april update

short post

• definitely my busiest month at mit. i have two sizable final projects due early may, for parallel computing and interactive music systems, and am also trying to wrap up my crypto project in time for one of my teammates to present at devconnect, an ongoing ethereum conference in amsterdam. my team wanted me to go to devconnect as well but i had passport renewal issues and wouldn’t have had the time anyway. luckily i don’t have any mental health project deadlines right now since those passed already
• aside from academic stuff, my a cappella group is performing at a showcase next weekend which should be very fun. our spring concert is the weekend after so we need to prepare for that too; we’ll probably have around 20 hours of rehearsal the week before. our concert theme is based on avatar: the last airbender, a show i haven’t watched, but i’m responsible for writing the concert skit so i’ve been using my effectively 6x speedwatching methods to catch up on the show. it’s obvious even at 6x that atla is very well-written though; i’ll try to revisit it when i have more time
• unfortunately i also got sick this weekend. honestly the thing that has surprised me most is how long i’ve been healthy for – the last time i was seriously sick was in november of 2019. i’ve never had a 2+ year period as healthy as the one that just ended and i’m very grateful that it happened. i’m also shocked that i didn’t get covid between october 2020 and april 2021, given that i was unvaccinated and meeting lots of new people and traveling a bit recklessly, though maybe i did get covid and was just asymptomatic. but anyway, all that is over and i am sick now. hopefully it passes in time for my voice to recover
• cpw (mit’s campus preview weekend for admitted high school seniors) happened last weekend, but i didn’t have time to participate much as a result of being busy. similarly, the weekend before that there was a large ea (effective altruism) conference in boston that a bunch of my west coast friends came for, but i only saw them relatively briefly
• i feel at peace! i have too much work to finish but all of it feels meaningful. being sick is not ideal but my symptoms aren’t very severe (yet) so that’s mostly been fine. i’m wondering how busy i want to be after college – doing good work all the time feels great, but it’d also be nice to have the bandwidth to eg. spend time with people when they happen to be visiting. i keep thinking back to when kobe said “I can be a good friend. But not a great friend. A great friend will call you every day and remember your birthday. I’ll get so wrapped up in my shit, I’ll never remember that stuff.” how much do i want that to represent me?