Saturday, Aug 26, 2023: Move In

Honestly, I should start writing these the moment a flash of inspiration comes to me. I remember having so many great ideas to write about, but none of them are coming to me now at the end of the night. It's not terribly late but I'm quite tired from everything that happened in the day. We landed in Boston and made our way over. We left our stuff in my dorm after I checked in and we headed straight to Hmart for lunch. I got some too-salty ramen. Then, we walked to the big Target that was like 2 miles away. I ended up doing a lot of walking today. My legs hurt a lot.

That's fine, though, because I got everything that I wanted for my room. So MIT has this program called FYRE, which stands for First Year Residency Exchange or something where you can apply to change where you live. Every dorm has its own culture (and I'm not really sure what each culture was; I chose MacGregor because it meant that I could have a single and man do I love my privacy), and one can partition each dorm into subcultures. Or at least I think that's the case for most all the dorms. It's definitely true for MacGregor. MacGregor has its own version of FYRE but inside the dorm, and you end up choosing which entry you want to live in. I'll be going to a lot of MacGregor events during O-week so I end up in an entry that I like. I think MacGregor has a culture of being more antisocial compared to the other dorms, because we are a dorm of singles, but I still want to make friends within my entry.

Anyways, MacGregor REX (Residency EXploration) means that I shouldn't unpack all of my stuff since I'll most likely be moving out on Thursday. I've left all my clothes in my luggage bag, but I've pulled out everything else. My room is lacking decorations and is also kind of a mess, but I like it so far. The biggest problem that I have with it is that the bed is way too high. It goes up past my knee. I have to literally jump onto bed, and since it's so high, I constantly question its stability. I'll try to lower it once I move into my permanent room.

Having the bed too high has many unforeseen side effects. It means that you can't just casually lie on your bed when you're tired, since getting on the bed takes actual effort in the first place. That means that there's no comfortable place to rest in my dorm, and I desperately would like to change that. I might invest in a little bean bag that I can crumple into at the end of the day. I suppose having the bed be inaccessible is a good thing: you won't get tempted to lie in it and endlessly scroll TikTok.

I played a variant of Poker with some other people. Nobody told me their names, but I tried to remember their faces. I hope I'll meet them again sometime and ask them what their name was. We also played something called "Projective Set," which was an interesting, harder variant on Set with a standard deck of 52 cards. I earned two points. I might've earned more if I was less sleep-deprived. Now, I am going to go to bed so that I will no longer be sleep-deprived. Good night.

100Days: 14

Afterthought: No, it has not sunk in that I am in college. Instead, I've gotten into the mindset that I'm going to a summer camp that'll run for a really long time. I've heard a lot of people describe college, especially MIT, like that. I hope I won't devolve into referring to life outside of MIT as "real life" like I did when I was at PROMYS. (I would ask someone about their "irl friends," as if this was not real life.)