The Rudolph Family Weekend

The Rudolph Family Weekend One week ago, everyones parents were here on campus, and I mean everyones but mine. In mathspeak, for all MIT students not equal to Kate Rudolph, the set of parents of those students is a subset of the set of people who were on campus for Family Weekend last weekend. And not only that! Brothers, sisters, grandparents! Okay, I exaggerate. I wasnt the only one whose parents didnt come, but sometimes it felt that way, and I got really homesick. I realized sometime last weekend that Ive been here for what is now over nine weeks, the longest Ive ever been away from home. I know people who go home or see their parents nearly every weekend, but those people are from Connecticut or New York. The trip to Chicago just isnt worth it for a weekend. But my Family Weekend was not completely lonely. My Uncle Jim and Aunt Maura and cousins Luke, Ally, and Erin live in the suburbs of Boston, and they came into Cambridge last weekend to spend the afternoon with me. That is once they found me Aside: The Story of My Phone: At some point several weeks ago, the screen on my phone developed a giant, spider-web shaped crack. The entire screen went black, except for a little triangle at the bottom, through which I could just barely make out what was going on, and since I have the button-sequences of my phone mostly memorized I was able to continue sending (poorly edited) texts and making phone calls. An interesting side effect of this was that I couldnt tell time for about a week, because my phone usually acts as my watch. My parents back in Illinois heard about this, and came to the rescue. You see, this summer, my sister threw her phone off a roller coaster. (Where by she threw it off a roller coaster I mean it accidentally fell off the roller coaster, completely unintentionally but the first one is funner to say. (Funner. It is a word. (Also, nested parentheses!))) The amusement park found it and sent it back to our house, but not before Laura had bought a replacement phone on ebay. So the phone my parents sent to my rescue was the eBay-phone, And the eBay-phone has issues. For some reason it uses a different service than phones do now, so it is continually looking for service and runs out of charge in about 12 hours. And sometimes, even when its fully charged and says it has signal, it wont make or receive calls or texts. Which is exactly what was happening last Saturday afternoon when Aunt Maura was trying to call me! End of Aside Eventually, the Boston Rudolphs caught up with me, and I took them on a tour of my floor, Tetazoo, and then we went on a walk through the MIT campus. There were lots of Family Weekend events going on, housemaster brunches and department-sponsored events and whatnot. And what did my cousins and I end up doing? I mean, wouldn’t you rather play beach volleyball on the pedestals in Lobby 7 and teach your imaginary class arithmetic in 32-123? Thanks to Uncle Jim and Aunt Maura for the super-cute video.