koolherc

^Ha, you've developed a sense of community among anonymous individuals and feel guilty about it!!! Congratulations (for the accept)!

:lol: Seriously though, after a set of 10 deliciously greasy garlic knots for $1, you are indeed taking your life into your own hands edit: Oh oh! And the stromboli! Holy sh*t.

A couple of good spots in west Harlem. Also, an expensive place I've never been to down by NYU. I was recently at a Senegalese place called Keur Sokhna on Adam Clayton Powell. That was some delicious stuff. Went with a friend who lived there for two years and she was having nostalgia-flavor-orgasms, figuratively speaking.

The best pizza I've had in the last 5 years is at John & Joe's in the Bronx on Lydig Avenue, off of White Plains Rd. Also the best garlic knots. And a good eggplant parmigiana. According to that homocides map, you're only likely to die on the way there, but not while you're eating at the restaurant.

Maybe four years ago, there was a trio of bongo drummers that would rock the 4/5/6 line. They were tremendous.

I consistently see two accordion acts. One is a pair with both guys having really sleepy looking eyes. The other is a solo guy that looks kind of like a stocky Italian; he's pretty good. Are either of them the one you see? I like the subway musicians.

I just had some delicious garlic knots

Heteronormativity FAIL. *accuses self of gender normativity and sexism*

TOO LATE! *accuses everyone of racism*

You need to look at murder rates. Brooklyn has the most people of all the boroughs. Come on, Ms. Baldwin

The amount of paranoia about UChicago's Hyde Park area is absurd. It's not even low-income, really. It just happens to have a lot of black people---but, of course, that means "ghetto" to a lot of people. Consider the fact that Farrakhan, the Obamas, and many of the wealthiest African Americans in the country live in Hyde Park. In undergrad, I worked as a tutor for a black family whose female head of household was a news reporter for the biggest local news channel in Chicago. Wealth oozes out of the area, and UChicago does its best to get rid of the "unseemly" elements via gentrification and employing the second largest police force in Illinois (after the Chicago municipal police force).

yeah, and wow. how does a person come across that kind of info?

wow, this thread was started less than 24 hours ago and it's already on the 4th page? It clearly hit a nerve, Trip Baldwin. I'm concerned that one of my top choices (among the progs that accepted me) hasn't responded to any of my emails or phone calls for 2 weeks now. When I talked to a prof via phone, I messed up and called her an hour later than our appointment, so now I wonder if they're considering rescinding my offer. 100% pure paranoia, I know. Oh, also, given the UChicago convo above, I'll add that I also did my ugrad there and had a great time.

I think you're 100% right. The problem is that these grad schools insist and convince us that we need to have a project already planned out beforehand, despite the fact that they very well know that these projects will eventually be scrapped. Not sure why they bother. I get that they want to make sure we're not a flakes, but... really, if anything, the grad programs are the ones being pretentious*. *noting point about the traditional def. of the word.

I think you're on to something. No one gave a hoot about my posts before.

Yeah, re-reading, that was a bit emotional on my part. Sorry long_time. Good luck to the OP.

I like what a lot of people have said here, but I'll add this in response to a couple of lines in the OP's comments: In regards to figuring out what you want to do before getting to vs while in grad school... I think that one should just get a normal job (or other less legal way of supporting oneself) and read books or articles or whatever by oneself until one does know what one wants to do. Get a reading group together, or, if you must, do a (cheap) MA somewhere. I'm so glad that I didn't go into a PhD program straight out of college, or at any other point in the 5 years between then and now. I could have and I might've gotten in somewhere, but I wouldn't have had the drive and desire to just straight wreck shit that I have now. Holding off as long as I did and being convinced by all the garbage online that tells us not to go to PhD programs helped me really focus my mind, my energies, and enhance my self-confidence and confidence in the fact that I want to be a nerd who gets paid to be a nerd for the rest of my life, while also hopefully making my colleagues shit their pants.

talk about them, not you. and have at least 100 questions ready to ask. most people, being self-centered, will gladly answer questions about themselves and forget to ask you about yourself. focus on external realities and ideas, not intrapersonal sociability

^I'm rootin' for ya.

I would say that public school (K-12) and public healthcare (especially through mind-altering drugs) are much more strongly this than university schooling. Uh huh, definitely. I think you expanded beyond my focus here a bit, though I definitely agree. What I'm pointing to is knowledge (specifically reason, expertise, and certain cognolinguistic aspects of natural language itself) as a tool of oppression. So, personally, for me, going into the university and arguing against knowledge (by publishing/teaching/etc about that) sounds pretty good to me.* Of course, I figure many of the rest of us professors, especially those that argue for universal truths and such, will be doing the exact opposite. Every posited truth that a professor "knows" (that is, makes up) is directly taking power away from Joe Shmoe on the bus that doesn't "know" it, especially if that truth is used by interested parties to argue about things on a larger, social scale. ---Though we knew this already: religious institutions have always used secret made up knowledge as power. *Of course, this argument is made for the intellectual to understand and hear. They're the ones who need to hear it---at least this part of it. But this is all going way off topic. My original thought was simply that the liberal arts might be defended from approximately this position, in being its own form of anti-knowledge-as-end. This might seem strange (that one sort of knowledge might be ends-oriented and another not), but, quite frankly, whenever the state+media is willing to take a position on these kinds of things (as it has), I think this tells us quite a bit and suggests to us where we might at least start looking.

i guess homeless, library-frequenting bum is the way to go. makes sense, actually

Touché. I listened to this the other day: A discussion between X and Baldwin. 7 parts. It's pretty sick.

say something absurd later, you can just say you were simply saying something absurd in order to get convo going. if u do this often enough, eventually people will stop knowing whether or not to take ur seriously when u say crazy stuff, and so u can get away with saying all kinds of things that you actually do believe in but might be otherwise considered nutso. meanwhile, ur putting all kinds of usually deeply witheld thoughts into the air and into the conversational stream of your certain ivory tower. years later, u become that prof and you've developed a rep.

Oohhhhhh. Well, my friend, that's what playing videogames and baseball is for.

No? <--Confused?