Editor's Note: Transmission Received

I am not a good talker. Unlike a great majority of the Harvard population, being articulate is not a skill that I have cultivated. The static on my phone line is not generated by electronic interference, but by my own communication difficulties. I fully embrace the prolonged ellipsis, the parenthetical "you-know-what-I-mean" and the awkward pause. Rather than punctuate my fragmented sentences, I let them trail off into my preferred word of closure: "whatever." To the well-trained listener the frequent "like"s that corrupt my language keep an expert tempo--to the rest, I babble.

I make this admission with confidence. I accept my tendency to bumble with words and feel inclined to defend my often incoherent speech. I have no pretensions about my way of speaking. It is not that my thoughts are too complex to articulate, nor is my soul profaned in base expression--at Harvard I have simply developed a distaste for the "stylized-explicit," precision vocabulary that evades making any point at all. Section superstars, masters of this technique, have essentially unlocked the secret of the horoscope--by expressing generic thoughts with seemingly specific words, they magically persuade all those willing. While I relinquish most hope of being persuasive in class, at least my form and content are happily congruent in their ambiguity.

It has occurred to me that my linguistic passivity amounts to a kind of laziness. But in some sense I fancy myself a rebel, actively passive, refusing to submit to Harvard's drive towards definition. Perhaps there is a "subtler eloquence" in my mumbles. Or perhaps my uneasiness with talking comes from the simple fact that I prefer the comfort that ambiguity provides.

So I suppose it makes sense that I am not a writer but a designer, articulating myself each week without saying a word. This is my letter of introduction--byline and all. I hope, for once, that the transmission has been static-free.