Summer Scribblings: May 2008

Whoa, it's crazy that three of you guys are partyin' it up in Boston already-- I've been home for barely 2 days and it feels like forever. Glad to hear you're having such interesting adventures though (and can't wait for your story, Jenn!)

Nothing super exciting has happened in Louisiana yet, so I'll backtrack a couple of days for blog material: I figure you should hear the story of what happened last Friday after everyone left and I pulled an all-nighter with our boys. Jackie's seen this (yes I cheated and copied 'cause my brain's still sleepy =P), and Jen saw the aftermath, but here's the event recorded in all its stupefied, rambling glory:

Imagine, if you will, the universe shrinking to a grey singularity, an omnipresent tether to knowledge you will never seek again. Like an amoeba in a Petri dish, you rub futilely along the edges of existence, only to find yourself full circle back at your desk, an esoteric textbook open and dragging you into the gloom, away from the warmth of the world. Relativity, quantum mechanics, bhavas, rasas, and iron monooxygenases—all bloom in day-long glory within your skull before returning to oblivion in an inescapable maelstrom. The dominant mood is stress. Stress and misery, punctuated by brief spurts of hysterical theatrics.

Slowly, agonizingly, like tar dripping from a straw, the final hour approaches, the time when color is scheduled to return to your vision. Emerging from the last exam, you swagger like an old-timer and explode in luminous relief. You and your friends shed heavy hermit-shells and exude a fount of ecstasy. Yet there is also an element of frenzy, a needful haste that grows and grows.

You sprint to bade farewell to your temporary home; you stuff the remainder of your packrat trove into orderly boxes and take leave of your roommates. Remember that hugs are only awkward when intentionally so and that while farewells take longer than anticipated, they never last quite long enough. One last half-rush to the bus stop, a meeting with eight long-lost companions, and a languid whoosh brings the party to the far reaches of Cambridge. Conversation embodies the frenzy that sprouted earlier and amplifies the shortness of time. At Lechmere, a thin Asian teen comments on the similarity of the site to a shoot-out zone. You and the others laugh nervously but trek steadfastly to your Afghani restaurant destination.

Prepare for disappointment—no seats open for eight without reservation. It is Friday night, you suppose, and anyway, the next door Thai place has proved its worth time and again. You crowd into the near-empty business and fill it with youthful exuberance, the feeling of casting off your fetters at last. The grey singularity fades. Was it just a commonplace nightmare? To Yi’s horror, the terms “N dishes” and “N-1 dishes” jump around the table with inordinate frequency. It works out in the end: eight different dishes spin about the table in a colorful flurry of flavor and just as quickly disappear down the gullets of eight hungry college students. A lady in green, a seafood volcano, an avocado dancing, wild curry from the jungle. The perfect topping: trusty mango sticky rice, an adventure with warm fried Chinese sweet bananas, and a spoonful of chilled coconut pudding. Suddenly, you find yourself trading nerdy tales of many many hours spent playing Heroes of Might and Magic or Magic the Gathering or Mario Kart. Eight faces glow with the illumination of sheepish nostalgia. Yet too soon, the dinner ends, and eight Asians boisterously conquer the covered bus stop, standing huddled against the cold. A circle-pointing game ends in Contact madness, and the night seems about to reach a natural end. More mundane conversation, then summer’s separation settles in. It is time to disperse to the dorms.

You wrap up your packing, then rendezvous with the guys downstairs for what you think will be a long, yet tranquil night. In particular, you anticipate finishing that book you borrowed from the library a week ago and returning it first thing in the morning. Somehow, you instead start a game of Heroes III with Zhou, all the while surveying the hurricane-like wreckage left in the wake of Dennis’s and Chris’s departures. Among the choicest specimens are a saucepan of jello colonized by sickeningly green mold and a sizable trash can filled with compressed organic residue. A dense scattering of dust, scraps, and pistachio shells litters the wood floor, and a closet full of derelict or expired food products emphasizes the bleakness. You feel a nagging urge to help the guys and agree to attempt storage during the night to preclude the need for Yi to rise before noon. Heroes is good, cathartic. It reminds you of the lazy summer days of yore, before academic stress so permeated everyday life. It feels good to live. Meanwhile, Yi provides unending amusement as he scours the room for discarded CUE guides and empty boxes, attempting to fill in 6 inches of empty space to preserve the integrity of his last box, protecting it from compression by other boxes. As the guys’ packing and cleaning dilemma intensifies exponentially with time, they drink a little vodka to “warm them up.” Also “just because.” You remember Jae and your flight tomorrow, and haltingly decide to pass.

Drinking morphs into hunger, and despite your still full belly, you accompany Yi and Zhou on your maiden pilgrimage to Cambridge Common. Three Asians plop into a bar booth in a bustling night scene, ordering water and fried sweet potato and dip and buffalo wings. From the munching, a bet arises: Zhou will attempt to solve an International Math Olympiad while wasted in order to investigate his mental capacity when impaired. The stakes? $5. A side debate discusses whether smoking and drugs will ever also incorporate themselves into the group’s lifestyles. On the one side is Zhou the doubtful; on the other, Yi of little faith in humanity. What happened with alcohol can potentially lead to the demolition of other reservation barriers. Yi begins feeling the effects of the vodka—his tongue swells and sitting straight becomes a task of immense difficulty. It is one hour past midnight, though, and the bet beckons. Satiated, you and the boys return to continue the amalgam of packing and computer gaming, after which will occur The Bet.

A hint of nervousness and anticipation—what is Zhou like when drunk? As if echoing your trepidation, Zhou’s fan begins whirring erratically. Zhou, perhaps not quite sober, makes the executive decision to dissect his machine in order to examine the problem. Armed with a screwdriver the size of a wood sliver and a makeshift tool in the form of Yi’s lucky ruler, he twists and groans and spills screws across the white, stained futon in the common room. Yi appears from his lair of packing, shaking his head and trying to save Zhou from tearing his computer apart. You mirror Yi and, following some attempts at reading, perform sacrifices to the Google gods and receive manufacturer’s instructions on how to disassemble an XPS M140 properly. There are even clickable links and diagrams; a kindergartener could even follow along, given this manual. Yi and Zhou continue their task, wielding the unwieldy ruler-turned screwdriver. They completely gut the machine and then, miraculously, reconstruct the thing in the span of two hours. By now, the vodka has worn off; Zhou postpones The Bet to another time.

After Zhou’s computer (somehow) passes the test of continued Heroes play, the room decides to commence storing boxes and furniture. 3:30 am—you are sent as a piteous delegate to fetch the storage key from the night guard. On your second circuit of the Cabot tunnels, you find him. In exchange for your swipe card, you are bequeathed a large ring of keys with instructions to “try ‘em out and see which works.” It is going to be a long night. Only when the first two boxes reach Briggs basement do Zhou and you realize that none of the keys work. How did Dennis Sun pull this off in less than half an hour the night before?? The guard advises you to leave the boxes and return around 7:30 when Colin arrives. You go to pass the unfortunate news to Yi, who meanwhile has procured 2 dollies with his swipe card and has loaded another 3 boxes onto them. As a group, you elect to deposit these boxes with the previous two, yet a voyage down to the basement reveals that the two boxes you left have disappeared. This occurred in the span of five minutes. Another fruitless search for the night guard, also mysteriously vanished, results in a general feeling of bafflement and incredulity. The sky is starting to lighten with sun rays and birdsong. Not exactly what you had imagined for yourself a night ago.

When at last you decide to concede defeat, the silhouette of the guard appears across the Quad and waves, inciting Zhou to jog over. Yi collapses on the stairs in front of Bertram, and you feel strongly tempted to do the same. Somehow, the guard has found the proper key for the storage room. At 5 am, box storage can officially commence. In the box room, you experience the logic that constitutes math majors as Yi determines the optimal configuration for “box packing,” i.e. Tetris in 3-D. It is 7 am when the Briggs B04 door slams shut, and Yi proposes finishing storage furniture as well. You and Zhou sigh but agree that it’s best. Zhou has long ago abandoned any plans to sleep this night and will likely join you in your vigil.

An extended wrestling match. A spatial visualization challenge. Maneuvering a bulky, half-broken futon down narrow stairs and past sharp corners requires the guys’ full mental, physical, and survival capabilities. Dehydration could prove disastrous. The fire escape is a great place to cool down. Two comfortable but heavy purple chairs follow the futon, then Jackie’s fridge and Yi’s monster join the motley collection of furniture in K01. Feeling semi-useless, you hold doors and take out trash and attempt to sweep the floor. Zhou shows off his “battle scar” from moving and finally, finally it’s over.

8:30 am. Yi is still awake. The night guard has ended his shift and the house office is abandoned, leaving Zhou swipe-less for a period. We wait it out in the room, continuing the Heroes game, and Yi retreats in a weary, disgruntled whirlwind to his room. His plans for wandering about Boston later may have to be revised. Before this, though, the three of you agree that however ironic, this night has turned out to be one of the most amazing ones you’ve had at Harvard. Perhaps performing menial labor and haphazardly forgoing sleep has yet undiscovered effects on happiness. Perhaps you just lead sad, sad lives. Then battlelust fully engulfs you and Zhou—the give and take of armies satisfies some primal urge within, and all attention turns to the game. Zhou has a crazily buffed-up hero; you are not sure how it will end. You don’t want to lose. What’s more, both of you are ridiculously hungry for some reason but feel too tired to venture out for food. Mentally, you thin out the list of errands you were planning to do in the morning—gaming with Zhou seems eminently more fun and important.

A string of phone calls: Alice Pang and Jackie Hsieh and Judy Fan and Jennifer Wu. Tantalizing, sleep-deprived, tipsy details pour out as psychological vomit. The one errand that you cannot escape before your flight—depositing the College Bowl check in Harvard Square—calls. Reluctantly, as the clock slays the minutes, you and Zhou concur that Heroes will not be completed before noon. With mutual admiration, you reveal the secrets of the past night and you conclude that it would have taken a long, long time for one to prevail over the other. Heroes are balanced with towns and armies. Then, visitors and bewilderment and Alice and Zhou greeting people in a fuzzy state. To his horror, Zhou is twice asked to help move more furniture; you hope fervently that the past night has not scarred him forever. You glance around at the suite-turned-trashcan, and wince again; it will take hours for four hands to scour the place even remotely clean. It is not fair. You understand the merits of single rooms, bless the thoughtfulness of your own suitemates, and mourn the dire situation that awaits Yi and Zhou. You wish your flight were later, so you could help with disaster relief.

But Time stops for no one, and far too soon, the hour comes. Twenty-four hours ago, you were cramming the citric acid cycle and wishing it were over; now, the world looks like an acid trip and you wish you could stay forever in schoolwork-less limbo. You wish there were time for carefree foosball and ping-pong and tennis. Maybe even a Heroes game, played to the end, in some not-too-distant future. The whirl of possibilities, of wishes and desires, of hazy, dizzying befuddlement, wraps you up and deposits you at Logan Airport. In this threshold of a thousand destinations, the events of the past twelve hours all of a sudden catch up, and sleepiness ensnares your weakened mind. Imagine, if you will, the universe shrinking to a grey singularity, the soothing blanket of slumber that encapsulates infinite dreams. They will bloom someday, and last a lifetime. You are equipped with knowledge you need not seek again. You are blessed with the most incredible blockmates in the world. Imagine…

I'll try to post something more coherent once I manage to catch up on sleep. For some reason, I keep waking up around 8am every day, grrr. You guys definitely need to see some pictures of my cousin Jonathan-- duuude he's so cute!

~Alice

Summer Scribblings

Saturday, May 31, 2008

=)

Monday, May 26, 2008

T minus 12 hrs...

Walkin' on sunshine

Sunshine!

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