A busy week

I could possibly title this post "a busy three months", referring to the last three months of my current position here in Chicago (October-December).

On Tuesday evening I went to the opening night of Ride the Cyclone, a quite new musical being performed at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. I arrived at Navy Pier early, so after picking up my ticket I bought a burrito for dinner then walked out to the stained glass gallery that I liked so much the first time I went to Navy Pier.

The basic story of the show is that a high school choir of six students was killed in an accident on a rollercoaster, and the fun park fortune telling machine is offering a chance for one of them to win back their life. Each character has an opportunity to tell about themselves and suggest why they should be chosen. There's the nerdy class president, the gay, nihilist teen who feels out of place in this century, the tough Ukrainian immigrant who is secretly very sweetly in love with a young woman back at home, the one who could not speak (until his death) but has a wild imagination that places him as the saviour of the alien cat people, the unidentified body, and the bumpkin who loves her small town and plans to live there her whole life. Each character has a song (or two in the case of Mischa, who goes from gangster rap to the kind of song and dance number you see in Bollywood movies, though with a Ukrainian folk style rather than Indian), each in a different genre. There's not a whole lot of plot, but that's not the purpose of the musical: it's more like a performance with a bit of a storyline to tie it together.

I'm used to choreography being much more impressive in professional shows, and that was the case here. I think the ability to work on it intensively in the weeks or days leading up to the performances really does help. And I was also very impressed by the quality of the singing. I certainly enjoyed the show and would recommend it to others (though, it is a little esoteric and I don't think I have as many musical fans as friends as I did in Boston).

Wednesday was meant to be a quiet evening, but on Tuesday evening, Arvind mentioned he'd like to work on our origami project the next day. We are attempting to determine the conditions under which a rigid sheet inscribed with creases can fold all at once. There's a complicated set of equations to solve, but we are not trying to solve them, but to determine the conditions under which the solutions behave differently. It's all about checking whether matrices are singular. It's quite addictive work because the problem is so well-defined and there are always new terms to calculate. Arvind happened to have a fair bit of time that evening (with two young children, his schedule is not always regular), so I ended up staying late to work alongside him. We've made a bit of progress and I even have had a new idea in the last 24 hours, which I want to work on as soon as I get a chance. It may be possible to find the answer using few equations than I had thought (I had initially taken lots of derivatives at one point, but one derivative at lots of points might be simpler).

On Thursday, Anqi and I went to watch the Kansas City vs White Sox baseball game. It was a very windy evening (it's been constantly windy since Tuesday), and the White Sox are well out of playoff contention, so the game wasn't very popular. It was a strange experience walking from the station to the gate without a crowd of people, entering in the absence of lines, and walking up to our level along almost empty ramps. Many of the concessions (I don't know why Americans call places in a stadium where you can buy food "concessions", but they do) were closed, but we were able to buy hot dogs (which were surprisingly good and filling: Chicago hot dogs are famous for being "dragged through the garden", which suits this vegetable-loving omnivore) to take to our seats. The stadium stayed mostly empty, and we moved closer to first base after a couple of innings. The weather stayed cold and windy throughout: I should be used to Chicago and have made the transition to winter attire faster (I didn't need a sweater on Tuesday, or Wednesday for that matter because I was inside all day, so I didn't think that I might require more than just a sweater on Thursday). The game itself was enjoyable but unspectacular. Kansas City did make a lot of hits, and there were some mildly unusual plays like a successful pick-off at first base. At the bottom of the eighth inning, I was looking at the statistics scoreboard as a new pitcher was introduced, wondering what IBB could stand for (intentional base on balls). The big screen was showing shots of the crowd, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that one of the people shown was wearing the same t-shirt as me (not so surprising, since I wore one of the free t-shirts I received at a White Sox game in August). And, like me, he was wearing it over a greyish sweater. And he had short blond hair. And was sitting next to someone dressed exactly like Anqi, and surrounded by empty seats! But by the time I looked up, we had disappeared and the next group was on the screen. The Sox got runners on base in that inning, but suffered their third out trying to get home on a passed ball. They were only two runs behind at that stage, but it was their last chance to make things interesting.

On Friday, I cooked for the Catholic grad students' dinner. Josephine had volunteered to cook pasta and Anqi soup, so I made a chocolate pudding for dessert. Michael told me it was excellent but not pudding, though he walked back to his seat that I could retort that he is excellent but not a grad student (ok, I'm not either, but I was recently, and it is officially the grad student and young professionals' dinner). We had a great time eating and chatting about being mistaken for a princess and other trials of life as a UC student.