actions, not words.

Earlier tonight, I think I believed today had been a pretty decent day. Once again, it seems to me that being awake late and spending time thinking has ruined my emotional state. This time, however, it seems that the thoughts are running in a direction I don't quite understand, and with no one else on this road with me, I stumble out into the dark. For the first time in a while, thoughts first, events later. I think the title of this blog has long since been overdue for a change. This new one originates, at least for me, from a description of Chinese culture found on the Wikipedia page for the short film Bao . (This specific aspect of Bao  is briefly mentioned here  and the first mention of the film appears here .) I think it's a good general life philosophy—to do things that actually matter to people, rather than just talk about them. I don't mean that we need to stop talking about problems, but rather that we ought to do things about them (sometimes, the talking is the ...

"The struggle is real , " Pei-Ken Hung, Real Analysis Instructor. Today was a mediocre day. I really don't want to write too much about it, but I'm inevitably going to do so. It's unfortunate that I do feel my writing facilities slipping away as I get more and more tired, especially since I'm still only functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, but what must be said must be said. I got up this morning and headed to Real Analysis lecture with very little sleep. The whole endeavor was somewhat rough; I overslept the alarm, dashed to class with a friend, sat through the first 30 minutes of the lecture until sharp abdominal pain forced me to leave briefly before returning for the rest of the class. Our focus was on functions and the Intermediate Value/Extreme Value Theorems, and the class was markedly more empty than usual. I struggled to focus, sleep barely leaving me. The fire alarm went off at the end, marking a fitting end to our last in-person lecture. Spanish...

Liminal . This is a word that my writing professor has been using to describe states of being in which it is good to start a story because it's something in-between. A transitional state, a threshold, one full of uncertainty, an apt environment for both hope and despair. All of MIT has been stuck in this liminal state for what feels like ages now. I legitimately could not tell you when the first email about coronavirus was sent—it could've been a day ago, it could've been two weeks ago. It is such a strange and draining state, and nothing normal can occur. I have no idea why I am up at this time on one of the days I'm supposed to sleep at 12:30 AM, but it's also the last day of its type for the semester. Everything is a last of some sort, in a way. Last Maseeh lunch of the semester. Last 'it's Wednesday, my dudes' email of the semester. Last everything of the semester, and of my first year on campus. It feels so much like everybody is trying to wrap ...

Unlike yesterday's assumption, today was categorically not fine, and, in fact, extremely bad. I've been on the verge of a gradual slide into a mental breakdown since 9:30 AM or so this morning, and it's only gotten worse since. I am extremely tired and I still have another two days of classes to make it through. To be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure how I'll survive tomorrow. I'll do it because I have to, but I certainly won't be happy about it. I got up this morning, ready for a perfectly fine morning after a pretty abysmal night's of sleep and having delayed my alarm through my breakfast time. I headed out at a pretty blistering pace to get to Real Analysis, where today our main points of discussion were about continuity and our continued discussion of the properties of the power series for the exponential function. It was not particularly efficient, but that didn't really matter because I was also pretty distracted throughout the lecture...