Philadelphia Orchestra + Planet Earth

Last night I went to the Mann Center, which is a huge amphitheater in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.  So I get in my car and start driving along these windy roads in the park, with no buildings around and no place to pull off until you get out of the park.  So Google Maps says it takes 20 minutes, so after about 15 minutes I still haven't come to the turn I was supposed to make.  But I tell myself to stop being paranoid, and that it's probably just around the corner.  So I keep driving, but after 25 minutes I'm like "Ok, maybe I should pull out the GPS on the iPhone to see where I am..."  And I'm MILES away from my destination, like on the OPPOSITE side of the Schukyll River, across a major bridge, etc.  And these are park roads with a median in the middle and no shoulders, so I have to drive another 10 minutes before I can turn around.  That's the worst  feeling in the world -- knowing that you're driving in the absolutely wrong direction, but you have no way of  turning around.

Anyway, I finally get there, and I paid about $40 to have an actual seat in the amphitheater (as compared to a lawn "seat").  And the program was AMAZING.  They had about 4 to 5-minute clips from Planet Earth that the Philadelphia Orchestra played to.  The composer/conductor of the original Planet Earth score was conducting the orchestra, so it was fantastic.  There were about 6 songs, and intermission, and another 6 songs.  In between each song, this guy would tell incredible stories about the clip we were about to see, and also about how they were able to capture these rare moments on film.  He had a British accent, which made it so much better : )   

Anyway, there was one clip with elephants migrating across the Kalahari Desert to reach water in Botswana, and they were the "happiest elephants ever" when they arrived there - it was so cute, they were trumpeting their trunks and splashing in the water and playing with each other.  Another segment involved the snow leopard in the mountains of Pakistan.  This animal is so elusive that BBC had sent one cameraman to look for it, and that guy lived in the Pakistani mountains for 3 months, and started hallucinating, thinking rocks were moving.  So they replaced him with another cameraman, who stayed in those mountains for another 4 months, and he started hallucinating again, but one time those "moving" rocks were actually a snow leopard! 

The last segment I liked was showing cranes migrating from central Asia to India, and to do this, they have to pass over Mount Everest.  Yes, that's right, OVER Mount Everest.  Not around it or to the side of it, but on top of it.  And with the lack of oxygen up there, you can see that each flap of their wings is a monumental effort. 

All in all, I am so glad that I went.  Despite getting lost, it was an extremely talented orchestra with some incredible film shots, topped off with the original composer/conductor of the Planet Earth score!

Random Thought

I was sitting in traffic, stopped at a traffic light. I started switching between radio stations and chose one.  Then I realized that the car next to me was playing the exact same one.  It was like the universe came together and aligned. Mind. Totally. Blown.

It felt like I should have been in a Pepsi commercial or something.

Yoga and Interesting Drunken Decisions

Life's been pretty crazy the past couple of days, which is why I haven't posted -- Sunday night frisbee turned into one of the best drunken nights I've had in awhile, which made the next day at jury duty sooo much fun... I didn't get picked for a case -- I got called for one at 10:30 am, they made us wait until 12, then let us have a 2-hour lunch break in which I took a good long nap at home, and then right when we got back, they told us they didn't need us anymore. So then I rush back to the office since it's our all-associate track retreat, which was super fun last year with a scavenger hunt all around the city, and I didn't want to miss whatever they had planned this year. 

Except this year, they nixed all the fun and basically had us do more work -- in 2 hours, we got a business case and had to create a 15-minute PowerPoint deck and then give a presentation to the 3 top principals in our office.  Yeah, don't know why I rushed back from jury duty for that. Uggh.  Although our team did win the competition, so I got a $10 iTunes gift card.  So at this point, I was still pretty hungover and my stomach was not feeling so hot.  So as part of the retreat, we go out to Fuji Mountain, a Japanese restaurant + karaoke bar.  And of course they give us 2 free drinks at the bar, plus unlimited wine with dinner.   So what do I do when I still have a hangover? Drink more, of course!  Man.  I made some interesting life decisions in the past 24 hours ; ) 

 And now, I just came back from yoga class at my gym.  I always get home from work on Tuesdays and during dinner I think to myself "Should I go to yoga? How much can 1 hour of glorified stretching really do?". So (most of the time) I don't go, but when I do, I always leave feeling refreshed and limber and content. You would think that as an intelligent human being, I would remember these feelings the next time I contemplate whether or not to go, but nope, each time I am pleasantly surprised.  The only drawback is that this particular teacher at Bally's has us do downward-facing dog, like every other move,

Downward-facing dog

Pigeon pose

which is really hard on your shoulders and arms if you're not like a super-buff man.  But besides that, I actually really enjoy it for stretching the muscles that I know are becoming useless because I sit in a chair for 9 hours a day.  There's been a lot of articles out recently about the health effects of sitting for too long.  So yeah, my favorite pose for really stretching the hip muscles is the pigeon pose (above right).  You basically just tuck one leg under, square your hips, and extend one leg behind you.  I highly recommend it if you have a 9-5 job sitting in front of a computer.

So besides working those muscles, another plus to going to yoga at Bally's is that this teacher literally gives good life advice to you while you're doing all these poses.  Today she was telling us how it's sometimes difficult to make decisions if they're uncomfortable, but you just have to plow through it if it's the right decision.  It's like having a personal psychologist and a trainer all rolled into one. 

I don't think I would need yoga as much, or find it as refreshing, if I didn't live smack dab in the middle of a city.  Yoga has a certain way of humanizing you, and I find I need that a lot since city living tends to make you feel like a robot, desensitizing you to the people around you and just generally making you feel invisible even when you're surrounded by millions of people.  So yeah, with the relaxing, the stretching, the calm music and the personal psychologist/trainer, I begin to feel a little bit more alive and alert and responsive to my surroundings, almost as if I lived in the lovely suburbs again : )

Work, Shopping and Purple Purses

So this past week at work has been pretty intense -- haven't left the office earlier than 7:30 pm, making for lovely 11-hour work days. And to top it off, I had to come in at 10:30 am today, and 9:00 am tomorrow (Sunday!?!?).  This past week has taught me that I am definitely a person who works to live, and does not live to work.  My weekends are sacred to me.  It's when I have time to go out, explore, discover, experience, and just do the things that bring me joy and make me feel content. And I don't think that will change, no matter what profession I'm in or how passionate I feel about my career.  So this weekend, when I was forced to set an alarm on a Saturday morning, rush through breakfast, not go to the gym and miss the local Saturday morning farmer's market, I was pretty angry. 

So what do I do? I go shopping.  Yes, I am aware that I am probably doing this because I feel like I lack control of my work life, so I try to make up for it by finding pleasure through shopping.  But whatever, I can justify it by the fact that I bring my lunch to work every single day and rarely go out for dinner, which surely has saved me hundreds, if not a thousand, dollars over the past year.  So yes, I went shopping.  I got lots of flirty, girly tops with flowers and ruffles and pretty pastel colors.  And the crown jewel was a purple purse.  I know a purple purse sounds hideous and gaudy, and like it won't match with anything.  But I can't help but look at it and smile. And I know I will look forward to wearing it every time. So after a bad start to my Saturday, that has brightened it up a bit.

CTY Reunion

Last weekend, I drove about 2 and a half hours west of Philly to a little town called Carlisle, PA, home of Dickinson College.  That night, CTY (Center for Talented Youth) was having a celebration for Dan Allen, a professor of history at the CTY Dickinson site for 24 years.  It was also his 80th birthday.  It was a very low-key event, some wine, beer, appetizers, and make-your-own tacos.  Most of the people there were his CTY colleagues or his family.  The former students were all older than me, many having attended CTY in the late 80s.  Many people are probably wondering why I drove so long for a guy I only knew for 3 weeks, some 7 years ago.  Part of it was just the fact that it was CTY -- it is such an integral part of my teenage years, because it was the first time living in a college dorm, having a roommate, picking a subject to concentrate in, living independently and meeting friends from all over the country, and of course, let's not forget the first boy-girl dances and stuff.  But I also went back to Carlisle because Dan Allen really was a spectacular professor.  Even though I wasn't a history major in college, I still carry with me the mindset that DA imparted to me, with how to approach history, and learning in general.  DA's history classes were filled with stories, such as the one about his friend who dropped the bomb on Japan.  It was the first time where I took the facts in front of me and truly processed them, mulling them from all different angles, and just truly living and breathing history as if I was there.  And of course we still had map quizzes requiring us to know every country and capital in Europe (it's harder than it sounds), but DA really taught me the importance of passion, creativity, and enthusiasm for a subject --- if those aren't there, you can never be a successful scholar.

So after the event, it was dark, but I still wanted to walk around the campus for awhile, since I hadn't been back since freshman summer of high school.  It was a wonderful, but very eerie feeling to be back.  It was a hot muggy summer night, and you could hear the summer insects buzzing, and a few current CTY campers were running between trees and bushes with glowsticks, and a few were tossing a frisbee under the light of a streetlamp. I found the tree where a fellow camper professed his love to me after only knowing me for a week, haha. 

I think what got me was not just visiting the physical campus, but being there also took me back to the old Hope -- the person that I was 7 years ago, and all the thoughts, emotions, wishes, dreams, and experiences that composed the 14-year-old Hope.  It was a good chance to just remember what my thoughts were for the future back then, and compare that to where I actually am now.  It's weird that those feelings can only be spurred by being in a specific location, but that's just how it is.  All in all, I felt that the 14-year-old Hope would be glad of the current decision I made, to go to grad school.  I think that is the route that will get me  back to the passion, creativity and excitement that I got from Dan Allen so many years ago.

CVS

So here in Philly, I live within a block or two of multiple Rite-Aids and CVSes (hm, how does one pluralize CVS?). Before, I was of the opinion that all convenience stores are pretty much the same -- utilitarian, not that welcoming or comfortable, harsh lighting, scruffed floors, etc. But I've recently been very impressed by a new re-design CVS has introduced to its stores. They carpeted the floors, have self check-out lanes with computer kiosks, a very colorful, easy-to-read way of labeling aisles, and even a coupon kiosk where you swipe your CVS card and it prints out coupons for the things that you've bought most frequently. Everything is clean, well-lit, bright, and colorful. The first thing that comes to mind is that it reminds me alot of Target -- CVS's new shopping baskets are bright red, and the labels for each aisle's contents are bullseye-shaped. It actually reminds me a lot of convenience stores in Europe -- I think Americans have gotten used to cheap things automatically being unpleasant and not well maintained, which doesn't have to be the case. In sum, I am quite impressed by the new feel of CVS's stores, so much so that I went in there one day just needing bleach, and I came out with 2 bags full of stuff.