Several groups on campus here are starting a SafeZone program, where the general idea is to “identify people and places where students can seek support free of bigotry and harassment”. Wonderful idea, and it’s been about a year in the making. At any rate, at the NSBE meeting I attended last night, a draft of the main race-related SafeZone documents circulated for approval. I took the time to read them out of curiosity. Of particular interest to me was the question “What is white privilege?” (I broke their frames in order to directly link to the page in question.) Their list is well worth reading and is highly enlightening, whether…

Last week, I broke my own heart. Despite my general internally upward trend since returning to school this winter, I had my morals tested last week and I failed to measure up. Much more than the fact that I let one my teams down, much more than the fact that I botched an interview, much more than the number of classes I skipped and material I didn’t learn is the fact that my trust in myself is shaken. Insert(abuse). Double right rotation.

My professor (disappointingly) couldn’t answer this without going into Cold War rhetoric (albeit thoughtful rhetoric): what makes Fidel Castro a bad person/the enemy? Better yet, is he a bad person? Even moving away from him as a person, why is his government bad? It is because the people under him have fewer political freedoms than we [think we?] do? It’d be nice to hear an answer from someone in my generation that hasn’t merely imported popular belief.

Way before I heard of that lame “in bed” joke about fortune cookies, I had “f-cookies.” Pronounced “fuh-cookies”. One word. Back in ninth or tenth grade, when I was taking programming with the awesome and hilarious storyteller Alex, [dred-]locked Maurice, and Dan-the-Man, when life was simple and life was Turbo Pascal, when coding was about goofily writing unmaintainable code in as many languages as we knew, when Alex was allowed to dominate the class for half a period during coding time to have us giggling too hard to be able to see the monitors… … back then we had f-cookies. The assignment was simple: write a fortune cookie generator using…