In Spanish, Isla Vista means “Island View.” To outsiders, it means skimpy outfits, warm natural light beer, and the biggest party of the year: Halloween. But to residents, Isla Vista means home. It is an extension of UCSB lecture halls including both I.V. Theatre and Embarcadero Hall. It is a collection of local shops and establishments, including food ranging from Little Asia to Woodstock’s pizza to Naan Stop and Freebirds. More than anything, Isla Vista is a contrast between parks so quiet you can hear your ipod playing from the headphones you left on the bench and parties so loud that everyone’s conversations blend into a collection of Dionysian drunkenness and childlike laughter.
Isla Vista is a mix between alternative kids hanging out at Java Jones and antsy kids waiting to get out of their lecture hall so they can get their favorite butter and cinnamon “Sex on a Bagel” special from The Bagel Shop. I.V. is a bit of a time warp; bikes are the primary form of transportation, bad 70’s and 80’s music blasts outside of Sam’s to Go and Blenders, and everyone seems to be happy. Homeless people in other cities are hooked on meth, ours are hooked on smiling and telling stories from their past. Competition here seems to be limited to the sign outside of I.V. bakery advertising for the cheapest sandwich. In one of the nicest towns on the West Coast with the unbeatable weather, lies a small park outside of Embarcadero Hall with a small windmill and a little lake for ducks. If you’re sitting on the mound enjoying your smoothie, a duck might approach you, not out of curiosity, but want of that leftover honey wheat roll from Silvergreens- the only place I know of that gives nutrition information of the food you order on your receipt.
Then there’s the not so quiet side of I.V. Topless boys on balconies yelling down to the tan skinny girls. Groups of Frat Boys running into the Keg Bottle market which seems to have the largest collection of liquor in the world. There’s the time a mad woman outside of Isla Vista theatre shouted “I am the Queen of England’s daughter” to a crowd of spectators. Then there’s the Sports “Nutrition” store for “fat loss, muscle gain, and general health.” They used to have an Ephedra Before It Sells Out (or becomes illegal) sign outside of their door. Isla Vista: in a town entirely run by twenty-year olds, what else can you expect?
Showing posts with label Lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee. Show all posts
Monday, June 4, 2007
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Book Arts
Wondering around the CCS building, you may have noticed books in a clear cabinet with pages sculpted and spiraled like ribbons for wrapping presents created in the book arts program. To find out more about “book arts,” I met with Linda Ekstrom, a CCS art professor. Noticing her bubble gum lipgloss, straight blonde hair and stylish black frames, I never thought this would be the Oz behind the creation and publication of books at CCS.
Book Arts is one of the three emphasis’s within the CCS Art Program and offers students the option to make their own short books or create art from already existing books. When I asked about book arts, she said, “You can think of book arts as one of the methods available to contemporary arts. Sometimes people think the idea of making books is not an art method. We think of a book as a cultural and symbolic object and a container of information.” Looking at one of the collaborative books the students made, it struck me how much detail they put into each one of the pages. Unique designs and styles add flavor to the pages and push the limit of the traditional black-font on white paper model. One student bound a book with thinly cut and delicately sliced bamboo pieces. She said that it might take one to three quarters to create a substantial hand-printed book. Still, many dedicated students, including 5 book arts majors, devote their free time into printing their own books.
Caitlin Macrae, a CCS student and a book arts major, opened a show on Thursday, May 24 in the CCS Art Gallery. Unlike most art galleries with signs that warn of consequences and possibly death, if you touch the pieces, she instructed to gallerygoers to “please touch everything.” By engaging the patrons with the text, she said that it “makes the art so much more tangible.” This is a way to make the words touchable. In the introduction to the gallery, she wrote that she was drawn to book arts because she felt “frustrated with and fascinated by that which wasn’t being conveyed by both the language itself and its visual display.” Her work is a response to language’s limits of expression. Her art aims to close the “spaces between what you want to say and what you can’t say” and express emotion. Her show displayed stuffed animal birds on shelves, handmade little books, and among other things, a spice rack. I asked whether she considered everything in her gallery a book and she told me, “I consider anything a book because I don’t think books [are confined to] shape, spine and pages.” “Books are amazing containers of time, space, and energy.”
Other students have toyed with the common definition of a book. Two sisters created a sort of paper doll book, inspired by their visit to their relatives as children. Others have designed books to showcase other writers poetry. However, it is not necessary to do letterpress printing. Professor Ekstrom creates sculptures from existing books. She showed me a book with a picture of a bible’s spilled out contents. It reminded me of a kid throwing up his lunch. She said that the program aims to take a cultural object, the book, and turn it into a sculptural form because “a book is already inherent with meaning.” By taking the book and altering it, spiraling its contents, it functions as a work of art. A book is unique in the sense that it has special qualities not found in other forms of art. For example, you can only see the pages of a book in time, whereas with painting or drawing, the work is available up-front in its entirety. They work with the uniqueness of this form of art to “build books based on the structures of books.”
Students in her classes have a variety of opportunities including making prints under their own press name, sending their books to shows in Chicago or Memphis, and selling their work to special collection libraries where book collectors might buy their work. The program teaches students to use their words sparingly and only when needed, like a cavemen drawing on a wall. Mrs. Macrae advises, “you don’t want to letterpress a word if it doesn’t mean something.” If you’re interested in sculpting or creating your own book, she said that the program “draws a lot of students from other majors,” especially students who “have a sense of what a book is about.” A beginning book arts class will be available in the fall for those interested.
Book Arts is one of the three emphasis’s within the CCS Art Program and offers students the option to make their own short books or create art from already existing books. When I asked about book arts, she said, “You can think of book arts as one of the methods available to contemporary arts. Sometimes people think the idea of making books is not an art method. We think of a book as a cultural and symbolic object and a container of information.” Looking at one of the collaborative books the students made, it struck me how much detail they put into each one of the pages. Unique designs and styles add flavor to the pages and push the limit of the traditional black-font on white paper model. One student bound a book with thinly cut and delicately sliced bamboo pieces. She said that it might take one to three quarters to create a substantial hand-printed book. Still, many dedicated students, including 5 book arts majors, devote their free time into printing their own books.
Caitlin Macrae, a CCS student and a book arts major, opened a show on Thursday, May 24 in the CCS Art Gallery. Unlike most art galleries with signs that warn of consequences and possibly death, if you touch the pieces, she instructed to gallerygoers to “please touch everything.” By engaging the patrons with the text, she said that it “makes the art so much more tangible.” This is a way to make the words touchable. In the introduction to the gallery, she wrote that she was drawn to book arts because she felt “frustrated with and fascinated by that which wasn’t being conveyed by both the language itself and its visual display.” Her work is a response to language’s limits of expression. Her art aims to close the “spaces between what you want to say and what you can’t say” and express emotion. Her show displayed stuffed animal birds on shelves, handmade little books, and among other things, a spice rack. I asked whether she considered everything in her gallery a book and she told me, “I consider anything a book because I don’t think books [are confined to] shape, spine and pages.” “Books are amazing containers of time, space, and energy.”
Other students have toyed with the common definition of a book. Two sisters created a sort of paper doll book, inspired by their visit to their relatives as children. Others have designed books to showcase other writers poetry. However, it is not necessary to do letterpress printing. Professor Ekstrom creates sculptures from existing books. She showed me a book with a picture of a bible’s spilled out contents. It reminded me of a kid throwing up his lunch. She said that the program aims to take a cultural object, the book, and turn it into a sculptural form because “a book is already inherent with meaning.” By taking the book and altering it, spiraling its contents, it functions as a work of art. A book is unique in the sense that it has special qualities not found in other forms of art. For example, you can only see the pages of a book in time, whereas with painting or drawing, the work is available up-front in its entirety. They work with the uniqueness of this form of art to “build books based on the structures of books.”
Students in her classes have a variety of opportunities including making prints under their own press name, sending their books to shows in Chicago or Memphis, and selling their work to special collection libraries where book collectors might buy their work. The program teaches students to use their words sparingly and only when needed, like a cavemen drawing on a wall. Mrs. Macrae advises, “you don’t want to letterpress a word if it doesn’t mean something.” If you’re interested in sculpting or creating your own book, she said that the program “draws a lot of students from other majors,” especially students who “have a sense of what a book is about.” A beginning book arts class will be available in the fall for those interested.
Robin "Avatar" Carr
I’ve always believed you can tell a lot about a person by the type of bagel they order. You can tell even more if they get flavored cream cheese. In light of this, I suggested to meet with Robin at the Bagel Café on a lazy end-of-May day. Arriving a few minutes late because I needed my Starbucks, I sadly used my credit card for my three dollar and fifteen cent order. I knew I needed to save those 3 one dollar bills for my upcoming delicious bagel. Noticing his shaggy brown hair, non-commercialized t-shirt that I forgot to ask about, and towering height, at least compared to me, I asked, “so what bagel are you getting?” I thought he told me a blueberry bagel with plain cream cheese, but I would soon find out that I was mistaken. He suggested we sit outside at the nearby park; an excellent suggestion considering the Santa Barbara sunny weather and an unusual one considering most people suggest to sit on the chairs right outside.
Sitting across from one another at a nearby bench, he whipped out his bagel which to my surprise had bruisy colored cream cheese. As I mentioned before, it takes a particular sort of character to order flavored, particularly non-strawberry flavored, cream cheese. Usually strawberry cream cheese is just for girls. But blueberry? Who orders blueberry cream cheese? Apparently Robin does- which intrigued me more than I’d like to admit. Looking around, I couldn’t help but remark how beautiful it was outside, how much I love the parks around the area, and how there is a grave merely four feet away. He nodded and agreed about the first two, then seemed to ignore- probably for the better- the last comment. After finishing our bagels and, on my part breaking the remainder of mine up into pieces on top of my grande-americano-sweetened with no room for sugar drink, we started getting down to business. Somewhere along the way talking about theoretical physics, I started taking notes about black holes. He said that, “Black holes suck everything in.” He added that you would think that because they slowly suck everything in and get bigger and bigger, then they’d eventually take over the world. To the contrary, he said, “if nothing is next to a black hole, they start to lose mass because positive matter and antimatter cancel each other out.” I couldn’t help but thinking about how much money they could make on zit cream if, as the zit grows in size, the cream diminishes it more and more until it’s gone to “the point of no return.”
He also mentioned that if you get sucked into a black hole, it would stretch your body out like that stretching torture machine in The Princess Bride. Thinking that this might be the last time to ask space questions, I had to mention, “so why isn’t Pluto a planet anymore?” I’ve seen the facebook group, actually was part of it, but never summoned the ambition to wikipedia it. He laughed and informed me that it’s an astroid from the Kuplar belt. At this point I noticed that Robin made the space stuff interesting, but I was still curious about some of his guilty pleasures. He said that he’s addicted to t.v., especially the Nickelodeon show Avatar. Actually, he said that it is currently his favorite show. I looked at him skeptically, but he defended it by saying, “No, it’s really cool.” He explained that four classical elements earth, wind, water and fire attack everyone using real Chinese martial arts moves. Apparently the airbending uses Tai Chai. I asked him how he could possibly know this and he said that he used to do martial arts. I was still skeptical he could tell what moves the animated characters were using and he added, “I actually looked it up on Wikepedia.” Without Wikepedia, he would never know that the one blind character uses Southern praying mantis Kung Fu. He said that while he watches it which he got his “friend” hooked on too, he enjoys eating the Avator fruitsnacks. At this point, I decided that I really liked Robin. He wasn’t afraid to admit embarrassing things. Next I asked if he likes any other sort of activities and he said swingdancing. Seeing his laugh and hearing him talk so passionately about Avatar, I pictured him swing dancing in his room with a blue blueberry flavored fruit snack hanging out of his mouth. Also, Nickelodeon would be on in the background.
You might think that Robin has interesting and varied interests, but he had just begun. He started talking about Middle Eastern history and military robots. Apparently, a military robot can fly around in the sky and shoot people with advisement from humans. The military is currently working on allowing them to operate on its own. However, the problem is that it can recognize people, but not distinguish friends from enemies. The implication of these UVA’s in future wars is that, if they replace soldiers, there will be no cost to start wars because no one will lose their men. Somewhere along the way of discussing- or rather him introducing me to technological advances- he notices a man on a very tall 10-15 feet unicycle peddling around the street. We were distracted and then changed the topic to books. He said that the DaVinci code is like the Scooby Doo mystery show. I mentioned some embarrassing books I’ve read and we waged a bit of a war as to the most embarrassing. I’m not sure who won, but he said that over his summer when fellow lit majors were struggling to finish The Idiot, he made a contest with his friend to see who could read the entire series of Animorphs the fastest. Rivaled only by Goosebumps, Animorphs, if you don’t recall, are those books with a cat who turns into a lion or something on the cover. I also thought that they were the books where you could flip to different pages for alternate endings, but he assured me that he thought only a few of the books were like that. He lost the contest, by the way, which was probably for the best.
Expressing that I quit reading Harry Potter by the middle of the third book, he voiced some advice for the Harry Potter fans. If you want to get it the first night it’s available, then you face a dilemma. You need to find that line between being too tired to enjoy it fully and wanting to read it as soon as possible. I hope Robin finds that line as well as the other readers. Nearly two hours after the first bite of my bagel, he points out a crater covered by a bush and said “Is that a tree or did the bush just eat that?” Sensing the burn on my backside and my itchy skirt, I was a little bit sad that I had to continue on with my day after my interview with Robin. By far one of the sweetest, most complex interesting guys I’ve met so far, I wish him the best of luck with Harry Potter and everything else.
Sitting across from one another at a nearby bench, he whipped out his bagel which to my surprise had bruisy colored cream cheese. As I mentioned before, it takes a particular sort of character to order flavored, particularly non-strawberry flavored, cream cheese. Usually strawberry cream cheese is just for girls. But blueberry? Who orders blueberry cream cheese? Apparently Robin does- which intrigued me more than I’d like to admit. Looking around, I couldn’t help but remark how beautiful it was outside, how much I love the parks around the area, and how there is a grave merely four feet away. He nodded and agreed about the first two, then seemed to ignore- probably for the better- the last comment. After finishing our bagels and, on my part breaking the remainder of mine up into pieces on top of my grande-americano-sweetened with no room for sugar drink, we started getting down to business. Somewhere along the way talking about theoretical physics, I started taking notes about black holes. He said that, “Black holes suck everything in.” He added that you would think that because they slowly suck everything in and get bigger and bigger, then they’d eventually take over the world. To the contrary, he said, “if nothing is next to a black hole, they start to lose mass because positive matter and antimatter cancel each other out.” I couldn’t help but thinking about how much money they could make on zit cream if, as the zit grows in size, the cream diminishes it more and more until it’s gone to “the point of no return.”
He also mentioned that if you get sucked into a black hole, it would stretch your body out like that stretching torture machine in The Princess Bride. Thinking that this might be the last time to ask space questions, I had to mention, “so why isn’t Pluto a planet anymore?” I’ve seen the facebook group, actually was part of it, but never summoned the ambition to wikipedia it. He laughed and informed me that it’s an astroid from the Kuplar belt. At this point I noticed that Robin made the space stuff interesting, but I was still curious about some of his guilty pleasures. He said that he’s addicted to t.v., especially the Nickelodeon show Avatar. Actually, he said that it is currently his favorite show. I looked at him skeptically, but he defended it by saying, “No, it’s really cool.” He explained that four classical elements earth, wind, water and fire attack everyone using real Chinese martial arts moves. Apparently the airbending uses Tai Chai. I asked him how he could possibly know this and he said that he used to do martial arts. I was still skeptical he could tell what moves the animated characters were using and he added, “I actually looked it up on Wikepedia.” Without Wikepedia, he would never know that the one blind character uses Southern praying mantis Kung Fu. He said that while he watches it which he got his “friend” hooked on too, he enjoys eating the Avator fruitsnacks. At this point, I decided that I really liked Robin. He wasn’t afraid to admit embarrassing things. Next I asked if he likes any other sort of activities and he said swingdancing. Seeing his laugh and hearing him talk so passionately about Avatar, I pictured him swing dancing in his room with a blue blueberry flavored fruit snack hanging out of his mouth. Also, Nickelodeon would be on in the background.
You might think that Robin has interesting and varied interests, but he had just begun. He started talking about Middle Eastern history and military robots. Apparently, a military robot can fly around in the sky and shoot people with advisement from humans. The military is currently working on allowing them to operate on its own. However, the problem is that it can recognize people, but not distinguish friends from enemies. The implication of these UVA’s in future wars is that, if they replace soldiers, there will be no cost to start wars because no one will lose their men. Somewhere along the way of discussing- or rather him introducing me to technological advances- he notices a man on a very tall 10-15 feet unicycle peddling around the street. We were distracted and then changed the topic to books. He said that the DaVinci code is like the Scooby Doo mystery show. I mentioned some embarrassing books I’ve read and we waged a bit of a war as to the most embarrassing. I’m not sure who won, but he said that over his summer when fellow lit majors were struggling to finish The Idiot, he made a contest with his friend to see who could read the entire series of Animorphs the fastest. Rivaled only by Goosebumps, Animorphs, if you don’t recall, are those books with a cat who turns into a lion or something on the cover. I also thought that they were the books where you could flip to different pages for alternate endings, but he assured me that he thought only a few of the books were like that. He lost the contest, by the way, which was probably for the best.
Expressing that I quit reading Harry Potter by the middle of the third book, he voiced some advice for the Harry Potter fans. If you want to get it the first night it’s available, then you face a dilemma. You need to find that line between being too tired to enjoy it fully and wanting to read it as soon as possible. I hope Robin finds that line as well as the other readers. Nearly two hours after the first bite of my bagel, he points out a crater covered by a bush and said “Is that a tree or did the bush just eat that?” Sensing the burn on my backside and my itchy skirt, I was a little bit sad that I had to continue on with my day after my interview with Robin. By far one of the sweetest, most complex interesting guys I’ve met so far, I wish him the best of luck with Harry Potter and everything else.
Mrs. Bit O Honey: A story in Joseph Mitchell Style
Lee Desser had straight mousy brown hair, a reserved complexion and very dirty shoes. “Shoe’s don’t say anything about a person,” she said. “And they certainly don’t say anything about me.” She came to Santa Barbara in 2007, expecting sunny days, rich friends and, above all, a tranquility that would be her excuse for her failure as a writer. She was born into a family consisting of her father, mother, and younger sister , which unbeknowengst to her sister, she held in the highest regard. As a primer expert on how to overcome psychological and behavioral problems in order to receive pets from her parents- one cat and one dog- she knew that her life would be in order. As a middle school material girl, Claire retained a dignity from prominent adults often lost with the application of makeup, addition of short skirts, and removal of nail-polish individuality. “Claire’s like one of those pretty magazine girls that you convince yourself is secretly suffering from low self-esteem in order to make yourself feel better,” she frequently brought up. “If you ask her ‘How are you today?’ you can’t help but shutter from the answer because when she replies ‘Just great,’ you can’t help but feel that she actually is, which just makes it all the more unbearable.”
In my time spent with Lee, she rarely referred to her father. When her sixth grade humanities teacher displayed charts of a rollercoaster and of a straight line and asked, “what are your relationships with people like?,” she thought ‘like a rollercoaster with the exception of my father.’ “My father would have the kind of funeral that others dream their lives for,” she said. People he had lost contact with would come to the podium and tell brief anecdotes about the time he treated their nineteen person table to an all-you-can eat brunch or how he took the role as the father figure for their son, they would say. He lived a kind, decent life; one Lee aspired both to live and avoid. His success as a person and failure as a freak intimidated and disinterested her like a solved Rubics cube. “We rarely fight, but the only time I reveal myself is when I’m having problems with my mom.”
Lee used to think that her mother secretly despised her because she gave up her career in order to have kids. “When I was little, it always seemed like my mom was pregnant, but no babies ever came out. I wonder if she was depressed or relieved,” she said. In recent years, she has accepted that when parents say they love their kids equally and couldn’t imagine their lives without them, they’re full of bull. “From what I can fathom, parents are a lot like kids, just older and less curious.” Her dream is to live in a Alzheimer’s retirement home on Ocean and Montana.
Lee loves her family and hopes that one day her kids will write a favorable short biography of herself. She hopes that she doesn’t die of type two diabetes from eating too much candy bit-o-honey which can be found at K-Mart.
In my time spent with Lee, she rarely referred to her father. When her sixth grade humanities teacher displayed charts of a rollercoaster and of a straight line and asked, “what are your relationships with people like?,” she thought ‘like a rollercoaster with the exception of my father.’ “My father would have the kind of funeral that others dream their lives for,” she said. People he had lost contact with would come to the podium and tell brief anecdotes about the time he treated their nineteen person table to an all-you-can eat brunch or how he took the role as the father figure for their son, they would say. He lived a kind, decent life; one Lee aspired both to live and avoid. His success as a person and failure as a freak intimidated and disinterested her like a solved Rubics cube. “We rarely fight, but the only time I reveal myself is when I’m having problems with my mom.”
Lee used to think that her mother secretly despised her because she gave up her career in order to have kids. “When I was little, it always seemed like my mom was pregnant, but no babies ever came out. I wonder if she was depressed or relieved,” she said. In recent years, she has accepted that when parents say they love their kids equally and couldn’t imagine their lives without them, they’re full of bull. “From what I can fathom, parents are a lot like kids, just older and less curious.” Her dream is to live in a Alzheimer’s retirement home on Ocean and Montana.
Lee loves her family and hopes that one day her kids will write a favorable short biography of herself. She hopes that she doesn’t die of type two diabetes from eating too much candy bit-o-honey which can be found at K-Mart.
Simon Says: An Interview with a Fourth Year CCS Math Student
To contact a fellow undergraduate, I did what any other college student would do: I searched for him on Facebook. Immediately, I noticed a peculiarity to his profile. Unlike most students who have a main photo of them laughing under the influence of one or another or many other illegal substances, his profile picture featured math formulas. His web page further confirmed my speculation: he loved math. A majority of students have quotes from Anchorman, Napolean Dynamite, or Old School under their “favorite quotes” section, but he had one from, gasp, not a teen comedy. The quote by Robert Heinlein reads, "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." His personal philosophy reveals that “I don’t necessarily consider myself an optimist, but I always do math (and everything else, for that matter) in (fountain) pen. I can't bear to admit that mistakes are inevitable, so I strive for nothing short of perfection.” I thought, “Anyone who does their math homework in pen, I must meet.”
We planned to meet on the CCS lawn and, shortly before the interview, I momentarily feared we would miss each other’s tracks because, according to Simon, he does not use phones. Questions like “what if I got the time wrong,” or “what if my class gets out late and he thinks I ditched him” and “I hope I recognize who he is” flew in and out of my brain. Later, it occurred to me that if he doesn’t use phones, my thousand worries about missing an appointment probably never even occurred to him or at least, never bothered him. I spotted him sitting under the shade of a tree reading a book. Brown shaggy hair, blue eyes, Landsend sweater and jeans: this didn’t seem like a guy who, I would later found out, seriously considered dropping out of high school.
We relocated to a room inside a CCS Math class, one I didn’t know existed. I asked him the question I knew he, as well as many other CCS students had heard a million times before, “Why CCS?” He told me that Charles Ryavic used to hold a competition for high school students as a recruitment tool. “My sophomore year of high school, Charles Ryavic invited all the people that qualified. I met him and he started showing me problems and said all the problems were easy and I should be able to do them, but they were really hard and I didn’t know how do any of them. He had super geniuses [do the problems] and managed to think I was one of them.” Charles Ryavic became his mentor and eventually led him to choose CCS. During his orientation, Mr. Ryavic told him that “All of the undergraduate classes were useless. I figured he was probably crazy, but I followed his advice.” For Simon, choosing CCS turned out to be one of the best choices in his college life. “Honestly, it was one of exactly three good decisions I had in college.” He pauses for a moment, “I can’t remember any time after that I took anyone’s advice on anything.”
Next, I asked him about his high school experience and how it compared to college and he said that he came from a public high school that he didn’t, to say the least, particularly enjoy. Senior year, he came very close to dropping out at the advice of Mr. Ryavic. “When I was a junior, I won the advanced competition and he told me to not bother with my senior year of high school. I hated my high school and I seriously considered dropping out, but I decided I could probably tolerate it without any more degeneration.” When it finally came time to decide where to attend college, Simon faced two choices: CCS or Berkeley. “I had a choice between CCS and Berkeley. I wasn’t really looking forward to going to Berkeley and sitting through boring math classes. I thought I might be able to get around that by coming here.” I inquired, “Why not L and S then?” He said, “They don’t expect L and S students to take advanced classes; it’s not encouraged. I looked at the prerequisites and it was horrifying.”
Earning straight A’s freshman year wasn’t Simon’s primary concern. He started taking graduate level classes immediately upon his entrance to college. “I did horribly in the graduate classes, but I learned so much. I didn’t do a lot but study freshman year.” He then adds that you could argue that all four years he hasn’t done a lot but study. However, outside of classes, he is a member of the math and chess club and plays the piano and cello. In the future, he plans to attend Stanford Graduate school and become a mathematician possibly working on algebraic number theory, which he says, particularly interests him. Before the interview ended, I needed to ask one final question: does he really do his math homework in pen? He laughed and said, “I write everything in fountain pen or dip pen if I want to write something that looks nice.” But for math homework he uses TeX. “It’s a typesetting program that’s clearly text based [to make] things look professional.”
We planned to meet on the CCS lawn and, shortly before the interview, I momentarily feared we would miss each other’s tracks because, according to Simon, he does not use phones. Questions like “what if I got the time wrong,” or “what if my class gets out late and he thinks I ditched him” and “I hope I recognize who he is” flew in and out of my brain. Later, it occurred to me that if he doesn’t use phones, my thousand worries about missing an appointment probably never even occurred to him or at least, never bothered him. I spotted him sitting under the shade of a tree reading a book. Brown shaggy hair, blue eyes, Landsend sweater and jeans: this didn’t seem like a guy who, I would later found out, seriously considered dropping out of high school.
We relocated to a room inside a CCS Math class, one I didn’t know existed. I asked him the question I knew he, as well as many other CCS students had heard a million times before, “Why CCS?” He told me that Charles Ryavic used to hold a competition for high school students as a recruitment tool. “My sophomore year of high school, Charles Ryavic invited all the people that qualified. I met him and he started showing me problems and said all the problems were easy and I should be able to do them, but they were really hard and I didn’t know how do any of them. He had super geniuses [do the problems] and managed to think I was one of them.” Charles Ryavic became his mentor and eventually led him to choose CCS. During his orientation, Mr. Ryavic told him that “All of the undergraduate classes were useless. I figured he was probably crazy, but I followed his advice.” For Simon, choosing CCS turned out to be one of the best choices in his college life. “Honestly, it was one of exactly three good decisions I had in college.” He pauses for a moment, “I can’t remember any time after that I took anyone’s advice on anything.”
Next, I asked him about his high school experience and how it compared to college and he said that he came from a public high school that he didn’t, to say the least, particularly enjoy. Senior year, he came very close to dropping out at the advice of Mr. Ryavic. “When I was a junior, I won the advanced competition and he told me to not bother with my senior year of high school. I hated my high school and I seriously considered dropping out, but I decided I could probably tolerate it without any more degeneration.” When it finally came time to decide where to attend college, Simon faced two choices: CCS or Berkeley. “I had a choice between CCS and Berkeley. I wasn’t really looking forward to going to Berkeley and sitting through boring math classes. I thought I might be able to get around that by coming here.” I inquired, “Why not L and S then?” He said, “They don’t expect L and S students to take advanced classes; it’s not encouraged. I looked at the prerequisites and it was horrifying.”
Earning straight A’s freshman year wasn’t Simon’s primary concern. He started taking graduate level classes immediately upon his entrance to college. “I did horribly in the graduate classes, but I learned so much. I didn’t do a lot but study freshman year.” He then adds that you could argue that all four years he hasn’t done a lot but study. However, outside of classes, he is a member of the math and chess club and plays the piano and cello. In the future, he plans to attend Stanford Graduate school and become a mathematician possibly working on algebraic number theory, which he says, particularly interests him. Before the interview ended, I needed to ask one final question: does he really do his math homework in pen? He laughed and said, “I write everything in fountain pen or dip pen if I want to write something that looks nice.” But for math homework he uses TeX. “It’s a typesetting program that’s clearly text based [to make] things look professional.”
My Problems with UCSB
The Great Gatsby partying
The Dorian Grey hedonism
The absence of seasons which denote the passage of time
The realization that it is entirely possible to go for months without talking to a person of color
The fact that you could party before your finals and it will not drastically effect your performance
The lack of alternative scene
The truth that Freebirds is not that good (Am I the only one?)
The empty library
The lack of studying, researching, and overall learning
The large impersonal, anxiety ridden lecture halls
The people sleeping in the large impersonal anxiety ridden lecture halls
The fake tans
The schools “diversity” limited to small non-blonde groups
The eating disorders
The reporting in a town with no news
The sameness
The faint smell of marajuana always circulating in the halls
The professors who try so hard, but so few students appreciate it
The T.A’s eyeing you because they know you’re the only one who does the reading
The drunkenness
The pretend drunkenness
The larger selection of Paul Frank merchandise than books at the UCEN
The frequency of month-long relationships
The So-Cal/ Nor-Cal conflict
The provocatively posed Facebook pictures
The dining commons opening at 10:30 a.m. on weekends (Does no one wake up before that?)
The quarter filled lecture halls for a full class
The cry for a challenge
The Dorian Grey hedonism
The absence of seasons which denote the passage of time
The realization that it is entirely possible to go for months without talking to a person of color
The fact that you could party before your finals and it will not drastically effect your performance
The lack of alternative scene
The truth that Freebirds is not that good (Am I the only one?)
The empty library
The lack of studying, researching, and overall learning
The large impersonal, anxiety ridden lecture halls
The people sleeping in the large impersonal anxiety ridden lecture halls
The fake tans
The schools “diversity” limited to small non-blonde groups
The eating disorders
The reporting in a town with no news
The sameness
The faint smell of marajuana always circulating in the halls
The professors who try so hard, but so few students appreciate it
The T.A’s eyeing you because they know you’re the only one who does the reading
The drunkenness
The pretend drunkenness
The larger selection of Paul Frank merchandise than books at the UCEN
The frequency of month-long relationships
The So-Cal/ Nor-Cal conflict
The provocatively posed Facebook pictures
The dining commons opening at 10:30 a.m. on weekends (Does no one wake up before that?)
The quarter filled lecture halls for a full class
The cry for a challenge
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
