Adventure Time with KC

Since I returned home two nights ago, I've slept, ate, unpacked, and began exploring the city I call home again. In some ways, I feel like things are starting over as I settle into this winter break. I have to readjust to home life and New York City life again, I have to find something new to do this summer, and to top it off, I have to start a new academic semester with an entirely new group of strangers, traveling to new countries I have no experiences with.  I would be remiss to not mention that I intended to start things over by taking time out to study abroad for a semester. Life inside the hedges has been fulfilling, exciting, and particularly challenging. I see myself grow every semester, bigger and better as the days and weeks push me to a different level. While I'm proud of all that I've done and feel that I've used my time well, I also feel that everything I've accomplished is beginning to wear on me. Between classes, extracurricular activities, an...

I realized I had not blogged in three weeks. How did three weeks fly by like that? Then I contemplated about what I had done in the past three weeks, which, in this day and age, means looking through your Facebook photos from the past three weeks to refresh your memory. In short, homecoming happened, Duncan's birthday week happened, one of my best friends Melissa's birthday happened, and now it's Thanksgiving weekend. I don't know why it took me so long to come up with an idea for a new blog post, because obviously I should've known right away. Giving thanks. What better topic to reflect on during this quiet and exciting time of the year? Looking back on the past year, I have so many things to be grateful for. Here's a list of things I am thankful for: Finishing sophomore year and completing some research papers that pushed me to learn about new and difficult topics outside the hedges of Rice My Alternative Spring Break trip and group. I loved working with...

At the beginning of the school year, I was contacted by a graduate student writing the Student Spotlights for the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality's website. She briefly wrote about my trip in April to the Women in the World Summit held in NYC, and requested a photo of me. I was really flattered that my experience was being honored on the center's website, so take a look at her brief summary here  http://swg.rice.edu/ho/  and feel free to look at the essay that I wrote reflecting on this experience. The link is provided at the end of the article and also here  http://swg.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/People/Student_Spotlights/ho_wiwreport.pdf I strongly encourage any one, specifically students, interested in poverty, marginalized populations, and women to check out this summit. It is held every year and a great learning opportunity to be inspired by what's already been done. In other news relate to the Center, they have a lecture coming up on unequal c...

I apologize for not updating for over three weeks. School has been stressful and busy as usual, so even though I've been doing a lot of extracurricular as well as academic stuff, I haven't had the time/energy/will power to write about them. I did some fun artsy stuff, outdoor cultural stuff, all of which mean nothing to you without pictures and reflections. I feel like I'm semi or quasi sick more often this year than my past two years at Rice. I think stress contributes to a reduced immune system maybe? I worry about staying in shape and taking care of my health, because I haven't been getting the best sleep or eating as healthy as I want to or exercising. I do really enjoy time spent with others, and I've been meeting new people, especially new students at Duncan, my residential college. Suite life is pretty sweet, with our cute gatherings to do homework and chat in the common room space. It makes me feel like I have a family away from home. Things are also going...

As per my previous post about launching Who Needs Feminism at Rice, my two friends, Clara and Anya, wrote an opinion piece for our school newspaper, The Thresher, about the project and urging people to join them in a feminist-themed discussion during lunch today. You can find the article, titled "Everyone at Rice Needs Feminism," here . I am so proud of them for being active citizens and urging people to action via public intervention. Obviously, not everyone reads the newspaper, but it is a way to disseminate ideas and information in hopes of reaching a substantial amount of the population. There is also a lot of history to feminism, and one article can hardly do it justice, which is why they ask that people share their opinions and begin this discussion. I would like to clarify my perspective on the article in general. From my understanding, we are trying to bring the discussion of feminism to Rice. What do I mean by feminism? Well, for me, generally, it's a framew...

At the end of my sociology class on deviance, justice & popular culture, our professor reminded us that next week, we're talking about women. Here's the heading for Week 7 in our syllabus, verbatim: Where are the women?: Gender, proper femininity, and pushing boundaries? (aka, ‘You go, girl’) Thanks, Professor, you go, too! So Steubenville, Blurred Lines, Kill Bill, and other juicy stuff are on the line-up next week, and I cannot be more excited. A fellow Duncaroo (one whose residential college affiliation is Duncan College) actually recently messaged me about what I thought of Blurred Lines and feminists' reactions to it. I gave my share of limited opinion because I feel that I have more questions than answers about this whole fiasco. I will save all my thoughts until after the two class meetings next week; I bet by then we would've generated so many great thoughts that I will be inspired to write a full blog post all about it. So stay tuned. In other ...

The other museum I visited today in zone 4 of Houston's Museum District is the Holocaust Museum. I am particularly interested because I had been to other Holocaust memorials, museums, centers, and even my high school had one. I also visited the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, so I wanted to compare the two. The Holocaust Museum in Houston had architecture and design that was very... black metal gate chamber esque. I wish I have the right words to describe it, but it gives a very somber feeling. The outside of the museum is a upward incline hill with stone tiles that named various Jewish communities that were annihilated during the Holocaust. Visual representation and memorial of history is very fascinating, as you can see all these communities lined up from bottom to up, and it only included a portion of the Jewish communities, many others also suffered. Inside, the permanent exhibit is called Bearing Witness. The beginning of Nazi propaganda against Jewish peoples was set up ...

Houston's Museum District Zone 4 museums were having special programs today, so I went to check them up. I wanted to go to the Children's Museum, the Health Museum, and the Holocaust Museum. The weather was not very good, it started to rain quite a bit by the time I left Rice (~2pm). Nonetheless, I was ready to go adventure despite the rain. In fact, last time I went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science with my friend Andy, and we had so much fun despite the rain. Also, the rain probably also means less people are going to visit the museums, so MORE MUSEUMS FOR ME! I didn't go to the Children's Museum because I'm pretty sure you need a child with you to go in and I do not have one, so what a bummer, I can't go in and melt because of adorable kids and fun hands-on exhibits designed for humans many years my junior. So I headed over to the Health Museum, which was pretty neat. A couple of organizations were there promoting themselves, one of which featured ...

A few friends of mine at my residential college have bravely taken up the cause of bringing feminism to the forefront of our lives. Today is the debut of Who Needs Feminism at Rice, and I'd like to say a few words in honor of this noble beginning. For your information, Who Needs Feminism is a PR campaign that 16 students from Duke University started to dispel negative associations and misconceptions surrounding feminism, including the belief that society no longer needs feminism. Who Needs Feminism works primarily through asking everyone to share what they think of feminism and taking photos of people who finish the sentence on a white board "I need feminism because..." These photos are then shared via social media to inspire conversations about feminism and its misconceptions. Visit their website here to see the amazing photos of people sharing why they need feminism. In preparation for launching Who Needs Feminism at Rice, my friend and suite mate Clara wrote down a...

Excuse me for being pretentious but this is really exciting. So my suite mate Clara mentioned to me that for this annual event at Rice where you find a blind date for your roommate and make them both dress up as something and embarrassingly go to dinner, people are vigorously advertising their roommates with elaborate descriptions, many of which were encoded with race-and-exoticism- heavy language. What does KC mean by that? Well, we recently read Ann Laura Stoler's chapter on "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender and Morality in the Making of Race" for my Sexual Debates in the U.S. class. How race, gender, and sexuality were managed and constructed were crucial to upholding imperialism. And now, race and exoticism are crucial to how we participate in this event where we actively find the perfect match. And this is where it gets juicy. If a person was not Caucasian, their heritage was mentioned quite often. And sometimes, their ethnicity became a point of discussio...

One of my goals this year is to continue seeking out awesome opportunities and do something different other than my daily routine. Our residential colleges send out a ton of emails every day, but I do try to make time to skim through the daily announcements email. Here's why: AWESOME EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES GET POSTED IN A SEA OF 10 OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS. The Consulate-General of Japan in Houston brought an unique aspect of Japanese culture to Houston last night in the form of a tall Caucasian Canadian man in a cowboy hat and American flag-themed kimono. His stage name is Katsura Sunshine, and he is a rakugo comic storyteller. His lovely assistant gave us background on rakugo in Japan, and Sunshine told us funny stories which end in a punch line. Here's a video of highlights for those of you who are interested! His opening joke? "I love that we're presenting Japanese culture, at a place called RICE!" Apparently, there is a substantial Japanese population in...

I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while since coming back to school for my junior year, but alas I've been busy with coursework and extracurricular activities. Forgive me blogosphere for leaving you hanging! I'm really happy to continue studying Chinese this semester, which has significantly stepped up its difficulty. I woke up late this morning, did not finish my assignment or study for the quiz. Thankfully both were postponed upon request. I'm also continuing my studies in sociology and women, gender, and sexuality studies. What I really enjoy is that this semester my courses feature more multimedia - videos, clips, news articles, films, songs, etc. They make the conversation so much more relevant and interactive. I sometimes live tweet my classes because so many interesting things are happening one after another. There are certainly overlaps and connections between my courses. For example, what I study in youth studies often interact with the same auth...