I’ve noticed lately that I say this a lot, and that most people I know don’t really. I don’t know where I picked it up, and I feel like I could be expressing myself more lucidly than simply, “and I was like…” Is this a Californian thing? Or maybe Californian plus whoever out there watches too much MTV/The OC type beach bimbo media.

Even through it does get the point across, there are a lot of things that get the point across and aren’t so ideal to say. It might even be annoying (if someone finds this annoying, please tell me!) I’m trying to imagine any of my professors saying, “I was like…” and I can’t. And what exactly am I trying to communicate by saying, “I was like…”? Certainly everyone else has appropriate replacements, and I haven’t been paying much attention to what those are. Sometimes it means, “And I said…” but sometimes I didn’t really say anything. So it could mean, “And I thought,” but that’s not quite accurate either. “And I imagined myself saying…” — while I do imagine myself saying things (and often accidentally say these things aloud), this is unwieldy and not very eloquent. Perhaps, “And my reaction/response was,” but that’s also not so all-purpose.

Then again, the all-purpose vagueness is also what makes, “And I was like…” such an undesirable clause to use. Oh well. I guess I need to get creative.

Washington Monthly strikes again, according to Aditya Panda ‘10 in recent post “Princeton Ranks Not First On Washington Monthly Rankings.” When I first received a copy of this publication’s rankings an acceptance package from UCLA in spring 2006 (despite repeated attempts to withdraw my application), I was convinced that it was a greasy underhanded attempt by the state almost-flagship university to snatch students out of their matriculation agreements.

The ranking on the flyer from UCLA ended at about #50 — just enough to include all of the UCs and highlight Princeton multiple times as being ranked near the bottom. The online publication this year, however, is currently doing away with its own clever façade in a not so clever way. Extending into the hundreds, Washington Monthly ranks Caltech as #109 — and honestly, I’m trying to imagine a significant fraction of Caltech students in ROTC etc., and I can’t.

And — perhaps fittingly, the rankings are accompanied by an article entitled, “Is Our Students Learning?“