I fly back from New Haven, CT today. My cab comes in 6 hours.
I’ve been doing a lot of contemplative wandering around Yale’s campus (particularly Old Campus, which I find the most charming) over the past two days. In the past week, I’ve danced without pants, attended a fraternity party in a house that was–approximately–as hot as the surface of the sun, gone to New York City where I visited art museums and, later, the bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey where TLC films its hit show, Cake Boss. Upon returning to NYC I ate pizza that obliterated the barrier between the theoretical Platonic ideal of what sauce and cheese and basil and crust can ever hope to achieve in concert and this ideal’s actualization.
In this seven days I re-read, for the second time this summer, This Side of Paradise and a short story collection, Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace.
I met some truly spectacular people, had great conversation, and am indebted to the eight or nine (I can’t quite remember) occupants of a house on Dwight for a really delicious vegetarian dinner. I thank the high school and college students both from Yale and other institutions in the courtyard of Davenport College for making snide remarks about- and sharing a deep-seeded hatred for that which might be called saccharine or insipid, i.e. that which leads to severe mental flabbiness or the cerebral equivalent of cellulite-afflicted thighs.
A very special “thank you” goes out to a particularly politically ambitious high school acquaintance of mine, a Beirut-spectating encounter with whom at the aforementioned hotter-than-Hell fraternity party led to one of the more satisfying taxi rides of my life the following morning… at his expense.
I promise more ruminations on my experience visiting Yale are forthcoming. In the meantime, keep a lookout for a post that goes live tomorrow morning at h600 CST. It is a co-blogging effort with a couple of close friends.
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