WRITING CULTURE 2012: Film, Food & Beyond

Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'

Obama stood tall…

January 3rd, 2013 Written by | No Comments

As he acknowledged to the country that he had won his second term as President of the United States.  With a tear in his eye, and amounts of happiness and appearing gratitude that overflowed, he took his place as a two-termer.  It surely was late enough into the evening, after his opponent Mitt Romney all but refused to concede – his hopes of winning getting smaller by the second as each state came in with who their votes were going to… almost every one adding to Obama’s already significantly higher number of electoral votes.

It was semi-brilliant watching FOX News’s anchors look pained as they announced Obama as the winner; the clearly biased news source would have loved to have announced Romney as our new president, but were denied the pleasure of their Republican candidate winning.  They held on until late in the evening as well, while other news outlets had announced much earlier that Obama was clearly getting the Presidential nod.

The fun really to be had on election night though was on social media – everyone with their “I am going to de-friend you’s” being threatened to their Facebook counterparts publicly endorsing their particular candidate.  I, personally, (while happy with the current president), would love to see Hillary Clinton in office; she would rock it.  http://hillaryclinton.com/

Tags: Election Night · Uncategorized

Long Branch… is a short film.

December 17th, 2012 Written by | No Comments

Long Branch, by Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart, is a short film about a potentially long relationship.   The film opens with our lead characters making out in a tunnel with a car driving past.  Our female lead (name still tba) bluntly asks the guy if he would like to have sex, in a much more crude fashion than we’ll touch on here, to which she receives a reply that is expected of any straight male; yes.  Her roommate has people over so they have to go back to his place – as he checks his phone for the time, he asks how good her shoe’s arch support is and they start running to make the train, which they do.  If they hadn’t the rest of the somewhat predictable plot would not be able to play out.

Long Branch

Once on the train, they make the few other people in the car uncomfortable and myself too a bit, to be honest.  Finally, after their make out session goes on for a while and a station name is announced, our female (who’s name we still do not know) asks where this guy lives to which he finally admits he lives in Long Branch – nearly 2 hours away.

Cue to them now being on a city bus in the snow – at this point, quite unrealistic.  Their down to awkward conversation when at least the girl lets us know why we don’t know character names “basic one night stand etiquette”.  That cleared a little bit up at least.  Finally, they make it back to his house where it is clear to the audience immediately that he lives with family.  She stays and they end up cozy-ing up to sleep, no sex involved, and leave the viewer thinking they may actually go on a real date. Not original, but cute and relatively enjoyable.

Tags: Short film critiques · Uncategorized

Initial Reaction: Hurricane Sandy

December 16th, 2012 Written by | 4 Comments

My first thought when I heard Hurricane Sandy was coming was essentially: “Phew, thank god I managed to make it back to New York in time, because I was NOT spending another night in the Detroit airport.”

To clarify, I’d only recently gotten back from an emergency trip to China to see me ailing grandmother, so news of Sandy came really fast and leaving me with little idea of what to expect. My family took very limited precautions, moving a few bits of furniture that wasn’t tied down or heavy enough from the terrace, locking down all the windows, etc. My biggest concern wasn’t even for me or the members of my family with me at the time, it was for my father who was told by the hotel he was working for to come in for work the day before Sandy hit. They would provide him and other members of the staff rooms there, but it would essentially strand him in Upper Manhattan until the storm passed. Profit waits for no man, even during a Hurricane apparently.

As for myself, my apartment complex is several stories high, made out of solid brick and mortar, while resting on a hill in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Willamsburg, resting in land and away from the river. You couldn’t really ask for a more storm, flood, and tree proof facility, so it was all about hunkering down and waiting for Sandy to pass. Besides the howling wind and oncoming rain my family and I ran into almost no inconvenience,  both power, phone lines, water, gas, and the internet were still running for the most part. And in the event that they weren’t we had one of these nifty heavy duty flashlights on hand to help out.

There was one scary moment I do have to admit though, sometime towards the end of the night the box-crate locker on our terrace where we kept most of our heavy tools came open, and I in turn got stuck with the job of braving the storm and shutting closed. The winds had died down by then, so it wasn’t too bad, but I had no inclination to linger and bolted back inside with extra hop in my step when the job was done. Afterwards, it was just tracking the storm, and then going to bed with the howling winds for a lullaby. Not the most exciting time in life, but there was some anxiety for some of my relatives scattered across the city, in Long Island, and New Jersey  Everyone came out alright by the end though, for that I’m extremely grateful, and more then willing to take the boredom of waiting the storm out versus the consequences that could have happened otherwise.

Tags: Hurricane Sandy · Uncategorized

Satisfying Crisp

December 16th, 2012 Written by | 4 Comments

I rarely ever eat much during breakfast most days. Something quick, something light, just something to give me a little bit of energy to shake off the grogginess of the morning and get me going. Usually that’s a sweet bun, a yogurt, or a piece of fruit like a banana.

But sometimes, there are just some mornings where I’ve got this deep, gnawing pit in my stomach, that demands to be filled. It’s mornings like those when I head over to the cafeteria and order myself one of these:

*Image from beerorkid.com

Hash Browns, the guilty pleasure of my morning life and probably my favorite breakfast food of them all. Yes,yes I know what you’re going to say “Aleck, it’s a bunch of cut up potato pieces fried together!” Yes it’s probably dipped into a ton of oil. Yes, it’s probably nothing but carobs  Yes, it will probably give me a heart-attack if eaten in sufficient quantities.

But boy is it good. The rich, crisp outer crust, combined with the savory, fluffy flakes inside just provide this beautiful contrast of textures and rich flavors. Nothing satisfies me more during a hungry morning then to have that warm, melting sensation wash right through my body.

Some people see fried grease shaped into a cube, I see my salvation for the day.

Tags: Breakfast at Baruch · Uncategorized

I fear…

December 15th, 2012 Written by | 3 Comments

     Compared with other people who lost their lives or their homes, I cannot say that I was the victim of Hurricane Sandy.
Bayside,Queens,where I live wasn’t bad compared with many other areas but did not have power or Internet access for a for few days. We had so many candles that we prepared for the hurricane,and we could light the house –but it was difficult to read a book or do many things. After Sandy hit us, I was totally isolated from news coverage,and the media. and I was unable to proceed with school, work, and appointments, as planned. I found that I liked the concept of life without Internet and technologies, until Wednesday morning when I started to anxious and afraid because I felt I was losing touch with reality and the world outside seemed so apocalyptic. I also realized how much our lives are engaged with technology and that made me think of something Albert Einstein said:
“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will be full of idiots.”

IMG_2642Photo by Dachan Chris Hwang

Tags: Hurricane Sandy · Uncategorized

Farewell, JITZY!

December 13th, 2012 Written by | No Comments

Well this is it! Time for JITZY to hang up the blog and call it a day. These passed couple of months doing this blog have been very eye opening and a lot of fun. We learned new things about each other and our cultures and even though we won’t be here, our experiences and our memories of this will always linger. Having the opportunity to have this blog with other people was great. We’ve all found out new things about ourselves on the way and we’ve all become better people along the way. We’ve become a voice for the people to inform them about New York City culture. We’ve become great friends that have learned much about each other’s traditions and lifestyles. We’ve become bloggers and we even though we won’t be around to do this blog anymore, rest assured we will each return individual and provide our own voices in the future and take every we’ve learned from this and become even better.

This is JITZY, signing off. Adios!

 

Tags: Uncategorized · WHO WE'VE BECOME

Hurricane Sandy Recovery

November 27th, 2012 Written by | No Comments

A buzzing sound right behind the wall, I wake up because it seems like someone is drilling my head. They start making noise at 9 am and keep working all day long. The first floor of our building got flooded and now the landlord is renovating it. The walls flake off like potato chips, my neighbor tells me he is afraid of all the mold to come up to our floor. Every day i see the growth of the heap of construction garbage near my door. Harrison NJ is recovering from Sandy. As i walk to the train station, I see people working on their basements, i see piles of trash, i even saw a chest with open drawers full of colorful panties; this whole thing was under the water and the owner just decided to throw away everything at once.
Path trains that connect NJ and NY are not running properly, they stop running at 10, so if you work at night, you should wait until 5 am when they start working again.
The stores’ shelves got full again, there is no shortage of bread, milk or eggs as it was right after the hurricane. The gas stations work as they used to work, everything comes back to normal.

Empty supermarket shelves before Hurricane Sandy, Montgomery

This was the scariest hurricane I faced (well, i remember Katrina hit when I was in Florida, but I was not affected as much as here) and I hope NYC will never be hit hard like this again.

The picture is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Empty_supermarket_shelves_before_Hurricane_Sandy,_Montgomery,_NY.jpg

Tags: Uncategorized

Recovery In North Salem

November 18th, 2012 Written by | No Comments

Recovering from anything that causes even the slightest bit of damage isn’t easy and doesn’t happen overnight. But when this slight bit of damage is caused by a hurricane that literally took New York by storm, it’s going to take much longer than that.

Thankfully, here in my neighborhood of Marine Park, Brooklyn, not too much damage was caused. Just trees and electrical wires being taken down by the winds and many of people’s rooftops, including mine being ripped off it’s base. However, my girlfriend’s neighborhood up in North Salem wasn’t as fortunate as mine. Her house which is surrounded by trees as many houses in that neighborhood are was covered in debris and toppled trees blocked her entrances so they couldn’t get out until they got assistance.

Luckily, even though it took about 10 days to get her house back to decent shape, everything in her neighborhood returned to normal. The whole family did manage to clear their property of the tree and debris and the neighborhood managed to recover from the disaster.

Tags: Uncategorized

DIY HTML

November 16th, 2012 Written by | 2 Comments

 

Hello, all,

If you are interested in learning HTML, which some of you brought up in class yesterday, or other coding or web-service languages or tools, there is a great, free resource available to you. Learning the basics of code-writing does not have to take a huge amount of time (HTML especially is quite simple), and will give you tremendously improved flexibility in terms of the back-end side of things with your new blogs; it can also be very helpful should you ever want to switch your blog’s platform (I was able to switch from Blogspot (now Blogger) to Tumblr without losing a single word or image).

I think you’ll find this site incredibly useful. As you explore, please feel free to email me with any questions!

Best wishes for a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Tags: Uncategorized

The Mayor Who Cried Hurricane

November 13th, 2012 Written by | 1 Comment

Being a typical New Yorker and having suffered many of Mayor Bloomberg’s “natural disaster scares” that have gotten me all riled in anticipation for something very impacting and awful only to be greeted with laughable wind currents and a snow storm that gives me the shivers, I was not expecting any of this to happen. The day before the subways were meant to be shutdown in lieu of Sandy’s rage, I was in Albany partying it up for Halloween not worrying a single bit about what will happen. My sister calls me the following morning telling me to go home early because the Subways were going to be shut down at 7pm and too be careful. Of course, I brush her off and give her a unamused “yeah okay got it” expecting nothing but a little rain fall and some mild to heavy gusts. Boy was I wrong. Big time.

Thankfully, I’m alive and well. Worst damage done to m home was just some minor roof damage but I’ll take it happily. I have no words to describe what happened. It was just a shock. Never in my lifetime I would have expected a hurricane of that caliber to hit Brooklyn the way it did. My heart goes out to the many of those who lost their homes, cars and loved ones during this tragic event. Just being without power for a day completely disables New York. Driving to work those couple of days afterwards felt like I was going through some post apocalypse city and some Resident Evil creature was going to jump out at me and eat my head off. It was pitch black. Never have I seen New York in such a paralyzed state and I was heart breaking.

For now, I am grateful. I feel New York did an outstanding job handling this unfortunate situation the best it could have. When Mother Nature strikes, the best thing to do is just keep on because you can place the blame on anyone. Here, a couple weeks after the matter, we are still trying to recover and go back to things being normal. Although it’s hard, we just have to be strong and keep on. We just don’t value our well beings and our city as much as we should. We take things for granted and assume the best. After the dozens of cries from the Mayor in previous years of similar situations, it’s not baffling why New Yorkers didn’t evacuate when they were told to and why people were still on the streets when they were told not to be. It’s New York. The best city in the world. The same city that people who want to go see the World Trade Center don’t because they can always go see it next weekend or next year and assume nothing bad will ever happen.

Tags: Uncategorized