Berkeley Time

At Cal:

  • Because we’re laid-back West Coast hippies, we start everything just a little bit late, and it’s cool.
  • Because we have an acupuncture needle stuck up our collective ass, we decided to make that precisely ten minutes late. If you show up at 11 minutes past you’re really harshing our learning buzz, y’know?

New arrivals to campus are left to discover this policy on their own, through the exciting process of being ridiculously early to their first class.

Meanwhile, back in the House of Applied Queer Theory:

  • There’s an ongoing debate about whether or not painting over some Ani DiFranco lyrics in the stairwell was somehow anti-feminist*.
  • We struck a blow for gay rights by relabeling all the cereal boxes as “Queerios”
  • My former temporary roommate is talking about a book she read (for some class on representations of homosexuality in film) that put forth in dead seriousness the proposition that anal sex leads to communism, because private parts inspire private property. Or something.

Finally, as Chris Clarke so eloquently reminds us, we’re all going to die but Berkeley is next.

*Why is it that people like to put poetry on walls? It’s just a lazy excuse for a proper mural. If anyone knows of some good radical feminist art, with none of this bullshit about putting content above visual style, let me know and I’ll propose it as a compromise.

Comments

  1. Hugo wrote:

    Which co-op are you in? I spent three years in Ridge House (2020-89)… I miss it still…

  2. yami wrote:

    I’m in Oscar Wilde, which certainly has its own crop of nostalgic alumni as well. Hoorah for co-ops!

  3. denisdekat wrote:

    sounds like latino time almost

  4. LDH wrote:

    “anal sex leads to communism” — wow, haven’t heard *that* one in a few decades…

  5. yami wrote:

    This was from a pro-anal-sex, pro-communist vantage, of course.

  6. Wren wrote:

    That 10 past the hour still gets me, and I’ve been here for many many years.
    Of course, if you’re the TA, er, GSI, and you arrive more than 5 minutes late for section/lab, your students will be long gone.

  7. yami wrote:

    Student desertion = they all fail = easy money… or am I missing something here?

  8. Wren wrote:

    You will learn, young one, that failing a student at Berkeley is hard to do. Particularly in the case of not attending section or lab. Generally, the in-major classes are well-behaved; it’s the non-major students who are only trying to fill a requirement who have a frustrating feeling of entitlement. “What does not showing up have to do with not getting an A?”

  9. yami wrote:

    I’m looking forward to testing my stubborn curmudgeonliness on these innocent kids, for sure.

  10. Amanda wrote:

    I so want to live in your house. (Queerios! Oscar Wilde!)

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