one weekend in March by Kai V. '25

I’ve been too hosed to write a post that requires beyond-brainstem activity, so instead, enjoy my weekend foray into lifestyle blogging.

Saturday

9:00 a.m. For breakfast I eat cereal and drink jasmine tea. Then I drive with Mira, another pika resident, to a nearby lake. I’ve been feeling pretty stressed and mentally out of it for a few weeks so I’m hoping to be calmed by a swim in cold water. Mira tells me about her past trips to Denmark and the UK, when she encountered lots of people who made cold plunges a habit for the serotonin boost that followed. When we get to the lake shore, it’s just us and the geese under a cloudy sky. We wade in.

It’s the coldest water I’ve ever swum in, but it’s not as bad as I imagined for water a few degrees off freezing. We stay in the shallows, where our feet can still touch the ground, and get out after a few laps. My whole body is physically pulsing with warmth afterwards, and my breathing is slower and more even than usual. I definitely feel calmer and might try to make this a habit in the future.

12:00 p.m. I have leftover shepherd’s pie and an apple with peanut butter for lunch. Then I work on my overdue pset for 6.7800, Inference and Information. The class gives seven allotted late days, so I won’t incur a penalty for turning this in late. But I’m anxious to finish it on time so I can get started on my work for next week.

2:45 p.m. It’s hard to tell whether I’m making progress on the pset. The later problems center on the expectation maximization algorithm, which is a cool way of doing parameter estimation for complicated probability distributions. I’m helping to run a social event for pika later today that needs snacks, so I head to HMart to buy them with house budget. I end up buying a bunch of stuff that’s coincidentally green: wasabi peas, mochi, a matcha swirl cake.

4:00 p.m. The event was slated to start at four, but pika’s stewards have just returned from Costco with our weekly food haul! I help them put away the groceries. pika runs a daily dinner mealplan that anyone can sign up for if they also sign up for a cook or clean shift every 1-2 weeks, and house members also use in-house groceries to make themselves breakfast and lunch. So we get a lot of groceries from Costco to provide for this, a job assigned to our stewards.

4:15 p.m. We run the event: a paint social, where we provide paint, canvases, and brushes, and pikans come paint what they want. We’ve run this once before, and my favorite part is when people who haven’t painted much before join and discover that painting is really fun and relaxing. I work on the same painting that I started last time.

6:30 p.m. House dinner is called!

7:24 p.m. I walk to campus for a performance called As Stars, Our Sacrifices (which Andi Q. ‘25 was in as part of MITWE!) that centers around human-induced environmental damage. It’s really beautiful, and it’s in the new music building which I’ve never entered before today. Embarrassingly, I’m very affected by live orchestral music, so I start crying like four measures in and don’t stop until the end.

10:00 p.m. I arrive back at pika and do more work on my pset.

12:42 a.m. My brain is not really functioning anymore so I go to sleep.

Sunday

5:11 a.m. I get up to finish the pset. Getting up early to finish work is a bit stressful but I’ve never been able to stay up late and remain focused, so waking up before dawn it is. Fortunately I always feel locked in in the morning when no one else is awake.

8:20 a.m. I submit the pset! Then I shower and start reading the report I have to critique for 8.14, Experimental Physics II (the sequel to Junior Lab). In the spirit of peer review, each of us has to read a past student’s work and write a referee report. The paper I’m assigned is about observing hyperfine structure⁠01 splitting of energy levels due to coupling between nuclear spins using Doppler-free spectroscopy⁠02 a kind of spectroscopy that uses two oppositely directed laser beams at the same frequency to excite and measure a sample at only that frequency, so that the resulting absorption lines are not broadened by the Doppler effect , which makes me really happy: I think, in another life, I’m an experimental atomic physicist. In fact, I definitely would have tried to angle myself towards grad school for atomic physics if I’d learned about it earlier. As it stands, I had no idea what it entailed until my junior spring when I took a graduate AMO⁠03 atomic, molecular, and optical physics class on a whim, and by then it felt too late to reroute my entire undergrad towards an atomic physics PhD. I’m happy where I am, but I don’t feel as excited by anything else in science, so it makes me wonder sometimes what could have been. Anyway—this is all to say that I had a wonderful time doing the assignment!

12:20 p.m. I wander downstairs where people are chatting after brunch. Someone has made a giant tray of vegan blueberry muffins. I eat like six of them. Then I have to do my SHITs (Sunday House Improvement Tasks, the one-hour-per-week obligation for each pikan to do some cleaning task to keep the house tidy), so I grab some bleach and toilet cleaner and scrub down the bathroom on my floor.

3:10 p.m. Yesterday was a pika resident’s birthday; today, she is holding a celebratory tea party! She offers us Chinese white tea, cucumber finger sandwiches, and home-baked cookies. Some people queue up to play the piano in the background. Someone eats a whole avocado like an apple (yes, including the pit—they just bite into it, which I didn’t know was possible). I curl up on the corner of the couch and work on debugging code for my UROP.

6:15 p.m. We have dinner and then our weekly house meeting.

9:15 p.m. Some pikans start watching Severance, so I join them for a couple of episodes. It’s really good!

11:30 p.m. I wonder if it was worth sinking two hours into Severance when I have a bunch of work due tomorrow. It’s okay: I’ll get up early to do it.⁠04 my success rate at getting up early to do my work is only like 70%. but this time I succeeded