It’s odds-and-ends day, which means that today’s column will be devoted to rejected seeds of columns and ramblings that couldn’t be stretched into 850-word screeds. Enjoy! (Or, more accurately: Skim and then turn to the crossword!)

A Day in the Life of my Upstairs Neighbors (A One-Act Play)

Scene: An elephant stampedes across the floor. Heavy Male #1 stirs in bed, then opens his eyes.
Heavy Male #1: Hey, where did that elephant come from?
Heavy Male #2: (Pogo-sticks into the room) Beats me.
Heavy Male #1: Good morning, housemate! Boy, I sure am exhausted from that four-hour sumo wrestler DDR tournament we held late last night.
Heavy Male #2: I’m not surprised you’re tired; I saw you pounding away at that anvil afterwards. You’re such a workhorse!
Heavy Male #1: What can I say? Just doing my job as a part-time smithy.
Heavy Male #2: Hey, catch! (Lobs a cannonball at Heavy Male #1)
Heavy Male #1: Oops! (Cannonball falls to floor) Oh well, maybe tomorrow morning. It’s 6:03 a.m., you know what that means!
Heavy Males #1 and #2: CLOG-DANCING!
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Unless you’ve been bedridden for the past few weeks, you’ve without a doubt seen them around campus: the big, shockingly red, somewhat disorienting archways standing in front of the most frequented buildings on each quad, causing pedestrians to take detours to avoid walking under them for some inexplicable reason. Some have pejorative signs tacked up on them; some are lying on the ground in three pieces, the targets of student discontentment.

According to an e-mail I just received from the Human Ecology administration, the uppercase name for the arches is “Diversity Archways,” and they’re scattered about the campus in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the phrase “Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds.” Also according to the e-mail, some of the arches are slated for interactive projects; the one in front of Martha Van Rensselaer Hall has been opened up as public forum, and members of the Human Ecology community are invited to “write down [their] thoughts using the rainproof materials provided, and … [s]taple them any way [they] wish to the archway using the staple guns and ladder provided.”

This whole arch thing brings up three interesting questions. One, have we become so desperate for things to commemorate that we’re now marking the anniversaries of phrases? Two, how much is Cornell paying in liability insurance to cover the countless injuries that will invariably result from the unfortunate combination of staple guns and ladders? Three, and most importantly, why are we, as a culture, so goddamned bad at memorializing?
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Two weekends ago: I accidentally cut off the tip of a finger while chopping lettuce, and spent my Saturday evening in the emergency room; a housemate nearly burned down the apartment when a pot of oil burst into flame; and the bathtub drain became stuck closed, leaving us with a tub filled with five inches of standing water and nowhere to shower.

Last weekend, in an attempt to recreate the excitement, I went to the 2005 New York State Fair. Before I start writing about the fair, let me just say that the topic has already been covered relatively recently in The Sun. A year ago, Alex Linhardt ‘06 wrote about the New York State Fair for Daze in arguably one of the finest pieces to appear in the section in the past decade. Linhardt discussed his reason for going to the fair, which was to discover the heart of America, to become acquainted with a country that had so long been a stranger. Ultimately, he was disappointed. Well, I harbored no such hopes of enlightenment. I went because I thought it would be goofy. And I was not disappointed.
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