(In response to myself…)

I think it’s a problem of trust. I don’t trust that I’ll be successful in most of my endeavors, but I’m not willing to wait to prove myself wrong. I don’t trust my friends to support me through everything, so I disconnect myself to deal with problems myself.

Somehow, I lost my optimism, and I’ll I’m left with is a sour feeling of distrust in everything. Hence arises a new question…How do I regain lost confidence?

Is this what college is supposed to be? Something that tears you apart just as a test to see if you’re capable of putting yourself back together? In the last few weeks, I’ve gotten so so stressed out that it takes me more than an hour to fall asleep each night. I was recovering from a cold yesterday but now I’m worse. I sleep sporadically multiple times a day to avoid having to think about… anything. And while I wait for sleep to claim me, formulas and problems and questionable solutions run endlessly through my mind. I’m perpetually tired. It takes me about an hour to warm up to a social event, any less than that and I weigh the options of leaving/staying. Way too often, I apologize for things that I do not believe are my fault. I lie.

I want to complain about how nothing is working out for me. Yes, I have food and residence and intelligence, but I take those for granted. What I yearn for is happiness and contentedness, but right now I just don’t see it. I feel lonely and stupid. Both are irrational. Both consume me.

I’m having trouble remembering how to be happy. This is ridiculous because when I think about the best times in my life, I can see myself surrounded by people who love me, who I love. I see a moving image of myself laughing openly, confident. It used to be so easy to have fun - I was especially good at it.

At a (yearbook) party today, I spent the majority of the time being angry. Angry at the lesser-than-expected turn-out, the cost and scarcity of the food, the unenthusiastic people. I was irrationally pissed off at anybody who didn’t recognize my costume as a bear. And mad at myself for being so stupid about the entire thing - I know that I’m not typically an angry person. I’m not supposed to be. It’s not a redeeming quality. I don’t like being lame.

It’s dumb because I know I’m wrong. I’m not stupid or alone, proof of which is in my passing grades and number of friends. How do I remind myself who I was? I’m stuck again.

I wasn’t going to blog so soon after that last one, but today was an awesome lecture day, despite my first prof being annoyed that none of us were participating and my second prof being flustered about having her notes mixed up. It was awesome because the material that I’m learning in the two classes I had today (150A - Intermediate Fluid Dynamics and 105D - Transport Phenomena) matched up almost perfectly. In fact, I really turned to Yuko during 105D and said, “Mechanical engineering is awesome!” during class. So just to share my (almost sudden) amazing appreciation for the concentration, here are pages from my notes from today!

This is from 105D! We just started a new topic today, convection, and it’s really crazily similar to fluid dynamics. Because the way that convection (conduction + advection) works is through bulk motion, which is generally caused by the flow of some fluid or other mass.

This is from 150A! Actually these are my notes from last week, but today we just went into deriving formulas so there weren’t any cool diagrams. Look at the velocity profile in the middle! It’s exactly (almost) the same as the one from 105D! Also, check out that airfoil. It’s SO REAL.

In 150A today we basically derived the definition of viscosity (via the viscous stress tensor) and in 105D we’re doing other things like temperature/concentration gradients and stuff, but they’re both talking about the same thing. They’re both just solving the boundary layer conditions between the surface of an object and a free stream. I love how applicable these things are. It’s fantastic.

Okay, that’s all. I’m done nerding it up, now it’s time for my third nap of the day. (I am sick and I have a midterm on Wednesday. I’m cutting three classes tomorrow to sleep and study, woot.) Oh yeah and sorry that the photo quality sucks, but I was really excited to blog today, haha.

I took a midterm today in my MAE102 Dynamics class and I totally failed it but that’s okay because now I have time to blog about last weekend!

Wesley, Stanley, and I went to Arcadia! Friday night, I finally got meet Carol’s boyfriend. We went to get boba and then Carol stayed over at Stanley’s house with me It was like a sleepover! We talked, and it was great, except I’m not going to elaborate because there are no pictures to go with this part. Saturday morning, we all woke up and got ready and ate lunch and then went to FORMULA D!!!! That’s right, I attended my first ever drifting competition. Round Seven of the Formula Drift Championship took place in Irwindale, CA on October 17th, 2009! We got there and roamed the stalls and got free swag and all that good stuff. I brought my camera, but didn’t take many pictures. (There weren’t many interesting this to take pictures of…)

This guy right here is funny! He bearded his braid! And when the sun caught his beard/bald head it looked cool so I snapped a photo. He is Ross Petty. (I looked it up on the FormulaD website.)

Anyway I guess I didn’t really have much to say about Formula D, except that I had fun, and I really liked watching them. I was going to explain about the rules and competition, but I’m kind of feeling lazy right now. But it’s really cool! Okay I’ll try to explain in like a sentence.

So basically the cars are graded on a couple things. The speed of their entrance, how closely they reach the clipping points, the angle of their car, and how well they chase when they’re not leading. The clipping points were like, the first wall, two cones, another wall, and another cone. So they basically have to make their car as sideways as they can to get closest to those points. So like, when a car drifts, it’s making the car go at a different angle as it’s wheels, pretty much. But there’s a constant angular motion in one direction, so they’re making like a turn. But if their turn isn’t at the right angle, they might crash into the wall or other car or not get close enough to the clipping point. The best drivers were the ones that didn’t need to correct their angle. And went really fast at the same time.

ZOOM!!!!

Today I made some amazing chicken (in my opinion) so I figured I might as well share my discoveries Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of the process, or a real picture of the end result (because I already started eating it) so…. use your imagination!

First, clean your chicken. I used a whole chicken breast that still had its bone attached, because that’s what I had. Awhile ago I used a similar method with chicken drumsticks (that was DELISH) so I’m sure that’d work, too. Depends what you want to do with it in the end, I guess.

After the chicken is clean and preferably (to me) with most of its fat picked off (but leave the skin! It has flavor!), marinate in pepper, garlic, salt, melted butter, and ginger. I dumbly refrigerated it after putting everything together, so my butter hardened before I remembered again. I’d say leaving it out is totally fine. Marinate for at least half an hour, the longer the better. And since it’s sitting in liquid, flip it over and sploosh it around a little. If you do put it in the fridge, take it out half an hour before you cook, so it’s closer to room temperature. I heard meat is better that way.

About an hour before eating time, preheat your (toaster) oven to 340 deg. Have ready a dish that can hold a bit of liquid, because the chicken will emit chicken juice and drip other delicousness as well. Place the chicken breast side up (or whatever) in your oven and note the time.

While it initiates it’s trip to Tastyland, get a small bowl and juice a lemon and lime. Juice them until there’s nothing left! Get rid of the seeds, because they are always useless. Add honey to the citrus mix. It’s hard to say how much, because I always eyeball it, but I’d say 1 part honey, 3 parts juice. Put this aside, because you won’t be saucing the chicken until at least half an hour later. If you like pepper, put some in. Mix well.

Flip the chicken after about 15 minutes. Total cook time is a little less than an hour (for a reasonable amount of chicken). Actually, before I started I looked up an estimate on how long it takes for a chicken to cook in an oven. The Internet tells me 30 min per pound at 325 deg F. So figure it out yourself, plus or minus a few ounces and degrees. After you flip the first time, sauce the bottom. It is totally okay for it to drip off the chicken, but make sure you let the liquid touch all the chicken’s surface.

Flip to it’s top-up side and sauce the top very liberally. (Next flipping time in approximately 20 minutes (to make it upside down) and then return to normalcy 15 min before you decide it’s done.)

And while it passes by Okaytasting Blvd, chop the basil. Scissors make it very easy. In middle school I learned this trick… if you put your leaves in a tall-ish cup, you can chop it up with scissors really quickly and easily without being afraid of cutting your fingers off! Fantastic! Too bad I didn’t put this method into practice today; I forgot about it until just now. The basil can just hang out for now because you’ll use it later with the chicken juice.

My flipping instructions are way disjointed, sorry! Flip upside down and sauce it. 15 minutes later-ish, flip right side up and sauce like a maniac.

Here is when I started making my pasta. It took about 20 minutes to wait for the (salted) water to boil and pasta to get to the right Roman texture (which I have from experience!!!), so I multi-tasked and flipped and mixed pasta at the same time. I know, I’m just that amazing.

When the chicken is done, pour its liquid emissions into a pan and add any leftover citrus-honey juice and mix in the basil. Add in powdered sugar and cinnamon!!!!!! Reduce until it reaches your desired consistency. For pasta, I’d say watery. As a main dish, I’d say thicken it. While your sauce simmers, slice your chicken! In any way you’d prefer. Or not at all. It’s up you you.

Pasta! Chicken! Sauce! You have thus reached your final destination. Congratulations, you are the first ever follower of any recipe-ish thing of mine. Take a picture and show me! Like this!

I’m very ad-lib prone in the kitchen, so I don’t have actual measurements, but I’ve been baking a lot recently so I actually know what a teaspoon looks like now. On the other hand, anybody who knows me knows that I am the worst person to ever make an trusted estimate. So I don’t know. Take with a grain of salt. Or a tablespoon, whichever.

For marinating.
1/2 ounce butter
1 tsp pepper or lemon pepper
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
3/4 tsp garlic powder
dash of salt

For citrus sauce.
1 small lemon
1 lime (so they’re about the same size)
1 tbsp honey
dash of pepper, if you want

For final sauce.
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh basil (about 15 leaves)
1 tbsp powdered sugar (variable - if you like sour, less.)
1/2 tsp powdered cinnamon
leftover citrus sauce

If anybody does end up trying this, let me know any changes/suggestions

PS. In case you can’t tell, it’s quite citrusy. If that’s not your thing, put double the suggested amount of honey.

I feel very oddly mature these days. Everyone (including myself) has been busily spicing up their resumes, dressing up all nice and wandering around campus after classes before attending info sessions and tech fairs a couple times a week. I guess it’s just that time of year again. I’m just like the others, I guess, trying to get an internship somewhere in the ginormous engineering field.

Today I went to an information session for Samsung. It was interesting to hear their human resources guy’s spiel…until the end, when he mentioned that they were only interested in hiring Master’s students in engineering. Oh, well. Stanley, Wesley, Jenn and I waited until the end regardless (unlike most people) to take part in a raffle and get free pizza. AND GUESS WHAT. Jenn got picked for the raffle and won a digital picture frame. Haha it was so dramatic, “Jennifer Wang!” “Which one…?” and then she got it

AND THEN. And then the guy had one last prize, for the first person who could name the five ideology things of Samsung. And since we got there early, I had lots of time to peruse the info book thing they gave us, and so I knew them and I was fast and guess what I won!!? I won a phone!!!! WOW!! It’s a Samsung Jack, for AT&T (which I so conveniently use) and it’s pretty cute. I haven’t decided whether I’ll use it or sell it though….we’ll see

Classes so far have been alright. My dynamics professor is a bit on the boring side, but the material isn’t too difficult yet (ie he spent two hours today talking about F=ma). Fluids is fantastic yet extremely confusing most of the time. Heat Transfer is interesting but about to get really really hard I think. And CAD is awesome yet boring at the same time, somehow.

And tonight!!!! Gonna go clubbing for the first time in CA Yay for loud music and rhythms!