Job/soul-searching
I remember it well. Back then, I was not the anxious one. I too sauntered casually about campus. I too thought little of the looming future. I too lived the halcyon days of youth, carefree as a lark.
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I remember it well. Back then, I was not the anxious one. I too sauntered casually about campus. I too thought little of the looming future. I too lived the halcyon days of youth, carefree as a lark.
There’s something terrifying about having a human body. At least I always thought so—I was clumsy and bloody-kneed at age 7, pubescent and self-conscious at age 12 and squeamish in anatomy class at age 17.
Finally, it’s happened. Hi there winter, reintroduce yourself to North Carolina. To be honest, the old Southern belle’s not very glad to see you—you two don’t meet for all that long—and she much prefers autumn’s crisp, vigorous afternoons to your icy, sickly nights.
I really dislike Harry Potter. Really, really.
Fabio Berger and Tito Bohrt own matching scooters. The sophomores often ride around campus together because scooting, they explain, allows for faster commuting. But these blockmates have more in common than just a superior mode of transport. As we sat on the patio outside von der Heyden Pavilion, Fabio and Tito talked with the same animated energy, jumping in at the end of each other’s sentences. They inhabit the same brain wave and maintain an easy flow of ideas.
How much meaning can you squeeze into four letters? Obscenities aside, here’s an example: ENTP. If you’re in the know, then I just gave you several clues about how I function in the world. You can now tell that I’m argumentative and chatty, that I love abstractions and that I find it almost impossible to make solid decisions.
What made headlines late last week? What great news story caught the attention of our young generation? Certainly we were all talking about the unveiling of the Republican Party’s “Pledge to America.” Or perhaps the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments at the United Nations General Assembly caused 33 delegations—including the U.S. and all 27 members of the European Union—to walk out. Or maybe even the fishy business that transpired between China and Japan on the East China Sea.
Above: the subject line of an e-mail I sent 20 people in my address book last Thursday night at 9:25 p.m. I imagined my contacts in various and sundry locales as my virtual message landed in their respective inboxes and waited to be read by impatient eyes.
Have you ever felt completely ordinary about something, only to discover that it’s actually an alarming abnormality worthy of a 7,500-word news article lamenting the current state of society?
Imagine this: On your extensive summer travels in Europe (right after you helped the hungry in Uganda and right before you studied abroad in Madrid, you worldly, do-gooder, stereotypical Duke student, you), you find yourself in a little city called Paris. You spot a University of Paris student nonchalantly nibbling on a piece of brie on the Métro and use your French-English pocket dictionary to ask him about places to go in the city.
If the academic year is the time for working hard, then it follows that summer should be the time for hardly working.
In economics, the endowment effect refers to an illogical quirk of human behavior that runs contrary to assumptions of rationality. In academic jargon, the endowment effect occurs when an economic agent’s willingness to pay for a good does not equal his willingness to accept an offer to sell the same good. In layman’s terms, it means that we all like our stuff way more than we should.
It’s been rainy the past few days. Clouds hug the city skyline, oftentimes convincing us of nightfall even as we amble outside after an early lunch. The eight of us Duke volunteers form a cluster shuffling along the city streets and leave our umbrellas dripping near the door of our shared multiple-bed hostel room.
A Chinese youth knelt beside a grasshopper, cupping his hands to ease it into the neck of a dusty plastic bottle. Looking back over his shoulder, he offered us a wink to make sure we knew to keep watching.
Last week, when you were passing the trees that line the West Campus Plaza on your way to lunch, did you catch a glimmer of silver out of the corner of your eye? While sitting on the C-1 on the way back from class, did you spot a humanoid figure dangling from the handrail above your head? Or did a miniature soldier guarding the beverage-containers recycling bin perhaps give you a moment’s pause as you walked out of Perkins after a night of studying?
Hello, my name is Shining Li, and I’m a recovering neuro-aholic.
One afternoon when I was eight years old and safely ensconced in the suburban apartment of my childhood, I found myself disenchanted with a rerun of “Doug.” On my way to change the channel on our television set, I stepped on a yellow-jacket that lay dying on the living room floor.
A startling revelation as I sit in my room, door shut, headphones securely in place, removed to my personal corner of campus and reduced to my own fleeting thoughts about life, the universe and everything:
Bad news, guys. It turns out that Thomas Hobbes was right. The life of man is “nasty, brutish and short” after all. In fact, it might actually be nastier, shorter and more brutish than we previously feared possible.
Every time I go home, I feel as though I’ve entered a different world entirely.