If you want to find Cherry Tree Lane,

don't trip off the glitz that i'm gonna display

2009-11-07T18:32:06Z

My mom and little sister came to visit me this weekend :) They arrived Thursday night along with Nic's mom and little sister, and after doing a house tour and meeting the roommates, I went back with them to the hotel and sat in the restaurant with my mom for several hours drinking wine (!) and talking about life. The following morning I went with them for breakfast pastries and we went to Chapters (I, like, live there now) before sitting in the Chateau Laurier (a v v fancy hotel) and catching sight of a Stephen Harper lookalike. We would have thought it was actually him were it not for the fact that he was walking alone, which Stephen Harper does not and would not be allowed to do. But still!

We tried to walk around the mall, but our list of things to do was a bit limited because Nic's mom has a broken foot - I had to leave for a meeting and my politics class (during which Burdz and I finished an entire crossword puzzle! So proud of ourselves...), but went to see an IMAX with them afterwards. The IMAX wasn't that good :( I miss the old IMAXes, the ones about coral reefs and rainforests and the Nile, where you get hardcore motion sickness and helicopters going through valleys and stuff. Those were epic.

We brought Nic, Catya, and Marley with us to dinner and then the Roommates and I went off to see Musician Man's show (a classmate of ours has a band - very good band - and he'd asked us to come and we were perfectly thrilled to), which was all the way out in bumfuck nowhere, but we made it! It was in a CHURCH which had been converted for the night into a SKATE PARK. Yeah, you heard that right. It soon became evident why he had asked us to come.

CATYA (via text): Is this going to be a high school party?
HE: I dunno but it's gonna be siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!

(We quoted him on that for the duration of the night, ps. No-one says that and gets away without a little bit of teasing.) It was mostly high-school students - actually, mostly grade 9 boys in hipster shirts (lol), but it was pretty cool, and their band is really good! They were the second set, so we all rushed up to stand under the stage (...pulpit?) and pretended to be bowing, lol. It was a lot of fun, and he obviously appreciated having us there (since we were, like, the whole crowd), and they were AMAZING! <3 I went for crepes this morning with the family before they had to leave. I love seeing them!

P.S. JON STEWART YOU WERE ALREADY MY FAVOURITE PERSON BUT NOW I LOVE YOU EVEN MORE. I don't think anyone's allowed to say you can't act anymore, lol. XDDD

P.P.S. I have listened to this song like 18 million times. Each time it gets more hilarious - especially because I have one that has Ryan Seacrest's radio show on either end and so I have to listen to him say 'bro' every time. Also I seem to be on some kind of Kelly Clarkson kick, which is odd as I don't normally like her style of music but I have honestly done nothing but listen and dance to it for like two weeks now.

you can only ignore Dumbledore for so long, you can pretend that the Ministry knows what's going on

2009-11-03T00:00:57Z

First Things First: I HAVE DROPPED RESEARCH METHODS BECAUSE IT IS NO USE TO ME AND I WILL SOON BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

Aaaaaand I celebrated by spelling "celebratory" wrong in my fbook status. *FACEPALM* Wow, what a great way to start off, huh? Clearly I am destined for *~*greatness*~*

I finally had my Appointment of Doom with my faculty (and really I shall miss them, their office is in the nicest building on campus) and the lady was the most confusing person on the history of the planet, but I think I know what's going on, and I just have to fill in a form and then wait for the Administrative Powers that Be to process it and ~voila! I will be an English major. Once that happens, I can go to my new faculty and declare a minor, and in the meantime I can pick out my courses for next semester and start trying to register for them. Even though I wasn't entirely sure this weekend that it was the right thing to do, life = nothing 100% (IF YOU SPOT THIS FIC QUOTE THEN YOU WIN EVERYTHING FOREVER ~~including ai podfic, apparently~~) so I just went ahead and did it, and I really just feel like a big weight came off my shoulders. *g*

I got a few midterms and assignments back, and they weren't great :/ I really haven't been putting in enough effort this semester. And, uh, I like my scholarship. So it's time to stop staring into space, methinks. I also picked up a pamphlet from the yoga place down the street and am planning on getting the arse into gear (pun very much intended) that way as well.

Marks aside, I've had a few pretty good classes recently in Contested Places (<33) because we started Territory and Territoriality, and have spent like four classes straight on Israel and Palestine, which I never felt I had a good bead on before but it's so simultaneously fascinating and sadness-inducing (studying history always does to me what horror movies do: all I can think is that yelling "DON'T GO DOWNSTAIRS, YOU FOOL! DON'T YOU *KNOW* THAT'S LIKE THE WORST POSSIBLE THING YOU CAN DO, YOU'RE JUST MESSING EVERYTHING UP! WHAT ARE YOU *DOING*!?!?" isn't really helpful).

"Virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency, and it is a mean because it aims at the intermediate condition in feelings and actions. And that is why it is hard work to be excellent." -Aristotle

Halloweek

2009-11-01T15:24:50Z

THINGS I LEARNED FROM HALLOWEEK:
-There is indeed such a thing as too much makeup.
-That I enjoy being in-character, even if that 'character' is just a doll: I skip down stairs, hold my purse like a little girl, and do doll blinks, and don't even realize I'm going it.
-Narcissism makes for some pretty awesome photos.
-It doesn't matter what you do to your hair - the wind will fuck it up.
-The vast majority of people will never say anything out loud about weird clothes; they will, however, stare at you and silently judge you.
-The vast majority of people love it when weird things happen.
-It is entirely possible to completely forget that you're dressed like Robin Hood and wonder why people are staring at you.
-Don't take yourself seriously. You're dressed like a 6-year old doll, self. Take a chill pill.
-If I don't have a piece of clothing I need, my roommates will.
-Always wear shorts under your costume. ALWAYS.
-How to be comfortable being different/standing out/looking ridiculous in public. So what if I look like a freak show? I ~OWN~ my ridiculousness, and I refuse to feel stupid about being awesome.

Not that Halloweek is particularly profound, or really anything other than a random piece of fun for two people, but I - believe it or not - am a relatively self-conscious person. And on a normal day, I don't stand out. Nobody's liable to watch me while I ride a bus, or look at me funny in class: I've got the privilege of Looking Normal And Harmless, and I've never had that happen before. And even though most of the costumes involved us looking at least somewhat attractive, as soon as you put a coat or a backpack on and add wind and scratch your face, you're going to look silly. And people are going to think you look silly. And people are very unsubtle creatures, so you will undoubtedly know that you look silly, or that other people think you look silly. But if I'm walking to school dressed as a bowling pin and I'm grinning from ear to ear because I love costumes and being dressed up as fun, and someone walking the other way gives me a once-over (in my rain-spattered tights, red band around my head, and backpack buckles done up over my coat) and a '~Seriously? Ugh' look? And I'm supposed to feel like I'm being judged, or that I look stupid, or I'm anything less than fabulous?

Too bad. I don't care. Because I'm having the time of my life, and you're judging me for looking like the fool I love being. Enjoy your life! Because mine's pretty awesome :D

I like to make myself believe that planet Earth turns slowly

2009-10-30T20:15:06Z

I really love today's costume because it is both low-maintenance (NO MAKEUP! I CAN TOUCH MY FAAAAACE. Oh the relief) and awesome: we all sat in formation in class as bowling pins (in all-white with red bands around our foreheads). Alas there could be no flash mobs because our bowling ball had forgotten to dress up and also it was raining like a mofo (WHY MUST IT RAIN HERE? WHY CAN'T IT RAIN IN KENYA, WHERE THEY ACTUALLY *NEED* IT?). International Relations became moderately interesting when some idiot in the back was all 'there's no reason Canada should help or have to help anyone else in the world. Like, they're in their own conflict on another continent' and then like 19 hands in the class went up and my dear Burdz was able to put my anger into words that were more elegant than my own, which was somewhere around the lines of 'Colonialism, bitch. Learn about it. Also, it's called being a human being.'

Because it is his wont, the prof only let the discussion go on for a few minutes before he dragged us back to mercantilist views of IPE (because obviously that's so much more engaging). There's been a colossal amount of stupid - and self-centred idiocy - in both of my politics classes over the past week (like, 'Canada gives so much money to foreign aid, why should we improve or give more?' BECAUSE POVERTY STILL EXISTS, DAMMIT. WHAT DO YOU THINK FOREIGN AID IS *FOR*??!). Yesterday's discussion group for Political Thought turned into a 'why poor people are poor' discussion, and even though there was thankfully none of the 'they're not trying hard enough' wank going around, there was still enough disconnection and privilege and 'well some people choose not to finish high school, you know' irrelevancy happening that it just gets hard to respond to at some point. Like, sometimes you can't even discuss things rationally (as that MTQ would say "it's like trying to do math with someone to whom 2 means 6 and 3 means paprika").

The article under discussion was another of the 'Uses of a Liberal Education' series, this time by Earl Shorris, and can be found here if you want to read it.
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I'm still confused about the switching-majors thing... my appointment is next Monday, and I'm still bouncing back and forth between whether I want to or not, aghl. I just want to get this out of my life, and I know if I don't I'm still going to want it, but I'm still thinking my current degree is better for what I want to do. Let the second round of introspection commence!
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And because I'm basically spending the next 48 hours dancing my face off and dressing up and engaging in the kinds of activities that will one day make it difficult for me to run for elected office, may I wish you all a Happy Halloween. Here, have a classic Even Stepvhen on the subject. "THERE GOES STINKY STEVE!" "I WANNA BE A VAMPIRE!" "GO ON, RING MY DOORBELL!" :DD

The one above is for Canucks, here's the American link here:

Down the rabbit hole

2009-10-29T03:10:00Z

As a side-note before I begin: I EFFING LOVE THIS SONG AND IT IS MY NEW ANTHEM. THE END.
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Halloweek continues to be AWESOME. Yesterday was Robin Hood (complete with construction-paper hats and feathers, as well has two sets of bows-and-arrows: one from Canadian Tire, one fashioned from random stuff in our backyard) and I had to take the bus alone again and I'm sure I was laughed at - but as soon as I came into Politics and plopped down beside Catya, all was made well. The prof (a man I despise for his horrible teaching skillz, even though he seems like a moderately pleasant person) looked up and said we had nice hats and spent the next ten minutes trying to scare us about H1N1, and the following 20 minutes actually being awesome and sarcastic and tearing people apart for being all 'well Canada gives lots of money to foreign aid' and 'I'm a student, I shouldn't have to help' and it was awesome because he just started swearing and being intelligent. But then he got boring again so I stopped paying attention.

We staged the photoshoot on the front lawn, which had trees and fences and piles of yellow leaves - and good thing we did, because when we walked by today they were blowing all the leaves away (#45 Things I Hate About Our Society: electric leaf-blowers. What is the point, you morons?) and had an amazing time.

Today's theme was Lost Little Girls, so Catya was Little Red Riding Hood, and I was Alice in Wonderland (because as you know I have the dress) - it was odd in that it wasn't immediately obvious I was in a costume, so I just got weird looks for wearing a ribbon on my head and 18 trucks of makeup. But we found a path with lampposts by the gorgeous old theatre building (all the buildings on our campus are ugly, so it was really the only option) and had another epic photoshoot with Catya's basket of cookies and rain everywhere :D

Funny story about the cookies. If you needed more proof that my house is ghetto (other than the whole in the kitchen floor and the fact that two weeks ago we had to punch 20 holes in the basement/Catya's bedroom to connect the heating system to the furnace)? I was baking cookies, whatever, and apparently the insulation melted off the coil and it started sparking and making mini-fireworks and it's all okay (I tried to bake the cookies in the toaster oven but that was weird) and we got it replaced, but yeah. This house. Is crazy.

Pictures from the first two days up on fbook, those of you who have me on there. If anyone wants to add me on fbook I can provide you with the deets - I just won't ever be putting IRL pictures of myself out on the Wide Internets.
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In seriousness now, I need opinions: tomorrow's theme is Super-Human Strength, and Catya is going to be a superhero and I will be a Maasai Warrior (because I own the shukahs and the bow). However, I was only going to change into it for the photoshoot (on a fire escape!) and not wear it to my discussion group because I'm a bit unsure about it. Because the maasai aren't storybook characters or archetypes or traditional figures open to public whoring-out (not in that sense, but I can't quite say what I mean here) like the other ones: they're people, and it's a complex culture, and it's a culture that's not mine, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was making it into a joke or a stereotype or just exploiting the "pretty"ness of the traditional wear, because that's not why I'm dressing up as a Maasai Warrior. Now obviously I know a bit more about the Maasai than random people in my discussion group, and I can talk about (and obviously learn way more about still, because I am clearly not actually Maasai and three weeks of knowledge is nothing compared to a lifetime) the culture and the history, but I would hate to give the wrong impression, or make a misstep, or hurt or offend anyone. So. Opinions? Should I wear the shukah and strut proud into my discussion group in-costume (since that's the whole point of this week), or should I keep it just for our own house and photoshoot, or should I not do it at all? Because I don't really know enough about issues like this yet to be able to put my finger exactly on what would be wrong with it, and I feel like on some levels it wouldn't be wrong at all, but obviously my perception of the costume is going to be different than other peoples'. (Let me know, and don't spare my feelings. If you think it's totally cool, then cool.)

For those unsure about what I mean by Maasai? I present Felix, my Maasai Warrior Husband. (Also, Felix now has FACEBOOK, WHAT. LOL FELIX.)
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TAYLOR SWIFT CONCERT SHOULD I GO Y/N?

The crinoline's for insulation

2009-10-27T02:03:17Z

First day of Halloweek: officially a success of epicsauce. Last night Catya and I tried out our makeup and costumes, and woke up at unholy hours this morning to get it just right. I wore this dress over a red tutu and a white frilly tanktop, with white ballet tights, white ballet flats with bows, and with my hair in pigtails with white ribbon. I also did EPIC doll makeup and honestly the bus ride to school was SO MUCH FUN, I was just reading my newspaper, nothing to see here, and I would look up and people would be full-out STARING and GRINNING THEIR FACES OFF.

In Contested Places, Burdz and I sit close to the front, and today - the one day! - I put my hand up to answer the prof's question and did so while he proceeded to try to act normally but couldn't stop looking. In Political Thought, I started a tally of how many times the prof looked at me awkwardly - he started avoiding looking at me (Burdz said I was being self-involved, but I COULD TELL), and in the last five minutes I was just looking at him, head tilted, and he looked at me and I slowly tipped my head to the other side and didn't change expression and he did the most EPIC double-take of life. Muahahahaha! Arabic is such a small class that people actually asked questions, and the prof didn't notice until I answered a question and then said "What is going on here? I love your eyes!!" and Hot Boy In Front gave me like the biggest grin ever.

It was so much fun - more like a social experiment than anything (I learned that NOBODY will EVER ask you, I suppose because we're so schooled to be "oh whatever, they're doing their own thing, I won't judge"), and not only did dressing up like an awesome doll make me feel super cute the whole day, it was also so much fun to see how thrilled people get from people dressing up randomly and walking around campus. Catya and I had an epic photoshoot on the columned front of the main building (it was SO FREEZING) and EVERYONE was looking, including a little girl who like ran away when I waved at her. lol.

Tomorrow is Robin Hood and Little John for politics class, photoshoot on the front lawn with the trees, and then GROCERY SHOPPING. It's like a week of flash mobs (even though Friday is the one we've actually planned flash mobs for). I love flash mobs: just people being awesome and happy FOR NO REASON WHATSOVER OTHER THAN BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME. For those unfamiliar with the concept: Wiki tells me it is a large group of people assembling suddenly in a public place, performing an unusual action for a brief time, then dispersing. Some examples:
-designed to attract attention/publicity stunt: flash mob dance of 'Single Ladies' in London. These girls have mad skillz, yo.
-designed to make people awkward: a random one in the middle of a cafteria. Everyone is SO AWKWARD.
-designed to be cool: everyone freezes in Grand Central. (I've done this one before in Toronto, people come RIGHT UP TO YOU.)

And MY FAVOURITE (SO MANY HAPPY TEARS EVERY TIME I WATCH IT), the epic Sound of Music one in the Netherlands.

And long overdue, another KenyaTale: not a comprehensive one this time, but a straight journal entry from May 31st written on the plane from Nairobi to Amsterdam. Apologies for the purple and also the interspersed Bruce lyrics (I get maudlin on recycled airplane air :P). All the KenyaTales are here.

I finally cried. The last few days - the last lorry ride to Nairobi in particular - I had just been trying to soak in as many maize fields as possible, and wondering why my heart wasn't feeling the ache and pull my brain told it it should be. Last night at dinner, I kept catching the waiters' red tunics in the corner of my eye and thinking it was Felix. On the airplane, I looked through all of my pictures while 'Africa' played. I wrote postcard after postcard that dulled the past three weeks to simple sentences I mixed and matched.

I watched 'The Wrestler,' and thought the movie was sad, the dying scene (no pun intended) brought about the Bruce song. I sat and listened to the beautiful, proud, pathetic song and looked across the plane out the blind window, thinking of blue and green maize fields, and I cried.

I cried because I realized that with my iPod, a few more t-shirts, and a new tube of toothpaste, I could have stayed there. I could have. I would have. I felt as if I had finally discovered something better than what makes me the happiest: what I need. All I need. Good, dirty, physical work (hardening muscles under a cloudy sun with cement under your fingernails). Amazing people who make you laugh and think and be (bearded orange laugh and cheeky red swishing blankets). A place that just gives and gives and gives, its heart wide open (mountains of red soil and torn school uniforms stamping out the beat). All the small things and big that fit a rhythm you'd heard before, but not with your eyes open (jostling lorries in rivers of mud and steaming milky chai).

I heard a worn, beautiful voice tell me about one-trick ponies and leaving with less than I had before, and I thought of hte ground streaming away below the plane. I can say right now that this is my life, that this will be my life, without knowing exactly what 'this' is other than only and everything I need.

There are things waiting for me at Pearson - things I like and like having and have been overdue on having for over three weeks now. But I don't need them. I'm scared to go back and need them again, have them again, let them rule me again. I can make you smile when the blood it hits the floor. I miss Africa already. I need Africa. I want to wrestle with this for the rest of my life.

Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

2009-10-25T16:29:50Z

Yesterday I accomplished nothing due to me waking up at 11:00 - I have never slept in that late, but after a week of early mornings and late nights (the late nights being no-one's fault but my own, of course. Or perhaps I could blame internet porn. LOL) I really needed the recharge. I went downtown with A-Dubs to meet Mariya - it was a mini-reunion of the Kenya Crew! We had lunch at La Marche/Richtree (all different states from different parts of the world, too much good food to handle) which in my case was a brunch of Pizza Margherita and Pecan Pie :DDD

And then we went and saw Craig! He was giving a talk as part of the Ottawa Writers' Festival because he and his brother have just finished a book called 'The World Needs Your Kid' about how to raise compassionate and aware children. I love seeing him speak, because he's just SO INTO whatever he's talking about, and it was a speech about what he does, of course, and about what youth can do, but also about his own childhood and how the things parents and teachers and mentors do help shape children who are not - as the Dalai Lama says - "dispassionate bystanders." After he was done there were some very good questions from both the awesome CBC personality/moderator and people in the crowd, including like an 8-year old who STUMPED Craig by asking him if there was one thing more he had not yet acheived that he wanted to in helping children.

When it was over we all lined up to sign things, and Craig is so awesome: he was thrilled to find out the three of us had been to Kenya together (and that we recognized Nbala from his slideshow!!) and asked us what we were doing and we talked about the MOBilizers trying to get started in Ottawa and We Day and it was just so epic because he's amazing and talked to us for quite a while before we snapped a beautiful picture and dashed off. ~~I wanted to give him a haircut, though.~~

Mariyya had a car, and after we discovered she and I both wanted to see 'Where the Wild Things Are' she drove us out to the movie theatre. We hung around in Chapters (you guys. The computers in Chapters have a search function where you can LOOK UP BOOKS THAT WERE ON THE DAILY SHOW) reading books and looking at travelogues and biographies and going to the kid's section to read 'Where the Wild Things Are,' and then we went to Montana's for dinner before going to the movie theatre.

I loved the movie <3333 It was gorgeous and sad and adorable all at once. The main actor was BEAUTIFUL, he was so good! Oh my heaaaart <3 It was an amazing movie: not necessarily FOR kids (it's actually pretty scary for kids, I thought), but about kids and about childhood and about imagination and wanting and oh it was beautiful. The kind of movie that you can write essays about, with the themes and the overlapping between real life, and just the perfect little portal into that world we all once knew. There are funny bits, and scary bits (actually, it probably scared ME more than it scared any of the kids that were there), and sweet bits and sad bits, but it's just a beautiful, beautiful movie.

It was so wonderful to get back together with some people who went to Kenya and talk about things: about Felix, about the other people on our trip, about what more we want to do (Mariyya and A-Dubs are probably going to India with Free the Children this summer) and a lot of the things I don't talk about on a regular basis. I talk about world issues and poverty and Africa a lot, but not about specific experiences or what I remember, and it was great to be with people who knew what it was like. And also they're awesome people - Mariyya and I basically have a giganto list of places we need to travel to together now, haha. And as Mariyya said, "Every time I see Craig I just get reaffirmed once more in what I want to do and what my priorities should be and I feel like I'm on the right track."

WORD. Also I spent wayyyyy too much money yesterday :/ Time to read 'Nichomachean Ethics,' fun times. Also, I saw TWO KIDS yesterday just around Ottawa that were at my school outreach day. Weeeeeird. Pictures from Kenya? YES:

Love is a temple; love is a higher law

2009-10-24T02:13:07Z

Today was the third day this week that I was awake before five o'clock in the morning: this time for a full day of school outreach presentations - my first! I had to get to campus, go to the office, get the buckets, and start a bus journey that lasted over an hour and a half just to get to the school. It was a hassle logistically only because I was alone with two very large rubbermaid bins that were RIDICULOUSLY HEAVY. My computer was in them, as well as sand and rocks. I carried bins of ROCKS through a bus maze during rush hour. I feel I should get a medal. Though because of that (plus waiting 45 minutes for a bus on the way back in the cold and having my arms start legitimately seizing by 5pm) I'm achey all over, I still had a really good day.

I'd forgotten - or maybe discovered - why the hell I signed up to be head of School Outreach in the first place. Even though four back-to-back presentations was very intensive and I had to make a lunchtime dash to find somewhere to buy more cotton balls for the afternoon groups, it was fun! It was fun and it was challenging and I felt good at it! Grade 9 kids aren't usually subtle about letting you know when they're not into something, and I had the rowdies and the noise and the requisite few with one iPod earbud in, but they were so engaged! And man, Grade 9s are smart! I don't give them enough credit, I think: my style of presenting is very much a "can anyone think of why...?" "who can tell me what...?" "what do you think...?" style because if I'm talking just to fill the silence I start blathering and dithering and "uhhh, uhmmmm" because I fail at speaking English coherently. And they really liked that, because if they didn't know the answers they would try to make connections, and they were really eager to prove the things that they knew.

The teacher usually introduced me as "an engineer" and then I had to start off MY schpiel with a bright "I'm actually NOT an engineer {apology squick face} but I hang out with a bunch of them so if you have any questions about engineering I'll probably know the answer!!" and perhaps because of that got quite a few suspicious questions about why was I in the club then, why was it made of engineers if that part didn't matter, and what WAS I studying, anyway? Thus they found out that I spoke Arabic and I was made to demostrate this to the class :| But the one girl who asked was all "omg you don't even have an accent that's awesome!!" so I was :DD

One thing about doing these presentations in a city like Ottawa is that there's a fair portion of the population that was born outside of Canada or whose family was or who has strong ties outside of Canada. Thus when breaking them into country groups I would always get specific "requests":
KIDLET #1: Oh can we be Somalia?
APOLOGETIC COLLINE #1: I'm sorry, I don't have Somalia :(
KIDLET #2: I want to be Korea!
APOLOGETIC COLLINE #2: There is no Korea either :(
KIDLETS #3, #4 & #5: Hey, what about a middle eastern country?
APOLOGETIC COLLINE #3, #4 & #5: I have none :(
KIDLETS: ... why the fuck not.
APOLOGETIC COLLINE: I DON'T KNOOOOOOOW BUT I LOVE YOU ALL.
KIDLET #1: Ethiopia's close enough I guess but I don't want to take it because you're not holding any money so Ethiopia's probably poor.
COLLINE: THAT'S NOT THE POINT OF THE ACTIVITY.

Oh they were wonderful <3 And crazy, and would always try to flirt with me so they could get more materials and called me "Miss" and stole money from the World Bank while smiling like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths and they were all so ADHD and really receptive and I really got comfortable in it and worked in a lot of zing-shots about poverty and why they should care and that the system is effed-up. A few in particular seemed really impacted, and a couple are sending me their email addresses :DD One zing shot in particular?

COLLINE: Around 30 000 people die every single day from water-related diseases like cholera and diarrhoea -
KID: *snorts with laughter*
COLLINE: Yeah, I know it sounds funny ~~because you're an immature 14-year old boy~~, but you know why it seems funny? Because you live in Canada, and getting diarrhoea in Canada isn't anyone's idea of fun, but it won't kill you like it kills these 30 000 people a day. It likely won't be the last thing you ever do. We sometimes think it's funny because it's out of our realm of experience: it's the same thing with sexist jokes, or teasing someone about their accent because their story is not our reality. To us diarrhoea a passing thing of a day, not the biggest killer of children under 5 years old. But for these 30 000 people, that is their reality: that something that is so trivial in Canada can kill them. Something so easy to fix can kill them, just because they're poor and they're not like you.

Yeah, they shut up after that. I may have been slightly less harsh than the above sounds, but that's what I said and you know when you catch peoples' eyes and they say "Oh. Oh, I - Oh. I get it now"? IT'S FUCKING ADDICTING. I kind of like teaching, I think. I can't wait to get better at this. (And I needed this, SORELY, because the logistics and planning and stress of it just gets so consuming and stressful that you need to remind yourself why you wanted to do it in the first place.)
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Sarah, one of the other EWB execs, went as our delegate to the conference our CEO was speaking at. There was a panel about bringing back officer training to campuses, and you know what she did? When they asked for questions, she stood up and told the head of the Canadian Army to look at his panel and around the room and that she challenged him to make women a priority and focus on how to get more women into positions of leadership, because if they want to engage the general public they have to challenge the fact that she was one of the only girls there.

Then she sat back down and the HEAD OF THE CANADIAN ARMY basically offered her his job. No word of a lie. George (our CEO) told Sarah afterwards that if it hadn't been almost over he would have stood up and offered her his seat on the panel. SHE'S MY SUPERHERO, Y'ALL <33333
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I also love Roommate Catya because she and I are doing HALLOWEEK. That's right. SO MANY COSTUMES, EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK. Tuesday we are being Robin Hood (her) and Little John (me; I was going to be Maid Marion but we decided that then EVERYONE will assume we are lesbinic together), Thursday she is being Little Red Riding Hood and I am being nothing because dressing up to sit around the house is lamesauce, Friday ALL OF US are being bowling pins (all in white, with red bands around our foreheads) except for Val who is the bowling ball and we are going to have EPIC FLASHMOBS of her running us down and us scattering out of Politics class and then reenact it all over campus. As for Actual Halloween, Catya and I are going as the Misfit Toys from that Rudolph claymation movie: I am the polka-dotted elephant, and she is King Moonchaser, the lion governor of the island who has epic hair and makeup (seriously, it's such an aamzing costume). We were going to make Nic be the abominable snowman with us but he has decided that Aladdin is cooler. Pffaah.

GUESS WHAT I'M DOING TOMORROW. OH NOTHING. JUST SEEING MY BOYFRIEND CRAIG KIELBURGER. <3333

scalia would disapprove

2009-10-22T16:44:46Z

ETA: sorry about the layout. It's having its time of the month (note: not a metaphor) and I'm trying to fix it, but it's either this or photobucket stuff all over the place. Just add ?style=mine to the end of the URL (if the URL already has a ?, put &style=mine instead) to view the entry in your own, less effed-up, style.

it's my 1000th entry shit yeah that's like one thousand entries or something, i don't know

You know what that means. Oh yeah.

OH YEAH.

PARTY POST! LET'S KNOCK THIS PLACE DOWN.

Why? Because one thousand is a lot.

ACCEPTABLE WAYS TO PARTY:
-FUNNY PICTURES
-CAPS LOCK
-WRITE ME THINGS
-TALK ABOUT ADAM FUCKING LAMBERT. OH MY GOD LOLL
-LINK TO PARTY MUSIC
-ROCK OUT
-PORN
-LEAVE ONE-WORD OR INCOMPREHENSIBLE OR LATIN COMMENTS JUST TO USE ICONS YOU NEVER GET TO USE
-IDK WE CAN PLAY GAMES OR JUST TALK ABOUT HOW AWESOME Y'ALL ARE OR HOW DELICIOUS APPLESAUCE IS OR SOME SHIT
-This would also be acceptable

So yeah. This LJ is almost four years old, or 1399 days, which means that there has been approximately one entry every 1.4 days. I'm torn between being impressed, alarmed, and very skeptical about my math skills. I got it on a snow day in December of Grade 10, a few days before Christmas, and have basically non-stop since then been projectile word vomiting all over the place, in both constructive ways and not. I really like LJ: I like having a journal, I like reading old entries and being able to remember little things that happened and big ways I felt about things. But I like people telling me what they think, and meeting awesome people from around the world and finding things in common with them and being goofy and being serious and learning from what I'm going to assume is the smartest and craziest flist ever. Though of course my frame of reference is limited.

Obvs my life is not that exciting, but there have still been a few things that have happened in my life, I suppose: having an exchange student that was manic/depressive; living in Belgium for two months; being editor of a school newspaper; acting in plays; going to university; going to Kenya(!). And other things, less events than processes: a slow evolution of learning more about the world and wanting to help it; finding a purpose; making mistakes.

Reading through a few of the entries I’ve made, it’s been getting more and more obvious how much I’ve matured, even in the last year. In Grade 12 I thought I was the smartest thing since Einstein, but when I read what I wrote, the way I wrote, what I thought, I find myself wanting to say “oh honey, you don’t even know.” Even entries from last year show me how much of a – well, an idiot – I’ve been and am capable of being. And I’m sure I’ll say the same thing next year looking back at things I’m writing now. One of the things I love about this is having a document of the things I’ve done, sure, and fun things that have happened, but it also allows me to watch myself over the years from two-sentence entries about going skiing for the weekend to dashed-out and self-absorbed entries about being busy and not knowing what I want, to what I do now. It allows me to remember and document things of wonder I might not otherwise keep in my brain, but it also lets me chart my progress as a girl, as a person who’s learning how to think and might not be very good at it yet, but is changing and thinking more and in different ways and about different things.

So yeah. That's pretty cool. I mean, I'm a fan.

HIGHLIGHTS/FAVOURITE ENTRIES:
-Wonderwall
-hailing a taxicab
-coming back from Africa
-that time I wrote kanye west poetry
-my totally awesome history professor
-a few typical entries: being mistake for the Irish and living my life in a lump sum

MAJOR TURNING POINTS/MOMENTS IN TIME:
-whoa there james joyce
-We regret to inform you (Columbia) : I’ve grown up a lot since then, and learned a lot since then. I don't look at the experience the same way now, but this was probably the first time I tried for something and wanted something, but didn't get it, and was able to learn from that.
-Coming Back from Belgium
-Wasting time in High School : oh, high school and high school self
-Making High School Count : brick by brick and my decision to actually DO SOMETHING about the issues I cared about. Basically the first step that got me to where I am now.

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT, SO YOU CAN ALL LAUGH AT HOW PROFOUND 15-YEAR OLD ME THOUGHT SHE WAS, HERE IS MY VERY FIRST ENTRY.

INDULGE ME. TELL ME WHAT YOU REMEMBER: SPECIFIC ENTRIES, THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED HERE, A CONVERSATION WE’VE HAD, TAGS.

QUOTES, aka REASONS I LOVE MY FRIENDS:
“I also got this amazing idea while watching it for a retelling of the whole 'Santa' thing, like you make Santa this miserable, drug-addled guy, and the elves are his enslavers and there's this rigourous class system, and Rudolph is an outcast and goes into the woods and joins this, like, Communist gang and there's guerilla and OMG IT WOULD BE SO HARD-CORE.”
-
DOUG: Really. *Really* Colline, you don't know what a 'brah' is?
COLLINE: It's not my fault, I live in the woods!
-
Z: What songs can we sing that everyone knows?
SIMON: Anyone know any Beatles songs?
Z: I think 'My Humps' would make a great singalong.
COLLINE: What about 'Baby Got Back'?
Z: We should fix it, though: I like big brains and I can't deny... uhm... when a girl walks in with a lot of knowledge...
COLLINE: You get INSPIRED!
-
KARLEE: All I'm saying is that an orgasm is an orgasm.
COLLINE: I have 4 words for you: Pictures. Of. Anderson. Cooper.
-
COLLINE'S BRAIN: "Student?" You are not a student. You are DONE WITH THAT SH*T. Frankly, you were done with that months ago. Haha, look, Jon Stewart videos. Wanna go dancing? I don't even know what a topic sentence LOOKS like! wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
-
COLLINE: Hey! You've got loads of checkmarks! Where are my checkmarks? WHY DON'T I HAVE ANY CHECKMARKS?
JEREMY: Your checkmarks are implied.

Party forth!

Geological Time

2009-10-20T21:08:54Z

Last night I pulled my first-ever all-nighter in an attempt to write my theory paper for International Relations, which was a success in that I managed to remain relatively awake, got three hours' sleep and am sure there are no spelling mistakes. Other than that it's anyone's guess because I stayed up with Catya, whose essay was definitely much more in-line with what I think the prof wants than mine is. But I'm still not in any kind of state to speculate about whether mine was or was not good, lol.

I'm feeling pretty horrible for having dropped the ball on some EWB stuff - I had to confirm some presentations (five of them in one day at the same school this Thursday) before I held the volunteer training sessions, and I put off investigating car rentals until today (to be fair to myself, the only time I could have done it would have been before last Friday, but I still should have done it earlier) only to find out that EVEN WITH a copy of my parents' insurance and EVEN WITH the university's corporate account and insurance policy, I still have no possible way to rent a car because I'm under 21. Which not only puts me in the unfortunate position of having to cancel a rather large committment only two days before, but means that I will personally be unable to facilitate or even book any presentations outside the immediate downtown area or bus range for this year. We could eventually get a volunteer who has access to a car, but since this year all the booking seem to be large-scale, I feel that's an unfair thing to ask of someone to dedicate an entire day of their time and use their car when they're just getting involved. I feel pretty unprofessional about it - thankfully Mama Hen is being awesome about it and talking about 'identifying root causes' (ohhhhhh EWB). ~~I can't even be happy about having my Thursday back yet~~ okay so now they're renting a shuttle to drive me out there? IDEK. And I have to cancel my Friday appointment with the faculty to do presentations then, too. :( :( I WANTED THIS TO BE FUN, WTH.

I'd arrived at the conclusion that I wasn't going to apply for the Junior Fellowship (summer volunteer position with EWB in development sectors in Africa) - I'm going to be starting a new semester and changing programs so I have a lot of personal introspection already going on, EWB is already more than I can handle time-wise, the craziness it would bring to me and my belief that even if I were somehow miraculously to get it, I wouldn't do a very good job. But our current Junior Fellow (who I've been communicating regularly with, and am one of the only members of our chapter to do so) sent me the following email:

"Dude. Tell me you're applying for JF. 'Nuff said."

So. There goes that, I guess. (!) :/

I'm still reading The World Without Us - it's taking me a long time since I only get to read little snippets on the bus every once in a while (and, uh, during IR class) - and I'm currently reading about all the nuclear reactors, power plants, uranium, and all the other crazy toxic chemical stuff being held all over the world, and it was shocking and almost terrifying to hear about all the unnatural things we've created, the averse effects they've had on the environment already, and how we're using things we have no idea what to do with and how most of this stuff is going to be with us forever. FOREVER. GEOLOGICAL TIME.

"Until 1989, the United States made plutonium detonators for atomic weapons at Rocky Flats with somewhat less than a lawful regard for safety. For years, thousands of drums of cutting oil saturated with plutonium and uranium were stacked outside on bare ground. When someone finally noticed they were leaking, asphalt was poured over the evidence. Radioactive runoff at Rocky Flats frequently reached local streams; cement was swirled into radioactive sludge in absurd attempts to try to slow seepage from cracked evaporation ponds; and radiation periodically escaped into the air."

"The Rocky Flats asphalt where drums of radioactive oil spilled was also scraped and shipped to South Carolina, along with three feet of soil. More than half its 800 structures were razed, including the infamous 'Infinity Room,' where contamination levels rose higher than instruments could measure."

(about Rocky Mountain Arsenal, another plant that made mustard and nerve gas): "its core was once called the most contaminated square mile on Earth [...] that required draining and sealing an Arsenal lake where ducks once died moments after landing, and where the bottoms of aluminum boats sent to fetch their carcasses rotted within a month. Although the plan is to treat and monitor toxic groundwater plumes for another century until they're considered safely diluted, today mule deer big as elk find asylum where humans once feared to tread."

(continued from above) "A century, however, would make little difference to uranium and plutonium residues whose half-lives start at 24 000 years and keep going. The weapons-grade plutonium from Rocky Flats was shipped to South Carolina [...] where two huge buildings are so contaminated that no one knows how they might be decommissioned, high-level nuclear waste is now melted in furnaces with glass beads. When poured into stainless steel containers, it turns into solid blocks of radioactive glass [...] Glass being one of our simplest, most durable creations, these hot glass bricks may be among the longest-lasting of all human creations. One day, should power go off permanently, a chamber full of decaying, glass-embedded radioactive material would get steadily warmer, with shattering results."

It was incredibly to disturbing to learn a lot of this stuff - I admittedly don't know a whole lot about the production of energy or how these plants operate or just how dangerous they are, and it was shocking to learn. It's probably because it isn't my career or field o study, but I cannot imagine every creating or being around some of the things the book talks about, let alone having to deal with so much danger of explosion and utter catastrophe - some things seem to me to be almost too powerful for us to try to handle (ESPECIALLY when we don't know what to do with its waste).

The book also talks about what's left of Rocky Flats: things too hot to move that were covered with concrete and where the US Dep. of Energy is legally required to dissuade anyone from coming too close for the next 10 000 years. What was interesting about this was how they mention that because language changes so fast (in 600 years becoming close to incomprehensible) they were at a loss as to how to do this, but just ended up putting it in six languages and pictures on a giant slab of stone.

I am so glad I'm reading this book, because it's not just about one thing: I'm learning a lot about different issues, and it makes you think and consider and ponder, like, 18 different issues per chapter. Oh reading, what would I do without you.

I am really enjoying my Political Philosophy AKA Socrates class, mainly because of the prof who is SO BIZARRE and yet SO AMAZING and I just cannot get a handle on who he is and it bothers me (TONGUE RING?!?). There have been a few moments in that class recently...

PROF: but Plato distinguished between real and unreal pleasures. He says that what we think of as pleasure is really just relief from pain: eating is a relief from the pain of hunger.
STUDENT #1: But what about sex? There's no real opposite to that, so it would discount his theory, right?
PROF: True. It's like tickling, you know, a kind of purely physical thing.
CLASS: That's not what you really mean.
STUDENT #2: But wouldn't sex just be the relief of the pain of being horny?
CLASS: ...
CLASS: *uproarious laughter*
PROF: That makes sense. You've got an itch, you gotta scratch it, I guess. I'd never thought about it that way.
~~JOE WILSON~~ CLASS: You lie!
CLASS: ... and what do you mean, you guess?
PROF: So this is awesome. I'm going to move on.

MORE QUOTES FROM PROF OF GEEKY MYSTERY:
PROF: There was also Pythagorus, who we all know as our dear friend rom lousy high school math classes.
PROF: People who like shiny things like democracy.
PROF: *pauses* Do I smell a candle? Or am I having some kind of stroke?
PROF: You can tell this is older - these are dated fonts. (it's like, Garamond. lol)
PROF: Being a prisoner is rarely the best thing you can be in a society.
PROF: It's not like I spend any of my time outside, I don't know why I'm so excited.

BURZ: Do you think he uses ancient greek pick-up lines?
COLLINE: This ain't a material reflection, baby... it's a true form.
BURZ: You and I would make only gold-souled children.

Now, in Links I Have Stolen From everysecondtues :
-An amazing picspam of women farmers around the world, with a link to an op-ed by Hillary Clinton about global food security (OP has a note about the view of farming internationally as a predominantly male vocation, though the reality is the exact opposite).
-To mock, or not to mock? The problem with poking fun at mistranslations between English and asian languages.
-A boy's life: transgendered children. I posted this article last year, and while it is a bit long, my roommates and I were discussing it the other night so I thought I'd post it again, since it's still very interesting and thought-provoking.

Off to finish answering EWB emails, ~~read new fic~~, and fill out applications! And then sleep. SLEEEEEEEEEP.

feel free to tell me to leave your flist alone, lol

2009-10-18T18:22:26Z

View Poll: This is a tag about tagging

How can we be so heartless? (we're nihilists!) How can we be so heaaaartless?

2009-10-18T18:12:04Z

I baked a scone today (and thus got into a pronounciation debate; mostly because I apparently also pronounce basil and cumin oddly). My roommates are continually amazed at the number of things I make "from scratch." I started to say "how else am I supposed to make it? I don't think they make instant scones-" but then I realized that I live in North America, and thus any thoughts that begin "they don't make instant ___" are foolish and untrue.

This is why I like going to grocery stores whenever I visit the States. Spray cheese in a can! Baconnaise! Oh it is endlessly amusing what you/we eat. Val and I also examined our jam jars closely to see whose had the least chemicals (I win muahahaha!), and were amused that the jars basically said "this is not a significant source of, well... anything, really."

I used to say I couldn't cook, and I still like to joke about it, but I've been realizing that's not exactly true. Or it is, but not to the extent I've always believed. If I can make awesome spaghetti sauce from scratch, I don't think I can claim FAIL status anymore - as I once did, hoping that Craig Kielburger would really like carrot cake. I still don't really like it, especially in our small kitchen, where all preparation, cooking, and eating is done on the kitchen table amid plates and newspapers and computers and chaos (especially when baking from scratch, which requires like a kajillion incredients). However, I have had successes, including winning a prize for raspberry jam tarts on Pi Day (homggggg Pi Day) - which, admittedly, was won more for my dorkitude of putting the Pi symbol on each one, but still! I think it counts. And now thanks to jessica_june I have a failsafe cupcake (and icing!) recipe (though I have been informed by the roommates that it is necessary to put food colouring in the icing because it otherwise "looks like someone jizzed on a cupcake"). Admittedly my strengths are mostly limited to desserts and sauces, but it will come, I suppose.
-----------
My roommate Nic is off to Montreal for a SOLAR PHYSICS CONFERENCE. We were like a bunch of proud mamas, all "have fun!!" and waving him off (poor fellow. It's his fault for living with five ~~crazy feminists who revolutionize the way he views the world~~ girls). Seriously though, solar physics? Buddy's a genius.

CATYA: When I came out of the shower I just stood for like ten minutes in front of Nic's room because he was listening to the most beautiful piano music. I was going to ask him what it was - I just had to know - but. Well. I was wearing a towel.
COLLINE: I know. I keep forgetting he's a boy.

NIC: This seems to be a constant theme in our house.
COLLINE: What does?
NIC: The smell of tacos.

WHY HAVE I NOT COME UP WITH A LEGIT TAG FOR THIS HOUSEHOLD YET? NEXT POST'S A POLL ON THE SUBJECT, I SWEAR.

And because I'm now addicted to Hugo Chavez "singing" and it makes me a nerdy sort of happy, I present to you the news, auto-tuned. As soon as Obama starts singing I just... lol forever. And Keef. It's dumb, but it made me laugh.

In Which No Ass Is Gotten Off Of

2009-10-17T21:35:52Z

I have wasted a rather spectacular amount of time this week - Thursday was meant to be Figure Out My Life day, but apparently you have to make appointments far in advance to talk to the Faculty, so I'm going back next Friday; I had a meeting with the Faculty of Engineering for EWB, and spent the rest of the afternoon... well, I don't really remember. Friday I spent most of the day on campus even though there were no classes, giving presentations for EWB. After all my scrambling to get French presenters, only two people came to the French presentation, and only four to the English presentation. :( It's nobody's fault, but it's still kind of disappointing.

What was cool about the presentation was that it was in a legit classroom/auditorium in the Engineering building, which is all new and fancy and big. I was wearing clicky-boots, and using a GIANT-ASS SCREEN and a remote, and a prof gave me a microphone to wear, one of the ones you clip on. I didn't end up using it because I didn't need to (and it's sort of hard to have it hanging off a dress, lol), but it was really cool. I felt all *~grown-up~* and *~professorial~* and *~authoritative~* in such a big classrom where my boots made echoing noises and... well, it was a cool feeling XDD

Last night it was Coyote's birthday, so we all headed over to his house and then downtown. I was kind of 'eh' on the bar (other than them playing 'Single Ladies' and Catya dragging me to the bar and us ROCKING THE F*** OUT) until the live band came out, and then it was EPIC. The band was really great; since it was for a dance floor, they were playing songs everyone knew, but AWESOME songs (Semi-Charmed Life, MGMT, The Fratellis). Catya manoeuvred us to stand in front of this GIANT FAN so our hair was blowing everywhere and we knew ALL THE WORDS and Stefan was so excited to hear every single song. Oh it was epic.

Today I slept in, rushed to campus in order to get to GoENG Girl, but as soon as I got there, Polly said 'I hope you brought your homework.' It was DEAD, apparently the big rush of people was in the morning and they were all in workshops so we were just chilling out. I was kind of angry that they hadn't let me know and just told me not to bother coming in, especially as I don't exactly live close to campus. Not to be helped, and it was nice to see Polly, but it was kind of a waste of time. I wasted more time at the library not writing my essay, and then at the grocery store. It's 5:30 and I haven't even started the exercise for Research Methods that's due on Monday, or the Politics paper that's due on Tuesday. I've been lazy and apathetic towards assignments before, but these ones are just... they're USELESS ASSIGNMENTS. The essay is just 'take two theories from the textbook and explain them to me.' Basically it's an exercise in 'how well can you use a thesaurus to rewrite the textbook?' And the RM one is all about variables and constants, shit I learned about in GRADE FREAKING SEVEN. Any coincidence that the same prof is teaching both courses, and they both suck? I am so over this semester, and I don't like that feeling. At ALL :(

I was expressing my frustration at the textbook (the chapter on Constructivism, which I'm guessing is new, is FULL of typos and the author keeps using 'I' randomly and not backing himself up and it's annoying and unprofessional at the same time) with one of the new members of EWB, who did his first degree in English and PoliSci.

NEWB: Was it written by Collins? I bet it was. If you ever hear anyone complaining about a PoliSci text, Collins wrote it.

I need to get over my ugh-school mood ASAP or I'm going to end up losing my scholarship or losing resolve altogether - I guess I've gotten used to enjoying what I study, and being substantially busier this year than last is meaning that I haven't done a single reading in... I'd say over two weeks now :/ SELF, GET OVER YOURSELF. LOVE, SELF.
---------------
I learned today from The World Without Us that on the DMZ between North and South Korea, 'large loudspeakers atop South Korea's positions have blasted regular insults, military anthems, and even strident themes like the William Tell Overture across the divide.'

WHAT?! LOL. That's amazing. Like two kids in the backseat of the car trying to piss each other off by humming loudly or putting their fingers slightly on the others' "side." LOL X A MILLION. Way to stay classy, S Korea. I like it.
---------------
I am ridiculously excited for Toy Story 3. Honestly, I hate sequels but those movies are so good and just <33333 I can't believe I was only 9 years old when the last one came out, especially since I can remember it so well.
I really want to see The Men Who Stare At Goats, lol. History geekiness+comedy+George Clooney? YES??!
Also, even though I never read Where The Wild Things Are, every review and preview and glimpse I've gotten of it is just making me need to see it more.

have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?

2009-10-15T03:17:46Z

So I have come to the conclusion that I don't really know how to deal with stress. This seems odd to me, as this is not the first time I've been stressed, and I'm obviously still here and ~~mostly~~ sane, so I've obviously dealt with it (after a fashion, at least) before in a somewhat-satisfactory method. But I think I just suck at it, if the past 2-3 days are any indication (sobbing, making like 18 private LJ entries using my rage icons, and eating vast quantities of food are Not Very Helpful Coping Mechanisms, Ever). Like, not only am I just not the kind of person who knows what to do, but it doesn't seem to be something I'm learning particularly well, since I KEEP GETTING STRESSED and then I KEEP BOTTLING IT and then I KEEP BURSTING INTO TEARS ALL THE TIME AND ALARMING PEOPLE.

Well, okay. Slight exaggeration. Not all time. Just during the exec meeting, and then while walking across campus, and then again after a phone conversation.
CHRIS: I think you need to go do something not stressful right now.
COLLINE: Can I fall asleep on the office couch?
CHRIS: Yes.
COLLINE: *does not fall asleep, but decides to do inventory instead*

I am now at the point where I can critically examine my stress, and not just... well, stress about it. And blame it on me just generally being an emotional person, or not hating disappointing people, or having some kind of VORACIOUS APPETITE for signing up for EVERYTHING EVER, but when things blow up am I not particularly good at just dealing with the issue.

The issue of the past couple days has been 1/2 EWB/School Outreach, 1/2 Life Plans/University/Homework, and a little bit of everything happening at the same time. Today? I had two midterm exams. Neither of which I got to study for. Which has never happened to me before: if I haven't studied for a test, it's been because I decided to play Sims2 instead, not because I genuinely had no time in which to do it. I haven't done a class reading in over two weeks, and I'm a little unsure of what exactly catching-up strategies are. You think I'd have figured that out by now. Guess not.

Thankfully the S.O. stuff is seeming more manageable this evening (BARELY), or at least I have some sort of plan for the next two weeks. And my tear ducts seem to have stopped going off every time I open my School Outreach email inbox. I wish I could direct this into some kind of piano-playing, kick-boxing whirlwind of emotion-siphoning, but I have a feeling I'm not that kind of person, either. So at this point my strategy is 'Man Up, Work Harder, Cry Less ~~In Front Of People~~.' Let's give that a whirl.
---------
Mission: deal with stress and get back to being 100% happy in a maximum three-day period, if only because I am *NOT* making my 1000th post a whine-fest, dammit!

Side note: Saturday I get to volunteer at GoENG Girl, an awesome conference/thing trying to promote Engineering (or even just math and science) to girls in Grades 7-11 at which one of my awesome presidents is speaking. Considering only like 10% of our university's ENG students are girls and that the faculty doesn't even sell ENG clothing in girl's sizes, I'm thinking it's an awesome event; it's hard to want to go into something like that or stay in something like that if it's an All Boys' Club (and ENG culture at Canadian universities is INSANE, it's very male-dominated). Even though I'm just Being There all day, I'm super psyched for it because it will be Smart Girls Being Awesome All The Time, basically. And Also Proving Larry Summers Wrong (because Larry Summers is a Super-Huge Dickface, and I don't care who knows it).

To shamelessly steal from Neil Gaiman...

2009-10-10T19:54:04Z

If you were wondering

what kind of day it was

it was this kind of day.

a stick! a stick! there never was such a stick.

om nom nom i loves my stick.

please throw us the stick. (look at their plaintive leetle faces)

This morning the sky was a brilliant blue, the moon was still visible, and all the leaves around our house were shaking orange out of them. I drove back from town with my windows slightly down, playing the Regina Spektor cd I bought on Thanksgiving two years ago. The road to my house was a gold canopy that sent magpies and small swallows flying out from the car’s wheels and the road’s ditches to lead the way through. Over the music I could hear the flutter and clatter of dry leaves disturbed by the car’s wheels. Our house is full of the smell of bread and cinnamon, and the puppies are dashing through the bushes, sending leaves flying.

I love fall <3
I love scarves and jackets and bright sun. And pumpkin pie and apple pie and cherry pie and stuffing. And orange leaves and red leaves and yellow leaves. And dogs that go swimming in the swamp. And sisters that go swimming in the swamp. And apples. And corn on the cob. And pumpkins. And pumpkin lights in the window. And cousins who visit from New York. And apple dumplings. And beautiful fall days.

Tell me what you love about fall.

Fall music:
-everything from ‘Begin to Hope,’ by Regina Spektor (but especially ‘Hotel Song’ and ‘On the Radio’)
-Working on a Dream, by Bruce Springsteen
-Drugstar, by Indochine
-Her Morning Elegance, by Oren Lavie
-Holland 1945, by Neutral Milk Hotel
-Hoodoo Voodoo by Billy Bragg & Wilco
-All Soul’s Night, by Loreena McKennitt
-No Rain, by Blind Melon
-Love You ‘Til the End, by the Pogues
-Je L'aime a Mourir, by Francis Cabrel
-Two Faces, by Bruce Springsteen

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving <3

The Collapse of Quebecois Bridges

2009-10-08T16:08:48Z

I'm trying to use today to prepare for next Wednesday's EWB meeting, when I have to train people how to lead School Outreach workshops (brief background: this year I am one of the VPs for my Engineers Without Borders chapter, and head of School Outreach. That means that I am in charge of advertising, booking, organising, and presenting a variety of workshops and presentations designed to get high school students engaged in international development and poverty issues [as well as engineering as a possible outlet to creating change]. We have 3 main presentations: Water for the World [about global water systems, issues around water conservation and access to water], Food for Thought [about the global food system, global hunger and food/resource inequality], and Energy Matters [about rural energy systems, different kinds of energy, and how electricity and energy relates to development]. My goal for this year is to establish a solid base of volunteers and presentors, which means attracting and recruiting them, training them, keeping them engaged and involved, and booking presentations for them. I'm trying to do this for our French and English sectors, which has gotten more difficult since my Director for the French presentations mysteriously disappeared). And I'm slowly freaking out about it.

Mostly because I already have presentations booked; not a problem, because most of those I can just present myself and it's not a big deal, but we have two coming up next Friday for all the Grade 12s that will be visiting the school, and one of those is in French AND I HAVE NO FRENCH PRESENTORS. No experienced ones whatsoever. Ahhhhhh. IT'S NEXT FRIDAY. And even if there are interested and competent people who come out to the training session next Wednesday, that's only two days before so there's no way they would be ready or comfortable and I'm not throwing anyone into that situation. I have a few email addresses, but it's still very alarming. NOT TO MENTION LAST NIGHT, when Hart told me to "not freak out" and then showed me an email from the faculty wanting us to do an all-day event for 150 students. NEXT WEEK.

Uhm, no. Thankfully Hart agreed with me that we didn't have the time or the resources (or the time to GET the resources), but now they're trying to book it for two weeks away and that's still too soon and I'm freaking out because I can't do that. I just -- I can't. I would need SO MANY volunteers that I just don't have... okay actually I'm looking at it again and if it's on a Thursday I'll just do the whole thing, I can probably get a few volunteers, it'll be okay, but... ahhhhhh. Crazy. I think I really underestimated the amount of time this would take. Not to mention that it's not like I'm old hat at these presentations EITHER. ~~I can't effing do public speaking, what is this? How the **** am I supposed to inspire Grade 8s? What is this?~~

</freakout>

Never mind. I've got it covered. I can do this. Fight fight kill.

I'm also fairly sure now that I'm not going to apply for the JF. I'm going to do the application process, but I know that in the slim event I were actually chosen, I would not be ready. Since I just figured out that I'm going to have to stay at university for five years, that gives me a few more summers to try my hand. We had a big meeting/presentation on the overseas stuff last night and it was incredibly inspiring and invigorating and awesome. I stayed behind afterwards to talk with one of our new members, a very awesome fellow from Out West who did his undergrad in English/PoliSc, and is now getting a second degree in Civil Engineering. We had a great conversation about politicization/americanization of universities, riding bikes in the cities, people getting sued, and how bridges in Quebec always seem to be falling down. He also mentioned his fiancé (second 'e' not there for a reason, ahuhuhuhu), and idk what it is, but whenever people talk about 'my fiance' and get all happy and goofy about it like they just still like saying the word, it makes me 15 different kinds of happy and squishy for them.

By the end of it, though, I was literally hopping from foot to foot, I had to go to the washroom so bad. I know this is TMI, but I was - no hyperbole, no word of a lie - doing the dance that four-year-olds do and he didn't notice. Lol. I got home and had a dinner of cake (I have awesome roommates) at 10:45 pm (such is my life). I also found a lovely package on the kitchen table!

CATYA: So you got a package! I'm sorry, it's been in my mouth. I bit it. I was trying to carry a lot of things inside. Then I saw that it came all the way from Thailand and I really don't want to know what it's touched along the way. So I regret that.

It was indeed from Thailand, because Kaz is awesome. The jewellery! The earrings with little giraffes ~~that I managed to break don't worry about it I'm just stupid, I'm going to find some glue~~! The green tea! The cat purse! All the postcards! And the gorgeous cabochon ring... there is a funny story about that. I was just so pleased to see it that I picked it up and shoved it on my middle finger to admire. And then I realized that it felt a little tight. And that it would probably be better on another finger. Alas, the ring decided it liked where it was and that it did not wish to come off. Ever. I spent fifteen minutes and nearly half the butter we had trying to get that thing off. I was sort of panicky at that point, thinking it was going to have to get cut off, but it did (eventually) come off, and now I have a very swollen finger. But now I know that the ring is going to go on a different finger.

CATYA: So I've decided that you and I are going to have hardcore workouts this year.
COLLINE: And why have you decided this?
CATYA: Because you're a tank.
COLLINE: Owie. My finger hurts.

It is 12:00. I have put on Real Person Pants (by which I mean a skirt) for the day, but am still in my pyjama shirt and the school outreach planning scared me so I think I shall take a break even though I have not officially started. ~~Pff, semantics.~~ And then back into the fray. *crosses fingers*

Major and Minor

2009-10-07T01:14:35Z

ETA: YOU GUYS. LOOK AT THIS JACKET. LOOK AT ALL THE PUNS IN THE DESCRIPTION. ~~I must have it~~. Lol, my nerd is going overboard here, I love modcloth. (For those who do not understand, look up the song 'Holland, 1945' by Neutral Milk Hotel and then understand that Stephen Colbert has good and weird taste and that the song is about ANNE FRANK, and then twig out nerdily at how awesome modcloth is.) That is all.
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I know this is posting overload (well... not really) and I have an essay to edit and Arabic drills to do, but I've been trawling through the university's website and planning my sparkly *~ALTERNATE MAJOR CHOICE~*, and I have come to three options:

1) Major in English; Minors in Political Science and United States Studies (or Arabic, but most likely US Studies). Surprise! I know the US thing is random, but a lot of the courses look super interesting, it's relevant, and frankly I'm really interested in a lot of the history, culture, politics, etc. ~~And it would give me an excuse to justify RBR and my Politispam pictures folder as 'studying'~~. The minor in PoliSci is to keep a lot of the courses I've already taken as valid credit requirements, but also because it will allow me to take a lot of interesting courses (Politics of Foreign Aid! Modern Slavery! ... I feel really bad putting exclamation marks next to those, actually) that will be Relevant and Useful - it also skips the boring requirements for a major and I can drop my boring-ass Research Methods class.

Downside: if I consider the credits I require and the credits I've already got, and if I'm able to get into the right courses for next semester (aka start taking this major in January), then all things considered I'm 5 courses short of graduating. I could fix that by taking more courses per semester, taking courses in the summer, or staying one extra semester (since it would be one semester exactly). I don't really want to stay behind the extra semester (I want to graduate in the spring, when it's sunny and all my friends are there and we're together. Shallow, but I want it), but I could work it out.

The courses I would be taking:
United States Studies:
Politics in the United States, History: the Colonial Era, History: 1776-1865, Critical and Historical Perspectives of US Foreign Policy, Selected Topics in United States Studies: socio-political issues, American Poetry of the 20th Century, American Fiction of the 19th Century, Intro to American Literature, Economic Dimensions of US-Canada Relations (shut up, I'm a nerd), and Selected Topics in US History.

Political Science: (4 requirements would already be covered; two I'm taking this semester, and two of the US ones)
Understanding Politics (blarg. A first-year course even more basic than the one I took last year. I'm thinking I could test out, or take this one in the summer), Comparative Politics of Development, African Politics (or Politics of the Middle East and the Arab World), Politics of Foreign Aid, Political Economics of Development, International Political Economy

English: (one requirement would already be covered from the US minor)
Literature and Composition: English Lit before 1700 (Advanced), Literature & Composition: English Lit since 1700 (Advanced), Intro to Canadian Literature, Jacobean Shakespeare, Sixteenth-Century Literature, Seventeenth Century Literature, Modern British Literature, Victorian Literature, Eigtheenth-Century Literature (or Romantic Literature), Shakespeare Seminar I (!!!!!), Shakespeare Seminar II (or a seminar in one of the other courses, not sure if they'd let me take two lol)

1) Major in English; Minor in Political Science. By having only one major, I allow the courses I've already taken to fill in as 'electives.' This way I graduate on time.

Downside: All told, I could graduate on time with room for two electives. Kind of a bummer, since I love me my electives, but since most of the electives I want to take are English ones anyway, not too much of a loss. Or I could do the extra courses/summer courses/extra semester thing and just take more electives. I also included credits for the three more Arabic language courses I'm going to take - I could stop taking Arabic and take more electives, but I feel like that would be a waste, and I really want to continue with it.

Courses- basically the same as above minus the US Studies ones, and plus the following two electives:
Jacobean Shakespeare and probably one of the US history courses (or an African history course)

3) Major in Political Science; Minor in English (and a bunch of electives; or a United States Studies minor; or an Arabic minor). This would mean that I get to take 3 options even if I got a minor and still graduate on time. The amount and variety of English courses I get to take is still a lot - at this point I really do think I would be happy with a minor or a major (the difference between the two really is only four courses) in English, and this would probably prepare me more for my *~Chosen Career Path~*. I'm not sure whether this or #1 is more attractive at this point.

Downside: I have to take boring Canadian Politics courses *snozzzzzzz* and a few other Intro to Modern Thought etc ones (but considering that I don't even know what those *are*, that could be good or bad).

Kind of weird to figure out, since I was expecting switching majors halfway through to put me at more of a loss, but since I'm not COMPLETELY switching (to, like, Biology or whatever) a few of my courses still count. Well, okay, two of them. But still. I consider that a success. And all of these would mean officially dropping French from my program; unless I kept the French Immersion, which is kind of scary but would also be very useful.

Still not entirely sure I want to do this. Eeeeeeeee. I mean, now that I've planned it out it doesn't feel all that different from my original degree (minus the boring requirements and the French, plus a few lit and history courses), and I feel like Bachelor of Arts: Major in English, Minor in Political Science is just not as shiny as International Studies and Modern Languages, at least for the field I want (where languages are such an asset... I mean, I can still *say* I speak competent French and basic Arabic, but having the degree to back that up is quite another thing). On the other hand, it's more versatile, and more open in terms of applying for grad schools (according to Burz, the program I'm in now is already too specialized for a lot of grad programs).
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Today I had an EWB meeting with someone from National Office (our awesome chapter buddy); it was really fun actually. He's a great guy, and it felt like just chatting, but it was about EWB and overseas stuff and plans for School Outreach (and further plans for advocacy). It made me start thinking about seriously (as opposed to just Far Off In My Mind) applying for the Junior Fellowship (JF) position: months of intensive preparation and ID studies followed by 4 months in Malawi/Zambia/Ghana doing ID work in agriculture/water & sanitation/good governance/infrastructure followed by months of advocacy back in Canada. It's very unstructured, very intensive, and VERY challenging. I'm not entirely sure if I should attempt it this year: I'm almost certain I wouldn't get the position just because I'm only in second year and I feel confident that I don't have the knowledge base or the maturity (lollllllllllllz) to do it yet, and if I *did* happen to get it, all the self-discovery that would come with that plus all the 'agh life! agh future!' problems I'm having with school would probably not mix in an unstressful fashion. But I still really want to do it, this summer or a future one. I have also been examining my options for next summer:

1) A full-summer intensive program/internship. Ones I am considering applying for (but which I am fairly certain I wouldn't get - that's not me fishing for compliments, that's me being realistic): Internship at the Canadian Embassy in DC (!), Editing Internship for National Geographic, Free the Children Internship, EWB Junior Fellowship - Suggest me another one? Please? I wouldn't make any money, but I would get to travel and learn COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF SHIT.

2) Spent the first 5 weeks in an Arabic Immersion Scholarship in Tunisia with the university, and either come back and work or spend several weeks in J'Explore, a French Immersion Scholarship someplace random in Canada (paid for by the government, hellz yeah). I wouldn't make any money, but it would help augment the languages (which I reaaaaaaaaally need, especially in French, ESPECIALLY if I'm considering dropping it from my official studies) and it would be fun and I'd get to travel and make COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF NEW FRIENDS and take COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF PICTURES WITH SCENERY IN THEM.

3) Go home to Muskoka and spend the summer working and doing another Shakespeare play with Robin. I could theoretically do the Tunisia thing and THEN go home; I would either work at the Toy Store again (easy, I know it), or I could work in a restaurant (more hours, make more $$), or I could work for my MP and volunteer at Legal Aid Ontario (what I really want to do). It would be frankly *really* nice to go back home for another summer and be with my family and my home friends and my lakes and forests and puppy dogs and my car. I don't *need* any of that, but I sort of selfishly want it and there would be COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF IAMBS, TOYS, RIVERS, AND FAMILIARITY.

4) Stay in Ottawa and spend the summer working - I'm considering retail stuff like the bookstore (!) or one of the Scottish pubs (because it'd be fun, profitable, I would have really nice calves by the end of it, and I could abuse the brogue), as well as Real Person stuff like... well actually I don't really know. I could also volunteer at Legal Aid Ontario if I stayed in Ottawa, and I would also make money. It would be really nice to stay with the roommates when there will be COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF TIME IN WHICH TO HANG OUT AND WATCH MOVIES AND PLAY SOCCER AND GO HIKING AND SPEND ALL OUR MONEY.

Oh life ~~why you gotta be so complicated~~ so many choicessssss.

For some reason my iTunes thinks it can "shuffle" through an awful lot of Christmas songs today. IDK what's up with that. Oh and clearly I lied, as there are no KenyaTales. I still have to do that and my big Thanksgiving post (YAY Thanksgiving's this weekend! Turkey and apple dumplings and family and I get to drive through the provincial park with all its gorgeous fall leaves :DDDD).

~~self-serving~~ MEME! What would you like to ask me? What would you like me to write about? I've got things I talk about and things I don't, and if you've ever wondered what my thoughts on toast were, say, or what I would name my hypothetical band or children, or my thoughts on nuclear proliferation (I'm sorry, I'm still a PIDSSA student, I can't pretend otherwise for too long). Last few times I did this it lead to a rather lengthly and awesome debate/talk about universal healthcare and me talking about West Virginia and Lal making me choose between Jon and Stephen, so I'm glad to proffer myself again (that and I really don't want to finish editing my essay). If you don't know what to get your 5-year old nephew for his birthday, ask away! (I have no thoughts on yaoi, just to hit that one out of the park before it is pitched.)

A Lingering Scent of Eden

2009-10-06T19:54:05Z

In another of life's weird acts of synchronicity, I spent the bus ride back home reading about giant beavers and paleolithic tigers, to discover two of the roommates (Marley and Nic) in the other room watching Jurassic Park. I was reading about mastodons and the like because a few days ago I bought 'The World Without Us,' by Alan Weisman (TDS interview with him here - alas, there's no comedy network version, but I thought I'd at least link the Amurrcans).

It's a fascinating book (and really well-written; or at least entertainingly-so) about what would happen if tomorrow, all humans just vanished, Rapture-style (or, uhm, Raptor-style. Whatever works). What would happen to the cities, the forests, the animals, all that C02 up in the atmosphere; and how long it would take, if ever, for our marks on the world to completely vanish.

It's also a really fascinating look at various cultures and historical happenings (for lack of a better word) over the years, especially of things I'd never heard of: the genocide of the Zápara Indians of South America, the Białowieża Puszcza (a piece of virtually untouched ancient forest in Europe, a last remaining scrap of what used to cover from Siberia to Ireland. Also really fun to try to pronounce), and the aforementioned giant creatures (sloths as big as cows). The section on all the creatures that have gone extinct (with the point of what species might come back, and what species we have put too far on the path to extinction already) was fascinating: picturing gigantic short-faced bears twice the size of grizzlies, a 10-ton mammoth, an animal 'looking like an armor-plated Volkswagon.' Just... COOL. Picturing my (distant, I'll grant you) ancestors facing those bears before crossing the Bering Strait or figuring out how to hunt lions twice the size of the ones we know today - that's pretty stunning.

I was also struck in particular by the section of the disintegration of cities and how comparatively little time it would take. Less than three days before the complete flooding of the New York subway system (even today, if you leave the pumps off for half an hour the water rises to a level where trains can't run) and the demolition of the city from underneath, the cracking and shifting and heaving of pavement. It's fascinating and harrowing and scary all at once; not least for the mental pictures it gives, but for for all our building and concrete and immovable objects, the marks we've made in cities for hundreds of years can give way so quickly. How close things like the subway systems are to constantly caving, how quickly people move every day to keep us that few hours away from collapse.

"...water would start cluicing away soil under the pavement. Before long, streets would start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface. Others appear suddenly as waterlogged subway ceilings collapse. Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side's 4, 5, and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river. [... ] In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, rain leaks in, bolts rush, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If the city hasn't burned yet, it will now. [...] Plugged sewers, deluged tunnels, and streets reverting to rivers, he says, will conspire to undermine subbasements and destablize their huge loads. In a future that portends stronger and more-frequent hurricans striking North America's Atlantic coast, ferocious winds will pummel tall, unsteady structures. Some will topple, knocking down others. Like a gap in the forest when a giant tree falls, new growth will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one."

What was also very interesting were his various hypotheses for global warming: even with humans gone and our massive carbon output stopping tomorrow (no cars, factories, breathing, or felling of trees ANYWHERE), what we have already put in motion will carry itself out. That's pretty fucking scary, considering that tomorrow millions of people will STILL be driving cars and pumping out waste and cutting down trees. By "carry itself out," though, I don't mean *~APOCALYPSE~* - he estimates it will take about 1000 years for the ocean and the earth to turn over and cycle out most of the excess carbon dioxide already trapped in the atmosphere, but that still won't reduce it to pre-Industrial levels. To get to pre-human levels, it would take about 100 000 years. That's CRAZY. Even crazier when you think about the fact that the Earth is not actually going to get that opportunity. Eek :/

And, of course, the usualy period of about 12 000 years between Ice Ages has already passed: normally, we'd be expecting another glacier over North America, oh, any day now. Which was also interesting to think about, considering humans haven't really made any plans for the earth's natural cycles of freezing and thawing and relocation of habitats. We just built our cities and assumed that the climate we had was here to stay; we're not really the type of hunters-and-gatherers who can pack up and move on and adjust with the way the Earth was built to work. A bit cool, but a bit not.

It's a very interesting mix between scientific non-fiction (like some extensively-reasearched massive National Geo article) and very gripping and personal writing. A section I found beautiful and striking: "Olduvai Gorge and the other fossil hominid sites, together comprising a screcent that runs south from Ethiopia and parallels the continent's eastern shore, have confirmed beyond much doubt that we are all Africans. The dust we breathe here, blown by zephyrs that leave a coating of gray tuff powder on Olduvai's sisals and acacias, contains calcified specks of the very DNA that we carry. From this place, humans radiated across continents and around a planet. Eventually, coming full circle, we returned, so estranged from our origins that we enslaved blood cousins who stayed behind to maintain our birthright."

Overall, it's so-far been a really fascinating look at the effect humans have had on the world: both in things like climate change that have so profoundly changed the swing of the way the atmosphere around us shifts, and yet how quickly all the things we build and accomplish can wash away, how the ultimate power here isn't ours, but the natural changes of elements: water in streets, animals and trees re-colonising what was taken, the shift of the forces at work on a massive planet too powerful for sidewalks and copper wiring.

And I'm only on page 74. Phew.
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I've also been watching Reel Bad Arabs, a documentary about the portrayals of Arabs and Middle Eastern culture in movies (particularly Hollywood). It's simultaneously disgusting and very interesting; most of the movies I haven't seen, but for the ones I have (like Aladdin, say), it's quite an eye-opener to the ways discrimination, stereotype, and outright fear and hatred can work its ways - unconsciously, and sometimes frighteningly consciously - into our art and perception of things and people.
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Oh, and I have decided that I am going to have 3 girl children: the oldest will be Enelerai, and the two youngest (twins) will be Emoryjoi and Motony. Thoughts? :D

Another KenyaTales post to come tonight or tomorrow.

"All that I know is that I know nothing"

2009-10-04T02:08:42Z

ETA: STEPHEN HARPER PLAYED THE PIANO TO A BEATLES SONG AT THE YO-YO MA CONCERT.

.... WHAT. THE. FUCK.

$*_@&#$)_@#(*_ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY DID I NOT GO AND WHAT IS UP WITH THE WORLD. WHAT. WHAT. STEPHEN HARPER. PLAYING PIANO. WITH YO-YO MA. AND SINGING. A BEATLES SONG.

BRAIN CANNOT COMPUTE. story here. youtube here. whaaaaaaaaaaa.
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Today I had the first documented nap of my adult life. I napped as a child, of course, but I can't really remember ever taking a nap or legit going to sleep in the middle of the day before. If I lie down I tend to just get drowsy and spend the rest of the day even more tired. However: when I got home after spending the morning volunteering and delivering flowers for EWB's mums drive, and almost an hour on the bus getting back (it's been a while since I've had a busfail, I was overdue), I was ridiculously tired and I knew I wouldn't get any work done at all in that state. So I bundled into my bed in the sunlight, all my clothes still on, and had one of the most delicious early afternoons of my life. Happiness is a warm sunny bed with a breezy window and orange pillows <333 (~~If I'd had a kitty to snuggle with it would have been perfect~~)

Part of the reason I was so tired was last night: a looooong EWB executive meeting at a pub, and then home for a party. The meeting was great, and I honestly don't mind that it was so long, because it's such a good group and honestly? I learned more in the four hours sitting around a table and eating a burger than I have in a month of five classes. No word of a lie. We were meeting to assess September, but also to do some visioning - lots of people had amazing ideas, and it was such a great experience of building something, everyone putting things together and feeding off of Chris' energy and everyone's brilliance <33 There was also some great discussion around the 0.7% campaign and other ID stuff that I won't go into, but just... guh, I love EWB.

As we walked to the bus stop, Mama Hen asked Chris and I if EWB was important to us. That too was a really great conversation - though when she asked me, she stopped and said "Oh right, I forgot - that probably opens up a whole big book for you, doesn't it?" You betcha. But we talked anyway, and then I kept walking in the rain.

I think I either caught a chill waiting for the bus in the rain, or I ate too much at dinner (okay - I *definitely* ate too much at dinner), but when I got off the bus and walked the few blocks to the house, by the time I got inside my hands were shaking and wouldn't stop, and I felt sick and disoriented. The house was already full of people in their finery, and I deked into my room to get dressed and look semi-presentable. I nearly stabbed myself with the mascara brush because my hands wouldn't stop shaking. I didn't end up going out to the bar with them because Val told me it wasn't worth it if I got sick; the hour or so I spent at home with everyone - Nick, Coyote, the Roomies, Shah, various other friends - was great. In particular when a Journey song came on and we filmed Coyote singing along to its entirety, complete with at one point a lime green feather boa (until he fell into the door and hurt his head).

The mums drive was fun this morning, especially since the weather was so great. Most of the flowers had been ordered by real estate or financial agents for their clients, so nobody knew who the flowers were from or that they were coming and were so surprised. One little old lady kept saying she didn't want them, and we kept having to tell her they were free, and when she saw the agent's business card on it she got so happy and delighted. It was adorable :)

And then I wrote an entire essay on Socrates in the space of two hours (was the nap a factor? WHO KNOWS. OR CARES). BOOM-SHACKA-LACKA-BOOM.

The Apology is such a neat piece, even if you admire it on purely literary terms. I know I'm weird for liking it because of this, but I find just the way things are worded (and the way you're forced to imagine all the translation and re-translation over the centuries, the turns of phrase they must have used and how it would be so out of place today while so many things - humour, for example - still translate) is so interesting. What's also neat to imagine while reading this is that much of this is being thought (or at least written) for the very first time. A lot of these thoughts occur to us all the time, or we take them for granted, or they've become embedded in our culture: but this is their birth and creator (if not in human existence, at least in human history).

It's a cool story - and important story, sure, and one with all kinds of weights attached, but overall it's just COOL. What gives it that weight, too, is that he was willing to die for it; not only was he willing, but he did. You can hear of people dying for causes, or for things, and that makes sense to me (in protection of another person, for instance), but to die for the simple, ballsy reason that you refuse to - cannot - compromise on your morals, on a belief that everything you do and say is acted on a set of principles of justice... that's pretty weighty right there.

Socrates' motto: 'All that I know is that I know nothing'
“‘I’m wiser than that person. For it’s likely that neither of us knows anything fine and good, but he thinks he knows something he doesn’t know, whereas I, since I don’t in fact know, don’t think that I do either. At any rate, it seems that I’m wiser than he in just this one small way: that what I don’t know, I don’t think I know.’” (21d)
“The result is that those they question are angry not at themselves, but at me, and say that Socrates is a thoroughly pestilential fellow who corrupts the young. Then, when they’re asked what he’s doing or teaching, they’ve nothing to say, as they don’t know. Yet, so as not to appear at a loss, they utter the stock phrases used against all who philosophize: ‘things in the sky and beneath the earth,’ and ‘not acknowledging the gods,’ and ‘making the weaker argument the stronger.’ For they wouldn’t be willing to tell the truth, I imagine: that it has become manifest they pretend to know, but know nothing.” (23d)

Socrates on not being afraid to die:
"But though he heard that, he was contemptuous of death and danger, for he was far more afraid of living as a bad man and of failing to avenge his friends." (28c)
“‘You’re not thinking straight, sir, if you think that a man who’s any use at all should give any opposing weight to the risk of living or dying, instead of looking to this alone whenever he does anything: whether his actions are just or unjust, the deeds of a good or bad man.’” (28b-c)
“You see, fearing death, gentlemen, is nothing other than thinking one is wise when one isn’t, since it’s thinking one knows what one doesn’t know. I mean, no one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all goods for people, but they fear it as if they knew for certain that it’s the worst thing of all.” (29a-b)
"You see, men of Athens, this is the truth of the matter: Wherever someone has stationed himself because he thinks it is best, or wherever he's been stationed by his commander, there, it seems to me, he should remain, steadfast in danger, taking no account at all of death or of anything else, in comparison to what's shameful." (28d)

“You may be sure that if you put me to death – a man of the sort I said I was just now – you won’t harm me more than you harm yourselves.” (30c)
“So, men of Athens, I’m far from pleading in my own defense now, as might be supposed. Instead, I’m pleading in yours, so that you don’t commit a great wrong against the god’s gift to you by condemning me.”
"This small favor, however, I ask of them. When my sons come of age, gentlemen, punish them by harassing them in the very same way that I harassed you, if they seem to you to take care of wealth or anything before virtue, if they think they're someone when they're no one. Reproach them, just as I reproached you: tell them that they don't care for the things they should and think they're someone when they're worth nothing. If you will do that, I'll have received my own just desserts from you, as will my sons. But now it's time to leave, I to die and you to live. Which of us goes to the better thing, however, is unclear to everyone except the god." (41e-42)

To-Do List for Tomorrow:
-moar dishes
-edit the snot out of my essay
-do Arabic homework and edit Marley's Arabic assignment
-play piano
-sing along to 'The River' (because it's too late to do it now)
-bike ride?? (ask Val to bike with me)
-don't eat nachos for dinner
-go over to Mariya's and watch a week's worth of TDS/TCR and behave like this :DDDDDDDD

Mr Google's Children

2009-10-02T14:44:52Z

Last entry I mentioned an article by Mark Edmundson that I found really interesting and had a big impact on me - however, I posted the wrong one. The one below the cut is the correct one - I'm going to remove the previous one tomorrow, so if you want a copy of it, C&P it before then. Both essays can probably be found on your school library's database, though. There's plenty to agree or disagree with, but a fair portion of this rings true, at least for me.

On the Uses of a Liberal Education (for real this time!) - Mark Edmundson

Today is evaluation day in my Freud class, and everything has changed. The class meets twice a week, late in the afternoon, and the clientele, about fifty undergraduates, tends to drag in and slump, looking disconsolate and a little lost, waiting for a jump start. To get the discussion moving, they usually require a joke, an anecdote, an off-the-wall question -- When you were a kid, were your Halloween getups ego costumes, id costumes, or superego costumes? That sort of thing. But today, as soon as I flourish the forms, a buzz rises in the room. Today they write their assessments of the course, their assessments of me, and they are without a doubt wide-awake. "What is your evaluation of the instructor?" asks question number eight, entreating them to circle a number between five (excellent) and one (poor, poor). Whatever interpretive subtlety they've acquired during the term is now out the window. Edmundson: one to five, stand and shoot.

And they do. As I retreat through the door -- I never stay around for this phase of the ritual -- I look over my shoulder and see them toiling away like the devil's auditors. They're pitched into high writing gear, even the ones who struggle to squeeze out their journal entries word by word, stoked on a procedure they have by now supremely mastered. They're playing the informed consumer, letting the provider know where he's come through and where he's not quite up to snuff.

But why am I so distressed, bolting like a refugee out of my own classroom, where I usually hold easy sway? Chances are the evaluations will be much like what they've been in the past -- they'll be just fine. It's likely that I'll be commended for being "interesting" (and I am commended, many times over), that I'll be cited for my relaxed and tolerant ways (that happens, too), that my sense of humor and capacity to connect the arcana of the subject matter with current culture will come in for some praise (yup). I've been hassled this term, finishing a manuscript, and so haven't given their journals the attention I should have, and for that I'm called -- quite civilly, though -- to account.. Overall, I get off pretty well.

Yet I have to admit that I do not much like the image of myself that emerges from these forms, the image of knowledgeable, humorous detachment and bland tolerance. I do not like the forms themselves, with their number ratings, reminiscent of the sheets circulated after the TV pilot has just played to its sample audience in Burbank. Most of all I dislike the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I'm disturbed by the serene belief that my function -- and, more important, Freud's, or Shakespeare's, or Blake's -- is to divert, entertain, and interest. Observes one respondent, not at all unrepresentative: "Edmundson has done a fantastic job of presenting this difficult, important & controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way."

Thanks but no thanks. I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says she "enjoyed" the course -- and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations -- somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind. The off-the-wall questions and the sidebar jokes are meant as lead-ins to stronger stuff -- in the case of the Freud course, to a complexly tragic view of life. But the affability and the one-liners often seem to be all that land with the students; their journals and evaluations leave me little doubt.
I want some of them to say that they've been changed by the course. I want them to measure themselves against what they've read. It's said that some time ago a Columbia University instructor used to issue a harsh two-part question. One: What book did you most dislike in the course? Two: What intellectual or characterological flaws in you does that dislike point to? The hand that framed that question was surely heavy. But at least it compels one to see intellectual work as a confrontation between two people, student and author, where the stakes matter. Those Columbia s&dents were being asked to relate the quality of an encounter, not rate the action as though it had unfolded on the big screen.

Why are my students describing the Oedipus complex and the death drive as being interesting and enjoyable to contemplate? And why am I coming across as an urbane, mildly ironic, endlessly affable guide to this intellectual territory, operating without intensity, generous, funny, and loose?

Because that's what works. On evaluation day, I reap the rewards of my partial compliance with the culture of my students and, too, with the culture of the university as it now operates. It's a culture that's gotten little exploration. Current critics tend to think that liberal-arts education is in crisis because universities have been invaded by professors with peculiar ideas: deconstruction, Lacanianism, feminism, queer theory. They believe that genius and tradition are out and that P.C., multiculturalism, and identity politics are in because of an invasion by tribes of tenured radicals, the late millennial equivalents of the Visigoth hordes that cracked Rome's walls.

But mulling over my evaluations and then trying to take a hard, extended look at campus life both here at the University of Virginia and around the country eventually led me to some different conclusions. To me, liberal-arts education is as ineffective as it is now not chiefly because there are a lot of strange theories in the air. (Used well, those theories can be illuminating.) Rather, it's that university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. For someone growing up in America now, there are few available alternatives to the cool consumer worldview. My students didn't ask for that view, much less create it, but they bring a consumer weltanschauung to school, where it exerts a powerful, and largely unacknowledged, influence. If we want to understand current universities, with their multiple woes, we might try leaving the realms of expert debate and fine ideas and turning to the classrooms and campuses, where a new kind of weather is gathering.

From time to time I bump into a colleague in the corridor and we have what I've come to think of as a Joon Lee fest. Joon Lee is one of the best students I've taught. He's endlessly curious, has read a small library's worth, seen every movie, and knows all about showbiz and entertainment. For a class of mine he wrote an essay using Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus to analyze the pop group The Supremes. A trite, cultural-studies bonbon? Not at all. He said striking things about conceptions of race in America and about how they shape our ideas of beauty. When I talk with one of his other teachers, we run on about the general splendors of his work and presence. But what inevitably follows a JL fest is a mournful reprise about the divide that separates him and a few other remarkable students from their contemporaries. It's not that some aren't nearly as bright -- in terms of intellectual ability, my students are all that I could ask for. Instead, it's that Joon Lee has decided to follow his interests and let them make him into a singular and rather eccentric man; in his charming way, he doesn't mind being at odds with most anyone.

It's his capacity for enthusiasm that sets Joon apart from what I've come to think of as the reigning generational style. Whether the students are sorority/fraternity types, grunge aficionados, piercer/tattooers, black or white, rich or middle class (alas, I teach almost no students from truly poor backgrounds), they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days they display a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there's little fire, little passion to be found.

This point came home to me a few weeks ago when I was wandering across the university grounds. There, beneath a classically cast portico, were two students, male and female, having a rip-roaring argument. They were incensed, bellowing at each other, headstrong, confident, and wild. It struck me how rarely I see this kind of full-out feeling in students anymore. Strong emotional display is forbidden. When conflicts arise, it's generally understood that one of the parties will say something sarcastically propitiating ("whatever" often does it) and slouch away.

How did my students reach this peculiar state in which all passion seems to be spent? I think that many of them have imbibed their sense of self from consumer culture in general and from the tube in particular. They're the progeny of 100 cable channels and omni-present Blockbuster outlets. TV, Marshall McLuhan famously said, is a cool medium. Those who play best on it are low-key and nonassertive; they blend in. Enthusiasm, a la Joon Lee, quickly looks absurd. The form of character that's most appealing on TV is calmly self-interested though never greedy, attuned to the conventions, and ironic. judicious timing is preferred to sudden self-assertion. The TV medium is inhospitable to inspiration, improvisation, failures, slipups. All must run perfectly.

Naturally, a cool youth culture is a marketing bonanza for producers of the right products, who do all they can to enlarge that culture and keep it grinding. The Internet, TV, and magazines now teem with what I call persona ads, ads for Nikes and Reeboks and jeeps and Blazers that don't so much endorse the capacities of the product per se as show you what sort of person you will be once you've acquired it. The jeep ad that features hip, outdoorsy kids whipping a Frisbee from mountaintop to mountaintop isn't so much about what jeeps can do as it is about the kind of people who own them. Buy a Jeep and be one with them. The ad is of little consequence in itself, but expand its message exponentially and you have the central thrust of current consumer culture -- buy in order to be.

Most of my students seem desperate to blend in, to look right, not to make a spectacle of themselves. (Do I have to tell you that those two students having the argument under the portico turned out to be acting in a role-playing game?) The specter of the uncool creates a subtle tyranny. It's apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, this Letterman-like, Tarantinolike cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are rather different. You're inhibited, except on ordained occasions, from showing emotion, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. You're made to feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code will get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

Am I coming off like something of a crank here? Maybe. Oscar Wilde, who is almost never wrong, suggested that it is perilous to promiscuously contradict people who are much younger than yourself. Point taken. But one of the lessons that consumer hype tries to insinuate is that we must never rebel against the new, never even question it. If it's new -- a new need, a new product, a new show, a new style, a new generation -- it must be good. So maybe, even at the risk of winning the withered, brown laurels of crankdom, it pays to resist newness-worship and cast a colder eye.

Praise for my students? I have some of that too. What my students are, at their best, is decent. They are potent believers in equality. They help out at the soup kitchen and volunteer to tutor poor kids to get a stripe on their resumes, sure. But they also want other people to have a fair shot. And in their commitment to fairness they are discerning; there you see them at their intellectual best. If I were on trial and innocent, I'd want them on the jury.
What they will not generally do, though, is indict the current system. They won't talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash. For the pervading view is the cool consumer perspective, where passion and strong admiration are forbidden. "To stand in awe of nothing, Numicus, is perhaps the one and only thing that can make a man happy and keep him so," says Horace in the Epistles, and I fear that his lines ought to hang as a motto over the university in this era of high consumer capitalism.

It's easy to mount one's high horse and blame the students for this state of affairs. But they didn't create the present culture of consumption. (It was largely my own generation, that of the Sixties, that let the counterculture search for pleasure devolve into a quest for commodities.) And they weren't the ones responsible, when they were six and seven and eight years old, for unplugging the TV set from time to time or for hauling off and kicking a hole through it. It's my generation of parents who sheltered these students, kept them away from the hard knocks of everyday life, making them cautious and overfragile, who demanded that their teachers, from grade school on, flatter them endlessly so that the kids are shocked if their college profs don't reflexively suck up to them.

Of course, the current generational style isn't simply derived from culture and environment. It's also about dollars. Students worry that taking too many chances with their educations will sabotage their future prospects. They're aware of the fact that a drop that looks more and more like one wall of the Grand Canyon separates the top economic tenth from the rest of the population. There's a sentiment currently abroad that if you step aside for a moment, to write, to travel, to fall too hard in love, you might lose position permanently. We may be on a conveyor belt, but it's worse down there on the filth-strewn floor. So don't sound off, don't blow your chance.

But wait. I teach at the famously conservative University of Virginia. Can I extend my view from Charlottesville to encompass the whole country, a whole generation of college students? I can only say that I hear comparable stories about classroom life from colleagues everywhere in America. When I visit other schools to lecture, I see a similar scene unfolding. There are, of course, terrific students everywhere. And they're all the better for the way they've had to strive against the existing conformity. At some of the small liberal-arts colleges, the tradition of strong engagement persists. But overall, the students strike me as being sweet and sad, hovering in a nearly suspended animation.

Too often now the pedagogical challenge is to make a lot from a little. Teaching Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," you ask for comments. No one responds. So you call on Stephen. Stephen: "The sound, this poem really flows." You: "Stephen seems interested in the music of the poem. We might extend his comment to ask if the poem's music coheres with its argument. Are they consistent? Or is there an emotional pain submerged here that's contrary to the poem's appealing melody?" All right, it's not usually that bad. But close. One friend describes it as rebound teaching: they proffer a weightless comment, you hit it back for all you're worth, then it comes dribbling out again. Occasionally a professor will try to explain away this intellectual timidity by describing the students as perpetrators of postmodern irony, a highly sophisticated mode. Everything's a slick counterfeit, a simulacrum, so by no means should any phenomenon be taken seriously. But the students don't have the urbane, Oscar Wilde-type demeanor that should go with this view. Oscar was cheerful funny, confident, strange. (Wilde, mortally ill, living in a Paris flophouse: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.") This generation's style is considerate, easy to please, and a touch depressed.

Granted, you might say, the kids come to school immersed in a consumer mentality -- they're good Americans, after all -- but then the university and the professors do everything in their power to fight that dreary mind-set in the interest of higher ideals, right? So it should be. But let us look at what is actually coming to pass.

Over the past few years, the physical layout of my university has been changing. To put it a little indecorously, the place is looking more and more like a retirement spread for the young. Our funds go to construction, into new dorms, into renovating the student union. We have a new aquatics center and ever-improving gyms, stocked with StairMasters and Nautilus machines. Engraved on the wall in the gleaming aquatics building is a line by our founder, Thomas Jefferson, declaring that everyone ought to get about two hours' exercise a day. Clearly even the author of the Declaration of Independence endorses the turning of his university into a sports-and-fitness emporium.

But such improvements shouldn't be surprising. Universities need to attract the best (that is, the smartest and the richest) students in order to survive in an ever more competitive market. Schools want kids whose parents can pay the full freight, not the ones who need scholarships or want to bargain down the tuition costs. If the marketing surveys say that the kids require sports centers, then, trustees willing, they shall have them. In fact, as I began looking around, I came to see that more and more of what's going on in the university is customer driven. The consumer pressures that beset me on evaluation day are only a part of an overall trend.

From the start, the contemporary university's relationship with students has a solicitous, nearly servile tone. As soon as someone enters his junior year in high school, and especially if he's living in a prosperous zip code, the informational material -- the advertising -- comes flooding in. Pictures, testimonials, videocassettes, and CD ROMs (some bidden, some not) arrive at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the student and his tuition cash. The freshman-to-be sees photos of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate phys-ed facilities; of fine dining rooms; of expertly kept sports fields; of orchestras and drama troupes; of students working alone (no overbearing grown-ups in range), peering with high serious-sness into computers and microscopes; or of students arrayed outdoors in attractive conversational garlands.

Occasionally -- but only occasionally, for we usually photograph rather badly; in appearance we tend at best to be styleless -- there's a professor teaching a class. (The college catalogues I received, by my request only, in the late Sixties were austere affairs full of professors' credentials and course descriptions; it was clear on whose terms the enterprise was going to unfold.) A college financial officer recently put matters to me in concise, if slightly melodramatic, terms: "Colleges don't have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments." Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come in thinking that the Freud and Shakespeare she had signed up to study were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part the answer is a matter of demographics and (surprise) of money. Aided by the G.I. bill, the college-going population in America dramatically increased after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them, schools continued to grow. Universities expand easily enough, but with tenure locking faculty in for lifetime jobs, and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it's not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through -- like a fat meal digested by a boa constrictor -- the colleges turned to energetic promotional strategies to fill the empty chairs. And suddenly college became a buyer's market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken more and more into account. That usually meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.

Just as universities must compete with one another for students, so must the individual departments. At a time of rank economic anxiety, the English and history majors have to contend for students against the more success-insuring branches, such as the sciences and the commerce school. In 1968, more than 21 percent of all the bachelor's degrees conferred in America were in the humanities; by 1993, that number had fallen to about 13 percent. The humanities now must struggle to attract students, many of whose parents devoutly wish they would study something else.

One of the ways we've tried to stay attractive is by loosening up. We grade much more softly than our colleagues in science. In English, we don't give many Ds, or Cs for that matter. (The rigors of Chem 101 create almost as many English majors per year as do the splendors of Shakespeare.) A professor at Stanford recently explained grade inflation in the humanities by observing that the undergraduates were getting smarter every year; the higher grades simply recorded how much better they were than their predecessors. Sure.

Along with softening the grades, many humanities departments have relaxed major requirements. There are some good reasons for introducing more choice into curricula and requiring fewer standard courses. But the move, like many others in the university now, jibes with a tendency to serve -- and not challenge -- the students. Students can also float in and out of classes during the first two weeks of each term without making any commitment. The common name for this time span -- shopping period -- speaks volumes about the consumer mentality that's now in play. Usually, too, the kids can drop courses up until the last month with only an innocuous "W" on their transcripts. Does a course look too challenging? No problem. Take it pass-fail. A happy consumer is, by definition, one with multiple options, one who can always have what he wants. And since a course is something the students and their parents have bought and paid for, why can't. they do with it pretty much as they please?.

A sure result of the university's widening elective leeway is to give students more power over their teachers. Those who don't like you can simply avoid you. If the clientele dislikes you en masse, you can be left without students, period. My first term teaching I walked into my introduction to poetry course and found it inhabited by one student, the gloriously named Bambi Lynn Dean. Bambi and I chatted amiably awhile, but for all that she and the pleasure of her name could offer, I was fast on the way to meltdown. It was all a mistake, luckily, a problem with the scheduling book. Everyone was waiting for me next door. But in a dozen years of teaching I haven't forgotten that feeling of being ignominiously marooned. For it happens to others, and not always because of scheduling glitches. I've seen older colleagues go through hot embarrassment at not having enough students sign up for their courses: they graded too hard, demanded too much, had beliefs too far out of keeping with the existing disposition. It takes only a few such instances to draw other members of the professoriat further into line.
And if what's called tenure reform -- which generally just means the abolition of tenure -- is broadly enacted, professors will be yet more vulnerable to the whims of their customer-students. Teach what pulls the kids in, or walk. What about entire departments that don't deliver? If the kids say no to Latin and Greek, is it time to dissolve classics? Such questions are being entertained more and more seriously by university administrators.

How does one prosper with the present clientele? Many of the most successful professors now are the ones who have "decentered" their classrooms. There's a new emphasis on group projects and on computer-generated exchanges among the students. What they seem to want most is to talk to one another. A classroom now is frequently an "environment," a place highly conducive to the exchange of existing ideas, the students' ideas. Listening to one another, students sometimes change their opinions. But what they generally can't do is acquire a new vocabulary, a new perspective, that will cast issues in a fresh light.

The Socratic method -- the animated, sometimes impolite give-and-take between student and teacher -- seems too jagged for current sensibilities. Students frequently come to my office to tell me how intimidated they feel in class; the thought of being embarrassed in front of the group fills them with dread. I remember a student telling me how humiliating it was to be corrected by the teacher, by me. So I asked the logical question: "Should I let a major factual error go by so as to save discomfort?" The student -- a good student, smart and earnest -- said that was a tough question. He'd need to think about it.

Disturbing? Sure. But I wonder, are we really getting students ready for Socratic exchange with professors when we push them off into vast lecture rooms, two and three hundred to a class, sometimes face them with only grad students until their third year, and signal in our myriad professorial ways that we often have much better things to do than sit in our offices and talk with them? How bad will the student-faculty ratios have to become, how teeming the lecture courses, before we hear students righteously complaining, as they did thirty years ago, about the impersonality of their schools, about their decline into knowledge factories? "This is a firm," said Mario Savio at Berkeley during the Free Speech protests of the Sixties, "and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors,... then ... the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material. But we're a bunch of raw material that don't mean ... to be made into any product."

Teachers who really do confront students, who provide significant challenges to what they believe, can be very successful, granted. But sometimes such professors generate more than a little trouble for themselves. A controversial teacher can send students hurrying to the deans and the counselors, claiming to have been offended. ("Offensive" is the preferred term of repugnance today, just as "enjoyable" is the summit of praise.) Colleges have brought in hordes of counselors and deans to make sure that everything is smooth, serene, unflustered, that everyone has a good time. To the counselor, to the dean, and to the university legal squad, that which is normal, healthy, and prudent is best.

An air of caution and deference is everywhere. When my students come to talk with me in my office, they often exhibit a Franciscan humility. "Do you have a moment?" "I know you're busy. I won't take up much of your time." Their presences tend to be very light; they almost never change the temperature of the room. The dress is nondescript: clothes are in earth tones; shoes are practical -- cross-trainers, hiking boots, work shoes, Dr. Martens, with now and then a stylish pair of raised-sole boots on one of the young women. Many, male and female both, peep from beneath the bills of monogrammed baseball caps. Quite a few wear sports, or even corporate, logos, sometimes on one piece of clothing but occasionally (and disconcertingly) on more. The walk is slow; speech is careful, sweet, a bit weary, and without strong inflection. (After the first lively week of the term, most seem far in debt to sleep.) They are almost unfailingly polite. They don't want to offend me; I could hurt them, savage their grades.
Naturally, there are exceptions, kids I chat animatedly with, who offer a joke, or go on about this or that new CD (almost never a book, no). But most of the traffic is genially sleepwalking. I have to admit that I'm a touch wary, too. I tend to hold back. An unguarded remark, a joke that's taken to be off-color, or simply an uncomprehended comment can lead to difficulties. I keep it literal. They scare me a little, these kind and melancholy students, who themselves seem rather frightened of their own lives.

Before they arrive, we ply the students with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get here, flattery and nonstop entertainment are available, if that's what they want. And when they leave? How do we send our students out into the world? More and more, our administrators call the booking agents and line up one or another celebrity to usher the graduates into the millennium. This past spring, Kermit the Frog won himself an honorary degree at Southampton College on Long Island; Bruce Willis and Yogi Berra took credentials away at Montclair State; Arnold Schwarzenegger scored at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. At Wellesley, Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address. (Wellesley -- one of the most rigorous academic colleges in the nation.) At the University of Vermont, Whoopi Goldberg laid down the word. But why should a worthy administrator contract the likes of Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, or Robert Hughes -- someone who might actually say something, something disturbing, something offensive" -- when he can get what the parents and kids apparently want and what the newspapers will softly commend -- more lire entertainment, more TV?

Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students -- steeped in consumer culture before going off to school, treated as potent customers by the university well before their date of arrival, then pandered to from day one until the morning of the final kiss-off from Kermit or one of his kin -- are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be placidly enjoyed or languidly cast down? Given the way universities are now administered (which is more and more to say, given the way that they are currently marketed), is it a shock that the kids don't come to school hot to learn, unable to bear their own ignorance? For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent -- which is much different than simple depression -- seems to me to be a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.

Not long ago, I asked my Freud class a question that, however hoary, never fails to solicit intriguing responses: Who are your heroes? Whom do you admire? After one remarkable answer, featuring T. S. Eliot as hero, a series of generic replies rolled in, one gray wave after the next: my father, my best friend, a doctor who lives in our town, my high school history teacher. Virtually all the heroes were people my students had known personally, people who had done something local, specific, and practical, and had done it for them. They were good people, unselfish people, these heroes, but most of all they were people who had delivered the goods.
My students' answers didn't exhibit any philosophical resistance to the idea of greatness. It's not that they had been primed by their professors with complex arguments to combat genius. For the truth is that these students don't need debunking theories. Long before college, skepticism became their habitual mode. They are the progeny of Bart Simpson and David Letterman, and the hyper-cool ethos of the box. It's inane to say that theorizing professors have created them, as many conservative critics like to do. Rather, they have substantially created a university environment in which facile skepticism can thrive without being substantially contested.
Skeptical approaches have potential value. If you have no all-encompassing religious faith, no faith in historical destiny, the future of the West, or anything comparably grand, you need to acquire your vision of the world somewhere. if it's from literature, then the various visions literature offers have to be inquired into skeptically. Surely it matters that women are denigrated in Milton and in Pope, that some novelistic voices assume an overbearing godlike authority, that the poor are, in this or that writer, inevitably cast as clowns. You can't buy all of literature wholesale if it's going to help draw your patterns of belief.

But demystifying theories are now overused, applied mechanically. It's all logocentrism, patriarchy, ideology. And in this the student environment -- laid-back, skeptical, knowing -- is, I believe, central. Full-out debunking is what plays with this clientele. Some have been doing it nearly as long as, if more crudely than, their deconstructionist teachers. In the context of the contemporary university, and cool consumer culture, a useful intellectual skepticism has become exaggerated into a fundamentalist caricature of itself. The teachers have buckled to their students' views.

At its best, multiculturalism can be attractive as well-deployed theory. What could be more valuable than encountering the best work of far-flung cultures and becoming a citizen of the world? But in the current consumer environment, where flattery plays so well, the urge to encounter the other can devolve into the urge to find others who embody and celebrate the right ethnic origins. So we put aside the African novelist Chinua Achebe's abrasive, troubling Things Fall Apart and gravitate toward hymns on Africa, cradle of all civilizations.

What about the phenomenon called political correctness? Raising the standard of civility and tolerance in the university has been -- who can deny it? -- a very good thing. Yet this admirable impulse has expanded to the point where one is enjoined to speak well -- and only well -- of women, blacks, gays, the disabled, in fact of virtually everyone. And we can owe this expansion in many ways to the student culture. Students now do not wish to be criticized, not in any form. (The culture of consumption never criticizes them, at least not overtly.) In the current university, the movement for urbane tolerance has devolved into an imperative against critical reaction, turning much of the intellectual life into a dreary Sargasso Sea. At a certain point, professors stopped being usefully sensitive and became more like careful retailers who have it as a cardinal point of doctrine never to piss the customers off.
To some professors, the solution lies in the movement called cultural studies. What students need, they believe, is to form a critical perspective on pop culture. It's a fine idea, no doubt. Students should be able to run a critical commentary against the stream of consumer stimulations in which they're immersed. But cultural-studies programs rarely work, because no matter what you propose by way of analysis, things tend to bolt downhill toward an uncritical discussion of students' tastes, into what they like and don't like. If you want to do a Frankfurt School-style analysis of Braveheart, you can be pretty sure that by mid-class Adorno and Horkheimer will be consigned to the junk heap of history and you'll be collectively weighing the charms of Mel Gibson. One sometimes wonders if cultural studies hasn't prospered because, under the guise of serious intellectual analysis, it gives the customers what they most want -- easy pleasure, more TV. Cultural studies becomes nothing better than what its detractors claim it is -- Madonna studies -- when students kick loose from the critical perspective and groove to the product, and that, in my experience teaching film and pop culture, happens plenty.

On the issue of genius, as on multiculturalism and political correctness, we professors of the humanities have, I think, also failed to press back against our students' consumer tastes. Here we tend to nurse a pair of -- to put it charitably -- disparate views. In one mode, we're inclined to a programmatic debunking criticism. We call the concept of genius into question. But in our professional lives per se, we aren't usually disposed against the idea of distinguished achievement. We argue animatedly about the caliber of potential colleagues. We support a star system, in which some professors are far better paid, teach less, and under better conditions than the rest. In our own profession, we are creating a system that is the mirror image of the one we're dismantling in the curriculum. Ask a professor what she thinks of the work of Stephen Greenblatt, a leading critic of Shakespeare, and you'll hear it for an hour. Ask her what her views are on Shakespeare's genius and she's likely to begin questioning the term along with the whole "discourse of evaluation." This dual sensibility may be intellectually incoherent. But in its awareness of what plays with students, it's conducive to good classroom evaluations and, in its awareness of where and how the professional bread is buttered, to self-advancement as well.

My overall point is this: It's not that a leftwing professorial coup has taken over the university. It's that at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism. The consumer ethos is winning. Ten how do those who at least occasionally promote genius and high literary ideals look to current students? How do we appear, those of us who take teaching to be something of a performance art and who imagine that if you give yourself over completely to your subject you'll be rewarded with insight beyond what you individually command?

I'm reminded of an old piece of newsreel footage I saw once. The speaker (perhaps it was Lenin, maybe Trotsky) was haranguing a large crowd. He was expostulating, arm waving, carrying on. Whether it was flawed technology or the man himself, I'm not sure, but the orator looked like an intricate mechanical device that had sprung into fast-forward. To my student$, who mistrust enthusiasm in every form, that's me when I start riffing about Freud or Blake. But more and more, as my evaluations showed, I've been replacing enthusiasm and intellectual animation with stand-up routines, keeping it all at arm's length, praising under the cover of irony.
It's too bad that the idea of genius has been denigrated so far, because it actually offers a live alternative to the demoralizing culture of hip in which most of my students are mired. By embracing the works and lives of extraordinary people, you can adapt new ideals to revise those that came courtesy of your parents, your neighborhood, your clan -- or the tube. The aim of a good liberal-arts education was once, to adapt an observation by the scholar Walter Jackson Bate, to see that "we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call `circumstances' (social, cultural, or reductively psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what Keats calls an 'immortal free-masonry' with the great we can become freer -- freer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value."

But genius isn't just a personal standard; genius can also have political effect. To me, one of the best things about democratic thinking is the conviction that genius can spring up anywhere. Walt Whitman is born into the working class and thirty-six years later we have a poetic image of America that gives a passionate dimension to the legalistic brilliance of the Constitution. A democracy needs to constantly develop, and to do so it requires the most powerful visionary minds to interpret the present and to propose possible shapes for the future. By continuing to notice and praise genius, we create a culture in which the kind of poetic gamble that Whitman made -- a gamble in which failure would have entailed rank humiliation, depression, maybe suicide -- still takes place. By rebelling against established ways of seeing and saying things, genius helps us to apprehend how malleable the present is and how promising and fraught with danger is the future. If we teachers do not endorse genius and self-overcoming, can we be surprised when our students find their ideal images in TV's latest persona ads?
A world uninterested in genius is a despondent place, whose sad denizens drift from coffee bar to Prozac dispensary, unfired by ideals, by the glowing image of the self that one might become. As Northrop Frye says in a beautiful and now dramatically unfashionable sentence, "The artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time." We ought not to deny the existence of such a place simply because we, or those we care for, find the demands it makes intimidating, the rent too high.

What happens if we keep trudging along this bleak course? What happens if our most intelligent students never learn to strive to overcome what they are? What if genius, and the imitation of genius, become silly, outmoded ideas? What you're likely to get are more and more one-dimensional men and women. These will be people who live for easy pleasures, for comfort and prosperity, who think of money first, then second, and third, who hug the status quo; people who believe in God as a sort of insurance policy (cover your bets); people who are never surprised. They will be people so pleased with themselves (when they're not in despair at the general pointlessness of their lives) that they cannot imagine humanity could do better. They'll think it their highest duty to clone themselves as frequently as possible. They'll claim to be happy, and they'll live a long time.

It is probably time now to offer a spate of inspiring solutions. Here ought to come a list of reforms, with due notations about a core curriculum and various requirements. What the traditionalists who offer such solutions miss is that no matter what our current students are given to read, many of them will simply translate it into melodrama, with flat characters and predictable morals. (The unabated capitalist culture that conservative critics so often endorse has put students in a position to do little else.) One can't simply wave a curricular wand and reverse acculturation.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to try firing the counselors and sending half the deans back into their classrooms, dismantling the football team and making the stadium into a playground for local kids, emptying the fraternities, and boarding up the student-activities office. Such measures would convey the message that American colleges are not northern outposts of Club Med. A willingness on the part of the faculty to defy student conviction and affront them occasionally -- to be usefully offensive -- also might not be a bad thing. We professors talk a lot about subversion, which generally means subverting the views of people who never hear us talk or read our work. But to subvert the views of our students, our customers, that would be something else again.

Ultimately, though, it is up to individuals -- and individual students in particular -- to make their own way against the current sludgy tide. There's still the library, still the museum, there's still the occasional teacher who lives to find things greater than herself to admire. There are still fellow students who have not been cowed. Universities are inefficient, cluttered, archaic places, with many unguarded comers where one can open a book or gaze out onto the larger world and construe it freely. Those who do as much, trusting themselves against the weight of current opinion, will have contributed something to bringing this sad dispensation to an end. As for myself, I'm canning my low-key one-liners; when the kids' TV-based tastes come to the fore, I'll aim and shoot. And when it's time to praise genius, I'll try to do it in the right style, full-out, with faith that finer artistic spirits (maybe not Homer and Isaiah quite, but close, close), still alive somewhere in the ether, will help me out when my invention flags, the students doze, or the dean mutters into the phone. I'm getting back to a more exuberant style; I'll be expostulating and arm waving straight into the millennium, yes I will.

-----------------
Yesterday I lost and then somewhat regained my faith in humanity just a tiny bit. That sounds dramatic, but y'all have probably gathered that I'm prone to histronics. Yesterday was the first discussion group for my Intro to Political Thought (aka Socrates) class, in which we were discussing the above article. As I said, I found the essay had lots to talk about and a lot of valid points, and I came armed with notes about the nature of education, etc. And then I sat, as one person after another, all around the room, basically reaffirmed all the author had noted about the *~*~youth of today~*~*
"I'm just here to get a job" "Why do we have to study Socrates, anyway? What relevance does this have to the real world?" "I'm never going to use this in life" "Of course university's been commericialized, it's nothing but a job factory anyway" "I know there's some bad stuff in the world but we in North America have it pretty good. So what if I just want to get a good job and make lots of money? Does that make me a bad person?" "It's the media's fault" "I don't see why this guy thinks it's important to question everything" "Isn't it easier to just sit back and go with the flow and just get easy marks?" "I feel like undergrad is nothing anymore - if you want learning you have to go to grad school"

I just... I forgot about marks for a second and I couldn't say anything, I didn't want to put my hand up because I felt more than a litle bit of despair that these people are my classmates, my peers, my cohort, my generation. I wanted to respond: "you should be here to learn how to be the kind of person who doesn't just get a job, but claims it and runs with it" "our revolutions, our constitutions, our art was built on Socrates, was built on great thinkers" "the act of you coming to university was basically an admission that you know nothing but want to learn something; so try to learn, not to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of 'this gives me nothing.' Of course it can't, if you don't let it" "want more" "you know WHY humans are better off today than they used to be? Because we strove. Because we wanted more than just a good job. We didn't get here just to stop here" "take responsibility for your own actions and your own shortcomings" "but shouldn't it be something? Shouldn't it be more than nothing? Isn't that the point, to want more than we're getting and to challenge and question what you're given?"

And then it just devolved into a senseless yelling fest when one guy compared Socrates to Jesus and said 'I'm just a s***-raiser like Socrates; I can see why they killed him!' and I just sunk deeper into my chair while the girls beside me rolled their eyes. It made me a little bit angry, but a LOT bit sad. I know all people aren't like this, but I think sometimes I get so caught up in my EWB friends and my own group of people that I start to form an opinion of Young People based on them and them alone, and I forget that this whole other crowd exists.

I left the portable (yeah, my discussion group was held in a portable. I got the *~AUTHENTIC~* elementary school experience) and walked to the library only to realize that I'd forgotten my purse in the room. I booked it back down the campus, and found the room empty - no people, no purse. Now, I leave things places all the time; I'm a scatterbrained reverse-Kleptomaniac. But this was the first time something hadn't been there when I remembered to go back and get it. Thankfully I recognized a guy outside the portable who told me some girls had found it and were taking it to the lost and found. After my heart rate (my cell phone! my credit card! my bank card! my ID! my Chronicles of Narnia chapstick! [you know you want it]) came down a little bit I went and got it.

Life Updates
-We were going to see Yo-Yo Ma tomorrow (oh yeah, we're cool) but alas there are no student rush tickets. Oh well, more essay time. Tonight we are going Out On The Town and I have been loaned Val's purple Sexytimes Dress (as Catya calls it). This is in celebration of actually having a house of six people, ALL OF WHOM are single. ~~Misery loves company? lol jokes~~

-I have finished Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, which was amazing and I loved it. For any other Shakespeare dorks out there: READ THIS BOOK. Guh. I was expecting it to be very dry, but he has a very interesting style of writing and I learned a LOT from it (mainly that I've only read a handful of his actual plays, lol). YAY for geekery and beautiful books.

Linkage
-bookshop has a wonderful essay on the whole Roman Polanski business and its consequences and roots in our culture.
-'In My Language,' an electrifying short film created by a woman with autism who speaks through an automated voice (like the one I wrote about in 'The Thing'). As the summary goes: 'The first part is in my "native language," and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.'
-Worldometers: keep track of the world's population, how many computers were sold today, and how many days left until the end of oil (and watch how quickly the ticker for 'people with no safe access to drinking water' moves upwards).

Some Quotes (most of which I heard last night at 'The Last Lecture,' some of which I just love):
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." -Stephen Hawking

"But we are born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." -Robert Ardrey

I apologize; this must be getting rather annoying. For me, too.

2009-09-30T01:20:08Z

As it sometimes does (see: North by Northwestern + volcanoes), my life has decided to arrange itself singularly around the boxing match that has become at once my two passions, my two majors, my two possible careers. I read the news and get all riled up over AIDS medicine and faulty legislature and I write a bunch of angry letters (double-dipping MPs FTW!); then before I go to bed I calm myself down by reading a chapter of Will in the World and get far too absorbed into Hamlet; I go see Stephen Lewis speak and am full of fire and brimstone and a need to fix things; I read a bunch of Mark Edmundson's essays and start longing for the liberal arts and the chance to dissect genius.

Yesterday after Contested Places, my friend Burdz and I found a place in the cafeteria, and had a startlingly honest, vivid, and mutual conversation about a variety of things, most of which involved frustration at the university for thus far failing to significantly teach/inspire us, and a yearning to find what we wanted to do with ourselves. "My problem was," Burdz said, "that I wanted to be something with no title. I didn't want to be a chemical engineer or a teacher or a vetrinarian or a lawyer. I mean, what the fuck is 'International Studies,' anyway? It doesn't lead to anything with a title: that's what I like, but that's also the problem with it."

Perhaps it's just us being blind or self-absorbed or needy, but neither of us felt we'd really gained any skills from university. Well, apart from note-taking, in-class essays, and memorizing things. But in our sophomore projections of The Real World, those things don't seem to hold any purchase: I'm not sure what to do with those in a job, in a profession, in a calling. It seems to be I should have - or be working towards - confidence, conviction, knowledge to help me do whatever it is I want to do. I knew coming in that I wasn't likely to get everything I needed from classes - but I wasn't expecting to have to do all the work.

Let me explain: apart from little windows of eloquence or clarity or humour, I've gotten very little education (in the way I define education) from my classes thus far. I was expecting to gain more from extracurriculars, but I wasn't expecting university to become a structure around which to plan the things that are actually teaching me. I'm spoiled, I know, but I want something (and it's not entertainment, it's not facts to remember), and I'M NOT GETTING IT, DAMMIT.

I stumbled upon Mark Edmundson earlier this evening, and spent more time than should be considered decency reading and highlighting and making 'DO WANT' macros in my head. 'On the Uses of a Liberal Education' is a lot of what I'm feeling and everything I'm wanting. Also this man writes the way I want to write. I WANT HIM TO BE MY TEACHER. I want to be a student in a class like that. I want to figure out a way I can be that student all by myself, because I know that I have to put everything at my fingertips into my education if I'm going to get anything close to what I want from it.

Long, but lots to consider, at least in my current state of mind.
On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As a Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students
Mark Edmundson

At the beginning of school last fall, I ran into a student on the University of Virginia Lawn, not far from the famous statue of Homer instructing an admiring pupil. Homer's student is in a toga. Mine was wearing wraparound sunglasses like Bono's, black jeans, and a red T-shirt emblazoned with Chinese characters in white. Over his shoulder he carried his laptop.

We asked each other the usual question: What did you do over the summer? What he did, as I recall, was a brief internship at a well-regarded Internet publication, a six-country swing though Europe, then back to enjoy his family and home, reconnect with high-school friends, and work on recording a rock CD. What had I done? I had written five drafts of a chapter for a book on the last two years of Sigmund Freud's life. I had traveled to Crozet, a few miles away, to get pizza. I'd sojourned overnight in Virginia Beach, the day after I woke up distressed because I couldn't figure out how to begin my chapter. I'd driven to the beach, figured it out (I thought), and then I'd come home. My young friend looked at me with a mixture of awe and compassion. I felt a little like one of those aged men of the earth who populate Wordsworth's poetry. One of them, the Old Cumberland Beggar, goes so slowly that you never actually see him move, but if you return to the spot where you first encountered him two hours past, lo, he has gone a little way down the road. The footprints are there to prove it.

I headed back to my office for draft No. 6, or something comparably glamorous. Where was my student going? He was no doubt heading into a more turbocharged version of his summer, a life of supreme intensity created in collaboration with the laptop slung over his shoulder. For his student generation is a singular one, at least in my experience

of 30 or so years teaching: Its members have a spectacular hunger for life and more life. They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they've ever known. And there's something else, too, that distinguishes them: They live to multiply possibilities. They're enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to.

This hunger for life has a number of consequences, for now and for the future. It's part of what makes this student generation appealing, highly promising--and also radically vulnerable. These students may go on to do great and good things, but they also present dangers to themselves and to the common future. They seem almost to have been created, as the poet says, "half to rise and half to fall." As a teacher of theirs (and fellow citizen), I'm more than a little concerned about which it's going to be.

Internet technology was on hand for my current students from about the time they were eight years old; it was in 1995 that the Netscape browser made the Internet accessible to everyone. And the Internet seems to me to have shaped their generation as much as the multichannel TV, with that critical device, the remote control, shaped the students who registered for my classes a decade ago. What is the Internet to current students?

Consider first what it is not. A friend of mine, who has assiduously kept a journal for 40 years, calls the journal, which now runs to about 40 volumes, a "life thickener." His quotations and pictures and clips and drawings and paintings give density and meaning to the blind onrush that life can be. He looks back through the volumes and sees that there was a life and that to him it meant something. To my students, I suspect, my friend would look like a medieval monk, laboring over his manuscripts, someone with a radically pre-postmodern feel for time, someone who did not, in fact, understand what time actually is.

An Internet-linked laptop, one may safely say, is not a life thickener. At the fingertips of my students, the laptop is a multiplier of the possible. "I dwell in possibility," says Emily Dickinson, "a fairer house than prose." Well, my students want to dwell there with her and, it seems, to leave me in the weed-grown bungalow, prose.

My university recently passed an edict: No one, damn it (insofar as edicts can say damn it), is going to triple major. Everyone now who is worth his tuition money double majors: The students in my classes are engineering/English; politics/English; chemistry/English. An urban legend in my leaf-fringed 'hood is that someone got around this inane dictum about triple majors by majoring in four subjects--there was, it seems, no rule against that. The top students at my university, the ones who set the standard for the rest, even if they drive the rest a little crazy, want to take eight classes a term, major promiscuously, have a semester abroad at three different colleges, connect with every likely person who has a page on Facebook, have 30 pages on Facebook, be checked in with and check in at every living moment.

One day I tried an experiment in a class I was teaching on English and American Romanticism. We had been studying Thoreau and talking about his reflections (sour) on the uses of technology for communication. ("We are in great haste," he famously said, "to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.") I asked the group, "How many places were you simultaneously yesterday--at the most?" Suppose you were chatting on your cellphone, partially watching a movie in one corner of the computer screen, instant messaging with three people (a modest number), and glancing occasionally at the text for some other course than ours--grazing, maybe, in Samuelson's Economics rather than diving deep into Thoreau's "Economy"--and then, also, tossing the occasional word to your roommate? Well, that would be seven, seven places at once. Some students--with a little high-spirited hyperbole thrown in, no doubt--got into double digits. Of course it wouldn't take the Dalai Lama or Thoreau to assure them that anyone who is in seven places at once is not anywhere in particular--not present, not here now. Be everywhere now--that's what the current technology invites, and that's what my students aspire to do.

Internet-linked computers are of course desiring machines--machines for the stimulation of desire. But so is a TV, so in a certain sense is a movie screen. What makes the Internet singular is its power to expand desire, expand possibility beyond the confines of prior media. (My students are possibility junkies.) You can multiply the number of possible clothing purchases near to infinity and do it with stunning speed. You can make all the pleated skirts in the world appear almost all at once, for you to choose from. As we talked about this in class--with Thoreau's disapproving specter looking on (sometimes it appears that Thoreau disapproves of everything, except the drinking of cold water)--something surprising came out. The moment of maximum Internet pleasure was not the moment of closure, where you sealed the deal; it was the moment when the choices had been multiplied to the highest sum. It was the moment of maximum promise, when you touched the lip of the possible: of four majors and eight courses per term and a gazillion hits on your Facebook page, and being everyplace (almost) at once, and gazing upon all the pleated skirts that the world doth hold.

This is what Immanuel Kant, were he around to see it, might have called the computer sublime (he called something like it mathematical sublimity). The moment when you make the purchase, close the deal, pick a girlfriend, set a date: All those things, the students around the Thoreau table concurred, were a letdown, consummations not really to be wished for. The students were a little surprised by the conclusions they came to about themselves. "It's when I can see it all in front of me," one young woman said, "that's when I'm the happiest."

Ask an American college student what he's doing on Friday night. Ask him at 5:30 Friday afternoon. "I don't know" will likely be the first response. But then will come a list of possibilities to make the average Chinese menu look sullenly costive: the concert, the play, the movie, the party, the stay-at-home, chilling (or chillaxing), the monitoring of Sports Center, the reading (fast, fast) of an assignment or two. University students now are virtual Hamlets of the virtual world, pondering possibility, faces pressed up against the sweet-shop window of their all-purpose desiring machines. To ticket or not to ticket, buy or not to, party or no: Or perhaps to simply stay in and to multiply options in numberless numbers, never to be closed down.

And once you do get somewhere, wherever it might be, you'll find that, as Gertrude Stein has it, there's "no there there." At a student party, about a fourth of the people have their cellphones locked to their ears. What are they doing? "They're talking to their friends." About? "About another party they might conceivably go to." And naturally the simulation party is better than the one that they're now at (and not at), though of course there will be people at that party on their cellphones, talking about other simulacrum gatherings, spiraling on into M. C. Escher infinity.

It's possible that recent events in the world have added intensity to students' quest for more possibilities, more and more life. The events of September 11, which current college students experienced in their early teens, were an undoubted horror. But they had the effect, I think, of waking America's young people up from a pseudo-nihilistic doze. Before New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the middle-class American teenager's world had been a pleasure dome, full of rare delights. It was the reign of television: the oracle that knows everything and can take you anywhere. Television brought images of bliss, and its ads showed you the products that you needed to buy in order to achieve it. The well-known Jeep ad that depicted hip kids tossing Frisbees and laughing like rock stars had nothing to do with the properties of a Jeep. It was a persona ad that advertised the sort of person you'd be when you acquired the product. The ad was an emblem of the consumer moment: Buy in order to be.

Students wanted to be cool. They wanted to be beyond reproach. There was a sense abroad that if you simply did what you were supposed to do, kept low to the ground and stayed on the conveyor belt, the future that TV promised would be yours. Everything was a mode of entertainment, or could be transformed into one, after it had been submitted to Letterman-like or Leno-like ridicule. The president was a genial boy from Arkansas who awoke one day and found himself in office. But that had not slaked his boyishness at all. He still wanted a version of what everyone did: all-nighters, pizza, and his pals. The president was a dog who couldn't stay on the porch. My students--the guys in particular--often found him the perfect image of success: You need never grow up; need never abandon college-boy mode. The couch where you sat, hours a day, in lordly condescension, monitoring the box, would in time morph into an airship to swoosh you into your dreams.

But then there came the day of near apocalypse in America, September 11, 2001. The prospect of hanging, Doctor Johnson observed, does wonders to concentrate the mind. Well, the mind of America has been concentrated. No one believes that the whole edifice is likely to come down around us soon. But everyone now lives charged with the knowledge that today, tomorrow, next week, we can suffer an event that will change everything drastically. A dirty bomb in the middle of a great city, poison wafting in soft clouds through a subway system, a water supply subtly tainted: Such things would not only derange the lives of those they touch directly, they'd discompose and remake America in ways that would be, to say the least, none too sweet. Tomorrow the deck may be shuffled and recut by the devil's hand. So what shall we do now?

The answer that comes from current students would seem to be this: Live, live. Before the bombs go off in San Francisco or the water goes vile in New York, and the new Mahdi appears on a billion screens at once to pronounce another turn in the holy war that, for him, has been going on since the first crusader scraped an armored foot on the soil of the Holy Land. On that bad day there will be, at the very least, the start of a comprehensive closing down. There will be no more free travel, no more easy money, and much less loose talk. Life will become a confinement, a prison, a pound. So now, as James's Strether instructs Little Bilham, you must "live all you can; it's a mistake not to." There's a humane hunger to my students' hustle for more life--but I think it's possible that down below bubbles a fear. Do it now, for later may be too late.

It's clearly a new university world that I'm living in, though it took me some time to see it. My revelation occurred a few months ago. Up to that point, I was always happy to see students bringing their laptops into class. The sight of them conjured up visions of upbeat news magazine covers: Kids in ordered rows behind their computers, tapping in the new millennium. And the students who brought their laptops seemed to be the most engaged: They'd be skittering fast across the keys, alert and alive, and glancing up from time to time to toss a few sentences into the conversation. These were the plugged-in kids, the committed ones. But then one day I made a rare trip to the blackboard and on the way glanced over a laptopper's shoulder. There was what appeared to be YouTube in one corner (Shakira? The Hips Don't Lie video?) and e-mail front and center--but nothing much to do with the ostensible subject of the class. How could I have missed it? This sort of thing is now the way of the classroom world.

Three thousand first-year students entered my university last year, and 2,906 of them brought laptops with them; 90 brought desktops. Four students-the incoming James Deans and Marion Brandos?--showed up computerless. (Ten years ago, half of our first-year students came to school without computers.) At Virginia, as at just about every other university, almost all buildings are now equipped with wireless routers. This began to happen about four years ago, and many of us professors barely noticed it, in part because we generally travel only from office to classroom. But our students are nomads, on the move all day. Wherever they sit, they set up Internet Command Central. Now students in almost any classroom can get directly onto the Internet and, given the shieldlike screens on their laptops, they can call up what they like. Especially in the big lecture classes now, everyone's flitting from Web site to Web site, checking e-mail, and instant messaging. Do they pay any attention to the class? My students tell me that they're experts in paying attention to many things at once: It's no problem at all.

A Romantic, says Nietzsche, is someone who always wants to be elsewhere. If that's so, then the children of the Internet are Romantics, for they perpetually wish to be someplace else, and the laptop reliably helps take them there-if only in imagination. The e-mailer, the instant messenger, the Web browser are all dispersing their energies and interests outward, away from the present, the here and now. The Internet user is constantly connecting with people and institutions far away, creating surrogate communities that displace the potential community at hand.

Then too, booking by computer has made travel easier and, by eliminating a certain number of middlemen, kept it reasonably cheap. So there's an inducement to take off physically as well. The Internet is perhaps the most centrifugal technology ever devised. The classroom, where you sit down in one space at one time and ponder a text or an issue in slow motion, is coming to feel ever more antiquated. What's at a premium now is movement, making connections, getting all the circuitry fizzing and popping.

For students now, life is elsewhere. Classes matter to them, but classes are just part of an ever-enlarging web of activities and diversions. Students now seek to master their work--not to be taken over by it and consumed. They want to dispatch it, do it well and quickly, then get on to the many other things that interest them. For my students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success and pleasure. They dwell in possibility.

"By their drugs shall ye know them," it says somewhere in the Scriptures, no doubt. The answer to the question, "What drugs are college students taking now?" is, as it has been for some time, "All of the above." But the drugs that have most recently entered the scene and had an impact are the ones designed to combat attention-deficit disorder: Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, and Daytrana, which delivers the meds through a patch. These are all pharmaceuticals, obtained by prescription, though often the people taking them have never gotten diagnosed. The ADD drugs seem to be omnipresent; they're on sale in every dorm at prices that rise exponentially as the week of final exams approaches. "Twenty dollars for a hit," one student told me, "on the night before an exam in the intro econ class." Their effect is, pretty subtly, but pretty surely, to speed the taker up. They kick him forward, give him fresh juice to keep exploring possibilities, buying and doing and buying and doing.

The idea is to keep moving, never to stop. It's now become so commonplace as to be beneath notice, but there was a time that every city block contiguous to a university did not contain a shop dispensing a speed-you-up drug and inviting people to sit down and enjoy it along with wireless computer access. Laptops seem to go with coffee and other stimulants, in much the way that blood-and-gold sunsets went with LSD and Oreo cookies with weed. (It's possible, I sometimes think, that fully half of the urban Starbucks in America are located in rental properties that, in an earlier incarnation, were head shops.) Nor were there always energy drinks: vile-tasting concoctions coming in cans costumed like superheroes, designed to make you run as fast and steady as your computer, your car, and--this is Darwinian capitalism after all--your colleagues. You've got to keep going. Almost all of my students have one book--an old book--that they've read and treasured, and read again. It's the American epic of free movement, On the Road, a half-century old last year, but to them one of the few things in the culture of my generation that's still youthful.

The sports that this generation has put its stamp on--X-games sorts of things, like snowboarding, surfing, and skateboarding--are all about velocity, motion, skimming. They're about speeding flawlessly through space, without being diverted, slowed down, or captured by mere gravity. (Gravity, in all senses, is what my students are out to avoid.) Like the drugs, the sports help to keep the kids moving elsewhere.

How about their music? It's a little hard to say. Students no longer turn their speakers out the dorm window and blast the quad with Poco's "Deliverin'." Music now comes personal, a whisper in the ear, through the iPod, so that everyone can walk around with the soundtrack to his own movie purring. This constant music plug-in is another mode of being elsewhere, about right for the current dispensation. As to the sort of music, well, the kind of stuff that runs through iPods is varied. Many of my students delight in listening to bands that absolutely no one but themselves seems to have heard of. When I ask them in class to tell me their favorite tunes, I'm reminded of the days when my friends and I would show each other our baseball cards. As you flipped yours over, the other guy responded with "Got it. Got it. Don't got it. Got it." "Don't got it" came with a wince. The coolest kid in the room now is clearly the one whose favorite bands are the ones the others wince most over--the ones they don't got.

But the students have a collective musical taste, too. When they're together at a party, when they've unplugged their iPods and put their cellphones, temporarily, on vibrate, what they generally want is rap. Whatever the content of rap, its form is propulsive forward motion--the beat, the energy pulse, is what it's about. It drives you forward, runs gas through the motor. Rap is part of the constant stimulation that students seem unable to live without.

When a seminar is over now, the students reach their hands into their pockets and draw--it looks a little like Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. But what they're reaching for, after discussing Thoreau, say, on the pleasures of solitude, are their cellphones. They've been unwired, off the drug, for more than an hour, and they need a fix. The cellphoning comes as a relief: The students have been (give or take) in one place, at one time, pondering a few passages from Walden. Now they need to disperse themselves again, get away from the immediate, dissolve the present away.

But I teach at a university known for high-powered students who are also sometimes high-octane partiers. Is what I'm saying true for all universities? Well, I do some traveling and talking to colleagues at other places, and from what I can tell, the more high-prestige the institution, the more frenetic and centrifugal the pace. At Harvard and Yale, I'd now expect to find kids who've hit a white incandescence or maybe who've fused completely with the Internet, living within it, like characters out of Neuromancer, finding in their merger with the machine a kind of high that can take the place of happiness.

Skate fast over the surfaces of life and cover all the extended space you can, says the new ethos. Perhaps the greatest of all surface skimmers, the poet laureate of the way we live now at college, was William Wordsworth's arch-antagonist, George Gordon, Lord Byron. The poetry of Wordsworth, the explorer of inner space, is deliberate, slow, ponderous, like those old men of the woods he loves to depict, and that I perhaps resemble to my fast-skimming students. The complaint against Wordsworth is that he is tiresome--he has no time for sex or violence, just muted natural beauty and a mystical sublime. Byron--rich, beautiful, glamorous, with startlingly white skin, black hair, and swanlike neck--doesn't celebrate violence. Sex is his game. In Don Juan, the hero skims and skips from one encounter to the next. His desires are mobile: He can play the woman's part as well as the man's. Desire doesn't provoke complex ambivalence in Byron, just the need to move from one beckoning satisfaction to the next. Byron's poetry has all the velocity of this ever-moving, ever-changing desire: His rhymes are shrewd, arch, unexpected, and seem to be turned with a flick of his wrist. Thus Byron on Wordsworth's good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who has just published his Biographia Literaria, a book Byron dislikes because it is dense and difficult, something you must read at least twice: "And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, / But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,--/Explaining metaphysics to the nation--/I wish he would explain his Explanation."

Byron claimed to compose best on horseback and to be able to concoct dozens of lines in an outing. Wordsworth shouted his lines aloud as he trudged through the Lake District, his dog browsing ahead of him to bark if strangers, who might hear his bellowing and think him mad, appeared on the trail. Byron disliked Wordsworth for one reason above all the rest: boring. The poet of "rocks and stones and trees" was boring. Byron wished never to be bored. So he kept moving, kept accelerating from one point to the next, not in hopes of being satisfied--that he took to be an illusion--but so as not to be overcome by the noontide demon, ennui. In 1825, the year after Byron died, the first passenger locomotive appeared, and maybe, says Camille Paglia, Byron's aristocratic spirit flew by metempsychosis into the machine. Well, perhaps Byron's restless daemon has migrated again, this time from locomotive to laptop.

Students now are Romantics--of a Byronic sort. He would have adored their world of fast travel, fast communication-and fast relationships. There is no more Byronic form of erotic life than the hookup. When after the publication of Childe Harold Byron became a celebrity--"I awoke and found myself famous," he said--he was beset with erotic opportunities. Women sent him notes begging for liaisons; they followed his carriage through the streets; they smuggled themselves into his rooms. And frequently Byron, who was probably more often seduced than seducing, was pleased to comply. In his super-speed erotic life, Byron is said to have hooked up hundreds of times.

What exactly does it mean to hook up? It means managing to have good sex without activating all the strong feelings that sex usually brings. Hooking up is a fantasy of frictionless sex--sex free of deep emotion. It's sex that lets you keep on sliding over surfaces, moving from partner to partner as smoothly as you move from site to site on the laptop. In fact, the Internet-linked computer is an erotic bazaar, a hookup machine. All of those personal pages on MySpace and Facebook are, among other things, personal ads. (Byron would love shopping there--and, more, being shopped for.) Here students can find objects more alluring and numerous than pleated skirts. They can find sexual possibilities without end.

Hooking up, of course, is a kind of myth. Sex usually does provoke strong feelings, even when people swear to each other that--this time, this time--it won't. Not everyone is wired like Lord Byron. Students often find that they need continuity and comfort in what can be a harsh college world. Many of them hold faithfully to boyfriends and girlfriends through all four years of school (albeit sometimes with special spring-break dispensations). And a few of those students busting out of my class, grabbing for their cellphones, are calling not the alluring near stranger who just IM-ed them, but their parents. In every class I teach, there are at least two or three students who call home every day.

For the way that my students live now is dangerous--some of them know it, some learn in time. "In skating over thin ice," Emerson says, "our safety is in our speed." But sometimes, like it or not, we're slowed down or stopped, and then trouble begins. Last term a young woman, an art history and commerce major in one of my classes, stopped by my office. She's a marvelous student; I've never taught anyone who could read poetry with much more subtlety and feeling. She was pale, sleepless; her teeth were chattering softly. I invited her to sit down and then asked some questions. "How many courses are you taking?" Five, no six, seven. "Audits?" Yes, one. "A thesis?" Almost done: She planned to knock out 40 pages over the weekend, but now her father, whom she clearly adored, was sick, and she'd have to go home and then how could she ...

"It's too much," I said. "What?" She hadn't heard me exactly. "What you're doing? It's too much." And then came-as it almost always does when I say these words, or something like them--a feeling of great relief. Someone with a claim to authority has said that it's OK to be tired, OK to ease up. OK to rest. When my students crash on their own, they crash like helicopters dropping straight out of the sky. They're often unaware that they're on the verge of trouble. They're doing what they are supposed to do, what their parents want, with all those courses and the multiple majors, and they haven't got much of any resources to look inside and to see that matters are out of joint--no one has thought to help them acquire those. Did Byron ever fall apart, victim of his own hunger for speed and space? If so, he told us little about it.

I wonder, thinking back to that fall day on the Lawn, was it something like an encounter I had had--to take the reincarnation trope a step further--with Lord Byron? He was all for glamour and motion. I was all for--well, what was I for? Was it the magic of the fifth draft on a project about a thinker, Freud, about whom--let us be generous-not everyone seems to care a great deal? I admit that I love that line of Yeats's about how writing is ceaseless stitching and unstitching, but "if it does not seem a moment's thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." The stitching-unstitching business fascinates me. Yet my student had been to six countries, six!--and that was only part of his summer's story. If you asked returning students now for that old composition standard, What I Did This Summer, they'd have to hit you with three-decker novels.

And what do I have to offer the speedsters, I, a slow person from the generation of one kind of Coke, three TV stations, one mom and one dad? How exactly do we professors teach this kind of student? What does she need to know?

Many of my colleagues have a ready answer, and its essence is this: If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. In effect, they've made the courses an extension of the Internet. Their classes are laser-and-light shows, fast-moving productions that mime the colors and sound and above all the velocity of the laptop. There are movie screens, sound systems, Internet tie-ins. And, these colleagues say, it works. One professor I know of equips his students with handheld wireless input devices that have 12 buttons and look a lot like TV remotes. Every five minutes or so, he stops teaching and polls the kids to see how well they're doing. I admire the resourcefulness that's on display here--and I admire the skill and energy that many of my fellow teachers have deployed to meet students halfway. And yet ...

Not long ago, a younger colleague came by my office to chat and at a certain point informed me that her son, who was 4 years old, had a favorite dinosaur and that it was called the Edmontosaurus. ("Edmundosaurus" is what I could have sworn she said.) She remarked, with what seemed untainted good will, that this may be the very oldest of the dinosaurs. A few weeks later she came by again--was she wheeling a TV in front of her, taking it to class?--and ended up telling me about this "Edmundosaurus" one more time. Well, the kind of schooling I endorse goes back at least as far as Socrates and maybe further, though not quite full-throttle to the thunder lizards.

If Socrates looked out on the current dispensation, what would he see? He'd see the velocity and the hunger for more life, faster, faster--sure. But given his interests, he'd notice something else, too. He'd see that by the time students get to college, they have been told who they are and what the world is many times over. Parents and friends, teachers, counselors, priests and rabbis, ministers and imams have had their say. They've let each student know how they size him up, and they've let him know what they think he should value. Every student has been submitted to what Socrates liked to call doxa, common sense, general belief.

And a student may be all the things the people who raised her say she is; she may want the things they have shown her are worth wanting. She may genuinely be her father and mother's daughter. But then again, she may not.

The primary reason to study Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who at a cocktail party is never embarrassed (but can embarrass others). The ultimate reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. They may help you to cut through established opinion--doxa--about who you are and what the world is. They may give you new ways of seeing and saying things, and those ways may be truer for you than the ones that you grew up with. Genuine education is a process that gives students a second chance. They've been socialized once by their parents and teachers; now it's time for a second, maybe a better, shot. It's time--to be a little idealizing about it for Socrates to have a turn.

For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists. She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does. Does she come to college as a fundamentalist guardian of crude faith? Then two necessary books for her are Freud's Future of an Illusion and Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ. Once she's weathered the surface insults, she may find herself in an intellectual version of paradise, where she can defend her beliefs or change them, and where what's on hand is not a chance conversation, as Socrates liked to say, but a dialogue about how to live. Is the student a scion of high-minded liberals who think that religion is the OxyContin--the redneck heroin--of Redneck Nation? Then on might come William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience or Schopenhauer's essays on faith. It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that immersion in the manic culture of the Internet and Adderall conditions students not to have. The first step for the professor now is to slow his classroom down. The common phrase for what he wants to do is telling: We "stop and think" Stop. Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They're always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising.

Not long ago a young man came to my office, plopped down, and looked at me with tired urgency. "Give me 10 minutes on Freud," he said. "Convince me that he really has something important to tell me." Despite appearances, this was a good moment. It was a chance to try to persuade him to slow it down. Get one of Freud's books--Civilization and Its Discontents is usually the best place to start--read it once and again, then let's talk.

When you have that kind of conversation, one on one, you begin, however modestly, to create a university. Why does the encounter need to take place face to face? The student and teacher need to create a bond of good feeling, where they are free to speak openly with each other. They need to connect not just through cold print, but through gestures, intonations, jokes. The student needs to discover what the teacher knows, and what she exemplifies about how to live. The teacher needs contact with the student's energy and hopes. That kind of connection happens best in person; perhaps it can happen only that way.

It's not a luxury, this Socratic education whose goal is self-knowledge. Constantly I see my students leaving the university, determined to do not what they want and need to do, but what their parents and their friends believe that they ought to do. And in this they can in some measure succeed. Society has a great span of resources to assist someone in doing what he's not cut out for yet still must be done. Alcohol, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don't need will all help you jam your round peg of a self into this or that square-holed profession.

But those students who, through whatever form of struggle, really have come to an independent sense of who they are and what they want genuinely seem to thrive in the world. Thoreau says that if you advance in the direction of your dreams, you'll find uncommon success, and teaching a few generations of students has persuaded me that he is right. The ones who do what they love without a lot of regard for conventional success tend to turn out happy and strong. As to those willing to advance in the direction of other people's dreams--well, prime the credit cards, crank the porn channel!

We teachers need to remind ourselves from time to time that our primary job is not to help our students to acquire skills, marketable skills, bankables. And we don't preeminently teach communication and computation and instill habits of punctuality and thoroughness. We're not here to help our students make their minds resemble their laptops, fast and feverish. We didn't get into teaching to make trains of thought run on time.

As to our students, all honor to them: They may have much to teach the five-drafter. By their hunger for more life they convey hope that the world is still in some measure a splendid place, worth seeing and appreciating. Into spontaneity they can liberate us. But life is more than spontaneity and whim. To live well, we must sometimes stop and think, and then try to remake the work in progress that we currently are. There's no better place for that than a college classroom where, together, we can slow it down and live deliberately, if only for a while.

And to that end--Edmundosaurus, take the mike !--starting this year, no more laptops in my classroom. You can leave them at home. You can check 'em at the door.

I didn't get the proofreader job, which somehow feels like a giant tragedy (I mean, really: how am I supposed to get a Real Person Job if I can't even be a goodamn comma-lackey for a campus newspaper? Try harder, self) and yet not that big of a deal (more time for volunteering, reading, and ballet classes). I'm not sure whether I should take it as a *~sign~* and turn away from that road or just to disregard it as a throwaway venture.

Burdz and I were also talking about advice. "I know most people change their careers 7 times," I ranted. "That DOESN'T HELP. I want to know that what I'm doing now is going to send me somewhere, that I'm working for a purpose, not that in six years I'm going to give it all up and become a wedding photographer."

I'm still not sure what to do about this: I've always been better at uselessly talking (or typing, as the case were) things out than at taking action from it. I'm pretty sure I'm not transferring universities, at any rate. If that helps. I became fairly certain earlier this week that I was going to stay in IR because I'm still sure that's the JOB I want to have. The part where I'm still unsure isn't what to do afterwards, but what to do while I'm here: how to get the most, how to learn the things I want to learn, how to profit (and, okay, enjoy) it, how to turn myself inside-out and start struggling with what I'm learning instead of just writing down the things I haven't heard 4 times before because I think they'll be on the midterm.

In Which there are Mentors, Tupperware, and Tapirs

2009-09-29T03:17:22Z

So I went to see Stephen Lewis last night. For those who don't know, Stephen Lewis is AMAZING: he was Canada's envoy to the UN, and then the UN Special Envoy on AIDS in Africa, and wrote Race Against Time about AIDS in Africa (specifically its effects on women), and is the most amazing humanitarian, feminist, and human being of life. Basically one of my top heroes ever. I was sitting in, like, the second row, and spent the first ten minutes just geeking out over how awesome he was (and he has one of the most amazing vocabularies ever. You might think this is a weird thing to notice, but you can't NOT notice it).

The speech was on his 'recipe for responsible activism,' but covered a lot of things, from his own work to current events. It was simultaneously inspiring, horrifying, electrifying, energizing, depressing, and thought-provoking. I <3 Stephen Lewis.

I had two rather in-depth conversations with my friends Burdz and Jolly today about a variety of things, including academic frustration, possible English majors, actually learning things at university, university, careers, life, international development, and all the things that I and others are trying to figure out right about now. I posted my 'Editing' entry as a fbook note and tagged all my IRL friends and they are being so splendiferous as to make me want to name stars after them. Honestly, just <333 I'm setting up a mentoring sesh with Mama Hen, who is one of my actual mentors and heros and also my EWB President (lol), which I'm actually making notes for, since when am I the kind of person who makes PRO V CON charts about my LIFE. I just don't even know. I'm going to try tp organise all three of those conversations into a coherent thing and then turn that thing into some kind of decision-making MACHINE to share with everyone, but I think first I need to progress to the point where it no longer turns me into some kind of seven-year-old blubberfest who just wants to play with trains until naptime.

And that is my life. Oh how cheering a thought.
-----------
Things I Have Started Doing Since Getting My Own House: (new tag! *domestic bliss - alternate suggestions welcome)
-baking at very late hours, usually while intoxicated
-an obscene amount of dishes
-militant recycling of everything from tin-foil butter-dish covers to plastic taco bags (they're resealable!)
-hating and regretting the only thing I've ever bought at Walmart (a $15, 40-pc tupperware set that's probably full of toxins, doesn't close properly, and stays greasy no matter how many times you wash it
-no homework whatsoever
-making surprisingly decent spaghetti sauce and salad dressing from scratch
-getting drunk on Tuesday nights (blame the roommates, totally not my fault)
-using plastic tablecloths
-using 'nachos' and 'nutella on bread' as the default meal plans
-being awesome

I have also learned that "no guy likes their dick bit." --Catya (truer words were never spoken?)
------------
News: (well this is not new because it's been one of my pet issues for years, but read about it in the paper today, so...)
-Bluefin tuna nearing extinction. (Other sources 1 2) The article I read today said it's probably going to happen in the next 3 years, and given all the research I've done on them (homg so many essays lol) I believe it.

sirdrakesheir gave me a meme: Reply to this post and I'll give you 5 words that remind me of you, and you have to explain what they mean to you.

My words beloooooow!

CREATURE: This is mainly because my response to her post was this picture, a tapir. I enjoy tapirs because they have interesting snouts, adorable offspring, and are related to the horse and the rhino. 'Creature,' though means a lot of things to me, like Orangutans and Hippogriffs and the television show 'Kratt's Creatures' (the precursor to 'Zaboomafoo'), which was AWESOME and basically the reason I wanted to be a zookeeper.

PARFAIT: I have absolutely no idea why I remind her of a parfait, because I have never actually had one - before you yell at me for not having eaten a parfait, I must explain that the only ones ever presented to me were in places like Starbucks, Tim Horton's, and the cafeteria, where things look soggy and the whipped cream is gross the the strawberries are genetically modified and from Chile. So no thank you. I am sure they would be delicious, though. What 'parfait' means to me is my high school French teacher, whose last name was pronounced like 'parfait' (which in French was hilarious). She was kickass and so awesome and taught me loads and had red hair and made us cook creme brulee in class and then watch naked French movies and is one of the most amazing teachers and women ever.

THEATRE: YAY THEATRE! I love theatre: I love plays, I love drama, I love the actual physical building. I do not consider myself an actor (by *~any~* stretch of the imagination) but I love it just the same. I actually do most of my acting/theatrical experience outside of theatres, but I still love their curtains and the way they smell and waiting in the wings. I love acting and rehearsals (! rehearsals <3) and learning lines, and knowing lines, and being constantly petrified of forgetting lines, and costumes, and emoting, and everything to do with theatre.

PURPLE: wtf, sirdrakesheir . *I'm* supposed to be explaining what these mean, not asking *you* to explain. Lol. I enjoy purple, especially since it looks very fetching with my now-red hair. (Wait - is this referring to prose? Because if so then I would have to wiki it to know what it actually means, and not just what I think it means.) I also know that it takes THOUSANDS of mollusks to produce even the tiniest amount of purple dye.

RAHM: basically this.

Behind the Veil

2009-09-26T22:14:20Z

Happy Things:
-Just back from the 'Busking Without Borders' event - relatively few crazies to deal with (which you always have to do, I have learned, when attempting public outreach events in large cities) and the last buskers were an awesome hip-hop dance troupe. We had free fair trade chocolate and coffee, and the event was completely not-for-profit (any donations went to the buskers, we were basically just there to talk to people). It was loads of fun, especially since someone from the Pro chapter brought their 6-month old Boxer who was fascinated with everything.
-The roommates and I are watching Ever After tonight.
-Catching up on TDS/TCR. "I thought you were Conan's date!"

World News:
-The Globe and Mail (my favourite newspaper) is doing a special this week on women in Afghanistan. The articles are very interesting, I've been making an effort to read them all this week; there's a lot obviously on the situation of women in Afghanistan, and a lot of things I would never have known: even though there's a mind-boggling statistic of domestic abuse, setting up battered women's shelters doesn't necessarily help because of strong cultural prejudices towards women living on their own and the automatic assumption that these would be brothels.

There's a lot more on the website, including video interviews with a variety of women, including women in government, a 19-year old police officer, a 14-year old Grade 9 student, and a 15-year old child bride, Sitara. The last one in particular was very striking - she looked very like my friend Zebra, and confessed her hopes and dreams "gone. It's too late for me." Just - I don't know how I would have dealt with being the journalist running the interview and not being able to help someone so obviously miserable and yet with so much potential and who you can still see smiling past the niqab. The differences between their lives and mine - and those of my sisters, who I couldn't help but think of since the ages were so similar - are so striking and heart-breaking.

I was a little annoyed with the way the interviews were run, in truth - a translator with a list of questions skipping ones that didn't apply and continuing with the questions even when there was more to ask, more to know, more to let the women speak. I understand you have to keep yourself emotionally separate, and that obviously it would be difficult or even inappropriate to ask some questions, especially when some of the women interviewed probably wouldn't have had many opportunities being invited or encouraged to share their feelings or stories (I'm thinking mainly of Sitara here; far from a family she says wouldn't listen with no-one to talk to) but I felt that the interviewer missed a lot of opportunities to ask follow-up questions and get deeper into the conversation. Which I guess is what you have to deal with when you work through a translator; but what I wouldn't give for a conversation with one of them.

-Kenya is still in drought, which is getting worse and worse. 24 million people are in urgent need of food and have no basic supplies. Crops won't grow, rivers are drying up, and cattle are dying. Cattle and goats are a MAJOR part of family and community life and subsistence - speaking of my heart breaking.

-I'm still mad at my government. Because they refuse to fix broken legistlation, our last shipment of cheap AIDS drugs is being sent to Africa. And then that's it. That's all. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

2009-09-24T19:57:01Z

And now, in 'CLASSES I'M ACTUALLY ENJOYING,' I bring you: ARABIC. Not only is my professor still adorable, but she's also the teacher for Arabic Cinema at the university so she's bringing Egyptian movies for us to watch in our labs. Right now we're watching 'The Emigrant,' which is about Joseph the prophet and is randomly funny when it's not supposed to be, and also surprisingly bloody. There was also some unexpected humour when someone was trying to phonetically sound out a word and I finally had to say "It's 'Washington.'" "Yes," said the prof. "You're drawing it out, expecting it to be all palm trees and oases and then you get Washington."

I'm loving how logical the language is, too - virtually every noun and verb has a 'root,' 3 main letters that form the basis for the word. You take these letters and add different vowels and you get all the related words. The best part? The things that end up being related. A word that means 'bread' also means 'the living.' The root 'to gather together' means both 'university,' 'mosque,' and 'Friday' (the day of prayer). The root for the verb 'to kiss' comes from the verb 'to accept.' <33333

As sirdrakesheir once said,

"ARABIC. I'D HIT IT."

Now, obvs this is isn't going to come close to last year's Awesome History Professor and his quotes, but here are a few things that have been going on in my classes, aka 'GLOBALIZATION: DO YOU FEEL LUCKY PUNK? WELL DO YA?'

CATYA: And then the book goes "well globalization might not even exist!" It had better fucking exist! It's my major!

PROF: There's no reason to go through life only knowing one bibliographic style.

CONTESTED PLACES:
The prof obviously wishing he was teaching fourth-years instead...
PROF: Okay, now think of an example for a place you feel uncomfortable.
STUDENT: Tila Tequila's.

Amusing mental images...
PROF: I mean, why is Ottawa here and not anywhere else? It's not like Queen Victoria was just throwing darts onto a map.

Gratuitous amounts of sarcasm...
PROF: Today we're going to talk about Place and Globalisation-
COLLINE: FML.
PROF: Time and space compression...
BURDZ: No way.
COLLINE: Really?
BURDZ: You're kidding me.
COLLINE: I've never even heard of that before!

Speaking of globalisation...
PROF: I've got email, I've got facebook, but I'm not twittering NO ONE.

My prof knows a lot of interesting people:
COLLINE: I want to come to his dinner parties!
BURDZ: I wonder if he knows Obama.

INTRO TO POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT:
PROF: So it seems my metaphor of the day is 'toast.' Hmm.

COLLINE: Omg. So I have been staring at this man's mouth for like 45 minutes. And he has a tongue ring.
BURDZ: What?!
BURDZ: ... Well that would explain how he talks.

PROF: Women couldn't really exist in the public sphere. Well, there were women entertainers, who would sort of dance and play the flute - that's not a metaphor, by the way - at public events.

PROF: And then Socrates goes into what I like to think of his 'origins' story-
BURDZ: He *would* read comic books.

STUDENT: *coughs*
PROF: I actually have cough drops. I don't mind giving them out. *surreptitiously drops on on the front desk* There will be no judgement here!
STUDENT: Sorry. *shameface*
PROF: It's not a problem. It's just practical for it to stop.

BURDZ: It looks like all our profs this year are in the Captain Obvious League.
COLLINE: They are No-Shit Sherlocks.
BURDZ: Socrates would NOT be impressed.
COLLINE: 'Going over rubrics does not take care of your SOUL!'

STUDENT: Did Socrates want to die to make his last lesson more important?
PROF: I don't think he *wanted* to die. But I mean, if I got a free ticket to Florida I'd take it.

PROF: This isn't the world's oldest episode of Law & Order.
BURDZ: No, it's like Socrates' 'I'M OUT, MOTHAFUCKAHS!' speech. He totally knows he's going down, and he's going out with a bang.
COLLINE: He's all 'you keep saying the word 'justice.' I do not think it means what you think it means.'

CLASS READINGS: THINGS I HAVE SCRAWLED SARCASTICALLY IN MY MARGINS
-"All too often we are told that our economy must obey 'the global market.'" There's no such thing. It's not just a big truck, you know, that you can just dump things on. (WAIT FOR IT, WAIT FOR IT....)
-"how does your economic position, your ethnicity, your gender, your culture, or your religion determine what globalization means to you?" IT'S A SERIES OF TUBES! (that's right)
-"with a global communications infrastructure has also come the transnational spread of ideas, cultures, and information, from Madonna to Mohammad" oh well aren't you clever.
-"What, in other words, is globalization?" Oh my god. DID THIS BOOK NOT READ ITS OWN LAST CHAPTER?
-"...diplomatic envoys, who did not, strictly speaking, enjoy the equivalent of diplomatic immunity characteristic of modern international society: they could be punished and held hotage and in several cases were actually killed. However, like ancient treaties, the institution of diplomacy was invested with religious solemnity." Great. "I'll kill you, and I'll kill you unfairly and without just cause, but I'm gonna do it with mother$%(*$&(ing SOLEMNITY."

This is why I love my dad

2009-09-24T02:33:10Z

Two poems that basically express how I'm feeling right about now:

1. The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

2. In-Class Assignment - Jaida Jones
It is one thirty when the professor says
"Write a forty-minute essay on love"
and suddenly all I can think about is
how much I hate communal bathrooms and
how the redhead in the dorm next to ours
thinks she is an opera singer and
how no one else on my floor knows how
to close a door quietly and
how I wish the salad dressing didn't have garlic in it and
why isn't my handwriting attractive, like Jackie's from room 611?

It is one thirty five and I have nothing on my paper
just a question--"What is love"--and a question mark--"?"--
and the sudden terror that where I am
is clearly not where I should be
and before my parents spent all their money some philanthropist
should have come and said
look--just, listen for a minute--I'm sorry to say it,
but college isn't for you
which would have saved everyone a lot of trouble
and now I'm going to have to pack up my new computer and my new notebook,
my vitamin pills and my retainers, and go home with eighteen
bed, bath, and beyond bags
on the New York subway, to buy some plane tickets
because what I think I'm better suited for
is raising kangaroos
in Australia.

It is one forty, maybe one forty one,
while everyone else is writing--
I look over at the paper to my left,
where Emily has two whole paragraphs
about the nature of self sacrifice and love eternal
and how love transcends this and how love defies that
while to my left Jackie's handwriting is still mocking mine
even though I can't read it
(and that's not helping).

It is one forty five, probably one forty six,
when the professor looks at me,
no doubt thinking "Why is this girl not booking her
plane tickets yet,
she is wasting my time, she is wasting the kangaroos' time,
and the aborigines' time, and her parents' money--
Oh God, think of her parents,
they have spent so much money,
when they could have bought a one-way ticket
to Australia," and meanwhile everyone is writing
and using their time wisely,
and people are crossing things out and the erasers are going crazy
and everyone is eloquent and I am thinking
love is my mommy, my mommy, my mommy
and then
what does a kangaroo eat,
and how long before they are house-trained?

At one fifty one I have been wasting time not just
for twenty-one minutes but also seventeen years,
so that the twenty-one minutes of class time
seems almost negligible
when you look at the time wasted from that perspective:
seventeen years old
and I cannot possibly know what love is;
seventeen years old and I cannot write
even one paragraph on love, much less two lined pages;
seventeen years old, my first assignment, a free-form essay,
I can say anything, and here I am, looking at the paper, thinking
I don't know anything about love, lady,
especially not in a literary context
and isn't that what I'm here for?
Why aren't you writing me an essay?

At one fifty five it's pretty much hopeless because
in twenty minutes I have to run
through the rain to my physics class
to discover that I cannot actually take my physics class
so I can leave and be late to my Japanese
so I can start crying on the campus steps
and the great unmoved alabaster facefront
of the great unmoving alabaster library
can tell me it doesn't give a word about my predicaments--
that it is wet--that it has other problems--that someone has
spilled coffee
on its card catalog and I cannot possibly understand this,
having no card catalog.

At one fifty six I realize the professor is bored out of her mind
watching Emily go on to her third page and Jackie make her j's
like sexual intercourse,
and my blank paper yawns, and my professor yawns,
and I write "It is not that I am
less when you are gone, but rather
that I am more when you are here"
and then
this does not pertain only to people
and then
but to words and to learning as well.
--Jaida Jones

3. Blackbird - The Beatles
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
I'm kind of exhausted with all the personal reflection (hence the short meme break yesterday). I know I have to go through this now, but it's getting to be a little much. Thankfully I have Mama Hen and the EWBers to offer hugs when I look stressed, and roommates to make me do indecent things at 7:30 on a Tuesday evening and then tuck me into bed afterwards <3

Thanks to everyone who has commented or emailed or said anything nice to me these past couple of weeks; I realize I am not much fun and there is projectile word vomit all over this journal and I'm the biggest baby ever for bawling over Robert Frost or little bits of advice and nice things that people keep saying to me but honestly it means a lot and I just wanted to say thanks for helping me try to sort this all out. You people rock my socks <3