Desiderata

Moving

Another interdomain migration: find me now at http://cintwan.wordpress.com.

Harvest

August is my favorite time of year at home. The gardens are in full bloom; swaths of silky petals flaunt their vibrant textures to the midsummer sun. The vegetables hang ripe and swollen on their veins, craving harvest. The heat has all but dissipated, and we enjoy dinners on our patio, sampling the succulent delicacies that hail from steps away, graced by the delicate scents of floral nectar, as the setting sun paints the sky a deep azalea.

Transience

In 5.5 hours I will have packed my belongings into a few cardboard boxes, stuffed the artifacts of my glorious summer into ad hoc time capsules, time capsules to be unearthed after what to me currently resembles a suspended eternity of nothingness. Going home always feels like entering an alternate universe: time suddenly seems to pause as all obligations, be it schoolwork, labwork, or even the menial tasks involved in taking care of oneself, seem to momentarily suspend as an ethereal mist, omnipresent yet ultimately insignificant.

In 10 hours I will be in a car, cruising down the familiar bumps of I-88, racing towards home. Home - what a complicated concept for us quasi-nomadic étudiants. Is home where we sleep at night? Is it where our parents live? Where we grew up? It always slightly unnerves me to hear someone refer to a dorm as "home" - then again, I have always held an almost awkward reverence towards names. In my head, my room in Lowell is known as "my room." This summer, our sublet has been "the house." Yet "home" to me isn't just necessarily another geographical location. It's the entire essence of being surrounded by the people and objects that instill in me a supreme, unparalleled comfort.

And despite my imminent journey towards unparalleled comfort, I'm going to miss this summer. The house, the housemates, the music, the cooking, the exploration, the independence, the restlessness - so many factors contributed to making this summer perhaps the best one I've ever had. But most significantly, I've started to feel settled. I've finally reached that threshold of familiarity, the one where you stop thinking "Oh, I should do this at least once while I'm living in the area" and start thinking "This is great, I'm so glad I live here so I can do it again." It's that familiarity which then beckons nostalgia, a nostalgia analogous to [yet completely independent from] that which I feel for home whenever I'm away.

In 12 hours I will be asleep in my own bed at home, momentarily satiated of my nostalgia for home, yet newly afflicted with nostalgia for the summer. When I return in 10 days, even though I return to the same city, the school-year on-campus routine will be inevitably different: no more breakfast omelets with J, no more dinner scheming with A, no more almost daily trips to Market Basket, no more bike expeditions to the suburbs on weekends. Such, however, is the transient nature of our lives, a stark contrast - and well-placed juxtaposition - to the dependable constancy that ultimately defines home.

Concert Season!

‹shameless self-promotion›

My ridiculous amounts of violining this summer will finally culminate in this next week, starting with today:

MIT Summer Philharmonic Orchestra presents
Tchaikovsky Francesca di Rimini
Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

Saturday, August 1st, 8PM @ MIT Kresge Auditorium [fbook]
(big green triangular curvy thing off Mass Ave)
Wednesday, August 5th, 7PM @ Hatch Shell on the Esplanade [fbook]
(bring blankets and a picnic!)

JAMMCLAN presents Party Like it's 1825:
Schubert String Quartet in d, D. 810, "Death and the Maiden" - Mvts I & II
Mendelssohn Octet in Eb, Op. 20 - Mvts I & IV

Friday, August 7th, 8PM @ Holden Chapel [fbook]
(btwn Stoughton, Hollis, Lionel, and Mower in Harvard Yard)
featuring:
Cindy Wang, Nina Han, Andres Camacho, Michelle Siao - violin
Louisa Bekker, Jackie Havens - viola

And of course, my favorite part of any concert is creating the concert poster:

‹/shameless self-promotion›

Things have been feeling slightly disorganized of late: I haven't had time to properly label my tubes, so things in the fridge with shorthand symbols on them; I haven't had the mental energy to regularly update my lab notebook, so my data has been accumulating in thousands of small green post-its. I wanted to take a trip out to the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum today, and a bunch of friends are biking the Emerald Necklace, but I decided that I needed time to myself today. Sleep and mental space rejuvenation time. I had a really great routine going on at the beginning of summer - lab in the day, followed by cooking dinner for the house and then a bit of individual practice or rehearsals, and then in bed by 11:30 with the journal or a good book. But lately it's been lab in the day, followed by quick dinner on my own and then a mad dash to some rehearsal or the other, then back to lab to heat shock my fish and set up the confocal for an overnight time-lapse, and finally back home at 2 or 3 in the morning, only to wake up at 8AM to do it all over again. In other words, I'm pretty damn tired.

But all of this, despite the having no free time thing - it's been so ridiculously fun. I feel so enriched - I'm getting so much more out of this summer musically than I did last summer, when I was immersed in it at Aspen. I even buckled down and got my bow rehaired and my strings changed, and it's been years since I've been in that quasi-euphorically obsessive state where I actually cared enough about my tone and technique to play around with different string brands and mixes. Research is great - I feel as if I have so much independence in lab, and I'm no longer doing things only because someone told me to. I'm also looking up my own ways to do things and functioning almost like a grad student (although with much much much less credibility mental capacity, I'm sure).

Next week will be concert week, and the week after will be catch-up-on-labwork-and-actually-cook-for-the-house week, and the week after (!!) will probably be pack-up-and-go-home week. Wow.

Summer's Glory

Lab, violin, bike, explore, hike, laze[ish], read, write, design, cook, eat, friends, sleep. That's really all I've been doing in the past week, and really all I need to do in order to be satisfied. Grad school, here I come.

From yesterday:

Wright's Tower @ Middlesex Fells

View of Boston from the foot of the tower

"Mirror," my favorite sand sculpture at the Revere Beach Sand Sculpting Festival

Sunset at Revere Beach

Briefly.

In the interest of time, I've put up all my photos on facebook, and you can read about the rest of my Montréal adventures there. I'd love to elaborate more, but I'm actually quite tired (especially after that red-eye bus trip back Monday morning) and am looking at a pretty busy week, with a thesis proposal to write and lots of music to learn for MITSPO and my two chamber ensembles.

1% battery remaining. Good night!

Momentary Hiatus

The irony: my gmail theme tells me that it's clear and sunny in Boston while here in Montréal water steadily pours from the skies. We spent the morning traipsing around Mile End and visiting relics of Laurel's time here - her first apartment, her studio, the cafés where she spent endless hours. Mile End is also home to Montréal's famed bagel shops, where delicious rings of moist, chewy dough emerge freshly baked from the wood oven 24 hours a day. We'd planned on heading to Au Pied de Cochon for dinner to get a taste of their duck in a can, which has seemed to gain a cult status, but we didn't manage to nab reservations for tonight. We'll do that tomorrow instead - my last meal in this self-purported foodie heaven.

Laurel's out enjoying a brief run through the rain, an activity in which I can no longer partake due to the psoriatic arthritis that plagues the second toe on my left foot, so I'm sitting here listening to Beirut while perusing Chowhound for other quintessential Montréal eating experiences and garnering inspiration for my own website. The last entry's big photo slideshow fail has only further convinced me that I need to move to my own domain - the idea's been sloshing through my noggin for a number of years, but I think I finally sketched out a satisfactory design and site navigation last night. Of course, I should probably do my thesis proposal and finish the lab website and do all that other stuff on my summer list first, but I'll fit it in somewhere. Hopefully.

Meanwhile, here is some documentation of today's adventures (so far):