You win some, you lose some. by Lulu L. '09

It was cold today. So cold. My dad put my winter coat in the mail and it hasn’t gotten here yet.

Wednesdays I only have 1 class. 8.07 from 11-12. This morning I woke up at 11:10, rolled over and shut off my alarm clock and slept until my cat jumped on my chest which was around 1:30. This means I didn’t get my test back. And this suits me alright.

Last night I stayed up til 6am purely out of habit.

For the next hour I read emails and watched last night’s Colbert Report on my laptop in my underwear wrapped up in my blanket, with JP licks curled up next to me. There was a lengthy and fairly serious thread that had developed overnight about The Victoria’s Secret Collegiate Pink Poll and the concerted effort on the part especially of the men of East Campus in scoring some Victoria’s Secret MIT Pink Collegiate gear. The inevitable server meltdown occurred when we were just peaking at about 20,000 votes per minute and I don’t think upon rebooting Victoria’s Secret has let another MIT vote go through since :( Which is sad. Looking at their list of currently sponsored schools, I don’t think they ever had any intention of making MIT brand gear anyhow. lol. They’d probably lose a lot of money trying to market that. But instead of being pissed or sorry about being blacklisted last I heard we’re giving some love to colleges that don’t usually really get a lot of love, the Zion Bible College, for one. Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Bob Jones University, Florida International University. Wellesley.

So when I finally got around to getting dressed it was about 2:30 and I put on my

SPS Shirt

and old lady jeans that went all the way up to my belly button and made me uncomfortable all day and boiled some tea, filled up my thermos with it, and headed to lab. I try to go to lab once a week. Sometimes I can’t make it at all. Sometimes I go more than that. Regardless, I’m always feeling guilty about it. Lab today was terrible. The same usual frustrations with having crappy software and crappy hardware and crappy electronics, except today in addition to all that I was excited about a shiny new CCD only to find out that nothing had changed whatsoever because our 12-bit electronics is still the limiting factor on our data acquisition. Speaking of data acquisition, it worked– sometimes. I think my greatest feeling of accomplishment today was from hooking up a new dry nitrogen tank and finding a couple of windows around back to look out of sadly. You win some, you lose some.

While the chamber cooled and even while it sat there doing nothing, I had to take care of something else that was giving me a deep sense of dread. There was some confusion with financial aid and somewhere some scholarship money got lost so I pored over statements from the last 4 months sent numerous emails, added and subtracted numbers on google calculator, and in the end it turns out my dad had just forgotten to pay last month.

At 5 I went to the professor’s office hours for 8.09. Stayed there until I felt my abject incompetence at this week’s problem set evolve into a gooey kind of reluctant understanding. During office hours my friend called to return my umbrella. I came home at 6 and opened up the 8.012 problem set to see if I could make some sense of it. I was happy to see they’d moved on to angular momentum. I’d always been partial to this particular unit. 7-9 was office hours for 8.012. I got locked out of my own tutoring room. I was late. The problem set’s not due til next week. Nobody came. It was lonely. I ate my tuna sandwich and drank my tea.

I started working on 8.09 around 9, which is when my mom called and we talked for a while. At 9:45 I was summoned by EC’s Intramural Badminton Team for a match against Phi Sigma. I was pretty cranky at this point and not feeling up to it but I ended up going anyhow and we kicked ass. Everybody playing for EC had played badminton in high school, and mine had won the state championships my senior year (out of a total of 5 teams. But still, you should have seen the look on Simsbury’s faces.) I couldn’t make it through high school without sports, I was on tennis, badminton, and gymnastics. And though I thought I’d be way too busy in college, after 3 years, I’ve done cheerleading, sailing, tennis, badminton, dance troupe… I just tend to gravitate toward physical activity as stress relief.

At 11 I lugged everything I had with me to the coffeehouse in the student center and finished the 8.09 pset (with the exception of some mean looking integrals) in 5 hours. I started writing this at around 4:30am, feeling less tired now than I did then walking home along the empty streets with that clean and still– early morning feeling– like the beginning of every trip somewhere when I was young, in the half light or the cold blue of dawn, loading the suitcases in the trunk clicking shut, climbing into the back seat, rolling down the window, past the sleeping houses, onto a foggy high way.

But this was the end of my day and not the beginning. I was heading home to sleep, and by the time I got the door to my dorm open my cat was already flying down the hall way toward me. I don’t know how I ever did it without her.