The short version is this: please give anything you can to support the parents of a 2010 alum, who were both victims of the bombing and are both in serious condition, at http://bit.ly/whalleyrecovery.

My name is Jess Kim, and I'm a 2010 alum. I've tried to make sense of the tragedy that happened in Boston this Monday, knowing full well that that may never happen. My heart is broken for Boston and the victims of this horrifying tragedy. This post is about two particular victims - the parents of a good friend of mine, and a fellow MIT alum, Rich Whalley '10.

On Monday evening, Rich posted on Facebook that his mom and dad had been at the finish line and he was unable to locate them. He had seen his a photo of his dad in the news reports of the bombing but had heard nothing about his mom (warning: graphic images ahead). We called every hospital in the Boston area until we were able to find them at two separate facilities; since then, these have been very long and tiring days. Ann is now stable but has numerous severe external wounds. Eric, on the other hand, was hit by shrapnel that entered through his eye; as a result, he has sustained severe brain trauma and will need several follow-up surgery, including a neurological operation later this week. Their family has a long, hard road ahead of them together as they recover from this awful tragedy. We've set up a recovery fund to ease some of that burden, and much of the MIT community has already rallied around the Whalleys to show their support. Anything you could give would be greatly appreciated, and please feel free to share this link: http://bit.ly/whalleyrecovery.

It's been stated previously that no one in the MIT community was hurt, but Eric and Ann Whalley are very much a part of this family. All funds will go directly to the Whalley family to help them with the expenses related to this tragedy.

Thank you very much for your love and support, and please be safe out there.
Jess

My name is Jess, and I graduated in 2010. That makes me twenty-three whole years old. I am impossibly old. I am improbably old. According to science (and by science I am obviously referring to Science Magazine, who published a study on my expected lifespan in their spring 2010 edition) I should have died by now, considering the way I continue to regularly eat peanut butter straight from the jar, or food that has fallen on the floor. I am probably the age of some of your older brothers or sisters, with whom I am competing for a space in an attentive yet flexible elderly care facility. When I was 18, I don't think I even knew anyone who was in their 20s, but now you do, and I am here to represent my decade of twenty-somethings (my least favorite phrase after "meat lover," "panty-dropping," and "we're all out of tacos") by giving you some elderly-person advice.

(Although I am not as old as a postdoc in my lab who shall remain unnamed to protect the aging, who told me, 'I was asking our undergrad [Janet] if she had seen Silence of the Lambs, which came out in 1991. And Janet goes, 'I was born in 1991!' And I was just like, 'please keep that information to yourself, JANET.'")

(I know. I know when you were all born, and it's after 1991. Please follow unnamed-elderly-postdoc's advice above and keep this information to yourself.)

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'm writing this entry for a few reasons. One, because the last entry I wrote as a blogger my senior year ended on something like a "stay tuned for my next blog entry, after graduation!" which I never wrote, and I imagine my tens of tens of readers were waiting with bated breath for an entry that never came. And by tens of tens of readers, I obviously mean just my mom, and today is my mom's birthday, so happy birthday, Mom. I've given you the gift of breathing! (Kind of like you did, twenty three years ago!) Two, because I hung out with a freshman recently who was all like, What's 50 Things? And I think my pacemaker almost stopped just right there on the spot. (You should go read 50 Things right now, if you haven't already. It is required reading for entering MIT. Don't worry, I'll wait.)

And three, because I'm about to be class of 2016 myself. After working for two years in Boston, I'm moving back to California to start medical school, where I will be wearing flip flops every single day, even in the OR. (See, this story does have a happy ending!)(It ends with me losing all my toes.)

I wanted to pass on some advice I would give to myself as an 18-year-old, other than stop eating food that has fallen on the floor; you're not as sneaky as you think you're being, and people can see you. I don't have 50 pieces of advice; Ben pretty much covered most of those bases already. But there are a few big things that I've tried to live by or maybe wish I had realized when I was your age, and I hope you find them helpful. So here goes nothing -

Try to actively put yourself out of your comfort zone as often as possible. When you put yourself in a situation that's uncomfortable, you learn things about yourself that you wouldn't normally discover sitting at home in your sweatpants eating Twizzlers and watching seven episodes of Game of Thrones in one sitting. (I would never do that! I hate Twizzlers!) Like for example, you're surprisingly resourceful! And you can meet people you wouldn't normally come in contact with! People who might be casting agents for the next season of Game of Thrones and just happen to be looking for a Korean-American character who wasn't written into the books! You know, things like that.

Change is a good thing.
As a freshman, I had a group of friends who I did everything with. We took the same classes, ate lunch together, went on road trips to Cape Cod together. We celebrated Passover and Christmas and pranked each other and held sleepovers and in short, they were my first family at college. We had an incredible first year together, and I thought it could only get better from there.

And then three of my very best friends in the world decided to leave MIT. (The retention rate at MIT is something like 97%, in case you were wondering.)

I was really, completely devastated. After relying on my friends for pretty much everything, I had no idea how to rebuild, but eventually I figured out I had to move. It took me a while, but I got up the courage to move to a floor where I knew almost no one. And it turned out that moving was the best thing I could have done.

Because here's what happened all when I moved to Burton 1, and met my second family at MIT: I met the girl who answered her apartment door for me at one thirty on a Tuesday night, when I needed a friend the most. She introduced me to the boy who, on my last night in Boston, stayed up until 3 AM with me, who borrowed a car and drove me to the airport two hours later. I learned how to start a dance party anywhere, any time. I fell in love and drove to the Grand Canyon. I made connections on my new floor that took me to Haiti, Monaco, Japan, and Senegal, all completely paid for (and even sometimes with a stipend!) by MIT. (Please, please do this. If you need help finding out how to go places through MIT, email me. Here's your first hint: you know all those weird pamphlets they sent you about things like MISTI that you probably either threw away or used as a napkin? Please read them. It's like a cheat code for free travel, if your life was a video game. MIT honestly paid my friend to go spend a month in Mongolia learning how to kill goats without spilling any blood. You know, the important stuff. There is nothing that broadens your perspective like living in another country for an extended period of time. In my opinion it should be a requirement to graduate, but, you know, it is much easier to sit at home and eat Twizzlers, Game of Thrones, etc.)

But back to the point - when I look back on how much of my life has been shaped by the people I met, just because I moved that one time, it's absurd that so much of my life hinged on that one moment. Because I moved, I met the people who I know will someday be in my wedding and at my medical school graduation and helping me raise my children. If I hadn't been brave enough to make that change, I don't even know if I would be headed off to med school today.

On a somewhat related note to that message - move. And I don't just mean dorms - when I was applying to college, the single most important thing was for me to go to school as far away from California as I could. Now I'm a little older, and applying to med school the single most important thing was for me to go back to California. I absolutely love Boston, and I'm so heartbroken to leave it, but there are times in your life when you realize you're stagnating. You still have a lot of growing to do. Move. 

Let chapters end. 
A study of a seventy-year-olds by the NY Times found that those who viewed themselves as happiest often viewed their lives as separated into chapters. The thing about every chapter, though, is that they all have to come to an end eventually. I have the worst time letting go of things, but you can't force people to stay the same just because you want them to. It doesn't mean you were any less important to each other when you were in each other's lives.

Which reminds me - the boy (or girl) who breaks your heart really badly and seems impossibly cool was just like you, lost and confused and a total nerd, this time last year. Forgive him anyway. He will never know the strength you've gained from having met him, and you'll be more careful with other people's feelings because of it.

Ask for help. It's okay to ask people for favors! Ask people for help all the time! Ask the lady next to you to help you zip up your sweater on the T and she'll probably do it, even if she thinks you're a weirdo with big thumbs! 
I grew up with two of the most supportive parents a girl can ask for, and I happened to go into a field that my parents are very well acquainted with. Inevitably, this means that my parents have tried to get involved in every facet of my career - trying to get me interviews with different labs, finding me shadowing opportunities with their friends, etc. And for a long time, I was really embarrassed by this. I rejected a lot of their efforts because I was scared, and I thought that I could only rely on myself.

Here's a big hint: the world doesn't work that way. We rely on other people to get us where we need to go, and I quickly learned at MIT, a few thousand miles away from my parents and any help they could try to impose on me, I still needed the help of those who had previously done what I hoped to do in order to get me to where I needed to be. Embracing that took a long time, and in turn I try my best to give advice and support to those who are now where I was not so long ago. It takes one person to extend the hand, but it doesn't make you weak to take it. Take the help; it's what you do with the opportunity that really matters.

There are a very short list of things in this life that can't be improved with a sense of humor. It'll make for a great party story later on.

And if all else fails, be brave!
I've been trying to write this entry for over a month now, and I'm finally finishing it on the plane ride home from Boston. You'll find that at this point in your life your friends become your family, and I'm leaving mine just as many of you are leaving yours. I'm terrified to start over, but I was just as terrified six years ago when I moved away from my real family in California to come to MIT. Sometimes the thing that you hold on to the most, the thing that's the most comfortable for you, is also the thing that's holding you back from the life you really want. Be brave. Grab the risk with both hands and don't look back. At the end of the day, you'll be better for it.

Be the kind of person who talks to cab drivers. Waste less time thinking about what other people think of you. Learn how to write a thank you note, and write them often. Sing karaoke. Stop worrying about what your hair looks like; nobody cares nearly as much about it as you do. Approach these next four years with an open heart and an open mind. Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for. But in my experience, and in Conan O'Brien's experience, if you work hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.

I can't wait to hear about all the amazing things you're going to do with your lives.

 -Jess

One of the best parts about Rambax is that you don't need any musical background whatsoever to start playing with the group - it's taught as a co-curricular class (21M.460) you can take at any point during your time at MIT, along with a few extra rehearsals. You also don't need any dance background, as evidenced by this video of us learning to dance on the beach in Dakar:

The music scene in Dakar is one of the most vibrant and thriving environments in the world. We often went out at night and stayed out until sun up dancing to mbalax music - a type of modern music in Senegal that incorporates sabar rhythms with guitars and piano - and sometimes they even invited our teacher Lamine up to play with them:

And finally, just for fun: here is a love song we wrote about Chocoleca, a peanut butter-chocolate spread that's sort of like the Senegalese version of Nutella:

In sum: there are a lot of things you can do at MIT; one of them happens to be learning about the incredible West African music scene from world-famous Senegalese drummers. I'm failing at a way to end this blog entry without using "check it out," but you should definitely check it out. Jërëjëf!

(For those of you who don't remember me, I'm a '10 graduate who once spent three months working in Tokyo. That's about all the backstory you need. Also, nice to meet you!)

You would be hard-pressed to find a piece of technology as varied in usability, as widely distributed in height, as completely and utterly mysterious as the Japanese toilet. From the bare minimum squat toilet in the ground that is commonly found in public bathrooms, train stations, and unfortunately, at my work place, to the highest of high-end seat-warming bidets that opens the lid automatically upon the user's entrance, complete with a little spout at the top for washing your hands when your business is complete, Japan's variety in chosen tool of sewage disposal truly brings the standardized American can to shame. It's a totally different cultural experience - and much like their toilet, living in Tokyo offers different type of cultural experience that may even leave your tuchus toasty warm.

I've spent the last three months working at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Tokyo doing behavioral analyses and studying the immunohistochemistry of zebra finch songbird pair bonding, and trying to soak in as much Japanese life as possible. Working in a Japanese lab has been an interesting experience, to say the least - while my lab is an international lab run by an American professor, the majority of lab members are Japanese, including Mai, the graduate student I primarily work with. This leads to all sorts of amusing Lost In Translation-type situations in which she tells me to go run the experiment by Monday at the latest and I thought she meant that I should go run the experiment right now, and I end up staying until 9 with Owen Wilson hair when she finds me and finally tells me I should go home and probably get a haircut.

To take things a step further, however, there's no lab dress code. Other people in my lab often wear shorts and open-toed shoes - in fact, Mai has a pair of open-toed lab slippers she changes IN to. The cherry on top of this weird, informally-dressed sundae is that I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who wears gloves. Maybe it's a sign of seniority - being so good at bird surgery that you don't even get blood or glue or anti-rabbit antibodies all over your hands like I do - but it's a little unnerving. Especially in a country where one in ten people regularly wears a SARS mask.

In fact, as an American I find a lot of the Japanese culture contradictory. Japanese people don't seem to sweat, ever, meandering through Shinjuku Station in heavy winter jackets and snowsuits, even though this is one of the most humid summers I've ever experienced. They frown upon eating on the subway and jaywalking and by all appearances, are more observant of The Rules than any group of people I've ever met, but I've been carded for purchasing drinks at clubs or bars approximately zero times this summer. (The drinking age here is 20, so celebrating my 21st birthday here was a bit anticlimactic.) During work hours, uniforms are standard wear for school children, salarymen, and even train conductors, but Japan is also home to some of the world's most eccentric street fashion trends (ganguro, maids, lolitas, gothic lolitas...) Public universities are seen as more prestigious than private ones, summer vacation is only one month out of the year, mayonnaise comes on everything, even pizza and once I ate a burger with a hole in the middle filled with mayonnaise..

I think the thing that made the biggest impact on me was the revelation the United States is one of the only countries in the world with such a richly diverse ethnic population. It may seem like such an obvious, ubiquitous, wholly unimportant statement, but this is something you don't truly realize until you live in a foreign country and get stared at everywhere (or in my case, as a Korean American, walk around with your Caucasian and African American friends and get stared at everywhere), and it's an extremely powerful force that should not be underestimated. I didn't fully get it until one day after lunch, having coffee and a discussion with a Greek research assistant and an Italian postdoc (RIKEN, as I mentioned, is an international lab, whose population is about 20% foreigners). The Greek man was under the impression that the US was a dangerous place, filled with gun-toting crazies around every corner because nobody knew how to relate to people of different backgrounds, but the Italian put it all in perspective for me: "No, no, no. When I teach classes in America, there are no less than four different ethnic groups represented in my class. Indian, Chinese, Caucasian, Latino... they are all there. Working together, learning together. I would never think twice to see a Chinese woman as the head of a big company in America, but in Italy? That would NEVER happen."

I came to Japan to immerse myself in the culture, develop my language skills, and eat as many noodles as humanly possible - but I come away now with a new awareness of this country that was tightly shut to foreign influence for the majority of its history, a country that is mostly racially homogeneous - and a new respect for the colorful foundation that America stands on. Because while homogeneity is useful when looking for your blonde non-Japanese-speaking friend who's 6'3" at Japan's busiest subway station, it's also a major difference between my home country and my current one, and it's helped me to realize that our country of racial diversity is a minority in a world full of divided people. And when you realize that there are so many other people in the world who go about their daily lives in just slightly different ways, ways that actually represent a deeper, greater difference in the way they think about everything - that completely changes the way you see the big picture.

(We found her eventually, by the way. My friend. She had to give the phone to a random Japanese guy on the street and he explained to us where she was, but it was no easy task - Japan's busiest subway station is also the world's busiest subway station, with over 200 exits. And an underground arcade! Super Mario, anyone?)

I've done a good bit of traveling around Japan - hopped on stones over the pond at Heianjingu garden in Kyoto as dark koi circled my feet, played with the tame deer at the base of the world's largest indoor Buddha in Nara, walked around Japan's biggest rock garden at Koya-san, watched a ninja fight reenactment at Nikko, climbed one of Mt. Fuji's hardest trails during one of the worst nights of the season to the top, experienced a transgender hostess club, enjoyed my host family's Japanese dinner party in a yukata (their parting gift to me), and indeed - ate many, many noodles. And these are all things I could not have experienced if I had sat on my butt all summer at MIT (except for eating noodles, but that would've required a lot more Top Ramen than would have been enjoyable).

People back home often ask me how I'm doing spending three months away from all my friends and family, in a foreign country where I only somewhat speak the language, in a culture so far removed from the American one to which I've grown accustomed. Everyone wants to know what Japan is like, and I always tell them, "Japan is weird." And it is a totally, completely, utterly weird place. You can take a train to a synthetic island off the coast of Tokyo to see a five-story Gundam that moves and blinks its eyes, and then go get your ears cleaned by a girl in a maid costume. But there's also so much beauty in all this weirdness, and recognizing that it comes from a long history that makes the US look like a toddler of a country. Now, I'm finally starting to understand how all this comes together to create a country packed with people who think a woman is more beautiful if her skin is pale, and that it's tasty to put fish eggs and rice cakes on a pizza.

These are just some of the many weird things I've learned to experience and love during my summer in Tokyo!

So this entry is a tribute to those never-posted blog entries, whether they stemmed from ideas or were just introductions to things I intended to write at one point or another. Today, we pay tribute to those we lost along the way, those that were too tired or sickly or too weary to make it (meaning, I fell asleep while writing and never got back to them): the great, never-finished blog entries.

1. From September 5th, 2008:
"I've attended public schools all my life, public schools that never had a stricter dress code than "spaghetti straps should be the width of two fingers, and if you wear a skirt shorter than your thumb your mother didn't raise you correctly," and so it's come to my attention recently that I've started to fall into a particular dress code - dictated by my schedule. I have a heavy class schedule Monday through Wednesdays, so I'll usually make a little more effort on those days to wear something I might call a "normal" outfit; Wednesdays I have labs, so I'll always be wearing long pants and close-toed shoes (and if you see me in otherwise, feel free to send me home with a note to my mother). But Thursdays and Fridays I only have one hour of class, and so Thursdays and Fridays it is a miracle I remember to go outside at all. It follows, then, that Thursdays and Fridays are sweatpants days. "

*I don't want to brag, but there were definitely some semesters that were sweatpants semesters. Just sayin'.

2. From September 7th, 2008:
"I've been at home for almost two weeks now, and have spent about half of that time roadtripping along the west coast. Not like the fun cool kind, where you go with your friends from high school and do fun cool people things, like get really bad indigestion from eating Taco Bell six times a day (what, you didn't do that?), but the kind with 24/7 family time. This means every conversation starts and ends with one of these questions:

1) You're wearing that?
2) Have you eaten/drank/slept/gone to the bathroom today?
3) Has the dog eaten/drank/slept/gone to the bathroom today?
4) Really, you're wearing that? Didn't you wear that yesterday?
5) What is that smell?? Oh, it's just Jess, she's wearing the same thing she wore yesterday
5) What are you doing with your life??????????
6) Why haven't you blogged in the last TWO MONTHS?

In between breaths, take a few hundred family photos in front of a Las Vegas hotel Christmas tree, eat four times your weight in Korean food, and spend a couple days waiting for your mom in the car, and you've pretty much got my holiday experience right there. Also, I sneezed really loudly just now, so you can throw some snot in for extra flavor.

Anyway, about #6. New Year's resolution, Internet. For reals this time. Along with working more hours on the ambulance, learning the crap out of my classes, spending more time reading and doing creative projects, saving the planet, and losing those extra 400 pounds, NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION. You can hold me to that."

*Heh. Yeah. That one worked out real well.

3. From September 19th, 2008:
"So a couple weeks ago I got this couch from FAP (blog entry regarding Freshman Arts Program coming soon, I promise).* It's awkwardly shaped and doesn't really fit in my room - having it here means an entire corner cut off and my futon is rendered unaccessible, tucked away underneath my bed - but its presence has changed how I reside in my room entirely. I no longer sit at the hard wooden Institute-issued chair at my hard wooden Institute-issued desk, my head screwed on straight and ready for studying. Instead, I lounge slovenly and totally ungracefully across this green rounded sofa, one leg propped up on the former chair that housed my rear and the other strewn across the back.

I won't lie - it's a pretty good way to live."

*I never did write that entry about Freshman Arts Program, and so I'll say this - in 2009 I was a film counselor for FAP, and it was one of the most ridiculous and enjoyable weeks of my life. I not only taught an awesome group of freshman everything from how to hold a camera to how to edit in Final Cut, I also shot a ten-minute epic film noir, wore a garbage bag and sported a terrible British accent as the Black Night from Monty Python of the Holy Grail, and led a segment on interpretive dance.

Sometime during the summer you'll get information about signing up for Freshman Pre-Orientation Programs (FPOPs), and I highly suggest you try FAP. Or for the less artistically minded, Discover Mechanical Engineering (DME) is a pretty good option, too. Or if none of the above sound good to you, there's also Freshman Outdoors Program, Freshman Leadership Program, Freshman Urban Program… you really can't go wrong with just about any FPOP. A lot of people I know meet people they're friends with all throughout MIT during this first week, and most all of them don't regret it. (Kidding!)Try it!

4. From December 31st, 2009:
"The MIT Externship Program matches MIT alums around the world with currently enrolled students in an effort to expose us to real world job situations for the month of January, with different degrees of involvement. Some are given actual projects to complete by the end of IAP, others are just there to observe. I fall mostly into the latter category - I'm shadowing radiation oncologist Dr. Anthony Abner, a member of the class of '83 with a degree in course 8, with Steph L. '11. For the most part the experience has been very educational, and sometimes very inspiring - the 89-year-old woman with chronic lymphocytic leukemia who, over five weeks of treatment, went from having very inflamed skin lesions that were weeping fluid all over her body to return almost completely to normal, all with a big smile on her face; the 72-year-old woman who'd outlived all her siblings battling breast cancer, Crohn's, and a bad case of psoriatic arthritis that caused her fingers and toes to become so deformed that she'd had to have surgery so that she could still wear shoes - and survived, claiming, "My other doctor said, 'The only way to kill you would be to shoot you!' And I said, 'You'd miss!'"

*This was one of the rare, more serious posts that I wrote and never finished, and I always really wished I did. Shadowing Dr. Abner during my last IAP was one of the most valuable experiences I had during my breaks at MIT, and I will never forget seeing my first surgery (a brachytherapy case, in which radioactive seeds are inserted into the prostate to help reduce the cancer), nor the 62-year-old woman with substance abuse problems, no insurance, and a bad tumor in her pitutary gland, nor the way the different radiation oncologists and medical oncologists and radiologists worked together to diagnose a particularly difficult case. And I'll definitely never forget holding a still-warm enlarged human kidney, moments after it was extracted from the body, after a six-hour laproscopic nephrectomy. These were all experiences that definitely contributed to my desire to go into medicine, and it was all because of connections through the MIT Alumni Association. Which I guess I'm now a part of. Man that's weird.

5. From March 31, 2010:
"Last week was my last spring break ever, a fact I was not fully aware of until I noticed my boyfriend, who graduated last year, was making plans for a mid-April vacation in which he and his friends would take two days off from their Jobs, capital J, to go to the Carribbean. "It's Adult Spring Break," he explained, and then it finally hit me that when you graduate you become an Adult, with Obligations, and Jobs. And no spring break. Which I was a little sad about, until I remembered that most of my spring breaks through 17 years of education (16? Do kindergarteners have spring break? Did anyone else just envision a bunch of toddlers sipping margaritas from sippy cups in high chairs on a beach in Cancun?) entailed me going home for a week, and my mom telling me to wait in the car while she bought six packs of toilet paper on sale at our neighborhood Safeway."

*This entry was, as you can probably tell, initially intended to be about my senior spring break. In between glorified photos of hiking up a volcano, scuba diving, and lounging on the beach, I intended for this entry to have a deeper purpose: to express gratitude for the people I consider to be my closest friends. Those who know me (or at least those who have been following along all these years) know that I moved dorms between freshman and sophomore year - to a place where I knew almost nobody - and ended up with some of the kindest, funniest, and good-looking people around me. So my advice to you is to never accept anything less if you know something doesn't feel right. Fortunately, MIT has a very flexible housing system, but I'm not just talking about that. Move around. Not just at MIT. There is always something better; it's just up to you to go get it.

And with that, I'm getting away from my laptop and heading outside! Stay tuned for my final entry..

For those who aren't familiar with the i3 DVD, i3 stands for the Interactive Introduction to the Institute and serves a first introduction (or second, after CPW) to all the different dorms. Each dorm makes a short video showcasing the culture, talent, and innovation of each dorm, while also welcoming the incoming freshman class. Most i3 videos, especially Burton Conner videos, are a montage of parties, study breaks, and people running around the dorm yelling a lot set to loud music, but when we were elected i3 chairs we decided we wanted to do something a little... different. So without further ado, I present to you: the 2010 Burton Conner i3 video.

A few notes about this video:
* The film stars over sixty different people, and took over 40 hours to plan, shoot, and edit over a period of two and a half months.

* There are at least 14 different memes in this video.

* I sent 107 emails having to do with the i3 over the course of this year. A lot of them were very wordy and long-winded. Some of them were "oh my god, can we do that" emails. Other ones were "I can't believe we're doing that" emails.

* The video is currently posted on YouTube in HD, YouTube (regular quality), Vimeo, and TechTV, amassing over 10,000 views (10,377 to be exact).

* Snively and I each make cameo appearances in the video. (Garrett, on the other hand, was our camera man and didn't show up until we finally get a hold of a tripod at the end.) See if you can find us?

The point is that they're two people who are my age, both of whom I love and mean a lot to me, pledging to spend the rest of their lives together. And the last time I checked that was something that only grown-ups did. (Also buying gifts for people off of a registry. And saying the word 'registry'. What I really want to know is do people ever use registries for anything else? Because they seem like something I really want to sign up for.)

It's a weird feeling, this growing up thing. Last Thursday I walked out of my very last lecture at MIT (9.65, Cognitive Processes), expecting the Lightning Bolt of Adulthood to strike me down to the sidewalk as I walked out the door of building 46, but it never came. After I finished my last exam this Tuesday, I began packing to move into my new apartment, for which we've already paid first and last month's rent, and looking for cheap furniture on Craigslist. Still nothing. I picked up some more prunes and denture cleaning solution from Shaw's on the way back to the retirement home. Even then, nothing.

Regardless of the fact that I've spent four years here and still feel like I haven't changed much at all, there are still a few things I hadn't done in Boston until last week - first of all, go to a Red Sox game:

I don't know why it took me so long to go see the Red Sox play. I actually sort of like baseball and I actually REALLY like Fenway Park hot dogs, which I didn't figure out until halfway through the third inning. I also didn't realize it was going to be freezing even though it's been fairly nice out, and so I spent half of the game burrowing my face into my scarf and the other half peeking out to see what the score was. It was still pretty enjoyable, though, and I left filled with Boston pride and a serious craving for more hot dogs.

Speaking of Boston pride, last week was also my first time at the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), which seems pretty ridiculous considering I grew up being taken to, and falling asleep during, San Francisco Symphony concerts as a kid. The night we went to see the BSO was a special event - John Williams, composer of such famous theme songs as those from Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T., Indiana Jones, Cinema Paradiso, and pretty much every other movie soundtrack that gets stuck in your head for days on end, returned to conducted the BSO (he was the principal conductor from 1980 to 1993) in a special event called "Hooray for Hollywood!", in which the orchestra paid tribute to Williams' most famous compositions, in honor of the BSO's 125th anniversary. And it was amazing. Maybe even more amazing than the fact that we'd gotten student rush tickets on the main floor for $10 with our MIT IDs.

And in case you don't recognize them by name - this is Hedwig's theme, from Harry Potter:

For a few of the selections, they also rolled down a video screen and played clips from the films:

And finally, they ended with:

It was a pretty amazing concert, and even though I had two papers due the next day, both of which I didn't start until about 1 AM, I couldn't help but think that this wasn't something I would have done freshman year. I would have given up the concert tickets and missed hearing selections from one of the greatest composers of our time. I'm pretty sure those papers - which did get finished, by the way, something else I learned to do in four years here! - won't go down in history as the greatest papers I've ever written, but I'm also pretty sure that I'll remember that night for a really long time. At least until I start losing my memory and my hair, but then I wouldn't have remembered those papers anyway, would I?

Tonight we drove through the city at the latest we'd ever been out here - we've been making a point to get back before dark, since some of our professors were concerned about safety - and saw the city in a whole different light. The majority of people here don't have electricity at night - or at all, so even more people come out than during the day (if it's possible) after dark to huddle around the one light bulb, or one candle, at one store on the corner. It's such a common pattern that when you look out over the city, instead of seeing wide windows filled with electric light, you see dots everywhere, as if you're looking at the stars but against a city, not a sky. It was so incredible that Amritaa '10 and I both stared out the window in awe, agreeing that even though we both considered ourselves decently well traveled we'd never seen anything like it before.

Tonight is also our last night in Haiti. The last few days were all such a blur - I got pretty sick yesterday, so I wasn't able to write or go anywhere or stay conscious, really - but our project actually came together, and we were able to coordinate with four different NGOs. We spent all of today training representatives from International Action, a physician who runs two HIV/AIDS clinics that in total see over 2,000 patients a day, and the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief on how to use our kits before leaving them here in Haiti, after sitting in on meetings with NGOs and NPOs and government organizations and soaking in as much as possible as we could about the current state of water quality in Haiti. And somehow, it all came together.

We also heard so many stories. We listened to our professor's cousin's husband tell us that he and his seven colleagues had been in a meeting when they slid four stories down to the ground, and then he walked a half hour home only to find that his wife wasn't there. (She came back two hours later, but for those horrible two hours he had no way of knowing she was safe.) We heard a student tell us about how he'd had to wait for hours under the collapsed remains of a building until someone came with an ice pick and dug him out of the destruction. We listened to the president of the state university of Haiti describe how he pulled his father out of the rubble, but his mother wasn't so lucky. "His wife, my mother, died in the earthquake. They were married for sixty-five years, and it was over in thirty seconds."

It's been an overwhelming week, filled with sorrow and enlightenment and the realization that there is so much more that needs to be done, so much that needs to be changed, that won't get done any time in the near future. It's been something I still can't describe, after writing all this just now, and something that I will never forget.

Tomorrow we'll leave Haiti, and this part of our project will end, but I fully intend to continue working with our partners here in Port-Au-Prince when we get back to Boston. Tomorrow we'll leave, but the street vendors will still be selling mangoes by the dozen and the tap-taps will still be screaming through the unpaved streets and the people will still come out at night to see by the light of one little light bulb.

Maybe it only takes one.

Today began with a trip to the mechanic at the Technique Club Garage, about half an hour away from our hotel. Darryl and Marvin '10 are working on a project that uses pedal power to generate electricity through an alternator, to be used to charge a cell phone battery at bodegas or local shops, so they'd planned to visit a Haitian mechanic to discuss the feasibility of the idea and put the machine together. Our mechanic was a really friendly guy who picked up on the idea right away. In fact, he even began adding his own contributions to the project, drawing out alternate designs that they could use. The limiting factor was, as usual, electricity - his power had gone out that morning and wouldn't return until the afternoon, so since he didn't have the capability to weld anything we told him we'd return back before the day was over.

We had one particularly awesome moment with him when he kept saying "facil," meaning "easy." Marvin asked "If it's so easy, then why haven't you done it yet?" To which the mechanic replied, "Because I didn't have the idea."

After leaving the parts that Marvin and Darryl had brought from MIT behind, we headed off to Darbonne, the epicenter of the earthquake, to see the school where the Waveplace pilot program was being executed. We were a bit early for the meeting, however, so we stopped by the side of the road to look around one of the tent cities and wait for our friends from last night. While we were waiting, a fourteen-year-old boy wandered up to us and began speaking to us in Creole. Marvin, who speaks French, asked him if he spoke French as well, and the boy said yes - but he couldn't understand most of the things Marvin was saying to him. He did, however, understand when Marvin asked if he liked music - and replied with "Akon!" So Marvin handed him his iPod, and then we were serenaded with Akon's "Beautiful" by a fourteen-year-old Haitian kid. Which is probably one of the top ten things I've ever experienced, save for surviving Mt. Fuji and flying an airplane. (Shortly thereafter, our professor emerged from the trees and was like, "WHAT are you doing to that poor guy?")

(I should note that we have extensive photo and video documentation of all this, but it'll have to wait until I get back to more stable internet connection. Aaand literally as I just wrote this, the power went out.)

The Waveplace people - Beth, John, and Bill - arrived to take us to Darbonne, where we sat in on a meeting with several of the mentors who worked with the kids and the XO laptop. Most of the meeting involved discussing the educational goals of the program, but we also talked about the structure of Haitian education as a whole, as well as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in Haiti. The Waveplace program, which is distinct from the OLPC program, lasts six weeks and is the third of its kind. Its main focus is to see how children learn best using the eToys software - a programming and storytelling software - and how these programs can be improved in the future. After the program is over, the XO laptops stay with the children forever, although there is the problem of energy - most all of the children do not have electricity at home, and as such can only use it for a limited time after school, where most of the exploration and self learning happens.

After the meeting, we headed over to the school, where we hung out with the children during their class time and used the bare minimum of Creole we had learned (mostly just "Koumon ou rele?", or "What's your name?" I also learned "Kilaj ou?", or "How old are you?", but since my French is pretty lacking I couldn't always tell what they said in response. Should've paid attention more in school..) Watching the curiosity and creativity brewing there was amazing. As I mentioned, Waveplace is separate from OLPC, but the programs share a lot of similar goals in getting the children to love learning - which is especially important in Haiti, where many schools still use rote memorization techniques. Professor DeGraff also told me that when he was a child most all schools were taught "to be silent in French", since using French is seen as a status symbol here, and even though everyone speaks Creole most schools still teach in French. These classes, however, were all taught in Haitian Creole, and the children were as raucous and joyful as any fourth or fifth grade class in the United States might be.

We said goodbye to our new friends and returned to the mechanic, where we dropped Marvin and Darryl off for two hours while the rest of us went to a university-turned-camp. There we met the president of the university, who is also Haiti's leading expert on earthquakes. He told us that there were 20,000 people living at the camp on their campus, or about 4,000 families of around 5 people each. He also explained that the camp was run by ADRA, an NGO, and that the university had not been in session until about two weeks or so ago. Now that the students were coming back to school, both refugees and university students attended classes together.

We returned to pick up Darryl and Marvin, and made the long trek home, where I incubated our water samples from yesterday. During dinner, we sat with a group of nurses who were working with International Medical Corps, who told us that they had been working for around two weeks and were mostly leaving the next day, although one was planning on staying until June. They told us about their major problems - infrastructure, access to reliable lab results, lack of equipment and specialist physicians - as well as shared a few crazy stories, such as the man who had taken a machete to the head and had to have a craniotomy performed right on the ER floor, since the OR was too dirty. They also invited us to come with them one day and observe, so hopefully we'll get to go either Thursday or Friday.

Professor DeGraff's brother and sister-in-law also came and met with us for dinner, who told us a lot about Haitian politics, and Clinton's involvement in the relief effort. What I found most striking was that the current president, Preval, has been in power for ten years - and is the only Haitian president to have served out a full term without being overthrown or driven out of the country - but there's still so much dissatisfaction with him, since people believe that he hasn't accomplished anything in his two terms. There are rumors that he'll try to revise the constitution to serve a third term, since there's a two term limit - to which I asked what the restrictions were to revising the Haitian constitution, and Professor DeGraff's brother replied: "All you need is the political will, and a signature."

Shortly after I put my samples to bed and headed up to wash off all the dirt - you know it's bad when you blow your nose and it comes out gray - and jump into bed. Tomorrow, we'll return to DINEPA for the WASH cluster meeting, as well as meet with students from Dale's cousin's university and go to the Haitian television station for the broadcast. For tonight, I'll keep trying to get the dust out from between my toes. And fingers. And ears.

Jean Francois sent us to Madame Elise, a woman involved in the testing aspect of DINEPA, whom we showed our testing kits. She told us she had used our method before and would be interested in helping us distribute them but needed to call around for us, which was again, really exciting - our biggest problem thus far has been trying to get in contact with people on the ground here, so to be offered instant help by the biggest water organization in Haiti was definitely a plus. We told her we'd be back on Wednesday for the WASH cluster meeting, a big organization put together by the UN based around water and sanitation issues, when we'd speak to her again.

DINEPA was actually not the first organization we went to - we'd also stopped at CAMEP, a company that distributed water to several camps, but were turned away because the man in charge there did not have permission from his bosses to speak to us, and as such didn't want to say anything that could misrepresent the organization. His reluctance to answer ANY of our questions, even the seemingly innocuous ones like "where do you distribute", was explained to me as fairly representative of business culture in Haiti by one of our Haitian professors, Professor Michel DeGraff. Our other professors are Dale Joachim, a visiting scientist to the media lab and a Haitian American, and Barry Vercoe, who works in music processing as well as with One Laptop Per Child.

After DINEPA, Amritaa '10s noticed a radio/TV station across the street, where she wanted to go since her original project was in health education programs on Haitian Radio. So she and Marvin '10 ventured in with Professor DeGraff, who returned outside shortly afterwards full of excitement. "You have to come in!" he told us. "The wife of the man who owns this radio station is my childhood friend, and she wants to meet you!"

And so, by complete coincidence, we entered the building to receive a tour of the station. The station was run out of a pristine-looking house, in sharp contrast to the other buildings we'd seen throughout the city center. The people working there explained to us that they'd been based more inside the city until they'd bought this house, and had been in the process of moving everything up when the earthquake hit. They also asked about our projects, and the man who ran the station (who incidentally looked and sounded a LOT like Quincy Jones - anyone? anyone?) said he liked what we were doing, and that we held a lot of power as young people, and that he wanted to broadcast us speaking about our projects for television. And that is the story of how we're going to be on Haitian television. (!) I wish I brought something other than free t-shirts and sweaty jean shorts. Oh well, it isn't like MIT's hygienic image is getting much better.

After this fortuitous meeting, we stopped for lunch, after which we wandered around town for a bit more. We also visited Dale's cousin's house, whose husband is a dean at the state-owned university, and whose students will be visiting us on Wednesday. These students have been out of school since the earthquake hit, and the dean mentioned that although many of them wanted to help after the earthquake - as many of them were civil engineering students - the government has not issued any request for help from these students, so they haven't done much. Dale's cousins also showed us how their house gets power - basically by ten big batteries that get power from the city during the day, and at night they use an inverter. The city shuts down power during the night to save money since not many people can afford an inverter, and so most people go without power. I should also mention that many people have told us that there isn't a great feeling for the government here. Many people don't believe the government is doing everything they can to help the people, and are hoping for more significant action come the October elections.

From Dale's cousin's house, we returned to the hotel for our last meeting of the day, with three Americans who work with WakePlace, an organization that has a series of programs for the XO. These people had distributed forty laptops each to seven different schools in Haiti, teaching a drawing/storytelling/programming program called eToys for a period of six weeks. We spoke to them for over an hour about their stories from working with the children here - one encouraging fact is that the laptop does belong to the children, who take them home and often play with them with their families. After a long night of playing with the computers, however, many of them run out of power in the morning - and electricity is a major issue for these laptops. Dale had brought a solar panel from the United States to help with the electricity issue, but its power can only be used for so many computers.

Our final meeting of the day was another random encounter, in which we met a bunch of ER nurses who are actually from about five minutes away from my hometown. They told us that said they were with some program based in Southern California that sends nurses to help out for two weeks or more. One of the most difficult things about the experience, though, is that many of them don't speak Haitian Creole, which is much more commonly used than French here. On top of that, since many of the Haitian doctors and nurses are no longer getting paid, many of them abandoned their posts after the earthquake. The nurses also told us they see a lot of tetanus, rabies, machete wounds (apparently machete is the weapon of choice here), and gun shot wounds, as well as hypertension and high blood pressure - since now people know they can get free care from these volunteer health workers, they just get sent down to the ICU.

After speaking to the nurses, we finished up our water tests and headed upstairs to tend to our sore feet and many mosquito bites. Today we'll go to an XO school in Dalebrun, at the epicenter of the earthquake, to work with the children and see what they've come up with. We'll also bring one of our water kits to potentially teach some of the children at the school how to test their own drinking water. Michel is also teaching us a little Creole, so - N a wè pita! (See you later!)

So today, we're in Haiti.

I don't know what I expected - I guess I didn't really think about how bad it would be here until I stepped off the plane. I've traveled to developing countries before, and I've traveled to areas after they've been hit by natural disasters before, but never of this scale. We got off the plane, and the airport was mostly intact except that immigration was in a warehouse - that was the first clue that something was off. After hopping in a van, we rode through the mostly unpaved roads of Port-Au-Prince to see signs of destruction and devastation in every direction. There are tent cities for miles. People everywhere. Concrete rubble and garbage flow in waves down long streets; turn the corner and what was once a house lies in shambles.

It seems like an impenetrable problem. How to rebuild after all this, how to deal with so many displaced people, how to implement infrastructure in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere - and most of all, how to make sense of all of this in just one short week. This is what I'm struggling with the most - I feel like we can never do enough, and yet I want to do so much. I feel ridiculous and strange sitting in a hotel room with air conditioning writing on the internet about how I feel when there are thousands of people outside our door without a roof or running water. I wish there was more that we could do.

But there is also the undeniable sense of hope here; there are still people dancing and singing in the streets. As we stood on the roof of our hotel after dinner, looking out at the mountains and the stars hanging above Port-Au-Prince, we listened to salsa drifting over from a neighboring restaurant and watched women carry huge buckets of waters on their shoulders, stepping to the beat of the music. There is something so resilient about the spirit here that I can't help but naively hope that maybe we will be able to do something small to contribute, even if we're only here for one short week.

Tomorrow, we'll go to meet with representatives from the Haiti WASH cluster, which is a UN organization that deals with sanitation and water issues in Port-Au-Prince. Tomorrow, we'll begin to work away at the impenetrable problem, doing whatever small things we can to contribute. Until then!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(What can we say? Kresge gets around.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HYPERVENTILATION.

"...of MIT."

Oh.
Hey Susie.

Let's try this again, shall we?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me back to my own life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopefully, we'll get it right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the view on the way down was spectacular.

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

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

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

Uh, no.

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!)