jasonswadley.com

Lost in the Meritocracy

Flexibility, irony, class consciousness, contrarianism. I’d gone to Princeton, and soon I’d go to Oxford, and these, I was about to tell Karl, are the ways one gets ahead now—not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d learned a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new class the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things. The class that makes the headlines—that writes the headlines, and the stories under them.

But I kept all this to myself; I didn’t tell Karl. He was a reader, a Buddhist, and an old friend, and there were some things he might not want to know. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know them either.

A really excellent essay on modern higher education.

A British Motto

What does it mean to be British? How do you express it in a country
that believes self-promotion to be embarrassing? And how do you deal
with a defining trait of the people you are trying to define: their
habit of making fun of worthy government proposals?

Detractors
spread the rumor that the government was looking not for a considered
statement, but for a snappy, pithy “liberté, égalité, fraternité”-style
slogan that it could plaster across government buildings in a kind of
branding exercise.

Nor did it help when The Times of London cynically sponsored a British motto-writing contest for its readers.

The
readers’ suggestions included “Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco” (Asbo
stands for “anti-social behavior order,” a law-enforcement tool, while
Tesco is a ubiquitous supermarket chain); “Once Mighty Empire, Slightly
Used”; “At Least We’re Not French”; and “We Apologize for the
Inconvenience.” The winner, favored by 20.9 percent of the readers, was
“No Motto Please, We’re British.”

Things I’ve Learned in Grad School

• There’s never time to blog.
• True academics use words like "reify" and "problematic."
• A frozen chicken breast can be completely cooked in a George Foreman grill in about 8 minutes.
• Home improvement costs more than you think.
• Items on craigslist cost less than you think.
• Life feels pretty complete doing little more than eating, sleeping, reading, and thinking.
• Moving away from frozen meals is tough.
• The life of eating, sleeping, reading, and thinking can get quite lonely at times.
• It’s true that you can’t take the country out of the boy. The people are the same wherever you go, but the air and sunsets are not.
• We are all tempted by myopic living.
• Even good books go out of print.
• When they do, they’re expensive.
• Very expensive.
• Cast iron is by far the best cookware.
• It’s ok to be the second or third (or 23rd) smartest person in the room.
• Civilization should have never left the warmer climates.
• Like Eskimos Inuits and seals, Chicago has different names for different cold weather patterns.
• I don’t miss my car.
• Erasing is one of the joys of writing.

Hitchens on English Eccentricities

Just to keep people on their toes, it has been decided that the English
(or British, or what you will) should have an absurdity at the very
apex of their well-worn arrangements. Accordingly, an elderly lady of
German descent is the head of the Church, the state, and the armed
forces (being, as far as I know, the only colonel of any English
regiment to be married to the colonel of another English regiment), and
just as she came by her job when her own father expired, so her son
will inherit these same responsibilities when she, too, is promoted to
a higher realm. Meanwhile, everyone agrees to say “the Royal Mint”
(where the money is actually coined) and “the national debt” (where the
money vanishes into infinity). Her Majesty the Queen has been recently
photographed wringing the neck of a wounded pheasant on one of her many
estates, and has a husband who has to walk several paces behind her
when she appears in public (and for all I know, though there are those
rather difficult children, in private). The great thing is that nobody
in England/Britain/Albion/ the U.K. appears to find any of this odd.
Why should they? It’s not as if the telephone numbers and area codes
for the nation’s different towns were the same length. Where on earth
would be the fun in standardizing something like that?