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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Last winter I went to Disney World with a couple of friends, and while other visitors waited in seemingly endless lines to go on the newest rides — rides that turn you upside-down, rides that skim precipitous drops, rides that accelerate at ungodly rates that bring to mind scenes from cartoons in which a character’s body shoots forward while his head remains behind, his neck stretching comically long — we spent our most pleasant late afternoons and evenings in that haven for pregnant women and children who are not yet “this tall”: Tomorrowland. Contrary to what its name suggests, Tomorrowland is less a peek into the future and more a glimpse into the past; the “tomorrow” to which it refers was decades ago. It is filled with rides and exhibits that were sleek and modern 40 years ago but now seem quaint and adorably misguided, like a drawing done by a five-year-old.

The gem of the Tomorrowland collection is the Carousel of Progress. Originally built for the 1960 World’s Fair in collaboration with General Electric, the Carousel cycles riders through four animatronic dioramas taking place in different times — the turn of the 20th century, 1920, 1940 and “today” — each of which features the same family boasting about their newest technological comforts. When G.E. withdrew their sponsorship in the early 1990s, the Carousel was refurbished, both to eliminate all mentions of G.E. and to modernize “today’s” diorama. The updated take-home message, very much a vestige of the early nineties and once again adorably misguided, seems to be that videophones are the wave of the future and will revolutionize telecommunications as we know it.
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My senior year begins tomorrow, which means that the past week has been filled with the hustle and bustle of compensating for a somewhat lackadaisical break; as my last real summer vacation draws to a close, I survey the crumpled to-do lists that litter my desk, the unanswered e-mails that fill my inbox, the abandoned beginnings of dozens of projects that never really left the ground and I realize: I could have done so much more. This disappointing realization has led to a last-ditch flurry of reading, and my mind has been racing with the listless, unbounded energy that comes from finishing a good book — the desire to create something, to do something extraordinary with my life.

But that will have to wait, because right now I’m watching the Food Network.

Last Monday I moved into a new apartment, and when I turned on the television I discovered that I inexplicably had cable. (Should I be writing that in a public forum? I swear I had nothing to do with it, kind people at Time Warner!) Suddenly the world was at my fingertips, if by “the world” I mean SpikeTV, TNN, and BET. No longer would I bask in the loneliness of a yet-to-be-filled four-bedroom apartment; no, my chores, my seemingly endless cleaning and putting away of unidentifiable kitchen implements would be accompanied by the glow of a hundred rosy faces, each in his own sparkling kitchen.
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Ladies, how many times has this happened to you? You’ve got a frame to hang, so you get out your toolkit; you start to hammer a nail into the wall when, suddenly, out of nowhere, who should appear but the cute guy with whom you went on a date last week and really hit it off. He takes one look at your ugly, greasy hammer, sprints out the door and never calls again — and, that night, all alone in bed, you cry yourself to sleep.

Well, dry your tears, because a woman named Barbara Kavovit has a solution for you: an entire line of tools created just for females. The eponymous “Barbara K” home improvement line has become immensely popular since it hit the market nearly two years ago, offering petite power tools with aquamarine accents, tool kits packed in translucent aquamarine plastic cases and aquamarine-covered how-to books. With Barbara K, even your six-in-one putty knife can be stylish, and you’ll never again fumble with a pass� pair of spring-assisted slip-joint pliers.

It’s enough to make one wonder. Certainly it’s sensible to create smaller, lighter tools for comparatively small-handed women, but isn’t it crossing some kind of line to put so much work into making something aesthetically pleasing when it will be used to apply torque to greasy bolts?

Ah, but you see, these tools are not simply for screwing and hammering, drilling and stapling. No, these are spiritual tools, tools that show you how to be a better person. The focus is less on home improvement and more on self improvement. “A hammer is not only used to construct something tangible,” Barbara K proclaims in one advertisement, “it can also help build confidence. It teaches you self-reliance, and teaches you how good that feels.” In a New York Times piece, she reiterates that tools are “things that give you confidence. That puts [sic] you back into your soul, your spirit, because you have enhanced your surroundings.”

Someone alert the medical community — there’s a new breakthrough cure for depression! Not to mention the potential impact this could have on gender equality; apparently all we need to shatter the glass ceiling is a 16-ounce fiberglass hammer with a comfort grip and ergonomic design. Who knew empowerment was so easy? It’s like that old Chinese proverb: “Give a woman 10 bucks, and she’ll eat for a day. Give her a nine-piece hex key set, and she’ll be able to put together Ikea furniture for a lifetime.”

Barbara K isn’t the only one marketing empowerment as something women can buy in a store. Another semi-recent trend has been the right-hand diamond ring, popular among the growing niche market of unmarried women with expendable income. The right-hand diamond ring is supposed to symbolize independence; rather than waiting for a man to propose, the logic goes, why not buy your own ring? One advertisement, hawking the wares of A Diamond is Forever, implores: “Your left hand says ‘We.’ Your right hand says ‘Me.’ Your left hand rocks the cradle. Your right hand rules the world. Women of the world, raise your right hand.”

I see a few things wrong with this picture. First, it’s more than slightly ironic that, under pretense of “independence,” women are spending thousands of dollars to follow a trend.

Second, although reclamation might work for insulting epithets (see: the evolution of “queer”), when you buy a right-hand diamond ring from A Diamond is Forever, you’re still delivering funds into the account of the company that advertises to men with phrases like, “God created woman. Then, after several million years of practice, he created yours.” Of course, the goal is not to picket diamond companies for promoting an ages-old, highly-gendered tradition wherein a man accompanies his modest proposal with an immodestly-sized gem in symbolic (and sometimes not-so-symbolic) exchange for his bride-to-be — the goal, presumably, is to get a diamond ring, because diamond rings are pretty.

Although I’ve never seen the appeal of diamonds myself, procuring a diamond ring is not an intrinsically dishonorable goal, or at least no more dishonorable than buying any other piece of expensive jewelry. But it isn’t the goal of women who buy right-hand diamond rings; if all they wanted was a ring with diamonds, they could wear it on whichever finger they wanted. The right-hand diamond ring seems to be less about its being a ring or having diamonds and more about its not being an engagement ring.

This leads into the third problem, which is that buying a right-hand diamond ring seems more like reaction formation than genuine empowerment; instead of conveying the message “my sense of self-worth does not depend on whether I have a romantic partner,” it seems to say, “I don’t care that I’m not married! Seriously! In fact, I’m glad I’m not married! Who needs men?! I certainly don’t! Pass the vodka!”

And this is the most troubling aspect of both the right-hand diamond ring and Barbara K’s tool boutique: both attempt to “subvert the dominant paradigm” by leaving it unquestioned. “Working in the construction business taught me how hard it can be for a woman to use tools,” Barbara K laments in an advertisement — so she created a line of hardware that women would be able to use more efficiently (empowering!) and then, because it was for women, she made it pretty and blue (condescending!). Women who purchase right-hand rings as a statement of “independence” are not changing the marital significance of a diamond ring; instead, they proclaim to the world that they harbor such desire for a proposal that they’re willing to propose to themselves.

It reeks of playground politics, of avenging an unreceptive secret club by forming your own even more secret club. By the end of recess the courtyard is filled with a hundred kindergarteners, each in her own “club,” putting more effort into pretending to ignore everyone around her than she puts into having fun. No boys allowed!

In 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched from the Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida. Twenty-seven years later, the spacecrafts are currently more than 90 A.U. — that’s 8.4 billion miles, for all you English majors — away from Earth, and have become the most distant human-made objects in the universe.

Let me pause for just a moment to mull over how amazing that is. It’s been 27 years, and these things are still hurtling through space at an average of 36,600 miles per hour. The batteries in my digital camera don’t last for more than three hours, but somehow these giant toaster ovens have enough juice to travel and send data back to us until 2020. Now past Neptune, the crafts are steadily approaching the edge of the solar system. In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass another star. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time — albeit a very, very long time — before it crashes into some distant planet, denting the roof of an alien trailer home.

NASA has, of course, gone to great lengths to prepare for such an occasion. Mounted upon each Voyager is a copy of The Golden Record, a sort of AAA guidebook to Earth that was designed by a committee chaired by late Cornell astronomy and space sciences professor Carl Sagan. The Golden Record is perhaps humankind’s most impressive feat of conciseness, condensing what is supposed to be a portrayal of “the diversity of life and culture on Earth” into a 12-inch, two-sided disc.
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I’ve been derelict in my columnal duties. Everyone reaches that point in the semester where they verge on breakdown, but a columnist’s self-destruction is more public than most. I’ve spent the past three months immersed in research on douches and feminine deodorant sprays (I know this sounds like the set-up to a joke, but I swear it isn’t), which means I could regale you with tales of the paradigmatic shift that occurs in feminine hygiene advertisements between 1965 and 1975, but I think it would be best (for both of us) if I refrained from doing so. So, in lieu of a coherent narrative structure and sweeping cultural commentary, I present you with a roundup of ideas that never made it past a brief scribble in my Moleskine notebook. For some of the ideas it will become immediately obvious why they remained on the cutting room floor; others may yet turn up in future columns.

Unanswered Questions

* Is the relationship between chocolate and deliciousness a linear one — that is, does something get better every time you add more chocolate to it, or is the function asymptotic to some ultimate, unattainable sublime deliciousness? Is it logarithmic? Parabolic? This is a weighty issue.
* Which is worse: Sunday or Monday? Obviously Sunday has the advantage because it’s the weekend, but at least at the end of the day on Monday, Monday is almost over.
* What is the least sexy food to eat? Not because of what it’s actually made out of, but because of how it has to be eaten. I say corn on the cob.
* Why is New York the only state that has implemented the “I [heart] __” t-shirt format? It’s not like it’s a state-specific sentiment. “I [heart] WY” makes just as much sense.

Random Facts I Have Learned in the Past Month

* According to Professor Michael Lynn, Hotel Administration, when a waitress draws a smiley-face on her check it increases her tips by 18 percent, but a waiter who does the same thing decreases his tips by nine percent.
* Lysol was originally used as a douche. Seriously.
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Last week, as Winter expelled its icy breath across the campus for (hopefully) one of the last times before Spring extends its dewy fingers, the gale-force winds carried with them the vestiges of a fleeting premature summer: bronzed bodies — skin baked pleasantly crisp by tropical suns — filled lectures, ambled across the Arts Quad wearing dissonantly copious amounts of clothing, and unintentionally tripled the ethnic diversity of Cornell.

I was not one of these tanned, refreshed travelers. Instead of voyaging to some small, equatorial island, I went to Denmark — which means that I returned to Cornell with a Scandinavian pallor, not to mention a hacking cough that still clears a three-seat radius around me in every lecture.

Though I’m ashamed to admit it, this was my first time ever leaving the country, and I had relatively high expectations for how much I would grow as a result of the experience. In my mind, one’s first trip to a foreign land was supposed to be life-changing, the sort of experience that forever alters the way you think about the world, making you question all of your cultural assumptions and stereotypes. Up is down! Black is white! Pickled herring is delicious!
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