Good morning y’all! I type this from the common room couch at 2am.
Today, I moved out of my room, my cherished 215. I washed literally all the bedding, maintaining a monopoly on the one working dryer for 4-5 hours out of sheer force of will. I scrubbed that room until Simon took one look at it, smiled, and checked off all the boxes on the move-out form without further inspection. Until nobody will ever know, that a guy named Spencer Peters lived in 215, poured his heart and soul into life in that room for five months way back in 2018. Yes, I’m already nostalgic.
I moved into Giacomo’s room on floor 4. I’ll be slumming there for a few days until Mia’s old room 214 opens up, then I’m moving there for the duration (another two weeks). #theRentIsTooDamnNonexistent
The morning was productive, but the cleaning was pretty miserable; my psychological state really suffered. Dating stresses me out for no real reason. I need to flow with the water, but my tendency is to always try to organize a date, write the perfect message, to try to build something–and as a builder of some imagined situation, I’m fragile and not antifragile. I’m always wondering about the soundness of my foundations, to assess what might be built on them. The water is antifragile; it knows what to do regardless of the shape of the ground it flows on; and, (to make an unnecessary precise analogy) the rockier and noisier the ground the steeper and more salient its gradient.
The trouble is that I enjoy building things carefully, enjoy getting logistics right, etc., just enough to keep myself at it. I need to remember that an experience can and should be cobbled together in an undirected and infinite game way and that I’ve actually been doing pretty well at that so far, despite myself.
When I was done with the cleaning and got myself some decent food at Holy Cow, my mood improved a lot. I read some absolutely hilarious anecdotes at Hyperbole and a Half I went back to Culmann and joined Ella’s birthday party. I got involved in some great foosball, even again with Alexis, and again Alexis and I together warded off another challenger team for the Culmann title. (Dora played really well though.)
The party was pretty lit, especially due to the two new American arrivals Sarah and Jason. I played foosball with Jason against Alexis and Oliver and won against all odds. (That was some of my best defense ever.) And I got to chat with Sarah a lot, chem major, from UT Austin. There were some fun moments in that conversation–I was trying to explain why it’s faster for planes to fly on great circles over the earth and hit upon the obvious explanation that the curvature of the great circles is the smallest, so flying along a great circle deviates least from flying straight through the earth (which is what you’d like to do). I also gave some tips–like, set an alarm for noon just in case, so that you don’t accidentally sleep until 7:30pm like I did when I was just arrived and destroy your schedule for half a week.
I finished up the evening by singing with Mirna. After we enacted a skit about her trying to explain some acronym to me, she commented that I was always willing to go along with her goofy ideas; in contrast to Anna, who went along for a little bit but wasn’t able to suspend disbelief in the weirdness after the second take. I’ve noticed this sort of accepting playfulness/willingness to improv and its absence (which can be positively defined as a heightened sensitivity to the appropriate and socially synchronized) a lot lately. That makes me think it’s a very fundamental personality trait of mine (dimension of thing-person-ness?).
I decided to sleep downstairs to avoid waking Giacomo up with going in and out–he has an exam tomorrow. I spirited away my bedding and made my nest in the common space. Then I called my parents with some good news about the details of the Microsoft internship, did some chess puzzles, wrote this log, and hit the hay.