One Wicked Weekend

Very original title, oh yes. Haha, I'm sure thousands of Wicked fans have started a blog or entry with that title, but oh well! It really was a Wicked weekend. I fell in love with Wicked during Senior year in high school. I remember at the end of Junior Year, my band director brought in the soundtrack, randomly blasted it for the whole band room to hear and said "This is our next year's theme." I thought he was nuts. OH THE IRONY! I thought Wicked was the weirdest thing ever.

God I love this picture. My friend Tiffany talked about how loud and strong their voices are, and I replied "Well...she has big...you know's...to support her!" And goddamn does Kristen have big you know's. That dress just makes them look like bowling balls, holy moly. And Idina looks soo awkward! Imagine yourself raising your shoulders up, sloutching your head down and opening your mouth wide as if to say "ahh." That is her pose.

So yeah, last Sunday (August 9) a LOT of us went to go see Wicked at the Civic Center in Downtown San Diego. By then, I had already fallen in love with it and seen it live in the Pantageous Theater in LA and was uber excited to experience the magic once again. What strikes me most about this musical is...wait. There isn't just one thing that strikes me the most. The story is so incredible, so perfectly fitting with the biggest plot twist that you never could have seen coming from The Wizard of Oz. You just get sucked into the tragedy that is the life of Elphaba, the love that makes you melt in your seat, the deceit and facades that shock your reality. This story...*sigh* god this story. I just want to give it a big hug. It's that amazing.

*Gasp* and the music! OMG the music! Sure, it was kinda...weird at first on that day my band director brought it in. But it didn't take long to realize its imaginative creativity and professional quality. The music and lyrics are so clever, jam packed with foreshadowing details and a precise vocabulary thats definitely worth a standing ovation. And the singers were AMAZING. Wait. I have to take that back actually. Sucks that after all this bolstering, we come to a point of negativity.

The actress that played Glinda had a realllyy shrilly voice, as if she were overdoing her high notes, and Fiyero's voice has too high in general to be a guy's. In "As Long As You're Mine," where Elphaba and Fiyero had a duet, I swear there were a couple points where I could not distinguish between their voices. Haha! Yeah...the other characters were actually really good, and I think this Elphaba was even better than Idina. ><

*Sigh* I wish they'd make the DVD of Wicked already so I could watch it over and over again whenever I wanted. Listening to the soundtrack all day just isn't enough.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

Later, I HAVE to blog about Wicked this weekend, but for now, a little event recap of this moment: So I'm working at Salk right now, counting colonies of bacteria on the pictures of plates I took last week. Annoying as it was, I noticed something that made things just a tad bit worse...her. I have no idea who she is, but she sits in the lab bay next to mine and dang can she talk. The moment I saw her over a year ago in the lab, I noticed she was a very chunky woman with a very stern and strong look. Miss independent. She's loud, she's social. I get it.

But DANG! This morning she must have been talking for at least an hour about herself again! It's all she ever does talk about. Bombastic waves of me, myself, and I. There doesn't seem to be a moment where she'd shut up about how her life is going. And after having her words shoved down my ears, I can tell she's not that interesting...what a B. I'm sure she's a nice person though. =)

Back to the Future II: A Good Time for Optimism

So last Wednesday we started thinking about the future again as a bunch of us went on a Grad School hunt online. It was a small but significant foreshadow on how we were all going to take our separate desired paths after undergrad life. Honyin to Business School. Dante and I to Grad School in different fields. Peter to Pharm School.

Sure, none of us are completely certain about our plans, but that's the classic future for you; ambiguous and uncertain.

Like for most people, the topic of our futures comes up alot (hence "Back to the Future Part II"...even though this is probably the billionth time). Talking about the future used to really excite me when the options of life extended as far as the gun shelves in The Matrix. But now as the years tip-toe closer to the end of my four years and as my GPA continues to deteriorate, I find that shelf falling short. Stupid me. After every bad decision I've made throughout college, I'd look in the mirror and mentally scold myself; a dark gray cloud of an ominous future taking a long-term post above my head.

BUT. (Yes, "but" in capital letters because its that epic.)

Back to last Wednesday. Without a clue, I searched "bioengineering grad schools" to see what would pop up. Gotta start somewhere, right? Then to no surprise the classic USNews school ranking list came up (a similar list from USNews came up when I searched for bioengineering undergrad schools those few years ago). I actually found reading the list from top to bottom was pretty hilarious.

#1 Johns Hopkins University

HA! Johns Hopkins Freakin' University. It should be renamed that. JHFU. There was no way I was going to go there. With an average entrance GPA of 3.8 and all the other assets that its crazy students carry under their belts, I didn't need to be a psychic to know this school was never going to be in my future. Why would I want to be with those mega nerds anyway? (just my way on convincing myself out of disappointment...haha)

As I travel along the list of schools, I pass Georgia Tech (O_O), UCSD (much <3, but that's way too competitive for me...) and then I arrive at Duke University. Wait, redo:

~*~*~ #4 DUKE UNIVERSITY ~*~*~

Check it. #4 in the nation for beng. 1250 GRE score minimum. 3.2 GPA minimum. No undergrad class requirements because the grad program is flexible. Not to mention an excellent student life in the beautiful east coast environment. It was love at first sight, as cheesy as that is. Every other school just felt so cold and strict. "I am an academic power house! Work Work Work!" they'd say through their websites. Duke just felt so warm and most of all, obtainable. AND they have a cool Masters of Engineering Management Program that really caught my eye, encompassing all that I may want to pursue later on. So perfect.

Of course, this is only the beginning. As the year goes on, who knows where I'll end up. There's a pretty good chance that I could end up a bum. But for now, I'm enjoying the fact that I have a sense of direction for once, a possible bright future in mind that I could never see before. It's like finding hope! No more moping about my sad GPA and my lost opportunities at early undergrad research. I have somewhere to be. See ya at Duke. (Hopefully...haha)

First Blog!

This is my first blog! Oh my!