June 7, 2022: First day!

The boys have arrived. Pure chaos ensues.

But that’s fine, we’re all chaos gremlins anyway, so more chaos can only be a good thing! 🙂

I think the first person to arrive was AGu. He came in at six or seven in the morning while I was still dancing. (I wake up at six in the morning every day at camp so that I can dance in the main lobby. I first decided to do this because I thought MOP would basically be math 24/7 and I wouldn’t have any time to exercise, so I would become a desk potato. That is quite far from what MOP is actually like, but I still decided that waking up at six in the morning to dance would be a good bragging point, so I stuck with it. VivL is always awake and doing geo in the lobby when I go downstairs to dance.)

We played some mafia, for which I was the narrator. Using a random word generator, I made a story about a cereal cult, where the mafias were the people who didn’t believe in the cereal god and were trying to murder those in the cereal cult. There was death via kit kat, death via lone rocket launching, almost-death saved by IV tubes of blessed cereal, and more.

Afterward, the others started playing Mao, but I begged off in order to write my journal. However, before I could write much of anything, I saw that some of the staff, namely JB, NG, and DebL, were doing set-up, so I decided to help. We set up a photo wall with photos of all the students and staff and taped up door tags that said who lived in each room.

JW gave me these two souvenirs from Aruba and they’re absolutely lovely. One is a shiny turtle and the other is a wooden dolphin.

We also went out for boba today with a whole group of other people. There were AZ, LuT, and RQ from Washington, EW, and many of the girls. Mom told me many times before leaving for MOP to not give my phone number away to random people. Guess what AZ did the moment we got to the boba shop and sat down? He started asking for every. Single. Person’s. Phone number. (AZ is now known around camp as a phone number collector, as he has basically everyone’s phone number.)

For the sake of not spending too much money and also because I’m trying to be somewhat health-conscious, I didn’t actually get any boba.

Once we got back from boba, we just hung out at Stever some more. We played another game of complicated charades.

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During dinner, I told Po about what parents talk about in WeChat groups, which he was very much amused by. I’d first brought up the topic during Pre-MOP, when I talked about sending pics to my mom and her probably sending them into the MOP parents group.

Things parents do in the MOP WeChat group:

• Complain that their children don’t send enough photos
• Complain that their children only send landscape photos and no faces. Then they start comparing the landscape photos to figure out where the kids are standing relative to one another. They have too much time, clearly.
• Apparently, tell their children to take photos of me
• RW‘s mom asked RW for photos, and then RW told her to ask me to send photos 😛
• Discuss parking in the parking lot, because that results in a ticket. Then, they researched parking in CMU and found out that if you get a parking ticket in CMU and flee back across the country to your home, they can’t actually do anything about it. 😛

Also during dinner, CH said something along the lines of wanting to ask LR how tall he is, so I got up and did so. He’s 6 feet. My question somehow set off a round of standing up and everyone comparing their heights, with LR saying the whole time, “I can’t possibly be the tallest MOPper!” 😝

Then, at the end of dinner, some of the girls (KS, VH, JW) and I were in a sort of huddle. They were telling me how bRavE it was of me to actually tAlk to LR. I was like, “He’s not scary!” And they were like, “He is scary!” I pointed out that none of them are scared of JW. KS rebutted that it’s the combination of being tall and smart (and possibly male) that makes a scary presence.

Then, LR walked past, so I waved him down to ask him what type of person he considered scary. He was like, “Um, I don’t know? But hopefully not me!?” with a somewhat worried, confused look on his face. I think he probably knew what we were talking about.

We eat in a room in Resnik Hall, and in order to improve ventilation, Po props the doors open with chairs. There’s a sign on the door that says that an alarm will sound if we open the door without approval, but we always ignore those signs and propped the doors open anyway :P. Apparently, Po thought the alarm wouldn’t sound because the door was propped open without issue the first day, but then SR told him that the Resnik staff actually helped us the first day. But it turned out fine :PPP

We (those of us talking about LR) walked out via those doors and wandered out to the track, which was right outside the dining hall. We chatted there for a while. By the time we finished talking and realized we should probably go back in, everybody had already left Resnik :((((. Then we realized that it was already 7 pm, so the campus tour had already began. We rushed to the intersection, where we met up with everyone. :).

We did a campus tour, as well! By which I mean Po brought us around to find where Tepper, the theater (where the talent show will be held), classrooms, and test rooms are. The classrooms are in Wean Hall, which looks like an underground bunker. The stairs in Wean Hall are lighted strangely and look like they’re part of a nuclear reactor. Meanwhile, Tepper, the business building, is made of glass and has high ceilings because business, unlike math, makes lots of money. Po told us to go to Tepper during weekends or something and use their lobby when we want to hang out because it’s very well-ventilated and more COVID-safe. Then, we returned to Tepper for the welcome orientation. However, partway through the campus tour, it started to rain, so we all ran to Tepper because it was absolutely pouring.

The assembly itself was great. We hung around Tepper lobby for a while until it was 8, at which point we got into the room for the assembly. A few minutes later, Turtle rushes in with his luggage and splattered with rainwater. We all got up and gave him a round of applause because a lot of MOPpers already knew him from previous years. The staff proceeded to introduce themselves. Then, Po gave a speech about MOP. 

He mentioned that the speaker and audio set-up were from the talks he gave on his tours, and that those tours were in preparation for making sure that MOP could still happen even if we had to hold MOP somewhere outdoors :P. He talked about how he wants MOP to be fun, not just stuffed full of math. That way, students will want to work hard during the year so they can come back to MOP, rather than just stuff a year of math into a month. He mentioned that he accidentally became a professor at CMU, and that we were all great at math <3.

Then, someone brought out cake for someone’s birthday, but I went back to Stever instead of waiting around for the cake because it was already past ten and I wanted to wake at 6.