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 fifteen 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.

Here's his door in action:

A couple notes from someone who has opened and shut this door from her iPhone on several occasions:

1) My decrepit old fogey of an iPhone that still runs on Edge is faster than Chris's 3G iPhone at opening his door every single time. Other things it beats Chris's phone at: finding things on maps, being good looking, etc.

2) Because the door button was right next to a lot of other important buttons on my iPhone, I often accidentally opened his door. Fortunately there's a webcam pointed at it so I could check if I'd left it open, but there have definitely been "hold on, I just accidentally opened Chris's door" occasions during phone calls.

3) This also happened with other people playing with the door, especially while I was napping.

4) An earlier version of the secret knock consisted of banging the top of the door really hard. Another enjoyable occurrence during naptime.

5) An actual quote from Chris, upon visiting my room: "Your door is so ANALOG(UE)!"

Chris wrote up a more technical explanation of his door (the "iDoor") on his blog, as well as submitted the video to Hack A Day. (In response to whoever commented, "that might even be impressive to whoever he comes stumbling back to his room with", I would just like the say that it was, but I was more impressed by the fact that he got an A+ in 6.033.)

As this whole trip has been an experience in pushing our cultural boundaries, our first challenge was to visit an onsen together, which is basically just a giant public bath. Essentially the idea is, "welcome to Kyoto; in order to get the free tour and food you'll all have to hang out naked together for a little while. But don't worry! You get to squat under one of those spigot things, then all get in a giant tub together. The water is scaldingly hot and then you have to dump ice cold water on yourself."

Needless to say, we all enjoyed the experience immensely, and then went to get dressed in opposite corners of the room.

We then piled onto a giant bus with a similar-sized group of Japanese students, most of whom were studying English and were comp sci students of Mike Barker, a previous MIT employee and our guide for the weekend. A microphone was passed around, and we were forced to introduce ourselves in our non-native language, which produced such gems as "I want to enjoy this tour!" and "Yorushoku" (intended to be "Yoroshiku"; Please take care of me; but instead "Yorushoku"; dinner). Luckily we reached our first temple before it got to the back of the bus and I got to keep my dignity.

Our first stop was Kinkakuji, the Golden Temple.

As the first Zen Buddhist temple out of several we had to visit that day, we pretty much zoomed through the grounds, while practicing our lackluster Japanese next to the lustrous temple. We did, however, stop to make a few wishes:

(It happened for reals, guys. I promise.)

Our second temple of the day was Daitokuji, which featured several rock gardens with giant rocks that were supposed to represent waterfalls and manatees. (You have to kind of tilt your head at something like a 270 degree angle, but eventually you'll see it.) Then we hit up our first Shinto shrine, Heian jingu, as Buddhism and Shintoism are the prominent religions featured side-by-side in Japanese culture. The shrine at Heian jingu was almost entirely garishly red, set beside a lush green garden filled with lotus flowers and weeping willows - sort of an Amelie color scheme meets Memoirs of a Geisha.

My favorite temple of that day, however, was definitely Kiyomizudera. I'd been to it four years ago, but coming back felt surprisingly different after having lived in Tokyo for a month, where there is little greenery and everything feels somewhat cramped. The temple is built out in the open air, next to a tree-covered mountain - maybe "tree-inundated mountain" is a better phrase - that's so majestic it's hard not to let your breath get taken away. (Or maybe that's just because you have to hike up a hill to get there.)

Even still, I loved it, especially because that hill was lined with little shops giving away free samples of yatsuhashi, or triangle-shaped mochi with different flavorings and fillings. (The original flavoring, I'm told, was just a cinammon filling, but now I think they're channeling Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans because they have all sorts of different combinations such as red bean, green tea, peach, blueberry, mango, strawberry chocolate, Ramune, mud, boogers, chicken feet.. maybe not chicken feet; we're in Japan, not China..)

After our long day of hiking and sightseeing, we headed back to our bus, where we learned Japanese children's songs as we drove an hour to Nara. (Fun fact: the Japanese onomatopoeia for rain is "pichi pichi, chappu chappu, ran ran ran." Another fun fact: they do not like it so much if you yell this while banging on the table at Japanese restaurants.)

We ended the evening by going out to karaoke and singing a lot of Japanese songs, which mostly consisted of the Japanese kids singing and the rest of us jumping up and down on the couches banging on tambourines like crazy people. (The Japanese also do not like this so much.) The next morning, we hit up Todaiji:

I'd also been to Todaiji four years ago, but coming back was especially exciting because of the tame deer. The deer will let you pet and photograph them (but to preempt further questions, particularly by my friend Steph, I imagine riding would be difficult and possibly fatal). Several of the vendors outside of the temple sell packets of deer biscuits, so a good number of people bought some (and were subsequently mauled by herds of hungry deer).

Todaiji's family-friendy vibe continues with the Buddha's Nostril, a hole cut into a wooden column purportedly the size of the giant Buddha statue's nose hole. If you're able to crawl through the nostril, you'll supposedly have good luck for seven years. Eager to soak in all the good fortune we could get, our huge line of shouting foreigners (most of whom were a good deal larger than the average Japanese person) attracted a little bit of a crowd, but we were for the most part succesful:

(I kind of think we wore the wood down to the point that the hole became a good deal larger than the actual Buddha's nostril, but people with broad shoulders deserve seven years of good luck too, right?)

We left Todaiji and headed for our last lunch together, at an okonomiyaki restaurant. Okonomiyaki, also known as Japanese pancakes, literally means "whatever you want, grilled", and comes with any variety of toppings from squid to soba, from mochi to kimchi. It's really freaking delicious. It was also probably the first filling meal I'd had in Japan, since everything here is SO tiny, but it feels like okonomiyaki gets into your stomach and and expands like a Chia pet. A tasty Chia pet.

Exhausted and weighed down by the extra ten pounds in our stomachs, we dragged our dusty selves back to the train to Kyoto, where we relaxed for a short while before our shinkansen (bullet train) back to Tokyo. Kyoto Station, by the way, is one of the largest buildings in Japan, and from the top you can see Kyoto Tower in its full glory, surrounded by the bustling city, shrouded by the same tree-covered mountains next to Kiyomizudera. As we looked over the city someone commented that they hadn't even noticed the city was surrounded by mountains, a marked difference from the modern capital of Japan.

We stolled lazily back to the shinkansen platform, but not before stopping on a landing to take in the beauty of Kyoto Station at sunset. With full bellies and seven years of good luck ahead of us, we boarded the train back to Tokyo.

Coming up: the world's best sushi! And fish uterus. I know I'm excited.

I'm seated on a double-decker 8-hour night bus from Tokyo to Kyoto called "Ladies Dream." I don't know if it's trying to imply that this bus is the ideal bus for ladies, or if the lack of apostrophe indicates that only females have pleasant dreams on this vehicle, but I try to imagine that everything happens for a reason. And so I'm trying to convince myself I am out 57 bucks on a bus 40 minutes after the one I had bought a ticket for in advance left, one without proper punctuation, because someone up there thought it would be funny if I rode a bus called "Ladies Dream."

I missed my original bus to Kyoto, and despite the motto I'm currently trying to convince myself of, not for any good reason. I spent a little too much time at home preparing before finally getting on the subway, which took a little too long waiting at the station JUST before I had to get off. (Of course it did.) I got off at Shinjuku-sanchome, realized I had gotten off at the wrong exit and panicked, and did what I would in the States if I didn't know where I was and only had 12 minutes to get to a bus I didn't know the location of - grabbed a cab.

The cab cost 710 yen (~$7), but more infuriating than that, only took me up the block. To get an idea of how short this is, the cab meter begins at - you guessed it - 710 yen. Kind of like the time I was sick and had to go to 5.12 lecture because it was the last one with material that would be covered on the exam, but I had such a high fever I couldn't make it back from campus to my dorm. So I took a cab. From Baker to Next House. It was approximately the same distance from Shinjuku-sanchome to the bus terminal, except in Boston it only cost me $3.60.

I got off, ran through the station, and asked no less than four different people where the bus going from Tokyo to Kyoto was. For some reason, no one had ANY idea, even though I later discovered we were standing directly over it. Only the policeman knew, and my brain was so fuzzy with panic and sweat I only understood the first half of his directions. I sprinted downstairs, ran to the left, felt sure he had said "turn to the right," and turned to the right.

I ended up right where the subway had dropped me off.

Dripping with sweat and fuming over that kindly old taxi driver robbing me of 710 yen - there's one more night this week I'll be eating convenience store onigiri for dinner - I ran back down the street, where I'd run past a bus ticket counter. I thought about stopping to ask but decided there wasn't time, since the line was too long, and ran past it - into the bus terminal.

"The bus.." I panted, unable to think in Japanese in my flustered state, "from Tokyo to Kyoto.. The ten thirty bus.. is this where it leaves??"

"It left already."

I looked at my phone and thrust it in the bus worker's face. "IT'S 10:31."

"Ahh, yes, I'm so sorry.."
"When is the next one?"
"11:10. You can buy the tickets at the desk."
"Can I exchange this one?"
"I'm sorry, you can't."

My crying has never gotten me out of getting shots, bad grades, or speeding tickets, and it certainly wasn't getting me anywhere now. (The only thing it's ever gotten me out of was getting my eyebrows plucked against my will, but as she put the tweezers away the lady called me a stupid baby. Oh, I know. Life is just so hard.) I felt the hot tears start to well up as I began gasping for air, one hand barely holding the rest of my body up on the gate, the other still waving my phone frantically in his face like somehow the harsh cold 10:31 would jump off the screen and cut him. (They did not.) The bus worker invented a problem elsewhere and walked awkwardly away, and just like I'd read about in the "stages of regret" article in O magazine earlier that day when I was supposed to be working, I quit being sad and got mad. I bought a new ticket (yes, on the "Ladies Dream" bus) and stalked off angrily, mentally setting ALL of his perfectly-coifed Japanese hair on fire.

(To put a cherry on top of my already excessively salty wound, my 11:10 bus is currently leaving EIGHT WHOLE MINUTES after 11:18. That is a LIFETIME in late person time. I could have made my 10:30 bus, got a job as an investment banker, met a nice Japanese dude, got married and had three kids in that time. EIGHT. MINUTES.)

But as Oprah says, turn your regret into productivity, and then give all your friends cars or something like that. So I wrote a blog entry.

The truth is, even though I was only one minute late I really probably would've missed it even if I had another hour. This is how I travel- I get hopelessly lost, forget that time exists, and wander happily through tiny streets and amongst tiny people on tiny buses. You know how I know, besides the fact that I'm out 5710 yen? I got lost on my way to my SEAT. The bus attendant had to come and show me where my seat was. But in the end, it all works out. The ticket for the 11:10 was cheaper than the original (which MIT is paying for anyway), and I got a much better seat with much more leg room; plus, I'll get to sleep in a little later than people on the original bus. And I'll probably miss most of the onsen (edited to add: Japanese hot springs), too, which means I won't have to see all my friends naked (edited to add: I was not that late to Kyoto, and I still had to see all my friends naked).

I also learned a valuable lesson - for god's sake, woman, leave three hours ahead of time when you buy expensive tickets around Japan. Running around a foreign country on MIT money is an incredible, life-changing opportunity, and unless you want to squander it all in one week you can't depend on grannies flying in and saving you every time.

You see? Everything happens for a reason.

Now it's time for this lady to dream.

It happened the moment when I got off the limousine bus from the airport to go to the landlord's office, and it happened even worse when I got off the train to look for my house. A woman helped me carry my luggage up two flights of stairs from the subway, then looked at my map and declared, "I think it's down that way, but I'm not sure. Just go down that street about ten minutes and it should be around that area somewhere."

And so I walked. Twenty minutes to the left of the station in the eighty-degree Tokyo heat, wearing two sweaters, dragging two heavy suitcases, and wondering why my bodily fluids were trying to escape me so freely. I walked for days. I walked until the Japanese Ghost of Christmas Past walked up next to me and was like, "Got a drink?"

At that time I knew it was time to ask directions, to the first person I saw in the midst of this solely residential area: an older Japanese woman pushing her mother-in-law in a wheelchair, having a conversation with an older man down the street.

"Anou, sumimasen.."
"Ehh?"
"America-jin desu kara.. kore, doko de wakarimasuka?"

She didn't know where it was exactly, but she looked at the map and surmised it was probably in the opposite direction. It was the third time today I'd walked at least fifteen minutes in the complete wrong direction, and the phrase "hantai no hoo" (opposite direction) was starting to sound all too familiar. But she took the number off the map and called the company just to make sure.

"Moshi moshi?..."

Just from her Japanese grunting noises ("Unnn", "Nnnn", "Sousousousou") and vigorous head nods I could tell that I was in the wrong place and was probably going to have to make yet another 180, to be followed by several other twisty and difficult turns that could only be navigated by someone whose nationality is from a place that invented the electronic bidet. I deflated slightly, knowing my jet-lagged legs would have to wait slightly longer to be alleviated of their fatigue, and that the smell that'd been hanging over me ever since I'd spent 11 hours seated next to an overly large man with a love of portable cheese would be with me a little longer. I wondered if I'd ever figure out my way through the completely illogical streets of Tokyo, and even worse, if I was sweating out of my ears. (I was.)

"Arigatoo gozaimashita." The woman hung up the phone. "Issyou ni ikimasyoo!"

Her offer to walk with me was so unexpected I almost passed out from surprise (and a little from heat stroke). As we walked she told me about her one son and two grandchildren, who lived in Singapore, and how her husband loved golf but wasn't very good at it. She told me she and her husband were retired and stayed at home taking care of their mother-in-law, who was in her 90s and her back was injured. She asked why I began studying Japanese and why I was here for the summer, and I told her.

I also told her I didn't really know anyone in Tokyo, to which she said "Me, your Japanese friend!"

My new Japanese friend dropped me off at my apartment, told me to get some rest, and to call her some time soon. That weekend, I skyped her to say hello, and mentioned off-hand that I wanted to buy a cell phone.

"Oh, I come with you! You eat breakfast yet? You come to my house!"

And then she made me breakfast, over which I talked to her husband about my flight, work, and getting lost in Tokyo. He told me about their honeymoon in Hawaii over forty years ago, how he'd studied German instead of English, and how he kinda wished he'd studied English now. There was a lot of toast and tea and ramen, and then she took me to Ikebukuro to get a cell phone - grabbing my arm protectively in the subway, guiding me down the street to the cell phone shop, asking if there was someone there who spoke English to explain the terms of the contract to me - where it turns out my visa wasn't a long enough period for me to buy the phone under my name, so she offered to put it under her ID card - all approximately five days after I'd first met her.

At this point I'm a little suspicious that my mom has sewed some kind of sign into all my clothes that says "LOST FOREIGNER - PLEASE HELP." Or that I just look really helpless and weak, and that I need someone to rescue me at all turns. My Japanese isn't that bad, I think, and I start to get defensive. What's in it for her? Why is this lady being so unexpectedly good to me?

She looks at me and smiles, and says "Me, your Japanese Mama!"

And then I realize there are no alternate motives here. She isn't trying to take my money or waste my time, nor is she intending to later break into my house and eat what little food I have. (She knows where I live.)

She's simply Japanese. This is how she interacts with other human beings - helping out a stranger on basic human kindness in a way that, much like yours truly on my first day in Tokyo, has become somewhat lost in American culture.

I follow her back into the subway station, happy to be found.

My small bladder has always been a troubling affliction, particularly on long international plane trips and also on cross-country road trips. I spent the last week driving from Boston to San Francisco with my boyfriend CV, who just graduated and has a much greater stamina for holding it than yours truly, so you'd think I'd have picked up a little more endurance. Instead of that, I've picked up a few interesting observations about this country:

-It is a very long drive from Boston to San Francisco.

-At night, they light up the Niagara Fall with all the colors of the rainbow. This is so they can remind you that even though you are experiencing one of the most fantastic natural wonders of this world, things are still better in the technicolor world of Oz.

-The hottest part of our trip was, surprisingly, in upstate New York, on our first day of driving. The day that our air conditioner also broke down the most was, not surprisingly, in upstate New York, on our first day of driving.

-There's a place in Ashland, Ohio, called Grandpa's Cheesebarn. (One word.) It sells a variety of cheeses, meats, pickled garnishes, and a wide collection of John Deere memorabilia. Stop by if you're ever around, and say hi to the Amish kids selling baskets on the lawn for me.

-Eating at a Steak 'n Shake in Indiana as a minority is a lonely endeavor, save for the one Filipino guy working the grill. (He gave me a high five on the way out. In my head.)

-CV has a built-in coffee maker at his house. Right in between the microwave and the food warmer. I plan to propose this for the next renovations of Burton-Conner's kitchens.

-"The Grand Canyon may not be the longest or deepest or widest canyon in the world, but many people would agree it is the grandest.": A direct quote from a plaque at the Grand Canyon museum. Which leaves one wondering: who is many people? How did they get to be on this grand decision-making committee? What kinds of requirements are there for becoming a canyon with the "grand" denomination? Also, why is CV driving the car away from me?

-The boundaries for where sweet tea is acquirable: somewhere in Ohio to approximately New Mexico. Someone fact check this. It is probably about as accurate as stating "Out of all the canyons, the Grand Canyon is the grandest."

-Things that we only have in California: toilet seat covers, carpool lanes, special carpool lane privileges for hybrid cars, special parking spaces for hybrid cars, guaranteed acceptance to MIT if you drive a hybrid car. Just kidding on the last one. You also get a full scholarship.

I'll be spending my summer in Japan, so it was a good chance to fully immerse myself in American culture, eat as much diner food as possible, and see the great midwest. The MISTI program (MIT Science and Technology Initiative) is paying for my flights, housing, and general life in Tokyo, as well as lined up a sweet job for me working as a research technician at RIKEN Brain Science Institute, so I'm pretty excited to declog my arteries and eat a meal that doesn't come with fries. I'm also pretty excited to get totally and completely lost on the Japanese Railway, discover my four semesters of Japanese have not nearly prepared me for surviving a foreign country, and celebrate my 21st birthday in a country where the drinking age is 20. Summer 2K9, guys; it's gonna be a blast. AND I PROMISE TO BLOG IT! For realsies!

In the meanwhile, I'd love to answer any of your questions about junior year (most of which I did not blog), MISTI, where to stay for cheap if you're stopping through Kingman, Arizona, or who I am. Since I haven't blogged since approximately before the time most of you were born, I might need to reintroduce myself: I'm Jess, and I need to go to the bathroom. I'll see you from the other side of the international date line!

(Also, to those who note that it's taken me a while to post again - WE'RE IN A RECESSION, PEOPLE.)(Actually, I really didn't post this for a while because I went to Hawaii.. oh, I know. Life is just so hard.)

When I was little, my favorite store was the Sanrio store, and my favorite thing to buy was the mystery bag. The mystery bag was a veritable wealth of the glorious unknown. The mystery bag was an opportunity to purchase anything, anything at all in the store, without even knowing you were purchasing it. The mystery bag was a door to another world.

I later came to realize the mystery bag was just a paper bag filled with useless crap they couldn't otherwise sell, like Hello Kitty erasers, Keropi compact mirrors and, oh, I don't know, Pochacco beard trimmers, and it wasn't like I was even growing a beard at that time, and yeah, we probably paid more for the bag than the erasers/trash cans/beard trimmers were worth combined, but it didn't matter. It was all worth it to me for the element of surprise.

Fast forward twelveish years later to IAP 2009. IAP is a pretty magical time; it's one month in the middle of the school year filled with possibilities. IAP is the mystery bag of the Sanrio store that is MIT (but with less beard trimmers). You can take actual classes - some even extend from the fall term through January - or you can take crash courses in pottery, truffle making, and Perl. You can do all those things you wanted to do during the school year that you didn't quite get to because you were working. You can even go somewhere else (WHAT? WHERE). Plus, the fact that you don't have class until February is pretty fun to rub in the faces of your suffering friends at other schools.

And so one weekend Kes '11, Dordy '12, Cathy '10, and I embarked on an adventure that would change the course of history. It started, as most adventures do, with the hunt for food. Unfortunately, this one involved less spears and loincloths and more hiking over the slushy Harvard bridge in 20 degree weather. (It ended, as only a small fraction of adventures do, with an igloo.) Since that's a moderately warm temperature for winter around these parts, here's a tip for you when you make the trip out to Boston: if you are going to walk across the Harvard bridge, wear rainboots up to your elbows. For serious - that bridge was the consistency of an icee two hours after you bought it and forgot about it. If you take only one thing away from this entry, it should be that. And that you can see your breath in igloos. But more on igloos later.

We ended up at a small French restaurant behind the Prudential Center that Cathy had been wanting to try for a while. Naturally, this meant that we all had to speak in French accents, and make French faces, and don French attire:

No, don't ask why. No, we never do this when dining at Thai or Italian restaurants, but somehow, it just happened. Also, as four college students trudging in from a trip over a bridge that could only be described by the word "soupy", we were clearly not classy enough for this place, and thus made every effort to class ourselves - and our meal - up.

After wandering around various places throughout Boston and avoiding a soggy return home by taking Saferide back to campus, then deciding to ride an entire Saferide loop and play a couple rounds of Euchre, we ended up at the igloo. This was not your grandmother's igloo. This was one epic igloo. How epic?

So epic, it even came with a logbook. What'd I tell you? Not your grandmother's igloo.

Eventually, though, as all adventures ending in an igloo do, this story ended with us freezing to horrible, horrible deaths. No, not really. We almost did, though: the igloo was blocked by a giant snow boulder that required significant effort to move:

We returned home mostly victorious, minus the various digits lost to frostbite. It was a tale for the ages. It was one to tell the children's children. Who knows? By that time, I'll probably even have a beard to trim.

So, because this is a lifetime advice plus health and wellness blog, I will now share with you a thing or two I've picked up on how to deal with these weeks. One might call them "a bad patch", "times of difficulty", or "oh dear, I've forgotten to change my pants during this short time period". One might even call them "heck weeks", especially if one is a wholesome student looking to be employed in the future. (And is a fully hardworking, productive, and really nice member of society who never says inappropriate things. Unless you are talking about the definition of inappropriate as described by the Glasgow Coma Scale, in which I make no such promises. I have definitely hit a GCS of 3 once or twice in these last few days.)

Here is how to survive a "heck week": rarely. To experience a bad patch at MIT is the essence of being a student here, and that's something we can all agree on. To experience several bad patches week after week is a surefire way to burn out, and is probably a sign that you have been poorly managing your time since the beginning of the semester. (Note to future self.) You don't have to be on your game at all times, but it's a good idea to know what's coming up at least two weeks in advance, and if it's a major project, a month at least. Maybe this is something you were lucky enough to pick up in high school, but for the rest of us who stared out the windows dreaming of schools where they didn't have to worry about getting wedgie-d, this is something we'll have to develop now. (Girls in my high school were mean.)

Figure out when you work best. I'm a morning person and have been ever since a very young age. I was the nerd at the sleepover who fell asleep at nine. So when I have a lot of work to do and don't feel particularly productive, I go to bed early and wake up at five or six, because I'm the most efficient at that time. (It also helps that no one is updating their blogs and people are not sending me YouTube videos at five or six in the morning, so that increases my productivity drastically.)

Find someone to study with, and set times to study with them. This is oh so very important at MIT, because here we're all about collaboration. (On problem sets. Exams, not so much.) And it happens so frequently, I'll often leave my room to get a drink and trip over freshmen psetting together in my hallways. Collaboration is the staple of success at MIT. Depending on the person, it can either force you to be much more productive, or much less productive. I find if it's someone who you feel slightly awkward around, you are much less likely to screw around while working. If you are in a class of a bunch of people you know and like really well, you will unfortunately have to bring up lots of awkward topics, like that one time you thought your study partner was actually the professor because he was wearing a really bad sweater. Or which of your dads would win in your fight. (This is an awkward topic for me personally because my dad would beat all of your dads in a fight together. All of them.)

Along with that - ASK FOR HELP. There will always, ALWAYS be someone smarter, faster, and more good-looking than you. They will probably be an upperclassman who's taken the class you're taking (lest you forget we all take the same General Institute Requirements). They may also be an underclassman. Or a professor or a GRT (Graduate Resident Tutor) or a housemaster. Or your parents! Remember them?

Take study breaks. Often. Not that often. Stop. Go back to work. What- is that a video of puppies? With Natalie Portman??

Above all, stop updating your blog. Just stop it. For a month. No, just don't do it while you are in the middle of writing a lab report. It is a bad idea because you will probably be up much later than you expected to be, and not get as much done. This is the only piece of advice I don't know too much about - I heard from a friend, so I don't know have too much personal experience with it. But hey, I also hear soon they'll be accepting blog entries fully explaining why you were unable to finish the assignment in lieu of the actual assignment, so I think I'm in the clear.

NOT. Do your work. Yeah, you!

So I'm trying something new this time, a new reason for why in the time it has taken me to write this new blog entry I have grown and shaved full-length two beards, and that reason is called the truth. Yes, folks, I'm about to tell you the truth, and man, is it a doozy. You guys don't even know. You want the real truth, the honest truth, nothing-but-the-truth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH.

The truth is I donated blood about a month ago, and I guess I just didn't eat enough that day, and, well, it's a month later. I woke up on the floor of the blood bank with a free sticker that said "HUG ME, I DONATED BLOOD TODAY" stuck to my eyelid and a little pamphlet on not engaging in vigorous physical activity for the next twenty-four hours. Or more like twenty-four days. I'm kind of irritated I lost so much time, but what can you do? I am pretty sure the Red Cross took some other stuff too - a kidney? An ovary? Something's gotta explain that three-inch scar - but, whatever, I've been doing okay without it thus far.

No, but seriously. The real truth is I got swept up with a group of hippies and have been hitchhiking across America, and as such that's put my MIT career (and blogging abilities) on hold.

I mean, I've been traveling on horseback with a group of mounties. They let me wear their hats sometimes, and made fun of me when I try to use the word "aboot".

I was on a fishing trip deep in the arctic. I spent the last month observing the mating habits of the narwhal.

I got a promotion at Oberlin, so I moved to Ohio and, well, nobody in Boston ever heard from me again.

Nope, wait, that's Ben Jones. Guys. No. Listen.

The truth is, guys, I joined a cult.

I really didn't mean to; I guess that's what everyone says, though, right? So I'm going to the Galleria to pick up some extra socks (it's just starting to get extra freezing here in New England, and Burton-Conner laundry machines always cost $0.75 and three of your favorite socks), and I hail this cab - turns out my driver is this guy with an incredible tan, like REALLY tan. So we started talking, and, well, now I have no idea where the last month went. But as it turns out conjoined words having to do with Web 2.0 are generally frowned upon in those circles, particularly the word "blog", so I really wasn't permitted to be writing about my life at a school of technology. Also, they erased all my email.

(Also, that's why I haven't called in a while, Mom.)

Actually, to be completely honest, MIT is hard. (For the record, I wrote this post and therefore came up with that sentiment before Snively, and MIT is still hard even if you study biology.) Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise, even the little voice in your head that's telling you to just strap on your hiking boots and go for a twelve-hour apple picking trip this Saturday. I sort of forgot that MIT is hard, as I tend to do, and then after I got out of my vomity-sickness coma I really remembered it, like smack-you-in-the-face-with-a-failing-grade-on-your-lab-report remembered it, and then all of a sudden I was really behind on all my classes - and not only that! Also, on The Office - and when I get behind on The Office I get cranky and go around slamming doors while everyone else is all, "Wait, so you're not coming apple picking with us?"

(I'm serious about the email though - I mean, it wasn't entirely erased, but I transferred it all to Gmail and now I can't find those questions people emailed me to respond to, because I had them tagged specially in my Apple mail. I know I meant to write about FAP - which was over TWO MONTHS AGO, gah - but I did have some outstanding questions that never got any love. So if you'll send me more Q's, I'll try to give you more A's. K?)

Anyway, that's all I have for now, and I'll try not to disappear again for such a long time. Right now, though, I'm leaving you again - my Abu Dhabian child is crying for my attention, and he can only wait so long. (His name is Usman, in case you were curious. And you think I don't tell you things!)