Adventure Time with KC

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 ...

#GovtShutdown is slightly trending on twitter, and Huffington Post's clever public affairs team jumped onto the frenzy by creating a twitter account called @GovtShutdown. I wasn't even sure the shutdown was legitimately happening until sometime past midnight when I realized I should take a study break from homework to catch up on the news. Indeed, in the bubble known as academia especially in a small private university, I went about my day and night doing my thing, virtually unaffected from the government shutdown. Or so I thought. As a student, the most important thing to me is knowledge. I was doing research on personality and classroom participation and gender on Google scholar and my school's library online database (powered through Ebsco). But a few articles wouldn't open up. The tab didn't change the page. When I opened a new tab to paste the link of the article in, here's the message I received. So it turns out that ERIC (Education Resources Info...

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 ...

Instead of writing my 7-page paper due tomorrow on West Side Story and the youth's intersections of race, gender, class, and how all that contribute to nation-making, I'm taking a break from writing my outline to do some creative exercise for my brain. There's a lot of gender going on in West Side Story. Anybodys is the tomboy who really really really wants to be in the Jets, but on multiple counts the boys dismiss her and ask her to conform to feminine standards of beauty. Anybodys even incessantly hangs around the Jets boys and imitate their masculine behavior, including spitting on the ground and insulting girls. Then there is the divide between the Shark boys and girls. They all acknowledge the opportunities and luxuries that America accords them, but while the girls really enjoy the new found freedom with all the nice buildings, roads, glamorous lives in New York City, the boys lament that they are discriminated against in America and the girls are getting too out ...