Coping with Lemons

Since Lindsay Lohan’s recent Vanity Fair confessions of bulimia and cocaine use, I have felt a particular—and peculiar—duty to discuss my own reading period affliction with the public. Hopefully, my candor will help others cope with similar issues, and will help me reveal the true culprits behind my shameful disorder.

I have intellectual bulimia. There. I said it, and I won’t retract it. I sit in Lamont or in Widener or in Ticknor, trying hopelessly to study for my four massive finals. I see my peers with eyes fixed on the writings of Hume and Hegel, and feeling the inevitable pressure not to fall behind, I remain in the library in agony. Sadly, I achieve nothing. I read, skim, outline, and peruse, but in the end, the facts never stick. In a matter of minutes, they are regurgitated from my brain into that dark abyss of intellectual nothingness.

I never used to have intellectual bulimia. I—like my other 1,600 classmates—was the cream of the high school crop, one of the nine percent of 22,000 applicants selected by Harvard last year. I never used to stare at myself in the mirror and see a slacker. I studied hard, I studied well, and I studied early.

Tom Cruise would say that I just don’t have the will power to control my affliction, but that’s not true. I do, of course I do. I am a Harvard student! So the blame must lie elsewhere. As with all problems on campus, we students know that the true culpability does not rest on our shoulders, but on those of Harvard’s administrators who put innumerable barriers on our path to success.

From funding only the second biggest library in the world (how can Harvard accept being beaten by the Library of Congress!) to giving us a scant two-and-a-half hours to eat dinner, the administration systematically inhibits our growth from ignorant teens into wizened adults.

Worst of all, our absurdly long reading period creates so many enticements that even a Harvard student must succumb to, god forbid, a social life. We have had to endure tea parties, Candy Land tournaments, and a parade of naked people just to pass the time.

The administration is testing us, of course.

This endless “reading” period is a farcical misnomer, a veritable play-time rather than the hell for which we paid $42,000. It is just another lemon in the large pile that Harvard deals its students.

Unfortunately, I am not a juicer, and neither are my friends, so squeezing lemonade from all of our lemons is out of the question. Instead, we are stuck with an unsavory and bitter, bitter fruit that costs more than the median American income.

I call on all Harvard students to shed their guilty procrastinating and failed attempts at studying, and rally in front of Mass Hall against the administration. We must fight—as usual—with gusto to battle administrators’ malicious tactics. The torturous schedule must be changed. We will be frazzled and disheveled and miserable with only four days of reading period at the end of December, but at least we shall not have wastefully enjoyed the month of January like thousands of other college students. We will complete a miraculous metamorphosis of one of Harvard’s biggest lemons into a new, much tastier orange.

Of course oranges have seeds too, but this shall be condemned at a later date.



Andrew D. Fine ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Stoughton Hall.