Reedgloss

Here is a long and boring glossary of stuffs at Reed College, which I have been meaning to post since last September:

THE CANYON: We need bridges to cross it (one is bouncy, one is blue), there is water, there are trees, it divides the campus in two, it is therefore a CANYON.

THE REACTOR: The only nuclear reactor monitored by undergrads in the whole of the world, or something. It looks pretty and blue when you turn the lights off.

FELLATIO RODRIQUEZ: Reed's improv comedy group. Consette could do better, but the idiot has so far prevented me from auditioning.

ELIOT: Eliot Hall is a nice old-school school building. It has tiny alcoves for water fountains, indented along all the walls.

CSOs: The Community Safety Officers keep everything ticking over. They ride segways. Only once have we felt in danger - when someone set alight to a car on the other side of The Grove dorms and we all had to evacuate. But the CSOs segwayed in calming circles, and everything was okay.

DOGS: Dogs are everywhere. There is one called 'woof' (I think) who sleeps under the desk during the idiot's poetry conference.

MLLL: The famous comic book library, requiring a secret password.

SCROUNGE: Can be either a verb 'to scrounge', or a noun denoting the activity of 'the scrounge', or the table given to scrounging is 'the scrounge', or the person who practices the scrounge is 'a scrounge' or 'a scrounger'. It basically means eating everyone's leftover food in Commons and to contract/spread disease.

SEQUOIA: Our posh dormitory in The Grove. There are rocking chairs in all the rooms.

GRAFFITI: Everywhere.

TOILET DEBATES: On the walls of any given bog.

BLUE LIKE JAZZ: Pending movie on Reed, for Christians.

GRADES: There are none. Or, at least, the idiot can't see them unless she asks nicely and signs a request form and gives good reason for wanting to know her academic achievements or failures. Halfway through the semester the students receive a note in their pigeonholes stating either 'satisfactory' or 'unsatisfactory' work, so if you're failing you shall definitely know about it.

CONFERENCE: Seminars are called conferences here. The idiot is a conference parasite, in that she doesn't really think for herself, but is actually one of those hideous sorts who jumps on the end of others' originality and adds something of no use whatsoever, before retreating once again back to gormlessness. She once equated her conference style to defecating in the middle of the floor, and leaving everyone else to clear it up.

DEADBEATS: There is a strong tradition of beatness at Reed, and The Deadbeats are the spoken-word/poetry/random performance group who meet on Wednesday nights in the SU. Much howling, some of it pleasant.

ANGEL DAVID RIVERA: Runs the International Society. A hero.

THESIS TOWER: What is the plural of thesis? Theses? Thesises? Anyway, they're all in the tower.

FREESTYLE FRIDAY: Rich kids rapping in Sallyport every Friday night. Not 'authentic': they don't have gun wounds, says Annie.

SALLYPORT: Archway passage running through the ODB (Old Dorm Building). On Freestyle Fridays, ODB = Old Dirty Bastard.

SLUR: Every other week. Sing Loudly Unto Reed. What it says on the tin.

GRAY FUND: Puts on cool things for students, thanks to Betty Gray who gave a whole load of money to the college when she died. The best last semester was the Night Kite Revival spoken word group. They opened with Anis Mojgani, draining us of cynicism like a catheter to the analytical vein (a relief in worky mid-November). We also went to see Howl, opening the LGBT film festival Portland, and ate a gourmet meal at Bluehour. Sissyboy was actually kind of moving, and Billy Collins grin-ful.

FOUCAULT: One of the professors here says he had sex with Michel Foucault in the 80s. This is Reed lore. Is he aware that Foucault died of aids?

R. KNAPP'S OFFICE: Books: breeding, towering, building little subsiduary houses of books.

JARS: Hipsters brew their own tea and drink it out of jam jars. A hazard, one would think, for that American Apparel rucksack?

PRETTY BOYS: So many, even Consette is admiring. Reed students bifurcate neatly into two separate groups: either you are so beautiful you can barely move, or you are so awkward you can barely move. In both cases, this paralysis benefits hard studying and academia. Coolness is a bit more complicated: to salivate over Harry Potter movies, eg, is very very (unironically) cool.

MADNESS: Occasionally we encounter someone with borderline schizophrenia, but we turn a blind eye and hope for the best.

TAI CHI ON THE FRONT LAWN: The idiot's P.E. credit last semester was in Tai Chi. Before the British weather hit Portland, the class had all their lessons outside, soundtracked on Wednesdays by heavy DnB pulsating from the student radio window (seemingly the only broadcasting medium through which the 'radio' transmits).

PORTLAND: The city in which we live, but never see.

BUT, SERIOUSLY, PORTLAND: It looks like Sim City, has amazing food, and a bookshop called Powell's which is so pleasurable you might blind if you spend too much time in there.

HOST FAMILY: The idiot is fortunate enough to have Karen, Kevin and Amelia as her allocated family whilst in Portland. Amelia is ten years old with bouncy ringlets and a precocious vocabulary. A delight.

THE SIMPSONS: Matt Groening is from Portand. An English Professor at Reed (incidentally a prospective prof for the idiot's next semester) was, they say, the inspiration for Lisa Simpson.

GAPS IN BETWEEN THE TOILET CUBICLES: What is with this? You can be seen.

PARADOXES: Two cafés on campus (the old Paradox, and the new one), where all the pretty boys slouch. Generally very nice coffee. Also, sellers of some tea latte kind of drink called a 'London Fog'. Ask for a London Fog in a British accent, and get slightly close to a flirt with a pretty barista.

THE HONOR PRINCIPLE: These lot are experts, and I tend to say something dishonourable when I try to explain. It's amazing, though, that mid-terms and final exams can be taken away and done in your free time. Every single Reed student who we've spoken to so far has baulked at the suggestion of cheating, or going over the time limit. Whatever this Honor Principle is, most people get quite into it.

PUB (AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE): 'Pub' at the end of 28th street. Or in the middle of. Pub at the end of my tether anyway - makes me, for a split second, miss England.

TWINKA: Twinka from Imogen and Twinka. Her wikipedia says she used to live with Henry Miller. Now a checkout lady in the Reed dining hall. Still got it.

Consette x