Shameless Promotion

Last day for the summer at SocialSphere. In honor of the occasion, I wrote a guest blog about some fun things I've discovered in my work over the summer. Head over to socialsphere.com and let me know what you think.

John Della Volpe was even kind enough to give me home page love. Check back next week, too - I hear Brandon's going to post something as well.

Kseniya Simonova

Most of the things I stumble across on the Internet are unintelligent, useless, or don't impact my life very much. Sometimes they are teach me something, sometimes they are entertaining. Occasionally I find something that sticks with me, either because of its cleverness, its funniness, or it's ability to move me. When I happened upon this video in a blog today, I wasn't expecting something so striking. Kseniya Simonova truly has a gift for storytelling, and it's rare that I encounter something I react to like this.

After I watched it, I realized she was a performer on the TV show "Ukraine's Got Talent." I've only seen previews and an extremely limited few partial episodes of "America's Got Talent," but after watching this video, I was saddened by how gimmicky the American version of the show is. The acts that do well seem to rely on flashy costumes or a dramatic personal story behind the artist rather than letting the art speak for itself. It's a sad state of the world. Most "successful" artists are sensationalistic in the sense of having an action-packed routine or being sexually provocative. I'm as fond of break dancers, gymnasts, and magicians as the next person, but I can't think of a time where I had an emotional reaction to any of those groups of people. Let's take a lesson from the Ukraine and have the next person to win "America's Got Talent" be someone who creates something special. After all, that's supposed to be the premise of the show, right?

She makes me want to create. Luckily, there seems to be a paint-day in the works for sometime before I go back to school. And I've got ink-blots waiting to be turned into monsters and a cardboard sculpture waiting for me to have the patience to build it.

Oh, hello, blog...

It appears that I've been on a somewhat lengthy hiatus from the blogosphere. Two events directly prompted my return:

1) Exchange of emails over the past few days with a girl from Rochester who's currently in India on the same program I was on (which made me miss India and, correspondingly, blogging).

2) Eating a dosa for the first time in the U.S. (...which made me miss India).

Regarding the first item, Julia was asking about classes at IES and DU, and as I was recounting my experiences to her and trying to make honest-but-not-too-biased recommendations, I realized how excited I am to go back to school. I haven't been in Rochester since December, and while I certainly didn't miss almost-daily precipitation and bitterly cold winds, I am looking forward to being back on campus. Furthermore, I'm eager to return to what I now appreciate as an extremely organized and engaging system of education. (Being a Teaching Fellow, probably with Ethan, one of my favorite Rochesterians - for a Prof. Brooks class, one of my favorite kinds - makes it even better!) Ask me around mid-October and I may have had enough, but right now I'm all start-of-the-semester excited and motivated. :)

Moving on to the dosas, though, since that's more of a story. Kevin and I were at the Museum of Natural History in New York last Saturday, and when we were done, it was dinnertime. We sat on the steps in front of the museum being indecisive, but only for a few minutes. We decided we wanted Indian food, and much to my delight, Kevin's iPhone located us a restaurant on nearby Amsterdam Avenue that served dosas!

The actual restaurant was an interesting mix of wood floors and furniture, sparse decorations, a book corner, and Hindi chants in the background. It seemed to be a coffee-shop-diner-meditation-room hybrid. Despite the misleading name of Hampton Chutney Co., they served dosas, uttapams (basically a dosa in pancake form), and sandwiches, along with a variety of specialty beverages and a few soups.

The dosas were delicious, though the tastes did not resemble an authentic Indian dosa; there was a distinct Western influence in my Masala Deluxe, which contained spinach, jack cheese, and roasted tomato in addition to the traditional curried potato. (My cilantro chutney, on the other hand, tasted exactly like something I would have received with a meal in Delhi.) Kevin's was an equally interesting combination of flavors: grilled corn, roasted peppers, roasted onions, arugula and jack cheese. Yum.

***

I may start posting here on a regular basis. I'm going to strongly encourage myself to get in the habit because most of the reason I've been silent this summer is due to tiredness. I'm hoping to create shorter, more frequent posts in the future - easily digestible, snack-sized updates on my life and my thoughts for those interested.

Enjoy the summer before it's suddenly fall!

Namaste.