I do not sleep.

I do not sleep. This is the name of my post. I am sick. I am less sick now than I was. I hope this means more sleep. I read 'toothpaste for dinner.'

Oh no.

Dominick Lawton and I are hanging out, talking about how we think we might be postmodernists.

Fuck.

In Honor of Exam Week

Excerpted from a curmudgeonly essay I wrote instead of working on a response paper that I ought to have spent more than an hour on:

Try and imagine this. It is the week before winter break. All our papers are coming due. I spent the night before last writing my first-ever twenty-page paper for a class on the North American landscape. It had twenty-five pages. I took a two-hour nap after class and then finished an entire problem set for my economics class in one evening. It helped that I don’t care about the class, so none of the answers had to be right or anything. I made an outline for a research paper I have to write tomorrow morning and then went to bed at four-thirty am.

BBRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAARR
RRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAA
AAAAAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAAA
RRRRbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I have slept for five and a half hours out of the last forty-two and have just woken unexpectedly to this sound. I do not know what the sound is or where it is coming from. Maybe we are under attack. Maybe someone is drilling into our basement with one of those big drill tractors that they use in mines. How am I supposed to know? My eyes won’t even open all the way. The little muscles in my cheeks and temples and eyelids are squinty-squinchy. I slouch up in bed. The room is still half dark because it’s winter and only just eight, goddamn it, I realize when my straining little half-eyes finally find my clock-radio. I meant to wake up at nine-thirty so I could get a full five hours.

Now my ears are working again and I can sort of tell that the sound is coming from the direction of the window. Going to see what it is will require me to get up and stagger fifteen feet across a cold hardwood floor. The noise keeps stopping and starting and every time it starts it opens with this plaintive whine, like someone is abusing a puppy. Maybe they are torturing a puppy down there. This, I simply will not tolerate. I throw off the covers and practically fall across the room, since I’m so dizzy I can’t stand up straight.

I think I am hallucinating when I first look outside. They have got one of those trucks set up like the trucks the phone company uses to fix a problem with the telephone wires. That’s the kind with the arm that stretches out towards the sky with you cradled in its basket like it’s delivering you up into the clouds. This one is right up next to a tree that has its top branches about twenty feet away from our window. There is a guy in a hooded sweatshirt in the truck’s basket. He has the hood up, which always makes you look like a gang member or a serial killer. The guy is also clutching a massive chainsaw. This makes him look more like a serial killer than a gang member. His friend has the driver’s side door of the truck open and is messing around with something on the dashboard that is making the arm move the little cradle up and down. The man with the chainsaw just stands there with the damn thing held inches from his chest while he and his little basket move a couple of inches up and a couple of inches down for practically a whole minute. Eventually the basket stops moving and the guy takes his chainsaw and slides it into a big thick brancheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeBBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRBBBB
BBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I am deeply unhappy. We were not informed that this work would be occurring today. No notice was tacked to the proctor’s bulletin board. No message was posted to the Pennypacker listserv. Stupor has been replaced by irritation verging on hauteur. The university couldn’t send us an email? They couldn’t wait another two hours to destroy this tree? My head probably would have hurt anyway this morning, but this feels like someone has inserted the bit of a power drill into my ear and flicked the on switch.

Now my roommate is awake. She’s a heavier sleeper than I am, but even she cannot sail blissfully through this. “Mmmmmmfffgggfffgggddisthaaaat?” she gurgles. I do not answer. Instead I stalk back to my bed, rip off the comforter, and cannonball onto the middle of the mattress, allowing the blanket to float slowly down and cover my rage-quaking form. I try to clench my knees over my ears to block the sound, but they don’t reach up that high. Where the hell are my earplugs? Gone, probably, vanished on moving day.

“MMMMFFFHHWWHHHAAT?” she asks, this time with an angry force that is not softened by her cotton-mouth.

“The motherfucking grounds service is doing a tree-fucking-removal and I’ve slept for five hours in the past two days and I want to die right now,” I retort.

“Whattimesit?”

“It is eight. I went to bed at four-thirty.” Where is the sense of decency? Does this institution retain no trace of gentility from its illustrious past? Were Theodore Roosevelt and T.S. Eliot jolted out of bed at the crack of dawn by the sound of a cannonade? Did they stand at the windows of their apartments in their dressing-gowns and caps and watch a pair of madmen re-landscape Harvard Yard with dynamite?

I am not a complainer. I do not return spoiled foods to the supermarket for a refund. I do not send back my dessert when the waiter brings me chocolate ice cream instead of Rocky Road. But right now I am angry. I could throw dignity out the window and lean out after it, red-cheeked and hollering like a 19th-century English fishwife, my semi-transparent t-shirt flapping wildly with every gust of cold morning wind.

...Yadda yadda depressing yadda, but I think you get the idea. Merry finals week, all! And to all a good night!

(If it makes you feel any better, we in Cantabrigia have our finals after break. It's even worse if you're in the humanities: you also have a volley of papers due before you leave for vacation. It's like two exam weeks ("exam month"? Oh dear God), and I don't even want to think about it. In fact, pretend I never told you that. One day of classes-- lovely classes, but still-- left in the fall semester!)

Julia il topo

"Topo" means "mouse." In Italian.

So as you know, I live in a ridiculous building. Our latest adventures, besides the bird that was stuck in the fireplace of the room next door, involve the mice that have decided to make our suites their homes.

My suitemate Sage is terrified of them.

The Harvard-Yale Pierson tailgate went really well. We had a bunch of brownies left over, so we left them shrink-wrapped in a cardboard box in our suite over break. There was nothing else to do with them, really.

So last night, we were all in the suite (except for Sage, which is good, because she would've hated this), and Sharon and Rhia, my roommate and other suitemate, heard scratching noises coming from the box of brownies. I ran upstairs to our friends' suite, where Riley was doing homework. 

I asked him, "Want to go on a mission?"

He did want to go on a mission.

We grabbed a plastic storage tub and went back to my suite, where we held the box above the tub and lifted trays of brownies up, one by one.

He was hiding underneath the last tray, of course. When I saw him, I jumped, and we dropped him into the tub.

He was tiny, and fuzzy, and really pretty cute. Sage has nothing to worry about. She's still worried.

Everyone gathered around from all over our entryway to see the adorable mouse. We were all talking about how he was so cute, and how he was probably scared to death, and trying to figure out what to do with him.

Then Vicky asked, "How do you know it's not a girl? I think her name's Julia."

So now we have Julia the mouse. Now that she's got a name, we can't just get rid of her. So we stole some cereal and carrots from the dining hall, and we put a plate of water and some shredded paper in the bottom of the tub for her. And we moved the tub upstairs, so that Sage didn't have an aneurism. 

The whole gender issue is a really big concern, but we've decided those that feel that the mouse might suffer permanent psychological damage from gender misassignment can just call it Jules.

Thanksgiving

So I was talking to Laura Kling the other day, and we both mentioned that we compulsively check the blog on a weekly basis. Sometimes daily. Usually daily. Anyway. Laura has convinced me that it's just stupid to keep checking the blog, hoping someone will post something new, and leaving without writing something of my own. And so came about the decision to write this post.

I don't have much to say. I never do. I think this is generally what keeps people from posting on the blog. I certainly don't want to waste anyone's time with my ramblings. But I will. I think it's more likely that we just want an acknowledgment that the TASPers still exist. So I have less qualms about the meandering style of this post.

Thanksgiving is upon us. In 2 hours and 41 minutes, American Thanksgiving begins. I don't know how all of you feel about Thanksgiving, but it's one of my favorite holidays. I really like eating. And not cooking or cleaning. Usually, my mom does the last two, and I do the first one. We'll see how I feel about this whole 'adult' thing once I have to clean up after myself on Thanksgiving. Anyway, I'm eating my Thanksgiving dinner with some friends who live in the dorm. I'm too poor to be taking a jaunt back to Chandler for a four day weekend. It may be a sad and awkward Thanksgiving. I hope not. I really like Thanksgiving.

Okay, so, I'm done wasting space. What is everyone else doing for Thanksgiving? When is the next time we can all see each other? Plans for winter break? Spring break? Summer? Non-break visitation? Let me know.

Wax Attack!

Back in the '70's, my mom was commissioned to sculpt the political and religious figures for Ireland's National Wax Museum. She used to teach sculpture classes at the community college here, but made money doing crap in wax for Madame Tussauds, Ripley's Believe it or Not, and a bunch of other random museums (if you're ever in Wall, South Dakota, go to the Wild West Museum to see my dad appear about 80 million times as a background character at the OK Corral, a bartender in a saloon with Billy the Kid in it, and so on -- hilarious).

Anyway, my brother stumbled on an article today about the National Wax Museum:

Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt are missing their clothes and Fred Flintstone and the Teletubbies are just plain missing after a raid on wax figures owned by Ireland's National Wax Museum.

At least 50 figures were stolen or wrecked several weeks ago, the museum reported Monday. The wax museum, closed since 2005, has been storing its 400 figures in a warehouse while it works to reopen this fall.

Police say they suspect a door was left unlocked and the warehouse was used for an all-night rave party but museum officials discount that theory.

Also stripped of their clothes were Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and rebel icons from Ireland's war of independence with Britain, including Michael Collins and Padraig Pearse.

Most figures stolen came from the Children's World of Fairy Tale and Fantasy section; others were taken from the Chamber of Horrors. Gone are Bob the Builder, Frankenstein's monster, Fred Flintstone, Gollum from "Lord of the Rings," a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, "Silence of the Lambs" killer Hannibal Lecter, and all four Teletubbies.

Guitars adorning the figures of U2's The Edge and Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott also disappeared. Others, including Elvis and Madonna, suffered lost hair, limbs or jewelry.

The museum has been shut and searching for a home since 2005, when its run-down north Dublin base was razed to make way for a hotel. Dublin city officials vetoed one popular location, citing the wax museum's lack of cultural merit.

Museum manager Kay Murray said Monday she expects to announce a new location and reopening plans next month, although she said she did not know where the money to fix all the damage would come from.

She estimated the uninsured loss at $1.4 million and said some clothing _ particularly the authentic rebel uniforms _ was irreplaceable.

The warehouse was ransacked in mid-June. Murray said she spoke out now because the national police force, the Garda Siochana, had not arrested any suspects. She said she doubted the police theory that partying youths had been responsible, because nobody had seen kids carrying away the wax figures.

"Whoever did it was looking for uniforms, because most of our uniforms were stolen," Murray said, adding, "It's not going to stop the museum reopening. It will just delay us."

Surreal, eh? For what it's worth, Kay Murray was one of the investors' mistresses. *thumbs up*

The bell tower here sometimes plays The Final Countdown. And the Tetris song.

David Tidmarsh just said, "You can't spell fashion without fascist."

This is our super speller, guys. Take his word for it. 

Olivia just gave me a really weird smile, because she's talking to Mac Krumpak about an experiment that made lots of people starve, and how "interesting doesn't make it good, so I'll give you that."

God knows what "that" is. I guess Mac made a good point.

So guys. It's super silly that we all obviously check this blog all the time, yet none of us post. Silliest thing in the world.

So let's chat. For Halloween, what did you guys do? I was Peter Pan, and a bunch of my friends were Lost Boys and Tinkerbell and Captain Hook and Tiger Lily. Amir wore a beard and a bedsheet, and was occasionally supposed to be Jesus, Moses, or straight-up God. David T borrowed my roommate's private school uniform (yes, he totally did), and I can't for the life of me figure out what Dom was supposed to be. Maybe some kind of Peruvian? He wore a beard and not much of a shirt. Good thing it wasn't too cold. I don't remember what Tyler was, but I think his hair was gold.

We just watched William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and my gosh, it reminded me so much of the beginning of that Hamlet movie, the one with the hotel and the yellow sunglasses and the awful.

Also, I'm supposed to be writing a paper, and Olivia should be doing calculus, and David T should be reading the Bible. Guess what we're not doing.

Apparently on Olivia's bus yesterday, a creepy older guy with no teeth called her "Princess" and said she reminded him of his parole officer.

That's so sketchy, guys. I'm glad she didn't die.

Dom's at orchestra practice, and Amir left yesterday. We had a couple of adventures trying to find the right bus stop, interspersed with watching the food network in David T's suite. He's got a really nice suite, but mine is definitely better, despite the smallness and the brokenness of the bathrooms and lights and doors and walls and everything.

It's so social. I love it so much.

Guys, I have the biggest inferiority complex EVER about my housing situation here. But they fixed the locks on the doors, and put a new cover on the light, and worked to clean up the scorch marks on the ceiling.

I think I'm just going to post pictures on facebook at some point.

Liv says the football players in her writing seminar always make connections and comparisons to Disney movies in class. She says it's weird.

Guys, I really have to write my paper. I watched a silly Shakespeare movie instead of doing it. And I think I might fail out of college as a result of too much Mario Party and Super Smash Bros.

I miss each and every one of you so, so much.

Guys, It's October!

And cold. I miss and think of you often.

Nabokov sends his regards:

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

Greetings

I thought I would drop in and say a hello and good luck to everybody! I hope that everyone is having a nice, easy and exciting transition into college life!

Connect-the-Dots

Cornellians get free copies of the NYT and blazingly fast internet connections, so I've been able to keep up with the media's breathless coverage of the present developments in Georgia. The reporting has been uniformly bad, but I suppose that's par for the course when we're speaking of "All the news that's fit to print." What's unfortunate is that the reporters have been missing out on an opportunity for some great fun with this conflict.


Let's play a game. Let's play connect-the-dots.


We know that as of now, the ascendance of China and India has meant much greater competition for resources that were once primarily the domain of the US and Europe, i.e. food, water, metals, and fuel.


Metal is, to an extent, renewable. A given quantity of aluminum, used for one purpose, can be reused. The aluminum in a can becomes part of a battle cruiser and fuels a war. Copper on the bottom of cheap pans becomes invaluable wiring and fuels modernization.

Food and water, while often scarce, are rarely viewed in terms of Strategic Geopolitical Resources(tm). Shortages are instead viewed in terms of mundane trade policy and accidents of nature. I would argue that this view is flawed -- for Third World agricultural exporters, the difference between market-skewing subsidies and naval blockades is not all that different in terms of impact. But in any case, economics is seen as economics and geopolitcs as something separate. And food is most definitely renewable. You eat corn, you excrete it, at some point you die and are burried, and by the end of it, the soil is ready to support yet more corn.


Fuel is different, though. Six hundred million years ago, a vast sea monster died and drifted to the bottom of the ocean. Compression and heat broke it down into a hydrocarbon sludge locked deep within the earth. And now, six hundred million years later, we sucked it up and sold it to you for $4 a gallon. When you drove to work, blasting through a school zone at 65 mph, you incinerated that sea monster into oblivion. It is no more. It is gone from the face of the earth. And for this reason, oil is unique among the resources nations are competing over right now. Without oil, our entire economic system collapses.


Europe doesn't just love oil; it loves natural gas. Obviously, Europe does not produce large quantities of its own natural gas. Natural gas is shipped off to Europe from the Middle East through various pipeline networks. Here is the South Stream pipeline, a very important natural gas artery:





So our dots are connected, it would seem. We go from Europe and head toward.... uh, oh. Something's very wrong with this picture. We're headed toward Russia! Russia is connected to natural gas pipelines, with both Russian producers and Middle Eastern producers in on the game. But you see, even though the EU loves natural gas, it doesn't love Russia. This is unfortunate, because most of the EU's natural gas comes from Russia. This is good for Gazprom and Putin, but not so much for Exxon and BP.

Exxon? Yes, Exxon. It may be a US company, but if the US has mastered any skill as a nation, it's market destabilization. We're simply the best in the world at it, and we aren't about to lose that distinction. Oil markets are especially important to us. We hold the Saudis' hands at Crawford and help them fund anti-American terrorist cells. We call Putin, who we are supposedly all touchy-feely, BFFs with, by his surname. So when the dots in our natural gas pipeline lead to Russia, we reconnect them.

So remember that South Stream, our old friend? Let's draw some new dots, and....


WOWZERS! Our new Nabucco pipeline makes everything so much simpler! "Nabucco" is how you say, "Fuck you, Putin, fuck you so hard up the ass" in English (and French, and German, and... well, you get the idea).

So where are all our new dots, anyway?

I'll start off with the easiest one. See Georgia there? See which part of Georgia we're headed through? Pretty neat coincidence, huh?

Uht, oh! See that little greenish region we have dots in, right above Georgia. That's Russia! "Liv, Liv, I thought we were AVOIDING Russia!" You big silly, that part of Russia is Chechnya. I hear there's a war going on there as well, but I'll bet it's unrelated.

"OK, Liv, but we have dots in Iraq! We'll never get them all connected if we're trying to draw the line through war zones!" Well, that's the Kurdish North of Iraq. You probably haven't heard much about it, because right after the US invaded Iraq, we made sure it was as secure and stable as can be, economically and politically. It's pretty wonderful... well, except when Turkey invades it...

The only problem is that while we draw our picture, the Russians are drawing theirs, and they're a little faster than us. They have dots that go into South Ossetia too, and they want to connect them all up, just in case our lines get accidentally broken a few hundred times and Georgia doesn't get to be a part of anyone's picture. But at least Turkey and the other downstream countries will have that line to pump through.

Fuck the NYT Daily Crossword. Connect-the-dots is a lot more exciting!

Hats off to you

I have had a lovely day, and I would like to share it with a group of lovely people.

I played piano for a couple of hours. I read a new book under my favorite old tree in our garden while drinking tea I'd made with mint from that same garden. I had good-natured but intense arguments with a few members of my household; I listened to music until my ears twitched, sang some old songs, went through some old letters.

For the first time in a year, I wore a certain black hat that once called the Telluride House at Cornell home but soon grew attached to my head and later to my bookshelf, a hat that was supposed to serve as a comforting reminder of six weeks of forever but was unsuccessful in driving away the pain of separation when pitted against the memory of the actual thing.

As many of us go on to start a new chapter of our lives, as some of us already have, I want to take the opportunity to just smile at you virtually, tell you how much I love you, remind you that you all will always be in my thoughts and in my heart, and salute you for being the exceptional people you are.

If I had a false mustache (I want to write "moustache" so desperately. There, I did it.), a monocle and a tailcoat, I would don them now with that TASP hat as a flashback to our kooky TASPy cross-dressing party and then slip into a low bow, removing the hat with a flourish. A virtual flourish, of course.

Basically, I've been missing you these past few days (weeks, months, year) and wanted to say hello and how are you and please keep this blog alive 103 posts after its inception and please, pretty please excuse my use of polysyndeton, which I know is annoying.

In other news, I am thinking of taking a trip in the Easterly direction this Thanksgiving. Nothing for certain yet, but the prospect of a reunion could be the incentive I need to actually go and get tickets. Anyone?

Laura's crazy, but Mac's boring, which is worse.

I think I'm probably a little crazy. I'm always really hesitant to post on here, because I think, "Jeez, they're going to think I'm totally wacko. They're going to think I spend all my time on this blog, just posting stuff that no one wants to read. I'll be such a bother."

As is evident, I think about it probably too much.
I also forget that the fact that I always check the blog, compulsively, as I told Aurelie, doesn't mean I'm actually communicating. I mean, you guys can't tell. I'm a little crazy.

Mac says, "A little?" Mac says I'm a lot crazy, apparently. Mac's kind of a jerk, you guys.

Mac's also contributing to this post, and doesn't think this is fair. Mac says, "I could just delete all of that." But then I wouldn't be communicating, either.

Hey you guys, Mac came to visit me! In scenic Kirksville! Super exciting! Scenic northeast Missouri (NEMO), specifically. We drove around the House district today, seeing the beautiful hills and being friendly. Also running political errands. Because that's what I spend so much time doing.

We miss you guys. I read the post Julieta wrote, and the posts everyone else wrote, and we're all nostalgic, and I think it's great. Mac said I sound generic, and that I make him sound like an awful person, to which he objects strongly. Mac is not an awful person. But I digress.
Mac and my brother, Andrew, whom some of you have met, are making fun of me for needing to sleep eight hours a night. They're saying I'm a sloth, and that I have too many toes. I say they're inaccurate. I am not a three-toed sloth, or any kind of sloth. Nope.

Anyway, yes. We do miss you guys. When I read the posts, I wanted to be all, "Oh my gosh, totally, I totally miss you guys!" That was my immediate response. I sound kind of vapid, guys. It's terrible. That's not Mac making a value judgment, that's me being critical. Mac's being quiet, instead of making fun of me. Only now he's doing it passive-aggressively. You guys miss us so much, right?
Mac's not a terrible person. He's being really nice and not saying anything about the typos I keep making. And in general, he's a pretty okay guy. Awww.

Anyway. Again. We've got a point. Mac says I shouldn't digress again. But I'm getting to the point. Which is that you all, to me, to us, are inspiring. Meeting you, and getting to know you, and falling in love with each of you, mattered. And still matters. You still matter to us. Julieta mentioned that she still thinks about TASP every day. I read that, and it seemed like a strange statement to me. I hadn't really thought about it before. But you guys, I can't imagine not thinking about TASP, or all of you, or living in the house and the whole beautiful summer every day.

I'm glad you all say stuff like that, though, because then I know it's not just me. And then I don't feel like I'm quite as totally crazy. So that's good.
Mac agrees.

Incidentally, we're having fun here in Kirksville. Mac's computer is really cool, because it changes colors. And there's aliens on it.

happy day out of time!

So it’s that time of the year again, in which either common sense or the hand of Nunn calls us to protect ourselves from the indignity of the Gregorian calendar, and to let this blog pass in silence, I’m sure you’d all agree, would be nothing short of egregious.

But anyway....It’s crazy (preposterous, even!) to think that a year ago we were still living in the same House. The same brickful of memory stuffed with creaking stairs and midnight excursions and funny quarrels, all topped with a handful of eternally endearing inhabitants who, even as I write this, having been scattered away to the four winds (though some are blessed to have clustered together), are now certainly busy with dominating the world, achieving intellectual greatness, etc.

Well—I don’t know what to write. I wish I could verbalize the unreality of those six weeks, or explain away this constricting of the chest that has made me so absurdly restless...

I went to China for six weeks or so. Time passes very slowly there (or is it the jetlag that has drugged me?) and then suddenly—knowingly, like a cruel jest—disappears. Beijing, as expected, is caught in the excitement and perspiration of Olympic fever. Children shout in the streets, thousands collapse in the wake of natural disaster; a genius is born and dies. The world seems so stupidly unaware of itself.

How I miss the tapioca pearls of Ithaca! And those random outings to collegetown, the academic eccentricity and quiet intellectualism we all possess to some degree, that air of familiarity I can’t quite place and maybe never will find again... Because as tightly-knit and visually aesthetic as it seems (actually it’s really not), Alpharetta pales in comparison. Everywhere I see strangers and forced smiles. True, the weather is nice and it’s always great to be in the company of classmates, but there’s an extreme deficiency in TASPer population, which invariably makes for some very dull and nonexistent conversations.

But back to the point: Happy July 25^th! I am in love with you all.

Croissants

I have accomplished something. Well, halfway. My mom made croissant dough, but didn't have time to make them. So... I rolled and baked them! And they are delicious. TASP comes back with every bite.

Flowers, Sunshine, and a Side Dish of Mosquitoes

My last comment on Julieta's post was amazingly depressing and I'm not actually feeling that depressed. Except when I think that someone else has taken over Room 21 at 217 West Avenue, Ithaca...

My life in Colorado has been full of mosquitoes. They drove me from my beloved garden! But I decided to defeat them and probably partially destroy myself by using mosquito repellent. Oh, you lovely, smelly deet. I'm not surprised mosquitoes hate the stuff, if I could, I'd probably get as far away from myself as possible when I'm wearing it. But of course, that sort of thing requires a much higher level of consciousness than I have personally reached. I suppose if I'd reached that point, I wouldn't have to put on the repellent because I would have ceased to notice the mosquitoes.
But, the flowers in my garden are the most beautiful things in the world. I have lupins, columbines, daisies, lilies, and tons of poppies. The poppies seed themselves EVERYWHERE. And my mom lets them. The neighbors think we're opium dealers, I'm sure.
I've been working on the farm, driving tractors mostly. If any of you want the farm experience, you should really come visit me! My dad would also appreciate the extra help.
The mountains are beautiful. But the snow is still everywhere, and I won't be able to go hiking for another two weeks, probably. I think my family's first trip is to travel about 20 miles of the Continental Divide. Then I'm climbing a fourteener (Mt. Blanca; elev. 14,100ish ft.), which I promised myself I would never do again, because there are so many people. If anyone would care to come on either of these trips, you should probably plan to arrive in Colorado in the next few days, because you'll need to get yourself acclimated.

So, what this post is trying to prove is that despite all the sad things I have to say about my community, my little sunny patch of Southern Colorado is really a worthwhile place to visit. And you don't even have to meet any people, because I live out in the country and go into town once a week at the most. Well, I admit that mosquitoes aren't a very appealing aspect of my life, but they should be gone in about a month! And I think everyone loves to have something to complain about in life, and mosquitoes make such a worthy adversary, don't you think?

The Anniversary

I find myself sitting at the computer on a Tuesday night thinking of what I was doing a year ago. I feel like I should be having some deep thoughts about TASP or sobbing or both. I always expected for this to be a weepy anniversary but I have had dry eyes all day. This may sound weird and obsessive and I may be the only one but a year later not a day goes by that I don't think about TASP or the people related to it. Not one day. I don't think there is anything else I think about everyday other than my immediate needs for survival.

Maybe that's what happened to me a year ago, I found something so impressive that it became fundamentally incorporated into my identity. Sometimes I think that perhaps I romanticize the whole experience into this epic experiment in communal living, intellectual inquiry, etc. And I think that I do but there is some truth behind the memories I hold. I don't know about anyone else but before TASP I believed that there had to be other people out there like me. Like me in the sense that with these "people" I wouldn't be accused of being arrogant for the way I spoke up in discussion, or that I would find others who pursued knowledge of a given subject with the same intensity that I did or that there were people out there that were simply dreamers like me. (Damn this is coming out like an angsty teenage confession. Sorry, it will get better--I hope.) I blindly trusted that those people were out there somewhere and that surely I would meet them in the utopic world that was college. But it wasn't until the summer of '07 that I actually knew they existed. And I lived with you all and just reveled in the feverishness that such a experience produced. That first week was simply dripping with life. I was wired on the energy of excitement. And I think that sort of exuberant excitement that lasts a whole week and trickels into another five only happens once in a life time. Other experiences are either too short to reach that intensity or too long to the point where the flaws are exposed.

I look back with nostalgia now but I am also focused on what lies ahead. After TASP, I have seen the energy and brilliance of my peers. Instead of becoming disillusioned when I am confronted with all the ways the world is falling apart these days I'm thinking that we'll manage. We'll survive because the world has people like all of you. I wish we could have stayed forever but we are all needed somewhere, somehow.

I'm sorry if this is corny. I can't help it. There is too much love for this to not be corny. Either that or I am just not badass enough. My writing skills could clearly use help from you rad bloggers.

I love you all.

My last column..dedicated to...hypocrite lecteur...mon semblable, - mon frere...whatever...dedicated to cornell tasp 07...for L.L Nunn...i guess..eeww

“Reading,” Schopenhauer writes, “is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.”

“Reading,” you think, “no one does that anymore. I read chapter summaries on a popular website for students who don’t like to read. And anyway, if Brian Sherwin is telling me that Schopenhauer wrote that reading is preventing me from thinking for myself, then I shouldn’t read, anyway!”

Wrong, but I don’t want to give you a longwinded explanation of why you should read. However, since I must write a column for the Hilltop Beacon, I’ll spend a tiny slice of your time to tell you why you should read. But I don’t like to be dogmatic, though. I don’t want to force you to do something that you don’t want to do. You go to Roslyn; you are constantly being told what to do by your parents, your teachers, your friends, your voices in your head, which are not the telltale signs of insanity. The voices in your head are your unique thoughts that other people cannot steal or see or read or hear. But that sort of contradicts my attempt to convince you to read because reading would plant an ancient author’s insane ramblings in your brain instead of allowing you to think for yourself. I’ve heard “think for yourself” so much that I don’t know what the phrase means anymore, though. But I want you to read! Here’s why you should read…

Alright, imagine that you are illiterate. You are unable to gather new information for yourself except for what you hear from other people. You walk into a grocery store (I don’t support product placement, so I won’t name the store Pathmark). You obliviously walk past the smiling cashiers and…forget the article, which I am writing at the moment because recent complaints from Complaints Choirs Worldwide have forced me to stop writing about illiteracy. They think that people from Roslyn High School aren’t going to start reading because of a silly little article that no one is going to read anyway. They think that Roslyn High School students should just join Complaints Choirs Worldwide to complain about everything. At least the complainers will learn how to unionize.

Complaints Choirs Worldwide would like me to say a few words about their history.

It happened in Helsinki, Finland. It was cold. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen were walking in a park. They huddled together with a large group of people. Naturally, the group complained about the weather. There is a Finnish expression which means “complaints choir,” which describes when a large group of people are complaining collectively. The Kalleinens thought that taking the expression literally would be a good idea.

The first Complaints Choir was started in Birmingham, England. They sang about complaints. After the success of the Birmingham Complaints Choir, the Kalleinens were invited to initiate choirs across the world.

Now that I think about it…I am basically just a professional complainer. I’ve complained about boredom, the conception of the self, RCP (in an unpublished article), complaining, and people who use SparkNotes. So, another thought pops into my puny pulp of a brain. Oh…what was the thought? I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.

I think both of us have had enough nonsense. Let’s just shake hands, part ways, and forget that my column ever existed.

I’ve always wanted to end a column with the word mayonnaise.

Pobrecitos conejitos

I had a graduation party with the kids from my Catholic elementary school, since we're all still friends. There was a lot of food left over, so we took home a veggie tray and some cheese. No one in my family likes radishes, though, so we didn't know what to do with them. I didn't really worry about it.
My brothers, benevolent friends to animals that they are, decided to throw them to the rabbits in our yard.

Wait, not to the rabbits. At the rabbits.

I didn't know about it until I heard them talking last night about how Joey hit three of them.

And of course they defended themselves.
"No, Laura, it's not sociopathic."
"The rabbits need food!"
"We're not throwing them hard, really. They slow down because of the air resistance, and they're never high enough for acceleration due to gravity to have much of an effect."
"The rabbits aren't hurt, they're happy! Happy because they love radishes!"
"You just want the rabbits to starve."
"Laura, why do you hate bunnies?"

Economics and Ethics: A Rant

Mac asked us to keep the blog alive, so I guess I'll share. This is one of those topics that's been bothering me for a while, but that I really can't talk to people in Wilson about with any depth. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

In the mid-1700s, Francis Hutchenson, one of Adam Smith's instructors at Glasgow, wrote A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. In the section entitled "The Principles of Oeconomics and Politics," we get a few chapters on marriage and divorce, roles within a household (parent/child, master/servant) and the duties and responsibilities of household members. Otherwise, the section is pretty much devoted to politics. It's only when you get to the section entitled "Elements of the Law of Nature" that you get anything about property, money, and prices. These, apparently, were not a part of "oeconomics."

Hutchenson wasn't being dense. "Oeconomics," as it was understood until about the 1750, mostly had to do with household management, politics, or even management in a more general sense. Xenophon's Oikonomikos was fundimentally a work of ethics, and it is worth noting that Adam Smith himself was primarily a moralist. Economics was not a science, it was a field concerned with obtaining "the good life," starting at the home and later branching out into a larger, national sense on the level of the state.

What's struck me as I read more about modern economics is the almost total reversal that's taken place when we talk about the role of ethics in economic analysis. Economists have an almost painfully self-conscious desire to be scientists, and part of this desire to avoid nonscientific analysis is an attempt to aviod the kind of moral baggage that their forerunners attached to their analyses. Aside from the pure silliness that comes with a man studying social constructs trying to present himself on the same level of material objectivity as, say, a chemist (really, guys? really?), it has some implications that really disturb me.

Economics is all about choice. And in a context where (1) alternatives are pretty loaded, morally (for example, the choice between feeding the poor through social programs or letting them starve until the market corrects itself) and (2) alternatives are laid out with at least the hypothetical expectation of implimentation ("There is no such thing as a free abstraction"), even the apparent lack of preference on the part of the economist represents a moral choice in and of itself. In other words, by presenting "aid the needy" and "let them eat cake" as equally valid alternatives, their respective consequences described without comment, the economist has made an ethical statement, and a fairly disturbing one at that.

Economists try to run from this problem with a weird kind of number fetishism (under the assumption, I suppose, that numbers speak for themselves and therefore do not require an analysis that isn't completely factual), but all that it has really accomplished is to have made the field one of incomplete analysis. So, for example, we talk about GDP because it is easily measured, but we are less comfortable talking about the actual standard of living of the citizenry. We talk about production levels in a capitalist system, but we are less comfortable talking about waste (in contexts other than efficiency within production). These are important issues, but recieve little attention.

As much as I loathe his ideology and his propagandistic techniques, in this sense I really do have a deep respect for Milton Friedman. Friedman did not simply say, "the market is self-correcting, unless its normal fluctuations are impeded by state intervention," but actually went further, interpreted that conclusion as one that implies a certain ideology, and defended the logical ethical conclusions of that ideology. (A less repugnant example of an economist who is also willing to moralize might be someone like Galbraith or Stiglitz, but TASP nostalgia made Friedman hard to resist.)

Economics needs ideologues. Writing that almost makes me cringe, and you can bet that you will never hear me say that about another field as long as I live. But I think it's incredibly important. Fuck "political economy," fuck "social science." We need a "moral economy." Economists are and have always been closely linked to questions of social organization and policy-making. Scientists and mathematicians can tell us how to get where we are going, but they cannot tell us where we must go. For that, we need moralists, we need a vision. In a field so closely linked to politics, it is unspeakably irresponsible to shirk this responsibility.

I know more TASPers than myself are going into Econ, or planning to, at least. For fuck's sake, don't become one of those assholes who creates elaborate models to determine the impact of a 0.1% change in the interest rate. Don't sit around in a pressed suit and ask a table full of identically-dressed balding men whether we're bulls or bears. You, of all people, need to be the ones to shape our world, or to at least have the spine to try.

Empty White Chairs

It seems as if the blog has died a little of late. I assume this has something to do with end-of-year formalities. I hope everyone is having fun at their wild shindigs and graduation ceremonies. Mine was destroyed by rain.

The graduating class was divided into groups, with one third graduating in the auditorium, and the rest of us in the gym. The orchestra, choir and band didn't get to play, because there wasn't enough room, so they used a recording of Pomp & Circumstance instead. Our commencement speaker, a friend of mine who is apparently a fabulous writer, had to record her speech earlier in the day, to be played in the auditorium. We in the gym got the real thing, and it was moving. I almost cried. There was a pall over the whole night. We could only have three guests per graduating student, so none of the younger students got to see us graduate, and for those whose families flew out to see the graduation, I imagine that graduation was not the best day ever.

Empty white chairs will be all that I remember of that night. The day before graduation, my friends and I went out to the football field, where graduation is normally held. They'd already put out the chairs for the graduating class, so there were rows and rows of empty white chairs facing an empty, blue-carpeted platform. Behind it were the risers for the choir and a stack of orchestra chairs. Tammy (my friend) wouldn't let any of us step on the blue carpet. She told us that we would have to wait until tomorrow night.

The next morning, we had to wake up unfortunately early for graduation practice, where they laid out the protocol in the event of rain. We all sat in uncomfortable white chairs, waiting while Mr. Gehrman, our principal, filled us in on Plan B. As it turns out, Plan B became the Plan. After a series of whirlwind visits to the junior classes, the senior AP English class went to Mrs. White's Golden Rule Cafe for Soul Food Day with our teacher. By the way, yams are delicious. As we came back from Soul Food Day, we passed by the stadium again. I saw the rows of empty white chairs again, and I think it was then that I decided they ought to be significant in some way, an unfulfilled promise to the graduating class of '08. Don't hate, oh-eight.

By this time, it was drizzling slightly. There were texts being buzzed around town, filled with inspirational cries of rebellion: "The class of '08 started together, the class of '08 will end together!" Viva la revolucion. Obviously, despite the fervor with which it seems the entire class of '08 opposed Plan B, the uprising failed. By the time I got to school for the graduation, I didn't hear any kind of dissent against what was now, officially, the Plan.

Ironically enough, at graduation time, there was no rain whatsoever. It looked like things might be clearing up. They didn't. In fact, things got much worse in the course of graduation. It was probably a good thing that we stayed inside. Marcos de Niza High School had theirs outside, and from all accounts, everyone was miserable. As it turned out, the post-graduation felicitations were much more heartfelt than might have been expected. Having been driven apart by Fate, we were far more inclined to cling to each other. The hugs were tighter, the smiles were bigger, and the laughs were louder.

Obviously, since I'd already decided that the empty white chairs were significant, I made sure to study them before we left. They were still sitting out on the field, empty, wet and soaking. I stole one for my friend Woody.

The rest of the night was filled with celebrations of a more traditional sort, and I forgot all about being a high school graduate. On the way back from Chris Lue Sang's graduation shindig, we noticed that the stadium lights were still on at our school, so we swung by again (Incidentally, I have no idea why the lights were on in the first place, if they weren't planning on having the graduation out there). The chairs were still there, and they were still being beaten by the rain. With the lights blazing, and the empty bleachers waiting for an audience, there was a definite air of expectancy. I would like to think they're still waiting, transported into a different dimension, for the class of '08 to return and graduate.

Anyway, I just thought you all should know what happened on my graduation night. Tell me all about yours! Or if it hasn't happened yet, then tell me about something else equally fascinating. Forgive me if my prose waxes obnoxious. These are just some thoughts that have been running through my head of late. You all need to show me how to write better. Try writing something in the blog, so I can have some examples. The blog must be revived! Viva la blog!

Who does this remind YOU of?

So I was watching Across the Universe the other day for the 500th time and for those of you haven't seen it, well...it's your loss. Anyway, I was watching it and then it occured to me that Bono's lines in this scene bear an uncanny resemblance to a certain "theosopher's" insightful words we had the pleasure of listening to on the peace sign that one memorable evening. Or maybe not....it just reminded me of it. My memory may actually be screwed up and I could actually be completely wrong and you'll all read this and watch this and be like what the fuck is she talking about but maybe this was my way of getting all of you to watch part of this movie or perhaps just my way of saying, "Hey!" So here you go...sorry the quality is quite poor. I was excited that I managed to find this scene on youtube in the first place. Oh and I hope everyone's APs and IBs and such are going well. And you don't have to watch the whole thing just that one part.

"Dude! Africa!"

I was recently reminded of this article by novelist Uzodinma Iweala. It ran in the WaPo last summer, and my mom actually mailed to me when I was at TASP. I thought of it after hearing that a group of students from my school had gone to lobby Congress for money for the education of children in "developing" countries.

While this may be a worthy cause (although I'm sure Gayatri Spivak would have something to say about the transmission of Anglo-American values through US-funded education systems), I'm absolutely infuriated by the idea that Congress would send ed money to other countries while schools just blocks away from the Capitol are understaffed, dilapidated, and lacking basic resources like clean drinking water and textbooks. But that's not really the point here.

"...There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems...

Two years ago I worked in a camp for internally displaced people in Nigeria, survivors of an uprising that killed about 1,000 people and displaced 200,000. True to form, the Western media reported on the violence but not on the humanitarian work the state and local governments -- without much international help -- did for the survivors. Social workers spent their time and in many cases their own salaries to care for their compatriots. These are the people saving Africa, and others like them across the continent get no credit for their work.

Last [June] the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth."

from "Stop Trying to 'Save' Africa" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301714.html)

I pose this question to you all: which is more important, giving aid (keeping in mind that financial assistance has produced valuable successes as well as miserable failures in many of these contries) or avoiding the development of quasi-colonial dependency in countries receiving it?

xkcd

A new comic strip I stumbled upon. I thought you would all appreciate it.

You guys, this is so apocalyptic!

Fermilab cited in suit to freeze Swiss accelerator

Switzerland has a long legacy of peaceful neutrality, but two men claim that Swiss scientists are building a device that could destroy the universe.

Walter Wagner, a former radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration who studied physics at University of California–Berkeley, and Luis Sancho, a self-professed time-theory researcher, have filed suit to halt construction on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until their safety concerns are satisfied. The U of C’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) is one of the defendants in the lawsuit.

The Geneva-based LHC will become the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator when unveiled this summer under the auspices of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). The $8-billion endeavor is an international collaborative effort involving scientists from dozens of countries and universities.

The collider will raise protons to energies approaching seven trillion electron volts before slamming them together in an attempt to produce the Higgs boson and other elementary particles that would help move scientists closer to a Grand Unified Theory of physics.

But Wagner and Sancho claim that these experiments will produce dangerous materials as well. One such possibility they suggest is the creation of strangelets, altered subatomic particles that would change the earth into a dense mass of exotic “strange matter.”

They also said that the creation of mini black holes inside the accelerator could grow to consume the earth or even our entire universe.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Hawaii, also charges CERN with failing to file an environmental impact statement as required by the U.S.’s National Environmental Policy Act.

Wagner and Sancho are seeking a restraining order to stop CERN from proceeding with the LHC until new environmental and safety studies can be completed. CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, but the suit also names Fermilab, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Science Foundation as defendants.

Fermilab and the DOE are building key components for the LHC, so restraining orders against them could slow or halt the project.

CERN physicists said that they have made efforts to ensure the LHC is not dangerous.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe,” said James Gillies, CERN’s head of communications, in an interview with The New York Times last week. “Scientifically, we’re not hiding away.”

A 2003 CERN internal review determined that the likelihood of apocalyptic results from the LHC is negligible.

But Wagner remains unconvinced.

“They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe, but basically it’s propaganda,” he told the Times. He said that CERN’s safety reviews were “fundamentally flawed” and weren’t conducted by disinterested parties.

Fermilab scientists and spokespeople would not comment on the pending lawsuit, deferring all questions to public affairs at the Department of Justice (DOJ). DOJ staff members, however, have also declined to comment.

But Edward Kolb, chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University, who spent a year working at CERN, said the suit is without scientific merit.

“I am much more concerned about Godzilla arising from Lake Michigan and cavorting about in Hyde Park than about collisions at CERN causing the end of the world,” Kolb said in an e-mail interview with the Maroon.

Kolb explained that cosmic rays strike the Earth’s atmosphere thousands of times per day with energies equal to or greater than those that will be produced in the LHC.

“If doomsday from energetic particle collisions was a possibility, it would have happened a long time ago,” he said.

However, the collisions of cosmic rays produce particles that fly away from the earth at near–light speed, while those in the LHC will stick around much longer. Some of these particles might form mini black holes. Physicist Stephen Hawking postulated in 1974 that such mini black holes were harmless and would quickly evaporate, but whether these black holes would be stable enough to consume the earth remains an open question.

Kolb added that if Wagner and Sancho are so worried about CERN, they should consider lobbying Congress to “ban cosmic radiation altogether.”

“Preliminary results point to the cosmic rays originating from gigantic black holes in distant galaxies. If Mr. Wagner’s concerns have any merit, then according to the [Bush] Administration’s policy of preemptive action, those galaxies must be immediately destroyed,” Kolb said.

Wagner unsuccessfully filed a similar lawsuit in 1999 to stop operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Since 2000, the RHIC has operated without incident.

-The Maroon

Limited-Time Offer!

I've been in ballet since I was five. I used to pretend (at around age 8) that I was an amazing dancer, but as a grew older, I had to come to terms with reality.

And today, I realized that story ballets (like "The Wizard of Oz") help ballet teachers deal with dancers like me. The character roles hide the bad dancers in comic costumes, and those who can actually dance are given solos like "Emerald" and "Glinda the Good Witch" (which I don't believe she is, because she sends Dorothy all through Oz just to tell her that the whole journey could have ended at the beginning and we've just wasted three hours with a pointless story).

But, who wants to walk around in a constricting tutu when you can walk around in a bad ass Cowardly Lion suit? I'm telling you, this thing is AMAZING! The crotch is down to my knees, and I've got the most uncomfortable mane, which covers half my face. If it was a cold winter night, I'd be the last to freeze in all the layers this suit has. Its even got a tail that I can hold on to when the Wicked Witch creeps up on me in the forest. I've got the most amazing lines in the whole show, I get to pass out, I get to dance with a cape like a bullfighter... (You get the idea that it's amazing?)

So,
"What puts the 'hot' in hot-n-tot, what puts the 'ape' in apricot, what have they got that I ain't got?"
Well, I'll tell you. They've got tickets to my show on May 9-11.

Order now and you'll get a free ticket along with a suite and gourmet food at the Miller-ter Kuile Hotel and Resort! The first 31 callers get a farm tour free of charge. Offer ends soon, and supplies are limited, so hurry in for yours today!
Some restrictions apply. Visit Ana for details. Must be a qualified TASPer to enter. Offer ends 05/11/08.

It's been a weird day, I'm sorry.
Love you all!
Ana

This Modern Economy

Like, whoa.

NYTimes.com: Treasury Dept. Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/business/29regulate.html?ex=1364529600&en=da56dc4e51747775&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
(Sorry, you may have to watch this bloody advertisement before you can read the article. It won't let you skip it. Just cope.)

Does this sound like an extension of federal regulatory power to anyone else? Dude, I thought the guys at the Treasury Department were supposed to be Republicans.
Okay, so Paulson says he's "not suggesting that more regulation is the answer," but that "we should and can have a [regulatory] structure that is designed for the world we live in, one that is more flexible.” Huh? Once we have a wider window onto all the crazy shit the banks and other corporate-financial institutions perpetrate to make money-- or to make bank, and thus be money, as some of us would say-- and assuming the press actually does some investigative reporting on the issue (it's a special occasion), public outrage over any semi-criminal activity would likely (eventually) lead to an expansion of powers of regulation commensurate with the proposed enlargement of powers of oversight.
This pronouncement isn't so remarkable in terms of content as it is for what it shows about the degree to which companies and financial institutions are allowed to occlude their internal activity. Not that economic structure ----> culture (I'm not a Marxist), but it does play a large role in the complex interactions that produce contemporary culture and society. Generally (owing to both corporate obfuscation and old-fashioned nonchalant ignorance), we don't know enough about the way our economy works. The function of the economy is a political issue-- maybe the political issue-- and we need to get educated.
At least, I do.
In the vain of political stuff, I highly recommend Said's essay "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community."

The Fame of my Hometown

I was born (but don't live) in a town that's known for sunshine and clean water-according to the mayor of Alamosa in her interview on NPR the other day.
If you looked up Alamosa on search engines before last week, you might have discovered that we celebrate being the coldest place in the nation. Not much to celbrate about, but when it's that cold, you'll basically celebrate anything to stay warm and alive.
Now we can proudly say that all the water is undrinkable because of a Salmonella outbreak. The intelligent water resource guys were very clever because they accidentally sliced a sewer line that somehow managed to contaminate one of the storage tanks.
So now, Alamosa will have chlorinated water forever.
I'm happy to say: number one, I don't live in Alamosa; and two, my house has its own well.
Then again, I live 1/4 mile from a contaminated river, so I could go crazy because of the amount of aluminum in the water. But at least I won't be throwing up and other stuff...

Montreal!

So I am currently in Montreal visiting Aurelie, and this will be a joint-post from the both of us. Several anecdotes from our adventures in la belle province:

You know you're from Montreal when...
- it's safer to walk in the middle of the street than on the icy sidewalks.
- random people walk down the streets smoking joints in plain sight.
- the bubble tea slushies are so cold that they give you brain freezes.
- some restaurants have menus only in English, some only in French.
- people play the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto so fast that the accompanist can't keep up.
- the subways and Chinatown are both clean.
- they make you pay to walk into churches.
- they have rock concerts in churches.

And other random anecdotes:
- we called Dominick on Sunday and talked to him over the speakerphone. We got to hear him urinate. It was memorable.
- Aurelie is the baby (not over 18) so we couldn't get into a bar - and ended up drinking tea with 6 other people at midnight.
- Aurelie's family initiated a debate over artwork that nobody (besides me) had ever seen.
- conversation between us- me: Where did you get your bracelet from? Aurelie: Martinique. me: is that a shop around here? Aurelie: it's an island in the Caribbean...
- Phone call with Valentin- us: Hey Valentin! Are you on break? Valentin: no, I'm in class...
- We try to contact David P. We call his cellphone. It is off. We call his home phone (but we misdial the number): Aurelie: hi, this is Aurelie from the summer program TASP. Is David home? Some random woman: We don't have any David working here... Then we try to redial the number, and we get the message that this phone number does not accept solicitations. Epic fail.

We love you guys.

Let's start writing, guys!

So school starts again tomorrow, and I'm having difficulty going to sleep. For that matter, I'm having difficulty doing anything. I'm supposed to read Invisible Man by tomorrow at around 2:02 PM, and I'm on chapter 10. Chapter 10 starts on page 192, and the book's a little over 500 pages long. I'm pretty much screwed. Especially if I keep not reading and not sleeping, like I'm doing right now.
I really have nothing to say here, but I felt it was important to post on the blog. We seem to have taken a collective hiatus from blog-posting, and it's time that comes to an end. So start posting! Please. I'm bored. And for other, more high-minded reasons, too. Like friendship or for the sake of the written word. Write something better than this pathetic excuse for a blogpost. One that uses actual words, instead of 'blogpost.' Blogger tells me that it's not a word. So start using real ones. Now I'm rambling. I'll see you all sometime before we all die. Or not.

Two posts in a row is maybe ridiculous. I'm maybe ridiculous.

Truman State might be the best place to go to school.
I just heard the big news--

From the Student Activities Board's Upcoming Events:

OMG! Shoes!
A Liam Show with Liam Sullivan
7pm on Wednesday, April 2nd, in Baldwin Auditorium
Tickets free with Student ID, $2 for GA
Warning: This show will contain Explicit Content

Guys, it's that guy. Text Message Breakup Guy is coming to my town. So soon.

You know you want to come visit me. Tickets are just two dollars! We could tell him all about how we combined his work with that of Rabelais, and he'd love us, I bet.

Also, I just got back from Demo Days, Northeast Missouri's favorite political conference.
Our State Auditor is HILARIOUS when she's drunk. And I got to be on TV, because Jay Nixon, the gubernatorial candidate, showed up and had a press conference. So if you were paying attention to Missouri politics today (instead of Wyoming, I guess), you totally could've seen me smiling and nodding at all the right points. He's going to turn this state around.
Mostly because he believes in letting children have doctors. Everyone at the convention really liked that.

Just imagine if this story were about Bloomberg.

I was at a chocolate festival yesterday.

It's a thing my town does every year. I think it's hosted by Planned Parenthood, or it's a fundraiser for them or something, so those who attend are of an overwhelmingly Democratic majority. It's mostly the politics people and the university people. They all know each other.
The way it works is that each person pays five dollars, and lots of people bring in plates full of pieces of different kinds of chocolate foods. Cakes, cookies, truffles, whatever. There's so much chocolate.

I was sitting at a table, and I was a little perturbed, because I had taken little samples of so many different things that I wanted to try. But I didn't really want to eat all of them, because it would've been way too much chocolate. I looked around the room for my friends, and the mayor of my town, who was standing near my table, happened to glance at me at the moment that I was looking in her direction.

It was that eye contact between people who don't really know each other that means they have to say something, some kind of small talk, so that it's not just a "I'm looking at you and you're looking at me" moment. Kirksville's a friendly town.

So she came over and asked me how I was doing, and I said I was fine and asked her how she was doing, and she said she was fine. Then:

Mayor of Kirksville: So did you get all the chocolate you wanted?
Me: Oh, man, yeah, there's way too much. I'm really hoping my friends will come back and share this plate with me, because I just wanted to try this stuff; I didn't want to eat all of it.
Mayor: Well, I admire your restraint. If I get a plate of chocolate in front of me, I just eat it all. Now I don't feel too well.
Me: Oh. (Sympathetically, not indifferently. I'm not a jerk to the mayor.)

And then she moved on. And that's my first conversation with the mayor of Kirksville.

Happy Frog Day!

(Though of course we all know the Gregorian calendrical system, parasitical entity that it is, completely sucks the life out of everything. Then again, today only happens once every four years, and we only age so fast...I wonder what that means, cosmically-speaking?)

But yes; hooray for galactical unity! I’m so glad we haven’t all slipped into oblivion nowadays; I love everything (almost) and everyone; February is such a draining, cold, dreary, clammy month—in fact it’s already snowed twice over here already—! But it would be cooler (no pun intended) if I could trade places with you, Ana. :O)

Anyway, I guess I don’t really have anything doubleplus-meaningful to enhance the aesthetic ambiance of this blog or whatnot (well, unless you count my daily dose of mindless drivel, ha!), but I did dig up a pretty interesting film clip that could use some serious collective TASPer analysis...

So, without further ado, THE CAGE DUDE.

(It’s not on YouTube. Everything is on YouTube. The fact that it’s not on YouTube, surprisingly, annoys me a little, because, well, that’s just not right, right?)

Ralph Ellison SUX!!!!!!!!!

So Invisible Man is just about the most obnoxious book I've ever read. It is the most ham-handed, clumsy excuse for prose to lay claim to the title. I bet Ralph Ellison thought he was so cool, writing with all his symbolism and his clever allegories for racial oppression and the battle for social equality. He's not.

I just wanted to share my opinion with all of you.

Planet of the Apes?

With God as my wittness, not a word of this is made up.

Some backstory:

My friend Dev is a blackbelt in karate (which is worth about one hundred hilarious stories in and of itself), and his old instructor's brother recently bought some substantial acreage in Wilson, on which he has constructed one of those epic, Tasteless Mansions that anyone who lives in the almost-country knows and loves. No one really knows how this guy got so much money, but we are aware of one source of his income. "Charlie the Chimp," a small chimpanzee with relatively impressive martial arts training, is a staple at state and county fairs. When our new neighbor goes to the local grocery store, you can bet that Charlie is with him, seated comfortably in a bag while his master peruses the Hamburger Helper. I suppose "Karate Chimp" counts as a helper animal, though I'd be more inclined to use the word "henchman."

Remember what I said about this being true, and stay with me here.

For the past two years, this guy has been trying to construct a chimpanzee sanctuary on his property. Some problems:

1. His first proposal utilized a chainlink fence and, I'm assuming, prayer to keep the chimps inside his property.
2. Since animal sanctuaries are untaxable, everyone assumes he's doing this as some kind of a crazy tax dodge, especially as his McMansion is on the same part of his property as the sanctuary would be (and would therefore be tax-free).
3. Neighbors are afraid that the chimps will escape his property, eat their garbage, and be impossible to shoo away as they will be trained in karate... I'd just like to recap here: they are afraid that chimpanzees trained in the martial arts will get into their garbage and run amok, due to their superior skills in hand-to-hand combat.

In response to all of the above, there was a huge town meeting a couple of weeks ago to attempt to resolve the issue. He unveiled elaborate blueprints detailing a sort of chimpanzee compound/supervillian lair, with three layers of concrete walls and automatically-sealing doors, a cage network, and for absolutely no reason, several thousand birds. Experts were brought in from across the region, character witnesses attested to the fact that, no really, this guy isn't a Batman villian, and a neighborhood watch official from an area in Niagara Falls that has such a sanctuary reported that he had experienced no chimp-related incidents, though the Niagara Falls chimps went untrained. "They have the strength of ten men, you know!"

However, I am sad to report, the Karate-Chimps-Will-Eat-My-Garbage-And-Render-Me-Helpless-What-With-Their-Plank-Breaking camp stayed firm, and the issue goes unresolved. The two-year battle continues. It isn't even a legal battle, really, as there's nothing stopping him from building the sanctuary right now. That's actually the most baffling part of all of this. His neighbors include a dairy farm and perhaps two other houses, depending on your definition of "neighbor," and he still demands community support before he begins constuction.

I'd send Charlie my condolences, but I'm afraid he'd eat my garbage and incapacitate me.

Anyone free on May 2?

I've got a plan, an evil plan.
No actually, it's not evil, just completely awesome.
Are any of you free to, you know, come to Colorado for the weekend of May 2?

-10 Degrees and Getting Colder!

I love having a consolidated school. Even if there are only three inches of snow at my house, I'll still get a snow day, because there are two feet elsewhere. Or, if I get two feet of snow at my house, school can't possibly go on without me, and I get a snow day. Put these two scenarios together and I get...two consecutive snow days! So, this last week, I had a spontaneous four-day weekend. And, I had lots of chemistry and calculus homework, not to mention a chemistry test once I got back to school, and I had a novel to read. Did I do any of it? Well, what do you think?
I have an obsession. No, actually, it's an addiction. As Dom would put it, I might be one of the only teenagers who can say I've failed chemistry because of this particular addiction.
If any of you would like to guess what my addiction is, write the answer on your suitcase and come deliver it (along with yourself) to me!
Love,
Ana

3. La mujer pasa mucho tiempo arreglando su pelo.

I'm doing my homework for one of the classes I'm taking at Truman, Spanish Conversations.
There's a grammar review and a vocabulary lesson for each chapter in the book, Conversación y controversia. This week's chapter is "La popularidad: hombres y mujeres," the idea of celebrity and the battle of the sexes.

All I really have to do for the grammar review is type out a bunch of sentences from the book, changing them from the present tense to the present perfect tense and stuff.
For example:
The exercise says, "You say that women are always more beautiful than men, right?"
And I change that to say, "You have said that women have always been more beautiful than men, right?"
Same with "Women observe the stupid things that men do" and "Women spend a lot of time fixing their hair."
I keep expecting Microsoft Word to put a bright green zigzag underneath what I'm typing, and when I right click on it, it'll say, "Unspeakably sexist (consider revising)."

Marginally less exciting than it should have been.

This is why I really can't complain about my school:
So perhaps you have heard of this new indie band Vampire Weekend. Ridiculous name aside, they are quite talented and also darlings of the "blogosphere," if you will (I can't believe I just used that bloody word.) Pitchfork Media, a respected yet pretentious and hipsterish music review site, gave their debut album (which came out 2 or 3 days ago) an 8.8 out of 10. The band in question is a group of four Columbia-educated preppies who play clean pop music backed by African rhythms (I'm not going to bother to parse out the theoretical implications of that stylistic choice. Get all postcolonial up in this bitch on your own time.
Man, I am using a lot of parenthetical expressions tonight.)
Well, it turns out that not only did one of the band members-- Rostam Batmanglij, the keyboardist and recording engineer, among several other things-- attend Potomac, but he happens to be the cousin of one of my debate chums. The best part is that, on the strength of their first single, I bought 2 tickets so my friend Mimi and I could see their DC show not only before
a) their full album dropped, but also before
b) the hype got ridiculous (Jesus, their website says the album is at #5 on iTunes AND Amazon right now. In the internet age, that means a lot), and
c) we found out that Yar and the keyboardist were cousins. Now don't I feel smart. We'll practically be with the band.
Potomac produced a semi-rock star. That would seem to count in its favor.

This is why I'm going to complain anyway, despite an utter lack of any reasonable justification:
For the past week, we'd been hearing that we were going to have a "mystery speaker" at today's assembly. As one of my homeroom compadres pointed out, the "mystery person" silhouette on the posters looked just like Captain Planet, but that is a moot (though exciting) point. We'd spent a good part of the past seven days dissecting verbal cues from student counsel members for any hint as to who the guest might be. The only thing we'd gotten out of anyone so far was that it was "a recent alumni [sic]" who "some of the girls will like."
As I was listening to Vampire Weekend's album for the first time last night, I had an overwhelming feeling that the "speaker" would actually be Yar's cousin, and possibly the rest of the band, and that all four of them perhaps might be singing and playing instruments. I was so sure, I almost called several people to inform them of my miraculous brain wave. The only thing holding me back was what I perceived as an extremely slim possibility that I might humiliate myself by being wrong.
That was the only wise thing I did last night (in addition to irrationally assuming that Yar's cousin would be the speaker, I blew off my homework, watched the election returns, and spent 3 hours lying on the floor of my bedroom and staring at the ceiling in a catatonic state because I was too lazy to brush my teeth and crawl into bed.) The "speaker" actually did turn out to be a male musician complete with singing and instrumentation. And he was pretty good-- his guitar work was actually quite impressive. But he wasn't, you know, Vampire Weekend. That sort of hurt.
I might get over it. Babies are starving in Burundi. And I still have the tickets for the Feb. 6 show.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite songs off the new album. Clearly, it is live. I'm mildly embarrassed to be posting a video of a band that's been on MTV, but it appears to be from British MTV, so that's slightly less dorky, maybe.
Look at Yar's cousin plinking away back there. He's tired, maybe even a bit bored, but he's being recorded for broadcast, so he's got to make it to the end of the song. After that he can sack out. Now that is a Potomac Student. Go Panthers!

Caffeinated at 11:23 PM. Did you expect it to make sense?

The gates of Hell are red. Well, reddish-orange.
When I enter those doors, that is, if I make it that far through the snow and ice of a Colorado winter, Satan manifests himself (herself, itself?) as an ominous black bubble camera recording my every movement, paranoid memorandums sent from an insecure principal to oppressed and underpaid teachers, and petty jockism.
You have to visualize these halls. Dank and gray. Actually they're white, with gray and red stripes. The point is, the atmosphere is dank and gray. The ceiling tiles help this effect; about half of them are disintegrating, becoming living organisms, probably some strange bio-terror science project of some mad scientist (Dr. Strangelove?) who is really running my school from the basement that none of us students knows exists (ah, the War Room). Another of his schemes is to test brainwave activity under freezing-cold conditions. I wear my huge pink ski jacket out of necessity, roaming the halls as a deformed pink marshmallow. Perhaps my disturbed scientist's real experiment is one in the psyche of high school students; how low will self-esteem levels get when students are subjected to extreme embarrassment, forced to galumph (I love that this is actually a word) through the halls?
Today I had a revelation. My school, is not a school. It might be cleverly, or not so cleverly, disguised as a learning institution, but it's not.
There is this class, a "Relationships" class, which seems to be very popular at Centauri High School this season. Let me explain. I walked into the bathroom one day and there was a girl wrapping something up in a blanket on the floor. Well, I was glad it was a girl because that meant I had entered the right restroom. Then I wondered what she was wrapping up. (okay, well my first reaction was curiosity for what might be in the blanket, I just added the other part in hindsight). Then I realized, she had killed a baby and was wrapping it up on the floor of the bathroom! Strange first conclusion, but it might be explained by the fact that babies aren't (or weren't, until recently) a common sight at my high school. But no, she had not killed the baby. The baby had never been alive. It was a doll. A demonic doll, one that cries and tries very hard to imitate a real baby and fails miserably. In part of the "Relationships" teacher's ploy to teach abstinence without actually, I think, telling girls about sex at all, she has managed to pass out these dolls to almost every girl in the school, except for me, of course. I doubt the babies are a very effective tool in teaching abstinence, because, much to my horror, most of the girls enjoy them very much. They are very good at annoying anyone at school who might actually want to learn anything without the elevator music of a baby's scream in the background.
So, I have concluded, my school is run by a Big Brother who is trying to control his pawns, the teachers, forcing them to become Thought Police. But what my school really is, beyond all this censorship and control, is a day care center.

Sorry for the length of this post. If anyone managed to read to the end of the rantings of this frustrated senior, here is your reward, a calculus pick-up line:
"I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves."

Reihan Salam: Conservative Blogger and...TASPer(?)

What he said...

At least we didn't have to deal with this:

(I can’t explain how intimidating a 40 page research paper sounded to me at that age. The other seminar at my TASP assigned an even more ungodly amount of work.)

This post reminds me so much of our stay at the house.

Love to you all,
Valentin

Today was Fun Trivia Day at the Library

I don't know if you guys knew.
I didn't, until today, and I live here. In Missouri. Where things are so weird.

I remember back in fifth grade or so, there was a big deal because our governor got killed in a plane crash. His name was Mel Carnahan. Apparently it was a really really really big deal, because he was running for Senator at the time, and it was just maybe three weeks before the election. I didn't know any of this, because I didn't care about politics when I was ten.

So the Lieutenant Governor was the new Governor for the next few months. Since it was so close to the election, there was no time to remove Carnahan's name from the ballot. So the Democrats said, "Okay, we'll just have his widow, Jean, be the unofficial candidate. If Mel Carnahan wins, we'll appoint her to the Senate, and that'll be great." They used the campaign slogan "I'm Still with Mel."

He was running against the Republican incumbent. In Missouri.
And you guys, he won. My state elected a dead Senator. A Democrat, too, over a Republican. Jean Carnahan filled the office for two years, until Jim Talent won (barely) in a special election.

And the former incumbent, John Ashcroft, got appointed Attorney General by Bush. So he still had a job, until 2005, at least. Then he retired, and now he's a consultant and lobbyist and stuff.

A Love Letter (If you don't want to waste your time, skip this one)

As a general rule, I don't write unless someone tells me I should. Not that I have any particular aversion to writing, but it just doesn't ever really come to mind. But. Of late, time has begun the inevitable long draw that passes somewhere after the climactic moment of the last episode, and somewhere before the beginning of the next.
You see, my We the People team (yes, it's an unfortunately ironic name, I agree) just won our state competition, which means I'm going to go visit Emily and Aditya in early May. This is a good thing to be sure, but most of you probably don't care, so I don't quite know why I'm telling you all this. Except that I feel somehow obligated to explain how I got into my present introspective predicament, and perhaps to provide some perspective.
When I am left with far too much time on my hands, as now, I confess I indulge rather excessively in personal reflection. I'm a very self-centered person as you can probably tell, so this should come as no surprise. At any rate, I am finally coming to the reason I decided to write this post: I think too much for my own good. There is a point at which the overwrought imagination of a hermetic youth turns into the angst-y quasi-philosophy of someone who never goes outside. I like to think this is what happened to Descartes. Why this matters to me, and more importantly, to you, is that this time I have decided to avail myself of the written word, and the resources of the most diverse, thoughtful pool of judges I could find. I will pretend that this exercise in futility will be somehow cathartic, and not, as I suspect, mournfully concupiscent with my ever-deepening spiral into the emo-crazy.

Once upon a time at TASP (and yes, Laura, this will sound familiar), I was asked the rather complex question, "What is love?" Seeing as how I had approximately a minute to respond (I get the sneaking suspicion that Aditya was playing tricks with the hands of the timer), I naturally chose to discuss 'surprise sex' and the implications thereof. This began a period of several months wherein the question remained lodged somewhere in my brain (I want to say medulla oblongata, because it sounds cool, but I really know nothing about neurology).
The next time it was brought to the forefront of my consciousness was during the TASPian New Year Extravaganza, when Gili, Laura and I watched Love Actually. It was the first time I had seen the movie, and I still can't decide if it's shockingly commercial, or adorably romantic, or possibly both. Again, totally pointless, but again, also to illustrate a point. Which is as follows: Love actually is all around.
So how do we determine which love is more legitimate than another, or if unconditional love is so unconditional, or if there is such a thing as love at all? I have no idea, really. I think perhaps my view is warped. Laura agrees with me. And here I resort to the opinions of mankind--or at least the opinions of my fellow TASPers, whose opinions are really the only ones I give a damn about. That was awful syntax, and I'm sure completely inappropriate for the English language, but I don't really care.
There are all kinds of love: a mother's love for her child, a child's love for its mother/father, a brother's love for his brother (or a sister's for her sister, and all the subsequent combinations), an individual's love for humanity, a lecherous old man's love for a little girl, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Most significant for me, why can love for a friend not be just as unconditional as that of a mother's love for a child? This truly bothers me. Even if friendship only lasts as long as two people live in the same county, how can the memories of that friendship be any less lasting than those of family? I think perhaps it is because I am and adopted child, filial and fraternal ties are considerably more insubstantial than those of friendship. It is not the family you came from, but the one you make, or something like that.
Love is supposed to be unconditional, but what the hell does that mean? If you were not who you are, I wouldn't love you? That makes no sense at all. I wouldn't be friends with any of you TASPers if it weren't for your amazing talents, but I wouldn't be my mother's child if she hadn't wanted kids so badly she went to Korea to find them. It seems to me that a person in love asks only that the beloved give everything of themselves to being loved. If that makes any sense at all. A mother desperately needs her child to be a child; otherwise, she couldn't be a mother.
I think what I'm trying to say is just that I really like having friends, even if only for a little while. Memories of love are more important than the real thing anyway. Reality is so bleak in comparison.
This all seems so terribly cliché and horribly foppish. I think I just spent a good hour or so (and wasted a whole bunch of your time, too, if you bothered to read this), writing a love letter to my TASPers. I just realized how horrifyingly long this post is, and how tremendously selfish it is of me to expect any of you to even want to read this. But I've already written it, and it's too late to turn back now. So please, comment if you want, call me a prat, tell me to stfu, or just ignore me. I just felt like having my say.

Jabberwocky.

Alina Hasanain decides to end her relative silence w.r.t. this blog...

It's nearly 1 AM and I should be finishing my essay(s) for homework. Instead, I'm trying to fight jet lag after a thirty-six hour trip by YouTubing (of course).

Apparently, this video was shown in my AP Biology class while I was gone. I'm sure many of you have seen it, but I think it will enhance the beauty of our blog just as much as a certain German's outrageous campaign ad does. So Nietzche has an awesome mustache (I've always preferred "moustache," actually. Friedrich seems like he has a "moustache," not a "mustache"). So what. Protein synthesis is cooler, anyway.

If you want to skip the intro, go to 3:20.

Beware the...Ribosomereleasingfactor...

Interpretive dance is so TASP. Methinks we should reenact this video at our next reunion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dhO0iCLww

A Post-Modern critique of intellectualism...the opinions expressed do not represent the actual views of the author.

Remember that article I wrote about the self? Well, the newspaper staff thought that it was complete nonsense. Here is the article I wrote for the next issue. I guess that it is as I say "somewhat of an apology," for me being too "philosophical." I guess I condescended, perhaps a little too much...

I think that I should write about something serious. I’ve been fooling around for way too long, and I want to present something to the students of Roslyn High School that they can actually read and use. Therefore, as somewhat of an apology, I have written the following article for each and every student at Roslyn High School.

I really like the Roslyn Crown Players. Seeing AIDA was the highlight of my High School existence (most of my four years here have been spent in a surreal haze of European History classes, Philosophy Club petitions, and Beck albums). I didn’t see Ragtime because I respect E.L. Doctorow (no offense RCP). But I should have seen Fiddler on the Roof, Rumors, and Urinetown (the t-shirts were very clever for Urinetown). The reason that I didn’t see those RCP productions was that I was vehemently against musicals for most of my High School existence (honestly, I was dragged to AIDA by my mother). I was a pretentious fool who was too elitist to just to sit back and enjoy a musical.

However, Mr. Cabat’s Film and Literature class has metamorphosed my Beck, Elliot Smith, and Nietzsche loving pretentious self into a musical obsessed freak. After I watched Singing in the Rain, the boundaries between high culture and low culture completely disintegrated. I found myself not only enjoying dance numbers like “Moses Supposes,” and “Good Morning,” but also realizing that there are messages to be found in them. In “Make ‘Em Laugh,” character Cosmo Brown goes into a dancing freak-out, in which he bounces off walls and tries to seduce a dummy. It may be a stretch, but I feel as if I can take away from the dance number that life is about sometimes acting a little crazy, having fun, and making people laugh. Sadly, in all of my philosophical inquiries, I haven’t come across better advice than what Singing in the Rain has given me. Maybe from now on, I’ll watch Gene Kelley musicals instead of reading Plato.

I am not satisfied, though.

Watching musicals is fun and purposeful. I get it, but I want to act in plays. I don’t like to sing and dance, and there is no venue for real stage acting at Roslyn High School. What am I supposed to do? No. What are we supposed to do? When one student at Roslyn High School feels alienated, I believe that we must step up as a community and take action. I have a suggestion. RCP should put on a one act plays night where students who don’t like to sing or dance, like me, can act. And I’ll even make a deal with you, RCP. If you put on a one act plays night, then I will go see Damn Yankees.

I guess I’m trying to teach you something, Roslyn High School (or probably the only person who reads this column – my mother). I am a human being, not a philosophical robot. I enjoy long walks on the beach, Sundays at church with Pastor Schlemiel, reruns of SpongeBob Squarepants, good old-fashioned peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off, and Hannah Montana. Yes. Although she poses a philosophical dilemma to me concerning the self, Hannah Montana/ Miley Stewart/ Miley Cyrus (daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, who sings my favorite song “Achy Breaky Heart”) is one of my favorite singers or dare I say, divas?

Alright, I’ll stop the nonsense.

RCP just remember that the offer is always on the table. Also, students of Roslyn High School just remember that you shouldn’t like something just because it is ‘elite’ or popular. You should like something because you genuinely enjoy it. No, scrap that. Who am I to tell you what you should like? I like Hannah Montana for God’s sake…