Hallo everyone!!!

After boarding the plane with peace09, speedyfalcon, coolbluealan, and avisioner, we landed to Boston after a pretty chill flight where I texted babyhamster a bunch, watched reels, and played Brawl Stars.

Upon landing, speedyfalcon’s mom told us we should not wait for pi271828 and sdash314 since “Due to rush hour, Lyft prices would go up.” Thus, we left with our own Lyft, and left sdash314 and pi271828 on their own, against their own opinions. (I literally protested against this, let’s see if speedyfalcon gets jumped later tonight.) Then, when pi271828 arrived, I accidentally gave speedyfalcon’s room number instead of ours, and we started running from pi271828 when he was chasing and ding dong ditching us. avisioner was sprinting for his life from pi271828, and it was honestly a fun experience. I think I burned a lot of calories and laughed a little too much.

Eventually, we got some dinner at either Shake Shack or Felipe’s, and then went over to Friday Night events. Upon trying to register, we were approached by the people in charge because since NCSSM has an HMMT team and avisioner and coolbluealan go to SSM, they are double eligible, which would make our team unofficial. Thus, we spent the next hour tracking down NCSSM coaches to get them to agree (which would result in us being official), panicking, figuring out a script, and yelling about how NCSSM “opped on us” (They didn’t really, but at the start it REALLY seemed like they opped on us because they were the ones who snitched to the HMMT officials). Eventually, we worked everything out because peace09 is the GOAT and knows how to effectively communicate, and life was good.

There were like 10 minutes before the next block and what we had left, so I joined back to where quasant had been for the entire time, and met babyhamster in-person for the first time. She was like “OMG HI MATHNERD_101” really loud during the estimathon, which was really funny, and I sat there for the free boba, just for babyhamster’s team not to place Top 6 and not to get boba. Unfortunately for me, this also meant that I didn’t get boba, so sadness.

After that whole situation where we almost got DQed (and the less scary situation where I didn’t get free boba), we went to Math Bowl. brianzjk was running this event, so as members of his team the previous year, we were kind of obligated to go. I was on a team with speedyfalcon, Skyler, and someone else whose name I don’t quite remember (I’m writing this two days later so my memory is a little foggy). During the qualifier round, speedyfalcon lowkey sold and sillied a few questions, whereas I had a 100% correct rate for all the problems I solved! We barely made it to the Math Bowl round as the 10th seed out of a 10 team bracket, so we were really excited (Go team dinglebinglers!). It turns out that Skyler had literally won National Science Bowl, and since the Math Bowl round was in a Science Bowl format, we were feeling pretty good. Aaand then we made Semifinals because Skyler absolutely carried the heck out of us and answered all of the questions (I kid you not, the rest of the team answered a total of 0 questions in every single one of the rounds.).

Finally, after we lost in Semifinals and failed to advance to the finals, speedyfalcon and I went downstairs, where we saw a bunch of things, such as peace09 talking to MathJams, akliu rizzing up sdash314 (jokingly, they’re both male), and some other… sights. We eventually tried to collect our team, but people kept getting lost (i.e. avisioner kept wandering off to talk to other moppers, quasant wandered off to go with her mom, etc. Eventually, we found each other (except for quasant, who had left earlier with her mom (and had given us a panic attack in the process). sdash314 connected to our speaker, and we played some music on our long walk back to our hotel.

After arriving, I called LY and we talked for a little bit before playing Brawl Stars with her. Eventually, it was time to sleep, and I hit the sacks. During the night, I basically didn’t sleep. I slept from 12-4, before not being able to fall back asleep, resulting in a total of 4 hours of sleep! Yayyyyyy!


Day 2:
The next day was competition day. In the morning, I was pretty energetic after a nice cold shower, and I was ready to go. After eating a nice healthy breakfast of two granola bars, I watched peace09 absolutely FUMBLE LIKE BAKER MAYFIELD IN THE WILD CARD ohhh my- this kid. He spent an egregiously long time trying to formulate a response to a cisgender XX chromosome human, and it was highkey funny seeing him tweak out over it all. quasant ended up leaving later than us, so I saved her a blueberry muffin while she managed to trudge her way into the entrance (took her long enough -_-). After a lot of laughs and seeing some people being really… socially… odd… (To those two kids who were “orzing” each other, please like… find a life. Thank you.), it was time to compete.

Team round went pretty cheeks. quasant and I were assigned to P1, which ended up being so much harder than I had anticipated (Like last year’s Team P1 was lowkey slight whereas this year I could NOT figure it out). quasant and I therefore didn’t contribute much, and we spent the majority of the team round trying to squirm our way into partials on the later problems. I’m not entirely sure if this was successful, since I don’t have the score distros yet.

Individual round was just a disaster for me. For one, because I was so tired, I thought 1+2+3+4 = 9 for the ENTIRE Geometry round, and then I just could not mentally think for anything else. I’m sure if I re-took the rounds I’d drop a MUCH better score, so… maybe we won’t be getting 4 hours of sleep next year… I ended up being the weakest link by 1 point this year, making me the weakest indiv for 2 years in a row, which lowkey pissed me off because I was confident that I wouldn’t be the weakest link this year. Time to lock tf in now.

After a nice lunch with speedyfalcon at Chipotle, we had Guts round. I think that I contributed significantly for the first rounds, but then I struggled to keep my eyes open during the last few. I was genuinely like drinking massive amounts of a Chipotle drink to try to sugar high my way through the round, but it didn’t really work. The mental aspect of HMMT gets me once again, I guess.

After Guts, pi271828 and I played football for a bit, and it seems my arm strength hasn’t gotten too much better since last year, though my accuracy and spiral has (as well as endurance, since I didn’t get shoulder problems this year after 5 minutes of playing catch). pi271828 lowkey ego farmed from peace09 by absolutely blasting peace09 on every single route he ran only for me to throw the ball short

Since there was still time to burn, sdash314, quasant, and I went to the boba shop, where the other two people got boba (I didn’t get any because my stomach was slowly recovering from 1. The inordinate amounts of chipotle I’d eaten and 2. The inordinate amounts of drinks I’d consumed in a short period of time). We grabbed it, quasant met up with some mathcamp person (This was a common theme I think she was stopped by like 200 people or something it was pretty darn crazy), and then we left for awards. We got there just in time to see the end of Logarithms or whatever the MIT acapella group is called, and then we watched integration bee. Integration bee was mad interesting because Yusuf (I think that’s how you spell his name?) was absolutely busted. Like someone please go into the dev portal and nerf this man at integration because what the heck? Finally came awards. Nobody from Team Dinglebinglers won anything (sad), but that’s ok because the real award was the friends we made along the way! peace09 left midway through awards to catch his flight, WHICH ENDED UP GETTING CANCELLED AT 3 AM SO LIKE POOKIE WOOKIE LITERALLY COULD’VE STAYED WITH US OVERNIGHT AHGHHHHH I’M SO MAD.

After awards, quasant, sdash314, pi271828 and I went to Chipotle. We grabbed our food, continued clowning peace09 for fumbling harder than the Warriors in the 2016 NBA finals. We lowkey ganged up on him, and we used pi271828’s phone to each send him a lengthy blurb on why we thought he fumbled and why he should have [redacted]. Right when we were about to leave for the hotel, I met with plang2008 and that was pretty cool despite only having a short interaction with him.

Returning back to our hotel, quasant, sdash314, pi271828, and I sat in the hotel room, continued flaming peace09, talking, flaming peace09 some more, and then quasant met LY for the first time on FaceTime, so that was pretty darn cool. Uhh yeah it would’ve been so much more fun with peace09 in person because then we coulda yelled at him in person instead of over text. At like 11:00 pm, quasant and pi271828 left, and then soon after quasant texted me “Omg I just realized how hard peace09 fumbled” and then EDGED ME BY SAYING “Oop I gotta go sleep now.” THAT TICKED ME OFF BROO LIKE SHE HAD NEW INFO AND SHE MADE ME WAIT TILL THE NEXT MORNING. I lied in bed and fell asleep really soon, and was woken up by avisioner and coolbluealan arriving back into the hotel room from their MOP Meetup. After a little 5 minute wake-up, I immediately fell back asleep.

Day 3:
I woke up to the sounds of avisioner and coolbluealan getting ready for Sunday Morning events, and then freaked out and gave up on going to them because I was far too late (I’m not showering and getting ready in 3 minutes LOL). So, my plan was to talk to quasant then leave for the airport with sdash314 and pi271828. The first part was a success, I [redacted] and then we talked some more about how peace09 fumbled and then we went back to [redacted]. Lowkey [redacted] had me in my feels, but like it’ll be alright. As we were talking, IT TURNED OUT THAT OUR FREAKING FLIGHT HAD GOTTEN DELAYED SO WE HAD TO PANIC AND BOOK ANOTHER TRIP. We figured it out, and our new plan was to go from BOS to Maryland and then have a 5 hour layover before going from Maryland to RDU. So, I quickly went to MIT with quasant and her mom, where we realized that the Sunday Morning events were in a DIFFERENT location from last year, so I helped locate quasant and her mom to the MIT Dome, where they took some pictures, and then we went to the actual destination. The issue was, it had been raining all morning, so it was absolutely flooded basically everywhere. Thus, my shoes and socks got absolutely soaked because there were pool-sized puddles littered all over the ground.

After arriving, I basically just messed around the entire time since we’d only be there for an hour at max. I sat with avisioner, coolbluealan, speedyfalcon, and quasant before there was a The Beauty of Math talk. I wandered in and out of it, getting interested then immediately bored the second I walked into the lecture hall because the talk was kind of mid in my opinion. Eventually, everyone left, and quasant and I went on a walk together to the second floor, where we met up with FlyingPig7 and angie., where they were playing Fish. This was actually the first time I met up with FlyingPig7 in-person, which is really cool (I still need to figure out who runs his freaking spam account). I ended up having to leave, because speedyfalcon’s sister, who would be taking us to Chipotle for lunch, showed up. Handiccraft, who was here for some conference, said that she wanted to come with us, but her mom forced her to stay in their hotel room, so she couldn’t come with. How unfortunate. speedyfalcon, his sister, his mom, and I ate Chipotle before Ubering over to the airport.

The airport was pretty mid. The only interesting part was that I mis-interpreted the socks that the vendor was selling to be 40 dollars when in fact it was 14. So, I bought a new pair of “aloe-infused” socks for both speedyfalcon and I (It came in a two-pack) to replace our drenched and now uncomfortable socks. I still have these socks on, and they are sooo cozy ahhhh. I talked to quasant through text a lot at the airport, and idk if quasant is going to read this, but I was lowkey being a little stubborn and whatnot. Apologies, quasant. We ended up having to board, and I was kind of in my feels the entire plane ride. It’d been a pretty poopy day with the weather and the whole sock thing as well as just some personal stuff (Ex: I was so so so tired), so I was on the verge of having a mental breakdown.

Upon arrival into BWI, avisioner, coolbluealan, speedyfalcon, his mom, and I got food at the food court. speedyfalcon and I got Chipotle (Chipotle at an airport is lowkey cool) while the other 3 got food from a Chinese restaurant. We ate before doing our own thing, with me playing Brawl Stars and writing this blog post, avisioner playing tetris on his phone, and speedyfalcon and coolbluealan playing 1v1 trackmania. Eventually, we all had to charge our things, so we went over to a new area, where we currently are. The others are playing Landlord (A chinese card game) while I’m writing this post (I’m SLAVING for y’all so y’all better like this jawn up and comment PLEASE).

This year, I hated HMMT. Not the tournament itself, but just what happened at the tournament. I hate the fact that we almost got our official team status revoked .I hate the fact that I’m so stupid and bad at math. I hate the fact that I work so hard at something just for someone else to do even better despite putting in 0 work, only to choke that opportunity that they had away nonchalantly as if nothing happened. I hate the fact that I suck at everything I put my heart into. I hate the fact that the weather sucked today. I hate the fact that [redacted]. I especially hate the fact that I [redacted] despite [redacted]. But that’s ok, right? It’ll all be OK. SURELY, RIGHT?!

I leave with this. I’m now motivated to do math again. Just thinking about [redacted] pisses me off SO MUCH that I’m motivated to do my stupid AIME Geo OTIS unit again. Just thinking about the fact that I was the worst person on our team in Indiv despite there being a NON AIME QUAL ON OUR TEAM pisses me off so much that I want to relearn the Intermediate AoPS books again. Just thinking about the fact that I wasn’t in the Top 3 AIME scorers at Enloe fuels the fire in me to lock in for State Math. So maybe HMMT was good for me. I came to the fact, and accepted, that I’m a fraud in literally everything I do. I’m a fraud academically, socially, and physically. I have literally completed the trifecta. It’s time to get to work.

Now all there is to do is to work and believe.

Quote Log:
“Tip of the day? Imma give you my tip of the day” -sdash314
“I really need that long stick now…” -speedyfalcon
“TSA asked me if coolbluealan was under 12 years old or not” -avisioner
"I HAVE A BOMB" -coolbluealan in the airport