The Bowdoin Orient

Welcome to the mansion! Like the roses? Me too. Watch your step on the cobblestones; last summer Chris Bukowski almost fell face first into a bonfire. But don’t worry. He was drunker than you. See those candles? Romantic, huh? Don’t brush your dress against them. ABC will cut a girl for less.

First night jitters? I understand, but don’t worry too much. Just be yourself! Skip the unicorn mask, the mini horse and the limo exit with your identical twin. Going on national television with her will lead to family therapy for the next fifteen years. Also, poor Ben won’t be able to tell you apart.

Made it through the first night? Congratulations! Try and blend in now. Smile often, clap for the girls who get date cards, say one or two snide things about the mean girls or “others.” Wear a sports bra every time Ben comes into the house. Make sure you give the producers a reason to keep you on television.

Do you have any trauma? Did someone you know die? Get sick? Lose a foot? Are you a widow-mother? Divorced? Did you leave your boyfriend to be on national television?

This is your story. Stick with it. If he tries to cut you, ask to talk to him alone. Look up at him from under your fake lashes. Tell him your pain, pull at America’s heart strings. He’ll have to keep you for another week, then. I promise.

Did you get a one-on-one date? I knew you would. Quick, hurry! Shave your legs, pull on those spanking white sneakers, straighten your hair until it’s so dry it looks like tumbleweeds beside the mansion’s driveway. Make sure to pack your bikini. And a ball gown. High heels are a must. You could be going anywhere!

It’s safe to say you’ll be flying, either in a plane, a helicopter, or a hot air balloon. I hear the camera’s installed in the basket with you and can swing around and smack you in the face.

Time for the dinner date! Enjoy, just don’t touch your food. While you’re sitting there, tell him something secret. If you don’t, you’re not ready for this. He won’t give you the rose. You’ll go home.

If you’re lucky and pretty, maybe Chris Harrison will pity-bang you as you’re on the way out. Still, it’s over.

Made it to the final four? Amazing! You’re as close as you’ll ever be to being the Bachelorette. Angle for that. If you get it, you’ll post hundreds of instas of yourself in bikinis and make a living that way for the rest of your life. I hear there’s a whole “Bachelor” community in Chicago. You’ll have family now, too!

Final two? This is the homestretch. If you lose now, it’s over. You’ll be humiliated. You’ve filmed too long to have a chance at being the Bachelorette. You’re alone now. It’s done.   

Last one standing? Congratulations! Look at that ring! Hug Ben. Kiss Ben. This is your moment. In a month or two, he’ll leave you. But that will be okay. Try for “Dancing with the Stars.” Come back next season. Open a themed bar. Go for more camera time on “Bachelor in Paradise.” I think you’d like it there. I love Mexico. I’m already looking forward to seeing you there.

  I’m sick. Over break, I took NyQuil in New Orleans, Advil in Atlanta and laxatives at my cousin’s wedding in LA. In Oregon, I lay half conscious on my aunt’s day bed, surrounded by tissues and peppermint tea. The whole time, my legs ached; they’d crack each time I stepped. When I walked, it sounded like drumming. I felt like one of those snap bracelets you’d had as a kid; one minute my legs would be curled up on the couch, the next they’d snap and lock out, sending ripples of pain down through my feet and up to my groin.

I went to a pediatrician, then a rheumatologist, then a woman specializing in infectious disease. I got blood drawn three times. I also spent a lot of time pooping into a green plastic bag and scooping the stuff into eight tiny vials.  

All my tests came back negative.

“We can see you’re sick,” the doctors said. “But your blood work looks great. You definitely don’t have cancer. It’s like arthritis, but isn’t.”

“Awesome,” I said. “That’s great.”

There’s this famous parable with frogs and boiling water. In the first instance, a frog is placed in boiling water and immediately jumps out. It’s hot! In the second, the frog is placed in a pot of cool water, which is slowly brought to a boil. The transition is so gradual the frog never notices and cooks.

It’s the same with being sick.

These days, it’s normal for me to walk down the stairs to the sound of my body banging out the rhythms of a mariachi band. But this shouldn’t feel normal. I don’t want to wake up a year from now and think it’s commonplace to spend hours on the couch, starting my day with one Aleve, two Tylenol, and half a dozen supplements and vitamins. I don’t want to believe that the pain, the whining, the binge watching seasons of The Bachelor, then The Bachelorette, then the genius that is Bachelor in Paradise is normal.

I don’t want to think this might never go away.

For me, the worst part of being sick is the uncertainty. When am I going to feel better? What’s happening to my body? Am I getting better or worse?

I’ve been sick so long I can’t trust my body’s cues. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be healthy. I’ve repressed it, I had to. Because if I compared my legs now to the ones I had two months ago—my Bachelor on the treadmill versus Bachelor in bed legs— I’d jump out of the boiling water screaming.

It took me two months to realize I was sick. It’s taken another to figure out what’s wrong, and it’ll take one more to hopefully cure it.

So this month, each time I pop my Aleve and Advil and antibiotics, I’m going to close my eyes and remember going on a long run, climbing with my mom, shopping at Target without getting tired and sitting down.

And I’m going to tell myself that’s what’s normal. Not this.

This week’s column was co-authored by Katherine Churchill ’16.

We have been the crazy girlfriend. Some of us might still be the crazy girlfriend. We’ve booked last minute international plane flights and gained 20 pounds and lost 15. We’ve drunk dialed our ex-boyfriends at 4 a.m. to tell them how “incredibly happy we are” for them and that new girl they’re dating.

We—like Taylor Swift—have a long list of ex-lovers. And they’ll tell you we’re insane.In the music video for “Blank Space,” the second song on Taylor’s chart-topping new album “1989,” she takes on the media’s misrepresentations of women in relationships. A shot in the first 15 seconds places a lace-clad Swift on a white bed flanked by two horses. Perhaps these beasts act as homage to her earlier days of “Love Story” and “White Horse.” Perhaps they’re an allusion to Katy Perry (with whom she has an alleged feud) and Katy’s appropriative hit “Dark Horse” with rapper Juicy J.

In “1989,” Taylor distances herself from all that. She proves she doesn’t need the backing of Juicy J or country music to sell 1.3 million albums in her first week. Instead, she creates her make-believe version of ’80s music—the kind of faux-innocent pop we wished existed but never did.“Blank Space” is a great song to groove to (see Katherine’s thirty plus iTunes play count), but it does more than abate our insatiable desire for pop. It addresses the pervasive and damaging stereotype of the “crazy (ex-) girlfriend.”

In the music video Taylor moves from serial dater to serial killer. In the style of Henry VIII, queen Taylor brunches and boozes with beautiful men before threatening to kill them. She golf-clubs a car a la Elin Nordegren. She cuts nipple holes a la “Mean Girls,” and then proceeds to slice tiny female figures out of her boo-thang’s shirt—feminizing him while also suggesting space for comment on fashion industry’s treatment of women. 

Late in the video, Taylor handles a poison apple, proving she is Snow White and Eve all at once. By making so many cultural references, Taylor clues in the viewer. “I am in on the joke,” she seems to say. “I know what you think about me. I know you love to play.”

And speaking of play, when Taylor croons, “you love the game,” is she talking about the men she’s with? Or is she talking about us? 

With her knowing glances through the fourth wall, Taylor comments on the way we track her dating life and relationships, printing timelines and discussions of her many men in magazines like Business Insider, Billboard and Vanity Fair. Taylor one ups all of our references. She knows the cultural chatter. She knows what we say about her and she laughs about it. We call her crazy, and in turn, she shows us what insanity actually looks like.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty.

In boldly calling out the media myths surrounding her experiences with men, Taylor creates a blank space to revise the expectations of women and power dynamics in relationships. She shows us what’s truly insane—car clubbing, picture slashing, deers by fireplaces, etc.—so that we can understand that emotional fulfillment, honesty and writing as process isn’t crazy at all.

The truly chilling thing about “Blank Space” is that domestic violence (which is actually what she is portraying in her video—think of the scene in which Taylor throws a potted plant at her lover’s head) happens every day, disproportionately to women, and very few people call that crazy. If a woman gets mad when her boyfriend isn’t fulfilling her emotional needs, she’s insane. Domestic violence, on the other hand, is “wrong” and “bad” but never “crazy.” 

The sad truth is that, while a woman asserting her personhood in a relationship is abnormal in our society, hurting women is not. We only notice the “insanity” of domestic violence when the assumed gender roles are switched. We should point out that Chris Brown has never been called crazy. He’s bad, but not “psychotic.”

Back in the day, each of Taylor’s relationships may have served as a creative blank space. But now Taylor’s all grown up. Now, each man is a literal blank space—a well-dressed, well-off brunette who’s picture will add nothing to the hall of mirrors Taylor already has built with her immense talent and cultural savvy. 

When one man’s picture is slashed, she’ll add on another. The biggest picture she’s slashing? Her portrait as painted by the media and society’s expectations of women. Taylor’s tearing it down and painting her own.

So, as we were saying: we may be the crazy girlfriend. But in a world that defines “crazy girlfriend” as “self-actualized woman” and normalizes domestic violence, maybe that’s what we want to be. Either way, with Taylor at our side, we know we’re in good company.

In November 2008, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis reviewed Catherine Hardwicke’s “Twilight,” calling the film “a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set...sighs and whispers, raging instincts, high school dramas and oh-so-confusing feelings, like, OMG he’s SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don’t CARE!!! :)”

The Friday after this review came out, I joined the hot-not-to-trotters in line at a downtown Berkeley movie theater. It was early in the afternoon. I cut sixth period to make the 4 p.m. showing.

I’d been given Twilight by a high school English teacher earlier that year. I think she thought I needed some sort of anti-sexual awakening. If so, it worked. The mental image of Bella in bed in her underwear with Edward haunted me for months. Every time I thought of it, I tried not to blush. (Relatedly, vampires don’t blush. You need blood to do it, and vampires are dead and therefore bloodless. This plot point brings up other questions about other things you need blood to do, but I won’t delve into all that).

Still, the inherent bloodlessness and deadness is part of the problem with “Twilight.” It hinges on a basic “will they or won’t they?” plot. Will Edward succumb to his instincts and snack on Bella’s neck? Will they have sex? Are neck-snacking and sex inherently intertwined? And is the threat of becoming a vampire all that alarming if the worst thing that happens is you become a super-hot—albeit paler—invincible version of your former self?

In “Twilight,” marriage—especially the consummating part—kills Bella. When she and Edward finally boink (in the fourth book) on an island off the coast of Brazil, things don’t go so well: Edward eats a down pillow, Bella eats fried chicken and vomits profusely, and then Bella is eaten from the inside out by her half-vampire half-human child. Her buddy Jacob begs her to save herself, but she refuses to abort the monster baby. Eventually, she starts drinking blood from a sippy cup in order to survive. 

Moral? Sex kills, kiddos. Especially if you’re boning the undead.

Moments like these are echoed in “Gone Girl,” Gillian Flynn’s runaway bestseller turned film. In “Gone Girl,” (spoiler alert!) Amy Dunne fakes her own death and frames her husband Nick Dunne for the murder. Halfway through the film, Amy comes back from the  pretend dead, sets out alone, and becomes a vampire-like murderess when she slits her high school boyfriend Desi’s throat after rocking his world in bed.

In some ways, “Twilight” is the little sister of “Gone Girl.” Both novels feature youthful romantic relationships that turn sour: Bella gets screwed when she literally gets screwed, while Amy believes she gets screwed after tying the knot.

These novels tell us that marriage makes women bloodthirsty: literally in Bella’s case (see the aforementioned sippy cup) and pretty close to that for Amy (see her moral deadness, lack of friends, pale beauty and skills with a box-cutter).

Maybe Elif Batuman was thinking about this when he wrote his October 10 article in The New Yorker discussing marriage in Gone Girl as an abduction or “violent crime.” But I wonder how much marriage can actually be abduction for a beautiful, privileged, well-off American woman. Sure, there is a societal pressure for women to marry, but there isn’t there as much pressure for men to do it as well?

The spinster stereotype seems as unwanted as that of the perennial bachelor. Maybe what these two books are getting at is that a married man can still be that bachelor—eating ice cream from the carton and swigging booze before lunch in Nick’s case, or heading off to eat grizzly bears in Edward’s—while the woman is forced to fundamentally and physically change with marriage and childbirth. 

Near the end of the first “Twilight” film, Edward and Bella dance in a gazebo surrounded by fairy lights. “I’m dying already,” Bella says. “Every second I get closer. Older.”

These books signal that the closer you get to sex and marriage, the more of yourself you leave behind. If sex is giving something up (as “Twilight” implies), wait until you get to marriage. “Twilight” tells us you have to be dead to have sex. “Gone Girl” says it might be better to be dead than be married. 

Both films warn against intimacy by saying it’s hard. Maybe it’s time to push the cynicism aside and instead empower all partners in relationships to actually be alive.

Bowdoin drinking culture is widely discussed in terms of decision making, illegality and hospitalization; it is less often thought of in terms of abstinence. Yet the prominence of camouflaged non-drinkers on campus is a stone I can no longer leave unturned. Katherine Churchill has blogged about her discovery of Chambo. I will take up the mantle of uncovering the truth of college drinking. 

Let me paint a scene:

It is a Friday night at Bowdoin. Someone has called the cops to Quinby’s Lilo and Stitch-themed Luau. Quinby residents quickly clear the house. But, the bathrooms are locked. Why? It’s still early. Surely first years can’t have gotten sick. But they have. Is it alcohol poisoning? Or is it the dreaded boozy poo?

I decide to investigate. There have been too many nights when I’ve been denied a trip to Super Snack because a “friend” is feeling ill.

Saturday night arrives, and I am ready. I dress in my pillow case toga, eat a lot of brownies, remove my pillow case toga and dress again in jogging shorts and a tee. I grab my notebook and pen. Epicuria seems like the perfect opportunity for my investigation. A taco truck, togas and a Beatles cover band leave little to be desired.

 I locate six random Bowdoin students and question them on their drinking choices.

First, I find B, a tall, blonde NARP. “Why aren’t you drinking tonight?” I ask. “Does drinking make you sick?”

“You’re pretty hostile,” she says.

I apologize. “Listen,” I say. “I’ve heard tequila shots leads to diarrhea.”

 “Diarrhea wouldn’t stop me,” she says. “Wait—if you quote that in the Orient I’ll kill you.”

“You’ll be anonymous,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

She looks at me with an icy, sober stare. “Can’t you write about Diva Cups or something?” she says.

I walk away and continue the investigation. I find a large athlete. She is wearing a toga.  

“I noticed you’re not drinking,” I say. “Why? Does it make you sick?”

“I’m on antibiotics,” she tells me.

“Ooh, for what?” I ask.

She walks away.  

I question a student glued to the taco truck. She is reaching over the counter to grab cheese with her bare hands.

“Are you drunk?” I say. “Are you 21? What do you like about alcohol?”

“Are you security?” she says.  

I shake my head. She giggles, crams stringy cheddar into her face and disappears into a bush.

“Probably drunk,” I write in my notebook. “Find more sources.”

One student tells me she’s not drinking because of a game. Another isn’t drinking because of an Outing Club trip. A third is very, very high.

I quit the job and go home.

Next weekend comes and it is Yom Kippur. I sit at the too-high counter in Smith Union. I spend some quality time on WebMD.

“Why do people drink?” I type into the search bar. Many things pop up. Most of them make sense.

I get bored and spend a while diagnosing myself in regard to several highly contagious and possibly lethal diseases. I get back to the grind. I learn that alcohol affects the body’s ability to absorb water, which explains that whole dehydration thing. I also learn that when the body can’t absorb water, sometimes it’ll absorb the toxic booze instead, leading to an “outpouring” of the booze. I learn that WebMD can be very graphic.

I close my laptop. I go for a walk. Bowdoin students pepper the Quad in their Birkenstocks and flannels, like speckles of toothpaste spat in a sink.

Indian summer is nice, I think. Then I wonder why it’s called that.

“Why is this called Indian summer?” I ask a frisbee player on the grass.

“Don’t be so PC,” she says.

I ask someone else.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in temple today?” they say.

I Google “Is it okay to call Indian Summer ‘Indian Summer’” and learn nothing. Perhaps I’ll never really know whether abstinence is the right way to stop college alcoholism, or if Indian Summer is appropriative, or if this girl my cousin knows really used her FASFA money to buy Pinnacle Whipped Cream Vodka and a flat-screen TV.

I sink onto the grass and pull out a Mike’s.

B bikes by. “That’s illegal,” she calls to me.

“I’m breaking the fast,” I tell her. “It’s fine.”

This summer, I spent a week in Ghana watching Mexican telenovas that had been re-dubbed in English in the film studios of Accra.My favorite soap was “Forever Yours,” which played nightly at seven. Terrible things happened to the characters. There were miscarriages and disappearances and kidnappings and death. Often, when a child went missing or a woman contemplated suicide, my host grandma would sigh loudly, bemoaning the losses for these characters on the screen. Other times, she and her daughter Michelle would laugh loudly at the acting, glancing at me to let me in on the joke.  During commercial breaks, we watched news coverage of the Ebola epidemic, or six minute animated PSAs detailing the spread of cholera through a rural area outside Accra, Ghana’s capital city. In these ads, a man saved his village with clean water and salt.Once, we watched “Basketball Wives.” Another time, I walked into their house to find an episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” playing on their small TV. I settled into my spot on the leopard print couch. Michelle handed me a tray with plantains and rice.On the TV, one of the contractors borrowed the family’s surfboards and went down to the beach. He looked like a kid in his khakis and cap.I mushed the plantains on my plate, wondering what it was like to watch a Floridian McMansion be rebuilt by grown-ups pretending to be kids, while living behind a large gate on a potholed dusty street in the capital of a country where millions reside in shacks.I looked at the TV. “This is the worst of America,” I said, while simultaneously WhatsApping my buddy from my new Android (purchased in a shack) and texting my mom from my iPhone. “Why’s that?” said Michelle.“They’re going to have a surf room,” I said. “For their surfboards. A room. Just for that.”Michelle stared at me, then at TV (where the fat Floridians were gleefully jumping up and down in their too-small, too-colorful bathing suits), then back to me on her couch. “You play on your phones a lot,” she said finally. “Are you done with your food?”   In Ghana, I read “The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” a Ghanaian novel about an unnamed railroad clerk too stubborn to take bribes. Now back at Bowdoin, I am reading “Jane Eyre,” “The Great Gatsby” and “My Antonia.” I’m surprised by the seriousness with which Mr. Rochester and the railroad clerk conduct themselves. In contrast, Jim Burden, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway seem like kids sneaking up to the grown-up table. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recently suggested that adulthood is dead. “It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups,” he wrote in the September 11 issue of New York Times Magazine.I think Scott has a point. But, if American adulthood is dead, maybe it always has been. Henderson, Ishmael, Humbert and Holden are childish, angsty, and scared. They’re American in the best sense, bumbling and naïve and self-centered. Even Thoreau’s ‘deliberate living’ resembles my little brother’s plan to take a semester off from Williams to “be in the woods.”Now, as I sit in my king size bed in Chambo, cradling a box of Lucky Charms and re-watching “The Mindy Project,” I wonder why American adulthood appears to be dead, while Ghanaian adulthood seemed firmly intact. Sure, people in Ghana watched “Basketball Wives.” But there seemed to be a seriousness with which they did it.My first day in Ghana, the program director stood before me in slacks and a bright linen shirt. “If you have allergies in Africa,” he said, “you are dead by eleven.”Maybe this has something to do with it.In Chambo, Mindy’s theme song jingles. I root around in the cereal box, mining for rainbow marshmallows and turning all this over in my head. Maybe, I think, we as Americans are so comfortable that we’ve begun to resist safety—through wrecking balls and bad jokes and anacondas and rap; while Ghanaians—less safe—are forced to cling to the safety they do have, forcing them into the “adulthood” many of us have left behind.My phone rings. “You racked up a $400 phone bill during your one week abroad,” my mom says.“Childhood is a privilege,” I tell her.“Call Verizon,” she says. 

Recently, I was struck by a few burning questions: What happens when terrible things happen to celebrities? What about great things? Perhaps more importantly: How do these terrible and great things affect us non-celebrity people?

These questions did not come on suddenly. Here’s what happened. About a week ago, I woke up jet-lagged from a quick Spring Break jaunt to Paris and checked Facebook. I saw that Sarah Michelle Gellar was upset. I saw a meme in which Barack Obama struggled with Crimea.

Then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. It was a photograph of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian cuddling up for Annie Leibovitz. It was on the cover of Vogue. In the picture, Kanye hovers behind Kim, head bowed and eyes half closed. Kim stands before him in a wedding dress, her fifteen-carat engagement ring front and center. I froze. I stared at the picture for a long while. Was I dreaming? I was not.

I got up. I went to Wild Oats. I called my mom.

“Your Kardashian’s finally made it to Vogue, honey,” she said on the line.

“Thanks for the heads up, Mom,” I said. “But just for the record they’re not really my Kardashians.”

But then I gave this some thought. Was she right? Wasn’t Kim as much mine as anyone else’s? Kim has made her dreams, successes, and failures so public that they seem to be all of our dreams, successes, and failures. So maybe Kim was mine, meaning that Vogue cover and fifteen-carat engagement ring were mine as well.

The thought brightened the rest of my Sunday. I walked back to campus. I started my week. Then another amazing thing happened. On Tuesday, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she and Chris Martin were “consciously uncoupling.” 

I applied my mom’s logic. Did this mean that Gwyneth and Chris’ break-up was my break-up as well? I kind of hoped not.

 I did some research, consisting predominantly of me reading Kanye’s tweets. Since the Kimye Vogue cover went public, Kanye had tweeted three times. The first was a simple thank you. The second read: “Dreams do come true,” with a photo from the spread attached. The third was similar. Kanye tweeted, “I love my family,” attaching a photo of him, Kim, and little North West lying seductively on a couch.

The tweets only added to my questions. For instance, how are we supposed to know what to do when celebrities’ dreams come true when we don’t even know what to do when our own dreams come true? Should we all just tweet about it? Is it possible for a baby to pose seductively with its parents? Is that weird?

I decided these last two queries were the easiest to answer. If you are Kimye, your baby can pose seductively. And it is very weird. The others proved more difficult.

We live in a world—at least those of us do who obsessively read all the gossip about Kim and Kanye, Gwyneth and Chris—where the successes and failures of celebrities can effect us as forcefully as those of a good friend. People will weep for Gwyneth and cheer for Kimye. No one really cares about Chris at this point, so not much will happen.

I wonder about the effect this has on us. Does caring about more people make us better, even if these people are celebrities we’ve never met? Or does this faux-caring dull what we feel for the people we actually care about? I still don’t know. I guess I’ll have to read Kimye’s spread in Vogue to possibly find out. Kanye usually does have damn good advice. 

Kim Kardashian is the modern day Marie Antoinette, if Marie Antoinette were perennially chastized by Anna Wintour and engaged to Kanye West. The similarities are uncanny. 

Let’s start with family. Marie Antoinette’s daddy was the Holy Roman Emperor. Kim’s was Robert Kardashian. Both were great protectors. While Francis looked after Austria, Robert defended O.J. Simpson. 

Marie Antionette married Louis XVI and Kim is marrying Kanye West. Both are kings. King Louis XVI ruled the French Empire. Kanye rules hip-hop and everything else really, from ostentatious Hermes bags decorated with ogres and naked women to self-aggrandizing wedding proposals and killer Twitter rants.

Marie and Kim have both experienced the joys of motherhood. Like Marie, Kim also has to deal with a partner who is not all that involved in the parenting process. AZcentral.com reports that, while Kim says Kanye is a “hands-on dad,” she also concedes that he isn’t “keen on changing North’s diapers.” She says, “He’s not a diaper kind of guy. And that’s OK. But he would if it was an emergency.” 

But Marie and Kim have more in common than men and babies. For instance, they both have absurd hair, large bosoms and sisters. Marie’s Wikipedia page claims she “was never lonely, since she never had the chance to be alone.” 

Kim also never has the chance to be alone—not that she wants to be. Instead, she has surrounded herself with Paris Hilton, fake husbands, soon-to-be-real husbands, the E! network, a crazy-ass mom even worse than Maria Theresa, sex tapes, real dads, fake dads and now little North West.  Kim would love to surround herself with real royals—the likes of Kate Middleton— but alas she is not real royalty. She is like royalty, but cheaper. 

Still, we can’t forget the biggest similarity between Kim and Marie: their charitable natures. Marie wanted the starving peasants to have cake. Kim wants them to have her brand’s perfumes, baby clothes, real people clothes, and tanning lotions. They are both givers.  

Although Kim should be flattered to have so much in common with such a notable historical figure, she should also be worried. Marie did not die gracefully and neither will Kim. Marie died in a white dress by guillotine. What if Kim and Kanye’s wedding starts another French Revolution? Maybe that’s why the French government won’t let them get married at Versailles. We, like the French, should consider the repercussions of Kim Kardashian as royalty. Kim is not Audrey Hepburn. She is not Marylin Monroe. She is not even Emma Stone. Kim is her own entity. She is the lowliest type of celebrity, the kind made famous through nepotism, by shear will power and utter lack of talent. 

In this way, Kim Kardashian epitomizes royalty for the millennial generation: the kind of royalty best filtered through Instagram and Twitter, reality TV and sex tapes. Kim Kardashian’s millennial royalty is the type that brings us to the palace gates but keeps us at bay.  

Napoleon Bonaparte once famously said, “Vanity made the French Revolution. Liberty was only a pretext.” If we rewrite this quote for our modern age, perhaps it should read, “Wealth made Kimye’s reign. Talent was only a pretext.”

To this end, Kanye is building his own Hall of Mirrors, and “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” is paying for the whole thing! Kim and Kanye’s wedding festivities will last a week and will hopefully include performances by the Wu-Tang Clan and Lady Gaga. Although they can’t rage in Versailles, Kimye can rage in Paris, their “second home,” according to Kim. 

Will “the people” be invited to the wedding? If so, perhaps we have come full circle. Kim’s metamorphosis into Marie Antoinette will be complete. Kanye will still be Kanye. 

I find this concerning. Today, we live in a democracy. Tomorrow, who knows. Kanye is an ambitious man. With Kim by his side, these celebrities, our chosen royalty, could truly rule. 

In the mean time, let them eat cake. Wedding cake.  

At 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, I’m sitting in Moulton, discussing Britney Spears and Jesus. More specifically their collective comeback. I asked my dinner companion: What does Britney represent in 2013? What does the album title Britney Jean really mean? Is it an oblique reference to that time she and Justin Timberlake wore matching jean suits? Or is it because her middle name is Jean? Is it socially acceptable to purchase Britney’s 13th fragrance? Was it acceptable to purchase her 12th and 11th? 

Then we started talking about Jesus. There’s a new musical out titled “SPEARS: The Gospel According to Britney.” Patrick Blute, the creator, claimed in a Fox News article that this will be “the greatest story ever told to the greatest music ever written.” Blute—a Columbia grad—is careful to say that the show is not meant to be rude. He assures us that the musical, “tells an essential story using fragments of pop culture in a non-offensive way.” Blute says the piece is meant to reconcile “the anxiety 20-somethings feel about living in a society that has thousands of statements and not much substance.”

The musical played to this key audience when it opened at Columbia before moving into New York City.

I want to talk about celebrity cage fighting. It should be a thing. 

Here’s my thinking: we all love “Dancing With The Stars” and “Skating With The Stars” (and remember ABC’s “Celebrity Diving?”) Few suffered through “Skating with Celebrities,” but those that persevered swear it was worth it. Keeping with theme, there was “Stars in Danger,” too—it was about high diving (I sense a trend). People liked “Stars in Danger” so much—or at least liked seeing their stars in bikinis and speedos so much—that Fox made a full-length film. It was cleverly titled “Stars in Danger: The High Dive.” Jenni “Jwoww” Farley starred. It was legitimate art. 

My favorite series was “I’m a Celebrity…Get me Out of Here.” It stared titular figures such as Janice Dickinson, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt and Melissa Rivers. These icons were placed in the jungle and told to survive. Tragically, “I’m a Celebrity…Get me Out of Here” was cancelled and was also sued (CBS noticed that it was “Survivor” but with celebrities). Still, a few seasons ran. Every moment was touching.  

Bill Nye the Science Guy is the beacon of our generation. We all have Bill memories—mine are romantic. I had my first lap-sitting experience to the sounds of his show. I perched on a certain Ben’s lap one eighth-grade chemistry class while Bill lectured soothingly on black holes. In this instant I felt like we (we being Ben, and Bill Nye, and I) were really connected. I was sitting on Ben’s lap and Bill was being brilliant and my science teacher was nowhere to be found. It was magical. 

But then reality, science, and my chemistry teacher returned. I got sent to detention and Ben got off free because of sexism (it was Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke all over again). But Bill remained. Soothing and educational and Godly. 

But I digress. More important than my own sexual awakening was the relief all millennials felt when our middle school teachers rolled in the black TV monitor and popped in a tape (VHS!) of Bill Nye. Now, as then, Bill has valuable lessons to impart. 

Miley Cyrus has done what the Republican Party could not. She has awakened—in our collective unconscious—a debate on God, the gender binary and the American family. Miley—unlike Gaga, Romney and Hova—has brought public health to the forefront of the American mind. Her album Bangerz has inspired us to ask big questions: What does a video of Nick Cage’s head superimposed over Miley’s naked body really mean? Who does the sledgehammer in “Wrecking Ball” represent? Is it Liam Hemsworth, or Miley herself? Are we meta, yet? 

Did Miley Purell that hammer she so lovingly licked? I hope so.

Miley has revolutionized language. Imagine googling “wrecking ball’ a year ago or, more provocatively, “turnt.” Her popularization of “turnt” (defined by Urban Dictionary as “the most wonderful feeling in the world...the only way to reach maximum swag”) has crossed cultural boundaries. Though “turnt” has been in use for years—see Juicy J, Roscoe Dash and Soulja Boy—Miley is the champion wordsmith who carried it from the relatively obscure to the common (and by common, I mean white) linguistic bank. 

Throughout the documentary, “This Is Us,” the band One Direction—Harry, Liam, Niall, Louis and Zayn (for those not in the mid-pubescent know)—discusses being normal.

“We’re just like normal teenage boys,” Harry Styles says. “We’re not like robots.”

This is too true. And as I sat watching “This Is Us” in an abandoned movie theater at noon on a Wednesday, I pondered Harry’s wise words. What was normal? Why did he—and we—want to be it? And were we better for it?