USC

Next up on the interview trail is USC. On the plus side they have an awesome football team, are located in Los Angeles, and have many rich alumni who have a tradition of helping students out. On the minus side they are located in the ghetto, exceptionally expensive, and filled with rich & entitled students who couldn't get in anywhere better but will get awesome jobs because their mommies and daddies know people in the right places. It's a school where every building has 3 people's names on it (the name of the building as a whole, and then also the name for the right-side wing of the building and the name for the left-side wing of the building). It's a school where people buy benches so that they can put bronze statues of their dogs holding footballs onto said benches.

They do have lots of good looking red brick buildings, however.

Believe it or not, it can rain in Los Angeles - and it has every time I've gone up this year.

Cornell

At Cornell to interview at the Johnson School (named after Johnson of SC Johnson, a family company, not Johnson & Johnson, a pharma company) last weekend. There are few places in the continental US that are further from San Diego than Ithaca (although Rochester, where I'm headed next weekend, is one of them). They had 6 feet of snow the previous week, but by the time I got there it was mostly sunny and a warm 20F.

This is Sage Hall, which is the B-School building. It used to be a women's dormitory (the first in the US), then an office building. Then they gutted it, sandblasted the outside, and filled it full of those classrooms with the U-shaped seating areas. In the center of the building is a glassed-in three story atrium.
This is a picture that proves that there was lots of snow. I think the building on the right is a library. In the valley below you can see what I believe is Lake Cayuga.Berkeley and Cornell both have Campaniles. This is Cornell's. If you ever have to choose between the two in a police lineup, I'll let you in on a secret - Berkeley's is the one without snow.

Of course the best part of visiting all these places is coming back home:

I have to be in LA today. It's the 3rd time in 4 weeks, each for a different reason. I also need to be dressed somewhat nicely. So you know the people dressed really well in the public libraries, surfing the net and pretending to be employed? Well I'm going to be one of them. But only for a little while.

Afterwards, I think I get to go to a club with a $30 cover. That'll be the most I've ever paid for cover. I live a life I can't afford.

I went to a really lame party....

I could have taken more pictures of more people, but they're all online on the school's site, and I figure the school hired better photographers. Plus I'm poor and I don't know a whole lot of people and I don't like this town any more. Well, I'm not sure why that part's in this post. It kinda makes sense though doesn't it? Maybe only to me.

Muffy Valentine

valentines day dinner

I don't really celebrate valentine's day, I think it's more of a holiday for single people to gather and share in their misery or glory over how they can still play sex in the city. Which brings me to my second point, Valentine's Day makes me feel poor. Poor and un-connected. So that's why I hate valentine's day.

But I made a fancy dinner, I mean I can hate the holiday but I'm not one to turn my back on society altogether. It's salmon with flageolets. The recipe calls for a ton of bacon and butter, and the potato is stuffed with sour cream, making this the least healthy recipe I've ever made. You can see the flowers C got me in the back. They're almost as pretty as Muffy.

I cook a lot. Mostly because I'm poor, and partly because cooking allows me to control exactly what I eat. We alternate cooking, with me cooking Sunday, Monday, Wednesday. This week I made chocolate chip cookie bars, Thai grilled chicken, spicy broccoli pasta from the Zuni Cafe cookbook. Since I'm stuck with Valentine's Day dinner (a day only single people remember), I'm making salmon w/ flageolets from the Zuni book. Don't ask me what flageolets are...I'm going to sub in lentils.

Of course when I tell people I cook, they feel compelled to inform me that most guys are superior cooks as compared to girls, and that a trophy wife ideally should have no cooking ability at all. Well, if I didn't cook, we would either eat fast food all day, or I would starve.

Disneyland portraits

H wasn't particularly cooperative, but I got C and P in some Disney poses in Toontown.

Disneyland

My brothers, C and I went to Disneyland to celebrate my brothers' 24th birthdays. C hasn't visited since he was 14, my brothers went to Tokyo Disney two years a go, and I haven't visited for almost 20 years. Since then I've been brainwashed by the media into equating Disney with other corporate evils such as Walmart and McDonalds, but after this visit, I've had to rethink that view. Disney actually delivers a quality product. I know, I can't believe I said that. But their rides are intricately detailed, they have excellent crowd control (as compared to other places), the food decent (again, compared to other theme parks), and their themed zones were actually unique and distinct from each other. In particular, I liked the way Disney used fireworks to complement music, instead of just plastering on the lights as we do during 4th of July celebrations.

We managed to hit up all the major rides, with a combination of the fast pass system, relatively short lines, and the fact that we stayed until 10pm. My favorite ride was the Buzz Astro Blaster contribution from Pixar. You take this gun and shoot at aliens as you're funneled through this dark tunnel. It's just like Halo, but with Disney characters.



Inside smallworld! I love how their rides aren't real rollercoasters. Disabled women, crazy old asian men (yes we met one), everyone can ride and in my case, play with C's camera.



Traffic jam in autotopia. I really wanted to ram some of those little kids! C tried to take the car off the track; my brothers tried to 'drift.' Unsuccessful unfortunately. I think in that episode of Futurama where they take the cart out of moonland, they used a crowbar. We need one of those next time.



We sat through the Main Street parade, twice actually. In the afternoon and at night...the girls wear so much makeup!! I wonder if this is the starting point before Vegas..






Sleeping beauty's castle at night. Mainly to prove that I was actually there at night. Couldn't figure out the camera's night mode yet.

C went to Michigan...

C went to Michigan to interview at Ross business school. He said it was cold (-20F). And that none of these pictures are actually Ross...."they're random buildings that looked good, the building at Ross is knocked down right now."

The point though, is that I always thought Michigan looked like Berkeley, maybe because they're essentially the same school, just located in different areas, so according to my logic they would look exactly the same. As these photos prove however, Michigan's got a much more east coast respectable institution look. Doesn't look like a public school to me!