My first objective upon entering a bus is to secure a seat to myself.  My general plan is to sit in the aisle seat, pile all of my stuff on the seat next to me, and immediately pretend to fall asleep.  Sometimes I drool just to add another discouraging element to my charade.

But this doesn’t always work.  Because of you, audacious Greyhound bus traveler, I am forced to share.  You will tap me politely on the knee and nod towards the seat next to me and mumble “um, uh?”  Or you will sharply poke my shoulder and say “Excuse me but may I have that seat please?”  No matter your tactic, you have  ruined my trip, and probably your own as well.

I am not being selfish, fellow frugal commuter, I’m doing this for your own good.  Really, you do NOT want to sit next to me.  Here’s why:

1. I will eat smelly food.  I’m talking egg salad, tuna fish, spinach.  The smelliest of the smelly foods.  Right under your nose. Tickling your tender nostrils with their pungent scent.

2. I will watch pornographic television shows on my laptop. Have you seen True Blood? It’s about vampires. And sex. And vampires having sex. There’s blood, too.

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As the semester wraps up and finals loom in the distance, I decided that my life wasn’t busy enough and recently began my quest to secure a post-undergraduate future in this (oh how do I put it nicely…) “volatile” job market (read: FUBAR).

While some of my peers are, and rightfully so, incredibly stressed out about searching for jobs, I’ve actually found it to be a pretty interesting process. I think discovering, in the next few weeks/months, where I will be and what I will do there is inherently exciting.

It helps that I have a sense of what I want to do in the next few years, but ultimately am very open to any opportunity; moreover, I really have no overwhelming preference regarding location (Be a lion tamer at a zoo in Tashkent, Uzbekistan? Yes, please!).

Yet, there are minor speed bumps.

For example, browsing through various job search resources such as PennLink, Idealist.org, and SimplyHired.com, I’ve noticed the trend that job descriptions are increasingly becoming more and more complicated.

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Former Penn Student Jade Vixen

Because of some sad news (you know, a love triangle resulting in a murder-suicide and a kidnapping), the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Post have reintroduced us to a former Penn student that Career Services has probably tried to forget.

Meet Edythe Maa, A.K.A. Jade Vixen, a top New York City dominatrix.

Maa is a former Penn engineering Ph.D. candidate. I’ll leave you to find out all of the salacious details of the tragic love triangle by clicking the above links on your own time, but this got me thinking about some other inspirational post-Penn career paths.

As someone desperately in need of direction in this crazy, crazy world of ours, I hope some of these Penn grads can serve as inspiration:

1) Kevin Allen: Contestant in the second season of The Apprentice. Maybe, dude, maaaaybe if you’d been on season one you could be my idol. Plus, you get points off for the whole Wharton deal. But your website certainly is fancy.

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With finals looming on the horizon, it’s almost time to start the bi-annual end-of-semester pissing contest (The metaphorical piss being one’s volume of papers/exams in combination with the slew of impending due dates).  It’s kind of like Victoria’s Secret’s “Semi-Annual Sale,” except it sucks.

The conversation goes something like this:
“Hey what’s up?”
“Oh not much, I just have 432 pages to write and 19 finals to take in the next 20 minutes.”
“That’s nothing, I have 5,213 pages to write, 23 finals to take and Wawa is out of Red Bull.”

This dialogue usually goes back and forth with each party one-upping the other until exhaustion takes over, and both people collapse on the floor of the lobby in Van Pelt.

But really, can we stop having this conversation? In the time we waste recounting the seemingly insurmountable mountain of things to do, we’re really not accomplishing much. In fact, in the time I’m wasting whining about people whining I could have at least made a dent in those 5,213 pages or scored some Red Bull from CVS.

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Future heartbreaker

A nine-year-old boy has written a book that I think all of us can learn from. Alec Greven, a fourth-grader from Colorado, is currently on tour (read: skipping school) to promote his book, How to Talk to Girls.

Written for a second-grade assignment, Alec’s book is going mainstream thanks to publishing house HarperCollins.

How to Talk to Girls is filled with tips and tricks straight from the playground that all Penn students, not just the guys, can benefit from.

For example, through his recess research, Alec deduced that “about 73 percent of regular girls ditch boys, 93 percent of pretty girls ditch boys.” So basically, don’t feel bad about getting rejected, guys. It happens all the time. And girls, maybe we should stop being so selective and give the guys a chance.

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I came across an article this week detailing the efforts of Shenandoah University’s spiritual-life team to deepen the faith of Christian students by providing, what they call, “church speed-dating.” Basically, the director of church relations has been taking kids on road trips, visiting a different denomination’s church each week, for a ten week span, for the sake of religious exposure and exploration.

And I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

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Van Pelt: my Bug-A-Boo

Van Pelt, you are my bitch lover.

You spit in my face and yet I spend most nights in your pleasantly warm arms. I take naps on your couch but your food tastes like shit.

We were so much closer when we started hanging out last fall. You were new, exciting. You still smelled good.

Now, I’m starting to see your age. You haven’t had a good cleaning since the sixties. You have stains everywhere. You smell like Qdoba.

Perhaps in my wide-eyed freshman glee I idealized you too much, Van Pelt. Or perhaps you took advantage of my youthful innocence and forced me into something before I was ready.

Still, you were the beacon of academia, representing everything that was right with my liberal arts education. Yet, once I discovered Fisher Fine Arts Library, I started to stray. I cheated, sometimes spending two nights a week with The Other Place. You need some gothification.

Van Pelt, you shame the good name of Melvil Dewey. Wireless has been a joke all year. “PAGE LOAD ERROR” is all you ever tell me. Why aren’t we talking anymore? Who is this new partner, “Air PennNet-Guest”? I thought I was your only guest.

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When I was younger, my mother used to take me and my three brothers to the Sussex County Fair. Every summer I’d convince everyone that I could handle the nausea-inducing, spinning teacups ride. But I was always mistaken. I would smile as I got on, but as soon as the twirls began, I would cling to the sides of my seat with whitened knuckles and scream. Yeah. I was that kid.

I no longer react that way on rides. But sometimes I still feel like I’m reeling. Like there was one summer, one ride, after which I never recovered. I kept on swirling, staggering through the too-quickly paced haze of an over-stimulated, over-programmed college-bound kid’s life.

We all spun through that haze. Sports teams, music lessons, student government, newspaper committee, college bowl, Russian tutor, blah, blah, blah. But now we’re here. We finally made it into Penn. So why are we still reeling?

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ahh, Thanksgiving: a classic American holiday to spend quality time at home with family, watch football games, not write final papers, and eat and sleep to your heart’s content.

Or is it?

Reading and watching the news this weekend, it seemed that in some parts of this country, the holiday season became a motivation for people to lose all sense of rationality and kill each other for the most senseless reasons.

As reported by numerous news sources, multiple deaths occurred around the United States on Black Friday. First, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, was killed as he opened the doors of a Wal-Mart in Long Island, New York. As soon as the store opened at 5am, the customers rushed in, trampling and killing him. Then, in Palm Desert, California, two men fatally shot each other while shopping in a Toys”R”Us.

I have one question: What is wrong with us?

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Image via Wikipedia

I’ll throw this out there: I feel really bad for President-elect Barack Obama.

Nothing is going his way right now. The economy’s in the toilet, Americans are unhappy, and the rest of the world is slowly going to shut itself in to deal with its own problems.

Don’t get me wrong. Everything started out well for him. Many elements of his platform were entirely feasible up to a few months ago. The one that I’ve got in mind specifically was his desire to make college education more affordable to all families.

He had proposed a $4,000 tax credit toward tuition for families who send their students to college as well as a simplification of the forms for federal financial aid. While these measures are a mere drop in the vast galaxy-sized bucket of Penn tuition, every bit helps.

In general, raising the number of students attending college can only yield positive results for the future of the United States economy. (See also: Cold War math and science education.)

The conflict in Mumbai right now brings into sharp relief the contrast between the ideal and the likely, in the sense that, once again, Obama has more on his hands than ever.

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