I wake up befuddled and only somewhat lucid, 20 minutes before morning lecture. I fight back exhaustion in my bed a few tortuous minutes more, until I know that any longer in my bed and I will cross the point of no return. I jump out of my bed, prep myself and my bag, run down the stairs, grab the yogurt prepared by our site director. The yogurt imparts energy into my haze, and by the time I get to our lounge to learn about LaTeX I am conscious.
The lecture takes a surprising turn as our professor eloquently leads in discussion of the culmination of classical electromagnetics, Maxwell’s Equations. At lunch time I walk as fast as possible to our distant dining hall so I can retrace my steps even faster to a local church with a piano for me to play. Afternoon lecture follows, as I try to comprehend the genius of Gauss’s pieced-together technique of orbital determination, which is the last piece of the puzzle we need to enable the orbital determination codes we’ve been writing for the past weeks to be viable.
At the end of that lecture, I use the remainder of my focus to get back to my room for a quick wellness nap. I wake up to another alarm, this one signaling a more classy occasion: dinner.
I put on my finer garments, and descend downstairs in reverie. I wait on the steps, briefly alone. And then the flood of people come out, and we go to the dining hall. Dinner is accompanied by an eclectic conversation with a professor, my site director, and other participants about books and media, math, countries we’ve visited. Dinner ends, we go back to the lecture hall after a brief break.
Through the evening I work with my friends to do 10% coding and 90% agonizing debugging. I laugh at my friends, they laugh at me, and somehow we make progress. At the end of the day, the world before my eyes shimmers as a meridian, and I gratefully plop onto my bunk and cocooned myself in my blankets. And yet, I glowed, as I remember in a groggy flash all the exciting, formative, and wonderful things I had done that day, and I hope that my convalescence of sleep will give way in the morning to another day of wonder.
(Hopefully I feel more awake tomorrow!)
-Mateo
