UC Berkeley « The Pedestrian Poet

Posts Tagged ‘UC Berkeley’

Garden Kaleidoscope

Friday, October 2nd, 2015

Trying to catch up on the last days of my road trip, it has been kind of hectic so bear with me! Here is the account of my final day in Madison, Wisconsin.

One of my favorite features thus far throughout Madison are all of the amazing gardens. From ALlen Centenntial Garden, to the Abrotetum, and now finally the Olbrich Botancial Gardens, all have been spectacular displays of nature within the confines of a major city.

Olbrich Botanical Gardens was like a playground for nature lovers. From amazing fountains, art exhibits hidden in the trees, and my personal favorite, a kaleidoscope of succulents.

My view of all the different gardens around the city had begun to feel like a kaleidoscope mash-up of everything I had seen thus far. I had luckily caught a period of time right before the major frost where flowers were still blooming and beautiful but leaves had begun to change colors already. I was getting the best of both worlds and I knew it. So I reveled in the amazing gardens and was shocked by the array of colors and textures I found everywhere I went.

There was even a Thai pavilion in the gardens that was ornate and beautiful with the backdrop of flowers surrounding it.

Everything was beautiful and so much fun to explore with my Aunt, we really had a great time.

There is one thing I forgot to mention thus far and it is the frequency with which Madison has free libraries in front of their homes. It always makes me very happy to see free book boxes in neighborhoods but Madison had an astounding abundance of ornate and well stocked free libraries. A neighborhood feels healthy and lively whenever there are free book boxes lining the streets. I really enjoyed this one which was a vibrant orange and had a beautiful mosaic of a tree on the side. Well done Madison, well done.

I went off on my own again with a more serious mission in mind this time: visit the University of Wisconsin- Madison campus and check out the English Graduate Program. I spent the rest of my day slowly meandering around campus (with an additional stop inside of a wonderful liitle bookstore on State street) and visiting the English Department.

The campus was really and truly very nice, I was genuinely impressed. The buildings were beautiful, the people were kind and generous with their information, the scenery was amazing (right on the lake and covered in colorful trees), and the available opportunities to talk to students and faculty was very abundant. I quite enjoyed it.

I even found an acorn friend that sadly rolled away from me and got crushed by a car. It was slightly heartbreaking. Can you tell I haven’t been terribly sociable? I have started befriending acorns.

But honestly, it made me miss Berkeley. There were so many things that kept reminding me of my alma mater and it left me with a heavy heart burdened by homesickness. There was even a tower that looked like the campanile (complete with carillons) and several of my favorite professors from Berkeley were going to be visiting campus to give lectures in the coming weeks. I missed my friends, my mentors, and the feeling of belonging to a community regardless of whether the people around you knew you or not. Despite actually really liking this campus, I left full of sadness because I wasn’t sure if anywhere else would ever feel like home in the way that Berkeley was. I know this is naive in many ways; I know I will go somewhere and I will learn to call it home, but Berkeley will always have my heart.

It was a hard day, the first of probably many to come in the next few months, but not something that would stop me from moving forward. Some days are worse than others, but every day on the road is a step farther from home that I am proud to be taking even on the days when I wish for nothing more than to be back where I was. I am learning to miss the things I love and I hope each day to miss these things with happiness rather than sadness, but sadly that day has not yet come. Despite my sadness, I know nothing is gained without losing something first. Growth can be painful and I would be foolish to wish that pain away, so for now I grit my teeth and try to push forward to days when it hurts less.

But I know it is worth it.

Back to the Beginning

Monday, September 14th, 2015

I want to begin again.

I know I have been gone a long time now but I miss this. I miss the feeling of my fingertips pressed against keys or pushing my pencil to the barren page. I miss having a place to put my words, a place to rest my weary head stirring with mercilessly jumbled thoughts. I miss knowing that I am doing exactly what I was put on this world to do. I have found myself purposeless these last few months, maybe even the last few years of my life and I am the only one to blame.

Thousands of excuses, busy days, hectic life, reorganized priorities, and a ceaselessly transforming sense of self have created a convoluted conundrum that I have self-titled ME. Here I stand six years after I began this blog and I am ashamed of how little I have written. Over the last four years I have found many new titles for myself: UC Berkeley Student, English Major, Jew, Christian, Proud Nerd, Tutor, Employee, World Traveler, Rome Resident, Slackliner, Rugby Player, Slam Poet, Academic Honoree, and finally, UC Berkeley Graduate.

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There are two titles that once meant the world to me that seem to have dropped from this list: Writer and Photographer. While yes, I have done both of these things over the past four years, I set them aside to see what other molds I could occupy, other worlds I could be a part of and inhabit for even a short amount of time. Those two words, writer and photographer, were my entire world and I never thought I could do or be anything else.I have found out two things over these last four years: I was both very wrong and incredibly correct. I have been a so many different things, but I don’t want to be anything else.

My friends who also graduated have been asking themselves and people have been asking me How have I changed in the last four years in college? I have heard a variety of responses; most respond that they have changed radically in unbelievable and unpredictable ways. Others mildly agree that they have changed, but not necessarily in a world shattering manner that leaves them aghast at how incredibly different they are now than the young freshmen walking under Sather Gate for the first time. I have pitted myself against this question several times and battled with the memories of who I was and who I am now. I have come up with a response that surprised myself: I have not changed at all.

This is not to say that I have not tried new things or had experiences that altered the way I view the world. What I mean by this is that I started at point A of myself, entered college and departed from point A into a million different directions and digressions that led me to very strange and unfamiliar places, which have radically affected me. However, in all of these different circles and loops off of the trajectory I had envisioned when I graduated high school, I have found that the root, the core of what made me me never changed. So, in saying that I have not changed at all, I am not declaring this a negative lack of progression or growth in character. Instead, in discovering this, I have also relearned how much those two titles meant to me because they were absent from my life for so long. I would never take back the things I tried, the hobbies I took up, and the adventures I had into the vast unknown world full of different opportunities, but I did lose an important part of myself as a result.

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I was lost in the craze of a thousand possibilities and the path that had always been so clear to me before was obscured. Like Dante, “Midway upon the journey of our life/ I found myself in a dark wood,/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost” (Canto 1, Inferno). Except I, unlike Dante, had no Virgil to guide me through the perils. But if there is one thing that I have discovered in my wanderings, it is that being lost is the best way to find yourself. Being lost is not necessarily a bad thing; for me, it did mean losing sight of the things that were most important to me, but if I had not put those pursuits on the shelf for as long as I did, I never would have known just how much I needed and loved them. It was only when I found myself lost and without my purpose that I was able to understand just how essential writing was to my entire existence. Writing and digital storytelling through my photography truly is my purpose above all else in the world, without it I am not really me. This is what I have found.

So here I stand, wholly changed, yet exactly the same and ready to begin again.

Welcome back to my strange little world; walk with me, talk with me, cry with me, and learn how to live again with me on this unexpected journey. I am ready to claw my way back to the roots of my being and strip away the atrophied muscles of my mind in order to find the words that have been buzzing in my brain, dormant but living, for the last four years. Join me.

Tags: change, college, Dante, graduate, identity, lost, new beginnings, photography, purpose, starting over, titles, UC Berkeley, writing
Posted in Thoughts |

Holi: Festival of Color

Sunday, April 14th, 2013

The holiday Holi was a couple of weeks ago but this weekend at University of California, Berkeley the Indian Student Association put on a festival for Holi. Many people have heard of these festivals of color where people by colored powder and in a giant mosh pit of people everyone throws color at each other.

A giant throng of people gathers and takes part in this festival each year; this is my second year taking part and it really is an amazing thing to experience. You can find last year’s story of Holi here

At times there are so many people crammed into one space it is hard to breathe, impossible to see if you are as short as me, and in the mist of color filling the air there are shouts of joy and surprise as color explodes across people’s hair, face and bodies in a huge spray of vibrant color.

A big group of my friends all came to the festival and we all stuck together in the massive crowd, dancing, screaming and throwing color at each other. It really is an experience everyone should have at some point in their life at least once.

Our faces were covered in a huge array of colors, it felt like every part of me had been dyed a different color.

After the war of color is over, everyone looks so different with a mask of colors changing the features of faces that are so familiar yet entirely altered.

I can’t wait for the years to come where we can celebrate again and again the vibrancy of our lives and the world.

Tags: berkeley, color, festival of color, friends, Holi, Indian Student Association, paint, portrait, UC Berkeley
Posted in Photos, Stories |

Reading Places

Friday, December 21st, 2012

I spent a lot of time this semester sitting in a library, neck craned, eyes strained, and brain drained. Even though these places are beautiful in their own majestic academic ways, with towering columns that have held up the burdening weight of university, I can’t help but feel closed in by four walls. There is so much outside those tall grandiose windows that let light drift gently in to illuminate the library walls.

I always sit and watch as the library is lit by the dazzling color of sunset as I sat with my textbooks splayed out in front of me like the casualties of war, thinking of the beauty outside the rows and rows of books that lined the world around me. Yet, even as the colors began to fade to a darker shade and slip farther and farther away, I would remain. Instead of taking a breath and leaving behind my books for a moment, I would dive right back in, but my air never lasted sufficiently. It felt like drowning because it was. Diving back down without a replenishing breath of air is a scary thing, yet almost everyone in that library with me was doing it. Gasping like a fish out of water, watching with wide glassy eyes the cast off colors of a sunset sitting right out side, but like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, we tried to draw real light from only the shadows of reality.

I am tired of the shadows of reality, and I have been growing tired because I have drained these shadows dry and am ready, craving for more. So I have abandoned my beautiful little box for the outside world. I have been drinking in the color of every sunset, and finding every place that one can fit themselves only to sit down and read. The familiar is full of fascinating places to explore that function just as well as a library seat for a place to rest my book. Whether it means climbing rooftops or climbing mountains just for a nice place to cross my legs and lay open a book infront of me, I have been exploring in the name of reading. Even if but for a short while to crack open the spine of a book while over looking the Golden Gate Bridge, or just sitting underneath the shade of a great redwood, or sitting on a cliff above the tumultous sea, I am expanding. I am ready for new horizons, if you need me, I will be at the cusp of the ordinary, waiting.

Tags: books, break, doe library, explore, library, mountains, nature, ocean, outdoors, plato's cave, reading, reality, roof tops, shadows, studying, sunsets, UC Berkeley, university
Posted in Photos, Thoughts |

Annular Eclipse

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

This evening around 6:30 there was a rare annular eclipse of the Sun which was visible in Northern California. According to Professor Marcy at UC Berkeley an annular eclipse is “when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are lined up, but the Moon is farther than average from Earth, so it looks a bit too small to fully cover the Sun. Thus, if you are at one of the right places, the Sun will form a ring, or annulus, around the Moon. It’s a special, fun form of a partial solar eclipse.”

So naturally, living in Northern California, I ran outside with my camera and some filters to use that would allow my camera to capture this astronomical event. Sadly I only caught the tail end of it but the results where still intriguing. The odd colors of the photos are not naturally emitted colors from the sun but simply the colors of the filters I used, disappointing I know.

Oh and to those wondering: no I did not look right at the eclipse. I switched the view finder on my camera to the screen and then just held up the camera and took these shots.

The filter also caused some interesting bokken like effects causing multiple images of the eclipse to be displayed.

I want to give another thanks to Professor Marcy for the heads up about this great event and the great information about it as well.

Tags: annular eclipse, astronomy, eclipse, filters, moon, Professor Marcy, solar eclipse, sun, UC Berkeley
Posted in Photos, Stories |

Holi: Festival of Colors

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

Yesterday at UC Berkeley was a celebration of the India holiday called Holi. At Uc Berkeley and many other places this festival is considered a celebration of the coming of spring. ANd who is it celebrated you might ask? By a bunch of people gathered together in one place to throw handfuls of color at each other.

This is the before photo where we are all nice and clean. It didn’t last long at all.

And the after photo. Random people just throw color at you and try to get you as dirty as possible. I think it is one of the few times in which someone will be happy and thank you for throwing something at them.

It was a lot of fun and I look forward to doing in the years to come here at Berkeley. I think I still haven’t gotten all of the color off of me yet but I regret nothing.

Tags: color, festival, Holi, India, UC Berkeley
Posted in Photos |

Johnny Depp At Berkeley!

Monday, October 17th, 2011

I just got back from an exciting encounter at Berkeley where in I got to meet and photograph Johnny Depp. Yes, the Johnny Depp. In an exclusive invite only event at Uc Berkeley, Johnny Depp’s new movie, The Rum Diary, based off of a Hunter S Thompson novel, was aired a week early. Oh and a Q&A with Johnny Depp after the movie. I love Hunter S Thompson, and the work done between Johnny Depp and Thompson is phenomenal. I am a die-hard fan.

Any who… The movie was really good, a few loose ends but a decent movie indeed. To get what you all are waiting for, Johnny Depp. I lurked in the back row with my telephoto lens to get these pictures.

He was exactly like what I imagined. He was the same as all his interviews, movies, or anything he every does, he was just Johnny Depp.

He was so nonchalant, but not in an arrogant way, very down to earth. It seemed like an altogether likeable guy. I really enjoyed his outfit. He had on like four necklaces, five rings, and a few bracelets as well as glasses. I feel like every interview I have ever seen him in he is wearing that hat. Not that it is bad, it is just sort of funny.

I really enjoyed his mannerisms. He was very expressive in his hand motions and altogether interesting to listen to as well as watch.

He talked a lot about Hunter and his relationship with him which was very interesting. Oh and he tried to take his jacket off and the interviewer that has there basically jumped to try to help him take it off. Johnny Depp gave him the funniest look, and started to laugh. So awkward and so funny.

P.S look at his tattoos, they are so interesting. I wonder what they mean.

Overall, a fun night. Very interesting to meet and see a celebrity. I wound up leaving a little early because I thought I was going ot either be kicked out or have my camera taken because we were not supposed to have “professional grade” equipment. So after I got to hear him talk for a little while and get a couple of good shots, I was outta there. Very cool, I hope to do this again some time soon.

Tags: celebrity, Hunter S Thompson, interview, Johnny Depp, movie, paparrazzi, The Rum Diary, UC Berkeley
Posted in Candid Photography, Photos, Stories |