Ok, so in my 12th grade AP Psych course, we did a module on bystander apathy -- aka the tedency of humans to ignore a fellow human's cries for help in an emergency situation, instead assuming someone else will call 911. But last night I proved that I am no apathetic bystander (although a bystander nonetheless).
At around 6 p.m. I was dutifully checking Facebook for the 172nd time that day when I heard my neighbor scream, "Chuck! Oh my God, someone call 911!" I look out my 3rd story window and all I can see is my neighbor bent over being attacked by something. At first I thought he was being attacked by a dog because my neighbor's wife and another neighbor were trying to pull whatever this was off of Chuck...and then I notice it's no dog but another one of our neighbors! And he's strangling Chuck!
The adrenaline is pumping as I call for my mom to come look and we call 911. Finally the wives are able to separate Chuck from this man (leave it to the wives to make peace) and next thing I know Chuck launches a right hook into the guy's face and then kicks him in the nose as he falls to the ground. There's blood in the street, on the men, all over their clothes...the second neighbor keeps trying to come back at Chuck and the wife is doing everything she can to get him to stop. First she kicked him where the sun don't shine (no effect), then she rammed her head into his stomach to try and push him (he pushed her back) and finally she attempted to use her body weight to push him up the stairs to their apartment. Meanwhile I'm watching all of this unfold from my bedroom window praying for the cops to arrive.
Fifteen minutes later (a person could be dead by then) and many a heavy heartbeat in tow (on my part, not the actual victims of the assault) the cops, a firetruck and an ambulance finally come roaring into our normally quiet neighborhood. And they stayed for more than 2 hours, talking to everyone, assessing the injuries and finally arresting the nameless neighbor (not Chuck, it turns out he wasn't the one who started the fight). After everything calmed down my mom and I went down to make sure Chuck was okay (which he was) and to let him know we called the cops.
What a night!
Off Topic: I don't suffer from bystander apathy
Musical Dorms
This afternoon I was searching the HBS Bulletin Boards while eating my Chinese take out (chicken lo-mein, delicious!) and noticed someone had posted about re-arranged floor plans on McCulloch Hall (my hall). I went online and lo and behold, my room had not only swapped places with another room, but it is now a one-room large single and NOT a 2-room suite. Are you confused yet? I know I am.
I called the Housing Office and the floor plans were apparently outdated on the Web site prior to yesterday. The deets (as of today) on my room are that it is for sure a one-room large single, it has a full-size bed (not a twin bed, which means all that bedding I bought is going back to Linens N Things), a built-in desk with bookshelf, one closet and one sink. Other than that, things seem to be the same. Here's the new (and hopefully final floor plan):
More Dorm News...
Today I found out the most miraculous dorm news yet...my two-room suite is all mine. No roommate, no suitemate, just two huge rooms all to myself! I was actually really surprised to hear that I wouldn't have a suitemate -- I guess I just misunderstood the meaning of a 2-room suite from my sorority house days where you not only shared your room with one person, but also had two suitemates next door. Nevertheless I'm thrilled! It does mean more decor will be necessary ;) and I think I'm going to make one room the typical bedroom and the second room a living area, with perhaps a futon for guests and my study area. We'll see how much money I have left over for decorating once the semester starts. I know they have IKEA in the Northeast and their stuff is pretty stylish and cheap, so I'll have to do some scavenging and dig out the deals.
Now this isn't exactly what I got, but I did get the green comforter, which comes with a matching sham, and three decorative pillows that aren't shown here -- two are large (one green, one the color blue shown in the photo) and one is a small accent pillow (blue). I haven't decided yet if the green striped sheets as shown here might make for a tad too much green, so I may go with white and blue, but I wanted to hold off on purchasing those until I got more Linens N Things coupons in the mail. I purposely went for the bright colors when I saw them because, hey, I know Boston winters can be a tad bit long and gloomy, and there's nothing that can brighten your day better than a bold bedroom to come home to. What do you all think?
My Home for the Next Year
Sorry for the delay in blogging -- it's been quite a month! Not too much has been happening on the HBS front, but my day-to-day life has been consumed with an increased work load (happily!), family pet emergencies and an overall busy schedule. But I'm back and with good news: Yesterday the HBS Residence Hall Lottery was drawn and I received a room assignment in Round 1! Readers, I present McCulloch Hall!
It doesn't look like much from this photo, but it's in a great location on campus, has four floors and tunnel access to all classrooms, the library, the gym and the student center (and it's air conditioned, thank goodness). My room is on the third floor with a view of one of the other dorms. According to the floor plans available on the HBS Web site, I was placed in a two-room suite, which although I've never seen one, is supposed to be nice.
The rooms come with an extra-long twin bed, a desk, bookshelf, dresser, closet and private sink. I'll have a shared bathroom with approximately 4 others. The building itself has 10 kitchen "areas" (no full kitchens, so it'll be dining hall life for me) with a fridge and microwave. I'll probably rent a mini-fridge for the room, but we're not allowed coffee makers (THE HORROR!) so I'm thinking maybe I'll buy and donate one to the kitchen "area" so I don't have to purchase my java each and every morning. The common area is beautiful and has a 52" flat screen TV and a grand piano incase I ever decide to learn Mozart in my free time. Take a look:
And finally, here are a few of the HBS-supplied sample photos of what a McCulloch standard room could look like (the dimensions are a little different for each room, plus I have a two-room suite, which they didn't have any photos of).
My room (the suite) has three windows, so hopefully it'll be a little brighter than what these pictures show (the room looks a little drab here).
Now the exciting part starts: searching for a bedspread, looking through design magazines to come up with my "theme" and getting ready to decorate! I'm going to try to stick to a blue/green and/or yellow theme so I can use as much of the decor that I already have from my current bedroom (less to buy new and try to get rid of after two years). The best news is that should I like this room, I can leave all of my stuff in it over the summer and not have to worry about shipping anything back and forth.
Analytics move-in is August 11th, so I'll fly up to Boston on the 10th. I can't believe it's already less than 4 months away! More news as it comes...
New Look For "Harvard Bound"
If you've visited my blog at any point over the last few days you may have noticed one of several new layouts I've been trying out. I was starting to feel constrained by what Blogspot offers in the realm of templates so I went searching in the World Wide Web and tried everything from a city scape to a subdued modern look, finally settling on this one. Since I'm a Florida gal, I figured what better to represent myself than a sunny beach (let's put aside the fact that I have a horrible fear of putting anything more than my pinky toe in ocean water...I do love the sand and sun though!).
I'm also going to try including more photos in my blogs, and if I can figure out how to edit the HTML, I want to add a counter so I can see how many of you are actually checking out my entries. I already added a Link List on the left sidebar where I'll link to some of my favorite blogs and Web sites in general. That list should grow past the current two links over the next few days.
So...what do you think of the new look? :)
I sold my couches!!
For those of you unaware of my couch saga, I purchased a couch and love seat when I moved to Orlando in Oct. 2006 to furnish my bare apartment. At that time I never thought I'd be moving back in with my mom, nor did I think I'd ever be moving back into a dorm. Needless to say both of those are now realities and after moving in with my mother in Oct. 2007, her 2 bedroom apartment suddenly became crammed with two apartments worth of furniture. You see, she already had a completely furnished apartment (what became my bedroom was a den) so now in addition to finding space for the furniture that formerly occupied the 2nd bedroom, we had to find space for my couch, love seat, kitchen table with four chairs and all of my random belongings. To accommodate this clutter, we turned the dining room into a storage room, pushed all the extra furniture in there, covered it with a sheet and pretended it wasn't there (which was tough). When I finally realized it would be more hassle than it's worth to move to Boston with all of my furniture (and pay to store it for 2 years), I decided to sell my like new couches the cheap way -- through CraigsList. It took more than two months of posting and re-posting my CraigsList ad (and subsequently lowering my price twice), until I was able to successfully sell my couches last night after a spur-of-the-moment call from a man in Titusville.
Around 7 p.m. last night he called asking when this week he might be able to come see the couches and before I knew it, we arranged for him to come right then and there. By 9 p.m. I had $600 cash in my hands (too bad it went straight to my credit card bill) and a lot more space in our dining room/storage place. Next up I've got to try to sell my mom's extra couch, our extra kitchen table and my mom's butcher-block sideboard. And then we plan to have a garage sale later this month -- currently 1/2 of our garage is packed with all the items we want to sell. There's so much stuff that I can barely fit my car in there!
Somehow I find de-cluttering so....well...cathartic! Plus, my mom always says that when you clear your life of all the things you no longer need, you make room for wonderful new things to enter. Too cheesy? Maybe, but I secretly hope she's right!
In HBS news, the Round 2 Admits received their admissions decisions the other day and the bulletin boards are back to being flooded with congratulatory remarks and get together invites. So far I haven't seen anyone respond to my original "Florida" posting. It would be nice to find a few more Florida folks at HBS so we can commiserate during the winter! Maybe Round Three!
In other news, I'm finally close to finishing my third HBS tutorial -- the one on Technology and the Internet. I've got to say it's the most boring one I've done yet -- no funny animation or cohesive storyline -- and sometimes I feel like I'm trying to learn a new language with all of the vocabulary thrown at me. I've already "failed" the tutorial (for this one there were 6 mini-quizzes and you needed a 60% on each to "pass" the tutorial) -- I got a 50% on the first quiz because I could not calculate something to do with bits, bytes, megablips, megahertz...well you get the point. Thankfully this was our "optional" tutorial, so failing doesn't have any repercussions and hopefully we won't have any cases on technology this detailed -- I never thought being an executive meant you also have to be an expert in computer science!
This weekend I am heading down to Boca to visit my grandparents and hopefully see one of my best friends, Tausha, who lives in New York but will be down the same weekend (Hi Tausha!). I can't wait to give my grandparents the HBS merchandise that I bought during Admit Weekend -- my grandfather has dutifully worn his Gator cap for the last five years so I think it's high time he replace it with a new crimson HBS one! I got a calendar for my grandmother -- she likes sentimental things like that and since she won't be able to come visit me in Boston, she can at least look at pictures of the buildings I'll be in every day and envision me there (sounds "out there" but it keeps her from feeling so lonely).
Back to the daily grind...!
This I Know...
Lately this blog seems to be veering slightly from the Harvard-bound topic, but seeing as HBS-related events have slowed (and will probably continue to slow for several months), I figure that dabbling in the philosophical and introspective every once in a while can't hurt.
Today I am inspired by a section in O The Oprah Magazine called "This I Know..." In the section, Oprah makes blanket statements about the things she knows about herself and her life. Personally, I find that in this ever-changing, twisting world, the things we truly know about ourselves can feel few and far between. But this I know:
1) Proud as I am to be a strong woman, I struggle with the "supposed to's" that are associated with my gender. I feel extremely lucky to have been born into the generation that I was, for today more than ever, women are given choices about the paths in their lives, and are (starting to be) respected for making what are sometimes unconventional decisions. But even with these strides toward equality, the world still makes decisions about the place a woman should have in society. She is to be the homemaker, the mother, the nurterer. Watch any cleaning supply commercial and I guarantee you'll never see a man bending down to scrub the toilet -- and if he is, it's only because he's eyeing a sexy female next door. When it comes to children, it's assumed that women not only want to be mothers, but that when the child arrives, she is to quit her job and put her life on hold to care for the home and the baby.
Why, despite the strides we've made toward equality in the workplace and in the political arena (we're not there yet, but almost!), does the equality not transfer to relationships and the home life? Which leads me to the second thing I know...
2) I want a family. I want the adoring husband who challenges me mentally and intellectually and who is my forever partner. I want the 2.5 children and a dog and the family dinners and the first steps and the trips to Disney World. I can see myself sitting down to dinner after a long day of work and feeling complete.
What I don't see is life as a housewife. I've come this far intellectually -- I'll be a Harvard MBA in 2 years -- so how could I ever throw away all mental stimulation to take care of a child, stay in a home day after day and relegate myself to watching soap operas and ironing my husband's shirts? It's just not in my future. I want to be the President of a company, have a great big corner office with a window overlooking a bustling city. I want to feel productive, intelligent, and successful in my day to day work. And then I want to pick my children up from school, read them bedtime stories and fall asleep in my husband's arms. But can both exist?
The answer to that question is something I don't know. I don't know if I can be the excellent mother I'd want to be and be a successful career woman and a loving wife. I don't know if I'll find a man who isn't intimidated by my ambition or career aspirations and who doesn't try to put me in a box and expect me to act like a possession. I don't even know if I'll change my mind ten years down the road and all of a sudden want nothing more than to have a baby and nurture it. And I guess that's part of the adventure of life -- knowing who you are and who you want to be, and wondering exact how, and if, you'll get there.
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