The Saga Continues

Friday

7:30 Wake up as other people are getting up. Look at time. Go back to sleep.
9:00 Get up fo' real, get dressed, &c. Head out to catch shuttle to main campus. [After making sure everything I might need for the day is in my purse.]
9:15 Call other people to see what we're doing for breakfast. Meara had wanted to meet at 10. Unable to contact Meara.
9:30 Katharine calls me back during the shuttle ride. We decide to meet at 77 Mass Ave.
9:45 Meet Katharine, go to Delta Kappa Epsilon for custom-made breakfast by 4-star chef. Wait in line. Get cheese omelette. [Was going to get cheese & tomato omelette, but then I was like . . . or I could just put ketchup on it. And I did.]
9:55 Lauren txts me, saying the boy next door was hogging the shower.
10:00 Katharine & I eat our breakfasts, with leftover frat brownies for dessert. Mmm, brownies. We make new friends.
10:30 With a couple new friends, we decide to go to an 11 o'clock Brain & Cognitive Sciences class: Sensation & Perception.
10:45 We wander over to E25-117, getting slightly lost on the way.
10:55 Arrive way too early to class; only other prefrosh are there. Txt Lauren about our plans.
11:00 Actual students enter class. Feel bad about hogging seats.
11:05 Sit through v. interesting class on sight & recognition. Would def. want to take that class fo' realz.
12:00 Class ends. Of course, the one I actually enjoyed was only an hour long.
12:05 Katharine, Lauren, New Friend 1 [sorry, I really don't remember her name. I think she had strawberry-blonde hair and was kind of sporty.] decide to visit the Garment District. We wander quite a while down Mass. Ave before realising we're not going the right way. So we turn in what we think is the general direction and eventually, miraculously, arrive at the GD.
12:35 I enjoy browsing the merch at my dear old friend the Garment District. See a really cute belt, but resist the urge to acquire. Also some really cute skirts. <3333
1:00 When shopping loses its novelty, we walk back to the Z Center for the Arts & Academic Fairs. Eat candy from art tables. Receive free pan pipes from the music department, plus assorted free pens. See some familiar faces, like Teal, my nerd camp tutor. Talk to her about taking AP exams. x.x Also talk to comparative media studies people, mostly because they have laptops with game demos, like Katamari Damacy. Might be an interesting field to consider. Also spoke to women's studies people because I felt bad. And I realised women's studies could be combined with another concentration, so you don't just go to college and major in women's studies. Who'd have thought? Okay, besides everybody.
3:00 Head over to Random Hall w. Katharine & Funk Masta Bizz for some boffing action.
3:17 Climb up to the roof. On the way there, pass resident with fuchsia hair & blue goatee. Love.
3:20 Observe people, including Nick, whacking each other with foam weapons. Lauren & I take up the offer of foam weapons and retreat to a corner of the roofdeck to boff each other. Except we mostly end up laughing hysterically from the joy of it and reenacting scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean, mostly involving Orlando Bloom & J. Depp. Apparently, we were not serious enough for the hardcore boffers, who chided us with cries of "cheesy Hollywood fighting!" and "attack the person, not the weapon." Yeah, thanks. If I ever decide to become a professional samurai, I will be sure to keep those criticisms in mind. Oh, wait. I don't want to be a professional samurai. I just wanted to have fun! & you completely ruined it! THANKS!
3:35 After we tire of having all the fun completely sucked out of what should have been a fun activity, we stood in a circle and talked. We WTFers were joined by Nick, Sally [from ... North Carolina? Or Virginia?], Danbee [means "sweet rain" in Korean], Matt [our Festival night friend], Sharife [from Egypt... the only reason I can spell his name is that he's always the first name to come up in the '09 guestbook], & maybe a couple of random Random Hall residents. So we chatted. I received a hug from Nick, though I don't remember why. <3 [Just to kill the suspense: if this were a literary work of a romantic nature, the weekend would climax with me hooking up with Nick in the upstairs of a frathouse, but that ne'er happened. My weekend crush was unrequited.] Sally and Katharine/Lauren decide someday I will find a boy with blue hair who dresses in all blue and he will be my One True Love. There was a boy dressed in all blue, but his hair was brown, so we were not One True Love, but I did wave to him whenever I saw him afterward.
4:05 Anticipating truffles, we start to head downstairs. Because a resident on the roof had tipped us off that Joia [nerd camp tutor] was around somewhere, Katharine had the bright idea to descend the stairs shouting "JOIA! JOIIIA!" Nick: "Are you sure it isn't Spanish for jewel? HOYA! HOYYYYA!" Miraculously, we suddenly hear Joia shriek & come running to find us. Hugs all around. Happy reunion, etc.
4:17 Truffles! Except I am too lazy to actually dip my own truffles, so I mostly live vicariously & watch other people eat them.
4:30 The WTP cr00 heads out to go to Baker, the dorm where Katharine's temped, so she can do something dormy there. Oh, right. Change her shoes. Because we were warned to wear shoes on the Tangerine Tour & flip-flops are apparently not shoes.
5:00 From Baker, we decide we want to go to dinner and a movie with the Society of Women Engineers, so we head out and run into Nick, Matt, Danbee, & Sally, who were headed toward the Baker BBQ. They decide to join us, lured by Bertucci's food & Ocean's Twelve. When we finally get to 4-154, however, it is packed with people and there is a massive line for food. F this s, we said. We're hungry, f00. So we decided to go back to the Baker barbecue. Which slightly irritated the people who had been on their way there when we sidetracked them. But whatevz, they lived.
5:30 There are chips & assorted yummies at the barbecue, but sadly, they were cooking no veggie burgers. ;.; But it's cool, I just ate way over the recommended serving size of Doritos & socialized. Met some more nice people, including a prefrosh named Angel. A male prefrosh named Angel. I wondered if he could sing & dance like in Rent, but didn't ask, out of politeness. There was also an MIT student named Kyle chatting with a group of prefrosh. Kyle with a smile. He was really friendly and had a bit of a Bahston accent. It was cute.
6:30 Barbecue gets boring, so Katharine & I peace out in favour of heading to Senior Haus for the 6,000 bouncy ball drop. We hang around in various cold places [the courtyard, the lobby] & txt Lauren to inform her of our whereabouts. When Lauren arrives, we venture up to the balcony of Senior Haus, where there are slightly intimidating people smoking. But we put on our best friendly prefrosh smiles & introduce ourselves, then chill there, admiring the psychedelic wall murals. Definitely the dorm for arty stoners.
7:30 Eventually it is time for the bouncy ball drop. We go out to the balcony to watch. Christine calls and we tell her to come join us, and she gets to the balcony just as the balls are dropped. Oh, bouncy balls. Good stuff.
7:45 It's time for the Mr and Miss MIT contest, so we teleport to the student center. [Okay, maybe just walk, but I'm running out of interesting verbs for changes of location.] Meara meets us there & we load up on snackfood.
8:00 The contest is pretty cute. The first guy to perform, an Asian freshman, sings some mushy song that I'd recognise if I heard it, but which I can't remember. And he was wearing white gloves [style points x 8] & had a red rose which he presented to an audience member while on one knee. Guess who that audience member was. [=me] Aww, yeah. The coolest part was this guy whose talent was collecting junk that MIT labs throw out & combining it to give a really awesome lightshow. The three judges were MIT professors, & they were all really adorable. One judge reviewed all the performances in rhyme. Hilarious.
9:30 The contest ends and Meara needs to go to East Campus [where she's temped] to get her coat & stuff [See? Prefrosh staying in normal dorms and nor independent living groups across the river can stop back at their dorms for errands & warmer clothing!]. We pass the lobby of East Campus, where all these shady characters dressed in black and often wearing berets/sunglasses are congregating. It is not conspicuous at ALL.
10:00 We loiter in the lobby of building 7 where there are lots of prefrosh gathered [~300]. Eventually we're broken into packets. [Yes, that's what they called them.] And taken off secret separate ways by our packet leaders. Packet 5, represent. We were mostly amused by the top secret spy act, so we joked around, asking, "can our packet have a theme song?" and humming the James Bond theme.
10:15 After being thoroughly disoriented, we arrived in a large lecture hall, where the black-clad "Jacks" were gathered at the front. Katharine, Meara, Christine, Matt, Nick, & I sat together. We waited a long time & it bordered on boring, so I first tried throwing my rose into the aisle to see if anyone would find it and have it touch their heart in an oh-so-special way. But no one did, so when Nick picked it up and gave it back to me, I started plucking off the petals and distributing them among my friends as tokens of my love. Yes, subtly tossing rose petals onto unsuspecting innocents seated in front of me was also a token of my love. Matt & I contemplated an alternate universe where one gives others flower petals instead of entire flowers, and Matt came up with the theory that you would give people you only liked a little lettuce leaves. Which was an amusing thought.
10:45 Eventually all the lagging packets show up & Jack Florey, the leader of this Tangerine-flavoured [-coloured? -scented?] Tour, gives us the DL on how to be sneaky, including how to walk up stairs and the two reasons the edges of roofs are dangerous. There's a pretty good article that sums up the basic experience here, and I'm too lazy to rehash everything she wrote, but I'll try to give you a general idea of what it was like.

1. cold
2. boring - long periods of waiting for them to scout safe routes, etc., whilst we listened to the same old hacking stories
3. way too long - we had planned to go to some frat parties afterward, but it didn't end until 3 or 4 in the morning & we were mostly exhausted
4. absolutely worth it

Picture me, shimmying up and down the dome in a pink skirt [=mistake x.x] & my pink stockings from Hannah [yes, Hannah, yr stockings came into contact with the dome at MIT. Feel special.] in the dark of the night, mostly fearing for my life, but also fearing I would inadvertently flash one of the hapless Jacks. It was pretty much awesome. And don't worry, I was wearing fairly sensible shoes, in the form of my Chucks. <3 Yes, those very same items of footwear that tread the mundane hallways of ASHS most days of the week, have perched on a well-known architectural structure of a prestigious center of higher education.

Word to your mother. The third and final installment coming soon to a theatre near you.