Can't help ya there, lady

"I know, but I'm a post-generalist, and he just doesn't UNDERSTAND!" – grad student on cell phone, Harvard Yard

Hi, this is the Almighty. Do you have 5 minutes for a short phone survey?

"Fine, we'll put God in charge of the data collection." – overheard, Harvard Yard

earth to planet grad student!

[redacted, chem grad student]: yeah lets totally hang out on monday!
[redacted]: is morning or afternoon better for you?
me: well i'm busy from 9-5
[redacted]: whoa what do you have that takes that long???

distinguished   faculty   is   tools

-- educational-themed magnetic poetry, bathroom on Harvard campus

this is the quality of emails I get in medical school

Subject: "Thirty Illnesses, Sorted According to Whether or Not You Can Eat the Victims."

Yes, I "go" to "Brown" -- how'd you "guess"?

well, honesty is the best policy

"Why did I get a C?"
"Because your paper sucks!"

--Kamila, summarizing her discussions with her students

I find myself in poetry

" 'Poetry has been attacked by an ignorant and frightened bunch of bores who don't understand how it's made, and the trouble with these creeps' -- and here he's talking about professors, about people like me -- 'is they wouldn't know poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.' "

--my advisor, interrupting his reading of an Allen Ginsberg quotation to provide clarification during lecture

we can all dream

I'm going to leave academia in total and become one of those high-paid people who...makes a lot of money and...scoffs at everything.

--overheard at grad student barbecue

O Squiggly line in my eye fluid

I can't stop imagining that it's Andrew on that bed.
I think Emily Dickinson would be proud.

Oh, core section, how I miss thee.

I've yet to have a chance to get around to the readings, but.....[insert vacuous 'I' statements]...you've got a point there...

-Girl in Mike's Moral Reasoning class during section--to the professor.

A: What about "I'd like to comprehend YOUR ontology?" If someone said that to me, I'd so want to have his ontological babies.
C: If he wanted to comprehend my ontology, I'd want to have his real babies!

The woes of the medievalist

"I must be practically the only person in America who's still pissed about the Crusades." – Anne

This should be a new Disneyland Ride!

"...we want girls, and boys, to have proper protection on their coital adventures."

-My OB/GYN professor, opening a talk on contraceptive use.

Optative Subjunctive

"Would that my life were as exciting as...."

-IvyGate excerpt from a recent posting in the Yale alumni magazine. Have I ever heard this pretentious contortion of English before? No. Will I speak it in casual conversations with a lilting Oxfordian accent from now on? HELL YES!

law school nerds

Your position on the number zero betrays a deeply impoverished view/ of roundness"
- from a poem by a 3L on NYU law review

Overheard in New York...WOFIGO edition

"They ask me, 'Are you pregnant?' and I answer, 'No, I have no eggs and he has no fish. We don't have ingredients."
- my cousin talking about humorously deflecting the pressure on newly-marrieds to procreate

"I mean, look at the US soldiers in Asia. They came. And then they left."
- an academic talking about the Ameriasian children born to US servicemen and local Asian women at the AAAS conference


"They're like wandering sheep. They're all over the place, stop and look at the sky, and need a shepherd."
- my other cousin talking about my dad and his brothers. The shepherd is my aunt.

Refusing the crown

The first thing on my list of things to do is "disavow authority."

--fellow student, glancing at his notes as he prepared to lead a meeting and discussion

oh, the innocence

"I would also like to thank whoever wrote 'queenness strikes at random,' but I have been unable to discover who it was."

-- in the completely serious acknowledgments section of a 1980's paper on social insects

Div school L0lz

Prof: . . . So don't think too hard about anything because it is all vanity.

From the back of class: We still have to do the paper, right?

Later: Prof: What does an eagle do in the sky? It soars up and it drops down, and then it confuses the chicken.