The Ice Burns of Prof. Haran

My Stat 200H [elementary statistics] teacher is a young Indian guy - maybe 30 or a little bit older - with a modern sense of style and vocabulary. He often refers to incorrect methods of statistics as "silly," but you can tell he knows it's sort of ironically funny.

Anyhow. One day in class, during the end of the voter registration drive up here, I was sitting in the back so I could pass notes with Dana, which we do to pass time. I had some "clings" in my backpack (kind of like stickers, but they used static cling instead of an adhesive material) that said "Vote for Change" on them. They were pretty big - probably about a foot diameter. So I took one out when he was looking away and put it on the back wall, over my head. When he turned around he did a quick double-take and asked me if I did that. "Did what?" "That." "Hm? Oh... uh, sure..."

He didn't seem upset by it. Furthermore, he's a professor and does research on global warming, so I felt pretty safe saying he was liberal. I think I asked him after class and he said he was supposed to be "shy" with his views, so he didn't tell me.

Another time, he asked me if I went to the Sarah Palin rally. He had. I was going to go, but I didn't have the effort to go because I heard you needed tickets, and I had driven 3 hours back home from an Obama rally that day. I prodded him again to ask if he were liberal - "Come on, you watch The Daily Show and you do research on global warming, you can't not be liberal." And he said, "I don't know, I might be..." and winked. But he still somehow didn't quite give it away.

But I'm going to go ahead and say he's liberal. Don't quote me on that.

Anyhow. Recently I got a lot of assignments back, and the first one was a lab on which I got 30/30. Generally I don't do super-hot in that class. I feel like I always answer things correctly, but the grader goes for details and you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, so I always end up with something like a 90% I feel like. Anyway, when I got the lab back, I said, "Oh my god! This is the first good grade I've gotten in this course!" He overheard me and said, cuttingly but playfully, "That's because you never come to class...?!"

I rarely go to class, it's true. But it was still funny the way he said it. It was just funny that he actually called me out on it.

Anyway, Colbert is on.

Peace out.

If I Had A Million Dollars

Sometime last year when I was at Brown, Chaz and Sarah and Nupur and Ben and other friends (Allegra? Margeaux? and one other whose name I forget, I think it started with a J, she played water polo) were hanging in Chaz's room. It was sort of small - actually, unusually small for a dorm room at Brown - but it never really felt cramped. It had a sunroof/moonroof/starroof above Chaz's bed in the corner, a futon/chair beside the bed, and his roommate's bed against the other wall. There was a little Ikea coffeetable in the middle that I "helped" Chaz put together during the first week we were there, and their desks were just about opposite their beds. I think this was the night of SexPowerGod, but I'm not sure.

In either case, Chaz had his computer - a white MacBook, I think - playing some music, and somehow when we were talking about music, we got to If I Had a Million Dollars, by The Barenaked Ladies. He said that he thought it was one of the prettiest songs he knew, and told us that sometime we should really listen to it - so we put it on right then.

If you're not familiar with the song If I Had a Million Dollars, you should be. The whole song is basically the two lead singers listing all the things they would buy for their girlfriend or wife if they had a million dollars, and each verse ends with "If I had a million dollars, I'd buy your love," before going into a chorus that lists more things they would buy for her so she would love him. And so we sat and really listened, and at the very end, Chaz said, "Oh, oh, this is the best part."

So I listened to the prolonged last line: "If I had a million dollars.... I'd be rich."

I'd listened to the song hundreds of times before, and I had always thought that it was just a pun. But for some reason when Chaz told me to listen to it, it completely changed the meaning. He wasn't talking about money at all; that's not the kind of rich he means.

I had actually momentarily forgotten the line as I was writing this post, and it didn't actually hit me until I wrote the line out just a moment ago, and when I did, it was strangely just as strong as the first time I realized what it really meant. And I remember the first time, Chaz and I just looked at each other, both feeling a little mushy and sentimental, and half-cried out, "It's so beautiful!" and hugged each other, non-ironically.

You should really listen to it sometime, maybe.

Peace out.