pizza for breakfast.

It's 3:13 in the morning. I'm making an outline for my paper on the political/economic factors that led to the brain drain during the 80s and 90s in Nigeria. I've had lots of cookie dough ice cream, lots of drunken phone call reports from Low/Pinnacle, one Hilary Duff movie, and this amazing email:

I just took a momentary break from attempting to write my paper in Hartley/procrastinating to go back to my room and get my iPod charger and a diet coke. So it's 1:50, and I'm waiting for the elevator to return, and David Billingsey stumbles out of the bathroom, looks and me, and yells "I got the wrong girl! I hooked up with the wrong girl!" and i'm like, "umm? sorry?" and he's like, "i was going for the other one, but I got the wrong one!" and as i was trying to figure out how to get out of this odd situation, the elevator opens and who comes out but Neha and your suitmate/wyatt's friend whose name I can never remember (andrew??). And neha is wearing a basbeall hat and is like dancing around as the doors opened and she sees me and goes, "HEY!! HEY!!! Can I give you a kiss???" and I'm like, umm, NO. and she goes, "just on the cheek, just on the cheek!" and then andrew (??) and david corner me and i throw my arm in front of my face and neha half kisses me on the cheek. and then the other elevator opens, i speed toward it, rudy comes out, and david goes, "hey man, wanna smoke?" And the thing I'm thinking as I descend is, wow, these people do not need any more mind-altering substances this evening.
and now it's back to south african housing policy. but at least i have diet coke. and a funny story. :-)

drives me crazy (in the good way)

pulling the pwug

So, I've just had the best and worst days of my "writing" life, ever. Back to back.

Tuesday:

There was a great unpublished piece somebody wrote for The Fed's Spec Parody that completely aped her style. "I love my floor...blah blah blah...JJ's...blah blah blah...blah blah...Facebook." It was wonderful.

Her "Imbibing New York" column had me in stitches at its pretentiousness. The first paragraph alone was brilliantly awful. She starts off with "We’re three months from finishing this initiation into the college realm," which belongs in the Overwriting Hall of Fame, and then ends by declaring herself in the minority and then immediately asking if she really is in the minority. I love it.

But she still sucks.

or

Hell, optimism and enthusiasm are great qualities to have, but she's writing newspaper columns, not teaching grade schoolers. And the simple fact of the matter is that (as so many seem to agree) her writing is irritating and pompous.

(You can be somebody's friend while still thinking they're a shitty writer, you know)

A bunch of great people wrote to me to tell me how they admired how well I'd taken all the crap, but I don't think I took it really well? Especially the "grade schoolers" part. Let's just say...I actually had nightmares. Hmm. Oh well. Walking to class on Wednesday, I felt like the girl who everyone knows the awful gossip about as she walks through the crowd. I wore extra eye-liner just in case too many people stared and knew how I (and my writing?) had been massacred on a dumb message board the day before.



Wednesday:

Scholarship Contest Winner, Finalists for 2006 Announced

The 2006 winner of the ninth annual College Columnist Scholarship Contest of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists was announced Wednesday, April 26.

In first place was Fernanda Diaz, a first-year-student at Columbia, said Russell Frank, chair of the NSNC Education Committee.

Second place went to Mike Devlin of New York University.

The total number of entries came to 120, which was up from 40 last year, said Frank, who is a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University.

The NSNCEF annually awards a $1,000 scholarship to an outstanding general-interest columnist for a college newspaper. The recipient also will be the guest of the NSNC at its 2006 convention in Boston on June 29 to July 2.

The scholarship was awarded based on applicants' clips. The contest was open to undergraduates (including seniors) who write by-lined general interest or editorial page and op-ed page columns.

!!!!!!!!!

Unpublished "Fed" Mockery

hahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahhh:


What I’m Trying to Say
By Fermina Daza

There are many different people on my floor. There are kids from California, Montana, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Dakotas and Carolinas North and South, and even Southern California. We have different interests and backgrounds, hopes, dreams, tastes (even though at night we do most of our tasting at JJ’s, hah), and even plans. Some of us have boyfriends (like me) and some don’t, some of us love reading Woolfe while sitting under a tree in the quad, marveling at her use of stream of consciousness, at her ability to not give so many fucking examples, perhaps even eating an apple (like in Genesis, remember?) and some of us don’t. So maybe what I’m trying to say is not so much that there are many, but that there are a myriad of different people on my floor. It’s kind of like New York. Beyond the lime-roofed, cloistered, ivy walls; beyond the bubble, one that is ready to burst with vigor and energy, one that wakes up to each new morning with a fresh face saying “I’m ready!” in a way that Thucydides might have, is a world far different from that of campus. New York is full of different people. Not a myriad, perhaps, but rather a plethora; indeed, a veritable bevy.

New York is like a handbag. You can open it up and a million different things are inside, and they’re all different. Sometimes they’re unorganized and you have to find what you’re looking for, but once in a while you’ve just got to take a deep breath, close your eyes and take what you get, like in life, or the housing lottery (Oh my!). Sometimes you have a zipper that closes everything up quickly and sometimes you have those little buckles, where you have to do one at a time, and it takes a while. Sometimes it’s small and has the same letter all over it and sometimes it’s larger and has many different letters in it (like Don Quixote!) but you sport it all the same, because, for better or worse, you’re a New Yorker.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that it feels like only yesterday that we were freshmen, overwhelmed by the sheer size of Low, smelling the smells of campus, meeting other kids who for the first time also liked Mozart, and Brahms, and Paganini, and Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich, and Bach, and even 50 Cent (haha), and knew it took being a Columbia student from some suburban town in New Jersey to truly understand what it is to be a New Yorker.

But you just can’t just live in New York, you have to live New York. In a city full of opportunities it’s almost our obligation to get out of campus, to enter the ironic darkness of the subway tunnels in a city that never sleeps. I almost feel sorry for students who feel the need to stay in their rooms drinking, instead of going out with their boyfriends and absorbing all that New York is. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that Winston Churchill once said: “I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly” (hah! Isn’t that funny?) which is the perfect example of the vices that inebriation, intoxication, and even drunkenness can force people to engage in.

There are opportunities abound at college, rather than engage in harmful, idiotic activities such as doing marijuana, heroin, and cigarettes. In the end, maybe what I’m trying to say in an overly verbose and circuitous manner is that sometimes I start thinking about school, and my friends, and life, and my family and I sit on the floor and start crying.

The headline looks like a mistake...

Introduction, Body, Conclusion
The Fern Fifteen

By Fernanda Diaz
April 25, 2006


I’m afraid of the Internet. Well, let me rephrase that—I’m sort of afraid of what a bunch of crazed pre-frosh can do on the Internet. Hell, it wasn’t too long ago when I was one myself, fiddling around online, just a couple of clicks away from making long-lasting connections the summer (or spring, or winter ... or fall) before moving in. And I’m not referring to the false promises of Facebook, nor the date-rape prospects of MySpace, not to mention the lots-of-therapy odds of College Confidential. No, I’m thinking of something far more dangerous; something that allowed us to naively create an over-involved network of friends before picking a meal plan, or receiving our UNIs, or even turning in our early decision applications. In the beginning, there was LiveJournal.

Before anyone who still respects me stumbles upon this information online, I’ve decided to come clean about this high-speed phenomenon. The thing is, for hundreds of us LJ users, freshman year started way, way before August. The perpetrator, LiveJournal.com, is designed to give you a personal blog that also conveniently compiles all of your friends’ blog entries onto one page, including community feeds. Through the wonders of this site, those of us who couldn’t wait to be students here intersected paths, and collectively jump-started our identities as Columbians on the Columbia2009 community we founded and developed.

If there were such a thing as an active “reverse alumni” network, we would have been it. Instead of looking back on our Columbia days with nostalgia, we were a group of “friends” looking forward to them with such enthusiasm that, before even going to our senior proms, we were already planning the adventures we’d go on together in college. We made promises to take each other to the Guggenheim, or wander the streets together with our cameras and notebooks—some of us took it so far as to fall in love with other members. I bet that if a reverse alumni coordinator had called us up and asked us to donate to a “pre-frosh fund,” a lot of us actually would have.

This Web site became a space that let us collectively create and be happy with a life we hadn’t actually lived yet. We could write an entry about the first six books of The Iliad or a story in that day’s Spec or AlcoholEdu or the practice rooms in Wien, and get loads of replies from other not-yet-freshmen who shared our anxieties or excitements or knew the answer to our doubts. “August!” became our motto; we had a schedule of site-wide chats and lots of us fostered friendly relationships outside the space of LiveJournal (yet thanks to the Internet, still kept our distance). What made this specific online rendezvous spot unlike any other was the scale of possible intersection points: even if we didn’t e-mail or IM one another, we were easily able to follow each others’ lives. Our life blogs were available on the site simply by following the link on our username.

It was all a tad bit ridiculous. Instead of coordinating class reunions, we were living an eight month pre-union. The tools are readily accessible for this, though; the Internet is practically designed to let common-interest connections like these be made from a distance, with benefits like companionship generally highly outweighing the cost. These long-distance connections almost never have an expiration date, however, and ours did—we would, sooner or later, find ourselves on the same floor or the same lecture hall. But we knew too much, we had tried too hard to pretend that we could use our common hyper-illusion to come to Columbia as enough of a justification to be friends.

In my first column, I admitted that I should never have hoped to make real friends out of my Facebook buddies simply because we liked the same novels or TV shows, but on many levels, the connections from the LiveJournal community were supposed to be deeper. I had friends miles away that I would talk to independently, about daily life, as if I had just seen them at school and they’d given me a ride home, and we were simply continuing our conversation on AIM. Some sent me mix CDs, and would ask me for advice on whether or not to lose their virginity that weekend. On top of that, I was automatically able to follow the lives of all those who made regular appearances on my friends page—I could read their musings on the perils of being a waitress, their accounts of being mugged, or their worries about whether they could feel at home in the northeast.

The community stopped being a community the day orientation began. Other than two people, I haven’t talked to any of them more than once, and find it completely awkward that remnants of these supposed connections are on a URL somewhere, but don’t really exist. Now that I look back, it’s the familiarity-from-a-distance that we all had with each other that probably makes it so weird to see any of these acquaintances. The funny thing is, I still have a LiveJournal, and the same people’s entries show up on my friends page. The girl with the breathtaking pictures still takes breathtaking pictures, and now she gets them published in the school newspaper. The girl who documented her life in terms of boys, parties, and national politics now writes of sorority parties and internships at think tanks. The ones who couldn’t wait for college to make better friends are still waiting, and hate how no one on their floor shuts up. We all came together with a craving for change, divulging our desire to be immersed in first-year life before the class of ’08 even finished their first semester of college. Then we left evidence of that desire behind, and we’re all well on our way, but we are all still practically the same—just in college.

Fernanda Diaz is a Columbia College first-year. The Fern Fifteen runs alternate Tuesdays.

overheard

Longest Ticket Line Since Alien

Two tourists spot the people camped out in front of the Mexican Consulate.

Tourist #1: Are all those people trying to get tickets to a concert or something?
Tourist #2: Maybe. Do you think that's Radio City?

--39th & Madison

That's Why They Call It a . . . Never Mind

Chick #1: Ahh! Why am I, like, sweating?
Chick #2: What is your shirt made of, cotton?
Chick #1: Well, it's from Forever 21, so it's probably dead Chinese children.

--Columbia University

hisashiburi

Samplings from my inbox today bring oh so much amazingness (and poor spelling from a grad student!):

...were you drunk? -mom


...My name is Kat McGrory. I'm a grad student at the journalism school
here at Columbia, and, believe it or not, someone who loves your
column. I'm looking to write a piece (for school) about the affects
of the new immigration legislation on the ground, and it occurred to
me today that it could be fun to write about the affect on students.
Since you penned an excellent column on the subject last week, I
thought you might be a good place to start.


...what foolish hands may tug at the strings of the heart,
wrenching and bruising because they were never taught
what it means to be subtle


...Help! Does anyone want to do 400 words on gay clubs in the city for
Monday midday? I will love you forever.

instead of coordinating class reunions, we were living an eight-month pre-union.

The past three days have been so silent...he's taking time, my mom's in brazil, my dad and brother in geneva...my phone never rings anymore.

I've felt surprisingly not alone though, somehow feeling safe in the temporary nature of this silence. Everyone's on vacation and in turn, giving me one.

I set my alarm for eight today, got up at 10:30, and felt a surprising lack of stress--I would work all day and not worry about anything because it would all be ok. It's been weeks since I gave myself that reminder.
But... I pretty much had no desire to go to starbucks AGAIN to try and write my column. So, I decided I'd take the day to wander. I tried searching the internet for good writers' cafes, but no such luck...so in my attempts to take the subway and get off anywhere and go to the first cafe I saw, I gave up around 50th street realizing I knew every single stop on the 1 really well and it wouldn't be random at all, so I just came to the City Bakery, where I write if I'm at my mom's. I sat next to John Leguizamo and had my gross concoction of mac and cheese avec guacamole that's actually so good...you don't even know.

I spent hours upon hours doing my usual--ending up with a word document of 2600 words of pre-writing and an intro that I've rewritten about 178 times and still makes no sense.

If there existed such a thing as an active “reverse alumni” network, we would have been it. Instead of looking back on our Columbia days with nostalgia, we were a group of “friends” looking forward to them with such enthusiasm, that before even going to our senior proms, we were already planning the adventures we’d go on together in college. We all met on the “Columbia09” community on Livejournal.com, where we made promises to take each other to the Guggenheim, or wander the streets together with our cameras and notebooks—some of us took it so far as to fall in love with each other. I bet that if a reverse alumni coordinator had called us up and asked us to donate to a “pre-frosh fund,” a lot of us actually would have.

This website became a space that let us collectively create and be happy with a life we hadn’t lived yet. “August!” became our motto; we actually spent valuable still-in-high-school time on our computers getting to know each other and awaiting move in day. It was a tad bit ridiculous (even if I didn’t realize it at the time): instead of coordinating class reunions, we were living an eight-month pre-union.

I realized that this was the first column that I hadn't a slightest idea what it'd be about when I sat down to write it. I just knew it would be my "end of freshman year" column, but a) that's really broad and b) that's really hard to write without being cheesy, let alone interesting. So after much deliberation, much guacamole, much jenny lewis, and much staring at John Leguizamo, I decided that I wouldn't try to make some great big comprehensive observation about all freshmen and what this year meant to us. Instead, I would write about something personal, and something very un-predictable. Once I'd picked my topic I spent the rest of time worrying it'd be too much like my first column, but then I tried to supress those worries and just went with it. I think it'll be good. I just have to write it...

urban beach?

"That's what I love him for! These sudden gestures of his!..."

It took me about seven hours from when I woke up today to notice that I hadn't gone to any of my classes.
The interview cut into comparative politics, and mass media was canceled, as per the holiday, so...that was that.
Before and after this realization, I spent the day reading outside--on the lawn, the other lawn with tom, the shade with ryan, my lunch table on the slanted amsterdam sidewalk around 120th--squinting at the creamy white pages of Crime and Punishment and smelling fleeting hints of weed.

This book is so I N C R E D I B L E. It's so obvious in such a conspicuous and meaningful and exciting way that makes me so jealous yet so worked up. The last time I read it, which was also the only time and the first time, it became my favorite book, amazed at the language and the perfect imagery. Now, re-reading it, I recall the speeches and tremblings and sudden character entrances and know what comes next right as they happen, the way you become aware that you know the lyrics to a song the instant after you hear them sung...

I went to lunch alone, as I always do and love to do, and sat outside the restaurant, trying to eat my second penne vodka in three days..."Why do restaurants have you sit outside? We're not in Europe! This is an avenue, not a piazza," says Wyatt...but it's such a treat that once spring arrives and every place with a piece of sidewalk props tables open outside that it doesn't matter if we're all being pseudo-european. So, I sat with my open book and my bowl of pasta surrounded by MBA-ers on their lunch break, one group of which spent fifteen minutes talking only about perfume, and read. I know...pretty boring, and pretty lonely. But I'm weird--it's the best part of my day. Especially when I get to moments like this:

Once and for all, never ask me about anything. I have no answers for you...Don't come to me. Maybe I'll come here. Leave me...but don't leave them. Do you understand me?

It was dark in the corridor; they were standing near a light. For a minute they looked silently at each other. Razumikhin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov's burning and fixed look seemed to grow more intense every moment, penetrating his soul, his consciousness. All at once Razumikhin gave a start. Something strange seemed to pass between them...as if the hint of some idea, something horrible, hideous, flitted by and suddenly understood on both sides...Razumukhin turned pale as a corpse.

"You understand now? Raskolnikov said suddenly, with a painfully contorted face. "Go back, go to them, he added suddenly, and, turning quickly, he walked out of the house...

I will not describe here what went on that evening at Pulcheria Alexandfrovna's, how Razumikhin went back to them, how he tried to calm them, how he swore that Rodya needed to be allowed some rest in his illness, swore that Rodya would come without fail, would visit them every day, that he was very, very upset, that he should not be irritated; that he, Razumikhin, would keep an eye on him, would find him a doctor, a good doctor, the best, a whole consultation...In short, from that evening on Razumikhin became their son and brother.

oh, miriam

"So. Tell me about your boyfriend."


[the usual: ex-boyfriend'sbestfriends and writers or engineers or photographers or all or neither and almost fourteen months. almost.]

{ you're already sweating--but you still don't know which part makes you so nervous. maybe that you're discussing this great love but yesterday was the first time in months, probably, that you didn't hear his voice. or maybe that you're being interviewed about something that you don't ever think about (that being, the lack thereof of sex). you know you're not having it and you won't be having it soon but you don't know why. }

"Ha, he sounds a lot like you."


[really?]

{ you like hearing that }


"So...Tell me why you're still a virgin."


[look off into the distance, tell miriam stuff about my parents and how he respects me and how my mother just knows but how i admire her and how i wasn't allowed to go to dances and how the only friend i had in high school who was having sex always thought it was condescending that i didn't and how he's so good that he will wait but how i don't want to grow up and how it's just part of my life and that's it.]

{ why "still?" }

my window's dirty

collecting

I've had a blue post-it stuck on my bookshelf for a while now, reading:

KRISTOFF
TRAVEL
due April 20

That's tomorrow. Uhhuh. Everyone and their mom probably wanted to apply and then didn't because college is more important than going on a trip with the pulitzer prize winning columnist to africa. This post-it was up for so long, and I didn't even try to think of what I would have written as a submission. I don't see the sense of making myself a reminder that I must have looked at--consciously looked at and absorbed--about twice in four weeks. I should stop doing that. I need to find a way to trick myself into remembering things.

I have hundreds of these reminders growing up the sides of my room--objects meant to remind me of european countries i visited when i was too young, of rock and roll stars i never met, of best friends and close friends and friends, of paintings i once stared at for too long, of concerts that are impossible to recreate, of nights at shitty hotel dance floors wearing orchid corsages and my mothers' jewelery. But I've seen them so many times that I don't look and them and feel the chill of prague, or the fatigue of grad night as i leaned on amanda's shoulder, or the inescapable awe you have when you pass by a dali sketch or a romare bearden collage or a garden on the hills above los angeles. The picture doesn't bring back the peace as I brushed up against his pink tie, or the tears I tried to hold back after graduation as I posed sandwiched between adam and justin.

Should I leave my walls blank and instead try to recall these moments without visual aides that don't even help, because once I've glanced at them for a week, for the other seven months they're only pretty "reminders" not doing their jobs? They've all just become a background, the companion I have in my tiny single, yet they're more like wallpaper whose pattern you can look at for hours upon hours of lone idleness but have no meaning--they're just lines or flowers or dots. I just find it crazy how one becomes detached even from one's own memories staring them in the face, only because they've been there too long. I don't like that this happens.

It's silly to think that anyone who has the same amount of reminders of you on his or her space is thinking of you every time they see your smile or hair or feet on their wall. Hmm

because the moment my thumb pressed down to end the call, i went out to an open window at the end of the hallway. and because the moment i saw those crazy 4am clouds i knew he would like them, and had to capture them.

whyilovenewyorkinspring part1

birkenstocks 1.

flower-petal confetti 2.

the end

only three weeks left until i move out of this room and away from this stenciled sunset...


'During his stay at Columbia in the 1930s, Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote, “My room in John Jay is wonderful. It is on the 12th floor of the dormitory, and I can see all the university buildings, the Hudson River and a distant vista of white and pink skyscrapers. On the right, spanning the horizon, is a great bridge under construction, of incredible grace and strength.” '