641A — Same, same. Same same.

The title of this blog post comes from a really cute song that one of my friends sent me and which I've been listening to on repeat for probably an hour now. Reminder that most daily posts are not getting published here—instead, they are on a staging blog that will be shared upon request—and that most posts will be edited down in the future to their core content.

Today was a great day. In regards to how productive I was, or how today sets me up for the coming few days, a different discussion can and probably should be had. However, I think I made a resolution at some point going into MIT that I was never going to regret not doing problem sets and not sleeping because I was spending time with friends, and I think today has to fall under that exemption. Never regret the good things—they are the only things you have. This doesn't stop you from exercising some time management skills, or planning for the future, but I strongly believe that this is a valuable part of one's life. Maybe this was already obvious to everyone around me, but I think this explicit mantra has helped me at least somewhat along the way, so I'll continue to espouse it in spite of its obviousness.

I got up this morning after a ridiculous amount of sleep, and ended up still laying in bed, awake, waiting to get up until just the right time to make Concourse Seminar. There were some interesting thoughts today during seminar, which today mostly involved people sharing their differing opinions about how the latter half of the semester had been. Some felt like they had a lot of extra free time; others did not. Personally, I fell somewhere in the middle, recalling the earlier two weeks of the semester where I did as much as I possibly could every day and added all of the side projects that I started pursuing at that point, but also noting the change of the tide now, where Physics and Real Analysis are actually taking up more of my time than they did on campus. It's a very strange shift, but it's one that is occurring now, so I'll take note of it.

Two specific notes that I think did resonate with me were this:

• "I feel like I was always rushing." My advisor made this comment, and it reminded me of a seminar from last semester where we read "The Acceleration of Tranquility." It talked about how the world was speeding up (this was a 1996 article, at the start of the digital revolution)—moving faster and causing us to produce more and more, and yet the most beautiful moments were always the slow ones. The existence of all of this digital media; the existence of all of these possible courses to take; the existence of all of the possible roads we now have the option to walk down makes us greedier and greedier and run faster and faster. I quoted this line then: "the life of the British statesman was superior because he was allowed rest and reflection." I think it still rings true. Now that we are home, we are not rushing quite as much; perhaps some of us could do with more rest and reflection.
• One of the other students noted that they felt like an inductor. An inductor is (more or less) an element in a circuit that does its best to keep the current the same. If a switch flips on, the inductor makes sure the change in current is smooth and gradual, and the same is true if the switch is turned off. This is not all they are used for, but that's beyond the point of this blog post. The reason she said she felt like this is because even as the stress levels have decreased, she's been generating her own stress—doing more activities, worrying about new things. I really identified with this model—I remember at the end of last semester when I was doing perfectly fine and really should not have been stressed, but even as classes and activities wound down, I felt like "my base level of anxiety [was] rising, for some unknown sort of reason, which [was] doing its best to drown out the rest of my feelings." It's the same reason I fill my day with organic chemistry and other content that doesn't need to be there; I'm always searching for the same level of activity and stress. This is why true "rest and reflection" I feel is unlikely—but maybe it'll happen sometime.

With the last seminar of the semester over, I can say I was very glad to have had the seminar the past few weeks to unwind and just to hear our professors talk to each other in a very human format. It felt refreshing and genuine—I think MIT really humanizes people in our collective struggles, and this has really helped me appreciate my professors more in that sense. Hopefully there will be many more interesting Concourse discussions to follow, although they won't be obligatory anymore.

I read some organic chemistry and had lunch afterwards. (Organic chemistry was, in fact, the only thing I worked on all day today, which is really quite miserable when you think about it.) From lunch onwards, my day became full of meetings—one productive meeting, which was an interview to be on the Next House Residence Exploration (REX) committee, which went quite well but was much more intense than the CPW committee interview had been. The rest were not productive, and had never been designed to be, for which I was glad.

The first involved me driving out to the baseball field parking lot again to meet up with some friends while socially distanced and chat, which lasted from 3 PM with a somewhat rotating cast all the way until around 5:40, when only me and my high school friend who's at MIT with me were left. This was quite a nice conversation, and it was extremely nice to able to be outside for a little while, at least. Afterwards, I headed home and jumped on another hour or so call with my RSI kids (our first call in a very long while), where I was really excited to learn that nine of my fourteen counselees would be in Boston for college, meaning that a) there is plenty more Alan's Zoo content to come and b) I'm going to have to spend more time at Harvard these coming semesters. Time to find all the good places to work on campus.

At this point, I ended up having a call with a friend which was purportedly about the real analysis final assignment. When I joined, however, it turned out that it was, in fact, a birthday party for me! (I had actually punted this call from yesterday because of my headache. Oops.) This was quite a joy for me, and I was very happy to be celebrating in 4W fashion along with many other friends from activities and whatnot. I legitimately cannot believe that I did not see this coming, but it was a complete surprise and I'm very happy for it. Some of us ended up staying on and chatting for an extended period of time, after watching Too Many Cooks at my very unfortunate suggestion. This, it turns out, was sufficient to carry me all the way over to dinner.

After dinner, I did my organic chemistry reading for the week, and that was basically all I was able to accomplish. What a day full of delight totally unrelated to the completion of schoolwork. Hopefully, in the future, there will be more of this feeling to follow when I meet up with friends again in person, although, as our Concourse director noted: it is likely that this will once again be normalized. I hope I will always remember this in the background, to remind me to be eternally grateful for the interactions I have with other people, but I suppose adaptation is just fundamentally part of the hedonistic treadmill. For now, however, the joy is truly great to have, especially in the middle of the stress of quarantine and final assignments.

Tomorrow, back to work, as ever.