Some V-day advice
Happy Valentine’s Day! If you’re a girl, you’re probably feeling a lot of mixed emotions today—wondering if the holiday is more about love or more about obligation, feeling lonely or wanting space, loving and wanting to be loved. If you’re a boy, you’ve probably just screamed, “Oh shit! It’s Valentine’s Day? I’ve got to go acquire a talking stuffed bear or a good excuse for not having a talking stuffed bear as quickly as possible!”
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daisy chain
On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on the Indian-American writer Salman Rushdie, calling on Muslims to execute him as punishment for writing the anti-Islamic novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini offered eternal paradise (and a massive bounty) to Rushdie’s killer. Nine years later, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami attempted to officially withdraw Iran’s support from the declaration, though Iranian conservatives stood by it.
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Letters to the Editor
Let me begin by commending Brian Stoffel for his Jan. 31 letter on atrocious fan behavior at the Grinnell-Carroll men’s basketball game the week prior. Mr. Stoffel’s letter strikes me as both courageous and timeless: courageous because of how hard it is to criticize peers and friends, and timeless because discussion of bad fan behavior seems to always have at hand an unfortunate supply of salient examples. Most of the egregious examples are elsewhere, but when one occurs on campus, it is cause for the kind of serious reflection that Mr. Stoffel’s letter initiates.
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Finding the internship
Each spring, the Career Development Office coaxes the fragile student body from their liberal arts nest with the promise of internship grants and a summer of easy living. These undergrads have spent the past few years nourishing themselves on social constructs, caffeine, and sexual frustration, so the CDO is wise in realizing that if students don’t at least take a peek outside the nest, they’ll crash and burn come graduation day.
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At the arrivals gate in Sri Lanka
Every night the Sri Lankan dusk oozed into my room with viscous ambers, saffrons and golds, forever ensnaring a piece of my memory like honey embalms an ant foolish enough to enter the cupboard. I thought I might write a travelogue in the well-reputed travel section of the S&B to un-embalm the memories and share the images and experiences crystallized in my imagination, for as honey crystallizes, it refracts light and, with it, one’s view of the world. But time is a sticky thing in retrospect. Chronology begins to blur, and while I wrote these stories as they happened, I cannot prevent post-travel reflection from seeping in. My experience in Sri Lanka was a haphazard ménage of colors, smells and late evening bats, a mixture of monks, mothers, stepped rice-paddies, flying yogic Dutch girls, stoned ex pats, and not a little arrack (a liquor distilled from coconuts) that will appear as 16 credits on my transcript. But credits are not and have never been a proper gauge of education.
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