The Future is Upon Us

College?

Tell me things.

Abortion e-cards?

Ummmmmm....

Yeah, so I was watching CNN and came across this story: Exhale (www.4exhale.org), a support group with resources for women who have had an abortion and their families, has launched new abotion e-cards.

A sample:




































E-cards! You hit a button and send this, "You've got mail!" style, like you'd send a goofy St. Patrick's Day greeting. I don't even do e-cards for birthdays-- if a friend made the personal and significant decision to have an abortion and I know she's sitting at home recovering, I can't imagine expressing my empathy through an e-card.

The pro-life organizations are jumping on this as trivializing abortion (maybe I share that view, actually, but in a different way) and encouraging abortion by normalizing it; Exhale defends that it has run a post-abortion hotline for five years now and all its staff are women who have had abortions--so who would know better what these women need?

What do you think?

Much TASPly love,
Tracy

PS I'm seeing Spencer this weekend!!! Of course, I'm excited beyond words. Pictures will be forthcoming.

Yesterday I got an email from a little TASPlet who told me he has the same interviewer as I had last year. That made me realize it's been a year since TASP interviews, which is sad and alarming and exciting to me. It means I'm about to go to college and that I've almost made it through this year without imploding. It also means that I haven't seen most of you in eight months and counting, and that we're rapidly moving towards another summer destined to be significantly less cool than the last.

On that mildly soulcrushing note, I have a gift for you all. I was going through files on my computer today and found some of the excellent videos made by Spencer on his phone to document the TASP experience. Here are the first couple, in all their boring, delightfully TASPy glory.


Note Tyler's use of the phrase, "we will love you...in a non-eros way" and Lynn's use of the Evil Glare. Also, we all look like we're falling asleep. Which we probably were.


Classic Manasi


Gerardo on El Salvador: "third world country, underdeveloped, pretty cool"


and now, just because I'm on a youtube trip, I bring you a special presentation. This is from my interview with the Denver mayor last week.

heh.

Apartheid: then and now

In the furore over Jimmy Carter’s use of term “apartheid” in his latest treatise on the Israel-Palestine problem, many strange things have happened. On an international scale, the architect of the Camp David Accords has been branded an anti-Semite (although his work, Joseph Lelyveld claims in the New York Review, “did more to secure Israel’s place and legitimacy in the region than all the diplomacy that preceded or followed it”). And on a personal scale, I’ve been driven to do something no self-respecting Wash U TASPer would ever dream possible: I’ve been referencing Nesbitt. I must admit I have gained a new appreciation for Nesbitt, as I have discovered that his prose is worth its tangled, tortured weight in gold when consumed in small chunks (although all 200 pages of unadulterated Nesbitt was a bit much to land on us at the end of TASP).

At any rate, I turned to Nesbitt because I was curious about the Carter administration’s reaction to the original apartheid (the South African variety, that is). Today, as the current outrage proves, the term “apartheid” packs a punch perhaps stronger even than that of the word “racist,” for “apartheid” suggests the wilful, carefully organized pursuit of freely acknowledged prejudice and hatred to horrible, horrible ends. On one level, it is heartening to see that there is now general recognition of the horrors associated with apartheid. However, it is worth remembering that there was a time when even the Nobel Peace laureate Mr. Carter did not find apartheid so repugnant as we do today. Quoth Nesbitt (starting halfway down page 105):

Meanwhile, the newly elected Democratic President Jimmy Carter appointed an African-American civil rights leader, Andrew Young, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Despite this appointment and Carter’s human rights rhetoric, however, there was little substantive change in U.S. policy toward the white regimes of southern Africa during his tenure… At a press conference to discuss his appointment as ambassador to the UN on 14 January1977, Young said that he was prepared to veto any resolution calling for the expulsion of South Africa…

When Young later took a more radical line and began to outline a tougher stance on Apartheid during a trip to Africa, he was “snubbed” by none other than, sorry Ryan, Vice-President Mondale whose remarks, according to Nesbitt “indicated the ambivalence of the Carter administration on the issue of apartheid.” (Interestingly enough, Nesbitt mentions the presence of PLO supporters in anti-apartheid marches during this period and notes that Israel was reluctant to attend anti-apartheid conferences for fear of delegates taking the opportunity to equate Zionism with apartheid.)

It is easy enough for us to recoil in horror at the very mention of apartheid today, now that it has been dismantled; however, it is humbling to remember that it was all too easy to turn a blind eye to the abuses taking place only thirty years ago. Today commentators would suggest that apartheid is “too strong” a word to use on any current situation. Nevertheless, we can be in no doubt that there is still massive injustice in the world, injustice to which we are no doubt as ambivalent as the Carter administration was to apartheid. That’s what has been bothering me since the end of TASP, since reading about all those brave activists and disparaging all those who cowered on the sidelines: for all my rhetoric, will I have the nerve to recognize injustice when we see it? And if I have the courage to recognize it, will I have the strength to act?

Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I

After the great import and sobriety of this post’s immediate predecessors, I must admit I feel horribly trivial posting on so banal a subject as colleges. The current search for colleges rather reminds me of genteel marriage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. High-powered mothers, like so many SAT Prep book-welding Mrs. Bennetts desperately trying to fling their offspring into the paths of the most eligible colleges, although some of us have nothing but our intellectual charms to recommend us. Yet, like a silly young girl I resolutely refuse to understand that the attractive colleges (to me, at least) need to have some funds to live on as well as the unattractive ones.

At any rate, that rather garbled introduction was my last gasp of desperately pretending that I really can go to Oxford. This morning I received a letter from Oriel in reply to my letter informing the college that I am now officially a subject of her Majesty. I have not opened the letter yet, but I know it can contains one of but two possible replies.

1) You like marmalade and read the Spectator, therefore we consider you British and the British government can foot the bill, or

2) We only wanted you for your money, so give us $150,000 or get lost. (Besides, you’ve never actually lived in Britain, you hideous imposter.)

My parents have been gently trying to prepare me for the latter response, and I regret now that I was so stubborn in my naivety. Rawr. Anyway, if I don’t get the optimal ending now, I can always try again when I apply to graduate school. However, Ryan’s post really helped me see how silly I have been. It is only a college, after all: going to Oriel is not an inalienable human right, but a “fiction... a dream of passion.” All the TASPers are safe and well: that is the important thing. And what’s the use of honing one’s intellect if one does not put it to as brilliant use as Comrade McClure has just done? At any rate, writing to the TASPers always makes one feel better and reminds me of the truly important things. So I shall open the letter tomorrow, but for tonight, I can still pretend…

Forgive my silly whining.

P. S. My Scottish grandfather just sent me a T. E. Lawrence action figurine. It’s awesomeness defies description. Pictures coming soon.

While I do not mean to upstage the erudite and charming Mr. McClure, I have a rather major story. I know I'll end up telling all of you this eventually, and to be perfectly honest I'd rather do it just once.

Originally I intended to write you a nice entry about the film festival I went to over the weekend, how the Denver Post published my letter to the editor (about that article on my school I posted last week), and my detour through Telluride on the way back (complete with photo of me sipping from an "I <3 Telluride" mug). And I still may do that at some point. But the whole trip was completely colored by what happened to us (my best friend and I) on our way back.

We had been driving all day Sunday, and by 9:30 or so at night we were almost home. We were driving through a mountain pass about an hour and half south of Denver when we hit a patch of ice and started skidding into the opposite lane. My friend, who was the one driving at that point, jerked the wheel back the other way and we slid right off the side of the road. The car slammed sideways into an embankment of snow and then flipped into the air. It rolled twice with us inside and landed upside down in a ditch.

Remarkably, we were both totally uninjured, save a few minor glass cuts and some whiplash. I was hanging from my seatbelt (if that's not an effective PSA for seat belt use, I don't know what is), so my friend unbuckled me and we started looking through the shattered car for a cell phone to call for help. When we couldn't find one, I started freaking out and saying that no one would find us and all of this nonsense that was so unreasonable that in retrospect I can't quite understand how I could have even believed myself. But anyway, we both climbed out her window, which was completely shattered through. There were about four feet of snow on the ground and I had lost my shoes somehow in the crash, but I barely noticed that as we climbed up the hill to the road about 15 feet away. A car had already stopped and he was calling 911. He let us sit in his car until the police came.

The rest of the night was pretty terrible, as you might imagine. I was basically crying inconsolably for an hour and a half while cops and paramedics and my parents asked me questions about what had happened. I frequently realize in situations of distress that my crisis-reaction stills are not top notch. This was yet another example. Anyway, because I was "injured" (the small cut on my forehead bled all over my face and looked far worse than it really was), my friend was charged with reckless driving and has to go to court. She also lost her license because she already has some points on it for parking/speeding tickets. My mom's car, which we were driving, was totally destroyed.

All that said, it's mostly just remarkable that we lived at all. I'm pretty sure it was only because we landed in such heavy snow and because we were both wearing our seatbelts. It could have so easily been much, much worse. There were some other strange things as well. We had been listening to my ipod through a tape adapter (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco. i'll probably never want to listen to that album again. a shame, since it's one of my favorites) and when we crashed it was thrown ten feet out of the car, but landed softly and when I picked it up later had simply paused on the last song we were listening to. A bottle of beer we were given at the film festival (long story) made it through unbroken and my laptop, which was in my backpack, sailed over the car somehow, but is still in working condition.

That's all peripheral, but I've been marveling over it just because the entire incident seems so unreal. I walked away unhurt, with all of my possessions intact. Logically, that doesn't happen when your car rolls over with you inside. What can I say except that it was the strangest (and also most terrifying) experience of my life. Sort of a boring conclusion, but it's true.

Anyway, if I owe you a phone call, it'll probably be a while before I get around to it because my cell phone is in a police station in the small town near where this all happened and I'm not sure when I'm going to get down there to pick it up. Yeah.

That's about it. That's a draining story to tell, even via blog, so I'm off to sleep now.
Good night.

Glory to the Builders of Stalin's Balloons

I realize this is now the second of my very few posts to deal with Burnt by the Sun, but I would just like to thank Lynn for showing us that incomparable piece of Russkie cinema, mainly for the phrase you can see in the title line above. Random, yes. Delectable, certainly.
You may not know this, but during TASP, inspired by that line, I started sketching out a play. I changed the pertinent quote to "Glory to the Crew of Nixon's Airship," which is both slightly more American and slightly less sensible, and the plot of the piece is in no way related to good ol' Burnty, but the impetus for the production remains firmly in the hands of Soviet cinematographers.
Two days ago was the premiere of my play. (Ruben - these were the rehearsals I was mumbling about.) Below, my program notes (the names you see below are all my friends/actors).

"Nixon’s Airship" is an extraordinarily adequate play. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly situates the piece in the blessed domain of the palatable, but most would venture to say that the stunning competency on display here is largely the result of vaguely committed efforts by (in imprecisely alphabetical order) the tolerable Finn (as the Official), the satisfactory Kaplan (as the Owner), the sufficient MacPherson (as the Detective), the acceptable Thrailkill (as the Newspaperman), and the somewhat disappointing but inexplicably erotic McClure (the Friend), who also would like to halfheartedly apologize for having directed the show in much the same way that an obese badger might ride a bicycle, as well as for having written all of the words you will hear tonight (with the arguable exception of “Ha!” on page 12).
Incidentally, it is these words, or “palabras,” as writers tend to refer to them, that pose Nixon’s greatest problem. After all, the play has so many of them, several of which are different, or at least spelled differently (e.g.: “cat” and “methamphetamines”). What do they all mean? Fortunately, very little, as it turns out.
The play is, on the surface, an absurdist slapstick centered around the real-life Alien Hand Syndrome, which causes one of the patient’s hands to take on a mind of its own. This is an admittedly horrifying condition that fortunately remains amusing because you’ve more than likely lost your capacity for empathy after accidentally tuning into C-SPAN at 2:00 in the morning while hurriedly searching for that one infomercial with the knives (try channel 21). However, much like a razorblade in an apple, Nixon has at its core a fractal exposition of Wittgenstein’s later linguistic theories, which state that words have no inherent meaning, but instead are defined communally by common usage. This is in itself the point of the play, and now that you’ve read it, you might as well go and boozhe menkatalovkerebgen purnka hopjedwaflip kogadurkeh bedajibbachep klamkin meschkintod waydelee.

In conclusion, all glory be to Lynn.