The great TV experiment of 09 - Thanksgiving break

Perhaps the thing I was most excited for was the intense TV experiment I had planned for myself. It had been really hectic right before break, so I fell behind on my weekly TV watching. Also, I like to tell myself that I watch most of these because I'v fallen into the habit of them and it wouldn't kill me if I stopped watching one.

So, in an effort to test my "I can quit anytime I want theory", I decided to stave off these shows for a month. Any show that I didn't feel like catching up with after said month, I was going to drop till rerun season. These are the shows I started off with:

Californication

Community

Cougar Town

Desperate Housewives

Family Guy

Flash Forward

Ghost Whisperer

Gossip Girl

House

How I Met Your Mother

Lie To Me

Modern Family

Private Practice

The Big Bang Theory

The Middle

The Simpsons

The end of the month long TV rehab was yesterday.

Which ones lived?

Which ones bit the dust?

We shall see!

The Art of Communal Solitude

I am currently partaking in what has become a ritual in today's age. I am sitting, laptop open, iced caramel machiatto in hand, right by the window in a Starbucks. I had what qualifies for a bad day yesterday, and I decided I just wanted to be alone for a while. Now, I live in an apartment all by myself where I have all the things I need (including coffee, specifically from Starbucks), and yet, I got dressed up, left my very very *very* comfy bed, took two buses, and voila! Here I am sipping a 5 dollar brew overlooking an exceedingly busy street.

So what is it that brought me, and another 20 odd humans, here, in the middle of the day? Free time? Everybody, me including, are busy typing away on their laptops or reading books and such. Coffee? I've been sitting here for about an hour and a half, my drinks reached the point of being mostly water, and this is true for the 8 people in my field of vision. The need to get work done? As far as I can see, three people are on farmville, two are intently staring out the window, two are on the phone, and I am reading John Mayer's twitter page.

Carrie Bradshaw once hypothesized that all the people sitting in Starbucks were not being pretentious, they were all people mid-fight. Wise words, true, but I have a different hypothesis. The reason we gravitate towards places that are inherently crowded even when we are looking to be left alone is because it's no fun to be left alone, alone.

Think about it. I wanted to not have to deal with anybody, and where did I land up? One of the most popular caffeine peddlers right next to campus during lunch. That, in itself, is an oxymoron if there ever was one. However, here I am. Because while I want to be alone, I don't want to avoid humanity. And even if I did, as I successfully am doing now, it's a subconscious desire to almost never want to be completely alone.

This, and I am copyrighting this, is the art of communal solitude. We all wanted to be alone, whether to finish a paper, read a book, harvest stuff on farmville or stalk celebrities on twitter, we all wanted to be alone. So we all came together, overpaid for a cup of coffee, sat down in the leather couches, plugged in our headphones, and commenced being completely alone, together.

Communal Solitude.

(If they ever sell out, Starbucks should definitely factor this in as a part of their intangibles. Yay for paying attention in accounting)

I'm Better!

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Tales of the Flu victim

As of this friday, I have officially become one of the many diagnosed with a "flu-like" illness. Since I am now essentially in forced isolation for a week, I have a lot more time on my hands. This doesn't help the fact that I don't have any will to live left, but well, at least I have TONS of time on my hands. It's times like this, when I'm sick and just want to curl up and die, that I really really wish I hadn't picked a college so far away from home. Needless to say, I would kill for a little bit of my mom's home cooked anything.

But, well, she's 13 time zones away, so I decided to help myself. I decided to whip out my famous lasagna with soup, essentially the same as regular lasagna, but instead of cheese I use condensed soup. I know it sounds like it would be a gooey mess, but hey, you would be surprised what a little cornflour can do. Also, my tonsils are swollen, so a little lumpy lasagna sounded great. So I dragged myself out of bed, defrosted, washed and assembled the requisite ingredients, heated the oven, set the timer to an hour, and flopped back in bed.

Usually, the entire apartment starts smelling like soup within the first ten minutes, but it had been about 40 minutes and I realized that I still couldn’t smell it. It was weird, though I just assumed the fact that I had tissue papers stuffed in both my nostrils was contributing to the whole lack of smell. Every inch of me was hurting, so I really didn't want to have to get up if I didn't need to. I assumed, as the weak often do, that everything was fine.

Another 15 minutes go by and I remember that if overcooked, the thing starts to taste like my famous burnt lasagna, so I decided to go the kitchen to check on the dish that should have been bubbling right about now, my stomach screaming in hunger.

So I walk in. The oven light was on, the timer had another 5 minutes.

The dish was sitting, untouched, on the kitchen counter.

As it had, for the past hour.

Damn you, Nyquil.

Reason number 2456 to come to IU - COBRA STARSHIP

If there was ever a reason to love IU, this thursday was it. Now, I am fully aware of the fact that this post is going to make me sound like a 15 year old high schooler, and probably make me lose any pseudo intellectual street cred I have going on right now, but dang it, it is worth it. I love Cobra Starship. And I have, and I always will. Probably, but well, for now, always stands. They may play teeny songs that really only should identify with a high schooler, a thing I haven't been for over 3 years now, but, well, I like them. And if that means sometimes having to fight off the occasional girl with braces for the last CD at the store, well that is my cross to bear. Sometimes, you just have to indulge in your guilty pleasure.

And that is what I went to do.

So, over the summer, there was a contest over at PINK, and IU won a free concert by - wait for it - COBRA STARSHIP and, if that wasn't enough, GIRL TALK. That concert was this thursday. Was it epic? Yes. Very much so. The stage was set, there were VS models by the plentiful, DJs who kept the show going between acts, the weather and the foliage was beautiful. Hell even the guys from the bands were like "we've never been here before, but what a beautiful campus! This is like the definition of Fall" Yay, yellowing leaves!

Ok, so we started off with a DJ, went on to the local band, then the Starship landed, and finally Girl Talk blew it up. Somewhere in the middle of getting crushed by the crowd, and screaming so hard that I'm fairly certain I have done irreparable damage to my throat, I realized something - this is why I came to IU. Because at IU, it doesn't matter whether there are swarms of ladybugs (check), rain in the middle of and almost throughout an open air concert (check), waaaaaaay too many people trying to get to the front (check), and there are a million people standing between you and the autograph you really want (oh dear lord, check), if you stick it out and play your cards right, you end up getting not just the autograph, but a picture and a hug from Gabriel freaking Saporta.

YES. YOU MAY NOW COMMENCE BEING JEALOUS.

China - The wrap/warp up

Well, the last few blogs were obviously a little deceptive - they sounded like I was blogging out of Beijing, all the while I was slogging through my multiple killer-classes this semester in good old b-town. That, unlike what Paul Rudd seems to think, is not Beyonce, but Bloomington ( don't get that reference? Don't watch as much SNL as I do).

Anyways, as I said a millenia of blogs before, blogger.com was blocked in China, and I wrote those pieces (mostly) in Beijing. I had other pieces, but now, looking back upon them, they seem really trivial. Blogs that pretty much say something like "OMG, there's Peking Duck here! And like really good Chinese Food" really don't look as great in retrospective. So, I put up the ones that sounded philosophical, thought out, or, at least, a little less like it was written by Kanye West when he interrupted all of China.

Coz he did.

You know it.

20 years later: Protests considered taboo

BEIJING – Twenty years ago Thursday, China was at the center of world attention for all the wrong reasons.

It was June 4, 1989, and the seven-week-old student protest occurring in Tiananmen Square had just been brutally crushed. Tales of police brutality were pouring into Western media, often live, and the unofficial death toll was reaching the thousands.
It was a tragedy that reverberated around the world.

The people’s protest
The protests started April 22, 1989, after many Peking University and Tsinghua University students were put off by the Communist Party’s lackluster response to the death of revered pro-democracy and anti-corruption official Hu Yaobang.

The day after his funeral, students marched into Tiananmen Square to mourn. Though largely lacking in general direction, the students soon began to chant for more democratic reform and for open negotiations between student-elected leaders and the government.

By May 4, 100,000 students and workers had marched into Tiananmen and had added the demand of free media to the want of reform. In the days that followed, the government rejected the dialogue, and the leading newspaper of the day, People’s Daily, tried to sway the public toward the government by calling the students “small segments of opportunists” who were “plotting civil unrest.”

On May 13, students began a hunger strike, which was largely
covered by Western media that had been invited into China to cover Mikhail Gorbachev’s state visit.

By May 27, the Goddess of Democracy, a foam and papier-mache statue that was modeled after the Statue of Liberty, was erected in the center of the Square. Directly across from the statue was a large portrait of Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, that hung from the gate of the Forbidden Palace.

Having been run out of Beijing by students, residents and workers, the army was ordered to clear the square by force.

Toll of tragedy
The timeline of the events from the evening of June 3 to the morning of June 4 remain unclear, as official accounts vary greatly from the student accounts.

Officially, no students were killed as the square had been cleared before the tanks were let in. Civilian accounts put the death toll near 3,000.

The army ambushed the square and opened fire on the protesters. Although some students used Molotov cocktails – improvised gasoline bombs – to retaliate, they were largely unarmed.

The tanks quickly crushed protesters, the Goddess of Democracy and all other structures constructed by the students.

By 5:40 a.m. June 4, the square was cleared, and government officials released the following statement: “Tiananmen Square has been returned to the people, but the square is off-limits to the public.”

Protestors remember; schools forget
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the protests, and the death of the pro-democracy movement in China.

The square is unmarked, and the incident, locally known as the “June 4th incident,” is a taboo topic.

There are no statues, no memorials and no public remembrances of this occurrence. Discussing the event in mainland China is illegal, and most Web pages pertaining to the protests are blocked.

Chinese officials unblocked the Wikipedia page (English) on the protests in April, but a Chinese version remains blocked.

As the topic is not discussed in schools, there is an entire generation growing up in China that has no way of learning about the protests except from their parents, many of whom choose not to discuss it.

Many of the protesters, especially the student leaders, were prosecuted, jailed and even executed.

“We were sent away from the city, into the rural areas, to get some perspective,” a woman at Peking University who had participated in the protests said. She wished to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Eventually, students were allowed to return to their colleges and continue their studies. In effect, the movement died quickly.

“We realized that the time was not right, for the movement,” the woman said. “In the rural areas, no one knew what had happened in Beijing. The country was too wide, too divided, for such a movement to be successful.”

Today: a different kind of red
The families of the victims have been trying to get the government to admit fault and allow an official commemoration of the protests.

The participants have largely gone on to integrate themselves into mainstream Chinese society, some even pioneering China’s economic reforms.

Many still support democracy but are less aggressive in its pursuit. They see economic reform as a gateway to a possible but distant realization of democracy in China.

In Hong Kong, 13 students are participating in a hunger strike to commemorate the Tiananmen protests.

Today, the square that witnessed one of the bloodiest protests in the history of student rebellions is draped in a different kind of red.

There are red flags along the central pillar of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and guards in red and green monitor the square from all sides. To enter the square, visitors pass through a security check.

Tiananmen – literally translated “Gate of Heavenly Peace” – hasn’t seen conflict since 1989.

The square is open to the public, but 20 years after it drew the world’s attention, many question whether it has truly been returned to the people.