What’s your name? Where’re you from? What’s your major? And where are you going abroad?

Oktoberfest 2006. Is it really worth going abroad for this? (Oktoberfest.de)

These days, I feel like everyone is asking me where I’m going next year. When I tell them that I’m not planning on going abroad, they seem to pity me and tell me that I’ll be lonely, as “everyone” will be gone and I’ll be the only junior stuck in Philadelphia next fall.

Students seem split into two groups on the purpose of going abroad: the learners and the partiers.

Those who have spent years learning a language so that they can immerse themselves in a new culture often fall in the former category. And then there is everyone else.

College senior Becky Fogel believes that, “If you want something comfortable and safe, you can always go on one of those programs that is basically Penn-in-London. If you want to challenge yourself, go somewhere where English isn’t the first language or where none of your friends are going to be.”

Some students decide to go abroad to escape the academic rigors of Penn for a semester. “I think a lot of people from Penn go abroad just to take a break,” said Wharton sophomore Erin Shipley.

In many cases, the schools that students will study at while abroad will not be as high in quality as Penn. If a student isn’t going abroad for a unique academic program, then it might be smarter to stay here and get her money’s worth. Another benefit to staying on campus junior year is that students who do automatically have a leg up on gaining leadership positions.

Some students who chose not to go abroad are of the mind that their academics should stay domestic. They wish to wait until they truly have the leisure time to travel. College junior Beth Newton sums it up by saying, “If I can travel over a summer, not have to worry about school during the experience and not have to miss a whole semester at Penn, why not do that instead?”

Any student considering going abroad should honestly weigh the worth of a semester at Penn against the things they wish to achieve while abroad. Believing the talk of your friends, “can pressure students into going–because everyone else is,” says Newton.

“Everyone” will not be gone in the fall. Those who believe this type of hype obviously aren’t very good at making friends. There will be over 8,000 people still on campus. Meet some of them.

Yeah…That’s great, but you’re being, like, really unpleasant right now. I don’t feel like talking to you.

That’s what my friend Jenny thought to herself recently when chatting with a new acquaintance. Jenny is the happiest person I know. She doesn’t have it easy, either–in recent years, she has had more on her plate than most people ever will. But she has kept life in perspective at times when I have faltered.

A few years ago Jenny realized that most people communicate through complaining. When initiating conversation with others, people turn to commiseration and criticism, rather than compliments and cheerfulness. It’s a bad and incredibly easy habit. Since she’s told me this story, every time I catch myself bellyaching, I hear Jenny’s characteristic North California drawl and think, am I being, like, really unpleasant right now?

People want to tell you about their issues, and you should listen. And you should share your own feelings. Discussing your problems with a friend is probably better than any therapy. But every once in a while, stop to ask yourself if things are really so bad, or if you can let up on the doom and gloom for a few minutes.

Sometimes, I feel deep when I am talking about my angst-y life. Then I listen objectively and realize that I am Debbie Downer without the humor, or the audience.

If you are feeling unshakably unpleasant, CAPS is booked until after Thanksgiving. So get home safe, take care of yourself, lean on your family and get ready for the final stretch.

A new (and more positive) perspective is crucial. I am not trying to spread a vomit-inducing sweetness. But I am looking to avoid listening to another person tell me about how much life sucks.

As the semester is reaching peak pseudo-suicide season, there is a need to remember that life is real, challenging and good. Try telling someone about it, and you might begin to believe it yourself.

We hate imposters in our midst. Fakes, phonies, worthless wannabies. We want the authentic item (though fake Chanel earrings are so out, They’re in).

In 1979, Le Anh Huynh came to America from Vietnam to start a better life. She started the Le Anh food cart, eventually selling it to another woman. The other woman kept the name for its publicity value, and no one seemed to care about the difference.

And then, several years later, Le Anh came back. She started her food truck again: bigger, brighter and with more variety than before. She set up on the south side of Spruce at 36th , right across the street from her original Le Anh, and called her new truck “The Real Le Anh.”

A certain Greek organization is facing a potential similar rivalry as they return to West Philadelphia. Two years ago, the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity was expelled from campus following four major violations in three years. Some members of the group kept the ZBT name and formed an off-campus “underground” society. Now the original fraternity is being reinstated on-campus, and they say that they are the real deal.

Which begs the question: what does “real” really mean? Is something real because it came first, or because it is just better?

Which one is saltier? Which one is least likely to get you killed? Which one has a better location? Which one follows code?

Sometimes breaking the rule–in food and in fraternity life–is half the fun. Sure, I know that undercooked eggs can give me salmonella, but I still want them runny in my egg drop soup. And a frat without violations is similarly too dry. I didn’t show up for soda, thanks (side note: The Real Le Anh has bubble tea).

Underground ZBT or “the real” ZBT? Le Anh or the Real Le Anh? Gents, should you choose to pledge allegiance to one or the other, check to see which one makes you less inclined to vomit. Ladies, check to see which one is cleaner. Try both and see which one is tastier. Whichever one has the longer line is probably the better time. I prefer underground and south side, myself.

But, honestly, everyone knows that Hemo is the best.

In 1877, Z.Z. Zamenhof set out to create Esperanto, an “international second language. Esperanto borrowed from many traditions, but avoided ties to any particular culture. The result was the ugliest language known to man.

Esperanto’s core comprises 900 roots that can be expanded into tens of thousands of words through compounding, suffixes and prefixes. The book International Planned Languages describes Esperanto as, “a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative and to a certain degree isolating in character.” Sounds catchy, right?

Esperanto was supposed to make whole the holocaust of Babel. It did not. we’re still scrambling around, not communicating with each other. As a history major, I get that the discord is ideological, not linguistic. But let’s pretend that one language could fix everything. That language would be Latin. E pluribus unum, after all.

If we all took Latin at Penn, we would understand dignity and humility. Truth and beauty. The most influential stories in Western thought were first recorded in Latin (or Greek). You could buy a translation, but it’s not the same as reading it directly. If I were taking Latin, I would have a stronger backbone and a clearer purpose in life.

My middle-school Latin helped me on my SATs, where I reasoned that “solipsism” had something to do with solus, meaning “alone,” and ipse, meaning “self.” How fitting. So maybe Latin isn’t about understanding everyone else; it’s about making sense of oneself.

It’s been ingrained in us that Latin is dead and its sole purpose is to help us achieve other ends. Yet there is something awesome about a language that we don’t have to live. It exists only to be written, read and understood completely. There is no one yelling at you in Latin. There is no future in Latin, but there is a perfectly recorded past. There is everything to understand, nothing to lose. What was lost has already been lost. Gaudeamus igitur, carpe diem, etc, etc.

The Native Americans were only half right when they said that the camera steals your soul. It takes away far worse: your mystery. And your marketability.

You need to have control over your own image. At the end of each weekend, there are hundreds of new pictures of Penn students up on Facebook, doing glamorous and respectable things like flipping off the camera, vomiting, urinating on Ben Franklin and making out with members of the same sex. Everyone likes to be a student celebrity, and to feel courted by the roving lens of the Pennparazzi (the friend with the digital camera). But overexposure now means less mystique later. The real truth that I must face is that if I want to be successful later, I’m going to have to keep a paper bag over my head right now. And this isn’t just to avoid One Night In Paris -type debacles. This is because I want to be a Serious Writer with a good jacket photo.

Don DeLillo’s reclusive protagonist in Mao II said that, “when a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” Well, I want to be God.

I appreciate the approach of J.D. Salinger. There are probably about three extant headshots of dear Jerome David, and the last one to appear on a dust jacket was taken in 1951. There was one taken in 1998, but who knows if it’s even the same guy since no one had seen him in four decades? Talk about enigmatic! Despite his alleged creepiness and penchant for macrobiotic foods and teenage girls, I will always think of him as a fresh-faced, affable youth of 32. There are about six photographs of Virginia Woolf, but they all send the same message: character-nose, serious, intense. Shakespeare, similarly, had a good trademark image (though it was a drawing, not a photograph). Great writers from Lord Byron to Pynchon have kept a low profile. Nowadays, such image maintenance is near impossible.

Up until the fall of 2005, you could only have one photograph of yourself on Facebook. Oh, the agony and pleasure of deciding how to present yourself to the world! It is wretched to have a photograph that reveals your homeliness, but it is also embarrassing to choose a picture that is too flattering. You must strike the right balance, and vigilantly de-tag.

Be iconic. Be elusive. Be modest with your image; don’t whore it out. The next time someone sticks a camera in your face, tell him to save it for the mortals. You’ve got a legacy to build.

It’s five dollars to enter, and that covers four dances (excluding tips).

Recently, I went to Les Gals on Market Street with some friends. Les Gals is a strip club for men that features pornographic films and “real live girls.”

It was a cool experience, mostly because it was ridiculous. The music was ultra-bizarre in the context of the club (a Dipset remix of the Supremes’ “Wait A Minute Mr Postman”), and the dancers could probably tell that I was, in a sense, kidding.

Watching yourself watch strangers at Les Gals (Photo by the author)

The entire wall behind the stripper pole was mirrored. The last place that you should go for self-reflection is a strip club. Watching yourself watch strangers dance naked in front of you requires more cajones (or less self-consciousness) than I have.

I couldn’t figure out whether I was allowed to enjoy myself in the moment, or whether I should be feeling bad about it. Was I being a good feminist? I didn’t feel guilty, but I felt like I should. Personal politics would be much easier to explain and maintain if everything were hypothetical.

My brand of feminism definitely condones strippers. If a woman wants to expose her body and to make money from the endeavor, that is fine. Everything about the stripper checks out.

However (and this is where it would be easier if people didn’t interact), the role of stripper requires someone to strip for, and that introduces numerous characters that might not check out at all. My guess is that not all customers clap politely and quote Our Bodies, Ourselves. More likely, customers heckle the women, think of them as a collection of gyrating body parts and don’t tip well. The bouncer and the owner are probably not touchy-feely in anything other than the literal sense.

I was endorsing the behaviors and attitudes of the lowest common denominator. No matter my good intentions, I was still culpable, since I was participating in an institution where people are frequently anti-feminist. While I felt like a respectful customer, it wasn’t about what was happening in the moment.

But why couldn’t it be? What’s with the guilt? For starters, why can’t something that seems fun just be fun? And secondly, could the pluses of a woman being proud of her body, able to fully control it and to use it to her economic advantage, outweigh the negatives of the customers? I might have to go back to Les Gals, and think about it some more.

There is a difference between real time and how we perceive time (a watched pot will not boil, after all). Every night when I look at the work I need to do, I compound so much time that I convince myself that I need to apply to law school and re-mortgage my house by the end of the week.

When you are young, you think to yourself, “I don’t have enough time.” In about fifty years you’re going to be sitting at home wondering, “What am I going to do with all this time on my hands?” You’ll wonder what the big rush was. Right now, every minute seems precious.

It Only Takes A Minute to Change Your Life!, written in 1977 by Willie Jolley, promises, “a motivational and inspirational revolution that will show you how to release the power within you.” I don’t know what Mr. Jolley suggests, but there are a lot of ways to kill your time. Just look how much you could be getting done instead procrastinating:

It only takes a minute to prevent child abuse in California, apparently, and also to donate money to breast cancer. It only takes a minute to install the Patio Door with 4-Way Cat Flap, and you can even take it with you when you move! And it only takes a second to die, of course, if you’re lucky. It only takes a moment on the lips to be forever on the hips, but it takes three minutes a day to get rock hard abs.

I’ve found different doom-and-gloom stats on this, but smoking a cigarette may take eight, 10, 13, or 20 minutes off of your life. However, my friends who smoke say that it only takes about fifteen seconds, and that if you’re smoking a cigarette that burns faster, you have those fifteen seconds to play with, anyway.

For each minute of anaerobic activity, you prolong your life by one minute. Welcome to eternity, Sisyphus.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that you do any of these things. That’s not the point. There is no need to fix your life (or your cat flap) in sixty seconds. there’s still time left. Try to use it a little more joyously.

At 5:30 in the morning, the Supreme Court security guard told us to get off the steps. “They’re touchy about their steps,” he said, and directed us to stand politely until he summoned us into the building a few hours later.

Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Souter, Alito, and Stevens (usatoday.com)

On Wednesday, my COMM-376 “Supreme Court Advocacy” class traveled to Washington to hear two oral arguments delivered before the highest court in the land. Although my class had read the briefs of the scheduled cases and was interested in the mechanics of the arguments, perhaps the best part about being inside the Court was the chance to see that the justices are real humans.

A few observations on the justices, going from left to right along the bench:

Justice Stephen Breyer: Sounds like Mr. Rogers, and very obviously hates sitting on the end of the bench, since he flattens his body onto the table in the direction of the other justices.

Justice Clarence Thomas: Did not say a single word during two entire hours of argument. Instead, he rubbed his face for about 15 minutes at a time, completely obscuring his features. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why this man is on the bench. At least Scalia can form sentences.

Justice Anthony Kennedy: Looks like he will eat you. Stays relatively quiet.

Justice John Paul Stevens: Is 86, wears a bowtie and is adorable. Plus, he’s moderate. What’s not to love?

Chief Justice John Roberts: The youngest justice. Who cares if he hates abortion rights–he’s sexy! However, You’d think that such a virile man would long ago have rethought that position…

Justice Antonin Scalia: A wily, wily man, with a sense of humor to boot. But I hear that Satan is a pretty funny guy, too.

Justice David Souter: Has an extremely tiny head, and asked such ridiculous hypothetical questions that I thought the lawyer for the plaintiff in the second case might faint.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A small–but fabulously feminist–troll. She also likes to interrupt. Girl power!

Justice Samuel Alito: Baby “Scalito,” appeared pretty tired yesterday, and seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open.

The fact that any person can stand in line to see an argument delivered before the Supreme Court is a testament to the transparency of the American legal system. I would highly recommend taking a trip down there–the government is the best reality television available these days.

Which argument is more stigmatizing: that people’s poor decisions make them poor, or that poverty causes people to make bad decisions?

In 2004, Bill Cosby inferred the former in his controversial address to Howard University on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. Branded the “Ghettoesburg Address”, some interpreted Cosby’s speech as a harsh indictment of blacks for shunning their responsibility to educate their children. Citing a fifty-percent high school drop-out rate among black teenagers, Cosby claimed that “lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” and that “Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem.”

Bill Cosby. People still talk about the “Ghettoesburg Address”.

Although Dr. Cosby’s speech was moving in its demand for a renewal of self-respect in the black community, some feared that his words could easily be misused by those who wish to believe that racism is obsolete, and that poor non-whites don’t need help from the more privileged. don’t they?

Penn’s very own Dr. Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has been studying the effect of socioeconomic status on the developmental capability of the brain. This week, the Times of London reported Dr. Farah’s findings, which indicate that “a deprived childhood may affect the physical development of the brain and render its owner less intellectually capable.”

This finding could elicit two responses: either it will draw attention to the need to radically tackle poverty–especially child poverty–or it will become a documented, credible reason to disenfranchise underprivileged adults. Now society will have a recusal for its guilt: poor people are dumb; it’s not our fault they can’t be employed! Both responses are possible. In a likely scenario, children will benefit from Farah’s analysis, while teenagers and adults will be seriously gypped.

The Times continues: “If poverty wrecks the brain, then it is plausible that, generally, poor people make ‘worse’ decisions than rich people. And if they do, do they bear the same level of responsibility for their actions?”

We love responsibility–we don’t like taking it, but we like assigning it, in which case it is called blame. The argument that low socioeconomic status causes intellectual impairment might assign responsibility in a good way, or in a bad way. Will the obligation to fix this problem be assigned to society, or will blame be placed on the poor (you grew up poor, you are mentally inferior, we can’t do anything about it now)?

One of the most quoted barbs of Cosby’s speech is “$500 sneakers, for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.” Could findings like those of Farah show that it isn’t a person’s fault to choose sneakers over scholarship, because poverty has rendered him intellectually unable to make a smart choice? Depending on how the mainstream interprets it, Farah’s argument could actually reduce the stigma attached to poverty.

Yet, no good deed can go unpunished, and no scientific discovery can go unhijacked. Just as people feared that conservatives would twist Bill Cosby’s speech to absolve society of responsibility, Farah’s work on the intellectual impact of socioeconomic status could be distorted to allow for abandoning poor adults as a lost cause.

It depends on where it’s most comfortable for us to place the blame.

I’m tired of having sexual discourse.

Reading (or writing) about sex is about as titillating and fresh as microwaved lasagna. Which is to say, not. Getting yourself amped-up about the umpteenth sexblog or Ivy League erotica journal takes more work than getting yourself amped-up to go on a date with your Chem partner who asks you to his Sigma Nu formal. Which is to say, a lot.

(amazon.com)

A few years ago, a Yale alumna wrote Chloe Does Yale, about her undergraduate stint as a sex columnist. Harvard let H-Bomb blow in 2004. The spring of 2005 saw the emergence of Penn’s very own Quake. Now the new rage is the web diary of Elle, the sexually active Harvard sophomore. For some reason, people seem to think that coupling an Ivy League setting with sex is the most riveting and raunchy combination ever. I think it’s getting pretty stale.

On top of it, every chick who’s tasted a Cosmopolitan thinks that she’s Carrie Bradshaw. Baby, just because you sit at home in front of your laptop in your underwear and can slur out some hackneyed puns don’t make you no Carrie Bradshaw. Drop a few pounds, take a journalism course, and try me again.

Superficial concerns aside, the salaciousness of one’s subject matter cannot trump one’s inability to tell a story coherently. It doesn’t take too much work to bait some bone, so the effort needs to be in the writing. Most of these writers have the subtlety and wit of a lab report. Not all sex writing has to be this bad, especially when written by such highly educated people. Foucault is more provocative than porn any day of the week. And Lacan’s description of power structures? Makes me go crazy.

Some of the women writing sex blogs seem to think that they’re risking everything for the sake of ladies everywhere by making it okay for me to be sexual, for me to talk about sex. They are dying to be controversial. They pray for someone to call them a slut.

That era has passed. I don’t really care. I don’t think you are breaking down any doors for me. I don’t think you are a slut. I think you’re a bore who knows HTML. And you’re not getting me off.

Side note: While typing up this post, I had to use HTML for the first time, and I now have much respect for all the bores who use it.