"The best thing to do in college is make friends with a bunch of slackers"

I was going to post before, but then I read Matthew's post. First of all, that is quite awesome. So, I see your Stephen Colbert and raise you Wang Dan (who led the Tianamen Square protests), Julian Bond (chairman of the NAACP), and the Capitol Steps (duh). We're so intellectual. Hah!

This week has not been that eventful. There's a "party" with Olin kids tonight (7-10 with 3 acapella groups? Sign me up!). We call that "movie night" here on campus... And on that note, allow me to remind something to the general male population. There are no male students on campus. However, being in possession of a phallus does not make you a god upon earth the minute you step off the bus. You may have been confused by those axe commercials and thought that the more you spray it on, the more girls will flock to you (and after all, there are over 2,300 of us). In fact, we have developed a sensitive sense of smell which causes us to flee once we recognize the combined stench of axe and beer. The Wellesley campus does not magically turn you into a hot, sexy stud in the eyes of all women- just as it does not turn us into naked wood nymphs. Erase that smirk off your face and take 5 steps back. Take your hands with you. And I swear to god that if you walk around my hallway yelling at 3am one more time there will be a pitchfork-carrying mob. (Now, I'm sure that plenty of nice guys come on campus. However niceness gets lessened as arrogance and alcohol rise. Plus I think most of those guys hide in a dark wooded area until the bus comes to take them back home.)

Ahem. Now I must return to my women's studies paper (with the words in the title, which- yes- were actually said on the wellesley campus, in mind).

PS: if anyone is in the area next weekend: Munger Mash. Friday night. 10-2. Come in costume. Crazy Wellesley sex not guaranteed.

And Singing the NU Fight Song, Tonight's Musical Guest...

Two stories in this post there will be.

On Wednesday this past week, a CA (community assistant) was walking around our dorm, yelling: "I have extra free passes to go see Borat! Who wants them?!" Naturally I bolted out of my bed and grabbed the passes.

The movie time was 7:00, so I figured, get there at 6:30, I'll definitely get in. Well, at 6:30, they said they weren't letting anyone else into the theater. They hadn't been for at least 10 minutes. Depressed, my friend and I turned around to go, when we ran into an administrator at Hillel named Andrea. After exchanging hugs, she said, "I think I might be able to get us in. I have connections." Now, I thought to myself, there is no way are we ever going to get in to see this movie. We waited around for 10 more minutes, and I was about to leave, when I guy storms out of the theater, goes up to Andrea, and gives her a hug. Turns out, he's the FOX representative that she has been texting and calling inside the theater. He says, "I have some extra seats, come on," and proceeds to barge his way through everyone and get us into the theater. In summary: Borat is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.


Alright, the second story explains the title. Yesterday, Friday, was our homecoming parade, and we were having a special guest come in as our grand marshall for the homecoming parade ( you'll find out soon). So, after eating dinner at Hillel, I met up with some friends, and we wait d for the parade to start. Now, I was anxious to see the grand marshall, and NU alum, and I was hoping that we had the perfect seats. The parade starts, the NU band goes past us, and then, driving up in a car, is the grand marshall:
STEPHEN COLBERT!
Me and my friends are yelling, "We love you Stephen!" As he gets closer and closer, until he is finally 5 feet in front of us. He then turns over to our side of the street, and the car stops. He makes eye contact with me and my two friends, and he says, "Do you know the fight song?" We yell, yes, and proceed to sing the Northwestern University fight song with Stephen Colbert. It was un-fucking-believable. It was one of the coolest things ever. It was as if time was frozen, and for like 2-3 minutes we were alone with Stephen Colbert, one of the funniest men alive.
And, most importantly Ezra, it finally settles our debate and answers the question: even you must now admit, NU is better than UC.

Treatise on Totem Poles, and the Climbing Thereof

There have been a dearth of blog posts lately. I take that to mean we're all settling in and have been busy and really haven't viewed this as a priority. At least, that's my excuse. I had some time, so I decided to check in...

From everything I've read and heard, if you're ambitious in any field, the key to getting to where you want to be is networking. You need to know the right people, who can help you when you need it. That was true with the Google guys and was probably true of almost any successful person.

That's all well and good, but the obvious question is where do you start? It's not like you can walk up to the President of the United States and ask for a job, or Sergey Brin (one of the Google guys), or Gary Williams. So you have to start small - on the bottom of the totem pole, and work your way up.

That's what I'm hoping will happen, now that I have gotten the position of statistician for the radio broadcast of the Men's Basketball team here at UMD. It's not the most incredible job in the world, but it lets me go to every game (and maybe even travel on the road to a lot of the games - I'll see you at DUKE, David) and more importantly, get to know the influential people at the radio station and among the coaching staff. It's my first in, and hopefully it will lead to bigger things, like getting in touch with the UMD coaching staff or being able to do play by play for the games on the radio sooner.

Meanwhile, roomy and I had our second radio show yesterday. It went very well, proving experience really helps. Above is my view from the station, of the mic and sound board. If you have time on Thursdays at 2:30-3:30, you can tune in by going to http://www.wmucsports.com and following the Listen Live link. Alternatively, we're making efforts to record the shows and then put them online afterwards, but the sound quality isn't incredible.

--

And here's the teaser...Coming up next post: Nathan (William and Mary) weighs in! It's too much of a pain to set him up with an account, so I'll just post what he emailed me. And trust me, it's hilarious.

MSU (Sucks), Pregaming, and A Little Surprise (Just Such A Good Week)

So last weekend was the Michigan - Michigan State weekend. It was also the weekend that my mom and aunt came to visit Ann Arbor and to see me on my birthday. Given what an important weekend it was, I was trying to figure out how to spend some time with my mom while spending time pregaming and going out. So this problem was solved when my mom and aunt were walking down Frat Row on game-day. Lets just say they got a taste of what we do on a game-day. The frats had live bands, there was some grilling going on, and as usual, lots and lots of beer.
After visiting some frats, I met up with my mom about an hour before the game started and we walked down to the stadium. Once inside, we found a couple of seats in the student section and watched Michigan beat MSU (thats right GO BLUE!!). She said she enjoyed the atmosphere (111,349 people all screaming), but the thing that blew her mind was when the Detroit Tigers score was announced and the cheer that followed. The cheer that followed the score was "Fuck the Yankees..." repeated many times. She commented that it's not that she doesnt agree with this, it was just that she had never heard that many people saying at once (I thought it was incredible).
The game ended and we walked back to campus. She had a good time and it was a good weekend.
Now comes the little surprise.
As I write this post, on Thursday October 12th, 2006, i am looking out my window and guess what, yea you guessed it, its snowing! It is the middle of October, and it is snowing!! This has been a great week becuase of the game, the weekend and it was topped off by snow, in mid October. So anyone who wants to get a taste of winter early on in the season, stop by michigan, ill show you a great time and you can get some snow!

Funny Florida Follies: Part I

Last night I returned from fall break. Normally, I would have gone home for those five days, but instead it was time for a Duke University Improv road trip. There are many stories from the amazing trip so I’ll break up this sure to be long-ish entry into chapters. I guess that makes this paragraph the Prologue.

Chapter 1: Baby You Can Drive My Car

Because of complicated circumstances only half the group drove down to Vero Beach, Florida. I was lucky enough to drive down and fly back. We packed the car at 1:30 PM and headed down south for what was supposed to be a 10-hour drive. In the car was me, Scott (freshman), Matt (junior), Brandon (junior) and Steve (senior). At first to kill some time we played the mileage game where Steve took out a map, named two cities and we had to guess the mileage Price is Right style (closest without going over). I stunned the car by guessing 2 distances exactly and earning two tiebreaker points. However, Brandon made a strong comeback in the “Double Jeopardy” round and ultimately won the game. OK, one hour down…9 to go.

Then we played two truths and a lie where you name three personal events and the others have to guess which one is a lie. One of my truths, and a story they found particularly weird, was that one of my friends attempted to commit bestiality. Of course, now they think Michael F (you know who) is the fake name I use when I describe something disgusting I’ve done. With many hours still to go we moved onto the meat of the car ride…the telling of life stories. My family seemed kind of normal compared to the other members’ stories of bipolar mothers, wives hiring private eyes to spy on husbands, bloody anal cavities (don’t ask), phone sex with cousins (ask me later), and one member told us that he “did” his girlfriend in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

After this life story fun, it was time for dinner. The upperclassmen told us that we had to eat at a road trip staple…The Cracker Barrel. The food was terrible but the meal did produce a funny moment. Keith was training waitresses and one of his trainees, Meredith, came up to him and showed him a $50 dollar bill. “Look at this tip I got,” Meredith exclaimed in a southern droll. “I guess it’s good,” answered Keith. Then Meredith uttered the priceless, “My ass it’s good, it’s fantastic!”

We hopped back into the car with about 4 more hours to go. With five manly guys fit snuggly into a car, we did what any group of guys would do…we put on Natasha Benningfield. Things got weird as we sang along to her music (we did a great rendition of “Unwritten”), Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy/Back,” JoJo, and Nelly Furtado…it was weird, but fun…in a weird way. Luckily this girly singing took up enough time to help us reach Florida without a boring moment. We arrived at 2:30 AM to find the 5 other members of the group already at the house. However, there was also something at the house we didn’t expect to see at all. It was…

To be continued. (Because I’m tired right now)

Today was awesome

For many reasons. In chronological order:

1- Music Theory was particularly fun, because our teacher wrote a 6-part Latin jazz song and we performed it as a class, with some people singing notes, some people tapping desks and some people sliding pens across the spiral binding of a spiral-bound notebook. It was cool.

2- My humanities teacher cancelled our class on Wednesday for so reason at all, though we still have to turn in essays.

3 - I read a book for Democracy and the Social Sciences and I actually understood it.

4 - I heard a talk by Steven Levitt, U of C economics professor and author of Freakonomics. The room (it was actually in the lounge of another dorm) was totally packed and I was practically standing outside - that's outside the building, not just the room - but it was very interesting. He talked about a few topics; the one I fond most interesting was about the Dictator Game to study altruism, and why it is a pointless test.

5 - I wrote, with Daniel Green, my first article for the Chicago Shady Dealer, the satirical newspaper on campus. It will be published sometime in around 3 weeks, I hope.

6 - I had my first cup of Ramen soup as a college student.

In summary, today = yay.

Oh yeah. I also asked Professor Levitt what it was like to be on the Daily Show. Two things you may have wondered - Jon Stewart writes all his questions for the interview, nothing is done for him; and he reads all the books that authors go on the show to discuss.

Bigger IS Better

I meant to post this a couple weeks ago. Between being busy and just not carving out the time to do it, it's languished in the back of my mind. But here it is - I'm finally turning it into reality. Words to the page, thoughts to pixels, keystrokes to the scree--man, I'm tired. WARNING: This could be really very quite rambly.

The point of the post, and what the title is hinting at, is that when I was looking for a college, I was incredibly wrong in what I was looking for. I maintained I wanted a small school - but after being at UMD, a campus swarming with around 25,000 undergraduates, for a length of time that seems longer than it has been I can see I had not a clue.

It's not just the different social mentality. I don't know about being anywhere else, although I have a feeling it's similar at most colleges, but with a place this big, you get the feeling that there's always someone out there who would be enjoyable to hang out with. There's so many people how could there not be someone who's going to share your interests? And if you make a complete fool of yourself with one person, you're probably never going to see them again - so who cares?

My guess is that feeling is present in most places - especially coming from a small high school. But what I feel is unique about the size of UMD is the opportunities the campus presents. I already wrote about my then upcoming trip to the Nats' game and meeting Bob Carpenter. Well on top of that, there's a host of other things going on...

On the Wednesday following my post, I went to the game. We sat between Carpenter and his color commentator as they called the game. We went down to the producers truck and saw how they queued up the instant replay, and how they warned the announcers ahead of time when they were putting a graphic on the screen. We even stopped in on the radio booth.

Earlier that morning I had attended a rally for Ben Cardin's campaign for Senate. Senator Barbara Mikulski and Senator Barack Obama came and spoke to a crowd of about 500-1,000. The next day I attended a lecture by the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon. When I got back, I got an email that said there was something called the Sadat Lecture for Peace coming up. You could get tickets for free - the lecture would be given by Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA (the international body that inspects countries' nuclear activities) and the winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

All that in the space of 2 days...and that's not to mention the opportunities I haven't been able to cash in on because of schedule conflicts - like attending a lecture by Dr. Maxine Singer, a winner of the National Medal of Science, who was talking about intelligent design vs. evolution, or attending another seminar entitled "Entrepreneurship in a Flat World."

The opportunities are coming faster than I can handle them, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Obviously a lot of the prestigious schools have similar opportunities, but not as many or as wide a range. All this is made possible because of the sheer size of the University of Maryland. And although I wasn't looking for this, I'm happy I ended up involved in it.