I O Europe by Sam M. '07

DID YOU KNOW? The drummers for the bands Queen and Duran Duran are both named Roger Taylor.

I started writing two entries while at home this week, but I was just never really in the state of mind to finish them. So, someday in August, just remind me that I owe you two entries, called…

Don’t let it control you! about the work/play balance at MIT.
I’m bleeding this about my awesome 120-mile bike trip with Tester Lab.

I’m counting on you, Snively. And all you other commenters. It’s just that Snively was the first one I remembered because his name is funny.

This past week has been pretty good. Well, I graduated from MIT. I was the most worried little kid, because we all had to line up at stations and get our names checked off, all of this at like 8:00 AM, so we could stand in line for two hours. I misread my major in haste and accidentally went to station the for Course 10B, which is chemical and biological engineering TOGETHER, which is basically just chemical engineering but you take out all the hard classes and replace them with introductory bio classes. Not that I’m biased. So I went there and I saw all the names on the list, and they were all my classmates, but I wasn’t there! I just whimpered, “but, but, but these are all my classmates, and it says ‘degree awarded’ on the website, and I got graduation tickets, and and and…” So the guy there was basically just, “Okay, no worries, just go to this desk.” And so I went there and they were like, “No, no, it’s station 8, STUPID.” So I went to station 8, which was the station for normal chemical engineering majors, and pretty much everything was fine. I spent graduation getting to page 104 in The Giver, making me the only person at MIT who was actually upset when they got finished with all 2,500 names, because it meant I had to stop reading. I feel like that could be some sort of metaphor for my voracious academic disposition, but I’m actually one of the three or four laziest people at MIT.

Then my family and I went to La Groceria, which has really awesome bruschetta but a terribly annoying noise on their website. See for yourself. BWAAAAA!!

And yeah, graduation was super sad or whatever. Luckily for me, I left all my packing until the last minute, so I was too busy frantically putting my room in twenty thousand tiny jars to worry about saying goodbyes, or missing people, or even processing the fact that I’m leaving my home in Boston for the next six years of my life.

BWAAAAA!!

But in the end, it was all good because I GOT TO GO TO HERSHEYPARK! Riding in the front seat of Storm Runner at 11 AM was the culmination of four years of regret of not coming home for the summer. And even if we had to run from actual storms later that evening, I still had one of the best sunny early afternoons in recent memory.

Also, Sam’s Mom made this delicious cake and, as she rightly pointed out, if I were still my old blogging self, I would have taken a picture of it as soon as I saw it, which I’ve done with like 8 other food items she’s cooked. It was delicious, but I have no picture. Hmm, maybe I can reproduce it in ASCII…

………
/_____
|xxxxx|
|_____|

The periods are whipped cream, the x is delicious strawberry filling, and everything else is sweet, sweet cake. I would also probably have taken a picture of my face after eating it, which would look like this:

^_^

Because I am an anime hero.

By the way, never see the movie “Die You Zombie Bastards!” While I almost always agree with my friend Allison’s movie selections, this was by far the single worst movie I have ever seen, ever. Seriously. Never see it. For any reason. I turned away from the screen in utter disgust like twelve times. There was only one redeeming quality, and that is that there was a character named Super Inge in the movie, and the morning after I saw it I had to call up someone named Inge to work out my flight reservations to Germany. But even that can hardly be attributed to the movie itself.

Oh! Germany! I ended up taking the job as MISTI reporter, so basically I’m getting paid to travel around Europe and interview MIT interns, then write about them. I really don’t know how I managed that. You can hear all about it in this blog, or possibly a special MISTI blog, or possibly both at the same time, or possibly both at different times, or possibly I’ll fall into a canal in Hamburg and get eaten by piranhas.

Just playin’, Sam’s Mom.

I look really bad with facial hair, but mine grows relatively fast, and I’m also terrible at shaving. So I’ve always told people that facial hair is my punishment for some terrible transgression in a past life. Surely then, this MISTI reporter job must be my reward for some awesome karma that I gathered in a different past life. Maybe as a friendly goat farmer in the Swiss Alps or a nurse during the American Civil War. Or maybe it’s just my reward for namedropping Frau Sigrid “These Boots Are Made for Finding Internships” Berka in my blog last summer. I’m not too sure, really.

Just think about it for a second. I’m getting paid to go to Europe. To paraphrase a great woman, “I cannot believe this! Look what MIT can do.”

In all honesty though, it wasn’t until I actually went through and planned out all my visits that I realized what a logistical challenge this is all going to be. If I miss one train going anywhere, I might end up scrubbing dishes in Düsseldorf for the rest of my life. So, while I’m excited to get a six week paid vacation in Germany, I’m also scared out of my gourd right now.

I’m so excited!
I’m so excited!
I’m so … scared.