Five More Answers

I will not answer mlstrm with quite the same panache as this reply uses, but:

1. What is your general theory on "the college experience," and is it really for everyone?

Tricky. I didn't really have "the college experience"; I had, ah, something else stretched over eight years.

I very much think that most people would benefit from taking a year off before going to college. People who have had non-stop education, and particularly those who haven't had to face the world outside the classroom, would, I think, appreciate more what college has to offer if they spend a year on their own working lousy jobs to make ends meet.

Then again, "the college experience" might be four years of partying on one's parents' dime, in which case my suggestion would ruin it; but I think I'm OK with that.

2. If there were going to be a movie made about your life, who would they get to play you and the three main costars?

Ergh.

leighjen suggests Colin Farrell; I'm less convinced. I was thinking Paul Reiser (though he's a bit old for the part, isn't he?). Possibly a much younger Dustin Hoffman. But I'm casting on suitability, not on physical similarity.

For costars, well, hm, I wonder who the three main costars would even be. It depends on how large a perspective the screenwriter took--I mean, my life right now and my roommate would be a major character, unless of course the screenwriter focused on the times I spent out of the house. I also wonder if a movie made of my life would find it easier to combine, say, the four Freaks into two characters, for the sake of simplicity for the moviegoing audience. (The full stretch of my life would probably have my parents as two major costars, but in My Life Right Now, you'd just need Judy Davis and Woody Allen to do a cameo.)

Let's go with (a perhaps somewhat younger) Bernadette Peters, Steve Buscemi, and Jennifer Connelly, and I'll let my friends fight over who I have playing who.

Oh, and of course in the role of "mysterious stranger who seduces me unexpectedly and my girlfriend is perfectly OK with it possibly because she was distracted by Brendan Frasier at the time," Nicole Kidman.

3. What is your most favorite phrase to hear from another person, and what is your least favorite phrase to hear from another person?

I'm assuming generally here, as opposed to the phrase "One more time?" from Nicole Kidman, say.

Generally speaking, I'd guess either "Yes, that makes sense" or "Good to see you again" (perhaps followed by "Dinner?").

Hm. The other is even harder. Perhaps "So, how's the paper coming?"

4. Five years ago, would you have seen yourself where you are now?

If you'd asked me that five years ago, the answer would have been "no." Now...five years ago was just before I started my last year of college, and while I wasn't quite cocky enough to assume I'd be at MIT, I was perfectly willing to believe it. It's not that much hasn't changed in four years, it's more than the last four or five years have been more or less the natural or straightforward continuation of the trajectory I was on at the time.

Non-professional aspects of my life--well, my dating leighjen wasn't really the natural result of where I was heading five years ago, but it's not a surprising result either. Probably the thing I've done in the last five years that would have most surprised the 25-year-old me is to write and solve puzzles with people whose names I'd known as constructors since I was ten or fifteen.

So I might not have predicted it, per se, but I wouldn't have been all that surprised.

5. What word/phrase/entry would you like to see in a crossword that you haven't seen yet?

My name. Of course, it can't appear in one without it being much better-known, so we'll have to see what we can do about that...

I'd love to see "tchotchke," actually. Not because it's a neologism, but because it's such a fun word.