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(12/08/09 2:19am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>This Thanksgiving I sat down with my family to watch ABC’s “The Middle,” a sitcom about Indiana – only it looked a lot different from the Indiana I know.The show was sharp and witty, but hidden behind the zingy one-liners was a little condescension. Take the family’s name, Heck, which sounds just a little too much like “hick,” or the fact that during the pilot episode the IU theme song plays in the background as the dorky daughter unsuccessfully tries out for 12 teams. Still, every quirky, dysfunctional family doesn’t have to reflect negatively on the real-life place in which it is set. Patricia Heaton’s other fictional family, the Romanos, didn’t demean Long Islanders or make the statement that everyone in the state of New York has an annoying mother-in-law. “Everybody Loves Raymond” didn’t claim to be telling the story of all New Yorkers, either. “The Middle,” on the other hand, seems to be saying that its fictional family is representative of the entire Midwest. The frame for the show’s credits depicts an airplane flying over a cornfield, and Heaton’s character said in the introduction that she’s from the part of the country that the rest of you just fly over. She is claiming that space – the Midwest – as her own, and saying it is a part of her identity. But can we trust the portrayal of a Hollywood-based production crew? It turns out that both of the women who wrote the pilot episode for “The Middle,” Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, should have some perspective, because they met each other as freshmen here at IU. Then they transferred to NYU two years later. I’m glad some of the writers actually lived in Indiana for a while, but it still begs the question – why are people who don’t live in Indiana the ones who are telling all of the stories about us? The easiest explanation is that if you want to write television shows and movies in this country, you need to live on the coast. But the result is that all of the stories about places other than California or New York feel shallow and processed, because the writers can’t really understand a different place because they have all lived out their adult lives in the same place.The result is that too often the stories that we see on TV only represent a narrow slice of the country. And when movies do seldom include other settings, what we are left with are often more like trite caricatures than real, substantive stories. We need real, genuine writers and thinkers to tell our story – the story of Indiana, of the Midwest. Those of us who have spent real time here need to be the ones telling its stories.What we need are more Kurt Vonneguts and Scott Russell Sanders and fewer Frankie Hecks.
(12/01/09 1:57am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Allow me to indulge my Carrie Bradshaw side.I might or might not have purchased copies of the book “He’s Just Not That Into You” to give to some of my girlfriends last Christmas. I now realize that was wrong, and I am sorry. When I happened upon Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s self-proclaimed “No excuses truth to understanding guys,” its simplicity spoke to me. I had heard all of the arguments against it. I knew that it was gendered – after all, there wasn’t a “She’s Just Not That Into You.” I understood that on some level it reduced women to silly, emotional, woefully oblivious fools. Still, I read it. I internalized it. Then I bought it for others. And I’m not the only one. Millions of you bought it, too. The film version grossed $178,404,614 worldwide, including $93,953,653 in the U.S., and the book was a New York Times Best Seller.Clearly, the advice resonated with a lot of us. The book struck a chord with so many of us, because – like almost every 20-something guy and girl I know – we had all suffered through the confusing and agonizing experience of being ignored by someone we thought we cared about. So when Greg and Liz offered to boil all that confusion down into one catchy six-word phrase, we took the bait. The problem with all this common-sense advice is that it lets us off the hook for not communicating. What Greg and Liz and their catchphrase are arguing is that not communicating something says something – namely he/she is not interested. This logic becomes more dangerous when used in the reverse. Heck, if communicating was this easy why would any of us ever bother to call anyone and give them a formal rejection? If simply not doing anything communicates the same thing, why would anyone ever go through the awkward and painful experience of hurting someone you cared about, if only slightly?Not to mention that assuming that every small oversight is an explicit slight can cause even more confusion. If we are all supposed to assume rejection at the first un-returned phone call or declined invitation, we don’t leave a whole lot of room for nuance.Newsweek’s Ramin Setoodeh once called HJNTIY dating advice a la George W. Bush – the you’re-either-with-us-or-you’re-against-us answer to ambiguous dating engagements. In the past I might have taken him to task. Now I mostly agree. “He’s Just Not That Into You” misses the mark when it comes to the real root of dating frustration. A good old lack of communication is behind all of the woes that Greg and Liz try and unravel, but unfortunately what they prescribe is more of the same – that is, not communicating.
(11/17/09 1:15am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Today, hockey-mom turned governor turned vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin will release her much-anticipated memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.”Her book, which reaches shelves today, has spent 50 days on Amazon.com’s top 100 and has already sold more than a million advance copies. “Going Rogue” even elbowed out James Patterson, Dan Brown and “SuperFreakonomics” to claim Amazon’s bestseller’s top spot. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I thought autobiographies were the sort of things that old, dying people scraped together to preserve a memory of their legacy – not another way to cash in on a waning 15 minutes of fame. I’m thinking of some of the great autobiographies of old. Benjamin Franklin was 82 when he finished his. Gandhi published his when he was 58. Malcolm X was only 39 when he finished relating his story to Alex Haley, but he had been threatened with assassination several times. He was shot and killed in 1965 – the same year that his autobiography was published. Nowadays everyone writes an autobiography – and soon. Bill Clinton has one. Hillary does, too. President Obama’s first book of memoirs hit shelves in 1995 – when he was just 34 years old. Even 16-year-old Miley Cyrus already has an autobiography under her belt. Too bad “Miles to Go” probably came out before her 10th-grade teacher could explain that Robert Frost allusion.And can you blame them? Autobiographies are a booming business, even in a difficult economy.Palin reportedly received $5 million just to pen her personal history, not to mention the money she’ll rake in when the royalties come rolling. Still, I think it’s funny that 45-year-old Palin is so quick to come out with her memoirs. If all the buzz about a 2012 run is even remotely true, why not wait a few more years, accomplish a little more and then put out a book with some substance? Even if she did wait, I probably wouldn’t put a lot of stock in the gospel of Palin according to Palin. But then again, I don’t put much stock in any autobiography anyway. Famed British biographer Humphrey Carpenter once called autobiographies “the most respectable form of lying.” And I think he got it right. The problem about memoirs of any sort is that there are fundamental credibility issues. Since no one likes to think of themselves in a negative light, everyone either consciously or unconsciously prunes and edits the first-draft of their thoughts. So by the time they make it onto the paper, it is hard to decipher the credible from the edited.Ultimately, autobiographies are interesting not for what they tell us, but often for what they leave out, which means we all must be vigilant readers in order to separate fact from fabrication. So for all of you who already have your hands on a copy of “Going Rogue,” I challenge you to think about not only what our favorite maverick princess is saying, but also why she might be saying it.Fortunately, the book of Sarah can’t possibly be very long.
(11/10/09 1:28am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I wonder what Dorothy felt like after “The Wizard of Oz” ended. After she, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry had gotten over the shock of Dorothy’s delusional dream, what happened next? How long did it take for the there’s-no-place-like-home euphoria to fade away? How many times did Dorothy have to get yelled at for forgetting to feed the chickens, or get scolded for not repairing that storm shelter before she thought to herself, “Man, Oz wasn’t really so bad after all?”For those of us who hope to enter the job market sometime in the near future, odds are that after college we might end up back in Kansas – at least for a little while. At the time of the 2000 census, almost 4 million people ages 25 to 34 reported that they were living with their parents. And the economic downturn has made our prospects for true independence even worse. As of September, 202,000 young college graduates were searching for a job – nearly a 33 percent increase from the year before. This high rate of unemployment probably explains why 60 percent of the college students who responded to a recent poll by job-search firm www.MonsterTRACK.com said they were planning on moving back home for some period of time after graduation, and 21 percent of those said they planned to stay at home for more than a year. After spending this past weekend at home, the prospect of making a more permanent move back doesn’t sound so appealing. I went home last Friday for the first time this semester. By the time I pulled out of Bloomington, I was so starved for home cooking, my old bed and my family that the two and a half hours couldn’t go fast enough. But once I got there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Since I had been gone, my parents had remodeled our bathrooms and repaved the sidewalk in front of our house. The bathroom where I had gotten ready for prom and every dance from sixth grade on had been replaced, and the tree I used to climb and sit in had been cut down to make way for the sidewalk. For the first time, I was home, but it wasn’t the home that I remembered. It was different, changed – like I had found something familiar, but it was inside out. I guess this happens to everyone at some point or another. There is a moment when the location of your capital “H” Home switches from your parents’ house to someplace else – for me, it must have happened sometime this semester.Unfortunately, it looks like just as many of us are beginning to feel comfortable away from the nest, economic forces might start propelling us back there. Perhaps it will just take a little bit of positive thinking to make us all more comfortable in the land of Mom and Dad. Take a cue from Dorothy and repeat after me: There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.
(11/03/09 3:52am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s been two weeks since Victoria’s Secret descended upon Dunn Meadow and erected its stage for the Oct. 22 Girl Talk concert.But I’m still upset. Sure, the concert was great. Everyone I know who went had a great time, and it was really exciting to have a concert outside. Granted, the concert also raised $5,000 for Middle Way house, and Victoria’s Secret put it on for no charge. But we should have known better. As my economics professor once told me, nothing can ever be free. There are always costs associated with something, even if they are non-monetary ones.And what was the great cost of last month’s Girl Talk concert? Dunn Meadow.If you haven’t walked down Seventh Street lately, you might not know that there is a well of mud masquerading as Dunn Meadow. It looks like California during the rainy season, or the third day of Woodstock – only less fun. Victoria’s Secret agreed to pay for the damages to the field, but I say that’s not enough. Because winter is coming on quickly, whatever grass the company puts down in the field won’t start growing until March. That’s four months we will have to suffer with a pig hole for a gathering place. I’m not the only one who is upset about this. Last week, someone erected a makeshift white sign in the middle of the mud pile. It called the desecration of the meadow an example of the destruction caused by giant corporations. What’s more is that Dunn Meadow is a historic spot on campus, and to have half of it covered in mud disgraces that history. Since 1963 when it was officially dubbed the assembling place for the campus, Dunn Meadow has hosted anti-war protests, memorial vigils and large gatherings of all sorts. Dunn Meadow is supposed to belong to the students. It is supposed to be our place to relax on blankets, to throw Frisbees, to challenge administrations. It isn’t fair that one event has rendered our collective gathering spot out of commission until spring. I like the idea of having concerts outside, but the next time Union Board helps to sponsor an event in Dunn Meadow, they need to make sure we aren’t going to be paying interest on that concert for months to come. Future events must be held to stringent rules so that we protect Dunn Meadow. Any artist that contracts to play there should be required not to repair the damage afterward, but to make sure that this sort of damage doesn’t happen in the first place. More careful planning could potentially have saved Dunn Meadow. And if those requirements scare away some artists or make it so we have to have all of our concerts in the IU Auditorium, so be it. The history and heritage of that space is worth preserving. Sacrificing Dunn Meadow for the better part of the school year is too high a price to pay for a “free concert.”
(10/27/09 1:56am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I can’t stand Halloween. I know that it makes me a horrible college student. I know that because it’s the last week of October, I’m supposed to be dishing out money for the most sacred uniform of collegiate America: the Halloween costume. By now I should have already invested hours into pulling together an outfit that is either witty, sexy or scary. But as the day draws nearer, I’m receding further into my shell. College law dictates that I should have already recruited the members for my group costume and tried to one-up the rivals. I’m so far behind the costume curve that when I made a last-stitch effort to scour Goodwill for anything remotely wearable, all I found was a pair of white tights and a red jacket. I considered being a revolutionary war soldier.In fact, next to that the best idea that I had was to be a lifeguard. I am a lifeguard. I know, I know – there must be something wrong with me. I hate candy corn, I don’t find costumes fun and I’d rather spend $46.95 on a pair of jeans than one yard’s worth of a Tinkerbell dress. I don’t even have a good reason for opposing Halloween. Sure, I’m not a huge fan of the gamut of women’s costume choices. (Will it be sexy kitten or pirate whore?) But that’s not the whole reason. I don’t think it’s fun to dress up. For the uncreative like me, Halloween is more stress than it’s worth. I’ll spend three weeks thinking, and all I will come up with are famous people who I don’t look like, things that I don’t have enough money to buy or something I don’t have the time to make. What I hate most about Halloween is all the pressure that comes with it. Since it’s supposed to be one of the most fun nights of the year, if I’m not enjoying myself I feel like a failed college student – like I’ve flunked some big social midterm. For me, Halloween represents this ridiculous ideal of fun that I can never seem to live up to. It’s like I build it up to be this great thing and then come down hard on myself when I’m not meeting some imaginary fun quota. But this isn’t just about me. It’s about you. It’s about us. It’s about how, Halloween or not, we all go along with things that we don’t like. We do things, wear things, say things that only half-fit because we have to live up to some ridiculous idea about how much fun we are “supposed” to be having. So if you want, spend Saturday night doing whatever boring, bland, mainstream thing you want. And don’t feel bad about it. Sure, Halloween can be fun, but if you’re not that into it, just say no. Then go find something else that is more fun and less expensive. I know I’ll be doing the same.
(10/20/09 7:25pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I absolutely hate Wonder Woman.I hated her even before I was born. I’ve loathed her ever since she first slipped on those red high-heeled boots and told all our moms that women could be powerful and strong – as long as they had a 24-inch waist. But it wasn’t all her fault. She was a tool, a metaphor: the 1960s answer to a time when women demanded change, but everyone else wasn’t ready.If women want to be professionals, OK, but they must also be homemakers. You want to do more? Why not do everything?Get a degree, find a job, lasso a husband, run a home, manage a family, fight crime, look sexy – that’s what the world told them.Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t complain, or sweat, or even struggle. Make it look easy. Don’t smudge that makeup, ladies. Smile.I hate Wonder Woman because of what she has made us believe we have to be. Our mothers fought to be taken seriously and were handed a doll used as a representation of a 5-foot-10, 125-pound woman. Then after years of chasing after that doll, our moms dusted her off and laid her, leotard and all, at our feet.Living up to that ideal is nauseating. What’s even more difficult is the fact that what we are supposed to be doesn’t even make sense.We have to be sexy, but we’re not supposed to actually want to have sex. And then if (God forbid) we decide to be sexual, we have to be coy and cool. But not too confident, or bam! We’re labeled a slut.In the classroom, it’s all the same. The girl who talks too much, who disagrees and who speaks her opinions is a bitch (See exhibit A: Hillary Clinton). A good girl is quiet, demure, gracious and doesn’t rub anyone the wrong way. Too bad those characteristics do not make a great leader.Did I mention that we’re supposed to look hot? Always. But not only that, we’re supposed to look like looking good wasn’t difficult. News flash: looking good is always difficult.And be careful not to look too sexy, because if someone rapes you, then they’ll say it was your fault. A cheetah-print top? Clearly she was asking for it.But it isn’t all bad. In fact, being a woman is often incredible and challenging and exciting and wonderful. The fact that the world underestimates us makes it that much more fun to exceed people’s expectations. Oh, and that multiple orgasm thing isn’t so shabby either.The day-to-day work of being a woman isn’t what is so difficult. It’s trying to live up to that suffocating standard that makes us go crazy. We’re just as diverse and complex as any other group of people, and we want to stop being pigeon-holed into assuming some sort of super-human persona. We want to be able do everything, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be everything all at once.Let us just be wonderful, women. Save the leotard for someone else.Erin Chapman is a junior majoring in history.
(10/19/09 2:08am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Whatever doubts were left about the Miss America Organization’s views of women were cleared up last week when they announced that Rush Limbaugh would be guest-judging this year’s competition.For years, Miss America has faced accusations from feminists that the competition is degrading to women. The traditional response is that Miss America is about honoring beautiful, talented, smart women with scholarship money for college. The feminist response generally goes something like this:Scholarship, huh? I guess that’s why only eight of the 52 contestants ever get to open their mouths on stage. And what about the swimsuit – I mean, “health and fitness” – portion? Please. If we were really testing these women’s healthy lifestyles, we would actually provide them with a pool to match those pretty suits. So, in an attempt to garner publicity, they selected Rush Limbaugh, the president of the He-man Woman-Haters Club, as their guest judge.But Rush is just the latest addition in the Feminists vs. Miss America debate that has been raging for decades. In fact, Miss America was one of the original modern feminist causes. The phrase “bra-burning” comes from the 1968 Miss America protest, when women threw clothes into a bin to be burned. Clearly, it didn’t take Rush Limbaugh for us to figure out that Miss America was bad for women. The real question is why do we still feel the need to say it?The ugly truth is that we have to say it because we haven’t convinced enough people. And by people, I mean women. While feminists were parading goats around outside the competition, millions of American women were tuning in inside their homes. Not because the menacing men made them, but because they liked it – enjoyed it, even.That, ladies, is the real problem – and it’s a whole lot bigger than Rush Limbaugh. Even now when I tune in, I find myself imagining what it would be like to wear that crown. And why shouldn’t I? After all, she embodies everything that they’ve been telling us for years we should be: beautiful, but not too sexy; skinny, but not too unhealthy; smart, but not too opinionated. She’s so hard to shake because she’s so much a part of what we’re supposed to want. The draw of Miss America is stitched so tightly into the fabric of growing up as a girl in this country that we can’t help but love watching it.The mold of the angry, hairy, bra-burning feminist is in many ways just as stifling as the prim and primped Miss America. Such a rigid dichotomy leaves no room for the millions of American women who fall somewhere in between. Just as Miss America is a problem for feminists, feminism is a problem for young women. We feminists need to stop all the heckling over Rush Limbaugh and Miss America and start making room for a more complex view of women.
(10/13/09 4:16am)
Here’s a novel idea: Nobel Prizes should be given to people after they have done things – not before.
(10/13/09 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Last Thursday the New York Times ran a page-one article that traced First Lady Michelle Obama to her enslaved ancestors.The article chronicled a 6-year-old slave girl, Melvinia, and her descendents’ journey from the plantation to the White House. Overall, the piece was well-written and well-researched, a sweeping Alex-Haley-esque chronicle of one woman’s humble roots. The story ended with a quote from a relative of Michelle. After finding out that her ancestor was related to the first lady she said, “Praise God, we’ve come a long way.”But there is something just a little too self-congratulatory about all this “look how far we’ve come” business. Articles like this are good for newspapers because they play on our emotions. They make us feel bad by reminding readers of how awful an institution slavery was, and then they alleviate those bad feelings by pointing out that in the end we did the right thing by electing a black man president – wrapping it all up with a nice moral and a narrative bow. Reminding everyone that our first lady descended from slaves is about congratulating ourselves for waking up and putting an end to a horrible institution. By focusing on Michelle Obama’s family we – white, anxious-about-race America – are not glorifying her, we are exonerating us. We aren’t just saying good for you for overcoming social barriers, we are saying good for us for ending slavery. Narratives like this New York Times piece are too simple. They trick us into believing that we live in a post-racial society when race is still a twisted subject in America, and injustices of all kinds are far from being abolished. The fact of the matter is that we still have a long way to go. Even as Barack Obama occupies the White House, one in every three black men in America can expect to be incarcerated at some point during their lifetime – compared with only one in twenty white men. While 76 percent of white students graduate from high school, only 51 percent of black students will receive their diplomas. Yes, voting a black family into the White House was an important step for historically racist America. But we need to stop collectively patting ourselves on the back and start the difficult work of closing the racial divide. There are too many lingering injustices in our society for us to be obsessing over Michelle Obama’s heritage. On Sunday, thousands of gay and lesbian activists had to march on Washington to get the nation’s attention for their bid for equality, and women are still making less money than their male co-workers. It’s time to stop implicitly congratulating ourselves for correcting past injustices. Someday the New York Times of tomorrow will be profiling a president who overcame some other great injustice – one that we were so oblivious about, but to them will seem so obvious.
(10/06/09 1:41am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The newest ad out of a Toronto-based charity would make any marketing director salivate. It features scantily-clad women, an MTV DJ and a final frame that looks like something from a “Girls Gone Wild” video. What were they advertising? Not beer or baseball, but a breast cancer charity event.At latest count the video had about 265,000 YouTube views, and it was even featured on VH1’s “Best Week Ever” and CNN.com. The video depicts a woman, MTV Canada DJ Aliya Jasmine Sovani, strutting by a pool in a skimpy two-piece while the pool-goers gawk at her half-exposed chest. The final frame flashes the words, “Now it’s time to save the boobs.”When did breast cancer (emphasis on the breasts) become so sexy?Even though the intention of this ad – raising awareness about breast cancer – is positive, the ad itself does nothing good for women or their “boobies.” The problem with ads like this is that they send the message that the boobs – not the woman – are desirable. How can a message like that do good things for sufferers of a disease that often destroys women’s breasts?Ads that use bikinis and boobs to push products are nothing new. What is so interesting about this one is that it is selling something more compelling than booze or big trucks. Because they are promoting cancer research – a cause that hardly anyone opposes – this particular pair of bouncing boobs is harder to write off. If sex does in fact sell, why not let it sell something worthwhile for a change? If breasts are always going to be used to make us gawk, shouldn’t we at least be gawking for a good cause?It’s Machiavelli in a string bikini: Do the ends justify the scantily clad means?Even though it is hard to argue with promoting awareness about cancer, these ads hurt more than they help.The truth is that many women who have breast cancer must have one or both of their breasts removed, and mastectomies cause painful physical and emotional scars. So if a woman in a skimpy swimsuit with protruding breasts turns heads, what does that mean for the cancer survivor who had both of her breasts removed? Will she ever be able to turn heads? Not to mention that ads like these make cancer into something we have to “sell” to people. If a disease has to be sexy for it to receive money and awareness, what happens to the 42,470 people who were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year? Are they supposed to suffer because “save the ta-tas” looks better on a T-shirt than “save the secretion”?This whole business about selling cancer is a twisted byproduct of our consumer age. Why isn’t the fact that in 2005 (the most recent year with available numbers) 41,116 women and 375 men died from breast cancer enough for us to pay attention?Must every worthwhile cause come dressed up in a swimsuit for us to take notice? Ads like this might be saving boobs, but they are destroying much more.
(09/27/09 11:53pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The timing of this column is all wrong. I’m writing to tell you to go to Lotus Fest. Unfortunately Lotus Fest is finished.I’m also writing to tell you about all of the things that I think you should do before you graduate, but I’m not a senior. I am not graduating anytime soon, and this isn’t May. But I am a junior, and I confess that I went to Lotus Fest for the first time last weekend. It was incredible. It was exciting. It was three years too late. The Lotus World Music and Arts Festival is one of the many incredible opportunities I had no idea about when I signed up to go to college in the middle of the Midwest. I danced to a Brazilian pop band, sang along with a group from South Africa and jumped up and down to a Mexican ska group. It was so incredible I just couldn’t let you miss it. Even though I already did. Lists like this always appear at the end of the school year when it is easy to regret but difficult to go out and change things. Or they come out during the first week of school when everyone is too blindsided by the prospect of all the opportunities to actually make it to some interesting event.But now it is week five. First papers are due and midterms are looming. Whatever dedication we all had to becoming culturally aware is buried somewhere beneath a pile of homework. The last thing that you want to hear is that you should take three hours away from your precious non-school-soiled time to attend something educational. I understand. But I’m going to tell you anyway: Go to Lotus Fest and the Fourth Street Art Festival. Oh, and also see a concert at the Musical Arts Center. The problem with education is that it often gets in the way of learning. In our attempt to keep our grades up, to pass our classes and to squeeze in that extra minor, we often do it at the cost of other culturally enriching opportunities. I’ll let you in on a little secret: Education doesn’t have to come wrapped up in lecture hall with a $30,000 price tag attached to it. It happens everywhere; we just have to look up from our textbooks every once in a while to see it.Educating happens in the middle of Fourth Street while a band shouts about the Zapatistas. It happens over dinner at Little Tibet, or during intermission of a theater department show. Here is what you must do:Spend an hour at the Lilly Library smelling old books. Walk through the IU Art Museum. Go see an opera at the music school, and while you are at it, see a ballet, too. There are so many incredible things to see and do and learn that I couldn’t wait to tell you about. So get going and doing and seeing. May is an awful time to realize all the things that you missed.
(09/13/09 10:56pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Did you miss it? Did you remember that we were supposed to never forget? I admit I only stumbled upon it. On Friday, during history class, I wrote the date at the top of my notebook: 9/11/09.Something inside me stopped, and I felt hollow. Is this what this date had come to? A moment of recognition and remorse somewhere between lunch and British history? I remember walking through the seventh-grade hallway after choir class. As I passed every door each teacher was standing still looking up at something, fixed, not talking. What was going on? What was on the TV? Mrs. Kofler was standing there two feet away from the TV that hung in the corner of the room. There was a building and it was on fire. “What’s going on?” Silence. We watched as Katie Couric and Matt Lauer explained it to us: a plane had hit a building, a tall building, somewhere in New York City. Was it an accident? We didn’t know. We were sitting there, being confused and 12 years old in North Bend, Ohio, as a second plane crashed into the other building.Months later, Dick Cheney would tell the world that 9/11 changed everything. And I would understand what he meant. In one day, the adult world with all of its uncertainties and moral ambiguities had come and knocked on my door. I asked my mom – Who was this Ih-sama guy? A bad man. Instead of American Girl books, I bought “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East,” and asked for a subscription to Newsweek for my 13th birthday. I was afraid of Anthrax, of small pox, of the plastic knives they served on airplanes. Sometimes I’ll look around my political science classes and wonder how many of us were pulled to “Introduction to Middle East Politics” because of that September day. How many of us were set on the track to become civil servants, journalists or historians the moment that plane took off from Boston? We are the 9/11 generation, aren’t we? Isn’t that what they made us?But as is so often the case, for those of us born in the ’80s and ’90s, 9/11 changed everything and nothing. We grew up. We learned to drive. We graduated from high school. And now, eight years later, we are left only with longer lines at the airport, the remnants of two forever wars and a hole in the New York skyline. For those of us who didn’t lose a loved one, who had never been to New York, who could only suffer vicariously, time has been swift to ease the pain. And now 9/11 is a badge I keep – a story about seventh grade and pre-algebra that I pull out for strangers when they ask me where I was. Some will say that is bad, that we should always remember. I say it is natural, healthy even, to pause for a stolen moment between classes and remember the day the world as we know it began.
(09/08/09 1:44am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Political discourse in the age of YouTube can be controlled by anyone. Last week it was a journalism student.The YouTube video shows a Bloomington student asking Baron Hill why she couldn’t tape his town hall meeting for her school project. He responded, “This is my town hall meeting. I set the rules.”The video was picked up by several Internet sites. It has riled the population from Bloomington and beyond, rallying the conservative blogosphere. For those of us who witnessed the exchange, it was clear that Hill had unwittingly struck a nerve. The all-important question: Whose town hall meeting is it, really? The resounding response: ours – not yours.But that a congressional representative would even think that the meeting belonged to him is incredible. Where have you been? Since when was democracy about you talking and us blindly listening?No doubt Baron Hill and his press office regret his rash response. But perhaps there is more ambiguity about all this than we thought.Town-hall democracy has a long tradition in the U.S. New Englanders gathered in the 17th century to vote on and discuss issues. It was this sort of grassroots, direct democracy that Congressmen all over the country were channeling with this batch of town hall meetings. The idea was a simple one. Take the bill to the people. Rally support. Return triumphant.But as August’s discourse has shown, they underestimated us. Congress had become too accustomed to apathetic constituents. They didn’t anticipate how strongly all of us would feel about this issue, and consequently the health care fallout that has followed has been beyond what anyone on Capitol Hill imagined.Screaming critics, personal attacks, assault rifles: None of this is a part of the sit-back-and-blog democracy that we have all become accustomed to. It’s because of this new political activism that part of me wants to stand up and applaud these town hall meetings.After all, this is a kind of enthusiastic participation that I haven’t witnessed in my lifetime. It’s the spirit that our generation has been criticized for lacking, and it’s the spirit that we all heralded Obama for bringing back to Washington. But there is a problem with all of this town-hall business: Too often it doesn’t lead us anywhere meaningful. When I walked out of Bloomington High School North on Wednesday, I felt more confused and uneducated than I did when I had walked in, like I had unlearned something about the debate. The hour was filled with too much booing and too many anecdotes to be educational. Enough with the pathos. What we need are particulars.A lot of the fault here is on the Congress. Town hall meetings should be a place where constituents voice their concerns to their representatives, not a place where congressmen assert their authority. If we really want to further this issue we need more constructive conversation and less emotional ranting. And we, the constituents, must take it upon ourselves to change the tone of discourse. After all, this is our town hall meeting.
(08/31/09 1:10am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>You’ve made it this far. You got through the SATs and the admissions essays. You survived orientation and move-in day. Now all you bright-eyed freshmen can even say you’ve got one full day of college under your belt. Congratulations. You made it through. I’d love to tell you the hard part is over, that from here on out everything is all sparkles and bubbles. But I can’t forget what I learned from Louis Sachar in the fourth grade – the second hole is always the hardest. And so is the third. And also the fourth. The sad truth is that sometimes college can be difficult – really difficult. From making new friends and trying to stay on top of your schoolwork, to navigating relationships and planning for the future, college will challenge you academically and socially in so many ways that sometimes you will wish you had stayed at home. It’s because of this stress that handfuls of new students decide not to come back. According to ACT in the 2007-08 academic year, the most recent year for which there is data, only 66 percent of college freshmen made it back to campus for Year 2. And of those students who start out at large research universities, on average only 29.4 percent will graduate in four years – and only 54.1 percent will leave with their degrees in less than six years. IU fares better than most other American schools. The retention rate at the Bloomington campus is 88 percent. This means that of the 7,208 of you who started your college careers today, only about one in eight of you will decide not to return. Still, staying on track can prove difficult. But the good news is, there is a little thing you can do to make sure you aren’t one of those 800-plus kids who fall victim to the first year – stay positive. A new study out of the University of Kentucky suggests that the more optimistic a student is about his or her academic prospects in college, the more likely he or she is to return for sophomore year. According to an article published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, students who had positive attitudes about college at the beginning of the study were more motivated and had an easier time adjusting to college life. The moral of the story: if you want to stick it out through college, start with a positive attitude. If the thought of finishing still has you scared, keep in mind that you have a lot to be positive about. You are a part of the smartest freshman class to ever step foot on IU’s campus. Those of you who started college yesterday have the highest collective SAT score in IU’s history and a whopping 2/3 of you were in the top 25 percent of your high school class. You, class of 2013, are certainly poised for success here at IU. So take a cue from the little engine that could, because when it comes to completing college, the odds are if you think you can, you probably will finish.
(08/25/09 12:22am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Halfway through my fifth week in Peru, my American classmates and I began to compile a list of things we missed about the States.It started out small: warm showers, Pandora.com and burritos. But as the week went on, it grew and grew.We would be sitting in class and someone would come back from the bathroom and say, “toilet paper in public restrooms.” Check. We added it to the list.Or halfway through the pollo, papas fritas and ensalada they served every day, another person would try to clean up a spill with the tissue-thin napkins, and snap. Real, thick napkins would join the list somewhere between Oreos and tall people.By the end of Week 6, the list had become our mantra: tap water, barbeque sauce, macaroni and cheese, non-sweet ketchup, hot breakfasts and swimming pools. It was our collective chant as the homesickness began to settle in. We started to come up with other lists too.There was the things-I-am-not-going-to-miss-about-Peru list (white rice, altitude sickness, micro-taxis), and the first-thing-I’m-going-to-do-when-I-get-home list (bathe, go to the pool, eat Chipotle).During the walk to school or on the way back from work, we pulled together our individual woes and wrapped them up nice and neat into a little list: our mutual homage to home.Our last week was a whirlwind, and there was no more time for lists.After spending seven weeks trying to live like Peruvians, we suddenly became tourists, boarded four planes in five days and jetted off across the country for the final leg of our trip.The mountains in Cusco were beautiful, and then seeing Machu Picchu open up through the sun gate after a day of hiking was unbelievable. Sipping one last Pisco sour with a friend in Lima was lovely.Twelve hours later, I was left sitting alone in the Atlanta airport trying to piece together where all the time had gone.The next morning, faithful to the list, I brushed my teeth with tap water, grabbed my pool bag and headed off to Chipotle.When I got to the front of the line, with a newfound confidence in my Spanish skills, I asked the server if I could order in Spanish, but she just looked at me confused. Had I messed it up? Had my one day back made me forget everything I learned?Then it dawned on me.I had used “castellano” instead of “espanol” and because this woman was Mexican and not Peruvian, she didn’t understand. I corrected myself, ordered my tacos and then headed to the pool.While sitting in my lawn chair I began to draft a new list. “Castellano”, avocados, the ocean, Coca-Cola with real sugar: an inventory of all the things I missed about Peru.
(08/02/09 8:49pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>LIMA, Peru – Let me tell you the story of what happened to a group of people in a small, Peruvian village. In December 1984, the community members of Putis, a village high in the Andes Mountains, began to worry about the increasing number of terrorist attacks in the region. Because of the growing threat of the violent, Maoist revolutionary group the Shining Path, the people of this community decided to seek refuge near a newly constructed military base in the region. The 123 people from the village arrived at the military base on the morning of December 13. Upon the group’s arrival, the guards at the base divided the members of the village into men and women and told the men to start digging a hole for a fish farm they were going to construct on the base. While the men were occupied, the guards sexually assaulted the women and then gathered up and shot the members of the village, throwing their bodies into the freshly dug holes. In a time of relative peace and security, violence of this sort is unimaginable for us. Yet one explanation that is often given for such extreme actions is fear. The armed forces suspected the people of Putis might have been sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. So, when the soldiers shot the innocent people, they were under some delusion that their actions would make their country safer. Still, what they did was unacceptable. Regardless of fear, we have to be held responsible for our actions.Last week I visited the village of Putis with coworkers from the human rights organization I am working for. We sat in on a town hall meeting and visited the site of the murder, which remains the largest mass grave ever to have been discovered in Peru. Going to bed that night, my thoughts wandered back to the government men who had perpetrated this horrible crime. I imagined what it must have been like to live in a time and place of such pervasive fear and terrorism. I thought about how afraid I was on Sept. 11, and of how relieved I felt when our president told the world, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” – the same sort of philosophy that the armed forces employed on the people of Putis. My mind flashed to the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and suddenly the actions of those Peruvian soldiers didn’t seem quite as foreign. Of course, the circumstances of Putis and the War on Terror are certainly different. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that maybe in some small way by not fighting harder against the abuses that occurred during my lifetime, I had been complacent toward the kind of crimes that I had traveled to a foreign place to fight. As we were driving home from Putis, I realized that human rights violations are much easier to condemn looking backward – which is unfortunate, because the only thing that will be able to stop incidents like the one in Putis is more vigilance by those of us who live through or at least relate to them.
(07/19/09 10:13pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>LIMA, Peru – I traveled to Peru to, like any study abroad trip, practice Spanish, to learn about South American history, and to immerse myself completely in another culture. So naturally last Wednesday I opted to partake in the most traditional of Peruvian cultural activities: making the opening night showing of the new “Harry Potter” movie, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”All right, I confess. Seeing my favorite British children’s series played out on the big screen isn’t exactly the reason I traveled all the way to South America. But I convinced myself if it was playing in Peru, Peruvians must like Harry Potter too. Clearly that makes it an opportunity for cultural exchange, right?However, one foot in the theater and I realized how wrong I was. The 8 p.m. showing with subtitles was an expatriate setting to a lost Hemingway novel, with nothing but “gringos,” as one of the Hispanic members of our group pointed out. Still, seeing the oh-so-familiar story played out with Spanish subtitles was interesting in and of itself.I learned, while I was waiting in the ticket line, that the book’s title (“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” for those of you uncool enough not to know) had two very different Spanish translations.The more common title, and the one that appeared on my ticket, “Harry Potter y la Misterioso del Principe,” translates to “Harry Potter and the Mystery of the Prince.”But the more literal translation of the English name and the one many Peruvians use is “Harry Potter y el Principe Mestizo,” a title that is charged with the particular undertones of a difficult racial history in South America.“Mestizo” is a word that harks back to the days of the Spanish conquest of South America. When Pizarro and the conquistadors arrived in Peru, many of them fathered children with members of the local indigenous population, producing a mixed European and indigenous race, which the Spanish dubbed “mestizo.” The conquistadors also brought with them the Spanish tradition of a racial hierarchy. In Peru, they used words like “mestizo” and “cholo” to make fine distinctions between races. And these distinctions laid the foundation for a racially stratified social system, wherein lighter-skinned people were offered more social opportunities than their darker-skinned counterparts.So, Wednesday night when Snape confessed to Harry that he was in fact the “principe mestizo,” it was clear to everyone in that Lima theater – gringos and Peruvians alike – that old Spanish words like “mestizo” still have a powerful meaning.When I got into the cab after the movie, I couldn’t help but notice my cab driver’s mixed skin. Was he a descendant of a mestizo family? Was he relegated to driving a cab because of the forsaken opportunities the color of his skin gave him?Of course, dissecting the relationship between history, race and contemporary society is as tricky in Peru as it is in America. But as he drove me to my light-skinned host mother’s middle-class house, I couldn’t help but wonder – had Harry Potter helped me understand something about Peru after all?
(07/05/09 10:19pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>LIMA, Peru – Beware: This is a scary story of sick proportions.It begins in Japan.In May I visited South Korea with a group of IU students. After we landed in Tokyo en route to Seoul, health officials dressed in blue paper suits and masks boarded our plane for a special health examination because of a threat of swine flu.One health official, who was dressed more like a spaceman than a surveyor, went seat by seat, interrogating passengers about their symptoms, while another took each passenger’s temperature with a thermo-radar gun.If for some reason a passenger’s answer was questionable, the officials marked off four rows in front of the questionable person’s seat and gave each person in the suspicious zone a paper mask to wear. But even for all of the excitement, swine flu hasn’t proved to be as lethal as we feared. In Japan I was not privy to epic international germ-transmission. Crisis averted.Or so I thought, until I arrived in Lima, Peru.On the very first day, one of the girls in my group began to complain that her skin itched. She showed us her arms, which were covered in pink, nickel-sized welts that had spread as far as her neck.She told us she had been in Tanzania and Kenya the week before, and we all feared the worst. Had she been bitten by malaria-transmitting insects, or did she have some strange African disease?Images of terrible diseases infected my mind, and I imagined she had caught some yet-to-be-discovered, fatal strain of cholera. I immediately regretted shaking her hand.The next morning she was gone, and our group director told us that she had been taken to the hospital, but no one could say what was wrong.She didn’t return to class the next day, or the day after. Finally, on the third day, our professor told us that after seeing three doctors, they figured out she was experiencing an allergic reaction to a Tanzanian plant.No swine flu. No cholera. Just plain old allergies.But the scary thing about the whole episode was what might have been. In this age when a girl who just returned from South Korea and another girl fresh back from Africa can be on the same plane to South America, the emergence of a worldwide pandemic is not only possible, but also probable.I was annoyed by the media’s exaggeration of the swine flu threat and by the Japanese inspectors’ extreme caution. But the fact remains that maybe they were right all along. Are we prepared for a health crisis in this age, when it is so easy to crisscross the globe?No, and honestly we can’t ever hope to be. The threat of a global pandemic seems to be an unfortunate side effect of our modern, interconnected world – one we should take with a little increased caution and a Pisco Sour, because it’s unavoidable.
(06/21/09 10:42pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Yo hablo espanol. Or, at least, I used to be pretty confident I could speak Spanish. But as my departure for Peru creeps closer and closer, I find myself doubting my language abilities more and more.Sure, I studied Spanish for four years in high school, and I’ve spent the last three semesters drilling grammar, culture and Latin American history into my head. I know Spain was conquered by los moros, that you use an “a” before people who are receiving actions and that you never conjugate two verbs in a row. Check.But that was classroom Spanish. Can I be sure that it will hold up against the speed and rawness of real, South American Spanish?So this summer I decided to take charge of my Spanish learning and raise my skills to the next level. I wanted to be able to practice Spanish with a native speaker so I could reassure myself I would be able to survive abroad. But how is an Anglo-American girl from the Midwest supposed to master Spanish without some amigos latinos at her disposal? Oh, I improvised.I started watching films in Spanish. In two weeks I made it through the Latin American versions of the first five “Harry Potter” films, the entire fifth season of the Spanish version of “Lost” – “Perdidos” – and the better part of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy – “El Señor de los Anillos.”But even after all my practice, I didn’t feel much more confident in my listening abilities. Barring a sci-fi film-related emergency, I didn’t feel like I would be able to communicate very well in Spanish. So, I borrowed books from the library. Pablo Neruda poems, Gabriel García Márquez stories – anything that was Spanish I took. And I plowed through them all, my highlighter and diccionario in hand. But still, what I couldn’t get enough of was practice speaking the language. I kept eating at Mexican restaurants trying to work up the courage to make small talk with the waiters without being pretentious or culturally insensitive, because ordering in Spanish at Chipotle can only get you so far. Then, last week at the pool, I heard it for the first time in a long while: spoken Spanish. I turned and I saw an entire family walking up the slide hablar-ing in espanol. I couldn’t contain myself. This was my chance. After running through the most appropriate mistake-free phrases seven times in my head, I approached the family and introduced myself. The youngest boy, who looked about 7 years old, turned around and said, “Huh?”I was taken aback by his confusion, but I regrouped and told him I studied Spanish in college and I wanted to practice.I asked him how my accent sounded, and he just laughed. “OK,” he said to me in English and kept walking on his way to go down the slide.