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.

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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.

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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!

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Always toward absent lovers love’s tide stronger flows.

Sextus Propertius

I have always been adamant about my need to not spend my summers at Hopkins. I love the university, the quads, the buildings, the lecture halls (besides Mudd 26), the restaurants in Baltimore, my friends, my apartment, watching football at PJs, my Tutorial kids, etc all the other things that make my life at Hopkins so great. But I need to be away for a few months of the year, I need to go home to Alexandria and be in the house that I’ve lived in since I was thirteen and hang out with my parents and sisters everyday, go for walks in the park behind our house, hit up my library and DC on a continual basis – because these are the things that calm my mind and relax my soul. And that is exactly the medicine that is needed to get ready for another (and my last?!?!) hectic and amazing year at Hopkins.

I don’t know if I have mentally prepared myself for another grueling year at Hopkins. I have a tendency of forgetting the hours of hard work, the stress and the anxiety that rules my life for weeks on end. But all I have to do is remind myself of the people I love at Hopkins, the experiences I enjoy, the moments of pure learning and exploration and the support system I’ve found there and I am reassured that I will not only survive my last year, but perhaps even thrive.

Look out for one last blog entry before school officially begins next week, I have some pre-senior year holy-cow thoughts I’ll be sharing. And just in case you ever wondered where the saying from which this post take’s it name comes from, you can thank the Roman poet Sextus Propertius.

The best thing about school starting again – that would be the English Premiere League and Serie A starting up again. Liverpool won at the Emirates against Arsenal for the first time in eleven years, suffice to say, I was over the moon! Enjoy the last week of August everyone!

Happy LFC makes me incredibly happy.

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When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, disciminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.

-Corretta Scott King

The past few days Hopkins life has been the furthest thing from my mind. Despite the fact that the majority of US media outlets refuse to acknowledge its existence, the riots in England, primarily London, have confused, angered, and educated me about social issues that often go undiscussed. Condemning the rioters was easy from my home in America where I have never wanted for anything, material, opportunity or otherwise. And it was heartbreaking to see my friends in England angered and terrified about the destruction that was being done by members of their own community. But what I perceive as “their communities” may not be how they understand their reality. We assume a commonality of identity based on geographic or racial proximity, but the existence of subdivisions of identity and community occur across those lines. I had to realize that my understanding of the situation as an outsider, with no intimate knowledge of the social climate in the UK, much less the experience of a person without means in that society, meant that my opinion is worth nothing more than the time it takes me to type this.

My friend Hillary put it quite eloquently when she said, riots are not meant to educate, they are meant to express. Not every expression has to teach something to be effective. If you’re waiting for a riot to change something, you’ll be waiting for a long time. That’s not to say that every riot doesn’t have any long-lasting outcome, just that the outcome itself should not and usually is not the focus in a riot.

I do not know if I completely agree with this assessment because riots in their essence must have a cause and that cause is not yet completely understood, the frustration is being communicated by those involved as “we have nothing better to do” and “we’re getting our taxes back.” And while that may sound mindless and frivolous, it perhaps is just a lack of ability to communication the fire of frustration that has now burst. Especially when one considers the fact that the Prime Minister was reluctant and delayed in returning from his vacation to deal with his capital city literally being set on fire.

This article explains the historical setting which may help contextualize the situation. I may not have been instantaneously sympathetic with the rioters because my frame of mind was perfectly described in a tweet I saw stating, ”The Youth of the Middle East rise up for basic freedoms. The Youth of London rise up for a HD ready 42″ Plasma TV.” I am entirely cognitive and empathetic to the cause of countries where oppression is a commonality, but understanding a marginalized minority and their anger is a different frame of mind. To be honest, the British media’s hysterics did not help elucidate anything. In fact, the BBC, so often a source of journalistic pride gave us this gem of embarrassment for all humanity, and a prime example of racially driven profiles of people.

The title of this blog not only references the actuality of the riots in England, but of course the classic The Clash song from 1977. The racial undertones that that song is frequently understood to explore are demonstrated so well by the lyric ““Black or white turn it on, face the new religion.”  The automatic responses from many panic-stricken people was that immigrants were the cause of this unrest. But a minority cannot be entirely at fault for marginalization, society as a whole creates otherization and fear of the unfamiliar. It was immigrants, Turkish, South Caribbean, Korean, etc that patrolled the streets of their neighborhoods with bats to guard their homes and businesses from looters. They protected the neighborhoods of London when the police were left unprepared and under-maned.

My opinion on this is my own and is still being formed, but my proclivity to see the situation through the eyes of the oppressed requires me to understand all facets of this situation to the best of my ability. I wanted to offer this blog up as food for thought, hopefully it’ll inspire you to think about this situation at least for a bit because marginalization and deprivation is not a uniquely British or European issue, it happens in our cities as well. It is a commonality we must all understand.

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You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed.

Rabindranath Tagore

A few weeks ago my parents and I got a chance to explore the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This festival has been around since 1967 and is basically an exhibition of living cultural heritage that has a varying highlighter every year, this year being the country Colombia, the Peace Corps and Rhythm and Blues. It’s one of my favorite activities in the DC summer, despite the fact that is continuously a struggle to breath in our humidity.

I wanted to visit a traveling exhibit in the National Museum of African Art before we explored the Mall, and the information guide kind of blankly stared at me when I asked her if she knew about North Africa. A+ hiring strategy there Smithsonian Institute. Considering my astute ability to look up things on my blackberry, we got to enjoy the exhibit and the lovely AC that went along with it.

I'm pretty sure my grandmother had a very similar plate to this priceless Persian piece of art.

The Festival always attracts the attention of locals and tourists alike. It provides, according to its official website, “programs of music, song, dance, celebratory performance, crafts and cooking demonstrations, storytelling, illustrations of workers’ culture, and narrative sessions for discussing cultural issues.”

If you’re ever near the area around July 4th, you should really come by and check out this festival and learn something about your world and the cultures and people that inhabit it that you never even contemplated.

Hope everybody’s July is treating them kinder than the 115 degrees DC was kind enough to inflict on us yesterday!

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An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

-Henry Miller

It is not even officially summer, and yet the heat wave in the Mid-atlantic has made us all want to retreat into places of high air-conditioning and iced drinks. The day I got into my car and it was 107 with the heat index and the AC wasn’t working was the day I truly was appreciative of what I usually have.

Today I braced the lovely humidity with my better-half, Emma, who as been mentioned many times on this blog. She has an internship for the summer at the DCPS and is staying in the city and so we meet for a lunch and some Smithsonian wandering so that she could get the native view on the touristy-sites. After an early lunch in Dupont, where the recent Pride Parada meant that the abundance of flags in every size and type imaginable, we explored my favorite, the National Art Gallery, which included a pit stop at the fountain that is found between the East and West Wings for a cool touch.

I am incredibly predictable when I take people on tours of this museum, visiting it for years on end has meant that I’ve developed a pattern of the pieces of art that I must visit and that I love. They include; Picasso’s Nude Woman, Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and his collection of miniatures, Magni’s The Reading Girl, the collection of Van Goghs, Ruben’s Daniel in the Lion’s Den, and, one that I decided I liked before I knew what art was, Monti’s Head of a Bull.

This summer, I hope to share with you all some of my favorite things to do in this city during the summer as it is the summer destination of many Hopkins students for internships. And so, as I show some of my close friends my favorite parts of this city and activities that uniquely occur during the humid months of the summer, I’ll hopefully be chronically them here.

All the best!

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Usually when I write a blog, I actually have a bit to type out and say. But if I am being honest, I spent the last week in bed with a horribly contagious case of strep throat with a side of the stomach flu. I missed nearly a week of classes and am currently freaking out a little bit about the work I need to make up so words and time are not my friends at the moment.

My favorite Russian hockey player

I came home Friday so that I could stop making myself lemon and honey tea, and also to go to the Washington Capitals game. Both my parents went down the “But you’re sick!” route and I responded with, “It is totally worth it!” And so my younger sister and I went to the Verizon center and cheered our hearts out for the Caps, and I got to see an Ovechkin goal  live so I can cross that off the bucket list.

And despite what AdmissionsDaniel might want, I like the Washington Caps and I enjoy hockey but they will never replace Liverpool FC or AS Roma or football as the only sport that rules my world. That being said: Rock the Red!

I hope to actually write a blog with a little bit of substance after this week is done! Enjoy the beginning of spring!

My sister and I know what's up

Verizon Center

No matter what sport, goalies are always my favorite. Holtby is my hockey keeper crush

Best bench in the NHL

Seriously.

Rock the Red

Caps win. That is what I call a game.

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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

-Martin Luther King, Jr

It is funny how easily I forget the daily grind of being at Hopkins. Give me a week or two away from this reality, throw me back in it and I have to relearn everything. Including 4 am wake up times and to-do lists that span multiple pages. But besides all the school stuff, something else has been holding my attention for these first weeks of the semester – and no it isn’t football or New York Fashion Week [as much as those two things make me happy].

I may not be a political science or international studies major, but I do have a brain and a conscious – so the Tunisia and Egypt situations and resulting ripples in the Middle East and North Africa are important to me. My older sister, a graduate of LSE, has always been the basis for my world awareness and her job at a news magazine in DC during this historic time has meant that I have perhaps even more frustrated by ignorance.

There are many aspects that I can express my opinions on: the fact that citizens across the region have taken this opportunity to capitalize on their pro-reform platforms, that the 18-day revolution will not be the norm, the Obama failed miserably in the eyes of the world, and most importantly that each country has its own unique history and social dynamics and thus must be observed independent of our need to simplify their political movements to fit into a Western doctrine. This is not about America, this is about each country and its nation-state.

There is no need for me express my explicit opinions on these matters, this is not a political blog, but an expectation I do have of the students who attend this university, or which to, is to be intellectual curious human beings and to be aware of the world in which they live. So it baffles me that people were unruffled or unaware of the fall of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, I wonder if college campuses were this uninterested during the Iranian Revolution. Reading people – the more you know.

And when I don’t have many words for moments and times like this, I’ll let photographs do the speaking. Scenes from the protests in Algeria courtesy of live from the casbah

Posted in Beyond Baltimore, Reflection | Share This

I love snow. It is one of my favorite things in the entire world. And so when the mid-Atlantic was pummeled with a blizzard this past weekend, I was beyond excited. That being said, I was a bit surprised when I stepped outside on Saturday and sunk knee-deep into twenty+ inches of snow.

It was actually the largest one-day snow in over seventy-years. The last storm anywhere near this magnitude that I remember is in 1994 when my little sister was born. Some of the pictures the accompany this blog are of her when we ventured out on Saturday to play in the snow, fifteen years after (and a whole lot taller) the snow storm that my family associates with her.

Certain habits pop up when you are stuck inside with a snowstorm, my knitting that has sat idly in my closet since last winter was brought out. My mother told me she was tired of see the same scarf every winter, so I’m planning on finally finishing it this winter break.

A huge congratulations is in order for the newly admitted Hopkins Class of 2014. Welcome to Hopkins! I am excited to welcome you to the university you will call home for the next four years, the place and the people that you will identify with, to welcome you to the residence halls, the lecture halls and the gorgeous quads. At Hopkins, hopefully, you will become the adults you choose to be and the university will be there to help you every step of the way.

My apologies for lack of end-of-semester nostalgia in this blog, the end of the semester was a rough one for me and I intend to take advantage of winter break’s offer of forgetting about school for a bit.

Kind regards!

Photo cred to The Washington Post for pictures 1, 6 and 7

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