salt and pepper chicken

(don’t worry @ my vegetarian friends this is not a food post)

a few posts ago i mentioned turning my dorm room into a hotel. the site for that is up now so check it out if you ever want to stay in my room for whatever reason, and feel free to share with people you know so that i can potentially meet them

aside from trying to run a hotel i want to start the club i mentioned earlier where we make viral tweets and tiktoks and other content, so planning for that is ongoing with robert. there’s also a new group called the impactful career society which is adjacent to effective altruism but with a bigger focus on practical career choices, which is pretty cool and more useful in my opinion. in addition i signed up to teach for web lab in the winter because it’s a large fun class and i’m no longer terrible at web development, and rejoined ohms because i miss singing and the highs that come with performances, though who knows if we’ll still sound good after all the covid-induced turnover we had. so in a somewhat surprising turn of events i am reimmersing myself in student groups. but this time around i’m only doing things i actually care about, and if it is too much i will quit stuff again

admissions blogging is also supposed to be ongoing. coming up with post ideas that a) i believe in b) are relevant to the admissions audience (eg. not Vincent’s Thoughts On Group Houses / Relationships / Startups / Feelings / whatever else i’d default to writing) c) do not reflect negatively on mit is a struggle, but i also haven’t received my blogging account yet so i have some time to think. also supposedly i can violate b) or c) if i want to, but ideally i’d wait a few posts before doing that

---

most of my free time on campus has been spent working either in the physics lounge or floors 2-5 of the student center. which is maybe a bit silly given that i don’t even have that much work to do; i’m not taking a particularly hard schedule and have no club obligations yet so i fill up the extra time by giving myself tasks like learning more about blockchain and reading neuroscience papers and writing

all of which is pretty fulfilling but also extremely isolating. i use isolating instead of lonely because i don’t feel lonely, for now at least; i’m just acutely aware of my physical separation from other people. i don’t want to say i have no friends on campus, because that is objectively not true and would be unfair to my friends, but i will say that most of the time i have nobody to talk to and on most days i don’t have plans with anyone. i don’t think i’m being antisocial though – i’m meeting a lot of new people and i have meaningful 1-2 hour conversations once every few days, and generally always say yes whenever someone asks to hang out because i enjoy spending time with people. but i also know that given how much free time and social energy i have, i could be spending twice as much time socializing and for some reason am choosing not to

this semester i’m taking:

• intro to solid-state chemistry (3.091) because it’s a graduation requirement
• computation structures (6.004) because i want to understand lower-level computer details
• robotic manipulation (6.843) because i want to learn how to do things with robots
• harmony and counterpoint i (21m.301) which is probably too easy for me but i don’t feel like i have enough composition experience to skip to harmony and counterpoint ii
• reading and writing short stories (21w.755) because i want to get better at writing

all five of my classes are taught by people with above-average lecturing ability which is a first for me, though maybe it has something to do with the fact that i am taking no math classes this semester. in my experience the math department has a much higher percentage of mediocre speakers than other mit departments

there are too many other classes i am trying to keep up with. primarily there is performance engineering (6.172) which i find very interesting but will probably never have time to take given that it’s 20-25 hours a week so i must follow the lecture notes instead, cognitive augmentation (mas.s65) which seems closely tied to areas of cs x psych and brain-computer interfaces that i want to explore more, and computational cognitive science (9.66) which i was unable to get off the waitlist for. there’s also a harvard class on mahler and the finis austriae that seemed very cool, but i didn’t feel like cross-registering and commuting to harvard twice a week

i could literally spend all day following all the classes that i care about but am not enrolled in; honestly what i have been doing the past few weeks is already not so different. i’m a lot more curious than i used to be, and i think the main difference is that when you assume you’re going to work for a company your default reaction to every new class or subject is “when am i ever going to use this” (eg. the majority of entry-level swe jobs don’t require any knowledge about the breadth of computer science; you just need to write passable code and solve algorithms questions and maybe know some webdev or machine learning) whereas when you’re looking for independent projects to work on the default reaction becomes “how can i use the information i am learning”. this is a really liberating shift that i will elaborate on in a later post

people keep asking me why i am back at mit, and i am really not sure how to answer this question because i always felt that returning was inevitable for me, but apparently other people didn’t feel the same way? anyway, the short answer is that i have not found a job or project idea compelling enough to warrant not being in college. the longer answer is that mit is a pretty good place for learning if you are actually trying to learn a lot and not just taking classes for the sake of filling up your schedule and going through the motions of learning, and i want to learn a lot more before deciding what to do post-college

---

one piece of writing i have a complicated relationship with is you have what you want, where the author argues that most of the recurring situations in your life are things you want on a conscious or subconscious level, and that if you truly didn’t want something you would stop getting involved in it. on one hand this is a problematic view that does not seriously consider factors like physical and mental health, wealth and privilege, and other elements not really within a person’s control. on the other hand, we do have a good amount of power over most other aspects of our lives, and it’s also true that many people i know are reasonably healthy and privileged, so i believe that you have what you want is an accurate summary of much of what i see in the lives of myself and those around me

this is a topic i have shied away from writing about, because declaring something like you have what you want and if you disagree it’s probably because you don’t see clearly enough to realize the ways in which you want what you have feels a lot like gaslighting, but i think it often makes sense? i also think this is not an unhealthy view to have if you treat your wants as flexible, since it keeps you focused on the ways in which you control your life. i don’t have close-knit friend groups because i keep rejecting them out of claustrophobia. i don’t have strong attachments to mit communities because i chose to spend the past year with older people who went to other schools or didn’t attend college. i spend time in the student center and physics lounge because i chose to move into a cultureless dorm floor. i keep doing optional work when i could be hanging out because i chose to replace meaning via relationships with meaning via gratitude and work. i am usually alone at mit because either my past self or my present self wanted to be

when we were in alaska, my housemates and i went to a strange chinese restaurant. one of the items on the menu was ‘salt and pepper chicken’, which we ordered only to find that the food was a box of cooked chicken pieces seasoned with salt and pepper, and literally nothing else. it wasn’t particularly good but my housemate left a 5/5 rating on yelp because “it’s the first time i’ve seen a restaurant deliver perfectly on what they promised” and “you can never be disappointed when someone does exactly what they told you they would”

and i have what i wanted, which is the salt and pepper chicken, right? when you want salt and pepper chicken and you get salt and pepper and chicken you can’t be upset at the world or the restaurant or the food. you can be upset at yourself for making the order you did, but in that case you should just figure out what food you actually want and order that instead

i am not upset yet. for now i am content with just learning a lot and figuring out what to do after college. maybe someday i will decide that i am lonely or want a more consistent social life, and then i will try replacing my salt and pepper with cumin