Day 116: Keezer's Classic Clothing... and empty desks.

Today started out with a bit of relaxing and then the beginning of a quest for a tux.  I find it amusing that I can buy a long black $10 skirt at TJ Maxx or Marshall's or whatever and it counts as "concert black formal", but men are required to acquire something that is priced in the hundreds of dollars even for a rental to achieve the same bar.  It must be the only place in the system where fashion financially favors women (whoa, lots of alliteration there).  Anyhow, I felt it somewhat my responsibility to assist in the tux-searching process since I had coerced D. into singing in the Mercury Orchestra concert, and somewhat less so to join Calliope, both groups requiring fancy concert-wear.

Thus I stopped by Keezer's (cool name for a used tux store, eh?) by myself this morning and had a lively chat with a gentleman who was working there.  It was a pretty kooky and fun place to go, and I sort of wished I got to wear a tux myself.  It's like men just strap these things on and there's a transformation -- I feel like I have to pinch and pull at myself forever to get real change.  It turns out that buying a used tux at Keezer's is oodles cheaper than renting one, and it also turns out that I didn't really need to do a scope-out because they had oodles of tuxes.  And shirts.  And suits.  And other paraphernalia.  It's an adorable place!

The silliness of the tux store (let's admit it; tuxes are pretty ridiculous) was balanced out by the sadness of cleaning out my MIT office this afternoon.  Decision-making is often a difficult process for me, as I like to always choose the best thing, but it's even worse when the thing you are choosing is what to get rid of.  Some of the books will stay at BCS for whomever wants to use them, a few came with me, a couple sold back to Amazon.com, some gifted to Max (who bought me dinner at MoS in exchange -- see Max's story-telling salt and pepper shakers above, all within the territory of hanging out with developmental cognitive scientists).

Day 60: Commencement

Lesson learned today: sleeping through alarms and phone calls due to karaoke-induced exhaustion and therefore arriving three hours late to your MIT graduation does not mean you cannot walk. It did, for me, mean that people were worried, but also that I got to stand in the shade with friends for 60 minutes rather than sit in the beating hot sun with people I barely knew for three hours and then slip into the line to walk across the stage to receive my diploma.


It was a beautiful day until about 3pm, well after graduation was finished.  Commencement at MIT is held in Killian Court, the lawn in front of the dome on Memorial Drive, on the Charles River.  Absolute perfection for a graduation ceremony in which everyone, undergrads included, gets to walk, so there is a lot of watching and waiting.

After graduation, I did a brief stroll around campus with the friends who came (E., T., and two of my roomies), which was lovely and resulted in many pictures.  Then to BCS, for a brief reception, and back home for some rest. Z. cooked one of my favorites, mac and cheese, for dinner, which was great, and then we all met up with some folks from my choir for the monthly karaoke sesh at Charles Playhouse.  Great end to a somewhat stressful day.

Cheers to MIT for being organized enough to remember to call the name of the girl who overslept by about three hours.

Day 51: Building 9

First, a story of old. During my first week at MIT, in fact the week before classes even started, there is a week-long graduate student orientation.  This involves various activities including meet-and-greets, trips to go fruit-picking and boating on the water and the like, receptions with food, and the like.  Interestingly, ours also included a scavenger hunt.  If you read these three posts, you will know that I (and clearly many of my friends, as well) have a particular penchant for scavenging.  Our team did not do so poorly that year, but there was one spot that escaped us -- the "Holy Grail" of MIT hacking (see also this post). A little bird told us that it was located somewhere in Building 9, likely in a basement somewhere.  Now, if you've never poked around the bowels of MIT, you won't know this, but MIT can be pretty intimidating in its winding underground corridors stuffed with nuclear engineering labs and sub-basements, and our essential flaw was that we weren't quite cheeky enough to find what we were looking for.

Later that evening there was another event, a reception in Morss Hall, and it was very nice -- excellent food, cheap (well, free for us, technically) wine, and beers.  After, we crossed the Mass Ave bridge into Boston and went to a "bro" bar on the other side, the Pourhouse.

Well, as you might imagine, by the end of the night our spirits were fairly high.  We crossed back into Cambridge and decided that we would indeed find that item from our list.  So, we re-entered the basement, and apparently we had drunk our courage right up, because find the ORIGINAL hacker's code, we did.

Tonight, I saved my friends some drinking and some courage and re-found it for them.  We markered up the walls and enjoyed the small shrine of hacking that resides in ... well, I can't tell you exactly where :).