Am I the only one who still regulates the schedule of living in school semesters?
My life is still strangely and curiously divided into three distinct parts: Fall Semester, Spring Semester and Summer Sessions. Why, it’s as if I never left Columbia University in the City of New York’s Morningside Heights Campus!
Whether you realize it or not, your schooling brands you — fairly or not — with its historic reputation in the perception of the mainstream, middling, public mind.
Continue reading → School Branding: From Football U. to Ivy League
In a recent article, Every Time I Talk to You, I Hear Sirens, we discussed how sounds define your environment. Today, using the same places described in the previous article, I hope we can investigate if smell is even more strongly related to place and memory than sound.
Is smell more valuable than hearing?
Washington, D.C. – Eastern Market:
We lived near the Eastern Market Metro station. There was a large, indoor, sort of farmer’s market nearby – that gave the train station its name — we passed through every day. The food was always fresh. The smell of raisin scones embedded in your clothes was a warm and welcome scent that perfumed you throughout the work day and reminded you that, no matter what happened, your scones always loved you.
New York City — Columbia University:
When we were living in Morningside Heights near Columbia, The City had a garbage strike. When an urban core has to deal with a garbage strike in the dead of summer things quickly begin to rot on the sidewalk. And in the streets. And in your mouth. And there is no harbor from the stench of six foot mounds of black garbage bags that line every sidewalk and street corner. Even if you breathe through your mouth you still smell the putrid sting of vomit that bleeds into every crevice and populates every pore.
Continue reading → Every Time I Think of You, I Smell Something
When we lived in the Alphabet City part of the East Village in New York City our apartment building was located one block away from a fire station and two blocks from a hospital. Having on-duty firemen and working doctors and nurses as your neighbors was a great comfort in a dangerous city, but one of the requirements of having such close proximity to first responders was dealing with the continuous caw of sirens 24 hours a day.
How many hours of your awake time is spent either looking at a computer screen or at a television? Five hours? Six hours? 12 hours? More? In a recent article, Own Your Words, I said this in the comments:
I think those in the future who choose to study us after we are dead will be amazed at how much free time we had when the world was crumbling all around us and we did nothing to heal it in time. They will discover were only interested in peering into LCDs and CRTs to ignore the fire engulfing us on all sides. It will be a sad day of reckoning for memories when they realize on our behalf that we never really lived at all.
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