3/6/16

1. 3/6/16
1. Another quick update! This weekend:
2. Friday night I traveled to Eastside Stomp in Redmond for a swing dance with Eleonore and her friend Nicholas. It was amazing. I danced for like 3 hours, my technique slowly improving. By the end I had danced with practically everyone there. And afterwards Eleonore, Nicholas, and some other shmids from Swing--the organizer Holly, the extremely friendly, mildly awkward CS student Ryan, and a physics! grad student whose name I can’t remember--went to this place called Beth’s Cafe and ate a world-class breakfast at like 2am.
3. Saturday I went to a picnic with floormates in the quad, went to this cool, clever-social-justice-parable movie called Zootopia with Holly and Eleonore (and Frankie, who’s been teaching intro swing lessons). Then went to the Ritmo Latino dance with Ahrif, Ricardo and Miriam from the floor. What a contrast to swing! Everyone was doing their own thing. The Salsa Club didn’t know how to prepare us in the intro lesson--they did like 10min of bachata, 10min salsa, and 10min merengue. The music was so loud that when I left my ears were ringing--and the beat was complex, subtle, multifaceted, impossible for my naive signal analysis protocols to process. At one point, a (very helpful dude who tried to teach me how I should be moving my hips, what instruments I should be listening to to discern the beat) asked me, “How did you end up here?”
4. I walked outta there like 11, brain reeling, had dinner, and flopped.
5. Crazy stuff happened in the middle of the night that I cannot discuss here, but I will record a pointer to my memories in this sentence so I don’t forget, and in my old age, I can be frustrated guessing what shenanigans occurred.
6. Today was super nice. It started with ennui--I woke up this morning and had no motivation to do anything homework related. This quarter I’d been fighting to network, to plan events, lunches, dances, meetups every day--it really has been more my focus than academics. (You must understand, I don’t mean it hasn’t been fun--in the same way that when I say I’ve been fighting to comprehend abstruse academic topics, I don’t mean it hasn’t been a great joy. I just mean I’ve been deliberately and intensely working on it.) So this day the 6th of March I declared a ceasefire--today was to be a Homework day, I would not think about doing anything cool, social, whatever. And it was awesome. I parked myself in the Music Library for a good 3 hours, ate a late lunch at Som Tam Thai while reviewing circuits, got back and did more work. (I did play a bit of Super Smash Flash with Xin and Brandon, but hey, focus != exclusion).
7. Wrote the SPS newsletter, wrote this log, and returned my consciousness to oblivion, in preparation for La Semana de Los Muertos. Good night all, sit pax tecum!