how late into the year is it too late to write about the past year? i find out today.
in my defense, I started writing this (and wrote most of it) on jan 17th, but just kind of kept adding and changing things and never really got around to… finishing it. (format and style inspired by the lovely dorian.)
jan
I started the year ugly crying in my bathroom at 1 am as I read the last twenty-or-so pages of a little life. i was gasping for air and trying not to get my tears on the library borrowed book and i think my parents were very concerned that this was how i chose to spend new years eve.
this book stuck with me this entire past year—and no, it isn’t the “trauma porn” everyone so haphazardly calls it. i’ve always wanted a book that, amongst other things, pays credence to every character and presents you their entire lives: how does a person go from being a nifty little college student in cambridge massachusetts to… you know. this?
spent much of this month in london. it was perhaps one of the best months of the year (possibly even of recent memory!?). loved cavorting around downtown london, riding the tube as i aestheticized my life blasting sea, swallow me (for some reason barbican reminded me a lot of that song) into my headphones, and walking into pubs and chit-chatting with strangers.
I loved waking up and going into LISA and spending the whole day learning ML (and, being around people who i saw as much more experienced and older than me find zero shame in asking questions and realizing that I should do that more). came out of it realizing i actually do like cs and i do like such ML/math things, it’s just college that’s killing me. (I also made the embarrassing mistake of converting my usd to euros instead of pounds…)
I lost and gained friendships, and felt this deeply. For once in a blue moon, I felt myself re-mapping the associations things had with the people in my life. I sat front row on double decker busses listening to vampire empire on loop; spent an entire week only listening to heavy with hoping, so much so that it ended up being my top song of the year. Wrote things I notice while traveling.
organized winter sparc with n. allowed myself to bodily experience anger and care for once in my life. went to a sourdough soiree run by d and was thoroughly surprised by how oxford people will show up with all their feathers and suits and spend an entire night having fun, no LAPTOPS IN SIGHT. (mit people, take notes…)
feb
this month, i spent mondays blue biking from a long day at the lab feeling dumb about circuits and rf to pika to clean up (and only clean up, as I was too busy to make it to the actual mealplan dinner). honestly, i didn’t regret this: I got to know my fellow cleaners and discussed the new idkhow album. angsted a lot over a uquiz “what song from so much (for) stardust by fall out boy are you?” (my song: flu game).
while in chicago, I watched two guys try to spend as much time jacket-less in the chicago wind and snow. honestly? I was impressed when c stayed out there in the teeth-shattering, butt-freezing sleet for an almost half-hour. 80% of my calendar this month was purple with the name: “grindset!!”
mother mother dropped their new album and I romanticized the concept of my funeral (end of me) before i realized i needed to take a breather.
march
education and mentorship-type things are still quite important to me, and spreading the gospel of hacking at blueprint was a great way to feel good about the work I was doing.
In a direct dichotomy, I learned to make irish car bombs and various other irish drinks on st. patricks day and had to experience everyone hating on the beer as if i personally offended them. got $1 oysters with s at viale (you should also!).
beautiful beautiful people in my life<3. had a romantic stroll in a graveyard. thought a lot about the concept of being deserving of love. i’m pretty sure a.p. and i got thrown out of a party, and somehow a.r. and a.p. get blacklisted for barking at a frat. i’m concerned my friends are more insane than i am.
spent much of spring break romanticizing the idea of dropping out and co-founding a startup w g. ended up not doing that, but it was a fun daydream while it lasted.
april
the sun is in my eyes! is it in yours??
(well. actually. the sun wasn’t for a bit. i found the eclipse to be such a beauitful moment—the entire nation, at once, stopped to look up to see an phenomenon that was greater than us, than all of us, combined.)
much time spent interviewing people and calling people for dojohouse and hackmit fundraising. for some reason, spent a lil stint doing ai safety work. heard its the little things you do together, share together, swear together (company: the musical) live… saw my childhood icon and the person i spent years of my life trying to become (sidenote: do I want to be too many people?): yuja wang play turangalîla.
ttpd came out and all i experienced was boatloads of hate and shame. honestly, people have NO decency! but i met matthew who helped teach the taylor swift class at harvard and felt deeply validated. fuck you, haters! ate a whole ass lobster (well. split with eddie) at cape cod and felt truly californian, because i realized just how much the beaches in the east coast suck.
visited my friend in the psych ward and spent many hours talking with my grad student about what it means to love.
may
switched majors officially. ate sushi from a mini ferris wheel. saw laufey and cried to california and me. yaz and i took too many photos at the top of salesforce tower but it’s the only time in the entire fucking year mit students ever wear something other than tech shirts, so i took what i could get
lost my self in work and i don’t think i had a single thought to myself this month. it was all work work work work work but maybe my take here is that honestly? that’s fine.
looped love hate music box by rainbow kitten surprise as i pulled two all-nighters getting our RL agent to train. and while doing so, spent too much of J’s gpu generosity.
…The one who is satisfied with the old ones, the one who loves death in man, the one who loves life in man, the happy humanist who always has the right word to make people laugh, the sober humanist whom you meet especially at funerals or wakes. They all hate each other: as individuals, naturally not as men. But the Self-Taught Man doesn’t know it: he has locked them up inside himself like cats in a bag and they are tearing each other in pieces without his noticing it.
— sartre, “nausea”
jun
the new york trip made it out of the group chat and spent a week with someone laying on my lap illegally as we tried to fit six people in a five person jeep. blasted yaz’s ken carson and saw challengers and I fell in love with zendaya again. luca guadagnino gave me some of the best movies this year and i will do anything for him.
felt like i was drowning a bit, in the sea of messages and emails and commitments and everything. the water felt cold, too, because it felt a bit like everything was slightly numb and dull—but its ok, because i saw chapell roan. maybe that makes up for it. i don’t know. wrote in my notes: “being around people makes me feel alive again. i feel real when im on a call and hear the silence of the static over my headphones.“ felt envy again.
moved into the dojohouse and discovered that the length of a commute actually does mean something to me. in response, I got lyft pink and felt the pure consumerist joy of paying for a recurring online service.
Brat was released and i started writing lengthy emotional paragraph music reviews for albums coming out and discovered that listening to the smashing pumpkin’s new hour long album was actually pretty fun.
I spent a lot of the summer in a dark room aligning lenses for a microscope and accidentally micro-dosing toxic chemicals that might mean I don’t live past thirty. spent a lot of time reading angsty merlin fanfiction and re-watched that one episode of criminal minds where spencer reid and aubrey plaza spend the entire episode in jail with S, briefly reviving the passion I had for that show for a few weeks.
shit-talked ea and ai safety people with my grad student. (fun times :))
july
became enamored with florence + the machine again when i saw her gatsby musical put on at harvard a.r.t. also flew to san francisco and accidentally stumbled into a group of weapons tech aficionados, but its okay because we almost died on the freeway after when k couldn’t figure out how to turn on the headlights. that balances out, right?
sang orlando magic with samarth and went to some fake fancy restaurant after an intense weekend of universal studios with the group house. got over my fear of rollercoasters (ha! bleachers!!), slightly.
Inez: One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are—your life, and nothing else.
— sartre, “no exit”
august
found myself in the beautiful land of the UK again, this time as a counselor for ESPR and a student at stripe press’ works in progress invisible college. I think I actually do understand why the UK economy is stagnant: they dragged us to multiple pubs every day! every day, starting at 5 pm sharp. sat through many rants about the beauty of craft beers.
i loved the version of me that was in london (oxford/cambridge). i was so much less internally socially awkward, i had that audacity, i believed i could do things. maybe it was the “otherness” feeling of being american and thinking: I’m already standing out so why not just go for it?
almost completely pivoted to work on policy after talking to s for hours on end. poor man, he had to sit through my like 1049180413 questions but at least it seemed like he enjoyed talking about it! it made me realize i want to more than just science in my life, I’m also pretty interesting in building incentive structures that can create change within complex systems.
september
goals I wrote for a actually good second year:
- start developing a very strong sleep schedule. try sticking to this 7:30 am ish wake up time (i.e. maybe wake up at the same time no matter how late i sleep?)
- working out in the mornings!!! this is so important omg please i need to figure out motivation for this
- try deleting insta/twitter? maybe removing from home screen + opal block? post less and find something else to idle with
- let myself have slack. work on passion projects with that time. self study things.
i ended up achieving none of these. :) i did manage to wake up at ~the same time every day, but that’s because i had a godawful morning class and even max tegmark being the prof did nothing to help it.
i think i strive for things that aren’t actually the thing i want—these goals of mine, I think the ones I do not achieve aren’t purely just because of a lack of will/self-control, but because these are things I feel I should be doing.
I spent more days off campus in september than on campus: contrary retreat, some scuffed d.e.shaw event, helped ran hackmit, tried (and failed) to get NEATs to work with my neural activity data… and while doing so, I realized there’s something gratifying about consciously foregoing very pressing work to see a friend perform or enjoy an art exhibition. stop and smell the roses, or something.
I also realized I did too much of “planned hangouts” and not enough of the spontaneous fun i want to achieve in my life. Said yes to two last-minute concerts because of that, but I don’t really think this was indicative at all of me actually changing my lifestyle
october
in october i learned to eat the first marshmallow—I went on a spontaneous trip to new york to see bleachers at madison square garden and elated in the joy of having financial freedom and turning off my life360. explored the boston book fair instead of submitting my computer structures code and bought a 1973 vogue magazine.
It is abhorrent to my soul to talk inhumanly about greatness, to let it loom darkly at a distance in an indefinite form, to make out that it is great without making the human character of it evident–wherewith it ceases to be great. For it is not what happens to me that makes me great, but it is what I do, and there is surely no one who thinks that a man became great because he won the great prize in the lottery.
— soren kierkegaard, “fear and trembling”
november
november was cold. I re-discovered the beauty of ttpd and looped the prophecy too many times to count. somehow every year, the weeks in and around thanksgiving break are the weeks big life events happen, and this year was really no different.
december
december was even colder. who coulda thunk?
went to the annual ally coalition talent show with m, which was one of the best experiences and nights of my entire life. live music is so beautiful especially when artists clearly do it with care.
finished my finals (almost failed 8.02), reunited with andover friends and basked in the comfort of that familiarity with old friends which I had sorely missed, learned to crochet (shoutout to my friend who sat through my dumb ass trying to figure out the loops), and went to flour bakery way too many times in my efforts to catch up with the people i had not seen the entire term.
But it’s better to have a bitter happiness than… a gray, dull life. Perhaps, I thought it all up later. But then he approached me and said: “Come with me.” And I did, and never regretted it. Never. We had a lot of sorrow, a lot of fear, and a lot of shame. But I never regretted it, and I never envied anyone. It’s just our fate, our life, that’s how we are. And if we haven’t had our misfortunes, we wouldn’t have been better off. It would have been worse. Because in that case, there wouldn’t have been any happiness.
And there wouldn’t have been any hope.
— tarkovsy, stalker (1979)