good morning

waffling a bit on the plan because this is a pretty big drop in sleep

I could do this and feel a bit of sunk cost fallacy to do so, but I think I would be happier taking some time to sleep

yeah that's what I'm going to do

it's what I did back in college anyway lol

I convinced myself to make a run at it

I just realized that I forgot my comb

I'll have to make do with my hands, I guess

ok I'm sure I'd get more out with a comb but at the least it's much better than it has been for the past few days where I had let it linger

it falls down for starters

trying to decide if I should take the time to put makeup on since I have about 30 minutes

tbh I think I need some time to emotionally get ready more

there's like a dinner tomorrow that I'll definitely get more dolled up for

I'm torn between higher chance of gender recognition and grumpy feminist "makeup is a tool of the patriarchy"

I think I feel more driven to do it more because I've noticed how much more often cis women have on makeup in situations where I felt it was casual or hardy enough to go without

but also because I want to get better at more subtle daily makeup

I'll eat a bit and then head over

actually ran into someone else living in Seattle who was a few years above me

much more successful than me lol

I can either go to an architectural tour or more undergrad led tour and one is a lot closer than the other...

I'll probably do the other tomorrow

either way I got like 20 minutes to kill and drink coffee

very fun morning at the reunion, I ran into some people I knew and they let me know about a lunch with members of our house and it was great to talk

they don't let the kids do more than half the stuff we got away with, but they still doing a lot of it and even more, so I'm very proud of them

nothing in the afternoon interested me so I wandered back to the hotel to possibly take a nap decompress from social

also had very interesting conversation with a black alum from the 70s who is definitely different from my feelings but then I think it's very important to understand that a lot of my problems may have aspects of racism that impact me but I also tend not to do myself favors

like this is the thing about how racism operates I think. while there's definitely shit made up whole cloth, most bigots are smart enough to operate with plausible deniability

it's also very amazing and sad to hear how scared the school is for the students forming Palestine encampments

I thought they were a bunch of people with sticks up their asses back in the aughts and it seems that stick may be even further up

but the kids seem all right :3

ow I just realized how sore I am from walking 😔

back at it for a dinner and an astrophysics scientist gave a lecture on his work finding extraplanetary oceans. fascinating stuff

he was discussing the issue of determining if planets have oceans when you have to deal with the light of the star it orbits

the light of the sun is 10 billion times the light reflected off the Earth and you want to be able to tell a difference of 100 billion times to determine if there are oceans...

but to make a comparison much closer to home, apparently Zuckerberg has a net worth of $200 billion. if his wealth was the light of the sun, the light of Earth would be a $20 bill

_that_ just feels frustrating

(my guess is he means the net worth of Meta, which _still_)

e: nope, that's the net worth of Zucc

back at the hotel room and that was very nice

it's weird but while Tech obviously can't be that far off there is like a sort of "type" that definitely is rarer outside of it

I'm not talking about intellectual prowess but mindset and way of thinking

like this was an alumi dinner and the speaker gave a technical presentation on a scientific problem and the solutions and one of the first questions was "hey when you showed that chart, there was this dip; what's up with that?"

and to some degree this is a bit of a difference between the money making and prestige factory of the research part and the often at odds undergrad parts where it's all the "smart kids" thrown together into a pressure cooker and told stories about clever pranks of the past and just being driven to find ways to let off steam

when I walked on campus I made a joke to myself of "ah these must be techers because they have that glum air of desperate striving to survive"

I'm a very weird level of being very open about how much I got hurt by the place or at least my own lack of preparation while still treasuring the people I knew there even if I didn't keep up with them and the various traditions we had

no place I've ever worked except maybe the coding boot camp has that for me