Dorm, Love

I'm about half way through packing up my dorm, and its been pretty bittersweet.

I love the decorations in my room:

A lot of them are magazine pictures Melissa and I found this year or drawings we made for each other or post-it note pictures. Silly things that mean a lot.

I've actually had two roommates this year. The first was my friend from high school, who dropped out after the first term, and then Melissa, who lived in the room next door, moved in with me. Both roommates were wonderful, and I'm going to be lonely this summer in a room all to myself.

My favorite things about my room this year:

10. The perpetually half-dying, half-living bamboo

9. My bobbleheads

8. Lots of Obama pictures

7. Our fish, who has had a half-million different names

6. The fruit lights

5. The mini-glow in the dark skeleton with no forearms

4. My Kevin Coval Chicago Trib article

3. My insane collection of pictures

2. Our random, werid refrigarator magnets

1. Our awesomeness essence

My Super Sappy Post about My First Year of College

Today I finished my last class of my first year in college.
This year was incredible. I made some awesome

<----------friends ---------->

I had a radio show.

With a kickass co-host.

I fell in love with feminism and started writing for a blog.

我学了中文。

I had an awesome roommate.

Who shared her family's Easter traditions

I took some classes, too. They were good.

Basically, although I had some pretty rough weeks, I had a wonderful first year.

I learned so much, which I know is the point of college. So when I say I learned so much, I mean I discovered so many new things. My friends and I debated, fought, cried, laughed (mostly), and just became family. We talked about everything from sex to Israel to enviromentalism to cafeteria food recipies to beer. Because so many of my friends are international, I won't be able to see them over the summer. I am going to miss them intensly.

But, you know what I won't miss: sharing a bathroom with 11 girls I don't really know. I won't miss walking in on shower sex or unflushed toilets. I definatley won't miss other people's hair in the drain.

But, enough with the negative. I love lists, so here are some reasons why I am excited about next year:

1. Living with all my friends!

2. Taking classes that I want

3. Learning Spanish

4. Declaring my majors

5. Meeting new kids

6. Sustainable take-out containers

7. Maybe writing for TKS

8. Decorating a whole new room

9. Not being a freshman

10. Sharing a bathroom with only 3 people

11. Not working at 7:45am

Yay.

Mexico?

So, this is kind of exciting.
My roommate is a first generation Mexican kid, and she is going back to Mexico this summer to visit her family, and she invited me to come with! Her family lives in a small, rural Mexican town called Cocaoyula, and she lived down there for a few years after she was born. This whole year she has been telling me stories about Mexico, eating iguana, killing chicken, and haggling at street markets, and now to have the opportunity to see it all myself, I am estatic.

The idea actually started because Melissa wants to collect some oral histories from her grandma and grandpa about the town, since they have lived there forever. I suggested that she try to turn it into an independent study project, and we formulated the idea from there. We want to go down this summer to get an idea of things and show our faces, and then next summer, spend a lot of time down there collecting oral histories and possibly filming a documentary.

Ah. I am psyched. Now all I have to do is ask my mom, mi madre.

love.

中国

你好。我想去中国！我想吃中国饭，看上海和北京，说中文！

So, I am dying to go to China. Here at school, I'm finishing up my first year of Chinese language instruction. Its been very challenging, and I am a little frustrated by how little I can speak (relatively, I know about 300 characters, however fluency requires about 3000), but because of my studies this year, I want to go to China so badly.

I actually just got out of a meeting about a trip to go over there, but, unfortuatnely its going to cost about 4000 dollars. While techinically I could do it, I can't justify a 10 day trip for that amount of money.

Ah, I think one of these days I'm going to just have a freak out and fly to China (pshht if your thinking about a visa, I mean, reality, who cares) and spend all my money on dumplings.

谢谢。我爱你！

Finally

Finally, I am going to begin posting here again.
The term is finally ending, and I will have a little more free time.
I took a poetry writing class this term and just turned in my final portfolio, so I feeling both relieved and saddened. So, I thought I would post one of the poems I wrote this term here:

Globalization

We couldn’t take anymore kids
with their Birkenstocks and orange tans
spouting CliffNote rhetoric about
Emily Dickinson and flies buzzing.
We couldn’t take anymore kids
popping the collar of uniform polos
and throwing down fake gang signs
from the windows of their Range Rovers.

So instead of hopping the yellow bus
we jumped a train to the city
and found ourselves in morning’s rush
briefcases and beige pantsuits
#1 MOM coffee cups and
polished shoes reflecting the headline
of their owners’ Chicago Tribune: Anti-
American Protests Continue in Afghanistan.

Outside the train station’s doors
the smell of sewer and cigarettes
spiked the oxygen in our blood.
Led to the EL by the sound of clicking heels,
we watched from the brown line window
a single file stream of briefcases on every block.
We stepped off of the EL and
stepped into a vintage Neverland.

Under the green street sign at the
intersection of Belmont and Clark
the sidewalk was filled with shoes
stitched by tiny, brown hands in Asia.
The shoes were filled with people
shouting to end war in the Middle East
and the sidewalk brimmed with
fliers that spelled Hamas Hummus.

We bought falafels and French
fries and drank Diet Coke and
watched a man harass a woman
watched a woman flinch
In the bathroom a plant hung over the sink
and on the door of the first white stall
someone had scrawled in red sharpie ink
“this is this and that is shit.”

As darkness fell neon rose,
and we wandered to the train station
passing bums layered in plaid shirts
collecting change in front of Neiman Marcus
passing skinny kids dressed like bums
carrying Neiman Marcus bags.
On the train we watched a man
drink whiskey out of a paper bag.

On the train we talked about
last week’s calculus test.