Friday vacation by Mollie B. '06

(Note of warning: this entry may be short, because I seriously screwed up my back/shoulder/neck area at cheerleading camp tonight, and I kind of can’t move my head. This makes sitting at my computer slightly difficult, or at least uncomfortable.)

One of the perks of being a biology/brain and cognitive sciences major is that I frequently don’t have class on Fridays, since many bio/BCS classes meet for an hour and a half or two hours twice a week rather than for an hour three times a week. This term, I only have 5.60 on Fridays (although my Tuesdays and Thursdays, um, suck). That means that I get to wander around and run errands and do fun stuff (like napping) on Fridays.

So this morning, I woke up at 8 as usual; normally I curl my hair before class, but today I had to bust my rump to get into lab by 9 AM — I needed to run some gels and generally be a productive UROP. Basically, my lab is moving to a new building in a few weeks (more on that later), so I need to get some experiments finished up before the disruption of moving.

After running around the lab like a chicken with my head cut off for an hour, I went to 5.60 lecture, where we learned about Gibbs free energy for an hour. There were a lot of partial derivatives involved. (I feel like noting in here somewhere that, thanks to most MIT students being night owls, no class at MIT ends before 10 AM — therefore, hour classes can’t start until 9 AM. Doesn’t that make you happy, considering that many high schools start around 7-7:30 AM?)

After class, I went across the street to the new Brain and Cognitive Sciences building, which is scheduled to open within the next month. My lab, as noted above, is moving over in a few weeks, and our head lab tech had asked me to stop by the new building to make sure my proximity card gave me access to the lab. I am happy to report that it does, and I spent a few minutes wandering around the new lab space and exclaiming to myself about how ridiculously huge the new tissue culture room is.

After exploring the new lab to my satisfaction, I headed by the Chemistry Education Office to hand in my 5.60 problem set for the week. At this point (since I had skipped breakfast to go into lab early), I decided to heed the rumblings of my stomach and try out the Steam Cafe. I had the vegetable ragout with northern beans, because I’m a wannabe vegetarian (not to be confused with a former vegetarian). Steam Cafe is really good! Plus, I think I feel better after cheerleading practice when I eat healthy food.

After reveling in my ragout (Adam says this is pronounced “rag-oo”, and laughed at me when I pronounced it “rag-out”. Whatever.) and reading today’s Tech (today’s The Tech?), I came home to my room and took a 4-hour nap (sleep deprivation, what), during which I had a dream that government agents were chasing me around the new BCS building. And then I went to cheerleading, where I apparently caused my neck to stop working in a neck-like way (I would post pictures of my extremely bruised body, but you’d probably be shocked).

So it was a good day.

Meta-comments:
1. Jessie and Ben commented on my host being named Molly when I was a prefrosh (actually, I think Jessie commented because she probably knows her. But you know what I mean). Weirdly, I have learned through a friend of a friend that Molly is the only other person he knows who keeps sleep statistics like I do. Crazy. I’m about 95% positive I didn’t pick it up from her; therefore, the admissions office must take mystical secret psychic variables into account when matching hosts and prefrosh. (Actually, one of my prefrosh, Holly, now lives in my entry and is one of my good friends. Yeah, Molly –> Mollie –> Holly. Maybe they do just match on names.)
2. Su asked how MIT is different from Ohio. That’s actually a whole entry in and of itself… I’ll write that entry soon, I promise. Just as soon as I figure out how to write it without degenerating into sweeping generalizations about both Ohio and MIT.