This post is a love letter to food written jointly by me (Sophia) and Tananya. 

I’m Sophia, the past head and creator of the Massachusetts Institute of Culinary Experiences (MINCE),⁠01 Check out mitmince.com and @mitmince on Instagram to learn more about our events, recipes, team, and general thoughts on food. (PS: Even we’re a little confused about the stylization of our club name. But we love the feel of 'mince.' It’s an action that often marks the start of a recipe, and by that understanding, 'mince' is an act of creation.) a culinary group on campus. Tananya is the current head of MINCE. I started this organization to create affordable dining experiences run by students, for students. Hosted at unique locations within MIT and beyond, these culinary pop ups are meant to serve both as a creative outlet for students interested in the culinary arts as well as an intimate space for students to form meaningful connections around the dinner table.

Our hungry, ever discerning MINCE cat

 The original intention of this blog was to expose more people to our organization by presenting the goal of MINCE and (attempting to) explain why we care about it. This itself was like finding yourself at a meadow, and having to explain why you enjoy it. Certainly, we still hope to achieve this message during the blog, but its driving pulse has since shifted to understanding why we ourselves are drawn to food, and through which mediums we’ve chosen to pursue that awe. Some of these include MINCE, others do not.

Sophia

Saying I grew up on food is no less obvious than saying I grew up on air. I needed it, both literally as sustenance and fundamentally as a gravity, a first principle to found my life upon. I’m not sure when it started and meditating on how and why would be unproductive. The truth is likely as simple as noodles slathered in chili flakes and green onions, a ladle of hot oil tumbling down, aromatics alive and well. Revolutionary. My love for food, this desire to cook — I found myself in the middle of it and holding a bowl of yogurt, drizzled with honey, a stray handful of raspberries. I haven’t yet found a way out.

Like most members of MINCE, my love for food feels more like an instinct, a second first nature, than any cause-and-effect relationship or line of logic. Among the few belongings I hauled to campus my first year of college was a cleaver carefully wrapped in a microfiber cloth. Most of the media I consume explores food in one form or another, whether that’s documentaries on world class chefs like Vladimir Mukhin and Nancy Silverton, or a short form Instagram series on compound butters. The one notebook I’ve kept consistently is a recipe ideation book.

A recent page

I knew, certainly, that there was a reason I was drawn to food, but the thrumming instinct to be involved with food occluded any desire to spell those reasons out, taking with it any clarity in the process of untangling. More than that, the expression of something so important was difficult — something simultaneously obvious and impossible to put a finger on.

I first hit something during the fall of my junior year with my friend Kenny, a recently graduated ’23. He is a brilliant biologist, statistician, musician, the list continues. He is intentional, kind, intelligent, and raucously funny. Though Kenny does not pursue accolades, he has an impressive body of research and awards. He could easily (and humbly) find himself at any institution post-graduation. Instead, he will be moving to Kansas City one week after graduation with a two-year contract with Teach for America, teaching biology to high school students. After those two years, if he enjoys the work and the district, he will consider staying.⁠02 I don’t include the previous details to perpetuate a ridiculous conclusion that because someone is well-educated at an institution like MIT, their goal must be to climb the ranks at even more elite institutions. I include it to illustrate a freedom of choice and diversity of opportunity that few people have access to, making his decision all the more thoughtful.

I asked why he chose teaching among his competing interests of research and academia. He explained with an integral.

 Teaching has an undeniable impact. It was the surest way, with his skillset, to make an impact every day on the twenty or so students that sat in his classroom. Doing that every day for years, he reasoned, was like integrating across a flat line (for the more scrutinizing eye, a unit step function). His career would have a reliable impact.

Whereas working on, for example, a research project is analogous to integrating a pulse function, or a right/time-shifted step function. Projects like these have high yield at success, but there is no guaranteed success.

There is clearly no best approach. Both must exist for a functioning and progressing society. However, his explanation acknowledged the fundamental importance of daily impact, something rarely accredited at MIT. MIT is an ecosystem of buzzwords. “Finding the next…”, “Breakthrough in…”, MIT is discovery, invention, and innovation. We are lucky to be in a place that enables us to pioneer the next novelty, but amidst this culture, you can easily lose your grounding.

In short, how we treat one another each afternoon, our daily services to our community, accumulates to reliably enormous significance.

Admittedly, rolling out tortellini on a Sunday morning for a friend, obsessing over the perfect acidity for a salad dressing, losing my mind over the set of a panna cotta, and claiming this was all important sometimes feels silly. However, I could not shake that feeling and at last he had given me the words.

More than an art, cooking is a service. Go one level further— what we cook is sustenance. There are few activities which are repeated so frequently and with such casual import. We have two to three meals daily, and we should get to enjoy those meals. Small changes to our attitude towards and preparation of food add up tremendously.

I feel privileged to cook for myself and especially for others. Participating in someone else’s ritual and on occasion elevating that ritual feels analogous to being let into someone’s most sacred habitual life, a fly on the (kitchen) wall. A meal is ordinary in the sense that it is common. A meal is also beautiful because it is so common. There is such latitude to experience food – all the flavors and textures, the sights and smells – because we eat often and with necessity.

I want to inspire joy through food, whether that’s a 15-minute ramen bowl or a meticulously orchestrated two-hour course. A meal may be ephemeral, but add it up — three times a day, 365 days a year, how many years in a lifetime? — and you’re left with something permanent, a lasting effect of care and love (because what is love if not the most consistent form of care?).

When food is posited only as the snack you eat in lecture, a trip to the dining hall before rehearsal — something fit in between the ‘actual’ events of our life — we forget the miraculous, life-giving fuel a meal is, and the nourishment food is capable of imparting. If anything is deserving of ceremony, food is surely a worthy candidate.

Well, what does this all look like in practice? MINCE is among my favorite examples. We are a 20-person team of students. Three times a semester, we host pop ups where we serve ~35 students, chosen by lottery, a 4-course menu priced at $17. Each menu is centered around a theme. I’ll expand briefly on two past events.

Night at the Art Gallery

Our goal with Night at the Art Gallery was to highlight the culinary arts by drawing parallels to well-known paintings and movements like the Renaissance period, Impressionism, and Neoplasticism. We wanted to transport our guests and challenge ourselves with modern gastronomy.

Our Night at the Art Gallery Menu 

Our menu was:

(starter) “Birth of Venus” Botticelli’s scallop nigiri

(main) “Compositions” Mondrian’s duck breast three ways

(dessert) “Water lilies” Monet’s white chocolate matcha genoise

(drink) “Starry Night” van Gogh’s 4D butterfly pea drink

our courses and some bts of our team

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Our dessert team spent eight hours the Tuesday and Wednesday before our event working on tempering a white chocolate flower for each cake. They even made a computer-aided-design (CAD) model of the flower and CNC machined a custom mold at a maker space on campus. Our main was an aged, sous vide duck atop a honey glazed milk bread sandwich with a duck-fat potato puree. To complement the duck, we experimented with countless set gels, eventually settling on an orange-safflower jelly and scallion, chicken broth aspic.

But food is only one part of any meal. The company and the environment make up the rest.

Our lottery intentionally limits parties of guests to 2. We encourage students to come willing and excited to form new connections around the dining room table. Our reservation form from this event asked participants, “what would you study if you could major in anything?”

A few of their answers:

coffee brewing

electronic textile handicrafts

meteorology

furniture making

gestalts

chipotle menu design

our wonderful guests <3 (hi cami!)

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We then formed tables with the responses, hoping to ignite chemistry and intimacy.

our design team working wonders

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Our design team made over 50 balloon-animal dogs by hand, a reference to Jeff Koons’ famous stainless-steel sculptures. One per guest was placed at the center of each table. A bamboo reed was stuck between the arms of each iridescent dog to diffuse lavender, the fourth dimension of our drink course. The table runners were brown sheets of paper carefully striped with intersecting lines of color, mimicking the precise geometric forms and primary colors of the de Stijl art movement we would reference in our main. Look carefully at our menu, and you’ll find that the background is a CAD rendered model of a man with an apple obstructing his face, a reference to The Son of Man by René Magritte. Angela, our head of decor, even sculpted 3 clay pieces for the event–apples, progressively melting–which we positioned on stands throughout the room. The venue was a lecture room in the architecture department, but that night, our guests dined in an art gallery long closed. Mesmerizing and whimsical. Sacred in its secrecy.  A tiny world created for the evening.

Romance through Film

Romance through Film was a Valentine’s Day event we hosted through collaboration with MIT Datamatch, a dating algorithm popular on campus. The event emphasized one of MINCE’s major goals: creating meaningful connections with food as the centerpiece. I asked myself before starting MINCE, “in the torrential firehose of life on campus, when do people have the chance to sit together unoccupied?” The answer was over a meal.

Our Romance through Film Menu

Our menu was:

(starter) Charcuterie cheese board

(main) Lamb ratatouille

(dessert, pt. 1) Apple rose tarts

(dessert, pt. 2) ‘Life is like a box of chocolates’

(drink) Love potion

our courses

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Each was a nostalgic reference to the food from childhood films our team largely grew up on, from Shrek’s ‘Happily Ever After’ potion (our take is a raspberry syrup, strawberry jam, and pomegranate concoction finished with dry ice) to a humble vegetable stew that transported the vulturous Anton Ego. In an extravagant touch that very much embodies the attitude of MINCE, the cook team laser-cut and assembled custom wooden boxes for our guests. Inside, we placed a Bordeaux chocolate and a white chocolate and raspberry truffle. Engraved on the box was the message, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Love, MINCE.” The head chef of this event, Michael, wanted to use the romance of memory to comfort and delight our guests.

our MINCE team looking as beautiful as the food ;)

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After service, we shared with him that as much of a pleasure the meal was for our guests, creating those courses had given our team a childlike joy we’d all missed dearly.

our décor and talented musicians

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 The decor for this event was simple and elegant. We booked a penthouse overlooking the Charles at sunset. Two talented friends of MINCE, a violinist/pianist and a guitarist, generously played our event. Our team focused on how to spark conversation between our pairs of strangers. We opted to create a deck of question cards, some taken from the New York Times’ 36 Questions That Lead to Love, others suggested by MINCE members. 

A few of the cards are shared below:

Admit something.

What’s something you wish you could do for the first time again?

What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

What do you wish you could spend more time doing?

our guests <3

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I am constantly surprised by the vulnerability strangers can achieve. Events like this have emphasized to me that when we create a place where vulnerability is both encouraged and importantly, casual, people will seek that space out with eagerness and intentionality.

This summer, I worked part time at a cozy ramen shop in Porter Square, Yume Wo Katare. Yume Wo Katare translates roughly to an invitation: talk about your dreams.

The shop is no bigger than two dorm doubles (maybe a generous triple) and is arranged in three neat rows of six. At any time, there are no more than 21 people in the restaurant, including staff. The walls are covered in cartoons. Each depicts one stage of the chef’s journey to opening this fan-favorite spot, from the years he spent in Japan to his arrival in Boston. There is a sign, much like one you might find on the road, NO PHONE ZONE, then in smaller lettering, stay present. Look up and you’ll find a painted sky, baby blue. Clouds, fat and imprecise, dot the ceiling. Each is a dream.

     Invent a patented design.

     Travel the world by van.

     Quit my job.

Even the chairs blend into this world of whimsy. The wooden backs of two chairs in the middle row read, THIS IS NOT JUST RAMEN. The second, THIS IS YOUR DREAM. There is only one item on the menu: pork tonkatsu. A broth so rich it looks almost murky, creamy from fat, some rendered, others still white, floating like icebergs in your bowl. Handcut noodles, chewy and jagged. Soft garlic, minced and preserved overnight, disappearing on your tongue just as it enters. The pork is salty and pink and has been braised for hours. Its fibers give way to the slightest parting of a chopstick. Delicious. When a customer finishes their bowl, a member of the Yume team will ask whether they have a dream to share. The customer nods and sets down their pair of chopsticks. The chef calls the attention of everyone in the restaurant. Even the noodles stop swimming.

He wants to build a log cabin in the woods and raise a family there. Stacked logs of cypress and moss, crisscrossing. Crickets chirping through the night (you hear them even with all the windows closed).

She is an amateur birdwatcher. Her dream is to spot a black-throated gray warbler, a rare bird found in the Midwest. She’s captivated.

“I want to grow old with my girlfriend.” She is sitting next to him.

“My dream is to publish a novel.” I know she will. The newest Brandon Sanderson sits on the table. I watched her thumb through it in line.

Inside the ramen dream workshop

 When I was first hired, I exhausted Jake, the owner and head chef, with questions about his bowl. What determined the plating order of all the ramen components? What was the flour mix and ratio he used? How did he come to the perfect minced consistency for the garlic? I tried and tried to drill to the root of the dish he had mastered from his Sensei. He answered, but I could tell he wasn’t interested. “You have to understand,” he said. “I’m not interested in food. This isn’t a restaurant; this is a dream workshop.” I was stunned. “I create a good bowl of noodles, so people respect the dream workshop.”

I am obsessed with food. I want to understand the mechanics of food, its science and interactions, in a pursuit of knowledge that feels more instinctual than necessarily deliberate. In this way, our attitudes are markedly different. But his words ring true to me. They remind me of the service and the space food occupies in the people it has and will touch.

Leftover gnocchi from our Fall in New England pop up, enough for an after party

The impromptu selfie

Leftover cream? No worries

Friendship <3

Upside down friendship <3

Haris’ masterclass on twerking, featuring the shores of Maine

A hug after our first pop down

Be real during R&D

Cutting custom tables for our first pop up

Don’t worry, it’s only a smoke detector

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 Among the people that food impacts, I want to emphasize that the service of cooking runs in both directions. In MINCE, as much as we focus on our guests, there is a special camaraderie built through battling with the kitchen. Most Friday nights before events, you will find the New House dorm kitchen and the adjacent conference room packed with members preparing pesto sauces, assembling banana leaf platters, julienning pickled radishes until well into the early morning. We’re fueled by our in-house barista, Haris, who at 11pm makes delicious instant coffee with hand-whipped cream. Michael once flew in a Thanksgiving pecan pie and roasted duck as a treat during one of our fall recipe and development (R&D) sessions. We listen to Tananya’s indie mixes. We go on roadtrips to New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Maine’s coastal cities for inspiration and retreat.

Without going out of our way to, MINCE has become a community of people who are as many parts passionate as they are kind and caring. A friend put it to me, “MINCE self-selects for people who would spend their weekends cooking for others.” I am proud of our members and lucky to call them my friends. As much as we create for our guests, who make all these events possible, we create for ourselves. The environment of innovation and friendship makes the delirious early morning hours, the frustrations over grainy caramel and burnt kulfis, part of an eager process for all of us.

team photos

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At the first restaurant I worked at, a modern Southeast Asian restaurant named Bone Kettle in Pasadena, California, days off were rare but anticipated. Each time, we would drive to Las Vegas to stuff ourselves at luxury casino buffets, stop at Cane’s for Texas toast off the highway, rip through bags of pork cracklings, and enjoy each other’s company in the brief refuge from long days. I consider the team at Bone Kettle to be an extension of family, and the two constants through our relationship were good food and good people. Working there in California was the last word of encouragement I sought out to start MINCE with my closest friends, because, in truth, all I’ve wanted was good food and good people.

Camaraderie on the line at Bone Kettle

As for MINCE’s future, I am excited to see Tananya’s vision come to life. Meeting her, getting to know her, is like taking your favorite walk at sunset by the river. Like putting on headphones and that first flood of music which crosses into audible sound, the swelling of something warm. More than anything, Tananya is open to the world, its ordinary and extraordinary offerings, in a way I find both incredibly rare and fundamentally accessible. I have met few people with such earnesty and affect. We share similar and different beliefs towards MINCE, which you’ll read about shortly. She has the patience and nurturing eye to both recognize and coax out the beauty in her environment. Further, she is able to translate that into something special, imparting onto others that sense of awe which comes so naturally to her, others might call magic.

Tananya and I

 I’m sure my understanding of food and my role in this vast ecosystem will change over time. This is my most complete, written understanding to date. When writing this blog, Tananya and I met many times to discuss. We were both struggling to commit pen to paper. She said, “how am I supposed to make every connection, when the words go in a line?” That’s exactly it. Like crumbs of bread scattered in my lap, the juice of a peach running down an arm…if I could explain the feeling with feeling.

Tananya

Hello! I’m Tananya, and I have just a few words I’d like to say. In my first draft, I actually had almost 2000 words to say, but after sitting on it for a month this is all I have left. Sophia has said most of what you need to know, so here is the rest. 

I’m writing this little piece because this summer, the responsibility of making decisions that guide Mince has been given from Sophia to myself. There’s been a lot to think about. I actually don’t have much experience dining in cool and innovative restaurants, and growing up I never ate out much. I probably don’t cook any more than the average person that just wants to save money, though I do want to work on that this coming year. Also like many other people, I see food as a meaningful expression of love and care, largely because of how I was raised–with good food shared with good people. Love, regularly scheduled, dinner every day. I believe that food is beautiful, because if you’re lucky, you have no choice but to eat, over and over and over again. If you’re lucky, eating is something memorable, and food becomes another way to find joy in daily life. 

In terms of joy, the other things I care about are pretty typical. I think the ways in which time is best spent boils down to only a few things. Being with the people I love, being with myself. Being with the outside world, seeking fresh air when possible. Reading good books, listening to good music, doing what makes me happy, whatever that entails. 

I also tend to believe that the things I pay attention to, and the fact that I pay attention to them, has meaning. Light and shadows, the feeling of wading in cold water. Kids running around places where they shouldn’t, the greenness of summer in my hometown. As I learn more and more about what it means to be alive, I find myself wanting to capture and express something about my experience, even though I haven’t quite put my finger on it. In short, I would like to be a storyteller. 

summer in Michigan

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I decided not to post 2000 words because explaining why I care about the things I do, to borrow Sophia’s metaphor, was like I came to the edge of a meadow and had to explain why it was nice. I want to try to tell my story in other ways, and see what comes through. 

I’m very happy to be able to call the people I’ve met in Mince my friends, and so grateful that Sophia started such a wonderful community. It’s a space where people can come together and share with each other, beyond food, what we love. Should you share a meal with us, we hope that you can feel that love as well. 

I hiked 16 miles today!! I am now suitably exhausted. I’m clean again, which feels like such a relief. Warm showers are my second favorite thing, after soap.

Alright — this morning I started late, like woke up at 11. I guess I was exhausted. Black Valley Hostel caters breakfast — eggs, oats, cereal, and toast, and the little plastic squares of jam that remind me of Waffle House. They bought groceries for me, too. Not knowing what to ask for, I requested beans and chicken.

I made eggs with no oil and then made oats in the same pan, and was about to do the chicken, too, when I decided that I wanted to get on the road. I’d forgotten the joy of pan-cooked oats. It goes way faster in a pan than a pot, too. Perhaps the thing to take over from yogurt as a daily breakfast?

I got on the road at 12:45 and vowed to turn around by 4:30, so that I could be back by 8:00, an hour before dark. The first few miles, everything was wonderful, so beautiful and green. The open valleys enhance the beauty, too — every new turn showed a whole new space, the valley and the climbing mountain on the other side of it. I enjoy that more than forests, I think. Coming out of a forest to see the edge of a lake, the rippling water, and the beginning of a river — that was magical.

I texted some friends about how hiking is like what I imagine microdosing psychadelics would be — everything is beautiful and exciting, and from another angle it’s also beautiful and exciting. “A mountain! A cool rock! The same cool rock from a different angle! Another cool rock similar to the first cool rock. A river!!” There’s dopamine from moving at the pace you are. It’s lovely.

rocks! and sheep!

a mountain! a river!

There is an Irish tradition of “permissive routes,” where landowners allow travellers to pass through their property. The Kerry Way uses these routes, winding for miles through private pasture. The gates have signs that I imagine are for foreigners, reminding them to always close the gates behind them.

I went through the gates, always closing them behind me. It felt — special? I knew this was an ancient tradition, and I was determined to respect it. I felt vaguely honored that this trust was extended to me, that I was not trespassing but being welcomed in. I would never feel safe on private property like that in America.

The first gate, I ran into a group of people herding sheep into a corral. They were shouting at the dogs, and one of the dogs was long-haired and mangy, and I wondered if it was aggressive. But it was fine, the sheep went into their corral, and the people asked where I was headed. I said I was walking the Kerry Way. That way, then, they said, and pointed me to their gate. It’s ok? I asked. Yes, of course.

ladder that goes over a fence

cool ironwork

I wondered if my nervousness around dogs could rightly be called trauma. Some of my family’s dogs were aggressive when I was a kid, though only toward other dogs, not people. We had to break up fights. I wondered if this is something I could resolve in the future, through some kind of exposure to aggressive dogs.

There were sheep everywhere, spray-painted bright colors, like I’ve seen on the internet. They were often nearly close enough to touch, but they always shied away from me. They were cute as hell, though. When you looked up at the mountain, it was specked with white dots, all the way to the clouds.

When I planned out this trip, and realized I couldn’t afford all the hostels along the Kerry Way, I was so afraid of camping. I didn’t really know the territory. I would definitely not camp solo in many parts of America. I decided to stick to affordable hostels, and hike out from wherever they were.

At this point in the hike, with the beautiful cloudy skies, I thought I could camp. Everyone I passed was friendly.

the sheep are blue!

I didn’t see any routes on Google to tackle Carrauntoohil, the tallest mountain in Ireland, but I figured there might be some that Google hadn’t picked up on. My plan, then, was to walk the Kerry Way and keep an eye out for trails that headed up the mountain.

Spoiler: I didn’t make it to the top of Carrauntoohil. There simply aren’t any paths from here — the trails, it seems, were hewn out later, and they are all accessible from the highway on the other side of the mountain. I could take a taxi there, if I wanted — and pay Western taxi rates — or see if I trust some fellow I meet tomorrow enough to take me to a mountain. That seems a sure-fire way of dying, so we’ll see.

When I reached the end of the road shown on Google Maps (which doesn’t show ‘permissive routes’), I saw a pathway heading upward. It was made of crushed rocks, never really packed down. I hiked up, passing a woman standing by a stream — she seemed ominous until she waved, and I realized she was there with her family. At the top was an orange tractor, moss growing between the tires. As I came higher, I saw a lake, in the hollow between two mountains. It was so beautiful. I cannot describe it. The runs running down to it, all of these rock tumbles. I took pictures — the orange tractor, bright against the natural hues. 

Then onwards — through this gap in the mountains, which had about 1000ft of elevation. There was a faint path, but mostly you were travelling from signpost to signpost. Fortunately the posts were abundant. The rocks were beautiful here, too, and impressive in their way. I was reminded of the stacked rocks in Arizona, although none of these were stacked, just jutting from the mountainside and covered in grass.

There is such abundance of life here, where everything is wet. The grass feels more soft, you wouldn’t call these plants tough — but they bounce back when they’re stepped on, because they have all the resources to. So you don’t have to worry about trampling them. It felt strange at first to step on plants so much, until I realized they would be okay.

Then down — for a long time — until I found the road again. There was a sign for the Cooky Monster Cafe, at the same place as a B&B I’d spotted on the map. I decided to shoot for it, telling myself not to get my hopes up (my hopes were sky-high. I was starving. I’d brought 2 granola bars, finished one). 

In fact the Cooky Monster Cafe was closed, but the man there (who saw me in his window, came out to greet me) let me fill my water bottle from a tap outside. Kindness everywhere. I filled my bottle, and then didn’t touch it again until I got back, because it started raining and was too much work to pull out a water bottle.

stone bridge

I went back. I passed some hikers, asked the woman, is it raining up there? It’s raining now, she said, and it’s windy too. As if I couldn’t tell, I thought. Or perhaps she thought I was criticizing her rain jacket. I was now the unprepared tourist, I thought, remembering travellers from Europe and Asia with little 12-oz water bottles, sunscreen slathered on their faces.

I donned my jacket not long after, for it began to rain. And rain. And rain. But when I got back my torso was mostly dry! A huge relief. 

The way back was exhausting. I was so hungry, wet, and tired. I started listening to a podcast of Irish folklore, which got me through. I ran into a whole herd of sheep, who ran away from me — by running farther up the road, so it looked like I was chasing them. I felt kinda bad but they eventually realized they could run sideways, and then I passed by them. A big fluffy dog ran out from its house, rolled in a field across the path, then ran back, directly at me. I shouted, NO! BE NICE! NO! BE NICE! and it kept running, but into its yard. I walked on in relief.

I definitely could not camp here, I thought, after the first two hours of rain. If I did, I would never be dry.

Then I was finally home. And I cooked all my chicken. And a nice man washed my dishes, even the pot with chicken stuck to it,⁠03 he didn't try to hit on me afterwards either! I disappeared to my room before he could try, but that didn't seem to be his intention and the German lady mumbled through all of her trip plans, and I went up to my room and read 2 pages of a book and then scrolled on my phone.

I loved the welcome on others’ property. How open a country would feel. How safe Ireland feels to me, now, even though I get anxious when travelling alone. 

I’m in Black Valley Hostel, a beautiful, cold little hostel about 21km south of Killarney, a town in County Kerry, Ireland. It’s the launching point to walk the Kerry Way, a nine-day hike around Kerry. This is also my only stop, as it’s the only hostel with beds below $70. Tomorrow I’ll hike as much of the Way as I can, then turn around and sleep here again.

my hefty yellow bag

I only caught the late train to Killarney. I hiked about 4 miles of the Kerry Way before it began to get dark, and my phone was dropping rapidly from 33% to 18%. It climbed to 23% when I charged it in the bathroom of an old abbey, and had fallen to 16% when I decided, fuck it, it was time to call a cab. The light was falling quickly now.

Uber didn’t work so I called one on the phone. This was the right decision — the fellow who picked me up was from a collective of ten-odd cab drivers. He was really nice, so warm, and had a fascinating life. He still bikes and hikes and hunts and fishes, even though his hair is white. He drives more aggressively with stick on tiny winding sheep-lined roads than anyone I’ve ever seen. He recommended a hike up the hill at the Killarney end of the Gap of Dunlow, which I might try for tomorrow. If not, then two days after — I could probably run there.

He worked in construction, structural steel, for thirty years — in many different places. Thirteen years, he said, alone in the Middle East. His children now are spread all over — Ireland, England, Australia. He bikes a 100-km loop around the Kerry Road on the first Sunday of July, when there’s a charity event for it. Folk come from all over the world.

He charged me at the top of the Gap, when there was still wifi, and when at the bottom of it we realized the fare was three euro more than I’d paid, he waved it off. Kind of him.

Sheep sprayed in bright pink, blue, or red kept jumping out of the road, or else hanging out just beside it. Cars went so fast, even though the Gap road is narrow and twisting, too thin for two cars abreast. 

The Gap itself was beautiful — dramatic rock with grass on top, hills curving down. I understood, again, why Ireland is praised for its landscapes. If fairies live anywhere, it’s among those stones.

When I got to the hostel, the woman welcomed me in and I realized that they only take cash. “You gave it to the cab?” she said, and I nodded, though I hadn’t. She said we’d sort it tomorrow — this is late for them. It was about 10:30.

I went to the room and I have it all to myself, which is a lovely lovely blessing. I haven’t slept in a room alone since… probably sleeping in the morning after I stayed at Kevín’s. A whole night? Not since I was in Tucson.

This is lovely, and I appreciate the beauty and people’s kindness in this place. The house is cute as heck — I love quaint maximalist European decor. All the same I am feeling guilty for not planning this day out better, so that I wouldn’t have needed to call a cab. I am also starting to notice the amount of money I’m so blithely spending — it’s really a bit much. Alas.

But no use wasting time on anxieties. I’ll get some work done tonight. But first I want to record the highlights of this day.

Lough Lane

This morning I said goodbye to Selena, and the beautiful Irish house in Dublin (an airbnb) that stressed me out because two other occupants were sick. Then I figured out which bus to take, with the help of a nice gay couple. One of them worked in finance. He had Buddhist principles — in Thai — tattooed on his inner arm, and more on his shoulder. His partner, he told me, had ink all across his chest. They’d spent two months in Thailand and went back every year — or few years? I don’t recall. 

On the bus, he told me highlights of Ireland, but was interrupted by a bald man with an accent so thick I could scarcely understand it at times. Dublin, he said, is full of — rubbish? Riff-raff? I remember the word starting with ‘r,’ the sense that it was a word you only hear this side of the pond. Be careful, the man warned me.

Then I left the bus and boarded a train. I spent the journey sleeping mostly, mirroring the older woman opposite me. The man with her seemed to be giving me strange looks, but maybe I was wrong, and after all I couldn’t blame him — me with my tourist backpack, my big coat curled over me like a blanket.

Then Mallow, a small town where I had an hour layover. I started walking to a café but passed a Bolivian flag (green, red, yellow) and Spanish music. I paused, looking between houses at the event. It seemed private, so I kept going, pleased that there were brown people in this teeny tiny town. But a white man at the event saw me looking and invited me in. It appeared that he’d invited himself, or perhaps he had friends who let him come. It was a bit awkward, because I didn’t want to intrude, and definitely didn’t want to do so in English. Everyone was friendly but I did feel like I was budging in. 

A woman asked me the typical questions — where are you from, how long are you in Ireland? — in Spanish, and I struggled to respond, but made valiant efforts. When I asked for a word, they switched to English. Someone offered me juice made with dried peaches, which has a special name and is common in Bolivia. Mocochinchi. A man with a beautifully embroidered shirt showed me pictures of this place that is a mirror of the sky in Bolivia, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. I think it’s ice.

Then the white guy started complaining about how white men get charged tourist prices in Latin America, which to me was wildly rude and out of touch. He started addressing the complaints to me. Not speaking Spanish clocked me in his head as whiter. I remembered reading about this phenomenon in an MIT class, how Latine immigrants who are bilingual are treated as ‘less fluent’ in English. 

I thanked them and left, making mental notes to myself to learn Spanish. I felt awkward about intruding but also so happy to have found this enclave of Hispanic people in the middle of  Ireland. We really are everywhere.

It’s called el Salar de Uyuni

Then I got back on the train, read some Neil Gaiman, and got off in Killarney. I fumbled for a map for a bit, realized my phone was at 33%, and well, you know the rest. I made some key mistakes here — not charging my phone on the train, not looking up maps ahead of time, not planning the train route ahead enough to get to Killarney early. Alas. 

I was stressed for parts of the hike but it was so beautiful. The lake with its islands is magnificent. The trees, the grass, all the plants — this is true hiking paradise.

Torc Waterfall

It’s near a bunch of roads, too, which meant that hikers of all ages were out and about. There were many families, and older couples, too. Imagine having this much beauty so close by.

There was a family of deer grazing in a meadow, not far from the path. Four different sets of hikers saw them and stopped. They noticed us too, one young buck taking watch the way geese do, but they didn’t seem afraid. They kept grazing. This is perfect, I thought. This is the dream.

#

The void is calling to you. You speak to the machines.

You rose closer with the sun today, shivered on the way to lab, the morning pale and grey. There are jobs that need doing in the basement by the street, where a massive CNC machine chatters and hums. You’re breathing foul chemicals you do not know the name of. They make the metal that you cut look clean. 

One piece you cut is fine and smooth, but the next has flaws in the designs. Someone else, perhaps as sleepless as yourself, forgot half the holes and channels. You set to fixing it, blinking through a tired haze. Your hands tremble with caffeine, this old well-trodden routine. This time you know the remedies: you trace the cuts, the way the machine will go.

You set a probe in the machine, a thin stick with a delicate and costly red glass ball at the end, and send it slowly shooting down. The void then does not call, it screams: smash it. Just to see the ball shatter. To remove the fear of messing up. You could crush that scarlet globe and the world would not crack. The shopmasters would not even be angry, just annoyed, and you’d have to spend time inserting a new probe.

You stop the probe one inch above your stock piece, tell the machine to measure the distance between the two. The void reduces to a whisper.

Nothing breaks, and the work progresses but isn’t finished entirely. You will be back again tomorrow.

Next you rush down the halls, crowded now with people. You find a different basement lab — the forge — which is usually sweltering but right now is simply warm. The taciturn forgemaster with the tattoo sleeve, whose name your little sister said came out of the fantasy novels you both used to read, is showing a student blocks of plaster with cast bronze medallions inside. The forgemaster lifts one block high and lets it smash to the ground. Plaster explodes to all sides. The three of you spend the next half hour chipping at the parts of plaster that didn’t break, freeing the bronze medallions.

The student asks for gloves, but you’ve had worse chemicals beneath your skin. You chip away the plaster as it dries your hands, makes your forearms itch.

Then there is class you’re only somewhat late for, where you are spoon-fed MatLab line by line. 

Next you are at your UROP lab, above ground but with no windows, pulling on a man’s green smock and floppy leather gloves. You’re welding a fuel tank. You put on crashing metal music, but the air filtration system drowns out all other sound.

You turn on the welder — it’s a TIG welder which is akin to a massive, bright solder. Your hands and arms are covered so the brightness doesn’t sear your skin, but you are wearing ripped jeans. If you do it right, nothing will spark, no molten metal will fly onto your skin. 

The electric circuit of the welder is operated with a foot pedal. Press down and electricity will flow. When you turn on the machine and grip the welding tip in hand, mask up, eyes exposed, the void rushes up through you. You could hit the pedal, shoot electricity into the air; you are at least 90% sure that nothing would happen. A google search tells you 100%. Even so. You imagine a shock passing through you, enough energy to melt metal shooting through you to the floor.

Your foot is itching over the pedal the way it never does over the gas, in a car, when the results are much more dire. But you don’t dare. Instead you tip the mask down, set the weld tip to the metal, start a spark and a circuit between the two.

The void falls away but as you fall into the work it keeps returning. When soldering, nothing will burn unless it’s within a centimeter of the solder gun; it’s easy to hold the solder wire from a proper distance. With welding, your gloves begin to heat up four inches away. You’ve seen two-inch-long wire bits, proof a more experienced welder could bring the wire closer and closer. Or perhaps a welder with heftier gloves. Even so, every time you get near the end, your fingers edge closer and closer, feeling a heat soak into the leather. Sometimes it burns, and you whip off the glove, press your fingers to your lips. 

You don’t finish the project but you’re nearly there, and no disaster happened, no burn marks on the gloves or your skin.

Finally it’s forging time. You stretch and wander down the outfinite, where the evening light is grey. You’ve been with the machines all day.

In the forge you’re crafting a dragon, which means holding chisels and various hand tools close to hot metal, hammering them at awkward angles. The chisels drink the heat from the workpiece, until they too are searing hot, so you wear gloves. The gloves heat up; when you return the piece to the fire, you take them off, feel the warm palms.

You lean over the dragon, checking on the growth of his teeth or his horns. He’s not red anymore but that is the most dangerous, when the metal is grey but just barely. Your brain doesn’t register the heat this way. The void whispers to grab the thing in your bare hands. At one point you smell burning hair, a stray strand that touched the dragon. 

When the dragon is red-hot the void rises again, conjures the burn and bubble of skin if you wrapped your whole hand around its head. You keep hammering. The dragon’s nose and eyes emerge, his angry eyebrows, the curl of his lower horns. 

You’ve burned yourself a couple times in here, but always through carelessness or a bad stroke of luck. This time you are careful, wary of your tiredness, how easy a mistake would be. You think of the work you choose, where mistakes are dangerous. Your deepest scar is from this year. How many craftsmen are missing chunks of their fingers. 

On bad nights, when you were young, you dreamt of crashing cars: careening down the street however much you slammed the brake, deadly straight for all that you yanked the steering wheel.  

Now you dream of the machines. When the alarm rips you from sleep it’s pulling you from sharp spinning blades eating your hair, rapidly drawing your head to the blade. Spinning wire brushes wipe the skin from your fingers. Pounding hammers smash through bones—

But that isn’t common. At least not for you to remember you wake; these dreams are buried in your REM cycles, the few that you can scrape. They are a wariness, a warning.

The void is not usually so strong. Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get more sleep before you speak to the machines.

I’m at Life Alive in Cambridge now, writing this, while beside me a student from another college has a massive book open beside her laptop. Two families with small kids order at the register. Every few minutes, a shadow crosses the window, cast by a pedestrian or two walking by on the street. 

We meandered down Beacon Street and stopped to watch the marathon. The track was lined with cheering families and friends. The runners were going about the pace I’d shoot for in a three-mile race. 

We wandered on, past college kids and people in rain jackets.⁠05 the two weren’t mutually exclusive but it appeared that more people over 25 check the weather Boston felt so alive. Eventually we found a Green Line stop, waited about as long as one would expect for a Green Line train, and were spat out in the middle of Allston. A snack stop and a few address mishaps later, we were in the backyard of a friend of a friend’s place, surrounded by students from BU. We set to mingling, shouting to be heard over the music. 

We went from that house to another, which had a backyard near some train tracks, where I’d been once before, my freshman summer. I was thinking then about sororities, the only MIT communities I’d seen so far, and how I could join one — I wouldn’t fit in entirely, but I liked their gatherings, in a different backyard beside the train tracks. I’ve never joined a sorority, but I’ve watched as several of my friends did, and decided whether they did or didn’t fit in. Some did, and they love it.

This would have been my final CPW, had I not taken a gap year. I keep thinking of what I had planned, though those plans were all nebulous, and involved a lot more scurrying off to work on my own than has ever happened.⁠06 I make efforts to not work alone now. Most evenings I’m surrounded by classmates I can’t help but wonder what the landscape would have looked like without the pandemic ravaging our freshman year. How groups would have formed differently, if we had that precious freshman fall of PNR. We’d have entered sophomore year knowing so many more people. But maybe that doesn’t matter now. 

I spent a good portion of time trying to find the perfect group that could fulfill all of me. Lately, though, I’ve come to realize that my different communities serve different parts of me. Some friends love going out; others hang out in my dorm. Most everyone will listen to me describe the projects I’m working on but some will have a mechanical project of their own to bring up, too. Some will go to protests with me, and my little sister will inspire me to go to more. I’ve found outlets for my writing at Harvard, and in a few friendships at MIT. I find house concerts in Allston, often populated by Berklee bands, and meet new people with cool fashion between sets.

I love meeting new people. Getting enough sleep this semester reminded me of that.

My friends and I wandered away from Allston and eventually wound up at an MIT frat’s barbecue, where I met new people who were at most one connection away, a friend of a friend, if we hadn’t shared a class or been to the same club or event. I’ve had this sort of encounter more and more as time passes, and the MIT community, with so many social pockets, feels closer.

I caught up with more people — a current classmate, a former one, a senior in my living group I think is super cool — and got my fourth and final burger of the long CPW weekend.

It’s fun just wandering amidst a crowd on the street, sharing in its energy, and talking to strangers you will probably never meet again. But it’s also cool meeting new MIT people who are in overlapping circles. I was thinking of all the communities at MIT: how I’ve grown close to some and hover on the fringes of others, and how there are always more to connect to.

I remember years ago feeling a sort of nostalgia for what never was. How sad that I couldn’t get to know deeply all the cities that I passed through, that I’d see the surface of so many icebergs of people and places without knowing the depths beneath. I’d meet travellers in hostels and think, we could be friends; and maybe we could, if they weren’t flying to another country tomorrow.

Now I meet people in courtyards and free food events and loud, dark rooms, exchange majors and living groups and how hosed both of us are. Sometimes I think, we should be friends. And sometimes we are, if one or the other of us isn’t too exhausted, too swept up in psets, too busy maintaining the relationships they have in the chaos of MIT to make room for another. Frequently it takes time, spacing out hangouts amidst the firehose of our lives. Often it takes luck, like being in the same class or walking the same route through the infinite; and dedication, choosing to stop and catch up for a few minutes in the middle of the day. 

My friends and I said our goodbyes to the barbecue and meandered back across the bridge. The mist had set in since the morning; I could barely make out the lights on dorm row. Our shoulders hunched against the cold. We met each other through living on Beast in EC, but we maintain the friendship by pillaging free food events together, psetting late nights, and hanging out every weekend. We carve out time from our busy Monday schedules to cross the bridge in the middle of the day and wander the streets of Boston.

Mills can cut in 3 directions, (X, Y, Z), which makes them useful for cutting shapes into metal. In this case, we’re talking about molds for the plastic pieces of our yo-yo. I’ll make a blog on the yo-yo making process in full some time down the road. This blog is about CAM — Computer-Aided Manufacturing, or making the mill run automatically.

A year and many days ago, I shuffled into LMP⁠07 Don’t ask me what this stands for because I don’t remember and it’s kind of silly. It’s a basement makerspace with lotsa big machines in a typical sleep-deprived stupor. Arcturus had scheduled a lesson on the CNC⁠08 Computerized Numerical Control: an automated mill. I use this word as a noun and a verb (CNC: to cut out a part on the CNC mill) with the LMP instructors. I would later learn that Wade and Josh are some of my favorite lecturers in MechE, but on that day, I could barely stay awake on my feet. Handling a mill was difficult, but automating the process seemed many times more so.

CNC front view

That spring, I took a class that showed me lots of new engineering skills, including using a wood CNC. I procrastinated drawing up a CAM⁠09 Computer-aided manufacturing, essentially telling the computer what toolpaths to take. model for, uh, weeks. I eventually got one in, but by then I was too hosed to go and machine the part.

So I came to 2.008, Manufacturing and Design II, without any practical CAM or CNC experience. I thought I was an outlier until we started planning our final project, and a senior teammate said, “Yeah, I’m gonna learn CAM.” 

As it turns out, we would all have to learn CAM. Manufacturing a yo-yo is fairly complicated. We’re injection-molding each plastic piece individually, and our yo-yo has 5 plastic pieces, meaning 10⁠10 actually way, way more, because we keep iterating on the design and re-making some of the parts mold halves to CAD, CAM, and CNC. We split the work between the five of us. 

3-D render of half the yo-yo body

The night before my first mold CAM was due, I came back from B1 fight club⁠11 exactly what it sounds like. around 1am, opened my laptop, and set to work. I stared at Fusion for a while, then stared at a Canvas tab, and switched back and forth for a while.

Eventually I pulled up Wade’s step-by-step CAM tutorial from 2.008 lecture. I’ve never had a CAM lesson that penetrated before, but seeing his screen on a recording allowed me to go back and see every mouse-click, which was actually so useful. By now it was 2 am. I was in a good mood from fight club, despite having been beaten up, and I wanted more than anything to go to sleep. 

So I went between the tutorial and my Fusion design, adding toolpaths and running simulations. A 9 am deadline makes crazy things happen. By 4 am, the CAM was done. 

CAM pathway showing an endmill toolpath (yellow) as it cuts the sides of the mold (blue)

The next day I felt mostly deceased, but I came to 2.008 lab and stayed awake this time as Josh taught us how to use the CNC. Its blades are enclosed in a big cage, and the machine will only run when the doors are shut, protecting human hands from spinning blades. The anxiety around running a CNC machine stems from the CNC tools being expensive. Bad instructions can cause it to break a tool and wreck your piece. 

But I was too sleep-deprived to feel much anxiety. The atmosphere was relaxed as all five of us gathered around the machine. One of my teammates volunteered to run the CNC first, under Josh’s instruction. He kept testing the limits of how fast the machine could go. 

We needed to finish the other half of the mold at open lab time during the week. I had taken on less work the first week, so I volunteered.

finished mold clamped in the machine

I came in to lab. A group of students were gathered around the lathe. Some grad students were stationed by the waterjet.⁠12 cuts metal with a jet of water I set up at the CNC. I asked for some pointers, then loaded the CAM program and moved carefully through the set-up. The machine whirred to life. It began to spray foul-smelling coolant on the piece. A spinning endmill⁠13 like a drill bit, but it can also cut sideways faced the part down.

I sat there, my hand over the stop button in case something went wrong. That’s the standard practice: you sit by the machine as it runs, always ready to step in. I thought about how much CAM and CNC had intimidated me once. Now my biggest worry was the machine finishing the process cut before I had to go to lab.

You just do it. Or you put yourself in classes that will make you do it. It will come due, and then it will be done.

Here’s the finished mold. We’re injection-molding the plastic yo-yo body next. 

class schedule

do not look at the purple one shhh

1. 2.008: Design and Manufacturing II [The Yo-Yo Class]

The goal: design and manufacture many many yo-yos. We’re in groups of 3-6, and we have all semester to CAD our designs, CNC molds for them, injection mold the parts, and assemble — each step of which involves a lot of iteration. I met with my team this weekend to finalize our design: the moon fish Tui and La from Avatar. Shout-out to Audrey for designing the fish in Illustrator!⁠14 and look out for a joint post from us when this project is done

One of the seniors took the lead on guiding our design. She’s super competent, I loved bouncing ideas off each other, and I’m excited to see where this goes. I’m also hyped to learn the injection molding process.

our whiteboard sketches

2. 2.671: Measurement and Instrumentation

This is my final core MechE requirement before 2.009. The tl;dr is you design your own research project, and you also learn about the research process in MechE. I’m planning to design an experiment around blacksmithing.

2.671 is unique in that rather than having one pset due each week, it has 1-3 assignments due throughout the week. Often one assignment is a pre-lab, due the day of one’s lab section, and another is a post-lab, due a few days after a lab. Other assignments are sprinkled in on any given day. I find this quite stressful as it requires you to shift other work around 2.671 in different ways each week. There is a lot of material to cover, and this is a CI-M; but it seems convoluted and difficult for difficulty’s sake.

3. 2.679: Electronics for Mechanical Systems II

This class is a 6-unit follow-up to 2.678, a core class in MechE. I took it partially because I wanted to learn more about electronics, but mostly because I really enjoyed Prof Banzaert’s teaching style in 2.678. He’s down-to-earth and gives insightful lectures, which are easy to follow even for someone without much electronics experience. This class is mostly lab-based, which has proven to be quite fun given how many people I know in the class.

I’ve been taking classes with MechE for 2 years now, and it’s lovely to come into each classroom and see many faces I know.

this little man (who is also a fridge magnet) activates a magnetic sensor on the circuit board, which switches on the LED.

4. CMS.306: Making Comics and Sequential Art

I signed up for this class on a whim after looking through the entirety of the literature, writing, history, and CMS department course catalogs this December.⁠15 finals week, y'know? One of my close high school friends does a lot of art, and I’d been toying with the idea of writing a graphic novel ever since I read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. 

I currently draw stick figures and the language of comics is foreign to me, so I knew the best way to make myself begin was to take a class. I think that breaking down scenes into shot-by-shot and line-by-line scripts will help me create stronger scenes in graphic novels and prose. So much language can be carried by art, and what is ‘told’ versus ‘shown’ takes on new dimensions.  This class feels like a new perspective on old storytelling principles.

I find myself extremely intimidated by drawing, probably because it’s the first thing I consciously gave up due to carpal tunnel. I bought a sketchbook for the first time since eighth grade. Walking around the art store, seeing this language I’d set down a decade ago, made me incredibly sad. I want to overcome this and fit drawing back into my catalogue of skills. I’m just gonna see how long that takes, how much it hurts.

notes on converting Fahrenheit 451 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into comics, plus a self-portrait.

5. 21L.504: Race and Identity in American Literature

This class overlaps with 2.008 lecture, so shshshsh don’t tell them I am taking it!⁠16 for this reason I may also have to drop it one day :(

This year, 21L.504 is focused on race and identity in American comics. It’s a perfect tie-in to my graphic novel writing class, especially since I don’t have extensive experience in comics to begin with.

This class is also so fun because I love criticizing media. In middle school my big sister asked me to not talk about movies after we saw them because I always had something snarky to say. I have since toned down my inner hater… but sometimes I get to unleash it.

The professor makes sure to highlight the strengths of the works we read, as well as the limitations imposed on authors who publish with big companies like Marvel and DC. It feels like we’ve struck a good balance between studying comics and criticizing them too.

I’m learning the basics and historical origins of classic heroes, like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. I’ve been introduced to many new comics, too. Last week, we read several issues of Nubia and Yara Flor/Wondergirl, two characters who are new tellings of the Wonder Woman mythos.

Extracurriculars

UROP: GEAR Lab

For my UROP, I’m designing the hydraulics of a small scale tractor. It’s more or less in the global development space, which I want to learn more about in MIT and the world at large. The parts for the hydraulic circuit are full of oil.

Half-Marathon

A group of Beast residents are training for a half-marathon! I personally found one half-marathon to be rather exhausting, but peer pressure is an excellent motivator. Maybe I will train this time.

MIT Monologues

I’m writing and performing a new piece! It’s nerve-wracking the second time around, too, but fortunately I have an amazing editor and director to guide me.

Misc.

I am having a bit of a mid-life crisis about concentrating in design or energy, and I’m trying to learn more about both those spaces in industry. I’m trying to be more involved in clubs and to meet new people. I also have some PE requirements left, which feel a bit more pressing now that I am old.

I successfully went to a Berklee house concert. It was a metal concert in a basement and had the youngest, cleanest, and most chaotic mosh pit I have seen.

I found more geese

I’m tryna prioritize having a life over throwing myself into classes. As happens every semester, however, I’m excited by all these classes and what I will learn from them. Let’s see how it goes.

I’m taking WGS.245: Race, Place, and Modernity. It’s a class focused on Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Brazilian culture, with tons of readings, movies, and museum visits each week. The class takes place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, so we’re engaged night and day in the setting we’re learning about. I find myself swept up in the intensity, bouncing from adventure to deep discussion and back again. Here’s a taste of what I’ve done.

Sao Paulo is full of murals — we saw this one on the drive from the airport

I managed to pack just one suitcase this time,⁠17 when I went to Denmark, I foolishly brought three and I still filled it with books. This was somewhat easier because it’s summer in Brazil, so I brought mostly shorts and crop tops. I have not had time to open most of the books — I didn’t realize how much time I would invest in this class and the environment.

Each day, we uber to the Brazilian British Center (BBC), a building of white marble surrounded by a mossy moat. There we discuss the day’s readings until 12:30. The readings cover Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history, culture, forms of resistance and ways of life. There is also focus on Black women and queer narratives.

The class is 20 people, mostly seniors, who are quite knowledgeable about the topics we cover. This is probably the most high-level HASS class I have taken at MIT; our discussions are complex and sometimes intense. I love learning with this group of people, and sometimes feel that I glean as much from a classmate’s perspective on the readings as I did from the readings themselves.

After discussion is over, we have a long break for lunch. We usually split off into groups and explore the restaurants around the BBC. There are a wide variety of cuisines in every neighborhood of Sao Paulo; so far I’ve had Mexican, Thai, Indian, Peruvian, Americanized Italian, and of course many types of Brazilian food. All of the former were less spicy than their counterparts in America. As it turns out, Brazilian food has little spice.

muqueca de camarão [Brazilian]

Peruvian, ft plantains

tapioca!! [Brazilian]

the least spicy burrito I have ever eaten [and I live in Boston]

the best arepa I have ever consumed. Cost $5

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Next we head to a lecture or museum. The variety of museums in Brazil has proven to be truly amazing. Some of my favorites were:

•  the Afro-Brazilian Museum, which had pieces from so many time periods and places of the African diaspora. I found some beautiful ironwork from Benin, as well as modern iron sculptures.
  • Our guide, Raphaellie, was incredible. She brought us from interpretations of modern Brazilian artists to breaking down and re-structuring colonial narratives in traditional European art.

Ironwork from Benin. I love the bird centerpiece.

More ironwork from Benin -- all of the features and textures are chiseled

modern sculpture -- modern methods are used to make the spiral 2-D

modern sculpture with more modern elements

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• Instituto Moreira Salles, a photography museum with an exhibit on Indigenous videography. The videographers were Indigenous youth who were documenting their own communities with the approval and involvement of community elders.
• Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, a museum which celebrates activism and especially Black activists throughout Brazil’s history. I loved the display of small-press literary zines put together by collectives.

Posters, not magazines, also by collectives and other radical groups

We were also lucky enough to have a lecture and Q-and-A session with Juliana Borges, an activist who fights for prison abolition in Brazil. While Brazil’s mass incarceration differs in some ways from America — for example Brazil has fewer private prisons — the crux of the issue, ie: incarceration as a method for the state to control Black and brown bodies, is the same. I was especially interested in how Borges works both within the governmental system and in groups outside of it to pressure leaders and push for change. I’d recommend her essay “Black Women Under Fire.”

an orixá of the Candomblé religion

In the past two weeks, I’ve absorbed a lot, and I’m still processing. I’ve studied systems of oppression and resistance in my personal life and via MIT classes, namely through a class on the Latinx diaspora and another on race and the environment. I can feel that WGS.245 is pushing my learning further, and I’m grateful for that. 

After class, we return to the hotel. I usually either run or crash, depending on the hour. Sao Paulo is an unfamiliar city, and I avoid running after dark. 

The night is ours to burn. We usually have a movie and/or a few hours of reading due the next day, so I try to tackle that. My first week, when some friends were in town, I also went out nearly every night. Brazil has an active nightlife, and we’ve romped through a wide variety of venues. By far my favorite trip (though not my favorite location) was when a Brazilian friend of mine asked our Uber driver for recs. Our driver suggested a venue, called his friend for more ideas, and then showed us pictures of his partner, daughter, and dogs. The dogs were corgis.

street market in Liberdade neighborhood

We travel everywhere by Uber, since it’s faster and cheaper than the rail system. Drivers in Sao Paulo are in my opinion incredible: it’s a hilly city, and everyone drives stick. The cars are close-packed and tiny, and drivers maneuver into spaces that I would never dare to wriggle into. Traffic lanes are more of a suggestion — once when the highway was empty enough, my driver couldn’t decide which lane to join, so he drove right down the dashed white line between them. Red lights are generally obeyed, but with more leeway than in the US, which I’ve had to be aware of each time I cross a street. My international friend finds all of this entirely normal, but it took me a few days to relax when I get into the front seat. 

another mural

When last weekend came around, we went to Rio de Janeiro as a class to visit a few museums and sites. We also stopped by the beach at night — the water was so warm — and wandered through the city. I love the nature all around, the small mountains and patches of jungle.

Before we went back, I ran down the beach, splashing in the water, dodging around couples, groups of friends playing football, and children and their parents. Tourists and locals covered every square foot of beach. I saw the mountainside where there used to be a waterfall, considered the environmental impact of swarms of tourists, as well as the impact of emissions from Brazil and the global north alike. Even so, I was happy to see so many people enjoying the ocean.

Copacabana beach, Rio, just after sunset

I can’t wait for the next two weeks⁠18 quite fun, so much that I didn't get back to this blog until right now. of Brazil.

I had some daring plans to go hiking every other day, but I wound up getting sick and having family obligations, so I had three major hikes to speak of, plus one noteworthy run:

river path

10 mile run

The first day I got back, stiff from the plane, I hit the river path outside my house. The river in Tucson is dry, always has been, but it goes on for miles with no interruptions. The path is secluded from the road with its rush of cars. I’d forgotten how quiet the desert is. 

I was just off the plane, and was still recovering sleep. I had music blasting. I imagine my head contained a lot of static.

If this were a lifestyle blog I would note that I was wearing spandex with pockets (!!) from Big 5 Sporting Goods and also no sunscreen.

'there is no water' I say and then post mainly photos of water

this was the river after a rain

river path; if you look closely you can see three coyotes

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Catalina State Park (ft my mother)

I believe this was a Christmas Eve hike. We’re Jewish, so Christmas for me typically means Chinese takeout and trying to go out but realizing everything is closed and all my friends are busy. My mom and I predicted the ‘everything is closed’ part and instead drove up to Cataline State Park, about forty minutes⁠20 one of the biggest changes in coming to Boston is how distant the city is from nature. In Tucson, no matter where you live, you are at most an hour from mountains. from our house. 

However, everyone else also predicted shops being closed and drove up to hike as well. We found a spot in the parking lot and wove through a mass of children gathered around glass cases on foldable tables. What were they looking at? We got closer. The glass cases held reptiles: snakes, small lizards, tarantulas, and even a gila monster.⁠21 a big venomous lizard. The G is pronounced like an H

I absolutely love reptiles. In the desert they are ubiquitous; freezes are unpleasant for them but never long enough to wipe them out. When I run or bike in summers, there are lizards sunning themselves up and down the asphalt path. I’ve nearly run over rattlesnakes more times than I can count, their scaly bodies indistinguishable, at a distance, from long fallen sticks.

Sonoran gophersnake (not venomous). he wanted to go somewhere

Sonoran Desert Toad. I am a little worried he had too much sun. But the people taking care of him seem responsible

Black-tailed rattlesnake (venomous; notice his cheeks are thick)

Gila Monster!

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After that we started hiking. The trail wound upward. I asked my mom about her work, her projects; every time I return she has new names to tell me, people she met and their projects. She works in web3 space. I told her how I was exhausted from taking seven classes, but was nevertheless much happier and more grounded than I had been a year ago. How I’d found myself again — in the starlit streets of Copenhagen, in the heat of the forge, in coffee shops scattered from Denmark to Arizona. I was good. 

I was also sick — I’d picked up something from the plane — and I could feel the urge to push through, keep hiking. I called for a stop about an hour in. We sat on the rocks and watched hikers pass by. A lot of them were parent and child pairs, too, talking about college or early careers. I drank water greedily; we’d brought more than enough. 

“Okay, let’s keep going,” I said. I had started drafting a blog about self-care that same week. It occurred to me that I could go another hour, but I’d prolong being sick by at least a day. Finally I got myself to say, “Actually! Let’s go back.”

Then I slept for all of Christmas day and felt mostly better.

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Sabino Canyon (ft Maddie ’23)

I joined forces with a friend from high school, Madeleine, who now goes to Smith. We drove out to Sabino Canyon, a popular paved hiking trail and one of the most likely ones around Tucson to contain water. There had been winter rains, and the water was high, pouring over several bridges. A tram which runs into the canyon couldn’t follow its usual circuit. Maddie and I got on the tram for a new and unusual circuit onto an overlook, and from there we took off and started hiking, vaguely following the river.

We caught up on one another’s adventures as we forded the icy river and hiked into the canyon.

I was struck by how many ups and downs she’s had; more recently, a lot of ups. She has a lovely repertoire of wild nights and stories to tell.

I have been thinking about this a lot. My little sister went to a school that caps students at 4 classes for all eight semesters. Several of her stories began with “So it was Tuesday, and I was bored.” Tuesday was my all-nighter day.⁠22 though I guess, properly speaking, the all-nighter portion took place on Wednesday

I don’t regret taking all the classes that I have, since I learned a lot, and I couldn’t double major with 4 classes each semester. It also seems to me that growth is partly a factor of experience, but partly a factor of time. Making the same chaotic choices several times in quick succession doesn’t necessarily guarantee learning more than you would from making that choice once. 

I have experimented and grown during my time at MIT, and I like where I’m at. Even so, I want to experience more. I feel ready. I’m hopeful that pruning down my number of classes for the spring will give me more space to be wild and foolish.

The river in Sabino Canyon was fast and cold and deep. We held our shoes and phones up high as we waded through, the water nibbling our stomachs and the small of our backs. But the sun, even in winter, is strong in Arizona. By the time we reached the parking lot, our clothes were dry.

so much water!

cholla cactus

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Finger Rock Trail (ft my big sister)

I ran up this trail once, years ago. It was faintly surreal: the trail itself faded from well-defined path to a series of cairns in untamed desert. Every now and then a white-haired man in sandals would appear on his way down from the peak and warn me it was difficult, and that I should turn back. I heeded none of these warnings. Eventually I reached the top, or near enough to it; climbing the finger itself requires ropes I didn’t have. 

This time, I was with my oldest sister,⁠23 for anyone who’s keeping track, I am #3 of 4 sisters her boyfriend, and their chihuahua mix, Taquito. Her boyfriend forges swords and leaves them in rocks. He told me how he started out by forging 100 nails. I found this rather cool since I have forged exactly 3 nails and thoroughly disliked the process. I also kept burning them in the forge so at the end I had 1 un-melted nail.

My sister and I talked about friendships and relationships. I liked hearing her vocabulary of needs and boundaries; it felt grounding. We swapped stories and little dramas, discussed our patterns of how we interact with people. My sister gives good advice. I want to be able to articulate people’s needs the way she does; I think I’m close, but I have more books to read. 

After the hike, her boyfriend took Taquito and my sister and I went to Trader Joe’s. We grabbed food and munched it in the parking lot. The mountains before us were purple and grey.

my sister took pictures of the hike but here is Taquito :D

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After these hikes, I have decided to read The Ethical Slut, to spend more time with people, and also to destroy my body less. I’m hoping that my friends and I make more time to get out to the mountains this spring!

I found a truck with goat horns!

bathroom of Black Crown Coffee, the only coffee shop in Tucson open til midnight

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I learned some valuable life skills in Denmark, from how to turn on an induction stove to how to balance on a bicycle in unfavorable conditions, such as after a grocery shopping trip, a concert, or a Friday. One of the other skills I practiced was self-care.

I learned to let myself rest when I was sick, let myself heal when I was injured, and to sleep after I ran myself and select members of the engineering department into the ground. I was going to write a blog about this, but then I took seven classes, got sick for a month, and pulled too many all-nighters to string together enough coherent sentences for much blogging. 

Now it’s December, and I’m writing this at a healthy 11pm in my favorite late-night coffee shop. I’ve clearly learned these skills in a lasting and deep manner.⁠24 now it’s January, and I’m finishing up this blog in the best Mexican restaurant in my area of Sao Paulo

In Denmark, my work was clear that when you’re sick, you stay home. It was summer, a slow period in countries where people get sizable vacations and take them. My absence wouldn’t hurt production.

So, when in June I woke up feeling not my best, I drank hot coffee and biked to work. I shouldn’t have, but I wasn’t coughing or sneezing, so I told myself it was fine. Luckily, no one else got sick. However, ignoring illness and still exerting myself did not make anything better, and the next day I woke up with an intense fever.

I crawled to my laptop, mentioned in the Teams chat that I was sick, and passed out on my futon.

Growing up, I was used to dealing with injuries and illnesses the way you deal with bullies: ignore them, and perhaps they’ll go away.

Maybe this comes from being called ‘tough’ as a kid. I didn’t often cry when I fell. 

Maybe it comes from having busy parents and a lot of siblings. They taught us to bandage our cuts but 

My family doesn’t go to doctors too often. When I was seven, I broke my arm at school, and we didn’t go to the emergency room until nightfall. When I was twelve, I had an infection that swelled for two days before we got it treated. I remember taking intravenous antibiotics. I may have been old enough that the doctors stopped calling me brave.

In Denmark, I spent my sick day alternately sleeping and reading Neil Gaiman, with a brief excursion into the outside world to breathe fresh air. I took another day off that week, too, and felt good by the weekend.

This was fortunate, since I was visiting MG in Berlin that weekend. 

I wonder if I would have taken time off if I weren’t about to board a plane and see my friend. The time crunch told me I couldn’t do anything that would prolong a cold. Sleeping a lot and drinking hot tea was the responsible course of action.

Of course, recovering before you re-enter society is always the responsible route, but I struggle to grasp that too much of the time.

It’s funny. I have carpal tunnel, and compartmentalize pain every waking hour. Maybe that’s part of why flesh wounds don’t affect me. I know that they’ll heal. When pain is temporary, it is only physical.

Anyway I don’t mind scars.

entrance to outdoor market in Denmark

Most days in Denmark I was up for anything. Swimming after work in the icy northern ocean? Yeah, let’s go. Go clubbing with co-workers in shifty bars where old men hand me free drinks? Of course.⁠25 one of the interns seemed shocked that I kept getting harassed Metal festival? Metal festival. It was easy to keep up when my co-workers were adults with work-life balance.

The only time I slowed down was after I got a new tattoo. I read some articles on tattoo care, and the tl;dr was not to get too much sunlight or seawater on one. Normally I’d take that liberally, but for once I was conservative. The tattoo in question was a goat skull with desert flowers on my calf. I cut up a sock to cover it from the sun when I went running, every day for a week.

I skipped ‘swim in the ocean day’ the day the tattoo got done, and afterwards I went home early from a party, too. The FOMO was real — everyone went to a salsa club which I never wound up visiting — but my tattoo is, to this day, not stretched from healing over a tense muscle. 

Feeling myself take care of the tattoo was interesting. I knew tattoos are permanent, so whatever decisions I made for a week or so in Copenhagen would have long repercussions. I wasn’t doing much, just applying lotion twice a day and covering it from sun, but the internal commitment to care was new to me.

Cut to this semester. I protect my hands but I wring the rest of my body through the grinder on the regular. Let’s skip the late nights — I didn’t manage to rest enough when I got sick, and I felt weak for much of October. Then I got this cool burn!

[BE WARNED it is a little gory! Here there be dragons]

this dragon. he is guilty.

I was forge welding a dragon head. When forge welding, you heat up iron more than you usually would: not the 1000-1500 degrees C of red-hot metal, but ~2400 degrees of white-hot. I pulled it out sparkling aggressively. I’d left it in for a bit too long — the sparks should be more mild — but I thought nothing of this and hit the sparking, white-hot metal with the hammer.

When metal is heated, it releases slag. Usually the slag is small and flaky and stays on the anvil. With this piece, however, a dime-sized piece of slag flew from the metal and into my boot, where it burned through the sock and sizzled on my skin.

I gasped, set down the hammer, and used the hot metal to brace myself on the anvil as I took off my boot and sock.

Yep, I thought, that sure did burn through the skin. It wasn’t bleeding, so I stuffed my foot back in my boot and turned back to the workpiece, which had gone from white hot to yellowish-orange, still hot enough to work. I picked up the hammer and smashed it several times before I added flux and stuck it back in the fire.

Then I took the workpiece out again, hammered it down, added flux, and stuck it back in. Twice more, to make sure the forge weld was solid.

Then I set the dragon on my anvil and limped over to the first aid kit. I wanted a band-aid. There weren’t any band-aids, so I closed this big case of burn cream and limped back to my workstation.

I picked up the dragon head. The snout was too narrow to split into an open mouth, so I took it over to another smith to ask for advice. I hoped he hadn’t seen my taking-off-my-boot shenanigans. I thought it was kind of silly.

look at him. how smug. his horns were thick and powerful but now after losing mass due to oxidation they are thin and scraggly.

I found a band-aid in my room later that day and felt incredibly responsible. My burn was about the size of a dime. It was white, which I assumed was the layer of fat that lies between skin and muscle. That would make this a second degree burn.

It was two weeks from my last final, which meant I had a lot of essays due, and then a lot of finals to study for, all in quick succession. I considered going to MIT Medical, but the last time I did that I was there for three hours. Besides, I knew how to deal with injuries. You put neosporin and band-aids on, and then ignore them and hope they go away.

posting pictures of my cool burn is apparently a bad idea so here is the desert

This burn, however, did not go away. It stayed there, an open wound. 

I changed the bandage religiously after each shower, hoping that the next time I removed it, it would be smaller. No such luck. It stayed, white and liquid.

Sometimes I exposed it to the open air, and it closed over, but only while it was in the open. Slap on a band-aid, and whatever scab had begun to form vanished, leaving the wound gaping.

I didn’t see a doctor until break. They told me that I’d been caring for it the wrong way: the white stuff I thought was fat was in fact dead cells that prevented the wound from properly healing. When the doctor scraped the dead cells away, I saw muscle the color of uncooked steak and realized I in fact had a third degree burn.

That is one degree more exciting! A cool story to tell. A big gory scar, if the thing ever heals.

But it has to heal first. Since that doctor’s visit I’ve been intentional with care. I still run, but I’ve been checking on the burn’s healing progress instead of ignoring it. 

Running myself into the ground goes with the territory; it’s what got me to where I am, and it’s what allows me to produce art despite the rush of work and school. I wouldn’t trade that work ethic. Nonetheless, I think this was a wake-up call to me to drop some responsibilities and be more in tune with my body. 

Looking down the tunnel of three more semesters of MIT that are as full and sleepless as the three in-person ones I’ve had fills me with exhaustion. I never expected this to happen, but I want to try to carve out balance in the semesters as well as summers and IAP. I want to sleep more, set aside time to run and lift, and let myself be well.

I think when this third-degree burn heals, I will put a tattoo around it. I’m not sure what it will be. And when I do, I’ll protect that tattoo from the sun.

Update: once I started taking care of it, the burn healed in about three weeks. The scar is disappointingly not that gory any more.