Chapter whut?

New blog. I shall be posting here now, so you may or may not want to follow. Cheers!=)

What I have learnt so far at Moho.

• Gender is a social construct. The moment you internalize this and learn to talk about it in a million different ways, endlessly and tirelessly as if it were the only thing you have ever learnt in life, the sooner you will be accepted into Moho's communal folds. And if you are like me and actively resist the idea that your gender is a social construct, well, pretend like you agree it's a social construct anyway.
• Ambition is not a problem. Nearly killing yourself is.
• There are turtles in the lake; no one knows where they came from, but there are turtles in the lake.
• The health center is redundant. Unless you're pregnant, but I have yet to meet anyone who paid a visit to the center for that particular ailment. Cures for seasonal allergies are, quite unfortunately, still being discovered.
• Meanwhile, are you pregnant?
• The menu repeats, don't cry if you miss out on quesidillas at the Rockies because Prospect had a pizza showcase. What goes around comes around.
• Speaking of menus, go to Sunday Brunch at around 12:45. You will avoid the stampede and therefore not look like you were engaged in a fierce battle for oven fried potatoes. There is no dearth of potatoes at Moho, and we can be civil about them.
• There is no such thing as a lowfat cookie.
• If you manage to go to the gym during finals, 95% of Mount Holyoke's student body will wish you pain. A lot of it.
• Talk about your feelings. That is all you will do during your first week here. If, however, you are unable to talk about your feelings (or have none to begin with), learn the art of BS-ing. It will prove to be useful later on in your college career.
• Talk about the sexual continuum and its infinitude in conjunction with gender being a social construct. It will earn you brownie points.
• When Public Safety sends out an email about a guy jerking off  while checking out students sunbathing by the dock, read the whole email. Otherwise you won't know it's about a guy jerking off while checking out students sunbathing on the dock.
• Your response to the abovementioned will vary according to how dead you are on the inside (I refer to emotional death, and not vaginal sensitivity here). If you have a lot of empathy you will be appalled and disgusted. If you are like me, you will cackle and tell as many people as you can. Because no one else read the email.
• PubSafe will not help you transport your belongings. Or shovel your car out of the snow. Even if you have a broken foot.
• Don't laugh at the self-defense demonstration. You might need to employ those skills, especially if there is a guy jerking off while checking you out as you sunbathe.
• Not all lesbians look like the gals from The L Word. Sorry.
• Sometimes radical feminism can make you turn to the Kardashians. Or Sex and the City.
• Monthly cycles sync on this campus. That's a whole lotta women, a whole lotta PMS and a whole lotta bitchin'.
• Get used to whining about how much work you have just to one up your friends when it comes to how much work they have. You might be dying, but hey, at least you're winning the "Shit-My-Brain-Is-Exploding" award.
• Jorge's quacking sounds like he/she is saying "Meghan".

There will be more.

Story of my life.

Today while talking to a friend:

Friend:  hahaha

have you never been turned on by someone you saw/met?

or even thought "you know, i could jump him."

 Me:  no my mind doesnt work like that

i think

"you know.. i could marry him"

true story

 Friend:  HAHAHAHA

fuck sake

Yeah, I know I have no hope in life. 

And now, live from Moho.

Our friend didn't want to walk all the way from our dorm to hers, so she made one of our friends call Public Safety ( the campus police) from my phone. This is what the conversation was like:

Friend: Hi... I'm in the New Dorm... I can't walk back to my dorm alone because it's dark and creepy outside...Can you drive me back?
Public Safety Dude: ... You want us to drive you back because it's creepy?
Friend: Yes....
Public Safety Dude: ........................Ok..
Friend: Thanks!

It wasn't a prank call. She got PubSafe to drive her back.

"So when did you start learning English?"

*.....Last week.*

Thus one of the harshest indictments against bystanders to genocide is that they are lulled by their own bigotry. Would Americans have stood by if the Rwandans were white, or if the Bosnians were overwhelmingly Christian? David Wyman, the leading historian of the United States' reaction to the Holocaust, cannot escape the conclusion that the country's passivity was driven by American anti-Semitism. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, of Bosnia, "The lives of the well-fed are worth more than the lives of the starving." Nelson Mandela said that Africans and Asians had to envy the willingness of the world to save Kosovo.
These kinds of biases are a particular concern for the press, which is supposed to be making judgments about news, not race. As Carr wrote, "An American newspaper correspondent in Europe is said to have laid down the rule that an accident was worth reporting if it involved the death of one American, five Englishmen, or ten Europeans." In 1970, the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, asked his editors, "Why is it that when the National Guard kills four white students we put it on page I, and when the National Guard kills six black people we put it on page 32?" When an explosion of army munitions in Lagos killed over a thousand fleeing Nigerians, it was not front-page news in the Chicago Tribune, which instead ran pieces on Illinois prescription drug coverage and corruption charges against a Chicago businessman, How can one justify this kind of partiality? At home, it is intolerable; abroad, it may be equally intolerable, but it is commonplace.
From Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention by Gary Bass

"It'll take a year for your system to get used to American germs and diseases."

Said someone down at the health care center to an acquaintance who, like myself, is Pakistani and a freshman at MHC. This was in response to this person falling ill and developing a cold fairly frequently. This happened about a day before I was going to go down to the health center myself because my nose runs like the eff-ing Niagara Falls these days, and I'm pretty sure that half of my lung capacity has been destroyed by constant fits of coughing. Cough and cold medication no longer works. Apparently, it'll take a year for my system to get used to American medication too.
And I resist going to the health center, so when I say "I need to go to the health center", it's serious. I've maintained since my first week here that it is useless, and this is just another thing that really proves my point.

The first time I went down there was because my foot was creaking. Yes. It was creaking. Like a spring. If I wiggled my foot, it would make a springy sound. If I touched it and wiggled it, it would be creaking. And it sort of hurt too. Naturally, I freaked out, and made trip no. 1 to the health center. After wandering around looking for the health center, and finally getting to it in 25 minutes ( it's all the way across campus. I'm not even sure if it's on campus), I went in and asked to see someone. They made me fill out a form, and as weird as it sounds, I put down "Creaky Foot" under reason for visit. True enough. I was thinking maybe they'd give me some medicine for the pain, or give me some fancy medical term for the condition I otherwise kept referring to as Creaky Foot. But no. What I was told was " We refer to this as Overstressed Feet Syndrome, you should rest your feet." I really wanted to ask her if she was planning to buy me a car, because that was the only way I could think of to "rest" my feet. Also, I had just walked 25 minutes to get to the health center just to be told that I should be resting my feet. And to add insult to injury, I got lost while trying to get back to my dorm. Talk about facepalm moments.

The health center is also notorious for connecting everything to pregnancy. Students have been asked if they are pregnant when it's just food poisoning they have. The staff down there really seems to have a lot of faith in the student body on campus. If I ever go there and someone asks me this, I will probably be prepared and answer with a " Why, yes!" and walk out. I mean, what else can you do when you're misdiagnosed like that?