Fall semester 2009 played host to great feats of student journalism excellence. It also featured several callous fights and a spate of blunders that made j-students both grimace and blush.  It was a typical term.

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As students begin to sober up and look toward spring 2010, here is a quick glimpse back at the highlights and lowlights within collegemediatopia in S1AY09-10.***  The first award is below.  (Check back for more over the next few days.)

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Most Industrious Reporting: Yale Daily News & Pitt News (tie)

The Daily News boasted regular scoops and extremely thorough reporting as the top news outlet, student or professional, covering the tragic killing of Yale graduate student Annie Le.  As a Poynter feature quoted one reader proclaiming, ”I have been following this story from Austin, Texas, and time and again I find myself on the YDN site because this is where the truly excellent reporting has been.”

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Meanwhile, the Pitt News covered G-20, 360. A crackerjack team of student editors, reporters, videographers, photographers, bloggers, and tweeters braved crowds, the elements, and even tear gas and the police to provide round-the-clock, multimediated coverage of nearly every facet of last September’s G-20 political summit in Pittsburgh.  As Pitt News editor in chief Drew Singer told me, “No other news organization in the world was providing as thorough and expedient description of things as they happened than we were.”

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Runner-up honors go to The Student Life at Washington University in St. Louis. Staffers at the paper used their student connections and new media savviness to cover the now infamous Chicago bar racism incident in-depth and from numerous angles. They posted the insta-famous Rejected, Admitted photos and had their opening story on the alleged blow to Civil Rights picked up by HuffPo and a host of other national outlets.

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Separate kudos to California j-students who covered and editorialized about the tuition hike announcement fallout statewide.

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*** Semester one, academic year 2009-10 for those playing at home.

The evidence of a link between Alzheimer’s and CJD is definitely beginning to stack up.  I find it interesting because my mother’s mother has Alzheimer’s disease.  When my mother was still alive, she was fascinated with AD and felt strongly that it had to do with amyloid plaques on the brain.  She also thought it had to do with her mother’s fatty Polish diet… I’m not sure if that’s true, but that was her theory.  My mother died of CJD, which she inherited from her father’s side of the family.  I’m not sure what this means for me in the long-term, as both of my biological grandmothers suffered from a neurodegenerative disease.

Read the whole article from Washington University in St. Louis.  The new research is promising and helping to connect the dots.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“This interplay between amyloid and the prion protein raises questions about whether these diseases are really all that different, and whether there are common pathways involved in both conditions that can provide an avenue for new treatments,” says lead author Nupur Ghoshal, M.D., Ph.D., an investigator at Washington University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC).

Today my heart became sadden by a study conducted by Washington University in St. Louis and Cornell University. The study reveals 49 percent of all U.S. children will be in a household that uses food stamps at some point during their childhood. The disparity is even more greater for African American children—90% will be clients of the National Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/Food Stamps) at least one time their life by the time he/she turn 20 years of age.

Author Greg Plotkin, at Change.org wrote, “One of the most dramatic examples I’ve seen of the true reach of hunger in the United States.” It makes me wonder how other spent their Thanksgiving holidays. So much food can go to waste, yet children go hungry. I guess my new years resolution, “Get into philanthropy and community involvement,” just found a focus. I found several organizations devoted to children’s improvement:

www.savethechildren.org
www.feedingamerica.org
www.wish.org
www.stjude.org

The study was based on an analysis of 30 years of information taken from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, looking at children between the ages of 1 to 20. Other findings include:
• Nearly one-quarter of all American children will be in households that use food stamps for five or more years during childhood.
• 91 percent of children with single parents will be in a household receiving food stamps, compared to 37 percent of children in married households.
• Looking at race, marital status and education simultaneously, children who are black and whose head of household is not married with less than 12 years of education have a cumulative percentage of residing in a food stamp household of 97 percent by age 10.

For more information on this study, click here. There is a video, in which Mark Rank, Ph.D. discusses his results.

Or to learn about other social issues in the U.S., visit www.change.org. They also have a Facebook and Twitter page.

a guest post by seeNoga.

NOESCO* in a wustlworkshop, photo by stan strembicki

As you doggedly pursue, chase, and snap at the heels of your Self, you do so knowing there is no chance you will ever catch up. For each of us, throughout our individual lives, we will be ever distant from knowing our own selves. When a person pursues his or her Self in an aggressive, determined way, the resulting hyperactive sensibility allows for a greater adaptability and sensitivity. This flexibility can be useful in contemporary human life, but only to a certain extent.  It is also due to the fast-paced nature of today’s engineered environments, that there is a strong tendency (especially among young people) to go to extreme lengths in order to sustain within their own lives the hyperactivity and intensity they witness in popular culture and media. Consider the called-for constant reachability via cell-phones and laptops, as well as many other forms of expedition in our ‘lived-in’ world. These accommodations range from aerodynamics to ATMs. As many workers in today’s professional world simultaneously lament and extol their parasitic relationships with a Blackberry or other such Pocket God, I, too, have at many times felt chained to my laptop (i.e. the Internet), fearing I would miss something absolutely critical. Unfortunately, the fact that missing anything important has not happened for the most part, hardly affects the worry and anxiety that it might happen.

Yet still, it seems, this once motivating anxiety is becoming a repressed urge, one which is less and less a bother, the more my environment becomes one seamless, semi-omniscient “news” feed. On the evening of President Barack Obama’s Address to the Nation, Maya Escobar recorded “Obama Tweet: How a New Generation Gets Their Information.” In this video Escobar documented a particular event, an important cultural event, one which incidentally brought the use of Twitter to the fore in popular culture.

Obama Tweet: How a New Generation Gets Their Information, 2008

I was with Escobar on this evening and was struck by the depth of her interaction with the digital realm. She was sitting in front of a T.V. broadcast of the speech, while she was also further mediating that media via her computer, on which she was following Twitter and CNN.com’s coverage of the event. Beyond all that, Escobar was creating her own real-time, indexical document of the event on television along with CNN and Twitter as instantaneous forms of annotations to the President’s speech. Escobar was watching, sitting one more stage removed, behind the lens of a video camera. Because of the way in which she layered the television screen the computer screen and then the interface of any viewer’s monitor, Escobar has effortlessly choreographed a multi-layered, engagement with the very most current of events. However, though I may have somewhat qualified and rationalized instant-communication tools, I still believe there must be a deliberate effort to complement those socially-prescribed media with other, independent forms of digital exchanges. While I do believe in the great social potential of our rapidly advancing communications media, my work seeks to push and pull on parts of these evolving global ‘informachines,’ in an effort to challenge the omnipresence of commercial media.

Look Out, 2008

That sort of layering of non-dimensional spaces is unique to the contemporary world, with the inception of digital technologies, and this collage-like aesthetic is of great interest to the work of Maya Escobar, as much as it is to my own. Although, unlike the deceptively referential works of my counter-part, in many of my works, I use and refer to popular media sources and specific Internet sites indirectly and rarely with any superficial visibility. It is with great deliberation and much hypothesizing that I curate my works in the manner in which I do. I intend my works to avoid specificity and leave wide-open their readings to a much more self-guided analysis by viewers. In the piece “Look Out,” the projected video came directly from YouTube. I simply cut off the last second of the original video, thus shortening it to 17 seconds. I then prepared it as a video-loop for its installation underneath a staircase at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Because of its placement, where it fills a theretofore, unaddressed space, it is as though the rolling image is part of the museum structure itself. The particular clip, which I chose after viewing dozens of similarly tagged videos (‘storm,’ ‘tree,’ ‘willow,’ and ‘weeping’), was selected for very specific compositional reasons; reasons which are the very same principles of design taught to anyone working in commercial design or the visual arts: complimentary colors, rule of thirds, dynamic composition and varied textures, to name a few. Because of my focused selection process, this video, although created for very different (and unknown) reasons, still fits very well into the installation space as a deliberately designed, and potentially permanent use of what is otherwise a neglected space. The video became part of the stairwell. By existing within a predetermined, architectural frame, it became part of the space, as opposed to sitting on the surface as a painting does.  This projection did not exist in the way that many (most) installations do: as obvious alterations or obtrusive interjections into a space. This work asserts itself as a physical part of the space, as the projector beams through from behind the scrim in the stairwell. It also assumes a living presence, as it reiterates itself, by many reflections and refractions, split and scattered, bouncing around the main hall of the museum. The video functioned as a decorative element but also an illusory window to an outside world, whereas, the space without that piece is simply a pane of glass that looks into the shadowy crotch of a stairwell.  I do not mean every square inch should be taken up for some sort of visual activity or illusionary window. Simply, this work proposes how our constructed spaces, in this case a venue for art viewing, might be reinterpreted. Insofar as, a corner can conceivably become a window, as illusory and impermanent as my particular interpretation may be.

*NOESCO is seeNoga and maya escobar

by Robert Teitelman, for The Deal, November 24, 2009.

The busy folks at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation — the name keeps getting longer – posted a paper Monday with the provocative title: “Do Envious CEOs Cause Merger Waves?” The study, by DePaul finance professor Anand Goel and Washington University in St. Louis finance prof Anjan Thakor, puts forth the theory that CEOs engage in merger activity out of envy of other CEOs who have boosted their company’s size through M&A and thus succeeded in raking in more pay for themselves. Not only that, but that powerful engine of envy is perfectly capable, they argue, of being set off by what they describe as an “idiosyncratic shock,” which seems to be defined as anything that’s not envy-driven, and which then creates a kind of cascade of greedy longing, as one CEO after another engages in a feverish attempt to keep up with the Joneses.

The envy theory is very au courant, taking a bit of behavioral economics, mixing it with some populist stereotypes about CEOs, pay and M&A and some sociological studies on envy and consumption choices. Now does anyone not believe that some CEOs do M&A transactions to get larger, drive the share price up and get paid more? Probably not, though as far as I know, no one can quantify how much exactly M&A is shaped by compensation. And most observers of the M&A scene would say that envy jostles with a small army of other factors when it comes to making the decision to acquire (not to say requires approval presumably from a board, which may not fully share in the CEOs envy drive; in fact this theory only works if shareholders and boards are effectively neutered.) This paper though assumes that envy supersedes all other factors, from the desire to acquire new products and technologies, to the imperative to grab market share or simply take out a rival. Some M&A deals are rational exercises in generating growth; others attempts to drive change…(continue reading)

Ben, Sunil, Rob, Jill, and I all went to bear’s den at midnight. The food eating was rather uneventful, but as we were leaving I ran into an old friend, Shira Sacks. She was wearing a green hoodie and some rainboots, as well as carrying a green umbrella. Having not seen her in some time I commented on her awesome boots, to which she replied “I sloshed through a puddle on my way here.”

My instantaneous response was “DID YOU HYDROPLANE?”

But I couldn’t even finish the sentence, as tiny as it is, before I started laughing. I had accidentally conjured an absurdly powerful mental image of this tiny cute rainbooted woman walking across a puddle and suddenly veering out of control, only to find her face planted into a green railing. The image was so vivid that I couldn’t stop laughing, even when Shira replied with “Fuck you!” and returned to her spot in line.

As we walked out I tried to explain it but found that I couldn’t because I was literally crying. Once I finally got the words out I found that no one else thought it was even remotely funny, but that my crying and poor explanation was mildly entertaining. When we neared home Sunny and Jill split to take a different path, and Ben nearly ran into a green railing.

Rob really wanted to beat Jill and Sunny home, so we started running. As we neared the stairs of our rescollege Rob said “Oh shit, slippers…HYDROPLANE!”

We giggled.

After not having any dreams or daydreams for the past few weeks it seems that they’ve come back. Though I can’t say it’s a causative, there seems to be a correlation between me sleeping (actually sleeping) with women and having creative energy. I hadn’t cuddled with someone for some time and then, the night I did, I had two dreams and have since been being hit during the daytime as well.

YES, MORE WOMAN MUSE PLEASE.

This dream I had last night was remarkable. It was myself, Tristan, and Michael Offerman at a massive dance party. There were some other friends there, but I don’t remember their faces or names, just the feeling. The party had been going for some time when Tristan started to do the Reject. This was no ordinary Reject, though, and as he did it (the Reject is like a backwards Running Man dance move) he actually traveled backwards around the room. Soon he was Rejecting around like an Olympic speed skater, and Offerman and I decided it was high time we joined him.

We began Rejecting around until we caught up with him, and by this time had attracted some more dancers. We were all Rejecting in this giant circle around the circumference of the dance floor when a really absurdly awesome thing happened. Instead of simply doing the Reject in sync, we all sat on each others’ legs, forming this giant Rejecting train of perfectly synchronized people. Eventually the entire dance party joined in and we were one massive, human train of Rejection.

It was so absurd and beautiful that I woke up from it giggling.

Everyone knows the sound of the raver bass. The UHNTZ UHNTZ UHNTZ, when paired with glowsticks, serves to hypnotize both raver and bystander alike, often leading to notoriously phat* dance parties.

Now, in dissecting the workings of a rave or of a random dance party in general, there remains one question. What came first, the raver or the uhntz?

Looking back through our musical and cultural history, it becomes very clear that the raver was the first reagent of the fat dance party. Peasants in the middle ages are even painted doing what is now referred to as “the jerk,” a dance move recently resurrected by The New Boyz in which the dancer appears to run backwards.

A peasant undoubtedly 'Jerking' to his buddy's lute.

More importantly, it was recently discovered by Beethoven experts that his composition “Moonlight Sonata” originally contained an extended part for the organ that looks like an ancestor to the now ubiquitous raver bass. Beethoven scribbled it out, writing over it “until men hold fire, this shall not be!”

He must have had some understanding of the possible consequences of unleashing raver bass during his time period. To release the UHNTZ on the world when the world was not ripe enough for it would cause disaster; revolutions would take place, people would soon lose their morals, and children would begin procreating at the age of 7**.

How can I be so sure of these consequences? By looking at a historical example. In the quiet town of Pompeii in the year 79 AD, life was easy, beautiful, and satisfying. That is, until Vesuvius*** unleashed the largest bass-blasting UHNTZ of all time. The citizens were unable to control

A Pompeiian beatboxing to the UHNTZ of Vesuvius

themselves; they danced so hard that buildings around them burst into flames while they themselves danced into stone form. It is no real surprise, then, that we find the bodies of those who perished in Pompeii in curiously raver-esque positions.

Looking back at our findings, it is interesting to note that the raver was born of humanity and the UHNTZ of nature. The union of these inextricably linked reagents to a good dance party couldn’t be more telling of the human condition; we are, as we always have been, products of the earth. Our dance parties now include fancy and safe sound equipment, but it’s clear that it wasn’t always this way. Humans took to their UHNTZ loving parties wherever they could before the creation of the modern stereo system. It just so happens that the power of the UHNTZ has been watered down from its days as bass thrown from volcanoes, and as such no longer allows us to dance our cities to ruin or our fellow man to dust. Is it better this way?

I leave that discussion to the ravers.

*phat: an American redefining of a psychologically painful insult to make it nice, likely due to the weight problem and our wanting to feel okay about it.

Eww she’s fat.

becomes

Ooo. She’s phat!

**7: as noted by the popular folk-rap duo, Flight of the Conchords, this could result in a “crazy russian doll situation,” as your children’s children would be rather small, and smaller still as the uhntzing continued.

***Vesuvius: This volcano currently takes the cake for having the most people live around it. If it explodes any time soon, as it is likes to do, we can expect UHNTZing of a whole new level.

I’m always hit by this weird wave of thought that makes my head go

“FUCK, MAKE SOMETHING!”

and it’s really starting to make me angry.

More than that, I think it’s making me sleep strangely. I now have class at either 11:30 or 1:00 in the afternoon, and so my sleeping schedule has moved forwards approximately 5 hours. I go to bed around 2 or 3, wake up at 11 or 12, and move on from there. However, I’ve noticed that I am almost impossible to pry out of bed before I absolutely must get out of bed. As a result, I’ve taken to staying up later to get work done, write, work out, etc., and so have continued the cycle.

The strangest thing, by far, is the fact that whenever I’m up at 2:00 in the AM and look at this box of sharpies in my second drawer, I end up writing all over myself. Sometimes it’s random thoughts, sometimes it’s quotes, sometimes it’s pieces of my poetry, written or unwritten. Tonight was especially bad, as I called in one of my friends to write a massive quote down my back and then continued, for about 45 minutes, to write many more on my left arm. I’m multicolored and full of language and I feel good.

But here’s my issue. I’ve been trying to write the archive for this book I want to write. By archive I mean backstory, history, etc., of the world and story I’m weaving. Besides a few brief moments, I haven’t been able to really explode all my thoughts onto paper. HOWEVER, I am frequently overtaken by the urge to write all over myself. Sometimes it’s weird stuff that I didn’t know I had on my mind.

Regardless, it’s really damn annoying that I can accidentally spend an hour tattooing myself with words but can’t find the ones to build a story with.

And I haven’t had any daydreams in a week. What in the hell is going on?

Newswise — Nearly half of American children – including 90 percent of black children and 90 percent of children who spend their childhoods in single-parent households – will eat meals paid for by food stamps at some point during childhood, reports a Cornell researcher.

Nearly one-quarter of U.S. children will live in homes that receive food stamps for five or more years. Food stamps are important indicators of poverty and risk of food insecurity, “two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child’s health,” says Thomas A. Hirschl, Cornell professor of development sociology and co-author of a study published in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (163:11).

The study is based on an analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a 32-year study of about 4,800 U.S. households; it builds on the authors’ 2004 research that reported that half of all Americans will use food stamps during adulthood.

“Children in poverty are significantly more likely to experience a range of health problems, including low birth weight, lead poisoning, asthma, mental health disorders, delayed immunization, dental problems and accidental death,” write Hirschl and co-author Mark R. Rank of Washington University in St. Louis. “Poverty during childhood is also associated with a host of health, economic and social problems later in life.”

It also adds some $22 billion per year in additional health care costs, the researchers report.

And the risk of living in homes using food stamps is far from equitably distributed: Ninety percent of children who live with single parents (compared with 37 percent who live in married and other two-parent households), 90 percent of black children (compared with 37 percent of white children) and 62 percent of those whose head of household did not graduate from high school (compared with 31 percent where the head has more than 12 years of school) “encounter spells of food stamp use,” the authors find.

Putting those risk factors together, the researchers found that 97 percent of black children living in non-married households where the household head has less than 12 years of education will have received food stamps, compared with 21 percent of white children living in married households whose head of household has 12 or more years of education.

“The situation is likely bad for children,” says Hirschl, “because families eligible for food stamps who participate tend to be worse off nutritionally than eligible families who don’t participate.” Only about 60 percent of families eligible for food stamps actually participate, he said, because of the stigma associated with government help. Although the sample used is representative of the U.S. populations, it does not reflect the immigrant population.

The study was federally funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food & Nutrition Service, via the Joint Center for Poverty Research, located at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

I will be presenting Berlin’s Eruv at KAM Isaiah Israel, as part of their World Jewry Program, this Sunday, November 8th. The lecture is open to the public.

video still from interview with Moshe Or

In 2008 I traveled to Berlin as part of exchange program with my University. Prior to this visit, I had never been to Germany- nor did I have any particular reservations about going or not going, but it seemed everyone else had their own opinion on the matter.

“Germany, how can you go there as a Jew?” “There are Jews in Germany? I thought they were all dead?” “You are so brave to go to Germany…”

Ultimately people’s projections as to my intentions for going to Germany became the filter through which I experienced Berlin.

While I was in Berlin I conducted interviews with members of the community concerning the highly visible presence of the monuments and memorials commemorating Jewish life (death) have impacted their individual and communal Jewish identities. Other topics included: the notion of German Jews vs Jews living in Germany and how this differs from an American Jewish identity, their status as diaspora Jews and their relationship to Israel, their thoughts on the European Union, anti-semitism and the widespread use of facebook as a mode of connection.

The title of the piece Berlin’s Eruv is a play on the fact that there is not actually an eruv in Berlin.  An eruv is a rabbinically sanctioned demarcation of space that transforms public space into private space for the purposes of the Sabbath, allowing Orthodox Jews to carry in public places, a practice which is otherwise prohibited. Modern eruvs are often made of wire strung between utility poles, a gesture towards a “walled courtyard,” indicating an enclosed, private space.

Just as the eruv exists in the minds of the people who abide by it, Berlin’s Eruv manifests itself through the conversations surrounding the idea of the piece. The interviews I conducted in Berlin relied on the presence of institutionalized markers of Jewish identity, to give weight to the idea non-presence of the living Jewish community.

Berlin’s Eruv Talk

11/8/09 @ 10:30 am
KAM Isaiah Israel
1100 E Hyde Park Blvd
Chicago, IL 60615-2810
773-924-1234

Mother’s, a popular night club in Chicago, appears to be reinstating Jim Crow laws as they recently barred entry to six African-American patrons. The six students were part of a senior class trip of 200 students from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and had made plans to visit the establishment. Upon trying to entering the venue, the Black students were denied entry and were told it was because their pants were too baggy.

Not believing the hype, a white student switched pants with one of his classmates and tried the entry process again. Lo and behold, the white student was still allowed in while the Black student was left outside.

The students have filed complaints with the Chicago Human Rights Commission, the Illinois Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The management of Mother’s has stated that there is an internal investigation but racism was not the cause. Their concern was reportedly safety issues.

So, here’s the poem.

I took all my daydreams from the past week or so and stitched them together when I was high on stress at 2:00 in the morning. I rather like how it turned out, besides the painful part about hymens. There’s some additional formatting on it, but  it’ll do fine as is. ENJOY.

Light-Headed

Black blazer slack jeans purple collars and white shoes wear

the peach colored fabric of a boy with clammy hands

and a shaking right leg.

He has Asian glow growing before the door

Opens, despite his whiteness and sobriety.  A

poem nestles itself in his ear as he asks in a bouquet tone

what her favorite date is.

Imagination tumbles into vertigo and her lips part and whisper

“Thursdays in September.”

His heart tries skipping merrily but trips over a feeling, crashing

through his chest, grappling for reciprocation. Like a badly timed

high-five, it  looks cooly away and slicks back desire.

Reality punches a hole through his occipital lobe as the door

Opens in slow-motive. His heart reaches through its chest-tunnel and presses

the portal open.

Bathed in hormonal light, he sees her wade through the door

Way. He’s not listening now, but his eyes see her mouthing

“How are you?”

And the daydream punches through his face like a fighter

jet through a hymen. The mind tumbles in free fall, drifting through clouds

of imagery on its collision course with reality. Lips smother the sun; fingers burst through clouds; earth

shadows sky.

Finally the drift settles on a man diving from a ladder.

His purple collar rumpled and pressed to his neck with

invisible resistance and his eyes wild with sun, projecting

blue light. His target lay 15 feet down and 7 feet left; a woman,

dressed as sky, smiling to the sun and the man diving as starfall

toward her.

And the ground struck and the heart-shake was gripped by another and

he was once again aware that she was looking at him, still standing in the door

where she had been when his mind reeled-in the dreams she gave him. His heart stretched through the past to now and rappelled down his esophagus.

“You look…”

And her irises hit horizon and forever until he sat, cradled in their perfect curves and sinking

into the black hole at the center of his new universe, watching the flares of yellow and green become static.

The dream rushed from the base of his spine, a powerful violet light that did not pulsate but simply was,

and showed him an accidental future at a wedding of a friend. He met her there, instead of in this door, and fell to her eyes. They kissed, he blacked out, and awoke a day later with an IV in his arm and an understanding that he was allergic to a part of her. She had stabbed him with epinephrine twice. A violet rash the shape of Africa shadowed his belly, where two punctures seemed to orbit around his navel…

“beautiful.”

And his hand stretched this time, through the dream to her and touched just to

be sure he wouldn’t need to be stabbed twice and IV’d. Relief swept

the stairs free of leaves and they descended together. He didn’t know how

this would go but he had broken the door

So it couldn’t close easily and her fingers had woven into his and she said

“Aren’t you…”

but he heard nothing else as the violet swept his spine free of leaves and

they ascended together through the clouds he fell through and the sun she kissed

and the stars he had fallen and the crushing singularity they had gotten caught in and he

knew he would have to wait to find what she thought because feelings travel as light when first detected

and he may only find out after the blast but he didn’t care because he had opened the

door.

So my life has taken and interesting (and welcome) turn lately. I’m applying to grad schools for PhD programs in bioinformatics/genomics/etc, and have found a few schools that have programs that seem perfect. One of those schools is WashU in St. Louis (where Sam is an undergrad).

My mother, grandparents, and I went to visit Sam last weekend, before which I had contacted a researcher at WashU whose work I am interested in, and asked if he had any work available. Turns out that he did. I interviewed with him last Monday, got the job, and found an apartment the next day.

Now I’m in Midway airport in Chicago, waiting for a flight to take me back to St. Louis. Since the job starts next Monday, I’m spending this two weeks traveling and getting things organized. I visited the gf in Dallas last week, then came to Chicago to talk to those who are writing my letters of recommendation and to other people I knew in college. Now I’m on my way to move into my apartment in St. Louis, after which I’ll drive back to Iowa to get the kitten and the rest of my things. Busy busy.

Once I start work I’ll post a description of what I’ll be doing. My title is “Laboratory Technician,” and I’ll be running a project for which funding was just obtained from a supplemental grant to a larger project. In a nut shell, I’ll be murdering yeast again. Maybe the tagline on my business cards should say “Adam Coster: yeast assassin.”

I was drunk when I decided to create a blog.  Very drunk.  Consequently, when I woke up this morning and found a load of meaningless alpha-numeric figures on my laptop ready to be posted, I was somewhat confused.  Though I don’t remember why I decided to enter the blogosphere in the first place, this seems as good a place as any to vent my frustrations and share stories that are far too long to be condensed into 140 characters on Twitter ().

Last night seems like a good starting point. 

I had been planning on pregaming with a friend of mine - Half ‘n’ Half , let’s call him – and then hitting up the frats.  Unfortunately, he decided to get sick and fall asleep in his dorm, and since I had already turned down a few other people in the expectation of hanging out with him, I was stuck with nothing to do.  I spent the next couple hours flitting from room to room on my floor, chatting with people and trying to alleviate my boredom.  Around 11, with still no sign of HnH, I began furiously texting other people.  One’s phone was broken, another was in a forest, another was in Boston, etc.  My only options were an ugly Hispanic girl and an extremely clingy guy from Seoul.  Great. 

Both options being unacceptable, and finding myself in a disturbingly sober state, I decided to down 5 shots of tequila (and at 5 “6 and 130 pounds, that’ll send me to the moon and back) and head off to ZBT, the local stoner frat, alone.  I took a shot of Everclear for the road.

A brief aside: never, NEVER take a straight shot of Everclear.  It’s 95% alcohol – that’s 190 proof – and is one of the most vile substances ever created.  This was nearly 24 hours ago, and my throat is still sore.  I spent the 10 minutes immediately following salivating overtime in the bathroom and trying not to throw up.  By contrast, my friend, who is 260 pounds and 6 “3 took a shot and threw up three times over the course of one night.  That’s a precautionary tale for you.

Once I felt less like death, I made my way over to ZBT.  It was pretty unremarkable; I drank 5 beers, played some beer pong, hit a hookah set, the usual.  The only highlight was a somewhat attractive brunette I ran into in the bathroom.  She looked to be about as wasted as I was, and the conversation ran something like this:

Me (looking up in surprise): Can I help you?
Her: I need the bathroom.
Me: Occupied.
Her: Oh..

Insert drunken teenage bodies getting closer, and about 3 minutes later, we were fucking on the sink.  She was alright.  I gave it my all for about half an hour, then got bored.  Plus, HnH was finally calling me, and I thought it would be rude to turn him down. I hitched up my trousers, said my goodbye’s, and began to stagger drunkenly home.  Along the way, I called HnH and told him to meet me at my room for more alcohol before going to frat row.

We never made it to the frat parties.  HnH got to my room at around 1:30, and demanded a shot of Everclear when he saw the bottle.  I repeated the story of my friend to him, but he was having none of it.  Five minutes later, he was throwing up into the sink.  He later told me that he was still sick when he came over, but hadn’t wanted to waste his Saturday night.  I decided to cope with the situation by having another shot.  At this point, I could barely stand.

My night continued to go downhill.  Annoyed by HnH’s incompetence, I sent him on his way and texted a girl I hooked up with a couple weeks ago, and asked her if she wanted to hit my volcano.  For those of you who don’t know, a volcano is a beautiful, ridiculously expensive vaporizer.  98% of the THC in weed is extracted and fed straight into your lungs.  German engineering.  It almost conquered the world, twice.

She was only too happy to oblige, and arrived at my room in 10 minutes.  While I was busying myself setting up my baby, she stopped over in my suitemate’s room.  I heard the sentence, “Can one of you come with us?  I don’t want him to rape me, but I really want to get high.”  Wait, what?  The full weight of these words didn’t hit me until the next morning, but I did text my roommate, “PLEse to not leave me alone with him cuts me like a knife.  K thought shr was a friendly person.”  I was understandably distressed.

I only have a hazy memory of what happened next, but I’m pretty sure we hit a few bags, I hit on her, and she left after about 15 minutes, a topic which I’ll cover in another post.  I then blacked out and woke up the next morning to the sound of my roommate shouting about how we had a suite meeting with the RA.

Shitty Saturday.

*All references to underage drinking and marijuana consumption are purely fictitious and were inserted for dramatic effect.

SO

Here’s the deal.

As much as I despise texting for its over-usage and lobotomy of social interaction, it serves its purposes. For instance, one day during the summer I was eating a banana. This fact was so interesting to me that I had to share it with a person I had recently gotten off the phone with. This person being a certain ex of mine who is rather accustom to my idiosyncrasies.

“Listen, bananaface.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m eating a banana. That is all.”

“I thought you were eating a burning sandwich.”

“That was before. Stop living in the past.”

After I reread the texts, I realized I had accidentally made a poem. More than that, I saw after reading it that text does actually carry a large emotional charge, even if it’s a small amount of text. It may be real or only in the mind of the receiver of text, but, regardless, it has an effect on both the conversation and the relationship.

For example, this little excerpt showed me a lot about my relationship with this person, the state we were in, and my own general feelings. Even though I say sarcastically “stop living in the past,” I’m not entirely kidding. More so, this bit of language is not just directed at her, but at myself as well.

Holy shit! Who would’ve thought that analyzing a 5 line texting-based poem would give me so much!

anyways.

I’ve been noticing more and more that people say some really beautiful things on accident, and at an alarming rate. Most of my poetic triggers come from things those around me say, and that I then write down.

It’s such a damn shame that more people don’t keep a book in their back pocket to record interesting things they hear.

“Is that you, pulling meteors from the sky?”

My roomie said this to me while looking over my shoulder as I rained pain onto some gamers. And here’s an interesting daydream I had today:

While walking through one of the dorms on campus, Hurd (for those of you who live here), I saw a sign on the wall that had the question

“What is your favorite type of date?”

or some such phrase.

Immediately upon seeing it I was hit with the weirdest daydream I’ve had in about a week, which is actually rather startling. I saw myself telling a story to a friend of mine, describing an evening with a woman I was clearly infatuated with. According to my daydream, the night had gone well and I had asked her a simple question:

“So, what’s your favorite type of date?”

presumably to use as ammo for the next round. However, here was the response I received:

“Thursdays in September.”

Hmm.

This daydream wrapped itself up in the 6 seconds it took me to get from seeing the sign to outside the door, but I couldn’t shake it. It  felt like it had actually happened, which is creepy, and carried a fair bit of emotional angst. In my interactions with women, specifically those I like, there is always a small sense of terror that fills the space between an asked question and the answer.

“Want to get pizza tomorrow?”

ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit

“Sure!”

*gasps for air

I assume, perhaps wrongly, that this stems from a fear of being rejected.

Hmm.

In any event, it’s a Thursday in September as I write this, and I’m feeling a bit more lucky than normal. Perhaps I’ll move the question forward and find someone to write poetry about over the weekend.

And I asked her, what’s your favorite type of date?

And she said, ‘Thursdays in September.’

Please leave a comment with something random someone said to/around you that had a nice ring to it. It doesn’t have to be epic, just something.

In poetry today, amid talks of emo poets and death and love lost, our teacher passed around a baby shark in a fermaldehyde jar.

This, he explained, was to be our trigger for a poem. He told us we had 15 minutes to write whatever came out and also gave us a few things to include:

female relative

something green

the sound ‘pop’

kitchen

So, after a bit of imagining, I saw my grandmother, Wanda, meandering around in her kitchen. More than that, I began to view her duties as that of a shark pack leader, herself being the matriarch. She finds food, prepares it for the chil’n’s, and watches as we happily devour it. The whole scene flew past my head and I set words to it that rhyme. Hopefully you’ll see her cruising around the same way I did.

Shark Matriarch

Useless legs ache while

she wades through the air

toward the kitchen oven

with a hungry stare.

The heat rolls forward

rolling as a wave

while g-ma’s oven mitts

cut through it like a glaive.

The pastries, forced from their

defensive trenches,

float on a saucer

when one of them flinches.

The children arrive

with mouths agape

Green eyes flashing with

thoughts of pastry rape.

The saucer floats on

oblivious to the sound

of wild hunger popping

from humanoid hounds.

The life raft held steady

on claw like rocks

the cakes have no chance

there’s a wolf in the flock.

Red frosting spills

all over the table top

amid full bellies

and that horrid ‘pop.’

]]> http://herdcat.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/wax-hand/ Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:24:54 +0000 Sam Coster http://herdcat.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/wax-hand/

Bailey and I were walking through the Danforth University Center today when we strolled into a strange looking station. In front of the grand fireplace were two people with DUC uniforms on, along with two bins of ice water and a strange looking series of vats.

“What are you guys doing?” We queried.

“Oh, we’re making wax hands.”

Hmm…

“For what?”

At this question the duo looked at one another, paused, and then shrugged.

“No reason.” said the woman.

Hmm…

“Alright, hook us up!”

We then discussed different hand positions and found, to our chagrin, that we couldn’t get a wax mold of us giving the middle finger. Apparently, that is the only sign that is off limits.

I contemplated doing the Shocker, but decided that such a gesture may be more than most people’s vulgarity meters could handle. After all, I was now planning on mounting this onto my wall.

I went with a good old thumbs up. My happiness was short-lived though, because, as I should have anticipated, the thumb broke off. I had to pull my hand out of a wax version of my hand without exploding it and failed rather miserably.

So now I have a shattered fist the size of a young snapping turtle to mount onto my dorm wall.

Above the bed, or perhaps the window? I’ll take open suggestions. Pictures will be posted later.

Will in front of Wash U's new 'green' building. Where apparently nothing works...

Didn’t I tell you I’d keep you posted?  (har, har)  Anyway…

My trip to Saint Louis was exactly what I needed.  I got to see Will and Rachel (my gift with purchase!) and Laura, got to visit campus and get my Kaldi’s fix, and I even got to pretend I was in college again and flirt drunkenly with cute boys (more on that later).  I’ve had too little sleep to think of a decent structure for this post, though, so I’m just going to go in chronological order, and I’ll analyze/soliloquize at the end.

I love me some gooey butter cake!

It thunderstormed Thursday night, and Will and I had dinner at Brandt’s outside under an awning, while the rain poured down and a band played inside.  Friday it was still pouring but we went on a long walk anyway checking out the new additions to campus, then winding our way through the seminary grounds and stopping at Kaldi’s for coffee and gooey butter cake, and finally pausing at the movies (Star Trek, which was SO good).  By the time we came out the sun had decided to show his face, so we did a little more walking around (the only thing I wanted to do, and something we did a lot of) and then split up so I could shower and Will could go to his freshman floor reunion.  (Apparently it sucked.  Their senior class council sounds pretty lame.  Who knew ours was so on top of things?)  That evening we had burritos on the Loop, and I met a few of Will’s girlfriends, for the first time.  It was an interesting insight into who he is, and the kind of people he surrounds himself with, and I don’t know how exactly I mean that…  Not meanly.  I liked them, and I related to them, and maybe that’s why I’m not sure how to interpret their relationships with Will.  (God, I thought this addition would clarify, but it’s only making me sound more cryptic!)

Saturday I had lunch plans with Laura.  She drove in from Columbia, MO, and we had tapas in Clayton.  It was lovely.  And then she got stuck in traffic trying to drop me off in Forest Park to meet Will and his friend Mike.  Sorry Laura!

Forest Park as seen from the Art Museum

Anyway we wandered around the art museum and I got to know Mike a little bit, then we grabbed another bite and suddenly my weekend was almost over!  There was time for one more wander-through of campus with Rachel, who appeared as expected in Juicy sweatpants and her mother’s BMW.  God I love that girl.  I was psyched when she agreed to come to dinner that night: steaks on the grill outside Mike’s U-Drive apartment.  So much fun.  We picked up some peppers and asparagus and beer and a nice Cabernet Sauvignon… and that’s where the trouble began.  I met a bunch of Will’s guy friends, and I started drinking wine, and within a couple of hours I was drunk and flirting up a storm.  It was so much fun, though, I got to pretend I was in college again, only this time I was social!  I was kind of annoyed he didn’t introduce me to them two years ago, because I always wished I had more guy friends and I felt like I got along well with them.

As for my ultimate goal of closure, it remains to be seen whether I’ve moved on from college nostalgia.  I did feel like an outsider / old like dirt, but I also still felt like I could easily fall back into that life, as long as I was made welcome (which I was).  What I do know is that I had a blast (too much of a blast, in fact; once the tequila started hanging out with its old buddy red wine, I was suffering hard core, and I still haven’t quite recovered).  I’m so glad I went; I got to see Will again, I got to see St Louis again, and I even got to be in college again, if only for a night.

PS For a less enthusiastic/idealistic view of the WU life, check out Emily’s take on our 4 years.

My life freshman year: the circle chair, a salad from Bear's Den, and allergy eye drops (or something?). Oh, and puff paint!

So tomorrow I’m off for another weekend trip, this time to St Louis (as evident by the title). I haven’t been back to the Lou since graduation, and since I’m actually staying on campus I’m bracing myself for a blast from the past. I know it hasn’t been that long, but in a weird way it feels like it’s been forever and a day. Or just a day. Depending on the day.

People (specifically my old roomies) keep asking me why I would ever go back. For one thing, I disliked St Louis for the first three years of college. In fact, I think it might be safe to say I hated it. But that had less to do with the city itself than with the ice (my tireless nemesis) and the allergies and the humidity and (here’s the clincher) the lack of transportation. My senior year I finally had a car, and oh man did the city ever open up to me. Who knew the city had a movie theater that used to be a mosque, or an old Italian part of town, or a Mexican food festival, or a little old-fashioned candy shop, or a cute French square, or a million other little nuggets of greatness? Well, Courtney knew, and sometimes she carted me along, but I, carless, was mostly confined to the Loop and Forest Park (two places I think I’ll appreciate a lot more with a little chronological distance).

As to the why: officially I’m going to visit my friend Will, who is joining the marines after graduation, and whose mind I hope to change on this point. Unofficially, I just miss it. I miss the classes, I miss the campus, I miss St Louis, but mostly I miss college. I miss the experience of living with my established best friends and taking late-night walks with new best friends and drinking coffee in the library café while pretending to work. I miss the flexibility of homework instead of a job. I miss seeing the people I love every day. I miss I miss I miss. But I know I can’t go back.

And that’s another reason I wanted to make this trip: because I think I need to see Wash U as an entity that’s whole without me. As something entirely separate from me and my experiences. I need to see that college has moved on from me, so I can start really moving on from it. I need closure!

Wish me luck! I’ll let you know how it all goes down.