猝然决定后天回家 需要黎戈大人安抚心境~
2007-04-22 14:46:00
从南京始发
今日微雨，没办法在室外活动。只好大扫除。我安慰自己：空气潮湿，不容易扬尘。从旮旯里翻出一件旧T恤，背面印着大大的“12”，突然想起这是老猪爸的旧时球衣，质地尚软，准备晚上做睡衣穿。又找到一本魏微的书《今晚你不留下陪我吗？》，好象是某次捡便宜在五元书店淘回来的，又因为这个书名太恶心，一直没有开卷。
顺手翻了几下，就放不下了——好的书，我以为就是这样的，至于它是一本黄色小说还是科幻网游，都次要。有的书，是比较侵略性的，你得宠着它，惯着它，寸步不离。有的书，情节在文字流中散步，你的阅读节奏就会比较松弛。看的是《从南京始发》。魏微的书，我是可以贴着成长线喜欢的。对其他人，我基本上只是局限于某个时间段的喜欢，比如早中期，或起飞期，或成型期之类的。小说大概四十来页。不过场景展转各地。魏微的小说，总是强调某种物质性。比如身体，又比如城市背景。
这篇是浸润在一种城市感觉里，可能这是它打动我的地方，小城来的晓风，是一个法学博士，他年轻，有盛大的欲望，不安于室（这个室是指，恩，怎么说呢，人群背后的书斋生活吧），也不安于市（他的小城）。他有与生俱来的城市气质，天赋与野心，可是却得窝在一个小城市里，磨损他的身体，浪掷他的青春，折坠他的野心。他不甘心。他在城市之间奔走，力图为自己谋一个好的前景，彻底把自己从那个局促，闭塞，物质气味稀薄寡淡的小城里解救出来。
而这个物质的气味，附于型就是激涌人流，车水马龙，闹市明亮密集的灯火，喧哗的人潮，峭拔林立的高楼，他不惜出卖自己的身体，青春和灵魂，去依傍一个老女人，只为了在闹市租一套房，每天在涨潮的市声里睡去。这真是让人心酸的，一个小地方的人，对饱满明亮的物质生活的饕餮食欲。和始终吃不饱，饥渴之中对城市的敌意，仇视，和疏离。晓风和大城市之间是爱很交加，北京的官僚气息，上海的商业气息，都让他抵触。
这些城市都与他性格不合，他可以曲折逢迎，可是因为严酷的自省习惯，又让他鄙夷自己。他最后又回到了南京，（魏微总是喜欢在小说里提及南京，她说，这是一个内向，安静，而淡泊的城市，所以，我选择留在这里生活，是个性使然。）然而小说的名字是《从南京始发》，始发，这个词意味着，离开，向着明亮丰盛的物质生活再度进发的野心。生逢盛世的知识分子，因着物质的取舍维艰，简直比生活在乱世还麻烦。
你可以说晓风没有责任心，或是物欲贪婪，权欲熏心。他有妻有子，还四处风流。社交手腕娴熟之极，为了向上爬可以谄媚逢迎。翻翻词典，可以用来砸晕他的贬义词不知有多少，然而这是道德家的事，小说家的事是，一个人的意识，必然导致某种行为模式，在这之间，又有着逻辑必然，做平这个人性的等式，就可以了。
我想她是有很大的文字野心的，时下大多数女作家的营养源，是杜拉斯+张爱玲+黄碧云+亦舒，等等等等，很象大碗面或是自助餐。任意取食，自主拼盘，但是原始材料就那么几道。并且她们只食皮毛，不屑于血肉骨架，所以最终只食得了文字气味。魏微的那个路子，却差不多是博尔赫斯+卡夫卡。很简净的文字下，埋伏着很汹涌的意识流。但是她也只习得了文字，我想，这是一种性别劣势，女人，很难有男性的那种注意力广度和思维半径，太难了。但是（原谅我用了两次但是，因为对她，必须多加理解），就象她很努力的去理解一个男性（晓风），也就是她经验之外的东西，个人觉得魏微是一个很温情的作家，理解力是最大的温情，我在她身上，看到了这个。
小说最迷人的地方，恰恰也是它的败笔所在，就是它有很多观念先行的地方。它有点象某种观念小说（赫胥黎写过一个《针锋相对》，小时候我很喜欢，这类小说，他老人家应该算是鼻祖）。就是，人物的内心质地，层次丰富，非常迷人，但是他们的想法太精致了了。所以，它只能发生在某些人身上。所以，赫胥黎的那个小说，和本篇，都是知识分子圈里的。前一阵子我看的《拉维尔斯袒》，也给我类似的感觉，书中人物的内心独白，对话啊，行为模式啊，都非常细腻知性，但是它只能在一个很小的平台上运作。
http://yuyiwang.blogcn.com/index.shtml
2007年4月27日
2007年4月21日
2007年4月19日
to the faithful departed
I'm beef-witted. I've just found the name Kurt Vonnegut in the obituary.
= a tribute to him =
= a tribute to him =
2007年4月17日
Ed narrowly missed ViTech, now it seems a blessing in disguise
Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 — The gunman who killed 32 people and himself on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute Monday has been identified as a student who lived in a dormitory on campus.
Published: April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 — The gunman who killed 32 people and himself on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute Monday has been identified as a student who lived in a dormitory on campus.
He was described by the university president as an Asian male, but no other information about the gunman was released. Federal law enforcement authorities said his name was Seung-Hui Cho.
Details about the gunman’s identify began to surface along with some information about the victims of the shooting rampage.
Charles W. Steger, Virginia Tech’s president, said in an interview on CNN this morning that the gunman at the classroom building was “an Asian male who was a resident of the university.” Mr. Steger said the authorities would not confirm that there had only been one gunman.Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 injured in two shooting attacks at the university on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.
The police and witnesses said some victims were executed with handguns while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.
It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.
Zach Petkewicz, a student, said he barricaded a classroom door to keep the gunman out, and the gunman shot through the door.
“Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on,” he said on CNN. “He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn’t get it in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out.”
Mr. Petkewicz said the gunman reloaded and “kept firing down the hall.”
Joseph Cacioppo, a surgeon at Montgomery Regional Hospital who treated some of the injured, said on CNN that the injuries showed that the gunman was “brutal.” None of the injured that he treated had “less than three to four wounds in them,” he said.
Twelve patients, all students, remained in area hospitals this morning in stable condition, said a spokesman at Montgomery Regional Hospital, Scott Hill.
President Bush is expected to attend a convocation ceremony at the campus today.
Police officials would not say on Monday night whether one person was behind both attacks, which wreaked devastation on this campus of 36,000 students, faculty members and staff.
A university spokeswoman, Jenn Lazenby, said the university was looking into whether two bomb threats at the campus — one last Friday, the other earlier this month — might be related to the shootings.
Mr. Steger expressed his “horror and disbelief and sorrow” at what he described as a tragedy of monumental proportions. But questions were immediately raised about whether university officials had responded adequately to the shootings.
There was a two-hour gap between the first shootings, when two people were killed, and the second, when a gunman stalked through the halls of an engineering building across campus, shooting at professors and students in classrooms and hallways, firing dozens of rounds and killing 30. Officials said he then shot himself so badly in the face that he could not be identified.
The university did not send a campus wide alert until the second attack had begun, even though the gunman in the first had not been apprehended.
Mr. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first attack was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a “domestic” dispute.
“We had one shooting early in the morning that initially, and we don’t know the answer to this, appeared to be a domestic fight, perhaps a murder-suicide,” Mr. Steger said. “It was characterized by our security people as being contained to that dorm room.”
“As we were working through what we were going to do to deal with that, the message came on over the radio that another shooting across campus was taking place, and that’s when the large number of people were killed.”
Responding to criticism and suggestions that there was a delay between the first shooting and the first e-mail notifying students that something had happened, he said that the first dormitory was immediately closed down after the first incident and surrounded by security guards. Streets were cordoned off and students in the building notified about what was going on, he said.
“We also had to find witnesses because we didn’t know what had happened,” he said. Wounded people were sent to hospital and, based on the interrogation of witnesses, they thought “there was another person involved.”
President Bush sent his condolences to the families of the victims and the university community. “Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning,” Mr. Bush said on Monday. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.”
The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to the police at 7:15 from West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory, as students were getting ready for classes or were on their way there.
Students said a gunman had gone room to room looking for his ex-girlfriend. He killed two people, a senior identified as Ryan Clark, from Augusta, Ga., and a freshman identified by other students on her floor as Emily Hilscher.
The shootings at the engineering building, Norris Hall, began about 9:45.
Some of the professors who were killed were named. Among them were Prof. Liviu Librescu, a Romanian Israeli who has lived in the United States for several years, and Dr. G.V. Loknathan, who was originally from India and became an American citizen after arriving in the United States in 1977.
Scott L. Hendricks, an associate professor of engineering, was in his office on the third floor when he heard 40 to 50 shots from what sounded like the second floor. Mr. Hendricks said he had called 911, but the police were already on the way.
The police surrounded the building and he barricaded the door to his office. After about an hour, the police broke down his door and ordered him to flee.
“When I left, I was one of the last to leave,” Mr. Hendricks said. “I had no idea of the magnitude of the event.”
According to the college newspaper, The Collegiate Times, many of the deaths took place in a German class in Norris Hall.
“He was just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit,” one student in the class, Erin Sheehan, told the newspaper. “He wore a tan button-up vest and this black vest — maybe it was for ammo or something.”
Ms. Sheehan added: “I saw bullets hit people’s bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don’t know maybe from shock from the pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured.”
Heavily armed local and state police officers swarmed onto campus. Video clips shown on local stations showed them with rifles at the ready as students ran or sought cover and a freakish snow swirled in heavy winds. The police evacuated students and faculty members, taking many of them to local hotels. A Montgomery County school official said all schools throughout the county were being shut down.
Many parents and students questioned the university’s response to the two fatal shootings in Ambler Johnston Hall, suggesting that more aggressive action could have prevented the later and deadlier attack.
“As a parent, I am totally outraged,” said Fran Bernhards of Sterling, Va., whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. “I would like to know why the university did not immediately shut down.”
Kirsten Bernhards, 18, said she and countless other students had no idea that a shooting had occurred when she left her dorm room in O’Shaughnessy Hall shortly before 10 a.m., more than two hours after the first shootings.
“I was leaving for my 10:10 film class,” she said. “I had just locked the door and my neighbor said, ‘Did you check your e-mail?’ “
The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent gunman. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.
The university’s first bulletin warned students to be “cautious.” Then, 20 minutes later, at 9:50, a second e-mail warning was sent, saying a gunman was “loose on campus” and telling students to stay in buildings and away from windows. At 10:16, a final message said classes were canceled and advised everyone on campus to stay where they were and lock their doors.
Ms. Bernhards recalled walking toward her class, preoccupied with an upcoming exam and listening to music on her iPod. On the way, she said, she heard loud cracks, and only later concluded that they had been gunshots from the second round of shootings. But even at that point, many students were walking around the campus with little sense of alarm.
It was only when Ms. Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized something was wrong.
“I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris,” she recalled.
The Virginia Tech police chief, Wendell Flinchum, defended the university’s decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying the information at the time indicated that it was an isolated event and that the attacker had left campus.
At an evening news conference, Chief Flinchum would not say that the same gunman was responsible for the shootings in the dormitory and the classrooms. He said he was awaiting ballistics tests and other laboratory results until declaring that the same person carried out both attacks.
He said accounts from students at the dorm had led the police to a “person of interest” who knew one or both of the victims there. The police were interviewing him off campus at the time of the shootings at Norris Hall. Chief Flinchum said officers had not arrested the man.
“You can second-guess all day,” he said. “We acted on the best information we had. We can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year.”
Classroom buildings are not locked and dormitories are open throughout the day but require a key card for entry at night, university officials said.
Chief Flinchum confirmed that police found some of the Norris Hall classroom doors chained shut from the inside, which is not a normal practice. Some of the people hurt there were injured leaping from windows to escape.
Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said.
Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.
“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.”
Students are not allowed to have guns on the campus.
At Ambler Johnston Hall, where the first shootings took place, many if not most students had left and those who remained stayed close to their rooms by late afternoon.
Mr. Clark, the senior who was shot in the dorm, was a resident adviser who went by the nickname Stack on Facebook.com, was well liked and was a member of the university’s marching band, the Marching Virginians, students said. “He was a cool guy,” said one fourth-floor resident.
The shootings unfolded in an age of instant messaging, cellphone cameras, blogs and social networking sites like Facebook. As the hours passed, students who were locked in their classrooms and dormitories passed on news and rumors.
In one cellphone video shown repeatedly on television networks, the sound of dozens of shots can be heard and students can be seen running from Norris Hall.
The student who made the video, Jamal Albarghouti, a graduate student, said he was already on edge because of two bomb threats on campus last week. “I knew this was something way more serious,” he told CNN.
The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to issue an alert to the campus.
In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The defendant, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges.
The atmosphere on campus was desolate and preternaturally quiet by Monday afternoon. Students gathered in small groups, some crying, some talking quietly and others consoling each other.
Up until today, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history was in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire, killing 16 people before he was shot and killed by the police. In the Columbine High attack in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.
The single deadliest shooting in the United States came in October 1991, when George Jo Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the window of a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., then shot 22 people dead and wounded at least 20 others. He shot himself in the head.
Details about the gunman’s identify began to surface along with some information about the victims of the shooting rampage.
Charles W. Steger, Virginia Tech’s president, said in an interview on CNN this morning that the gunman at the classroom building was “an Asian male who was a resident of the university.” Mr. Steger said the authorities would not confirm that there had only been one gunman.Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 injured in two shooting attacks at the university on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.
The police and witnesses said some victims were executed with handguns while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.
It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.
Zach Petkewicz, a student, said he barricaded a classroom door to keep the gunman out, and the gunman shot through the door.
“Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on,” he said on CNN. “He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn’t get it in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out.”
Mr. Petkewicz said the gunman reloaded and “kept firing down the hall.”
Joseph Cacioppo, a surgeon at Montgomery Regional Hospital who treated some of the injured, said on CNN that the injuries showed that the gunman was “brutal.” None of the injured that he treated had “less than three to four wounds in them,” he said.
Twelve patients, all students, remained in area hospitals this morning in stable condition, said a spokesman at Montgomery Regional Hospital, Scott Hill.
President Bush is expected to attend a convocation ceremony at the campus today.
Police officials would not say on Monday night whether one person was behind both attacks, which wreaked devastation on this campus of 36,000 students, faculty members and staff.
A university spokeswoman, Jenn Lazenby, said the university was looking into whether two bomb threats at the campus — one last Friday, the other earlier this month — might be related to the shootings.
Mr. Steger expressed his “horror and disbelief and sorrow” at what he described as a tragedy of monumental proportions. But questions were immediately raised about whether university officials had responded adequately to the shootings.
There was a two-hour gap between the first shootings, when two people were killed, and the second, when a gunman stalked through the halls of an engineering building across campus, shooting at professors and students in classrooms and hallways, firing dozens of rounds and killing 30. Officials said he then shot himself so badly in the face that he could not be identified.
The university did not send a campus wide alert until the second attack had begun, even though the gunman in the first had not been apprehended.
Mr. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first attack was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a “domestic” dispute.
“We had one shooting early in the morning that initially, and we don’t know the answer to this, appeared to be a domestic fight, perhaps a murder-suicide,” Mr. Steger said. “It was characterized by our security people as being contained to that dorm room.”
“As we were working through what we were going to do to deal with that, the message came on over the radio that another shooting across campus was taking place, and that’s when the large number of people were killed.”
Responding to criticism and suggestions that there was a delay between the first shooting and the first e-mail notifying students that something had happened, he said that the first dormitory was immediately closed down after the first incident and surrounded by security guards. Streets were cordoned off and students in the building notified about what was going on, he said.
“We also had to find witnesses because we didn’t know what had happened,” he said. Wounded people were sent to hospital and, based on the interrogation of witnesses, they thought “there was another person involved.”
President Bush sent his condolences to the families of the victims and the university community. “Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning,” Mr. Bush said on Monday. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.”
The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to the police at 7:15 from West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory, as students were getting ready for classes or were on their way there.
Students said a gunman had gone room to room looking for his ex-girlfriend. He killed two people, a senior identified as Ryan Clark, from Augusta, Ga., and a freshman identified by other students on her floor as Emily Hilscher.
The shootings at the engineering building, Norris Hall, began about 9:45.
Some of the professors who were killed were named. Among them were Prof. Liviu Librescu, a Romanian Israeli who has lived in the United States for several years, and Dr. G.V. Loknathan, who was originally from India and became an American citizen after arriving in the United States in 1977.
Scott L. Hendricks, an associate professor of engineering, was in his office on the third floor when he heard 40 to 50 shots from what sounded like the second floor. Mr. Hendricks said he had called 911, but the police were already on the way.
The police surrounded the building and he barricaded the door to his office. After about an hour, the police broke down his door and ordered him to flee.
“When I left, I was one of the last to leave,” Mr. Hendricks said. “I had no idea of the magnitude of the event.”
According to the college newspaper, The Collegiate Times, many of the deaths took place in a German class in Norris Hall.
“He was just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit,” one student in the class, Erin Sheehan, told the newspaper. “He wore a tan button-up vest and this black vest — maybe it was for ammo or something.”
Ms. Sheehan added: “I saw bullets hit people’s bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don’t know maybe from shock from the pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured.”
Heavily armed local and state police officers swarmed onto campus. Video clips shown on local stations showed them with rifles at the ready as students ran or sought cover and a freakish snow swirled in heavy winds. The police evacuated students and faculty members, taking many of them to local hotels. A Montgomery County school official said all schools throughout the county were being shut down.
Many parents and students questioned the university’s response to the two fatal shootings in Ambler Johnston Hall, suggesting that more aggressive action could have prevented the later and deadlier attack.
“As a parent, I am totally outraged,” said Fran Bernhards of Sterling, Va., whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. “I would like to know why the university did not immediately shut down.”
Kirsten Bernhards, 18, said she and countless other students had no idea that a shooting had occurred when she left her dorm room in O’Shaughnessy Hall shortly before 10 a.m., more than two hours after the first shootings.
“I was leaving for my 10:10 film class,” she said. “I had just locked the door and my neighbor said, ‘Did you check your e-mail?’ “
The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent gunman. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.
The university’s first bulletin warned students to be “cautious.” Then, 20 minutes later, at 9:50, a second e-mail warning was sent, saying a gunman was “loose on campus” and telling students to stay in buildings and away from windows. At 10:16, a final message said classes were canceled and advised everyone on campus to stay where they were and lock their doors.
Ms. Bernhards recalled walking toward her class, preoccupied with an upcoming exam and listening to music on her iPod. On the way, she said, she heard loud cracks, and only later concluded that they had been gunshots from the second round of shootings. But even at that point, many students were walking around the campus with little sense of alarm.
It was only when Ms. Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized something was wrong.
“I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris,” she recalled.
The Virginia Tech police chief, Wendell Flinchum, defended the university’s decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying the information at the time indicated that it was an isolated event and that the attacker had left campus.
At an evening news conference, Chief Flinchum would not say that the same gunman was responsible for the shootings in the dormitory and the classrooms. He said he was awaiting ballistics tests and other laboratory results until declaring that the same person carried out both attacks.
He said accounts from students at the dorm had led the police to a “person of interest” who knew one or both of the victims there. The police were interviewing him off campus at the time of the shootings at Norris Hall. Chief Flinchum said officers had not arrested the man.
“You can second-guess all day,” he said. “We acted on the best information we had. We can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year.”
Classroom buildings are not locked and dormitories are open throughout the day but require a key card for entry at night, university officials said.
Chief Flinchum confirmed that police found some of the Norris Hall classroom doors chained shut from the inside, which is not a normal practice. Some of the people hurt there were injured leaping from windows to escape.
Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said.
Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.
“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.”
Students are not allowed to have guns on the campus.
At Ambler Johnston Hall, where the first shootings took place, many if not most students had left and those who remained stayed close to their rooms by late afternoon.
Mr. Clark, the senior who was shot in the dorm, was a resident adviser who went by the nickname Stack on Facebook.com, was well liked and was a member of the university’s marching band, the Marching Virginians, students said. “He was a cool guy,” said one fourth-floor resident.
The shootings unfolded in an age of instant messaging, cellphone cameras, blogs and social networking sites like Facebook. As the hours passed, students who were locked in their classrooms and dormitories passed on news and rumors.
In one cellphone video shown repeatedly on television networks, the sound of dozens of shots can be heard and students can be seen running from Norris Hall.
The student who made the video, Jamal Albarghouti, a graduate student, said he was already on edge because of two bomb threats on campus last week. “I knew this was something way more serious,” he told CNN.
The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to issue an alert to the campus.
In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The defendant, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges.
The atmosphere on campus was desolate and preternaturally quiet by Monday afternoon. Students gathered in small groups, some crying, some talking quietly and others consoling each other.
Up until today, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history was in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire, killing 16 people before he was shot and killed by the police. In the Columbine High attack in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.
The single deadliest shooting in the United States came in October 1991, when George Jo Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the window of a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., then shot 22 people dead and wounded at least 20 others. He shot himself in the head.
2007年4月16日
check this out
( the tone is just soooooooooo randy...the one with the first name of jackson,of course = = )
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?id=373
the point is!!! the good-looking guy up there smiling from the right corner with innocent Eric Bana eyes and a most typical OMEGA chin!!! gosh i'm just falling for him~
the technology paradox whatsoever...give way plz...at least tonight...
btw. Am I the only one to relate to Peter Pan&Hook as analogical to Justin&Brian and other fallen-yet-seductive-opium-typed-men versus seeming-innocent-alas-leecher-underneath-the-skin-boys gests?
http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?id=373
the point is!!! the good-looking guy up there smiling from the right corner with innocent Eric Bana eyes and a most typical OMEGA chin!!! gosh i'm just falling for him~
the technology paradox whatsoever...give way plz...at least tonight...
btw. Am I the only one to relate to Peter Pan&Hook as analogical to Justin&Brian and other fallen-yet-seductive-opium-typed-men versus seeming-innocent-alas-leecher-underneath-the-skin-boys gests?
2007年4月14日
we are so young and so gone
一个人沉默的大暴走.
大半年了,来来去去亦只是这条路而已. 没有去看盛况满城的烟花汇演,或许是不能,或许是不想.如果对一件事从头就没有热情,又何苦去假装呢? 进入大学之后我终于能够坦然面对独处这件事. 时间有限,分分钟都奢侈到不愿意放手. 私人空间已经最大限度被剥夺,且在很长一段时间里我将对此无计可施,那么剩下的这点自由,无论如何都要拼命维系.
对于自己怎么就成了一个对感情和人际关系态度悲观的人,我始终理解不能. 或许是早年生命里理想化的爱都来得过于轻易,习惯了一切的自然而然. 对于声嘶力竭惊心动魄的情感, 心底始终是怀疑和疏远的. 如果是过度的需索,我所能想到的对策只有退却而已,更现实点看来,远在呼救声音传来之前我必然已经彻底厌倦. 多数喧哗浮动的爱在我看来可笑而盲目,哪一面都是做戏,正如戏中人不屑的目光用一成不变的方式回击我.
=======让好逻辑尖叫的分割线=======
QAF结尾Brian重回巴比伦,带着时光没有消磨殆尽的骄傲与孤独.这是他的氧气他的图腾,在一场所谓的爱中连同他的自我一起几近崩溃,幸而最后Just的离开将他救回. 看着他带着眼角眉梢掩不住的焦躁患得患失地诉说些烂俗的誓言,感到的快乐远不及悲哀,那种类似小时候读快乐王子一片片剥离自己生命和光芒的时候感觉到的茫然无措的悲哀. 终于小J推开了戒指,说,这不是爱,这是牺牲.长久的牺牲让我越来越不认识这样的你.我爱你,但是我要离开.笑.我爱极了这个结尾. 所谓爱,终究不是每个人的空气.
今朝有酒今朝醉么,尽兴跳完这一支舞便好. 纵然巴比伦在黎明到来之前就要轰然陨毁,最爱的人一去不返,韶华破碎,永不再见好时光. 你在梦什么,过去的一切又是什么. 明天永远太遥远,容不得我们幻想.
大半年了,来来去去亦只是这条路而已. 没有去看盛况满城的烟花汇演,或许是不能,或许是不想.如果对一件事从头就没有热情,又何苦去假装呢? 进入大学之后我终于能够坦然面对独处这件事. 时间有限,分分钟都奢侈到不愿意放手. 私人空间已经最大限度被剥夺,且在很长一段时间里我将对此无计可施,那么剩下的这点自由,无论如何都要拼命维系.
对于自己怎么就成了一个对感情和人际关系态度悲观的人,我始终理解不能. 或许是早年生命里理想化的爱都来得过于轻易,习惯了一切的自然而然. 对于声嘶力竭惊心动魄的情感, 心底始终是怀疑和疏远的. 如果是过度的需索,我所能想到的对策只有退却而已,更现实点看来,远在呼救声音传来之前我必然已经彻底厌倦. 多数喧哗浮动的爱在我看来可笑而盲目,哪一面都是做戏,正如戏中人不屑的目光用一成不变的方式回击我.
=======让好逻辑尖叫的分割线=======
QAF结尾Brian重回巴比伦,带着时光没有消磨殆尽的骄傲与孤独.这是他的氧气他的图腾,在一场所谓的爱中连同他的自我一起几近崩溃,幸而最后Just的离开将他救回. 看着他带着眼角眉梢掩不住的焦躁患得患失地诉说些烂俗的誓言,感到的快乐远不及悲哀,那种类似小时候读快乐王子一片片剥离自己生命和光芒的时候感觉到的茫然无措的悲哀. 终于小J推开了戒指,说,这不是爱,这是牺牲.长久的牺牲让我越来越不认识这样的你.我爱你,但是我要离开.笑.我爱极了这个结尾. 所谓爱,终究不是每个人的空气.
今朝有酒今朝醉么,尽兴跳完这一支舞便好. 纵然巴比伦在黎明到来之前就要轰然陨毁,最爱的人一去不返,韶华破碎,永不再见好时光. 你在梦什么,过去的一切又是什么. 明天永远太遥远,容不得我们幻想.
on cynicism
Lately this word has been my bellyache. After immersing myself into Charlie Brookers, Simon Dumenco, rottemtomatoes and the holy masterpiece the legendary South Park I'm totally addicted to the whole anti-social frenzy.
2007年4月12日
no blame
I didn't come to show my mercy, anyway I'm no less ignorant than most of you are. I'm merely so amused to hear ppl defining me as no fun but serious and that I'm supposed to have a miserable childhood. They're just the opposite of the truth. Believe it or not.
It's no big deal to be misunderstood, esp by ppl you don't really care. However, sitting here, typing this, I guess somehow I still feel offended. How can some ppl judge others so casually and cockily given the pathetic insight they've got? I don't blame them simply coz it doesn't make any sense, besides, it does me no good. Now I'm going back to my own private eccentricity, you plz feel free to leave alone this weirdo, good bye the creeps' paradise.
It's no big deal to be misunderstood, esp by ppl you don't really care. However, sitting here, typing this, I guess somehow I still feel offended. How can some ppl judge others so casually and cockily given the pathetic insight they've got? I don't blame them simply coz it doesn't make any sense, besides, it does me no good. Now I'm going back to my own private eccentricity, you plz feel free to leave alone this weirdo, good bye the creeps' paradise.
2007年4月9日
broken social scene
似乎是翻作崩世光景 叫人无端生出惶惶之感~这一支唱出来却又像极了eels
第一次听到不过是在某人画质斑驳的ipod上 且被某段散发重度安非他命气味的落入窠臼的BJ向h场景迷惑住心神 窗外是夜色暗涌的(假想)匹兹堡 it's time that we grow old and do some shit. I like it all that way.
最近的功课是学习如何在喧嚣中创造小生境既而得以生存. 哦哦多么令人欣喜的翻译腔~卡尔老师会感动的 握拳~凛然如我的大好青年想必是被XQ那第三人称叙事如何避免上帝视角贴煞到了罢 = =
说来是人间四月天 心底却一片灰败 说不清反常还是无常. brett的新砖在记忆中已然积灰 依稀记得他说love is dead 在mv里收敛起风骚淡漠了眉角 只剩黑白.大提琴和光照下空气中的浮尘 然而终究还是被收场的虚镜里明显恍惚的眼神出卖 好吧 你说存在就存在 任凭它遥远得像一场春秋大梦. 终日只愿囚禁于斗室 在驴子上1k2k地拖着OST 想来也是好的 对周遭人事的热情无可救药地消退消退.
现在怎么连中文都敢说得这么别扭.我喜欢长长短短错落有致的句子.自己却从来办不到.
第一次听到不过是在某人画质斑驳的ipod上 且被某段散发重度安非他命气味的落入窠臼的BJ向h场景迷惑住心神 窗外是夜色暗涌的(假想)匹兹堡 it's time that we grow old and do some shit. I like it all that way.
最近的功课是学习如何在喧嚣中创造小生境既而得以生存. 哦哦多么令人欣喜的翻译腔~卡尔老师会感动的 握拳~凛然如我的大好青年想必是被XQ那第三人称叙事如何避免上帝视角贴煞到了罢 = =
说来是人间四月天 心底却一片灰败 说不清反常还是无常. brett的新砖在记忆中已然积灰 依稀记得他说love is dead 在mv里收敛起风骚淡漠了眉角 只剩黑白.大提琴和光照下空气中的浮尘 然而终究还是被收场的虚镜里明显恍惚的眼神出卖 好吧 你说存在就存在 任凭它遥远得像一场春秋大梦. 终日只愿囚禁于斗室 在驴子上1k2k地拖着OST 想来也是好的 对周遭人事的热情无可救药地消退消退.
现在怎么连中文都敢说得这么别扭.我喜欢长长短短错落有致的句子.自己却从来办不到.
2007年4月3日
who can say the way it should be
For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too
By SARA RIMER
Published: April 1, 2007
Correction Appended
NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.
“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.
“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”
Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?
“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”
They both burst out laughing.
Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.
But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.
An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive mood in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.
To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.
It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.
The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.
And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.
If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how your résumé measured up: The college acceptances, and rejections, are rolling in.
“You want to achieve,” Esther said. “But how do you achieve and still be genuine?”
If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.
But balance is out the window when you’re a high-achieving senior in the home stretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you. These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.
“You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater,” said another of Esther’s 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three Advanced Placement classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress. “You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.”
“You’re supposed to do all these things,” Julie said, “and not go insane.”
Stress Trumps Relaxation
Newton, which has a population of almost 84,000, is known for a liberal sensibility and a high concentration of professionals like doctors, lawyers and academics. Six miles west of Boston, with its heavily settled neighborhoods, bustling downtowns and high numbers of immigrants, Newton is a suburb with an urban feel.
The main shopping area, in Newton Centre, is a concrete manifestation of the conflicting messages Esther and the other girls are constantly struggling to decode. In one five-block stretch are two Starbucks and one Peets Coffee & Tea, several psychotherapists’ offices, three SAT test-prep services, two after-school math programs, and three yoga studios promising relaxation and inner peace.
Smack in the middle of all of this is Esther’s church, the 227-year-old First Baptist, which welcomes everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation or denomination, and where Esther puts in a lot of time.
The test-prep business is booming. Kaplan (“Be the ideal college applicant!”) is practically around the corner from Chyten (“Our average SAT II score across all subjects is 720!”), which is three blocks from Princeton Review (“We’re all about scoring more!”). My First Yoga (for children 3 and up), with its founder playing up her Harvard degree, is conveniently located above Chyten, which includes the SAT Cafe.
High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.
“I think it’s unfair,” Esther said, explaining why she decided against an SAT tutor, though she worried about her score (ultimately getting, as she put it, “above 2000”). “Why do I deserve this leg up?”
Parents view Newton’s expensive real estate — the median house price in 2006 was $730,000 — and high taxes as the price of admission to the prized public schools. There are less affluent parents, small-business owners, carpenters, plumbers, social workers and high school guidance counselors, but many of these families arrived decades ago when it was possible to buy a nice two-story Colonial for $150,000 or less.
Newton North, one of two outstanding public high schools here, is known for its academic rigor, but also its vocational education, reflecting the wide range of its 1,967 students. Nearly 73 percent of them are white, 7.3 percent black, nearly 12 percent Asian and 7.5 percent Hispanic. Many of the black and Hispanic students live in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and are bused in under a 35-year-old voluntary integration program.
Newton North has a student theater, winning athletic teams and dozens of after-school clubs (ultimate Frisbee, mock trial, black leadership, Hispanic culture, Israeli dance). There is an emphasis on nonconformity — even if it is often conformity dressed up as nonconformity — and an absence of such high school conventions as, say, homecoming queens, valedictorians and class rankings.
‘Superhuman’ Resistance
Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé building. By age 14, Ms. Price said, the school’s highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: “You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure.”
If more students aren’t listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Ms. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton — she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey — and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.
But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Penn or Stanford.
Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, the Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors, and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.
“In a lot of ways, it’s all about that one week,” she said.
There is something about the lives these girls lead — their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation’s most selective colleges — that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.
Admission to a brand-name college is viewed by many parents, and their children, as holding the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.
“It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up,” Kat said.
Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession. Inspired by her father, Greg Mobley, who is a Biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.
She says she is interested in “Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this.” More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, “and religion is what I most like to write about.”
“I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith,” she continued. “It gives me priorities. That’s why I’m not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money.”
First Baptist Church counts on Esther. She organizes pancake suppers, tutors a young congregant and helps lead the youth group’s outreach to the poor.
On a springlike Sunday afternoon toward the end of winter, Esther could be found with her father, her two brothers and members of her youth group handing out food to homeless people on Boston Common. She had spent the morning in church.
About 2 p.m., a text message flashed across her cellphone from Gabe Gladstone, a co-captain of mock trial: “Where are you?” Esther, a key member of the group, was needed at a meeting.
Esther messaged back: “I’m feeding the homeless, I’ll come when God’s work is done.”
Fending Off ‘Anorexia of the Soul’
On a Saturday afternoon in late November, Esther and her mother, Page Kelley, sat at the dining room table talking about the contradictions and complexities of life in Newton. Esther’s father was with his sons, Gregory, 15, who plays varsity basketball for Newton North, and Tommy, 10, coaching Tommy’s basketball team.
Ms. Kelley, 47, an assistant federal public defender, and Mr. Mobley, 49, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, grew up in Kentucky and came north for college. Ms. Kelley is a graduate of Smith College and Harvard Law School. Mr. Mobley has two graduate degrees from Harvard.
Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”
“It’s the idea that you end up with this strange drive,” she continued. “One of the great things about Esther is that she does have some kind of spiritual life. You just hope your kid has good priorities. We keep saying to her: ‘The name of the college you go to doesn’t matter. There are a lot of good colleges out there.’ ”
Esther said her mother is her role model. “I think the work she does is very noble,” she said.
“She has these impressive degrees,” Esther said, “and she chooses to do something where she’s not making as much money as she could.”
As close as mother and daughter are, there is one important generational divide. “My mother applied to one college,” Esther said. “She got in, she went.”
Back from basketball practice with his sons, Mr. Mobley joined the conversation. To Mr. Mobley, a formalized, competitive culture pervades everything from youth sports to getting into college. He pointed out to his wife that the lives of their three children were far more directed “than any of the aimless hours I spent in my youth daydreaming and meandering.”
Ms. Kelley asked, “Is that because of us?”
“Yes — and no,” he said. “It’s because of 2006 in America, and the Northeast.”
The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation, he said: “Our children start where we finished.”
As the afternoon turned into early evening, Esther went out to meet her best friend, Aliza Edelstein. The family dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bandit, was underfoot, trolling for affection.
“I’m not worried about Esther because I know her,” Mr. Mobley said. “Esther’s character is sealed in some fundamental way.”
Ms. Kelley, however, wondered aloud: “Don’t you worry that she never rebelled? When I was growing up, you were supposed to rebel.”
But she acknowledged that she had sent her own mixed signals. “As I’m sitting here saying I don’t care what kind of grades she gets, I’m thinking, she comes home with a B, and I say: ‘What’d you get a B for? Who gave you a B? I’m going to talk to them.’
“You do want your child to do well.”
Mr. Mobley nodded. “We’re not above it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
On a Fierce Mission to Shine
To sit in on classes with Esther in her vibrant high school where, between classes, the central corridor, called Main Street, is a bustling social hub, is to see why these students are genuinely excited about school.
Their teachers are pushing them to wrestle with big questions: What is truth? What does Virgil’s “Aeneid” tell us about destiny and individual happiness? How does DNA work? How is the global economy reshaping the world (subtext: you have to be fluid and highly educated to survive in the new economy)?
Esther’s ethics teacher, Joel Greifinger, spent considerable time this winter on moral theories. An examination of John Rawls’s theory of justice led to extensive discussions about American society and class inequality. Among the reading material Mr. Greifinger presented was research showing the correlation between income and SAT scores.
The class strengthened Esther’s earlier decision not to take private SAT prep.
In her honors philosophy/literature class, Esther has been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, “Sophie’s Choice” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Amid a discussion of the strangely unsettling emptiness Frankl encountered upon his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Esther quoted Sartre: “You are condemned to freedom.”
Her honors teacher, Mike Fieleke, nodded. “That’s the existential idea. If we don’t awaken to that freedom, then we are slaves to our fate.”
A few weeks earlier, Esther, taking stock of her own life, wrote in an e-mail message: “I feel like I’m on the verge. I feel like I’m just about to get out of high school, to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment.”
More immediately, she wrote, Mr. Fieleke had told her “he thought, from reading my papers and hearing me speak in class, that I was just on the verge of some really great idea.”
“I asked him if he thought that idea would come by next Wednesday, when our big Hamlet paper was due. He said I might feel this way all year long.”
The most intensely pressurized academic force field at school is the one surrounding the students on the Advanced Placement and honors track. About 145 of the 500 seniors are taking a combined total of three, four and five Advanced Placement and honors classes, with a few students even juggling six and seven.
Esther’s friend Colby takes four Advanced Placement and one honors class. “I’m living up to my own expectations,” Colby said. “It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.”
Another of Esther’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for her starring role as Maggie, the seductive Southern belle in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, she was still fighting her way through Advanced Placement physics homework. She dissolved in tears.
“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superwoman.’ ”
She dropped physics — and was incandescent as Maggie.
Esther’s schedule includes two Advanced Placement and one honors class. Among certain of her classmates who are mindful that many elite colleges advise prospective applicants to pursue the most rigorous possible course of study, taking two Advanced Placement classes is viewed as “only two A.P.’s.” But Esther says she is simply taking the subjects she is most interested in.
She also shrugged off advice that it would look better on her résumé to take another science class instead of her passion, A.P. Latin. Like so many of her classmates, Esther started taking Latin in the seventh grade, when everyone was saying Latin would help them with the SAT. But now, except for Esther and a handful of other diehards who are devoted to Latin — and to their teacher, Robert Mitchell — everyone else has moved on.
“I like languages,” said Esther, who also takes Advanced Placement Spanish. “And I really like Latin.”
Who Needs a Boyfriend?
This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”
Esther turned to Colby: she seems to pretty much always have a boyfriend.
“I never felt like having a boyfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”
Esther said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”
But who needs a boyfriend? “My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends,” Esther wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, girlfriends last longer.”
Boyfriends or not, a deeper question for Esther and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young women. They have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.
They say they want to be both feminine and assertive, like their mothers. But Colby made the point at lunch that she would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally feminine than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”
Esther agreed. She said she admired Cristina, the spunky resident on “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of her favorite TV shows.
“She really stands up for herself and knows who she is, which I aspire to,” Esther said.
Cristina is also “gorgeous,” Esther laughed. “And when she’s taking off her scrubs, she’s always wearing cute lingerie.”
Speaking of lingerie, part of being feminine is feeling good about how you look. Esther is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the girls who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.
She never looks “scrubby,” to use the slang for being a slob, but sometimes comes to school in sweats and moccasins.
“I think sometimes I might be trying a little too hard not to conform,” Esther says.
She says she is one of the few girls in her circle who doesn’t have a credit card. But she is hardly immune to the pressure to be a good consumer.
During the discussion around the dining room table, Esther’s mother expressed her astonishment over her daughter’s expertise in designer jeans. They had been people-watching at the mall. Esther, as it turned out, knew the brand of every pair of jeans that went by.
So what were the coolest jeans at Newton North?
“The coolest jeans are True Religions,” Esther said.
“They look,” she said, and here she smiled sheepishly as she stood up to reveal her denim-clad legs, “like these.”
Aliza and several of Esther’s other friends chipped in to buy them for her 17th birthday, in November.
Encouraged to Ease Up a Little
The amazing boys say they admire girls like Esther and Colby.
“I hate it when girls dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.
Cameron said he felt the same way.
One of Esther’s close friends is Dan Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Esther is how smart she is,” said Dan, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. “There’s always been this intellectual tension between us. I see why she likes Kierkegaard — he’s existential, but still Christian. She really likes Descartes. I was not so into Descartes. I really like Hume, Nietzsche, the existentialist authors. The musician we’re most collectively into is Bob Dylan.”
Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging girls to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the girls to “let go” in auditions.
Peter Martin, the girls’ cross-country coach, says girls try so hard to please everyone — coaches, teachers, parents — that he bends over backward not to criticize them. “I tell them, ‘Just go out and run.’ ” His team wins consistently.
But how do you chill out and still get into a highly selective college?
One of Esther’s favorite rituals is to hang out at her house with Aliza, eating Ben and Jerry’s and watching a DVD of a favorite program like “The Office.” Their friendship helped Esther and Aliza keep going last fall, when there was hardly time to hang out. Esther recalled in an e-mail message how one night she had telephoned Aliza, who is also a top student, and a cross-country team captain, to say she was feeling overwhelmed.
“I said, ‘Aliza, this is crazy, I have so much homework to do, and I won’t be able to relax until I do it all. I haven’t gone out in weeks!’ And Aliza (who had also been staying in on Fridays and Saturdays to do homework) pointed out: ‘I’d rather get into college.’ ”
By Dec. 15, Newton North was in a frenzy over early admissions answers. Esther’s friend Phoebe Gardener had been accepted to Dartmouth. Her friend Dan Lurie was in at Brown. Harvard wanted Dan Catomeris.
Esther was in calculus class, the last period of the day when her cellphone rang. It was her father. The letter from Williams College — her ideal of the small, liberal arts school — had arrived.
Her father would be at her brother’s basketball game when she got home. Her mother would still be at the office. Esther did not want to be alone when she opened the letter.
“Dad, can you bring it to school?” she asked.
Ten minutes later, when her father arrived, Esther realized that he had somehow not registered the devastating thinness of the envelope. The admissions office was sorry. Williams had had a record number of highly qualified applicants for early admission this year. Esther had been rejected. Not deferred. Rejected.
Her father hugged her as she cried outside her classroom, and then he drove her home.
Esther said several days later: “Maybe it hurt me that I wasn’t an athlete.”
But she was already moving on. “I chose Williams,” she said, with a shrug. “They didn’t choose me back.”
About that thin envelope: Mr. Mobley, unschooled in such intricacies, said he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had wanted so much for his daughter to get into Williams, he said, and believed so strongly in her, that it was as if he had wished the letter into being an acceptance.
“It was a setback,” Mr. Mobley said weeks later. “But it’s not a failure.”
And Then One Day, a Letter Arrives
Has this all been a temporary insanity?
Esther’s friend Colby learned in February that she had been accepted at the University of Southern California. Soon, more letters of acceptance rolled in: from the University of Miami, the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane. With the college-application pressure behind her, she can go back to being the pragmatic romantic who opened her journal last August and wrote her “life list,” with 35 goals and dreams, in pink ink.
She wants: To write a novel. Own a (red) Jeep Wrangler. Get into college. Name her firstborn daughter Carmen. Go to carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Learn to surf. Live in a Spanish-speaking country. Learn to play the doppio movimiento of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat. Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced.
In mid-January Esther was thrilled to receive an acceptance letter from Centre College, one of her fallback schools, in Kentucky. But she was still dreaming about her remaining top choices: Amherst, Middlebury, Davidson and Smith, her mother’s alma mater.
Esther’s application to Smith included a letter from her father. He wrote about how, when Esther was a baby, they had gone to his wife’s 10th college reunion. He described the alumni parade as an “angelic procession of women in white, decade by decade, at every stage in the course of human life.”
He wrote about seeing the young women, the middle-aged graduates and, finally, “the elderly women, some with the assistance of canes and wheelchairs, but with no diminution of the confidence that a great education brings.”
“I still remember holding Esther as we watched those saints go marching into the central campus for the commencement ceremony,” he wrote.
“Lord,” he concluded, and he could have been talking about any of the schools his daughter still has her heart set on, “I want Esther to be in that number.”
Epilogue: Esther learned last week that she had gotten into Smith. She learned on Saturday that she had been rejected by Amherst and Middlebury. She is still hoping for Davidson.
Correction: April 3, 2007
A front-page article on Sunday about the experiences of high-achieving high school girls in Newton, Mass., misstated a verb property of Latin, which one of the girls in the article studies. It is the subjunctive mood; there is no subjunctive "tense."
original edition here
生活对谁都并非易事.
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