jump start

There's no better way to jump start a morning than getting frantic calls on my cell phone at 8:23AM. Panicked freshman proceeded to first call and leave a voice message at 8:15AM, then called again at 8:23AM. Apparently, his life was ending because he didn't know which sloan classes to bid for or what he should take next semester.

I'm almost never in a good mood and certainly never at such an obscenely early hour. However, I tried to be helpful and invited said panicked freshman over so he could pre-register for classes on his laptop while I provided ground support from mine. While his enthusiasm is endearing, he could spare a bit to find that the information is all online. Good grief. Clearly, the point is to get as many required classes out of the way as possible so we can move on to bigger and better classes in the future.

Maybe I never took my classes seriously enough to have a full-fledged panic attack (I only started having those this year). Maybe I was still in EECS at the time and therefore dead to the rest of the world. I just don't understand why registering for classes qualifies as a national emergency for some people. I also don't understand why he would assume that I was awake at 8AM, considering that the majority of people here go to sleep around 3 or 4AM. Oh well...I guess it's cute that I can help out, but please, please don't wake me up in the future.

L's birthday

Yay! What a fun Friday night, where there was just the right amount of people, food, alcohol, movies, and general happiness:) Congrats to L on her birthday...it was fun and special and probably one of the last celebrations before graduating from college.

I learned many invaluable lessons, like how to cook a wonderful swordfish in tomato sauce (complicated), and how to cook an absolutely scrumptious appetizer of mushrooms rolled in bacon (easy)... and took my first tequila shot (liked the salt, hated the tequila, liked the lemon). Something else including ~three glasses of wine, one rum and coke, and a Smirnoff's.

Along with all that, it was just plain fun having a good night with four absolutely wonderful girls whom I've known and admired and loved for four packed years. Cheers!

the meat market

It's strange how young Americans have fun nowadays...going clubbing. Granted, once young people begin working, it's difficult to meet people that aren't your co-workers. But clubbing exists solely to get ass. Any guy who tries to have a meaningful conversation in a club is beyond creepy and should be avoided at all costs. Clubbing is just an orgy of gratuitious groping and grinding. It's basically like making out with random strangers while standing up.

We went to the Avalon in Fenway, which is the largest club in Boston. There were lines and lines of people flooding out of the door. The dance floor is a crowded, sweaty pit with fake mist everywhere (not sure how the mist helps). Some people really did go to dance and danced pretty damn well. Some guys just migrate from girl group to group, trying to dance as many people as possible. Others stood in a ring on the edge of the floor, picked out specific girls in the crowd that they wanted to dance with, and went after them. Honestly, it's like prostitution except that everyone pays the cover fee.

As one of my friends mentioned, it's brutal but honest because there's no pretense. Just by being there, a girl's going to get treated like a piece of property and get hit on. It's understood. The strange thing is that it doesn't feel uncomfortable at the time but sure as hell feels wrong later. At a club, you can just leave your brain at home and just go with the flow...

stupid stupid people

It really annoys me when people drill outside of my room at 4AM in the morning and turn on bright searchlights. It's ok up to 2AM, but not ok at 4-5AM. I was really pissed off because I had an exam today and I slept 3 hours because people on my hall were procrastinating and building the stuff for the prefrosh today.

If I had moved to my dorm as a freshman, it would've been fine. I would build things and stay up 'till odd hours of the morning and socialize. Now, I don't think that way anymore and I wouldn't do many of the things that I would have four years ago.
Each hall has a different mentality and a different feel about it. My floor is fairly normal, no cats, few druggies, but a bent towards operating chainsaws and sledgehammers. 4W is the druggie floor, 3E and 5E are the scary floors with black and red tape over all of their lights. 2E and 5W are fairly normal, 4E and 3W are fairly normal, quiet, and dorky. I don't know anything about 1E and 1W but assume that they're not terribly weird.

When I moved onto the hall last year, I really wanted to live in a place where everyone on the hall talked to each other and had this bond. It never materialized. I have three really good friends on the hall, and two other friends that I talk to. Everyone else is nice, but I've never sat down with one of them and started talking. It's like I have nothing in common with them. People in this dorm are fairly open and original, but sometimes they're irresponsible and childish. It's something I wouldn't even have noticed freshman year. I don't think I'm the most responsible person in the world and I sure as hell make crappy decisions sometimes, but I try. Sometimes, that's all that matters.

classroom squabbles

Whenever I deal with Complex Variables, I always feel like there's a war going on. An insidious guerilla war. Here's the scoop: Prof. B is an extremely young professor (Early 30s) who's lecturing this class for the second time, and Prof. T is a not so young professor (Early 70s-80s) who teaches recitation and had previously been the lecturer for many semesters before B took over.

In the first recitation, T taught various little methods that B covered in his next lecture...and B was probably surprised as to why everyone looked bored...T is a master of the sly, teaching everything his own way and making occaisonal subtle remarks such as "This problem on the problem set was actually mine." B is not unaware and comments, "I had intended T to cover this in recitation, but I guess I'll go over it again." There's a not-so-subtle power struggle going on.

One problem is that neither one lectures particularly well. B has problems teaching such a low-level class, and has a tendency to mumble at the end of his sentences. He also apologizes incessantly and has frequent sign errors (not uncommon among math professors). It's this apparent lack of self-confidence on the outside that bothers me. Since he's a professor here, I fail to see on what grounds he could possibly lack self-confidence. Clearly, B is quite brilliant, but he's nervous and just not fun to listen to.

T speaks and gesticulates loudly, although he also has the tendency to speak too quickly. He is fond of doing arithematic on the board, and dumbing concepts down. He does get a point, because I don't fall asleep quite as often in his recitation as I do in lecture.

For young professors, they always feel like there's something to prove. Case in point: writing a retarded problem set that is pretty impossible to do. Older professors are sometimes too complacent, too sure of themselves, too stuck in their own way. Everything's a struggle. Between you and someone else. Between you and the problem set.

moodiness and roses

I'm not in the mood to study anymore for my 14.13 midterm tomorrow morning (~10 hours from now), and even less in the mood to start my 18.100A pset (due ~35 hours from now). It saddens me that spring break seems so far away (~37 hours from now).

The beginning of spring break will be spent finishing up part of my urop (the non-crazy, non-regular one) so I can get to the fun stuff (women entrepreneurs) the second half of term. I'll probably stay for a day or two in Rhode Island with my dad, then go down to DC for the rest of the week at my mom's with two of my other friends.

Washington DC is one of my favorite places. It's beautiful and sweltering in the summer, and I love going into all of the museums and strolling through Arlington national cemetary. I'm not into cemetaries in general, but Arlington is so beautiful and peaceful. Of course, there's also the dying for your country/heroism part that I'm a huge fan of.

Another thing that I love about the Smithsonian are the roses growing outside...I love pure white roses and deep red roses. They're so vibrant and absolute. In a world of no absolutes (except for the fact that I'm not dead, as Amy so generously pointed out to me), it's nice to see such beauty.

I also like irises because of their unique shape and impossible blueness. I realized that everyone loves blue because all shades of blue look wonderful, whereas there are so many shades of green that make you want to puke, despite the fact that certain shades of bright crystal green and deep green are stunningly gorgeous.

I've been to most of the good spots in DC already, but I definitely wouldn't mind seeing some of them again. I also want to explore Virginia. Shenandoah valley and Fredericksburg are on my list for the summer.

swords and spies

When I was seven years old, I wanted to be an American Plains Indian. There was something appealing about living in a teepee and shooting at buffalo with arrows, tanning buffalo hides, and smoking strips of meat.

At eleven, I wanted to be an F-15 fighter pilot and be chased by Russian MiGs (fed by a Top Gun obsession). A year later, I wanted to be a CIA agent and shoot at people. I always had these weird fantasies of being the best CIA agent in the world and being married to the second best CIA agent in the world. That would probably be awkward, considering that it would be weird to know exactly what your partner did every day but not to know anything at the same time. Also, I'm not sure that we would even be allowed to work together, considering how hard it is to juggle between two personas.

Years later, I became more management-oriented and decided that I would be the director of the CIA and my husband would be the director of the FBI. Rewind a few decades to when presidents and governments actually cared about other countries (and staged coups in other countries), the president had daily morning briefings with his top advisors, including the DCI (the most powerful person in intelligence at the time) and the director of the FBI. Those meetings would be "family time", because I have no doubt that we'd both be busy putting out fires and starting new ones the rest of the time. Obviously, we'd both meet in the FBI (because we're both workaholics), he'd be my boss, and I'd eventually transfer to the CIA and the fun and games would begin.

Of course, there are sound reasons why married people should not work together in intelligence, and there is a 0% probability that the DCI and director of the FBI would ever be married to each other. Of course, the marriage would collapse and it would be hard if the FBI ever needed information from the CIA and vice versa and...

If I were to ever join the FBI or CIA or some other intelligence agency (which I won't), I would want to be in ops (stupid risk-seeking side talking). It's not glamorous and is downright drudge and danger, but better than pushing paperwork all the time (as opposed to 90% of the time). The problem is that I have too much empathy for people. I wonder if I would have the balls to really do things and not regret them later. Ah well, it's a good thought experiment.

the lost art of intuition

It's funny how some people seem to gain more intuition as they get older, and others bury what intuition they have under miles and miles of rubble. There are always two dilemmas: should one think from the head or from the heart? And should one act from the head or from the heart? The great thing about watching most little kids is that the second between thought and action is almost instantaneous. It's later in life that we tend to think too much and act too little, or vice versa.

There are always so many expectations to deal with. Expectations of who you think you ought to be. Expectations of who others think you ought to be. It's true that some people ignore this and just do their own thing. It's also true that many other people lose the real 'I' or cover it under layers of self-doubt and extreme risk-aversion. In some way, we all want to go back into our childhoods because we were so carefree and blindly happy. Converesly, we're also pulled in the other direction to make something of ourselves, to posess wisdom and sophistication.

Change is difficult, and I'm not sure that change is good. Is it right to force yourself to be someone who you think you should be, especially if you think there are parts of the original you is flawed? Or is that just tampering with cogs in a machine that rotates perfectly naturally without a helping hand? If we just leave it alone and go with the flow, are we going to be happier and better off? Or are we just going to be bums lying on the sidewalk under cardboard boxes?

We (Most of us) want to be better people and better at what we do. But if all we do is make small steps in improving things and everything is relative, then what's the point? Am I ever going to have a moment where I feel completely satisfied with who I am and what I've accomplished? Am I going to suddenly feel the piece that controls every other piece click into place? Or am I just going to keep on asking questions my entire life? That's not entirely a bad thing, but am I ever going to be satisfied?

my non-fantasy

I'm sitting at my desk running regressions on my laptop. My dream man throws open the door, rushes in, tears the laptop away from my hands and declares, "Honey, you can finish those regressions later." I swoon while he throws me on my bed...

No, I'm kidding. It's almost impossible to get into my dorm. First, he has to get through the main door, then through the locked door on my hall. Finally, my door is almost always locked, so he'd probably have to knock (In the unlikely event that he got to my door in the first place), in which case, I'd have to get up and open the door, thus making it impossible for me to be sitting at my laptop...

Actually, I'd settle for a cup of tea and a pastry at ABP.

my true love

My true love is doing psets...no, seriously, my true love is au bon pan. I spend approximately half of my waking hours at abp, working/sipping an iced peach lemonade/munching on a shortbread cookie/slurping broccoli-cheddar soup/gulping down a cobb salad wrap/talking/motioning frantically/giggling...it's my home.

It's wonderful because abp is at the border of campus and off-campus. The music is eclectic, and it's a cozy place where Amy and I spend a lot of time chatting. Amy, Julia, Tom, and I had lunch there today.

Julia and Amy looking cute for the camera.

Tom, Julia, and I smiling slightly for the camera.

*************
Tom: I'm not your TA anymore and I will never teach you again.

Amy: Mimi wants septuplets.
Mimi: Grrrrrrrr.
Tom: You could have blue-eyed, genetically engineered septuplets.

Amy: I see that all men at MIT have lost touch with their razors.
Tom: -------------

Julia: So can you do something bad in one state in the US that isn't a crime in another state?
Mimi: Yes, but you go on trial in the state that you committed the crime in.
Julia: Interesting.
Amy: Most states have capital punishment, but some don't.
*Pause*
Mimi: I'm scared now.

Mimi: Just because I'm vertically challenged doesn't mean that I wear stilettos...
*Amy stares at her very stilettoed feet*
Tom: Stilettos...like that whole dominatrix thing.
Amy, Julia, Mimi: -------

Mimi: When I go away on break, I use an automated fish feeder that lasts about two weeks...
Tom: I can see Mimi's kids with an automated feeder.

Julia: What animal would you be?
Amy, Mimi, Tom: ---------
Julia: What? Have you never heard of this before?

Tom: I'd be a 3-toed sloth, fumbling to climb up a tree, then falling to the ground when I got somwhere, and then getting up and climbing again...
Amy: A sheep dog.
Julia: A bear and a hummingbird. A bear for when someone interrupts me from hibernating and I become exceedingly grumpy.
Mimi: Um...I'd like to be a tiger.

Tom: A tiger and an electric cage...are you saying I should go for aggressive women?

Tom: So how's my roommate as a TA?
Julia: She's great, very organized.
*pause*
Julia: I didn't mean it that way!
Amy: I'll bet she can draw straight lines as well!
Tom: That's just hitting below the belt.

Tom: Why is everyone picking on me?
Mimi: I'm just naturally like this.

Mimi: I would slap you, but I don't know you well enough.
Tom: So I have a free one-day pass to make fun of you?
Mimi:-----------

The Classic:
Mimi: If grad school doesn't work out for you, you could always be a surgeon or something.
*Tom holds out shaking hand*
Tom: I'd make everyone look like Harry Potter.
**************