Credit to Zach B.

This strip is a celebration of my good friend Zach Biegun, and his positive attitude. Zach spent a portion of his undergraduate years living in a tent to avoid paying for housing. Not everybody wants to live in a tent, and most are willing to pay some amount of money which they’ve rationalized in their mind, in order to not have to. This strip is not intended to make any judgments about how much is too much to pay for housing, since that is subjective. Certainly there’s a limit between practical spending and wasteful spending, but many people spend much more than $1000 per month on their mortgages or apartments, so the figures I’ve illustrated in this strip are not intended to seem outrageous.

What I’m highlighting are those people who complain about various situations in their lives that they have control over, but who reject any suggestions of alternatives that would fix their situation, whether those alternatives are extreme or minor lifestyle changes. Zach has described some pretty shocked reactions from friends when they found out he was choosing to live in a tent. It’s undeniable that many of us have a knee-jerk reaction to things we may not encounter a lot and prefer to avoid, like homelessness. What this comic is trying to address is the tendency for us to sometimes take that reaction too far and start making assumptions about the character of the individual, calling a person “crazy,” or making judgments and acting rudely in other ways, perhaps without even realizing it. All it really boils down to are the numbers that we can rationalize in our heads. And the truth is that many of us can’t rationalize how much we spend on certain things because we’ve set our standard higher than our means, we try to avoid thinking about it, and we convince ourselves that it’s not in our control, rather than fixing it.

Happy Graduation, Class of 2009!

Credit to Zach B.

Cornell has a list of “161 Things To Do Before You Graduate.”

Credit to Alan

Dragon Day, a tradition which began in 1901, is celebrated at Cornell each year on the day before spring break. It involves the Architecture students dressing up in costumes and parading around campus with a massive dragon, created by the Architecture freshmen. A more recent tradition involves the Engineering students building a phoenix, a knight, or another such similar combatant to chase the dragon to the Arts Quad where it is set on fire and burned.

Credit to Alan & Jason

As far as we know, Cornell is the only university with a mandatory swim test as a condition for graduation.

Credit to Christine A.

My friend Christine came up with the idea for this strip. When she sees freshmen walking around in “Class of” shirts, it reminds her of birds with little metal tags on their ankles, because they’ve been labeled and numbered. Freshman year is when we all receive our student ID numbers, thus making us more like numbered birds in some kind of greater experiment.