Maisha Foster-O'Neal’s Campus Journal

the last spoonful of the semester

As the semester drags itself closer to Finals, I spend more and more of my time in the library. I have very scientifically graphed my relationship to library time as it correlates to the progression of time and posted it to the right. The library is a really great place to focus, as long as I turn off the internet switch on my laptop. Thanks to some extended library time this week and a moderate amount of caffeine, I managed to finish my first final paper of the semester, and even got to bed before 2am the night before it was due. It felt so good to turn it in yesterday! To reward us all for working so hard on our final papers, our Astronomy professor put together a lecture primarily composed of beautiful photographs and video clips and containing absolutely zero mathematics.

Somehow, this last spoonful of the semester is dense with performance poetry. On Tuesday, Elephant Engine High Dive Revival performed to a crowded and rowdy Council Chamber. Two of my favourite poets were in the lineup this year, Anis Mojgani and Buddy Wakefield, plus Derrick Brown and Mike McGee. The same four poets performed together at LC when I was a first-year, but they called themselves the Solomon Sparrow Electric Whale Revival then. They’re good with names. I shot two videos of Anis performing, one of the whole group, and one of Buddy. (Content/language of videos is not appropriate for all audiences. Send your kids out of the room.) One of the things I like about Buddy’s style is you can never tell when he begins a poem because he usually slips into it with a stream of banter, and then you’re halfway through the poem before you realise it’s a poem.

The very next day, Katastrophe and Athens Boys Choir rocked the Trail Room with their hip-hop and spoken word madness. Since I brought them as “visiting scholars,” SAAB agreed to fund the workshop and performance, collectively called F to eMbody. What a great way to celebrate Trans Day of Remembrance. I took a completely ridiculous number of videos of these two dudes, and again with the language and content warning. But if you’re okay with some F-grenades, definitely check out those videos. It was really cool to be the person who arranged and hosted that tour, because it meant I got to have dinner with two quasi-famous hip-hop artists, usher them to our library to use the internet, and just generally hang out with a couple of chillers doing the work of social and political change. The workshop and show inspired me to keep doing what I’m doing, the creative arts stuff and the LGBTQ advocacy stuff.

Next week, the Pincushion Orchestra is coming to campus for yet another dose of performance poetry, and then we have our last Slam of the semester following that. I wrote a new poem on Wednesday (it’s about beekeeping) that I might perform if I can get it suitably memorised in time.

Here’s my class lineup for next semester: Intro to Queer Studies, Gender in Relational Communication, Women in American Religious History, and Bowling. Yeah, Bowling. Oh hey there, final PE credit! I’m pretty stoked. It’s going to be a good semester.

We had a mix-up between the book store and our syllabus whereby my whole Anthropology of the Body class realised yesterday that none of us has the book we’re supposed to discuss on Monday. We all bought a different (although similarly titled) book back in September. Luckily, a few of us had put the correct book on hold through the library, and when our copies came in we requested that the librarians put them on Course Reserve, meaning any student who is in our class can check out the book for a maximum of two hours at a time. It will work out, but it sure is inconvenient! Luckily, mix-ups like that don’t happen very often.

Okay, my goal for the weekend is to get some sleep! I am ten thousand kinds of ready for Thanksgiving break. I get to go home and snuggle my dogs!

Email me at maisha@lclark.edu after the beep.

P.S. – I’m having some difficulty with the youtubes, so videos will be posted later this weekend. Hold tight.

20 November 2009

self-propelled exploration

It’s the Tenth Week. That’s college-speak for burnout time. The last sprint of the semester is just a week stretch, a Thanksgiving break hurdle, and another week stretch, and then we’ll catapult right through the Final Exams finish line.

My first final paper (on the red controversy of Sirius) is due on Thursday next week in Astronomy, so I barricaded myself in the library for a five-hour stint on Tuesday to gather and read my sources. I was initially experiencing research turbulence, so I booked an appointment with one of our super helpful reference librarians, and she set me up with about twice as many sources as my paper actually requires. I got thoroughly acquainted with the Periodicals section of the library, and then went on a date with the photocopier machine. This weekend, I’ll be distilling all that research into a five-to-seven page paper that presents the evidence for several competing explanations for why the ancients recorded Sirius as reddish when today it is distinctly bluish.

It somehow turned out to be Craft Week in Maishaworld. Observe:

1. On Sunday, I abandoned homework for a few hours to attend a screenprinting workshop in the Co-op on campus. I whipped up a tea-based design, taped it to a window to trace it onto freezer paper, painstakingly cut it out with a combination of x-acto knife and kid scissors, taped it to the largest screenprinting frame the Co-op could muster, and squeegeed purple paint onto the screen, which transferred my design to my t-shirt. It was awesome! If I had an extra few weeks without homework, I would just screenprint t-shirts for everyone for Christmas. Since that’s not gonna happen, I hope everyone likes receiving hugs as gifts. College makes you money and time deficient.

2. I finally finished my first scarf! I’ve graduated from scarves and now I’m starting in on my first hat. My knitting teacher, Kris Tea, says I’m getting good enough to be worthy of quality yarn; the yarn I’m using now is blue and fuzzy, and it’s a lot nicer than the stuff I used for my scarf.

3. I hand-sewed a plaidypus shirt! I am immensely pleased with this visual pun. The platypus was cut from a secondhand pair of plaid pyjama pants I picked up at the Goodwill Bins for the express purpose of this kind of crafting. Not-so-secretly, I hope to begin making things like this in some degree of quantity and selling my creations at the Co-op. Or Etsy. Winter break project, perhaps?

The three-day Annual Ray Warren Multicultural Symposium was this week! I really, truly loved this year’s theme, Mixed: The Politics of Hybrid Identities, because I feel like almost everyone feels a little mixed, no matter what they look like on the outside. Attending the panel Remix: Identities and Artistic Expression encouraged me to reflect upon how I stir, stitch, and spin my various identities into my creative pursuits. Of the panelists, I particularly enjoyed Leyendas de México, a storytelling/music-playing bilingual performance by two artists who emigrated from Mexico to the US a number of years ago. They said that they chose to perform legends in order to reconnect to their indigenous roots. Click for a video of their performance.

I also attended the Race Monologues, which had so many people in attendance that it probably violated fire code – people were perched all around the periphery of the room because all the seats were full. The Race Monologues were born at LC six years ago by a student who wanted to participate in the Vagina Monologues but was barred on account of his gender (the Womyn’s Center at the time was not as inclusive as it is today) – so he created his own space where students of other marginalised demographics could speak about their experiences. The Race Monologues, unlike the Vagina Monologues, are written and performed by the participating students every year, so it’s really a once-in-a-lifetime performance. Although anyone and everyone can participate, the Race Monologues have always drawn a high proportion of participants of colour. I think it’s great, since people who have been systemically marginalised because of their race by a society still struggling toward equality need to have a space where they not only have a voice, but listners too. I loved every single monologue even more than I loved the three cups of hot apple cider I quaffed during the mingle-style social following the performance.

Tonight is the last night of Beckett(s)! I saw it last Saturday with Mel. The whole stage is a world, it turns out – the performance was all over the theatre building, even in the men’s shower and the costume loft. The first hour was a confusing self-propelled exploration of a handful of shorts being performed all over the building simultaneously (I managed to see most of most of them), while the second hour was the regular sit-down style performance of End Game. I’m glad I had to read Waiting for Godot in high school, because it somewhat prepared me for the off-kilter nihilism of Samuel Beckett’s playwriting. I’m friends with several of the theatre people, and they insist that this production is haunted by Samuel Beckett’s ghost – they’re convinced that something catastrophic will transpire tonight at the dénouement of the show, since several things have already gone horribly wrong at almost every performance thus far. The night I saw Beckett(s), though, it was immaculate. If you’re in the Portland area, I definitely recommend you drive, bus, scooter, bike, or walk on over to Fir Acres Theatre. Just be prepared for a strange night of macabre humour, hopeless nonsensicalness, and ennui. Samuel Beckett wasn’t exactly the most cheery of playwrights.

And with that, it’s time I turn to the army of articles on my floor that all insist different reasons for Sirius’s alleged colour shift. Here’s my email address, you know what to do with it: maisha@lclark.edu.

14 November 2009

equal parts glorious and very, very stupid

In collegeland, Hallowe’en on a Saturday translates to three whole days of tomfoolery – Friday and Sunday are not spared. Last year, Hallowe’en found me on a practically-deserted stretch of the Tanzanian coast, so my costuming was limited to what I could glean from my surroundings: seashells and palm tree bark and my trusty roll of duct tape enabled me to haphazardly dress as a hermit crab. Two years ago, when I was a first-year at LC, I skipped Hallowe’en in favour of homework. So this year, since it had been two years since my last proper Hallowe’en, I decided to do things right, despite being on duty. I got together with friends and carved pumpkins – mine was the Great Eye of Sauron. I also passed out tootsiepops to everyone I came across on campus, and I dressed as the Dinosaur Extinction for dinner and rounds. Six or seven people, independently of one another, took a good long look at my meteor hat, dinosaur-studded t-shirt, and ocean pants, and said, “Oh! I get it! You’re the Big Bang.” No. Wrong astrophysical occurrence.

My girlfriend Mel co-opted Hallowe’en as a last hurrah for her mohawk. She sculpted it into spikes for her pterodactyl/triceratops costume, and then, rather than simply wash the Elmer’s glue out at the end of the night, she chopped her spikes off with my scissors, and we shaved her head the rest of the way on Sunday. Bald. Like, with three straight-edge razors. (The razors didn’t survive the night.)

This week, the Womyn’s Center is hosting Love Your Body, Love Yourself week. Monday was Henna Night. I ended up sticking around for far too long, squeezing henna onto people. I did a tree for Rachey, a Mayan Tree of Life for Chris, and a pretty design for Adrian, who in turn did one on me. Wednesday night was a body-positive themed open mic in the Platteau, so I covered a poem called Instructions for a Body (warning: one inappropriate word in that video) by Marty McConnell. I couldn’t attend the events on Tuesday and Thursday, but I heard they were awesome.

Wednesday was my Crazy Person day. In my two classes, I had a Spanish composición and an annotated bibliography due; I also had my SAAB grant application to submit and three marathon-length meetings to attend. In my one hour of unstructured time, I sat down and figured out the next four months of my life. Next semester, if all goes well during course registration next week, I will be taking Intro to Queer Studies, Gender in Relational Communication, Women in American Religious History, and whatever PE class I can fit around those courses. Engage excitement now.

The Gender Studies Symposium had our four-hour-long fall semester meeting, at which we assembled the symposium schedule to actually start looking like a fully-fledged event. The fun part of the meeting (besides the catered South Asian buffet) was titling all the panels we had just assembled. I think my favourite panel title is She Blinded Me With Science: Women and Girls in Science. We are not above cheesyness, and I respect that.

Last night, Acabrella (the A Cappella Union) hosted a concert in the Co-op. The place was stuffed and the lights were low. Darkness factor: The Darkest. Just keep that in mind when you watch the videos I recorded of Section Line Drive performing Chicago, The Merry Weathers performing The Sound of Silence, and Momo and the Coop performing a gospel-ish hymn called Freedom is Coming. Our newest a cappella group, The Ravine Academy, debuted with Tainted Love and Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay. My friend Jonah Luke performed a couple of his songs between sets too – you can listen to (and download!) his singing-songwriting goodness at his website here.

In keeping with my tradition of being a Crazy Person, I have decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year – that’s National Novel Writing Month, and it is equal parts glorious and very, very stupid. The goal is to write 50,000 words, roughly a short novel, during the calendar month of November. Since I don’t want to compromise my RA job or my studies, and I also got a late start, I am only aiming for 10,000 words by November 30^th, which is totally doable. That breaks down to just over 333 words per day. I’ve never done NaNoWriMo before, although I’ve wanted to since sometime in middle school when I first found out about it, so I am extra excited. Several of my friends at LC are doing it too, but most of them are hardcore non-wimps and are doing the full 50,000.

I just got back from the girls’ volleyball game against Linfield College. I’m not sure where my voice went, but I’m sure it helped us win all three games. My friend Lou did some spectacular dives, and Kat (who is 6′3”) is the queen of spikes. It was such a dynamic game – the teams were well-matched. I had never been to a volleyball game at LC before, and I loved how much fun it was to watch.

Okay, roll those questions on over to my inbox at maisha@lclark.edu and I will answer all your questions in nearly novel-length fashion.

P.S. - Super special secret: hover over the photos on the right. I always include a little bit more information in the alt-text banners.

6 November 2009

explosion into this world

Warning: when you turn 21, your birthday never ends. On Friday, almost a full month after the twenty-first anniversary of my explosion into this world, my girlfriend Mel treated me to an Ani DiFranco show at the Crystal Ballroom. We went out to dinner beforehand to an LC favourite: Thai Peacock. Half the kids who live in my building just so happened to be there, and the waitress just so happened to seat us right next to them. Way to kill the romance, Thai Peacock lady.

The Thai Peacock crew all just so happened to be going to the Ani show too. LC students (including Mel and me) formed a respectable block of enthusiastic swayers near the front of the crowd. Anaïs Mitchell, who in my opinion does lovely guitar work ruined by whiney vocals, was the opener. Ani, in her usual unpretentious white tanktop and baggy khakis, materialised onstage, and the crowd (as Dith would say) went cuckoo bananapants. Ani played a solid set, including a revitalized version of an old folk tune called Which Side Are You On.

On Saturday, a chartered bus – the kind with its own on-board bathroom – deposited a passel of LC students at Sauvie Island Pumpkin Patch. We shivered our way through the line for the Field of Screams Haunted Corn Maize, then screamed our way through the ear-y paths. (Haha, get it? What a corny pun.) It was terrifying and wonderful. A man in a swine mask chased me for awhile, which was unfairly scary because I used to be really afraid of pigs when I was a little kid. When we were squishing down the homestretch, we heard a chainsaw in the distance. “There’s always a psycho chainsaw murderer at the end, always,” Ashley said, and just as I was explaining how “I’ve never seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so chainsaws don’t really scare me,” chainsaw man leapt out of the corn on my left and swung his monstrous machine through the air above my head. I ducked and screamed for probably a full 60 seconds. Protip: Don’t talk about what you’re not afraid of, because it will take the opportunity to prove you wrong.

When we got back to campus, I claimed my spot in line for a Once Upon a Weekend seat. OUAW, a series of hilarious theatrical one acts, takes place over the course of a single weekend each semester. This semester, the theme was Saboteur. Students wrote and submitted short plays relating to the theme – everything from pirates versus ninjas to a Christmas card photography set going wrong wrong wronger – and directors and actors had just two days to cast, memorise, block, and rehearse, and then everyone is on stage, fumbling and improvising. This year was the tenth anniversary, so LC theatre alum were invited to act and direct alongside current students. Between performances, three of our a cappella groups performed. Section Line Drive was wearing Wheat Thins paraphernalia (”Because it’s Once Upon a Wheat Thin!”), Momo & the Coop dressed crazy, and the Merry Weathers handled their sometimes pointy-heeled shoes admirably. (Click here for five videos!)

Non-homework events on Sunday included postcard-making and s’more roasting. Now that some of the students in my building are fire safety certified, we can use our fireplace anytime we like! Bring it, winter. We’re ready for you. We will take you down with our marshmallow power.

I have been working relentlessly to write a really solid application for a SAAB grant. I’m planning on bringing Athens Boys Choir and Katastrophe, two spoken word and hip-hop trans activists, to campus in mid-November for Trans Day of Remembrance. The trick is to slate the event, a combination workshop and multimedia performance called F to eMbody, as academic in nature and supplemental to the Gender Studies curriculum already in place at LC. I think I’ll be able to pull it off. I will keep you posted.

I’ve been doing a ton of research about intersex for my Anthropology of the Body class. I just read a mind-bending (although not quite blowing) memoir called Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) and I’ve been plugging away at the ten or twelve intersex-related articles I’ve extracted from a handful of academic journals. It’s amazing how tiny the intersex community is. The same names keep surfacing in my research. Statistically, more babies are born intersex than are born with cystic fibrosis, but which condition is the average person more familiar with? Politics, privilege, and a paradigm of normality all contribute to the obfuscation of intersex issues. I’m really enjoying digging into the scientific dirt surrounding intersexuality.

I started typing this blog later than usual today because I stopped by the Physics and Chemistry Department’s annual pumpkin launch and demolition. I was rather underwhelmed by what the trebuchet could do to a lineup of jello-filled and dry ice-filled pumpkins, but then a guy in a lab coat brought out a pitcher of a sodium compound, the exact composition of which I have forgotten. He poured it into a hollowed-out pumpkin filled with water, retreated to the sidelines, and we all waited, fingers corked in our ears. The forthcoming explosion was awesome! The entire pumpkin literally vanished! Hallowe’en is magical. I enjoy pointless destruction on occasion.

I’m on duty this weekend, which means I’m doing rounds in costume, and I’m armed. With candy. To give to ghoulish revelers. I’m disguising myself as the dinosaur extinction, because I have an unreasonable number of dinosaur toys and a fondness for conceptual costumes.

Slide those questions on over to maisha@lclark.edu, and answers will magically appear in your inbox. Try it. I dare you.

30 October 2009

in colour flux

Everywhere on campus smells disconcertingly like damp dog food. It took me a couple of days to figure out that it’s fertilizer – Palatine Hill is slowly changing green leaves into redorangeyellow leaves while the grass turns from brown to green. The whole place is in colour flux. Compare the photo on the right featuring the tree outside my window to this photo, taken just a few weeks ago.

Last weekend my RA staff team and I packed ourselves into three cars and zipped on over to Lincoln City for retreat. Our house was on a lake – like, on top of a lake. We had a hot tub and a boat house and a creepy mustachioed carved head. And so much spinach dip. We spent most of retreat doing homework, eating, skewering things and suspending them over the fireplace flames, eating said skewered things, and scattering our belongings throughout the entire rather sizable house. The internet taught me how to unwrap Starburst wrappers with my tongue (thanks internet!) so I’ve been practicing my newfound and very employable skill. On Saturday, dressed in black garbage bags decorated with orange electrical tape, we rolled on over to the football game against Linfield and cheered on our Pioneers. The moment we showed up our boys scored a touchdown, but we still lost spectacularly in the end. It was fun for everyone anyway. And of course, because we were wearing our super high-tech and patriotic raingear, it didn’t rain at all. I was even prepared for the cold with my zip-up onesie footie pyjamas! Weather:1. Me: 0

On Monday, my parents took me out for a fancy dinner at Andina, a Peruvian restaurant in the Pearl, to celebrate my 21^st birthday. The waiter didn’t even card me when I ordered a Sacsayhuamán – the Americanised pronunciation of that is “sexy woman” and it’s got habañero peppers in it. I spent quite awhile trying to lick all the sugar off the rim between the various dishes we ordered over the course of the evening. All in all, I name the evening a success.

I whisked myself off to my Astronomy professor’s office this week. We discussed Hallowe’en costumes (I’m going as the dinosaur extinction), the Hadron Collider, and my research paper topic. I’m going to write my paper about the Red Controversy of Sirius – the star, not the animagus. (Although Sirius Black miiiiight be responsible for my interest in that particular star in the first place.) Wikipedia informs me that Ptolemy recorded several stars as distinctively red in colour, including Sirius. The thing is, Sirius is very obviously blue, although all those other stars are indeed reddish. So my research question is: was Ptolemy just crazy, or was there something different about Sirius at the time Ptolemy was marking his observations? We just had our Astronomy midterm yesterday, and it went mostly okay except when I got really stuck on one of the math questions. After 20 minutes of floundering and exuberant scribblings-out, I scrawled “okay, I give up” in the corner and handed in my exam. Afterwards, I whaled on some strike pads in Women’s Self Defense, and that made me feel a lot better. Punching inanimate objects is a good way to shake the angries.

It’s Homecoming Week. In honour of that, the College distributed 800 orange and black Voodoo doughnuts at the crack of early on Wednesday and 100 boxes of pizza at post-lunch-pre-dinner-time on Thursday. The pizza was gone in under half an hour – them kids be hungry! The various yet-to-come Homecoming events include a professional performance of Rocky Horror Picture Show; a Former Ghosts concert; back-to-back screenings of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; and of course the football game on Saturday.

I have collected quite an impressive amalgamation of exciting weekend plans. Guess you’ll have to wait till next Friday to find out what they are! I’ll cut you a deal: I’ll take on my To Do list so I can actually do fun things this weekend, and you work on flooding my inbox with questions, maisha@lclark.edu.

23 October 2009

smoke and mirrors

This week has been Productive with a capital P. I shan’t regale you with the details, just know it involved a lot of reading and discussion. I have two midterm exams next week, one in Astronomy and one in Spanish. To prepare for the Spanish examen, we played a team game in class today – Mantequilla de Cacahuete (Peanut Butter) versus Piratas (Pirates). The game involved darting across the room to slap words written on the whiteboard, and toward the end it got pretty violent. I’m not sure I actually have a better handle on vocabulario or direct object pronouns than I did before the game, but it was undeniably fun to actually move around, since usually we’re pretty sedentary in Spanish class.

Yesterday morning I received an exciting email from SPASM. That’s the Subcommittee for Petitions, Appeals, and Student-designed Majors, and is also possibly my favourite acronym at Lewis & Clark. SPASM approved my self-designed major application! That means that I am officially a Gender Studies major. As one of my advisors said to me in a congratulatory email: Huzzah!

Last Sunday was the annual Portland AIDS Walk, a three-mile trek across the Morrison and Hawthorne bridges and along the waterfront. This is the third or fourth year I’ve done the AIDS Walk, and we had the biggest Lewis & Clark team we’ve ever had – about 20 kids, which is pretty decent considering the AIDS Walk almost always lands smack in the middle of our Fall Break. The AIDS Walk is sort of like the laid-back lovechild of a gay pride parade and Race for the Cure, except, you know, HIV/AIDS-oriented rather than breast cancer-oriented. Shohei and Alison, two of our incredibly talented first-year students, serenaded us as we walked, with Shohei on guitar and Alison covering vocals. Shohei is such a great guitarist that he’s already released an album (called Waterways) which you can buy on iTunes; Alison is one of the newest members of Momo and the Coop, one of our a cappella groups, which just released its sophomore album, Joh Eh Ba Dop, this week. Click here to download it for free. I’ve listened to it practically nonstop for the last three consecutive days.

Today after my Spanish class, I attended the October Gender Studies Department brownbag, All in the Drag Family. Three of Portland’s most beloved Drag Queens strutted into the classroom in full drag splendor, folded themselves into our tiny desk-chairs, and spent an hour telling all in attendance about their glamourous lives as Queens. I had no idea that there is such a community basis to being a Drag Queen – each Queen has a “Drag mother” who first “adopted” her and taught her how to paint her face, fix her hair, and design her clothing, and then in turn the new Queen adopts her own daughters. The part of the conversation that I found most interesting was when one of the Queens was explaining how for Queens, their drag persona is an exaggeration of femininity, it’s all smoke-and-mirrors, whereas for most women in our culture, it is a norm and an expectation to “put on face” and “do hair” every day – women do not get to take off their femininity at the end of the day the way Queens do. All in all, it was a fascinating discussion, incorporating about seven hundred repetitions of the word “fabulous,” of course.

This weekend I’m off to Lincoln City for the Platt-Howard-Hartzfeld RA Staff Retreat. We depart right after dinner and return Sunday evening. I still need to pack!

As always, my email address is maisha@lclark.edu. You know what to do with it.

16 October 2009

beautiful monstrosity

This semester is roaring by. Like a lion on rollerskates. Or something.

For the first time since starting college two years ago, I actually have the perfect ratio of obligations to available time. I’m taking three academic classes: Spanish 201 to finish up my foreign language requirement, Astronomy to take care of one of my science/math requirements, and Anthropology of the Body as one of my Gender Studies major electives. I’m also taking Women’s Self-Defense, which is half ridiculous and half totally liberating. It turns out little pacifist me loves whacking the heck out of pads while perfecting the stinkeye. When those 14 credits of classes are added to the two credits I get for being a Gender Studies Symposium student co-chair, the semester clocks in at the standard 16 credits.

Astronomy is surprisingly enjoyable. Before the semester started I was steeling myself for a grueling wrestling match with the physics of light and advanced mathematics, but our professor, Ethan – who, as bonus points, wears a UtiliKilt to class almost every day – wants our Astronomy course to be less about mastering astrophysics and more about inspiring us to pursue cosmology in future. So far, all the math we’ve done for the class has been limited to the comfortable realm of proportions and trigonometry. Fun fact: Ethan has promised that the student who writes the best research paper will get to dictate the sculpting of his (currently nonexistent) facial hair. My friend Matt has decided he is going to win. He’ll be competing against approximately 70 papers – Astronomy is one of the largest classes LC offers – so he’s gonna have to really rock his topic.

Even though I’m taking four classes, co-chairing the GSS, leading Unisex, and working as an RA, I still have a decent amount of free time. It’s lovely.

Last week was my first big Unisex event of the year: Coming Out Week. You can read Lee’s feature article about it in the Piolog, our weekly student newspaper. Tuesday we hosted a game of Guess the Het, which is a tradition here at LC: we invite several Reed students or other Portlanders to serve on a panel, and the LC audience members ask general interest questions in hopes of narrowing down which panelist identifies as a heterosexual (and there’s only one, so the odds are against you!). Wednesday was a small Speak Out Poetry Slam, a sort of teaser for the impending first big Slam of the year. Thursday paraded a lot of crossdressing through the Trail Room – three of our a capella groups performed, and all of them interpreted the title Out Loud differently. Section Line Drive dressed in drag, Momo and the Coop dressed in a rainbow, and the all-girls Merry Weathers filed onto the stage looking like a manly moustache brigade. We rounded off Coming Out Week with a performance by singer-songwriter Chris Pureka, who opened for Ani DiFranco this summer and for Dar Williams last week in Portland.

My birthday was on Tuesday! I’m finally 21, which mostly means that I can get into all those poetry and music shows I was previously barred from on account of my age.

On my birthday, I practically knocked my PE professor over when it was my turn to practice my disarming strikes. (That’s a good thing. It means I’m doing them right.)

When I went into the Dovecote on campus to get Kris Tea to fix my latest knitting goof-up, she led the whole café in a rendition of happy birthday, then snuck me a chocolate-filled pastry. Awww.

After classes, my friend Emdowd and I made my birthday cake! Emdowd, who just returned to LC after spending a year studying abroad in Munich, lives in the German language apartment on campus. The only thing I know how to say in German is “whatever” (schnickschnack), so it’s a good thing Em and her flatmates all speak to me in English when I visit. Accompanied by a string quartet version of Beatles classics, Em and I adapted two or three recipes trawled from the internet to concoct a magnificent vegan rainbow cake. We didn’t use enough baking soda, so the resultant beautiful monstrosity was a bit too dense – it looked just like playdoh, for reals – but other than that it tasted pretty good, thanks to the seven cups of powdered sugar in the frosting.

Following cake-baking, I had dinner with Jon Sands, one of my favourite Slam poets who happened to be visiting Portland from New York City. October 6 was the first LC Poetry Slam of the year, so Apocalips, our Slam team, was hosting Jon as a guest performer. I pulled the birthday card and asked Jon to perform my favourite poem of his, “Being Human Being,” and he agreed, even though he hadn’t originally planned it into his set. Halfway through the Slam, Jon roused the whole audience into a riotous rendition of Happy Birthday, but rather than dedicating it to me, he told people to dedicate the song to whatever they loved most at that moment. It was perfect. I spit one of my poems, and some of my favourite people (like Christabel, Mel, Kelly, and Anna) rocked their poems, too.

After the Slam, I called up seven of my best friends on campus and invited everyone over to my room for cake decorating and consuming, pyjama attire recommended. We lit the squiggly candles (there were 12 of them, which we rationalised as 21 backwards) out in the parking lot, and since it was after quiet hours by this point, everyone sang happy birthday to me in whispers. It was splendid. When four of the people in attendance at your birthday party are RAs, everyone follows the rules.

The very next day, Mel and I headed for the coast to kick off Fall Break shortly after she got off work. Our late start (we had to stop for supplies at her house, my house, and the grocery store before leaving Portland) meant that we didn’t arrive at Cape Lookout until close to midnight, but that wasn’t going to stop us from lighting a fire and roasting s’mores! The next morning, we slept in until almost noon, then spent another two and a half hours trying to boil water over our fire, which needed a couple of jumpstarts in the process, so that we could make our tea. We are tea fiends, both of us. The day couldn’t start until we’d had our ashy, rapidly-cooling tea.

We packed up and went for a five mile hike out onto the cape. At the very tip of it, we could see the shore waaaay behind us, and the ocean, curving convex at the edges of the horizon, out in front of us. It was beautiful. We were so leisurely about our day that we actually ran out of time to go to the beach itself. Oh well – it just means we’ll have to go back really soon, so we can get our wavejumping and sandcastle-building fix.

I’m going to spend the remainder of Fall Break mostly doing homework. I’m reading this really fascinating book for my Anthro of the Body class called Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) – it’s a memoir, so I’m calling it ethnographic fieldwork for my Anthro final research project.

I have more stories, and you can hear about them if you email me at maisha@lclark.edu. See you next week for a more reasonably lengthed blog entry!

10 October 2009

a sea monster and everything

Greetings new readers, and welcome back to my adoring fans (aka my mom). Since sometime in August, the Admissions Office has been deluged with weekly emails from me inquiring as to when our blogs would be up and dancing again. I’ve been that excited to return to the Real Life Blogosphere. In celebration of being back, y’all are gonna get two separate entries from me this week.

This first one is a photoblog tour of my spacious new room. This year I live in Hartzfeld B. Hartzfeld is a highly coveted complex open only to sophomores and above. It’s tucked into a (relatively) far corner of campus and its brick walls and cozy courtyard make it feel like a snuggly den, particularly lovely for the wet, cold winter months ahead. Hartzfeld is suite-style living. That means that a pair of roommates share a central bathroom with two other roommates. I’m an RA (Resident Assistant) this year, so I have a double room all to myself, including my own private bathroom. Yeah, it’s pretty sweet.

This is the door to my room, come on in!

And this is the back side of my door, plastered with my collection of postcards.

Here’s my desk… or actually, both of my desks. That bumperstickered drawer contains my supply of miso soup, goldfish crackers, and chocolate chips – all essential food groups for surviving college.

This is the view out my window.

Although sometimes, I see this, and I spend all morning laughing at the irony of soda being advertised as “fresh.”

This is my closet. It’s time to do laundry!

I converted my second closet to a reading nook.

My dishes are drying. Last night my girlfriend Mel and I cooked a late dinner (whole wheat pasta and baked kale) in my hall kitchen. The kitchen, which is huge, is located right underneath my floor, so whenever someone burns popcorn, my whole room smells like it.

My bed is on one side of the room.

My awkwardly uncomfortable (but free!) couch is on the other side of the room. I call it the Serious Couch, because I have Serious Conversations on it. Or sometimes I invade my own photos to knit. I’m a knitting newbie, so I’m still at the scarf stage.

Behind the rainbow flag is my own personal bathroom. I am responsible for cleaning it, but that’s just fine with me. The housekeepers clean all the other Hartzfeld bathrooms, which is probably a good thing. Not all college students are as fastidious about cleanliness as I am.

I’m growing a dinosaur in my bathtub at the moment. His name is Fitzgibbons.

This is our hall lounge, as seen from the balcony right outside my room. If that piece of white butcher paper were unfolded, you’d see the marker mural that kids who live in my hall are working on drawing. It’s got a flying pirate ship and a sea monster and everything.

Welcome to my life! Email me at maisha@lclark.edu for more information. I will be updating weekly on Fridays. You can also still read my Real Life blog entries from last semester.

9 October 2009