Happy Things by Karen F. '11

This is what MIT felt like when I first arrived: Sunny, warm, people playing Frisbee on Kresge Oval.

Spring seems to have arrived at last, though this isn’t the first time this year – we’ve had nice days on and off for awhile now. I’ve learned not to trust Boston weather, it’ll probably snow tomorrow or something.

At least we haven’t gotten any earthquakes though. I always miss all the good stuff in the Midwest – last year while I was on exchange, like all of Illinois got multiple snow days! Dang.

For now, though, it’s byooootiful. The kind of weather I’d like to ride my bike in (not that any weather really stops me from riding my bike. Though I’ve never tried in an earthquake) if my bike hadn’t gotten stolen.

Oh yeah, so you know those lists you’ve been writing compulsively about What To Bring To MIT Next Fall? If you’re planning on having a bike, make sure to bring a good bike lock. Maybe four.

I don’t actually know if it’s been stolen – I have a tendency to…forget where I leave things. Like my MIT ID. Haven’t seen it since before CPW. I’m going to assume my prefrosh didn’t take it because she seemed pretty cool, and just hope I find it laying around my stuff sometime. Anyway, I don’t know where I left my bike, but I haven’t seen it in any of the normal places I go, so I think it might have gotten stolen. This would be more sad if I weren’t getting my new bike for Bike and Build (which you haven’t donated to yet…) soon. Weee, summer!

Anyway, I know last weekend was supposed to be the weekend to end all weekends or something because it was CPW, but actually, this weekend is the one I’ve been looking forward to all year. Besides having Monday AND Tuesday off, this weekend at MIT there are two really cool really cool things going on:

1. the Global Poverty Initiative Conference. Oh man, nothing gets me excited like poverty. I mean. Solving poverty. Yeah. So this conference – lots of people at MIT this year have spent countless hours planning this thing – it’s the first time ever that it’s happening. There are over 1,400 people (yeah, that’s more than there were at CPW…) from about 280 different schools and organizations. They’ve invited lots of really cool speakers like John Edwards, Paul Farmer (OMG), John Legend, the main singer from Dispatch, our own Amy Smith, Jeffrey Sachs (another OMG), Augustine Mahiga, and a load of other really inspiring people to speak (I mean, they MUST be cool, they all have wikipedia pages!), and they’re also holding Action workshops such as “Starting Projects for Global Change” and Overcoming Barriers in Project Delivery.”

Basically, it’s just a whole weekend of AWESOME. I’m sooo excited. They also have a really cool website where you can see the program for the whole weekend.

2. APDA Nationals are being hosted here by the MIT Debate Team (http://web.mit.edu/debate/www/). I was really into speech team back in high school and I still really love seeing guys dress up and suits and ties and give persuasive speeches ;), and since I participated in a few tournaments first semester, I’m helping out with generally making sure people don’t get lost and stuff.

Also, I’ll be spending a lot of time at one of the coolest places ever, tEp, this weekend, partially because they’re having a party called Yeast Roast, which is exactly what is sounds like, and partially because I like going there whether they’re baking crazy amounts of bread or not. tEp is one of my favorite places ever but I’ve been too busy lately to really go, so I’m excited for that as well.

And tonight (in about five minutes, in fact) I’m going to dinner with DUSP, as kind of an informational-welcome to the department type thing, because I finally got to declare course 11 last week!

EDIT: So on my way back home from eating dinner with DUSP I was so full that I decided to go to tep instead of going home, thinking I’d spend a calm evening here catching up on blogging, email, etc. Then the fire alarm went off due to …um…cooking…..Hah. So much for relaxing evening.