INDEX

B. S. in Economics

For the most part, Cornell produces good little foot-soldiers of the technocracy—unquestioning, reliable, hard working peons who have no other distracting interests. This is accomplished by overworking the students at all times and not allowing them time to pause and ask the question "What's it all for?" It is a strategy whereby they, kept eternally occupied, never have time to ask questions such as "Is it reasonable the demand $31, 000 per student, per year for an education?" Is it reasonable to demand any money? Modern Man has made his world so complicated that in order to survive his children must spend up to a quarter of their lives in school, and the rest of their lives paying for it. Then to create the illusion of fairness they introduced the concept of Financial Aid. But as those of you who have had need to deal with this monument to bureaucracy will agree The Financial Aid Office has an entire science of "Do not meet Eligibility Requirements"s and "Additional Documentation Required"s to keep poor people from getting an education. I should include a scathingly sarcastic comment about how much I just love wrestling with these odious little shits, but I fear the sort of criticism I'm trying to make is beyond the scope of sarcasm. I most resort to hyperbolic comparison: I would rather have my nasal cavity flushed with Sprite and then coated with red chili powder. Or in the words of Mr. DiPaulo: "Give Katherine Hepburn 3 pots of black coffee and let her shave my pubes with a weedwhacker." Apparently I didn't read the fine print where it said "This process will be akin to dropping your pants in the shower room at Rikers Island and bending over holding a sign that says 'Come and get it boys.'"
So Cornell is very particular about her money. (Remember money?... and those accompanying sensations of power and self-worth.) It seems they would rather use it to inconvenience pedestrians and block up traffic so that they can rebuild entire building complexes and make butt ugly walkways punctuated with uneven chunks of stone than educate the poor.
I, and others like me will have to take loans, and wind up repaying them for the rest of our lives, to reserve our shot at the American Dream. Only in America must one mortgage his future in order to have one.
 

Prostitution

I've taken Philosophy (... OK, just one class... OK, it was a Freshman Writing Seminar) and I have to conclude that it is a self perpetuating, arbitrary, accessory discipline and an imperial pain in the ass. Perhaps I'm just bitter out of bad personal experience; in particular a certain paper I was "invited" to rewrite because it was apparently not written at the second grade reading level. So I changed my writing style so that it read like a Dr Seuss book. I feel prostituted that I would comprimise my title of king of subordinate clauses, which took me years of careful cultivation and much excessive verbiage to acheive, and which is, in and of itself, a monumental acheivement, especially when one considers how difficult it is to maintain sense and keep from losing one's train of....  ...    Anyway I'm annoyed.
 

Slope Day '96

I have a nasty suspicion that the new Rawlings Administration is trying to put a gradual and sneakily subversive end to Slope Day. They're going to attempt this, it seems, by progressively phasing out the traditional festivities and phasing in the non-alcoholic alternatives: Hope Day; and the once rumoured Shoelkopf Concert thing. In '95 they canceled the music and refreshments that used to line West Ave. The new "plan" may have succeeded to make for an overall quieter Slope Day; and the overcast skies and rain may have kept the delicate and gentile at home drinking tea, but lack of revelry there was not. Students of the sciences will no doubt be familiar with the Partyan equation: water + slope = mudslides. As one of the early (sober) sliders I subscribed to the Conventional Wisdom Principle which states: broken bottles + rocks + buttsurfing - shirts = lacerations. I opted to remain clothed while barreling down a mountainside of black mud and sundry sharp objects, a decision I paid for all the following week in the laundry room. It took a week and a half of soaking and 3 tours of the washing machine... for me to come to the realization that mud was now a permanent part of the design.
Slope Day did claim the lives of two very close to me. That day, in the midst of the joy, the laughter, and the mud, I lost my glasses and my favorite hat. And it was all because of a $@%#+*& cop. Not even a cop! One of those pasty-loser-Public-Safety-rent-a-cops. This genius decided to stand directly in the path of a barrage of eight full-sized adolescents as gravity (and a near frictionless surface) did their thing. I believe he was trying to stop us by standing in our way; apparently in his highschool science class Newton's Law on the Conservation of Momentum was dismissed as quackery. Whatever his intent, I was the one unfortunate enough to crash into him, and as the side of my head clipped the side of his leg my head gear went flying to be lost forever in the muck and mire. *sniff*
So I survived without glasses for a while. (As one concerned with outward image I refused to wear my spare glasses, which I believe are the very nadir of geekdom). I would walk around clumsily, bumping into things and not recognizing people I knew even at close range until I went home to the city and got new glasses. Smaller, black, different. And they have that cool spring loaded, back-bendy hinge thingy. It feels good, as I careen through the streets of New York with nothing to protect my honor but a pair of big shorts, to be able to see those traffic lights again, and those other things... what are they called?... oncoming cars? People look a lot fatter though. Well, "fat" may be rather a harsh term; plumper perhaps. White people mostly. With uncorrected fuzzy vision edges are blurred, creating a sort of "trimmed" illusion. Also with the rectified sight one tends to see unflattering details like warts and extra fingers. Maybe good vision isn't all that hot a ticket item. The only advantage I have noticed is that you can pick out fine looking women (or men if that is your fancy) at distances that it isn't entirely obvious you're staring at them—an ability for which I'm sure Scott (a friend of sorts) is eternally thankful to contacts and more so to sunglasses. And God knows there are a few to... er... be distracted by in New York. Central Park must be location central for the summer's daily skin parade: a modern mass mating ritual for which standard practice is to wear something tight and providing so little coverage as to be ill-suited to the category of Coverage, and the obligatory sunglasses, which generally mask out the important features of the face.
 

Elementary Study Habits

In most Colleges and University towards the latter part of the semester, there emerges among students a motif of being irreconcilably behind in their work. At Cornell it is a pattern into which all but the most brilliant, or lifeless Cornell students eventually sink. At that point several "Catch Up Weekends" (CUWs) are designated. But by a remarkable coincidence these are also the weekends of the Dave Matthews concert, the all-night rave-house party, the weekends your girl/boyfriend stays over, or the those in which you routinely wake up at 5pm. In the vanguard of behindness are those unseasoned underclassmen who at the beginning of the semester when the work was easy and scarce signed up for 18 credit-hours, joined six clubs and organizations, took two jobs and got a part in a play.Then, with term papers coming due and finals approaching, club projects pending, 40 more hours for your bonus, and the play opening this weekend many respond by sending e-mails to long lost friends, or surfing the web for 3 hours, or writing a webpage... at least that's what I did. Usually when faced with this situation I regress to the Rubin Method of Studying. This method evolved from the universal law that in other applications brought us Partial Credit. The method operates on the principle that by not watching "The Simpsons" one has done work.
It seems that the only time I ever write to my friends is when I'm in severe schtoøk. And all I ever write about is how much of an academic hole I'm digging. It's like prayer. People only seem to pray when things are crappy. "In the Book of Job, Job asks God: 'Lord why do you cause suffering? Can you not take it away?' and God replies, 'Of course not don't be silly. If I took away suffering no one would talk to me.' This is of course a paraphrasing of God's words." [Bill Maher] but it seems clear that people only see God as a fall back crutch (most people at least). And why is it people only seem to find God when they have sunk to a new low? The testimony is invariably to the tune of "I lost my job, my wife died, I got leprosy from a hooker... then I found God." Have you ever heard them say "I just won the lottery, my kid is a Rhodes scholar, I still love my wife after thirty years, and I got a promotion... then I found God."? No. So why is God at the bottom of the bucket?
 

"How to Waste Time."

Steve, a one-time housemate of mine, on a whim went out and bought a Nintendo 64, brought it home and unleashed it on the rest of us. That Saturday I was in the lounge from the time it was unpacked to the time I realized I needed sleep, a total of about 10 hours! For the rest of the summer my Waste-of-Time of choice was 3-player battle rounds of Mario Kart during those long afternoons in lieu of homework, late at night in lieu of sleep, and the commercial breaks in the Simpsons. If you ever want to forget that you have problems and concerns and responsibilities like homework or finding time to feed yourself, this is the way to do it.

I saw an advertisement on a tic-tac box that read:

Stop Illiteracy. Write To: Literacy Volunteers of America, P.O. Box 6255 Syracuse, NY 13217

??? (You can't MAKE UP shit like this.)

Banned From Jason's

I bought a 2-litre bottle of soda from Jason's Deli (on College Ave. in Collegetown) which I intended to share with my "business" partners at a meeting. I was served by a rather unfortunate-looking, squirrely, dweeb-like clerk with glasses and bad hair, whom I can only assume was the nefarious Jason himself. I asked him if he had any cups, and he promptly indicated the packets of cups in a tone which in retrospect seem almost premonitory.
     "No, I mean just a couple of cups for..."
     "We don't have any for free!" he snapped rather emphatically and
pre-emptively. This struck me as odd, since they give away plastic bags for free, as well as spoons and napkins. Also having just been overcharged for a 2 litres of sugar-water, a couple of courtesy cups would be the least I could get. Actually the least I could get would be a measure of courtesy!

As I was leaving I remembered the Collider, there were styrofoam cups in a dispenser under the machine, and making a somewhat brash assumption I took two—exactly two—on the way out of the door. He was apparently waiting for this. He stuck his head out over the display and scolded:
     "Hey, those aren't free for you to just take!" Stopped in my tracks I turned and replied in as reasonable a voice as one can given the dialogue:
     "I can't believe you're going to be a hard-ass about this." Granted this was probably a poor choice of words but at this point I was getting the distinct impression that this guy disliked me for some reason despite my patronage and congeniallity. He informed me that he was indeed going to be said hard-ass, and ordered me to put the cups back (which, having worked in food-service, I believe is a violation of sanitation protocol). Appalled by this I tossed the cups back at the counter saying "Here, I hope they save you a couple of cents."

But I missed and they fell to the floor. I'm not entirely clear on what a coniption is, but I really want to use it to describe his reaction to this. As the door closed behind me he was still protesting, ordering me to come back and pick them up. As I walked away he came out of the store—for which he would have had to leave the store unattended—to continue his tirade.
     "You must be Jason." I turned and said calmly, suddenly connecting all the "Jason's an asshole" stories I had heard, but having never encountered the thing in person had heretofore never taken to heart.

He told me that I was not to come back, that I was banned from the store, that "we don't want your type here." This is a direct quote. For those of you who don't know or remember I am Sri Lankan, a condition that, when some sort of head-wear conceals my hair, renders me passable as a person of African extraction (I look black). Now, it would be irresponsible of me to extrapolate this isolated incident into a summary of Mr. Jason's socio-political views (am I using those terms correctly?) but I've talked with others who inform me that among other things he is quite unjustifiably nasty towards women. So given that he is an accomplished misogynist and at the very least a widely-known misanthropist, racial hatred may be the least of his endearing qualities.

If you know anyone who would find this account informative, interesting, of even simply entertaining please feel free to pass it on. Or send me your own Jason's horror stories and we can bond.
 

Saturday Night Fever

One Saturday I ran into a friend—we'll call him Mike—whom I hadn't seen or talked to in a while (because of his full time girlfriend). His proud boasting about his recent experimentations with a certain narcotic substance and it's effects on the coital experience... convinced me to join him, his aforementioned girlfriend, and another friend of theirs for dinner at Little Joe's (a local restaurant). I still can't fully fathom exactly how much mating behaviour had been going on between those two in that condition, but it was reportedly more than their usual. Now given that they (if you'll pardon the phrase) fuck-like-bunnies this must have been a marathon event!
Anyway I ended up hanging out with him and an ever-changing, rotating group of peripheral friends as we shuttled frantically between Little Joe's, Risley (a dormitory), Stella's (a coffee shop), the Haunt (local club), Diamond's Bar, and Republica (another local club) and got to observe the epic soap-opera of his friends' lives and relationships.

An Outsider's Summary of the Situation. (Names have been changed)
"Hester" is a friend of Mike and his girlfriend. "Hester" has a boy, "Igman" whom she has been with since December. "Igman" has a good friend (a girl) "Yuri" from back home who was up visiting him that weekend. Apparently there is some tension within this triangle, as demonstrated in the rampant territorial behavior that I observed and inferred last night. I don't want to say anymore for fear of gossiping (…more).

So this was the backdrop to the evening's activities... which went something like this:
After Joe's Mike and I decided we would make an appearance at "Rocky" (Insider's lingo for Risley's production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show—for those who have heard things about Risley's production of Rocky I can assure you everything you've heard is true!... And more. After dropping off the two girls I introduced Mike to my vinyl pants, to which he took and instant liking despite the discomfort associated with cramming is ample butt (and ample other things) into a garment that barely fits my less ample butt. But I wasn't willing to relinquish the pants unless a) he could guarantee that during his brief tenure they would not explode, an b) he could produce something *ahem* better for me to wear. So it was back to Risley where we rummaged through Mike's girlfriend's clothes and picked out a suitable outfit: miniskirt, bright red tank-top, and 5-inch-heel black-leather knee-boots. Mike did his makeup which amounted to spiking his hair, applying black eye-liner, and petitioning everyone in Risley that night for nipple clamps... unfortunately—and inexplicably!—unsuccessfully.
All set for Rocky, but first... The Haunt. Back to Collegetown (we must have driven through C-town in Mike's overpowered Volvo blasting some brand of hard-core technotrance obnoxiously loud several hundred times). Picked up Ora at Stella's, dropped by her friend's place where we all donned black lipstick, and Mike added more black eye-liner and a studded collar, and then on downtown. Looking and acting the way were we might very well have passed unnoticed at the Haunt, but Diamond's is a townie bar filled with older conservatively dressed Saturday night drinkers. It was to here that we were unexpectedly detoured. I'm still at a loss for why.
When we did finally get to the Haunt we stayed until about midnight and then back to Risley for Rocky. Mike wore my vinyl pants, a situation which if it were to be described would unavoidably have to include the phrase "bustin' out". Apart from that and shoes he wore the aforementioned makeup and collar, and a trail of kisses, applied by his girlfriend, from his nipples to his... well I'm not sure exactly how far down they went, I was impelled to leave to room during the application process. This likely means nothing to you if you are unfamiliar with Mr. Mike's default stylings, but the operative effect of seeing him like this should be to evoke the sort of surprise you would have at seeing any of the living Kennedys bring honor to their family name.
We didn't stay at Rocky long. Since my previous exposure (NPI) to Risley's Rocky it seems the production has decreased much in value, the performers have become significantly more unsightly, and the performances of the participants has gotten quite weak and awkward.
Car... obnoxious techno... C-town... Back to the Haunt. (but not before a change of clothes—again!). Haunt shuts down circa 1:30. Back to Risley. Change clothes, pick up the soap-opera players, —> Republica! Surprisingly free for some reason.
Anyway this is where I got to observe more of this acme of female territorial behavior. "Hester" is described by Mike as one not significantly invested in the activity of dancing (of course a paraphrasing of his words) But she was—if I may use some technical jargon—dancing her ass off; as it would appear competing with "Yuri" in a contest to my eyes just slightly less intense than a gladiatorial duel with scary-looking spiked devices. It seemed that "Hester" was uncharacteristically lascivious with "Igman" that night to, as it were, rub it in her face ("Yuri"'s). I think her almost obscene grinding, and the contribution of Mike's girlfriend, by which she went so far as to "ride him", will back me up on this. Now "Igman" isn't exactly a paragon of a man, but last night he got more female attention than a guy who can lick his own eyebrows.
Landed with the shit-end of the stick of course was "Yuri" who was not only in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by unfamiliar people, and already not the girlfriend but she was outnumbered 2-to-1. But even after I danced with her (perhaps some other male attention would aid her campaign) she seemed nervous that her opponent was gaining the upper hand in time-share while she was wasting time with this inconsequential brown kid.