Category Archives: Life

Gone, baby gone

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For the love of Christ, don’t put two condoms on. That is a terrible idea!

I am officially (as of last Saturday) in possession of an Associate of Arts degree from Oxford College of Emory University. It’s not actually in anything, as far as I can tell, but they gave me an inconveniently large piece of parchment with my name in a fancy font on it, so that’s got to be worth something. Thus ends my frequently-emotionally-conflicted tenure at the better of Emory’s two options for starting your degree*.

There was a lot of talk during the commencement speeches about community. That has been my favorite part about Oxford. When my car battery decided to scare me by almost going belly-up before graduation, I knew that there were people at Oxford who would help me tow my car or haul in a replacement battery or generally listen to me freak out. One of my friends helped me jump my car at 10:30 at night in the cold, and there is something–a very real something–to be said for friends who will help you out when they do not have to and when it is inconvenient and cold and late. There is something to be said for that, particularly when those people include not just your peers but your professors, your boss, and your chaplain (doubly so if you, like me, are an atheist–our chaplain’s awesome). That is wonderful. Continue reading →

I want to get it published.

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Paper monsterNews Paper Origami Dragon Monster / epSos .de / CC BY 2.0

I’ve been talking a lot lately about essays. This is partly because, as of today, I am done with classes at Oxford College (woo! and also, wah!) and so I and my friends are writing lots and lots of term papers now (including mine on Facebook and death). But mostly, it’s because several of my friends have had some very similar interactions in the last few days. They go like this.

SANE PERSON: Done with my paper!

CRAZY CLASSMATE: How long is it?

SANE PERSON: Fifteen pages. You?

CRAZY PERSON: Oh, 35. I want to get it published.

This has happened with us on papers with 12-page limits, on papers with 20-page limits, and on papers with one-page limits. Someone-typically multiple someones–turns in a paper 10-20 pages longer than the maximum word limit assigned by the professor. This bothers my friends.

It’s offensive to begin with because, if nothing else, turning in final papers twice as long as requested indicates that students do not value a professor’s time. The professor presumably knows how long it takes her to grade 20 five-page papers, and so that is what she has budgeted. When one person (or five) turn in papers of 10 pages, then the professor is put in a bind. Plus, speaking from a purely self-interested standpoint, turning in papers which are longer than requested takes away time from every other student in the class, meaning that their papers (the ones that followed the requirements!) are likely to receive a less thorough evaluation than they might otherwise. It’s not that the people who turn in extra-long papers are bad people, but they are being inconsiderate. There needs to be a reassertion that maximum word limits are there for a reason, not just for shits and giggles. Grading takes time. Turning in unasked-for huge papers wastes that.

More worryingly, approaching papers in this way seems to indicate an underlying problem of a culture which values quantity over quality. Students are encouraged to do more: more clubs, more classes, more honors societies. Little attention is paid–by faculty and staff or by students–to doing better. At best, this leads to substandard work and clubs dominated by the same small group of people who are minimally invested–the same complaint that I’ve been making at HackCollege over the last few weeks. At worst, as Lena Chen has been discussing on her blog this week, it leads to a college culture which promotes mental illness and anxiety disorders. Colleges need to look at what they are doing as institutions to encourage this approach to learning.

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Sexual Assault Awareness Month: Programming Style!

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I just finished up the last of my two programs for Sexual Assault Awareness Month–this one on men and gendered violence. It was exciting, as these things go, because we had a guest speaker and people I didn’t tell to show up also came. Educational programming will cause you to lower your standards real quick-like.

The first program involved our director of RES Life and focused on the Oxford College implementation of the Emory University assault policy. It was mostly attended by women, which was expected but always a little frustrating–women are most likely to be pressing charges under conduct, but men need to know what the policy covers in case their conduct is questionable or in case they are assaulted.

That being said, I was glad people came, and I do think it focused on something that more schools our size need to focus on–making sure students know the details of the policy and the process for going forward under school conduct board should the survivor choose to do so. Of course, as the speaker (my boss’s boss, for full disclosure) is a school employee who runs the process, she was more cheerful than I think the situation at our school deserves; sometimes it felt like valid student concerns (like the lack of minimum sentences for conduct violations, or concerns about the massive underreporting at Oxford) were being ignored, but small, significant changes are being made and that is at least something better than what we started with. Continue reading →

Viva Academia: Women’s Studies Symposium Style

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Last week, I presented at my first conference (like a grown up!). It was Oxford’s Women’s Studies Symposium. The presentation was over  a paper I wrote as a culminating project for my Women and Cross Cultural Perspectives class. Here’s the abstract:

This paper explores the evolution of third gender identities in the Navajo, Zuni, and Lakota in North America. Prior to European settlement, each tribe possessed a different term for and conception of third gendered individuals. Though it is tempting to consider Native American tribes as enlightened and accepting of non-binary sexualities, the treatment of third gendered individuals within these groups (and the roles they were expected to fulfill) was as unique as each individual tribal identity prior to European settlement. Though each tribe possessed distinct, defined third-gender identities before European settlement, individuals which identified as third gendered became much less common as a European gender binary was either forced on Native American tribes or accepted as part of an intentional effort to seem more European. However, since the 1970s these identities have reemerged in the form of a pan-Indian two-spirit identity intimately tied to Native American activism surrounding health care, land rights, and the AIDS epidemic. In part, this is the result of LGBT Native American individuals who have been alienated from the Euro-American dominated LGBT movement in the US. This modern two-spirit identity, though outwardly similar to the traditional third genders, is actually quite different for many of the tribes: third gendered people were typically conceived of as engaged in heterogendered sexual partnership; this is not true with the modern two-spirit person. The paper concludes with a summary of the two-spirit movement as it stands, in the words of two-spirit individuals.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, the paper is available here.

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How I Wound Up Freelancing

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At my building staff meeting tonight, the question of the week (our little closing ritual) was where we saw ourselves in five years. It being Emory, half the group answered “med school.” I said that I was planning to be working in the Smithsonian by then, but on second thought (after much debate among the med school kids about whether residencies are in a lottery that, I must confess, I did not pay attention to) I said that I might want to run social media outreach for an interesting company. One of my co-workers said that she could see me doing that, and another pointed out that I have job skills that are not like normal college kid job skills.

Though I don’t think I’m unusually skilled, I do realize that my sources of income outside of school–primarily freelance writing gigs–are weird. So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how I stumbled into getting paid for writing.

I didn’t do paid writing until this year. As a high school student, I spent three years as an editor on the school paper, the last two as the Editor-in-Chief, and that gave me some experience writing on a deadline and a lot more experience with badly-applied AP Style, group writing, and how to manage an illegal install of InDesign and hook up a network the school didn’t want–plus how to deal with our printers in rural Georgia and fiddle with a WordPress supplement that my teacher didn’t want. All of these–particularly group dynamics and learning to work around silly restrictions–were tremendously useful skills, but when I graduated I quit using most of them.

This summer, while working at school, I saw that Kelly put out a call for new writers on HackCollege. I’ve been reading the site since I was in high school (yes, I’m that kid) so I applied. I was accepted, and after a truly geeky happy dance, started writing for the site regularly. I don’t get paid for the site*, but having someone force me to write regularly in a non-academic context made me more confident in my writing abilities and gave me a body of work that other people read.

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Exactly How I Spent My Time Today

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On Monday, I stuck a post up on HackCollege the basic premise of which was that I have decided that when I treat college and the work attached to it like my job, and attempt to confine it to a roughly 10-6 schedule, I am a) surprised at how little time it takes to get through my work and b) happier. Then I got to talk about hobbies, and about having them in college in an attempt to retain some semblance of an ability to interact normally with other people. That part of the article is basically just a conversation I had with my friend Bijan over Spring Break, but with me writing it down instead of him figuring it out because he is wonderfully smart. (He is also a tremendously interesting person to talk to.)

The article seemed to be well-received, and some people who I respect tremendously said nice things about it, and I was very happy. External validation is the best, you guys!

But since this is my personal space on the internet, I wanted to address something that’s not looked at in the original piece, which is how I spend my day in terms of work/not work/work-that-I-like-so-it-isn’t-work. I want to know if I spend more or less time doing things now than when I will be employed. So, here’s how my day broke down (for tl;dr scroll down): Continue reading →

Lying to Bouncers, Dancing with Nerds: SB ’11

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So much plaid, everywhere.

SXSW 2011 / Shashi Bellamkonda / CC BY 2.0

After my weird little half-week and a weekend back from Spring Break, I am fully readjusted to not living out of a suitcase (yay!). I am not the sort of person who does well with traveling–somehow my clothes always wind up smelling weird and I wear the same outfit six time even though I overpacked. It’s not attractive.

I spent the break, along with two additional being-a-truant days, in Austin with Kelly, Shep, and Laura from HackCollege exploring the unconference aspects (ie, networking and parties) of South by Southwest Interactive. I was glad the trip wound up happening in part because it gave me an excuse to see some relatives I have not seen in several years, and because it involved tacos*, which are one of those foods that are delicious and that Georgians just don’t do.**

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That Girl Who Talks About Vaginas A Lot

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Someone please explain to me why I cannot get this song out of my head. I think it has something to do with Matthew Morrison’s dancing. Because, mm.

This is one of those weeks where I step out of my room for lunch and then suddenly I look up and, oh wait, it’s 10pm and I haven’t been back and I have to do homework and look my RA bulletin board is due in an hour.* It’s a great week–I’ve organized two programs and the Vagina Monologues production that I’m directing  is this Thursday and Friday and then it’s my birthday and then it’s SXSWi–but it’s also kind of maybe a little insane. I used to think freshman year that I knew what busy was. I did not. I know I did not, because freshman year I had friends I saw outside of Lil’s and went to bed at 11pm. Good memories.

However, freshman year I did not get to make these sorts of things:

Vagina Week Poster

Yes. Yes it is a Georgia O'Keefe painting.

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Professor’s Pen Point

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Fickle, High, or Strict: all three = rageI think I was in high school when I learned about the engineer’s/freelancer’s triangle. It’s the old joke about good, fast, and cheap–you can have two of the three but you give up control of the third. It has the distinction of being both funny and true. However, I think there’s an overlooked version of this for professors and their grading: to keep it thematic, I suppose you could call it the professor’s pen point.

You have three options: your grading can be strict, your grading scale can be high, or you can be capricious with what your questions mean. You can be two of the three, but if you pull all three your students will hate you. I know this because a professor who I normally love just managed to move from his typical pairing (strict decisions about what he’ll take and a high grading scale) into the dreaded all-three zone. In a class in which an A is a 94 or above, an A- is a 92-94, and a B+ is an 89-92, he just gave a test where the highest grade in the entire class was a 91. Literally no one got an A. No one got an A-. All of us are annoyed.

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Reevaluating Facebook

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New Year's Eve

Seriously. They're awesome parties.

I removed my Facebook wall today. I’m going to try to avoid Facebook as much as I can, and see if that goes well. I think it will. Realistically, there are very few people I interact with regularly, and I have redundant systems–email for my friends who don’t got to school with me, phone for my family, and running into people at my little tiny school if they need me. My contact information is still up there, if someone needs to text me.

While my wall is gone, I’m going to reevaluate what I’m using Facebook for. I’m not one of those people who truly wants to delete my profile; for one, I have had useful and good things come of Facebook, and it is by far the thing that gets me the most hits on this site or on my HackCollege articles. It’s a great way to distribute content I find interesting or useful (or–to be honest–that I create). There are links that I routinely want to send to individuals, and I think it’s probably ruder and more intrusive to send those via email. The reusable K-cup that I found the other day is totally awesome for my friend with a Kurig, but that doesn’t make it worth an email. And, oftentimes, it’s the way that I find out about parties friends are throwing–real-life events that I want to attend because my friends throw awesome parties.

Perhaps the way to use it is to reevaluate the Facebook ettiquette. Currently, I’m like most people; I friend pretty much anyone who requests me, regardless of degree of intimacy. Perhaps if I knocked that back down to the 50 or so people I actually care about, Facebook would become useful for me again. It is difficult to go through the 500-ish friends I have accumulated, though, and rearrange my settings so that I’m back where I want to be. And, because I’m a worrier, I’m always somewhat afraid that I’ll unfriend someone who I really will want to get in touch with at some point. The fact that I possess about 800 ways to do this outside of Facebook (or, with Facebook messages, within Facebook) does not seem to appease my lizard brain. And, if I lost those contacts I would have difficulty keeping people up-to-date with things I write, which is something I want to do.

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