Above Ground by Paige B. '24

This entire blog has this playlist. Enjoy. Also this is the second and final part to my previous blog.

I spent last semester trying to catch my breath. Now that I finally have, I’m not quite certain what to do with myself. I mean so far over break I’ve read about various math topics, I completed two puzzles, and I’m finally feeling ready to start the next thing. The issue is, that I don’t know how long this feeling is meant to last for.

Because I don’t know what that next thing will be– that next big thing that’ll finally get me out of this slump of emo-ish blogs and living. I know in theory that this feeling is okay, it just is rather boring. I’ve been feeling like I’m on the brink of something bigger coming around the corner, but with no clue what that bigger thing is supposed to be, I’m just waiting.

Sure, it’s nice to feel excited about something– especially if that something is the intense MIT workload or something akin to this, but it’s also anxiety inducing. At least now I’m above ground. I’m no longer drowning, and I’m just antsy for some project to get my hands dirty. Thankfully, I have a few of those projects happening this IAP.

That’s right, it’s a good old fashioned “here’s what I’m doing over IAP” blogpost. (Honestly this was partially inspired by Fatima’s semester in checkboxes post– y’all should check that one out.)

• Teaching a class.
  I’ve written about this before, but yeah I’m teaching a class which is never not cool to me. This year, lectures are officially being recorded to be put on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). Which means I need to care slightly more about my outfits for presenting,⁠01 maybe I should do a blog on these outfits not that this is the most important thing but it’s stressing me out SO MUCH. Anyways.
• Recording stuff for OCW.
  (more on this later….)
• The Directed Reading Program (DRP).
  The DRP is a program run by the math department in which undergraduate students are paired with graduate students and postdoctorates to read *gestures vaguely* something. This year, my partner and I are jumping between three different books/sets of notes:

  i) A Panorama of Harmonic Analysis by Steven Krantz,
  ii) 18.118: Decoupling 2017 lecture notes from the class run by Larry Guth, and
  iii) Fourier Restriction, Decoupling, and Applications by Ciprian Demeter.

  Now that I say this out loud, this seems like a lot. But I promise I’m enjoying the readings.

• Writing.
  This should be relatively obvious given this is being written in, y’know, a blog, but also I’ve been writing for personal stuff. There’s a poetry workshop being run this IAP I hope to be a part of, and I’ve gotten a huge number of notebooks for this Christmas that I’ve been putting to good use.⁠02 Did you know: Not everything written needs to be put online! Insane.
• UROPing.
  Poorly, but UROPing nonetheless. Someone cited my work recently at a conference I went to. Really cool feeling.
• Talking with various people.
  For as few people are on campus right now (due to IAP), there’s a lot of people I’ve been meaning to talk to and catch up with.

None of these things feel like they will be conclusion to my slump of emo-blogs, but it’s nice to just feel like I can b r e a t h e. Maybe this is the best conclusion I can ever hope for, but I optimistically choose to believe that something bigger is coming. Maybe it’ll be one of these things. Who knows.

Like CJ, I don’t know how to conclude my blog, so.