Anti- vs. Anti-Anti-

The large lecture hall is almost full. At least, it seems that way. The mood is a bit tense, which is not at all helped when one of the Student Government Vice Presidents gets up and, in introducing the event, informs everyone that members of Student Government will be going around and will ask anyone who yells or interrupts someone else to leave, and that if someone refuses to leave, an officer from the UCPD is standing by the doors. The Anti-Anti-Coke people handed out a bunch of Coca-Cola-red t-shirts, which form antagonizing clumps in the audience, like a bullfighter's cape. Still, it seems that Anti-Coke people have the advantage in terms of numbers.

The event is a "Student Government Forum" on whether or not to kick Coke off campus for not investigating alleged human rights violations at its factories in Columbia and horrible environmental practices at its factories in India. The Anti-Coke campaign has been brewing for a while - my friend Evan told me about it several years ago - and has been a major campaign in labor-rights circles. But what is new, and what is perhaps unique to the U of C, is the rise of an Anti-Anti-Coke campaign, a group of people organized, sort of organized at least, to defend Coca-Cola. How many campuses have groups that fight for huge multi-national corporations?

I was there to support the Anti-Coke campaign, though I have some problems with the head of the national campaign, Ray Rogers. The Anti-Coke people had handed out packets of information and prepared questions for when the representatives from Coca-Cola came up to speak. The Anti-Anti-Coke people handed out free Cokes.

When Ray Rogers got up, he was speaking first, all the Anti-Anti-Coke people opened up their cans at once, emitting a chorus of the unmistakable sound of a popped soda can. Rogers was a bit kooky, not quite recognizing that speaking as though he were at a labor rally was not really the best approach for the U of C. Most of the questions were softballs from Anti-Coke people.

Then the Coca-Cola representatives came up. They were, if possible, even more out of touch with the audience. They actually had a conference call with two people from God-knows-where in addition to the several people they actually had at the event. First of all, they did not recognize how ridiculous it was to have people conferencing in to a forum that was being held in a large lecture hall. They couldn't hear us and we couldn't hear them. But also, they kept fiddling with the phone, messing up who was on mute and such, and just generally bumbling. And, they kept trying to point to people who got Coca-Cola scholarships, and people they were helping in Chicago, when the whole issue was thousands of miles away in Columbia and India. We didn't care how good they were in Chicago.

At the end, there was a period of student comments. On one side, there were reiterations of the allegations, and on the other, attempted arguments with an economic basis. I think the economic arguments - the idea that if people didn't approve of Coke, they could buy less and then the school would negotiate for a lower contract with Coke - was bunk. But it was very U of C, I thought, that such arguments were even offered. And a lot of people talked about choice and freedom, and the nature of economic freedom being linked to democratic freedoms. Milton Friedman would be proud.

Terribly lovely

I've been having trouble writing lately, I don't know if it's the stress of my impending doom graduation, or just life or whatever, but all the words feel clunky and impossibly prosaic (that word choice just there, "impossibly prosaic", that'll make more sense in a bit.)

So I decided to go back to my favorites, to the things I can read without feeling like I'm educating myself or being productive or anything. Take the class out of writing. I took a trip to Myopic and picked up Franny and Zooey.

I had forgotten how much I loved J.D. Salinger. For a long time (and maybe still, I don't know) Catcher was my favorite book. The tone is so terribly grand and at the same time really neurotic in the most essential way. The whole thing has airs about it, as in the kind of airs that are put on. Reading about Franny doing all her Franny things, passively fighting and all that, and Lane being a complete scoundrel in an almost lovable way, really it's just terribly fine. I mean there's the whole Pilgrim bit and she's describing it to him and he's sitting there, eating goddam frog's legs for chrissake, and he's saying things like "I don't know if we'll even have time to get to the game" right before he orders coffee instead of just screwing the coffee and leaving.

It's all just fascinating, the style I mean, and of course the characters, too. Franny faints at the end, and it's just so Salinger - I mean who faints these days? No one faints anymore, or uses handkerchiefs, or tries to make someone "come thoroughly to" with ammonia. It's all just so civilized and petty at the same time, so farcical and serious and terribly fun.

But then it's over. Not just Franny and Zooey, I mean all of it, Salinger's work just stops dead. Bam. Like a car crash. Like Camus.

Sometimes I secretly await the day that Salinger dies, simply because I hope he has a whole bunch of novels just tucked in drawers somewhere, waiting to be published posthumously. I know that's really morbid and everything, and probably immoral , too. But it would just be so lovely to read a new work. So terribly lovely.

The Zen/Flow of Scav

Aside from the obvious road trip items, I only really got to do one item this year. Last year for the party we had used a strobe light, and the strobe light had been given to me for safe keeping until the next Scav. How convenient, then, when one of the items turns out to be a contraption that uses a strobe light to make a stream of water seem to freeze in midair, little droplets suspended in space.

I arrived back from road trip at 4 in the morning (the judges always do the complete road trip themselves ahead of time to make sure everything works just so, and they disclosed that on their dry run they got back at 6 a.m.) I had been planning to sleep and things, since we needed to be at judgment at 10:00 to get our items judged. Of course, though, the spirit of the night - the last night before judgment the next day - drew me in and I ended up not sleeping at all. Instead I focused my energies on the frozen water droplets.

I knew exactly what they were going for - I had seen it on one of my many trips to the local science museum. Luckily this year they had basically emptied out the Searle chemistry laboratory, and Scavvies quickly took up all of the supplies. So there were stands and flasks and tubes. I got a box - darkness was going to be needed - and a plastic water bottle and started putting holes in things - holes in the box, holes in the bottle, eeerything. I nailed tiny nails into plastic bottle caps, seeing if they created the disired effect when water was poured in, and then tapping the nails more when the wholes weren't ever big enough.

It was a simple project, really, emulating something I had seen a million times before. And we had all the materials; getting the right materials is often the hardest part. But for an hour or so, I drilled and hammered and cut and twisted and tested. Over and over again, I tested, trying to get the water to break up into droplets but still flow freely. And during that time I didn't notice anything or anyone. I walked into people, stepped over friends on the floor. I had achieved what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow", where the passage of time is distorted, where self-consiousness melds into the activity itself, etc. That's what Scav is, it's flow. It's a timeless endeavor with clear goals - to win - and relatively immediate feedback that gets people immerse themselves in that kind of embarrassment. It is about blending the ego and the self with the work itself.

Quicksand Part 2

Once Thursday (and thus my official responsibilities) was over, having not slept since Tuesday night, I collapsed into my bed. Only I couldn't fall asleep. I kept going over the list in my mind. But I needed to sleep; I needed to fly out to Mass. in the morning. Nevertheless I tossed and turned, ruminating on the items one by one.

Eventually I gave up and just got out of bed, heading to the computer. I looked for some items that had not been done (according to our team's website) and started Googling. The item I found was: "Eudaimonia." I can't remember how man points it was or anything, but that didn't matter. See, as any U of C student learns sometime in their first or second year, eudaimonia is the term for what Aristotle saw as the highest goal in life: a sort of enlightened, active, and virtuous happiness.

Now almost everything on the list is a reference to something, so I was looking for what, precisely the judges were referring to by "Eudaimonia." After maybe half an hour of Googling, I found that there used to be a group of obscure German philosophers who put out a journal in the late 18th century called, that's right, "Eudaimonia." Ok, a lead perhaps, but it was missing something necessary for me to be convinced that that was what the item called for.

It turns out that the journal Eudaimonia is not at all easy to find; only a handful of libraries in the world have it, and the U of C was not one. U of I was, and...so was Princeton. Dressed only in boxers, sitting in the dark before the blue glow of my computer screen, all the pieces started to fall into place in my mind: journal, Princeton, road trip eudaimonia...clearly the judges wanted us to take the journal out of the library in Princeton and...bring it back? That part was a bit unclear, but I ran downstairs to the war room (in my mind, I went downstairs still in nothing but my boxers...though I might have put some pants on or something) and told someone of my discovery. They were then going to get some ally on the Princeton campus to take it out of the library, give it to the road trip team, they would drive it back to Chicago, present it at Judgment, and then we'd Fed-Ex it back to our ally in Princeton who would dutifully return the rare volumes. My inspiration finally dispatched and my responsibilities complete, I returned to bed and fell asleep.

I had about an hour to kill before my flight, so I naturally studied the list. Quicksand. How do you make quicksand, I wondered. The answer: look on the internet. I found that you need to get water to flow up from the bottom. I started the project, coming up with some vague plans, and passed if off as I = left with my bag for Massachusetts.

The speech in Mass. went well, though I had known from the start that I would lose. But I couldn't wait to get back to Scav. Items went in and out of my head. Most were things I had no idea what they were even looking for. Some I knew exactly what they wanted but could not fathom actually producing such an item. After less than 48 hours at home, I got back on a plane early Sunday morning to fly back to the U of C.

When I came back there was a large blue barrel filled with sand, sand which I later learned had come - under somewhat extralegal means - from the 57th street beach in the middle of the night. There was a hose duct-taped to a water bottle which had been cut to fit the size of a whole in the bottom of the barrel. Interested, I asked them to turn it on, which they did. I stuck my hand in and it stubbornly, until the water was cut off at least, refused to come out.

Quicksand Part 1

The secret to quicksand is a flow of water that comes from the bottom. Well, there's another option: if a sand-water mix is shaken just so, like in an earthquake, it'll spontaneously devolve into that liquid-solid trap so frequently featured in movies and adventure stories. But that, the shaking option, wasn't feasible. The best way, clearly , is water flowing from underneath.

It was my first Scav, and we had to present to the judges working quicksand. My official position had been "Thursday Czar", meaning that I was in charge of the various events that need to happen on the first day of the Hunt. In my case, it meant organizing a hot dog stand complete with a grill, an electric hot dog maker (think toaster with round slots - it was mostly for decoration), and Mia, a fellow team member, dressed in a hot dog costume in the middle of the Quads.

Although the road trip - that year it was going out to Princeton and doing all sorts of Ivy-league themed items - also left on Thursday, I had minimal responsibilities for that. In any case, they were gone by 10 a.m., so I focused all my attention on the hot dog stand. We were supposed to give away 100 hot dogs over the course of two hours each on Thursday and Friday. The thing to keep in mind is there were going to be 5 or 6 teams, each selling hot dogs. So even if demand was high, there was no guarantee our hot dogs would go fast. In the end, though, we "sold" all 100 on Thursday.

I was Thursday Czar because I had to leave on Friday to fly back to Massachusetts in order to run to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. I had signed up for it before I knew when Scav was. I had worked for Kerry the summer before, in New Hampshire, and I was going to work for him again the next summer in DC, so I was pretty tied to the campaign. Still, I'm not sure if, had I known the two things would conflict, I might have chosen Scav over the DNC.

Let it Ride

Item #203. If Flamin’ Harry McGonigal can entertain 500,000 at Sturgis every year, surely Clan Costner can draw a crowd of at least 10 with their performance of BTO’s “Let It Ride”. [26 points]

None of us new "Let it Ride" - a little before our time - but we had a CD and we listened to it over and over again on the drive across South Dakota. James was the beat box, Veronica and I were back up, and Bob was lead singer. We practiced the chorus, and the progressions, and then we practiced them again.

James, who had the most musical talent of any of us, said that he had never seen four people singing in different keys before. "We start out at around the same place, but then somehow we end up all over the place."

Eventually we arrived at Sturgis, South Dakota. Sturgis is home to one of (if not the) largest biker conventions in the country. There were signs everywhere still welcoming bikers, even thought the convention was at the end of the summer. First, we had to do Item 224:

Photos of the Mariner with the youngest, Criminelvis with the oldest, Ray Kinsella with the burliest,
and Robin Hood with the girliest bikers in Sturgis. [4 points per photo]

So we went from biker bar to biker bar, looking for our requisite bikers. By the time we were done, it was after 10pm on Friday night, and the bars were just starting to fill up.

Veronica had the idea of us asking to perform in one of the bars. Certainly there would be more than 10 people there. We went back to the first bar, which had a live band, and asked the owner, whose name I think was DJ, or JD, or something like that.

As we waited, James thought to ask the band to back us up. There was some negociation - we ended up having to go on with the Max team because the owner didn't want groups of badly-singing becostumed college students going up on stage one after another.

The band was great - they seemed really excited to do it, and the owner, too. But they needed to learn the song. I never realized how they learned the song, but somehow they picked up the beat and the tune. And we were ready to go.

Now, I have never sung on stage. Certainly not in a biker bar. And normally I would be terrified of such a situation. But, there was something about having two guitarists behind me, and a bassist, and a drummer, something about the microphone in front of me, and of course, something about the Elvis costume I was wearing, that made the whole thing only wonderful, and not embarrassing at all.

It went great. We all stumbled a little bit, trying to find when we were supposed to come in over the backup, but after a few bars we were rolling. Or...riding.

Pond Him!

Some of my favorite items this year that I wish I'd been back in Chicago for:

71. A Gingerbread House of Ill Repute. [16 points]
45. Part a fool and his money. [30 points]
74. Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land. [18 points]
285. Man, this lecture class is so boring. If only a giant pitcher would burst in to distribute fruit punch! [21 p-OH YEAH-ints]
321. Stage the cafeteria scene from High School Musical in one of the UofC dining halls during a mealtime. [15 points]


Road trip was certainly a lot of fun, but I am a little sad that I didn't have a chance to just be in Chicago, without responsibilities of a captain or anything like that. Driving in the middle of South Dakota, reading the list, wondering how things were going, I couldn't help but feel disconnected.

Of course, I was going to feel disconnected anyway, that was inevitable. I hardly knew any of the first years, and they made up the bulk of the team, as they always do. But there were rites, one Wednesday, that made us all a team. We went over the rules, and then the speeches came. Mark adapted Genesis chapter 1 ("And the Judges looked at the Hunt that they had made and they saw that it was good."). Ramya imparted some maternal wisdom in the form of song. Pranks offered a puppet show. A first year, who I didn't know, got up and gave the traditional first-year rep. speech, but his was far more serious than any others I had seen. He seemed to really recognize what Scav was, which is in a way seriousness that shuns seriousness.

Then we ponded him.

See, Hitchcock, which is right on the main quads, has a tradition of throwing the people we love into what is somewhat ironically called "Botany Pond." It is a fake pond that exists within the confines of concrete, though there are real ducks and turtles who live there. But the emphasis really is on botany: there are unknowable forms of plant life lurking in the murky waters and coating the shallow bottom. Which makes it the perfect place to throw someone, like a new RA, or a new House President, or a first-year rep.

The upper-classmen started fidgeting as soon as they felt his speech winding down. I involuntarily and prematurely stood up, ready to grab this kid I didn't know, or a part of him. Finally, he was done, and a spontaneous chant of "Pond him! Pond him!" arose from the crowd. The first years quickly caught on. We removed the victims valuables, phone and wallet and such, and his shoes, and let him out into the hot evening.

There is a giddiness that always accompanies a ponding. People are jumping up and down, running to the pond and back, taking up a calf or an elbow of the pondee. we chanted and rejoiced until he was being supported by only two people who stood on the edge of the brown-green water. They started swinging him over the water, then back, and we all counted: 1...swing...2...swing...3!

Then he was in the air, never rising very high, and suddenly hidden beneath the water. There was a moment of silence, as everyone focused on the surface of the water, until he rose, almost like Halle Berry in that Bond movie, shaking his hair, disgusting drops of water falling through the air, making little splash-circles in the then-turbulent water.

Like all forms of religion, Scav relies on sacrifices, and once that sacrifice was made, we truly became a team.

Scav Road Trip: NE

It was amazing that the things balanced. They were 10, maybe 12 feet tall, long, dull gray objects. Mostly there were two standing vertically, with a third on top resting horizontally. Some of them, however had fallen over, but even that seemed to be in a planned way. The whole thing was arranged in a circle, no doubt aligned to the sun or something like that. And it did seem mystical, in the middle of nowhere like that, with nothing but plains for miles.

Who had built this, I wondered. Who had put in this effort, dragging the heavy blocks from who-knows-where just to build this structure, a sculpture, or perhaps a religious monument, or whatever it was.

Item #112. Carhenge! It’s Stonehenge, only made out of cars! Don’t you understand? [10 points]

We were not in England, we were in the opposite of England: Nebraska. Alliance, Nebraska, technically, but Carhenge was at least 3 miles out of town. It was in what seemed to be the backyard of a small, abandoned, and somewhat dilapidated white house.

When we got there there were several bikers in the small parking lot, drinking coffee. We thought we had left all the bikers in Sturgis, but apparently not. Then, as we got out of the car, two more bikers drove into the lot, driving bright red and yellow restored bikes with sidecars and puny mufflers. They did figure eights for a while, showing off. Meanwhile we went out to investigate.

We had a number of items at Carhenge. We had to find a grave for foreign cars: “Here lie the bodies of foreign cars. They served their purpose while Detroit slept. Now Detroit is awake and America is great!” and complete the equation: Randi + Cindy = ? (the answer is "BFFs"). Then we had to take a picture in an old station wagon, and use a steering wheel that stuck up out of the ground to drive the Earth into the Sun (the item was worth "[1,000,000,000 points; 2 points for effort]"; since we remained alive, we assumed we got 2). Then Robin Hood/Veronica had to slay a random dinosaur skeleton that was there. And we had to eat cheese balls. Always, it seemed, we were eating cheese balls.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to ponder the greater meaning of Carhenge, perhaps gain some new wisdom from the ancient constructors of it. We had to get to Colorado, to find the best Rocky Mountain Oysters and the Swedish Parking area of Julesburg. And eat cheese balls.

Scav Road Trip: SD

Item #249:
Criminelvis plays the Palace, joining the ranks of Raven-Symone, LeeAnn Rimes, and that dude from Riverdance. [5 points]

I was dressed as Kevin Costner's character in 3000 Miles to Graceland, which the Judges referred to as "Criminelvis."

"The Palace" was the infamous Corn Palace, the World's Only, A-Maize-ing, Corn Palace. It's in Mitchell, South Dakota, maybe 30 miles west of Sioux Falls. Certainly it's a feat; they replace the corn every year except for this past year, because of the drought. Inside, though, there's little reason for it to exist, other than a large auditorium. I was expecting some kind of celebration of corn, or corn museum, but really there is one wall with a series of pictures and captions.

Now, the auditorium was why we were there, at least. I had to sing (I chose Hound Dog, since it was the one I knew without having to listen to it again) on stage. I have no ability to sing. I have less ability to dance. I have even less ability to dance like Elvis. So, it was with some trepidation that I got up on stage, aware of the tiny red light on the video camera that one of my team mates was holding.

The good news was the place was empty. Except there were a few maintenance workers I noticed on the way out. They gave me quite a look.

Item #233. The Clan Costner loves cheese balls. Loves ’em so much, they’re going to try to eat them in as many states as possible. [5 points per state, maximum 8 states]

It took us a while to find cheese balls in the first place - we had to go to a grocery store in La Crosse, WI. Once we found them, though, we had to get out in each state we could and take a picture with the orange puffs in our hands and big grins on our faces.

Which is why we were going to Wyoming. Well, there was one other item we needed to complete there:

53. The Mariner: IN WYOMING!!! [20 points] (The Mariner being Kevin Costner's character in Waterworld)

But also we needed to eat cheeseballs.

It was late when we left Kevin Costner's casino in Deadwood, SD, so we decided to get food in Spearfish, SD, a couple miles from the Wyoming border. We stopped at a Quizno's sub, arriving at 8:40, 20 minutes before close.

When we got there, the chairs were already up on the tables, and the two people who were behind the counter were packing up the veggies and sliced meats. It was Spearfish, SD, after all, so it was not that unreasonable to not expect anyone else to come in after 8:30.

But not only did people come in, people came in dressed like Robin Hood, a Chicago Black Sock, the Mariner from Waterworld, and a criminal Elvis. Which the two kids behind the counter clearly did not expect. As we looked up at the menu boards, trying to decide what to get, they moved into the back and started laughing. Theoretically they were trying to get out of our field of vision, but they were laughing so loudly we couldn't possibly not hear them. One of them came out to take our order, and immediately went right back again, unable to hold it in.

Scav Road Trip: WI

Item #248:
“What would you say if I told you that your nickname was The Boat?” These must be the first words you say to a random traveler at the Van Galder bus stop in Madtown. Said traveler must be waiting for the 14:00 bus to Chicago. The Clan Costner must convince this traveler to carry a receipt and a book from Booked før Murder to Union Station in Chicago, where he/she will give up the receipt and his/her nickname to the mysterious stranger with a corncob pipe and a captain’s hat. [40 points]

It was a hot, sunny day in Madison. We got to the bus station early, so we waited for a bit, suffering glances of countless Madisonians. I can't blame them; if I saw four people dressed like Kevin Costner characters, I'd stare too.

We had the brilliant idea to go to the ticket counter (which was in the book store) to wait for people to buy tickets to Chicago. But, it turns out most people buy their tickets in advance, so we went out to the bus stop, looking for people with baggage.

One woman was already carrying a book. We stood around, undoubtedly sketchy, and tried to pick our mark. Then, a girl with pink hair (I think). She was sitting on her bag, looking a bit glum.

James did it. "What would you say if I told you your nickname was The Boat?"

"Go away," she said, not moving her gaze. Immediately we started groveling. "Please, it's for a scavenger hunt, we go to the University of Chicago, we just need you to carry this book, there'll be a guy at the station, corncob pipe,..."

She acquiesced. "I guess I'll do it for the U of C." Somehow we had lucked upon a sympathizer, though she never revealed the nature of her connection.

***

Item #61:
Don’t disturb the dead, even if the dead disturb you. Clan Costner always calls ahead. [25 points]

What the hell is this?, we wondered. Somehow we learned that we were supposed to go to a funeral home in Tomah, Wisconsin, maybe 45 minutes out of Madison.

We arrived and were immediately invited downstairs by a manager, or owner, or something. She was friendly and cordial, and interested in us as young people. A sort of "Oh, isn't that just lovely, what you kids are doing" kind of way.

Downstairs, in this funeral home in Wisconsin, we found a large taxonomy museum. Deer were coming out the walls, birds were flying overhead, and ferrets were chasing each other around a tree. Then there was the squirrel room. They had been arranged like dolls in various poses. This one's cooking dinner. This one's relaxing on the beach. This one's storing nuts. And there was a bar, with a little squirrel bartender and little squirrel regulars drinking little squirrel-sized cocktails from little squirrel-sized glasses. There was one who was hitting on another one by the bar, and another who was leaning over his drink, as if he'd been broken by years of misery.

To complete the item we needed to fill out a worksheet, counting antlers, finding certain figures, etc. One of the tasks was to count all the fish in the museum, so I started. Then, after 120 or so, I lost count, and started again. Then, after 150 or so, I lost count, and started again. Then, I had all of them except for those that were in the back room, which was filled with fish. And I lost count. And I started again. In the end, there were over 200 fish in that basement museum, including several who were mounted on motorized carousel so they looked like they were being dragged in circles by the lures stuck in their mouths.

The owner was very nice, though, and gave us directions to get back on I-90. Funeral home directors always seem to be nice.

LB Who?

I saw Tim O'Brien yesterday at Columbia College. He's one of my favorite writers, and I've been looking forward to it for a while. When I got there the room - a movie theater really - was packed with students, professors, and people from all over Chicago. The image of the fliers for the event - pictures of the Vietnam memorial with the words "An Evening With Tim O'Brien" - were projected onto the screen.

An evening, I thought. Wow, a whole evening.

There was an empty chair at the front, one of those directors' chairs made of cloth. It looked as if anyone sitting there would be perpetually perturbed by the large flower arrangement that was placed next to it.

In the end, O'Brien didn't sit in the chair, though, he spoke at the podium. He looked oddly frail. Odd because he reminds me a lot of my teacher Mr. McGraw - they were both veterans and writers and O'Brien's book-jacket photo has him wearing a baseball cap with sort of unkempt hair, and he looks very much like Mr. McGraw - but Mr. McGraw was undoubtedly vital, coaching JV baseball and pacing around the room, dancing in flurries of arm movements at the board. During the reading, O'Brien kept his hat on the whole time - a sort of nondescript beige hat - which made his eyes look sunken.

He spoke at length about the distinctions of what he calls story-truth and happening-truth, an idea I find very interesting, so I was listening intently. The two girls behind me, however, were not listening so intently.

At one point, O'Brien mentioned passing a statue of LBJ somewhere in Texas. "What's LBJ" one of the girls behind me asked.

"I think it's Lyndon Johnson."

"Lyndon Johnson?"

"Yeah, the president."

"Oh. [thinking] What's the 'b' stand for?"

Then, when the talk let out, I waited in line for some of what seemed to be really delicious food. There was spicy chicken satay, stuffed mushrooms, peach-brie quesadillas, and sliced-tenderloin tarts with carmelized red onions. The only problem was that the dishes were so fancy they only had one of each, so after ten minutes of creeping though the line, there was nothing left. Not even a diet coke.

I left without getting my book signed.

The Ballad of Einstein's Bagels

Culture is not passive at the U of C, it's a force.

For years before I came there had been a tradition in the C-Shop - a coffee shop on campus - called Shake Day. Every Wednesday milkshakes were $1. This certainly didn't do wonders for kids trying to avoid the Freshman Fifteen, or the Sophomore Six, or the Junior Jellyroll, or the Senior Spare Tire. But, as I understand from my predecessors, it did do wonders for psychological health on campus.

Then Einstein's Bagels decided to take over the C-Shop. A fine idea, to have bagels on campus (which are hard to find in Chicago, good ones at least) and actual good cofee and such. Except Einstein's doesn't do milkshakes.

So they got rid of shake day. The students protested. "But we're a bagel chain," the Einstein's people said. Didn't make a difference; the students wanted their shake day damn it, they wanted their $1 shake. I wanted it, too, even though I'd never had it, because it was advertised in all the admissions materials.

Einstein's acquiesced - sort of. They started offering tiny shakes in little plastic cups - the kind you see at a water cooler. "Here," they said, "we have reinstituted Shake Day."

"Not good enough," the students said,"these shakes are puny."

"But how are we to make money? We are a business, after all."

"No, you're a campus coffee shop at the University of Chicago. You're on our turf, not live by our rules."

Einstein's protested, but we got our way. And now I'm sure we have the only Einstein's Bagel franchise that serves milk shakes.

Also, we sure as hell don't call it "Einstein's." We call it the C-Shop.

Susan Sontag makes me feel like an idiot

She does. I read her interview in Unsentamental Education and I feel like at my age she had already surpassed anything I will ever do in my life, including getting married and having kids. She started to learn at three and basically read all the great books by the time she was 14. Then she came to U of C when everyone had to take 14 year-long sequences, and passed out of half of them, even though she was 16. Then, she was disappointed that she would be done in only two years! How awful!

One day she walked into a friends hum class, I think, maybe soc, anyway, she was just sitting in, and then she went up to talk to the professor. Two weeks later they were married. Shortly after that they had their first child. It's as if she couldn't bear to do anything slowly.

So I'm a bit hesitant to use her observations about the U of C, since she is such an outlier, but some of them are really interesting. For example:

What led me to Chicago? It was reading an article in, I believe, Collier's magazine in 1946 or 1947. It was either by Robert Hutchins, explaining the aims and curriculum of the College, or it was an article about this eccentric place, which didn't have a football team, where all the people did was studey, and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that's for me.

What's strange is that I was drawn to the U of C by an article - in the New York Times Magazine I think. Only this article was about an economist named Steven Levitt, who back then was known to very few people without PhD's in economics, but who is now the Freakonomist. Perhaps it is a testament to the reportorial skill of the New York Times Magazine, but the thought of sitting in this guy's class really made me want to go to the U of C. And I did. And in my first year I took Intro to Microeconomics with Steven Levitt. And loved it, from the first day when he auctioned off a six-pack of coke to demonstrate a demand curve.

Also what's interesting is that I was not the only person who saw that article, nor the only person who credits that article, at least in part, to their decision to come to U of C. Several of my friends had almost the same experience. I think it's because the U of C is a very professor-driven school - professors have all the power, and they attract droves of followers, almost cult-like. There are just so many personalities, like Friedman and Bloom and Arendt. Plus, you can't toss a tome written in a dead language without hitting a Nobel laureate. Or at least someone more brilliant than you'll ever be.

Like Susan Sontag.

Napoleonic ambitions

I picked up An Unsentimental Education, edited by Molly McQuade, which is a collection of interviews/monologues by famous writers who are in some way connected to the University.

In it, Saul Bellow talks about coming to the U of C at 17, with only "cloudy yearnings" of becoming a writer. He found a group of similar people - people like Isaac Rosenfeld and Oscar Tarcov. Bellow says:

The great advantage of the U of C was that it gave us a cover, a color of legitimacy...The quadrangles gave a certain cultural weight to our flimsy or sketchy aspirations...The students gathered in the Wieboldt Lounge to listen to discussions about Eliot, Proust, and Kafka were secretly filled with Napoleonic ambitions. They didn't dare to announce publicly what they so passionately and madly aspired to.

In one sense the U of C today has many things in common with that College Bellow attended. The U of C brand allows the students a certain pass on being pretentious, since it's only pretentiousness if you are pretending, and at the U of C, people really can grow up to do great, Earth-shattering things. And certainly I have learned here how to dress up what was essentially a hunch or an inkling or even a suspicion so that it was indistinguishable from academics; put a few quotes in, a couple citations, some really good explanatory footnotes, then put a thesis on the top, a conclusion on the bottom and BANG: you got yourself an essay.

The discussions Bellow talks about also ring true today. We do talk about such things. Maybe not as often as Bellow did - I always conceive of people of his era just studying all the time, reading the Aeneid in Latin in their spare time, but then again he never had facebook, so no wonder. A lot of students hide their "Napoleonic ambitions", but many don't.

That, I think, is the difference, the thing that makes the U of C today different from the U of C of his day. We are encouraged to have dreams of conquering Europe, and we are never told of possible Waterloos lurking up ahead. Of course, failure is something we are already familiar with, so we need no education in that range of possible outcomes of our lives.

Part of it, I guess, is what our passions are. Academia is certainly something people have no qualms about revealing as their destination in life, though it is usually put in terms of "I plan to go to grad school" or "I'm thinking of getting a PhD." Those are almost the unambitious people, just following the easiest, in a way, path out of this school.

The ambitious people are the ones who want to go into business or law or medicine...sometimes known as the professions. They are the people who might conceal their plans - though a fair share practically introduce themselves as "John Doe, pre-med" or "Jane Smith, consultant".

As for the writers, I know of only a handful of people (undergrads, that is) who will say that - that they want to be writers. There's still such a mystique about the whole thing. For them, it seems, Bellow is still right.

Clark's

There's a guy with short, conservative hair, a tucked-in white polo shirt, and khaki pants. But the combat boots reveal a rebellious spirit.

Next to him is another polo-ed guy, but he's got tattooed arms and a somewhat more intense air about him.

Behind me is a couple, both sitting on the same side of the table. The guy's saying things like "Where are you from, where have you been? It's unfair: I've been living here for 11 years, and I only just met you." He's wearing a knit hat, even though it's pretty warm outside, and he's got an uninspired goatee.

To my left: A guy with 8s-esque spiked hair, short on the sides and longer on the top, shiny from the gel, wearing a vest from a 3-piece suit and really light jeans that are more thread than cloth, and also pointy, Italian-like leather shoes (boots?).

This is Clark's diner on Belmont Ave., one of the few 24-hour spots in the city. At least the few that U of C students know about. It's the kind of place where short and stout Mexican men walk continuously around and between the tables, clearing plates and refilling water, and then moving on with remarkable speed, even at 1 in the morning.

I came here for the bottomless coffee, but I have to keep ordering small dishes or else I start to feel unwelcome. Even on a weekday night the place is pretty busy, and they don't want me clogging up the tables.

...Bus of Life

When I was a first year I used to go downtown every week, or at least I'd leave Hyde Park. Most weeks it was me, Will and Laura (who were dating then), and then Margaret or Emily or whoever. Laura, Will, and I spent so much time together people called us Brilla, as in BRIan-wiLL-laurA. But in any case we would take the 173, which went from the Reynold's club up to Belmont, leaving every hour on the hour.

Inevitably, we would emerge from a movie, or dinner, or what have you, with five minutes before the 173 would be stopping a few blocks away. If we missed the bus, we'd have to wait an hour for the next one, or else find an alternate route, which would be much less convenient. So we walked briskly.

Often we would see the bus pass us, on the way to the stop. Will and Laura and whoever else was with us would make some exclamation of disappointment and disgust. I, for reasons I still am not quite sure about, would start to run.

Now in my defense I caught the bus several times, and I would stumble on, winded, as my companions used my stalling to catch up. But a lot of times, predictably, I would simply end up winded. It seemed so important to me then to catch that bus.

And some times I like to say that I'm chasing the bus of life, whose route number I don't know. All I know is sometimes I seem to catch it - to reach a point where I can sit on my heels a bit and look out at the world - and sometimes I seem to miss it - and I'm left always moving and trying and trying and still not finishing an assignment enough, or leaving the chores to pile up. But no matter whether I'm stumbling up the stairs searching my pockets for bus fare or am standing in the winder cold on the deserted sidewalks of downtown at night, I always end up wheezing and coughing. I always end up out of breath.

Recent studies say happiness is partly genetic, that like body weight, people have a "set point" of happiness from which they have trouble moving away. People who won the lottery six months ago are no happier than they were before they won, and people who were paralyzed six months ago are no unhappier than they were before their accident. Maybe time, pacing, is also set from some developmental period in a person's life. People use up the time they have, and are thus as busy as they let themselves be. And maybe I'm just wired to always be chasing the bus.

Chasing the...

I went to the beach today. Well, it's on the lake, not the ocean. And the sand is brought in from somewhere. And it's about ten feet from a major highway into downtown. But it's almost a beach.

It was warm, certainly, and the beach was not vacant. But the water was frigid, and also I suppose it was the Lord's Day, so it wasn't crowded. Everyone had set up as close to the water as possible - where the sand was smoothest - and on average there were about two rows of blankets across the beach.

I was with Laura and Emily, who were excited to finally be donning their swimsuits, even if they never really went in the water. (Ok, Laura went in once to dunk her head under. And then again when I accidentally let all of her papers blow into the ocea...er...lake and she ran into the water to grab the wet sheets which reminded me of the letter that Daisy has on her wedding day in the Great Gatsby, the one she gets from Gatsby and she gets drunk because of it and Jordan puts her in the bath to sober her up and Daisy won't let go of the letter and so it gets wet and, in Fitzgerald's image, begins to fall apart "like soap". But certainly there were no laps or anything.)

In front of us, on the water's edge, there were dozens of kids, young to old, building things and otherwise amusing themselves. Above them floated parents stooped over like octogenarians, tending to the children's needs.

To the left there was a group of U of C students - one of them was wearing a shirt with the U of C logo on it, but I didn't need that to tell that they were U of C kids - maybe 20 in all. I figured they must be there as a dorm trip or something. It was mixed gender, which ruled out frats, and the only context in which 20 people do something all at once seems to be a house trip. They seemed like first years, and I was suddenly nostalgic.

I had loved my dorm so much my first year. Everyone was too new to really have drama, and so it was just a bunch of people who still thought the U of C was easy as pie - not easy per se, but not difficult, not difficult socially and academically and psychologically. Somehow it seemed we had so much time. Where, I wonder, did that time go? I have three classes now, only two days a week. I have a fair amount of work, evenly spread out but not insignificant, but I simply can't seem to catch up, catch up to my work, or chores, or whatever it is I'm running after.

The Point

Mary was laughing. Always, when Ben was around, Mary was laughing. Even when she was being serious, her eyes were laughing, or sometimes her shoulders.

After a few sputters, it seemed like spring had finally arrived for good. It was still a bit chilly with the wind, but the sun finally seemed comfortable when the clouds briefly covered it; before it seemed as if the sun was afraid it might disappear behind a cloud forever, but now it was not scared.

We were at the Point, which I have visited too rarely in the last two years. Whatever the weather, the Point is always beautiful. I remember once, it was November I think, and there had been a violent storm. The spray from the lake had lacquered everything in ice, the blades of grass were covered in ice though still defined, the trees were covered (on the side facing the lake), and the stones, which kept the soil of the Point from falling into the sea, they were also coated with translucent, organic ice. The cold was bitter, raw, wet, and yet the sight was so beautiful.

This time, of course, it was not icy. There were dozens of people there, bikers, rollerbladers, families, a few frat brothers who had built a spit over a campfire andwere trying to cook. Mary, Ben, and I laid on a blanked on the grass, out at the end where you can look north to the city, its heights bursting out of the water, or turn around and look south at the vaguely noxious clouds that hover over Gary, IN. But we were, for the most part, not looking north or south, we were looking up, at clouds that looked like the eastern seaboard with a little cloud-Florida on the end, or perhaps like Canada with Greenland just off to the side, or other parts of the cloud-globe.

Ben was in town, having flown in from grad school at UCLA, and he and Mary had gotten a bucket of ribs to eat by the point, and I joined them. They were not ribs so much as rib tips, little bits of meat surrounding bone and cartilage and unknowable pieces of pork. And they were drenched in barbecue sauce, which dripped to the bottom of the bucket - we all agreed that foods that are served in buckets are almost always good - so that the last of the ribs had to be summoned from the depths with weak plastic forks. With the bucket of ribs came a bucket of French fries which were soggy and mostly unappetizing, but the last of the ribs could be laid on the fries, which would absorb the absurd amounts of sauce and leave an almost-edible morsel. Ben joked that French fries were "nature's napkins". And Mary laughed.

As we were all laughing, an old couple walked slowly by us, on the grass instead of the path. They looked at us with an expression of disgust that was probably a reaction to the walk which must have been difficult, but we took the expression as a judgment of us and our youthful revelry. Cranky old people, we thought, cramping our style.

We were, are, so young, sometimes I am amazed at how young we still are. But now, Mary and I at least are facing that time where spending a lazy afternoon - an afternoon which had somehow snuck upon us, which we had not noticed until it was there, having not needed to cherish every moment of it because it seemed so ordinary - sitting on a blanket on the grass eating simply horrific food and laughing at silliness, we are facing a time where that will no longer be so easy, so careless.

And that is a shame. But I know Mary will keep laughing.

Free writing

Allen Lee's teacher assigned a "free writing" exercise. That meant: "Write whatever comes into your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing."

Allen Lee followed that assignment and for that he has been charged with two counts of disorderly conduct. Seems, what came into his head was a scene of violence, sex, and disillusionment.

The essay is certainly disturbing. Of course Lee should be referred to psychological counseling. But does following the teacher's assignment warrant criminal charges? "Do not censor" the teacher says, and then the kid gets arrested for failing to censor. Would it have been better if he had cut out the violent and perverted portions? People in trouble often speak out, and it is better that they speak than if they remained silent.

I think the form of the assignment is rather disappointing; the sheet is filled with bullet points and outlines "guidelines" for free writing (oxymoronic, no?), and it lists the "benefits" of the exercise, since every action must be in furtherance of some goal.

Of course there is a dilemma whenever a student writes something disturbing, whenever fiction and nonfiction become indistinguishable. Lee claims that the section about shooting people in the school and then having sex with the bodies, a section which is in quotes, was written as if from the point of view of a character. How can we know that is not true? And if it is true, is that more or less acceptable?

I think kids are often let down by their teachers, who at once try to let their students think freely and then try to impose a structure upon thought. When I was doing research on early education, I read a manual for one particular curriculum. It's basic tenet was that play was the most important thing for young kids, that kids learned mostly through play, and limiting play would limit their minds. Also, it argued that the teacher's job was to allow the children to interact with each other and with the teacher, since collaboration and exhibition was central to the learning process. It warned against asking children questions - for example, if the child was playing with a male doll and a female doll, the teacher should not ask "Are these two married?" - because the question itself limits the terms of the child's imagination. They suddenly are placed in a certain mindset - male and female people are either married or not, that is how they are defined.

Is it possible for a teacher to assign anything that could possibly be "free writing"? The assignment itself emphasizes the usefulness of free writing. Doesn't that impose a goal-oriented, or perhaps it might be termed a capitalistic, mindset? Do this in order to get that. Well, Lee wrote something in order to get a reaction; he expressly insults the teacher and argues that she is attempting to divide herself from her class. Certainly he wrote that being aware that the teacher would read it, and probable he wrote that because he knew that the teacher would read it.

That is not to say this is the teacher's fault. Of course it is not, and of course it is expected that such an essay would make her feel uncomfortable, threatened, and even assaulted. But how much of it is the kid's fault, either? And how much of it is the fault of the questions he was asked?

Item #0: Drama. [Infinite Drama Points]

I forgot about the drama that surrounds Scav. Well, I didn't forget, but I hadn't had to think about it in a while. I suppose it is necessary for such an endeavor, having drama within the team. But I think that is why I liked being a team member better than being a captain. As a member, I didn't need to worry about not only who was free to do road trip, but which team would work best together, and who would be offended if they didn't get to go, and all that.

My second year, the first year I was captain, we had a lot of trouble finding people and a car for road trip. Shannon was willing to go, and Ben could be convinced. Melissa also wanted to go, which was good since she was a first year then. But who was the fourth?

Nick had a car, which we still didn't have. It was a newish car that he might be reluctant to use, but we thought we could push him into it, which we did. But then C wanted to go.

Ok, so C: she went my first year with her boyfriend R, Shannon, and Josie. Which was fine. Until C went insane over an item (that is, they were somewhere in New Jersey, in the middle of Scav, trying to complete an item so they could turn back and come home) and started strangling R. Now C is perhaps 110 pounds, max, likely less, and R is at least 200. C is strangling R, while Shannon and Josie look on trying to figure out how to deal with the situation. In the end, R was understandably unhurt, and they managed to get back on time.

But, the point was that C simply was not going to go on road trip; we (the captains) couldn't take the chance that she would flip out even a few hours into a three-day-long, stress-filled road trip to God-knows-where. But, Nick lives with C, and yet Nick and C felt the need to communicate on each others' blogs, so that everyone could see what they were telling each other. And Nick offered to, in effect, ransom his car for C's ability to go on road trip. As in: C goes or no one goes.

This whole thing happened a few weeks before Scav, maybe even later. That was not a anxiety-free day. In the end Nick backed down, but I vowed never to let such a dramatic situation develop.

Of course, that is like vowing never to get behind on work - it somehow always happens.

Item #8

I don't remember what everyone was chanting, but I know they were chanting something. It happened suddenly, amidst the chaos that is Judgment Day/Mother's Day. Everyone somehow knew that someone was doing something that needed to be watched. An ad hoc ring of people formed around someone - who? I can only see dark hair. Then he stands on a chair. It's Phil. Phil, a leader of the Max Palevsky Scav team and a kid I vaguely knew from high school. In college, we'd gotten to know each other better, and I had discovered him to be a future politician, as I then thought I was, complete with a built-in repressor, which closes one's mouth before saying something stupid, pushes one away from potentially scandalous situations, and screens every interaction for future consequences.

What was Phil doing, standing on a chair on Judgment Day, smiling for the crowd? There was a judge by his feet, holding a clipboard, which meant that he was judging some item. Phil was about to complete an item. He held up his hand, and in it a small blob of beige and sickly-white.

"What is that?" I asked whoever was next to me.

"A twinkie."

"A twinkie? What's he doing with a twinkie?"

"It's the umbilical cord, item #8."

I looked at the person who was speaking, a person I didn't know. I doubt it was hard to read my expression of shock, and they soon answered my unasked question: "Yeah," they said, "he's eating his own umbilical cord."

The chanting continued. Phil seemed to be relishing the attention. The only way to go through with it, I guess, to get high on the crowd. He would later blame it on lack of sleep, on still being hungover from the huge Scav party on Friday night, two days before. The twinkie was raised even higher, and then he tilted his head up opened his mouth, dropped the capsule of sugar into his mouth and swallowed. Some time later, he told me that he hadn't tasted the twinkie, but not the small piece of preserved human tissue that was hidden within the goo.

Max people cheered. Everyone else gagged.

***

"What?" Virtually the entire team had asked the same question upon hearing item #8. The people who didn't ask it were laughing. The first thing after getting the list is reading the list, and we sit everyone down and go item by item, reading it aloud so that everyone is made to hear every item at least once. Item 8: "A teammember’s umbilical chord, to be eaten by that teammember. [96 points]"

A brief discussion started: did people keep that kind of thing? A few people confirmed, yes, it was done. People saved it, kept it in a jar somewhere. Who would do that? "I don't know," the confirmers each said, "but people do it." Still, no one would admit to the existence of their omphalic tissue in some nasty jar in their parents room perhaps. Or on the mantel? It was always "people do it", never "my mom did it".

We moved on shortly, but throughout the Hunt, we tried to find some way to pull #8 off. Now, 96 points, by itself doesn't mean anything; there is no consistent scale for how many points are possible if all the items are completed perfectly. Indeed, many items are lambda points, or some other unpronounceable symbol, with that symbol itself inserted into a square-root sign, or placed over some irrational (in the mathematical sense) number like pi. But that year, my first year doing Scav, 96 points was significant, but not huge. Not a deal breaker to be sure. I believe the winning score was over 10,000, to give you an idea. So we weren't really worried when Judgment came upon us and we had nothing for the item.

But, on the other hand, we didn't attract a crowd like Phil had.

Smokey Robinson

“I am not wearing a studded belt,” I said.

“Just try it,” Lila said.

I took it into the dressing room, along with a plain black pocket-T, three pairs of shorts (one a sort of rugged, nylon version of khaki, the other two various patterns of camo), and a black hoody.

I was at Ragstock, a thrift store on the North Side, looking for an anarchist outfit. There’s an anarchist convention on theory this weekend, and I couldn’t very well go in GAP jeans and a polo, so I needed a new wardrobe. The advantage of the anarchist fashion is that it is cheap: anything not bought used better have been free. The t-shirt was $3 and the shorts 4. The disadvantage is that the style was utterly ridiculous when not at an anarchist event. The shorts went down to mid-shin, and the belt made me look like an oversized Rottweiler.

In the end I couldn’t stomach buying anything camouflaged, and studs were simply out of the question. The most basic problem with such things was that my collegiate glasses and newly short hair would be stupendously incongruous. But also I did not want to become a poser, I did not want to wear a costume. I wanted to be a little less conspicuous, but my goal was not to walk among the anarchists as one of them, trying to get clued in to their secrets and rituals.

The only other person in the basement of the store (which is the men’s section), besides me and Lila, was the cashier-cum-dj. He had some Smokey Robinson on, and it had begun to grate on our ears. Lila, in a rare fit of awkwardness, made a comment to that effect to the cashier. Then, realizing her faux pas: “Or…did you put this music on?”

He looked at her. “You got a problem with Smokey Robinson?”

“No, no…it can just be…a little much…after a while…” Lila slinked away.

That...something...in his eyes

Greg has chaotic hair - light brown but the ends are bleached yellow. His beard seems to be an afterthought, a result and not an ends in itself. He has something in his eyes - what might often be called a spark or a glint or some such light/flame/fire metaphor, but I will call it a galaxy. Right there, in his eyes, is reflected an unfinished image of a whole galaxy - which for its inhabitants might as well be the whole Universe, since it's all the same once it gets that far away from you - and it is the Universe in which his perfect world has been place.

He is an idealist. Comically so.

I have seen Greg around campus before - he says he is a second year - but he has come over to talk to me because of when we saw each other yesterday, at the study-in in President Zimmer's lobby. I was hoping to read Tomcat In Love by Tim O'Brien, because it has been sitting on my desk for months, never quite on the top of the pile, but now he is coming to speak and so I would like to remember why I like him so much and what it is that his words can do (he says they can kill people, and I believe him). But instead, Greg, who is fittingly gregarious, comes over and asks to sit down and of course I say yes.

He asks me about STAND (Students Take Action Now: Darfur) and whether I agree with its tactics. I tell him that I do not necessarily believe that STAND's repeated efforts to make life difficult for Zimmer - by sitting in his lobby, by dumping change on his secretary's desk, by protesting loudly in front of Admin - will reverse the school's decision not to divest from Sudan. But, I say, that is not the only measure for success; if the protests and the sit-ins and all of it can enliven the activists on campus, if it can convince people who thought they were alone in wanting to act that in fact they are no where near alone, then it is a success.

Only then, I think, once the students have truly become active, or activated, can we actually move in ways that might reverse the decision. Then, we can get students on the Board of Trustees, maybe get Jim Crown to resign (as I don't think he will ever change his mind - his is a particularly egregious form of stubbornness, I think).

Greg listens well, generally, only rarely interrupting (and in fairness, I interrupt him more often than he me). But when he speaks, he seems to relish the disagreement - not in a menacing way, or a malicious way, but in a truly U of C way. He is taking pleasure in the difference of opinion because it is boring (especially to U of C students) to talk to people who agree with you. If we disagree, that means we can keep talking, and the discussion is what is entertaining.

He thinks we need to rebuild the University from the ground up, completely changing the meaning of education and the structure of the institution. I am skeptical; I tell him it is far easier to start a new institution than it is to destroy an old one and rebuild it. He, as a true U of C student, concedes the impracticality of his idea, and yet he continues to advocate for it. At first I find this frustrating. After a while though, I find it endearing. He is a second year, I think condescendingly, let him have his hopes.

Sit-in? No. Study-in.

I walked into the admin building half expecting there to be a security guard by the elevators. "What's your business?" he would ask. And I had planned an answer: "I'm here for a meeting with the deputy provost [whose name I didn't know] on the fifth floor." Hopefully that would get me in. But of course there was no security guard, and I got on the elevator unimpeded.

When I got out on the fifth floor I saw about 15 people wearing white. "I must have missed the memo," I said. But no, there had not been a memo; the shirts had been made by members of STAND for this very event: a study-in in the lobby of President Zimmer's office. That's right. A study-in. How U of C. People bring their laptops, their books, their problem sets, because no one would come for very long if it would mean they couldn't do work.

Now, it is important to note that at no time did we actually see Zimmer's office. His office was behind a door which was in turn behind at least one set of double glass doors. But Zimmer himself occasionally walked by. Ran, I should say. He ran by, ducking his head slightly and trying to seem amiable. He would greet us kindly, and then Alex would shout at him: "Are you ready to divest yet?" and Zimmer would smile and nod nervously and head straight for the stairs so as to avoid waiting for the elevator.

Of course, what more could we expect? He was a math professor, after all, and a math professor certainly doesn't require skill in avoiding protesters.

At various points during the day, one of the Deputy Deans of Students would come in and ask us to clear a path so people get through. "You guys have been great so far," she said at some time in the early afternoon, "so if you could please just keep cooperating with us...we need aisles so people can get through, please someone will trip over these power cords. It's fine that you guys are here, but you need to make sure that the people in this building can do the jobs they need to do."

Each time when she warned us to move, we would mill about aimlessly, looking at each other in disbelief. Doesn't she realize why we're here? The whole point of this thing is to disrupt the people who work in the building. If we wanted to get out of the way, we would protest in our rooms. Once she left, we'd move back to where we'd been before, like commuters who slow down when they see a cop car on the side of the road, then accelerate with abandon as soon as they've passed.

November 2, 2004

The 2000 election was bad for me, I took it personally, but it was a mere glancing blow compared to the 2004 election, which hit me right in the kidneys.

I had supported Gore, but I had not been involved at all. For Kerry, I had worked for his primary campaign in New Hampshire one summer, and then worked in his DC headquarters during the general the next summer. I had been the co-head of my school's students for Kerry chapter (not that I did much), and had spent several weekends campaigning for him in Iowa and Wisconsin.

It did not seem possible that he could lose. I was aghast at how so many people could vote for him in the first place, but at least I could understand it. I could justify it as a great duping of the American public who had just enough time to hear what he said and not enough time to look at what he had done.

But after four years of his reign, how could people not see? How could people not recognize the damage he had done to so many people in this country, arguing that it was the fault of the poor that they were poor and that the environment was not in danger (and even if it was, what could anyone do about it?). He had limited research into life-saving cures, had cut funding for great safety net programs in order to fund his holy war and provide funding to religious groups as part of his "Faith-Based Initiatives" program. He had overseen a great widening of the division between rich and poor, black and white, and Democrat and Republican. How could people not see this, and how could they believe the lies of the Swift Boat "veterans" and the RNC?

Still, there was this calm I felt, throughout the fall, like being in the eye of a hurricane. It was a knot in my stomach and a bitter taste in my throat. But I pushed those doubts away. I reasoned them away. And I went to Wisconsin on Election Day ready to work and to await a sure (I told myself) victory.

Much of the time in Milwaukee that day was unproductive. Supposedly we were increasing turnout, but the lists were bad, and half the people had voted early, anyway. Indeed, my previous trips had been mostly going to Democrats' houses to try to convince them to vote early. Even though it was unproductive, though, the work in Milwaukee allowed me to think about the election only on a microscopic level: this door, this voter, this precinct. About a half hour before polls closed, I left and, with two friends who had also come up to Wisconsin to work, went to the bus station to head back home.

Before we even got on the bus, we started drinking. I bought a bottle of orange juice from a vending machine and mixed in some vanilla vodka my friend Laura had brought. We hardly spoke on the way back. Behind us on the bus, there was a group of Mennonites in dark dress. The presence of such religious folk seemed to be a bad omen.

And Bush won. And the war came.

With Kurt Vonnegut's death so recent, I feel it is proper to write: So it goes.

Growing up in Bush's America

I sometimes forget that there was a time before George W. Bush.

He has so dominated my political consciousness that it seems as though he is an institution, like the Supreme Court, or Congress. My political awareness began, really, with the 2000 election. I had been interested in politics before, certainly. When the central political issue during the time in which you are reaching puberty is a sex scandal, politics begins to seem quite...interesting. But as a pursuit, rather than an interest, a pastime rather than a sort of vague background noise, it was the fight between Gore and Bush that introduced me to politics.

I remember going to bed depressed on Election Day, 2000. NBC, which I had trusted, called the election for Bush, and, unable to deal with it, I went to sleep.

I do that sometimes: sleep in order to deal with things that are inconceivable. When I was a freshman in high school, the senior class president committed suicide on a dark day in February. He hung himself from the stairwell of his dorm (it was a boarding school) with a belt, leaving his dormmates to find him. It is one of those moments that I remember vividly. I was sitting in front of my computer in my bedroom, doing an assignment for Mr. Jones' history class, which I hated because I hated Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones thought that any use of the verb "to be" made the sentence passive, and therefore utterly unacceptable.

But Mr. Jones had assigned us something on the Black Plague. I remember the phone ringing as I opened up google - this was back when google was cutting edge, the hot new thing. I of course didn't answer. Then, I remember typing in "the black p". I got as far as 'p', and my mom came up the stairs, the portable phone in hand. She looked serious. I took the phone from her, and I remember that she sat down on my bed, which I thought was unusual at the time. Why was she lingering like this?

The person on the phone was my adviser. She told me what had happened. Not the belt and all that, that I learned later. But she told me about the suicide and after a short conversation, we hung up.

I realized why my mother was there; she wanted to talk to me, to make sure I was ok. I was, I thought. I did not know him well, only a few months. I had not actually ever talked to him. The most I ever heard him say was when he spoke at an all-school meeting at the beginning of the year, to welcome everyone. But still, I knew that I could not really handle the news I had just heard. It would not sink in. So I went to sleep. That moment, right then, without brushing my teeth or anything, I got in my bed and slept, somehow able to sleep.

It is perhaps a deficiency of humanity for me to admit that my reaction when George W. Bush was elected was similar to that of hearing of a peer's suicide. But for me, I genuinely felt, and feel, like Bush has hurt millions of people through his policies and his rhetoric. I think he has put the lives of many millions more at risk. The thing was, Bush didn't hide what he was thinking; if you were listening, you knew exactly what he was going to do. And what he was going to do scared me to death.

What he has actually done has scared me even more.

4 anarchists sharing 2 guitars

Yesterday Evan was doing a show at the Mercury Cafe, on Chicago Ave. The place was large and, though most of the seats were taken, it somehow seemed unfilled. The cast of characters inside was exactly what I have learned to expect from one of Evan's shows.

First, there was hair of all colors. There were dreads, mohawks, rat tails, etc. The general theme in terms of clothing was "grunge", both literally and reminiscent of the music culture. There was a ripe smell, which was not unexpected given the number of people who had most certainly hitchhiked there and/or had slept in the streets.

I was surprised at how much the clothing and accessories (earrings, industrials, nose rings, eyebrow rings, lip rings, as well as studded belts, collars, bracelets, and clothing) evoked violence. There were several people in camo, a number in combat boots, some in motorcycle-gang-style jackets, buzz cuts, etc. Yet, it had all been modifyed to convey a message of peace. One kid who wore full camo also had patches that had anti-Nazi symbols. One woman wore a intense jacket - right out of the punk scene - that had "Anti-Racist Activists" emblazoned on the back in what I can only describe as an outlaw font.

Many of the songs, too, used violent language - revolution, fight, attack, destroy - to convey a message of egalitarianism and peace (eventually, at least). One singer, Shannon, sang a song about being a creative feminist, as opposed to a destructive feminist. But, she was quick to point out, she was not "knocking anger", anger has a place, she said.

It is a remarkable thing, I realize, that these people can absorb all of the anger and hatred in this world, and then project this vision of an undivided world, filled with understanding, peace, justice. True: the message is clothed in violence, like a long syringe used to inject medicine. But what else should we expect? A child who hears only the language of anger will speak always in anger, even if they are speaking about love.

Hey Bri I'm an anarchist, Part 2

Evan became an anarchist sometime during middle school, but it didn't become a defining feature until high school. He went to a sort of artsy school, did theatre with an "re", and started playing music. I think the artsy environment helped him a lot - the two of us have always felt, I think, somewhat like outsiders, and his school was filled with other outsiders. I also think that the school helped to foster his anarchist philosophy.

It is strange that Evan went to Swarthmore. It is strange because Swarthmore was one of my top choices, and yet I never really knew that he was looking there. Our friendship was almost frozen in boyhood; when we were together, we weren't really applying to schools, certainly not graduating high school. We were maybe, maybe in middle school, but often still playing video games like we did when we were young.

But, in any case, it was, as far as I could see, at Swat that Evan really developed some intellectual basis for his anarchism. I mean, certainly he read Zinn and others in high school, and he was active in the anti-war movement, but his passion though righteous and certainly genuine, was not entirely reasoned. That is not to say that it was adolescent or stupid, merely that, in high school, we do not feel like our feelings need to be justified to a broader world. If they can be justified, where is the rebellion?

I confess that I know very little about anarchist philosophy, and most of that which I do know is through Evan. I know now who Emma Goldman was, though I have read none of her work. And, as an economics major, I was not exactly receptive to Evan's views. He was calling Kerry a coward and a fascist for voting for the war; I was working for Kerry's campaign.

But over the years, though I still disagree fundamentally with his view of human nature - I guess I am more of a Hobbesian than I'd like to admit - I understand where he is coming from much more than I used to. I understand, now, what it means to be so frustrated with the system that breaking the system down and rebuilding it from scratch seems like a reasonable option.

Evan's views have become more like mine as well, in a certain way. He is now very concerned with being effective; the "if you are concerned about practicalities than you are not being true to your principles" reasoning is gone. And he recognizes the strengths of other methods; he is glad that some people are working on legislative paths to change, and that others are working on changing corporate practices. Those are things that must be done. He just feels that someone also needs to be standing up for revolution.

Now, to be clear, I, and Evan, use the term "revolution" in a somewhat figurative sense, to mean a complete and swift overhaul of the status quo. Which does not in anyway mean violence. Evan, like most of his anarchist friends, abhors violence. Anarchists are almost all vegetarians, and most, I would say, are vegans. They will not condone the killing of a chicken, much less a human being. So when Evan speaks of revolution, he is speaking of a world in which people, through individual actions, refuse to support the current system and ensure that another system is put in place. The revolution is not one of killing off the leaders of the society, but of rewriting the social contract and having every member of society ratify it anew.

Hey Bri, I'm an anarchist

Evan and I became friends over spy gear. It was during one of those periods in Kindergarten that is explicitly set off for free time. I don't know where those times went; I want some time explicitly earmarked for free time.

I used to read books about spies and detectives. Magazines too, I think. One of them had a diagram for this clever way to spy on people: cut two eye holed in a newspaper, so you look like you're reading the paper but actually you're spying on people. I was building such a device, unperturbed by the fact that seeing a 6-year-old kid reading a newspaper would be more suspicious than seeing a kid staring at someone, when this kid - I have no recollection what he looked like - came up to me. That kid turned out to be my best friend, even as we switched schools. That kid was Evan.

Soon, our duo was made a trio with the addition of Bennet. We did boy things. Nerd-boy things, but boy things. Like building snow forts and wrestling/fighting/finding creative ways to hurt each other. Also, there was, often, Magic: The Gathering and occasionally Dungeons and Dragons. Computer games became popular one computer games started to exist (it is strange to think that I grew up in a time when SimCity was considered good graphics).

Politics was no where in that whole sequence. Certainly I was the most political of the bunch. Evan was vaguely Democratic, but certainly not passionate.

As we went to different elementary and middle schools, we ceased to be involved in each other's day-to-day lives. I could not, therefore, place the moment that Evan became an anarchist.

Some thoughts on Scav

Most teachers know nothing about Scav. If they do, they are often against it. Many students, even, have only vague understandings of it. Though large, Scav involves only a small fraction of the students on campus.

Yet, I think Scav is the epitome of the U of C. It is, at least, the school's nature distilled into an eau de vie. And in that essence is contained the contradictions of this place: it is the biggest engineering project at a school without engineering. The people who miss class to participate are often the most studious people. It is a huge social event, which includes a large and alcohol-blurred party, yet most people who do it are, or at least were in high school, not terribly social people and certainly not huge partiers. It is the purest form of concrete - relying on tangible objects - at a school that prides itself on its focus on the theoretical - we sell shirts that say "That's fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?".

Scav is not just for nerds, though, far from it. First of all, whatever my reputation in high school, I hardly count as a nerd at U of C. Second, many people participate only for the party, which has a theme that requires extensive construction of costumes. Some people only do ScavOlympics, items that are vaguely athletic (although often they are not - one item was to eat an entire crave case of White Castle sliders). Some only do a few items, others sleep in the war room. Some help out by sewing things and putting makeup on people as part of costumes. Others spend the whole four days with a power tool in their hands (note that the latter are almost as likely to be females, and the former almost as likely to be males). Some just want an excuse to drive halfway across the country and back in three days. Others just want to stay in one room, fiddling.

After reading Wilfred Owen, I am hesitant mix war metaphors with ideas about camaraderie and honor. But I feel that the entrenchment that comes from Scav really does force people to work together and learn about each other. People, often people who are not involved at all, will bring extra food back from the dining hall in order to help feed the Scavvies. People meet others from different years and different dorms (occasionally - some people from dorms that have weak teams will join other teams to get a chance to compete). Rivalries are forgotten, friendships forged, sacrifices made for one's brethren. All in the name of Scav.

Of course, many places have their own testaments to uselessness. People run around naked, or have zany contests that require building robots that play soccer, or stuff like that. One could argue that the most ubiquitous celebration of uselessness is Spring Break, with its boobs and its sun and its drinking. Certainly nothing useful there. And I am not arguing, not yet at least, that Scav is superior to any of those other methods of dealing with this absurdly pragmatic, grounded, finite society. But it is the method that best fits the U of C. It is academic as well as anti-academic, full of knowledge and exploration. Every item is an experiment, an essay in the original meaning of "a try" or "a go" as in "give it a go". It is quite possible that the things I learned during Scav, as a team member and as a captain, will be more valuable to me than anything I learned in my economics classes. Certainly as a captain I learned more about how to lead a team (or, in my case, how NOT to lead a team, but that knowledge is just as valuable) and how to create a budget and raise money and set and keep deadlines than in any of my individual classes.

So maybe we should just have Scav instead of class.

An Undisguised Rant

U of C students have no sense of Chicago's geography. We think in terms of El stops, not neighborhoods, because anywhere we go is a train ride away. We call Lakeview "Belmont", because the Red Line stop is "Belmont". Of course, this is also the CTA's fault. A lot of things are the CTA's fault, but I'll limit myself to the naming of stations. Before they recently created the Pink Line by renaming part of the Blue Line the Pink Line, there were two stops on the Blue Line called "California", and three called "Western". See, the names refer to the cross-streets. The problem is that the three branches of the Blue Line crossed California Ave twice and Western three times. Then, of course, the Green Line also crosses California, so there's a California stop on the Green Line as well. There's a Chicago stop (yes, in Chicago there's a street named "Chicago") on the Blue, Brown, and Red lines, as well as an Addison on the Blue, Brown and Red, and a 47th street stop on the Green and Red. There are two Grands, several Ciceros, and a couple Irving Parks, neither of which is near Irving Park (which I haven't been able to find).

This is all just to say that U of C students, when they mean "Wicker Park", the neighborhood near very small park of the same name, they say "near the Damen Blue Line stop." Which is where I am. At Filter, a trendy coffee shop on the North Side.

Filter used to be a real coffee shop where people went to read and write and talk. Now, as one of my teachers says, it's a place where people go to look like they're writing so that hipsters will hit on them. But, Gourmand was closed, and Bourgeois Pig was not an option, so Filter it was.

See, there are no good coffee shops in Hyde Park. None. The Med's "coffee shop" has four, yes four, tables, and you can't get food to eat there. Third World Cafe is ok, but it's often slow, the seating is not great, and it closes at the ridiculously early hour of 7:30. Plus the music is very soft-rock. Istria is ok, except it's pretty far from campus, it's small, and the decor they chose could be described as "operating-room meets Ikea", all colors and stainless steel. In any case, they don't have any couches or comfortable chairs.

Like so many things related to student life, the University has to manufacture coffee shops. They heavily subsidize several on campus, including Einstein's Bagels. However, though I have doubts about the Econ dept. here, they are right on one thing: if people don't have an incentive to do their jobs, they won't do them. The service is often poor, and with good reason: I wouldn't work hard if I was getting 7 bucks an hour with no possibility of advancement. Most of the "student-run" coffee shops close before 5. Of the two that stay open late-ish, one, in the library, is not even a real coffee shop. The other, Uncle Joe's AKA Hallowed Grounds, is the closest thing to what I need: they have decent coffee (now, at least), couches, and lots of seating. However, their music is awful for working. Even when the music is good, the click-clacking coming from the three pool tables is terribly distracting. The furniture is falling apart, and not in a good way, and outlets are inconveniently located and often don't work.

And so, I, like many U of C students, must leave campus to find a chill work environment. That is why I am at filter, sitting next to two guys who are evidently working on a movie. One guy, who looks 30 or 35, talks and dresses like he's 20. Then, for some reason there are lots of kids running around. And some UIC kids who sat a few seats away from each other but insist on having a discussion, to the annoyance of the people unluckily sitting between them.

Now, to a great extent, the lack of coffee shops and other retail options is the fault of the university itself. When the Music Box, a great indie cinema on the North Side offered to buy the old movie theater that has been closed for a number of years, the University, which owns the building, said no. They didn't want to threaten the Max Palevsky Cinema located in Ida Noyes Hall. The University has its own barber, its own pub, its own hotel, and its own convenience store (which is poorly run - atrociously run). All of these push out external entrepreneurs. This is the home of economic liberalism, but Bart Mart, the only thing on campus or near campus open after 12 (except the aforementioned Uncle Joe's), is a university-sanctioned monopoly. Any econ prof here could tell you that the effects of that would be undersupply as the monopolist earns economic profits. Well, Bart Mart is always understaffed and understocked, not to mention overpriced. And the University, which owns practically everything around campus, doesn't allow another convenience store to open up nearby and offer better service and better prices. Perhaps the U of C needs to start practicing what it preaches.

Harper: the first existentialist?

I'm sitting in Uncle Joe's doing work. Behind me punk/alt/hipster music is blaring too loud from the stereo. Don't try to get them to change it though, they'll just get defiant - they work there, they get to choose the fucking music!

In front of me, a guy in dark blue jeans and a slightly too casual collared shirt lies sleeping on a couch by the window. His mouth is agape, his head resting on a puffy black coat. His hands are resting on the keyboard of his laptop. His fingers are still on the keys, frozen mid-word.

This is the U of C: working too much to actually be productive. How many times have I worked until the point where I started to doze as I was typing, only to force myself to alertness to find the last paragraph is filled with typos and grammatical mistakes?

It's spring: BA time, and this guy is probably on the 5th draft, revising page 25 of 35. But wouldn't it be more productive to just go home and sleep in a real bed? Or even just close the computer, and curl up by the always-on radiator?

Spring is usually a great quarter. In November, 50-degree weather is freezing, but in April it's balmy (though it's snowing right now). So everyone is outside, in light jackets, then sweaters, then t-shirts, playing frisbee and reading. Spring is a college catalog, more than fall, since we don't start fall quarter until the very end of September.

The flowers are out, too, which makes this gray city so much more bearable. Everyone's a birdwatcher in Spring, too, as the robins and cardinals come back. And yet there's still a collective exhaustion; the fourth-years are finishing their BAs and coming to terms with their inescapable graduation, while the underclassmen aren't used to the winter yet, so have been worn down more.

I always think, in spring, about the need for contrast in life, the misery and the joy being intrinsically connected. Spring would not be spring if it were not preceded by winter. I need to read more Camus, I think, though I've read most of his fiction, at least.

Maybe that's what the U of C is: a prescient embodiment of the absurd. Anticipating Camus, Rockefeller and Harper and their ilk decided to build this grand, old-looking institution in the New City of America, still on the frontiers of civilized America, in the middle of prairies and farms. They would use a radical view of education and Democracy to teach the likes of Aristotle and Augustine. And in the dead, cold, gray stone buildings, decorated with nonliving demon gargoyles, they conceived of great living, Holy Discourses being instilled within every mind, actually inspired to vigor by the stagnation around them.

UnCommon Response

The students were standing on the quad that cold snow-covered December because the UnCommon application is a symbol and an expression of what it means to be a U of C student. A friend of mine who works at the Admissions Office told me how the Dean of Admissions, Ted O’Neill waxes poetic on the existential meaning of the UnCommon app. It’s on different paper, he points out, and it has a different font. It’s contained in a package that is visually different from other applications. The tone is different, almost playful. Here are the instructions for the essay question on the Common App:

This personal statement helps us become acquainted with you in ways different from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will demonstrate your ability to organize thoughts and express yourself. We are looking for an essay that will help us know you better as a person and as a student. Please write an essay (250–500 words) on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below. Please indicate your topic by checking the appropriate box below.

And here’s the UnCommon App:

Then choose one of the five extended essay options and respond to it in a page or two...This is your chance to speak to us and our chance to listen as you tell us about yourself, your tastes, and your ambitions. Each topic can be addressed with utter seriousness, complete fancy, or something in between—it’s your choice. Play, analyze (don’t agonize), create, compose—let us hear the result of your thinking about something that interests you, in a voice that is your own.

To develop this year’s extended essay options, we emailed the students who had been admitted last year and asked them for topics. We received several hundred responses, many of which were eloquent, intriguing, or downright wacky. As you can see by the attributions, the questions below were inspired by submissions by your peers.

The Common App tells you what your essay will do (“demonstrate your ability” etc.) while the UnCommon is giving you a “chance to speak”. The Common tells you what they are looking for. The UnCommon gives you the choice. The Common gives you “250-500 words”, and the UnCommon gives you “a page or two”. The UnCommon tells you to play! For God’s sakes it uses the phrase “complete fancy”. Complete fancy!

This difference in tone does not go unnoticed. I’ve talked to countless students who cite the UnCommon App as the only one that was fun. In a million years, before I heard about U of C, I would never have used “college application essay” and “fun” in the same sentence. At the U of C, even the application to get in is seen as an opportunity for personal intellectual growth, and personal intellectual growth is supposed to be fun.

I remember vividly my UnCommon essay. I liked U of C a lot when I visited, so I was applying there and to Harvard for Early Action (you find out early, but you don’t commit to anything). I was also applying to Yale, Swarthmore, and GW.

Except for the U of C, all the schools had very similar essays (or, even identical essays in the case of those that used only the Common App). They were all along the lines of the first option on the Common App: “Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.” It might as well have read: “Bullshit for 250-500 words. The best bullshitter wins.”

I wrote about a community service project I led, and how I learned new things and expanded my horizons, blah, blah, blah. At first I tried to tweak it to fit the U of C essay, but it sounded forced and dull, because it was. Maybe, I thought, I could fit the essay better to one of the other options.

As I reread the essay options, and reread them again, it hit me. One of the questions had this spark, a little reference that I clung to, and from that I extrapolated a story. Really, it was the first time I had ever done that. I wrote a story, about a guy who runs into this sketchy motel to get out of the rain, and goes up the elevator to the second floor, only to find that the laws of physics don’t apply up there. Objects float and hover and go right through each other.

Of course, I was entering the U of C as a physics and public policy double major, so I never thought of the story I wrote as part of a larger change in my personality. But now I see it as one example of the writer that was dormant within me, only needing the wet cobblestones of Paris to awaken. Though I'm sure I would see it filled with flaws now, that essay was one of only two pieces of writing from before college that I ever really liked.

And that was all the essay questions. Here I was, this strange combination of conformist and outcast, trying desperately to give the admissions committees what they wanted, whatever that was, and I simply couldn't do that with U of C. They wouldn't let me, and so I had to explore other options. I had to learn, learn about myself. Because at the U of C everything is an opportunity to learn.

Scav Rally and a Homecoming

Last night I went to the Scav rally at my old dorm, Snell-Hitchcock. Since I moved out last year, along with most of my close friends, I have never felt comfortable going back to Hitchcock. It is always strange coming back to a place that is so familiar and yet slightly strange. The signs are different, there is new furniture in the rec room, and of course new people walking the halls.

That awkwardness was heightened by the nature of the event. I was Scav captain for the previous two years. Ok, to explain Scav, I'd need pages and pages, but the brief explanation is this:

There is a list of items, and teams compete to get the items, just like a normal scavenger hunt. However, the items are not normal. Often they're not items at all. Sometimes there'll be some code you have to break, or some performance you have to do. One item was to eat your own umbilical cord. Another was to get a real tattoo that said "Sorry about the syphilis, can we still be cousins?" Others are real items, a walk-in kaleidescope, for example, or a Tesla coil that can transmit power across the Midway (although we faked that last one; turns out actually doing it would require tons of electricity and would be both dangerous and highly illegal). On top of that, there is a road trip that can travel up to 1000 miles, picking up/stopping by items along the way. Of course, no one tells you which items are road trip items. That would be too easy.

The way Scav goes, the list comes out on midnight of the Wednesday before Mother's Day. Judgement Day is Sunday at 12. In those 84 hours, the teams must complete hundreds of items ranging in point value from .01 points to lambda points to hundreds of points. Of course, the points are all relative, so it doesn't really matter. Many people don't sleep if they can help it. Classes are often, uh, forgotten, as is homework. Which, at the U of C, is significant.

See, the only thing more important than work is work no one grades. Scav is not easy, it is sometimes even not fun (though terribly fun on the whole). But the delight comes from the fact that the whole endeavor, and it is an endeavor, is fruitless. Of course, it isn't; even if most of the items are destroyed at the end, the memories last. But it is fruitless in the sense that the fruit of the labor is not the purpose of the labor. The work itself is the reward, and that, it seems to me, is the nirvana of this absurd world of higher education, where resumes and cover letters are woven into the very fabric of our minds, strange rough threads in an otherwise smooth piece of silk.

Obviously, I am passionate about Scav; it is more than four days in May for me, it is a statement about society and our future. It is a confirmation of my faith in humanity, that we can be such silly creatures. Dictators are not silly. Genocide is not silly. Our silliness is directly connected to an environment of peace and a hope for the future. For these reasons, I was a captain of the Snell-Hitchcock Scav team for two years.

Now, as I return no longer a resident of the dorm, I am not sure of my footing. As a 4th year and a former captain, I feel like I should be giving advice, like every word that leaves my mouth should be to help the team. Yet, I am a foreigner, now. I know maybe half the people in the room, and many of them I am not all that friendly with; three years of dorm drama has taken its toll. And I do not want to be one of those captains who can't let go, who assumes some kind of authority like an ex-President calling up the White House to put in his two cents on how the current guy is doing.

But I am there because I was invited to give a speech and share a story. As I am talking, it all comes back to me: the War Room, the team headquarters that is covered in tarps and sleeping bodies as well as spilled paint, pretzels that have been crushed on the floor, half-finished items, and electrical cords leading to unseen machines. The feeling of waking up one morning to find that the Green Room, our house lounge, has been transformed into central command for a great endeavor, talking about Scav this feeling comes back to me. The anticipation is half the fun, the count-down. The power tools, the late nights outside building high-point items, soldering and screwing and hammering and hitting. The communal food that somehow materializes and is devoured in a flash, and the look in peoples' eyes as the present an item they have worked so hard on to a judge, who half the time put the item on the list simply because they thought it would be cool to see a mimeograph machine or a video called "Not Fast Enough Not Furious Enough".

And as I leave, having played my part, I think about how singular the tradition of Scav is, how unique to the U of C. And I can't wait for May.