Christmas Wishlist 2005

In the movie “Good Will Hunting,” starring Robin Williams and Matt Damon, Williams tells Damon a story about his late wife to illustrate the nature of true love. The story is about how his wife used to pass gas in her sleep, and one night it was so loud it woke her up. Williams makes the point that the true meaning of love is wrapped up in things like these gas attacks: “The little idiosyncrasies that only I know about... people call these things imperfections, but they’re not. That’s the good stuff.”

There are similar idiosyncrasies coloring every Harvard student’s love affair with the College on the Charles. These quirks provide us students with sources of suffering and incredulity over which to bond. And they reassure us mere mortals that even the greatest College in the world has its own stocking-stuffer to medium-sized imperfections. But, in the spirit of the Christmas (err, Holiday) season and the mental and physical renovations which this season often inspires, we’d like to see our very own Santa Summers and his physical plant elves deliver us few Christmas renovations as soon as possible after we return from our long winter’s naps. Our wishlist:

Ten: Fix the carwash outside of Canaday. Astronomer or Aston-Martin? ESPP or BMW? Students making their daily treks to the Science Center or Memorial Hall after a heavy rain are treated to a real, live wash down without the hand-toweling or the Turtle Wax. The depression in the brick by the gate near Canaday fills up with six inches of rainwater just a little slower than Yale Sociology majors pass out of their requirements. Lucky thing there’s a huge duct nearby that vents dry, vaguely Kinkos-scented air. A little asphalt would go a long way.

Nine: Speed the trip to Mem. Hall 203. The door on the elevator traversing the shaft between the basement and second floor of Memorial Hall does its best Star Wars trash-compactor impression every time you push “2.” The door closes so slowly that most students save their Justice section reading for the ride up.

Eight: Make Gov office hours equal-opportunity. Gov-jocks are somewhat of a thing of the past now that the Government department has put its grade-inflationary past behind it. But the department’s brand new buildings, called CGIS Knafel and CGIS South, have doors so heavy that only those aforementioned jocks can wrench them open. Note to the Gov department: rolling boulders to block the doorway would be easier, and they might fit the facade better.

Seven: De-creep Cabot House. What do manual elevators and Quadlings have in common? A tendency to get stuck in less-than-ideal places. Combine the two and you’ll recreate the plight of Cabot E-entryway residents and their creepy manual elevators that often get stuck between floors when Quadlings don’t close the manual doors correctly. At least they smell better than the elevators in 20 DeWolfe.

Six: Stop overzealous green Quincy-ites (after “fixing” the mural). During the spring of 2004, Quincy residents raised money to buy a week’s worth of wind power in a final push for the Green Cup (eventually won by Currier). But we wonder why they bothered with wind energy when they already seem to have an industrial-sized generator attached to the main door into Quincy (making the door second to CGIS’s when it comes to heaviness). Though the “generator” is probably just a motor to assist handicapped individuals in opening the door, we suspect that, come lunchtime, in-and-out traffic could power enough electric sprayers to paint over Quincy dining hall’s ugly mural in under a passing period’s worth of time. After that, Quincy should donate the motor to be installed in that Memorial Hall elevator.

Five: Protect our privacy. The stalls in the men’s bathroom in the basement of the Science Center are to stall goers what loincloths are to their owners’ unmentionables. Any privacy is purely coincidental. The average gap between stall fixtures seems to be around four inches, enough for any innocent urinal user to get a real eyefull on his way down the line.

Four: Wherefore aren’t there vending machines? As attractive as a $1.25 bag of jellybeans sounds, the Greenhouse in the Science Center isn’t priced for everyone. That’s why we love going to the vending machines in the Science Center to grab a $.75 Snicker’s bar, or even some delectable T.G.I. Friday’s cheddar and bacon potato skins. Those snacks make life studying orgo in Cabot library so much more bearable. Yum, yum. Good snacks. Yep. Oh right, there aren’t any vending machines in the Science Center.

Three: Exorcise the 802.11b demons. Prominent Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi called Sever Hall his “favorite building in America.” It shows “the validity of architecture as generic shelter rather than abstract-expressive sculpture,” Venturi wrote. To students inside Sever, however, it shows the pitfalls of delaying the outfit of a building constructed during the post-impressionistic era with information-age technology. There is no official wireless in many parts of Sever, but a faint, ghostlike 802.11b peer-to-peer network (named “Sever Hall”) continually tempts the hordes of laptoppers who frequent Sever everyday. With wireless in Sever, we could even look up the definition of “abstract-expressive.”

Two: Bring back the sahel. The Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) has never been the friendliest of places for those who resist bringing water-bottles with them. But at least we had the drinking fountain in the basement by the free-weight room. Recently, with that gone, the desert has encroached—it’s a long, thirsty, two-floor climb up to the cardio rooms and the nearest alternative drinking fountain. Does this extended sahel/desert metaphor mean that soon fitness geeks will gather around the MAC’s pool as wildebeest do around a watering hole on the Serengeti? We’ll tell you once that drinking fountain gets replaced.

One: Pimp our pit-stops. Three words: toilet seat protectors. Widener Library has them. Lamont Library has them. House common bathrooms don’t. We realize this is an unfair comparison. But after wiping the seat down with the Purel by the card-swiper’s desk for the umpteenth time, we figured it might deserve a prominent mention. If we can’t—how shall we say—mate los microorganismos, we might as well put a thin sheet of wax paper between them and us.

Though our chimneys were blocked as of fall 2003, that still shouldn’t keep Santa from delivering on our wishlist. Taken together, fixing these ten easy problems could revolutionize the undergraduate experience at the College. Or, at the very least, it’ll mean we’ll have ten new things to write about next Christmas.