If
anything, this week was even crazier than last week. Actually, I guess the week
as a whole wasn’t that bad... it’s just the individual days that were insane.
Which I guess makes the week rather insane. Okay... I’m going to stop trying to
decide whether my week was crazy or not, and just tell you about it. You can
draw your own conclusions. :)
On Monday,
I was conscripted into the West Campus ‘Water Wars’ team (and I somehow managed
to get my friends conscripted as well... sorry guys). It all began when one of
my friends who lives on the floor came looking for someone who knows how to use
a circular saw. Being unfamiliar with the proper names for power tools, I said
that I knew how to use one. (I have used power saws before, but generally only
table saws and miter saws, neither of which I knew the appropriate name for
until just now, and both of which I assumed could be circular saws, since they
have circular blades. My father is probably hitting his head against a wall
right now. :P ) Anyway, we figured out how circular saws work, and I ended up
cutting about 25 or 30 pieces of wood to be used as shields during the Water
War. We then somehow ended up painting said pieces of wood... and drilling
holes in them to attach ropes... and attaching the ropes. We also ended up
filling water balloons, carrying things over to the field, and eventually
actually fighting in the Water War.
Water War
is something of an MIT tradition that takes place during Freshman Orientation
every year. The West Campus dorms fight the East Campus dorms. It’s more or
less a foregone conclusion that East Campus will win, if only because they
manage to drum up more participants each year. The basic idea is to get the
other team as soaking wet as possible, by throwing water balloons, or shooting
homemade squirt guns, or dumping buckets of water on people. Essentially, you
want to soak the other team by using whatever means necessary. This was
actually my first year participating in Water Wars, because I was a lame
freshman and only really went to the required orientation events. It was pretty
exciting, as far as water balloon fights go.
On Tuesday,
I had a really, really long day. It began with buying eight watermelons at the
grocery store. Yes, you read that right- I bought eight watermelons. Eight
watermelons are surprisingly heavy; getting them back to the dorm was something
of a struggle. I did manage it somehow though, and I got one and a half of them
cut up before I had to head outside to get the barbecue set up. See, the reason
that Tuesday was such a long day was because I was in charge of an eight-hour
barbecue for my dorm, to try to get freshmen to come live with us. Don’t ask me
why an eight-hour barbecue was necessary... I have zero idea. However, I was
put in charge of it, so I spent 8+ hours on Tuesday grilling burgers and
running around. I’m very, very grateful to all of my friends who allowed me to
conscript them into helping. Without all of them, it’s very likely that it
would have been a disaster. (As an example of the disaster potential inherent
in this event, I spent the vast majority of the day cooking beef burgers,
something that I don’t eat and have never really seen cooked... so if one of my
friends hadn’t taught me in the morning what we were doing, there probably would
have been some disgusting burgers served.)
All eight
watermelons were eaten fairly quickly, which I don’t find surprising at all
(they were delicious). We grilled through lunch, and while there were slow
periods, there was almost always someone who wanted a burger, or something that
needed doing in order to keep everything running smoothly. We then continued
grilling trough dinner time, but we eventually ran out of charcoal and had to
stop. Unfortunately, my day wasn’t over at this point, since I was also in
charge of a s’mores making event after the barbecue, that was scheduled to run
for another four hours. Unfortunately (or fortunately, in my case) it had to be
cut short for various reasons. As a result, I was done running events well
before midnight, which was something of a relief, because I was exhausted.
Tuesday was
the last day of the REX part of freshman orientation. REX stands for
Residential EXploration period, and it’s the time that MIT freshmen have to
choose where they’re going to live. They’re temped in a dorm when they get to
MIT, and then they can choose whether or not that dorm really fits what they’re
looking for once they get here. Once all the freshmen have chosen their
official dorms, there’s an in-dorm rooming process that lets them choose which
floor best suits them within the dorm. This is especially important in dorms
like Burton-Conner, where I live, in which each floor has a fairly unique
culture. During the in-dorm rooming process in Burton-Conner, each floor has
events intended to showcase some things about the floor, residents of the floor
are available for questions, and there’s lots of good food.
Floor Rush
(as the in-dorm rooming process is known in Burton-Conner) is a lot of fun, but
it’s also quite a bit of work to set up as an upperclassman. Again, this was a
totally new experience for me, since I wasn’t involved in the setup of Floor
Rush my freshman year, and I wasn’t back in Boston yet last year. It was fun,
but not stress-free, since there were a lot of things to set up in a relatively
short amount of time, and then there were three hours of trying to convince
freshmen that my floor is the best place for them. I’m not nearly as shy as I
was a few years ago, but large-scale social situations are still not really my
cup of tea. Luckily, I managed to work around this by timing the people running
the obstacle course, which basically allowed me to run a stopwatch and tell
people their times, while leaving most of the convincing to the more persuasive
members of my floor.
For various
reasons (most involving cleaning and advance planning for the next day, when
the freshmen would find out what floor they were on, and we would place them in
rooms where we thought they would fit best on the floor) I went to sleep fairly
late on Wednesday night/Thursday morning.
And then I had to get up pretty early on Thursday in order to meet our
new freshmen... this week had something of a theme of not getting enough sleep.
Thursday morning and early afternoon was filled with doing a lot of stuff to
get the rooming information for our floor to the appropriate people and
corrected in all the places it needed to be corrected. After we were done with
that, we had a few hours to take a break and just chill before helping our GRT
(Graduate Resident Tutor; the grad student who lives on our floor and is there
for advice/cookie making/general helpfulness) make dinner for the freshmen. She
had decided on a pizza making event, so the freshmen all made their pizzas in
one of the conference rooms in Burton-Conner, and then we brought them upstairs
and cooked them, returning them to the freshmen when the pizzas were done. It
was a lot of fun, and we got to use some of the leftover dough to make pizzas
for ourselves for dinner, which was awesome.
Friday was
the first full day where I didn’t have anything REX or Floor Rush or
Orientation related to do... so I slept for a good portion of it. :P On Friday
night, a group of friends and I went into Harvard Square to have dinner and
celebrate being back together and done with REX things. We went to the Thai
restaurant that I had gone to earlier in the summer, and it was delicious once
again. It’s definitely going on my list of go-to restaurants.
On
Saturday, I woke up not feeling great, but I had been planning to go running
with two of my friends, so I decided I should at least try to do that. It was
pretty much an epic fail... first of all, I’m not a very fast runner, even when
I’m in top form, so running with these two (both of whom are a good deal faster
than me) was maybe not my best plan ever. Additionally, I was having trouble
not coughing every time I tried to breathe... so running was maybe not the best
idea. I ended up taking a three mile walk, which took more out of me than I can
state without being embarrassed. We had planned to go grocery shopping after we
got back, but I was wiped out, both because I’m severely out of shape and
because of my cold, so I kind of just went back to sleep and took two three
hour naps. I more or less hid in my room for the rest of that day, watching
awful movies on Hulu (a free internet video streaming site) and sleeping. This
recuperation method seemed to work pretty well though, because I definitely
felt better after sleeping. My guess is that high stress levels and being ridiculously
busy shot my immune system, so that once I finally relaxed a little bit, the
evil common cold caught up to me. Not the most scientific explanation, perhaps,
but one that makes some amount of sense in this case.
On Sunday I
slept pretty late again, and then spent a good portion of the day setting up my
room, something that I hadn’t really done up to that point. It’s not all that
exciting... but it is cleaner than it will probably be all year, so I took some
pictures (see below) for posterity.
This is my corner of the room- I hung up some pictures above my bed.
The poster you can see to the left of the window is a list of 101 things to do before you graduate from MIT... I've got 57.5 done so far. (The half is because the last one is "Earn your degree" and I'm halfway there, which is utterly bizarre.)
Next week is the start of my Junior year, which is totally
ridiculous to think about... I feel so old! Hopefully it will be good though...
we’ll see! :D
Also, I mentioned the Revere Beach Sand Castle Contest in
one of my previous posts, back in the middle of the summer. I was unable to
take pictures of the sculptures because my camera died, but I stumbled across a
webpage that had the pictures posted today, so I’m including the link here: http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=78413
I hope everyone has a good week!
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