ate doritos for the first time since march

i’m a bit shocked by how frequently i’ve been posting recently; it’s a lot more manageable than i initially thought (sorry cj for using this as an excuse to not apply for admissions blogger lol). it helps that my schedule has light mondays-wednesdays and heavy thursdays-sundays, and i think i want to preserve something like this in future semesters. 

we’re kind of in the middle of nowhere (truchas apparently has a population of 200-300 so our house makes up 10% of the town, which just feels like a ridiculous sentence to write..) and it’s been really calming 🙂 it’s nice to be able to look in the window and see lots of plants and mountains, and i walk outside pretty frequently when i get tired of looking at screens. theres also a pretty loud piano that people play on often, so i hear lots of music every day and i guess i’d forgotten how pleasant pianos sound in real life. we’re also having 1-1 teaching sessions regularly; so far i’ve learned about neurons and the internal family systems model and i’ve taught markov chains and computer arithmetic stuff

marley convinced me to start using curius.app which seems like a decent way to keep track of things i liked reading; you can find me at my curius profile though i haven’t been reading much lately

around half the people here are working or recently worked in startups they cofounded so i’m learning way more about startup culture than i ever wanted to though it is interesting. it’s definitely the first time in a while, since winter sparc at the very least, where i’ve consistently felt like the least competent person in the room (minimum room size 5 people) which, honestly, is a great thing to feel again after 9 months. although it is a bit strange, like it seems that people here are very concerned about how to build things and i’m more concerned about how to live and does that make me naive or slow or something else? i don’t know. theres also a lot of backlash against college and large corporate positions and normie internships; it feels like the anti-sellout sentiment at mit except healthier in the sense that a lot of the arguments at mit were about shaming people and weaponizing moral “obligations” while here it’s more like a genuine confusion about why you’d be interested in those jobs. i feel like this is resulting in a lot of changes in my personal beliefs, but it’s too early for me to understand what the changes actually are yet. i’m confident they’re good changes though, and i’m glad people are cool and approachable and that the concerns i had 2 posts ago have basically been non-issues

in a lot of ways it feels like i’m getting most of the things i wanted to experience in college but couldn’t find at mit. like, i finally get a blank slate because nobody knows much about my background, i’m finally in a place where close to 100% of the conversations i have are interesting, i finally feel obligated to be the best version of me all the time, and it’s actually ridiculous how much more clearly i can think now. it’s also funny how people here feel more tech-y than mit students despite attending less tech-y schools; part of that is selection bias but i think another part is just that mit students spend so much time on homework and that’s not something i really understood until living with other college students

sharing the previous post led to very mixed reactions. there were some productive conversations with people i usually don’t talk to, as well as a few of my friendships collapsing which, along with adjusting to high altitudes, sort of destroyed all my energy for a few days but i feel better now. i think there’s also a pretty large class of people with the mentality of “ew why are you putting weird personal content on facebook” but that just means i need to keep writing better things until they appreciate them B) 

ive been thinking about relationships and semi-relationships my friends are in. this week i imagined inserting myself into relationships and realized i’d… hate pretty much all of them 😛 i really can’t tell if this is a good state to be in or not but i think it’s progress from where i was before, like at least i have greater self-understanding and better frameworks for thinking about this now, and that’s something i was severely lacking

so it feels kind of awkward to say this because it’s been such a long time but i finally feel consistently good again 🙂 

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update on some classes:

• 5.12 (orgo) is getting harder, though im doing okay on assignments and passing is apparently usually ~50% for the semester so i think it’ll be fine on pass/fail
• i still haven’t decided on dropping 6.849 (geometric folding algorithms); depends on how busy i am in a few weeks as it’s completely manageable for now
• i’m starting to get triggered by 6.009 (fundamentals of programming) because i’ve hated recursion in python ever since i TLEd on codeforces 5 years ago and we keep using recursive approaches instead of iterative ones to solve problems with the justification being it’s “simpler”. which, yes, it is initially simpler to think about, but if you write more iterative solutions they start coming far more naturally so this all feels kind of fake to me. i did ok on the quiz but it required optimization insights which were definitely not taught in the course itself. so it’s still a fun class but there are definitely at least a few aspects of the teaching which i find questionable
• my favorite class is still 21m.284 (film music). professor marks goes on lots of interesting tangents about musical history during class and i’ve never experienced anything like it before so it’s all very fresh. more movies we’ve watched:

1. the adventures of robin hood (1938): the action scenes were reasonably entertaining, but i was very annoyed by the fact that all (two) of the female characters in the movie were just extremely shallow props passed around by the main characters. like sure maybe robin hood has good morals and is fighting tyranny but he also just comes off as a massive simp with little respect for females so uhh would not recommend (though this is a movie trope i get triggered by way more than most other people so you might not mind as much)
2. laura (1944): overall this was alright. im not a big fan of the detective / mystery genre because i think it’s usually slow and not very meaningful, but there were some interesting characters and it was fairly original?
3. sullivan’s travels: i thought this was decent. the main character is an idiot but i suppose that’s the whole point, and the meta-commentary on hollywood and comedy was interesting
4. casablanca: this doesn’t really count since i’ve already watched it, but revisiting is always nice 🙂 and professor marks was able to give a lot more context on the historical hidden meanings of the film which i wouldn’t have picked up myself