Mollie B. '06 | July 06, 2005
"On abnormality"
I was reading back over the last two entries and realized I may have made myself sound somewhat normal, as people go (other than saying that biology research is one of the loves of my life). So I decided to devote this entry to a small subset of the ways in which I am either unique (if you're my mother) or weird (if you're the rest of the general public).
First and definitely foremost. I like to make lists. And spreadsheets. And graphs. If it can be made into an Excel spreadsheet, I have not only made it into an Excel spreadsheet, I have also converted it to Adobe PDF and stored it in my Athena locker.
One of my more notorious quirks is that I keep my sleep statistics in a set of Excel files. Every morning when I wake up, I record the time I fell asleep and the time I woke up, as well as the times of any naps I may have taken; every few weeks, I add that data to the statistics file, where I analyze it by type of day (schoolday, non-schoolday, or workday) and by year (freshman, sophomore, junior). It will probably not shock you to hear that, after much detailed statistical analysis, I discovered that I sleep more on the weekends than I do on schooldays.
My Athena locker also contains my schedule for this past spring term. I need to keep this in easily accessible form because I am extremely absentminded and occasionally forget which day of the week it is.
I was always like this as a child, although MIT has exacerbated my tendencies to record and graph random bits of information about my life. When I was little, I used to always get a 96-box of Crayola crayons for the first day of school (you know, the ones that came with the crayon sharpener in the back?)... and then I would carefully organize them so they were in rainbow order, with all the reds in one box, the oranges next to them...
I suppose the weirdest and most anal thing of all is that I have compiled all of my oddities into a single webpage. (It's kind of like a hall of mirrors -- it's odd that I record all of my oddities about recording things...)
I'm sure I've freaked everyone out enough for one day, so I'll stop there. ;)
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You are one IMPRESSIVE gal! I bow before you...now if I can become that organized (maybe not arrange my clothes in rainbow order) I wouldn't feel so disorientated. You've opened my eyes. I want to learn from you! By the way, that sleep stats you keep - I am going to try to do that my freshmen year too.
Posted by: Prefrosh on July 7, 2005 02:46 AM
That is so weird! I used to organize crayons by color too... then when the school year was almost over, I would take them all out and reorganize them by length and try and figure out which colors I used the most and why... Usually it was blue and green because I'd always draw outdoor pictures and I always included the sky and grass in them...
But for me the whole organizing thing has basically died off... I realized that I have been progressively getting more and more tired and don't have the time or the energy to do the things I used to do when I was like four. Oh well, I'll get over it!!!
Posted by: Katharine Chu on July 7, 2005 05:47 PM
Hi, Mollie! I'm loving your blog! Thanks for answering my questions on CC.
Posted by: Ann on July 7, 2005 11:04 PM
Mollie, your blog is rocking! Thanks for joining us!
Posted by: madmatt on July 8, 2005 12:46 AM
haha, I can definitely relate, because second semester from February to May, every day I wrote down the number of hours I spent on schoolwork, to see how much I was really working (turned out the average was around 3, though it sure felt like more :-P)
Posted by: bz on July 8, 2005 11:09 AM
