Back

Just checking in.

I know I haven’t been here in a while- I can’t really be that casual. Perhaps this should have the air of a return, with long suffering motley crew no less; a grieving ostensible widow and some shocked relatives. Teary moments ensue. Unfortunately, I can’t trust to that kind of an ending—or beginning--because nobody reads this anyways.

Regardless, I’m back and hopefully here to stay. A great deal has happened since the last post—nearly a year ago—and I won’t bother trying to cover it with the usual disgusting thoroughness and scintillating pretension. But I will mention that I got into Yale-that is context, by the way, not braggadocio-and that my twin did as well.

So, I figured that I might reinvent this, make it a frank account of freshman year, but I have neither candor nor anything particularly revealing to say. I am a quiet person, I prefer the predictable and cautious and would be therefore unlikely to suggest anything hitherto unknown about the university experience. Besides, there’s always Tom Wolfe.

Instead this is just as the title suggests and has always suggested- the Chronicle of an Overachiever.

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Yale, I think, is trying to pique our anticipation for September by sending us innumerable mail outs. Everything from our room assignments to a linen catalogue, it’s like a couple of steps; you feel like you’re coming closer to university with each letter, with each banality and triviality out of the way.

One of the more interesting steps sent loyally along was instructions for activating our e-mails- and The Facebook. For those not well versed in college jargon, The Facebook—before it assumes the aura of a nameless entity, it can more tangibly found at http://www.thefacebook.com--is a compilation of the profiles of college-going people across the nation (you can only really access the profiles of your friends or those at your own college). You can “friend” people (or “facebook” them as the lexicon goes), which means little else then having a link posted on your profile. Really, the entire setup seems to be aimed at aspiring philanderers; they can figure out how to access those who catch their fancy by finding friends they have in common (facebook even maps it out for you) or courses they both attend.

Anyways, my profile is noticeably sparse; I don’t really buy into it. It seems like another way to postpone actual contact. Also, we all know how much of a philanderer I am, right? So I used it for a more benign purpose- to get an idea of what courses other Biomedical Engineering majors took freshman year.
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Finally, I can read.

For two years I've been entirely engrossed in getting my IB Diploma. Now that high school is over, and I satisfactorily passed said diploma (by the way, I got 100%-45 out of 45! I haven't been able to enthuse about this to anyone except Twin and I think he's tired of hearing me say it) I can actually spend some time doing something else other than studying or stressing out, which were my primary occupations hitherto.

So, in the space of a month and a bit, I've read five amazing books:

“The Club Dumas” by I-forget-who: A crazy, intertextual thriller/mystery- great for those who are of the literature-latin mold (I’m not, so a lot of the Dumas and Stendhal references flew right by me). The story centers around an unlikely protagonist named Corso; a veteran, middle aged, book-hunter who finds himself in a very peculiar plot involving occult worship and real-life characters from “The Three Musketeers”. The end is great, the writing is marvelous and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson: Strongly recommended to anyone who is literate. I don’t normally do non-fiction, but the cover of this one was particularly attractive (I’m judgmental). I started it out of mild curiosity and literally couldn’t put it down until I had finished reading the last of the copious endnotes. The writer- apparently one of the world’s most “beloved” according to the back-undertakes a prodigious task: to write about most of known science. He takes you on a lucid and witty journey through centuries of science, deftly widening your perspective and keeping your interest constantly engaged. He’s also hilarious- his well-written caricatures of some of science’s more eccentric figures made me laugh out loud.

“Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen: For a debut book (this was Austen’s first), “Sense and Sensibility” is remarkable. Although it takes a while to adapt to the British style of writing (involving lots of semicolons, dashes and stoic narration), the story is interesting, not predictable and actually quite funny. If you’ve read it, you should know that Mr. Palmer is my favorite character. Such charming sang-froid! Anyways, I’m going to move on to “Pride and Prejudice” which is supposed to be better.

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” by J.K. Rowling: It was OK. I don’t know; I didn’t like it as much as the other ones. I didn’t find it as well-written, either. I think she’s losing her touch. I won’t reveal the end, but I will note that I hated it.

“The Human Stain” by Philip Roth: Now, unequivocally a part of the Roshan Canon. It was brilliant and mind-blowing. Not only is Roth an amazing writer (his prose is erudite but it is so discerning that you can’t stop reading his sentences, if only to marvel at their construction) but the plot itself is appealing. The setting is 1998, a year fraught with outrage over Clinton’s impropriety in the Oval Office. Against this backdrop, Roth describes the past and present of Coleman Silk, a classics professor at the fictional Athena College. I don’t think I’ll say anything else more to give the plot away- just read it.
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This is really long, so I think I’ll post the rest later on.