When I found out I was going to be covering track and field for the Alligator, two things happened immediately.
Here comes the Boone
I still remember my first semester at UF in 2012.
The hallways of The Carolina Inn on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are filled with photographs and paintings of people who made a difference in the university’s 228-year history. After staying in the inn for three nights last month, I felt like I had a sense of how UNC was influenced by the two centuries of faculty, staff and alumni whose likenesses lined the halls.
My faded black Jimi Hendrix T-shirt was drenched in sweat as I walked across UF’s campus on a blistering August day.
With graduation nearing, you might be feeling a bit stressed.
I love science fiction. My favorite works come from the ‘60s and ‘70s, when novels like “Childhood’s End” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” crystallized the genre, pioneered by writers like Isaac Asimov, of utopian speculative fiction. Don’t get me wrong, “Alien” and “Blade Runner” hold a special place in my heart, but there was an optimism in “Star Trek” that seems to have been fading since writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick popularized stories of a grim, dystopian future.
Due to the increasing pervasiveness and equal awareness of obesity as a health problem, especially in the U.S., it has become a truism today to inform the public about caring for themselves and their bodies. I’m quite aware of this beneficial trend in fitness, and I’m a firm believer in the idea that “your body’s a temple, and you should worship it.” However, in a quasi-paradoxical fashion, I also believe you should go out into the great unknown and destroy yourself if you must.
Nearly two years ago, I received a text from the newly appointed Alligator opinions editor while on a Greyhound bus full of potential sorority girls barreling down Museum Road toward Pi Beta Phi. It read, “Hey. Do you want to have a column in the Alligator?” Immediately, I thought to myself, “Hell no.” Yet for some unbeknownst reason, I texted back, “Sure, when do I start?”
I have seen many of the photographs. I have read the news. I have cringed as I read through tweets about the crisis in Syria, where more than 80 people, including children, died in a chemical gas attack on April 4, and then hated myself for cringing when I should be translating that sorrow and disgust into action. So today, I provide you — by way of researching this myself — ways we can support Syrian refugees.
The Miami Heat’s 2016-17 season came to an abrupt end on Wednesday night.
His name is Jared Kushner, and you probably have never heard of him. If you have, then it is only for being the husband of one of the most influential women in the world at the moment: Ivanka Trump. But what many do not know about Jared Kushner is just how significant a role he currently has in the White House, and as he is a man of very few words, this has been a cause of concern. Since long before Election Day, Kushner could be found lurking in the shadows of President Donald Trump as he made his cantankerous, political-landscape-altering, scorched-earth trek through America. The Trump campaign might have had a revolving door of campaign managers and aides, but it was the reserved Mr. Kushner who, as we are now learning, led Trump to the presidency.
The U.S. has seen a boom in feminism lately, something that I, a long-time nasty woman, should be elated about. However, and much to my own dismay, I’ve come to realize this new wave of feminism is nothing to be exciting about.
Before you start commenting that I’m an entitled millennial sh-t for defending participation trophies, please know I recognize your concern. It’s definitely a cliché thing for a 20-year-old to do. But with the number of slam pieces written about the privileged “snowflake” generation and its sense of entitlement, I think there’s something to be said about how participation trophies can actually be a good thing.
There’s an ailment afflicting young people today. It’s not a disease or a behavioral epidemic, but an idea. It is an idea that affects our entire approach to intimacy. It stems from our phobia of discomfort, of appearing foolish or being declined. It is the idea that there exists such a thing as a “right moment.” Allow me to elaborate.
The human race is intrinsically a selfish bunch. When we’re born, we are strictly self-serving. We exist only to keep ourselves alive and to advance ourselves to the point where we can do this without help. We communicate our needs by crying, screaming or doing whatever it takes to get our parents’ attention, and once this is complete, we just head on back to whatever we were doing before we decided we needed something.
I ended last week’s column with an image of a man limping through life with a broken leg. I made the comment that this image captures the problem with our cultural dictum: “Believe in yourself.” The meaning behind my comment is twofold. First, people generally suffer from self-doubt, a certain awareness that all is not well within one’s self, or from an inability to feel affirmed, confident and whole. Second, the solution to this problem cannot be believing in one’s self because the problem lies primarily within the self. Thus, the image of a man who thinks he can mend his leg by walking on it.
We don’t know anything.
In all honesty, I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to write a thesis. Maybe I decided to do it because I like making my own life difficult. Maybe I like having something to complain about at all hours of the day. Maybe I just wanted to be able to say, “I have to work on my thesis” out loud, leaving friends and strangers alike dazzled by my dedication to long-form academic inquiry.
Solutions by The State News
