Sometimes I like to stare, really hard, at my pudgy belly:

Whenever the weather gets gloomy and I feel like wallowing in my day-to-day melodramas, I like to take the most unscenic path to school. For some inexplicable reason, I find walking on that two track railway strangely calming. A thin, desolate strectch of wasteland linking Cambridge to Boston that hardly sees more than 2 trains a week. Normal people don't go near the tracks. I've only seen drunks, homeless people and the occasional New Age couple trailing along. That or train drivers trying to hold a conversation with anyone who happens to be around.

On some mornings, liquid nitrogen will be spilling out of the ginormous gas tanks onto the tracks, making huge rivers of fog. It puts the place right into an espionnage movie. Getting lost in the fog is both terrifying and strangely exciting, specially when you can feel the chill of the liquid nitrogen on your legs.

Sometimes when the weather is clear, the sunset puts an aurora / halo-like glow on the exhaust smoke coming out of the giant chimney next to the track. I've never seen that amazing quality of light anywhere else. God knows how many MIT students have tried to photograph that smoke, that chimney, that intersection. But it never turns out well.