emotional

yesterday, I ate breakfast at 7:30, took a final at 8, wasted a lot of time, and 12 hours later found myself at a place that desperately tried to be home almost 2 years ago. I laughed, I stared, I played Angry Birds, I ate ice cream, I watched laundry, I met new people, I climbed an insane staircase to a bell tower full of bird poo and bat skeletons, sat on a roof, searched in the dark for a place to put my feet, found out that I could have shared an apartment with a 12 foot Pepsi sign, and tried to sleep at 4:30 am. Today I ate breakfast at 10 and then put food on plates for a room full of homeless people, each one with a story screaming to be told and understood, and used to change the lives of others.
then I was gifted lunch from Chipotle.


tomorrow, reality returns with its usual unforgiving, trips-you-down-the-stairs ways.
i think.
i thought i knew which was the dream and which was the staring at the ceiling with your head on a pillow, but I suppose i really don't. and perhaps I never will.
maybe its all a dream, and you wake up when you're 65 and realize you slept through your alarm and you're going to be late for school, once again, and you graduate with the most number of tardy marks in the senior class.

i need to understand how to use multivariable calculus to describe engineering probability models before 8:00 monday morning.

before i forget

if there's anything I have learned as an engineering student so far, it is that you can't solve a problem by looking at the problem. you have to look past the problem to the other side and see the answer. the solution is what connects the two together. Engineering doesn't care much for the answer, you usually already know what that is (for instance, better life for all). It's the solution, the substance that allows us to reach the answer, that is elusive.

Magical

This past saturday I spent the morning waiting for the Comcast guy to show up at the Strand Theater to install internet. After 5 hours and a no-show, I at least got to spend the time with my best friend. Also changed the marquee, which is exciting because people always stop and ask what's going on or tell their children to watch out for that guy struggling with the ladder.

More importantly, i caught the saturday performances of Berwick's dance shows this year. Even disregarding how awesome it is to walk into a building and immediately have people running up to you asking how your life has been or having people you don't remember meeting start talking to you, i love watching production happen. Especially in a place where i spent hours upon hours trying to make musicals and dance shows happen as smoothly as possible from a lights/sound/video perspective, tech booths feel like home to me. I could do technical theater for the rest of my life and enjoy every minute of it. Watching stressed-out performers and producers and stage managers fight and yell and pour their passions into something that everyone has to share, that is more magical than an iPad.