272A — I'm just a dead man walking tonight...

This post was pinned because of introspection which took a significant portion out of the day to write.

Today was a pretty decent day, although the question does remain of whether the upcoming week can maintain that level of "goodness". I feel like I've written this far too many times, but, as usually happens on Sundays, the decisions made today sacrificed the sustainability of work in the upcoming days for having a good day. There are a lot of things I need get done in the upcoming week. Hopefully, all goes well.

I'm going to do my best to jump through the mundanity of the day (of which there is a lot) so I can get to the introspection below. I got up today around 10 or so, and ended up mowing the lawn after breakfast. Usually, I really don't like this task, but today, being outside, listening to a podcast, pushing the extremely old mower back and forth across the front lawn, and then the back, seemed surprisingly satisfying. The age of the mower makes it hard to start on one's own sometimes, but when it died halfway through and we couldn't get it started even together, getting it started on my own a while later was actually really self-gratifying. Sometimes it's the little things in life. Something about this whole situation seems very Walt Whitman, but I couldn't tell you what. Leaves of Grass, I guess.

That, combined with a very poignant blog post about National Science Bowl by one of my friends (which was the first actual piece of content that made me actually feel like I had missed something, although, as discussed below, I still would've been much sadder to miss FRC), consumed most of my morning, and eventually lunch was had, and work began in earnest in the afternoon. I worked on some AP Psych research stuff, and then also spent some time writing the stuff below. I don't know what else might have been included in that time, but it sort of just moved by. Efficiency was sporadic, and so it is hard to find specific personal documentation of what I accomplished, but it felt productive enough. At the very least, I don't feel too anxious or overwhelmed, so I've got that going for me.

A quick side note: we had some RSI info security breaches today mainly as a result of me adding people on Insta, and subsequent sharing. As far as I know, the kids who have discovered this blog have not talked about it yet, at the very least. If you are an RSI 2019 kid, and you are reading this blog, a) RSI is going to be a lot more fun if you get surprised, b) there are still plenty of surprises to come and, c) just don't share please. Thanks.

After dinner, I had some conversations with various MIT and RSI people, which was nice. I did some AP Bio review, and I plan on doing some more after finishing this blog. The Codex editing stuff is kind of giving me anxiety, but there has to be time. I'm not sure. I'm nervous. Tomorrow, more work. It's nice having all of my activities be over—gives me so much free time surrounding everything to be productive. So sad most of that free time goes wasted. (There are so many projects I should be/could be working on, but instead I just sit on my phone and waste away.) I leave you with the introspection from earlier in the day:

I had some second thoughts yesterday about the difficulties of MIT and all of the AP credit I'm going to be missing out on with my double major and whatnot, but today I saw a picture of the front of Lobby 7 on someone's story, the place where I worked all summer, and my heart just kind of fluttered a bit, and something felt cosmically right about the decision I had made. At the moment, I look back on the decision to go to MIT, to go to FRC, all as positives. I'm honestly kind of proud. I can't shake the universal correctness of it all. Maybe it's just rationalization. Maybe it's actually true. I put my second LGBTQ+FIRST pin on my backpack this week, and I'm going to continue to rep the things I care about. Pride is coming up! As the line in my Harvard supplement went, it's not about "[becoming] a different version of 'me'." It's about becoming myself. Here's a link back to "Why am I so gay?", a foundational TedX video about some of this that I think is really important.

On the other hand, I haven't formally started the reflection on the school year essay I wanted to be writing around this time period, but I've been thinking about it, and all signs point towards me not really having changed that much this year, despite the surprising amount of success I found in various activities this year. I'm kind of disappointed and kind of angry about that to be honest—to not have grown since RSI feels like stagnation; feels like the experience I had there was wasted as a sort of push forwards for myself for my next year at home. Instead, I feel like I am hopelessly drifting away from my home, set on course to rush into the flood currents of camp and college, with few communities left to cling to. I have barely seven weeks left in Rapid, distributed between now and the beginning of August. I'm considering doing an FPOP, which may shave yet another week off of that time. I've always thought of the journey as a form of escape, like the line from "Piano Man" that ends with "if I could get out of this place." Now that I've almost done it, I look back in wonder what I've been escaping from the whole time, and if I shouldn't have tried harder to have made it my home, changing both myself and the community around me to be better. It's not as if I haven't done anything, but when it comes to culture-level change in activities or whatnot, I don't feel like I've really done enough. Maybe that's still my station as someone who lacks some level of privilege. Maybe that's just my crutch to excuse incompetence and selfishness. In any case, I guess we've crossed the event horizon now, so there's only forwards from here on out. Forwards, with the lessons I've learned from my past to bring into the future. Hopefully, at the very least, I'll be a good counselor for RSI '19. Let's start with that. Stepping stones.

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