Out From Under The Button: Carlin Graduates
For the past nine months, we at UTB have been lucky to have our columnist Carlin grace this blog with her wit and wisdom. She graduated with the rest of the class of ’09, but we convinced her to bid adieu with one last post. From now on, you can visit Carlin at her new personal blog.
When I was in elementary school, we were asked each semester in my nine years of attendance to fill out a five page self evaluation. I was asked, beginning at the age of five, what was my favorite class? What was the best thing I’d learned? What kind of a friend was I? What kind of a student? What were my strengths? My weaknesses?
I would fill these out pretty meticulously, with the knowledge that not only would my teachers be seeing them, but eventually my parents would too, so what I was really evaluating was the person I wanted them to see me as. Not that I was lying, exactly. But I wanted to be seen as a leader, as creative. A wonderful friend, and wonderfully liked. Smart. Good at everything I put my mind to. When transcripts were added into the equation, I wanted to be seen as engaged; involved in every club, every advanced class, and eventually, rewarded with the perfect boyfriend and wardrobe (I got him, and dumped him two months later for being too boring. The legacy of my wardrobe, however, continues).
Though I haven’t been asked to fill out one of these evaluations in about eight years, I’ve recently found myself thinking about the way we present ourselves, in contrast to the way we actually view ourselves when we strip away the Greek affiliations, social cliques, Facebook, and general Penn-isms. I carried these aspirations of self-preservation with me through college, and added in the edgy flavor of sexual deviant and potty mouth with a rockin’ closet. Read the rest of this entry »





At the beginning of this semester, I admitted to my ritualistic behavior of
Penn kids are very smart. Which means they are inherently socially inept, especially when it comes to dealing with members of the opposite sex. But fear not — I’m looking out for you, so on this Valentine’s Day you can pull off some fairly normal human interaction. Or at least fake it really really well.
The other night, in a break from the frigidity and classic girl-on-girl rush flirt, two of my housemates brought out lists of everyone they’d ever hooked up with–or at least those they could remember. Agreeing to skip over my own slutty whimsies of middle school (at camp one summer as an act of rebellion for being my improv partner’s beard, I got it on with every straight guy in the spin-the-flashlight circle), since I still had braces, not to mention the ghosts of high school boyfriends’ past, we concluded that our respective lists should focus on the college years, summers included.
As bona fide college students, we simply can’t ignore a novel that heralds itself as “a sharply observed portrait of campus life and all the many pressures–economic, academic, social–that are funneled into its culture.” A college-centric novel promises to be either really juicy or really lame, Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons being the gold standard for lameness. Wolfe’s book (which, ooooh, was partially based on research completed at Penn’s very own St. A’s) fell flat because each page couldn’t help but reveal how scandalized Wolfe was by “kids these days,” with their sex and drugs and loose morals (all of which provided the author with an excuse to seriously overuse the word “insouciant”). While the main character of Weitz’s book is, regrettably, a tad reminiscent of Charlotte Simmons, College Girl proves itself to be unsentimental, thought-provoking, and really compelling.
Since Thursday, I have spent approximately 32 hours in Van Pelt. My breaks were for meals, sleeping, and meetings. Literally. As I read through my text books, made flashcards, wrote two papers, and prepared for presentations that should take me through the Monday after Thanksgiving, I acquired two tics: the instinctive looking up expectantly as I catch any tall boy in my peripheral vision, and–the more embarrassing one–impulsively texting boys from home in anticipation of a weekend of gluttony.



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