Wake up at 11, 11:16, no alarm. Apparently, my brain is ready for the day, which is interesting considering the Catan game ended at 2:45 this morning. Is eight hours still eight hours translated so outrageously? Not sure. I don’t think too much about sleep these days—it is one of the pleasures of this current semester in which all my classes start, uncoincidentally, after noon. Today I have math section at 1:30, which will nearly give me enough time to get ready and eat.
Breakfast at Nolan’s on 33rd. Unfortunately, it has not been breakfast time at Nolan’s for a few hours, so I eat pasta stir-fried with chicken and garlic and other little things. Of course this is not actually a problem: I haven’t been to breakfast in so long, my tastebuds hardly recognize the garlicky pasta as being offensive to the tradition of the Eggo.
Tl;dr: tasty
Next is the hike to math section up at Bloomberg (the physics center). Today we have a sub. He is friendly, he knows his stuff, and it is Friday. My friends and I get ahead on the homework, and find that the solution to a problem involves a function that decreases like 1/x^2, but spikes up periodically. It looks like it would be a very dangerous object if it were to pop off the graph. It would be infinitely long and tall, but it would also have finite mass and be wieldy! Is what me and my friends learned in section.
After section crunch time begins: I need to finish one essay and write another for the Hopkins Insider blog! Actually, I enjoy this work, but the second essay is about the history of Hopkins student centers and by 7 p.m. I am only up to 1980. The kicker is that at 7:30 p.m., the Sophomore Garden Party begins. Not only was registration three dollars, I told my girlfriend I’d go—putting six dollars on the line–I’m kidding!!
Hopefully my boss doesn’t work weekends. Walking back to the dorm, I catch the red fox scurrying across the marble behind Gilman Hall. Last time he was in the bushes near Wolman Hall. People moan that he’s an orphan since he’s always alone. Google says red foxes are just solitary, but among the hyper-optimized landscape of Homewood—seriously, look at the geometry around Gilman, or that stone flower bed on the way to Olin; it feels like late-game Sims—he does look wayward. I understand. We are all, to an extent, trying to figure out exactly how this wacky place works.
The Sophomore Garden Party is in the Baltimore Museum of Art on the south edge of campus, in the museum restaurant (adjacent to the museum’s Statue Garden). The restaurant’s colors are those of a movie theatre lobby, in a classy, upscale way. I eat some wings, no sauce but for some reason they’re delicious. Then my friend, a Washingtonian, asks “What do you think of the Old Bay wings?”
I tell him they’re everything. People flit around and take pictures and a few dance. My girlfriend and I are offered a choice of Pepsi or a pinkish drink with a sprig of mint in it. We both choose the second, it’s too sweet, and then we debrief and learn that we were independently seduced by the luxury of a two-component beverage. Who knows what it means to be a sophomore? Even at our definitive event, the Garden Party, the answer is inscrutable. The revelation of the night is the Old Bay wings.
