V is for Venerability

After being a lamer and downloading Tap Tap Revenge 3, I managed to get addicted to Tino Coury‘s works. The style of his beats reminds me heavily of the likes of Enrique Iglesias and other darker-sounding dance beats. It’s very rare that I stumble upon an artist whose entire EP sounds agreeable to my ears, but I suppose he’s succeeded in appeasing my extremely picky audiophile self. Props.

So what have I been up to these past few days? Nothing much, actually. I’ve drank too much miso soup for my own good, knocked a few pounds off the scale (yes!), studied lots of 8.02, applied for jobs (so what else is new). To be honest, I’m not even quite sure why I’m writing this entry if I have nothing to share, but bear with me, alright?

After stalking some individuals on Facebook and seeing the success that they have achieved, I’ve come to the very sad realization that there really isn’t anything that I’m good at. Not just decent, but stand-out amazing. The expert in a field, or famous for an accomplishment – whether it’s publishing a novel or winning a national competition or something. I want an area of life that I excel at; something that my future children can reference and say, “Look at my mother, she’s amazing/famous/respected because of XYZ.” Right now the closest thing would be dance, but once I leave MIT then I also leave ADT; though it’s an amazing legacy, that is not something that stays with me forever. I want to create my dance company and my other super-secret project and many others, but what if none of them come to fruition? It’s not something like sports or academics where the only input is practice; for an entrepreneurial venture like that, so much of it depends on luck.

What if I end up going through life without anything of importance to my name? What if, when people talk about me, they say, “Yeah, she kinda does dance… and has this other company… no, it’s not really big. No, they don’t really have any bestsellers yet. Well I’m sure someday…” That just makes me sound like some kind of hopeless dream chaser. Which, in a way, I guess I am. I’m chasing a dream of something that may or may not work out in my favour, a dream of being something great, a dream of being able to defy the odds. Can I defy the odds? Only time will tell…

They say that most people can be classified as either a mechanics person or an electromagnetism person. For MIT students, these two branches form the physics core of our General Institute Requirements; that is, every student, regardless if they’re majoring in Chemistry or Political Science, is required to commit a year of their undergraduate life to learning the beauty of physics.

For someone like me, for whom calculus-based subjects are not a forte’, I took classical mechanics my freshman year and then put off E&M until now, my senior year. In a way, I’m kind of happy that I did; although I did not take any other math- or physics-intensive classes between then and now, the sheer act of going through MIT somehow trains your mind to learn faster and process concepts better. I’m currently self-studying to pass the Advanced Standing Examination (credit-by-exam) for our required Physics E&M class, and I’m finding it incredibly smooth-sailing. How is it that 8.012 was that difficult my freshman year?