COLUMN: A thought from me to you

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '98 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '98At a certain point as the semester wears down, I always expect a moment of clarity, a single second where all of my papers, all of my exams, my hopes and dreams for the future and my negligible social life will just come together, as if displayed on a flow chart. However, damned if exam season isn't cold and flu season and nothing stirs up the mind like aches and pains and a fever. Don't you think British spellings just look better on some words? Come on, "theatre" or "theater"?? Personally, I think a great graduation speaker would be Jesse "The Mind/Body" Ventura? Alternatively, I'm sure that school could rally around a big KISS concert instead? Did you know that College Hall is made out of serpentenite?? Did Axel Rose ask us to feel his sepentenite in "Welcome to the Jungle"? Three years of college and we don't get to storm anything, and then suddenly in two weeks we're all over Franklin Field and the hardwood of the Palestra. Good times. Are we all psyched to storm the baseball diamond come May? How many girls out there named Mary are just downright sick of guys commenting that there just "something about" them. Next time, slug the person -- unless it's me. It's already been three years since Alanis Morissette destroyed the meaning of the word "ironic" and it just keeps getting worse. Until people can tell the difference between a "coincidence," the genuinely ironic and things that just plain suck, it's time for a moratorium on the word. Personal favorite word to misuse in its stead? "Phlegmatic." Isn't it phlegmatic? A little too phlegmatic? If Monica Lewinsky appears with Barbara Walters in February and every single American turns off the TV and joins together in a quilting bee, would they both cease to exist? Or would we just have a big quilt with gaps in it from where all the people cheated and turned the TV back on? Anybody else finding themselves nervous whenever they enter an empty campus bathroom? That can't be good? I'm not sure that I'm prepared to memorize the new 10-digit telephone numbers? Going abroad is a genuinely great thing to do. I recommend learning English to go on that Katmandu program. My dad's dream is to go to Katmandu, so if you could just send him a postcard? Memo to self: Always walk around off campus with somebody wearing one of those nifty "Am I A Target?" bullseyes, as the existential dilemma is bound to prove too great for your typical mugger. Odds are your friend will bear the brunt? What kind of girl sends a guy flowers? Not to suggest anything, but surely a strip-o-gram would be more thoughtful. I didn't mean that, don't worry. Strange-but-Suspected-to-be-True: Beck is Tom Wolfe. Has anybody ever seen them in the same room? In the same white suit? So you're a movie theater and you have a little money. Do you make improvements to the individual screening rooms or the overall appearance of your business? Or do you buy a goofy garish sign that makes people wince? Anybody out there think the new Cinemagic sign is an aesthetic advance for West Philly? On the other hand, it serves as a perfect complement for the endless repetition of "At the Hop" perpetually oozing from Eat at Joe's. Ah, synergy. Seriously, though, isn't school pride at a very high point these days? Between the basketball and football and rising college rankings and nobody being shot, there are more people walking around in "Not Penn State" shirts than ever before. If that ain't pride? But what to do to top this semester? If SAC had its act together, now would be the right time to pull another of those "No Place Like Penn" fiestas? And is there any way that people will actually go to those midseason basketball games against Yale and Columbia? Come out and scream? OK, if one more book award goes to some middle-aged man's rambling memoirs about growing up Irish with a drunken Irish father, a timid repressive Irish-Catholic mother and a bad-seed brother who ran off to join the IRA, I'm gonna scream. James Joyce did OK with this whole theme 75 years ago, and Roddy Doyle's been overdoing it for a couple decades now. I've polled two Irish friends and neither of their parents were lushes. Fine, they were all cops, but whatever? Or "acumen"? Anybody want to misuse the word "acumen" for a while? It's especially funny when you confuse it with "albumen." I feel sorry for Christopher Reaves. Really, I do. And I find his triumph over adversity to be amazing, but really? Could this guy even get work before his accident? It feels so slimey for the American audiences to be cozying up to him now. Where were they when he made that goofy Superman movie with Dolph Lundgren and the nuclear weapons? How disturbed should we be when the Boston Museum of Fine Art runs a Monet exhibition including works which were captured by the Nazis during World War Two? Makes you wonder what percentage of the Impressionist stuff in other galleries actually came from looted private collections. It's time for another Steve Guttenberg comeback. Anyone want to join my campaign to make him the new provost? Think about it, the dude's hip to student issues. Students all want a real Diner and we all get in High Spirits when it's time to go Home for the Holidays or when we beat The Big Green. Was that a stretch? I told you I was about to Short Circuit. So now you know what's happening in my mind when my eyes glaze while trying to make it through physics, or Beloved. Sometimes it's just better not to know. Till we meet again?