TANKS!

The Bwog staff did what we always do and compiled a list of things we are thankful for. Feel free to leave yours in the comments.

Columbia, have an absolutely lovely Thanksgiving. We are so very, truly thankful to you for reading this website and for lots of other things.

Randos

  • PDF versions of textbooks
  • The idea of going abroad
  • Firm handshakes
  • Being of the Harry Potter generation
  • The mysterious sliding window between RotiRoll and Suite
  • Free hot water everywhere sans embittered glances
  • Palindromes
  • Actually going downtown when you say you will
  • The Canon 5D
  • Walking about the campus on a sunny day and feeling fresh
  • Riding the lion outside Dodge
  • Having just enough pencil lead to finish an exam
  • Having exactly $0.00 left on a Metrocard
  • Things overheard through Wien’s thin walls
  • Clothespins
  • Overly abbreviated text messages from my parents
  • The beautiful beautiful architecture strewn across (most of) campus
  • NBA League Pass
  • Watching the sun rise for non work-related reason
  • Getting there just in time
  • Those moments when you stop procrastinating
  • Bananagrams
  • Adhesive lint rollers
  • The cute guys who work at Book Culture
  • Bikes
  • The car rental age in New York being 18

Places

  • Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
  • New Jersey
  • The commuter lounge in the Diana
  • The Lehman 2nd floor printer- it has never been broken when I needed it. Ever.
  • New Hampshire
  • The Notary Public at Citibank
  • The ATM in Lerner

Facts

  • Planning to read on Low Steps, never actually reading on Low Steps
  • This year not being Sophomore year
  • Realizing that a career isn’t the only thing in life
  • Free New York Times
  • Magenta suede in the Diana
  • Having a three-day weekend every weekend
  • Exchanging awkward, enduring smiles with people I sort of know from class
  • Wearing other people’s sweaters and thinking about them
  • The crosswalk light to cross Broadway turning green (white) just as you reach ir
  • No credit card minimum at Morton Williams
  • Fridays at Potluck
  • The banter at Milano
  • The fact that things are open past 9PM (a true city luxury)
  • Solid high-fives
  • Seeing movies with old people at Lincoln Plaza
  • The fact that Fayerweather smells like condensed soup
  • Realizing you know almost everyone in your prospective major

Loved Ones

  • Parents
  • My Dad for offering to call to wake me up for my 6:00 AM flight home (Oh Dad, don’t you know I just won’t sleep?)
  • People on the subway who are so thoroughly engaged in the music on their iPod that they sing and dance to it as if no one else was around
  • Friends whose parents send them great care packages (with peanut butter fudge)
  • Anthony Randolph + our raggedy New York Knicks
  • Everyone who works at Housing for dancing with me during Room Selection and being generally lovely people
  • Friends who live off-campus
  • My friends’ signature dance moves
  • Friends that straight live in Butler Cafe
  • The other kid in Butler at 3am
  • Seeing your friends from home and talking about the same old useless things
  • Raj’s smiles (Butler Cafe)
  • Kia’s sass (Cafe 212)
  • Ricky Martin
  • Hunter Parrish
  • Sir Mike of Carman
  • The guy who always presses the open and close elevator buttons to make crowded Mudd elevator rides faster
  • Suitemates
  • My neurotic dog
  • My corporate finance problem set team all of whom are awesome
  • The Westside Staff – props to Andrew and Luis!
  • My neurotic family
  • Asian tourists who treat our campus like a real New York landmark
  • Security guards that keep pictures of their girlfriends/wives/families on their desks while they work
  • People taking pictures of Columbia
  • People taking pictures of people taking pictures of Columbia
  • Visitors
  • New friends
  • The people who go insane at dubstep shows
  • The kitchen power couple
  • The Hewitt dining staff—the sassier the better!
  • Squirrel Man
  • Friends with rich parents
  • Bella Ayalof (the woman who works at Cafe Nana)’s Israeli accent
  • Architecture majors: for perspective
  • Freshmen: for perspective
  • All of the friends who do more for me than I ever could have asked for, the most amazing people I could ever fathom

Netflix, etc.

  • 30 Rock, Season 2
  • Megavideo time limits
  • Those days when you just watch an entire episode of 30 Rock with your roommate
  • SVU on Netflix
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix
  • Boardwalk Empire

Weezy F. Baby

  • A free Weezy
  • Brownies (pot variety)
  • Mid/late-aughts hip-hop
  • “Youthful indiscretion”
  • High-quality marijuana
  • Trey Songz
  • Bringing the beat back, bitch
  • No-pants parties
  • My younger sister buying me an eighth to celebrate that I am coming home for Thanksgiving
  • The new Kanye album

The Intelligentsia

  • Max Weber, Herman Melville, John Pemberton + Wen Jin
  • New York Magazine
  • Capital New York
  • The United States
  • Science in pre-1800 literature
  • Thinking too much about sports
  • Overthinking most other things, too
  • Marxist anthropology
  • Reading for pleasure
  • Not going to grad school
  • My Corporate Finance problem set team all of whom are awesome
  • Eric Foner bringing history alive
  • Having a tolerant roommate
  • Eric Foner at least partially restoring my faith in college as an institution/idea
  • Christia Mercer for genuinely caring about her past students
  • Grad students who love what they do
  • Journalism not dying

Mark Hay, Duh

  • Ira Glass
  • Hindi
  • Urdu
  • Farsi
  • Pashto
  • Islamic Law
  • Peter Awn
  • Doing everything in the most janky way possible
  • Using the word janky
  • Wael Hallaq
  • Being on a listserv for Mongolian real estate … you know, just in case
  • This couplet: “Nind us kii hai, dimaG us ka hai, rate’n us kii hai’n/Teri zulafe’n jis ke bazuu par parisha’n ho ga’ee”
  • Not living in Spokane anymore
  • The fact that Daniel Day Lewis makes shoes and one day I will buy some

Sustenance

  • The grill at Smith and Wollensky’s
  • Udon at m2m
  • Tea
  • Lemsip
  • The wealth of appetizers that come free with bibimbap at Mill Korean
  • Chilling out and calling starbucks drink sizes by their goofy given names (also recognizing that sometimes it’s OK to go to starbucks, guys!)
  • Oren’s iced coffee, scones and other baked goods
  • Egg and cheese on toasted cinnamon raisin from Nussbaum
  • Hummus
  • 2 Vitamin Waters for $3 at Westside
  • Ice-cold water fountains
  • Koronet during the day
  • Brownies (Avery eatery)
  • Brownies (tasty dessert)
  • The Junior’s cheesecake shop in Grand Central
  • Thai Market lunch specials
  • Toasted anything at Milano
  • Southampton Double White beer at Mel’s
  • Hale and Hearty Soups and Sandwiches
  • Food trucks
  • Froyo
  • Maoz falafel/salad bar
  • Trader Joe’s
  • Barnard bake sales
  • Apple cider
  • Momofuku Milk Bar chocolate-chocolate-chip-marshallow cookies
  • The large peanut butter cookies at 212
  • Ollie’s noodles
  • Silver Moon Bakery
  • Milano M3
  • Microwave in my room
  • Spontaneous brownie baking
  • Peppermint ice cream
  • Gingerbread lattes at Starbucks
  • Peppermint tea
  • The Ollie’s delivery guy who comes in 6 mins or less
  • Coffee, in all its forms
  • Levain Bakery
  • Bubble tea from Cafe East
  • Making banana bread in my dorm toaster oven
  • CrackDel
  • The Hungarian
  • Thin crust pizza at the Diana Café
  • Ben and Jerry’s
  • Cafe East French Vanilla Bubble Tea
  • Hooda
  • Salt and Vinegar potato chips
  • Morton Williams challah
  • Tofucken
  • Selling chocolate chip cookies in Lerner
  • Subsconscious for having my favorite lollipops
  • Amir’s discounts
  • Gummy frogs
  • Cider donuts at the Greenmarket
  • Stocking up on green tea, mugs, cups, flatware and fruit at John Jay
  • The cranberry-encrusted goat cheese that the Diana Cafe sometimes has

Drink

  • Mango margaritas at the Heights
  • Regular flavored (duh) margaritas at the Heights
  • Rome at 1020
  • Drunch
  • Belgian-style wheat ales
  • 1020 bathroom graffiti
  • Drinking games
  • $4 champagne
  • Britas used to filter Nikolai
  • $11 Magic Hat at Crackel
  • Going out on Wednesdays
  • Paul, bartender at the Abbey
  • Awful fakes that work in Morningside
  • Seeing freshman girls in leather jackets (you know, those girls) with armfuls of fourloko at Crackdel—if that wasn’t jumping the shark, I’m not sure what is.

Shelter

  • Woodbridge
  • Getting shafted by housing and realizing that it only gets better from here
  • The river view that makes up for my tiny double
  • Having a single for the first time
  • Having a full bed for the first time
  • Living really fucking close to Columbia

College!

  • Uris Library
  • Red Bull
  • African Studies Reading Room on Butler 6
  • Butler Cafe
  • Pseudo-intellectual jargon when you can use it to your own advantage
  • Interlibrary loans
  • Extensions (for papers, not hair)
  • Staedtler erasers
  • Assigned reading that doesn’t feel like work
  • When your professor doesnt call on you the one day you haven’t done the reading
  • Never having read a book at Columbia
  • Professors who post their own lecture notes on Courseworks
  • Weekly departmental foreign films
  • Butler librarians
  • Male TAs who carry “man-purses” and wear “dress-sneakers”
  • The abundance of Morningside newsstands, so it never feels too much like a bubble
  • Good advisers– they do exist!
  • Core requirements that you end up loving
  • The Butler Cafe crew who stick around til midnight and let me slip in (sometimes) after they close the doors

Google

  • GChat invisibility
  • Google Translate
  • Google Docs
  • Forwarding my Cubmail to Gmail

Meta

  • BwogWeather
  • My cameo on BwogWeather
  • Bwog gifting us two minutes for wackiness
  • Listservs
  • Eliza’s little brother
  • The mysterious bottomless bank account of Pat Blute
  • The freshman contributions to this list
  • Bwog bless us. Every one!