I don't get what the indictment's supposed to be here. Eight days is not a long time not to be heard from, particularly under the circumstances grad students often operate in (no fixed, obligatory schedules or work places).
Were you using ReadQuick? He wasn't a graduate student.
Oh, ok. Point still more or less stands, though.
Point I take it, and boy do I feel it, is that the apparent institutional indifference is characteristic. Many of us have experienced it, and it often only increases our devotion.
Sort of institutional negging?
Yeah, if I didn't see a 20-yr-old student for a week, I'd assume they had to go home suddenly long before I'd get to dead in the locked dorm room.
Whenever I see a car that is parked on the street for more than a few weeks, I assume there is a dead guy in the trunk.
Did he not have one friend?
Whether you have friends or not is almost orthogonal, here. The question is how long can someone be gone before you should sound the alarm? It varies from minutes to months, depending on the particulars, and we don't know the particulars.
So you're saying the Professor of the class I'm teaching scheduled a meeting for today, a University holiday, because he was worried about me and hadn't seen me in a while? That's so sweet.
He had friends. I don't know what anyone should have done about it though, besides knocking on his door, which presumably people did. I also don't see why it matters how long the body decomposes for, though it is slightly disturbing I guess.
Did he not have one friend?
He was only gone for about a week. What do you think they should have done? I can imagine people called emailed IMed texted tweeted did whatever the kids do these days asking him what's up, but if he didn't respond in a few days, that doesn't obviously mean he's dead.
We joked when I was in college that nobody would notice that you were dead until they could smell the body.
A real difference of opinion then: yes, if I don't hear from someone when I expect to, "he's dead" is one of the first serious thoughts I have. So you guys don't turn on the breaking news feed when someone is late, to see if they've died in a crash? MUST BE NICE.
I mean, I'm a worrier, but this didn't seem like a marginal case. A week! He lives in a dorm!
It took me a few weeks my last year of college to realize my roommate was never leaving the dorm room. I just assumed he was out and about during a subset of the time when I was. Turned out he had decided to starve himself. That was awkward.
I have a friend who like to play the hypothetical game of "How long would it take before someone broke down my door if I died in my apartment?" It's tough to guess how fast friends would get concerned enough to go to an RA or campus police or something. If he was flaky about communicating (phone battery frequently dead, reception lousy in his dorm), I feel like eight days isn't totally crazy. I've got a friend who gets four day migraines who will be unreachable until he feels better. If the student died Friday night, they might think he'd gone home for the weekend, then I guess missing Mon and Tues classes wouldn't cue in a prof or TA since they're probably all different classes. By Wednesday night, maybe people should have sent e-mails, but I don't think as a TA or prof I'd draw the line from unanswered e-mail to dead. I think by Thursday or Friday, friends should have been getting worried, but maybe not enough to go to an authority. At any rate, gross, but not totally outside what I'd think reasonable delay.
I think the implication in the Trib that U of C should be tracking students' movements using their access cards is extremely troubling. Preventing tragedy by checking student movement does not seem like good precedent.
17: What? Oh my.
Since this happened at the University of Chicago, surely the Economics department must be to blame somehow or other.
17: He was staying up every night loudly playing video games, so I thought he was okay. Turned out he had gone a few weeks without eating. Eventually some of us reported to the dorm's resident head that something was amiss, at which point he blamed us for his depression.
Then again, I was in college before the rise of cell phones and social media. Sometimes people just went missing for a while.
Was he drinking something with some calories?
21: Me also, but I was expected to call home once a week or I'd get a worried, guilt-inducing call from my mom.
22: Maybe. I don't remember it very well, since it was... holy shit it was a decade ago. When did I get so old?
I think the U of C was pretty shitty at dealing with students with mental health problems; their main strategy seemed to be getting the students to take a leave of absence so it wasn't their problem anymore. But maybe that doesn't have anything to do with this current incident.
20: That might win most uncomfortable roommate story. Poor guy, poor you. Hope he (or you) got moved elsewhere posthaste.
I don't think I would be any good at starving myself.
I don't think I'd notice if any of my friends weren't in touch for a week or more. Never mind notice and then worry slightly before assuming they'd gone elsewhere or were busy. Even when I shared a flat with people, it wasn't unusual for people to go away for a week visiting family, or on a field trip, or off on a boozy rugby trip, or whatever.
26: Me neither, but I'd be great at loudly playing video games all night.
I had a roommate who basically flunked an entire semester due to obsessively playing computer games almost 24/7. He did somehow manage to keep eating, though.
I've had friends who switched to mostly just drinking Ensure because they were preoccupied with music production and (in some cases) meth, but that still counts as eating, sort of.
My wife and I are U of C grads, and our "it figures" reaction to this story matches Oggeds. Probably local culture of cynicism.
But both of my kids went to small liberal arts colleges in the past few years, and the level of caring and concern there was revelatory, given our expectations.
Some people don't have friends, in fact.
Turns out he is from the "near Pittsburgh" that is very near to me and went to the local private high school.
Also from the Trib, "Video: Student found dead in U of C dorm room."
Like a very special Law and Order? Ugh, no thanks.
I can imagine people called emailed IMed texted tweeted did whatever the kids do these days asking him what's up
Snapchatted, but there's no record that they did.
It's nice that ogged thinks any regular commenter who doesn't post for a week must be dead, but I imagine his blood pressure is pretty high as a result.
Or maybe he assumes people are dead but is completely indifferent about it, in which case his BP is totally fine.
With proper medical care, you can probably control your blood pressure regardless of the amount of worry you are under.
I'm with people who say that this is depressing, but not cause to investigate why no one noticed that he was missing.
33: If I went to Hudson University, I'd definitely assume that if someone was missing for a few days then they were dead.
UsNews should include the mean time before your body is found in their ranking formula.
That would be disproportionately hard on southern schools, unless there was a correction for climate.
Wouldn't it benefit southern schools, so conscientiously removing quick-to-rot bodies before their northern counterparts even have a whiff?
I was thinking of schools for murderers who need time to get away.
Such a specific school would surely keep close tabs on their proto-murderers-on-the-lam.
Are you guys suggesting my change to their rankings might result in bias? Well, I never.
Complete morbid followup realization to 32.2 given his "near Pittsburgh" roots and the recent Post Office name discussion. during which I managed to come up with what turns out to have been a situationally infelicitous illustration, [e]xcept it's your "hometown" that the newspaper will use when the neighbors finally break in and discover you eaten by your dogs
So, hmmm.
Oh, I see Moby's point. The U of C is being unfairly criticized here; it's been a long, cold winter.
42: exactly. A body in a student room in Minnesota could be there for months before it became noticeable. In warmer weather, you'd notice it a lot faster.
It would give a tremendous benefit to universities that follow the peculiar US tradition of making their students share rooms with each other. Even a final-year postgrad would probably notice if he was sharing a room with a corpse. This chap went undiscovered because he was one of the privileged few that got a single room to himself (I notice the writeup actually mentioned this).
Possibly the body had been discovered several times before, but the people who found it were all Chicago economists, and so reasoned that there couldn't possibly be a dead body there, because if there had been, someone else would already have done something about it.
24: That was Harvard's strategy as well. I think it got slightly better but not much. The insurance started covering prescriptions by around 2004. It didn't when I was there.
Nobody found five dollars, of course.
It would give a tremendous benefit to universities that follow the peculiar US tradition of making their students share rooms with each other.
It's also odd that half the time we're criticized for not realizing that in most of the world, people don't get their own bedroom, and then also criticized for having college kids share a room.
But it looks like most of the news reports are just calling him a "student from Pittsburgh." The sanctity of your North Hills non-town has been preserved.
I think the U of C was pretty shitty at dealing with students with mental health problems
On the other hand, the many suicides while I was there (and the university's half-hearted attempt to deal with them after the fact) made me so angry that I became uncharacteristically bent on self-preservation. I felt like if I killed myself, they could add mine to their undergraduate skull collection, so I became adversarial instead. Only time I ever successfully turned my huge reservoirs of self-directed rage outwards. I suppose I could start some outreach program for the poor undergrads to whom this strategy does not occur.
It definitely occurred to me last year that my graduate advisors wouldn't have noticed if I'd died. One wrote to me to ask for an update, I told him I was severely depressed and unsure if I was going to continue in the program, and he just didn't write back. That was so awesome.
It's also odd that half the time we're criticized for not realizing that in most of the world, people don't get their own bedroom, and then also criticized for having college kids share a room.
Also, US universities are ridiculously luxurious and opulent to their students compared to the practical accommodations everywhere else, which is terrible, except for how it's also the exact opposite and students are treated terribly by having to share a room.
54: From more detailed reports of where he is from, his zip code is either mine or the next one over to the east. Both of those have "Pittsburgh" as the primary (rather than one of the non-towns) and secondaries which do not include his actual municipality.
I give it to comment 100 before Stormcrow realizes this was his kid.
I give it to comment 100 before Stormcrow realizes this was his kid.
Or to comment 150 before he realizes that it was actually him and he's been commenting from beyond the grave.
I was worried there for a bit that I might end up with the most heartless comment in the thread.
I was thinking of schools for murderers who need time to get away
If the murdering course is good, they won't need as much time.
Some lessons are better saved for graduate school.
53, 56: If anything, it's the perceived wealth of the US and its universities that makes the room-sharing thing seem so odd.
Nobody found five dollars, of course.
Check his pockets.
I agree with 64. I did not think there was much room-sharing today at elite schools.
66: I think most new dorms these days are built on the suite model where people get individual bedrooms but share a common living room-ish space.
The dorms I lived in at the U of C that had suites still had two people to a bedroom.
But at other universities, they feed both students.
But at other universities, they feed both students.
That's why the Chicago school is so well-represented in the power elite: only the strong survive.
But at other universities, they feed both students.
That's why the Chicago school is so well-represented in the power elite: only the strong survive.
What did I do wrong?
It's just ice cream.
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Every year I grade these high school essays. I used to take them home and live-blog them, but now we all meet in a room and barrel through them in an afternoon, and so I have to rely on my shitty memory for quotes.
1. "Memory is what separates us from machines."(In response to a (stupid) question about what you'd rather lose, your sight or all your memories.)
2. One of the students nattered on about his savior and spreading the word and living through Jesus and on and on in his first essay. (Well, lots of them do this, to be fair.) Then in the second essay, he chose "where in history would you spend one year, if you could?" He began by saying something along the lines of, "I'd go to Israel, in 30 AD. You may be wondering why would anyone choose to go there and then?" YES, I WAS WONDERING. What a random choice.
Later he wrote "He Biblically never turned people away who had needs" which cracked me up.
|>
YOU BIBLICALLY LEFT ME
JUST WHEN I NEEDED YOU MOST
I have a friend who teaches freshman composition. Every so often, she sends me batches of quotes from student papers. This is one group:
An individual's identity is a huge part of their makeup.
Because of the massive increase in divorce rates, awareness needs to be presented to society; therefore people can be aware of what is going on in the world.
Not all who sleepwalk are hysterical.
But in the Christian religion some historians don't find the upcoming apocalypse to be absolute.
These theories on theological apocalypse cannot be complete proven or disproven until such an apocalypse would occur.
[if the earth is ejected from the solar system,] the oceans [would] freeze solid where only micro bacteria would be able to survive the initial freezing, but these forms are only projected to live about 30 billion years.
The study of the relationship between mother and son is very significant in that the serial killer, being male or female, needs to be cared for in the right way.
Women who are struggling financially seem to be able to support themselves and live a better lifestyle when receiving an abortion.
Unfortunately for China, [voluntary abortion of female fetuses] has led to the "missing girls" epidemic and as the males grow older, missing brides arise.
As time progresses, we should all keep the gorillas on the top of our mind.
It has been researched that illegal immigrants use a lot of social services, such as education, medical facilities, and as well as incarceration.
The number of people smoking marijuana in the United States is very high.
Marijuana is one of the most promising illegal drugs available today. [Never, ever has a student produced a successful paper on this topic.]
Then they cut off his balls, which is a form of castration.
Damnit Apo, I can't read It has been researched that illegal immigrants use a lot of social services, such as education, medical facilities, and as well as incarceration and keep a straight face while proctoring a test.
Those are wonderful. I will endeavor to keep gorillas on top of my mind.
Marijuana is one of the most promising illegal drugs available today.
What's wrong with that? I can't think of another illegal drug with even half the promise of marijuana.
As time progresses, we should all keep the gorillas on the top of our mind.
New mouseover.
Or alternatively:
Then they cut off his balls, which is a form of castration.
Maybe he was thinking of "chemical castration" as a form a castration that doesn't involve cutting off balls.
84. "Promising" implies the results are not yet in. In the case of MJ, I'd say t was a wrap.
I admit I'm curious what phrase in the original was replaced by "voluntary abortion of female fetuses."
(May I - once commenter, now mostly lurker - return to an earlier point in the thread?
But both of my kids went to small liberal arts colleges in the past few years, and the level of caring and concern there was revelatory, given our expectations.
This seems like the ideal time to mention a suicide attempt by a friend of mine in freshman year. She wandered into my room while I was trying to fall asleep, chatted idly and mentioned that she was feeling a little bit odd. Luckily, something struck me as strange in her tone and I asked her what did she mean, "odd", to which she replied that she meant she'd taken all her pills. (This was back before everyone had pills, too.) So I raced down the hall to the RA, who apparently had not been trained in what to do about a medical emergency, since I actually had to ask her multiple times to call 911. (There was something wrong with the phone in my room.) My friend was rushed to the hospital, her life was saved and to my intense surprise, her parents did not come to see her at all. The next year she took some of my clothes without asking and dressed up as me for a party (which was grotesque, since she was tall and willowy and I am built more like a fireplug, linebacker or bear) and then, days later, had a screaming fit in the student coffee house, loudly blaming me for her suicide attempt. (Which, since I was one of the few visibly queer people on campus, probably convinced everyone that we'd had an affair and I'd done something disgustingly homosexual to precipitate her breakdown.) She withdrew from school. We talked a few more times on the phone and I think she visited once, but I got kind of freaked out and overwhelmed by the whole thing and stopped returning her calls, which I felt terrible about for years.
It remains pretty scary to me to reflect that if I had been asleep when she'd walked in, my friend might very well have wandered back to her room, sat down and died.
This was all at a small, expensive, well-regarded liberal arts college. It was not a nice place, not even close.
The NYT apparently has problems expressing things in English too. Current front page blurb about DUI tests for marijuana:
"Tests to identify drunken drivers aren't nearly as effective as identifying those under the influence of marijuana."
That's interesting, I thought- what are these highly effective tests for identifying who's high? It turns out that blurb most likely meant to say "aren't nearly as effective at identifying those..." since typical DUI tests are only 30% effective for detecting impairment due to marijuana.
They could make people say the alphabet backwards while holding a bag of chips and not eating any.
89: That's an awful lot of stuff to dump on a freshman.
I admit I'm curious what phrase in the original was replaced by "voluntary abortion of female fetuses."
"It" or "this," I reckon.
To be fair, cutting off the balls is not the only form of castration nowadays.
I suppose 89 should make me mad at your college, but it makes me mad at your suicidal friend, who seems like a real jerk.
Suicidal people are often jerks. It's easy to lose perspective when the thing you want most is to not exist.
Frowner! (I was thinking of you just this morning when I listened to "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang")
I suppose 89 should make me mad at your college, but it makes me mad at your suicidal friend, who seems like a real jerk.
Honestly, we were all kind of jerks in that particular social circle. Or I mean, I wasn't the world's best friend to her anyway. Although I recognize that this probably wouldn't have helped, since we were relatively close before the suicide attempt. She had a tough time at home, I think. I was very, very shocked that her parents didn't show up. I don't know. I blamed myself a lot for not wanting to be around her after a while, and I know she felt a lot of loss because we stopped being such good friends. The thing is, I was an emotionally stunted mess who hadn't actually had a friend since I was about twelve (literally - late in high school, I had a couple of "school only" friends, but I didn't even sit with them at lunch or anything, we just chatted in class sometimes) and I didn't understand how to be a friend, or what being a friend felt like. In retrospect, I couldn't actually tell the difference between people I liked and people I didn't - it was pretty much "people who let me hang around" versus "people who don't" - so I ended up with a social circle of people who not only didn't like me that much but who I didn't like that much either, only I couldn't recognize it since I had no basis for comparison.
It was a pretty sad situation all around, and I really didn't have anyone to talk to about it at all.
(I was thinking of you just this morning when I listened to "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang")
I was actually just listening to that song and thinking about whether there's actually an anti-Reagan aesthetic. (I think there is.)
I was very, very shocked that her parents didn't show up.
Not on the same level, but a friend recently recounted this story: C is seven or 8, and C's friend invites him to go skiing on their family vacation. They go to Colorado.
On the slopes, C breaks his leg. The friend's parents accompany him to the hospital, and then leave him there and go back to finish skiing. C's parents end up driving over from Texas to pick him up and taking him home. (That last sentence isn't that crazy. More just leaving a traumatized 7 year old alone at the hospital is humorously sad.)
C'mon, sitting in a hospital with a kid with a broken leg isn't as much fun as skiing!
On the slopes, C breaks his leg. The friend's parents accompany him to the hospital, and then leave him there and go back to finish skiing. C's parents end up driving over from Texas to pick him up and taking him home. (That last sentence isn't that crazy. More just leaving a traumatized 7 year old alone at the hospital is humorously sad.)
This is almost why I think some kind of moral scaffolding would be useful. It sounds just totally morally bankrupt to abandon a small child at the hospital with a broken leg (unless, I suppose, the child was certainly going to be unconscious the whole time and was in a stable condition) but I wonder sometimes if it's just that people don't think, and if someone actually walked them through some kind of Elementary Moral Scenarios thing where they had to really imagine the situation, they might be ready. I mean, I've certainly seen people (as I think I have mentioned before on this very blog) quite literally walk right past a little old lady in her Sunday best who had fallen on the pavement - this in the tourist streets of DC. I stopped, but that's because I have often thought "what will I do if I see someone who has fallen/is in medical crisis" and so I was paying attention and was ready.
This is almost why I think some kind of moral scaffolding would be useful.
Yeah, I dunno, 8 days doesn't seem like some kind of massive indictment of a callous University and its selfish student body. And at a big school, how are professors going to keep track of anyone?
I believe I've mentioned before that watching this was a formative school experience of mine, as I 100% identified with the eponymous character, and felt that the filmmakers held him to blame for his own demise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERJU8YKlX4s
Come on, have you seen how much those lift tickets cost? Time is money.
Well, they don't have to worry about any other parents allowing kids to go on ski trips with them.
A few years ago, I remember realizing that it would take quite a long time (a week or more) for people to notice and get worried if I had suddenly keeled over at home - I lived alone and worked a mostly solitary & erratically timed job. So much of our society is organized around couples & families that single people in situations like that can feel really invisible; I certainly did. But of course we don't think of college student in dorms as living alone either.
I hope they took the kid's remaining lift tickets for the day/trip and resold them. He wasn't going to need them.
if I don't hear from someone when I expect to, "he's dead" is one of the first serious thoughts I have.
Which really just highlights the insensitivity of your lengthy blog-silence.
111: Yes, exactly.
At Harvard, I thought that the resident tutors and masters of the Houses ought to be keeping an eye n people to some degree.
Speaking of H/rv/rd, the guy in the office across the hall from me brought his daughter to work today. She played with the emergency exit to the fire escape and somehow broke it so that an alarm started going off and wouldn't stop. So then they just left the building, leaving everyone else working here to try to figure out who to call to turn off the alarm since it's a university holiday and the usual maintenance staff isn't around. I swear, sometimes I think no one I work with is an actual adult.
Why doesn't everybody else just leave since it's a university holiday?
That reminds me of the time I saw an assistant professor in my department jam the photocopier. He looked one direction, then the other (didn't notice me there), and then gathered his things and slunk off. Couldn't even be bothered to tell the administrator that he'd jammed the copier. Dude! The copier even tells you how to find the jam, including pictures!
I can remember when I used to use the copier because printing multiple copies meant that I had to remove the edge strip with the holes for the paper-moving wheel.
I'm pretty sure a comment thread with the word H/rv/rd is not likely to come up high in search results even if you didn't hide it.
116: what, now academics are supposed to acknowledge the existence of holidays? Next you'll say they shouldn't work all weekend.
Whenever I see a car that is parked on the street for more than a few weeks, I assume there is a dead guy in the trunk.
A car parked in the lot at my mom's office years ago got towed after a couple of days, and when the snow melted off the windows it turned out that there was a corpse in it. The punch line being, of course, that my mother was the state medical examiner.
And that's why you should never bring work home.
This was all at a small, expensive, well-regarded liberal arts college. It was not a nice place, not even close
Some context. Maybe all colleges, even including the U of C, have gotten better at this in the last 30 years. So our expectations are driven by our experiences, which may be out-of-date.
But my daughter would be an instructive case. She had her share of crazy/dangerous roommate stories, and every college must have institutional failures, kids who fall through the cracks. Close friends of ours remain furious their son's collapse and withdrawal from the world went unnoticed, at yet another small, expensive, well-regarded Midwestern liberal arts college.
But when my daughter had a breakdown in her sophomore year, she got tons of support, from her advisor, who gave excellent academic and life advice, and from student health and the administration. My daughter withdrew for a while, worked and got herself together and returned to have very successful finishing years. She never lost a bit of her extensive financial aid.
When I compare that to the "help" I got with some of my issues, or the many stories we can all tell, the contrast is stark. My experience would only be useful were I developing an "elite college standup" routine.
comment thread with the word H/rv/rd is not likely to come up high in search results
Indeed, even "Steinford" doesn't show in at least the first dozen pages.
when the snow melted off the windows it turned out that there was a corpse in it
With this thread in mind, I noticed today that I was parked, in a remote corner of the parking lot, next to a new Mercedes that had an orange abandoned car sticker on it. Then I noticed that it was a dealer courtesy car. Dead owner or dead body, right? I called the dealership; now I'll turn on the news!
116: In my case, because I had a meeting scheduled with a student who wanted me to acknowledge his deep distress at not being admitted to his top choice of grad school. That was also fun.
I bet the snowdrifts are basically full of bodies by this point. Gonna be a humdinger of a spring for the corpse wagon.
117: I like the repeated scene in The Wire where the detectives decide whether someone is okay or not based on whether they start a new pot of coffee when they take the last of the old one. Basic human decency.
Now that we're navigating k-cup territory in our department, I'm doing my best to instill the norm that you should leave your k-cup in the machine, (remember we have these re-usable ones) for the next person to clean out. That way everyone cleans out a cooled-off k-cup from the previous person, while their own cup is brewing, as opposed to having to clean a scalding hot k-cup while postponing your own cup. Am I really still typing this dull, dull comment. Yes I am.
A car parked in the lot at my mom's office years ago got towed after a couple of days, and when the snow melted off the windows it turned out that there was a corpse in it. The punch line being, of course, that my mother was the state medical examiner.
One of my favorite Baltimore stories from back in grad school was a story in The Sun about someone who bought a car at a police auction and found a corpse in the trunk when they got it home.
121: And that's not helping my nerves.
I'm going to the bar, because it's too smokey to notice a corpse.
Plus, they check every morning to be sure no corpse is there at opening.
My favorite body in a car story on the job so far.
I'm going to the bar, because it's too smokey to notice a corpse.
You go to that bar a lot! Is it a magical place of wonders?
132 -- It doesn't take too long living in a place where smoking is prohibited in bars to forget that it's allowed anywhere. Is PA headed in the direction of banning it?
Is smoking still allowed anywhere else?
I see from that thread that Ajay is a military history and equipment buff, as am I. And LB knows a remarkable amount about it. Nothing new about either of those observations, just refreshing my recollection.
136: You can smoke in a Virginia bar if the smoking area is physically separate (like, by a door) from the non-smoking area and has separate ventilation. I know of two places locally that allow it, one of which proclaims it proudly on a banner out front: "SMOKING ALLOWED."
It definitely occurred to me last year that my graduate advisors wouldn't have noticed if I'd died. One wrote to me to ask for an update, I told him I was severely depressed and unsure if I was going to continue in the program, and he just didn't write back.
How awful. I had a similar experience, except without ever getting asked for updates. Bleh.
32 -- It doesn't take too long living in a place where smoking is prohibited in bars to forget that it's allowed anywhere. Is PA headed in the direction of banning it?
Yes, they already banned it, in restaurants.
I think food has to represent a certain percent of your revenue to allow smoking. Although the smokiest place I know has a big menu. Although I never see anyone order an entree.
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At some point later during the Olympics, Mary Carillo will air a short "documentary" on Harding/Kerrigan, and did apparently get Kerrigan to speak to it.
|>
141: I saw the teaser and it made me sad.
127: Gonna be a humdinger of a spring for the corpse wagon.
From the annals of my local punk rock bar:
The fellow who used to sit on the stool I often now sit on died of acute liver failure outside a different bar on 4th of July weekend a couple of years ago. It was extremely hot & humid -- like 100 degrees for 3 days straight -- during the interval before someone found him. Yucky.
A couple of years ago, when we had the insane winter of constant snow-subzero temps-snow-subzero temps (like this winter, but worse), the ice finally melted (in mid-April) from the curb in front of the bar, revealing literally thousands of cigarette butts that had been deposited there over the winter. Even the smokers who had put them there were grossed out and had to smoke several feet away until they made one of the bar backs clean it all up.
humdinger of a spring for the corpse wagon
Do they call them bumsicles back east as well?
I've never heard "bumsicle" We haven't had enough snow in the Midwest for years before this year for there to be many instances. People who work in high rises near the Chicago river speak of "floaters."
144: Frozen Tootsie Rolls on a stick. No?
147: A coworker at a previous job called cat turds scooby snacks because her pit bull would seek them out in the yard and eat them.
It definitely occurred to me last year that my graduate advisors wouldn't have noticed if I'd died. One wrote to me to ask for an update, I told him I was severely depressed and unsure if I was going to continue in the program, and he just didn't write back.
When I was in college, a well-loved, outgoing student died in a plane crash on his way home to Columbia for Christmas. It made it into the Crim/son, and there was a story about how his roommates all spent Christmas together in their dorm room.
There was a huge memorial service in a theater. Greg Na/gy knew the guy from his large core course and had advised him on applying for a fellowship to study Columbian myth. He did a lovely eulogy.
The guy was an Economic concentrator. His thesis advisor had only just started to wonder why he had not heard from him. I think that he happened to see all these people going to the Memorial service and realized what was going on.
Seriously?!
142: As did (for me) the comment Carillo made about how they're now both in their 40s and moms and so that gives them a whole new perspective on the events. There was something very eww about that.
151: No, the country. (You must be "taking the piss" here.)
There was actually a lovely story about him going out to play in the snow when he saw snowflakes in New York, because he'd never seen snow before.
I was sort of taking the piss, but I am fairly confident the country is Colombia in any idiolect.
Columbia, the country, like the gem of the ocean?
154: It's been a long day--running interference between my defensive, irritable father and an overzealous care person at my parents' assisted living who was trying to boss my parents around.
Capital of South Carolina, here.
made me sad
Can either of you unpack that a bit? I just want a little better sense I know what you're feeling about this.
136: Ned has it in 140. I don't understand all the rules. Just that this particular bar has, by deliberate policy, changed as little as possible for as long as possible. That includes the smoke eater, which is now mostly decorative.
Capital of South Carolina, here.
I believe the mythology there has been exhaustively studied already.
159: I was partly joking, because I wasn't saddened by the clips from the documentary. The interview snippets were awkward and defensive for both women and then the subtext of the comments after was "These were some of the best figure skaters in the world, but now that they're MOMS their lives have a whole new meaning!" I don't want to dismiss the impact of Olympic figure skaters or of moms and luckily I'd seen Carillo's badminton thing and so all I know of her is that it's her job to be a bit wacky and opinionated, but the whole thing was a bit weird.
162: while it's obviously wrong to spread the idea that being a MOTHER is the highest and only proper aspiration for any woman, at least motherhood is rather more worthwhile and valuable than figure skating. (Or any other Olympic sport, really. Grown adults spend years of their lives monomaniacally practising to run round and round in circles ever so slightly faster than other similarly deranged grown adults. Really? This is what we as a society value?)
163: I totally agree with you, but it was the idea that they can't define their own lives however they want and I don't know, that both sides of the balance seemed pushy and wrong. And the whole documentary clip and the talk around it similarly made me queasy about how they were objectified then and how they have to defend and also fight against that objectification now. (I don't think I can make what I'm saying actually make sense. I also don't really care about figure skating or any other sport and just happened to be checking email while Lee had the channel on, which is why I saw it.)
Further to 164, the grossness was that in the midst of all this Olympic pageantry they were putting in a promo for something that's going to air later in the Olympics AND playing the "But the most important thing in a woman's life is to be a mom and thus be able to see the world as it truly is!" because it's all just about the network cashing in on whatever they can.
I usually am pretty into the winter olympics, as far as that goes, but I haven't watched more than ten minutes of this one, all told, and you know what? The unearned sense of mild moral superiority is also kind of pleasant.
When I was doing the overseas year of my degree under the European Union's wonderful SOCRATES* programme, I remember frequently thinking that Royal Holloway wouldn't notice in the slightest if I disappeared. Like when I was unofficially sort-of on the university strike committee. "Hey guys, we were trying to put on a revolution and Harrowell vanished." "Uh...he's not here?"
*Or was it ERASMUS? Nobody knows the difference. Anyway, do a year's study at another European university for cheap.
164, 165: agreed; I just wanted to take the chance of a quick stab in the direction of figure skating.
168: stabbing, the winter sport of Scotland.
168, 169: Wrong weapon for the US where a police baton is preferred.
For some reason a lot of my friends in the early '90s were in to carrying those extendable batons around. I'm happy to report that no figure skating broke out and they mostly remained unextended.
I don't know if the clips they showed are online, but it was basically Nancy Kerrigan saying, "And I didn't even grow up rich! And I wasn't whiny! It's not whiny to yell when you've just been hit hard with a metal baton!" and Tonya Harding said, "What was I doing on what day in January? When? Hmm." and in both cases it seemed so rehearsed and faux-earnest it almost wasn't manipulative.
But I don't speak for oudemia, who seems to know more and to have had a more meaningful emotional response.
Now figure skating with stabbing, I'd watch that. Ice Fencing. Or Ice Muay Thai, using the skates.
166: but I haven't watched more than ten minutes of this one, all told
I'm mostly trying to watch curling*, but others in the household have drawn me into various speed skating and x-c skiing. They're semi-maniacs, and have had up to three screens going at one time in the same room showing different events.
*Which always reminds me of my first unfogged meetup which day went pretty much as follows:
In NYC on mission which proved to be completely unnecessary.
Hang out in an apartment watching curling *all* day (I'd never really paid attention to it previously) punctuated by several contentious, emotionally draining phone calls.
Blow off relatives who want to meet that evening with lame excuse.
Watch more curling and never get around to eating.
Walk to meetup in Brooklyn from the Village.
On the way, run into blown off relatives on relatively deserted Atlantic Ave. (I did visit with them the next day.)
Mutombo!
Get drunk embarrassingly quickly, curse like an asshole, and spill beer.
163 is insane. I mean sure speed skating sucks (except for its role in creating pictures of Trapnel in a full spandex bodysuit), but SOME humans who are Olympic winter athletes are training to ski fast and also shoot at things or do YOLOflips, and those things are way more awesome than motherhood, which is mostly about nagging and changing diapers.
Trollfail.
Too obvious and forced. Judges give it a 4.5.
My maternal grandparents' courtship involved a lot of mixed curling on frozen rivers (in WI.com, no less!) and so I have sort of a soft spot for it but still don't know all that much about it. And it's not moral superiority that I haven't really watched, just that I was doing other stupid things (and nagging and changing diapers.)
I had no idea that there was any "native" curling in the US; I thought it was like luge, a sport that basically no one does unless they have at least some vague hope of going to the Olympics.
Ice Fencing. Or Ice Muay Thai, using the skates.
They use a special Zamboni to remove the blood stains.
My grandpa also ran a knitting mill, so their curling photos always include adorable hats and gloves. I don't know, they curled and then played golf. My other grandparents skiied and played tennis and eventually windsurfed. Other people's families play horseshoes or go bowling. Curling with a bunch of friends while drinking beer makes more intuitive sense to me than pinning your dreams on Olympic curling, and I don't even drink beer.
No, recreational curling sounds OK I guess, I just had no idea anyone in the US did it. Wikipedia says its a Scottish-Canadian sport (makes sense since Canada is so heavily Scottish) with some penetration into the upper Midwest.
There is apparently a curling rink (second one in England) opening near us this year. My 11 year old is beside herself with excitement.
My 15 year old put her alarm on for 5am (it's a school holiday this week) to watch the men's play off this morning.
I had no idea that there was any "native" curling in the US; I thought it was like luge, a sport that basically no one does unless they have at least some vague hope of going to the Olympics.
There are a couple dozen cities in the US at least with curling clubs. All you need is access to a big ice rink and a set of (expensive) stones. And special sliding/non-sliding shoes.
As for luge, there aren't a couple dozen tracks in the entire world.
I like how the reporter sent to cover the local curling event didn't even bother to pretend anybody will give a shit in the long term.
I haven't watched more than ten minutes of this one
In keeping with my normal biannual Olympics viewing habits, have watched exactly none of this year's games.
My old school had a curling team. (Also, stabnation.)
Curling is basically the same sport as coaching 3-4 year old soccer. You're allowed on the field but you can't touch the ball, so you do your best to sweep everything in the right direction, mostly by yelling.
The difference is you're not allowed to bet on 3-4 year-old soccer if you are the coach.
It's not whiny to yell when you've just been hit hard with a metal baton!
Agreed!
Does she actually say this? If so, that's kind of great.
191: She did! And I agree with her, of course! She had some really odd but endearing wording, "knee had been smashed by a... metal stick swung by a very strong person" or something like that, but yes.
She did get a bit of a bad rap with the canonization of "Why me?" (Time notoriously had that on its cover) when she clearly just repeatedly says 'Why?"
Curling is basically the same sport as coaching 3-4 year old soccer.
Coaching 3-4 year old soccer is a thing? Like, not here's a ball, have fun, but actual coaching?
Well, no. Coaching 3-4 year old soccer is "No, no! No hands! Wrong goal! Go this way! Stay on the field! Why are you taking off your shoes?"
Jammies: Pokey! Wrong way! This is your goal, you want to score on the other team's goal!
Pokey: There's too many people that way.
So he continued on and intentionally scored on his goal. GOOOOOAL!
My favorite part of 5 year old soccer is when a plane flies overhead and everyone stops to watch.
OT: "Money makes parenting less meaningful" and "Money and parenting don't mix. That's according to new research that suggests that merely thinking about money diminishes the meaning people derive from parenting." seem like absurdly sensationalistic ways to describe the results of this study.
"So try to avoid buying stocks or taking a business call right before or during taking care of your kids." And no discussion at all of any class implications of this study, ha ha! (Presumably because this is a lousy writeup, not necessarily because the research avoided it.)
I admit that I sometimes get annoyed by fostering bureaucracy when I think "The stipend money for one day is what I can make in one hour at work," which is mostly when I'm wasting hours sitting around or missing work to be dealing with annoying stuff. But that has nothing to do with the actual parenting part.
This new work suggests that parents are unhappy when they encounter greater negative emotions, magnified financial problems, more sleep disturbance, and troubled marriages. On the other hand, parents find joy when they experience positive emotions, satisfaction of their basic human needs, fulfillment of their social roles, and purpose and meaning in life.
Those psychologists sure are treading in novel waters.
198: "Simply asking whether parents are happier than non-parents is not very meaningful," Nelson says. "Parents have such different experiences that researchers should not take an 'all parents are created equal' approach.
Wow! A shocking conclusion!
I hypothesize that people's overall happiness drops significantly immediately after they are poked in the eye with a sharp stick.
Maybe I can get the research funded through kickstarter.
Something like this happened at the I-house when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, in the 90s, and we were all horrified and though it was an appalling indictment of the dead student's floormates. I had various friends drop out or disappear over the years, and my friends and I usually very much noticed and made enough of a ruckus that the administration would have to look into it and reassure that the person was fine. There was one guy in particular who was heartbroken over being dumped by his girlfriend, and then disappeared. For days the physics building was plastered with notes saying, "Have you seen S____ ______?! EMAIL US!" and his buddies made enough of a ruckus that the dean had to call them in and say he was not allowed to tell them anything further but the boy had withdrawn, and as far as he knew, was still alive. (I had not actually met S____ yet at this point.) A year later S______ climbed into the window of the reading room (having not yet gotten his key-access back) and revealed that he biked to CO and worked there in construction for a while, and had just biked back. This is actually when I met him for the first time. The party that erupted in celebration of his non-death and return is still one of my favorite memories of college.
This thread is making me feel kind of stupid about dropping out of graduate school. As an undergraduate I switched my major to physics largely b/c the professors were nice--for example, my quantum mechanics professor noticed when I didn't come to class (I was ill) and had the GSI call my house to check up on me. There were about 75 people in this course. It seemed perfectly in character at the time. Then I went to graduate school, wound up in the hospital with a horrible kidney infection on the first day, generally had a miserable and sickly first semester, and was assigned a professor to oversee my academic recovery in the second semester and be kept updated by my doctors regarding my health. I did alright for a few weeks and then in his class one morning I suddenly got up, stumbled out of the room with nausea, passed out in the hallway, bashed my head on the cinderblock wall, was awakened by a passing undergraduate whom I promptly repaid by throwing up on his shoe, and was finally scraped off the floor and taken away by the paramedics who went back to the classroom and loudly asked for my stuff. Officemates, professor, department---no one tried to find out what happened to me. This was a real problem b/c the paramedics actually hadn't succeeded in getting all my stuff--only my Sakurai---and I woke up at the hospital with no wallet, keys, or cell phone, and would have been stranded there had my mother not called a friend of ours in town who picked me up and got my landlord to let me in my apartment. One boy I did not know, who was not in the program but was taking our classes, very sweetly emailed me to ask me if I was okay. That's it. I realized that since I had only majored in physics, in the first place, b/c the department in college was nice, it really wasn't worth struggling with illness in a department that couldn't be bothered to find out what happened to me after the paramedics took me away, and dropped out. Apparently my standards for departmental niceness were too high, though?
89: That blows. Sounds like you were quite heroic and her parents quite awful. I for one agree that not visiting after a suicide attempt is genuinely shocking.
Wikipedia says its a Scottish-Canadian sport (makes sense since Canada is so heavily Scottish) with some penetration into the upper Midwest.
Earlier today, I was surprised to hear someone say that he thought curling had been invented in Canada. Played in Canada? Yes. Invented in Canada? Er, no, I'm pretty sure not. I always thought it was a Scottish thing, imported to Canada along with strong whisky and sensible woollens.
Curling's a big deal in Alaska too, especially in the Fairbanks area where it was introduced by Scots and/or Canadians during the Gold Rush era.
Curling is something my dad took up when our family moved to Ontario, before I was born, so he could work on the atomic project. A big social activity then, but he hadn't done it growing up, on the threshold of the most Scottish place in the world when he was growing up, Cape Breton, where much of Highland culture which had died out at home was still preserved. But not much curling. After we moved to Ottawa he never did it again.
Obviously a time & place sort of thing
204.2 is pretty awful, and I certainly don't think you should feel bad about dropping out of a department that callous.
204.2 is pretty awful, and I certainly don't think you should feel bad about dropping out of a department that callous.
207: So your dad took up curling in Chalk River or some place like that, but dropped it once in Ottawa?
Cape Breton is a place that almost doesn't quite seem to belong to North America. Not because it is so beautiful (it is very beautiful indeed, but there are very many beautiful places in North America), but because it seems so much closer to the "Old" World in cultural terms, though obviously geographically situated in the "New."
204.2 does sound terrible. I don't want to let that one go without saying. I think I would feel a little bit guilty if I did. It would be as though I were a tiny bit like those people who just left you in the hall.
Cat curling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7PP52Ah6L0k
210:
Yes, precisely. My earliest memories are of Deep River, and its community-building activities. I think across the continent there were new towns like that after the war, and I've often wondered how much our lives resembled those of Oak Ridge or Livermore families.
Understood as social fear, social anxiety disorder is the severe fearfulness of particular social events or situations. For people with the disorder, worry of those social situations are of high magnitude and apparently difficult to overcome.