So Much To Do

My school prides itself on always having a million things going on at once. Just last night there was an A Capella Jam, the Freshmen 'First Chance Dance,' a Muslim Chaplain Meeting, and several thousand upperclassmen throwing parties with grossly uneven male-to-female ratios. There are 450 student organizations, ranging from singing to rugby to politics to writing to hitting each other with giant foam katanas, and Harvard Square is always, as the kids today (allegedly) say, "bumpin." But all of this begs the question: what is there to do if you aren't drunk?

There are a few things.

First, you can do laundry. I don't recommend this as it really undermines your first and last line of defense against advances from the opposite sex, which can be a huge distraction from your studies.

Second, you can go for a walk and introduce yourself to people. This is nice because it's both awkward and pointless. If I had a dime for every person I've met and had a delightful twenty second repartee with in the past week, I'd have no idea how many dimes I'd have, because I've forgotten almost all of it. Hopefully enough to buy a couple beers.

Third, you can catch a T into downtown Boston or a bus out to Allston. The great thing about Boston is that it's filled with angry Irish people, drunken Irish people, and some very confused Italians. Also a great thing to do is to visit Emerson College and take note of how much prettier the girls are just outside of the Ivy League. Allston is fun because it's sort of like a giant dingy neighborhood where everyone is under twenty-six and seemingly expects to die in a hilarious party-related accident before they outgrow the place. Plus, there are plenty of hipsters who can show you how not to use hair gel. And there's Dave Noonan, God bless his soul.

Fourth, you can hop in on one of the tours that run constantly right outside your dorm and nod admiringly at all the historical gibberish that the Crimson Key Society probably makes up on the spot. Also, get your picture taken with Asian tourists at least nine or forty times. Every time you feel down in the dumps you can easily take heart knowing that someone who thinks you're a Greek fuckin' God is never more than a stone's throw away. Then jump on the T and introduce yourself as a Harvard student and see what people throw at you. I've so far collected a dog chain, a plastic rape whistle, and a half-eaten Egg McMuffin, which was delicious.

Fifth, you can go to the library. Nah, just kidding. Only nerds do that.

Fifth, (for real). This is a fun game you can play by yourself without even taking off your pants. Field calls from everyone you know and try, and fail, to convey with your voice the inordinate level of enthusiasm that they expect from you just for being where you are:

Them: "So how is Hahvahd?! Is it, like, the greatest thing ever?"
Me: "Oh, yeah, totally. It's the bomb-diggity and shit."
Them: "What's it like?"
Me: "It's..."
Them: "Well?"
Me: "Um...fuck, it's like, ah, I don't know. Warm apple pie."
Them: "Warm apple pie?"
Me: "...yeah."
Them: "How so?"
Me: "Mostly the moistness factor. There is much moistness."
Them: "What the hell?"
Me: "Mmmmmmoist."

The point of the game is to see how long it takes for them to decide either that you're crazy, or just to never call again.

Sixth, you can scope out the chicks. I'm always up for a challenge, so this is one of my favorites. The best part about this one is getting so drunk that you can't tell if you just think a girl's attractive because she looks sort of like some other attractive girl you knew back home, or if she's actually, legitimately, all inebriation aside, just a dude.

Did I mention this is something you really should only do while sober?

Anyway, I'm not saying there aren't any hot girls at Harvard. But then, I also believe in unicorns.


SO, I've only been here for a week and I've already found all these awesome things to do. Isn't it great? Everyone should come visit me. Soon.

Please?

In Harvard, nobody can hear you scream.

Of all the crazy statistics Harvard manages to post year after year, one of the craziest is it's freshman retention rate. It's up around 98%. And if I'm not mistaken, the number of students who graduate within six years is around 90%.

Have you ever wondered what happens to that 2%, or that 10%? They don't all steal code worth billions of dollars and become successful entrepreneurs overnight. Maybe half do, but that still leaves dozens of kids from every entering class who simply fall off the map.

But I actually know where some of them go, for a while at least.

My mother works with mentally ill people. She doesn't mind telling me that most are fairly young, all are affluent, and at any given time, several of them are Harvard students. She gets people from Brown, too, and once in a while a girl from Columbia. Columbia only sends girls for some reason.

So I'm slowly coming to the full realization that within a few years, if my mother keeps this job, she will end up working with one of my classmates, perhaps even one I'll know.

All three of the people in this triangle will be completely ignorant of the situation. My mother only reveals her first name to her patients, and she is professionally bound not to divulge to anyone any details that might let one of her patients be identified. I'll never find out about it. If my best friend here ends up hanging himself in her presence, I'll be told a lie about what happened. If some girl I sleep with goes crazy because she finds out, too late, that I'm an emotionally corrupt, morally vacuous bucket of human waste, and ends up telling my mother every grotesque detail of our meeting, I will not find out. My mother will just be furious with me and be unable to communicate why.

Imagine if every time your mother was angry at you and wouldn't explain why, you had reason to suspect in the back of your mind it was because she met one of those souls you senselessly crush on a weekly basis. This is my now my life.

Now, you're probably thinking: "Gee-golly-shucks! It sure is egotistical of this guy to think he could single-handedly cause someone to lose her marbles. Huh-yuck!"

Tell me I don't have your internal monologues down pat. It's almost eerie.

If I were so inclined I could tell you more than one story that would cause you to, among other things, stick your own foot in your mouth directly. But I am not so inclined. Suffice it to say that I have reason to feel guilty for the rest of my ridiculous, inescapably Catholic life. And next time you're feeling sentimental, direct a moment of silence towards the all the sweet, gentle girls in this world who will always be ruined by the endlessly cunning evils of childish men.

But this piece isn't about all that any more than everything I ever write will be--which is to say, only subconsciously, maybe sorta--and this sentence isn't really any good. Skip over it.

This piece is about people going crazy at Harvard. I know how supposedly we're all enterprising sons-of-bitches. We've got all our ducks in a row, which is why we're here. We're motivated, intelligent, competent, and assertive with our lives. Or we're legacies. Or we have Asian parents.

But if all of that is true, why is it that we're given a whole team of advisers to look after us and help us pick out what classes we take? All week that's been what we do: meet with this adviser, that adviser, go to this lecture on what level of class to take, hear this guy give us advice on the college experience, and once in a while, sleep and try to not go crazy. But if even we fail that, we're reminded that Harvard University Health Services supplies comprehensive psychiatric care to any student seeking it. So no worries, right? There's always someone to turn to in the unlikely event that you wake up one morning and are completely overwhelmed.

It's like how the government told us to duct tape our windows in case of a biological attack, or hide under our desks when the alarm sounds.

You know, so we feel safe.

I never was bothered by all the bullshit the government fed us. Even after September 11th I never seriously thought I, or anyone I knew, might be killed by terrorists. But all this good-intentioned advice is scaring the shit out of me. I'm actually worried I'll just go nuts, suddenly, without warning, because apparently it's a Harvard epidemic. Maybe I'll brush up against someone at a party or share a glass with the wrong person and that'll be it: I'll have caught the crazy.

It's gotten to the point where I spent my time holed up in my room flipping through the course catalog and choosing which 3468 of the 3500 amazing offered classes I'd least regret not taking. Occasionally I step out to our cathedral of a dining hall and binge on frozen yogurt and Spicy Thai Peanut salad dressing until my stomach turns into a jelly-filled beach ball and my face looks like a slice of Antonio's Red Tortellini pizza. Then I go back to my room, get drunk and belligerent, get written up by the proctor who lives directly above me, and try to figure out how I'll make it through the next four years surrounded by people who actually think they know what they want to do with their lives. And late at night when I can't sleep, partially because Mass Ave is just outside my window and evidently ambulance runs are very popular between 2 and 4 AM, and partially because I can't wrap my head around the way my life just got uprooted completely at a time when its roots were actually beginning to mean something, I'll wander out into the courtyard to chain smoke and throw sticks of deodorant at squirrels, or draw massive arrays of animalistic rituals with sharpies on giant pieces of cardboard and caption them with Latin and lines from early John Keats because those slowly become the only things that seem to make sense.

And then in that absurd time late at night between dialing a number and having the girl on the other end pick up I wonder where it is all the crazy Harvard students end up once my mom can't help them anymore.





This is a work of satire.

Speaking of Busch Light:

Let me tell you an interesting little story about an old white dude you probably had to learn about back in your freshman year of high school (or, if you're a Brown student, your forty-eighth season on the Peace-Love-Asparagus plantation). The man's name was Socrates, he was Greek, and as far as anybody knows, he started going bald before his testicles dropped.

Once, as a young man--though not so young that he still had hair--he was traveling with a legion of soldiers on some obligatory campaign across the rocky, olive-infested tundra of some Grecian peninsula, looking for barbarians and malformed babies to kill. Failing that, the soldiers decided to set up camp and dick around for a weekend or so in the middle of some dusty clearing in the ass end of nowhere.

Right in the middle of pitching a tent on the first evening, a thought struck Socrates. It struck him so hard he was dumbfounded. He dropped the polls, tossed his corner of the canvas to one of the fellows who actually cared about staying dry that night, and went off to stand by a stump. And he thought about this thought. Something about it bothered him. He could no resolve it, so he stood there and tried to wrap his bald little noodle around it.

The night wore on, and Socrates stood dead still. Finally some soldier walked over to him as dinner was wrapping up and offered him a bowl of gruel. Socrates did not respond. He simply looked blankly into the middle distance, letting the ol' cogs wheel about in his head on their own accord. The solider found this odd, for Socrates had earned notoriety for his superhuman appetite for gruel. The solider persisted, resorting even to poking Socrates in the chest, but all to no avail. Thanks only to the soldier's solid military discipline did he restrain himself from tickling Socrates. Modern historians hold a general consensus today that Socrates, as well as philosophy as we currently know it, would have been fundamentally altered had such a tickling taken place.

Finally the solider walked away and left Socrates to his own devices. He continued to stand by the stump and think throughout the night. In the morning the soldiers awoke to find him still standing, still thinking, and still refusing to give any response. Periodically some curious soul would wander over to him to see if he could pry him away from his thoughts, but none succeeded. Socrates remained in his spot until nightfall, at which point another soldier came and once again offered Socrates some gruel. Again, he gave no response.

Another night passed and Socrates did not move. He was beginning to truly frighten the soldiers, and they avoided him the next day as they prepared to depart. Then finally, around noon, Socrates' eyes snapped back into focus and he walked over to the nearest tent.

"How are things going?" he asked--and I paraphrase, for Socrates would never deign to speak English.

The soldiers simply stared.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

"Why were you standing by that stump for two days, Socrates?" asked one of them.

"I had a question that needed answering," replied Socrates.

"But what was the question?" asked a soldier.

"Oh, that doesn't matter," Socrates said. "What's important is that I've found the answer."

There was a long pause while the soldiers waited for him to explain himself. But Socrates said nothing.

"Well then, what was the answer!?" they all yelled at last.

Socrates smiled and said, "I don't know."

This was the birth of the Socratic Method. It was also the worst ass-kicking of Socrates' life.

* * *

I told you that story so I could tell you another story. This one is about me and Busch Light.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was at a party where all the beer had been exhausted except for Busch Light. You may wonder: why would one of Tim's friends even have Busch Light? Wouldn't that mean, by definition, that he wasn't Tim's friend? Generally, yes, it would, but this was a unique case. I won't describe it in detail, but suffice it to say that I justifiably blame it on the interference of skinny jeans, undercooked egg whites, and estrogen--and that's all I'm going to say about it.

I assure you that everything in this story is true. It actually happened to me. What you will read shortly may shock and appall you, but do not disbelieve it. It's imperative to your safety that you listen to me. So here it is:

I drank Busch Light.

Let that sink in. It gets worse.

I drank five cans of Busch Light. In quick succession. Without time to purge myself or suck out the poison through cuts in my flesh. I didn't even have a chance to utilize my emergency reserve jar of leeches, which is basically a get-out-of-any-medical-disaster-for-free-card.

Do you want to know what happened?

I nearly fucking died.

The reason may surprise you, though. Busch Light does not contain anything, save alcohol, that poses any direct threat to one's physical health. I did not wind up in the hospital or praying to the porcelain gods because of this shit that I drank. But I wish it had only been that bad. What happened to me was far worse. Within thirty six hours I would be standing on top of a water tower somewhere in Hadley, completely unaware of my own identity, and fully determined to jump to my long-overdue death.

But I'll get to all that.

There are a few peripheral characters in this story whom I shall neglect to mention. I do this not to trivialize their roles; rather, I do it to underscore the idea that this odyssey of mine was primarily a duel to the death between me and Busch Light.

So where was I?

I'm sitting in my friend's basement in the wreckage of what was once a pretty damn good party. The girls have left, the music has stopped, and most of the extraneous douchebags have disappeared into their sordid corners of the night. And that leaves me with the host and a couple other guys, drinking Busch Light and ruminating on how bad it is. There was a guitar involved, as well as a bongo, and even a black man rapping. We had its badness down to an artful science.

But then this happened:

Says one fellow: "Busch Light: Like the Holocaust in a Drink!"

So then I lose it. Or, perhaps, I suppose, find it.

There is a rush of perspective. Here I am sitting in an unfinished room in an unfinished basement, drinking the last of the party's crumby alcohol with three other minors in some perverse male ego-stroking ritual, and complaining about it as I do so, allowing it to spiral so tastelessly out of proportion that one among us deems it fit to draw a comparison between the activity and genocide--a concept that, despite fifteen years of sensitivity training at the hands of one of the most liberal communities this side of the Atlantic, I can only grasp in banal abstraction, to the point that all its atrocity and horror are perceived as excellent fodder for outlandish jokes that I choose to appreciate under the impenetrable shield of irony and deliberate self-delusion.

Deep breath.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking, ten thousand miles away people are actually facing genocide, and to them the word means nothing--because there can be no conceptualizing death when it occurs so randomly, so suddenly, and so often that terror becomes almost mundane in its predictability--and certainly they lack the luxury to sit in some unfinished basement with a guitar and a bongo and complain about such trifles as which brand of illicit substances they choose to ingest, and they certainly lack the profound luxury of keeping an ironic viewpoint of their own lives, and they most definitely, most abso-fucking-lutely do not have the time or the motivation to get rip-roaring trashed in the middle of the night, celebrating nothing, in the hopes of attaining some catatonic state wherein they might find the sort of soul-crushing epiphany that reminds them without a hint of a shadow of a doubt that the lives they lead are worse than useless, that they are human cancer and the all-consuming putrid slime of the universe, nature's bastard children, failed experiments in consciousness and conscience, the pinnacle of amoral and apathetic decadence, with whom any discerning intelligence with even a modicum of rational thought would be ashamed only to share the same plane of existence.

I smash my final, empty Busch Light can, and wordlessly exit the house.

I really wish that could have been the crux of this story. It isn't even close.

In my intoxicated state I have only a vague understanding of exactly where I am. I understand the town is Shutesbury, the state is Massachusettes, and beyond that the polity is irrelevant insofar as I'm stuck in the fucking woods, which I am, and will continue to be until the voices in my head say otherwise.

That's something I forgot to mention: I started hearing voices after I smashed the Busch Light can. For the purposes of clarity, if not accuracy, I'll just refer to these voices as Busch Light itself.

I knew there was a road somewhere nearby, and logic, or whatever relic remained of that section of the brain that controls logic, dictated that I ought to find it by walking around the house. This is did, and work it did not.

So "Onward!" cried Busch Light, and it spoke with such authority that I was compelled to listen. I picked a direction and kept to it. I started out this trek with two solid running shoes, a sturdy pair of denim jeans, and a beat up t-shirt bearing the words 'Amherst Cross Country.' I ended up losing everything but the pants. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I went along with Busch Light's directions for a good while, but after walking for what felt like several miles, and tripping over what must have been several dozen mossy, maggot encrusted logs, I decided enough was enough, and I picked a fight with it.

"Where the fuck are we going?" I asked.

"Onward!" said Busch Light.

"To what end?"

"Would you prefer that I lied and gave you a destination?"

"So there is no destination?"

"Of course there is," said Busch Light.

"Then what is it?"

"The moon!" screamed Busch Light and laughed maniacally. It had a tinny sort of voice that was not particularly intimidating. For some reason it reminded me of Mandark from Dexter's Laboratory.

"Seriously," I said.

"Verily!" said Busch Light.

"I want a real answer."

"And I have given you one!"

"You fucking can't walk to the fucking moon! FUCK!" I scream.

"Actually, I can't walk at all. It's a good thing you're driving."

I look at my hands. Suddenly a steering wheel flashes between them. A horn blares somewhere ahead of me, then beside me. Bright lights, shattering glass, then silence.

I'm back in the woods.

"What the fuck is going on here!?" I yell.

"Don't worry about it," says Busch Light.

I stop where I am and sit down on a patch of moss atop a rotting stump. I start shaking my head. I look up trough the trees and can no longer see the stars. The sky is brightening. Dawn approaches.

"You know, I think you're crazy," whispers Busch Light.

"You should be one to talk. Do you know how crazy it is for beer to be talking?"

"Nope. How crazy is it?"

"Ah, fuck. I don't know. It's just an expression."

"Huh?"

"I can't quantify it. I just know it's really crazy."

"Crazy of me or crazy of you?"

"FUCK!" I yell, and jump up and kick a tree. My foot sinks into it and it starts to crumble at the base. I try to pull it out, but it's caught. I yank harder, and the tree begins to tip toward me.

"Shitshitshitshitshit!" I'm yelling.

Finally I manage to flip myself over, grab the stump I was sitting on, and pull my foot out of the tree as it falls. Right before it hits I roll out of the way. It lands with a gigantic squish.

I'm still so drunk I can't see for shit, but I want my shoe back. I start clawing through the soggy, rotten bark, feeling for anything that might be my shoe.

"You know, it's a good thing you were here," says Busch Light. "If you weren't, that tree might not have even made a sound."

"No, it wouldn't have fallen over."

"Eh, same difference."

I can't find my shoe. This is a thick tree and my shoe is deep inside it. I'm just about to give up when I hear the first gunshot.

My first reaction: I'm going to die.

This passes quickly enough, and soon I come to the conclusion that the noise must have been a engine backfiring, which strikes me as a good thing, since it implies the road is nearby. I feel a newfound levity and begin to skip off in the direction of the noise. Busch Light says nothing, and right as the silence is reaching that length of time when none can deny its awkwardness, I hear another fucking gunshot.

"Fuck!" I yell and drop on my stomach on the moist forest floor.

Busch Light says something to the effect of "Cinnamon harpoon plastic spasm!"

I don't have time to ask what it means, because the next thing I know footsteps are thrashing through leaves from every direction of the forest, closing in on me. I'm still lying prone with only one shoe, my spine involuntarily rattling and Busch Light whistling "Uptown Girl" with such obsessive gusto that it would stand up the hair on the back of a chemotherapy patient's neck.

By God, I'm thinking, it's only Billy Joel. Wherefore dost he stir such passions in thee, Bush Light?

And this is my last thought before I hear a faint click and feel something pierce deep into my neck. Busch Light slows its whistling and the world fades into a gray curtain that falls, and falls, and falls, and falls...


...I wake up propped against the corner of a room wearing a three piece suit and a clip-on tie. There's a bed a few feet away from me and it seems to be occupied. I try to stand up suddenly and fail entirely. My legs don't respond. I poke them. I have no sensation whatsoever.

Well then. Lucky I still have my arms. I push myself up off the wall like goddamn Lieutenant Dan and try to get a look at who is sleeping in the bed.

You want drama, go to a play.

Don't bring it to the parties.

This is something which I find more and more tiresome as I meander through this year's mid-August drunken stupor. It seems every time more than a half a dozen people gather, there is some terribly awkward yet unspoken tension between select parties that renders what should be a pleasant and excitable group of teenagers into something resembling those wakes that people in the South throw when they realize one of their children/neighbors/sports-heroes is gay. Absolutely miserable. Let me tell you.

I'm not going to go on a long rant about how it seems everyone around me, including me, acts like a child when alcohol enters the picture, because that's really a tired and narrow argument. The truth is that we all act like children all the time, and drinking seems more and more like a pretense toward adulthood than anything else. Put a beer in someone's hand and suddenly there emerges this small, troll-like voice from the back of their head insidiously reminding them that they ought to emulate a 21-year-old, as if to prove to himself, his friends, the world, or the great Bog himself, maybe, that he's mature (read: sleazy) enough for the whole ritual of promiscuity and borrowed punchlines.

I'm not complaining about alcohol. I'm complaining that people can't tell the difference between an adult acting like a kid, and a kid acting like an adult, so we end up with kids trying to act like adults acting like kids. And what happens then? The saddest parody you'll ever see.

Most people can remember fights in Kindergarten. Teachers would need to intervene, either to mediate the problem or separate the kids from each other. I guess we were supposed to learn how to do these things on our own, and we got it halfway. We've mastered the self-prescribed time-out. Someone you didn't want to see just walked into the party, and what happens? Do you say hello? Extend a good-natured hand? No, you move across the room, bring along the kids from your lunch table, and act as if you're the motherfucking Montagues and Capulets. You give each other the evil eye and yell "Sluts!" or something, but it's mostly just a Let's-not-talk-about-it-and-maybe-it-will-go-away type of affair. Time-outs are meant as a last resort, but it's always the first thing people try.

You know, if I saw my parents doing something like that, I'd tell them to grow the fuck up. If I saw some high school freshmen doing that, I'd tell them to grow the fuck up: "Walk over, extend the peace pipe, bite the bullet, and stop having a lousy time just so you can keep your illusory sense of superiority. There is no honor in grudges, no fealty to animosity."

I'd say these things, but they're hypocritical. My friends do it and I do it and we're all a bunch of babies. I think the problem is that we never got beat up enough as kids, on the whole. You get into a fistfight with someone, wind up bleeding from the temple with a half-dozen bruised ribs, and you realize all those squabbles you had with what's-her-face weren't worth getting your lace panties in a bundle over. Sounds sociopathic, but pain--real pain, physical pain--really puts things in perspective. I'm not saying I advocate self mutilation or anything...but I'm also not saying that I don't.

So I guess here's my point, strange as it may sound: I am so tired of record-scratch moments at every party I attend that I'd gladly start a brawl just to get the stupid out of our systems. If you're down for that, then do your part. Punch a stranger in the face. Everything's crazy.

Essential facts for getting you laid.

Here are some facts y’all should know.

- The giant panda is a bear. The koala is not. The mandabear is in limbo somewhere.

- When a male zebra copulates with a female horse the resultant crime against God is called a “zorse.” When the genders are reversed it is called a hebra

- Jellyfish are technically plankton. That means that the largest piece of plankton ever observed by man was 35 meters long. Plankton spelled backwards is notknalp.

- Cocaethylene is a chemical which exists only when someone is intoxicated by both alcohol and cocaine simultaneously. It increases feelings of euphoria significantly, but also raises the chance of death due to cardiovascular failure. This fact arouses both the chemist and the drug addict in me. COKE!

- One joint of marijuana 5 times the damage to your lungs as a single cigarette. On the other hand one cigarette makes you 5 times the hipster as a single joint. I’ll take the joint.

- Wikipedia defines a “brain drain” as “an emigration of trained and talented individuals to other nations or jurisdictions, due to conflicts, lack of opportunity, health hazards where they are living, discrimination or other reasons.” Urbandictionary defines it as “When one car window is open and you can feel pulsing in your ears. Use the back window to maximize the effect.”

- It’s estimated that 1 in 10 people are gay. 1 in 10 people living in New York City are Asian. Coincidence? Probably.

- Eli Moss isn’t part of this blog anymore because he got eaten by plankton. Fuck Brown.

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