I find myself in a mode where lots of thoughts are bottled up inside my brain and I've cut off (voluntarily - I said I would, email and IRC.  But in the meantime, I can still think and write here.

My heart feels like it's going to come bursting through my chest right now. Couple reasons for this:

  1. I drank a fair amount of caffeine today, which I'm pretty sensitive to, which lasts a long time in my system, and which (among other things) makes my heart beat fast and loudly - and then I kept forgetting that and running (because I'm hyper and I'm happy) until - "what's that loud LUB-DUP-LUB-DUP noise and... OH! Um, walking!"
  2. I love Olin. Like, love Olin. Love the people there. Love the community. The vision and the fight. And it hurts to be torn and it hurts to care, because stuff is broken - but that hurt and that pain and the staying despite that is also what drives us to do things, to make things happen.
  3. I am so proud of my underclassmen right now. They have surpassed me.

Backing up a bit. Rewind to the beginning of the day for a quick recap:

Crashed hard and got nearly 7h of sleep this morning. Might have something to do with not sleeping for about 2 weeks - it was sometime around midnight when I was sitting on the sofa with my laptop open and my eyes (mostly) closed mumbling something about how I was perfectly fine that I abruptly realized that I was being an idiot and was, in fact, exhausted. "Fine, fine, I'm going to sleep after I finish this email, stop looking at me so skeptically, I just... email almost... done... finishing... I'm going to bed soon, really..."

Sleep, wake up, play Beethoven on the piano.

Sebastian and I read "Oh The Places You'll Go!" to Lynne May's (extremely excited) 1st grade class. We were visiting, it was reading time, it was the only Dr. Seuss book I had (my favorite, actually) and he'd never heard of Dr. Seuss before, so that was fun. They told us their Sugar names (their nicks for participation in the Sugar community - we've got everyone from "L" to "Ron Weasley" to "Amethyst"), we fielded questions... the funniest part was in the beginning, when we slipped quietly into the back of the classroom while all the kids were playing with Legos. They kept furtively looking up at us and then continuing to build things - and then finally one kid came up and poked us and announced that we were, in fact, real. (Good to know.)

Simon's coffeeshop on Mass Ave: cappuccino (aforementioned caffeine) and Mexican hot chocolate (I had to keep being reminded to stop working and drink it) and grad school apps (which I have promised I will finish before I try packaging a few Sugar activities) and the SLOBs meeting and as much work email as I could stay on top of, which was not much. And I think "oh boy, I'm going to have a lot to do early on Sunday morning to catch up on things I should have done today." But that's cool - it feels like the right rhythm for right now. Worked there 'till Greg came, worked some more, ran out exactly as the parking meter expired. Sweet.

Hit Cabots and Blue Ribbon on the way to Olin, getting a Pru Frappe at the first and a bunch of BBQ sandwiches at the second. For those unfamiliar with a Pru, it's a shake with 12 scoops of ice cream, and when purchased to-go, comes in a bucket. The reaction of the guys was priceless. So we sat in my car in the Olin parking lot eating BBQ and slurping "death by chocolate" from a bucket. (Some things are priceless; for everything else, there's 24-hours-of-Le-Noms.)

Meeting with Joanne Kossuth and David Carver, which was off to a slow start but ended up being pretty cool (as hoped) and now we've basically got a blessing and are setting a date to check in and get feedback on any alumni-created collaboration infrastructure we can cook up. We chip in the resources and time and set it up so we can do it any way we want - but then they'll take a look and tell us what we're doing wrong and what we're doing right and figure out what points of Olin's IT Infrastructure, if any, can overlap with what we've made.

We need alumni help on this... right now I'm tired enough that I can't even write a coherent call-to-action and put it in more useful places, but if you're interested, please comment or email me or otherwise start spamming me with questions, because that's what's going to draw those notes and thoughts out of my brain and into the world where we can all work on them. That was a relatively smallish portion of the meeting, though. Mostly it was Greg rockin' the house (by doing a lot of listening) and Sebastian and myself watching and learning.

At this point I said goodbye to the guys and proceeded to spend the remainder of the evening in Alumni Mode.

  • Talked with Leslie Gerhat about her gap year teaching inner city math, and how hard it is to learn how to think the way some kids think so you can teach them - but that's also how hard it is for them to learn the way we think - and also about the Grand Challenge Scholars program and how it's tough to find out much about it and how it needs to be even more transparent, more more more transparent. That was pretty awesome.
  • Got my Susan hug. Always gotta have a Susan hug when I visit Olin.
  • Watched Nikki Lee utterly kick ass. Because that's just what she does.
  • Multiple conversations with Jeffrey Atkinson. Good ones, too. Yay Jeffrey! He's the student making GCSP externally participatable-in right now. I'm trying to back him up as much as possible.
  • Acquisition of new Olin swag - my car now has a rear window decal, I have a t-shirt and a sweater... I used to have all these things but I wore all my Olin shirts and my Olin hoodie to (literal) rags, and my car was totalled right before I graduated, so now I am once again properly equipped.
  • Extended convo with Christine Kelly about Olin and Life. I love Christine; she cares so much - she's like the heart of Olin - and every time I talk with her, she helps me grow up a little bit.
  • Watched Matt, Chester, and Ben rock the Entrepreneurship room, followed by listening to Tank and the OCO play Mozart and Handel and I think Beethoven (lovely!) and then more conversations (Colin!) and then the FWOP play (Blood Brothers - excellent).
  • Me + 5 Olin students pile into my car for the (500-feet) drive back to Olin, whereupon I spend the remainder of the evening in Man Hall at "Ye Olde Storytyme" (listening to upperclassmen tell freshmen about Olin's old days, and occasionally chiming in with details myself - it was a deliberate spontaneous oral-history-passing-down gathering) and then talking with Jeffrey and Nikki (and Zach, who passed by in the end) about... hm. The shortest way to summarize it would be "change."

Saw a lot more people, too - did a lot more things - not writing down right now because I finally do feel like passing out. So much thinking spinning in brain right now but also so very, very tired. Must sleep for a few hours, then get up tomorrow and... and then see what I do from there, I suppose.

*thonk*