castles made of sand

There’s often something that seems to be increasingly unfair. Whenever someone goes to a choir concert, band performance, or a theatre production, it’s understood that these are the work of students. You don’t compare those performances with those of professionals, who have spent their lives working on their craft. You realize that these are students who are constantly learning about their art, and as such, may not display the quality of high ended performances. We don’t compare the student cafeteria with a five star restaurant, we don’t compare the basketball and baseball teams with professionals, and we don’t expect students in the medical field to perform surgery.

So why then is the student run newspaper critiqued so fiercely? The Independent is a student learning project and collaboration that gives students an introduction into the field of journalism. You can’t expect every story you read or they write to be Pulitzer worthy. These are students learning how to write, student who are using the college paper to find out what works and what doesn’t work in their writing. Trial and Error.

Despite this, the student newspaper is constantly berated with people pointing out our faults and laughing at our mistakes. They hold the work of students to unfair standards with high-minded superiority, with so rarely offering constructive criticism.

Think for a minute, if you would like your English 102 paper critiqued publicly on a weekly basis. How many students would join the theatre productions if they knew their audience would judge them so harshly? How many people would sing, or play their instrument, or compete if they thought that their every mistake would be highlighted, and their success would be buried.

The point of student participating in programs at Clark, a community college, is so that we can try out different things before devoting the rest of our college life on it. We constantly learn new things about how our field works and what we can do to make it better. Given the response I’ve heard from friends, peers, and even teachers, I’ve come to expect that if I want to continue in this field, I should get comfortable with being ridiculed and critiqued on a daily basis. I should come to love the sneer and disdain that even my friends have for my field. I should, in all probability, find something else that’s not so universally reviled. The faculty and student body actively alienates a group of students who are still learning. So much for the ‘next step’.

The theatre department is putting on A Streetcar Named Desire sometime next month. The show itself is great, even though Tennessee Williams gets caught up in his own cleverness, both Streetcar and A cat on a hot tin roof are really well written plays that have helped a lot of actors start their career, such as Marlon Brando.

Even though the show is prolific and a classic, I really don’t think that it can be performed well at the college level. Since this is a community college, the amount of student taking theatre classes is smaller than Universities with larger budgets. The talent you find at a community college is sparse compared to a theatre school you’d have to audition for. With that in mind, shows that have such a wealth of interpretation like Streetcar isn’t the best choice for student actors. It’s like Shakespeare. No matter how good a student is, how deep they play Hamlet or how flippant they play Puck, there are still thousands of actors that are doing the same thing, and better.

The community college theatre is more a place to explore new ideas on stage, newer plays and less known scripts to expand the horizons of both the actors and the audience. The problem with putting on shows like Streetcar, or Fiddler on the Roof, or anything Shakespeare, is that the audience is going to be much more critical, as they’ve seen the show many times before. They will have been exposed to many interpretations of those shows and will stack all those performances against the show put on by the students.

Lisa Abbott, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, is leaving Clark after this show. I was hoping that she’d do something a bit more challenging or controversial to signal her departure. The Clark audience would have really benefited from seeing No Escape or Tartuffe, or something as grand and magnanimous as Les Miserables. Instead, we’re going to get a well-meaning, but disadvantaged version of a show almost everyone’s seen.

The end of a Quarter at Clark always inspires ‘over-the-horizon’ behavior not unlike Wizard of Oz. The people who make flyers and posters, and hand out free food often like to mark the end of a Quarter as a milestone. And while we don’t go that far, The Independent does do little things, usually only a banner though.

The most the end of a Quarter ever meant for me was a brief chance to get some actual sleep, attempt to do some things on my ‘Super Magic Fun Time World Domination’ checklist, and hope I didn’t fail any of my classes.

Seriously, I’m really looking forward to sleeping in for a few days. I think when it comes to going to bed at a decent hour, I’m a masochist. I know that I’m going to have to get up at the crack of dawn, but I always end up going to bed at 2 or 3. This strangely extended spring break we’re all getting is going to be spent walking around Portland and enjoying criminally long naps.

You know, I still haven’t heard a satisfactory reason why this Quarter was shortened so much. The Quarter started later and is ending sooner than previous Quarters. I’m not really complaining, it means less class time, but if Clark was going to make a major change in the length of their curriculum, shouldn’t have there been a memo? Still, if it means two whole weeks of Spring Break, it can’t be bad.

This Quarter saw a lot of things on campus change. For instance, the remodeling of Gaiser Hall, which I think started last winter, is finally done. The building is completed, and the poor middle management types that were banished to the T-Building will probably spend their two weeks dragging their stuff back to this side of the road. We have maps and markers on campus and in the parking lots. Personally, I think that color coordinated parking lot system is rather cloying, but I sort of approve. The signs though are a bit weird.

While walking to class today, I came across two maps. In one map, north was south, Gaiser was on the bottom and Bauer, Baird and AA5 was on the top. This makes sense because it’s facing the direction a student is walking. However, all my on the fly logic escaped me when I saw another sign next to the Science building in which North was left and South was right. Gaiser was on the left side of the map and Bauer was on the right. This makes no sense and I also begs the question, ‘Who the hell designed these things?’.

Anyway, on a more local note, next quarter will be different because we won’t have Rachel or Rylan here anymore. It’ll be weird, but as long as Joanna doesn’t abuse her new power and keeps Chris in check, things should be fine.

People in this culture don’t make eye contact. When you try, they seem to become immediately fascinated by their fingernails or a new development on their shoes. I wonder why this is? I spent a bit of time on the balcony outside the ASCC, the one above the entrance to Archer Gallery. I kept trying to make eye contact with the people below who were looking up, but every time I made a connection, they broke off.

I’ll be the first to admit being far too introspective, but we’ve lost the ability to make connections with people. I don’t know how, I can only guess. One of my theories has to do with our mode of entertainment. We don’t need to go out to the movie theater or the bookstore to be entertained. We can get all of that information, that culture, from home. We don’t even need to leave our homes to eat or work. We can do that all from the comforts of our homes. Maybe this is why our social muscle has atrophied.

Another theory that I have is that people’s aversion to eye contact has nothing to do with our culture, but more to the point our personality; what we think is normal. We betray so much of our emotion and thought through our eyes. We can be read in an instant by one single, actual glance into our eyes. This aversion to eye contact then becomes a self-defense mechanism. We avert our gaze so that other people can’t look at us, look into us.

But this begs another question, why do we fear being understood? If my life, the lives of my friends, and my family are any indication, the average person in this country is relatively good, if a little misguided. Great acts of evil, shame, and guilt are rare, but we all carry this perceived weight on our shoulders, as if we’re ashamed at being alive. These little transgressions that we make in our daily lives are small, but we enlarge them and punish ourselves for them by carrying the weight. We as a people need to learn how to forgive each other, and how to live without turning our heads away from each other.

But while we’re demanding the impossible, I’d like a helicopter, a tropical island with a pirate fortress, and an education that won’t put me into debt for the rest of my life.

During psychology yesterday, we conducted a small experiment that exhibits the characteristics of group think. The professor had a bottle of what she said was the essence of what they add to natural gas to make it smell like rotten eggs. She said she was going to open the bottle and we were going to raise our hands when we detected it. She opened it and stepped back quickly, after about 30 seconds, I thought I smelt something, so I raised my hand. One other person near my also raised his hand.

As it turns out, there was nothing in that bottle but water, which she demonstrated by spraying me with. I’m not so upset about being sprayed as learning of my susceptibility to suggestion. In social situations, I’ve always brandished my charisma around and mostly got people to do as I want, but I never thought that I’m just as easily swayed.

So, I’ve decided I’m going to be (or try) to be completely self-reliant. I’m going to depend on my own senses and my own logic rather than allow others to influence me. This is sort of funny/hypocritical, as this decision was influenced by my psychology professor and her little social experiment.

I got my Washington State Primary ballot in the mail yesterday after I got back from classes. So, after I put all my shit down and had a cup of tea, I went through my mail, ballot first. This isn’t the first time the State of Washington has sent my one of these things, a while ago I got a ballot for Clark County Elections and that went okay. All the set pieces were the same, but the only thing new was a green envelope that was on the bottom of the letter. I’ll get to that latter.

Washington’s primaries are held on Feb. 19, putting it with the other laggers that don’t jump in with the rest of the crowd on Super Tuesday. Oregon’s come later, but whatever. The first thing I noticed was that every single candidate who’d ever even considered nomination apparently was on the ticket. I wasn’t surprised to still see Guiliani and Edwards, but even Richardson was still on there.

So, while I’m considering whether I’ll vote for Obama or Paul (Basically, between the Democratic and Republican parties), I notice the back part. It said that I must pledge that I will only vote for the party whose candidate I choose is ascribed. In essence, pledge myself to be a loyal Democrat or Republican. This is bullshit. I’m not voting for the party, I’m voting for the person, regardless of their political affiliations. So, explain to me why I have to pledge myself to a political party?

I’m not really concerned about not being able to vote Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, etc. What I’m worried about is that somewhere in Washington’s voters records that my name will be included in a list of Democrats or vice versa. But, while this is rather alienating, I get the reasoning behind it. It’s not the state that’s having the election, it’s the parties. So, since I doubt I’m going to reconcile this, I don’t think I’m going to vote in our primaries. I think this is rather moot anyway, as Washington State only has 9 electoral votes .

This sort of brings me to my next point as well. I can’t decide that if I do decide to vote in these pre-elections, who am I going to go for, Obama or Paul? At this point, Barrack Obama needs all the votes he can get in order to defeat Hillary Clinton. But on the other hand, Ron Paul needs more voting supporters.

But I have time. Super Tuesday is today, and I think that most of the decisions will be made today. Once this day is over, I might have a clearer vision of who to vote for, if I vote at all.

Like a portion of college students nowadays, I have a laptop that I use for just about everything. It’s a Dell cookie-cutter computer that I’ve modified to suit my needs, but the main thing I use it for is the internet. Within the scope of my college day, I use my laptop and the internet for a lot of classes. For Psychology, I use the eLearning BlackBoard site to get assignments, I maintain the clarknews.org web site as part of my job at the college newspaper, and I keep in touch with other students in my math class.

One of the boons of having a laptop at Clark College is the wireless internet that’s basically free to all registered students. When I started attending here last year, the only place for anyone to get wireless internet was the upper part of the campus, Gaiser Hall and Cannel Library. But at the start of this academic year, wireless routers were placed around campus, bringing the internet to students who don’t have classes ‘up north’ or simply don’t want to trek up to PUB to check their mail. But this is not all the sunshine and rainbows that it appears to be. When the internet was focused here, in the northern parts of the campus, it was extremely reliably, insofar as it could be. I could always connect and had a fast, responsive connection. When they dispersed the network across campus, that went away.

For the most part, trying to connect to the wireless internet anywhere near the Fireside Lounge, the ASCC, the Independent, or the Upper level is completely impossible. I can connect to the network, but it takes me twenty-three minutes to simply go to the Student Wireless Log-on screen. This is extremely aggravating, as most of my day is spent in this area.

I feel that the college missed the point of larger wireless. The point was to bring a fast connect to a larger area that’s easy for students, and while they have aspects one and two down, they still struggle with three. It doesn’t matter to me at all if they internet is everywhere, if I can’t use it, it doesn’t matter.

Clark has an undefined identity. It’s unique in that, at it’s core, it’s a place of higher learning for anyone and everyone who happens to stumble on campus, but there are a lot of locked doors, a lot of unanswered questions that makes it self know only by anomaly of it being a community college. The younger Clark students, those out of High School or under the age of 25 seem to attend primarily to gain an AA degree and go somewhere else. I’ve noticed that whenever asked, young students are taking only those classes that get them out of here as fast as they can. In that regard, Clark College is High School part two.

For the older student, I’ve found that a majority of them are working toward a specific program or goal in which they either will complete within their stay at Clark College or will finish somewhere else, but they separate themselves by having a goal in mind. Their a lot more focused on what they want out of an education and Clark is an easy first step.

The idea of Clark being the second stage for the High School experiences seems to be magnified by the activities, and even presence, of the Associate Students of Clark College (ASCC). The ASCC spends quite a bit of coin a quarter in order to fund free food events with entertainment thrown in. They direct our students funds and remain the only student organization that the Board of Trustees of Clark College will formally recognize. However, those two attributes are the only thing that separate the ASCC from any High School’s ASB. The real government of the school, the real decision makers is the administration, currently led by President Robert Knight. The way he came into power is still a topic my friends at the paper like to mull over. The Board of Trustees selects various candidates for the President of the College and presents them to the public in a series of conferences that span about five months. However, when the previous President left Clark College under dubious circumstances, of which I’m still in the dark, Robert Knight was selected by the Board of Trustees as the interim President. The odd thing about it though is that when it came time to do the whole democratic process that we so admire, the Board of Trustees basically shirked their responsibilities and only really endorsed Bob Knight.

However, in the interest of fairness, I will not hold this shadowy selection process against Mr. Knight nor his administration. What I will do is question the wisdom of some of the things they’ve spent Clark’s funds on. First, they parking lot identifiers. While this is a helpful tool to campus security and students by offering a quick reference regarding location, it seems that it only puts a fresh coat of paint on a collapsing house. Parking is the single biggest irk for any student that drives or carpools to school everyday. The cries for more parking lots have been heard throughout the life of Clark College and when the funds are allocated for something, we instead get Fisher Price ‘My First Parking Lot’ signs which pretty colors and numbers.

Secondly, the holes in the ground around campus that no one seemed to explain to the students, sadly including The Independent. They appeared one day, roped off with industrial strength caution tape without any indication of purpose. In between Fall Quarter and Winter, those holes were filled with brick and eventually blue signs that say ‘Campus Map’ at the top. However, in the time since, no map has been added to these boards and they remain blank blue slabs that litter the campus.

This school employs the idea of transition to potential students. ‘The Next Step’, as it were. But the school itself is undergoing a transition. With the completion of another branch on Mill Plain, increased presence in the area, and stronger ties to University’s and other institutions, this College is moving away from being a community college toward a University itself.