They're Called Legs, Asshole. Fuckin' Use Them.

Hi guys!
So I'm taking this awesome break from totally stressing out about finals and sleeping in Butler and working on 15 different papers for each class and attending review sessions and never going out ever to write a blog post! Pretty crazy to think that there's something outside of schoolwork in the week leading up to finals, but wow, look at what you discover when you leave your John Jay single/Butler study corner!

Anyway, I thought I'd write for y'all today about a phenomenon, which I had never before encountered before coming to Columbia. I was also going to make you guys pretty diagrams, but my Photoshop broke when I installed Tiger. Boo!

Every building here at Columbia has doors! This seems like a really stupid thing to say, but apparently there's a building at Harvard that has no doors. I think it's where they keep potential transfer students and poor people. What was I saying? Oh yeah, doors!

So the doors here are all structured in pairs. One door opens to the left, and one to the right. This makes a lot of sense as paths of traffic tend to stick the right, so depending on which way you're headed people should flow easily through their respective right-hand door.

But this simple system would be too straight-forward for the brilliant minds at Columbia. Eschewing the typical New Yorker attitude of getting to where you're going as fast as possible, Columbia students only ever use one door. If one side of the traffic flow is going out through one door, the other side will sit and wait until each and every person has gone out that door and then continue through it themselves.

Now, this doesn't seem like such a big deal at first. After all, when you're in a rush you can just open the other door and go through, right? WRONG! IDIOT! LOSER! This manifestation of navigatory logic is thwarted by the simple fact that the lazy bastards who can't bring themselves to reach out and open the other door also block everyone else from doing so.

So what's a man to do? I've come up with two solutions. The first is to take a lesson from real New Yorkers. Let's adopt some new phrases into our vocabulary. Repeat after me.
"Get out of my fucking way ya fuckin asshole!"
"Ey where the fuck do ya think you're goin?"
or my personal favorite,
"Fucking move! Dick!"
Very good. Well done. A+.

But there's a problem with this solution. It must be repeated over and over again to achieve the desired effect. And let's face it, there's only so many times I can scream abusive phrases of profanity at poor asian applied math majors who have never been to a big school before, not to mention a city. So let's try a different approach.
Columbia students like nothing more than to study. (Don't believe me? Walk through the library on a Saturday night. Count heads.) Let's take advantage of this fact. In the same vein of hunger strikers demanding an ethnic studies core requirement we need to create a new class. While the name is debatable, my vote goes for "How to Move Your Slow Country Ass Around a City, Dipshit." Within a semester your problem is solved. Students will navigate through doors (and maybe even subway stations) just as easily as they accurately quote Homer, Thucydides and Jesus.

But hey, let's not stop there! Let's make it a requirement for coming to New York. I'm sick of pushing over old women and children in Times Square so I can make my transfer from the 1 to the N quicker. I'm sick of yelling at groups of 50 Japanese tourists, sick of shoving confused Southerners down flights of stairs. So let's make a class. Let's make everyone take it. I'm sure it will save lives.

Installation Blues

I realize that as our mentally-handicapped Harvard liaison it's partially my charge to deliver the occasional slack-jawed commentary on all the highly intelligent happenings of this here fine institution of brick buildings, international aristocrats, and DisneyWorld-caliber smoke n' mirrors. But I'm the first to admit that I'm not very good at that. Hell, I can't really think about anything right now except how much Moss's last post is begging for some e. e. cummings crack, but I can't bring myself to make it for a variety of bad reasons.

But now I'm wracking my brain, trying to think of what exactly has happened here worthy of note and/or badly worded, uninspired adolescent aspersions. What do I come up with? Something that happened a long, long time ago:

The Faust Installation.

So as you may know already, Harvard recently elected their first ever (supposedly) female president. Her name is Drew Faust, and much like Goethe's famous character of the same name, she's a man.

She's about six-two, has shoulders wider than the freshman beds (proven fact), and has hands that can effortlessly crush the skull of any Columbia football player. She also has a penis bigger than my leg that has been known to eat squirrels that cross her path on campus. Have I myself seen this? I'd rather not talk about it.

Fortunately at her installation she was wearing a huge Jedi robe that covered all her superhuman anatomical endowments, and I think very few people noticed when a huge node of flesh slivered out from behind the podium during her speech. Which I'll get to in a minute.

But first let's talk about the seven thousand introductions. I was in my room writing a paper for most of them, which explains why I still have some modicum of sanity left. It also explains why I have almost no memory of the ceremony.

So here's what happened:

I arrived when Mop-head Petersen was giving his whiny speech. I didn't pay much attention to it, since I was looking around to see if I could find anyone I knew, though I did get to experience that tricolon first hand. So much enthusiasm. Whatever.

Next up was Deval Patrick, or as I like to call him, DeePee. He delivered a speech that couldn't have lasted more than five minutes. It was mostly an anecdote about his time at Harvard. It won more than a few chuckles and a great deal of applause. Afterward a full grown man holding a Harvard umbrella turned around and asked me if I knew who the speaker was. Isn't that great? You know what's greater, though? Just to be an asshole, I said, "I have no idea." Welcome to Massachusetts, assbag.

Who spoke after this? Some old guy, and then some old lady. They both said the same things in different words, all of which meant nothing. Then, finally, Mr. Faust herself came to the podium. A hush fell over the crowd. They were scared of her. She looked so tall, standing there. So powerful. So male.

Her huge, thin-lipped maw opened up above the overtly phallic microphone. Her Adam's apple quivered with excitement. I could only imagine what thoughts were going through her head. She was holding a manila envelope that had been sealed for over fifty years, containing a letter written by a Harvard President during the Cold War, addressed to the first Harvard President to assume office in the 21st century. Its message was one of profound fear and anxiety about the future. It spoke of the tremendous burden that would be lain upon the shoulders of whatever person dared take command of America's oldest and most revered academic institution in the uncertain future. And the first line read, "Dear Sir." You could see the faintest glint in her eye. It wasn't smugness. It was joy. It was the absolutely rock-solid sensation of success, of having finally arrived. She knew she had now broken down a barrier that fifty years ago had seemed insurmountable. She had torn another pane out of that shattered glass ceiling. And now thousands of people from all across the country, and hundreds of the world's most distinguished academics, all huddled together in the rain, eagerly awaiting her first words as the newly-installed President of Harvard University. She was on the verge of breaking the silence--but someone from the crowd beat her to it:

"Show us your tits!"

And that's how I almost got expelled from Harvard.

Atari was so effing sweet.

Today, while attending my second General Chemistry lecture of the semester I witnessed an amazing thing.

In the middle of the lecture a life-sized Pac-Man ran screaming through the bottom of the lecture hall chased by a life-sized ghost. The whole thing lasted about 15 seconds and then the lecture resumed with no further interruption.

This ordeal got me thinking -- quite a remarkable development in itself. Isn't life just a gigantic game of Pac-Man? We are all Pac-Men. Arguably, some of us are Ms. Pacmen, but that really has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

We are all running from ghosts. All the time. Ghosts are there to consume us, to beat us down. Right now I'm running from the ghost of my exam schedule, the ghost of sickness, the ghost of me wanting to fucking sleep more than 3 hours a night but I can't because I have insomnia and I'm sick and my neighbor plays rap too loud. I guess what I'm trying to say is ghosts=bad.

But we are the Pac-(Wo)Men. We're just running through the maze of life trying to avoid bad shit. Sometimes we eat things. Eating things gives you bonus points and if you get enough of those you get an extra Pac-Man. I'm not quite sure what the real-life parallel to this is, but it probably has something to do with prescription drugs.

We also eat a lot of little white dot things. Some would call this a primal urge to make ourselves whole again. After all, someone did cut a huge wedge out of our faces. Why can't we be circles? Circles are aesthetically pleasing. Admittedly, if we were circles we would have trouble speaking, munching on little white things, and occasionally eating 8-bit fruit, but I'm relatively convinced that in a perfect world these would be unnecessary and forgotten relics of a primitive past.

Oh yeah, sometimes in real life we also have to put quarters in things so they work, just like a Pac-Man game. Some examples of this include washers, dryers, pool tables, juke boxes and Tim's genitals. Sometimes we run out of quarters. Then we can't play Pac-Man anymore, or we just have to walk around for weeks with dirty clothes because I'm just not gonna hand-wash all this shit.

Then again, life might not be like Pac-Man at all. I may have just taken way too much cold medicine. I suppose we'll never know.

Harvard Students Unite! Smoke Crack!

Once upon a time, not too long ago, Harvard students were allowed to get drunk.

I was here in April. Back then I hadn't yet paid thousands of dollars to Harvard, closed the doors on at least six or seven other first-class schools (Brown not included), and agreed to have my life essentially dictated by their whims for the next four years for the sake of gaining a bunch of unscrupulous politician friends and a piece of paper inscribed with the school's name and a bunch of silly-sounding Latin words (cum laude? Bwa!). Needless to say, Harvard went all-out to impress me.

There was booze everywhere. Vodka flowed from the taps in the bathrooms. Tequila sprung from the fountain in front of the Science Center. In the dining halls we used kegs for seats. You know the Charles River? All beer.

I went to a party with seven or eight girls. None of them were particularly good looking. We're talking two- or three-stars here. Mind you, that's out of ten stars. I thought, "I bet Harvard will do something about this!" And Harvard did.

The first great thing Harvard did was remind me that I was surrounded by the most sheltered kids in the world. Kids whose idea of a party was Church, only without the wine, because drinking Jebus' blood is, like, icky. When we arrived at the party the girls took one whiff of the punch and all but two of them ran away, literally crying. This was partially because they were sheltered, but mostly because the punch was actually radiator fluid, and they had just turned their face into one giant sinus. Serves them right for being less physically attractive than they were intellectually promising! I'd also like to add that one of the girls actually called her parents and asked if she could stay with them in their hotel, because, she said, "People drink the alcohols here!"

The other two girls hung around. They were so cool. One said, "I totally know everything about everything." The other one got really drunk really fast and didn't talk about anything at all. I would have fallen in love if Harvard hadn't already taken hold of my entire heart. And how exactly did Harvard manage to take control of everything from my aortas to my pulmonary arteries? The same way they take control of everything: dollars.

How many dollars did I sell my heart for? Sixty-five. And Harvard got a full rebate.

See, I found out at that party that Harvard actually gave money to students to throw parties, tacitly accepting, like any good parent ought to, that the students were going to use that money to buy drugs, and use those drugs to lubricate their sex lives, figuratively and literally.

"Harvard pays for our alcohol? Awesome!! Coming here is like being famous!" That's what I sounded like then. But then was a long time from now...a long time backwards.

More recently, I found out that all that money 'Harvard' spends on our alcohol is distributed through the Undergraduate Council, the student governing body of Harvard. And all the money they have at their disposal comes from a sixty-five dollar surcharge that Harvard adds surreptitiously to every student's term-bill. How much of those funds go to party grants? Eight percent. Where does the rest of the money go? Nobody knows. Some people say Harvard burns it on hookers. Others say Israel. But the most common whispering is that Harvard just burns it all. With fire.

All right, so that's considerably less awesome. It turns out that everything Harvard supposedly 'gives' to its students is actually paid for at great cost--it's just that the students tend not to realize it, probably because its all paid for in advance, all at once, and usually by their parents. Of course, this doesn't really apply to me, because I'm here on scholarship. Whoo-hoo!

So naturally I'm not going to complain about how Harvard wants to use its money, because very little of it came from me. I'm not even going to complain about how put a hidden charge on our bills so they can give us a false feeling of Providence. (I'm not talking about the dirty city in RI, mind you. I'm talking about the Christian idea that God provides. You know...to imply that Harvard thinks it's God. Is that too oblique? Yeah, all right. Whatever. Moving on.)

What I am going to complain about is Harvard's recent crackdown on alcohol.

Our UC President Ryan Petersen made a speech at Drew Faust's inauguration a few weeks ago about Dean Pilbeam's decision to suspend all UC-sanctioned reimbursements for alcohol. He never actually mentioned it directly, but he did say this:

"This process of decisions made behind closed doors, this disempowerment of students, this denial of citizenship must end now!"

Hey kids! Remember ascending tricolon? Here it is again! Petersen thinks he's Cicero. Unfortunately, he's a nerdy Harvard student who looks like a mop.

I'd rag on Petersen more, but I don't really know him, and I guess I sort of appreciate that he's looking out for my desire to be drunk at all times. What I really don't appreciate is how he's trying to argue against Pilbeam's decision in a political way, as if it makes it more principled.

The truth is, students really don't have any legitimate right to whine about Pilbeam's decision. The money was distributed by an official Harvard organization, and was going primarily to purchasing alcohol, which was being distributed primarily to underage students. Pilbeam's got every valid legal point on his side, and Petersen's got nothing but what ultimately amounts to, "Waaaaah! This is unethical, because I say it is! We're supposed to be more entitled than this!"

Well, fuck that. I don't care whether Harvard pays for alcohol or not. We've got enough rich kids around here to foot the bill for almost anything we could want. That really isn't the issue. It's just a symptom of the real issue, which is that Harvard has turned into one giant bitch when it comes to alcohol.

As I understand it, most college dormitories across the country have Resident Advisers, which are really just students who make sure nobody gets raped or chokes to death on his own vomit. Harvard works differently. Our "Proctors," as Harvard calls them, are not undergraduates. They are not young people. They are not our friends. They are mostly doctoral students who, for some reason, don't mind living in Freshman dorms and sharing showers with sexually-repressed teenagers.

These people don't tolerate alcohol. They will come down, bust in on a party, take all the alcohol, and write you up. This could happen at any time of the day. You don't need to be disturbing anyone. You don't need to be doing anything unsafe. All that matters is that alcohol is involved. If you are throwing the party, you will be written up. If you are present in someone else's room when it's invaded, you could be written up. If you're sleeping in your bed while your roommates party, you could be written up.

Harvard Yard is officially dry. You will get kicked out of the college if you get caught more than twice.

So what's a poor freshman to do these days? Go to the upperclassmen houses. That's easy enough, right?

Wrong. First of all, 7 out of 10 upperclassmen are total pricks to freshmen. Secondly, they're the ones who generally take advantage of intoxicated freshman girls. Am I implying that Harvard's alcohol policies increases the likelihood of rape? Yes. Yes, I am.

But, oh, if it were only rape we had to worry about.

Unfortunately Harvard is trying to crack down here, too. For the first time, Harvard is seriously pushing Harvard party-throwers to check the IDs of guests before serving them alcohol. Harvard is posting sentries. They're watching us while we play in the dark.

Meanwhile, outside the gates, the Cambridge Police are ramping things up as well. They've just announced that they're going to be using youths to check if convenience stores check ID properly. They've been running all over town putting store-owners through courses to spot fakes and recognize the signs of intoxication, and nailing their pets to their doors as warnings, should they decide to ignore the law.

It seems that everywhere, some sudden terror has seized the minds of the powers that be. They can no longer sleep at night knowing that college students under 21 might be getting drunk.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THEIR PROBLEM?

Now, I'm not going to try and make a nice principled argument against these people, because those are exactly the tools they've fashioned in their own cause. That's right. They made up principles. They can do that, because they're in charge.

But here's how I see it. If these people are over 45, and most of them certainly are, they grew up in a time when the drinking age was 18. They partied up. In college they went apeshit. They grew up in a time when kids didn't need to wear bicycle helmets, or protective shells covering every inch of their bodies. They grew up back when nobody worried about trans fats. They grew up back when coming home covered in blood was perfectly acceptable. They grew up in Vietnam.

College students have been getting trashed on a regular basis since long before rock music, MTV, and then rap music were around to corrupt their ideals. But for some reason, nowadays drinking is a much more serious offense.

Why? I'm not going to bother looking for an answer. I'm going to assume it's because old people miss their glory days and are apparently unaware, because they grew up in a time of godless hedonism, that envy is a deadly sin.

But I have a solution. If Harvard is so damn worried about us getting drunk that they're going to do everything in their power to keep us from it, then I refuse to play ball. I won't try and circumvent all their stupid rules. I won't get drunk at all. I'll go to harder drugs. Crack. Meth. Heroin. Oxycontin. How about lithium, half a gram, straight to the motherfuckin' temple? It won't get me high, but it will sure as hell scare people!

And that's the point. Because you see, despite all the criticism parents and authorities take for being overprotective and so on, there really are some horrible things out there threatening young people that weren't around twenty or thirty years ago. Compared to them, alcohol is downright friendly.

So here's what I'm trying to say:

Harvard, let me get drunk. The rest of the world does, and you can't shelter me forever. And besides, if you're still worried about alcohol, oh, boy, do I have some fresh terrors for you.

There's no bond like a punch to the stomach

So you've probably heard that Harvard kids can't fight. And if you haven't heard it, well, I'm sure you assumed it. But let me tell you this: you're right.

I've met a lot of friendly blokes around here. Blokes, I call them, because they're actually all British. Did you know that 30% of Harvard students come from the UK? I made that statistic up, but it's illustrative of the truth, which is that there are actually WMDs in Iraq, right under Elvis' sprawling subterranean Pelvis-Scrambling-Funk-Village. Did I type funk? I meant fuck. It's a Fuck Village, and it's perched totally unreasonably against an enormous deposit of uranium bombs. I learned all of this from Hans Zimmer, who incidentally went to Harvard. Remember that awesome battle music from Gladiator? The one that played behind all the scenes that rocked your face back through your brain stem, causing you to actually gag on your own gag reflex? That's the one. Awesome, right? Well, you'd probably think so if you didn't know that Zimmer couldn't throw a punch to save his life. Which brings me back to the English.

English people can't fight. I'm actually calling you all out, right now. I used to think all English people were pansies. This was until I saw several English men lose a fight to a field of actual pansies, choking on their own mucus as they groveled before the flying histamines for mercy. It was one of those moments entirely beyond words. I remember screaming "Blasilhup glanderdaw nuck-nuck-zamboni!" which is really the only way I can describe the carnage without the aid of some sort of visual capture device such as an etch-a-sketch or Mario Paint. I believe it's Urdu.

I got into a huge brawl yesterday. Have you ever heard someone say, "You can't spell brawl without bawl!", perchance? The answer is you haven't, and that's because the two are totally dissimilar and etiologically unrelated. Also, because if someone ever said that, any nearby citizen mindful of the public good would promptly disembowel him, starting with his ovaries.

Here's what I'm trying to say: I got into a huge fucking fight the other day. Fists a-flying, teeth a-shattering, random ladies on the street a-screaming a-bloody murder. It was between me and every black person to ever go to Harvard. It was three against one. They was all like, "Yo cracka can't jump," and I was all, "Bitch say whaaa?" And then the bleeding commenced.

Here's the thing though. I'm sure, since everyone who reads this blahg is racist (Eric "The Jew Hater" Nazar, I'm looking at you) you probably assumed that all black people can fight. This is not true. See, some black people are from England. And all black Harvard students are from England. Imagine that!

What the fuck am I talking about?

Self-Righteous Dieting. (I changed the name, you assholes.)

I would like to draw our readers' attention to something monumental happening currently at Columbia. In response to the recent instances of hate-based vandalism around campus as well as the University's imminent gentrification of Manhattanville, students have formed an "anti-racist coalition." This coalition, upon its founding, produced a rather massive list of demands. The full list can be found on Bwog, but for convenience I will summarize many of them here.

The coalition demands:
- Columbia must hire more advisers for students of color and LGBTQ students
- Columbia Public Safety must report hate-crimes as they happen and compile an annual report of said crimes.
- Columbia must immediately begin hiring 2 full-time professors every year in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. This hiring will continue until each department has 12 new full-time professors.
- Columbia must create a [section of a?] department devoted to Queer Studies and Native American Studies
- CSER and IRAAS must be given complete autonomy over their hiring decisions. Something entirely unprecedented not just at Columbia, but at any university in this country.
- Columbia must completely renegotiate its expansion plan to meet more the community's demands
- Columbia must create a core class in seminar format which deals entirely with racialization and colonization.

In an attempt to force the administration to meet these demands, nine students have begun a hunger strike. They are camped out in the middle of the quad and, well, not eating. The administration has yet to issue a response.

Now, I was recently alerted to another strike. This one is at UMass. The UMass students support a much more reasonable list of demands, which include the following:
- Student fee rollback
- Funding and accountability for diversity
- Cops out of the dorms
- Student control over student space

The students at UMass are organizing a general student strike, in which students will not attend classes on November 15th and 16th.

Which strike will be more effective? Don't bother thinking about that question for too long, because I'm about to tell you. And as always, I'm right. It's UMass'.

The first flaw in Columbia's strike is the list of demands. Namely, it's absolutely ridiculous. They aren't just talking creating new classes, they're talking creating new departments. Hiring 24 new professors alone is a massive amount of money. Not to mention the fact that such a massive hiring would require a huge increase in office space. Columbia, unfortunately does not have office space because the entire campus is bounded by 114th, 120th, Amsterdam and Broadway.

An increase in office space would require some sort of expansion. If only there were one planned. Oh wait, there is one planned. It's the expansion that's going to kick all the black people out of "SoHa" as it were. Well this is tough because the coalition is also anti-expansion. This stops their demands short before we even get to ask the question "Is it better to teach people about oppression of minorities or actually stop oppression of minorities?" How is the administration supposed to respond to the coalition's demands when they contradict each other? How many hundreds of millions of dollars is the administration supposed to spend on the demands of a few students?

There is also the issue of creating a new core class. The core already takes up a huge percentage of a Columbia student's schedule, making it harder to complete a major here than at any other school. But creating a seminar-style class requires the university to create more than 50 new sections of an entirely new class and subsequently find people to teach these sections. Seeing as two classes of this sort are already required, there is a legitimate question of whether or not this will have a severe negative impact on students trying to complete majors.

The primary reason for the strike's approaching failure, however, is not the demands, but the method. The strike started off with 9 participants. After one day it is down to 5. If nearly half the participants in the strikes could not make it a single day, how is anyone supposed to take the strike's intentions seriously?

The remaining 5 are under strict medical observance. They have made it clear that should any of them drop below a dangerous weight that they will drop out of the strike. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the point of a hunger strike has typically been to convince the people in power that unless your demands are met you will die. Gandhi, for example, had to be talked down from each of his strikes because he was quite literally teetering on the brink of death.

When the strikers make it clear that they are not willing to take the protest to this level, they are changing the nature of the hunger strike. Instead of generating worry for their lives, they are simply making themselves useless to the institution. This technique is effective, but only on a massive scale. 5 students not attending classes will not cause the administration to blink an eye. 1000 students not attending class will.

This brings us back to the UMass strike. It is a simple general student strike with four simple demands. The advantage to it is that it has the possibility of inspiring thousands of students to skip class. Now, since we've already established that the only thing the Columbia strike is doing is causing five students to skip class, we can make a judgment on which is more effective. Last I checked, any number of thousand is more than five.

And which demands are more likely to be met? The Columbia students have a list of 13 demands. If the administration were to meet them it would require hundreds of millions in funding and the destruction of an entire black neighborhood in the name of "Ethnic Studies", a step which would inherently contradict another one of the coalition's demands. The UMass strike, however, has a list of 4 demands. The administration could easily meet all of them with relatively little spending.

So this raises an underlying question. Why are students at a public school notorious for its apathy so much more effective at organizing a strike than students at an ivy league school notorious for its political activism? I've been pondering this question for nearly 2 days now, and I think, thanks to a discussion with my friend Ruthie, that I have finally come to a conclusion.

Protesting at Columbia means nothing because it is overdone. Every single day there are a few students on the Steps waving banners and screaming into megaphones. How are we supposed to focus on a cause when instead of one large movement we create hundreds of small ones? How is anyone supposed to take us seriously when the most powerful protest we have had all year consists of five people sitting in tents and not eating?

My advice to the students camping outside right now: Go inside, grab a sandwich, rework your demands and organize the rest of campus to boycott classes for the next week. Maybe then you'll elicit an actual response from someone with power.

Alcoholism, and other games to play with your children

When people hear a word like “alcoholism,” they generally respond in one of a few ways. Some laugh derisively, trying to hide the fact that they don’t know what it means, others laugh nervously, knowing they have some troubled past to conceal, and others say, “Alco-what-you-say?” Nobody really understands it.

But here are the facts. Alcoholism affects over five-and-a-half hundred million Americans every year, not including Canadians. Think about that. That’s almost twice as many Americans as exist within America. That means for every person you know who isn’t an alcoholic, that person is actually over five-thirds of an alcoholic. That person is lying to you.

Did you know most people you see in the street are alcoholics? Think about how many people you see in the street every day. Millions, probably. Some of them are walking alone, holding hands, or walking along, buying things, must most are just walking along, being alcoholics. If you’re like most people, you probably thought only panhandlers are alcoholics. But that’s not true; in fact, it’s almost false. These people can’t even afford enough booze to be proper alcoholics. Most alcoholics are rich, and what’s more, most of them don’t even drink.

Not surprisingly, there are still some old-fashioned people who don’t consider alcoholism a legitimate disease. These are the same sort of people who still think that only gay people get AIDS, and that humans aren’t really descended from Galapagos finches. In short, they’re old people.

Alcoholism is not just alcohol addiction. Nor is it merely a symptom of some other psychological illness or infirmity. Nor is it a cultural construct. Nor is it a variety of other things. What is it, then? Just look at the word if you want to know. Alcoholism: a combination between Al (the name of most bus drivers), cholera, a girl named Liz, and the letter m, which is, not coincidentally, the first letter of mendacity.

That's really all you need to know. Now go out and get drunk.

Guide to Flyers (and what they mean!)

If there's one thing Columbia students like to do more than protest and whine about how much work they have, it's print and post flyers. There is not a flat upright surface on our campus that is not covered with these wonderful multi-colored sheets of paper.

Now, flyers have multiple uses. Once I discovered that they could be used for something other than fueling a trash-can fire in my dorm room when Columbia refuses to turn on the heat during fall break even though it's 45 degrees out and I can't feel my fingers, I extinguished the blaze in the corner of my room, took a shot or seven of vodka for warmth and contemplated their various purposes. So, without further ado, I give you a guide to college flyers:


What it really says: The boring black on white text on our flyer matches the soulless peppy personalities in our club. We don't have auditions because we'll take anyone who will openly admit to not only going to Columbia, but also to being in its Glee Club.


What it really says: Hey guys! We're cool! Look! Would we have so many flyers if we weren't so damn cool? I didn't think so! OMG!!! WUTCHU MEAN PRINTING 2 MENY FLIERZ IZ BADZ??!?!?!1


What it really says: This will buy you 4 beers during happy hour at 1020. Only some of them involve physical pain and/or waterboarding. Take your chances. We all need beer.


What it really says: I'm the only person on this fucking campus who has never heard of eBay. Trust my faith in the technology I'm selling.


What it really says: Our advertising campaigns are less than strategic. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a ton of people working for NYPD with $200,000 educations. Well, maybe not a ton, but someone had to come up with the bright idea to advertise police jobs to a group of 4,000 students who are primarily too scared to walk 10 blocks north into the dangerous area known as "Harlem". It's where black people live. Nuff said.


What it really says: We know you cheated your way into an ivy league school... Now you can cheat your way out too! Give us money and people with real intelligence will do your work for you.


What it really says: You never did drugs in high school because you were too busy doing work... but it's never too late to start! Right!?


What it really says: Your liberal Satan-worshiping professors are brainwashing you to think critically. Come, let us indoctrinate you.


What it really says: We're not in denial... Remember 1961!!!


What it really says: Rape is bad. But...fruit is good. You know, I'm really caught in the middle about this one.


What it really says: NYU sucks.


What it really says: Look how cleverly ironical I am! But seriously, printing so many damn flyers is really bad for the environment. I hope you guys are getting this.


What it really says: You may be fighting for a good cause through clever irony, but I'm a grammar Nazi (bitch).


What it really says: This one's pretty straightforward. Columbia students love to pee. Everywhere.

Attention Harvard Coop: Go Fuck Yourself.

So. I've been in a school for less than two months and already I hate the Coop. I'm not talking dislike. I'm not talking detest. I'm not even talking loathe. This is out-and-out hate. I hate it like a fat kid hates running. I hate it like Eli hates women. I hate it like I hate myself.

To those not at all familiar with the Harvard Coop, I'm tempted to just say, "Stop reading here. Go on with your lives, however blissful or wretched they may be, and spare yourself the unrivaled agony of a close, intimate relationship with the ungodly scourge that is the Harvard Coop." But I'm not actually going to say that. What you just read never happened.

A little background:

The Harvard Coop was established in the mid-1940s by a group of enterprising undergraduates with a fund donated by a short, mustachioed fellow by the name of Albert Wiefshaufel. It is a well-documented but aggressively-concealed fact that the Wiefshaufel clan drew their wealth from several highly-successful retail outlets in Berlin, all of which were expropriated from Jews in the late '30s after the institution of the Nuremberg Laws. To this day Harvard tours will still cite Wiefshaufel as one of the university's greatest benefactors and philanthropists, known equally for his (and I quote directly here) "generous character and eccentric mannerisms," which I'm quite certain included screaming anti-Semitic propaganda in public places and kicking handicapped people in the face.

The Coop's original intention was, ostensibly, to form a co-operative between the Harvard administration and the students, rooted in the unshakable and time-honored union of mutual economic gain. The real reason, however, was to disenfranchise all students of 'unmeritorious' descent by way of monopolizing the academic textbook market. In the beginning the Coop required all students register individually for their services; those deemed unfit for the college had their files marked with a Y. This is actually the origin of the Harvard slang term, "Y-listed," which is the pejorative term for rejected applicants to the college, the implication being that these students had to go to Yale. In reality, however, the Coop files were marked with a Y because the letter J in the German "Juden" is pronounced like the English "y," and those marking the files thought this was both a clever, discreet, and tasteful reference to the Nazi ostracization, oppression, and subsequent slaughter of Europe's Jewish population.

The original Y-listed students faced a much more severe consequence than going to Harvard's bitch school. All of the textbooks and academic supplies at the Coop were officially marked-up anywhere from one hundred to six hundred per cent; those students deemed "meritorious" were given "discounts" that let them pay the actual market price, while the Y-listed ones were forced to pay outrageous fees for the same materials. As there was a distinct correlation between economic status and ethnic "merit," most of the Y-listed students could not afford the assigned books, forcing them to use the scarce, out-of-date materials available in the university libraries, or, more often, to endure the stigma and humiliation (not to mention inconvenience) of living off the charity of their classmates. Those rare Y-listed students who could afford the textbooks were often sabotaged in their attempts to get them--when requested they would be reported as out of stock, or back-ordered, or lost in transit. The result was that Y-listed students faced an enormous disadvantage, both socially and in the classroom, and many either performed poorly or were forced to withdraw from the college.

Naturally, this unspoken system of disenfranchisement could not remain secret for long. Eventually Y-listed students caught on and brought complaints to the administration. The administration, however, responded with all the indifference a well-trained bureaucracy can muster. Remember: this is the same administration that invented the "extracurricular" component of the application process because going by test scores alone resulted in disproportionately high numbers of Jewish students. 'Meritocracy' in American universities, as we know it today, was actually born of antisemitism.

[As a side note: Isn't it crazy to think that maybe the reason you're really taking that boring internship or playing the cello or doing all that community service is actually to give your top-choice school some reason to accept you over someone who would make a more competent student but is undesirable for a reason that has nothing to do with extracurriculars at all? Isn't it crazy to think that "extracurriculars" once actually meant "race," "religion," or "parent's profession," and for all we really know, it still does? What happens in that admissions conference room stays in that admissions conference room. They can reject you because they don't like your face, and don't think for a minute that they're too principled to do so.]

The situation remained unchanged for nearly two decades, until finally a group of undergraduate students with some modicum of decency and social conscience managed to quietly but effectively reform the Coop into the different brand of monstrosity that the world faces today.

I think it would be grossly insensitive to all those formerly slighted ethnic groups to say that the situation has not improved much. From their perspective it most certainly has. Harvard now prides itself on having its number of white and black students proportional to national population statistics; it is also loath to mention that, although Latino students are underrepresented to the point where students in Spanish classes regularly ask, "So who speaks this language, anyway?", Asian-American students are overrepresented by about 400%. Which just goes to show that maintaining proportionality is only a validating exercise when applied to the important races. Right, Ivies?

Notice how I didn't mention Jews at all in that last paragraph (for once!). That's because Harvard, just like most colleges, likes to avoid publishing those numbers. It's a real sore spot. Also note how on the Common Application there is a section that asks you to define yourself racially, but none that asks you to identify yourself religiously. Maybe the reasoning behind this is that the color of your skin tells an admissions officer much more about a student's character than a self-selected core belief system ever could. Who could argue with that? Only an insensitive jerk!

But I'm digressing. Unlike Eli, I don't like to hold grudges against people or organizations after they've made a concerted effort to make amends for their wrongful past acts. And nobody now is expropriating or disenfranchising students from the shady lofts of the Coop.

OR ARE THEY?

Well, no. They're not. But what they're doing is still despicable. See, the first thing with which every Harvard student is confronted when he enters this putrid glass building is a room filled, from floor to ceiling, with Harvard multicolored paraphernalia. Hats, sweatshirts, pants, shirts, ties, condoms, socks, female condoms, jackets, ribbed condoms, cufflinks...it's like a psychedelic Harvard madhouse. The last time I went in there I was tripping on acid and I ended up kicking over clothes racks and crying with my fists in my ears. To shut out the voices.

Ever see that movie where Robin Williams works as a film developer and grows obsessed with the pictures of families who entrust him with their pictures? Neither did I. But at one point I understand he covers this whole wall with pictures of people he doesn't even know, and then blood starts pouring out of all sorts of weird places and shit starts exploding. That's basically what the bottom floor of the Harvard Coop is like: Robin Williams being creepy. Only he's doing it on Fox News in front of a video background of jingoistic iconography, like the Zapruder Film interposed with shots from 300 and old sepia-colored pictures of Lincoln and Ty Cobb, set to the music they play on ESPN when an American golfer wins a tournament in Scotland.

Up a half flight of stairs is where they keep all those dark-eyed sixty-dollar teddy bears wearing tiny Harvard shirts. And these nighttime cuddlemuffins are flanked on both sides by wonderful bedtime story books, such as, "How They Got In: Secrets to Harvard Admission" or "50 Successful Harvard Application Essays," or, my personal favorite, "Great Expectations: How to Raise Your Child to Resent You and Develop Borderline Personality Disorder."

It all just goes to show that you can be as exclusive and as elitist as you want and still get people to pay to eat shit right out of your ass.

The next floor--if you can make it that far, and if so, wow--is filled with outrageously priced school and dorm supplies. One does not linger here.

The third floor is the where you finally get to the books. Or, you find the shelves where the books are supposed to be. See, the Coop never actually stocks enough. For a class of twelve, the math geniuses in the back room will order seven books. For a class of 172, they'll order eight. They once ordered nine books for one class, but only because someone wrote a six upside down. The class had 800 people.

Once you find the empty space on the shelf where you're book is supposed to be, you'll either see a sign that says the books are out of stock, or a sign that says they, mysteriously enough, aren't. In the case of the former, you go to the desk, stand in line for twenty minutes, and fill out a form, just so you can order a book that the Coop should already have and would be cheaper and faster to buy on Amazon, but is probably unavailable because it was published by the Harvard University Press two days ago. In the case of the latter, you're charge is to sneak around the corridors and try to find one of the employees with the red tags on their necks, who behave very much like a cross between those giant ogres before the Forest Temple in The Ocarina of Time (in that if they see you, they'll whip out a giant cudgel and send a shock wave that will blow you off your feet into a wall), and the monkey in the Tall Tall Mountain level from Mario 64 (in that they're unreasonably fast and will just make false promises and steal your hat if you ever manage to grab them).

If you're really clever you're probably thinking, "Well, gee mister, why don't you just copy down the IBSN from the books and run a search on Google! That'll solve all your problems." And you know what? For once you'd be right. Only if the Coop catches you doing that, they will actually call the cops on you. I've seen it happen. The poor student saw the boys in blue coming for him and bolted down the back stairwell. He made it to the ground floor but became disoriented by the bright colors and fainted, throwing up all over himself. The cops beat him with billy-clubs until all the blood was drained from his flesh. Behind the carnage I saw a Coop employee mark a tally on the wall. "Four-hundred!" she screamed, and laughed...and laughed...and laughed...

My Harvard Application Essay

After I was accepted to every school in the world anyone in the world could ever want to go to, ever, a lot of people asked me, not knowing my name wasn't actually Ted, "Hey, Ted, what do you think got you in?" To which I would sagely reply, "It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue." Most people would be sort of intimidated by that response because they figured I was so smart, and they'd stop and think about it as if it contained all the answers they sought, but the truth is I was just being weird. Looking back I guess that's sort of how Jesus or Bob Dylan must have felt before they jumped the shark and got crucified.

The truth is, though, I actually know what got me into Harvard. It was my essay. They even wrote me back and said, "Ted, we don't really like you and we don't think you'll be a very good student, but your essay was one of the best we read this year." Actually, they didn't really write those first seventeen words--only the last eleven. But the rest was implied.

So I've decided, since people have asked me in the past, and I miss those people, since I guess most of them are dead by now, that I'll put up my winning essay. So without further ado, this is what it takes to get you into Harvard:

In response to the prompt, "Describe a fictional character, historical figure, or creative work (art, music, science, etc.) that’s influenced you and explain that influence."

Toast, by Tim Lambert

If I could do any one thing in my life—anything—I would be a space dolphin hunter.

Why? I hate dolphins. They're trash to me. They're scum. And everyone knows that by the time I'm out of college—about nine years from now—they will be in space…lurking in the darkness.

And someone's gonna have to kill 'em.

When I was just a wee little boy I watched my first Crocodile Dundee movie, and it changed my life forever. When I saw ol' Mick Dundee dive into that river and come out with the carcass of a ten foot lizard slung over his back, I knew what I was meant to do. I would dream at night about sharpening knives on the ice caps of Nepal, in frantic search of the Yeti. I figured since it was so elusive, it must have done something it was ashamed of. And when a Yeti is ashamed, you know shit has really gone down.

Anyway, I basically just killed stuff. All the time. For looking at me funny, and for having no souls.

Someone once called me a sociopath. She had a degree in psychology. But if she was so smart, how come she's dead now? Huh? The answer is she's stupid.

But space dolphins aren't stupid. They're cunning bastards, and it takes a truly sharp human intellect to trace them through the vacuum of space. But I figure that won't be a problem, since I aced two of the sections on the SATs.

So back in the jungle, I was wading through a river dyed red with my blood, draining rapidly out of an inch-wide gash circling my abdomen like a hoola hoop. I knew I wouldn't make it much longer if I didn't make it to the helipad by the time the sun hit the jewel of the monkey idol I had placed at the top of the Incan ruins. For the first time in my life I stopped to consider what I was still living for. What was there? Another endless line of vacuous monsters just waiting to be made into corpses. It was the same grind, over and over. Couldn't there be something more to life? Shouldn't there be? What had happened to those high-minded dreams of meaning and morality that I had held so dear long ago?

But just then my bullshit was cut short by a huge fireball that broke through the canopy and landed on the bank behind me and exploded. I was knocked face first into the water before I could even manage to take a breath. I lay below the rippling surface for nearly a full minute before finally collecting my senses and pushing off the muck below. But as I rose slowly from the deep, having been pushed into the center of the river, I felt something cold as death itself slide against my leg.

Dolphin.

Fast forward to space. I'm floating around in a strange embryonic sack of fluid that the government assures me will keep my alive for up to six years in the void. I don't plan to take that long. Five hours before I made a near-fatal mistake by wandering into the den of the space dolphins in the midst of a spontaneous orgy. I only managed to escape after having my left leg severed by one particularly raucous female.

The sack has started its slow process of rebuilding my leg, but I've taken the severed one for my own purposes. For the past three hours now I've been pulling away the skin and muscle fiber. My femur will make an excellent cudgel—and I know who my first target will be. That horny dolphin she-bitch-slut.

I take a break for breakfast. It was here that I first found solace in toast.

I was the first person in the history of my school to come out as toastsexual. I'll never forget the first day after I broke the news. I only told a few friends, but word spread overnight. In my first class, during a test, a boy behind me made toaster noises. Everyone laughed at my expense. Then in the cafeteria I went to buy some milk and one of the lunch ladies threw a fork through my eyelid and farted aggressively. I found out later that she was actually having a psychotic breakdown, but at the time I took it really personally. I went outside to eat under the dock, alone with my toast.

At least, I thought I was alone. I was almost finished when a dolphin walked out of the ocean, dragging what I estimated to be several thousand of those giant barbed things that were all over the Normandy beaches in the D-Day scene of Saving Private Ryan. She glared at me, and made a noise that sounded like "Blomph."

Several minutes after killing it, I went back and talked to my toast. Being the cold-hearted killer that I was, I didn't know if it would work out between me and this warm, exquisitely golden-brown beauty freckled with raspberry jam. Toast said toast understood, and told me toast had known for a long time that I loved killing more than toast. Toast only wished toast could satisfy me in the same way killing did. I said, "Toast, you gave me the only satisfaction a man should need. It's just that I ain't yet what a man should be." Toast laughed in that sweet, crusty little way it always did, and then offered itself unto me. I ate it without remorse, but not a day goes by now that I don't think: what if?

If there's anything I've learned from killing dolphins it's that love can be a funny thing.

Dramamine, Zealotry, and the American Dream

Sometimes when I'm alone I think about things really hard and then I get a headache and throw up on my shirt and subsequently the rest of my self. But then I eat a bunch of Dramamine and feel better. Recently though this hasn't been working nearly as well as the movies and the media and Modest Mouse in that one song said that it would. So I've come to a crossroads: either I can find more powerful drugs, which probably won't be available over the counter and will demand shady ventures out into the pit of Harvard Square where all the winos and dirty kids with bad haircuts hang out, or to stop thinking so hard. I've decided to stop thinking so hard, at least until my Dramamine tolerance drops back down to a healthy nil.

By the way, is it still all right to use the term "wino" to describe one of those alcoholic bums on the street? Or has that too fallen under the sword of those euphemism-touting politicos of this do-nothing generation of American academics? I think "wino" is a perfectly acceptable term. Is it mean? Absolutely. Is it meaner than gently calling the people "unemployed urban campers with alcohol abuse issues"? I don't think so; most winos probably wouldn't even understand that name, because they're too fucking drunk. Maybe my moral compass isn't as fine as your average specimen of the New England intelligentsia, but then again I break that mold in a lot of ways, most notably in that I don't like modern art and never jerk off to The New Yorker.

While I'm still free associating, I'd like to add that I'm really don't have anything against The New Yorker. I mean, sure, it's smug, pretentious, opaque to the point of being outright vapid, and home to short stories so bad they make me lose hope in the future of American literature--if not literacy itself--but I'm still deeply grateful that it's still around. Just imagine what those editors would be doing otherwise. Can you say 'most obnoxious winos ever'?

Now let me tell you a little story which is actually true:

A few weeks ago I was riding the T from Boston to Cambridge with two of my Harvard buddies. The cart was crowded and we were standing up. Across the isle from us was sitting a dirty, hairy man who was clearly drunk. This was about 8:30 on a Friday night. I saw him tap a well-dressed man on the shoulder and ask if he would spare some change. The man told him he couldn't, and after harassing him for a minute longer, the dirty man eventually gave up and looked down at the ground. Then I saw him reach into his pocket and pull out a wad of cash. He rifled through the bills, counting them, and from the corner of my eye I could see that he had at least twenty bucks. I tapped my friends' shoulders and gestured to the man. After a moment he put the cash away and looked again at the ground.

Then this fellow decided to ask us if we could spare any change.

"What do you need change for, man?" I said. "You've got more money that I do."
"What are you talking about?" he said.
"I just saw you holding a huge wad of cash."
"No you didn't."
"Yeah," I say, "You're probably right." And I proceeded to ignore him. But one of my friends, who is, incidentally, from Alaska, pressed on:
"Why should we give you money, anyway, if you're just going to use it to get booze?"
"Hey, you don't know that," said the man.
"Well are you?" asked my friend.
"Yeah, well, maybe I am, but so what?"
"You don't need that. You clearly don't need booze. Why should I give you money for booze?"
The guy was quiet for a minute, as if he couldn't process the question. And it turned out, he couldn't, because he responded like this:
"So what, are you some rich punk ass kid? Is that it?"
"No," said my friend, "You've got more money that I do."
"What the fuck do you know? You're just a punk ass kid. You just got everything given to you."
"No I haven't."
"Oh yeah?"
"I'm proud of what I've accomplished."
"So your mommy and daddy gave you all the money you need? Yeah? I bet if you asked them for a hundred dollars they'd just give it to you."
"Yeah, that's right," my friend finally resigned. "I'm just a rich punk ass kid."
"Punk ass kid," said the guy.

Then he went silent again and looked at the floor. A few people on the train were staring at us and the rest were trying to stare at anything else. Right before our stop came the man pulled out his wad of cash and counted it again.

The doors opened and we quickly got off and climbed up into Harvard Square. Before going back to our dorm my friend went to a liquor store and bought us some vodka. It cost eighteen dollars and eighty-nine cents.

The Sentence that Kills Children

I do not consider myself to be a good writer. I do not even consider myself to be a decent writer. In fact, whenever I publish or hand in any written work I do so with an almost crippling sense of shame at how hopelessly inadequate my command of my native language remains despite eighteen years of total immersion in it. I do, however, have some grasp of what distinguishes utterly terrible writing from the inoffensively mediocre. Being that I can't write my way out of a subordinate clause without a nauseating degree of self-referential irony, I tend to hold back my nitpicks or outright condemnations of another's sub-substandard writing. Sometimes, though, there comes before my eyes such a travesty, such a shameful bastardization of all that marks English as a language worthy of human utterance, that I can not abide its existence. I'd compare it to being a bystander during the Holocaust, but that would be outrageous. I guess it's more like standing passive and inert while a child drowns in front of you. That's not so bad, right? I'm thinking the Jews wouldn't object to that level of insensitivity. Am I good? Judges? I'm getting the green light from Mordecai, my Hebrew-speaking roommate who is also the mounted head of a ram from Guatemala. Funny story about that, actually. Try getting that through customs. Ah, shit, this always happens. Where the hell was I? Jews? I need a drink.

Right. Ahem. Sorry about that. I was talking about writing.

So here is an excerpt from an article being used as an example of a good "conversational essay," in a freshman writing course at Columbia University. As you read this, try not to think of a child drowning. Try not to imagine her cherubic face sinking beneath the algae-encrusted surface of a stagnant pond as her arms slow their desperate thrashing and her bright blue eyes dilate in fear as she catches her last glimpse of this fleeting life, absolutely and permanently alone. Don't think about that at all.

"With its bright colors, rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races, and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions, a mural in the Soundview neighborhood of' the South Bronx on 174th St. entitled 'We Are Here to Awaken from the Illusions of Our Separateness" (Figs. 1-4) exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

The horror. The...horror...

I'd like to point out up front that this is actually the first sentence of the essay. I'd also like to take a moment to ask the reader to consider whether or not he would ever willingly continue reading an essay that began like this, and if so, I'd like to humbly request that he shoot himself in the face.

I think I've thinned the herd enough. So let's begin.

First, take a moment to try to appreciate just how friggin' long this sentence is. Count the words. Go ahead. I dare you. No, but seriously, don't. It will hurt you. It's 80 words long.

Eighty words. Let's try to put that in perspective.

• The Lord's Prayer is 70 words long.
• Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is 114 words.
• The Gettysburg Address is 271 words.
• The Declaration of Independence is 1322 words.

The following passage, the entirety of Chapter III from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, is 75 words.

"We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that."

Before you object and say that using Hemingway as a comparison is unfair because the cornerstones of his style were short sentences and omission, among other things, take a minute to A.) suck my dick, and B.) kill yourself. Then read this following opening sentence from a little known work by Thomas "Two-Dolla-Billz" Jefferson:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

How long is this sentence, written in the 18th century era of diction so baroque it would have compelled Hemingway to punch a Spanish child in the face? Seventy-one words. Seventy-one words were all it took for Our Founding Fathers to state their thesis that America ought to be a country. But this other bitch can't even squirt out a point about some corny, inconsequential mural without weaving a 80-word brainfuck so serpentine it would make Milton ejaculate with envy. And yes, Milton could do that, because he was blind.

So allow me to break down this mammoth motherfucker into more manageable morsels. This sentence has:

• Two uses of the word "races," less than 15 words apart.
• Another use of the word "racial."
  
• Two uses of the word "socioeconomic."
• Two present active participles.
  
• Two perfect passive participles.
• Five uses of the word "of."
• Five uses of the word "the."
• One totally unnecessary and ill-placed address.
  
• One main singular subject, "a mural," 35 words deep in the sentence.
  
• One main verb, "exemplifies."
  
• No strong verbs.
  
• Nothing good at all.

A social studies teacher would call this sentence a "thesis," but only, I hope, through a clenched jaw and with tears of agony welling up in her eyes. An English teacher would call this sentence many things, most of them profane, but among them, "top-heavy."

What's a top-heavy sentence? It's a bland, fairly simple sentence that a lazy and/or foolish writer has decided to obscure by piling an unreasonable amount of adverbial phrases and other modifiers in front of it. Imagine a scrawny guy with knobby knees and a small penis who wears a mohawk to distract people from his shortcomings. Now turn him into a sentence. He's top-heavy, and he also, strangely enough, resembles a drowning child.

There are a few reasons someone might want to make a top-heavy sentence. None of them could possibly apply to thesis-writing. And besides, no amateur writer does this deliberately. They do it because they don't know shit.

Now let's really dig into these stupid literary mohawks.

"With its bright colors..."

So what the hell do bright colors have to do with anything? Let's put it somewhere else and see how it reads: "A mural with its bright colors exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals..." Bright colors are arguably captivating, but is this person really using bright colors as evidence for a key point of her thesis? You know--since normally murals use dreary colors, so nobody will look at them. How astute of her to point out the bright colors. She's a sublime aesthete. A goddamn idiot-savant. Gag me.

"...rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races..."

Isn't that pretty. I love rays of sun. I love them almost as much as rays of sunlight, which is a cliche which actually makes some sort of sense. And I love them almost as much as I love boring theses that try to wax poetic to cover up their complete irrelevance. I also love the use of "showering" to describe light, since we all know light falls just like rain and isn't a trite way to describe "rays of sun" at all. Though, the second half of the sentence is what really bothers me. Her use of influential is totally unnecessary. What leader isn't influential? She could have cut this sentence down to a trim 79 words, just like that. Worst of all, the ambiguity of "of" leaves the reader wondering if she means the leaders come from different racial backgrounds, or whether different races have their own leaders--like the King of the Blacks, or Emperor Whitey, or something. Nice attention to detail, Ms. Bright Colors.

"...and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions..."

This one came as a relief. After slogging through those last two bewildering items on this list, I was appreciative that the writer thought to remind me that "inspiring" things are meant to "stir" people. I thought it had something to do with food or something, because I don't know much about them wordstuffs without her done telling me synonyms straightaway. It was also sweet of her to include that passive participle without any agent. Honestly, I don't really want to know who "coined" these slogans. I expect it's totally irrelevant. And I certainly know precisely what she means by the "gap between races." And the idea of "gaps between...divisions" just plain tickles me. I imagine it resembles the space between her ears.

I might be more willing to excuse this writer's offenses if I suspected she never read anything good. I mean, then, who could blame her for writing crap? If the extent of her literary experience was R.L. Stine and Barbara Kingsolver, then I'd understand and just shrug her off as a amiably goofy rookie. Unfortunately, I can't believe this. I can tell she's actually had some instruction in the art of essay writing, as well as at least an introduction to the quarks of rhetoric. How do I know this?

ASCENDING TRICOLON.

Ascending Tricolon is one of the most common rhetorical devices, and perhaps the easiest to use effectively. It really does the work for you. All you need to do is have a list of three things, hence the "tri-colon," and as you list them, make them either longer, more complicated, or more important in some way. Ascending tricolon mimics the structure of a good five-paragraph essay, in which the three-paragraph body begins with the weakest argument and builds to the strongest. Lots of people use this tool without even knowing what it's called, or maybe realizing they're doing it, in conversation as well as writing. It's a fairly commonsense way to phrase a list, and it generally works well in jokes. Paradoxically, the best way to tell that someone is conscious that they're doing it is if it's really, really poorly done. If it is clearly forced or just reeks of pretension. For instance, when someone really only has two things to list, but makes up a third to fill it out. This happens all the time in Time Magazine. It has also clearly happened in this train-wreck of a sentence we have in question. I mean, really: bright colors? Jesus H. Christ.

This girl has a level of education and rhetorical comprehension necessary to use ascending tricolon, but all the common sense of a squirrel trying to cross the street. She steps into this sentence, then freezes and thinks about the meaning of acorns or some shit, and apparently gets squished by a metaphorical bus, since it strikes her as a good idea to put in the address of the mural for no friggin' reason at all. I figure her brain was liquefied in the middle of writing this rubbish and all the information she actually had inside it just spilled out onto the page. Her ascending tricolon builds into a perfect anticlimax, almost twenty-five words of apposition, which is the syntactical equivalent of a sinkhole filled with the rotting corpses of unicorns.

Forget Hemingway punching this bitch in the face. We're talking a Cicero beatdown right here.

And then we finally get to the predicate, and she basically spits in our face. What she actually says, once you strip away all the fat, is "...a mural...exemplifies a trend to create...murals." You're kidding. That's what you're telling us? That's what took you EIGHTY WORDS? A mural is evidence of murals? I. HATE. YOU.


I can't go on any further. Eli, I'm tagging you in.

---------------
Well Tim, you pretty much covered all bases there. But let me stress again the needless repetition in this catastrophe of a sentence. We are told early on that the mural has "inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions". Awesome, now we know what the mural is all about. Yet, apparently the horrendous phrasing is not enough for the statement to stick in our minds. The author must again tell us at the end of the sentence that the mural "exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

You're kidding. You're kidding! We already know the fucking mural is in New York. You even told us the address. We already know the whole crap about racial and socioeconomic issues, you told us about 50 words earlier. We even already know the mural is educational. What the FUCK did you tell us in those last 21 words? That it's a trend? Well I've got news for you, bud: By this point in time, I could care less if these murals were a fucking revolution. If you can't express your thoughts any better, they're not worth hearing.

In closing, I'd like to touch back on something Tim mentioned earlier. The only way to learn to write well is to read. Now, whether or not most college students read is a topic for another debate. However, by this point in the semester every Columbia student has read Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey The Homeric Hymns and Herodotus' Histories. These books are the foundation of all literature. They may not be the best examples of how to write for the modern author, but if you are unable to take any sense of written language from them then there is no hope for your academic career. Please, do us all a favor and never write again.

So it's time for a little confessional:

I've been holding something in for a really long time, and I don't just mean puberty, which I'm still waiting to break out when I find the right back-alley whore. Till then my balls are going to stay safe within the confines of my hairless lower thorax. Where they belong.

I get distracted easily. For instance, take the previous paragraph, if I may be so bold as to call the above brain-vomit a deliberate packet of coherent thought. It started out straightforward enough, and then devolved into a veritable scatological smörgåsbords wherein even the lowliest intelligence might not find sufficient refuge even from the anti-syntactic growls of a neo-realist lecture. What the hell am I talking about? That may or may not be my point.

I titled this piece before I started writing it. That's entirely coincidental. I had something to say originally, but, like most things in life, it disappeared before it could come to fruition. Again this brings me back to puberty. Tangentially perhaps. Irrelevantly certainly. And to all those English fellows who told me I couldn't write a sentence with only adverbs, I say this: "Well, well, well."

I'm going to be honest. I've been doing crack with a near-religious diligence since I arrived on campus just three weeks ago. I smoke it all the time. It makes me feel wonderful. But you know what else makes me feel wonderful? Actually, nothing. All I've got now is crack. You may think I'm joking, but I want you to think really hard about the following three things: 1.) If I weren't, how would you even know? 2.) Do you really think I'd want you to know? 3.) Wouldn't it be a load off my conscience to confess my faults and sins publicly to an audience that doesn't believe them? Also think about how much effort the French put into building the Eiffel Tower--and for what? You don't need to think about that last part, but frankly, I think it's the most interesting.

I write all my posts drunk. Every single one. I've never written sober on this blahg. You're probably thinking, "Well, gee, that doesn't make sense, since some of these are posted in the morning or early afternoon!" But you're forgetting one terribly important detail: I'm drunk all the time. I really wonder what you'd think of me if you met me when I was sober. You might think I was an ax-murderer. Probably because without alcohol I'm terrifically shy and introverted, quiet and seemingly malicious. Also I tend to carry around an ax. Why? Dragons.

I bet you didn't know that dragons can speak every human language. Simultaneously. I bet you didn't even know they were real. Did you? But have you ever seen a dragon? Have you ever had one approach you and openly admit they don't exist? Then I'd have to ask you: what makes you so sure, Mr. Skeptic? Yeah. You don't know shit. Also dragons can fly, whether or not they have wings. Explain that, Mr. Science. When will you admit that you're whole philosophy of objective analysis has just been an elaborate ruse? Probably right before the dragons eat you.

Where am I going with all this, anyway? Answer: straight down to hell. Hope you'll join me.

Neoconservatism is the new black

Here at Harvard I have a really cool schedule, consisting of nine hours of class a week, and meetings only three days a week. It's so cool that if I wake up early enough to eat a warm breakfast (it's happened twice so far), I might even show up. When I do I mostly learn about dead white guys. I'm not too concerned with dead white guys, unless they can teach me how to make money, get laid, or live forever, which they clearly can't, since they're dead. So most of the time I skip class and get notes from friendly British girl upstairs who habitually says adorable things like "quite," "spirits," "wanker," and "fuck a sheep" and apparently came to America for nefarious reasons having to do with cultural imperialism. I like her a lot, but not, you know, in that way. What I mean is I don't want to fuck a sheep. But then, she's growing on me, so we'll see.

The point I'm trying to make is that since I have so much free time, I mostly go around starting friendly debates with people, usually about AIDS, rape, or whether or not Jesus Christ smoked marijuana (he did). To do this I employ the Socratic method, something I'm told is very popular in Harvard classrooms. Here's an example:

TJ: Hey, I'm TJ. I live in Mathews and I like Computer Science.
Me: Is it definitely rape if she only says stop once?
TJ: Um...why--well, yes, I guess. But--
Me: Well how are you supposed to know if stop is referring to intercourse or something else, like say you're sucking her nips?
TJ: Did...did you really just say nips? Out loud?
Me: And what if she doesn't speak any English and you don't understand Armenian?
TJ: You...you didn't even tell me your name.
Me: My heart has been broken too many times, TJ. I need a man's strong embrace.
TJ: I was just trying to be friendly...
Me: But what is friendship, anyway?

The important thing is not whether you're right or wrong, only that you establish a meaningful dialogue. Once you've done that, class becomes unnecessary. Class is just like a dialogue, only it's between a flock of sheep and a wood-chipper. Does that analogy hold up under any scrutiny? Doesn't matter. Like everything else I write, I'm not handing this in.

Occasionally people approach me asking for directions, and every time I try to put on a different fake accent. I do this because people asking for directions are generally from out-of-town, don't know a Boston accent from a well-articulated fart, and could reasonably believe that, as a Harvard student, you're from anywhere in the whole world. I get creative with them, too; the other day I decided to pronounce all my Vs as Ws, all my Hs as Ys, and to hiccup at every schwa. Today I decided to thump my chest whenever I use an infinitive or imperative. Looking back, I guess I'm not very good at this game. That isn't an accent so much as a social more.

I met a really lovely girl the other day, only to realize she was actually from Boston College. So I guess she wasn't lovely after all. They do a lot of coke over there.

Since today is Friday, and I don't have any classes, I decided to go down to the Charles and jump off the footbridge, which, incidentally, is what everyone is doing these days. It turned out to be a bad idea. For some reason there are actually metal spikes under the bridge. I know this because a girl came out with one of them sticking through her calf. They put her in a whistling truck and some people were crying. Cambridge can be really weird sometimes.

I love to play pranks on people. One of the Freshman dorms is called Wigglesworth. The T runs right under it, so every five minutes you can feel a faint rumbling in the rooms and you can hear a earthquake-like roar in the basement common room. None of my pranks have anything to do with this. I just thought it was interesting. I did meet a girl from there at a party, though. She was Japanese so I assumed she liked Pokemon. I asked her if she wanted to see my Diglet. She said she wasn't interested unless it was a Dugtrio. I said with a little more training I'm sure it would evolve. Then she laughed, hissed, slapped me in the face, and flew away. With my heart. For the rest of that weekend I played Pokemon Red nonstop. That's not code for masturbating. I found out later that the girl was actually a bat. I guess I was pretty drunk.

Ahmadinejad is Mah Homeboy

A lot of people have been asking about my experiences with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to campus yesterday. I decided that rather then tell the story over and over again I should just tell it once on this blahg. So, I apologize for the break from out typical tone of petty irony and arrogance. I also apologize for the length of this post. Anyone looking for dumb humor can probably skip it. And here we go:

The Controversy
Columbia University invited the insane dictator of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come give a talk as part of its "World Leaders Forum." Ahmadinejad has become infamous for his oppression of gays and women as well as his views that the Holocaust did not exist and that Israel should be annihilated.

The sides were not split down a simple partisan line on this issue. Rather, they were shattered into many factions: Angry Jewish protesters, angry military personnel, angry feminists, angry homosexuals, angry proponents of free speech and angry liberal conspiracy theorists. Basically the argument boiled down to this: By allowing him a platform to speak are we legitimizing his views?

The Event
While the actual speech filled up within minutes of its announcement, a large overflow broadcast was conducts on the south lawn. This is what I ended up attending and it was rather packed. Here's a picture courtesy of Bwog:


The Interesting Part
So, rather than sit around and watch the various campus protests, my dear friends Gelseigh and James joined me in exiting the campus gates to mingle with outside protesters. These people would have loved to be on campus, but Columbia, thankfully, decided to require a valid student ID to gain access to the quad.

Now our main goal was to pick out the people with the craziest signs and engage in debate with them. We all split up.

The first man I spoke to was carrying a sign which portrayed a large swastika with Ahmadinejad's head on top. The debate, in severe paraphrase, went something like this:
Me: Don't you think it's a little ridiculous and offensive to compare this man to Hitler?
Him: Well let me first tell you that I'm a Holocaust survivor and I watched my sister die next to me in a concentration camp.
Me: (stunned silence)
Him: This man wants to do just what Hitler did. He wants another Holocaust.
Me: I don't deny that, but don't you think that it's important to allow him to speak before that can happen? As a means of spreading awareness maybe?
Him: Why should he have a right to speak here? You're legitimizing his ideas by allowing him to speak here.

(insert 10 minutes of elevated debate. The rest of it is carried out in screams from the man)

Me: How are we supposed to know how to respond to this guy if we don't allow anyone to engage him directly?
Him: He's had his time to speak. Bringing him here is sponsoring a hate rally. You don't know what you're talking about.
Me: It's not a hate rally, it's a forum to question him.
Him: You don't know anything. I wish you were there in the camps with me. I wish you had seen my sister die.
Me: (silence) ... I'm sorry you feel that way. (I walk away).

At this point a reporter came up to me and told me I held up very well and that the guy was totally out of line. I answered a few questions and went back into the crowd to calm down a little then find someone else to argue with.

When you started talking to people in the crowd itself about 6 reporters would show up with notebooks and mics and cameras as soon as it started. Needless to say, it's a little tough to debate with all this crap shoved in your face, but it was an experience.

The next group I approached was of two women with an "Ashamed to be Alumni" sign. James started arguing with one of them and I the other one started in on me. This was nice, because as soon as you started arguing about 5 other people tended to jump in and shout you down.

The premise of this debate was a little less heated. They believed that we would be brainwashed by the man. We disagreed and said that the main pillar of higher education was learning to question what was said to us. It moved on to a discussion of whether we had the ability as college students to question him, to which we answered that we out of anyone probably had the best ability to question him.

Then some angry man jumped in and called me naive and an idiot. I told him I wasn't going to debate anything with him if he was going to attack me personally. He responded that what he meant was actually an idea of Stalin's of the "useful idiot". I told him that I was not a useful idiot and that I didn't think it was appropriate for him to use Stalinist rhetoric against me. He told me I had no idea what I was talking about, that diplomacy is useless and that the only answer is war. I responded that war sure helped us on the road to peace in Vietnam and both Iraq wars. He responded that he was in the Gulf war and that if they had taken out Saddam it would've created peace. I responded that our foreign policy should definitely become one of assassinating any foreign leader we don't like. He called me an idiot again and walked away.

The Speech

It was time to leave the madness and go back in the gates to watch the speech. PrezBo opened up by essentially owning the fuck out of Ahmadinejad. It was a little disappointing to see him cave so much to the public pressure of the people that had just been hurling unfounded insults at me all morning. He did need to make it clear that we were not in support of this guy's politics though, so maybe it was good.

Ahmadinejad then proceeded to ramble for about 40 minutes about science and religion. He made absolutely no sense for the majority of it. Gawker managed to grab this quote from somewhere:
"In the teachings of the prophets, one reality shall always be attached to science: the reality of purity of spirit and good behavior. Knowledge and wisdom are pure and clear reality. Science is a light."

Yep.

Well, the question-and-answer was a bit more interesting. He managed to dodge every single question pretty masterfully.
"Do you believe in the destruction of Israel"
"*Long rant about Palestine's right to exist*"
etc.

The highlight of the speech was definitely when a question was asked about homosexuality. At first he ignored it. The question was then repeated. He answered:
" In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country ... In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this."

Conclusion
Well, all-in-all it was an intense day. The speech was mostly passive and harmless, but the discussions it inspired were more valuable than all the weeks of classes I've been to at this school. This is what a university is supposed to be and I'm glad our President had the sense to invite the man to come speak. I was shouted down numerous times, told that I should've died in the Holocaust and told that I couldn't possibly know anything about politics or the world in general. But I feel like if I managed to get something out of the experience in spite of all that, then the university has done its job. Hats off to our administration...for once.

Here's some pictures from inside the gates:

So Basically I'm Batman

I've always flattered myself my thinking I'm psychically sound enough to not be hit too hard by homesickness. I spent all eighteen years of my life in the same town, with very few excursions elsewhere lasting longer than a few days. I figured once I left the sentimentality of it would quickly fade and I'd realize that Amherst doesn't really offer anything that Cambridge, among other places, doesn't offer in excess.

When I first got here I went down the list of the things that were most precious to me back home. I found street musicians, a kickass burrito place, drugged-out slackers with dreams of revolution, several pretty places to run, trees to climb (albeit illegally), and plenty of dark-haired, doe-eyed virgins with low alcohol tolerance who dream of writing their coming-of-age novels and moving to a third world country to help orphans. I think somewhere in the mix I even found some people who could become very good friends.

But you know what I didn't find?

Love.

But you know what I didn't find, and I actually wish I had?

Antonio's.

Cambridge needs a friggin' Antonio's. They've got a Pinnochio's, incidentally, and it's actually the original from which the shady Amherst chapter was spawned. The drunk kids around here call it 'Noc's, and the fruity kids call it Pinnoc's, probably because that sounds more like penis.

I like to keep an open mind when it comes to pizzerias, so last week I got rip-roaring drunk and wandered down the dark streets of Cambridge in hopes of locating a distant choir of screams that could only mean deliciousness. As I walked I contemplated what rip-roaring drunk actually meant. I decided it was sort of like Enlightenment, in that some Zen asshole just made it up because he wanted an excuse not to get a real job. Of course, when I was thinking this, I was rip-roaring drunk. So I still really don't know what it means.

Deep in the throes of this internal debate I somehow managed to almost get run over by a moped. The driver was an elderly woman with a ponytail, wearing a pink helmet and a leather jacket. She swore profusely at me and I made fun of her for being blind. Shortly after the two of us went on our merry ways I heard a massive crash behind me. I turned to find the old hag sprawled out face down on the sidewalk. Her moped had managed to lodge itself in the metal grating of a closed tobacco shop. I ran over to her and tried to pry her off the ground. She shook me off. "I can do it myself, you fucking fuckers!" she said sagely. And then, with a eloquent cough that seemed to fill a thousand blissful years, she cooed, "Actually, young man, I don't think I can walk."

I laughed at her ruse and challenged her to an arm wrestle. She turned me down, clearly fearful of my undeniable man-essence. I didn't really want to arm-wrestle her, anyway. I figured since she was so old she was probably going to die soon, anyway, so I might as well make her feel as if she isn't totally inferior in her last moments. Like in all those baseball movies where the kid meets his favorite player and tosses his historic home-run ball back to him, so he can have it as his own keepsake, and then the big star says, "Wow, champ, that's a heckuva arm ya got there!" Or some shit like that. And the kid really appreciates that because his father was a deadbeat or a Nazi and never gave him any positive reinforcement, and the kid probably also has cancer or something. I don't know if there's ever been a movie like that, but if so, it totally sucked ass.

So while she was lying there, dying like the champ that she wasn't, I figured I'd go find some pizza for the two of us. But I realized if I went all the way to the nearest pizza place, which could be millions of miles away, and then all the way back, the pizza would be cold and covered in my drool, and my drool would be equally cold. Plus, I really didn't want to walk all the way back here before turning in for the night. So naturally I lifted up this old woman and threw her over my shoulder like a large straw dummy meticulously fashioned after an old woman. At first she was all like, "Hey, what are you doing? Where are you bringing me?" But she knew. She was just playing the Old-Person-with-Alzheimer's Card and pretending to forget everything. I decided to one-up her by telling her we were going to the Kingdom of Heaven and that I was the Angel of Death. She got really quiet after that, and pretty soon I forgot I was carrying her.

After a half dozen blocks I was getting really tired, party because I'm out of shape, but mostly because I was carrying an old woman and didn't realize it. So I decided to stop in at one of the 362 CVS stores in Cambridge and buy some smokes. I get in there and this short black guy behind the counter is just sort of shaking his head like he's listening to some crazy music that nobody else can hear.

He looked up and his eyes went all bugged-out on me and I figured he must be reacting to the fumes of drugs he ignited and inhaled before I came in. He started mumbling, something to the effect of, "Excuse me, sir, but I thought I might inform you that you are carrying the limp and unconscious body of an elderly female, and given that this is a convenience store and not the emergency room of a hospital, I would posit further that your presence here is inappropriate to the point of being profane."

I asked him why he did not have any American Spirits behind the counter. He shrugged his shoulders and said that Camels were all right.

"All right?" I screamed. "You think Camels are all right?"

The next thing I knew I was foaming at the mouth, and it tasted like Sour Cream and Onion. I knew something bad was about to happen, so I beckoned to the man behind the counter. He seemed confused, and intimated to me that he did not want to come any closer to me, and besides if he did he would be unable, on account of the persistently solid counter affixed to the floor between us.

Something inside me died in that moment, and I once I came to the clear truth of it all: all of us - me, the CVS man, the old woman, me, Bruce Springsteen, Sour Cream and Onion, me, Batman, and even I myself were all simply swirling around in an amoral universe like motes of dust in a dusty dustbowl. Nothing I did mattered. Soon I would die and it would all be oblivion, and then I would be dead for the rest of my life.

The woman on my shoulders announced her presence with a gentle purr, which evolved into projectile vomit, bile intermingled with blood. Suddenly I knew what I had to do.

"Do you know why we bury our dead, laddie?" I intoned to the drugged Mister in the blue CVS shit.

He looked at me as if he had been dealing with the customer behind me for the past several minutes.

With an explosion of force the likes of which I had never before experienced outside of James Cameron films, I hurled the old woman at the drug-man. She spun around several times, a ballerina on a horizontal axis, before striking him directly all over his body. The two of them fell against the wall of cigarettes in a highly poetical heap. Tobacco products lay scattered across them like body glitter on a body, a body that was the floor.

Immediately several people started cheering hysterically, lost for all sensible words. The screamed for help, frustrated that they could not find a camera in order to preserve this image of justice forever. I strode over to them and placed a hand on each of their shoulders in turn.

"Do not worry, my peerless children. I am that is. A destroyer of worlds. Tobacco products are carcinogenic, and cancer is the light of lights."

And with that I disappeared into the night, leaving all to wonder what had happened to what they once called their lives.