THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Overhead in the Dodge women's locker room:
"I just watch The L Word and hope for the best."
As final exam season gets into swing, we offer the following anecdote from one of our embedded Butler correspondents:
"Two grown men were fighting over a seat in 402 Butler Saturday night. Saddest thing I've ever seen. It was really only verbal, although one did grab the other at one point. There was some yelling and disruption. Security was called.
One guy had his stuff at a desk and left and while he was gone, the other man sat down at the desk. When the guy came back he got super pissed and refused to take his stuff or leave or let it go."
Starting May 15th, the staff of The Blue and White will be ringing a gong for all those deceased in similar altercations.
Two girls wearing skinny jeans are sitting near the sundial. One plays her guitar and sings the following ditty:
"You drink so much PBR,
While playing your bass guitar.
You take the L train everyday,
I still don't know if you are gay."
A crowd of young men wearing cardigans and colorful sneakers had formed a crowd around the pair. "Are they talking about us?" asked one, taking a drag of his hand-rolled cigarette. "No, probably some hipsters," said another.
From an e-mail sent by Professor Matthew Jones to his Renaissance history class:
"I fear that I must cancel all of my appointments and the lecture tonight. I had to go to the ER yesterday and still have, alas, a raging infection and high fever. It is beyond lame, as a famous bard once put it."
Marlowe would have proffered "totes wack," while Spenser preferred "bereft of kickass-ness."
LA RECHERCE DU THESES PERDU
English Department adviser Michael Mallick sent the following stern message to senior honors applicants:
"It seem quite a number of you—this year's senior essayists—did not follow the instructions clearly set out with regard to the distribution of your final essay... In the past couple of days, as many as half of the essay sponsors arrived in 602 telling us they never received a copy of their sponsee's essay... I urge you to act immediately. I further urge you not to email me—I am merely relaying a message on behalf of a number of perplexed faculty. I do not have the time to respond to individual protestations, rationalizations, fantastic explanations, and the like... I am acting solely now as a messenger, not a judge, nor am I an arbitrator... I'd save the breath and act fast instead."
THAT WARM, FAMILY FEELING
Overheard, women's bathroom on the ground floor of Butler:
A girl is in the stall, on the phone with one of her parents:
"Yeah, I'll do it when I come home for Passover. Yeah."
[She starts to pee, loudly.]
"No, I'm not peeing! I wouldn't do that on the phone with you!" [Laughs nervously.]
[Another bathroom occupant turns on the faucet.]
"Yeah, that's the sink. I'm... in the kitchen. Of my suite... I'm washing a carrot."
GAYS ON CAMPUS
Overheard, Days on Campus activities fair:
Women's basketball coach, setting up her own table, glances down the row to the rainbow-festooned display of the Columbia Queer Alliance. She exclaims with enthusiasm,
"We're pretty gay here too!"
Overheard near West Side Market:
Girl clinging to her boyfriend: "This is pretty nice for Harlem!"
A girl and her father are talking on Broadway in heavy upper class English accents.
Girl: "Daddy, stop! I'll consider coming to Columbia if you buy me a sweatshirt with a lion on it."
PRE-MED VS. PRE-GAME
One Thursday night, during an 8:15 p.m. Deborah Mowshowitz biology class, 50 frantic students were taking an exam in a classrooms in Math.
Teaching Assistant: "Excuse me, may I have your attention please. We're going to need to move the exam to another room."
Another TA: "Yes, this room was reserved for the Bartending Agency. We're moving to Havemeyer."
Student: "What the hell? Why can't they go to Havemeyer since we're already here and taking a test!?"
TA: "Apparently they have a lot of alcohol."
And the exam-taking biology students were ushered 100 feet away to Havemeyer, passing through a gauntlet of giddy, heckling bartending students waiting to enter the Math classroom.l
Barnard French professor to academic:
"The catastrophe of Bordieu was that they marketed him. So all these people said, look here's this French guy who's a philosopher and an intellectual—he must be right!"
No, Simon Schama is British.
A group of pre-schoolers are walking down 115th towards Riverside with two caretakers. One little boy points to a sign on a brownstone.
Little boy: What does that say?
Caretaker: Korean Methodist Church and Institute.
Little boy: Oh, so it's a Chinese church?
Caretaker: Yup.
Barnard Class Day... it's the 1927 Yankees!
