BU Today

It’s been a month. At least. A month of a strict hot soup/hot tea/cough drop diet. Of purchases of everything from Kleenex to Robitussin to Sudafed. And while my CVS rewards card has done well for itself, I am still sick.

I was in denial for a while, refusing to believe that my persistent cough meant something real. But I soon realized that everybody else figured out what was up. They knew I was sick, and they were ready to diagnose me. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when, as I left the Warren dining hall in a sudden coughing fit, a freshman looked at me, shook his head, and said with a mixture of pity and condemnation:

“Swine flu.”

As it turns out, I have bronchitis, which is slowly but surely being remedied by some pretty intense antibiotics. But to the general public, the diagnosis doesn’t matter. As far as they’re concerned, I have H1N1 written all over me.

It was a popular Halloween costume: a pink pig with a mask and its scientific alias scrawled across the front. It’s been nicknamed and abbreviated; everybody loves to joke about “the swine.” But while people laugh about this public health scare, they’re nervous. I know this is true, because no matter how hard I try to stifle my cough, I still get the look.

The look says a lot of things. We’ve all done it — the quick sidelong glance. It can be cruel or compassionate, but it usually means one of the following:

“Lock it up.”

“That sucks for her.”

“Get away from me.”

“Why did she come to class?”

“Is she serious?”

“SWINE!”

“I hope I don’t get whatever she has.”

And, my personal favorite:

“Your cough is disgusting.”

Like most realities of life, it seems that the best medicine is laughter, that joking about it makes us feel better. But if you go to Student Health Services, I can promise that no one is laughing.

It’s that time of year. Everyone’s sick with “flu-like symptoms,” and when you walk into SHS it’s clear. When I stepped into the packed waiting room, it was pretty much silent save for the white noise of stifled coughs and sniffles. “The look,” however, was rampant. Even though we were all sick, we were staring each other down behind our blue masks. Sitting as tightly as possible, crossing every body part as if to ward off our neighbors’ illnesses, we couldn’t find compassion for each other, even when we were in the same shoes.

So the next time you’re tempted to give “the look,” have some empathy — after all, it could be contagious.

Even while she’s recuperating, Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

Getting 'the look'? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.

My grandmother is addicted. So is my dad. Maybe it’s genetic.

As a little kid I used to watch my dad make the perfect cup of joe. I used to sit in the backseat of my grandmother’s car, watching the coffee bubble over the lid as we bumped along the road. But perhaps the most memorable of my early coffee encounters were holidays. I would sit at the dining room table, legs crossed, making castles out of discarded white sugar packets, with accents of coveted, pretty pink Sweet’N Lows and blue Equals.

I wanted to be their equal. I wanted a piece of the grown-up fun. As far as I was concerned, their lives were like one big tea party, 24/7. I was so jealous that as a four-year-old, I used to peer into the depths of my father’s mug, looking for a taste of the grown-up life. Now I find myself peering into my own mug, wondering how I got here, how I fell in love, how I got to be in a relationship with coffee.

All signs point to social capital. A term created by Bourdieu, it refers to the values, the habits, and more importantly, the social networks of an individual. And with every day of my college career, I have become more convinced that coffee is a key to the social capital of BU.

On a daily basis, in the smallest of ways, we are inundated with the value of coffee. It’s personal, it’s social, it’s everything. And it’s frighteningly true. The sheer presence of coffee on campus makes it pretty much impossible for it to be anything but a big part of our lives. There are by my calculations approximately five Starbucks, four Camp Cos, three Dunkin’ Donuts, and one Espresso Royale on the Charles River Campus. BU bleeds coffee; my text message outbox is filled with texts that say, Want to grab coffee later?

Whether Pumpkin Spice latte, Kenyan blend, or straight-up black, coffee has some legit magical powers. It provides a forum in which to socialize, to develop those networks that social capital is all about. A latte can change your life. It can make your worst class bearable, make surviving your 8 a.m. a possibility. It can set the mood for studying. It can get you through an all-nighter. It can lift spirits, offer hope, and let us dream big. It can, as Howard Thurman would say, “make us come alive.”

Yes we can.

Maybe I’m getting a little carried away. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe you don’t feel the same way. Maybe it’s all a placebo effect. Maybe this is some cruel manifestation of my addiction. But all you have to do is wait in line at any Starbucks on campus to realize the serious addiction our student body faces, the same addiction that spurred Bach to write the Coffee Cantata almost 300 years ago, one encouraged by our dean of students.

Every Friday, Kenn Elmore hosts Coffee & Conversation, where coffee and cookies inspire students’ thoughts. Beyond this weekly date, the dean has been known to tweet about it, too:

“Needed a joe and the internet.”

WORD, Dean Elmore.

Don’t we all?

Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

How do you see BU's culture? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.

THURSDAY, 2:27 PM

Racecar. Radar. Rotator. Nun. Kayak.

Palindromes are awesome. Who doesn’t love them? It’s something about the symmetry, the singular and universal meaning of the word, forwards and backwards, made more valuable by the fact that they are few and far between. Palindromes are like a rare art form, the varsity of the English language. So while this might be a bit bold, I would like to nominate a word for palindrome status: stressed.

Stressed spells desserts backwards. And in true palindrome sense, the forwards and backwards meanings of this word have become synonymous for me: in my life, there is a direct relationship between being stressed and eating chocolate chip cookies from the GSU. But this is just one of the many ways that I deal with stress. According to my friends, everything about my body language indicates that I’m stressing out. I tend to sigh profusely and rub my eyes. My contacts are replaced with glasses, and I acquire a generally frazzled appearance.

No one is safe. Especially in October.

It is universally acknowledged that October sucks. It’s starting to get cold, and classes are starting to get real. Papers, midterms, quizzes. You name it, they’ve got it. Professors love October. Students hate it. And you can tell. Stress is written all over their faces. If you’re not convinced, just go to Mugar. People freak out there. It’s the perfect place to do a case study.

Noon or midnight, Mugar is the place to be. People are camped out, there to stay, and this permanence of work and stress is, in and of itself, a controversial matter. Watching from the computer station on the first floor, I not only see the stress in my neighbor’s eyes when his computer suddenly restarts mid-paper, I see the stress in the eyes of the guy leaning against the pillar waiting for his turn.

In this sense, there is a weird competition among students during midterms. Everybody wants to do well. And everybody is demanding the same resources. We need computers. We need a study space that is perfectly conducive to our work, papers spread out, highlighters at the ready. We need sleep, but more important, we need energy in the form of Red Bulls for our hearts and Arnold Palmers for our souls. And when it all runs out, we tend to get sassy.

It is this urgency we feel that makes us so — BU. We’re city kids. We’re too busy to start studying more than 12 hours in advance, to write a paper more than a week before it’s due. But more than that, I think we like being stressed out.

In my medical anthropology class, we once discussed the physiological effects of stress. We first defined stress as a physical response to environmental demands threatening the individual. We then discussed the ways in which natural selection has enhanced our ability to respond quickly to danger, how our blood pumps faster and our senses are heightened. Stress transforms us. It makes us superhuman. It allows us to escape danger, do things that we wouldn’t normally be able to do by kicking our body into overdrive and creating some pleasant adrenaline side effects to those all-nighters. But when we crash the next day after lunch, we remember that we are mere mortals.

So why do we do it? Why let ourselves get to this breaking point? Like so many things in life, stress has a different meaning for everyone, different associations, different consequences. But one thing is for certain: stress unites the campus in an empathetic way. It brings us together to mourn the sleep we aren’t getting and the money we’re spending on coffee.

And so for all those stressed out as October comes to an end, here’s a soothing thought to keep in mind:

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

How do you see BU's culture? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.

THURSDAY, 11:46 A.M. WARREN DINING HALL

She sat down at a table that had already been saved and didn’t realize it. She began to innocently eat her grilled cheese and sip Lipton tea, when the girl who had originally marked the table as her own swooped in for the kill. She came and grabbed her purse from the booth, hidden from sight. Poor grilled cheese girl, you can see it in her eyes; all she’s thinking is: FAIL.

This territorial moment has happened to all of us. And for some reason, it seems most likely to happen in the dining hall — the DH, as some affectionately call it. Looking at the horizon of mirrors on the back wall, you can see distinct territorial lines forming. Backpacks, sweaters, Nalgenes are everywhere, marking coveted booths and tables.

In my anthropology classes, this natural act of separation is called proxemics. We can’t deal with being all up in each other’s space, so we spread across a room. But marking boundaries is something that I associate with tigers.

I love tigers. But I think it’s weird that we act like them in the dining hall, and in the classroom. I’m totally guilty of the same behavior. Freshman year, my friends would descend from the 18th floor every night and rush to the back corner of the dining hall to grab those booths that were ours. I’m not sure what made them “ours,” but we felt strongly about it. It was a routine, a ritual. We felt at home there, and we were mad when some rival floor from C tower decided it was their home, too.

You find a seat in class. You like it. You love it. And then you can’t sit anywhere else. And when someone “steals” it, you feel lost. It all feels very juvenile to me. I’m 20 years old. Why am I still attached to a seat? Why does the Warren dining hall faintly resemble a high school cafeteria?

And why is it embarrassing to sit by yourself? It’s some kind of innate fear or something. I distinctly remember sitting at the lunch table in high school when one of my friends sighed and said, “Guys, I really hope I don’t have to eat by myself in college. That’s the most depressing thing ever.”

I will admit that my first solo eating experience in the dining hall was depressing. I sat at one of the long tables, half off the chair, eating as quickly as possible, not sure what the rationale was for that. Maybe if I ate fast, I could pretend I never ate by myself?

Everyone eating alone is engaged with some piece of technology. I’m on my laptop, the guy in the yellow button-down is talking on his cell phone, grilled cheese girl is staring at her BlackBerry, as if willing it to ring.

We’re always too close or too far away — we never seem to find a balance.

Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

How do you see BU's culture? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.

Ellen’s so cool
By Sarah Zlotowitz (UNI’11). Photo by Kimberly Cornuelle

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 4:13 P.M.

The only reason I have a Twitter account is because my best friend made it for me. She claimed it was for my own good, that she was looking out for my best interests.

I’ve barely used it. Since February 19, 2009, the birthday of my passive Twitter account, I’ve tweeted 43 times, followed 16 people, and been followed by 37. But now I’m sitting in class, clicking the refresh button on my Twitter page like it’s my job.

I’m freaking out because Ellen DeGeneres is at BU. I think. But I’m not sure. Because she’s tweeting clues to BU students about prizes and there are cameras on Marsh Chapel. And I’m on the Medical Campus.

FAIL.

The people sitting behind me must think I’m crazy. I’m constantly flitting between my class notes, Twitter, Facebook, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show Web site. It feels like Gossip Girl just got real. I’m getting texts that say, “Official looking cameras on marsh … Ellen???” and “The Ellen DeGeneres show is here!” The only thing that Ellen hasn’t done is sign her tweets, “You know you love me. Xoxo.”

But the thing is I do love her. She’s so cool. She was Dory in Finding Nemo. Enough said. And judging by the eight comments that were made on my Ellen-related Facebook status just 35 minutes after its post, I would say everybody else loves her, too.

No offense, Ellen, but why do we care so much?

“It’s ELLEN!” one of my friends says. “She’s relatable and funny and open.” Word. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder whether we, as a campus, are particularly attracted to her because BU is all of those things, too.

There are very few women we consistently call by first name only: Hilary, Oprah, Beyonce and, of course, Ellen. There’s an intimacy to that. We feel like we know them. And maybe it is this feeling of connectedness that explains why, in the span of a few hours, a chunk of the BU campus sacrifices time, money, and, in some cases, dignity for Ellen’s sake. There is a sense of investment. And, shockingly, this investment is in something totally uncertain.

“What does Ellen know?”

“How did this happen?”

“Why BU?”

“It’s going to be a scavenger hunt!”

“I bet you Ellen is hiding on top of CAS.”

This is just a sampling of things people are whispering at 6:15 p.m., standing clumped in front of the cameras, clinging to their phones. Clearly, nobody has any idea what’s going on. Everyone has gathered based on rumor, based on Twitter. I don’t even understand Twitter, but I do understand that whatever Ellen is trying to do, this is social networking. 

Never have I ever seen such a tangibly immediate and widespread chain of communication. BU is showing up. And I think, this is a testament to how addicted BU is to our best friend and mortal enemy: the World Wide Web.

Visit here to see BU on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

How do you see BU's culture? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.

Friday afternoon, ten of, and everyone is finishing with class and starting the weekend. Class seems to civilize us, and weekends… don’t. As soon as students walk out the doors of CAS and onto the beautified sidewalks, they change. Sunglasses, cellphones, iPods appear out of thin air. In this ritualized way, each and every person integrates into the Comm Ave. crowd.

It’s a loud crowd, amplified by sounds of the T, bike pedals, a braking MBTA bus. It creates a rhythm, pulsing back and forth all day. Every so often, a tour group wanders through, confused and straggling behind their leader. “I thought this was Boston College!” I hear one mother say, papers spilling from her purse. I can’t help but laugh. Athletic rivalries aside, I think the one thing that frustrates me most about this common misconception is that BC is in no way in Boston. BU, on the other hand, is part of the city’s fabric. And this common ground that we share with our urban landscape largely determines our character.

In many of my classes, my professors have spoken to the value of contextualization. The context informs the meaning, society shapes man, our environment makes us who we are — you can say it a thousand ways, but it seems to remain a universal truth. Our context, our habitat, is the artery that is Commonwealth Avenue. It makes us urban, it makes us outfitted, it is our sounding board, our stage. It makes us less collegiate, but maybe a little more real. It makes us who we are.

As I sit on one of the fancy benches between Marsh Plaza and the Tsai steps, a friend of mine passes by and asks me what I’m doing. I realize how creepy anthropology can be. I’ve never done fieldwork before. This isn’t Facebook, where you can pretend you’re not looking with a quick flick of the mouse. I’m blatantly creeping on people. I feel like Lindsay Lohan’s character in Mean Girls, in that scene where she envisions the mall as a watering hole, looking at my peers as if in an urban jungle. The feeling is reinforced when a guy in a gorilla suit runs by, receiving a round of applause. The anthropological gods are laughing at me.

I’m laughing myself, trying to explain what I’m doing to my friend. “Are you studying me?” he asks.

I guess I am.

Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

How do you see BU's culture? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.

Exotic cultures, Myles apart
By Sarah Zlotowitz (UNI’11)

Five student bloggers join BU Today this week, each given his or her own day, each hoping to contribute through the semester. This being Tuesday, Sarah’s up.

It’s my favorite store: Anthropologie. It’s also my major — kind of.

I’m not exactly sure how my diploma will read. My college, the small but still breathing University Professors Program, lets you title your own major, something that is, theoretically, original and interdisciplinary. You also have to construct your own curriculum and write a thesis. Great — kind of. It’s just that things are looking iffy right now. This is my third year on campus, leaving me with a strange amalgamation of courses on my transcript, various abroad applications on my desktop, and big life choices on my mind.

In its most romanticized form, anthropology is about fieldwork, going out there and getting your hands dirty. It’s about throwing yourself into a culture and observing traditions, complexities, organization, religion, economic life, kinship, politics, food, language. It’s about pluralism and cultural brokerage. It’s a marriage of science and poetry. But all I’ve ever done is talked about it in class, read about it in ethnographies. I haven’t made any real discoveries, or comparisons, or even observations.

Sure, I’ve traveled to faraway places; East Boston, Jamaica Plain. Done some personal investigation of the area. But even though my professors try to refute this innate feeling among new anthropology students, I feel like I have to go to Africa, or at least somewhere exotic, to be legit. I went to Oklahoma one time for spring break. Does that count?

I was talking to a friend of mine and he commented on a culture that seems very far away. I was living in Myles and we were talking about the residence hall’s infamous breakfasts. “They’re so … Myles,” he said.

At that moment I realized that I didn’t need to go to Africa. I didn’t need to go to Oklahoma or even East Boston to find culture. There was an ethnography to be written about the very campus beneath my feet.

And so I have decided to begin an anthropological study of BU via a weekly blog, presented in a series of case studies dedicated to those BU experiences we take for granted every day. I hope to unfold the BU culture and tap into our authentic essence.

Of course, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m making this up as I go along — like my major. Like my education.

So far, so good. We’ll see how it turns out. 

Sarah Zlotowitz can be reached at sarahz11@bu.edu.

How do you see BU's culture? Let us know in the comments.

Read more blogs here.