Well, this blog tonight is coming to you from a brain that has been doing statistics nearly the entire day. That means a tired brain, a brain that feels like mush, a brain that feels more like a t-distribution than a normal one. Statistics jokes. I have an Econ Stats midterm tomorrow, in case you couldn’t tell. I went in to Clapp library tonight, and nestled into my little table to chug away at re-doing my third PSET of the day, and somehow I ended up being surrounded by five of my classmates. This was a blessing, because we could not only commiserate about confidence intervals, but sound off last minute questions and keep each other’s spirits up, as up as they can be with an 8:10 am statistics midterm the next morning.
I have been throwing myself into my schoolwork, partly because it’s my way of dealing with the frankly traumatizing experience that was the election, but mostly because that’s what the sheer quantity of work demands. I don’t really feel like stressing myself out more the night before my midterm by writing about the election, or even about the twenty-four pages of papers I’ve produced over the past week. No, I want to tell you about my weekend. Specifically, the part where I wasn’t writing about “organized violence against cognitive processes” in John Ashbury’s Paradoxes and Oxymorons, or detailing chromatin immunoprecipitation on my genetics problem set. I want to tell you about the part where I got to see dear friends from high school, walk along a beach with nearly forty dogs, and see the Supermoon rise over the ocean.
Dear friends first. My friend Christin (we met in 10th grade English class when we had to share a chair because there weren’t enough seats) was at Harvard for a conference, and my friend Toni (we met drawing on MS paint at Work Family Connection in 4th grade) already goes there. It’s a relatively rare opportunity to get the three of us in the same place; it usually only happens about 3-4 times a year. We met up at the Harvard Art Museum, but didn’t actually end up going inside, because yours truly had forgotten to eat lunch (college). So instead we walked to a café and I had this beautiful chicken panini, and I melted because of delicious food and even warmer company. With all the high-strung emotions of the election, it was such a relief to be able to talk things through with people I know so well, and for so long.
I stayed as long as I could, an hour, sprinting to catch the train at North Station. My friend Vanessa had invited me to stay the night her house on the North Shore, and if there ever was a time where I felt like I needed to see the ocean, this was it. I can’t describe how wonderful it was to be in an actual house, and eat food with spices, and sit in front of the fire doing homework. We did spend the majority of the time doing work, but we took a break to watch Planet Earth (bio nerds), and walk her dog, Rosie, along the beach. The beach had turned into a dog park in fall; there must have been forty or so dogs of all shapes and sizes, jubilantly happy to be running on the sand. We sat down on the sand and watched the dogs go by for a few minutes, listening to the rhythmic lapping of the ocean.
Rosie loves belly rubs
Right before we headed back to Wellesley, we swung the beach again, and to our surprise, there was the Supermoon, peaking its head over the point. Cameras didn’t do it justice, it was breathtaking. A wonderful image to carry us into the week to come.
My iPhone does not do the Supermoon justice, but you can appreciate the location anyways
Ever lovely yours,
Eleanor