Brouhaha Rhythm
Blood Has Viscosity Greater Than One
Family Weekend — when hundreds of parents and family members converge to see how a detached arm and leg look when planted and watered for up to three and a half years. As far as my father’s visit to campus is concerned, my giddiness regarding my plans to show him as much on-campus awesomeness as I can find shows no sign of diminishing.
The event schedule for the weekend feels a lot like a more mainstream, mini-version of CPW, where all of the neat things we told our parents that we did over CPW are discredited and verbally depicted as having taken place in a perfectly safe and socially acceptable setting. Tee-hee. (To Mom and Dad: I’m totally kidding. Really.)
In spite of all the free food (in keeping with the “mini-CPW” comparison), I do feel like it would be only fair to take my father out at least once or twice to try and show him where the best fooderies can be found near campus.
Of course, since I have no incoming cash flow, Dad is technically paying, but I’m sure that opportunities to sell my body to science should make themselves known soon enough. The first point of order after my dad got here was to take him out for clam chowder, since having me constantly talk about it doesn’t really make sipping canned Campbell’s any easier for him.
So far, he’s taken the Pepsi challenge with no fewer than three different sources of New England clam chowder. (Props to Café Four, by the way, for bringing back their Friday clam chowder, which kept pace with professional seafood restaurant-quality soup at half the price. And no, I swear, this isn’t a tasteless bid for free chowder. Really.)
In addition to how I keep my perpetually-underweight frame from withering away, there are any of a number of campus idiosyncrasies my Dad needs to see. If you’ve done any of a number of things in recent memory, such as reading my column, visiting the MIT website, or stepping on campus and looking around, you know what I’m talking about.
Chances are high that I’ll have taken Dad to see an improv comedy show and/or an LSC movie, if only for the sake of gauging his reaction to my private hunt for cue dots. Worst-case scenario, he looks at me like I’m crazy and wonders who on earth I’ve been hanging out with … which would actually be about par for the course, now that I think about it.
He’s already heard the chirping intersections, seen the bubble machine, and been dragged to the Friday game lab. I’d take him to see the ballpit, but I don’t live at Simmons anymore, and even if I did, I feel that my using it only to show visitors how weird MIT is would be something of an illegitimate claim to idiosyncrasy. Sort of like only taking out the super-nice silverware for party guests and expecting them to assume that it represents your default level of sophistication.
Well, I hope everyone had a nice, easygoing weekend with minimal crises of frantic room-cleaning and enough time to finish all required assignments on top of spending quality time with one’s family.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a very busy week ahead of me, and if I’m going to keep my procrastination-to-work ratio above my quota, I’ve got to hit the YouTube videos running.