Que Tengas Precaución

Baghdad sí, Tijuana no. These are the commands being given to U.S. Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton in SoCal, many of whom are used to spending their leisure time in the Mexican border city's bars and night clubs.

According to a USA Today article, "The limits were first put in place for the Christmas holiday. Last week the commander extended the order indefinitely."

Growing up in San Diego, CA, I remember older friends and classmates running Ssuth for the weekend, seeking beaches, bars, and other fun where the legal drinking age is 18. So it is a shock that 2008 was the bloodiest year ever for Tijuana, with 843 killings compared to 337 in 2007, owing predominately to the narcotics trade.

Here's the USA Today article about it: Tijuana off-limits to U.S. Marines

On campus, inauguration is must-see TV

Staffers take break from daily routines to watch ‘history in the making’

By Rachel Cromidas

CHICAGO — “I’ve got to go—I’ll call you later,” Stella Manns said, hanging up the phone at the front desk of Snell-Hitchcock Hall.

“That was another desk clerk, from Maclean. We didn’t want to talk too much, we don’t want to even take our eyes off it for a minute.”

Like students, faculty, and staff all over campus, Manns and dozens of other housing and dining staff members took a few moments Tuesday morning from their jobs checking ID cards, preparing food, and keeping house. Whatever attention could be spared went to dormitory televisions and desk computers showing the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

“I’m speechless,” Manns said, splitting her attention between the Channel 9 news and the students running through the dormitory front door. “I knew one day this would happen, but I never thought I would live to see it.”

Manns, a resident of the Chatham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, has been working for the University for 31 years. She started out as a cashier in Hutchinson Commons, and later at International House, before joining the housing staff.

“They just went to church,” she said, tracking the Obamas on television. “There goes Al Gore, and his wife, and [George] Herbert Walker Bush. Did you know he walked with a cane? Barbara looks good.”

“I’m going to watch the inauguration the whole time,” she added. “And it won’t interfere with my work. It’s history in the making.”


Chicago Studies is a project of the College in partnership with the University Community Service Center. Chicago Studies is funded in part by the Women's Board. © 2008 The University of Chicago

I'm on NYTimes.com!

Um, yes, self-explanatory title.

Please click here!

UPDATE: See if you can find the other photo I submitted.

Volunteer’s tale: Day of Service

Check it out! Student journalists (like me) will be giving you coverage all day of Inauguration events at the Chicago Studies webpage.

Here's my first piece:

CHICAGO — Rev. C.T. Vivian wanted the crowd to know about a “mighty force” that has the power to decide what congressmen will do, a force that is able build more houses than any architect.

“It’s not God,” the Baptist minister and friend to Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech over MLK Weekend.

And it isn’t Barack Obama either, he said. “Obama wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for this mighty force. He wouldn’t have even been a senator.”

Vivian was talking about the spirit of volunteerism—the same force that assembled hundreds of volunteers, including 120 from the University of Chicago, at the United Center at 8:30 on Saturday morning, to prepare for a day of civic engagement through service.

Chicago Cares, a non-profit group that organizes volunteer projects throughout Chicago, organized the Jan. 17 Day of Service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Chicago Cares also arranged for Vivian, a champion of King’s message of non-violent action, to speak to volunteers the morning of the service project.

Just as Chicago Cares asked volunteers across the city to set aside time for community service, Brooke Fallon, a fourth-year in the College, asked University students to set aside their textbooks and spend the day painting classrooms and building bookshelves at nearby Fiske Elementary School.

“I am really impressed with the fact that so many students care enough about the community to take a full day out of their schedule, wake up early and come do something like this,” said Fallon, the University’s Day of Service coordinator. “The library isn’t going anywhere.”

Fiske, a prekindergarten through eighth-grade school located at the corner of 62nd Street and Ingleside Avenue, is just blocks away from campus and several dorms. But it may as well have been in a different world for the some University’s volunteers making their first foray into Woodlawn, a high-poverty neighborhood with historically tenuous University relations.

For fourth-year Stephan Skepnek, the Day of Service provided the perfect opportunity to spend his day outside of Hyde Park, and away from students’ usual off-campus haunts.

“One of my biggest regrets after having spent the last four years in Chicago is that I don’t know most of the city. It’s just so easy, once you get comfortable in Hyde Park and develop a close group of friends, to become insulated. But I think getting out into the city and exploring is really a part of what being a college student is,” he said.

Skepnek attended the Day of Service with his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon.

Though the Day of Service honors King’s memory, Skepneck had President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration at the front of his mind. It was hard not to—several classroom walls featured cut-out news articles about Obama and a collection of student essays titled “If I Were President…”

“[Obama] inspired a lot of youth to really get proactive, so hopefully he can just keep it going,” Skepnek said. “I didn’t begin volunteering because of Obama, but I think he has gotten me to step back and think about my relationship to the community.”


Chicago Studies is a project of the College in partnership with the University Community Service Center. Chicago Studies is funded in part by the Women's Board. © 2008 The University of Chicago

Saddlebacking all the way to D.C.

My favorite advice columnist and queer Dan Savage recently proposed another sex-act-naming contest, this time to commemorate the word "Saddleback." As both the name of the Reverend Rick Warren's church and a term just too suggestive to pass up, Dan's seven reader-suggested definitions for saddlebacking can be found here. Go vote for your favorite.

I'm not sure how I'm voting yet (though leaning towards 5), but these are my thoughts on the choices:

(1) I agree with Dan; "sex" should by default suggest the use of a condom in today's speech, and doesn't need another term.

(2) This suggestion only half makes sense to me; Obviously in a consenual relationship, having "submissive/masochistic tendencies" is not dark or nefarious, and using the term to apply to any kind of unreciprocal sex act wrongly implies that two people can't at the same time enjoy something like oral sex. I think Dan knows better than to offer this suggestion up to readers. However, I do like the example of the word in action: 'I don't know why Obama is letting Rick Warren saddleback him into presiding over his inauguration.'" Perhaps tweak this definition a little to describe the act of intentionally hijacking a sex act to suit your own fantasies while disregarding your partner?

(3) Aside from the gory description, I like how this suggestion references "barebacking," a term already in use.

(4) "To saddleback is to rail against gay sex in public while secretly indulging in the same in private. Ted Haggard? Total saddlebacker. Larry Craig? Saddlebacker. Rick Warren? Probably a saddlebacker." Ha ha ha. It's funny now, but I'm not picking this one because I think the joke will get old too fast.

(5) Yes! This one looks like the most appropriate choice so far because it directly speaks to the hypocritical, misinformed understanding of sex someone who goes through Rick Warren's idea of "sex-ed" would have.

(6) Like number 3, I think it works, but I think Dan should be looking for something more.

(7) Rick Warren probably loves the idea of "saddlebacking" as it is defined in this choice. That's reason enough not to pick it.

What do you think?

How did we miss this, UChicago?

5 people shot outside Chicago high school.

Swastika flag and name-calling mar Gaza panel

Gaza panel organizer: Altercation and offensive flag distract from the real political debate

By Rachel Cromidas
Updated: 2009-01-13

Some students were troubled by incidents that preceded a panel last Thursday on the Gaza conflict. The talk, entitled “Crisis in Gaza: the U.S., Israel, and Palestine,” featured former DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein; writer Ali Abunimah; and professor John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby, a controversial critique on Israeli–U.S. politics.

A middle-aged man not affiliated with the University hung a flag decorated with a Star of David, crosses, and a swastika on the balcony in Mandel Hall. The man was asked to remove it by Director of Student Activities Sharlene Holly, and he did so, carrying it away and leaving before the event began.

In an unrelated incident, a self-identified Israel supporter was called a Nazi by a man standing in line, prompting the supporter to knock the man’s glasses off, according to a University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) report. UCPD officers escorted the supporter out of the Reynolds Club.

A member of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a group that helped organize the panel event, who asked that his name be withheld, said that this incident was peripheral, was resolved swiftly and immediately, and did not detract from the tone of an event largely received as a successful informational forum for scholarly discourse.

Holly said the banner was not removed because of its message, but because its size presented a safety hazard.
“UCPD likes us not to allow large scale signage,” Holly said. “If there were to be any immediate crowd movement or there was a fire, they’re unsafe. It was brought to my attention because of its content, but that’s not why I asked him to take it down.”
The MSA, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and the student chapter of Amnesty International co-sponsored the event. It was primarily organized by Ali Al-Arian, a first-year in the college who said he is not affiliated with those organizations.

The event’s purpose was to “discuss the reasoning and ramifications of the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza,” according to Al-Arian.

“The mainstream U.S. media hasn’t exactly been truthful in its reports, so I wanted to bring three distinguished scholars to speak about it,” he said. “Everything they presented was backed by facts.”

Although Al-Arian said he had heard rumors about the flag and name-calling, he did not observe either incident himself.

“The event was about so much more, and in my opinion these are distractions… from what the real issues are,” he said.

“I’m sure the students who are complaining about these issues didn’t really agree with the topic of the event,” he added. “And they’re just trying to find an excuse.”

Hila Mehr, president of Chicago Friends of Israel, said panel organizers told her “they would do a very good job [with] security and making sure that the event wouldn’t get out of hand. I think that a lot of students were concerned about the event and made that clear to officials,” she said.

Mehr said she thought the panel was unbalanced, but added, “I want to stress that I didn’t think the event was anti-Semitic itself. But I did think some of the incidents that occurred there were.”

A representative from CMES was not available to comment.

Students who attended found the events to be a minor distraction from an otherwise successful lecture.

“I personally found [the flag] offensive and inappropriate,” said Danya Lagos, a first-year in the college who attended the discussion. “I believe the University was correct in making him put it away.”

Fourth-year Justine Kentla also noticed the man with the American flag outlined in the shape of a swastika. “I thought that was a little bit strange, but other than that, I didn’t feel that the event was biased at all. Very informative,” he said. “I think I learned a lot more about the issue than just from watching CNN or reading the news.”

Wiped Out

Not me—it's only first week!—but my hard-drive. I lost everything on my computer last night after the "genius" at the Apple store tried at least three times without success to restart my computer. It crashed on Tuesday afternoon, and since then I've been getting by checking emails and printing course readings at my work computer, all the while hoping this was just a minor setback and before long I would have my job applications, college essays, diary and calendar back. I clearly am being too optimistic for winter.

Now I don't even have Microsoft Office. That application, along with Adobe Creative Suites and my iTunes library are completely gone. And I'm left to gather together the system I spent the past two years building, and not backing up, on this fragile piece of equipment.

Wish me luck.

The Importance of Breathing

It’s the first day of the quarter, and two of my classes have already run me into the ground. Granted, they’re both P.E. classes, and that ground is cushioned by a yoga mat during one of them.

In addition to a full course load (four classes; two for the core and two for my majors), I will be spending my Monday mornings and evenings in the Ratner Athletic Center’s dance studio, first for a yoga class and later for Modern Dance—not exactly in sync with my apparent lack of flexibility and rhythm.

Our instructor calls it Hatha yoga; my friend said it was the best nap he’s had in a long time. It’s the most common form of yoga practiced in the States, at home in health centers, hotel spas and living rooms alike. According to Wikipedia, “The 2005 "Yoga in America" survey, conducted by Yoga Journal, shows that the number of practitioners in the US increased to 16.5 million with the 18-24 age group, showing a 46% increase in one year,” and making it symptomatic of the health food and lifestyle fads popping up across the country faster than a class doing the Upward-Dog. Even our instructor said she had only been practicing for a year.

Why am I taking a yoga class? There are myriad professed health benefits, including increased flexibility and “centeredness,” which I suppose is the ability to spend longer amounts of time hunched over my computer in the Reg. But what really convinced me was the explanation our instructor had for breathing techniques. (And no, I don’t mean the part about find our “third eye,” though that sounds cool.)

“You should be inhaling and exhaling through your nose,” she said, weaving between students and their yoga mats, “not your mouth. In fact, the only person who should have to open her mouth during yoga is me.”

An hour solid of daylight with no talking, just breathing? Count me incapable. I can’t sit still, let alone lie face-up on a mat; I don’t like to relax (I am from the University of Chicago); and I love to talk. Which makes me think this is exactly the class for me.

So we practiced breathing. Breathing with our hands on our stomachs; breathing with our knees raised; breathing with our pelvic bones in the air. I was ready to go back to the dorm and sleep by 10:30 a.m. Anyone who has told you that UChicago will eat your soul has never been to the dance studio.

I was ready to go again by 4:00 p.m. This time, I was the yoga mat, wiggling and rolling my joints around on the floor per the teacher’s instructions until I could unfurl and contort as easily as exhaling.

Modern dance is not what happens at high school dances, for starters. It’s better, at least if the teacher’s “Your body is perfect just the way it is” mantra holds any relevance to the act of throwing your limbs into space to the beat of a live drummer sitting the studio’s corner for 45 minutes.

I almost felt like a real dancer—until my cell phone went off, filling the studio with my generic, vaguely hip-hop/techno ringtone.

What I’m Reading on the Plane

…You can bet it won’t be the articles on U.S.-Mexico border policing I just printed out for one of my classes. At least, not when I have a ton of wonderful books I received as holiday presents:

*True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman. This book is an excellent non-fiction account of writer Mark Salzman’s time teaching a creative writing class at a juvenile detention center in Los Angeles. His students are just teenagers, but the crimes they are charged with are so severe they are being tried as adults. And regrets about there cases, the gangs and families waiting for them in the outside world, and the choices they made that led them to prison consume the vignettes the boys write during Mark’s visits.

My boyfriend gave the book to me for the holidays and I couldn’t be more pleased with it—I’m about half way through the it now, but I would finish it all tonight if I didn’t have to pack. He joked that the book was an apt answer to the question “Why write well?”—a Raymond Pettibon quote written on a popular UChicago t-shirt—but I am impressed by how the boys’ honest, unadorned language answer the question “Why write at all?” in the first few chapters, both for themselves and for Mark, who portrays himself as shallow, quick to stereotype and afraid of Central Juvenile Hall’s inmates in the first chapters.

The next two gifts are both art books—which reminds me how absent visual art has been in my life since I provisionally nixed an Art History major in favor of Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. I’m taking an Art History class this quarter, but these texts should hold me over until then:

*Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews with Mel Bochner, 1965–2007



I worked at the San Diego Museum of Art for almost two years in high school, giving tours and teaching children about art during Family Weekends. One of my favorite exhibitions (and probably the most challenging to tour) was of Mel Bochner, a conceptual artist who played with language, transparency and representation in very monochromatic, symmetrical and patterned drawings and installations. Like Bochner, I am fascinated with the question “How do we articulate what we think about what we see?” or in other words, how do we use language to express how we feel, think and live from an intellectual premise? The book opens with one piece that I think exemplifies this conundrum: “Language is not Transparent,” (1970) a phrase written in chalk on a wall of the L.A. County Museum of Art, is an installation which explores how writing and art lend immediacy to an abstract and not at all transparent idea.

I’ve only skimmed the book so far, but I’m already pleased to read about Bochner’s relationship to the philosopher Wittgenstein who examines similar concepts in Philosophical Investigations, a text I keep returning to since I arrived at the University.

* Paul Klee: Selected by Genius, 1917-1933
ed. By Roland Doschka



Klee is just fantastic; I don’t have much to say here besides awe over this full-color volume of some of Klee’s best works—a mix of abstract, German expressionism, and witty, swirling images that don’t quite fall into any one art movement. I’ll have to visit the Art Institute of Chicago this winter to see some of his paintings and etchings up-close again. What, a girl can’t read all the time?

"First Things First" (1957) for January First

Here is "First Things First," a poem by W.H. Auden that I read about two years ago and noted in my diary on Jan. 1, 2006.


Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.

This, moreover, at an hour when only too often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do,
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
-So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer- putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Resolve

The funny thing about New Years resolutions, I’ve always thought, is how little they have to do with making real changes. Change is an obvious consequence of the progression of time, and if you live in the U.S., it’s next year’s political catch-phrase; but I have trouble associating it with the moment when Dec. 31 becomes Jan. 1. I’ve made countless resolutions—most of them between the ages of seven and fourteen, before the holiday had lost much of it’s confetti-speckled luster, and when I still stayed up until midnight… and then didn’t fall asleep until 5 a.m. for no better reason than because it was new—and I can’t remember a single one of them.

I thought about making a few resolutions this year. They would amount to largely physical changes, like using dental floss between meals (some friends will surely ask if I could floss any more often than I already do), not mooching food off of my boyfriend’s plate at the college dining hall, or writing a blog post every day (which has already been difficult during Winter Break, but will become near impossible). I’ve already broken my yell-less resolution. My boyfriend kindly pointed out to me yesterday that a resolution that sounds like “Do less of X” is ambiguous at best.

Exercise more. Check Facebook less. These are the kinds of resolutions you’d expect to hear from college students like me. But there are some less tangible resolutions I’m going to try to make this year too:

1.) Read more articles like this one, by Nick Kristof. And write more articles like it too. I began following Kristof when he first started making trips to Africa with aspiring journalist and humanitarians, like Will Okun, a Chicago-based photojournalist and school teacher who spoke at UChicago last year, and I have always been inspired by his portraits of some of the most egregious human rights violations in the world, such as the sex traffic addressed in today’s column. This is exactly the kind of socially responsibility I want my own writing to embody.

2.) Declare myself … or at least a minor. Technically, I declared two majors last year: Law, Letters and Society (LLSO), and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. I know, it is sounds like six majors, and it was too much to juggle. Both are intensely interdisciplinary and together appealed to my desire to study law, politics, rhetoric, sexuality, irony, thinkers like Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Plato—the list goes on. I dropped the latter major at the end of Autumn Quarter, and I’m still not sure if it was the right decision. But I know that if I stay with LLSO I will have my work cut out for me, with 13 classes spanning the sociology, public policy and English departments, and a 30-page B.A. paper. So when I get back to campus I’m filling out a “consent to complete a minor” form for Art History. (More on that later-it's not cognitive dissonance, it's just a lot of U of C work.)

3.) Keep fewer secrets. One of my closest high school friends got me a copy of PostSecret the collaborative art project-turned internet sensation-turned book; a collection of anonymous postcards adorned with testy and teary “secrets,” such as “I hate people who reply to all on emails” and “I hated my childhood.” Ironically, the collages have made me more upbeat than melancholic, but it also reminded me of how painful secrets can be. Several of the people closest to me came out last year, showing me how difficult it is to share something about yourself that you don’t even want to know at times. In 2008 I saw and heard people respond to our secrets in sometimes unexpected, sometimes loving and sometimes immensely negative, judgmental ways.

I want to have the courage in 2009 to banish some of the shame that keeps me “righteously indignant,” on behalf of those anonymous secret-writers, yet uncomfortable sharing more than this broken link in a blog with my name on it.

And with that, here’s to 2009.