Tag Archive: Scenic Views

  1. Let's get compassionate

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    To start, I’d like to thank the confused masses for sending in great questions over the past two weeks. So many people are wondering about so many things! The TLC Tip runs on alternate Fridays. Direct your anonymous queries to lauren.rosenthal@yale.edu and they’ll be answered in confidence. If you have a question not for print, let me know and I’ll get back to you.

    Q. How do you get your roommates to not eat your food?

    A. There’s an old saying in the Pacific Northwest, where I’m from. It goes like this: “Give your roommates food poisoning once? Shame on you. Give your roommates food poisoning twice, and they will never touch your shit again.”

    Q. How do I tell if a panhandler is honest?

    A. WHOA. This question makes me squirm on the inside, and it should make you squirm, too. This summer, I had an awkward, completely unintended face-off with a man who sat on the curb outside my chi-chi neighborhood grocery store in Pittsburgh and asked passers-by for money. Most people ignored him as they walked by. As I entered the store one night, he asked me for money and I looked up and met his gaze. He yelled at me that I had no right to look into his eyes: “You look down at the ground! Don’t you glance at me! Look away!” People walking by stopped and stared. I was pretty shaken. It wasn’t my intention — and I assume it’s not yours — to make any panhandler feel like furniture as they stand on the street. With everyone’s gaze on me, wondering what the hell I did to make this man give me the tongue-lashing he did, I started to get an idea of how he felt when total strangers viewed him so dispassionately. Then, I went inside and cried a little in the frozen food aisle. Short answer is that it’s not up to you to judge whether a panhandler is honest, or whether they really need the money. If someone’s out on the street asking for change, treat them like a human being — not like they’re on trial.

    Q. Up until the beginning of this year, my schedule moved like a runaway freight train en route to the gates of Hell. I was a “full-time student,” had a 50-plus hour weekly commitment and was, all the while, searching for gainful employment. But now all that is over and I know precisely what I’ll be doing when I graduate. What should define the last leg of my Yale career and motivate me to stop getting out of bed at 2:30 p.m. every day?

    A. It sounds like your body is now engaged in a frantic campaign to recover the 10 years you took off your life with your schedule. What the hell were you even doing? Drug running? Domestic surveillance? Online poker? Porn? Speculation aside, you’re also in a minor funk. That’s very fixable! You’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll feel if you go to sleep around the same time every night — midnight, 4 a.m., it doesn’t matter. Set your alarm to roust you at the same time every day. Even weekends. Life is hard, so fucking get used to it. You should try to create a happy morning ritual so you have something to look forward to upon waking. I like to listen to my go-to summertime playlist in the shower, and eat Kashi Heart to Heart while standing up in my kitchen. These are things I try not to allow myself to do on a regular basis, and now use as incentives. (I am so ready to be an adult, you guys don’t even know.) Structure your time well: Start using Gcal or iCal or if you’re me/a dinosaur, buy a real planner, and divide up your day into easily digestible chunks of studying and socialization. Sounds sad, but it will work. Your GPA is probably a negative number by now, so hop on the fast track to Phi Beta Kappa and start reading books again. You could also hang out with your friends, volunteer, and stop whining, because as much as I’d like to feel sorry for you, you have a job, and that means you and I are natural enemies.

    Q. How do you survive Yale without going to class?

    A. Holy skeeballs. Why don’t you ask the guy above?

  2. Caroline Smith’s got the swing at the Underbrook

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    As a Caroline, I have an affinity for things that sound like “Caroline.” I audited the Western art history survey last year starting at the Carolingian period; I identify in general as “sanguine.” So on Saturday evening after listening to Minneapolis band Caroline Smith and the Goodnight Sleeps, who shared the stage with Yale’s own Plume Giant, I felt a little emboldened by the fact that women named Caroline can in fact do cool things like front rock bands.

    The show took place in a never-cozier Saybrook Underbrook with dim lights, student art on the walls, and cabaret-style tables. The concert series, The Underbrook Coffeehouse, was started this year by a group of students to hold concerts by one Yale and one outside band every other week. There were some technical difficulties, but once a keen-eared audience member yelled from the floor how much to turn up the vocals and down the bass, Smith’s voice came through clearly. The balance yielded fully pleasant indie-pop, with lyrics largely about men and set against folky pastoral backgrounds: in “Strong Shoulders” and its reprise, for instance, “I know that I said that I’d be gone by now/belly up you said, but I wanted you by my side” turns into “I am looking across the water/where the mountains eat the trees.”

    Smith, who has curly white-blonde hair, stands in front of the band in leggings and a sweater, playing the guitar and singing. The rest of the band consists of a drummer, bassist and keyboard-player-slash-backup-guitarist, who were all dressed in hipster regalia (oversized glasses, flannel shirt, baby-blue bandana around head respectively). Smith’s feminine charm leads the group: the drums, for instance, are sequined silver and teal. They are feminine, not feminist.

    Smith’s website claims that the influences of Billie Holliday, Leslie Feist and Joanna Newsom are present in her music. The influence of Holliday is clearest on the song “Denim Boy,” from her album “Little Wind.” Smith swings, “cause the little sweety boys/they all got to use their women like toys/I been working, and treatin’ you good/I ain’t leaving though I know I should/I keep trying till you hold me right.” Newsom is present in Smith’s voice on “Eagle’s Nest,” and in the daintier elements of her music — the bells, for instance, in the openings of “Strong Shoulders” and “Scholarships.” But eventually the guitar comes in too strong for the fairy-tale style of Newsom. That’s where Feist is present, plus in the drums, and the unapologetic union of folk and syncopation.

    I started to wonder during the show when boys became willing to back a woman who is not a dolled-up pop star but a song-writing, instrument-playing feminine person. I think it’s a quiet, pervasive influence of Riot Grrl, the branch of punk rock created in the early 90s by girls sick of being pushed out of the way by boys at shows, mistreated and/or abused romantically, and beholden to media conceptions of women’s bodies. The term “girl power” is credited to a zine made by the band Bikini Kill (who had a male guitarist backing up the girl-punk) during that time. Smith’s band inherits next to nothing stylistically from Riot Grrl. The fact that her role as a feminine musician leading a band (in contrast to Newsom and Feist’s individual singer-songwriter careers) might go unquestioned is the essence of girl power.

    Conor Oberst’s meticulously curated early-2000s Midwestern indie rock scene and Neko Case’s alt-country style gave way to the last few years’ folk revival, endorsed largely by hipsters and Old Crow Medicine Show enthusiasts. Smith’s slight twang and pastoral folkiness seems to be an inheritance of all of these in succession. There’s a terse balance between earnest and trite. I cringe at the title of the final song on “Little Wind,” “Birch Trees and Broken Barns,” for instance, which pulls out all the stops of easy nostalgia. Ultimately, however, Smith comes out on the right side of that balance, and yields a take I like on the state of girl-fronted indie music: a folk-pop that is sincere but not afraid of its pleasantries.

  3. Nebraska woman solves nation's problems

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    These days, Americans cannot agree on anything at all! Following the example of our political leaders — who are notable mostly for their dashing good looks and reptilian brains — we have become a body politic divided on all sorts of issues that really must be solved if we wish to keep our nation from becoming an irradiated wasteland ruled by cats. (Cats love radiation.)

    If I had Republican friends, I’m sure we’d argue about all sorts of things. I’d say that we need a beefy progressive income tax; a social safety net that guarantees quality education, housing and health care for every citizen; a proactive economic policy that creates jobs in the public sector; equality for minorities and gays, emphatically enforced; and a sensible policy on climate change designed to head off catastrophe. My Republican friends would probably say that poor people can go screw themselves. And also something mean about Obama.

    Is there a way to end this disheartening division and to find peace in our collective civic existence? I think so. I think we can follow the example of certain sensible Americans who live life how it should be. These ideal citizens live in the sort of communities to which we should all aspire. Communities where cooperation is the norm and kindness the very spice of life. Where the mayor and mailman break bread. Where you can sit on your stoop on a soft summer afternoon and know everyone in town. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the sleepy little burg of Monowi, Nebraska.

    Located on a delightfully quaint patch of blank, featureless prairie, Monowi is home to a vibrant little population of one. Indeed, if you were to tell me that you live in Monowi, I would tell you that you’re a dirty liar because only one person lives in Monowi, and her name is Elsie Eiler. Ms. Eiler, it seems, has discovered the secret to efficient government, civic consensus and community spirit: live alone in your own town!

    Monowi seems to have hit a bit of a rough patch after its “Booming ’30s” when it had nearly 150 residents. Apparently some of the young people were seduced by the easy luxury and profligate morals of the big city and fled to that den of iniquity, Omaha. Yet 80 years and 149 citizens later, Monowi carries on, albeit somewhat diminished. But where most people would find a soul-crushingly bleak panorama of boarded-up homes and a desolate sea of plains, Ms. Eiler saw an opportunity!

    She is the mayor, having won the office in a landslide. Each year she dutifully pays her taxes — no complaining, Elsie! — and issues herself a liquor license, so that she may throw her notoriously gaudy all-night affairs to which she invites literally every citizen. And so it is that Monowi is a fine American town where strife is nearly unknown and the mechanisms of government run smoothly and agreeably. Imagine Ms. Eiler’s pride as she strolls along one of Monowi’s five or six roads and examines one of its four working stoplights!

    Could life be any more ideal in Monowi, metropolis-of-the-plains? Should this not be the blissful arrangement we all seek? Laugh if you will, but isn’t this the very purest distillation of the ill-defined and long-sought American Dream? To have your own town, where you are truly ruler of all you survey? With a population density of 83 people per square mile, the United States could easily be divided into 300 million equally-sized plots of .012 square miles each. This arrangement has already been adopted by intrepid residents in the comely little towns of Bonanza, Utah; Green’s Grant, New Hampshire; and the especially homey-sounding Township 157-30, Minnesota.

    You might convincingly argue that this would solve approximately none of the major problems facing our nation — in fact, you might add, it would be entirely counterproductive and would only serve to deepen existing divisions. Well, you insufferable know-it-all, I say if I can’t agree with you, why the hell should I be forced to live near you? My plan has the virtue of allowing us to avoid each other completely until the problems we face solve themselves. And at that point, friends, we may come together again as one people, proud subjects of our new masters: the radiation cats.

  4. Of Rats and Recess

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    This late October midterm period, the whole campus seems to be running on empty. And worse than running on empty, some are actually losing gas they don’t have as they go along, which is kind of like vomiting as you run.

    Today I walked by two people mid-breakdown in the two-block walk from my room to Old Campus, and they didn’t look like they had the tears they were vomiting to spare.

    Were you one of these two people? Do you identify with their #yalepplproblems?

    Then surely you have a lot to learn from rats. Haven’t you heard how much learning can go on outside the classroom? Among the wisdom they have to spare: how to live and learn with lactose intolerance; swiftness over stealth when stealing food; and why Yale’s first October recess, scheduled for this time next year, will serve as a much-needed cushion for your broken tailbone of a season (I’m looking super sternly at you, sophomore slump).

    Rats get it, as do those who have been stationed in the wild and happenin’ zip code of 06511 these past four weekends as friends from every other school glance pityingly at us on their way to New York/Boston/Aruba. (Even Deep Springs has a week-long fall break, guys).

    A psych lab that gets a four-day fall break found last year that rats undergoing new experiences — like learning new mazes and hooking up with hotter, younger mice — couldn’t fully process them as they were happening. The lessons and memories of that one red hot mama mousie could only be made permanent when the rats took a break from their adventures.

    Which they did.

    Because they are sane.

    And because it is natural to.

    Just because Yale somehow maintains a 100 percent Type A quota year after year doesn’t mean our brains are somehow invulnerable to this basic, intuitive truth. This isn’t my opinion, it’s what the facts — what the rats — just have to say. How are we supposed to track our literary adventures when we can’t remember them? And don’t even ask us about our scientific adventures. Which is why, a year from now, we’ll be on our five-day October breaks. (Except for you, seniors, who’ve felt the dense matter where the hole of fall break should be for four years! Lots of memory-establishing to do post-graduation for you guys.)

    The three months before Thanksgiving break is a time when the leaves they are a-changin’ for everyone on campus: freshmen revel in that constant hyperstimulation mode we all love to hate, professors are brought out of their summer solitude and squirrels adjust not so gracefully to new neighbors. Some might even dare to call these new experiences.

    So, if you forgot about a reading response, if you’re inexplicably restless, if you’re generally feeling the absence of fall break: you are not alone. The new break is not too little and it won’t be too late.

    Vassar lore holds that their fall break’s debut on the academic calendar reduced the number of fall semester nervous breakdowns by 70 percent. When there’s such an obvious overall mental health dip at this jolly time of the year, we’ll gladly sacrifice two days of our reading periods for a week of re-remembering: we can’t run on empty forever.

    Anyway, you’re getting vomit in your running shoes.

  5. I don't perspire much, but I do shvitz

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    I am not a Jew. I did not grow up in a Yiddish-speaking environment, which means I have only a faint grasp of the Yale Daily News’s unofficial second language. But in the past couple of months, I have grown intimately familiar with the most commonly used and flexibly defined Yiddish word: shvitz (a noun, a verb and the base of an adjective all related to sweatiness or sweating, but more broadly connoting a deeply anxious, unfocused state of mind).

    I began senior year calm and collected after a summer of wearing clean clothes, eating breakfast and generally behaving like a functional adult. But as soon as shopping period began, I started feeling anxious about finding the right schedule for my last fall semester at Yale. I was emailing professors and counting empty seats in seminars. I even semi-successfully convinced a professor to change the time of a once-a-week seminar to better accommodate my other potential classes.

    “Stop shvitzing so much,” my friends would often say to me. “Everything is going to be okay.”

    That’s when I first started really paying attention to the word. Sure enough, my schedule fell into place and everything was indeed okay. But the shvitzing didn’t stop.

    Before long, I found the number of things to shvitz over growing exponentially.

    I found myself shvitzing over job applications with deadlines that were months away. I was shvitzing over a senior thesis that I don’t foresee writing until the week before Myrtle. I was even shvitzing over what I would do to fill the free time I would have after finishing my term as an editor of this paper. Yes, I was shvitzing over having free time.

    At this point, shvitzing has become such an ingrained part of my being that the people I have met for the first time in my senior year think of me as one incessantly hyperventilating shvitz, like those fearful, shaking Chihuahuas with bulging eyes.

    It all came to a head last week when I stood in between racks of Halloween costumes and could not find any suitable capes for either of my ideal disguises — a Freemason or an upper-level Scientologist.

    Before I explain what happened, I should give you some background.

    I really enjoy wearing capes. Having a lengthy piece of fabric fastened around my neck gives me a sense of accomplishment that I only otherwise feel when I’m driving a large vehicle or standing on an elevated podium. But in a place as fickle as Yale, I very rarely have the opportunity to just don a cape before heading out to dinner.

    One of the only times of the year when I get to wear a cape and also have friends (mutually exclusive qualities, you see) is Halloween.

    So, back to me in the costume shop. I had every intention of leaving with a cape — not wearing one seemed like an incredibly disappointing lost opportunity. And I began to shvitz. Don’t I sound like an idiot right now? Luckily, as I stood between the racks, I also realized that there was a problem bigger than missing a cape — I was being an imbecile. My life had dissolved into one long string of #whitegrlproblems.

    I mean, I’m still a pretty big shvitz. I’ve been shvitzing about this view (my first, hope you’re still reading) for a good 24 hours now. But somehow I feel like I have a much better sense of perspective on things. This past Wednesday, for example, I was supposed to have lunch at Scoozzi. For some strange and unfortunate reason, Scoozzi went out of business on Tuesday. How much did I shvitz? Not one ounce.

    But as I write this view, I find myself sitting in bed staring at three costumes that involve not a single cape. Not even a capelet. And I have genuinely come to terms with them, displaying a great amount of recently-acquired maturity and wisdom on my part. Yes, I am happy with my costumes: the clothes of a plague doctor, a tux that vaguely evokes Ellen DeGeneres at her wedding to Portia de Rossi, and — what I’m most excited about — slutty Sam Tsui.

  6. Love your Pride, drop your Prejudice

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    The once great and revolutionary institution that is American television has taken a trashy, unfortunate turn. It seems like every channel has some celebutante flipping their over-treated hair in their baby daddy’s face while talking trash like, “Oh, nah that bitch didn’t! Do my bubbies need an extra cup size?” It is an attack on everything that is great and good and Mary Tyler Moore. This trash that is oh so hard not to watch but literally dumbs down the population outshines the gems — like Game of Thrones and 30 Rock — that have tried to redeem our sense of wit and class. Alas, the Bachelor persists and the horror that is Jersey Shore has been allowed to win out over our formerly refined sensibilities.

    I think the only way to revive the glory days of American television is to look to our former colonizers, the Brits. Their television programming has the perfect mix of trashy indulgence, youthful geekiness and witty drama. They have turned television into an art, an art that we have lost. Like the Romans in ancient times, we have cast our vote for the death of high drama for the sake of an easy entertainment fix. Let’s be real, there’s not much of a difference between a Gladiator fight and “Toddlers in Tiaras.” The UK, on the other hand, has absorbed the stoic spirit of Churchill, “Keep Calm and Carry On” for delayed gratification.

    For the obtuse American, it’d be wise to start slowly by being introduced to a show that is a mix of reality, wit, and education — namely the renowned automotive show “Top Gear.” Americans like cars! Why not watch some British man with a snotty accent participate in a foxhunt as the fox (with four-wheel drive) while crossing the streams and hills of the English countryside. We like violence and destruction in our TV. With “Top Gear” we can get both of those things with a newfound knowledge of horsepower. Delicious.

    As for trash, nothing is trashier or more beautiful than British “Skins.” So basically, if you take “Degrassi” and add more sex, more fights, more drugs and bigger consequences, you get “Skins.” It’s sexy — which is weird to say because the actors are like 12 — and edgy in a way that isn’t the “Basketball Wives,” “Lemme snatch your weave out at a polo match, bitch” train wreck. Once you start watching, I dare you to stop. I DARE YOU.

    British TV has also produced a television show that really makes a mockery of everything we’ve ever produced for primetime and seriously outshines our sci-fi television efforts. Though you Trekkies out there may scream in dissent, Doctor Who is the best science fiction show of all time. Kanye would agree. Can you name another sci-fi show that’s run for almost 50 years? I DIDN’T THINK SO. Doctor Who could add so much more to our culture. It is family friendly, witty and has David Tennant. America needs David Tennant’s left eyebrow. And Matt Smith’s bowtie. I started watching Doctor Who, and suddenly so many allusions in popular culture made sense! Jump on the bandwagon and back into the living room with your nieces, nephews and grandparents to watch a show that appeals to all — a kind whose likes haven’t been seen since the end of “The Wonder Years.”

    And the coup de gras, the thing that the Brits have that we absolutely need, is the mini-drama. For those of you out there who haven’t seen the light, the mini-drama is the mini-series but on crack. They take, say, Jane Austen and they do mini-dramas for her entire body of work. They don’t stop there. No. Then they take a modern-day girl and shove her into “Pride and Prejudice” just to see what the fuck will happen. Brilliant. Then, there’s the smash hit “Sherlock” set in modern day London. It’s fast, it’s addicting and there are only three episodes! Why is that important? Well, sometimes a show can take over your life if it’s interesting enough. As my roommate knows, “Grey’s Anatomy” can seriously affect your social/academic well-being by the sixth season. If there are only three very long episodes, only your weekend will be ruined by TV crack, not your life.

    British TV is a beautiful thing. It is greatly underappreciated and should make an appearance in every American home. Yeah, I watch the Real Housewives of Absent Rich Asshole Husbands, and maybe I have seen more than the acceptable number of “Two and a Half Men” episodes, but by golly, I’m tired of turning on the tube to watch rubbish (that’s a British word). I, for one, welcome the coming of another British invasion.

  7. Bildungsroman, ruined

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    The thing about being free of junior-year commitments is that I now have time which I can spend doing nothing. Sort of. As a friend of mine recently quipped this past weekend when someone expressed surprise at her having “no work,” “I could FIND work to do.” But, like her, I’m in no rush to occupy my time, even if I should be catching up on my entomology reading or — worse — thinking about and planning DIE ZUKUNFT. (That’s German for “the future.” It sounds scarier that way, or like someone is sentencing someone named Zukunft to death.)

    Instead of working, I came up with a theory that makes me feel better about my Hamletian levels of paralyzing indecision, and the theory is this: adulthood is defined by the inability to do everything that’s important to you with 100 percent of the energy it would require to make you and the ones you love really, truly happy about all of those things. I’m sorry if that sounds terribly obvious to you, especially if you’re an adult because — fuck me, right? — I didn’t know. I didn’t know that it’s actually impossible because, until a few minutes ago, I was too busy stuffing burrito cart burritos into my stupid face between meeting with my T.A. to discuss a paper proposal I bullshitted in 10 minutes and getting coffee with someone I actually like and with whom I’ve probably hung out, like, twice since sophomore year.

    When you’re a child, you’re an asshole because you literally have all the time in the world. Think about all the free time afforded to the average five-year-old. Kindergarten can be brutal, of course, but then what? Apple juice followed by naps? I would KILL to be in a place where my day could consist of apple juice followed by naps. Hell, I would execute ZUKUNFT myself. But unfortunately, things are expected of me, either by my own standards or by the people who, in one way, shape or form, depend on me for the completion of certain tasks to which I have committed because I think they’re important or — worse — because these people think I’m competent.

    Thus the dilemma. The paradoxical, catch-22, existential bear-trap tragedy of my life right now is that, between wedging a love life into the slightest crevices of my social calendar and considering “careers options,” I have these terrifying moments of lucidity in which I can look down the speed tunnel of my remaining self-conscious years and know for sure that it’s only going to get more complicated. My commitments to the people I love and the things I consider worthwhile — or (blech!) moral — are only going to multiply.

    Just to be clear, I’m not talking about being “busy.” “Busy” is to this feeling what “butterflies” is to the kind of angst you pronounce with a long, German “a.” Uncle Ben was right (and just to be clear, we’re talking “Spider-Man,” not rice bowls): with great power comes great responsibility. The trouble is that I’m not Peter Parker. I don’t feel like Spider-Man. I feel like someone who is being relied upon to fight the same caliber of villain but without the webs or the sticky fingers or the super strength and with an overstimulated spidey sense — an adherence to the paranoid creed that true, tangible danger is around every turn. I don’t want to make decisions because I know the decisions I make are starting to actually matter, but I can’t just abstain from decision-making altogether because my conscience prevents me from not giving a shit about the consequences.

    People say that when you’re young, you have nothing to lose. I think it’s more accurate to say that you have no idea what you have to lose, which can sometimes feel like nothing and sometimes feel like everything. In this vestibular space between adolescent apathy and adult ambivalence, I’ve lost the taste for apple juice, but nothing has risen to take its place. The closest thing color-wise is probably Hefeweizen, whose calories will only contribute to my already sedentary lifestyle. And then I’ll have to use the treadmill, whose cyclical belt will only remind me that I’m not fucking going anywhere. To be or not to be?

    Thus the dilemma.

  8. Blonde: Keeping the October Sky from Falling

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    As the first whole month of real school, October is notoriously a struggle. Just last weekend you were picking apples with your college and dancing to Madonna at UOFC PINK! dance. This week you’re picking up an apple from the dining hall because you don’t have time to each lunch as you muddle through that paper on the cultural significance of “Material Girl.” You’re left wondering — how can it already be midterm season? What have I learned? What have I accomplished? Why am I here? I’m studying for the first midterm of my last fall semester at Yale and I STILL haven’t learned which of the women’s stalls in Bass actually closes. I also haven’t come to terms with the fact that the staplers in Bass must actually just be there for show, which is why they will never ever (ever) have staples in them.

    Your G-Cal is starting to resemble the coat of many colors. Your club commitments no longer only consist of talking big talk for an hour and not doing anything. And you’re stuck having to pretend like two papers and two midterms in two days is NO PROBLEM GUYZ because you got it lyk dat.

    And the worst part? October is one of the most fun and exciting months at Yale. Temptation station. Safety dance, Halloweekend, Fall Show (?) — everything feels really high risk, high-chance-of-crushing-failure-for-that-thing-I-should-be-doing-but-am-not-because-I’m-acting-the-fool-at-Safety, but high reward. I could either spend the next two hours trying to get my hair to look like Cyndi Lauper’s or I could study for econ. Priorities, guys! Cyndi Lauper has brought you so many hits — you owe her this!

    So you do it all. You leave at 10:15 every morning, packed with everything you’ll need for the next 11 hours until you make it back to your room. You take shots of 5-hour ENERGY during the week so you can party on the weekend. You sleep at 3, wake up at 9, and even when you stop for one second, your mind is fixated on what comes next, what still has to be done. And amidst all of that crazy, you forget to take care of yourself. Studying and being social and enjoying parties and friends is part of this, but it’s certainly not the whole picture.

    I write all of this because this week I forgot to breathe. Wrapped up in all the stress of trying to balance my schoolwork, my postgrad job search and making time for the clubs and the people that I care about, I forgot to take care of myself. And while you’re here, in this month where everything starts to pick up, it can be hard to detach “you” from everything that you “do.” What I mean to say is that when taking a quick shower becomes a luxury, it might be time to step back, think about why this is happening, and the small things that you can do to make it better. I’m remembering now, especially in the wake of Steve Jobs’ passing, that mental and physical health are the most important things that we have, and it scares me to think that in our pursuit of learning, money, power (or whatever it is that we’re after), we put this at risk. Stress is a part of life here, and learning to deal with it without dropping everything and running is something that everyone has to do. At the end of the day, though, my 5’1” frame and my mind are all that I have, and I’m realizing that they also need a spot on the G-Cal.

  9. WEEKEND: Life is for the living

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    After two weeks of too-much pizza and too-long nights in a hot boardroom, antecedent to the 30-hour-long saga of YDN elections (read: YaleDailyWaterworks), we emerge to you: your four servants in the duty of WEEKEND, your quartet of mischief, your foremen in the factory of Arts and Living at Yale.

    We come to you fresh —but not too fresh— in the history of WEEKEND.

    [ydn-legacy-photo-inline id=”431″ ]

    If you’ve been here a year or two, you might remember the days when your weekly Arts and Living section was filled with things strange and mystical, things that pushed onto the boundaries of the unreal. There were dragons and sea monsters and brains stowed away in underground closets; slightly awkward editorials written “for those of you unsure of how to style the hair down there.”

    But it eventually came time to bring things back to earth. Which is why, in September 2010, WEEKEND was born.

    Our three editors and mentors were handed this tiny WEEKEND baby hardly past its gestation period. Or, as they put it, “We like to think that we took this piece of Play-Doh and filled our nostrils with its lemony scent and molded it into something really great, like a Godzilla-type thing, or an astronaut.”

    Lauren, Austin and Gabriel molded and remolded this Doh-baby every week. We have to give them props for that. Because, they won’t be the last to say it, but they won’t be the first ones either: this job ain’t easy.

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    You might have noticed an appreciable change in the atmosphere of these hallowed pages. Our three musketeers (aka the tilty triangle) did a few things differently. Theirs wasn’t the brandy-filled lounge of scene’s bygone days, in which the merits of Akkadian were discussed to a Dubstep bassline into the wee hours of Friday morning (final edits: pending). The tilty triangle was too busy building a new B-section to live up to the traditions of the Oldest College Daily.

    You might have been there when the times got tough. Maybe Lauren asked you to pick up a Skinny Vanilla Latte from Starbucks some night; maybe you bowed in terror at yet another menacing message from Gabriel (“WHERE IS YOUR ARTICLE? WHERE IS IT.”). And Austin got a new edgy haircut this year.

    But, if you were there through the tough times, then you were also there to witness the glory. You were there for the craft; the vision. And, with the help of Production & Design artisan extraordinaire Rachel, they crafted one damn sexy product.

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    Together they gave us —Brenna, Nikita, Chase & Erin— one heck of an oven, and now it’s time we bake our cake. (Disclaimer: we intend to eat it too.)

    This year, we want to fill our noses with the arts and the living of you, the students of Yale. We want to reaffirm this as a space for everyone. A WEEKEND reverberating with your melodic (or atonal) musings about what’s really happening out there in the world. We’re in this together, so you better speak up about what you’d like to be seeing, hearing and doing around here. Because the most important part of this whole shindig is enjoying the living. Live, enjoy, make art but gosh golly once and for all start enjoying the living!

    We’re here to make it happen.

  10. WEEKEND: Every day is WEEKEND

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    Cards on the table: a lot of what we’ve said in these little communiques hasn’t made any sense. Which isn’t to say that we lied or didn’t mean what we said or in any way ever took this space for granted. We’ve always used it on some special occasion (and, alright, occasionally when content fell through) to tell you guys something about how we were feeling about our time and our place and the strange circumstances that found us spinning through space and — aw, hell there we go again. The point we’re trying to make here is that, even if how we were feeling was sometimes so uncontrollably potent that it overcame our very ability to express it via the conventions of standard English, we still felt we could just go ahead and say it because we knew you were on the other end.

    And now we’re here, across the bottom of the page, to tell you how we’re feeling one last time.

    Old Jack said it best: the sooner we started realizing the implications of this hat we were wearing, the sooner we stopped thinking of it as a hat at all. As the Hold Steady put it, we had some massive nights up here in the WEEKEND lounge, nights when things were booming and nights when things were crashing in around us and we had to think fast and act faster or face the worst music of all: the kind made by the Insane Clown Posse. In many ways, we were handed a concept without definition, a name whose only denotation was the two or three days at the beginning or end of the week, depending on where your calendar’s from. (To this day, Gabriel swears the week begins with Lunes, but we don’t speak Italian or whatever, so we’ve never really known what he meant.) Either way, we like to think that we took this piece of Play-Doh and filled our nostrils with its lemony scent and molded it into something really great, like a Godzilla-type thing, or an astronaut. Hell, maybe we made them both and had them fight each other so fiercely that they glommed together to make a half-Godzilla, half-astronaut baby — metaphors are weird like that.

    But we did that almost every week, even weeks when, to be quite honest with you, we weren’t feeling up to it, because we were convinced that what we were doing here was important. Sure, we were never Stephen Harper important, or even Bob Rae important, but we’d like to think — and would like to hope — that we brought you voices and views and glimpses into worlds you would have never thought about before. There’s a lot of wonder around this campus, and lots of people trying to harness it any way they can. For those people, we want them to know that there will always be a place in WEEKEND for them, because that’s what we do.

    Even when we’re gone after this week, that spirit will live on. We’re sure that whoever they’ve sent from corporate to replace us and destroy our memory units will be just swell. Or anyway, that’s what they tell us.

    We hate to keep quoting, but our own voices have become so hoarse. And as Michael Stipe said it last week, we’d like to put it to you: “We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.”

  11. Nell: Accidental spooning, graffiti and kale

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    I went to the South this summer. A lot of interesting things happened! I could literally talk for a loooong time about all the things that I experienced in the South. My friend and I stayed in a bed & breakfast that we later learned doubled as the sensual-gay-massage mecca of Savannah; we ate our body weight in fried meats and somehow did not gain any weight, we went to Vicksburg, I bookmarked “Chick-Fil-A Location Finder” on my smart phone, we saw a terrible Matthew Broderick movie, and once she had a stress dream about improv auditions. We spent a night in a Holiday Inn Express saying in low but intense voices, “THIS IS VERY LUXURIOUS. I DO NOT DESERVE THIS.” We also went to the East Nashville Tomato Festival, which was interesting because I thought Williamsburg was the only Williamsburg, but it turns out that there is also a Williamsburg in Tennessee (I mean East Nashville. I mean, you are very Williamsburg-y, East Nashville! I ate kale and chickpeas while visiting you, and rarely have I seen so many denim short-silk shirt combos, if it is hot enough for shorts there is no reason to wear a sweat-absorbent silk shirt, except if you are a big old hipster!)

    East Nashville is also notable for having a lot of graffiti, at least in my admittedly limited experience. I very much enjoyed a brick wall that had a Plato quote painted on it in magenta! But more than that I liked, and took a smart phone picture of, a poster that had a quote by some lady that said “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Actually, now that I think about it, this was not graffiti, it was a poster, and I think it was actually in Charleston. Whoops! Get it together with your correctness re: locations and classification of artistic media! Anyway, my point stands: I liked seeing that. It was sorta a wakeup call. I was spending my days eating even when I wasn’t hungry just because it tasted good and waking up accidentally spooning my lady friend, and that became my life, for enough time to form many memories. If you do things enough, sometimes you just become the kind of person who does those things, as much as you would like not to be. Over the past year and a half, I’ve spent about twelve days writing as many columns for this newspaper, and that was part of my life, I’M SORRY, IT’S TRUE, I LIKE YOU WEEKEND!

    In addition, I have spent the past three days watching about 10 episodes of “Law & Order: SVU” per day, because it’s streaming on Netflix. Turns out that that is fast becoming my life. Sometimes I am walking down the street and hear “DUM DUM” in my head, the musical sound of a portentous gavel, and sometimes I want to make a smartass, inappropriately lighthearted quip about a serious assault case, like Ice-T. So we’ll see how that works out for me. That’s how I’m spending my days, and today I was watching like my third or fourth episode, and just as the guest star said something sassy and got shot, I realized that it was adding up to more time I wanted to spend. Now I only watch one episode a day, sometimes two if it is a multi-episode arc. Go to the South if you can, okay, guys? There is no further moral to this view than that, so stop looking for one. That would be very luxurious, and you and I don’t deserve that.