The Old Curiosity Shop

2:17pm: How to Get an A in College
When people told me the college paper is an entirely different beast than the high school paper, I laughed. I rocked papers in high school. They walked up to me, I fed them grass from the palm of my hand, shot them, presented the carcasses to my teachers and received accolades.

Then I got to college and was utterly utterly demolished in my first few writing courses. The college paper is heftier creature, more wily, more complicated, existing on an entirely different plane of existence. I had to rethink my whole philosophy and rework my technique. While previously I’d just sauntered into the savannah and strangle the thing with my bare hands, in college I had to sharpen my hunting knife and hide in the bushes for a good week or so before I even caught a glimpse of the beast.

I learned to revise my butt off, do prep work weeks in advance and meditate about papers. However, even though my grades slowly climbed from horrifying to respectable, I still couldn’t get up to my former high school standards. I was doing solidly but not brilliantly.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” I told one of my TAs, after receiving yet another respectable grade for a slightly mangled beast. “I really want to know how to write a truly excellent paper, and I’m not there yet.”

“You realize you’re close, right?” the TA replied. “You shouldn’t even worry,” he said, damning me with another B+/A-.

Not helpful.

But, during my last year of college I finally figured out what makes a truly excellent paper in the eyes of the grader. Here are the papers that taught me what it was.

( How to capture the college paper beast that stalks about rainforests )

12:25am: Taking Over the World
The writer’s block is a frozen mass of um, something that’s solid and really hard to um break down. Yeah. Words. Diamond. Yes. I have a solid diamond writer’s block thing. Shouldn’t I be able to sell it on e-bay?

I have lost the art of conversation.

Thankfully my friends haven’t.

Me: I’m bored.
Azzy: I was bored, so now I'm plotting to take over the world.
It looks like it will take a while.
But if I can find 3 other people with about the same abilities as me who are down with the plan, we can complete phase 1 five years after graduating.
Me: Can I be one of those people?
Azzy: Do you feel like learning how to operate a data center?
And are you roughly guaranteed to have a way to generate 80k/yr in spending capital after graduation?
Those are the current requirements for things to move efficiently.
Me: …are you rejecting me?
Azzy: Kind of?
Quite frankly, you'd be very very useful at around stage 3 or 4
But stage 1 or 2, the endeavor has to be run very tightly, and is based on a bunch of tech you don't know.
Stage 3/4, we need people who can talk to the public, so there you'd be useful.
But stage 1 is just capital generation and research.
(Essentially we [CENSORED])
At around stage 3 things get very complicated, so, almost not even worth talking about it yet.
Me: But that’s where I’m involved. I want to know!
Azzy: Fine. Stage 3 is where we need to get the US gov't to grant us a very small legally independent country.
We basically want to do this based on developing some weapons for which testing them on US soil would be very bad, then do some lobbying saying essentially (but in better words): "We can give you bigger guns, but we need to have an extralegal zone to do it, because law prohibits us."If we ever get to stage 3, I promise I'll explain 4, but if any of this ever comes to pass, I'd rather not have stage 4 written down in chat logs forever, just in case.
Me: I have issues with that!
Azzy: Don't worry. Realistically, I have a good chance of getting 1 and 2 to happen, but not 3.


Censored= Azzy gave me the full details of his plans but asked me not to post these details on my blog.

I think this is the difference between genius and ordinary schmuck. Azzy gets bored and takes over the world. I get bored and I watch j-dramas.

9:31pm: I will not be defeated by writer's block.

1:02pm: German Correspondence Course
The most successful piece I ever submitted for fiction class was a mock facebook wall I wrote. Naturally some clever fiend just had to say, “Well, I don’t understand the point. Could you just turn in a real facebook wall instead of writing your own? What’s the difference?”

Honestly, the difference is that the real wall conversations are much better. My friends Erica and Alex are doing a German correspondence course via facebook, and every morning I stalk them diligently and spend about fifteen minutes laughing my ass off.

Um, I should probably ask their permission to post this, but that’s extremely awkward so I’m going to be a plagiarist and just post it. (I am going to burn in writer hell, oh my God, but that’s okay, this is so funny I’ll be redeemed for sharing it.)

( German Correspondence Course )

1:42am: Temporary Security
Some days I worry about privacy. The interiority of my life—more than most of my friends, more than most of my relatives, perhaps more than I know about me— is online. There is a blithe blindness in writing publicly. I am not considering the friends of the friends who potentially have access to this, the person who found this on a computer’s browsing history I forgot to delete, or the people who will track me down years from now.

Yet, when I stop to censor myself, to narrow the broad range of topics, to eliminate this or that person from today’s rant because my words may get back to them, it feels as if fetters are locking themselves over my wrist. I don’t want to be prudent; I want to write as if this were a cheap diary with a lock that I hid in my underwear drawer. It is not satisfying otherwise.

Instead I tell myself that there are so many people online, so many things to do, and so little time. I don’t imagine anyone could be particularly interested in stalking me.

So wrote the girl who posted her address online, the suicidal boy who transferred sophomore year, or the high school freshman who described her fantasies about her crush in explicit detail. No one seemed to care in real life, and it seemed impossible that anyone would bother to read them online, so they described their lives in morbid detail.

I read their blogs, waded through pages of bad writing and spelling mistakes written by people I barely knew, because I found it fascinating to watch their masks crumble to pieces on their faces.

Columnists like Anna Quindlen have written articles mourning the disappearance of privacy for the internet generation. I’m not sure how I feel. In high school I shared my blog with school mates. Most of the people I knew well did not read it. Somehow though, I got to know a small circle of people whom I never would have imagined befriending: upperclassmen I was too shy to talk to, underclassmen I had no classes with, people I liked but somehow never saw. I’m still in touch with several of them now. I love hearing from them, I read their updates, and I think about them from time to time. I hope they are doing well.

Sharing blogs with my college friends has allowed us to describe the details of our lives, capture the intensity of our emotions in the moment, or just rant about or day, at our own convenience. The key to relationships is time: time to sit down and talk over lunch, time to check in with each other, and that doesn’t happen often. Being able to read what’s going on in each other’s lives prevents us from falling out of touch when we don’t see each other.

Yet, I am worried about the day I slip up- perhaps I already have- and an employer reads something bad and fires me, or a friend of a friend of a friend that I wrote about somehow gets this address and reads something cruel I wrote about them, years and years ago.

What I really worry about though, is vulnerability. In my last blog a couple people left vitriolic anonymous notes that stung for months afterwards. I worry what I post is too honest, too full of emotion, and I have just sauntered naked across the screen for everyone and their pet elephant. Then one day, when I am comfortably ensconced in my post as mayor of New York, all of this will come out and my career will crash. Or that you, right now, are judging me. Are you the boy who sits next to me in class? Do you laugh when I write about despair because I know nothing about despair?

We are taught not to cry in public when we are small. It is loud, it embarrasses our parents, and it disturbs other people. Rather, we must put our best foot forward, learn to shake hands with a firm grip, and perfect our smile for the camera because the moment we are born we are entered into a grand competition for resources in the world: food, shelter, and the means to obtain more of each.

We are told to practice impression management because it will help us during interviews. We learn to present our best self, gloss over our mistakes and failures, and focus on moments when we have outshone everyone else around us. The result is a toxic cycle where everyone constantly feels outshone and constantly tries to outshine everyone else. People around me still talk about their SAT scores.
“Ooh man, I studied so hard and it paid off. I got a 750 on math.”
“Really? I took it cold and got a perfect score on math.”
“Oh, well, you know I didn’t study that much. Besides, they gave me a scholarship. Pretty awesome.”
“Sadly, I’m not eligible for a scholarship. My family makes too much money.”

Similarly, it becomes natural to snap something sarcastic at someone who hurts our feelings instead of saying: “You hurt my feelings,” because feelings make us vulnerable.

No wonder blogs are so compelling. It’s a relief to know how vulnerable everyone is behind the impervious iron smiles that go up every day. It’s a relief to know that other people are just like you: more vulnerable, fragile and beautiful than you could possibly imagine.

It’s also a relief because now you have blackmail material on them.

I am going friends only this summer for my internship.* Please leave a note if you've been lurking, and you'd like me to friend you.


*Mostly because I have a bad bad feeling that during my last internship my boss could have/maybe/probably did read this.



"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
-Benjamin Franklin