climate change

As the people I know here at Columbia have already expounded on to me, I will now mostly repeat things I have been told.

There seems to be a lot more pressure to look better here, than there is in Chicago. But I suspect it's not really only a difference of cities, or regions, but also a different of schools. I'm told, and for the most part believe, that the difference is even more dramatic still if I were to compare the UofC with NYU.

The bottom line here being that I think if somebody asked me if I thought people looked better here or at Chicago, I'd say here. It's hard to explain, but there is definitely a stronger cultural influence that I feel I experience and the pressure is to look better. Going around looking slovenly as I so often do at Chicago is something I think I might be able to do a little here, but I'd quickly be made to feel like I was doing something wrong.

Well, it's not really that bad, but all the same, presumably there is some social phenomenon at work here to account for how it is that all these not-ugly people accumulate away from Chicago.

Somebody's probably going to pounce on me for not really thinking this through much before hitting that "publish" button.