it's been a blur but i want to write this down. here it is:
on thursday i finished that final paper i was talking about and went to simmons dining with @anas-bizarre-adventure (shoutout to swipe sharing!).
i give it a 3.75/5. could definitely use more variety but what they had was done well. look, plantains! hooray! (and yay, milk!) ana and i spoke spanish throughout this meal and i surprised myself by being kind of funny in spanish (recuerdo que dije "las personas en simmons son similares a las personas en next, pero las personas aquí duchan.")
friday, @budumtssss and i woke up late (for different reasons) and hit up the new house gym, working hard to build the fattest, filthiest dumptrucks we could. we were definitely feeling the weight and walking slowly afterwards.
we walked slowly with ana all the way to pika, because @emill-lirios invited us to their bbq at 3pm. we arrived at around 4pm, but due to a cultural misunderstanding between poc time and white people time, we were baffled to see that the bbq was winding down. some people had already eaten and were hanging out or smoking or going back into the house, and there we were, adrift, three ducklings without a mother, facing each other in a circle to prevent other people from talking to us, with no idea how to go about getting plates or hamburger buns and no willingness to ask. it was not very dignified.
luckily we had one almost-complete computer science education (pending a final on tuesday, good luck!) to share between the three of us, and we mustered up enough social intelligence to figure out how to get food (some guy asked ana if she wanted cheese on her burger and that was the breakthrough). michael was ready to break his plant-based diet, surely by accident, but ana caught it and someone got him his rightful plant-based burger. then em ale finally came and we didn't have to worry about the possibility of being asked why we were there. a collective sigh of relief.
a 4.25/5. not that the food itself was better than simmons, but the vibes were so good. free food in the backyard of a cool house in cambridgeport with friends! what more could you ask for?
em ale took us on a tour of the house and we played games on the roof and the basement until dark. on the roof i kept thinking that it was moments like these where i remember why i love the onset of summer. the sun was setting, the wind felt nice, and we were losing our minds over a dice game. this month of may feels just like all the other mays before it: always some kids killing time, dying to move onto the next grade, waiting for school to let out and summer to actually start.
once we had enough of michael throwing books on himself and falling over (charades in the game cranium) we headed back to ihouse — but then @lvcyklm called me and invited me to a freestyle dance session somewhere in central. thank god for lucy. i think she might think i didn't like it that much — it was very scary, and i didn't do much, just watched mostly — but it was really cool to see people find new and interesting ways to move the human body, and cool to find out that i could (maybe) move and do things in a way i hadn't before. and it's always cool to see people at school outside of the context of school entirely.
i didn't grab a picture of the dancing but to close out, here's a picture lucy took of me and ana on dorm row the other day:
the sun is setting and we look so happy. this is the kind of stuff i want to keep and save from this place — not MDPs or RNNs or whatever, but these kind of moments. i don't know. going places. killing time. life.
i have to get back to studying, and i have to stop listening to big star by lorde ('i've got so much to tell you and not enough time to do it in' / 'you're a big star, wanna take your picture'). stay tuned for more excursions! see you soon x
