The true-life account of a conversation I have at least once a week

“So, Danny, what are you majoring in?”

“Um, I'm actually double majoring.”

“Oh wow, really? In what?”

“English Lit and Kinesiology.”

Short pause.

“That's an interesting combination, what are you going to do with it?”

How the conversation reaches this point changes, but the exact wording of the exact same questions is surprisingly stable for the number of times I've had to explain myself.

I like English. I've known since about the eighth grade that when I went to college I would most likely would end up as an English major. Sure, there was a period in high school where I considered a Journalism major, but this was only because it was similar enough to English and would have allowed me to continue in my passion for journalism. I realized pretty quickly after getting to college that my passion wasn't for journalism itself, but for the journalism community I had build up around me in high school.

So as I neared the end of my sophomore year, I was struggling. I was running out of GUR classes to take and needed to declare in order to get into the upper division classes I would take within whatever major I chose.

As I sat with this decision, I knew I didn't want to be one of those people who starts at university straight of high school and takes forever to finish their undergraduate degree because they waffled and wavered and switched majors five times. I didn't want to get so far in a program only to realize it wasn't for me with a year left before graduation.

So I looked around me. I had one professor tell me that if I went into English I should be prepared to work in a non-English field. There are so many people majoring in English out there, but only so many jobs related, and with the critical thinking abilities you get through an English major you're able to go into things like teaching or data analysis or even law should you apply yourself in that direction.

As an English Lit major I've learned to deconstruct a text, to pick it apart and analyze it in order to see both the broad implications and the minute interrelations between facets. This appeals to me. I love reading something and just mulling it over until I see the socio-cultural, political, narrative, historical implications. For example, rereading books by Orson Scott Card with the knowledge of his conservative politics has completely reshaped how I interpret them.

I'm a better feminist, queer and activist because I can better understand the plurality of discourses at work in any given conversation. That kind of bigger picture, holistic mindset is something I've learned to strive toward.

But at some point I realized this isn't what I want to do. I want to do this and I want to apply it everywhere in my life, but it's not something I want to make a career out of. So I looked at what else fascinates me and eventually concluded that the only other fields of study that really held my interest were related to human bodies.

There are multiple reasons for this, not the least of which stemmed from watching my mother go through physical therapy the latter half of my high school career. As an extrovert with an interest in serving people, a health-related field seems natural in a way. That and my experience rowing on the crew team gave me an appreciation and understanding of myself I never knew I had.

Yeah, in all reality I was the weakest guy on the team, but I was consistent and determined and absolutely captivated by the dynamics of movement involved: the kinesthetics, chemistry, and physics behind each muscle contraction, the leverage necessary to generate each little movement, all of them have captured my attention. And it taught me to be physical, that I can do something with my body beyond just move from place to place.

Growing up I was always a bookworm, eschewing the outdoors and ball games of my peers in favor of flying through the works of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and countless others. In a similar way, I've come to appreciate the human body as a book I want to learn to read. Not just muscles either; the whole thing, from nutrition to psychology to immune responses.

And as a double major with English, I can do that. If I take the time to understand material, I feel like I can explain it and make connections clearer than I would be able to otherwise.

That's not exactly why I'm double majoring, which has far more to do with me being stubborn and wanting to be well-rounded.  But it helps explain why I would choose such disparate majors.

"Squirrel!"

I saw a squirrel today. It had picked up a discarded apple core, carried it up a tree, and sat on a branch to eat it. Something about this made me smile, so I walked back and took a picture.

Linguist Boy: A Missed Connection

So I posted this poem to Craigslist earlier. We'll see how this goes.

http://bellingham.craigslist.org/mis/2706415366.html

Linguist Boy

Linguist boy,
I would forgive you your bilabial trills
if you would do the math
and make them quadrilabial.
Would you, for me,
cut down that Indo-European tree
so we can keep warm in its ashes?
Linguist boy,
save some sibilants
for my ears in the dark
and maybe I'll teach you
the anatomy I've been learning.
See, that fricative is begging me to stop,
but you left it unvoiced
and it got swallowed in the laryngal folds.
Linguist boy,
I want to explore that interdental space
and touch your alveolar ridge with my tongue.
The topography of your body
is a morphology I want to learn to read
but the phonetics contains sounds
I've never heard before.
Here's a clause, let's draw a tree:
"Linguist boy," that's a noun phrase
with embedded adjective phrase. Linguist describing boy.
"warm up my bed."
I admit the verb phrase suffers some
lexical ambiguity.
Do I mean warm as in heat
or warm as in ffffffuriction
between all those parts you linguists ignore?
We can blend our bodies like
two free morphemes to make something new.
Linguist boy,
do you consider "boyfriend" to be monomorphemic,
or are we two free morphemes
unbound by labels and only loosely 
connected by word order?
These looks and smiles we share
have a semantics of attraction,
but the meaning gets lost in 
a convoluted syntax of time and distance:
wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
Linguist boy, 
have I said too much?
I don't want this to be the 
false etymology of a relationship, 
but maybe you can pause
and analyze my language variation. 

The Western Front: Censorship and spending

I've decided that if I want to call myself a former student journalist, I should start reading my campus publication regularly. Activists throw around words like solidarity, but I think it's equally viable to apply the term to other ares (and I think in many forms journalism has the potential to act as a stimulus for activism). It's also good policy for knowing some of what's going on.

So let's start with yesterday's Volume 156 Issue13, November 1, 2011.

I'm tempted to play a game of count the inaccuracies, but that's just mean and detracts from the content. So I'll focus on two stories that caught my eye.

The first, an unobstrusive seeming piece that starts hidden in the bottom right corner of the front page, has a headline that seems rather dry: “Resolution would ask publications to censor content in online archives” but blossoms into what must easily be a 1200 word piece when it continues on page four that is further continued in an editorial on page 12. This was my first clue that this was a story stirring up trouble in the WF offices. Journalists report the news, they don't make the news, why would they be writing so much about something they're directly involved in?

Ah, censorship.

It's a bane of the journalist's existence, more so of student journalist who have to deal not only with media law and ethics, but campus ethics and codes and policies. So what is this resolution that has our friends at the Western Front scared? Apparently there's a little something-something dancing around on the Student Senate floor saying that online content could be subject for removal or alteration.
In short, because of the ease with which it's possible to make changes to digital media, someone says it might be worthwhile to erase some of those ill-conceived comments made by students that could otherwise be construed as indiscretions.

I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for that line of thinking. Assuming this isn't some kind of undercover operation that would never happen with a campus publication, if you're being spoken to by a journalist (and if they're interviewing you in such a way that you could be quoted, you'll know they're a reporter, they'll have said so), you should always triple think what you say before you say it.

If we were all minors, it would be one thing. The vetting and verification process for content would likely be a little more rigorous and permissions might be a sticking point, but this is college. We're supposed to be adults. In fact, any of us could be interviewed by national news organizations and all our stupid little “um”s and “like”s could be broadcast to the world. A college paper, not so tough cookies. If we need to limit what gets posted by our campus publications, what's the point in having them?

And that is what's scary about censorship.

The other story that caught my eye was a guest column about university spending during budget cuts that made me want to cry a little. Why don't people research how the system works? Buchannan Towers are not being remodeled, those things under construction were additions so we could fit more students (i.e. more freshmen crowding classrooms and helping split the cost of our ever growing tuition).

The money for that was likely budgeted and allocated to that project at least a full year before it began. I'm assuming a good chunk of the funding came from some kind of donations or government grants having to do with building maintenance and updates that while significant in amount tend to be fairly regulated and specific in what they're used for. If the state gives me ten thousand dollars but with the stipulation that I have to use it for shoes, if I try to buy socks, they're going to take it away, so I'm going to buy as many shoes as I can. That's a reality of the way these kinds of institutions work.

It's a similar story with the rebranding brought up in this guest column. The money was spent a while ago, we're just now seeing the results. And for a corporation like a university, because yes, the two are increasingly similar in how they're run (how long until I can call up CEO Bruce Shepard?), branding is important. It's how you get more of those out of state students (holla to my OSSA peeps) who you can charge higher fees to help offset the money you're losing from in-state students losing higher education funding from the state.

Rather than piss and moan about how Western is spending it's money, why not yell and shout (or send a polite but strongly worded email to) your state representatives who are allowing all these cuts to higher education? The AS Board, and especially our Vice President of Legislative Affairs (there's something so satisfying about typing out the entire title instead of VP of LegAff) Iris are working their asses off to get people riled up enough to show the state that Western has had enough.

When people say vote with your wallet, they usually mean give money where it's worth giving, but I also think it should mean vote with your wallet in mind and choose people who are going to represent you and spend your tax dollars the way you want it to be spent.

Anyways, that's my two cents on the news. Someone give me a dollar and maybe I'll write about the whole issue next time.

National Coming Out Day 2011

While I respect the institutional and personal need for coming out that makes it an empowering experience for a lot of people, and I accept that because of this fact coming out has socio-historical significance for the majority of GLBT people, FUCK National Coming Out Day.

Come out when you're ready to. Don't let some nationalized agenda tell you that you have to come out today. Come out however works best for your situation be that to select people that matter or to the whole rainbows and glitter, campy universe.

The closet is full of more than just rainbows or childhood monsters and the door isn't always easy to open so once you're there, celebrate being out every day of your life by living out, not just today.

Think OUTside the box and challenge the normative institutions and thought systems that oppress you. OUTreach to the populations that will help you as well as those that need your help. The OUTcry of your actions will OUTdo any opposition.

This OUTburst is an exercise. Queer as in fuck you, shit gets complicated. I've been OUTraged and OUTfitted with the tools of expression to make it known:

Out requires an in.

But what about beside? What about around, encompassing? Even if I'd been in the closet, it couldn't hold me because this little nightlight is too damn bright.

Dammit if that in isn't going to be the best place to standOUT in a crowd. Twist and shOUT no need to pOUT, this is what I'm all abOUT.

Be daring and bold. Be warm and cold. Be so far OUT that the world is your closet and identity your clothes.

Am I making sense? Do these synapse connections collect inf(l)ections I don't mean?

I didn't think so.

There's a plurality OUT there. Thought you should be aware.

And if I'm flaunting a privilege, so be it. Humble me. Pride comes before a fall.

Coming out from sea to shining fucking sea.

I don't believe in out.

Only a socially constructed ideal of what it means to be gay.

Have it your way.