By A SLAC Employee

This is hard. I don’t want to make things awkward between us, but there’s something on my mind I think we need to discuss. Every day we come to work—we try to solve the mysteries of the universe, try to develop a better understanding of the atoms that surround our existence. But somewhere along the way, I think something got lost in translation.

I think it’s time. We need to talk about the giant particle accelerator in the room.

I know what you’re thinking. “What are you talking about? We work at SLAC—we talk about the particle accelerator all day, every day.” But I’m not talking about that giant particle accelerator. No. I’m talking about the other one. The particle accelerator that keeps you up at night, the one that haunts your dreams and invades your thoughts. I’m talking about the giant particle accelerator in your heart. Sometimes it’s hard to see—sometimes we look at it and think, “Hey, that’s a real particle accelerator.” But at the end of the day, we’re deceiving ourselves. We know it’s not real.

The only particle accelerator is the one in our minds, and the longer we try to delude ourselves, the longer it will take us to realize that those “particles” that seem to be bouncing about are nothing more than figments of our imagination, colliding with each other in some tragic Shakespearian drama.

But that all stops today. I’m not going to let this particle accelerator control me, and neither should you. At stake are not only our lives, but the lives of our husbands and wives, our sons and our daughters. What most people don’t realize is that everyone has a giant particle accelerator in their lives. Some people call their giant particle accelerator “mother-in-law,” others call it “pepper spray,”—I call mine “a giant particle accelerator,” but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is that everyone has two giant metal tubes in their mind, working day in and day out to smash tiny things together, and until we have the courage to talk about it, nothing will ever get done.

Dude, what the heck? It’s like, so much colder than it was last year. I know I say this every year, but this time it really seems like it’s a lot colder. Stanford usually is pretty balmy in the winter, at least, that’s the way I remember it. It’s pretty nice in the spring too. And this fall was pretty good. But it seems like this winter the cold weather and rain just haven’t let up, and it just wasn’t like that last year. I remember last year that one time where it was really sunny and we all, like, went out to Wilbur Field and played frisbee in the middle of February. There were sunbathers and everything. In February. That hasn’t happened yet this year.

Something’s up, seriously. That’s why I chose Stanford over Harvard, because of like, the weather. It’s usually much warmer here than there. If global warming is real, you wouldn’t know it from this winter, because it’s been pretty darn cold. Last winter I had my windows open at night, because you could do that. I tried it this year, but it was so cold that I had to close them again.

I hope it doesn’t start raining. I’m pretty sure it didn’t rain much last year. I don’t have an umbrella, and I don’t like biking in the rain. It’s pretty miserable, and I have a class on the other side of campus at ten in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays.

I looked up last year’s temperatures on weather.com, and they seemed pretty similar, but that can’t be right. It just seems so much colder this year. Maybe I should get a sweatshirt. I’m used to being able to wear t-shirts during the winter. This one time, we were out in Wilbur Field in February and I was able to wear a t-shirt. And this winter I tried to wear a t-shirt and it was really uncomfortable, especially when I was biking. This is bullshit.

News has been flitting around the campus lately that the ASSU will be releasing the names of students who request a refund from Special Fees groups. Here at the Flipside, we are very excited to get the names of people on this list, and I’ll tell you right here what we will do with those names.

First, we will carry that list of names around with us at all times in our best attempt to deny you of all Flipside-related services. This means if we see you laughing at a Flipside article, or looking at someone enjoying a Flipside puzzle, or in a room with someone who knows someone who read the Flipside once, we will bring out our Special Fees sponsored Flipside SWAT team to take you away to a remote location far, far away from the main quad.

We’ll lock you somewhere in a room and make you write apologetic sentences on a chalkboard until you get very tired, and then make you watch Requiem for a Dream on repeat. At that point, we’ll see how you feel, and then start making you eat dining hall hot dogs for the next five hours. There’s many more things we’ll do after that, but I am not allowed by our current editors to say those things here.

Every April 22, thousands come together to “celebrate the beauty of the planet we call home.” But while our precious “environmentalists” promote their ever so special “Earth Day,” they are doing nothing more than legitimizing planetary discrimination and Earth superiority. According to a recent survey conducted by Reuters News Service, nearly 98% of Americans believe Earth is “the best planet in the solar system.” We live in a world where we get bent out of shape when we hear about racial discrimination or gender bias—yet no one cares about the injustice that actually matters. For millennia, the inhabitants of Earth have engaged in discrimination on a planetary scale. Sure, we have our Earth Day, but what about Mars or Mercury? What about Venus, or Neptune? Are these planets not worthy of our love or attention? How can we, in good conscience, care about the depletion of our O-zone layer while countless underprivileged planets can never hope to have anything even resembling an O-zone layer?

People promote Earth Day, but what these people fail to realize is that every day is Earth Day. When was the last time you heard someone lobbying to preserve the atmosphere on Jupiter? How many activists work to protect the gaseous atmosphere on Uranus? The fact of the matter is, day in and day out, the environmentalists and “green citizens” think about just one thing: Earth.

But where do we go from here? How do we stop this perpetual cycle of planetary discrimination? The answer is education and reparations. Pluto, which has lost the most from planetary prejudice, has suffered from countless forms of discrimination over the years—people denying its existence, the claim that it orbits around the Earth rather than the sun, the denial of its basic planethood, etc. Since one Pluto day is equivalent to over six Earth days, Pluto Awareness Month would give the environmentalists over seven Earth months to appreciate the special nature of not just Pluto, but every planet that has been neglected by the Earth supremacists.

I know I’m tired. I was there when I stayed up until 4:30 am finishing two problem sets. I was also there when the loud-ass construction trucks started their incessant beeping at 7 am. I can clearly see the dark circles under my eyes every time I walk past a mirror or a piece of particularly reflective glass.

Despite all this, you somehow seem to think that you’re being super helpful when you come up to me and say in your stupidly bubbly voice, “You look tired today!” Really? Do I? I had no fucking idea! I thought I looked wide awake!

Honestly, what are you trying to accomplish when you say shit like that? Is there some action you think I should take? I’ve already drank three cups of coffee and splashed my face with cold water four times. I’m still tired, and your stupid little comment did absolutely nothing to help.

So here’s the bottom line: I don’t go around telling you that you look ugly or act annoying even though you do, so please fuck off and stop telling me that I look tired. Thanks a million!

By Tuesday

It has recently come to my attention that for the past couple of centuries people have been referring to me as “fat”. In all honesty, this is pretty offensive. Okay, maybe I did eat a bit too much lamb that one time back in 1148. But I’ve been on a diet since then, eating few carbs and even fewer junk foods. I’ve started to exercise on all of the other days of the week when I’m not busy working. Anybody can clearly see that I’ve slimmed down from my prior state, and weigh about 24 hours just like every other day of the week.

However, people around the world still refer to me as fat, and that has become a serious problem both for my reputation and for my ego. How would you like being called fat all the time? Take last week, for example. I was trying to pick up this smokin’ hot Thursday, but my middle-man Wednesday said to her, “Do you want a date with Fat Tuesday?” I could see her grimace from afar, and the only date that I got was the one assigned to me by the calendar.

So, I plead with you all: stop calling me Fat Tuesday. Let me get called Super Tuesday more often than once every four years. It would make me feel a whole lot better than myself, and it would prevent me from being made fun of by other days of the week like Good Friday or Sexy Sunday. Thank you for your attention.

This week, I received several e-mails promoting “V-Week” events—film screenings, panel discussions, Oprah praising sessions, etc. But while vaginas are certainly to be celebrated (believe me—I love vaginas just as much as the next guy), I take issue with the V-Week Chocolate Vagina sale. In their rush to promote their vaginas, Stanford women have forgotten that chocolates are not just random collections of sugar, melted together for our idle amusement, consumed only to satisfy our human desires. No—chocolates are special. Each one has a unique taste, a special quality that should be appreciated and respected.

By selling their chocolate vaginas, V-Week proponents are saying that chocolates are just objects to be sold, commodities to place on the market, to use only for profit and personal gain. Even worse, the V-Week women fail to recognize chocolate diversity. Gone are the distinctions between white and black, sweet and semi-sweet, dark and light. Gone are the caramel chocolates and the hot chocolates, the Belgian chocolates and the Swiss chocolates, the whipped chocolates and the mint chocolates. By selling their uniform vaginas, the women of Stanford deny the diversity and specialness of chocolates everywhere.

As a chocolate advocate, I can’t sit idly by, chewing on vaginas and watching as the chocolates I love so much suffer at the hands of feminists. No! I must take a stand! I must make a statement so that this objectification can never happen again! To all chocolate lovers—join me in boycotting chocolate vaginas. Help me send a message that will not soon be forgotten: Chocolates deserve our respect and admiration. They are not objects to be used to fulfill human urges, but are instead sensitive and delicates bundles of joy that we should strive to protect from fat kids, nutritionists, and heat sources.

By A Mountain Lion

Hello. I’m a mountain lion. You may have heard about me recently. You see, last week I was the first mountain lion in my family to make it into college. Not just any college—the college—my college—Stanford. I’m writing this because over the past several days, several people have asked me how I got past Stanford’s admissions officers.

The good news is that pretty much anyone can attend Stanford. But before you can even think about living here, before you even take one step onto campus, you need to have a good attitude. No matter who you are or where you’re from, there are always going to be people who say you don’t belong, people who feel threatened by you, who want you to go home. I know, because I see these people all the time. No matter how nice I am, I can never get these people to be friendly. In fact, most of the time when people saw me at Stanford, they tried to 1-up me by waving their arms, talking smack, and trying to look bigger than me (I’m a tall fella’. I’d say I’m about 6’4”).

The point is, people will try to shoot you down, so it’s important to have a sense of self-confidence and entitlement. But once you have that, getting into Stanford is as easy as putting one foot in front of the other.

I’d like to close by talking about grades and test scores. Most people say that you need to get a 2000 or higher on the SAT to get Stanford to notice you. But I know from experience that this simply isn’t true. I didn’t even take the SAT and I’ve never even seen a high school. Hell, I didn’t even apply to Stanford. But did that stop me from becoming a member of the Stanford student body? Absolutely not.

So when you’re thinking about what you want to do with your life, about where you want to end up, don’t let “requirements” and “applications” get in your way, just do what feels right. How else could a mountain lion like me end up in the school of his dreams?

A lot of people wonder how Vampire parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what it’s like inside the family and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them because I’ve done it.

I’m using the term “Vampire mother” loosely. I know some werewolf, zombie and orc parents who qualify too. I’m also using the term “Chinese mothers” loosely. Chinese mothers try to do what we do, but they fail to go far enough.

A lot of Chinese mothers think they are being strict, but they usually don’t come close to being Vampire mothers.

For instance, Chinese mothers try to yell at their kids to get them to practice the piano. Vampire mothers just tell their children they will get their necks bitten if they don’t practice. They practice because they believe it.

If a Chinese daughter is overweight, their mother says, “Hey fatty–lose some weight.” This requires the daughter to actually do something about it. This isn’t nearly as effective as the Vampire approach of just starving the child by making them sleep in a coffin for a week with no food. We don’t ask for results, we create them.

Chinese mothers try to force their children to work hard and excel, but that’s not enough. Vampire mothers scare the shit out of their children. How could you not excel when you are scared out of your mind your mom will bite your neck and drink your blood if you don’t perform up to their standards.

It’s a scary, big world out there, and Vampire mothers are arming their kids with the overwhelming fear and paranoia that will force them to excel in the harshest conditions.

They say everybody does things they regret. That statement has never rang truer than it does now, now as I’m flying on the plane home from Miami, wondering what might have been. Sure, going to the orange bowl was the sensible thing to do, but there are certain opportunities that only come knocking once in a lifetime and I just let one walk away without even answering the door.

I spent most of the game eagerly checking my cell phone to see if any of my friends who had stayed would happen to text and give me updates on what was going on back at school: Maybe the bookstore was crowded, maybe they were serving tamales at Stern…anything. Anything tangible that would ‘take me there’. And I did get a few texts, with most saying that they were in the sky box watching the Orange Bowl, and sarcastically adding how ‘jealous’ they were. I too was watching the Orange Bowl, but as far as the camaraderie and good-spirits that can only come with eating pizza and watching a big football game on TV with your friends…well, I would just have to do without those.

So I tell you now: Learn from my mistakes. If something amazing comes your way that probably won’t come your way again, just do it. Don’t just picture the eager faces of your friends in line at the post office: be there. Don’t just imagine the thrill of wandering around the quad trying to figure out where your PWR II class is: live it. Don’t do as I ended up doing: cheering till my throat hurt, partying deep into the south Florida night, thinking of opportunities come and gone and memories lost. Life’s just too short.