:D Awesome

Hello hello hello.

MIT seems to have continued to be MIT since I left. Classes have not started yet (my two-week machining class starts tomorrow at 9am, but proper subjects lie far, far away at the beginning of February), but the rest of the mad, peculiar status quo seems to have been retained.

1. This weekend was...Mystery Hunt weekend! Mystery Hunt is basically a big, complicated puzzle hunt that pretty much the entire MIT campus participates in. It involves solving various puzzles that involve the typical word games/cryptic symbols/lists of names or dates or photos or 1970s Broadway Musicals that are linked in obscure ways, and also ones that involve cooking/dressing up as various things/giant scavenger hunts around Boston etc. There are about 50 MIT teams, some living-group affiliated, some not. I was hunting (unofficially) with the team from Random Hall, basically on a whim after my friend Josh asked me jokingly if I was on their time and I decided to answer 'YES'.

( Mystery Hunty Hunt Hunt )

2. Also - it is snowing! In a wonderfully pretty way. Being from a place where precipitation is rather crystally challenges, I was obviously very ( snap happy )

3. Gig season has started, yay! Yay for using my reduced rent and food money to, er, pay for $8 tickets to reasonably unknown bands at the Middle East. This week me and the gig crew went to see The Rosebuds, a sort of folkier version of the Subways. They were pretty good, and from them I must post one ubiquitous ( crappy gig picture )

4. I continue to have friends that put up with me, bless 'em, and until classes start we are actually able to *gasp* see each other. Here, before the Rosebuds, ( we go to Toscaninis )

I now realise that a few people read this to see what I'm doing/whether I'm still alive, so for the next while it will be full of common or garden "these are some things wot I done" format.

Classes have not started yet. This does not mean everything is not still hectic...

I spent my first week working for the Ocean Engineering department, running their orientation program to recruit new freshman (as I was recruited many months ago). We took them to various places like the New England aquarium and a recreation 18thC shipping port in Conneticut where we met various professional tall-ship sailors. One of them was telling me how a few research vessels still ran off New England and could need oceanographers, leaving me fantasising about my future career...

The freshman had to build robots, but being intelligent MIT types, they were very capable of doing it on their own. This left us, the mentors, free to create our own masterpiece: a floating armchair with propellers underneath, wired up to a control box so we could drive ourself around the MIT swimming pool in it :). I will have pictures.

After that week finished it was dorm rush, where we try to get all the freshmen to live in our dorms. Right now it's fraternity/ILG rush week, where strange student cults named after greek letters indocrinate young freshmen "pledges" and hit them with paddles by way of team-building exercises. At the edges of this there are the six MIT-affiliated independing living groups, who are not crazy 'brotherhoods', just places where people live. Our job is to band together to save the freshmen from the frats and let them live with us instead. It's a difficult task.

Also, I somehow ended up working light board for a production of 'Into the Woods'. It was a favour for the producer, who is a good friend of mine, but it's fun anyhow as it's a really good show. The set is gorgeous. The light cues are also really bleedin complicated.

Oh, and I got a job as a tutor! W00t! This means I'm dropping one class, Special Relativity, but I figured that getting paid to review Linear Differential Equations (which I really need to know...) is better than snowing myself under with a subject I don't actually need to do to graduate. And I'll still be taking 3 technical + 1 humanities classes, which is the recommended maximum unless one is a Genius Prodigy or Crazy.

What else? I'm joint Technical Director and joint Set Designer for a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. It should be really really fun - the director is awesome and his idea for the set is exactly the same as ours. Also, the rest of the prod staff are all my close friends (Anna is Lighting Designer, Kel is producer, Brianna is my other half in both jobs). So yay. Fun all round.

I must stop now, as the other 0.5TD is coming to discuss our pretty pretty set.

Love
Grace

Back where I belong...briefly.

The first term at MIT has been a strange, hectic, surreal experience that almost seems like it belongs in another universe. I can never decide whether things feel as if they happened last week or last year - I feel at once like an old hand and like I'm still completely out of my depth.

I wish I could put the whole experience in words, but I don't think there's enough space or time. In short, physics is damn hard but damn interesting, my dorm is awesome, life is never ever boring and to be honest I think of the underage-for-drink thing as being a benefit. Time is a precious commodity, and there are far better things to do with it than get shitfaced.

Now I'm back, I'm even more relieved to see Glasgow than I thought I'd be. I thought the common going-away-to-college attitude was generally 'Yes!! Freedom!!', but for some reason I don't feel that way. As amazing a place as MIT is, I still feel more at home here in the Old Country than I think I'll ever be anywhere else. Reality is very firmly here - this place with familiar voices, and irony, and nice-tasting bacon. And unlike many other returning students, I really like being back with my family. They're pretty awesome.

Ditto my old friends. To paraphrase one of them - I've made plenty of new friends in college, but few of them know me well enough to spring sexual lubricant anecdotes on me at a moment's notice. To be fair, I do that to them anyway, but it feels nice to recieve as well as give sometimes.

The best thing about being home, though? That at this time of night, after wasting some quality time on the intertubes, I can go curl up in my bed with a good book and a nice spot of tea in my Sex Pistols mug (ah, the irony), and not worry about that pset I have to finish for tomorrow or the class I have at 9am...

...Yes. It's good to be home.

Happy :-)

8.012 Physics: By some silly presumption of my own abilities, I signed up for 'hard physics' this term. It's a fickle mistress, to be fair, and sometimes is the most frustrating thing imaginable, but it's incredibly interesting. Also, when you've spent four hours labouring over this one problem about rotational momentum and then at 3am finally get it...it feels so damn good.
Costume Design: A Humanities class I switched into at the last minute because my friend said it sounded cool...and turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made here so far. There's nothing like relaxing between problem sets by painting giant robot suits and making imitation armour out of carpet fabric - and getting academic credit for it, too.
My room started out a bland kind of ecru, was painted initially with giant multicoloured bubbles, and now is the canvas for whatever me and my Sharpie want to produce in the early hours of the morning. So far some giant-eyeball plants, a literal clockwork orange, butterflies, a few Baron Samedi portraits, the Sex Pistols logo and a saltire.
friday juggling club - no, seriously, I'm in the juggling club. Doesn't mean I can juggle, does mean that I'm learning to...also poi, unicycle, stick-throwing etc. It's awesome fun, not least because of the fact that the first time I turned up I found that all of the people I'd met randomly during fresher's week and thought were awesome were in it too.
the fact that at any moment someone will make a sweeping scientific analogy for whatever the conversation is about, then run to the nearest whiteboard to make a graph/set of equations for it (example - one of my friends just came into my room and drew an integral for charge on a sphere - with respect to (_), radius ♥ - above my bubble-heart painting, then ran away saying 'I've been wanting to do that for a while...'). Also the fact that everyone is interesting in some way - and though not everyone is nice, none of them are stupid.
all the silly traditions and hacks and 'cultures' that no-one really takes seriously but at the same time really do. In any case, they're great fun.
The Artists and Craftsman - a small, multicoloured art supply store competing with the shiny chain 'Pearl Arts & Crafts' across the road, staffed by friendly Mass-Art students who already recognise me.
MITSFSthe MIT Science Fiction library. It takes up around the same proportion of the student body as the Science Fiction society does in most colleges, but this being MIT, where everyone is a nerd, the SFS contains the nerdiest nerds in nerdland. And is therefore awesome. It's also a nice, quiet, cosy place to curl up with a book of PKD short stories for half an hour between classes.
Sunny's - a tiny, cute little dinner close by whose coffee always somehow seems to hit the spot when you've just pulled an all-nighter to finish a physics p-set.
Those lucid moments during lecture when your brain is somehow working faster than usual and miraculously UNDERSTANDS SCIENCE!!
late friday night exploring with my friends, ending up back at East Campus to make smoothies and talk into the early hours of saturday morning.
The fact that everyone is too busy to drink
All the little awesome things that happen daily - like when someone in my hall comes back with a cannister of liquid nitrogen and we all make ice cream/frozen grapes/frozen anything we can get our hands on, getting out of campus and talking to random Bostonians, passing people riding on unicycles down the main corridor...etc.

Life here is just crazy, but fun.

I intended to make a "Things at MIT that make me sad..." list, but all I can think of right now is:
Everyone is smarter than I am. Subsequently I always feel very stupid...but then I ask around and find that, actually, everyone else feels that way too.
My laptop got stolen :-(
There are only 24 hours in a day.

...that's about it, I think!
Should sleep now...luckily I don't have class til 1pm tomorrow - so Wednesday nights are it's-okay-if-you-work-until-6am nights...or something.

That's another thing - sleep schedule here? Forget it...

Am now proper, bona-fide almost-MIT student. Though I have been on campus for five days already, scheduled classes are still that strange beast off on the horizon somewhere that I haven't really got round to thinking about yet. Already, though, I have paper-mached a giant wood-and-wire elephant, rode a human-sized hamster wheel, wandered through Boston to a 24-hour bakery at 1am, and many other awesome things that I am now too tired to remember. Funnily enough, the concept of 8 hours of sleep a night has already become a distant memory.

I got temped in my first choice dorm, East Campus - the rooms get juggled around next week in case people change their minds about where they want to live. I'm going to stick with it though, because it is, as they say, the awesome. The walls are covered in murals, there are cute cats everywhere and in the five days I've been here the central courtyard has been transformed from a bit of patchy grass to the building site for a twisted sort of kiddie funfair. So far a chariot powered by hamster-humans in the wheels and a mobile sofa have been constructed, and in various stages of completion are a revolving see-saw, a maze and an almost life-size elephant. The people are very friendly, and it feels like it's the best place I'd ever want to live in. In fact, to show you the awesome, here are some pictures.

My room - for now. Ceiling encroaching.


This is not actually my floor, but apparently it is Bat Country.


The common room-type bit on my floor, consisting of a fishtank, a bar, and a sewing machine.


"George Clinton was here"


Yes, people paint this kind of stuff on their doors. Jamie, you can breathe now.


...and the bathroom stalls, apparently.


The other night, some nice students got me and the other freshmen some marshmallows and a bunsen burner. It was very much appreciated.


The half-finshed East Campus elephant


A nice kitty. This one jumped into my room as soon as I arrived and started making itself at home on my suitcases.



After a few days of being herded around with the rest of the jet-lagged internationals to be told the many things I cannot do on my student visa (there are many. I give it three months before deportation) I am now doing my 'Pre-Orienation course'. Think fresher's week in a place where the drinking age is 21 and there is a regular supply of robot parts. Since my course is run by the Ocean Engineering department our robot goes underwater and so is the hottest thing since sliced awesome. My robot-building partner Anna and I christened it the AquaTardis - it travels through space, time and water, and thus is better than the Doctor's. There is an extraordinary number of American 'Doctor Who' fans at this college, actually. Which would be its own reason to go...

AQUATARDIS!


Anna giving last-minte repairs to the AquaTardis.


Some crazies on the Ocean Engineering course...


And okay, it's unrelated, but WE SAW KISMET!! The last day my mum was here we went out to the MIT Museum, where we saw the, er, anthropomorphic speech-recognition robotic head that I was obsessed with as a child. In't he cute?


Well yes, sleepy time calls now. I should really have gone to bed an hour ago, as we are up bright and early tomorrow morning to go see the guy who discovered the wreck of the Titanic. Ah, life is hard :-). Mahalo, stay alive in Amsterdam, kiddies.
♥

Mahalo from Cambridge, MA! I type here from Hotel MIT, which is awesome liek woah - there are robots in the lobby, equations on the bedspread, and the lifts look like something out of 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Maw and I arrived in Boston late last night, absolutely shattered, with our (well, okay, my) enormous suitcases in tow. I think, for maybe about half an hour, I may have regretted deciding to pack that carpet. The border control was surprisingly fast - instead of a full-scale interrogation and strip search, the tactic seemed to be to deter terrorists with the rudest Federal employee in New England. After shouting at me for not moving quickly enough, she asked me what year I was in at school. I promptly answered something like "Well, no, I'm not actually in school...see, but...but I'm starting college. I start next week. For the first time. I'm a freshman," which earned me the most soul-destroying glare I have ever received and a "That's all I needed to know, Ma'am." Note for future culture-immersion: apparently 'school' in America also means 'college'...

We were driven in to the city by an eccentric Moroccan bloke who got lost several times on the way to the hotel, but made up for it with gems like "You no need the seatbelt! I save you! I save all the ladies! These men can all go to hell!", and when Maw for some reason doubted this and changed to a safer seat: "Oh no! One of beautiful ladies has disappear! Where can she gone???". After many dramatic wrong turns ("Oh no! It is wrong street! I think someone has moved buildings over to other side!") we finally arrived in (OMG!!) MIT.

After wandering around Cambridge itself, I can honestly say that the place is AWESOME. I could really imagine leaving here. At first it seems very bizarre - like a direct cross between a fairly shady American city and a cute Swiss mountain village. The architecture is all Colonial red brick, with lots of little independent shops and cafes, and there's a very eclectic mix of people - lots of studenty types, crusty old men with wooden pipes, women in business suits, grubby guys sitting around in the street drinking a Bucky equivalent, young families, and one man who I was sure was some sort of Priest of Scientology.

There is too much to describe about Boston itself. We took a wander around today, me enjoying my brief status as a tourist before I officially live here and am no longer allowed to trek huge distances between landmarks with my nose in a guidebook. But a picture says a thousand words etc etc, so here are some pics from my brank spanking new (£80! ASDA retail price: £135! Dollar exchange rate, I love you) camera.

( Boston )

'Sup.

I know the grand readership of four-ish of this journal are all away in Europe atm, but I feel a more upbeat post was needed than that last one. Unfortunately, due to the fact that they are in Europe and I am here upbeat is a pretty hard thing to achieve.

Who knew there was so much to packing one's entire life into a suitcase? Sure not me. I am notoriously awful at packing. I pack clothes that don't match and are seasonally inappropriate, and forget essential things like socks and a toothbrush. This is just for week holidays. I now have to pack for five months at MIT - a tremendous feat involving horrifyingly practical things like laundry baskets, foam mattress-supplements and coat hangers. This on top of clothing, which cannot take up too much space but is vitally important - though I am far away at an American tech college, I am told that I must still look like a Glasgow art student.

I wonder what sort of impression turning up to my first lesson in kinky boots would create?

Other than that - SO EXCITED!! I'm going to be in MIT in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS!!! In my mind there is a whirlwind of excitement and robots and roofs adorned with municipal vehicles, but I have this nagging wee feeling that in reality there will also be lots of maths, and that I probably should have revised those pre-calculus units they gave me a bit more. And by this I mean 'looked at them'.

But speaking of maths...A BAND ONE!!! YA DANCER!!! Uh-huh-huh!

I think that was a year of masochistic studying and flaying the body of my dying social life well spent. :-)