Last Friday I drove to Tallahassee to play a show. I hadn’t spent much time there before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had heard Tallahassee was “nasty” from many of my peers at UF, but I never quite understood why.
It’s time for my series to reach its conclusion. Valentine’s Day is over, and February is coming to a close. All good things must come to an end, so let’s talk about endings.
Growing up, I was taught to fear student debt — even when I didn’t truly understand what it was. This lesson didn’t really come from my parents, who worked full time to pay their way through school, but from the horror stories of twenty-something-year-olds haunted by six-figure debt that so often appeared in the news. As I’ve continued my education, these stories have appeared to increase in both frequency and urgency. I often manage to convince myself that this is probably due to my own hyperawareness, but it does seem as though the coverage surrounding the student-debt epidemic is at an all-time high.
We have the ability to form and hold opinions. We sometimes take this so lightly, but this is a truly fascinating and incredible concept. We are able to take information from outside ourselves, interpret it and form thoughts about how we feel about it. We can decide if we think something is right or wrong, if it is OK or not OK.
I remember my first MP3 player so vividly. I already loved the portability of my music. As an elementary-schooler before the days of the first iPod, I would grab my cassette player — and later my portable CD player — for any car ride longer than 10 minutes. When my parents excitedly told me we’d received a free Napster MP3 player as part of a BellSouth promotion — yeah, that’s a sentence you’ll probably never hear again — I was pumped: We just download our music from the internet? And this little thing can hold more than 70 songs?
In the year 1840, when the U.S. was not even a century old, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the historical “Democracy in America,” the detailed observations of a nation just starting to break on through its initial growing pains. By then, the experiment that was the U.S. had been around long enough for both its citizens and outsiders from Europe to take note of how things were going. If the life of America, thus far was a college course, “Democracy in America” would be the country’s gradebook after a rough midterm week. A point where one thinks, “Alright, how are we doing here?”
Women who have made their way to the top of the professional food chain did so by shattering through the tenacious glass ceiling that prevents women from climbing up the rungs of the corporate ladder.
Any conversation about intimacy would be remiss to ignore the subject of sex, and I think it is vital to examine a longstanding social trend known as “purity culture.” Society has deemed sex as the single act in human experience which is detractive. The term “virginity” has no parallel in our language. You don’t avoid learning to swim because you can never again be a “non-swimmer.” Let’s take a look at why.
Much has been said, and much will be said, about the recent presidential election. It appears that many are still wrestling with the potential consequences of the outcome, and I doubt this wrestling will cease anytime soon. Unfortunately, this was my first presidential election. I have no other experience of how an election normally goes. Yet, this one did not seem to conform to anyone’s — except President Donald Trump’s — idea of how an election ought to go.
I hate concerts. There, I said it. I hate concerts. I hate being packed like a sardine in a big crowd of sweaty people. I hate nodding my head idly to the lackluster performances of small-time opening acts. I hate it when opening acts play long sets. I hate ticketing websites’ “convenience fees.” I hate overpriced T-shirts. I hate that touring acts always sell warped vinyl. I hate buying something at the merchandise table at the beginning of the night only to realize I have to hold it for the rest of the show. I hate people loudly singing in my ear when I am trying to enjoy the show. I hate how sweaty my legs, armpits and forehead get while I am standing in the audience. I hate the way the bottoms of my feet ache after standing for three hours. I hate bouncers. I hate other people’s body odor. I hate poor mixing. I hate poor lighting. I hate the way sold-out shows are so crowded and some venues are so poorly designed that in a fire, several people would certainly be trampled on their way out of the venue.
I’ve spent the past two weeks reading and rereading the stories in Samuel P. Garvey’s “The Tales of Captain Albert Alexander,” as well as examining the scribbles and equations in the margins of its pages. Professor Bishop says the drawings aren’t his, and I think he’s right. The handwriting isn’t his, but the designs, drawings and system specifications outlined in the writing all seem to be pointing toward me — or another automaton just like me.
I have lived in France and Ivory Coast, two countries targeted by IS and al-Qaida in 2016. I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, the most dangerous city in the world. Yet I have never felt as unsafe as I did last week when I listened to a class debate in which students gave incredibly offensive speeches.
Our whole lives, we work to be independent. College is our first shot at independence, and quite frankly, most of us blow it at least a little bit at the beginning. Try as we might to stop relying on other people, we can never hope to be truly free from some sort of dependence on others, and that’s OK.
Asian Americans in film are hard to come by — and portrayals that don’t rely on stereotypes are even more sparse. I had always been aware of this to some extent, but this past week, as I was working on a project for my web apps class, it became even more clear. The assignment was to create a database, and so I sought to create a database of movies with diverse casting — movies that didn’t have a completely white main cast. I saw this as a relatively low standard to meet, but I was surprised how hard it was to come by films that met my standard. It was a struggle to find films with an inclusive cast across different genres, but when I started specifically looking for more Asian American casts, I had to dig further into years past. One of the only films in the past year I could easily find with an Asian American lead was “Lion,” which stars Dev Patel.
When we think about relationships, the word that often comes to mind is love. It can give us a sense of purpose, bring out the noblest parts of us and reveal things we never knew about ourselves. Too often, however, we think of love applying only to our romantic partners. In honor of everyone else, I’d like to talk this week about friendship.
Americans have spent a lot of time fuming these past few weeks. I know I did. A flurry of executive actions by President Donald Trump saw the reinstatement of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, a press blackout and grant-freezing at the Environmental Protection Agency, a head-scratching reorganization of the National Security Council, a backward withdraw of funding for essential aid organizations in the developing world and a broad-stroked travel ban that at its best bars legal U.S. residents from returning home and at its worst sees America turning its back on its founding principles.
Who has watched a cellphone commercial that advertised limited texting and data? Who has been upset at Chick-fil-A for not being open on Sundays or Chipotle for not being open all night? If Netflix or Hulu had a time limit — you could only watch a certain number of shows per week — would people subscribe? Would there be protests if Amazon imposed a delivery ban past a certain time or if you ordered multiple packages within a month’s period? Or if buffets and “have it your way” food services became extinct? What if the internet shut off globally at 10 p.m. every night, what then? How would we respond?
It’s obvious the past few months have initiated our transition into a sort of new normal. Several of my fellow columnists have addressed it, and I have spent plenty of time trying to come to terms with it. More often than not, this “coming to terms” has taken the form of scrolling through Facebook and growing increasingly anxious with every news article, political post and comment war I encounter. Unsurprisingly, this unhealthy routine has left me not only emotionally drained but also stressed as hell. So as a result, I’ve found myself at a crossroad where I’m forced to choose either my sanity or the responsibility of being an informed citizen — but not both.
About two weeks ago, I was just driving around and taking care of a few errands with a friend of mine. We were coming from Publix, and I forgot to get something, so we stopped by the little CVS on 13th street. As we got out of the car, we both heard a hissing noise and soon discerned it was my tire. I ran over a nail. My tire was flat, and it was the largest blemish in the face of a great day. I finally had time last week to take care of my flat tire Wednesday. I mean, I had the spare on, but I had to take care of getting a new, used tire. I was getting a used tire because I was in the process of selling that heap of junk. Anyway, I called a few used tire places to find the cheapest price on a tire and the replacement fee. I eventually ended up at some place near downtown, walked in, and then what was once a nuisance turned into a great experience.
I am attending school to become a journalist. This was not always my goal. I went through phases, as most children and adolescents do. My doctor phase was by far the longest and most involved phase. I was pre-med for one semester before I jumped ship and realized my heart wasn’t in the right place to succeed and be happy in that career. I took a journey from the Chemistry Lab Building to Weimer Hall, and I never looked back.
Solutions by The State News
