The Best Reason I Have to Move Out of My Parents' House

The Columbia alumni magazine, Columbia College today, arrived in the mail. Yippee! An entire magazine devoted to fellow graduates who are more successful than I am. How could I have ever lived without this?

Also, I can hook up with old buddies from the Class of '39. (And I do mean old buddies.) David W. Mason '39 now owns a Christmas tree farm in Maine. Man, David, he was such a kidder. Like that time after that kegger, when David glued all of the dean's fountain pens to his desk. Or when he paid that out-of-work dude standing in a breadline fifteen cents to take his Lit Hum midterm for him. That was classic!

On a side note, I wonder if the homeless woman who wanders around Butler Library late at night — she gets in with her alumna ID — gets a copy of CCT. The "Ivy League IQ" test on the back page must warm her poverty-stricken heart.

Anyhoo, this month's cover story is "Min Makes Her Mark: Under the editorship of Janice Min '90, Us Weekly satisfies its growing legion of young readers with a mix of celebrities and fashion." Us Weekly. Wow, that's just like Atlantic Monthly, except it's weekly and it's for vapid, retarded people who cream themselves over critical world issues like "Angelina Exclusive: Billy Bob Wants Her Back!" I'm so proud of how my fellow alumnoid turned out — how about next month, CCT profiles a guy from the class of '85 who makes a living placing odds on cockfighting matches down in Tijuana?

(Ironically, Us Weekly has absolutely no relevance to "us." More like Them Weekly.)

The self-gratifying feature article in this month's CCT is "Dan Harris [no known relation] '01 Begins An Amazing Career." Subtle. Dan was a senior doing shots at The West End while I was a freshman, living alone in a room the size and temperature of a sauna, listening that goddamn garbage truck idle on Amsterdam Avenue outside my window for like half an hour at like one in the morning every single night. I'm not jealous at all then that Dan wrote and directed his first feature film, something you've probably never heard called "Imaginary Heroes" that a whopping one-third of critics liked. The meta-critical website rottentomatoes.com described it as "a muddled, melodramatic and unconvincing drama." Amazing.