5th Column: Hello, Kitty… Welcome to College

Thursday night is a sacred night in college.  People go out, people study, people hibernate in preparation for a crazy weekend – Thursday night is unspeakably important.
Last Thursday night, as I snuggled down under my blankets, feeling responsible for getting Friday’s homework done and excited to get a good night sleep, I said to myself, “Wow, how lucky am I to live in America, where my fellow kinsmen appreciate the hallowed events of Thursday night.” My roommate, who has just recently gotten over the fact that I always talk to myself before falling asleep, nodded and went back to cramming for her major history exam.

Just as all the week’s troubles began to disappear with that magic Thursday night slumber, the most horrible noise woke me up.  It was worse than the kids in the room above me when they sing Hannah Montana, it was worse than drunken shrieks, it was even more vile than my alarm clock.  It was the fire alarm, and it was definitely unwelcomed at 2:30 in the morning.

My roommate urged me to get up and get out of the building.  I calmly grabbed a jacket and started sliding on boots, looking around the room, wondering if there was anything else I should take – books? Too heavy.  Jewelry?  Too silly.  Pillows and blanket in case Flather burns down and I have to live on the streets?  Nah, too much trouble.

I realized how dazed I was as I tried to walk out of the room, tripping over my own feet and wondering aloud if my boots matched my sparkly Hello Kitty pajamas.  My roommate and I found a stampede erupting in the stairwell, but made it to the first floor un-trampled.

My fellow Flather residents spilled out into the chilly outdoors wearing robes, pj pants, or like some of the more unlucky ones, just boxers.  Some complained, some huddled together for warmth, some even tried to study.  One of my friends tried to dry his hair, as he had just jumped out of the shower.  Ironically, the group closest to me lit up cigarettes, and through the haze of smoke and naturally bad eyesight sans glasses or contacts, I saw that the magic of Thursday night had been ruined.

There are so many milestones that we were warned about before college: the sleepless nights, the tough professors, living on your own.  It could have been the hour of sleep, it might have been the cold, but, standing outside in my pajamas I wondered if this was a milestone.  Yes, some idiot pulled the fire alarm.

That probably happens all the time.  But people were standing in groups, looking out for friends – just three months ago, I didn’t even know any of these people existed.  Imagine who we will be in three years.  Hopefully we won’t be getting dragged out of our beds in the wee hours of the morning.  Maybe by senior year, none of us will even be in bed by 2:30.

Who will we be?  Do we have to grow up?  As I continue my “journey” at CUA, do I have to give up things like Hello Kitty pajamas?  Do I have to start doing adult things like folding my socks?  I’m BAD at folding clothes! Is there any hope for me? What if I decide to change my major to Political Computer Spanish History? What if I have to graduate late?  What if I don’t graduate at all?!  Then, I will have to roam the streets.  I cursed myself for not grabbing my pillow and blanket.  That would have made the transition to hobo life way easier.

My inner panic attack was cut short by my RA shuffling us back into the building.  I almost forgot my anxieties when one of the boys on the fifth floor laughed at my pj’s.  Back in my warm, cozy room, I realized that this fire alarm had been a sort of awakening, both literally and metaphorically.  Over-thinking the future is lame.  Milestones are for old people.  Just enjoy the moment, even if it means huddling close to your relatively new friends for warmth or laughing at the kid who didn’t get a chance to put clothes on before evacuating his dorm room.

Oh, and P.S. Whoever pulled that fire alarm: Don’t do it again.  Thanks.

Overheard: B.J. Novak

“Pandas do not think pandas are cute! If I were a panda, I would be all about pandas. I am all about pandas now, I just know where to draw the line. If I were a panda, I would be f**king the s**t out of pandas, just so I could cuddle afterward.”

“I do think we can all agree that smoking pot is the only way for some people to unwind from the stress of rolling a joint.”

“This is packed I was told this is a sold out room it’s a lot bigger then I expected…that’s what she said.
There seems to be excitement on campus…A lot of post-it notes with my name on them. Sorry if those got annoying. And the huge banner that probably stared at you and made you uncomfortable… I apologize for that.”

“I’m in a fight right now with the OnStar lady. We are not getting along… I’m not proud of this: I don’t know how she could have answered this, but she gave me a wrong turn and I said, ‘I am going to kill you, that is the last time you give me a wrong direction. I am literally going to kill you. How do I get to OnStar Headquarters?’

Notes and Asides

Alright, who is the smart aleck who slipped the phrase “Black Out” past administrators in promoting the football game tomorrow?

For those of you keeping score on the Speaker’s Policy: things it’s OK to talk about at CUA - beastiality, porn, fellatio, homosexuality…Things it’s not okay to talk about: abortion.

So… next celebrity appearance on campus- Elderly Ghetto Gospel Choir! Loves it! Youtube immediately.

OMG! Twilight comes out next weekend! Vampires are way too hot for the big screen. This better not suck. I’m waiting another year for Harry Potter 5 for this, and there aren’t any more books to read in the meantime.

Just incase you needed another reason not to go to the Cardinal’s Nest, a bunch of people finally got what they asked for and got effed up! Ohhhh Snap!

Fall Crawl = best college parties ever that end at 8PM! Thanks for prolonging the festivies, ADG.

Ok, ok, ok. ‘That’s what she said’ jokes are okay, in moderation (cough cough BJ Novak cough cough).

“Welding Makes You Feel Powerful”

Chemistry Major David Myers Shares His Plans for World Domination

Dave Myers is from Peoria, Illinois. He is a chemistry major and he’s starting a Frisbee Golf club here on campus. “Frolfing, we call it,” says Dave. Read on to find out how he’ll be controlling your brain when he grows up.

Tell me what I can understand about chemistry.

I like chemistry because when you can use it to understand everything that goes on around you, you can truly understand how things are then manipulate them to your advantage. I want to go into medicine. You need chemical knowledge to understand all the terminology, all the processes, how drugs work … It’s really about trying to understand how things work on the molecular level.

So you have to understand how they work just by reading about them?
You have to do a lot of measurements. A lot of times, you can tag certain molecules with fluorescence, so once they break down or go through a certain reaction, the fluorescence fades, comes back in. It’s all about using what you can measure to figure out what you don’t know.

So it’s just like algebra.
It’s a lot of math.

You like art.
I really enjoy it – I love sculpting and welding especially. Welding makes you feel powerful. You can manipulate these strong things.

Are you doing another welding project?
I’m going to build a big pole that comes up and gets smaller as it goes up, probably four or five feet tall, and have something on the top that can either spin, or I’m going to hang things – hopefully I’ll be able to make it spin around.

What inspired you to do that?
I like doing structures like that – things that can stand up and support [their] own weight. I saw some dude on the Internet that had a bunch of them and I was like, “Wow.” Some dude from Arizona or New Mexico – he used to live in a commune in Washington or Oregon. He went to college and after college he was like, fuck this. So he went and had fun on a commune for a few years and he loved it. Tried to go back to some kind of engineering or whatever he studied in college and he couldn’t do it. He was like, “This is a waste of my life.”

He couldn’t handle the real world?
[He’d experienced] a more peaceful way of living than going through the stresses of everyday capitalism in the US. So he started collecting steel in his backyard and just making things. I think it was Royce Carlson.

I’m excited to see it. Where are you from?
Illinois. Peoria.

I’ve heard of that town.
It’s great. I like the friendly people. There’s about the Midwest – everybody’s nicer. Clerks, even – clerks are just happy all the time.

What else is different about the East coast? I always wonder if that distinction is as concrete as it seems to be. Would you say that there is a disparity?
There is, but it gets blurred a lot. It’s hard to make the full distinction – a lot of the small towns and cities around here are just like the towns in cities in Illinois. I think it’s just a matter of social etiquette. In Illinois, it’s much calmer. Out here, it’s a race to talk fast. If you go up to Chicago, it’s similar to DC. Just because city life is no fun.

Maybe it’s not so much of a difference between -
East coast and west coast. Its more of like -

City and country. That’s definitely a possibility.
There’s still the fast talking.

We talk faster?
A lot faster.

So are you going to medical school?
I think so. I took the MCAT last summer, which is way earlier than most people do it, which is spring of their junior year. I took the summer before my junior year. I did well enough, so I should be able to get in.

What made you want to take it so early?
You usually have to go through some sort of preparation in order to take it, because there’s so much stuff you have to learn. I just had a whole lot more time this summer. I thought I could just spend a month and a half intensively working on this stuff, pounding it into my brain, and take [the test] before school [started]. I thought it would be way more efficient and I would probably score better if I could just get it done, not have to worry about anything else.

Was everyone like, “You’re crazy”?
Kind of. My advisor was like, “what?” I was like, I’m gonna do it. Relax.

You’re happy with your score?
Absolutely.

Do you think you’re going to be a doctor of people or a doctor of making medicine?
I’ll probably go into something like neuro-psychiatry, or the psychiatry of brain imaging. I was reading this book about this doctor from California. Around 2004, he had just started using this thing called SPECT imaging - single photon emission computed tomography.

Whaaa?
It’s able to measure and pick up on metabolic things that are going on in your brain. If a certain area of your brain is really working hard, they can pick that up. Basically its going change psychiatry. People can say, “I feel depressed.” In the brain, that can be triggered by numerous, numerous things – five to ten different things completely aside from one another. Back in the day, they would just use serotonin inhibitors. There were only a few ways to treat it. Those drugs can cause it to get worse if it’s not diagnosed correctly. What he’s doing is going to change the face of psychiatry and I want to jump in on that. The brain and genetics are the only places in the human body that we haven’t really investigated.

Overheard…

Political metaphorist:

“Pencils are weapons of mass destruction and the Joker proved it.”

Young Woman on the subject of Barack Obama:

“His swagger is outrageous. Michelle is a lucky woman.”

Fifth Column November 7, 2008

Where do I even begin? I’m privileged to have the school community’s ear this week. A duty that has been admittedly challenging over the course of the semester is a blessing in light of the monumental moment that occurred on Tuesday. I am overwhelmed with ideas to touch on, all encapsulated by the election of President Barack Obama.

So I have a new challenge now – an embarrassment of riches. How to best paint this juncture in American history? Do I focus on the humor of the last few days? The moment on Tuesday night when my companions and I, sitting in my apartment, muted Obama’s televised speech to listen to my upstairs neigbor cry out “We can do it! 45 years! We can do it!” to no one in particular? Being high-fived by complete strangers as I walked down the street at 1:00 AM Wednesday morning? Listening to a woman crying out “My uterus is mine!” as she pranced down U Street?

Should I talk about how great it feels to be in DC right now? Over 90 percent of us voted for Obama on Tuesday, so the mayhem that ensued that night was exciting not only for its power but also for its uniformity – it’s rare to have such a consensus in any given population, especially one as divided as DC can be. I’ve lived in this city for a long time, and I’ve been to my share of political demonstrations in the last four years – all of which were responses to a perceived injustice or bonehead move on the part of the political system: the election of George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and so on.     Tuesday’s demonstrations were intoxicating for their scale, their longevity, and their unadulterated positivity. All of the tropes of a large-scale protest were present – the energized throngs, the yelling and chanting, the politically-themed accessories, the makeshift musical stylings of people armed with buckets and vocal chords. The only thing missing was the anger and disappointment that usually mark such gatherings in D.C. Strangers hugged, people boogied from atop bus stop shelters, and car horns blared endlessly as drivers expressed their joy, for once, at being stuck in D.C traffic.

Should I get, like, kind of emo? This is the first time in my adult life that I have known a president that I actively like. As a person. He seems nice! His wife is fashionable! His children are well-behaved! (I’m easy to please.) Will he be a great president? Will he “fix” America? Well, I’m neither a political junkie nor a soosthsayer, so I’m not really qualified to make that call. There’s  no telling how the next four years is going to play out – there’s only so much we can predict based on what any leader promises us, and I think we’d be hard-pressed to come to any sort of universal conclusion about how Obama is going to run the country. It’s almost irrelevant. What is relevant is his obvious intelligence and reassuringly positive attitude towards our nation’s potential. The best part? These attributes are going to represent the United States in the political Miss Universe pageant for the next four years. How awesome is that?

I know this probably sounds like a blasphemous dumbing-down of “our nation’s highest office,” but within that turn of phrase lies the rub – along with this altitude comes a global, mediated prominence that many of us felt that George W. Bush did not deserve. Yes, I do have faith that Obama’s grace and diplomacy will guide us as successfully as any president reasonably can through what’s sure to be four sticky years, but I am mostly beyond pumped that his personal attributes will be representing me during that period! (A selfish concern for appearances - how typically American is that?)

Notes & Asides - November 7, 2008

Guys - it’s almost senior portrait time. Puh-leeze take advantage of this amazing opportunity to immortalize whatever egregious fashion sins you’re currently committing and provide fodder for those Classmates.com ads.

Did you know that the English Department is sponsoring Faust on Monday? Don’t get too excited - the Devil himself is not coming to campus. (Darn that pesky, slippery speaker policy!) This is actually a film screening of a puppet-show version of Goethe’s famous play. Cool …

OMG, BJ Novak is coming! There is going to be a collective bladder failure at CUA when this dude arrives at school on Tuesday. Hopefully he will bring some Jim cooties with him. Yum. Beer me, as Andy would say.

I wonder where we can find the seven percent of District residents that didn’t vote for Obama? Hmm… Anyone at Catholic registered to vote here?

The Hartke Declamation Prize is offering a $1,000 first prize for a winning oratory on this year’s theme: “The United States Presidency.” $1,000 for talking for five minutes straight? About my favorite new best friend? Where do I sign?

Student Spotlight: A Conversation with David Sparks

Emily Ruane: You’re from Indiana, right?

David Sparks: I did my undergraduate at Indiana University, in Bloomington. I started out wanting to be a director, actually – I always did home movies when I was in high school. I did do a film certificate there and learned film theory. Which is pretty interesting, still, to me. I kind of had the renaissance man experience in college, like anybody. I decided to major in cognitive science, and my focus in that was linguistics – so that’s how my interest in language came about. After I graduated, I decided I was kind of sick of Western culture, and I was just wanted to get out, so I took a job in Korea teaching English for a year. Then I came back. I wanted to be fluent in another language – I was fascinated, still, by language.
ER: Do you speak any Korean?

DS: A little bit. It’s faded because it’s been five years-ish. I can still understand the basics: “how are you” – and I can read Korean. It’s a very easy alphabet to learn – it takes like, 20 minutes. It’s amazingly simple.

ER:Are there less than 26 characters?

DS: Yeah – they have a circle as a symbol for the vowel, and then they have slashes for different vowel sounds, and [those] combine with a set of consonants. So when you’re reading, you’re actually reading syllables. You kind of read it left to right to down. But it’s very easy to learn – I think the literacy rate in Korea is like, 99% or something.
ER: Awesome! We should try that.
DS: So then I moved to Spain, and learned Spanish, and came back after a year and I was like, “Well, now that I speak Spanish, what should I do?” So I went to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and did a Master’s in teaching Spanish. After that I decided I didn’t want to get into just teaching, I wanted to focus more on literature and really get into that, so I ended up here. And here I am!
ER: And you’ve been here for two years? Time flies.
DS: I’m like the mutt that sits by the fireplace now. It’s weird though – you get very comfortable here. I can’t go five minutes without seeing ten of my students on campus – which is cool, I like that about this place. It’s sort of freaky also.
ER: Do you find that the [University’s] emphasis on philosophy affects your department?
DS: I hear my students constantly moaning about their philosophy classes. I mean, I’m teaching them Spanish, but I can’t resist taking five minutes and being like, look at why this is important. The other day they were complaining, and we had a few minutes before class, and I started explaining – in Spanish – like, “You know the Ship of Theseus? Does this matter?” And they’re like, “No!” And I’m like, “Well, think about it. Your body is not made up of any of the molecules that it had when you were born – so, where are you? Are you the same person or not?” If you’re not the same person, then there’s no meaning in life at all and you might as well go … join a cult. Drink a lot of Kool-Aid.
ER: Jump over a bridge or something.
DS: It’s a weird campus, because there is that rigor – there are a lot of students who are really into like, exploring things – and there are people here that –
ER: That seem to be sleepwalking through their education. Or by the time they get hip to it, it’s way too late. I think that may just be a symptom of the way people go to college in America.
DS: That’s true. It definitely was in my case – I spent a lot of time doing other stuff. One of my best stories in college was – I had a test, and it was a linguistics class. I think it was at 11. I didn’t care. I got there 50 minutes late. I was the first one finished with the exam and got an A. I was like, “Are you even going to let me take this?” I just didn’t care – it was just like, I’m here to listen to music and write songs. Depending on your high school experience, college can be a time when you’re really allowed to explore, or when you’re supposed to be disciplining yourself to do what you know you already want to do. For me, it was definitely the former. In retrospect, I would have taken time off to get a better idea.
ER: What are you working on currently?
DS: I’m doing Spanish literature right now. I’m at the point where I’ve decided exactly what area I want to focus on. Having a background in science, I approach literature in a very analytic way. There are people that recoil at that. I’m not a traditionalist. I think it’s important to have a culturally informed perspective on literature. I want to take my time, and really acquaint myself with the specific corpus that I’m interested in before I adopt a theoretical approach. Right now I’m taking a class on the generation of ’98. They’re one of my favorite groups of writers in Spain and I would focus on that.
It’s interesting because in Spain the political history really intrigued me. You’re talking about a country that for a long time was occupied by Arabs – but I think 700 years is beyond the period of occupation. Then you have the Catholic European history in there – its very hodge-podge. It’s an interesting place for that reason. The literature reflects that, and I really like that.
ER: Do you ever read the Tower?
DS: In a blue moon, honestly.

Fifth Column: Stupes in the City: The TV Round-up

For some inexplicable reason, my domestic partner and I have been watching a lot of Felicity recently. After borrowing Season One from a friend (who informed us that the show was “about time travel”), we eagerly loaded the first disc, our excitement at seeing the early work of Lost guru J. J. Abrams barely contained.

Well, we’re now on the fourth episode and I feel safe in saying that this show is trippin’! Never before have I seen such a dreamlike, fallacious, and downright misleading portrayal of the college experience. Allow me to assuage any doubts that you may have about my college-experience credentials: I have been an undergraduate for seven (7) years at three different institutions – one large public school, an art school, and now CUA. I have not had all college experience, but I have had my fair share, and I’ve yet to encounter one like Felicity’s.

Let’s pause for a moment: why am I singling out innocent, wide-eyed little Felicity for an offense that is committed so often by television shows as to be the norm? Well – this a college newspaper; Felicity is all about college. For those of you who don’t know what the show is about (blessed are the few): it’s high-school graduation day, and the introspective, overachieving, deer-like Felicity asks the young man she’s been in love with for all of high school to sign her yearbook. After reading the weirdly probing message he writes, she decides to forgo her acceptance to Stanford University and enroll at the “University of New York” so she can be closer to her crush. The show follows Felicity as she makes bonehead move after bonehead move, backlit gently by the sunlight streaming in the bay window of her dorm room.

Wait. I know that sick dorms exist on campus (I just heard about the second-floor quad in Caldwell – whoa!) but in my experience, dorms are cinderblocked boxes with tiny windows that probably don’t even open.

Also crushingly unrealistic is the show’s portrayal of relationships: I have never in my life encountered members of male species so very willing to discuss feelings as the men of Felicity. Need I even bring up the perpetually yellow light that occurs in almost every shot and the romantic play of chiaroscuro shadows that highlight the actors’ faces? It’s always either sunrise or sunset in this New York. Absent is the harsh, industrial fluorescent lighting of almost every building on this campus, the pale, stark sunlight whitewashing the increasingly colder days here in DC.

The other weird show I have been watching is Stylista, which premiered Wednesday night on the CW. I don’t know how I feel about Elle’s integration into the Tyra Banks/Ken Mok paradigm. Fashion magazines and reality TV were different pleasures before – now they’ve merged and suddenly there’s a two-hour black hole in my Wednesday night. (Sometimes its three-hour if I watch Friends and Sex and the City! There’s a really amazing article in the New York Times magazine about how Banks is really sweet, traditional, and earnest, and figured out how to middle-manage modeling and successfully control an industry which is never manned by women, so I can’t help but be deeply curious about the television that she makes.

On Stylista, 11 contestants compete for a position as a junior editor at Elle, a prominent women’s fashion magazine. My favorite (and predicted winner) is Johanna. She’s going to annihilate everyone for a couple of reasons: a.) she has crazy hair; b.) she is 28; c.) prior to the show, she worked as a military analyst in DC, which means that she is a probably a crazed go-getter with balls of steel.

Both Felicity and Stylista depict the lives of young people who have traveled to an American epicenter to “follow their dreams,” whatever that means - and what starkly different depictions of this experience they offer. Where Felicity is forgiving, Stylista puts young women (and men) on the chopping block, and their errors cost them their time in the spotlight. I know – it’s like, how can I even compare these two shows? Well, I just did, so…

Student Spotlight: Philosopher Micah Tillman

Hometown:
Gainesville, Florida
Major:
PhD candidate, Philosophy

PhD candidate and freelance writer Micah Tillman is about to finish his dissertation here at the University. He recently spoke to the Tower about music, philosophy, faith and the intersection of the three.

Q. How did you become interested in Philosophy?
A. It was my mom. I was home schooled and she taught a co-op class for other families that were home schooling. One of the classes she taught was on Philosophy, and she was so engaged in it and taught it so well that I became interested in it and tried to take as many philosophy classes as I could when I was an undergraduate.

Q. What was your interest before philosophy when you went to college?
A. It was music and computers. I was a song writer, a musician and a programmer.  I majored in computer science and minored in music.

Q. In college you played in a band?
A. I was going to school at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania which is just south of the capitol, Harrisburg. It was about a two hour trip home and on weekends and I would often drive home to play shows.

Q. What kind of music did you play?
A. We were a mixture of punk and grunge, which I guess is a kind of a natural mix since Kurt Cobain thought he was a punk artist. We were a Christian grunge-punk band and we played at a lot of churches.

Q. After you graduated you decided you didn’t like computer programming you went back to school?
A. I actually decided I didn’t like it when I was a junior but by then it was too late for me to change. The first two years of the computer science major was heavy in programming and the second two years were not creative at all.  I realized that not only did the major not fit me but I didn’t fit in to the culture of the computer science majors.

Q. Where did you recieve your Master’s in Philosophy?
A. I went to West Chester University in Pennsylvania. I was actually accepted to Catholic University but I turned Catholic down so I could have two more years playing with my band to see if [it] was going anywhere. It was a good experience being at a secular university for a while - being the only Christian in a secular environment taught me to be quick on my feet as a thinker. It was a good experience but I knew I wanted to come to Catholic afterwards.

Q. Was there a teacher here who impacted you in a certain way and had an influence on you?
A. Msgr. Robert Sokolowski has been a big influence on me here, especially on the phenomenology front. One of the reasons I chose Catholic University because it had a strong background in religious philosophy and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get that schooling I went to another University.

Q. What is your dissertation on?
A. It’s on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and how he deals with presence and absence.

Q. What classes are you teaching?
A. I am teaching two sections of the Classical Mind and I teach Modern Mind in the spring. What I like most about teaching any of the classes is getting to interact with the students. I like to think I help my students.

Q. One of your assignments is to analyze a song and how it relates to the principles of philosophy. Does that have anything to do with you being in a band and because you like music?
A. Every semester I assign my Classical Mind students to take the course topics that we have been learning about and show me how they appear in lyrics in the song of their choice. One of the reasons I like music so much is it that it fills some of the same needs as philosophy.  It helps you cope with life, it helps you think about the world, it shapes the way you look at things and interact with other people. Philosophy’s job is to help you to think more clearly about your life and I want my students to see that philosophy’s ideas actually do apply to there lives if nothing else they apply to the music they are listening to.

Q. You have your own blog. What have you written recently?
A. It’s micahtillman.com.  I write a weekly article for freeliberal.com, which is a libertarian site. On my own blog I do a lot of political commentary.

Q. After your dissertation what are your plans? Do you want to go into teaching philosophy? Do you want to stay in the area?
A. Immediately I would like to stay in the area. I really love Catholic University and the environment here. Even though I am not Catholic myself it is a good place to be, philosophically and religiously. Even as a musician, I felt that my mission was to [help] Christian youth think about their own faith and their lives.

Next Page »