Thoughts on Caltech My parents convinced me to have my photo taken a few months after I graduated high school, back when I still thought I was pretty smart . Now I only bother to get dressed when I get home, where I can be pampered by my parents. Here at Caltech, I'm generally slightly emaciated (they don't bother to feed the Techers on weekends here) with a more weary complexion (Sleep? What is this "sleep"?). Additionally, I tend to look a little shaggier, as haircuts are rather rare for many Scurve Techers. I like others to think that I am part of a multifaceted cultural elite. My life is a superfeteration of high culture: I enjoy classical music that drives normal humans crazy (Glass's Floe by Glassworks, for example); I'd be the first to pay millions for a preschooler's mindless doodles; I take my dates to see these enigmatic European films that people go to just to appear cultured; and my talk about the untapped potential of the information superhighway will bore even Al Gore. Of course, my rudeness and crude manners probably automatically disqualify me from any elitist group I aspire to be a member of; but this, of course, apodictically identifies me as a cultural poser. It doesn't stop there. Even though I'm not actually white, I'm still male, heterosexual, Christian (Protestant, even), somewhat conservative, and non-vegetarian (note all the bad groups). Having been pretty thoroughly corrupted by submission to Western indoctrination (MTV, and all that), I have been rightly criticized for oppressing more than my share of underrepresented cultures: women, atheists, liberals , gays... I've probably oppressed you too, if you are different from me in any way. Or maybe I'm the victim. When someone gets to the point where they're willing to abandon 5,000 years of cultural tradition just to listen to the insidious laughter of Beavis and Butthead, we really can't tell who was the victim. Or at least that's what we all claim. These things should bother me constantly (I'm the type of guy who thinks more about how he should think/feels than what he actually thinks/feels), but I deal with boredom by numbing my senses with my opiate of choice: studying physics as a sophomore at Caltech. (It's strange, because I notice that I probably waste more energy playing with computers..