A Moment of Happiness

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self-satisfaction.

-William Osler

Earlier this week, a friend of mine and one of the organizers at the Tutorial Project, Hannah invited me to come to a Baltimore City school initiative. The meeting consisted of parents, teachers, social workers, and community organizers discussing the various campaigns being worked on to address the immediate needs of the BCPS system. The topic of this particular meeting was the bottle tax and property tax initiative that will help raise money in order to ameliorate the issue of crumbing and decrepit infrastructure that is a reality for the majority of schools in Baltimore City. As individuals who spend much of our time working with and for Baltimore youth, Hannah and I were moved by the dedication and passion of those at the meeting. There was a sense of objective understanding that our involvement, despite our desire to be a part of the work and movement, would be that of outsiders. Whether that was a manifestation of our own making or because seeing Hopkins students at these kinds of meeting is such an anomaly is a distinction that is up for interpretation, but it did spark a thought in my mind concerning how Hopkins students interact within our community.

Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus can feel like an oasis of higher education in a sea of poverty. Baltimore City is not a exceedingly wealthy city, there are parts of the city where graduation rates are lower than you would conceive to be possible, and it struggles to deal with a economy that has not been allowed it to recover from a decline in industry. With all of that said, Baltimore City still stands as a testament to its citizens and its reputation as charm city. To spend four years here, or any city for that matter, and remain apathetic towards is plights is to do a disservice to the opportunities offered by the college experience.  Sitting in lecture, learning how to think, articulate, argue and fail are all important to the classroom education in college; however, I believe there are more fundamental lessons that are learned through the independence and immersion into a new community.

That community extends beyond the walkways and lecture halls of a college campus. I know this because I see it every day. I see it in the interactions between our tutors and tutees at the Tutorial project, between families that come to Kennedy Krieger to participate in research and the volunteers, between freshmen during Orientation and the areas they serve during the President’s Day of Service. I have seen in countless times during my four years at Hopkins, but I have never been able to articulate why I find it so particularly important. For the first time, this meeting allowed me the vocabulary to discuss why college students must, on the merit of necessity, be engrained and concerned about the triumphs and tribulations of their adopted city.

My family came to this country for the sole purpose of offering my sisters and myself the opportunity for an amazing education; moreover, I recognize the importance of the schooling part of education. To learn and to expand and to grow, it is all dandy and important. But, almost more consequentially, education should allow you to grow as a whole human. To expand your capability for compassion and involvement. You can gain all the skills in the world, but without the values and experience to apply them they remain stagnant and benefiting nobody. I may not remember how to solve a gravitational potential problem in ten years, but I will value the ability to integrate and contribute to issues that affect my community, wherever that may be.

So it matters to me. It matters that elementary schools in Baltimore do not have heating in the winter, that their walls are crumbling and that their funding is lacking. That is the particular issue that evokes my passions, it may not be the same for everybody, but something (ambiguity intended) should be important enough for you to care. Apathy is limiting, frustrating and fruitless. Caring about BCPS is not included in my curriculum to graduate, but it bears just as much importance to my education. Because this is now my home as well, and to remain disengaged would be an insult to the warmth, opportunities and wealth of support that this city has offered me. That is a lesson that should be taken by all college students, future and present, because the choices we make now about the value we place on issues we care about will be long-lasting and run very deep.

Every hardship; evry joy; every temptation is a challenge of the spirit; that the human soul may prove itself.

-Elias A. Ford

At this time exactly one year ago, I was in Algeria – checking out Roman ruins, being fed exorbitant amounts of food by my many family members, driving through the bridges of Constantine, taking advantage of the fact that I was the only one traveling with my father and thus he bought me everything I looked at, and being asked by everybody second cousin to say something in English.

hi dzayer. i miss you. let's reunite real soon okay?

This year – my winter break and Intersession could not look more different to that vacation.

This year, every day consists of my making my coffee in the morning, packing a sandwich and heading off to my local library for eight hour study marathons in preparation to take the MCAT at the end of this month. To say that this is not a fun time would be an understatement of epic proportions. Thankfully, my mother convinced me to stay home in DC while studying which means that I don’t have to worry about general housekeeping/cooking/etc that I would have if I had returned to Baltimore to study. While this means that I am no longer working on perfecting my Nutella thumbprint cookies (which by the way, are pretty flawless cause my dad finished half a batch in one evening and he doesn’t even like Nutella), it is nice that I can come home from hours of convincing myself that functional groups and Newton’s laws are important enough for me to remember and get to de-stress with my parents and sister.

I usually can pull out some positive spin from whatever is going on in my life, but really right now I am in either “study” or “try not to freak out about studying” mode. Considering I have under twenty days before I take this exam, and one I hopefully intend to take only once, I figure that it is one of those toughen up times. And, in all honesty, this is part of the path that I have wanted to follow since I was a child.

Realistically, it is easy to tell people “doctor, lawyer, engineer, writer, curator, chef, etc” when you are asked your career aspirations. They are just words. I could as easily say I want to be on Broadway, but as any of my closest friends can tell you, I couldn’t carry a tune if you gave it to me in a child-proof bucket with a lid. My point being, there comes a point when the words we say, the dreams we claim to have, the aspirations that we so easily assign to our futures must begin to become a reality. And with the beginning of the realization of those desires often comes waves of hard work and a test of your dedication and passion. Would I rather be reading, perfecting my cookie recipes, preparing dinner for my family and knitting during this Intersession? Absolutely. But I have goals and I am the only person that can make them happen and so I huddle in a cubicle every day and work until my fingers cramp.

We had the first snow of 2012 today! This is the view from behind my house. (I stole this picture from my baby sister, as per usual she is my favorite photographer)

I have always hated blog posts that are irrationally and unrealistically inspirational; I feel like they are a mockery and incredibly facetious. But if I may be so bold as to dabble in some thoughts; there are certain qualities inherent to all us, the distinct ability to push ourselves to try for something more than we currently are. Passion and drive are not virtues assigned based on birth place or circumstance but rather intrinsic qualities of the human spirit that need naught more than nourishment to be integral to achieving one’s aspirations. Aspirations that are educational, personal, physical, etc in purpose. Whatever it is that you want, there is some path, some puzzle pieces that can be put together to make it a reality. So the question always is – how bad do you want it?

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

-Elizabeth Bowen

When my friend Adam told me that he had never officially ventured to the Baltimore Museum of Art which resides directly adjacent/for all intensive purposes on the Hopkins campus, I basically wept internally to myself and sat next to Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen for a bit till I felt better. With most people who tell me things that break my heart a little (“football is boring,” “I don’t read for fun,” “I’ve never seen Lord of the Rings,” “chocolate is not my favorite thing in the world,” “you can’t be African, you’re pale!” etc), I basically just pretend that it never happened, denial is not just a river in Egypt and all that, but with this – I literally was like “we need to fix this right now.” Mainly because if I like you enough as a friend, I like to share things that I enjoy (duh!) and in return, I love it when my friends challenge my experiences and perceptions. For example, I now no longer have a rudimentary stereotypical perception of Wisconsin. I actually think it is an interesting state. Also it’s state drink is milk – go figure. It also has a city that has the most outdoor public sculpture per capita of any city in North American. Things I learned from Adam while on D level during finals. The more you know, the further you go people – Reading Rainbow wasn’t lying to us.

I'm such a sucker for marble sculptures. They are never short of magnificent.

Anyway, I actually have a point to this rambling. So we went in the midst of finals as a form of a mental break, and I art-nerded and Adam dealt with me, like only my friends know how to. My complete devotion to museums, and art museums specifically, is something that I simultaneously thank and blame my mother for entirely. When we first came to this country, my mother used to take my older sister and I to museums all the time. I grew up playing in Rotunda in the National Art Gallery, challenging my sisters to name artists in the each gallery, the butterfly enclave in the National Museum of Natural History still remains one of my favorite places on Earth. But as I got older, I had to come to the realization that that experience was something that was gifted to me by where I grew up, who my parents were and what values they passed onto me. I made friends from parts of the country that did not have museums easily accessible to them and thus had a different appreciation for aspects of it that I had taken for granted.

I am going to make every one of my friends come to see the butterflies with me before I graduate. No joke.

I actually think I was getting complacent in my trips to the BMA. I would usually make a bee-line for the impressionist gallery and/or the inner courtyard and just sit and think, read, write etc. I guess with most things, familiarity leads to a decrease in appreciation. A fresh perspective usually is enough to jolt me back to recognition of treasuring everything that I am allowed to be a part of. The BMA trip was just one example. After three and a half years at Hopkins, I only occasionally take a moment to stop and marvel at aspects of this university and my experience that are commonplace to me.  The campus on an exceptionally beautiful October day, the psychedelic walls in the Tutorial office, the to-die-for truffle based drinks at Chocolatea, the stacks on D level with literature that makes me want to give up on school and just read for a living, and more than anything else – the people that I have shared even a fraction of my time here with. It is actually quite annoying how emotional I get over the fact that the sand in the hourglass of my time here is moving much more briskly than I am comfortable with. And so the point of my tale is, whether it is by inviting a friend to visit a museum that you adore or by taking a moment every time you do something that is regularly in your routine – it is worth it to remind yourself to take a breath, enjoy the moment and appreciate the little joys that often pepper our lives subconsciously.

Seriously. Chocolatea is sinfully good. photo from http://www.chocolateacafe.com/

Happy Holidays and New Year Everyone! Whatever you may celebrate (or nothing at all) – enjoy the food, family and days off of work!

Risk is essential. There is not growth of inspiration in staying within what is safe and comfortable. Once you find out what you do best, why not try something else?

-Alex Noble

Sinto impulsos covardes, assustadiços e escapistas de voltar. Também porque sinto saudade, muita, de tudo. Mas sei que não devo.

-Caio Fernando Abreu

This past weekend, I dragged a few friends of mine down to DC to watch a play that my older sister’s best friend, Andrew, was performing in. It was a beautiful post-modern piece that explored the ways in which we as humans wish for things to “stay.” My favorite word in any language is saudade, a longing for something so intangible that it is indefinable. People loved and lost, tragedies of life, moments to be treasured, a nostalgia of times past, the lost rhythm of life, people who left, people who stayed and changed – “all things born of the soul that can only be felt.” A word that means more to me than I could ever hope to explain, and it was the name of a scene in this play so needless to say I was extremely moved.

It was a beautiful production and I’ve encouraged basically everybody I know to go into DC to support it, cause the local arts always have gems such as this. It also gave me an avenue by which to attempt to understand all the emotions I am having about my impending graduation. There is everything to be excited about and everything to be terrified of. I want to tell high school seniors that this I am feeling what you are feeling, but it is a bit skewed. I know I want to go to medical school the year after next but having twelve months absolutely free for me to do as I will is almost overwhelming in its possibility. I want to do everything and nothing, I continuously freak out about how quickly this year is going (how is it that after tomorrow I will only have five days left of class for the fall semester?!) but I am thrilled about the options open to me.

I have moments of absolutely crystal clear reflection where I become hyperaware of the finality of my time at Hopkins. Reading for my Islamic literature moves me to tears because I know that this will be the last time I take a literature class as an undergraduate just cause I want to expand my mind, weekly lunches with Peter always make me realize how quickly the time will come where my friends and I will be scattered everywhere, every drop off at Tutorial is one less time that I get to hang out with my kids. I am excited about what comes next in my big picture, but for now I just want to yell at everything to “stay” just as it is, in this perfect moment where I am comfortable and familiar and content. That will probably not be my mindset during finals but the great thing about this feeling is that I give it absolute free reign to change based on the day, my mood, etc. For the first time in my life, I think I’m learning to go to with the flow.

Chocolatea is the perfect place to muse over all of this.

I have a very close friend who is entirely in love with Halloween, she plans her costume a month in advance, overbooks herself for parties and gatherings, and then spends two days recovering. I, however, have no such soft spot for the holiday. I didn’t go trick-or-treating as a child so I have no nostalgia, no need to go out or dress up or any of it (apologies to the Fell’s Point faithful, you guys keep on keeping on) – to be quite honest, I spend the last weeks of October willing Thanksgiving to get here faster and singing to Frank Sinatra holiday music.

But, for the last four years, on the Thursday before Halloween, I’ve been given a reason to care, a reason to get excited over the costumes, the candy, the fantasy of it all: the Tutorial Halloween party. I’ve spoken about this party for the last three years, my freshmen year when I was a tutor taking my kid around to trick-or-treat, as a sophomore as an organizer being in charge of my six pairs and dressing up as a cowgirl, as a junior as the Student Director running the whole shebang dressed up as a footballer and this year, for the last time, as Cruella de Vil while my orgs were dalmatians.

Please note how ridiculously adorable and perfect my staff is, and the fact that I am trying to keep a "mean" Cruella face on when I really was smiling the entire time.

Our Halloween party consists of ushering our many princesses, zombies, butterflies, and Scream-masked kids to the freshmen dorms where they filled bags with more candy then they could ever hope to trade during lunch. That was followed by a pizza party, viewing of the Goosbumps movie “The Blob That Ate Everything,” face painting and all the gross food that my boss Young decided to grace us with. There was “boogers” which was cheese dip with green food coloring, “worms” which was jello that was formed in straws, and “kitty litter” which was cake complete with “poop” aka tootsie rolls. I basically refused to try any of the gross foods until I saw somebody else eat and enjoy them, and two of my dalmatians, Hannah and Aaron, convinced me to eat the actually super delicious kitty litter. Plus, their dog ears were really just so cute I couldn’t say no.

Hannah and Aaron eating kitty litter.

Basically, it was a fantastic way to end this four year tradition. I could talk about it forever and how every day when we drop the last kids off at home, I have a quick quiet moment where I realize that the number of times I will do this is now becoming finite. While the three lovely SAABabies, Erica, Joseph, Kevin, are just beginning their adventure, I have my usual overwhelming sense of finality. I need to remind myself to enjoy these moments now and then, I’ll deal with the finality of it all next May!

Our one normal group shot!

I love these people.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

-Aesop

There are certain things that I have always been familiar to me. I know my dad is coming towards me in a store by the sound his keys make when he walks. The way my mother takes her tea is second nature to me, as is the times she calls me during the day. I know who is on the other side of the line when I call home, before they speak, just by how many times it rang before being picked up. I know what song of The Phantom of the Opera’s soundtrack is playing by the first few notes of music. With all due respect to Aesop, comfort and familiarity are things that I adore.

Roma winning is occasionally a familiar sight, other times they like to stomp on my stomach. Oh the life of a sports fan

By the time my fourth years at Hopkins rolled around, there were other things that started to become familiar. I know what times to avoid Cafe Q when I venture to the library for a Anarchy in the UK. I know what time to leave Levering to reach Mason Hall exactly in time for SAAB Meetings. I know how Neuroscience professors lecture and grade, what times my PI shouldn’t be bothered cause his mind is preoccupied with future experiments, I know that to unlock and open the library door at Tutorial takes a kick and a bit of unnatural gymnastics with my arms, and I have a methodology and rhythm to how I go about my studies.

I already miss the comfort of Pete's Grill and I'm going there this weekend. (photo taken from my little sister, Meriem, who is my favorite photographer of all time)

We are creatures of habit, human beings like to nest and get comfortable. And over the past three years I have nested here at Hopkins, I’ve invested and become entangled into the habits and quirks of this university. And now as my friends and I have entered our final year, everything throws us into a transcendental crisis. We have roots at Hopkins, we are familiar and comfortable and suddenly we have to fathom that next October it will not be this campus we will be enjoying the brisk air at. Change may be grand and welcome and all that jazz, but for the moment a very big part of me wants to crash on the couch in the Little Theater and pretend that I won’t have to give up this familiarity.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

-Isaac Asimov

Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant

-Saadi

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.

-Saint Jerome

Human beings have the amazing capacity of dealing with all sorts of trials and tribulations that happen in our lives, we have the gift of allowing ourselves and others forgiveness and forgetting. It is the best of humans that forgives those that trespass against us, and I can only hope to gain the height of self-awareness and openness of heart that comes to some individuals so easily.

When I am trespassed against, I am like an elephant – it gets engraved into my mind and I am compelled to acknowledge the effect it has on me. I have a distinct inability to forget transgressions, something my mother is forever admonishing me about. I never allow ignorance as an excuse, not for myself nor for others. So when my professor leaned across the table we were sitting at, gestured at my name and asked me if I had been educated in the country as a way of trying to explain what she thought was my poor writing, all I could do was laugh. Out loud and harshly and my brain racked with trying to legitimize the question and why my professor would find it at all appropriate to ask it. Instead of the snippy remarks I wanted to make, not the least of which included the fact that many adults who learn English as a second language speak and write it better than many native speakers, I bit the inside of my cheek and left at the first possible opportunity to go calm myself.

To say that this was the first time I’ve experienced this situation or this question would be a lie, but it was the first time it came from a professor and somebody, with a PhD and who teaches at Hopkins, from which it was more of a shock than a confused local in rural West Virginia. My experience with professors at Hopkins, overall, has been nothing short of exemplary and while I’ve had a few mishits (namely my Orgo lab professor who turned me off recrystallization forever), in my three years I have learned from the most brilliant minds who genuinely care about their students and their abilities. That being the mold of professors that I held to be truth, this experience is such an unfortunate anomaly.

In the immortal words of Thumper...

My personal inclinations have always been strongly antiracist and highly sympathetic to minorities because of the obvious self-extension it offers me. That being said, I appreciate the novelty of dealing with cultures and individuals that were previously unexplored. To approach that from an angle of ignorance and ethnocentricity cheapens the scope of human experience. While I may not be able to change my professor nor reprimand her for her stereotyping and unfortunate remark, I can use it to remind myself and those around me of the dangers of falling into a mental pattern of ignorance.

Anyway, the whole racist look hasn’t been in for quite some time, please do try and keep up professor.

I'm not hip enough for this to be my photo, courtesy of http://omgruok.blogspot.com

Small, sleek, cowering, timorous beast/ O, what a panic is in your breast!/ You need not start away so hasty/ With hurrying scamper!/ I would be loath to run and chase you,/ With murdering plough-staff

-Rober Burns, “To A Mouse”

Like most upperclassmen at Hopkins, I live off-campus. My apartment building dates to the first half of the twentieth century and thus has its roots firmly into this patch of Baltimorean land. That comes with the occasional viewing of furry friends, which I had never seen in their natural environment because I had only ever worked with them in a lab. The first time I saw a mouse in the early dawn light, at that time where shadows often play tricks on your eyes, I sat straight up and watched in shock as this triumphant mouse went home after a night of scavenging.

Needless to say, I wasn’t having that. The exterminator that services our building is spectacular and got rid of the problem within a few weeks, with the aid of our constant vigilance as to where we left our chocolate and snacks. It had been a good seven months since any sighting when my roommate woke me up a few weeks ago at 1:30 in the morning insisting that she could hear a mouse collecting spoils in her snack box. And sure enough, he was. Was ensued was standing on her bed, yelling sporadically at the mouse to go away, and then a 2 am trek to the dumpster to get rid of the box of snacks, our trash and anything else we conceived in our sleepy state would be attractive to a mouse.

That mouse, which was obviously the mouse version of the fat cousin from the movie Ratatouille, had the audacity to come back and find a stash of chocolate my roommate had forgotten about since we moved into the apartment. And not only was he audacious in coming during waking hours, but this bourgeois mouse selectively only ate dark chocolate and then around the caramel in the Milky Ways. I was a little be shocked and a little bit impressed at the personality he demonstrated.

But, despite my respect for this mouse and his elitist tastes, he had to go. Our apartment underwent a bleach-cleansing process and traps were set every three feet in an attempt to encourage our friend, now named Sir George V because a bourgeois mouse deserves a name with a title and a number, to die a gallant death.

And sure enough, a few days ago, around 6 am while I was making my morning coffee I heard the sure snap of the end of the tale of one of the only mouse that I’ll ever have any inkling of liking for. I was seriously a bit sad to see him go, I like animals with personality, but I rather remember Sir George V fondly than have to continually put my chocolate on top of the fridge. So so-long Sir George V, it’s been real – RIP and please don’t send any of your friends or family to take your spot!

People who know me in real life know that I make very few apologies for what I believe in, I’ve always been strong-willed and, as my mother would say, stubborn. More than that, I know what I like and what I dislike and I didn’t need to wait to grow up to know that, I always have and have stood by those convictions. So when I say that I hate Facebook, I am completely serious. I cannot stand the disconnected facade of human relationships that exist on this website, and the only reason I let it exist at all is because of my family abroad and friends I made at the international peace camp I went to when I was 15 and I frequently and without warning deactivate it because the hypocrisy of it annoys me.

But how does this relate at all to my Hopkins blog? Well for a variety of reasons, not the least of which entails my reflection at the beginning of my senior year and looking forward to post-university days. Just typing that out gives me a little bit of an existential crisis, but I know that I am capable of, and will keep in touch with friends that I’ve made at Hopkins without Facebook. And also because I had to learn how to do that when I first came to college, because it is so easy for us in this modern age where social media and networking sites have replaced real inter-personal relationships, to forget that writing on each other’s wall once or twice a year does not constitute a friendship. It requires a bit more effort, a bit more investment of time and thoughts to continue the connections with people that you deem worthy of that effort.

Furthermore, there is the question of privacy. Marlon Brando famously once said “Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.” I might cherish my own privacy a bit much, but divulging too much is never a good thing. There is a reason that self-help interview sites always mention to change one’s Facebook to private settings, the picture, information, etc if you’re apply for graduate school or a job. But I’ve always thought that that is the way that it should be all the time. There has always been a certain joy in finding out tidbits about one’s friends and relationships building over time, so that only one’s closest friends know everything about you. That differentiation has all but evaporated in an online world where nothing is sacred and everything is up for disclosure. (If you think I’m being over dramatic, check out the website http://www.stfuparentsblog.com/ seriously do it – if my memory serves me correctly, I don’t think the author uses bad language but freely discusses bodily functions of babies, just a head’s up).

I am by no means advocating not using Facebook, that is a personal decision to make and it obviously serves its purpose of allowing people to stay connected. My question, however, is the merit of that connection and making sure that the quality of relationships isn’t sacrificed in the name the number of “friends” one has online. So with this being a new school year, no matter where you might be, give a real conversation a try, call somebody on their birthday, go old-school and send an email – the benefits of building meaningful connections and relationships will be yours to reap for years to come.

All the best.

My motto in life to be honest.