Top 5 things at NYU that no campus tour guide will tell you

5. NYC hates you. It's a justifiable enough hatred-- we eminent domained the shit out of them and fill the sidewalks with drunk 18 year olds walking four abreast. But it's a hatred intensified by New Yorkers timeless aversion to new people. And by the hyper sensitivity of said 18 year olds, who are probably lifelong perfectionists, do-gooders, and general confrontation-avoiders.

4. There are an unfathomable number of people here. Try to find a place to eat lunch and do your homework. Oh, is it cold/rainy outside? You need a power outlet for your computer? Happy hunting.

3. Undergraduates are garbage. Don't get me wrong-- I am satisfied and impressed with the level of education I've received here. It's endowed me with, among many other things, the skills to write snappy blog posts. I think very hard here and it feels good. But we have virtually no agency in the bureaucratic labyrinth that is NYU, are internally referred to as "clients", and our dissatisfaction with the system is discounted because, huzzah!, we are the Infinity Plus Dream School of America and there will always be a slew of Midwestern high schoolers with big Sarah-Jessica-Parker dreams who will come here. In the eyes of this private university, a service is being provided for money. I still believe it's a very good service, but the undergraduate school at NYU is less a symbiotic academic environment than it is a service-for-payment exchange. I'd imagine the administration likens last year's TBNYU protest (which was misguided and unproductive but rooted in SOME basically good ideals, i.e. budget transparency) to going into a restaurant and ordering food and saying, 'fuck this restaurant! This restaurant needs to change its policies, and support Palestine! I'm gonna occupy this restaurant!'

2. It's more than just the lack of a traditional campus that gives NYU its distinctive non-community community. It's also the concerted efforts of culture-shocked undergraduates who want to establish their "NY savvy" as quickly as possible, and do so by adopting an air of total indifference and isolation. A lot of time at NYU is spent in big anonymous crows and lines (see #4); consequently, a lot of time is spent shoving and not saying excuse me. [I don't know, honestly, what a more traditional campus vibe feels like, but something tells me things must be much different at a school where running into someone you know is not a nice rare surprise.] It fosters a lot of acrimony, a lot of envy, particularly among the ladiesss, which brings me to:

1. The huge number of girls (and to a somewhat lesser though not to be ignored degree, boys) involved/engrossed in various crushing states of self-destruction and self-loathing. Oh, how often I have found the barely-digested remnants of someone's salad lunch in a Bobst bathroom. Emaciated girl picks through loose fruit at space market. Coffee coffee water water cocaine. This is agonizing for me-- you are supposed to be of the world's brightest and most talented young women. You are attending this incredible school in this amazing city. You are scorning your thighs and staring wishfully at some other girl's protruding pelvic bones when you SHOULD be writing your opus. Sigh.

Are you a woman and/or someone who loves a woman?

Stupak-Pitts will screwwww you!

(Well, probably.)

This is obviously something a lot of people are pissed about-- it's this huge step back for reproductive rights, it basically nullifies the House's health care bill's mandate against gender discrimination by insurers, etc. But I just came from PPNYC's legislative overview training and it's made me think a bigger problem might be understanding that this isn't just a problem for poor women. This is going to be a problem for MOST women. The reproductive health of any woman depending on any health care plan that receives one dollar

of federal funding or subsidy is going to be jeopardized by this. If this amendment were to pass, and I don't think it will because cooler heads are supposed to prevail in the Senate right, here are some women who would not get insurance coverage for abortion services:
-Any woman who gets health insurance in the exchange including:
-self-employed women
-women who work for small businesses
-unemployed women
-divorced/single women
-low-income women
-women who are satisfied with their current health care plan and would not purchase insurance in the exchange but whose insurer would cover JUST ONE SINGLE subsidized individual including:
-everyone
-you
-me
-any woman who gets insurance from her employer or her spouse's employer once said employer enters the exchange!

And we haven't even begun to consider the overwhelming number of federal employees using employer insurance denied comprehensive health care coverage here: public school teachers, post office clerks, the people who pick up our garbage, the people who drive our subway trains, law enforcement: it's not just stupid policy, it's bad politics. Stupak violates the very tenet of health care reform meant to appease its right wing opponents: if you're already happy with your health care, you can keep it.

I love this

Simone Trop bonne pour toi [ Le clip ] Exclu
by gianni93

the gist is, "I'm simone, I'm too good for you" many many many times.

"j'prends ma douche habillée parce que j'aime bien rester mouillée" lit: I take showers with my clothes on because I like to stay wet. wacky french!

Girls Named Alex, Stop Messing With Your Name

I have had at least a couple dozen, "oh you're a GIRL!" moments in my life, upon meeting someone who has only heard my androgynous forename. This is because Alex is, while a totally normal and acceptable name for a chick, more common among my male contemporaries. Fine by me, but it leaves me with an interesting decision every time I sign off an email to someone I don't know or a blog comment or anything in the anonymous abyss of the Internet (particularly interesting in light of the issue of misogyny online). [incidentally: this summer, a male Alex counselor showed up at camp halfway through the summer and I made it very clear that I would not be appending any sort of initial to the end of my name to distinguish myself, since I was there first, but that he could do that and I could be the original Alex. It didn't work out too well; I was Girl Alex, he was Asian Alex. we were also good friends and he once helped remove a live bat from my hallway at 3am so I'm not hating.]

But some bullshit I can't stand is when girls named Alex feel the need to dick around with their name to make it more interesting and unique. Listen, ladies, I got over this by 8th grade. It's not like you're a Jessica or an Ashley or a Jennifer, okay? Your name does not need to be sexed up.

Here is what I'm talking about:



WHO DOES THIS BEEZY THINK SHE IS? You don't pronounce XX any different than you pronounce X. This is a little cute because maybe the implication is that she is a female Alex and hence has two X chromosomes but I don't think that was the intention.




Why do these girls tend to also be raven haired singer/songwriters who look like they probably have Disney endorsements?



Apparently, Alexx Woods is a fictional character on CSI: Miami. Wait, what? The only thing lamer than modding one's own Alex name is modding that of one's fictional character.

A really good book I've read in the past month: Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski

A really bad book I've read in the past month: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (uck)

A book I've read in the past month that I was totally late to and that filled me with total despondence and apathy: Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

I once heard that the NYU library was modeled after the idea of a 'panopticon' prison, in which architectural design allows one to simultaneously observe the entire building. If this is true, I'm not really sure why the Bobst masterminds decided to mimic a prison, or what advantage they thought students studying would glean from being able to watch a lot of other students studying. But now there's a security guard stationed on every 4th floor totally capitalizing on this building's wonky design.

Just had a lengthy chat with one of the security guards patrolling Bobst in the wake of last week's suicide. Your plans to jump in the library are foiled, NYU students. Having a productive conversation about suicide and mental health and why this school has a notorious history with both will have NONE of the positive consequences of sticking security guards on every floor of the library to...deter suicide? Talk kids down? Physically remove them from scaling the plexiglass put up also for this very purpose? I'm tired of NYU responding to student suicides in a way that says, 'hey kids, if you try to kill yourselves in our buildings, we will find you and we will catch you.' As an undergrad myself, I'm gonna have to say this attitude probably plays some part in precipitating the very environment that makes kids want to kill themselves in the first place. We need discourse beyond just the thousandth referral to the Wellness Exchange (GOD just call it just fucking CALL it already 9999 JESUS have you called it yet).

Of course, I can see why there's no choice but to do this right now. After all, past Bobst suicides have occurred in numbers (before my time). But I'm tired of the NYU student-suicide form email that does everything it can to vindicate NYU, followed by a refusal to facilitate any sort of public discussion (beyond WELLNESS EXCHANGE JESUS CHRIST CALL IT NOW OPERATORS ARE DYING TO TALK TO YOU), in spite of the fact that a student killing himself in such a public way in such a public space is something that everyone is going to think and talk and feel shitty about, and carries a pretty hard to ignore fuck-you message.

I would like to see a more productive response from NYU. I would like to see NYU alter the response I have seen them give every suicide that has occurred here since I've come to the school, of which there have been entirely too many. I understand the need for respect and privacy but I am tired of this university's presumption that our high suicide rate is a problem within the undergraduate student body but detached from the institution, a problem for which no blame or accountability can possibly rest on NYU.