Klas goes to college

I did two half projects this January. One was learning C, the programming language. It was pretty awesome, but not too exciting as far as documenting it goes. The other was making clothes, and that resulted in lots of awesome things to document! So here they are:

First project: pair of pants. pretty easy, just two pieces of fabric and a bunch of straight seams, and then elastic at the top.

second project: a bag. I used kikoys from Uganda. wahoo!

third project: a tunic-y t-shirt thing. this pattern was really simple, but the cloth was *really* difficult to work with.

fourth project: jacket! this was a pretty complicated pattern, with set-in sleeves, buttonholes (which are difficult to make look good with fleece), and a hood.

the pattern pieces laid out:

the final product:

a close up on the button holes:

final project: a collared, button up shirt. definitely the most complicated and detailed.

I’m already starting to miss summer, but it’s good to be back at school. The year kicked off with convocation which, as is traditional, involved copious amounts of shouting, profanity, nudity, and partying. Smith is very much not a party school. Smithies know this, and try to make up for it by going all out during convocation.

Then classes started. This year I’m taking Medieval Welsh, in which we learn Welsh through the process of translating Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, a mythic story from medieval Welsh literature. This is fun, and the language is not as hard as it looks once you accept that although it uses the same alphabet as English, nothing sounds how you think it should sound. There are some other difficulties, including the fact that the beginnings of words change depending on how the word is used. For example:

chair = cadair

the chair = y gadair

my chair = fy nghadair

her chair = ei chadair

The other problem is that although modern Welsh has very standardized spellings, people transcribing stories in medieval Wales pretty much spelled things however they wanted. The combination of the mutations and the laissez-faire approach to spelling can make looking up a word a serious challenge, but it’s kind of a fun challenge.

I’m also taking Physiology of Behavior which, depending on how you look at it is either a very neuroscience heavy psych course, or a very psych heavy neuroscience course. We learn about the brain starting with individual neurons and glial cells, moving up to larger brain structures like the visual cortex and the limbic system, and then learn how all these things relate to brain diseases from ALS, to schizophrenia, to Tourette’s, to depression, to multiple sclerosis (sidenote: it turns out that The West Wing isn’t just helpful in my government classes; it also taught me a lot about M.S.).

I’m also taking Intro to Computing and the Arts, in which we learn to use computers as a medium for creating art, mostly through the Processing programming language. The plan is to focus mostly on visual art, but we’ll do some stuff with sound, and we might get to do some interactive projects. The class has a really interesting mix of people; some come to the class with an art-focused background, some with a computer science background. The course doesn’t assume previous programming experience, so I have a bit of a head start at the moment, but I expect this class will start taking up a lot of my time very soon.

My final class (and the only one likely to contribute to my major (although I might be a computer science or psych minor)) is International Politics. The professor is great, and I like the topic (which is good, as it’s probably going to be my concentration within my major). So far we’ve covered international politics in the context of World War I and the Treaties of Versailles. I’ve discovered that I remember a surprising amount from the time we spent on World War I in IB World History. I’m also really glad I took the the Europe in the 19^th Century class last semester. Europe in the 20^th century makes a lot more sense when you know about Europe in the 19^th Century.

My government and history courses have made me feel a lot better about the state of the world today. I spent the majority of this summer living alone in a cabin without running water, electricity, or a car. I spent my time working on my neighbor’s farm, hanging out with friends, and reading. I also spent a lot of time listening to the news on the radio. When I last lived in Vermont (about four years ago), we didn’t get a lot of good radio stations. I didn’t mind listening to the pop station, the NPR station, or the country station, but even those stations were problematic. The pop station was eventually replaced by a classic rock station. The NPR station played classical music all day, leaving little time for the news segments. The country station was alright, but after awhile it would start sounding pretty repetitive. If you listen long enough, you begin to notice subgenres. These include:

The unrequited love song – See Tim McGraw’s Just to See You Smile, or Taylor Swift’s You Belong With Me.

The post break-up revenge song – See Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, or Steve Holy’s Brand New Girlfriend.

The soldier song (these tend to make me cry) – See John Michael Montgomery’s Letters From Home, The Dixie Chick’s Travelin’ Soldier, or Trace Adkins’ Arlington.

The “things were better in the old days” song – See Montgomery Gentry’s Gone, or Rascal Flatts’ Mayberry.

The “things are better in the country / rednecks are awesome” song – See Gretchen Wilson’s Redneck Woman, or Little Big Town’s Boondocks.

These are not the only subgenres, and to be fair, anyone who’s spent time listening to top 40 pop (or Axis of Awesome’s Four Chord Song) knows that country has no monopoly on unoriginal songwriting, and there are plenty of country songs that either avoid the common tropes or do them so well that you don’t care. My only real problem with country is with the “things were better in the old days” songs, and their tendency to sugarcoat the “old days”, especially when talking about the old South. Sure, some things were better in the old days, but these songs generally manage to forget little inconveniences like Jim Crow laws. There are things to miss about the past, but a lot of things are a lot better than they used to be.

And this is where my detour through my relationship with country music finally connects back to why my history and government classes make me feel better about the state of the world today. Radio has changed in the four years since I last lived in Vermont. Now there are more stations, and better stations. More to the point, Vermont Public Radio has a separate classical station, and plays news for most of the day. So I spent a lot of time listening to the news. And there was a lot of bad news.

This summer brought a middle east balancing on the thin line between harsh dictators and the possible chaos of revolution. It brought mass famine in Somalia. It brought a volatile stock market and a phone hacking scandal. It brought rioting in London, continued worries over radiation in Japan, shootings in Norway, and a gridlocked and ineffective American Congress.

The flooding that came as August turned to September was small compared to the other disasters of the summer, but it also struck closer to home. My grandparents were stranded in their house without water or electricity for days. My brother is out of a job, as his employer’s business was destroyed. An elementary school I used to attend is so badly damaged it may never reopen. My neighbors from when my family lived in Vermont / my employers for the summer took a hit as well. They run the farm, but one of them also works in her father’s business, which has been destroyed by flooding. It was hard to see the devastation of the town where my grandparents live, where my mother and her siblings grew up, and where I went to school. It was hard to see the destruction in Vermont, a state that was struggling already, where many of my friends live, where I have spent more of my life than anywhere else. I guess I’ve had a lot of hometowns. This summer, two were hit at once.

On any given day there are so many reasons to be sad, anxious, and afraid for the future. It’s so, so easy to get wrapped up in everything that’s wrong. And there is an awful lot of wrong in the world. But we need to remember what’s right. Today we worry that France and Germany may not be able to save the Eurozone, and that the U.K.’s rioting may spread. It’s easy to forget that our grandparents’ generation saw France and Germany and the U.K. and many other countries embroiled in a war that killed an estimated 60 million people. 60,000,000. That’s kind of a lot of zeros.

My grandfather (my father’s father) liked to talk about “the good old days”, growing up in Gettysburg Pennsylvania. He also said that the “good old days” were’t actually all that good. My grandfather was born in 1927, grew up during the great depression, and lost multiple childhood friends to disease. He joined the navy during World War II, only to start showing the symptoms of rheumatic fever the day he was supposed to ship out. He was hospitalized for almost a year due heart problems caused by the disease. It’s hard to know if he would have fared better had he shipped out. Before he got sick, he was headed to the Pacific Theatre in the later days of the Word War II, a time and a place many, many people never came back from.

The point of all this rambling is this; bad news comes at us from so many directions, and sometimes I start feeling like the world is falling apart. But it isn’t. Or at least it isn’t falling apart any more than it always has been.

As you’ve probably noticed, this post kind of got away from me. I meant to talk about classes and debate and this summer, but some of that stuff will have to wait. It’s good to be back.

/ Ends too-long post

Dear friends,

At the time, high school seemed pretty dramatic. Um, looks like I was kidding myself because infidelity, life threatening diseases, and polyamorous bisexual people make things way way way more complicated. But since it’s no fun to be miserable all the time, I will be stepping in as the enthusiast (although Sayer is much better at it than I am) and sharing some of my favorite things right now:

1. Vocal Debauchery. My a cappella group rocks. And not just in the sense of rocking out because we sing and stuff. I got my first solo (yay) and am growing both musically and confidence-wise because of my amazing friends in VD who are so supportive. We’ve had a lot of some issues in the past, but since working through them, we actually feel like a family. Which is a really corny thing to say, but I’m okay with that.

2. Ladyboners. Seriously, who DOESN’T want to look at pretty guys? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Maybe I’ll encourage the jock who spent the entirety of an 80 minute Social Psych class looking at pictures of Ryan Gosling to hit up my favorite subreddit. :D

3. Writing a musical. Cassie and I decided we didn’t feel like we had enough on our plates this semester, so we came up with the idea of putting on an original musical. If everything goes to plan, College Musical (a parody of High School Musical) will make its debut next semester.

4. Wesleyan’s quirky traditions. I’m going to dedicate a post later to my favorites like the 24 hour play festival and Porn and Milkshakes. Which is as weird as it sounds, in case you were wondering. Also, Amanda Palmer was here last weekend (I didn’t know she was an alumnus?) and it was awesome.

Also, in response to Sayer’s post: WINTER IS THE WORST.

I love you all and hope you’re all settling in and enjoying the first week(s) of the semester.

When this blog was conceptualized, we were very excited by the possibilities. “Yeah! We can each write something every week! We can have weekly themes or questions that we all answer so we can compare our experiences! We’ll have photography contests and strangers around the world will read about our adventures!”

Most of this hasn’t happened, which is fine. I might have had some unrealistic expectations. But, in the interest of having a post that isn’t just me using all-caps to talk about how HAPPY and EXCITED I am, here is a themed-post.

The Five Worst Things About Oberlin

1. Stevenson Dining Hall. I hear Oberlin has pretty good food compared to other colleges, but you would find this hard to believe after eating at Stevie for a week. At its best it’s reasonably good dining hall food, healthy, local, and pretty tasty. At its worst it’s your favorite dish, but deep-fried, blended, sucked of all seasoning and then stuck in a hollowed out tomato.

2. Winter. In the past few days, several of my friends have started expressing very real fear of the coming season. As it’s started to rain more and has been getting colder, a deep feeling of dread has started gnawing at my stomach lining. I get the feeling a third of the student body is, at this very moment, researching the best price on sun lamps, or seeing how much it costs to ship a box of hot chocolate from their home town to Ohio. I’ve decided to leave a blank spot in my mind, and when I think of the future I try to go directly to “Man, spring is going to be *so* great!”

3. Obietalk. I think most colleges have some equivalent of the anonymous forum going on. Obietalk has its uses. Last year it was responsible both for me getting free Macbeth tickets and for my lost iPod being returned to me. I appreciate that a lot. That said, Obietalk is the place that freshman ideals (such as hope, camaraderie, love, and going to bed at a reasonable hour) go to die.* “Trolling” == seeing the extent to which you can make your peers lose faith in the world.

4. Expected-productivity-in-a-womb-chair to actual-productivity-in-a-womb-chair ratio. For those of you who aren’t obies, this is a womb chair. They’re kind of a big deal. But… you can’t actually expect to do any work in them because you’ll start pushing yourself around in a circle with your foot, or finding different ways to curl up in it for maximum comfort, or just fall asleep. I’ve spent hours in one before without doing any actual work. It’s kind of sad.

5. Winter. Seriously. As I remember it, a dark cloud descends over everyone, and your soul is crammed into the freezer next to the left-over turkey, where you are left shuddering and feeling guilty about thinking that maybe climate change isn’t such a bad thing.

Man, spring is going to be *so* great!

*This is not a universally accepted claim.

Good morning klas.

It feels so excellent to be back in Oberlin. My room is decorated, my course schedule is set, my sleep schedule is ridiculous, as is my homework load. I’m loving being back here. My summer was pretty crazy (as you’ll recall from my earlier post, I was a camp counsellor and my sister got married), but hooray for being back at my other-other home. Here are some things that are going on in my life!

-On my first day back everyone from last year’s improv exco met up and decided we want to form a troupe so we can keep hanging out with each other (possible names include Good Intentions, Extreme Love, Spontaneous Volition, Great Expectations, and the Souper Troupers). SO EXCITED.

-My friend Josh and I are forming a french tarot club. ALSO EXCITED. We’re thinking we’ll have weekly meetings for a few hours, where one week it will be for people who already know how to play, and then the next week will be for people to bring newbies so we can teach them. We’ve both gotten pretty good at explaining the game, but given the ridiculous complexity of tarot, it still takes about an hour.

-I just auditioned for the acapelicans! My friend malia was in them last year, and they are fantastic. I haven’t sung for any official singing group in ages (probably since I was in Annie in elementary school, and I really don’t think that counts), so I don’t have huge expectations. But it would be so much fun.

-I’m taking this Monday-Wednesday-Friday 8AM kickboxing class. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve done.

-My other classes are really cool too! I’ve got Principles of Computer Science 2, Discrete Math, Modern Moral Issues in Religious Perspective, and Environment and Society. It’s gonna be an intense semester.

-Aaaaand I’m working for Campus Dining Services and I’m planning on applying to be an Oberlin blogger.

My life is pretty dang hectic. I love it. I’m going to go run through the rain and then do my religion reading while listening to the Beatles now.

In the spirit of my first post on Klas, I have compiled a list of 20 things I’ve learned over the past two semesters. These aren’t necessarily the most important things I learned. They aren’t listed in any particular order. I’ll definitely forget some of them over the summer, and I’ll probably forget some by next Tuesday. Nevertheless, I have a list. Because lists are fun.

1. It’s not a girls school, it’s a women’s college.
2. Don’t wait for Sunday night to do laundry. In fact, the best time to do laundry is Wednesday. Also, that weird looking mold in the soap dispenser is (mostly) harmless.
3. I really shouldn’t wait until Monday at 4:00am to write papers due Monday a 9:00am. This is one of the ones I’ll probably forget over the summer.
4. I must keep track of my parentheses and indentations. It saves a lot of frustration.
5. I can sleep an average of four hours a night for about a week and a half before becoming too hysterical to function.
6. The definitions and histories of many of the -isms of 19^th Century Europe, including, but not limited to, anti-clericalism, anti-semitism, capitalism, Catholicism, classicism, conservatism, constitutionalism, expansionism, imperialism, liberalism, marxism, militarism, nationalism, neomercantilism, physical force nationalism, Protestantism, republicanism, romanticism, realism, socialism, and ultramontanism.
7. I like to alphabetize things.
8. During an APDA round, one should always aim to express maximum indignation.
9. If you spend 15 minutes pretending to be a gargoyle on the steps of the campus center, adults will ask if you are doing performance art. Students won’t spare you a second glance.
10. They will spare you a second glance if you spend 15 minutes in a tree making vulture sounds at passers-by. Some will also start walking extremely quickly in the opposite direction. Really cool people will make bird-calls back to you.
11. The correct answer to any economic question is “it depends.”
12. Dorms are specially constructed to further the sense of House Community. This is mainly accomplished by building walls that conduct and amplify sound. These special acoustic properties ensure that everyone can hear exactly what everyone else in is doing at all times.
13. People often ask me what going to a women’s college is like. Many of them will not accept “like any other college but with fewer guys” for an answer.
14. No matter how desperate for coffee I am, it really isn’t a good idea to walk a quarter of a mile downhill to get some when every surface is covered with ice. I’ll forget this one by next winter.
15. Sporcle is a good way to improve geography and spelling. For example, I can now spell Herzegovina, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan, and point to their exact locations on a blank map of the world. Unfortunately, this did not improve my performance on my macroeconomics test.
16. Office hours are helpful. I should actually use them more.
17. There is no such thing as too much caffeine, until there is.
18. Madonna’s Material Girl makes Marx more memorable.
19. Alliteration is fun.
20. It’s not a girl’s school, it’s a women’s college.

Title courtesy of my friend Avery.

Woooo we’ve all posted! Haha, this is awesome. And I second what Leada said about LDRs, of course.

There are five weeks left of college. This is ridiculous. I’m going to miss the lovely rhythm that life has when most of your friends live within five minutes of you and there’s always something going on. Here are some examples of those things:

-I’ve started playing tarot with some people from sci-fi hall. It’s amazing how much I missed that game.

-We went to the aerial acrobatics and tumbling show case last night. HOLY SMOKES. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I’ll link to pictures as soon as any go up.

-Improv is still one of the coolest things about my life. There are two long-form improv troupes, two short-form troupes, one semi-improvised performance group, as well as a handful of sketch groups that base their sketches on improv scenes. It is a fantastic campus if you’re interested in comedy improv, which I absolutely am. So, cool.

-Now that the weather’s nice, we can go to the arboretum at night, make bonfires and roast marshmallows. Hooray!

-But also SO MUCH HOMEWORK.

On the plus side, though, I’m extremely excited for summer. I get to Portland in late May, and get to see a whole bunch of lovely people (including, but not limited to, some of the cowriters of this blog) (Katya, it sounds like I’m not going to be able to see you! D: ) My sister and her incredible boyfriend, Jay, are getting married in June, which I’m psyched for, and then in July and August I get to be a counselor at Centauri Summer Arts Camp, the camp I’ve been going to since I was little and which has pretty much entirely shaped who I am today.

One of these days I’m going to say something other than “woooo collegeeeee!” in my posts, I promise.

Hello everybody! I am officially no longer a ghost. In fact, today, I would like to talk about a frequently debated issue in college- the long distance relationship (LDR). There are legitimate arguments for both sides, and there was definitely a point in my life when I thought a long distance relationship was the right decision for me. HOWEVER, I come to you all now as a less naive child who has encountered the dark side of long distance relationships. And let me tell you, it ain’t pretty.

College is really busy. You might be pledging a frat, directing a musical, running cross country, or working a nonprofit. Or you know, whatever else you’re interested in. But usually, you don’t have a lot of free time. This is problem number one. I’ve seen people balance school, athletics, a social life, and a LDR. They are impressive (and rare!) folks. I also know a guy who spends four hours on the phone every night with his long distance girlfriend. FOUR HOURS?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE? Seriously, think about all the other things you could do during those four hours. And four hours a night is 28 HOURS a week. Approximately 124 HOURS a month. That is absolutely insane and he is probably going to regret a lot of things about his college career in the future. Moral of the story is, there’s a spectrum of crazy when it comes to long distance relationships. Some people handle it well, but there are also a lot of people who can’t/don’t.

The problem I encountered was that the more I thought about wanting to be with my OMSI boy, the less I wanted to be at school. I ended up withdrawing from my friends and social life because I felt unhappy so much of the time. Some of you may already know this, but I submitted a transfer application to another college over spring break. I also cried hysterically WHILE DRIVING for multiple hours. It was definitely a wake-up call. In the end, college is about YOU. YOUR education, YOUR new life experiences, and YOUR learned lessons so you can become a better person and a capable adult. Victor Turner (AKA an old anthropologist guy) would describe college as a “liminal period.” You’re not an adult, but you’re also not a child. The usual rules of society don’t really apply to you because you’re undergoing a (frickin’ important!) transformation. You need to focus on yourself. It’s as simple as that.

On a happier note, the world is a much happier place for me now. I have many exciting projects and activities that I will talk about in more detail very soon! But in the meantime, take some time to smile and revel in your liminality. Some people are ridiculously envious of our lives. Might as well give them the opportunity to live vicariously, right?

Aaand one last thing. I think I am officially progressing along the path to becoming a corny motivational self-help book writer. I suppose there are worse things! :D

So, my family is officially moving to Massachusetts. It’s bittersweet, because although this makes visiting Oregon more difficult, it’s the right choice for my parents, and I’m glad they’ll be happy here. Besides, it will be nice to have them close, and although future visits to Portland will be less frequent, they will still happen.

However, this does further complicate the question of where home is. People always ask where I’m from, and I’m never quite sure how to answer. For the last couple years the answer has been Portland, but I usually feel like it should come with an asterisk and a footnote. I’m not sure if “where I’m from” is where I was born, where I lived the longest, where I live now, where I lived most recently, or where my parents live. Before college, the last three on that list were all the same place. Once I left, only the last two were. Soon, my parents will be living in the same state as me. By the time I graduate from college, Massachusetts will be the place I have lived the longest.

At what point does it become more accurate to say I’m from Massachusetts, instead of Oregon? If Massachusetts is the most accurate answer, does that mean I’ve lost some part of my connection to Portland, or have I simply gained new connections without losing the old ones? And what are those connections anyway? If home is really about people and experiences and memories, then does geography even matter, or is it just a placeholder, a shorthand that implicates those other, more important things? More importantly, how well can I maintain those other things once I lose the common connection that geography provides?

I know that I’m seriously over-thinking this. I know that “where I’m from” isn’t just one place, and it doesn’t have to be. Home isn’t static. Home is different things to different people at different times. I know that when someone asks me where I’m from, it’s usually just a way of making conversation. My reply doesn’t have to convey everything about the places that are my home now, or ever were my home in the past. In fact, an answer that did that would probably constitute socially inappropriate oversharing.

All I need is a simple answer. I just wish I knew how to figure out which simple answer is the most true. And what it means when the simple answer changes.

Okay. So I’m going to talk about the term thus far in terms of resolutions that I’ve made. I pretty much just wrote down a list on a piece of paper and I’m going to go through it and explain them and in the process talk about how spring semester is going. Sound good?

1. Keep up (email) correspondences:

A few friends from not-Oberlin recently emailed me and I replied or we made plans to email, and it has been great. Skype is cool and all, except you just hang out thinking of things to say for an hour and then hang up and realize you forgot to mention that you just when the lottery and your mutual friend is pregnant. Emailing is a pretty lovely format, something you can quickly get out when you have a moment (like a blog post!). Sooo, I want to keep up some fairly regular email correspondences over the semester.

2. Think of myself as a writer:

I’m taking a class this semester called Jewish Shorts: Creative Writing and Reading. As I’m sure you’ve figured out, it’s a fantastic class. We read short stories by Jewish writers and discuss “jewishness” and write. A lot. It’s a class I’m really excited for, except that I don’t typically define myself as a “writer”. I have written some things in my time, but I’m not majoring in creative writing or anything, and I think that creates a sort of mental block wherein I don’t really believe that I can write legitimate pieces. So I want to get rid of that.

3. Drop the ego that I tend to have when it comes to math-related things:

Actually, this one’s going to be super easy since my calc class is eating me alive. Moving on.

4. Improvimprovimprov:

I forget if I talked about this last semester. Essentially, I took a beginning improv class last semester and it was amazing. It gave me a will to live, it rejuvenated me, it actually healed me when I was sick one time (no joke!). So I want to keep doing improv this semester. Which is pretty much taken care of since I just found I got into the advanced improv class! Hooray!

Also, I want to be really good at improv.

5. Self-confidence:

Because self-doubting and insecurities are so last year.

6. Work hard:

I’ve been able to get through most of my schooling with relatively little effort. That is not going to be the case this semester, and I’m going to be incredibly busy (4 academic classes including caaaalc, and then 2 excos, a job, and hopefully piano class). Oberlin’s motto or something is “learning and labor”, which doesn’t sound all that exciting but the more I’m here the more I love that that’s our motto (or something). So I’m going to work like crazy, starting right after I post this.