634A — But I'm weak, and what's wrong with that?

tl;dr: this blog is going to be condensed down to only "quality" writing starting May 7th; daily minutia will continue to be published at a staging blog—contact me for details.

My mood has been kind of wobbly recently, and I'm not entirely sure why. There have been days where the writing has kind of come naturally to me and my mind is full of ideas, and other days where the writing is dull and repetitive, full of echoes of things already said. This strange emotional variability can also be seen from some of the data I keep from this blog, so I'm not just imagining it—my mood has been more consistently variable over the past few weeks, if one can forgive the oxymoronic phrase of "consistently variable."

In regards to writing, I plan on significantly changing the form factor of this blog in the coming few weeks—I do think that having this daily writing has benefited me by giving a space to unravel my thoughts, but I don't think this is useful as a public platform, and I would rather have a site that contains mostly my best writing—or, at the very least, the thoughts that I hold most dear to me, since I am doubtful of the actual quality of any of this content, even in comparative perspective. At the moment, the plan is this: I've imported all of the posts from this blog onto a separate, private staging blog that various individuals already have access to. For the coming week, until May 7th, all posts on this blog will also be posted there—everything will appear as usual.

After May 7th, daily posts will appear only on the private blog. If anyone would still like access to those posts, they are welcome to contact me, although, to be honest, I don't suspect that this is likely. After this point, almost all posts on this blog will also be unpublished, apart from those which I have previously tagged as "Best of the Blogs"—this will most likely pose some practical burden on the links between blogs, but that concern will hopefully be resolved as I go through each individual post and edit for clarity following May 7th. Blog posts from the private blog which contain "good content", whatever that means, will also be published here. The general migration will be complete when all posts are edited and resolved.

One of the big reasons I am doing this is actually to allow me to share this posts on this site without having them confronted by a large corpus of generally mediocre writing. In the vein of public presentation, there is also a low-probability that I will eventually be attempting to move this blog to a subdomain of a scripts.mit.edu site hosted at the same domain—because of the difficult way in which this blog is served through Cloudflare, however, this may end up being a difficult task and will most likely require significant forethought. More details may follow in that regards; we'll have to see.

Perhaps, now, for some more interesting thoughts that have been festering in this document for longer than I'm willing to admit:

I've been thinking about the "six degrees of separation" concept recently—it's popped up in a variety of locations, playing over in my mind, in a strange sort of way. Obviously, the number six itself is not really borne out by the science, but the specifics of small-world networks indicates that the number of likely connections between any two individuals on the planet is probably reasonably small, especially as one expands the definition of "connection." There's a quote from an eponymous play by Guare that I read for AP literature:

I find that A) tremendously comforting that we're so close and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names. It's anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought...How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people.

As I've written somewhere before, however, it's not just that. I think the initial seed that re-sparked this reflection was a line from a blog post I read about missed connections. There are so many people I will never get to meet—so many people I had an opportunity to get to know, but didn't—and there are so many connections from those connections that immediately dry up, never to be found. The same is, of course, true for most things—there are so many things I will never get to do, so many paths I will never get to take—but the ache of missing out on specific human connections seems to be the most acute. Perhaps, however, this is why I think meeting new people is particularly valuable—and I guess I am glad that at the very least I have been in a lot of different situations where I've been able to do that.

In a markedly different tone, today was May 1st, also known as College Decision Day, and I'm very excited because so many of my counselees from RSI 2019 are going to be in Cambridge. Knowing them, I know they'll be really busy, but I cannot wait to see them again in the fall. I'm also going to ignore the possibility that classes aren't on campus on the fall—my heart will break if I have to wait to see them (as well as, of course, the MIT community and Next House) for longer than I have to. We'll have to wait and see though.

On the other hand, I am concerned about where my ability to express my empathy has gone since starting MIT. I feel like I don't have the right words anymore. I don't even know what I used to say. This school has robbed me of comforting words in the fear that they might be wrong or inappropriate. There was a question yesterday which read "you are enough and everything will be ok" and it reminded me of when I used to be able to pull these words out of myself to give to others. Words like "I can't possibly fully understand what you are going through but goddamnit I'm here for you, and it will be ok, I promise." It feels like my words have run dry and I don't understand it. My friends tell me something and I literally just don't have words to say anymore; I can't comfort them they way I need to. Not even the wrong words—just no words—and I honestly think the silence is worse. This feels really bad, and I don't understand it. Yikes.

Other things I forgot to mention in the past few blogs: summer plans! I have some! I'm still stuck at home, obviously, but I have at the very least I have some form of job for about six weeks, and quite a few side-projects to work on. I'm hoping to be one of the REX chairs for Next House, which should take up some good amount of time, as should continuing to work through 8.03x. I'm also planning on self-studying some of the 6.006 content from this semester with a friend, and my mother and I are reading through an organic chemistry textbook, which is also quite exciting. The final tasks are an EECS project for my dad that I haven't made progress on in a few weeks and reading lots of books, all of which I am quite excited for. It will be a good time.

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Now, for the content I usually write.

Today was a good day. I was astoundingly productive, and although I had to struggle through some tasks, the majority of it felt really good, so much so that the productivity level made me think that it was a Saturday.

I got up this morning just in time to attend Concourse Seminar, which today was truly glorious. We had a global discussion about hobbies and activities everybody was doing to adapt to quarantine. I learned a lot about my professors as they discussed a variety of media and activities they enjoyed, which was honestly just quite a good time. There were some discussions of everything from campaign-based board games (our physics professor) to competing over the NY Times Sunday crossword (our director/history professor) to reading Pride and Prejudice with their children (our chemistry professor), and all of it seemed very wholesome and joyful.

Following seminar, I decided to re-read John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (as discussed above), which was a truly good time; lunch also occurred in the middle of this, and afterwards I took a pretty significant break before deciding that it was finally time to complete and turn in my major proposal. I'm sending it to my writing advisor first, which means there will still be some time before it's officially a major, but I'm excited! I then continued on to read the chapter of the information theory textbook that we're reading, which is getting more and more abstract, although not totally incomprehensible and occasionally quite interesting (for example, I learned exactly how a phase change manifests itself in statistical physics, which is quite cool). At some point in the late evening, I transitioned into trying to work on my real analysis final assignment, which failed miserably and resulted in an hour of work with absolutely no progress. Frustrated, I took a break before tackling some basic wiring for my 6.08 project, interspersed with dinner.

I did my best to tackle a little bit of my Spanish homework at the very end of this, but found that my ability to focus was rapidly waning. I then decided to give up on this endeavor and go to sleep early, and then proceeded to take some pretty significant amount of time to finish writing this. Oops. At least this isn't a bad sleep time at all.

Tomorrow, work! Exciting.