American U. senior Brandon Krapf was featured Friday in a video on the USA Today website that is part of the week-long series “Degrees of Difficulty.”

The series highlights the struggles of five “non-traditional” college students, or those who did not go straight to college and get a degree in the four years after they graduated from high school. The episodes have been released throughout this week on the Education page of USA Today.

Krapf’s section is the last in the series and “adds a really interesting piece of the puzzle,” said Cynthia Farrar, CEO and executive producer for Purple States, the media company that produced the series.

In the audition video that he submitted to become a participant in the project, Krapf described his decision to turn down a job offer that he received after six years of serving in the military, including a year in Iraq. The job offered him $180,000 a year to work in a contractor job overseas in war zones.

He turned it down to get his bachelor’s degree. He enrolled at AU in the School of International Service in the fall of 2007 after a semester at Ocean County College in New Jersey.

“If I could go back to Iraq and get a bachelor’s degree, I assure you I would, all right?  This is the hardest experience of my entire life, and I’ve served 6 years in military,” Krapf said in his audition video for Degrees of Difficulty. “I would do combat for 15 hours straight before I’d ever come to college.”

Krapf said he stated that in his video because he is “a lot more stretched out in college. You’re kind of multi-tasking on a much larger, macro-level. So that’s different from the military…all of your support is there in the military. Generally, you’re supported and taken care of.”

While struggling to pay bills, working to keep his grades up and adjusting to the age difference of his classmates and peers, the 27-year-old vet found time to serve on the executive board of Delta Chi for five semesters, including as president of the fraternity for a year at AU.

He also founded Veterans of American University, the school’s chapter of the national organization Student Veterans of America. Brandon served as president of the organization for a year, and it has expanded to include members of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and a civilians’ corps, according to Krapf.

Since the student veterans group started, AU has added an online veterans’ resources network and become a participant in the Yellow Ribbon Program, which offers veterans extra financial support to attend AU, The Eagle previously reported.

Krapf said that he credits AU for taking these steps but worries about veterans that had gone through AU before the establishment of Veterans of American University and other support.

One of the things Krapf is most frustrated with is that he cannot reap benefits from the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act. This Post-9/11 GI Bill was introduced by Rep. Harry Mitchell, D.-Ariz., and Sen. Jim Webb, D.-Va., and was passed June 18, 2008.

But benefits from the bill were not effective until August 1, 2009, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, two years after Brandon started at AU.

This particular struggle is something Farrar wanted to capture from Krapf’s story in the Degrees of Difficulty series.

“There’s a whole lot of people…who are in Brandon’s situation,” she said.

As part of the series, each student came to D.C. to meet with federal policymakers and discuss the options they and others like them have concerning Federal student loans and GI benefits.

Krapf spoke with Mitchell about the Post-9/11 GI bill and the problems of veterans who served after 9/11 but started college before it was enacted.

“There’s a whole category of individuals that we thought were taken care of when it came to being able to have the resources to go through college,“ Farrar said when discussing why she chose Brandon as one of the five students. “People don’t realize that even if you have the GI bill, you can rack up a huge amount of debt.”

As a beneficiary of the previous GI Bill, Krapf’s debt from student loans now totals around 100,000 dollars, he said.

“When you get the GI Bill, it’s supposed to cover tuition, but you end up living off of it,” Krapf said. “I’ve thought about quitting school many times.”

Now, Krapf is on the cusp of graduating.

He hoped to finally graduate at the end of the summer, but he has hit a roadblock. He has a language requirement left to fulfill before graduating but no available classes.

“It’s my understanding that AU canceled all Arabic classes this summer, so that’s going to kind of be a hindrance” Krapf said.

All nine summer Arabic classes on the my.american Schedule of Classes website are listed as “Cancelled.”

McKendree Whitney, operations coordinator at the Office of the Registrar, said that departments decide whether to cancel classes, and the reason is often low enrollment numbers, which is common for summer sessions.

“I’ll have to kind of find another way to complete my language requirement,” Krapf said.

Farrar said Purple States is considering a continuation of the series.

“We are thinking about what a sequel might be,” Farrar said. “We feel we really touched a nerve here, and that these are just very powerful issues for a lot of people in this country, and it would be really good to find a way to continue.”

Krapf said that he has learned a lot from the experience, including from talking with the other members of the cast about scholarship, grant and loan options.

“As long as I get my bachelor’s degree and if everything works out — there have obviously been a lot of troubles — and I do get the degree, I’d say, hands down, it was worth it.” Krapf said.

The night before the Indianapolis 500 Dario Franchitti dreamed of the race and Tony Kanaan. He dreamed that him and Kanaan would go head to head for the win at the fabled Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

And when Franchitti saw Kanaan, who started in 33rd place, creep up to second place behind him, he thought his nightmare was coming true.

“I thought, ‘I knew it,’ Franchitti said.

However Franchitti didn’t let his dream intimidate him as he focused on both moving away from Kanaan and saving as much fuel as possible. Kanaan was forced to pit due to lack of fuel, which Franchitti said took the pressure off of him.

“Until he pitted, I never took my eye off him because he can always surprise you,” Franchitti said. “He didn’t get the result that he deserved, but to have gone from last to second was cool.”

However, Franchitti and Kanaan were never expected to be competing in the end of the race or at any logical point, as the two started thirty positions apart. Instead much of the pre-race hype was about three-time winner Helio Castroneves.

Castroneves won everything—the pole and the pit crew challenge—except the one that mattered after 200 laps on the excruciatingly hot track.  After being pegged the favorite by many, the sheer dominance that Franchitti, and not Castroneves, displayed was unexpected.

“What an awesome car he (Franchitti) had,” Castroneves said. “Ganassi (Chip) did an incredible job to put him up there. It was the car to beat today. We tried.”

“Unfortunately, silly mistakes put us in the back.”

Franchitti was indeed the car to beat as he led 155 of the 200 laps en route to his second Indianapolis 500 victory. In the past several years the driver leading the most laps has failed to win the race, as fellow Target Chip Ganassi teammate, Scott Dixon, led the most laps in both 2008 and 2009, failing to win either race. The last time a winning driver led more laps was in 2000, when Juan Pablo Montoya led 167 laps.

Target Chip Ganassi Racing drivers have led the most laps in the last three Indianapolis 500 races. Franchitti also is now ranked 21st on the all-time lap list. Prior to the race he was ranked 59th.

With his second Indianapolis 500 victory, Franchitti becomes the 17th driver to kiss the bricks at least twice. He also is the first driver from Scotland to win the race duplicate times.

Another record was also set with Franchitti’s victory on Sunday, as Chip Ganassi hit a unique milestone. Ganassi became the first owner to win both the Daytona 500, under driver Jamie McMurray, and the Indianapolis 500 in the same year.

However, even though this accomplishment is extraordinary, Ganassi has remained humble about his success in the racing world.

“I didn’t drive either car. I didn’t change any tires. I didn’t put any fuel in the cars,” Ganassi said. “I don’t do any of that stuff. I have hundreds of people that do that kind of thing. I’m very, very lucky is what it comes down to. I’m very lucky.”
?“I’m just the guy that gets my name on the door, the sign in the front. But it’s a lot of hard work by a lot of people, a lot of people that never get the attention they should.”

The victory gave Ganassi his fourth overall Indianapolis 500 win as an owner, with two coming from Franchitti. While only 16 other drivers have managed to accomplish the feat Franchitti did on Sunday, he feels that it does not place him among the great drivers of the past.

“Those guys are legends. I said the other night, ‘I’m just a driver, those guys are legends,’ Franchitti said.  “I’m so lucky to be driving for Chip and Team Target, getting in good cars, especially having gone away after we won in ’07. To be invited back was pretty cool. To have won a championship and an Indy 500, I didn’t expect any of this…I expected to be retired by the time I was 35.

“This is all a bonus and it’s pretty cool.”

Duke U. senior Ned Crotty hopped from one foot to the other, back and forth. He stared down the goalie in front of him, Adam Ghitelman, in a game of cat-and-mouse that seemed bound to end in a shot attempt from Crotty.

After what seemed like an eternity, Crotty made his move. He faked right, ran left, then, instead of shooting as the play was designed, he did something he’s statistically better than anyone else in the country at.

He passed.

Fellow senior Max Quinzani, finally free for the first time all night thanks to a bruising pick from junior Zach Howell, streaked across the field and snagged Crotty’s toss, then, whipping his stick, found nothing but the back of the net with only 12 seconds left in the game. After a bumbled attempt by top-seeded Virginia to answer, which failed when Brian Carroll was called for offsides, fifth-seeded Duke had the 14-13 win and its first trip to the title game since 2007.

“[The goal] was unbelievable. That game was so emotionally draining,” Crotty said.

Quinzani added, “My head went blank. I just was so tired but so happy.”

The goal capped a rollicking, back-and-forth affair between the two teams.

After a sloppy first half, Duke and Virginia had a combined 21 turnovers, and the attacking line of Quinzani, Crotty and Howell combined for only one point.

“We came in at the half and said, ‘Alright it can’t get any worse than that,'” Crotty said. “That was it. I would say that, overall, we played one of our worst games so far in the tournament and one of our worst games of all time, but the effort was always there and we made the plays when we needed to.”

Coming out of the locker room into the second half, the Blue Devils began to clear the ball better, clearing it 5-of-6 times in the third quarter, and 2-of-4 times in the fourth.

They also stayed consistent on the faceoff. In the first half, Duke was unbeatable from the X, winning 10-of-13 faceoffs. That percentage dropped a bit in the second, but the Blue Devils still proved to be the better faceoff team.

Still, after a goal from Virginia’s Chris Bocklet, Duke found itself down 8-5 early in the third quarter. An incredible scoring run was about to change that.

Duke rolled off seven unanswered goals, three of them by Quinzani, to completely change the momentum of the game from a three-goal Blue Devil deficit to a four-goal lead. With only 12:11 left in the game, Duke, which seemed lifeless and inert for much of the game, suddenly had a commanding lead.

But Virginia wasn’t quite done yet. Taking advantage of a couple of faceoff wins, the Cavaliers scored twice in rapid succession to cut the lead to two. “There was a time in the end of the third quarter, early in the fourth quarter, where maybe [the Cavaliers] were going to get a little tired,” head coach John Danowski said. “And their kids fought valiantly and fought hard and played just tremendously in that fourth quarter.”

With 6:55 left in the game, Virginia’s Carroll, who would later be called offsides on the last play of the game, scored with an assist from Matt White to pull the Cavaliers within one. Howell scored his second goal of the game with 4:27 left to put Duke up two and seemingly out of reach, but back-to-back scores from Steele Stanwick and Carroll tied it up.

Quinzani’s wrist flick a minute later decided the game for the Blue Devils.

For the first time since Crotty and Quinzani were freshmen in 2007, the Blue Devils are playing for the national championship. Their path to the game has mirrored that of a Shakespearean revenge drama, with Duke picking off each team that’s given them trouble over the years.

First, in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, it was Johns Hopkins, who had a well-documented history of ending Duke’s seasons. The Blue Jays beat the Blue Devils in the national championship games in 2005 and 2007, and pulled off an upset in the national semifinal to topple Duke in 2008.

Then, in the second round, Duke took down North Carolina, which handed it a 13-7 loss back in March. And now, a win over Virginia, which previously won 16-12 against the Blue Devils this year’s ACC Championship semifinals.

Up Monday at 3:30 p.m. is another team Duke looks to settle a score with—Notre Dame, which won a February 20 matchup in Koskinen Stadium 11-7. According to the Blue Devils, they have improved tremendously since that loss.

“The team that we are now, as opposed to what we were then, is just night and day,” Crotty said.

“To be able to avenge that loss and get another shot at them is something we’re definitely looking forward to.”

The attorney for BART shooting victim Oscar Grant’s family has filed a request to be removed from the potential witness list of the defense for Johannes Mehserle, the former BART Police officer charged with second-degree murder in the shooting.

Mehserle’s defense attorney, Michael Rains, had asked to subpoena Grant family attorney John Burris, saying that Burris could provide “testimony concerning threats or intimidation” of witnesses who “may be reluctant to give testimony which would ostensibly be helpful to Mr. Mehserle and harmful to Mr. Grant.”

At a Feb. 5 news conference, Burris blasted BART for disclosing the personal information of some of his clients who are potential witnesses in Mehserle’s trial, saying that the disclosure potentially endangered his clients’ well-being.

Acording to California Beat legal analyst Preston Thomas, any knowledge of threats to Burris’s clients is information that the defense could potentially use during the trial to hold the witnesses that he represents to the stories they previously told.

But Burris said that he was speaking in “general terms about the possibility” that his clients could be labeled as snitches, and that he had heard of “no specific threats” to his clients when he made those statements.

“I don’t have any relevant evidence” for the defense, Burris said.

While Burris said that Rains’s subpoena request had been denied by the court, he remains on the list of potential witnesses for the defense.

“I want my name to be removed,” he said, in part because as long as he remains on the witness list, it’s possible he may be covered under the gag order which prevents trial participants from sharing information with reporters.

“Feels like it,” Burris said, when asked whether he believed that Rains had made his request in order to silence him. Burris has so far been outspoken in his criticism of BART and Mehserle in the media.

Burris has hired attorney Carl Douglas, who worked with Johnnie Cochran on O.J. Simpson’s defense, to represent him when his request is heard at a pre-trial hearing June 1 in Los Angeles, where the trial has been moved due to concerns about whether Mehserle could get a fair trial in Alameda County.

U. Connecticut announced Friday morning that it has received a notice of allegations from the NCAA, citing eight violations in the men’s basketball program.

The alleged violations include improper phone calls and text messages to recruits and giving recruits improper benefits. Coach Jim Calhoun was cited for failing to “promote and atmosphere of compliance” in the program.

The notice also included allegations against two members of the basketball staff for providing false and misleading information to NCAA Enforcement staff and to the institution. The announcement comes a day after the two accused staff, Assistant Coach Patrick Sellers and Director of Basketball Operations Beau Archibald, resigned from their positions.

The University was cited for failing to adequately monitor the conduct and administration of the men’s basketball program, specifically in regards to telephone records, representatives of the programs interests, and complimentary admissions or discretionary tickets.

UConn released the notice from the NCAA following a 15-month investigation, stemming from initial reports by Yahoo! Sports in March 2009 that the program had made improper contact to recruit Nate Miles through former student manager Josh Nochimson in 2008.

UConn has until August 20 to respond to the allegations, and school representatives will appear before the NCAA Committee on Infractions in October.

“Let me be clear that the University of Connecticut is fully committed to NCAA rules compliance and takes this matter very seriously,” said Director of Athletics Jeffrey Hathaway in a prepared statement.

“During these past fifteen months, we have fully cooperated with the NCAA’s into our recruitment of a particular student athlete and other matters generally related to the recruitment and conduct of our program,” said coach Jim Calhoun. “In this regard, we are steadfast in our belief that we operate a program deeply committed to complying with the NCAA’s guidelines.”

The University and the athletic department said that they will not comment further on the allegations because “this is an ongoing process with the NCAA.”

When Penn State Athletic director Tim Curley stepped out of last week’s Big Ten meetings in Chicago, he left with the same mindset he had when he walked in.

Staying patient, weighing all the options and letting the process play out were all things Curley took away from the meetings. And while conference expansion talks continue, Curley said Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany’s 12-to-18-month timetable, set in December, is still on schedule.

“These decisions are certainly very, very important,” Curley said during Thursday’s “Evening with Joe” event in Hershey. Joe Paterno did not attend the event because he’s recovering from the flu. “You need to really think them out, do your due diligence and take your time with it because it’s something we’re going to live with. I think the Big Ten, we’ll take our time and do what’s right for us.”

While Curley said the interest surrounding the conference’s potential growth is much more than he anticipated, he insisted the Big Ten won’t rush to make a decision. Even if the Pac-10 decides to expand, Curley said there’s no set limit on the number of teams, if any, the Big Ten would consider adding.

With coach Joe Paterno absent from Thursday’s event, as well as the conference meetings, Curley said Paterno is still interested in staying up to speed on expansion.

“We want to hear what he has to say and we certainly value his input, particularly because of his history and his experience with all of this,” Curley said. “I think it would be remiss if all of us didn’t listen to what he has to say and take that into account as we move forward. And the good news is he’s seen a lot of this happen before.”

For the first time, U. Oklahoma researchers have discovered a way to create a vaccine using a protein that activates a distinct part of the immune system.

The OU Health Sciences Center research has potential treatment and prevention applications for cancer, tuberculosis, HIV and several other viral diseases, according to a press release from the HSC.

“No one has ever done this with a T-cell vaccine, so we’re learning; but now we are starting to get some traction. We are finding that a T-cell vaccine can work,” said William Hildebrand, the lead researcher on the project.

Hildebrand and his research team have been working with the body’s alarm system to learn how cells alert the immune system that something is wrong. The goal is to create viable targets for vaccines that activate T-cells in the immune system, said Hildebrand, microbiology and immunology professor.

T-cells are responsible for killing virus-infected cells in the body. T-cells also kill cells that become cancerous. Some vaccines such as the smallpox vaccine activate T-cells, but this occurs inadvertently. Until now, vaccines have focused on generating antibodies to keep people from getting sick, according to the release.

While many of these antibody (B-cell) vaccines work well, the dependence on antibodies has prompted some viruses to skirt antibody immunity, making vaccines less effective or not effective at all for some viruses. With a T-cell vaccine, researchers would be able to activate another arm of the immune system to target a specific virus in the body and kill it.

To develop the vaccine, Hildebrand began by determining how the immune system distinguishes between a virus-infected or cancerous cell and a healthy cell.

Researchers started with West Nile virus since it doesn’t change like the flu or develop resistance like cancer or HIV. After developing the target, researchers at the HSC worked with colleagues at Washington U. in St. Louis to create a vaccine, the release stated.

The process is now being repeated for targets and vaccines in other areas, such as cancer, where activating T-cells can be difficult.

“Now that we have demonstrated the feasibility of developing a T-cell-specific vaccine, we intend to use the same process to discover other reliable targets, validate them and develop additional vaccines,” Hildebrand said.

Wealthy campaign donors and lobbyists continue to exercise a disproportionate amount of influence on lawmakers, Harvard U. Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said Thursday evening in the lecture “Rebooting Democracy.” Lessig said the influence is part of a set of “completely predictable, understandable results” of a democracy centered on a flawed system of electoral campaign finance.

The United States has experienced a “radical change in the industry of lobbying” in recent decades, Lessig said, explaining that members of Congress have become “increasingly dependent on campaign cash” as the costs of campaigning increase. Politicians are spending a significant portion of their time in office ensuring that they or other members of their party are re-elected, he added.

The recent financial crisis exemplified this problem, according to Lessig. The “explosion in campaign cash” given to the Democratic and Republican parties by large firms who lobbied for financial deregulation changed the nature of Wall Street operations, Lessig said. This exchange fostered a relationship between the government and corporations that gave lobbyists more power in Washington, he added.

Financial regulations have also protected Wall Street interests through bailouts, which “socialize risk and privatize benefit,” Lessig said.

The return on investment for lobbying efforts is enormous, which explains the amount of money poured into the occupation, Lessig said. According to one report, the return of investment for lobbying efforts can reach up to 22,000 percent, he said.

The flourishing lobbying industry has caused a “wealth boom” in Washington, D.C.

“The business of selling policy is an extraordinary profitable business,” Lessig said.

The nature of campaign finance in the United States has created a democracy that favors policies supporting the interests of the largest campaign donors, despite the insistence of politicians that campaign money “might be affecting access to lawmakers, but is definitely not affecting results,” according to Lessig.

Lessig said the “learned obliviousness” of legislators is the underlying cause of this problem.

The debate over global warming is another example of how private industries are attempting to shape public policies, Lessig said. He cited a survey of approximately 1,000 peer-reviewed science articles, all of which support the global warming findings articulated by former Vice President Al Gore. At the same time, over 50 percent of articles produced by “popular media” explicitly questioned the validity of the global warming issue, he said.

“The difference between science and the popular media is the extraordinary amount of junk science that has been spread into this debate by campaign funders who have particular and self-interested views in the matter,” Lessig said.

These donors hope to give Congress reason to delay implementing environmental-related policies that might hurt businesses, he added.

“Policies get bent to those who pay … to the effect that it weakens public trust of American democracy,” Lessig said.

A poll suggested that roughly 88 percent of the American population currently believes that “money buys results in Congress,” he said.

The solution, Lessig said, is to “reboot our democracy.”

Lessig proposed a cross-partisan citizen movement to restore the integrity of American democracy, and the link between what the people want and the policies lawmakers implement.

“We need to take control of this alternate path to delete the corruption that is our government in this sense,” he said.

Lessig currently serves as the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard U.

During my last week of classes at Brown U., I wrestled the fourth dimension and tried to travel back in time. For seven days, I vowed to stop using any technology that did not exist in 1988, the year the majority of the students in the class of 2010 were born. This meant no Internet, no e-mail, no text messaging, no thousands of songs on my iPod. I failed.

My attempted “week in 1988” was flawed to begin with, of course. Doing away with e-mail completely during the last week of the semester — especially the last week of the last semester — is ridiculous, if not idiotic. So I made exceptions: I would check my e-mail a couple of times a day (never on my phone) to make sure I wasn’t missing important messages from professors; I brought my cell phone with me when I left the house, just in case (pretending it was a car phone); I listened to music on my iPod (but restricted my listening to music recorded in 1988 and before).

I also cheated: I used an online Spanish dictionary to find out if the correct preposition for “to look” is “for” or “of”; I skimmed the Wikipedia entry on “rhizome”; I e-mailed friends for our weekly viewing of “Lost”; and, in a temperature-related outfit crisis before my thesis reading, I checked the hour-by-hour weather forecast.

I resisted some, too: I did not look up the cola nut’s role in modern sodas or the process that makes corned beef “corned”; I did not search for images of nettles or for their potential edible uses; I did not read the Wikipedia entry on the Chicago flag to remind myself of the symbolism behind its stars; I fought, with all my might, against the repetitive urge to solidify the difference between concrete and cement.

When my week without modern technology surged to a close, I basked in the glow of my computer screen, its flashing banner ads and pixelated black text against stark white. I sent more text messages than normal, as if to make up for lost time. I cut through pages of Wikipedia, blogs and Facebook. I played catch-up.

Clicking away

During my week, I did not visit the New York Times website, but that’s not a big change — I get the paper delivered every day and, though I normally check the site a few times during the day if I see an article I want to read, I look for it in print first.

There are two reasons behind my insistence on paper, and both reveal part of the motivation behind my experiment, the reason why I would try to do without the information superhighway, my favorite invention.

First, I really do care about the fate of print media, though I will speak without hesitation about the glories of the Internet and the countless articles I read as light projected from a computer screen. But standards for Internet journalism are not the same as those for print journalism. It’s much easier to correct an online article — and much more subtle — than to print a correction the next day in the paper. The Internet is about speed; the newspaper is about accuracy and writing.

The second reason, closely linked to the first, is that I have a hard time absorbing things I read on the computer. It’s partly the light and the hunched-back, unblinking stupor a computer demands. But it’s mostly the urge to click elsewhere, to follow new links before they have been contextualized, to find the best possible version of any song, article, celebrity photo or well-priced bestseller.

That urge has translated to reading books, too. There is the need to be doing as many things as possible. Read while watching television, or read while watching the latest pseudo-campy music video. Never just read.

I thought going a week without technology would imbue my reading with a pre-Internet calm, but a week is not long enough to change the habits that have grown up with me. These are the habits that encourage the constant intersection of the digital and the analog, habits that nearly mirrored my own development and intellectual tendencies.

Text twist

The Internet was just one strand of my week unplugged. Having equal weight — in terms of convenience and social comfort — was text messaging.

I less-than-fondly remember the days of my first year in college, when I was restricted to a mere 100 messages a month. Such a limit required a numerically watchful eye. This time, the limit — the removal of the technology altogether — required stubborn willpower.

I turned off text-message notifications on my phone and let my friends know I would only communicate remotely by speaking. I also asked them to help me avoid temptation. A few messages rolled in, and in an unthinking, Sunday-morning moment, I fell back on muscle memory and almost shot futureward into 2010. I caught myself.

Not sending text messages cuts off distinct parts of social communication. When it comes to communication of low consequence, we are a generation more comfortable working with short bursts of text rather than dealing with stuttered telephone conversations. Talking about plans on the telephone gives them more weight and makes it more difficult to be flaky. Talking also restricts whom we’re willing to get in touch with. Peripheral friends would stay that way much longer if it weren’t for the casual, impersonal text message.

And, for me, someone who still sometimes relies on a scribbled script for a long-put off phone call, the removal of text messages was the removal of a well-loved crutch.

The lack of text messages also cuts off trivial communication. The text is a near-perfect medium for anecdotes and overheard-on-the-Main-Green snippets. But a phone call instills in those observations — small, banal, hilarious — too much expectation. The phone call is not instant enough. Or maybe it’s that the phone call is not read; in reading text messages, the recipients make it their own in a way speech does not allow. But this is a digression better suited for the digital world, where I can stumble around Wikipedia, and stumble in private.

The cell phone itself is a remarkably useful object. There is something so instinctive in idly checking the phone for missed calls or text messages, or just idly looking at it. The cell phone is a game. The cell phone is a social signifier. The cell phone is not just a cell phone.

During my week off I did not check my phone in class, did not tap e-mails beneath my desk. I did not do whatever it is people do when they’re “on their phones” while waiting for friends to show up. And though I know there were cell phones in 1988, I did not talk on mine while walking around; I pretended it was too heavy a machine to comfortably cradle against my cheek for blocks on end. I listened to and left messages. (For some reason I balk at the term “voicemail”; maybe it’s because, until its recent demise, a mini-cassette recorder served my house better than any digital device).

The trouble with my experiment has to do with timing and context. Living without modern technology for a week is hardly a commitment. And I was surrounded by people who still did have modern technology; they could text each other to set up plans, stay tuned in to campus goings-on through Facebook, give me a better weather forecast than the New York Times’ “pleasant” and “70s.”

As long as I had an accomplice, I wasn’t too far from the technology I was pretending hadn’t been invented yet.

Back to the future

What’s more: I wasn’t actually without technology. If I had gone the week without checking my e-mail, I would have missed meetings and assignments. I wouldn’t have found the prized free food offerings in Morning Mail (which I claimed I needed to read “just in case” something important came up).

I expected a grand lesson would reveal itself, but as the experiment crept to an end, and I could feel the tendrils of technology stretching forth, there was the anticipation of downloading music and Facebook-stalking again. There wasn’t much else. It wasn’t a return to communication. It was only a return.

The Internet and text messages are not telephone and mail add-ons. They are replacements; they are what those technologies have become. And they are, to a degree, what we have become. We are not interested in reading complete articles; the overwhelming number of links in any online news article shows that. Songs are mashed together, iPods shuffle and tabbed Internet browsing doesn’t just encourage rampant clicking around — it necessitates it. We monitor and we quantify, we click “refresh” to encourage e-mails to arrive rather than wait for the daily mail delivery.

My week of 1988 technology came to a close without so much as a whimper. The futuristic-yet-modern devices I surround myself with had spent the week inching closer after I had tethered them to wall plugs. On the seventh day, the machines asserted their territorial dominance. And they rested, basking in their own steady glow.