seantime

I think all these posts are now connected to facebook and twitter. The internets truly is interconnecteds.

The Saturday (1/30) 2pm was the 7th Swan Lake I’ve seen, but I never saw Sarah Van Patten in it, so it was worth the trip to SF Ballet. It was probably a bad idea trying to watch Serena vs. Henin in the Australian Open the night before, because I was kind of tired for the show. And by kind of, I mean very. I think this reflects at least slightly in my experience of SL #7.

Although I don’t recall all the specifics of last year’s performances, I can say that Mr. Tomasson’s production doesn’t seem quite so bad, although it still feels a bit bare in some places, and the story as a whole seems disconnected in a way I can’t describe. Overall, it was a nice experience. The performance really could have used Elana Altman, though.  She pretty much blows my socks off in the swan maiden and Spanish variations, but you know I’m a little biased.

SVP gave a solid performance, but perhaps I expected too much, given the hype about her in Pointe magazine and by Ms. Maffre’s suggestion. It did seem like SVP’s technical skills were a little below the other ballerinas’, especially with her fouttes ending a bit precariously; she didn’t do any doubles, which I guess I liked in a way. It seems to fit Odile’s character a little more to not have that technical feat.

I must say though that I got goosebumps from SVP’s Odette interpretation, even if it wasn’t the most impressive technically. Her port de bras as Odette in particular was quite powerful. Her expressive capabilities make her Odette wonderful to watch. Her Odile didn’t seem as memorable. Something just wasn’t quite sadistic enough in it.

I can’t wait to see Sarah Van Patten in Romeo and Juliet. And Elana Altman better get some bombass roles this season. Otherwise, I’ll be sad.

Also, taking ballet makes watching it a lot harder. Instead of enjoying the show as a whole, I was also trying to figure out all the steps as well, which was mentally taxing. Life is so cruel sometimes.

Will this show up on my website?

Some unkind person took seantime on twitter, so I’m using seantyan. I’m hoping that this wordpress/twitter integration thing works.

So I think I’ve settled upon classes for the quarter:

• Stat 217 – Intro Stochastic Processes (required)
• Stat 329 – Large-Scale Simultaneous Inference, taught by Efron.  This should be pretty good material, and since he’s going to publish the material, it’s all typed up neatly, which is awesome.
• BMI 217 – Translational Bioinformatics. I still have no idea what that adjective means, but it seems like it’ll be a great applied bioinformatics class.

Tougher than any of those, though, is back-to-back ballet classes (beginning and then intermediate). I think I might die with that schedule, but I wouldn’t be motivated any other way to build the requisite endurance. Plus, tp girl is in the intermediate class.

I also just realized that I took AP Bio (10 years ago!?) before the human genome was sequenced, so all this genomics stuff is rather foreign to me. I’m trying to refresh myself on the very basics of molecular biology, of which I knew little in the first place. Like, there are now two new amino acids: selenocysteine and pyrrolysine? Craziness.

It is kind of funny to me that the lecture hall in the medical school has hand sanitizer and clorox wipes for the professor, though.