Comments, UROPs, field trips, and OMG HP7! by Laura N. '09

Responses to comments:
Aaron said: Actually, Anna Lucia was killed off because of the negative audience reaction to her. I think if you watched the show from first airing you’d notice how she didn’t fit in and everyone hated her. Now the sad part was Libby dying, but I hear she had scheduling conflicts with another show.

Wings ’11 said: Actually, I disliked Libby. Ana Lucia was much more kick-butt. Oh well, I’ve never been mainstream ;)

Aaron replied: I just thought Anna Lucia’s butch-factor was really forced feeling. I didn’t think she could act well and just thought that the aggressiveness was sort-of how she wanted to be perceived with her infractions and all in real life.

Okay, no way, Ana Lucia rocked. And I refuse to respect any other opinion.

Kidding! Seriously though, I loved her. Michelle Rodriguez has always played characters like that- like in Resident Evil. Oh man she was awesome in Resident Evil. Anyway, yeah, the other characters on the show might have all hated her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the viewers did. First of all, she killed Shannon, and while I don’t condone violence or anything, dude that character was ANNOYING. In any case, she was the only strong female character on the show, because Claire is just all “my baby!” and Kate is just like “I like Jack. No I like Sawyer. No Jack. No Sawyer. Wouldn’t it be cool if the writers actually gave me something interesting to do, considering I’m an ex-con and all? No? Okay, I’ll just go get into some contrived situation that will involve me touching one of them or having to take my clothes off.” Yech.

While I’m still talking about TV (God I’ve turned into a TV junkie…I’ll have no brain cells left by next term) I was visitng the admissions office the other day and had a chat with Matt, who said that if I liked Veronica Mars then I’d like Buffy, because there’s a lot of snark and such things in it. So I ordered the first disc off of Netflix and popped it into the DVD player…and as I was watching I was like “well this is interesting or something, yeah yeah, sarcasm, she’s okay at it, whatever…” and not really feeling it, and then there was this mean, catty girl who was being a total drain on the reputation of females everywhere, and then she opened her locker and a dead guy fell out on top of her and I was like “sweet, this show rocks.”

Anonymous said:
My boyfriend gave me a dremel for our “First-monthly-anniversary.” And I love it!

Oh my God, you have the coolest boyfriend ever.

Mollie said: Wait, where’s the part where you talk about coming to my Super-Awesome Housewarming Party? ;)
Ack! How could I forget? Everyone’s favorite blogger alum Mollie is getting all grown up- she and her fiance moved into their own real-life-non-MIT-run apartment a few weeks ago and invited a bunch of us bloggers over for the housewarming. Aw! The bloggers are like one big, happy family. *sniff* Of course, I was the only one able to go, which meant that I didn’t know a single person there, but hey, I thrive on…awkward. Anyway, Mollie and Adam now live in a very nice apartment with jungle themed bathrooms or something (the details slip my mind, Mollie can correct me) and it’s all very cute and awesome and adult and FREAKING WEIRD. Like, just you wait until all your friends start getting engaged and married and moving into real houses/apartments and getting ACTUAL JOBS, you’ll start hyperventilating on the inside singing the Toys R Us theme in your head about never growing up. It’s true. Then, if you’re me, you’ll stick glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling just to keep things from getting too crazy and then when you turn your lights off every night you’ll think “whew, disaster averted” with relief.

Anyway.

Where have I been, you ask? Well, here. Doing…actually, quite a lot, considering it’s the summer. I have a UROP in the BioInstrumentation lab, where I’m now the proud owner of a $45 LED (no joke). And, I’m happy to report that after a month and a half of all kinds of frustration, my very first experiment of any kind (which was, admittedly, highly un-scientific) was successful! Basically the thing that I wanted to happen, did. I have absolutely no idea how well it worked and no numbers at all to back up my assertion, but it’s good enough for me to leave for vacation on a high note. (That’s right, vacation…I’m SO looking forward to it.)

Speaking of my UROP, my UROP supervisor, Craig, hasn’t been around much at all this summer. I can’t hold it against him though, because he’s been on American Inventor, the reality TV show. No joke. If any of you have been watching, he’s one of the inventors of the hanging bike clamp thing. There are two of them- one comes off as serious and business-like, the other wears a lab coat and frequently jumps around like a crazy person. I’ll let you guess which one I work for. =) Anyway- tune in this Wednesday at 9 to ABC to watch and vote for the winner!

(Although I have to say, possibly the coolest thing about this whole situation is that when Craig and his partner were surprised with the news that they were the New York finalists, Craig said, “Let’s do it for enginerds everywhere!” and this is SO totally my word. Apparently someone else in the lab also claims it as his own, so I guess we can share. But seriously, I’ve been saying that for years now, and I rather liked thinking that I had made it up…so, you should use it. Because if it ever became even somewhat mainstream, it would basically triple my coolness factor. Or something…)

There are two other things I’m doing this summer- I’m the Burton Conner RA, which is a pretty low-key job, except that occasionally there are small injuries or conflicts between residents wanting to use the TV in the lounge and such, which I have to reside over. I’m also attending training sessions for my term-time campus job, which is relevant because we took a field trip to Akami, which basically is this technology company which maintains servers all around the world and does all kinds of stuff involving efficient use of bandwidth and such. Their headquarters is right near MIT, and they estimate that nearly 10% of the Internet’s traffic makes its way through them. And I was there. And got a private tour of their command center. I know, you are all so jealous right now.

So anyway, I’m off to the bookstore- I’m getting my Harry Potter book at midnight (squee! how excited are you?!), then taking it with me on a week long cruise to the Caribbean. It doesn’t get much better than that.

While we’re on the topic, just a couple of pre-release comments. There are a few things I really, really want to happen in the 7th book. These aren’t spoilers, I have no reason to believe that any of them WILL happen, I just want them to.

1. Me to be right about something. Anything. See, I’m really bad at guessing the ending of anything. Even mystery movies with really obvious endings totally surprise me. I loved the movie Inside Man, just because it’s the only movie in which I made a half-correct guess about the ending. So I’m hoping to either figure out some plot twist or another before it happens, or for one of my very few, very lame theories to be correct. I guess this is more on me than JKR, though…

2. Neville kicking some Death Eater butt- seriously, Neville rocks. I’ve always kind of thought that he was an awesome, powerful wizard who’d been tormented by his messed up family life. He started to come into his own in Book 5, but never even performed one successful spell on any of the Death Eaters. This leads me to my wishful thinking that JKR is saving up for a BIG moment, where Neville comes in and saves the day. If this happens, I will probably cheer in happiness, right there in my pool chair in the middle of the cruise boat.

3. A good Slytherin to appear. Why are the Slytherins always rotten people? Even the ones that aren’t flat out evil are always weak or nasty in some other way. This bothers me, because JKR makes like she’s trying to portray all kinds of gray areas- like when Sirius says, “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters.” You’d think she’d drive this message home a bit, by having someone from Slytherin who’s actually on the side of good. I mean, all that Slytherin’s are described by is cunning, manipulative wit, resourcefulness, etc. There’s nothing in there that says they have to be rotten human beings. If any Slytherin character turns out to be good, I’ll be thrilled. (I’ll admit that this wish is mostly driven by the fact that, if I were at Hogwarts, I almost certainly would be sorted into Slytherin…)

I’ll see you in a week! Happy Harry Potter Release Night! Yay!

(If you post spoilers in the comments, I’ll hex you from all the way in the Bahamas. I’m just that good.)