Requiescat in pace

Death is cliche

Even that is cliche

It's all been said

Whispered in hushed tones

Grief and sorror mingle indiscriminately

With happy memories

It comes to us all

Life's great cliche

We all die in the end

 

Remember man that you are dust

And unto dust you shall return

To be blown about as joyous thoughts

And smiling memories

Through endless years and on countless tongues

Person to thought

Unending

Requiescat in pace

Uncle Norb

Wet Word Play

Lying unseen in the clouds
Flowing in channels underground
Like flood waters, rising unexpectedly
Sometimes threatening to drown us
Second chances pour from the sky
Confused, you stumble
Searching for a source, a cause
A reason
Knee deep in forgiveness, you start to swim
Powerless, you are carried onward by the current
Minutes, hours, days later
You find your footing
Standing, you look around.
The hills glow, soaking in the beauty
Rained down upon them
Smile cracks, and you begin to laugh.
You run, you dive into the current
And let yourself be carried away

The Hoya: Election Season

For election day, along with voting for president, students who are registered to vote in the District are asked to vote for commissioners to represent them on the Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. These bodies serve as the most local form of governance in D.C. and as such are very important for student-community relations.

 

On ANC, Students Strive to Define Role

   As Peter Prindiville (SFS ’14) and Craig Cassey (COL ’15) prepare to become the likely student representatives on Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E, it is apparent that they will confront many of the same challenges faced by decades of student commissioners before them.
   Justin Kopa (COL ’03) served as commissioner from 2001 to 2003 alongside Justin Wagner (COL ’03), marking the last term during which there were two student representatives on the commission. This year, after a recent redistricting of ANC 2E’s jurisdiction, two single-member districts are allotted to areas almost entirely occupied by students.
   Both seats are likely to be occupied by students, as Cassey and Prindiville are each running uncontested.
   According to Kopa, the biggest challenge he and Wagner faced as new commissioners was trying to establish themselves on the committee. “We had to work hard to gain credibility,” he said. “It took a lot of time and work to do that.”
   Several past commissioners said that the most substantial ongoing challenge during their terms involved forging productive and friendly relationships with fellow commissioners while remaining focused on representing students.
   Brett Clements (COL ’07), who served as an ANC commissioner from 2005 until 2007, highlighted this dilemma. “It’s easy to get swept up in the relationships with the other commissioners, but it’s important not to forget that your goal is [to make] the university better,” he said.
   For Michael Glick (COL ’05), who served on the ANC from 2003 until 2005, it was his obligations to students that dominated his agenda. “I think that there is a tendency to make it students versus the community — and there was certainly some of that — but by and large [for] most of the issues we tackled, we were one big community working together,” Glick said. “But one of the bigger challenges was prioritizing and compromising and trying to work with my fellow commissioners to make sure the student voice and perspective [were] heard.”
   Outgoing student commissioner Jake Sticka (COL ’13) said that building strong relationships with fellow commissioners was particularly challenging during his term because he served amid the often-toxic negotiations related to the 2010 Campus Plan and area redistricting.
   “The personal relationships I was able to build [differ] from commissioner to commissioner, and some of them will tell you that given the constraints of the Campus Plan period, that was difficult,” Sticka said. “But I feel as though they respect me and I respect them. Our interactions have always been professional and some of them … have been very helpful as mentors [whom] I think I will be able to speak to for years to come.”
   Sticka added that his successors are set to join the commission amid a new era of cooperation — facilitated by the newly established Georgetown Community Partnership — and should therefore have a less difficult time forging relationships with fellow commissioners.
   Apart from this overarching challenge, past commissioners dealt with issues unique to their terms.
   Kopa recalled a fight over a district-wide moratorium on issuing new liquor licenses that took place during his time on the ANC. “To get [a license], you had to buy one from someone who already had one,” Kopa said. “In Georgetown, we leveraged that to limit local bars and the types of drink specials aimed at college students and young people.”
   Clements used his position on the commission to lobby the university about its proposal to ban kegs from campus. “I was able to get the other commissioners to support my opposition to the keg ban. Neighbors realized that banning kegs in on-campus housing would push parties off campus,” he said.
   And when Daniel Rigby (MSB ’05) perished in a townhouse fire in 2004, Clements joined with the other commissioners in calling for more housing inspections. “Basically, a lot of the off-campus housing was not up to code and was not properly inspected to rent to a large number of people. We tried to make a big effort to get those inspections done at all of the houses,” Clements said.
   Sticka added that while he made the most of his status as the lone student commissioner during his term, he is enthusiastic about the possibilities available to Prindiville and Cassey.
   “Throughout my term, I did my best to voice student opinion in a respectful manner. On the commission where there’s one student and six non-students, my ability to … win votes by myself was limited,” he said. “In terms of redistricting, we ultimately got a compromise plan where there’s going to be two students elected just about every year … and that’s certainly a better one than we’ve had in the past 10 years.”

Traditio

Tradition is important. It binds us together. Gives a sense of greater purpose. College is full of important traditions. At Georgetown there are as many traditions as there are undergraduates. You don't step on the Healy seal. You try to steal a full set of Leo's silverware. Your room gets wet in hurricanes. You run the Exorcist steps and watch The Exorcist  on Halloween. We have had the luck to do two of those things in the past week. Usually The Exorcist is shown in Gaston Hall, but not this year. So, to continue tradition, we are watching it in the common room tonight. If you hear screams, that's probably us.

Q and A

Where do you put your faith?
Who do you think you are?
What is history?
How do you do that?
Why the fuck would you say that?
Did you hear a word I said?
What are you doing here?
Why now?
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Daily Schedule

1:30 pm -- Wake up

2:00-2:30 pm -- Lunch

2:45-4 pm -- Ancient Greek Homework

4-5 pm -- Planning 2nd Semester classes

6:30-11 pm -- Crew for History Boys

11:30-??? --  

The Problem of God

An interesting aspect of the college experience that often isn't highlighted is the ridiculous intersection of classes and experiences you get to have while you're there. That International Relations class you're taking gives you a reading that you talked about the week before in Ancient Greek. The conversation you had at rehearsal last night with the set designer comes up discussing seventeenth-century opera in your seminar the next day. By living at school, never being away from your studies, has the amazing ability to bring the most wide-ranging aspects of your academic life together with your regular life. A few days ago, as we all spilled out of our Intro Theology course, I heard my professor mention that the biggest problem humans have when engaging with the divine is language. We are incapable of describing in words our experience. That thought kept twirling in head until Concert Choir rehearsal, when an idea (the confluence of two entirely unrelated classes), popped into my head:

Music brings us closer to the divine because it transcends language and human understanding in a way quite similar to the divine. It transcends linguistic boundaries and touches an inner part of ourselves that we cannot reach with words alone.

College Essays - Revisited

Today, during the two-hour break we had from rehearsal, I met up with the friends from high school. One of them is still a senior, out here visiting schools. It may be a tad sadistic, but one of the most enjoyable experiences for college students is to watch other kids apply to college. That speaks volumes about the pain involved in the process; and who doesn't like little bit a schadenfreude once and again? But an interesting point came up in conversation. Namely, why do college essays suck so much.

One easy argument against college essays is that they are simply extra work that nobody wants. But I think they are hard because, if done well, they require you to put a lot more into them then you might realize. Not only are you asked to put down 250-500 words, you are asked to fit yourself within that short space. And that is of course predicated on the assumption that you know what this "self" is. It's a challenge for anyone to encapsulate themselves in 500 words, but for a 17-year old it is often overwhelming. And this is on top of senior year school work and choosing colleges and general teenage life (which is never allows as much time for self-reflection as you want).

Michael Winerip of The New York Times has a wonderful line about this in an article he wrote recently: "They’re thinking big and exotic, when they need to think small and meaningful. The single most important advice I give them is to write about something that happened to them that made them feel deeply."

So maybe, instead of focusing picking just the right life story, they should focus on the internal relevance of the story. Don't write what you think they want you to write. Write about what is important to you, what you think defines you. And if you do it well it will also allow you to think deeply about yourself. Correctly done, the college essay should be a defining experience, a line drawn, before and after. (And, done correctly also means done!)