A note about CSS, and how I chose my major

I got interested in the College of Social Studies (CSS) my freshman year because I was dating a CSS boy. As it turns out, the major was a much better choice than the boy.

Typically, if you are a freshman interested in History, Government, Economics, or Philosophy, CSS is a great multi-disciplinary way of combining all those things. For me, though, my academic interests weren't necessarily in those areas. I just wanted to read a lot and write a lot and debate a lot about what we read and wrote, and CSS is a great way to do that too.

If you're at all interested in becoming a part of this warm, supportive, and challenging community, please consider attending one of our weekly Monday lunches (Noon, Woodhead lounge, in Exley) or Friday social hours (4pm, CSS lounge, 4th floor PAC).

This week's Monday lunch talk is on education and development in Rwanda, by Michael Brotchner, CSS '95, Executive Director of Orphans of Rwanda. Again, that's noon on Monday March 3, in the Woodhead Lounge.

More information on the CSS can be found here, and Applications are due March 28.

Photo credit: Ben Rowland Photography

Mildly Sleazy Uses of Facebook

(from xkcd)

Tips for Long Distance Friendships

So every summer there comes a time when a whole bunch of new kiddies come to Wesleyan and a whole bunch of older kiddies leave. Summer, then, is a transitional time for a lot of people and it often calls for the geographic displacement of close friends to be sucked up by schools in other time zones or *gasp* tiny, tiny cubicles in big, big buildings in cities far away.

And with the advent of Facebook, many of these kids say to themselves, "Hey, we'll be in touch, there's always Facebook!" Yeah huh.

Facebook sucks for bonding. I've railed against it before as a really poor substitute for social engagement, but I can't emphasize this enough: DO NOT RELY ON FACEBOOK TO KEEP IN TOUCH. Facebook is only good for one of three things: 1) looking up someone mentioned in conversation who you do not know, 2) graffiti and 3) leaving totally non-committal "let's hang!" notes on people's walls.

Right. So with that said, Facebook is lame. Except for graffiti. Graffiti will revolutionize the entire internet. Just like The Two Coreys will revolutionize television. You'll see.

Ok, back to my point. So what do you do when friends move away?

I'm not the best phone chatter. In fact, when I look at my monthly cell phone statement, on my family plan of my brother, my grandmother and I, both my brother and my grandmother outtalk me. Which is both revealing of my character and lends credence to my theory that gram is actually a neo-soviet spy using my unused minutes to contact the mother country.

But I do manage to keep in touch with a lot of friends scattered now all over the country via snail mail. And I can't recommend this enough. Email gets curt and trite after a while. "Hey, sorry I haven't written in a while, I've been busy! Studying lots! Are you busy? Studying? Yeah, I hear you. Anyway, I gotta go. Test tomorrow." And then they gradually become less and less frequent and three years later you ask yourself, "Hey, didn't I used to be friends with that girl?"

Right, so tip #2, (after not relying on facebook) is not to rely on email. Email is fine for aunts you see once every three years, but I can't remember the last time I got really excited to get a long email.

So tip #3, my best tip, is to invest in snail mail. At school (or alone in your apartment after taking a new job) receiving letters, postcards and tiny packages can make all the difference between a really crappy day and a pretty good one. Things to consider picking up the next time you're out:

• An address book. Seriously, I think I may be one of the only people I know who still keeps one of these, but I make it a point to jot down things like birthdays, school addresses, phone numbers, etc.
  

• Stamps. Both regular (or those crazy *forever* stamps) and postcard. Stock up. I always regret when I'm pennywise and pound poor about buying stamps because then I'll write a letter out only to realize I have no postage. It's quite possibly one of the most annoying things in the world, ranked closely in my heart next to those ladies at the grocery store who park their carts in front of the yogurt, blocking you from getting said yogurt. Seriously. So annoying.

• Stationery. Blank cards, envelopes, nice letter paper, good pens. The works. I keep a box of this crap filled and make a point to stock up whenever I see a sale or find cheap Thank You cards at the dollar store...which...brings me to my next point:
  

• Thank You Cards. As a human being living and breathing on Earth, I can't tell you how many thank-you cards I've sent out since being at college. Letters of recommendation writers, gift givers, friends who do you considerate favors, the like. They're incredibly important and go a long way to show gratitude and appreciation but I feel like no one sends them anymore--which makes them even more important! These you should *always* have on hand. Always. It might as well be the law.
  

• Assorted Clippings. Ok, this is more a quirk I have than anything, but I often clip out things like recipes I find in magazines or print out comics I like and put them in my stationery box to include in my next letter to a friend. It's not much, but sometimes I end up sending an entire letter just composed of clippings and a mix cd. Xue tried this once when I worked as a camp counselor; she sent me an envelope full of wheat wrapped in a drawing of an octopus. It's the thought that counts.

Guppy Theory of Attraction

Why do some guys at Wesleyan seem to get an unbelievable amount of crushin' on the ACB? Maybe because the dude put his own name down and then girls, thinking it's another girl confessin' her lust for the lad, reconsider him and voila! He's cast a net of gullible female guppies. (Just a theory...OR IS IT?!)

Do they all really share identical taste for, say, Brad Pitt, or that cute guy in physics class? A new study suggests that, in fact, women will look more favourably on the men that other women find attractive.

Ben Jones at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and colleagues, showed 28 men and 28 women pairs of male faces and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photos had been already been rated by 40 women as of about equal attractiveness.

The researchers then showed the same faces alongside a third photo of a female face in profile, positioned so she was looking at one of them, and smiling – or not. The viewers were asked to grade the faces again.

Women found the men who were being smiled at suddenly more attractive, while men who apparently elicited no such smiling approval were pronounced less attractive.

Men, meanwhile, behaved in a strikingly different manner. They rated men who had been smiled at as less attractive. ”Within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes towards men who are the target of positive social interest from women,” the researchers conclude.

Or to put it another way, the next time you hear a man say “I don’t know what she sees in him”, remember the fact she’s sees anything at all may be off-putting enough…

Dating at Wesleyan: Yes or no?

I wonder if this is really how people unconsciously make this decision.

(source)

Fox Gives Dating Advice!

This video was recently played on Fox News and is getting the shit kicked out of it by MSNBC. What's wrong with it? Well, god, what's right with it? "Dating" expert Marie Forlio lays down college dating...like:

• "Don't hook up with a guy if you're sloppy drunk or he's sloppy drunk. You're just going to find yourself doing the walk of shame the next morning and that's not going to be cute."

It's worth watching how she basically slams any lifestyle that wouldn't be condoned between the pages of Cosmopolitan.

Overall, it's lame. I'd get into the stereotypes and imagery presented more, but it's just Fox News and disgustingly biased as is. I'm going to go be lame in my "mini" marriage and stunt my social growth a little bit more, kthanksbye.

Hooking Up in the Shadow of Facebook

"Hooking up" as a phrase makes absolutely no sense. We've all come to accept this. "Hooking up" in college is like the illustrious baseball field of high school, where you had no idea where any of the bases were or what they meant. (If you touch a boob over the shirt is that sliding into second? No? Ok what about touching the bra, that's clearly second base territory. No? Ok, what about if she touches my chest? No?! Come on, throw me a frikkin' bone here.)

"Hooking up" in college can mean just about anything from making out to engaging in an all-out bestial orgy. If you at all care what is going on in someone's pants, you have to ask for clarification. Otherwise, you'll make some kind of ridiculous assumption about the sex lives of others and die a horrible social death BECAUSE IT'S JUST THAT IMPORTANT TO ACCURATELY KNOW WHO IS BOINKING WHO. As of right now, facebook has no option to show who is boinking who, but pray for patience, as this is only a matter of time.

Sometimes hooking up can be more than just a one-night occurrence. Hooking up, in fact, can be used to describe an ongoing "fling" of sorts in which two people continually end up with another person for physical purposes. Why we don't use the phrase "meaningless fling" to describe this ongoing "hooking up" boggles the rational mind as "hooking up" as a phrase is confusing enough to understand already.

See, usually, in a relationship involving two people (in sociology we call this a diad) there is usually an uneven power balance. This uneven power balance can stem from a number of different variables, but most frequently it is one person's deep aversion to the term "relationship." Contrary to popular belief, they do not actually fear the concept of a relationship, more or less, they just fear the literal word "relationship." If you wrote the word "relationship" on a piece of paper and put it in front of their face, they would let out a girly scream and run away.

You must understand that most sane people in the real world would call many of Wesleyan's "hooking up" relationships actual relationships, as they take on many of the characteristics of a real relationship such as courting, monogamy, routine and well, physical relations. But not at Wesleyan. No, at Wesleyan no one is really "in a relationship" until facebook says they are in a relationship. Everything else is just "complicated" (Which now, also thanks to facebook, you can finally apply an appropriate label to the mess your fuckbuddy refuses to label! Because that makes sense!).

(Actually, by the way, people who are in diads where one person labels it on face book as "complicated" you can almost always count on the other person to be "single." Unless of course two girls who are friends and are both themselves single [you can tell they are straight because their profiles say they are only interested in men] decide to involve themselves in a complicated facebook relationship. [Because let's face it, facebook is complicated.] Before "complicated" was an option, you could "marry" your friends and fill the facebook void that way.)

So again, if you examine a hook-up diad closely, you'll quickly understand this uneven power balance concept as it applies to facebook. One person may stick with the diad in hopes of turning it into an official, society-accepted relationship. They both may stick with the diad because physical relations is all they seek out of the relationship and making it official would obligate them to invest emotionally into someone they actually have no feelings for. Perhaps they are practicing to be porn stars. Who knows. But the entire act of making a hook-up official or not making a hook-up official on facebook implies leverage in a diad which gives one person in the relationship more power over the other. (In fact, if you are really a nerd and want to learn about the balance of power in diads, I recommend reading Sadomasochism in Everyday Life by Lynn S. Chancer.)

What's really fucked up about this is is that this is a relatively recent social phenomenon as facebook has only been available at Wesleyan for two years. See, before facebook, historians theorize that if you were in a hook-up diad, quite a number of people a) either didn't care about you or your love life, b) confused you for being in an actual relationship or C) talked to you enough to distinguish that you are simply just hooking up and no, she is not your girlfriend. Now, thanks to facebook, your status is on the internet for everyone to scrutinize and there is no more gray ambiguity involving your penis. See, before facebook, people applied real-world social logic to your penis, but now they apply facebook logic, which is completely different and thus makes absolutely no fucking sense (and it burns a little when you pee).

So that's hooking up at Wesleyan as far as facebook is concerned.

The end.