we're trying to get a former, original MIT Blackjack team member to join our $100K team. we had a meeting with him and he seemed pretty excited about our proposal. how awesome would that be?

earlier today, my mom wrote this in an email:

"Do you remember when you were in west junior high school? You wrote a paper for president camping (campaign?). I remember your president was a 40 something years old African American family guy. That just match Obama today. do you remember? “Wow!”  That only I can say.   "

i had almost completely forgotten about this. in a 9th grade government class, one of our projects was to create a presidential candidate and we would campaign as the candidate themselves. we also had in-class debates about the full spectrum of issues. my candidate was a 40-something african-american with good family values. an important component of this project was to discuss which demographic we would reach. i decided that i would focus on the youth and i did that by associating myself with music and showing that i was "in touch"; i would hold rallies with concerts of bands i liked (which were mainly alternative and indie). needless to say, i knew almost nothing about politics at the time (not to say i know a lot now, but i'm trying to be more informed), but just a strange coincidence how things turned out...

afterwards, i regretted not having chosen an asian-american candidate instead. guess it was too unrealistic at the time. but someday...

(on a sidenote, another strange coincidence was in that same class, we had another project to focus on a solution for a current issue. i chose gun control and created a solution accordingly. years later, i read a newsweek article that featured a very similar solution. strange...)

it's surprising to see how there are a number of people who run or bike along mem/storrow drive around midnight. 19.5 miles, baby!