Namaste

Hey, everyone!

We actually had an almost full week of classes this week, and I definitely felt the tiredness. But next week will be the real full week. Yikes. But I'm ready to "attack" the semester. After two years, I like to think that I've got things under control, but life likes to surprise people (especially us poor, unsuspecting college students).

I've previously talked about my love for putting things up on the walls of my room. There's stuff up everywhere. I'm running out of white space. But I think it looks awesome. It's the culmination of three years of inspiration and lots of "Hey, I think this looks cool. Let's put it on the wall." I know that a lot of people decorate their dorms when they're college, but since I don't dorm, I'm missing out on that experience. I'm completely ok with it though. My room is much bigger than a dorm, which means I have more wall space to put things on. Also, if I dormed, I think I would miss all the cool things hanging on these walls.

The primary election was this week, and I voted! My last class that day ended at 6:50 P.M. so I had a good amount of time to get back to Brooklyn before the polls closed at 9 PM. The old voting machines (they're from the 1960's) were not as confusing as I thought they would be, but I heard there was some trouble with the machines in some other areas. The biggest story that came out of the primary was the continuing battle between Bill de Blasio and Bill Thompson. We still don't know who the Democratic mayoral candidate is, which is a bit frustrating. Also, I was surprised to see that Spitzer lost to Stringer. I guess his money wasn't enough to make people trust him. He's super intelligent though, and I really think he may have been the better comptroller.

I was sitting on the train on Wednesday morning on the way to my 8 AM physics class, and I was reading The Bhagavad Gita, which is part of a Hindu epic called Mahabharata. (My religion professor assigned the first few chapters for us to read for next week.) The man sitting next to me was an Orthodox Jew, and he was reading a  book written in Hebrew (which I assume was the Torah, but it could have been something else.) On the other side of me was a woman reading another book, but I'm not sure what it was about. I just thought it was the coolest thing that the three of us were sitting side by side reading three different texts at 7 AM on the train. Kinda awesome.

I had my first bio quiz for Bio 203 on Thursday. It was NOT easy. Sigh.

Some thoughts on DNA: People underestimate the complexity of DNA. They like to think that all the answers to a person's problems lie in their DNA. Maybe they do, but first we have to understand how to read it properly and that is not an easy thing. Also, people like to think that DNA is a concrete thing, and it is in many ways. But gene expression changes all the time, and we don't fully understand why or how.

Anyway, we're approaching mid-September. I'm looking forward to the crisp fall air that's soon to come.

I couldn't figure out what to call this week's featured phrase so I just called it "Meaning of the week". Every time I think about the meaning of "namaste", I want to quit saying "hello" to people and just say "namaste". It's so much more powerful.

S.

Meaning of the Week

Namaste

“I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, We are One.”