Everything’s coming up Milhouse! by Sam M. '07

DID YOU KNOW? Madonna is 48 years old. Seriously.

Guys, I need a favor, okay? You have to remind me to enter the PE Lottery, which starts tomorrow. I’ve forgotten to do it for nine of the past ten quarters. Yes, okay, it’s true that you can just show up on the first day for any class and as long as it’s not something really popular like Pistol or Yoga, they’ll probably find room for you. But my universe tends toward disorder, and usually the entropy of activation required for that process is just too high for me to muster.

Don’t you forget to enter it either, Class of 2010! As DAPER says, “Successful students complete 4 six-week classes during their Freshman year.”

That must make me a failure. Good thing I have Mollie to cheer me up.

Everything’s a little bit bittersweet here, because most of the interns who have been here for three to five months are heading home at the end of August. It’s been great getting to know all these people from all these different countries and showing them that people in the US aren’t always as dumb as we look. But the sadness of ending has been tempered by three things:

1. Today was crepe day in the cafeteria.
2. Tomorrow all six hundred people at my site have to go to some workshop, so my normally very German boss gave me the day off.
3. On Thursday, my last day of work, we’re having another party with cakes and coffee. Not to celebrate my leaving, or anything in particulate, but just because my boss felt like it.

And for you guys, everything is just beginning, huh? Well, don’t have any fun at MIT until I get back next Monday. Just playin’. Enjoy all the times you’re having right now with all your orientation buddies! Because you’ll never talk to them again once classes start. No, seriously.

There was this one guy who I met on my first day of MIT through this other girl in my orientation group. It was right when we were getting out of Playfair. He played French Horn. Hey, I played French Horn too! So, as we took a tour of Simmons that night we had about 30 minutes of French Horn-related conversation, which is enough time to exhaust most of the finer points of that topic. Then I went home, presumably to get some sleep but actually to grab some midnight pizza with Ruth ’07 and two really friendly upperclassmen guys who didn’t live in the dorm but nevertheless wanted to get to know me better.

So French Horn Guy and I spent the next five semesters greeting each other awkwardly at chance meetings in the Infinite or on Amherst Alley or in the burrito line at Anna’s, but we never said anything more than that. The greetings ran the gamut from the polite, formal “Hello.” to a familiar-sounding “Hey!” to occasionally, on particularly nice days, “Hi Sam!” and “Hi Ian!” But nothing else. No “How’s it going?” Because I don’t think either of us really cared. Sometimes we did that really uncomfortable “Oh shoot, maybe he didn’t see me, let me look over HEY THAT’S A REALLY INTERESTING POSTER FOR MIT 50K” thing. We didn’t even become Facebook friends–but that’s probably only because Facebook didn’t really take hold of MIT until the next April.

Finally, last semester we saw each other in the infinite and I decided that French Horn Guy and I needed to reevaluate our relationship. So as I walked by, I very politely stared him down. And he just looked at me and didn’t say anything. And that was that. We were over. Again, a little bittersweet. But one less thing to worry about as I’m walking down the Infinite with Falafel dripping out of my mouth.

So see that Freshman guy you just met an hour ago who’s sitting on your bed looking at your high school yearbook? That’s him in two years.