• Uncategorized

    Lacking power on the last day of classes–a fragmented account

    It’s 00:50, and power on the Rose campus just came back on. For twelve hours, Rose has been on its knees, with no Internet, no lights, no air conditioning, and, in my residence hall, no plumbing. I was getting ready to take my last Gender Issues exam when the power in the office started fluctuating and turning on and off both regularly and quickly. I ran around and quickly turned off all the computers and the printer, since the last thing I wanted was for Luke to have to spend any more of the Thorn’s money on equipment. What was the common sentiment on campus as soon as the power…

  • Uncategorized

    A month off can be a good thing.

    So the Thorn’s final issue, a commemorative issue to Dr. Hulbert, our departing president, is done. I just e-mailed the PDFs to our printer, right at the 05:00 deadline. I ended up becoming only one of the halves of a lap onto which the paper was dropped. I look at what’s finished, and I realized I did very, very little. How disappointing. We were supposed to have most of the content in by April 30, so we wouldn’t be doing this shit at 04:30 on the night before distribution. I, however, didn’t write my story until Monday this week, dragging my heels because I didn’t want to write my first-ever…

  • Uncategorized

    Finally…

    The Thorn office has cleared out. Bob (who I love to death) had been loitering and complaining all evening, and Laura (a nice girl woman) had just sort of been in the way, blocking access to resources I needed. They kept talking to me, meaning I couldn’t keep my headphones on loud and focus on work. But now I’ve got until 07:30 before I need to shower and get ready for class, and I can work straight through the night until then, no interruptions. Oh, yeah.

  • Uncategorized

    "That’ll teach you."

    Is there any other phrase better designed to cause quenched, beaten down, silenced resistance to flare back up in a blaze of semi-impotent fury? After I (admittedly) got my ass whooped in the wee hours of the morning earlier today, I was going to stop stealing someone’s knife and lay off with the permanent marker drawings on the back of his neck. When I woke up after my two-hour nap after said fight unable to lift my arms above my head or type/write for more than ten seconds without needing a break, I was going to stop using Luke as my punching bag just so I could stop having my…

  • Uncategorized

    Growing into one’s skin

    “Fat people have opinions too“. Not a diatribe against discrimination of fat folks (although those are fun to read, too), but something so much better–an account of a woman’s development of a self-assurance and self-confidence that is hard and long in coming. It’s something I still don’t have. I still can’t look at myself in the mirror without giving myself a critical eye–how much more weight I need to lose, how many hours I need to spend in the sun to get my skin to be where I want it to be, etc., etc. I still flinch and twitch in overreaction and hypersensitivity to physical contact–my body is not one…