Fun in the Sun

I’m working on an article about sex and expectations and would love to hear a few different perspectives on the subject.  If you are interested in sharing your thoughts, no strings attached (i.e. complete confidentiality) let me know and we can set up an interview or just chat over coffee.  Leave a comment here with your name and email address or email me at okatrandjian09@amherst.edu

Cheers,

Olivia

“Yeah, because we was fightin’,” she said to me, as if repeating it would convince me that it was a perfectly good explanation for why her boyfriend had punched her in the face and sprayed her with pepper spray.

“Yes,” I responded, equally frustrated, “but that’s not a good reason. Just because you were arguing doesn’t give him the right to punch you.”

I was trying to get through to her but she refused to listen. I continued: “It’s never okay for someone to punch you, regardless of whether or not you’re fighting. It’s never okay.”

“…But we was fightin’.”

“Ma’am, I know you was fightin’!!” I responded, giving myself a quizzical look for a second and then deciding in exasperation not to even bother correcting my grammar.

“Look, I don’t even know why use callin’ me, I TOLE them befoe that I didn’ wanna press charges.”

They never want to press charges.

Many victims of domestic assault even go so far as to blatantly and completely change their stories after they’ve called 911 and gotten themselves out of immediate danger. When a victim, crying, scared and hurt, picks up the phone to call the police, everything comes out – the punching, the hitting, the abuse. But a few hours later, when a lawyer calls from the DA’s Office to find out what happened, inevitably nothing, in fact, ever happened. “He didn’t even touch me,” they’ll say. “We was just arguin’, it was nothin’. I tole ‘em, I don’ wanna press charges.”

Sometimes the woman’s afraid of what her man might do to her if she goes through with the charges. Often the woman doesn’t have a job and can’t support herself or her children on her own, so no matter how violent her man is, she has no choice but to put up with him. In the worst cases, not only has the woman been a witness to domestic violence as a child, but has been abused by so many men outside her home as well that it’s all she knows.

I suppose what struck me about this case was the woman’s complete confidence in the fact that her boyfriend had done nothing wrong – that it was fundamentally acceptable and even expected for him to hit her given the circumstances of an argument. “We was fightin’,” she kept telling me. “It was because we was fightin’.”

I hung up the phone and leaned back in my chair, staring into nothing. I let out a long, silent sigh, disappointed and confused at the state of things I did not and would never fully understand.

I got up, walked down the hall to my boss’ office and told her how resolute the woman had been in her belief that what her boyfriend had done was not wrong.

“Everyone whose been on the street knows that an order of protection doesn’t mean shit in this town. A piece of paper isn’t going to stop a guy from showing up at her office, shooting her, and then shooting himself – actually I just had one of those last week,” she said nonchalantly, as if she was recalling tasting one of the new banana mango smoothies at Starbucks.

“Once in awhile we have female defendants come in, but it’s usually the other way around. See like this woman slashed her husband’s forehead with a knife,” she said, pointing to a photograph on her computer screen. I looked at the laceration and winced, but she just kept on talking: “When that happens, I don’ really feel bad. The guy’s usually done some bonehead thing and he’s getting what he deserves.”

“What, like cheating on her?” I asked, not quite understanding what she was referring to.

“Yeah, you know, whatever.”

Don’t get me wrong, if any guy ever cheated on me, he’d be out the door in a second, but I didn’t know it was okay to stab him for it. What’s with the double standard?

Not wanting to get into another “public service crime” discussion with my boss, who saw many of the murders in Brooklyn as, well, public service, since half the victims were criminals themselves, I walked back to my desk and got back to work.

After I finished writing up the complaint and turned in the case, I went back to my cubicle and sat down. I looked at my next case, held it in my hand for a second and then put it back down on the desk. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a crumpled up piece of paper and stared at it. Before handing in the case, I had scribbled down the victim’s phone number when no one was looking. I pushed my next case aside, picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone for a few seconds before punching in the digits.

Instead of ringing, the dial tone broke into Kanye’s “Stronger.” I bobbed my head along until the music ended abruptly and I heard her familiar voice – “Hello?”

“Yes, hi, it’s Olivia calling again from the District Attorney’s Office…”

For several seconds the phone line was silent. She had been pretty clear as to her position earlier and I was sure she was wondering why I was calling again. I was wondering why I was calling her again too - I was not allowed to contact a victim after closing the case.

“Ma’am, I just want you to know that you don’t have to decline to prosecute if you don’t want to. You don’t have to drop the charges.”

We were speaking woman to woman now, and she responded with a tone to match: “Look, I know what you tryin’ to say. But he’s a good person. An’ we sat down, we spoke about it, an’ he spoke to ma son. He’s a good person,” she repeated. “It just happened, ya know?”

No, I didn’t.

I sat on my bed, my laptop sat next to me. It was just before eleven on a Friday night, and to kill time before going out, I was sifting through stories on www.tuckermax.com. Let me assure you, this is not my usual way of killing time. In fact, I had only heard of Tucker Max earlier that day, when a friend insisted I buy the book.

“It’s 13 dollars, Liv, just buy it,” he said.

“It’s not the money,” I replied. “It’s the principle. I wouldn’t spend one dollar on that crap.”

Sticking to my principle had not killed my interest, however, and I had no qualms about reading the stories online for free.

After reading a couple stories, I was glad I hadn’t wasted the 13.99. I didn’t find them particularly entertaining and the man himself wasn’t particularly attractive. So what was the appeal?

Tucker Max’s email address was listed on his website, and instead of wasting time reading other stories, I figured I’d just ask him myself.

A friend I was talking to thought I was crazy. “What, you actually think he’s going to respond to you?!” Fuck it, I thought, what’s the worst that could happen?

At 11:01 PM, I wrote:

Dear Mr. Max,

I have been asked to write a female response to Neil Strauss’ The Game, and after taking a look at your blog, I thought it might be helpful to speak with you. Are you free for a drink sometime?

Olivia Katrandjian

In an attempt to sound professional, I entitled the email “Interview Inquiry,” but this did not stop him from being quite the opposite. And in record time, I might add – less than one minute later, I received a response:

I am always free for drinks with a hot girl.

Ew. The bottom of his email was signed with a quotation:

“…highly entertaining and thoroughly reprehensible…”
-NY Times describing TuckerMax.com

I figured I’d have to play along if I wanted to get anywhere, so at 11:14 PM, I responded:

How perfectly quaint. How’s tomorrow evening?

I came home the next morning to find that he had responded at 2 AM:

Where do you live?

What was the allegedly insane partier, Mr. Tucker Max, doing home on a Friday night? And writing to me, no less?

Maybe he had an assistant responding to emails for him. How perfectly quaint.

I had read somewhere that he lives in the Flatiron District of Manhattan, and operating on the assumption that everyone who is anyone lives in New York, doing further research on his whereabouts had not even crossed my mind.

At 10:09 AM, I replied simply: Manhattan.

My little brother called me and I filled him in on the situation, thinking he might be amused. Now generally speaking, my little brother is pretty unprotective of me, at least in comparison to my older brother, but - “WHAAAT?!?!” I guess he had heard of Mr. Max. “Chill Philly, I just want to do an interview, and it prolly won’t even happen.” “Fine. FINE! BUT IT ENDS AT DINNER LIV!! IT ENDDDDDDS AT DINNER!!!!”

My inbox beeped with new mail and I hung up the phone:

I live in LA.

Looks like my brother wasn’t going to have to worry after all. 20 minutes later, I sent a response:

Oh damn, I read somewhere you live in the Flatiron District. Will you be in New York anytime soon?

Half an hour later, he responded:

Nope.

You still haven’t sent pics.

I did a double take.  What? – did he– was I– what?!

I closed my laptop and went out. When I returned several hours later, I responded:

Would you be up for a phone interview sometime next week? Or an online interview?

As for the pictures, I’ll leave that up to your imagination…

Not a minute later, he laid down the line:

Then that’s where our interview will stay, in the imagination.

I expressed my surprise, replying immediately with exactly what was on my mind:

You have got to be kidding me.

It didn’t take him a minute to express his surprise as well:

You want something from me, without offering anything to me, and
you’re being a bitch about it? That’s a good way to get it. Let’s see
how that works out for you.

Bitch? I’m a bitch?! I mean I am, but he doesn’t know that.

So much for the interview. But let’s be real here, I already got everything I needed.

“I want you to pick any piece you like and I’ll learn it for you for my senior recital,” I said to my mother, waiting for her response with a childlike impatience. ‘I’m such a nice daughter,’ I thought to myself as I stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I don’t want a piece. Just make sure it’s not horrible like the last one,” she responded, referring to my high school graduation recital. Her half smile did not hide her sincerity, and I said nothing. I turned away to walk up the stairs and hadn’t reached the second step when the tears hit my cheeks.

My feet carried me up the stairs and down the hallway to my bedroom door, which I pushed open blindly before curling up on my bed, my tears now wetting the covers around me.

She didn’t mean to be hurtful. She probably thought she was being funny, that she was just joking around. But not really. My mother is never really joking.

I piled my comforter up around me and hid myself in it, morphing into a ball of down feathers squirreled away in the corner of my big brass bed. I knew my little brother was going to barge into my room any second, see me in my utterly pathetic state and start laughing. He didn’t.

“You’re such a baby,” I thought to myself. “What the hell are you doing?! You’re twenty-one years old for god’s sake!”

I pulled up my t-shirt and wiped the tears from my face. Sure, I should have practiced more. I knew it. But even so, I still worked my ass off, and you can never practice enough. I’ve spent my LIFE not practicing enough.

I’ve never watched the tape of my high school graduation recital. I’ve even covered my ears and slipped out of the room when I’ve walked in on other people watching it.

Maybe I’m scared I played badly.

To be honest, I don’t really remember how I played. I remember the dress I wore. I remember after performing solo for over an hour, being utterly exhausted but having to finish the program. I remember fighting against the thick summer air, constrained by its weight. I remember feeling like I just ran a marathon when I lifted my bow off the string for the last time, sweat running down my face as I took a bow, breathing so heavily I could hear it over the sound of more than a hundred people clapping. I remember trying to escape and being overtaken by people - people hugging me, people kissing me, people giving me presents. I remember the happiness I felt, thinking it went really well, until my mother looked at me and said, “Well, at least you looked good.”

I pushed the covers aside and called my best friend from high school, who now goes to Juilliard. “Jen, be honest. Tell me the truth. Was my recital really that bad?” “Liv, what are you talking about? Which concert?” It was early in the morning and I had woken her up. “My senior recital Jen,” I snapped back, needing to know. I told her what my mom said. “Oh, the one in Jersey – yes, yes of course I remember. No, that’s totally unwarranted.” “You can tell me the truth, really – I want to know,” I said, hoping desperately she would lie if it was bad. “Liv, I’m not lying. I promise. You did a great job.”

A few days later, I had an idea for what to learn for my graduation recital, a piece that I’d love to play and have wanted to for awhile. In high school, my teacher had told me that I wasn’t mature enough to play it, and I had conceded in stubborn frustration. Now, grown-up and teacher-less, there was nothing to stop me.

Except good sense.

I called up my musician friends again: “No way. You’d have to practice for eight hours every day.” “But it’s so gorgeous,” I said, knowing all the while it was way too difficult. “Liv, we go to Juilliard and we can’t play it. You’re not even a music major.”

They were right. Of course they were right, what was I thinking?! I had chosen one of the most difficult concertos in the violin repertoire, and I hadn’t even been taking lessons in over a year.

But I had decided I wanted to play it and that was that. “You have no faith in me,” I said to my friends, knowing that wasn’t the case but needing to be a bit pampered after my mother’s cutting rejection.

“It’s not that we don’t have faith in you,” they explained. “You just haven’t played all the stuff you have to play before taking on such a difficult piece – you haven’t been doing any of the technique exercises. What have you been working on lately?”

Shit. I hadn’t been working seriously on anything. Not wanting to admit that my most vivid musical performances of late had been realized late at night after several drinks, much to the disturbance of my neighbors, I named a couple of pieces off the top of my head that I’ve played around with in the last couple months. But it wasn’t enough, and I knew it.

A little while later, I talked to one of my friends from Amherst.  He is by no means a musician and, in turn, thinks my drunk concerts are amazing. I presented him with two pieces, courtesy of YouTube, one of which was the piece my friends and I both knew I could not play.

“I think you can do the hard one,” he said, without having any idea of the magnitude of its difficulty. “The song sounds hard, but it’s purdy.” “You don’t understand,” I said. “I want to play it, but there’s just no way.” And then he asked the question that should have been apparent to me all along: “What’s going to make you happy? Playing something impossible and doing a decent job, or doing something less challenging really well?”

I didn’t even have to think about the answer. I have always been taught that you do something well or you don’t do it at all. “I don’t care if you spend two hours on this one measure,” my teacher would say to me. “Don’t go on until it’s polished.” My mother felt the same way, only much stronger: “How could you play that in front of those people? You can’t just play things whenever you feel like it Olivia – you don’t go in front of people unless it’s perfect!” She would have died at the jam sessions that went down once I left home and went to college.

A few nights later, still cooped up at home, I was practicing a piece I had played when I was little.

“I like that piece,” my mom called to me from the top of the stairs, on her way to bed. I stopped for a second and then kept on playing. I know, mom. That’s why I’m playing it.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot. About New York, about the ridiculous happenings of my own life, about everything and nothing.

I’m working at the District Attorney’s Office this summer, surrounded by people who either have gone to law school or are planning on it. Talk among my fellow interns often shifts toward the best LSAT courses, the highlights of each law school, Kaplan vs. Testmasters, Harvard vs. Yale, and on and on. Whenever anyone asks me which LSAT course I’m taking, I answer truthfully that I’m not taking anything. I don’t want to admit that I’d rather be on Law and Order than actually be a lawyer. As a musician and artist, I haven’t been able to sell to myself the idea of sitting in a cubicle doing paperwork for the rest of my life.

Several of my friends have decided that I should be a journalist or a writer, and sure, I might enjoy writing if I learned how to do it. But the decision to become a writer is not one with which I am comfortable. Inherent in the act of writing and publishing is the assumption that people are going to want to read what you have to say. And who says what you have to say is anything entertaining or worthwhile?

Let’s take Amhpub. Many blogs discuss current events and controversial issues. But many are just musings and stories, recounts of what’s going on in our respective lives. I am guilty of this as well - the majority of my blog is made up of personal essays. But what makes us think our lives are any more interesting than anyone else’s? What makes us think will people want to read a play-by-play of our day-to-day?

A friend of mine who recently broke up with his girlfriend told me that being in a relationship with someone is about having a spectator to your life. Ultimately, we want someone to witness the minute details of our lives and in doing so make them add up to something more than an exhausted yawn at the end of the day – having someone witness our silly, circumstantial and unimportant daily occurrences makes them worth something.

Writing about our lives takes that idea to the next level. Even if we have a personal witness, sometimes we need more. A significant other ideally loves us unconditionally and is by definition interested in our lives. But perhaps we need people who are not connected to us to say that that what is going on in our lives is interesting, that our stories are entertaining. I get excited whenever I get an email notifying me that someone has commented on my blog. (I got a comment!!!) You do too, don’t even try to hide it.

I leave you with one final question: isn’t there something inherently arrogant about writing a blog? An often unspoken and even unrecognized confidence that we can’t help but display when we press the publish button? Or perhaps it’s an insecurity.

I looked up from my computer. Decorating the table in front of me were two cans of Pomegranate Juiced Rockstar, a bag of almonds, a can of coke, a wad of crumpled napkins, a half-eaten blondie, a Red Bull, a chocolate bar. A bag of pretzels, a bag of walnuts, three half-empty bottles of water, lip balm, an apple, a bag of rice cakes stolen from Val, cereal stolen from Val, an orange stolen from Val. The Schwemms cup my friends and I used to mix together different drinks to make interesting caffeinated concoctions. The water filter we scrounged from the library refrigerator. The eyeliner pencil we used to draw fake moles on ourselves. A Monster lined up next to a Starbucks’ Frappacino and a post-it on each: one read “11/12 PM” and the other “5/6 AM”. A frisbee nestled among the pile of bags and clothes on the floor. Three 647-page multiliths strewn, well, everywhere.

“I wish I was Princess Lea,” I thought to myself. “Then I wouldn’t have to be here.” At that point, I had been in the science library for five hours. It was only noon. After spending 27 hours in that same library, at that same desk trashed with all conceivable amenities, my thoughts had strayed much closer to insanity than a Princess Lea fantasy. Here is my story.

7 AM was late. My friend Jacob had arrived at 6 and my roommate soon after. They had lined up several desks against the window so we could look out over the lawn next to Keefe. Which we did, all day and all night long, as we sat working on the same paper: 12 pages on why there was no peace in the Middle East. “If they knew why ‘all attempts at a two-state solution had failed,’” I thought to myself, “wouldn’t they have come farther by now? And who were ‘they’?” I needed to figure these things out, but I had a few hours until 4 PM, when it was due.

In the early afternoon, I started to feel claustrophobic. “I can’t sit here anymore,” I said to my roommate. “I just can’t do it.” A friend of mine called to say he was leaving and wanted to say goodbye. “Should I come by Pratt?” I asked, desperately wanting to escape the library, but not knowing if my body would let me leave my seat. “No, no, I’ll come to you,” he said. He drove up and I met him at his car. It was to be my first journey into the outside world. We talked, we hugged, he left. I slowly made my way back to my sad, pathetic life in the library and realized how much I’d rather be outside with him. I sat down at my desk and opened my phone: “Don’t leave! Come back!” I wrote. A minute later my phone buzzed and the people around me gave me dirty looks – they were trying to concentrate. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he wrote. I fluttered with excitement. In my hermitage, I had gone insane and actually thought he might be serious. “Really?! :)” “Uhh…no.” I snapped back to reality.

We kept working. 4 PM came and went. I took the deadline as more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule. We kept working.

When the clock struck 6 PM, we decided it was time to eat. We needed to brave the outdoors and venture to Val. Not to sit down, not to spend time there, just to grab something and return to our doom. As I was leaving the cafeteria, I heard my name being called. “How’d the paper go?” asked someone in my class. I gave him a strange look. “You finished??” I said, confused. “Yeah, didn’t you?!” I just walked away. Back to the library.

Knowing it would be a long night, I stopped in Schwemms to pick up an energy drink. Since I don’t drink coffee and rarely drink soda, energy drinks were totally out of my range of knowledge. I called a few people to see what I should get, but everyone had a different opinion. What the hell, I thought, I’ll just buy them all. Except for Full Throttle. If the title didn’t do it, the motto of “Let Your Man Out” made it sound like some weird porno.

Soon, darkness set in. We could no longer distract ourselves by creepily watching the people who passed by outside. We found other ways. I’ve been asked not to go into them.

We made a pact – no one was leaving until everyone finished. I knew I would probably finish first – I started first, and even though I tried to tell them it wasn’t true, I had a lot more down on paper than either of my friends. I made the pact anyway. If any of us were going to get out of this alive, we needed to stick together.

Midnight came and went. There were about eight of us who were there for the long haul. I noticed a friend of mine was bleeding on both his foot and his leg. “What happened?!” I asked him. “My paper is a beast in bed,” he said. We both knew he had too much to do to even think about cleaning off or wrapping up his scrapes, so I didn’t bother suggesting it, even though it looked like his toe was falling off. Details, details. That phrase would come up a lot that night.

At 4 AM my roommate cracked. She had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown for some time. One eye was bright red and bulging out of her face. She had lost all hand eye coordination and begun to wobble. “You don’t understand. I’m drunk. I’m actually drunk.” She had consumed zero alcohol. I think it was the Rockstar. She thought it was the stress of having four papers due that day and only finishing three of them, or the two hours of sleep she had gotten over the past three days. I tried to convince her to stay – she had to, I thought. If she left now, she might never make it. And what about the pact?! She sat back down at her computer with a fanatical look of determination in her eyes. “Ten minutes,” she said. “I’ll try it for ten minutes.” I started to feel bad… “No roomie, it’s okay. Take a nap for a little while.” “TEN MINUTES!” she barked at me. “TEN MINUTES!” She soon hit her breaking point and left.

I pulled a couch into the stacks and dozed off for a little while. When my phone’s alarm went off I got up and wandered around the library. I ran into someone from my class and asked him what his thesis was. “Whenever anyone tries to make any progress,” he said, “they get shot.” I thought for a second. Yup, that pretty much summed it up.

People started to smell funky. We played around with the idea of washing off in the emergency chemistry lab showers. Then we actually started to consider it. “Nice hair,” I said to a friend of mine sporting a mohawk. “How does it stay up?” “Oh,” he said to me, “It’s just dirty.”

The sun rose and we were still writing. Val opened whenever it opens and people starting making food runs. Anyone who ventured out asked everyone, even people they didn’t know, if they wanted anything. We felt each other’s pain. I’ll take a banana.

My roommate returned. It was daylight again, and we watched as people walked by victoriously, holding papers, presumably going to turn them in. I hated them, those people with the smug faces. A friend of ours came up to our table smiling. She was nice, I liked her. “I’m done!” she said happily. What a bitch, I hated her. “You are now the enemy,” I said. “I can’t look at you. Please, just go.”

Around 11 AM, I printed out my own paper. I didn’t want to tell anyone, I didn’t want to cross over onto enemy lines. I wanted to stay until my friends were finished too, but they insisted I go turn it in. I think they just wanted me to leave so I could get them some food.

Part of me was scared – I had forgotten what life was like on the outside. I wandered around in a daze, past Chapin, past Val, past Converse. Somehow I made it to my teacher’s office in Morgan Hall… “So what are you doing this summer?” he said. “Sleeping,” I thought to myself. “Oh, so do you want to go to law school?” “No, I want to sleep,” I thought. “Why is he asking me all these questions?!”

After a long, arduous conversation with my teacher on my life goals in which I probably made very little sense, I left. I roamed around, not really knowing where to go or what to do. My feet took me into Converse, peering into offices and classrooms. I found a bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I stared up at myself in the mirror – I looked like death.

I found myself in the President’s Office in my slippers, my hair more of a mess than usual and my general being only to be characterized by total and complete griminess. “Is Professor Marx here?” I asked his secretary. “Are you okay?” she responded.

He wasn’t in, so I didn’t get to say what I wanted to:

“Look at me. LOOK AT ME! This is why we need a reading period.”

Finals time is not generally a time of joy. So when in passing people ask how I’m doing and I respond with excitement, I’m not surprised to get a few strange looks. Of course, I don’t have time to explain the reasons for my happiness to everyone I pass, so here it is.

I’ll start from the beginning. I’ve been playing the violin since I was seven years old. That’s fourteen years of practicing, rehearsing, struggling, performing, fighting with my brothers, who are also violinists, going to band camp, teaching at band camp… the list goes on forever. It’s also been fourteen years of not being able to play sports in which I might hurt my fingers, and always putting the safer sports I’ve been allowed to try second to my one true love: music.

My first experience on a sports team was a bit of an accident. When I was little, my mom didn’t let me eat sweets, because, well, I was a bit of a pudge ball and she was bit of a health nut. Whenever my dad took my brothers to their Little League games, I tagged along so I could sit in the dug out and eat the Famous Amos cookies that other parents brought for the team. Since my mom didn’t come to the games, this worked out very well, until one year my dad caught me stashing cookies in my pockets and said, “Livy, next year, if you want to come and eat the Famous Amos cookies, you have to play on the team.” I shrugged. I had no particular interest in baseball, but I wasn’t about to give up my delectable treats. If baseball’s what it takes, I decided, I’m there.

So I played. Since all the other girls played softball, I was the only girl in the league.  I remember my coach, the father of one of my teammates, giving me a rubber band once to use as a hair tie. As any girl knows, that doesn’t work out too well, especially when you try to get the rubber band out of your hair. But I learned. Soon enough, I could spit farther than any boy on the team. I became queen of the outfield. Of course, I always wanted to be shortstop, but I knew I had no real talent.

My next experience on an athletic team was Cross Country – I ran all through middle school. I was easily was the worst runner on the team, which, coincidentally, was again all boys except for me. One girl joined for a couple weeks, realized she couldn’t run with her asthma and left. By the end of 8^th grade, I had serious knee pain and after being examined by a doctor, I was told there wasn’t much I could do to fix it – hours upon hours of practicing violin had caused me to have terrible posture, and unless I wanted to stop playing and try to fix it, it would affect the way I ran.  Again music was ruining my ever so promising career as an athlete. If I wasn’t going to stop playing violin, he said, I shouldn’t run at all from there on in. And I haven’t, until a few weeks ago when I began running a mile (I started out at 12 minutes and as of today I’m down to 8:38, oh baby).

Ninth grade came around, and I joined the swim team. There were four lanes in the pool, ordered in terms of speed. I rocked out in Lane 4. At about 15 pounds lighter than I am now, I shared Lane 4 with Andy, who was so obese that he was forced to join the team by his doctor. We quickly became best buds. Both of us tired out fairly easily, so we spent about a good percentage of our time devising ways of getting out of doing the assigned sets. I learned how to hold my breath longer than anyone on the team due solely to the fact that I practiced it every day – when I got tired, which was often, I took a deep breath and dipped under the large gush of water shooting out into the pool. I would hide there from Coach Duffy until Andy came back from his lap, and then I’d slip back into the set as if I’d been there all along.

Two years later, I developed tendinitis in both arms and for the first time in my life had to take time off from playing the violin. My physical therapist told me I needed to build up my arm muscles and encouraged me to join the crew team. I laughed. No, really, she told me, just try it, you might even like it. Doubtful, but I was up for anything. I joined a boat house on the Harlem River designed to teach inner city children how to row. After realizing that I wasn’t terribly qualified to teach rowing and didn’t have any particular interest in learning, we switched gears. I brought several of my old violins to the boathouse, and instead of erging, the kids started honking out “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the dock. It was beautiful.

When I arrived at Amherst I became co-captain of the Warrior Monkeys, an intramural soccer team. I had no actual skill, so I resorted to aggressive defense and verbal abuse (Once, in the heat of battle, I actually shouted “I had sex with your mom last night!” as a large, athletic, lax-playing member of the other team was about to score. I don’t know what came over me, but it did work). We didn’t win the championships, but my boyfriend’s team did and I stole his “Intramural Champion” shirt. I wear it to bed at night and pretend I’m a star.

Outside of my dreams, I’ve never won an award for athletic performance. I’ve won my share of musical competitions, but when it comes to sports, I’ve got nothing. Not even the smallest medal for being able to down more Famous Amos cookies than any boy on my Little League team. Until last Saturday night. The girls frisbee team presented me with the award of “Most Likely to Leave Sparkle Motion and Join Army of Darkness,” an award that was not even on the voting sheet, but created especially for me on the insistence of a member of the boys team (Thanks Andy!). I was ecstatic – my very own paper plate! I couldn’t believe it. I have been working for this all semester, tossing with the boys during the day and going to the boys’ practices in the afternoons. When they announced the award, I jumped up and hugged both captains of the boys’ team, not even thinking to hug either female captain.

After all the awards had been handed out, the boys welcomed me to their team. The new captain hugged me and told me I’d be added to the email list (Don’t forget, Monty! ). A member of the girls’ team came up to me and said she wasn’t sure if I would like it or be insulted. Are you kidding me?! I could not have asked for a better award.

On apprend l’Eau par la soif
Et la Terre par les voyages en mer -
La passion - par les affres
Et la paix par les récits de guerre -
L’amour - par la mort
Et les oiseaux - par l’hiver

Yesterday I posted an article for discussion with the promise that I would reveal my opinion of it after everyone had a chance to read it. Due to time constraints they won’t be eloquent or particularly funny, but without further ado, here are my thoughts…

The set up of the article is a copout. For example, in the opening the writer uses the medium of asking a friend a question to get across an idea. She writes, “So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating.” Presenting an idea through Steve’s response to her question is a tad too simple and childish for my taste – Can we not be a little more creative? And not only with the way of presenting the idea, but the content - “I asked him what he thought about dating.” Fo’ real?

The writer opens by introducing the many different types of possible ‘relationships’ existing today and the undefined and often overlapping nature of them. Our friend Steve goes on to explain why we can’t be expected to be faithful to our partners – New York is filled with so many people that every moment is decorated with the possibility of finding a person better than the one you’re already with. The writer decides to support Stevie’s point (that there are a lot of people out there) and states, “For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll say I’ve dated a lot of guys. It’s not that I’ve gone out anywhere with a lot of these guys, or been physical with most of them, or even seen them more than once. But there have been many, many encounters.” But wait, wait, she changes her mind – no need to be brief and stop at merely supporting Stevie’s point – and goes on to prove Stevie’s point, spending the majority of the essay listing all the weird guys she’s been with. My personal favorites are the antediluvian in the graying long underwear (although she dated his roommate, not him) and the Jesuit who insisted on a little sometin sometin before the clock ticked midnight and it was time to go to back to church.

Sure, it has some entertainment value. But is this indicative of our generation? Do we do this? Let me rephrase that, since I know I don’t generally dig the whole tattooed knuckles deal or the late night subway construction worker – do you do this?!

In short, I was looking forward to an insightful and stimulating piece, and instead found myself a bit baffled and dissatisfied. There was no meat to the argument, and I’m no vegetarian. Maybe that in itself is the message of the piece, but if it is, I don’t buy it. That said, I’m optimistic that in the weeks to come, the published essays of the four runner-ups will be more thought-provoking.

A couple months ago I entered the New York Times Modern Love Essay Contest for college students. The deal was if you won, you would be contacted by “mid-April” and if you didn’t, you wouldn’t hear jack shit. I didn’t expect to win or even come in second, let’s be real here. So when April 15th came and went and I heard nothing, I wasn’t surprised or terribly disappointed. I stretched out the idea of “mid-April” for a few more days and when I still hadn’t heard anything by April 20th or so, I picked up the shattered pieces of my life and moved on.

This morning, I sifted through the paper for a little while before realizing that today was the day the winner’s essay would be published.  When it hit me, I pushed aside “Is Urban Violence a Virus?” and scrambled through the many sections of the Sunday Times until I found it: “The College Essay Winner: It’s a Complicated Subject.” I read the blurb and finally got to the winning essay: “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define.” Lame title, I thought, but then again, so was mine. No matter, I had been looking forward to this for awhile and I was genuinely excited to read the essay – selected out of over 1,200 others, it had to be good.

Long story short, I was disappointed. I was expecting a piece that would make me think, make me see things in a different light, make me question the very essence of my being – okay, not quite, but something that would cause a reaction, any reaction, other than, “…wait. Huh?!”

I don’t want to influence you too much with my reactions to the article, at least not until after you’ve read it, so I’ll hold off on divulging my full opinions until later.  However, I am extremely interested in what you guys think of it. Feel free to praise it/bash it/love it/hate it in your comments below. Here’s the link, go crazy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04love.html?_r=1&oref=slogin