Let it be known that mountains exist.

This weekend, I went on a road trip to Vermont with Alison and Krissy.  We mostly were happy to get off campus for a weekend- to sleep in real beds, eat real food, and have a good time.  We did do a few touristy-Vermont things, though.

Here we are at a sugar shack eating “maple creamies”, maple-flavored soft-serve ice cream.

Me, Krissy, and Alison eating our creamies.  They were delicious.  :)

The thing that got me, though, were the MOUNTAINS!  They weren’t exactly my first mountains, but they might as well have been.  I guess I just didn’t realize that all of New England is covered in them that way.

I feel really ignorant saying I didn’t believe mountains existed before, but it’s sort of true.  I guess I thought the pointed, triangle-top mountains that kids draw were some sort of exaggeration, that mountains were really just taller versions of hills.  I’ve been saying right along that we define what we see around us in terms of what we know- it was that way with me and mountains.  At the very least I didn’t really think REAL mountains existed outside of the famous mountain ranges of Europe, Africa, and South America.

But there they were, evident almost as soon as we crossed the border, covering Vermont like a feild of giants.  I didn’t take very impressive pictures of them, but I really think you just have to experience them to know what I mean.  From up above they were quite beautiful, though I told Alison and Krissy I think I would get claustrophobic pretty quickly if I were to spend a very long time there.  Nonetheless, when Alison said
“Do you understand now why I feel naked in New York?  I didn’t notice it so much in New Mexico, because the scenery was so different, but in New York everything is the same as Vermont but without the Mountains!” I knew exactly what she meant.

Dorm Room

Over the course of the year, I’ve come to view my dorm room as something of a pet.  Maybe that’s just because we aren’t allowed actual pets, or maybe it’s because I’m accustomed to thinking outside the box, but whatever it is it’s true.  Our room has its own little quirks- the strange noises the walls make at night, the way it shakes in high winds, the way it’s always much hotter than the rest of campus.  Sometimes it does get its pests- the spiders we had the begining of the year, for instance, but overall it’s fairly clean.  We have a really excellent view of the sycamore and the lake.  The point is, I know I’m probably going to have to say goodbye to this room for good in a few weeks.  It’s sad, sort of like I’ve only been fostering the room and now the time has come to pass it on to someone else.  Or perhaps the room has been fostering me.  Nonetheless, it has been a good run.  I’ll miss this room.

Reflections on Oppression

I realized the other day that I don’t remember ever NOT knowing about slavery in the United States.  I was horrified.  Not because I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about it, but because I don’t remember first learning about it.  I would have thought that finding out about such a horrible practice that happened in my country would have been horrifying, shocking, confusing, SOMETHING.  The fact that I can’t even remember it proves to me that it wasn’t that eye-opening of an event in my life.  What kind of world do we live in when a white girl isn’t impacted enough by slavery to the point where she takes it in stride like that?

At first I thought it might be because I’m an average white girl in the twenty-first century, and a history of slavery doesn’t affect my life that much.  (I am not saying slavery doesn’t affect my life, because Of Course it Does.  For the sake of argument, though, I am saying that I do not have that much in common with a typical slave.)  But when I started to think about it, I realized that I don’t remember ever NOT knowing about the Women’s Rights movement either.  That one sounds better on the surface- it means that I’ve always known about feminism.  But look deeper- if I’ve always known about feminism then I’ve always known about the subordination of women.  I consider myself a feminist; how can I have, at some point in the distant past, merely accepted the subordination of women as fact and not allowed the discovery to impact me?

It embarrasses and shocks me to think that when I made these important discoveries, whenever that may have been, I was not surprized enough to remember it.  What does this say about our society?  How can we as a culture allow this to happen?  What about subordination is so socialized that it doesn’t make an impact on our youth?  What other things am I taking foregranted every day?

Just some things to think about.

A letter to a friend

It isn’t true that young people think they’re immortal. We know we have to die someday, but we avoid thinking about it as much as possible. We imagine that death is in the far-off someday- after college, after having a career, after raising a family, and after having grandchildren. It sucks to think that you won’t get a chance at those things, even though whatever you’re doing now is probably way better. For us, it’s hard to imagine what death is like because even when life isn’t great, we always have the hope of turning it around. Each time a friend or loved one passes on, it brings us closer to death and makes it that much eaiser to think about. We don’t like death partially because it reminds us of our own eventual fate, a journey into the utterly unknown. Your life was so fleeting, and it makes me wonder if mine will be as long as I imagine it. Death shakes our firm beleif in the future. Thanks for being such a great guy, Dave.

Historical Figure #6: Friedrich Nietzsche

Okay, so I know Nietzsche is pretty mainstream, but I just found this part of his theory so interesting I had to share it!

Neitzsche had a big problem with just about everything we value in American culture today:  democracy, the notion of natural rights, equality, and Christianity, among other things.  His problem with Christianity is the part I found so funny.  Essentially, Nietzsche believed that Christianity was founded by a bunch of losers.  They had nothing, and they were meek, weak, and bleak.  Their lot in life was considered BAD.  Meanwhile, the winners of society had everything- power, money, strength, influence, and the like.  These things, because the winners had them, were considered GOOD.  So the answer that Paul and the early founders of the Christian church came up with was:

Oh yeah?  Well our God says all those things you guys have are really EVIL.

Somehow this caught on, and our notions of GOOD and BAD were inverted.  Power and money are bad, and the meek will inheirit the Earth.  Nietzsche actually admired the way Christians got nearly everyone to believe something he thought was so obviously wrong.  His problem was with what Christianity had turned into.  He wrote that Christian society was still based on resentment about being less powerful even though that had already won that struggle.  (This is where he came up with his famous idea that “God is Dead”, and we don’t even know it.)

Something to think about, eh?

I learned this in a lecture here at school.  To learn more about Nietzsche, try this site:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/