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.