The trees are breeding, the tour groups are in full swarm and the academic end times are upon us. I don't have my cap and gown yet, but I already feel that sickly mix of dread and apathy that means our time has come. And sure enough, there's less than a month until roughly a quarter of us ride off in the hellish chariot of post-graduate life, pulled by a hairy mutant beast out of Revelations and sponsored by Career Services.
But while I'm basking and baking in my own apathy, twiddling my thumbs as I await the four horsemen of the collegiate apocalypse (senioritis, last goodbyes, unemployment and alcohol abuse), I figured I'd take stock of my four years here and see how things are looking (generally not well is the answer).
After cleaning up trash, vacuuming under everything and bleaching a couple of surfaces, I think I managed to make something useful out of the greasy clutter that constitutes my four most recent years of existence. Here's a couple of life lessons I've managed to scrounge up (and when I say "scrounge," I really mean "scrounge"):
1. "Hammocking is not permitted in the Arboretum" is something people will tell you from time to time, but I put it in quotes just now because do it anyway. Nature was meant to be (respectfully) lived in, not jealously guarded like a Lego model of the Death Star.
2. Burritos are tasty but gross to eat, grosser to throw and grossest to have thrown at you. But still tasty.
3. Once you've died of deep, soul-killing embarrassment at least once, you're pretty much immortal as far as dignity is concerned. All it took for me was a motley crew of cops and librarians gawking at me in the UL at four in the morning as I held a cardiac event recorder up to the phone for about five minutes and let it loudly beep, deedle and whirr its signals through the mouthpiece like a cyborg E.T. quite literally phoning home (we've all been there before).
Now I roam the earth like an untouchable spirit, numbly making a fool out of myself like Hamlet's dad or Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense," freely expressing myself and making myself felt and heard, but largely unconcerned with how people might judge me or my actions. So just be yourself, you know?
4. Learning can be like, fun and stuff.
5. There's no limit to how many library books you can check out! My personal record is 70. ("Overdue fees" get their own column in my monthly budget.)
6. Young adults at the average age of graduation are still at high risk for serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia!
No big surprise there though. We've made it through four years of routinized stress and mental trauma just in time to be flung out into the unstructured void thereafter and expected to cobble together a meaningful existence with nothing but hope, rubber bands and a liberal arts education.
So yeah, support systems are good. Also deep breaths! Take a lot of them.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/04/column-repent-heed-the-end-of-days
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Driving and/or Sleeping (LCM Bell Tower April 2014)
Between the hot Miami sun, the endless hours of traffic among those unpredictable, irrational animals we call "Florida drivers," and the tremendous amount of time, energy, and effort everyone put into every task over the course of our time in Miami, it was a pretty long week -- and we all felt the strain.
How could I tell? Well, just about every time we sat in the car for longer than 20 minutes (so every time we sat in the car), just about everyone would start to drift off to sleep immediately. People's bodies would notice the lapse in activity and immediately demand a few minutes of deep hibernation, and one way or another they'd be sufficiently recharged to go bounding enthusiastically into the next activity. (Some people's bodies were more susceptible than others to the whole "crash headlong into an impenetrable nap without a moment's notice" thing. (i.e., Kathleen. I'm talking about Kathleen.))
But of course, I happened to be one of the four drivers for this spring break, so I got to be the one jamming to tunez in the front and making fun of the sleepers in the back whenever I needed to bury my envy and exhaustion in a corny joke or two.
As the driver, however, I had a lot of extra time for quiet reflection. When I wasn't brooding about my navigator's song selections or idly wondering how long I could go without another coffee, I thought about the people dozing behind me. In spite of all the tiring work, all the hiccups, setbacks, and confusions, and the sleep schedule that got gradually more irresponsible as the week went on, the positivity never ceased to be astounding. They drifted off to sleep every chance they got, then bounced back into action, smiling and ready to do whatever was required, whether that was manual labor, sharing, or simply just listening.
How could I tell? Well, just about every time we sat in the car for longer than 20 minutes (so every time we sat in the car), just about everyone would start to drift off to sleep immediately. People's bodies would notice the lapse in activity and immediately demand a few minutes of deep hibernation, and one way or another they'd be sufficiently recharged to go bounding enthusiastically into the next activity. (Some people's bodies were more susceptible than others to the whole "crash headlong into an impenetrable nap without a moment's notice" thing. (i.e., Kathleen. I'm talking about Kathleen.))
But of course, I happened to be one of the four drivers for this spring break, so I got to be the one jamming to tunez in the front and making fun of the sleepers in the back whenever I needed to bury my envy and exhaustion in a corny joke or two.
As the driver, however, I had a lot of extra time for quiet reflection. When I wasn't brooding about my navigator's song selections or idly wondering how long I could go without another coffee, I thought about the people dozing behind me. In spite of all the tiring work, all the hiccups, setbacks, and confusions, and the sleep schedule that got gradually more irresponsible as the week went on, the positivity never ceased to be astounding. They drifted off to sleep every chance they got, then bounced back into action, smiling and ready to do whatever was required, whether that was manual labor, sharing, or simply just listening.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Maybe Putin needs a hug (DTH opinion column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
What's the difference between Vladimir Putin and a chicken trying to cross the road?
Well let's see. They're both conscious, semi-rational social creatures like myself, struggling their way through this crazy world and doing the best they can with what they have. But the chicken seems like someone I could get along with, while I most decidedly would not enjoy getting stuck in a ski lift with Putin.
And why is that? That "different species" thing could make establishing a meaningful rapport with the chicken a little challenging (and we can go ahead and forget about communicating any ideas more complex than "Look, food!"). But with Putin I'd be too busy stifling the aggressive Hitler jokes in my head to manage a conversation. The moral dilemma would be a little distracting -- because he's evil, right? But what does that entail?
Evil is like a good joke. We love it because it's simple, because it makes everything so easy -- it is what it is, and all we have to do is voice our hatred for it or laugh until we hurt ourselves. Comedy and moral absolutes give us relief because we don't have to think, and if there's one thing we college students have good reason to be tired of, it's thinking.
And just like jokes, evil is subjective. Not everyone's going to agree on what qualifies as "funny" or "Satan-esque." (I might be disgusted by Carlos Mencia, Dane Cook or former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but you might just think I'm oversensitive and full of crap -- because what's a few crimes against humanity in a war against communism? Whatever.)
Of course that's not to say there isn't any sort of universal moral standard for assessing these claims, just as there might not be any universal barometer of "funny," but that's not the problem.
Whether evil for you is Putin, Dick Cheney, terrorists or anti-abortion activists who insist on comparing abortion to genocide and shoving graphic images in your face, that's valid.
But just like jokes, evil is ruined the moment someone explains it. The mechanics that made the joke funny or set up the circumstances for evil to happen are revealed in an instant like the paunchy dimwit behind the Wizard of Oz -- and the magic is gone.
The joke is lifeless and formulaic, not the vivid burst of spontaneity it was a moment before. And now the evil is the result of a terrible string of random existential circumstances, plus the occasional misplaced moral conviction or childhood trauma (trauma here meaning anything from malnutrition and lead exposure to a profound lack of hugs).
For jokes, I humbly suggest we learn to live in ignorance. For evil, however, it'd probably be best if we keep trying to understand. We don't have to condone it, obviously, but a little sympathy might help move us toward a consensus.
And if that ski lift scenario ever pans out, maybe I'll be able to have an impact! But at the very least I'd have an epic selfie opportunity.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/04/col-0403
Well let's see. They're both conscious, semi-rational social creatures like myself, struggling their way through this crazy world and doing the best they can with what they have. But the chicken seems like someone I could get along with, while I most decidedly would not enjoy getting stuck in a ski lift with Putin.
And why is that? That "different species" thing could make establishing a meaningful rapport with the chicken a little challenging (and we can go ahead and forget about communicating any ideas more complex than "Look, food!"). But with Putin I'd be too busy stifling the aggressive Hitler jokes in my head to manage a conversation. The moral dilemma would be a little distracting -- because he's evil, right? But what does that entail?
Evil is like a good joke. We love it because it's simple, because it makes everything so easy -- it is what it is, and all we have to do is voice our hatred for it or laugh until we hurt ourselves. Comedy and moral absolutes give us relief because we don't have to think, and if there's one thing we college students have good reason to be tired of, it's thinking.
And just like jokes, evil is subjective. Not everyone's going to agree on what qualifies as "funny" or "Satan-esque." (I might be disgusted by Carlos Mencia, Dane Cook or former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but you might just think I'm oversensitive and full of crap -- because what's a few crimes against humanity in a war against communism? Whatever.)
Of course that's not to say there isn't any sort of universal moral standard for assessing these claims, just as there might not be any universal barometer of "funny," but that's not the problem.
Whether evil for you is Putin, Dick Cheney, terrorists or anti-abortion activists who insist on comparing abortion to genocide and shoving graphic images in your face, that's valid.
But just like jokes, evil is ruined the moment someone explains it. The mechanics that made the joke funny or set up the circumstances for evil to happen are revealed in an instant like the paunchy dimwit behind the Wizard of Oz -- and the magic is gone.
The joke is lifeless and formulaic, not the vivid burst of spontaneity it was a moment before. And now the evil is the result of a terrible string of random existential circumstances, plus the occasional misplaced moral conviction or childhood trauma (trauma here meaning anything from malnutrition and lead exposure to a profound lack of hugs).
For jokes, I humbly suggest we learn to live in ignorance. For evil, however, it'd probably be best if we keep trying to understand. We don't have to condone it, obviously, but a little sympathy might help move us toward a consensus.
And if that ski lift scenario ever pans out, maybe I'll be able to have an impact! But at the very least I'd have an epic selfie opportunity.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/04/col-0403
Thursday, March 20, 2014
A Lenten festivus for the rest of us (Daily Tar Heel Opinion Column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
For anyone unaware, we're currently making our way through the Christian season of Lent, a period commonly associated in the popular imagination with affluent suburbanites who nobly commit themselves to exorcising Oreos from their diet for about 40 days each spring.
It's one of those weird niche holidays that seem to exist only parallel to our mass culture -- like Boxing Day, Norwegian Constitution Day and various religious holidays. Also Kwanzaa.
But in the spirit of our long-standing human tradition of cultural co-optation, how about we secularize and assimilate Lent a bit? We don't have to ruin it for practitioners, just make it more accessible.
I'm thinking something along the lines of what secular America has done to Christmas (and what early Christians did to the winter celebration of the birth of the Roman sun god).
And maybe our botched adaptation of Easter can be a cautionary tale. Secular Christmas is a little garish, but it holds onto some useful love and generosity from its sacred equivalent. It's a built-in period for affirming bonds of family and extending goodwill into the world in an intentional way. (Secular Easter is just an opportunity for candy and traumatizing anthropomorphisms.)
Two questions you might be asking: Why draw so heavily on Christian tradition if our nation has so many other traditions? Also: Does America truly need a chance to give up soda or cheese biscuits for a month and a half?
Well if we're going to have a shared culture based on something besides jingoism, self-gratification and Lady Gaga, this is our best bet. And as a nation we don't know enough about any other traditions to adopt them without butchering them.
As for the second question, Lenten sacrifice can be a lot more than just a short-term New Year's resolution. The original tradition is one of sustained fasting (much like strong traditions of fasting in Judaism and Islam), which tends to demand a little more willpower than the still painstaking switch from fried to grilled at KFC.
And many groups today use Lent as a time for reflection on the individual and community level, effectively assessing and reshaping the collective identity of the group to reorient it in relation to the world.
So instead of the individualized self-improvement of New Year's resolutions, Lent can be and often is more about self-discipline and introspection. And who couldn't use a little more of those in their lives?
Let's be honest: we're animals. We're products of our circumstances. Impulse control and critical self-reflection are skills -- just like driving, shooting or caring -- that must be endlessly honed and practiced.
They also happen to be essential for a healthy society, and some regular exercise with them might help mitigate the obesity, political polarization, violence and sexual assault that happen to be systemic in our society.
Worth a try? If I were us, I'd be ready to try anything.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/a-lenten-festivus-for-the-rest-of-us_0320
It's one of those weird niche holidays that seem to exist only parallel to our mass culture -- like Boxing Day, Norwegian Constitution Day and various religious holidays. Also Kwanzaa.
But in the spirit of our long-standing human tradition of cultural co-optation, how about we secularize and assimilate Lent a bit? We don't have to ruin it for practitioners, just make it more accessible.
I'm thinking something along the lines of what secular America has done to Christmas (and what early Christians did to the winter celebration of the birth of the Roman sun god).
And maybe our botched adaptation of Easter can be a cautionary tale. Secular Christmas is a little garish, but it holds onto some useful love and generosity from its sacred equivalent. It's a built-in period for affirming bonds of family and extending goodwill into the world in an intentional way. (Secular Easter is just an opportunity for candy and traumatizing anthropomorphisms.)
Two questions you might be asking: Why draw so heavily on Christian tradition if our nation has so many other traditions? Also: Does America truly need a chance to give up soda or cheese biscuits for a month and a half?
Well if we're going to have a shared culture based on something besides jingoism, self-gratification and Lady Gaga, this is our best bet. And as a nation we don't know enough about any other traditions to adopt them without butchering them.
As for the second question, Lenten sacrifice can be a lot more than just a short-term New Year's resolution. The original tradition is one of sustained fasting (much like strong traditions of fasting in Judaism and Islam), which tends to demand a little more willpower than the still painstaking switch from fried to grilled at KFC.
And many groups today use Lent as a time for reflection on the individual and community level, effectively assessing and reshaping the collective identity of the group to reorient it in relation to the world.
So instead of the individualized self-improvement of New Year's resolutions, Lent can be and often is more about self-discipline and introspection. And who couldn't use a little more of those in their lives?
Let's be honest: we're animals. We're products of our circumstances. Impulse control and critical self-reflection are skills -- just like driving, shooting or caring -- that must be endlessly honed and practiced.
They also happen to be essential for a healthy society, and some regular exercise with them might help mitigate the obesity, political polarization, violence and sexual assault that happen to be systemic in our society.
Worth a try? If I were us, I'd be ready to try anything.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/a-lenten-festivus-for-the-rest-of-us_0320
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
In defense of just faking it (Daily Tar Heel Opinion Column Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
So you don't care about basketball. You don't pray toward the Smith Center five times daily, you don't get a sense of humble reverence in your heart from reciting the names of UNC point guards into antiquity -- and maybe you don't feel anything toward Duke but a vague antipathy.
For whatever reason, you just don't buy into the whole "school spirit mob mentality" with its blind enthusiasm and mass fervor. That's cool, but what makes you think you're so special?
I know it's all silly in the grand scheme of things, and I could intellectualize about school spirit as an artificial cultural phenomenon all day if I wanted to be obnoxious, repetitive and cliched -- but I'd rather join in the fun.
I might not be able to convince myself that it really matters how many balls we get through hoops, or if our sports can dramatically outmaneuver the other universities' sports and elevate our sports to the greatest sports ever to have sportsed in regular season play -- despite our abysmal sportsing percentage on the sports line.
But I sure can act like I care, and caring is good. In the religious pantheon of college athletics, you could call me a practicing Tar Heel agnostic.
Communities like UNC are the social structures that give our lives shape and meaning, but they're also fun. They're filled with people who care about you and have fun affirming their commitment to an abstraction -- through and in their caring about you.
Indulging in some healthy school spirit -- or whatever your chosen abstraction may be -- pulls you out of yourself and your brooding ego. You can't be unhappy or lonely when you're not fully aware of your finite individuality!
The passion you each feel and perform for UNC in shouting about free throws translates to compassion for each other as Tar Heels. And as long as the community is a healthy one, your involvement in it reorients you in relation to other communities as well.
Practicing my love for the UNC community and its members builds synaptic bridges of empathy in my mind. It sharpens my sense of fellow-feeling and draws out my social antennae, setting me up to sincerely care my way into any community I see fit to fit myself into.
Obviously you'll get less out of all this if you secretly don't care, and you might feel awkward for a while, but "agnostic" is actually a fairly misleading term for this -- you're putting so much thought into acting like you care that you can't help but start caring.
You can only sing the alma mater, shout "I'm a Tar Heel" and march to Franklin with people who love you so many times before you start to believe it means something. And as much as I may pretend to be secretly above the groupthink of school spirit, my love for the community runs deep in my Carolina blue blood.
It deepens with every chant, every collective scream at a Wade Moody 3-pointer or Michael Jordan name drop.
It's a good feeling. And in some not insignificant way, I'm a stronger, more compassionate human being for feeling it.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/in-defense-of-just-faking-it
For whatever reason, you just don't buy into the whole "school spirit mob mentality" with its blind enthusiasm and mass fervor. That's cool, but what makes you think you're so special?
I know it's all silly in the grand scheme of things, and I could intellectualize about school spirit as an artificial cultural phenomenon all day if I wanted to be obnoxious, repetitive and cliched -- but I'd rather join in the fun.
I might not be able to convince myself that it really matters how many balls we get through hoops, or if our sports can dramatically outmaneuver the other universities' sports and elevate our sports to the greatest sports ever to have sportsed in regular season play -- despite our abysmal sportsing percentage on the sports line.
But I sure can act like I care, and caring is good. In the religious pantheon of college athletics, you could call me a practicing Tar Heel agnostic.
Communities like UNC are the social structures that give our lives shape and meaning, but they're also fun. They're filled with people who care about you and have fun affirming their commitment to an abstraction -- through and in their caring about you.
Indulging in some healthy school spirit -- or whatever your chosen abstraction may be -- pulls you out of yourself and your brooding ego. You can't be unhappy or lonely when you're not fully aware of your finite individuality!
The passion you each feel and perform for UNC in shouting about free throws translates to compassion for each other as Tar Heels. And as long as the community is a healthy one, your involvement in it reorients you in relation to other communities as well.
Practicing my love for the UNC community and its members builds synaptic bridges of empathy in my mind. It sharpens my sense of fellow-feeling and draws out my social antennae, setting me up to sincerely care my way into any community I see fit to fit myself into.
Obviously you'll get less out of all this if you secretly don't care, and you might feel awkward for a while, but "agnostic" is actually a fairly misleading term for this -- you're putting so much thought into acting like you care that you can't help but start caring.
You can only sing the alma mater, shout "I'm a Tar Heel" and march to Franklin with people who love you so many times before you start to believe it means something. And as much as I may pretend to be secretly above the groupthink of school spirit, my love for the community runs deep in my Carolina blue blood.
It deepens with every chant, every collective scream at a Wade Moody 3-pointer or Michael Jordan name drop.
It's a good feeling. And in some not insignificant way, I'm a stronger, more compassionate human being for feeling it.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/in-defense-of-just-faking-it
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Hacking at some racist trees (Daily Tar Heel Cries from the Peanut Gallery opinion column)
If a tree celebrates Presidents Day in the forest, does it make a sound? And at what point do we care?
I guess it depends if the tree's of voting age? It'd seem significant if the tree's potential for civic engagement weren't limited to a small circle of soil. Or if anyone else were around to be inspired to a newfound respect for the office of president by the oak's fervent patriotism.
But let's set trees aside for the moment.
Holidays, like public monuments and the political blogosphere, are stubbornly fixed set-pieces in the ongoing stage production that is our society.
They are prominent, largely unshakeable features of the structure in and through which we go about our lives. Like trees! And like trees, they're only relatively stable because we've stuck them in the ground good and tight, and ignoring them is easier than buying a chainsaw on a college budget.
Unlike trees, however, holidays, statues and buildings named after Ku Klux Klan organizers are man-made. Thus they only really "do things" when we celebrate or regularly attend classes in them.
So what's a holiday do if it just sits on campus and gets ignored? Does Presidents Day do something to us simply by existing -- even though we didn't get a day off to contemplate its significance and nurse our snow-weekend hangovers?
We're conscious of it, so that's something. And a lot of states use it to celebrate just George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's birthdays, so maybe that specificity mixes things up?
Alabama excludes Lincoln and celebrates Washington and Thomas Jefferson's birthdays -- even though the latter isn't until April. Presumably because that other president presided over one of the greatest periods of death and violence in American history?
(At least they're not celebrating Andrew Jackson -- I think the irony alone would be enough to kill me, or at the very least uproot thousands from the land they've lived on for centuries and force them to march thousands of miles so white settlements can expand comfortably.)
So Presidents Day must have some symbolic value in shaping how we see our society. But what about holidays like Labor Day? We get a day off, so it must be significant, but does it play a role in shaping our values or ourselves?
Probably not, because until the age of 16 I'd never considered Labor Day to be about anything beyond pregnant ladies and obscure fashion codes. (I had to check Wikipedia to be sure it's actually about the American labor movement. It is.)
We actively celebrate Veterans Day, but that's a tree we've altered over time. (It used to be Armistice Day -- so a bit more about "peace" than "soldiers.") But what about Columbus Day?
And while we're on the subject of memorialized racism, what about all these Confederate legacies and quiet monuments to racism scattered around our campus? Lingering relics of an ugly past slowing our moral march forward? Useful symbols of injustice to rally around (e.g., the Pit Preacher)? Dead metaphors like Labor Day?
I'm undecided. But if we get a consensus going I'll chip in for a chainsaw.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/hacking-at-some-racist-trees
I guess it depends if the tree's of voting age? It'd seem significant if the tree's potential for civic engagement weren't limited to a small circle of soil. Or if anyone else were around to be inspired to a newfound respect for the office of president by the oak's fervent patriotism.
But let's set trees aside for the moment.
Holidays, like public monuments and the political blogosphere, are stubbornly fixed set-pieces in the ongoing stage production that is our society.
They are prominent, largely unshakeable features of the structure in and through which we go about our lives. Like trees! And like trees, they're only relatively stable because we've stuck them in the ground good and tight, and ignoring them is easier than buying a chainsaw on a college budget.
Unlike trees, however, holidays, statues and buildings named after Ku Klux Klan organizers are man-made. Thus they only really "do things" when we celebrate or regularly attend classes in them.
So what's a holiday do if it just sits on campus and gets ignored? Does Presidents Day do something to us simply by existing -- even though we didn't get a day off to contemplate its significance and nurse our snow-weekend hangovers?
We're conscious of it, so that's something. And a lot of states use it to celebrate just George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's birthdays, so maybe that specificity mixes things up?
Alabama excludes Lincoln and celebrates Washington and Thomas Jefferson's birthdays -- even though the latter isn't until April. Presumably because that other president presided over one of the greatest periods of death and violence in American history?
(At least they're not celebrating Andrew Jackson -- I think the irony alone would be enough to kill me, or at the very least uproot thousands from the land they've lived on for centuries and force them to march thousands of miles so white settlements can expand comfortably.)
So Presidents Day must have some symbolic value in shaping how we see our society. But what about holidays like Labor Day? We get a day off, so it must be significant, but does it play a role in shaping our values or ourselves?
Probably not, because until the age of 16 I'd never considered Labor Day to be about anything beyond pregnant ladies and obscure fashion codes. (I had to check Wikipedia to be sure it's actually about the American labor movement. It is.)
We actively celebrate Veterans Day, but that's a tree we've altered over time. (It used to be Armistice Day -- so a bit more about "peace" than "soldiers.") But what about Columbus Day?
And while we're on the subject of memorialized racism, what about all these Confederate legacies and quiet monuments to racism scattered around our campus? Lingering relics of an ugly past slowing our moral march forward? Useful symbols of injustice to rally around (e.g., the Pit Preacher)? Dead metaphors like Labor Day?
I'm undecided. But if we get a consensus going I'll chip in for a chainsaw.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/hacking-at-some-racist-trees
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Obama makes it to the end zone (Daily Tar Heel Op-ed column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
Making sports analogies is like being political on Facebook. It gets you a lot of attention, and you can be saying intelligent things, but it's nothing some blogger hasn't already beaten to death, and unless you're astoundingly subtle you'll alienate half of your audience right off the bat -- but we keep doing it.
Anyway, we've just gone through two of the bigger significant American events of the year in a week and a half: the Super Bowl and the State of the Union.
One is a pageant of commercial excess, a scripted display of pretense and coercive prowess masking empty pandering and desperate appeals to and for various demographics -- the other one has Peyton Manning.
They really are more alike than different, but the Super Bowl is a lot better at doing what the State of the Union is really meant to do in the first place -- you know, assess the state of our union and whatnot.
The Super Bowl is that time of year where our whole diverse, opinionated society gets together and drinks until it's not awkward (family reunions!). We try not to talk about anything divisive -- but you know some people can't help but chime in (and you can't really blame them, because it's not like Uncle Ben stops being a dick over Thanksgiving, we're just actively trying not to talk about it).
The State of the Union, on the other hand, is when a small segment of our nation gets packed into an auditorium, fidgets in silence for a couple of hours and claps until their hands snap off.
Even with the embarrassingly uncompetitive little league soccer match that somehow passed for a serious athletic event this Sunday, more people watched it than have ever watched anything on a screen at the same time in American history. And the people that didn't watch it all posted statuses to make sure everyone was aware of exactly how little they cared.
In both events there are always going to be farcical attempts and failures to somehow make everyone happy. (See: Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers with their guitars unplugged.)
The smallest, subtlest things carry a lot of meaning, and they're easy to miss. Bob Dylan had all of 30 seconds to talk to America during the Super Bowl, but he only needed for four to write off three-fifths of the world's population ("Asia makes our cellphones").
All things considered, however, I thought our union looked pretty great this year. (Except Jerry Seinfeld -- at this point it feels like he's dropped the jokes and we're just watching him age). It definitely wasn't much worse than any other recent year, and maybe even a little better. But that's not to say there's not massive room for improvement.
As with both the State of the Union and the Super Bowl, you always feel like there's something missing -- something incredibly pertinent but eerily absent from the conversation, that we'd really prefer to just leave off the table for now. Native American slurs, drone warfare and sex trafficking, perhaps? Oh well.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/obama-makes-it-to-the-end-zone
Anyway, we've just gone through two of the bigger significant American events of the year in a week and a half: the Super Bowl and the State of the Union.
One is a pageant of commercial excess, a scripted display of pretense and coercive prowess masking empty pandering and desperate appeals to and for various demographics -- the other one has Peyton Manning.
They really are more alike than different, but the Super Bowl is a lot better at doing what the State of the Union is really meant to do in the first place -- you know, assess the state of our union and whatnot.
The Super Bowl is that time of year where our whole diverse, opinionated society gets together and drinks until it's not awkward (family reunions!). We try not to talk about anything divisive -- but you know some people can't help but chime in (and you can't really blame them, because it's not like Uncle Ben stops being a dick over Thanksgiving, we're just actively trying not to talk about it).
The State of the Union, on the other hand, is when a small segment of our nation gets packed into an auditorium, fidgets in silence for a couple of hours and claps until their hands snap off.
Even with the embarrassingly uncompetitive little league soccer match that somehow passed for a serious athletic event this Sunday, more people watched it than have ever watched anything on a screen at the same time in American history. And the people that didn't watch it all posted statuses to make sure everyone was aware of exactly how little they cared.
In both events there are always going to be farcical attempts and failures to somehow make everyone happy. (See: Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers with their guitars unplugged.)
The smallest, subtlest things carry a lot of meaning, and they're easy to miss. Bob Dylan had all of 30 seconds to talk to America during the Super Bowl, but he only needed for four to write off three-fifths of the world's population ("Asia makes our cellphones").
All things considered, however, I thought our union looked pretty great this year. (Except Jerry Seinfeld -- at this point it feels like he's dropped the jokes and we're just watching him age). It definitely wasn't much worse than any other recent year, and maybe even a little better. But that's not to say there's not massive room for improvement.
As with both the State of the Union and the Super Bowl, you always feel like there's something missing -- something incredibly pertinent but eerily absent from the conversation, that we'd really prefer to just leave off the table for now. Native American slurs, drone warfare and sex trafficking, perhaps? Oh well.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/obama-makes-it-to-the-end-zone
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
The real media and the real fake media (Guest post on copyediting blog)
The question of the day used to be, "Who gets to count as a real journalist?" But that doesn't seem to cover it anymore. For some reason, the question just seems irrelevant and nitpicky.
Now there's a better question: "What gets to count as a real news organization?" After all, that's the first thing we see when sharing or finding information online. Any article I'm sharing is attributed first and foremost to a company or website and only secondarily to the individual.
Here are a few online news organizations you may or may not have heard of: Free Wood Post, the Daily Currant, Diversity Chronicle and Hayibo. All of them have had articles go viral at one point or another.
The catch? They're all fake. They call themselves satire, which seems to legitimize what they do, but they are "satire" the same way TMZ or the Drudge Report could be called "news."
So let's amend our question once more: "What gets to count as a real fake news organization?"
Given how easy it is to confuse the real and the fake, we should consider it as a spectrum. At one end is The Onion, the big dog as far as media satire is concerned, and at the other end are the most reputable of the standard news agencies: The New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.
Then we drift toward the middle, what we might generally refer to as the tabloid zone. The National Enquirer imitates real news organizations just like Diversity Chronicle imitates fake news organizations, but at that point in the spectrum they probably have more in common with each other than with either of our more reliable poles.
Although, of course, there are ambiguous points on each side. The Drudge Report and Hayibo might be closer to the edge, if not out of the tabloid zone entirely. (Hayibo is a South African satire site, now defunct.) But the worst satire is virtually indistinguishable from the worst news.
So what's the problem? In a nutshell: Bad news can spread misinformation and reduce people's trust in the news, and bad satire is even worse.
The Onion is a fairly well-established organization, but their articles still occasionally get taken as real news. (There's even a whole website devoted to documenting this phenomenon.) For the more tabloid-esque satire, however, one gets the feeling that they subsist almost entirely on readers that mistakenly think they're reading actual journalism. And this isn't only because the brands aren't well-known and the disclaimers are tucked away in corners; the content is different too.
Polished satire from organizations like The Onion tends to have a political slant, but it's obvious, and it approaches issues from a very particular sort of angle that shapes the way it's read. They feature shareable headlines like "Al-Qaeda operative can't believe how expensive Super Bowl tickets are," or "Biden frantically hitting up Cabinet members for piss." Readers might take these as real, but that only leads to confusion, hilarity and embarrassment.
And how does bad satire compare? Free Wood Post goes viral with headlines like "Mitt Romney: I can relate to black people, my ancestors once owned slaves," and Daily Currant gets views with headlines like "Obamacare death panel orders first execution." The contrast should be obvious. The worst of these articles are nothing more than hyperbolic political rants masquerading as journalism -- and as a general rule, they're not even funny.
While satire ideally contributes to public discourse and offers novel perspectives in otherwise stagnant debates, sites like these reflect and perpetuate the political polarization that permeates our media. Uncritical readers who share the expressed partisan views take the satire as fact, while others simply disbelieve.
And if I haven't made it clear so far, this problem isn't adjacent to the modern media landscape and its own quirks and discrepancies, it's fully a part of it. It's an extension of the already polarized political media, and it's only one of a number of ongoing factors that erode media credibility and contribute to the conflicting views of reality entrenched on each side of the political spectrum.
So it's a problem. And it's not quite clear what we can do about it.
http://editdesk.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-real-media-and-the-real-fake-media/
Now there's a better question: "What gets to count as a real news organization?" After all, that's the first thing we see when sharing or finding information online. Any article I'm sharing is attributed first and foremost to a company or website and only secondarily to the individual.
Here are a few online news organizations you may or may not have heard of: Free Wood Post, the Daily Currant, Diversity Chronicle and Hayibo. All of them have had articles go viral at one point or another.
The catch? They're all fake. They call themselves satire, which seems to legitimize what they do, but they are "satire" the same way TMZ or the Drudge Report could be called "news."
So let's amend our question once more: "What gets to count as a real fake news organization?"
Given how easy it is to confuse the real and the fake, we should consider it as a spectrum. At one end is The Onion, the big dog as far as media satire is concerned, and at the other end are the most reputable of the standard news agencies: The New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.
Then we drift toward the middle, what we might generally refer to as the tabloid zone. The National Enquirer imitates real news organizations just like Diversity Chronicle imitates fake news organizations, but at that point in the spectrum they probably have more in common with each other than with either of our more reliable poles.
Although, of course, there are ambiguous points on each side. The Drudge Report and Hayibo might be closer to the edge, if not out of the tabloid zone entirely. (Hayibo is a South African satire site, now defunct.) But the worst satire is virtually indistinguishable from the worst news.
So what's the problem? In a nutshell: Bad news can spread misinformation and reduce people's trust in the news, and bad satire is even worse.
The Onion is a fairly well-established organization, but their articles still occasionally get taken as real news. (There's even a whole website devoted to documenting this phenomenon.) For the more tabloid-esque satire, however, one gets the feeling that they subsist almost entirely on readers that mistakenly think they're reading actual journalism. And this isn't only because the brands aren't well-known and the disclaimers are tucked away in corners; the content is different too.
Polished satire from organizations like The Onion tends to have a political slant, but it's obvious, and it approaches issues from a very particular sort of angle that shapes the way it's read. They feature shareable headlines like "Al-Qaeda operative can't believe how expensive Super Bowl tickets are," or "Biden frantically hitting up Cabinet members for piss." Readers might take these as real, but that only leads to confusion, hilarity and embarrassment.
And how does bad satire compare? Free Wood Post goes viral with headlines like "Mitt Romney: I can relate to black people, my ancestors once owned slaves," and Daily Currant gets views with headlines like "Obamacare death panel orders first execution." The contrast should be obvious. The worst of these articles are nothing more than hyperbolic political rants masquerading as journalism -- and as a general rule, they're not even funny.
While satire ideally contributes to public discourse and offers novel perspectives in otherwise stagnant debates, sites like these reflect and perpetuate the political polarization that permeates our media. Uncritical readers who share the expressed partisan views take the satire as fact, while others simply disbelieve.
And if I haven't made it clear so far, this problem isn't adjacent to the modern media landscape and its own quirks and discrepancies, it's fully a part of it. It's an extension of the already polarized political media, and it's only one of a number of ongoing factors that erode media credibility and contribute to the conflicting views of reality entrenched on each side of the political spectrum.
So it's a problem. And it's not quite clear what we can do about it.
http://editdesk.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-real-media-and-the-real-fake-media/
What makes for a good roommate? (Daily Tar Heel special housing issue column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
The short answer: It depends. But otherwise there's a lot of ground to cover.
Roommates should either be just like you or totally the opposite, as it needs to be clear where they'll fit in your life (also in your nap, shower and angry ranting schedule). If they're you, you'll get along great. You'll pick up each other's mannerisms (like thumb-twiddling or laugh-suffocating), your cycles will sync (you'll need two toilets) and your lives will merge into one undifferentiated mass.
But if you have too much in common it'll be obnoxious, for the obvious reasons, but also because you'll have doubles of every new Killers album (and if you're me, you don't need to be reminded that they're way past their prime).
Also it'll piss you off and ruin your life forever when you find the one thing you differ on so radically (for me it's usually drone warfare, photojournalism or cashews).
You avoid that inevitability if you pick someone entirely different, but this can go wrong, too. It helps to have at least enough in common to fill one good lunch with conversation every couple of months on a random hungover Saturday of your choice.
Without any common ground, your relationship will be stuck at "friends-by-association." (The association here being that you sleep within at most 20 feet of each other and thus are exceedingly vulnerable to sneak attack.)
Not being close is easy because your lives are separate, like aloof and uncommunicative parallel lines. But one of you is going to be hilariously useless if you ever find the other crying on the kitchen floor some afternoon.
You might not think it'll ever happen to you, but you're probably delusional, which, incidentally, is another common type of stress-burnout -- we don't all break down the same way, but boy do we break down. (I'm a reclusive, break-off-from-reality-and-paint-inkblots type, but I think crying would be healthier.)
Anyway, it helps if your roommate knows you well enough to at least know whom to call for you during the periodic meltdowns in the productive but poorly designed nuclear reactors that are your life.
So a balance between the two extremes is probably for the best! Also, trying to decide and preemptively control the place your roommate is going to occupy in your life is futile and misguided, and it's not going to work.
What you need to do is sit down and compare notes. Talk about what you want in the college experience and your roommate relationship, and see if you're compatible -- communicate!
But that's awkward, so never mind. Screw it -- just pick somebody and run with it.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/what-makes-for-a-good-roommate
Roommates should either be just like you or totally the opposite, as it needs to be clear where they'll fit in your life (also in your nap, shower and angry ranting schedule). If they're you, you'll get along great. You'll pick up each other's mannerisms (like thumb-twiddling or laugh-suffocating), your cycles will sync (you'll need two toilets) and your lives will merge into one undifferentiated mass.
But if you have too much in common it'll be obnoxious, for the obvious reasons, but also because you'll have doubles of every new Killers album (and if you're me, you don't need to be reminded that they're way past their prime).
Also it'll piss you off and ruin your life forever when you find the one thing you differ on so radically (for me it's usually drone warfare, photojournalism or cashews).
You avoid that inevitability if you pick someone entirely different, but this can go wrong, too. It helps to have at least enough in common to fill one good lunch with conversation every couple of months on a random hungover Saturday of your choice.
Without any common ground, your relationship will be stuck at "friends-by-association." (The association here being that you sleep within at most 20 feet of each other and thus are exceedingly vulnerable to sneak attack.)
Not being close is easy because your lives are separate, like aloof and uncommunicative parallel lines. But one of you is going to be hilariously useless if you ever find the other crying on the kitchen floor some afternoon.
You might not think it'll ever happen to you, but you're probably delusional, which, incidentally, is another common type of stress-burnout -- we don't all break down the same way, but boy do we break down. (I'm a reclusive, break-off-from-reality-and-paint-inkblots type, but I think crying would be healthier.)
Anyway, it helps if your roommate knows you well enough to at least know whom to call for you during the periodic meltdowns in the productive but poorly designed nuclear reactors that are your life.
So a balance between the two extremes is probably for the best! Also, trying to decide and preemptively control the place your roommate is going to occupy in your life is futile and misguided, and it's not going to work.
What you need to do is sit down and compare notes. Talk about what you want in the college experience and your roommate relationship, and see if you're compatible -- communicate!
But that's awkward, so never mind. Screw it -- just pick somebody and run with it.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/what-makes-for-a-good-roommate
Monday, February 3, 2014
Of gray areas and gazpacho (Daily Tar Heel Opinion Column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
It was pink and smooth, a peaceful sea populated by roaming herds of bell peppers and stale bread. It was also gazpacho, and I was supposed to eat it.
The first bite made me immediately uncomfortable, like a pack of teens stopping in front of me on the beach or a passing acquaintance who insists on forcing small talk. (It's not that I can't make words, but that the nagging voice in the back of my head won't stop shouting "THIS CONVERSATION MEANS NOTHING.")
But my disgust with the gazpacho had nothing to do with the unexpectedly salty flavor, the garlicky lumps of protein or the creamy-but-grainy texture of old yogurt -- my problem was that it was cold. I was a caveman again, sticking random twigs and berries in my mouth, and I knew instinctively that this particular bit of organic material was not food.
It was like a senile aunt or that possessed lady from Ghostbusters was forcing me to eat her leftover chowder straight out of the fridge -- and I couldn't say no because that'd be rude.
It was a simple enough problem, and there seemed to be a simple enough solution. "Hey, you know what?" I said to myself, "This soup wouldn't be all that bad if I just stuck it in the microwave." I grunted in agreement.
My dialogue completed, I translated for my host -- but there I came upon the crux of the issue. As my coarse but caring Spanish host mother so emphatically explained, "Gazpacho is cold." To deviate from that principle would be to alter the reality of the gazpacho itself! Hot gazpacho is soup, and soup is not gazpacho -- so sit down and eat, Michael.
I begrudgingly complied, but I couldn't help but think: Why the dogmatic distinction? Gazpacho and soup -- can't it be both?
Society likes to give us choices and pretend there're only two options, that it's always black and white (It makes me gag to use "society" as the subject of a sentence -- sorry). But as a general rule for life, it's better to embrace the gray. Because you never want to just nail yourself down to one color and one color only, you know?
Ambiguity rules! In that it's always there if you look for it. And I'm not going for "best of both worlds" with this whole "hot gazpacho" thing -- because the gray third option is never a straightforward mix of the standard two. Plus, you'll probably never stop getting crap from both soup people and gazpacho people, and golly do people get crazy about their liquid comestibles.
But if you're comfortable with never really being certain about anything, it can be a lot of fun! And you're probably closer to the truth than anyone else in terms of the fundamental nature of soup and such.
As with all boundaries and binaries, the most fun is in the middle. As with soup (or soup-like entities), so with life.
...Hm. Following an expedition to Wikipedia, it seems that what I ate was not gazpacho but a local variant called salmorejo. Gazpacho is more reddish without eggs. Forget I said anything.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/of-gray-areas-and-gazpacho
The first bite made me immediately uncomfortable, like a pack of teens stopping in front of me on the beach or a passing acquaintance who insists on forcing small talk. (It's not that I can't make words, but that the nagging voice in the back of my head won't stop shouting "THIS CONVERSATION MEANS NOTHING.")
But my disgust with the gazpacho had nothing to do with the unexpectedly salty flavor, the garlicky lumps of protein or the creamy-but-grainy texture of old yogurt -- my problem was that it was cold. I was a caveman again, sticking random twigs and berries in my mouth, and I knew instinctively that this particular bit of organic material was not food.
It was like a senile aunt or that possessed lady from Ghostbusters was forcing me to eat her leftover chowder straight out of the fridge -- and I couldn't say no because that'd be rude.
It was a simple enough problem, and there seemed to be a simple enough solution. "Hey, you know what?" I said to myself, "This soup wouldn't be all that bad if I just stuck it in the microwave." I grunted in agreement.
My dialogue completed, I translated for my host -- but there I came upon the crux of the issue. As my coarse but caring Spanish host mother so emphatically explained, "Gazpacho is cold." To deviate from that principle would be to alter the reality of the gazpacho itself! Hot gazpacho is soup, and soup is not gazpacho -- so sit down and eat, Michael.
I begrudgingly complied, but I couldn't help but think: Why the dogmatic distinction? Gazpacho and soup -- can't it be both?
Society likes to give us choices and pretend there're only two options, that it's always black and white (It makes me gag to use "society" as the subject of a sentence -- sorry). But as a general rule for life, it's better to embrace the gray. Because you never want to just nail yourself down to one color and one color only, you know?
Ambiguity rules! In that it's always there if you look for it. And I'm not going for "best of both worlds" with this whole "hot gazpacho" thing -- because the gray third option is never a straightforward mix of the standard two. Plus, you'll probably never stop getting crap from both soup people and gazpacho people, and golly do people get crazy about their liquid comestibles.
But if you're comfortable with never really being certain about anything, it can be a lot of fun! And you're probably closer to the truth than anyone else in terms of the fundamental nature of soup and such.
As with all boundaries and binaries, the most fun is in the middle. As with soup (or soup-like entities), so with life.
...Hm. Following an expedition to Wikipedia, it seems that what I ate was not gazpacho but a local variant called salmorejo. Gazpacho is more reddish without eggs. Forget I said anything.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/of-gray-areas-and-gazpacho
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Of pride, mollusks and sex jokes (DTH Opinion column "Cries from the Peanut Gallery")
Well seniors, this is it: the point of no return. For those of us eligible to graduate -- whether you're a headstrong, dedicated junior or a boring, credit-conscious senior -- something fundamental is changing.
Of course, this isn't just starting now. Like divorce and puberty, this is a process that begins long before we see the telltale signs (e.g. a lack of sexual contact, emotional distance and rapid undesirable, hair growth).
You finally have your own Amazon account, you've gone from the fated, ancestral enemy with your siblings to close friends and your aunt no longer censors her sex jokes around you -- and if you're me, you're learning the right way to tie your shoes and graduating beyond skateboard-brand Velcro wallets.
But most of those are just arbitrary markers of adulthood, and I'm never embracing any transition that tells me I should stop filling my spare time with Lego: Indiana Jones for PlayStation 2, Wii or PC.
What I'm talking about is what's changing right now, in a direct relation to our advancement through this convoluted and quixotic process of self-improvement and sacrifice we call higher education: our connection to home.
Up until now, the command has been "Come home. Spend time with us. Bring us back our Tupperware." But the polarity is reversing; your parents' magnetic field is shifting to push you away. (English major here, sorry -- you might say electromagnetic metaphors are a little out of my field. I try to stay current, but I have to force it to make it quark sometimes. Well, it is watt it is).
Your family probably isn't even aware of it yet, but it's happening. Every visit home in the past was welcomed with much rejoicing. But pretty soon after graduation, even short visits might be tainted with a little shame if you're not rapidly moving on to the next big thing.
You might've already noticed this slow shift in orientation over break. Every night after my first day back, my mom would make oblique references to "whenever we'll see you next" and say goodnight like I'd be leaving before dawn to find passage on a freighter to Singapore.
And after just a week of being at home, my self-worth started to dry and curl into a shriveled, unrecognizable mollusk of an ordinarily healthy (albeit swollen) ego. That's exaggerating a little bit, but it was a paralyzing and dazzlingly unproductive venture (dealing with the parents' shock at finding me on the couch again every morning didn't help).
Now don't get me wrong -- moving back home can be a smart, if not inevitable option. But be forewarned: what it costs you in pride and self-respect might end up keeping you there longer than you want or expect.
But then again, we should feel blessed to even have that option, especially in bone-chilling, godforsaken, polar vortex weather like this.
Pride, self-respect and a warm place to sleep and eat? One out of three ain't bad, and that's a deal many don't ever get a shot at.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/of-pride-mollusks-and-sex-jokes
Of course, this isn't just starting now. Like divorce and puberty, this is a process that begins long before we see the telltale signs (e.g. a lack of sexual contact, emotional distance and rapid undesirable, hair growth).
You finally have your own Amazon account, you've gone from the fated, ancestral enemy with your siblings to close friends and your aunt no longer censors her sex jokes around you -- and if you're me, you're learning the right way to tie your shoes and graduating beyond skateboard-brand Velcro wallets.
But most of those are just arbitrary markers of adulthood, and I'm never embracing any transition that tells me I should stop filling my spare time with Lego: Indiana Jones for PlayStation 2, Wii or PC.
What I'm talking about is what's changing right now, in a direct relation to our advancement through this convoluted and quixotic process of self-improvement and sacrifice we call higher education: our connection to home.
Up until now, the command has been "Come home. Spend time with us. Bring us back our Tupperware." But the polarity is reversing; your parents' magnetic field is shifting to push you away. (English major here, sorry -- you might say electromagnetic metaphors are a little out of my field. I try to stay current, but I have to force it to make it quark sometimes. Well, it is watt it is).
Your family probably isn't even aware of it yet, but it's happening. Every visit home in the past was welcomed with much rejoicing. But pretty soon after graduation, even short visits might be tainted with a little shame if you're not rapidly moving on to the next big thing.
You might've already noticed this slow shift in orientation over break. Every night after my first day back, my mom would make oblique references to "whenever we'll see you next" and say goodnight like I'd be leaving before dawn to find passage on a freighter to Singapore.
And after just a week of being at home, my self-worth started to dry and curl into a shriveled, unrecognizable mollusk of an ordinarily healthy (albeit swollen) ego. That's exaggerating a little bit, but it was a paralyzing and dazzlingly unproductive venture (dealing with the parents' shock at finding me on the couch again every morning didn't help).
Now don't get me wrong -- moving back home can be a smart, if not inevitable option. But be forewarned: what it costs you in pride and self-respect might end up keeping you there longer than you want or expect.
But then again, we should feel blessed to even have that option, especially in bone-chilling, godforsaken, polar vortex weather like this.
Pride, self-respect and a warm place to sleep and eat? One out of three ain't bad, and that's a deal many don't ever get a shot at.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/of-pride-mollusks-and-sex-jokes
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