like hell i'm gonna do that. i think his lecture has its own charisma, one that i will entirely ruin by making a field report on. but it was definitely interesting and worth going. so if you hear dr. cham coming to a university nearby you, definitely go. work your schedule around the lecture. after all, this is just one more thing to help you procrastinate from whatever you're supposed to be doing.
sam just made me noodle soup with dumplings. thanks, sam, you really make a good housewife.
it was about 4 pm when i found him outside warren lecture hall.
funny. there he was, the man whose name in the academia (or rather, pre-academia) is so famous that his website may very well be mentioned once everytime the name einstein is mentioned twice, yet none of the undergraduates around him noticed him. i guess they're all too busy with pennyarcade and never even considered going to gradschool. so i walked up to him and said hi. it was nerve-wracking. it was not awkward, but adrenaline did build up. after all, he is THE man whose 9-year worth of comic-strip archive i've read through several times, whose website i check religiously for new updates, and whose comic strips depict the life of just about every person i know, including myself, almost perfectly. it almost felt like seeing oda standing around at a starbucks, waiting for the person behind the counter to yell out his name and tell him that his caramel macchiato is ready, although if that were to happen instead, i would probably poke him with a long ugly stick instead since i would be too afraid to come close to the god of all mangaka.
and then i will make a shrine of the long ugly stick i poked him with.
i diverged. allow me to go back to where i was. i said hi. he said hi back. we started a conversation. i told him how i've read his archives several times. he asked me which department i'm from. i said physics. he asked what i want to do. i said go to gradschool. he laughed, and among the laughter he asked, "did you REALLY read through all of them?"
i told him i do comics for the school newspaper too. he asked me if he could see it. i snatched him a copy of the latest guardian and his first comment was "nice art. you like manga, don't you?" i guess it was that obvious.
i answered yes. he asked which one i like best. wrong question. asking a one piece fan that question is like asking "who is jesus" to the people on campus with a button all over their backpacks and shirts that says "ask me about jesus." they will keep talking for hours. maybe even days. and that was exactly what i did.
e: one piece
j: ohhh
e: you know?
j: i.. have read
e: how do you like it?
j: the art stands out. it's...
e: childish at the beginning...
j: ... but very sophisticated and detailed
e: yes, yes, very much.
j: i've only read one volume though. what is the one piece?
again, bad question. i started rambling about the void century, the poneglyphs, the truth tablets, the clue tables, the speculations about what one piece is, the ancient weapon, pluton and poseidon, usopp and luffy's fight, nico robin's betrayal, oda's foreshadowing technique, oda's colorspreads, and many other. i might have entirely bored him out of his mind at this point, but it certainly wasn't my fault he brought up one piece. he brought this upon himself.
i showed him some of oda's colorspread which he examined meticulously (or so it seemed). then he asked if there's wireless because he wanted to check his email. probably a habit picked up while being a graduate student. i'm not one yet but i already have that habit. i let him login to ucsd's wireless using my username and password. at the very least, if anything happens to my account, i know who to hunt down.
we talked a bit more about his comics. apparently he did all of his work on a tablet. he claimed to never have used a piece of paper to draw his comics. if that is true then he has a very sophisticated and clear lineart, one that is being sketched in the brain and inked immediately as a final product. he would never have to do rough sketches like what i always had to do. he then went on to check his email on his laptop while i blogged the post before this one. he was still checking and replying email when david and jen arrived, also to attend dr. cham's lecture, saw me and apparently completely missed dr. cham who was sitting next to me, and stormed straight into warren lecture hall 2005. few minutes later david approached me and said: "uh, there's still a class in there." to which i replied "of course, the lecturing dude's over here." apparently david walked into the lecture hall in the middle of a lecture for economics of ocean resources class and yelled out SHIT IT'S FULL and managed to successfully gained the attention of everyone in the class.
after i introduced dr. cham to david and jen, he left to price center to get some food, and came back about twenty minutes later eating a bowl of something. we showed him the (wrong) way to the back entrance of the lecture hall and helped him carry his boxes downstairs. the lecture started a few minutes after this, and we, the undergraduates grabbed a seat in the front row.
bad idea, he was using the slides. i told david it was a good reason to slouch. he bought it. we slouched.
the lecture was brilliant. one person in the back asked if his research presentations have also been this splendid. he answered no with much hesitation. one person in the front asked him what he is actually doing right now in terms of research. he answered he had no idea either. one person behind me asked him how long it took him to get his phd, but then changed his mind before the words came out and decided not to ask instead. i asked him where he got his personalized DR CHAM shoes from. he denied he had them. i told him i saw them with my own eyes. he eventually gave in and admitted he ordered them online.
i borrowed ten bucks from sam and got myself the second book of PhDcomics. the signing line went all the way out of the lecture hall, but it was worth it. he signed it with my red marker, too. he asked if i wanted a drawing. i said of course. he asked of whom. i told him i already have mike, so i want the nameless dude with glasses.
he drew it with a one piece reference. that made my day. after all, what more could a fan ask?
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