Personal Safety First

This Mother’s Day, I called my folks at the annual brunch after I finished a women’s self-defense course. The Assistant Dean’s Office and the Polity Council jointly funded the five-hour IMPACT course. IMPACT is a worldwide organization that focuses on self-defense with an important training element: the aggressor instructor wears a full body suit and helmet so that students strike with full force every time. I was one of about fifteen women, as no men had expressed interest; I was also one of four seniors. I was surprised and pleased with the course’s structure: we spent equal time on learning a physical drill for a frontal attack and practising verbal skills to defuse a situation before it escalated to a physical level. I am not a confrontational person, but it is satisfying to know that I have a better idea of how to take care of myself in a number of uncomfortable situations. We also discussed the boundaries and subtleties of abuse in all environments (i.e. platonic/romantic, work, family). This is the first time any course of this kind has been offered here, and I hope things work out so that more people can take the course next semester. It would be great to do a co-ed course in the future, and I will be sure to investigate their twenty-hour extended course when I am back in Santa Fe.

Check It Out: The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

The worst returns to laughter

This weekend we put up King Lear for the annual Shakespeare play. I only worked on costumes---normally I would involve myself much more in a production, but I wrote my senior essay on this play and didn’t want my interpretation to clash with the director or my enjoyment of the show. It was staged outside for the first two nights and indoors for the matinee. I was very pleased with the show, especially with the amount of effects we managed to put in. Our theatre group is entirely student-run, and we have a very small budget, no particular performance space and few resources. Nonetheless, they did an excellent job at portraying the violence that is at the heart of this tragedy. We even had goat eyes for the eye-gouging scene! That was a pleasant surprise. Our King Lear was a tutor, as no one our age could do justice to this role. It was an excellent production to finish my time with the theatre group, and I am very proud of everyone who participated.

Check It Out: Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt

How Nerdy Can We Be?

Unsurprisingly, St. John’s is packed with people who understand and revel in obscurity. That was a very inflated sentence in reference to the marvellous number of nerds that are here. I had no experience with video games, role-playing or anything other than music and movies before coming here. However, I have slowly been slipping into these hobbies and having an enormously good time. This year, I’m helping out with a friend’s role-playing campaign and exploring various computer games. I have also gotten far deeper into movies and comic books than I ever thought was possible. My favorite part of listening to lunch gaming conversations is the staggering levels of intelligence and humor. It is very heartening that all this counterculture, which is rumoured to be brain-damaging, truly requires advanced thinking. I am constantly surprised by who I can happily jabber to about photoshopp’d comic book covers and the latest fantasy series satire. Naturally, a haven for book people would be a haven for comics, games, movies and good old social interaction. I can’t wait until the next session!

Check It Out: Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
The Starro picture should be credited to mightygodking.com, it's his photoshop cover.

Processions of Grandeur

This past week was my senior oral. It was extremely fun and rather successful, in that it was an excellent conversation and I passed. Hurray! The senior essay and oral examination is the culmination of the program and drives many people up the wall. We’re given a month off to write our essays, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief when we turn them in. Orals begin after the Registrar frantically assembles a schedule between everyone’s conflicting schedules, and students and tutors alike both begin to fray at the edges. The oral committee is composed of the Chair, who directs the conversation and asks the opening question; the Presenter, who announces the senior to the Chairperson; and the Member, who acts as another questioning presence. Everyone processes in and sits in formal regalia, and the conversation begins. I had a ball talking about King Lear for an hour with extremely intelligent people. My presenter asked a very intriguing question about the nature of parenting and how it deepens the pathos of the play. This is not an experience that I have access to, so I was quite pleased to have the opportunity to view the play through an entirely different lens. I wish everyone else luck for their orals and look forward to more fascinating conversations.

Check It Out: Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber

Elise Kutsunai

April Is The Cruellest Month

Everyone is now back from Spring Break, and I was certainly amused by my return to Santa Fe. Luckily it hasn’t snowed since Friday, but the weather is rather frigid. Most people are shocked or resigned that we have essentially returned to winter, as opposed to spring moving into summer. Fortunately, Santa Fe is notoriously changeable and will inevitably warm up soon. We can’t have softball season without warm weather! Every year after Spring Break, classes have the option of challenging each other to softball games instead of holding class. Challenges should be suitably dramatic and impressive, but we are not competitive about the game itself. The point of Johnnie softball is, like classes and the program, to enjoy ourselves in excellent company. I personally cannot play to save my life, but thankfully there are no strikeouts. I may also have someone else hit for me, or run for another person who can’t make it around the basepath. Once the weather stops dragging its feet, I am confident that we will have many games. What could be better than fresh air, sunshine, and watching friends hitting homeruns?

Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson

Mysterious E Factor

In senior lab this semester, we tackle with the Modern Synthesis (Darwin and Mendel’s theories of biology). We have been splitting time between readings on evolution and cells and practica on breeding Drosophila melanogaster, or common fruit flies. They are particularly attractive for genetics work because they breed true traits very quickly and require little care. We have also been studying slides of cells of various organisms in many stages of development. I took A.P. Biology as a high school senior and have done most of these experiments before, but they never fail to take my breath away. Our latest conundrum is about the cell itself. If cells are analogous to atoms as the unit or building block of life, how are they different? Every example of cells’ capabilities that my lab class could supply was matched by a counter-example of the same process in non-living organisms. The most obvious (and most troubling) is the idea that cells reproduce copies of themselves in a ordered fashion. Crystals do exactly the same thing! Unfortunately, however much I wish it were so, snowflakes are not alive. We have circled back to the elusive “E factor” from freshman lab, the élan vital that supplies the spark of life. We have no idea what this is, and neither do the authors we are currently reading. I am confident that we will progress and develop a better understanding, but life itself is such an intrinsically mysterious thing. Someday a scientist will pin it down, but then we’ll all rush forward with questions about the soul, and everything will start from the beginning. Oh, discovery!

Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle (movie)

Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair!

Last week was the midnight opening of Watchmen. After pondering for a bit, I have decided that I like this movie. It was a riot to be at the opening, mostly because there were at least fifty Johnnies. Everyone had high expectations for the movie, especially since Alan Moore’s Watchmen is perhaps the most Johnnie piece of literature that I have ever read. It is stuffed with references and many moments of meta-thinking that demand a lot from the reader. The movie couldn’t be as seminal as the graphic novel, mostly because the graphic novel exploited and tested the boundaries of its art form to a masterful extent. The movie also left out the intervening segments between the graphic novel’s chapters (press releases, articles, essays, etc) for the sake of clarity. Many people were of course disappointed, but I am pleased nonetheless. The movie attempted to be as literally faithful to the graphic novel as possible (and thus of course missed many of the myriad subplots and subtleties of the original), and it succeeded admirably. There were people in costume and the trailers were particularly exciting. I am hopeful about the new Terminator and Star Trek movies that will open in May! Thankfully, Angels and Demons was met with extreme scepticism. At the very least, I am surrounded by people who are dubious about Dan Brown’s literary skill.

Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley