Ramen Diet (the blog of college pursuits)

Let me start by saying how offended I am at the insultingly obvious symbolism Oberlin employs with the location of its buildings. I think you would agree with me that one of the most classic examples of the American entrepreneur is steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Perfecting vertical integration, Carnegie made railway infrastructure in the United States possible, a feat accomplished by hiring Chinese immigrants willing to work for far less than any union workers. It’s a classic story, the rich American profiting by exploiting cheap labor, and one that even in today’s society is hard to leave behind.

This year I live in Asia House, a dorm devoted to exploring and promoting Asian culture on campus. It sits directly behind the Carnegie building, obscured by columns of administrative offices. Disgusting, am I right? I could go on about how Asia House is obscured on its other sides by a chapel and an oversized dining hall. No explanation necessary. And don’t even *ask* me to go into why we are so supportive of this steel-toed bastard when our primary alumnus proprietor was the inventor of modern aluminum. For a school that trumpets its horn of liberalism and diversity, seems pretty darn backwards to me.

Asia House itself is modeled after traditional Asian architecture, made of such exotic materials as brick and drywall. The inside is furnished not with tatami mats, but herringbone-patterned hardwood floors (or linoleum, if you’re not in the ballroom)

Traditional Asian ballroom, with traditional Thai-Victorian vaulted cieling.

The college also installed a library in the building, but, in trying to keep myself and my Asian bretheren down, saw fit to provide it with no books. Perhaps they fell prey to the stereotype that Asian people do not like to read or enhance their intellectual capacity. I do not know. Please also note the traditional Mongolian checkerboard flooring.

The "Library". I also made airquotes while I typed this. It was that necessary.

My room itself is like a prison. My window is covered with vines and obscures my view, though perhaps this is a blessing. As Asia House is shaped like a quadrangle, my inside room looks out on the “garden” which, without the grass, bears a striking resemblance to a prison yard. During orientation, tables and chairs were set out for us, but I knew it would be my last meal before the dining halls. (If you’re reading this, send me a cake with a nail file hidden in it; they won’t check. I’m hungry and there’s no place for a good manipeti).

I was offered karaoke instead of a last meal...

All in all, I hate this place. It’s obvious that the administration is toying with us, giving us beautiful buildings with comfortable mattresses, walk in closets, and spare easy chairs all in an effort to lull us into a false sense of trust. I won’t have it!

If this post makes it past the censors (I KNOW YOU”RE READING THIS KRISLOV), tell the world what I saw here.

Oh, and don’t live in Dascomb, it’s worse (sorry froshies!)

It seems the more I promise to update this site, the less I actually write on it. Thus, dear reader, I now choose to leave you in perpetual ignorance as to whether or not I have posted new morsels of text for you to devour and regurgitate for your younglings. For now, however, they will not starve this winter. Your update follows, as never-to-be-promised-again.

Returning to Ohio weather was far less traumatizing than I was expecting, and has seriously started me reconsidering this whole aversion to global warming. I don’t think I’m getting a bike this semester (again), but on my first day of classes I had no problems getting back and forth.

Overall, there’s not too much to report yet. I may do a belated post about some other Oberlin activities that happened last semester. Stay tuned for class schedule / first impressions, as well as new developments like the Spring ExCo fair and a new season of Semi-Automatic Players!

To say that only now do I realize I never followed up on my class-scheduling disaster would be a complete lie. In fact, I remember a long time ago. It’s simply that I ran into so few snags and so much excitement has filled campus air since the post that I just haven’t bothered. Well, consider me bothering. I’ll make this short and sweet, since you probably wouldn’t find my talking-with-teacher episodes terribly interesting if you weren’t there. Or even if you were.

So, things ended up getting worked out EXCEPT… I had 18 credits worth of courses for a 17 credit limit. You can pay to have credit limit extended, but it’s a ridiculously absurd amount that I won’t say here. Needless to say, I didn’t pay it. The end result was scaling back two separate types of “secondary” piano lessons (a half hour of jazz a week and a half hour of classical a week) to “primary” jazz lessons (an hour of jazz a week). So without further ado, my schedule is (with the course descriptions from the catalog):

M/W/F

Music Theory I: “Tonic, dominant, leading-tone, subdominant, submediant, and supertonic triads; the dominant-seventh chord (including inversions); the leading-tone diminished seventh chord and the cadential six-four chord. Introduction to phrase and period structure. Analytical and writing skills are introduced and developed.” Somehow we’re already past this point? The course description doesn’t even mention counterpoint. Plech.

Selfishness or Altruism? “This course explores the ability of evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in humans and other animals. Can natural selection favor cooperation in non-human animals in spite of their ’selfish genes’? Perhaps so, but can evolutionary theory account for elaborate social phenomena that seem restricted to humans - for example, religion, economic exchange and political alliances? We will explore these issues through discussion, writing exercises and independent projects.”

Jazz Theory: “Designed to acquaint students with rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and structural aspects of improvised music, including chord/scale relationships, common chord progressions, chord voicing and harmonization, chord substitution and reharmonizations, melodic transformation, and modal mixture and chromaticism. Emphasis will be placed on the development of analytical and writing skills within the context of such forms as the blues and song forms.”

Tues/Thurs

Study of Behavior (psychology 100): “A survey of contemporary research and theory in the study of behavior, including topics drawn from biological, cognitive, social, developmental, personality, and clinical psychology.”

I’m loving all my classes, especially Selfishness or Altruism, in which I’ve NEVER been bored, NEVER felt unchallenged, and NEVER come away from a class with a stupid grin on my face because all we do is engage in fruitful debate and discussion.

Wednesday night I camped for art.

I showed up to the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s courtyard at 9PM with my fuzzy pillow, warm clothing (storms had been rolling through all week), a sleeping bag and pad (my roommate Steven was kind enough to bring over and lend me for the night), a little homework, and my rental room map. A crowd had already packed in, but my resolve had never been stronger. I was going to rent some art, dammit! Just try and stop me.

I knew what art was available; earlier that day the rental pieces were on display for students to see what their choices were and mark locations of pieces that interested them on a map so it would be easy to find them the next day. The pieces available for rent - $5 per piece for a semester, two pieces maximum - are not to be taken lightly. I saw a Picasso, a Warhol, to Keith Harings, a George Braque, Roy Lichtenstein… the lineup was incredible. Did I mention that they’re all originals? I personally fell in love with a very large piece by José Braulio Bedia Valdés, and spent the night obsessing over it. By the time I got to the campsite later that evening, 65 people had already put their names down on the list, knowing full well their spot would be forfeit if they left the courtyard for the night. I chalked my name down on the list that, by 8:00 the next morning, would read over 140 people. What can I say, Obies love their art!

The rest of the night passed relatively quickly, filled with lots of socializing and dirty word Taboo games. Sleeping was welcome, since the night was very cold and I, pesonally, could find space only on a freezing cold air vent. The filtered air was welcome, though, since more than one student decided it was okay to smoke a few feet from me, and I was too bundled up to approach them. I digress to pictures.

Everyone wakes up, makes sure order has been maintained overnight

In the end, I ended up not liking the José Bedia enough to deprive the girl behind me of it. I knew that at least one of my two allowed pieces I required to challenge me, something that I might not instantly gravitate toward. To fulfill this, I chose a piece from the Fancy Free collection by Mary Grigoriadis, a pioneer of the pattern movement. From afar I loved it, but every time I went to claim it (four times, total), I hated how it looked up close. Challenge - check.

Part of the "Fancy Free" collection by Mary Grigoriadis (click for full size)

The second piece was just too cool to pass up, not to mention that I loved it anyways. A simple piece by Mr. Alexander Calder, famous for his mobiles and sculptures. It’s been fun having a painting of his in the room, because sometimes the canvas does feel like a sculpture.

Why yes, this is an original Calder, why do you ask?

All in all, the art camp out was a fantastic experience. We had a lot of happy campers.

Click for a full-size view of that smile

First let me say that I’ve been meaning to post for a very long time, and will be much better about updates in the future. Disclaimer: the previous sentence was quite possibly an empty promise.

There’s something to be said for seeing two of one’s three jazz piano performance peers in Jazz Theory I (and, presumably, Music Theory I as well.) The Jazz Theory I course has a surprisingly large number of non-jazz majors mixed into the group, and having gotten past the initial disappointment with myself for not placing out, the diverse array of music talents is refreshing, if not soothing. Competitive pressure narrows down to one’s peers to whom others would most quickly compare me. Professor Ferrazza anticipated this and gave the perfect cool-down talk about the subjectivity of art to take away the lingering fears of being judged, not being as good. His humorous yet down-to-earth nature is appreciated.

The rest of the day was low-key. An administrative meeting to follow up on concerns outlined in yesterday’s post, which I’ll get into again when everything’s finalized. The strange jewel in the crown of the evening (poetry!) was the Experimental College fair.

First, for the safety of all, please allow me to pre-empt all the jokes and get it out of the way; Oberlin encourages you to experiment in college. Har har. ExCos are student or faculty (or outsider) run classes, usually with pretty loose curriculums. This years subjects ranged from storytelling to apocalyptic movies to teaching children to the SexCo. A friend on the fencing team has expressed great interest in starting the BurlesquO (I have no idea how you’d actually spell it) next semester.

For all the gripes I said in my previous post, I still consider the school a bastion of support for the creative endeavors of its student body. More recently (since the above portions of the post were drafted) I went to a panel for Leadership and Entrepreneurism at Oberlin. The amount of stuent projects the school funds — with significant money! — is admirably beyond belief. Few schools support students without some guaranteed return of investment. Oberlin walks the walk when it says it’s proven to helping students truly learn what it means to be an entrepreneur, and provides a real-life chance to try and make a big idea into reality without the risk of losing everything if you mess up.

As someone who’s inclinced not to take as many risks as perhaps I should, so far Oberlin has pushed me in all the right ways, and cheered me along as I take some leaps of faith. Doesn’t mean that they were easy or pleasant processes at times (such as course registration), but I wouldn’t trade it in for all the graduate-only Ivy League research labs in the country.

Not that I’d be doing science anyway…

I met all the incoming jazz students on Day 3, including the three other first-year jazz pianists, at a mini orientation concerning course planning for jazz performance majors. The session was lead by the dean of the conservatory, Dean Stull, who, in addition to being one of the nicest people I’ve yet met at Oberlin, has a voice crying to be put on the radio. I would give many things to speak like that man.

What I realized is that the requirements for the jazz course don’t allow me to take all the courses I want to outside of the conservatory. While the conservatory program is important to me, and a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience, it doesn’t allow me to develop my intellect and character in all the ways I hope to during my career at Oberlin. After discussing my interests with one of the associate deans at the conservatory, I’ve now stepped onto the Double Degree track, a five-year program that lets me earn two degees: my Bachelor of Music in Jazz Piano Performance, and my Bachelor of the Arts (currently hovering around some sort of sociology/philosophy/psychology hybrid.)

The double-degree program itself is, if you’re comfortable taking the extra year to do it, a phenomenal program. However, it has a few drawbacks, the more prominent of which is that while you can take more courses in more things, there is little room to experiment with classes like you can as an Arts and Sciences student. I’m comfortable not taking another class in chemistry or calculus, but it means that I have to develop some sort of academic tunnel vision and plan my course very specifically. You can’t be Double Degree and take a risk on a class; as someone without a specifically defined major, and consequently making up a “suggested course list” to accomplish over my five year career, getting into certain basic-level classes like Intro to Sociology is extremely important.

Which is why I’m completely boned.

Before arriving on campus, all students are assigned advisers, professors from their prospective or declared Major fields who help the student plan courses, among other things. They’re like advisers you might have had in high school, except far more important, what with all the chaos and changes concerning college. So Conservatory students get Conservatory advisers, A&S students get A&S advisers, and Double Degree students get one from each (for each of their degrees). Let me now remind you that I chose to go Double Degree five days ago. I wasn’t assigned an adviser for my Arts and Sciences major.

“Not yet, at least,” you might say, knowing (or perhaps working off an educated guess) that students who go DD after arriving will be given a second adviser. The problem is that I need an adviser to not only go over my schedule with, but give me consent to even sign up for some classes. The  Academic Dean for Double Degree students has not yet been able to meet with me (I had to make an appointment for 30 hours later) just to be assigned an adviser. And while I’m waiting on this, classes are filling up, wait list spots are being taken, and I feel like I’m watching my biggest interests slip through my fingers.

Granted, I’m sure a lot of this is an over-reaction. After all, I don’t have prior experience in this area. But allow me to provide you with an example from today (while conveniently skipping over the rest of Orientation in order to not be blogging five days behind “the haps”.)

To get into a course you haven’t officially registered for, standard procedure states that you a) email the professor and b) sit in on the class. These two things get you a) on the wait list and b) off the wait list. If you are the student that shows up to class from the wait list, even if 20 people were on the list ahead of you, if they don’t show too, you’ll get the first spot. So today I sat in on a Freshman Seminar course called “Satire and the Uses of Laughter”. I figured since I intend to explore the imagination and social interactions in my Independent Major, it would be a good class to take. It was scheduled at 11:00. Two hours before the class, I’d gone to make my appointment to see the Academic Dean of DD Students. My meeting time options were: 11:00 today, or 4:00 tomorrow. Ugh. Having made a pretty solid prototype schedule with this class time filled in, I decided to go to the class and try and get in (the Prof. had sent me a cheery email making no promises that I could register, but was welcome to sit in). It was only at the end of the class, however, that she let me know it was pretty impossible for me to get off the wait list, and my time would be better spent pursuing another course (no pun intended). So now I have to wait another day to see what classes are even left for me to take, much less sign up for them.

My frustration with the system isn’t really much to do with Oberlin. Frankly, I can’t come up with a better alternative. But not having immediate access to an adviser, or even being given someone to talk to as an interim adviser has set me back many paces. And if my insecurities are falsely grounded, no one has bothered to tell me.

I look forward to hearing the results of my botched auditions for both jazz combo/ensemble groups and the Sunshine Scouts (Oberlin’s longform improv group).

Five days in to having a blog, behind three days of posting . Truly, I am a blogger already! Luckily, most of the things I have to report are either boring and inconsequential, such as the endless talks given to us on the second day of orientation concerning broad “make the most of your education” speeches, an unoriginal faculty panel encouraging us to actually sleep, privacy policies within the administration, and the honor code. It was the day of necessary BS talk and it ended eventually, as these things thankfully tend to.

The interesting part of the day came around 7:00 in the evening, with a presentation called “The O.C.” The O.C. is Oberlin’s orientation presentation concerning the more illicit and dangerous sides of student life on campus, focusing especially on sexual exploration and dangers. Instead of a panel or lecture, however, it was a series of skits both serious and comical that did a very good job of portraying heavier subjects with dignity and the lighter, more sure-to-happen topics with a good deal of self-deprecation, hardly ever sounding patronizing about the obvious and the well-understood. It definitely made me look forward to the Social Justice Institute, which you’ll be hearing all about real soon. Stay tuned!

Ah, first day on campus! Dorm check-in was scheduled for 9:00, so of course my parents and I arrived at 10:00. Not an issue. After a pain free check-in process, I went to my room.

I’m in East Hall, which houses the most Freshman of any dorm on campus. It has a reputation for being in poor condition with the smallest, most worn rooms. Having been assigned a quad, I was prepared for the worst. When you’re in a quad, you have three roommates. With East’s reputation, I was expecting a single room with four beds (perhaps bunked) in which the fragrances of teenage boy could be left to ferment on their own merits. Apparently that was almost the case. Almost.

When I received my room key, I was told that my room had been re-assigned from East 275 to East 118. East 275 had been a lounge room. Lounges aren’t terribly spacious, and have absorbed the brunt of dorm messiness into their walls and cushions. It would have been hell, had my roommates and I not been moved to 118. In the world of freshman dorms, East 118 is king.

The quad is comprised of three rooms: two shared doubles and a common area.  The doubles rooms are very spacious, with generous shelving and closet space and two desks next to each other (my roommate has a bonsai tree on his — but I’m going to talk about them in tomorrow’s post). The common area has even more shelving / cupboard space, plus a round table with a sofa and two (absent) easy chairs. Not only this, but East 118 is a corner unit, which means LOTS of windows. With the heat and humidity that can fill this place, having a crossbreeze is like conjuring water in the desert. Or summoning pop tarts at fat camp. I digress.

Much of the rest of the day was hearing about privacy policies and various social opportunities to meet other first-years (Oberlin’s way of avoiding the word “Freshman”, a term which apparently instigates all sorts of nasty, Mean Girls-like behavior from older students if used as a label for new arrivals. “First-years” has no such effect.) Orientation, Day 2, posts tomorrow!

Welcome to Ramen Diet, the low-budget, high-sodium cyberspace journal on which I’ll be documenting my college escapades. Quick plug: if you don’t have an account on the site, I highly encourage you to make one so you can post all sorts of fun comments, participate in polls, and enjoy all sorts of fun stuff that’ll be available here. Now then, on to the real meat of the entry.

Perhaps “meat” is a poor choice of words on a blog about Oberlin. Without getting too heavy into descriptions of the college environment — you’ll be hearing about it progressively as I post more– the school is a bastion of “progressive” thought. Many of these progressive viewpoints resonate with me: politically, the school is almost completely liberal, great attention is given to social justice issues, the campus is extremely eco-friendly, and stuffier social formalities are replaced with a gender-ambiguous bathrooms (as school policy, at least one multi-gender bathroom is on each dorm floor to ensure that students who do not identify themselves as one gender or the other are comfortable choosing where to take a leak).

There are other progressive elements, however, that don’t fit my lifestyle choice. At this point, I’d like to say that I’m sure I am reacting to a more vocal minority; however, this minority is not a terribly small one. Let me begin with vegetarians. Now, vegetarianism is nothing new to me. I have friends who are vegetarians, I’ve heard lectures from vegetarians, and the Bay Area is chock full of vegetarian alternatives. However, there very well may be more vegetarians than meat-eaters here. Which makes me feel a primal sense of threat. There’s meat to be found on-campus, but the number of veggie dishes is staggering. I fear for my meals at the kosher co-op (of which I am not part, but hope to drop in). I have pinned a note to my bear hat assuring observers of the fur’s artifice, lest I be torn to shreds and used to fertilize soybean stalks. I consider it a mark of my own courage that I brought the hat at all.

More serious differences remain to be explored. The issue that concerns me the most is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which doesn’t manifest in the militant protests UC campuses have displayed, but remains a hot-button issue which reddens more than a few faces.

But Oberlin students’ faces have all been pleasant thus far. Everyone carries a genuine interest in everyone else around them, and with good reason! All the kids here are quite remarkable. I’m sure you’ll here more about them at a later date. Don’t touch that dial!