35 posts tagged “college”

The apartment, the cupboards. I came out of the bathroom earlier and reached over to chuck my clothes in what would've been a makeshift hamper outside of my bathroom door. After cleaning around my desk, I reached over towards the right to what would've been a wastebasket. It's funny how your body is conditioned to certain habitual maneuvers. I'm tired beyond comprehension, but I'm sure some introspective post will be written about life as an undergrad. Some things don't change. :o)

The students in Beijing believe that the backdrop of our campus at St. John's in a travel piece is digitally manipulated. True, I suppose adjusting the contrast could work in our favor. The thing of it is, a blue sky is an anomaly in Beijing. Production and development are costly, costly in more ways than one. The Blue Sky project was launched about ten years ago to provide Beijing with about 100 days with a blue sky - smog is the norm there.

I am concerned. Concerned that this new generation of students - myself included - are among the most deflated of youths thus far. Why is it that inspiration is so fleeting? In Balzac and the Little Chiense Seamstress, the protagonists discover a trunk full of banned books that give them a glimpse outside of Communist China. My father lived it. He studied Marx & Engels before the Red Guards destroyed a generation of education along with over 7 million precious texts. Watched teachers and intellectuals being beaten and humiliated. He, as were the characters in Balzac, was sent to re-education camp where tilling the soil was the only objective and intellectualism was viewed as pathological.

The little seamstress is a run-of-the-mill country girl whose fate was intertwined with making clothing for villagers and probably marrying into another mundane livelihood dictated by the menial. She then learns to read and has her companions read from these Western texts - Balzac and Shakespeare among others - and has the cliched epiphany of life outside of her own. To their surprise, she packs a bag and leaves the village, only to disappear.

I'm at such an impasse right now that I'm not sure how to reconcile with this. Lately, I press the snooze button and allow myself maybe just forty minutes to get ready. I lie in bed, curled in the fetal position, half awake, prolonging the remnants of REM sleep for up to half an hour sometimes. It's a good day when I've packed most of my stuff the night before, disastrous when I haven't. I graduate in five weeks, and I haven't the faintest notion of where one thing ends and another begins. We're so preoccupied with text messages and to-do lists, that we leave so little premium on the oft-trivialized pursuits of self-definition, self-discovery, and social change. We've resigned to the prospects of McCain's victory in November; hell, I'm surprised the State's putting a fight up against congestion pricing here.

It's hard enough getting people to RSVP or return e-mails, how fathomable is a social movement? Disturbing, indeed. Maybe we're the ones here who have normalized the smog around us. Blue skies mean little if there's always so much shit up in the air.

What inspires you? I can't give you a concise answer, at the moment. I gather that, by this point in time, inspiration won't come in a trunk or within the auspices of a clear day. Prove me wrong; that is all I ever ask for before I go to bed.

I am currently diagnosing Arnie Grape from What's Eating Gilbert Grape per the DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic Criteria for my Child & Adolescent Psychopathology class. Then I have to diagnose the blonde girl from Thirteen. I think a comorbity of autism and mental retardation for the former and some form of oppositional defiant disorder for the latter. I have many qualms about this, diagnosing. Because then you start involuntarily categorizing others because the criteria are embedded into your consciousness. Not cool. But cool for the drug companies and their shareholders and psychiatrists during their annual banquet fodder.

i completely neglected one - okay, maybe more - class and was suddenly reminded i have four midterms and four short papers due next week, one each day except for wednesday. this blows goat nuts, it really does.

I am currently sitting at the Organization Congress. If you don't know what that is, it's our school's equivalent of the US State of the Union held every month. Pretty much a hall full of self-important delegates engaging in collective intellectual whacking off. It's as necessary as a cold sore on a second date. Really not. Luckily, they've enticed our minimal attention with catered food!

so i decided to do the optional paper for criminology at 11:15 PM and literally just went off on an unadulterated rant. my professor is either going to hate me more or actually like me. oh well.

            While I can understand how many can be sold on the link between abortion and crime rates, I argue that the wide acceptance of this relationship is peppered with dangerous presuppositions about poverty, crime, and race. Many things are not taken into account; many structural and political factors. The notion of preventing “unwanted babies” is connected with the erroneous theory of the culture of poverty.

Donahue and Levitt are essentially implicating select classes and areas as doomed to an environment of impoverishment, wherein procreation is equated with the breeding of potential criminals. Yes, children born into an otherwise poor environment may be more vulnerable to deviance, but is that a cultural problem? Is aborting them the solution? No - it’s a structural problem of class atomization, changes in social welfare policies that dictate mothers to work after a certain amount of years of receiving aid, etc. Another factor that has not been taken into consideration is the practice of eugenics and involuntary sterilization of poor and Black women - involuntary because many were uninformed of it happening. I believe what they have widely publicized is a spurious relationship. Donahue and Levitt’s thesis, much like an extension of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s analysis of the Black family, dangerously reifies the status of these “undesirable environments.”

While I disagree that abortion is a primary factor in the reduction of crime in the 90s, I agree with Lott and Whitley’s approach in their rebuttal, citing multiple factors that may have contributed the flux of crime. And as some critics argued that the Donahue-Levitt thesis as fraught with a hidden agenda in “pro-abortion,” I disagree that it was primarily advocating abortion. Their constant justification and dogmatic backing of their initial thesis could just be a refusal to concede to errors in analysis. I’m unsure of what their agenda was in repeatedly supporting their thesis, but Freakonomics was an interesting book.

You may be drawn to the romantic notion of getting away from it all, yet this could sound better than it really is. Still, a sensibly planned trip may make sense. There's no need to be impulsive about it but the sooner you begin considering your options, the sooner you can turn this dream into a reality. If possible, include someone else in your adventure, for the energy you receive from others can fuel your enthusiasm.

what i really want right now is an epiphany - something by which to be inspired; not a religious rapture or a resurrection of something dead inside me.

in the interim, i have to go back to reading for class.

sorry, L; i veered off course :-(.