being sarah marie
They love to plant...
Pull, then Push
Savage Minds
The Trick is to...
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
Bad Dirt, Annie Proulx
Brown, Richard Rodriguez
Namesake
Rewind to the present
Two long but fascinating articles about China and ...
I wish I knew where to start or how to begin. Ther...
I guess it's time to start coming out of hiberatio...
Privacy and the Net
Blogging and Free Speech
Month of Discontent
Sister Issues/My Hunger Strike
August 26, 2005
Suffocation
I hate to think that I painted a too-rosy picture of my situation back at school in the last few posts. I wish I had that rosy-dandy feeling all the time, but as much as I appreciate the housing and the friend situation this year around, I can't deny that I'm getting stronger and more unavoidable shivers with every step I take deeper into the back-to-school pond.
Get ready for a far-fetched metaphor.
Think about college as a swimming program. Your aim is to learn how to swim, just like in college your aim is to learn whatever they shove down your ears during lecture. Whereas we would like to start our lessons in the shallow water and take it step by step till we feel comfortable, sometimes college decides to take a different approach. They board you on a ship and sail out to the middle of a big, deep lake. You stand on the ship terrified of the cold, deep waters, and besides, this isn't what you had in mind anyway when you thought about swimming lessons.
The instructor, a big beefy olympic swimming stud whose prime passed a couple decades ago, shouts, "JUMP!" Trustingly, or naively all of the students jump but you don't and the instructor starts yelling at you. You hold onto the railing and try to block out his shouting as you watch your classmates land in the water. They look like a pack of confused baby ducklings trying to survive on their own. Some tread the water in panic, shouting and swallowing water, as their body slowly sinks. Others bob up to the surface and manage to float, while a select few begin to breast stroke their way to shore 1000 feet away.
You tell yourself that this isn't what you signed up for, and it's not something you want to go through, but in order to be a respectable member in society you have to learn how to swim and this program is considered really prestigious, too. But you watch in horror as some of your classmates drown and others get tired and appear to head towards the same fate halfway to the shore.
The instructor is irate by now because you didn't follow his orders. He marches to you, and you hold on tight to the railing, but your dinky body is no match to this angry olympian's. He grabs your body, tears you from the railing, and throws you into the water. The adrenaline rushes through your body and traumatic fear fills you up as you fly through the air. Then you make a painful splash into the water and you don't know what's more shocking, the pain from the splash, the emotional shock, or the freezing water, but you can't focus on that for too long because you're in the water and you don't know how to swim but you ought to figure out quick if you plan on staying alive.
You tread and kick and try to keep your head above the water although for five minutes it seems like you're struggling just to stay afloat. Eventually you manage to avoid drowning and then you set out to swim back to shore. You don't know how to swim so your pace is slower than a turtle's on land. Your limbs are tired and begin to hurt, so you pause and endure the sensation of the freezing water until you resume gliding slowly across the pond.
You finally make it onshore and find that only 5 of the original 20 made it back. The instructor greets you by telling you how much you need to improve instead of praising the fact that you beat the odds and survived. You're glad the nightmare is over but you dread the other three required sessions in this course which presumably involve more dramatic beginnings and more difficult swimming--perhaps they'll make you struggle through raging ocean waves or countercurrent to a gushing river?
Right now this is my last round, and I feel like I'm at the point where I'm glued to the railing fighting for my dignity and a more humane way to be taught. I don't know what to say or do to make the instructor leave me alone or treat me differently, but I'm doing all I can.
I'm on the edge for the last time. All the previous times I've surrendered and endured the shame and pain, and every time left me wishing I could say, "never again." In these purgatorial days before my fate for the next couple months is decided I'm wishing that I somehow manage to outsmart the instructor.
I loved Yolanda's idea in my last post to do my thing and let my advisor weep after I hand in my final project. I just hope I don't have to do some weeping of my own first.
Build 'Em Up
My campus has been undergoing a pretty drastic facelift in the last couple years. Some of the classroom buildings, and most notoriously the dorms, that were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s were getting embarrassingly run down and slummy. Tables and chairs were wobbling and the wood was giving in to decades of bored scribbles. Some of the walls were sagging and paint crumbling. Carpets were stained by stray coke and coffee spills that accumulated over time. Bed mattresses sunk, bathrooms were too public, too cramped, and too often stained with piss or stray fecal streaks. No one should have really been expected to live, or carry out their studies and other business in places like this, and it's all the more shocking in a rich, "elite" institution.
And yet people did precisely all that for decades. Thinking back on the bad things I've heard about this school, I wouldn't be surprised if these nasty places were the source of a lot of the students' frustrations and faculty's snappiness. And when I had to live in one of those slummy dorms, a couple days were enough to make me feel uncomfortable about my surroundings, a couple weeks were enough to make me uncomfortable about myself. No one else there seemed particularly happy. We'd walk past each other in the dorm hallways like mummies, unconscious of each other. Afterall, who likes to take dumps with 3 other people in stalls next to you doing the same thing? Or who likes coming home after a long stressful day to a bed that can't even hold you up, a closet you have to wrestle with to open, and a carpet you don't want to walk on because it's so run down and stained that it might stick to your feet.
This year is a different story. They knocked that old dorm I lived in last year and instead of it they're building another new one. Now I'm living in one of the new dorms that they built in the past two years, and it's a world of a difference. Aside from the nice, new everything the people surprise me the most. I went from unsocial, miserable neighbors last year who wouldn't even acknowledge my presence down the hallway, much less reciprocate a "hello," to smiling people who not only say hello but even stop to chat with you. Is it sheer luck that this hall is full of friendly people, or does our contentment with the place we're living in play a role in it, too?
The funny thing is that my next door neighbor is a girl who was on my hall in the nasty dorm early on last year. I remember seeing her and brushing shoulders down the hall a lot last year, but I never remember swapping even one word with her. This year we're already on a first-name basis.
Moral of the story, if you want happy people, one thing you can do is house them in a place they'll be happy about. It doesn't take a mansion.
August 23, 2005
Put Your $$$ Where Your Mouth Is?
Do you think it's hypocritical to criticize or question something without carrying out what you criticize or question? Up until today I thought that the general consensus was that in order to live fulfilling lives we need to "be the change we want," or live our lives the way we would like others to be, and therefore analysts, consultants, pundits, professors, and whomever else who jabbers about something without following through is a little hypocritical, if not at least a bit problematic.
Quick clarification--I'm not saying all professors, pundits, consultants, analysts, etc. are hypocrites or problematic. Far from it. Just when people, anyone really, start calling for one thing to happen and never take part in what they want to see, then a problem starts to arise.
To an extent, my whole final project which I need to complete before graduation is based on that premise. In discussing my project with my advisor today, he seemed to throw that all up in the air. It went something like this, "So if we take a slice of intellectual leaders and theorists from the past century, we find that a lot of them came from good money and high places in society and simply wrote about a problem without being involved in it."
"Yes?"
"Then based on what you're saying, almost nine out of ten of the authors who wrote great works about schools of thoughts and social movements were hypocrites!" He looked stunned, flabbergasted, as emphatically perplexed as can be. Yet to me it seemed so simple and obvious.
"Yes," I muttered like a student who's afraid to disagree with a teacher but takes that bold move, knowing the teacher might mark him down for being "wrong" or at least use their superior position and knowledge to discredit him. My advisor was shocked, so I explained in the simplest way that if you say something and your actions are to the contrary, then there's a problem.
He put words in my mouth, though. I didn't say they were hypocrites, but I did say that there was a bit of a problem with their position or idea or something.
It boils down to this, if my project puts me in the position of observing society and writing about it as I see it, what good would it do if I only write about things that the university will approve of? I do not plan on being rude, vulgar, or inflammatory, so why do I need to filter out my truth just to please others? Change is not going to happen if we keep being PC and students keep punching out cookie-cutter thesis projects that are obscure and esoteric enough not to strike a nerve with anyone.
Whoever decided that academia at its best and knowledge in its purest form comes in the form of an overly dry, unpleasantly formal, typed-out thesis with an obvious argument in the first page and then dozens of pages that repetitiously repeat the point made a statement. But it's a statement that doesn't work for me, as I've often enjoyed and learned the most about life and myself from the stories of other people.
Therefore I made the decision that my final project won't be a thesis, but a collection of creative nonfiction stories that somehow capture unique stories and moments that characterize the struggles of living in a crazy world at a crazy time. Besides, the world is too rich and insane to narrow down to one thesis.
And when I do, as part of this project, write about the university system (because it's so prominent an institution in today's society) in all its glory and all its gory... and if I do end up questioning some things about university culture, life, academics... would it not be just a little bit hypocritical (or at least introduce a little point of contention) if I did it all completely on the university's terms, in the way the university wants to see it presented (i.e. in a predictable thesis)?
I know comments are hard to come by in most blogs, but I'd love to hear you sound off. Do we need to be (or at least try to be) the change we preach? How about my situation? Does my advisor have a point, or should I be sticking to my own?
August 22, 2005
Round Three
After a night of packing followed by a 6 a.m. flight, my third year at college is about to begin. Surprisingly, the whole transition, though stressful as usual, went by quite smoothly. My Northwest Airline flights were roughly on time, despite the strikes, and both of my suitcases arrived at my final destination (two for two? Wow!). A bus ride and a ten-minute suitcase haul later, I found the boxes full of my life that I put into storage earlier this summer awaiting me, stacked on my bed, nonchalantly in my new room.
Oh yes, and the new room. It's small: 10ft x 10ft, but oh-so-cozy. I am the second person to live in this room so it's full of glitzy newness. Aside from quite a few bangs and smudges on the walls, the room is in great shape. New carpet. Two big windows. New dresser, desk, and bookshelf. Air conditioning, and a human-sized mirror along my closet. Comparing this with last year's digs would be like comparing solar to dirty coal, so I won't even go there. The cherry to top it off? That horrid dorm no longer exists. Yes, demolish that dorm and all those terrible memories! This school is finally building better ones.
And unlike last year when, knowing no one around, I really felt like I was starting over again, this time two of the girls I blocked with in this dorm were already there and greeted me with friendly smiles and all. Dinner on the first night with a friend, and I even dared to venture off campus to meet up with another friend.
All in a day's move with only 2 hours of sleep?!
August 17, 2005
Your Orientation
Welcome to my new spot. I hope you like it a little more than More to Life, or at least just the same. As you can see this isn't one of the blogger templates, so I had to spend a couple painstaking days wrestling with XHTML code to work this out.
I've got three columns up for a little more content and flexibility. On the left-hand column, you can take walk down memory lane with me as I highlight some of my favorite past posts. If you ever get sick of me, you can find some other highly recommended blogs in the Blog On section.
In the center section you can feast your eyes on the main dish, what this blog is really all about. On the right-hand column you'll find quirky comments about me or the blog in the About section. Recent Pieces should help you navigate through my most recent posts (you know, in case you've been slaking off on your visits :P). Under the Music section, you can tune your ears into some musician I can't seem to get enough of at the moment, and the archives, well you know what that's all about.
That's it! Not too complicated, right? And the best thing about this orientation? No fees and No red tape! Soak in the new look&feel, let me know what you think and I'll be back in circa ten days.
August 14, 2005
Welcome!
Welcome to stage two of my life as a blogger. In case you're wondering, stage one lasted a healthy two years in the form of More to Life. More to Life was my crash landing. It was my crash landing onto the blogosphere, and it also chronicled a period in my life when I crash-landed into independent college life. I had so much going on, I was depressed, angry, sleep deprived, and all the other things that make for a beautiful crash.
But despite the crash, I survived and I'm still in good shape. While I'm not quite off and running yet, I'm definitely walking without a limp. Although sometimes "the more things change, the more they stay the same," I'm hoping that this blog will follow a new stage in my life and along with that a somewhat new & improved attitude. This fall will usher in my last year at college (I HOPE!), and along with that the mayhem of trying to plan for my first steps into the unpredictable "real world."
The saga begins the last week of August with my return to college. Stay tuned...
