How I got mugged in the frozen foods section.

How I got mugged in the frozen foods section. So I was really tired last night. I’d been in northern Michigan snowboarding with a couple of my friends from high school, and if you’ve ever been skiing or snowboarding or just plain cold for more than 20 minutes you know what I mean when I say that I was kind of like the walking dead when I got home, only minus the drool. And when I’m tired, I have kind of ridiculous dreams. Like this one dream I had over the summer. I was in Harry Potter, and I had to get Dumbledore’s help because I was hiding in a broom closet at my old grade school, which was headquarters for some secret spy organization, and we needed his help to keep Voldemort from getting in because the blue paint on our walls wasn’t magic enough. And then I had to blog. But this wasn’t just any blog. It was totally legit, with a really clever ending and it talked about Ford trucks and red necks and it was just a really good blog entry in general. But then I woke up and was totally creeped out by the fact that the blagosphere had actually invaded my sleep, and then I thought of this xkcd and a little part of me died. Last night’s kind of took the cake, though, because I think my subconscious is officially way too emotionally invested in the interwebz. So I was just sitting on this deck in the woods, minding my own business, right, when apparently a high school boyfriend’s mother decides to hold a birthday party for her dog. Problem is, she wants this 47 and three quarter foot oak tree cut down with my bare hands and moved to the middle of this big party tent. But then the tree kind of fell on the house, I made a break for it, and then I somehow got involved in a gang fight in a supermarket, after which I was arrested for not blogging enough. (If you’re trying to follow the logical progression in that one, good luck. It’s my own brain and even I got lost somewhere around the fresh produce section.) But anyways, the moral of the story is that I woke up this morning and thought, “you know, that’s kind of a good synopsis of last semester. That would make a good blog entry.” Life at MIT does not make sense a lot of times, and this only really makes sense when you’ve been sitting at home watching House marathons for two weeks. There are the 5.112 psets that you will look at and think that the professor wrote them in Romanian or something, because whatever he’s asking you is certainly not anything you have any idea of how to do. And then you’ll spend 20 hours learning chemistry that weekend and still be looking at an all-nighter the night before that stupid assignment is due, but you’ll just keep chugging away because that’s all you really CAN do. Friends at other schools won’t get this. A good friend of mine at Notre Dame didn’t believe me when I told him how hard our work was until we exchanged psets and his response was, roughly-ish verbatim, “I would’ve given up on question one.” Or like this one time when I ran into a group of friends the Sunday before finals on my way to the library. We were just catching up, and when asked how I was doing my response went something like this: “I’m doing alright, 8.01 shouldn’t be too bad, 5.112 might rape me, but how are- man, I don’t think the Subway guy toasted my sandwich.” Total stream of consciousness. They were kind of confused, but the conversation just kept moving and that was that. I’m not headed back to campus until Saturday, which is practically forever and a half away. Home is nice, and trust me, regardless of how much you people are ready to be gone right now, you will appreciate whatever time you can get to come home next year and just veg and be with the fam. But there comes a point at which you’ll realize that your little locus of friends has been quietly shifting from Anywhere, America to Cambridge, Massachusetts (or wherever it is you guys end up), and home will take on a bit more nebulous meaning. My hometown friends are hilarious people that I love to death, but their reaction to the first dream would have been a laugh, and a “Shannon, you really need to get off the internet.” At MIT, my best friend’s reaction was “one, XKCD ftw! And speaking of which, we should totally paint the room blue.” I better put Dumbledore on call.