A few words on hair crimping.

Hey remember how in the '90s we all crimped our hair? That was dumb...it's one of those fads that is testimony to the fact that so often in our naive youth we do things purely because they're trendy with total disregard of their hideousness. There is just nothing cute about this. It's heinous. What was also heinous was the purple flat iron that I had with the detachable flat iron plates that I could replace with crimping plates. To my hair, I am sorry for the heat damage I subjected you to in elementary school and junior high to achieve what is quite possibly the least natural look in the entire world.

yesss

Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Being a Camp Counselor

Rule number 1: No whining.
Rule number 2: Play the game.

"Dying of Too-Much Choice"

Sarah Palin and The Handmaid's Tale

Things I Won't Miss About College

I like my great big obnoxious urban school. I really do. But there are some things I just won't miss about my college days.

1. The way we eat in college
"Uhh I'm totally hungover and hungry and late. But the only thing in my fridge is beer. Beer and leftover dining hall salad, which is composed almost solely of iceberg lettuce, which is not, in fact, edible at all. And this big brick of hardened, waxy American cheese that someone bought back when grocery shopping was novel." It's worth noting that my at-home eating habits have improved enormously from last year, when I lived in not an apartment but a "Traditional style" dorm without a kitchen. Just the memory of making tea in the same microwave that bore chef boyardee splatter sends chills down my spine.

2. The cruel things we do to our bodies in college
Just because cheap plastic-jug vodka (i.e. Georgi, Crystal Palace, Poland Spring) is only slightly more expensive than the mixer you're putting it in does not mean you should drink it all the time. It is actually industrial strength floor cleaner disguised as an alcoholic beverage.

Ew.

3. The way girls dress in college
This probably has a lot more to do with NYU than it does college in general, but sometimes I feel like the girls here take fashion beyond its usual definition of looking nice and put together and unique, to a whole new level I would call a look-fucked-up-contest. Of course you should rip the neckline off a men's XXL wifebeater and wear it with a chartreuse bra and a gigantic pendant of an owl with great big sapphire eyes. You should definitely tuck your high wasted jeans into your pumas. What a fashion yes. It seems to me sometimes, when I look around my lecture, that dress is now less of a way to say who you are and more a way to say, I can totally be the most batshit of us all!
Which brings me to...

4. All the hipbones
I have decided that starving ourselves is so 1985. You want a blasé way to die, there you have it. I will not miss all the marya-hornbacher-chic sunken-eyed girls chainsmoking sullenly.

And last but not least
5. Sleazy college guys
I go to a good school filled with, for the most part, smart people. So why does, like, practically every guy who hits on me treat me like I'm totally vapid?

I've honestly never been-- or at least have tried really hard not to be--one of those NYU students who is totally whine-happy about everything, but I have an observation I just have to make.

What the hell is the point in having a turnstile at the doorway, through which one can enter only by swiping their NYU ID and entering their birthdate, which is watched over 24/7 by a security guard who signs in foreign guests and takes their ID cards until they leave, if the lobby of my tower in Carlyle is going to be turned into an official polling place? I stepped out of the elevator this morning and was literally face to face with a woman ready to sign in voters from the 98th district. It's just silly to come downstairs and see fifty people I don't know mingling right outside of the elevator, and then walk 30 yards to where I have to turnstile-out of the building.

Please help find this woman.

There is an extremely unsettlng disparity between the media coverage of kidnappings of white women and that of the kidnappings of black women. (There is an adage that if you are going to be kidnapped, it helps to be the right gender, race, age, and social class.) But I don't know if this is the time or place to enter that difficult realm of debate; Hannah Upp's story hits particularly close to home, not just because she is white and female. For my friends and I, she is around our age, living around where we live, doing a lot of the same stuff we do. She went missing last Sunday, and when her roommates checked her room, they found her keys, ID, metro card, wallet, etc. The story gives me chills.