It
seems like, as time goes on, the days get longer and the weeks get shorter. I’m
getting plenty of sleep, but it’s getting increasingly more difficult to get
myself out of bed in the morning – not from depression; just from indolence.
However, despite that, last week was a fairly eventful week, so I will deviate
from my countdown of the days until break to fill you in.
First
things first: concert videos are here! I’m posting the link at the bottom of
this page, so you can watch them at your leisure. Enjoy! Also, while on the
subject of good news, I was quite worried about my physics grade for a while
last week. Harvard factoid: we have no way of tracking our grades – sometimes
the teachers even refuse to give out overall grades until the end of the semester.
However, I did end up crunching the numbers, and it turns out I’m doing much
better in physics than I thought, so that was encouraging.
Another
bit of welcome news: I was accepted into my study abroad program for next
semester! I didn’t want to mention it on here until I got In, but it’s official
– I’ll be spending next semester in Jerusalem, barring any unexpected
obstacles, and studying at the Rothberg Institute at Hebrew University. I’ll
have more information on that as it gets closer to time to leave.
For
now, though, there are still plenty of things happening here in Massachusetts.
Speaking of Hebrew, my Hebrew class attended a film screening on Thursday night
for an Israeli TV series that’s being remade in the US. It was very good; I
haven’t been able to find it online, but in the process of looking for it, I
stumbled over several other TV shows in Hebrew that I’m excited about watching
when I get time.
Not
that I’m terribly busy at the moment. I spent the weekend browsing through a
bunch of Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic films on Netflix, along with having a few
American films thrown in. It wasn’t all that productive of a day, but I did get
some foreign language study in, and I did all the work that needed to be done.
The fact that MIT got Monday and Tuesday of this week off for Veterans’ Day
meant that I didn’t have PT Monday morning, which helped. Over the weekend I
also finished the 600-page novel I bought as a stress-reliever earlier in the
week. I haven’t finished a book in a long time; it was a good feeling.
Also
this weekend, I picked up another activity that I haven’t done in a while:
sailing. ROTC had a mini-regatta this past Saturday for Midshipmen in our
company. We sailed for a while, to practice, and then we ate grilled hamburgers
and hot dogs, and then we went out and actually raced. The first time, my boat
came in last, since neither I nor my partner remembered much about sailing.
However, we moved up a place each time, so we considered ourselves as receiving
the award for most improvement at the end.
Sailing,
I found, can be a source of life lessons. For instance, in sailing, the tighter
you make your sail, the more control the wind has over your boat, which is to
say that a tight sail is good if you want speed and bad if you’re about to tip
over; those two have to be balanced. Furthermore, the thing to always remember
is that, if your boat is about to tip, one of the best things to do is to let
the sail out; the effect is noticeable and immediate.
However,
letting the sail out is very unintuitive for me when the boat is starting to
tilt. The more we start to lean, the more I want to pull tight, to hold
everything in and have control. Which of course, only makes things worse. By
the end of the day, I’d learned that sometimes the best thing to do is to calm
down and just give up some of that control. Sometimes that works in life, too –
what I think I need to do to make sure things are running smoothly only makes
them worse, and it’s better if I just sit back for a while and let the wind
take me where it will without worrying so much.
I
hope everyone had a wonderful Veterans’ Day, and I hope you have some free time
to watch the concert at the link below. You can also find us on facebook at the
second link. Until next week!
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