bironic

Back from a weekend that was full of adjectives: lovely, refreshing, exciting, fun, nostalgic, stimulating, unexpected, much-needed, too brief. I got to hang out for the first time in a while with most of my grad school classmates, one of whom brought her seven-week-old son. We delivered and heard a bunch of interesting and/or entertaining presentations, and I talked with dozens of people in a way that wasn't draining like networking usually is, because it was all natural and mutually interested conversation (and because it was interspersed with lectures, ha). I got a kiss on the cheek from a favorite professor. There was much wining and dining, and yesterday a fellow alum/friend introduced me to a nearby bakery that had opened up after I graduated. Mm, tea and fluffy Mediterranean quiche.

At one of the events I encountered a man with my last name, which has never ever happened before. It's a rare name, so it wasn't a surprise after the initial discovery to find that we are related.

On Friday, I got to meet rubynye! I get nervous sometimes when meeting a new online friend one on one that we won't be able to sustain a conversation, but she is an absolute delight and we had a great time in one of Harvard Square's new-ish coffeehouses. Well, I did, anyway; I shouldn't speak for her. :) I am not just saying that because she brought me a hand-made tentacle magnet and some baked goods. The few hours we had together went too quickly.

The other surprise of the weekend was that I actually won one of the eight thousand raffles I entered in a travel expo a couple of weeks back, which, if no more catches present themselves, means I am the recipient of two round-trip airfares to one of a few select destinations... provided I buy the minimum night stays at their hotel(s) at said destination. I read the terms of agreement and think it will still be worth it, given air travel costs these days.

Mostly it was one of those weekends where you really needed a change of pace and didn't realize it until you had it. On either side, the flights provided welcome reading time. For those of you keeping track, the penultimate few chapters of My Own Country broke my heart, not because of the author's difficulty taking care of terminal AIDS patients (redundant at that time, in the mid- and late '80s) or his marital problems but because of his portrayal of the families when they started losing their adult children and siblings and spouses to this disease that had no treatment, the descriptions of what happened to their bodies and minds as they faded, and especially the chapter in which Verghese worked out the pattern and the cultural narrative of infection from his Tennessee base: a generation of young men who migrated from small-town, mainly small-minded U.S.A. to the coastal cities to celebrate gay and bisexual liberation only to contract this illness and make their painful ways back to their roots for care until they died.

Next up, a change of pace: The Hunger Games. Might as well, right? Almost everyone appears to be out of town the next couple of weeks anyway.

The end of the semester rushed in like the sidewalk when you've fallen off a building. Wham, and it's over. My family came up Thursday night and has already gone. They took most of my stuff with them; the apartment is empty. After more than a week of solid work, I've suddenly got nothing to do,* and it's quiet. I'm kind of exhausted, and now I'm also unexpectedly sad.

* Besides small stuff, anyway: shop for business casual clothes, get thesis printed on the proper paper and acquire its proper signatures, and sort through the massive pile of papers that's built up since September so I don't lug junk home.

Yesterday was wonderful, though. I had to give a presentation, and I kicked its butt. Then we went out to dinner and I had steak for the first time since my birthday last summer, made all the better not only for the time that lapsed between but because it was nice and rare. Some places these days will ask what level of doneness you want and then cook it medium-to-well-done anyway for safety reasons.

I did not start this post intending to write about the ideal state of filets. Rather, I was thinking about how this is my last week at MIT—out-of-town internship this summer, then graduation in the fall—and so I've been taking pictures to share here. Sort of the "day in the life" meme that goes around every so often, only more of a "week in the life," or three weeks, since I'm going to be in three cities before the end of the month. A week here, some pictures from NY, and then some from DC. Thought it might be fun, anyway.

Here's the first batch: ( Featuring alien potato growths, math geekery, and jewelry. )

Okay so! The first draft of my thesis is TURNED IN and I don't have to think about it until next week. There was a phrase from a story by astolat, "Under the Sea" I think, that described some frat boys the morning after a party as "hollow-eyed and stunned-looking." That is my last little while in a nutshell.

Now let's unload what I've been saving up all that time.

Well, first of all, while disappointed that the skies didn't deliver as much as the forecast promised, I was pleased to wake up this morning to ( snow: )

That would be the Charles River, always an interesting shade of puce in winter. The ice floes remind me of the flabby petroleum jelly in Drawing Restraint 9.

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I escaped twice during the marathon: once to see astrophysicist/TV host/McKay nemesis Neil deGrasse Tyson give a talk about his new book about having been blamed for demoting Pluto, and once to go to a birthday party. I took your advice on the former—okay, I was going to do it anyway, but you said it was all right—and teased him about having been on SGA. He said he's a terrible actor; I said, but you only had to play yourself!; and then he said something else I don't remember. Then we talked about my professor who knows him, and he signed two books for me. It was fun.

Here are a picture and two video clips I took that I thought might entertain:

( talking, dancing and reading a letter from a seven-year-old. )

I kicked myself afterwards, though, because it was only when I was on the train home that it occurred to me to have had him dedicate the second autograph to Rodney.

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At the party there were fangirls and cake and juice and a game of fannish charades, which I'd never played but now recommend to all, so long as the people involved share fandoms. My favorite part was how the group had their own shortcut movement for "John Sheppard/Joe Flanigan" where the charader would put her hand behind her head and stick fingers up like turkey feathers. (Sproing!) I submitted "Sam the Whale" for consideration; someone else had "[someone I don't remember] goes grocery shopping with Dr. House."

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Speaking of Sheppard, I had this terrific series of classes a couple of weeks ago in which we got to do textual analysis (my long-ago love!) not only of some pieces of writing but also Beethoven, Glenn Miller band, a Hungarian Cold War film I now want to see, and Dirty Harry. The prof started out by reciting from memory Adrienne Rich's Storm Warnings, which I remember from high school, when I was the only person in class who knew that "the glass has been falling all the afternoon" meant that the barometer signaled the approach of a storm, not that it was icy outside or that shards of glass had been falling on her all afternoon. Byron was even mentioned at some point. I was in my happy place. But here is my point: the end of Dirty Harry, and SGA's "The Eye"—

( John Sheppard = Clint Eastwood, y/n? )

Oh and hey, that's Andrew Robinson (Garak) with the bandage across his nose. He looks more like Harvey Keitel to me. Shudder.

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What else. My sister is on tour for two months with her musician and David Cook all over the south and midwest, I passed Henry Jenkins in the hall the other day, I haven't washed the dishes in like two weeks, tomorrow I will finally get to catch up on House, I'm going to Florida in a few weeks to see my grandparents, and there are two fun events coming up on Wednesday and Thursday that I'm looking forward to telling you about.

Also, does anyone know of any Audacity tutorials?

Since it seems like many of us are anticipating ice or snow tonight, here is Richard Shindell's foot-tappin' Waiting for the Storm, even though that is about a hurricane. You can never have enough Richard Shindell.

Here in Boston we have been promised a few inches of snow. It's 14 degrees out; it'd better snow. Plowed piles from the last few storms' worth still haven't melted. The dirty tops have interesting, deep icy crusts.

Thankfully, it looks like the weather's gonna clear by Thursday when I fly. It'll be nice to take the trip, although I could use another week or three right now to do all my work. Caught a cold after my sister visited last week (no connection; she's fine) and lost a few days.

To have something for the flight, I picked up Neil deGrasse Tyson's new book tonight, (a) because I like him and (b) because he's doing a book signing nearby next month, so I may as well read it first. Disappointingly, it is for young people. The font is big and the pages glossy and there are a lot of pictures. Many of which are of Tyson. Including one on the back where he's straddling a large telescope and smirking. Wow.

Bill Nye wrote a blurb for it about "the first of the plutoids," pretty much recapitulating his line on SGA. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Stop me from having more thoughts of McKay/Tyson/Nye angry!sex, please. ...I would at least need an "I'm going to the special hell" icon.

On that note:

[Poll #1338836]

Mmrph. It was such a bad idea to stay up so late last night to write the Wilson/Cuddy thing. I only slept five hours afterwards. All I could handle this morning was fiddling around with PowerPoint for a presentation I have to give next week. Hm. Should I be juvenile and make a joke about how a box of parts sounds like S&M toys? (i.e. penetrators, switches, butt connectors, and of course nuts and screws.)

1. synn is coming to visit for a week in December! \o/ \o/ \o/

2. Is this not the quintessential MIT gym class? Chemistry of the Body.

3. I'm excited for [casting spoiler] on SGA tonight. (I posted about it back here, to spare those who don't want to know and if you don't recall.)

4. In exchange for a few hours of light manual labor—i.e. finding nametags and putting out some folding chairs—I was able to get in to a session at Futures of Entertainment today without paying the unnecessarily high conference fee. (Was fed falafel and tofu and Greek salad, too.) The same deal holds for tomorrow, when there are Watchmen and franchising panels, even though I'm not sure yet if that's the best use of my time.

I heard pieces of panels as they were broadcast on TV to the overflow room where we were sitting, but the one I went in to the theater to see was "Making Audiences Matter." Interesting perspectives from the panelists. I'm too tired and short of time to do a thoughtful write-up, but ( here are some notes I took: )

At lunch I introduced myself to Henry Jenkins, who announced this week that he's leaving MIT at the end of the academic year for the University of Southern California. The future is uncertain for his CMS program; they've frozen graduate admissions, from what I hear. It was great to meet him finally and chat about fan production, although our conversation wasn't much of a conversation, since I didn't have anything in particular prepared to discuss and he always had a person or six waiting to grab his ear. He was very friendly, but kind of bland—though I wouldn't count that for much, considering the circumstances. He wore suspenders. (Not nearly as sexy as Thirteen's.)

Oh, roga, Nguyen said his favorite show right now is How I Met Your Mother. He brought it up for no particular reason except to declare that and to add that producers can't always give audiences what they want, because, for instance, people always ask who the mother is, and that would ruin the show. I have no idea if this is true, having never watched it, but you might know.

5. I'm sure I'll remember what #5 was in a minute.

Yeah, so I dropped that theory course. Yikes. I'm down to the recommended load now of one elective instead of three, and it's already more manageable.

Classes have been going for a little more than a week, and I'm really enjoying them. Something about having worked for a few years focuses your goals and helps you appreciate why you're here and what you want to get out of it. It's not just work, it's work with a purpose you care about. And my classmates and I all like each other (so far). Plus, this place is kind of amazing in itself. (Tuesday I met someone who builds social robots. Tonight I met a professor working on quantum calculators.)

Minor annoyances center on noise levels in my apartment and include my next-door neighbor, the desk-drummer; my upstairs neighbor, who sounds like an elephant when s/he walks around and makes my ceiling lights rattle; and the fact that I'm over the piano room, so almost every day it's the same parts of the same pieces screwed up in the same places. Oh, well; that's what my little nighttime white-noise fan is for.

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I had this dream last night that I was watching the House premiere, and I was going to post about it, but I had to, like, do my work and go to class and stuff, and now I can't remember most of it except for how Wilson was lying naked in a lounge chair and House was swimming in his pool (and how the H/W fans were going to be all over that), and Cuddy'd had a baby that may or may not have been House's and the baby was sick, and House authorized a CT scan for it, which he hadn't allowed before when things were less dire. I'm sure there was more to it, but pfffft, it's gone.

I blame daasgrrl. You will know why soon.

Today I learned that one of my classmates is also a House fan. Score. Makes up for how I just dropped that lit class. It was sooooo sloooooow, and the level of discussion was a joke. "Why don't you just keep talking about House with your friends?" asked my sister when I complained about it. She had a point.

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Saturday evening I had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting ignazwisdom for dinner and a movie. Never mind the cloying humidity and intermittent downpours of Hanna's remnants—it was a great time. Turns out she is as exceedingly awesome in person as she is online, in some expected and some new ways. Fun and very easy to talk to and we had some stuff in common I hadn't known about. I'm very happy to have her in the area, and I'm not just saying that because she's got a bigger TV than I do and likes House.

After curry we went to see Iron Man in a lecture hall on campus. Both of us had managed to miss it when it came out. They'd hooked up the room with a popcorn machine and soda fridge and everything, and there were some families in the crowd, and they showed previews for upcoming screenings. Latest observed quirk of MIT culture: Whenever the preview slide would say something like "Next Saturday and Sunday," the audience would yell, "Next Saturday and Sunday—in stereo…!" I wonder where that comes from.

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Iron Man: ( Discuss. )

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Okay, back to work. It took five days to post this.

At half-credit and undergrad level, not to mention what's implied by the last few words, it would be a fluff class in addition to my regular courseload, but I might have to do it:

http://lit.mit.edu/program/fall08_samplings.php#21L325

This post comes to you direct from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have set up shop for the next 10-12 months in a lovely apartment that I will probably stop noticing beyond the area around my laptop as soon as schoolwork kicks in. It's nice to be in Boston again—I did my undergrad across the river lo these many years ago—and even better to be back in school, and even better than that to have been given the opportunity to come to this school in particular.

(I'm at MIT. I debated for months about what to reveal in public posts here on LJ, and I've finally decided to talk about the school but not my program, because it has to be one or the other but not both for privacy reasons, and I don't think I could hold myself back from talking about MIT, since I'm so curious about what it's really like and assume that some others are too, especially with SGA fanon so often proposing that McKay and/or Sheppard went here. See, I can say "here" now!)

So I'm on the lookout for The Real MIT as I go along. Thus far I've directly observed the local culture at a dorm dinner on Wednesday and Shabbat services tonight, and by riding a couple of campus shuttle buses, looking at posters and websites for goings-on, and keeping my eyes open as I walk around. I've seen posters in the student center for Harry Potter-themed dance parties (admission with MIT or Hogwarts ID), Star Trek movie screenings (I will probably go to see First Contact tomorrow), lawn meditation, and many solicitations for research study participants.

( More details for the curious. )

Man, I'd almost forgotten what it's like to be in a stimulating and diverse environment. And classes haven't even started yet.

( Meanwhile, here is my abode: )

And that is pretty much the news for the week. Prep, goodbyes, moving, unpacking, shopping for the few remaining needed items, meeting/greeting, reading, sleeping and exploring. So far, I have successfully navigated:

• one (1) dorm pizza social,
• three (3) new local buses and shuttles,
• two (2) floors of the main school library,
• one (1) fully cooked dinner in my new kitchen,
• two (2) trips to the supermarket,
• the forty (40) or so TV channels we get on campus, and
• one (1) Hillel Reform Friday night service followed by dinner, at which I met a decent enough guy, although he has a bit too much of the slacker mentality for me to fully respect him. Imagine! a sort of slacker at MIT.

Much more will come from Sunday onward as orientation activities kick in. Until then...


ETA: Oh, right. I'm going to be posting my new address under friends-lock at some point. If you would like it and you're not on my f-list, just ask!

After a busy but very nice birthday weekend I had a dentist appointment after work on Monday and a doctor's appointment after work on Tuesday and got a flat tire on the way in to the office that morning but had it fixed with little hassle and then signed a loan promissory note and registered my bank account on the financial section of the school's website and paid my first bill and found that the school said they were paid but the bank said the money hasn't been withdrawn so tried to fix that and in the meantime arranged with my new building manager to let me come visit my apartment next week which is coincidentally around the same time a friend from abroad will be in the area which is cool but because my mom wants to come with me I also have to look up hotels since I can't ask her to stay on my other friend's futon like I usually do, and I went to lunch with my ex-manager yesterday and with my boss today and have been training two of my four replacements all week in between being innovative and productive because I want to prove that I'm not slacking off just because it's my last week and finishing up my own tasks that are so numerous there is not really any time for goofing off on LJ so to relax last night I wrote up a packing list and watched two Star Trek episodes and am considering watching a few more tonight because the letter I got in the mail today about coming up with well-considered thesis topics by Labor Day is too scary to contemplate considering I've been awake since 4:30 a.m. and now tomorrow is my last day of work following which we're having a going-away party until who knows when so I'll have to record SGA and instead of spending my first weekend as a free person sleeping and writing stories I'll be going into the city to see a Birthright friend for dinner and then to my sister's friend's rock show and staying overnight at my mom's only to be dropped off home early enough to pack her car with a grandfather clock she wants before I go to a morning picnic with my dad and—

Is where I've been and am and will be.

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Want to write up the last two Israel photo posts (photos having already been chosen, edited and uploaded). Want to do a Porn Battle ficlet. Want to finish a WIP or two. Want to reply to outstanding comments. Want to talk about birthday things. Want to post about the writing/performance thing and other assorted small philosophical moments that've been striking lately. Want to watch more Star Trek. Want to do a lot of things.

One day at a time.

I am all applicantated—sent off the whole stack of papers from the post office yesterday after picking up the last evaluation form on lunch break from my old internship boss at the eleventh hour, and now it's in the mail and I don't have to think about it anymore until the acceptance and rejection letters are sent out in April. There was no real sense of satisfaction in getting it done, though, just a vague relief that it's over; it could have been much better if I'd had the discipline to start it earlier and work on it more often, and I wasted a lot of time along the way, so I can't help but blame myself if I don't get in, but at the same time I'm proud to have put together what I did (or put it together at all), considering the mental state my job has reduced me to. And I keep reminding myself that I'm applying to a school, not a job, so the admissions committee should be looking for potential, not perfection.

Between that and the trailing-off of craziness at work now that the Big Project is complete (except for revisions and additional modules I've been told to consult on, which will never be finished), I have that strange feeling you get after finishing something you've been dealing with for so long that you can't shake the sense that you need to be doing something important when actually you're able to relax. With luck, the need to be doing something will translate to renewed participation on LJ including the delayed Memoryfest, among other things. And I'd really, really, really like to be able to write again.

I am reading actual books, so that's something: Asimov's The Positronic Man (the story that inspired the movie Bicentennial Man) on cassette tape on the way to and from work, and Naomi Novik's Temeraire series on krisdia's recommendation, which is utterly charming. Watched A.I. last weekend—creepy and weird, not what I was expecting at all, but interesting—and The Illustrated Man is on tap for tonight. I've always loved sci fi, but the recent desire to read and watch the android stories can be blamed on Leah's gorgeous, adorable SGA AI AU stories, Male Enhancement (The Soul and Company Store Remix) and its prequel, Muscle and Blood and Skin and Bones.

Since my dad sort of broke up with his not-girlfriend (a long medium-length and boring story) a week ago, he had an extra ticket to see a local production of Oliver! last night and nobody to go with, so I recorded SGA and went along, despite expecting three hours of pain. It turned out to be a very good production, and I didn't remember most of the songs from the only other time I'd seen it (I was…13?) and hadn't caught most of the subtext before, so it was like seeing half of it for the first time too. Who Will Buy? is such a sweet song; it's one of the only musical numbers I have an mp3 of. I also amused myself by imagining a Wilson/House dysfunctional UST fanvid set to As Long As He Needs Me (lyrics), and a team bonding or Sheppard worship vid set to I'd Do Anything (lyrics). Come on, tell me they wouldn't be cute.

So I watched the episode, "Spoils of War," just now and I don't have much to say about it beyond what sheafrotherdon covered, ETA: and what thingswithwings said in the latter half of her post ETAA: and what fiercelydreamed said in hers, other than ( these four really quick things: )

ETA: post-ep fic: The Other Queen by sheafrotherdon

I miss House. Has anyone read any good House fics lately? Or written? I haven't been keeping up very well.