Parmita's Blog

This winter break I volunteered at the Southern California Vipassana Center in Joshua Tree near LA. On being free: I've done a couple of 10-day meditation retreats in the past through the Vipassana Organization and the neat thing is that it is completely free. Not even that it's a non-profit, but actually free . You don't pay for your room, the facilities, the food, heat, water, the volunteer's labor, the teachers' labor, anything . The entire organization is run purely on donations and volunteering. And on top of that, only accepts donations from people who have completed a 10-day retreat. There's no giant wealthy philanthropist, no big government institution that supporting the Vipassana Organization. Every cent is donated by people who truly want to help and support others in their meditation. If you're wondering why people are so dedicated to this, I would honestly suggest taking a 10-day course yourself. It truly is something best learned abo

idk how to explain this My friend Neha asked me what would happen if you replaced the word dream in all those "deep" internet quotes with the word meme and we spent the next half hour laughing about this. I laughed harder about this than I have about anything all year. So I made an extension to do the replacement: Enjoy https://github.com/parmita52/dream2meme/tree/master

I was fortunate enough to go to the annual Grace Hopper Celebration-- the world's largest gathering of women technologists. Here are some random thoughts I had throughout my experience: On travelling:  Travelling can be pretty annoying. Planning an itinerary, packing the right amount of stuff, waiting in line, standing at the airport, sitting in a plane--and as someone with absurdly long legs, airplanes are an extra pain. However, this time was definitely slightly better. It was a different experience travelling with a big group of girls my age. I’ve never been on, say, a travelling sports team, or something of the like, so this was a first time thing for me. There’s a nice sense of comradery as we slug through bag claim, navigating the airport and planning rides together. On Wifi: Our hotel did not have wifi (it also had a few critters and crawlies around, but that’s a different story), but I couldn’t really complain since I was lucky enough to have my school pay fo

Many summers, I regret not doing as many activities or going to as many places as I could have. I think part of that is because at the start of summer it feels like you have an infinite amount of time so “why not go somewhere next weekend?” As sad as it sounds I was indeed procrastinating having fun --or rather, I was procrastinating putting in the effort to have fun . It’s really easy to “have fun” watching Netflix: you can just start it immediately. It’s a bit more difficult to “have fun” with friends at an amusement park: you have to find a time that works for everyone, buy tickets, arrange rides, etc. To get over that hurdle, I made a list of activities I wanted to do over summer and which weekend I would do each one, filling up pretty much every weekend. The plan was flexible since I could switch activities around to accommodate other people’s schedules, but still packed enough that I couldn’t simply skip an activity. That helped motivate my butt out of the couch and out the d