the wheeler hall seige of 2009

I was shaking my fist at the protesters when some asshat pulled the fire alarm in Moffitt just as I was trying to print an important assignment. No, actually, I was still slightly sympathetic afterward, and it was when I discovered that fire-alarms had simultaneously been pulled in every other major building (i.e. every building with an accessible printing facility) that I was really pissed off. It didn't help that we were forced out into the pouring rain, with no place to take refuge.

And then I learned what was really going on in Wheeler. The emergency email I had received earlier this morning from our Dear Chancellor didn't really phase me because I was sufficiently pacified by the calm language he used to not understand that I was doing exactly what he wanted me to: resume my day as usual. I had some other problems to distract me, and strikes have been going on all week, so it didn't seem like anything special. "Students have occupied Wheeler, but it's no big deal, my dear and stupid money-pigs. Today is an ordinary day." He didn't mention the police barricades and the huge numbers of students mobilizing in protest of the ridiculous fee hikes.

[Aside: In retrospect, I am a little insulted by the university's patronizing attitude -- it's so condescending, almost to the point of hostility.]

And this is how I found myself in Moffitt, desperately saving my work before being herded out of emergency exits. And this is how I found myself attending to class I usually skip in a kind of "HAVE AT YOU, PROTESTERS WHO WANT TO RUIN MY GRADES, I.E. LIFE" gesture. And my day would have ended there, with some obviously inaccurate updates from Dear Chancellor ("Chill out, there are only 50-some rogue students involved in this business. They're not cool people, unlike you darlings who are our vapid pawns"). It should have, but it some how did not.


The anomaly can perhaps be traced to my interactions with science people. My cell-bio GSI was the only science-related instructor who acknowledged the protests at all, and even she, whom I know to be all kinds of well-meaning, was protesting because the fee cuts "hurt science" rather than for the grievous offense it is against the lower classes and the very foundations of public education. And while I was waiting for the afternoon class to begin, I was forced to listen to disgustingly self-satisfied science kids condescendingly pooh-poohing the protesters with reasons suckled directly from Herr Chancellor's breast. I wanted to scream: AT LEAST THEY'RE DOING SOMETHING. Really: How can you not acknowledge that something is wrong??

It was shortly afterward that I realized I am all coward and emptiness -- perhaps worse than those smug science students I wanted to punch in the teeth. I, aware of the injustice, preferred to turn a blind eye.

I wish I could say this is the part of the story where I slathered on the war paint and jumped into the mad mob with my "FUCK YUDOF" sign, taking a baton to the ribs in the name of social justice, but I cannot believe in anything like that. I did, however, participate in my own condescending way, silently observing from the periphery.

As I watched the chanting students, the swaying masses pressing against the Police barricades, I wanted to be inspired, but I was afraid of the blindness, and I could not submit to that mob mentality. "THIS IS WHAT THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE"? It looks like hundreds of young adults chanting mindlessly some catchy political jingles? It looks like a confusion of bodies, no one with any clear idea of what's going on, a shitfest of different agendas, the faceless, volatile throng glued together by confusion and frustration? I couldn't let go of these distancing thoughts!

As I saw the SWAT team, some hundred policemen all told, in their riot gear, their rifles, their stern silence, helmets gleaming in the dark shadows among trees lining Wheeler Hall, I couldn't believe this was reality. I couldn't believe this much force was necessary to face a crowd of what Birgeneau called "15-20 students occupying Wheeler" and "about two-hundred protesters." (The university news site shows pictures that suggest the protest included maybe twenty in all, when there were clearly a lot more, and 41 protesters arrested in Wheeler at the end of the day.)

When I got home and read the news articles, I couldn't believe the misinformation -- beyond Birgeneau's personal misinformation feed. The protest ended peacefully because the administration allegedly announced that the students in Wheeler would be allowed to go free without charges. Every article Google News can find says all 41 of the protesters in Wheeler were arrested and "processed" before they ever left the building. None of the articles mention the deceit.

I called my mother, so confused and astonished by this world I've lived in, and she said, with a sleepy sigh, "These are the things you learn when you get old."

the weekend was nice while it lasted

Love
1. Cowboy Bebop marathon
2. Yoko Kanno & "Tank!"
3. "Ave Maria" (Bach/Schubert>>>"Cuccini")
4. Die Zauberflote! "Papageno Papagena!" & "Der Holle Rache" (feat. Moser or Jo, kplzthx)
5. scholarship $$
6. 'SC losing their homecoming game to the lamest team in the Pac 10
7. chocolates (<3 Ferrero Rocher)
8. Marilynne Robinson (Gilead) & Li-Young Lee ("Black Petals" & "Tearing the Page")


Loathe
1. three lectures behind in MCB 110
2. 0/4 reading assignments completed
3. -2 ideas for paper theses
4. Charlotte Church (GAG!)
5. unemployment
6. Stanfurd's unexpected victory
7. being able to read nutrition label on chocolates
8. rogue mosquitoes that bite my face. WHILE I'M STILL AWAKE.


Notes:
-listed in no particular order
-8 is for "8 Figs" and # of histone subunits. Also, it is arbitrary. Look, I've written a Muller poem.
-:P is what I think of Muller.

peeping tom

The most enduring and disturbing part is that our dear cameraman antihero is not the offending party -- only its vehicle for the duration of the film. His violent, self-inflicted death leaves us with no relief. We remain impaled on our own fear and disgust long after the projector reaches the end of the reel. It's almost worse that he's dead; now that the aggressor is disembodied, we have no reference with which to control or anchor or mediate this instinct, the niggling, floating sense of a most profoundly unsettling anxiety (referent). It goes from image to sound to instinct, progressing into increasingly intrinsic and uncapturable forms until it's just an empty screen, washed in red light.

I really wish I hadn't seen it.

p53 and apoptosis: master guardian and executioner of the cell

The Biology of Cancer is perhaps my favorite science text of all time. Not only does it present the material with clear writing and helpful diagrams... but these extra Easter Eggs: surprising vocabulary, cheesy sub-headings, quotations from Shelley's Frankenstein in his chapterly epigraphs. Prof. M may have his issues with Bob Weinberg's "flowery language," but there are no problems here. Seriously? "Mdm2 and ARF battle over the fate of p53"? In my mind, I can distinctly hear his earnest, quivering tenor, one finger readjusting his coke-bottle glasses as he dramatically narrates a game of Dungeons and Dragons: The Cancerous Cell (against himself, in his mother's basement, etc). How could I ever forget this stuff?

say "what" again, i dare you

Pulp Fiction. I can't believe I've lived so long without watching it properly. There is not enough explosive agreement in the world "love" to satisfactorily explain my feelings. It is perhaps my favorite movie ever. No, that's unfair to Inglourious Basterds and Reservoir Dogs, both of which I've seen in the last month-ish.

Tarantino's films are an utter shit-fest, violently mashing together all the miscellaneous pop cultural crap he can think of, and YET, he somehow makes it taste so amazing -- I can't even believe how offensively delicious. They are the impossibly personable pigs that are acceptable for Samuel L. Jackson's consumption. When I stop to really think about what exactly his films are made of, I throw up a little in my mouth, but it doesn't stop me from rushing to see every film he's ever made (a woefully short list, if you ask me). And that is such evil, evil genius.


P.S. And the choice of music! Always perfect. The supplementary example of "perfect" used in dictionaries. <3




[An aside: Kaufman's Adaptation. is an uncommonly vicious species of mobius-stripping, flatworm Ouroboros that embeds itself in your skull where it denucleates all your neurons so as to fill a pool full of your brain-cell carcasses and pee in it.]

american news coverage is the best

three-hundred miles

When I get homesick, I pull out the guitar and crappily strum my way through some old John Denver songs from my youth. My dad was something of a fan, so on long drives, we'd listen to Mister Denver on cassette tape along with The Carpenters, The Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel. These were the only acceptable non-Classical musicians in our household, and I learned to love them in a familiar and unimpressed way -- not like the fearful reverence I was taught to harbor for the "true masters," but a deep and lasting affection, nevertheless.

I'm not much for making music except that it's soothing and good company on when home feels far. Neither would I ever count myself as a country music lover, but there's something in these catchy tunes about clear skies and mountains that strangely help me feel a little closer to the smoggy LA skyline.