feelings from the summer I wish I could describe more accurately by Alan Z. '23, MEng '24
partially inspired by ducks, newburyport
I’ve been living on campus, working on finishing my MEng thesis this summer. It’s been an interesting summer; I’ve really enjoyed being able to put my head down and sort of dig into the work, and although there have been ups and downs, I think it has been, on the whole, a pretty good summer. One thing I’ve noticed this summer is the presence of what I will call Big Feelings™, in the sense that I feel like many of the experiences and emotions I’ve had are actually broken down into these fractally spiraling, smaller thoughts and feelings. Here is my best attempt to describe some of them:
the feeling of accompanying musical theatre rehearsals on piano
a satisfaction in being able to play decently well, surprisingly, after years of not having practiced; a continuous panic to try and reduce the impossibly difficult scores that they give players on Broadway to something you can actually play while still allowing the actors to follow you; the satisfaction of executing that reduction live; the enjoyment of letting the singer lead while you follow them through whatever tempo changes they’d like; the frustration of trying to help read difficult rhythms out to the singer, which is somehow impossible despite your best efforts and years of musical training; the challenge of (or failure to) playing six different vocal lines at once in different octaves; the nice and simple joy of learning new tricks for running rehearsals while being a useful and minimal part of a fun process
the feeling of trying seven different things on your research and having none of them work
a surprisingly common feeling; one that feels like riding a stationary bike, which is, you know, not fun unless you’re into that kind of thing; an increasing sense of desperation as you get closer and closer to the end of the day; a relapse into bad code management, that despite knowing you should individually commit and test each change you make, you just want to get something working and you can unravel it later (you can’t); a questioning about whether you know anything, actually, about what you’re doing; the toxic cocktail of knowing you should step away from your computer and take a walk and try something else later and yet not being able to put things down until you’ve actually made progress; checking the time on your computer and realizing it’s three hours later than you thought it was and you should probably be asleep, but the laptop is so tempting…
a cardinal I saw on campus while leaving work :0
the feeling of buying a discounted membership to a rock climbing gym
a fear from self-knowledge that you’ve never successfully exercised regularly, despite your best efforts; the wondering if you’ve somehow been psychologically scammed by the discount; the calculation about how many times you have to go for it to pay off; the calculation of how many weeks, exactly, you have left in this town; the tentativeness of watching the bill hit your credit card; the excitement of heading to the gym for the first time afterwards and getting a little key tag with a barcode on it
the feeling of revisiting places you’ve seen before, but a long time ago
the nostalgia of spending the Fourth of July in Boston again, of all the memories you’ve had there in years past; the fact that, driving up I-95, you somehow spot all the places you went on during The Long Walk from Maine to Boston, and you also kind of miss that walk despite all the pain it caused you; the fact that you’ve been to Portland three times with friends and have done so few things beyond the art museum and Peaks Island; the knowledge that that art museum is one of your favorites, and, yes, having a “favorite art museum” is incredibly pretentious but the first time you went to Portland you had just discovered you liked art museums at all, and how much we have changed in the past three or four or five years, but the places we visit look the same
the feeling of wearing a hoodie in an air-conditioned building in the summer
a simple feeling: the comfort of being warm in the cold, like cuddling up in a blanket in the winter, but also the annoyance of it being way too cold in the buildings, all the time, when you wish you could just wear a T-shirt and shorts instead
the feeling of making a one-line change to your code which gives you a 30% improvement
the excitement at finally making progress; the frustration that the seven other things you spent twelve hours yesterday on only gave you at most a 10% benefit, but here you are; the forgetting that sometimes you need to take the seven other paths to learn enough to get the progress from that eighth path; the satisfaction of watching runtimes go down; the acceptance that sometimes this is how progress is, plateaus followed by cliffs, and at least the cliffs go up instead of down in this metaphor; the questioning of what amount of improvement will finally be enough for me to feel satisfied with all this work
the feeling of going to a book store and actually buying books
the enjoyment of looking through the things on the shelves, some of which you actually recognize and have a context for; the weird joy of being a poetry snob; the irredeemable desire to own more things that you might not finish reading (though you have finished the last three plays and poetry collections you bought); the wonderment about how people actually find books they didn’t already know about; the adventurous feeling of buying a book you have no context on because it sounds cool, even though you are about as far from adventure as a person can physically be (i.e., the book store), if you subscribe to the conventional definition of adventure; the just sheer joy of walking out into the night, holding three books in your hand like a student; the knowledge that each of these books was individually cheap but together they cost way more than you would have liked; the smell of all the paper, the feel of the texture as you thumb through the side of each book, the sound of the words as you read the first poem aloud: “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian…”
some books from the harvard book store
the feeling of going to a rock climbing gym regularly
the satisfaction of having that discounted membership pay off, for some sense of the word; the feeling that this might actually be the one tolerable form of exercise to you, because 1) you’re tall and that’s a “loophole I’m gonna exploit the hell out of” and 2) it’s kind of fun to treat it like puzzle solving; the wondering hesitance of whether this habit is going to last once you move; the knowledge that you should probably also be working on other things as well (cardio); the observation of the incredible things that other people can do with their body that you will still probably never be able to do; the excitement of having a friend to go with who can point out things to do or try and who you can do your best to help as well; the weird social environment of people at so many different skill levels and whether or not to offer/receive unsolicited advice from them; the immense satisfaction of being able to do things you weren’t able to do last time; the feeling of having your forearms puffed up at the end of a session, barely able to hold on to anything anymore; the fear of falling off the wall and the elation in the conquering of that fear
the feeling of signing a lease for the first time
the instant question of “why is this document over sixty pages long”; the fear of missing something in those sixty pages and knowing that this is probably the most important Terms and Conditions that you’ve ever signed; the comfort of knowing that you’re going to have a place to live when you move; the bittersweetness of leaving town, and semi-permanently, knowing how much you’ve grown to love the whole New England vibe, the way the towns and parks and streets have a certain poetry to them; the excitement of starting a new chapter with a friend; the gratitude towards your roommate for managing the whole process and the shame in not contributing as much as you ought to have; the worry that you now have to start actually cleaning your room so that you can move across the country; the wonder about exactly how long you can survive without buying a bed if you already own a couch
the feeling of going to the same Japanese restaurant every Wednesday
the unsettling calculation about how much money, exactly, you’ve spent at this place; the shame and pride that the waitress now recognizes you and doesn’t even wait for you to sit down before she’s placed your order (which is always the same); the awareness that you only have one more Wednesday left before you’ll have to wait months to go to this place again; the overwhelming love you have for their food because it just brings you comfort in a way that food has scarcely ever done; the fact that it almost made you cry once; the freedom of having a schedule where you can, in fact, take the train three stops to eat at a restaurant on a weekday; the fact that no matter how many times you have the pork cutlet curry, it always reminds you of your freshman year, making curry with strangers in an East Campus kitchen, feeling truly at home and welcome at MIT for the first or second time
the feeling of watching your friends play League of Legends
the disappointment in yourself for actually knowing things about this game, now; the unsolicited opinions about the gameplay that you now have and which try to keep to yourself; the elation of watching your friends win and the uncertainty of the in-between moments where it feels like it’s inevitable that one team will lose, but it takes another twenty or thirty minutes for that to happen or sometimes they mount a comeback; the weird feeling that you could never really commit that much time to playing games but you spend just as much time on YouTube if not more; the mild shame that right now the only video game you’re playing is Minecraft, where all you’re doing is digging out a 16×16 hole and then filling it with dirt, which is surely even less productive; the joy in just getting to spend time with friends, even if it’s online, watching them play a game, because they still play the game in subtle ways that match their personality, which is what made you friends with them in the first place
the feeling of understanding something more deeply than you ever have before
the feeling of looking at a problem in your head like mentally visualizing all the nooks and crannies of your own room; the satisfaction of being able to spin that system around in your head despite that phrase not really having semantic meaning; the shame of knowing there are still corners of this algorithm you have treated as a kind of “black box” even though you have already unraveled so many layers of this particular onion; the calmness that you imagine from someone meditating at the bottom of the pool, the heavy and fruitful waters of knowledge gently splashing above you
the feeling of playing in a pit orchestra again after two years of conducting
the joy of following a conductor again; the comfort in knowing that, no matter how lost you are, you can always find the downbeat at the podium; the re-invigorated section leader instincts to breathe in and lift your head before entrances despite the fact that you are playing piano, not violin, and there is nobody else in your section; the uncomfortable fact that you aren’t watching the conductor quite as much as you would like a player to be watching the conductor if you were conducting; the feeling that music is so much more collaborative than you remember it being, and that somehow you know things now, funnily enough, between helping with sound equipment and knowing what the parts of a drum kit are and baton management; the thought that maybe you should start a band some time, because this is just plain fun, making music with friends, but that is perhaps a dream for a later you with more time and practice
the feeling of having people mention your writing to you in a non-writing context
the mortifying ordeal of being known; the excitement that “somebody actually reads all this junk I make”; the genuine heart-warming of people liking it, especially people who you know (through virtue of the context) are much more intelligent than you; the wonder about what writing you’re going to do next and who will see it, and whether you need to live more to be able to write more, and “what does that even mean, anyways?”; the reminder that your writing is important and impactful, writing is important and impactful (it is important and impactful)
the feeling of loving and knowing many things
(but also not knowing many more things); the feeling that “I’m so lucky to have all this,” to be decent or maybe good or at least okay at computer systems/architecture, and writing, and music, to varying levels, but certainly to love doing all of them so much; the fear that I will let the desire to be good overtake the enjoyment of it; the sadness about all the things I could’ve learned more about but never got the chance or time to, like chemistry and biology, all the branches pruned off the tree of possible paths; but, man, I am so happy to be who I am and to have learned so much and to have so much more to learn, and so soon (but I do have to finish this thesis)