Guess who's back???

First of all, I'd like to welcome all the new bloggers, all the new students, and all the new blog-readers to this school year! Everyone else - welcome back!

The beginning of my sophomore year is exactly how I expected - classes, ambitions, and a whole lot of chaos. Also, I might be sick.

My summer was excellent - I worked as a Deputy Field Organizer in the Town of Huntington, running a coordinated campaign for the Town Supervisor, the County Legislators, and the Town Council members. I went to Disney World in Florida with my parents and my little brother.

Move-in day was hectic, since Hunter moved in the same day as the BioBlitz. The BioBlitz was intriguing, if not my cup of tea. The nice part was that I got plants, which meant I got to take the day easy- plants can't run away.

The first week of classes went about as I expected. I'm taking an Asian Religions class, a class on Criminal and Constitutional Law, my Macaulay Seminar, and a class on the Bill of Rights. While I like the topics, I've found a few professors I don't care for. However, I decided not to switch out of the classes. It felt too much like giving up if I did. I guess I'll just focus on the readings and pray that I survive class time. We had quite an odd assortment of days off in the first two weeks (thank god for Jewish holidays) so I went to Buffalo to visit my Grandmother. She had a small conniption when she found out that textbooks really do cost $160 or more. She thought the man on the radio was exaggerating. Oh how I wish he was Grandma, how I wish he was.

Its pretty excellent being back in the city - 24 hour restaurants, 24 hour subway system, constantly surrounded by friends - I missed this when I was home. To be frank though, I miss the sleep I got when I was home.  This is "the city that never sleeps" for a reason.

I feel compelled to say  something on the subject of General Petraeus' appointment. There has been so much controversy about it - students incredibly excited to learn from such a successful man, students terrified to have him among our ranks. People are continually calling him a "war criminal" and a "misuse of CUNY money".

I don't have an issue with the respectful dissent that is going on - people not signing up for his class, sign-holding, respectful protest against his presence. No one says you have to agree with every decision CUNY and Macaulay make.

But of late, the protesting has gotten out of hand. Students were shouting at him, calling him names, not even related to what his supposed transgressions are. By harassing him and disrupting his class with displays outside of it, they're refusing to respect the intellectual freedom of their fellow students.

If we, as a society, decided to outlaw learning from "criminals", we would be sent back to the stone ages. Many great theorists in politics were technically members of the Nazi party. Wernher Von Braun, the founder of NASA, was a Nazi. Even Henry David Thoreau wasn't a law-abiding citizen. One of the professors here at Hunter was suspected of terrorism, and incarcerated for possession of explosives. Yet, she teaches one of the best classes - Women's Prison Memoirs. General Petraeus isn't teaching a class on warfare. He's not talking about destruction. He's talking about creation, the future- and what we as students might do to make it better.

And for those who claim to know something about the war he helped command, those who seem to determined to say that he is, beyond all doubt, a war criminal - I would remind you "Innocent, until proven guilty.

If you'd care to read it,  here is Dean Kirschner's excellent response, on the Macaulay Homepage.

Crossing That Line

My second post was supposed to be happy - about starting up my fall classes, finally moving all my stuff into my room and having it be livable, and getting to hang out with all the friends that I hadn't seen in months - but somethings have been happening at Macaulay and Hunter recently that I couldn't not say anything about. I'm sure everyone knows about General Petraeus' class and about much of the attention that his position at Macaulay has garnered. Well, last week was the first class and there was a group of students protesting outside. Now, I wasn't there but I have seen a video documenting a group of students' verbal harassment of General Petraeus while he's walking on the streets that day.

I am not an expert on Petraeus' past, I don't particularly have any personal interest in taking his class, but I know when something is crossing a line. And I'm not talking about him teaching here, I'm talking about these students verbally abusing a man that has been approved of by the faculty at this institution they are a part of. Watching the video of them doing so actually made me feel ill. Petraeus remains silent and continues to walk, even crossing the street in an attempt to get away from these students (though they follow him). In response, Dean Kirschner put out a statement that did not outright ban the students from protesting again (as they promised to do to Petraeus' face), as she obviously cannot censor them that way, but more asking them to reconsider acting so disgustingly (not using that word, of course).

I don't think that there is any problem with students not wanting Petraeus to teach here. I don't think that there is any problem with any student not wanting any professor to teach here. However, shouting about Petraeus being a war criminal, in my opinion, is really ridiculous because he has never been convicted - he's never even been brought to trial. Also, no matter how much you don't want something - making yourself look like more of the bad guy is never the solution. I think the bottom line is that I, personally, don't believe that one should cross ethical lines to get one's viewpoint across. Now the question would be, I suppose, is protesting the way those students are crossing an ethical line? To me, when I'm watching a recording of it and feeling ill, yes it is. And, personally, I am really embarrassed to call these people my classmates/schoolmates, because their reactions to what has become a controversial appointment is very childish and, as I've said, has made me ill to watch. I don't think that anyone should be stopped from protesting or talking about why they don't want Petraeus to teach at Macaulay, but I don't think anyone should resort to the manner these students have.

If people are interested, here is the link to the video and you can find Dean Kirschner's statement on the homepage of the Macaulay website.

The Liver and His Integrity

Sadly, I'm afraid that this blog has essentially become a chronicling of my ridiculous tv obsessions through college. I'm surprised I didn't dedicate an entire post to Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls' baby faced smile. But aha! This year I have only watched one twenty minute show and it's been two weeks of college! And it was the season 2 premiere of The Mindy Project! Ok and Legend of Korra season 2 premiere as well...but nothing else! (Wait can I just say...Mako and Korra are cute and stuff but also boring now that they're together. Moment of silence for this)

In my exciting adventures this past week, I ran into a vaguely cute boy. We made slightly awkward eye contact before I casually sashayed away (just kidding. I bumblingly dashed, I'm sure, but for imagination purposes let's go with sashayed) and as I contemplated the meaning of our .02 seconds of deep eye contact, my ever informative friend tapped my shoulder and told me of the piece of banana hovering over my lip. And that's how I keep it classy with the boys, folks. In fact, I'm sure I'll meet my to be husband (unless the title of cat lady is in my future) while doing something extremely embarrassing. I say this because every cute boy I've ever interacted with usually involves our first meeting being very memorable... them tapping my shoulder and me shrieking and turning around as if I were in Taken with enough fright to make them fall, and other worse stories like this but I'll refrain from scandalizing the public with unnecessary awkwardness.
However, my dad has hope for me yet: in admiring the watch he bought for me for class, he looked at it lovingly and said, "You know Amirah. I think now that you've got this watch, and it looks so nice and stylish, you'll hook a lot of boys now." Obviously the watch alone will help me in this regard- thank goodness I've got it now, dad, it'll definitely bring all the boys to the yard, this is what I've been missing all these years, this thin stylish band that will heighten my attractiveness to an unparalleled level never seen before!

Anyway, other updates I'm sure everyone wants to read: I spent last week reading over twenty chapters, and my textbook was interesting, so interesting in fact that I have written a series of short stories entitled The Liver and His Integrity. Additionally I am creating a master-plan outline for my upcoming new fantasy adventure series that takes place in the body, and features:

-a pair of naughty prankster lungs and their pleura, whose idea of fun is to feign respiratory arrest and ask the cerebral twins for bail

-a burbling, slow moving blood-brain barrier whom nothing gets past (quite literally so, eh?)

-a grumpy paranoid cirrhosis-fearing liver and his enzymatic minions of digestion

-a soft speaking, literary aficionado heart whose mutters are oft taken for murmurs, to his great annoyance 

-a loud, grumbling but harmless and generally overestimated fellow of a stomach who doesn't like his HCL anymore than the next microbe

-all in all, a really rather cheeky gallbladder

-a worrisome, overweight bladder with an overbearing uterus of a mother

-and of course, our underdog hero and his possible band of misfits...but it's a work in progress. 

I have really been spending a lot of time with my textbook. Don't judge me.

I feel needlessly happy- no really- because I've got so much reading to do and clinicals to practice for, and I had two long classes today but I enjoyed them and I like what I'm doing! And I guess that's enough to be happy sometimes. Junior year feels like freshman year all over again. I'm in the nursing program, so I'm meeting and befriending cool new people, and I wish we could all just know each other already so we'd be past this potentially-awkward meeting stage. I have made a bunch of cool new friends and we hang out and practice taking blood pressure on each other and make jokes about assessing our lives since that is a major component of our nursing textbook right now.

I meant to keep this post short and decidedly non-rambly, but what fun would that be, so wish me luck in my adventures of trying to accurately take blood pressure without cutting off my friends' circulations!

Amirah

PS: Excerpts from this week's Adventures in the Library

1. Ate chocolates and toffee before going to the library this week, promptly fell asleep and woke the next hour living in fear that the poor lady next to me had cringed listening to me snore the entire time

2. Reflected that Copacabana is a cool name and a cool place where I would like to fan myself on the beach and sip a cold drink. This may or not only be because of a recent Bollywood movie I watched and them mentioning this location in Law & Order: SVU. 

3. Cried over Esperanza Rising when I reread the ending. This crying in the children's book section is getting inappropriate because the kids keep seeing me, and I'm not sure if I'm scaring them off books. I couldn't believe the onset of emotions I had over Miguel and her father dying. I'm not sure the fifth graders could believe it either.

4. I bilaterally assessed my carotid pulses and then I read that you're not supposed to bilaterally do it, because you could stimulate your carotid sinuses and cause irreversible damage to cerebral blood flow, which then freaked me out for the next hour as I convinced myself that I was having odd head and neck pains...I'm still not 100% sure my neck feels the same right now either, honestly