scholastic rigor is our wine...

...but it's watered down, because we're underage.

In keeping with the golden rule of economics, I generally quit a task once marginal cost has exceeded marginal benefit. Yeah, the mundanity of electromagnetism has long ago balanced out my desire to skip a GIR. Time to browse Facebook and explore Flickr.

But as our esteemed teacher once claimed, the consumer's evaluations of utility are always held to be rational. As he once related to us in the Parable of the Irrational Fashionista, there was once a fresh young college graduate with an underpaying job and an overwhelming hunger for designer handbags. She was psychologically ravaged by her daily dilemma: to accessorize or to eat, but like a true economist, she carefully weighted the personal marginal utilities of purses and sustenance against each other and each day, chose the former until she was forced to go homeless, attended only by her harem of handbags.

"But that's insane!" cried the shocked students. "How can it be considered economically wise to emphasize luxury goods over basic needs?"

"No, my children," said our wise mentor, wagging his head, "The consumer's needs are always considered right."

Clearly I need to reevaluate my priorities.

Yes, 8.02 bores me to death. But I can pass it, and a week or two of tedium trumps a semester any day.

Besides, I really don't need to see every Facebook status message and every ultrawideangle HDR landscape on the internet.

...Right. That's why I'm blogging right now.

(YES I AM SPENDING HALF MY SUMMER STUDYING FOR ASES ONO ONO ONO)

(I HAVE FUN IN THE EVENINGS AND SLEEP ALOT THOUGH)

never gonna let you down

Sleep is nice. Without it, my brain becomes a horrible boggy swamp through which only the most persistent of thoughts may crawl, gasping, to the muddy roiling shores of my consciousness. So naturally I try to get at least 6 hours of sleep a day. More is better. Wednesdays are my savior, because I get double first free then extra help and saunter into school at 9:30 or so instead of 7:50 like usual.

Today, thanks to the extraordinarily pleasant non-anally-violating goodness of a diffeq test that is worth approximately 30% of my semester grade, I decided to get plenty of extra sleep and came in at about 9:25 am, slightly ahead of time so that I could review section 3.6 once more before the big crunch. The hallways were deserted. Must be an alternate schedule. And then I remembered: THE MIT LOGS ARE PERFORMING THIS WEEK. I dropped my backpack, ran to the gym, and sat in the very back so as not to attract unwanted attention from cranky decaffeinated teachers eager to hand out detentions. Hm, bad idea. I could barely see the tops of their heads milling around in front of the stage. They were still introducing themselves ("W, mechanical engineering." "X, computer engineering." "Y, nuclear engineering!" [faint cheers from the audience] "Z, ROCKET SCIENCE!" [the crowd goes wild]) and I was sort of awkwardly sitting there way way in the very back corner of the gym, craning my neck over the taller Asians' heads while trying to pick out the face of Sham's stalkee as I'd promised.

And then they sang and it was beautiful. I'm not going to attempt to confine the pure auditory bliss to the feeble constructs of the English language. Except that we got rickrolled unexpectedly, and for once, it was pretty good.

When they moved on from eargasms to Q&A, Harker went straight to the point. The Logs didn't answer the question about their high school GPAs. Most of them did, however, raise their hands when some girl in the front asked if they were single. (Go for it, MIT12.) Then we all descended upon the stage in a fangirling blizzard of excitement and purchased their CDs. I exchanged like three lines of conversation with a probably half-asian Log, by which point I was still reeling from their intense aura of awesomeness but had also realized that no, I could not possibly do them all, not even for the sake of the MIT12 chat. Thus I leave this arduous task to you, fellow 12ers.

See you at CPW.

Okay, if a Log actually reads this, a lot of it is sarcasm, I'm not that creepy.

intravenous turkey refuse

(crossposted from my personal blog)

When I first discovered MIT, I got myself hooked on the MITblogs right away. Like an IV drip straight to the vein (although aren't they all? I guess you could miss), they nourished me with the life-giving anecdotes upon which stalkers feed. Their subtly sarcastic humor pulled me through the churning whitewaters of high school. When I had to stay up until 2 am to finish an APUSH essay that I started reading the prompt for at my usual bedtime, the MITbloggers coincidentally pulled all-nighters that night for their thesis papers or whatever, and then I would feel better about never having actually pulled an all-nighter because I would probably get my fair share of those in college. When I was all depressed about that B-prus test in Engrish, the MITbloggers assured me that life was okay, because they were getting C's on their midterms and even though MIT was way harder than high school I wasn't a loser at life. When I spent sleepless nights worrying whether MIT would defer me or just reject me outright, Ben Jones ranted uncontrollably about his overwhelming love for the applicant pool and its awesomeness, and I felt better inside.

Oh, MITblogs. I love them all, but Mitra and Sam were my favorites to read, and considering that they were pretty obviously dating, well, that just made them more awesome.

But all good things must come to an end. As mournfully chronicled by the MIT'12 chatroom, Sam made his Last MIT Blog Post Ever earlier this week. We modulo Sham would have cried, had it not been for our cultish secret: we know about his new blog.

Don't worry, Sam Maurer. We're watching you.

(Not really. But I mean, I don't know what the others are doing, so no guarantees.)

Some say love, it is a razor...

THAT LEAVES YOUR SOUL TO BLEED

But instead we'll listen to the music of logs (and spheres)

A few months ago, being the dork that I am, I made this little caffeine molecule thing for my phone:


And yesterday, I received a valentine embossed with its sister molecule, theobromine:


I don't know of any other school that spoils its prefrosh like this -- the individually hand signed cards, the nerdy poetry, the telethons, the frickin' cool tubes with confetti and posters. It's little things like this that make MIT that much more amazing. C'mon 12ers. Let's go be awesome and never turn back.

ghost town

I was finishing up a cute, fast little gearbox cad around 6 pm or so today, when all my compatriots suddenly ran off to the other building to play with the IR sensor on our test drive platform. The angry growls of the German metal men blasting through our speakers were paused, the clatter of aluminum and procrastination was hushed, even the constant whirring of overworked laptops ceased as they completed their renders and fell into a half-watchful sleep. Ghost town. Not to mention my school is the perfect setting for an FPS. Long dark corridors with evenly placed skylights that cast shadows as often as light, not to mention the new building, with its half-finished concrete walls and puddles of rain and scattered pipes, blanketed by layers of fog in the morning. It's creepy.

Enter MIT12, where Zen is no longer a challenge and people have acquired social lives (or maybe just homework). Actually, the low population at this time is probably just due to the high concentration of ESTers (eastern time, not RC=O-OR) who frequent MIT12. But yes, ghost town is eerie. COME BACK PLX

Seniorit...y

Finals begin in two days. I am almost a second semester senior. MIT likes me (at least that’s what the tube said). Does that mean…I can stop doing schoolwork? Gasp!

Despite my alleged superiority, defined by an ability to pull passing grades without simultaneously pulling all-nighters, and the justification to laugh at the plebes who haven’t gotten into college yet, I don’t want to give up all semblance of academic effort just yet. Because I think I’m getting my lowest grade ever in a class right now. AHH PANIC

For me, there is always that one class that, no matter how legitimately I study for it (so surfing Facebook with the textbook open doesn’t count), the desirable grade remains elusive. Maybe the teacher is unreasonable, the test questions are ambiguous, or the material just won’t stick in the brain, but the test grades are sorely lacking.

I’m pretty sure my grade is only where it is, and not lower, because of the saving grace of homework. But oh snap, finals get their own category in the gradebook. So if I don’t study a bit, I’ll probably end up with, well, something that college would frown upon. (This isn’t CollegeConfidential; I’m not crying because I just got my first A-. No kidding.)

And, well, even if I were to forgo studying, my sleep quota has plenty of backup diet options.

(This post overdramatizes reality a little because I just wanted an excuse to use that long tag there.)

a list.

I'm Shamarah and I'd like to introduce myself, in an itemized fashion :)

1. The "froshface" title was my idea and I'm really happy that it was chosen
2. I'm the girl who memorized course numbers way back in August
3. Najah and I share a brain and a love for New House
4. Rachel and I share a love for The Logs and, to a lesser but still pretty large extent, Sam Maurer
5. I'm a seven sister (GET WITH IT OR GET LOST. *THUG STANCE*)
6. I have a thug stance
7. Paninis, lol
8. I'm from Florida
9. I love MIT - a lot
10. School starts tomorrow for me :(
11. MIT12 is hilarious and is now my favorite AIM chatroom ever, and I'll be very sad to have to stop going there as often since I'll have homework to do and, you know, a life to live

That's about it. Stay cool, everyone!

a categorical imperative, but not really.

It was great to see all the alumni at school yesterday, but wow, so many of them have changed. In the words of my esteemed co-pres: “Everyone looks like a pimp, a stoner, or exactly the same.” I looked around, and lo and behold, it was true. But I guess you can stuff anyone into a mental category if you try.

MIT12 is addictive. The regulars are, in fact, so addictive to talk to that I’m afraid when we finally meet in person they’ll be like malformed cephalopagic Siamese triplets with one enormous functional superbrain or they’ll secretly take hourly IV infusions of LSD in order to maintain their interestingness, because no way are they normal kids. Of course, we already knew that. (The last part.)

Yet as time ticks later and later into the night, and we get more and more tired, it seems like our primal instincts kick in and turn the chat toward angsty thwarted teenage romance (hah, got it semantically correct that time) as I oh so astutely noted. Or perhaps it was just yesterday that that happened.

It’s good to know that most of us illustrious MIT12ers, brilliant and charismatic and stunning though we may be, are human inside. Like, we can play Mersenne zen and use pickup lines like “Let me be DNA helicase and unzip your genes” and use MIT course numbers all the time to confuse people, yet still not be ashamed to admit that Asian chicks are HOT (inorite?) or discuss our secret, burning love for Sam Maurer. Because blog updates from Sam Maurer are like ambrosia from the heavens.

You know, I thought I’d be writing a lot of brilliant blog entries after I got into MIT. And fill my blog with bloggy goodness, so that the world might know of my daily exploits, and I’d become rich and famous and get paid to tour the world and blog, and of course become an MIT admissions blogger. Wishful thinking. But seriously, which posts belong in MIT2012, and which ones in my personal blog? This one clearly belongs here, but that’ll be something to mull over in the future. Or I’ll just take the easy way out and double-post.

ttyl.