Hi everyone,
So my boyfriend Sean and I have created a blog called (un)civilunion, which is basically a debating site. It’s still brand new, but be on the lookout for posts in the next few weeks! Check it out if you have a moment 
Julie
Wow, it has been so long since I’ve last updated. Complete fail on the accountability front -so apologies there – but it’s been an insane couple of months.
I feel like first semester just flew by – sophomore year is so much busier than freshman year! Especially now. Second semester is always infinitely more intense than first because it’s much shorter, and so it feels as if the professors try and cram all the important midterms and papers in before Spring Break. Which is in just a couple of weeks! It’s also a lot more hectic because there is a campus-wide flurry to figure out summer jobs and internships, and so tensions are much higher all around. I have applied to be a counselor for Yale Summer Session, so hopefully that comes through! Ideally, I would love to work as a counselor, take classes, and do research for the Religious Studies department. Unfortunately, this is entirely dependent on whether or not I get the job, so until then I am keeping my fingers crossed.
This semester I took on an additional role as Chief of Staff of the Party of the Left. So far I absolutely love it. The CoS is effectively responsible for Party attendance, social events, bringing in new members, and just generally making sure that current members are happy with the Party and with each other. The PoL is such a wonderful organization, and I love being in a position that lets me work toward making it better. I’m still bizzing for Redhot, and so the combination of offices has kept me pretty busy this semester, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Sex Week began this past weekend, although it’s existence this year faced much opposition. Because Sex Week occurs every two years, this will be my first at Yale (and hopefully not my last!). Sex Week is a biennial event that brings in speakers and workshops focusing on romance and intimacy, and lately has been the cause of much controversy. Yale has not (especially lately) exactly maintained a healthy sexual climate on campus, and its policies on sexual harassment and the reporting thereof underwent significant review this year. However, a group of students took it upon themselves to campaign against Sex Week, arguing that it perpetuated the harmful sexual attitudes on campus and created a focus on the unhealthiest part of romance: sex. When their campaigning failed to get Sex Week banned, they created a counter-program called True Love Week. I have mixed feelings about this. On one level, I respect the dedication to their goals, and think it’s actually kind of cool that they stuck it to the man by creating an alternate program. On the other hand, I am concerned and a little frightened that rather than creating this counter-program as the initial response to Sex Week, their first instinct was to lobby against it entirely. It is absolutely true that Yale’s sexual climate is far from healthy right now, but the absolute last thing we should be fighting for is the suppression of discourse. Sex Week has historically held workshops on everything from “How to Give a Blowjob” to “Faith and Love in Marriage”. It’s purpose is to explore every aspect of sex, and silencing the entire event because certain people disapprove of some of those aspects is ridiculous, and would have constituted a significant loss on campus.
So I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: Rock on, True Love Week! But it terrifies me that you only created this event as a last-ditch option when you couldn’t have your first choice – which was censorship.
This has been an incredibly busy week.
For starters, my a cappella group Redhot & Blue had a concert in New York last night! It was our freshmen’s first real concert, which was awesome in and of itself. The coolest part about it, though, was that the concert took place in the home of Marina Belica, lead singer for the band The October Project, and founding member (and second pitch) of Redhot. She contacted me out of nowhere this summer and told me that Yale in Hollywood – a Los Angeles-based a forum focused on networking for former Yalies who are interested in the arts – was coming to the East Coast, and that she was hosting the first official event in her New York Salon. After months of crazy back-and-forth emails trying to work out the financial and logistical details of the trip, all of that work finally culminated last night in a truly spectacular evening. Marina’s salon is in the heart of the city, and Redhot performed among: a preview of a musical number that will open a new broadway performance called The Strange and Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, a demonstration of how music is scored by Jonathan Zalben, who writes music for film and multimedia, and a private performance from the October Project. Between the amazing salon itself, the incredible artists we were lucky enough to perform alongside, and some damn good brandy cider, the night was a huge success.
Now that both midterms and a cappella rush are over, I’ve had a little more time to myself. This semester has been wonderful so far, but I’ve been struggling to find time to just go off somewhere and write. That is one of the reasons I’ve started this blog, actually. I wrote in my first post about the relationship between a blogger and their audience, and I was hoping that having an audience would hold me accountable. If you’re just writing for yourself, it’s so easy to put it off in favor of something less demanding, which for me is – more and more often now – a nap. If you’re writing for a group of people, even if they are anonymous, there suddenly comes a huge desire not to loose their attention and their interest, and that desire has become an enormous incentive for me to keep blogging. It’s worked out well so far, and I guess we’ll see how much farther that goes
The Party of the Left has also been keeping me busy. I wasn’t able to go as often as I would have liked the first month or so of school, because a cappella rush is unbelievably time-consuming and as one of the Business Managers of the group, it’s not a responsibility that I can just put aside. As a consequence, Inductions for the POL are tonight and I don’t really have a relationship with any of our new freshmen, which is pretty sad. I’m hoping to change that soon.
On a brighter note, I was able to speak at the Yale Political Union this past Tuesday, and was the docketed affirmative for the topic Resolved: Ban Smoking at Yale. Our guest was Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv. Reason is a libertarian-intellectual magazine, and Gillespie was named one of “The Right’s Top 25 Journalists” this past year. I was lucky enough to have dinner with him and some other YPU members right before the debate, and he is a really interesting guy. I fundamentally disagree with many of his beliefs, but it was a pleasure to get to hear him speak, and an even greater pleasure to debate against him.
I was hoping to discuss “The Egg” a little bit today (check the previous post for those of you who haven’t yet read it), but it doesn’t look like I have time. It’s such a fantastic little story with a lot of wild, fascinating implications, and I promise I’ll get to it soon. Now, though, it’s time to induct some freshmen!
With love,
Julie
So this is perhaps one of the most beautifully thought-provoking stories I have ever read: hhttp://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html
It’s a short story called “The Egg”. In total it takes about two minutes to read, but I can guarantee it will keep you thinking for hours afterward. Will discuss it later, but for now I’m going to bed.
Also, interestingly enough, apparently they’ve finally discovered the “most relaxing song of all time”. Enjoy.
http://thehairpin.com/2011/10/beware-the-most-relaxing-song-of-all-time-marconi-unions-weightless
Hi everybody,
Wow, what an exciting feeling. I’ve never had a blog before! Diaries definitely, but there is a certain safety – a security – that comes with having a diary that I feel cannot be found with a blog. I think I’m fine with that, though. Thing is, there is no risk with a diary. With a diary, you can say whatever you want without the fear of repercussion. A diary is a place to vent, to rage, to purge, and to exhaust yourself within the confines of a finite, tangible space. There is a satisfaction to pouring your thoughts and emotions into the concrete host that is the blank page of a diary, to swelling it’s emptiness with everything you think and believe and desire. Have you ever just stopped to look at a blank piece of paper, before filling it to the brim with ink? It is a beautifully satisfying thing.
I feel as though blogging is an entirely different story, though. When you blog, you are doing more than just disgorging your feelings into a private little book. There is certainly the same self-indulgence that comes with blogging as there comes with keeping a diary, but suddenly you have to keep in mind an audience. Rather than just simply pouring yourself into a space that is exclusively yours, you enter instead into a relationship with your readers. It is true that you still continue to write first and foremost for you and not for them, but suddenly instead of soliloquy, you have dialogue. Discourse. You make speeches instead of recording thoughts, and those thoughts carry the weight of mutual recognition that a diary – with no audience but you – simply cannot match.
This is my first true foray into the public sphere, and I couldn’t be more excited to take that leap.
The very first thing I want to talk about is the name I’ve chosen for this blog. To be honest, I wanted it to be simply “thisiswater”, but that name was already taken! (I tried googling it to see what kind of person had scooped up the name before me, but alas. Couldn’t find it.) Regardless, the name comes from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in 2005 to the graduating seniors of Kenyon College. In the speech, he tells the story of two young fish who are swimming around when they run into an older, wiser fish. The older fish greets them by saying, “Morning boys, how’s the water?”. As the older fish swims away, one of the younger fish looks at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
The ultimate point of Wallace’s speech (elaborated more fully and beautifully by him than I will ever be able to accomplish through paraphrase) is that sometimes the most obvious and important things in life are the easiest things to take for granted (or, worst of all, fail to understand). He goes on to elaborate about the merits of a liberal arts education, and argues that the most important thing one gains from an undergraduate experience is not the capacity to think, but rather the choice of what to think about. In the same way that those two fish were so caught up in the intricacies of their swim and their conversation that they were unable to appreciate the only constant in their lives – the water, at once so insignificant that it barely warranted a passing thought and yet so vital that they depended on it utterly and absolutely – so, too, does it become easy for us to ignore the real and essential, and to deaden our awareness of the beautiful insignificances that truly make us tick.
I love that message more than any other, because it will never stop speaking to me. Wallace’s words will never be outdated, or irrelevant, or inappropriate. I think that he has touched on something truly beautiful when he points out the simple grace and understanding that comes when one can appreciate the unadorned, unembellished aspects of reality right along with the show-stopping, life-altering moments. More than anything, I hope that in this blog, the relationship that I establish with you, readers, can reflect the understanding that thinking is more than just our ability to do so: it is also a choice we can make to engage what we otherwise might not and to push our limits in what we choose to understand about the world around us. More than anything, it is our choice to recognize that
this.
is.
water.
And we sure as hell better do so.
With love,
Julie
