Hodge-Podge by Snively '11

I should be sleeping right now. I should be tired. I got less than five hours of sleep last night, but for some reason I’m awake and feeling guilty about having not blogged in a little while.

I think I may have said this before, but my summer is very routine and kind of boring. I have very little awake time during the week and there isn’t a whole lot to blog about. Yes, I know, I will eventually write about work, the application, the Celtics riots, the Red Sox game I went to, yadda yadda yadda, but there’s just so little time to write when I could be sleeping.

So little happens during the week that I’ve taken to writing notes to myself on my iPod Touch, things I should remember to mention on my blog. Each could have its own entry, but I’ll fall asleep before accomplishing that, so I’m going to go through them all in this entry. These are totally random, maybe not what you’d typically expect from me (or maybe you would?), and kind of interesting. Here we go!

1) Before Wall-E there were previews for movies that are coming out soon. Two of these movies probably involved screenwriters on crack who have no judge of what movies the public actually wants to see. These two movies include Madagascar 2 and Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Why? WHY!? The third preview actually looks good. “Bolt” the wonderdog has extreme potential, see for yourself:

2) It REALLY bugs me when sound mixer people fade music that’s supposed to acoustically explode. Crescendos exist so that they can reach a climax, not so they can be turned down so the speakers overload. Examples of this include:

This song, 8 seconds in,
This one at 4:15
and this one at 11:30

3) If you are a girl and you smell good, you earn uber bonus points. Smelling good can make up for a lot of shortcomings, as shallow as this sounds (but isn’t that why you wear perfume, for guys to notice?). Personal favorites? Vanilla and sweet pea. If I catch you wearing these then I automatically consider you a friend.

4) Have you ever noticed that Kellogg’s Corn Pops and Fortune cookies have the same aftertaste?

5) I remember something that happened at high school graduation. A tradition existed at my high school. The seniors sneak inflatable beach balls into commencement every year so that we have something to play with between all the speeches and name calling. My year was no exception. When you enter staging for commencement they make you give them your cap and gown, which they proceed to shake. They then check you for any visible bulges. If you’re clean then you get to put your gown on and wait to graduate. I found about a gazillion ways around this system, and thus managed to get 9 beach balls and 2 inflatable dolphin rafts into graduation. The 9 beach balls were on my person, smashed flat under some Under Armor shorts and some baggy khaki pants. The dolphin smuggling was a bit more covert. There was no way to sneak them in on me, so I had to organize a hand-off. The graduates walk right by the band on the way to their seats, so I gave a percussionist a small packaged that contained two dolphins, wrapped in masking tape. As we marched by he just pulled it out of the cymbal bag, held it under the roped off area, and a friend grabbed it, hid it under his robes, and got it all the way to our seats.

The funny part about this is that I was very involved in digging beach balls out of my pants for much of commencement. As such, I didn’t realize that the faculty speaker was finishing up his speech. I also didn’t know what order the ceremonies were going in. During a particularly extravagant attempt to remove plastic from my pants I heard “And now to deliver his commencement speech, senior Michael Snively!” Oh.

I didn’t have time to zip up or button my pants and I had a beach ball hanging halfway out. I quickly tightened my belt and jumped up, creating a nice and comfortable Under Armor wedgie, and started towards the stage. I tried to make my awkward under-robe situation as invisible as possible, but there was definitely some creative shuffling and strange steps on my way to the stage. That’s right, I gave my graduation speech with my pants half off, a beach ball hanging out of my waist band, and a giant wedgie. I rock.

6) I took a class called 2.001 last semester (you look it up) taught by professor Hosoi. The other day I was reading CNN and stumbled upon this article:

Click to read article

OMG! My professor was in CNN! This was beyond cool. What was even more beyond cool was what happened once in class, securing Hosoi as awesome in my book forever.

At the end of each week we were all handed blank notecards that we were allowed to anonymously ask questions on. Then, after reviewing all the cards, Prof Hosoi would post her answers online. Sometimes there were no questions and students improvised. I decided to test Prof Hosoi’s 1337ness one day and simply wrote “My spoon is too big” on the notecard. Would she respond? How?

By the way, this quote is from the following video:Watch More Videos       Uploaded by www.bebo.com/YaManicKill

A couple of days later the answers came online. I scrolled through looking for my card. BINGO! There it was, at the bottom. What was the response?

“I am a banana!!!”

Hosoi, you win.

7) Looking back on high school I realize that I’ve experienced just about every girlfriend stereotype I could imagine. These include: the cheating girlfriend, the sketchy girlfriend, the overly physical/affectionate girlfriend, the girlfriend I met online, the girlfriend that moved away, the girlfriend that now wants to kill me, the long distance girlfriend, and the perfect girlfriend. Very few people know who all of these girls are, but let’s just say that high school was definitely an opportunity to experience different types of relationships.

8) If you ride an escalator that’s only wide enough for one person, you better be walking up or down that escalator. If you’re on an escalator wide enough for two people you’d better be standing if you’re on the right or moving if you’re on the left. If you’re doing anything else, I (and many many other people) really just want to shove you out of the way and tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Don’t be an escalator n00b, be courteous and think of others.

9) Did you know that there’s a junior mint factory right on the edge of campus and that every so often (a couple of times a month) the air all around main campus will smell like junior mint?

10) I’ve been doing the same thing every morning for the last two months. It’s routine. Other people have routines as well, and I’ve started to notice what other peoples’ routines are. There’s a lady that gives out copies of “The Metro” at South Station who, every day, will walk up and order coffee from McDonalds right at 6:05. There’s a guy who sits at the same table in the station reading the newspaper, every morning, with a green baseball hat that says “Ice” on it. The train conductor is the same every morning, and when I skate from the train stop to work I always pass a donut place and wave and say hi to a black guy sitting in the same spot on a bench, waiting for somebody.

Routine is kind of cool, it makes you feel semi-psychic knowing what you’re about to see when you round a corner.

11) People say firefighters are like brothers. This is true, maybe more so than you thought. My dad has been a fire captain for as long as I can remember and as such, I grew up around fire stations, fire trucks, and fire fighters. As a member of a fire fighter family, I get certain perks. Any fire station in the entire country is open to me. Seriously, if I needed a place to stay or somewhere to crash/shower/rest then I can walk up to any fire station, introduce myself, tell the firefighters that my dad is a captain, and I can just wander in. Fire station parking lots are also accessible, as are directions if I get lost. It’s amazing how close firefighters are, it’s really really cool.

12) Sometimes I wonder if, before I spend a large amount of time talking to somebody or giving them advice about applying to MIT, I should administer the geek test to all potential MIT applicants that ask for help or advice. Maybe MIT should even include it in their application? Reading responses to that test would help me answer so many questions more effectively and it really lets me know what a person is like. Therefore, if you ever want to guarantee the number one priority in my e-mail inbox and want a very long, thought out reply, include which items of the geek test you checked. I will over-achieve in answering your question.

13) People complain about my blog entries all the time, saying that they’re dumb and have nothing to do with admissions at MIT. This bugged me a lot one day so I wrote a reply on my iPod, which I’ll copy directly to here:

The blogs are an atmosphere, reading a single post isn’t enough, MIT is how you feel after reading hundreds of posts, seeing the mix and how blog entries change over the course of the year. An overall impression is built from many different types of posts.

That about sums it up. Try to see the forest through the trees. Just as a casual exercise, read through my entries and by looking at frequency of posting and tone of entry, try to figure out when I was most stressed during the school year. Ignore the actual content, just go by tone and frequency of postings (because sometimes I’ll lie and say I’m doing great when really I’m slowly dying).

14) I was at Home Depot the other day and say 4 foot long zip ties. They were amazing. I want some, I have no idea what I’d do with them, but I want some.

So that’s it, everything from my iPod. Hope you enjoyed, it was kind of fun typing these all out!