I think, therefore, I'm old.

Apparently I'm halfway through college. This is kind of (really) scary. College has been a reasonably good experience so far, of course, but I have this terrible feeling that I haven't really done anything. I was fairly happy with how things were going halfway through high school, though, and the following two years, though extremely fun, were kind of a bummer on the getting things done side, so who knows how the last two years of college will go.

Anyway, a little about the finale of my semi-undergraduate life, since for the most part this has received little to no attention during the actual meat of the last two years. For background, I really dislike the idea of a secluded university, cut off from everything around it. This doesn't mean I like college situated in bustling cities, or anything like that - if I were in a college town, where everything revolved around the school, then I'd be fine with that. But wherever I am, I want to feel like I actually live there, like I'm part of whatever larger community exists. This drives me to some fairly silly things, like walking 2 miles regularly to go work at the public library instead of in my own room, or on campus somewhere. In any case, I decided that, having lived in Cambridge for two years, my knowledge of the area was pretty poor. To remedy this then, following a pretty good lunch with my roommate and another friend, my roommate went back to the room to the crash (he had just had his final final), while this other guy and I decided to take a walk, as it were. We wanted to go all the way to the end of the branch of the T (the metro here) that ran out of Boston in the direction of the Northern suburbs, i.e. where we lived. The results you can see here below:


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Now, thanks to (read: in spite of) my excellent navigation skills, we managed to stay for the most part on course. The astute observer might note that this is patently false, to which I respond, we covered equivalent distance and your face is probably very ugly. In any case, it was an interesting walk through the parts of Cambridge that clearly could not care less that their city contained two universities. It was really refreshing, seeing how similar and yet how different suburbs in different places can be (this directed at those who bash suburbia at every chance they get). In any case, I eventually realized, thanks to my phone's GPS service (phones have this now?) that we might have taken 1 (or 50) wrong turns, and so were almost crossing the river, without being any closer to the T line. We decided to turn back, stopping for frozen yogurt on our way. During the walk, I talked to this guy, who I had know well enough, quite a bit. During the course of conversation, I managed to convince him that biology was in fact legitimate (one of my favorite pastimes these days, also you guys should read this: http://protein.bio.msu.su/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_1403.pdf, I'm not sure I agree with everything in it, but it's pretty good). All in all a very worthwhile experience, and a great excuse for learning how to make routes in google maps. In any case, I'm set to leave Boston in another 6 hours. Sunday is reserved for family, but weekdays are free, so let's do something please!

Until then,


~jnub