linesdivide

I’m involved with this on-campus group called Men Acting Against Rape (MAAR) and we do a lot of stuff within the campus community. This coming Wednesday we are putting on a presentation called “Good Sex?” which will consist of a panel of about five speakers answering a bunch of questions submitted anonymously by UCD students. Over the last couple weeks the MAAR guys have been sifting through the 100 or so questions that’ve been submitted in order to find a solid twenty for the panel to answer.

Yesterday Adam (the president), Diego (the vice president), Lisa (our coordinator at the Women’s Resource Center), Tony (another member) and I sorted the latest batch of questions, trying to determine the final cut. A lot of the questions had to be “gender nuetralized” in order to have the question apply to both a large audience and the key speakers but during the course of the question selection process the five of us discussed issues of gendered pronouns. A few of the participants at yesterday’s meeting thought it might be a good idea to use “ze”, the non-gendered pronoun replacement for “he” and “she”. Not having heard this before, I was at first amused and then puzzled. Does society really need to deconstruct age-old lanuage patterns in order to be more inclusive and fair? Or does creating new words to suit a seemingly minute problem open up a potentially overwhelming readjustment of language as we know it?

I’m well aware that various other languages, including Chinese (see wikipedia link here) have gender neutral pronouns but in the process of changing from an established engendered system to a specifically non-gendered one, it seems as though something would be lost. Perhaps the loss would be positive and result in something like an increase in equality between women and men but that seems like a long shot at best. For the time being, the quest to make language politically correct by removing any gendered words seems like a practice in futility.

I can never really come up with decent titles for my posts but I guess I’ll worry about that more when I have time to do so. Today was crazy and started just after 7am with torrential rain going sideways in what would be a generally gray day. I drove over to the Sorrento apartment lease office to sign up for a house for next and got there two hours before opening to assure my place in line. With Jack Kerouac to keep me company, I wasted the next hour and forty-five minutes of my life. Unfortunately, my hasty early arrival (not something I am generally known for) didn’t get me anywhere as the next arrival to the lease office came in around 10:15am.

I returned to take a nap, go to chem, attempt to read about quatum numbers and go to a MAAR meeting. Around ten I watched Law and Order, after which I realized my resnet connection was still down. UC Davis has this great policy of denying access to anyone who is thought to have a virus/worm on their system that spreads across the network and seeing how my beloved Powerbook isn’t affected by these crazy things, I can only assume that my trusty roommate Alfdog has something suspicious on his computer. For the mean time, I’ll run a wire into Ronaldo’s room and steal his bandwidth. Muuhahahhahaha!!

With only about 37 hours remaining before my chem midterm starts I should probably get some sleep. Starting around nine tomorrow morning until the time of the exam I can be found in the Primero Grove Commons wondering why the hell chemistry has to be so damn tedious.

Way back in the spring of 2000, three friends, my father and I went to Mammoth Lakes, CA for a few days of snowboarding. This year marks the fourth year of the trip and while the lineup of friends has changed, the fun remains. This year we had Allan, Mauricio, Mitchell, Paul (my brother), Marshall (the pops) and Randy (Allan’s dad). I took a ton of pictures, so without further ado, here they are:

warning: these pictures are a little on the large side (~100kB) so they might take a while to load on slower connections.

Maui gets ready. He also has an affinity for Chinese women (half-joking). We saw a lot of wildlife on our trip through Yosemite. But then we had to turn around and get gasoline. We continued to drive through the night and into the morning (2, 3). Allan continued to drive through the morning to our cabin. Maui wasn’t feeling well so he chilled in the backseat. Allan and Maui being tough. The three of us got to our cabin around 7am, 11 hours after we left Berkeley. We slept until two in the afternoon, after which we went shopping. Maui hung out on the couch and watched some TV. Around midnight everyone else came in. Mitchell was excited. Everyone else was in the kitchen. The rest of us hung out in our beds. We got up early the next day so we could get a full day in. Mitchell waited patiently. It was beautiful outside. Paul was amped. This wild dog approached us. Looks scary, huh? Allan got his boots on. Mitch was ready. Maui, Mitchell and Allan headed up on the lift. Paul and I were there too. Meanwhile, Randy cooked up a storm in the kitchen. Here we are on the couch on the morning of day two. Mitchell in the car. A picture of the sky the afternoon we left. Seeing as Maui, Allan and I got lost on the way up, the dads took it upon themselves to make sure we got back. Fortunately, the trip back was fine and I got a chance to hang out with Maui’s puppy Tux.

A great weekend, for sure. I’m already looking forward to next year. Mammoth? Tahoe? Somewhere in Utah or Colorado? Whatever it is, it’ll be good.

That’s right, the Pixies are coming to UC Davis. One of only two California dates, the other being the Coachella Music Festival.

Tickets go on sale on March 1st.