The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:00:10 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 Das Racist And Other Friends I Never Made In College http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/das-racist-and-other-friends-i-never-made-in-college http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/das-racist-and-other-friends-i-never-made-in-college#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:00:10 +0000 Annalisa Grier http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/das-racist-and-other-friends-i-never-made-in-college Since I'm a graduate student and drunkenness on a Thursday night is practically required, last Thursday I was terrifically far from sober and, as a direct result, read an article about Das Racist. I read this article because whenever Das Racist pops up on my radar, I read about them, like I read about MGMT even though I've only ever listened to MGMT once, and that was their song “Kids,” and, when I listened to it, it was about two years after “Kids” was a hit. I try to avoid dwelling on Das Racist, but, like I said, last Thursday I was drunk. Even when I'm not drunk, I have this terrible compulsion to read everything ever written about Das Racist because we all went to the same college, and because that fact signifies to me something particular, some life I wanted and didn't have. This particular article said that Das Racist was pronounced Da-as, as in "That’s," and it occurred to me that I’d always pronounced it in my head Dass, like "Ram Dass," and how horrifying, because the members of Das Racist were practically in my year. (My internal voice is slightly histrionic.) Which at my university actually meant something, since it was a student body of 2,800 and everybody there seemed to know everybody, except for me.

I had hit college at 17 full of optimism that I’d find friends. I had a whole slew of them in high school and figured it would be easy to find new ones in college. We would do what college girls do: hang out in each other’s dorm rooms at night, talking, and there would be somebody lounging on the floor and somebody propped up on a pillow on the bed, and we’d stay up late and share makeup and maybe someday there’d be weed. How exciting! And then, as if it had been predetermined, and there was nothing I could do to change it: nothing. No friends, no late-night gab sessions. Nothing.

Nothing but hope, naturally: that the phone would ring or a message appear on my Facebook page with an invitation to a party, to coffee, anywhere. Many nights I would sit on the bed and watch my roommate get ready to go out. From the first week, this roommate and I had maintained a cordial, mutual hatred; we traded words maybe once every three days (I mean this quite seriously; “what’s up” was a big event). She sewed her own cosplay outfits and spent days drawing manga on her expensive tablet computer. The tablet was terrifyingly top-of-the-line, and I was jealous, of it and of her, a jealousy that intertwined with the raw loneliness I felt whenever I overheard her on the phone with her friends. I knew these girls only in passing but they clearly preferred her to me, and this appalled me: How, I wondered spitefully, can you prefer this girl? How is her weekend fully booked and why am I here, alone, working on my papers, studying too far in advance for a Japanese test, preparing to go to bed at 10 on a Friday night? Other nights, friends of hers would come over to play Dance Dance Revolution and I would bury myself in my laptop, pretending to do the week's class reading while trying to pinpoint where I'd failed. This roommate, after all, had arrived as friendless as I had. How did she now have friends and I did not? (I'm not, I should note, in any way proud of these emotions, and the ways in which they contributed to my loneliness are surely numerous; it must be self-preservation at work to sense the ugliness of that kind of desperation coming off someone, and to flee it. But my aloneness was mixed up in my jealousy, my jealousy in my aloneness, until I could no longer have told you which came first, much less how to extricate them.)

But my aloneness was mixed up in my jealousy, my jealousy in my aloneness, until I could no longer have told you which came first, much less how to extricate them.
There were a few girls I talked to on LiveJournal (this was very much back in the day) with whom conversation never seemed to work in real life; or on Facebook, which was then in its infancy. They were too muddled, hesitant—too much, in other words, like me. The friend dates were brief and abortive. One day I walked to the magic shop ("shoppe," please, and "magick"; a hand-painted sign and a display of tarot cards in the window) with one potential friend, of whom I had started thinking, almost clinically, as a kind of candidate. Halfway there she offered me a cigarette, which I turned down, and as we walked and she smoked I wracked my brain for something to say. We had already gone over (I listed in my head) her childhood in rural Montana, her coming-out experience in high school, her decision to attend our college, her selection of courses for the fall, her distant plans for New York City internships, etc. etc., as I enacted, one by one, my mother's lessons on How To Be Interesting. Rule one: Ask questions! But I couldn't figure out how to shape the questions into a conversation, the conversation into a friendship. Turning to her again with some vaguely formed query I saw her glancing at the dirt beneath her nails, then off at the trees, and I knew with absolute clarity that I had already lost her attention; my audition—my candidacy—was over.

I'm sure you—who are reading this, coffee in hand, a college grad yourself, maybe having suffered through a month or a semester of loneliness—were not like this; this is the precinct of the hopelessly pathetic, the domain of the pitiable. Or maybe you were like this, in which case, how did we not find each other? Or maybe we did, and we spoke, and we never spoke again. It's hard, when you are friendless, not to resent the people who (you think) should be equally broken and bereft. I found myself looking at more people, not just my roommate, and wondering, "How does she have friends?" And yet! She did. They all did, these girls! They must have figured it out somehow during orientation, because they were everywhere: walking across the quad, buying movie tickets, climbing the stairs together at the campus center, making plans at the library. And yet for you, the friendless, it never went like that. You tried—you got out of your dorm room, you joined a club or two, you did activities, went to movie nights, talked to people in class, but it never worked. When you left, no one ever seemed to notice you going. And when you encountered these girls, making their plans on the library steps, you'd scurry past, pretending to be in a rush. You hated them, you wanted them; your jealousy was lodged in your skin like ringworm.

Now I read about Das Racist, feeling slightly furtive, reluctant to explain why I consume magazine profiles of a group whose music I don't enjoy. The articles never fail to note that the members of Das Racist met at college; when I read this, I always envision them late at night in someone’s dorm room as the sun sneaks up on them. (My vision of this scene is vaguely homoerotic.) I imagine with a jealous pleasure that Das Racist had precisely the experience that would be summed up in the words “they met at college”: to my mind that phrase shorthands college as my peers (well-educated, ambitious, perpetually underemployed) knew it, or as they have recounted it: the red Solo cups, the eyeliner, the sweatshirts. This is college as I imagine it to be, the way I'd imagine it for a character in a novel, using for my descriptions something familiar I'd once observed but never done myself.

I wondered, sometimes, how this had happened: was it that my first-year roommate and I had hated each other so much; was that the reason? Was it because I had a boyfriend, whom I'd met during Orientation Week, and was too busy exploring the sexual freedom that comes with not having your mother walking up and down the hallway right outside your bedroom? I was spending all my time with him, and he with me, but he still had friends. How, exactly, had I missed out on the first year—the first week, even—when everyone else had settled into a group of likeminded people, like garter snakes into a ball? Where was I when Das Racist was meeting? While they learning each other's phone numbers, while they were at the Spring Fling concert together on the hill in the middle of campus, watching Andrew W.K. and getting stoned?

***

In the Midwestern city where I come from, it would be hard for college to matter less. The first question any new acquaintance asks is “Where did you go to high school?” Your high school stands in for your neighborhood, your social status, your brains, your ambitions, and in this city I know the right answers. When I'm home, I speak the language; I understand the currency.

At least, it seems that way now, but of course I have to remind myself that it didn't always. The friends I had in high school I only made after a year in which I wore the same Hard Rock Café Kuala Lumpur shirt and plaid pajama pants to school, braless and with unwashed hair, for thirty straight days. I could not be motivated to change my shirt or do laundry. At the end of thirty days I washed my clothes, then resumed wearing them like a uniform. For the months of that year I spoke to no one and went nowhere. I was, I suppose, in a depression; but I perceived it not as depression but as terminal aloneness.

The issue, as I understood it then, was whether or not I had someone I could call, without having to give it a second thought. People who have never been friendless do not know what this is like: that there is a brutally specific kind of dread that comes of knowing that, before dialing any person in your contacts list, you will have to draw on your dwindling store of courage, because you don't know if whoever you're calling will be happy to hear from you, or even instantly recognize your name. The friendless person can make no assumptions. The weekend, rolling out before you, is empty and terrifying: you run out of homework to do, and invent some. In college, you work two jobs, three, just to fill that space. You become the person who does not know how to pronounce “Das Racist,” since you have never, not once, heard the words spoken in conversation with your friends.

The issue, as I understood it then, was whether or not I had someone I could call, without having to give it a second thought.
But then, in the summer just before I turned sixteen, the darkness lifted as inexplicably as it arrived: I awoke, sitting in the back of someone else’s car, staring at the skull of a boy on whom I had just realized I had an intense, consuming crush. Within a month this boy and I were dating, and I had a group of friends with whom I spent nearly every waking moment. Still, this—the sudden brightening, the arrival of friendship—was not his doing. It just happened to occur when I was looking at him. There was someone I had been becoming, without knowing it, in the time I was coming out of the unwashed sadness, as the universe formed and reformed around me. The space filled. As much as I try I have never found the magic that needs to be worked for this to happen when you ask it to; the order of the universe changes, it seems, on its own, the flags are dropped, the engine gunned. Even now I don't know how it happens, and could not replicate it; though, surely, I would pay good money to know.

***

I like to think I've left those years behind, locked securely away. And yet I read these articles about Das Racist, as if searching them for some hint about how to fix the person I was back then. How do you fix the brokenness of the past? I think about grad school, my current life; the people I am with now—by serendipity, by luck—are broken in the ways I'm broken, mostly. And we're older now, and kinder. There were a lost four or five years, I guess. That should be the end of it, and yet my mind keeps circling, going over it again and again, to find the points where I could have made a choice, changed the future.

In my senior year of college, a girl I knew—were we friends? I wonder what the definition would have to be, for us to qualify; we lived together but often seemed in a state of bare toleration, our lives crossing occasionally at lunch and once or twice in the middle of the night as we snacked from the refrigerator—asked me if I wanted to write for this blog she was starting, about campus life at our university. I didn’t. The blog turned into a phenomenon. It's still being published now, years after our graduation. It recently ran an interview with my roommate and a friend of hers, the founders. In the interview they mentioned the alumni listserv: “It’s so busy,” one said, that she actually had to unsubscribe. “The alumni are really connected,” said the other; “the alumni are all still friends now.” I read this with a monocle in one eye: studying it from a distance, turning it over, again and again.

I see in Das Racist (who, it should be said, never consented to be what I have made them: emblems, emissaries) something I thought I would be once, and never was; something I might have had a chance of getting, at some intersection, some fork I didn’t take. This reading I do, this recounting and dissection of the past (which is shameful, and which I hide) is worse, somehow, because of the ease with which I found friends at graduate school. I ask my friends, at our regular pub on a Tuesday evening, how they think we found each other, and they have no better answer than I do. Pushed, some of them recount the same experiences I had in college: weekend nights spent in our dorm rooms, a feeling that the rest of the collegiate universe had coalesced without us. But why us, why now, why are we sitting here with pints at our elbows, laughing? “Because we're so awesome,” one of them says, which is heartwarming but not helpful: there is no key to it, nothing more than luck, the puzzle piece we didn't expect to fit.



Annalisa Grier recently completed her MA in Pubs of Northern England.

Photo by LianaAn.

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]]> Since I'm a graduate student and drunkenness on a Thursday night is practically required, last Thursday I was terrifically far from sober and, as a direct result, read an article about Das Racist. I read this article because whenever Das Racist pops up on my radar, I read about them, like I read about MGMT even though I've only ever listened to MGMT once, and that was their song “Kids,” and, when I listened to it, it was about two years after “Kids” was a hit. I try to avoid dwelling on Das Racist, but, like I said, last Thursday I was drunk. Even when I'm not drunk, I have this terrible compulsion to read everything ever written about Das Racist because we all went to the same college, and because that fact signifies to me something particular, some life I wanted and didn't have. This particular article said that Das Racist was pronounced Da-as, as in "That’s," and it occurred to me that I’d always pronounced it in my head Dass, like "Ram Dass," and how horrifying, because the members of Das Racist were practically in my year. (My internal voice is slightly histrionic.) Which at my university actually meant something, since it was a student body of 2,800 and everybody there seemed to know everybody, except for me.

I had hit college at 17 full of optimism that I’d find friends. I had a whole slew of them in high school and figured it would be easy to find new ones in college. We would do what college girls do: hang out in each other’s dorm rooms at night, talking, and there would be somebody lounging on the floor and somebody propped up on a pillow on the bed, and we’d stay up late and share makeup and maybe someday there’d be weed. How exciting! And then, as if it had been predetermined, and there was nothing I could do to change it: nothing. No friends, no late-night gab sessions. Nothing.

Nothing but hope, naturally: that the phone would ring or a message appear on my Facebook page with an invitation to a party, to coffee, anywhere. Many nights I would sit on the bed and watch my roommate get ready to go out. From the first week, this roommate and I had maintained a cordial, mutual hatred; we traded words maybe once every three days (I mean this quite seriously; “what’s up” was a big event). She sewed her own cosplay outfits and spent days drawing manga on her expensive tablet computer. The tablet was terrifyingly top-of-the-line, and I was jealous, of it and of her, a jealousy that intertwined with the raw loneliness I felt whenever I overheard her on the phone with her friends. I knew these girls only in passing but they clearly preferred her to me, and this appalled me: How, I wondered spitefully, can you prefer this girl? How is her weekend fully booked and why am I here, alone, working on my papers, studying too far in advance for a Japanese test, preparing to go to bed at 10 on a Friday night? Other nights, friends of hers would come over to play Dance Dance Revolution and I would bury myself in my laptop, pretending to do the week's class reading while trying to pinpoint where I'd failed. This roommate, after all, had arrived as friendless as I had. How did she now have friends and I did not? (I'm not, I should note, in any way proud of these emotions, and the ways in which they contributed to my loneliness are surely numerous; it must be self-preservation at work to sense the ugliness of that kind of desperation coming off someone, and to flee it. But my aloneness was mixed up in my jealousy, my jealousy in my aloneness, until I could no longer have told you which came first, much less how to extricate them.)

But my aloneness was mixed up in my jealousy, my jealousy in my aloneness, until I could no longer have told you which came first, much less how to extricate them.
There were a few girls I talked to on LiveJournal (this was very much back in the day) with whom conversation never seemed to work in real life; or on Facebook, which was then in its infancy. They were too muddled, hesitant—too much, in other words, like me. The friend dates were brief and abortive. One day I walked to the magic shop ("shoppe," please, and "magick"; a hand-painted sign and a display of tarot cards in the window) with one potential friend, of whom I had started thinking, almost clinically, as a kind of candidate. Halfway there she offered me a cigarette, which I turned down, and as we walked and she smoked I wracked my brain for something to say. We had already gone over (I listed in my head) her childhood in rural Montana, her coming-out experience in high school, her decision to attend our college, her selection of courses for the fall, her distant plans for New York City internships, etc. etc., as I enacted, one by one, my mother's lessons on How To Be Interesting. Rule one: Ask questions! But I couldn't figure out how to shape the questions into a conversation, the conversation into a friendship. Turning to her again with some vaguely formed query I saw her glancing at the dirt beneath her nails, then off at the trees, and I knew with absolute clarity that I had already lost her attention; my audition—my candidacy—was over.

I'm sure you—who are reading this, coffee in hand, a college grad yourself, maybe having suffered through a month or a semester of loneliness—were not like this; this is the precinct of the hopelessly pathetic, the domain of the pitiable. Or maybe you were like this, in which case, how did we not find each other? Or maybe we did, and we spoke, and we never spoke again. It's hard, when you are friendless, not to resent the people who (you think) should be equally broken and bereft. I found myself looking at more people, not just my roommate, and wondering, "How does she have friends?" And yet! She did. They all did, these girls! They must have figured it out somehow during orientation, because they were everywhere: walking across the quad, buying movie tickets, climbing the stairs together at the campus center, making plans at the library. And yet for you, the friendless, it never went like that. You tried—you got out of your dorm room, you joined a club or two, you did activities, went to movie nights, talked to people in class, but it never worked. When you left, no one ever seemed to notice you going. And when you encountered these girls, making their plans on the library steps, you'd scurry past, pretending to be in a rush. You hated them, you wanted them; your jealousy was lodged in your skin like ringworm.

Now I read about Das Racist, feeling slightly furtive, reluctant to explain why I consume magazine profiles of a group whose music I don't enjoy. The articles never fail to note that the members of Das Racist met at college; when I read this, I always envision them late at night in someone’s dorm room as the sun sneaks up on them. (My vision of this scene is vaguely homoerotic.) I imagine with a jealous pleasure that Das Racist had precisely the experience that would be summed up in the words “they met at college”: to my mind that phrase shorthands college as my peers (well-educated, ambitious, perpetually underemployed) knew it, or as they have recounted it: the red Solo cups, the eyeliner, the sweatshirts. This is college as I imagine it to be, the way I'd imagine it for a character in a novel, using for my descriptions something familiar I'd once observed but never done myself.

I wondered, sometimes, how this had happened: was it that my first-year roommate and I had hated each other so much; was that the reason? Was it because I had a boyfriend, whom I'd met during Orientation Week, and was too busy exploring the sexual freedom that comes with not having your mother walking up and down the hallway right outside your bedroom? I was spending all my time with him, and he with me, but he still had friends. How, exactly, had I missed out on the first year—the first week, even—when everyone else had settled into a group of likeminded people, like garter snakes into a ball? Where was I when Das Racist was meeting? While they learning each other's phone numbers, while they were at the Spring Fling concert together on the hill in the middle of campus, watching Andrew W.K. and getting stoned?

***

In the Midwestern city where I come from, it would be hard for college to matter less. The first question any new acquaintance asks is “Where did you go to high school?” Your high school stands in for your neighborhood, your social status, your brains, your ambitions, and in this city I know the right answers. When I'm home, I speak the language; I understand the currency.

At least, it seems that way now, but of course I have to remind myself that it didn't always. The friends I had in high school I only made after a year in which I wore the same Hard Rock Café Kuala Lumpur shirt and plaid pajama pants to school, braless and with unwashed hair, for thirty straight days. I could not be motivated to change my shirt or do laundry. At the end of thirty days I washed my clothes, then resumed wearing them like a uniform. For the months of that year I spoke to no one and went nowhere. I was, I suppose, in a depression; but I perceived it not as depression but as terminal aloneness.

The issue, as I understood it then, was whether or not I had someone I could call, without having to give it a second thought. People who have never been friendless do not know what this is like: that there is a brutally specific kind of dread that comes of knowing that, before dialing any person in your contacts list, you will have to draw on your dwindling store of courage, because you don't know if whoever you're calling will be happy to hear from you, or even instantly recognize your name. The friendless person can make no assumptions. The weekend, rolling out before you, is empty and terrifying: you run out of homework to do, and invent some. In college, you work two jobs, three, just to fill that space. You become the person who does not know how to pronounce “Das Racist,” since you have never, not once, heard the words spoken in conversation with your friends.

The issue, as I understood it then, was whether or not I had someone I could call, without having to give it a second thought.
But then, in the summer just before I turned sixteen, the darkness lifted as inexplicably as it arrived: I awoke, sitting in the back of someone else’s car, staring at the skull of a boy on whom I had just realized I had an intense, consuming crush. Within a month this boy and I were dating, and I had a group of friends with whom I spent nearly every waking moment. Still, this—the sudden brightening, the arrival of friendship—was not his doing. It just happened to occur when I was looking at him. There was someone I had been becoming, without knowing it, in the time I was coming out of the unwashed sadness, as the universe formed and reformed around me. The space filled. As much as I try I have never found the magic that needs to be worked for this to happen when you ask it to; the order of the universe changes, it seems, on its own, the flags are dropped, the engine gunned. Even now I don't know how it happens, and could not replicate it; though, surely, I would pay good money to know.

***

I like to think I've left those years behind, locked securely away. And yet I read these articles about Das Racist, as if searching them for some hint about how to fix the person I was back then. How do you fix the brokenness of the past? I think about grad school, my current life; the people I am with now—by serendipity, by luck—are broken in the ways I'm broken, mostly. And we're older now, and kinder. There were a lost four or five years, I guess. That should be the end of it, and yet my mind keeps circling, going over it again and again, to find the points where I could have made a choice, changed the future.

In my senior year of college, a girl I knew—were we friends? I wonder what the definition would have to be, for us to qualify; we lived together but often seemed in a state of bare toleration, our lives crossing occasionally at lunch and once or twice in the middle of the night as we snacked from the refrigerator—asked me if I wanted to write for this blog she was starting, about campus life at our university. I didn’t. The blog turned into a phenomenon. It's still being published now, years after our graduation. It recently ran an interview with my roommate and a friend of hers, the founders. In the interview they mentioned the alumni listserv: “It’s so busy,” one said, that she actually had to unsubscribe. “The alumni are really connected,” said the other; “the alumni are all still friends now.” I read this with a monocle in one eye: studying it from a distance, turning it over, again and again.

I see in Das Racist (who, it should be said, never consented to be what I have made them: emblems, emissaries) something I thought I would be once, and never was; something I might have had a chance of getting, at some intersection, some fork I didn’t take. This reading I do, this recounting and dissection of the past (which is shameful, and which I hide) is worse, somehow, because of the ease with which I found friends at graduate school. I ask my friends, at our regular pub on a Tuesday evening, how they think we found each other, and they have no better answer than I do. Pushed, some of them recount the same experiences I had in college: weekend nights spent in our dorm rooms, a feeling that the rest of the collegiate universe had coalesced without us. But why us, why now, why are we sitting here with pints at our elbows, laughing? “Because we're so awesome,” one of them says, which is heartwarming but not helpful: there is no key to it, nothing more than luck, the puzzle piece we didn't expect to fit.



Annalisa Grier recently completed her MA in Pubs of Northern England.

Photo by LianaAn.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/das-racist-and-other-friends-i-never-made-in-college/feed 16 Go Ahead, Go To College http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/go-ahead-go-to-college http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/go-ahead-go-to-college#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:10:08 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/go-ahead-go-to-college "By any financial measure, the investment in a college degree is the winning choice, with a rate of return of a whopping 15.2% a year on the $102,000 investment for those who earn the average salary for college graduates. This is more than double the average rate of return in the stock market during the last 60 years (6.8%), and more than five times the return to investments in corporate bonds (2.9%), gold (2.3%) long-term government bonds (2.2%) or housing (0.4%)."
—You should totally go to college, say some guys from the Brookings Institution. I reluctantly agree! I mean, I used to think college was a total scam, but that ignores the ample opportunities it affords one to get drunk and laid. Also? With the way the economy is going now? Those 87 jobs America has left will probably all require college degrees. So if you feel like you've got a good chance of landing one of those 87 jobs—and why not you? It's gotta be somebody, right?—you should probably go for it. And finally: if you are a dude, going to college is a no-brainer. What with how women are going to have to run the wreckage we've left for them, college is where you go to find yourself a wife who will take care of you.

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]]> "By any financial measure, the investment in a college degree is the winning choice, with a rate of return of a whopping 15.2% a year on the $102,000 investment for those who earn the average salary for college graduates. This is more than double the average rate of return in the stock market during the last 60 years (6.8%), and more than five times the return to investments in corporate bonds (2.9%), gold (2.3%) long-term government bonds (2.2%) or housing (0.4%)."
—You should totally go to college, say some guys from the Brookings Institution. I reluctantly agree! I mean, I used to think college was a total scam, but that ignores the ample opportunities it affords one to get drunk and laid. Also? With the way the economy is going now? Those 87 jobs America has left will probably all require college degrees. So if you feel like you've got a good chance of landing one of those 87 jobs—and why not you? It's gotta be somebody, right?—you should probably go for it. And finally: if you are a dude, going to college is a no-brainer. What with how women are going to have to run the wreckage we've left for them, college is where you go to find yourself a wife who will take care of you.

Photo by tinaxduzgen

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/go-ahead-go-to-college/feed 9 "Human Sexuality," The "Best Course" at Northwestern, is Canceled http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/human-sexuality-the-best-course-at-northwestern-is-canceled http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/human-sexuality-the-best-course-at-northwestern-is-canceled#comments Tue, 10 May 2011 10:10:07 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/human-sexuality-the-best-course-at-northwestern-is-canceled "Prof. John Michael Bailey's popular Human Sexuality course, which came under national scrutiny following a controversial after-class, optional sex toy demonstration in February, will not be offered next academic year."
—America's most infamous college class is dead. But according to one student's account of attending the class, it was the best course at Northwestern.

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]]> "Prof. John Michael Bailey's popular Human Sexuality course, which came under national scrutiny following a controversial after-class, optional sex toy demonstration in February, will not be offered next academic year."
—America's most infamous college class is dead. But according to one student's account of attending the class, it was the best course at Northwestern.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/human-sexuality-the-best-course-at-northwestern-is-canceled/feed 3 Raw Video of College Campus "Osama Death Flash Mobs" http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/raw-video-of-college-campus-osama-flash-mobs http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/raw-video-of-college-campus-osama-flash-mobs#comments Mon, 02 May 2011 16:00:38 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/raw-video-of-college-campus-osama-flash-mobs This is not quite what I expected to see in response to the death of Osama bin Laden. I guess it makes sense? It must have been weird for them to have tried to understand 9/11 in 5th grade. Good thing we don't have a draft. I guess.

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]]> This is not quite what I expected to see in response to the death of Osama bin Laden. I guess it makes sense? It must have been weird for them to have tried to understand 9/11 in 5th grade. Good thing we don't have a draft. I guess.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/raw-video-of-college-campus-osama-flash-mobs/feed 61 A Guide To Richmond, VA, By a Guy Who Lived There from '93 to '97 http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/a-guide-to-richmond-va-by-a-guy-who-lived-there-from-93-to-97 http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/a-guide-to-richmond-va-by-a-guy-who-lived-there-from-93-to-97#comments Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:45:05 +0000 Jason Linkins http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/a-guide-to-richmond-va-by-a-guy-who-lived-there-from-93-to-97 Thanks to the college basketball championships, in which both Richmond, Virginia-based teams (Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond) performed admirably, we had cause to ponder, "Not sure why people are so into Richmond, Virginia." That's a reasonable question! Richmond is a mostly busted-ass city on the banks of the James River that's played host to such luminaries as George Allen, and also George Allen's wife—what's her name, the one who married George Allen. It's best known as the capital of the Confederacy, and, as many of the old-school Richmondites—by which I mean the "racist" ones—will probably tell you, that's basically where the city peaked.

But I attended Virginia Commonwealth University for just as long as was humanly necessary, and I have to say, I have a fondness for Richmond that just won't quit. So I thought I'd share some fun facts about a place I lived while I was getting an MFA that I pretty much don't really use anymore!

Richmond loves them some confederate heroes! And they celebrate them all on a road called Monument Avenue. There, you'll find all the greats: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis. Also, there is some guy named Matthew Fontaine Maury whose importance is a mystery to me. He did something with sextants, I think?

Also, Arthur Ashe! Arthur Ashe was a tennis playing hero of Richmond who won three Grand Slam titles, which was more Grand Slams than the entire Confederate Army put together! But when it came time to put his statue on Monument Avenue, man... people really freaked out! A lot of people didn't want Ashe on the Avenue because they looked him up and saw that he was a black dude. The whole tennis part threw them for a while, but they sussed it out eventually. And so: racism. But a lot of otherwise nicer people didn't want his statue on the street because they didn't want Ashe associated with a bunch of Civil War losers. Whatever! That's where they put the statue, so everyone loses!

To be honest with you, have you seen the statue? It kind of looks like Ashe is about to cold whoop some kids upside the head with some books and/or his tennis racket. I always thought it looked weird, anyway, but I never said much about it, because my wife was friends with some people who were friends with the sculptor, so you never knew who you were going to be in the room with at any given time that you were at a party and felt the urge to just start straight up making fun of the statue.

There are some appreciable differences between the student bodies of Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond. VCU students fell into several categories: heroin users, meth users, people with multiple tattoos, people with multiple piercings, people with multiple piercings that you didn't realize were there until you were in the middle of having sex with them and discovered that you had all this shrapnel to navigate around, and also some people who weren't in the art school. By contrast, students from the University of Richmond were basically "like UVa. students, only dumb."

The Ku Klux Klan's number was in the White Pages! Is that normal? I never noticed it in the White Pages of any other place I've lived. And I haven't checked any White Pages since. It was more like one night I was like, "Damn, I bet the Klan's phone number is in this town's phone book or something," and lo, there it was! It was just an answering machine, though. (A thoroughly racist answering machine.) Me and Justice, my coworker at the record store, would call and leave messages that graphically depicted us in the middle of some "hardcore miscegenation."

There are no left turns in Richmond. Or, at least there were a surprising amount of streets in our neighborhood where they were disallowed.

Also, all the prostitutes that you were likely to encounter around VCU were cross-dressers. There were no exceptions to this.

Both of those facts (the left turns, the crossdressers) were immortalized in a song called "No Left Turns In Richmond" by my friends' band, but you probably never heard that song because their other song was named "I Shot Michael Jordan's Dad (And I'm Glad)" and people just weren't into that. Too soon.

We sometimes hung out with this dude named Ivo whose brother was in Bio Ritmo. Talking to him was just like talking to someone who had committed himself to doing a lifelong, "Saturday Night Live"-style John Travolta imitation. But he was cool, though. I'm pretty sure he sold one of my friends a gun.

Someone once approached me about possibly "fiancee swapping." Except it was this middle-aged grad student who was grey and sweaty and who didn't have a fiancee, or a girlfriend even, for that matter, to swap. Not that I would have done it if he had, he was gross! And get this: he pitched this idea to me at the Carpenter Center during the intermission of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. I mean, of all the places!

VCU now plays basketball at a place called the Siegel Center. It wasn't there when I was a student. But it's two blocks from my old apartment, in a neighborhood that VCU long coveted and finally overtook. Gone now is the terrible strip club down the street from me, the decent comic book store and the converted movie theatre where I saw the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion leap around to the light of a single maddening strobe.

My friends Jessica and Sarah lived in a haunted house on Grove Avenue. For realsies! This poltergeist was all up in their shit, constantly!

My wife got fired from the Body Shop while we lived in Richmond. The Body Shop! What do you have to do to get fired from the Body Shop? (The story of how my wife got fired from the Body Shop is really not that interesting actually.)

Here's an interesting story. One night, while I was up working on my thesis, I started hearing this strange, repeated noise out my window, coming from the back alley. I went down the back stairs and outside, and the noise became more clear: it sounded like someone yelling some loud gibberish, followed by this epically confident laughter, like, "Garbhlegharg bafulliblah. [pause] HEH. HEH. HEH." Over and over again. I walked out into the alley, seeking to identify the source of the noise. I discovered that it was emanating from the fifth floor of the retirement home that backed onto the alley shared by my apartment. Upstairs, there was some old codger in a grey t-shirt, with the window open, just yelling out into the night, some drunken blather punctuated by this cocksure HEH-HEH-HEHs. People all up and down the street were howling at this guy to shut the hell up already, it was after two in the morning and people were sleeping, etc. But he didn't give a shit. Those catcalls just fueled him further. And so he stood at his window, pulling on a bottle, howling his nonsense into the night, and letting everyone on the block know that tonight, he just DID NOT GIVE A FUCK. For one night, he was going to forget the life that passed him by, that had brought him to this ramshackle retirement home, and just give the world outside his window a piece of his goddamn mind until someone finally busted down the door and stopped him. I stood out there in the alley for a few minutes more, craning my neck to get a better view of the gaunt figure in the window, raining down indecipherable epithets upon my poor, broken-down Southern town. In a world of perfect honesty, that guy would have a statue on Monument Avenue.



Jason Linkins' life was saved by some truly great ER doctors and nurses at the Medical College of Virginia, and he wishes them the best.

Photo from Flickr by rvaphotodude.

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]]> Thanks to the college basketball championships, in which both Richmond, Virginia-based teams (Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond) performed admirably, we had cause to ponder, "Not sure why people are so into Richmond, Virginia." That's a reasonable question! Richmond is a mostly busted-ass city on the banks of the James River that's played host to such luminaries as George Allen, and also George Allen's wife—what's her name, the one who married George Allen. It's best known as the capital of the Confederacy, and, as many of the old-school Richmondites—by which I mean the "racist" ones—will probably tell you, that's basically where the city peaked.

But I attended Virginia Commonwealth University for just as long as was humanly necessary, and I have to say, I have a fondness for Richmond that just won't quit. So I thought I'd share some fun facts about a place I lived while I was getting an MFA that I pretty much don't really use anymore!

Richmond loves them some confederate heroes! And they celebrate them all on a road called Monument Avenue. There, you'll find all the greats: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis. Also, there is some guy named Matthew Fontaine Maury whose importance is a mystery to me. He did something with sextants, I think?

Also, Arthur Ashe! Arthur Ashe was a tennis playing hero of Richmond who won three Grand Slam titles, which was more Grand Slams than the entire Confederate Army put together! But when it came time to put his statue on Monument Avenue, man... people really freaked out! A lot of people didn't want Ashe on the Avenue because they looked him up and saw that he was a black dude. The whole tennis part threw them for a while, but they sussed it out eventually. And so: racism. But a lot of otherwise nicer people didn't want his statue on the street because they didn't want Ashe associated with a bunch of Civil War losers. Whatever! That's where they put the statue, so everyone loses!

To be honest with you, have you seen the statue? It kind of looks like Ashe is about to cold whoop some kids upside the head with some books and/or his tennis racket. I always thought it looked weird, anyway, but I never said much about it, because my wife was friends with some people who were friends with the sculptor, so you never knew who you were going to be in the room with at any given time that you were at a party and felt the urge to just start straight up making fun of the statue.

There are some appreciable differences between the student bodies of Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond. VCU students fell into several categories: heroin users, meth users, people with multiple tattoos, people with multiple piercings, people with multiple piercings that you didn't realize were there until you were in the middle of having sex with them and discovered that you had all this shrapnel to navigate around, and also some people who weren't in the art school. By contrast, students from the University of Richmond were basically "like UVa. students, only dumb."

The Ku Klux Klan's number was in the White Pages! Is that normal? I never noticed it in the White Pages of any other place I've lived. And I haven't checked any White Pages since. It was more like one night I was like, "Damn, I bet the Klan's phone number is in this town's phone book or something," and lo, there it was! It was just an answering machine, though. (A thoroughly racist answering machine.) Me and Justice, my coworker at the record store, would call and leave messages that graphically depicted us in the middle of some "hardcore miscegenation."

There are no left turns in Richmond. Or, at least there were a surprising amount of streets in our neighborhood where they were disallowed.

Also, all the prostitutes that you were likely to encounter around VCU were cross-dressers. There were no exceptions to this.

Both of those facts (the left turns, the crossdressers) were immortalized in a song called "No Left Turns In Richmond" by my friends' band, but you probably never heard that song because their other song was named "I Shot Michael Jordan's Dad (And I'm Glad)" and people just weren't into that. Too soon.

We sometimes hung out with this dude named Ivo whose brother was in Bio Ritmo. Talking to him was just like talking to someone who had committed himself to doing a lifelong, "Saturday Night Live"-style John Travolta imitation. But he was cool, though. I'm pretty sure he sold one of my friends a gun.

Someone once approached me about possibly "fiancee swapping." Except it was this middle-aged grad student who was grey and sweaty and who didn't have a fiancee, or a girlfriend even, for that matter, to swap. Not that I would have done it if he had, he was gross! And get this: he pitched this idea to me at the Carpenter Center during the intermission of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. I mean, of all the places!

VCU now plays basketball at a place called the Siegel Center. It wasn't there when I was a student. But it's two blocks from my old apartment, in a neighborhood that VCU long coveted and finally overtook. Gone now is the terrible strip club down the street from me, the decent comic book store and the converted movie theatre where I saw the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion leap around to the light of a single maddening strobe.

My friends Jessica and Sarah lived in a haunted house on Grove Avenue. For realsies! This poltergeist was all up in their shit, constantly!

My wife got fired from the Body Shop while we lived in Richmond. The Body Shop! What do you have to do to get fired from the Body Shop? (The story of how my wife got fired from the Body Shop is really not that interesting actually.)

Here's an interesting story. One night, while I was up working on my thesis, I started hearing this strange, repeated noise out my window, coming from the back alley. I went down the back stairs and outside, and the noise became more clear: it sounded like someone yelling some loud gibberish, followed by this epically confident laughter, like, "Garbhlegharg bafulliblah. [pause] HEH. HEH. HEH." Over and over again. I walked out into the alley, seeking to identify the source of the noise. I discovered that it was emanating from the fifth floor of the retirement home that backed onto the alley shared by my apartment. Upstairs, there was some old codger in a grey t-shirt, with the window open, just yelling out into the night, some drunken blather punctuated by this cocksure HEH-HEH-HEHs. People all up and down the street were howling at this guy to shut the hell up already, it was after two in the morning and people were sleeping, etc. But he didn't give a shit. Those catcalls just fueled him further. And so he stood at his window, pulling on a bottle, howling his nonsense into the night, and letting everyone on the block know that tonight, he just DID NOT GIVE A FUCK. For one night, he was going to forget the life that passed him by, that had brought him to this ramshackle retirement home, and just give the world outside his window a piece of his goddamn mind until someone finally busted down the door and stopped him. I stood out there in the alley for a few minutes more, craning my neck to get a better view of the gaunt figure in the window, raining down indecipherable epithets upon my poor, broken-down Southern town. In a world of perfect honesty, that guy would have a statue on Monument Avenue.



Jason Linkins' life was saved by some truly great ER doctors and nurses at the Medical College of Virginia, and he wishes them the best.

Photo from Flickr by rvaphotodude.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/a-guide-to-richmond-va-by-a-guy-who-lived-there-from-93-to-97/feed 41 College Prof Walks After Ridiculous Parent Complains About Profanity http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/college-prof-walks-after-ridiculous-parent-complains-about-profanity http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/college-prof-walks-after-ridiculous-parent-complains-about-profanity#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:50:35 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/college-prof-walks-after-ridiculous-parent-complains-about-profanity Meet Daniel Petersen, philosophy professor at Hawaii's Community College and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. He just quit his job, because of what ensued when the parent of a student wrote a letter to the school complaining because he said "shit" in class. Can you imagine? An adult saying "shit" to other adults? BURN DOWN THE COLLEGES.

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]]> Meet Daniel Petersen, philosophy professor at Hawaii's Community College and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. He just quit his job, because of what ensued when the parent of a student wrote a letter to the school complaining because he said "shit" in class. Can you imagine? An adult saying "shit" to other adults? BURN DOWN THE COLLEGES.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/college-prof-walks-after-ridiculous-parent-complains-about-profanity/feed 15 Updates on Dorm Room Decoratin' Season! http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/updates-on-dorm-room-decoratin-season http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/updates-on-dorm-room-decoratin-season#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:40:27 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/updates-on-dorm-room-decoratin-season "When Heloise McKee moved to the District after college, she packed her car with the essentials: five bags of clothes, an alarm clock and a folder filled with tear sheets from shelter magazines."

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]]> "When Heloise McKee moved to the District after college, she packed her car with the essentials: five bags of clothes, an alarm clock and a folder filled with tear sheets from shelter magazines."

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/updates-on-dorm-room-decoratin-season/feed 14 You Can Pick Your President: Obama Takes Seattle http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/you-can-pick-your-president-obama-takes-seattle http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/you-can-pick-your-president-obama-takes-seattle#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:00:12 +0000 Mike Barthel http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/you-can-pick-your-president-obama-takes-seattle The guy from the White House advance team steps out of one of those crossover SUV things and at first I think he's the sort of awful D.C. jerkface who had to get his dad to call in a favor to stop him from getting fired from his summer internship for looking at porn during business hours, but once he leads us inside the gym (which is where the rally will be the next day) and I get a good look at him, I realize how wrong I was. This man is dreamy. He looks like he used to smoke pot very neatly out of a one-hitter and was a camp counselor at a camp where all the girls had hopeless crushes on him, and nowadays to relax he likes to go into his rustic-chic kitchen and cook a wide-noodled pasta dish with some sort of hearty ragu and open up a nice bottle of red wine for someone who loves him very much. I don't remember his name, but the volunteer who I hang out with the next day, Z, tells me his name is Brandon. "All the girls remembered," she said. "I looked him up when I got home. He is all over the internet."

Brandon tells us in a wry, self-effacing way that he took us inside because "the press likes to tape these meetings and make us look stupid," and we all chuckle sympathetically. He also tells us the following things: not to climb up on the risers, because it will make the picture shake (rolling his eyes to let us know he knows this is stupid); not to wear jorts ("Whoa, a lot of questions after the jorts thing"); not to answer any questions we might get from the press; that "it's all about Patty Murray"—the troubled Senator whose reelection campaign the Prez is coming to support—"that's why people are coming, right?" and we chortle and guffaw in a knowing way because he is acknowledging the ridiculousness of the political process while also reasonably asking us to respect it; that he was also a communication major like us (that is how we got recruited to be volunteers at the speech) and if anyone knows where his college (St. Edwards) is, "you get to meet the President," and we laugh, which is a nice way of telling us that we are not going to get to meet the President; and finally, if there are any other embarrassing questions. There are not. We laugh at this, too. It does not occur to me until later that none of these questions were as embarrassing as would be a question along the lines of, say, "cut or uncut?" I am mostly glad I did not think of this at the time.

We follow him outside like smitten little puppies and he gives us a perfunctory overview of our duties before drifting off to check his mobile phone, which has a label on it. I can't see what the label says.

* * *

While walking across the quad to get to my bus, I see a reporter/cameraman pair blocking my path and swerve to avoid them but they have already intercepted someone else. Their target is, worryingly, a blonde boy wearing a white t-shirt and riding a skateboard and carrying a briefcase. I have no good explanation for why he has chosen this particular combination of characteristics other than one which is simultaneously meaningless and perfectly explanatory: he has done so because he is in college.

"Are you going to vote?" the reporter asked him.

"Absolutely," he said. "I plan on registering very soon."

* * *

At home that night, I think about how Brandon (squee!) told us that the White House press corps would be there, and that the White House press corps consists of 50 people who would be housed in a separate building from where the President was speaking, and I think about how absolutely Looney Tunes this is. I already know what the President is going to do: he is going to give the exact same speech he has given at every other campaign stop, except that he will say nice things about Patty Murray. The odds that he will not do this are so small that it hardly seems worth sending someone to cover it; whatever money you might miss out on from not covering the big unusual event that will happen once out of every thousand times can't possibly be more than the amount of money an organization has to pay to send a correspondent and/or a camera crew and/or a photographer on Air Force One. It's like if every single network had to film the Kardashians at every moment of the day, rather than just relying on E! to let us know when something particularly noteworthy happened. I guess it's a sort of status thing, but geez.

Maybe it's just that we, as Americans, feel better knowing that, in the middle of this wonderful clusterfuck of a country where who-knows-what is going on at any given moment, there is one human being whose every activity we know about with as fine a grain as possible. It doesn't matter if those activities are repetitious or boring or pointless; all that matters is that we know they happened. It is as if only by engaging in a ritual recitation of one individual's experience of reality are we able to continually assert that such shared reality does, in fact, exist; that there is more than just the pictures in our heads, dancing on their own.

* * *

On the bus to campus the next morning I sit down behind two first-year students and I resist putting my headphones in because I am reporting. And good thing, because I love them! They are a baby gay with a Beiber-flop and a fab straight girl with vanishing amber highlights and purple nail polish. He has a map because he wants to find places to explore and she keeps telling him to put it away because they will have an adventure. At one point she suggests starting a filmmaking collective (!) and when he demurs she calls him "Mr. Indecisive" before doubling back and explaining that her mother always called her bossy. (She also suggests they go camping, because we are in the Pacific Northwest. "Do you have any, like, camping clothes?" she asks him teasingly, and I am glad that she is making it all about the costume.) When they get out, I see that the girl is wearing all black with a blue plaid flannel shirt and the baby gay is wearing a slim-cut suit with a crewneck white t underneath, because he is going to a political speech, and holy shit, I want them to be literal BFFs. I hope it all works out for them.

I get there half an hour late but still half an hour before we're actually going to do anything. Our hosts are now two people from the Murray campaign named Rhonda and Lars. Rhonda and Lars are nice, but look frazzled. ("Rhonda and Lars," Rhonda said yesterday after Brandon introduced them. "It sounds like a power duo.") After all the talk about security yesterday I am expecting a thorough screening but instead we are given laminated badges hung from white yarn, like we are a bunch of kindergarteners on a field trip to somewhere bright and sticky. Rhonda and Lars send us away, on vague missions to direct the press to their proper entrance. I position myself as close to a leanable surface as possible.

Eventually I need to pee and head over to the workout center. I see that there are people using the elliptical machines at 8 in the morning. I imagine they feel like I do when I am using the elliptical machines while people are going to a football game—something along the lines of "what the fuck is wrong with all these assholes?"—but mainly I think that anyone who works out at 8 in the morning can't be very fun to hang out with, especially if they are doing so instead of attending an Obama speech.

This is one of the many times in my recent life I have been glad not to be young: while everyone else either sticks priggishly to their positions or kind of skulks away resentfully when they want a break, I just stride off purposefully when nature calls, because I am old enough to know that this is legitimate, and I don't really care about being punished. But mainly I am just old. The other volunteers are all undergrads, which I think probably means I missed some sort of important social cue at some point in the process.

Here is what I wrote in my notebook about the experience of spending two hours outside, watching people go by:

• "This is like a parade of adorableness!"

• Elderly couples with one hand holding a sign and the other holding the other's hand!

• Shy, excited girls in hijabs!

• Brassy middle-aged lesbian couples!

• Star-spangled hats!

• Nine-year-old girls with "OBAMA!" signs hand-drawn with magic marker on posterboard!

•Black ladies in their Sunday best!

• Four-year-old boys with slicked-down hair in full suits!

The day is young but we are all young, or feeling young, giddy and free. When one of the volunteers—the aforementioned Z—gets bored with her job and wanders over to hang out with me, she comments that "It's funny his approval ratings are so low but people still come and camp out overnight." I decline to debate the point on the approval-ratings thing, but she's certainly right about the excitement level.

Z's mom arrives, hoping Z will be able to get her in backstage. I assure her that at these sort of giant organizational gangbangs the best way to attain admission is to show up at the last minute, look non-threatening, and ask the most harried-looking person politely if you can come in. (Though not in so many words.) She strikes up a conversation with the campus cop guarding the nearby entrance. He is friendly enough that he has already shown Z pictures of his kids, and the two chatter away while Z and I discuss the perils of parents on Facebook. When Z's mom comes back she has the cop's phone number and gives it to Z with the suggestion that she give him a call "if you ever get into trouble." This makes me miss my mom, and I end up calling her later. (She is fine.)

As it gets closer to start time the other volunteers congregate where Z and I are; we huddle together, warming ourselves. One girl, S, sees another girl approaching and they do that whole high-pitched "hiiiii!"-and-hug thing that girls do. S tells us later that this other girl is her sorority sister and the student body president. She is also the daughter of the state attorney general. "So it's, like, in her blood. But they have very different views." S was very excited for her friend after she saw her friend's Facebook status indicating that her friend is going to introduce the president, and we all coo in appreciation of this achievement. "She'll totally get to shake his hand," one of the girls says. "Oh yeah," says S.

As it will turn out, her friend is not introducing the president, but the county executive; I receive no follow-up report as to her hand-shaking activities. There is probably some message here about politics, but she seems like a nice enough girl and I wish her nothing but the best in her future endeavors.

* * *

Once we get inside, we are confined to the press pen, which is pen-like enough to have a wide-open grazing area in the back leading to a narrow chute that takes you to the side of the stage, where there is a platform for photographers. (I assume this is where the media ritualistically slaughtered a bald eagle before we were let in; certainly it is where I would have done so.) A guy is playing songs over the PA from an Apple laptop and I really want to offer him my iPod instead, because he is really leaning on some old dogs like "No Surrender" and "I Won't Back Down." When I get bored, I make a mix of songs that would be better, albeit extremely ill-advised.

A gospel choir gets up and sings "God Bless America" and "Stand By Me" and, oh God, "Amazing Grace." Seattle usually does not like to admit that black people exist except as crime victims, so their presence here makes the whole thing seem like we're trying too hard, like when you do too good a job cleaning up your apartment before your parents come over. You know they're going to walk in and think "Oh, bullshit he dusts his wainscoting on a regular basis" and then smile and say "Oh honey, your place is so nice!" instead, and the wainscoting probably isn't comfortable in this situation either, if you know what I mean, but in grand post-racial fashion, we've all decided to pretend like we don't fundamentally distrust each other while dad's around. Eventually the choir gets down and the crowd starts to do the wave, because they are bored. Two Pacific Islander girls are sleeping on each others' shoulders.

I go to the bathroom which is through the basketball team's locker room (UW stickers on the soap dispensers, in case they forget where they are, I guess), and when I come back, there are thousands of Patty Murray signs fluttering amongst the crowd, distributed from who-knows-where. The whole thing gets going in earnest: a Marine leads us in the Pledge, and the aforementioned student body president takes the stage. At one point she says something about how "the cynics" don't think young people will vote, and a gay near me yells "boo cynics!" which I like for all sorts of reasons. She tries to lead us in a call-and-response chant of the candidate's name, but while the first "Patty!" "Murray!" exchange goes fine, the crowd picks up a rhythm on its own and keeps chanting "Murray!" and the speaker has to scramble to keep up and interject some "Patty!"s at the right places. The crowd is beginning to become... self-aware.

She introduces the county executive, who tells us to update our Facebook status with something about voting, and then he introduces a Congressional candidate who says "I am also a Husky!" and my Tourette's starts acting up; when she says "We need to make things better!" I have to tap my fingers to avoid yelling "Talk specifics!" She seems nice, though, and I do learn that apparently everyone wants to sell electric cars to China, judging by the crowd reaction to her proposal of this plan. She introduces a sitting Congressman named Norm Dix who my notes say is a "Shatner-looking motherfucker," and he gives a pretty great speech in which he brings up Bush a lot. When he mentions that he took classes at UW from a Keynesian, me and the guy next to me chuckle knowingly, and I notice he is Twittering up a storm. This means we are both giant nerds. The crowd tries to get a "six more years!" chant going, but it fades away quickly, too self-conscious to self-sustain.

So then (whew) Norm introduces the governor, who gives an even better speech in which she leans hard on health care, gets cheers for "Our troops are coming home from Iraq," boos for how the other side is "scooping up donations thanks to the Supreme Court's decision," and laughs for "Look at the candidates they're putting forward!" She gets a very successful "Patty!" "Murray!" chant going. Then she leaves and the Secret Service sweeps the podium, and we all know what's coming. The crowd can't decide what to chant and eventually settles on the wave again, because who doesn't like the wave? The White House press corps files in behind us in the pen's chute, led by Brandon, and the excitement level generally ramps up. I see someone from the Washington Post, and want to talk to him about their coverage of the health care debate, but think better of it. The DJ plays either Amerie's "Gotta Work" or the song it samples, Sam and Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and it works like a charm. We are pumped up.

Then Obama comes in with Murray and the place goes nuts with flashbulbs all over and ladies rending their garments and grown men weeping and like that. Obama takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves very deliberately while people cheer, and he waves. Murray gives a good speech and gets a great call-and-response going where we get to yell "No!" which is always fun, but no one really cares. We can't even hear her introduction to Obama; we know what's coming, and we go insane. Someone yells "I love you!" and Obama says "I love you back," which we really like. Squee!

The beginning of the speech is weird because the speech doesn't really matter. Everyone in the place, no matter their role, is using it as a photo op. The photographers and camera guys are all jockeying for shots on the risers and trying to get different angles around the press pen, and everyone in the crowd is taking pictures of Obama, sure, but also everyone in the crowd is trying to get shots of themselves with Obama. Like the very attractive mixed-mixed-race couple in front of me, who take pictures of each other with their backs to Obama and then take pictures of themselves with their backs to Obama and then look at the pictures and comment on how attractive they look in these pictures of themselves with the President also in the frame, and everyone is doing this. They don't just want to document that Obama was here, they want to document that they were here, seeing Obama. The crowd is now making its own rally, shouting different things both at Obama ("Repeal don't ask don't tell!") and at each other; pockets of alliances form and disperse and small social gatherings sprout up in every section of the building.

And I realize that what matters isn't Obama's speech, but his mere presence. Despite the loudspeakers, it's not his voice dominating the room. It's the fact that he is here, with us. His presence makes this time special. We have made it special, taking time out of our days (it is around noon on a Thursday) by missing class or work to come here and wait for hours to get in and see this particular event. We have changed our routines. This is an abnormal event. Which means it's like a festival, or a carnival; a celebration less of what we're celebrating than of us, and the fact that we exist.

I am thinking profound thoughts along these lines when Obama looks directly at me and locks eyes and I realize that, in that moment, when I am face-to-face with the most powerful person on Earth, I have my index finger halfway up my right nostril. This is probably the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me.

Perhaps spurred by this rather disrespectful and also gross gesture, Obama brings it back. He uses his considerable gifts to distract us from the visual in favor of the word, rolling into his familiar metaphor of the car in the ditch with palpable glee. He has fun with it, diddling the details around rhetorically and playing with us, teasing us with the punchline we know is coming. And the crowd comes together in this moment, led on by our leader, focused suddenly on what he's saying. The festival is harnessed to a practical purpose by this particular power of charisma, ritual, style. When he hits it—when he yells "You put the car in D!"—we go nuts all over again, responding this time not to his mere presence, but to what he has done to us.

When it's all over, the DJ plays Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America," which was George W. Bush's campaign song. I walk out the press entrance and back toward class, where we will discuss the particular authority bloggers have, and how it is constructed. I am walking side-by-side with a family.

"What did you like best?" the dad asks his son.

"I liked the wave!" the son says.

The dad tries to correct him. "Didn't you like how he found accessible ways to talk about complex policy issues?" But no, the kid's right: the wave was great. Who doesn't like the wave?



Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

---

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]]> The guy from the White House advance team steps out of one of those crossover SUV things and at first I think he's the sort of awful D.C. jerkface who had to get his dad to call in a favor to stop him from getting fired from his summer internship for looking at porn during business hours, but once he leads us inside the gym (which is where the rally will be the next day) and I get a good look at him, I realize how wrong I was. This man is dreamy. He looks like he used to smoke pot very neatly out of a one-hitter and was a camp counselor at a camp where all the girls had hopeless crushes on him, and nowadays to relax he likes to go into his rustic-chic kitchen and cook a wide-noodled pasta dish with some sort of hearty ragu and open up a nice bottle of red wine for someone who loves him very much. I don't remember his name, but the volunteer who I hang out with the next day, Z, tells me his name is Brandon. "All the girls remembered," she said. "I looked him up when I got home. He is all over the internet."

Brandon tells us in a wry, self-effacing way that he took us inside because "the press likes to tape these meetings and make us look stupid," and we all chuckle sympathetically. He also tells us the following things: not to climb up on the risers, because it will make the picture shake (rolling his eyes to let us know he knows this is stupid); not to wear jorts ("Whoa, a lot of questions after the jorts thing"); not to answer any questions we might get from the press; that "it's all about Patty Murray"—the troubled Senator whose reelection campaign the Prez is coming to support—"that's why people are coming, right?" and we chortle and guffaw in a knowing way because he is acknowledging the ridiculousness of the political process while also reasonably asking us to respect it; that he was also a communication major like us (that is how we got recruited to be volunteers at the speech) and if anyone knows where his college (St. Edwards) is, "you get to meet the President," and we laugh, which is a nice way of telling us that we are not going to get to meet the President; and finally, if there are any other embarrassing questions. There are not. We laugh at this, too. It does not occur to me until later that none of these questions were as embarrassing as would be a question along the lines of, say, "cut or uncut?" I am mostly glad I did not think of this at the time.

We follow him outside like smitten little puppies and he gives us a perfunctory overview of our duties before drifting off to check his mobile phone, which has a label on it. I can't see what the label says.

* * *

While walking across the quad to get to my bus, I see a reporter/cameraman pair blocking my path and swerve to avoid them but they have already intercepted someone else. Their target is, worryingly, a blonde boy wearing a white t-shirt and riding a skateboard and carrying a briefcase. I have no good explanation for why he has chosen this particular combination of characteristics other than one which is simultaneously meaningless and perfectly explanatory: he has done so because he is in college.

"Are you going to vote?" the reporter asked him.

"Absolutely," he said. "I plan on registering very soon."

* * *

At home that night, I think about how Brandon (squee!) told us that the White House press corps would be there, and that the White House press corps consists of 50 people who would be housed in a separate building from where the President was speaking, and I think about how absolutely Looney Tunes this is. I already know what the President is going to do: he is going to give the exact same speech he has given at every other campaign stop, except that he will say nice things about Patty Murray. The odds that he will not do this are so small that it hardly seems worth sending someone to cover it; whatever money you might miss out on from not covering the big unusual event that will happen once out of every thousand times can't possibly be more than the amount of money an organization has to pay to send a correspondent and/or a camera crew and/or a photographer on Air Force One. It's like if every single network had to film the Kardashians at every moment of the day, rather than just relying on E! to let us know when something particularly noteworthy happened. I guess it's a sort of status thing, but geez.

Maybe it's just that we, as Americans, feel better knowing that, in the middle of this wonderful clusterfuck of a country where who-knows-what is going on at any given moment, there is one human being whose every activity we know about with as fine a grain as possible. It doesn't matter if those activities are repetitious or boring or pointless; all that matters is that we know they happened. It is as if only by engaging in a ritual recitation of one individual's experience of reality are we able to continually assert that such shared reality does, in fact, exist; that there is more than just the pictures in our heads, dancing on their own.

* * *

On the bus to campus the next morning I sit down behind two first-year students and I resist putting my headphones in because I am reporting. And good thing, because I love them! They are a baby gay with a Beiber-flop and a fab straight girl with vanishing amber highlights and purple nail polish. He has a map because he wants to find places to explore and she keeps telling him to put it away because they will have an adventure. At one point she suggests starting a filmmaking collective (!) and when he demurs she calls him "Mr. Indecisive" before doubling back and explaining that her mother always called her bossy. (She also suggests they go camping, because we are in the Pacific Northwest. "Do you have any, like, camping clothes?" she asks him teasingly, and I am glad that she is making it all about the costume.) When they get out, I see that the girl is wearing all black with a blue plaid flannel shirt and the baby gay is wearing a slim-cut suit with a crewneck white t underneath, because he is going to a political speech, and holy shit, I want them to be literal BFFs. I hope it all works out for them.

I get there half an hour late but still half an hour before we're actually going to do anything. Our hosts are now two people from the Murray campaign named Rhonda and Lars. Rhonda and Lars are nice, but look frazzled. ("Rhonda and Lars," Rhonda said yesterday after Brandon introduced them. "It sounds like a power duo.") After all the talk about security yesterday I am expecting a thorough screening but instead we are given laminated badges hung from white yarn, like we are a bunch of kindergarteners on a field trip to somewhere bright and sticky. Rhonda and Lars send us away, on vague missions to direct the press to their proper entrance. I position myself as close to a leanable surface as possible.

Eventually I need to pee and head over to the workout center. I see that there are people using the elliptical machines at 8 in the morning. I imagine they feel like I do when I am using the elliptical machines while people are going to a football game—something along the lines of "what the fuck is wrong with all these assholes?"—but mainly I think that anyone who works out at 8 in the morning can't be very fun to hang out with, especially if they are doing so instead of attending an Obama speech.

This is one of the many times in my recent life I have been glad not to be young: while everyone else either sticks priggishly to their positions or kind of skulks away resentfully when they want a break, I just stride off purposefully when nature calls, because I am old enough to know that this is legitimate, and I don't really care about being punished. But mainly I am just old. The other volunteers are all undergrads, which I think probably means I missed some sort of important social cue at some point in the process.

Here is what I wrote in my notebook about the experience of spending two hours outside, watching people go by:

• "This is like a parade of adorableness!"

• Elderly couples with one hand holding a sign and the other holding the other's hand!

• Shy, excited girls in hijabs!

• Brassy middle-aged lesbian couples!

• Star-spangled hats!

• Nine-year-old girls with "OBAMA!" signs hand-drawn with magic marker on posterboard!

•Black ladies in their Sunday best!

• Four-year-old boys with slicked-down hair in full suits!

The day is young but we are all young, or feeling young, giddy and free. When one of the volunteers—the aforementioned Z—gets bored with her job and wanders over to hang out with me, she comments that "It's funny his approval ratings are so low but people still come and camp out overnight." I decline to debate the point on the approval-ratings thing, but she's certainly right about the excitement level.

Z's mom arrives, hoping Z will be able to get her in backstage. I assure her that at these sort of giant organizational gangbangs the best way to attain admission is to show up at the last minute, look non-threatening, and ask the most harried-looking person politely if you can come in. (Though not in so many words.) She strikes up a conversation with the campus cop guarding the nearby entrance. He is friendly enough that he has already shown Z pictures of his kids, and the two chatter away while Z and I discuss the perils of parents on Facebook. When Z's mom comes back she has the cop's phone number and gives it to Z with the suggestion that she give him a call "if you ever get into trouble." This makes me miss my mom, and I end up calling her later. (She is fine.)

As it gets closer to start time the other volunteers congregate where Z and I are; we huddle together, warming ourselves. One girl, S, sees another girl approaching and they do that whole high-pitched "hiiiii!"-and-hug thing that girls do. S tells us later that this other girl is her sorority sister and the student body president. She is also the daughter of the state attorney general. "So it's, like, in her blood. But they have very different views." S was very excited for her friend after she saw her friend's Facebook status indicating that her friend is going to introduce the president, and we all coo in appreciation of this achievement. "She'll totally get to shake his hand," one of the girls says. "Oh yeah," says S.

As it will turn out, her friend is not introducing the president, but the county executive; I receive no follow-up report as to her hand-shaking activities. There is probably some message here about politics, but she seems like a nice enough girl and I wish her nothing but the best in her future endeavors.

* * *

Once we get inside, we are confined to the press pen, which is pen-like enough to have a wide-open grazing area in the back leading to a narrow chute that takes you to the side of the stage, where there is a platform for photographers. (I assume this is where the media ritualistically slaughtered a bald eagle before we were let in; certainly it is where I would have done so.) A guy is playing songs over the PA from an Apple laptop and I really want to offer him my iPod instead, because he is really leaning on some old dogs like "No Surrender" and "I Won't Back Down." When I get bored, I make a mix of songs that would be better, albeit extremely ill-advised.

A gospel choir gets up and sings "God Bless America" and "Stand By Me" and, oh God, "Amazing Grace." Seattle usually does not like to admit that black people exist except as crime victims, so their presence here makes the whole thing seem like we're trying too hard, like when you do too good a job cleaning up your apartment before your parents come over. You know they're going to walk in and think "Oh, bullshit he dusts his wainscoting on a regular basis" and then smile and say "Oh honey, your place is so nice!" instead, and the wainscoting probably isn't comfortable in this situation either, if you know what I mean, but in grand post-racial fashion, we've all decided to pretend like we don't fundamentally distrust each other while dad's around. Eventually the choir gets down and the crowd starts to do the wave, because they are bored. Two Pacific Islander girls are sleeping on each others' shoulders.

I go to the bathroom which is through the basketball team's locker room (UW stickers on the soap dispensers, in case they forget where they are, I guess), and when I come back, there are thousands of Patty Murray signs fluttering amongst the crowd, distributed from who-knows-where. The whole thing gets going in earnest: a Marine leads us in the Pledge, and the aforementioned student body president takes the stage. At one point she says something about how "the cynics" don't think young people will vote, and a gay near me yells "boo cynics!" which I like for all sorts of reasons. She tries to lead us in a call-and-response chant of the candidate's name, but while the first "Patty!" "Murray!" exchange goes fine, the crowd picks up a rhythm on its own and keeps chanting "Murray!" and the speaker has to scramble to keep up and interject some "Patty!"s at the right places. The crowd is beginning to become... self-aware.

She introduces the county executive, who tells us to update our Facebook status with something about voting, and then he introduces a Congressional candidate who says "I am also a Husky!" and my Tourette's starts acting up; when she says "We need to make things better!" I have to tap my fingers to avoid yelling "Talk specifics!" She seems nice, though, and I do learn that apparently everyone wants to sell electric cars to China, judging by the crowd reaction to her proposal of this plan. She introduces a sitting Congressman named Norm Dix who my notes say is a "Shatner-looking motherfucker," and he gives a pretty great speech in which he brings up Bush a lot. When he mentions that he took classes at UW from a Keynesian, me and the guy next to me chuckle knowingly, and I notice he is Twittering up a storm. This means we are both giant nerds. The crowd tries to get a "six more years!" chant going, but it fades away quickly, too self-conscious to self-sustain.

So then (whew) Norm introduces the governor, who gives an even better speech in which she leans hard on health care, gets cheers for "Our troops are coming home from Iraq," boos for how the other side is "scooping up donations thanks to the Supreme Court's decision," and laughs for "Look at the candidates they're putting forward!" She gets a very successful "Patty!" "Murray!" chant going. Then she leaves and the Secret Service sweeps the podium, and we all know what's coming. The crowd can't decide what to chant and eventually settles on the wave again, because who doesn't like the wave? The White House press corps files in behind us in the pen's chute, led by Brandon, and the excitement level generally ramps up. I see someone from the Washington Post, and want to talk to him about their coverage of the health care debate, but think better of it. The DJ plays either Amerie's "Gotta Work" or the song it samples, Sam and Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and it works like a charm. We are pumped up.

Then Obama comes in with Murray and the place goes nuts with flashbulbs all over and ladies rending their garments and grown men weeping and like that. Obama takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves very deliberately while people cheer, and he waves. Murray gives a good speech and gets a great call-and-response going where we get to yell "No!" which is always fun, but no one really cares. We can't even hear her introduction to Obama; we know what's coming, and we go insane. Someone yells "I love you!" and Obama says "I love you back," which we really like. Squee!

The beginning of the speech is weird because the speech doesn't really matter. Everyone in the place, no matter their role, is using it as a photo op. The photographers and camera guys are all jockeying for shots on the risers and trying to get different angles around the press pen, and everyone in the crowd is taking pictures of Obama, sure, but also everyone in the crowd is trying to get shots of themselves with Obama. Like the very attractive mixed-mixed-race couple in front of me, who take pictures of each other with their backs to Obama and then take pictures of themselves with their backs to Obama and then look at the pictures and comment on how attractive they look in these pictures of themselves with the President also in the frame, and everyone is doing this. They don't just want to document that Obama was here, they want to document that they were here, seeing Obama. The crowd is now making its own rally, shouting different things both at Obama ("Repeal don't ask don't tell!") and at each other; pockets of alliances form and disperse and small social gatherings sprout up in every section of the building.

And I realize that what matters isn't Obama's speech, but his mere presence. Despite the loudspeakers, it's not his voice dominating the room. It's the fact that he is here, with us. His presence makes this time special. We have made it special, taking time out of our days (it is around noon on a Thursday) by missing class or work to come here and wait for hours to get in and see this particular event. We have changed our routines. This is an abnormal event. Which means it's like a festival, or a carnival; a celebration less of what we're celebrating than of us, and the fact that we exist.

I am thinking profound thoughts along these lines when Obama looks directly at me and locks eyes and I realize that, in that moment, when I am face-to-face with the most powerful person on Earth, I have my index finger halfway up my right nostril. This is probably the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me.

Perhaps spurred by this rather disrespectful and also gross gesture, Obama brings it back. He uses his considerable gifts to distract us from the visual in favor of the word, rolling into his familiar metaphor of the car in the ditch with palpable glee. He has fun with it, diddling the details around rhetorically and playing with us, teasing us with the punchline we know is coming. And the crowd comes together in this moment, led on by our leader, focused suddenly on what he's saying. The festival is harnessed to a practical purpose by this particular power of charisma, ritual, style. When he hits it—when he yells "You put the car in D!"—we go nuts all over again, responding this time not to his mere presence, but to what he has done to us.

When it's all over, the DJ plays Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America," which was George W. Bush's campaign song. I walk out the press entrance and back toward class, where we will discuss the particular authority bloggers have, and how it is constructed. I am walking side-by-side with a family.

"What did you like best?" the dad asks his son.

"I liked the wave!" the son says.

The dad tries to correct him. "Didn't you like how he found accessible ways to talk about complex policy issues?" But no, the kid's right: the wave was great. Who doesn't like the wave?



Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/you-can-pick-your-president-obama-takes-seattle/feed 10 Maine Collegians Doing Their Best To Have Fun Without Hard Alcohol http://www.theawl.com/2010/09/maine-collegians-doing-their-best-to-have-fun-without-hard-alcohol http://www.theawl.com/2010/09/maine-collegians-doing-their-best-to-have-fun-without-hard-alcohol#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:30:13 +0000 Dave Bry http://www.theawl.com/2010/09/maine-collegians-doing-their-best-to-have-fun-without-hard-alcohol No Jack DanielsSo how are students at Bowdoin, Bates and Colby surviving this semester with no hard alcohol allowed on their campuses? The outright bans-decided on over the summer, when the students were not able to riot and take over administration buildings-seem particularly cruel for these bright young things, cut off as they already are from the rest of society by virtue of their being in college. And Maine. I mean, where and when does an 18- or 19-year-old really need a glass of something strong if not snowed-in in some musty old dorm room during finals week? It's gonna be like The Shining up there this winter.

Judging from a quick perusal of their respective college newspapers, though, nothing so gory so far.

Bowdoin students are making do with beer. The Bowdoin Orient's William Albuquerque and some friends celebrated the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest by taste testing Hefeweizens.

After managing to get the pouring technique down (read: beer shower), my group of Hefeweizen compatriots and I were able to truly enjoy the various beers assembled, which included not only authentic Bavarian imports, but also some American takes on the classic German wheat beer.

Colby co-eds, on the other hand, are replacing whiskey and vodka with a more permissive attitude towards beer-and-wine fueled sexual encounters than their peers at other colleges nationwide. From an informal campus poll conducted by The Colby Echo:

"Interfering in a friend's drunken hook-up might actually go against accepted social codes. 'Who wants to have their friends intervene in their sex life or be the one to intervene in their friends' sex lives? No one,' Kristine Walters '12 said. 'If both you and your friends are in agreement that the situation is safe then why not have a little fun?'"

Batesians, meanwhile, are doing their best to remember a time before the ban, years ago, when Absolut ruled the scene and, according to the title of an article in The Bates Student, "What Happens On The Dance Floor Stays On The Dance Floor."

"In a swirl of spandex, legwarmers and jean cutoffs, the '80s dance returned last Saturday night, September 18th, while gangs of students got their grind on underneath the library. The live band rocked the arcade with classics like 'I Think We're Alone Now' and 'Your Love,' renditions that would make Tiffany and The Outfield proud... Although some didn't manage to ever make it to the dance, those who did were rewarded with raucous dancing and perhaps more bodily contact than they had bargained for."

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]]> No Jack DanielsSo how are students at Bowdoin, Bates and Colby surviving this semester with no hard alcohol allowed on their campuses? The outright bans-decided on over the summer, when the students were not able to riot and take over administration buildings-seem particularly cruel for these bright young things, cut off as they already are from the rest of society by virtue of their being in college. And Maine. I mean, where and when does an 18- or 19-year-old really need a glass of something strong if not snowed-in in some musty old dorm room during finals week? It's gonna be like The Shining up there this winter.

Judging from a quick perusal of their respective college newspapers, though, nothing so gory so far.

Bowdoin students are making do with beer. The Bowdoin Orient's William Albuquerque and some friends celebrated the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest by taste testing Hefeweizens.

After managing to get the pouring technique down (read: beer shower), my group of Hefeweizen compatriots and I were able to truly enjoy the various beers assembled, which included not only authentic Bavarian imports, but also some American takes on the classic German wheat beer.

Colby co-eds, on the other hand, are replacing whiskey and vodka with a more permissive attitude towards beer-and-wine fueled sexual encounters than their peers at other colleges nationwide. From an informal campus poll conducted by The Colby Echo:

"Interfering in a friend's drunken hook-up might actually go against accepted social codes. 'Who wants to have their friends intervene in their sex life or be the one to intervene in their friends' sex lives? No one,' Kristine Walters '12 said. 'If both you and your friends are in agreement that the situation is safe then why not have a little fun?'"

Batesians, meanwhile, are doing their best to remember a time before the ban, years ago, when Absolut ruled the scene and, according to the title of an article in The Bates Student, "What Happens On The Dance Floor Stays On The Dance Floor."

"In a swirl of spandex, legwarmers and jean cutoffs, the '80s dance returned last Saturday night, September 18th, while gangs of students got their grind on underneath the library. The live band rocked the arcade with classics like 'I Think We're Alone Now' and 'Your Love,' renditions that would make Tiffany and The Outfield proud... Although some didn't manage to ever make it to the dance, those who did were rewarded with raucous dancing and perhaps more bodily contact than they had bargained for."

---

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31 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/09/maine-collegians-doing-their-best-to-have-fun-without-hard-alcohol/feed 31 I Was Briefly the Face of an Unemployed Generation http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/i-was-briefly-the-face-of-an-unemployed-generation http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/i-was-briefly-the-face-of-an-unemployed-generation#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:40:22 +0000 Emma Carmichael http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/i-was-briefly-the-face-of-an-unemployed-generation Three months ago, I posed for my college graduation photo-the official one in front of an American flag, diploma in hand, ready to face the world. Since then the photography company has emailed me almost weekly, offering discount upon discount and before-it's-too-lates. But when the picture was taken, just seconds after I had crossed the stage and shaken hands, I was too delirious to smile, so instead I bit my lower lip. I mean I almost swallowed it. I don't know how it happened. Normally, I have no trouble smiling. But I remember at that moment that the muscles would not contract into a casual, triumphant smile, that my lower jaw was literally shaking with some kind of dread or excitement or panic or all of those things, and to control it-literally, to stop the shaking-I bit my lower lip. In a big way. The photo is commendably awful. If the discount gets steep enough then I'll buy it and take it out whenever I need to take myself less seriously.

But another photo of me on graduation day-May 23, 2010-was, in conventional modern Internet terms, a huge success.

There was a moment on the day I graduated when, bored by the endless procession and also nursing a pulsing hangover, I looked away from the crowd-basically at nothing. It was at this moment that a photographer seemed to spring into my line of vision, and I heard a snap, and I broke my gaze to catch him darting away again. I was vaguely aware that he had taken my photo. I was more aware that I was wearing a polyester black gown in ninety-degree heat at ten in the morning.

A few days later that photo showed up on the Internet on a popular news blog. It was credited as a Getty image. A lot of people sent me the link. The photo was unexpected for a number of reasons; most disturbingly, in that bored, brain-pounding moment when I glanced mindlessly at the five-piece brass band playing the processional, I had somehow managed to look thoughtful. I am looking away from the crowd, away from my classmates who face forward and smile and rejoice in the moment, and I am looking somehow self-satisfied and also positively uncertain of myself. I also look tired. Worn-down. As if I've had enough.

Is there anything more pathetic than unintentional poignancy?

After that first posting, the photo continued to surface, mostly in a handful of articles about the recently graduated class of two thousand and ten. The articles were all about how nobody in this graduating class would get hired for a long time. CNN reported it. The Atlantic reported it. The Huffington Post reported it. We were all destined for unemployment and my face seemed to say it best. Hungover and under-prepared, but I could fake contemplation and self-awareness with the best of them.

My friends declared me The Face of An Unemployed Generation. I received emails with links embedded, a quick note attached: "Hey Emma, you're famous! Hired yet?" It was fine; it was funny. My father tracked down the photographer who took it, the springy guy, and talked him into mailing us a few copies without the expensive Getty costs. My grandmothers were thrilled.

The Getty photo has now made it to my parents' piano top, suggesting that is somehow iconic, affecting. It's not right. The iconic photos I know best-my parents wrapped in a blanket on a porch in Vermont at age 22, laughing and hugging and dotted with sunlight-are from a time when film was developed and intensely personal and usually in black and white. This picture, the brass-band gaze picture, is hyper-modern. It is digital, high-quality, licensed, recycled, stock, somehow representative. And most of all, a fluke.

The image that really has stuck is not even necessarily one of me, but of many others-the same way my parents on a porch in the seventies is probably the image many of my classmates have of their parents on a porch in the seventies.

In the two-week waiting period after my very first job interview after graduation-a period in which I over-analyzed my every misplaced word and nostril-scratch-I remembered with a terrified jolt that before it had even begun, before I had crossed my legs and folded my hands in my lap and smiled expectantly across a desk with neatly stacked papers, the very first image I gave a potential employer was of me, pulling on a pair of locked glass doors.

I was wearing safety-pinned pencil skirt and a borrowed blazer and I had three copies of my resume in the canvas bag on my shoulder. The woman at the elevator bank twenty floors down had wished me good luck and told me I'd do fine.

I got off the elevator on the twentieth floor of the Manhattan skyscraper, I walked to the doors, and I pulled. Then, I pushed. The doors did not move. The man in the suit came forward from where he stood waiting for me, beyond the doors, and opened them. Of course. The doors to corporate America were locked, and I could not get in. I am the cliché in action.

When I reached out to shake the man's hand and smile confidently-I know that I bit my lip. Click.

And you know the first thing he said to me? "You look so familiar."


Emma is moving from Vermont to Brooklyn to better blend in with the rest of her unemployed peers. She sort of wishes she were on Twitter.

The photo of Emma Carmichael above is by Andy Kropa, licensed through Getty Images.

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]]> Three months ago, I posed for my college graduation photo-the official one in front of an American flag, diploma in hand, ready to face the world. Since then the photography company has emailed me almost weekly, offering discount upon discount and before-it's-too-lates. But when the picture was taken, just seconds after I had crossed the stage and shaken hands, I was too delirious to smile, so instead I bit my lower lip. I mean I almost swallowed it. I don't know how it happened. Normally, I have no trouble smiling. But I remember at that moment that the muscles would not contract into a casual, triumphant smile, that my lower jaw was literally shaking with some kind of dread or excitement or panic or all of those things, and to control it-literally, to stop the shaking-I bit my lower lip. In a big way. The photo is commendably awful. If the discount gets steep enough then I'll buy it and take it out whenever I need to take myself less seriously.

But another photo of me on graduation day-May 23, 2010-was, in conventional modern Internet terms, a huge success.

There was a moment on the day I graduated when, bored by the endless procession and also nursing a pulsing hangover, I looked away from the crowd-basically at nothing. It was at this moment that a photographer seemed to spring into my line of vision, and I heard a snap, and I broke my gaze to catch him darting away again. I was vaguely aware that he had taken my photo. I was more aware that I was wearing a polyester black gown in ninety-degree heat at ten in the morning.

A few days later that photo showed up on the Internet on a popular news blog. It was credited as a Getty image. A lot of people sent me the link. The photo was unexpected for a number of reasons; most disturbingly, in that bored, brain-pounding moment when I glanced mindlessly at the five-piece brass band playing the processional, I had somehow managed to look thoughtful. I am looking away from the crowd, away from my classmates who face forward and smile and rejoice in the moment, and I am looking somehow self-satisfied and also positively uncertain of myself. I also look tired. Worn-down. As if I've had enough.

Is there anything more pathetic than unintentional poignancy?

After that first posting, the photo continued to surface, mostly in a handful of articles about the recently graduated class of two thousand and ten. The articles were all about how nobody in this graduating class would get hired for a long time. CNN reported it. The Atlantic reported it. The Huffington Post reported it. We were all destined for unemployment and my face seemed to say it best. Hungover and under-prepared, but I could fake contemplation and self-awareness with the best of them.

My friends declared me The Face of An Unemployed Generation. I received emails with links embedded, a quick note attached: "Hey Emma, you're famous! Hired yet?" It was fine; it was funny. My father tracked down the photographer who took it, the springy guy, and talked him into mailing us a few copies without the expensive Getty costs. My grandmothers were thrilled.

The Getty photo has now made it to my parents' piano top, suggesting that is somehow iconic, affecting. It's not right. The iconic photos I know best-my parents wrapped in a blanket on a porch in Vermont at age 22, laughing and hugging and dotted with sunlight-are from a time when film was developed and intensely personal and usually in black and white. This picture, the brass-band gaze picture, is hyper-modern. It is digital, high-quality, licensed, recycled, stock, somehow representative. And most of all, a fluke.

The image that really has stuck is not even necessarily one of me, but of many others-the same way my parents on a porch in the seventies is probably the image many of my classmates have of their parents on a porch in the seventies.

In the two-week waiting period after my very first job interview after graduation-a period in which I over-analyzed my every misplaced word and nostril-scratch-I remembered with a terrified jolt that before it had even begun, before I had crossed my legs and folded my hands in my lap and smiled expectantly across a desk with neatly stacked papers, the very first image I gave a potential employer was of me, pulling on a pair of locked glass doors.

I was wearing safety-pinned pencil skirt and a borrowed blazer and I had three copies of my resume in the canvas bag on my shoulder. The woman at the elevator bank twenty floors down had wished me good luck and told me I'd do fine.

I got off the elevator on the twentieth floor of the Manhattan skyscraper, I walked to the doors, and I pulled. Then, I pushed. The doors did not move. The man in the suit came forward from where he stood waiting for me, beyond the doors, and opened them. Of course. The doors to corporate America were locked, and I could not get in. I am the cliché in action.

When I reached out to shake the man's hand and smile confidently-I know that I bit my lip. Click.

And you know the first thing he said to me? "You look so familiar."


Emma is moving from Vermont to Brooklyn to better blend in with the rest of her unemployed peers. She sort of wishes she were on Twitter.

The photo of Emma Carmichael above is by Andy Kropa, licensed through Getty Images.

---

See more posts by Emma Carmichael

19 comments

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