things i’m thinking about by Veronica P. '27

Some time last semester, I discovered that I had completely forgotten how to write to y’all. I think it stemmed from some internal rubric forcing me to complete my thoughts, to fully flesh out and consider every blog topic before I put it on the internet. I still mostly agree with this self-imposed rubric, but I’m tired of it preventing me from blogging anything at all. So, in defiance, here’s a series of thoughts, none of which are even a little bit complete! 

I’m thinking about all the blogs that I never finished writing this past semester: a sequel to my tarot blog, a New Years blog, a blog from the beginning of junior fall where I complained about everyone being way too scared of junior fall, a blog from the middle of junior fall where I admitted that I, too, was terrified.

And also about this writing exercise, from the essay class I took the spring of my freshman year. The prompt was to write for ten minutes about MIT. When it was time to share aloud, my professor commented, “It’s fascinating how you even describe your dorm bed as ‘precariously tall,’ maintaining a sense of unease and danger.” It felt so revealing, but mostly because my choice was entirely subconscious.

Last night, I thought a lot about the feng shui of my suite’s living room, where I’m currently writing. I moved the couch to be in a more ‘commanding position.’ I think it helps.

I’m wondering about this one Taylor Swift lyric: “How can a person know everything at eighteen, but nothing at twenty two?” I’m twenty right now, supposedly halfway between this state of knowing and not knowing. I already feel like I know next to nothing, but isn’t it also true that the more you know, the more you realize everything that you don’t know?

This reminded me of thermal-fluids engineering. In 2.005, everything could be solved analytically, using essential physics principles. Then, you get to 2.006, and suddenly all those assumptions they let you get away with in 2.005 are too simplistic. Analytical solutions stop being possible, and you instead have to rely on experimentation, on approximated solutions that might only be accurate 20% of the time. It almost feels like a let down, except for the fact that it’s a lot more applicable to real life.

I’m thinking, too, about the significance of repetition. In Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment”, she writes, “Maybe there’s no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.” 

I’m recalling this one time when I was about 10 years old, when my Girl Scout troop volunteered to act as tornado victims to help train first responders. I was assigned the role of walking wounded, and given a cosmetic scrape on my cheek. When the EMT’s-to-be found me, they asked how high the pain level was in my head. I said a 7 out of 10, and suddenly found myself becoming one of the most high priority victims, equipped with a neck brace and all. The supervisor came to check on me as I was lying on the ground, per instructions; she leaned over, and her sweat landed on my nose as she asked, “How did this even happen?” My pain scale had been so laughably off, not even she could comprehend it.

The other engineeringism I find myself thinking about a lot is the black box. It encourages you to view a system as an opaque, indecipherable box. All you need to know about the black box is what went in and what came out; what happened inside is irrelevant. When I find myself overthinking too much, I turn to the black box to remind myself about the essentials. Sometimes the how and the why is less helpful than the what is.