I dunno who started it, but I first saw the meme over at Ryan Estrada’s blog. He drew himself at age sixteen, but I don’t think I really looked all that different five years ago. Bangs and an aversion to skirts, I guess. So I did sometime roughly around ninth grade, when I was 13-14.
Hooray for art memes!
This weekend was taken up by choir concerts, one Saturday evening and one Sunday afternoon. Lots of standing on risers for eternity on two uncomfortable shoes and one borked hip flexor. The music was lovely, though–as I would hope, for my final Concert Choir show. (I still have one more Chamber Choir concert in two weeks.)
I don’t have any recordings of the Concert repertoire (though I intend to get a copy of the CD) but my lovely former peer mentor Cypress videotaped two of the Chamber songs, The Tree and My Bonny Lass She Smelleth. Quality!
You probably heard about Harvard’s new financial aid system. If you didn’t, go read. As much as I hate Hahvahd, it’s pretty extraordinary, even if they are only doing it to avoid uncomfortable questions from Congress about their obscenely big endowment. (They could give a free ride to every student and they wouldn’t run out of money for 100 years.)
Basically: any family making $60,000 or less goes to Harvard for free. Anywhere from there to $180,000, you pay a percentage of your income somewhere between zero to ten percent. A family making $120,000/year pays $12,000 for Harvard. Jesus Christ, my family makes significantly less than that yet year after year the FAFSA told me that my parents could realistically cough up like $50,000! Goddammit do I hate the FAFSA.
Like so many other things, other schools are following Harvard’s lead. A number of other liberal arts colleges have also announced explicit income floors below which you don’t have to pay a cent. The competitors haven’t beaten Harvard in the price war, but it does mark the first reduction in the effective price of college in what seems like centuries. Meanwhile, tons of liberal arts colleges, unable or unwilling to provide income floors but still needing to compete, are now guaranteeing loan-free financial aid packages. As far as I’m considered, these are mostly bullshit, in that you’ll still have to take out loans when/if the financial aid office thinks you can afford more than what your parents are willing to pay. Assuming that you *do* qualify for financial aid in the first place, this just gets rid of a (at Swarthmore) $4500 loan each year. Nice, sure, but in practice not as awesome as the press releases imply. Unless you have the cold hard numbers in your hand of what family income levels get what aid (as Harvard’s program does), I don’t trust it.
So far, however, Scripps isn’t even offering that. And given the word around campus, I doubt that they will be improving their financial aid offers for the next few years at least. What word? Apparently the administration is nervous about Scripps’ endowment. My understanding is that back in the day, when Scripps was a finishing school verdant educational institution for young ladies, Scripps alumnae typically married old-money billionaire douchebags. These alums were able to use their husbands’ bank accounts to give ridiculously large sums of cash back to the school.
Now, things are different. Scripps graduates are still frequently affluent, to be sure–we graduate tons of future doctors, lawyers, and business owners. But that’s just it–Scripps alumnae are making their own money instead of marrying into it. As such, while they can certainly give back to their alma mater, they don’t tend to be so ridiculously wealthy that they can offer the kind of mind-blowing one-time contributions that get buildings named after you.
Now there’s no reason to fear that Scripps is gonna go bankrupt or something anytime soon. We don’t have that much lawn to water! But given the relatively generous financial aid offers that are now in vogue–and being implemented at two of our 5C sister schools, CMC and Pomona–if Scripps doesn’t have the capital to keep up, we may lose the bidding war that Harvard began. Scripps initially created the JES scholarship so they could buy high SAT scores and raise their average.* Competition from the new wave of financial aid might bring that average right back down again.
What an awful prospect for our dear alma mater! Clearly us Scripps Women, the class of 2008, need to take things old-school style and go out and wed some old-money billionaire douchebags! Just lie back and think of Claremont, ladies! Incipit vita nova!!**
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* Can’t find the memo where I originally drew this conclusion, but this Scripps Magazine article pretty much states the same:
Average SAT scores have jumped about 100 points in the past five years, a “huge” leap according to Goldsmith, who directly attributes the rise to the expansion of merit scholarship aid. “Also, we’ve gone from no National Merit Finalists to 20 in the same period,” Goldsmith concludes, a record number among women’s colleges this year.
** “Here Begins New Life,” the Scripps school motto. Lisa was planning to print it on thongs and sell them at the Seal Court craft fair. I need to bug her about that.
Link. Basically, twenty friends decided to celebrate my favorite founding father’s birthday by going to his monument at midnight and having a dance party. In order to not disturb other visitors (yes, the monument’s open 24 hours), they used iPods instead of a boombox. Park cops show up, tell them to get out, one girl asks “why?” (just that, why) and is immediately arrested and hauled downtown. She’s since been released, with a charge of “interference with agency duties”, whatever that is (just screams “catch-all”…).
“Nobody puts Baby in a corner [cell]!”
I participated in something similar last year–the Harvard free culture conference Dance Conspiracy where we danced around the streets of Cambridge to someone’s laptop broadcasting short-range radio. You’d think that enough flash mob-style dance events have happened by now to make them clearly non-dangerous (as if they were ever legitimately scary to begin with; it’s a bunch of happy people dancing, for Christ’s sake! It’s like the opposite of terrorism!)
To hell with the War on Fun. When I go back to DC, dancing at the Jefferson Memorial is at the top of my list of things to do.
So there was an ad in the Career Courier today for a seminar directed at students on careers in advertising, design, and new media. I thought, hm, might be interesting. Maybe I should go.
It’s in Torrance (the Del Amo Fashion Center) on a Saturday at 8:30 AM. Turns out, there is physically no way for me to get there. The LA bus I would need to catch leaves at 7:10; the first Metrolink doesn’t arrive in LA until after 8.
What is the point of having public transit when it is completely ****ing useless? Seriously–I can’t think of a time when an LA-area bus or train *ever* went where I wanted when I needed it. The pathetic state of public transit here screwed me over when I tried to interview for an internship with American Public Media. It made me walk for two miles without a sidewalk to fetch a U-Haul. It makes it impossible to do anything outside of walking distance on the weekends, midday, or at night.
Get me out of this godforsaken, car-addicted hellhole.
My dad gave me his old computer and I upgraded to Leopard. Yay, a computer that actually works! However, sometime during that transition Photoshop broke. When I open it, it says some file that it needs is missing, and that I should re-install it. I can open Photoshop, I can still draw things in it, but I can’t open any previously saved files. Which is pretty much useless to me.
So I try to re-install Photoshop–and it says that the install CD is damaged. No visible scratches or anything, but it refuses to re-install.
And lovely, open-source Gimpshop still crashes every time I try to use it.
So now I’m trying to pirate Photoshop. We’ll see how that goes. I (well, my dad, for Christmas) actually paid for this damn piece of graphical shit–I expect to be able to use it, goddammit!
Blah. Even if piracy works, there don’t appear to be any Mac versions of Flash or Dreamweaver (the main applications I’ve used in my portfolio/for class here) available. Which means once I graduate, either I shell out $1,800.00 or I lose all access to a significant chunk of my artsy/webby output over the last two years. Not to mention become incapable of doing further portfolio/professional work without corporate backing.
Sigh. Why does it cost so much to be a starving artist?
So much hate for Adobe right now.
I found The Illustrated BMI Categories Project off the New York Times health blog. Basically, in terms of what people intuitively think of as “fat,” BMI is a load of bullcrap. Some highlights:
“Overweight”…and gets the Nelson & Karen stamp of SEXY approval!
“Overweight”…and a frickin’ triathlete.
“Nearly obese”…and beautiful. :)
When I started the Weight Watchers deal two months ago or so, I set my goal weight at 160 lbs. The only time I’ve ever been 160 was before I finished puberty, but that’s how skinny I’d need to be to be “normal” according to the BMI calculator I consulted. Now I’m wondering if that’s at all feasible, given how arbitrary BMI appears to be. In terms of health, sure, the medical establishment uses BMI as their independent variable, and there are correlations between high BMI and diabetes, heart disease, etc. But other factors, like abdominal fat, seem to correlate better–so why use BMI, given its flaws? Especially given other studies showing that overweight women survive heart attacks *more* often than “normal” women do. Who knows where the health benefits and the risks intersect with regard to BMI? It seems like a mostly confusing and pointless standard.
The New York Times has its own BMI calculator, but it includes other factors like abdominal fat, physical inactivity, smoking, high blood pressure, and so forth. I still get a BMI of 28.7 (fail), but their calculator says that “if you are overweight, but do not have a high waist measurement and have fewer than two risk factors, you may need to prevent further weight gain rather than lose weight.” Well, as far as I know, I don’t have any other risk factors. Heck, my blood pressure is low. So hmm.
I’m still keeping with the Weight Watchers thing, and trying to exercise more. That’s a good idea no matter what. But maybe I don’t have to freak out if I never quite drop the 30 lbs…
