May there be peace

in my passing.
a calm in my heart.
a spring in my step, and something to spark
the weathered kindle of hatred
the fire sublime
may everything heal with the passing of time.
-KL, 5/1/11

An announcement.

I've been experimenting with a vegetarian diet off and on for a year now. For some reason or another up until now I have always wandered my way back to the word of omnivorism. This week, I decided not to wander back. I am vegetarian. Finally.

Regards,
Kris

Why I have negleced to update this.

In a word, TKD. I am now showing my inner premed. I am publicity chair of TKD, and this semester my grades could be wayyyy better. I am perpetually hosed. I am having money issues. etc. et al.

Blahhhhhhh.

TKD.

It took me ten+ years, but I finally made it.

Kristina fought an amazing match that was a real breakthrough performance for her. She was very smart with her checks and kicks and kept her head in the game the whole time. She hit her opponent with two very decisive axe kicks that left both her opponent and the onlookers stunned. She broke the match wide open at the start of the second round by garnering a 9-point lead. She stayed aggressive throughout her match to clinch a win for the team.

-Kris

More house-keeping. Or a new house.

So I started this blog approximately one year and six months ago hoping to document the mental toll that the college admissions process can have on a sixteen-year-old applying to a ridiculous range of long shot schools. Here I am at one of the said schools looking through all of the posts and I am amazed by two things: what has changed and what hasn't.

So, for the record, I will write a new about me section to mark the changes that I have gone through these past eighteen months. My first section can be found here.

My name is Kristina Lynn Lozoya. I am eighteen years old and a second semester freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I plan to major in biological engineering and minor in Chinese. Most days I do my best to balance school work (there's a lot of it here at MIT) with sanity. Most days I succeed, but sometimes I don't. The biggest lesson that I have learned in my short time at MIT is that it is okay to fail and that you will eventually get caught up and be on the same page as everyone else. It's okay to pick one thing, oner person that you absolutely can't live without and concentrate your precious little free time on them, so long as you hit the books for twice as long. So I'm not the best here, but I have grown as a person unlike if I had been anywhere else. No, I am not the best. Yes I can (and do) ignore those who take seven classes per semester plus 345304958230495 extracurricular activities.

Believe me, it took awhile to find my place here, but I finally have. It is taking slow walks along the Charles at night and obsessing over the smallest amount of snow in the East Campus courtyard. It is alongside my teammates, cheering them on in victory and standing by them in defeat while plotting revenge for the heavyweight that kicked my ass on my birthday for the next tournament at West Point. It is hating physics and loving the life sciences, discovering the beauty of the simple logic behind Chinese and pledging to myself that I will learn it one day. It is cursing my professor for assigning long and outrageously hard problem sets, agonizing over a certain problem for a few hours, and then doing a victory dance when I reason through it all. It is looking past the darkness and seeing the light that shines through God's grace and makes this life so freaking beautiful.

My place is right here, thank you sir.

Love, a transfixed, Kris

Wisdom.

So, the tittle, subtitle, whatever you want to call it, of this blog is wisdom from someone still learning, but looking at the brief and overly emotional content of the last few posts, I feel like that premise of the blog has been a bit lacking. To that point, I will post the greatest bit of advice that I have ever heard. Of course, being a bit mentally narcoleptic, it is embodied in a quote that I read off of my friend's Facebook wall.

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." -Nietzche

Take it for what it is. Love it. Embrace it. Run free with reckless abandon. I don't care qhat you do with it. The beauty of tis is that it is yours to do with as you please.

I'm losing it.

The title says it all.

I swore I thought that MIT would never get to me.

Now I understand.

I'm so so unsure of myself right now.

Someone please help.