I had some time to kill this afternoon, so I did some reading in one of the carrels on the third floor of Hatcher. I turned to look out the window and saw a fascinating display on the radiator below the window. The radiator was one of those old 1960s/1970s models with hundreds of vents, and each of the vents had a sloping slat on which it looked like various students who had used the carrel over the years had scribbled slogans, epithets, and messages.

This wasn’t the usual obscene stuff you see scribbled on bathroom walls, though certainly there was some of that. This was a meticulous collection of pithy and often trenchant comments, most of which were carefully dated, as though adhering to some unspoken tradition. I didn’t copy all of them down, but the ones I did copy were mainly comments about the weather on a given day, along with the occasional complaint about grind courses.

10/7/90 Dreary!

10/22/90 Horny!

10/4/91 Raining

11/17/91 Kinda cold but you can go w/o a jacket & not freeze

3/4/92 55° sunny

4/28/92 Sittin’ at home watchin’ Arsenio Hall

5/5/92 Dismal & muggy

11/2/93 Physics bites!

10/4/95 Cold & rainy

1/30/96 Windy, cold

12/16/96 Snowing

11/11/97 Cloudy & cold

11/17/97 Cold 28°

11/23/97 Frustrated

3/23/00 Perfect

12/17/00 Econ loathes me

2/18/04 Damn this blows!