726A — Every path I make, every road leads back...

this is a post moved over from the daily series, with minimal edits.

I am up slightly later than I would like to be, but part of that is due to the fact that I have irreparably broken my sleep schedule, and therefore, in combination with a lot of naps I took in the afternoon, am still capable of being awake at this time. I'm trying to put myself back on track, however, so hopefully that will work itself out. We'll see how it goes. In any case, today was pretty okay.

I got up this morning at 9:30 AM, thirty minutes after my alarm was set for, which was unfortunate, since I was supposed to get up at 9 to make HSSP slides. Fortunately, this week's verse of "We Didn't Start the Fire" was shorter than others, so I was able to make the slides for the lyrics I was covering and still have some time left over, and go a little more in-depth to the subjects than I normally would. My coteacher and I managed to finish the slides right under the wire (as is usual), and, once again, managed to mispace our class by some marginal amount, resulting in us rushing the pop culture section. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, however, and honestly I thought this class was a lot better informed than previous ones. I'm really happy with how the class is going; two weeks left to cover the last verse. Exciting.

After lunch, I went back to bed, and managed to slip all the way into deep sleep. I napped from around 1 to 5, and eventually got up, groggy, and sort of just sat around the house and listened to podcasts. My podcast backlog has ballooned since the end of spring semester, when my stress level started peaking. (The balance between the amount of music I listen to and the amount of podcasts I listen to is strongly dictated by how emotionally well I am, which is an interesting phenomenon.) This lasted me until dinner, after which I remained out of the mood to do things, and instead played some casual games while listening to podcasts and signed some student summerbooks.

This broad lack of initiative reminds me strongly of the two weeks after RSI 2018, two years ago, when I started writing this streak of daily posts. (We're a few days out from hitting the full two year mark, but still.) I remember sleeping until noon everyday, and just generally feeling like there was nothing that could possibly motivate me to get out of bed and do the work I had to do. I don't remember feeling that same sort of collapse with RSI 2019, but I think that can be attributed to an easier workload, a few extra days at MIT to decompress, and the lasting excitement of an impending freshman year which would start in just two weeks. After this year's workload, the fact that I am immediately kicked back into my "normal life", and without too much to look forwards to (apart from getting out of my house in a month), I suppose it is reasonable that I feel more exhausted than in 2019.

I remember in high school that I was asked the following tongue-in-cheek question once or twice: "does your back hurt from carrying so hard?" (This was in relation to some academic activity; I don't remember which and don't particularly care.) I won't relitigate my high school career here, but my insertion of the question here is not intended to be, nor is it factually, a form of bragging. Rather, it's sort of a thought that returned to my mind, that although I would never in any way claim that I had carried the program in the sense it was connoted in the original question (after all, I had just handled the social/technical aspects of the program, and the staff in any case has been exceptional in these exceptional circumstances), RSI is an exceptionally heavy program, laden with its reputation, its mission, its traditions, and its inordinate size and scope, and each of the staff has had to carry a portion of that weight as we've proceeded through the summer. The answer to the question, in this sense, is yes. I am exhausted and my body physically aches from having helped shoulder a small piece of the portion weight of the program this summer.

Left with this, I think I owe it to myself to reflect a little bit about my emotions regarding the whole experience. I guess the reason RSI means so much to me, the reason I wrote about it so much at the time, on this blog, in my college applications, is that it provided me a community where I felt completely at home, a place where I could be me without any sort of qualifications. In some ways, although we made it through this year's RSI, I feel more empty than I did last year, because the community we built wasn't as strong (there exists some evidence against this, in the comments and posts students are leaving everywhere), and because I didn't feel quite as integrated in it. A lot of it is, of course, because our efforts were hindered by the online medium and the time zone differences. Part of it, however, I suspect, is because my role this year was less student-oriented. I'm not really sure what that means, but it is something I need to recognize and think about for the future, however uncertain that is.

The future of RSI, I think, is similarly uncertain. It's not clear to me that RSI 2021 will be able to escape from the virtual nature of RSI 2020. It's also not clear to me how RSI 2021 can acquire a staff that will be able to adapt back to the in-person aspects of the program, if they do occur. The training for the staff, in essence, is having gone through the program in the previous year's incarnation, and providing the RSI '20s that training is essentially impossible. To do so, they'll need experienced leadership, but our director is stepping down and the most recent assistant director will be graduating from university. Given the above thoughts (and a need for actual work experience), I'm not sure if I'm willing to step in (or, for the matter, if they'll want me to), and the remaining ranks of people willing to be Assistant Director or Systems Manager are exceptionally small if not zero; probably not the counselors this year, who did not have a real Assistant Director to learn from this year, and none of the counselors from last year considered it either. I guess we will have to wait and see, but I am worried.

This is not to say it is all gloom. (I think my exhausted voice tends to overemphasize the negative here.) One year ago, I sat on the "steps of Killian Court, gazed at the Boston skyline, and thought about my RSI experience. On the way back, I paused in Lobby 7, and sang 'Amazing Grace', voice echoing in the empty chamber." This year, another RSI draws to a close, and although the circumstances under which it closes are very different, and in spite of my tired tone from above, I am still proud to say that we have pulled it off once more, by some amazing grace. 84 new students, distributed across the globe from Korea to California, join the Rickoid family, and we close out the 37th Research Science Institute.

Tomorrow, trying to get back on track with my UROP work. I'm not entirely sure if that's possible, but I'll do my best. I'm not entirely sure what my best is, at this moment, given my depleted energy reserves, but hopefully, I'll have some small amount left. One will hope.