Crimsonietta.net

… puzzles get finished in a flurry of grandeur! =D

So for the past half a week or so, there’s been a Hazard Puzzle sitting nonchalantly on the table of the 4W lounge at Next House. Random passersby have attempted to put it together a piece at a time, but after quite a few days only about 8 pieces of the 36 had been successfully pieced together. As I waited for my ramen to cook, I sat myself down at the table and carefully shoved about 10 addictional pieces onto the main block.

The microwave beeped. Ramen was done!

… or not. It ended up way too hot to stick in my mouth. Back to the puzzle. My roommate Mallika, who had been speaking with her father over the phone, sprawled out on one of the sofas in the lounge, came over and munched on some of my Triscuits as she mused over the enigmatic pieces with me.

Then the speed of our conglomeration accelerated. Bit by bit the image came together; part by part the puzzle spoke to us and told us how to reassemble it in all its splendor. Lo and behold, 10 minutes later we ended up with a gorgeous image!

And naturally, I couldn’t leave without announcing to everyone who had solved the hazard puzzle, so I ran back to my room to get my camera and a sticky note:

On an unrelated note, I biked over to Shaw’s to pick up some things - ingredients to make devilled eggs, strawberries, Triscuit, and unsweetened soymilk (!!) - and managed to make it back in one piece even though it’s extremely hard to bike against ~15mph winds with a bag of stuff clamped to your bike and two slung over your shoulders. At least now I know where to go if I need stuff that can’t be bought at La Verde’s, and I now have unsweetened soymilk!

And -that- is the story of my early-afternoon adventures =)

Starting out on a journey…
Life is a road and I wanna keep going;
Love is a river and I wanna keep flowing.
Life is a road; now and forever, wonderful journey.

I’ve been drafting a “why I love MIT” post for quite some time but I have never been able to finish it because I just couldn’t explain what I felt towards the great Institvte. Yet after Convocation, I am able to target explicitly what I love.

The second speaker, Phillip Clay, addressed our experience at MIT as a “journey” - something wide open, just waiting for us to explore and find our way through the darkness, until we too achieve the ultimate goal of becoming someone that we are proud of. In a way, I too have begun a series of journeys: one to reach MIT, another to transition, and I am just about to start my third, appropriately titled Freshman Year. In each of these paths, I have faced considerable troubles. For example, I never would have dreamed I would be admitted in the first place, but after failing the Math Diagnostic Exam, I felt as if MIT had seriously made a mistake in admitting me. (21/100 isn’t exactly a brilliant score, if you know what I mean, and I actually went into the testing room with the intent of attempting the test…)

I knew I would hit lots of walls, not only academically but socially. Already I have had to learn to adapt to housing/seminar arrangements I dislike (including adjusting to roommates who sleep incredibly early), I have to audition against hundreds of other musical masterminds to join MITSO, I have successfully failed my first test at MIT (quite extremely too), I failed to qualify as an admissions blogger (I have the slightest feeling my controversial posts may be at fault ;D), and just flipping through the textbooks for my upcoming fall semester classes makes me want to curl up under the covers with my Flu GiantMicrobe (that my brother bought for me at the MIT Museum) and cry. The lab assistants weren’t kidding when they said MIT is set on beating you down to the ground, letting you find your way back up, and beating you down again.

And yet, we enjoy it here. Why? Surely we can’t all be masochists (okay, maybe that -is- a possibility); rather, I believe we enjoy it because we enjoy the challenge of being beaten down to the ground. We take pride in saying that we were able to beat the system (ex. hacking culture); we enjoy seeing those lofty walls looming ahead and find thrill in figuring ways to scale them; we enjoy the fact that we’re stepping into an open door onto an open path in our life at MIT. There is something amazing in the fact that we are aware of the challenges ahead - there is a certain camaraderie that forms between students as we face the unknown together, be we friends or strangers - and that WE, not our parents or mentors, are ultimately the ones who carry the tools that will be able to pave the way towards the future. I hope not to sound full of purple prose or random cliches, but whenever I feel extremely upset, I just look up at the wide Cambridge sky and marvel in the wonder that lives in this Institute of Technology… and I know that tomorrow will be better.

On an unrelated note, I clearly remember drafting a HUGE entry about why I dislike Apple - you know, to explain to all my iPhone-fanboy friends - but now I can’t find it in my drafts or published posts at all. Strange… and disappointing, since I spent quite a bit of time making it sound perfect :p

This post comes a few days late, but I have quite a bit of catching up to do with blogging, hehe.

Tuesday the 5th, the date before my departure, I spent the entire day with several members of my high school life that, truthfully, I feel incredibly sad to be leaving behind as I journey to a new life at MIT.

The first of these was my AP Biology teacher Mrs. Mann, whose house I invaded at 8:45 in the morning. After following her around for a while as she watered her plants and fed her turtle, we settled down on the couches with glasses of green tea and spoke about every subject under the sun - the 2009 scifair team, AP tests, college, political ideologies, vacations, the weather (I kid you not), Campbell’s Biology textbook… yeah. She also let me play with her new fancy toy…

… a Vernier LabQuest! Now for those of you who aren’t as scientifically inclined (i.e. not as nerdy as the members of the VRHS science department), this may seem like some random clunky PDA.. but it’s not! ;D Instead of using LoggerPro on the computer, the LabQuest can record data directly onto its memory, perform analyses, import/export said data, and even better… there’s a complete Periodic Table built in with every piece of data you could possibly want about each element :o

… okay, I can tell you’re probably not as excited as I am about this revolutionary data acquisition tool. Either way, I succeeded in freezing the screen while playing with said new fancy toy, and we were unable to find the reset button, so we ended up leaving the poor little overworked thing “rebooting” as we headed out to lunch at Midori Sushi with my other (honors) Biology teacher Mrs. Christman. Again, we spent about 2 hours at the restaurant, munching away on matching lunch dishes (chicken teriyaki with chef’s special sushi, California rolls, and rice) and discussing - once again - every subject under the sun. We finally said our goodbyes as rain began to trickle down from the skies; I was able to snap a quick picture with the two of them before the torrents became so heavy I had to stow away my camera.

Mrs. Mann and I dropped by her local H-E-B to pick up some ingredients to make devilled eggs, which I had expressed an extreme craving for over lunch. We spent the rest of our time together trying to remedy my terrible kitchen skills; thankfully, the devilled eggs that I made ended up edible, and I even took some to my next and final get-together before leaving for vacation… party at Sapphi’s house!

… I swear we’re all actually having a lot of fun, despite our really bored/pissed/forced looks. I actually arrived fairly early - Royce (is that how you spell his name?), Greg, and Steven had already invaded Sapphi’s house, and before the night was over we were eventually joined by John, Jennifer, Kavita, Joni, Joe, Mina, and Chris for a full party of 12. In between eating (a must at any of Sapphi’s get-togethers), laughing hysterically at random YouTube clips, watching the Onion Movie, playing with Joni’s puppy, and taking.. interesting pictures, amongst other things, I shared a ton of laughs with some of my best high school friends. (Now if only there had been a CS party earlier in the summer, but I have a strange feeling that would quickly turn itself into a LAN party of some sort involving FPS games..)

I left that night after hugging my friends with my throat choked up. It was hard to imagine this was the last I would see of everyone for a long time - sure, I’d come back for Christmas but it wouldn’t be quite the same. I love you all; I won’t ever forget our times together; you guys make life worthwhile =)