actions, not words.

It is a strange, uncomfortable feeling to not finish what you had planned, but unfortunately that feeling is one that I have experienced far too often throughout the past few months. I suppose that I am probably spread overly thin, but hopefully some of it will coalesce in the near future. With that, I guess it is appropriate to note that only the non-supplementary parts of my Harvard and Columbia applications were submitted today (although this is not necessarily completely my fault), but I accomplished very little separate from that as well. In fact, I believe the only truly productive thing I did today was outlining my AP Psych assignment and write more bits and pieces of my Year in Review, so all-in-all not my best work. At all. Despite my slightly earlier blogging time yesterday, I couldn't fall asleep early last night (or perhaps, I was not dedicated enough to the task of falling asleep), and so proceeded to have a two-hour-long conversation with one of my friends from RSI,...

"The Admissions Committee has reviewed your application, and while we are unable to offer you a place in the class at this time, we would like to review your application again in the spring." Well...shit. Okay. It's not that bad. I'm not as disappointed as I was about MIT. But this deferral was really kind of unexpected—I really did like my UChicago essays, and I thought they were very strong. What gives? I'm not entirely sure. I am, however, reminded of the lyrics in a song we listened to in Spanish: "No voy a llorar y decir que no merezco esto, porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero..." which means "I'm not going to cry and say that I don't deserve this, because I probably do deserve it, but I don't want it." It's in a much different context than this is in, and I did cry today for other reasons (discussed further below), but I think it's quite relevant. I've emailed all the relevant people now though—...

This post is pinned because even though it heralds bad news, the emotions in it need to be conveyed. "We have completed our Early Action review of your application and have chosen to defer it to our Regular Action review." Well, the streak is over. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel right now. I'm really proud of all my friends who did make it, but it's really weird because I felt like I would either be devastated or be able to just shrug it off, but right now it's just kind of sinking in my soul, certainly not positive, but not too negative either. It almost feels like the biggest consequence of this decision is a requirement to write and edit more essays, but it feels like that shouldn't be it. I'm not sure, but I suppose reality has acted as it normally does, not the best-case scenario, but also not the worst. Just a vast sea of middle outcomes, which don't inspire hope, but don't crush it either. We'll submit the February update w...

This post was pinned because I loved it. It was replaced by a much sadder post. Today was a good day. I almost can't believe how long this week has been—it feels like an eternity has passed since I got my audition results on Monday—but it has also felt blissfully short—the days have not truly dragged in the run-up to MIT decisions, and my anxieties have not yet began to show, possibly because I've started engaging in the Caltech community, and they're also pretty exciting, but also partially because I've entered the phase (where I should've been many weeks ago) where I am resigned to my fate, and, as this blog from MIT admissions puts it , one way or another, I will end up becoming myself, and that's what really matters. I started off this morning early (after sleeping relatively on time?) for Orchestra, which went relatively okay. I'm gradually getting accustomed to the actual responsibility and enjoying it a bit more, so at least that's a good thi...

This post was pinned because of the discussion of psychological concepts, and poetry. Today was better than the first Monday after break deserved to be, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily good. I couldn't sleep for a long while, pinned awake by emotional stresses, and I thus spent some time upping my spirits by going through the parts of my email which I save just for times like these (labeled "Fun" and "Achievements.") I also discovered that my mentor at RSI has an Erdos number of 5, which means that (with some fudging, since RSI papers aren't published) I have an Erdos number of 6! Also, because successful mathematicians often have a lot of students, my mentor's "mathematical lineage" traces up to Gauss, Laplace, Lagrange, Poisson, Fourier, Dirichlet, Lipschitz, Weierstrass (who formalized the definition of a limit), etc., which is quite impressive to be honest. I ended up getting up around 6:50 or so, and after breakfast and wh...

This post is alternatively titled "Anxiety: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!." It is also surprisingly long, but I think that's because writing helps quell my emotions. I hate this. Everything that happened today should have led to today being a good day. Nothing went wrong, it was a Friday, all the ingredients were there for it being an amazing day. Why then, do I still feel like I'm falling apart? I don't know, but it hurts like hell. Today started off in the bitter cold of 6°F, because when South Dakota hears that winter is coming it goes hard up. The roads were not slippery though, thankfully, so the driving experience at least gave me some semblance of control over something in my life. I printed some Spanish stuff and worked on not very much while in the library before class this morning. AP Psych was uneventful; we introduced our new unit which is social psych. One of the assignments is to "break a social norm", which personally I find mildly ridiculou...

Today's blog will not be normal, just like today's political events were not normal. I would rather not go over my day-to-day minutia, partially because they are comparatively unimportant, and partially because they involved a feeling of disgust so strong I spent the whole day on the edge of throwing up  and a grotesque feeling of being stuck which was exemplified by me staring as Senators and staff walked in and out of a backroom for forty minutes, only to result in the most minor of concessions. This blog is not, in particular, about the Kavanaugh confirmation. (Although I am particularly annoyed by the Senate's "dilemma" over where the ethical bar should be for the most important judgeship in the country . We have reasonably credible reasons to believe Ford, and reasonably credible reasons to disbelieve Kavanaugh. What more do you need?) Rather, it is about a deep-seated disillusionment with the systemic properties of American culture and politics which over ...