905A — Pointless work for pointless pay…

It's been a while, but here's a blog from the daily series on the private blog (email me at az23@mit.edu for access). The Year in Review is coming soon, hopefully by January 31st (but we'll have to see). Also, this title is from a meme song and is absolutely not a reference to my work this IAP, which I love very much.

Today was an okay day. As the normal tradeoff goes, I got more work-related stuff done today, but got very little blog writing done, which is problematic because there are multiple blogs I want to produce this week. This is a good reason to try and start recovering my sleep schedule, so, in fact, that is exactly what I will try and do by keeping this blog entry, in general, short. I reserve the right to ramble—but anyways.

I got up today just before noon after struggling immensely. I spent today editing an interview that was…extremely difficult to cut down. Last interview was hard enough, but this one includes a lot of sentence fragments and branching tangents which are hard to really pick out and edit around. Regardless, I will hopefully complete this task by end of tomorrow, and clean out my agenda for the last day—but that may be difficult. It may simply be that I will not accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish this month, and I suppose that will have to be ok.

Apart from that, I had a chat with some friends about decisions what I want to do in the spring, which ultimately resulted in me deciding to TA CC.802, but in the process I got a re-estimate of my workload for the coming semester which is…only marginally better than the workload for the past semester. That is really, really concerning, and I'm not happy about it at all. Regardless, we'll have to see how it goes. I also got a email from one of my supervisors last summer offering me another UROP opportunity, which is absolutely buck wild given how I felt after the end of that UROP. Unfortunately, I will not have time to UROP this semester, but hopefully the dropoff next semester will allow me to budget in slightly more time to work on other things.

I headed out of Next around 5 PM for my walk today. I walked to Back Bay station and then got on the Southwest Corridor Park, heading southwest towards Forest Hills. It was stunning to see how much of the route was littered with memories, recent and old. The start was where CJ, Sammy [I think], and I once went on a walk in October; I don't remember the date but I do remember that also being Rocky Picture Horror Show day. I passed a crossing point which I had seen just the other day on my walk to Andrew. I remembered taking the CT2 to Ruggles to eat a meal with one of my high school friends at Northeastern very early on in my freshman year. I passed Roxbury Crossing, where CJ and I had made one of our runs and joked about the Domino's during last November's trip. I passed Stony Brook, where Shuli and I got back on the Orange Line after a day of walking last October, and then ended at Forest Hills, where Shuli and I had started that trip. The whole ordeal was very surreal; I've always attached memories to places, but I thought that would apply more to MIT locations. It seems that the purview of memory has expanded, but perhaps that has always been the case.

In any case, I got a special treat at Forest Hills! One of the newer CRRC trains pulled in, which was extremely exciting, and I took a ton of photos and waited so that I could ride it back into town, changing at Downtown Crossing to get back to Kendall/MIT via a more typical Red Line train. I called my dad and quickly dashed to dining to grab dinner before it closed, and then did…nothing? For the rest of time? I just texted people, mostly, and made a few graphics [at the bottom]. At 11 PM or so, I started writing emails to my State Representatives, thanking them for voting no on HB 1076 [although it still ended up passing the house], and then emailed my State Senator, telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he ought to vote no on HB 1076. I'm not sure what's going to happen to this bill, but I am not happy about it. Not at all.

After spending an hour or more on those emails and others, I did the crossword with a friend and then vibed for a bit longer, wrapping up a few loose ends in the process.

Here are the graphics:

all the places I've walked this IAP

class tier list: thanks to kat for building the tool and nisha for the general idea

Tomorrow, starting to wrap up micro-internship work and working on three separate blog posts: Year in Review 2020 [this blog], and two admissions posts. Should be a good time.