S&M for the Ivory Tower

My parents and grandfather have a comfortable routine at home where they eat dinner, do dishes, watch one episode of a television show on a rented DVD, and head down to bed. It's very homey and companionable.

The only difficulty is in finding a television show that all three of them can watch. My grandfather is a little more deaf than he likes to admit, so it has to either have English subtitles or be blasted at "oh, the poor neighbors"-level volume (usually, both). It can't have any sex in it or it offends my mother and grandfather's sensibilities. A certain level of violence is acceptable, but anything graphic or upsetting is too much for my mother.

One of the sort-of compromises we occasionally watch is Law and Order, and in a recent episode, I found a surprising cultural reference.

Detective Whatever-His-Name was investigating a neuroscientist who became obsessed with a serial killer she was studying, and he searched her apartment for evidence that she was in a sadomasochistic, submissive relationship with him. The evidence he found?

A Yukio Mishima novel, which he called "domination porno for intellectuals."


I love that not only did mainstream American popular culture make a Japanese literature reference, they got it totally right.

Cambridge/Capitalism

I am sitting in a Starbucks, drinking something extremely warm, sweet, creamy, and minty. It's bustling and warm in here, and their Christmas decorations are still up. The baristas are all cute in girl-next-door ways (the pudgy indie girl, the bespectacled brunette, the delicate-boned middle-aged lady).

This JASCy photo was taken outside the original Starbucks in Seattle! (60th JASC Seattle site wooo.) My dumb grin in this picture is immortalized in JASC publicity materials!

I'm here because I got a Starbucks card as a holiday present (yippee), but I don't think I'll come back. Not because the coffee isn't delicious (it's sooo goood--please see the following YouTube video to experience the full extent of the goodness of this coffee), but because I can't overcome my guilt at knowing that I'm destroying Harvard Square.


This is how good the coffee is. So good.

Harvard Square used to be, and to some extent, still is, a quirky little neighborhood full of weird and stylish stores and cafes. Some of my absolute favorite local fixtures are Little Tibet, which has had a "Going Out of Business" sign up for two years running, Oona's, the trashiest thrift store in the world (I'm going to miss their $2 shirts sooo much), the Garment District (filthy, hideous clothes for $1.50 a pound!), and most of all the Harvard Book Store, with their bargain and remainder basement (this is where at least 50% of my discretionary spending goes).

But there's no question that Harvard Square is changing. Some of the biggest fixtures are now Au Bon Pain, Chipotle, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts... There's something sad about it. A lot of the charm of Cambridge is in the dives, the student hangouts, the more-pretentious-than-thou cafes, the obscure used bookstores. When we patronize the enormous corporations that move in, we help erase that and turn Cambridge into something indistinguishable from the rest of America.

So no more Starbucks for me. My conscience can't take it. The next time I want to study somewhere with caffeine outside my room, I'm going to Cafe Pamplona. It's on my way to class, so I've walked past it almost every day for three years, but I've never been inside. I'm beginning to think about all the things I'm going to regret not seeing or doing in Cambridge. While I know I'll miss all the funny little shops and students hangouts, I'm sure I won't regret not spending more time in Starbucks.

BurritoQuest 2008

At midnight, some night last week (they all start to blur together in a haze of sleepless misery), I decided that what I needed was a burrito. So I went out to our beloved neighborhood taqueria, the favorite of college students here because it serves delicious Mexican food until 2 A.M. And I documented the process.

Here is my world, on a December midnight:

I live in the Tower. I love looking up and seeing lights on and imagining what sort of people are inside.

Someone decorated a tree in our courtyard with Christmas lights.


Dunster.
The view across the Charles.


An advertising display for Starbucks.
The Garage, home of the cheapest food around.


My favorite! This tree is decorated with lights year round.


Returning home, the halfway-decorated tree in our dining hall.

I'm going to miss this place a lot when I have to leave.

Brrrr cold!

Monday was sunny; Tuesday was cloudy. Then Wednesday and Thursday inexplicably descended into wintry despair. It's better today, the expected high is in the low 50s (degrees Fahrenheit).

I am devoting a post to the banalities of weather in part because I came across this picture of a snow monkey (also known as a Japanese macaque, though I tend to think of them as spa monkeys). I also happen to believe that weather is far from banal. It determines what I do and colors how I feel; to say that it's mere backdrop to my life is to ignore just how often it intrudes into the foreground. I didn't realize this until I came to college, when the vagaries of New England weather made a wreck of my winters. I thought about investing in a sun lamp.

When it's cold -- not so much that I can't think of anything but the ache in my ears but enough that I instinctively hunch inwards -- I am reminded of home, the familiarity of a brick house and the warmth of the kitchen. I think of Thanksgiving, Cowboys game on the TV, and my parents' cooking. I'm idealizing, of course: my parents routinely turn the thermostat down to save money and energy, so our house is often punishingly cold, the Cowboys haven't been worth watching since their glory days in the early 1990s, and I have spent every Thanksgiving in the last three years away from home (each time building on this nostalgic longing).

This year, though, I'm going home on November 26th. So, each day I walk through the Yard, shivering and kicking fallen leaves, is one day closer to home.

Thanks to the economy, I have no future

My last post was a bit abstract, so here is a very real speculation on the state of my life after graduation.


After four years of learning, privilege, toil (however you choose to describe my college education), I am finally ready to enter society as a theoretically functional individual. In June 2009, I graduate. In my Panglossian fantasy, my parents and I celebrate, I receive a fellowship to study in China for a year, and then I move onto law school.


Given near-paralysis of the credit market, however, many of my fellow graduating students that would have entered the investment banking industry are now considering other options, like graduate school or fellowships. All of a sudden, my idyllic little pasture is overcrowded with starving sheep, as it were. Competition drives evolution; it drives the market. What emerges is a more efficient equilibrium. Competition is, essentially, a "good" thing.


But competition also causes profound instability and dislocation. And my lizard brain is intensely insecure about my survival. What is the back-up to my flimsy plans? The prospect of going home to live with my parents is frightening: disappointment and shame within an enclosed space would invariably lead to madness. I could find odd jobs here and there (assuming that Barnes and Noble would even hire a simultaneously overqualified and inexperienced college graduate), apply to law school, and wait out the year. I could pack up, move to Shanghai, and eke out a living tutoring English in China's new Gotham. Or simply live overseas as one of those disaffected young expatriates that populate Hemingway's novels.


Clearly, my speculation has reached the realm of fantasy. It got so bad that, while trying to have the same conversation with Rachel a few days ago, we ended up talking about launching crime syndicates -- planting poppies in the power-vacuum of post-war Afghanistan and the kind -- in lieu of legitimate post-graduation plans. We kid, of course, but it's a rather dark sort of humor.


And alright, I acknowledge that ultimately I am speaking from a privileged position, and that this rant veers on the melodramatic. My problem is not at all unique; it's one that all college graduates face. After investing so much (of my parents' money) into my (questionably productive) education, what do I do with my life that will validate my parents' sacrifice and my self-worth?

Nancy's room

This looks marginally more welcoming than when I first moved in. I still don't have spare furniture, but the walls are looking decidedly less institutional!

This is my "Turkish harem" corner. That is, as soon as I get more pillows and gauzy fabric and Turks.

Just kidding. Maybe.

This is currently my favorite thing on my wall right now. In case it's not clear from the photograph, the poster reads: "E-COW-NOMICS: Economic Models Explained with Cows."

In a rare display of spontaneity, I bought a pot of orchids.
This picture doesn't really do the blooms justice (the color looks bizarrely artificial), but the plant is poetically beautiful. The great thing about orchids, or at least this particular subspecies, is that they are hardy and thrive in mediocre conditions. Not at all the fragile beauty that I had assumed them to be, and I find that very charming.

Boston JASC Reunion, Part Deux

Monday starts bright and early. Which is to say we all woke up around 11 in the morning and barely left my dorm by noon. The following posters grabbed our attention at the subway stop:

Yes, the first ad does in fact say, "COULD YOU SPARE SOME DNA?" And while mitosis does happen, it is really meiosis that makes reproduction with genetic variation possible. I digress. Fascinated by this fantastically-concocted ad campaign, we actually looked up spore.com upon our return and discovered, to our disappointment, that it is merely another computer/Playstation game in the take-control-of-a-civilization-and-lead-it-to-greatness tradition. It's hard to say, in retrospect, what we were expecting. But had it been advertisement for a sperm-donation service, I would have been quite satisfied.



This is a (staged though nonetheless evocative) shot of Schlachet mourning his camera. Apparently, "the flash setting cannot be changed." Both Rachel and I are technologically hapless and in no way tried to help.



Rachel entrusted her camera to me, so the first thing I did with it is take awkward self-portraits. Here we are on the subway. Rachel demonstrates how to properly make a fish-face. I fail.




I like taking pictures of produce stands. I think they are beautiful. Hopeful and reassuring.



The long subway ride takes us to Jamaica Plains, which Rachel assures us is a charming neighborhood, but we are both unfamiliar with the area, and the process of finding lunch was more arduous than we had expected. Here, we stumble into a grocery store, in which Rachel contemplates "Old Bread, Reduced" for lunch fare.



JASC never really leaves us.



We ended up at Fiore's Bakery, which exceeded my expectations and made me wish to return many times (irrationally so, as the trip to Fiore's takes a good hour or so, even on a good day). We pose for a group picture before we dive into our respective sandwiches: from left to right, the Sophia Loren, the Mobster, and the Gobbler. Yummy.



After our satisfying meal, we take a little detour to the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. The sprawling greens are calming, though not quite what I would have expected an arboretum to be. In my youth (haha, I speak as if I am long past that age), I went to the arboretum with my parents several times and remembered a profusion of colors, flowers competing against each other to be noticed. It was, however, a wonderful walk, and we return to the gate for another group picture.




And this is really the highlight of our day. Rachel, by some stroke of brilliance or divine inspiration, suggests that we visit the Museum of Bad Art, which, ladies and gentlemen, does exist. Albeit in the basement of a community theater in Dedham. Where is Dedham? That's a good question. And the best answer we can give you is that it is approximately 1 hour in subway ride and another 25 minutes on a bus from Cambridge. The admissions is free. But, in retrospect, I would have been willing to pay a hefty price for a ticket, both in support of unintentional artistic failure and in appreciation of my opportunity to witness some stunning artistic failures.



Nancy: What is this?
Josh: What is this? "Mexican in Tiananmen Square"?


Point for Josh.
(Also note that the Museum Curator has accidentally misspelled "Tian'anmen".)
We saw many other pieces of artwork, so earnest and so repulsively bad. I could try to describe them here, but any attempts on my part would dilute the spectacle that was the Museum of Bad Art.



We take a walk around historic Dedham. Houses from the 1830s and earlier. We were not impressed and sought shelter in an independent coffee shop. Here, Rachel and I indulge ourselves in a moment of photographic mutual admiration: we take pictures of each other.




Our drinks: white chocolate raspberry truffle latte, raspberry lime rickey, junior mint latte. And also peace signs.


OMG!
We decide to open a bar in Japan. I'm not sure we were really kidding.