As long as schools like Columbia champion the “sink-or-swim” school of language instruction, you will inevitably come into contact with, whether in fulfilling your requirement or just being intellectually curious, the Language Professor Who Does Not Speak English. This professor can exist in any language department. The idea of this professor is that you are supposed to appreciate him/her over time, but usually, at least while you are still in Elementary I, he/she will be the source of continued frustration that you will not experience again until you actually make it abroad (if you ever do make it abroad). What this professors will lack in bilingualism, however, he/she will generally make up in authentic cultural knowledge, due to the generally recent move from his/her country of origin.

You will probably at some point resent this teacher until you remember that one of your Elementary I classmates is planning to move to the country of said language and teach English there as soon as the semester is over, at which point you will feel like a hypocrite.

Conversely, this professor may speak limited amounts of a strange and original hybrid of English with his/her native language.

Text by Hannah Goldstein, illustration by Chloe Gogo

Bwog has hopped, poked, and swiftly skimmed, but now we’re inviting other writers into the Bwog Bubble. We think there’s lots of fantastic campus journalism out there that sometimes slips under the radar. In the spirit of Enlightenment salons from centuries past, we present our newest feature, BwogSalon. Bwog asked the editors of each publication on campus to send us a teaser article from their most recent issue—something distinctly representative of their point of view, but still accessible. Below, check out Carlos Blanco’s piece from Sanctum: The Undergraduate Journal of Religion at Columbia University. You’ll make your fave French intellectual and your spiritually searching sister proud.

I Got It from My Mama

I was pretty young when I realized my family was poor. I think it had something to do with seeing what my family had versus what the American media told us we should have. We didn’t have a second-story house, there was no pool in our backyard, and going out to eat meant a very special occasion. But, while my family saw our share of struggles, every Sunday during mass, my mom would donate twenty dollars to the collection pin.

Now, I know twenty dollars is not a hefty amount of cash, but, to a seven-year- old kid, twenty dollars was the world. Thoughts of the things I would have bought—Pokemon cards, toys, and candy—would haunt me as I saw my mom give her weekly tithe.

But, more than lamenting the things I missed out on, I never understood why my mother gave up her hard-earned money to St. Bernadette’s, and it often angered me. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the hypocrisy: how come the Church needed more money than we did? If God was so powerful, then why should we have to help him? It was all the more perplexing, given how much those donations affected us; most Sundays, my mother would quietly pat my head and tell me we couldn’t even afford to buy donuts on the way home, like the other kids. My mother’s actions only seemed to reinforce some of the doubts I began to have about religion in general. Read more…

Freshpeople! You tired, you poor, you huddled masses gathering to take the Frontiers final today: we promise, college isn’t always like this. To provide some last-minute assistance, here are some haikus sent by one of your own. If you have other haikus, Frontiers-related or otherwise, leave ‘em in the comments. Good luck, friends!

Two distributions
Significantly different?
Check the error bars

Making assumptions
We’re not being judgmental
Just reasonable
Living on islands
You might meet a relative
No alternatives

Saw a shooting star?
If you are a dinosaur
Your end is coming.

Spiral galaxies
Beyond ours, more are lurking
future cannibals?

Action potentials
The currency of our thoughts
Small spikes make big waves

Black Verizon LG cellphone with slide-out keyboard possibly dropped between 116th station and River Hall. Reward offered. Emailcmd2159@columbia.edu if found.

While working as a professor, the Activist is forced out of his/her/non-gender- specific-pronoun’s natural habitat. Best suited for the front lines of some genre of consciousness-raising event, this experienced and opinionated speaker captures the class with what seems at the time to be an extremely relevant argument against society’s unnecessary gendering of bath products. The Activist Professor sits crisscrossed on the floor of your Philosophy and Feminism class, speaking brilliant words that, though you don’t understand, leave you feeling oddly invigorated and prepared to fight the evils of Wal-Mart. The Activist Professor’s choice to wear aggressively comfortable shoes confirms their dedication to the issues.

The younger Activist (read: T.A.) often comes equipped with a few extra piercings, tattoos written in Sanskrit, and if students are lucky, a strand of neon blue or pink hair. These all act as visual tools to help reaffirm the Activist’s strong activist-y beliefs (in what? who cares!?). Each extra piercing represents the young Activist’s growing hope to “just have a conversation, you guys” about free-range farming and the rise of evangelical Christianity in the United States.

The Activist is very serious about the issues. All of the issues. Do you share with your professor an interest in fighting for the rights of sex workers? Have you seen your professor give a speech at an event for the Human Rights Campaign? Does your professor inexplicably wear Birkenstocks to class everyday? If yes, congratulations…you have an Activist Professor. This is what college was like in 1994, we guess.

Text by Lily Icangelo, illustration by Hannah Kloepfer

bring it, bitch.

Another vintage post from our archives for you to contemplate while holed up in the library…

With classes completed and a weekend now free to bemoan our misery, Bwoggers weigh in from Butler Cafe/salon: what’s worse, studying for finals or writing papers?

Papers

Remember: every essay is an open book test. With class notes, a few highlighted passages, and the wisdom of Wikipedia, writing the final paper for that morning lecture you haven’t graced with your presence since October becomes a manageable feat. For the overachiever, a few days of advance planning gives plenty of time to skim a book or two on an exhaustive syllabus. After a night’s work, you’re an experton Early Modern thought – or, at very least, you’re an expert on Descartes, whose Meditations on First Philosophy clocks in at around 70 pages– and your professor will be awed at your profound insights.Whereas the finals studier, settling down to confront that stack of unread books the morning before the test begins, will probably forget everything he wished he knew about Hobbes as soon as the clock starts ticking.

That’s another thing – essays are free of the stomach-churning anxiety that reminds you of the night before the SATs. And that nervousness doesn’t make you work faster, it only makes you stall. It’s not high school anymore, and we’re out of testing practice. Remember how you used to fire out short answers about the Monroe Doctrine? Remember how you used to diagram the stages of anaerobic respiration? Remember how you used to make flashcards? Just look at you now: struggling to make a simple comparison between Aristotle and Aquinas. Pathetic. Don’t mourn your lost youth and do what we came here to do: argue, debate, and use enough pretty language to hide what you don’t know.

Finals

Finals are the godsend of the procrastinating humanities student. You read, er… skimmed, er… sparknoted all those books, but more importantly you sat through class and based your bullshit comments on the synopsis there given by the one person who read all of The Republic. They say you’ll remember an idea if you really engage with it – well, you have! You sat at that seminar table, didn’t you? Now all that’s left to do is to review, and you’ve got plenty of time, the test is tomorrow. It’s past midnight? Ok, technically it’s today. The test is in two hours. One hour. Not ready? Too bad, you can’t make up an excuse to turn this paper in late, even if it has the potential to be a masterpiece (once you start it). You have to show up to that test. And chances are you’ll do fine. And even if you don’t, 2 hours of studying will probably get you a passing grade, while two hours of writing a paper will probably only get you half a paper. This is about time management, Butler zombies.

Ok, so the more technically or linguistically minded among us might not get many organic compounds or Italian verbs memorized in 2 hours. But think of your theoretical other option – in an alternate universe, you’d be writing a paper about the development of that Italian verb (or worse, writing a paper in Italian) or a research paper on the use of Vomitoxin, Uranocene, or Fukalite (yeah, those are real organic compounds). But if you have a final, you’ll probably be asked at most to identify what type of compound Dinocap (also real) is in. And even if you don’t prepare in advance, you know you can – exams that test you on the whole of a psychology text book, for example, are easy to read ahead on. No “here’s you paper topic, due in 72 hours.” No one will argue that computer science concepts are easy, but would you really rather be writing a paper about them?

We’re stuck in Butler too, wishing we were back in elementary school when all we had to do was color in the circles and not calculate their velocities relative to the Sun as they hurtle through space.

Holding fast to the spirit of youth, we’ve created a cootie catcher. Now this toy you once used to judge your friends will help you ace your finals. Well, kinda. Click the flyer below for instructions on how to make your very own Bwog Fortune Teller or click the fortune teller to see a larger version!

Instructions and cutout (PDF)

Big version (PDF)

Pizza party! Pizza party!

Just not you!

A girl on Broadway, to a group of friends: “I was so drunk I put my face on pizza.”

Originally, Bingo was a lottery game called “Il Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia” invented and played in Italy around 1530. Usually, Bingo is a game played by your great aunt. Today, Bingo is a game that will make your procrastination dreams come true.

Here’s how to play: sit in Butler. Look at the game board. Scroll over each square to read its description. Look around you. When you observe something that corresponds with a square on the board, click that square to fill it in. When you get five in a row, stand up, shout “BINGO!” and do a little dance. Then pat yourself on the back and feel accomplished that you actually did something while in Butler.

And just like at Pleasant Oaks Community Center, each time you play is a whole new experience. Every time you refresh this page, the board randomizes and the positions of the squares change. So play a new game every time you’re in Butler, and good luck with finals!

Our second installment of Graveyard Shift finds Diana Clarke hanging out with Gamal, late-night/early-morning coffee vendor on 114th Street. Remember: other people stay up late, too. Good luck studying.

As students stumble home from Butler in the wee hours, they’re likely to pass a man stocking his coffee cart on 114th and Broadway with fresh donuts and bagels. His name is Gamal, and he’s been parked on that corner every weekday morning for the last fourteen years. In that time Gamal, who’s from Egypt, has made “a lot of friends here,” he says, along with all the regulars he knows from his job. And it’s a crowd as international as any at Columbia: people from the Middle East, Africa, Sweden.

When asked if he sees a lot of students at his cart, Gamal just answers “Yeah,” adding “Everybody here is nice with me.” But as for his feelings about the neighborhood? “It depends on the customer, you know?” Although apparently he’s pretty well liked: “A lot of people come here and make interviews with me” he says. “Everybody’s happy” that he’s worked here a long time, and he says that their tastes are so different that everything in his cart is popular. But he’s not interested in any of it. “For me? Nothing,” he says. “Otherwise, I’d eat everything. I like everything from another cart.”

And that business model appears to be working for him. Yes, chatting with the regular customers and seeing the students is fun, but Gamal’s final word is this: “I like everybody here, you know, because I make money from them.”

The New York Times published a story today that calls last week’s bust of a drug ring involving Columbia students “unremarkable, but for one thing: [the] Ivy League clients.” Below, we highlight some relevant new information that our (full disclaimer!) very own Eliza Shapiro helped report:

• The original anonymous call to Crime Stoppers that prompted the investigation happened towards the end of the Spring ’10 semester, “leading the police to begin an investigation that focused on one Columbia student in particular: Harrison David.” There is still no public information about the context or content of that call.
• Harrison David “unwittingly led undercover officers to everyone else charged in the indictment.” He connected an undercover cop to his dealer, Miron Sarzynski.
• Most of the drug purchases were in “relatively small amounts,” such as an ounce of marijuana or “a few pills” or Adderall or ecstasy.
• Concerning disciplinary actions resulting from things such as the smell of marijuana, Shollenberger says that Columbia’s “threshold of proof is much lower than law enforcement’s for us to move forward.” However, he noted that it is not Columbia’s policy to actively search dorm rooms for drugs.
• Shollenberger also commented that the rise in the recorded number of disciplinary actions taken as a result of drug usage possibly went up recently due to recent changes in policy, such as increased training for RAs.
• Some personal info about the suppliers: Lagares, a supplier of cocaine to David, operated a Mister Softee truck. Sarzynski and Asper, marijuana suppliers from the East Village, were dating and eventually “planned to start a juice and health food business one day.” On her boyfriend, Asper says: “Miron is small potatoes. I thought the police had bigger fish to fry.”
• The Times also notes that given the depth “notorious New York City drug cases, these suspects seem somewhat unremarkable,” and that “illegal drug use is an issue on virtually all university and college campuses in the United States, and Columbia is no different.”

We, oppressed Humanities students, have discovered, through our weeks of crazed paper-writing, that Microsoft Word doesn’t know anything about anything. If “precolonial” isn’t a real word according to our computers, college is a lie. Here are some words Bwog was punished with that red squiggly line for writing recently. Add your own in the comments.

• Mugabe
• Historiographical
• Problematize
• Pwned
• Detente
• Freedpeople
• Radicalization
• Bwog
• Blub
• Precolonial
• Reappropriate
• Francophonie
• Monarchial
• Expositional
• Aristotelian
• Your name, so you [Anish Bramhandkar] don’t accidentally turn in a paper with the name “Amish Brandenburg”
• Heteronormative
• Appomattox
• Bacchae
• Aeneid
• Flyting
• Priapus
• Antagonization
• Privateering
• Commodification
• Heteropatriarchy
• Gauls
• Orientalism
• Recontextualize

Public Safety has just confirmed that a yet-unidentified man passed away due to natural causes in a Columbia-owned building on 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, across from Watt. The man was a Columbia alumnus from the Class of 1964.

Grad students spend a lot of time talking about binaries, which, if you think about it, is sort of fitting. Being in grad school is a kind of middle ground, and binaries are everywhere! Think about it: you’re not quite a student, but certainly not a professor; you want to be friendly to undergrads while cultivating an aura of endless and foreign mystery; you spend all your time at school, but probably don’t live here.

For many graduate students, this difficult, liminal existence extends to the realm of footwear: the dress sneaker. You know, those bizarre leather-and-rubber hybrids stuck in limbo. What dress sneakers want to say: “Hey! I’m formal and stylish! I know that I’m a professional, but I like to be able to run around if I have to!” What dress sneakers actually say: “I couldn’t decide which shoes to wear. I spent so much on textbooks that I couldn’t afford sneakers and loafers. Yes, I know that you’re probably not going to give me your number.”

The dress-sneakered grad student spends a lot of time smoking hand-rolled cigarettes outside Avery (curiously, he doesn’t spend much time inside the library), and is often seen with any of the following: black windbreaker, messenger bag, loud scarf, copy of Of Grammatology.

We don’t mean to pass any sort of personal judgment—it’s easier to think of the dress sneaker as the logical extension of the grad student’s highly theoretical existence. Grad school is definitely a tightrope, and all structures are highly contingent and hegemonic, or something. But that doesn’t give you an excuse to wear dumb shoes; some binaries, it seems, just aren’t meant to be collapsed. Take that, post-structuralism!

Text by Sam Schube, illustration by Hannah Kloepfer

We’ve got you covered! Good luck, sophomores and anyone else fortunate enough to take the CC final today!