Nuyoricans Poetry Slam

As part of my creative writing class, we had to go to some sort of reading - poetry or short story.  Noveen and I went to the Nuyorican which is this really cool bar that was the first place ever to do poetry slams.  By the time we got there it was standing room only but for the second half we got a spot on the balcony.  The show started off with two slam poets just doing a couple of their own poems and then after that the actual slam started.  Pretty much, if you want to be in the poetry slam, you have to send in a video clip and they'll select you if you're good enough.  Then, they randomly select 5 audience members to be the judges.  My favorite poet of the night was this girl from Brown who had one poem about how she's in love with Philip Seymour Hoffman.  It was really funny.  Unfortunately though, she didn't win.  If only they had picked me to be one of the judges...  

I've never been to a poetry slam before but it was really great, because there's such a larger emphasis put on word play and rhyme, as well as the motions that go into the poetry.  You don't just stand there, stiff as a board, and recite your poem.  One guy actually did breakdancing while doing his poem, which I thought was incredibly fitting way to describe how the genre fits within the realm of poetry...  Anyways, hopefully I'll go back another night.

Our view from above:

Brooklyn Adventure

I decided to do a little final-studying procrastination and take a trip to Brooklyn with Mary and Noveen.

First, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

View of Manhattan and Mary.

More Manhattan.  You can probably see my dorm in this picture.

And then we got Grimaldi's Pizza which is famous and there was a super long line.

And we ate it at the Brooklyn Bridge Park

And then to top off our dinner adventure, we got some ice cream (Shh, don't tell my boss...)

Delicious!

And the sunset walk home.

Bagel Fest

So a school tradition that had been forgotten was resurrected by Student Council this year: Bagel Fest!  Basically, it's just an opportunity for students to get free bagels and for us to get feedback from students/inform them about upcoming events and initiatives/meet other students.  It's been super successful, as free food tends to be and we're definitely doing it again next year. (*Though for those of you NYU students, it has been switched to every other Tuesday from 10:30-12:30)

Our 2nd to last bagel fest was by far the craziest and the Dean's gave us free coffee, which was awesome.  Here's a shot of the action:

Relay for Life

Relay for Life, a charity event that raises money for cancer research was held in our gym this past April.  I was team captain for Student Council along with Mary and we came up with an awesome theme: Western.  We ended up raising over $2,500, which is more than Student Council has ever raised before, so thank you so much to all of you who donated!  The entire event itself raised over $140,000, which is ridiculously awesome.   

Walking our banner around the track

You're trying to fundraise while you're there too, so one of our ideas (stolen from a friend, I will admit) was Jail.  $1 to put someone in jail and $1 to get out.  Unfortunately, we realized a little too late that we didn't actually have any brawny people to jail people or to keep them there...

Birds-eye view of the event. 

Our table with some student council people.

Our beautiful banner that I convinced Aleja to paint, even though she's not in Student Council.  Our slogan was "Cancer: I don't wanna see you around these parts no more!"

Whoa, that's a tiny computer...

CELEBRITY CITING

Today at work, I served Jason Bateman (Juno, Arrested Development, Hancock, etc) and his super adorable 3 year old daughter ice cream at work.  It was awesome, possibly the most exciting thing to happen to me all week.  For those of you who care, he ordered a scoop of no sugar added Caramel Pecan and a scoop of no sugar added Moose Tracks (vanilla ice cream with a chocolate fudge ripple mini peanut butter cups).  I'm calling that the "Jason Bateman  Special" from now on.

Ahh, I think this was potentially the best celebrity citing I've had yet. 

NYU iPhone Class

Wow, sorry I've been so bad at keeping up with this, but I knew that would happen towards the end of the year... Anyways expect a giant outpouring of posts to be coming soon, now that school is about over.

I recently discovered that NYU has a new class called "iPhone Programming" that was offered this semester in the Computer Science department and basically, the point of the class is to teach you how to create apps for the iPhone (slightly unrelated, but still equally cool is the fact that NYU is offering a major next semester that is devoted to video games and making them and stuff...).  The final project is to create your own app and some of them look really amazing.  I've already checked for them on iTunes, but they're not up, though I'm hoping that after they present them next week, they'll be available.  

I've included the link for you right here, but just wanted to mention my favorites:

iHungry: This one is by far my favorite.  You enter the food items that you have in your fridge/cupboard and the app will give you recipes based on those ingredients.  Also, you can store a list of staple items, like butter, sugar, etc...  I want this app.

NYU Courses:  check the availability of classes, reviews of the professors, and even map out where the classes are going to be 

CityInsider:  It's like Urban Spoon, for those of you who have the app, which recommends different places to eat.  The difference is that this app will tell you where to eat based on what restaurant has the best deal.

iNYUBus:  Gives you the NYU bus schedule plus tells you where the closest stop is based on your current location.  This would have been so helpful this past semester...

Who Is It?:  This looks like the game, Guess Who? but for your phone.

Bun Week! Part 3: Black Light Party

Wednesday was our black light party, which basically consisted of us buying and setting up 20 blacklights, giving out glow sticks, and having people decorate shirts with black light markers.  It was pretty cool.

This is what the room looked liked before we turned the lights off:

And this is after:

I believe this is Emily, twirling her glow-necklaces at me

More glow-necklace twirling, this time by Cristina

A nice glow-smile

Bun Week! Part 1: Stress Free Night

Monday night was Stress Free Night, which involved lots of fun and destressing activites:

We had a table of games, including a puzzle, Sock 'Em Bop 'Ems, PlayDoh, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Legos, and coloring books.

Noveen takes out her anger on Bozo the Punching Clown, while eating some free Coldstone Ice Cream.

Justin gets acupuncture in his ear

Cristina missed out on the free ice cream, so she was left with just sprinkles. 

I blew bubbles.

Meli tried to blow bubbles but failed.

Lindsay got acupuncture too. 

This is her pre-acupuncture afraid face.

There was also massages and yoga, which I have never done before but after 45 minutes of it, I was sore for the next 2 days...

Bun Week! Part 2: Sunnygrams

Tuesday was our Sunnygrams event, which is an organization where you make cards for children in the hospital and then they deliver them.  As you can see, we made some pretty sparkly and bright cards...

It may not be traditional, but it is the coolest campus...

The view from our student center looking out at Washington Square Park (which is currently under renovation, though fingers crossed, it will be ready in time for my graduation next year) and 5th Ave.

Financial District Protest

This Saturday, I heard chanting outside of my window and looked out to see a protest marching down the street.  I think they were protesting something about the bailout and women, though I couldn't really hear what they were saying/read their signs.  Perhaps it was just a continuation of the previous day's activities.  Nothing says adults protesting the bail outs like "pillow fight at Wall Street"

Birthday Cake

It was my roommate's 21st birthday this weekend and instead of buying her a gift, I decided to bake her a cake because it's delicious and easy and I like coming up with cake ideas.  Past cakes of mine have included a 4-layer red velvet cake with polka dot icing, peanut butter marble cake, and a dark chocolate raspberry cake.  I decided to go with an Oreo cake this time, but of course the grocery store was out of regular Oreos.  Luckily, there was one deli open (the product of late night grocery shopping in the financial district) that sold small packages of Oreos.  I made a chocolate devil's food cake with a layer of Oreos, and then because I for some reason decided to make the really smart decision of not putting the flat sides of the cakes together, I put Oreos around the outside of the cake to hide the gapping hole between the 2 layers.  All in all, I think it was a pretty successful baking experience.

1 layer done:

Finished product chilling in the fridge (btw, it says 21!, not 211):

Topshop

Waiting in line...

Topshop opened its first US location on Thursday.  It's a British store, similar to H&M but pricier and with a collection by designed by Kate Moss.  They have been doing advertising for it for the past two weeks, with little Topshop trucks parked outside of our student center, with girls in bowler hats handing out totes filled with water bottles, catalogues, and gift certificates that are only redeemable on Thursday and can be anywhere from $5-$500.   Now everyone is carrying Topshop tote bags around campus, so I'd say it's pretty effective marketing. 

I dragged some other Student Council members with me after our Dylan's Candy Bar event and even though we went at like 7pm (the store opened at 11am, I think) there was still a line around the block.  There were Topshop employees standing in line, entertaining customers and checking gift cards.  I only had $5, of course and the lady told me that they hadn't had any $500 all day.  I heard that there was free Pinkberry and coffee and donuts earlier in the day for those who braved the line.  When we finally got inside, I really liked what I saw.  Everything was really cute and trendy (though totally out of my budget, except for maybe a couple of select purchases here and there.  Hi Mom.), and I'm sure that most people at school will soon be sporting Topshop clothes like we now do H&M.

Dylan's Candy Bar Cupcake Extravaganza

Our third student council event this week was geared towards freshman and was a cupcake decorating party hosted by Dylan's Candy Bar, this really amazing candy store uptown that's down the street from Serendipity's.  (Dylan is the daughter of Ralph Lauren. You can do cool things like open your own candy store when your dad is a famous designer)  Anyways, needless to say, and as the below pictures prove, the event was quite delicious.  

Poems

One of my courses this semester is a creative writing course, and it's probably my favorite class, mostly because of the people in the class, but also because it's such a fun and stress-free atmosphere.  I always look forward to going to it and to doing my homework (crazy, I know...).  We just recently started our poems unit and I just thought I would share two of the poems I wrote.

This one was inspired by my blog :) and I had to make it a picture so that you could get the full effect.  Click on it to make it bigger/readable.

(ps. it's an acrostic)

This last one I actually wrote freshman year for another class, but I was trying to be green and recycle.  

The New York Times

The Riddle we can guess

--Sometimes--

But other times

We don't know 

22 down,

A four-letter word

For "first murder victim"

Second letter is "b"

And it's only Monday

Oh--Abel

Based on the feedback from my class, most people felt like there should be a bigger religious message since it's about Cain and Abel.  But there really isn't and I'm okay with that...

Filming in the park

Nicholas Cage and crew, for the new live action version of the
Sorcerer's Apprentice (you know, mickey and tye dancing brooms in
fantasia), have been filming in and around our campus. You can't see
Nick in this shot, but he's just behind these people, in a full length
leather coat, pointy black hat and curly, stringy hair extensions.
This is the second big budget movie that they've filmed on campus
since I've been here (the other being Will Smith's I Am Legend) and
despite the fact that there are annoying people telling you to walk on
the other side of the road because they're filming, it's one of the
things that I love about going to school in New York. Not a lot of
students can say that they saw Nicholas Cage filming his new movie
during their lunch break..

Where The Wild Things Are

So, for some reason, I'm totally in love with the new trailer for the movie version of Maurice Sendak's famous book "Where The Wild Things Are".  I'm not really sure what it is about the trailer that I love but it just all works really well.  Also, the movie is directed by Spike Jones and the script was written by Spike Jones, Maurice Sendak (duh), and Dave Eggers (who is a really cool current author), so the movie promises to be a good one... Anyways, check out the trailer and you'll see what I'm talking about....

Speed Dating for Charity

This week and next week are chock full of Student Council events.  The insanity started today with the a "411 on Grad School" event for juniors in the afternoon.  We had a bunch of representatives from the grad departments come, as well as a rep from Kaplan, who was raffling off a free test prep course (which is expensive!).  I think that our school doesn't do a good job of giving you info on grad school if you're not going to med school/law school, so this was a really great opportunity for students to learn more and get their questions answered.  Unfortunately, at least for the part of the event that I was present for, there weren't that many students there.  I think a lot of people were in class because it started at 2.  I had to leave around 3:10 to get to my next class, but hopefully when students got out of their 2 o'clock classes, they started to trickle in... In such a large school, with such an apathetic student body, it's really hard to engage students and get them to come out to events, even though the stuff that we (and I'm sure lots of other organizations) plan are really great and beneficial for them...

Then, directly after the grad school event ended, we had "Speed Dating for Charity", which we did my freshman year and was such a great event.  It's set up like a speed dating session is, where you switch places every couple of minutes, but you make sandwiches for City Harvest, this really great organization that drives around the city picking up excess food that restaurants and other organizations donate and then giving them to the hungry.  The turnout wasn't as great as it was my freshman year, but the more important thing is that we made 200 sandwiches in under an hour, which is awesome.  Hopefully we can do this event again, because when you get a ton of people there, it's a lot of fun and a great way to meet other students.

You know it's spring when there is a pink monkey, a chicken, and cookie monster playing in the park...