Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Sailing and Next Semester

            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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