the whole fall party scene at bard is building up to one party, usually held in late october: the Drag Race. we had the 2002 one last night. apparently this party is written about in the college guidebooks, and is apprently ranked on someone's list of the top ten college parties, but i couldn't find the list. (playboy sometimes makes similar lists, but a quick jaunt around their site did not easily yield such list. good to see that wvu's still #5 party school tho.)

    the Drag Race is always planned before any other parties of the semester, and all the other clubs have to plan around drag race weekend. recent alumni and other students who have dropped out come back just for this party. in previous years, it's been held on parents weekend. that's ok, because parents are usally nestled safe in their off-campus beds long before festivities begin. this year, it was on daylight savings weekend, a good trick because the party can go for five hours 10-2.

    Members of the sponsoring Queer Alliance spend all week decorating. by saturday, they're putting finishing touches in place. the grafitti'd walls of the old gym are covered up; streamers and decorations are hung from the ceiling. platforms are built in the corners for people to dance on, and a catwalk in the middle. a professional drag queen (and this year a king too) is hired from new jersey. i overheard Pia, the head of the drag race committee, say at 9pm last night, "i've been in the old gym for 12 hours today. i'll see you after i shower and get dressed."

    oh, and the outfits. the idea is to change your gender, but that's only the default. there are men as ugly women, women as ugly men, and ugly men and women as themselves. and there's celebrity costumes - cowgirls, mad hatters, cher, hunter s. thompson, slash, marilyn monroe, michael jackson. many people are mostly naked or wearing the smallest amount possible - lots of teddys, corsets, and fishnets. there was an adam and eve couple this year, with fig leaves. a girl went a few years ago topless, with rainbow painted swirls around her nipples. one of our friends last year went wearing only a towel - on his head.

    this event is not intended for the sober. there's a huge spike in the on-campus drug trade the weekend of the party, and afterward there's a huge shortage. the local liquor stores actually sell out of vodka, 40s, and carlo rossi. it's one of the only times local law enforcement are allowed on campus - to do sober-driving checkpoints.
    administrators are on uber call the night of the drag race. clusters of them, including the dean of students and all his associate deans, the head of reslife, and even Leon are known to appear. they wear slacks and fleeces and carry radios around outside, able to procure rides home quicker than a drunk can say he's not.

    the party itself is basically composed of as much flesh and makeup as possible packed together. it's a massive swarm of glitter and lipstick that can barely stand up. there's music, but no room to dance. to breathe, attendees have to go outside into the 40-degree air. because they're half naked, they soon get cold and go back into the sweaty mob. the professional drag queen comes out, but everyone's so sloshed that they can't stay off the stage long enough to let her do her musical number. and the stage is never high enough so that people can actually see her, because that would present a safety hazard to drunk people falling off it.

    but one of the parts i like the best is the morning after, because i can laugh at everyone else's mistakes. this morning, todd and i got up at what we thought was 11, but it was really 10. we found our freshman friend patrick outside the dorm, and we asked him how his head felt today. he said, "i felt fine until i realized i was waking up in some apartment in red hook." when asked whose apartment it was, he mumbled something. i said, "who?" and he said "exactly. i think he's hungarian or something?"
    many of the people at breakfast were still in their costumes. we assumed that if they had slept at all, it had not been in their own rooms. i heard a girl eating behind us saying that she had decided to go sober, but then discovered that drag race sucked sober, so then went home to get stoned, and when she got back, the party was over. she also said that her boyfriend dumped her at the party because she did too many drugs. maybe that contributed to her urge to smoke up.

    personally, i'm not really a big fan of drag race. freshman year i thought the horribly pessimistic, "what if everyone in here overdosed at the same time - EMS wouldn't be able to handle it." this thought has plagued my enjoyment of this and other large parties throughout my college career. there was only one year i didn't go completely sober - we went to the dorm next door to smoke, and i didn't get high anyway.

    the whole thing is so hyped, and here i am hyping it some more. the flyers are the glossiest of them all, and there are workshops in the freshmen dorms on "being safe on drag race night". we get emails telling us the schedule and where the checkpoints will be and to make sure we lock our doors and register our guests by 5pm. the freshmen ask me, "do people really have sex in the middle of the dance floor?"
    why even bother? i think it's an incredibly unsafe event masquerading as a drag show. before i attended my first drag race, i envisioned it as a real race, like down annandale road. imagine if it were less a dark, scary, unsafe party, and more a costumed parade in broad daylight. with flags and music! your costumes, which you've spent hours preparing, wouldn't be crushed by drunk people falling into you, but rather flaunted and awarded all kinds of prizes. it could be in may - when it's warm outside and nakedness is ok and we have a queer alliance-sponsored spring fling already scheduled every year. i suppose i just don't see why they keep doing this if it's so unsafe. the only fun part is seeing everyone else's costumes, but even taht is not fun enough to make it worth it, and fun can be had in so much better ways.

yeah, so i called my dad yesterday. he said "it's been a week and i hadn't heard anything - tell me about your trip!" i know, it's been a lot longer than that since i've posted, but if you really want to know, call or IM me.

    in kind of reverse chronological order: this weekend todd and i were sick and spent most of it in bed resting. now the sick has moved all around my body - from coughing to earaches to now my stomach hurts. what's up with a head cold going into your stomach? anyway.

    before the weekend, todd's friend nicole was here. that was fun. nicole is awesome. i can't help laughing at her stories because she always starts laughing in the middle of them. plus she miraculously has time to read every movie/book/play/restaurant review, especially those in the New York Times, so she always knows what's good. we took her to foursquare and introduced her to ben popik, but i expected a lot more sparks. her quiche was yummy, too bad i bought "wine product" at the grocery store instead of real wine at the liquor store. (to get more of these events, read todd's blog.)

    so before nicole came, we were in boston. Todd and i went there for our fall break. (it was monday and tuesday of columbus day, but we left the thursday before.) we stayed with his friend chris at harvard. good old harvard. it was populated with all these preppy rich people. kind of like new york city, but smarter. the place to hang out on harvard square is the Au Bon Pain (or ABP), a french deli-ish place with chess boards built into the tables outside. there were all kinds of shops and restaurants on harvard square, which looking back on, seem like they would get old pretty quickly. chris and his friends are pretty neat tho. we went to Kendall Square a couple of times, once when i bought dancing shoes at a dollar-a-pound clothing store (which i promptly left in chris's room), and once when we went with some people to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, missed the first showing, and hung out in a deserted southwestern-themed bar drinking coffee until the next show.
    here's something interesting: Apparently the Let's Go travel guide company is run by harvard students, and chris's friend clay last summer went and wrote the guides to Romania and Moldova. have you ever heard of moldova? exactly. he had learned romanian for a girl. apparently they speak romanian in moldova too, but call it moldovan. anyway. so he goes into the tourist office in moldova and tells them that he's a tourist, and they laugh in his face. he's like the first tourist ever in moldova. so anyway.

    so the real reason for our trip to boston was not just to chill at harvard and speak moldovan, but also to visit law schools. Specifically, Boston College and Northeastern. i had had these two in my head for several months, but now i can't quite remember why. i seem to remember that both of them are know for public interest, which i want to go into, and are fairly highly ranked among law schools. but now i can't really recall where i heard that, because i can't find any public interest rankings. (if anyone knows of any resources, by the way, that rank or lists law schools that are good in public interest, i'm interested.)

    so we go to northeastern first. it's a cold, dark, rainy day, like all of them that we spent in boston. i doubt Bard would ever start a law school, but if they did, Northeastern would be it. from what i can tell, NUSL (Northeastern University School of Law) is as hippie and flaky a school as i ever might want to attend. they don't have letter grades, but rather evaluative essays written by professors. these evaluations can be up to 12 pages long. they're on a quarter system, and you spend every other quarter in an internship somewhere. that's pretty cool. but the quarters are shorter than semesters at other schools, so students in NUSL classes don't get to all the academic content that students at other law schools do. i thought that's kind of weird. but apparently the school is really liberal and activist, and many of the classes are small. that's certainly an advantage. but then i thought: this school is so similar to bard. i do enjoy bard, but i don't know that going to two similar schools is the best thing for my education. or for getting jobs later maybe? i dunno. i also spoke to the bard law professor/advisor, and he said that since lawyers learn most of what they do in their job anyway, and law school is more about how to learn it, then the internships really would teach you more than the classroom does in traditional law programs. so i dunno. seems like a good idea.
    right in the boston city, the law school at northeastern is all in one 5-story building, half of which is the library. i dunno about that. not having to go outside to get from one class to another. but we'll see. todd really hated the architecture. a lot of the places to hang out are underground.

    so then we went to visit boston college. boston college is in newton, which is a boston suburb. the campus is wooded with lawns and nice, but within walking distance to newton centre (that's what they call the downtown, i dunno) and a subway stop. i thought it was a much better location than the NUSL campus, and there were more windows and sun and outsideness. and of course, being outside of the city, the surroundings weren't as dirty. so our tour guide was apparently a fill-in for the day, and showed us around pretty dispassionately. when i asked her about the public interest programs, she said as a student interested in public interest also, that they're trying to build them up, which to me means that they don't have much of a program. and she couldn't really tell us much specifics, even tho that's her field, except about the student-run activist groups. so she basically said, "yeah, that's my field, but i dont' really know much about it except that the program's pretty weak." i was quite discouraged. then we found some other first-year students hanging around, and asked them why they chose BC. one girl was like, "well, i dunno, i also applied to Emory and Vanderbilt, but i decided to go to BC." gee, yeah, that gives me some good information about the school. none of them were really passionate about BC, about anything unique about BC, or about any reason why they chose BC over anywhere else. so we found them pretty useless and went home. todd pointed out the problem: what if all the students there are useless? i don't want to be hanging around useless people. i have since emailed BC law admissions asking, what's unique about your school? why are you proud of it? and i hope i get a good response. i really really want to like BC.

    so alan, the law professor/advisor guy here, said that no matter what school i go to, i'll get a good education and probably a good job. but what i really want is to be stimulated by my fellow students. and i don't really know how to judge schools on that criteria. i don't want to be surrounded by overachievers that are way above me, but i also don't want to be going to school with a bunch of students that are older and already established in life. i guess i want to go to school with people like me, and where are people like me going? and how, if i find a school that's not near here, can i find out anything helpful about it?

    so anyway, that's been my week.

since todd and ben's blogs are both down, i feel like someone should post something.

    so this semester so far, todd and i have made two trips to the city so far this semester and neither one of them involved getting stuck in croton. that's good.

    we're going to boston next weekend for fall break.

    i had something to post about, but i forgot what it was.

    this weekend is the LSAT. i've taken three practice tests and my score keeps going down. i keep royally fucking up one section. yesterday i went to career development to get a practice test, and this nice kid nate xeroxed one for me, but then i forgot to go get it.
    i've gotten the catalog-prospectus-thingies for both Boston College and Northeastern, and they both look absolutely awesome.

so i was proud of myself yesterday when i got my email inbox down to 11 messages. todd says he's happy he got his down to 86.

    we get lots and lots of spam every day. and virii. lots of them. tony gets the more interesting asian porn tho. i got a spam message two days in a row with the same picture of the topless girl, but in one, it said "hi, i'm katie, call this number to talk to me" and the other said "hi, i'm melissa. i just turned 18 and am eager to please. call this number to talk to me." i think it's safe to say that the poor girl's name was neither melissa nor katie.

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    i found a disk in the lost and found that i think belonged to an administrator that is now on maternity leave. it's got some juicy letters to students kicking them out of school or something.

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    so reslife gave us the option of moving into a double upstairs in my own dorm. that's cool. as long as either todd moves us mostly or i don't have to do it before the LSAT on october 5.
    but we wouldn't have to use the hub to share a single ethernet connection and todd would have a key to the dorm. and we wouldn't have to walk outside in the cold at 8:30am to the next dorm to take showers. there are several advantages.

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    so i got a phone bill the other day. apparently these days AT&T (the college campus version) is giving you not only 30 free minutes for using your personal code number (you can use them until november 30!), but 10 more free minutes for paying your bill on time. that's crazy. so on my bill, it outlines every one of my calls, and credits them one by one. yet my bill is still $13. and i only made $1.23 worth of calls. the fuckers.

it seems like everyone and their sisters are starting blogs these days. the fun part about them is that most of them are only read and commented on by real-life friends of the writer. that makes it fun. here's a current list of people i read every day:

--todd - my wonderful boyfriend. he's a great writer and puts a lot more thought into his posts than most of the others. he also has made himself a comics page which loads with our favorite comic strips every day.
--ben - also a pretty good writer. ben's blog is interesting and popular.
--adam - who started this whole blogging thing among my friends. it just took a few more before it caught on. he's going through some kind of minimalist design period right now, tho.
--tony - todd's best friend here and someone we hang out with every day. tony's a whacko. he just started.
--tina - todd's sister, also a new blog. she's a freshman at UNC Greensboro, and has taken to studying in the elevator, something i always wish i could have done.
--the freshmen - live on my hall. they're not so much interesting, but i read them because i like knowing what's in people's minds. apparently owen (posts as "o") used to live here but left bard before the year began. so this is how they keep in touch with him or something.
--joe - one of my great friends from home, he's now posting several times a day. eh, it breaks up the monotony of a big university, i guess.

sometimes i read:
--emily sauter - a year after their ill-fated quasi-romantic affair, sauter and todd had somewhat of a blogfight. basically he insulted her and then to apologize he did it again. but i think we're over it now. click her and see what all the buzz was about.
--daniel's update - daniel was a kid on my hall last year that was in a horrifying car accident last spring. his family has been posting daily updates of his progress online all summer, and now that he's up and walking around, daniel actually posted his own update yesterday. this kid is amazing. he used to keep his own blog, which you may remember from last valentine's day when it involved a fictional account of gay daniel having sex with a girl.

so the past two weeks have been insanely busy. it's like living paycheck to paycheck with bills due, but really i'm living class meeting to class meeting with reading due. and i feel like i've barely figured out what i might want to do for senior project, and i'm supposed to give a talk on that in a few weeks. like each week finishes, and i think "what? but i didn't get to do ------ that i was supposed to do by friday!" my desk is full of stuff piled on top of itself, and although we fixed my computer, it's not in its right place which makes my world feel even more cluttered.

    and we're having some sort of conflict with residence life - they want todd and i to move into a double so we're not taking up two singles and just hanging out together the whole time. whatever. i hope that goes away if i ignore it long enough.

    and the freshmen are so loud in my dorm. basically all the time. one of things that i really don't like is people talking unnecessarily loud in normal conversation. people who have eaten meals with me will notice that this is especially true in kline, where basically all the conversations meld together anyway. i adore listening, like in todd's post about grand central station, to the nice background hum of voices. but i don't really like one to stand out usually. i tend to avoid people with the louder dining hall voices, and there's one girl in my hall whose voice is extremely boisterous. i feel like i'd really like her if she just didn't talk so damned loudly.

so i'm living in the same dorm as i did last year. know what that means? that means there are new freshmen living across my hall. it's weird, this year the bard administration made freshmen's 3-week orientation (called L&T) totally dry and increased the workload for the writing class. they also decreased the amount of social activities. what this means, at least for our dorm, is that the freshmen were already a tight little circle when todd and i moved in here. they have two online photo albums, and their own blog. these are just the kids in my hall. imagine how many of these there are for freshmen all over campus, and even at the rest of the colleges in the rest of the world!

    here's a picture of the two guys that now live in todd's former room.

    anyway.

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    todd and i went to the city on saturday, just for fun. his friend who goes to harvard emailed him on thursday and said "wanna get together in nyc saturday? here's my cell phone number" or something, and so we did. we hung out with chris and his friend jim from harvard too. they're cool cats.

    i'm not sure what i think about the city. i compared it to leon botstein, the president of our college. most students think leon's their own personal lord and savior, but there are a few students who refuse to blindly believe that and remain skeptical of that botstein character. i'm kind of like that with new york city - like, yeah, it may be the greatest city in the greatest nation on earth, but whatever. i go there, it's pretty fun, but it's not shangri-la or anything. it's all dirty and everything's paved.

    mostly on our trip this time we hung out in delis and cafes and stopped by The Strand overrated used bookstore for about an hour. we saw a wall in i think grand central station with genuine "missing person" flyers which i assumed had been there for about a year. we didn't go to ground zero or anything, but that kind of made a lot of people's loss a little more real to me. there are all kinds of panel discussions and memorials and whatnot on wednesday. sometimes i want to go to them all and sometimes i just want to try to forget it and just go to class.

    todd and i also braved the croton train station, for real this time, like people are supposed to. he posted about the trip, too.

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    oh, and we just want to know one thing: his site has a sitemeter, which tells him where his viewers are on the net and from what site they came to his. there's someone from the university of iowa that comes to his site every day from a link here in my journal. we're just curious, but who are you? neither of us really know anything about the midwest, except that i think st. louis is an exciting town that i might want to work in some day. what can you tell us, u-iowan, about where you live? and why not just bookmark his site every day, why come to mine first? you're definitely welcome to read us, and we'd be fine if you totally ignore this paragraph. we're just curious.

so there's this kid here in yankee-ville new york from kentucky, and because he speaks with a heavy appalachian accent, people haven't bothered to learn his name and just call him Kentucky. but i'm not so sure his accent is genuine. i have a class with him, and when he spoke in class the other day, his accent seemed to totally disappear. like maybe he puts on the accent for his peers but goes more the Tom Brokaw route when speaking for professors. it's weird. todd and i have both noticed that we sometimes speak with southern/appalachian accents, like when he's talking with his family, or when i'm living and working in charleston. but this kid Kentucky, his accent disappears moment-to-moment. it's odd. we're skeptical and think he might just affect it for attention. i went to thailand with a kid from louisville, ky, and he didn't have an accent much more than i do. of course, i'd bet either one of us could do a pretty good deliverance impression if we'd care to try.

    so also that politics class with Kentucky was moved from a room we didn't all fit into to a larger room in the languanges building. the rooms in the languages building are built to facilitate language clarity: the ceilings are lower than the rooms in the humanities building, and their acoustics are adjusted so you can hear everything going on. the problem with that is, today like 4 people had colds and kept coughing and sneezing during class. i hardly heard much of the professor. when he was going around trying to learn names, he kept having to ask again, because "my name is " would happen. it was inconvenient.

    also, Kentucky talked again in class today, and he was back with his heavy accent again. he's weird.

i'm looking for cheap textbooks. anyone know a good website for that kind of thing? preferably, one that searches for cheap textbooks all over the web?

ok, so i'm back at school. i haven't been posting much lately, less because nothing has happened and more because everything has happened. to see a more detailed account, read todd's recent entries.

    i finished my job on the 16th, and basically since then we've been driving around west virginia packing and re-packing and now we're back at bard.

    classes start tuesday, and i get to meet with my advisor for the first time about my senior project. i'm thinking more and more about doing something on modelling instant runoff voting. it would be very interesting, but there might be nothing on it and it might be too hard. i dunno.

    this year's freshman are not as attractive as last year's, but they're really into stuff. we had an info session on student government, and like 20 of them showed up. nice.

so right now, i'm sitting at WVU leeching their wireless network. it's fun stuff :) i really need to stop borrowing other people's and get myself a laptop.

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    today, along with my LSAT prep book, i bought A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. it's about hiking the appalachian trail, but bryson is good and humorous. i also bought, on nicole's recommendation, Fraud by David Rakoff. i couldn't pass up a book by anyone that hangs out with David Sedaris and Dave Eggers. it's cynical like Sedaris, and brimming with pop-culture references that i often don't get. but the ones i do get, like when he compares a fellow inn patron to atticus finch, are exhilarating. :)

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    oh, and today my friend kiran spelled hieroglyphics like "hiroglifics." i had a hell of a time interpreting what he meant.

What to do if you've been discriminated against in housing or employment in WV

1. go to the West Virginia Human Rights Commission. there you can file a complaint within one year of the incident.

2. the HRC will investigate your claim (talk to witnesses, etc.) and determine if you have probable cause.

3. if your claim is what we call "PC'd", or determined to have probable cause, then it is
docketed with one of the HRC's judges for hearing in about a year.

4. if you can afford to pay a lawyer, get one. if you can't, your file is transferred to my office, the Civil Rights Division of the WV Attorney General's Office.

5. from there, we are your lawyers. we file discovery. we depose the other side. we mediate. sometimes we settle.

6. if we don't settle, we take you to hearing. several months later, the judge issues a final decision.

there is more about this on the HRC's page, and they have their own step-by-step process.

so this weekend, instead of going somewhere like morgantown or winston-salem, i stayed around here. hanging out with my charleston friends was ok, except that --and i'm sure you know the feeling-- sometimes being around people for too long, you just get tired of them and testy. that happened. but otherwise it was ok.
    eating out at chinese was good fun. lee, the resident aryan pentacostal kid, flirted with the heavily-acented 24-year-old petite chinese waitress. she was talking about surnames and given names, and he told her his name. she said "why you have chinese name?" then she told him that lee was such a common family name in china, he had 3 million brothers and sisters. :)

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    on saturday i read Elie Wiesel's Night. i've wanted to for a long time. it's powerful. the holocaust is weird. i've always been interested in it. horrified, of course, that people could do that. but how?
    since the book isn't all that well written, i kinda felt like the holocaust was in a fictional world far away. movies like Life is Beautiful and Schindler's List tend to bring it home more for me.

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    anyway, work is going really well even tho i still don't think they're sure what to give a good undergrad intern to do. they have all the judge final decisions since 1985 or so, and i've been assigned the task of reading them, determining the cause of action (type of discrimination and whether it was failure to hire, wrongful termination, a hostile work environment, etc.) and indexing them. which is cool because i get to read every decision the civil rights division has had in the last 17 years.

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    the only problems with my apartment are that it's too small to entertain much, there's no screen on the bathroom window, the air conditioning has stopped being cool, and there's a big-ass fly flying around.

    and the landlord is incredibly unresponsive. i'll call him to fix stuff, and sometimes i'll come home and it's fixed, but i sent him a letter about the static on my phone line 3 weeks ago and i've heard nothing. eh. at least it's mine.

so there was this girl i went to school with this year, sarah. she was a freshman work-study student for the CS department. basically she got to install redhat on like 30 workstations.

    but the main reason i liked her was that she reminded me of me.

todd.: got an email from sarah. mostly because i sent her one.
me: who's sarah?
todd.: you know the freshman who had a work-study job with the cs department? wore a lot of bandanas, smiled a lot?

    she dressed like i used to dress and had a similar look and disposition.
.
.
.
    but now she has left bard and is finishing her schooling in China.

    anyway, here's a link to her bard page, including a poem about oral fixations in lieu of anyone to kiss and some stuff she wrote while staying up all night. now that she's in china, she has a new journal on blogspot.

so i wish i could post why my job is so cool. basically i get to help sue racist and sexist bastards around the state. it's so wonderful.

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    i went to north carolina this weekend. we rented Bridget Jones Diary. it was ok. i can see why people like it, because before they get together, both romatic partners make complete fools of themselves every time they open their mouths. and i think most people can identify with that. but i can't really. my relationship is so wonderfully storybook right now that it just kind of bored me. "oh, it takes work and embarassment to be as happy as i am? eh."

    oh, and speaking of my relationship - According to todd's 7-year-old sister courtney, we're in love. here's how it went:

courtney: there's two cheerios stuck to your tray.
me: maybe they're in love.
courtney: ya'll are. [pointing and giggling ensue]

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    so we went to borders with his friend nicole, and we were talking about new books, and she's like "so what have you all heard is good?" and that's funny because i hardly hear of anything new, and todd gets all his info from her. so i'm like "what are you talking about? todd says 'so nicole says this is good, we should read it' or 'nicole says such and such movie is good, we should go see it' or we hear of a new movie, and 'i dunno if it's any good, nicole didn't mention it.'"

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    i like how there's a NASCAR race called the Tropicana 400, and along the track there's these huge bottles of juice. they just showed it on the news.

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    here are some cds i want:
--the new coon creek girls
--the eminem show
--the new cd by grandmaster flash
--the new moby cd

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    oh, and just for the information of the gentlement out there, all women's restrooms should have trash cans in every stall. it's just important.