Stress

I have been admittedly fairly stressed out these past two months. It’s halfway through the semester, so I owe it to myself to take a retrospective view and re-evaluate what I’m doing.

And I don’t even know. My most common technique is to compare what I do now to what  I used to, what I used to deal with, in past semesters. And while I’m not entirely sure my work load (between work, school, etc.) is necessarily too different, my stress level is certainly higher. Yet, I feel like the strain of work and school is lower. What happened?

• I’m actually starting to approach a time where I’m making decisions and planning for post-graduation. You know, it’s a like the “final step” into “the real world”. Each step I take doesn’t feel that unique though. But I think leaving college probably will.
• The imperative of reality is that it is subjective. It is what feels important. The real world for college freshman is intro-level classes, and that’s as real as it gets. No, it’s not hunger, having difficulty paying rent and health insurance, or the stress of raising a family. Suffering is not a requirement for the real world. Meaning and how we engage the world define reality.
• The definition of my real world is changing drastically. Classes matter less and engaging with communities and implementing effective education are becoming monumental. But I still care a lot about my work, regardless of where I do it.

A friend recently shared an article with me on the idea of parallax, which is an idea well defined in psychology and photography. While you’re moving, things close to you appear to move quickly, while things far away don’t move at all. This situation of shifting priorities while maintaining others is creating a serious parallax.

So what do we do? Continue to manage my time. Study hard for tests and reports. Continue volunteering and continue programming. Find relief in the structure easily built in college life. Not just relief, but temporary asylum, as I plan my foray into a new reality.

Oh, and lots of Holst. 

A Communal Education

What if instead of a million notebooks scattered throughout a lecture hall, students consolidated work. A collection of thoughts, ideas, tips, tricks, mechanisms, references.

Oh wait. That exists already. It’s called wikipedia.

But no Wikipedia page can walk you through a class. A journey into Wikipedia can lead you along many different paths. Which is, in it’s own right, a unique educational foray.

What if students made class wikis, that collected notes and lectures into a coherent project? Would there still be an incentive to go to class? Would this actually inspire a different kind of peer-to-peer collaboration? What happens when peers disagree on the basic information transfer that happens during lecture?? Would this work for a math or physics class as well as it would a history or evolution class?

Would the University frown on this? Once the essence of a class is established in a wiki (not only the information, but the progression, the references, the inside jokes), is there still value inherent in the establishment? How would the public react to this? Would it allow us to compare pedagogical techniques between universities and professors? Would it allow the general public to understand science and become more scientifically literate?

Would students stop taking notes in class and start engaging with the class? Why aren’t universities working on collaborating an easy collection of basic information for us to navigate so that we can skip unnecessary lectures that only function as an audiobook for the text? Would there not be value to a student created collection of knowledge? What will students choose to share and focus on compared to what professors would? How much would this change between Universities?

What would happen if your organic professor required each student to write a blog post about a mechanism? Would it be purely technical, or would you add an aesthetic to make it more accessible? Or would you just add the application of the mechanism in industry and research? This would be such a basic level of synthesis  that it’s embarrassing the University barely does it. And it would teach students to learn how to communicate difficult concepts with everyone.

A wiki would take the concept of your discussion section and make it real, tangible, and alive. Are you willing to try this?

Personal Projects

Everyone has a hobby. Or, at the least, we all make things. Most of us have the tendency to archive and store the things we’ve created.

When is it okay to edit our originals? Is there something unique about the way I wrote this poem two years ago, that if I edit it now will make it change? My new maturity likely cannot completely empathize with the way I thought four years ago. There’s something to be said about the speaker in a poem, and many times that speaker was not constructed. It was me. So, maybe it wasn’t a literary construction. I am a construction.

But yet my poems are speaking to truths that I feel transcend my own individual experience. Perhaps past work is best used as inspiration for today. How long after genesis do we have before something is unalterable?

I’m Tired

So here’s what’s going on.

People are filling the streets across the world, inspired by Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party has invaded the Republican Party, which means that the Presidential race for 2012 won’t be any good. I’m like many liberals, in that I’m fairly upset with Obama recently. But the Republicans are literally unable to put together even a barely feasible candidate. Everyday I turn on the radio as Marketplace churns out another negative economics report on Europe.

Our immigration problem is not being solved, but rather inciting even more racism. Our education problem is not being solved, but rather inciting even more classism. Our civil rights problems is not being solved, but rather inciting even more sexism. As I read the news and listen to the radio, each and every day I feel more and more disconnected from my country. Our politicians try to only help those who no longer need it, under some unspoken rule that tax breaks for the rich will help the poor? It’s embarrassing because people buy it.

After all, what do I do with my day? I solve physics problems after dinner, learn about organic reactions in the morning, and every so often work on cloning new virus strains. I read science fiction in my free time. Campus feels like a bubble, partially isolated from the politics of everyday life everywhere else.

And then I step into the community. Volunteering in a school has been one of the best experiences of my entire time in college. Each new day is a fresh challenge filled with inspiration. That doesn’t mean the work is always easy or necessarily fun, but it is meaningful and challenging.

My commitment, my life, my work, is to them. So that they can lived as I have found a way to live–in awe, in curiosity, in simplicity. So that they can also go out and help those who cannot always help themselves. So that they can become the writers of new fiction, the scientists to eradicate third world diseases, the carpenters of houses for the homeless, and the men and women who create sustainable communities and businesses. So that, if not them, then their children will not have to worry about the cost of higher education. They are the 99%.

Metro-Homo-Foodsexual

Language is a funny thing. I like to think and talk about language with my friends. I’m always surprised by how strongly people opine about language without even knowing it. Strong cultural forces like racism and classism push people to use language as a way to mark someone in an outgroup. Language is about expression, how you do it and what it gets to tell. It is inherently just one of a couple systems of symbolism we have to communicate with each other.

Sexuality is not a language. It is an inherent property of someone that determines only one thing–who they are attracted to romantically, physically, and emotionally. People confuse sexuality with sexual expression and gender expression all the time. There are a lot of manifestations of this. Calling someone gay for wearing a pink polo is one example of confusing sexuality with expression.

The epitome of this confusion could be considered the synthesis of the word “metrosexual”. There are a lot of ways to get at the meaning of this word. Most crude circles will see it as someone who “looks gay but isn’t”. Essentially and generally, the word only applies to men, and those that live in metropolitan areas. They spend time and money on the upkeep of their appearance. They have a supposed interest in art and culture. It is said that these men are in touch with their feminine side.

Hold the phone! Feminine side? I can’t tell what that means. You think a guy isn’t strong or courageous enough? Are women not allowed to have those qualities, and when they do, are they in touch with their masculine side? ugh! This common day definition of metrosexual is riddled with prejudice and bigotry.

If you want, you can dip into a little bit of higher theory. Metrosexuals, and often those concerned about other metros or being percieved as one, could be considered narcissistic. In fact, considering and redefining the general meaning of metrosexual as that being “attracted romantically, emotionally, and physically to urban and capitalist culture” might even make sense. So while at first metrosexual was a way to reconcile people’s confusion about a person’s percieved expression (gay) with their sexuality (straight), this high theory definition recognizes a unique form of desire that attracts metrosexuals in a way that closely parallels actual sexual expression in monogamous couples.

In the end, the lesson is obviously that a person’s expression of sexuality and gender is not directly dependent on their actual sexuality. Attempts to relabel them into another class of people or assign them unique sexualities are basic cultural mechanisms. But these mechanisms do nothing but sit within theory land and rear their ugly head in our everyday lingo and perception of common sense. Sometimes you need to take some time and deconstruct the words and ideas you throw out without thinking about them. This case is pretty harmless, but it can only go to show the easy path language takes to segregate communities.