Today, I am in the letters section of the NY Times. Glad to know my useless superpower is still in fine operating condition.

My letter

Amusingly, you can follow my entire academic/career trajectory to date through my Times letters. Standardized testing, college apps, freshman-style social awareness, Sesame Street, PBS Kids, and now internships. Also throw in there the one about the X-Files, and my mother's about paying for college tuition, and you have a pretty good record of my life in the Grey Lady. You're welcome, Future Biographers!

On the college admissions process

Today I learned that high school students and their parents ask entirely the wrong questions about the college admissions process. Not stupid questions, mind. Just the wrong ones.

Their questions betray that they just don't get the point of the whole thing. A highly typical example: "My son has a 3.7 GPA and plays lacrosse. How many hours of community service does he need for Harvard?" This reflects a student-centered concept of the process that is inaccurate and counter-productive.

Admissions committees are not awarding prizes in a scavenger hunt. They're crafting a college class. Maybe it's different at less prestigious, more ranking-conscious schools, and they really do tick off a list of GPA/SAT/AP attributes. But the good places only care about those numbers inasmuch as they are shorthand for the attributes of Real Actual People. No one cares about your 1600 2400 if you aren't also special.

Maybe that's the first filter to the whole process - the first test of your Harvardiness is whether you can grok the reason for the admissions committee's existence. Which of course means this is yet another way in which disadvantaged kids are further disadvantaged... Understanding the motivations of the man behind the curtain, when everyone around you is an idiot, is a pretty sophisticated cognitive task.

There's just so much mis-information and bad advice - often coming from professional advice-givers, which is what sparked this blog post - that it makes me sad. And for many kids who don't have ivy-level parents or friends, the first way they learn about college admissions is through television. In my case, that meant seeing Zach Morris get a 1507 or some such impossible score on his SAT, and then watching the rest of the Saved By The Bell kids scheme to make the Hahvahd recruiter at the college fair notice Jessie Spano, as though those college fairs matter in the slightest.

Or just last week on LOST, that entire sideways-world subplot where Alex so desperately wanted a letter of recommendation for Yale from the asshole principal, and not from her mentor Dr. Linus, because the asshole principal was a Yale alum. NO ONE CARES IF HE WENT TO YALE. Ben Linus would have written a far better letter. Or at least manipulated Yale into doing his bidding, whatever. Ugh.

Maybe I should just write a tv show about kids applying to college, and do some good in the world.

Today I learned a new Harvard building! You know that building to the right of Lamont? Me neither till today! In all these years, I have not only never been inside that building, or known what it is, but I've never even really registered its existence. So today I walked in and announced my presence to the dude at the desk:

Me: Hi! I've been here five years and have never been in this building. Where am I?
Dude: This is the Houghton rare books library.
Me: Whoa, that exists?
Dude: ...yes.
Me: I mean, I always thought it was just one of those Hollis designations for a particular collection, not an actual physical location.
Dude: Rare books generally need to be stored somewhere secure. And physical.
Me: This makes sense.

Next up: Liz learns to navigate new Lamont floor-numbering, avoids further embarrassing attempts to locate Shakespeare in the government docs stacks.

What I Learned In School Today

This semester, I am going to write down one thing that I learned every day. I'll do it here, so that we can all learn together. Yay learning.

Today I learned that the Graduate School of Design is way cooler than the Graduate School of Education, and has far more interesting classes and far more attractive (and plentiful) men. I also learned that chocolate-covered Goldfish are awesome.


. . . I am hoping that once classes start, I'll be learning things slightly more academic. But I won't hold my breath.

Sitemeter is awesome

A recent visitor to this blog reached the page through the following Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1T4GGLD_enUS320US320&q=%22harvard%20glee%20club%22%20gay%20sex&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Yeah, you read that right. Okay, fess up, who was it?

How my brain works

Facebook: Richard is Alternate Juror #1

Me: Hah, I hope that means he's an understudy in a production of 12 Angry Men. I've never actually read 12 Angry Men. I wonder how the character names are formatted. Like is it :

JUROR #3
Hang him high!

JUROR #9
Chill out, dude

etc? That would get really hard on the eyes. Maybe they write out the numbers, so it's like:

TEN
He's totes guilty.

FOUR
You always say that!

Although then it just looks like the script for a multi-Doctor story. Ooh!


And this is how the words "all 12 Doctors perform 12 Angry Men" appeared in my google search bar.

I made eye contact with Gerard Butler while doing the Chicken Dance

So there me and Candace were. Minding our own business. Doing the chicken dance in front of Penn Station. Because we had decided to walk from 23rd St. to Times Square by doing a different dance down each block. Naturally. And 34th St. was the chicken dance.

So we're minding our own business, doing the chicken dance, and the "clap clap clap clap!" part was getting a lot of attention. Not as much attention as our zombie walk got on 25th, but heads were turning. Including the head of Gerard Butler. And the rest of him. As well as his personal gentleman. He looked at us like we were crazy. With good reason. But he was dancing on the inside.

I smiled and waved at Mr. Butler. I didn't know who he was (of course). Candace informed me on the corner. And then we continued on our merry way, Macarena-ing down 35th.

The end.

Citing Safety Concerns, Harvard Solves Problem of Race

By Liz & Ben

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The Harvard Admissions Office announced today that it would reverse its longstanding promotion of equal opportunity through the consideration of race in its decisions.

The move comes in response to the recent discovery that even African-American students who are three weeks from graduation are still dangerous criminal thugs.

"It's a shame", said William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions. "After years of believing we were educating these kids, it's turned out that they are just as black and poor as they were before they enrolled."

Dissatisfaction with current policy reached a breaking point after the shootings in Kirkland house last month, in which Jabrai Jordan Copney of New York City allegedly shot Cambridge resident Justin Cosby in a drug-related incident. The spotlight quickly shifted to Harvard senior Chanequa Campbell, who, to the shock of many, was acquainted with the victim.

"I've known Channy for years, but I never saw this coming" said Chanequa's classmate, Eliot Canaday III. "Who knew she was still "down" with the "street?" Sure, she still looks black, but I mean, this is Harvard."

Widely criticized for failing to prevent this tragedy by properly assimilating black students into Harvard culture, the administration has responded with sweeping policy change. "Decades of occasional effort and perhaps hundreds of dollars have gone into Harvard's attempt to educate all students equally," said President Drew Faust in a video address yesterday, in which she appeared with several armed guards and a pitbull. "But it is time to acknowledge that these efforts have jeopardized the safety of our real students."

Harvard is calling its decision vital to maintaining the 371-year-old institution's educational integrity, but Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes disagrees. "This runs contrary to many years of progress towards the true American dream - to take any lump-of-clay students, whether financially, ethnically, or genderly challenged, and mold them into affluent white men."

Outside Cambridge the change has been applauded, except in the handful of newspapers not published by former Crimson editors, and Yale and Princeton have quickly followed suit. "We have been preparing to unroll a similar change for the last 19 months," grumbled an anonymous Princeton official, "but now that the cat's out of the bag: fine, us too." Neither of Princeton's black students could be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, student life has continued as usual. Junior Fulbright A. Rhodes didn't even notice the change. "The black kids, you know, they kept to themselves. Only time you saw them was at school-wide events, like formals and stuff. And even in tuxedos, they always ended up looking like the hired help anyway."

Cambridge, UK-flavour

Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge. I just returned from a weekend in Cambridge, and oh my. It is just so excessively, ridiculously beautiful and ancient.

When you see Harvard for the first time after seeing other colleges, you may find yourself thinking "Oh, so that's what they're trying to do." And then you see Cambridge. And no, no - THAT's what they're trying to do. I think this may even be an appropriate situation to get a bit Platonic, vis a vis C.S. Lewis. Harvard is the Shadowlands of Cambridge. It's nice enough in its own right, but Cambridge is the real thing.

However, the first thing I did in Cambridge was to... see a lecture by one of my old Harvard professors. About Harvard. I was visiting my wonderful friend Con, who is a Harvard-Cambridge fellow, and he and the other fellows were attending a lecture by the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Professor of Christian Morals and all around enjoyable fellow. It was the tenth anniversary of something or other (possibly the tenth anniversary of the 300th anniversary of something else?) and so Gomes was invited to speak.

The Harvard fellows and I were the only people at the lecture who were 1) not in academic gowns, and 2) not white old men. Gomes himself excepted on the latter, of course. His lecture was on the historical connection between Harvard and Emmanuel College, and though the topic was more interesting in Gomes's hands than it would have been in anyone else's, it still got a bit dull. I did perk up at an unexpected Radcliffe Choral Society shout-out, though! We performed at the tricentennial of something or other, apparently. Guess the Glee Club has somewhere more exciting to be for that one.

After the lecture, Con and I explored. Con hadn't explored most of the Cambridge colleges, and he takes very seriously the rules about not walking on the grass and not wandering past fences marked "private". I, however, remember fondly a very silly evening exploring Jesus College with Jenny and Kavita and a video camera, and additionally have a personal mission of helping my more rule-laden friends to unburden themselves of these issues, so explore we did. We even walked on the grass. A little.

In typical Con fashion, he got himself a concussion last week, so he couldn't drink and forgot the odd English word here and there. At dinner, he said something like "I'm glad I had food, my poor concussed brain needs the primary sources." I looked at him, puzzled. "Oh, wait, I mean... raw materials! Needs the raw materials." I found this a fascinating slip. I, and many people, would replace a forgotten phrase with something that sounds similar, or something of like context. Con's brain used a phrase that was conceptually equivalent in a completely different frame of reference. I have smart friends.

On Saturday, Con and I took a walk to what he'd called a magical discount shopping heaven, which turned out to be... T.K. Maxx. Like T.J. Maxx but, umm, with a K for some reason. Only difference seems to be that at the UK version, they sell Dalek voice-changer helmets at the checkout line. I am both pleased and disoriented to be in a land where my obscure, esoteric obsession is the stuff of discount center checkout queue doodads.

We spent rather a long time at the grocery, because we like groceries, and had a lunch of random items from teh deli counter, each of which turning out to be another unappetizing variation on greyish meat wrapped in dough. Oh, Britain! Then we went to a JCR-type thing back at Trinity and cooked... casado! Well, actually, gallo pinto. Rice and beans. (this is because the last time I saw Con was when I stayed with him during Costa Rica tour, after having spent the previous three weeks eating nothing but rice and beans). We had a lovely Valentine's dinner party for all the Cambridge Harvard lonely-hearts.

And then Sunday we were supposed to go punting, but the punt rental companies disagreed due to some bothersome rain. So we went with our plan B of walking over the meadows to Grandchester. Rain and snow meltage had turned the meadows to marsh and the path to mud, but we decided to sacrifice our shoes and sludge ahead. It felt very authentically British, slogging a half hour through mud on a grey day to reach a tea place. Sunshine would have been lovely but wrong. And anyway, Sylvia Plath used to do this walk regularly (along with a litany of other literary figures, as the brochure at the tea place was quick to note), and she never would have stood for sunshine. And it was still quite beautiful, if squishy. Over tea in Grandchester, we decided that the only person worthy/capable of sustaining a relationship with Peter Gomes would be Garrison Keilor. They could orate anecdotes at each other from across a very long breakfast table.

Then a sludge back to Cambridge, and a lovely choral evensong at Trinity Chapel, and more exploring and hanging out. Cambridge is a wonderful place, and it sounds like students there are held to amazingly higher standards than at Harvard, and actually receive, like, educations worthy of the institution's reputation (whoa, novel idea), and basically I am jealous and want to stay.

In other news, Jelly Babies are surprisingly good.

as Napoleon never said...

Jenny and I were having a very serious discussion about the class system in England and the USA… as relates to Bertie Wooster.

Jenny: I love that Bertie never has money problems. It just makes him so innocent and free to have relation-induced mishaps

Liz: I love that class of British people who just have income without doing anything, like the Darcys. We don't have that in America. Even the absurdly rich, their money comes from somewhere. Generally some scrappy great-grandfather who invested in trains or somesuch.

Jenny: Whereas in England, money coming from somewhere is a low-class idea.

Liz: Right.

Jenny: Money, like wine, gets better with age.

Well, that is a fine aphorism, is it not?

Liz: Did you just make that up?

Jenny: I think so

Liz: You should embroider it on something, or start using it as an aphorism and see if it gets picked up.

Jenny: You mean I should just drop it into conversations?

Liz: Yes.

Jenny: All those conversations I have about old versus new money?

Liz: No, just irrelevantly. And, introduce it with "as they say.”

Jenny: See if it gets picked up as conventional wisdom.

Liz: Or give a different citation every time! Like, “as the Good Book says, money like wine gets better with age.”

Jenny: Or "as the Bard tells us..."

And then we got a little carried away…

Liz: As we’ve seen with President Obama...

Jenny: As I learned from Sesame Street...

Liz: as my grand-pappy Old Reliable used to say...

Jenny: as the Eskimos teach us...

Liz: as can be inferred from a close reading of Durkheim...

Jenny: as it says on Mount Rushmore...

Liz: as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and the Marquis de Sade all said at one point or another...

Jenny: as I learned on my first day at Hahvahd...

Liz: as my years in the circus taught me,

Jenny: according to the great clown himself...

Liz: as the prophet speaketh to me...

Jenny: as you yourself have noted...

Liz: as the ancient runes translate...

as is scribbled on this cocktail napkin that I'm waving in your face...

Jenny: as Dumbledore said to Harry on page 519 of the Half-Blood Prince, 12.2 lines from the top...

Liz: As Justice Brandeis noted in the fourth footnote of the Carolene decision...

Jenny: As Joan of Arc herself was about to say...

Liz: as Napoleon never said...

as was viciously mauled in the substandard translation of Hugo's Miserables...

Jenny: as Madame de Pompadour probably said, before everyone forgot why she was famous...

Liz: fanTAStic gardener.

(that will be funny after you watch Doctor Who)

as my alphabet soup spelled last night...

as Jim Marvin once said while demonstrating the proper distance between Mars and Spain...

Jenny: as it probably says in Doctor Who, but I couldn't tell you because I still haven't watched it even though I have this friend, see, who makes references to it all the time, and I think I'm going to have to watch it soon or she's going to come after me with a broadsword in my sleep, and maybe like cut off my ANKLES, or something, or possibly my entire lower half, and anyway, I think there was an aphorism in here somewhere...

Liz: as the negative infractions of the patient's pituitary gland suggest...

as it says on the manufacturer's label, which you really shouldn't have removed, really, that was a bad idea...

Jenny: as the surgeon general might warn you...

Liz: as she said....

You get the idea. And that’s right, folks - this is the duo that’s spending two weeks together in Europe. By the end of which we will either have begun speaking entirely in an incomprehensible invented language of inside jokes and Buffy references, or will have jumped off the train somewhere in Spain and run screaming in opposite directions across the plain. In the rain. Mainly.

Liz: Jenny, why are we SO AWESOME?

Jenny: I don't know, Liz, but I think we just can't help it. It is our burden to bear.

HP7 Drinking Game

[relocated from Facebook, and back-dated. composed prior to the release of the seventh book]

Weinbloom & Wolahan bring you:

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS
The Drinking Game

We recommend using M&Ms in lieu of actual alcohol for this game, unless you are particularly talented at reading while smashed.

Enjoy!


Take a drink every time:

Harry’s scar hurts

Someone shouts in ALL CAPS

Hermione encourages reference to “Hogwarts, A History”

Three drinks if someone other than Hermione mentions “Hogwarts, A History”

Malfoy insults someone’s parents

2 if someone actually manages to restrain their anger when Malfoy insults their parents.

Five drinks if we finally get a decent “your mom” joke in response

Drink if Ron and Hermione start bickering

2 if Ron and Hermione start snogging

Trelawney predicts someone’s imminent death

Rowling foreshadows someone’s imminent death

2 when someone actually dies who wasn’t foreshadowed at all

Aunt Petunia purses her lips

Bad pun in a proper noun (ie, Diagon Alley)

Two drinks for a good pun

There’s evidence that journalists and newspapers in the Wizarding world are corrupt

Two drinks if a journalist does something good

Hermione runs away to do something without any explanation

Drink every time you get furious about a character’s immense and stubborn stupidity

Snape sneers

Lupin looks shabby

Tonks trips over something

Neville trips over something

Peeves smashes something

Hagrid breeds something

Ron or Harry refer to S.P.E.W as “Spew”

Nearly Headless Nick adjusts his head

Someone new stops calling Voldemort “You-Know-Who”

2 if she explains the "triumphant look"

Dobby extolls Harry's greatness

Ron runs from spiders

Fleur kisses someone on the cheek

Someone says Harry has his mother's eyes

Harry tallies the remaining horcruxes

3 if RAB is NOT Regulus Black

Finish if Harry ends up being the only one who thinks Snape is good

If Snape really truly is evil, send JKR a Howler

Someone says something darkly

2 if Neville and Luna hook up

2 if Harry attempts to use an Unforgivable curse

Finish the drink if he succeeds

Have another entire drink if he is immediately filled with remorse

Harry returns to the curtain at the Department of Mysteries

2 if he finds Sirius there

Kreacher sulks

Harry complains about the unpleasantness of apparition

2 if Neville saves the day

Fawkes returns

Harry enrolls at Hogwarts for his seventh year after all

Harry pines for Ginny

Mrs. Weasley cooks

Hagrid is a poor cook

Any "sickening thud"

Harry enters a pensieve

Mrs. Weasley's clock is referenced

Hermione has exam anxiety

2 if Hermione has exam anxiety though not enrolled in school

3 if someone ends up going to college

4 if it's a Muggle college

Finish the bottle if it's Harvard

The first chapter starts outside Harry's point of view

The last chapter ends outside Harry's point of view

There's an epilogue summarizing the rest of everyone's lives

Any clearly slash-y line that slipped past the editors (ie, "Who's Cedric, your boyfriend?")

Ron and Hermione make each other jealous

Aberforth Dumbledore appears

Aberforth Dumbledore appears, with goats

Hogwarts has a drastically reduced student population

Hogwarts is under threat of being closed

Petunia displays more knowledge of wizarding world

2 if the Dursleys do something right for once

Muggles get involved in the war

Hermione mentions, talks to, or (gasp!) visits her parents

Hermione sneaks into the Hogwarts Library while not a student

The three don't fit under the invisibility cloak

This Lupin/Tonks thing turns out to be something else entirely

Harry has a monster in his stomach/chest/other awkward body part

2 if JKR writes a remotely legit romance subplot

Mutter grumpily if she completely screws up Ron/Hermione

Malfoy is shown sympathetically

Snape is shown sympathetically

There's a connection between Godric's Hollow and Godric Gryffindor

Any time someone we've heard of dies

Harry remembers that everyone he loves is dead

Ron gets in the way

Ron does something really great and important

Ron gloats about great and important thing for next three weeks

If it takes Ron more tries to pass his apparition test than it took you to pass your driving test (sulk in the corner if you still can't drive)

Harry doubts his father's integrity

2 if Harry manages to win the day without having destroyed all the horcruxes

3 if Harry is a horcrux

Finish if Harry kills himself

Voldemort is destroyed in an as-yet-unpredictable fashion that isn't avada kedavra

Finish if Voldemort is destroyed with love. And complain loudly.