things that made me happy lately by Kai V. '25

It was the morning of the second or third day of classes and I had brewed jasmine tea at the pika⁠01 My very cool independent living group! kitchen counter and was sipping it while listening in on breakfast conversations. “The curse of this degree is that now I perceive every building I enter really intensely,” said our GRA⁠02 Graduate Resident Advisor, a grad student who provides support to your living community , a PhD student in Course 4 (architecture). “How do you perceive pika?” someone asked. “It’s a little structurally alarming sometimes,” our GRA admitted.

It was early—8 a.m.—so only a few people were awake. People talked in low tones about physical chemistry and the recitations they had to attend or TA. pika gets much louder at night, and since our mealplan is open to anyone we can have upwards of forty people at dinner. But mornings feel cold and quiet and serene.

I moved into pika this fall, which makes me feel almost froshlike. I have a new roommate (hi Uzay), new room, new living group. I hang up all my posters on the brick wall facing my and Uzay’s desks. Every day, it seems, another poster falls, and I stick it back on grimly with another layer of masking tape. When I come home from classes I linger in the CGE⁠03 aka the Communist Gastrointestinal Experiment, or functionally pika’s dining room to strike up conversations with my housemates while they work or snack, about why small modular reactors suck or why we think another housemate gives Virginia vibes or our collective love for soy milk.

It’s sort of how I imagined my freshman year would go. Though my first year here didn’t end up going badly, it also wasn’t at all what I expected. Mostly I felt confused and disoriented—maybe because my prefrontal cortex hadn’t developed yet; maybe because I knew less than I do now about what was available to me at MIT; maybe because I entered college fresh out of the pandemic and it took a few months (or years) to feel like a productive, social creature again.

Whatever the case, things feel simpler now. pika held a zine-making workshop the other night as part of chill week, which is a week filled with events for new people to have an excuse to come over and get to know pika. We ate Trader Joe’s ice cream mochi together and cut out parts of magazines and glued them to folded cardstock. I had just made dinner for everyone, which included this strangely textured orange mushroom that someone had foraged. I was behind on all my work and the semester had barely even started. In some ways this is a simple narrative: friends, food, firehose. That’s what I expected coming in, and it wasn’t until very recently that I found it, but now it’s mine.

A few words about my classes, which are also making me happy. I’m taking:

6.2220 [Power Electronics Laboratory]: This class makes it trivial to manage my time. It takes over 20 hours a week and you can only do the high-voltage work in lab. Thus, I have no choice but to go to lab whenever I can, and when lab is closed I work on my other classes. Of course sitting in lab poking transistors into breadboard sockets for five hours straight is exhausting sometimes, but other times I look at the signals on my oscilloscope screen and think, this is awesome, I could look at oscilloscope signals forever.

18.404 [Theory of Computation]: For a long time I have thought in a non-rigorous way about how humans and machines process information. It’s probably one of the most interesting concepts in the world to me. I think this shows in what I like to write about, too: how things like memory and art and love flow through and are crystallized in our information-processing pipelines.⁠04 this makes me sound like a tech bro lol. ok humans are more than information-processing pipelines but isn’t the information-processing part in particular really fun to think about? Now this class will help me rigorize my thinking, which I am excited for. I know it sounds like wishy-washy mysticism to be tying all these things together but they’re truly very intertwined in my mind.

18.112 [Complex Analysis]: This class is just okay so far. But it motivates me to read my very good complex analysis textbook, so I’m happy with it. The complex plane is quite beautiful!

21G.111 [Chinese Calligraphy]: In this class, we meditate and write pretty Chinese characters for three hours a week. I think handwriting is such an intimate thing—I wish it was more normalized to handwrite and send letters to friends. I keep everything people handwrite for me: a note on the front page of a novel, For Kai, From Amos. Or a years-old birthday card, Happy Birthday, From Joseph. It’s this very beautiful evidence of existence and intention. In particular my best writing is always, always done pen-to-paper. 05 I’m writing this blog post on my laptop though oops There’s something about feeling your fingers physically form the words that forces an understanding and rhythm that isn’t necessarily there when you type, instead watching your words form impersonally in front of you, in a pre-rendered font with predetermined spacings. Anyway—the point is—I’m so excited to take a whole class dedicated to studying and practicing handwriting closely and deliberately.

me trying and failing to write "一" ("one") for an hour

the ideal "一"

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