Misery Loves Company Part 1

Misery Loves Company Part 1 For those of you who missed the blog post subtitle: You might fit in at MIT if you love being miserable! Now wait just a second while I clean up this potential PR disaster; if I dont, Chris and Dave will probably turn me into bacon. (Speaking of which, do you know what form of pork I find to be often more delicious than bacon? Chinese barbeque pork (or at least, thats what I think it is browsing google images seemed to suggest thats what its called. You know, the delicious pork dish thats so red it seems candied? Anywho) More delicious than bacon? Perhaps. Image taken from royalbaconsociety.com. Wait, what? Royal Bacon Society? Dare I even ask?Speaking of bacon, I dont see what the big deal is, anyway. Bacons just one of those foods that youre not allowed to dislike. You tell people you dont really like bacon and they tell you theyre going to steal your firstborn and hold him hostage until you try bacon, because apparently if you dont like bacon you must have never tried it before. Alternatively, you tell people you dont like bacon and wake up in a bath tub full of ice, your kidneys removed, and a pile of bacon of comparable value to your kidneys in the living room with a note its for your own good. Or maybe not. But people get too worked up over bacon; when I tell people that I dont especially care for bacon they sometimes look at me like I just said something nasty about their grandmother. However, its time to move on with this blog post, before the bacon police come after me or (as previously warned) Chris and Dave turn me into tofu. *for the record, I am okay with bacon. Im just not a huge fan. Two different things. Also, wow, thats an old (4 years) picture of me.Moving on, really. By now, youve probably forgotten what I began this post with; I certainly have. However, Im going to write about being miserable. I think people at MIT like to be miserable. I think, however, that its not an oxymoron; keep reading, and maybe youll see what I mean. By miserable, I mean absolutely and terribly busy. I didnt use to think I was the kind of person who liked being busy; after all, Im quite lazy, and procrastinate to the point of painfulness. Even when I dont have much work, I procrastinate; if I have to do one thing in a day, like get groceries, I can almost guarantee that I will take more than one day to do it. However, thats not to say I dont get things done. The way it works for me is that when there are more things I want to and need to get done than one in a day when there are so many I cant possibly do them all, in a day or a week or even this year I begin to buckle down. I get efficient. I get into it. I still procrastinate, I still take time to relax no matter how much work Im facing, but when I have a lot of work is also when I most enjoy my relaxation. Sitting around and watching TV (Psych! the only show I pay significant attention to at the moment) is *boring* to me, when theres nothing else to do. At the end of this summer, I had two weeks with absolutely nothing I had to do, and I started off watching TV and sitting around with my laptop for the first two days. It was after I returned from one of the busiest vacations in my life if it can be called that which had immediately (12hrs) followed the busiest work week of my life. It was a busy summer, and thats what Part 2 of this post will be: my busy summer. Part 3 is about this semester, and the wonderfully stupid choice Ive made (that I dont yet regret at all, and hope to continue not regretting) Ive made. However, when I returned from my busy summer to spend two weeks in front of the TV, I grew restless after two days. I st arted driving to MIT at nights to help out with rush and recruiting freshmen for my dormitory. I started working heavily on a project, and treating it like work. I tried to find more and more things that I wanted to do, knowing fully that I would only seriously approach a small number of them. In other words, I got busy. I sometimes feel a bit miserable when Im too busy. I think thats the one problem with this lifestyle: when things overload and theres too much to do, it stops being fun. When youve got regular life to keep up with in addition to all the fun projects and classes you want to pursue and the two sides conflict, it can start to feel like a demolition derby; then you realize you have a test next week and a pset due in four hours that you havent started and you still havent had time to buy groceries so you havent had a meal in a week and youve been living off of yogurt and granola bars but you still cant keep up when it starts to feel more overwhelming than this run-on sentence thats when things get tricky. However, those moments do not make up my life. I think one of the most important things at MIT is not learning to be efficient with your time time-management doesnt work for everybody, and it doesnt seem to work for me but rather learning how to deal with your time. How to handle those moments of tension and overload and take on just enough so that those moments are few and far between. I think furthermore that MIT is full of people like this, like me in this regard; I think were a bunch of busybodies, too eager to pursue things to the point where our schedules become longer than our textbooks. I think thats a great thing; it certainly has potential to be a bad thing, but everybody I meet seems to have figured out how to keep it under control, and harnesses it to do amazing things. What brought this to mind last week was a post-blogger-meeting trip to IKEA for my new standing desk expect an eventual (pre-2013 ;) ) blogpost about my attempts at using a standing desk, perhaps once Ive had more time with it with Anna, whom you may have read about. Anna tried to enumerate to me the clubs she had joined and the activities she was pursuing the day before classes started, before any of the really heavy work had even begun and I malloced to null, because it was an absolutely humongous list. I think its what a lot of freshmen do, though you sign up for a million clubs, and in the end you only actually spend time at 15-20 of them (I kid its definitely a single digit number). But anyway Anna, good luck with all that. Ill leave discussion about that list, though, and about narrowing down choices of activities, to you (if you want), since I have enough blog fodder lying around here somewhere. And Im busy enough that I dont feel the need to add any more to the list, r ight now. (But thank you for inspiring these thoughts!) I guess thats how it is here most people at MIT seem to love being busy, even if they (like me) dont realize it. However, you know what they say; misery loves company, and I think that the company here is some of the best. I dont think the busy leads to miserable, though; I think we keep it under control, and it feels awesome. Just dont get so busy that you start having your cat do your homework for you. From top to bottom: Vincent, cat.-Cam