So, here’s the new plan: I’m going to write about my favorite parts of CPW, one day at a time. Then at the end, I’ll incorporate some of the other stories I have. If we’re lucky, these will be small enough chunks that I will actually write some, and large enough that I can start to get through the backlog of stuff.

So, Day I is Thursday, but I’m going to include through when I went to sleep, which was around 5:00 or 5:30 AM.

Flights were uneventful, although lunch in La Guardia sucked. I payed like $10 for a wrap, and after like 10 or 12 minutes (and only with prompting), the woman at the counter tells me they don’t have the one I ordered. So I change, and another 10 or 12 minutes later, they give me my food. Except it’s not what I changed to. I scurry back through security and over to a seat at the gate to inhale my sandwich and potato chips.

I was a little confused at Logan Airport (which is Boston, if you didn’t know), because I didn’t realize that a bus ride was required to go from Terminal B (where my flight came in) to Terminal E (where the bus to MIT was). Luckily I caught on, and showed up at campus…

…only to find out that I wasn’t in the computer as attending. Turns out that some of the early submissions to the CPW registration form weren’t logged in the computer. And I submitted pretty early.

However, there were a bunch more hosts than there were prefrosh, so there were hosts on standby. I got matched up with a Course VIer in Next House, Kevin Wang, who was apparently one of the original MIT Bloggers.

For a quick deviation on Next House (I’m going to do one dorm deviation per day, based on when I got an actual tour of the dorms in question)…

Next House was not a bad place. The dorms were nice, the views were good. However, Next House is a really, really long way away from the main part of campus. In fact, I checked a map, and I’m pretty sure that Next House is as far as housing gets from the Infinite Corridor without crossing the Charles River.

My other issue with Next was that it was kind of quiet. There were lots of little study/hang-out lounge-type areas, but I almost never saw anyone out there. Generally if I saw people they were just tooling on their own in their room. Which is probably what I’ll do most of the time anyway, but I think I’d rather have a dorm that at least tries to push me outside of that.

I should note that Kevin was very helpful and not at all quiet, and many people in the dorm may not be. The truth of the matter is that I tended to pick bad times to show up (like either noon or 5:00 in the morning). However, distance does not change with time (which is probably fortunate).

After dropping off my stuff and doing some brief planning, I headed out to Random Hall for lasagna. I ate lasagna and talked to MegaHAL for a little while before heading to the Green Building.

Because, let’s face it, what’s cooler than a stolen cannon reappearing on the other side of the country?

Then I scurried down to the welcoming ceremony. Many people gave speeches and a few even sang. After an attempted icebreaker activity which really failed entirely, we were led off to the CPW Festival, where there was lots of free food and a few free t-shirts.

Around the time of the ceremony, I met up with Anneke, an NJCL friend from Boston, and her friend, Lauren. One of the things we did was a Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game sponsored by Model UN. It was very basic geography. By sheer luck (and good timing with a buzzer—they were playing Jeopardy! style, where you can’t buzz in until the end of the question), I managed to make it to the finals, where I had to point at the countries the host named with a laser pointer. Of course, crossing the border of the country counted as “pointing,” so I just pointed at the continent and waved. I managed to get enough to go for the price stash, so I now have a DVD of X2. After having our share of chocolate, bubble tea, and liquid nitrogen ice cream, we headed for some frat parties, which I honestly thought were rather boring, mostly because I don’t dance (I’m white, male, and Jewish—three strikes) and don’t play pool.

Around midnight, I headed back for the Student Center, where ESP was sponsoring a series of interesting/amusing lectures. My favorites were the ones on black holes (the 7 ways black holes can kill you) and zombology.

After the zombie lecture, I couldn’t bring myself to stay up any longer, so I staggered (not really) back to Next and went to sleep.

And now for your other story:

During Spring Break, Mom took my car to the mechanic to get the oil changed. The plan was for her to drop me at class (because, let’s face it, Vandy classes are like a juggernaut: you just can’t stop them). However, the shop called back and said it was ready, so Mom, in all her wisdom, decided that we were going to go retrieve the car now. Never mind that class started in 15 minutes. I could afford to be late, after all.

So I get the car and speed (not in the literal sense) back to Vandy, where I nab the first parking spot I can find. I then go to class. Without putting money in the meter.

There was a $20 ticket waiting for me when I got back. Mom was kind of ticked, but she called Vandy Parking, and the excused it. So there’s your story about how I didn’t have to pay Vandy any money.

And one last brief piece of quizbowl news: Jae, Peter, Dallas, Will, and I are all committed to going to Chicago for the NAQT National Tournament, which will be awesome. So not only will we have a full team, but we’ll have our usual full team too. Which means we’ll have a chance.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 7:54 pm and is filed under High School, College Admissions, Quizbowl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.