My MIT Blog Hit Parade

Hello readers. If you are reading this, I thank you for sticking around!

I've taken a hiatus from blogging. Two weeks ago, I removed myself from the Iron Blogger challenge; it was pretty fun and I got some beer out of it, but my heart is just not in it on a weekly basis anymore. I'm being kept on the payroll out of laziness since I'll be graduating soon, but I've pretty much quit my job over at the MIT Admissions Blogs.


Looking back on the entries I've written for MIT Admissions, I'm happy to notice that I like every single post I've written. With each post I authored, I tried to play with a topic that was relevant. I tried to fill the little voids I came across, and I'm reasonably satisfied with what I came up with. One topic I'd wanted to approach since the start, dating at MIT, I never got to address (it's perhaps just as well, for maybe some things are better left unsaid and that's why there're still no posts about what it's like to date at MIT beyond what Charm School teaches?). Maybe I'll write about that here someday?

Here are my favorite posts of mine, for the simple reason that the writing is really true to who I am and where I come from:

Cristen's MIT Admissions Blog Hit Parade

1. A Week in the Life: Optimism Edition. My very first post as an Admissions Blogger starts with a quote from a hallmate creating one of the few instances where I gained insight as to how others see me. It was... interesting. That Sunday night ended up being a bit more special than my readers realize, but I cannot get into that here. While this is a fairly simple post - a highlighted description of my week, day by day event by event - in the end it shows me for who I am: a "unit of happy," to quote a guy I used to date.
2. Ask Yourself. My boyfriend at the time takes a leave of absence, opening our eyes to a whole host of questions regarding just how "right" MIT is for us. Personalities clash, love fades, darkness persists. Frankly, I was distraught. The result was this gentle warning in the form of a request: to please ask yourself some very important questions before enrolling in a college. College decisions are serious business.
3. My First Visit / My College Essay. I take the perspective of the prospective college applicant! The two entries were posted hours apart, and present information which is especially practical for the distant blog reader who wants to apply to MIT (hey, that's exactly who my audience is)! My First Visit reminisces over my visit to MIT's campus in February 2005 as a high school junior, while My College Essay bravely started a short-lived trend where some Bloggers posted their application essays for the whole world to see.  My College Essay generated the most comments out of my blog posts for MIT, even though (or because?) my writing in November 2005 was embarrassingly bad..
4. A Characterization. The post that eventually brought my name onto the front page of the New York Times. A confessional at its core, A Characterization reveals a few things about me which shock some people... ;)

I don't know how long or strong this hiatus will be. I mean, I'm writing a blog post right now right?  However, I feel the need to sort out the mess that is currently my Online Presence; like any Internet-addicted 20-something, I've left a wide trail of myself along nearly a decade of The Internet. So I deleted my LiveJournal account, changed my Tumblr name and made my Facebook as private as I possibly could, but it will probably never feel like enough. What a world!

See you later.

A Walk and a Dream

On Wednesday morning my friend Andrew and I walked around town. It felt way longer than it looks on the map, which defines this route as approximately 4.4 miles long. But the part that really killed my legs was walking up the 291 steps of the Bunker Hill Monument.

It was my longest walk in a very long time. Now that I have Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays free I'd like to spend more of that time exercising - my favorite way being walking. Unfortunately, I've had a very difficult time finding additional walking partners, since most people (a) won't wake up early, (b) would rather run or jog than walk, (c) don't want to spend that many hours with me at a time. All of which I totally understand, but still means solitary walks for me. To where should I walk tomorrow?

Utada Does America/UK

On Friday, February 5th, Hikaru Utada performed her show at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, somewhere near Boston University.

(I have no photographic evidence because the club insisting on checking our cameras... so the photos here are taken from Utada's official website, from previous shows.)

From the Las Vegas show at the House of Blues

Now, why is this concert so significant that I'm blogging it?

Well, for most of her life, Utada was 宇多田 ヒカル, Japanese pop superstar. Her debut album, First Love in 1999, is the best-selling album in Japanese history. I and many other fans from across the world followed her over most of the last decade, but, of course, we could merely dream of seeing her in person....

Utada's "In The Flesh" 2010 Tour supports her second recent attempt at American/International stardom. Built off her newest album, This Is The One, I was a bit apprehensive at first. I'd listened to the album a bit first but it hadn't yet grown on me - and what would the rest of her already-established fans from the J-pop days think? 

 

Thankfully it seems she thought about this, and in the end made an awesome concert with a diverse selection of songs in both Japanese and English.

Set List (with [albums] annotated, italics are Japanese):

[Exodus] Crossover Interlude

[This is the One] On & On

[This is the One] Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - FYI

[This is the One] Poppin'

[This is the One] This One (Crying Like A Child)

[Ultra Blue/Kingdom Hearts II] Passion & Sanctuary (mixed together)

[Deep River] Sakura Drops

[Heart Station] Stay Gold

[Exodus] Devil Inside

[Exodus] Kremlin Dusk

[Exodus] You Make Me Want To Be A Man

The Bitter End (Placebo cover)

[This is the One] Apple & Cinnamon

[Heart Station] Boku Wa Kuma (audience request)

[This is the One] Come Back To Me

[First Love] First Love

[Distance] Can You Keep A Secret?

[First Love] Automatic

[This is the One] Dirty Desire

Encore:

[Kingdom Hearts] Simple & Clean

[This is the One] Me Muero

From the Seattle show at the Showbox

So this is her first North American/United Kingdom tour.  Her show in London sold out in 5 hours (an additional show has been scheduled since). Most of her shows in the States sold out well in advance, including the one I went to at the Paradise Rock Club.

Wow.. all.. thirty Japanese people in Boston came out to see this.

--guy behind me on line to enter the venue

( I think there were even more Japanese folks sitting in reserved sections on a mezzanine... did Utada bring her own entourage from Japan with her?? )

Luckily I'd been to the Paradise Rock Club a mere week and a half earlier to see Of Montreal, but the knowledge didn't do much good because I got there late (almost forgot the ticket -_-) and ended up standing all the way in the back. But the tall guy standing in front of me drifted enough to the left and I squeezed enough to the right that I, at the utterly average height of 5'3", still got to see her!!

From the San Francisco show at the Fillmore

She dressed plainly in a shiny purple dress (I think.. remember I could barely see!) and little makeup. She looks just like she does on the CD covers, and sings just like she does on the CDs. The real deal.

Sometimes Utada chatted with her audience, admitting that she chose smaller venues for this tour because she wanted these shows to be more intimate in nature. In turn the audience shouted out stuff like "I LOVE YOU!!"  「だいすき!!」"You're beautiful!" and tried to convince her to come to Northeastern Harvard BC BU MIT ("I'm not a very technical person.." she admitted.) Utada told us some stories about how she's a college dropout but really kind of a nerd (which was naturally met with uproarious cheering), and about that one time she went to Boston and got taken to some tiny dingy Chinatown restaurant by her best friend and like, ate a hotdog at Fenway Park. She punctuated her talking with the Japanese equivalent to umm.

Ummm. :)

Some last random tidbits I have from the show.

• Sakura Drops was some acoustic piano version. I'm pretty sure no one saw it coming when Utada started to play the keyboard that was placed in front of her!
• A few fans had brought teddy bears, which they waved around while Utada sang her famous children's song ぼくはくま (Boku wa Kuma). Speaking of which, she messed up the words a bit but gracefully laughed it off.
• The songs she chose to perform translate pretty well onto the live stage. Also, her band/sound system were great.
• But sometimes I couldn't tell where she was lip-synching and where she was singing (see kids this is what happens when you don't alter your voice in your music ;)! She did both within the same chorus! I was like uhhhh no... if there's a pair of lines that just repeat, either sing it all or don't try to pretend for one line and then not go through with the identical line..
• I think she did a great job not alienating her fans from yesteryear by performing some of her best classics. It really made us happy!
• Her newest single will be Dirty Desire, so, ええと , request it on the radio and stuff.