The pair teaches Introduction to American Sign, a class you may have stumbled upon on CAESAR as CMN 396-22: Student-Organized Seminar. According to Angela, a Communication student, and Emilie, who’s in Weinberg, they never intended to play professor to the 16 students who show up to Frances Searle 3-220 every Monday and Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. Rather, Angela and Emilie have been the co-presidents of the American Sign Language Club for two years, where they spread awareness about the language, deaf culture and practice signing.

But the group’s chief goal has been Northwestern’s recognition of American Sign Language as an official language. Angela and Emilie’s lobbying efforts won them a seminar class sponsored by the Communication Sciences and Disorders department that students can take for elective credit — and, oh yeah, that Angela and Emilie teach.

Next quarter, Medill sophomore Tania Karas will be teaching the class (officially, the instructor has been and is Chuck Larson), but the founding duo says they’ll definitely be around to help Tania out. But in the meantime, they’ve got a final exam to plan. Hear from Angela and Emilie themselves on what it takes to be a teacher, and why bored-looking students isn’t necessarily a bad sign (really!).

Full disclosure: Tania Karas writes for North by Northwestern.

Parts of Sheridan Road were closed this afternoon due to an accident involving a motorcyclist, the university reports.

The accident occurred at approximately 9:26 a.m., according to Commander Tom Guenther of the Evanston Police Department, when a northbound motorcycle collided with a pickup truck on the 1900 block of Sheridan Road. A Major Crash Accident Team responded to the scene, and sent the motorcycle driver to the hospital for treatment.

“The crash is currently under investigation and the motorcycle driver’s condition is unknown at this time,” Guenther said

As of 10:12 a.m., parts of Sheridan were to remain closed for about two hours to allow an investigation of the accident. During that time, traffic, including shuttle buses, was rerouted between Foster Street and Chicago Avenue.

Sheridan Road re-opened some time between 1:15 and 1:30 p.m., according to University Relations Vice President Al Cubbage.

SESP junior Alex Sims had just crossed the street onto Sheridan from Emerson when she heard the collision of the motorcycle with a green pickup truck.

“It was really, really loud…then I saw the motorcycle fall down, pretty hard. The helmet broke, there was blood splattering, and yeah, I kind of panicked,” said Sims, who was walking by another female student who called 911.

“The police showed up right away, but it took a while for the ambulance to show up. The guy on the motorcycle was down for almost five minutes,” Sims said. “It was pretty scary because we weren’t sure how fast they would get there, and he wasn’t moving.”

Cubbage said that according to University Police, the motorcyclist injured in the accident does not appear to have a connection to Northwestern, and he had not received any such information about the driver of the pickup truck.
Megan Friedman and Chloe Benoist contributed reporting.

On Jan. 25, we published an article titled “The worst food in Evanston.” The article details some of the unhealthiest items on the menus of restaurants, cafes and fast-food stops in Evanston. In this week’s issue of The Weekly, the “Confirmed and Denied” segment and an appended comment from The Weekly’s Editor-in-Chief suggested that there were several issues, with the story and within our editorial board. We would like to address them at this time.

Perhaps most troubling, and urgent to clarify, was the allegation that North By Northwestern editors were removing comments on the article that suggested plagiarism and linked to the article titled “The 20 Worst Foods in America” in Men’s Health Magazine. The allegation that editors removed these comments is not, and has never been, the truth. After a thorough investigation, we discovered that our content management system, WordPress, had a new glitch that caused all comments containing one or more hyperlinks to be automatically removed from public view. Because WordPress removed the comments seconds after they were posted, the editorial board was never aware the comments existed. After reading The Weekly’s story, we went into our content management system and found the moderated comments. We are currently working to fix this glitch in WordPress. In the meantime, the comments have been made visible. We apologize if you were misled about the integrity of our editorial board.

Now that this has been brought to our attention, we’d like to address the rest of the allegations individually:

Calorie-counting is a common topic in lifestyle journalism, one that our writer eagerly explored. We hope the intent of the article was clear: the author set out to identify notably unhealthy food at popular establishments.

However, an important attribution that should have been made was not. In the original article, Chili’s Texas Cheese Fries with Jalapeno-Ranch Dressing was called the calorie equivalent of “16 Taco Bell Crunchy Tacos.” This was originally printed in Men’s Health, and we should have properly credited it in the article. The writer says she saw this phrase on several blogs while conducting her research, and that she did not realize it was the exclusive idea of Men’s Health. We deeply regret that we did not catch this error before publication, and apologize to Men’s Health and our readers.

The Weekly’s “Confirmed and Denied” segment made three other allegations about the integrity of the piece. First, it pointed out that Chipotle’s Chicken Burrito was listed in Men’s Health as an unhealthy item. Second, the Weekly noted that Jamba Juice’s Chocolate Moo’d Power Smoothie was also listed in Men’s Health. We understand why this may raise an eyebrow, and we spoke with our writer, who thoroughly outlined the steps she took and the Web sites she visited when choosing her “worst food” items. Because we believe our writer did original research, we have decided that this is not plagiarism, but an example of both our writer and the Men’s Health writer doing proper research.

Third, The Weekly alleges that a sentence from our article comparing the Chocolate Moo’d Power Smoothie to a milkshake is similar to the description from “The 20 Worst Foods in America” in Men’s Health. We have reviewed this allegation and, having seen this smoothie/milkshake joke used often on the Internet and in common descriptions of the item, we have decided that this comparison was cliché, but it was not plagiarism.

After speaking with Loren Ghiglione, the Richard A. Schwarzlose Professor of Media Ethics at Medill, we have decided to remove the “16 Taco Bell Crunchy Tacos” comparison and recognize it as plagiarism. The rest of the article shall remain on North By Northwestern appended with an editor’s note. We have fact checked the article again, and believe the article contains no more statements of questionable origin.

To reiterate, there were no efforts to hide or delete critical comments. North By Northwestern is open to all sorts of comments, including those criticizing our articles. For example, in the Nov. 19, 2008 article titled “Josh Schwartz: manufacturer of perfect men, ruiner of lives,” commenters suggested that the topic was too similar to writings by Chuck Klosterman. Not only did the comments remain untouched, but the editorial board removed comments by the author defending her work, as we expected it and still expect it to stand on its own.

We’d like to share our comment policy with you. Article I, Section A, of the North By Northwestern Policies and Procedures reads as such:

The [Editor-in-chief] or a managing editor may remove comments from the site at their discretion. Grounds for removal include, but are not limited to:

-Posts that specifically reference the author, but not the content, of a story may be deleted.
-No personal attacks on the writer will be accepted.
-Defamation, libel, racial slurs and other offensive material will be removed.

We know that when you read North By Northwestern, you expect fair, accurate and truthful information, and we are 100 percent committed to delivering that to you. Thank you for the trust you put in us. We again apologize for lapses on our part, and we’re glad we had this chance to clear up any confusion surrounding the article in question. And of course, we’d like to thank the staff of The Weekly for notifying us of these lapses, though we wish that they had contacted us for comment before publication.

Sincerely,
Lisa Gartner
Editor-in-chief

Several buildings on South and Central Campus lost power Wednesday afternoon due to an underground electrical vault explosion near Clark Street.

The explosion occurred at approximately 12:25 p.m. in an alley near 555 Clark St. No injuries were reported and there was no damage to buildings, University Relations Vice President Alan Cubbage said.

Power was restored to all affected buildings by 4:14 p.m., Commonwealth Edison spokesperson Pam Anton said, although she could not confirm that there was an explosion in the underground electrical vault. According to a university statement, the campus building at 1800 Sherman Ave. will remain closed due to equipment problems related to fire safety.

Many campus buildings lost power Tuesday night at 11 p.m. due to the failure of a Commonwealth Edison power line, according to Cubbage.

Anton said that today’s outage was caused by problems with “a backup circuit that was affected from the restoration effort of last night’s outage.”

Tuesday night’s power loss hit South Campus buildings such as 1835 Hinman, PARC and East and West Fairchild, as well as buildings further north such as SPAC. Power was restored by about 12:30 a.m.

“We work to restore our customers and we can’t anticipate that those things will happen in the future,” Anton said.

Amanda Litman contributed reporting.

Horses.

It’s August 1939, and as Italy is invading Albania and the New York World’s Fair opens, horses attached to steel chains are pulling the Dearborn Observatory out of the ground. Northwestern is building something big; this means compromise. To make room, the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house is relocated north and the original Patten Gym, dedicated in 1910, is demolished. Horses drag the Dearborn Observatory 664 feet southeast. In place of these buildings, one of the largest academic structures in the world goes up. You may have heard of it: the Technological Institute.

Now time rolls back to 1914, and you’re standing outside of Deering Library. It’s burning down. But it’s not Deering Library — it’s Heck Hall, and no one can say with certainty what happened, except for whispers of “mice and matches.” The next year, Harris Hall is built and ground is broken on the Shakespeare Garden. Eighteen years later, Deering Library goes up — Orrington Lunt Library of 1894 becomes Lunt Hall — and everyone forgets about Heck Hall.

And time passes.

“And the rest is history”

Dearborn Observatory was moved by horses to make room for Tech. Photo courtesy of University Archives.

On Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008, the university released a 50-year plan to structurally reorganize campus: reshape the lakefill, demolish dorms, fraternities and academic buildings, and move Lunt Hall. The Campus Framework Plan is being hailed by the university as “probably the biggest” long-term plan in its history, citing the need for a more coherent, homogeneous campus environment.

Kevin Leonard, the acting university archivist, has spent more than 28 years working in the Northwestern archives. He says that, while the Campus Framework Plan is “absolutely” the most ambitious campus reorganization project in Northwestern history, it’s certainly not the first. Structural change has been a part of campus since its inception, when Clark Hinman, as legend goes, first caught sight of the lake’s waves glimmering through the oak trees. “He said, ‘Goodness, this is special,’” Leonard says. “And eureka, they tossed their hats in the air and they found it, and the rest is history.”

Locations in the Loop and Jefferson Park were heavily considered, but Clark Hinman — Northwestern’s first president, who died before a single building was erected — felt strongly about moving into an area where the school had room to grow.

The first building was a very modest wooden structure that came to be known as Old College. Eventually, it would be struck by lightning during a summer storm in 1973 and when an ensuing investigation of the water damage would reveal dangerous rot, Old College would be unceremoniously torn down as a safety hazard. But right now it’s 1865, and Old College sits, unassuming, at the corner of Hinman and Davis.

A sketch of Old College, courtesy of the University Archives.

“The campus grew incrementally as the university expanded its enrollment and secured its financial footing,” Leonard says. “When they were able to afford it, they built University Hall.”

University Hall was crafted out of hard stone, not soft wood, a sign that Leonard calls “a testament to the university’s endurance.” Old College’s timber frame was scuttled across Evanston to the location of present-day Fisk, then moved north to make way for the journalism building — so while physically moving Lunt in accordance with the Campus Framework Plan has made many scratch their heads, it’s not without precedent.

But campus kept growing: College Cottage in 1872, the women’s college in 1874, a gymnasium and a Life-Saving Station in 1876, and so on and so very forth. If you don’t recognize these names, don’t worry. They were torn down and built over long ago, or else reimagined and renamed. Buildings go up, and buildings go down.

“It would force people to bump into each other”

The Campus Framework Plan is built on the idea that our university is fragmented: a North-South divide prevents the physical campus from being harmonic, and thus from bringing that cohesion to students; the idea that Bobb-McCulloch Hall is not Shepard Residential College, and the Technological Institute is not the McCormick Tribune Center.

“That separation goes back to the 19th century, when there were zones of influence clearly defined,” Leonard says. “A lot of it relates to Willard Hall (now the Music Administration Building); that was the women’s college, which emphasized things like fine arts and music. The arts and humanities were concentrated in one zone because of women…and the North Campus with the hard sciences and engineering, there was time when it was essentially male.”

The physical divide stretched a mile across campus when the women’s quadrangle was dedicated in 1926. “There was a center of gravity there,” Leonard says, while central campus was reserved for general purpose buildings like the library and the student center.

But if the university’s layout contributed to the fragmenting of campus, it’s changed its tune in recent years. It built the Block Museum to keep students who seek art in Chicago engaged in the Northwestern community, and started the residential college program to create pockets of common interest among students.

“In past years, campus has tried to cluster students. Now, it’s trying to build a community, more so,” Leonard says, pointing to the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as an example of an effort to cut across academic disciplines, and even the very structure of Crowe Hall.

“Crowe was built to physically allow more interaction between members of departments,” Leonard says. “Crow Café wasn’t just a food thing. It was a very conscious recognition, that it would force people to bump into each other more often.”

The Campus Framework Plan hedges this priority: “crescents” of open space promise to blur the lines between campus zones, and several student-gathering places are outlined in the proposal, such as an area of steps by the lakefill. The plan politely would like you to picture yourself there.

“There will be a price to pay with the local community”

Physical change has always been at the forefront of Northwestern’s growth. It may not even be a matter of having enough beds for students, Leonard says: Campus expansion is driven by technological and scientific growth, which requires facilities.

“[Northwestern] is on par with major research institutions of the world, and there have been so many changes in research, particularly in life sciences and physical sciences, that buildings are needed,” Leonard says. “Take nanotechnology, for example. You have to keep up with trends and development in research. You need teaching and research space.”

The rocks surrounding the lakefill were brought in on a barge to reinforce the lake’s new borders. Photo courtesy of the University Archives.

Next week, the proposal will begin to circulate in both the Northwestern and Evanston communities for open discussion, and the the university committee hopes to take that feedback and finalize the plan this year. The most reasonable event in history to gauge the community’s reaction with would be the construction of the lakefill in the early 1960s, Leonard says.

“There was resistance in some quarters, because what they were doing was dredging out Burnham Harbor in Indiana and bringing fill up here. The issue was hashed out in the newspapers, but students were generally favorable, because they hadn’t developed that whole counter-cultural shtick where people of a certain age will almost automatically oppose the policy of an institution.”

Students have supported most campus expansion in the past, helping to fundraise for the women’s quadrangle and especially helping to garner support for the 1940 construction of Scott Hall, which served as the student center.

Back then, most opposition to expansion came from the community outside of Northwestern: a little shanty town called Evanston–population 76,000–and Leonard says to expect no differently this time around. “The plan incorporates elements that affect the west side of Sheridan Road, and the people most strident in their opposition to Northwestern’s development are those who live closest to it. There will be a price to pay with the local community.”

The lakefill dedication ceremony. Photo courtesy of the University Archives.

Which is why, according to Leonard, the petition’s whirlwind tour of Evanston is a good political move. “I would think you want to get as many people on board with a big proposal like this as you possibly can, so you make an effort to reach out to various constituencies,” Leonard says. “You’re going to face opposition, particularly in an institution like this, which is abutted by a residential community that has elements within the local community very much opposed to anything Northwestern does. You have to extend your hand to try to gain support where you can get it.”

It’s not clear whether or not the proposal can pass without Evanston’s explicit approval; but from a political standpoint, the university is smooth not to bite the hand that gives out the WildCARD discount.

Changing, always.

Leonard predicts that the first building to go up under the plan will be for the Bienen School of Music, “or if not first, pretty quickly, because there is a demonstrated need for that. Fundraising is already underway.”

But the plan — like the ideas it puts forth — is also at the whim of change.

“It’s a very long-range plan which is useful to have,” University President Henry Bienen said in an e-mail. “I am sure time and opportunities will change a lot. None of this is written in stone.”

When the Campus Framework Plan was released, the general eye-widener was either: a) shock at the idea of one’s freshman dorm getting flattened or b) curiosity at how a building like Lunt gets “moved” across campus. But Bobb and McCulloch halls were built brick by brick in 1955, then joined in 1980, and one day the notorious party dorm will fall, too. And Lunt will drift across Sheridan like the very first building at Northwestern did.

In the next 50 years, the face of campus may change — like it always has changed, and always is changing. Every day that you walk up Sheridan Road, Old College has been struck by lightning, Fayerweather Hall has been torn down to make way for Kresge, and Heck Hall has burned to the ground. The future may see the continuation of change: the fall of Foster-Walker, a new shape to the lagoon. And all the while, the Dearborn Observatory is dragged, steadily, southeast, by horses.

What is the MGPNG, you may ask? Let me take you back to earlier this month, when it all began. You see, where I used to be interested in meeting deadlines and pleasing my editors, I now enjoy dropping classes, buying thrift-store jeans instead of washing the pants I own, and complaining loudly. A requirement of this last interest is that I whine about things, but never take steps to fix them.

So about two weeks ago, I ran out of eye-makeup remover. Five days later, I ran out of Clorox Bleach Wipes and my eyes were bleeding. So I decided to be crafty and look up do-it-yourself eye-makeup remover recipes. The first Google search was pretty confusing, as apparently “DIY” and “DUI” are very different abbreviations; but when I finally found a DIY recipe, it called for jojoba oil. Here’s a hint, Internet: If I don’t have eye-makeup remover, I probably don’t have a toolbox of essential oils whose names I can’t pronounce. As I refused to walk the 16 light-years from Bobb to CVS, the problem went unremedied.

So when I saw something strange in my shower on Sunday, I thought it must be a side effect of the sodium hypochlorite poisoning my eyes. You see, I know it’s not normal for people to molt. Yet that’s what I found: some sort of tattered, dirty and otherwise sexy remnants of a molting on the shower floor. Okay, cool, I thought. I’d suspected that this one chick on my floor was part human, part bastardization of science, so I was excited to finally have some evidence to send the good ‘ol FB of I. An excellent Sunday, by all accounts.

On closer inspection, though, I found the floor of the shower to be covered in dirt and leaves. Walking to my 3 p.m. meeting, I kept passing strange mud-creature people. First, the Internet betrayed me with its jojoba oil. Now mud was betraying me, by being confusing.

But apparently, this was part of Alpha Phi’s philanthropy, “Mud Olympics,” to benefit Cardiac Care, according to the Facebook group. Teams of four paid $25 to participate in an afternoon full of events involving everyone’s favorite wet, packed dirt: mud.

APhi’s Mud Olympics follows Alpha Chi Omega and Lambda Chi Alpha’s May 17 “Watermelon Bust” and Delta Zeta’s “Turtle Tug” of past years. Soon to come? Pi Beta Phi’s “Pi Phi Pie Phight” on May 24. It’s Greek philanthropy season, wallets are getting thinner, and confused, unaffiliated people like me are e-mailing federal bureaus about molting co-eds.

I’m cool with the Greek system for raising money for good causes. Yeah, no one outside of the sorority actually knows or cares what they’re donating money for — just an afternoon of muddy, turtle-y, or delicious pie-like fun — but that’s okay. The college kids get to have fun and make a Facebook album, the people with the medical conditions get help. It’s win-win.

What I don’t understand is how the hell you come up with these events. Turtle Tug? Watermelon Bust? I’m really at a loss about the Greek science that goes into naming these fundraisers. Other than a loose affiliation to a symbol associated with the sorority (which is usually irrelevant and random within itself), the naming is pretty baffling.

But I’ll be baffled no more: I have created the Moxie Greek Philanthropy Name Generator, a device that I believe closely resembles the steaming, hissing machine that frats and sororities themselves use to come up with such events as Kappa Delta’s Demon Dash (this sounds frightening and possibly damning), which celebrates Halloween with a 5K run.

Equation: Frat + Sorority + Irrelevant Animal + Unfortunate-sounding verb-turned-noun.

My personal favorites are “Kappa and Theta Chi Manatee Thrust” and “Gamma Phi and SAE Chinchilla Dry-heave.” If anyone wants to be on my team for any of these fantastic events, just let me know. I can’t wait to see “Lisa Gartner was tagged in an album: FUN AT THE TAPEWORM FLOP – 60 photos” pop up on your minifeed.

That’s what it says on the back of every individual-sized bag of Smartfood Popcorn White Cheddar. I know this because every time I spend .89 points on this particular bastardization of corn, I read the high-gloss description that runs alongside the nutrition facts.

For me, it’s a fascination with understanding what I’ve bought into, understanding a decision I’ve already made. But this is advertising, obviously, meant to persuade the average student strolling through the C-Store to make this popcorn their afternoon snack. They can only read the back and guess how it tastes, based on the promises the packaging makes.

This is what I want to say to the students accepted to the class of 2012: A bag of Smartfood Popcorn White Cheddar might illuminate the position that they’re in right now. Prospective students making their college decisions have gathered as much information as brochures, pamphlets, tours and even overnight stays will allow ‘em. But the information that they are digesting is essentially propaganda. No one knows for sure what’s inside their popcorn bag — and what they’re really getting themselves into — until they’ve shipped their stuff to Evanston, Ill. And even then, it’s just beginning.

A recent article on this site about Northwestern admission figures prompted a small comment war, which raged over the following quote by incoming freshman Adam Docksey:

NU seemed cooler and more friendly than the uptight rep that the Ivies have. After the perpetual stress of high school, loading up on APs and freaking out whenever any test came along, I’m looking forward to do something I want to do, not something that just satisfies the system. NU is so outside the box, I can’t wait to live there, learn there, and grow there. I have a strong feeling that place is Mecca.

This kind of sentiment is the mortar that holds together the bricks of the Northwestern 2012 Facebook group. There are 182 threads, which range from “Any Asians in the House?!” to “You on Youtube.” My favorite, though, is, “what specific things are you guys excited about???” started by Nicola Paracchini. Her personal list of excitements:

-the actual college classes
-jogging along lake michigan
-going into chicago
-internships
-meeting people
-eating in evanston
-going out
-living on my own

My instinct is to make fun of this fresh-faced idealism. I know and you know that they absolutely don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Eating in Evanston? When your work-study can barely fund your last EV1 run? And being excited for internships? Sure, until you write 13 cover letters. You and I live “the Northwestern experience” that the pre-frosh try so earnestly to predict, so it’s laughable that we’d look forward to “actual college classes” when we’re two clicks away from dropping Intro to Stats.

But I can’t make fun of the Class of 2012, and I won’t. Thing is, I was accepted to Northwestern on Dec. 10, 2005, under Early Decision. When I saw the word “Congratulations” on the computer screen, I screamed so loud that my brother thought I was being mugged.

Unfortunately, I still had six months of high school and three months of summer left. I had Odd Day lunch — or was it Even Day? I’m kind of startled that I can’t remember — with two of my best girl friends. The three of us would bemoan over sandwich crusts how we were so done with high school, how it was so unfair that we had to still be there. We developed our own catchphrase: “Is it college yet?”

College, to us, was something of Adam Docksey’s “Mecca.” We would take classes that we would be passionate about — no more Spanish IV or Personal Fitness. The boys would find a smart girl attractive, not intimidating, and we would transcend our high-school identities. We could be anyone: theater kids, intramural tennis enthusiasts, business-picketing political activists. And we would be, we assured each other: We’d be that and more.

But, looking back, I don’t understand why Northwestern was my first choice — or rather, I wonder how a 17-year-old kid in South Florida decided that a Midwest school she’d never seen was the most perfect college for her to spend the next four years.

And I’ve come to understand that I, myself, read the back of the popcorn bag.

Until I came to Northwestern, I couldn’t actually experience Northwestern. Instead, I experienced a simulation of the school. You did this too: You read pamphlets and brochures that undergraduate admissions sent you. You clicked collegeboard.com, you scrolled College Confidential. Maybe you dragged a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges into the bathroom. You took a tour of campus, you went to a prospie weekend. And that was Northwestern to you.

I used all of those means to envision what would surely become my life at Northwestern. I’d learn about politics, probably sink right into College Democrats, and I’d start playing tennis again. I would take only classes that I was genuinely interested in (and never anything before noon!). From what I’d gathered, The Daily Northwestern was the be-all, end-all of college journalism, so naturally I’d join right away, climb the ranks, eventually take control, get a great job out of college, somehow make money in journalism, be rich and successful, and die happy and inexplicably married to Edward Norton. Fin.

Needless to say, my life at school resembles nothing of what I imagined back in 2005. Club Tennis is really competitive, and I’m not that good. I experienced my first hangover the morning I was supposed to go door-to-door with the College Dems. And while I wrote two (kind of shitty) articles for The Daily, and still believe it’s a fine paper, I realized that I’m too narcissistic of a writer to know an inverted pyramid from a sugar cube.

Northwestern will not be what admitted students think it will be when they announce, “Here I come!” They will likely not take it by storm, and it will not take them by storm (unless as a snowstorm). The kids who miss snow, the kids who can’t wait to take classes at the Medill School of World-Renowned Journalism, the kids who are so focused on picking a dorm that’s crazy but not too crazy but still kind of crazy because it’s (woo!) freshmen year — they will find themselves knee-deep in a pile of slush, too late to class to stop and admire the picturesque lake, cursing because their feet will now marinate in drenched socks for the 12 hours before they can return to their crazy but not too crazy but still kind of crazy dorm, because there are classes to go to and meetings that are absolutely pointless, and the classes that you were genuinely interested in require the most reading, so it’s going to be a long night, kid, a long night at the library you glimpsed on the campus tour, and you better get used to Smartfood Popcorn because tonight’s dinner is courtesy of the vending machine.

This sounds pessimistic at best. I know. But it is day-to-day life. There is an upshot, though, and here it is:

I fucking love Northwestern. I love that I go here and that I chose to go here, and I would never go back and apply to any other school. And this is where it circles back to Facebook.

The class of 2012, like the class of 2011 before it, like the class of 2010 before it, has frenzied Facebook with questions such as: Where should I live next year? What are you most worried about? How would you describe the person above you? How would you stereotype the person above you?

At some point, each person in that group will preference her dorm and sign up for classes. She’ll make the best guess she can. And at some point, these decisions she is lightheartedly typing into cyberspace will come alive. Allison Hall the idea became Allison Hall the place where I slept and did laundry and had shopping cart races and met my best friends. Social Inequality: Race, Class and Power became the class I swore I’d take because I was genuinely interested in it… and then it became the class I dropped. And yeah, stereotyping the person above you becomes stereotyping the real people you meet.

What I want to say to pre-frosh is to stop worrying about the perfect Northwestern experience. Guys, you can’t create it until you get here and create it; and honestly, there is no single “Northwestern experience.” It’s different for every person, truly. The thing that unites us all is that we each saw something here that made us see ourselves here.

College is not a mecca, and usually not a place of transcendent transformation. But it doesn’t need to be. Whatever dorm you end up in, you’ll be fine. Maybe it will smell, maybe it won’t. I can tell you that Bobb is not a zoo, as the discussion threads have insinuated, though the rumors are true in so far as that the furniture is chained to the walls. You’ll probably change your major 12 times, no matter how sure you are about your future. You’ll probably sleep through the class you had to lie, beg and steal to get into, and you will fucking hate snow by February.

But you will discover the intangible joys that could never be captured by a rankings list. You will discover how to run wildly, half-buzzed and laughing like a little kid, to catch shuttles at night. You will discover amazing individuals who get your crazy sense of humor, don’t care that you’re messier than Middle East politics, and like you for the pasted-together collage of a person that you’re slowly becoming. You will discover yourself in the middle of one of those outside-the-classroom philosophical discussions that you never thought really happened or, while splitting a bottle of wine with a close friend, debating what it means to be in love. And you will discover snow when the first flurries fall like polite confetti over the dark surf of Lake Michigan.

You will fall in love with Northwestern. It will not be the Northwestern that you envisioned, and it will not be what the packaging on the proverbial popcorn bag said it would be, but you will love her all the more for it. And maybe, like me, you will wonder how you made the best guess of your life.

“Oh, you’re definitely crazy,” the teapot whistled, wagging its spout from side to side like a pageant girl on a parade float.

“Shut up you,” I said, and knocked it from the table.

*

I work as a secretary for a short round man who does short round things, and that’s all I need to know to file his papers and answer his phone. I think I have a title like admini… well, adminisomething, but it’s all crap anyway. My real job is to distract his wife when she drops by unannounced and he’s otherwise occupied (fucking his former adminisomething in the conference room); and to pretend that the coffee mugs aren’t racist hunters from Alabama. The last one’s a given, but it’s more difficult than you’d think when Mrs. Blatt traipses into the office wrapped in mink.

And more or less smelling like a dead animal.

“Hello, Mrs. Blatt,” I always say in a voice that sounds far too cheerful to be my own. I used to know that as my mother’s “phone voice”; she’d be screaming and hissing and raging at my brother and I, then the phone would ring and she’d be as polite and dainty as Mary Tyler-Moore (midjump). “Can I get your coat?”

Of course, she wouldn’t reply – not yet, anyway. As I fussed around the coat rack, her fat, freckled arms would crawl out of her shrunken cardigan, reach into her dead-animal-bag and retrieve a tube of lipstick. “Alison,” she’s sniff. Mrs. Blatt was cordial, but she was no Mary Tyler-Moore. I’d pretend to ring her husband, and she knew that.

“If he thinks for one second that I believe he’s in a meeting,” she drawled.

“I could make a rug out of her,” World’s #1 Dad said, nudging Happy Valentine’s Day with his handle.

“Some coffee, Mrs. Blatt?” I chirped, maybe a little too loudly.

*

Jack worked later on Tuesdays because board meetings were on Wednesdays, and Jack was never the type to be caught unprepared; his “unprepared face” is simply too comical for the workplace.

“Look at you,” I’d tease.

“Look at me what?”

“Going to board meetings and carrying a briefcase and stuff. You’re like a real person or something.”

I liked to imagine Jack at those meetings losing his temper over some moral breach by a slick exec. It was, of course, far more likely that he sat plaintively in his swivel chair, sticking his index finger in the air and asking permission to speak every time he had a point to make. Jack was very diplomatic like that.

I heard his shoes stomping off mud onto the welcome mat, then that friction-y sound of metal when keys scrape inside their soul mates.

“The day I had.” He ducked through the doorframe of the kitchen and kissed the top of my head. Jack had the voice of a game show announcer, all spirit at an artificial volume that he harnessed as genuine. He was handsome; or rather, much like a caricature of a handsome person, his eyes a little too big and a little too deep-set, his curly hair jumping off his scalp like wayward springs.

“The day you had,” I parroted.

“If I never have to hear about the malum in se again…”

“Well fuck. There goes my dinner conversation starter.”

“Your idea of dinner conversation is making cat noises and otherwise pretending you’re five.” Jack slouched against the counter and grinned. “What is that?” All the tiny wrinkles outside his eyes smiled too.

“What is what?” My hands followed his stare and found themselves in my hair.

“That. Is that a Chip Clip?”

“My hair was in my face.”

“Your hair was in your…”

“So how about that mal… what did you call it? Something about Malfoy?”

Sometimes his eyes twinkle just right and I know he loves me. “C’mere,” Jack said, legs loping backward from the kitchen. “I have an idea.”

“He has an idea, Judge! Can you argue with that persuasion?”

I slapped my knees, stood up, and followed him to bed.

*

When I was 23 I realized that I could build a zipline from one place to another with just my mind. All I had to do was think, I really want a Mars Bar, and there it would be, a zipline cord from my apartment to the 7-11. I couldn’t use it, though, or think about it, because everyone around me could hear my thoughts. I suspected my landlady was controlling these thoughts, and making me think I could build ziplines so that I’d try to use one and just fall off a building; but someone informed me that I was crazy before I was able to confirm that suspicion.

That was three years ago. Since I first started showing “symptoms” (because – would you believe it – the belief that you can create transportation devices usually reserved for Jackie Chan movies isn’t classically “normal”), I’ve become a regular at the local drugstore. I find it strange that pharmacies are referred to as “drugstores,” considering that most people there are buying disposable cameras or shampoo… and not neuroleptics. But that may just be my take on the matter.

Because when the doors slide open and that sterile smell of wiped-clean glass greets me, my hands dig tunnels in my pockets, as though my forearms could follow and drag my body inside itself and disappear. I’m not buying scrunchies or gummy worms or Newsweek. The pharmacist is not giving me cold medicine or Vagisil. I wish she was.

We don’t exchange words, usually. Once she – a squat Asian woman with sullen eyes and thin lips – found it in her heart to tell me:

“You know not to take these if you think you might be pregnant.”

I knew that. It said it on the label. “And I take it with food,” I said stiffly.

But normally I just slide my chicken-scratch prescription note across the table, she reads it, then looks at me like there should be a barrier between us – prison or confessional booth, I can’t be sure; but she gets the pills and I get on my way. My eyes lose focus and blur the aisles into shapeless colors until I’m out of the store, outside, where the air is stale from car exhaust, but I gulp it in.

Do this once a week.

*

He met me four months after I started taking meds, when I was still always nervous that I’d slip up somehow in public. I’d missed the bus I usually took to see my parents in McLean. I was waiting for the next one, crunching on a candy bar, wondering if the crunch-gnash-crunch sounded as loud to everyone else as it did to me. I was so startled when he spoke that I literally squeaked. He asked:

“So do you go to GW?” because he did, and I was wearing a George Washington University sweatshirt. It was the middle of summer but my hands were wrestling together in the pocket of the hoodie. I had to drop out of grad school. I smiled because I didn’t want to tell him that. He thought I wasn’t interested, he’d later explain, and that’s why he didn’t sit with me on the bus.

But I liked how he smiled with half his mouth, and how he didn’t know I was breakable parts, like everyone else did. I showed up at the bus stop the same time the next day. I didn’t need to go anywhere.

When he walked up to the corner, I said, “I used to.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m answering your question. I used to go to GW.”

He was expressionless under a heavy set of black sunglasses. Blood was pumping in my cheeks, my knuckles were gnashing together inside my sweatshirt, because maybe that hadn’t been a normal thing to say, and hell, he wasn’t saying anything at all. I was about to turn and run, arms flailing in a wild sprint back to my crappy apartment and my crappy life.

But he smiled with half his mouth and said, “I’m a law student. My name is Jack.”

We sat down and he said he liked my pin and was it for that cause? (It wasn’t.) That I looked like this girl on TV whom he loved madly when he was six. And the next week he paid for my bus fare because I was low (on change, not sad).

Seven months later, we moved in together. How strange and light it felt to be so strange and light.

*

It was never close enough, when he held me. I was always limited by the barrier of our skin, wanted to permeate every hair and flake and pore of it, wanted it to give way so I could fall right through it and disappear inside him forever. I’d bury my head in the crevice where his chest met his shoulder so hard he could’ve bruised – but he never complained and I never broke through.

“I’m going to get some water,” he said. His fingers dusted my spine like a daddy long legs, feathery and sweet. “You want a glass of water?”

I nodded. My nose bobbed against the comforter I had pulled to my chin; he leaned in to kiss me but missed my mouth by a centimeter. I closed my eyes, listened to the slow, easy creak of the door.

I wondered what it would be like to close my eyes and listen to the door slam, never knowing which side of it he’d be on, hoping to God he’d be standing there when I opened my eyes.

“Baby?” he called from the kitchen. “What happened to the teapot?”

*

Sometimes I wake up and want to cut the clothes off my body, wash the shampoo out of my hair and slough all my skin off until I’m raw (just a pattering heart in a skeletal cage), until I’ve disappeared.

I froze too long in front of the full-length mirror one morning and he noticed. There are things to look for. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, but Jack asked, “Whatcha thinking?” His voice was sleepy, drugged by sex; but his eyes were wide and waiting in the reflection. I was thinking:

What do I look like under this?

I wanted to ask, but I knew not to. Instead I said, “Do I look fat? Or like someone who asks cliché questions?”

He laughed and I laughed and everything was okay that day.

*

I’d be more honest with my therapist if she wasn’t such a raging bitch.

“Pregnant,” she echoed, pursing her penciled-in lips. “That’s… interesting.”

When I had told her my symptoms had come back, she’d been far more sympathetic – or at least less interested.

“I don’t understand,” I’d told her. “I’ve been taking the fucking pills every day. Like, religiously.”

She had jotted a word or two on the notepad before becoming bored with her own handwriting. “It isn’t unusual,” she had drawled. “Patients with schizophrenia, they have residual symptoms sometimes. Left-overs, of sorts.”

She’d cocked her head and yawned, stretching her drawn-on lips into a perfect circle, the kind you’d throw bean bags through for prizes at a carnival. “It doesn’t mean the medicine isn’t working. The delusions, the paranoia, that’s gone, right?”

I nodded dumbly, blank as the wall.

“The important thing is that you can live your day to day life. Can you?”

I’d been staring at the farthest point of the carpet, where the seams frayed up against the plaster. “Can I what?”

“Live your day to day life.”

“Uh.” I wanted to ask, What the hell is a day to day life? “Yes. Well, I think so.”

“And you say your hallucinations are limited to… porcelain objects? Is that right?”

*

At first, I had thought it was the smell of Mrs. Blatt that was making me nauseous. When I realized it was morning sickness, I thought, How cliché. Mrs. Blatt seemed like such a more likely culprit.

“Alison,” she sniffed as she blustered through the office door. “You’re not a natural redhead, right?” She lowered her leathery sack of a chin, inviting me to divulge some deep secret.

“Actually I am, Mrs. Blatt. Why do you ask?” My hands found the cup of paperclips and busied themselves making a chain. Being nice is like reading from a script.

Mrs. Blatt rolled her eyes and plunked herself down. Her thick arms spilled over the chair frame. “You look pale today.”

Apparently she had not received her copy of the script. “I’ve been a bit under the weather,” I chirped, wedding a pink paperclip to a blue.

“A little chunkier, too.”

My hands had snapped a paperclip in half.

I blinked rapidly. Mrs. Blatt’s watery eyes were wide-open. Her jaw had divorced her mouth; it hung slack in her jowls. “Cheap office supplies,” I muttered, pushing off my desk. “Uh, excuse me, Mrs. Blatt.” The desk chair spun out behind me and clattered concernedly.

“Come now,” World’s #1 Dad chided. “The little paperclip fella didn’t do nothin’ to you.”

My arm was outstretched for the door knob a full ten seconds before it found the bathroom door. I slammed my fist against the mirror before the door could do the same behind me. “You look pale today, Alison. And almost as fat as me, Alison.” Fuck fuck fuck.

It was at about this point that the toilet invited me to throw up in it.

“Come here, sugar,” she said, voice sticky and saccharine. “Give me a kiss.”

I touched my lower abdomen, paralyzed with that sick wash of sudden knowledge. Spine swayed on the tile floor until my back found the wall, the thick cotton-white room, just tile after tile… I pictured Jack’s and my DNA, swirling around in a liquid tilt-a-whirl until it was one irrefutable thing, latching together and lurching and shuddering, shaking into being, tile after tile, fingers and toes kicking and crawling and tearing at my insides, screaming, screaming, tile after tile, I was sitting on the floor covered in my own vomit, gasping silently, shrinking.

“Oh, sugar,” the toilet clucked. “This is just embarrassing.”

*

When Jack graduated, he found a job with a firm uptown and I moved into his apartment on 8th. It smelled like warmth and musty books, and I fell back on the queen-sized bed with equally proportioned pride. I was so proud of myself. I was so normal.

“How y’feeling?” Jack would ask casually when he was pouring milk or changing the vacuum bag.

“Fine,” I’d reply, all sing-song and spirit. “Absolute perfectionism.”

I was so mad when the fine china started chiming in. “Your fiery courage will bring you great reward” or “Patience is virtue most envied by friends.”

I’d been taking my medicine every day. I had been taking my medicine every damn day. “Shut up,” I’d hiss hysterically. “Shut up!”

“Short temper, tall problem.”

“Shut up shut up shut the fuck—”

“Babe?” Jack stood in the doorway, a dark red towel wrapped around his waist. Drops of water from his hair, dark from dampness, were falling to the tile floor of the kitchen. He blinked a few times. I wanted him to stop looking at me like that. I never wanted him to look at me like that.

“Sorry,” I tried. “I was just singing something stupid.”

His fingers scratched his cheek, eyebrows still bent inward. My heart pounded out of my chest and beached onto the floor.

“It’s a stupid song,” I said again. “Just stuck in my head.”

He nodded with questionable conviction and sort of smiled.

“Just kiss me,” I pleaded. He did. He never mentioned it again. I was never so careless again. The next day we went to the mall and ate soft-serve ice-cream and we were happy.

*

I stood at the sink, staring down the drain.

Plink, plink, plink. He loves me.

The little white tablet danced on the metal, then took its final bow into the garbage disposal. I dropped another. Plink, plink, plink. He loves me not.

The orange bottle was empty. I left it sitting on the counter and walked into the bedroom. It was almost 7 o’clock, and it was Tuesday. Jack was probably stuck in traffic somewhere uptown. He wouldn’t be home for another hour.

I lay on the queen-sized bed that I always felt too small or meager or something in. The air conditioner was on too high, humming in perpetual exhale. The hairs on my arms prickled and stood up. What would happen? Even on pills, even in therapy, I was talking to toilets, I was screaming at the fine china. What would happen now?

I blinked. I unblinked.

“I love you,” I said to the no one in the room.

I thought of Mrs. Blatt, lard shifting in that cheap gray chair in that fucking waiting room. She was venomous, a toxic thing of a woman. But once upon a time, she fell in love. I wondered what she wore on her first date. I wondered what she thought the first time she made love to her husband. I wondered how long she would wait there, what she was waiting for.

I thought of the creature lolling around in my abdomen, drinking in my disease. I thought it to have Jack’s dark, sweet eyes. I wondered if its brain was already sick. I wanted to hold it and I wanted to kill it.

Mostly, I thought of Jack. I could tell him about the baby, and we could have a shotgun Tupperware wedding. Maybe we could take a zipline to Hawaii after the ceremony. Every little girl’s dream.

I spent an hour gluing my eyelids shut, forcing my brain to retrace every line of his body, memorize the limp of his smile, the feel of his fingertips on my cheeks when we slept inside each other, when he’d hold my face like an anchor and I would be right there. Oh, god.

I took my coat from the hall closet. I emptied the drawers and took my toothbrush.

“Where you goin’, Alison?” the coffee mug asked.

Folded my sweaters, took my photos off the fridge.

“Alison?” asked the tea cups.

My suitcase was red and nubby, and I had to sit on it so that it’d close.

“Alison? The fine china, the soap dish, the shards of the teapot in the dustbin that Jack had said we could glue back together. But we didn’t.

I left the scraped-up key on the counter, and I disappeared.