Another thing that made me happy this week was getting an email from one of my coworkers, sending me information that might be useful for my internship. I know I haven't explained much about my project yet (I'll get to it later, I'm about to go to sleep...), but basically, it will potentially involve re-programming a WiiMote. To that end, my coworker sent me some links to a project that his friend had worked on, which involved using the WiiMote to control robots.

http://www.iearobotics.com/proyectos/friki-apps/wii-servo-linux/wii-servo.html
(As it turns out, "friki" is the Spanish slang word for what we would call "geeky." I am learning so much useful vocabulary over here, it's great.)

He also sent me some information on some libraries his friend had written for this project. The best part? They're written in Python, the only programming language I know. Win!

One more thing that's making me happy right now- Adelaide '09 is visiting Madrid! We walked over a huge portion of the city today, and I was proud of myself to discover that I actually have a pretty decent idea of where things are. The highlight of the night was definitely the play we saw- La Importancia de Llamarse Ernesto. Yes, that's right, we saw a modern, Spanish interpretation of the Oscar Wilde Victorian Era comedy, and it ROCKED.

Anyway, I'm going to sleep, we have some museums to visit bright and early tomorrow.

One bonus about the weekend? I might finally have some pictures to post of Madrid.

Hasta luego!

In other words, I'm totally settled in! =)

(Translation: As you guys should know, I'm spending this summer working for Telefónica in Madrid. Well, I got here last Saturday, so I've been living here for a two whole weeks. I have a room in Puerta del Sol, a new cell phone (whose number I still can't remember), a monthly metro pass, my own desk at the office, I've already eaten paella and tortilla española, and I know the fastest way to work and what they mean by "la noche madrileña"- the night in Madrid.)

So that's the one paragraph summary, but after that I don't even know where to begin. I guess the beginning is best- I got here Saturday afternoon and was met at the airport by Mónica, who is the sister of my friend Martín. (Their family used to live in Madrid when they were kids. Their parents moved with them to the US, but 3 of the 4 siblings have made their way back here to live, or study in college.) Martín was in most of my classes in high school (Spanish included), and even though he drove me crazy, he helped me learn a ton of Spanish. (If we were passing notes in class, not like we would ever do that, of course, but just suppose we passed notes in class about trivial gossip, he would insist that I respond to him in Spanish, then would return the note with his response, along with corrections on my grammar. I'm not kidding. He totally (would) do that when (if) we passed notes.) Anyway, Mónica showed me around a little, and then took me to Puerta del Sol. I'd been emailing with a woman who lives there about renting a room in her apartment, so I went to check it out. Well, it's the smallest apartment I think I've ever been in but I loved it, and it's in a super cool area- Puerta del Sol is kind of like the Times Square of Madrid- there are more people in the streets outside my apartment at 2 AM than 2 PM, so it's pretty cool place to live! So she (her name is Berny) told me to come back the next day with all my stuff (since I had already planned to spend the first night with Mónica). Then Mónica and I left to meet the rest of her siblings (Martín is studying in China right now, but thanks to him I already have a bunch of friends here!), and Berny left to go meet with another girl who might end up being my roommate.

So we hung out around Puerta del Sol for awhile, then made our way back to the Metro so we could catch the last bus back to Mónica's house, which is actually in the suburbs. As soon as we entered the Metro stop, I heard someone yelling my name with an American accent. Um, what?

It turns out it was Lauren M '10, who also lives on Conner 2, and who I knew was getting to Madrid the same day as me to start her job with GMV, an aerospace firm. "Laura, guess what, I just got an apartment!"

And the moment she said that, I knew. "With Berny, right?"

"Yeah, do you know her?"

Okay, you math geeks, someone out there please tell me, in a city the size of Madrid, what exactly are the odds of that?

So within 12 hours of landing in Barajas Airport, I had my first utterly insane story of the summer. My friends are always telling me that one day, my life will make a really entertaining movie.

I spent the next day moving into my new apartment, tracking down the suitcase that never made it all the way to Madrid, buying a new cellphone, and trying to remember all that Spanish that I hadn't used in 3 years.

Monday was my first day at work, and seriously, my job is awesome. I basically have a Media Lab UROP. I'm working in the ambient intelligence group. Ambient intelligence is the idea that computing should be ubiquitous, invisible, and intelligent. So, for example, as you drive home from work, your car should send a wireless signal to your house and tell it to turn the heat back on. This means there are computers everywhere, they're all connected, and they do what you want them to either without you telling them, or with a very natural interaction. Typing on a keyboard and clicking things with a mouse are very NOT intuitive. Computers should be able to recognize your voice and gestures, and react to you that way.

Another good example is something that my coworker David is working on- a smart cell phone that offers tourist advice. Say you're out in an unfamiliar city, and you're getting hungry. Your cell phone can take your coordinates from its GPS, some preset preferences you've entered, the time of day, and recommend some nearby restaurants that are open at that time- and then give you directions right to its door. Maybe after you eat there you can tell your phone whether you liked it or not, and your phone would learn through experience, comparing possible suggestions to your rankings, and the rankings of other people in the network with similar preferences.

So I've been doing a lot of reading lately, half in English and half in Spanish, and most of it straight out of MIT. No joke. Most of the projects I've been researching have been products of the Media Lab. I think my boss is trying to make me feel at home. We're still working on defining my specific project, but I'll keep you updated when I know more about it.

So my job is cool, and my coworkers are even cooler. I've made a bunch of new friends here, who are all super friendly and oddly excited to hang out with Americans. I've already gone out with people from work at least 3 different times. They really like showing us typical hangouts in Madrid, and giving us advice about what to see and do. Plus, all of us speak varying levels of both English and Spanish, so we have a lot of bilingual fun teaching each other. David writes emails to me in English, and I respond in Spanish. There's a sheet of paper on his desk to which I keep adding useful tidbits of American culture and the English language. I call it his American scrapbook. On Friday, Carlos spent all of our lunch hour making me attempt various Spanish tongue twisters so he could laugh at my accent. But let me tell you, hearing "She sells seashells by the seashore" in a Spanish accent is quite hilarious!

So, I'm having a great time over here! I live right near Puerta del Sol and La Plaza Mayor, which are famous sightseeing spots, so I've seen them. I also took a trip to Retiro Park last Sunday, but other than that I haven't really done many of the typical touristy things yet. Then again, there aren't many. But Adelaide '09 is coming to visit this weekend, so we'll be sure to visit some of the more famous places when she gets here! (This all means that I have no pictures for you yet- sorry! I don't think I've brought my camera with me anywhere yet!)

Anyway, Madrid is more a city to be experienced than to be seen, and I've been doing a lot of experiencing! I love the food. I am going to be so sad when I go back to the US and can't have chorizo anymore. (I mean okay, chorizo is possibly the most fattening food ever, but still.)

Well, I've got to go grocery shopping, so we can cook something in time for dinner- which is served around 10 PM over here. I've actually gotten used to that pretty quickly, but I'm still not used to eating my largest meal at 2 PM! (Spanish lunch is the biggest meal of the day.)

Hasta luego!

So, I should be relaxed right now, right?

Wrong.

I need to have everything I own packed and stored by 6 PM tomorrow. Also, I'm going to be in Madrid in 4 days and still don't have an apartment.

So I'm still hosed, and only taking a small break to remind you that you only have one day to bid on Ben's autographed business card. ;-)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230253143995

We're up to over ten bucks! How crazy is that?! Ben, I think you really are a rock star.

Remember, proceeds go to a good cause that I haven't picked yet.

(I considered adding spoiler space here, but um...that'd just be weird. Because the rest of this entry is SO TOTALLY NORMAL and all, and I just didn't want to ruin that.)

Snively loves the Internet. Too much. Seriously...that kid is just weird sometimes. He gets the most disproportionate enjoyment out of the most random, absurd, completely mind-numbing oddities that can be found in the tubes. Do you remember awhile ago, when he blogged about the enjoyment he got out of "dramatic lemur," and how some unnamed "people in the lounge" were concerned for him?

Well, I was one of those people. Let me show you what that looked like from MY point of view:

This picture really doesn't even do justice to how...I don't even have the words. Seriously? That kid was...cuddling with his laptop. I'm not kidding.

Okay, now I'm going to make a huge jump to what might appear to be a TOTALLY different subject, but it'll all come together in the end. I promise. I have a gift for this kind of thing.

So, when Ben informed all of the bloggers that he'd be leaving MIT, we were obviously really sad. Myself included. I know that may seem hard to believe, since everyone has this image of me being this cold-hearted badass (an image perpetrated mostly by Ben himself), but seriously. Me. Sad. I swear.

But then I figured out how to make money off of it.

See, I remembered something that happened like, almost 2 years ago. I was in Ben's office so I could rant to him about how much I hate the world, or maybe he was giving me crap about my ex-boyfriend. (Seriously, every time I see Ben he has a new story to tell me about my ex. I wonder what he tells the ex about ME. I am truly sorry to all of you out there who will never get a chance to meet Ben and understand how completely ridiculous he truly is. You have no idea what you're missing out on.) Anyway, after the usual banter about my love life, Ben started talking about business cards. I'm not even kidding.

See, back in the day, the admissions blogs were hosted at mitblogs.com. So my blog was at laura.mitblogs.com, and Ben was at ben.mitblogs.com, etc. Then, at the beginning of the 06-07 school year, they switched everything over to the new server, after paying Mollie to update every link on the site and categorize every blog entry ever written. I will never understand that girl, I swear. Luckily, the old links still redirect, so whenever I comment I can just leave my URL as "laura.mitblogs.com" instead of "http://www.mitadmissions.org/Laura.shtml" because like...just no.

Anyway, the point is, as a result of this, Ben and Matt had to have new business cards made to reflect the new URL. Even though, as I just mentioned, the old ones worked too. Listen, I never said I understood the concept.

Whatever, the point is, Ben took a business card out of the organizer on his desk, flipped it over and grabbed a pen. As he signed his name on the back of the card, he explained to me that he wasn't just trying to get rid of these old things he was getting replaced, he was actually giving me a collector's item.

I stared at him skeptically as he handed me the card. Then, either he said, "No I'm serious, you can sell that on eBay!" or I said, "Wow Ben, thanks, maybe I'll go sell it on eBay and make a million dollars!" One of those lines was sarcastic, and one was not. I'll let you guess which was which. Anyway, one of us said this, but it was so long ago that I honestly can't remember which one of us it was.

So I took this "collector's item" business card, stuck it in the front pocket of my messenger bag, and forgot about it.

Until now.

I had been skeptical before, but now is clearly THE time to profit off of the collector's item. Two years out of print! Authentic autograph! (Really, I watched him sign it!) About to be obsolete! Authentic claim to being "old school."

So, without further ado:

eBay listing for "authentic Ben Jones autographed business card"

Let the bidding begin!

By the way, in the completely surreal event that anyone actually...wants to pay money for this thing (you blog stalkers are weird, let me tell you), I won't actually keep the money for myself. That'd just be weird. Hey Moneyman, is there anyway I can make a random donation of like $4.17 to the financial aid fund? =)

Also, I just charged 15 cents to my credit card.

So, just as I'm always telling Snively, sometimes the Internet is truly absurd.

Oh wait, I just contributed to that, didn't I? Foiled!

(See how I did that? It all came back together. And you didn't believe me!)

Now, whenever you print something to one of the campus printers (unless you take the action to turn it off), the printer automatically prints what's called a "header page" before all of your stuff. This page has your MIT username in the top corner, so you can quickly and easily find your printouts in the massive pile of stuff that has been strewn around the printer over the past few days. To make them less wasteful, the header pages always have something useful on them, like graph paper or musical staffs, so that you can actually use them for something, instead of just killing trees. They're also useful for clothing, as Ruth demonstrated at the Anything But Clothes Party 2 years ago.

Anyway, I had used a header page for scap paper and thrown it into the recycling bin earlier that day, so Diana decided to recycle it again to save my piece of cake for me. People sometimes go by their username as a nickname, and since another Laura moved onto the floor over a year ago, I've been trying to get everyone to call me by my username (with very limited success) ever since. I found the slice of cake in the kitchen the next morning, and decided to eat it for part of my lunch right before heading off to my 2.008 exam, which was at 12:30.

Then I noticed the small note below my username:

Well, Diana is an excellent cook, she probably knows best.

So I went and took the 2.008 exam, which SUCKED and was way harder than it ever needed to be, and I certainly didn't have time to finish. (Although it didn't seem like anyone else did either, so I guess that's not so bad.) Then I went to music class and had another test, which was just in major scales but still hard because I suck at music. Also, music is dumb. Intervals are just stupid. I don't understand them, so they should go away. After that I had another organizational meeting for MassCPR, this huge event that is ruining my life by not planning itself.

So, when I finally returned to the dorm, I walked into my room to find a slice of chocolate cake that literally had my name on it. I poured myself a glass of milk, and enjoyed Diana's delicious baking. Thanks Diana!

Okay, so an update.

Remember my to-do list from a week ago?

Well, some of them were completely impossible, and some of them I said "screw it, I'll do it after break." So I'm not totally superhuman, but after realizing my limits and readjusting, I'd sort of completed everything. Then I sent our technical advisor for MIT-EMS an email, explained to him what he needed to do to complete the event registration form I'd dropped off for him at MIT Medical earlier today, thanked him for being my hero and taking care of this so I could get away from this place without stressing out about whether the CAC would spontaneously call me up the day before to cancel the event that has ruined my life because the paperwork wasn't filed on time, and took out a big black marker to cross off the last item on the list.

So now all I have to say is:

Forget this place, I'm going to Paris. Oh, and Rome. HA!

I don't exist, because this is my to-do list:

No joke. It's an entire sheet of loose-leaf paper. With 2 exceptions, every item on that list must be completed within 1 week. Starred items must be finished today.

Speaking of starred items, I between taking that photo 3 minutes ago and writing the first 2 lines of this entry, I remembered another one. But I've run out of actual lines on the sheet, and had to squeeze it into the margin.

I hope you'll notice that I actually added a section labeled "fun." Basically I decided that if my to do list looks like that, I might as well add "GET OFF CAMPUS" to it, to keep myself from going insane. Unfortunately, one of the "fun" items has the description "Let someone else do it." No joke.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my list now that I've given you the proof of how completely hosed I am. (hosed = MIT slang for being so busy that your to-do list takes up an entire sheet of looseleaf paper)

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The reason all of these things need to be done by next Thursday is because I will be spending Thursday night packing for my week long trip to Paris and Rome.

And now you know why Spring Break exists. To keep us all from going crazy.

You might be wondering about MIT's language department, considering that....it's MIT, and languages don't involve math and all. First of all, I can reassure you that MIT does have humanities classes, and a lot of them are pretty awesome. In fact, MIT has one of the best political science programs around. For example.

But this entry is about languages. Unfortunately, MIT's selection is pretty limited, but the classes are still great. (We only offer Chinese, ESL, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and only one level of Italian is offered, and only over IAP.)

The very first humanities course I took here my first semester was 21F.716, Introduction to Contemporary Hispanic Literature. We read a different book each week (Bodas de Sangre, La Nada Cotidiana, La Plaza del Diamante, El Beso de la Mujer Arana, and a few others) and discussed them. As you might have figured out, the class was held entirely in Spanish, so it was pretty advanced, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Knowing Spanish has made learning Italian both easier and more difficult at the same time. It's easier because Romance languages have a lot of similarities, so I'm already used to conjugating verbs and making nouns and adjectives agree in number and gender. Plus, Italian and Spanish are even more similar than almost any other pair of Romance languages. There are words which are identical except for the spelling, conjugations which differ only slightly, and very similar idiomatic expressions. At the same time, this makes it difficult: because a lot of things are so close to each other that I often forget which is which. A perfect example: the word "and" in Spanish is "y" (pronounced like a long E), while the word "and" in Italian is "e" (pronounced like a long A). You can imagine that I mix these two up quite a lot. Throw in de/di, se/si, and so on, and you can see how this might get annoying.

But, the class was still awesome, and I will hopefully be using my knowledge when I visit Rome for 2 days this spring. Or, maybe I should say, hopefully I learned enough to get around Rome for 2 days this spring....

Anyway, like all good language courses, there is a listening component. And like all introductory language courses, there's that awful video series of 2 people (one male, one female) traveling around the country where the language originated making overly dramatic but grammatically simple statements. But we didn't use these materials in class- they were part of our homework assignments. So how did we access them?

The LLARC- the Language Learning and Resource Center is a familiar place to all who study language at MIT.

Right outside the LLARC there's a lounge, which is obviously cool because it has laser discs on the walls. I mean, come on. That's awesome. Also, there's a television which is always set to some foreign language channel or another.

The LLARC has audio tapes for all of the various language textbooks used at MIT:

And individual tape recorders you can use to listen to them. Here's what it looked like when I was doing Italian listening assignments:

There are also video monitors and computer stations for watching videos and doing computer based learning activities, and the walls are decorated with foreign film posters. There are also a couple of conference rooms which you can use to watch a foreign language film with some friends, or your whole class.

The textbook videos, along with a whole selection of other materials in each of the languages offerred, can be checked out from the front desk:

Plus, French comics!

Learning language through media is pretty awesome. Every day in Italian class, our professor would show us another Italian music video, and we would challenge ourselves to see how many words we recognized in each one. Then she'd hand out the lyrics and we'd go over them together, learning to translate the whole thing. Once we even watched a commercial for coca cola (which was hilarious), and a scene from 90210 which had been dubbed into Italian.

But by far the most awesome and class favorite video was Lunapop's 50 Special. It's about a guy who wants a Vespa. It's amazing. Watch it once, and you'll be hooked. Promise. I mean, it's Italian pop music! What's not to love?

Who ever knew YouTube would be such a great learning tool? (Don't tell Snively. He'd never see the sun again.)

Plus, completely not related: This is totally going to start up a huge gender/affirmative action war, but dude. Hilarious.

As I might have mentioned, I have never been outside the country (unless you count Bermuda and the Bahamas, which I don't). This makes me very sad.

It's hard to explain how incredibly jealous I get of friends who have traveled. I think it's a particularly touchy subject because I feel....well, "ashamed" is the closest word I can think of...of the fact that I've lived such a sheltered life so to speak, and when I gush over the fact that my friends have been to even the UK (of all non-exotic places, at least from our point of view), I feel the need to rush to my own defense, saying, "No, you don't understand! It's not my fault I'm this naive!" I'm sure some of you understand this feeling- it's very, very uncomfortable to feel defensive about things outside your control.

So I played around with that Facebook application yesterday, just to see how boring my travel experiences really were, and how little of world out there I actually know anything about. Places I've been are highlighted in blue. (Also, this is clearly a very US-centric program, since it delineates the US states but for example, none of the regional divisions of China).

Basically, the most interesting places I've been are Disney World, Utah, and the Henry Ford Museum.

But all that's about to change.

First of all, I'm spending spring break visiting Adelaide in France, with a 2 day excursion to Italy.

Second of all, I was officially offered a job at Telefónica. If the name sounds Spanish, it might be because the office I'll be reporting to every day this coming summer is in MADRID.

OhmygodI'msoincrediblyexcitedyouhavenoidea!

So basically, after 21 years of living on either the same street in New Jersey or the same floor of the same dorm at MIT, I'm finally taking matters into my own hands and knocking off as many interesting places as I can in the next few months. Any suggestions for weekend travel while I'm in Europe this summer? =)

And hey, if I get into D-Lab next semester, maybe they'll send me to Africa...

The only practical result of this for me, since I insist on denying that the future is rushing towards me at a terrifying pace, is that I am constantly being asked what I'm going to do when I graduate.

And I HATE it.

Why? Because I have NO CLUE what I'm going to do when I graduate. Furthermore, I'm spending four years bashing my head against textbooks about thermodynamics and control systems, and I don't even know if I want to be an engineer anymore.

I can't tell if I never even wanted to be an engineer and just accidentally ended up on this path which led me to MIT and my ultimate hatred of anything math-related, or if I'm just burned out from classes and getting sick of doing textbook problems instead of actual engineering, or if maybe I choose the wrong major after all and should have just been Course 16, or if I'm just in a grouchy mood lately and want to do nothing but lie on a beach reading all day for the rest of my life.

Luckily, I've found that Adelaide '09, despite being as mild mannered, polite, and sweet as I am not, usually agrees with me on matters of great importance, such as this. During one particularly gross problem set, she proclaimed that she would simply become a hermit in a cave in Hong Kong after graduation. I proclaimed that I would become a baseball announcer, since everyone on the floor has commented on how much enjoyment I get out of yelling at the television during baseball games. (This usually involves mocking the actual announcers for their lack of insight into the intricacies of the greatest sport of all time.) Adelaide told her mom about this plan, who wasn't sure that Adelaide would like it so much, so she suggested that Adelaide at least keep her options open- maybe there are suitable caves in other cities as well?

Inspired, Adelaide and I proceeded to spend the rest of the semester continually adding to the following list of ridiculously improbable post-graduation paths. The only thing is, we're not at all sure how ridiculously improbable any of them actually are...

• hermit in cave in Hong Kong
• baseball announcer
• The Daily Show
• Admissions Counselor
• Teach for America
• start up FIRST teams worldwide
• escape to Spain
• EMT/Paramedic
• wedding planner
• teacher
• Board of Education
• librarian
• author/screenwriter
• movie producer
• magazine editor
• book critic
• escape to Italy
• escape to South America
• engineer medical devices
• one of Santa's Elves
• actress
• United Nations!
• sock designer
• teacher at HTHS (my high school)
• Discovery Channel "reality" (host our own Mythbusters type show!)

I'd like to point out that the word "engineer" did make it onto the list once, at position 19, and was immediately followed by "one of Santa's elves." You see the scope of our confusion.

While this was going on, I was applying for a summer internship through MISTI-Spain. MISTI, which stands for MIT International Science and Technology Initiative (gah! embedded acronyms!), is a program which helps students find and plan study and internships abroad. I've been corresponding with Telefónica lately, a telephony and IT company based in Madrid. They asked me to come visit them at the European Career Fair, which was today in the athletics center on campus.

So I got up this morning, ate some waffles, and headed over to the fair. As soon as I got there, I realized an important fact: I was wearing jeans, and every signle other person there was in business attire.

Yeah, it had totally slipped my mind that I was supposed to dress up for these kinds of things. I'm very fashion challenged. So, I headed back to my room to get changed. This proved to be a difficult task, because I hate dress clothes and...well, I had an adventure. I found an undershirt and then put the collared shirt on over it. Was I supposed to tuck it in? What about the buttons? You only button the bottom half, right? Or something? And what about the sleeves? The shirt I was wearing needed to be cuffed...but do you have to fasten the buttons on the cuff afterwards? I didn't know. I decided not to, because I could barely bend my elbows without the sleeves cutting into my wrists as it was. I probably looked like an idiot. Maybe I should have gone to Charm School. How to Dress Yourself 101. Or something.

This is what my bed looked like when I left:

I successfully arrived at the Career Fair, now appropriately dressed. The first booth I passed was MISTI, one of the sponsors:

I wandered around the fair a bit, taking pictures for your enjoyment:

Then I briefly chatted with the representatives from Telefónica (they're interviewing me tomorrow, so we kept it short today), and then I wandered around the fair, looking for cool companies to talk to.

I picked up some information on Sennheiser (they design audio equipment...I never knew there were so many kinds of headphones), EADS (aerospace, defense and security projects), Stryker (designing medical devices, with openings in over a dozen countries including Italy and Spain...and hey! that was actually on the list!), and Finmeccanica (more aerospace and defense with a year long training constituting a master's program in International Business Engineering which takes place in Rome).

And then something happened.

I thought...that maybe I might actually want to be an engineer after all. Previously, the idea of having a job as an engineer in some firm just...bored me to death. And then I learned about some supercool and socially responsible European firms...and for whatever reason, the idea of doing the exact same thing I thought I'd dread, only in Rome instead of New York...made some sort of huge difference. I can't say I have any concrete plans. The coolest company I talked to today was Finmeccanica, and the chances that I would ever actually be admitted to their program is approximately zero. But still, some idea has been planted...so I think that maybe, if I can somehow manage to get a job doing interesting stuff and applying engineering to sustainability or renewable energy with a company that has projects which advance technical education, and can mix things up a bit by living in Italy or Spain...maybe this will work out after all.

While I was writing this entry, Alison '09 informed Zach '08 and myself that she was voting for Obama in the primaries, which basically shattered our respective worlds. (Alison is the resident Republican.) I immediately emailed Adelaide to tell her about it, and a few minutes later she sent me a Skype message about her concern for Hell, which had apparently just frozen over. During the course of our conversation, I mentioned this blog entry, and she told me to wait while she ran and got her Chinese notebook, on which she had scribbled another item for the above list which came to her in a moment when she was supposed to be studying:

Adelaide says: OOOH!
Adelaide says: i have something to add to the list!
Adelaide says: wait i wrote it down in the back of my chinese notebook!
Adelaide says: okay, and this is a serious plan this time (not that i'm not serious about the cave in hkg on occasion, but you know):
Laura says: of course
Adelaide says: grad school somewhere (possibly california since that's where all the cool kids are going these days, and, you know, good schools and stuff and i have to get out of mit), internship at the UN during a grad school summer (since they only take grad student interns), then work in developing sustainable energy things -- i'm doing tons of fluid mechanics here and am really getting into the idea of working on wind turbines/wave turbines. preferably, working in hong kong, but that's not required. and then, to keep life balanced, I would be a FIRST volunteer and a UN volunteer. and life would be good
Laura says: oh wow, that is like an actual plan

So, good times all around- apparently we're both figuring out what to do with our lives. So okay, Adelaide has figured something out, and I have a vague idea that I'm not totally screwed. But still! Baby steps! It's exciting!

Our conversation veered slightly off topic, and we started talking about classes we'd be taking. I leave you with this parting thought:

Laura says: did I tell you? I'm planning on taking 21M.051, so I can stop being musically ignorant
Adelaide says: i certainly don't recall you being musically ignorant
Laura says: ummm
Adelaide says: however, speaking of ignorant... i don't know what 21m.051 is
Laura says: it's called fundamentals of music or something
Adelaide says: oh ok
Laura says: and I am most certianly musically ignorant
Adelaide says: really?
Laura says: James was going on about the difference between minor chords and major chords, and I said, "what's a chord?"
Adelaide says: oh well never mind then
Laura says: my knowledge of music is that there are scales, with lines and spaces
Adelaide says: it's a start!
Laura says: and each one represents a note, which come in octaves
Laura says: I have no idea what that means
Laura says: the octaves part
Laura says: but I know you count by 8
Adelaide says: i mean, when you think about it, mozart didn't know any more than that when he composed his first sonata or whatever when he was 5
Laura says: haha so there's hope for me to be the next mozart =P
Adelaide says: precisely!
Adelaide says: ADD IT TO THE LIFE LIST!
Laura says: Adelaide, you're awesome
Laura says: this is totally how I'm ending my blog entry

The topic, you might be surprised, to know, was religion.

MIT's Asian Christian Fellowship hosted "Doubter's Anonymous," which listed the following description in the IAP guide:

"A discussion group about hard questions regarding faith and Christianity. Practicing and retired Christians, agnostics, atheists, and general doubters are all encouraged to come. Discussion will follow the questions that you anonymously suggest at the beginning of the meeting. Facilitators are Kevin Ford (an MIT chaplain and pastor) and Garrett Smith, who is well versed in Judaism, Eastern religions, and Christianity. Regardless of where you are on your spiritual journey, come and pose your hard questions about faith, science, Christianity, and doubt."

As someone who considers herself spiritual but often has a hard time believing things on blind faith, this seminar seemed particularly interesting to me. The two speakers took turns answers some tough questions, like "How do Christians view Muhammad, who said that God spoke to him? Are we to simply disregard his personal spiritual encounter?" and "As a scientist, how can I believe in things described in the Bible like the sun standing still, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc?"

Unfortunately, the seminar seemed more geared towards Christians hoping to strengthen their faith by overcoming these questions, rather than someone like me, who wasn't actually looking for a solid answer. Because of that, I found some of the answers less than satisfying. For example, the speakers explained their personal reasons for believing in Jesus rather than Muhammad, which was insightful, but without an Islamic point of view, the discussion...wasn't really much of a discussion.

One of the interesting things the speaker mentioned was that he thought that there should be a huge price for declaring faith- that'll keep you honest. When members of a certain religion are persecuted, only those who really believe in it will risk it. Think about it- when people are less tolerant, religion is more pure. Crazy. Looking at it from the reverse: part of the problem with Christianity today, in this speaker's view, is that if you grow up in a Christian family, there's a huge price for NOT declaring your faith. So you end up with a lot of people who say they're Christians when they're really not, which really dilutes the power and message of those people who are truly faithful. The world is unfortunately brimming over with the effects of this phenomenon as it applies to all religions.

The second question I mentioned above was perhaps more interesting, because one of the students at the seminar suggested that we change it to reflect some recent letters to the editor which had been published in the Tech.

Rather recently, MIT appointed Dean Randolph its first ever Chaplain.

This inspired a letter to the editor of the Tech by someone who opposed the apointment of a chaplain, and, as you can imagine, a few responses to that. I've provided the links to the letters below, but be warned, it gets heated pretty fast. My personal opinion is that the original letter writer is being horrendously narrow-minded, but see for yourself:

MIT does not need a chaplain
Responses published on 1/16
Responses published on 1/23

One of the speakers wrote on the board, "Is there purpose in the universe?" pointed to it, and asked "can science answer this question?" He claimed the answer was "no," because science isn't designed to answer that question. Even among scientists, it's pretty commonly accepted that the limit of science merges with philosophy. That there's a point at which things might just be unknowable, and that's where faith comes in.

As for the miraculous, science-defying events that happen in the Bible, he claimed that people just wrote what they saw, and we have to figure out what they meant by that. He posed the following example:

"If you're at the beach in the evening and the sky is a very pretty red, you might say, 'what a pretty sunset.' You don't say, 'Wow, look at the way the sun's rays are refracting through the layers of the atmosphere as its angle of declination to our line of sight changes over time.' You say, 'that's a pretty sunset-' but that's terribly scientifically inaccurate!"

I'm not sure how far this goes into convincing skeptics of the truth in the Bible despite its miraculous proclamations, but it certainly got a good laugh out of the crowd.

The other speaker took a different route: he claimed that there are so many miraculous things that happen all the time that we take for granted that we just never bother to try to explain them. For example, the miracle of birth. Sure we know all about the biology of it, but we seem to be so caught up in our detailed knowledge of the sperm fertilizing the egg and the chromosomes splitting and so on and so forth, that we never really seem stop to think that all of those cells doing their thing actually creates a new person. That's pretty miraculous, if you stop to think about it for a second.

Like I said, I had a lot of problems with some of the things the speakers were saying, but it did provide some interesting food for thought which should keep me mentally occupied for awhile.

So, in case you were wondering- yes, there is a religious following at MIT, but like in everything else, we're still MIT students about it- so we think too much and make science jokes about it too. =)

You can see more IAP activities related to religion here.

Responses to comments:
Isshak said:
do you like to read Kafka ? You should read The Trial, it's a great book !
What do you like to read ?
I haven't read any Kafka, but I do read pretty much anything and everything, so I'll be sure to add that to my list. I've literally walked down an aisle of the library and pulled a book off the shelves at random for leisure reading. In general, though, I'm a big fan of fantasy, however cheesy and unoriginal it might be. I just love reading about people who are doing more exciting things than me, leading brave and epic lives and fighting evil and what not, because I'd totally love to be one of those characters. I'm also a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut, because his stuff is very sarcastic and satirical, and sarcastic just might be my middle name. One other thing I love to read but am never, ever able to finish is Hispanic literature. It's just so hard to get through a whole book in a non-native language. It takes SO long, but I absolutely adore Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende anyway. They write with what's called "magical realism" which is a style that relies on blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Sorry for the long-winded answer, but you did ask me a question about one of my favorite topics ever. =)

Justin Powell asked:
Also this might be a dumb question but I have looked for the emails of the bloggers a few times and have not been able to find them... Where the heck are they??
This one has already been answered, but for anyone else who's wondering, all of the bloggers have contact information listed to the left of their banner photos at the top of each of their entries. Feel free to contact me at asklaura at mit dot edu. I will reply to your email, but I can make absolutely no promise as to how quickly I'll accomplish that.

Also, to everyone who sent in blog entry ideas in response to my last entry: you're awesome! Obviously they won't all be happening right away, but rest assured that I've taken note of them and will be tackling them eventually. If you ever have any personal questions or blog entry ideas, please let me know. Believe it or not, the comment section below is not specifically designed so you can have a "first post" war. And like I said, I do reply to all the emails I get from you guys. Eventually. =)