CMU “Pope Girl” Update # 2

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Pittsburgh, Religion

Tags

CMU, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pope Girl, Public Nudity

I was wondering why my Carnegie Mellon blog post on Spring Carnival and the “Pope Girl” was trending again, and then I saw this, courtesy of Kaitlynn Riely of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Monday, June 10:

“A Carnegie Mellon University student who dressed as a naked pope and another who portrayed a naked astronaut during an on-campus art parade in April will have their indecent-exposure charges withdrawn so long as they each complete 80 hours of community service.

The agreement, struck by CMU, the district attorney’s office and the students, was ‘a great result’ for Katherine B. O’Connor, 19, and Robb S. Godshaw, 22, who had been scheduled for preliminary hearings Monday morning, said attorney Jon Pushinsky, who represented Ms. O’Connor on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union.”

O’Connor, a.k.a. “Pope Girl,” and Godshaw must complete their community service in 120 days. Good for them. Now the ACLU can get back to PRISM, NSA and the Obama Administration.

What I Didn’t Know (in ’81, in ’97, in ’13)…

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anticipation, Back Stabbers, Bruce Anthony Jones, Child Abuse, CMU, Domestic Violence, Family, Hustling, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Not Knowing, O'Jays, Pitt, Poverty, Publishing, Success, The Matrix (1999), Welfare Poverty, Wisdom, Writing

Noah with me, January 3, 2004 [he was five months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

Noah with me, February 28, 2004 [he was seven months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

What I didn’t know across the past thirty-two years could be another book for me. I assume that would be the case for anyone would could look back across their life and second-guess themselves over that long a period of time. For me, though, the significance of today comes out of my mathematics background. You see, today’s my sixteenth PhD graduation anniversary. Not all that significant, I suppose. Except that I’m as far away from the end of my graduate school days at Carnegie Mellon today as I was from the first days of being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my family fall into welfare poverty when I graduated in ’97.

100th Commencement Ceremony program, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two things will hurt your success in this life. One is not acting on the things you know you should or must do. I learned that hard lesson from watching my mother make the decision to not make any decisions until it was too late, all while growing up at 616. Two is the enormous danger of not knowing, and therefore, not being able to act or respond to new or damaging situations as they arise. I’ve learned that lesson pretty well, too. Sometimes the hard way, through really bad experiences or decisions I didn’t play out like a game of eleventh-dimension chess. Sometimes through insight, foresight, even divine inspiration, anticipating what I didn’t know ahead of time.

And even with anticipation, you still might not be able to do anything about what you do and don’t know, simply because you’re not in any position to change things. That was especially true in ’81. I knew that my now deceased idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was no good. But when my Mom decided to end her six months’ separation from him, there was nothing I could really do about it. I knew that with inflation rates of 14.5 percent in ’79 and 11.8 percent in ’80 (thank you, Scholastic Weekly Reader) and my Mom income of roughly $15,000 per year that we had less and less to work with at home. Again, not much I could do about that, either. Even paper boy jobs were drying up by the time I turned twelve!

O’Jays Back Stabbers (1972) album cover, November 10, 2011. (Dan56 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use as low-resolution illustration of subject matter.

What I didn’t know was how quick and violent the shift into poverty would be. What I didn’t know was that Maurice would use his/our conversion as Hebrew-Israelites as justification for abusing my Mom and me. What I didn’t know was that my Mom would have three more kids by this man between July ’81 and May ’84. What I didn’t know was that I would feel so low about the loss of my best friend and my sense of self that I’d attempt to take my own life on my fourteenth birthday, at the end of ’83.

But when I looked back on this in ’97, I mostly thought about the good things that had occurred in the fifteen years between the domestic violence my Mom endured on Memorial Day ’82 and my doctoral graduation ceremony. My independent conversion to Christianity in ’84. Knocking out a 5 on my AP US History exam without ever cracking open Morison and Commager. Overcoming poverty and my lack of self-esteem to build a life at Pitt and in Pittsburgh between ’88 and ’97.

Still, I’d already been wounded, badly. By the things I knew but did nothing about. By those things I could’ve anticipated but my efforts to counteract were insufficient. By those things I couldn’t have known at all. I knew I’d have problems with my “running interference” advisor Joe Trotter coming down the dissertation stretch. Yet because of departmental politics and my need to be done sooner rather than later, I did nothing about this until I was six chapters into an eight-chapter dissertation. I knew my mentor and committee member Bruce Anthony Jones could sometimes be unreliable. Yet I had no idea that he would completely abandon me and his other doctoral students the moment he signed his name to my and their dissertations.

My dissertation’s signature page, May 18, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins),

Most of all, I never anticipated that my Mom would actually be jealous of me, and would spend a whole week with me at 616 and in Pittsburgh doing and saying things to completely disparage what I’d worked so hard for. For me, for her, for my family. That was hard to get over. There are times I’m not sure if I’m entirely over this yet.

What I’m sure of in ’13, though, is what I do know, don’t know, and can only anticipate with the wisdom of experience and wisdom beyond my experience. I know that I love my wife, that there’s a lot in common between her and Crush #1 (for those of you who’ve read Boy @ The Window so far, the implications should be obvious), real and from my own imagination. I didn’t know that I’d have a kid, a son who at nearly ten is both wonderful and perplexing, and hopefully, off to a much better start in life than I ever got. I suspect that one of my references for jobs and consulting gigs has been undermining my efforts over the past five years, and have thus removed her as a reference.

What I don’t know — but can only hope and work like a dog toward — is whether Boy @ The Window will be a success. I’m not sure if quantifying it would help. I sold a thousand copies of Fear of a “Black” America between August ’04 and January ’07, without the benefit of this blog, Twitter, Facebook or the e-book platforms. How long before I sell my first hundred, thousand, 5,000 or more? I have no idea. But as they say, I “must walk the path, not just know it.”

Afrocentricity and the Writing Bug

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Africana Studies, Afrocentric Education, Afrocentric Idea (1987), Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Black Action Society, Black Issues in Higher Education, Black Studies, Blackness, Cool, Coolness, Litmus Test, Marc Hopkins, Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Pitt, Temple University, Writing, Writing Bug

A ladybug, often a symbol for the writing “bug,” May 15, 2013. (http://flickr.com). In public domain.

This time two decades ago, I was already a bit desperate for work. In transferring from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon, I’d left myself without any financial coverage for the summer of ’93 (see my post “The Arrogance of Youth, Grad School Style” from June ’12). I had applied for several fellowships, summer teaching gigs, even some nonprofit work. But as of the middle of that May, nothing had come through. I’d already spent $200 on a root canal that occurred on the same day as my written PhD comps at CMU (see my post “Facing the Tooth” from May ’12).

Even before my comps and my surprise root canal, I had talked with my friend Marc about writing a joint article about the false litmus test of Blackness that Afrocentricity had come to represent in our minds. Between Molefi Asante’s students at Temple — not to mention the overtly Afrocentric turn of both the Black Action Society and the Black Studies department (which had changed its name to Africana Studies) in the previous eighteen months — both of us felt we needed to provide an alternate perspective.

On that third Saturday in May (and the day after my comps and root canal surgery), we worked for five hours in putting together what amounted to a 1,200-word opinion piece against the belief system and authenticity test that Afrocentricity (and Afrocentric education) had become. By some folks’ definition, we realized that jazz, Miles Davis and John Coltrane would fail the authentically Black test of a Molefi Asante’s wonderful Afrocentric Idea (1987) and of Maulana Karenga as well.

Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers (1991), [about as authentic as auto-tunes], May 15, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

Now I’m pretty sure why Marc had problems with Afrocentricity. As a Christian and a jazz aficionado, Marc likely saw Afrocentricity as something somewhere between a misguided way of thinking about Blackness and complete and utter bull crap. His goal was to “add to the debate” and “educate” those who weren’t Asante or Karenga apostles and disciples. A laudable — if somewhat naive about the politics of academia and race — goal.

As for me, beyond the academic superficiality of having a litmus test on what is and isn’t Black, I had at least two unconscious reasons for writing my first crossover piece. One had to do with my sense that too many young folks were all too interested in doing the cool thing and not the right thing. Afrocentricity was cool, just like all rap and hip-hop was cool, just like giving libations to ancestors was cool.

Being cool had always meant following a crowd and seldom saying anything that would dig more than a nanometer beyond the surface. Or saying a critical thing about the cool thing that everyone in the same crowd otherwise takes in without a critical thought. I went to a high school full of people like that, and loathed being around people like that when I’d been a part of the Black Action Society at Pitt.

Unconscious reason number two had something to do with my Hebrew-Israelite days. Again, I gave this zero direct thought during my grad school days. But the given the trauma I’d suffered through during my three years of kufi-dom, it had to affect my thinking about Afrocentricity. The Black folk I knew who were part of the Hebrew-Israelite religion were much more obvious about what they did and didn’t consider Black or kosher. Yet, it was so obvious that they constantly contradicted themselves, in terms of food or music, how they treated their wives or children. Most important for me, though, was the fact that they tried to live separate and apart from other Blacks, yet seemed no more different beyond the kufis, veils and kosher meats from other Blacks (or Jews, for that matter).

I saw Afrocentricity as bullshit, and still see the fact that so many folks who get caught up in this sense of authenticity around Blackness as folks falling for bullshit. If I hadn’t lived as a Hebrew-Israelite between the ages of eleven and fifteen, perhaps I wouldn’t see Afrocentricity this way. If I hadn’t been around the “Party All The Time” folks in high school and the “Black Panther Party” posers at Pitt, maybe Afrocentricity would’ve been more appealing to me.

Letters to the Editor, Black Issues in Higher Education, September 9, 1993. (Donald Earl Collins).

But at twenty-three years old, I was already tired of the pursuit of coolness and authenticity. That hasn’t changed in the past two decades. I’m sure the letters that called Marc and I “Uncle Toms” after our piece was published in Black Issues in Higher Education were from folks who thought we weren’t cool, and thought they had the answers to life itself.

I wonder how those folks back then would see the academics who believe that hip-hop can explain everything in the social sciences and humanities who are prominent today. Perhaps some of these people today were the Afrocentric followers of twenty years ago. Perhaps not. All I know is, I haven’t stopped writing since that cloudy day in mid-May.

Carnegie Mellon and the “Pope Girl”

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Alumni, Anti-Gravity Downhill Derby, Birth of a Nation (1915), Bishop David Zubik, Buggy Races, Carnival, Catholic Church, Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, Jared Cohon, Parody, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pope, Pope Girl, School of Art, Spring Carnival, Spring Carnival 2013, WPXI

Pope Girl, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, April 18, 2013. (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review).

A couple of days ago, outgoing Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon responded to criticism from the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh regarding an incident during the Spring Carnival 2013 festivities in mid-April. Known primarily for buggy cart races on campus/near Schenley Park, the Spring Carnival has also been a time for alumni to gather in force on the sanitarium of a campus, to relive whatever wonderful memories they have of attending CMU (by comparison, I’ve never attended, not even when I was a graduate student at CMU).

This year, though, the fourth annual spoofing of Carnival and the cart races by CMU’s School of Art — known as the Anti-Gravity Downhill Derby — involved a student dressed as the pope from the waist up. The get-up included a facsimile of the pontiff’s hat and crimson gown. From the waist down, the young woman wore nothing. Except for her vagina hair, cut in the shape of the cross. If this wasn’t bad enough, she and her compadres marched in the parade and handed out condoms during the event.

Now folks like Bishop David Zubik — and likely some deep-pocket conservative (and maybe even Catholic) alumni — want to see the CMU student the local media has called the “Pope Girl” punished. Hence, President Cohon’s emailed statement to the CMU alumni community on Wednesday:

Email message from CMU President Cohon to alumni, May 1, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

I don’t find what this CMU student did “highly offensive” or even mildly offensive at all. Maybe it’s because I’d been to gay and lesbian pride parades at NYU back in the ’90s, where women and men dressed as the pope. Where women put black tape in the shape of a cross across their breasts while holding signs that said, “F— the Catholic Church.” Maybe I’m not offended because CMU’s the same university that didn’t close on the Martin Luther King holiday back in the ’90s, yet somehow thought it okay for students to show Birth of a Nation (1915) on that day.

CMU student dressed as pope (cropped, pre-parade), April 18, 2013. (http://bit.ly/109fnni for full pic).

I’m sure that exposing one’s pubic hair and butt cheeks in public violates some standards, either public nudity or lewdness in general. But beyond this, if there’s to be any punishment, it would be beyond unfair. After all, the Pope Girl is an adult, and has First Amendment rights to free speech, free expression and in this case, freedom of religion (specifically, the right to mock the pope). Yes, five centuries ago, she would’ve been declared a heretic, tortured and burned at the stake. But then again, so would’ve the 6,000 or so Catholic priests and their superiors who were involved in child molestation and rape over the years.

Face it. CMU’s only responding now because money may be involved, as in the loss of financial support from donors and potential donors. Morality, religion and decency aren’t exactly the central tenets of a university that’s dying to be seen on the same level of elite as MIT or Stanford. Still, this is the most exciting end to the Spring Carnival that I or anyone else has likely ever heard of or seen.

All The Media’s Stereotypes

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Dirty Laundry" (1982), 9/11. Jingoism, Boston, Boston Marathon Bombing, Branch Davidian Compound, Breaking News, Centrism, Chechnya, CNN, Cultural Stereotypes, Don Henley, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FOX News, Immigrants, Immigration, Islam, Jihadists, John King, Jonathan Capehart, Lockdown, Media Bias, New York Post, Oklahoma City Bombing, Police Chase, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Stereotypes, Tamerlane Tsarnaev, Terrorism, Terrorized, Waco, Washington Post, West Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion, Xenophobia

Dzhokhar & Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston Marathon crowd moments before bomb blasts, April 15, 2013. (http://www.mirror.co.uk)

The mainstream American media was just one big, almost unbelievable fail this past week. Between the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent hunt for brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the ricin letters to Mississippi GOP politicians and President Obama and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. In the last case, the one that killed and injured more people than two dumb asses in Boston. Yet, somehow, in a world in which the best answer should be “I don’t know” or “We don’t know yet,” media folks and their experts have been tweeting and reporting at the level of gossip for the past five or six days.

Usually a fairly careful journalist/columnist, Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post tweeting three hours after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, “April 19: Anniversary of storming of Branch Davidian compound & the Okla. City bombing.” At that point, we didn’t even know the number of people killed, maimed or injured. Nor did we know the number of bombs that had exploded in Copley Square. Think, man, think!

The more famous comments of the week came out of CNN’s shop, though. John King had breaking news Wednesday afternoon that law enforcement officials had identified a “dark-skinned male” suspect. Being a White guy working in mainstream media means that you never have to say “I’m sorry,” apparently. Especially when all of his “breaking news” reporting turned out to be completely wrong.

Let’s not really analyze the so-called reporting of FOX News or the New York Post. You’d get more truth from a psychic doing a Vulcan mind-meld with Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brain right now than you could from Murdoch’s news media world in a year.

Let’s also not forget many of the so-called terrorism experts whom guessed wrong about race, immigrant status and so many other details this past week. Not to mention reports whom apparently couldn’t find Chechnya on a map if the republic were blown up to 100x normal map size and they put a floodlight on it.

But the most disturbing — yet not very surprising — thing about the past seven days has been how the US media has engaged in a near-endless campaign of racial stereotypes, immigrant stereotypes, terrorism stereotypes, religious stereotypes, patriotism stereotypes, and hyperbole that attempts to defy history. A simple list should help:

Terrorist(s) = Arab Muslims
Males from the Caucasus = Caucasians, but not White
Muslims who commit a violent act = terrorists
Violent criminals = anyone not White (especially Blacks & Latinos)
Violent mass-murdering Whites = mentally disturbed (i.e., NOT terrorists)
Arab Muslims = immigrants, NOT US citizens
Indo-Europeans who are White (phenotypically) & citizens but not born in US = Immigrants
Boston = city terrorized like no city ever before

On this last one, I must put on my academic historian hat. As in — are you kidding me? Anyone ever hear of Boston in the years before and during the American Revolution? Or, in more recent times, the Oklahoma City bombing in ’95, 9/11 and Lower Manhattan, the DC sniper rampage in ’02? Or, if the idea here is that terrorism should only be viewed through the prism of those who feel terrorized, what about poor Blacks on the South Side of Chicago, in SE Washington, DC, or poor Latinos in cities like Albuquerque and Phoenix? Or, for that matter, innocent civilians in Yemen and Pakistan attempting to avoid being among the “collateral damage” caused by our drone wars for terrorist scalps?

And then, there was the need for release, for yelps of relief and cheers of joy over the successful capture of Dzhokhar Tsarneav late Friday evening, with chants of “USA! USA! USA!” included. Of course people should feel relief for the end of a tense situation. But let’s not get carried away with the tide here.

Stereotype quote taken from Annie Murphy Paul article (May 1998) in Psychology Today, January 16, 2011. (http://nwso.net/). In public domain.

We know nothing of motive, but we do know that the police will return to its regularly scheduled racial and socioeconomic profiling in the coming days. We can’t wrap our collective heads around the idea that two assimilated White American immigrants decided to kill runners at the Boston Marathon. Yet we also somehow decided to culturally and legally un-Americanize them — something we didn’t do with Timothy McVeigh. Chants patriotic might be a way to show solidarity, but we refuse to come to grips with the racial/xenophobic and anti-Muslim psychology that comes with these impromptu outbreaks of so-called unity.

Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” remains just as relevant now as his tune about the American news media was three decades ago. Still, the completely centrist and biased, always-concerned-about-the-bottom-line media is a mere reflection of our narcissistic and imperialistic selves.

Boy @ The Window Is Live!

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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E-Book, ebook, PDF edition, Publishing

Final Cover

Well, “it is done,” as my former graduate advisor Joe Trotter used to say. Boy @ The Window is now a published book. For now, it’s an e-book, available on Amazon.com through Kindle Books (as Boy @ The Window: A Memoir) and through Smashwords.com (which will then ensure that the book makes its way to iBooks, Apple’s bookstore, as well as Barnes & Noble.com). I also have a free PDF edition of Boy @ The Window (text only) available on this blog site (in the sidebar to the right), at least for the next three months.

I anticipate putting out a trade paperback edition in the next few months, either in July or in the fall. But with more than forty percent of the book market now in the e-book realm, it made far more sense to start with the fastest growing part of the market first. It’s a bit weird not holding a copy of Boy @ The Window in my hands, being able to leaf through the paper pages. It’s been on my iPad, though, for a couple of days, and seeing it there in 100 percent working order has been a pretty good feeling.

For me, at least, incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing yesterday — and so many other tragedies and dastardly events in the seven years and four months since I first began writing my book — are a reminder to live every day like there may not be a next one. After years of work and waiting for the commercial market to say “yes” to Boy @ The Window, I knew I didn’t want to wait forever to put this work of mine out into the world. So, “hello, world!”

Transfer Anniversary

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Politics, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Department of HIstory, Dissertation Completion, Dissertation Funding, Doctoral Completion, Elite Universities, Elitism, Funding, History Department, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter, John Modell, Jr., Larry Glasco, Laurence Glasco, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Politics of Academia, Transfer, University of Pittsburgh

Viewing Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon’s mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

March ’93 was an interesting month for me, to say the least. Just about the biggest thing happening for me that month was my transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon (or CMU) to finish my doctorate. After nearly two years of grad school in the History Department, I knew I needed to leave. Especially with Larry Glasco as my well-meaning but sometimes absentee advisor and with a bunch of professors who never hid their disdain for me as a masters and then a doctoral student. I’d also been at Pitt for six years between undergrad and grad school, most of those focused on history, Black Studies, or education foundations and policy as areas of research.

I knew that Carnegie Mellon wasn’t an ideal situation. I was sure that had I desired, I could’ve applied to and been accepted by doctoral programs as far and wide as NYU, University of Maryland, University of Michigan and other places. All were places where history didn’t simply consist of working-class historians who believed in the supremacy of class and neo-Marxism above all else – race and racism be damned! What I didn’t know, though, was whether those departments would accept my doctoral credits, cutting my coursework time in half. What I couldn’t be sure about was whether I’d be able to move toward PhD comprehensives and my dissertation proposal within a year of enrollment.

See, these were the things that Joe Trotter, my eventual advisor and John Modell, the graduate coordinator for the department, had promised me as part of my deal for transferring across the bridge to CMU. Those promises, along with the idea of working with an enthusiastic professor whose research didn’t seem out-of-date in a department that seemed to fast-track its students toward doctoral completion. That really appealed to me at the time.

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

When I finally broke it to Larry at the beginning of March that I’d made this decision, he didn’t exactly try to convince me to stay. I think he knew why. An audit of the program in ’98 confirmed officially what I had learned anecdotally over my six years at Pitt. That there were students in the program who’d been ABD (All But Dissertation) since Nixon and Watergate. That fully half of my cohort from ’91 hadn’t even completed their master’s degrees, and only three of us (counting myself) out of twenty-one would ever go on to complete our doctorates. That no Pitt History grad student had obtained substantial research funding from outside the university since my Mom potty-trained me back in ’72-’73. And that politically, the powers that used to be in the department didn’t take my or Larry’s work with me seriously. Even if Larry didn’t see that, I sure did.

Off then, I went. Into the unknown known of CMU, conservative, elite and elitist, not sure if I’d ever be comfortable on the lily-White and honorary-White-as-Asian campus. Still, I reminded myself that Pitt was really only a couple of blocks away at the closest point between the two campuses, that I still had lots of friends and acquaintances there. I also knew, though, that my relationship with Trotter as my advisor would be crucial to my successful navigation of this drab and stuffy world. Too bad I wasn’t clairvoyant!