It's official!

I am enrolled as a grad student @ Emory. I'll be taking the med anthro class! yes! avoiding that possible political land mine in theory. yes!

we had our grad school orientation today. our grad student pres. is "Farmer Ted"/Brian all grown up with a little ferris bueller thrown in. he's adorable and he's teaching charlie and the chocolate factory to some first years so he gave away golden mugs that entitle the bearers to cut to the front of the keg lines at the grad events through out the semester. I'm at Emory now . . .

Tomorrow i have to buy some worms for lil' Agnes and i have an outdoor social gathering. lizzy, the other pop culture fiend in my cohort, is going to see the 40 year old virgin with me this weekend. Grad school is pretty cool so far.

You know it's hard out here for a . . . scholar

so i had my departmental orientation today which was cool. very cool actually. my department is the bomb. According to one of the professors, BGS was bigging me up at some conference in ny. I swear if i was a little older . . .

I'm taking a race & feminism class along with a topics and methods class. Verdict's still out on class three but I'm leaning toward this medical anthro class that is dead on in terms of my area of interest and potentially requires less political navigation.

I can walk to school and I kind of feel like I did walking to the library from leverett all the way back in elementary school. It's a nice time to think and it's far enough to feel like exercise.

The vma's were horrible. JB gave a good recap and i'm totally feeling her on her new found simpson hatred. I'll add my two cents:

Diddy can't dance
How are you gonna introduce krumping and not say anyone's name but LaChapelle?
Beyonce and 'em looked so tacky
Rock and Rap, that's it?
how did gideo get a job? How does chuck norris still have one?
and R. Kelly, are you f*cking serious?!

I don't think we should watch this anymore. I'm serious! Celeb worship is out of hand and i am not going to participate anymore (well i'm going to try not too).

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go upstairs and see if alison will let me get in on her indoor bowling tournament.

A new thai place

so today i went to the first social gathering for my dept., a dinner at a thai restaurant in the dec.

I was the last to arrive (i underestimated the drive) and i decided to sit by Danica, the other new black girl in the program. Also a spelman grad, class '01 as well as the recently retired miss georgia. She's cool people as are the rest of the people in the department. conversation was easy and not too awkward. I was pretty quiet though. Not really jumping into the fray as much but i'm sure things will be different tomorrow.

Now off to watch the VMA's so we'll all have something to talk about in the morning.

feelin' so good . . .

Today was a good day, good day indeed! the universe is moving and i'm back in the swing of it back in the mix and it's great. I feel like I'm ready and I'm doing what I need to be. Making peace and forgiving, or trying to.

J lo ain't so bad . . .

grad school on the horizon

so i got this book that is supposed to help me prepare for the next 5 (hey i'm optimistic) years of my life. It's pretty good but a little depressing as well.

I don't want to be anything other than someone completely dedicated to the humanity of the globe and i thought that going to grad school was a way to aid me in that. but from what the book says, academia is as much a hierarchical good ol' boys club as anything else. However, I am in a women's studies program and i'm hoping that that means something, that that will negate a lot of the pitfalls he points to in the book.

So some useful or not so useful tips he offered (summer what do you think?):

Create a calendar mapping the entire length of your program including the dates of publication of articles you should be working on and conferences etc.

make contracts with your professors about when you are supposed to finish things and stick to them

write and work on your thesis for a couple of hours each day as opposed to in large concentrated blocks

set up a filing system etc.

For those of you who know me and have seen my room, or my apt. you know that organization is not something that is high on my list of priorities but i guess i've got to work on that. It's just hard to get into that frame of mind when it's the summer and friends are here and gavin is playing!!!

But i'm going to get it together. Trust! B/c the revolution depends on it!

Misc.

don't really have anything new to say but i wanted to see something else on this page. Maybe another list is in order.

1. I'm really feeling luther (Track 6) right now
2. the salt eaters is speaking to me in a weird way, i've never read a book like this (meaning both the way i'm reading it and the content)
3. anyone heard from sarah?
4. I'm going to see gavin next friday!!
5. This feels a little like 20 questions but a lot less cryptic and mean.
6. I need to work on being angry, or at least be more vocal about it.

That's all folks . . .

the fast runner

I've always felt this connection to inuit people. I really don't know what that's about but i thought I'd share a little bit of their struggle because They are so often overlooked. In the oppression olympics, they are gold medalists.

"The impacts of climate change have very real, negative, harmful impacts on the Inuit's ability to sustain themselves as they have traditionally done, their ability to be healthy, which they have a right to in the Inter-American human-rights system," explains Wagner, of Earthjustice. "Their ability to maintain their unique culture, which is absolutely dependent on ice and snow; their ability to hunt and fish and harvest plant foods; their ability to have shelter and build their homes -- all of those rights are impacted by climate change in the Arctic."


The Inuit had been noticing alterations in ice, land, water, and wildlife for years -- phenomena that fell outside their extensive traditional knowledge. Ice formed later in the year and broke up sooner. Changes in the ice pack altered travel routes over land and sea. Experienced hunters were falling through thinning ice into seawater cold enough to kill in minutes. Once-frozen coastlines were eroding, destroying Inuit homes.

Also potentially devastating, residents were observing changes in the creatures around them, including caribou, polar bears, ringed seals, walrus, beluga whales, and seabirds. The culture has relied on these animals for food, clothing, and other materials for thousands of years. Now, increasingly, they were noticing that polar bears couldn't find seals along the receding ice edge and were forced to scavenge elsewhere for food. A mosquito invasion drove caribou into the hills during the summer, forcing them to forsake rich lowland grazing for scrappier fare. And robins and barn owls -- birds for which the Inuit had no name -- appeared for the first time.

Global warming is not the first industrial threat to reach this land. In the late 1980s, medical research revealed that chemicals and pollutants including chlordane, DDT, and PCBs had been accumulating in the globe's farthest north for decades, carried from thousands of miles away by atmospheric and oceanic currents -- or, as scientists have more recently supposed, by bird droppings. These persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, become more concentrated higher in the food chain, reaching unprecedented levels in predator mammals at the top like polar bears, ringed seals, beluga whales, walrus -- and Inuit, who carry more than 200 toxic pollutants in their bodies.

This poisoning from afar means "we have to think twice about how we deal with going out into the environment," says Watt-Cloutier, "because the environment's our supermarket, it's our way of getting food back to our families and to our communities." Canadian Inuit mothers, for example, who have seven times more PCBs in their breast milk than women in the country's largest cities, are advised either not to nurse their babies, or not to eat meat from the hunt.

The Inuit have also struggled to survive a cultural dissolution common to many indigenous peoples who have experienced rapid modernization. Canadian Inuit struggle with some of the highest rates of alcoholism and drug abuse in the nation. Inuit infant mortality rates are two to three times higher than the Canadian national average, life expectancy is about five to seven years shorter, and the suicide rate is six times higher.

"Everything is connected," she continues. "Connectivity is going to be the key to addressing these issues, like contaminants and climate change. They're not just about contaminants on your plate. They're not just about the ice depleting. They're about the issue of humanity. What we do every day -- whether you live in Mexico, the United States, Russia, China ... can have a very negative impact on an entire way of life for an entire people far away from that source."

This summer, Wagner, Goldberg, and the ICC will continue gathering facts to support their case, including videotaped testimony by Inuit elders. In the meantime, Watt-Cloutier's stature as a global activist is growing: in April, she accepted a U.N. Champions of the Earth award and helped stage a massive, Hollywood-infused "Global Warning" photo shoot on the ice in Nunavut, Canada's Inuit territory; in June, she generated headlines from Norway when she accepted the international Sophie Prize, given annually to a recipient "working toward a sustainable future."

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and this too shall pass . . .