Graduate student rant

You know I have really tried to make it work with these no-talent ass clowns, but I'm so through with these socially inept gossipy bastards, I need to cleanse. Here are all the characters that have been plaguing my life for the past 3 quarters plus summer:

Neurotica--I really liked you. I thought you were cool and dressed well. I was impressed that you wore make-up. We had a lot of common interests, shopping, shoes, boys. I kinda liked your rocker boyfriend, but then when I found out he didn't like me--I was a little miffed, but whatevs, right? Imagine my surprise when you actually let his scant opinion of me, influence yours! Mind control? I was amazed at your inability to do most normal things, like break up with loser boyfriends and chose advisors that will actually help you. You would obsess over every possible decision and expect my sympathy when your big breasted sister tried to give your her out-grown bras. I mean this is life. Maybe I was too hard on you about trying to break up with this loser, but I got a little worried when you told me you had to sell your clothes to buy food. That loser you live with is a waiter; if he doesn't cover rent, do you think he could at least take the dead food from the kitchen?

Tattoo Jane--I really liked you too. I know you were cool and had a hot, let me say it again, hot, boyfriend. He is Armenian and he is a sexy sexy beast. We went drinking a few times and always to your side of town. You never came to ours. I mean we like your side, but our side has stuff going on too. My bf thought your tattoos were cool, but you told him you always kept them covered because you didn't want people in the academic community to judge you. Um, what? You had two full sleeves. Who were you kidding? If you didn't want people to judge you for not having tattoos, then why did you get them? And also, if you plan on having a career in academia, do you really think it is realistic to cover your arms for the rest of your life? But even this didn't bother me. It was the fact that you never came to my side of town always on the excuse of needing to see "Jimmy." I think I called you up and said I haven't seen you in months, come to this art show and your response was "I'm hanging out with Jimmy . . . I haven't seen him in like a week." I've never met him. If "Jimmy" was code for your boyfriend's penis, I would have been more understanding. I would definitely want to hang out with Jimmy. There was no reason we could not all hang out with Jimmy together. I would even buy him a drink.

Jersey--Being from Jersey also, I thought we would understand each other and we did, but something about you was really off. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but felt I was vindicated after you broke up with your girlfriend in Russia (everyone raise your hand who didn't see that coming) and started nailing undergrads. Not that I wouldn't want to nail undergrads. Actually, I wouldn't, they're slightly more stupid and more insidious than grad students.

X--You were so well connected and depressed it was like hanging out with any of my ex-boyfriends. You were also an ex-graduate student, or not really on the attendance list as it were. I tried to help you out of your depression by calling you to come out or over for dinner made to your dietary specifications. I even offered to put you on my health insurance so you could get your meds and then maybe you would stop being so depressed and finish your paper for that class you took like three years ago. It all came crumbling down when I told you that you had no chance with my best friend. And what you were surprised by this information? Dude, you have no job, you are overweight, you are generally cranky, you dropped out of school, you live alone in an apt. with no furniture, your parents support you and you are bald. The latter is not so much a deal breaker, it's just another obvious reason why you have no chance. Also you are 37 and you have nothing to show for it.



Tee-toller--I never had any specific problems with you, not that I ever really want to hang out with you, but you always seem to be around. It's just that you can't hold your liquor for shit and it's not that I have to drink to go out, but you seem to have to, but you can't. I'm really in awe at your inability to hold your liquor. You take one drink and you're three sheets to the wind. If you wanna drink, do it home alone where I don't have to spend my evening making sure some assmunch doesn't date rape you; if you wanna come out with me, don't drink.

Mr. Boring--You were pretty nice to me, but I was also pretty amazed that you managed to tell me a 20 minute long story about your bike skidding to a stop. I was so amazed at your boringness and the fact that you would stare at my chest the whole time. I think my breasts are pretty cute, but let's face it, when I wear a low cut shirt, I'm revealing more of a flat expanse of chest and not cleavage. Maybe you think my flat expanse is sexy. I just wish you would touch my boobs then, or not look at them. At least coping a feel would have been interesting. I was also amazed at how boring your friends were. They were actually watching Howard Zinn read on C-SPAN 2. Then they talked about the other night when they all got reaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllyyyyyyyyyy wasted. Really? Like didn't anything cool happen? No? Nothing funny? Did someone piss on your couch? Did you all have an orgy? Did you play Truth or Dare? Did you do anything other than drink?!?!?! Then who the fuck cares and why are you still talking about it three days later.

The Dreamer--I get it, you are so not together and can be funny and cute and you're really working that well. It's like, Hmm, I don't know , should I go to class or pick flowers? You are such a free spirit. It's not like you haven't planned out your life from jr. high or talk to your mother every night. Oh look your mom is calling you now. She wants to know how the towels she bought you are working out. Your bathroom was delish, so very zen like.

Anyway, I could go on, but these are the main culprits that annoyed me. Fuck grad students, I'm hanging out with Dommes instead.

Stages of Graduate School Parties

Stage One:
Get awesomely dressed up, listen to Blondie on the way, make a stunning entrance--everyone turns, stares and ignores you. You spend the rest of the evening next to the vegetable dip not speaking to the 40something first year student. You get moderately drunk and notice with moderate awe that you are the only female to be wearing make-up. At the end, you severely judge everyone left as they launch into play by plays of apparently every show of the Fall season including Next Top Model and Project Runway. You haven't had cable in five years.

Stage Two:
Get somewhat dressed up, listen to the radio on the way, make an entrance and proceed to get as drunk as possible. Attempt conversation. You get stuck by the chips and talk to a stiff girl from the Midwest and talk about beer. You run away and find no one else to talk to and try to coax the cat out from under a bed or out from a closet. You're not exactly sure of its location.

Stage Three:
Get really drunk before you go, complain on the way there how much you hate these parties, enter and promptly find the guacamole where you proceed to drink even more. Still finding no one to talk to you, you wander the fruit garden and admire the lemon, guava and avocado trees and long for a garden of your own. You are shit faced. You are a 12 on the Richter scale of drunk, light and lines cease to make sense. Nothing is blurry, but everything is tilted. You find out that some graduate students are engaged in a marriage secret to the female's parents. You drunkenly bellow, C'mere! I want to have a talking to you and straighten this thing out. Now, what in tarnation is going on here? Are you getting any money out of this? Isn't she going to have to tell her parents eventually? Are you in a functionally gay relationship? Every few seconds mutter, that is some bullshit. Punch the Marxist in the arm and say, you better never do that to me even if I am a shiksa! In some small, not yet drunk part of your mind, you realize, you must leave before causing a serious problem.

Stage Four
Get dressed in a skirt because you got killer legs anyway, listen to M.I.A. on the way there because she's really rad, enter, and do blow in the bathroom on someone's iPhone. Attempt to engage in conversation. Again. Again. Nustle up by the Marxist as he is surrounded by The Intellectual, and The Older Poet. Frown. Crinkle brow. Leave to find The Younger Poet who ignores you, trying to pick up a fairly attractive blonde who is not receptive to his no skills mac. Decide to leave because its all boring and wander around the neighborhood until the Marxist finds you and coaxes you back inside telling you what he always tells you, the conversation he was having could have only been had by a select few people in the world and he was it, and if other people are having a conversation, just jump in and ask them to explain what the hell they are talking about, and usually they don't know. Decide you are fucked up enough to call up the girl who annoyed you at the last party, tell her she's an asshole, do more blow, then fall asleep on the couch until its time to leave.


Stage Five:
Get really pissed that you are no longer allowed at graduate school parties and the Marxist is going without you.

Defending Dirty Dancing to a Dirty Marxist

We were in a cafe of course and somehow got onto the topic of John Swayze. Look, I don't care what you think, Marxy, but Dirty Dancing was a great movie. A. laments, why does every girl I date love that movie and want to watch it with me?

And so I began into a rather long rant of why Dirty Dancing is an outstanding movie and why a Marxist like him should take note of the class struggle in a Catskill mountain resort in the 60s.

Before I begin, I should note that having watched this movie almost every week when I was a child, I could recite it line by line and once even owned the soundtrack--both soundtracks.

The movie couldn't be set up more perfectly than it's opening line, a line that should be remembered like Tolstoy's: "That was the summer of 1963 - when everybody called me Baby, and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellerman's."

It was the summer before rebellion, before a modern age that presidents could be shot on television, before rock'n'roll, before a nice upper-middle class girl could think of anything better to help the world than joining the Peace Corps and when she is still in love with her father.

Enter an upper-middle class family; dad is a doctor, mom is a housewife; older sister is smart and younger sister is pretty. Frances or "Baby" is concerned with underdeveloped nations and wants to help the world by going into the Peace Corps. Lisa is concerned with finding her beige iridescent lipstick. Both fall prey to various matchmaking schemes by both family and owner of resort; Baby to the grandson of the owner, Neil, a pompous, ineffectual nerd and Robby a waiter saving money to go to med school. Both recognized as stellar choices; both total boneheads, but Robby proves to be a real bastard, impregnating the star dancer and leaving her high and dry.


Enter "bad boy" Johnny, who doesn't seem to really have any vices other than wearing tank tops and pants, perpetually in black throughout the film. There is some hint that he was involved with the "bungalow bunnies" in past seasons and the owner tells him to keep his hands off. Penny, the star dancer gets preggers by Robby and ends up tragically not being in the big show.

I think this movie appeals to women for a few different reasons. First, good ole sibling rivalry. Baby and Lisa enter their summer as virgins and sisters who don't particularly like each other. They constantly bicker is safe, 60s appropriate banter: "Butt out, Baby" "Oh Lisa's going to decorate [the world]."

But the main reason, is that the quintessential smart girl gets the bad boy. However, it is also a movie about deceiving appearances. Baby turns out to be a very sexy, rebellious woman and Johnny isn't the bad ass that everyone wants him to be--he tries to help Penny when she becomes pregnant and offers what little is left of his salary to cover her illegal abortion. Later he tries to thank Baby's father for what he did for Penny and tell him that Baby is a wonderful woman who turned out just the way he wanted. It should also be noted that he does not tell him that Robbie is the one who actually got Penny pregnant. You get the feeling that Baby doesn't lead a particularly rebellious life--she never lies to her parents, she's going to college etc. Baby sees no other way to save this young girl's life other than ask her father for money for an illegal abortion, then when it becomes botched she goes to her father in the middle of night for his assistance to save Penny's life and knowing he would not alert the authorities. All the dance kids stand around while Penny is bleeding not being able to call for a doctor. They all have slightly numb expressions, like this is just the way it is. Johnny attempts a whole-hearted thanks to the doctor, who brushes him off, wrongly thinking that he was the one who impregnated this poor butchered girl. The father forbids Baby to have anything to so with those people again.

But Baby isn't in the corner yet. She goes to Johnny's studio to unpack the night's events. First Johnny is distinctly embarrassed by the small, dirty space he inhabits and tries to clean it up saying, sorry, I'm sure you have a better room. Baby replies, louder than she has to, "No, it's a great room." Then, they have a discussion about what each one thinks about the other. She attempts to apologize for her father's behavior. Johnny knows what she is talking about, but is a gentlemen, and says, No, the way he was with Penny was great. (For all his inconsistencies, he does have a great bedside manner.) But Baby insists, "No, the way he was with you." Again, Johnny brushes it off saying, "No, I mean the way he saved her. I mean, I... I could never do anything like that. That was somethin'. The reason people treat me like I'm nothin' is 'cause I'm nothin'.
Baby reacts: "You, you're everything!"
"I never met someone like you, someone's lost, you find them, someone's bleeding--" "Yeah I go get my Daddy, that's really brave. Like you said."
"That took a lot of guts to go to him. You are not scared of anything."
"Me? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of what I saw, I'm scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you."

Both these underdog characters fall in love with each other not because of they mythologized personalities but because of who they really are; Johnny is not the rebellious bad ass nor is Baby the scared little girl who listens to Mommy and Daddy. They both have a hard time coming to terms about who they really are; Johnny thinks that he is pathetic because he couldn't do anything to help Penny and was helpless until Baby came on vacation. Baby thinks she's still Daddy's girl because she repeatedly went to him for help.

Why the Marxist should like this movie is because of the obvious class struggle in this often made fun of chronicle of Catskills resort life. It is the family's first real vacation in years pointing to the doctor's hard work building his practice and clientèle. The owner greets the family, "If it weren't for this man, I would be standing here dead." The family looks somewhat proud and used to hearing such comments.

Johnny challenges Robbie, "just lay your pickle on everybody's plate college boy and leave the hard stuff to me." He says this already knowing that Robbie got Penny pregnant, however, the audience does not. We are led to think that he implies Robbie is just a pretty play boy who dicks around, but Johnny is the real panther in the sack. Later, this would mean that Robbie sleeps around, but the "hard stuff" is helping a woman fixing the problem of an unwanted pregnancy in 1960s. It is also a pretty witty line, and all Robbie can talk about is lame ass novels like Fountainhead.

While it is pretty obvious that most of the dancers come to their profession by lack of other options we only find out about Penny and Johnny. When Baby compliments Penny on her dancing, she brushes her aside, "Well, my mother kicked me out when I was sixteen and I've been dancing every since. It's all I ever wanted to do anyway." No, there was no college for Penny, it doesn't even appear she graduated from high school. This was the only thing she ever wanted to do because no other options presented themselves. Johnny tells a story of sitting in a cafe and someone comes in and offers a chance to become a dance instructor. He says "we were all sittin' around doing nothing" meaning they were all unemployed with no other options.

Johnny talks about his desire to do something else, but he wants to get into a union. He tells Baby his father called and Uncle Paulie can finally get him into a union. Baby is hopeful, "Well, what Union?"
"House painters Union 115 at your service," Johnny says with disgust. He has no real clear objective of what he wants to do with his life; he knows he does not want to be a dancer, but he also years for something more than being a house painter. Both jobs are for uneducated labor; the waitering jobs are for guys like Robbie. The owner goes to Harvard and Yale to find them; the dancers come from broken homes in lower socioeconomic divisions.

Finally, Baby has a showdown with her father, calling him on all his hypocritical bullshit. When Johnny gets accused of stealing, Baby knows it wasn't him because she spent the night with him. Unable to bear the thought of her lover being charged with a crime he didn't commit and getting fired, she tells the resort owner and her family over breakfast that she was sleeping with Johnny that night. That took some balls in 1963. Later Baby's father refuses to talk to her because she went against his wishes; she continued to see Johnny after her father forbade it and confessed to having premarital sex. Baby confronts him, telling him, "You told me you wanted me to help people, but you meant by being like you. I'm not proud of myself, but I'm part of this family and you can't keep shutting me out." She finally realizes her father's hypocrisy; that it wasn't enough that she helped a young girl's life from being over by obtaining her an illegal, albeit almost completely botched abortion, but also saved Johnny from being criminalized. (Incidentally her mentioning of seeing the Schumachers with several wallets alerts the staff to the real culprits; another deceiving appearance: Silvia and Sydney a nice little old couple who made a fortune stealing wallets in several states.) Baby also acknowledges that blood is thicker than water; she is not proud on herself that she lied to her family and embarrassed them over some bagels, but she never regrets her actions. She tells her father, "I'm sorry I let you down, Daddy, but you let me down too."

And now, as per usual, it's time for the Jew card. Baby Houseman, Robbie Gould, Max Kellerman, Silvia and Sydney Schumacher, Vivian and Moe Pressman, all the guests and owners are Jewish. This goes totally unmentioned in the film, accept for the mention of their last names. Now, let's go back to what should be the most quoted line of the movie: "You just lay your pickle on every body's plate college boy and leave the hard stuff to me."