*witty title here* (Guest Entry) by Snively '11
You want awesome? I'll show you awesome!
By Chris Mills ’12
It’s 3:30 a.m. I have to leave to get to the airport in approximately 30 minutes. In a moment I’m all too familiar with, I glance at the clock and wonder how I managed to waste so much time. My suitcase is unpacked-in fact I haven’t even brought it down from the attic- I’m unprepared. It’s not entirely my fault though, I’ve been up all night reading and looking at pictures of the most amazing place I’m going to be visiting.
MIT
After going through the surprisingly crowded entrance to Bush Intercontinental, my mom and I settle down in the terminal. We decide to grab some breakfast and her mom instinct kicks in by insisting we take a picture:
far more chipper than I
The rest of our flight is a blur, mostly because I slept. When I woke up, we were landing at Logan. The guy sitting next to us asked me what I was doing visiting Boston, so I told him about getting into MIT and CPW. After a brief conversation he gave me his business card and told me to call him if I was ever looking for summer work. Wow, I’m beginning to like this place! My mom and I flew in on Wednesday so that we could have a day for travel and use it to look around Boston a bit. We walked down Newbury st. and took a look at all the quirky shops before eating dinner at Vinny T’s.
Boylston Street
My mom and I spent way too much money at The Coop and retired to our room.That night I tooled away on Calculus homework while watching the Discovery Channel (I was meant for MIT!) until my friends finally showed up to the hotel.
roughly 3 a.m. Thats my party face.
THURSDAY:
So I’m supposed to go meet Snively (my host with the most) at 10:30. Thinking there is no way on Earth that I’ll wake up before noon since Massachusetts is an hour ahead of Texas and I didn’t go to bed until roughly 3, I set three alarms. In a random anomaly in the universe that my close friend Stephen Hawking is still trying to reconcile, I woke up at 7:00. Odd. I got up and got dressed and headed over toward campus to register for CPW. Along the way I saw this and nearly died laughing, which made everyone on the street think I was crazy:
Just so you know where that steam is coming from. (Note: I later learned this is legitimate, and not a joke. Still funny though.) I registered and met Ben Jones! (pronounced Ben Jones factorial) Laura and…someone…. (I’m horrific with names):
They handed me a CPW packet which looks like this:
That card you see in the lower left was loaded with $20.12 TechCash. Clever!
I met Snively and briefly-but-awesomely faked him out with a real thick southern twang. I don’t know if he actually bought it, but he played along well in any case. I wanted to take a picture for my blog but he said later because he was too hosed(remember that, it’s ironic later) Most of the rest of the day I spent in Boston until the CPW prefrosh welcome and festival:
We call him Blurry Stu. The blur is not the film.
Also the festival was incredible, there was break dancing, music, and….err….trauma simulation….
FUN!
I planned on going to Math Until We Die @ 2 a.m., but unfortunately I fell asleep. FAIL.
FRIDAY
Probably the most eventful day ever. I woke up to go to a Fin-Aid meeting with my mom at 10. Then I came back and hung out in the dorm and talked to Snively for a while. He’s a cool kid, I imagine we’ll be friends. After a while the inner boy kicks in and we go off to scrounge for food. Along the way we met Viva Coles from CA at a barbecue by Kriesge (hey did you know it’s an 1/8th of a sphere?…) Now, I’m from Texas, so every time I heard “Barbecue” I imagined brisket, or ribs, sausage, or at the very least, barbecue sauce. No, instead there were hot dogs, and hamburgers. But they were free and delicious so I won’t get picky.
After chowing down on some free food we decide to go pay for food at Anna’s Taqueria (Reason #38 why MIT is awesome) Anna’s is delicio
us. Our motley crew then decides to head over to the Academic Fair to learn about a small but growing interest at MIT: Academics.
An actual class. (Reason #22 why MIT is awesome). They had finger painting set up so I did one:
get it?
And irony:
Following the Academic Fair we went back to Burton-Conner for another barbecue. Oh yea, and look at this:
Reason #64 why MIT is awesome.
Snively and I poked around at Simmons, where we threw their dining room chairs around. and guess what? they bounce! I accidentally bounced one into a table which made a loud crashing noise and garnered looks from people walking around. Simmons is cool though, very unique architecture. My camera died so I don’t have a lot of pictures of these next parts, but Meet The Bloggers was amazing! First of all, they had root beer floats. It was cool to talk to all the bloggers in real life. During the course of meet the bloggers I decided to finally matriculate for real, since I’d experienced enough of CPW to make a valid judgment on if it was good or not. Not one to wait around, I matriculated on Snively’s iPod Touch. The most epic way to register ever.
I was supposed to go meet a friend of mine named Jack for a campus tour, but it was getting late and Jack was tired so instead my new friends Danny and Jennifer and I head over to Alpha Delta Phi for a foam party. I’m a bartender, so I’m familiar with what exactly a foam party entails, Jennifer and Danny….not so much. Danny decides he’d rather go to Random, but I manage to convince Jennifer that it will be fun. I was right, it was, and all the ADP brothers were really nice. When we left though, Jennifer was afraid of dying of hypothermia so we threw our pants in the dryer and sat around in towels waiting for them to dry. For like 5 hours. Eventually we grab our dry pants and head back to Burton Conner for a comedy movie marathon until I pass out around 3 or 4.
Saturday:
I woke up around noon to go see my friend off to the airport. After that I returned and found Snively filming the marching band. We became marching band groupies and followed them around campus. They played such awesome songs as Final Countdown and Dragonstei den tei (also known as Numa Numa) as well as the Engineer Drinking Song, which if you haven’t heard you should go google immediately. The band even played for Susan Hockfield!
All this marching made us hungry, so we went back to Burton Conner for -surprise!- a barbecue! All this eating made me anxious to hear live music so I went over to Battle of the Bands. Sadly, Ben Jones wasn’t playing this year, but there was an awesome band known as elephant house. I left early so I could head over to East Campus completely randomly. When I got there I met some really cool people who showed me a neat trick with Liquid Nitrogen ice cream. Trust me it’s cool. Following that spectacle, my friend Jack decided that he would take me on a tour that night. After the tour, I retired back to Burton Conner for some indoor games until I got tired and went to bed.
SUNDAY
My mom insisted on waking up early and going to breakfast at Dunkin Donuts. So I met her there. I also stopped in at La Verdes for some much-needed caffeine. They had a somewhat limited selection though:
be carfeul, there is a lot of sarcasm on the floor.
Mom and I then went to the MIT museum down the street. Looking around in there was a nice way to wrap up my MIT experience. Everyone is a lot of fun, but underneath it all, there are truly brilliant minds at work. That’s what is amazing about MIT to me, that the people there play as hard as they work, there is a balance between the two, work and play, mind and hand, mens et manus etc. We returned from the museum and I went back to the dorm to get my stuff. I poked Snively awake so we could take our picture and here is the result:
remember what I told you to remember? look how hosed we are!
Out the door and on a plane back to Texas. Where I could change my countdown timer on my blog from CPW to Orientation week.
only 4 months to go.
*If you enjoyed this entry, feel free to check out my entire CPW blog @ charlemagnecpw.blogspot.com
first??
good entry btw. i like the picture of the energy drinks the best.. i never saw that at cpw.
i suppose i could’ve taken the time to read it and still have gotten first post. but i didn’t wanna take the risk.
Wow, I thought for sure you were kidding with your “Profession: Bartender” entry on your blog profile!
lawl… I’m still experiencing that after-shock from caffeine for 4 days at MIT
@___0
The other person in the photo with Laura and Ben is Mollie. Just throwing that out there. :D
Anyway, nice entry.
The monster coffee they had sounds gross.
oh whoa I think I met you during the BC barbecue thing when they had that random raffle? or maybe during the DMSE open house.. but definitely sometime during the weekend lol.
Trogdor the Burninator! :D
The one thing I choose to notice out of all of the pictures…
Apparently dying cameras was the theme of CPW this year.
not only is bankman famous, he wusses out of parties
hey, way to make it like you weren’t scared of dying of hypothermia. i just didn’t want wet pants!
what would the TSA say about a cactus? You can take fruits and stuff on domestic flights, would a cactus count?
HEY!!! Wait until you see my footage of MIT Steam–yes, yes, that’s right–15 WHOLE SECONDS. LIVE FOOTAGE OF MIT STEAM!!!
WOOT!!! Okay… you guys may all back away slowly now…
But don’t worry, that’s not the strangest thing… wait until you see EC’s bathroom…
And I am being VERY VERY SERIOUS. I’ll show anyone–see y’all in the Fall!!
@ Becca
I don’t know necessarily that TSA would have a problem with it, but they aren’t the people I’m inclined to take chances with either. Not to mention it means I’d have to carry a cactus around the entire time.
Umm am I the only one that when he mentioned that he named his cactus “Jim”, the cartoon Ed, Edd n Eddy came to mind.
Hehe, hilarious post- nicely done!! I especially enjoyed the pic captions. XD
I know, I’m stalking my own blog, how sad.
@Shauna
AHH!! congratulations you win the prize! I didn’t think anyone would pick up on that.
Chris, stalking your own blog is not sad, it is another level of coolness ^^’
Great blog by the way !
@ Chris: Yeah, they do tend to get a bit prickly after spending some time with them. Sorry, bad attempt at a pun, but yeah, I didn’t get one for the same reason. Maybe someone should have planted some or something and seen if a cactus garden would grow.