Cornell, The land I will never return to...

When I was a kid I used to play with Play-doh. I'm sure you kids did too. I remember my first set came with all the colors my mom could afford: blue, orange, green and purple. And for a while, it was fun, molding it into the same crappy dinosaur/bird/car/"its a dog, but its legs fell off." The legs always fall off. After that first ten minutes though, you get bored and you find new things to do with your play-doh. Play-doh, so bright and colorful, like candy. So soft and squishy, like candy. I remember taking a piece of blue, because it was going to taste like blue, rolling it into a ball and slipping it into my mouth. The taste was awful, bland and salty. Mistake.

Being in Cornell is like eating play-doh. Really, it's a nice place to look at but it's as interesting and engaging as this leaf here.

As a result of this bland boredom, Cornelians find new ways to entertain themselves, with "hang-over" results. I had the displeasure of spending a weekend with a few members from the Cornell wrestling team: Charlie, DiSolvo, Keith, Luke, and Josh. These kids are a different breed. Sure they play the same drinking games we do (flip cup, Beirut) but that's not enough.

We played Chicken Leg the first night out. In this game, one guy chooses another guy at random and grabs on to his leg. The "chicken" will then have to continue the night with player in tow. The game ends when the "chicken" gets really angry and starts beating on the player, in which case, the rest of the team rushes in and beats down on the chicken. Laughter and applause follows. Charlie won when he rode his chicken for a good hour and a half before the beatdown. I chose not to play.

Drinking as well has become too simple and new forms have arisen. Eyeball shots are the most extreme form of alcohol ingestion I have ever seen. The belief is that one gets drunker faster if one holds a shot of vodka or any other high quality liquor to their eye. To some extent its true. The eye is the only external organ connected directly to the brain. Anyways the process involves a lot of screaming and cursing. I chose not to drink.

Overall, I'm thankful for my trip to Cornell, because I never have to go back there again. My sister graduated so really there is no reason to return.

Learn about the bomb and then learn to love it

There are two statements that I wrote on my refrigerator: "Fuck the Bitches, live life!" and "Learn about the bomb and then learn to love it." The topic of this post is the latter statement. It has loose reference to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The film tackles the absurd fears that pervaded the Cold War era. It's a comedic tale about the possibilities of mutually assured destruction for the US and USSR. I first saw it in the tenth grade in history class. This class' teacher had a penchant for introducing us to other artifacts like Nazi daggers and arm bands; he assured us that he doesn't don these items and march around home with a pair of shiny black boots.

As you know, capitalism prevailed. Apple pie beats kompot any day. Much as the threat of the atomic bomb could not be "worried away," neither can capitalism's hegemony. For the past three years, I have studied the motor of urban development. In classes like "Cities in a Global Context," "World Cultures: the African Diaspora," "The Port of New York," "Law and Urban Problems," and especially "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Metropolitan Studies," my classmates and I almost uniformly criticize neoliberal orthodoxy, bemoan the sad state of affairs of the world, and attribute it's uneven development and contested class structures to contemporary globalization. To have such peers is comforting, indeed. We endlessly discussed the developmentalist paradigm of neoliberalism, it's wholesale faith in the market, and concluded that the world's gross inequalities can be attributed to it. (Some of us had greater fervor than others).

I once ran into a classmate and we decided to grab a cup of coffee. I suggested the Starbucks in Washington Square Park. He didn't seem so conforming and expressed reservations. I'd hate to quote him from memory, but he did say something along the lines of not finding large multinational corporations agreeable.

I am working for one this summer. I am a retail management intern for Sears Holdings Corporation. It sounds either impressive or derision-worthy, depending on your perspective. I intern at a Sears store on the north side of Chicago. With five floors of shopping glory, it's among the company's largest of the Midwest. It makes me recall a term I appropriated for describing the American suburb: "shit factory." The everyday mode of living, or Heidegger's Dasein, of the average American is shaped around a culture of consumerism for the financial benefit of shareholders of stores like Sears. They shamelessly shovel shit into middle America. The suburban landscape is built with Craftsman tools; at least one in two American households has a Kenmore brand appliance; and Martha Stewart's sensibilities expanded their reach since Kmart and Sears' merger. (HA! I just realized a link between Dasein and the fact that Stewart's company is named "Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc." and her brand of products sold at Kmart is called "Martha Stewart Everyday.")

I would like to say that I am in the belly of the beast, but I am not. It would provide for a more delicious story. (Think The Devil Wears Prada.) I did, however, get an offer to be a competitive analyst intern at Sears Holdings' corporate headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, but I turned it down. A more apropos characterization is that I am a foot soldier for the beast, working for the man, the corporate man.

My job at Sears consists of attending the store's meetings, gaining insights from its management team, and following and helping associates with their daily tasks. (This weekend, I was given the particularly important task of grilling hot dogs for the associates cook out.) The goal here is to provide the intern with preparation for becoming a store manager. My assignment is to take as many notes as possible about the store's operating inefficiencies and to make an end-of-internship report about how to act on those "opportunities," in Sears parlance. Not a day goes by when I don't think about how I could turn this into a book deal or a reality-TV show.

I will never become a store manager for Sears; it's a personal goal of mine. But I do hope to attain some acumen in management from the private sector, from a Fortune 500 company. Still, I can't help but sense a certain uselessness to angling the clothes racks so that they face the customers a certain way or ensuring that we display clothing on mannequins in layers, both directives that came from the Chicagoland district manager. But then again, retail is a pennies driven industry and the extra effort may be the finishing touch necessary to get those flannel shirts off the sales floor. My most important take-away from microeconomics is to think on the margins.

And so I am learning about the bomb, it's machinations, it's ruination, it's ceaseless and ruthless drive for profit. Everyday I work with people whose lives are sustained by Sears and made joyless by Sears. I will likely see the firing of an assistant store manager, whose underperformance is notorious among the management team. I have gotten to know 70 year olds who work along side high schoolers, several of whom go to work to buy their first baby strollers. At my first store meeting I marveled at the ethnic diversity of the attendees. I then quickly realized the social stratification at work here and wondered if the average skin color of a meeting at the corporate headquarters would skew as brown. An assistant store manager admonished me to not go into retail. "You pay too much for your education for this. I'm only here because I didn't get an education above high school."

I worry that my decision to come here was a mistake, that I shouldn't have to share in this crowd's bottom-of-the-ladder existence. There is an opportunity cost for this final summer before graduation, after all. But for someone like me, who is disconcerted by the notion of working for a living, perhaps I need something like this. I must will myself to love it, or at the very least learn to deal with it. And then, maybe, fix it.

(Credit to Mary Kearl for the first photo of my dorm room refrigerator, furtively taken in my absence).