Off of College Hill July 5, 2008
Posted by Amandeep in Hopes and Fears, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.Tags: Brown, College Hill, nostalgia
1 comment so far
The intersection outside the Friends House
So just outside of one of my bedroom windows in the Friends House, there is an intersection, pictured to the left.
Every morning, I wake up and look out my window and see a big orange sign that says “College Hill, that way” as though to constantly remind me that I am not on it. I haven’t moved very far, close enough that there’s a decent chance someone driving down this road is on their way to College Hill. However, every morning, this sign reminds me that College Hill is a separate place, off thattaway. It is a place that I have crossed over and nearly left, with only a toe still on it, reluctant as I am to leave the place where I have had so much happiness.
I first came up the hill from the other side almost 4 years ago in a van containing the minimal needs for a new beginning and a heart filled with expectation and excitement to mount the hill’s slope and see what lay at the top. Now, literally over the hill, I am burdened with much more stuff, the accumulation of 4 years of life, and my heart is a wearier, less excitable thing. But though the view downhill is much clearer, and it seems all the bends are, for a ways, laid plain to sight, I still hold a hope, as I did 4 years ago, that mysteries and new experiences lurk in the twists of these roads and that they will lead me to still magical lands with new kinds of sunshine.
austentacious June 2, 2008
Posted by Sonia in Predictions of the Future.1 comment so far
I have a problem. This problem is conventionally referred to as “Jane Austen.”
Perhaps I am just desperately trying to compensate for the gaping abyss in my life that is the absence of my dearest Friends House, but I am embarking on the six-hour Pride and Prejudice miniseries. Yesterday I watched the Keira Knightley version, and while I love the music in that one and I approve of some of the casting choices (I am probably the only straight woman in the world who doesn’t think Colin Firth is all that) there are some serious issues with it and blah blah I’m a purist.
This sort of dovetails with something else I did recently: I saw the Sex and the City movie yesterday with my sister. (Brief review: far too long, but entirely what one would expect.) Unlike my Jane Austen love, I am not really proud of my interest in Sex and the City, a pretty unhealthy but addictive television show. I wonder what Jane Austen would say about Carrie Bradshaw. Austen didn’t like rich people much, or premarital sex. But they do have something in common: They both offer the modern woman a chance at traditional love. Or, at least, I think that’s why both are astounding popular these days.
Pathetically, I have drunk the Kool-Aid on both counts. Pride and Prejudice is the only novel I feel I have inherited from my family — it’s my great-uncle’s favorite book, it was my grandmother’s favorite book, my aunt and mother forced it on me. My mother bought me a copy from Publix, I think, which looks like a trashy romance novel — and has the trashy copy on the back to boot. “Marry. Marry well. Marry rich.” “Will any of the Bennet sisters find true love and fortune?”
A few months ago I watched Becoming Jane, a completely untrue movie about Jane Austen’s life. So, this movie was marketed at people like me and I hate being predictable but I freakin loved it, mostly because James McAvoy is desperately attractive. But it was a sad movie, and that was intriguing. I think too many modern spectators forget that things were actually terrible for the women of Austen’s novels. They lived constrained, dependent lives — and they were obsessed with marriage, if only because marriage was the only power a woman exercised in her entire life. Austen shows the marriage market for what it is — not an exercise in love and romance, but a trade of money and power — but usually, because they’re novels, with a happy ending.
The modern woman seeking love. The vague plot of Becoming Jane is that Jane Austen falls in love but since their parents don’t approve and they have no independent wealth, they can’t get married. At some point, the man (played by James McAvoy) asks her at a ball if she’s dancing with passion to seek a husband or a lover, and she’s suddenly transformed from confident to vulnerable. She responds, “Rest easy, Mr. LeFroy, I have no expectation on either count.” I have been thinking about that line a lot. At the risk of sounding too MCM, I think it problematizes (I’m purposely leaving out a direct object). It represents to me some sort of glitch in the system between the modernity and the tradition (is tradition the right word? maybe I really mean “fantasy”).
I think that’s the reason women watch Sex and the City, anyway. Or read things like this. I feel like there’s something terribly wrong with the prevailing paradigm of romance and dating right now, but I don’t know what to do about it.
Anyway I have no idea why I just wrote all of that.
INTERNAL MEMO June 2, 2008
Posted by Sonia in Hong Kong, Parliamentarian's Report, We don't have a cat.add a comment
To: The Friends House
Re: My absence
Don’t have too much fun without me 
Happy move in!
love,
sonia (a.k.a. ginger spice)
The Beginning May 31, 2008
Posted by Amandeep in Ritual Sacrifice, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.add a comment
It is the eve of the Friends House move in. Get ready, world.
I have made all the necessary ritual sacrifices to the gods of packing and U-Haul and can only hope that our journey to the land of milk and honey is one we will survive.
Cloning Attempt Leads to Misery, Dispair. May 17, 2008
Posted by Leah in I'm at work right now.2 comments
Saturday, May 17– General Peter S. Mastersonn, owner of “Pookie“, came into trouble yesterday with the Coalition Against Cloning of Animals, when he cloned over a dozen dogs to serve as genetic matches for his dog as “Organ-replacement dogs”. This high-profile case marks a growing fad among military personnel, especially high-ranking military officials, of using all resources possible, even government resources for saving their own personal man’s best friend.
The representative for CACA stated “This whole thing is like, ridiculous, man. I mean, what kind of person would clone a bunch of animals to like, save one animal?” The representative who wished to be named only as “the masked protector” revealed later in the interview that he “doesn’t even like animals” and that his involvement in CACA is purely “to tear down the imperialistic structure that man has created for itself” and “for the chicks”.
When General Mastersonn was asked to comment, he said “I don’t know why I did it, I just know that I love my dog,” and said about the affair “[my wife and I] just don’t know what to do, we are devastated. I had no idea that animal cloning was unethical. The whole ordeal came as a bit of a surprise”
When asked why he decided to clone so many dogs, Mastersonn replied “Just to be safe”. This case marks the largest cloning operation ever for a single individual, human or otherwise.
Think that cloning a replacement for your dog might be in order? Slow down. Researchers have shown that cloned animals have a much shorter life expectancy than their natural born cousins, some explanations have been linked to many of these dogs being used as organs for other dogs.
why the Friends House is awesome May 13, 2008
Posted by Amandeep in Better than Claire Coiro '06, Kitchen Confidential.add a comment
The Friends House is better than your house. Why?
Here are five reasons:
1) In the Friends House, no one pees on the toilet seat, or if they do, they clean it up.
I have greatly enjoyed my time in college, but dorm life does have its drawbacks. An example of one of them is the serial seat pisser who dwells on the second floor of the sacred halls of the Alpha Delta Phi Society. There is really nothing worse than sleepily walking into the bathroom after waking up to relieve myself and sitting in someone else’s urine. I don’t know who you are, Mr. Serial Toilet Seat Defiler, but since I’m fairly confident you are not Ben, I know you will not be at the Friends House.
2) The Friends House does dishes.
This past summer, I lived at Hockey House which was, you guessed it, the home of the Brown men’s hockey team. Turns out that hockey players are generally nice and also hot. However, they aren’t cleanly, unlike the members of the Friends House. In the Friends House, the sink is clear enough to wash dishes in, and at any given time, there are clean dishes to be used. In the Friends House, there are no swarms of flies or ants, drawn to the rank aroma of unwashed dishes and untaken-out trash. In the Friends House, I don’t take out the dripping and disgusting trash every day. In the Friends House, we take turns taking out the trash. And the Friends House doesn’t put things that drip in the trash.
3) In the Friends House, you don’t have to wear shoes in the shower.
I am tired of wearing shoes into the shower. In the Friends House, it is okay to go shoeless into the shower. You also don’t have to worry about your elbows hitting the walls in the shower, although I have become a master at avoiding this without thought. However, if your elbows did hit the walls of the Friends House shower, it would be okay because you’d know the shower was clean and that the Friends are not disgusting.
In the Friends House, there are no flimsy shower curtains that don’t close all the way, curl back at the edges, and may or may not be ripped on end hooks such that you can never feel totally secure of your shower privacy. However, even if there were, it wouldn’t matter because in the Friends House, there aren’t 3 other people of various sexes/genders in the bathroom at the same time as you.
Come to think of it, showering isn’t the only bathroom activity for which it will be nice to have some privacy.
4) We can paint the walls in the Friends House.
For years, we college students have papered our walls with as much color as possible to bring life to the cracking, surface-marred white paint of dorm rooms. And while I will miss the dorm style of decoration (and may in fact still employ it in my Friends House boudoir) I will enjoy the fact that my abode will still have personality and beauty without it. So maybe we can’t paint it really bright or interesting colors, but at least it will have an even color and surface texture.
5) The Friends House is in a nice residential neighborhood – not in the middle of the frat and program house section of campus.
It will be nice not to be woken up and forced to leave the building whenever DPhi sets vomit on fire and not to be woken by Thetes chanting “Naked Moat!” at ungodly hours before exams.
Once, sophomore year, at 4am on the morning of a 9am physics final, some Thetes actually took a megaphone outside to start yelling at the quad with the express purpose of waking people up and disturbing them. When, at 5am, I called the Department of Public Safety in hopes that I could at least get something approaching a decent amount of sleep, they informed me that noise complaints weren’t their problem and that I should find my community director’s room and tell her to deal with it. Uh-huh. I should pit a poor sweet girl against the football frat when they are being intentionally disruptive? When you make a lot of noise outside of the Friends House, I call the cops on you and you get your ass busted.
Ben has med school and I have 2 upper level physics classes to look forward to. I think we will appreciate the quiet for studying. Skip will no longer have to take periodic sabbaticals away from noise. And Leah and Sonia will probably appreciate the transition into rooms that aren’t right above nightly Beirut games and oh-so-kickable doors.
problems May 13, 2008
Posted by Sonia in Hong Kong.add a comment
My shampoo says I should express more approval. It’s jealous of my conditioner.
Friends House Meme (quiz)–Respond in comments11!!!! lolz May 10, 2008
Posted by Leah in Bathroom Humor, Communism, Just for fun, Question and Answer.8 comments
About You:
Name:
What would you say is your personal motto?
What color shirt are you wearing?
What kind of pie do you like?
What’s your totem animal?
Never have you ever…:
Would you rather:
Freeze to death/be burned alive?
Eat a raw egg with its shell/be crushed alive?
Sit down/stand up?
#1/#2?
Respond to this meme/Do something else?
About the house:
What animal do you associate with:
Amandeep:
Ben:
Leah:
Skip:
Sonia:
What Color do you associate with:
Amandeep:
Ben:
Leah:
Skip:
Sonia:
Where do you see _________ in 10 years:
Amandeep:
Ben:
Leah:
Skip:
Sonia:
Who in the house do you think is most likely to:
Be on a television show?
Get eaten alive by bears?
Get eaten alive by cannibals?
Form a religion?
Get married to a native Serbian?
Have 15 babies?
Own a Mule?
Make out with you?
Make out with your mom?
Search Engine Terms May 10, 2008
Posted by Ben Brown in Sass, Self-Help.4 comments
One of the great things that WordPress does is track what search engine terms people use to find your blog. This is particularly useful if you are, say, selling something online. If, for example, I were hawking bargain-priced oranges and I found that people kept finding my site by searching “bargain apples,” maybe I would want to consider expanding into other fruits. Wait, does that make any sense? Whatever. I think you sort of understand what I’m talking about: the search engine term history is like free market research, albeit for a very specific and potentially useless segment of the market.
Anyway, here at the Friends House Blog, the only use of this function is amusement. I don’t care how people find our page, especially since most of the people reading it will be our friends. I can’t imagine why anyone who doesn’t know us would want to read this stuff, but if they do, more power to them.
But I digress. A lot. What I’m trying to say is, the terms people use to find our blog can be amusing. In addition to the seven searches for “friends house wordpress” (predictable), there was one search today which I find most excellent: someone made their way to the Friends House Blog by googling “taryn sass.”
Now, first of all, I have no way of knowing who this was, so don’t worry if it was you. Even if I wanted to judge you, I couldn’t. But the truth is, I don’t want to judge you. I want to shake your hand. You have made my life a little happier and actually induced me to type “taryn sass” into Google to see what comes up. Here’s a list of some of the more notable hits:
- The top page is from a University of Washington climate dynamics class. Taryn Sass is in group F.
- A hit from page two is an article on Taryn Manning: “Once the bad girl sidekick, this actress is heading for the front lines.”
- Taryn’s fashion blog reminds us all that “Milly is the quintessential label for uptown girls with a bit of sass.”
- On the Cumberland, Rhode Island Public Library’s website, there is a book review of Getting the Boot by Alyssa, age 13 which states in its plot summary that “Kelly really wants to study abroad in Italy over the summer. She is lucky enough to be admitted to the S.A.S.S. program, Students Across the Seven Seas.”
- Finally, on page six, The Friends House appears. I don’t know who waded through all these pages to find us. I’m just thankful they decided it was worth their time to check us out.
So, loyal readers, I invite you to try to find the wackiest search engine term which will turn up the Friends House Blog. When you find us in the results page, make sure you follow the link to our site or else it won’t register on our side. I will continue to check the search history regularly and will post the best terms I find there. Google-bomb us, baby!
In which I also Ask Leah May 10, 2008
Posted by Ben Brown in Advice, Goldfish, Question and Answer.add a comment
Hi Leah,
I’m a recent college graduate with a degree in Trans-Atlantic Critical Sociology. I’ve been on the job market for a few months now, and have applied – without success – to a number of positions in investment banking, raw food activism and military intelligence. In spite of my really hip credentials, no one seems to want to hire me. What am I doing wrong and how can I make myself a more attractive job candidate?
Signed,
Unemployed in Ulster
