Wednesday, April 26, 2006

I always get freaked out towards the end of the semester, especially in the spring. I guess it has something to do with the fact that the summer looms ahead as a vast emptiness of space and opportunity, of time to be taken advantage of or wasted. Maybe it has something to do with how I was brought up, going to school each year and finding no respite until late spring when I was granted freedom in the form of a last half-day with parties or movies instead of class.

When we're growing up, at least in this country, springtime almost becomes a sort of second New Year's Eve-- the last day of school is the countdown until the dropping of the ball, the first step into the unburdened sunlight is the moment we kiss our loved ones and scream "Happy New Year!" Life feels like a pattern in school--the same teacher and classmates and subjects--and our moment of freedom is the turning of a new leaf, it's the opportunity to get our stuff together, to make new academic and life goals. It feels like a new chance to spread our wings and discover something new about ourselves.

So maybe that's why I get so jittery at the end of a spring semester, especially this one. I'm not graduating, I'm not even packing and moving my things, and I'll hardly have a break before I'm in the classroom again. But regardless, that last day of school still looms and it seems to be shouting on the horizon "Happy Last Year of Childhood!" "Happy Last Year Before You're an Adult!"

With years, with experience, as each day becomes a smaller and smaller portion of our lives, I find myself looking back at all my end-of-the-year resolutions and finding myself frozen in the face of those in my future. I find myself wondering if our end-of-school-eves will become nothing but our nostalgic longings of the past; and if after all this school and all this education is done, what used to be our yearly step into the freedom of summer and possibility will merely become just another day in the office or just another change of the seasons.

So we stand here. We stand and look out towards that horizon, possibility one of the last we will have sight of. We cannot stop the time, we cannot delay the approach. Perhaps all we can do is have the courage to make the best resolution we possibly can and learn that in the future, that resolution is the kind that's always worth keeping.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Regardless of what you think of NYU, no one can deny that it might very well be the most inspiring school in the country. I know I'm going to sound like an admissions officer with this post, but after today, and after tomorrow, I truly believe that NYU has a leg up on most other schools in America.

Why? Because every second at NYU, living in the heart of Manhattan, is an education. Perhaps this is true outside the classroom more so than in. Let me give you three examples.

1. This past Fall, our graduate student TAs went on strike demanding that the University recognize their union. What outsiders might not realize, is that everyone in the NYU community got to experience first hand the power of the First Amendment and the right of the worker. We chose whether or not to cross picket lines, opting for pissing off professors or pissing off protestors. We chose to walk off campus to go to class, we heard brilliant people talking about how the unions saved their ancestors, their parents, themselves, and heard up-and-coming Ph.D.s and Masters students screaming at the top of their lungs and drumming beneath an inflatable rat. Going to NYU in the Fall was in a way reliving a history that most people can only read and dream about. We watched as rights were upheld and knocked down, and maybe we took a little something away from that.

2. Today Washington Square Park was crawling with immigrants and their supporters, police barracades, ACLU watchdogs and journalists. The air was alive with a language that lots of people didn't understand, chants that meant nothing to probably the majority of the NYU community. But our sidewalks were blocked off, and our streets were covered with silent police lights and we watched the protest of our government as we ate lunch in our "quad." It was almost as if we had thousands of visitors that had come to our campus to show us just what it means to exercise our right to protest our government and not be stopped: it was an interactive lecture, a celebration of Americanism that had fallen into our laps to show us possibility.

3. Tomorrow is the tuition reform rally, which will probably prove to be much smaller than the teeming immigration protest of today. Still, it seems so fitting that it comes at such a moment at our university. We have spent the last two semesters on the sidelines or in the masses of these two great examples of the way that rights can be exercised, and here we are at a cross-roads when we can begin to take change into our own hands. I don't believe that tomorrow's rally is about the outcome, I believe it's about the act itself. It is about students, faculty, a community demonstrating for a common good, the way we have learned by just being present for the past year. Perhaps we have no other choice than to rally together, or perhaps we do it because we've been inspired.

My point is not to put NYU on a pedestal. Hardly. My point is that our education, especially here, is all the time. It happens accidentally on the street corner or while we're picniking by the fountain. It happens when we're walking between classes or getting a cup of coffee in the morning. And with it, with this knowledge and understanding, comes an immense responsibility. No longer will we be able to justifiably sit on the sidelines and watch people practice the rights they were born with, but we will have to jump into the fray, scream in any language, thump on any drum, just because we've seen it and we know how it's done. If I can wish one thing for the community at NYU, that is what I wish. I wish that they will jump in, I wish that they will prove their rights everyday. I fear that they won't, but I hope that they will.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

The more I hang out with people my age, the more I realize how very much the same we are, how very lost we all are. At an age when confidence is cool, when success is increasingly necessary, and to be successful, we cannot lose sight of the goal, the time when doubt is most strongly taking hold, is the first time when its existence seems dangerous to our entire futures.

It’s not only me, I realize, who hides my self-doubt. The more I think on it, every single one of us is doing it: we’ve just gotten really good at building a shield to hide the fact that we’re all freaking out. Our shields say composed, put together, happy, proud. Our shields tell the world that it can trust us, even though we have no idea what we’re doing. Even though, behind it, each and everyone of us is having a crisis, is holding back tears, is tremendously terrified for ourselves, terrified for each other.

Sometimes when I feel pain, when I feel sad or overwhelmed or generally confused about what the hell I’m doing, I feel like I’m the only one. I cannot feel another’s pain and so forget, you feel it too. Maybe that’s our problem: we’ve all forgotten that we’re a collective freak-out, our entire age group is a collective panic attack, stifled under the pressure of each other, of a world that gives us the materials to build really good walls and motes around ourselves. A world, an age, that teaches us to ignore the freak-out. But when we ignore it, we forget that every single one of us…yeah, every single one…is freaking-out behind closed doors.

This post is dedicated to our collective panic attack. It’s dedicated to the guy who doesn’t know where he wants to be or what he wants to do.

It’s to the girl who’s in the most beautiful country in the world, but still feels lonely.

It’s to the guy who can’t choose a life path because he’s still burdened by his past.

It’s to the girl who trying so hard to build on a job that doesn’t really make her happy.

It’s to the guy who will stay up all night tonight ‘cause things just don’t always work out.

It’s to the girl who’s still so haunted by a past that keeps throwing itself at her.

It’s to the girl who’s making the tough decision. The girl who’s overwhelmed with work. The guy who’s afraid of the love he’s falling into. The girl having the quarter life crisis. The guy trying so hard to make friends. The girl who had to cut the time of her life short…

It’s dedicated to our pain, our tough decisions. It’s dedicated to the face that we look at in the mirror every morning, the chin we push up high, the smile we paint on. It’s dedicated to our strength. I believe in that strength…I believe it’s harder than people realize to be us, to be our age. And the more I spend time with us, the more I realize how very strong we all are.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

What is spring? How do we know it when we see it?

If I could take a picture of spring, I would take a picture of the sound of my bedroom this afternoon. Passed out on my bed, lit by the dwindling sun of a late-March evening of a day when spring shined so evidently through the cracks that you could smell it even in New York, I woke up to the sound of latin pop literally pulsing through my open window. You know it is spring when you can wake up from a nap, and the darkness outside can actually make you smile because it's just as alive as the light. The car parked on the street, rocking spanish so loud that the whole block must have shaken, the swarms of people packing the streets at 2:30 in the morning. It is their sound I wish I could take a picture of-- if only I could capture that hazy moment between lucidity and dreaming when Shakira's voice invade my subconscious world to tell me the world is vibrant, that would be spring.

Spring would be the low murmer of people all around me, in the darkness of the night, partying under the distant glow of the Empire State building, the rings of cell phones, the pattering of footsteps on the ceiling from the party on the roof. If only I could take a picture of these sounds, of that morning smell that announces the new season just before it starts, me in my room with the energy of the neighborhood breezing through my window and flooding the world with life.

How do you know it's spring? Can you capture it on film? In words? In memory? Can you capture emotion, power, happiness with any one sense? Or must we always use them all to archive the scented sounds of spring?