Return of the Natives

In late August, students return to Boston to complete their higher education. MIT begins with Rush Week, which is a chance for freshmen to become oriented and upperclassmen to become disoriented. Like the Dropkick Murphys the classes start shipping up to Boston, and a school year begins (on the West Coast, students at Stanford, which operates on a more relaxed calendar, return to campus in mid-September, which is their summer).

Rush Week serves an important function at MIT, as it is during that week that the fraternities begin identifying their pledges; those chosen will have the option to spend their next four years within the hallowed halls of one of those Greek institutions. Those who are fated to end up in the dormitory system will declare their preferences and hope for the best. I was fated to live in East Campus with these guys my senior year.

By quirk of the East Campus dormitory situation, I ended up in a single room beginning my freshman year and never had a roommate until I got married, long after my college days had ended.

There is also a special group of students who become disillusioned with the social arrangements offered by the fraternity and dorm system and choose to strike out on their own, finding a residence somewhere in Cambridge or Boston to live - with their friends or a dog or a cat or who knows what. They are spared the joys of Commons and common areas, and can avoid human contact for as long as they choose not to attend classes.

Now, the means by which students get back to campus at the beginning of the year vary. Some travel by car, carrying their possessions (this option is generally reserved to students within 250 miles of the campus for whom this is not a major imposition). Some travel by bus or train. But many of us boarded airplanes for the trek back to campus. The year 1977 was still the Golden Age of Air Travel, when the airlines had creative ways to lose all kinds of money for their investors and students were reasonably assured of finding a favorite seat without having to pay an extra fee for it. It was also a time when checked bags were free and overhead bins were reserved for things like wedding cakes (yes, I did that once). These days, you pay extra for checking your bags or getting an aisle seat, and you're limited to one carry-on (whoever invented roll-aboards deserves a special place in Hell; the bags with the little wheels chew up all kinds of overhead space, which disappears usually by the time your seat number is allowed to board the plane). You can, if you choose, even pay to board the airplane in that special red-carpet lane (yippie-skip!). But when it comes to claiming your checked baggage at your destination, all citizens become equals in the eyes of God, and bags come off bag claim at the same slow pace for king and commoner alike. That has not changed much in the decades since I went to school...

The little vignette about Rosé wine-making actually happened to one of my colleagues in the consulting business when he flew cross-country. The airline may have been TWA, for which they were punished by having Carl Icahn as an owner - a fate worse than death.

The Agony of the Feet

Not much has been posted here in three years - a function of a move from one residence to another, in which a folder full of strips disappeared.

But some strips got found that I had never remembered, including this threesome, drawn sometime in 1980. One of the effects of being on the once-a-week shower plan (weekly showers whether we needed them or not) is a baked-in stink. The Strategic Gamers were famous for parking themselves outside the thursday offices, often for 72 hours straight, and by that third day, they had begun to ripen into something resembling a Corpse Flower. Gaming was the most important thing in their lives and nothing could deter them. These days, there are people who spend their every waking moment playing games, but they rarely have need to leave their rooms or otherwise expose themselves to the outside world (and this new breed is nothing like the nerds with their board games).

Stinky feet, however, know no class distinctions, visiting rich and poor, bosses and underlings alike. There are various foot powders and deodorants that can be deployed against them, but feet tend to spend long days in shoes, so the aroma must always be contended with.

Or ignored, which is what creates cartoons:

I've never heard whether they ever graced the pages of The Tech - which is to where most of the thursday cartoons transferred after the newspaper folded in 1979.