Ocean

Life threw a lot of curveballs at me last night and today, which meant crisis management, frustration, and a little bit of angry katies =( But then I came home and started looking up X-Factor clips and life is all good again =)

Anyways for those of you who care about my academic life, a couple of notes:
Arch 170A: Arch Hist. from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
I have no friends in that class and I'm always late but Shanken did manage to make cave paintings INTERESTING so there is some hope...

AAS 122: Japanese American History
Everyone keeps telling me I don't need to take this class but there are a lot of reasons why I'm taking it, some of which lie in principles rather than practicalities or even interest. Anyways there are lots of films and I'm looking forward to continuing my self-education, which I started some time around the 4th grade.

Cy Plan c114: Intro. to Urban and Regional Transportation
I was going to drop this class until I went today and the lecture convinced me to stay. I realized that this, along with a myriad of other city planning issues, are what REALLY interest me and what I REALLY understand. To me, it's all pretty much common sense and looking at all the sides of an issue (which is great since I'm such an "amiable" type anyways!). There is an annoying knowitall in this class (seriously why are there so many in the class of 09???) but other than that this should be a goodie. One of the GSIs may be my new lets-kick-it-and-talk-about-life amigo since Alex appears to be gone this year. Something that I need to be reminded of more often: Planners don't get to make the decisions. Odd concept, but a fundamental one...

Anthro 137: Energy, Culture, & Society
I am hoping I can get this to count for my minor. I don't know much about energy policy but it has political and lifestyle implications not just for the US but the entire world. THe professor is a little kray kray (she likes to call things "cuckoo" a lot) but some of her stories are great (like the one about the 50MPG engines from the early 80s..."the other car is in hiding, for future historians to find!") and somewhere in there I know she's got a lot to share that will be useful. Plus, there's no discussion section or midterm as of now, and a good friend of mine is in it, and it is in the new Stanley Hall building. I'm not going to lie....good facilities helped sell this course. Let this be a lesson to you, stupid people who built Dwinelle!

Cy Plan c115: Global Poverty: Hopes and Challenges in the New Millenium
Professor Ananya Roy won the GOlden Apple Teaching Award at Cal last year, and there is a reason for it. She is also a DCRP professor, so I just had to try out at least one of her classes while I'm here. I didn't think global poverty would interest me much or have a lot to do with studying city planning, but I love this course so far. First, Ananya gives amazing lectures that are fast-paced and interesting and delivered in a great accent =) She doesn't waste words either...which means that you want to write down EVERY word she says and my hands get tired. Maybe I should get a recorder. I'd listen to her lectures again, they are that good! Then, there are the people in the course: like half of senate, architecture friends, city planning friends, and old roomies. The lecture hall is ALWAYS full which is weird because I have 170 in there right before and it is never even half full. Third, the content is fascinating (the reading has been really easy to read), albeit a little shocking at times. Fourth, my GSI seems to be almost as cool as Ananya. His ice-breaker question: "name two cities that you are obssessed with." I had such a hard time narrowing it down to TWO. I find something I am fascinated with in every city I go to and the more I study architecture the more I want to visit different cities. My list of places to see is huge, to the point where I've separated it into "places I'd love to see" and "places I am actually going to try to see". So yeah that just made me super excited about life and my GSI seems really chill (yet demanding). Though I doubt I'll be devoting my career to helping end global poverty, or even going to Bono concert (Ananya loves Bono...my GSI quoted her quoting Bono and said that he was quoting "a rockstar who is quoting another rock star."), this is still one of those courses that embodies what college is all about.

Cy Plan 113B: Community & Economic Development
The longer I sit in this class, the less appealing it becomes. The problem with going to a school that is a hotbed of liberalism is that the opportunity to see the conservative point of view is often times nonexistent and this is no exception. I'm not necessarily conservative but I like to see both sides and I like to see things get challenged. Today was pretty much an Obama love fest though and neither candidate has sold me yet so it was pretty frustrating. The prof is pretty deaf and one of those old white liberal democrats that you are more likely to find in the humaninties. He is all about teaching practicalities rather than theory. Which I used to like, but I also think that if you sign up to go to Cal you know what you are getting into. Want practical? Go to the vocational schools.

The prof set a grim picture of the current US economy today and I totally agreed with him two months ago. Living in America has been easier than it is today. Our poverty line is at $20,000 for a family of four, and a minimum wage job does not earn that much annually. The healthcare system IS in need of a change. But if you're not thrown too much bad luck, the possibility to improve economically exists in this country. I'm not saying you aren't going to work a bajillion hours and that you won't have to make some hard decisions...but it exists. In most of Africa and Asia, it doesn't matter how much you work, because your country is probably stuck in a poverty trap...I mean, one sixth of the world population lives in extreme poverty. So I have a hard time swallowing all this pro-americanism that gets thrown around in class. Not because I don't love America - at my core I truly do love this country, this culture, and all the peoplle that make it what it is. But I am critical of it in a domestic as well as a global context, because I've lived in Europe (and yeah I'm also taking that poverty course).

And as a result of my experiences I am in the process of re-evaluating what it means to be American. Some times it is tough to llive in a country that locked up your grandfather (a born citizen of this nation) and 100,000 other people on the basis of their ancestry and denied them of their rights, and blindly proclaim to love it. Some times it bothers me to know that if my parents were a generation before theirs, it would have been illegal for them to marry. It would have been illegal for me to exist. And I guess I am a little confused, because I want Americans to have jobs, I really do (hell I want to have a job), but enticing corporations to bring their factories back from relatively undeveloped places also means that you are probably writing a death sentence for those people in that far-off place. It's crazy to know that people make decisions every day that will decide who dies where, and when. I look at what the INS does and wonder how much good they are doing when they try to deport non-criminals who have children that were born here and have been contributing to society in a positive manner. I wonder about myself and my opinions and the policies of others a lot. I'm afraid that at the moment I don't know what it means to be American any more than I know what it means to be Japanese American (which was the number one question I got asked this summer).

Shoot, I was going to drop CP 113B because I can't stand the professor. THere was a cute guy I made friends with that would have been nice to know. ANd I enjoyed watching Roger and Me. But my prof has unknowingly given me a lot to think about. It makes me really critical and bitter though, because I don't know what to do with all my contradictions and angry-ness yet. Oh, did I mention we have to do 16 hours of community service isntead of a midterm??