Can you miss the good old days of something you never actually experienced?

Everything I know about politics I learned from Stuyvesant High School

Why can't Broadway be just like it used to

Wherefore art thou, print media!

Catwalk it back to Venus de Milo, she says

Bwog was just stopped by a pair of high school pollsters from New York's Urban Academy, looking for Columbia students' opinions on the upcoming election for a project.

Help 'em out! The young lady is wearing a purple jacket, the young man is sporting a navy blue backwards cap. They're outside Lerner holding clipboards now. Ask for the "bonus question" about how you feel about Palin's stance on teenage abortion rights.

Bwog's suburban diarist Madeline L. is spending the summer away from the city -- and she's enjoying it. Here, our diarist disects the nature of the suburban summer, and why it beats Morningside anyday.

Summer in the suburbs is built on a founding myth; an event within a circle of friends that becomes retold in different heights of enthusiasm, with different details added or subtracted. It becomes so recognizable that the difference of experience between people who lived it and those who heard about it is nonexistent. Collectiveness and camaraderie encapsulate the suburban summer -- that and a lot of weed.

For me, the summer of 2007 was the summer of getting thrown in a pool -- completely clothed, mascara trickling down my face, contacts mangled in the white of my eye, shirt pulled down. The boy who playfully threw me in the chlorine perils argued after the fact that it was my own fault. I made myself fall in, he reasoned. "You just have really shitty balance," he said.

In which Bwog correspondent and past-life high school orator, Andrew Flynn, sojourns to a recent Harvard high school debate tournament and waxes philosophical about the current state of that ever so nebulous academic activity.

When the wind-chills of February announce their arrival in Morningside Heights, when long papers and dry readings begin to weigh heavily on my soul, there is no respite I look forward to more than getting on a coach bus filled with rowdy 15 through 18 year-olds and making the seven and a half hour trip to Cambridge for the annual Harvard Speech and Debate tournament.

Harvard is one of the kings of high-school forensics competitions. (Unlike at my local state tournament, Harvard does not need to remind its competitors that defecating in the classrooms is against the rules.) Here, thousands of high school speakers and debaters from across the east coast and Midwest (sometimes further) meet to match wits and spend their downtime wandering aimlessly around the Epcotesque tourist trap that is Harvard Square. But, "Harvard" is a bit misleading.

In which Courtney Douds communes with the poet of misspent suburban youth.

I predict this to be the least ironic post ever written for Bwog.

This past Tuesday, I attended the first of two concerts given by the band Marilyn Manson and their infamous frontman of the same name at the Hammerstein Ballroom. And though he played a fairly long set, I could have handled having my upper body crushed by a thousand people for ten more hours for him to perform his whole repertoire. I went as a princess of darkness, with black eyeliner, bright blue eyeshadow, and red lipstick smeared across my face.

While most of Columbia is away on fall break, high school students invaded campus. Today Columbia was host to the Scholastic Press Association Conference. Bwog managed to snap a few shots of these youths in bloom.

What's with the pinwheels on the Butler lawn? Bwog wondered too--apparently, kids from a Long Island high school are setting up 6,000 of them to represent the number of people who die every year from ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It's like a cure is blowing in the wind, or something.

Aside from the lethal shooting of an NYU student, the burial of the kids and adults who didn't make it out of that Bronx house fire, and about two days of above 65 degree weather, you didn't miss much in NYC. But at Columbia, on the other hand...just look at all of the exciting things that happened while you were gone:

The novelty of the Christmas decorations wore off halfway through the Yule Log bash, but the lights twinkled on for several snow-less months anyway. Yesterday, the holiday cheer was spotted bagged up and waiting for storage in Columbia's musty attic until next year's festivities.

Further down College Walk, a horde of baby journalists here for a Columbia Scholastic Press Association conference, wearing name tags and eager smiles, colonized Alma Mater. They've been crawling around campus all week. Go away!

And speaking of nuisances, Low Library is undergoing a "bird control project." Luckily, the ugly scaffolding you may be able to see if you squint and look at the back of the photo at left, should be gone by tomorrow.

-SEV

Aside from the lethal shooting of an NYU student, the burial of the kids and adults who didn't make it out of that Bronx house fire, and about two days of above 65 degree weather, you didn't miss much in NYC.

But at Columbia, on the other hand... Just look at all of the exciting things that happened while you were gone:

The novelty of the Christmas decorations wore off halfway through the Yule Log bash, but the lights twinkled on for several snow-less months anyway. Yesterday, the holiday cheer was spotted bagged up and waiting for storage in Columbia's musty attic until next year's festivities.

Further down College Walk, a horde of high school student-journalists wearing name tags
and eager smiles colonized Alma Mater. They've been crawling around campus
all week!

Go away!

And speaking of nuisances, Low Library is undergoing a "bird control project." Luckily, the ugly scaffolding you may be able to see if you squint and look at the back of the photo at left, should be gone by tomorrow.

-SEV

This just in from Bwog correspondent Addison Anderson:

"There are two male high school kids standing on College Walk, one of whom wants a Columbia student to take the SAT II for him. He asked me if I was a Columbia undergraduate, and when I said yes, he said "Okay...so the SAT II is tomorrow...and I haven't studied. I'm ready to lay out a thousand bucks for someone to take it for me." Meanwhile his friend looked around like this was a drug deal. I was shocked, intrigued, then ultimately wary of the possibility these 'kids' were undercover Daily News reporters, so I passed on the offer and mumbled something about a very important naked party I needed to get to. Anyway, I saw them still out there later. The kid ready to lay out the grand is short, stocky and sullen, and his friend is tall, skinny and sullen."

Bwog would not be averse to a cut of the profit if a successful match is made.

Hey, Facebook understands that some of you may be upset that high school and college students can now interact. We did this because a lot of people asked for it and we wanted to make it even easier for you to communicate with your friends. We realize that friendship is not restricted to a particular stage of school and we decided to stop dividing people based on what grade they were in.

One Bwogger realized today his 14 year old sister was interested in "Men." Not boys, but "Men." Sometimes, separate but equal really IS separate but equal. But then again, now Bwog won't have as much trouble finding a date.

Hat tip to Bwog correspondent John Klopfer.

Full text of Facebook's response after the jump.