Ummm, where IS the sun?

Well, I suppose I must contribute a line or two to the blog, and I do actually have a few minutes to punt. Cambridge is a great little town in a great little latitude, but I'm afraid the days of sunshine here are all but over. Last weekend was great; I took two long bike rides basically back-to-back through New England foliage in simply gorgeous weather. It's quite a treat to blast through the back woods in a sea of yellows and reds, and I'm sure everyone in the northeast will attest to that. But for now, the landscape is all grays.

As for the college living, I think my character and being have already been profoundly affected by MIT. Firstly, I'm overly impatient now, thanks to MIT's crazily maintained computer system. Yesterday our hall downloaded an entire full-length movie in high quality onto our server. In five minutes flat. Meaning we could have started watching when it started downloading and we wouldn't have gotten through the credits before it was done. It's madness. Similarily, I can't stand people who don't answer e-mails instantaneously, whether that's a valid request or not. Everything moves at light speed here, especially homework deadlines, which sneak up on you and murder you in the night. I've been caught out by more than one.

Perhaps even more than my behavior, my vocabulary has been MIT-ified, and I can't help it. There are two modes of life here: "tool" and "punt". Tooling is to do legitimate work, like psets or papers or lab writeups. Punting is to slack off and play videogames or putz around with friends, whilst avoiding productivity. Right now, I'm punting a physics pset which will get attention later in the night. Another common status, if not the default, is the phenomenon of being "hosed." That one comes from the proverb "Getting a MIT education is like drinking out of a fire hose." That's the reason that all math grad students smoke (really, ALL of them) and that keeps me up until 4AM on a all-too-regular basis. Which brings me to another idiom, that of the "night-shift." Everyone on campus is shifted at least a few hours from a normal concept of nighttime, and to me, 2AM is an early bedtime. Around here, noon till sunset is afternoon, sunset to midnight is late afternoon, and past midnight is when true night begins. And what about morning? Morning doesn't exist.

I'm trying to think about how to condense the rest of my time here into a closign paragraph, but it's just too much. In the past two weeks I've been to the IgNobel lectures (the study on spaghetti breaking was the coolest), learned to play hallway cricket (I'm an atrocious bowler), and gone sailing on a windy moonless night. Not to mention the Saturday night pasttime of creative trespassing or hacking. I love this place: it makes me smile and cry and bang my head on the wall and laugh out loud in the wee hours of the morning when I realize what my professor wants me to learn for the next day's test. Oh, and if you're walking around MIT after midnight, just look up and you'll be surprised at what you see.

-Charles