1. Pants. A wise man named Alec Baldwin once said to Canteen Boy, "You know what I hate? Underpants."
While I'm not the kind of girl that blogs about her preference in unmentionables, I'll tell you what I do hate: PANTS. and TIGHTS. and SHOES. I am so f-ing sick of wearing pants every day, and even sicker of having my precious few skirt-wearing occasions tainted by having to wear hosiery and shoes. Mother Nature messed up and gave me a taste of warm weather, apparently before she was ready to make a lasting commitment to it. It's f-ing MAY! My legs and feet are yearning to break free from the oppressive bonds of winter! I want to wear skirts and shorts and sandals! True, I've worn flip-flops pretty much every day since the middle of March, but it's not quite as enjoyable when I'm getting cold rainwater scum on my feet instead of a killer Reef Tan.
2. Stalking. There was a show on NPR yesterday about a football team at a big university (I can't remember where, and I can't seem to find it on the website, but this is fairly similar) that got in big trouble for... wait for it... drinking. As we all know, college students, especially athletes, never drink (well maybe they really don't at Division I schools, but the Trinity ones were pretty OK with it). Long story short, each member of the team signs a contract at the beginning of the year saying they will not use alcohol, drugs, etc., and violating the contract will get you thrown off the team.
Enter Facebook. Apparently, faculty and administrators at this school got access to some players' Facebook profiles, where they discovered a variety of clues revealing that the players had been misbehaving, like wall posts referring to parties involving people drinking something you'd never expect to rear its ugly head on a college campus - beer!
Now I'm not saying that these guys didn't break their contracts, and I'm not saying that they should get to flagrantly violate the promise they made. I'm definitely not saying that anyone should condone the amount of drinking that happens on most college campuses, although I do think these coaches and administrators are just lying to themselves if they think these guys aren't drinking. But this isn't even about the alcohol, or the fact that they are athletes, or even the fact they got caught and might get thrown off the team. It's the way they got caught that bothers me, because it reflects just how much access people have, and how much access people give, to private information.
First of all, these guys, and everyone else who uses Facebook etc. or writes a public blog, ought to know that anyone could read it. For some reason nobody actually thinks about it though. Just a few weeks ago I was shocked when I found out that people from school were reading my blog - it was kind of a wake-up call for me. I got paranoid and decided I wouldn't use people's names anymore, but really, that's not enough to keep me out of trouble if someone really wanted to mess with me.
Last night K_____ (see?) told me that she might be getting expelled from school for posting an assignment on LiveJournal. The assignment was to write a letter, just as a writing exercise, not a letter that would actually be mailed off, to a public official (she chose Deval Patrick). After she finished it she wanted a friend to proofread it but for some reason couldn't send it as an email attachment, so she posted it on her LiveJournal for him to read. The letter didn't include her name but did say which college she goes to. At the end of the assignment she wrote a message to her friend, saying "I pulled this out of my ass at 2am." Not very poetic, but anyways...
After she handed it in, she got a phone call from one of her professors, who was in tears, telling her that the school's web-monitoring person had found the letter and that the dean of her college wanted to meet with her and discuss it. She showed up and found herself in a room with every faculty member in the entire department, plus the Dean and some other administrators. She had to apologize to each one of them individually for tarnishing the college's reputation (as they put it), and now she just has to wait and find out whether that was good enough. If she gets expelled she won't get credit for the entire semester, and she'll have a tough time ever completing her degree because her program is only offered at two schools in the area (one of which she could not get into even before she began her 'criminal' career, and the other being her current school).
I don't think they have any right to expel her - what she did may have been wrong, kind of, but nothing that warrants getting expelled. She didn't have any intentions of actually sending it to Deval Patrick (or anyone else for that matter), and even if she did, who cares if she "pulled it out of her ass"? If the issue is the language, I'd argue that students' use of foul language has absolutely nothing to do with the schools they attend or the quality of their work. And we're talking about the content of what she actually said, it's just like the drinking - professors would be lying to themselves if they thought students didn't procrastinate and write papers at the last minute. They know it happens, and so does Deval Patrick.
More to the point, it's insane that they're considering the letter - because of the language or content of that last sentence - any kind of diatribe against her college. She said nothing about the school besides the fact that she attends it. Even if she did, what would happen if every student who complained about their school got expelled? These are very questionable grounds for expulsion, and a really slippery slope, which I hope they realize.
3. Poetry. This isn't actually a protest at all, just an awesome Leonard Cohen poem I found, called "The Only Poem." My LC obsession has cooled down recently, but he's still an f-ing genius. Stuff like this makes me wish I were born Canadian, Jewish, male...and, you know, a genius.
This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
one nights like this
by one like me
7 comments:
the times, they are a-changin', and unfortunately someone's going to have to be the guinea pig for how "authorities" who have been able to look the other way on certain issues are going to deal with the offenders themselves delivering proof of thier illegal/unsavory activities, at least to the blogosphere. i think that the drinking example you gave inspires less sympathy than k's story... i see pictures of kids drinking all the time on facebook/myspace and i think it's kind of a dumb thing to advertise... i have a lot to say about this but i am off to a meeting so i'll talk to you later. xox
Wow. Some serious blogging on here recently. I think the blogosphere is back in proper alignment with your triumphant return.
Some comments:
1) I agree wholeheartedly. Not that I want to wear skirts myself, but I am a big fan. Warm weather please.
2) I can't have too much sympathy for the students that got caught. If you put stuff online, anyone can read it (in theory). I do feel bad, however, because it does seem like a violation of sorts by the school's administration (almost like an unwritten rule, although they probably have literature in the school's code of conduct to address this very thing). Specifically, the latter case with your friend K____ seems absolutely ridiculous. I hope she doesn't get expelled.
3) You may not be Canadian, Jewish, or male, but you are a genius.
all I'm saying with the athletes is that the whole thing smacks of entrapment and kind of reminds me of the "war on drugs" in Colombia where the punshment-reward system is inconsistent because the rules are flexible enough to accommodate whatever the best interest of the US is that day.
the administration has this rule they know no one follows, and up until now it's been business as usual, people looking the other way while the rules are broken. But now that the drinking has entered the public sphere, where someone could make a real fuss about the unfairness of these guys breaking the rules without getting punished, they have to punish them to save face. which is lame.
entrapment!? anne! underage drinking is illegal. so... don't post pictures of yourself robbing a bank on facebook, either. obviously not quite the same thing, but i think you get my meaning. the internet is public. i don't want my brothers (who are my facebook friends) to see me smoking cigarettes, so there isn't a single picture of me smoking on my facebook, and i think i've got most of them hidden of flickr. i understand that the internet is public, and anyone who doesn't needs to catch up. maybe it kind of stinks that the school administration or whoever is patrolling social networking sites, but really, i think that as time passes, more and more parents will be part of those communities with their children and self-policing will kick in. like i said before, it's just a wierd in-between time.
i know, i know. but they aren't necessarily even underage.
It doesn't seem like a sound argument to me to say that if the rules were practically unenforceable in the past, therefore now, what with the internets, the administration shouldn't enforce them.
And why isn't saving face a legitimate reason? The administration has a responsibility to maintain an image that it runs an educational institution, not a booze palace. Everyone in his right mind knows that higher education and wanton binge drinking go hand-in-hand, but it's not something you want out in the open.
I'm just saying a) the administration is morally questionable, because they probably would have let things go on like 'normal' if this hadn't become so public, and b) I hate the internet sometimes, it makes me feel so vulnerable, like a newborn baby left on the highway, and whatnot.
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