Bertie Wooster
Staffwriter
Trying to split the atom, 2029
Bio
Hailing from a place of good, if not always sound, breeding (one mustn't blame the fellow for their forebears), Bertie Wooster has traded the hallowed, if dreadfully dull, halls of the Drones Club for the marginally less dated dorms of Carnegie Mellon.
Fun Fact
Named after a winning racehorse
Previous Work
I wrote this article while drunk
It’s 2:17 AM. I’ve stumbled my way back to my dorm from some other person’s dorm. Don’t worry, their neighbors didn’t complain. Or, at least, we couldn’t hear any complaints. There’s vomit in the trash can and trash on the floor. The trash can is also on the floor. My dignity’s in the trash too. Anyways, my laptop screen is blindingly bright and my roommate’s just fallen asleep again. They woke up just to yell at me for arriving back at this unholy hour.
Why do I do this? Not because I’m an alcoholic. An alcoholic could never sustain a career as a successful writer. I’m drunk because I have made the bold decision to write this article while completely sloshed. For the new insights it is offering and will offer. This is different from my other articles, which I write on Adderall.
You see, sobriety creates lies. It’s a sterile and formulaic process shackled by grammar, coherence and self restraint. Sober Me outlines. Sober Me uses Oxford commas. Sober Me uses transitions (and, like any true CMU student, dreams of transitioning to the opposite gender. Unfortunately, alcohol hasn’t fixed this). Drunk Me, however, is a visionary. Drunk Me understands that true genius stems not from restraint and the prefrontal cortex but from somewhere more southern and incontinent. When barriers are down, truth may reign. In vino veritas. The Greeks knew what was up. And you know what truths are being suppressed by society, God, and Farnam? The big ones. About CMU.
Sober Me would never examine the real questions: Why are there so many squirrels on campus? Did they immigrate from Squirrel Hill? Why do none of the other fauna get scared when people approach? On the other hand, I’m extremely afraid right now: Is there a camera aimed at the free Narcan in the UC? And if they’re watching the Narcan, who knows what else they’re watching? Like those 3.7 seconds of desperate, yearning eye contact I made last Thursday with a guy outside Baker. Was that hot guy gay or CFA? Is there a difference? I have the questions and the answers.
First, sober science calls them rodents. They’re not. They’re parts of a neural network gathering big data for SCS. Squirrel Hill is where the pruned weights go to live. Think I’m nuts? Fine, but when ASI (Artificial Squirrel Intelligence) arrives, don’t come crying to me. Now, the other animals. They don’t get scared because we’re CMU students. We’re nothing in the face of a rabbit. Have you seen the size of their teeth? Of course you have. You’re probably a furry.
On to the Narcan. There’s a camera. Duh! But the camera’s not for CMUPD to catch students. It’s for a sinister plot the school of drama is up to. They don’t have time to get high anymore, so they watch us for inspiration on how to play their roles in Long Day’s Journey. Also, please don’t ask why I’m thinking about Narcan after a party. I plead the Fifth; let’s move on.
And the hot guy. I could talk all night about hot guys but, sadly, the answer is obvious. At this point, the math major part of my brain that I haven’t managed to fully drown in alcohol wants me to say that CFA is a subset of gay. Regardless, he’s not CFA or gay. He’s a figment of my sleep-deprived imagination. There are no hot people at CMU. Not with our sleep schedules and hygiene.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about the body. Specifically, my body’s current situationship with gravity. My head feels like a leaden weight while my feet are like helium balloons. This means I was able to walk up the stairs to my room without stumbling. Besides alcohol making CMU students more coordinated (two wrongs do make a right!), I am now able to connect with the campus in my new state of enlightenment. I’ve always wondered why Wean’s so ugly. Now I know. The whole building is a giant Turing machine designed to separate the functional from the … oh god, the room is spinning. Focus. The point is, you need to be drunk to see the genius of the weird mix of brutalist, gothic revival, and neo pool tile architecture on the campus we share.
People! I love my fellow students, even you. Because you work and you work. And so when I don’t, I’m special. I’m a rebel for being a normal college student, I’m a rock star for being invited to a party, I’m an outlier for having a social life. At any other school, I’d be a dork. So, as I finally reach a word count of 750 (thank you for counting, Google Docs), I raise my glass—or I would, if I hadn’t knocked it over halfway through—to you. Shit, it spilled onto my keyiafbnjkd
I Saw Mommy Kissing Scotty Dog
Wow, mommy's kissing Scotty Dog
I saw mommy kissing Scotty Dog
Right beside the sweepstakes track last night
She didn't see me creep
Past the booths to have a peep
She thought that I was tucked up in my dorm room, fast asleep
Then I saw mommy tickle Scotty Dog
Underneath his kilt so tartan bright
Oh, what a laugh it would have been
If Daddy Farnam had only seen mommy kissing Scotty Dog last night
Oh, what a laugh it would have been
If Farnam had only seen mommy kissing Scotty Dog last night
I Was Abducted and Brought to the Mellon Institute
It was a normal Thursday night, meaning I had one tequila soda, one IPA, three tequila sodas, and a Celsius. I was walking back to my dorm from Squirrel Hill when a bright light appeared over me. All of a sudden, I found myself falling over. I assumed it was God. Or the police. Or the police acting in service of God. But no, it was far worse and stranger.
When I woke up, I was lying on a steel table in the Mellon Institute. You know, the only building with sixty-two columns that’s not in Greece, though it’s nearly as long a walk. Imagine the Parthenon but for biologists and chemists who haven’t felt joy since their own undergrad in the Bush administration. I was able to recognize it from the scent of mildew and the faint screams of monkeys being experimented on. They (my captors, not the monkeys) were communicating in a strange language I initially took for German: “Bond angles,” “pseudopodia,” “pi orbitals,” “ligand exchange.” Absolute nonsense. I tried to scream out for help but all that I could manage was “I’m in Tepper!” This only seemed to anger them. They then probed me, but not in the fun way. First, someone stuck a pipette or something up my nose. Next, a group of aids sent me through the MRI. One of them whispered, “We’re going to determine your resonance frequency.” I think they meant my GPA. Thankfully, it’s excellent, in spite of such brutal classes as Business Presentations and Management Game.
Anyway, I blacked out again and awoke in a tiny room lined with old, yellowing journals. They forced me to sign an NDA, which I’m currently violating, and then threatened to make me TA a lab section. Why, you ask? Well, they want more funding—a LOT more funding—and I’ve apparently been bioengineered into the perfect weapon. It’s a genius move: because of the sheer absurdity of their plan, any attempt to bring attention to the matter be dismissed as hangover ravings. Their ultimate goal is to implant me as a spy in Tepper and force me to reroute the funds. Speaking of implants, they put something in me. I don’t know what. Since then, I’ve noticed strange changes: I can identify solvents by smell, I get aroused near Bunsen burners, and I involuntarily hiss when someone mentions Dietrich.
They finally released me onto Fifth Avenue at dawn. Before I left, one scientist touched my forehead and I experienced a moment of telepathic visions: a grad student crying in a stairwell, a failed grant proposal, and an escaped mouse hiding under the vending machine. I also saw the heat death of the universe, or perhaps just a professor waiting for their paper to be published. And, at that moment, I understood the pain that comes with being in MCS, toiling away day and night in a department with a mediocre US News Ranking for a pitiful salary. At least, I imagine I would have felt something, if they had remembered to give me empathy.
I managed to stumble home, reeking of acetone, my memories fragmented. My roommate doesn’t believe me, and I have no friends to confide in, only a series of individuals I’ve networked with. If you see me around campus, twitching as I pass a fume hood, know I’ve seen the other side.
Readme's production in decline due to Prohibition
The pervasive hum of the printing press putting out Readme’s weekly dreck has finally faltered. A well-meaning administrator, upon hearing the rumor the magazine runs on a 70/30 blend of grain alcohol and caffeine, initiated a campuswide effort to enforce the national ban on spirits. The goal was to improve its output, but the fallout has been dire.
The Readme office, once a vibrant den of inspired madness, resembles a UPMC autopsy center. Editors, now tragically lucid, are unable to reach their highs of maniacal, drug induced criticism. Writers are submitting coherent, factchecked articles that one disgusted reader criticized as “drier than my concepts homework.” They now communicate in hushed, grammatically correct sentences. The most exciting thing to happen this week was a lively debate over the Oxford comma, and no one cried or threw a shoe. Thankfully, most of these poor souls were able to find work at The Tartan.
A handful of others, in a state of catastrophic withdrawal, plug away at their typewriters, producing reams of text that may be brilliant but that editors find utterly indecipherable. One such writer, known only as Jax, was found staring at a blank wall, muttering about “the tyranny of narrative structure.” His typewriter held a single page containing nothing but the word “why?” repeated 4,000 times. This piece has already been claimed for CFA’s latest minimalism installation.
Not everyone is so lucky. The most severe cases have lost the ability to write altogether. These unfortunates sit in a corner of the office, clutching their pencils. Attempts at simple writing prompts, such as “describe this apple,” have yielded only whimpers and blank stares. Medical professionals have been called, but all have declared the situation “beyond the capabilities of science.” Priests would not dare set foot in Readme headquarters, docile as its inhabitants may now be. They are the last surviving members of Readme, if only because no one else will take them.
Meanwhile, the effect on the campus at large has been almost as drastic. The Fence, whose coating had been alternating nightly between praising presidential candidates Harding and Cox (with one interruption calling for a unified “HardCox” coalition) prior to the prohibition, is now a drab grey. Student morale has plummeted even further, which CaPS had previously deemed “a psychological impossibility.”
Not all hope is lost. Rumor has it that one determined student has managed to distill a usable spirit from buggy grease. The Readme team awaits his first batch with the desperate thirst of people who have just read a logically sound paragraph.