Feelings... and the Zoo

It's been a long time since I've felt this way. I don't know if it's hormones or what, but I feel overwhelmed, stressed, tired, sickly, unwanted. I don't feel beautiful. I don't feel smart. I don't feel successful. I don't feel special or even particularly notable.

It feels like my health, my work, and my relationships are spinning away, out of control. It's almost an intense anger, coupled with sadness; misdirected in so many directions, but mostly at myself. There's a lot of insecurity, and I'm not sure what can quench it. I wish I were a better person. I wish I weren't so needy. I wish my body would get its act together. I wish I had been more driven, focused.

I imagine a lot of it is psychological, worsened by the physical fatigue. I just want to lay down in a blue, peaceful ocean, with the sunshine streaming down on me. And just float there, worry-free, letting my feelings drop into the water below me and sink away. The best I can do is curl up in bed, and wait for myself to fall asleep.

Writing about how I feel sometimes helps. There's an entire livejournal out there of teenage angst and emotional mood swings, though I thought those times had passed. I think my worst fear of letting out all my negative feelings is that people who care will stop caring, and realize that "being there" is not worth the time or effort. That scares me, so much. The rational part of me scoffs and laughs: "Being an emotional wreck won't get you anywhere; stop being ridiculous."

I wish I had a kitchen right now: cooking is methodical, emotionless. I've always found it a peaceful way to do some personal thinking while being productive, yielding a satisfactory end result. "Productive" is up for debate, certainly; it's been argued to me that purchasing prepared (healthy) food is a better alternative, time always being a cost.




On to a less fragile and emotional part of this post... last Saturday I went to Washington D.C. for a day trip.Friday night at 10:30pm the budget "crisis" was still ongoing, with threat of a government shutdown, which would leave the Smithsonian museums, National Parks, etc. closed. If it was truly an issue over women's reproductive care/Planned Parenthood and whether they deserve federal funding, I will be really annoyed. However, government got its crap pulled together and crisis was averted.

Here are photos from the National Zoo. It's truly a beautiful zoo; I would love to visit again and see the parts I missed.

Entrance; giant pedestrian crosswalk.

Meerkat.

Cheetah lunchtime.

 

Keeper talks about zebras.

Panda. I found it crazy that female pandas will only come in estrus only once per YEAR, and that period only lasts for 48 hours.

Elephant.

Red panda.

My favorite creatures were definitely the Asian clawed otters. They just look cheerful, all the time.

 

Komodo dragon. Pretty large fella, there.

Beautiful corals in the indoor exhibits. Watching them swoosh in the water is incredibly relaxing.

Hermit crab.

Tarantula, though not the giant bird-eating variety.

The silverback gorillas were grossing out audiences with bodily functions.

I'd love to be sunning like that right now...

Burmese python jaw: open and closed.

Some sort of large iguana, perhaps? I love the textures and patterns on its skin.

The tiger was ready to head indoors...

... as well as the entire lion family. Or maybe it was feeding time.

The Cherry Blossom Street Festival was just wrapping up as we arrived.

There was a mad dash to the Washington Monument, as the cherry blossoms were in that direction. I learned that I need to up my cardio.

Blossoming flowers were few and far between. Apparently most of them had blossomed a week ago, and only the stragglers were left. I was disappointed because most of the trees were pretty paltry.

Some nice views along the walkway.

 

Line of cherry trees in the back there...

Restaurant Week (Melting Pot)

My boyfriend and I went to dinner at the Melting Pot last week for a nice restaurant week dinner!

The menu: a cheese fondue, salad, entree (also a fondue-type thing), and finally a dessert fondue.  

I had some kind of fruity cocktail (Dragon something?). It was really tasty and had a cherry at the bottom :D

We started with a Fondue a la France for the cheese fondue. It's a mix of "baby Brie, Fontina, Gruyere and Radette cheeses accented with Nueske's bacon, onions, white-truffle cream and fresh chives." What I liked most was that the server mixed the fondue right in front of us, pouring in the different ingredients and explaining what each one was. There were veggies, granny smith apples and breads for dipping.

Individual salads came up next (no picture, sorry!); I picked their house salad with peppercorn ranch.

My entree: asparagus, chicken breast, sesame teriyaki sirloin, filet mignon, ravioli and spicy white shrimp. It's all raw, and you cook it yourself in the court bouillon broth that's boiling in the fondue pot. The server explained to us the different cooking times: the red meats take a little longer than the seafood and vegetables.

My boyfriend's entree: same as above, except salmon instead of shrimp, a dumpling instead of ravioli, duck a l'orange instead of teriyaki.

We also had extra veggies on the side. The mushrooms were my favorite! I was pretty impressed how many vegetables they managed to fit into this, so I didn't feel like it was completely unhealthy.

... and plenty of dipping sauces to give things a kick!

For dessert, we chose the Yin & Yang, which is a half dark and half white swirled chocolate. The presentation was really pretty.

As long as there is chocolate left, they'll keep on bringing you dipping stuff. A typical platter had bananas, dusted marshmallows, brownie chunks, rice krispies, pound cake chunks, cheesecake and strawberries. We asked for a few plates of strawberries and bananas because those are my favorite :)

Stuffed by the end of dinner... chocolate fondue was most definitely the best!

Overall, I had a fantastic time and the fondue experience was fun and romantic <3

Things Missed

I was feeling sad, so I drew a squirrel to keep me company.

Grace Hopper

Posting from Atlanta, Georgia at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing! I wasn't sure what to expect, but I am really glad I had the opportunity to come.From the outside, it just seems like another conference, but after being here and seeing what the conference atmosphere actually is, I feel as if I've missed out the past three years and I feel so fortunate to be coming my last year as a student.

I've never seen so many technical women all in one place -- it's so strange to realize that every single person around you knows what computer science really is. And kind of feels the same way you do, being a woman in CS. (There are also some men attending the conference, but the percentage is fairly small.) I think the stats are about 2,000-something attendees, with ~960 of them being students.

I arrived Tuesday night, checked into the Hyatt Regency. The room is pretty sweet:

+1 for wi-fi in rooms (thanks to Grace Hopper) and a desk with a ton of outlets for all of the random things that need to be charged. :-)

The first day, Wednesday, I wasn't able to attend the sessions in the morning or afternoon because I had to work on an assignment that was due that day. 

I did make it to "Job Search: From the Interview to Negotiating the Salary" late in the afternoon.This was a bit of a misnomer, as there wasn't too much specific advice on either of those. However, the presenters walked through a hypothetical scenario and pointed out errors and listed 10 specific tips for interviews, dealing with offers, etc. Then I went to the "Newcomer Session", where the event organizers highlighted the different things going on and made sure first-timers to the conference had a good grasp of the different things going on and where all the resources (to find slides, etc) are.

The career fair. I'm here as a winner of Facebook's Grace Hopper Scholarship, so a big thank you to Facebook! I got to meet up with Brynn, a former DMDer who graduated last year and is now working on the design team at Facebook. There's a bunch of (Penn) Women in Computer Science people at this conference, including this year's WICS board, so I got to hang out with them. I also found a friend from high school whom I haven't seen since high school graduation!

My Google host from this summer was also here. I caught up with her at the Google booth. It's really so cool to see people you know (and so many people you don't).

The hotel is really nice in general. This is a view of the inside -- there's this giant structure with room balconies (facing inside) around the lobby. I'm not living in this area, but they have a few buildings adjoined. I'm in the Radius tower, where there are ~10 rooms on each floor arranged in a cylindrical fashion around the elevators in the center.

These are "pokens" which are free for students (and cost a bit for non-students). It's a way of paperless networking; you basically wave two pokens together and it records the contact ID. You can then plug the poken into the USB port and sync the contacts online. Pretty cute :)

In completely unrelated news, I went to an Intro to Aerials one-time class with my boyfriend and it was really awesome :D

Static trapeze.

Silks.

And rope.

PennApps

Two weeks into the new semester, the Dining Philosophers (the general CS club at Penn) hosted PennApps, an annual hackathon in its second year. Last year's format was something like ~two weeks and focused on web apps; we revamped the format to be 48 hours and removed a lot of the previous rules and restrictions.



My  personal favorite is the "poorly rendered dodecahedron".

Although I was on the organization team, two or three (amazing) people really put forth 90% of the work to put this even together. My specific minimal contributions were:
* contributed to official rules document
* designed the PennApps logo and T-shirts
* designed the judges' voting slips
* emcee'd (is that a verb?) the awards ceremony and final presentations

It was amazing to see this thing come to fruition (and with no emergencies and few snags!).
The finished projects were great, and it's amazing how much sponsorship we got from sponsoring companies.

What's slightly more amazing was the amount of food and Red Bull that was consumed during this :-)

Vacation

It's only been a few weeks into the fall semester and already I'm feeling swamped with work! Some belated things to blog about here - separated into multiple posts.

(By the way, Blogger's design options are awesome. You should totally make a cool design for your blog instead of using the default options.)

Family Vacation - Puerto Rico and surrounding Caribbean islands
The week before school started, my family went on a cruise departing from Puerto Rico and visiting five of the surrounding islands. We were supposed to visit a new island each day (because they're all so damn close to each other), but due to the hurricane we didn't get to visit St. Maarten, and swapped St. Thomas, Dominica and St. Lucia around.

A pretty beach we stopped at.

We were hoping to surf that day in Barbados, but the waves weren't cooperating so people were bodyboarding instead.

The cruise ship (Carnival Victory).

Emerald Pool in Dominica. Gorgeously clear water.

The waitstaff would get on tables and sing and dance halfway through dinner service. Bizarre :-)

A melon something (margarita or martini maybe?) and a screwdriver. Melon thing = blech, screwdriver = tasty.

We went ziplining in Dominica. I think this was my favorite activity the entire vacation.

I really like climbing things and doing obstacle courses :D

Coki's Beach in St. Thomas USVI. We snorkeled here -- the water is crystal clear and there are a lot of fish.

Had lunch at a place called Glady's Cafe, tucked away. Nice ambiance and homey decor.

View of Magen's Bay, acclaimed as one of the best beaches in the world.

View of neighboring islands from St. Thomas.

Lots of tropical fruit for sale!

One of the few pictures of myself that I actually like :-)