Oberlin Blogs

During fall orientation, while moving all my belongings from storage to my room, I got a phone call inviting me to Thanksgiving. And due to the sheer wonderfulness of this family, and their foresight, I accepted. I knew that my Thanksgiving would feel like home with the Albrechts.

I'm keeping the coat, of course. There's a lot of life there.

As a rule, I try to avoid soaking in sicky-sweet pools of sentimentality (diabetes does, after all, run in my family), but when I talk about Thanksgivings at Fairkid I can't help but get that...

The real difference between seeing the dress and the show, though, is the audience. I've been in performance audiences lovingly called the "little audience that could," the small audiences that make up for lacking size with more emotion, appreciation, and gusto than a full house.

My running log for Tuesday, Nov. 11 says "cold run, 3.5 miles in 25:36. Ran through the Arb, ran to North Fields, back along Woodland." This is not the whole story.

As I write this (but not as I type this, because I'll be doing that later), I'm drinking egg nog left over from my dinner at Lord/Saunders. That's right, I ventured to south campus to eat dinner tonight.

There's something to be said for a small liberal-arts college in a backwater hamlet a charming slice of small-town America that has two newspapers. And there's something more to be said a college that has two newspapers ( The Oberlin Review , The Oberlin Grape --for which I am a copy editor), three non-fiction magazines ( Wilder Voice , Vox , In Solidarity ), a literary journal (formerly The Plum Creek Review , formerly Enchiridion , now The Plum Creek Review --again), a genre-fiction magazine ( Spiral ) and doesn't have a journalism department.

The college essay can be hard to write, and equally hard to give advice on. Here's my attempt on the latter.

I am learning more and more that there is no single moment when you suddenly become fluent in a second language.

I don't think I'll ever be ready for winter. Each year, it seems to catch me by surprise.

Imagine someone handing you a check for $28,000 to go anywhere in the world to do whatever you'd most like to do in the year after college graduation.

Interviews: What To Do (and What Not To Do)