Marginal Discomforts
Some small life-problems, and whether or not they are indicative of a fundamentally diseased society.
It’s been well-established that anything which annoys me personally is indicative of an irreparably diseased society. For example: my roommates’ continued unwillingness to replace rolls of toilet paper in our shared bathroom, Taylor Swift’s single-style, multicolored Eras Tour outfits, and the presence of HUDS vegan-only mac and cheese are all glaring symptoms of institutional failure. We should assume that the world will shortly collapse in on itself, like a very soft smore.
So: here are a few Harvard problems I’ve encountered recently, and my irreproachable rulings on whether or not they represent the collapse of human civilization. (A.k.a., seven subjects I didn’t care enough to write a full essay on.) You’re welcome.
An Older Male Professor is Trying to Compliment Your Outfit Without It Sounding Creepy (challenge level: easier than you might think!)
Last year, I enrolled in a 9 a.m. GENED whose biweekly lectures were famously optional. I still attended, in part out of a desire to people-please and also because I’m an early riser, so might as well. I was probably one of ten(?) students still showing up by the midterm.
One morning, I had a Fancy Luncheon to attend after class — or at least, I had a section and another section and office hours to attend after class, followed by the Fancy Luncheon. So I wore a nice business-casual dress.
Interrelatedly, there’s been a recent — good! — trend of older men steering clear of commenting on women’s appearances. This is wise; they should continue to do so. But as I walked into the lecture hall, my professor was clearly surprised to see a student arrive in non-pajama clothing. “Nina!” he eventually exclaimed, after giving the subject a lot of thought. “You look… fun?”
I elected to take this compliment in the spirit in which it had been offered. “Thanks, Professor.”
VERDICT: Not symptomatic of a fundamentally diseased society; actually sort of charming.
This Student Dance Showcase Ran Longer than One Calendar Hour
Let’s face it. At the sixty-minute mark of your friend’s modern dance performance, the Loeb Ex fills with a low grade neurotoxin that makes every beat of Lorde’s “Ribs” feel like a hammer to the head Up until that moment, she’s been skipping happily across the stage, Capezio tights glittering under the amateur lighting rig. But one hour deep, having been denied any opportunity to escape (or sip water) for lack of an intermission, you’re well and truly stuck.
I am a consummate shower-upper. I make a point to show up to my friends’ creative/pre-professional/entrepreneurial events, ideally with flowers. In return, I expect the following:
To see something kinda good
For the event to not take up my entire afternoon.
For some reason, that second requirement is really difficult for the average Harvard dance troupe to pull off. I’ve seen honestly-pretty-bad routines in my time and emerged unscathed — everyone can enjoy a clean forty-five of offbeat, joyful dancing. But I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed sitting in a black box theater for longer than the active play time of the Harvard-Yale Game. Please do better, Harvard student dance troupes.
VERDICT: Okay, this one might indicate a diseased society.
Uh oh! This student has a personal website written in the third person.
Possibly my toughest case to date: Is it ever ethical for an undergraduate to have a website touting their professional achievements, let alone a nice one? This is more common of a concern than you might think. Plenty of Harvard students have a catch-all domain to tout their many and varied successes: rave reviews for a debut chapbook; pictures of an eponymous direct-to-QVC jewelry line; clips of impassioned advocacy for light rail in front of the New York City Council; an encrypted Signal number for unspecified “tips;” a talent agency for speaking engagements if you’re fancy.
A couple of problems with the concept. In a general sense, one’s personal website always risks looking [under/over]produced — either cheap, cobbled together on Wix one day and then abandoned, or else like excessive sums of time and money have been spent commissioning headshots, a videographer, and a graphic designer, to say nothing of the maintenance required to update the site with your further accomplishments and successes.
What does a website even do that a tidy LinkedIn presence and a handful of Crimson mentions cannot? The key, fatal flaw — which seems to elude most adherents of personal-websiteism — is how obviously one’s online portfolio is meant to flex on one’s peers. A student is not getting a job postgrad because his employer was impressed by the copywriting that described him as a, “progressive changemaker, actorvist, and community thought leader.” That website is meant to make him feel good about himself, and to piss you off when you google-stalk him during seminar.
VERDICT: You’re never gonna believe this
My Friends Are Impossible to Take Pictures With
One of the weirder phenomenons I’ve observed among my female friends is that they can get picky about when they think their face looks “good” in a photo. Each person has their own preferred camera angles and settings (high/low, tilted/vertical, full-body/bust, flash/no), and will not be persuaded to deviate from this schema. Half the battle in taking a group photo is negotiating a suitable framework within which someone’s boyfriend can take a hypothetical photo — subject, of course, to subsequent edit requests from the subjects. Henry Kissinger had an easier time settling the Vietnam War than I do getting a consensus on which group photos are appropriate for posting to Instagram. If I had my way, all Instagram slideshows would be curated by sending the entire collection of raw photos to an independent (young, female) third party, and she would pick her favorites on the user’s behalf.
VERDICT: Not a diseased society, though we could all stand to think about our bodies a little less neurotically.
The Coddling of the Harvard Mind/The Ed Board is Correct
Readers of this blog will know that there is one thing that pains me above all else — above taking the shuttles, and above drinking oat milk, I truly hate to hand it to the Crimson’s Editorial Board. For those all-too-self-important section kids to have a permanent above-the-fold presence in the world’s widest read college newspaper strikes me as one big 152-year-long gross misadventure. I am not a fan.
So it is with immense disappointment that I announce: the Ed Board is correct; the rest of you losers are wrong.
A few weeks ago, the College announced that beginning next year, students will be suspended for missing two weeks of classes for non-disability, unexcused absences. The rulebook amendment was targeted at the 30under30 crowd, for whom the act of “being a Harvard student” is more of a part-time badge of social status, rather than a commitment to living in Cambridge and learning. You know the type. The personal-website-havers of the world. Yeah, now Harvard wants to exercise some discipline over our future United Nations Global Empowerment Ambassadors. Tragic!!!
“It doesn’t give me flexibility to pursue my professional career alongside school,” complained one impacted student about the change.
“So true, queen,” responded the College Student Handbook drafting committee as members sipped frozen margs and bounced a hacky sack around University Hall. “That’s, like, the whole point.”
A week later, the CrimEds waded into the discourse to meekly assert that, yeah, Harvard students could stand to be a little less overextended by their extracurriculars. “Academics often play second fiddle to professional aspirations,” wrote the Ed Board — in essence, boldly claiming that students should care about their studies somewhat. They were right!!
Sidechat did not like this idea one bit. People flipped their shit at the suggestion that they ought to care about their classwork. Across-the-board, hundreds of upvotes on (pretty uncreative) insults of the article. I have something in the pipeline that will tackle the subject in more detail. But all is to say: I intensely resent that you all have made me hand it to the Ed Board.
VERDICT: Ya.
Uh oh! This student thinks their fun anecdotes are significantly more interesting than the stories actually are.
I’ve been here. We’ve all been here. The jokes aren’t landing. Everyone is slowly inching away as you enter minute five of a story about commuting to your summer internship at the department holiday reception. They can’t all be investigating the dessert table, can they?
VERDICT: Funny enough, not a diseased society! Just a sign to keep your conversations short, sweet, and aggressively focused on other people. Like bouncing a hacky sack, or something.
Student Publication Not Named “The Crimson” Thinks It’s Hot Shit, Doesn’t Want to Share Table at the Club Fair
Every year, registered Harvard student clubs are made to double up on table space in the Tercentenary Theatre during the annual club fair. This becomes problematic when the table buddies are not necessarily equivalent in size and/or ego. For example, tiny resume-building and/or identitarian clubs have no need to compete with each other for room and for compers. The Kurdish-American Environmental Alliance and Pro Bono Legal Clinic for Instagram Pet Influencers would probably get along well, if made to share twenty-one square feet of table space. On the other hand — the DSO indiscriminately places big names next to total normies, and we all have to suffer the consequences.
I run a small departmental journal whose identity is not relevant to this story; the only fact that matters is its continued registration with the SOCH. Ready to bribe my way into a healthy membership of a dozen freshman, this fall I rocked up to the Yard with a stack of donuts and our entire print run on a trolley stolen from the Mather building manager’s office. On the steps of Widener, I found my co-president watching the crowd with a thousand-yard stare. “We’re sharing a table,” she told me, vexed.
“Looks like everyone is. Did we get another department’s journal?”
“Ugh. I wish. No; we’re with The [RHYMES WITH “SMINDEPENDENT”].”
I will just say this, as a word of advice to our unwilling companions for that suckish two hours in September: Step zero is to not repeatedly body-check the people standing next to you, just because you feel their table section is rightly yours by virtue of your purple greatness; step one is to not encourage your prospective compers to take our club’s donuts; step two (if you’ve made it this far) is to produce good writing. Our companions have not yet succeeded on any count. I came away from that morning with bruises on my torso and a deep, seething resentment of B-tier student journalism.
VERDICT: All this to put out the Sex Issue, Smindependent? Diseased society.