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With croquet in the rearview mirror, we

can now accelerate into the exciting future of non-croquet-related events. However, our speed is so prodigious, we hope we will have the chance to release another issue before we make the jump o( the ramp of dead week and into the flaming pile of summer vacation. Please enjoy what we hope you will agree is an especially special issue... for all you special people! !

) — The New & Improved Gadfly Team

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Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the stu-dent newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and sta( of the An-napolis campus.Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gad-fly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way neces-sary to publish a professional, informa-tive, and thought-provoking newsmaga-zine.The next Gadfly submissions will be due May 2, at 11:59 PM. Next meeting Sun-day, April 27.Articles can continue to be sent to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

Nathan GoldmanIan Tuttle

Hayden Pendergrass

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Caleb BernardAlex KudrzyckiPatricia LockeAbigail PetrichLouis Petrich

Leila SaadBonnie Scott

Career Services

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Noe JimenezAllison Tretina

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!"#$%&'%(")*%!"+,#-Patricia Locke Tutor

Alex Kudrzycki A’17

Many of you may be wondering what exactly a scru!y lit-tle freshman means by o!ering advice to graduating se-

niors. “Who is this pipsqueak?” you demand, “and what does he think he knows about The Real World?” I might reply with a rather St. John’s-ish question of my own: what is this “The Real World?” How can we really “know” it? But unfortunately, a St. Johns-ish discussion of the matter would probably not be too reassuring to a senior who is about to walk the plank into the churning, shark-infested depths of graduation. You want something more straightforward, more substantial (and pref-erably tested against sharks). I don’t blame you.

These, then, are my qualifications for advising you: unlike most freshman, I am twenty-two. Before coming to St. John’s, I spent three years living in that societally abhorred abyss known as “my parents’ house.” For most of that time, I was nei-ther earning money nor planning to ever return to school. The reasons for this are many and complex, and to detail them would be far beyond the scope of this article. I’ll say only this of my experience: if you think the “what am I doing with my life?” question is a tough one now, try asking it once you’re an unemployed legal adult with no lighted path to follow.

To this, some seniors are probably thinking, “Right, like that will ever happen to me. I’m going straight into med school/law school/bartending school/bouncer school/monster truck driving school/etc. and after that I’m set for my career.” And maybe that’s right, for now. Maybe some other path will light up immediately at the end of this glorious St. John’s Highway, and that path will lead straight into another, and so on.

But this string of paths we call a career is neither so long nor so impregnable as to keep us employed forever. One day, something will force us from our lighted way, whether it’s trouble finding our next job, trouble keeping a job, a single nervous breakdown in which we call our superior a prepos-terous busybody, a sudden health calamity, or even the finality of retirement. The Angel of Unemployment is our daemon for life, patient as the Reaper, with Time as its ally.

But I would guess that for most of you, the day this daemon comes to claim you (at least for a time) is not now so far o!. Therefore, as someone who survived three years in the abyss, I will teach you the ways of finding your own employment.

I should warn you that these are not job-searching tips. While such things can be useful, their power is limited; for one thing, they are useless to someone who literally cannot work, whether for physical, legal, or other reasons. Rather these are tips on surviving within the confines of the abyss.

Further, the tips I’m about to give may seem hopelessly op-timistic, as though I were handing you strips of scrap metal and telling you that they would in due time add up to a durable and highly-rated car. While it’s true that these tricks are not magical, do not underestimate their power. For me, at least,

they are the di!erence between flourishing and decay.1) Set yourself goals that are unrelated to your career.

Make a list of things you have always wanted to do or learn but did not have the time while you were in school. For me, these goals were to work on my writing and to learn the fiddle. Each goal you make will solve two problems at once: fulfilling an unfulfilled dream and preventing boredom.

2) Keep a schedule. Scheduling is just as important, if not more so in the abyss of unemployment than it was in school, or even in a 9-5 job. Because you have more time to account for, the potential for wasting it is much greater. Keep track of

everything you do throughout the day and edit out wasteful activities. If you don’t do this, then (if you’re like me) you will find yourself playing Minecraft for eight hours a day, wondering why there’s so little time to get things done.

3) Find a group. Goals can seem pho-ny when you’re the only one who knows or measures them. Mine, for one, felt like

something I was just throwing myself at in a sad attempt to justify my life. But the first time you sit in a room with warm human beings who are passionately discussing the very thing you’re interested in, you will notice the di!erence. A great re-source for finding groups of all objects and interests is Meetup.com; you wouldn’t believe how much I owe to this site.

4) Don’t give up. Even though so far I’ve only listed three fairly intuitive steps, all of them are hard. You will not suc-ceed the first, second, third, or even one-hundredth time you try and employ your unemployed life. Without your accus-tomed external authority figures whipping you into shape, you will probably find yourself logging three hours on Minecraft, knowing that your future self will hate you, but you won’t care because he can’t stop you from logging another four and a half hours later that evening. Each time, you will hate yourself more, and it will seem that you are failing over and over and everything you do is pointless.

But if you keep at it–even if it takes years, as it did for me–you will improve more than you ever thought possible. You will find, as I did, that life beyond the lighted way is not so terrible after all; it is simply a way of living we have not been accustomed to.

In fact, you may find that you begin to value your own ac-complishments even more. Because many of us are used to being assigned tasks and then awarded artificial fulfillment for them by our teachers and superiors, we have become es-tranged from the true fulfillment that exists in the tasks them-selves. But when we are forced to assign ourselves tasks and to find our own rewards–as will continue to happen as we get older–we are required to come into closer contact with the kind of fulfillment that is for its own sake. This is why I have

Sebastian Barajas A’17The Secret to Lifelong Employment

“ You will !nd, as I did, that life beyond the lighted way is not so terrible after all; it is simply a way of living we have not been accustomed to.

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Are there any particular themes or ideas in the play you chose to focus on?

I think we were really interested in what it means for a soci-ety and a family to fall apart. Lear is the story of a family and a country’s destruction, and it was important to us that it felt both intimate and real. I also really wanted to ask the question: when and how is it ethical to take and use power? Edmund, Regan, and Goneril’s reasons for taking power are all perfectly reasonable, in one light, and completely destructive in anoth-er. Lear uses his power irresponsibly and loses it as a result, but we pity and sympathize with him nonetheless.

How did you keep yourself from going mad during the production process?

Have I not gone mad? Really though, we have the greatest friends.

Did you have a preconceived vision for the production from the beginning? Or did your interpretation of the play evolve from one rehearsal to the next?

We came on as directors midway through production, and so there was a lot of really great work already in place. Shannon McGovern had already designed the set, which was brought to beautiful life by Yosef Trachtenberg and his helpers. We tried not to copycat Slaya Nemoy’s vision, but of course a lot of it came through in the final product. I’m embarrassed to say that our vision changed a lot from scene to scene. We were really flying by the seat of our pants, and we relied really heavily on our actors’ thoughts and instincts. Luckily, we have a fantastic cast. Overall, we’re really happy with how our visions melded.

While looking upon his dead daughter, Cordelia, Lear ut-ters his last words: “Look on her: look, her lips, look there, look there.” For you, is Lear actually seeing her breath and expressing a trace of hope, optimism, or something of that sort? Or is this a moment Lear is coming to terms with re-ality and accepting his daughter’s death?

I don’t think Lear is capable of really understanding Cordelia’s death. There are some truths that are too impossible to con-front, and I think that after seeing his world crumble around him, he goes mad. And after being reunited with his daughter–both a symbol of his a!ection and his failure–Lear can’t handle another upheaval.

As we know, Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed by actors on a stage. What are some of the benefits some-one will get from watching King Lear that they won’t get from only reading the play?

Awesome fight scenes! Honestly, I don’t think you can really understand a play until you’ve seen it performed. You aren’t interpreting the characters through their written word, they are working on you, communicating with you.

Will you be directing any more Shakespeare plays in the future? I don’t know. Depends on my level of self-loathing. !

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Whether or not the word family evokes positive or negative memories, family is inescapable. Nature has sewn the intertwining web of humanity with family, and has deemed it the helm of all humanity. Keep it or leave it. From family come our notions of origin, dependence, power, duty, and so forth. When familial a!airs become tangled, so do political and moral af-fairs. "e result: a tragedy. "e King William Players bring Shakespeare’s King Lear to the FSK stage on Friday, April 25, at 8 p.m. Co-director Leila Saad has taken some time to discuss the production.

T"# G$%&'(04

Allison Tretina A’16

photo by Henley Moore

photo by Julia Kulon

photo by Julia Kulon

I was surprised when, a few months into my freshman year, I learned that there were prizes allotted for annual essays. It wasn’t that it upset me, it was just a shock to hear any sort of mention of a rewards system at St. Johns. There was some part of me that was disheartened by it. This was mainly because I was beginning to settle comfortably into the academic envi-ronment here, which I’ve found to be a safe place in which the intrinsic value of each academic pur-suit wins over the external value every time. There’s a strange intoxication that comes with being admired and upheld through titles, positions, and awards that I finally felt detoxed from in com-ing here. Though I recognize that there are uplifting factors that come with recognizing talent and awarding excel-lence, I’m afraid that there’s a dark component that almost always accompanies these sorts of prizes. It’s human nature to desire to be intelligent, kind, hard-working, generous, and outstanding. However, there’s a fine line between desiring to possess these traits and desiring to be perceived as possess-ing them. Distinguishing the di!erence between these things is a problem that I believe we all face, and perhaps more often than we realize. I truly believe that it is only through letting go of the desire for others to see us a certain way that we can be free to pursue the good. I’m afraid that having a prize system of any kind pushes us towards seeking out the image and the title, with creativity and excellence being but necessary tools in our pursuit for positive attention.

After all, our college already functions on these principles and this understanding. We are encouraged not to check our

grades for this very reason; St. John’s doesn’t participate in na-tional ranking of any kind; students are admitted to St. Johns because of their academic curiosity and strength of character rather than for their performance in high school. The prize system itself is riddled with flaws, as most are. Though it seems perfectly logical that there is a “top rung” of essays that are clearly above the rest in terms of maturity or creativity, I

still find it di"cult to believe that there’s any way to compare an essay about the wonder of Platonic myths and math in the Iliad. Each essay has its own strengths and weaknesses and possesses a di!erent geist, or inner spirit. To act as if one is “the best” seems strange to me, especially given the amount of faith that is put in such a decision after the prize is awarded. It is as if it becomes a law of nature that so and so had “the best essay

of the freshman class.” In addition, it is common practice that not all essays have been read by the tutors before the applica-tion date for prize essays is due, eliminating an entire pool of potential essays. Perhaps there are underlying reasons for the prize system that I’m unaware of, but I think it’s important to recognize that it is out of line with our school’s principles and beliefs. If it’s not possible for the system on the whole to be done away with, I would like to advocate for a healthier at-titude towards such a system. It’s through the environment at St. Johns that I’ve been able to open up the most genuine part of myself, intellectually and personally. I want to preserve the principles that have allowed me to shed myself of the pressure to achieve some sort of image outside of myself, and instead look inward, inciting true growth. !

“ I’m afraid that there’s a dark component that almost always accom-panies these sorts of prizes.

!"#$%&'()*#$+)&,-./(&.,)$,0$122(3$4'.5#2Bonnie Scott A’17

the fiddle: not because I hope to one day tour with Flogging Molly, or even bust out Sailor’s Hornpipe for bonus points at my job interview, but because playing is an inherently enjoyable activity.

But if you’re a senior with a cutlass at your back, a mass of dorsal fins churning the waters below, it might be that even this hopeful prospect doesn’t reassure you. It might be that this boogeyman known as “The Real World” still seems too big and chaotic to be reasoned with. In that case, perhaps a more St. John’s-ish sentiment might prove comforting after all:

The world that waits on the other side of College Ave is no more “real” than the world you’ve lived in all your life. Gradua-tion will mean change, to be sure, but life is full of change. You have already seen this: schools come and go, responsibilities come and go, and so does everything else. This is “The Real World.” There is nothing unfamiliar about it. Live life then as you do now: pursuing things that give you joy, and refusing to give up. As long as you do this, you will never truly be unem-ployed. !

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Marybeth Beydler ’16Anne Arundel County State’s At-torney’s O(ce, Annapolis, MD

Andy Blanco ’15 ACLU National Prison Project, Washington, DC

Yitian Cai ’14 Law related, TBD

Katelyn Caldwell ’16 Pear Press, Seattle, WA

Laura Cleveland ’14 Forest Woods Media, Annapolis, MD

Amy Cowling ’16 Education related, TBD

Kerrigan Dougherty ’16 Girl Rising, New York, NY

Mary Kate Eckles ’16 Museum/Archival related, TBD

Stella Fillmore-Patrick ’15 Law/Politics related, TBD Emily Grazier ’16 Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens, Columbus, OH

Gurer Gundondu ’15 University of Pennsylvania, Cen-ter for Cognitive Neuroscience, Philadelphia, PA

Joseph Hamd ’15 The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, Wash-ington, DC

Andrea Hill ’16 Dutton Road Veterinary Clinic, Philadelphia, PA

Henry Hirsch ’15 Erik Block Design Build, LLC, Hadlyme, CT

Xiaoquin Hu ’16 Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA

Christopher Hutter ’16 Baltimore Theatre Project, Balti-more, MD

Jake Israel ’17 The Arch Academy, San Diego, CA

Julia Kulon ’16 Bamboo, Chicago, IL

Qiu Lin ’15 Hainan Provincial Cultural Heritage Research Association, Haikou, China

Sihui Ma ’17 Central South University, Xiang-ya School of Medicine, Cancer Research Institute, Changsha, China

Lyra Meurer ’16 Historic Annapolis Foundation, William Paca House & Gardens, Annapolis, MD

Clifton Mobbs ’16 Motor City Blight Busters, De-troit, MI

Erik Neave ’16 Sheboygan County O(ce of the District Attorney, Victim-Wit-ness O(ce, Sheboygan, WI

Evgenia Olimpieva ’14Resource Security Institute/In-stitute for European, Russian & Eurasian Studies, Washington, DC

Ronald Pagano ’15 U.S. Naval Observatory, Wash-ington, DC

Rohini Pandit ’15 U.S. Naval Observatory, Wash-ington, DC

Linnea Payne ’15 Museum/Archival, TBD, Colum-bia, SC

Nicole Pease ’15 David R. Godine, Inc., Boston, MA

Michelle Porcelli ’14 University of Maryland, Depart-ment of Physics, Physics Edu-cation Research Group, College Park, MD

Chengyaqing Shi ’16 Beijing Wangliang Law Firm, Beijing, China

Amritpal Singh ’15 Georgetown University, Depart-ment of Psychology, Culture & Emotions Lab, Washington, DC

Miles Steinert ’14 Georgetown University, Depart-ment of Psychology, Culture & Emotions Lab, Washington, DC

Allison Tretina ’16 New York University Press, New York, NY

Ojiugo Uche ’14 University of Pittsburgh, Neu-rological Surgery Department, Pittsburgh, PA

Marina Weber ’16 Music related, TBD Catherine White ’16 Education related, TBD

!"#$%&'(&)$*)+#,)("-.$/01,'(The Hodson Internship award is given to enale St. John’s students to acquire professional experience, expand the range of their skills, explore their talents, and learn about the realities of fields in which they think they might like to work. For 2014 we made 36 awards. Please join the St. John’s College community in congratulating the following awardees”

What is your current job?I am a writer, working right now on a feature film (for hire) and also on several other potential projects in film, TV and publishing. We (my wife and I) have a hit show on Broad-way based on our first film and several other movies to our name that are meaningful to a lot of people. On occasion I feel pleased about this, but one problem with being a writer is there’s always something more to be written.

Did you attend other schools after St. John’s?I had no further education and no particular training for any-thing I have attempted since leaving St. John’s in 1975.

Did you know what you wanted to do while attending St. John’s?I don’t recall giving it much thought. I enjoyed theater, espe-cially acting, in high school, and this continued at St. John’s. In my sophomore year a fellow student encouraged me to audi-tion for a summer stock theater he knew, which led to my first professional acting work and started me barefoot on a path paved with, at various times, sharp pebbles or gold.

Did St. John’s help prepare you for work in the field?I can imagine no better preparation for the ill-prepared than St. John’s. I have valued this education more with every pass-ing year. St. John’s encourages the assumption that there is a deeper layer to everything, so I start o! ready to learn no mat-ter how “expertise” I may feel, or how utterly lost.

What didn’t St. John’s prepare you for?When I was a student, ambition was not publicly prized in the school culture. I wasn’t exposed to the beauty of action. I didn’t understand how far one could reach, and how quickly.

Any specific disadvantages to a St. John’s background?I was, and remain, somewhat stunned when I encounter peo-ple who use speech as a means to victory at any cost. I feel naïve even as I say it, but why would we waste time merely winning an argument when we could be helping each other see something new? While I really can’t blame St. John’s for that character trait (flaw, when it comes to some situations), the school certainly reinforced it.

How did you feel you compared, in graduate school or ear-ly jobs, to people from di!erent educational backgrounds, particularly those with field-related degrees?Because I lacked training in my chosen fields, I sometimes

lacked access to tools and disciplines that can actually be learned. I was forced to invent my own methods, and while this may sometimes lead to a fresh perspective, it can also waste time. I‘ve seen well-trained people who were better able to handle bumps in the road, because they had technique to fall back on. They’d had teachers who helped them frame their experience, and encouraged them to develop themselves. I’ve also seen people limited by the language of their training, or worse, thinking the world falls short when it does not sub-scribe to their methods. On balance, I think training, wisely pursued, is usually the better course.

Can you describe a general track someone from St. John’s might take to get into a career in this field?Be born into it.

Any general advice, especially for an upperclassman who is interested in this field but is not quite sure what to do?This upperclassman obviously ignored the previous advice. If you think you know what you want to be doing, go straight for it. This is not an industry with defined paths of advancement, nor any particular respect for age and experience. If you want to act, find places to do it, or create them. Writing requires nothing but time and a willingness to feel like a fool much of that time. If filmmaking is the goal, the means of production are available to anyone these days. Just start, and find a com-munity of people who resonate together. They are your sub-stitute for appropriate parentage. Be ready with the necessary talents, as opportunities may surprise you and may not recur.

How did you market yourself with a St. John’s degree?Hmm. Was I supposed to market myself? That explains so much. I find people rarely inquire into my educational back-ground. When they do, I’m often surprised they know any-thing about St. John’s. If they do I feel instantly warmer to them.

How would you characterize your field as a whole? Is it accessible to newcomers or di"cult to enter? Stable or fluid? Etc.Neither age nor experience has ever been prized in entertain-ment. This malady is now extending to almost all fields. The insecurity of show biz has now been visited even on the Post O"ce.

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From College Avenue to Broadway, a St. John’s education will follow you anywhere. Bob Tzudiker, A’75, shares his experience in the !eld of writing and entertainment.

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In the first place, what are num-bers? Some people might be able to go on and on, but I can use nine words. Numbers are things you say when you count things. Since now we know what numbers are, what do we know about negative numbers? Some people cannot even answer this--come on people! Negative numbers are numbers below zero. And what is zero? Imagine four fingers, then you take away one, and then another one, and then another, and then another, and now what do you have left? That’s zero. What about fractions? Fractions are just something that a generous person would use to share a pie. What are irrational numbers? Sorry, we don’t talk about them in my school. Now that we know all that, what are imaginary numbers? That one is easy. Imaginary num-bers are numbers that don’t exist! Trust me. I am a third-grader at Jones Elementary School, and we have to know numbers to get to fourth grade. !

Dear Gadfly: My eight-year old daughter, Abigail Petrich, wrote the following piece for the Gadfly

when she saw that I was reading Dedekind and studying numbers with my junior math students. She is also studying numbers at school. One of the satisfactions of teaching elementary things at St. John’s is that a parent finds much in common to discuss with his children.

--Louis Petrich, Tutor

Numbers?Abigail Petrich

What was your senior essay topic?I wrote about Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” which was not on the Program at that time.

What is your favorite book on the Program?“Philoctetes.” But I recently revisited Lucretius, to great e(ect. Right now I find myself imagining a wrestling match between Sophocles and Lucretius: the most wondrous sculptor of events versus one who denies their very existence. I don’t know who’d win but I’d pay to see that match. Montaigne would referee.

Do you find that you lead a philosophical life?I’d pay a lot for the aforementioned wrestling match. Does that mean I lead a philosophical life? I’d say I have philosophical tenden-cies that are the center of my interior life but not always manifest in public.engaging with countries to help better their lot is very important to our own security. This was an important realization to buttress the moral and economic argument for foreign assistance.

I think this field is penetrable, but having interlocutors to help illuminate the way in and open a few doors is important. There are many di(erent paths to take within the field of international development—many di(erent subject areas, di(erent platforms (donor, business, non-profit, etc.), the possibility of working overseas or in a headquarters, policy versus practitioner, and so on. Each person has to sort that out for themselves and identify which strand fits them best.

What is your favorite book on the Program?Oh dear, so many books that I have loved in di(erent ways. Just thinking of an answer takes me down many wonderful pathways, thinking of the many books and how they present di(erently over one’s life. But I don’t land on just one favorite! Do you find that you lead a philosophical life?Of course. I can’t imagine a Johnnie that doesn’t continue to question, inquire, examine, and try to discern meaning in life. !

Continued From Pg. 7