June 19, 2022: Life & Cockroaches

Schedule for the day.

We didn’t really do much in the morning. I did quite a bit of work on my journal.

JC asked me to come down to the main lobby and, once I did, he took my hat :(. Then, he took inspiration from my ponytail and looped his nametag thing through the hole in the back of the hat. 

Then they started playing cards or something, so I quite casually just unlatched the back of his hat and took it anyway. And like? He barely even noticed, so clearly the nametag thing really didn’t work. Then I realized I was going to dance class, where I wouldn’t really need to wear a hat, so I decided to be kind and return the hat. 

Dance Class

I went to the dance class from 10:30 am – 12:00 pm in the activities room in the Jared L. Cohon University Center. When DebL first mentioned this to me, I was SO EXCITED! Like, a week ago, DebL had told me while we were doing singing troupe that her daughter’s teacher is an award-winning dancer from China, and she might possibly be able to bring her in, I was so excited I was bouncing off the walls! And that’s not even much of an exaggeration! Like, I actually was bouncing on my feet and so so happy! And DebL was like, you’ll need at least five people, so I was running all over the place shouting (because it was loud due to the music going on) at my friends (EB, VH, EW, etc.) if they would like to go.

The activities room was really nice. There was a whole wall of mirrors 🙂 <3. DiaL, DebL, and VinL came to watch us (VinL never watches DiaL‘s classes though, lol) and the teacher asked DiaL to help demonstrate the warmups. We started with just sitting on the floor and doing stretches. Then, we learned two dances: one was a Mongolian dance and another just like a normal traditional Chinese dance. The normal traditional Chinese dance was basically just eye exercises, having us follow our hands with our eyes as we do certain things. And then after that, we did an exercise with our feet just learning how to walk in Chinese dances.

The people who went to the class were Evan Chen, FW, AZ, EB, SL, and VH.

We also discussed whether we were going to dance anything we learned from there at the talent show. The teacher was so nice, she was like, “I’ll make sure to come to the talent show if you do!”

DebL and the teacher seemed very enthusiastic about it, while the rest of us just sort of hemmed and hawed a lot.

After dance class, we ate lunch.

…And, like, the hat is gone?

And I’m like, JC, who took the hat?

And he’s like, I don’t know.

How do you not know who took a hat off your head???

ELMO

After lunch was ELMO. The proctors wrote the seating arrangements on the board, with each team in a row, and some of the names were boxed. We couldn’t understand what the boxes were for: initially, we thought that the boxes were for, like, particularly good students, or something, because I think MM and FY were both boxed?

And then as they began passing out the papers and I tried to figure it all out, I suddenly realized that they were all the ELSMO takers :P.

I was writing again, though I did not submit it to the graders (that would’ve been awkward, as the graders of ELMO are the, you know, other students). I wrote about dreams and how fluid they are. Then, I wrote a “Why MIT?” and a “Why Harvard?” essay, though granted, the “Why Harvard?” essay was more like a “Why not MIT?” essay. Po’s Philosophy has been on my mind a lot.

Evening

After dinner, a few of us may or may not have skipped the test review (by which I mean we totally skipped it, shhhH). I walked back to the dorm with, among others, AZ and JW. As I was walking back, I was phoning my family. Not much has happened today so I wasn’t sure what to tell Jason about, so I started doing a sort of “Let me tell you about five things about everybody at MOP.”

In reality, I was really just doing AZ (his tendency to say “Da,” his phone collection, the Shakespeare cutout thing, he swears, he lives in Washington? A few others?), and then I started doing JC (by which I mean I just noted that he has a hat that is mine and like, I kept being interrupted).

Po once again held story time in Tepper. There were really few people, by which I mean only Po and I were in Tepper. Everyone else was at test review, which I skipped. (Apparently, test review went on really long. JLee explaining ELMO problem 6 alone took an eternity. In fact, test review was supposed to be ELMO followed directly by MIMO test review in Doherty 2210, but because ELMO review was so. frickin’. long, they ended up starting MIMO test review in another room, instead. Also apparently, the graders sort of graded MIMO as quickly as possible so that they can rub it in the faces of the returners when they fail to grade ELMO in any sort of decent time. So they were essentially able to pass back MIMO papers by the time of MIMO test review :P)

So Po’s storytime was really just us sitting on those lovely huge chairs in Tepper and talking about what I plan to do.

I sort of explained the whole “I wanted to grow up and be a princess, then I grew up a bit and realized that wasn’t possible so I wanted to be like Mom and play Candy Crush and shout at my children to play piano (that’s not anything close to what she does, of course, but children can be selectively blind), so in order to do that I’d obviously have to marry a decently well-off dude. But then I realized I liked teaching so maybe marry a well-off dude and be a teacher? Because teachers aren’t paid enough. But then I realized that that’s hardly respectable so I edited it to, ‘I want to be a software engineer, build up good money, and then be a teacher.”

Then he talked about how I would probably be really good at sort of getting a bunch of people to work together in like a startup because I’m so social. He suggested I talk to the RAMP guy tomorrow because I would probably be able to learn a lot from him. (RAMP is a startup now worth many billion that has a MOPper as one of the five co-founders! The RAMP guy who Po mentioned is the past MOPper, and he’s now, like, chief of staff or some such and thus does a lot of talking with people and figuring out where they would do best, which Po thinks I would be good at, which is why he thinks I should talk to him.)

And then more people finally came and we sort of just all chatted. (The topic had been supposed to be “College (what you can do there)”)

Cockroach Chronicles

When I finally went up to bed and did my teeth brushing and everything, it was around 11:30. After I took out my contacts and started brushing my teeth, JW burst into the bathroom and starts grabbing paper towels. 

Get this: JW lives on the second floor.

Yeah.

I was incredibly confused, too. When I asked her what she was doing, the answer was rather muddled and unclear, so I followed her when she left the bathroom and went to AGe and VH‘s room. There, we found AGe and VH shrieking (quietly) as they trapped a cockroach within an empty container for toiletries.

What transpired next was a sequence of squeals and shrieks as I, with great exasperation, proclaimed that “It’s just a cockroach!” and, after telling the others to bring the box outside to keep their dorm floor from being dirtied, proceeded to whack it many times with my shoe.

Then I whacked it a few more times because it was still wiggling.

Right as I was going to give it yet another whack (to be sure of its demise), JB walked past (she’s the RA on the fourth floor) and just said, “Sophie, I think that’s enough.”

I asked JC what he would do in the case of a cockroach, hoping for validation that the girls were being silly, and he said, “Also just kil it :p”

Very astute.

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