Short Stories

Blue Suede Shoes:
Sometime soon after arriving at Cornell, I wore a hole through the bottom of my right sandal . . . only my right sandal. I got a new pair a little while ago. The sandals are grey and green and made of rubber and various synthetic materials. So they’re not blue, not suede, and they’re not even shoes. I was going for parallelism. . . . I should just stick to engineering. Anyway, while sandal shopping, I would go over to the women’s section and look for the “casual” section. I’m just going to say that the last time I saw someone casually wear gold sparkly 6-inch heels to the beach was – let me think – never? I am aware that I’m on the let’s-go-walk-through-a-mud-puddle end of casual, not the cocktail-party-in-a-lounge side, but I wasn't aware that you didn't actually have to be able to walk in sandals anymore. Maybe it’s just me. I mean, I did almost mange to trip off a stage during a band concert once. Wearing flats.

Spam and Eggs (actually, just spam):
What’s almost as amusing as receiving audition notices for all-male a cappella groups is when Cornell mail goes to spam. Case in point: sometime around one of three days of spring in Ithaca, for the second time, Cornell sent me an email about Big Red Shipping and Storage. (They’re a company managed by Cornell students that will store the contents of your dorm room for the summer if you can’t or don’t want to take them home with you.) The email went straight to spam. Both times.

Best Day Ever:
After my last final of my freshman year, I had an entire afternoon with absolutely nothing to do for the first time in weeks. A friend and I went to get lunch, walked back to north campus, and then decided to walk back to west campus to go bouldering at Noyes. It was just as tiring as I remembered, but I got farther on the Spiderman route and did a couple other easy routes. We had the bouldering wall to ourselves, so we got to climb continuously and get super tired. At that point, we took a quick detour by the library to check out A. D. White’s library (also known as the Harry Potter library), then camped out on the arts quad. It was an absolutely perfect day, the kind of day Cornell puts on their admissions brochures. And it’s gotten me to thinking, what would be my best day ever? How exactly do you combine hiking, clarinets, and math and science without psychedelic drugs and/or a time turner? I guess I’d settle for a good long hike up some mountains in the middle of nowhere. Acadia National Park would be good. Acadia is currently my favorite vacation destination and the answer to 11-down in a crossword puzzle I was doing recently.