I feel in the same way that even if we don’t realize it, here at Wash. U. we often have a tendency to segment off into racial cliques.

Someone told me before I came here that there was a lot of socioeconomic and racial segregation. I didn’t believe it until I got here and saw the groups that walked around campus. Before I go any farther, I want to say that this is by no means the standard here at Wash. U., but it is definitely prevalent.

Even when I got here, I didn’t notice it until the day when someone commented about a certain group keeping to themselves and shutting everyone else out. I started to notice it and then started to look around for it. When I began to look for it, I realized that it reached far and was represented in many clumps of people I saw walking together on campus.

It seems like even here, where we are in college and supposed to be so culturally aware and racially accepting, a lot of us still have a tendency to compartmentalize ourselves based on the color of our skin. It’s like we claim that when we come here, we are united under our titles as Wash. U. students or under our over-packed schedules or sleep deprivation, but instead of being characterized by those sorts of pan-traits, we take those off and draw lines, not even by majors or extracurricular activities, but by whether we’re black, white or Native American.

What bothers me is that we don’t even mean to do it. We just fall into old habits, maybe glom onto a group of people around whom we’re comfortable, but that raises the question of why being the same race as someone elicits a friendship. I’ve never really understood that. I don’t feel that it’s inherent in our genetic makeup, but rather that we’re just caving to old, still lingering ways of thought.

Just like my friend did not acknowledge the difference that he’s in business and I’m in English or that my hair is long and his is short or that I’m loud and he’s quiet, we seem to strip away all of our other characteristics like they’re just clothes and get down to what we really are: a pigment.

I don’t mean to imply that it’s intentional; I just want to bring awareness to it. We tend to slip into these sort of implicit cultural segregations and go against what our society supposedly is. We need to notice this so we can remedy it and actually be the accepting, integrated university that we’re supposed to be.

It doesn’t matter that my friend is black and I am white; we both wound up at the same place.

In the same manner, I feel like I (and I’m hopefully not the only one) am starting to feel the heat of another round of end-of-the-semester essays/exams and the worry is starting to blister.

I have a weird relationship with the sun. He and I get along very well all throughout the year, except during the spring/summer months, when he decides to redden my skin if I hang out with him for more than 10 minutes or so without wearing sunblock. I don’t know what it is. I have dark hair; everyone in my family is darkly complexioned. However, for some reason, I turn red, get the slightest of tans and fade back to my crazy paleness to start the cycle of skin cancer over again. Because of this, I should have learned that I need to be more careful when I go outside to play stickball with all of my friends, but still I go outside more often than not with absolutely nothing to defend my poor skin from the glare. 

Similarly, I seem to be falling into a sort of lulled ignorance with the end of the semester and the mess of assignments that come with them. I skip merrily through my work, enjoying (or hating) my reading and notes and Spanish, completely unaware that as soon as it’s warm and fun enough for me to change into short sleeves, I will regret it.  

I didn’t even realize how quickly the semester has gone by. We have four weeks left? And then finals? And then my first year here will be over, and I’ll go back home and probably forget to put on sunblock and wind up with a raging burn, a week of freckles and slight pigmentation, and then turn white again.

The harsh UV rays come with the failure to acknowledge the end of the semester until it’s right before us and we find ourselves completely stressed out about our two or three 10-page papers due within a week of each other (am I projecting here?). At least, what I’m feeling right now is an almost complete sense of freaking out at the thought of getting all these done, and it’s making me wish I had some shade or sunglasses or a parasol or something. The worry itself and a lack of adequate preparation are what are so charring. 

There are those, however, those whom I’ve come to envy, like every single cousin I have back home, who can skip the burn stage and go straight to the bronze. I’m not talking to you because you guys are actually prepared and aware without having to try hard, which makes me feel terribly inadequate.  

However, for those of you who share my tender-skinned pain, take heart! While, yes, exams and huge essays may be coming soon and you feel that prickly burn on your neck, remember, you’re almost done with this year. Before we know it, we will be on the other side of May and the burn will have worn off and we’ll be sporting the tan of our accomplishments and have another year under our belt. We can do it, but just make sure to keep a watch on that mole you got from the Orgo exam.

I realized in that moment that I am an extremely awkward person.

Granted, it’s not always easy to interpret the signs given by your friends/bros/what have you, even among the best of friends. But there’s still something to be said about my complete inability to know what kind of shake to do when. If I had more experience, I would probably compile a list of certain instances when whichever salutation/congratulation is available, but judging from my situation on Friday, I obviously do not have that kind of knowledge or experience, which is quite a shame, really.

I know I’ve mastered a couple, though, even if it’s only with a small group of people. For example, when I greet my friends at church, it is always with our secret handshake that they taught me a couple months ago (I felt so cool learning it). Yes, it’s very dorky and very “Boy Meets World,” but I know for a fact that it is how we greet each other, which makes me feel slightly less awkward.

But my inexperience continues to show itself in many greetings. While I have realized that in most business or introduction situations, the general manner of greeting is a handshake, I have found that that is not always the case, so I wind up going in for one when this new person wants, hey, a hug!

I have nothing against the introductory hug, but I find that I usually only go in for one when one is not solicited and wait too long to go in for one when it is warranted. This whole greeting thing just goes to exaggerate my awkwardness, which can also be found in my inability to engage in small talk, my frequent tripping when there is nothing on the ground, and my tendency to, at times, only wear one sock around my dorm room. And, furthermore, how awkward is it to write an entire column about a person’s awkwardness?

What I really want to say in this, though, is not that I absolutely fail at knowing which kind of handshake to do when, but rather that I am an awkward person at a school filled with awkward people, and it is amazing. In my short amount of time here, I have encountered so many wonderfully hilarious incidents and people, which leads me to believe that everyone is a bit awkward. I mean, really, because at how many other places around the country do all the students, even the ones who party on the weekends until they pass out, hole themselves up in their rooms and do homework all night the night before studying for orgo? We have such a hilarious system filled with nerds who are cool but aren’t but are, in spite of their awkwardness.

This wonderfully mundane revelation makes me too happy because I know that even though I do have a copy of “Pokémon Blue” sitting in my desk here and a mild fear of ovens, I am not alone. I know that when I have some intention of greeting someone with whatever derivative of a handshake that I choose, they do not always pick up on my signals, and that’s OK. Because none of us really knows what we’re doing, but we’ll find out after a couple of tries and some not necessarily desired hugs.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@wustl.edu.

It made me wonder about my reluctance and the hesitance of our generation to enter into a sort of conventional adulthood and responsibility.

A lot of the skaters there were crazily talented, skating backward and executing spin-jumps whose names I won’t pretend to know. On top of their ability to do things I would never dream of being able to do on a set of wheels (like getting around the rink without stumbling or falling down completely), some of the people there actually had their skates tricked out with striped laces, Nike Air shoes and even drag-racing under-lights. The whole Friday night skating thing obviously wasn’t something they did every once in a while, but, rather, they had made circling that track over and over again into a lifestyle.

In the same way, I know from my own experience that I’m terrified to think about the concept of stepping into adulthood (and by adulthood I mean the Southern Illinois version I’ve been raised with: job, house, marriage, kids, etc.). The thought of taking on such responsibility terrifies me, which I think seems to be pervasive in our generation. We have so many things to divert us from entering into that situation, though, that we can just hop into the rink and skate, going nowhere but in a circle. This, in turn, becomes a lifestyle, and not just a diversion on our way out of adolescence.

For the most part, people are getting married later, having children later, contenting themselves with living a lifestyle that for a long time before us would have been considered, for the most part, a kind of perpetual adolescence. It’s like we’ve created the time of deferral, pushing back what has been taken as normal for so long, so we can do what we want and maybe not have to worry about going out completely on our own or gaining financial independence from our parents.

When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean it is a bad thing. I know for some weird reason, I have a tendency to get lost in thought when I’m skating. Maybe it’s the cyclical nature or something? Either way, though, there’s something to be said about this period of deferral in which many of my older friends have found themselves. Maybe it helps younger people find out who they are before they have to jump into the real world (although I’ve always considered everything in my life to be as real as the world can be).

I don’t pretend to have the answers. All I know is that when my dad and my grandpa were my age, they were married, owned a house and possibly had a child on the way (once again, that could be Southern Illinois, but maybe not). Even the thought of marriage terrifies me, and I can’t imagine having such a link to another person. I just want to be able to find myself before anything else.

I guess as far as I’m concerned, I am content that I have this rink that I can cycle through for a while and learn a little bit more about myself. We’ll all unlace our skates when we’re ready, but in the meantime, I think I’ll worry about keeping my balance here and avoiding any collisions with the guy turning a triple axel over there.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@gmail.com.

In the same manner, I feel that I (we) have a tendency to grow so distracted by school and all of the obligations associated with it that I have come to lose track of my own desires in an effort to satisfy some sort of ideal that cannot be reconciled.

Granted, we all have homework and extracurricular activities that we have to keep track of, but I know that in my case, I have become so fervent about my studies or throwing myself into everything I have to read for class that I completely lose touch with the outside world. I spend all Thursday nights and Fridays working on homework so I can get it all out of the way, but then I wind up waiting until the night before a paper is due, staying awake until the wee hours of the morning and then pretending that I’m some kind of martyr for the literary tradition. And see, the thing is that I tell myself it is worth becoming so immersed in this spectacle of academia, writing papers and identifying arguments and slicing open old, old books, all for the sake of “knowledge,” and making myself better for that one ominous day when some boat brings the bishop to cross himself and give me a communion wafer.

I used to like writing fiction, stories with actual characters and plot, stories like the ones I find myself having to read for class, but not nearly as good. But now? Now, I’m too busy scouring and organizing my house before the priest gets here so I can be acceptable as a college student or intellectual or whatever it is we’re supposed to be at a university. An adult?

Whatever it is I find myself pretending to be, and whatever it is I’m preening over, I feel like I’ve lost a little bit of myself. I came here so I could improve my writing, and I’m even in a fiction class this semester, but now even that has become hurried, mechanical. It’s more about fitting myself to the expectations of my professors and not what I, myself, am really passionate about.

The problem with the citizens in “Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada” is that they become so concerned with preparing themselves for the bishop’s oh-so-holy coming to demonstrate how very sacred and sanctified they are, that right in the middle of their efforts, they watch as an innocent man is murdered and do absolutely nothing. In their efforts to be blameless, they end the story with blood on their hands, guilty by association, but still guilty.

I know I, at least, have done that, and I can imagine that I am not the only one. I have harbored and squelched the one thing that I enjoy more than anything else. I have claimed a title of scholar and augmented it with only superficial thoughts and readings. I have called for profound and ground-shaking action, all the while chatting on Facebook or continuing to contribute to the systems against which I protest with my words. I have prepared my temple for the Man of God, and I, in my inaction, have killed Santiago Nasar.

The greatest irony of “Crónica” is that the bishop never actually comes. In the blind zeal of the measures taken to make his visit a pleasant and holy one, the townspeople let one of their own die because they were too distracted by the promise of something that would make their lives what they were supposed to be, some ideal. In the end, though, they find that they have lost a part of themselves for something that was never worth it to begin with.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@wustl.edu.

The only advertisements with real people on them show skinny women bent in some sexy position with their bedroom eyes assaulting passersby, which makes me feel like even here at our very accepting school we are perpetuating the cycle of the objectification of women and telling a lie about beauty.

The look is thin. Everyone knows that. My friend and I were discussing the other day how chain stores like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch have shrunk the size of their women’s clothing (she had to go up two sizes to fit in their clothes). Couple that with the skin-tightness of everything, and we find our nation’s girls trying to get thinner and thinner to fit the standards of the magazines they read and the television shows they watch. Preteen girls have begun to develop eating disorders as early as age 5 or 6. It’s easy for us to see that, shake our heads in derision, and say what a shame it is.

And it’s easy for us to call shenanigans and sexism when we see Beyoncé and Lady Gaga writhing in their music videos (“Video Phone,” anyone?), and talk about the degradation of society, and put the Federal Communications Commission on speed dial. I mean, even Miley is showing a little skin nowadays. They have every right to do whatever they want with their bodies, don’t get me wrong, but they are promulgating a super-sexualized body image for impressionable younger (and even older) females that has been around for centuries. You are breasts. You are hips. You are uterus. Throw in a little prophecy, and you are the makings of a Virgilian epic.

We have had a culture of misogyny and objectification of women created for us. We all know that.

What I can’t seem to wrap my mind around, though, is the thought that even here at Wash. U., where we find ourselves so educated, we fall into those same constructs. It’s more than just the posters, but they are a prime example. We try so hard to be politically correct here, and we read our Foucault and our Times, but then we slap these half-naked girls on our posters, falling right back into the cultural norms. If men and women were equally represented, I would understand, but that isn’t the case. Sport is still being made of her quality as a sexual object.

And might I add that the women presented on these posters are skinny white women? We’ve become so inextricably tied into this view (although it may be implicit) that the ideal woman is white, thin, curvy in all the right places and sprawled half-naked on the hood of a Ford truck, even here at our school.

Why do we continue to enforce these beliefs and values of beauty where we can actually influence beauty’s perception? When we fall back on the default of the super-sexualized woman (even when it’s something as small as a poster) we only augment years of the subservience of women and insult who they are as people. Check out the Tantric Sex Workshop, yeah, but remember that you and/or the women in your life are more than that.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@gmail.com.

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