Parting Remarks Part I: Leaving Marks by Abby H. '20

Maybe it’s a little existential, but at the back of my mind, I am always thinking about what I will leave behind once my time on earth comes to an end. It would be great if I left more than bones and a carbon footprint at the end of all of this.

Now I’m not saying that I’m dying any time soon, but my time here⁠01 In LiGhT oF rEcEnT eVeNtS rElAtEd To ThE cOvId-19 CrIsIs, read: <em>there</em> at MIT has come to its end. And I do not want to be just an entry in the registrar’s records, a person who exists on paper but not in living people’s lives.

I am sad about leaving. What has made me less sad is thinking about the little “marks” that I am leaving behind: evidence, however ephemeral, that I was here and I affected MIT in ways other than bringing down the average on almost every exam I took. Here is the far-from-comprehensive⁠02 I only included stuff that I have photographic or other evidence of list.

A handful of murals. In addition to the elephants I painted on my door sophomore year, I put some other stuff on the walls. A frequent collaborator was my friend Ethan M. ’20, who did some excellent tape work.

me and ethan painting an F in the Fentry stairwell

the finished product

the burning giraffe in F32 is one of mine

the noid (I had a lot of black paint)

the bit of wall next to my old room: I am not responsible for the upper Squidward

ethan did the letters, I did the gadsden flag

the wall next to my most recent room, which I intended to add more stuff to

this is an ethan original

another ethan original, very cute

As I rushed to take pictures of the murals on my move-out day, I considered leaving out Ethan's unfinished Space Ghost tribute. But I couldn't do that.

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A $25 waffle-maker. There’s a reason this one was left behind: just because it can be cooked in a waffle-maker doesn’t mean it should be. I hope someone uses it.

me and Olivia S. ’20 figuring out that you should put the chocolate chips on the waffle after it cooks instead of mixing the chocolate chips into the waffle batter

A brief cameo in an SFS video. Not sure why I did this.

A tombstone for MacCon, the deceased MacGregor Convenience store. The 2020s are perhaps the only ones who remember MacCon and we will carry its memory with us when we graduate.

I spent a lot of time summer 2017 doing this kind of stuff with Ethan

A solidarity banner for the deceased(?) Senior Haus. Ethan and I took it upon ourselves to paint our own banner back when everything went down. I think someone called the MIT police on us when we were trying to install it on the balcony of E entry, because a cop car showed up and just kind of waited there. We ended up hanging it in the window of our main lounge, visible to anyone walking down Amherst Alley. It’s now rolled up in a closet somewhere.

the teeth were the hardest part

A failed mailing list. One day, Ethan (the same one who has been in almost all of the above items) remarked on how he would gladly venmo someone a surcharge to buy him a Diet Coke from Verde’s and bring it to MacGregor. This was before MacG had vending machines but after MacCon had shuttered its glass door (see above). I threw out the idea that there should just be a free-food style mailing list but for people willing to do odd jobs. Thus spawned the mailing list “odd-jobs.” It flopped. There were a few funny requests that were sent, though.

A thousand people who’ve seen my bedroom.

this screengrab is so tiny

An unofficial CPW event. There was a pretty hyped up fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor that happened during REX⁠03 Residence EXploration AKA the time before orientation where you try out other dorms to see if you want to move somewhere else 2017. This email got at least 40 people packed into the Flounge to watch sweaty men pummel each other.

respect women

Bringing late night acid to WMBR. This was a message from a listener who appreciated my acid-house-themed special edition show.

WMBR DJs love it when you text them

My name outside the Walker lab in Building 68. I’m going to miss my lab.

Very Cool !

Book-sharing among Concourse⁠04 a freshman learning community that was great but wasn't for me (disputable). I’m not saying that I invented this, but in fall 2017 I sent an email to the Concourse ’21s offering my old books to them for free.

Two years later, I was working desk at MacGregor when someone came by to drop off Concourse books for someone else. I didn’t think about it for a while, but then it hit me: these could be the very books that I passed down. Maybe I started something. I didn’t check the books for my name in the front cover out of respect for the recipient’s privacy and also because I wanted to keep the magical idea alive.

Improved quality of thesis defense posters in Building 68. Maybe this one is disputable, too. But tell me how it just so happens that thesis defense posters from after my post look like this:

Some changes to the format of the financial aid award letter. In June 2019 I wrote a post about how I was itching to find emails to respond to/send in the vacuum of classes ending and summer beginning. One of these emails went to SFS. I had just gotten my financial aid award letter and had some trouble making sense of what exactly I needed to pay. So, I emailed someone, and they supposedly⁠05 I may never know since I will never again receive a financial aid award letter from MIT implemented some of the changes I suggested.

A parting message written in The Book⁠06 a book where DJs/engineers write important updates about equipment issues, running for general manager, becoming OTA engineers, etc. at WMBR, from a scene not included in that video I made as an intro to WMBR/documentary of the blur that was the week of March 8, 2020. Can’t help but plug it once more because I put several hours into editing and assembling and subtitling that thing. I don’t remember what exactly I wrote, but it was a heartfelt good-bye.

Hector and Jackie signing off their own farewells in The Book

And finally,

Almost 60 posts on this very site. I went back to look at some of them and they’re not as bad as I remember.

But then of course there are the marks that MIT has left on me. There is no way you can go here and not change just a little. Here are those changes that I’m aware of.

A greater appreciation for low-level absurdity. I wrote a whole post about this, but my time at MIT has been plagued by little cursed incidents.

facts

:o

I don't want to get into why I made this image but it was for class

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A cure to my freemium gaming obsession. I played a lot of Tiny Tower, Pocket Planes, Pocket Frogs, and Simpsons Tapped Out in high school. I liked assigning tasks and optimizing in-game currency flow, but it got to where I would plan my life around these apps. I never spent any real money on them, but I thought about them constantly. You will find none of those apps on my phone these days. MIT will give you real tasks to complete and assign to other people and optimize and troubleshoot. The Institvte makes managers out of everyone, even leadership-averse people like me.

or maybe I quit playing because I was too good at the game and it began to bore me

A literal mark around my right ring finger. I stopped wearing my Brass Rat when I got home in March, but I’ve been wearing it every day this week so that it will feel ceremonious tomorrow when I get to flip the ring around.

…I have not been to the Boston Public Library since ring delivery

Door vandalism. I took these move-out reminder door-hangers off of some doors and repeatedly hung them on Jason P. ’20’s doorknob every time he took one off. (I like little pranks that involve making the victim feel like they’re losing it.) He returned the favor with a hearty “F U” installation on my door.

art

Four small puncture wounds, administered at one year intervals.

mom… dad… I’m vaccinated

Potential asbestos poisoning. To be fair, any building from before 1978 is probably full of this stuff.

there’s a reason no one ever made forbidden snack memes about asbestos

Great calves. I already had soccer legs⁠07 so much of having good calves is just genetics when I started in Fall ’16, but walking around Boston and Cambridge all the time really gave me some definition, especially coming from a city where everyone drives.

if you’re not impressed by this… this is impressive for me

A love of the trader named Joe. The first Trader Joe’s I ever went to was the one by Micro Center. I’ve been a believer ever since.

they’re for people!

An understanding of why people take group pictures. I don’t like when people take pictures of me. There are probably fewer than 20 photos of me as a child, and they all look like this:

bangs, tamagotchi around my neck, flare jeans, killing it at the build-a-bear workshop

But then again all my pictures look like that even now.

my last-minute costume for the senior boat cruise was “beatnik”

I don’t have many pictures of me that I can look at to remember freshman or sophomore or junior or senior year. The ones that I do have are group pictures. So group pictures have become artifacts of my personal history, and I am filled with regret that I won’t get to take one with my friends at graduation.

posing in Greece

posing with my leg

posing a threat

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So that’s what me and MIT have exchanged over the past four years. There is so much I did but so much I didn’t get the chance to do. Maybe I’ll be able to experience those things vicariously through the blogs, like I did junior and senior year of high school, like some of you are doing right now.