by the end of today

I will be finished (for better or worse) with my MIT career.

Damn.

hello, MIT

This is the kind of school I attend.

I find this horrifically funny. This probably reflects poorly on the mental status I have achieved after four years here.

v. anxious

somewhat tired and a little glum. I missed a couple assignments -- one in Spanish, because she changed it from the syllabus during class and I didn't quite understand what she was saying -- and one in Japanese, because I just sort of let it buzz by (we're supposed to be writing a blog entry online, and I forgot.)

I'm worried I didn't get my thesis proposal done in time. I'm worried I'm not going to get my MISTI Spain application done in time. I'm worried . . . that I'm not going to get my Japanese homework done. I have two hours and two pages left. Argh. . . I feel guilty that I added 4 TBS instead of 2 TBS of maple syrup to my oatmeal this morning. I swear it was an accident, and it tasted too sweet, but I didn't want to throw it away. I also feel guilty that my proposal for the Gondoliers poster is a composition of pieces rather than an entirely original artwork by moi. It seems like I'm cheating. I need to think some more about that. . .

I was reading an architecture friend's blog/twitter and feeling mightily inadequate. It seems like most of my architecture friends have done all these marvelous things -- Hawaii workshop, Cambodia workshop, the Veneto experience, study abroad in Copenhagen, study abroad in Delft, working in Paris. . . I feel kind of dumb and small in comparison. Yes, I went to Japan, but I was incompetent and confused and feel approximately like the same person I was before I went, which is to say, unpolished, uncoordinated, and uncool. I did not have deep thoughts about urban planning while I was there.

ARGH.

---

To make myself feel better I will now post things I found on her twitter site that did not make feel inadequate, although now I want to play with watercolors.

Vietnamese wildlife. Watercolors!

Kitties. In honor of Kitty, the Fenway House Feline (her name is actually Zelda, but we are all maladjusted so we call her Kitty. She is a dog in catpants. She lets me rub her tummy and wants to play all the time.)

The Impossible Cool. A blog. I find it humorous. I don't think it's supposed to be humorous.

maybe

One of the blogs I read is written by a fellow student at MIT who I know peripherally (as, I'm convinced, she knows virtually the entire campus.)

She posted a video of one of her friends singing Beyoncé's "Halo," with various inducements to watch it. The funny thing is (because we don't so much run in the same circles), I know the girl in the video, because she was my first freshman year roommate.

The funnier thing is, because she was only my roommate for maybe two and a half months before she moved into a different room, seeing her reminds me of a very short, very specific frame of time, the time when I was still discovering MIT, still discovering the people here, when some people who would later become good friends seemed new and strange, and others (who I would later regard differently) seemed marvelous and exciting.

I wrote this during my first month here --