HaveyoumetJeff

Well I made my goodbyes to the guys at The Brand Union.

In the past few days back at MIT I have:

• Learned a new Chinese card game: Sheng Ji
• Eaten dumplings at the tasty Gourmet Dumpling House
• Cleaned up my room since I’ve returned
• Seen tons of awesome people I’ve missed seeing during the whole month
• Been at a party shut down by the friendly neighborhood MIT police
• Been at a party shut down by the friendly dorm housemaster
• Registered for my new architecture classes
• Gone to the MIT tech fair
• Tasted LaVerdi’s once again. Yum…

Tomorrow school starts! I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions, so I guess I might as well make them now.

New Year’s Resolutions

• Hit a 4.5 GPA
• Go somewhere awesome for spring break
• Keep on dancing
• Begin learning how to play guitar
• Successfully complete 100 pushups program
• Snag a sweet internship in SF, NY, Portland, Chicago, or Boston
• Win a competition or some sort
• Meet new friendly femmes and take them on dates :)
• Improve my photography abilities
• Be more positive
• Be nicer, more friendly, and everything that is nice.

I’m sure there’s more, but let’s leave it there for now. I think that’s a good amount to deal with on my plate.

Ah yes, the timeless Girl Scout cookies so beloved by Americans everywhere. I remember I begged my parents to shell out twenties to buy these scrumptious boxes of hydrogenated fat and oils. I figured with all my free time in New York, why not make them myself?

First off, here’s the link to the recipe I followed to bake these delicious cookies. Great site by the way.

I have to say that Nicole Weston, the author of the famous site (name top 50 food blog by London Times!), falsely led me to believe these cookies were easy to make. The list of ingredients was short, the pictures of the process look fabulous, and her wording just made it sound so…so…well - easy to make!

Boy was I wrong. Weston notes, “These cookies are fairly time consuming to make…”

Fairly time consuming?! I should have looked at the comments box. It took me four hours to make the damn cookies! For others, it took them five! And yet others still, they weren’t even able to finish them!

So before I present these pictures of my own creations, let me add a few words of advice to follow should you choose to use the recipe to try your hand at your own Samoas.

• Follow the ingredients list exactly. My oopsies moment was adding a bit too much sugar to the cookie dough. When baking, the sugar melts, and turns into a liquid. Too much sugar, and your cookie shapes won’t hold and become wide, flat, cookies.
• Don’t cut a stupid little hole in the center of your cookies. Pointless and time consuming. Cookies will taste better than Samoas anyways.
• Cookies should be golden brown. Let them cool so they can harden and then you can take them off the pan. Otherwise they’ll break. And over baking will leave them brittle.
• Buy only soft caramels. When they melt down and cool down again, they stil have to be chewy.
• Use a double boiler for the caramel topping and also the chocolate topping. It keeps it soft without burning the stuff.
• When pressing the caramels to the cookies, use your fingers. Wet your fingers with a bit of water between cookies so the caramel won’t stick to your fingers. And it’s easier to mold to the cookie that way too.
• DO NOT add milk to the melting chocolate. Remember what I said to following the ingredients list to the dot? In small quantities of milk, it’ll cause the chocolate to seize up and you’ll be left with a solid fudgey thing. Getting it back to a liquid to drizzle on the cookies is the hardest thing ever. It needs more milk and lots and lots of patience.

And so here’s my process!

I had no rolling pin, so I used a clean rod from a swifter duster…

Cut the dough into cute circles! (Used a spice cap to cut em out)

With coconut!

Dark chocolate!

Made a hundred something cookies.

ANDDDD

gorgeous. (the chocolate was hard to work with though)

So you think I forgot about it?

I think not.

I’ve been steadfast in my workout, and now I’ve finally reached the end of Week 4! Unfortunately, I had to repeat week 2 twice, but that was only a minor hiccup. Only two more weeks to go and we’ll do a little test!

Hooray! You can do this challenge too! 100 pushups

TOUCHDOWNNN STEELERRSSS.Nine minutes in and a touchdown :D

All my New York roommates are Jets fans. I hope I don’t get lynched.

Don’t stress. Try not to pick a favorite college that you’ve ALWAYS dreamed of getting into. Rejection happens and it’s not often that pretty. But looking back at it, no matter what college you get into, it’ll turn out alright. Admissions isn’t completely life changing, and it shouldn’t be the end of the world if you get rejected.

Personally, I coped with my ED to Stanford like it was no biggie. I thought it’d be nice to go to Stanford, but if I didn’t get in - hey, no big deal - there’s tons of other colleges out there for me. After I applied, I destressed and went about school.

Some of my classmates were really dumb and counted down the days to college acceptance decision dates. It’s more stress than you’ll ever need. In fact, I removed myself so far from admissions that I didn’t even know the date of when Stanford decisions came out, and only found out I was rejected from ED when I checked my email that afternoon.

And seriously, forums like these that talk about chances and whatnot are silly.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/889310-mit-acceptance-rejection.html

It’s too much. College confidential is okay, but people who use the site are for desperate, anxious people who need to take some sleeping pills and just relax. Don’t over analyze you fools.

Hope that answers the question. If you have questions on what they look for in admissions or whatever, or other questions, just ask again. :D

Got a question? Ask!

Suck. A lot. Even at some of the softest volumes, the music leaks out of the headphones for all to hear.

Case in point:

I was on the subway the other day, and this pepper-haired 40ish man in a suit, peacoat, and a clean cut finish stood next to me with apple headphones in his ear.

For the short duration I was on the subway, I could easily hear Ke$ha and Lady Gaga blasting out of his ears.

He wasn’t nodding his head to the music, nor tapping his feet. Completely stoic, like a straightlaced formal bussinessman. Except he was listening to teen pop music. And everyone on the subway (not just me) could hear him.

There were a lot of furtive glances and chuckles between fellow commuters that morning.

8 am

First alarm rings. Turn it off.

8:30 am

Three more alarms ring before I pop up and slide out of bed. Getting up in the morning usually looks like this.

8:50 am

Stunningly dressed, I gather together my belongings and waltz out the door

8:50-9:10 am

My walk to work is usually a mini musical. I sing to the birds and everyone I pass waves at me and knows my name. Boy am I popular! It’s kind of like that scene from 500 Days of Summer, except that happens to me every single day I go to work. I know, right?!

9:10 am

I suddenly appear in the office in all my shining magnificence. The office ladies come up to me and croon over the “new, young, and handsome intern”. I daresay I’ve made several enemies among the guys here.

9:10-12:00 pm

Diligently working and coming up with fresh and innovative ideas. Somewhere during this time the CEO will pull me into his office and ask for advice on how to successfully run the company. He’ll usually offer to take me golfing, but I politely decline. I think I’m going to be offered an executive position at the end of the month. Cool!

12 – 1 pm

The other intern and I take a break for lunch. We’re pretty much regulars at this one café, and everybody knows us well. We’ve even got our own lunch table reserved solely for us. After ordering a light meal, the chef usually comes out to chat with us for a bit and makes us a special complimentary dessert. I daresay I’ll miss Antonio after this month.

1 – 5 pm

Usually have meetings with clients during this time. This week Apple’s executives are going to stop by to ask for some ideas on their next product. I suggested technology infused office and home furniture designs. They really liked my idea for the levitating, gyroscopic, touch sensor reclining office chair/bed. Last week was Google asking me to redesign their logo. New design will be out in a few days.

5 – 7 pm

I return back to my apartment and usually cook myself a little something. Last night I did an easy 5 course meal with Kobe beef and truffles, scallion seared light nut soup, creamy escargot, savory blood pudding, and crème brulee. Using only an easy-bake oven and safety scissors.

7 – 8 pm

I’ll work out in my apartment. Since I don’t have dumbbells I lift the bed for the benchpress and I’ll hang from my legs out the window for crunches. There’s no gym in the building either, so I sometimes do handstand pushups in the moving elevators.

8 – 1 am

Do something productive. Right now I’m writing a novel in Latin about the political struggles of the early folk in Liechtenstein. Sometimes I’ll watch a movie on Netflix or listen to Tosh.0 on the side, but usually I’ll just listen to the girl next door play the guitar. Sometimes she’ll come over and ask to sing her newest piece for me.

1 pm

Lights out! I drift off to sleep listening to Mother Goose and other sorts of bedtime stories read over the phone to me by Ted Williams, the man with golden radio voice.

Usually I will walk to my workplace in Union Square. It’s a leisurely twenty minute walk across a couple avenues and through a few tiny parks that dot the area. However if I’m ever late for work, or it’s way to cold and snowy outside, I’ll jump on the subway to save a few minutes. Today I ended up on the train since it was raining like crazy outside.

Rain in the middle of winter is never good. All the snow piled up on the streets is turned into slush that pours all over the sidewalks in deep puddles of cold muddy crud. I took the subway to save myself from getting completely drenched by the time I got to work.

But back to the point. Taking the subway in New York is really only the lesser of two evils.  Why?

Everybody takes the subway to work in the mornings. There are hundreds of people waiting at my stop at any given time over the morning, and trying to get on the train is akin to dogs fighting over a scrap of meat. You’ll be unapologetically pushed, shoved, bumped, yelled at – all sorts of demeaning manner come out in the nicest of people in the mornings.

In the train itself, you might be squished between anywhere from four to eight people who are equally as pressed for space in the train.  I’m a small guy, so I practically disappear among all the parkas and peacoats and get buried among them. That’s more of a emotional grievance about the subways more than anything else, but no less important.

Getting up or down the stairs is a physical struggle against the crowd. You get shoved into other people, you shove back, people get pushed, and it’s pretty bad. There’s a complete lack of humanity and general manners on the subways, so I try to avoid it as much as I can. But when I do take them, I straighten up and harden myself for the battle ahead of me. It’s an “every man for himself” situation and trying to play nice in New York doesn’t ever work.

So thanks to Netflix having a free one month trial subscription, and me having lots of time outside of my internship…

I watch about a movie every other day. That means extra time to catch up on movies I haven’t yet been able to watch. Like Toy Story 3 for example.

Whereas most trilogies don’t tie up lose ends or are poorly followed through, Toy Story passed with flying colors.

There’s intrigue, mystery, betrayal, love, and hope all tied beautifully in there. Thankfully they don’t lose their sense of humor or references with quotes like:

“Nice Ascot”

“F-A-O my Schwartz”

Totoro and soybean Japanese toys made cameos too!

It was sad when they all held hands cause they thought they were going to be melted down.  Such an awesome movie overall.

Just started week three today, and it definitely hasn’t gotten any easier.

I ended up having to repeat week two last week cause I wasn’t able to do it all the well, but it looks like I’m now on my way to success! And “jacked”-ness.

ONEHUNDRED PUSHUPS

Just finished up the first part of a project at work, and now it’s a nice little lull until next week.

Maybe I should try to sneak out of work early muahahaha.

Hey guys, I wrote an article for the MIT alumni blog, part of a series of articles written by interns working around the country. It’s about my dreaded first day of work and it was published today online!

Check it out: http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2011/01/14/externship-lin/

Ah man, I almost forgot post this one too!

I woke up last Sunday and cooked brunch for me and my roommate!

Scrambled eggs (Gordon Ramsey style) on top of sourdough toast. Roasted portabellos and asparagus on the side, and cinamon belgian waffles with fresh honeycrisp apples with honey to top it off!

Yummm. Too bad my roommate woke up at 8 pm that day and ate it all cold. My cooking is underappreciated. Grr.

I’ve been cooking a lot so far while I’ve been in New York. It takes a lot longer than just going out to eat pizza every night, but it keeps my wallet fat and I get to learn new things on cooking.

For example, tonight I just made my first pasta dish with a cream sauce. If I recall, the last time I tried to make a creamy sauce, I ended up with some sort of curdled milk and avocado paste on top of dry pasta. This time turned out to be much more successful thankfully.

Sausage and shrimp with egg noodles in alfredo sauce. Not bad eh?

First dish I made in New York!

Shrimp and asparagus in a light olive dressing

Sausage and roasted red potatoes

There’s a lot of repitition unfortunately, since I’m pretty much just cooking for myself and the food comes in gigantic packages haha.

Apparently I am missing out on a fantastic snow day at MIT. Classes are cancelled and people are building snowmen and having a snowball fight.

My work didn’t close the office, but I did get to have a snow fight with a passing taxi on the street today. It splashed mud and snow all over my front.

I hate winter.

Friday night was a night for celebration after the first week of work, and a way to just let go.

I ended up hanging out with some Bostonian friends like SoSarin, who came to the area for the weekend and maybe go exploring in New York. We had all decided to see Afrojack at club Pacha that night.

For those of you who don’t know Afrojack, he’s sort of a DJ celebrity in Europe these days, playing house/techno musica in the genre of Deadmau5 and Benny Benassi. Now I’m not so much a huge fan of house music, but club situations are what the music is usually appropriate for and I thought going would be a great way to have some fun.

Never. Again.

There’s about 4-5 different lines to get into the club in the first place. There’s VIP, regular ticket admission, people who need to buy tickets, guest list tickets, and so on. Once you do happen to get in, after you get through the patdown of course, it’s a nice long half hour wait for the coat check. By this time, you’re already dealing with sticky floors, drunk people, and the like.

Finally, the main floor is pretty awesome, albeit crowded. I swear they must have stuffed half of New York into this club - three-fourths of them being guidos. There’s tons of lights that swivel around and blaring music just like any club. A gust of fog will spray in every so often so people can get cooled down. All in all, the scene itself is pretty cool.

That’s the only positive thing.

The body odor is overwhelming. Farting, sweating, spilling of beer, and all sorts of unimaginable things go in this club. Everywhere I turn, I’m squished up against two overly large guidos that smash their drenched back into my face. The drunkness is pretty much out of control, as people will kick and punch and shove you in this every-man-for-himself situation. About five or six different liquids were splashed on top of my head throughout the night.

Noise? Dude, I can’t even hear more than people screaming three feet in front of me. The speakers are juiced up so loud just so everyone can hear the music, and your eardrums are pretty much permanently damaged to some extent. I felt like a person who needed hearing aids afterwards.

Our group ended up being split up at different times and everything seemed pretty hectic. When Afrojack finally came out, the crowd went wild and so commenced two hours of non stop dubstep and house music. Not bad at first, but soon I my feet got a little annoyed of being stomped upon.

And so it got late and our sore, tired bodies went downstairs to the coatcheck when lo and behold…

I AM MISSING MY WALLET.

Ruh-roh. I knew I had my wallet in my jeans while downstairs waiting to retreive our coats. I panicked. I looked for twenty minutes running around the coat area looking for it, but then I realized if someone had pickpocketed my stuff, there’d be no way for me to get it back.

I went into action, I canceled both my credit cards and made the standard preparations.

So now, I am currently missing two credit cards, five dollars, my drivers license, and a couple gift cards. I have a checkbook still though, so I’m not short on cash, but still…

But worst of all, I’m now missing Red Mango card. EGADS. I had two redeemable free Red Mango yogurts!!!

I hope that thief is enjoying their froyo right now.

So you know those picturesque scenes from movies that take place in in the middle of snowy New York?

I used to love those scenes. You know, the ones where snowflakes would melt on the camera screen and there’d be these emotional dynamic character changes when the actors stand in the middle of New York with the snow falling on their shoulders and they cry out these pivotal lines that change the direction of the movie.

Man, such beautiful cinematography always made me want to be in the middle of all those.

Well flash forward to where I’m currently living in New York all by myself, and I can tell you that it’s not anything close to the movies. You pretty much forget how cold it has to be for lots of snow to be falling, and when there’s lots of snow falling, there’s usually a lot of slush, mud, dirt, and nasty water that splashes all over the place.

I mean I’m walking outside trying to find the dry places on the sidewalk so my shoes don’t get soiled, and you really have to watch out for the puddles on the streets so the cars won’t slash that water all over you. Sure, the parks and stuff are pretty, but when you need to trudge your way to work, you want to find the most direct and driest way to get there. The streets aren’t quite as picturesque either, since the honking cars and the mud that gets sprayed everywhere makes things look anything but the movies.

Now I’m inside the office and the outside really does look pretty beautiful, with all the snow covering the city in this foggy atmosphere. Everything’s shaded a grey and white tone, which is gorgeous.

Too bad all I can think of is how the hell I’m going to walk home after work.

I am currently eating the most delicious apple I have ever eaten in my life. It’s called a Honeycrisp apple that I got on the farmers market that I always pass on my walk to work.Three apples cost me $4.15, kind of pricey, but the best apples I have ever eaten.

It’s like a sugary honey suckle tartness to it, with a fine granulated texture to it. The honey just rushes over your tongue every time you bite into a piece. Yum.

I ended up spending about two hours cleaning and never got around to cooking. I gave up and ran across to the nearest quick food restaurant, which happened to be one of those cheap, quick and dirty Chinese takeout places.

I told the guy behind the counter to give me a “surprise”, and he looked at me as if I was crazy to dare to ask such a dangerous thing. Now if you’re just a regular ol’ caucasian American, asking for a “surprise” at a Chinese restaurant is bound to give you something a little too exotic for your tastes. But me? Eh, I can take on anything that’s close to my own ethnic cuisine.

The lady behind me? Not so adventurous. She asked for the chicken and broccoli.

“I hope you like the surprise” he said with a chuckle.

I rush back to the apartment to relax and watch some TV while eating, and lo and behold, guess what I got in my takeout?

I got the chicken and broccoli, obviously a mix-up between me and the lady behind me. I hope she likes her surprise, though I still wonder what they had intended to give me.

I’m living it out by myself in NYC for the month, and a way to save money is to just cook your own meals.

Now I pride myself on being a pretty competent cook. So I buy about a hundred dollars worth of groceries and then I lug it all back to the apartment. I enter the kitchen and…holy moley georgie porgie. The kitchen is a complete mess. Why the guys I’m staying with haven’t bothered to clean it up, I have no freaking clue. The only guy staying with me wasn’t there at the time, otherwise I probably woud have clocked him over the head.

There’s rice in a rice cooker that’s probably been left there being kepy warm, dry, and crusty since probably December.

I open the fridge, and there’s unidentifiable masses of molding lumps scattered about the interior. I swear I saw some things crawling too.

The pots and pans also seem to have grown new life that would win any scientist the Nobel Prize in biology.

I saw the Loch Ness monster hiding among the dirty dishes laying in month old bath water in the sink. Oh wait hold on… do you see it? Do you see it?!

It’s lettuce that expired all the way back IN FREAKING SEPTEMBER!

At first I just screamed like a little girl, and said “ew” and “gross” to every sopping mound like a faboulous queen would to tacky clothing. After a while, I regained my breath and then proceeded to scream out expletives while I scrubbed and cleaned the kitchen just like I imagine my ancestors to have done in rural ancient Asia.

I get my own freaking desk and a macbook! For a first real job, I daresay it feels pretty good.

The other intern from MIT is a second year MBA candidate, so she happens to know everything and I know nothing. She asked all the technical questions with a bunch of mumbo jumbo that I didn’t understand. I’m feeling pretty inadequate.

Hopefully though, I’ll be diving into the job pretty soon and I won’t feel so dumb. Once I understand better the jobs that I’ll be doing for the month, I’ll write about it. At least I’m not fetching people coffee or faxing papers.

It’s also really lonely here in New York. Urgh.

I arrived early this evening at the Stuyvesant Town complex on 14th St and 1st Ave, and it’s where I’m staying for a full month for the duration of my internship.

I met the NYU guy who’s sublet I’m taking over for the month, and chilled for  bit with the other NYU roommate I’m staying with. So far so good!

And tomorrow marks the beginning of my mini internship with the Brand Union! Hopefully it’ll be a great experience for me and I won’t feel a) too inexperienced b) too overwhelmed c) too bored

Too bad I don’t know enough people in NYC, but hopefully it won’t be too lonesome up here either!

Among one of the many wrong decisions I made to kick off the new year, I gave a Boston bus driver a big hug on my way out the door.

Forgive me if I startled you, but who knew all the subways and buses ran for free on New Year’s Day?! I was so ecstatic I had to show my thanks somehow.

Happy New Year’s everyone!