Posts Tagged ‘ smrt ’
If ever there is a biopic of my time in grad school, the opening scene was surely written early this evening, as I stood by the buffet table at the Harvard Teachers’ Reception, third glass of champagne in one hand, mound of melting cheese cubes in the other, stealthily avoiding a man with a name tag that read “Florian” and trying to figure out where I could stash the eclairs.
Today I learned that you can keep walking into walls until the walls are there, and that it’s possible to spend a lot of time dwelling on a forearm. This is basically everything I’ve learned in grad school in one convenient sentence.
Today I learned that you can’t merge cells in a table in a Google Word document. I severely underestimated my desire not to learn this, as I learned this repeatedly over the course of over two hours.
And I learned that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born the same day in the same year. That is nice and important and all, but not as cool as sharing your birthday (albeit not year) with someone who happened to have penned this song:
Today I learned that no matter how many hours you’ve logged in the library, you can still get lost in its depths, and it is still very very very scary.
Today I learned not to put a wet umbrella on top of your library books.
Today I learned that your thesis can have havoc wreaked on it by your bastardized free “Word” program when it autocorrects you straight into Mr. Goers’ Neighborhood.
Today I learned that it’s possible to completely space on the Harvard 375th anniversary dinner to which you affirmatively RSVPd with a plus one. This social faux pas is exacerbated by the sin of passing up the free alcohol that was included with said dinner. This would all be enough to send me to hell if I weren’t already on my way due to the great “imported cigarette” rooftop debacle of 2002.
(OF COURSE the 375th anniversary has its own logo.)
(This logo may or may not have been made with ClipArt.)
Today I learned that when you leave a bar the second it becomes Cambridge Frat Boy Lacrosse Black Eyed Peas central, you should probably make sure you have closed out your tab first. This is a lesson I somehow avoided needing to learn in a decade dotted with visits to hundreds of millions of bars, thus supporting my hypothesis that grad school makes you dumber. (Control group: the real world.)
And I learned that Cambridge houses skunks. Yeah, it was a banner night, folks. Banner night.
Today I learned that Harvard students are capable of emptying an entire dorm of exhausted students because they have set off the fire alarm for the second time in a week. By burning toast. Possibly they’ve never had to cook anything this elaborate before.
I’m back in America. I have been breathing a lot of spotless air and eating a lot of peanut butter. I have not worn waterproof boots once. I have watched so many hours of ESPN that an entire section of my brain has actually shut down. I am hoping it is the part I need for grad school, so that then I will have another reason to drop out.
Here is a wrap-up of some of the most important things I learned in three months in Russia:
I learned that Russian professors love to shock you, but their shocking material is slightly dissipated by the disclaimer “Does this shock you?” that always accompanies it.
I learned that Russian people are generally Very Very Russian in their avoidance of human contact, but stick a busker or a disabled person in front of them, and they will Soviet spare change the crap out of him.
I learned that Russians don’t know how to preserve books or art, but their selection of bathroom door artwork is so impressive that they almost don’t need to.
I learned that the funniest word in Cyrillic is “kung-fu”. Close second: panda.
I learned that when a cafeteria worker tells you that a dish is “vegetables”, there’s an 80% chance that it has pork in it.
I learned that nobody puts up or tears down statues and monuments like Eastern Europeans.
I learned that if you spend three months bemoaning the fact that you automatically respond in French every time someone speaks Russian to you, don’t get excited when you board an Air France flight for your return home. Because the second a stewardess asks you in French what you’d like to drink, you’re going to respond by saying “coffee” in…Russian.
I learned that for as organized as the Soviets were in their sports system, you will spend hours walking around the Olympic complex looking for a race registration. And as helpful as all of the guards are, you will ultimately never find it, but you will happen upon that event so crucial to Soviet sports success: Ghetto Basket.
I learned that the best friends you can make in Russia are Soviet Pin Guy, Monestary Admission Lady, Front Door Babushka, Cute Bookstore Guy, and Coat Check Lady. I’m fairly convinced that Coat Check Lady could help one avoid deportation if it came to that.
I learned that every Russian movie has a wide-faced, wide-eyed child somewhere in it, and most of them will make you cry.
I learned that it takes a lot longer than three months in Russia to learn to tell when Russians are rewriting history and when they’re just being theatrical.
I learned that pet snails grow a hell of a lot faster than you expect them to.
And most importantly, I learned that there are no heels too high, no article of clothing too sparkly, no skirt too short, and no makeup too purple to take out on the town. This is true liberation, my friends, democracy at its finest, and I miss seeing the living embodiment of this more and more every day that I stare at Mike and Mike in the morning.
Final nudity tally: 18. On the record.
And just when traffic on the blog is inexplicably up, I’m going on hiatus. Because I’m on summer vacation, kids, and if grad school tries to teach me a damn thing this summer, I’m going to drop kick its ass into a swimming pool as I scream Katy Perry songs at the top of my lungs. If I don’t become a dropout, I’ll see you all in the fall.
Here's what I'm learning in grad school 