happiness

happiness I wrote this email two nights ago, a little after midnight: woke up ~ 5 am today. it was early and the sun had not risen. i contemplated going back to sleep and worked on my urop instead. then i took a shower, got an early lunch, and took the 11am bus to wellesley. i caught up on my email and read some articles and flipped through the first chapter of the python natural language processing textbook. then i hung out with toons, ate dinner with toons, sang a concert with toons, and ate ice cream with toons. it was a rare occasion where i didnt feel drained by social interaction. today i feel like my life is worthwhile; like im doing good work that i can be proud of, and like im contributing a positive thing to peoples lives. this is a good feeling and id like it to stick around. another ending begins. people shifting, people leaving, commemorating nostalgia. i saw a tumblr quote today: if you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph The concert we sang was a farewell concert for our graduating seniors. Last night we celebrated a good friends twenty-first birthday. Today Im reading danah boyds reflection on John Perry Barlows 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. I am also thinking about this weeks topic in CMS.701, echo chambers and filter bubbles. Wikipedia says: A filter bubble is a result of a personalized search in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user (such as location, past click behavior and search history) and, as a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. Wikipedia took me to the article on collaborative filtering, a term used to describe a class of recommender systems (think: people similar to you also liked these movies). There, I learned about gray sheep: Gray sheep refers to the users whose opinions do not consistently agree or disagree with any group of people and thus do not benefit from collaborative filtering. Black sheep are the opposite group whose idiosyncratic tastes make recommendations nearly impossible. Although this is a failure of the recommender system, non-electronic recommenders also have great problems in these cases, so black sheep is an acceptable failure. Now I am reading Natashas post on spring and resilience: A spring can be pressed or pulled but returns to its former shape when released. I do not want to return to my former shape. I have changed in the past four years, mostly for the better, and Im a little afraid to leave. I know I wont un-grow but Im still apprehensive about leaving this place that has changed me so much. Im not attached to the place, but Im attached to the people, and the intellectual energy, and the endless spring of opportunity. There is also something about being in school, where all your work is on your own becoming, that I think Ill miss. I am resolved to enjoy it as much as I can this last month. I am so grateful for all of this. Id like to think MIT makes us into gray sheep (or at least somewhat grayer sheep). For sure it changes us in complicated and difficult-to-explain ways. During CPW, many visiting prefrosh asked me questions about what I liked and disliked about MIT; what majors and opportunities are offered; what I would have done differently; whether I think I made the right choice to come here. I, like many of my friends, struggled to distill our experiences into helpful words of wisdom. Now those friends, newly gray, are turning twenty-one, they are graduating, they are singing their last songs with us. I have a strange nostalgia for the future. It is impossible to explain. Happiness The weather has been fluctuating lately as has my mood. There are some days I literally bounce out of bed and others where I wish a thousand times that I could sleep just a little bit longer. Sad. Thrilled. Discouraged. Grateful. Angry. Glad. These are all words that at some point or another these past few weeks (and for that matter, during my entire life, haha) could have been used to describe me. Thanks to one of my friends, Christina 10 an MIT alum and a fellow Camp Kesem (more on Camp Kesem in an entry coming soon!) counselor Ive had a chance to spend a little more time on the positive side of the emotional spectrum. She recently created a website called Project Happy Memory, which you can check out here. It gives people all over the world a chance to submit stories about happy moments theyve experienced in their life. There arent that many posts at the moment, since the website was launched just two days ago. But Christina told me today that there are thousands of views which I fully believe since I myself have visited the site quite a few times =P I wanted to share this site with you for a few reasons: (1) Christina said I could! Yayy. (2) I know many of you are at the point in your school year where the amount of work seems unending and the end of the semester always appears just a little too far away. Spare a few moments, check out Project Happy Memory, get your good spirit and energy back, take a deep breath then plunge back into your work. Its worked well so far for me :) and, lastly (3) I feel like Christinas site is a pretty good representation of how MIT works: people here come up with ideas, they implement them, and they share them with others. They ask for thoughts, advice, suggestions, and help. They realize that they cant do things alone, that they need to rely on others, and that optimism, while hard to maintain at times, is the one thing that absolutely must be preserved. There are soo many things that make me happy right now: friends, family, lab, etc. I havent had the time to write anything up for the Project Happy Memory site but I will soon. And you should too :) Enjoy the site! p.s. Heres the link to the Twitter for Project Happy Memory.