BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

George Orwell’s 1984 gives me the heebie-jeebies.

—

Are we truly in control of our lives–or are out thoughts, ideas, and values being molded by the images and ideas that are constantly bombarding our neurons, courtesy of the entertainment and news media, magazines, texts, and music that we “choose” to listen to? Where do ideas of morality, sexuality, beauty, etc. come from? Perhaps we begin to be programmed as soon as we’re born.

We’re only exposed to what’s immediately available to us.  It’s strange for me to think about, but perhaps humans don’t have as much control of the environment as they think they do; the universe is a dynamic place, and everything in it is in a constant state of flux.  We’re influenced and affected by things we probably don’t even realize exist.  Yet there’s an illusion of and a desire for control.

There seems to be a tendency to project an image to the people we interact with, keeping our true selves guarded and hidden.  What we project always has to be something acceptable and presentable.  We hide certain aspects of ourselves in depending on the situation just to fit in and be accepted.  It’s frustrating, yet for the sake of surviving both emotionally and physically, it’s advantageous to fit in and be accepted by society.  I feel like I’m living within the bounds of someone else’s definition of what life is–that of my parents, of my friends, of society.  What happens if I step outside of those bounds?

Who decides what’s valuable and acceptable in life? Just because everyone else says something is worthwhile, does it become worthwhile? Who defines “success”, “happiness”, and “socially desirable”? Who has the control?

Who are the people who truly accept you? How can you differentiate those people from the ones who act like they accept you simply because of social obligation?

—-

I had bought my mother the light-yellow Dragon Day t-shirt that she had asked for, and I also a hot-pink Dragon Day t-shirt.  I gave it to her in the car, and told her that I bought the hot-pink t-shirt.  She immediately asked me why I bought a hot-pink t-shirt.  She told me that I needed to give her the hot-pink t-shirt and that she would let me wear the light-yellow t-shirt.  “Boys don’t wear pink.  Yellow is a better color.  You’re a boy, you shouldn’t wear pink.”

I left the car and went inside to sit down in my aunt’s restaurant.  My cousin who had been working in Germany walked in soon after; I guess he was visiting.  I have never had a real conversation with the guy, he doesn’t really know me that well at all.

He spotted me and sat down next to me, asked me how things were going.  He commented on the “witty posts” on my Facebook.  At this point I thought to myself, “He reads my Facebook? How much does he think he knows about me?”  He asked me what I was doing after college, told him I wasn’t sure.  He told me that I was a “smart guy” and should go to school and get a degree.  He talked about a mutual friend we knew who had gone to get a degree in pharmacy and was making loads and loads of money.  “You gotta get a degree so you can have a high paying job.  You need to climb the food chain and get some respect! You don’t want to be stuck as a lab rat.  A B.A. means shit these days, even if it’s from Cornell.  And your mom probably expects you to start a family.”

I told him I never talk to my mom about having a family, and that I’d rather figure out what really makes me happy rather than jump into grad school without any idea of why I’d be there.  He apologized for singling me out and walked off to go interact with the other relatives.

I sat in the chair for a while and sulked.  Finally, I decided I was tired of feeling suffocated.  It was a beautiful day outside and I wanted to enjoy it.  I got up and left.

-Emerson

Teas!

Answers to the question: If you were a flavor of tea, what flavor would you be?

• Xiana (pledge): Rooibos
• Rashaan (pledge): Early Grey
• Andrew (pledge): Green
• Monica: I think I would be peppermint – not too brisk & not too challenging, but refreshing anyway =P
• Nikita: Nik-o-tea-n flavor!
• Ashwin (pledge): ASIAN SPICE
• Natalie: Peppermint? or vanilla black tea?
• Jonathan: Catnip
• Maddy: Earl Grey
• Charles (pledge): Mate
• Vaidehi: Lemon Ginger
• Ana (pledge): Chai! or pomegranate!
• Emerson: Uh… Emersontastic
• Kristine: Lady Grey, because everyone seems to like that (including [Monica] and Catherine)
• Stephanie (pledge): Passion (Tazo Tea) [the title says it all. not to mention it's delicious]
• Carly: Moon over Madagascar
• Jess: earl grey lavender
• Catherine: Lady Grey. Of course.

Thanks to Monica for this dataset So, what flavor of tea would you be?

People and Places

Cornell is a huge place, as anyone who’s needed to cross it on a deadline can attest to. Different majors have there own turf and secret paths that make inter-major contact less frequent.

Of course you don’t always take classes in your major, giving you a chance to meet new people and see friends you might not run into otherwise. It’s fun to have them show you the nooks and crannies they’ve become so familiar with, that you may have never come across.

Having some more free time then I used to I hope to spend some of it finding people I wouldn’t normally see, in places I might not normally enter.

The day I cut my finger off

Okay, hyperbole. It wasn’t even that bad of a cut. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell you about The Most Interesting Thing That Happened To Me Over Winter Break. Here’s how it went down:

It was Christmas morning. Being almost 21 years old, I of course still get a stocking full of candy (and this year, an external hard drive!) from “Santa,” so I was up in my room eating Twix bars and going through my loot. I was trying to open a particularly stubborn little package, and for some reason it was sealed with the heaviest-duty heavy-duty tape I’d encountered yet that holiday season. After some futile attempts to peel it off with brute strength, I looked around for a sharp object.

Scissors? No. Damn. How do I not have a scissors?

X-acto knife? PERFECT. It’s way sharper than a scissors, too, so theoretically it’ll work even better.

I had bought the thing for cutting tiny pictures out of magazines to make collages (my secret love), but here it revealed its true purpose: destroying excessive packaging. So I hunkered down, holding the package steady with my left hand and putting all my weight behind the X-acto knife, blade up, in my right hand.

And then the predictable happened: the knife slipped away from the stubborn tape and sliced right into my left index finger. It took me a moment to feel the pain, but as soon as I saw the blood I scrambled down the hall to the bathroom. I didn’t even scream; I believe I only uttered a few panicked obscenities. I arrived in the bathroom. Frankly, I had no idea a finger could bleed so much. I tried to wash the blood away in the sink, and then, shaking, managed to grab a hunk of toilet paper to absorb the blood pouring out. At this point, I looked at myself in the mirror. I am already very white, but I had become so pale I was probably almost translucent. I stumbled three feet to my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was getting ready to go to my Uncle Paul’s house for brunch.

“I hurt my finger” was all I managed before falling over in her arms as my vision faded.

“PAUL” my mother shrieked for my father. “PAUL COME HERE RIGHT NOW CATHERINE CUT HERSELF AND SHE’S FAINTING CALL 911 SHE’S THROWING UP”

My father rushed in to see me on the floor, toilet paper grasped around my finger. Somehow a towel ended up in my lap, and I promptly vomited into it. I was lucid enough to realize I was throwing up blood. All this from a cut on my finger?

My mother called the paramedics while my head swam. Tiny fireworks exploded in front of my eyes for a few long moments before the world came back into view. I estimated my body temperature to be about 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. Minutes later, seven or eight burly paramedic dudes hustled into my parents’ room. I showed them my tiny cut, which had stopped gushing blood. “Oh yeah,” one of them said, “you’ll need one or two stitches in that.”I was conscious again, and I could tell the paramedics realized that this cut probably wasn’t a very big deal. I bet they got into the ambulance and laughed about it.

But I still had to go to the ER, so my heroic father volunteered to drive me. In the car, I did what I always do: I texted Kristine to tell her about it. “I love that you text me things like this,” she typed. “Don’t die.” I didn’t make any promises.

The ER is a bleak place on Christmas Day. Next to me, a sad-looking guy still in his pyjama pants clutched a bloody cloth to his fingers. Snowblower accident, I guessed. I tried not to imagine what his hand looked like under the bandage. It was probably missing fingers. After about an hour of waiting, I got a hospital bed.

My father sat next to me, reading his new Kindle. I turned on the TV and found it was already tuned to–hallelujah!–Animal Planet. To my utmost delight, there appeared to be a “Dogs 101″ marathon on, a show with which I was unfamiliar but quickly grew to love. The first episode was on Welsh Corgis, the breed of dog that has been scientifically proven to cheer up people suffering from X-acto knife trauma.

I was hooked up to a machine that took my blood pressure every 20 minutes. It feels nice the first time, but after three hours, it feels like the cuff is trying to squeeze all the fat out of your arm. Every half hour, the same nurse would poke her head in and ask, “Can I get you anything, honey?” I always said no, though I suppose I could have asked for some crackers or something. I was pretty hungry.

The fifth episode of Dogs 101 was about rare dog breeds. My favorite was the Puli. It looked like a mop. The doctor finally arrived, along with her cute assistant who was assigned to clean out my cut. I took one last look at the gash, with its tiny puffs of yellow adipose tissue poking out, before offering it to the doctor.

“Okay,” she said, “first I’m going to numb it. This is the worst part. Have you ever been stung by a bee? We’re talking African Killer Bees here.” She sprayed the African Killer Bee venom all over my finger. Actually, it was Lidocaine, and it didn’t sting quite so bad.

“Almost done,” she said.

“With everything?” I asked.

She laughed. “No. With the numbing.”

I was then passed off to the hot nurse/doctor’s assistant/whatever she was so my finger could be cleaned. This ponytailed butch hottie took my numb finger in her capable hands and cleaned it out, I assume, but I couldn’t feel anything. I quietly swooned as she washed out my gash, and was treated to another hour-long wait and two more episodes of Dogs 101 (designer breeds!) before the doctor returned.

She sat down next to me and I prodded her to tell me gruesome ER stories, but to no avail. The best I got was “People don’t realize they’re supposed to go out chainsawing and then have a few beers, not the other way around.”

Aside from some improperly applied Lidocaine which caused me to feel the first stitch (ow), everything went ok, and I got a big fat hunk of gauze to stick my finger into. It’s still numb near the scar, over a month later (!), but the doctor just shrugged and told me it could take years for those little connections to repair themselves.

So the lessons I learned were: don’t cut stuff with an X-acto knife blade up, or maybe don’t use sharp things at all, unless you want your entire family to joke about how you can’t be trusted with scissors. That joke was funny every time.

The finger, later that day

Tiny’s Banjo

I bought a banjo from craigslist on the second of January. I took a train from my parents’ house in central Jersey to New York City. I met Jono in the financial district and he brought me up to his apartment there. He had a dog named Marlow, soft and mahogany colored. Jono was selling a lot of his instruments before he moved to California. I tried his accordion. It was klunky on me, I fumbled around with the keys trying to play. I wasn’t very good. Jono wrapped the banjo in plastic for me. It had no case.

I took the R train to Brooklyn. I was about to transfer. A man stopped me on the stairs and said I looked cute, he needed to take a picture of me. He had wisps of thin brown hair, and thick glasses. His sweatshirt was worn.

“Just turn around real quick and start walking up the stairs again,” he said. “I like your banjo,” he said. He took a picture with his iPhone.

“You have to come to my friend’s place,” he said. “We’re going to jam. We play some crazy shit. You know how to play banjo?”

“Not really,” I said. “I just bought it.”

“Well you have to come along. We play, like, electronic music mixed with folk stuff. Experimental. You know?”

I listened mostly. He liked talking. I agreed to go with him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but if I changed my mind, I could just hop off before we got there and make an excuse. We got back down to the track.

He said, “Do you know Appalachian claw-hammer style playing?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Here, let me show you.” He took my banjo. “It’s wrapped in plastic.”

“I don’t have a case for it.”

“Yeah. We’ll just do this,” he said, and ripped the plastic off. It took a while to get through the tape. The plastic was unusable after that. It fluttered down into the next track. A 3 train blew it away after a few minutes.

“Okay, everyone,” he said to the whole platform. “I’m going to show you how to play banjo Appalachian claw-hammer style. See, this is the claw.” He held up his curled fingers. “And this is the hammer.” He held up his thumb. “And you just…” He played like someone who doesn’t really know how to play banjo, but doesn’t realize that he’s not very good. So it was loud and bad. I thought he would break my strings.

“I never said I was any good,” he said. He kept playing.

“Is that our train?” I said when another R train pulled up.

“I’m just going to sell some stuff.” He pulled some things out of his duffel bag. A few DVDs, a pair of shoes–one had a tennis ball in it, and a sound mixer. “The mixer’s not going to sell. But I have to make it look like it will.”

He kept talking to me. I sipped on my coffee and nodded when it made sense to nod. Another R train came. He hopped up and hollered into the open car, asking if it went to 9th Ave. Someone must have said yes because he told me to get on. I barely made it on. He stopped the door from closing with his foot and threw his duffel bag with the sound mixer and DVDs onto the train.

“Just the shoes!” he said and ran back. I didn’t know if he would make it. I didn’t know if I should help by holding the door open. It felt rude both ways. He stuck his foot in at the last second and made it on the train. He sat down where his stuff landed.

An old man got on the train at the next stop. He saw my banjo and smiled at me. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of guitar strings to show me. I smiled and nodded.

“You play?” he said.

“I just bought it,” I said. “I’m learning.”

The man from the platform jumped up and said, “She knows how to play.” He started saying it in Spanish. I wasn’t sure the old man was Latino. The man from the platform had an awful accent. He spoke loudly and poorly.

The Mexican band that always plays on the R train got on. Two classical guitars and an accordion. They started playing Latin music. The man from the platform jumped up. “We have to play with them!” He grabbed my banjo and started playing and singing loudly in his poor Spanish. The men with the guitars looked delighted. The man with the accordion went around the car with a hat. The man with my banjo lay on his back on the floor and kept playing.

A woman sitting nearby said, “You probably don’t want to do that.”

I darted off the R and onto a D with my banjo as soon as the train stopped again.

REGRESSION!

A mixture of those adorable primitive preschoolers from Recess and Lord of the Flies, Regression night was lots of fun. I am now kicking myself in the head because I don’t think anyone took any pictures but we made pictures! With lots of goo! and colors!

There were also penis shaped balloons which were a little disconcerting. Ribbed for whose pleasure?

Pictures from Spring ’07

A few pictures I (Marissa) took in Spring 2007:

SCD gang at the park

Vanessa skipping rocks

Lisa by the lake

Ji Gu, Mike Martin, Durham Goode at Taughannock Park

Durham sending a brave paratrooper across Ho Plaza

Rachel!

Adam and Rachel in the warm glow of 116 Height Ct’s plastic covered windows

Opening of Blog!

This blog has been set up to keep those interested up to date on the goings on at SCD. It takes no programming knowledge to update and can have nifty things like votes and pictures and anyone can leave comments.

So with that said and done hopefully this will find some use, for starters here’s a picture of a movie night toward the end of fall 08

Movie Night