Over Friday lunch with Clark and May Ying:

The best advice that I ever got from them is to build your resumé and to get new work experience. The more the better. I think that there is much to be said about how to make each work experience more enjoyable and more meaningful. The interview questions also show you how you should present yourself and to portray yourself as a dynamic individual, through your interest and how well you spend your free time.

Thanks a bunch!

And think about OPT during winter break...

The sole fact of experience that demonstrates that life is generally good is that the overwhelming majority of men prefer it to death. For this to be so it must be that in the average existence happiness triumphs over unhappiness. If the relationship were reversed on would not understand either whence arose the attachment of men or life, nor above all how it could continue, threatened as it is at every moment by the facts. It is true that pessimists explain the persistence of this phenomnenon by the illusions of hope.

Roman, who teaches one of the Lindy Classes on Wednesday and the class of '99, recommended the following places to explore in Chicago:

1. The Metro (rock concert)
2. Flying Gayonas (they teach you how to fly the trapeze!)
3. Rainbow Cone (95th & Western)
4. Too Much Light Makes the Baby go Blind (neofuturists.org)
5. Superdawg
6. Hema's Kitchen (Indian food, Devon)
7. Maxwell St. Polish (hotdogs)
8. Music Box Theatre
9. Tango Sun (great steak place to go!) Both of them are near Wrigley's Field
10. Yassa (79th & Cottage Grove). Offers Senegalese food (order the Maffe)
11. Cyanois (French). There exist a French Restaurant near Big City Swing
12. Devil in a Woodpile @ the Hideout (21+ free great for balance)
13. The Green Mill. Jazz Club (21+)

Book that I want to read at some point over Winter break or whenever I get time off for such luxury:

1. The Closing of the American Mind
2. The Selfish Gene
3. Whatever Felipe or Richard recommended the other day, in class.
4. Paul Krugman's new book.
5. Possibly something else that Daniel will recommend because he's pretty sensible on such topics.
6. Atlas shrugged

The study of the concrete, which is the study of the whole, is made more readily, is more interesting and furnishes more explanations in the sphere of sociology than the study of the abstract.

The aim and principle of sociology is to observe and understand the whole group in its total behavior.

All societies with the exception of European socities are segmentary. Rules of friendship and contract are present to ensure the peace of markets and villages.

Societies have progressed in the meausre in which they have been able to stablizie, their contracts adn to give, receive and repay. In order to trade, man must first lay down his spear. When that is done he can succeed in exchanging goods and persons not only between clan and clan but between tribe and tribe and nations and nation, and above all between individuals. It is only then that people can create, can satisfy their interests mutually and define them without recourse to arms. It is in this way that the clan, the tribe and nation have learnt - just as in the future the classes and nations and individuals will learn - how to oppose one another without slaughter and to give without sacrificing themselves to others. That is one of teh secrets of their wisdom and solidarity.

Thus we see how it is possible under certain circumstances to study total human behaviour; and how that concrete study leads not only to a science of manners, a partial social science, but even to ethical conclusions - 'civility', or 'civics' as we say today. Through studies of this sort we can find, measure and assess the various determinants, aesthetic, moral religious and economic, and the material and demographic factors, whose sums is the basis of society and constitutes the common life, and whose conscious direction is the supreme art - politics in the Socratic sense of the word.

Since its first publication in English in 1954, Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le Don has been acclaimed as a classic among anthropology texts. A brilliant example of the comparative method, it presents the first systematic study of the custom - widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia - of exchanging gifts.

The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees the gift exchange as related to individuals and groups as much as to the objects themselves, and his analysis calls into question the social conventions and economic systems that had been taken for granted for so many years.

In a modern translation, introduced by the distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, The Gift is essential reading for students of social antrhopology and sociology.

Ave Maria

Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc,
Et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Let It Snow!

Oh, the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we've no place to go,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

It doesn't show signs of stopping,
And I brought some corn for popping.
The lights are turned way down low,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

When we finally say goodnight,
How I'll hate going out in the storm!
But if you'll really hold me tight,
All the way home I'll be warm.

Oh, the fire is slowly dying,
And, my dear, we're still goodbye-ing,
But as long as you love me so,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus
Underneath the mistletoe last night.
She didn't see me creep
Down the stairs to have a peep.
She thought that I was tucked up in my bedroom fast asleep.

Then i saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus
Underneath his beard so snowy white.
Oh, what a laugh it would have been
If Daddy had only seen
Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.

Text: Thomas P. Conner

Written 1952, 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus' was originally sung by Jimmy Boyd, who was thirteen years old at the time. It reached no. 1 on the Billboard charts, although the song met with resistance from the more conservative forces in the Catholic Church in Boston for mixing 'lewdness and Christmas'. In 2001, the song became a movie starring Connie Sellecca and Corbin Bernsen. Santa, of course, turns out to be Dad.

Je crois que notre rencontre était écrite mais les Parques ont mal calculé quelque chose... Sans elle, je serais heureuse... mais je l'aime tellement que mon coeur - bien qu'il est blessé - ferais mieux de le voir content avec elle.

Si c'est pour lui, la douleur... ça en vaut la peine.

[I believe I was destined to meet him but the Fates have miscalculated something... Without her, I would be happy... but I love him so much that my heart - although it hurts - would be better off seeing him happy with her.

If it's for him, the pain... it's worth it.]

For the bookish ones:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/travel/escapes/16North.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Amherst, MA

Journalism

http://www.theatlantic.com/about/bosintern.htm

http://journalism.nyu.edu/currentstudents/careerservices/internships/postintern.html?id=120

Things to think at the back of your mind...
And to think that it's not easy finding your own niche.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of albour belong to private individuals.

Durkheim: Division of Labour in Society

Everybody knows that we like what resembles us, those who think and feel as we do. But the opposite phenomenon is no less frequently encountered. Very often we happen to feel drawn to people who do not resemble us, precisely because they do not do so. These facts are seemingly so much at odds that in every age moralists have hesitated about the true nature of friendship and have traced it now to the one cause, now to the other. The Greeks had already posed the question. 'Friendship,' says Aristotle, 'gives rise to much argument. For some it consists in a certain resemblance, and those who resemble each other like each other; hence the provers, "like goes with like", and "birds of a feather flock together", and other similar sayings. But on the contrary, according to others, all those who resemble one another grate upon one antoher. Other explanations are sought at a higher level which are taken from a consideration of nature. Thus Euripides says that the parched earth is in love with the rain, and that the overcast sky heavy with rain pours down upon the earth in a fury of love. Heraclitus claims that one only accommodates to what one opposed, that the finest harmony is born from differences, and that discord is the law of all becoming.

What demonstrates these opposing doctrines is the fact that both forms of friendship exist in nature. Dissimilarity, just like resemblance, can be a cause of mutual attraction. However, not every kind of dissimilarity is sufficient to bring this about. We find no pleasure in meeting others whose nature is merely different from our own. Prodigals do not seek the company of the miserly, nor upright and frank characters that of the hypocritical and underhand. Kind and gentle spirits feel no attraction for those of harsh and evil disposition. Thus only differences of a certain kind incline us towards one another. These are those which, instead of mutually opposing and excluding one another, complement one another. Bain says, 'There is a kind of disparity that repels and a kind that attracts; a kind that tends to rivalry, and a kind that tends to friendship...if what the one has, the other has not, but desires, there is a basis of positive attraction.

Thus the theorist with a reasoning and subtle mind has often a very special sympathy for practical men who are direct and whose intuition is swift. The fearful are attracted to those who are decisive and resolute, the weak to the strong, and vice versa. However richly endowed we may be, we always lack something, and the best among us feel our own inadequacy. This is why we seek in our friends those qualities we lack, because in uniting with them we share in some way in their nature, feeling ourselves then less complete. In this way small groups of friends grow up in which each individual plays a role in keeping with his character, in which a veritable exchange of services occurs. The one protects, the other consoles; one advises, the other executes, and it is this distribution of function or, to use the common expression, this division of labour, that determines these relations of friendship.

Grace Tsiang, and a CAPS advisor both mentioned the same thing: U of C students tend to be passive and do very poorly at interviews. Why is this?

There may exist between two adversaires some general synpathy which keeps their antagonism within bounds, tempering it. But this sympathy needs to be stronger than the antagonism, or else it does not survive. Or indeed the two elements confronting each other will abandon the contest when it becomes evident that it will be indecisive; each will content itself with maintaining its respective position. Not being able to destroy each other, they are mutually tolerant. The reciprocal toleration that sometimes marks the end of wars of religion is often of this nature. In all such cases, if the clash of feelings does not produce its natural consequences, it is not because it does not contain them, but because it is prevented from producing them.

Durkheim, from 'The Division of Labor'

Cambridge Associates: Advisor on asset management for non-profit institutions
Come up with investment ideas, evaluate portfolios, plead endowment's cause
Eric Mindich - Eton Park Capital Management
Emerging market analayst
Hedge funds and private equity

Diplomat:
Phrasing of statements in non-confrontational, polite manner.

Is there a job market for literary journalism?
Avant-garde - upfront [people or work] that are experimental with regards to art, culture, and politics.
Stereotypes, falsehoods, and insincere sentiments.
Is that what you are referring to???

Adam Smith once said "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merrimetn and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

What do you think?