Blogs

I wished with all my heart that I could pee in the woods. Honestly, that was the only thing that ever made me feel jealous of boys when I was growing up, that they could pee in the woods easily while I could not, at least not as comfortably. I was proud of my girlhood from a young age, preferring feminine clothing (as in that made for female-bodied people), joining Girl Scouts, riding a bike without the bar from seat to handles, etc, but out in nature, camping and on long hikes and places generally free from the normal facilities and peeing in the woods was sometimes the only option, I wished I could be a boy, even if only for five minutes.

After an excruciating 13 hour flight from Seoul to New York, I waited in line to get through immigration. I was pulled away from the line by an officer after peering into my passport and led into a plain room. On our way there, the officer jokingly commented on how there were “so many of you Lee’s and Park’s” (which is partially true - Korea's most common last names are Lee, Jeong, Kim and Park but each of these last names have a very unique Chinese root and can be distinguished by region, class, and clan) and I nervously laughed and agreed, unknowingly giving into a micro-aggressive comment and leading him to think that statments like that would not offend anyone. The room was filled other international students like me and there were families with young children who were anxious to start their vacation. I was not in any trouble and the immigration office just merely wanted to make sure and interview us that we were indeed college students. The process took a long time and I sat in the room staring at the blank walls and listening to the conversation amongst the officers. However, an instance that stuck out to me was when an officer read someone’s documents and started laughing and passed it around with his coworkers. The officers were laughing at a name because it sounded funny but what struck me the most was that they did not care that we were in front of them and could hear and understand every word.

When's it my turn?
Wouldn't I love, love to explore that world up above?
Out of the sea,
Wish I could be,
Part of that world

--The Little Mermaid

 I’d sing along, my young self draped over the coffee table in front of the TV with a huge smile on my face, I was a mermaid. I even asked the shopping mall Santa to make me into a mermaid that year, my heart filled with mild disappointment when I awoke to a Little Mermaid toy doll under the tree instead of real life fins on my feet. I didn’t recognize until recently the irony in this wish, how I so badly wanted to become a mermaid and escape to the sea while I sang along to a tale about leaving the ocean to become human. Ironic, even, that this mermaid became human in order to commit to a lover, while I wanted to become a mermaid to find freedom and independence.

Yet, my mom sometimes recounts a story of a very young Simona experiencing the ocean for the first time. I put my hand into the sand, looked at the grains stuck to my skin, stared at the waves, turned my eyes to my mom’s face, and began to cry. Sand was a foreign substance, and the ocean was as threatening as the unexplored depths it guards. This fear of the sea as a young child compared to my love for the underwater world found in films is a confusing contradiction. What impacted me more, the fantasy or the reality?

http://www.viralnova.com/beach-art/

This is really cool and it reminded me of Ava's art in it's impermanence and its connection to natural mediums/forms.

NEW HOMEWORK for 2/14/14 meeting of  the Bryn Mawr Book Group

Read to p. 202 of The Glass Castle.
Write 3 pp. describing the kind of education you got outside of school.

This writing assignment steps off from our discussion about how Mom’s philosophy of schooling, in The Glass Castle, is like her philosophy of mothering: in both areas, she thought kids flourished best if they had no rules, no discipline, and lots of freedom….

We want you to think about the relationship between what you learned in school and what you learned outside of it. In giving you this assignment, we’re drawing on a book by Wendy Luttrell called Schoolsmart and Motherwise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling.  It describes the difference between “book learning” and “commonsense knowledge,” and says that  "real intelligence" can be attained outside school, from life experience.

Lesson Plan for Riverside, 2/7/31

I. Sasha:
Welcome! We’ve brought two more students with us…
we want to introduce them. Some of you may be new, too,
and we want to learn your names.

--everyone have a name tag?
--anyone need a copy of The Glass Castle?

Take a moment to find one sentence in The Glass Castle that stood out to you.
Go around, say your name, and read that sentence. Don’t comment on it,

One of my good friends on the rugby team came to Bryn Mawr her freshman year with plans to join the soccer team. On her first day the team seniors talked to the new players and one of the things that they took pride in/ bragged about was how they were the only "straight" team at Bryn Mawr. This made my friend really uncomfortable and she quit the team that week.

I don't know all of the soccer players but I do know that this isn't the first time that I've heard from players on the soccer team that the team has some homophobic people on the team. This summer I worked at Bryn Mawr with a girl on the soccer team and we would occacionally talk about our teams. So one day I brought up the story my friend told me. The girl I worked with admitted that it happened and that she didn't think it was right.

I'm surprised that this is a thing at Bryn Mawr and really want someone to explain this to me because I don't understand how it wasn't addressed.

I’ve never understood the variety of Whites or Caucasian as you may point out. In Malaysia, the media often portrays a single type of White, the privilege one. There’s no such thing as poor whites, Latinos or a Jewish background. As long as you have white skin, you are considered “Guai Loi” which means ghost guy or white person. My experience at Bryn Mawr has taught me otherwise. A lot of my close Jewish friends taught me that Jews have been through a lot to get to where they are now. One of my most memorable lectures that I saw my Jewish friends fall into tears was a speech by Norman Finkelstein’s “How to Resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict”. As a fellow Malaysian who indirectly supports Palestine based it’s cruel history, seeing my Jewish friends blamed for being Jews was quite heartbreaking. I can never understand the true power dynamics that was involve. I find it quite interesting how a significant number of Jewish people I know come from hardworking families but are also blamed for their cruelty towards the Palestinians. I can see some form of grudge sometimes through silence. This will forever remain a sensitive topic at least in my circle of ‘diverse’ friends.