Watergate All Over Again?

 

I’m no expert on politics, or any social science for that matter. I can, however, recognize a repeat of an especially important historical fauxpas, and this CNN story reminded me quite a bit of the Watergate scandal that got Nixon and all of his cronies into quite a bit of trouble.

I’m not saying that McCain is behind this particular incident, but I will say that it seems as though the GOP is willing to surreptitiously sneak around, no matter how illegal, to dig up little vilifying victuals of Obama’s past.  Unacceptable.  But then, what sort of behavior do you really expect from them?

Police Brutality

Recently, the media news has inundated us with stories and images of the misuse of police authority.  I am not saying that  excessive force is never necessary when dealing with especially combative suspects, but these recent reports have brought to light an issues that I think needs some serious further investigation.

I know quite a few police officers, and I fully understand and respect the rigors inherent in the job.  The footage from CNN, and other stories, however, exhibit behavior that is absolutely unacceptable.

This Is So Gay…

I was perusing the headlines just now, and I came across this BBC article.

As a previous high school student and a future high school teacher, I recognize that bullying by and harassment from peers is a real source of stress for marginalized students. Whether you’re calling someone a jock, a bitch, a jew, or a fag, you’re diminishing their humanity by ridiculing who who they are.  Not only does using such language diminish their humanity, but it goes further to inflict actual psychological wounds.  Words are burdened with much previous meaning and connotation.  Therefore, every time  the word nigger is used, hundreds of years of hatred and killing and abuse of black people are carried with it.  Likewise, every time the word faggot is used, every gay hate crime ever committed is brought to bare, and that hurt is inflicted all over again.  Words are never just words… they are very powerful things, indeed.

I was never physically harmed… mostly because I never really stood up for myself or challenged those who were being so cruel to me. For those who were, however, I extend sincere empathy.

This issue needs to be addressed on an extremely sweeping and broad base. The solution must be realized in elementary school classrooms and extend all the way onto the floor of the legislature.

Gen Ed Requirements

So, here I am… cramming for a midterm in Chinese Landscape Painting.  Why, Shaun are you taking such a class?  Because, dear readers, the University requires its students to be well rounded… we want our History students to know some Biology, and we want our Chemistry students to be somewhat versed in foreign cultures… a noble idea, I suppose.

The painting above, if any of you were wondering, is a Song dynasty copy of Li Zhaodao’s “Emperor Minghuang’s Journey Into Shu.”  Please take note of the caravan’s serpentine progression allowing for various spatial planes of the composition to be connected.  Also of note is Li’s fine brush technique.  This affords figural detail within the composition, and yet still allows him to maintain a strong sense of perspective throughout

“Teaching”

I’m a teaching assistant, you see. If someone asked me to describe what makes me tick, I would first say that I am studying Neuroscience and Microbiology, and then secondly, I would say that I teach. I absolutely love teaching… I’m not sure what I love most about it, but I truly believe that there are few nobler things one could do than to pass a particular body of knowledge on to a group of people.

My dad’s a teacher… high school social studies. My mom went to school to be a teacher, but switched to nursing, as a junior. She has, none the less, taught quite a few nursing classes over the years. My brother’s about to graduate high school, and he too wants to teach… high school tech ed. I suppose you could say that teaching is one of the strongest common threads that holds my family’s identity together.

I’ve been a teaching assistant for 5 semesters now. I have more experience in the classroom setting than most graduates of our School of Education, and far more than is required of graduate students who successfully complete their PhD work in the Biology department.

The professor with whom I’ve TA’ed for the past 4 semesters, in both introductory and upper level classes, has told me that she doesn’t want me to go to med school, but instead she would like to see me go to graduate school and become a college lecturer. I just don’t know, though.

I know I want to teach… physicians teach, though. I’m hoping that after I’ve taught high school science for a couple years as a teaching fellow, I’ll have a clearer sense of where exactly I want to take my life.

As I stand before a lecture class of 200 students and talk about genomic evolution, I see many things. I see at least 10 or 15 nodding off, terribly bored and apathetic to the material I’m presenting… I see the regulars down in front who are so devilishly committed to doing well, they miss fewer words than a court stenographer… I see the majority of people who see this course as simply another obstacle standing between them and a degree… And finally, I see those who have entered college with an enormous burden placed upon them by their family or by themselves… the burden to do well and to take certain courses. They’d performed fine all throughout high school, they’d graduated with 4.0 GPA’s, and yet they’re struggling to get a C in this introductory Biology course.

I look back on my freshman year, and I remember how I wanted to go to my Biology and Chemistry lectures… how I wanted to learn as much as I could about myself and the world around me. I then ask myself: How do these people do it? How can they wake up each morning and look ahead at a day full of things they don’t want to be doing? What drives them to do something they don’t want to? If only we could all stop resisting ourselves and realize our own potentials and follow our own dream, I’m sure that this would be a much better world.

Impasse

m-w.com offers a rather dull definition for this post’s title. You can check it out for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Some random website dealing with Gestalt psychology, I feel, better defines what I’m feeling right now:

“glimpsing beyond the role to the possibilities outside, causing (existential) anxiety”…

I’ll graduate college in about 12 months. Does that make me an real grownup? For quite some time, I’ve been convinced that I must become a physician to fulfill not only my family’s expectations of myself, but my own as well. Only recently have I honestly considered other possibilities. When I think about what I need to make myself happy, I’m not even sure I know anymore. I used to imagine expensive cars and a huge house… Certainly, money is important: those who claim that it isn’t aren’t just naive… they’re ignorant to the society in which they live. But what can one use as a barometer of happiness? I look around and see so many unhappy people. I don’t necessarily mean sad or miserable people… just people who lack happiness. Wealthy people… Poor people… Black people… White people… Straight people… Gay people…

So, I stand here at an impasse, opening myself to new possibilities… trying to look beyond the role that I’ve (errantly?) created for myself and full of existential anxiety.

Anxiety is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing. Whenever I hear or think of that word, I’m immediately reunited with my 8th grade English teacher, Ms Feather, who said “Anxiety is never fully bad… Anxiety carries with it some sort of excitement and anticipation… And these are things on which we thrive.”

No Cookies for the Chinese Farmer

As this weekend (and unfortunately my spring break as well) draws to an end, I look ahead to  a week during which I have three mid terms and a guest lecture, and I desperately scour the internet for any sort of drivel so that my procrastination is somewhat justified.  Well, let me tell you, I think I came across a little gem.

Living in Pittsburgh for the latter portion of my life, I’m relatively unaware of how other people actually live on a day-to-day basis.  I certainly don’t have the capacity to empathize with the world’s poorest, but, on the flip side, I cannot fathom how the world’s wealthiest live either… or with themselves for that matter.  I say this, because I came across these splendid cookies, you see.  If ever there was a paragon of sugar cookies, it would certainly be one of these little gems.

When I first saw them, a part of me smiled inside, and I wanted to order some like whoa.  So, I did some digging and found out that the price of 18 cookies (granted, a few cookies more than the traditional baker’s dozen) is $66.  No, you didn’t misread that figure… sixty-six dollars… for eighteen sugar cookies… before shipping (from Manhattan).

So then, I remembered hearing that the average annual salary for China’s poorest farmers (a whopping 21.5 million people) is around $90.  I’m sure those fellows aren’t working 40-hour work weeks, either.  Eighteen sugar cookies would cost an entire household just over 73% of all the capitol they earned throughout the entire year.

Personally, I find this incredible.  In a society where gas is quickly approaching  $4/gallon in Pennsylvania, we are still willing to pay $66 for a box of sugar cookies that wouldn’t even satiate the average kindergarten class in our public schools.

For me, an Eat ‘n Park smiley cookie will suffice.

This week’s best and brightest

I’m going to try to commit to a weekly post of tidbits I found especially interesting across the course of the week. Hopefully, the posts will include (but certainly not limited to) one song and one news headline. The music promises to be especially delicious, being that I have very non-trendy (:-P) and poppish tastes.

In the new news, this week, the feud between Obama and Clinton seems to be escalating. I certainly hope that these early bouts will not prematurely doom the Democrats’ white house bid. I fear, however, that they may. McCain is, no doubt, sitting in the wings and sharpening his fangs. CNN’s view after the hop. An aside: my family was eating dinner with another family last night at Red Lobster. As we ate our meal, the woman turned to my mother and said, “there seems to be a lot of black people here tonight.”

My mother and I were horrified by the comment’s subtle implications. If she, as a fairly progressive liberal, makes comments like that about Red Lobster’s dinner scene, what does she, and the millions of other American who fall where she does along the ideological spectrum, really feel about having a black-ish president? I’m just hoping that the subdued yet ever present and all-too-pernicious racism of the American citizenry doesn’t rear it’s ugly head in the eleventh hour and allow for another conservative traditionalist administration.

Also, this week saw a veritable thumbs-up given to the further spread of religious conservativism in the middle east. Although the Iranian parliament was predicted to remain within the choke-hold of conservatives, this recent round of elections were none-the-less quite disappointing. BBC’s and Asia Times‘ coverage after the hop.

This week’s most compelling PostSecret, after the hop.

This week’s song is, without a doubt Leona Lewis’ little ditty “Bleeding Love.” I just can’t stop listening to its funky-fresh euro trashy beat coupled with her soulful lyrics. Enjoy.

Also deserving an honorable mention is Alicia Keys’ “You’ll Never See Me Again.” Alicia does it up right, once again.

Post Nouveau

I’ve always had a particular fascination with foreign languages. Sadly, though, I’ve found myself rather unwilling to actually learn any one. How does one even go about choosing which language he will devote his studies to?

Shall it be a Romance language? I’ve always liked how many vowels French seems to squeeze into words, but I’ve always felt as though Romance languages, in general, are simply far too common. I mean, perhaps in Europe knowing one of them would come in quite handy. But, really, the only thing learning a Romance language has ever done for any of my friends is instill within them a rather hefty misconception that they know the language they’ve been taught the last few years of their life. Why do I have such a gloomy view of language-learning? Well, you see, I distinctly remember a friend of mine ordering lunch in Française at a particular tres chic restaurant in Epcot’s French Pavilion. She really made an utter fool of herself because, as a senior in high school and thus having studied French for the last 6 years of her life, she was unable to properly order her meal. Her sentence structure was consequently critiqued by our snippy waiter (whose name, of course was Sebastion).

After having witnessed my poor friend betrayed by her ill-begotten language skills, I became quite proud of myself for choosing to study Latin. Granted, I had to spend 7200 hours of my life (not taking into consideration my frequent high school truancies) monkishly translating line after line of absolutely superfluous verse and prose, in the end, it had to be less painful than the humiliation and emptiness an inadequate fluency would bare (even though our classroom lacked fun posters of the Eiffel Tower or young fellows named Diego shaking maracas).

As far as Asian languages go, I could never write in pictogram matrices. Nor could I ever hold up a peace sign in every photograph I appear in. Nor could I ever wear a Hello Kitty backpack.

And that, my friends, was a Post Nouveau.