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?