-Letter. Meanwhile, I obtained the image of the Chipotle logo via Google Image Search. Finally, thanks to my friend Nian, an FSA freshman, who let me use one of her photos from the D6 semiformal.

My last entry was a simple little-introduce-my-blog piece of writing, so I think I need to do some blog updating.

Culture Show, which I’ve mentioned in previous entries, went well. It was a production held at Shriver Hall on Saturday, November 11, that was comprised of singing and dancing performances representing various cultures, including American culture. I danced in a routine consisting of reggaeton, bachata, merengue, and salsa with the OLÉ Dance Group towards the end of the first act, and with the Filipino Students Association (FSA) towards the beginning of the second act. (By the way, JHU_Liny also performed in Culture Show, as part of Shakti, the classical Indian dance group! Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch her, since I was changing from my OLÉ outfit to my FSA outfit.) FSA danced the following two Filipino folk dances: sayaw sa bangko (literally, “dance of the bench”), a rural folk dance performed by couples on narrow benches (the ones that we used were ten inches wide); and singkil, a traditional Muslim folk dance from the southern Philippines. I was in sayaw sa bangko, and I was grateful that I didn’t fall while dancing it!

You’re hoping to view some non-textual media, aren’t you? Here you go! Embedded in this paragraph is a group photo of the members of OLÉ Dance Group who performed in Culture Show. (FYI, there have been so many members of OLÉ Dance Group this year that those of us who performed at Latino Fest and Culture Show were only a representation of the entire group; we had determined who would perform in those two events via auditions sometime in October.) There’s also a group photo of the members of FSA immediately after Culture Show. Finally, there are YouTube videos of the OLÉ dance routine from Culture Show and both FSA dance routines from Culture Show. In the OLÉ video, I’m the girl at the second from the right starting at around 0:25, and in the FSA video, I’m the girl dancing on the bench at the right. Just so you know, the emcee seen at the beginning of the FSA video erroneously made us sound very skillful by saying that we were dancing on five-inch-wide benches for sayaw sa bangko.

That’s all I have to say about Culture Show! Vale. (That means, “Goodbye,” in Latin.)

I love the way I’ve found various social niches here. The way this weekend has gone so far is one illustration of that. First, I went shopping at the Towson Town Center with two of my female housemates for about two hours yesterday afternoon.

Second, as soon as we returned from Towson, I went to a rehearsal for the OLÉ Dance Group. (We were going to perform a routine of bachata, merengue, and salsa at Latino Fest in the evening.) While our rehearsal had a generally serious atmosphere, we still made jokes and enjoyed ourselves. I feel that those of us in the OLÉ Dance Group have started to form a nice camaraderie during the practices we’ve had so far, and last night’s only helped to strengthen it.

Following rehearsal, I hung out with people from the Filipino Students Association in the Glass Pav (where Latino Fest was being held), since we’d been invited to start Latino Fest with our tinikling routine. After FSA finished dancing tinikling, I sat with my housemates who had come to Latino Fest until it was time to dance with OLÉ, and I rejoined them after dancing. Once I’d gotten food, though (food was served shortly after we OLÉ dancers were done with our dance routine), I sat with my FSA friends, and once there was an open dance floor, I danced with people from my residence, FSA, and OLÉ at different points during the evening. That was fun–I laughed hard while dancing so many times.

Finally, earlier today, I spent a few hours with other members of SAAB. While we were supposed to help with the Humanities and Social Sciences Open House, we ended up simply chatting with each other most of the time, since there were much fewer prospective applicants and parents on campus than last week. At one point, Admissions_Daniel, JHU_Jackie, JHU_Julia, JHU_Rachel, JHU_Ramy, and I were sitting in the lobby of Levering Hall and playing a warped version of volleyball with a blue balloon that had been an open house decoration. Welcome to Hopkins.

Oh, yeah, and while I’ve just discussed a few examples of how you can reinforce social bonds at Hopkins, let me tell you that you can bond with homework as well. Big time–and I’m about to do it now!

This past weekend was busy, because (a) it was Family Weekend; (b) the Engineering and Natural Sciences Open House was on Saturday, October 21; and (c) Filipino Cultural Night was yesterday (i.e., Sunday, October 22).

My family arrived sometime on late Friday afternoon, and I spent most of my afternoon and evening with them. On Saturday morning, I started assisting with the Engineering and Natural Sciences Open House around 8:00. Around 10:00, there wasn’t much to do, so I spent time with my family and my friend Megan, who was visiting campus for the open house. In the afternoon, I joined five other Hopkins students at a student life panel. Four of us–JHU_Julia, JHU_Roxi, JHU_Tanmay, and I–were proudly representing SAAB there and plugging Hopkins Interactive in some of our responses. Following my open house involvement, I rejoined my family, and I spent the rest of my afternoon and evening with them.

After my family left to go home early yesterday afternoon, I spent the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening doing FSA-related activities. Following my family’s departure, I joined some freshmen from the Filipino Students Association (FSA) in frying Filipino food at the common kitchen of Building A, which is one of the freshman dorms; we prepared (1) siakoy, which are small braids of fried dough covered with sugar, (2) karioka, which are fried balls made of rice flour, sesame seeds, and coconut and served with a caramelized sugar sauce, and (3) lumpia, which are egg rolls. After cooking, we all headed with the fried goodies to the Glass Pavilion (a.k.a. “Glass Pav”), where the FSA upperclassmen were setting up for the event. In addition to what we freshmen cooked, some of the upperclassmen also prepared Filipino food, but the biggest culinary boost came from a caterer who made several dishes. There’s a picture here with a pretty good view of most of the food available, and you can see some of us from FSA serving it. All that food was gone before the entertainment aspect of the evening even started!

Here’s how the evening went: first, we FSA members met at the Glass Pav, where we set up and practiced tinikling. Tinikling is a traditional rural folk dance in which people dance between two bamboo poles clapped together; it’s supposed to be an imitation of the tikling bird moving among tree branches and grass stems. Shortly after the doors opened, we started to serve food, and by the time the program itself had begun, there was no more food left. The emcees of the evening were Chesca and JoJo, seniors in FSA. They introduced vocal performances by Gina, a sophomore in FSA, and piano performances of music by Filipino classical composers by Reynaldo Reyes, a music professor at Towson University and a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory of the Peabody Institute. At the end of the evening, we performed tinikling. While we didn’t dance like professionals, we did pretty well.  You can watch a YouTube video of it below. By the way, not everyone who danced in the tinikling routine is in the video, including yours truly.

Following tinikling, people left, since that was the end of the event, and we FSA members cleaned up–but not before posing for group pictures! Here’s one with most of us. By the way, you don’t have to be Filipino to be in FSA. For that matter, you don’t have to be of a certain race or ethnicity to join any of the cultural groups on campus!

N.B. Thanks to my friends Caroline and Clarisa–they’re freshmen in FSA–for allowing me to use the photos they took for Filipino Cultural Night.