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
October 30, 2005
Pre-enroll
Pre-enrollment for spring courses begins at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow morning. When I was a freshman and didn't know better, I made the effort to wake up as soon as the online queues opened. Of course, the morning would go by with me maybe locking in two classes if I were lucky. And of course, by the end of the week I somehow always got the classes that I wanted. I wasn't the only big loser for waking up early when I didn't have to. Everyone in the freshman class did due to the fierce competition over classroom space and the fact that the faculty and upperclassmen managed to convince us all that getting up early just to waste our time was absolutely necessary.
It infuriated me, so I wrote a few angry e-mails and vowed never to be that sucker again.
Sophomore year I never woke up early to pre-enroll for classes and I always managed to lock in what I wanted. Well, "wanted" being kind of a relative term... As the semesters went by I progressively lost my interest in picking classes. I used to leaf through the course rosters like a hungry wolf with an appetite for anything I could take.
This time, I'm on the verge of enrollment period and I can't even say I have much of an idea of what I'll be taking. I don't really care. With any luck this will be my last semester of academic slavery. Then freedom. I'm looking forward to 4 credits of "independent study" to write my "thesis." I was thinking of subjecting myself to a mind-numbing statistics course--figured no one is this phony real world would consider me for much without any background in stats. Then I need one more class in order to snag all the credits I need to graduate and maintain my obligatory full-time status. It's really that one 4-credit class that's holding me up. I wish I could wing it, but all the "simple" stuff seems so boring and all the advanced stuff seems so boring and like way too much work, though I assume the simple stuff will be tons of work too because that's how they do it around here.
Someone please just fast-forward my life to the end of may 2006? Thank you.
October 28, 2005
Taking Stock of Tomorrow
Nearly halfway through the semester, I want to stop and look back on the time that passed in the blink of an eye that got me to this point. Made it to the middle; I'm at rock bottom and it's an uphill climb to the top at the end. This could be the worst. My life these days is fused to the clock, so even if I want to stop and look back, time pushes me forward.
Despite my hectic schedule, I'm usually good about remembering things. Apparently this year is different. Pre-enrollment for spring courses begins on Monday for me. Wow. It crept up on me. Where was my head? I usually sort through classes weeks in advance of pre-enrollment just to distract myself from the present stress and to indulge in a little fantasy (which never seems to come true) of how next semester's courses will be easier and more manageable. A few days ago I picked up the course packet for the Spring and there were hardly any left over. Apparently I really have been in a bubble since everyone else knew.
This weekend: pick classes.
But this weekend is particularly insane. My two jobs both need me so I'll be putting in a couple of hours of work on Saturday and Sunday. How many times have I said, "no rest of the weary?"
And if this weekend seems unusually tough, it's only foreboding probably the toughest month ahead of me. November, bring it on, but I'm not saying I got the energy to deal with you. I was spoiled in October since circumstances enabled me to take off an extra day of work every week. That hiatus is over and November's back to full schedule with a vengeance--5 days of work a week. I haven't been able to keep up with my school work on 4 days of work a week, so I'm a little bit worried about 5.
As time inevitably drags me closer to the end of this year (I no longer even have the strength to drag my feet through the mud), I still don't know for sure whether or not I'll be graduating. I put in my application, but my advisor is holding me up. For the past two weeks he's told me how he hasn't been able to fill out my application to graduate, and then he self-indulgently smiles and says, "don't worry, we'll get you out of here." If he only knew what kind of torture this is for me.
Two weeks, baby; I've been on his case for two weeks and he tells me these horror stories of people who almost weren't let out because of that damn application and I wonder why can't he just get the paperwork rolling?!? In the meantime, because of this, I have no clue what I'm doing come May. Gearing up for another year of academic prison or trying to figure out my life for real? I'm really chill about the whole thing. See, I've stopped caring, but campus life is a ridiculous constant reminder. Every day I get a barrage of deadlines for applications, internships, grad school visits that I pass up because I have no clue what's even worth looking into. Whatever, I don't even have the time.
It'll all start to let up around Thanksgiving. I decided to take an extra couple days off of school to fly home early. Heck yeah. The thing is, I had the worst nightmare last night--that I missed my flight out of here for Thanksgiving so I ended up being stuck on the deserted campus for the whole holiday--I almost went insane. I get shivers just thinking about it. Waking up to that dream just heightens my anticipation for that break, hurry on up!
Lambs, I'm just happy I have an extra hour to count some sheep this weekend.
October 20, 2005
Nearing Completion
I really needed to take a year off before I started college. Lord knows how hard I worked in high school to get into this one (snobbish like the rest) ivy league university and rejected from all the others I applied to. I took all honors classes, two and a half hours a of an evening program twice a week, volunteering on Sunday mornings at the community center, extracurriculars at school, and volunteering lots with the Sierra Club any other spare moment I had. Getting into a good school consumed my life, so I built my life around that one goal. Somehow in the process I forget to fully consider how much the process itself would consume me, and somehow I assumed that once I got into college all the hard work would be over and I could start to coast.
Ever was I wrong. I fully had the option to take some time off. No one would have sued me for it, and I would probably been better off for it, but nothing around me suggested that would even be an option worth considering. All my life I grew up with people politely smiling at me saying, "You're the type of kid who will go straight through to get a Ph.D." (If they only knew how many hours I was capable of wasting on MTV). Their words found a place in my self image. Besides, for some reason I always held an anxious jealousy towards those kids who managed to skip a grade and do fine. I felt like part of high school was kind of redundant and wished I was in that position (why waste those years of my life when I could get it over with quicker and move on?). College was my chance to keep with it. Taking a year off meant falling behind.
I came to school and the first year was roughly hell. I made some friends but not many good ones, by the end of the first semester I gave up on trying to go to dinner with people and started to eat alone every night. Going into the freshmen dining halls alone, where most people clump together like superglue, was one of the toughest things I had to learn to do. And then there were classes. I took premed biology and chemistry and some other things. Not only were those weed-killer intro courses lethal, I couldn't understand how so many students so willingly subjected themselves to mind-numbing lectures with mind-numbing professors. Outside of class people couldn't stop complaining but they all shut up and plugged their ears at the thought of trying to do something about it. The complacency and evasion drove me nuts.
Sophomore year was roughly hell, too. A few weeks into the first semester and I seriously considered dropping out. Instead, after a lot of thinking and some encouraging comments on my blog and from friends and family I decided to try to keep it together and graduate early instead. College, I began to realize, wasn't much more than a dead end. A golden path leading nowhere.
Then in my spring semester, I read an essay by Richard Rodriguez called "The Achievement of Desire." It was kind of a clunky title, and although I frowned slightly at its weirdness, I read on. He described the way he made it through Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley, and then while doing his post-doctorate in England came his reckoning. All these years of elite school, he realized, had so distanced him from his family, his culture, and his roots that he became overwhelmed with a desire to end his schooling and reclaim the very things his years of schooling took away from him. He left his post-doc program and finally, after many years, achieved what he truly needed and desired.
Reading his words, I saw a picture of myself projected into the future. Did I want to be that machine-driven motivated person who puts his education above all else and goes, goes, goes? Did I want to immerse the next decade of my life in the dusty elite institutions of America, internalizing a culture foreign to me and a culture that subordinates my family and my unique history? The "no" resounded in my head, and I finally found the articulation and justification I needed to come to terms with another option. Shaken weak by mounds of frustrating homework and hours at my two jobs after classes, I decided that I too need to put an end to this miserable education.
About a week ago I put in my application to graduate. Fighting the administration over early graduation has been a full-time job in and of itself. (They have almost $45K vested in keeping me here another year.) Nevertheless, this puts me one step closer to the end.
As I walked out of my meeting with my professor for our independent study course, I realized that I have finally gained what I needed from this education. I learned enough to begin to answer my itching questions about our burdened society: the true nature of our democracy, our ideal of equality and how it stands unresolved in our troublesome unequal reality, our institutions that were supposed to reform and yet left an unfulfilled promise to transform our society into that city upon a hill and our lives into an "American Dream." I've taken the classes, and done the reading to begin to understand and articulate the complex answers to these questions which have irritated me for years.
So my time spent here wasn't a complete waste. Now that I know, I feel more ready than ever to go. And if I ever come back... it'll be when I'm ready and when I want. No pressure over school books.
October 13, 2005
Sick of Being Wrong
Three to four meaningful and thought-provoking contributions to class each day will earn you an A for your participation grade, so my professor determined when he wrote up the class syllabus. People dropped the class like dead flies after the first day, but I stayed. Not many people remained, we're only a class of five students now and we meet once a week for two hours.
Since the class is so long and we are so few, it's hard not to open your mouth and say something three, four, five or even six times. But I can't get over the subjective notion of meaningful and thought provoking. What's interesting to me is what you'd love to avoid, or my perspective is just different than yours. Even the whole idea of having to participate a certain amount of times each day strikes a nerve when I get fed up with the discussions.
The young professor, freshly minted with a Ph.D. from Princeton, sort of pisses me off. At first I brushed it aside, but the trend has continued in each class. Eight weeks is enough for me to reach my conclusions. "It's capitalism triumphant," I mentioned in class today, and then proceeded to explain what I meant.
"No," the professor counters. "It's consumerism," and he continues to explain in his elegant, polished language what he means, and I find myself nodding and nodding and nodding and I agree with everything, so I wonder how that's even different from what I said. Aren't capitalism and consumerism two intimately connected things? And why is it that everything that I tried to say is everything he proclaimed but perhaps just under a different name.
It's the "no" that stings, because what it really means is "You're wrong, I'm right." So I sit there and listen to the professor knock me down time after time and begin to wonder what this is really all about. The striking similarities in our positions always go unacknowledged. It's just "no," and he clears the slate clean and trashes everything that came out of my mouth. I wonder, then, if that's the way it goes, why should I ever feel like participating in class?
"But how is that different?" I dare to venture when I get really ticked off. "How is that so different from what I tried to say when this and this and this is so much like that and that and that?" If I'm really eloquent and polished he might nod a couple times and go silent for a while until another student quickly fills the void. Most of the time, it's "but, but, but."
But whatever, and to hell with it all. Nothing I say is ever going to be good enough when you think, (most times by virtue of your expensive education and years of training), and you can say it better; just like the way nothing I write (no matter how hard I try, and how many different approaches I take) is ever worth that coveted "+". It's always check, or if you're feeling particularly generous or full of pitty, a check-plus, "oh poor thing, he tried." Some day I'll leave you to rot behind these old ivy walls and let you drown in your culture of disagreements and distinctions. That day, I hope I'll be in a place where I'm not always wrong.
October 10, 2005
Breaking Something Bad
A few weeks into my freshman year at college, about a month after I bought new glasses, my dorm's social committee decided to throw a dorm-wide game of capture the flag. In my effort to be social and make new friends, I decided to join in.
About 100 of us descended upon the Arts Quad around dusk and split into our two teams: the west side of the dorm versus the east side. We each claimed our half of the quad and got into our starting positions. I didn't feel too awkward about participating in this game. One thing I had going for me was that I had always been a decent runner. So whenever some flag-greedy nemesis from the west side tried to break into our territory, I was all over it: running after them and tagging them straight into the jail.
The sun set, and throughout the game dusk transformed into a cloudy darkness punctured by only a few stars. As the visibility dropped, it became harder to distinguish our teammates from opponents. In the obscurity I picked up on an unguarded opponent snagging our flag and making a run for it. Alarmed, I set out for him from the north, another girl came from the east, another guy from the west and several other of our teammates descended upon our stolen flag from even less well defined directions.
He was surrounded, but he was also close to his home base. Some of my teammates were closer to him, but it looked like he was increasing his lead on them. Worried, I kicked into turbo gear, as did some of my other teammates. He was only a few feet from the end of our territory, only a few feet from winning the game. He kept on running, but I was getting closer. I reached my hands out in front of me as far as I could. Reach, reach, reach, I was only inches away, it was going to be all right. He was getting tired from all of his maneuvering, and so was I but this was my chance. I made a few bigger and faster leaps and finally I could feel my fingertips brushing up against his shirt. One more step and then...
BOOM!
There was a huge impact to the side of my head and then on my torso from the other direction. The next snapsecond I was skidding across the dew-moistened grass for a few feet. Ouch. I wasn't sure what had happened but our opponent was on the ground too, and he was definitely out of the game and our flag was once again safe. Yes, I did it. We did it. Whatever happened.
One of the girls came up to me, "I'm so sorry I ran into you."
"Don't worry about it," I reassured her, and reached for the side of my head where she made impact in order to reassure myself that everything was really OK. "At least we got him. Good job!"
The girl smiled and walked away, but as I felt the side of my head for bumps my hand brushed up against the handle of my glasses that rests the main frame behind my ears. It was completely indented with the shape of the girl's forehead, and as a result the glasses sat on my face at a severe angle.
Panicked that I broke my brand new glasses I stepped to one of the far corners of the quad so no one would see me. I took of my glasses and tried to mold them back into shape. I smoothed out the handle, and it responded but still retained some of its kinks. I rested the frame back on my nose and bent the lenses until they were even on my face. I managed but it was only a cosmetic fix.
For the next few days I found myself constantly having to mold my glasses back into shape. They seemed hell bent on curving and twisting after that impact. I liked the frame, but for the next few weeks I couldn't wait till I got a new one. This one was only a month old but already damaged.
Two years passed by and I was still wearing those glasses. They got tired of fighting me, or perhaps the tiny fixes I had to make just became a hassle-free routine to me. After months upon months of smoothing out the kinks the damage didn't visibly bother me, but it was still ever so slightly there.
Perhaps if I had the money and the spunk I would have done something more serious about the situation two years ago. Maybe I would have tried to switch them or get new ones. Two years ago I told myself I couldn't wait for new ones but because of my inertia, nervousness and then being sucked into the life of school work and college jobs I never found the time.
After two years of wearing those glasses and getting very attached to them I FLIPPED OUT when I woke up after a short nap to find them crushed under me. The thought, the destruction, the loss plunged me into an angry, self-loathing depression. After two years, I was not willing to give up those glasses. I had settled with them into a comfortably unsatisfactory relationship that I had really wanted to end as early as one month into the deal.
Now that I'm home for fall break, I found the time to get new glasses. It was an annoyingly difficult decision to make. I just didn't have that mindset to go looking for something new, and there wasn't much that I even liked. Eventually I found something very similar to my original glasses but a little smaller and perhaps even a littler chic-er. A day or two later, and I'm quite content with them.
I can't help but wonder if, despite all the anger and stress, it was a good thing that I slept on my old glasses and unconsciously crushed them. I made a decision at the beginning of this year to start turning my life around, getting rid of the old things that wore me down but keeping the lessons and moving on to the newer and better. So I can't help but think that this whole ordeal with the glasses is really just what I needed to help me move along, move along...
October 03, 2005
NYC: Not for me
I had a wonderful time in New York, New York. It was nice because I got to get out of school, and because I got to see family whom I love very much, and because the wedding was amazing, small, elegant, and classy. The couple picked out this place on the tip of Manhattan overlooking the statue of liberty and all the surrounding islands. The food was delectable, the people friendly, the setting just right.
Towards the end of the wedding they played Gwen Stefani and Eve's "Rich Girl." When I saw my Mom and two of her 50+ year old cousins breakin' it down to the upbeat tempo, I couldn't resist but join in with them. It was a hilarious bunch of fun.
I did realize for the first time, however, how much a wedding is an event for families and couples. Young singles just don't seem as numerous, so I felt a bit out of place. An older relative of mine took note of that and tried to set me up. He pulled me aside and whispered in my ear, "A lot of the girls here are in the music industry, so they might be loose." I laughed him off, I couldn't believe I heard that.
Seeing that I wasn't very proactive about the advice, this same relative later introduced me to a girl on the bride's side of the family. She seemed sweet and nice, but it turned out that she was a high school junior--obviously not very appropriate considering his intentions, and those weren't every my intentions to begin with, but it made the whole situation a bit awkward.
We all hear people rant and rave about NYC, and if NYC isn't good enough to live in, they say it's great to visit. All that is probably true, and while NYC has its amazing factors, this trip highlighted to me most of all how crazy-crazy-crazy that place is. Cars bustling everywhere, a brown and polluted skyline, hardly any green spaces and even the trees in central park look sickly and brown at times, people fighting in the subways, and homeless people getting in your face demanding money. I had to put it up with all of that this weekend and it was just a bit too much.
See, when I get out of school for a rare weekend, I want it to be fun and relaxing. Chaotic and fun just won't do. NYC was too, too, too chaotic. I feel like there's just no place to escape, to take it easy. It's rivers of concrete punctured by sky-scrapers everywhere, ACK! I was eyeballing a graduate school program there for some time in the distant future, but I dunno if I can handle the madness.
If anything, the city just made me appreciate coming back to a really small, quaint picturesque town in the middle of nowhere. Wow, and if anything can make me appreciate my school just a little bit--that's amazing.
