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Chris Lando

I Miss Late Meal

by Chris Lando on April 30, 2012 · View Comments

As junior year draws to a close and I reflect on the first three years of Princeton, I must say that as an upperclassmen, I really miss going to late meal. It’s not so much that I miss the particular food I ate. While good, I can’t say I’d go out of my way to recommend any particular item to someone eating in Frist for the first time. Rather, what I miss about late meal is the unique way that it brought me together with friends that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen as frequently.

One of the best aspects of late meal is that it is a nearly ubiquitous underclassmen experience. Whereas for most regular meals, students likely eat in their respective residential college dining halls, late meal is a chance to dine and socialize with people you know from every residential college. It’s often far easier to meet someone for late meal than a regular meal due to conflicting class schedules, and without it, I feel I would have formed weaker relationships with friends I had in classes and activities who didn’t also live in my residential college.

Sadly, there is no late meal equivalent for upperclassmen. We are now mostly all segregated by eating club, and it’s harder to catch up with people for meals without a “late meal” that you know everyone will be gathering at. While meal exchanges between clubs are nice, it’s just less sporadic than showing up at late meal not knowing who you’ll see and sitting with multiple groups of people over the course of an hour.

Perhaps the new campus pub will act as a similar social hub, but without the guarantee of free meals at set hours each day, it is unlikely that entire classes will congregate in the same way that made late meal such a special social avenue. I implore underclassmen to enjoy late meal while you can because it is an experience I truly miss.

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On Reading Week

by Chris Lando on January 7, 2012 · View Comments

Well this is strange, coming back to Princeton after a THREE week break. Over this break I, of course, took the time to catch up and review any readings/lecture slides I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with. I also wrote, and edited three times, my entire JP, which isn’t due until April (since economics requires only one). Coming back for reading period, I need only prepare for a concert for my MUS 310 seminar (Friday at 8pm in Taplin Hall. Everyone should totally attend!), which, if possible, I would have also done early.

If this sounds like the exact opposite of your break, then before fretting that you couldn’t possibly compete with my totally honest depiction of my winter break, perhaps we should reflect more closely on the nature of reading period. While I know it’s technically called reading period, mentally everyone kind of treats it like a week because we tend to block things into familiar units. The university, in its almighty foresight, was smart enough to give us one and half to two and a half extra days (depending on if you start counting the week on Sunday or Monday) more than a week in order to finish all of our written work. It’s like it has procrastination already factored in!

Additionally, over a week and a half of exams is a far more generous window than many other schools. So as much all you engineers and over-achievers have managed to give yourself five exams as well as a few twenty page papers and a presentation and group work and oversight of the publication of your latest novel going to press the same day that you have the second batch of three exams since they couldn’t reschedule your exam period in any way that could leave you with just two on two separate days, we actually have it pretty good over here.

Yes, it does kind of suck to have a month between your last class and your first final. A month is a long time (almost enough to beat Skyrim!). At the end of the day though, I kind of like our strange outlandish schedule. To the outside it says, “Look at those elite douchenozzles and their pretentious exam schedules,” but to me it says, “More time at Princeton!” Because when you think about it, exams or not, is there anywhere else you want to be?

Tagged as: finals, reading period, skyrim, winter break

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The Heat is Too Damn High!

by Chris Lando on December 1, 2011 · View Comments

Winter is coming…which at Princeton means I have to both be prepared for the sometimes nasty cold of the northeast as well as the incessant saunas that exist in nearly all buildings. I’ll need to tactfully build my outfits layer by layer to insure I’m ready for both the frozen tundra and the rainforest. My question to Princeton is this: why do you make every interior location on campus so hot?

In fact, the reason I sat down to write this was because in spite of sitting next to three open windows, I’m forced to wear a t-shirt in order to not die of dehydration induced by sweating in my dorm. Now, I’m sure some of you people who live in fancy new dorms have your own thermostat, but for those of us lucky enough to live in slums, our heaters have a mind of their own. (See my post Slum-Dorm Millionaire where one was mistaken for a squirrel)

For a campus that touts its shift towards sustainability, it seems like an awfully large expenditure of energy to have the windows left wide open for nearly all of winter just to balance out the temperature. Maybe we should create better ways to moderate the interior temperatures before we start insulating Butler’s roofs with grass and using those annoying high-efficiency washers that vacuum seal your clothing to the edges. Until then though, please just lower the heat. We’ll live if we have to wear a sweater while we’re indoors.

Tagged as: heat, slums, squirrel, sustainability

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On Hoagie Haven

by Chris Lando on October 13, 2011 · View Comments

It’s 1:55am in the basement of TI. The party offers the expected debauchery and class (or lack-there-of) of the Glorious tap room. I tell my friend visiting from Columbia that if he’s down to sprint a few blocks, we can eat the greatest sandwiches known to man, but we’d have to leave the party now. He’d heard me rambling about this place all night and – as he is a man of impeccable taste – he agreed. We bolt down whatever that street is that separates the people stuck with class in Friend from the truly depraved engineers and arrived moments before two.

As this is a blog and not a creative writing class, I need not go into a description of the sandwiches we ate or my and my friend’s reaction to eating said sandwiches. Their consumption was orgasmic, as is typical. I reflect on this night and realize the terrible dilemma that we faced. The party at TI was by all means excellent, but to stay until it past its peak would mean forgoing all opportunity to indulge in delectable Hoagies. This paradox is surely the work of some great administrative conspiracy to cause all Princetonians to exit the street en masse at 2 in order to reduce the amount of time we partake in undesirable (read: fun) activities…

As believable as this explanation may be, the clear reason that Hoagie Haven closes at 2 is because it can. It’s that good. It doesn’t need to stay open all night long to still have the best food on—well, kind of near campus. Frist is open to take our money (because who would actually buy their pizza during the day) and the Wa is endearing only by virtue of the fact that it never closes.

At the end of the day Hoagie Haven’s philosophy of “everything tastes better with cheese steak” and dedication to putting all of our favorite foods into one giant hero will continue to compel students to trek well out of their way for hoagies no matter what time it closes.

...the leading cause of heart disease after smoking

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Slum-Dorm Millionaire

by Chris Lando on October 5, 2011 · View Comments

Regrettably, I am now a junior. That means each day that passes I am closer to my graduation date than the day I first started at Princeton, I have to write JPs, and worst of all, I have to live in the place that I have been indoctrinated to know as “the slums” for the past two years of Princeton. Wait what? You mean those gorgeous old buildings on the west side of campus just past Dillon gym? Yes. Those are the slums.

Sure walking to the street takes forever (under fifteen minutes walking leisurely). Sure it is unbearably hot in September with no AC, and the heaters are already crackling in such strange ways that my roommate (the editor of this fine online publication) swore there was a squirrel running around one of our doubles.

After living here for a month though, I have to say the slums is the most incredible place on campus. For the first time, all your friends from various res colleges are packed together into one small sector of campus allowing you to interact with them way more than before, especially your Forbes friends (that is, if you ever met anyone from that far away land). It’s also a well-known fact that all trips to the street end at the Wa, and there are very few places closer to the Wa than slums, thus actually reducing total travel distance on nights out.

Brown may be in the center of campus, but I don’t have to be a recluse living in a single until I start my thesis. Bloomberg has AC, but it also has frosh to cramp your style, and I’m still not sure anyone knows what happened to Princeton’s architecture south of Frist/Guyot. My general mood has improved ten-fold just due to the aesthetic boost of living among the finest collegiate Gothic buildings on campus. I basically live in a castle, and that’s a lot more awesome than those strange white cubes that comprise Spellman

In conclusion, I think that there have been some cunning upperclassmen in past years pulling an old Viking trick…

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Morose Mondays: The Endless Machine

by Chris Lando on April 25, 2011 · View Comments

Those of you who have found yourselves browsing the web in class have probably hit up a number of common websites to remain “cultured” in the ways of the internet. The bravest or craziest among us may check out 4chan, the rawest and least filtered form on the Internet. Those with more refined tastes probably wound up on reddit or maybe digg, that is, if they enjoy being late to the party.

Another option exists, however, removed from these more mainstream options: www.meme-meme.org. This fine website is a seemingly endless compilation of picture and video memes from throughout the web. While it lacks the bells and whistles of user-posted content and commentary, it has the advantage of being a pure meme-feed.

There is absolutely nothing to read, aside from captions. Instead, you are faced with an onslaught of visual stimuli from all corners of the Internet. As you scroll down, meme after meme appears. They range from motivational posters, to rage comics, to lolcats, to just about any other picture or video you would imagine one of your friends sending you online.

It’s easy to burn a lot of time on the site because as you scroll, the page expands seemingly indefinitely, much like your newsfeed on Facebook. Each time you think to yourself that you’ll stop at the end of this page, you’re actually making the page bigger and bigger. It’s a similar experience to climbing the infinite staircase in Mario 64 before you have enough stars for the final Bowser fight, only rather than quickly turning around to find more stars, you’ll instead be drawn deeper and deeper in the wealth of humor the Internet has chronicled through one simple site.

In closing, here’s some advice on how to save paper:

The joke is that it took a lot of paper to make the announcement.

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The Hangover: A Precise Japanese Remedy

by Chris Lando on April 22, 2011 · View Comments

So you forgot to drink water before you went to bed. Or maybe you forgot that dodgeball was supposed to be a dry event (it’s sponsored by the Alcohol Initiative after all—the initiative it supports is not the consumption of alcohol). Regardless of your excuse or lack thereof, this week we bring you a hangover cure straight from the Japanese archipelago.

It’s been common practice in Japan to wear a surgical mask soaked in sake. The idea may seem silly at first, but how often does the idea of consuming more alcohol seem appealing after you’ve awoken with a terrible hangover? Rather than have something to drink, this cure assures that you need not place another drop in your mouth. Rather, by simply inhaling the sake fumes, you will slowly numb the effects of your hangover.

This is a very subtle and subdued approach to fixing a hangover and should simply work slowly without much thought. Aside from the slightly comical look you might be getting from passersby, the last thing they will suspect is that you woke up with a splitting headache from last night’s adventures. In fact, the assumption will probably be that you have just come out of an important surgery that went through the night and that you need something to eat.

The remedy is so popular, in fact, that the SARS epidemic was actually a cover-up for an epic Asian party that left people so wasted that it became common practice to wear sake-soaked surgical masks to ward off the perpetual hangovers that ensued.

Disease prevention? Or are they already walking dead?

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Our Orange Bubble: Political Apathy

by Chris Lando on April 20, 2011 · View Comments

It’s time for elections again. I know this because I have been invited to over a dozen Facebook events imploring me to vote for so-and-so for U-Council. (What do they do again?) I didn’t find any such invitations asking me to vote for my own class’s officers (2013). That’s because each position was uncontested, from president to secretary. Why on earth in a school full of honor-seeking, hypercompetitive, type-A personalities are such positions of power widely uncontested throughout each class?

Morose Mondays: A Classic in the Making

by Chris Lando on April 18, 2011 · View Comments

It’s one of those early afternoon lectures. Your stomach grumbles for Late Meal at Frist, but not before professor so-and-so reads off his power point for another fifty minutes. You’ve already checked Facebook ten times (or maybe you were accidentally Facebook stalking your neighbor and now returning is not an option). What to do?

Chris Lando

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