Word: written
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...irony, so full of wink-wink suggestion, that its purpose can be easily obscured. In one sense, a plan file is like a calling card, announcing your position and social status to whoever wants to call on you. Since anyone can finger your account, a plan file is theoretically written for everyone to read. But at the same time, the text establishes an intimate bond between author and reader. To finger someone's account means expressing interest in that person, however benign, and the plan file must by its very nature take that attraction into account...
Occasionally, one comes across a plan file that was clearly written with a specific person in mind. It's like opening a letter that was misdelivered to your house--you know you really shouldn't be reading it, but it's just too absorbing to put down. When the intended audience is a tight group of friends, the plan file is characterized by cryptic in-jokes, humorous anecdotes and such. In other cases, the author knows he or she is being stalked by a particular person (usually some jilted romantic flame), and tailors the text accordingly. These plan files...
...majority of plan files, however, are written to be read by anyone who is interested enough to finger you in the first place. These kinds of plan files are intended to make their authors look aloof, mysterious and witty. They must tantalize the reader's curiosity but not give too much away. We find the ancient Greeks so fascinating because we only possess fragments of their work. A plan file is like a fragment of a personality, a shard from a giant amphora. It tempts us to put all the pieces together and reconstruct the person from the parts...
...Exit. So laments Jean Paul Sartre in his famous play, written in the 1930s. Similarly, student life at Harvard manifests this same existential predicament; there is no exit beyond Johnston or Thayer Gates...
...think I'll go to Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and then down into Malaysia and Singapore, but who knows. I love not having anything written in stone," he added...