Harry Lee

Thanksgiving is family time - maybe that's why it's a brief holiday. I like my family, but since we're divided by the Atlantic, I'm stuck with a surrogate family for most of the year - the Penn family. No, I haven't been hired by the administration to whip you into a frenzy of love for your peers.

I landed here in a flying machine over a year ago. Officially, I'm a resident alien. Life as an alien can be hard. Imagine trying to learn the language of aliens that inhabit a distant planet very dissimilar to our own. A tough task. Philosophers call it "radical translation" and few believe it possible.

A hectic, slightly hapless afternoon in New York is behind me. Smartsave map in hand, I made it to the U.N. building two minutes after it closed to visitors; a clutch of taxi drivers refused my fare; and I took the sweltering 456 subway line to the Whitney Museum of American Art arriving at 5:10 p.

Avoiding weirdos is often easy, even though they crowd this world. But at Penn, you can get stuck with blossoming freaks as roommates every semester. School acts like a greenhouse for oddities, which thrive once removed from parental shadows. How can you deal with your roommates' peculiar ways and odd beliefs? For example, many weirdos believe that were they not to leave thickets of pubic hair in the shower, others would die from frustrated curiosity about its length, color and curliness.

I wiped my savings account this summer and, in the last weeks, I lost six toes to hunger. I hope you fared better. Perhaps you worked as an intern, earned a tidy sum and wound up indentured to some soul-sucking firm. I heard that graduates on the International Teaching Assistants Program (ITAP) did very nicely.

I left Heathrow airport wearing old jeans, a light jumper - Americans: read sweater - and a suede jacket. One flight later, I stumbled for a cab at Philadelphia airport in sizzling heat with a giant wedgie, dripping like a chicken on a spit roast. My first sartorial error: dressing like an Eskimo in heat high enough to induce nuclear fusion.

The University inexplicably lacks a coordinated system for handling mental-health emergencies