In my 9.65 (Cognitive Development) class, we've been talking a lot about the nature of memory and how it's divided into various type (conceptual short term memory, working memory and the visuospatial sketchpad, long term memory, etc.), and one experiment we ran in class involved everyone writing down their memories of an emportant emotional experience, a phenomenon called "flashbulb memories". In this case, specifically recalling the day you found out you got into MIT. What it felt like, what you were wearing, what you did before and after, etc. Crazily enough, even though that was way back in the dark ages of 2006 (in my day, I read my acceptance letter by candle, before saddling up my horse and picking up some celebratory goose fat from the general store), I can still remember exactly how it happened - driving home from school, seeing the tube sticking out the mailbox, SCREAMING MY HEAD OFF, screaming my head off some more, jumping up and down, scaring my dog, running in circles, shooting off fireworks, setting my house on fire, having to call 911, etc.)

(No. Not really. But everything short of fireworks, yes.)

Things are a little different now, since decisions are released online. But you still get a tube and/or big packet in the mail eventually, so whether you're early decision or just found out - what's your story? Feel free to share in the form of pictures, haiku, sonnet, or just plain comment below. Or read some old stories for inspiration (as well as a more comprehensive version of my story, sans fireworks).

Looking forward to meeting you all in a few weeks! :)

(In reference to this.)
(Photo credit: Liz Kimball '11.)
(See part one.)
(Yes, we ate it afterwards.)

Tonight I was walking back from the T along the street where the food trucks are usually parked when I began wondering where the food trucks go after hours. Do they all go to one big parking lot together, like school buses? Maybe they go for an after-work drink at the Asgard? Maybe they go home to their wives, the ice cream truck, and spend the evening listening to "Pop Goes The Weasel" play over and over again? And so I came up with this little ditty, to the tune of Ed Helms's "Tyson's Tiger Song" from The Hangover. Ahem -

Where do food trucks sleep at
when they take a little food truck snooze?
Do they dream of serving MIT kids
or getting a liquor license to serve booze?
Don't you worry your food trucky head
We're gonna see you in the morning, Jose's Mexican
And then we're gonna eat at Clover Food Truck
so we can have a sandwich with bacon that's vegan.
Veeeee-gaaaan, ohh,
veegy veegy veegy, vee-ee-eegan.
But if they raise prices to eight bucks a sandwich..
Well then we'll go to Cosi.

I'll be here all week, folks. (And by all week, I mean until they let me graduate. So more like until the end of May. Eating vegan bacon sandwiches.)

Speaking of throwbacks, three years ago during my freshman spring, Sam held a dinner party. (You can actually read my blog entry about it here, it'll be almost like you were there!) It was a pretty epic dinner party - there was Ina Garten's Butternut Squash soup and entirely mismatched sets of flatware - but it was also not long after I'd moved to Burton Conner. Let's just say it was kind of a weird time in my life - I'd just moved to a new room with a new roommate who I didn't know all that well, to a new floor surrounded by new people and a new dorm; in a lot of ways I was starting all over. I felt awkward. Much like my fourth-grade-self. Did I mention from about 1994 to 1996 I mostly only wore hand-me-down XXL t-shirts? Not because I actually was an XXL, but it was like wearing pajamas to school? Growing up is a beautiful thing, ain't it?

Moving was bittersweet, and one of the only people I knew in Burton-Conner at that time was Spam. But it also gave me the fresh start I needed, and it gave me a whole new perspective on MIT - especially its pretty amazing housing system. (If you're new around here, each of our dorms has its own unique culture, amongst which you can move with relative freedom if you wish. Burton Conner is organized by suites of 4-12 people, each with its own kitchen and bathroom, and trampoline. What? Of course I'm not trying to peer pressure you into moving into my dorm! Our housemasters definitely don't ever bring you free Egg McMuffins and there are no free massages ever! Who told you that??)

Things have changed a lot in the last four years. I no longer live on that floor and I've switched rooms three times since then and suites twice; I've gotten to know my new floor like my family and am so at home here that I sometimes forget to wear pants in the hallway. (But then again, who doesn't?) We go on trips together; we all go to cheer each other on at varsity volleyball games and jazz concerts, and sometimes, we even hold dinner parties. My suite this year has held three big potluck dinners - somehow I managed to move into a suite with excellent culinary prowess - and they've all been ridiculously gourmet. There was piccata. There was pavlova. There was flounder in a white sauce that would make even the Little Mermaid convert to pescetarianism.

But I've never cooked a whole three-course-meal by myself, and so in a throwback to that first original dinner party - one at which I first began to feel like I was in the place where I belonged - I held a dinner party myself last Friday, for old friends and a few new ones. A dinner party to celebrate how far we'd all come since those early days, where we're all going in the next year and the other major transitions to come. Complete with Ina Garten's Butternut Squash soup, and totally mismatched flatware.

This entry brought to you by the fact that I am like eight hundred years old, especially since most of you guys were all born in 2009 and are all going, "Which baseball team was Ace of Base on?" I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS STUFF.

It's also RIDICULOUSLY fun. Imagine banging on a drum with a stick. Now bang on your imaginary drum with your hand. Now combine it. See how much imaginary fun you're having? I thought so. (The other fun part is playing different beats in sync with 30 other people, and really getting into the groove - but mostly the banging-on-a-drum-with-a-stick thing.)

Not only that, but our three hours of practice a week count as a class (21M.460), open to just about anyone with some sense of rhythm and a desire to rock out, so we get 6 units of credit per term - just to bang on a drum (well, learn different rhythms and techniques)(but mostly, bang on a drum) for an extended period of time every week. That's about half the credit of a normal MIT class, but it's more than twice the fun - and probably relieves a good fraction of the stress accumulated from the more typical MIT classes, so it works out.

Our fall concert was held in early December, not long before finals, in the student center. We arrived a few hours early to get ready, try out the acoustics in our new digs, and get decked out in the fancy shirts Patty had accumulated from her time in Senegal:

One thing I forgot to mention - Lamine is actually a total badass. In fact, shortly before the concert I made this flyer advertising his incredible drumming, superior dancing talent, and skillful crowd-raising ability (read: badassness) to get more people to come to the show. One of the greatest benefits of coming to a university like MIT is that it tends to attract some truly incredible people, and Lamine is one of them. His impromptu solos during our rehearsals and performance, sense of humor and rich singing voice never cease to amaze. Also, his luxurious black dreads.

The last part of our performance was a small subgroup of dancers, all of whom were drummers who just decided to put in some extra time to learn some Senegalese dance moves, and pulled off a spectacular performance despite having only about five rehearsals:

This is, unfortunately, where all my media stops: I was playing for the rest of the night and, as it turns out, it is rather difficult to take photos and videos while you are banging out songs on a mbung-mbung. My sister took one photo of the performance, which unfortunately doesn't quite capture the scale of the group - pictured here are about half of the drummers, mostly all MIT undergrads or affiliates minus Lamine (pictured in the center, dancing away in the center with his drum):

Since a photo can't really capture the epic scale of sabar (and especially how loud sabar is - let's just say there were a couple of noise complaints), however, I do have a couple good videos, all filmed by Rich '10, another Rambax drummer. Here's a short clip of us rehearsing before the show:

No songs from the actual show, though I can tell you it was the most fun I'd ever had playing sabar. Lamine totally worked the crowd by dancing, playing, and singing throughout the show, getting the audience to sing or get up and dance along, and teaching them Senegalese phrases like "waaw waaw" (literally, "yes yes", often said in approval of a particularly good solo). Shortly after our drummers played, our dancers took the stage:

Patty and Lamine also brought in a wealth of guest performers - Lamine's cousins from Senegal - to join in on the show and show off their mad drumming/dancing skills. To my knowledge, most of these performers are improvising their moves; and the chair at the end was definitely occupied prior to being sat upon:

Though the end of fall term is rife with concerts of all types of performing arts - dancing, a capella, orchestral music - ours was truly unique in that the evening finished with what was essentially a giant party. All drummers came together - Rambax and guests alike - to stand and play while the audience danced (or at least attempted to) around and throughout us:

Which brings us back to Christmas - a week or two after the concert, Patty emailed us to announce that we'd been asked to play for NPR's Marketplace Money, for a Christmas special on how much it'd actually cost to buy all the gifts mentioned in "12 Days of Christmas". You can read the transcript of the broadcatst, as well as listen to a small group of us playing, as the twelve drummers drumming - fourteen, to be exact - at the end of the piece here: Is a partridge in a pear tree affordable?

(Patty noted that, in fact, we would cost nothing to hire since we don't charge anything, and it would be somewhat irrelevant to send someone twelve or fourteen drummers drumming sabar on Christmas since most people in Senegal are Muslim.)

Regardless of whether twelve or fourteen sabar drummers are relevant to your religious beliefs, however, I hope your holidays were happy ones!

There are some times in your MIT career when you're tired and struggling to keep your eyes open and your focus on this pset and wondering when exactly it was the last time you got to go outside, and you lose perspective. (Oh, calm down. It's not all that bad. I was outside just last week!) You forget, most of the time, that you're a student at one of the top engineering schools in the country, or that the guy on the other side of the wall is developing an indoor autonomous quad-rotor helicopter that can be used for search-and-rescue missions, and maybe someday, finding the remote from that deep crevasse between couch cushions without you having to get up. You forget that this is an institute of world-class research because it's also the place where you live and play and work and buy enchiladas from Jose's Food Truck.

And then there are other days when you can't help but be reminded, like when Obama came to MIT a few Fridays ago.

It all happened so suddenly. I've heard that MIT didn't even know he was coming until the weekend before, but all I know is I received nine separate emails between 6:09 PM and 7:46 PM on Tuesday evening about Obama visiting MIT on Friday morning (mostly punctuated with multiple exclamation marks, and one misspelling of "Obama" as "yomama")(that last one might have been me. Please don't tell Barack). President Obama is the second standing president to ever visit MIT, after Clinton's commencement speech in 1998. He is also, in case you have been kidnapped some time in the last two years and are unaware of the current state of American politics, the first black president of the United States. (If you are, in fact, kidnapped, and this was the first thing you decided to read instead of sending a distress email, I'm certainly honored, but please do contact your parents at some point. I'll wait.)

So it was certainly an overwhelming feeling to think that we were here, as MIT students, about to witness this tremendously historic event. The second standing president to visit MIT, the first African American president of the United States, was about to give an address on the state of renewable energy on the same stage that I have personally slid, belly-first, across. Matt McGann and I hosted the 2009 CPW variety show and talked about the time I bought a Logs serenade for my boyfriend on that stage. And the night after, BJ Novak was going to be up there, on THAT VERY STAGE, doing standup with a hand puppet.

(What can we say? Kresge gets around.)

One of these emails I got in that nine email blast was an email from Vice President for Institute Affairs, Kirk D. Kolenbrander, assuring us that "the tickets MIT has for the event will be allocated in such a way as to be broadly representative of the Institute--and weighted to favor students". This was greatly exciting news, and we all went to sleep that night with visions of Obama speaking to an auditorium full of hackers and Sloanies. Except the next morning it came out that there would only actually be 50 student tickets, and so it was truly an honor to get the opportunity to see him speak.

The talk was slated to start at around 12-12:30, so naturally they asked us to get there at 10. (I guess when you're the president, you get to ask people to take several hours out of their incredibly valuable time at the Massachu- okay, I probably would have been sleeping, but still, two and a half hours??) Nina '10 (one of the few other MIT students I knew with the privilege to see Obama speak) and I ended up getting there at around 9:30, and already the line was pretty much packed.

Standing in line that day was so crazy to me because I'd personally tramped all over these grounds for the past three years, not giving a second thought to slopping my feet down all over the grass and ruining countless pairs of shoes in the constantly muddy patch of grass in front of Kresge, but on this day, the entire path around Kresge was blocked. It was like President Obama had come down and blessed the ground itself, and for that reason they needed ropes, gates, and a handful of Secret Service agents making sure nobody tried to sneak in and streak across the field or anything. (Not that we do that.)

So Nina '10 and I get inside - mind you, we were probably about 40 people from the front - when some lady comes up to us and asks, "Are you MIT students?"
"Yes?" I respond, unsure if she's trying to figure out what smells so bad.
"Come with me," she says, leading us around to the middle section. To a block of seats marked "reserved".

"Is it really okay? Isn't Susan Hockfield or someone sitting here?"
"Go for it; they're for you."
Nina and I settle into our seats two rows from the front, directly in the center, right in the line of fire if President Obama were to spit or something, and I begin to hyperventilate a little bit. A lot bit.

After Nina finds me a paper bag to breathe in, I take a look around and realize 1) that we have literally the best seats that you can get without being a professor, better than the members of the UA, better than Jason Scott, Class of 2010 president and better than Nina's dad's seat, as the Dean of Engineering and 2) that they really aren't optimizing the space as well as they could be. A few rows behind us, the center section is entirely blocked off for press:

To my left are some pretty important people: Peter Lu '11, and an MIT alum my mother is very thankful for:

(What can I say? The Kim family really loves their Roomba.) And in front of me, freshman chemistry professor and minor MIT celebrity for bringing in a glass of champagne and toasting the class at his final lecture of every fall semester:

After a little while, people started to get restless. Being locked in an auditorium with all the famousness and cameras and glory surrounding this event were beginning to get a little monotonous, and so they lowered all the patriotic orchestral music blaring through Kresge's speakers and sent out Cecilia Louis '10, a member of the Chorallaries with an amazing voice, to sing the national anthem. It was awe-inspiring, really; so much so that the entire auditorium collectively had no idea what to do afterwards.

Finally, they sent out a dude to bring out the presidential water bottle (oh, and the presidential seal):

Another brief moment of panic (and a quick text message to my mom) when Deval Patrick and John Kerry decided to show up:

Have you ever seen the standing president of the United States in person? Yes? No? Have you ever seen someone with such celebrity status that it makes you want to eat your own hand, a little? (I'll accept Lady Gaga.*) That is kind of what it is like to see the president in person.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the president!..."

HYPERVENTILATION.

"...of MIT."

Oh.
Hey Susie.

Let's try this again, shall we?

"Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States!"

"Thank you, MIT... I am hugely honored to be here. It's always been a dream of mine to visit the most prestigious school in Cambridge, Massachusetts." Obama began. Cheers.
"Hold on a second. Certainly the most prestigious school in this part of Cambridge, anyway."
"I'll probably be here for a while; I understand a bunch of engineering students put my motorcade on top of building 10."

Oh, President Obama, you and your pink tie had me at "motorcade".

And then he spoke, and I stopped taking pictures for a little bit. In all honesty, the speech wasn't that.. earth shattering, although it was pretty incredible to see him in person. It was fantastic that he acknowledged the energy initiative research happening at MIT, and I felt very moved when he talked about how continuing support for renewable energy research would be key in ensuring America leads the way in the global economy. For the most part, however, a lot of his speech was very generic in discussing how we would go about making these changes; most of the terms that he used to describe the need for clean energy were fairly non-specific.

Even still, when he stepped off the stage I felt so inspired to run home and unplug my space heater that I pretty much missed the entire part where he walked around in the crowd and shook people's hands. Fortunately, Class of 2010 President Jason Scott didn't:

As we filed out of Kresge, I noticed that most of the field was still blocked off - and people were basically hanging from the barriers, trying to get a glimpse of the president as he ran out to his motorcade:

It was an incredible day, and I was truly honored to have been a part of it. I walked off to class with an extra bounce in my step and a feeling of awe, like I'd just witnessed history in the making, like I'd just experienced something that I would tell my robot grandchildren about in the year 2070. And then the next night I went back to Kresge:

You can watch a flash video of Obama's s speech (unfortunately, sans really awkward moment post-singing of the National Anthem) here.

*Hey, even he admitted it. ""It is a privilege to be here tonight to open for Lady Gaga. I've made it."

I am lucky to still be alive, having brought my spoon dancing, running, sleeping, and sometimes swimming, and also having become extra cautious of all Malaysian babies in my way. As this week the spoon changed to toothbrush, if you happen upon me anywhere in the greater Boston or Cambridge area you should know it's not because I'm just that vigilant about dental hygeine.

In another sense, I'm taking a fiction workshop this term taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz. It's the first fiction class I've taken in a long time, maybe even since middle school, and the combination of such an inspiring professor with the fact that I've been at MIT for four years and have never thought to take a creative writing class before have quickly transformed the twice-a-week, hour-and-a-half sessions into something I eagerly look forward to. We write, we read, we read other's writing, we write about other's writing, and we write again. Sometimes our assignments are as simple as a seven page story, and other times they're as specific as "Write a four-line conversation in which the characters in Meder's story have a conversation with his parents, to highlight the isolation one feels in returning to a place that's supposedly your home to the people who supposedly know you."

Professor Diaz is a fascinating guy to study under as well - during these sessions he strides around our overly large square workshop table, stopping occasionally to think out loud with his hands extremely close to your face, or to encourage us all to volunteer - "Come on guys, we've got to get you more enthusiastic about volunteering. This will be very helpful for our future, when we're all drafted in the military." Last Tuesday as we read a fellow student's story about a mother with a brain tumor and the son that cares for her, he urged us all to think of what the mother wants. "When we're talking about the pathology too much, we're not talking about the character," Junot Diaz says, and I think about his full name in my head, like when you meet the Prince of Morocco and you add "says Mohammad VI, Prince of Morocco" every time he says anything. "How many times have you seen that 'I am not my disease' ad? How difficult is it to maintain an autonomous self when everyone wants to reduce you just to this disease?"

"What does the mother want? She hasn't gotten anything back. Have I really given my characters what they want? More than just what I want?"

I thought about this some more as I left class that day. Each character that you write, even though they may just live in this universe that you've created, has wants and needs and dreams and desires, too, and even if you write about interesting things that don't often happen to people (my latest story was a happy combination of bipolar II disorder, psychotic schizophrenia, domestic violence, and miscarriage), you've made them real. They have lives, too. And by extension, they desire things and dream of being something greater, just as you do.

Which brings me back to my own life.

I have always wanted to be a writer. Just like I’ve always wanted to be a farmer, cowboy, obstetrician, or one of those clowns who makes balloon hats. Some of those dreams kind of got lost along the way, and as an MIT senior, I spend a lot of my time wondering if writing has become one of them. Three years prior to Junot Diaz's hand being incredibly close to my face, my favorite high school English teacher sat me down and told me she didn’t think MIT would let me reach my full creative capacity. Although it was more tactful than my sister’s words, who told me that if I went to MIT I would die before the age of nineteen, it still stuck with me that someone who believed in me thought I wasn’t supposed to be a scientist.

I am twenty-one now, and if I fall off a building now I will have been twenty-three months past my predicted date of expiration. Which is, notably, not too far off the age of milk in my fridge (though I am in my second decade, I am also nowhere near adulthood). Inability to throw things away aside, I am getting to that age where people from professors to the guy who mops my dorm bathroom keep asking me what I am going to do with my life, and I just don’t have any idea.

For a while it was “astronaut.” This vocational path quickly fell to the wayside when I realized the department of aeronautics and astronautics was filled with undergrads floating down that zero gravity canal of self-destruction. Not wanting to prove my sister right before my first semester was over, I settled on course 9, brain and cognitive science. Brain and cognitive science is a great major if you want to do a lot of thinking about other people thinking, which seemed just convincing enough to me to convince other people that I was thinking about what they were thinking and also thinking that I think I know what I’m doing.

“You think or you know?” They would ask, scratching their heads.
“I think.”

It all sounds so funny because MIT is one of those places where a lot of people really know what they’re doing, where they’ll be in five years, and what color socks they’re wearing tomorrow. They probably won’t be matching socks, but I’ll be damned if they’re not olive green and striped brown. In five years, they’ll have won the MacArthur Genius Grant for their work on nanophotonics, and there was never any question of what field they would devote their life to because it’s all they’ve ever wanted to do. And then there are people like me, who haven't yet decided if they want to wear the grey sweatpants, or the red ones today. (It's looking like red, but it's still a little too early to tell. I'll get back to you on this one.)

This is absolutely not to say that I think that MIT was the wrong choice for me. I've truly loved the coursework and the material I was digesting, my intellectual restriction enzymes chomping along merrily on 9.12 (Neurobiology Lab) to 9.15 (Biochemistry and Pharmacology of Synaptic Transmission, which I love a little bit because of the mouthful of the full course name). But just when I realized that I very much enjoyed mulling over the complexities of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, I also realized I was a senior, the time when all the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kids you once sat next to in 8.02 suddenly have suits and job interviews at places that supposedly offer a diverse and challenging working environment that will utilize your analytical problem skills and critical thinking, diving into a job market that's essentially stacked against young people everywhere.

I am exploring my options as of now, but I wanted to write this post to tell you a little bit about my life right now, why I've been a little lax on posting and how our lives are suddenly so similar. As you fill out your college applications and ask for recommendations and worry about that one not-so-fantastic grade you got in AP Chemistry, whatever that may have been, rest assured I am just as confused and hopeful and optimistic and worried about the future as you are. It's my life, I think, and it's all of our lives that we need to think of as writers, but at least we have a leg up on those fictional characters - we don't have to sit around and wait for someone to write it for us. We are more than what someone writes about us in the paper, whether it's the New York Times or whether it's something we wrote down in a 250-word personal statement about our biggest challenges. We have a say.

Hopefully, we'll get it right.

Best of luck to you all, and please feel free to email me with any burning questions about admissions, life as a student here, or what color sweatpants I finally decided on. (We're back to grey as of now.)

Oh, and 5) I did not know or fully realize all these facts until I was about halfway up the mountain, legs and throat on fire, clothes soaked through to my underwear, and ready to throw in the really, really wet towel I was wearing around my head.

Here are some other facts that I didn't know - thanks, Wikipedia: Mt. Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan at 3,776 m (12,388 ft). It is an active volcano and a well-known symbol of Japan that is frequently depicted in art and photographs, as well as visited by sightseers and climbers (okay, I kinda knew that part). The mountain is divided into stations; typically climbers will ascend from the 5th station to the 10th (the summit); as well as four main trails. Most climbers take the Fujinomiya trail - to the extent that it becomes very crowded during climbing season, and there is a line to the summit past the 8th or 9th station - but there are some other very steep and challenging trails, like the one we climbed. The one we climbed was called the Subashiri trail, which when I heard it I thought they were calling it the Samishii trail, or the Lonely Trail. Which made sense to me, because I was dead last in our group, and therefore pretty much climbed the damn thing myself.

Oh, and its sunrise is supposed to be legen - wait for it - dary. Awe-inspiring. Epic. Life-changing. LEGENDARY.

And so we started off at the fifth station, shortly after devouring bowls of chicken, eggs and rice, and buying a backpack cover that cost me my firstborn. Fuji may be a rather strenuous mountain to hike, but it's also a tourist trap, even when it's pitch black, windy, and wet - a fact I was to be reminded of when our trail merged with the most popular trail after the 8th station. (FORESHADOWING!) There were five of us: Yasu, our insane driver and leader who had hiked two weeks ago when it was still snowing, Takuya, Yasu's friend from his university who took hiking PE classes for fun, Alexis, Yasu's other friend and my fellow inexperienced climber, Chris '10, who's in pretty good shape, and me, who used to run like a 20 minute mile in school and probably still does.

We left at about 9 or 9:30 PM. The plan was to hike all night to see the sunrise at 4:30 AM, hang around at the top for seven hours or so, then watch the eclipse from the highest point in Japan at 11:30. Then we would head back down and hit up an onsen (hot springs) at the base of the mountain. It seemed flawless except for the weather, but there was no other night to do it because eclipses wait for no man. So we set off onto the dark and rainy path, Yasu and Takuya in their hardcore hiking gear, and Chris '10 and I in really cheap rain suits we'd bought from a Walmart-like place near our work for $20. (FORESHADOWING!)

It wasn't too bad at first. But then it started getting harder. And harder. And harder. There is something truly to be said about the masochism of MIT students, and as I was dragging myself up the tree-shrouded path between the 5th and 6th stations in the pouring rain, the main thought that crossed my mind was "how am I going to blog about this later??" And then it came to me: with a hugely cliched metaphor!

Kids, climbing Fuji is like going through MIT in a lot of ways. You have no idea what you're about to put yourself through - and in some ways, this makes it easier, since I couldn't see behind me or in front of me any further than where I was stepping. You're tired a lot of the time. You think if I could just make it through to the next station, I can chill out for a little bit.. but you're glad your friends are there with you. You don't sleep. And you're sweaty a lot of the time. Maybe that's just me. Anyway.

We eventually made it up to the sixth station, which we thought was the seventh station because it took us more than an hour to get there from the fifth station. It was probably the longest distance between any two stations, and it took even longer because we kept stopping on the way to reflect on the beautiful view of Japan below us.

Not long after the sixth station it looked like we were about to reach another station, but we didn't. Because they had this terrible thing called "Old Xth Station" in between every station to make you think you were reaching another station, but you weren't. This is why when Yasu, Chris, and Alexis reached the Old 6th Station about a minute before Takuya (who was kind enough to wait for me) and I did, I heard Alexis yell, "nooooOOOOOOOOO!!!"

We stopped briefly at the Old 6th station to reflect on the world below and also how much our thighs hurt, then traipsed on. The 7th station was not too far off, but I was starting to feel the fact that it was a little past 1 in the morning and that we'd been hiking for about four hours straight at that point, so when we finally made it up to the 7th station I used my expertly honed-at-MIT abilities of being able to nap anywhere to promptly fall asleep.

When I woke up I found the rain was now going sideways and underneath my $20 plastic bodysuit, and that most of my extremities were rapidly transforming from waterlogged to icelogged - oh, how phase changes plague me even now, at 3,000 meters above sea level and really far away from thermodynamics - and since the hut was closed, the only place for me to stand was inside the bathroom. Unfortunately, I didn't check the signs and about twenty seconds after I parked myself in the entrance, huddled against the side of the bathroom wall for warmth, a very large Japanese dude brushed past me and stormed into the urinal. Instead of a normal girl who hadn't been hiking up a mountain in the rain and wind who might've taken this as their cue to leave, I took this as a good time to take another one minute nap. (Don't judge me. Especially since this was not my first time accidentally hanging out in a men's bathroom. What? Who said that?)

We'd almost made it up to the 8th station - and I'd almost gotten that manly bathroom smell off me - when the weather started to get really, really bad. Difficult to stand up, let alone walk, bad. So I don't think I am exaggerating too much when I tell you hiking up to each station began to look like the Pearly Gates:

You can imagine our disappointment when we found that the 8th Station was nothing more than a closed hut with a bunch of lights and a huddled group of freezing hikers sucking on oxygen tanks. But despite its more irritating, earlier counterparts, the Old 8th Station was definitely my favorite. We stopped to get some of the best hot chocolate I have ever had in my life, probably because I was hallucinating hot springs everywhere at that point, and warmed up for a few minutes since we were a little ahead of schedule.

From the Old 8th Station to the summit, and the time we spent to the summit, the weather was so bad that I couldn't take out my camera anymore, especially since my fingers wouldn't permit me. At this point, however, our trail merged with the most popular trail, which meant we started seeing more and more people. It was pretty surprising considering I was two minutes away from turning into a snowman and was sure no one else could be as crazy as we were, but as I said, Fuji is only open for two months out of the year, so any time during that two months you can be sure there will be people. Even if it's pouring and a Tuesday night/Wednesday morning and a bunch of the huts are closed - the moral of the story is that any day of the week, PEOPLE ARE CRAZY.

It got so bad past the 9th Station that we were literally standing in line to get to the top of the mountain, right about the same time the weather decided to take a turn for the worse. For about an hour we stood in lines of tourists, feeling the rain slam down our necks, every now and then taking a step, every now and then getting blasted with an angry gust of wind. For about an hour I stood almost but not quite at the top, shivering and hating myself for doing this, wondering why I would ever put myself through this, what was I trying to prove, when this was ever going to end.

I forgot to add that the majority of the time we we'd been hiking, besides all the times I wasn't breathlessly trying to keep up with the guys or playing songs in my head over and over to keep my mind off things, I was counting the ways I was lucky. Lucky that I couldn't see anything - because if I had been able to see how far up we were going, I probably would've turned around and gone home. (Alexis had headed back down shortly before the 7th station because of his fear of heights, and I knew at that point I had to keep going.) Lucky that I was so out of breath, because my body heat was keeping me from really feeling the cold most of the time. Lucky that I was so ridiculously unprepared and had no idea what was in store for me because that made it harder for me to psych myself out. Lucky that Takuya was nice enough to wait up for me, lucky that the wind kept me from getting too overheated, lucky that it was raining so I didn't have to get out my water bottle. (You ever hear that song? If allll the rain drops were lemon drops and gum drops..)

But at this point, we had essentially stopped hiking, and I'd really begun to feel the cold. I was no longer warmed by being sweaty or out of breath, and the plastic bags I'd tied over my shoes (did I mention we were REALLY unprepared?) had torn completely off so that my socks were soaked through. In fact, everything I was wearing was completely soaked through - my gloves, my sweatshirt, my fleece, my jeans, my hair - oh, yes, ALL of my hair - and I was reminded of particularly cold mornings in Cambridge when I'd run to class - late, of course - just out of the shower, and my hair would freeze over or break off. I imagined the same thing happening to my fingers, one by one, like icicles that would be left on the ground to melt into Fuji's rocks forever.

And then Takuya, loyally trudging behind me in line, yelled "200 m to 10th station!"
"Huh??"
"200 m left! Yatta ne!"
"We did it!" I yelled, flailing my arms around and almost knocking Takuya back down the mountain.

Those last 200 m were the longest of my life, but the sky had started to lighten as day began to break and I slowly began to feel lucky again. I looked up and started to see dozens of other hikers, all drudging slowly and patiently up to the peak, and I felt that same sense of warmth spread through my chest like when you find someone in the lounge up at 3 in the morning doing the same pset you are. Finally, FINALLY, we stumbled up the final stairs and jumped around the summit of Mt. Fuji, pumping our fists in victory and in the desperate hope that feeling might return to our fingers.

Takuya and I had been long separated from Chris and Yasu at that point, so we wandered around for a bit trying to find them before succumbing to the internally heated temptation of the huts at the top. These huts sold ramen and curry and hot drinks at ridiculous prices and offered all the comforts of the men's bathroom at the 7th station without any of the smell. Except for the smell of VICTORY. (In case you were wondering, victory kinda smells like burned rice.)

We didn't get to see the sunrise. The sky was too cloudy and it was still raining by 4:30, so there were no legendary skies for us, despite all extra grief we'd been through to get there. And at around 7:30, one of the hut workers told us we were going to get altitude sickness if we stayed up there any longer and advised us to go down - so we didn't get to see the eclipse, either.

But the view on the way down was spectacular.

Two weeks later back at sea level, I'm not sure if it was worth it. It was worth it in the sense that I wanted to climb Mt. Fuji, and I wanted to prove I was just as hardcore as the boys I climbed with, and the view on the way down was really something else. It wasn't worth it in that I had really wanted to see the sunrise and the eclipse, but if I keep thinking about all the regrets I have about the things I have no control over I'd miss out on the chance to think about how lucky we were - especially since there were two climbers that went missing a few nights before we climbed Fuji.

But we conquered Mt. Fuji, and now I feel like I can do anything.

"GREAT!" my mom said, when I'd finished telling her this story (not in so many words) over Skype. "So now you can do it again when we get there?"

Uh, no.