The Starfish Revolution

28 things I am not going to miss about living in the dorms:

1. Not being allowed to have pets other than goldfish (which suck).
2. Having to wear shoes all the time for fear of broken glass, other debris, or germs...
3. ...especially in the communal showers...
4. ...which are so gross that I think they deserve an additional spot on this list because people have sex in them and, worse, leave big wads of hair all over the stall walls and in the drain.
5.  Textured walls that give you road rash if you accidentally rub against them (known as "wall burn").
6. Not being able to use the kitchen because the people in my building have evidently been raised by wolverines and cannot be bothered to clean up after themselves, so the communal kitchen is always totally disgusting...
7. ...and therefore being stuck with crappy school food and whatever can be prepared in a microwave.
8. Inconsiderate potheads (like the one who lives next to me) who don't towel their doors and allow the stench to seep into the hallways, common areas, and my room. It's gotten so bad that I have to towel MY door to keep it from soaking into everything I own.
9. Never being able to have guests over without having the entire building knowing about it within ten minutes of me running into someone in the hall, elevator, or stairwell.
10. Having to drag my clothes fifty yards to do laundry in another building.
11. Moving at least two times a year, sometimes more depending how much stuff I transfer over Winter Break.
12. Certain male engineering students (*cough* Nature Boy *cough*) who think that showering is optional...
13. ...whose odor you can also distinctly smell in the halls.
14. The fact that noises echo to an unbelievable degree in the stairwell, which is right near my room, so that I get to experience all kinds of great noise pollution...
15. ...like the horribly irritating laugh of the guy who lives one floor down...
16. ...and the thumping and beeping of the dance music that the guy who lives two floors down plays incessantly, to the point where I wonder if he sleeps.
17. ...in addition to the girl on my floor who is constantly having screaming fights with her boyfriend over her cell phone.
18. Living in an 11 x 15 foot room that is supposed to hold all my worldly possessions (and is unusually large, as far as dorm rooms go).
19. Having a teeny, tiny closet that can't even hold all my shoes, much less all my clothes that need to be on hangers.
20. Not being allowed to burn candles (even though I do it anyway), even though the entire dorm smells mildewy during the spring and fall because of all the humidity.
21.  The all-too-ready availability of junk food in the vending machines.
22. The fact that we can have EITHER heat OR air conditioning at any given moment, and the changeover between the two happens at about sixty degrees, which means that, if it's 55 on a summer morning, the heat will come on and my room will be a freaking oven by noon when the temperature outside hits eighty.
23. There is no thermostat attached to the heater/air-conditioning unit, which means that you get a blast of iciness or a hot miasma, and nothing in between.
24. It also cuts off randomly.
25. And they only change the filters twice a year, which, again, can make the entire room smell like mildew when it's humid out and moisture collects in the unit.
26. Drunken idiots who vomit in the water fountains. Or in the showers. Or on the bathroom floors.
27. Or, best yet, in their trashcans and they later choose to leave the barf-filled trash bag in the hallway outside of my room after I've already left for Thanksgiving break-- besmirching my otherwise perfect disciplinary record.   
28. Asshats who  think it's really clever to run around the attic, which is right over my room, at three o'clock in the morning.

Tomorrow, I turn in the final, bound draft of my thesis, after which I am officially done with undergrad.

General Update

I just turned in my last final this morning, and I return triumphant!

Mostly. I still have to turn in the final version of my thesis, but I think I can afford an hour or so to update this thing. Here goes:

I've decided to make this blog a bit more anonymous, so I've removed all the information about the school that I am attending, my location, and any pictures of myself I've posted here. I honestly don't think that keeping this blog is going to significantly endanger my chances for employment, otherwise, I'd delete it altogether, since anonymity on the internet is largely illusory. Besides, I'm pretty sure my minor in women's and gender studies is enough to alert any and all potential employers to the fact that I'm a crazy pinko man-hating liberal, and any blog entries to the same effect would border on being redundant.

However, I'm not wild about stalkers and I might end up teaching, so some degree of anonymity (to the effect of: "You can't PROVE that's me!") is probably a good thing, especially after witnessing first-hand the hilarity that resulted from the time my friends and I uncovered the MySpace page of a housing official who liked to bust on us for violating university alcohol policy. Let's just say there are few things more amusing than proof that your most loathed disciplinarian is functionally illiterate and suffering from a terminal case of internet disease. I really don't want that to be me three years down the line, so I decided to delete my MySpace account altogether. I also broke down and deleted my infamous e-dating profiles, partly because that is also sketchy, and partly because I got a boyfriend (sigh, there goes my lesbian street cred) and therefore don't really need them anymore.

So, as of now, I am officially an almost-graduated (nine days!) student from Elite, Over-Priced University (yes, I am still bitter about my student loans) in a Southern city, where I'm planning on staying after I graduate. Sound good? I think so.

As far as my real life goes, it's been a rollercoaster of getting ready to graduate, frantically finishing my thesis, deciding not to go to grad school (and experiencing a major existential crisis accordingly), rushing through finals, and a virtual hurricane of personal drama that includes, but is by no means limited to, acquiring a boyfriend amidst midterms, dorm-related woes, and threats of severe bodily injury over LiveJournal. Things have mostly stabilized this week, though, and I'm hoping it continues.

My current trajectory is as follows: finish thesis -> graduate -> get a relatively lucrative job that will provide me with enough income to live off of and health insurance. The last step doesn't look like it's working out so well, which doesn't exactly surprise me, given my degree and lack of work experience outside of the food service industry.  So, I've decided that if it doesn't work out, I'm going to get a quasi-cruddy job that pays well enough to cover the bills and go back to school in the fall to obtain teaching licensure. If I like that, I'll keep with it; if not, I'll do something else.

That's about it. I'll write more later or tomorrow. I've missed this thing.

Ball of Happy

I just found out that I got into grad school! I haven't gotten my financial information yet and the details are still pretty up in the air, but I'm still beyond excited.

I'm still going to have to get a job. Oh well.

Still giddy.

Further lolz, courtesy of online dating.

Guy: So, I see from your profile that you're writing a thesis. What's it on?
Me: Toni Morrison.
Guy: Yeah, he's a really great writer. I've read some of his books myself.
Me: ...

The end.

Yecch.

So, you know what they say about the week before Spring Break?

It sucks.

I have a soc paper to write, a basketball player to help write the same paper, a thesis chapter to completely re-write, and a new thesis chapter to turn in. I'm also supposed to be keeping a body journal for one of my sociology classes (what crazy fun that will prove to be), so I need to get caught up on that.

So, I probably won't be writing a whole lot this week. I'm shooting for one decent entry a day, but don't expect a whole lot by way of current events commentary because I barely have time to read the student paper, much less anything else.

Quit Derailing.

Dear Certain Individuals in One of My Women's and Gender Studies Classes,

The topic of the course is "Perspectives on Women and the World," not "Ill-Informed Perspectives on Christianity," "Justify All the Past Failings of Christianity," "Play the 'I'm a Unique and Beautiful Christian Snowflake' Game," or "Bore Everyone in Class with Inane Ramblings About What You Learned in Bible Study This Week." The goal of the class (at least, according to the syllabus) is to discuss the ways in which women affected and were affected by colonialism and its discourses, not re-hash whether or not Christianity functioned as a patriarchal and imperialist entity (It did, it still does, and there's really nothing that can change that) and derail into inane discussions about what the Bible does and doesn't say. It's not relevant. Nobody cares about what happened in your Bible study last week.

It would also behoove you to get it through your heads that a critique of the past and present shortcomings of Christianity does not constitute an attack on your individual faith. It is therefore not necessary for you to get defensive and derail the discussion for the rest of the class insisting that "Not all Christians are bad," "Some Christians are respectful of other cultures," or "Christians are nice and don't do things like that now." We're all aware that most Christians do not suck. That fact, however, does not alter the hard realities of history, and ignoring them or trying to cover them up with lame, half-assed excuses about how GREAT modern Christians are doesn't work, either. Face it: Christianity has a bad history. Also, it is not my job to reconcile that with your faith, it's yours. However you choose to deal with it (even if it's with denial) is your business, but do not try to make me complicit in it.

Furthermore, I am not an idiot. I may be an atheist, but I was raised Southern Baptist in a state that is saturated with fundamentalist Christianity. I have a pretty good grasp on the basic tenets of Christianity- and by that, I mean that I've read the Bible in its entirety and know it cold. So, you can stop assuming that I don't know what I'm talking about when I criticize Christianity. I DO know of what I speak, and it's why I am not a Christian anymore.

Seriously. I'm not going butt-deep in debt to Vanderbilt to talk about Bible studies, listen to morally and intellectually dishonest justifications of Christianity's bad behavior, or learn everything I didn't care to know about your religious beliefs. Let's make a deal: if you stop being an asshat and quit derailing class discussions, I'll stop calling you out on it and being a meanie head by making you think about your religious beliefs for once.

I hope to have a semi-decent discussion of the readings on Thursday,
That Disgruntled Atheist that You All Hate

PS: Just because the professor enables your atrocious behavior and minimizes or ignores the concerns of other students like me (and yes, there are several in the class who feel the same way I do; I'm just the only one who's really vocal about it) doesn't mean it's okay.

Using Accurate Language in Children's Books is Bad, Okay?

I admit it. I didn't know what the word "scrotum" was until at least middle school (possibly later. I'm from the Bible Belt and my sex education was rather lacking). However, I'm pretty sure that being exposed to it within the context of a dog being bitten by a rattlesnake probably wouldn't have scarred me for life or encouraged me to become sexually active at the ripe old age of ten.

Needless to say, I don't even know where to begin with this (NYT, may require registration). A few choice excerpts:

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

Typical. A controversial book (in which the human body is discussed in frank, medically accurate terms- oh, no!) gets published, and knee-jerk banning from elementary and middle-school libraries immediately follows. Nevermind that the book is about the character learning about body parts, and that the context surrounding the term is about as sexual as, well, an injured dog- them's be talkin' about nekkid boy parts, and we can't have that polluting the children's minds. Heaven help us all if anyone stops to think critically about the relative merit of educating children about their bodies instead of shrouding them in the usual shame, secrecy, and silence that only seems to lead to widespread STDs and high rates of teen pregnancy later.

But noooo. That would make some educators uncomfortable.

Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview.

Sometimes I wonder if educators ever stop to consider the fact that it's, you know, their job to educate children, even on subjects that might make them uncomfortable.

I'm sufficiently irked by this to track down a copy of the book and read it. The college of education's library usually keep several copies of the Newberry winners (oh yeah, I failed to mention the part where the book was so well-written that it earned the highest award for children's literature there is), so I'll try to swing by there sometime this week and pick up a copy.

I'll also be telephoning my sister, an elementary education major, and see what she has to say about all this. And then I'll buy her a copy for her classroom.