Alex Bayer – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Mon, 11 Nov 2013 16:21:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Alex Bayer – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Love Inc. https://stanforddaily.com/2013/11/11/love-inc/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/11/11/love-inc/#respond Mon, 11 Nov 2013 16:21:57 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1080381 If the latest wave of me-centric technology primes us to think of ourselves as consumers and all of life’s offerings, even love itself, as commodities we can accrue with enough cash for an eHarmony subscription, are we not like the mortals, skewered by many a Greek tragedy, who foolishly believe they’re in control of all the elements?

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As I was riding the London tube last weekend, a sign caught my eye. The caption said, “From everyday essentials to future spouse potentials,” and there were pictures of a bag of groceries and a young couple in love. It was an advertisement for a website that combines all your favorite shopping sites into one place, anything from a grocery shopping site to Match.com.

 

It shouldn’t be too surprising that a dating site be grouped into online shopping, but isn’t a bit weird, and fascinating, that love in the 21st century is a commodified process that works much the same way as picking up some new clothes or browsing through hotels? In all these scenarios, we’re consumers browsing through a catalogue of options, selecting what we like.

But just for a minute, back to this idea of online dating, which I find so intriguing. Because along with giving us an aisle of options, it also declaws relationship hunting of the potential for rejection which has been, up until now, par for the course when it comes to love. If someone isn’t interested in us, we simply don’t hear back. But more likely, we won’t even have to experience a despondent paramour; dating sites are already engineered to align people who are mathematically likely to be attracted to each other. Potential unrequited lovers simply fall by the wayside.

As idyllic as it sounds, the more I consider this paradigm, the more I wonder: As we become more conditioned to being handed what we like, what will happen to us when life gives us a bad deck? If the latest wave of me-centric technology primes us to think of ourselves as consumers and all of life’s offerings, even love itself, as commodities we can accrue with enough cash for an eHarmony subscription, are we not like the mortals, skewered by many a Greek tragedy, who foolishly believe they’re in control of all the elements?

The 20-something sitting at the helm of his iPhone (ordering take-out, summoning cabs, making plans, all without a moving a muscle) exerts his power with effortless ease; how could you not, when the world rushes to your feet, think of yourself as master of the universe?

Will we experience a similar fate as our unfortunate Greek and Shakespearian forerunners? Will the gods (no doubt having a laugh at our hubris) swoop in to remind us who’s really in control? For whether if you believe in gods or a universe governed solely by chance and evolution, the conclusion they lead us to is the same, though we will always go to great lengths to deny it: The workings of the universe are out of our hands, unintelligible and, for all we know, indifferent to us.

The more we think of ourselves as consumers, the more blinded we become to the truth: that we are “merely players” upon the world’s stage who do a jig and then take our exit so others can have their 15 minutes to dance in the limelight. Alas, we’re no more in control of the desires of those we secretly pine for than we are of the weather but is it really “alas?”

If you had access to Cupid’s bow or a love potion, would you use it on the one you wish would love you back? As kids we may have said yes, but, now that we’ve lived a bit, I think we might hesitate. For wouldn’t that take out the friction, the back and forth that makes its reward all the more intensely intoxicating?

What would romantic comedies be without misunderstandings, foiled plans and missed signals? Who would want to watch a film in which Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant decide to become a couple in the first five minutes? That isn’t a story, we would say. Love, in its raw form, is a story. It is two uncertain souls tepidly dancing around each other, given to moments of courage and lapses into fear, until one’s bravery to act aligns with the other’s bravery to fall in love, and the rest is history. The road is rocky, but in the end it is rechristened as beautiful, and isn’t that life too?

As I see it, there are two ways we can live: with a false illusion of power or with deep humility. Though our sense of power may be bolstered by the ease with we can call up a taxi or have a half-baked question answered in a heartbeat by Yahoo! Answers, life at some point or another will throw us a monkey wrench and momentarily make us feel as small and as powerless as Napoleon must have felt when he was exiled from the kingdom that once seemed so unquestionably, eternally his.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of technology, but as many a dethroned king has learned the hard way, it’s in our best interest to keep our power in perspective. Not just because we may someday lose it, but because, as with matters like love, there is something to be said about leaving it to the mysterious whims of the gods. And just imagine: If we replace a desire to have everything go as we want it to with deep and simple gratitude, the lows will look beautiful even in real time.

 

Contact Alex Bayer at abayer@stanford.edu.

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Make More Bad Decisions https://stanforddaily.com/2013/11/01/make-more-bad-decisions/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/11/01/make-more-bad-decisions/#comments Fri, 01 Nov 2013 19:04:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1080072 How are we to learn — truly learn — if not through our own mistakes? Sometimes the only real lesson is the hard lesson.

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Ah, the internet. On the one hand, it’s a great blessing that we have access to infinite information. But it’s also a detriment: The more information we have, the more we have at our disposal to make a good, informed opinion — so we think. But do we ever know what’s the right decision?

As Alfred Hirschman, the late economist, championed all his life, it’s the bad decisions that end up being the most valuable sources of growth. For example, take my latest issue: My initial housing in Paris didn’t work out, so I was forced to find an apartment on my own. All of a sudden I was acting like a real adult — emailing landlords, dealing with Craigslist scammers, going to open houses.

I learned that i) the Paris real estate market is insane ii) there is an inverse relationship between location and crappiness of any given flat. But the biggest lesson, besides all the knowledge, was that if called upon to do this in the future, I actually could.

Who was this person making color-coded lists and attending open houses? And where was the girl who procrastinates on practically everything and shows up to class late?

In feeling a little more like an adult and less like a teenage shit-show, I felt a disproportionate amount of pride. And I had the sudden housing crisis and the real possibility of homelessness to thank for it; for had I not been pushed to my extremes, I would not have discovered this more resilient, creative alter ego.

Even just knowing you can take care of yourself and more or less survive is empowering enough. It reminds me of something George Orwell wrote about the period when he was broke in Paris: “It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

That’s the beauty of really terrible decisions. For how are we to learn — truly learn — if not through our own mistakes? The right information may help us avoid making the mistakes, but we miss out on the knowledge we might have gained had we really screwed it up.

Yahoo Answers, though it has the answer to all of my obscure questions and existential crises, alas cannot shine a light on who I am nor explain to me the roots of my fears nor reveal what my heart really wants.

This is why I’m worried, or at least ponderous, about how technology will deprive us of these opportunities to make really bad decisions.

If stranded at an unknown corner, we can conjure a cab in an instant with Uber and get home safe and dry. What would my dad have done? Would he wander around, get soaked, and ask a man working at a laundromat for help?

Might he make a new friend, or at least learn about asking help from strangers? Might all these random encounters, tallied up, have shaped him into a more outgoing, open-minded person, the one I know him as? How many chance encounters does our automated system of decisions deprive us of? In being handed, again and again, the “right” path, what do we forgo along the “wrong” one?

I’m reminded of playgrounds, and how tin slides, see-saws and speedy merry-go-rounds have been disappearing in favor of puny plastic slides and lame padded forts. It’s no wonder, iPads aside, I see less kids enthused about the jungle gyms in their yards. They’re just not as fun.

And though our parents surely do this out of love and concern for our well-being, how are we to learn? How can we stretch our wings, know our strength? And if we break an arm, do we not learn what it means to heal, and how strength regenerates?

Though it’s natural for parents to want the world for their kids, just as it’s natural for us to want a cab in the middle of the night, sometimes the only real lesson is the hard lesson. How are we to know our strength if never called upon to use it? How are we to grow antibodies that will make us resilient to infection if never exposed to germs in small, occasional doses?

What do we never learn when we take the easy route? About what we’re capable of, about how to respond to crises? When life inevitably hits us in unexpected, unfair ways, how will we respond? If we lose someone we love, where does one go from there? Yahoo Answers is blank; despite what the self-help aisle has you believe, there are no real manuals for this stuff. Only the words of those who’ve lived it really get you.

Why does heartache make the most beautiful sound? And why do we turn to our parents, the older we get? Life, beneath its serene and beautiful surface, is rocky and enigmatic. The wise are not the ones who know information, but the ones who have lived.

And to live, you’ve got to mess up and make mistakes and hit a dozen rock bottoms and claw yourself up and up again. Nietzsche, via Kanye West, was right when he said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I didn’t get that line for the longest time, because I never could understand the formula.

A teacher who dislikes me? A friend who has abandoned me? A school I was rejected from? Feeling as small as a mouse, I couldn’t possibly understand how any of these were supposed to make me feel stronger. Not until recently did it finally click: It’s not the problem itself, but what you do in response to it, that makes you stronger.

It’s all about the fight; that’s what makes you use your inner strength, and how would you know you’ve got it in you otherwise? Crazily enough, the most wrong decision may be the only right one.

Contact Alex Bayer at abayer ‘at’ stanford.edu

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A Fourth Open Letter to Miley https://stanforddaily.com/2013/10/14/a-fourth-open-letter-to-miley/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/10/14/a-fourth-open-letter-to-miley/#respond Mon, 14 Oct 2013 07:47:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1079390 I can’t deny how catchy “We Can’t Stop Is,” but I can’t respect you as an artist in the way I respect those who do it from a place of tenderness. Music is not the business of the cruel; it is the business of the wronged.

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Dear Miley,

I was on your side until now. It’s not that I didn’t cringe watching the VMAs or “Wrecking Ball,” but I gave you the benefit of the doubt. The media has a history of being hypocritical about female sexuality, both afraid and mesmerized by it.

When you explained that your VMA performance wasn’t about being sexy, I had even more respect for you. Once you stated this wasn’t your aim, the blame fell on us as spectators: Why were we expecting it in the first place? Why did we assume that your goal was seduction?

Why, if we broaden the question, do we feel like we’re entitled to it? When you look at the actresses who are most in demand (Scarlet Johansson, Olivia Wilde, etc.) and the roles they’re offered, it’s not hard to see that the media prescribes women a certain function: as sirens and objects of desire, and  if they fail in this function, if they fail to seduce us– in the eyes of a society that judges them for exclusively this– they have nothing else of value to their name.

I am just hypothesizing. Miley, don’t take offense, but I don’t imagine any such deeper agenda inspired your VMA performance. You were just being you, following your prerogative, as my beloved Britney Spears once sang.

The rebellious young woman coming into her own will fascinate the critics in perpetuity and lead others to bemoan the state of youth culture, wondering about the sexuality of female pop stars and whether it expresses empowerment or further forces women to perform to their function as sexualized objects.

Regardless, Miley, I lost all respect for you when you tweeted a screenshot of Sinead O’Connor’s tweets from two years ago. You invoked her struggle with mental illness as a means to delegitimize her opinion, which she had wielded not to hurt you but to warn you.

She was critical of your actions but not critical of you. They were harsh but not ill-intentioned words, but in your binary view (Miley vs. the world), you misconstrued them as an attack and responded with one of your own that, unlike her letter, was deeply hurtful and insensitive in its intent.

In the process, you brought in Amanda Bynes, who has already played punching bag to the media a hundred times over. This insult is, in a way, even crueler; Sinead may be of a different generation, but Amanda is one of your own. Before you were the star of a hit TV show, Amanda commandeered one of the greatest one-woman shows ever at the age of 13.

Before a generation of tween girls looking up to you, there was my generation looking up to Amanda as the cool older sister or the best friend we wished we had. I’m grateful to her that I learned that a girl’s worth could be comedic timing and talent and charisma, and nothing to do with looks or sensuality, which has been impressed upon girls a thousand times over otherwise.

Instead of lambasting Amanda Bynes and Britney Spears for their most humiliating lows, we owe it to them to treat them like we would any friend we cared about, with kindness and empathy. If we are capable of loving and idolizing them when they’re in their element, we should feed the love right back into them with they’re caught in a low, re-inspire them to take the stage and mesmerize us again and again for as long as they have the passion for it.

As O’Connor writes, though it’s hardly news, showbiz is impersonal. Most executives behind it have less regard for the soul-saving powers of music than the profits. As O’Connor pointed out, the decade-long trend of singing shows has turned singing, just like everything else in America, into a competition where the only thing that matters is who is “best.”

I have no problem with you doing your thing, Miley– to each their own, and if swinging naked on a wrecking ball is your thing, I don’t care enough to persuade you to think otherwise. But if your goal really is to show up the critics and rebel against people’s expectations of you, have conviction beneath it; stand for something, for someone– not just for you, not just for the sake of rebelling.

Sinead is a model for doing your own thing, and she’s radical as it gets, but no one can say she isn’t fearless. When you took a dig at her mental illness, you were acting out of fear. If all of your latest work was your soul playing out its prerogative, you shouldn’t care what people think.

But the more defensive you get about it, the more I think that your desire to prove everyone wrong is trumping your desire to create art. If you believe in the art, then you have my respect, and if you can stand up for it, then you have it doubly. But when you treat someone with such insensitivity, it doesn’t matter. You’ve lost me.

Because art is about everything that your gesture was not. Art is about love, and the university of struggle. When Anthony Kiedis sings about drawing blood in “Under the Bridge,” Billie Holliday mourns racism in “Strange Fruit” and a musician sings about heartbreak, we match our heartache to theirs and feel our hearts heal through the opening of theirs.

We look to artists to interpret pain and give it a name and a semblance of beauty, to convey to us hope when we have none. Your response to Sinead wasn’t just an insult to those with diagnosed mental health issues. It was an insult to the power and purpose of music.

I can’t deny how catchy “We Can’t Stop Is,” but I can’t respect you as an artist in the way I respect those who do it from a place of tenderness. Music is not the business of the cruel; it is the business of the wronged.

It belongs to the bird with broken wings willing to sing, to the poet who has touched rock bottom and lived to tell the tale. The musician is the ally of the suffering soul. When you paraded Sinead’s struggle out into the world to make a mockery of it, the person you did the greatest injury to wasn’t Sinead, but to the millionth lonely soul turning to music when nothing else remains.

Contact Alex Bayer at abayer@stanford.edu

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Time/Out https://stanforddaily.com/2013/09/30/timeout/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/09/30/timeout/#respond Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:48:54 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1078940 I think that Paris may be a conspiracy to make you forget about time. Somehow I’ve forgotten to worry about or even think about it. It’s funny how time works: A whole summer of time makes you go crazy with boredom, but an hour to finish a paper kills you with stress.

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I think that Paris may be a conspiracy to make you forget about time. Somehow I’ve forgotten to worry about or even think about it. It’s funny how time works: A whole summer of time makes you go crazy with boredom, but an hour to finish a paper kills you with stress.

Through most of my life, time has been a source of anxiety. I worry too much about it for my own good. I fret about it passing too quickly, about becoming old, about failing to accomplish what I had dreams about accomplishing.

In my nightmarish vision of time, its embodiment is less a kindly old father than a grim reaper claiming back my childhood little by little; the wise elders of my family have passed on, and the cousins I pretended to be spies with have fiancées and jobs and babies on the way. It’s crazy and weird. Hilary Duff has a kid, and though I should be happy for her, I am sad for myself: wistful for the childhood that was once, and never will be again.

Alex, you say rightfully, stop being so melodramatic. Time isn’t that bad. And besides, if we didn’t have limits on time, then would not life be monotonous and meaningless? Yes, I would have to concede, you’re right.

In Paris, time seems to move differently than it does in Palo Alto. Maybe some of you have mastered the art of time management, but I, alas, have not.

When the experts talk about time management it always seems they’re talking about being able to do your assignments on time without procrastinating, but I think it’s much more complicated and difficult than that. Granted, I still have problems with procrastination, but my bigger problem is that I just can’t seem to crack a balance between doing work and living life.

The more last year went on, the more I became a slave to the dominant (albeit unspoken) mentality at Stanford, one that is part caveman, part stock trader: WORK = GOOD. NOT WORK = BAD. If I wasn’t doing work, I was feeling guilty about not doing work, like the paranoid dude in a psychological horror movie: Unread emails haunted her mind like discontented ghosts, and with the fanaticism of a mad philosopher scribbling aphorisms, she scrawled out pointless to-do list after to-do list.

I’m curious: if someone had done a brain study of my brain during that time, what would they have found? What would be the ratio of actual thinking to thinking about how I should be thinking?

The worst was definitely the weekends. How many times did I scratch my plans for Half Moon Bay or San Francisco because I had a little too much work? Sigh. Too many. If I went to a concert on a Tuesday night I felt like a kid playing hooky– even though that hardly made sense. Wasn’t I in college? An adult? By now, hadn’t I earned the right to decide whether I could go to a concert or do my homework?

Of course, it was all in my head. My professor wasn’t going to put me in a corner with a dunce cap. At worst, I would get a bad grade and it would melt in with all the other ones and my GPA, and then what would come of that? Would it even make it to my resume? And if it did, would the reader see the blood sweat and tears or merely a number? Would an artist even ask for a resume?

My anxieties about how I used my time only magnified my fundamental fear of time. But just when I was ready to write off a truce, I came here, and I realized that time is incredibly relative.

One of the most beautiful things about Paris is that you can be completely busy and accomplish absolutely nothing. As the writer Adam Gopnick eloquently put it, “In Paris, Americans achieve absorption without obvious accomplishment, a lovely and un-American emotion.” Indeed, it’s as if Paris is set up to make you forget about using time “productively.”

Take the cafe experience: You can sit at a table for hours, writing or reading or simply gazing at the people drifting by. Eventually, when you do want to leave, you might find it difficult to flag down your waiter for the check. Some might mistakenly call this culture one of leisure, but that does it a disservice. It’s much more meaningful than that: All that nothing is full of everything. We turn back into philosophers, thinkers and dreamers again.

What I really love about Paris, and why I suspect so many artists make their homes here, is that unlike so many westernized and westernizing parts of the world, in Paris, time very much stands still. No one’s asking you to be anywhere or deliver a product. Design thinking, for all its outward appearance of creative spontaneity, is still ultimately driven towards producing a concrete idea that will lead to a concrete product. In Paris, there is art for art’s sake.

The metros are plastered with adverts for experimental plays and art exhibits, many of which are funded by the French government, which places a high precedence on supporting the arts as a staple of national pride. Maybe it is a conspiracy of sorts, but if it’s the government we’re talking about, it’s kind of the most awful way to encourage hard work: For in Paris, it’s as if you become so distracted with art and beauty that you forget about accomplishing something, or why that was ever important in the first place.

All you need is a friend to chat with and enough money to buy yourself an espresso, and if you can snag a subsidized ticket to a show or a pass to the Pompidou, you’re set. In Paris, it’s not hard to see art. It’s everywhere, and if it’s not behind closed doors then it’s in the metro: via the man peddling his voice for change, the hipster art history majors with their Doc Martens, the spacey bohemian artists with their dyed and wild hair. You see, I’ve learned it’s much easier to forget about time when the people around you have forgotten about it too.

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A State of Confusion https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/11/a-state-of-confusion/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/08/11/a-state-of-confusion/#comments Sun, 11 Aug 2013 23:11:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1078242 Where and how does one find their anchor? When you veer from the handed-down K through college path, either by graduating or falling into an existential crisis like me, how do you go about getting back your sense of direction?

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Being lonely is a given when I’m at home. I knew it wasn’t a matter of if I would feel lonely, but when. I tried my best to stave it off this summer, I really did. I joined a gym, a yoga studio; I ploughed through books the best I could and willfully resisted the lure of Xfinity On Demand. I saw friends, had lunch dates with my dad, and for a time I was content. “You know, it’s so weird,” I told a friend in some words or another. “I’m doing nothing, but I feel so busy.”

Ah, if only things could last. I spoke too soon. A couple weeks later, I feel unbalanced, restless for no reason, and worst of all, lonely. My best friend is going to Lollapalooza this week, leaving me very much alone. I have other friends I can call, but the self-isolating hermit in me resists dialing the phone.

Lonely, but too weak for human contact. Alex, why can’t you just fully embrace being an introvert? Why do you have to feel lonely? You can have a perfectly good time on your own. This is what I tell myself, but it’s not entirely persuasive. Past experience tells me that I enjoy the clarity that comes with being alone for a day or two. But soon the feeling of newfound freedom wears off and I am left feeling lonesome and lost. I remember driving off to Los Angeles at the beginning of spring break.

Flying through San Jose, I could not get enough of freedom. I flew through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, just like that. But that night, when I got to LA with a few hours to kill, my aloneness circled around me like a gang of samurai. I found myself (figuratively and literally) on a darkened downtown street, not a soul in sight.

However grown-up and independent I like to think of myself as, I did not feel either of these things at this moment. Alone in my car, my sole companions Ryan Seacrest’s voice and a Clif Bar, I felt as meek as a child lost and bleating in a department store after it’s closed and shut off its lights.

I can see why graduating is so frightening. Who wouldn’t want to move back into their parent’s place? It’s not just about laundry, or home-cooked meals. Alone in LA that night, I felt a discomfort like that I had at Admit Weekend, or the first day of YMCA camp. Being naturally shy, the worst day is always the first day, when I am forced to partake in icebreakers and attempt small talk.

This discomfort boils down to an internal log of questions, like: What do they think of me? Will they like me? Can they see how insecure I am? The same paranoia hits me as I find myself alone in a city without a safety net to fall back on: Will I find friends? Will I find love here? Or will I be eaten alive?

It is, when it comes down to the basics, a question of love. With my dad there, there is no question to it. But left to my own defenses, armed with a shaky sense of self-worth and a thirst to be accepted, the city brings out my worst fears: Will I be loved? The skyscrapers look like fangs; every street looks like an opportunity to be mugged. But in truth, it’s not portents of crime or physical peril that have me ill at ease; it is my fear of slipping through the cracks, unloved, unnoticed.

But being in a brand new scary city is one thing; being home, when my dad is right downstairs, is another. And so I realized in part, my loneliness is fueled by simple and straight-up depression, that Scrooge of all Scrooges who manages to make you feel lonely even in a crowded room of people.

But it’s also this weird position I’m in, at the crossroads of two universes: I’m leaving behind Stanford to study in Paris with NYU kids. The thought of this is stirring up all new, but not so unfamiliar fears: Will I make friends? Who are my permanent friends?

On top of that, home is not the fixed place I had imagined it to be. My friends are heading back to college, or busy with jobs and serious boyfriends. People are heading in different directions, away from Connecticut, and I hardly know which way I’m heading. It’s all terribly disconcerting.

And so here I stand, in this wide deep ocean, without a lighthouse to calm me down. The future and now even the present, feel unsettled. Where and how does one find their anchor? When you veer from the handed-down K through college path, either by graduating or falling into an existential crisis like me, how do you go about getting back your sense of direction?

Ah, I don’t know. I wish I had the answer to this because if I did, I would write a self-help book and pitch it to Oprah, then sell it door-to-door until all the millions of people having existential crises could figure out the answer (which, alas, is not how existential crises work).

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The Pain (and Joy) of Running https://stanforddaily.com/2013/07/22/the-pain-and-joy-of-running/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/07/22/the-pain-and-joy-of-running/#comments Mon, 22 Jul 2013 21:19:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1078096 Electric. That’s what it felt like. Electric, like sitting on the beach and imagining whales ballooning in the ocean, and what the sky looked like in Melbourne. The electricity rooted in dreams of faraway places, but planted right here, in the present moment.

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I’m in Nantucket with my friend and her family, and though I’ve never felt quite like I belonged in a place like this, it’s quite nice. Beach life has a way of seeping into you, making your whole body heavy. Not with tiredness (I’m sleeping too much) or physical exhaustion. Is it the air, I wonder? Is the mixture of sea salt and a warm breeze a kind of narcotic? I feel like Dorothy falling asleep in a bed of poppies, too limp to think. I fall asleep like a happy baby, walk like an elderly woman without anywhere to go.

On the first night I was here, I found myself sitting alone on the beach, staring out at the waves. I felt so at peace that the world seemed to close in around me, everything going still for a moment. Inner peace: it had seemed so deceptively close then, and I wondered whether this is all it took – shipping out to paradise, and leaving all the worries and regrets back on the mainland.

This is what being a kid was – is – like: staring out at the sky and sea with nothing in between. I turned to the sky, and suddenly sensed its infinitude: a mast unfurling all the way to beaches in Australia and Thailand, a thousand adventures waiting to happen. Maybe I would share this sky, on a new beach, with a gaggle of foreign friends, or a lover. Imagine how infinite the sky would seem then. I was already having dreams in my dreams, a bit of self-inception.

I turned to the sea and studied the fog, imagined whales and old foghorns plowing through the night. So this is what it was like to have been a kid: there was adventure in everything. It showed itself to me in this perfect kind of silence, where it was just me and the earth, and no unanswered emails in between.

But of course, this moment of peace didn’t last. I’m too weary, too cynical, to really believe it would. Even in a place like this, my old anxieties have a way of tracking me down, like a spy who just can’t escape her foes no matter how many names she tries on or identities she wriggles into. Sure enough, the next morning I woke up at 4 a.m., that evil hour, and couldn’t fall back asleep. An hour of tossing and turning, eyes half-opening and closing, huffing at the light, until I finally threw up my hands and gave up. I put on my sneakers and headed down the road towards the beach.

I was not technically supposed to be running. I had a sketchy-looking mole removed last week (lovely, right?) and the patch of skin it formerly occupied was now an unsightly purple wound tied up with stitches. The doctor told me that if I ran, the wound wouldn’t heal as well and might leave behind a more visible scar. But I couldn’t not run — I had to get rid of these anxieties, whatever they were (nameless and tangled at this hour). And so I ran in spite of it, this pair of purple lips pouting at me angrily all the way. Good, I thought: I’d been so worn out obsessing over beauty image as of late that this came as a kind of relief. So what if there was a fat scar running alongside my thigh? Matter of fact, here’s a present for you: a scar. Learn what to make of that.

But beauty’s only the half of it. I remember one night in May, when I was stressed out of my mind. It must have been 9 p.m., and I got the urge to run. I don’t know; I’m not a runner. My calves get sore and all that. But I put on my sneakers anyways and headed into the night. I dashed underneath pools of orange streetlight, past headlights. I turned up the volume and ran as fast as I could, stuffing all the anger I could muster into my legs so that when they hit the pavement, they snuffed them out right there.

Man, did it feel good. Man, did I feel vindicated. Running like that for myself. Not the Gods of beauty. I put on another song, a song so bloated with memories of Coachella (the feeling of being lost; the ecstasy of dancing; so many rises and falls packed into it that it might as well be a Shakespeare tragedy) that I wanted to dance and cry at the same time. I tilted my head back, felt the wind rushing through me. I felt like I was floating. I probably looked like a crazy person but, man, was it liberating.

Sitting on the beach, peaceful as it was, I felt a little helpless waiting for it to end, knowing too well that it would. I thought that maybe, if I diligently held on to the feeling, I could keep it in my grasp for a while longer. If I forgot about it even for a second, I was afraid, it would slip right out of me like a con artist. I couldn’t enjoy the moment; I was too wrapped up with prolonging it.

I was powerless. Sitting on the beach, I was waiting for the peace to decide to up and leave. But running, I was hunting it down, seizing it, carving it out of nothing. It’s one thing to be blessed with a visit from Tranquility. One could wallow there for eternity. But it’s another thing to claw yourself out of the very opposite: the throes of sheets, the pale light of early morning, a mind that won’t shut up. The moments of quiet are few and far in between, but the struggle is everywhere: it’s the white noise, the undercurrent of our lives.

That said, arriving at those moments of impossible stillness are feats in themselves. Intense peace is not possible without intense stress. You can’t experience a release if there’s nothing to be released from. But the experience of actually experiencing acute happiness is passive: you have no control over when it slips away. The more you fight to prolong it, the more easily it skitters away. The only thing to do is enjoy it – harder said than done when you know it’s going to end and don’t know when you’ll see it next. I guess I like running because you can fight for it — if not to feel happiness, then to not feel sad. It’s like clawing out of something, into something. And this, this feels like power. Not sitting on a beach, but hitting the pavement.

That is what I’ll remember: the lighthouse coming into view in the golden light, running my hands through the dewy tall grass, stopping to peer down the crumbling cliff. An adventure. Me: a kid poking through her backyard. Not running to burn calories or to get in shape. Running, then stopping, letting my eyes wander. I felt I had all the time in the world. I could be here all morning. I could run for as long as I wanted, past the lighthouse if I wanted.

Electric. That’s what it felt like. Electric, like sitting on the beach and imagining whales ballooning in the ocean, and what the sky looked like in Melbourne. The electricity rooted in dreams of faraway places, but planted right here, in the present moment.

Emanating from my tingling legs or maybe my heart spinning from its sudden catharsis. The lighthouse, the dewy grass, the light spreading everywhere. Like my childlike avatar sitting on the beach, I took it all in without a filter, expect that was it. I didn’t imagine lighthouses in New Zealand, or how the light might fall on a beach in Thailand.

I guess you could say I was content here. But I could’ve been content anywhere: the peace was coming from within. I’d lost the battle for sleep, but somewhere made it to the edge of this bluff. I wanted to cry for no good reason (and I did, almost, I was so tired now). The scar was squealing with rage; the exhaustion was crashing back into me. Sleep: sometimes I get the feeling it’s one of those “friends” who’s friends with you on a good day and conveniently deserts you on bad ones. And sure enough, here it was, back with open arms to take me in. But I didn’t need it anymore. I was too awake.

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The Great Nothing https://stanforddaily.com/2013/07/07/the-great-nothing/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/07/07/the-great-nothing/#respond Mon, 08 Jul 2013 01:49:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077990 Summer, offering all of its temptations and incentives for career-furthering labor, may be most fruitful when it is used to do nothing at all.

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A couple months back, I wrote about my summer plans, or really, my lack of them. Come June, I would be heading back to the suburbs without an internship or even a job at Dunkin’ Donuts to save me from the awkward pause that inevitably follows the polite question: “What are your plans this summer?” When I answered this question, I made sure to beam with the confidence of someone who was perfectly okay with doing absolutely nothing. But really, I feared the worst: I worried that I would fall into a coma of boredom. I had spent too many summers taking refuge on a sofa to discount this as a very real possibility.

So you can see why, as I watched the familiar green hills and steeple towers come into focus outside my window, I was a little worried. Had I made a mistake? I thought of the dozen internships and grants I had half-heartedly applied to, most of which ended in polite rejection emails. At least I had tried, I tried to reassure myself.

Walking through the airport, I tried to muster that full-out bliss I felt back at Christmas break, when I leaped into my bed and wrapped myself in my covers. But unlike then, this wasn’t a quick jaunt into memory lane. It was two months of nothingness staring me in the face.

But man, free time is nice. I panicked for a second when I got into a feisty argument with my dad, the slamming-doors, stomping-up-to-my-room kind of riff that culminated in me angrily making a collage to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ emotive “Under the Bridge.” And then another moment of panic on my way to meet an old friend for coffee (why the hell are you nervous, I asked myself). It’s been weird reconciling these two versions of me: the one forged from 0-18, and the one who fled to California.

But they seem to be settling into each other, becoming pals. And this being-on-your-own-schedule thing is kind of great. Ah yeah: hit me up in a month, but for now, grocery shopping is like walking through a meditation garden. Even the elliptical is not so bad. Maybe because free time is so elusive at Stanford (and the free time you have is always hampered by the nagging thoughts of what you should be doing), I really relish it now.

Truth be told, I needed it more than I would like to admit. In the spring, I felt myself unraveling like a spool of thread. I was burned out from two quarters of academics, had never really given myself a proper break, and worst of all, I noticed how impatient and restless I was, too wrapped up in my own head to listen to the friends who were asking for, or not asking but needing, someone to listen. “I feel like I’m losing myself,” I said to a friend wearily. More accurately, it felt like my compassionate, 2.0 self was wearing thin and the flaws I had taken pains to override (my impatience, my introversion) were frothing to the surface, and like evil sea banshees, dragging me back down back to subterranean, prehistoric Alex. I finished sophomore year less with a bang than a whimper, crawling out into the light like Sméagol coming out of his cave.

Back in May, I became aware that I couldn’t “think.” An extremely bright girl I know said it best when she said that she felt “dumb.” This came as she was getting straight A’s and taking 20 units. At Stanford, we expend so much mental energy on academics that we hardly have any brainpower left for aimless thought. Since I had learned the art of self-discipline, mental self-flagellation really, when I noticed my mind wandering, I whipped it back into line. My common sense screamed at me this was all wrong, that writing poetry was what I wanted and needed, but against the booming dictator inside me, its voice was little more than a whisper, the measly plea of a doomed soldier.

You know those rides that are shaped like a cylinder, the ones that speed up to such a high velocity until you’re pinned against the wall? That was how it felt. In the midst of essays and research and the never-ending stream of emails and to-do lists, I never had the time to stand back and process what was happening. At its worst, the quarter system is a bit like whiplash, maybe even like the experience of trauma, when just enough adrenaline kicks in to deliver you to a safe exit.

I thought in the boxes that were asked of me, but to think outside of these boxes, to think expansively and critically and creatively, was asking for trouble. A bit like a monkey inside a cage, being probed by presumptuous scientists. They ask him questions like, which hand am I holding the food in? What color is this card? What they don’t ask are the questions the monkey may very well be asking himself, as you or I would if we found ourselves in a cage being interrogated by strangers. Why are these men probing me? Why would they do such a thing to me?

Do we resemble these chimps, trained to answer questions about American history and physics, but not to think about why we’re sitting in a classroom in the first place, when in theory we could be doing a million other things? Sometimes, when I’m sitting in a class or doing a particularly dreadful all-nighter, I wonder, “Why am I subjecting myself to such a torturous class that I am not actually taking anything from?”

But those left-brain self-discipline instincts kick in, introducing a string of rational antibodies: “I’m almost done with it; I would need to retake it in the future; a ‘W’ doesn’t look too good on a transcript.” This brief moment of wider, critical thought has passed, effectively inoculated. It’s impractical to ask these kinds of questions, and maybe even dangerous when the pace is so relentless: they could derail you.

And yet, any question that makes us look introspectively into the way we lead our lives is important and useful in a way that an esoteric fact about Andrew Jackson’s political views will never be. There it is again: the tension between common sense and what we’ve been taught is important. That brain that seems to live in our hearts is so hazy and indecipherable, and yet it’s so terribly strong sometimes. I wish I had the courage to ignore everything I’ve learned and listen to it.

Which in kind of a weird way, relates back to this whole notion of nothingness. It’s not just that I can think again. I can…listen. It’s kind of like when you’re meditating, and you reach that rare moment of absolute silence. A funny thing happens when your mind goes completely silent: the thoughts come to you, as if you’re dreaming, but awake. And these thoughts are somehow wiser than normal, as if they’re the very answers you’ve been agonizing through hours of mental strain to arrive at. Just like that, they appeared. All you had to do was stop, and listen…

One more thing about being home, the best gift of all: I’m daydreaming again. I dream about Paris in the fall, and jet-setting adventures. In high school, I dreamed about college: the bohemian outfits, the confident smile of a girl who finally found some. I had hazy notions of a boyfriend, and visions of me in an art studio with paint all over my cheek, hair swirled in a bun like I belonged in Florence.

I had similarly ambitious visions of myself in high school, back in eighth grade, none of which came to fruition either. But it feels good to dream, to be engaged in the act of creating plans. Whether they make it past the drawing board or collapse into the dustbins of all my past fantasies won’t really matter. Like a kid building up and tearing down houses of Legos, I’m constantly creating, imagining, and thinking. I needed a blank canvas to learn how to do these things again. I can’t help but smile. Nothing could have been better than, well, nothing.

Contact Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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Reviews: ‘The Hangover III’ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/24/reviews-the-hangover-iii/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/24/reviews-the-hangover-iii/#respond Fri, 24 May 2013 07:31:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077398 Forgive me for sounding harsh, but “The Hangover III” is such an awful movie that I considered whether it even deserved a review.

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Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Forgive me for sounding harsh, but “The Hangover III” is such an awful movie that I considered whether it even deserved a review. It almost seems kind of cruel for me to do, since what else can this review be but an indictment of everything wrong with it…which is, pretty much, everything? But I know I have a duty, so I will do my best to convey to you why you should save your $10 for a sandwich instead.

 

The film’s first scene involves the decapitation of a giraffe, I kid you not, and this–yes, this–is the high point of the movie. From there, it just gets less amusing.

 

Shortly after the giraffe incident, Alan’s (Zach Galifianakis) father dies. The “Wolfpack” reunites for his funeral and then goes on a road-trip to get Alan treated for mental issues (yes, this happens). On the way, a drug lord kidnaps them; apparently, Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) has been making all kinds of trouble, and Alan’s the only one who knows where he is. The gang has three days to find him or else Doug (Justin Bartha) gets it.

 

This doesn’t sound so bad, but unfortunately, the plot is little more than a series of stunts. A bigger budget proves to be a curse: More sweeping aerial shots and gunfights means less depth and creativity. Jokes are delivered as crude one-liners, leaving no room for well-crafted humor.

 

What about the magic combination of Stu (Ed Helms), Alan and Phil (Bradley Cooper)? This too, I am afraid, is a casualty of the lazy script. Inexplicably, more attention is paid to the relationship between Alan and Chow, both of whom function best as side dishes, not starring attractions. Alan’s transformation is perhaps the most lamentable: The once lovable weirdo is no more. In his place is a horribly insolent narcissist, my dislike of whom can hardly be put into words. To give you a sense of how mean-spirited Alan 3.0 is, the basis of his budding romance with a pawnshop dealer is their fondness for abusing the elderly. Alas, what the movie lacks is warmth; even in a franchise that celebrates over-the-top-debauchery, the journey simply isn’t fun without Alan and the ragtag trio providing it heart.

 

I don’t know if I’ve ever left a movie feeling so deflated. Maybe this has less to do with the movie itself and more about accepting the fact that movies are simply not made for us anymore; they are produced for a global market. They are engineered to be as generic as possible so that a kid in Mumbai will understand it just as much as a farmhand in Ukraine. (Apparently, the power of art to make you understand the world through someone else’s eyes means nothing anymore.)

 

The unfortunate and inevitable truth is that “The Hangover III” will make money, if not here, then overseas. No one will protest (it’s just a movie), and the studios will continue cluttering American theaters with a two-hour trailer of explosions, heart-racing music and quick, panicked cuts, as if the more frenetic a film is, the more it holds our attention.

 

I can’t help but feel offended: For any work of art, even a blockbuster, there is an unspoken pact between creator and artist. I pay to see your work; you do your best to deliver. This film doesn’t even try. It does even worse: It exploits an audience that was promised a good story. As Alan, Stu and Phil hop from one place to the next in pursuit of Chow, their exasperation mirrors our own. When the trio finally reaches Vegas, it might as well be a different city. Looking up at Caesar’s Palace, Phil wearily sighs, “I can’t believe we’re here again”–but I had the odd sensation that it was actually Bradley Cooper imploring the audience to rescue him from the ashes of cinema.

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Joy vs. Pleasure https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/20/joy-vs-pleasure/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/20/joy-vs-pleasure/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 18:01:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077305 The pursuit of joy, I would hypothesize, is what moves us.

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What if we managed to turn a blind eye to suffering, let ourselves fall into an electro trance with the help of some chemicals? We would no doubt experience something tantamount to joy. But would it be the same joy you might feel as you finally kiss the person you have secretly loved for two years? Would joy amongst nightclub strangers be the same joy experienced amongst your closest friends in the same nightclub? I say there are different degrees of joy, and the more hard-earned a moment of joy, the more expansive and blissful it is. Zadie Smith writes a great essay on the difference between pleasure and joy. Pleasure can be found quite easily: in a sensation of warmth, a cookie, a hug. I would say “living mindfully” or “in the moment” is a matter of turning insignificant moments into a series of pleasures.

My own experience tells me that joy is much harder to capture. It arrives rarely, unexpectedly, and it is the product, perhaps, of many pleasurable threads coalescing at once. So the point is: joy is a build-up. I still remember, distinctly, a rush of joy as I walked into the Sydney airport after a three-week student trip in Australia. Why joy? It was the sum of many parts: perhaps the thought of dancing with my tween crush last night, the the feeling of being abroad, the wildly promising knowledge that there was a world, full of hope and novelty, beyond the iron bars of middle school.

But such joy would only be possible if I knew what it was like to hate middle school repression, for there would be no bliss in encountering a free world’s possibilities if in fact I had no concept of an insular, repressed one. Likewise, there would be far less bliss in dancing with the boy I liked if it were not preceded by two weeks of stifled, unspoken attraction – and far less bliss if in fact I had never previously known the sting of not being liked back. Does a child, who has no concept of pain, experience never-ending joy throughout childhood? I certainly was happy as a child, but happiness, like pleasure, can exist without ever having suffered. Joy is joy because it is earned; to get there, you’ve got to know its antithesis. To revel in being loved, you must know how it feels to be rejected. To stand on stage with an Oscar in your hand and feel pure elation, you’ve got to know what it feels like to feel unworthy and untalented. Depression, darkness – these make the reverse proportionally more elevating. Thus one can never experience the heights of joy without venturing into the depths of misery.

But all this is easier said than done. When you’re down in the dumps, you wonder if the few and fleeting moments of bliss make it worth it. But let’s return to the dance floor, where joy, it seems, flows to no end. But the catch is this: We mistake what is actually a monotonous stream of pleasure for a joy. A stream of pleasure is very different. If you think of joy and depression as the opposite spectrums of a pendulum, I would even argue that constant, static pleasure precludes the chance of achieving joy.

Callicles and Nietzsche may refute me. A life of ongoing hollow pleasure, he may say, is better than a life of sorrowful contemplation sprinkled with but a few moments of joy. I would still take the second option, and though some may not, I imagine most people would do the same as me. This pursuit of joy, I would even hypothesize, is what moves us. For why else would we allow ourselves to fall in love, knowing full well that more than likely there is a horrible break-up at the end, that the person you love most may wind up being a perfect stranger? Who would take this risk if not promised those moments of unequaled joy found only in mutual love? Who on earth would climb Mount Everest, expose oneself to ungodly wind-chill, potentially lose a limb to frostbite (or else fall off a cliff), if it weren’t for that moment of joy at the summit? At any moment, we could reach for immediate pleasure (sex, drugs, donuts), but human history shows that we voluntarily suffer and endure because we know that the light at the end of the tunnel possesses a pleasure of a different species, fantastic enough to justify all the suffering that came before it.

Contact Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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An Attempt at Reflection https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/13/an-attempt-at-reflection/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/13/an-attempt-at-reflection/#respond Tue, 14 May 2013 06:52:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077180 Life and Stanford are often at odds

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When I think of fall, it seems incredibly long ago. I had different roommates, different classes. I was a little wider in the hips, a little more twinkly in the eyes. After a summer away, I was re-energized and full of big plans. Forget sophomore slump; this was going to be my time to shine. Columbae! Friends! Maybe even a relationship? The night before school, I lay awake in my bed too excited to fall asleep; it grew light outside, and the dump trucks came, and still I was smiling.

In retrospect, the best moments happened when I was expecting nothing. In the spaces in between the big plans. Isn’t that always how it works? Coachella wasn’t the highlight moment of my year; finding an old Columbae alum sprawled on our floor, entranced by the star projector and that eventually leading to a chanting circle with a bunch of strangers was the highlight of my year.

Alas, life and Stanford are often at odds. My friend and I were having a conversation about this. When I say life, I mean people, conversations, play, leisure… the things that make you happy. In my experience, life exists in pockets at Stanford, penciled in with everything else.

I must confess, I have, of late, been prioritizing the latter more than I should. On weekends where I should have been doing my work like a responsible student, I went to a Killer’s concert in the city, explored the Mission, attended a concert at Bing alone. It was magnificent at times: I rediscovered a love for poetry, for the joy of giving into the music. I made memories; they may not be permanent, but they certainly have a greater shelf life than working in the cluster on a Saturday night.

Why the intervention? Why did I feel the need to pump a little blood into my spring quarter, when this year was already supposed to be the best year ever? Well, it wasn’t. At least not in the ways I expected. I expected it to be a never-ending stream of sunshine and rainbows and Instagrammed picture where my friends and I would be skateboarding down Mayfield in rally gear en route to some party.

This is not how years work. This is not how college works. And certainly is not how Stanford works, despite my valiant efforts. Life does not move in a steady stream but like a wave, undulating. I have experienced some high highs, but I also have experienced moments of darkness and these weigh upon my recollection of the year and cloud its better attributes. In truth, these will in time reveal themselves to be its gems. I will look back on lovesick or lonely nights and see that I did most of my growing during them.

That is one thing I know I do not possess as long as I’m here: perspective. I have a vague idea that I have grown as a human being, but I don’t have the time nor distance to see how. The emails are always pressing; the paper is always knocking on my door. When I allow myself to think, I think of what I have to do. And when I shut that impulse off, I think of home; I dream of how the light falls on the cornfields at 6 p.m. and how the soft-shell crab at my favorite Thai restaurant smells.

None of this is productive thought. It is just the wishful thinking of a soldier who allows himself to remember what ice cream tastes like and then dutifully sticks his eye back into the periscope; but the scent of ice cream, once triggered, does not leave and keeps pawing at his thoughts like a fruit fly, and soon the soldier regrets pausing to think about it in the first place, so much trouble has it caused. So maybe in time this will be the “best” year ever, but for now all I can think about is the route I have taken from Columbae to class for the past eight months, so fried is this brain of mine. “How has this quarter been?” I can’t even answer that question. My mind dulls and goes fuzzy and provides me with a useless grab bag of recollections: Killers concert… Coachella… Special D… if I manage to blurt out any of these, I sound like an idiot. So usually I am upfront about my myopia, which proves very unhelpful to any conversation so that I would not be surprised if I am on a blacklist for small talk partners.

Where to return to? Stanford, life, perspective (or rather lack of it), living without expectations… all of them are intertwined, and given my conundrum, I cannot only begin to piece out the hairs. I have learned a lot. And I have grown a lot. I keep expecting sophomore year to turn into the all-out party I somehow thought it would be, but maybe that’s not what I need right now. I can save that for next year, when I’m drinking in life abroad. Maybe what I needed this year was growth, pure and unadulterated growth and maybe it’s not pretty, but maybe it will look beautiful in retrospect.

I have just about one month left until departing into the great study-abroad-gap-year-unknown. I am scared by the uncertain look of my future, and so the fact that come June I can depend on ResEd to kick me out of Palo Alto is oddly comforting. I’ll fly home, collapse into my bed, remember the smell of my covers. At some point, I’ll emerge from my hibernation and start piecing together what this year meant to me.

Two months of this and I will grow bored, and then restless. So I will fly to a far-away place, reinvent myself through the gazes of strangers and thus the cycle will repeat. Rising and falling, rising and falling. Like a wave.

Alex would love to hear from you at abayer@stanford.edu.

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The Guilt of Having an Ordinary Summer https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/07/the-guilt-of-having-an-ordinary-summer/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/07/the-guilt-of-having-an-ordinary-summer/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 18:00:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077001 When I sit back and allow myself to be all right with it, I actually start getting excited.

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“If your back is hurting, maybe don’t stretch so much. Check your alignment.” I was in yoga class, and this phrase, which normally slips through my ears without notice, caught my attention. You see, I have been preoccupied with this very thought for the last two weeks: What is the balance between centering myself and pushing myself?

At a place like Stanford, this is no easy task. Take, for example, summer plans. I’ve found that whenever I pose that question to my classmates, I leave with a bruised ego. One of my friends is doing a photography study of hip-hop culture in Norway; another one of my friends is working with a social activist circus in Cape Town. Still another one of my friends is interning with an NGO in Santiago and going to Rio to study its favelas.

I did try; months ago, I sat down and researched grants and fellowships. I researched about places and people I could research. I was on the lookout for some story, some niche in the universe that would fire me up. Maybe food culture in Hong Kong…? Attitudes about death in Japan…? Folklore in Ireland? But at the end of the day, I could not muster the energy to write a grant proposal, and the deadlines, as they are wont to do, slipped by.

February, March, April… as the months passed, my options began to winnow themselves out. I submitted a few applications here and there, just to stay afloat. But to cut a long story short, it looks like I am heading home for the summer.

I say this with a tinge of reticence, as if not quite ready to believe it myself. Why the guilt? Isn’t this a thing normal college kids do? Go back home, mow lawns for some spending money, haunt some high school parties? I think back to the college students trolling around my hometown. There was an air of mystery about them and they seemed older, cooler. Now I’m them, strangely enough. Wouldn’t it be kind of fun to pretend I’m a little cooler?

It’s never easy to trust your own voice; such is the lot of twenty-somethings still figuring out who they are. But the problem is especially magnified at Stanford: We’re worried about our future, we’re insecure, and we’re success-driven. It’s a given that we compare ourselves to others, but the caliber of things we’re doing is abnormally awesome. A circus? Biking across America? A fellowship in Sao Paolo? It’s a sheer effort of will, every time, to remind myself that it’s OK I’m not doing any of these things. I’m going…home. Maybe I’ll work at my public library. Maybe I’ll spend my afternoons walking my dog. “That’s OK,” I have to tell myself (it’s harder than it looks).

When I sit back and allow myself to be all right with it, I actually start getting excited more than I will admit to most people. I think of the mundane possibilities (Grocery shopping! Eating at the Chili’s where all the high schoolers go! Walking my dog!) and a swell of joy rises in me. I’m even thinking of ways I can rediscover my hometown and change it in meaningful ways, and all of a sudden I feel the passion I kept waiting for a cool-sounding fellowship in a foreign country to elicit in me.

Then I realize: The reason I’ve been driving to Barnes and Noble or studying in Starbucks? They remind me of their carbon copies back home. Home was tugging at me all along. Home was what I needed. And now it’s what I’m wanting. Ah, clarity. Once I stopped trying to find something to want and simply listened to what I needed, it took care of itself. It turns out the two are sometimes the same.

Share your summer plans with Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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Pro-choice is not anti-life https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/01/pro-choice-is-not-anti-life/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/01/pro-choice-is-not-anti-life/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:38:51 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074561 There is no show called “Teen Dad.”

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It is unsettling to see pro-choice feminists portrayed in the Fox News Circuit as insensitive, bossy women too wrapped up in themselves to consider the “miracle of life.” I cannot think of a single pro-choice advocate, down to the most ardent feminist, who if faced with the choice of an abortion would not wrestle with the ethical and emotional weight of it. I couldn’t say with certainty what I myself would do. Nevertheless, I am firmly pro-choice.

The fact is, abortion is an issue that affects women’s lives far more intensely than men’s. If a teenage girl had a baby, she simply couldn’t be a full-time student. We hope the boyfriend’s a good guy who sticks around. Nevertheless, he’s not tied to the domestic responsibilities that fall upon his female counterpart; it’s just simply not expected of him. Doing his part would mean getting a decent-paying job to support their new family, but is this any different from what he would do otherwise? If he has higher aspirations than the supermarket checkout aisle, what is stopping him from climbing the career ladder? Who would protest? In fact, who wouldn’t applaud him for his motivation and success, for are not these the benchmarks of being an effective father?

What I mean to say, in short, is that it’s easy to talk in idealistic terms about whom the birth of a baby affects. Of course, I want to believe that it affects father and mother equally.

But this is so seldom the case. There is no show called “Teen Dad.” In “Teen Mom,” the lanky, shaggy-haired young fathers drift in and out as if they’re cameo actors. If they help raise their child, they are adored. If they shirk responsibility, as is expected, we simply bow our heads, disappointed but unsurprised.

On the flip side, the notion of a runaway mom who has forsaken her own child inspires disgust. A psychological breakdown may redeem her from being labeled a straight-out witch, yet this would classify maternal abandonment as a neurological dysfunction. Is a psychological disorder ever used to explain absentee fathers? Is it not telling that women who abandon their babies make headlines, face a public shaming, but the fathers who have long since left the picture earn little more than a faceless mention for informational purposes?

It’s absolutely true that there should be more social infrastructure to support young mothers. In reality, though, this will not change the dichotomy in the expectations society holds for young mothers and fathers. If every piece of legislation making abortion illegal came with a clause that forced, by law, fathers to raise their babies in equal share with the mothers, I wonder if the vastly male pro-life politicians would have a change of heart?

How and when these support systems will improve is unknown. For now, we have the all-too-common narrative of a young mother cracking under the pressure of stress. The recent case of a woman abandoning her baby in a Portuguese airport made sensational headlines. Distressed, she attempted to explain herself: “I can see why people must think I am the worst mother in the world… but I was so depressed… I couldn’t afford a passport for Charlie and I reached breaking-point.”

Cases like these underscore the lack of a safety net for women who, already financially stressed, are burdened with the enormous responsibility, the enormous task of providing for a child singlehandedly. By voting “pro life,” a politician is also eliminating a young woman’s choice in the question of whether she’s ready to contend with this intensely demanding new life. In this sense, “pro life” is the antithesis of choice.

As it is for me and every woman, abortion is an emotionally fraught, tirelessly complex decision that we hope we never have to face. To think that the decision to have an abortion is akin to the dropping of a hat – how absolutely absurd. Many women, for various reasons, decide that giving breath to new life takes precedence. But whether she does, or doesn’t, the choice resides within her governance.

Just because I support a woman’s right to choose does not mean that I am any less sensitive to the gravity of what an abortion means – in fact, I’ll take a wild guess that I have put far more thought into it than the old white men who have appointed themselves authorities about it. I am pro-choice because I understand what it means for a woman to have a child. In a nation that prizes “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” above all else, it is duplicitous to then entrust one of the most momentous decisions in a woman’s life to a faceless institution. It is well-intentioned but wishful thinking that with merely a sense of personal responsibility, a woman can make it work.

The trials of being a young-mother are well-chronicled. Now, if a politician wants to propose a clause in his or her anti-abortion legislation that legally binds fathers to expend an equal amount of time in the domestic side of raising their child, I could take more seriously an argument on the importance of a newborn life over those of its guardians. I suspect, however, that few in the male pro-life contingent in Congress would consent their name to any proposal that threatens the loss of their job.

Share your thoughts on abortion and gender equality with Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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The pressure to be happy and the crisis of the humanities, part II https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/the-pressure-to-be-happy-and-the-crisis-of-the-humanities-part-ii/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/24/the-pressure-to-be-happy-and-the-crisis-of-the-humanities-part-ii/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 07:50:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074341 Stanford’s approach to career-building is very one-sided.

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This column is the second in a two-part series examining the connections between happiness, pressure and the study of the humanities at Stanford.

Last year, I found myself debating three of my friends, all some variation of techie-ness. “Humanities feed your soul,” I offered desperately. I criticized excessive time and money spent on research, since much of it is simply funneled into the vortex of academia, never to be seen again. My friend pointed out that research could cure cancer. I felt tempted to fire back that cancers are often traced to man-made chemicals, more often that not produced in these very laboratories, and then launched into a tirade about the ghastly ways in which technology has compromised meaningful human connection. This did not get me very far. “Well,” I offered, stomaching my lack of conviction, “In grief, what do you turn to? Science may explain death, but it does not heal grief. A poem can make you feel better.” This was met with blank stares, so I quickly amended it: “A song can make you feel better.”

I left the room, disappointed that I had only managed to half-heartedly convince them (and even that wasn’t such a sure point, for maybe they had just taken pity on the dying pit bull). If anything, I had become less convinced myself. I hadn’t been able to prove the worth of the humanities; I hadn’t even addressed what makes writing a novel as equally important to civilization as designing a wind turbine. A song can make you feel better. Was this paltry line my best argument?

In Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life,” he advises his friend Paulinus, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” To imbue our lives with wisdom and clarity, look no further “high priests of liberal studies,” the philosophers who have taken to task hard questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” Seneca writes: “By the toil of others we are let into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light… None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.” For now, I like to think, a good book will suffice.

I do need to make one important clarification: lest this argument be mistaken for a critique of the sciences and a manifesto declaring that all students should be classics and English majors, I should say the problem here is not biology or computer science or mechanical engineering. There are plenty of devoutly passionate students who study the sciences (and can understand them, God bless you), who want to push the fold of human knowledge further, who dream of changing the world for the better. This is as noble a cause as any.

No, the problem is the never-ending career fairs, the looming recruitment rounds, the pressure felt by so many here to not just secure a job, but a damn good one, one with the kind of clout and money-earning potential to make the university proud. I wonder: how many graduates become elementary school teachers who arguably have an impact unparalleled by other professions? What is that number compared to the number of students who enter consulting or marketing, neither of which they likely knew about in high school and, I suspect, aren’t terribly passionate about even as they go down that route? The curiosity students have nourished since childhood is squandered in professions whose focus is, in the ultimate end, to make money.

Choosing this path is not unreasonable. Job security is frightful right now, and many take these positions knowing it’ll help them land better ones they actually like doing.

But I fear too many students are getting sucked, irreversibly, into a vacuum wherein profit is an impostor for purpose and competition a means of lifestyle. The worst part is that the university, with its eagerness to bring recruiters and its more-than-friendly, deeply biased relationship with Silicon Valley, promotes these kinds of jobs. I went to a job fair at White Plaza once. I passed booths touting careers I had never heard of, firms with sterile names. It was all very intimidating, so I beelined for the Walt Disney booth, hoping to find their information about being a story-boarder or an artist. Standing behind a girl dressed in business slacks, I scanned the poster. Disney was here to recruit future marketers, legal team members, potential executives. My grin faded.

Stanford’s approach to career-building is very one-sided. Where was the creative contingent among all these employers? Where were the architects, where was National Geographic, The New York Times? Perhaps companies like these don’t pluck smart college students like consulting firms do, but with Stanford’s resources, is it out of their power to bring them to campus for at least an information session? Why are the heroes, touted by Stanford’s press, the people who have made the most money and won the most medals? What about the activists, the teachers? Why do I not hear about achievement outside of the context of winning and prestige? A liberal arts education is not a trade school to be wealthy or “successful.” The reason we come to college is to challenge our minds, become better thinkers, better human beings, armed with knowledge of life’s truths and conviction in who were are to venture into the real world and face its inevitable hardships.

I urge the university to take a look at how its utopian-like pressure to be happy and its biased emphasis on “profitable” jobs actually undermines students’ ultimate happiness. In fact, these misguided priorities get in the way of letting students do what they are meant to do in college: wade into the self-discovery that arcs across our maddening existences. At its purest, education isn’t about providing us with answers, as the promise of a lucrative job might lead one to believe. As educator Mark Lilla put it, speaking to a group of freshmen: “The real reason you were excited about college was because you had questions, buckets of questions, not life plans and PowerPoint presentations. My students convinced me that they are far less interested in getting what they want than in figuring out just what it is that’s worth wanting.”

Alex would love to hear about your experiences with the humanities. Email her at abayer@stanford.edu.

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The Pressure to Be Happy and the Crisis of the Humanities https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/18/the-pressure-to-be-happy-and-the-crisis-of-the-humanities/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/18/the-pressure-to-be-happy-and-the-crisis-of-the-humanities/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:01:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074183 The weakest members of a utopia are the ones who can’t have fun.

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This column is the first in a two-part series examining the connections between happiness, pressure and the study of the humanities at Stanford.

There are worse things than being in a place of happy people. At times, the effect can even be contagious. But there are also (and I hate to be the gnat who puts a damper on the party) drawbacks to living in a utopia.

When I say utopia, I don’t mean it in the theoretical sense of the word, as in a place where bliss truly does exist endlessly, but in its concrete application: a term to describe places that aspire to be utopias by exclaiming that everyone there is happy, and through this myth, keeping everyone, through the corresponding fear of being left behind or isolated, “happy.”

And, yes, you may have guessed, I deem Stanford one of these places.

The myth that “everyone here is happy all the time” makes feeling unhappy abnormal and shameful. I am surely not the only one who, upon feeling a bout of sadness, retreats inward. When I come across an acquaintance in the bookstore, I plaster on my smile.

“How are you?” they ask. “Good,” I say. At times I say, “Okay,” for this is my most courageous euphemism for, “Life absolutely sucks at the moment.” Whenever I get beyond the superficial banter stage, I learn that everyone has insecurities, sad days and, most upsettingly for me, a sense of guilt and isolation for feeling these things; every time one of these “revelation” moments occurs, I feel surprised, strangely enough. To have come across another human being? Why should students feel ashamed of feeling what is perfectly normal?

This has created a crisis: CAPS (Vaden’s psychological services wing) is so flooded with demand that it can’t adequately accommodate the number of students seeking its services. When two student suicides occurred last year, there was silence on the part of the administration – not even a candlelit vigil in White Plaza. Are we afraid of what would happen to us if we voice our sadness and our confusion, or even worse, our grief? Are we afraid that other people will see something wrong with us, cast us off with the party-pooping crowd who can’t have fun? I believe that what we fear is excommunication, not of the official sort, but of the unspoken and insidious kind.

The weakest members of a utopia are the ones who can’t have fun. In a true community, the greatest threats are the ones who haven’t learned to empathize, practice humility, care for the injured. Sadness is not a character trait. It is a passing emotion that we are all wont to feel at some time or another. However, in a utopia, sadness and its many cousins (insecurity, self-doubt, confusion, grief, jealousy) are diagnosed as character flaws and prescribed one of two antidotes: suppress it in public and tend to it in private, or leave, lest you risk spoiling the fun for the rest.

The greatest, and most effective, medicine for this natural and inevitable recourse of the human mind is not “medicine,” but empathy. To compel students to emulate an aura of immaculate happiness is to deprive everyone of an open and caring community. It is to shut down meaningful communication between students (a blockade they must overcome through their own devices), depriving them of the guidance and sympathy of thousands of young adults going through the same trials and tribulations.

This brings me to the value of humanities. I will allow you a moment to groan, rightfully so, for I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to bemoan the dwindling presence of the liberal arts here. The argument I hear most often is that humanities are beneficial to one’s intellectual reasoning. Well, yes. All learning is. Yet the bigger grievance I have with this argument is that it assigns value to the humanities based on how successful they can make you. Law schools actually favor English degrees. Medical schools in fact prefer students with a solid, well-rounded liberal arts education. An art history minor will distinguish you from all those other Microsoft applicants. Philosophy is a great exercise for the mind, so you can tackle those tough-as-nails interviews (and dazzle your interviewers and colleagues with Sophocles quotes.

Thus, many students, I take it, interact with the humanities because they are compelled to or (if the goodwill campaign is a success) because they have been convinced it will help them out in their pursuit of a successful, practical career. What is missing is a discussion of why humanities are indispensable in and of themselves.

They deserve more than to simply be a means to an end. However much the sciences may reveal about the body or the world or the neurological origins of happiness, what they can never do is instruct you in how to live. For two millennia, the greatest minds have wrestled with the existential questions that we all inevitably encounter: who am I? What is my place, my purpose, in the world? They have produced an infinite amount of literature to help us along with this process. Mourning a loved one? Pining for the guy who dumped you? Envious of the girl who has it all? There is, if not an answer, then a guidebook for that.

A library can be seen as a medicine cabinet for your emotional ailments. A pharmacy may be able to prescribe you Prozac for the depression that stemmed from the break-up, but the pharmacist will not tell you about the awful break-up she had when she was your age, how she hated yet still loved him, how she got over him and what she learned about love from it. If the “classics major will get you into law school” argument is effective because it speaks, quite frankly, to our self-centered ambition, then why aren’t we selling humanities on the basis that studying them is an entirely self-serving experience?

In next week’s column, Alex will discuss the links between the pressure to be happy and  the in-depth study of the humanities. Email her with ideas at abayer@stanford.edu.

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Eyebrows, Walmart and the trials of beauty https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/10/eyebrows-walmart-and-the-trials-of-beauty/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/10/eyebrows-walmart-and-the-trials-of-beauty/#respond Fri, 11 Jan 2013 07:53:28 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074010 "I wish I had eyebrows like yours.”

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When I was young, pre-tween age, I went to Walmart with my mom one day. The new Mary Kate and Ashley line was out for girls my age, and man, it was all the rage. Next thing I know I’m staring at my reflection in the mirror with a sad look on my face. I was only nine, but already noticing the flaws in my body. My belly peeked out of the camisole – the pretty little camisole Mary Kate and Ashley surely wore, and looked nice in.

My mom was by my side, reading her book. She noticed I was crestfallen and tried to cheer me up. She stood behind me, grasping my shoulders, insisting that I look at myself in the mirror in a new light. “You’re beautiful.” I quickly wrote it off. Then she said: “you have the most beautiful eyebrows. I wish I had eyebrows like yours.”

I went home some time later and sat on the counter and looked, really inspected, these eyebrows of mine. It was no small deal; after all, that the most beautiful woman I knew thought they were kind of nice. Well, they didn’t look so special. They were pretty bushy and shapeless, never having met a Tweezers or a teenage girl’s perfectionist scrutiny (yet). Like two furry caterpillars. But nonetheless, I was proud of them. My mom thought they were beautiful. That’s all that mattered. They had the holy seal of approval.

Of course, the holy parental seal has an expiration date. For me, it was around the age of fourteen, when middle school really kicked into high gear. Girls started wearing makeup. Shaving their legs. Donning tight-fitting Abercrombie tees and chunky sterling silver jewelry. For a time, I still wore my athletic shorts and oversized Adidas t-shirts, still shied away from make-up, and let my eyebrows be. But then I started caring (why must we care) and ticking off the rites of passage. The eyebrows were last, but finally I caved. Out came the Tweezers. And of course, I over-tweezed the poor caterpillars to shreds. Thin, threadbare lines of hair. Well, you couldn’t really tell they were hair anymore. They merely carried the suggestion, the essence, of hair. Like all the other girls.

Like all the other girls. The rites continued. Shaving long blond hairs was only the beginning. There was flat-ironing to be done in the morning, weight to be maintained and lost. Always the weight. It was no longer enough to have a t-shirt from Abercrombie. Cue the eating disorders. Cue the girls dropping out of school to go to rehab. Cue elliptical binges, self-loathing, self-flagellation at the intersection of increase and pound. This, at an all-girls school – looking good for the boys wasn’t even at stake.

Girls, seventeen-year-old girls, who wanted to look like fourteen-year-old six-foot models. Girls, who just wanted to shed a few pounds so their bodies would feel more lithe at dances, catch the eye of a cute boy – a fling they hoped would maybe result in something more, like a conversation, and if you’re absurdly lucky, a courtship, a date, and if you’re really lucky, a relationship.

There must be girls who love their bodies. Who travel through puberty and the even more treacherous minefield that is “Teen Vogue” and “Teen Nick” and all of mass media with unearthly grace and self-esteem. I never knew such confidence; it has always eluded me, and I am both envious of and reverential towards it.

I inspect my eyebrows every few days or so, Tweezers in hand. I put everything in impeccable order, right where it should be. Like all the girls. I take a last glimpse. They are nice, if unremarkable. My face turns sad as I remember their former imprint. Nice, if unremarkable.

I can’t help it. The two thin lines furrow into the ungraceful curve of an almost-unibrow, as I frown at my reflection. Nice they may be, but unremarkable eyebrows were never complimented by a beautiful woman in a Walmart dressing room.

Contact Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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The writer’s ethical dilemma https://stanforddaily.com/2012/12/10/the-writers-ethical-dilemma/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/12/10/the-writers-ethical-dilemma/#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:38:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073691 Admittedly, being a writer is not a strenuous job. It doesn’t require me to leave my bed, nor talk to people in a cheery voice. Expressing my innermost feelings, which some take to be a brave feat, is actually just cathartic. In fact, revealing details about myself has turned out to be the easiest way […]

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Admittedly, being a writer is not a strenuous job. It doesn’t require me to leave my bed, nor talk to people in a cheery voice. Expressing my innermost feelings, which some take to be a brave feat, is actually just cathartic. In fact, revealing details about myself has turned out to be the easiest way to avoid criticism. In this sense, I am cowardly.

Writing is a selfish occupation, and though I write with the hope that in sharing my experiences people feel less alone, I end up hurting the ones I love most. It’s one thing to talk about depression or my angst. But I am also guilty of bringing into the fold the imperfections and misbehaviors of those closest to me, so that I can reflect on what I have learned from them or offer a more authentic picture of myself. I tell myself I do so because being truthful about what I’ve experienced seems like a writer’s obligation. As soon as I begin censoring my words, I feel like I’m betraying a reader’s trust by committing the lie of omission. At least, this is what I tell myself.

I realize it’s not just the writer’s dilemma, but the artist’s. Does Taylor Swift go through the same ethical dilemma when she chooses to write a spiteful song about a former lover, the identity of whom is only thinly veiled? Surely, she must have resolved that dilemma long ago, since most of her songs seem to be rebukes against former flames. But no one, I suspect, would accuse her of being selfish or exploitative. Most would say she’s entitled to expressing herself. Joe Jonas broke up with her by text message. Is it not her right to express her anger in a song, or does that take the revenge too far? Doesn’t broadcasting Joe Jonas’s cowardice and insensivity to the world seem a little unfairly matched to his original sin? When put like this, it does seem a little cruel. Then again, a song like this has no doubt given solace to thousands of teenage girls who’ve been broken up with. Does the comfort she provided all those girls outweigh the hurt she caused Joe Jonas? At the end of the day, I’d prefer she keep writing these diatribes against famous men like John Mayer and Taylor Lautner. For her to stop writing would be a pity, many would agree; it would deprive her audience, teenaged girls navigating through the discomforts of adolescence, of sisterly guidance, of a voice that gently reminds them: “You’re not the only one,” and “If I can get through this, you can too.”

Then again, writing about an ex-boyfriend seems like a territory of its own. He hurt you, and in that sense, you have a right to hurt him back. Where the ethical dilemma becomes fuzzier is when it’s a matter of writing about someone you love and who has not necessarily done anything to hurt you. There’s a great story by David Sedaris, “Repeat After Me,” that’s about his guilt about writing about his sister. In the story, he writes about her nuances, neurotic tendencies, personal details of her life; all the while, she is noticeably tepid and guarded, afraid that should she reveal something about herself her brother will go and put it into writing. At one point, he reflects:

“In order to sleep at night, I have to remove myself from the equation, pretending that the people I love voluntarily chose to expose themselves. Amy breaks up with a boyfriend and sends out a press release. Paul regularly discusses his bowel movements on daytime talk shows. I’m not the conduit, but just a poor typist stuck in the middle.”

In the end, he cannot bear to stop writing about his loved ones; this he admits with both helplessness and guilt. He has accepted, albeit with much reluctance and self-delusion, that being a writer may harm the innocent. Would I want him to stop writing? Like many, I get a kick out of reading about his neurotic family; it makes me feel like it’s okay to not have a picture-perfect nuclear family. But is it selfish of me to disregard those who were hurt in the making, the people whose imperfections he has written about to alleviate shame of my own?

There was a story, a few years back, about an artist named Larry Rivers who recorded videos of his two young daughters, naked, as he asked them how they felt about their developing breasts. The daughters, now grown, were pressing NYU to remove them from their archives and return them to their possession. They attributed years of psychological trauma and anorexia to these videos. Of course, I said to myself at the time, they should give the videos back to the women. I didn’t even hesitate. Yet this too, not unlike the Sedaris story, raises the question of to what extent an artist is entitled to use the vulnerabilities of others in the name of art. Why am I okay with David Sedaris writing about the insecurities of his sister and not okay with an artist documenting puberty vis-a-vis his daughters? It goes beyond the uncomfortable child pornography implications. Is it that these videotapes have less value to the audience? After all, their motivation isn’t to help the viewer come to terms with his or her own experience with puberty or bodily insecurities. Rather, it makes us think about the nature of puberty in conceptual terms, not unlike an artist who does a series about a chair to complicate our understanding of what a chair is. Does this then suggest that the audience is a rather selfish creature who justifies the potential hurt caused by certain creative works based on their use-value to the audience itself? Am I quick to excuse Taylor Swift and David Sedaris because their work, though hurtful to a select few, gives me guidance and comfort? Conversely, am I critical of Larry Rivers because his art doesn’t have enough value to me personally to justify the hurt he caused his subjects?

What are your thoughts about this? Is occasionally hurting those closest to you a necessary evil of being a writer? Or can a writer avoid this, and still not compromise his or her truthfulness? Does the comfort of many justify the hurt of one? I ask because I don’t know. In trying to be selfless with my honesty, I have been utterly selfish when it comes to my human subjects. I am not ready to undertake the lie David Sedaris repeats to himself. But if I am to be a real writer, will I have to?

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Deciphering twenty-something angst: a two-part analysis https://stanforddaily.com/2012/12/07/deciphering-twenty-something-angst-a-two-part-analysis/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/12/07/deciphering-twenty-something-angst-a-two-part-analysis/#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2012 04:51:57 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073680 In a world of infinite choice, the road in front of me looks like a minefield.

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Part One

College is kind of a big deal. I feel like we don’t talk about that enough. I mean, being on my own doesn’t just mean I have to do my own laundry (well damn, I can’t even do that). See, my friend and I got into a conversation about this. We deduced being on your own means that you are solely responsible for all of your emotional baggage. You become the ambassador for “all that shit back home.”

When I was in high school back in Connecticut, sure, certain aspects of life kind of sucked. But at least I could draw a distinction between me and the problems that were causing my misery. Now that I’m on the other side of the country, surrounded by people who know absolutely nothing about where I come from, all of the bad stuff lives in the abstract. In their physical absence, I carry the facts of my life around like parcels of luggage, internalizing the external, assimilating it to my self-identity. I suppose this is why the sordid details of our past, when we leave the nest, tend to coalesce into shame.

This is why, I suspect, we evolve into guarded creatures, shameful of external circumstances beyond our control simply because we have internalized them and taken on the burden of their memory. That said, I think these very unsightly details can be sources of strength and courage. You just have to separate yourself from them, treat them as things you have overcome and not things weighing you down, which isn’t easy when all you have at your disposal is vague recollection.

Part Deux

All of this is very well said in the abstract, like most things. The truth is, I haven’t quite figured out the proper way to regard my unbecoming origins. Even when I was in high school, I was very guarded about my upbringing, so it’s not like sweet old Connecticut is the answer. Who knows – life is confusing. (Duh, you say.) You’re led to believe your teenaged years are the most baffling period of your life, and therefore pine for the days when you’re 20 and you’ll have yourself all figured out. As if.

Your twenties are waaay more confusing. At least in high school I had a purpose (get into college) and could convince myself that I would resolve all my insecurities and concerns in that mythical place. In college, you don’t have an excuse. I mean, I guess some people just set up a new goal: grad school, or a nice job. I asked my dad, a doctor, how he dealt with all of this confusion when he was my age. He confided to me that to deal with that massive uncertainty, he put his nose in his books. He studied relentlessly and got by on the contrived belief that becoming a doctor, professional and successful, would bring him inner peace and security. He is 65 now, and wise and truthful. When he talks, a wistful gaze slips over his eyes. He wishes he had become an English teacher.

To think: my father, an English teacher. Had he confronted that confusion, done the painful job that many avoid of asking himself what he really wanted to do with his life, would he be lecturing to high school students in a tweed jacket? Would he be more content with himself? Would his eyes be twinkling, beset with conviction, instead of pathos for what could have been? No doubt he is happy, and successful; he has helped untold thousands of people in their most endangered states. I am proud of him, and perhaps his choice of career is extraordinarily minor compared to how he has chosen to raise his family–and here, he has not gone wrong. Maybe angst is just something that dissolves of its own accord; maybe there are others ways to affirm oneself outside of the framework of a career. I suspect that regret is inevitable and unavoidable no matter what you do, and thus indicting my father for his decision is unfair to him. We all carry regrets. It’s what you do moving forward that matters and for as long as I have observed him, my dad has stayed true to himself.

I too have regrets, and that makes me nervous I’m going to do something that leaves me with still more. Doing the most generic and socially acceptable thing seems like the less risky and therefore the most attractive. After all, I am plagued with countless uncertainties about my choice of major, my career, my likelihood of success, the “right” path I should take from here on out. There are so many possibilities that I am paralyzed with choice. Like every human being on the planet, my greatest wish is to be happy. Like every student here, I want to be successful. In a world of infinite choice, the road in front of me looks like a minefield.

One misstep and I’m out.  It’s so tempting to avoid all this, to put my head down and tally off the days until graduate school, and then after that an entry-level job, and then a better job, and so on and so forth. But I fear that I will end up on the other side regretful. Perhaps I will have a mid-life crisis because I didn’t take the time to figure out what I truly wanted to do with my life when I was 20.

I am confused. I know this is normal because my friends are too, and because I have done a lot of Google searches about this. A very big part of me wants to run home to my room and slam the door on the howling world. It will always be there, though. Ah, forget trekking to Mount Doom. To take a step into the vicious wind, and stay there – to face an unkind world and endure it until we claim our place in it – is a feat of ungodly courage. One could spend the rest of her days in the Shire or a decent job, pretty content. Beneath it will be an awful fear. An awful fear of the world beyond she has never had the courage to know.

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Home hunters https://stanforddaily.com/2012/12/02/home-hunters/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/12/02/home-hunters/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 06:15:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073368 My favorite show (er, the one I get the most mind-numbing pleasure out of) is “House Hunters International.” Why, you ask? Well, I enjoy normal “House Hunters,” but lately they’ve been going downhill with this condo business. I mean, who wants to watch a competition between three awful ’80s condominums? Taking it international was a […]

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My favorite show (er, the one I get the most mind-numbing pleasure out of) is “House Hunters International.” Why, you ask? Well, I enjoy normal “House Hunters,” but lately they’ve been going downhill with this condo business. I mean, who wants to watch a competition between three awful ’80s condominums? Taking it international was a brilliant move on the part of the producers and might have just saved the series. I think I like it so much because you never know what you’re going to get. In one episode a wealthy-looking guy is looking at uber-modern London flats. In another, a bi-national couple considers houseboats in Amsterdam. In yet another, a mother and daughter inspect potential artist lofts in Chile. Talk about variety! I’ve postulated that the reason I am so fascinated with homes is because it’s been a while since I’ve felt at home. Perhaps the last time I can recall feeling like I was in a real, warm and fuzzy home was when I was 5, before my parents divorced. There have since been attempts to recreate a sensation of being at “home” the way Anthropologie does it, attempts involving scented candles and music and using the stove, but never have I been able to successfully repopulate my house with people.

One of the homiest homes I’ve ever been was in the Netherlands, in a town outside of Amsterdam. For a week, I stayed with a girl and her family. During the day, we biked to town in the frigid air. For me, this was akin to training for a marathon. My legs cramped up, my bare hands were frozen to the handlebars, and I could not breathe. But somehow I made it there and back, and oh, how nice it was to roll our bikes up to the side door and enter a warm home. I can see it now: her mom and older sister on the couch, watching television and stroking the cat. Her brother at the table messing around on the Internet. Her dad, a kind and quiet man, slipping in and out of the kitchen. Their house wasn’t very big; the first floor was like a box, each corner a living room, kitchen, dining room or foyer. Furniture was provisioned by Ikea. I can’t recall any candles or music, and sometimes we got back well after the lights had been dimmed on the kitchen. I can’t really say what it was: perhaps the amount of people sharing such a small space? Maybe it was the way they teased and joked with each other? Huh, I thought, so this is what’s it like. Leaving it was bitter. I love my dad, don’t get me wrong, but our house does not possess this warmth. The floorboards seldom creak, because there are only two pairs of feet. If the TV is on, it’s because he’s fallen asleep to it downstairs. The dining room table is a receptacle for our unopened envelopes. I have tried candles; I have tried jazz music. But there are only two of us, and we navigate this hollow condominum like ships passing in the night. You know that scene in “Home Alone” when he puts up the cardboard partygoers? I wish I could do that, with real people. Maybe this is why I am so enamored with “House Hunters International.” It allows me to imagine that perhaps if I travel far enough, I can find for myself a home that feels like a home. Silly, I know, but people who will sign up to be your live-in family members are hard to come by.

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In defense of Hostess https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/30/in-defense-of-hostess/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/30/in-defense-of-hostess/#respond Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:23:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073531 I’m sentimental about things I shouldn’t be, and Hostess is at the top of that list.

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I have mixed feelings about the prospect of Hostess going bankrupt and fading away. I have some good memories tied to these trans fat delights. Before I had any concept of health food, back when I ate Lunchables on a regular basis, I ate Hostess pies every week to pump myself up for Hebrew school. How can I forget that very distinct sensation of something cold, lumpy and reminiscent of something “apple” sliding down my esophagus, battling my immune system along the way and finally sinking to the bottommost pit of my stomach? Twinkies were a staple of my lunch bags. Sometimes you can forget it’s there, and 10 weeks later, you open the secret compartment in your backpack and it’s still good. Who can compete with that?

I’m sentimental about things I shouldn’t be, and Hostess is at the top of that list. My conscience is opposed. Ethically speaking, Hostess might as well be the poster child for the processed food industry that exhibits microscopic amounts of respect for its assembly line workers and the consumers whose arteries its products are fatally clogging. Just the mention of Hostess conjures up awful visions of vats filled with mystery sludge, smokestacks coughing out soot, bleak industrial parks in Ohio and New Jersey and food dyes concocted from crushed insect parts. God, I hope these are just my dystopian nightmares.

On a brighter note, people like me are becoming more informed about the benefits of eating healthy and more wary of inscrutable ingredient lists. I can’t think of anywhere where this movement is more present than in Northern California, practically the birthplace of Alice Waters, locavorism and phrases like “artisan ingredients,” “heirloom,” and “grass-fed.” In this rewritten balance of power, Whole Foods is the supermarket powerhouse, Chipotle is the go-to for fast food and Clif Bars are infiltrating the candy bar aisle.

The casualties of this movement are archaic brands like Hostess, whose executives are not nimble enough to rebrand their products in disingenuous, business-savvy ways, like the trend-reflexive charlatans at McDonald’s and Walmart. But the real challenge that has stymied Hostess’s efforts to don the “all-natural” veil is simple: sugary, guilt-ridden goodness is its brand. There’s something refreshingly up-front about how blatantly artificial Wonder Bread and Twinkies are.

Hostess, unlike so many of its processed food competitors, has made no effort to smack a green leaf on its Hostess pie wrappers or extract the phrase “contains natural flavors” and stick it on a box of Mini Muffins as if it were the title of a sermon on wholesomeness. Truth be told, I prefer Hostess’s absurdly, unwittingly honest approach to the deception of companies with stronger marketing departments. What do I trust more? A Hostess chocolate cupcake that is unabashedly artificial and which I know is not going to win any kudos from my stomach, or a box of Froot Loops tantalizing me with its promise of whole grains and fiber?

I know what to eat most of the time and what to eat on occasion, in late-night moments of bad decision-making. In a perfect world, the whole universe of processed food would be gone, and Hostess along with it, my childhood nostalgia be damned.

But in the current reality, in which multibillion-dollar corporations continue to exist and evolve despite everything, I would gladly take the frank unhealthiness of Hostess over the oatmeal secretly loaded with sugar, the “salad” secretly packed with as much fat as a Whopper and the mango smoothie that bears not a single trace of mango nor nutrient. It’s this gray area of terrible-for-you processed food masquerading as healthy food that is the most dangerous enemy of the food revolution, not the Twinkie whose artificiality borders on legendary. It’s perfectly OK to have chocolate cake every once in a while, but when chocolate cake is being 3sold as a “low-calorie, low-fat, high-in-fiber, sugar-free, gluten-free” pseudo-healthy snack, then dang, I’m going to eat cake every day.

You can have your cake and eat it too by emailing Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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For your procrastination: five good movies https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/26/for-your-procrastination-five-good-movies/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/26/for-your-procrastination-five-good-movies/#respond Tue, 27 Nov 2012 05:33:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073367 Okay, I’m going to take a break from the serious fare to bring you my ULTRA-FAVORITE PASSION EVER: movies. If you happen to find yourself on a weekday night and have consciously elected to not think about the essay you should be working on, then, why, you are in luck! Below, my list of favorite […]

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Okay, I’m going to take a break from the serious fare to bring you my ULTRA-FAVORITE PASSION EVER: movies. If you happen to find yourself on a weekday night and have consciously elected to not think about the essay you should be working on, then, why, you are in luck! Below, my list of favorite movies, curated by my made-up categories.

The best freaking horror movie: “Rosemary’s Baby”
Because my friends are tired of me breaking into hysterics when they suggest the option of watching a horror movie, let me say it here to spare them: Watch it, watch it I say! If you’re looking for a super creepy thriller (She’s carrying the devil’s baby! The devil’s baby!) pick up this Mia Farrow classic. Better than “Human Centipede.”

The ridiculously awesome comedy: “Mars Attacks!”
I would say “Zoolander,” but by now everyone’s seen that. Right? If you’re looking for something a bit off the beaten path, pick up this (intentionally — repeat, intentionally) tacky send-up of the classic alien invasion. Exploding alien brains, grungy Natalie Portman, Sarah Jessica’s head on a chihuahua! Who makes this stuff?!

The subtitled one you should watch: “Mother”
You may have heard that most good Hollywood thrillers are based on Asian predecessors, like “The Departed.” True! Look for your proof in this South Korean psycho-drama about a ruthlessly protective mom whose son is accused of murder. There are subtitles. You will not notice them.

Before M. Night Shyamalan went off the deep end: “Unbreakable”
Everyone’s seen “Signs” and “The Sixth Sense,” but few know about this underrated gem. If you like superhero hero origin stories, Samuel L. Jackson and M. Night Shyamalan B.S. (before sucking), then you will like this.

The romance for people who need perspective for their shitty breakup: “Match Point”
Plot twist! Woody Allen is not just your harmless, neighborhood neurotic: He has a dark side. It’s never better on display than in this ScarJo and Jonathan Rhys Meyers romance turned romance-from-hell, set in the stratosphere of London high society. As they may say there, wicked good. Okay, okay. I don’t know if that’s something they actually say.

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When time stands still https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/15/when-time-stands-still/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/15/when-time-stands-still/#respond Fri, 16 Nov 2012 07:21:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073148 Virtual flowers. Interactive sympathy cards. Is this the future of mourning?

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Two years ago, a girl I went to middle school with passed away in a car accident. She and her boyfriend had been driving 90 miles per hour on a windy road. They were killed instantly. I found out in a most ungraceful way unbefitting of any tragedy: through people’s Facebook statuses. Shock flooded the airwaves. Her Facebook was still up, and here her friends gathered to process the loss. People recalled memories of her, consoled each other, wrote prayers addressed to heaven. Like flowers, I suppose, but in the age of social media, grief is conducted in public. Virtual flowers. Interactive sympathy cards. Is this the future of mourning?

Grief unfolds in predictable stages when it’s a matter of someone you love intimately. But how is it supposed to work when someone you used to know suddenly dies, well after you have parted ways and lapsed out of communication and become, to one another, passing blips on the newsfeed? I think of all the kids I had inside jokes with in seventh grade, and how many I talk to now.

There was a time I was pretty good friends with Mellissa. We did track together, competed on the same four-person relay team. We had overlapping friends. We joked around. She entertained my quirkiness. She was always laughing.

Middle school came to an end. She went off to Avon High, and I went off to a private high school. Years went by and my old friendships started clocking out. People forgot who I was, or pretended to. By the time I heard the news, I hadn’t seen Mellissa for at least three years.

I used to read her wall every day, every post. Sometimes I wanted to write something, but my fingertips hesitated on the keys. This was a space for people who loved her. Knew her. What could I write? Nothing insightful, nothing beautiful. I was a stranger. I wanted to cry. I tried to make myself cry. I flipped through her photos and read her obituary again and again, trying to make it sink in, waiting for it to process. She is gone. But how to transcribe her absence these past few years to a greater, more profound absence? How to trick my mind into realizing that her absence is no longer simply circumstantial? How do I trigger the tears? How do I make this feel real, so that I can grieve and feel like a person capable of caring about an old friend?

Two years later, her Facebook page is still up. That same photo is there, her senior portrait. She will never age, I realize. There she is, swaying from a tree, leaning 45 degrees to the left, because why not, because she is the picture of youth on the cusp of everything. Suspended in time. Life, trapped in the form of potential energy that will never become kinetic.

She is what I think about when I think about Connecticut in the spring. There are few things I like about Connecticut, but I love the spring. The warm, dewy mornings, the lawnmowers in the afternoon. How green it was. I remember every landmark along the walk from the middle school to the high school we took daily for track practice. Luke’s Doughnuts. The brand new mortuary. The gas station where we bought slushies, also rumored to be robbed at gunpoint more frequently than any other business in Avon. And how could I forget the sound of cars on West Avon Road, the glimpses of fresh-faced high schoolers riding off to unknown adventures, the rising and fading waves of Radio Top 40? How could I forget any of this? Stretching on the football field. The warmth on my arms. Those lawnmowers. Warm-up sprints. Packs of girls meandering around the track, spying on those high school boys.

The four of us get together. We take up our positions on the track. Ready, go. The first girl sprints, hands it off. The second girl sprints, hands it to Mellissa. Mellissa’s coming up behind me. There’s so much fight in her that you cannot ignore the presence barreling toward you. But she is so composed. That face. Whenever I run, my face contorts into a heaving eyesore, but she’s got everything locked down. When she’s coming your way, her wide brown eyes are full of fight. Off-duty, they are gentle. She was always that way; hers was the loveliest, most photogenic smile. The fire’s always there, though. I don’t know what it is. I haven’t figured it out. This was not the faux strength of a middle school queen. There was not a single trace of malice or jealousy in it. This was strength well beyond her years, a quiet strength that she never had the ego to assert. But you felt it. You were drawn to it. I saw it, in the form of a runner sprinting to the spot where I now stood.

I start to run and extend my arm behind me. I look back for a second, see her pouring her last ounce of energy into this final meter. The baton slips into my fingers, and I race off as fast as my legs can carry me. I never look back. I never think to look back.

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Pursuit of Happiness https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/14/pursuit-of-happiness/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/14/pursuit-of-happiness/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:38:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073087 The downside of happiness is that it’s always fleeting. It says hello, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, then takes its leave without saying goodbye.

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I’d like to talk a little about happiness. We’re all trying to find it, right? I am at least. It’s a trope so widely circulated that I hesitate to use it, but what the heck. You know: money won’t buy you happiness. I think we all have an inkling of what makes us happy, like being with people you like and eating a bowl of ice cream. The downside of happiness is that it’s always fleeting. It says hello, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, then takes its leave without saying goodbye.

This should be somewhat comforting. If happiness is fleeting, so is sadness, right? All emotions are but temporary. But when you’re sad, it feels like you’ll be sad forever. When you’re happy, you can already feel it slipping away.

What kills me is that happiness is really just a state of mind. I can be happy literally any moment. I can will myself to be overjoyed about how comfortable this blanket feels, and there’s no reason that that my joy can’t be equal (or greater) than the joy of a man who just bought a yacht. But of course, I don’t. I pin my happiness on things out of my reach, like that cool T-shirt I really want. If only I had that T-shirt, my brain whispers to me. Think of how cool you would look! Think of all the friends you would have! Shut up, brain.

It’s very likely the man that just bought his yacht or Porsche or (insert fancy schmancy object here) is not too happy anymore. Maybe his bliss lasted for a day or so. I don’t know what you’d call this state of bliss (uber-rich people: what is the word I am looking for?). In any case, after a period of hours, the yacht has failed to provide the fulfillment said man had hoped it would. We buy things to fill emotional vacuums. No one ever buys a shirt because it’s a pretty shirt. Well, maybe they do. But when I buy a shirt I buy it because I have visions of me in this rad shirt feeling like a million bucks and making a boatload of friends. Chances are, the man probably imagined that a yacht would bring with it cadres (binders?) of women, and maybe of those, he would find a wife he really loved and settle down with, and finally he’d fulfill that secret dream of his, living in a treehouse in the middle of the woods.

This equation never works. I buy a shirt. I wear the shirt. Nothing happens. It’s just a shirt, I realize. Just a shirt. This is why I imagine perfumes are the most anticlimactic purchase you can make. Perfume ads must be in a devilish bargain with our inner critic, because they’ve mastered the trick of making us believe that with this perfume, we will transform into the belle of the ball and be pursued by an unshaven European man wearing a tuxedo. You cave and buy the perfume. Nothing happens. You look at it again and see it now. It’s just a bottle of liquid! ‘You paid $50 for this?’ my brain shouts at me in disbelief, the same brain that fell for the promise of the European man. Oh, brain.

Happiness is relative, yadda yadda. You are surely smart cookies and have a grasp on the basic tenets of new-agey wisdom. We’re children of the ‘90s, after all. Where I start to worry, though, is when I get to thinking about my future. See, I’ve always been enamored with this idea of The Big Dream. I’ve loved the movies all my life and I’ve never really deviated from my ambition to be a writer-director. To consider doing something else is too painful, too earth-shatteringly destabilizing, that I can’t even bear to fathom it. But this question of happiness keeps nipping at my ankles, prodding me to answer: Is this really going to make you happy? As far as I can tell, it is. I love cinema, I truly do. Sometimes, though, I imagine myself living at an orangutan sanctuary somewhere in Southeast Asia and being truly content. You know, meditating and surfing and just being all-around happy with life. What would be the difference between happiness attained that way versus happiness earned tooth and nail, by achieving my dream of success and fame? Can you quantify happiness? Or a better question, what makes one kind of happiness more precious than the other? In the end, isn’t it the same? Couldn’t I be just as happy right now, at 9 on a Wednesday night, chilling in my room? Who says I even need to fly to Thailand?

“No! What are you saying, you crazy hippie!” my brain fires back. My brain gets scared by the work involved in assuming a “happy” state of mind. It’s too impatient and impulsive. It gets to poking me about Thailand, and being in shape, and yes, that shirt. Truly, my brain is the most effective slimy salesman out there. If only you did this and had these things, it coos, why then, you’d be happy. Again, it seduces me. I cave. I buy the damn shirt. A few endorphins rush in, quickly depart, and then it’s back to square one: back on the prowl for the next quick fix. A few endorphins. Disappointment. All of it hollow, fruitless. I know this and yet I’m still a slave to the material promise of happiness. Out of laziness? Impatience? Whatever it is, the cycle is self-perpetuating. When it comes down to it, who can resist the perfumer’s siren song, the glass vial of concentrated happiness? So effortless. Forget fifty bucks. People would pay a million for that.

Contact Alex Bayer at abayer@stanford.edu.

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Depression, Shakespeare and the Madness of a Taboo https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/11/depression-shakespeare-and-the-madness-of-a-taboo/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/11/depression-shakespeare-and-the-madness-of-a-taboo/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2012 04:22:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072918 Depression sounds very dark and brooding and clinical, but really it’s quite simple and quite natural.

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The idea that we are all blissful at this stage of our lives is ludicrous, ludicrous. To think of all the breakups that take place, the identity-searching that is adolescence, the existential crises I experience on a daily basis. I wrestle with the realization that my youth is running out, the uncertainty of what lies ahead, who my real friends are, who I am. We are all engaged in an identical struggle, played over the span of our lives, to be and to become our best selves.

The problem I have with this depression stigma is that it’s nonsensical. We are humans partaking in the game of life. No good song, no good film, is without intimations of the fear and insecurity that we all struggle with. No good literature, not a single book, is written about people who are happy all the time. Would you watch a movie about happy people? What’s remotely interesting about that?

Depression sounds very dark and brooding and clinical, but really it’s quite simple and quite natural. Some of the greatest actors, artists, comedians, scholars, poets and writers have suffered from depression. Abraham Lincoln was famously afflicted with melancholia, and some experts think it was his resulting introversion that made him so deeply thoughtful and visionary a leader. People like Winston Churchill, Eminem, William Faulkner, Jon Hamm, Demi Lovato, Lupe Fiasco, Ann Hathaway, Beyonce, Mozart, Isaac Newton, Nietzsche, J.K. Rowling, Gwen Stefani, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Van Gogh, Reese Witherspoon and Oprah – yes, even Oprah – have suffered from depression. I don’t mean to glorify depression (though I do believe it’s an individual’s decision to address depression in the way they see fit). What I mean to do is point out how normal this supposed syndrome is.

Depression is, at its simplest, the affliction of coming to terms with life’s inherent unanswered questions: the losses that have no point, the relationship that was not to be, the failure of parents we expect to be invincible and upstanding. We are left, at every turn, with a mini identity crisis and a larger one: the disillusionment that accompanies an awareness of our parent’s fallibility and the flippancy with which the universe dispenses out bad luck.

Once you scratch the surface, I’ve found much everyone I’ve talked to at Stanford has their own set of insecurities and angsts and medication. And why not? We are at college, prime time for the nitty-gritty of self-exploration. It’s a beautiful thing, a painful thing, but above all, a process that is central to our very humanity. How could there be shame in that?

The university experience is much more than four years of academics and intellectual questioning. For many, it is the messy but fundamental period where we shape the trajectory of who we are. Stanford has a responsibility to honor not just the former side of the coin but also the latter. I applaud Vaden’s efforts, but the university has fallen short in other crucial areas. Its close-lipped attitude in the wake of student suicides was shameful.

What may be contributing to the problem is Stanford’s growing emphasis on job recruiting, a pressure felt by many students. It may lead to an attractive endowment, but it causes students to fixate on getting that lucrative job at the end of the tunnel, an ambition that distracts from the deep, if unspoken, purpose of a well-rounded liberal arts education: learning who we are and getting an inkling of how we fit into the larger picture. College is not a means to an end.     It is a journey in its own right, a voyage replete with trials so commonplace they are rites of passage. It is life in motion, and here I find myself back to sentence one. Depression is the result of living life. It can be overcome, but never, for any reason, should one feel the need to repress it. Stanford needs to do its part in validating the real truth of adolescent angst beyond just offering services to students. If the stigma is to really fall away, the administration itself needs to make a vocal and brave declaration about the normalcy of depression and the “myth” of the impossibly happy Stanford student.

To be, or not to be. Why does Hamlet’s line captivate us so? For so concise a line, it encapsulates the infinite. The infinite questions that nip at our feet, the doubts that haunt our every step. Have no shame in dealing with depression or fear in disclosing it. Rest assured that you’re in the company of not only luminaries, but all of mankind.

Contact Alex at abayer@stanford.edu.

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‘Skyfall’ breathes new life into Bond https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/09/skyfall-breathes-new-life-into-bond/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/09/skyfall-breathes-new-life-into-bond/#respond Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:30:53 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072840 “Skyfall” is the breath of fresh air the James Bond series needs after the dismal “Quantum of Solace.” But the movie’s originality lies not in its plot - Bond is up to his old tricks - but in the nuanced execution.

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Skyfall” is the breath of fresh air the James Bond series needs after the dismal “Quantum of Solace.” But the movie’s originality lies not in its plot – Bond is up to his old tricks – but in the nuanced execution.

'Skyfall' breathes new life into Bond
Courtesy MCT

It’s not a perfect film. Like many third acts, “Skyfall” is in part about Bond’s (Daniel Craig) resurrection. After a near-fatal fall during a botched assassination attempt in Turkey, he rises from the ashes (nursed, of course, by an attractive woman) and returns to London unshaven, alcoholic and out of shape. He’s an old hat in an intelligence world that’s becoming increasingly reliant on technology.

M (Judi Dench), is busy defending MI6’s relevance to the British government when a crisis strikes: a hacker with a dark sense of humor has infiltrated the agency’s ironclad database, exposing the identities of active agents and putting them in peril. Someone is out to get MI6, someone with a personal vendetta against M – someone, she says ominously, from within.

'Skyfall' breathes new life into Bond
Courtesy MCT

The pending doom of his agency throws Bond on an expedition to Shanghai, a visual playground director Sam Mendes mines for its sensuality. Bond stalks his target through a high-tech high-rise. All is silent. Cat and mouse are alternately illuminated, obscured and illuminated again in a floating dreamscape of colors. In a hand-to-hand combat set, the fighters’ silhouettes are backlit by a sensuous blue jellyfish that gives way to twinkling stars. Where the script fails in poetic depth, Mendes compensates with stunning visuals.

Though resplendent with beautiful females (the femme fatale, the plucky assistant; I will save my two cents on gender representation for another day), the film hones in on Bond’s relationship with M, which in many ways is his most genuine. Bond also returns to his roots, though not with the substance as one would hope. Goldmember’s origin story was deeper than this.

The film scratches at the surface of Bond’s wounds, his exterior of invulnerability, but it never lets him truly break his composure. That might have been a different film, and an interesting one, akin to what Christopher Nolan did with our time’s Bruce Wayne. The screenwriters may have feared that it would take away from Bond’s untouchable coolness, but more psychological spelunking wouldn’t hurt.

Part of the fun in challenging Bond is that it brings out his icy wit. Probe another layer, past this famous defense mechanism – can he function without it? Can Bond be as nuanced and vulnerable as Bruce Wayne and still be Bond?

The plot is not as strong and cohesive as “Casino Royale,” and you may leave wishing the film had probed a few inches deeper into Bond’s wounds. Nevertheless, it has what audiences missed in “Quantum”: British wit; the spunky, blonde Javier Bardem as a villain (think a more flamboyant, sassier version of his “No Country for Old Men” psychopath); and Ralph Fiennes.

'Skyfall' breathes new life into Bond
Courtesy MCT

Like Bond himself, “Skyfall” is an old horse with new tricks (and some old: welcome back, Aston Martin DB5). There are shades of the zeitgeist, including technology eclipsing the need for personnel and Asia as a rising superpower. Sam Mendes handles his material with the grace and sophistication you expect of “Bond – James Bond,” and with arrestingly poetic visuals, “Skyfall” does the Bond series a big favor.

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Monday morning deliveries https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/06/monday-morning-deliveries/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/06/monday-morning-deliveries/#respond Wed, 07 Nov 2012 04:08:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072662 On Monday mornings, I deliver meals to senior citizens around the area. My route switches from week to week. Sometimes I deliver meals to the side of Menlo Park closer to campus. Sometimes it’s the other side of Menlo Park, the one that begins when you cross 101, sometimes it’s Redwood City. You notice the […]

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On Monday mornings, I deliver meals to senior citizens around the area. My route switches from week to week. Sometimes I deliver meals to the side of Menlo Park closer to campus. Sometimes it’s the other side of Menlo Park, the one that begins when you cross 101, sometimes it’s Redwood City. You notice the obvious disparities: The lawns in certain neighborhoods are greener, the cars are newer, the streets are better paved. You notice it when you step into the home, but not always. There is a common look to the living rooms of clients: It is a menagerie of things you imagine they have collected over the span of their life and haven’t the hard to dispose of. It reminds me of the glass cabinet my grandma kept. Inside were these tiny glass animals and porcelain pill boxes, nothing special, just the kinds of things that turn up in yard sales. But the affection for these few objects was clear. She put them in that glass display to dazzle the easily enchanted eyes of kids like me.

You can tell a lot by a person’s things. I learned this because sometimes you knock or ring the doorbell, and no one answers, so you step quietly inside, say “hello” and tiptoe into the kitchen and put the meal in the fridge. The elderly tend to have objects like my grandma did, tchotchkes that they’ve transformed into little treasures. Books they may never read. A TV set. A velvety brown couch. I stepped in one home and heard country music playing; there were Virgin Marys and one of those hokey country outlaw photographs you take at the county fair. On the door of another house was a Giants tapestry inside a Grateful Dead head. Are you a Deadhead? I asked the woman. I knew Jerry! she said.

Photos of grandchildren. Dishes in the sink. Wedding photos. Sometimes it’s not them who answer the door, but their grown kids. In a rough neighborhood, a shirtless man opened the screen door. Tattoos, do-rag. “Ma,” he said, cheerfully. “Your meal’s here!” Sometime the kids answer the door, sometimes they’re just weaving past you. You wonder whose home is it; with others, you wonder if anyone pays them a visit.

Sometimes I am afraid of getting old. But other times, when I’m stepping up a porch and I look around. There’s a vine of roses clinging to the pole, a few little clay frogs here and there, a mail slot. Everything’s real quiet. The only thing missing is a wind chime. You consider all of this for a second. Maybe by then, when you’re old and gray, you’ll find a porch like this, sit, and it’ll all feel real peaceful inside.

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Adventures in food https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/02/adventures-in-food/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/02/adventures-in-food/#respond Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:18:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072521 Down goes the plate steaming with spaghetti. Grace. Someone say grace.

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Down goes the plate steaming with spaghetti. Grace. Someone say grace. We hold hands. We close our eyes. I eye my spaghetti. Amen. My fellow diners gracefully pluck their forks and knives in between thumb and pointer finger. “How was your day, honey?” she asks. Not to me, because this isn’t my house. “School was all right…” my friend begins. This is my chance. I plunge fork into noodle. Four minutes in I’m done. I look up. My friend is looking over at me, slightly horrified. That fork is still daintily pressed between her fingers and a single, sinewy spaghetti strand is curled in it, the same piece of spaghetti, I think, she had four minutes ago.

My relationship with what I eat is at a complicated impasse. I have never known what it’s like to sit down at a dinner table at 6 p.m. Whenever I sit down to eat at a friend’s house I feel like a bear sitting at a table of humans, unsure of the etiquette in this neck of the woods. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lovely experience, but one I came to appreciate a little too late. By now my concept of restraint has already been molded into the tiniest of Pillsbury dough balls.

My parents divorced young enough that my only memory of a meal shared between us was at a gloomy, poorly lit restaurant. The mood had already been set: we had just driven three hours through Northern Connecticut to get to Six Flags, and it was closed. Closed. Something about thunderstorms. This, and my parents already resented each other. Forget conversation. The best you could ask for was a word or two muttered bitterly over a lukewarm burger.

For my dad and I, eating was like island-hopping. We were more like a pair of tourists than a couple of diners. You know that lonely pair you see through the window at a Thai restaurant on Tuesday night at 10? Yeah, that was us, hunched over soft-shell crab, speaking in spurts of soft-spoken conversation. For some reason we could hold a real conversation here. At home, it was a different story. We failed at making conversation. “How was your day?” “It was okay.” We gave the routine our best shot, but our eyes were already preparing for the impending migration. Down our gazes went, back to our plates and then the copy of Time. My dad always felt guilty about not making dinner more often, but I really didn’t mind. Eating for us was a solitary pleasure, one spent hunched over a magazine instead of words that to us felt empty.

I love food madly. I love and hate it. You know the drill. For girls my age, Venus is a lanky fourteen-year-old Teen Vogue model. It doesn’t matter how ideologically I abhor beauty ideals; I see this girl everywhere, and in every smoky-eyed perfume ad she is equated with beauty, romance and happiness. The road to real self-acceptance is such a daunting journey; zero percent body fat is quicker. Last year I would go on these stupid yo-yo diets. I would eliminate carbsbread, sugar, fruitand then ravished, I would eat everything in the kitchen I’d been salivating over for the last week and boom, it’s all back. I’m back to square one and utterly contemptuous of my measly willpower. A day later I realize how unwise it was to do such a thing to my body, until I get to feeling my curves and dreams of thin limbs haunt me once again.

I read about food like a fanboy. There’s an interesting article in The New York Times about the diet company Jenny Craig. They were trying to export the brand to France and having a hard time. Valérie Bignon is a French woman and a director at Nestlé France, which is overseeing the Gallicization of Jenny Craig. “If I were the minister of health in America and I was in charge of the battle against obesity,” she says in the article, “the most powerful, brilliant thing I could do would be to communicate this message: let’s not worry too much about what’s on the table. I’d say let’s concern ourselves with sitting at the table together and preparing a meal.” Her point is this: America’s approach to food is individualistic as opposed to social. In France, the notion of to-go food or even self-serve is anathema. On the other hand, when you sit down at the table and have a well-rounded, quality meal, there’s little impetus to snack throughout the day. Plus, she says, the presence of others reinforces healthy eating habits like “helping yourself to only so much” and “the habit of discipline and moderation,” lessons that were largely absent in my single-parent adolescence.

A second article I recently read at first sounded too good to be true. This also came from The New York Times, and it was about Ikaria, a sleepy Greek isle whose inhabitants live remarkably long, many of them past a hundred. Not only that, but the quality of their lives is enviable; it’s not unusual to see a centenarian gossiping over a glass of wine with old friends come evening. As in France, part of the secret is what they eat: vegetables, bread, goat’s milk, honey, wine, herbal tea. All of it is grown and produced on the island. Experts also point out that the typical Mediterranean diet is high in antioxidants and low in saturated fats, among other plusses.

The other part of the equation, as in France as well, is the social culture around food. In Ikaria, the most available foods are also the healthiest. When your neighbors come over, they’ll bring over vegetables from their garden, tea, or wine, not a casserole. It is not uncommon to spend an evening with friends, chatting for hours over a couple glasses of wine. Your closest friends, family, neighborsessentially, every single person around youreinforces this healthy eating style. Consider this excerpt from the article about Seventh-day Adventists, who eat a plant-based diet: “Adventists hang out with other Adventists. When you go to an Adventist picnic, there’s no steak grilling on the barbecue; it’s a vegetarian potluck. No one is drinking alcohol or smoking.” Furthermore, “As Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard, found when examining data from a long-term study of the residents of Framingham, Mass., health habits can be as contagious as a cold virus. By his calculation, a Framingham individual’s chances of becoming obese shot up by 57 percent if a friend became obese. Among the Adventists we looked at, it was mostly positive social contagions that were in circulation.”

On the other hand, in mainstream America, we’re tantalized by junk food on a regular basis. You can’t buy a bottle of shampoo at CVS without passing a display box full of candy placed ingeniously next to the register. The great thing about living in a co-op like Columbae is that the kitchen is full of fresh produce. We sit down and eat dinner together. But as soon as I leave the premises, it’s back to the status quo. I can’t get a cup of coffee without staring down a tray of cake pops.

In the U.S., there’s a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to dieting. Companies like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig tend to focus exclusively on what we eat or how much of it. Obediently, we compartmentalize an hour of exercise into our schedules. For a typical America, weight management is nothing if it’s not a science. It is an equation, and its units are calories; a deficit of calories results in less fat, and if perfume ads are to be believed, that damned elusive contentment.

Sooner or later, having quietly pined over a hundred bags of Rolos, I’m going to cave. It’ll be back to the drawing board of self-loathing, and then one more stab at it. Fighting the American culinary status quo is a difficult mission because we are by nature influenced by the culture that surrounds us. I swore off fries and fast food long ago, but I still struggle with moderation. Quinoa and lentils are tasty, but that pack of Sour Punch Straws at the concession stand looks mighty delicious. If I have five minutes to get to class thanks to my self-torturous twenty units, am I more likely to make an egg scramble or grab a to-go bar? What’s in our food is an important question, one I’m glad we’re asking. But how we eat may be just as crucial, if not more so.

Tell Alex your food story at abayer@stanford.edu.

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Musings on the syndrome of the duck https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/30/musings-on-the-syndrome-of-the-duck/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/30/musings-on-the-syndrome-of-the-duck/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 07:04:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072411 I have gone to Stanford for exactly a year now, and my report from the field indicates that the floating duck syndrome attributed to it is not a myth as I had hoped. It is real. Very, very real. Like, very syndrome-y. And as much as I hate it, I am a floating duck too. […]

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I have gone to Stanford for exactly a year now, and my report from the field indicates that the floating duck syndrome attributed to it is not a myth as I had hoped. It is real. Very, very real. Like, very syndrome-y. And as much as I hate it, I am a floating duck too. I want to look like everything’s dandy, because, well, who wants to look like an utter mess? Certainly not me! I want to seem well-adjusted. Heck, I want to look like a kid with a future in my pocket. Don’t we all? Don’t we all want to look like Stanford students? But that’s the issue, and I get it. See, I still have the vestigial organs from the kid I was in high school. The girl who did too many extracurriculars I didn’t love, who stressed way too much over a freaking B, who had no social life a) because I went to an all-girls school and b) because I was obsessed over that freaking future of mine. A lot of us, I suspect, were kids like me. Kids who put the future ahead of the present on their priority list, which is smart, but in other ways, stupid. Now that I’m at Stanford, you think I’d be over all that crap, right? And I am, in a lot of ways. But not all. The floating duck is my kind of vestigial organ. So to speak. Because that imagery is weird. It’s the mask I put on to tell myself, perhaps more than anyone else, that I got a future on my shoulders. Here I am at Stanford, surrounded by a bunch of kids who talk about the startup they’re making right NOW, or the internship they have this summer, or their plans to be famous or rich or successful that all feel so urgent, so impatiently desired … in a place like this, is there any patience for a future put off? The future is now — that is the status quo, and I’m into it. I’m going to wear my future on my face and suffer the present inside. Because that’s how I get by. By the promise of the future. And the problem with that, well … it’s easy to see. When you spend too much time grooming the future, you make the present unloved and shameful … and I realize now, all too helplessly, that the present I am burying will someday turn into that glossy dream of the future, except that in truth, that glossy future will be nothing more than the offspring of my crappy, neglected present.

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Public Transportation https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/22/public-transportation/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/22/public-transportation/#respond Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:35:24 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1071835 I went to San Francisco the other day on what was perhaps one of the busiest days of tourism of the year. So there I was, on the Caltrain, smushed in a train full of sardines, standing up, head nodding off on the cold metal staircase. Private space had shrunk to no more than an […]

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I went to San Francisco the other day on what was perhaps one of the busiest days of tourism of the year. So there I was, on the Caltrain, smushed in a train full of sardines, standing up, head nodding off on the cold metal staircase. Private space had shrunk to no more than an inch in front of one’s face. After an excruciatingly long ten minutes, we reached Menlo Park, and on wriggled twenty fresh passengers–seas were parted, purses were jabbed into waists, toes were stepped on, until, finally, the doors closed, and the train rumbled on, everyone hanging on to something for dear life. A woman next to me moaned to her husband: “we paid for this?” I rolled my eyes–but really, I wasn’t any better. Was I enviously eyeing those single-passenger seats on the top row? Aw yea. Did I kind of glare at the twelve-year-old boy who swiped the last open seat? Duh. I’m an awful person, I realized–the kind of person who begins to hate not only the seated people for their possession of seats, but my fellow plebeians in the aisles who wanted that butter-soft blue-cushioned seat just as much as I did.

I had to pee though, and that sucked, because nothing is worse than having to pee and knowing you’re going to be stuck in that place for an hour. Halfway in, a man got up and scooted past me. An empty seat! I turned around, but there was a man next to the seat. He had obviously been waiting there longer than I. Human decency resumed for the moment; I gestured for him to have the seat. To my surprise, he gestured back– “you have the seat.” After some polite back and forth, it was agreed (through hand gestures) that I sit–the train ride after that wasn’t so bad, thanks to this kind gentleman. Maybe people are good…was my faith in humanity being restored? Or was I just an oblivious noble now?

Another, strangely, life-affirming moment happened on the Muni. I was in an overly crowded bus near Chinatown, trying to get off at my stop. The doors were about to close, when I said softly, sort of to the small Asian lady next to me that I needed to get off. “Oh, you have to get off!” Her eyes widened and she began pushing me out the door. “She has to get off!” she called. She pushed me, quite literally squeezed me, through the clump of being standing on the stairs. Another woman I think I actually crushed on my way out replied sympathetically to my meek excuse me’s: “Oh, oh, you have to get out,” she said knowingly, and let me plow by. I finally landed on the street, like a cell popping out its membrane, and I have to say–I kinda missed those people on the bus.

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Letter to My Freshman Self https://stanforddaily.com/2012/09/17/letter-to-my-freshman-self/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/09/17/letter-to-my-freshman-self/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:27:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1070683 You’re only a Stanford freshman once. Well, if you’re doing it right. In this epistolary reflection on her own freshman year, Alex Bayer doles out some advice you’ll want to note, office-hours- and judgment-free. Or not. #YOSFO #OrTwice

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You’re only a Stanford freshman once. Well, if you’re doing it right. In this epistolary reflection on her own freshman year, Alex Bayer doles out some advice you’ll want to note, office-hours- and judgment-free. Or not. #YOSFO #OrTwice

Dear Freshman Self,

            If you’re reading this, you’re probably feeling awkward and friendless and reeling from NSO. You’re probably trying to look your coolest and well-adjusted on the outside because, you know, that’s the thing to do. (Cool cargo jacket by the way, that one’s gonna pay off.)

            You may have attended your first frat party and been thoroughly frightened by the realization that you know no one, save for the roommate pasted by your side. You may have spotted the frosh you stalked before getting to school, and that surely made you feel creepy and (justifiably) friendless. In short, you were probably riding the struggle bus real hard.

            What would I, older, wiser and equally weird soon-to-be-sophomore, tell you, young grasshopper? I guess I would tell you that everything’s going to be okay, yet when I think about it, there was nothing I could have really done to make anything significantly better. Yeah, I could’ve been more social and stuff, but you weren’t so bad at that (good on you, you little introvert). You joined a lot of clubs, got too much junk mail. You took classes just because you thought they were cool, and that was cool. You were mostly yourself, and I’m proud of you for that, squirt. Really the only thing that made things better was time. It’s the same for a really awful addiction, or a crappy breakup.

            With time came friends that were more than just the people you smiled at and said “Hey” to in the hallway because to do otherwise would be very awkward. With time came an understanding of the lay of the land and the realization that no, you did not need frat parties in your life. With time you understood that if you stay in the bubble too long, you get really, really miserable and almost depressed, and that University Avenue, while it’s no College Town Avenue, has some cool restaurants and things. Better than nothing, after all. You realized that it was kind of nice to take your bike out to Stanford Shopping Center, or even better, just walk to class. You went surfing in Santa Cruz one day and realized that getting out of Silicon Valley is even more gratifying. You weren’t always wiser with time. You got hung up on a boy and suffered more agony than you knew you should’ve allowed yourself. But with time you got over him, and it was the getting-over-said-boy that made you look elsewhere for fun, and that’s when the surfing and the going-out-to-eat-and-becoming-broke all started happening.

So in short, Alex, you didn’t do too bad. Because would I have done anything differently at this point in September? I don’t think I could have! I think I would do the same thing you did—take everything as it comes and just wait for the slightly cooler, slightly more self-assured, one-year-older version of yourself to arrive.

Letter to My Freshman Self
The author (center) at her own Frosh Formal. Courtesy of Facebook.

Best, (Apparently people sign off this way)

A-Bay-Bay

Alex is a spunky sophomore with auburn hair and illustrated jokes.

 

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Dan Klein: Improviser, Inspiration https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/18/dan-klein-improviser-inspiration/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/18/dan-klein-improviser-inspiration/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 07:58:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1066731 On a recent Monday morning in Drama 103: Beginning Improvisation, two students sit on stage as their classmates watch. They’ve volunteered to act out an exercise about “status.” For example, a British lord would probably play “high” status, while an indentured servant most likely plays “low.” Standing on the side, teacher Dan Klein instructs the two to try to “one up” each other in status. They begin discussing their majors. “Oh, you’re a psych major?” the girl asks, one knee crossed over the other haughtily. “That’s so cute,’” Klein suggests. “That’s so cute,” she utters sweetly, rife with condescension. The class laughs, marveling at the transformation of the (otherwise kindhearted) student.

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On a recent Monday morning in Drama 103: Beginning Improvisation, two students sit on stage as their classmates watch. They’ve volunteered to act out an exercise about “status.” For example, a British lord would probably play “high” status, while an indentured servant most likely plays “low.” Standing on the side, teacher Dan Klein ’91 instructs the two to try to “one up” each other in status. They begin discussing their majors. “Oh, you’re a psych major?” the girl asks, one knee crossed over the other haughtily. “That’s so cute,’” Klein suggests. “That’s so cute,” she utters sweetly, rife with condescension. The class laughs, marveling at the transformation of the (otherwise kindhearted) student.

 

Klein makes suggestions in a gentle voice. When he speaks in front of the class, his arms hang by his sides innocuously, and when he talks, there’s an irrepressible smile on his lips. He has a certain peacefulness about him; it’s the stillness of limbs, yes, and the steady deliverance of his words, but one gets the sense it’s something within. Klein is the kind of guy you want to ask, what’s it all about? Where does one find such serenity, such unspoken happiness? Long gone is the middle school theater director shrilly commanding his students to enunciate. Klein is like the Buddhist master of theater, but instead of daily meditation, his practice of choice is improvisation. But as it turns out, the two have more in common than you might think.

 

How does one get “professional improviser” on a business card? For Klein, it started, incidentally, when he was a sophomore at Stanford and took Drama 103. “There was a girl involved,” he admits. A good friend of his. “She was funny and playful, and I sort of had this crush on her.” He smiles. “It was thrilling, it was scary. I never really fully let go when I first took it. I got the idea that I’m so supposed to talk without thinking beforehand, without editing and censoring, but I still couldn’t quite let go.”

 

Then, in the beginning of junior year, Klein suffered a serious car accident and had to miss a full year of school. As part of his recovery for his head injury the following year, he took different types of classes to stimulate different parts of his brain. That’s when he remembered improv. Problem was, you weren’t allowed to take the class a second time. He thought he found a solution when the teacher at the time, Patricia Ryan, asked him to be her teaching assistant. He recalls sitting in class on that first day. “Dan, will you be the TA?” Ryan asked. Another guy named Dan stood up. “Sure,” he answered. Luckily, other-Dan was absent at the second class. Dan Klein got the job. He would TA the next year, too. That quarter he joined Ryan as she created SImps — a quasi-acronym (at Stanford? who knew!) for the Stanford Improvisers — a campus improv troupe that’s still thriving today.

 

“After my car accident, I had a different sense of what it meant to take a risk. Like, the idea of saying something in front of a group of classmates I hadn’t edited yet wasn’t quite as scary as getting hit by a drunk driver on El Camino. And so I was able to let go, just a little bit more, and I felt, I just kind of got it,” Klein recalls, beaming. His foray into improv has since blossomed into a career not only teaching Stanford students, but also leading workshops around the world. He recalls performing in front of Japanese dental implant salesmen using translator headphones (there’d be a joke, followed by a few seconds of painful silence, and then finally, laughter); performing on a high-definition video conference in Copenhagen; performing alongside the CEO of the Nordic Stock Exchange in Stockholm after a workshop. “How did I get here?” he remembers thinking.

 

Stanford students, Klein says, offer a particular gift. “When I tell students to shoot for average and fail cheerfully, I can feel this burden being lifted, and it’s one of my favorite things about teaching this population in particular,” he says.

 

For a university marked by its high academic standards and its career-driven students, it’s tempting to think the cores of improv are incongruent, even contradictory, with the Stanford mentality. But Klein is quick to point out that the improv spirit is embraced on many levels. He brings up Patricia Ryan. During her thirty years teaching at Stanford, she formed a fruitful alliance with the product design faculty. What has emerged in part out of that relationship is the d.school, which Klein sees as the embodiment of improv’s spirit of collaboration, the notion of allowing mistakes to be gifts and a selfless desire “to make your partner look good.”

 

But perhaps the most surprising thing to learn from this improv expert is that very little of improv is being funny. “That’s really about a third of it, if that,” he says. That’s also one of the hurdles of teaching newcomers to the practice: They come in believing that to succeed as improvisers, they have to be relentlessly funny.

 

Having traveled around the world, Klein has come to believe that anyone’s capable of being funny. How? It turns out some of the funniest moments come from just being authentic.

 

“I’m addicted to the pure, honest moments in the classroom when someone discovers something right there; it’s totally fresh and unexpected, and it surprises them, and it gets a huge house laugh … that’s what I’m going for. And I find that moment comes from anyone.”

 

Klein admits it’s the laughs that got him into it. But he’s come to realize that improv is about so much more than that.

 

“What I really love is changing for the audience’s emotion,” he says. “Laughter is the easiest one to hear, but to do something that has an effect on the audience, that’s really amazing.”

 

There’s a distinctly humanist element to how Klein explains improv. In some ways it’s even spiritual. He discusses “masks,” the characters people put on to obscure their true selves, not just in performance but in life.

 

“To be as simple as possible, some people hide by retreating, and some people hide by advancing,” he explains. The great beauty of improv, and theater by extension, is that it allows people to peel away their defenses. If there’s an irony to this, that the artifice of the stage gives voice to this wonderful authenticity, it’s quite a fascinating one. The core of theater, Klein says, is about connecting and being authentic. There’s got to be something truthful at the core of the performance. That’s where the humor comes in: when an audience is watching a person, a performer, “having an authentic reaction in the moment.”

 

In the process, Klein has learned a thing or two about humans. He recalls being intimidated 12 years ago when he first started leading workshops with corporations. He expected these people to be serious, high-powered, demanding, critical. It took a while to realize that every group is just people. Everyone, even the most high-powered CEO, has insecurities, things they’re working on and strengths. And most importantly, “everyone needs to be witnessed.” Klein’s great ability is to create a space where people can feel safe taking a risk, in front of colleagues or even strangers.

“I can’t believe this is my job; I really can’t believe it,” he says. “It’s almost like all those lessons about improv really were true: say yes, pay attention, notice what are the offers and gifts, make use of the mistakes and twists and turns and see where it takes you. And it’s kind of amazing that I find that it’s taken me here, where I literally get to play every day, and that’s my job.”

Klein smiles wide. “Whatever it was that made me feel like this was valuable and worthwhile to me, I think this is really true for other people. People want to connect with each other. They want permission to mess up and do it together and be witnessed. And they want to sometimes be brilliant and have it be okay if they’re not.

“I’m just lucky,” he continues. “I think improvisers are lucky because some of the skills improvisers are taught actually make you luckier. You’re able to notice more things, you’re able to turn negative things into positive things and you’re more likely to connect with people and increase the chances of something fortuitous happening.” He leans over and whispers: “That’s what my TED Talk is about.”

 

How does one become a professional improviser? Klein might give you this simple advice: by being an improviser in life. To improvise is to say yes, embrace mistakes, live in the moment and listen, closely, to others. Is it any wonder, then, that students flock to Klein’s classes and, at the tail end, marvel at how much they’ve grown not just as improvisers, but as people? Perhaps this proves that the essence of improv is authenticity, which everyone possesses in bucket loads. And how about Klein’s remarkable serenity? That, too, is solvable. When you’ve chosen to live with fresh eyes, keen ears and an open heart, and what’s more, spend your time giving these abilities, these gifts, to others, you court a lot of good in your life. And surely, a lot of laughs.

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SWL: A Medley https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/11/swl-a-medleu/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/11/swl-a-medleu/#respond Fri, 11 May 2012 07:35:30 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1066092 Why choose just one thing to love when there are so many options? (Sidenote: that could be the motto of college kids everywhere). We decided not to choose and in the spirit of all things lists, here’s a medley of things we’re loving this week. Other than college kids, of course.

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Why choose just one thing to love when there are so many options? (Sidenote: that could be the motto of college kids everywhere). We decided not to choose and in the spirit of all things lists, here’s a medley of things we’re loving this week. Other than college kids, of course.

 

Purity Ring: This boy/girl duo doesn’t even have a record out, but you can download the awesomely trippy track “Odebear” on their website for free. It’s ambient and groovy, and sounds a bit like Beach House. Like I said, awesomely trippy. A great soundtrack for certain things—like doing homework. Why, what were you thinking?

 

Jason Segel:  Although his new flick “The Five-Year Engagement” is sometimes too cute and not quite as charming as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” Jason Segel is just as lovable as the vulnerable loser. If Intermission could find a boyfriend as kind, funny, and totally in tune with our chick problems, well, we wouldn’t be writing this article right now, would we? Plus pirated re-runs of “Freaks and Geeks” still get us as tingly as they did when we were too young for TV-14.

 

Miracle Berry Fruit Tablets:  I know it looks like I’m trying to discreetly convince you to buy drugs, but fear not, I’m a kindly law-abiding citizen. Thanks to some protein found in the “Miracle Fruit,” bitter and sour foods suddenly taste mind-blowingly sweet. Apparently an orange will taste like heavenly nectar and a lemon will taste like a piece of candy. Winston, bring me the vegetables!

 

Longform.org: If you love good meaty journalism about the downfall of Sears, Joe Francis, the Google-sponsored race to the moon, the sinking of the Concordia cruise ships, murder cases, scandals and any other obscure topic that strikes your interest, you’ll find it here. The free site gathers and graciously distributes the best articles from The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone,and a host of other publications. Some are recent and some oldies, you know, like if you feel like going on the road with Axl Rose in 1991…

 

Japantown:  If you find the time to go to San Francisco, God bless you, tell me your secrets! Secondly, check out Japantown if you haven’t already. It’s less touristy and cleaner than Chinatown, plus it has an arcade of Japanese photobooths, mochi stands, killer sushi, and Sanrio galore, so you can indulge those fantasies of being a Harajuki doll. Maybe that’s just us. In any case, you can have a good chuckle at the girls dressed up as their favorite anime characters and the geisha and samurai holding hands on the escalator.

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Five Local Restaurants as Told by Its (Fictional) Patrons https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/04/five-local-restaurants-as-told-by-its-fictional-patrons/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/04/five-local-restaurants-as-told-by-its-fictional-patrons/#respond Fri, 04 May 2012 07:57:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1065470 The first part because I like food and getting off campus. The second because a list of restaurants seemed quite drab, and I happen to be in the mood for role-play.

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Five Local Restaurants as Told by Its (Fictional) Patrons
Courtesy of Camden Minervino

The first part because I like food and getting off campus. The second because a list of restaurants seemed quite drab, and I happen to be in the mood for role-play.

Lavanda, Palo Alto (upscale Mediterranean, read: PARENTS WEEKEND): I am a classy businessman in my early 60s on a double date with my wife, who I met in college, and Nancy and Steve, who we also know from college. We enjoy wine and live jazz trios. At dinner, we reminisce about our days at said college in exaggerated tones and talk about cultured things, like the independent movie (I mean, film) we just saw at the Aquarius. Or the Guild. Or CineArts Palo Alto.

Reposado, Palo Alto (upscale Mexican, read: PARENTS WEEKEND): I am a 20-something member of a hip, promising start-up, and a 50-year-old investor is taking us broke 20-somethings out for a good dinner at a buzzy place that still makes him look young and exotic. He entertains us with stories of when he was a 20-something, continuing his ploy to relate to us. He is most likely a VC with a scratched up motorcycle and a lonely condo.

Oren’s Hummus Shop, Palo Alto (mid-priced Israeli/Mediterranean; good for a night out every couple weeks):  I am a carefree girl in my late 20s, out to dinner with my former sorority sistaaas for a little reunion. We all work in the Bay for different consulting firms, but like, we’re all so busy with advancing our careers and being modern women and finding the cute leader of a promising start-up – I mean, Mr. Right – that we hardly have time to loosen up like this. You girls want pita? Waiter, could we get more PITAAAH for the table and another bottle of that wine? I’m really “tryna” get my rip, dip, eat on here.

Thaiphoon, Palo Alto (mid-to-high-priced Thai, as far as Thai goes; good for a quality meal every now and then): I am a single man in my late 40s who is eating alone because, while I appreciate culinary finesse, I am a hopeless romantic who will someday resort to marrying a very loud-mouthed woman I like only mildly. I offer extra soup to the table with two girls next to me as a kind gesture, but they stare at me like I’m a creep or something. I do not like chain restaurants. (Based on true events.)

Shiva’s Indian Restaurant and Bar, Mountain View (reasonably-priced Indian; go for the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet for $12):  I am a middle-aged woman with purple hair and purple glasses out for the first time with my newly minted husband, a fellow divorcee. We are with his adopted, grown stepchild, Young-Jun, who sits at the table in silence, and Young-Jun’s newly discovered birth mother, who also stares at me in silence. (Based on true events.)

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Tapping into the Chappie https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/27/tapping-into-the-chappie/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/27/tapping-into-the-chappie/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:00:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1064818 Stepping into the Chappie offices isn’t unlike setting foot into your older brother’s room. A really weird, cool older brother. In the small, square room where the Chappie regulars and their guests congregate once a week (that’s 8:30 p.m., Wednesdays, Nitery 2nd floor), a pair of battered sofa chairs face a ring of mismatched sectionals. Candy-colored vintage Chappie issues line the wall; they could easily pass for your brother’s retro comic collection. In the corner, next to a bird cage (no explanation available), is a bookcase of Chappie-themed memorabilia: a few cans that once held “Chappi” brand dog food, a framed photograph of Die Antwoord’s badass emcee Yolandi Visser showing off a “Chappie” tattoo on her forearm, another framed photograph of the crew crashing Kirsten Dunst’s birthday. Yes, they did that.

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Tapping into the Chappie
Courtesy of Alex Hertz

Stepping into the Chappie offices isn’t unlike setting foot into your older brother’s room. A really weird, cool older brother. In the small, square room where the Chappie regulars and their guests congregate once a week (that’s 8:30 p.m., Wednesdays, Nitery 2nd floor), a pair of battered sofa chairs face a ring of mismatched sectionals. Candy-colored vintage Chappie issues line the wall; they could easily pass for your brother’s retro comic collection. In the corner, next to a bird cage (no explanation available), is a bookcase of Chappie-themed memorabilia: a few cans that once held “Chappi” brand dog food, a framed photograph of Die Antwoord’s badass emcee Yolandi Visser showing off a “Chappie” tattoo on her forearm, another framed photograph of the crew crashing Kirsten Dunst’s birthday. Yes, they did that.

For those on the outside, the Chappie is impenetrable. Weird, absurdist, not funny – the Chappie has weathered such labels its entire 106-year existence. What the people on the inside will tell you is that the Chappie doesn’t seek to be embraced by the mainstream; its lifeblood is in opposition. The group has had historic friction with the University administration, such as in 1961, when editor in chief Brad Efron ran a risqué parody of Playboy, causing the magazine to undergo suspension. In 1975, editor in chief Mike Dornheim (’75) hooked up a speaker to a vending machine after the heiress Patty Hearst was famously kidnapped in Palo Alto and cried out from behind the glass, “Help, I’m trapped! I’m Patty Hearst!” (A frightened girl called the police, twenty squadron cars showed up and entered into a standoff with the vending machine )

The Chappie continues its history of pranking today with its annual publication of a fake Daily, a publication resembling in form and content The Stanford Daily. In fact, pranks between The Chappie and The Daily have played out in past decades, including a 1980 publication in the actual Daily when a group of Chappie members snuck a photograph and report that the University’s bowling team had just perished in a plane crash. The Chappie’s mischief is timeless, just like its mascot, a red jester often seen with a sly smirk on his lips. The jester’s all about having a laugh with you, but rest assured, he does things his own way.

Sitting in those two especially worn-out chairs are the current Old Boys (as the editor in chiefs are called), Sam Coggeshall (’12) and Alex Hertz (’13). As resident Old Boys, the pair presides over the publication of this year’s issues and front the Wednesday meetings (in case you’re wondering whether there have been female Old Boys, the answer is yes).        Coggeshall, a spiffy-dressing senior with a brown, curly fro and a goofy smile, and Hertz, a clean-cut junior with a penchant for chambray button-downs and a laid-back grin (I don’t know why I’m fixating on smiles), are roommates, best friends “4 lyfe” (Hertz tells me) and a bit of a balancing act. Hertz describes himself as the creative force, channeling into the Chappie his absurdist and silly brand of humor. He describes Coggeshall as approaching humor from an intellectual stance; Hertz tempers his fellow Old Boy’s trademark energy, while Coggeshall keeps in check Hertz’s absurdist humor. What results is a lovely family portrait and the makings of a hit CBS sitcom. As described by Hertz: Coggeshall is the boring father figure, Hertz is the crazy uncle and they’re raising a son together, which would be the Chappie.

So how about that damn humor? The question on everyone’s lips is: Do people get the Chappie, and does it matter if they do? For the denizens of this office, the majority would say no. Hertz describes his mission as producing the funniest magazine possible; sure, he’d like to see it be accessible, but preserving that signature Chappie voice is more important to him. Perhaps Old Boy Emeritus Joshua Meisel (’12) puts it best, when he relates to me some wise words from the comedian Dan Minsk, a successful stand-up comedian despite his high-brow, obscure humor. Stand-up comedians, he explained, have control over the timing of their jokes; that’s how they make their material funny. Therein lies the challenge of publishing humor in a magazine: It’s up to the reader to find for him or herself the rhythm of the jokes. It would be like scattering music sheets on the sidewalk and expecting passerby to appreciate a symphony’s aural beauty.

This presents somewhat of a catch-22 when it comes to ASSU special fees. As many know, the Chappie recently failed to gain student-voted special fees for the second year in a row, a blow to its ego if nothing else. How does a publication that prides itself on its contradiction of the mainstream reconcile with its needs for, well, money? In cases like this, the popular vote is important. And unfortunately, that’s something the Chappie simply isn’t engineered to attract. Time will tell which direction the Chappie will choose to take when, next year, two new Old Boys, Kian Ameli (’13) and Daniel Koning (’14), will take over the beat-up sofa chair thrones. For now, Hertz invites us to look forward to the upcoming “Funk” issue, of which he is particularly proud.

The Chappie is weird, proudly so. And at the steering wheel of this weird, weird ship are two quirky guys sitting in a pair of beat-up La-Z-Boys, fighting the “man” (that would be the Stanford status quo) one “Face Cat” at a time. That is to say, one absurdist joke at a time. Amen.

 

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SWL: Favorite Flicks https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/20/swl-favorite-flicks/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/20/swl-favorite-flicks/#respond Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:39:15 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1064080 It’s a Thursday night, and you have three hours to kill. First, that’s a miracle. Really, you should check that out. Second, you find yourself on Netflix craving something a little more substantial than “No Strings Attached.” The “critically-acclaimed foreign drama” box is staring into your soul, saying, “If you don’t watch one of my subtitled guerrilla documentaries, you’re pretty much admitting you don’t have an attention span.” One more episode of “Modern Family” and you definitely don’t…that’s it…don’t you go to Hulu…aw, shoot.

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SWL: Favorite Flicks
Courtesy of Universal Pictures

It’s a Thursday night, and you have three hours to kill. First, that’s a miracle. Really, you should check that out. Second, you find yourself on Netflix craving something a little more substantial than “No Strings Attached.” The “critically-acclaimed foreign drama” box is staring into your soul, saying, “If you don’t watch one of my subtitled guerrilla documentaries, you’re pretty much admitting you don’t have an attention span.” One more episode of “Modern Family” and you definitely don’t…that’s it…don’t you go to Hulu…aw, shoot.

 

See, I have a problem. I love movies, but my attention span is quite low. I admire those that can sit through two-hour experimental films and then debate how it reveals the meaning of art. But I can sympathize with the guy in the audience who sits there slightly perplexed/horrified.

 

I love great stories. “Kill Bill,” “American Beauty,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Requiem for a Dream” are some of my favorite examples of great storytelling, but chances are you’ve seen at least a couple of those. So I’m going rogue! Behold, a list of genuinely entertaining movies you probably haven’t seen, but are worth your time and money. Did I say money? I meant time.

 

Aliens”: The movie that made me fall in love with movies. If you like action, and you haven’t seen this, see it. Sigourney Weaver (Stanford alum, hey!) stars as Ripley, pretty much the most badass heroine ever. Don’t let the crappy remakes/reboots fool you: This is a classic, directed by James Cameron, who you might recognize as the man behind “Avatar” and “Terminator.” Try not fist-pumping the universe when Ripley tells the mother alien to “Get away from her, you bitch!” Just try.

 

Boogie Nights”: I, too, was skeptical about a movie about a male porn star, even if that porn star is Mark Wahlberg. But this film about the, ahem (I’m feeling bashful), adult entertainment industry, in 1970s LA makes a riveting story and complex characters out of the sex/coke/murder cliches. Don’t worry, though, there is plenty of sex/coke/murder.

 

Mother”: I don’t know how I discovered it, but it’s one of the best random finds in recent memory. This South Korean thriller (you don’t even notice the subtitles) follows a mother desperately trying to find the killer who framed her disabled son for murder. No wonder Hollywood keeps turning to Asia to find thrillers to remake: The stories are so good. And the originals are almost always better. Check out “Oldboyand “Battle Royale(what “Hunger Games” should be) if these strike your fancy.

 

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring”: I have quite a soft spot for Asian cinema and culture, so I love this film, though it moves at a deliberately slow pace. It takes place on the same lake and follows the life of a monk and his disciple through changing seasons and passing years. It’s a beautiful film if the Buddhist philosophy has ever appealed to you. If it’s not your cup of (green) tea, that’s okay too.

 

Do the Right Thing”: See it, see it, see it! My Film Studies 101 class would almost surely agree: This is one of those rare films that feel like a revelation. The Spike Lee classic follows a Brooklyn neighborhood as it gives rise to the racial and socioeconomic tensions of the late 1980s and is truly filmmaking at its best.

 

 

Alright, that’s all for now, folks! Happy Netflixing/unofficial channel surfing.

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TFM: Total Frat Movie https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/13/tfm-total-frat-movie/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/13/tfm-total-frat-movie/#respond Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:51:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1063212 Dear Hollywood, make better college movies. Well, actually, that should be “Dear Hollywood, make better movies, period,” but we’ll settle for baby steps. Why is it that so many movies about the fabled “Row” suck? Why does a movie like “National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze 2” exist? If I ruled the world…

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TFM: Total Frat Movie
Courtesy of DreamWorks

Dear Hollywood, make better college movies. Well, actually, that should be “Dear Hollywood, make better movies, period,” but we’ll settle for baby steps. Why is it that so many movies about the fabled “Row” suck? Why does a movie like “National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze 2” exist? If I ruled the world…

 

But that’s not to say there aren’t some goodies. Allow me to wade through the Walmart clearance bins of crappy sorority horror movies and National Lampoon blah blah blahs to find you some Greek fare worth taking a look-see at. For those of you rushing and those of you pre-assigning to Synergy alike, here are some films to keep your spirits high as girls wander the Farm at odd hours of the night and future fraternity men do whatever it is they do at 103—oops, I mean Kappa Sig. Without further ado:

 

Animal House”

Yeah, you knew this would be on here. I couldn’t help it. Still considered the gold standard for college movies, the John Belushi vehicle about a misfit frat taking on the administration still resonates with those crazy college kids…go figure.

 

Revenge of the Nerds

Like “Animal House,” this one also involves a renegade fraternity<\p>.<\p>.<\p>.<\p>a more awesomely dorky one. But don’t let the pocket protectors fool you. This 1980s cult comedy has plenty of R-rated humor and sexual angst. Yeah, you knew the latter was coming.

 

Accepted

I’m told this comedy starring the adorkably likable Justin Long and a more voluptuous Jonah Hill is actually pretty funny. After getting rejected by every college he applies to, a high school senior creates a fake university of (but of course) likable misfits. Sort of like Stanford, but the valiant young protagonist didn’t have to die first. (Thanks, Leland Jr.!)

 

Old School

If you like Will Ferrell and/or “Hangover” director Todd Phillips and their trademark humor, you’ll more or less enjoy this. While not consistently funny, this comedy about three buddies reliving their college years has its good moments, mostly thanks to Ferrell. Still, this is cramping my credibility…must find critically acclaimed drama…

 

Love Story

This classic 1970 film stars Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw as a wealthy Harvard student and a working classic music student, respectively, and follows their troubled romance. In the vein of “The Graduate,” this is by the far the most thoughtful and intelligent film here. Aw yeah (hand thrust).

 

Legally Blonde

It’s not the most inspired choice, I admit, but good sorority movies prove hard to come by. This Reese Witherspoon rom-com is still plenty charming. Runners-up (if you’re really in the mood for a real chick flick…like, with lots of chicks) “The House Bunny” and “Sydney White” are decent picks. Well, they’re really the only ones besides “Sorority Row” fare (starring Audrina Patridge; enough said). Seriously, this obsession with slashers let loose in sorority homes seems kind of unhealthy. And exploitative. But I wouldn’t mind if they weren’t so bad.

 

Hope you enjoy these! Now go and watch “Community” (NBC, Thursdays 8 p.m… secretly this list knows TV’s where it’s at).

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Review: ‘Touch’ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/27/review-touch/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/27/review-touch/#respond Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:36:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1055582 “Touch” is a show about how we’re all connected. It really, really wants you to know that.

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Review: 'Touch'
Courtesy of Fox

Touch” is a show about how we’re all connected. It really, really wants you to know that.

 

The latest brainchild of Tim Kring, the creator of “Heroes,” “Touch” treads on territory that’s familiar to fans of that show and others like “Lost” and “Fringe.” “Heroes” took on more than it can handle. A simple-enough plot took a convoluted turn and sank into a tangled, canceled mess. Somewhere, a lesson was learned: the pilot of “Touch” gives us a plot that’s pretty easy to follow. Sure, its hinting about some metaphysical connection between human beings and a league of people who can connect all the dots is a bit mind-dizzying, but all told, the show revolves around a familiar dynamic: a down-on-his-luck dad, Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland), struggles to relate to his 11-year-old son Jake (David Mazouz). The problem with Jake is that he hasn’t spoken a word in his life and refuses to be touched. He buries himself in a notebook, writing down numbers in endless concentric circles.

 

Sutherland is the show’s saving grace. He’s believable as both a widower whose wife died on 9/11 and a father who’s both exasperated and defensive of his incomprehensible son. He brings a realism that helps distinguish “Touch” from like-minded network shows whose characters’ inner struggles seem manufactured for emotional effect. For instance: when a social worker (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) comes into the picture and points out that he’s been working a string of low-paying jobs, I was tempted to scoff at his stylish apartment. But to the show’s credit, Sutherland fires back that his wife was a stockbroker whose family had a lot of money.

 

The same can’t be said of the show as a whole. If Sutherland wasn’t there to anchor it, it would be tempting to write off “Touch” as another entry in a breed of modern network television dramas in which the lighting is attractively natural, the people all good-looking and the action coated in some aspirational message about how “we’re all connected.” Kudos to “Touch” for dipping into international waters, and in its defense, it doesn’t have the liberty to give us gritty portraits in the same way Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film “Babel” does. So far, the characters it’s introduced us to, besides Martin and Jake, are another American man who collects lottery tickets, an aspiring singer in Ireland, a prostitute in Japan, a young Englishman and a teenage boy in Baghdad. The last one is the most compelling and ambitious. As a show about connections, “Touch” manages to draw coincidental relationships between all of them. Somewhat annoyingly, it keeps reminding us of that fact. It doesn’t help that some of these connections are far-fetched, like a phone that passes hands and in the process manages to catapult a video of the Irish woman singing to YouTube stardom.

 

After bouncing around variations of “we’re all connected” too many times to count, the pilot builds to a conclusion that can only be described as inevitable. Like many an ensemble piece, the strangers ultimately connect in what are supposed to be startling and inspiring ways. If you’ve managed to not be slightly off-put by its heavy-handed use of “coincidences,” you may not have the same stomach for its emotionally pandering climax. Its message about universal connectivity is a nice thought–just not when you’re being hit over the head with it.

 

Overall, “Touch” is a decent attempt at what it aimed to accomplish. It’s a little airbrushed and too overtly “heart-tugging.” If it tones down the sentimentality and fleshes out its potentially interesting narratives, it may have some longevity. If nothing else, Sutherland’s presence will sustain it for at least a season or two.

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Top 5: People with the worst luck https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/13/top-5-people-with-the-worst-luck/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/13/top-5-people-with-the-worst-luck/#respond Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:32:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1054213 Happy Friday the 13th! Getting seven years of bad luck sucks, so don’t break any mirrors or walk under any ladders (EANABS!). But if you do, at least you’ll be better off than these people.

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Happy Friday the 13th! Getting seven years of bad luck sucks, so don’t break any mirrors or walk under any ladders (EANABS!). But if you do, at least you’ll be better off than these people.

 

The babies in Babyoncé’s maternity ward

Allegedly Beyoncé and Jay-Z locked down the entire sixth floor in New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital to welcome this century’s power baby. An expectant mother reported being turned away, but seemed quite forgiving when reminiscing how she caught a glimpse of Blue Ivy Carter. My undelivered baby would wait in line for that too.

 

Coachella.com’s webmasters

This is not a good week for the poor souls who manage Coachella’s website, which has struggled to stay up and running since the lineup was released Monday. With the remaining $285 tickets on sale today, I can only imagine a room full of frazzled, body-painted hipsters trying to keep up with Internet traffic.

 

Jon Huntsman

Despite an endorsement from the Boston Globe (a slight to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) and the media bouncing around the “dark horse” card, the only sane candidate left in the GOP race still hasn’t caught that crucial break. Jon Huntsman, stay away from ladders. And black cats. And especially Michele Bachmann. That one’s just common sense.

 

Golden Globe Nominees

They feel lucky now, but wait until Jan. 15, when they’re at the mercy of returning host Ricky Gervais. True, he doesn’t have as easy targets as Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, awkwardly nominated in the comedy/musical categories for “The Tourist.” But let’s be real: it’s Ricky Gervais. Nominees best be practicing their “look-I-can-laugh-at-myself-but-secretly-I-want-to-murder-you” smiles.

 

Twinkie lovers

Hostess is filing for bankruptcy a second time. I mean, you probably shouldn’t be eating Twinkies or Wonder Bread, but what would a world be like without them? Probably healthier and less at risk for heart attacks, but sad. Quite sad.

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Review: ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/10/review-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/10/review-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:52:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1053882 It begins with a sleek intro set to Karen O.’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” Black oil slicks down a woman’s body. She begins kissing a man, oil envelopes the two of them and they burst into flames. A bird flaps its flaming wings. Insects crawl out of her mouth. As the final chords rage, things burn and smolder. If you’ve read the books, it’s metaphorical, but more importantly, it’s stylish, edgy, inventive--everything you want to see in an adaptation of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by David Fincher.

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Review: 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'
Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

It begins with a sleek intro set to Karen O.’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” Black oil slicks down a woman’s body. She begins kissing a man, oil envelopes the two of them and they burst into flames. A bird flaps its flaming wings. Insects crawl out of her mouth. As the final chords rage, things burn and smolder. If you’ve read the books, it’s metaphorical, but more importantly, it’s stylish, edgy, inventive–everything you want to see in an adaptation of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by David Fincher.

 

So far, so good, especially since from the start, Fincher’s adaptation has been defined by a formidable challenge. It exists in the shadow of two older and beloved brothers, the kind who won over all the teachers before you even got to high school. One is Stieg Larsson’s trilogy of novels and the other the highly praised Swedish film adaptation.

 

And Fincher, of course, has the burden of working with content whose crucial shock factor has already worn off for audience members like me. But oddly, it’s not the content that’s the problem; Fincher, director of “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” gives rightful justice to the novel’s most disturbing scenes. Rather, it’s his style that is bothersome. Fincher does not seize “Dragon Tattoo” and make it his own.

 

Take “Fight Club,” which centers on another famous, unstable and self-exiled individual, Tyler Durden. That film seems much truer to Fincher’s vision, a piece of passion, with an unhinged energy through which we see Tyler’s world. That’s missing in “Dragon Tattoo,” which for all its risky content is rather stylistically conservative. We see Lisbeth’s life. She’s at a club populated by punks. She’s hacking away, downing Coca-Colas and Ramen noodles. Fincher studies her with aloof fascination and admiration. It’s all what we expect to see. She’s playing into our expectations, when a character as subversive as she is should be defying them. Tyler Durden, and the subculture he presides over, occupies “Fight Club” and challenges our assumptions unapologetically. But strangely, Fincher seems cautious when it comes to surrendering his lens to Lisbeth’s world view; neither her character nor the world she inhabits are given the realism they deserve. Where’s the raw energy of the intro? Or its passion, written in the pulsating riffs of “Immigrant Song”? It’s somewhere within Lisbeth, insinuated but contained.

 

Where Fincher excels is at making you feeling things, which in the context of these novels, in which sensations like pain are so visceral, is not a trivial feat. The pain of being tattooed across the chest, the pain of being raped, is uncomfortably vivid. He also captures the minimalist coldness of the color-drained Swedish landscap–not just the pure, shiver-inducing cold, but the haunting isolation that befits a novel whose characters are defined by their inability to relate to others. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score, quietly eerie and unnerving, has the same effect.

 

As for Daniel Craig, he has the worn face for the part of the strained publisher-reporter Mikael Blomkvist. He’s a skillful actor, but he could’ve drawn on more vulnerability and insecurity. The film would have been more compelling, and affecting, had he unhinged himself (as he did in the last few scenes), giving greater weight to Blomkvist’s underlying loneliness and melancholy. Perhaps it would’ve lent greater poignancy to his relationship with Salander, another troubled and isolated soul.

 

Speaking of Salander; Swedish actress Noomi Rapace emerged from her fearless performance as the film’s heroine universally praised and a burgeoning star, leaving Rooney Mara–Fincher’s personal pick for the role–with large shoes to fill. At first, Mara’s face seems too innocent, her light eyes vacuous in comparison to Rapace’s strong features and deep brown eyes. But despite myself and my bias, I warmed up to her. Her strength, though not immediately apparent, manifested itself over time, in her actions, true to Lisbeth herself. Mara is certainly different than Rapace, perhaps a quieter presence, but does justice to the role. Like in the novels, her interaction with Craig, an unexpected and endearing kind of banter, is one of the most promising aspects. But their relationship is not given enough time to develop so that when it develops into something deeper, it doesn’t seem entirely warranted yet.

 

All said, when I left the theater, I felt somewhat empowered. There was a little stomp to my step, a faint “I don’t care what these people think” ringing in my head. It was the Lisbeth effect. Fincher’s adaptation is imperfect, but it gives justice to Lisbeth’s complexity. She’s much more than a punk–he gets that. It gives me hope. I hope he’ll become riskier, not just in content but style, but at least with a good Lisbeth, he’s got his grasp on the heart of the novels. I can’t exactly say how I feel about Mara’s version of her, but I left the theater with an inkling of liking her. Even better, I wanted to know more. In that case, kudos to her and Fincher. Lisbeth is not a character who should be digested easily.

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Review: ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/10/review-the-adventures-of-tintin/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/10/review-the-adventures-of-tintin/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:48:35 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1053869 At some point as I sat watching “The Adventures of Tintin,” I realized what a weird brand of humor I was raised on. Think of the “Rock Bottom” episode in “Spongebob Squarepants.” Or any episode of “Spongebob.” Or the very concept of a talking sponge...that wears pants...and lives in a pineapple.

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Review: 'The Adventures of Tintin'
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

At some point as I sat watching “The Adventures of Tintin,” I realized what a weird brand of humor I was raised on. Think of the “Rock Bottom” episode in “Spongebob Squarepants.” Or any episode of “Spongebob.” Or the very concept of a talking sponge…that wears pants…and lives in a pineapple.

 

In comparison, “Tintin” seems impossibly wholesome. Based on a series of comic books that first appeared in 1929, it follows, well, the adventures of a freckly red-headed kid named Tintin and his sidekick terrier, Snowy. In this particular episode, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, he’s on a treasure hunt for a sunken ship, though a lot of that involves just getting the three little slips of paper the coordinates are written on.

 

After encountering an icy man named Sakharine, the film’s haughty, cold-eyed villain, Tintin eventually crosses path with Captain Haddock, the comic book’s other main character. Whiskey-guzzling, drunkenly babbling and temperamental, Haddock is the sarcastic antidote to Tintin’s wholesome heroism. But the film just didn’t get the chemistry quite right; Tintin and Haddock are so starkly different that the former comes across as an off-putting know-it-all and the latter as an exhaustingly immature buffoon. Originally, Tintin’s age was undisclosed, but he was thought to be in his early twenties. No doubt to appeal to its target demographic, the film makes it clear he’s no older than sixteen. Still, he lives in his own London flat, having already become famous for his precocious crime-solving abilities, and talks with the self-assurance of a young Neil Patrick Harris. It’s actually refreshing that the filmmakers didn’t infantilize their young protagonist, but it makes it difficult for the audience to find a soft spot to share in his struggle. It also bungles Haddock’s role as comic relief: Tintin’s (often) humorless cockiness casts his silly, bumbling companion in a patronizing light. The immaculate and self-asserting young man, who’s evidently eschewed immaturity, leaves us with little patience for a hedonistic, misbehaving adult.

 

The action and visuals, on the other hand, are quite masterful. Characters’ faces are illustrated with a keen realism. The expansive scenes of Bagghar, a fictional Moroccan port town, are beautifully colored and evoke the same love for the exotic and worldly as the Indiana Jones films. The action is swift, with little pause for dialogue or hardship, to the point that I sometimes felt I was witnessing a video game. At times it seemed the characters were just pawns in a frenzy of booms and bangs, or rather, excuses to bring to life this nostalgic, romanticized vision of exploration.

 

There’s a sweet, understated humor here that is undeniably lovable at times, the kind that reminds me of “Wallace and Gromit” (it was a mix of that and “Spongebob”). Thomson and Thompson, two endearingly incompetent detectives, banter unwittingly while the criminals get away and suffer their share of pratfalls. A pickpocket, it turns out, just has a helpless love of wallets.

 

Yet “Tintin,” in spite of its whimsical veneer, is darker than it seems. Along with Haddock’s affection for whiskey, a man is gunned down–blood visible–and the characters, like Tintin, are endowed with a cold intellectualism most cartoons nowadays totally forgo; Sakharine could pass for the villain in “Die Hard.” That too was refreshing against today’s cornucopia of dumbed-down animated features, whose M.O. is written in cheap punch lines. Still, it all comes back to Tintin, the film’s unquestionable center. And still, he’s got it all under control–and if he doesn’t, he’s still playing father to the insufferable Haddock. He doesn’t have to lose his precocious wit, but if only the filmmakers had imbued him with some more vulnerability, a greater sense of struggle. Instead, I found myself longing for the unrequited tug between father and son in “Finding Nemo.” Even the love story of Shrek and Fiona. There’s a lot of energetic imagery and artfully interpreted characters to breathe life into this indulgently nostalgic whirlwind, but not enough heart at its center to let me slip into the shoes of its adventurer. As the credits rolled I asked my 13-year-old cousin how she liked it. She shrugged.

 

It struck me that a movie, crafted by truly gifted storytellers who know how to create epic emotional journeys, would inspire such a dispassionate reaction. A movie like this deserves to be experienced through a melody of bated breaths and wide, expectant eyes; an adventure so spirited, so lovingly wrought, should also be affecting, right? I wonder, had it just let its self-possessed protagonist stray more deeply into doubt and insecurity along the way, whether it could have been.

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Review: ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/10/review-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-shadows/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/01/10/review-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-shadows/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:45:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1053863 “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” begins with a bang. Literally. A bomb goes off--one that Sherlock, played by the lovably roguish Robert Downey Jr., artfully diverts from blowing up a room of auctioneers.

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Review: 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows'
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” begins with a bang. Literally. A bomb goes off–one that Sherlock, played by the lovably roguish Robert Downey Jr., artfully diverts from blowing up a room of auctioneers.

 

He’s at it again–that is, always one step ahead of everyone else. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is not a dapper gentleman who slowly draws on his pipe and muses about things like anagrams and red herrings, but a crime-solving tour de force who maneuvers his way through a fight as effortlessly as he puts clues together. This is what taking a beloved classic and assimilating it into the “Transformers” and “Thor” mold looks like. Yet as exhausting as the pace of action is, “Holmes” is blessed with a rare wit and gameness that lends its energy a devilishly entertaining edge. I can’t help but like it.

 

Consider a scene (minor spoiler alert) on a moving train when Downey appears disguised as a woman to his crime-solving partner, Watson (Jude Law). A gunfight breaks out; Holmes breaks out his fists and sheds the dress–but he’s still wearing unsightly amounts of purple eye shadow and smeared red lipstick. Downey, an atypical action star if there ever was one, brings to the role a delightful slapstick that harkens back to entertainers of yore: Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, even Charlie Chaplin. A light bulb must’ve gone off somewhere in Hollywood after “Iron Man.” Imagine, movie people said, a classic entertainer in the shoes of an action star. What a brilliant idea.

 

This is a sequel better than the original. The first one had a good plot going for it (this does too, but it’s not as tight), but the sequel’s writers smartly capitalized on Holmes’ comic eccentricity and the endearingly love-hate relationship between him and Watson. The result is an action film that does the rare thing: not take itself too seriously. Just imagine putting into the driver’s seat Genie from “Aladdin” with a dash of Daniel Craig’s James Bond.

 

Downey’s role, in all ways, is to entertain us. With the rapid pace with which he puts clues together, the audience is hardly in a position to follow the leaps of his mind, much less solve the crimes in unison. His ingenious intellect, much like his unhinged character, is there to dazzle and surprise us. He’s always a step ahead of everyone–the audience included. It’s often frustrating to follow in his footsteps, but the dots, when they do belatedly connect in our minds, are still beguiling, especially in the well-engineered last act.

 

I went in expecting a mediocre yet entertaining film. Entertaining it is, but mediocre is an ill-fitting word. By no means does this movie aspire to great philosophical or artful heights; it wants to entertain you. Robert Downey Jr. wants to entertain you. Then you remember: that’s the point of movies, right? It’s the giddy thrill of thinking, “How is he going to get out of this one?” and seeing him do it, in drag.

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