The best things in life are free.

It's been three weeks.

I've actually really wanted to make a new post, but I've been putting it off forever because I just didn't know where to start.

I will TRY to highlight all of the cool stuff that's been happening here at Penn State ever since I landed here. The first week was spent playing catch-up in all of my classes (remember, I skipped a week?) and for some reason, I decided to take Organic Chemistry. I don't regret it now, but I didn't know then that OChem was rumored to be one of the hardest classes offered by Penn State (a laughable claim, as you will learn in a future post). I'm also taking Gen Chem 2 (Chem 112) with lab, Psychology 100, Nutrition 100, and Mechanics (Physics 211) with lab, all of which are very manageable. And all are, regrettably, lecture classes...which means that attendance is not mandatory. Which doesn't give me much motivation to actually attend class, especially when the class is at 8 AM. This explains why I have attended 3 out of the 12 Chem lectures so far.

Anyway, when I'm not catching up by reading textbooks, I hunt down some nice dance-related YouTube videos. I found a telugu movie by K. Vishwanath called Swarnakamalam. It's excellent; you should watch it.

Speaking of dance...my obsession has not faded and I dragged some friends to watch The Gypsy and the Princess, a Bharatanatyam/Kuchipudi neo-classical ballet that took place at Mt. Nittany Middle School, a few miles from here. I was incredibly surprised that a dance troupe would come all the way over here, but apparently Indian Classical Dance is relatively popular in these areas. Though the dancing wasn't superb, the performance was very enjoyable--the costumes, arrangement, and choreography were fantastic. Of course, I'm biased--Jothi Aunty's productions always feature dance skill that is pretty much unsurpassed, so everything else looks mediocre to me. But I nevertheless enjoyed taking a break from all that reading and engrossing myself in dance all over again. Ramya came with me and we managed to drag along Shivam as well (I guilt tripped him into coming with, "how will we ever keep alive Hindu culture if you don't attend such performances? What kind of a human being are you?" so he came. He won't admit it, but he enjoyed it.

The rest of the next week was spent crashing the introductory meetings of various clubs in order to take advantage of the free pizza. We crashed Math Club, The College of Science Student Council, and some others. I actually joined the Vedic Society though, and indulged in a sumptuous home-cooked vegetarian meal after the first meeting. Apparently these super-Indian grad students home cook the food and bring it to every meeting. The yoga is the reason I attend. Really.

And the last rather interesting thing that happened last week was the Career Fair at the Bryce Jordan Center. Basically, a bunch of companies showcase themselves to us, the students, who are potential future employees. There is really no need for us progs (premed kids) to attend, because we aren't going to be getting jobs that quickly anyway. But that doesn't stop us from dressing real professional-like and mooching off all the free stuff. And you have to SEE exactly how much free stuff we got.


That's not even half of it. But anyway, we were still in the BJC hording all this free stuff and Ramya starts complaining that she's tired and she wants to go back to the dorm. Me and Shivam, are like, "just stop complaining, go sit down, we'll be done in another half hour". So we finally finish about an hour later and Ramya (who, by the way, thought it was an efficient use of space to put TWO ROLLS OF PAPER TOWELS in her backpack instead of other usefull stuff) decides to take the White Loop back to campus. So we get on the bus, and instead of taking us to campus, it brings us to the edge of town. When we're almost all the way back to the BJC, we decide to just get off and walk back. That was probably the best workout I've had in a long time. My arms were aching for three days after carrying all the loot. But definitely a very productive day, I'd say.

And in other news, some people saw Kal Penn on campus campaigning for Barack Obama. Of course they call me after he's already left.


So, theres some interesting happenings during my first three weeks at PSU. I'm still a little behind chronologically, so expect another post about past events before I catch up to real time. Thanks for reading.